JAKARTA — German chemical giant BASF and French miner Eramet have pulled out of a multibillion-dollar “green energy” project in Indonesia because of its impact on one of the last Indigenous tribes on Earth living in voluntary isolation.
In an announcement on June 24, both companies said they had scrapped plans to invest up to $2.6 billion in the project on the island of Halmahera in Indonesia’s eastern province of North Maluku. The Sonic Bay project would have seen the construction of a refinery producing about 67,000 metric tons of nickel and 7,500 metric tons of cobalt a year. These metals, crucial ingredients in electric vehicle batteries, would have come from the nearby Weda Bay Nickel mine, the world’s largest nickel mine, in which Eramet holds a minority stake.
In its announcement, BASF said it would “stop all ongoing evaluation and negotiation activities for the project in Weda Bay.”
The decision came after a sustained campaign by activists voicing concerns that the Sonic Bay refinery, which is essentially an extension of the Weda Bay Nickel project, would increase the risk of Indigenous peoples in the area losing their lands. Weda Bay Nickel’s concession overlaps with rainforest that’s home to hundreds of members of the Forest Tobelo people, according to U.K.-based Indigenous rights NGO Survival International, which has lobbied both BASF and the German authorities to drop out of the project.
Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Forest Tobelo people in Halmahera, Indonesia. Image courtesy of Survival International.
‘The people who live in the forest’
The Forest Tobelo tribe are among the last Indigenous groups still living in voluntary isolation from the rest of world. They are believed to number between 300 and 500 hunter-gatherer nomadic peoples whose way of life is so intricately tied to the environment that they call themselves O’Hongana Manyawa — the people who live in the forest.
Because the Forest Tobelo people avoid contact with outsiders, it’s unlikely they could ever be reasonably consulted about any projects in their area, or give their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for the use of their customary lands. Some tribe members have emerged from their isolation to report losing their forests to the mining concession.
As such, any investment in the Sonic Bay project would likely contribute to the ongoing destruction of the Forest Tobelo people’s forests, Survival International said.
This could be a reason why BASF and Eramet pulled out of the project, said Pius Ginting, coordinator of the Indonesian NGO Action for Ecology and Emancipation of the People (AEER). BASF’s stated reason is that the supply of battery-grade nickel in the market has eased, and that it therefore doesn’t need to invest so heavily to secure supplies.
What it doesn’t mention, however, is that its home government, Germany, is legally obligated to protect, respect and implement the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples and improve their living and working conditions in the countries where they live. That’s because Germany in 2021 ratified the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention.
That would therefore make any German company’s involvement in a project like Sonic Bay that threatens Indigenous peoples a violation of the convention, Pius said.
He also pointed out that WBN had scored poorly in a routine annual assessment of environmental parameters by Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry. Known as the PROPER assessment, it assigns a color code to rate companies’ performance, ranging from gold to green to blue to red to black; a gold or green grade means a company exceeds legal requirements.
In 2022, Weda Bay Nickel received a red grade, meaning it failed to operate in accordance with existing environmental and social regulations.
“Even if [BASF and Eramet] said the main reason [for their withdrawal] is because of the market and the economy, we see that environmental risks are of course being considered as well due to WBN’s bad PROPER score,” Pius said.
He added their abandonment of the project should be a wake-up call for the rest of the battery metals industry and the Indonesian government to improve the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of the industry.
A member of the Forest Tobelo indigenous group in North Maluku, Indonesia. Photo by Muhammad Ector Prasetyo/Flickr.
‘No-go zone’ to protect Indigenous tribe
Despite this development, WBN’s mining operation looks set to continue as the government pushes for Indonesia to become a powerhouse in the production of battery metals. This means the Forest Tobelo people will continue to be at risk of losing their forests, Survival International said.
The campaign group recently posted a video showing an uncontacted Forest Tobelo family approaching workers at a mining camp. According to Survival International, the family was asking for food after their rainforest was destroyed. It said similar scenes can be prevented by establishing a no-go zone, where no mining or other activities can take place.
Much of the nickel mined at Weda Bay goes to Chinese EV makers; the mine’s majority stakeholder is Tsingshan Holding Group, the world’s biggest nickel producer. Tesla, which doesn’t currently source nickel from Weda Bay but has signed agreements worth billions of dollars with Indonesian nickel and cobalt suppliers, said in its 2023 impact report that it was “exploring the need for a no-go zone” to protect uncontacted Indigenous peoples.
In a meeting with Survival International representatives, senior Indonesian politician Tamsil Linrung also voiced his support for the protection of the Forest Tobelo people through the establishment of a no-go zone.
“We will try to make that region a no-go zone. If not in the near future, perhaps after the next president is sworn into office [in October 2024],” he said.
Uncontacted Forest Tobelo peoples appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp. The uncontacted Forest Tobelo are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home. Image courtesy of Survival International.
Respite — for now
For now, the news that BASF and Eramet are dropping out of the refinery project provides some respite for the Forest Tobelo people, said Survival International director Caroline Pearce.
“BASF’s withdrawal means that they, at least, will not be complicit in the Hongana Manyawa’s destruction. But Eramet, and other companies, are still ripping up the rainforest and the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa simply won’t survive without it. They must stop now, for good, before it’s too late,” she said.
