Last month, three Guarani communities, the local Argentine government of Misiones, and the UK-based NGO World Land Trust forged an agreement to create a nature reserve connecting three protected areas in the fractured, and almost extinct, Atlantic Forest. Dubbed the Emerald Green Corridor, the reserve protects 3,764 hectares (9,301 acres) in Argentina; although relatively small, the land connects three protected other protected areas creating a combined conservation area (41,000 hectares) around the size of Barbados in the greater Yaboti Biosphere Reserve. In Argentina only 1 percent of the historical Atlantic Forest survives.
“The agreement that has been reached is truly ground-breaking,” John Burton the head of World Land Trust (WLT) said in a press release, “and it’s been heralded as such by the government of Misiones. In my view, it is probably the most important land purchase the WLT will ever make, because of the innovations involved and the wealth of biodiversity it protects.”
Once stretching along South America’s Atlantic coast from northern Brazil to Argentina, the Atlantic Forest (also known as the Mata Atlantica) has been fragmented by centuries of logging, agriculture, and urbanization. Around 8 percent of the Atlantic Forest still survives, most of it in Brazil, and most of it fragmented and degraded.
“The rainforest of Misiones is the largest remaining fragment of the Atlantic Rainforest of South America. It is full of unique plants and important animal species—it is vital to preserve the best sample of this ecosystem,” noted Sir Ghillean Prance, an advisor to the project and scientific director of the Eden Project, in a press release.
The establishment of the Emerald Green Corridor, which was purchased from logging company Moconá Forestal, ends 16 years of the Guarani communities fighting for their traditional lands. The land will now be considered Traditional Indigenous Lands, while the indigenous community is currently working on a conservation management plan to protect the forest and its species.
Editor’s note: “In recent years, the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam experienced a boom in renewable energy investments driven by generous feed-in tariffs, under which the state committed to buying electricity for 20 years at above-market prices. However, the high tariffs increased losses for Vietnam’s state-owned power utility EVN, the only buyer of the generated electricity, and led to an increase in power prices for households and factories. Authorities have repeatedly tried to reduce the high tariffs. Now they are considering a retroactive review of the criteria set for accessing the feed-in tariffs.”
“It’s really hard to build wind farms in Arizona, and if you put this into place, it’s just pretty much wiping you out,” said Troy Rule, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a published expert on renewable energy systems. “It’s like you’re trying to kill Arizona’s wind farm industry.”
United States Congressional House Republicans are seeking to prevent the use of taxpayer dollars to incentivize what they describe as “green energy boondoggles” on agricultural lands, citing subsidies that could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
They are expensive to build, just finding their footing on this side of the Atlantic, and have faced backlash from parties as varied as beachfront property owners and fishermen to coastal businesses and fossil fuel backers(most of the developers have fossil fuel ties).
The future of Humboldt County’s offshore wind industry appears increasingly uncertain following mass layoffs at RWE and Vineyard Offshore, the multinational energy companies leading efforts to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms on the North Coast. The job cuts come in response to widespread market uncertainty following President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban offshore wind development in the United States.
A critical permit for an offshore wind farm planned near the New Jersey Shore has been invalidated by an administrative appeals board.
COLOMBO — In a dramatic turn of events, Indian tycoon Gautam Adani’s Green Energy Limited (AGEL) has withdrawn from the second phase of a proposed wind power project in northern Sri Lanka. The project, which was planned to generate 250 MW through the installation of 52 wind turbines in Mannar in the island’s north, faced strong opposition since the beginning due to serious environmental implications and allegations of financial irregularities.
While renewable energy is a crucial need in the era of climate change, Sri Lankan environmentalists opposed the project, citing potential ecological damage to the sensitive Mannar region. Additionally, concerns arose over the way the contract was awarded, without a competitive bidding process.
The former government, led by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, had inked an agreement with AGEL, setting the power purchase price at $0.82 per unit for 20 years. This rate was significantly higher than rates typically offered by local companies. “This is an increase of about 70%, a scandalous deal that should be investigated,” said Rohan Pethiyagoda, a globally recognized taxonomist and former deputy chair of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.
Legal battles
Five lawsuits were filed against this project by local environmental organizations, including the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, the Centre for Environmental Justice and the Environmental Foundation Ltd. In January, the newly elected government expressed its desire to cancel the initial agreement and to renegotiate its terms and conditions, citing the high electricity tariff. Environmentalists welcomed the decision, believing the project would be scrapped entirely. However, their relief was short-lived when AGEL clarified that the project itself was not canceled, only the tariff agreement.
Government spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa later confirmed that the project would proceed after renegotiating a lower power purchase rate. However, two weeks later, AGEL announced its complete withdrawal from the project, a decision widely believed to be influenced by the government’s stance.
Wind energy potential
Sri Lanka has been exploring wind energy potential for more than two decades, with the first large-scale wind farm in Mannar named Thambapavani commissioned in 2020. This facility, comprising 30 wind turbines, currently generates 100 MW of power. With an additional 20 turbines planned, the Mannar wind sector would have surpassed 100 towers.
The Adani Group had pledged an investment totaling $442 million, and already, $5 million has been spent in predevelopment activities. On Feb. 15, the Adani Group formally announced its decision to leave the project. In a statement, the group stated: “We would respectfully withdraw from the said project. As we bow out, we wish to reaffirm that we would always be available for the Sri Lankan government to have us undertake any development opportunity.”
Environmentalists argue that Mannar, a fragile peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow land strip, cannot sustain such extensive development. “If built, this project would exceed the carrying capacity of the island,” Pethiyagoda noted.
Mannar is not only a growing tourism hub, known for its pristine beaches and archaeological sites, but also Sri Lanka’s most important bird migration corridor. As the last landmass along the Central Asian Flyway, the region hosts millions of migratory birds, including 20 globally threatened species, he added.
Sampath Seneviratne of the University of Colombo, who has conducted satellite tracking research on migratory birds, highlighted the global importance of Mannar. “Some birds that winter here have home ranges as far as the Arctic Circle,” he said. His research has shown how extensively these birds rely on the Mannar Peninsula.
Although mitigation measures such as bird monitoring radar have been proposed to reduce turbine collisions, power lines distributing electricity remain a significant threat, particularly to species like flamingos, a major attraction in Mannar. The power lines distributing electricity from the already established wind farm near the Vankalai Ramsar Wetland and are already proven to be a death trap for unsuspecting feathered kind.
Nature-based tourism
Given Mannar’s ecological significance, conservationists say the region has greater potential as a destination for ecotourism rather than large-scale industrial projects. “Mannar’s rich biodiversity and historical value make it ideal for nature-friendly tourism, which would also benefit the local community,” Pethiyagoda added.
With AGEL’s withdrawal, Sri Lanka now faces the challenge of balancing its renewable energy ambitions with environmental conservation. However, there are other sites in Sri Lanka having more wind power potential, and Sri Lankan environmentalists hope ecologically rich Mannar will be spared from unsustainable wind farms projects.
KLAMATH, CALIFORNIA—Brook M. Thompson was just 7 years old when she witnessed an apocalypse.
“A day after our world renewal ceremony, we saw all these fish lined up on the shores, just rotting in piles,” says Thompson, a Yurok tribal member who is also Karuk and living in present-day Northern California. “This is something that’s never happened in our oral history, since time immemorial.”
During the 2002 fish kill in the Klamath River, an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 salmon died when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. This catastrophic event catalyzed a movement to remove four dams that had choked the river for nearly a century.
