What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and if you didn't know I've moved my streaming activities to Twitch, my channel is linked in the video description below. This particular Bella game is from a test stream I did and I feel like I'm improving as a Predacessor player. I'll have to talk about some of the differences between Predacessor and Overprime and I think Predacessor is better for gamers that improve via practice, while Overprime is better for those with quick reactionary skills. Success in Predacessor is often based on situational awareness and having enough experience in the game to identify how you should move on the map and the best positioning during a teamfight. Basically Overprime is more of a pick up and play sort of game while Predacessor requires a bit more prior knowledge and practice and there are benefits to both. That's enough of me joining on about random thoughts though let's get to the game. As always if you have any tips that will help you improve please let me know in the comments like this video if you enjoyed it sub for more content on both games but for now let's play some belly. But I mean they got time they're finally getting a store which is nice, people get a little chance to actually use the platinum that they were given for doing it up. I think I'll probably save mine until they get like a original skin or something but I'm not going to buy old Paragon skins with my platinum. Looks like the Fey, okay she's not being too aggressive I thought she was going to start being aggressive here.  That's fine I would like to freeze this on my side so I'll just pop off occasional shots over here and it looks like we're frozen. Very nice. I'm just going to hold this here let people know that mid is missing she's not missing but she came back to me. So I don't want her to push this under the lane up a little bit alright there's still kind of on my side which is nice nice to see you'll love to see it. We've got 30 seconds until the Riverbuff spawns oh it's like we both got ganked that's funny they ganked at the same time you'll have to blink out of that but he might be dead.


18 I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, travelling in the leisurely manner, of the latitudes transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over for weeks at a time, perhaps in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice, when a dinghy, palmutu schooner, deep laden with cobra and crowded with pearl-divers eager for a whirl at Vieti in the island capital, crept into the pass, I had word of him, but there was no hint of return. It was a month of calms, long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cats-paw, shimmered in blinding sunlight while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once at midday a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and diesel engines going came in to waken the town with the horse-climber of a hurr-exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street. Your friend Hall is homeward bound, he told me. I spoke the Poti Rivera, a bit of thirty-ton schooner, off Nakatakawaki, and he was aboard of her. She ought to be in some time this week. The days passed in a rapid and dreamy fashion, peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the Coral Islands or, perhaps, only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The Poti Rivera was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and towards sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black. There was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront, the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses. I heard snatches of talk. Have you noticed a glass?  Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone. The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise. I had heard of the hurricane of 1906 when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papati to the hills. On Motu Uta, an island in the bay, a white man was living with his Pamamotian wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the island from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a low-highlander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf of a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband, drifting with dead pigs and horses, and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town. The city Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner it was following with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to wake in me. There was a new sound in the air, the uproar of surth breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon. The sea is rising, said Tara. The waves are breaking under the paru trees, and if you do not come quickly, to help me our canoe will be washed away. The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water usually so calm was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came, drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof, and after the rain the wind. At dawn the was seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast. It was obvious that all danger of a hurricane was passed. At midday the glass began to rise, and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly. More than once during the night I had thought of haul out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. The bowtie Rivera reputed to be an able little boat with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Pomoto the dangerous archipelago where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather there was cause for anxiety. The storm blew itself out in two days time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on the waterfront with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of the bowtie Rivera. By this time the object of mild misgivings when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout, there she is now. He announced and looking up I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched gray sails rounding the point of Vacherette. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore. A few moments later I was welcoming home, very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Pomotian. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable, when once seen the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have been known. Who always said, come along to the hotel, it must be dinner time. Find Joe Vivellis though I could eat a raw shark. When he had eaten two dinners complete from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again, he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands. It was all right he began, until we left Hale. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat. You've seen the schooner. She's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe. There were four of us aboard. Mittai, the skipper, a Pomotonian, and a seaman by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude or longitude. Two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantitis and myself.  The hold was crammed with it, and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Opposite the companion away, they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the forward deck. If we had anything to cook, the galley might have been useful, but Mittai had given away nearly all the ship's provisions to his relatives in Hale. He gave him a feast while some copra was being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return. The two sailors looked sour, while they watched the people opening their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but after all, the prevailing Windsor Fair, normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days. Mittai overdid the giving away business, however. When we took stock of our kauke on the first day of the calm, I found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen ripe nuts someone was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry, stale and full of wiggily young mosquitoes, and by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demi-john sent by Tino of the Windship, which I filled with fresh rain water in hail. My demi-john lasted precisely a day and a half, all hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of their lavishness. There was supposed to be a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged up an awning with a part of an old mainsail. I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me. Forestats, Chronicles of England, France and Spain. The days seemed interminable. The starlight pale, the sun rose to glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea and sent it last on a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed, sometimes I watched the reflections of the bospirate. It was painted gray with a bright red tip, and seen in the faintly heaving water it looked like a long gray snake spitting fire as it writhed in gracious underlations. The sufferer from elf and Titus turned out to be an extraordinary man. It was not worthwhile to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired to this stifling cubby-hole among the copper sacks and slept. Slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn again. Now then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck. Once I went aft to look at him. Lying naked except for a Peru, mouth open and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the cobra. Metis and Terra showed a different side of native character. The schooner belonged to their captain, and, keeping her trim, giving the same delight a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor was Metis Nefu. And the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping a rail and top sides in preparation for a French coat of paint. It was strange, when I was deep in forested sieges and battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim of the horizon. The silhouette of the foremast against the hot blue sky, and it took Kanakas endlessly at work, scrape, scrape, scrape, and exchange of low-toned remarks at chuckle as they heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below. Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful cat-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us, others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner to moving gently on her course, only to die away and leave the sea glassy as before. On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel be calmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them, ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zig-zags, or lay motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old gray shark. He had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of his head, and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for an hour within a yard of the vessel side. I could see the texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motions of fins and tail. I could understand now the hatred sharks inspiring men who follow the sea. It wasn't long before I had decided to try to kill the big, insolent brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally with a file and the point of a rusty boat hook I improvised a makeshift sort of spear. Armed with this I waited by the rail until my victim came in range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off his tough hide. He swam away in a leisurely manner. Turned, and a moment later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back. But it was like trying to kill an elephant with a pen-knife. I think the point of my boat hook punctured him. But he only circled off again and returned to give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him in possession of the field. The nights when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing overhead were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection made sky and sea alike dark backgrounds for the mirrored lights of the constellations. Lying on deck while the other slept I used to regret that I had not learned something of astronomy. The average native sailor knows more about the stars than I. Orion I know. The Pleiades, which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call Mataraki, the little eyes, and the scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui, flung into the sky by the god when he had finished pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds, streamers of stardust, like vapor, impallible, and remote. In spite of my companions sleeping quietly on the deck, those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness, the languid air, the solitary ship, immobile on the face of a lifeless sea, the immense expanse of the universe, a blaze with the light of distant suns. When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My damage on, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that, we used the drinking-nuts, and not until the last of them was gone, did anyone think of investigating the water-cask. There was consternation when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty water. Either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack of ripe nuts, thin, sharp stuff for drinking. But a lot of them went in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup-spoon. Finally the barrel was dry. And we went two days with nothing of any kind to drink. It was no joke.  The natives stood it wonderfully well. Mity did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore he was planning to drink too much coconut. The victim of Fifi continued his slumberous routine. I wondered if he were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded gurgling riblets. It was my first experience of thirst, odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a time. Waking and sleeping my head was filled with dreams of water, brooks, rivers, lakes, of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face and drink. I dreamed of locks and highland burns in Scotland. Of the gorge of Fontana, on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the cataract. Well, it wasn't much fun. Another day or two might have been unendable. In one comfort, at any rate, if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the copper sacks. At dawn Mity touched my shoulder and pointed to the south, where the pailing stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later the rain water was streaming out of these scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recouped in case of leaks. When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark blue leaping sea, we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast. Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water and reserve, we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Mity prowled about below and came on deck with a package of rice stowed away during some previous voyage. It was a valuable find for we had nothing else to eat. There was copper, of course, which the native will eat in a pinch, but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds, sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the land rose higher and higher out of the sea, it was Macatea, and we were more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner Mity's relatives gave us that night. We got away next morning with a liberal stock of provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti, a philosophic pig who traveled lashed under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the First Order. This time, however, the calm was soon over. Heavy, greenish black clouds were drifting down on us from the north. The sunrise gave place to an evil, violent gloom. Mity and his two men sprang into a sudden activity. They battered down the forward hatch, put extra lashings on the boat, double reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then in a breathless calm a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a strange murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse. If the wind before the rain sheets your top sails home again, if the rain before the wind, then your top sails hail your mind. It was a disagreeable moment, even the pig felt it, for when the sailors moved him to a place in the bow of the dory, he refrained from the usual shrill protest. One detail sticks in my memory. When the skipper had taken his place at the wheel, he gave a sudden order. The man with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to where the boat was lashed down and pulled out the plug from its bottom. Then came the wind. It swept down on us from the north-northeast, from the quarter in which hurricanes begin, and the first furious gust was a mild sample of what was to come. The matigotter laid to, heading at a slight angle into the seas. I realized the splendid qualities of the little potei revera. No small vessel would have kept her decks dry in the sea that made up within an hour. The captain never left the wheel, and I doubt if there's a finer helmsman in the south seas, but before noon the galley, with our entire supply of food, was swept clean overboard, and time after time the lashed-down boat was filled. The pig had worked himself free except for one hind leg tied to a bottom board with a rough strip of hibiscus bark. And as the water drained out slowly through the unplugged hole a stern, the agitated surface would be broken by his snout, emitting sputtering screams. He lived through it, by the way. All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a hurricane. Every hour the violence of the wind increased. It was agailed from the north-northeast, the wind called by the ancient Polynesians the terrible Meilke. It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of fury. Tearing off the entire crest of waves and hurling, solid water about us as though it were spray. The forward hatch leaked badly. When I think of that storm, my memory is filled with a nightmare of endless pumping. A day and a night passed, and Don found us riding a mountainous sea, but the wind was abating and our decks were dry. The victim of elephantitis had been taking spells with me at the pump. He is a man that fellow in spite of his loathsome infirmity.  Mitty's eyes are sharp. Enough pumping, he shouted. Go and sleep, you two. We obeyed the order with alacrity. Sleeping on deck was out of the question. Without an instant of hesitation I crawled in among the copress-axe, besides my repulsive companion. When I awoke it was evening and we were running, with a heavy following wind. Mitty was still at the helm, red-eyed from want of sleep, but whirling the spokes dexterously as each big sea past beneath us, engaging ahead for the first glimpse of Tahiti. The clouds broke just before dark, and we had a glimpse of the high ridges of Terrapu. Dead ahead. We got sail on earth at that, and stood off to the north-west, past the bay of Tavaro, and the sunken reefs of Hitya. Toward morning we raised point venus light, but the wind failed in the leaoth of the island and it took us all day to reach Papati Harbor. All finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone long since, and, safe for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty. What are your plans, I asked? Our year in the south seas is up. Where are you going now? I have no plans, he said, except that I doubt if I shall ever go north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I have had enough of civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why should we leave the islands? I fancy the south seas have claimed the pair of us.


