I had just returned from a bruising three-day environmental symposium in Davos—where we made significant, hard-fought headway on standardizing the font sizes for corporate carbon disclosures—when I saw the news. English Heritage, a charity ostensibly dedicated to preservation, is actively recruiting a "merry band" of volunteers to maintain the meadows at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset.
They are teaching these people to use scythes. By hand. To create a habitat for the rare shrill carder bee. And, as if to deliberately mock the global economic framework, they are compensating these laborers with hunks of bread and cheese.
I had to put my fourteen-dollar fair-trade oat cortado down on my reclaimed-driftwood desk just to massage my temples. We are hurtling toward a tipping point in the global climate system, and the British public has decided the solution is to cosplay as nineteenth-century agricultural serfs.
It is genuinely staggering how selfish everyday people can be when they are asked to shoulder the burden of ecological collapse. Rather than engaging with the complex geopolitical realities of the moment, these volunteers have chosen to retreat into a Thomas Hardy novel, swinging curved sticks at buttercups while the rest of us do the grueling work of managing climate anxiety.
We just wanted to get out in the fresh air, hear the birds, and help a little bee thrive in its natural habitat without the roar of petrol engines.
The absolute arrogance of it. Simon and his little scythe club get to stand in a sunlit meadow feeling morally superior, completely ignoring the fact that their quaint little hobby does nothing to generate the large-scale carbon offsets required by our corporate partners.
I sat in on a Big Oil earnings call just last Tuesday. Do you know what those executives are doing? They are pioneering a fourteen-billion-dollar direct-air-capture facility in the desert that will eventually remove almost as much carbon as their executive jet fleet emits during a long weekend in Aspen. That is what real environmentalism looks like. It is expensive, it involves seventy-slide PowerPoint presentations, and it makes you feel profoundly empty inside.
But these volunteers in Somerset do not want to do the hard work of reading four-hundred-page sustainability audits. They want to wear a linen shirt, swing a blade at some tall grass, and feel the breeze on their faces.
And let us examine this "bread and cheese" compensation model. In a modern green economy, labor must be monetized so it can be taxed, and those taxes must be funneled into subsidies for experimental biofuel startups. By bartering their manual labor for dairy and carbohydrates, these rogue scythers are effectively defunding the climate fight.
Furthermore, do they have any idea what the methane footprint of a Somerset dairy cow looks like? They are ostensibly out there to "save nature," yet they are fueling their labor with the exact livestock emissions that are currently boiling the oceans. I, on the other hand, strictly fuel my climate advocacy with imported Peruvian maca powder, which has a much more complicated, but corporately certified, supply chain.
The shrill carder bee relies on the varied stem heights that only a hand-scythe can provide, which is why this targeted, slow approach is so essential for the colony.
If the shrill carder bee cannot survive the gentle, humming embrace of a four-thousand-pound autonomous electric lawn tractor, then perhaps the bee is simply not ready for the realities of the twenty-first century. We cannot halt global progress every time a hyper-specific pollinator refuses to adapt to the market.
I have dedicated my entire professional life to flying around the world telling people they are ruining it. I have sacrificed my evenings drafting strongly worded op-eds about how you, personally, are not sorting your household recycling with enough reverence. I have sat through thousands of hours of fluorescent-lit meetings discussing the theoretical deployment of atmospheric sulfur.
And my reward is having to watch a bunch of West Country locals treat environmental stewardship like a pleasant picnic in the countryside. It undermines the very core of modern climate activism: the profound, paralyzing dread that must accompany every waking moment.
We are entirely supportive of the public spending their weekends worrying about a single insect in Somerset, as it provides a wonderful narrative counterweight to our deep-water drilling portfolio.
If we make saving the planet look like a joyful afternoon with friends, people might actually want to do it without consulting the proper bureaucratic authorities. And if anyone can just walk outside, learn a traditional skill, and help their local ecosystem for free, what was the point of my dual master's degrees in Environmental Guilt and Policy Administration?
The meadows of Muchelney Abbey do not need a scythe. They need a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder feasibility study on integrating the acreage into a multinational carbon credit portfolio.
We are out of time, but go off.