Meanwhile, indigenous peoples worldwide are still fighting for basic recognition of their rights and are frequently harassed, criminalised, assaulted or killed for defending their territories.

We can go to them and say: 'You're not doing your job properly, you're destroying creeks when you're logging, you're not following your own rules,'" says Meness. The journalist’s first book is both a cool, irresistibly argued analysis of Britain’s lurch towards popularism culminating the country’s sleepwalk to Brexit, and a memoir about how the country’s politics turned being Jewish from a private, incidental thing into a frontline issue. Both sides of the political spectrum are skewered by Behr’s Reithian perspective, which gives opposing viewpoints equal consideration.

We have to more than double the national network of these areas to meet our targets by 2030," says Valérie Courtois, a member of the Ilnu Nation and director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. "The only way that Canada is going to be able to do that is by enabling, supporting and financing the work of indigenous peoples." Working as a guardian has enriched Meness' life with new experiences and knowledge. From elders she has learnt how to build birch bark canoes and identify medicinal plants. Once, in a remote camp, a woman had been burnt and Meness, given this expertise, was called upon to help. Gathering yarrow, which has cooling effects, and winter green, which soothes inflammation and pain, she mashed them together in a bowl, thinning the mixture ever so slightly with river water. A few minutes after applying the paste to the burn, the woman felt relief, says Meness. Since the late 1990s, the vast majority of protected areas established in Canada have been led or co-led by indigenous peoples, says Courtois, and their ambitions far exceed those of governments and global targets. Here Behr reveals with the clarity of spring water the logic with which Corbyn’s acolytes see Jews via Zionism as the enemy of socialism and therefore also of the “dear leader”.

Western science tends to say: 'We're fact-based, we should lead in decision-making,'" says Courtois. "There's not always a recognition of equivalency of indigenous science to that. And while some may say that they believe in indigenous science, where Western science and indigenous science clash, guess who wins in this system?" Although the new forms of recognition in the Global Biodiversity Framework are a high watermark, it is by no means enough," says Holly Jonas, global coordinator of the ICCA Consortium, an international non-profit which supports Indigenous Peoples' and Community Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCAs). Indigenous protection models are not new, says Alison Woodley, senior strategic advisor for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, "But the elevation and recognition of [them] in society and by crown governments are fairly recent."True, there were always “diligent antisemites” who pointed out Behr’s Jewishness irrespective of its irrelevance to him and his work.

On average in Canada, when indigenous peoples are holding the pen, we see 60% plus protection of their landscape," she says. Theresa May’s post-Brexit speech in which she declared that anyone who was not a citizen of Britain was a “citizen of nowhere” chimes eerily with Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitan”, a euphemism for Jews. Didn’t she realise that? No, reports Behr. He asked her aides and they said as much.And there would likely be many more – if the money was there. At the last intake, Courtois says demand for guardians programmes far outweighed available funding. It is difficult not to conclude that we are ruled by a generation of meat-headed (my phrase) politicians who are either unaware of how rhetoric can chime with the darkest reaches of 20th-century history (to which Behr is attached by virtue of his murdered forbears) or just don’t care (Boris Johnson). Courtois hopes Canada can serve as a model to other parts of the world – on the art of the possible when it comes to decolonisation and reconciliation. But she cautions against the indigenous-led conservation movement being used to reinforce a colonial apparatus. Despite existing for millennia and embodying a wealth of wisdom, indigenous knowledge systems often still struggle for recognition. By collecting data on water quality in streams and rivers, they help determine if companies are adhering to regulations.

But even before any data is gathered, Meness and her colleague are on the look out for indications that something is off. Seeing an unusually high amount of sand in streams – which leaks into the water from logging roads – is one sign they look out for, based on indigenous knowledge, says Meness. Like elsewhere, this biodiversity is threatened by habitat loss and degradation, over-exploitation, pollution and climate change. The most recent national assessment found 20% of measured species face some level of risk of extinction, with 873 of these species critically endangered mainly due to human activities encroaching their habitat. The Global Biodiversity Framework adopted at Cop15 made small steps forward by recognising and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples. But the agreement didn't incorporate indigenous people's demand for their lands and territories to be fully recognised as a specific category of conserved area – meant to protect them from land evictions and abuses. This exclusion leaves them at greater risk of human rights violations, according to human rights non-profit Amnesty International. People are actually listening now," she says. "Being a guardian means to me that [indigenous] people will never go away. We'll always be here. Stop trying to go against us and start working with us."Serving as the "eyes and ears" on traditional territories, guardians are trained experts responsible for helping indigenous nations steward their lands and waters. Guardians manage protected areas and restore wildlife and plants. They are central to creating land-use and marine-use plans. And they test water quality and monitor resource development. But what most interested him were the complex currents of identity in countries whose view of the Second World War is loaded by Russian occupation and not (in their view) the lesser evil of the Nazi’s invasion. There are chapters about ideology, Europe, Brexit, culture wars, conspiracy theory, polarisation, radicalisation, the way those forces are accelerated by digital technology, the ways political journalism fails to meet the challenges of populism. It’s also about the need to keep those things in some historical perspective; everything you need to know about, in fact, plus, neuroscience, some jokes and a dose of cardiology.