But another top official, Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia — who faces allegations of self-dealing and corruption in the revocation and reissuance of mining permits — said negotiations are still underway to get BASF and Eramet to invest in the refinery. He attributed their withdrawal to a decline in EV sales in Europe as a result of weakening purchasing power, but said this would only be temporary.
“[The project] is still pending,” he said as quoted by Indonesian news website Tempo.co. “We’re still negotiating.”
Editor’s Note: The Halmahera Island in Indonesia is the only known home to the Hongana Manyana tribe. Unfortunately, it is also the home to vast reserves of nickel. Mining companies are now evading the indigenous rights and ecological rights of the inhabitants of the island, as well as of the island herself, to steal the nickel. The nickel is going to be used for manufacturing electric cars. The following piece is taken from Survival International.
Nickel Mining Threatens Uncontacted Hongana Manyana Tribe in Indonesia
The Hongana Manyawa – which means ‘People of the Forest’ in their own language – are one of the last nomadic hunter gatherer tribes in Indonesia, and many of them are uncontacted.
They have a profound reverence for their forest and everything in it: they believe that trees, like humans, possess souls and feelings. Rather than cut down trees to build houses, they make their dwellings from sticks and leaves. When forest products are used, rituals are performed to ask permission from the plants, and offerings are left out of respect.
The Hongana Manyawa root their whole lives to the forest, from birth to death. When a child is born, the family plant a tree in gratitude, and bury the umbilical cord underneath: the tree grows with the child, marking their age. At the end of their lives, their bodies are placed in the trees in a special area of the forest that is reserved for the spirits.
If there is no more forest, then there will be no more Hongana Manyawa.
Providing for themselves almost entirely from hunting and gathering, the Hongana Manyawa are nomadic; setting up home in one part of the forest before moving on and allowing it to regenerate. They have unrivalled expertise in the Halmahera rainforest, hunting wild boar, deer and other animals and maintaining a close connection with the sago trees – now threatened by deforestation from mining – which provide their main source of carbohydrate. They also have incredible medicinal knowledge and can treat many sicknesses with local plants, although this has become increasingly difficult following the new diseases brought by forced contact and resettlement in villages.
It’s more convenient for me to keep moving because the food is much more diverse and available, I can go hunting regularly. Permanently staying in the village is very uncomfortable and there is a lack of food.
Avoiding contact to stay alive
The arrival of the mining companies is just the latest threat to the Hongana Manyawa and their land. In recent decades, Indonesian governments have repeatedly tried to force contact onto the Hongana Manyawa, with the aim of stopping their nomadic way of life and evicting them from their ancestral forest home. They say this is to “civilize” them: they have tried to settle the Hongana Manyawa and have built Indonesian-style houses for them. The Hongana Manyawa say these new houses, with roofs made of metal sheets rather than palm leaves, made them feel “like animals in a cage”.
We are so happy living by the forest with different kinds of meat and food, where we can collect roof materials so we can replace the zinc roof the government has built for us.
As with uncontacted tribes the world over, forced contact has proved disastrous for the Hongana Manyawa. They were immediately exposed to diseases to which they had no immunity – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, terrible outbreaks of diseases which the Hongana Manyawa refer to as “the plague” affected the newly-settled villages, leading to widespread suffering and even death.
We had many different diseases when first settled, some of the sickness led to deaths, some people had fever that went on for days and nights and endless coughing for days and even weeks.
The contacted Hongana Manyawa also serve as convenient scapegoats for the police, who frequently blame them for crimes they have had nothing to do with. Several of them have been imprisoned for murders they did not commit and have languished in jail for many years.
It’s better to live in the forest so we don’t get accused of these things. We feel unsafe and many of the men moved into the forest and then came to get their wives and families. Some are deep in the forest…they are deeply traumatized.
Far from being respected for their unique and self-sufficient ways of living, the Hongana Manyawa experience severe racism and are regularly described by Indonesian officials and the media as ‘primitive’. There is a widespread belief that they would benefit from ‘integration’ into wider society: a belief that comes with disastrous and deadly consequences.
Many Hongana Manyawa are now living in government-built villages. Many others – traumatised by the government’s forced settlement attempts, like other peoples around the world who have experienced forced contact – have returned to their forest.
The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa have made it clear time and time again that they do not want to settle or have outsiders coming into their forest. They are very much aware of the dangers – including fatal epidemics of disease – which forced contact brings. As with the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe of India, it is little wonder that they are defending their lands and shooting arrows at those who force their way in.
But now they face the threat not just of being forced out of the forest that sustains them, but of seeing it all destroyed by corporations rushing to provide a supposedly ‘sustainable’ and ‘environmentally friendly’ lifestyle to people thousands of miles away.
‘Green’ mining threatens the lives of uncontacted tribal people
The greatest threat to the Hongana Manyawa today comes from a supposedly ‘green’ industry.
