I’ve found this period deeply triggering for reasons I trace back to my adolescence.

As a teenager in South Africa, I regularly experienced our water and electricity being cut off because my parents were unable to pay their bills. I have no recollection of how many months of unpaid utilities they accrued before this happened (and it happened often). But cut off they were. And this was not my only experience of debt enforcement.

Imagine what it feels like not being able to shower before school, or having to turn a friend away because your electricity has once again been shut off by the supplier. Imagine trying to explain to your friends why you have suddenly moved house, without telling them your family has been evicted because you are too humiliated to admit it. The point is, debt enforcement deprived me of the experiences and securities that so many people take for granted.

Explaining these experiences to a reader is easy. Conveying the sense of fear and humiliation that accompanied being on the receiving end of corporate and government debt enforcement, even though I was not personally responsible for generating the debt, is very difficult. I would go so far as to say that one cannot fully appreciate the trauma of these experiences without experiencing it for themselves.

One of the most salient of these experiences was as a result of the debt my mother accrued through credit extended by Edgars, a large South African clothing retailer that was part of the Edcon group (which went into business rescue in 2020 and has since ceased trading). My mother rapidly accumulated thousands of rands in debt via a store credit card, which my parents simply could not afford to repay.

Neither of my parents ever received a formal diagnosis for mental health conditions. But looking back, I believe both suffered from depression, and possibly other comorbidities. Both had serious problems with alcohol. Whatever the precise diagnoses might have been, they were struggling, and they needed help. This is not surprising, as a relationship between debt and mental health problems is well documented. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, for example, reports that 18% of people with mental health problems experience problem debt versus 5% of people without mental health challenges. In a survey of about 5 500 people with experience of mental health problems, 72% of respondents said those problems had negatively impacted their financial wellbeing. And the converse is true too: 86% said their financial situation had worsened their mental health.

So, there is a clear link between problem debt and poor mental health, and yet, we exist in a society where the obligation to repay debt is still treated as inviolable. That it was easier for my mother to access credit than appropriate mental health care tells you a great deal about the priorities of the economy she was living in.

After months of non-payment and warnings, the debt was handed over to a collection agency. One of its tactics was to make automated telephone calls threatening all sorts of consequences if the account was not settled immediately. In an act of purposeful cruelty, these calls came at seven o’clock on Saturday mornings, many of which I answered myself.

Things came to a head just after I finished high school, when a Sheriff of the Court (a role broadly equivalent to a bailiff in England) arrived at our house with a court order to attach assets to cover the unpaid debt, as well as the costs of collecting it. By this stage, I had secured a simple office job. My intention was to save enough money to buy a plane ticket to the UK and escape my life in South Africa. Instead, I ended up paying down my mother’s debt.

I can write about all of this now, more than twenty years later, and the primary emotion I experience is rage. But at the time, I was overwhelmed by humiliation.

The narrative we are fed is that debt is something that bad, irresponsible people get themselves into because they cannot manage their lives properly, and I was subject to that narrative. I was humiliated by my parents, by our circumstances, and by the different forms of debt enforcement to which we were subjected. Looking back, I can recognise that what my parents needed was psychological and financial support. What they got were threatening letters and debt collectors.

It is impossible for me to know what appropriate support might have changed for my parents. But I find it difficult to see how threatening calls on Saturday mornings could have helped them address the profound cognitive and emotional problems underlying their debt.

And I was caught in the blast radius of these enforcement actions. And this is something I believe that analyses of debt so often fail to recognise. Debt enforcement reaches people who never directly borrowed, never consented to an act of borrowing, and have no real power to resolve the debt.

Children do not sign credit agreements. They do not negotiate repayment terms or interest rates. They cannot challenge collection agencies. But they can answer the telephone. They can go to school after having spent a couple of days without electricity or running water. They can learn to suppress normal adolescent relationships, because they are humiliated. Debt may belong to one person, but its consequences do not. And debt enforcement almost entirely fails to recognise this fact.

In England and Wales, household water supplies cannot be disconnected for non-payment. Whatever debt a household has accrued, losing access to water is not a permissible means of recovering it. But people in Britain are still subjected to debt enforcement practices that can bring fear, humiliation, and trauma into their homes. Debt Justice’s Ban the Bailiffs campaign calls for an end to the use of bailiffs to collect council tax debt. Thinking about families facing these visits brings back memories of experiences I wholeheartedly believe do not belong in a compassionate society.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber explores how deeply debt is entangled with our ideas of morality and societal obligations. His work challenges us to question arrangements that we have come to treat as natural or inevitable. Why does the obligation to repay become so morally profound that the suffering inflicted in its name is treated as incidental? There is nothing sacrosanct about financial debt. The mere existence of an unpaid debt does not universally justify collection, and simply having access to legal enforcement does not equate to morality.

From personal experience, I can say that debt enforcement can be brutal, inhumane and traumatising. I know what it feels like to be dominated by an institution wielding the law under the guise of a moral imperative. I also know how easily shame falls on the people being subjected to enforcement. And when we zoom out, we can see this same moral logic operating on a far greater scale.

Ever since an Anthropology lecture in my early twenties, I’ve remembered learning about structural adjustment programmes in African countries facing debt crises. During the debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, access to IMF and World Bank finance came with conditions that often included cuts to public expenditure like healthcare and education. These measures often resulted in increased mother and child mortality rates, domestic violence, and poorer educational outcomes.

More recently, a review published in 2017 examined thirteen studies of structural adjustment in developing countries. Eleven linked structural adjustment to worse child or maternal health outcomes. These findings raise a question we cannot ignore: why should the health of children or their mothers become part of the adjustment required to resolve debt?

The scale and mechanisms are different from what happened to my family. But an unjust and downright odious distribution of power remains consistent. People who had no part in taking on the debt still become subject to its consequences. Children in Mozambique or the DRC or Zambia do not negotiate sovereign loans. Yet their healthcare, education and future opportunities can become part of what is sacrificed in the response to a debt crisis.

We should be deeply troubled by an economic order in which financial claims can take precedence over people’s wellbeing. We should also question the power that creditors are permitted to exercise over the choices available to indebted countries. The right to repayment should never amount to an unrestricted claim on a population’s future. As a society, we need to reinvent our relationship with debt, and with one another.

In the short term, we should support initiatives like Ban the Bailiffs. We should demand accessible financial and psychological support before households collapse into crises. Lending practices that exploit vulnerability or disregard the ability to repay should be aggressively curtailed. Our welfare systems should protect people from needing to borrow simply to get through the month.

We should also support debt cancellation where debts have been unjustly incurred, or where repayment can only be achieved through unacceptable harms. And this is a principle that should be applied at any scale - from individual households to entire countries. The vulnerable should not be forced to bear the consequences of repayment at any cost.

More than twenty years later, I can see my parents’ circumstances with a compassion I could not manage as a teenager. They needed help. I needed a stable home, the freedom to invite friends over, and the chance to save for my own ambitions. Instead, my early life was organised around debt. I do not believe the humiliation I experienced made anyone more responsible, nor do I believe it made our society healthier, fairer or more humane.

The debt was treated as an obligation that had to be honoured. The damage done was simply a consequence to bear. For our collective wellbeing, we should reject the idea that enforcing a financial debt matters more than the lives of the people affected.

References

1. Hyprop Investments (2021). Integrated Annual Report 2021.

2. Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. Money and mental health: facts and statistics.

3. Murray, T. and Bond, N. (2023). Debts and Despair: How debt collection practices contribute to psychological harm.

4. Ofwat. Problems with your bill.

5. Debt Justice. Ban the Bailiffs.

6. Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

7. World Bank. History: Economies in transition and structural adjustment.

8. Thomson, M., Kentikelenis, A. and Stubbs, T. (2017). Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: a systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health. Public Health Reviews, 38, article 13.

9. Photo by Jeffrey Clayton on Unsplash

The approval was widely anticipated, and came as no surprise to me. Despite this, I still felt profound dismay at the announcement, which amplified my ever-increasing sense of horror at both the UK government’s and international leaders’ lethargy and short-sightedness when it comes to climate.

Having fully embraced Yvon Chouinard’s belief that “the cure for depression is action.", I made use of ClientEarth’s initiative to submit a pre-written email to my local MP, Conservative MP for East Hampshire Damian Hinds. Within 30 minutes, I received a response acknowledging the environmental concerns but setting out his support for further North Sea extraction.

His argument was that Britain should make use of its own resources while neighbouring countries such as Norway continued to extract theirs. He warned that the government’s policy on new licences was “putting 200,000 jobs at risk”, and that failing to approve Rosebank would threaten investment and harm the economy.

He also argued that a strong economy was needed to finance the energy transition, that Britain would continue to need significant quantities of oil and gas for many years to come, and that replacing domestic production with imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) would increase emissions from production and transport. He described this as a “false environmental economy”.

I acknowledge this is a thoughtful response. I also acknowledge that many others, including renewables proponents like the CEO of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, are of the opinion that the decision to approve Jackdaw was the right one in the shorter term (but to be clear, I do not mean to equate Greg Jackson’s longer-term stance with that of Hind’s). There is a school of thought which argues that approving Jackdaw was the pragmatic decision: the UK is still massively dependent on fossil fuels, and it’s better to make use of local resources rather than imports.

I can acknowledge the thoughtfulness of this stance, but I still believe it is inaccurate, and inadequate in addressing the climate emergency. Damian Hinds’s email has provided me with the perfect vehicle to challenge this particular line of thinking.

1. On the idea that the UK should not allow its resources to go untapped whilst neighbours like Norway extract resources “from the same seabed”: I am always mystified when Conservative MPs put Norway forward as an example of how powerful natural resource extraction can be, without also discussing what Norway did with the revenue generated.

When the Ekofisk oilfield was discovered in 1969, Norway embarked on an approach to resource management that placed strong emphasis on public control and public benefit for the long-term. Its sovereign wealth fund, built using revenues from Norway’s oil and gas resources, was established in 1990. Compare this with the UK, where successive governments used North Sea revenues to meet immediate fiscal needs without establishing an equivalent sovereign wealth fund. Thatcher’s governments also privatised energy businesses, including Britoil, and sold further state holdings in BP (although admittedly BP share sales had begun earlier under Labour in 1977).

The UK still collected substantial revenues from North Sea extraction, reaching £12 billion in 1984–85. My objection is to the short-termism of failing to preserve more of that finite wealth for the future. Saving it would, of course, have required higher taxes, lower spending or more borrowing elsewhere. But that is precisely the point: governments made choices about what to prioritise!

Mr Hinds’s argument that a strong economy is needed to fund the transition away from fossil fuels is absolutely true. Had successive governments made the decision to preserve more of the proceeds of the UK’s energy reserves for the long-term benefit of the British people, we could arguably be in a stronger position to finance that transition now.

The government has, in fairness, announced a £2 billion Energy Wealth Fund alongside Jackdaw’s approval, intended to invest oil and gas revenues in the energy transition. The principle is good, but it’s hard not to believe that this horse has already bolted.

None of this, by itself, settles whether Jackdaw should be approved. But anyone in the UK who invokes the Norway example must also acknowledge its stewardship of resource wealth for the benefit of Norwegians.

2. On the figure of 200,000 jobs being placed at risk by the government’s policies on North Sea extraction: I believe the way this figure has been presented needs much closer scrutiny.

Here, Hinds is referencing wider North Sea policy, rather than explicitly claiming that 200,000 jobs depend on Jackdaw and Rosebank alone. The figure describes employment supported by the UK oil and gas industry as a whole, including supply-chain jobs and employment sustained by workers’ spending. That is not evidence that all those jobs would disappear under the policy he opposes.

Jackdaw is expected to support nearly 500 jobs annually, including direct, indirect and induced employment. That includes 273 existing Shearwater jobs and 27 new direct full-time-equivalent roles. On Jackdaw employment peaked at more than 1,400 during development. Rosebank is forecast to support around 2,000 UK jobs at peak construction and an average of 525 UK full-time jobs over the field’s lifetime, again including direct, indirect and induced employment. It’s also important to acknowledge that I have encountered significantly lower job creation estimates via industry conversations.

