Friends of the Earth

Before becoming an MP, Ellie was a councillor and a Green MEP.

She also worked for charities, including Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth.

Grantham, please welcome your Any Questions panel.

Now this week, like every week, our panellists do not know what the questions will be before they're read out live on air.

Environmental organisations, scientists and local communities point to decades of nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff, sewage discharges and other sources as major contributors to the crisis.

Friends of the Earth highlights that pollution from both animal and human waste is helping drive the algae blooms, while DERA identifies excessive phosphorus and nitrogen from agriculture and wastewater.

as well as climate change as key factors.

Among those campaigning and taking legal action is Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland.

And joining us today is Laura Neill, environmental lawyer with Friends of the Earth NI to explain what is happening, who's responsible and what action is needed and how people across Northern Ireland can help protect one of our most important natural assets.

Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's toxic to pets.

So very much broadening my vision of sustainable development.

I was always a member of the local Friends of the Earth group, Manchester Friends of the Earth, local Friends of the Earth group.

And that was a fairly, I suppose my vision then was a fairly standard save the whale, save the tree, save the shrimp type environmentalism.

You do a ride like that through the global south, and see how this needs to land, sustainable development needs to land and involve people, involve society and the economy.

So by the end of today, I was left with three fairly simple questions out of not a lot of complicated discussion.

What value are we putting on this landscape? How reliable is the methodology being used to assess the impact on it? And when we're shown an image of what this development is supposed to look like, are we actually being shown enough to understand what will be there? And most importantly of all maybe, what if the landscape baseline you're starting from isn't reliable in the first place? James Orr from Friends of the Earth was at the inquiry again today.

James is also a former planner, so before we finish, I asked him what he made of today's discussion.

Today was about landscape impacts and when I did eventually speak about landscape impact and planning case law, it just felt to me that the argument wasn't allowed to be pursued, the point I was making.

So it was a bit of a dispiriting sort of moment.

And from there, I ended up doing the usual Australian things, backpacking, ending up in London, and then working at Friends of the Earth, long story short, during the period where we were securing the Climate Change Act and doing international climate negotiations and all the rest of it.

That was kind of...

By the time I got to the end of my time at Friends of the Earth, which was 2012, I needed a bit of a break.

So I ended up doing a PhD and finding refuge, as it was, in academia, where I've spent eight of the last nine years doing industrial organizing.

You sort of described that as like you just got involved in lefty stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, that was always a bit of a myth,