Hey everybody it's Gary back to here and in this video I want to talk about some new lenses that Tamron just announced today, February 20th 2019. Now there's three new lenses coming out, two R4 DSLRs, so Canon and Nikon mounts, but the one I'm most excited about is the new Sony lens. Now this is going to be a 17 to 28 f 2.8 for Sony E-mount cameras and it pairs really nicely with the Tamron 28 to 75 which is a great lens which I already own. Now one of the good things about this new lens is it's also a 67 millimeter filter size which means if you have a neutral density filter or filters that you're using on say your 28 to 75 lens you can also use them on the new Tamron lens. Now it doesn't say how much this weighs but it does look pretty compact for a 17 to 28. Now it is kind of a weird range 16 to 35 is a popular lens size but it would pair really nicely if you were traveling say with the Tamron 28 to 75 which is a very affordable lens for Sony, very high quality for the price point. If you had something like this you could just take two lenses with you and you'd have most of the range covered for travel type photos so I'm looking forward to this lens. I don't know what the pricing is, they haven't announced the pricing yet. They said it'll be available in mid 2019. We'll just have to wait and see what the pricing is on this. I'm hoping it's you know somewhere around the same price as the Tamron 28 to 75, hopefully cheaper but I assume it's going to be a lot more affordable than say the Sony 16 to 35 which is a very expensive lens. So anyway I just want to let you know that that announcement came out today and pricing well that's to be determined. Anyway thanks for watching this video I'll see you in the next one.


Puncture thank you all very much familiar faces. You're all very welcome and this afternoon and as You will be aware. We have a very distinguished guest as afternoon to address us and Lord Carnwood Lord Robert Carnwood or to give him his full title which I will if I may say it may do so once the right Honourable Lord Carnwood of Notting Hill and is our guest this afternoon and Robert Carnwood study law Trinity College Cambridge. He was called to the bar in 1968 took silk in 1985 He served as attorney general to the Prince of Wales, which I wasn't I wasn't aware that Prince of Wales has an attorney general I must tell you about you about that. He did that from 1988 to 1994 became a judge then the chance to be division and in 1994 served there until 2002 was appointed to the Court of Appeal that year became a justice of the Supreme Court in 2012 I think we're all Very familiar as well as practitioners and people interested in environment climate change energy policy with the body or the corpus of Environmental law that is relevant and that we see litigated all the time in the Irish courts much of it If not pretty much all of it coming through Directors from the European Union and transposed into law in Ireland So we're familiar with this territory, but it's also become a much Bigger question in recent years as we debate and struggle with the question and the issues of climate change and how We make laws make international agreements obviously, but how we make laws that are amenable to being tested and being litigated by citizens not just Intergovernmental activity in other words, but citizens and NGOs and other groups can take an interest in this Perhaps drive on the agenda through making new law and I think that's maybe some of the issues that Robert Karnworth might touch on in his talk, which I'll invite him to give in just a moment before I remind you to Adjust your mobile phone. You don't have to turn it off But if you put it to silent that'd be great And it would allow you also if you're minded to do so to tweet And if you're going to tweet the handle is IEA so we've got about an hour and As is the normal practice the address is on the record But when we have a Q&A session afterwards we'll observe Chatham house rules and when you're asking questions at that point You might just say who you are what your background is and interest and so forth So anyway without any further delay, I'm delighted to invite Robert Karnworth to address us. Thank you very much Well, thanks very much Alex for that introduction kind introduction It's a great pleasure to be in Dublin a great honor I mean you couldn't be my role as Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales is Long Unfortunately some time ago, but for your interest it actually is the post one of the oldest post it goes back to the 14th century When the black Prince was fighting wars in Europe and needed an attorney to look after his affairs in at home Happily in my case I was appointed to a Prince who was less litigious than that and But he's also was very interested in the environment I think was one of the reasons I got appointed because it was a time when he was actually Developing his interest in environment and planning law and I specialized in that at the bar, but anyway, here we are I'm conscious that This subject is quite topical here I'm we were talking at lunch about case you were have brought by the Friends of Ireland here Involving the issues of human rights and climate change, which I understand was heard earlier this year in the High Court and You're awaiting judgment now, obviously, I'm not going to say anything about that But I'm going to start from the other end of the other side of the world in Australia because a Month ago, it was announced that eight residents of the Torres Strait Islands in Australia Were bringing human rights challenges against the Australian government Now they are a group of islands north of Queensland Home to a unique First Nation people who've inhabited the region for thousands of years And it's one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world and they are threatened by climate change Which is causing regular flooding of their land and homes and is predicted to get much worse Now the islands are within the jurisdiction of the Australian government And they complain that the government has not done enough to protect their interests Either by adopting sufficiently rigorous greenhouse gas targets or funding adequate coastal defences But they're not bringing their cases under Australian law There appear to be no suitable domestic law frameworks of legal duties and remedies Instead they are taking the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Now that dates from 1966 and the original Is it said nothing about the environment it talked about Article 27 the right to culture Article 17 protection of family and home life and article six right to life and those are the articles which are relied on But in fact things have moved on since 1966 because a general comment on article six Which replaced previous commentaries dating from the early 80s was issued by the committee in 2018 and it expanded on the meaning of the right to life under article six It said this environmental degradation climate change and unsustainable development Constitutes some of the most pressing and serious threats to the ability of present and future generations to enjoy the right to life Obligations of states parties under international environmental law should thus inform the contents of article six Implementation of the obligation to respect and ensure the right to life and in particular life with