British farmland, our rural communities and even UK food security are at risk from ‘tree- mania’ led by venture capitalists egged on by government grants in a scramble to fulfil tree-planting promises made by multinationals to ‘offset their carbon footprint’.

One of them is the Foresight Group, based in the Shard office block in London.  Their subsidiary Foresight Sustainable Forestry Company Ltd are buying prime agricultural land in Wales with Government grants and planting monoculture conifers on it.

Their activities are not remotely ‘sustainable’ because (1) they damage the eco-system and rural life and (2) better trees than those they are planting are being cut down in a rainforest across the globe to plant and raise the food that the land they bought should have produced to feed our population.

We prepared a leaflet to give out at the Shard on 16th December 2021. Here is the text of it:

Shard-based speculators destroying farmland in ‘tree-mania’

‘I think that I shall never see,
‘A poem lovely as a tree’  Wrote the poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer.

We all love trees, and planting them is seen as one way to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plants use the energy from sunlight during the day to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic matter based on carbon. In the process they release oxygen into the air.

Greenwashing

Multinational corporations are engaged in ‘greenwashing’ to offset their carbon footprint. And that normally means promising to plant trees. Woodside Trust say Lloyds Bank, Sainsbury’s, DFS and the People’s Postcode Lottery have all promised to plant trees, and there are thousands of other corporations in the same climate-savvy boat.

But where will they plant all these promised trees? And in the rush, will they plant the right tree, in the right place, for the right reason?

If a tree stores 250kg of carbon over its life and each UK person emits 12 tons yearly, it would need the entire UK area to plant the required 3.2 billion trees for one year’s emissions. It’s absurd and ignores all the other carbon sinks such as grassland, peat moorland and above all, oceans.

Worldwide, in July this year, Oxfam crunched the numbers and found that if all the trees the global companies have promised were planted, they would occupy an area five times the size of India, or all the farmland on the planet.

In short, there just isn’t enough land to fulfil the tree-planting promises and even to attempt it is a threat to global food security.

Enter the Foresight Group

Of course the companies making these unrealistic virtue-signalling promises are not planting trees themselves. They sub-contract the job out to a tree-planting firm. Venture capitalists are now jumping on the band-wagon.

The latest is the Foresight Group and its subsidiary Foresight Sustainable (sic) Forestry Company Ltd. They are based in the Shard, the glass-clad office block at London Bridge.

The directors are listed as Richard Davidson, accountant Sarika Patel, consultant Josephine Bush and timber industry veteran Christopher Sutton.

Monoculture

These speculators have spotted a way to make money out of Climate Change and Net Zero aspirations. They are buying up good grazing land in Wales. Then they apply for Welsh Government grants and pay another sub-contractor to dig it all up, releasing carbon stored in the ground, and plant trees on it.

They plant a monoculture of quick-growing conifers, usually alien species like Sitka spruce, perhaps hidden behind a thin net curtain of native trees.

The Woodland Trust say native trees such as oak, ash, beech, hazel, Scots pine, randomly planted or self-sown, are far better for bio-diversity than non-native conifers such as spruce. Monoculture conifers deprive many meadow flowering plants, butterflies and ground-nesting birds such as curlews of their habitat. They also decrease public access and involvement in nature.

Planted on hillsides

Non-native tree-planting has been done in the past in Wales. Vast areas of moorland and scrub hillsides were acquired by the Forestry Commission and planted with conifers as far back as the 1920s. The Brechfa Forest in Carmarthenshire is just one example. The object then was to increase the production of domestic timber for construction.

As Sitka spruce takes between 25-35 years to be ready for harvesting, many of these non- native forests have already been harvested or are being harvested right now. In some cases, the foresters are having the courtesy to replant the hillsides with native trees like Welsh sessile oak.

Prime Agricultural Land

But the Foresight Group are buying, not hillsides, not scrub, but prime agricultural land. The United Kingdom currently imports 45% of its food. If young farmers in Wales are denied the opportunity to raise livestock on good Welsh land, not only does that impact rural life, but it means the livestock we need will be raised elsewhere.

That will probably mean cutting down trees in Brazil and converting land that was rainforest into grazing. It won’t be very good grazing land and won’t last very long before it is exhausted. So collectively we have cut down a better tree on poorer land in Brazil and grown a worse tree on prime land in Wales.

