Indigenous Understanding of Salween River Key for Biodiversity

Indigenous Understanding of Salween River Key for Biodiversity

This story first appeared in The Third Pole.

By Saw John Bright.

This week, governments from around the world will convene online for the first part of the UN Biodiversity Summit COP15 (the second part will take place partially in-person in Kunming in spring), which will agree on the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Framed as a ‘stepping stone’ to the 2050 Vision of ‘Living in harmony with nature’ as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), ratified by 196 countries, this framework is intended to deal with runaway biodiversity loss over the next decade.

Increased attention is being paid to how Indigenous peoples have for centuries realised this aspiration of harmony. Indigenous peoples manage or have rights to 22% of the world’s land, yet this land supports 80% of the world’s biodiversity, even as they struggle to regain ancestral lands that were taken from them in many places. What is less recognised is how Indigenous understanding and perception of reality upholds this harmony.

The CBD meeting three years ago promised greater inclusion of Indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge, and there is much discussion of these issues ahead of COP15. The CBD developed the Akwé: Kon Guidelines in 2004 and further deepened involvement with the launch of a Traditional Knowledge Information Portal. Despite this progress, when mainstreaming of biodiversity into the energy sector was discussed by CBD parties in 2017, the negative impacts of hydropower dams were discussed in biodiversity and ecosystem terms, paying mere lip service to Indigenous rights.

A narrowly technical understanding of hydropower – passed off as “scientific” – underestimates how culture supports economies, conservation and utility for Indigenous peoples living in river basins. When external experts interpret Indigenous knowledge without the context of Indigenous perception of reality (ontology), they fail to grasp its importance. What is needed is an incorporation of Indigenous understanding of reality when discussing biodiversity in Indigenous territories, in order to manage ecosystems better.

The Salween through Indigenous eyes

The Salween River is one of the few major rivers in Asia who still flows freely and uninterrupted by large-scale dams. Roughly 2,400 kilometres long, the Salween flows from the Tibetan Plateau through Yunnan into Myanmar, briefly touching Thailand. The river supports some of the most biodiverse areas in the world and is home to diverse Indigenous groups including the Akha, Blang, Derung, Hmong, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Kokang, Lahu, Lisu, Mon, Nu, Palaung (T’arng), Pa’O, Shan, Tibetan, Yao, and Wa.

As custodians of the Salween River, community members maintain a spiritual relationship with the Salween, as our ancestors have done since they descended from the Tibetan Plateau many centuries ago. For us, the Salween is home to countless important spirits who are intermediaries between our human societies and the environment around us. She supports the sacred animal and plant species who populate our cosmos and carries the memories of our ancestors whose lives were intertwined with the river. Our relationship with the spirits is maintained and the memories of our ancestors kept alive by our continuous interaction with the Salween River. She is the backbone of our traditional knowledge and practices.

This is a wider understanding of the river than a mere provider of ‘ecosystem services’ that sustains our ‘livelihoods’. In our Indigenous understanding and perception of reality, developed over generations of living in the Salween basin, we don’t make a distinction between plants, animals, humans and more-than-humans such as spirits and ancestral spirits. This interconnectedness remains strong because the Salween is a free-flowing river.

These connections are reflected in Indigenous land, water and natural resource management across the Salween basin. As has been noted with reference to the Htee K’Sah guardian spirits of the water in S’gaw Karen ontology in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology,

“Karen environmental governance consists of social relations and ceremonial obligations with more-than-humans… It is through relations with the K‘Sah that Karen villagers relate to the water and land itself, and humans’ rights to use the land are contingent on maintaining these ritual obligations.”

Indigenous knowledge systems lead to better conservation

Our customary water governance traditions include stewardship practices, hunting and fishing restrictions, and ceremonial protocols that have fostered harmony with nature and safeguarded biodiversity. Our river is inhabited and protected by guardian spirits. In sanctuary areas, prayer ceremonies are performed to protect the fish and harm those who fish there. Our traditional watershed management systems designate ecologically sensitive areas such as ridges, watersheds and old growth forests, where the cutting back of forest is prohibited.

