Lancaster Environment Centre’s new lecturer in Political Ecology draws as much experience from his own activism as he does from academic study.

Originally from Manchester, Kai Heron grew up in Brighton where he was part of the alternative punk and hardcore scene.

He went on to study History and Politics in Bristol, with a particular emphasis on social and workers’ history.

A vegan for 17 years, Kai took part in animal rights and environmental activism as an undergraduate, and then started freelance copywriting for a large bank.

He was then moved into working as a copywriter for a finance company, but given his central involvement in Occupy Bristol, the former role became untenable.

Instead, he began a Masters in International Politics at The University of Sussex.

“I got the ‘academic bug’ whilst still being involved in environmental activism,” he said.

“I did my PhD on Anti-fracking struggles in the United States, which at the time was a live issue in Sussex, as well as here in Lancashire, where fracking had been proposed.

“I wanted to know what was potentially coming our way, so I went out to see how fracking was impacting communities in the United States.

“I spent a year and a half in the field in Pennsylvania and New York, at the same time taking part in anti-fracking activism.

“I saw all sorts of scary things, like for example if you turned the tap on and put a match to it, the water would set on fire because people’s water was contaminated with methane and various carcinogens.”

Kai’s findings in the US are coming out next year in a book called Fracking and Hinterlands: Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, and Revolutionary Universality.

“There have always been blurred lines for me between activism and academia,” he said.

I was studying this stuff, but I was also involved personally, so for me the two things go hand in hand.

“When I went to the US I saw the scale of fracking, and it’s off the charts.

“It just couldn’t happen in the UK.

“There were too many things going against fracking being a large-scale industry in the UK.”

One of the issues Kai became interested in whilst doing his PhD was the question of land, who owns it, and how it’s used.

“The companies involved with fracking weren’t the ones that owned the land, and it was often farmers who were struggling for income in parts of Pennsylvania and New York who would lease out the land, so I became interested in the political economy of land-use and ownership,” Kai said.

“My wife is from the US, and we lived in Manchester for a long time, but we didn’t want to move to London.

“My wife said she’d love to live in Lancaster.

“I had friends at Lancaster University, and we’re keen cyclists so the idea of living near the Lake District, Morecambe Bay, and the Forest of Bowland really appealed to us.

“So when the political ecology lectureship came up, everything fell into place.”

Kai describes political ecology as the study of society’s co-production with the environment, which he says is something that traditional politics doesn’t often appreciate.

“Political ecology is the study of struggles in and over what we call ‘nature’ or the environment. It’s about how non-human nature is pressed into service by human communities, in the past, present, and future. And how, in turn, ecological processes shape human communities.

“I find political ecology especially exciting because it gives us the tools to make sense of environmental protest movements and environmental struggles of all kinds, but particularly, for me, land transitions.

“Given the ongoing climate crisis, and how calamitous it’s proving to be – we’re going to need to transition away from the types of land-use we are used to, especially conventional agriculture which is so ecologically damaging.

“Most conventional, or industrial, farming destroys biodiversity, pollutes waterways, so it’s about re-imagining relationships with land in a way that is socially just, and so that it repairs damaged ecosystems and food systems.”

Kai is also currently working on a report called Food Sovereignty Through Public-Common Partnerships, which proposes a transition towards agroecological food systems that combine crops and livestock.

“It’s how people farmed for thousands of years, but industrialization and for-profit production changed everything,” Kai said.

“The systems we currently have in place are unsustainable. They’re highly polluting, destroy essential habitats and they’re extremely vulnerable to climate disasters, so we need to transition towards agroecological farming systems as quickly as possible.”

Kai recently co-wrote an article for The New Statesman, in which he argues that when the UK left the EU and put in place Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS), the government didn’t go far enough.

“ELMs claim’s it’s a nature-based farming system, which includes re-wilding, but it sounds better than it is in practice, and in practice it’s just not going far enough.

“It doesn’t help the people that are doing the work of radically re-imagining our food systems which is what is needed.

“On the plus side, there is a massive increase in interest in agroecological farming in the UK, from organizations like Land In our Names, and The Land Worker’s Alliance, to urban growing communities.

“The report I’m producing will re-imagine land owned by local authorities, many of which are being forced to sell it to private landowners to generate lost revenue for social care.