by DGR News Service | Dec 20, 2019 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Human Supremacy, Toxification
by Sean Butler and Will Falk / Featured image: an aerial photograph showing harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie in August of 2017. These are believed to be caused by the effluent runoff from factory farms in the watershed. Public domain photo by NOAA.
Rights of nature advocates often repeat the words, “The structure of the legal system makes meaningful environmental protection illegal.” It’s a bold claim, but for most people it’s too vague to mean anything. Most folks (understandably) don’t know the difference between a federal district court and a circuit court of appeals, let alone what we mean by the “structure” of the legal system.
But it’s actually quite simple. We’re referring to two aspects of the American legal system: (1) laws and regulations at the federal, state, and local (city and county) levels and the relative hierarchy among them; and (2) the holdings of various state and federal courts throughout the history of our country, which establish “precedent” for what those laws and regulations actually mean.
Perhaps nowhere in recent memory has the “structure of the legal system” been laid bare more clearly than in the aftermath of the passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights by the citizens of Toledo, OH in February 2019. The Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) grants Lake Erie the rights to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve; grants the residents of Toledo a right to a healthy environment; and “elevates the rights of the community and its natural environment over powers claimed by certain corporations.”
Although remarkable on its face, LEBOR is only one of dozens of similar local laws that have been passed in recent years in cities and counties across the United States. What is truly remarkable is the response LEBOR has received from existing institutions.
Mere hours after the City of Toledo certified LEBOR’s election results, entrenched interests opposed to environmental protection leveraged the existing structure of American law to mount an urgent opposition to LEBOR. Drewes Farms Partnership (“Drewes Farms”), represented by a corporate law firm, sued the City seeking an injunction against enforcing the law on the basis that LEBOR violates Drewes Farms’ “civil rights.” The State of Ohio was allowed to intervene in the case to argue for LEBOR’s invalidation while the grassroots community group, Toledoans for Safe Water – who drafted LEBOR and ushered it through Ohio’s citizen initiative process — was barred from the case by the federal judge. Then, the Ohio State legislature (at the request of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce) included in its 2019 budget a provision explicitly making it illegal for local governments to make or enforce laws ascribing legal rights to nature.
In short, the existing legal system and those who profit from it brought the full weight of the legal system against LEBOR. To really understand what is meant when we say that the structure of the legal system makes meaningful environmental protection illegal we need to dig into the specifics of this onslaught.
LEBOR’s opponents make primarily two legal arguments against it. First, they claim that LEBOR should be invalidated because it infringes on corporate constitutional rights. Second, they argue that LEBOR is preempted by state and federal law that reserves the right of the state of Ohio and the federal government to legislate on environmental matters.
Drewes Farms makes the corporate constitutional rights argument very clearly in the complaint it filed in federal court, claiming that:
“LEBOR causes real and concrete harms on Drewes Farms by violating the United States Constitution including but not limited to:
- Depriving Drewes Farms of its fundamental right to freedom of speech and to petition the courts under the First Amendment;
- Violating Drewes Farms’ right to equal protection by targeting it for liability based solely on the fact that it operates as a partnership business entity;
- Violating the Fifth Amendment protection against vague laws by exposing Drewes Farms to strict criminal liability and massive damages and fines under a standardless Charter Amendment; and
- Depriving Drewes Farms of its rights without due process.”
This 2010 map shows the location of major factory farming operations in Ohio and corresponding water quality readings. Ohio has among the highest density of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) of any U.S. state. Map by Kim Michalson.
Just so we’re clear, Drewes Farms, a non-human legal entity, lays claim to rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution AND claims that those rights are violated by a law that recognizes nature’s right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.
Meanwhile, the State of Ohio, in its Complaint for Declaratory Judgment and Injunctive Relief plainly states that “[t]he Ohio Constitution art. XVIII § 3 does not allow a municipality to enact an ordinance that prohibits regulated activity authorized under state permits issued pursuant to state laws of general applicability.” To support its claim, the State cited a recent Ohio case in which the judge ruled “[s]tate laws with state-wide application preempt local ordinances that discriminate, unfairly impede, or obstruct general laws regulating oil and gas activities.” In other words, the Ohio state constitution itself specifically prohibits any local government to enact laws that prohibit activities that are permitted by state laws.
The fundamental issue with both of these arguments is…they are absolutely, totally, and completely right. Under current American jurisprudence, Drewes Farms does have civil rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments (among others), and LEBOR does violate principles of preemption.
And that is precisely the problem.
Because American law has long recognized corporate civil rights and has long used preemption to invalidate local laws that provide for stricter regulations than federal or state governments, the State of Ohio and Drewes Farms would have us believe that this should be the end of the discussion. But, ending the discussion here leaves several problematic assumptions unchallenged. Arguing that LEBOR should be invalidated because it infringes on corporate rights only makes sense if corporations should enjoy those rights under our system of law. And arguing that LEBOR should never be enforced because it violates established principles of preemption only makes sense if preemption is beneficial to American citizens.
So, we must dig deeper. We must ask: Why do corporations exist? What are corporate rights? Why does the American legal system afford corporations rights in the first place? We must also ask: Why does preemption exist? Why does the American legal system protect the state and federal governments’ power to preempt laws passed by local communities? And, is there a connection between growing corporate power and preemption?
While there is a debate about what corporations should exist to do, the fact remains that corporations exist to amass wealth, or to borrow one of corporate apologists’ favorite phrases, to “maximize shareholder value.” We can see this argument clearly in the hugely influential essay published in 1970 by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in The New York Times Magazine aptly-titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Environmental author and philosopher Derrick Jensen, in The Culture of Make Believe, is more direct:
“To expect corporations to function differently than they do is to engage in magical thinking. We may as well expect a clock to cook, a car to give birth, or a gun to plant flowers. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth. The function is not to guarantee that children are raised in environments free of toxic chemicals, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, nor to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to design safe modes of transportation, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to serve communities. It never has been and never will be.”
Wealth is power. This is especially true in the legal system. Many people envision law as an all-powerful list of rules that dictates what someone can or cannot do. Similarly, many people think of rights as a list of privileges that specify what a person is entitled to do or entitled to be free from. As such, many people imagine that they can simply invoke these rights to be safe. But, it is a mistake to think that rules written somewhere in a book of statutes or rights listed in the Constitution have the power to jump off the paper where they are written and enforce themselves.
The key to understanding law and rights lies in understanding how they are enforced. Judges enforce law and rights by making decisions in court. And those decisions in court, in turn, are enforced by the police who are entitled to use physical force to ensure a judge’s decision is adhered to. When most people think about how this works, they envision examples such as President Eisenhower’s use of the National Guard to desegregate schools to uphold African Americans’ Fourteenth Amendment rights. But, a more apt and contemporary example is reflected in how the police were used at Standing Rock. Dogs, water cannons, and military-style weapons were turned against nonviolent protesters once the owner of the pipeline project, a corporation, won a favorable court ruling. These corporate rights-holders harnessed the state’s police power through the courts.
A typical “animal waste lagoon.” These containment ponds continuously leach into groundwater, and often overflow. Public domain photo by NRCS.
Rights, then, are power, too. When shareholders form a corporation, the corporation gains the privilege of “corporate personhood.” Because American courts treat corporations as “persons,” corporations have long exercised rights, including those afforded the highest level of protection under the Bill of Rights’ Contracts Clause, Due Process Clause, Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment Takings and Double Jeopardy Clauses, Sixth Amendment, and Seventh Amendment.
These rights have, for the most part, been judicially created and have consistently expanded throughout American history. The word “corporation” is found nowhere in the Constitution. Despite this, in 1819, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Contract Clause of the Constitution granted private business corporations protection from governmental interference in internal governance. In 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a person under the law and is therefore entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon, that coal corporations were entitled to protection under the Fifth Amendment “Takings Clause” and that the government must compensate corporations for property value lost due to mining regulations. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that federal laws which limited corporate spending in elections violated corporate First Amendment “free speech” rights in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. Then, in 2014, the Supreme Court, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, allowed corporations to deny its employees health coverage of contraception to which the employees would otherwise be entitled because corporations are entitled to First Amendment freedom of religion protection.
This might not seem problematic on its face, but recall that rights only have practical effect to the extent that rights holders can access the courts in order to ask a judge to enforce those rights. Corporations, that exist to, and have grown quite adept at, amassing wealth, have greater means to put behind the legal enforcement of rights. This naturally means more cases won by corporate plaintiffs, more caselaw upholding corporate rights, and therefore, by extension, more caselaw expanding the sphere of corporate civil rights. And the sheer number of cases bear out this reality. As an example, consider this: between 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court ruled on only 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations, it is easy to conclude that the Fourteenth Amendment has done a better job protecting the rights of corporations than that of African Americans.
At the same time, the expansion of rights in one sphere necessarily produces the curtailing of rights in another. Deep ecologist John Livingston describes the problem:
Effluent discharge pipe. Public domain image from USDA.
“We sometimes forget that every time a court or legislature – or even custom – confers or confirms a right in someone, someone else’s right is nibbled at: the right of women to equal employment opportunity is an infringement of the freedom of the misogynist employer; the right to make a profit is at someone else’s cost; the right to run a motorcycle or a snowmobile reduces someone else’s right to peace and quiet in his own backyard; the rights of embryos impinge upon the rights of the women who carry them. And so on.”
In other words, the expansion of corporate rights shrinks the rights enjoyed by citizens and communities. Because American law extends to corporations many of the same constitutional rights humans enjoy and because corporations exist to accumulate wealth, we should not be surprised when corporations use their power to do exactly that at the expense of the rights of human beings and nature.
The other major legal argument made against LEBOR is that it is preempted by state and federal law. Preemption is a doctrine that says the law of a higher jurisdiction should displace the law of a lower jurisdiction when the two jurisdictions conflict. The American legal system is divided basically into three jurisdictions: federal, state, and local law (local law is a general term for the law of the smallest legislating entities American law allows, entities such as municipalities, cities, or villages). When federal and state law conflict, American courts interpret the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution (Article VI, Section 2) to mean that federal law should displace state law. Similarly, state law usually trumps local law when the two conflict.
Corporations, using their superior wealth and their constitutional rights, have found tremendous success in influencing federal and state legislatures, especially pro-business, conservative legislatures and persuading them to enact aggressive new preemption laws. When local governments pass laws with stricter restrictions than the federal or state legislatures, corporations lobby legislatures to employ preemption to attack these local laws. This typically happens in one of two ways. First, government lawyers, primarily attorneys general, assert the doctrine of preemption in court. The State of Ohio’s arguments against LEBOR are a perfect example. Second, legislatures pass legislation known as “blanket” preemption to expressly forbid local ordinances that contradict state law. And, in fact, the Ohio House of Representatives recently employed blanket preemption when it adopted its 2020-2021 budget with provisions that prohibit anyone, including local governments, from enforcing rights of nature laws.
That’s what preemption is. The more important question is: Why does American law protect the federal and state governments’ power to preempt laws passed by local communities? The answer, quite simply, is corporate power.
The modern preemption doctrine was born from an 1868 decision written by Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice John Dillon in The City of Clinton v. The Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company. The case involved an attempt by the people of Clinton, Iowa to prevent railroad corporations from building railroads through their town. An ordinance was passed by the Clinton city council which prohibited any “railroad company from constructing its track through or upon any street within the limits of the city, and from occupying the same for right of way or other railroad purposes.”
In the decision, Dillon struck down Clinton’s ordinance and described his philosophy of the limited powers of municipal corporations and other local governing entities. This philosophy is now known as “Dillon’s Rule.” He wrote:
Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so it may destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control. Unless there is some constitutional limitation on the right, the legislature might, by a single act, if we can suppose it capable of so great a folly and so great a wrong, sweep from existence all of the municipal corporations in the State, and the corporation could not prevent it. We know of no limitation on this right so far as the corporations themselves are concerned. They are, so to phrase it, the mere tenants at will of the legislature. 24 Iowa 455, 475.
A pig at a factory farming operation. These industrial farms are the largest source of nutrient pollution in Lake Erie. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Via Mercy for Animals.
And, Dillon’s Rule was later adopted by the United States Supreme Court in 1907 in Hunter v. Pittsburgh.
As you can see, from the outset, preemption has been, quite literally, about corporations “railroading” local communities who do oppose destructive corporate projects. Today, preemption has grown into a powerful tool wielded by, especially, conservative, pro-business state legislatures. Judge Jon D. Russell and Aaron Bostrom, in a white paper titled “Federalism, Dillon Rule and Home Rule” recently written for the American City County Exchange (an organization that “helps to advance limited government and free market principles in local government through model policies, conferences, and online collaboration”), provide a solid example of the rationale employed by state legislators to defend preempting local laws.
Russell and Bostrom write:
The Dillon Rule guarantees a certain level of uniformity throughout the state…Rather than having vastly different policies and codes in each local jurisdiction, the state can create uniform tax codes and licensing policies, making it a business-friendly environment. Without commonality between local governments on these issues, businesses find more red tape than opportunity, making it difficult for the state and businesses to prosper.
Dr. Lori Riverstone-Newell, an expert in the interaction of governments in the American system, describes how in the past few years, “a growing number of state officials have sponsored and supported preemption legislation with the intent to weaken local authority and to thwart local progressive policies.” In simpler terms, conservative state legislators are learning how to use preemption to prevent progressive communities from enacting progressive laws.
We can see why some commentators argue we live in a corporate state. If the fundamental element of a democracy is the right of the people to enact and enforce the laws to which they are subject, then preemption is fundamentally an anti-democratic concept, especially as the doctrine has been influenced and wielded by entrenched economic interests and the state and federal legislators who support (and who are, of course, supported by) those interests.
Indeed legislators are not working alone; they are implementing policies pushed by corporate lobbyists. Dr. Riverstone-Newell explains, “Recent preemption efforts can be understood, at one level, as part of longstanding campaigns waged by industry groups hoping to stop or limit progressive local policies in order to create a friendlier business environment for themselves.” She describes how industry groups and trade associations first began pressuring state legislatures to rein in their cities in the late 1980s. R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco corporation, “pressed states to enact preemption laws in the 1980s as a central strategy to overcome local smoking restrictions and bans.” Abby Rapoport, a journalist writing for The American Prospect, reports how the National Rifle Association launched a campaign in the 1990s for state preemption of local gun regulations. This campaign was so successful “43 states now have some form of maximum preemption preventing localities from passing additional gun regulations on top of state law.”
It may very well be that “a certain level of uniformity” of laws in different jurisdictions enables business to “prosper,” but having reached the point in our nation’s history where we are confronting ecological collapse, we have to ask ourselves, whether blanket uniformity and unchecked economic growth and prosperity are the only values that matter to us. Or, instead, might it be that local environmental protection laws are key to protecting local ecology? Might it be that the unique ecosystems in one ‘jurisdiction’ require unique laws and regulations in order for them to thrive? Why should we expect that laws protecting swamplands in Florida be the same as those protecting the Nevada desert? If we are to see our way through the current environmental crisis, we can’t simply accept the doctrine of preemption on its face; we must consider the value of it, and its history and development, in order to determine whether or not it is compatible with the future we want for our grandchildren and the planet.
The failure to recognize how American law makes sustainability illegal is a primary reason environmentalists have failed to keep the health of the North American continent from deteriorating over the last century. Because we fail to recognize this, we keep seeking to protect the natural world through legal and political processes that do not – cannot – work. The late corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris described our predicament clairvoyantly:
Lake Erie (left) is the 11th largest lake in the world. Public domain NASA photo.
“Our campaigns follow the gambling addiction model. The last bet didn’t pay off but the next one might if…if…if we just had a new, improved tripod, three more experts, more labor or church support, ten more elected officials on our side, a hundred more people at the demo, or a thousand more letters in the mail…Who are we kidding? We are just doing the ‘same old thing’ over and over again and fooling ourselves that it might work next time. We are stuck in a feedback loop where our failures are interpreted as signs that we should repeat our failed tactics, but try harder. This is what it is to be colonized.”