The benefits of traditional knowledge and practices for biodiversity thus come from the cultivation of a harmonious relationship between humans and more-than-humans, which is why sacred areas – an old tree or an entire mountain or river – must be protected. The ongoing relevance of such traditional knowledge and practices can be seen in the Salween Peace Park, an Indigenous initiative in Karen state that was awarded the 2020 UNDP Equator Prize. Around 75% of the forests, mountains and rivers that constitute the 1.4-million-acre area is managed according to traditional ‘kaw’ customary knowledge that combines spirituality, culture and conservation. This combination characterises Indigenous knowledge and is at the heart of Indigenous identity even when people have adopted ‘formal’ religions.

Indigenous knowledge and practices that are beneficial for biodiversity cannot be separated from Indigenous understanding and perception of reality. The inseparability of Indigenous ontology, Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous practices is hard to recognise for people living outside these ontologies. It is not possible to capture or preserve our Indigenous knowledge in a museum or a book. What meditation and prayer in a house of worship is for other religions, for us is the interaction with the Salween River. Our knowledge regenerates from our interaction with our environment, especially at the countless natural sacred sites and auspicious confluence points where the Salween meets its tributaries. We see her as a living entity.

Uninterrupted interconnectedness is key for the Salween

There are plans for seven Chinese-built dams along the Salween River, which has been a source of friction between Myanmar and China, as well as the current and previous governments and Indigenous groups. If the Salween River is dammed, it will strike at the heart of our cultures and beliefs. The severance of the river itself and the cascade of consequences will be the death knell for our traditional knowledge and practices for three reasons.

Firstly, the Salween responds to seasonal snowmelt and monsoon rains. Altering these variations in her flow affects the river’s ecology, severing people’s interdependency with the river by causing a decline in local river-linked livelihoods such as fisheries and agriculture. If these are disrupted, young people will have no choice but to take up professions disconnected from the river or move away. Less interaction and cohabitation with the river over time weakens Indigenous knowledge systems.

In the Karen context, Lu Htee Hta is one of the most important ceremonies performed as part of our relationship with the water, a ‘founders’ ritual’ which maintains a social contract with the more-than-human owners of the water and land. If the next generation is not able to conduct these rituals, the social contract will be broken. Without the continuous interactions between animals, humans and non-humans in the Salween basin, Indigenous knowledge will cease, and with it practices that have sustained the rich biodiversity we see today.

Secondly, dam-induced changes to the river’s rhythms, levels and nutrition will reduce the numbers and ranges of many sacred aquatic species that are strictly protected in the traditional management systems of the Salween, including the fish Nya Moo, Nya Ter Taw, and Nya Pla (Neolissochilus sp.). For instance, a reddish species of Nya P’tay is regarded as the king of all fish and killing them, we believe, will result in the extinction of fish species and water scarcity and drought. The Salween is home to a diversity of turtles greater than any other river in the world, and we regard a number of them as sacred.

Mainstream dams will also affect river-based sites considered sacred, such as the Thawthi Kho watershed area, threatening the effective protected status of waterbodies rich in biodiversity such as spring-fed pools, mud beds, waterfalls, rapids and islands. If these sacred natural sites run dry or flood in unusual ways, people will believe that the spirits may become angry and cause accidents and illness in nearby communities, or leave the river altogether, stripping these sites of protection.

Third, if our Salween is fragmented by dams, this will disrupt the flow, interconnection and relationship between all beings that depended on it. This upsets the balance in the river, which in turn upsets the balance between the river, humans and more-than-humans. It is the wholeness of the river – connecting beginning to end; past to present; humans to more-than-humans – that makes her the backbone of our belief systems. This gives her a sacred meaning as an indivisible living entity that supports our Indigenous cosmos.

Recognition and action for Indigenous ontologies

We draw hope from recent developments that have seen the central importance of free-flowing rivers in Indigenous ontologies being increasingly recognised, including by parties to the CBD. In 2017, New Zealand acknowledged the sacred status of the Whanganui River in Maori ontology by giving the river legal personhood. Through this act, New Zealand recognised the Whanganui as “an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating its tributaries and all its physical and metaphysical elements”. New Zealand acknowledged “the enduring concept of Te Awa Tupua – the inseparability of the people and the River” thereby echoing the ancient Maori proverb: “The Great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River and the River is me.”

According to the New Zealand attorney general in charge of the process, their most difficult challenge was getting the country’s European-descendant majority “to see the world through Maori eyes”. While rivers have since been recognised as living entities in CBD member countries such as EcuadorBangladesh and Canada, many other CBD members are still severing the flow of rivers sacred to Indigenous Peoples. In our own country, Myanmar, the military junta recently announced a fresh push to dam the Salween River.

Participants at the COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity should move beyond previous calls for ‘participation by’ and ‘consultation with’ Indigenous Peoples to recognise ontological diversity in order to safeguard biodiversity in Indigenous territories. To play an effective role in addressing the biodiversity crisis, we have to be able to sustain our own ‘Ecological Civilisation’.

Parties to the CBD should consider legislation that recognises legal personhood and rights of rivers considered sacred to Indigenous Peoples and incorporate Rights of Nature into the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Parties should also translate the Akwé: Kon Guidelines into their national laws so that these guidelines become more relevant. Through enabling more research into Indigenous ontologies and their spiritual relationship with rivers, the CBD Secretariat should help to foster a better understanding of who a river is in the ontology of Indigenous Peoples.

Above all, parties to the CBD should, in their effort to mainstream biodiversity in the energy sector, commit to excluding large-scale hydropower as an energy option for rivers such as the Salween which are sacred and culturally significant to Indigenous Peoples.

Banner image: Christophe95 – Own work (CC BY-SA 4.0)

EPA Suspends Enforcement of Environmental Regulations: BREAKING

EPA Suspends Enforcement of Environmental Regulations: BREAKING

Editor’s note: on Thursday news broke that the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. is suspending enforcement of regulations due to the coronavirus outbreak.

This comes several weeks after China waived their own environmental regulations in order to re-start their economy as fast as possible, raising fears of a “pollution backlash.”

From a DGR analysis, this is predictable. Within a culture that is dependent on destroying the planet, the needs of the economy—and of the rich—will always be prioritized over the needs of the natural world.

It’s obvious that environmental regulations are failing to protect the planet. That’s partly because, as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) often states, regulatory law is written by and for corporations. Nonetheless, regulations do mitigate and slow some of the worst harms. Now, even that flimsy barrier is being dismantled.

We expect this. As Derrick Jensen wrote in Premise 20 of the book Endgame, “Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.”

Featured image: Public domain photo. Air pollution kills roughly 7 million human beings annually.


‘Holy Crap This Is Insane’: Citing Coronavirus Pandemic, EPA Indefinitely Suspends Environmental Rules

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a “green light to pollute with impunity.”

Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies “act responsibly” to avoid violations.

“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” Wheeler said in a statement. “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.”

Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is “essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future.”

“It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic,” said Giles. “And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was.”

Published under  the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Coronavirus is a “Disease of Civilization”

Coronavirus is a “Disease of Civilization”

Editor’s note: This article, first published at Marx21, dives into the origin and epidemiology of the CoViD-19 virus with a socialist biologist. While it does not represent an official Deep Green Resistance perspective, it does include valuable factual information—including the essential analysis that CoViD is a “disease of civilization.” For further reading on this topic, see “Civilization Makes Us Sick” and “The Ecology of Disease.” Republished with permission.

The coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures. A talk with Rob Wallace (Evolutionary Biologist) about the dangers of CoViD-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases.

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and phylogeographer for public health in the USA. He has been working for twenty-five years on various aspects of new pandemics and is the author of the book “Big Farms Make Big Flu”.

How dangerous is the new coronavirus?

Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not?

So all this fuss about the virus is just scare tactics?

No, certainly not. At the population level, Covid-19 was clocking in at between 2 and 4% case fatality ratio or CFR at the start of the outbreak in Wuhan. Outside Wuhan, the CFR appears to drop off to more like 1% and even less, but also appears to spike in spots here and there, including in places in Italy and the United States.. Its range doesn’t seem much in comparison to, say, SARS at 10%, the influenza of1918 5-20%, »avian influenza« H5N1 60%, or at some points Ebola 90%. But it certainly exceeds seasonal influenza’s 0.1% CFR. The danger isn’t just a matter of the death rate, however. We have to grapple with what’s called penetrance or community attack rate: how much of the global population is penetrated by the outbreak.

Can you be more specific?

The global travel network is at record connectivity. With no vaccines or specific antivirals for coronaviruses, nor at this point any herd immunity to the virus, even a strain at only 1% mortality can present a considerable danger. With an incubation period of up to two weeks and increasing evidence of some transmission before sickness–before we know people are infected–few places would likely be free of infection. If, say, Covid-19 registers 1% fatality in the course of infecting four billion people, that’s 40 million dead. A small proportion of a large number can still be a large number.

These are frightening numbers for an ostensibly less than virulent pathogen…

Definitely and we are only at the beginning of the outbreak. It’s important to understand that many new infections change over the course of epidemics. Infectivity, virulence, or both may attenuate. On the other hand, other outbreaks ramp up in virulence. The first wave of the influenza pandemic in the spring of 1918 was a relatively mild infection. It was the second and third waves that winter and into 1919 that killed millions.

But pandemic skeptics argue that far fewer patients have been infected and killed by the coronavirus than by the typical seasonal flu. What do you think about that?

I would be the first to celebrate if this outbreak proves a dud. But these efforts to dismiss Covid-19 as a possible danger by citing other deadly diseases, especially influenza, is a rhetorical device to spin concern about the coronavirus as badly placed.

So the comparison with seasonal flu is limping …

It makes little sense to compare two pathogens on different parts of their epicurves. Yes, seasonal influenza infects many millions worldwide each other, killing, by WHO estimates, up to 650,000 people a year. Covid-19, however, is only starting its epidemiological journey. And unlike influenza, we have neither vaccine, nor herd immunity to slow infection and protect the most vulnerable populations.

Even if the comparison is misleading, both diseases belong to viruses, even to a specific group, the RNA viruses. Both can cause disease. Both affect the mouth and throat area and sometimes also the lungs. Both are quite contagious.

Those are superficial similarities that miss a critical part in comparing two pathogens. We know a lot about influenza’s dynamics. We know very little about Covid-19’s. They’re steeped in unknowns. Indeed, there is much about Covid-19 that is even unknowable until the outbreak plays out fully. At the same time, it is important to understand that it isn’t a matter of Covid-19 versus influenza. It’s Covid-19 and influenza. The emergence of multiple infections capable of going pandemic, attacking populations in combos, should be the front and center worry.

You have been researching epidemics and their causes for several years. In your book »Big Farms Make Big Flu« you attempt to draw these connections between industrial farming practices, organic farming and viral epidemiology. What are your insights?

The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.

When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.

Who is to blame?

I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.

For which diseases is this the case?

There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.

What is the role of multinational companies in this process?

Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.

What effects do the production methods of agribusinesses have on this?

The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.

How so?

Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.

What!?

These companies can just externalize the costs of their epidemiologically dangerous operations on everyone else. From the animals themselves to consumers, farmworkers, local environments, and governments across jurisdictions. The damages are so extensive that if we were to return those costs onto company balance sheets, agribusiness as we know it would be ended forever. No company could support the costs of the damage it imposes.

In many media it is claimed that the starting point of the coronavirus was an »exotic food market« in Wuhan. Is this description true?

Yes and no. There are spatial clues in favor of the notion. Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held.

But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.

Covid-19 is not the first virus to develop in China that the government tried to cover it up.

Yes, but this is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a »health emergency of international concern«. Is this step correct?

Yes. The danger of such a pathogen is that health authorities do not have a handle on the statistical risk distribution. We have no idea how the pathogen may respond. We went from an outbreak in a market to infections splattered across the world in a matter of weeks. The pathogen could just burn out. That would be great. But we don’t know. Better preparation would better the odds of undercutting the pathogen’s escape velocity.

The WHO’s declaration is also part of what I call pandemic theater. International organizations have died in the face of inaction. The League of Nations comes to mind. The UN group of organizations is always worried about its relevance, power, and funding. But such actionism can also converge on the actual preparation and prevention the world needs to disrupt Covid-19’s chains of transmission.

The neoliberal restructuring of the health care system has worsened both the research and the general care of patients, for example in hospitals. What difference could a better funded healthcare system make to fight the virus?

There’s the terrible but telling story of the Miami medical device company employee who upon returning from China with flu-like symptoms did the righteous thing by his family and community and demanded a local hospital test him for Covid-19. He worried that his minimal Obamacare option wouldn’t cover the tests. He was right. He was suddenly on the hook for US$3270. An American demand might be an emergency order be passed that stipulates that during a pandemic outbreak, all outstanding medical bills related to testing for infection and for treatment following a positive test would be paid for by the federal government. We want to encourage people to seek help, after all, rather than hide away—and infect others—because they can’t afford treatment. The obvious solution is a national health service—fully staffed and equipped to handle such community-wide emergencies—so that such a ridiculous problem as discouraging community cooperation would never arise.

As soon as the virus is discovered in one country, governments everywhere react with authoritarian and punitive measures, such as a compulsory quarantine of entire areas of land and cities. Are such drastic measures justified?

Using an outbreak to beta-test the latest in autocratic control post-outbreak is disaster capitalism gone off the rails. In terms of public health, I would err on the side of trust and compassion, which are important epidemiological variables. Without either, jurisdictions lose their populations‘ support. A sense of solidarity and common respect is a critical part of eliciting the cooperation we need to survive such threats together. Self-quarantines with the proper support–check-ins by trained neighborhood brigades, food supply trucks going door-to-door, work release and unemployment insurance–can elicit that kind of cooperation, that we are all in this together.

As you may know, in Germany with the AfD we have a de facto Nazi party with 94 seats in parliament. The hard Nazi Right and other groups in association with AfD politicians use the Corona-Crisis for their agitation. They spread (false) reports about the virus and demand more authoritarian measures from the government: Restrict flights and entry stops for migrants, border closures and forced quarantine …

Travel bans and border closures are demands with which the radical right wants to to racialize what are now global diseases. This is, of course, nonsense. At this point, given the virus is already on its way to spreading everywhere, the sensible thing to do is to work on developing the kind of public health resilience in which it doesn’t matter who shows up with an infection, we have the means to treat and cure them. Of course, stop stealing people’s land abroad and driving the exoduses in the first place, and we can keep the pathogens from emerging in the first place.

What would be sustainable changes?

In order to reduce the emergence of new virus outbreaks, food production has to change radically. Farmer autonomy and a strong public sector can curb environmental ratchets and runaway infections. Introduce varieties of stock and crops—and strategic rewilding—at both the farm and regional levels. Permit food animals to reproduce on-site to pass on tested immunities. Connect just production with just circulation. Subsidize price supports and consumer purchasing programs supporting agroecological production. Defend these experiments from both the compulsions that neoliberal economics impose upon individuals and communities alike and the threat of capital-led State repression.

What should socialists call for in the face of the increasing dynamics of disease outbreaks?

Agribusiness as a mode of social reproduction must be ended for good if only as a matter of public health. Highly capitalized production of food depends on practices that endanger the entirety of humanity, in this case helping unleash a new deadly pandemic. We should demand food systems be socialized in such a way that pathogens this dangerous are kept from emerging in the first place. That will require reintegrating food production into the needs of rural communities first. That will require agroecological practices that protect the environment and farmers as they grow our food. Big picture, we must heal the metabolic rifts separating our ecologies from our economies. In short, we have a planet to win.

Thank you very much for the interview.

(The questions were asked by Yaak Pabst.)

A Look at Protracted People’s War

A Look at Protracted People’s War

Editor’s Note: Revolutionaries must study each revolutionary tradition and learn from it. We don’t believe that PPW is a “magic bullet” for current pre-revolutionary conditions, but it is worth studying.

By JP

Protracted People’s War (PPW) is a military theory developed by Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War and the war against the Japanese in China. What Mao puts forward is that a guerrilla movement must be able to maintain the support of the people for long enough to wage a long war against an enemy, hence protracted. Mao said also that by moving into the countryside, the people’s army could stretch the supply-lines of the enemy thin and break their will to fight. This is a very broad definition and we will go into a more detailed one later on. PPW has moved beyond being a military theory for a revolution in China since Mao conceived of it. It’s principles have been used in numerous countries from Vietnam and Cuba to India and the Philippines today. It has also become a fundamental tenet of the modern ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism which proclaims its universality. There are also those who decry it as a theory solely for the conditions of China. Both of these claims are right and wrong in their own ways as they are both ideological arguments. They both ignore critical analysis of military theory and material conditions. One must remember that war is complex and different, especially in the context of revolutionary warfare. All military theories need to be analysed and adapted to material conditions or they cease to be effective. Warfare develops as fast as technology does and that sometimes makes it difficult to study. Keep this in mind.

What is Protracted People’s War?

As stated earlier, protracted people’s war is a theory of revolutionary warfare centred on the building up of popular support for a long and drawn out war against an enemy. It is, like most Marxist military theories, rooted in politics. That does not detract from it, however. In fact, it makes it a smarter theory in that it accounts for such things. Mao divided the protracted war into three basic stages:

  1. The Strategic Defensive
  2. The Strategic Stalemate
  3. The Strategic Offensive

During the strategic defensive, the army will go into the countryside with difficult terrain and establish revolutionary base areas. From these base areas, the army will carry out attacks on the enemy through guerilla means. This mostly includes attacking patrols, crippling supply lines, and destroying key military infrastructure. During this period the army also begins to gain strength from in and around the revolutionary base areas. Once enough strength is gained, the second stage can begin. In the strategic stalemate, the army begins to spread from its initial bases and establishes new ones. The army also begins to strategically engage the enemy in more conventional warfare. The assumption is that by this time the army is strong enough, and the enemy is weak enough to begin strategic confrontation on a larger scale. During this, the army gains a sizeable amount of territory but, the enemy does not lose much of value, hence a stalemate. Following another period of building strength, the army enters the third and final stage of the war; the strategic offensive. This is when the army goes into high gear against a weak and tired enemy. It first drives them out of the countryside and encircles the cities. From there is routs them and takes major population centres. It then proceeds to defeat the enemy obliterating the will of the enemy or destroying them. From there is victory for the army.

While it can be easy to describe this process in a relatively condensed manner, PPW is anything but short. It is a long and ruthless conflict. The amount of time an army spends in any of the stages depends on the conditions and ability of the army. Mao was aware of this and in his work “On Protracted War” (1938), gives a summation of the nature of protracted war:

“It is thus obvious that the war is protracted and consequently ruthless in nature. The enemy will not be able to gobble up the whole of China but will be able to occupy many places for a considerable time. China will not be able to oust the Japanese quickly, but the greater part of her territory will remain in her hands. Ultimately the enemy will lose and we will win, but we shall have a hard stretch of road to travel”.

PPW is a long-term affair and Mao developed many theories as to how each stage would be carried out, specific tactical objectives for each stage, and the discipline of the army as a whole. What ties these all together is the role of politics. PPW is not just a war against an enemy, but also a war for the hearts and spirits of the people. One of the key goals of the army in PPW is establishing a democratic order in the areas it occupies. In China, this was done via land reform and the establishment of peasant councils in the countryside. Political education is also a must of the army (PPW assumes the army has a political force behind it). Political education in the Chinese context was the promoting of Marxism-Leninism and anti-reactionary views among the Chinese people. Mao also was working with a united front against the Japanese and accounted for the politics of that situation into his theory. He maintained that only through the united front of anti-reactionary groups could the war succeed in its final victory. This was important because the main base that PPW relies on is popular support. Such a long conflict and process can only succeed if the people are on board and are able to unite. This is not just true of the army but of the nation as well. The people must be willing to live through struggle and destruction in order to obtain victory. In Mao’s case, he was right. The Chinese people persevered and won their victory; both against the Japanese and the Kuomintang. It was from this victory that people across the world would take inspiration.

PPW would be taken by others across the world and used to wage revolutionary conflicts. Although, none of them would be exactly the same; all would be similar situations. Vietnam and Cuba both took aspects of PPW but morphed them with more conventional tactics. For Vietnam specifically, Vo Nguyen Giap wrote a book titled “People’s Army, People’s War” which outlines much of the strategy used by the Viet Minh and Viet Cong. In Cuba aspects of PPW were fused with Foco Theory by Che Guevara. More Maoist oriented people’s wars would be carried out by guerrillas in Nepal, India, Peru, Turkey, and the Philippines. Of these Maoist-based PPWs, only Nepal was a complete success with the establishment of democracy in Nepal. The Shining Path in Peru failed due to their reliance on and cult of personality surrounding Abimael Guzman (Presidente Gonzalo). The failures of many people’s wars are due mainly to mistakes within guerrilla organisations and the will of the enemy to crush them. However, in India, Turkey, and the Philippines the conflicts are still ongoing so, it would be unfair to judge them. In all three of these, the groups have been progressive forces for revolutionary change against reactionary governments. The NPA in the Philippines is especially successful and constantly gaining support.

On the Universality of Protracted People’s War

One of the central tenets of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the universality of PPW, claiming that it can be applied everywhere and be successful. This claim is ideological and not driven by concrete analysis of material conditions or military theory in general. In military theory and Marxism in general, there is no universal plan that works 100% of the time. There are things that will probably work most of the time depending on the conditions. This is true of most methods. PPW works in places dominated by a non-urban population with military infrastructure based within population centres with minor bases outside of them to maintain a presence. In China and most places back in the 20th Century, this worked because that was how militaries operated. Today one would be hard pressed to find a military that operated in this way, even outside of the imperialist centres in the Third World. That is because governments have developed around the threat of insurgencies and accommodated themselves to them or in the case of countries like the United States, the military never operated that way.

While the argument can be made that PPW could work successfully in the Third World is legitimate (for now), the argument of complete universality falls apart when one looks at the United States or any other Western country. The United States runs the largest military in the world in terms of budget. This has led to a completely monstrous military with a large international presence. The US military is also political in that most soldiers are devoted volunteers, different from the forced conscripts of Chiang Kai-shek. Other aspects such as level of training and experience also do not look good when applying PPW to the United States. The one primary problem, however, is the way the military operates domestically. US military bases are everywhere in almost every state and region of the country. The only place they are not is where there are no people. Needless to say, the United States does not look ideal for the establishment of revolutionary base areas. One other key issue is that of technology. Modern armies are technologically equipped almost to the point where soldiers are not always necessary. Drones, missiles, aircraft, and explosives make modern warfare different from the warfare of the past century. Unless a people’s army could adapt to or obtain that technology, it is almost impossible to win.

Now those who support the argument of the complete universality of PPW have many responses to the situation of modern warfare. One of the most prevalent is the idea that the revolution will not start in the imperialist centres and that the effects of revolutions in the Third World on the economies of Western countries will weaken them, making revolution and PPW possible. This argument assumes too much and is too dependent on the success of Third World revolutions. Also, revolutionaries in the Third World would not just be fighting one enemy but, a multitude of enemies if there were any possibility of success. The US empire is global and can move on any threat to its hegemony or economic situation. While the best hope is in the Third World, one must not be so arrogant and confident in that all hopes lead to success. Another thing people often try to do is change PPW to fit modern conditions without actually doing a material analysis. One proposed change for PPW in the West is for it to stem from cities. This still suffers the same difficulties as regular PPW in that the army would still be subject to the same problems, just in a city. Cities are also easy to close off and prevent movement from if need be. This threatens the need for mobility in a guerrilla war. Not that urban guerrilla warfare cannot work, look at the IRA, but, urban PPW seems farfetched.

Finally, the largest argument often made in support of the complete universality of PPW is that if the people’s army maintains popular support, it cannot be defeated. This is correct depending on what they mean by never be defeated. Ideas and causes, such as that of the workers, can never be defeated by brute force. Armies can be defeated by brute force. An army can be completely routed and obliterated as long as their enemy has the will and the ability to do so. This strikes at the main problem with PPW; it assumes it cannot lose. It assumes that an army will always be unable to cope with the effects of guerrilla warfare. This is simply not true, especially today. People’s wars worked because of the enemy’s inability to cope with the conditions. The army made it so the enemy could not adapt easily and with the level of technology available then, it was much easier to do that. Today we have modern armies fully equipped with modern technology ready and willing to obliterate their enemies. The sheer size and protection given to military infrastructure today make it nearly impossible to sabotage the enemy to the level of weakness needed to wage an effective war. Also, people’s wars depended on the enemy not having the will and means to crush them. If there is an army with the will and means to snuff out an insurgency, it will and that is all it would take. If the enemy went to the base areas and drone struck them all, that is the end of the war. There is no assurance of victory in any military strategy or theory, all are subject to material conditions. People need to remember this.
Conclusion

This essay is not meant to be pessimistic or discouraging of revolutionary action, on the contrary, it is meant to try and get people to think more about how a revolution would be conducted in certain settings. This also is not meant to put down Protracted People’s War as a concept either. It is a genius concept and Mao is a genius for formulating it. People just need to accept that revolution is different everywhere and there is never a method that is always successful. All this being said, revolutionary tactics should not be the main focus in the present time. Much of the world still has a long way to go. That does not mean ignore them but, there are more pressing issues. Something key to PPW and any revolution is unity. Maybe start there.

Republished from https://redsuninthesky.com/ under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Greenwash, spin and bad science reporting

     by Papillon 

Today on Facebook I came across an article celebrating the fact that NASA has found that the earth has greened up over the past 20 years thanks to massive tree planting in China and India.