dignity depends on measures taken by states to preserve The environment and protect it against harm pollution and climate change caused by public and private actors so there's the original Article six right to life being expanded to buy buy the Commentary produced by the committee and that's been as I understand at the basis of the present case and client earth who are very active and Non-governmental organizations, you know Has put out a frequently answered questions document Which gives a pithy summary of what the case is about it says this how is Australia failing on climate change? Currently the Australian government has no policies to meet its low emissions reduction target of 26 to 28 percent by 2030 Meanwhile, Canberra has continued to push the interest of fossil fuel industries in particular coal and coal seam gas Last year the UN's international panel on climate change Released a report stating humanity as just over a decade to introduce rapid Decarbonization of its economy to avert the worst of catastrophic climate change So there you have in a nutshell the basic dilemma facing Mankind in fact now and it's being put in the form of a complaint against the Australian government under human international human rights conventions But if you ask then well, where's that actually going to lead in practical terms and here? I'm afraid client earth is a little less upbeat It goes on when will the claim be decided? The process is quite involved and it could take up to three years for a decision After the claim is filed on May 13th 2019 the committee is likely to request a response from the Australian government later this year Once Canberra responds the authors could expect to reply from the committee in 2020 and following a potential all herring a decision in 2021 So hardly a very speedy process What would a succession decide? What would a successful decision mean legally? They ask If successful it would be the first decision from an international body finding that nation states have a duty to reduce their emissions under human rights law Unfortunately, even if the committee finds that there has been a violation it cannot force Australia to comply with its decision However, taking a case the committee Results in international pressure on Australia and nation states do frequently comply with rulings of the human rights committee so a fairly Modest claim as to what such action should achieve now, of course I say nothing about the merits of case nor what how the Australian courts might react if there were an adverse finding in the committee But I cited to underline a basic problem about the concept of human rights in national international environmental law It's one thing to assert such rights or even to establish them to the satisfaction of a tribunal It was quite another to convert them into action or into effective and enforceable duties at national or still less at international level Now as judges we are inevitably restricted both by the cases that come before us and by the limits of the legal toolbox at our disposal And that raises the question whether human rights law can make a significant contribution to addressing the immense Invert challenges we face in protecting the environment or is it just chipping away at the edges? I was struck by this dilemma Particularly a few weeks ago when we had the extinction rebellion demonstration I don't know whether you read about that. It was they they talk over Parliament Square and My window in the Supreme Court looked out over Parliament Square and so I was able to watch this process going on and They may they were making a very powerful case of stronger action on environmental issues Notably climate change and they attracted a lot of media attention and I think did succeed in raising the political debate but In fact, they'd even gone as far as to put up a an information tent immediately outside the entrance of the Supreme Court Which we had to negotiate it coming into and out of the building This led to a bit of a debate amongst us whether we had any legal powers to stop them doing it We decided they weren't doing much harm and so there it stayed Which I was quite pleased by it seemed to me a sort of quite a good arrangement and the police had obviously decided To take a reasonably hands-off approach In fact, the only time that anyone sort of intervened was when one of them climbed up a tree which actually From which you can actually look into my room and someone was afraid that there might be secret documents on my desk which I'm sorry to disappoint them there was nothing of any interest at all, but Looking down on them. I wondered whether there was any sort of symbolism in the location of their tent Was it a coded message to us as judges to be more proactive in holding the executive to account? Sadly, I don't think so. I think we just happen to be a convenient location opposite Parliament which was the real focus of their attention and rightly so But I wondered what if one of them had recognized me as a judge with a special interest in environmental law What sort of conversation might I have had with such an activist and with how much common ground? and what would I have been able to say to convince him or her of the Value of what we as judges do in with the tools that are disposal Now I'll come back to that later Towards the end of this talk But first I want to look at some examples of effective use of human rights law around the world Now in some jurisdictions the courts have been able to build on constitutional guarantees to turn such rights into effective action in the famous Opposer case in 1993 the Philippines Supreme Court Described rights to a balanced and healthful ecology as quotes basic rights which predate all governments and constitutions And need not be written in the Constitution for they are assumed to exist from the inception of humankind The court memorably upheld a challenge of the state's policies for granting consents to fell in the country's virgin forests Brought by some 43 children from all over the Philippines On behalf of themselves and quotes generations yet unborn Now that was 1993. It was a very progressive Decision which has been often cited and in some cases followed In the same spirit the courts of India and Pakistan have taken the lead in Interpreting constitutional guarantees of the right to life to include environmental rights In the words of the Pakistan Supreme Court in the leading case of Shelled Zia In 1994 They said the right to life Quotes does not mean nor can it be restricted only to the vegetative or animal life or mere existence from conception to death Life includes all such amenities and facilities Which a person born in a free country is entitled to enjoy with dignity legally and constitutionly And that approach has been adopted in a number of well particularly India, but also a number of other South Asian jurisdictions with with strong effects and A well-known and very powerful example Of the potential of this approach is the case of leg Hari and the Attorney General in the Lahore High Court in 2015 The court was faced with a claim by a farmer whose land was suffering from the effects of climate change and Who charged the government with failure to implement its own climate change policies The court upheld the claim relying again on the constitutional right to life It all of the setting up of a climate change