Lawyers, and their clients, are especially vulnerable to falling victim to Morris’ gambling addiction model. The adversarial, competitive nature of law where two or more sides jockey for the approval of a judge makes it easy for losing parties to conclude that if they just hired a more expensive law firm, or if they just argued an issue differently, or if they just cited this case instead of that case then they would have won. The problem, however, is not that we need to try harder; the problem is that the structure of American law prevents our ability to implement strong enough measures to truly protect the natural world.
The people of the City of Toledo, recognizing that corporate rights and preemption must be confronted and overturned to protect Lake Erie and all those who depend on her, voted to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The arguments made by the State of Ohio and Drewes Farms Partnership are currently the law en vogue. This is one of the major reasons American law makes sustainability illegal. This must change if the natural world, and all of us who depend on her, are going to survive the current ecological predicament. To achieve a sane, sustainable culture, corporate rights and preemption must go.
by DGR News Service | Dec 18, 2019 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification
A series of headlines from around the world, compiled by Max Wilbert and Mark Behrend. Featured image by Max Wilbert.
2019 Was the 2nd Hottest Year on Record
Global average temperature reached the 2nd highest annual level ever recorded, according to preliminary data for 2019. While the data is not yet finalized, it’s almost certain 2019 will go down as the 2nd hottest ever. The hottest five years on record have been the last five years, and we are in the final days of the hottest decade in the record.
https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/1206608106819661826
70,000 Children Have Been Detained at the U.S. Border in 2019
As climate crisis and ecological collapse drives ever more migration, abuse at the southern border of the U.S. is escalating. One recent report finds that nearly 70,000 children have been detained in 2019:
The story lays out in excrutiating detail the emotional pain of victims of President Donald Trump’s child separation policy, focusing on, among others, a Honduran father whose three-year-old daughter can no longer look at him or connect with him after being separated at the U.S. border and abused in foster care.
“I think about this trauma staying with her too, because the trauma has remained with me and still hasn’t faded,” the father told AP.
The 3-year-old Honduran girl was taken from her father when immigration officials caught them near the border in Texas in March 2019 and sent her to government-funded foster care. The father had no idea where his daughter was for three panicked weeks. It was another month before a caregiver put her on the phone but the girl, who turned four in government custody, refused to speak, screaming in anger.
“She said that I had left her alone and she was crying,” said her father during an interview with the AP and Frontline at their home in Honduras. “‘I don’t love you Daddy, you left me alone,'” she told him.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/12/causing-profound-trauma-trump-administration-detained-record-breaking-70000-children
Koalas Declared “Functionally Extinct” After Fires Destroy 80% of Remaining Habitat
Experts believe the long-term outlook for the species is bleak, after centuries of habitat destruction, overhunting, and culling.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/11/23/koalas-functionally-extinct-after-australia-bushfires-destroy-80-of-their-habitat/#4dfb62fc7bad
Light Pollution is Key ‘Bringer of Insect Apocalypse’
Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.
Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.
“We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/22/light-pollution-insect-apocalypse
Sea Ice Update:
Arctic sea ice extent for November 2019 ended up at second lowest in the 41-year satellite record. Regionally, extent remains well below average in the Chukchi Sea, Hudson Bay, and Davis Strait.
October daily sea ice extent went from third lowest in the satellite record at the beginning of the month to lowest on record starting on October 13 through October 30. Daily extent finished second lowest, just above 2016, at month’s end. Average sea ice extent for the month was the lowest on record. While freeze-up has been rapid along the coastal seas of Siberia, extensive open water remains in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, resulting in unusually high air temperatures in the region. Extent also remains low in Baffin Bay.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Gemeni Solar Project Threatens Important Habitat in Nevada
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently released a document identifying the severe impacts that would be inflicted on the Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) from the Gemini Solar Project, located in southern Nevada. The agency, tasked with recovering rare species headed for extinction, wrote a Biological Opinion for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency in charge of permitting the 7,100 acre Gemini Solar Project which will be located on public lands near Valley of Fire State Park, as part of its consultation process. BLM is reviewing an Environmental Impact Statement for the project.
Although the document claims that mitigation measures will make up for the impacts, the FWS claims that the Gemini Solar Project could kill or injure as many as 1,825 federally threatened desert tortoises in its 30-year operational lifespan. While the Biological Opinion assures us that the project would be heavily mitigated, it still raises dire concerns about these impacts.
The Mojave desert tortoise had declined so drastically decades ago that in 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the species as federally threatened. In the year 2000 the FWS began systematically surveying desert tortoise population numbers across its range using the latest scientific methods. What they saw was continuing declines of tortoise numbers, and even population crashes. Based on these surveys the Desert Tortoise Council has recently recommended up-listing the status of the Mojave desert tortoise from a threatened status to a higher endangered status–which means an emergency to stave off extinction.
The vegetation would be mowed using 23,000 pound Heavy Duty mulchers. Because not all individual tortoises will be detected by biologists or project staff, the agency is concerned that death and injury of desert tortoises could result from excavation activities such as clearing of vegetation, and entrapment in trenches and pipes during construction. Tortoises could be crushed by heavy vehicles. The FWS claims tortoise burrows would be avoided during all this constriction and maintenance activity with equipment and vehicles over years, but we have seen tortoise home burrows crushed and caved in by such activities on other development projects.
After solar project construction is complete and hundreds of tortoises are dug up and raided out of their burrows, the agencies are proposing to then release them back on to this disturbed habitat. The presence of re-occupied desert tortoises on the solar site, with vehicle traffic, may result in injuries or death during routine maintenance of facilities such as vegetation trimming. Tortoises outside of the fenced solar site may also be injured or killed due to truck traffic along the transmission lines and associated access roads.
Capture and translocation (moving) of desert tortoises may result in death and injury from stress or disease transmission associated with handling tortoises, stress associated with moving individuals outside of their established home range, stress associated with artificially increasing the density of tortoises in an area and thereby increasing competition for resources, and disease transmission between and among translocated and resident desert tortoises.
Translocation has the potential to increase the prevalence of diseases, such as Upper Respiratory Tract Disease (URTD), a major mortality factor for desert tortoises. Stresses associated with handling and movement could exacerbate this risk in translocated individuals that carry diseases. Equally, desert tortoises in quarantine pens could increase their exposure and vulnerability to stress, dehydration, and inadequate food resources.
The Gemini Solar Project represents an unacceptably large threat to tortoise populations, connectivity, and high-quality habitat in the northeastern Mojave Desert. FWS appears to us to be minimizing the threat of this project and recommending mitigation measures that will fail to halt tortoise mortality and further cumulative habitat degradation.
http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/
Australia Bushfires Rage
3900 square miles of Australia (an area more than 3 times the size of Yosemite National Park) were burned during a single week of November. – New York Post, 11/26/2019
Rice Farming is Major Source of Methane Emissions
Rice farming, long believed responsible for 2.5% of carbon emissions, is now believed to emit up to twice as much — due to new farming methods that only burn the fields intermittently, rather than annually. Leaving the fields in standing water has been found to stimulate bacterial growth that adds the equivalent of 1200 coal-fired power plants in carbon emissions. – Independent (online news magazine), 09/10/2018
The Plastic Pollution Explosion
A deer found dead in rural Thailand recently had 18 pounds of plastic in its stomach. – CNN, 11/26/2019
Consumer Culture Metastasizing Across the Globe
France says that Black Friday is the worst ever American import, topping Halloween and McDonald’s. The one-day shopping frenzy is said to produce the equivalent of a truckload of textiles being dumped every second, across France. – France 24, 11/30/2019
E-Waste is Growing Fast
Electronic waste worldwide is expected to exceed 50 million tons annually by 2020. Before it becomes e-waste, producing a single computer and monitor requires 1.5 tons of water, 48 lbs. of chemicals, and 530 lbs. of fossil fuels. – “The Balance SMB (balancesmb.com), 10/15/2019
Amazon Deforestation Accelerating Under Bolsonaro
Amazon deforestation in 2019 (so far) is estimated at more than 1130 square miles, an area equal to 97% of Yosemite. – CNN, 11/14/2019
Another estimate puts Amazon deforestation at 3700 square miles thus far this year.
Sea of Okhotsk Warming Rapidly
Parts of the Sea of Okhotsk, between Siberia and Japan, are now 3° C. warmer than in pre-industrial times. Oxygen levels in the sea are down, and the Okhotsk salmon population has declined 70%, just since 2004. With colder areas of the planet reacting fastest to climate change, scientists fear that what is happening around Okhotsk is a warning for seas and sea life globally. – Washington Post, 11/12/2019
Air Pollution in India
Forty percent of school children in four of India’s largest cities have lung capacity described as “poor” or “bad,” following breathing tests. Air quality in Indian cities is consistently rated among the worst in the world. – India Times.com, 05/05/2015
Niger is Desertifying Rapidly
In Niger, an area of grasslands equal to 110,000 football fields is lost every year to desertification and erosion. Nomadic herdsmen, who have followed this lifestyle for centuries, blame climate change. Some report losing half of their herds in recent years, and say they are now being driven into cities to look for work. – France 24, 12/05/2019
30-40% of Food is Wasted for “Cosmetic Reasons”
Thirty to forty percent of American farm produce never makes it to market, due to inefficient distribution, and to discarding for cosmetic reasons. – France 24, 11/30/2019
Alaska Temperatures Caused Salmon to Have Heart Attacks
Record high temperatures across portions of Alaska caused thousands of salmon to have heart attacks and die last summer.
by DGR News Service | Oct 7, 2019 | Agriculture
Editor’s note: people with various diets are involved in Deep Green Resistance. Critical analysis of agriculture is central to our understanding.
By Lierre Keith
Start with a sixteen-year-old girl. She has a conscience, a brain, and two eyes. Her planet is being drawn and quartered, species by species. She knows it even while the adults around her play shell games with carbon trade schemes and ethanol. She’s also found information that leaves her sickened in her soul, the torment of animals that merges sadism with economic rationality to become the US food supply. Their suffering is both detailed and institution- ally distant, and both of those descriptors hold their own horrors.
A friend of mine talks about “the thing that breaks and is never repaired.” Anyone who has faced the truth about willful or socially- sanctioned cruelty knows that experience: in slavery, historic and con- temporary; in the endless sexual sadism of rape, battering, pornography; in the Holocaust and other genocides. You’re never the same after some knowledge gets through with you. But our sixteen-year-old has courage and commitment, and now she wants to do what’s right.
The vegetarians have a complete plan for her. It’s simple. You can create justice for animals, for impoverished humans, and for the earth if you eat grains and beans. That simplicity is part of its appeal, partly because humans have a tendency to like easy rules. But it also speaks to our desire for beauty, that with one act so much that’s wrong can be set right: our health, our compassion, our planet.
The problem is they’re wrong, not in their attempts to save the world, but in their solution. The moral valuing of justice over power, care over cruelty and biophilia over anthropocentrism is a shift in values that must occur if we are to save this planet. I didn’t call this book The Vegetarian Lie. I called it The Vegetarian Myth for a reason. It’s not a lie that animals are sentient beings currently being tortured for our food. It’s not a lie that the rich nations are siphoning off the life of the planet for literally oceans full of endless, empty plastic junk. It’s not a lie that most people refuse to face the systems of domination— their brute scale—that are destroying us and the earth.
But the vegetarians’ solution is a myth based on ignorance, an ignorance as encompassing as any of those dominating systems. Civilization, the life of cities, has broken our identification with the living land and broken the land itself. “The plow is the … the world’s most feared wrecking ball,” writes Steven Stoll. For ten thousand years, the six centers of civilization have waged war against our only home, waged it mostly with axes and plows. Those are weapons, not tools. Never mind reparations or repair: no peace is possible until we lay them down.
Those six centers were each driven by a tight cohort of creatures, at the center of which stand an annual plant or two. And humans have been so useful to corn and rice and potatoes, clever enough to conquer perennial polycultures as vast as forests, as tough as prairies, but not smart enough to see we’ve been destroying the world. The cohort has often included infectious diseases, diseases like smallpox and measles that jumped the species barrier from domesticated animals to humans. Humans who stood in the way of civilization’s hunger have been eradicated by the millions through civilization’s microbes, the first clear-cut preparing the way for the plow.
This is the ignorance where the vegetarian myth dead ends. Life must kill and we are all made possible by the dead body of another. It’s not killing that’s domination: it’s agriculture. The foods the vegetarians say will save us are the foods that destroy the world. The vegetarian attempt to remove humans from a paradigmatical pinnacle is commendable. And it’s crucial. We will never take our true place, one sibling amongst millions, sharing a common journey from carbon to consciousness, sacred and hungry, then back to carbon, without firmly and forever rejecting human dominion.
But in order to save the world we must know it, and the veg- etarians don’t, not any more than the rest of the civilized, especially the industrially so. Hens driven insane in battery cages are visible to vegetarians; both morally and politically that insistent sight is needed. What are invisible are all the other animals that agriculture has driven extinct. Entire continents have been skinned alive, yet that act goes unnoticed to vegetarians, despite the scale. How do they not see it? The answer is they don’t know to look for it. We are all so used to a devastated landscape, covered in asphalt and the same small handful of suburban plants, a biotic coup of its own. The whole east coast should be one slow sigh of wetland, interspersed with marsh meadows and old growth forest. It’s all gone, replaced by a McMonocrop of houses, shackles of asphalt, the brutal weight of cities.
Where the water goes shy, the trees should thin to savanna and prairie, although even there the wetlands should cradle the rivers. But there’s nothing left. The deltas and swamps, bison and black terns, have been turned into soy and wheat and corn. The capitalists say we should turn those into animal units; the vegetarians say we should dump them near the starving; I say we should stop growing them and let the world come back to life. Then we can take our place again, that place that the vegetarians claim to want, our place as participants.
We can dominate or we can participate but there is no way out. That’s what no one is telling that sixteen-year-old. The earth is liter- ally dying for wetlands and forests, rivers and prairies. And if humans would simply step aside, the world would do the work of repairing itself. But that repair involves death. It means letting the beavers eat the trees, letting the wolves eat the beavers, letting the soil eat us all. It means taking down every last dam and letting the salmon come home to lay their eggs and be eaten, and in the eating become the forest. This is the world as it should be, resiliently nourishing itself, the gift both given and received. No one is going to tell that sixteen- year-old girl the truth, because there’s no one left in her world who knows it.
Letting the beavers come back will mean that wetlands may well cover one-third of the land in places. Those wetlands can’t coexist with our roads and suburbs and agriculture. So where does your loyalty lie? Ask yourself that question as if you really mean it. Those wetlands would also feed us forever. To bring the wolves back would require a similar and massive contracture of human activity: they need land, wild land, sturdy with functioning forests and grasslands, not broken by cars, gouged into subdivisions, and coerced into mono- crops. You can’t have it both ways, vegetarians. If you want to save this world, including its animals, you can’t keep destroying it. And your food destroys it.
If you want rules about what to eat, I can give you some principles. They’re slightly more complicated than “Meat Is Murder,” but then the living world is complex, and beholding it should leave us all aching with awe. So start with topsoil, the beginning place. Remember, one million creatures per tablespoon. It’s alive, and it will protect itself if we stop assaulting it. It protects itself with perennial poly- cultures, with lots and lots of plants intertwining their roots, adding carbonaceous leaves, and working together with mycelium, bacteria, protozoa, making a new organism between them, the mycorrhiza that talks and nourishes and directs.
Defend the soil with your life, reader: there is no other organism that can touch the intelligence of what goes on beneath your feet.
So here are the questions you should ask, a new form of grace to say over your food. Does this food build or destroy topsoil? Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?
Everything falls into place with those three questions. Those annual monocrops lose on all three counts, unless you live in Nebraska, where it “only” fails the first two. Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer argues that you should only eat animal products if you can see their origin with your own eyes. While I agree with the impulse—to end the denial and ignorance that protect factory farming—this demand has to be much bigger: you should know where every bite of your food comes from. We need to end the denial and ignorance that protect agriculture. The worldview that gives any and all plant foods an automatic pass is profoundly blind to how those very foods devour living communities. Go look at Nebraska, where the native prairie is 98 percent gone. Even if you’ve never seen an Audubon bighorn or a swift fox, you must surely miss them.
We’ve all built this living world of gift and need, birth and return. To repair this planet, we must take our sustenance as part of those relationships instead of destroying them. We can pull the forest down or we can eat the deer that live there. We can rip up the grass or we can eat the bison that should stretch across the plains. We can dam the rivers or we can eat the fish that could feed us forever. We can turn biologic processes into commodities until the soil is salt and dust, or we can take our place as another hungering member of an ancient tribe, the tribe of carbon. All flesh is grass, wrote someone named Isaiah in a book I don’t usually quote. In Hebrew, the word translated as “flesh” is basar, meaning meat, something one eats. Isaiah understood what is no longer physically visible to us, living at the end of the world: we are all a part of one another, made from grass, become meat.
“But food requires destruction,” a vegan argued with me, in an e-mail exchange that went exactly nowhere. That is the final myth you must face, vegetarians. Because the food I am proposing, the food of our ancestors, whose paleolithic hearts and souls we still inhabit, does not require destruction. At this moment it would in fact require repair and restitution: the forests and grasslands mended, conquered territory ceded back to the earth for her wetlands. Steven Stoll sums up agriculture: “Humans became parasites of the soil.” It’s your food that has brought us to the end of the world.
My food builds topsoil. I’ve watched it happen. The mixture of grasses and trees, cousins in their own right, provides for the animals, who in their turn maintain and nourish by their simple biological functions of eating and excreting. On Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm— the mecca of sustainable food production—organic matter has increased from 1.5 percent in 1961 to 8 percent today. The average right now in the US is 2-3 percent. In case you don’t understand, let me explain. A 6.5 percent increase in organic matter isn’t a fact for ink and paper: it’s a song for the angels to sing. Remember that pine forest that built one-sixteenth of an inch of soil in fifty years? Cue those angels again: Salatin’s rotating mixture of animals on pasture is building one inch of soil annually.
Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the Salatins’ to count: “about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly from Omaha and Topeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of Mexico.” Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of carbon every year. Bane writes:
That’s equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing forests and soils … Without expanding farm acreage or removing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which are absolutely imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by changing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.
Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warming. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization (see Figure 5, opposite), an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that is what your food—those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans—has done. Remember the ghost acres and the ghost slaves? What you’re eating in those grains and beans is ghost meat, down to the bare bones of whole species. There is no reconciling civilization and its foods with the needs of our living planet.
To save the world, we must first stop destroying it. Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses, and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.
“And why are we not doing this now?” is the clarion call Bane ends with. For a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with power. But a new populism could spring from this need, a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights groups, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts—all of us who are desperate for a new, and living, world.
That’s the real reason I’ve written this book. The earth, our only home, needs that movement, and she needs it now. The only just economy is a local economy; the only sustainable economy is a local economy. Come at it from whichever angle matches your passion, the answers nest around the same central theme: humans have to draw their sustenance from where they live, without destroying that place.
That means that first we must know that place. I can’t give you a list of what to eat because I don’t know what can live where you do. I can only give you the principles I’ve already laid out. Then you’ll have to ask questions. How much rain falls where you are? What’s the terrain, the temperature, the soil? Dairy cattle, for instance, do great things where I live in cold, wet New England. I wouldn’t suggest them in dry New Mexico.
Understand my point. Farming—the growing of annual mono- crops—will never be sustainable. Our only chance is a judicious and humble human participation in perennial polycultures. We can do that poorly, as demonstrated in the overgrazing due to population pressures that is currently turning grasslands to desert the world over. Or we can do it well, like the Fulani of Africa, with a largely unbroken line reaching back to a pre-human time four million years ago.
How much can we change the landscape before participation becomes destruction? Especially when our impact may not be visible for a thousand years? Should we, for instance, use fire? Fire will drive out some species, both plant and animal, and encourage others. Where I live, sugar maples are iconic. Yet five hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have been here, or not many of them. The burning practices of Native Americans kept the forest here shifted toward fire-resistant and mast-bearing trees. That information was a shock
to my system: don’t mess with my maple trees. But Brian Donahue makes the point that as long as there has been a forest in New Eng- land, there have been humans living in it. We belong here, too, if we would just behave like it. The pristine forest free of human influence has never existed here, so is it the ideal we should be aiming for?
If so, that ideal must presuppose a devastated landscape some- where else and an interstate highway system to transport the foods produced out of it. None of this can last: not the devastation, the fossil fuel, the distance. We need to eat where we live and our food must be part of the repair of our home.
Let’s look at an example. Do dairy cows belong in New Eng- land? In the here and now, as I make my personal and political decisions about breakfast, are cows on the side of good or do they need to be hauled up Mount Doom?
Dairy cattle were brought over from Europe four hundred years ago. Does that rule them out automatically? But if you dig deeper into the past, there were once thirty-three more genera of large mammals on this continent, relatives of horses, cows, elephants, giraffes— and not that long ago, a mere 12,000 years. Their absence has left evolutionary widows, trees like honey locust and osage orange that are in decline because they need large herbivores to help them.9 In that sense, horses and cows were perhaps reintroduced with the spread of Europeans. So dig deeper still. Are these new animals similar enough to the ones that are gone, or do their divergences make them destructive assailants on the land base? There were, for instance, once equids here, but they had cloven hooves and no upper teeth. The result of the solid hooves and incisors is “ecological havoc.”10 The feral horses from Europe destroy desert seeps and springs, smother spawning gravel with silt, and strip grasslands to bare dirt. The most in-depth analysis of nineteen study sites found severe damage to “soils, rodents, reptiles, ants, and plants.” That damage puts species from desert tortoises to the endangered Lahontan cutthroats at risk.
There are clearly brittle landscapes too fragile for cows—especially for dairy cows—as well. Most of the west is more suited to the animals that were already there—buffalo, pronghorns, elk—and that’s what the people there should be eating. So that’s a directive: restore the prairie, long grass and short, and the drylands, and return their animal cohorts. Then think long and hard about other megafauna and their place on this continent. Do the grasslands and savannas want them back, or their relatives that still survive? What about the honey locust and osage orange, who need their large seeds to be di- gested and carried by large herbivores? Is their dying simply evolution at work? If we humans reintroduce some creature that might fulfill that function and restore the range of those trees, is that also evolu- tion? Or is that interference?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
Cattle on pasture in my climate can easily be sustainable. Joel Salatin is certainly proving that. The model is sound and the climate and rainfall are suitable. But pasture isn’t the natural landscape of New England. Forests, wetlands, and marsh meadows are. The Europeans’ cows first grazed in those meadows and forests. As the beaver were eradicated, the wetlands and marsh meadows disappeared. Meanwhile, in Europe, experimentation with plant admixtures improved the sustainability of pastures dramatically. How does turning some forest land into pasture compare with the habitat shift of burning? Both of these are activities that, done well, will build topsoil and provide for human sustenance essentially forever. So how much impact are we allowed to have? The entire rainforest is a human project. Small patches are burned by the indigenous like the Lacandon Mayan, and then planted in a secession of eighty different crops, including the vines, shrubs, and trees that will take over when the plot has been abandoned—though “abandoned” is not really an accurate description, as the plot will be revisited in a twenty-year rotation, and will meanwhile produce food, fiber, and building materials, as well as a home for the wild animals that serve as protein.
Which brings me to my point. It wasn’t pasture that brought down the northeast forest. It was coal. As long as the human economy was based on wood in this cold climate, people more or less took care of the forest, because they needed it. Coal was what reduced the forest to simply one more commodity, and the land that forests grew on was more profitably used for wool breeds of sheep. What will happen as the price of oil first climbs past what the average household can pay, then past the effort worth retrieving it from the ground? Will New England be cleared from the Atlantic Ocean to the Housatonic River as people freeze to death? Or will the rural areas and private woodlot owners be able to hang onto their parts of this young forest, knowing that without it they, too, will soon freeze? Will we be facing a war not over Middle Eastern oilfields, but over trees in the Berkshires?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
I can raise these issues, but maybe I can’t answer the questions.
I know that whatever we’re eating has to build soil, and if it doesn’t, it has to be struck forever from the human menu. It has to be part of a self-replicating community, where life and death are inseparable in the process of nourishment. Everyone has to give back, through the labor of their life functions, and then through the nutrients stored in their bodies. Our food can’t be based on fossil fuel, for nitrogen or energy. Nor can it use fossil water, or indeed any water that empties a river.
Dairy cows, where I live, meet those criteria and more. But is the change in species composition wrought by human-set fire on the acceptable side of the line while the change required for pasture placed in the unacceptable column? Then what we will eat instead will be deer and moose. Both of those, along with bison, migrated here from Eurasia not too long ago, maybe 12,000 years. They filled in niches left empty by the megafaunal extinctions. They’re Eurasian trans- plants, too. Do you see how complicated this gets?
And I still need my breakfast.
In the end, I do have my own answers to offer, of course, but they involve a bit more than drinking soy milk. Agriculture has to stop. It’s been a ten thousand year disaster, as life on earth will tell us if we listen. Writes William Catton:
The breakthrough we called industrialization was fundamentally unlike earlier ones. It did not just take over for human use another portion of the web that had previously supported other forms of life. Instead, it went underground to extract carrying capacity supplements from a finite and depletable fund …
As discussed earlier, I think the beginning of the fossil fuel age does mark a new level of human destructiveness, but he’s wrong in his characterization of agriculture as simply taking over more ecological niches. Agriculture is extractive: soil is depletable and “peak soil” was ten thousand years ago, on the day before agriculture began. We’ve been on the down curve ever since.
So agriculture has to stop. It’s about to run out anyway—of soil, of water, of ecosystems—but it would go easier on us all if we faced that collectively, and then developed cultural constraints that would stop us from ever doing it again.
Where I live, the wetlands need to return to cover the land in a soft, slow blanket of water. They will be a home for a lush multitude of species, many of which—waterfowl, moose, fish—could feed us. The rivers need to be undammed. And the suburbs and the roads need to be abandoned. I have no great solutions for how to make that economically feasible: I sincerely doubt it’s possible. I only know it has to happen, no matter how much we resist.
This is an excerpt from “To Save the World” in the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. Click here to order directly from the author.
by DGR News Service | Sep 17, 2019 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Liam Campbell
In 1997, forest fires in Indonesia grew so large that they accounted for 40% of global emissions during that period. The Borneo rainforest is the most ancient in the world, having taken 120 million years to evolve into its current state of rich diversity. Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropic peat bogs, deep and vast stockpiles of carbon which have formed over millennia. When these peat bogs ignite they are almost impossible to extinguish because they burn deeply into the Earth and smoulder for weeks or even months, and they can also release millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere very suddenly. Although seasonal fires are common in the Borneo, climate collapse has made the rainforest more susceptible, and the magnitude of this year’s fires are already unfathomable.
Many of the fires we’re seeing right now are caused by exploitative agriculturalists who are burning the rainforest to open land up for human crops and livestock. In doing so, they are destroying 120 million years of evolution and rapidly annihilating one of the Earth’s most diverse and ancient living ecosystems. Although Indonesia claims to be doing “everything in their power” to extinguish the fires, they are not doing nearly enough to prevent them from happening in the first place. Only about 200 suspects have been arrested in relation to the arsons, and it is likely that many of them will be released without charges or consequences. It is understandable that individual farmers may be tempted by the prospect of opening more land for profitable exploitation, but the act of burning such an ancient ecosystem is among the worst crimes a human can commit; it not only endangers the rest of the planet’s climate, it destroys one of the most ancient living systems on this planet.
Most of the fires were started by palm oil plantations, which are often owned by large corporations. Officials estimate that about 80% of the fires were set intentionally and they now number in the thousands, with 2,900 especially bad hot spots. In all, only about two dozen palm oil plantations have been temporarily shut down in connection to arsons, they are primarily owned by Malaysian and Singaporean companies. These companies are unlikely to face significant charges or repercussions, and will likely return to increasingly profitable business after paying fines.
by DGR News Service | Aug 5, 2019 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Male Supremacy, The Solution: Resistance, Women & Radical Feminism
Editors Note: This essay by Deep Green Resistance co-founder Lierre Keith was originally published on the DGR News Service in August 2015 under the title, “The Girls and the Grasses.” We think it an exceptional piece, and would like to share it again. [Photo by Max Wilbert, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.]
by Lierre Keith
Captured in a test tube, blood may look like a static liquid, but it’s alive, as animate and intelligent as the rest of you. It also makes up a great deal of you: of your 50 trillion cells, one-quarter are red blood cells. Two million are born every second. On their way to maturation, red blood cells jettison their nuclei―their DNA, their capacity to divide and repair. They have no future, only a task: to carry the hemoglobin that will hold your oxygen. They don’t use the oxygen themselves–they only transport it. This they do with exquisite precision, completing a cycle of circulation through your body every twenty seconds for a hundred days. Then they die.
The core of hemoglobin is a molecule of iron. It’s the iron that grasps the oxygen at the surface of your lungs, hangs on through the rush of blood, then releases it to wanting cells. If iron goes missing, the body, as ever, has a fallback plan. It adds more water to increase blood volume; thin blood travels faster through the fine capillaries. Do more with less.
All good except there’s less and less oxygen offered to the cells. Another plan kicks in: increased cardiac output. The heart ups its stroke volume and its rate. To keep you from exploding, the brain joins in, sending signals to the muscles enfolding each blood vessel, telling them to relax. Now blood volume can increase with blood pressure stable.
But still no iron arrives. At this point, the other organs have to cooperate, giving up blood flow to protect the brain and heart. The skin makes major sacrifices, which is why anemics are known for their pallor. Symptoms perceived by the person―you―will probably increase as your tissues, and then organs, begin to starve.
If there is no relief, ultimately all the plans will fail. Even a strong heart can only strain for so long. Blood backs up into the capillaries. Under the pressure, liquid seeps out into surrounding tissues. You are now swelling and you don’t know why. Then the lungs are breached. The alveoli, the tiny sacs that await the promise of air, stiffen from the gathering flood. It doesn’t take much. The sacs fill with fluid. Your body is drowning itself. This is called pulmonary edema, and you are in big trouble.
I know this because it happened to me. Uterine fibroids wrung a murder scene from me every month; the surgery to remove them pushed me across the red cell Rubicon. I knew nothing: my body understood and responded. My eyes swelled, then my ankles, my calves. Then I couldn’t breathe. Then it hurt to breathe. I finally stopped taking advice from my dog―Take a nap! With me!–and dragged myself to the ER, where, eventually, all was revealed.
Two weeks later, the flood had subsided, absorbed back into some wetland tissue of my body, and I felt the absence of pain as a positive. Breathing was exquisite, the sweetest thing I could imagine. Every moment of effortless air was all I could ever want. I knew it would fade and I would forget. But for a few days, I was alive. And it was good.
Our bodies are both all we have and everything we could want. We are alive and we get to be alive. There is joy on the surface of the skin waiting for sunlight and soft things (both of which produce endorphins, so yes: joy). There is the constant, stalwart sound of our hearts. Babies who are carried against their mothers’ hearts learn to breathe better than those who aren’t. There is the strength of bone and the stretch of muscle and their complex coordination. We are a set of electrical impulses inside a watery environment: how? Well, the nerves that conduct the impulses are sheathed by a fatty substance called myelin―they’re insulated. This permits “agile communication between distant body parts.” Understand this: it’s all alive, it all communicates, it makes decisions, and it knows what it’s doing. You can’t possibly fathom its intricacies. To start to explore the filigree of brain, synapse, nerve, and muscle is to know that even the blink of your eyes is a miracle.
Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddes of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time , we knew we were alive. And it was good.
__________
And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell.
Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.
Necrophilia is the end point of sadism. The sadistic urge is about control–“the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being,” as Fromm defined it. The objective of inflicting pain and degradation is to break a human being. Pain is always degrading; victimization humiliates; eventually, everyone breaks. The power to do that is the sadist’s dream. And who could be more broken to your control than a woman who can’t walk?
Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven-year-old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with its 8,000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of FGM, the labia are cut off and the vagina sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl’s husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.
You don’t do this to a human being. You do it to an object. That much is true. But there is more. Because the world is full of actual objects—cardboard boxes and abandoned cars—and men don’t spend their time torturing those. They know we aren’t objects, that we have nerves that feel and flesh that bruises. They know we have nowhere else to go when they lay claim to our bodies. That’s where the sadist finds his pleasure: pain produces suffering, humiliation perhaps more, and if he can inflict that on her, it’s absolute proof of his control.
Behind the sadists are the institutions, the condensations of power, that hand us to him. Every time a judge rules that women have no right to bodily integrity—that upskirt photos are legal, that miscarriages are murder, that women should expect to be beaten—he wins. Every time the Fashion Masters make heels higher and clothes smaller, he smiles. Every time an entire class of women—the poorest and most desperate, at the bottom of every conceivable hierarchy—are declared legal commodities for sex, he gets a collective hard-on. Whether he personally uses any such women is beside the point. Society has ruled they are there for him, other men have ensured their compliance, and they will comply. He can kill one—the ultimate sex act for the sadist—and no one will notice. And no one does.
There is no stop to this, no natural endpoint. There is always another sentient, self-willed being to inflame his desire to control, so the addiction is forever fed. With other addictions, the addict bottoms out, his life becomes unmanageable, and the stark choice is stop or die. But the sadist isn’t hurting himself. There’s no looming bottom to hit, only an endless choice of victims, served up by the culture. Women are the feast at our own funeral, and he is happy to feed.
_____
If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: no. “No” is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at no. Feminists said no and we meant it.
The boundary of “no” extended outward, an insult to one being an injury to all: “we” is the word of political movements. Without it, women are cast adrift in a hostile, chaotic sea, holding our breath against the next Bad Thing. With the lens of feminism, the chaos snaps into sharp focus. We gave words to the Bad Things, then faced down denial and despair to see the pattern. That’s called theory. Then we demanded remedies. That’s what subjects, especially political subjects, do. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragettes, worked at the Census Office as a birth registrar. Every day, young girls came in with their newborns. Every day, she had to ask who the father was, and every day the girls wept in humiliation and rage. Reader, you know who the fathers were. That’s why Pankhurst never gave up.
To say no to the sadist is to assert those girls as political subjects, as human beings with the standing that comes from inalienable rights. Each and every life is self-willed and sovereign; each life can only be lived in a body. Not an object to be broken down for parts: a living body. Child sexual abuse is especially designed to turn the body into a cage. The bars may start as terror and pain but they will harden to self-loathing. Instilling shame is the best method to ensure compliance: we are ashamed—sexual violation is very good at that—and for the rest of our lives we will comply. Our compliance is, of course, his control. His power is his pleasure, and another generation of girls will grow up in bodies they will surely hate, to be women who comply.
_______
What has been done to our bodies has been done to our planet. The sadist exerts his control; the necrophiliac turns the living into the dead. The self-willed and the wild are their targets and their necrotic project is almost complete.
Taken one by one, the facts are appalling. In my lifetime, the earth has lost half her wildlife. Every day, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. “Ocean” is synonymous with the words abundance and plenty. Fullness is on the list, as well as infinity. And by 2048, the oceans will be empty of fish. Crustaceans are experiencing “complete reproductive failure.” In plain terms, their babies are dying. Plankton are also disappearing. Maybe plankton are too small and green for anyone to care about, but know this: two out of three animal breaths are made possible by the oxygen plankton produce. If the oceans go down, we go down with them.
How could it be otherwise? See the pattern, not just the facts. There were so many bison on the Great Plains, you could sit and watch for days as a herd thundered by. In the central valley of California, the flocks of waterbirds were so thick they blocked out the sun. One-quarter of Indiana was a wetland, lush with life and the promise of more. Now it’s a desert of corn. Where I live in the pacific northwest, ten million fish have been reduced to ten thousand. People would hear them coming for a whole day. This is not a story: there are people alive who remember it. And I have never once heard the sound that water makes when forty million years of persistence finds it way home. Am I allowed to use the word “apocalypse” yet?
The necrophiliac insists we are mechanical components, that rivers are an engineering project, and genes can be sliced up and arranged at whim. He believes we are all machines, despite the obvious: a machine can be taken apart and put back together. A living being can’t. May I add: neither can a living planet.
Understand where the war against the world began. In seven places around the globe, humans took up the activity called agriculture. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and then you plant it to human use. Instead of sharing that land with the other million creatures who need to live there, you’re only growing humans on it. It’s biotic cleansing. The human population grows to huge numbers; everyone else is driven into extinction.
Agriculture creates a way of life called civilization. Civilization means people living in cities. What that means is: they need more than the land can give. Food, water, energy have to come from someplace else. It doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide. Because no one willing gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences.
The end of every civilization is written into the beginning. Agriculture destroys the world. That’s not agriculture on a bad day. That’s what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil. Civilizations last between 800 and maybe 2,000 years—they last until the soil gives out.
What could be more sadistic then control of entire continents? He turns mountains into rubble, and rivers must do as they are told. The basic unit of life is violated with genetic engineering. The basic unit of matter as well, to make bombs that kill millions. This is his passion, turning the living into the dead. It’s not just individual deaths and not even the deaths of species. The process of life itself is now under assault and it is losing badly. Vertebrate evolution has long since come to a halt—there isn’t enough habitat left. There are areas in China where there are no flowering plants. Why? Because the pollinators are all dead. That’s five hundred million years of evolution: gone.
He wants it all dead. That’s his biggest thrill and the only way he can control it. According to him it was never alive. There is no self-willed community, no truly wild land. It’s all inanimate components he can arrange to this liking, a garden he can manage. Never mind that every land so managed has been lessened into desert. The essential integrity of life has been breached, and now he claims it never existed. He can do whatever he wants. And no one stops him.
__________
Can we stop him?
I say yes, but then I have no intention of giving up. The facts as they stand are unbearable, but it’s only in facing them that pattern comes clear. Civilization is based on drawdown. It props itself up with imperialism, conquering its neighbors and stripping their land, but eventually even the colonies wear out. Fossil fuel has been an accelerant, as has capitalism, but the underlying problem is much bigger than either. Civilization requires agriculture, and agriculture is a war against the living world. Whatever good was in the culture before, ten thousand years of that war has turned it necrotic.
But what humans do they can stop doing. Granted every institution is headed in the wrong direction, there’s no material reason the destruction must continue. The reason is political: the sadist is rewarded, and rewarded well. Most leftists and environmentalists see that. What they don’t see is the central insight of radical feminism: his pleasure in domination.
The real brilliance of patriarchy is right here: it doesn’t just naturalize oppression, it sexualizes acts of oppression. It eroticizes domination and subordination and then institutionalizes them into masculinity and femininity. Men become real men by breaking boundaries—the sexual boundaries of women and children, the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous people, the biological boundaries of rivers and forests, the genetic boundaries of other species, and the physical boundaries of the atom itself. The sadist is rewarded with money and power, but he also gets a sexual thrill from dominating. And the end of the world is a mass circle jerk of autoerotic asphyxiation.
The real brilliance of feminism is that we figured that out.
What has to happen to save our planet is simple: stop the war. If we just get out of the way, life will return because life wants to live. The forests and prairies will find their way back. Every dam will fail, every cement channel, and the rivers will ease their sorrows and meet the ocean again. The fish will know what to do. In being eaten, they feed the forest, which protects the rivers, which makes a home for more salmon. This is not the death of destruction but the death of participation that makes the world whole.
Sometimes there are facts that require all the courage we have in our hearts. Here is one. Carbon has breached 400 ppm. For life to continue, that carbon needs to get back into the ground. And so we come to grasses.
Where the world is wet, trees make forests. Where it’s dry, the grasses grow. Grasslands endure extreme heat in summer and vicious cold in winter. Grasses survive by keeping 80 percent of their bodies underground, in the form of roots. Those roots are crucial to the community of life. They provide physical channels for rain to enter the soil. They can reach down fifteen feet and bring up minerals from the rocks below, minerals that every living creature needs. They can build soil at an extraordinary rate. The base material they use to make soil is carbon. Which means the grasses are our only hope to get that carbon out of the sky.
And they will do it if we let them. If we could repair 75 percent of the world’s grasslands—destroyed by the war of agriculture—in under fifteen years, the grasses would sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age. Read that again if you need to. Then take it with you wherever you go. Tell it to anyone who will listen. There is still a chance.
The grasses can’t do it alone. No creature exists independent of all others. Repairing the grasslands means restoring the ruminants. In the hot, dry summer, life goes dormant on the surface of the soil. It’s the ruminants who keep the nutrient cycle moving. They carry an ecosystem inside themselves, especially the bacteria that digests cellulose. When a bison grazes, she’s not actually eating the grass. She’s feeding it to her bacteria. The bacteria eat the grass and then she eats the bacteria. Her wastes then water and fertilize the grasses. And the circle is complete.
The grasslands have been eradicated for agriculture, to grow cereal grains for people. Because I want to restore the grasses, I get accused of wanting to kill six billion people. That’s not a random number. In 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, there were one billion people. Now there are seven billion. Six billion are only here because of fossil fuel. Eating a non-renewable resource was never a plan with a future. Yet pointing that out somehow makes me a mass murderer.
Start with the obvious. Nothing we do at these numbers is sustainable. Ninety-eight percent of the old-growth forests and 99 percent of the grasslands are gone, and gone with them was most of the soil they built. There’s nothing left to take. The planet has been skinned alive.
Add to that: all civilizations end in collapse. All of them. How could it be otherwise if your way of life relies on destroying the place you live? The soil is gone and the oil is running out. By avoiding the facts, we are ensuring it will end in the worst possible way.
We can do better than mass starvation, failed states, ethnic strife, misogyny, petty warlords, and the dystopian scenarios that collapse brings. It’s very simple: reproduce at less than replacement numbers. The problem will take care of itself. And now we come to the girls.
What drops the birthrate universally is raising the status of women. Very specifically, the action with the greatest impact is teaching a girl to read. When women and girls have even that tiny bit of power over their lives, they choose to have fewer children. Yes, women need birth control, but what we really need is liberty. Around the world, women have very little control over how men use our bodies. Close to half of all pregnancies are unplanned or unwanted. Pregnancy is the second leading cause of death for girls age 15-19. Not much has changed since Emmeline Pankhurst refused to give up.
We should be defending the human rights of girls because girls matter. As it turns out, the basic rights of girls are crucial to the survival of the planet.
Can we stop him?
Yes, but only if we understand what we’re up against.
He wants the world dead. Anything alive must be replaced by something mechanical. He prefers gears, pistons, circuits to soft animal bodies, even his own. He hopes to upload himself into a computer some day.
He wants the world dead. He enjoys making it submit. He’s erected giant cities where once were forests. Concrete and asphalt tame the unruly.
He wants the world dead. Anything female must be punished, permanently. The younger they are, the sooner they break. So he starts early.
A war against your body is a war against your life. If he can get us to fight the war for him, we’ll never be free. But we said every woman’s body was sacred. And we meant it, too. Every creature has her own physical integrity, an inviolable whole. It’s a whole too complex to understand, even as we live inside it. I had no idea why my eyes were swelling and my lungs were aching. The complexities of keeping me alive could never be left to me.
One teaspoon of soil contains a million living creatures. One tiny scoop of life and it’s already more complex than we could ever understand. And he thinks he can manage oceans?
We’re going to have to match his contempt with our courage. We’re going to have to match his brute power with our fierce and fragile dreams. And we’re going to have to match his bottomless sadism with a determination that will not bend and will not break and will not stop.
And if we can’t do it for ourselves, we have to do it for the girls.
Whatever you love, it is under assault. Love is a verb. May that love call us to action.
Lierre Keith is the author of six books. Visit her website at www.lierrekeith.com
This essay first appeared August 8, 2015 on RadFem Repost.
by DGR News Service | Jul 25, 2019 | Agriculture, Direct Action, Property & Material Destruction
Editor’s note: large sections of this article are inspired by Without Rubber, the Machines Stop by Stop Fossil Fuels. Deep Green Resistance does not endorse their organization or their analysis but it’s worth reading.
by Liam Campbell
It’s easy to take rubber for granted. Without it, most of the world’s vehicles would literally grind to a halt, airplanes would eventually be grounded, and most of the world’s industrial factories would cease to be profitable. When someone mentions rubber people think of tires, but open up a car and you’ll find a staggering number of components require the substance: seals, hoses, shock absorbers, wiring, and interiors. If you swim farther down the supply chain you’ll discover that the manufacturing factories that create vehicles also need vast quantities of rubber to operate their own machinery; the same is true of the processing plants that refine raw materials for the factories, and so on all the way down the supply chain.
About half of all rubber comes from trees, and over 90% of natural rubber comes from Asia. The three largest producers are Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia; these few countries account for nearly 75% of all natural rubber production. The Americas used to be the world’s largest producer of rubber, until a highly resilient fungus called Microcyclus ulei annihilated the entire American industry.
In Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, Rob Dunn explains:
“Leaf blight will arrive in Asia at some point. How will it come? The spores of the fungus are thin and so don’t do well on extended travel, such as on boats, but they’d do fine on a plane. […] As a 2012 study notes, ‘The pathogen can be easily isolated from infected rubber trees…and transported undetected across borders,’ which is to say that the intentional destruction of the majority of the world’s rubber supply would be easy […] It would be easy because the trees are planted densely; because most of the plantations are relatively close together; because the trees are genetically very similar to each other. It would be easy because the trees in Malaysia have not been selected for resistance; they have been selected for productivity. Planters chose trees with lots of latex, favoring short-term benefit over long-term security.
Scholars express concern about whether terrorists might have the technology necessary to spread leaf blight to Asia. Do they have the specialized knowledge necessary to transport and propagate fungal spores, the specialized knowledge necessary to destroy the world’s supply of rubber? Of course they do, because all it would really take is a pocket full of infected leaves.
In other words, a single person could severely cripple industrial civilization by simply booking a few flights, carrying a few infected leaves, and going for a walk in among the trees. Soon after, Asia’s rubber plantations would suffer the same fate as their counterparts in the Americas, the cost of rubber would skyrocket, and industrial civilization would be dealt a crippling blow.
The other half of global rubber is derived from petroleum, but synthetic rubber remains significantly inferior to natural rubber. The increased cost and reduced availability would seriously interfere with industrial activities making personal vehicles much more expensive, hindering airlines, and likely reducing global fossil fuel use. More critically, aircraft tires and heavy industrial vehicle tires require almost 100% natural rubber, meaning those vehicles would become extremely difficult to maintain if Microcyclus ulei found its way to Asia.
We are indoctrinated to believe that individuals are powerless, and that industrialized civilization is an invincible Goliath. None of that is true. When systems become large and complex, they also become fragile due to having so many interdependent systems; this makes them susceptible to cascading failures. The stunning reality is that a determined 80-year-old grandmother could take down vast amounts of industrialized civilization by simply booking a holiday that included stops in the Americas and Asia, and collecting a few leaves along the way.
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