Surely not, I thought. So I googled the phrase “NASA says world greener” and found a slew of articles published over the past 24 hours all trumpeting the news. The first 20 or so all had variations on the same headline praising China and India’s tree planting. So it must be true, right?

Unfortunately no. This is a really good example of bad science reporting, spin and “greenwashing”.

Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
Credits: NASA Earth Observatory
[Image and caption copied directly from the NASA Ames Research Centre article linked below]

Regrettably, even the NASA web page about the research – which was NOT conducted by NASA at all but merely used publicly available data from NASA’s satellites – is highly misleading. And it’s all in the spin. When you talk about “China and India leading the increase” and China’s “ambitious tree planting programs” as in NASA’s caption above, you can certainly see where the commonly reported headline comes from. While the NASA article isn’t technically incorrect, the wording is very misleading. Unless you have been trained to focus on the precise meaning of every single word (as scientists like me have), you are simply not going to pick it up. But it’s spin. Fake news. Greenwash. Given an aura of legitimacy by the NASA badge.

YES, it’s true, there have been massive tree plantings in China and, to a lesser extent, India. And we should certainly be happy about that.

And YES, scientist Chi Chen and colleagues from Boston University in Massachusetts are reporting a 5% increase in average total leaf area across the entire planet over the period 2000-2017.

But tree plantings in China and India are NOT chiefly responsible for the increase in planetary greenness. What the headline should probably have said is what the scientists actually reported in their paper, namely

“Earth is 5% greener since 2000 due to the Greenhouse Effect”. 

But that’s not quite as sexy, is it. Nor is it good news. In fact it’s quite the opposite.

What Chi Chen and colleagues actually found (as reported in Nature Sustainability volume 2, pages 122–129 (2019)) was:

  • the earth’s Greenness Index (something detected by sensors on NASA’s MODIS satellites) has increased over the period 2000-2017 and this equates to a 5% increase in annual average total leaf area across the entire planet
  • over the period 2000-2017 the total surface area covered by leaves in the planet’s vegetated zones has grown. The increase is spread out across the world but if put together would be roughly equal in size to the Amazon rainforest.
  • in addition to this, about 30% of land that was already green in 2000 is even greener now and about 5% is less green now
  • the “dominant drivers” of this overall increase in greenness are “climate change and CO2 fertilization effects”. In other words – the Greenhouse Effect. These indirect effects of human activity account for 70% of the increased greenness across the planet.
  • the remaining 30% is due to direct effects of human activity and this is concentrated in China and India
  • in China:
    • 42% of the increase in greenness is due to large scale tree plantings.
    • 32% of the increase in greenness is due to agricultural intensification
      (that is, greater use of irrigation, fertiliser (particularly Nitrogen), pesticides and fossil fuels.)
  • in India:
    • only 4% of the increase is due to large scale tree plantings.
    • and fully 82% of the increase is due to agricultural intensification.

A worker in China plants a pine sapling as part of the country’s ambitious plan to reforest its landscape. Credit: Xinhua/ZUMA Wire

Now, if you’ve made it this far through the article and all that accurate science reporting hasn’t put you to sleep, you’ll see that this tree story isn’t half as green as it seemed. Indeed its only 42% of 25% of 5% as green as it seemed. It’s precisely 0.525% as green as it seemed.

So the great news about the tree plantings in China (and it really IS great news) is sadly only the thin silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud of climate change and ‘business-as-usual’ industrial agriculture.

Am I disappointed the world isn’t 5% greener due to tree plantings? Yes, I am. But I am much more disappointed that the research has not been reported honestly by a respected scientific institution, and that literally dozens of news services that trust that institution are now promulgating the spin, fake news, and greenwash of its story. Why would the Ames Research Center spin the story this way? Who knows. Maybe it’s just a staffer in their communications department with a particularly optimistic disposition, who lacks the skills to actually read the original article properly. Maybe it goes much deeper than this and comes down to political influence. But regardless of where it sits on the spectrum, from inept to devious, it stinks!

If, like me, harsh realities like this tend to make you sad, angry and perhaps despairing, let me encourage you to take that energy and invest it in a positive way. Do what you can – everything you can – to stop being part of the problem and, as much as is within your power, every day strive to be part of the solution.

The original scientific publication is here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0220-7

NASA’s post is here:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows