Editor’s note: The International Day for Biodiversity was celebrated on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty. What lessons have we learned from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future?
Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent review published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether.
Restoration has typically prioritized utilitarian goals such as timber production, carbon sequestration or erosion control. This bias is reflected in the widespread use of monoculture plantations or low-diversity agroforests. Nearly half the forest commitments in the Bonn Challenge to restore degraded and deforested landscapes consist of commercial plantations of exotic species, a trend that risks undermining biodiversity rather than enhancing it.
Scientific evidence shows that restoring biodiversity requires more than planting trees. Methods like natural regeneration — allowing forests to recover on their own — can often yield superior biodiversity outcomes, though they face social and economic barriers. By contrast, planting a few fast-growing species may sequester carbon quickly but offers little for threatened plants and animals.
Biodiversity recovery is influenced by many factors: the intensity of prior land use, the surrounding landscape and the species chosen for restoration. Recovery is slow, often measured in decades, and tends to lag for rare and specialist species. Alarmingly, most projects stop monitoring after just a few years, long before ecosystems stabilize.
Scientists underline that while proforestation, reforestation and forest rewilding can contribute to curbing climate change and biodiversity loss, they have their limits and must be combined with deep carbon emissions cuts and conservation of existing forests and wilderness.
Edward Faison, an ecologist at the Highstead Foundation, stood quietly in a patch of forest that stretched for miles in all directions. Above him, the needles from white pine trees swayed — common in the Adirondack Forest Preserve in northern New York state. He stepped past downed wood and big, broken snags, observing how the forest functioned with minimal interference.
“These forests have been essentially unmanaged for over 125 years. To see them continue to thrive and accumulate carbon, recover from natural disturbances and develop complexity without our help reveal just how resilient these systems are,” Faison says.
Protected from logging in 1894 by an act of the New York Legislature, the Adirondack Forest Preserve (AFP) is a model of natural forest growth, or letting forests simply “get on with it.” The largest trees, white pines (Pinus strobus), are more than a century old and stretch more than 150 feet tall and are 4-5 feet in diameter.
The AFP, the largest wilderness preserve in the eastern United States, is a prime example of what researchers have come to call “proforestation.” Coined in 2019 by Tufts University professor William Moomaw and Trinity College professor of applied science Susan Masino, the term proforestation describes the process of allowing existing forests to continue growing without human interference until they achieve their full ecological potential for carbon sequestration and biological diversity.
Proforestation is considered a natural climate solution, i.e., a strategy to steward the Earth’s vegetation to increase the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. According to Faison, a forest naturally develops greater complexity over time, with a diversity of tree sizes and heights as well as large standing dead trees and downed logs. This complexity provides habitat for various animals, plants and fungi, which make the forest more resilient to disturbances associated with climate change.
Proforestation is distinct from reforestation, which can involve planting new trees in deforested areas to restore them (or allowing deforested areas to naturally regenerate). It is also different from afforestation, which is the process of planting new forests in previously unforested areas. Proforestation’s merit lies in inaction: simply leaving old forests undisturbed, allowing for continuous growth to maximize carbon accumulation over time. As forests mature and trees grow larger, they sequester greater amounts of carbon.
“The largest 1% diameter trees in a mature multiage forest hold half the carbon,” according to Moomaw. “It’s the existing forests that we have that are doing the work.” Existing forests remove almost 30% of CO2 from the atmosphere that humans put in every year from burning fossil fuels.
Older is better
In Mohawk Trail State Forest in Massachusetts, Moomaw studied the tallest grove of white pine trees in New England, aged between 150 and 200 years, observing how the trees grew. When comparing them with younger trees of the same type growing under similar conditions, he found that “the amount of carbon added by these trees between 100 and 150 years of age is greater than the amount added between zero and 50.”
In addition to carbon storage capabilities, old forests are pivotal in controlling regional and global water cycles through a process called evapotranspiration, by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere. Due to deeper and more complex root systems as well as larger canopies and leaves, old forests capture more water and release it as vapor into the atmosphere.
“Old forests have the genetic competence to do this work,” Masino says. “It’s not done by meadows. It’s not done by grassy areas. It’s not done as effectively by forests that have been cut or planted. It’s these ancient systems that have the complexity to bring water to themselves. And in doing that, they’re bringing it to the rest of the landscape. Once you start cutting the landscape, you’re drying it out.”
Masino, who also has a joint appointment in neuroscience and psychology at Trinity College, emphasizes the importance of designating natural areas appropriately and allowing more room for proforestation.
“It’s urgent to decide where we intend to prioritize natural processes, where we are doing research, and what areas we are dedicating for our resource needs,” she says. “Nature needs room to breathe. We can’t leave everything open to manipulation and extraction. It’s deadly.”
She says that planting trees on streets, on campuses or in parks is good for temperature regulation, flood protection and creating habitat, but these trees don’t grow up in a web of life. Planting trees in a forest, too, can risk disrupting the dynamic complexity of evolved and evolving genetic knowledge.
Wildlife dependent on old growth
Over on the West Coast, University of Oregon professor emeritus Beverly Law has studied forests for decades. She describes watching three logging trucks, each with a giant log from an old, single tree strapped to the back, passing in a procession while waiting at an intersection on her bike, a frequent occurrence on her way to work at the university in the late 1980s.
“There are plant and animal species that rely on these old forests for their survival. You take away the forest, and they’re gone,” Law says. “It’s important to have diverse genetics in the forest. Some of them will be more genetically able to withstand climate change than others. You don’t know which ones they will be. That is why genetic diversity within species is important.”
Mature forests are crucial to the survival of certain critically endangered animals that rely on the connected canopies or the soil-rich forest floor. Preserving the biodiversity of the Pacific Northwest, which hosts forests more than a thousand years old, is especially dire. According to a 2022 paper published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, old growth forests retain a number of species from both the top and bottom of the food chain, such as the Olympic salamander (Rhyacotriton olympicus), the Del Norte salamander (Plethodon elongatus) and the two species of tailed frog (Ascaphidae). Losing them forever could kick off a cascade effect and result in severe consequences for the environment.
The spotted owl (Strix occidentalis), too, depends on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, requiring the specific environment for roosting and nesting, and remains a central figure in forest management debates.
Such hulking ancient trees are the eyes of the woods, having stood through changing years and the changing climate.
“Ten to 12% of old-growth forests are left [in the US], and it’s insane that people are still trying to cut them down,” Law says. “They are the only survivors of American handiwork. Is it man’s dominion over the forest? We should have reverence, considering they’re all that’s left.”
Banner image: Pine cone of a white pine (Pinus strobus). Image by Denis Lifanov via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Editor’s note: “What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets.
To understand what’s going on with the carbon market, it’s important to know the terms(term-oil), vocabulary and organizations involved. For starters, a carbon credit is different from a carbon offset. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of other climate-warming gases kept out of the atmosphere. If a company (or individual, or country) uses that credit to compensate for its emissions — perhaps on the way to a claim of reduced net emissions — it becomes an offset.
“We need to pay countries to protect their forests, and that’s just not happening,” Mulder said. But the problem with carbon credits is they are likely to be used as offsets “to enable or justify ongoing emissions,” she said. “The best-case scenario is still not very good. And the worst-case scenario is pretty catastrophic, because we’re just locking in business as usual.”
“Offsetting via carbon credits is another way to balance the carbon checkbook. The idea first took hold in the 1980s and picked up in the following decade. Industrialized countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became part of a mandatory compliance market, in which a cap-and-trade system limited the quantity of greenhouse gases those countries could emit. An industrialized country emitting over its cap could purchase credits from another industrialized country that emitted less than its quota. Emitters could also offset CO2 by investing in projects that reduced emissions in developing countries, which were not required to have targets.”
Yet, the truth is far darker. Far from being an effective tool, carbon credits have become a convenient smokescreen that allows polluters to continue their damaging practices unchecked. As a result, they’re hastening our descent into environmental and societal breakdown.
The entire framework of carbon credits is based on a single, fatal assumption: that “offsets” can substitute for actual emissions reductions. But instead of cutting emissions, companies and countries are using carbon credits as a cheap alternative to meaningful action. This lack of accountability is pushing us closer to catastrophic climate tipping points, with the far-reaching impacts of climate change and resource depletion threatening the lives of everyone on this planet.
Brazilian prosecutors are calling for the cancellation of the largest carbon credit deal in the Amazon Rainforest, saying it breaks national law and risks harming Indigenous communities.
While marketed as a solution to mitigate climate change, carbon markets have been criticized as a facade for continued extractivism and corporate control of minerals in Africa.
Africa’s vast forests, minerals, and land are increasingly commodified under the guise of carbon offset projects. Global corporations invest in these projects, claiming to “offset” their emissions while continuing business as usual in their countries. This arrangement does little to address emissions at the source and increase exploitation in Africa, where land grabs, displacement, and ecological degradation often accompany carbon offset schemes.
“But beginning in January 2023, The Guardian, together with other news organizations, have published a series of articles that contend the majority of carbon credit sales in their analysis did not lead to the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. The questions have centered on concepts such as additionality, which refers to whether a credit represents carbon savings over and above what would have happened without the underlying effort, and other methods used to calculate climate benefits.
The series also presented evidence that a Verra-approved conservation project in Peru promoted as a success story for the deforestation it helped to halt resulted in the displacement of local landowners. Corporations like Chevron, the second-largest fossil fuel company in the U.S., purchase carbon credits to bolster their claims of carbon neutrality. But an analysis by the watchdog group Corporate Accountability found that these credits were backed by questionable carbon capture technologies and that Chevron is ignoring the emissions that will result from the burning of the fossil fuels it produces.”
Since 2009, Tesla has had a tidy little side hustle selling the regulatory credits it collects for shifting relatively huge numbers of EVs in markets like China, Europe and California. The company earns the credits selling EVs and then sells them to automakers whose current lineup exceeds emission rules set out in certain territories. This business has proven quite lucrative for Tesla, as Automotive News explains:
The Elon Musk-led manufacturer generated $1.79 billion in regulatory credit revenue last year, an annual filing showed last week. That brought the cumulative total Tesla has raked in since 2009 to almost $9 billion.
“Tesla shouldn’t be considered a car manufacturer: they’re a climate movement profiteer. Most of their profits come from carbon trading. Car companies would run afoul of government regulations and fines for producing high emissions vehicles, but thanks to carbon credits, they can just pay money to companies like Tesla to continue churning out gas guzzlers. In other words, according to Elon Musk’s business model: no gas guzzlers, no Tesla.” – Peter Gelderloos
A LICENSE TO POLLUTE
The carbon offset market is an integral part of efforts to prevent effective climate action
In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa.
Reports suggested that Blue Carbon—a company privately owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family—had signed deals promising the firm control over vast tracts of land across the African continent. These deals included an astonishing 10 percent of the landmass in Liberia, Zambia and Tanzania, and 20 percent in Zimbabwe. Altogether, the area equaled the size of Britain.
Blue Carbon intended to use the land to launch carbon offset projects, an increasingly popular practice that proponents claim will help tackle climate change. Carbon offsets involve forest protection and other environmental schemes that are equated to a certain quantity of carbon “credits.” These credits can then be sold to polluters around the world to offset their own emissions. Prior to entering into the negotiations of the massive deal, Blue Carbon had no experience in either carbon offsets or forest management. Nonetheless the firm stood to make billions of dollars from these projects.
Environmental NGOs, journalists and activists quickly condemned the deals as a new “scramble for Africa”—a land grab enacted in the name of climate change mitigation. In response, Blue Carbon insisted the discussions were merely exploratory and would require community consultation and further negotiation before formal approval.
Regardless of their current status, the land deals raise concerns that indigenous and other local communities could be evicted to make way for Blue Carbon’s forest protection plans. In Eastern Kenya, for example, the indigenous Ogiek People were driven out of the Mau Forest in November 2023, an expulsion that lawyers linked to ongoing negotiations between Blue Carbon and Kenya’s president, William Ruto. Protests have also followed the Liberian government’s closed-door negotiations with Blue Carbon, with activists claiming the project violates the land rights of indigenous people enshrined within Liberian law. Similar cases of land evictions elsewhere have led the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, to call for a global moratorium on carbon offset projects.
Beyond their potentially destructive impact on local communities, Blue Carbon’s activities in Africa point to a major shift in the climate strategies of Gulf states. As critics have shown, the carbon offsetting industry exists largely as a greenwashing mechanism, allowing polluters to hide their continued emissions behind the smokescreen of misleading carbon accounting methodologies while providing a profitable new asset class for financial actors. As the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and liquified natural gas, the Gulf states are now positioning themselves across all stages of this new industry—including the financial markets where carbon credits are bought and sold. This development is reconfiguring the Gulf’s relationships with the African continent and will have significant consequences for the trajectories of our warming planet.
False Accounting and Carbon Laundering
There are many varieties of carbon offset projects. The most common involves the avoided deforestation schemes that make up the bulk of Blue Carbon’s interest in African land. In these schemes, land is enclosed and protected from deforestation. Carbon offset certifiers—of which the largest in the world is the Washington-based firm, Verra—then assess the amount of carbon these projects prevent from being released into the atmosphere (measured in tons of CO2). Once assessed, carbon credits can be sold to polluters, who use them to cancel out their own emissions and thus meet their stated climate goals.
Superficially attractive—after all, who doesn’t want to see money going into the protection of forests?—such schemes have two major flaws. The first is known as “permanence.” Buyers who purchase carbon credits gain the right to pollute in the here and now. Meanwhile, it takes hundreds of years for those carbon emissions to be re-absorbed from the atmosphere, and there is no guarantee that the forest will continue to stand for that timeframe. If a forest fire occurs or the political situation changes and the forest is destroyed, it is too late to take back the carbon credits that were initially issued. This concern is not simply theoretical. In recent years, California wildfires have consumed millions of hectares of forest, including offsets purchased by major international firms such as Microsoft and BP. Given the increasing incidence of forest fires due to global warming, such outcomes will undoubtedly become more frequent.
Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits.
The second major flaw with these schemes is that any estimation of carbon credits for avoided deforestation projects rests on an imaginary counterfactual: How much carbon would have been released if the offset project were not in place? Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits. By inflating the estimated emissions reductions associated with a particular project, it is possible to sell many more carbon credits than are actually warranted. This scope for speculation is one reason why the carbon credit market is so closely associated with repeated scandals and corruption. Indeed, according to reporting in the New Yorker, after one massive carbon fraud was revealed in Europe, “the Danish government admitted that eighty per cent of the country’s carbon-trading firms were fronts for the racket.”[1]
These methodological problems are structurally intrinsic to offsetting and cannot be avoided. As a result, most carbon credits traded today are fictitious and do not result in any real reduction in carbon emissions. Tunisian analyst Fadhel Kaboub describes them as simply “a license to pollute.”[2] One investigative report from early 2023 found that more than 90 percent of rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra were likely bogus and did not represent actual carbon reductions. Another study conducted for the EU Commission reported that 85 percent of the offset projects established under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism failed to reduce emissions. A recent academic study of offset projects across six countries, meanwhile, found that most did not reduce deforestation, and for those that did, the reductions were significantly lower than initially claimed. Consequently, the authors conclude, carbon credits sold for these projects were used to “offset almost three times more carbon emissions than their actual contributions to climate change mitigation.”[3]
Despite these fundamental problems—or perhaps because of them—the use of carbon offsets is growing rapidly. The investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts that the market will be worth $250 billion by 2050, up from about $2 billion in 2020, as large polluters utilize offsetting to sanction their continued carbon emissions while claiming to meet net zero targets. In the case of Blue Carbon, one estimate found that the amount of carbon credits likely to be accredited through the firm’s projects in Africa would equal all of the UAE’s annual carbon emissions. Akin to carbon laundering, this practice allows ongoing emissions to disappear from the carbon accounting ledger, swapped for credits that have little basis in reality.
Monetizing Nature as a Development Strategy
For the African continent, the growth of these new carbon markets cannot be separated from the escalating global debt crisis that has followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. According to a new database, Debt Service Watch, the Global South is experiencing its worst debt crisis on record, with one-third of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa spending over half their budget revenues on servicing debt. Faced with such unprecedented fiscal pressures, the commodification of land through offsetting is now heavily promoted by international lenders and many development organizations as a way out of the deep-rooted crisis.
The African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), an alliance launched in 2022 at the Cairo COP27 summit, has emerged as a prominent voice in this new development discourse. ACMI brings together African leaders, carbon credit firms (including Verra), Western donors (USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund) and multilateral organizations like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Along with practical efforts to mobilize funds and encourage policy changes, ACMI has taken a lead role in advocating for carbon markets as a win-win solution for both heavily indebted African countries and the climate. In the words of the organization’s founding document, “The emergence of carbon credits as a new product allows for the monetization of Africa’s large natural capital endowment, while enhancing it.”[4]
ACMI’s activities are deeply tied to the Gulf. One side to this relationship is that Gulf firms, especially fossil fuel producers, are now the key source of demand for future African carbon credits. At the September 2023 African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a group of prominent Emirati energy and financial firms (known as the UAE Carbon Alliance) committed to purchasing $450 million worth of carbon credits from ACMI over the next six years. The pledge immediately confirmed the UAE as ACMI’s biggest financial backer. Moreover, by guaranteeing demand for carbon credits for the rest of this decade, the UAE’s pledge helps create the market today, driving forward new offset projects and solidifying their place in the development strategies of African states. It also helps legitimize offsetting as a response to the climate emergency, despite the numerous scandals that have beset the industry in recent years.
Saudi Arabia is likewise playing a major role in pushing forward carbon markets in Africa. One of ACMI’s steering committee members is the Saudi businesswoman, Riham ElGizy, who heads the Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC). Established in 2022 as a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) and the Saudi stock exchange, Tadawul, RVCMC has organized the world’s two largest carbon auctions, selling more than 3.5 million tons worth of carbon credits in 2022 and 2023. 70 percent of the credits sold in these auctions were sourced from offset projects in Africa, with the 2023 auction taking place in Kenya. The principal buyers of these credits were Saudi firms, led by the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco.
Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers.
The Emirati and Saudi relationships with ACMI and the trade in African carbon credits illustrate a notable development when it comes to the Gulf’s role in these new markets. Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers. In this respect, the Gulf is emerging as a key economic space where African carbon is turned into a financial asset that can be bought, sold and speculated upon by financial actors across the globe.
Indeed, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have each sought to establish permanent carbon exchanges, where carbon credits can be bought and sold just like any other commodity. The UAE set up the first such trading exchange following an investment by the Abu Dhabi-controlled sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, in the Singapore-based AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) in September 2022. As part of this acquisition, Mubadala now owns 20 percent of ACX and has established a regulated digital carbon trading exchange in Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone, the Abu Dhabi Global Market. ACX claims the exchange is the first regulated exchange of its kind in the world, with the trade in carbon credits beginning there in late 2023. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia the RVCMC has partnered with US market technology firm Xpansiv to establish a permanent carbon credit exchange set to launch in late 2024.
Whether these two Gulf-based exchanges will compete or prioritize different trading instruments, such as carbon derivatives or Shariah-compliant carbon credits, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that major financial centers in the Gulf are leveraging their existing infrastructures to establish regional dominance in the sale of carbon. Active at all stages of the offsetting industry—from generating carbon credits to purchasing them—the Gulf is now a principal actor in the new forms of wealth extraction that connect the African continent to the wider global economy.
Entrenching a Fossil-Fueled Future
Over the past two decades, the Gulf’s oil and especially gas production has grown markedly, alongside a substantial eastward shift in energy exports to meet the new hydrocarbon demand from China and East Asia. At the same time, the Gulf states have expanded their involvement in energy-intensive downstream sectors, notably the production of petrochemicals, plastics and fertilizers. Led by Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Gulf-based National Oil Companies now rival the traditional Western oil supermajors in key metrics such as reserves, refining capacity and export levels.
Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
In this context—and despite the reality of the climate emergency—the Gulf states are doubling down on fossil fuel production, seeing much to be gained from hanging on to an oil-centered world for as long as possible. As the Saudi oil minister vowed back in 2021, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”[5] But this approach does not mean the Gulf states have adopted a stance of head-in-the-sand climate change denialism. Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
One side to this approach is their heavy involvement in flawed and unproven low carbon technologies, like hydrogen and carbon capture. Another is their attempts to steer global climate negotiations, seen in the recent UN climate change conferences, COP27 and COP28, where the Gulf states channeled policy discussions away from effective efforts to phase out fossil fuels, turning these events into little more than corporate spectacles and networking forums for the oil industry.
The carbon offset market should be viewed as an integral part of these efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways. Through the deceptive carbon accounting of offset projects, the big oil and gas industries in the Gulf can continue business as usual while claiming to meet their so-called climate targets. The Gulf’s dispossession of African land is key to this strategy, ultimately enabling the disastrous specter of ever-accelerating fossil fuel production.
This statement, published on July 2, 2024, responds to the growing efforts of corporations to greenwash their greenhouse gas emissions by buying “credits” for supposed emission reductions elsewhere. It is signed by more than 80 leading civil society organizations.