Now, that decades-long tribal-led movement has finally come to fruition. As of Oct. 5, the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams have been fully removed from the river, freeing 676 kilometers (420 miles) of the river and its tributaries. This is the largest dam-removal project in history.
“This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” says Thompson, who is an artist, a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe and pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“I feel amazing,” Thompson tells Mongabay at the annual Yurok Salmon Festival in Klamath, California, in late August, just weeks before the river was freed. “I feel like the weight of all that concrete is lifted off my shoulders.”
A river dammed
The Klamath River stretches 423 km (263 mi) from its headwaters in southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean just south of Crescent City, California. It was once the third-largest salmon-producing river in the contiguous U.S., sustaining tribes for centuries and later also supporting a thriving recreational and commercial fishing industry.
Six Klamath River dams were built by the California Oregon Power Company (now Portland, Oregon-based electric company PacifiCorp) in the 20th century. The four lower dams, built to generate hydroelectric power, were Copco No. 1, completed in 1918, followed by Copco No. 2 in 1925, the J.C. Boyle Dam in 1958, and Iron Gate Dam in 1964.
At the time, they were seen as marvels of engineering and progress, promising cheap electricity to fuel the region’s growth. Together, these four dams could generate 163 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 70,000 homes and drive development in the remote territory.
However, the dams came at a tremendous cost to the river’s ecosystem and the Karuk, Yurok, Shasta, Klamath and Modoc tribes who have depended on its salmon since time immemorial.
In the decades after dam construction, the river’s once-thriving ecosystem began to collapse and salmon populations plummeted. In 1997, coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the Klamath were listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The life cycle of salmon is tied to the free flow of rivers. These fish are born in freshwater streams and migrate to the ocean, where they spend most of their adult lives, and then return to their natal streams to spawn and die. This journey, which can span thousands of miles, is crucial for the genetic diversity and resilience of salmon populations.
Dams disrupt this natural cycle by blocking access to spawning habitat, altering water temperatures, and degrading water quality. On the Klamath, salmon lost hundreds of miles of habitat. Worldwide, not just salmon, but many other migratory fish species such as trout, herring, eels and sea lamprey are blocked by dams.
Dead salmon floating in the Klamath River in 2002. An estimated 70,000 salmon died when PacifiCorp withheld water behind the Iron Gate Dam, sending it to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. Photo from Salmon kill photo archive.Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner uses a dip net to fish for salmon on the Klamath river in Karuk territory. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
“The dams were like a blockage in the river’s arteries. They stopped the flow of life, not just for the fish, but for our people too,” Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner, tells Mongabay. He recalls the stark decline in fish populations during his lifetime.
“As I grew up, the fish catching down here became almost nonexistent. At some points I was catching maybe 100 fish in a year,” Reed says. “At the time the Karuk Tribe had more than 3,000 members. That’s not enough for anything. Not even everybody gets a bite.”
Commercial and recreational fishing also took a hit over the years. “Back in the mid-1900s, the Klamath River was known as the single most revered fly-fishing river in California,” Mark Rockwell, vice president of conservation for the Montana-based NGO Fly Fishers International, which supported the dam removal efforts, said in a statement. “Fly fishers came from all over the U.S. and other countries to experience the historic fishery. All that was lost because of the dams and the damage & disease they brought to the river.”
For the tribes, the impact of the dams went beyond fish. The dams created large reservoirs that flooded ancestral lands and cultural sites, particularly village sites and important ceremonial areas of the Shasta Indian Nation in the upper Klamath.
Reed also shared memories of the dangers posed by the dams farther downstream in Karuk territory. “When I was growing up, we were not allowed to go to the river. Before Iron Gate Dam was put up [to control flows from the Copco dams] you had that surge when they made electricity and that fluctuation was up to 3 feet,” he said. “We were losing people along the river. There are stories of our people drowning.”
The movement to undam the Klamath
The fight to remove the four lower Klamath dams began in earnest in the early 2000s, led by the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes. After the 2002 fish kill made national news, the campaign to remove the dams grew beyond a local issue into a national movement supported by environmental NGOs and pro-fishing groups in California and beyond, such as American Rivers, Ridges to Riffles Conservation Group, California Trout, Save California Salmon, and the Native Fish Society.
In 2004, Tribal members and their allies traveled to Scotland to protest Scottish Power, which owned the dams at the time. The Scottish people rallied in support of the protesters, and in 2005 Scottish Power transferred ownership back to PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Protesters then took their message to shareholder meetings in Omaha, Nebraska.
Those in favor of dam removal argued that dams had been catastrophic for the ecosystem. The lower dams provided no irrigation, drinking water or flood control. Electricity from the dams did not go directly to local residents but was channeled into the Pacific power grid, which powers homes as far north as Vancouver, British Colombia, and as far south as Baja California. And finally, it would cost more to bring the dams up to modern standards than to remove them.
On the other hand, residents of the Copco community stood to lose the Copco Reservoir, a lake used for recreation and a tourism draw for the area. Others feared loss of energy and water quality problems. The campaign to remove the Klamath dams faced numerous challenges, including entrenched economic interests, local opposition, and complex regulatory hurdles.
Dam removal advocates overcame these obstacles through persistent grassroots organizing, alliances between tribes and environmental groups, and media campaigns that brought national attention to the scientific evidence about the dams’ negative impacts on salmon populations and water quality.
But what really made a difference was proving that removing the dams would cost less than fixing them up.
PacifiCorp and its parent company, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, initially resisted removal, but gradually shifted their stance as the financial and regulatory landscape changed. The turning point came when advocates demonstrated that removal could cap PacifiCorp’s liability and potentially save ratepayers money in the long term.
In 2016, after much negotiation, PacifiCorp agreed to transfer the dams to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), a nonprofit organization created specifically to take ownership of the dams and oversee their removal. By agreeing to transfer the dams to KRRC, PacifiCorp found a way to get rid of money-losing properties while avoiding uncertain future costs and risks.
In 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the plan, paving the way for the largest-ever dam removal and river restoration project not just in the U.S., but in the world.
Ultimately, dam removal and river restoration came with a price tag of approximately $450 million, funded through a combination of surcharges on PacifiCorp customers and California state bond money. Although Pacificorp hasn’t provided an official cost estimate, they have said it would have cost a great deal more to keep the dams operating safely.
Removing mountains of concrete and earth
Removing four massive dams is no small feat. The process involved years of planning, environmental impact studies, and complex engineering work.
“Removing a dam is like performing open-heart surgery on the landscape,” says Dan Chase, a fisheries biologist with Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the company contracted to handle the restoration work. “You have to be incredibly careful and precise, or you risk causing more harm than good.”
The physical removal of the dams began in mid-2023 and concluded in October 2024. It was a carefully orchestrated process that involved slowly draining reservoirs, demolishing concrete structures, scooping away the earthen dams, and managing the release of decades of accumulated sediment.
The removal of the dams occurred in a staggered sequence, beginning with the smallest dam and progressing to the larger ones. Copco 2, the smallest, was the first to be fully removed, with the process completed in October 2023.
This was followed by the initiation of drawdown (the controlled release of water) for the large reservoirs behind the three remaining dams, Iron Gate, J.C. Boyle and Copco 1, in January 2024.
The first step was to breach the dam (either with explosives or using existing openings) and lower the water level in the reservoir behind it. This was done gradually to minimize erosion and downstream damage. Contractors used special water tunnels and diversions to control water release.
Dam removal underway on the Iron Gate dam on Aug 15, 2024. Contractors diverted water during the removal process. Drone image by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Ren Brownell, the public information officer for KRRC, describes the day she watched the waters of the Iron Gate reservoir, tinged electric green from toxic algal blooms, drain in just 17 hours.
“It was like watching 10,000 years of geology in a matter of a week. [The sediment] washed away and eventually the Klamath River was revealed,” Brownell, who grew up in the area, tells Mongabay. “I end up looking back on that period as one of my favorite times on the project, because I got to watch a river come back to life and just reveal itself.”
Decades worth of sediment had accumulated behind the dams, most of which was washed downstream by the draining of the reservoirs. Although the river was extra muddy and turbid after each dam removal, experts view this as a positive sign of the ecosystem reclaiming its natural state.
The historic path of the Klamath river reemerges after the Iron Gate dam was removed and the reservoir drained. Native plants can be seen along the, planted by crews after the reservoir was drained. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
With the water levels lowered, heavy machinery moved in to begin breaking apart the concrete structures. Kiewit, the contractor KRRC hired to complete the deconstruction elements of the project, used hydraulic hammers, explosives, and other specialized equipment to demolish the dams, piece by piece.
According to KRRC, the concrete was buried onsite and the earthen material was returned to nearby areas, ideally where it had been originally removed from to build the dams. Hazardous materials were hauled offsite to appropriate facilities and metals were recycled.
Restoring an ecosystem
RES, who is overseeing restoration, now faces the monumental task of restoring the river channel and the 890 hectares (2,200 acres) of land that were once submerged beneath reservoirs.
“It’s not enough to just take out the dams,” says Chase, the RES fish biologist. “We need to help jump-start the ecosystem’s recovery.”
This effort began years before the dams were removed. In 2019, crews of primarily Yurok tribal members began a massive effort to gather seeds from native plants in the surrounding areas, including oak trees, poppies and various grasses.
“We had crews out collecting native seeds, with close to 100 different species collected from the area that we then took to commercial nurseries to grow and harvest and grow out again to the point where we’re now in the neighborhood of 17 to 19 billion native seeds,” says David Meurer, director of community affairs for RES.
A combination of hand seeding and helicopter seeding occurred at all three major reservoir footprints: Copco 1, Iron Gate and J.C. Boyle. (The smaller Copco 2 dam had impounded just a narrow, rocky area that only needed to be reshaped, according to RES.) The first round of seeding served to stabilize the sediment and improve soil. RES says this was a success, though there have been some challenges and surprises, including some rogue horses.
“We did not expect a huge and ever-increasing herd of horses who obviously are going to prefer our forage, which is green and lush, to what they saw in the surrounding hillside,” Meurer says. To address this unwanted grazing, RES is installing a rather long and costly fence around the planted areas.
As the dams came down, crews also began restoring the natural river channel. RES worked with a Yurok construction company to help direct the stream back toward its historic alignment. The team is still fine-tuning the river’s path, using plane-mounted lidar laser imaging to map and guide their work.
Free-roaming horses graze on restoration plantings along the Klamath river. Before dam removal, this area was submerged by the Iron Gate reservoir. The piles of logs shown here will be placed along the river to guide the river path and create habitat. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
The return of the salmon
Down a gravel road in Northern California, through a thicket of willow trees, around big boulders, and over smooth cobbles, is the place the Karuk Tribe calls the center of the world. A massive wedge of stone, a mini-mountain, stands guard over a section of the Klamath River rife with riffles and rapids.
On the river’s edge, Reed sits atop a massive boulder, praying. A white bird traces slow circles overhead. It’s later summer, a season of ceremony for the tribes. The world renewal ceremony is tied to the upstream migration of salmon.
Reed, a tribal elder, hops spryly across boulders to the base of a small rapid. With practiced movements, he swoops the end of a traditional dip net, a 15-foot loop of willow tree branch with a net at the end, into the whitewater.
Karuk Tribal citizens Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell catch the first fall chinook salmon of the on the Klamath river in late August. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Within seconds, a fat salmon thrashes in the net. Reed and Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, let out shouts of celebration. This was the first fall Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) of the season. They carry the fish back to a congratulatory crew and carefully clean it in a trickle of fresh water.
“We’re eating well tonight,” Mitchell says.
Because of their cultural and economic status, restoration efforts cater largely to the needs of the fish. As the physical landscape transforms post-dam removal, eyes are on the river’s iconic salmon.
“We’re already seeing positive changes,” Toz Soto, fisheries program manager for the Karuk Tribe, said, just weeks before the dam removal was complete. “Water temperatures are more natural, sediment is moving downstream as it should, and we expect fish to start to explore areas they haven’t been able to reach in generations.”
This expectation has already become a reality. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, “On October 16, a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.”
And a post by Swiftwater films, the official documentary crew for the project stated, “The first chinook salmon in over 60 years are officially spawning above the former Iron Gate dam on the Klamath, just two weeks after construction wrapped on dam removal…The fish are bright, strong and beautiful. What an incredible few days and a testament to the resilience of salmon.”
Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, holds the first fall chinook salmon of the year caught by the tribe. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
To improve salmon habitat, the RES team is adding structures to the river and its tributaries, such as fallen trees, to create pools and riffles the salmon require for spawning. They’re also installing what they call “beaver dam analogs,” structures of wood or rock pounded in along streams to slow the water down and catch sediment.
The removal of the Klamath dams will help many types of fish, says Shari Witmore, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who is studying salmon and other fish in the river, told Mongabay. The coho salmon, which are threatened with extinction, will gain about 122 km (76 mi) of river to live in. The project might also bring back spring Chinook salmon, which used to be common in the upper river but have nearly disappeared.
“What we’ve seen in other dam removals is that it takes about three to four [salmon] generations for salmon populations to become sustainable,” Witmore says. “And so for Chinook salmon, that’s 15 to 20 years, and for coho salmon, that’s six to 12 years.”
Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus), another culturally important species for the tribes, and steelhead (O. mykiss irideus) will gain access to an additional 644 km (400 mi) of river. These fish can swim in faster-moving water than salmon. With more places to live and breed, all these fish species should have a better chance of survival.
And, of course, the whole ecosystem will benefit, says Chase of RES. “We have northwestern pond turtle. We have freshwater mussels. There’s beaver out there. We’ve been seeing river otter foraging … it goes on and on.”
Yurok tribal members and others fish at the mouth of the Klamath River. Commercial salmon fishing was suspended this year due to low numbers, but scientists predict salmon populations will rebound in about a decade. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Tribal knowledge and collaboration
The restoration of the Klamath River has been aided by tribal knowledge, sometimes referred to as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or, as Reed calls it, “place-based Indigenous science.”
“Certainly, the place-based knowledge component has been vital to us,” Chase says. “Thinking about the species of plants to use, where they’re occurring on the landscape, what species are culturally significant and important that need to be included. That’s been an element of refining and improving our restoration work.”
On the fisheries side, Chase says, the tribes have shared an immense amount of information with the RES team on how fish move through the landscape, the habitats they use, and the ways the different life stages respond to various environmental factors.
One example is related to off-channel habitats, places off the main river stem where fish can go in the winters when stream flow is faster and in the warm summer when cover and food are critical. Tribal knowledge about how to create and enhance these features, and how fish interact with them, has helped RES to restore historic salmon habitats.
Healing rivers, healing people
“The decline of salmon has been linked to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease in our communities,” says Thompson, the Karuk and Yurok restoration engineer and Ph.D. student. “Their return is quite literally a matter of life and death for us.”