Not sustainable

All ways around that has damaged bio-diversity, released more carbon than it has gained, harmed UK food security, increased food miles and desecrated good land, all for a quick profit. It is not remotely sustainable.

Foresight are not saving the planet. They are making money. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, it is hard to think of any get-rich-quick scheme which is quite as irresponsible, grasping and destructive as that being pursued by the Foresight Group and Foresight ‘Sustainable’ Forestry in the Shard.

Care for Creation

People of all faiths and indeed of none are concerned about the environment and human society, but as we are a Christian group, we’ll just take this opportunity to bring you up to speed with what we believe.

We worship God as the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth. In his first commandment to Adam and Eve, he gave them, and us their successors, a duty to care for his creation and put it in order:

Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (KJV)

Creation is here for us, not us for it. People have a God-given right to socialise, to earn a living, to house, clothe and feed themselves and their families.

So the Almighty is concerned about the whole of life, about nations, families and even individuals. He gave us righteous laws to live by and to ensure a stable society. Men always think they know better than God, but trying to go another way brings instability and ultimate destruction.

A bit of good news

At a personal level, sin separates us from God, but belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ forgives your sin and gives you the power of the Holy Spirit to live a new, better, forgiven life. The first public words of Jesus, recorded in Mark’s Gospel, were:

Mark 1:15: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye and believe the Gospel’.

The Gospel does not just mean forgiveness and salvation, it brings healing and deliverance. Whatever sin or spiritual power is holding you back, you will find release and freedom in Jesus to live life to the full. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ today, and know his purpose for your life.

Prayer and Action!

Pray against this irresponsibility. Pray for wisdom from on high for those in authority. May Almighty God bring the destructive schemes of the mighty to naught.

The same scandal appears to be taking place all over England and Wales, and probably in Scotland nand Northern Irealnd as well. Use this link to the UK Parliament website to email your MP to ask the Government what assessment they have made of the impact on UK food security and biuodiversity and on worldwide deforestation of planting conifers on prime British farmland, and if they will end Government grants for this practice.

We appreciate your support – without it we can’t do our research and help inform your prayers.
So click below to join Christian Voice and stand up for the King of kings

Click on the social media links below to share this post:

Her Majesty’s Government intend to ignore the advice of their own vaccine advisory body and press on with jabs for kids regardless. So much for ‘following the science’.

On Friday, in a rare but welcome display of common sense, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) refused to give the green light to vaccinating healthy children aged 12-15 years old.

But later that day and over the weekend, ministers claimed ‘wider issues’ meant the JCVI could be ignored.

LOW RISK FROM VIRUS

The JCVI concluded children are at such low risk from the virus that vaccination would offer only ‘marginal gain’. Therefore there was ‘insufficient’ evidence to offer mass vaccination to this age group. The decision on healthy children was based on concern over the blood clotting side effect of the Pfizer vaccine which causes heart inflammation. The complication may be ‘extremely rare‘, as the BBC hastened to observe, but it would be self-inflicted.

Instead, some 200,000 children with chronic heart, lung and liver conditions, who are at higher risk from Covid than healthy children, should be offered the vaccines, said the JCVI. The BBC adds ‘A group of 150,000 children with conditions such as severe neurodisabilities, Down‘s syndrome and severely weakened immune systems as well as those living with vulnerable adults are already eligible.‘

To put those numbers in perspective, there is a total of three million children in the 12-15 age group across the UK.

Prof Wei Shen Lim, chairman of Covid immunisation for the JCVI said it was “taking a precautionary approach’.

‘The margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal Covid-19 vaccination for this age group at this time. The committee will continue to review safety data as they emerge,’ he added.

‘WIDER ISSUES’ INVOLVED

The JCVI’s decision is only advisory. In an indication that they have been leant on by ministers, they conceded the government ‘could consider wider issues including disruption to schools’.

Of course the ‘disruption to schools’ could be ended by stopping the bubble system and getting back to pre-pandemic normal. But money and politics, not health, are to be the driving factors.
According to the Telegraph, last week the NHS began recruiting thousands of vaccinators for schools. The Health Secretary said the Government needed to ‘move quickly’ on the rollout of jabs to children.

Clearly the health service has been jumping the gun, or as Health Secretary Sajid Javid put it, ‘making preparations while awaiting advice from the JCVI on whether the rollout should be extended’.

Also last week, Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, said he ‘very much hopes’ that vaccines can be rolled out to the under-16s. Why would anyone want do that? Let us pray he is put under pressure to explain why the Government are ignoring the JCVI when Parliament resumes and he takes questions in the House of Commons from 2.30pm on Monday 6th September.

‘Seek Further Advice’

In another display of weakness, the JCVI recommended that the Health Secretary ‘seek further advice’ as if their advice is not good enough.

So it is that Mr Javid quickly told Professor Chris Whitty, England‘s Chief Medical Officer to go off and find a ‘wider benefit to society’ from vaccinating youngsters.

Mr Javid wants Prof. Whitty and the chief medical officers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to ‘consider the vaccination of 12 to 15-year-olds from a broader perspective’.
He has asked them to look at ‘the effects of Covid on children‘s education and pupil absences from school’. The JCVI – made up of vaccine experts – is apparently not qualified to consider this vital ‘ediucational’ aspect.

‘We will then consider the advice, building on the advice from the JCVI, before making a decision shortly,’ he said.

Straight out of ‘Yes minister’

Note the spin: ‘building on the advice‘ rather than the more truthful ‘ignoring the advice‘. It is right out of the 1980s ‘Yes Minister’ sitcom. ‘So we are ignoring their advice, then, Sir Humphrey?’ ‘No, no, minister, of course you aren’t ignoring their advice, no, you are building on it.’

The Telegraph says it ‘understands ministers are confident that Prof Whitty and the other experts will give the plan the go-ahead in the middle of next week.

‘Whitehall sources – while stressing that they could not pre-empt the chief medical officers’ joint decision – expect ministers to be able to start the rollout of vaccines for 12 to 15-year-olds shortly. One said vaccination of the cohort would get the “go-ahead”’.

Educational Disruption

The truth is, pupil absences from school are entirely the result of government bowing to teaching unions rather than following the science. There was never any good reason for sending home a whole class because one child had ‘tested positive’. Last term children were swapping TikTok videos showing them how to falsify a PCR test to get off school.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said on Friday the union was ‘disappointed’ that the Government‘s vaccine advisers had decided against a mass rollout to the age group.

He added: ‘The upshot is that this would make it more difficult during the autumn term and beyond to guard against educational disruption caused by transmission of the virus’.

He must know that is nonsense. But he is not alone. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has called for a return of self-isolation for pupils who have merely been in contact with sonmeone tesing positive.

Dr Patrick Roach, NASUWT general secretary, warned that ministers must ‘not risk complacency’ and should ‘look across the border to Scotland’.

He went on: ‘In the event of rising case numbers, ministers will need to consider the reintroduction of the requirement for pupils to self-isolate when they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive.’

Why is the teaching establishment so keen on forcing unnecessary isolation regimes and vaccinations onto children? Are they simply intent on disrupting education or is something more deeply spiritual going on?

Parents’ consent required

Naturally, the BBC chimed in, with a propaganda article this morning beginning: ‘Millions of pupils are returning to classrooms in England and Wales, amid fears of a spike in Covid cases.‘ Who has these ‘fears’? It’s just a sub-group of Sage, the ‘Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’, claiming ‘it is highly likely that exponential increases will be seen in school-attending age groups after schools open’. They have been wrong before. And if they are right, so what? Are not their teachers and parents all vaccinated? Or is it that vaccines do not prevent transmission? In that case, why give them to children?

The only silver lining is that children’s parents will, the Telegraph reports, be asked to give their written consent for vaccination to take place. The paper concedes that ‘could complicate the speed of the rollout. The consent process will be aligned to how the NHS and schools obtain parental consent for other vaccination programmes, adding to delays’.

It will be down to parents of healthy children to quote from the JCVI and tell teachers their child will not receive at best a pointless and at worst a potentially dangerous untested unlicensed vaccine.

PRAY – and Email your MP

Job 28:28 And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

Pray for the Lord to send humility and wisdom into the hearts and minds of Her Majesty’s Ministers. Pray they will heed the JCVI’s advice. Pray the ‘wider issues’ will be exposed as a smoke-screen. Pray for the Lord to raise up prophetic voices in Parliament. And pray for courage for parents.
Use this link to the UK Parliament website to email your MP to ask Gavin Williamson this afternoon why he is so intent on giving a totally unnecessary vaccine to school children.

We appreciate your support – without it we can’t do our research and help inform your prayers.
So click below to join Christian Voice and stand up for the King of kings

Click on the social media links below to share this post: