Most of the time, the conversation around climate chaos is narrowly focused on carbon emissions, to the exclusion of land use as a major factor whose effects are at least equal if not greater. Both the mainstream corporate media and independent/activist media commit this same lapse. This is due in part to the fact that proposed policy around carbon emissions can be neatly folded into the appetites of industry, whether Capitalist or Socialist, without interrupting business-as-usual. Capitalist profits are not threatened by carbon trading. Socialist “development” can continue unabated with new energy infrastructure. Ecocide, however, marches on with both, and that’s what’s left out of the popular narrative as it’s currently told.

In episode 3 of the “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From” podcast, Nikki Hill and I talked to Nikos Giannakis is a biologist with the University of Leeds, currently working in Greece. His graduate work was in environmental pollution control and agricultural chemistry, and his PhD was on soil microbiology. His national service requirement in Greece led to environmental consulting including impact assessment. Currently he is living with his wife (an architect specializing in natural building techniques) and six cats in an abandoned village in a national park in northwestern Greece. His activism focuses on defending nature from “green energy” projects and on bringing land use into the climate conversation.

Our interview hit many topics including “green energy” projects in Europe; land use as the “other leg” of climate change (besides the greenhouse effect), as highlighted by Spanish climatalogist Millán Millán; carbon reductionism in the climate change narrative; the hijacking of the environmental movement by the carbon conversation; land use and fire mitigation; the necessity to be wholistic in our relationship with nature; the all-too-material reality of the digital realm; increasingly extreme weather; conservation efforts worldwide (which Nikos is involved with); future directions for agriculture; public vs. private land; humans as keystone species in ecology; the importance of community; opportunities for young people to find new answers; the power of media to control narratives and hence public perception, and much more!

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