The removal of the Klamath dams is a step toward healing historical wounds inflicted on the Native American tribes of the region through decades of genocide and colonialism, according to Thompson and Reed.
However, the fight to remove the dams has taken a toll on those involved. Reed speaks candidly about the mental health challenges he and others have faced during the long struggle.
“I almost lost my family. You’re gone trying to fix the world. I’m going to Scotland. I’m going to wherever, whenever, however. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle. Meanwhile, my wife’s home with six children.” Eventually, he says, “I broke down, suffered depression … I just happened to have a good, strong family that allowed me to kind of come out of it.”
Reed and hundreds of others persevered. “We’re not just fighting for ourselves,” Reed says. “We’re fighting for our children, our grandchildren, and the salmon themselves.”
“These salmon were taken care of by my ancestors, who I had never met and never had contact with myself,” Thompson says. “The salmon are like love letters sent into the future where the love and effort put into the salmon were done so that I could have a good and healthy life.”
Challenges remain
For the Klamath region, the challenges are far from over. Climate change, wildfires, and the legacy of more than a century of colonialism and ecological disruption still pose significant threats.
“There’s been so much degradation over the last 100-plus years from agriculture, forestry, water diversion and grazing,” says Mark Buettner, director of the Klamath Tribe’s Ambodat Department, which is responsible for aquatic resource management in the Upper Klamath Basin.
There are still two smaller dams in the upper Klamath River in Oregon: the Keno and Link River dams. These aren’t hydropower dams, unlike the four that were removed; they provide flood control and water for agriculture, and there’s currently no plan to remove them.
“I want to emphasize that we’re happy that salmon will be back, but we’re not really ready for them,” Buettner adds. “Sure, the fish have free access to the upper basin, but the upper basin habitats aren’t optimal. Young fish could be diverted into irrigation diversions. The Keno dam needs a new fish ladder.”
As I pass through Karuk territory in late August, traveling west toward the ocean, the air is heavy with smoke and fire crews pass regularly in their trucks, serving as a stark reminder of the work that still lies ahead. This includes addressing more than 150 years of colonial fire suppression practices, Reed says.
A sign warns of high fire risk near the Klamath river in late August 2024. More than a century of colonial fire suppression practices, along with climate change has made fires more frequent and severe in the U.S. West. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.As the Klamath River flows by, a wildfire burns in the distance, near Orleans, California on August 18, 2024. This is was just one of many fires burning in the region that day. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
“When settlers first arrived in the Klamath region of what is now Northern California, they found forests with enormous trees, wooden homes and structures, acorn orchards, abundant plants, berries, fish, wildlife and clean water. All of it was made possible by Indigenous peoples’ frequent use of fire on the landscape,” Russel Attebery, chair of the Karuk Tribe, writes in a opinion piece for news outlet CalMatters. “California is not just fire-adapted, it is fire dependent.”
However, these controlled or cultural burns were outlawed in 1850 and are still “unjustly criminalized,” Attebery writes. The lack of prescribed burns, coupled with warmer and drier conditions from climate change, has led to more severe and frequent wildfires.
Wildfires are taking a toll on the Klamath River. Debris flow from last year’s McKinney Fire killed thousands of fish. Fires can heat up the river, making it too warm for cold-water fish like salmon. They also send silt and ash into the water, which can choke fish and smother their eggs. Sometimes, the erosion from fires even changes the river’s path. The ecosystem evolved with fire, but not at the frequency and severity of modern fires.
Reed and other traditional fire practitioners are being asked by academics and fire-management agencies to advise on traditional burning practices, and restore balance.
The irony of Native peoples being asked to consult on how to restore the land that was stolen from them isn’t lost on Reed. “I think we’re leading the nation with teaching cultural fire, through a faith-based process and hopefully this co-production of knowledge,” he says. But, he adds, “it’s kind of like, OK, they took our gold, they took our timber, they took everything, and they’re still taking our knowledge.”
Karuk Tribal members Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell in “the center of the world” by the Klamath River. The air is smokey from nearby forest fires. As a cultural fire practitioner, Reed has been asked to teach and share traditional knowledge in academia and with government agencies but says Indigenous people are seldom justly compensated for their knowledge. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
A cautionary tale
Many of the people I speak to cast the story of the Klamath dams as one of hope, but also as a cautionary tale for regions around the world considering large-scale dam projects.
While dams can provide benefits such as hydropower and water storage, they also levy significant environmental and social costs. Moreover, all dams have a finite lifespan, and their eventual removal is an expensive and complex process that planners often ignore.
“Dams were never meant to be pyramids,” says Ann Willis, California director of the NGO American Rivers. “They’re just infrastructure, and eventually, infrastructure ages. You can either be proactive about repairing, retrofitting or removing it, or you can deal with the far greater costs of a catastrophic failure after it happens. But there’s no question that one day it will fail.”
In many parts of the world, large dam projects are still being proposed and constructed. The lessons from the Klamath suggest these projects should be approached with caution, with full consideration given to long-term environmental and social impacts, as well as the inevitable costs of decommissioning at the end of the dam’s lifespan.
Site of the J.C. Boyle dam in Oregon after dam removal. Drone photo by Mongabay.
“No single agency is responsible for removing a dam, and [there’s] no requirement for dam owners to save funds for its removal,” Willis says. “The process of removing obsolete, disintegrating dams can take decades while people navigate a web of bureaucracy and look for funding. As time goes on, the risk of failure increases, which is incredibly dangerous as most dams would cause significant loss of human life and economic damage if they failed.”
As of February 2024, more than 2,000 dams have been removed across the U.S., most of them in the past 25 years, according to American Rivers. But more than 92,000 remain standing. Willis says she hopes the success of the Klamath dams’ removal and restoration project can serve as a blueprint for similar efforts around the world.
“The Klamath is significant not only because it is the biggest dam removal and river restoration effort in history, but because it shows that we can work towards righting historic wrongs and make big, bold dreams a reality for our rivers and communities,” Willis says. “Dam removal is the best way to bring a river back to life.”
Ren Brownell, public information officer for Klamath River Renewal Corporation, stands over the Copco 1 dam removal site. KRRC was formed to oversee the dam removal process. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
‘Anything is possible now’
Amid the world’s tallest trees, where the Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean, the annual Yurok Salmon Festival is in full swing when I arrive. On the main street, outside the Yurok Tribal Headquarters in the town of Klamath, California, dozens of booths are selling arts and crafts. There’s music, dancing, games, and a palpable sense of joy in the air.
But something’s missing this year: The salmon. Due to low numbers, both tribal and commercial fishing have been suspended this year.
Despite this absence, attendees express hope and a sense that change is coming. “We are delighted about the dam removal and hope for the return of the salmon,” says Yurok artist Paula Carrol. “We are salmon people. Without salmon, who are we?”
“This is still a celebration,” Thompson says, “and anything is possible now.”
A parade rolls through the town of Klamath, California during the annual Yurok Salmon Festival. This year, there was no salmon. Still, many attendees were hopeful for the salmons’ renewal post dam removal. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.
The protesters shouted, “Tourists go home.” They held signs that said, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”
The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.” Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”
Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time. The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers.
There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.
In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.
The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.
“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.
“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”
One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.
“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.” Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”
The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.
With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.
***
I have watched the touristification process wreck lives in an American city I once considered a place to settle and raise a family. Moab, Utah, is called “the adventure capital of the world,” and the hordes converge on it for exploration of the surrounding desert wildernesses on vast public lands that include two legendary national parks, Arches and Canyonlands. In the last 20 years, the city has become a nightmare of hypervisitation. The Utah state government and a cabal of elites – landowners, businesspeople, speculators, moneylenders, rentiers – have joined to market Moab across the United States and globally so that huge profits can be reaped from a harvest of ever-increasing numbers of tourists.
The effect is no different from that in Barcelona, especially in the spawning of a precariat working class in Moab. These are the service-industry peons at the bottom rungs of a system of economic inequality that has only worsened with hypervisitation. Many are driven out of town by the high cost of living and end up car-camping on public lands, where they are vulnerable to predation. Such was the case of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, a gay couple described as “deeply in love” and who lived out of their car, who were stalked and murdered in August 2021. As my friend Laurel Hagen, attorney and long-time Moab resident and mother of two young children, put it to me, “Moab’s people are being fed slowly but surely to the tourism Moloch.”
The beneficiaries are also the same as in Barcelona. “Those who benefit the most from hypertourism,” Jon Kovash, a writer and radio journalist in Moab, told me, “are the hedge funders engaged in raping the town. Anybody selling gasoline or liquor or restaurant food. Realtors and land pimps. The internet lodging industry.” Kovash also includes in this list of villains what he calls the “adventure scammers.” These are the businesspeople who seek to convince the public of the need for paid guides or expensive mechanized rent-a-toys to get into the backcountry, when all one needs really is boots, backpack, a compass and map and a modicum of courage. (I lived in Moab for several years and spent glorious times in the backcountry without spending a nickel.)
Moab’s citizens are today under assault “like never before” – so longtime friends in town tell me – with the arrival of the UTV tour industry. Utility task vehicles, or “side-by-sides,” are small, powerful four-wheel-drive autos designed for aggressive driving both off-road and on. Piston, camshaft, clutch, gearbox, and various belts produce extraordinarily high levels of noise. Renting a UTV to tear about Moab and into the surrounding desert at full blast has become the thing to do.
“People in Moab should be defending their homes against UTV colonization and the violence of noise pollution,” Christian Wright, an author and former National Park Service historian, told me when I first met him in 2022. Wright, who in 2019 published a book about radicalized “miners for democracy” in the coal towns of the American West, had himself been radicalized by the torture of years of living around UTVs in Moab. The machines, he said, “are destroying the peace, harmony, and friendliness that once characterized Moab Valley. Do we not have mountains of evidence that the constant noise leads to elevated heart rates, discontentment, and unprecedentedly colorful manifestations of language?”
The problem became so widespread that some Moabites, who happened to be parents dealing with infants terrified of the sound of the machines, described UTV tourism as a danger to the health of children. Jon Kovash and his daughter Josie Kovash, who lived a few blocks from her dad and was herself a new mother, produced a radio documentary in 2021 cataloging the complaints of besieged residents.
None of these concerns were aired in a political vacuum. Officials of Grand County, of which Moab is the seat, noted that their offices had in recent years received more complaints about noise than about any other issue. According to former Grand County prosecutor Christina Sloan, the impacts on residents included “stress-related illnesses, high blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep disruption and lost productivity,” along with “feelings of isolation,” “lowered morale” and “emotional trauma.”
Acting on these concerns of the great majority of Moabites, the city in 2021 placed restrictions on UTV businesses and daily tours, setting up an enforcement system to reduce noise levels – only to see the Utah state legislature, friend to the industry, kill the local ordinances with passage in 2022 of an extraordinary bill that appeared to violate municipal sovereignty. The infamous Blue Ribbon Coalition, a rightwing astroturf lobby group funded by fossil fuel companies and auto manufacturers, joined the fray with the filing of a lawsuit against the city of Moab for the attempt at regulation. Christina Sloan declared the 2022 pro-UTV bill “an illegal restraint on county and municipal constitutional police power. ” It turns out Utah is now the only state in the union that has made UTVs street legal while also prohibiting municipalities from opting out of their use on streets.
Such is the hypocrisy that one finds everywhere across the rightwing American West: local sovereignty is sacrosanct only so long as it doesn’t conflict with industrial profits. In this case, tourism trumped both liberty and democracy.
***
As a global force of havoc in the natural world, tourism is well-known to be “one of the leading sectors with deleterious effects on the environment.” The air travel related to tourism accounts for 8 percent or more of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tourism is anathema to biodiversity, implicated in producing wildlife deserts, as masses of people in animal habitat tend to adrenalize the animals and scatter them while impairing the habitat with dispersed pollutants. Backcountry tourism in Colorado, to take one example, has caused the die-off of elk populations.
Tourism is implicated in diminished freshwater supply for local residents. It increases the chance of contamination from sewage and chemicals, soil erosion from trampling, and the accumulation of waste and air pollution. Craig Downs, a toxicology expert who runs the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, has found that sunscreen effluent from mass tourism produces “a cascade of insults to the ecological structure” of both marine and freshwater ecosystems, reducing the life cycle viability of aquatic wildlife – in other words, poisoning the animals to the point they can no longer reproduce.
Tourism is also a source of enormous volumes of noise pollution. The effect of noise pollution on human health is well-documented. Over time, it is debilitating to body and mind, and the problem is only getting worse with the growing din of technoindustrial civilization. What about the effect, on a captive population, of the peculiarly grating racket of UTVs? Moab is an experimental site, one resident told me, “to see how people react to the presence of high-pitched whining machines. I think we are guinea pigs and the goal of the experiment is to see how long it takes to drive us nuts.”
Christian Wright, the historian who worked for the National Park Service, was driven almost to the edge. His case, sensationalized and twisted in the media, made headlines across Utah. On February 17, 2023, he was surrounded at a gas station in Moab by heavily armed police. He was arrested, and his house was raided and searched. Police found five AR-15-style assault rifles, along with a stash of psychedelic mushrooms, possession of which made it illegal under Utah law to own the guns. His phones, computers, and hard drives were also seized. Local newspapers declared him a terrorist in waiting.
The evidence marshaled to justify the raid and arrest was that Wright may have participated in a vandalism campaign in which stickers were glued to various public objects in town, including utility poles. The campaign, I later learned, involved numerous Moabites who were posting such stickers. Wright was not some lone nutter. One of the stickers said DEATH TO INDUSTRIAL TOURISM: it burns oil – destroys habitat – low wages – expensive housing. Another said UTV NOISE IS CHILD ABUSE, and another said UTV NOISE IS RAPE CULTURE.
A sticker that Wright gave me as a gift was the old chestnut, DIE YUPPIE SCUM. Another that police allegedly found in their raid of his house was decorated with an image of an assault rifle and stated, DEFEND YOUR HOME, RESIST UTV NOISE HARASSMENT, ABUSIVE TOURISTS & SLC POLITICIANS TAKE NOTE: MOAB IS NOT YOUR WHORE.
I had been corresponding with Wright for close to a year prior to his arrest, and we had become friendly. Nothing in our exchanges suggested he was dangerous to people (though he might have been dangerous to property, which in the United States can be a worse crime). We had gone on long hikes together in the desert backcountry when I visited him in the snowy January of 2023, navigating the treacherous ice of red rock cliffs to collect in our backpacks the plastic detritus – mostly water bottles – that hikers had left in remote canyons of Arches National Park the previous summer. We had gone out boozing at a Moab saloon and had a fine time getting drunk. We played music in his basement, me on his drums, he on piano. He had a punk-rock style, with his mullet and leather jacket. He was aggressive in a gentle way, and a weirdo, and maladjusted (I can relate).