Editor’s notes: “A Washington state city has granted part of the Snohomish River watershed legal rights that can be enforced in court. In nearly all cases, state legislatures heavily lobbied by commercial industries have preempted the laws, rendering them unenforceable. But the Everett initiative could be the first to withstand such a challenge. Democrats, typically more open to stronger environmental protections than Republicans, currently control Washington’s Legislature and governorship.”
Efforts to apply the rights of nature in Ecuador have often failed. Legal challenges can become highly politicised and there is little legal infrastructure beyond general constitutional principles.
For example, in a case brought after road builders had dumped material into the Vilcabamba River, plaintiffs claimed to represent nature in court. However, they were not genuinely advocating for the river’s rights – their main concern was protecting their downstream property.
Ultimately, defending the rights of nature in court will be a struggle if the nature in question – the river, forest or lake – is not represented by someone with an ecocentric perspective. That means prioritising the intrinsic value of nature itself, rather than focusing on how it can serve human interests.
“According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.”
Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing.
Many Indigenous peoples have long emphasised the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, the late University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone proposed what then seemed like a whimsical idea: to vest legal rights in natural objects to allow a shift from an anthropocentric to an intrinsic worldview.
Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.
By Katie Surma
April 2, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.
Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech.
At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy. That means the law views sentient species like elephants and bald eagles, as well as life-supporting ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, no differently than objects like microwaves or cars.
For the people behind the rights of nature movement, that way of thinking is deeply flawed. It’s also scientifically inaccurate.
Humans are part of nature and depend on ecosystems for survival—from the food we eat to the water we drink and air we breathe. Evolutionary biology shows that humans share a common ancestor with all other life on Earth. Forests, rivers and other biomes provide conditions for human life to thrive. And humans have always shaped the environment and have been shaped by it.
Understanding this interconnectedness is key to understanding that human flourishing ultimately depends on a healthy Earth. Rights of nature activists say most societies have forgotten that basic truth, harming their own wellbeing—and threatening their very survival—as a result.
When did this forgetting happen? Academics have traced the notion that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature back to Renaissance-era thinkers like René Descartes, who compared animals to machines. The idea is also woven into the Bible’s book of Genesis, with God giving man “dominion” over the Earth. Others point to the advent of cities, when masses of people lost regular contact with nature.
Modern legal systems have been shaped by these developments and ideas, thus institutionalizing the belief that nature is an object, or thing, beneath humans.
“Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time,” law professor Christopher Stone wrote in the seminal 1972 law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone noted that the law has always evolved to extend rights to new groups: moving from white, property-owning men to include women, people of color and children.
In 2006, a rural, conservative Pennsylvania town plagued by industrial pollution enacted the world’s first rights of nature resolution. Since then, scores of countries—including Ecuador, Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, India, the United States and Uganda—have had court rulings or enacted laws at the national or subnational level recognizing nature’s rights.
The advocates behind these laws argue that if nature’s rights are respected, humans will benefit.
How Do Rights of Nature Laws Differ From Environmental Regulations?
In the course of human history, environmental law is a relatively young field. In the United States, it largely developed in the late 1960s in response to mass pollution wrought by industrialization. Rivers caught fire, pervasive smog blanketed cities and chemicals like DDT were sprayed indiscriminately.
Policymakers enacted legislation like the Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate human activity and limit impacts of industry on human health. Those laws did curtail pollution. But rights of nature advocates argue that those conventional laws haven’t stopped the severe environmental problems we face today, like climate change, biodiversity loss and mass pollution.
Advocates say conventional environmental laws have a central flaw: They’re designed to permit pollution. They only control how much.
Rights of nature laws start from an entirely different place. Ecosystems, wildlife and Earth itself are treated as living beings with inherent rights deserving of the highest form of legal protection. The central concern of rights of nature laws is to maintain and preserve the integrity of ecosystems, requiring governments to take a preventative, rather than a reactionary, approach.
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has said this mandates government officials to respect what is known as the “precautionary principle,” or the idea that, absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems.
How Do These Laws Work in Practice?
The laws do not give nature’s rights absolute primacy over all other rights and interests.
No legal right is absolute. A right to free speech ends when that speech is defamatory or incites violence. Judges balance competing rights in the decisions they make every day. Nature’s rights are no different.
Rights of nature jurisprudence is still a young field. Most countries with such laws on the books haven’t had lawsuits attempting to enforce them. It’s also important to note that not all rights of nature laws are the same—there is wide variation in how the laws are written and what rights are recognized.
But Ecuador, which constitutionalized nature’s rights in 2008, has seen dozens of cases. There, Mother Earth, or Pachamama, has a right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”
The Ecuadorian Constitution also requires the government to prevent the “extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
Not all cases have been favorable for ecosystems. Ecuador’s economy is still largely dependent on oil revenues and other extractive industries.
But Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of mangroves, cloud forests, rivers, endangered frogs and coastal marine ecosystems, thwarting mining operations, industrial fishing and other nature-damaging activities. In some cases, courts have ordered the government to restore damaged ecosystems. Cases decided in favor of nature usually have a compelling reason for why nature’s rights ought to prevail over competing interests, like a high risk of extinction for certain species.
In the cloud forest case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explained the importance of protecting a sensitive ecosystem from mining impacts, saying: “[T]he risk in this case is not necessarily related to human beings … but to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
In deciding these cases, Ecuadorian courts have depended heavily on scientific experts and evidence. Judges have also looked holistically at the health of ecosystems, rather than at piecemeal levels of pollution—a departure from the way courts tend to evaluate conventional environmental laws.
Scientists have come to the forefront of the movement in other ways. In Panama, for instance, marine biologists were instrumental in the passage of that country’s national rights of nature law.
How Are Rights of Nature Laws Enforced?
Trees and wild animals can’t walk into a courtroom and make their case. But rights of nature laws give ecosystems and species the ability to act in their own capacity under the law with help from people, similar to other non-human entities like corporations, business partnerships, ships and nonprofits.
This is done through a longstanding concept called legal personhood. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.
Each of those nonhuman entities is represented by a human guardian. Similar arrangements are used for minors and incapacitated people in court proceedings.
Who Is Behind This Movement?
Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the movement in several ways.
The worldviews of many Indigenous cultures—that humans are part of nature and owe responsibilities to other living beings—are foundational for the movement.
Honoring and preserving those worldviews and related knowledge for centuries has been no small thing. Indigenous communities have faced a long, dark history of colonization and other attempts aimed at eradicating their culture and separating them from their territories. Today, people in many Indigenous communities are still harassed, attacked and sometimes killed for defending water and land.
Indigenous peoples have also been behind many of the laws and court rulings advancing the movement. In New Zealand, Māori people fought for a settlement with the national government, resulting in legal personhood for a river, national park and mountains.
It was Ecuador’s strong Indigenous movements that led to the country becoming the first in the world in 2008 to constitutionally recognize Mother Earth’s rights. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has also drawn on Indigenous knowledge in deciding rights of nature cases.
Bolivia’s Indigenous movements were behind that country’s 2010 and 2012 laws recognizing the rights of Mother Earth. Enforcement of nature’s rights in Bolivia has proved difficult, however.
Across North America, many Indigenous nations have passed rights of nature laws.
And in Peru, a coalition of Indigenous women won rights for the Marañón River ecosystem, a place the oil industry has heavily polluted for decades. The fight for the Marañón River came at great personal cost for Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, and other women in the organization, who were harassed and threatened for their advocacy.
What Are the Criticisms of Rights of Nature Laws?
The biggest opposition to the movement has come from industry groups—developers, the industrial agricultural sector and other polluting industries—and politicians aligned with those interests.
Those opponents argue that giving nature a higher level of protection will impede development and lead to an explosion of litigation. In practice, that hasn’t happened. Barriers to pursuing lawsuits, like the high cost of attorney fees, are substantial.
But the laws do threaten the interests of industries and businesses that have made money off extracting from and monetizing the natural world in unsustainable ways.
Some critics of the movement have questioned whether, if nature has rights, it also has duties: Can a river be sued if it floods and harms humans? Rights of nature advocates respond to this by saying that legal rights, duties and liability are always tailored to the entity they are assigned to.
Corporations, for instance, don’t have a right to family. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to act with intent and therefore should not have legal liability for harm it causes, advocates argue.
Another prevalent charge is that the rights of nature movement is an attempt to force human societies to surrender modern comforts and technology. In practice, though, advocates have sought to rebalance human interests with the health of ecosystems by placing better guardrails around human activity, ensuring the integrity and sustainability of Earth is maintained now and into the future. Advocates argue that humanity isn’t harmed by that but benefits instead.
They also say nothing so quickly forces people to surrender modern comforts as a disaster that destroys their homes and communities, and megadisasters are far more common in a warming world.
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and papal exhortation Laudate Deum, said humans have a moral duty to protect the Earth.
“For ‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum.
Ecuadorian activists say the country’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights has made their country more pluralistic by incorporating the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and is changing the way everyday people think about the Earth, their home.
“We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights,” Ecuadorian political scientist Natalia Greene told Inside Climate News. “The law has influenced peoples’ understanding of nature and that is very powerful.”
Learn More
Follow our reporting at Inside Climate News. We’re the only newsroom we know of that has a dedicated rights of nature beat. Start here and here.
Books by Indigenous authors and ecocentric thinkers:
Our system of law and government was founded in racial-divisiveness and colonization and is dominated by corporations. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) fights to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to a local self-government system and the Rights of Nature. Fight for a more just, Earth-centered tomorrow, today.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature(GARN) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”
Banner: To protect it from mining and deforestation, Los Cedros cloud forest was awarded the same rights as people.
Editor’s note: “Most people don’t realize that part of gas extraction is a liquid condensate, the origin of plastics, which is being pumped, defying Climate Chaos, via the maze of fracking pipelines to the Gulf Coast, where the US is set on cornering the world plastics market, as well as shipping the LNG gas it has forced on its European vassals.” In a bid to become a world plastics monopoly, Exxon quietly plans to erect a new $8.6 billion plastics plant. The proposal calls for a steam cracker, a facility that uses oil and natural gas to make ethylene and propylene — the chemical building blocks of plastic. “Besides ethylene and propylene, steam crackers produce climate pollution and hazardous chemicals like ammonia, benzene, toluene, and methanol.”
“Where Exxon is going to put their bloody plant is smack-dab in front of [what will be] one of the largest oyster farms in Texas,” said Wilson, who is not convinced that any plastics factory can operate without polluting. She noted that Formosa has already violated its settlement agreement nearly 800 times, racking up over $25 million in fines. “Exxon is going to be exactly like Formosa.”
“We have been cleaning the piss out of [Cox Creek], and this is the very place where Exxon is going to try to put its plastics plant,” Wilson, who lives in nearby Seadrift, said of the facility’s potential location. “You see this nightmare of another plant, trying to do the very same thing.”
A Shrimper’s Crusade Pays Big Dividends on a Remote Stretch of Texas Coastline
Five years after Diane Wilson’s landmark settlement with Formosa Plastics, money flows to “the bay and the fishermen.”
By Dylan Baddour
December 24, 2024
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
PORT LAVACA, Texas—Few men still fish for a living on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The work is hard and pay is meager. In the hearts of rundown seaside towns, dilapidated harbors barely recall the communities that thrived here generations ago.
But at the docks of Port Lavaca, one group of humble fishermen just got a staggering $20 million to bring back their timeless way of life. They’re buying out the buyer of their catch, starting the largest oyster farm in Texas and dreaming big for the first time in a long time.
“We have a lot of hope,” said Jose Lozano, 46, who docks his oyster boats in Port Lavaca. “Things will get better.”
It’s all thanks to one elder fisherwoman’s longshot crusade against the petrochemical behemoth across the bay, and her historic settlement in 2019. Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from the tiny town of Seadrift, took on a $250 billion Taiwanese chemical company, Formosa Plastics Corp., and won a $50 million trust fund, the largest sum ever awarded in a civil suit under the Clean Water Act.
Now, five years later, that money is beginning to flow into some major development projects on this mostly rural and generally overlooked stretch of Texas coastline. Through the largest of them, the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, formed in February this year, Wilson dreams of rebuilding this community’s relationship with the sea and reviving a lifestyle that flourished here before global markets cratered the seafood industry and local economies shifted to giant chemical plants.
“I refuse to believe it’s a thing of the past,” said Wilson, 76, who lives in a converted barn, down a dirt road, amid a scraggle of mossy oak trees. “We’re going to put money for the fishermen. They’re not going to be destroyed.”
The fishing cooperative has only just begun to spend its $20 million, Wilson said. It’s the largest of dozens of projects funded by her settlement agreement. Others include a marine science summer camp at the Port Lavaca YMCA, a global campaign to document plastic pollution from chemical plants, a $500,000 study of mercury pollution in Lavaca Bay and the $10 million development of a local freshwater lake for public access.
“They are doing some wonderful things,” said Gary Reese, a Calhoun County commissioner. He also received grants from the fund to build a pier and a playground pavilion at other county parks.
The fund resulted from a lawsuit Wilson filed in 2017 under the Clean Water Act, which enables citizens to petition for enforcement of environmental law where state regulators have failed to act. By gathering evidence from her kayak over years, Wilson demonstrated that Formosa had routinely discharged large amounts of plastic pellets into local waterways for decades, violating language in its permits.
These sorts of lawsuits typically result in settlements with companies that fund development projects, said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center in Boston. But seldom do they come anywhere close to the dollar amount involved in Wilson’s $50 million settlement with Formosa.
“It’s a real outlier in that aspect,” Kratka said.
For example, he said, environmental organizations in Texas sued a Shell oil refinery in Deer Park and won a $5.8 million settlement in 2008 that funded an upgrade of a local district’s school bus fleet and solar panels on local government buildings. In 2009 groups sued a Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown and won a $2 million settlement in 2009 that funded an environmental health clinic for underserved communities.
One reason for the scale of Wilson’s winning, Kratka said, was an unprecedented citizen effort to gather plastic pollution from the bays as evidence in court. While violations of permit limits are typically proven through company self-reporting, Wilson mobilized a small team of volunteers.
“This was done by everyday people in this community, that’s what built the case,” said Erin Gaines, an attorney who previously worked on the case for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “This had never been done before, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
Wilson’s settlement included much more than the initial $50 million payment. Formosa also agreed to clean up its own legacy plastic pollution and has so far spent $32 million doing so, according to case records. And the company committed to discharge no more plastic material from its Point Comfort complex—a standard which had never been applied to any plastics plants across the nation.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen. It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa consented to regular wastewater testing to verify compliance, and to penalties for violations. Now, three times a week, a specially engineered contraption analyzes the outflows at Formosa. Three times a week, it finds they are full of plastic. And three times a week, Formosa pays a $65,000 penalty into Wilson’s trust fund.
It’s small change for a company that makes about a billion dollars per year at its Point Comfort complex, or $2.7 million per day. To date, those penalty payments have totaled more than $24 million, in addition to the $50 million awarded in 2019.
The money doesn’t belong to Wilson, who has never been rich, and she never touches it. It goes into a fund called the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust, which is independently managed.
For the first $50 million, Wilson evaluated grant applications and allocated the money to government entities, registered nonprofits and public universities. Now an independent panel administers the fund.
Many locals who know her story assume that Wilson is rich now, she said. But she never got a penny of the settlement. She was never doing this for the money.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen,” she said. “It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa also writes grants for community development programs, although none of them approach the size of the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
In response to a query from Inside Climate News, the company provided a summary of its community spending over 30 years, including $2.4 million on local and regional environmental projects, $2 million for a new Memorial Medical clinic, $2 million to upgrade local water treatment systems, $2 million to an area food bank, $1.3 million for local religious organizations and $1.2 million on scholarships for high school seniors.
The company has contributed $6.3 million for regional roadway improvements, donated 19 houses to the Calhoun County Independent School District and built a classroom in restored wetlands. Its annual employee golf tournament raises $500,000 for United Way charities, and its national headquarters in New Jersey gives $1 million each year to local charities. In Point Comfort it has programs to plant trees, protect bees and restore monarch butterfly habitat.
“Formosa Plastics has always believed in giving back to the community and approximately 30 years ago established education, environmental, medical, religious and scholarship trusts,” the company said in a five-page statement.
Since the 2019 settlement, Formosa has taken steps to address environmental challenges and reduce the environmental impact at its Point Comfort complex, the company said.
Formosa has installed pollution control systems to reduce the release of plastic particles, has partnered with industry experts to develop better filtration methods and is monitoring emerging technologies for opportunities to improve environmental stewardship, it said. The Point Comfort complex has also improved stormwater drainage to reduce plastics in runoff, and is engaging with community advocates to identify sustainable solutions.
“We understand the importance of protecting the environment and the communities where we operate, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement,” the statement said.
The Fishing Way of Life
Wilson fondly recalls the bustling fishing community of her youth in Seadrift, more than 60 years ago. There were hundreds of boats at the docks, surrounded by a town full of mechanics, welders, netmakers and fish houses.
They weren’t rich, Wilson said, but they were free. They answered to no one, except maybe game wardens. They had twilight every morning, the silence of the water, the adventure of the search, the thrill of the catch and a regular intimacy with spirits of the sea, sun, wind and sky.
“You are out there on that bay, facing the elements, making decisions,” Wilson said. “That is as close to nature as you can get.”
Over her life, she watched it all fall apart. There are no fish houses in Seadrift today. Almost all the old businesses were bulldozed or boarded up. Wilson’s own brothers took jobs at the giant petrochemical plants growing onshore. But every day off they spent back on the water.
Most people called her crazy, 30 years ago, when she started complaining about water pollution from Formosa. Powerful interests denounced her and no one defended her.
But Wilson never gave up speaking out against pollution in the bay.
“That bay is alive. She is family and I will fight for her,” Wilson said. “I think everyone else would let her be destroyed.”
Over years of persistent, rambunctious protests targeting Formosa, Wilson began to get calls from employees at the plant, asking to meet secretly in fields, pastures and beer joints to talk about what they’d seen. They told her about vast amounts of plastic dust and pellets washed down drains, and about the wastewater outfalls where it all ended up.
When Wilson started visiting those places, often only accessible by kayak, she began to find the substance for her landmark lawsuit, millions and millions of plastic pellets that filled waterways and marshes.
“Felt like Huck Finn out there, all that exploring,” she said.
In 2017, Wislon filed her petition in federal court, then continued collecting evidence for years before trial. It was the first case over plastic pellet pollution brought under the Clean Water Act, according to Amy Johnson, then a contract attorney with the nonprofit RioGrande Legal Aid and lead attorney for Wilson’s case.
Gathering Nurdles
Down the coast in Port Aransas, a researcher at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute named Jace Tunnell had just launched a project in 2018 to study water pollution from plastics manufacturing plants. At that time, little was known about the scale of releases of plastic pellets, also called nurdles, into the oceans from those industrial facilities.
The Nurdle Patrol, as Tunnell called it, was beginning on a shoestring budget to methodically collect and catalog the nurdles in hopes of getting a better picture of the problem. That’s when Tunnel, a fourth generation Gulf Coast native and a second generation marine scientist, heard about a fisherwoman who was also collecting nurdles up the coast.
He contacted Wilson, who shared her data. But Tunnell didn’t believe it. Wilson claimed to have gathered 30,000 nurdles in 10 minutes. Tunnell would typically collect up to 200 in that time. He drove out to see for himself and found, to his shock, that it was true.
“The nurdles were just pluming up back there,” Tunnell said. “It really was an eye opener for me of how bad Formosa was.”
At that time, Wilson and her small team of volunteers were pulling up huge amounts of plastic from the bay system and logging it as evidence.
In 2019, the case went to trial. At one point, she parked a pickup truck full of damp, stinky plastic outside the federal courthouse and brought the judge out to see. She also cited Nurdle Patrol’s scientific method for gathering pellets as a means to estimate overall discharges in the bay.
“Diane was able to use Nurdle Patrol data in the lawsuit to seal the deal,” Tunnell said.
Later that year, the judge ruled in Wilson’s favor, finding Formosa had violated its permit limits to discharge “trace amounts” of plastics thousands of times over decades.
Formosa opted to negotiate a settlement with Wilson rather than seek a court-ordered penalty. In December 2019, the two parties signed a consent decree outlining their agreement and creating the $50 million Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
Funding Community Projects
Right away, Wilson signed over $1 million to the Nurdle Patrol, which Tunnell used over five years to build an international network with 23,000 volunteers and an online portal with the best data available on plastic nurdles in the oceans. They’ve also provided elementary and high schools with thousands of teaching kits about plastics production and water pollution.
“There’s no accountability for the industries that release this,” Tunnell said as he picked plastic pellets from the sand near his home on North Padre Island in early December. “Of course, Diane kind of changed that.”
The trust’s largest grant programs are still yet to take effect. Wilson allocated $10 million to Calhoun County to develop a 6,400 acre park around Green Lake, the second largest natural lake in Texas, currently inaccessible to the public.
The county will begin taking bids this month to build phase one of the project, which will include walking trails and birding stands, according to county commissioner Reese. Later they’ll build a parking lot and boat ramp.
The county brought this property in 2012 with hopes of making a park, but never had the money. Initially, county officials planned to build an RV park with plenty of pavement. But funding from Wilson’s trust forbade RVs and required a lighter footprint to respect the significant Native American and Civil War campsites identified on the property.
“It’ll be more of a back-to-nature thing,” Reese said. “It’s been a long time coming, we hope to be able to provide a quality facility for the public thanks to Matagorda Mitigation Trust.”
By far, the largest grant from the trust has gone to the fishermen. Wilson allocated $20 million to form a cooperative at the docks of Port Lavaca—an unlikely sum of money for seamen who struggle to feed their families well. Wilson dreamed that this money could help bring back the vanishing lifestyle that she loved.
The Fishermen
Today, most of the remaining commercial fishermen on this Gulf coast come from Mexico and have fished here for decades. It’s hard work without health insurance, retirement plans or guaranteed daily income. But it’s an ancient occupation that has always been available to enterprising people by the sea.
“It’s what we’ve done our whole life,” said Homero Muñoz, 48, a board member of the fishermen’s cooperative, who has worked the Texas coast since he was 19. “This is what we like to do.”
Lately it’s been more difficult than ever, he said. Declining vitality in the bays, widespread reef closures by Texas authorities and opposition from wealthy sportfishing organizations force the commercial fishermen to compete for shrinking oyster populations in small and distant areas. Then, the fishermen have little power to negotiate on low prices for their catch set by a few big regional buyers, who also own most of the dock space. The buyers distribute it at a markup to restaurants and markets across the county.
“There isn’t anyone who helps us,” said Cecilio Ruiz, a 58-year-old father of three who has fished the Texas coast since 1982.
To help the fishermen build a sustainable business, Wilson tapped the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization based in Atlanta originally founded to help Black farmers and landowners form cooperatives in the newly de-segregated South. For FSC, it was an unprecedented offer.
“This is an amazing project, very historic,” said Terence Courtney, director of cooperative development and strategic initiatives at FSC.
Usually, money is the biggest obstacle for producers wanting to form a collectively owned business, Courtney said. He’d never seen a case where a donor put up millions of dollars to make it happen.
“Opportunities like this don’t come around often. I can’t think of another example,” Courtney said. “We saw this as something that history was compelling us to do.”
The Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative
In 2020 Courtney started traveling regularly to Port Lavaca, meeting groups of fishermen, assessing their needs, discussing the concept of a cooperative and studying feasibility.
The men, who speak primarily Spanish, had trouble understanding Courtney’s English at first. But they knew someone who could help: Veronica Briceño, the daughter of a late local fisherman known as Captain Ralph. As a child, she translated between English and Spanish around her father’s business and the local docks and harbors.
Briceño, a 40-year-old worker at the county tax appraisal office, was excited to hear about the effort. She’d learned to fish on her grandfather’s boat. Her father left her four boats and she couldn’t bring herself to sell them. She joined FSC as a volunteer translator for the project.
“These men, all they know how to do is really just work,” she said. “They were needing support from someone.”
A year later, FSC hired Briceño as project coordinator. They leased an old bait shop with dock space at the harbor in Port Lavaca and renovated it as an office. Then in February 2024 they officially formed the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, composed of 37 boat owners with 77 boats that employ up to 230 people.
Now Briceño has a desk at the office where she helps the fishermen with paperwork, permitting and legal questions while coordinating a growing list of contracts as the cooperative begins to spend big money.
Negotiations are underway for the cooperative to purchase a major local seafood buyer, Miller’s Seafood, along with its boats, dock space, processing operations and supply contracts for about $2 million.
“I hope they help carry it on,” said Curtis Miller, 63, the owner of Miller’s Seafood, which was founded by his uncle in the 1960s. “I would like to see them be able to succeed.”
Many of the cooperative members have worked for Miller’s Seafood during the last 40 years, he said. The company handles almost entirely oysters now and provides them wholesale to restaurants on the East Coast, Florida and in Texas.
The cooperative has also leased 60 acres of bay water from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to start the largest oyster farm in Texas, a relatively new practice here. FSC is now permitting the project with the Texas General Land Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“That might be the future of the industry,” said Miller. “It might be the next big thing.”
“It Can Be Revived”
At a recent meeting of the cooperative, the members discussed options for a $2.5 million purchase of more than 7,000 oyster cages to install on the new farm. They talked about plans to visit and study a working oyster farm. The cooperative is finalizing a marketing and distribution plan for the farmed oysters.
The project would give two acres to each oysterman to farm, and would finally do away with the frantic race to harvest the few available oyster areas before other boats do. Now, they’ll have a place of their own.
“To have our own farms, liberty to go to our own piece of water,” said Miguel Fierros, 44, a bearded, third-generation fisherman and father of three. “It’s a unique opportunity I don’t think we’ll ever get again.”
Briceño, the project coordinator, hopes that the practice of oyster farming will bring a new generation into the seafood industry here. Neither of her kids plan to make a living on the water like her father or grandfather, who always encouraged the family to find jobs with health insurance and retirement. Now her 21-year-old son works at Formosa, like many of his peers, as a crane operator.
Perhaps this cooperative, with its miraculous $20 million endowment, can realize the dream of a local fishing industry with dignified pay and benefits. If it goes well, Briceño said, maybe her grandkids will be fishermen someday.
“We’re going to get a younger crowd actually interested,” she said.
This project is just getting started. Most of their money still remains to be spent, and the fishermen have many ideas. They would like to buy a boat repair business to service their fleet, as well as a net workshop, and to open more oyster farms.
For Wilson, now an internationally recognized environmental advocate, this all just proves how much can be accomplished by a stubborn country woman with volunteer helpers and non-profit lawyers. Ultimately, she hopes these projects will help rebuild a fishing community and bring back the fishermen’s way of life.
For now, the program is only getting started.
“It can be revived,” Wilson said. “There is a lot of money left.”
Editor’s note: “MMA is methyl methacrylate, a chemical compound that was banned by the FDA in the 1970s for use in nail enhancements due to its potential health hazards,” Hanna says. Celebrity manicurist Julie Kandalec adds, “It’s an ingredient commonly found in acrylic liquids, called monomer.”
One of the easiest ways to check if there is MMA in your acrylic or nail supplies is to check the ingredient list of your products. It should not be listed as an ingredient in any reputable acrylic nail product. A few additional tips include: Smelling a very harsh odor when applying and filing your acrylic nails – some people say it smells like cat urine.
“Mitsubishi Chemical Group (MCG) has concluded a license agreement with SNF Group regarding MCG’s N-vinylformamide (NVF) manufacturing technology. NVF is a raw material of functional polymers. Using the manufacturing technology licensed under this agreement, SNF will start the commercial production of NVF at its new plant in Dunkirk, France as of this June. NVF is a monomer used as a material for papermaking chemicals, water treatment agents, and oil field chemicals.”
Environmental activists claim victory as Mitsubishi scraps $1.3 billion chemical plant in ‘Cancer Alley’
by Tristan Baurick, Verite News New Orleans
Environmental groups are claiming victory after Mitsubishi Chemical Group dropped plans for a $1.3 billion plant in the heart of Louisiana’s industrial corridor.
In the works for more than a decade, the chemical manufacturing complex would have been the largest of its kind in the world, stretching across 77 acres in Geismar, a small Ascension Parish community about 60 miles west of New Orleans. Tokyo-based Mitsubishi cited only economic factors when announcing the cancellation last week, but a recent report on the plant’s feasibility noted that growing community concern about air pollution could also hamper the project’s success.
“The frontline communities are fighting back, causing delays, and that amounts to money being lost,” said Gail LeBoeuf with Inclusive Louisiana, an environmental group focused on the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley.
The nonprofit group Beyond Petrochemical declared the project’s failure a “major victory for the health and safety of Louisianans.”
According to Mitsubishi, the plant could have produced up to 350,000 tons per year of methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a colorless liquid used in the manufacture of plastics and a host of consumer products, including TVs, paint and nail polish.
The plant was expected to be a major polluter, releasing hundreds of tons per year of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and other harmful chemicals, according to its permit information.
Mitsubishi cited rising costs and waning demand for MMA as the reasons for dropping the project. In a statement, the company indicated the plant likely wouldn’t have enough MMA customers to cover “increases in capital investment stemming from inflation and other factors.”
In July, a report on the plant’s viability warned that a global oversupply of MMA and fierce local opposition made the project a “bad bet.”
Conducted by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the report said that credit agencies are paying more attention to “community sentiment” about petrochemical projects, particularly in Louisiana. In Geismar and other parts of Cancer Alley, there’s a “disproportionately heavy concentration of polluting industrial facilities” and Mitsubishi could become “entangled in a decades-long dispute involving issues of racial inequality and environmental justice,” the IEEFA report said.
Geismar residents are surrounded by about a half-dozen large chemical facilities that emit harmful levels of air pollution. Of the more than 6,000 people who live within the three miles of the planned project site, about 40% are Black or Hispanic, and 20% are considered low-income, according to federal data.
“The air here is already so dirty that the kids can’t play outside anymore,” said Pamela Ambeau, Ascension Parish resident and member of the group Rural Roots Louisiana.
The proposed plant is the latest in a string of failed industrial projects in Cancer Alley. Since 2019, local activism was instrumental in halting the development of two large plastics complexes in St. James Parish and a grain export terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish. All three projects would have been built in historically Black and rural communities.
Mitsubishi’s project had the strong backing of Louisiana political leaders. In 2020, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, praised the project as a “world-scale” chemical manufacturing facility that would create “quality jobs.”
Louisiana Economic Development predicted the plant would create 125 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 and another 669 “indirect jobs” in the region.
The state agency began courting Mitsubishi in 2016, offering the company worker recruitment and training assistance and a $4 million grant to offset construction costs.
In 2021, Mitsubishi applied for property tax abatement via the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP. The tax relief, which Louisiana has granted to several similar projects, was pending the plant’s construction and would have saved the company an estimated $17 million in its first year, according to LED.
The first of a series of project delays began in 2022 due to what Mitsubishi called “market volatilities.”
Mitsubishi appeared to be betting on generous state subsidies “while ignoring the larger financial landscape,” said Tom Sanzillo, author of the IEEFA report.
The combination of sustained market weakness and strong public opposition “erased the potential benefits they are counting on,” he said.
Community Land & Water Coalition (CLWC) on Friday Feb. 14, 2025, filed a demand for a cease and desist after confirming that Eric Pontiff, doing business under the name of Standish Investment Group, LLC, started the work before the legal appeal period expired.
The group’s cease and desist request states:
The Work is destroying the ancestral lands and heritage of the Wampanoag Tribes including destroying potential burial sites, graves, and homesites without an archeological study, without Free Prior Informed Consent and in violation of Article 32 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, the laws of Massachusetts and the Zoning Bylaw.
Photos Above: February 14, 2025, tree clearing has started to cut down ancient trees on sacred Wampanoag Lands at 71 Hedges Pond Road, Cedarville, Plymouth MA.
One of the last remaining hills in the Town, sacred site of the Wampanoag People
The proposed mining site is 33-acres of forested land at 71 Hedges Pond Road. It is one of the last hills not leveled by decades of sand and gravel mining in the Town. The plans show massive excavation that will start at the top of the 150-foot hill and mine about 90 feet deep across the site.
In January 2025, following a recommendation by Plymouth’s Planning Board, the Town’s Director of Inspectional Services issued zoning and building permits to level the 150 foot hill, allegedly preparing the site for a “commercial complex” of large buildings. Over 1,000 letters were sent to the Town demanding that the Director require a special permit under the Town’s Zoning Bylaw. The Town ignored the letters.
The hill and forested land is in an area known as the “Ancient Indian Plantation” and are the ancestral lands of the state’s Native American Wampanoag People.
“We oppose this project and the development of this area on Hedges Pond Road,” said Melissa Ferretti, Chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe based in Plymouth, which was called Patuxet by Indigenous People. “This location is an integral part of our original reservation lands known to us as the “Great Lot.” This project threatens to irreversibly damage our ancestral homelands, the heart of our existence and heritage here in Plymouth. The Great Lot holds immense cultural and historic significance for our community and any development would not only harm the land but also disrupt our deep-rooted connection to it. Honoring the sacredness of these grounds is fundamental to our community and culture,” Ferretti stated. In November 2024, Governor Healy issued an Executive Order granting the Tribe state recognition, a major accomplishment.
Speaking at the February 11, 2025 Select Board meeting,Indigenous youth urged the Town to, “At least consider and possibly even invite people from her tribe and other neighboring sister tribes to have discussions about these matters and include them in them.”
At the Select Board meeting Miciah Stasis from the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe said, “Our people have been here for thousands of years and our ancestors lay beneath those lands that you are trying to sand mine… If this was anybody else’s grandmother or grandparents that are being dug up right now, there would be an issue.”
“Plymouth officials and the business interests that make up the Plymouth Foundation promote the Town as “America’s Hometown.” They market the Native American and Pilgrim story to the world’s tourists. They profit from the Thanksgiving story but are letting this project destroy that very history without even an archeological or environmental impact study,” said Meg Sheehan, attorney for the petitioners filing the appeal.
The community neighborhood Cedarville Village Steering Committee in a December finding unanimously rejected the “unified complex” plan calling it vague. By claiming a development is a “unified complex,” a sand and gravel company can seek to evade the more stringent special permitting process and proceed without a public hearing.
The February 14, 2025 appeal requires the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) to hold a public hearing on whether to uphold the permits. The hearing will be scheduled in several weeks and is open to the public. In a potential conflict of interest, two members of the ZBA are Directors of the Plymouth Foundation, which received the sand mining permit from the Town.
On another mining project, on March 3, 2025, the Zoning Board of Appeals will hold the second day of a public hearing on a proposal by PA Landers, a regional sand and gravel mining operator, to expand its 100 acre mine and level a hill visible from Route 3 North. This is adjacent to 71 Hedges Pond Road, the subject of the February 14, 2025, legal appeal. The hearing is in the Great Hall, 2nd Floor, 26 Court St., Plymouth, 7 pm.
On Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 7 p.m. the local group CLWC is holding its second public forum on sand and gravel mining in Plymouth.
A state-wide campaign, Stop the Desecration, seeks to raise awareness about the destruction of Native American archeological sites without proper legal reviews.