commission to oversee the implementation of those policies under the supervision of the court and the commissioners recently submitted its final report following Successful completion of the main phases of its work and that's an extraordinary activist approach for the court to set up a Commission to do the work of actually bringing government to account in a practical way But of course, it was important the success of that case That the court was not seeking to impose on the government anything to which it was not already in principle committed It was simply seeking to hold the government to its own policies And no doubt for this reason the government did not appeal the decision But cooperated fully in the work of the court appointed commission So That is a powerful example of the way one can use human rights or constitutional guarantees of human rights, but Working with the government Now I think the South Asian courts have gone much further than would be Thought as yet appropriate for common law or civil courts in other parts of the world including our own In Europe part of our legal toolbox is the European Convention on Human Rights Now as you know the convention itself says nothing about the environment We were discussing at lunch actually the wreath lectures given recently by my former colleague Jonathan Sumption and he pointed out the extent to which article eight of the Convention has been expanded to cover all sorts of things probably weren't in the minds of the original Crafters one of them being the protection of the environment Jonathan has sort of emphasized the dangers of the expansion of the law into areas better left in his view to political resolution As he put it quotes human rights are where law and politics meet it can be an unfriendly meeting And he quoted our former Prime Minister's comment that a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights about votes for prisoners Made him quotes physically sick But that was slightly extreme and happily I'm not aware of any comparable Political reaction to decisions of the Strasbourg court relating to the environment and I think this is because the Court has in practice stared a careful line between the protection of individual rights and the margin of appreciation Allowed to the government on policy issues Two cases illustrate the contrast the first Significant environmental case in Strasbourg was called Lopez, Austria against Spain in 1995 Where the court upheld a complaint about the Spanish government's failure to deal With smells noise and fumes from a waste treatment plant situated a few meters away from the claimant's home She had put up with it for three years before having to move It was held that there was a violation of article 8 as the authorities have not stuck a fair balance between the town's economic Well-being and her private life and there'd been Effective total failure by the government to respond to a serious and unlawful interference with her home life But the other end of the spectrum is the leading grand shamer case relating to night flights at Heathrow Hatton and the United Kingdom in 2002 Now there there was no doubt about the sleep interruptions caused by night flights and The third section of the court had initially upheld the claim by a majority But the grand chamber disagreed The difference turned on the view taken of the margin of appreciation and whether the regulations reflected a fair balance Previous cases such as Lopez Ostra were distinguished on the basis that quote The violation was predicated on a failure by the national authorities to comply with some aspect of the domestic regime Whereas this element of quote's domestic Irregularity is wholly absent in the present case Overall it was said the court does not find that in substance the authorities overstepped their margin of appreciation By failing to strike a fair balance between the right of the individuals affected by those Regulations to respect for their private life at home and the conflicting interests of others and of the community as a whole It's interesting that my colleague Lord Kerr who had been sitting as an ad hoc judge in the Chamber decision and had dissented for reasons very close to those of the grand chamber he observed that Central problem in such cases is to define the boundaries between the respective roles of policy makers and courts He said this if convention stands are not met in an individual case It is the role of the court to say so regardless of how many others are in the same position But when as hair a substantial proportion of the population of South London is a similar in a similar position to the applicants The court must consider whether the proper place for a discussion of the particular policy is in Strasbourg Or whether the issue should not be left the domestic political sphere now similar issues I think are at the heart of the arguments in the Famous agenda case in the Netherlands That was a case brought by the Dutch agenda foundation and And a number of citizens to compel the government to comply with its Kyoto commitments And it was held by the court and wasn't really contested that the government had not limited Emissions to the extent which they had undertaken to do in previous international conferences The district court the Hague district court which heard the case first Rejected arguments that these were purely political issues It held but given the undisputed evidence as a serious threat to man and the environment posed by climate change And even without specific legislation The government had to do to take appropriate mitigation measures in its own territory to address it Now the district court put its decision on a slightly esoteric Feature of Dutch law called unlawful hazardous negligence Which I don't think is repeated in our system or I suspect yours, but the Court of Appeal Last year upheld that decision on grounds of more general interest Because they based their decision on the European Convention and in particular on articles 2 and 8 They held that climate change represents a real threat resulting in the serious risk That the current generations of citizens will be confronted with loss of life and or disruption of family life They've done articles 2 and 8 of the convention the student aid has a duty to protect against this real threat Now that has rightly been treated as a landmark case in its recognition that the threat posed by climate change Can be seen as a human rights issue We are currently awaiting the result of the government's appeal to the Supreme Court and The argument of which was heard recently But One has to accept that articles 8 and of the convention Really are not very well adapted to protection of environmental rights on any of you it is a significant limitation on those visions that Article 8 is about protection of people and their homes and families rather than the environment for its own sake This is a point that came up in a case called Kurt Tatox against Greece in 2005 Where the applicants and challenged the government's failure to demolish buildings In where permits to build on a swamp had been ruled unlawful by the Greek court The first section held that there was no violation of article 8 as the applicants are not sure how damaged the birds and other protected species Directly affected their own private or family rights The court observed Neither article 8 nor any other of the articles of the convention are specifically designed to provide general protection of the environment as such To that effect other international instruments and domestic legislation are more pertinent in dealing with this particular aspect Now as that passage implicitly recognizes environmental rights are not human rights in the ordinary sense There are much more than that they involve rights and duties The rights are those of not just humans, but of all living things The duties are ours as a species which has the unique ability to influence the environment for good or ill It is not at all clear that we yet have in place quotes other international instruments fit for the purpose A more comprehensive view of the scope of environmental rights and duties is found in the important decision in February 2018 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its advisory opinion at the request of the Republic of Columbia Concerning state obligations in relation to the environment Again the original version of the American invention on human rights dating from 1969 said nothing about the environment Article 26 merely imposed a general obligation for the progressive development of quotes economic social and cultural rights It was not until the El Salvador protocol of 1989 there was included a specific reference to the environment Article 11 of the protocol is in relatively simple terms, but it does Deal with both rights and duties It says everyone shall have the right to live in a healthy environment and to have access to basic public services The state's parties shall promote the protection preservation and improvement of the environment and from this the text The judgment develops an elaborate framework of rights and responsibilities national and trance Poundry and it is indeed a remarkable example of an environmental human rights courts Developing the framework in a progressive way which actually come encompasses most of the sort of accepted principles of international environmental law and the court also emphasizes the importance of Protection of the environment as an end in itself quite apart from risk to individual human beings The same approach is adopted in another Recent development that is the proposed global pact for the environment which was produced in France by a group of experts under the leadership of Laurel Fabius who was the chairman of the Paris negotiations in 2015 and This was had the blessing of President Macron and it was presented by him to the UN General Assembly in September 2017 It's been subject to discussions within the United Nations since The ambition according to the accompany of material was for the pact to become quotes the cornerstone of international environmental law and to stand alongside the two international governments of 1966 relating to civil and political rights and economic social and cultural rights So establishing it was said a third generation of fundamental rights the rights related to environmental protection So a very ambitious endeavor I was in fact honored to be a member of the group of international legal specialists invited to advise on the text and I went to the launch event in the Sorbonne back in 2017 What I think is very important about the pact is it actually brings together a number of very familiar Concepts which one finds in other documents, but such as sustainable development intergenerational equity polluter pays and so on But it does so in a very simple and tangible form But I think the most important point is the starting point which emphasize Again, this is not just about rights, but about the balance of rights and duties individual and collective So article one Right to an ecologically sound environment every person has the right to live in an ecologically sound environment adequate for their health well-being dignity culture and fulfillment Article two duty to take care of the environment Every state or international institution every person natural or legal public or private Has the duty to take care of the environment To this end everyone everyone contributes to their own levels to the conservation protection and Restoration of the integrity of the earth's ecosystem Now I like that because it goes beyond the idea. That's just a matter of estates It's something which every person natural or legal has an involvement in and it goes beyond just protection But restoration of the integrity of the earth's ecosystem Now as I say that's Progressing it's there's been a large measure of international support for the pack within and outside the United Nations But there's been opposition from some predictable quarters and so future progress remains uncertain Now let me come back in conclude well In conclusion to the my hypothetical conversation with the environmental activist on the doorstep of the Supreme Court Now she might have asked me to explain what courts like mine were doing in practical terms to enforce Environmental rights and with what results Now I could have offered some examples. I might have pointed to the order we made in the Supreme Court in 2015 against the government in a case brought by client earth Challenging the government's failure to bring pollution levels in certain major urban areas within the Manchelette Limits set by the European Directives We ordered the government to produce a revised plan within a Specific period and gave liberty to apply to the administrative court for consequential orders Revised plan was produced, but that was challenged by client earth and found wanting by the administrative court And the court laid down a tight program for its improvement So far so good my activists might have said but what then and I would have had to admit That we were not enforcing environmental rights as such, but we were enforcing Specific statutory rules laid down by a directive Okay, so And but even in that context There had been a question whether enforcement was a matter of the European Commission rather than the courts Which we had referred to the European Court So the whole process had taken rather a long time the case was started in 2011 And even now eight years later, it's open to question how much it has achieved in terms of strict compliance Pollution in London remains a major issue I might perhaps have turned our conversation to the courts of the USA and the great case of Massachusetts and the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 There as you know the Supreme Court decided by five to four that the agency's powers under the Clean Air Act extended to greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2 emissions from motor vehicles and they held that the There was unchallenged evidence That global warming threatens a precipitate rise in sea levels by the end of the century and severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems And the agency's failure to take any action was held to be arbitrary and capricious and therefore unlawful Now that again was not a case about human rights as such it turned on the construction of the Clean Air Act But it was very important Following the change of administration. It was decided that's under the Bush administration But then when President Obama getting caught in it gave him the necessary legal tools which he was able to work in the face of The unlike to have getting any actual laws through Congress and it paved the way for his strong climate change program And for the USA is crucial leadership in the Paris negotiations in 2015 But again, I would have had to admit that subsequent progress has been patching The judgment still stands. It does not mean questioned in any later cases But it does not prevent to the next president reversing the EPA's policy approach and Deciding to pull out of the Paris Agreement Now you will not find any coherent explanation of this change of view as far as I can see anywhere on In the government or indeed on the EPA website Curiously you will find on the website a page headed quotes climate change in the United States benefits of global action it gives a link to a 2015 report by the climate change impacts and risk analysis Cira Which it is said shows that global action on climate change Will significantly benefit Americans by saving lives and avoiding costly damages across the US economy But how this is compatible with the decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is not explained Another USA case which has attracted a lot of interest was the judgment of Judge Akin in the case of Juliana with the USA in 2016 in the US District Court of Oregon But again progress has been painfully slow The plaintiffs were a group of young people alleging specific harm due to the effects of climate change and Challenging the federal government's failure to take adequate steps to protect them Judge Akin dismissed the government's attempt to have the case struck out as disclosing no arguable case She rejected arguments that these were political questions She held that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is Fundamental to a free and ordered society and thus protected by the due process clause of the Constitution The case was supposed to go to a full hearing last autumn But it was delayed by interlocutory wrangles which went all the way up to the Supreme Court and a still waiting resolution now I'd have had to confess to my Activist friend that when one is dealing with issues as complex and wide-ranging as climate change Human rights law is an imperfect tool In the long run, there is no real alternative to political consensus Supported by robust legal frameworks. I Could have emphasized it in the United Kingdom We are fortunate the issue was was long ago taken out of the serious area of serious political controversy By legislation in the form of the Climate Change Act of 2008 Which imposes a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that the net emissions of greenhouse gases for the year 2050 Are at least 80% lower than the 1990 baseline It provides the machinery for the Secretary of State to set statutory carbon budgets for successive five-year periods and And it established an independent climate change committee to give expert advice including on the setting of the carbon budgets and for the moment our performance has been on track Although the committee has made clear that more needs to be done for the future and for the moment that Those issues have not come before the courts in any significant way Now as you probably know last month the committee advised that to satisfy our Paris commitments The target in the act needs to be revised downwards to net zero emissions by 2050 The act provides a mechanism for that to be done by statutory instrument and recently Mrs. May is part of her Legacy announced that the government had accepted this advice and would promote the necessary legislation Now this announcement Attracted criticism on both sides some said it was unachievable others said it did not go far enough The BBC reported the chance of the exchequer had warned that it would cost one trillion pounds by 2050 The acting energy minister on the other hand pointed out that this was no more than one to two percent of the UK's GDP And others said it was a small price to pay for saving the world Now whatever target is proposed you'll undoubtedly attract intense political debate And I know that this week Ireland also announced It's the launch of its own climate change plan aiming for net zero emissions by 2050 Now to me as an environmental lawyer and judge The important point is that in the 2008 act in the United Kingdom We have more than political commitments or generalized human rights protection We have a strong legal framework with clear and enforceable targets based on objective and independent advice expert advice and I Think I would say to my activist friend that whatever else we do by way of Test cases such as the Torres Island case or by way of the sort of protest such as the extinction rebellion protest We need to direct all our efforts to achieving legal regimes across the ball globe which are effective and enforceable and fit for purpose Now in this connection. I was delighted to see the announcement This week that the UK has reached an agreement with Italy in its bid to host the 26th conference of the parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Now this is a crucial meeting Marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the time for the quotes global stock take To be undertaken by the conference of the parties under article 14 to assess collective progress Towards achieving the purpose of the agreement Now it happens to coincide with the US a Presidential elections which gives added pecansia to that particular objective Now for me, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of that Meeting for the future of the world as we know it As my activist friend would no doubt tell me the Paris Agreement is far from perfect But I would reply that from a legal point of view. It's the best thing we have and we have to make it work


How did you discover geographic information systems? Probably not on television. Although weather maps and other news maps appear frequently, you'll rarely see the analytics that distinguish GIS from ordinary mapping. And you'll never see a Super Bowl commercial about GIS. Maybe you have a family member or friend who works with GIS and told you about it. It's unlikely that you discovered GIS in grade school or high school. In the U.S. at least, geography is rarely included in school curricula. And despite decades of research, advocacy, and donated technology, few school teachers or administrators use GIS in their work. It's more likely that you first discovered GIS in college. Thousands of colleges and universities around the world offer classes, training, and support for GIS. And at least a quarter million students use GIS software in their studies every year. In fact, degree programs in geography in the U.S. describe themselves as discovery majors, because so few high school graduates are aware that the discipline even exists. This is the story of a young woman named Annika Shears, who discovered GIS in college, then rediscovered it after graduation. Calvin College is a well-regarded liberal arts school whose bucolic campus is in the city of Grand Rapids in western Michigan. Calvin's Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies has offered GIS classes since the 1990s. Here we see students at work in the James A. Clarke Geospatial Laboratory. After matriculating at Calvin as a history major, Annika found her way to geography. She learned to make maps like these in her GIS classes. The one on the left shows the results of buffer and raster analyses to determine census tracks with inadequate access to healthy groceries. On the right, Annika analyzed soil's data to identify property parcels best suited for viticulture. She fell in love with the rich analysis and visualization capabilities of ARCMAP. For Annika and students like her, GIS was synonymous with a single monolithic desktop software package. And GIS analysis generally meant a linear sequence of steps by which GIS transforms input data into information products like maps. Here's an example of a stepwise workflow diagram for a site selection analysis by Nate Stair of the homebrewing family, the Stair Brothers. Annika would soon discover that there's a lot more to modern GIS than she thought. In her senior year at Calvin, she applied and was selected for a prestigious Summer of Maps fellowship with Azavia. You learned a bit about Azavia and Summer of Maps in the video prelude to this case study. As founder Robert Cheatham puts it, Azavia is a B corporation that creates civic geospatial software and data analytics for the web. B corporations meet comprehensive social and environmental performance standards. The B corporation status emphasizes the triple bottom line of social responsibility, sustainability, and profitability. Azavia's offices are in the fifth floor of this building at 990 Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. An inscription at the building's entrance says, This city was made from makers. Join the revival of innovation and creativity in the Spring Arts District. Here's what Azavia's workspace looked like in 2016, about six months after they'd moved in and around the time I visited. It's an open plan environment that encourages communication and collaboration. One example of Azavia's work is the Coastal Resilience Project, which it developed for the Nature Conservancy, and which won the 2014 United Nations Award for Best Professional and Scientific App for Disaster Risk Reduction. Her Summer of Maps fellowship paired Annika with the nonprofit American Red Cross. The Red Cross cosponsors Missing Maps, a program that promotes and organizes crowdsourced mapping of places where some of the world's most vulnerable people live. One of those places is the border region of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Using data from volunteer community surveys, Annika's project was to analyze and map vulnerability in relation to water accessibility and quality, household size, sanitation infrastructure, and high traffic areas. She performed statistical analyses to identify clusters of high and low vulnerability and to determine which vulnerability sectors were most significant. That much, she felt pretty well prepared to do. But the Red Cross sought to communicate her findings to employees and volunteers with an interactive web app. That would require HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding using Leaflet, a JavaScript library for lightweight web and mobile geo-apps. Annika felt completely unprepared for this set of tasks. How, she wondered, would she ever learn all of this within a 12-week fellowship? Annika had rediscovered GIS as a broad and dynamic ecosystem of interrelated technologies and methods. Robert Cheatham sketched this conceptual map of the Web GIS technology ecosystem at my request in collaboration with Michael Lippmann of the mapping services firm Blue Raster in a 90-minute online whiteboarding session in August of 2016. The sketch map depicts data products and services, organizations, technologies and products, and languages that Robert and Mike felt were essential elements of the ecosystem at that time. Robert says, every time I see that diagram, I want to start editing it. We'll take a closer look at the contents of this map, their relationships and implications in our next lesson, which happens to be a case study about Blue Raster. For now, let's focus on how Annika came to grips with this daunting milieu. Annika succeeded because of a certain mindset. Author Gil Broza defines mindset as how you think about acting in a given situation. What Annika learned at Azavia is close to what Broza calls the agile mindset. Agile is a set of values, beliefs, principles and associated methods that emerged in response to dissatisfaction with an earlier approach called traditional or waterfall development. I didn't know it at the time, but I learned the waterfall development approach as a student of cartography in the 1980s. In those days, every layer of information that was to appear on a map had to be created as a physical layer of plastic film that cartographers engraved or drew on or affixed labels to by hand. Because every layer was labor-intensive to create and expensive to change, we learned to confirm customer requirements and commit to a design plan in advance, trusting that it would all turn out well in the end. The waterfall approach made sense when mapmaking was essentially a manufacturing process. A generation later, the linear, sequential approach to GIS analysis and visualization that Annika learned in college was still essentially waterfall. The agile mindset understands map and app development as an interactive process, not a once and for all design problem. Agile is an umbrella term that encompasses several methodologies. The primary agile method used at Azavia is called scrum. Ironically, scrum was inspired by continuous improvement and just-in-time manufacturing processes developed in Japan by Toyota and others. In rugby, a scrum is a formation of teammates who link together to gain possession of the ball and advance it toward the goal. In software and app development, teams identify a backlog of work to be done from user stories about desired project outcomes. Importantly, it's not assumed that either the project team or the client knows all of the project requirements in advance. The team then maps the backlog into a series of time-boxed sprints, each of which yields a working increment of software. Specific outcomes are determined at the sprint level, not the project level. During a sprint, each day begins with a brief stand-up meeting in which team members share status updates, identify impediments to be overcome, and set goals for the day's work. Along the way, clients are encouraged to interact with the team, to ask questions and pose challenges, and to expect the team to respond quickly to an evolving project vision. Another agile technique called Kanban is a workflow practice that's also inspired by Japanese product management. Here's a Kanban board used by an Azavia team to track the flow of project backlog through a queue to works-in-progress and finally to done. The core values of the agile mindset were first expressed in the manifesto for agile software development that a group of pioneers published in 2001. In contrast to traditional development, the agile mindset values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Supporting the core value that people come first, one of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto is to build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Implicit in that principle is that agile organizations value continuing professional development and expect employees to know how to learn independently and collaboratively. Onika succeeded in her summer of maps fellowship because her Azavia mentors and colleagues helped her learn how to learn. I hope that's a mindset that you too will take away from this class and the ones that follow.