Yet here was Wright, one month later, confined to a holding cell in the Moab city jail, charged with crimes – terroristic threats, illegal possession of assault rifles and drugs – that made him sound like a lunatic ready to burst. It’s true that he had sent Grand County attorney Christina Sloan a letter, in 2022, stating that he wanted to chop up with an ax the owner of a UTV rental company that operated next door to the house he owned in Moab. The unceasing UTV traffic was like a jackhammer in his brain. He made no attempt to communicate with the person he wanted to kill, however, but only told prosecutor Sloan of his intentions – which is not how one usually conducts a death threat.
Sloan herself came to his defense in an article she published following his arrest. “I’ve watched this smart, articulate, engaged, empathetic human fall apart over the last two years,” she said of Wright. “It has made me feel more passionately than ever that noise pollution is a significant public health issue that needs our full attention.” Sloan recalled Wright’s comments on UTV tourism to the Grand County Commission in April 2021, noting that “he and his mullet were vibrant and refreshing.” Wright, she said, “articulately countered the pro-[UTV] conservative talking points hailing the supremacy of the American dollar above all else.”
Not long after his arrest, Wright was remanded for four months to a mental health facility in Utah, where he was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. He appreciated the care from the loving staff but didn’t enjoy being regarded as a “terrorist” based on slander spread by Moab authorities. As of this writing, he is back in his home, and most of the charges against him have been dropped.
***
The conflict over hyper-visitation plays out wherever there are lovely places that people want to consume as travelers. In my backyard, on the highlands along the Hudson River valley north of New York City, a man named Dave Merandy, ex-mayor of the touristed village of Cold Spring, is fighting to stop the flood of people on his home ground.
The Hudson Highlands is a major draw with its green hills and handsome cliffs that afford scenic views of the wide Hudson. The area already attracts hundreds of thousands of people a year. Merandy, who stepped down as mayor of Cold Spring in 2021 after seven years of service, is a leader in the opposition to a planned expansion of tourism amenities that will likely increase the number of visitors in the Highlands to more than a million per annum. Known as the Fjord Trail project, the expansion is supported by the New York State government, numerous environmental NGOs, and a friendly neighborhood billionaire named Chris Davis, heir to a Wall Street fortune who considers himself the lord over the commoners in this stretch of rural New York.
Why stop the growth of tourism in the Highlands? “Because we already have enough,” Merandy told me during a visit at his house. “We don’t need more people.” He understood with clear eyes that the conflict was part of a global problem. “Nobody wants to address overpopulation. Everybody thinks it’s sustainable. We think we can just keep growing and growing. It’s crazy. This is a case where we want to have as many people as possible. You only have X amount of acres that can sustain a certain number of people. But then we tell ourselves, just bring them in, more and more and more. Put up a neon light, have a ribbon cutting, and everybody will say Chris Davis the billionaire is a hero.“
After I left Merandy, I stopped at a busy intersection on Route 9, in the town of Fishkill, where a masked man stood in the median in a black robe that whipped in the wind of the passing cars. He wore the infamous Scream mask and a big analog clock around his neck. This, obviously, was the Grim Reaper. I stopped to ask him what he was doing. “I’m Death,” he said. “And I’m reminding people they’re going to die.”
It struck me that, yes, lots of us are going to die a lot sooner than we expect if the growthist monster isn’t stopped. Climate change and ecological collapse, driven by overpopulation coupled with affluence-seeking, will kill out not only the beautiful wild things worth keeping on this planet but also a large part of humanity that hasn’t the money to buy its way out of collapse.
The place to build opposition to the monster is in your backyard, where the consequences are most painfully felt. En revanche, the prostitutes of business-as-usual – say, the billionaire lords up in the manor – will curse and slander you, declare you reactionary, the enemy of “progress,” and, perhaps worst of all, a nimby, somebody who wants selfishly to keep the backyard all to yourself. Merandy, who grew up in the Highlands and learned there a love of nature, has been called all these things, as have the resisters in Barcelona and Moab.
Wright and Merandy and the Barcelonans armed with water guns are all engaged in the same fight in defense of the place they call home. They have the right and the duty to take their stand. And history will prove them to be honorable. Those who oppose mass tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow. The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if society is to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. The tourism industry – along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future – will not accept that judgment.
An abridged version of this piece first appeared at Truthdig.
Under the banner Oil Kills, small groups of activists have occupied airport departure lounges, plane cabins, terminals, tarmacs and roads across three continents — and they aren’t done yet. Here are the numbers so far: 500 people, 31 airports, 22 groups, 166 arrests, 42 people on remand in prison — all in support of their one demand.
The coalition formed when members of Extinction Rebellion, the A22 Network and Stay Grounded began reaching out to other groups globally. What resulted was an unprecedented alliance of civil resistance groups focused on the sustained disruption of airports — a key pillar of the fossil fuel economy.
Unifying aims, collective strategy and diverse tactics
All Oil Kills participants are committed to nonviolent direct action and to the central demand, but from there, individual creativity and context has led to an array of actions. The resulting structure is a decentralized yet cohesive power bloc with unified aims that becomes more than the sum of its parts, rather than a lowest common denominator coalition.
Each participating group has adopted the central demand that governments must work together to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030, as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition. But each local group also brings its own unique knowledge and demands which are in turn supported by the coalition. Futuro Vegetal in Spain, for example, focuses on the imperative to adopt a plant-based agri-food system while Students Against EACOP in Uganda demand a stop to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline — and all stand in solidarity with one another.
Each group also brings its own creative tactics, from airport glue-ins, to plane occupations, to spray-painting terminals, to street marches. “The airports don’t know what to expect because we don’t even know exactly what to expect from each other — it’s beautiful and effective,” said a coalition member who requested to remain anonymous for legal reasons.
On Aug. 9, Students Against EACOP in Uganda joined the Oil Kills campaign, planning a peaceful march to the parliament in Kampala and the delivery of a petition demanding an end to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, and for their government to sign the treaty to end fossil fuels.
Kamya Carlos, a student at Kyambogo University and spokesperson for Students Against EACOP, connects the inequitable and ecocidal nature of today’s airline industry to its origins in neocolonial extractivism. “New oil, gas and coal infrastructure continues to exacerbate the climate crisis. As the global temperatures hit their tipping points it is clear that projects such as the East African Crude Oil Pipeline should never be constructed in the first place,” he said. “These projects, which end up being used almost exclusively by rich people and polluting the atmosphere, should never be allowed by right thinking members of society. We demand the government to sign a fossil free treaty and call an end to EACOP.”
Even though police repression represents a major threat, on Aug. 27, 20 climate activists and persons affected by the oil pipeline came back out in another peaceful march to petition Uganda’s Ministry of Energy. They were again violently dragged from the street by police in fatigues and held on remand until Sept. 6, when the court finally granted their release on bail. All 20 have been ordered to appear for a hearing on Nov. 12.
“The resilience under extreme repression shown by Students Against EACOP is an inspiration and metaphor for the Oil Kills movement,” said Jamie McGonagill, an Oil Kills member from XR Boston. “We refuse to die.”
You can’t arrest a rising sea
As of this writing, 22 Oil Kills activists remain in custody in Uganda, six in Germany and 14 in the U.K. Speaking to the increasing criminalization of dissent, McGonagill explained that “draconian responses that imprison nonviolent climate activists, especially as we’ve seen lately in the U.K. and in Uganda, show that the authorities misunderstand us. They will not stop us. We will just get more and more creative.”
Oil Kills is not alone in facing repression. On Aug. 8 in New York City, a 63-year-old grandfather and professional cellist, John Mark Rozendaal, was arrested and hit with a criminal contempt charge, carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in jail, for performing Bach’s “Suites for Cello” at Citibank’s headquarters. Rozendaal was participating in the Summer of Heat campaign to pressure Citibank to divest from fossil fuels through sustained nonviolent civil disobedience. Connecting this case to the burgeoning international movement, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor, in following Rozendaal’s case, has expressed her “strong concern” at the severity of the charges.
In a disturbing trend that has become the new normal in Italy, peaceful eco-activists are being branded a “danger to security and public order,” served with specious charges, banned from cities without trial, and criminalized under anti-terrorist laws intended to prosecute the Mafia.
Last week in the U.K., several high profile journalists and activists affiliated with the movement for Palestinian liberation were arrested in a sweep by counter-terrorism police for their opposition to genocide. They have been held under Section 12 of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, which outlaws support for a “proscribed organization.” Such an application of the law would mean that you can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion.
XR NYC organizer Meg Starr, a long-time Puerto Rican solidarity activist and coordinator of the XR Allies sub-circle, noted that the links between genocide and ecocide — in Palestine and elsewhere — are becoming clearer and more important to emphasize. “Our targeting of Citibank,” Starr commented, “included a focus on Citi’s major support of the Israeli military as part of their role as the world’s leading financier of oil and gas expansion.”
“Repression is not a gradual process, it leaps out at you and takes you off guard,” he warned from his prison cell. “Do you remember the Solidarity leaders in Poland? They were invited into talks with the Polish government but when they got to the meeting, they were arrested in one fell swoop and imprisoned for years. You don’t think it will happen to you and then it does.”
Hallam’s message is that we can expect more repression, but that authorities must also expect more resistance. “You can’t negotiate with physics, with a thousand peer-reviewed articles,” he wrote. “Just Stop Oil reminds us what resistance, that far-off folk memory relegated to Netflix, actually looks like in the present moment. Thousands of arrests, hundreds of imprisonments and a five-year sentence for making a speech.”
In a statement announcing a pause in international actions to allow politicians to consider their demands, Oil Kills echoed the realism of Hallam’s framing. “The facts are clear, we are flying towards the obliteration of everything we know and love. Continuing to extract and burn oil, gas and coal is an act of war against humanity. …To know these facts and yet to have no plan to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal is reckless and immoral.”
They point out that while activists sounding the alarm and demanding change are increasingly criminalized, our politicians are actually the ones who are complicit in the greatest crime in human history. “Whether those in charge realize that they are engaging in genocide is not the question. For this is how it will be seen by the next generation and all future generations,” Oil Kills warned. “For now we are taking a pause, but governments must take heed: you cannot arrest your way out of this, just as you cannot imprison a flood or serve injunctions on a wildfire.”
Oppose oil injustice, propose mobility justice
Stay Grounded is a network of individuals, local airport opposition and climate justice groups, NGOs, trade unions, initiatives fostering alternatives to aviation like night trains and organizations supporting communities that struggle against offset or projects to develop so-called “sustainable aviation fuels.” Importantly, Stay Grounded goes beyond affirming the conclusion that business as usual is not an option, and stands for a 13-step program to transform transport, society and the economy to be just and environmentally sound.
“Flying is the fastest way to fry the planet so it’s key to start by cutting pointless and unfair flights like private jets or short haul flights,” said Inês Teles, a spokesperson for Stay Grounded and an Oil Kills member. “Our actions disrupting airports should be a shock to the system that is driving us towards climate catastrophe.”
In summary, Stay Grounded’s program begins with a positive vision for justice. It includes advice for achieving a just transition, shifting to other modes of transportation, developing economies of short distances and changed modes of living, as well as strong political commitments for land rights, human rights and climate justice.
Their program then details what must be avoided — obvious yet important items like growing the harmful air travel industry, including infrastructure expansion, loopholes and privileges for aviation, and common greenwashing pitfalls like carbon offsetting, biofuels, and illusory technocentric fixes.
Though Stay Grounded’s aims are more specific to the air travel industry than Oil Kills’ unifying demand for a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030, coalition members are able to build on these positive aims, utilizing leadership from frontline communities affected by the air travel industry. Sharing and even cross-pollinating pro-social and ecologically healthy programs, in addition to opposing destructive practices, has been an effective way of galvanizing and sustaining support across diverse movements and communities.
Covering activism isn’t activist
The choice to focus on disrupting the air travel industry in order to pressure governments to adopt a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty is as bold as the demand itself. Much of the media’s reaction so far has been unsurprisingly harsh, condemning the disruptions as “not the right way to do it.” Very little critical analysis has been audible above the din, but that doesn’t mean critical analysis isn’t happening.
It turns out, if you actually listen to them, that Oil Kills activists take strategy extremely seriously — after all, they’re knowingly putting their own freedom on the line through their actions. That is not a decision to be taken lightly, especially in today’s legal context. While news coverage of their “stunts” has circulated widely, what about the reasons behind their actions and assessments of their impact?
Covering climate activism well is a critical part of getting the climate story right. Too often journalism focuses on protesters’ tactics and not the problems they’re drawing attention to or the arguments they’re making. In a recent roundtable discussion, author, journalist and activist Bill McKibben urged fellow journalists to consider that, “we can serve our audiences better, treating activists as the newsmakers they are, rigorously evaluating their arguments as we would a public official.”
Journalists often shy away from foregrounding activists as sources of information and analysis for fear of being perceived to be more “activist” than “objective.” This framing is entirely misleading however, and can more accurately be explained as the pressure to avoid platforming those seeking to change the system in deference to those whose position exists to maintain the system. Why is a politician or a business owner an appropriate subject, but not an activist? There is no objectivity in this, but there are salaries and awards.
The myth that journalism must keep activism at arms length also misses the point that many of these ordinary people taking action are some of the best informed on the biggest news story of our time: the climate and ecological emergency. Activists have been speaking on climate science and policy for decades, many have even been personally affected by ecological disaster, but they have been almost exclusively ignored by the mainstream press. After decades of fossil fuel industry gaslighting, it turns out the activists have been right all along. It’s past time to hear these people out as legitimate subjects and newsmakers, able and deserving to speak about their work and their areas of expertise.
Why target air travel?
First, the obvious answer: oil kills. And the air travel industry is very, very oily. Aviation is by far the mode of transport with the biggest climate impact. If aviation was a country, it would be one of the top 10 emitters.
Emissions from aviation are rising more rapidly than any other sector of the economy. The number of aircraft and the number of passenger-miles flown is expected to double over the next 20 years. If left unchecked, they could consume a full quarter of the available carbon budget for limiting temperature rise to 1.5 C.
Second, oil isn’t extracted equitably, burned equitably, and neither does it kill equitably. At the turn of the millennium, less than 5 percent of the world’s population had ever sat in an aircraft. But it is mostly non-flyers who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and the negative effects of airport expansion like land grabbing, noise, particle pollution and health issues. Communities in the Global South that have barely contributed to the crisis are affected most. Indeed, well before the repression of the Oil Kills coalition, climate activists — especially in Latin America — have faced what is being termed “ecopoliticide”: the targeted and strategic murder of those who dare take action.
Stephen Okwai, a project affected person who has joined the movement to stop the EACOP pipeline in Uganda, feels there is now greater risk in inaction than in protesting. A project affected person, or PAP, is a legal term for the people directly affected by land acquisition for a project through loss of part or all of their assets including land, houses, other structures, businesses, crops/trees and other components of livelihoods. They are legally owed compensation, but in the case of Okwai and others affected by EACOP, there has been no such justice.