Their rainforest sits on lands rich in nickel, a metal increasingly sought after as an ingredient in the manufacture of electric car batteries. Indonesia is now the world’s largest producer of nickel, and Halmahera is estimated to contain some of the world’s largest unexploited nickel reserves. Nickel is not essential for these batteries, but now that the nickel market is booming, mining companies are homing in and tearing up huge swathes of rainforest.
The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are on the run. Without their rainforest, they will not survive. These cars are marketed as ecofriendly alternatives to fossil fuel powered cars, but there is nothing ecofriendly about the way nickel is being mined in Halmahera.
It goes without saying that uncontacted tribes cannot give their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to exploitation of their land – which is legally required for all ‘developments’ on Indigenous territories under international law.
Nevertheless, Weda Bay Nickel (WBN) – a company partly owned by French mining company Eramet – has an enormous mining concession on the island which overlaps with Hongana Manyawa territories. WBN began mining in 2019 and now operates the largest nickel mine in the world. Huge areas of rainforest which the Hongana Manyawa call home have already been destroyed. The company plans to ramp up the mining to many times its current rate and operate for up to 50 years.
If we don’t support the fight for their forest, my uncontacted relatives will just die. The forest is everything, it is their heart and life. My parents and siblings are in the forest and without support they will die. Everything in the forest is getting destroyed now – the river, the animals, it is gone.
The Indonesian government claims that nickel mining is “critical for clean energy technologies” yet coal-fired power stations are being constructed at IWIP to process the nickel. The International Energy Agency estimates that 19 metric tons of carbon are released for every metric ton of nickel smelted and there is evidence from a similar project in Sulawesi of this leading to respiratory diseases for locals. Not only is this mining (accompanied by roads, smelters and other huge industrial projects) devastating the Hongana Manyawa’s rainforests, it is also polluting the air and damaging the rivers. The processing of nickel is often highly toxic, involving a host of chemicals which produce almost two metric tons of toxic waste for every metric ton of ore processed.
They are poisoning our water and making us feel like we are being slowly killed.
Eramet, Tesla and connected companies
International companies are involved, directly or indirectly, in the mining of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa land.
WBN is a joint venture between several companies, but French company Eramet is part-owner and responsible for the mining itself. Eramet prides itself on its environmental and human rights credentials, claiming that it will “set the standard” and “be a benchmark company” when it comes to human rights. Yet it continues to mine on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa.
Survival has learned that German chemical company BASF is also planning to partner with Eramet to build a refining complex in Halmahera and that a possible location for this may be on uncontacted Hongana Manyawa territory. This would be devastating for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in the area, who are already in hiding from mining.
Survival has been told that uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are now fleeing further and further into the rainforest, traumatized by the attacks on their forests and way of life.
Trees are gone and replaced with the big road, where giant machines go in and out making noise and driving the animals away.
Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle company, has signed contracts worth billions of US dollars to buy Indonesian nickel and cobalt for its batteries. Its CEO Elon Musk has also had high level negotiations with the Indonesian government to open an electric car battery factory in the country. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has even offered Tesla a ‘nickel mining concession.’
Tesla’s Indigenous rights policy states: “For all raw material extraction and processing used in Tesla products, we expect our mining industry suppliers to engage with legitimate representatives of indigenous communities and include the right to free and informed consent in their operations.”
Yet Tesla has now signed deals with Chinese companies Huayou Cobalt and CNGR Advanced Material, both of which have links to nickel mining in Halmahera. While supply chains are secretive and often obscure, Tesla’s interests in Indonesia and the scale of the planned mining in Halmahera make it possible that nickel mined from Halmahera could well end up in Tesla cars.
I do not give consent for them to take it…tell them that we do not want to give away our forest.
Demand for electric cars is driving the destruction of uncontacted people’s lands.
Rather than destroying yet more of the natural world, and the people who defend it, in the name of combating climate change, we should be supporting uncontacted tribes to defend their rainforests and their land rights; they are the guardians of the green lungs of the planet.
We the Hongana Manyawa, do not want a mining company to come, because it will destroy our forest. We will protect this forest as much as we can. If the forest is destroyed, where will we live?
Take Urgent Action for the Hongana Manyawa
The Hongana Manyawa are running out of forest and running out of time. They desperately need international support to stop the destruction of their homelands before it’s too late.
The Hongana Manyawa’s land rights must be recognised. Survival is calling for the declaration of an emergency zone for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Around the world, Survival has successfully campaigned for the land rights of uncontacted tribes, defending them from outsiders bringing in deadly diseases and devastating development projects which could destroy them.
We are calling for:
– Eramet and the other companies mining in Halmahera, to immediately abide by international law and stop mining and other developments on the lands of uncontacted tribal people.
– Tesla and other car companies to publicly commit to ensure that none of the nickel or cobalt they buy ever comes from the lands of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in Halmahera.
– The Indonesian government to establish an ‘Uncontacted Tribe No-Go Zone” to protect the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa and their territories.
With your support, the territories of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa can be protected from mining so that they can continue to live as they choose on their own land.
I want to share my knowledge with my grandchildren and those who want to learn how to eat and live in the forest.
Please tell Tesla to pledge that none of the minerals they buy ever comes from the lands of uncontacted Indigenous people in Halmahera – and let the mining companies, and the Indonesian authorities, know you’ve done so.
On July 10th 1985 the Rainbow Warrior, ship of the environmental organization Greenpeace, was sunk by agents of the French Service Action.
From the 1940’s til the 60’s, the US-Army had been testing atomic bombs on the Marshall Islands. What used to be a South Pacific Paradise, was now contaminated. The people suffered diseases and cancer, children were born with abnormalities. In 1985, the residents of the Island Rongelap asked Greenpeace for help. The Rainbow Warrior came and relocated 300 people to the Island of Mejato. From Mejato, the ship was supposed to move to New Zealand for a short stop and then to the Moruroa-atoll (French Polynesia), to protest against French atomic-bomb tests. While the Rainbow Warrior was anchored in the port of Aukland, New Zealand, during the night of july 10th two bombs detonated in the ship’s hull. While the ship sunk, most of the crew were able to save themselves, except for the photographer Fernando Pereira, who drowned.1 Tragically, he was a parent of two small children.
The investigations of the New Zealand police lead to the French secret service. Under growing pressure, the government under Francois Mitterand steadily admitted being responsible for the attack.
The people in charge of the French government were never held accountable. In 1987, the French government paid compensation of 8 million US-Dollars to Greenpeace, and more than 7 million to the New Zealand government. All of the people involved stayed in charge and kept their positions in the French government, some received the highest military honors.
In 1985, I was six years old. The pictures of the Rainbow Warrior were on the media everywhere. Since then, the Greenpeace-activists have been my heros. I would look at the Greenpeace-magazines, that shocked me deeply with pictures of baby seals slayed with clubs, burning rainforests and dead whales, swimming in a sea of blood.
If you take the perspective of a six or seven year old child, you see buts all around you and you hear the voices of grown-ups from above. In my memory, most times the grown-ups spoke about work. “How was work?” “Well, ok…” “I have to work tomorrow.” “Will you go to work?” “Yes.” “I hear that you have a new job? How do you like it?” “It‘s pretty ok…” work…” “at work…” “for my work…” “in my work…” “work…” “work…” “work…”
I felt there was a huge chasm between the conversations I overheard from the adults, and the pictures that stuck in my childish mind from the Greenpeace-magazines. They always wanted to know, what I wanted to be when I grew up. The question is hard to understand for a six or seven year old. What should I become? I’m a human being already, and there is not much more I can actually become. Well, a grown-up human being, someday. But such a stressed out, worried human being, which is at the same time dependent and plagued by its daily work, like the grown-ups around me, I certainly didn’t want to become. Why is their work so important to them, when at the same time such horrible things are happening?
Later, when I understood better what they were up to with that question, I always answered that I wanted to become an environmentalist. This was very important to me. After I learned to read and write, I printed business cards, stating environmentalist as my profession.
Back then, questions evolved, that didn’t change much over all these years. Why do these people, by all costs, want to kill whales? And seals? And why do they want to destroy these rainforests everywhere? And why are the people from Greenpeace obviously the only ones who care and try to stop the killing?
I asked these questions as a child, but soon stopped, because I would never receive a satisfying answer. “You won’t understand this, you are to small…” They would avoid my questions. They didn’t like these questions. They were unpleasant to them, and they had no answers.
As a child, one tends to think, that the grown-ups are very smart and know more than children. Unfortunately, this is a fraud. Most adults are very stupid indeed, highly indoctrinated, and don’t know any answers to the really important questions.
Still, the questions stay the same. Why are the grown-ups always talking about work, while there is a horrible slaughter going on? Nowadays, I‘d boil all the questions of my childhood down to one: Why is our culture killing the planet?
When I asked my grandmother why all the Indians had to die, she answered that this had been God’s will. The Indians, soon enough, would have built big ships on their own, sailed to Europe and would have exterminated us, she said. How great that God is with us…
Thanks to answers like this, over time I learned to forget my questions and hide my feelings, which after all arose from a very normal empathy I felt for our fellow beings.
I went through the mainstream-culture with severe depressions. I held myself together with books, which helped me to survive disturbing dreams, think deeply and question everything. I will always be grateful to the authors of these books.
Finally, I found myself realising, that the decision I had made when I was six years old was still right and valid.
Within a culture that mistreats its fellow creatures like ours, resistance is a moral imperative. I understood this as a child. Actually, it isn’t very hard to understand. All we have to do is to look around us. Foolishly, we have built a whole culture based on not looking around us.
It also has to do with the form of social organization this culture is based on. Which might be the most destructive invention, that humans have ever made. Gunpowder, for example, is surely a very destructive invention, especially if you use it, like our culture does, for firearms. It is symptomatic for our culture, to use all technological inventions for destructive purposes, most times for ever more destructive weapons. Without firearms, it would have been far more difficult to drive big animals like bears, bisons or siberian tigers to the brink of extinction. Without firearms, the conquest of the Americas and the genocide of indigenous peoples worldwide would have been far more difficult. Firearms therefore, take the second place on my list of the most destructive inventions.
The plow and the combustion engine compete for the third place. While the wheel, which is often mentioned as one of the most important inventions, isn’t very destructive, the car, with all the surrounding infrastructure like roads, is one of the most destructive inventions one could think of. It is an extreme waste of energy, to move a machine of about two tonnes of weight, most times only to transport one single human being. Car culture is the most energy intensive form of transportation to ever exist. We can only afford this unbelievable decadence, because we learned to use fossil fuel for combustion engines. Apart from the waste of energy, it is also not very intelligent to poison the air that we need to breathe. This is a crime we commit to our future generations.
Martin Prechtel says:
“Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other’s dreams — or, if you prefer, adding on to each other’s studies and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that’s where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.”2
The plow stands for monocultural agriculture. I like to describe agriculture as the blueprint of colonialism. They take a piece of land, drive away or kill all indigenous living beings, animals, humans and plants, and replace them with a monoculture of one species, with individuals entirely brought into line.
The most destructive invention that humans ever made is not a technological innovation, but a form of social organization (indeed one which is very technological). It is the megamachine; a form of social organization, that makes is possible for a hundred thousand people to spend the majority of their lifetime happily working for the goals of a company like Daimler-Benz, BASF, Bayer, Deutsche Bank et cetera. Hundreds of thousands of employees, working strictly organized and brought into line within a hierarchical organization. Often, there is a very strong identification of the employees with their company. This is the modern version of what made it possible for the ancient Egyptians to build the giant symbols of their civilization. In ancient Egypt, the slaves already formed an organized caste, that used strikes as a way to fight for better food, housing or working conditions. Even back then, people had already accepted their fate as a working class, as part of the machine, and tried to ensure slightly better conditions within it. Derrick Jensen talks about dismembering, and about how suppressors bring their victims to identify with them in this video.
Ultimately, slavery is the cradle of civilization in the same way as agriculture. Both are related, because large-scale monoculture is only possible with slaves. Initially, slaves must be hold in captivity and forced to work. Nobody volunteers to be a slave. At the beginning at least. Over a few thousand years, our culture perfected the machine more and more. With a permanent combination of organized violence, lies and propaganda, alongside powerful institutions like state, church and school, the original forms of social organization were destroyed, and replaced with a breed of totally isolated human beings, who by themselves identify as workers and do not resist any more. These are the happy slaves, that serve the machine. Without them, factories are unthinkable, there would be no industrial agriculture, no machines, no industrial production. Nothing of this would be possible without the innovation of the mechanical social organization, which in the ancient civilizations began as massive slavery. About 80% of the population in ancient Greece were slaves.
Hence, industrial civilization is the most extreme and by far most destructive form, because it combines this form of social organization with actual machines. Actually, these two have merged already. The humans, who are functioning as part of the machine, are themselves handling machines all the time. They identify more with their car, their computer or their smartphone than they identify with other living beings –including humans. This is why the people of our culture don’t care about the mass extinction of our fellow beings. The extinction of the insects and songbirds doesn’t lead to an uproar, unlike, say, driving restrictions due to increasing air pollution. The parts of the machine can’t imagine a life without cars and other machines; the machine belongs to them as they belong to it, and they are absolutely loyal to it.
Unfortunately, neither the machine nor its parts are intelligent or know any kind of morality. It is not intelligent to poison the air we need to breathe, the water we need to drink and the soil we need to grow food.
People who strike, fight for better working conditions or against cutbacks of jobs are already perfectly oiled gears of the machine. These people identify as working class, as parts of the machine, they have been born and raised as parts of the machine; the gainful employment, the profession, is in our culture a very important part of individual identity.
Being part of the machine is all they know. The limits of their perception are already very restricted. They don’t know real freedom. As part of a machine, you don’t need to think, but to work. This is our dominant industrial culture.
If humans exist as parts of a machine, they forget how to be responsible for their own lives and the lives of their children. This is why so few people are resisting against the slaughter of our fellow beings and the destruction of the planet. The liability for the machine is never carried by its parts, but its inventors. It is a strictly hierarchical system. Only with a system like this, it is possible to build institutions like the police force, the giant bureaucratic apparatus of state and government, or huge corporations, with people simply following orders without taking any responsibility for their actions. The responsibility is always up in the hierarchy. There is no humanity within a machine.
A machine has no empathy. It works exactly like it has been built. Some call that structural violence, or, like Samuel Huntington, organized violence. “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” 3
This form of social organization made it possible for Europeans to conquer almost the whole world. The machine made the brutal extinction of most of the life on the American continent possible. Propaganda and rationalizations, like the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, served as instruction manuals for the machine. It is actually needless to say that the Third Reich, with the industrial mass extermination of unwanted human beings, exactly worked according to the principles of the megamachine. Of course, the IG Farben knew what their products would be used for.
For the few people, who are still able to think clearly, this culture is long since a dystopian nightmare. For the indoctrinated, this nightmare is the bare reality.
If a creature learns, to completely accept captivity and slavery, it can drive out the pain. But to be free, one must look at the pain; one must go through all the terror.
Jack D. Forbes
If people can’t get out of this nightmare, because they think this is “the way things are,” they are trapped in a life-long horror trip. It’s a horror trip to believe, that we must sell eight hours per day or more of our lifetime, to work and do things we would rather not.
Institutionalized religion works as another instruction manual for the machine. Christianity plays an important role for the indoctrination by teaching us for thousands of years that life is full of privation and a vale of tears. Later, the evangelical christians declared the morale, the work ethic, to a new religious doctrine, and therefore created the basis for capitalistic ideology.4
The reward comes after death, if we behaved well and obedient during our lifetime. Thus, institutionalized religion has proven to be one of the most effective tools for suppression. Due to almighty belief systems like this, people don’t have to be suppressed by brute force; through faith, they will suppress themselves, others and their own children. Says Robert Combs: “Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of a culture. Nowadays, parents raise their children according to the religion of capitalism and the believe in an almighty market, in order that they will have a chance to be successful in this culture.”
Our culture is based on institutionalized lies, that have been erected as barriers to truth. One of the most obvious and thus most propagated lies is, that we can have industrial civilization and a living planet. The bare truth is, that we have to decide. As things stand, most people in our culture made their choice in favor of the megamachine and against a living planet.
After all, humans are animals. The wild packs of wolves, being the enemy of civilization, have been exterminated nearly everywhere; nowadays, all that is left are state-owned, domesticated dogs. Dogs can be raised to be the most loving and caring creatures, like guide-dogs who take care of blind humans with a highly developed social competence. But they can also be conditioned to become terrible monsters, like the Spanish conquistadores with their fighting dogs that were fed with butchered Indian children.
Violence has always been the most effective tool of our civilization.
At 9 am on an overcast morning in paradise, hundreds of protesters gathered in traditional Hawaiian chant and prayer. Upon hearing the sound of the conch shell, known here as Pū, the protesters followed a group of women towards Monsanto’s grounds.
“A’ole GMO,” cried the mothers as they marched alongside Monsanto’s cornfields, located only feet from their homes on Molokai, one of the smallest of Hawaii’s main islands. In a tiny, tropical corner of the Pacific that has warded off tourism and development, Monsanto’s fields are one of only a few corporate entities that separates the bare terrain of the mountains and oceans.
This spirited marchwas the last of a series of protests on the five Hawaiian islands that Monsanto and other biotech companies have turned into the world’s ground zero for chemical testing and food engineering.Hawai’i is currently at the epicenter of the debate over genetically modified organisms, generally shortened to GMOs. Because Hawai’i is geographically isolated from the broader public, it is an ideal location for conducting chemical experiments. The island chain’s climate and abundant natural resources have lured five of the world’s largest biotech chemical corporations: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF. In the past 20 years, these chemical companies have performed over 5,000 open-field-test experiments of pesticide-resistant crops on an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 acres of Hawaiian land without any disclosure, making the place and its people a guinea pig for biotech engineering.
The presence of these corporations has propelled one of the largest movement mobilizations in Hawai’i in decades. Similar to the environmental and land sovereignty protests in Canada and the continental United States, the movement is influenced by indigenous culture.
“All of the resources that our kapuna [elders] gave to us, we need to take care of now for the next generation,” said Walter Ritte, a Hawai’i activist, speaking in part in the Hawaiian indigenous language.
“That is our kuleana [responsibility]. That is everybody’s kuleana.”
In Hawaiian indigenous culture, the very idea of GMOs is effectively sacrilegious.
“For Hawaii’s indigenous peoples, the concepts underlying genetic manipulation of life forms are offensive and contrary to the cultural values of aloha ‘ʻāina [love for the land],” wrote Mililani B. Trask, a native Hawaiian attorney.
Deadly practices
Monsanto has a long history of making chemicals that bring about devastation. The company participated in the Manhattan Project to help produce the atomic bomb during World War II. It developed the herbicide “Agent Orange” used by U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War, which caused an estimated half-million birth deformities. Most recently, Monsanto has driven thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives, often by drinking chemical insecticide, after the high cost of the company’s seeds forced them into unpayable debt.
The impacts of chemical testing and GMOs are immediate — and, in the long-term, could prove deadly. In Hawaii, Monsanto and other biotech corporations have sprayed over 70 different chemicals during field tests of genetically engineered crops, more chemical testing than in any other place in the world. Human studies have not been conducted on GMO foods, but animal experiments show that genetically modified foods lead to pre-cancerous cell growth, infertility, and severe damage to the kidneys, liver and large intestines. Additionally, the health risks of chemical herbicides sprayed onto GMO crops cause hormone disruption, cancer, neurological disorders and birth defects. In Hawaii, some open-field testing sites are near homes and schools. Prematurity, adult on-set diabetes and cancer rates have significantly increased in Hawai’i in the last ten years. Many residents fear chemical drift is poisoning them.
Monsanto’s agricultural procedures also enable the practice of monocropping, which contributes to environmental degradation, especially on an island like Hawai’i. Monocropping is an agricultural practice where one crop is repeatedly planted in the same spot, a system that strips the soil of its nutrients and drives farmers to use a herbicide called Roundup, which is linked to infertility. Farmers are also forced to use pesticides and fertilizers that cause climate change and reef damage, and that decrease the biodiversity of Hawai’i.
Food sovereignty as resistance
At the first of the series of marches against GMOs, organizers planted coconut trees in Haleiwa, a community on the north shore of Oahu Island. In the movement, protesting and acting as caretakers of the land are no longer viewed as separate actions, particularly in a region where Monsanto is leasing more than 1,000 acres of prime agricultural soil.
During the march, people chanted and held signs declaring, “Aloha ‘āina: De-occupy Hawai’i.”
The phrase aloha ‘āina is regularly seen and heard at anti-GMO protests. Today the words are defined as “love of the land,” but the phrase has also signified “love for the country.” Historically, it was commonly used by individuals and groups fighting for the restoration of the independent Hawaiian nation, and it is now frequently deployed at anti-GMO protests when people speak of Hawaiian sovereignty and independence.
After the protest, marchers gathered in Haleiwa Beach Park, where they performed speeches, music, spoken-word poetry and dance while sharing free locally grown food. The strategy of connecting with the land was also a feature of the subsequent protest on the Big Island, where people planted taro before the march, and also at the state capitol rally, where hundreds participated in the traditional process of pounding taro to make poi, a Polynesian staple food.
The import economy is a new reality for Hawaii, one directly tied to the imposition of modern food practices on the island. Ancient Hawai’i operated within the Ahupua’a system, a communal model of distributing land and work, which allowed the islands to be entirely self-sufficient.
“Private land ownership was unknown, and public, common use of the ahupua’a resources demanded that boundaries be drawn to include sufficient land for residence and cultivation, freshwater sources, shoreline and open ocean access,” explained Carol Silva, an historian and Hawaiian language professor.
Inspired by the Ahupua’a model, the food sovereignty movement is building an organic local system that fosters the connections between communities and their food — a way of resisting GMOs while simultaneously creating alternatives.
Colonial history
The decline of the Ahupua’a system didn’t only set Hawai’i on the path away from food sovereignty; it also destroyed the political independence of the now-U.S. state. And indeed, when protesters chant “aloha ‘āina” at anti-GMO marches, they are alluding to the fact that this fight isn’t only over competing visions of land use and food creation. It’s also a battle for the islands’ political sovereignty.
Historically, foreign corporate interests have repeatedly taken control of Hawai’i — and have exploited and mistreated the land and its people in the process.
“It’s a systemic problem and the GMO issue just happens to be at the forefront of public debate at the moment,” said Keoni Lee of ʻŌiwi TV. “ʻĀina [land] equals that which provides. Provides for who?”
The presence of Monsanto and the other chemical corporations is eerily reminiscent of the business interests that led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Throughout the 19th century, the Hawaiian Kingdom was recognized as an independent nation. That reality changed in 1893, when a group of American businessmen and sugar planters orchestrated a U.S. Marine’s armed coup d’etat of the Hawaiian Kingdom government.
Five years later, the U.S. apprehended the islands for strategic military use during the Spanish-American War despite local resistance. Even then-President Grover Cleveland called the overthrow a “substantial wrong” and vowed to restore the Hawaiian kingdom. But the economic interests overpowered the political will, and Hawai’i remained a U.S. colony for the following 60 years.
The annexation of Hawai’i profited five sugarcane-manufacturing companies commonly referred to as the Big Five: Alexander & Baldwin, Amfac (American Factors), Castle & Cooke, C. Brewer, and Theo H. Davies. Most of the founders of these companies were missionaries who were actively involved in lobbying for the annexation of the Hawaiian islands in 1898. After the takeover, the Big Five manipulated great political power and influence in what was then considered the “Territory of Hawaii,” gaining unparalleled control of banking, shipping and importing on the island chain. The companies only sponsored white republicans in government, creating an oligarchy that threatened the labor force if it voted against their interests. The companies’ environmental practices, meanwhile, caused air and water pollution and altered the biodiversity of the land.
The current presence of the five-biotech chemical corporations in Hawai’i mirrors the political and economic colonialism of the Big Five in the early 20th century — particularly because Monsanto has become the largest employer on Molokai.
“There is no difference between the “Big Five” that actually ruled Hawai’i in the past,” said Walter Ritte. “Now it’s another “Big Five,” and they’re all chemical companies. So it’s almost like this is the same thing. It’s like déjàvu.”
Rising up
At the opening of this year’s legislative session on January 16, hundreds of farmers, students and residents marched to the state capitol for a rally titled “Idle No More: We the People.” There, agricultural specialist and food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva, who traveled from India to Hawai’i for the event, addressed the crowd.
“I see Hawai’i not as a place where I come and people say, ‘Monsanto is the biggest employer,’ but people say, ‘this land, its biodiversity, our cultural heritage is our biggest employer,’” she said.
As she alluded to, a major obstacle facing the anti-GMO movement is the perception that the chemical corporations provide jobs that otherwise might not exist — an economic specter that the sugarcane companies also wielded to their advantage. Anti-GMO organizers are aware of how entrenched this power is.
“The things that we’re standing up against are really at the core of capitalism,” proclaimed Hawaiian rights activist Andre Perez at the rally.
Given the enormity of the enemy, anti-GMO activists are attacking the issue from a variety of fronts, including organizing mass education, advocating for non-GMO food sovereignty and pushing for legislative protections. Organizers see education, in particular, as the critical element to win this battle.
“Hawai’i has the cheapest form of democracy,” said Daniel Anthony, a young local activist and founder of a traditional poi business. “Here we can educate a million people, and Monsanto is out.”
Others are using art to educate the public, such as Hawaiian rapper Hood Prince, who rails against Monsanto in his song “Say No to GMO.” This movement is also educating the community through teach-ins and the free distribution of the newly released book Facing Hawaii’s Future: Essential Information about GMOs.
Hawai’i has already succeeded in protecting its traditional food from genetic engineering. Similar to the way the Big Five controlled varying sectors of society, the biotech engineering companies are financially linked to the local government, schools and university. Monsanto partially funds the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii. The university and the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center began the process of genetically engineering taro in 2003 after the university patented three of its varieties. Once this information became widely known, it incited uproar of objection from the Hawaiian community. Taro holds spiritual significance in the islands’ indigenous culture, in which it is honored as the first Hawaiian ancestor in the creation story.
“It felt like we were being violated by the scientific community,” wrote Ritte in Facing Hawaii’s Future. “For the Hawaiian community, taro is not just a plant. It’s a family member. It’s our common ancestor‘Haloa …. They weren’t satisfied with just taking our land; now they wanted to take our mana, our spirit too.”
The public outcry eventually drove the university to drop its patents.
Anti-GMO activists are hoping for further successes in stopping genetic food engineering. In the current legislative session, there are about a dozen proposed bills pushing GMO regulation, labeling and a ban on all imported GMO produce. These fights over mandating GMO labeling and regulation in Hawai’i may seem like a remote issue, but what happens on these isolated islands is pivotal for land sovereignty movements across the globe.
“These five major chemical companies chose us to be their center,” said Ritte. “So whatever we do is going to impact everybody in the world.”
Widely used pesticides can kill frogs within an hour, new research has revealed, suggesting the chemicals are playing a significant and previously unknown role in the catastrophic global decline of amphibians.
The scientists behind the study said it was both “astonishing” and “alarming” that common pesticides could be so toxic at the doses approved by regulatory authorities, adding to growing criticism of how pesticides are tested.
“You would not think products registered on the market would have such a toxic effect,” said Carsten Brühl, at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. “It is the simplest effect you can think of: you spray the amphibian with the pesticide and it is dead. That should translate into a dramatic effect on populations.”
Trenton Garner, an ecologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: “This is a valuable addition to the substantial body of literature detailing how existing standards for the use of agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers are inadequate for the protection of biodiversity.”
Amphibians are the best example of the great extinction of species currently under way, as they are the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group. More than a third of all amphibians are included in the IUCN “red list” of endangered species, with loss of habitat, climate change and disease posing the biggest threats.
Brühl had previously studied how easily frogs can absorb pesticides through their permeable skins, which they can breathe through when underwater. But pesticides are not required to be tested on amphibians, said Brühl: “We could only find one study for one pesticide that was using an exposure likely to occur on farmland.”
His team chose widely used fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. The most striking results were for a fungicide called pyraclostrobin, sold as the product Headline by the manufacturer BASF and used on 90 different crops across the world. It killed all the common European frogs used as test animals within an hour when applied at the rate recommended on the label. Other fungicides, herbicides and insecticides also showed acute toxicity, even when applied at just 10% of the label rate, with the insecticide dimethoate, for example, killing 40% of animals within a week.
The study, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports [will be live after embargo], concluded: “The observation of acute mortality in a vertebrate group caused by commercially available pesticides at recommended field rates is astonishing, since 50 years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring one would have thought that the development of refined risk-assessment procedures would make such effects virtually impossible.”
A BASF spokesman disputed the findings: “This study was performed under laboratory ‘worst-case’ conditions. Under normal agricultural conditions amphibians are not exposed to such pesticide concentrations. According to our knowledge, no significant impact on amphibian populations has been reported despite the widespread and global use of the fungicide pyraclostrobin.”
Brühl said the method, a single spray directly on to the frogs, sometimes at just 10% of the label rate, was a “realistic worst-case” scenario. He added that in the field, multiple sprays of a variety of pesticides was likely and that chemicals might run off into ponds where frogs lived.
Sandra Bell, Friends of the Earth’s nature campaigner, said: “From frogs to bees, there is mounting evidence that the pesticide bombardment of our farmland is having a major impact on our precious wildlife. Strong action is urgently needed to get farmers off the chemical treadmill.
“As well as banning the most toxic products, governments must set clear targets for reducing all pesticides and ensure farmers have safe and thoroughly tested alternatives.”
Earlier this month, the world’s most widely used insecticide was for the first time officially labelled an “unacceptable” danger to bees feeding on flowering crops, by the European Food Safety Agency. The agency had previously stated that current “simplistic” regulations contained “major weaknesses”.
“There is an urgency to address [the amphibian issue] as pesticides will be applied again soon because it’s spring, and that’s when we have all these migrations to ponds,” said Brühl.
“We don’t have any data from the wild about dead frogs because no one is looking for them – and if you don’t look, you don’t find. But the pesticides are very widely used and so have the potential to have a significant effect on populations.”