It’s also worth considering the employment opportunities created by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. The government estimates that the Warm Homes Plan could support up to 180,000 additional jobs across the UK in energy efficiency and clean heating by 2030.

These are different forecasts, covering different periods of time, and we cannot pretend a job created elsewhere in the country automatically replaces one lost in a North Sea community. A just transition must include opportunity generation for the people affected by that transition. But protecting livelihoods and prolonging extraction are not synonymous. North Sea communities will also be exposed to the impacts of climate change, and they deserve a future that extends beyond the limited lifetimes of oil and gas fields.

3. On the idea that not approving North Sea extraction is damaging to the economy: I think we need to take a considerably wider view of what constitutes economic damage.

Without additional adaptation, climate change-related damage could cost the UK economy the equivalent of £60–£260 billion per year by 2050 (expressed in 2025 costs), under scenarios involving ~2°C of global warming. Compare this with the estimated lifetime economic contributions of Jackdaw and Rosebank, which are forecast to deliver approximately £27 billion combined. These are estimates of gross value added, not company revenues or tax generated. To be clear, this is a comparison of scale, not a cost-benefit calculation. I also acknowledge that rejection of these two fields would not prevent all of these potential climate costs, which would be the product of global emissions accumulated over time.

But the scale matters. We are discussing the economic benefits of further extraction whilst facing climate risks on a vastly greater scale. Any claim to economic pragmatism needs to confront the additional emissions, the implications for future investment, and the risks of prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels. Listing the benefits of extraction is only a small part of a much, much larger story.

4. And finally, on the claim that the UK will still need significant quantities of oil and gas in the coming decades: let’s be clear, the quantity we need, how long we need it for, and how quickly that need declines are profoundly shaped by policy decisions. Presenting our addiction to fossil fuels as an intractable feature of reality is inaccurate and disingenuous.

Decarbonising existing buildings, vehicles, and industrial equipment will take time, money, and vast infrastructure development. Even the Climate Change Committee’s ambitious pathway retains a limited role for fossil fuels in 2050. But acknowledging that we will need some oil and gas during the transition does not automatically justify approving these particular developments, nor does it make a universal case for further extraction at scale.

Hinds’s point about imported LNG deserves acknowledgement too. A North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) analysis, using 2024 data, estimates that imported LNG produces on average about three times the emissions of UK-produced gas before combustion. Hinds is clear in his reference to these pre-combustion stages of production, rather than the emissions from burning it. There is, admittedly, a genuine advantage here.

But imported gas is not all LNG, and much arrives by pipeline from Norway, whose gas has lower average production emissions than the UK’s. And burning gas still releases carbon dioxide; the climate could not care less where it comes from. Jackdaw’s advantage over LNG does not settle the question of how quickly we should be reducing gas demand.

Our domestic and global addiction to fossil fuels could be reduced on a greatly accelerated timeframe with concerted effort. I’ll quote Ed Miliband here, speaking in 2019: we need “an absolute wartime mobilisation” to tackle the climate emergency. Such a mobilisation would require compromises and sacrifices. It would not be easy. But the alternatives are too dreadful to contemplate.

Ultimately, I believe that what we are seeing in Labour’s approval of Jackdaw, the opposition’s calls for even more North Sea extraction, and the insistence that continued investment in fossil fuels is necessary, is the masking of myopia with pragmatism.

If we wanted to be truly practical, we would be throwing absolutely everything we’ve got at reducing emissions and preparing for the climate damage we can no longer avoid. Insulation, heat pumps, clean power, storage and electricity networks would be treated with the same urgency that we encounter when another large extraction project is awaiting approval. Instead, governments insist on kicking the can down the road, whilst big oil continues to reap the rewards of our addiction.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is very likely to weaken this century, and a collapse is possible in the longer-term, the consequences of which would be severe. The Amazon faces a growing risk of catastrophic ecosystem collapse as warming, drought, deforestation and fire compound. The point is, the Earth does not care about any human conception of pragmatism. It is subject to physics, and the science is clear about the need to reduce emissions. Any political or economic arguments which fail to recognise the science are far from pragmatic.

