Editor’s note: Climate change is a symptom predicament of overshoot and is exploited by power elites to deflect from what is necessary, ending modern civilization. The slow death of nature started with civilization, it has exponentially sped up since the 1700s. The reason there are no more natural disasters is because they are all now man-made.
Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism.”
Almost everything we buy exploits the environment and the people who depend on it to a greater or lesser extent. Almost everything we buy contributes to climate breakdown through emissions, local environmental degradation, or, most commonly, both. Yet, in a world where greenwashing is so commonplace that almost every product proclaims ecological benefits, it tends not to be seen that way. In fact, it tends not to be seen at all.
Carbon emissions and pollution are a phase that we all pass through, meaning that the ability—and crucially the money—to avoid the ratcheting risks of climate change is something we have earned, and others too will earn as each nation continues inexorably along its separate curve. Wealthy countries accept this narrative because it is comfortable and provides a logical and moral explanation of the relative safety and health of the rich world.
But what if it wasn’t true? What if one place was devastated because the other was clean? Just as carbon emissions are not acts of God, neither is exposure to the results of those emissions. In other words, you can’t remove money from the geography of disaster risk.
This is carbon colonialism: the latest incarnation of an age-old system in which natural resources continue to be extracted, exported, and profited from far from the people they used to belong to. It is, in many ways, an old story, but what is new is the hidden cost of that extraction: the carbon bill footed in inverse relation to the resource feast.
Most colonial economies were organized around extraction, providing the raw materials that drove imperial growth. As a result, even when the imperial administration is taken out, the underlying economic structures put in place by colonizers are very difficult to get away from and continue to hold newly independent countries back.
On a basic level, exporting raw materials adds less economic value to the country that does it than processing, manufacturing, and reselling those materials, so for every watt of energy, every hectare of land, and every hour of work used to make goods exported from the global North to the South, the South has to generate, use, and work many more units to pay for it.
Decolonizing Climate Change
We already have the ways and means to decolonize how we measure, mitigate, and adapt to climate change.
This task is as sizable as it is vital, but at its core are three priorities. First, carbon emissions targets based on national production must be abandoned in favor of consumption-based measures, which, though readily available, tend to be marginalized for rich nations’ political convenience. Secondly, with half of emissions in some wealthy economies now occurring overseas, environmental and emissions regulation must be applied as rigorously to supply chains as they are to domestic production.
By adopting these new viewpoints, we can aim towards a final priority: recognizing how the global factory manufactures the landscape of disaster. Our globalized economy is built on foundations designed to siphon materials and wealth to the rich world while leaving waste in its place.
Yet there is, as ever, another way. It is possible to reject the globalization of environmental value by giving voice to the people it belongs to. Environments do not have to be merely abstract commodities.
Giving greater value to how people think about their local environments is seen as a way to decolonize our environmental thinking, move away from extractivism, and perhaps forestall the slow death of nature that began in the 1700s.
Environmental Myths and How to Think Differently
One of the most widely shared myths in climate change discourse is that climate change increases the likelihood of natural disasters. This burden is ‘disproportionately’ falling upon poorer countries. Yet, it is fundamentally flawed. Climate change is not causing more natural disasters because disasters are not natural in the first place. They do not result from storms, floods, or droughts alone, but when those dangerous hazards meet vulnerability and economic inequality.
A hurricane, after all, means something completely different to the populations of Singapore and East Timor. This difference is no accident of geography but of a global economy that ensures that some parts of the world remain more vulnerable to climate change than others. Natural disasters are, therefore, economic disasters: the result of centuries of unequal trade and the specific, everyday impacts of contemporary commerce.
With rich countries doing an ever-diminishing share of their manufacturing, the responsibility to report real-world emissions is left to international corporations, which have little incentive to report accurate information on their supply chains.
The environments of the rich world are becoming cleaner and safer, even in an increasingly uncertain environment. The resources needed to tackle the challenges of climate change are accruing and being spent to protect their privileged populations.
Yet, for most of the world, the opposite is true. Natural resources continue to flow ever outward, with only meager capital returning in compensation. Forests are being degraded by big and small actors as climate and market combine to undermine traditional livelihoods. Factory workers are toiling in sweltering conditions. Fishers are facing ever-declining livelihoods.
In other words, we have all the tools we need to solve climate breakdown but lack control or visibility over the production processes that shape it. From legal challenges to climate strikes and new constitutions, people are waking up to the myths that shape our thinking on the environment. They are waking up to the fact that climate change has never been about undeveloped technologies but always about unequal power.
As the impacts of climate breakdown become ever more apparent, this can be a moment of political and social rupture, of the wheels finally beginning to come off the status quo.
Demand an end to the delays. Demand an end to tolerance for the brazenly unknown in our economy. Demand an end to carbon colonialism.
Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast continue to suffer threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining.
Residents say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
This year, there have been 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to Indigenous rights groups that spoke at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel this month.
Increasing violence in northern Nicaragua this year has displaced rural families and led to calls for more drastic action from the international community, which activists say hasn’t done enough to hold the Ortega government accountable for human rights abuses.
For years, Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast have suffered threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining. This year appears to be as bad as ever, and residents say they are desperate for help.
“Urgent measures must be taken to protect these communities,” said Gloria Monique de Mees, the OAS rapporteur on the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination. “Failure to address the crisis will only embolden the Nicaraguan government to continue its repressive campaign.”
Much of the violence is concentrated within the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN), a jurisdiction communally governed and titled by Indigenous communities since the late 1980s. It’s home to Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ulwa, Ramas, Creole and Garífunas peoples, and contains mountain, rainforest and coastal ecosystems.
The area has attracted non-Indigenous Nicaraguans, known locally as colonos, looking to set up farms, logging operations and artisanal mines. Massive gold and copper deposits have also created opportunities for multinational mining corporations, with backing from the government.
Indigenous communities say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
An IACHR panel in March on unlawful arrests in Nicaragua. Photo by CIDH via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Conflicts between Indigenous communities and the colonos, who are often armed, have led to tragedy in multiple instances this year, according to witnesses who spoke at a panel hosted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this month.
“This situation was created particularly by the dispossession of our territories as part of a process of colonization that implies, in the words of the communities, an ethnocide, in which settlers deprive us of our food and exploit our natural resources, usurping Indigenous territories through acts of armed violence and strategies to destroy out traditional ways of life,” Tininiska Rivera, a community member now living in exile, said during the panel.
In the first six months of this year, there have been over 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to several Indigenous rights groups present at the panel.
Many of the communities where the violence occurred have protection measures in place from the IACHR, which involves asking for special intervention by the Nicaraguan government. Human rights advocates say officials haven’t complied.
In one instance this year, five people were killed and two were seriously injured in the Wilú community in the Mayangna Sauní As territory. During the same incident, other families saw their homes and crops burned down, resulting in their displacement. At least 75 Indigenous people have been killed in the area since 2013, according to the panel.
At least 58 of this year’s cases in protected communities involved sexual, psychological, or physical violence against women, the groups said.
There have also been 37 cases in which forest rangers have been targeted by the government while carrying out patrols, according to Camila Ormar, an attorney for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Eleven Mayangna people have been formally convicted while another 14 have outstanding arrest warrants.
Colonos have used high-caliber weapons and deprived their captors of food, according to the communities. They allegedly have connections to the government as well as various groups made up of former combatants from the revolution.
“One of the stopping points is not to engage with the dictatorship as if everything were normal, but rather to recognize the scale of the abuses that are ongoing, the imprisonment of not just the religious but the young people, the sexual violence against women and children, the dispossession of whole communities,” said OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Arif Bulkan.
In 2022, the US issuedsanctions against state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMIENAS), saying that it was “using gold revenue to continue to oppress the people of Nicaragua.” But the country’s mining concessions have continued to expand, often in Indigenous communities that struggle to find adequate legal representation or don’t understand their rights.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the government granted three Chinese companies 13 mining concessions in the country, eight of them in the RACCN, according to a Confidential investigation published earlier this year. All of them were approved within eight months, suggesting that proper environmental impact studies and consultation with the communities were never carried out.
The concessions last 25 years and gives the three companies — Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group — exclusive rights to extract minerals in the area, according to the investigation.
The companies couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The Ministry of Energy and Mines didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests.
Speakers at the IACHR panel said it’s important to continue to document the human rights abuses taking place on the northern Caribbean coast and to bring it to attention of the rest of the world. They also said that many protection measures are still working but also need to be improved.
For his part, Bulkan said that the international community has been “timid” in its response to the situation in Nicaragua. “[There has been] a shameless response from what we would think of as champions of human rights in the region,” he said. Adding, “One clear line of work has to be continuing with advocacy with the international community.”
Max Radwin is a staff writer covering Latin America for Mongabay. For updates on his work, follow him on Twitter via @MaxRadwin.
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Editor’s note: Environmental activism will only play a role in the lives of young people if adults are great role models and walk the talk. As custodians, we need to take the young out into nature to help them gain an appreciation for wilderness. So that they will want to protect the earth in the future. At the same time, many teenagers lose their connection to the natural world, because the lifestyle of our sedentary, technology-focused culture doesn’t give them any incentive to connect. Instead of investing in research for techno-fixes, we should find out how people will care more deeply about the planet’s ecosystems.
I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. – Gus Speth, Founder, World Resources Institute.
At the federal level, even recent Democratic administrations have proven unable to enact policy measures ambitious enough to bend the curve of carbon emissions (at least without “help” from COVID). Nor has technology been our salvation. Although they held promise to reduce the carbon intensity of our economic output, technological advances have been offset by Americans’ consumption habits, population growth, and the energy intensity of information-processing technologies.
With each passing year, the disconnect grows ever more stark between 1) the mounting scientific evidence that global climate disruption is happening now and 2) the inadequacy of collective action to control rising carbon emissions. We do not lack for effective solutions. Rather, society and its leaders lack sufficient will and caring about future generations to implement solutions that meet the challenge. Like it or not, we find ourselves in a long game with adverse climate and biodiversity impacts baked in for decades to come.
One resource that has not yet been adequately mobilized, however, is the innate human capacity for caring, compassion, and love. Compared to technology and policy innovations, little research attention has been devoted to what makes people care enough to adopt pro-nature attitudes and behaviors and to support environmental policy initiatives that affect their lifestyles.
At the same time, people are increasingly disconnected from the environment they are being asked to help protect. The physical and psychic disconnection is due in part to urbanization and sedentary lifestyles, exacerbated by the explosive increase in time spent interacting with the physical world through a small two-dimensional screen.
To combat what some call “nature deficit disorder,” parents, schools, nonprofits, and governments have long offered a wide range of nature-based experiences for young people. Some are structured, such as outdoor education programs, forest schools, green schoolyards, community clean-up and tree-planting projects, and scouting. Others are unstructured: climbing trees, foraging, hunting, and having pets. The Children and Nature Network (C&NN), a national nonprofit that tracks and supports childhood nature activities, has documented that such activities yield significant immediate psychological, physiological and emotional benefits to participants.
But do nature-based experiences also result in their young participants developing pro-environmental attitudes, behaviors, and activism in adulthood? Given currently adverse environmental trajectories, this is clearly a question with high stakes. To explore linkages between childhood nature activities and adult environmental activism, I reviewed recent research in this field on behalf of C&NN.
Findings suggest that instilling a love for the natural world in young people does offer hope for future generations becoming better ancestors than the present one. Early experiences in nature can lead to feelings of connectedness, which can then lead to pro-environmental attitudes, and ultimately pro-environmental behavior. Many studies suggest that nature experiences and connection to nature in childhood are vital to pro-environmental behaviors in adulthood.
The link between time in nature and connectedness to nature is often explored retrospectively by asking adults to recall their childhood nature experiences. Studies taking this approach have documented significant relationships between childhood nature experience and ecologically conscious behavior later in life. These findings underscore the importance of ample time in nature during childhood. However, there are nuances that suggest various factors may result in individual variation.
For example, early experiences that stimulate emotional responses to nature create a deeper bond than purely information-based experiences. Emotional bonds with nature offer a pathway for inspiring future environmental action in adulthood. While cognitive understanding and environmental knowledge may influence behaviors, investigations have established stronger connections between emotional feelings for nature and increased care for nature through pro-environmental behaviors. A program that brings inner-city teens from New York into the Adirondacks for both learning and hiking inspires some participants to pursue subsequent environmental education and careers.
Childhood nature experiences are not the only path to pro-environmental behavior in adulthood. For example, an urban environmental justice or climate justice advocate might have grown up in a household that placed a high value on social justice more generally.
Overall, despite a growing body of research, this field of study is not as robust as the above question demands. Significant research gaps and methodological deficiencies persist. Empirical evidence is stronger for correlative than for causal relationships.
The challenge facing both outdoor educators and environmental advocates may be less about designing initiatives to instill a newfound love for nature than about how to retain humans’ innate tendencies to do so. At an early age, children demonstrate compassion towards each other, other animal species, and even to non-living entities. Children come into the world with the capacity to experience curiosity, wonder, and (especially at an early age) a less sharp distinction between themselves and their surrounding world. At an early age, children demonstrate the capacity to develop moral relationships with both sentient and non-sentient nature. (My then three-year-old son befriended a chicken pinata at the start of a birthday party, a friendship that did not end well.)
Creating opportunities for exposure to nature may help nurture such instincts and prevent them from withering as kids develop to adulthood. Implications for adults may thus be to focus less on fostering connections with nature than on getting out of the way of children’s “natural” tendencies. Relatedly, connection to nature tends to drop off during the teen years, suggesting that nature experiences need to be designed and targeted to teens’ developmental stage.
The pathways by which children in Western societies feel connected with nature are often different than in indigenous societies. In place-based societies that depend on natural resources for their sustenance, survival depends on practices that evolve from long-term experience in responding to the natural world. Stewardship norms and behaviors become established in children through demonstrating traditional livelihoods in which older children and adults play strong teaching roles. One largely untapped opportunity for Western society is to elevate wisdom about relationships with the natural world that are contained in indigenous traditions.
One challenge in designing nature-based initiatives is that opportunities for young people to connect with nature are becoming more constrained. Disrupted climate patterns may make it less pleasant to be outdoors, especially in ever-hotter summers. Young people today are precluded from forming connections with aspects of the natural world that have already been lost or altered from shifting baselines (insect and bird populations, white Christmas, etc.). Risk aversion and legal liability result in rules limiting the range of acceptable childhood activities — like tree-climbing or unsupervised outdoor play.
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible. That means equipping them with a suite of nature-friendly technologies and policies. It also means providing them with experiences that form the basis for an emotional and moral commitment to protect what they love.
Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture/Public Domain CC0
We here at DGR would love to invite you to our upcoming online conference opportunities. They’re all about our annual conference which is fast approaching. The dates of the conference are Friday, August 23rd (afternoon) until Monday, August 26th (morning).
We’ll be doing three livestreams. They are all taking place on Saturday, August 24th and all times listed are in the Pacific Daylight Time zone. Our first live stream starts at 9 am on the 24th and will bepresented by Lierre Keith. Those of you who have seen Lierre in action know what a powerful speaker she is. Her talk is entitled From Living Planet to Necrosphere: In the Time of Patriarchy’s Endgame and you definitely don’t want to miss it!
Our second livestream will be taking place at 2:30 pm and it will be a Q & A hosted by award-winning author Derrick Jensen. Here is the event page link for both of these first two livestreams and this is also where you can submit questions for Derrick to take on during his event. https://www.facebook.com/events/1201872644161114
The third livestream, our Grand Finale, is also a much-needed Fundraiser and begins promptly at 6 pm. We could really use your help, now more than ever, and we’ll be deeply appreciative of every single dime our fundraiser brings in. Here’s the event description for you: It’s Open Mic night at the annual DGR conference. Join us live for magic, music, poetry, and prose, and lots and lots of jokes. We’re running this as a fundraiser and appreciate anything you can give.
An additional item for your attention is that we will be offering all of our Conference Workshops over Zoom, a video meeting platform. Some of you have already asked to be on the Zoom list so next I’ll be gathering the names and getting everything ready for this, including publishing the schedule. There will be a limited number of spots for Zoom participants; if you haven’t already asked to be on the list but want to be, now is the time to request this. You’ll need links to be able to Join and we’ll need to have you ‘all set’ in plenty of time. To request your spot on the Zoom list, please send me an email at brandiwork24@gmail.com letting me know. I will respond to let you know either that your spot is confirmed or that we are full.
Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.
The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.
For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
Struggle against hoarding of reservoir water by agro-industry sees five days of action, culminating in a 10,000-strong march on the commercial port of La Rochelle
The French environmentalist movement Soulevements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Land) is carrying on its campaign against mishandling of water resources. This phase of action began on July 16 with the “Village for Water and Land Defense“, a meeting bringing activists from around the world to discuss strategy. This assembly of culminated in two demonstrations of around 10,000 people on the July 19 and 20, despite severe repression by police including teargas, blockades, and police charges at protesters.
The demonstrations July the 19 proceeded in a pattern not dissimilar to previous protests against the expansion of magabasins in France. 10,000 protesters on foot marched on Cerience, a seed subsidiary of the agro-industrial group Terrena. Parallel to this a group of 600 cyclists accompanied by campaigners from another group, Naturalistes des Terres, used kites to drop duckweed into nearby megabasin reservoirs to clog their pumps and pipes. The reservoirs they targeted provide water for the poultry factory farms of the Pampr’ouef group, who have recently been facing legal challenges over animal cruelty in their farms.
Demonstrations on July 20, however, marked a shift in the group’s focus towards a more global stage. Aiming to block the commercial port of La Pallice, farmers in tractors began to block the port at 6 a.m. followed by a larger demonstration beginning at 10 a.m which included people moving both on foot and by boat. Here, the focus was not directly on the expansion of reservoirs , but rather on the companies who profit from the government-funded privatisation of water. In a statement from the Soulevements de la Terre the group outlined how “competition from French cereals” prevents countries in Western Africa, a central destination of the port’s exports, from achieving food independence. Thus the expansion of their protests from megabasin reservoirs to ports marks an expansion of the fight to “abolish free trade, commercial predation and speculation” to a new arena.
While Soulevements de la Terre continue to bring attention to the centralisation of French agriculture and inflict millions of Euros in damage to the largest companies, their continued existence faces immense legal and political pressure. In 2023, after a mass action against the construction of a megabasin reservoir at Sainte Soline that resulted in the injury of 200 activists, the French government outlawed the organisation. Although this has been temporarily suspended by the Council of State (France’s Supreme Administrative Court), it hasn’t stopped the anti-terrorism section of the police making multiple arrests related to the sabotage of Lafarge cement factory.