“Currently most of us in western Uganda are being disturbed,” he explained. “You cannot know when the rain is going to start and when it will stop yet most of these people are farmers. The effect of this oil project is greatly impacted on the people.”
After he was arrested during the Aug. 27 march in Kampala, Robert Pitua, a member of Oil Kills, Students Against EACOP, and a PAP, said that, “Livelihood restoration programs [have been] insufficient, and now we cannot manage to restore the initial livelihoods we had. Most people are given unfair and inadequate compensation.” This structural and planned destruction of hundreds of communities has left PAPs no choice but to resist, and is the source of a common refrain in Students Against EACOP’s demonstrations: “We refuse to die.”
This leads to the third reason to target aviation. The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex; and it is connected with the undue influence of big business on public policy, including trade, economic development and climate.
“Not only is the air travel industry a cornerstone of globalized fossil capitalism, but it is also a symbol of inequity,” Jamie McGonagill said. “By disrupting a major column of the system, we aim to disrupt the system itself.”
Rather than plentiful data and common sense reasoning, it is more often a powerful underlying consciousness that has spurred many to action. When asked why it was necessary to disrupt air travel across Europe and North America, Just Stop Oil spokespeople replied, “because governments and fossil fuel producers are waging war on humanity. Even so-called climate leaders have continued to approve new oil, gas and coal projects pushing the world closer to global catastrophe and condemning hundreds of millions to death.”
The Oil Kills coalition has rallied around reality with the seriousness it deserves, refusing dystopia by disrupting it, and demanding a clear and urgent path towards repair. “Our leaders from wealthier countries must seek a negotiating mandate for an emergency Fossil Fuel Treaty,” said coalition members in an Aug. 14 statement. “They also need to immediately finance and support poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition.”
If increased media attention on the climate and ecological emergency is any indicator of success, and it is, the Oil Kills uprising is punching well above its weight. “Oil Kills” was mentioned over 2,900 times in the press during the first week of the campaign. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative has also never attracted so much media attention worldwide, with an increase of over 1,000 percent in mentions from the week prior to the campaign’s launch. Oil Kills actions drew comments from politicians, government officials and from the vice president of Norwegian oil giant, Equinor. For only 500 people spread out over three continents, they have indeed been hard to ignore.
It is true, not all publicity is created equal — but pleasing the general public is not always the priority. In a recent article, Mark Engler and Paul Engler, coauthors of “This is an Uprising,” discussed why protest works even when not everyone likes them. They explain that a very common result is that, when asked about a demonstration that makes news headlines, respondents will report sympathy for the protesters’ demands, but they will express distaste for the tactics deployed. They will see the activists themselves as too noisy, impatient and discourteous.
The coauthors, both experienced activists and resistance scholars, point out that this is actually an age-old dynamic, and one addressed eloquently by Martin Luther King Jr. in his renowned 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” They explain that, “this letter was written not as a response to racist opponents of the movement, but rather to people who professed support for the cause while criticizing demonstrations as ‘untimely’ and deriding direct action methods. ‘Frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation,’ King quipped. But confronting these criticisms, he made the case for why the movement’s campaigns were both necessary and effective.”
In a similar vein, Oil Kills participants, like medical student Regina Stephan who recently took action at the Berlin airport with Letzte Generation, feel they have no choice but to act: “Just yesterday, the state of Lower Saxony gave the green light for new gas drilling off Borkum,” Stephan said. “That can’t be true! As long as our decision-makers work hand in hand with the fossil fuel companies and put profit before human life, I’m standing here — on the tarmac — and I can’t help it!”
Joining in this sentiment, Anja Windl, who took action at Stuttgart airport said very succinctly: “As long as our livelihoods are being systematically destroyed, our protests will not stop.”
Importantly, Oil Kills participants are not demanding that everyone utilize the same tactics. Rather, these activists are urging others to join the climate justice movement in diverse ways. Anja continued, “if you also want to campaign for an end to fossil fuels, you don’t have to sit on an airfield like I did: Just come to a Disobedient Assembly near you!”
In recent years, there has been considerable research published that attempts to measure radical flank effects and track the polarizing effects of movements. Mark Engler and Paul Englers’ analysis cautions that, “while there are limits to how much protest impacts can be precisely quantified, the cumulative result of such research, in the words of one literature review, is to point to ‘strong evidence that protests or protest movements can be effective in achieving their desired outcomes,’ and that they can produce ‘positive effects on public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior.’” They conclude that both the historical experience of organizers and recent studies provide backing for the idea that “support for a movement’s issue can grow, even when a majority of people do not particularly like the tactics being used.”
Finally, success cannot be fully measured by public opinion, especially when the strategy is to trouble public consensus. Oil Kills has been very clear that they are not acting in order to sooth or please anyone — they are intentionally sounding the alarm as a way of empowering people to act. By treating the climate crisis as a crisis, and reacting accordingly, activists are, in a sense, giving other people permission to do the same and showing them how. It’s like when someone is real with you and that makes you feel like you can be real too — and we all need to get real, real fast. The spell of complacency is like the tranquilizer that helps walk a cow to slaughter. Oil Kills is shouting, “wake up and live!”
In a debrief by the Oil Kills campaign on Aug. 16, they addressed the public: “it is time to face reality: no one is coming to save us. There is no free pass, no shelter from the coming storm. Our best chance of survival is to resist. To join the growing numbers of ordinary, everyday people, from across the globe who are refusing to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered.”
Offering a pathway forward out of doom, Oil Kill’s messaging has remained crystal clear: “The climate crisis will not end until every single country has phased out fossil fuels, [and] those who bear the greatest responsibility and have the greatest capacity must do the most … In this time of crisis, we expect our governments to work collaboratively, as we have done, and negotiate a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the war on humanity before we lose everything.”
The next rebellion is coming
Coming back down from the hugeness of our crisis and into ourselves as individuals often causes a feeling of paralysis, especially for the majority of people not yet interconnected within communities of resistance and solidarity. But there have been actions where small groups or even lone activists have held up an Oil Kills banner and received media coverage and support because they are part of a global campaign which can’t be ignored. Every single contribution adds to that.
In a Sept. 6 letter to climate activist prisoners of conscience, Naomi Klein wrote, “In a world that was right-side up, you would be celebrated as the ones who helped break the spell that is setting our world on fire. In truth, your actions could still do that, if enough people know about them.”
It continues to be an urgent and essential task to ensure that more and more people do know about Oil Kills and other manifestations of resistance, but it is also evident that the world’s elites already understand the threat that these actions represent — the threat of mass uprising. That threat is precisely why nonviolent direct action in defense of planetary life is being criminalized so viciously.
Klein continued, “Movements against climate arson are already converging with movements against genocide and unfettered greed. The next wave of rebellion is coming. Along with the tankers, I see it clearly on the horizon.” The Oil Kills uprising and fellow movements around the world have placed their bodies between those tankers and our shared future to say, “here, and no further.”
If enough of us line up behind them, their actions could very well lead the way to an adoption of a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030 — that remains to be won. What is for certain is that their actions are troubling the autopilot system, disrupting the mechanics of fossil-capital’s death march and creating desperately needed space to pursue alternate routes. Whatever else lies on the horizon, their contributions are already impacting the world in ways we cannot yet know, but will be unlikely to forget.