References

1. Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and HM Treasury (21 October 2026). Jackdaw gas field gets green light. Approval, licence distinction, Jackdaw economic contribution and Energy Wealth Fund.

2. Patagonia Works (6 February 2018). Patagonia Gives Customers a Way to Fight for the Planet. Original source for Chouinard’s quoted remark.

3. AFP (21 October 2026). UK approves drilling in controversial Jackdaw gas field. Greg Jackson’s response.

4. Norges Bank Investment Management. The history. Ekofisk discovery and the establishment and funding of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

5. House of Commons Library (2014). Privatisation. Chronology of BP share sales and Britoil privatisation.

6. Office for Budget Responsibility (2023). The evolution of North Sea oil and gas receipts. Historical tax receipts.

7. Offshore Energies UK. Our industry manifesto. Sector-wide employment estimate and explanation of direct, indirect and induced jobs.

8. Adura (June 2026). Jackdaw: responses to the Regulation 12(1) notice. Employment estimates: printed pages 77 and 88, items 16 and 19.

9. Rosebank developer submission (2025). Other Secretary of State considerations: good, long-term jobs. Section 3: UK construction and lifetime employment, including direct, indirect and induced jobs.

10. Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (2026). Warm Homes Plan. Chapter 6: projected employment growth. See also the parliamentary answer of 17 June 2026.

11. Climate Change Committee (2026). A Well-Adapted UK. Chapter 2: annual climate-damage estimates, warming scenarios and adaptation assumptions.

12. Adura (17 August 2026). Milestone for Rosebank as public consultation closes. Rosebank lifetime GVA and combined tax-revenue forecasts; these are developer estimates.

13. North Sea Transition Authority (September 2025). 2024 Emissions intensity of producing natural gas. Comparison of UK-produced gas, imported LNG and pipeline gas, excluding final combustion emissions.

14. Climate Change Committee (2025). The Seventh Carbon Budget. Chapter 10: energy-system transformation, residual fossil-fuel use and demand reduction.

15. The Guardian (23 September 2019). Ed Miliband calls for ‘wartime’ mobilisation to tackle climate crisis.

16. Met Office. What is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?. See also Climate change: AMOC likely to withstand future warming (26 February 2025). Weakening projections and uncertainty over collapse.

17. Flores, B. M., et al. (2024). Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system. Nature, 626, 555–564. Research on interacting stresses and potential ecosystem transitions.

18. Primary correspondence: Damian Hinds MP, email to the author following Jackdaw’s approval. Position summarised and short extracts quoted from correspondence supplied by the author; no public link.

19. Times Radio (23 October 2026). Jackdaw Is Necessary For Now But Britain Needs To Get Off Gas | Octopus Energy. YouTube video. Interview with Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy.

20. Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

And then, as so often happens when I am confronted by the cosmic beauty of a starry sky, I began to ponder the vast distance between us and our nearest neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri. And of course, that distance was nothing compared to the size of our galaxy, with its innumerable stars and planets, some of which may even host life. And then what of the Local Group, our neighbourhood of galaxies? And the superclusters beyond? And the universe as a whole?

Very rapidly, I plunge into the most wonderful existential wormhole. I am reminded of my smallness, and how the various problems, challenges, heartaches, regrets and aspirations I’ve encountered during my time on this planet, whilst deeply meaningful to me, are most certainly not of cosmic significance. The fears and hopes and dreams I hold for the future are unlikely to make much of a dent in spacetime. This does not make them meaningless, nor does it make suffering any less real. But the dark sky can help us confront our own smallness, and in doing so, loosen the hold that our problems have upon us. There is, as so many others have experienced, an almost paradoxical comfort in this.

There is a term for the wonder we experience when confronted by something so vast that it stretches our understanding: awe. Research has linked experiences of awe with a reduced focus on the self, greater generosity and a willingness to help others. Separate research has found that spending time in nature can reduce rumination, that miserable tendency to turn the same troubling thoughts over and over in our minds. These are different findings, and neither establishes that looking up at the stars is a treatment for mental illness. But they resonate with something I have experienced myself: there is not simply beauty to be found outside in nature, but also comfort, perspective, and sometimes a renewed sense of purpose.

I have been lucky enough to visit some of the most beautiful places on the planet. These have been wonderful experiences, and have strengthened my love for and resolve to protect nature.

But the night sky is a different beast. So often, the most beautiful places are also the least developed, and therefore more likely to offer views free of light pollution. Yet unlike the Grand Canyon, or Cape Point, or Eryri, the sky is already there, above every one of us. We should not have to cross a continent to encounter it.

Of course, simply looking up is no longer enough in many places. Getting away from too much light can require a car, money, time, and somewhere safe to go. What ought to be available without admission or expense has become, for many, something that must be sought out. The dark sky is a shared inheritance whose accessibility we are eroding.

It also tells us a different story to terrestrial beauty. Our home planet is precious: so far as we know, a little beacon of consciousness and life in an otherwise indifferent universe. But it is also so small. When I look beyond it, I cannot help but wonder whether somewhere else, something else is looking back into the same darkness, confronting its own existence. I have no answer to that question. But being able to ask it, beneath a sky that gives some sense of its enormity, provides me with a context I struggle to find anywhere else.

And here we wander into firmly philosophical waters, and towards the point that I believe deserves so much more attention: the relationship between the night sky and spirituality.

To be clear, I am not a religious man, and I don’t appeal specifically to religion when I refer to spirituality. Nor do I feel my argument is irrelevant to those who do. Spirituality is, in my mind, an amalgam of emotions, thoughts and desires through which we confront the human condition. It encompasses more than any single emotion, but is also something different from a philosophical argument. It allows us to search for purpose in the context of the transience and contradictions and absurdities that are intrinsically part of being human.

When I gaze up at the stars, I wonder how many other people throughout the human story have confronted existence by doing exactly the same thing, and decided: there is meaning to be found here! Countless others, I expect. People whose languages I could not speak, whose beliefs I might not understand, and whose lives bore almost no resemblance to mine. Yet here is an experience we could share.

There are urgent ecological reasons to protect our nighttime environments. Artificial light at night disrupts insect behaviour and interactions, can disorient sea turtle hatchlings and migrating birds, and affects the rhythms of living things. It also reaches into our own lives, suppressing melatonin and disrupting the natural cycles that help regulate sleep.

But alongside these harms is a loss that is much harder to describe, let alone quantify. I believe light pollution is also eroding an opportunity to nourish our spiritual wellbeing.

We can measure how much darkness we have lost. We can investigate the effects of artificial light on wildlife, and examine what happens to our bodies when night no longer brings darkness. We can also study the cultural and psychological significance of the sky. But no measurement can fully capture what it means to lose a source of wonder and perspective that has accompanied us throughout our history.

The experience of feeling at once infinitely small, but also overwhelmed by awe and wonder at being part of our mysterious and achingly beautiful universe, is one I treasure. The stars invite us to imagine an impossibly vast universe, and in doing so, to question the boundaries of our own possibility.

The night sky is our greatest collective therapist, counsellor, and spiritual guru. It has been there through lives and civilisations we can scarcely imagine, offering its contemplative silence to whoever cared to look up. It is deserving of our respect and protection. And the opportunity to encounter it should remain an inheritance we can all share.

References

Piff et al. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Awe, generosity and helping behaviour.

Bratman et al. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. PNAS. Nature exposure and repetitive negative thinking.

Owens & Lewis (2018). The impact of artificial light at night on nocturnal insects: A review and synthesis. Ecology and Evolution.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The impact of artificial lighting on nocturnal wildlife. Includes effects on birds and sea turtle hatchlings.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (2023). Light and dark: Underappreciated exposures with big effects on health. Light exposure, melatonin and circadian rhythms.

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash