by DGR News Service | Mar 16, 2021 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
Our Dear Readers are invited to join the launch of the new book “Bright Green Lies” by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.
There are two events happening today, Tuesday 16th, 2021:
The first one you can join via Zoom. It will start 4pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles):
Register for the meeting here:
https://zoom.us/j/97416977102 (map)
Derrick Jensen returns to The Stoa, along with Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, his co-authors of the new book: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living).
This event caps our meta-crisis symposium and it also serves as a book launch party.
The second event will start right after the first at 5pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles) and will be hosted on Facebook:
Event by Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and Monkfish Book Publishing Company
The authors of the book “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” are hosting a virtual launch party. The event will feature the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Max Wilbert.
WHAT: You are invited to an online event with Facebook Live
DATE: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 5 PM Pacific Time
COST: Free
Public · Anyone on or off Facebook
![Inside the Lithium Mining War That Could Poison the Nevada Desert’s Water [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/03/Bildschirmfoto-7.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Mar 15, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Direct Action, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification
In this excerpt, Samir offers an outline of the rationale for the harmful development of lithium mines. In parallel we are also offered an outline of the development of the protest camp. While we are happy that a popular outlet like Vice News is writing about our campaign, we do not agree with all of the author’s statements. DGR is strongly opposed to any kind of industrial processes like mining because they are inherently destructive to life on planet earth. Hence we do not believe that there can be a “greener” kind of industrial resource extraction.
A mining giant wants to extract lithium from the Nevada desert to power electric cars. But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without costs.
One of the largest known lithium deposits in the world has sat undisturbed under the Nevada desert for centuries. Now, a mining giant wants to extract the resource to power electric cars using a potentially harmful method.
Before bringing in its equipment, however, the company will have to go through a blockade of environmental protesters that have been camped out at the site since December.
“Like the wildlife, we hunker down when the weather gets very bad and wait for the storm to break,”
said Max Wilbert, who started the Protect Thacker Pass, the grassroots organization leading the occupation.
“But we’re not backing down. What is at stake here is the soul of the entire environmental movement.”
Right now, Thacker Pass, a section of public land stretching hundreds of acres in northern Nevada, is several environmental permits—and lawsuits—away from becoming a massive open-pit mining project run by Canada-based Lithium Americas. The metal excavated from the planned 18,000-acre site will be used to manufacture rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without its costs:
The proposed mining process at Thacker Pass uses sulfuric acid, which could seep into the water supply. The operation also requires tapping into groundwater, which could decrease its availability. Both would impact the ecosystems of several at-risk species, like golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, and Nevada’s state fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout.
In an effort to protect the land, dozens of protestors from across the country have posted up at the site in freezing nighttime temperatures with heated tents and portable mini-toilets. Local ranchers, concerned about the welfare of their land and water supply, have also joined the cause.
The original article can be read in full on Vice News.
For more on the issue:
by DGR News Service | Mar 12, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification
In this article, originally published on The Conversation, the authors describe how extractive industries use social engineering and counterinsurgency techniques to avoid or manage resistance.
By Judith Verweijen, Lecturer, University of Sheffield, and
Alexander Dunlap, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Oslo
Around the globe, concern is mounting about the unfolding climate and ecological catastrophe. Yet the extraction of natural resources through mining and energy projects continues on a large scale, with disastrous environmental consequences.
To understand how this is possible, one place to start is recognising that extraction is not just a physical engineering process. It requires social engineering as well. To be able to function smoothly, extractive corporations and their governmental allies sculpt social conditions. They “manufacture” consent and “manage” dissent towards their ventures.
These industries depend on shaping the perceptions and behaviour of governments, shareholders, consumers, and people living in the areas where large-scale resource extraction occurs.
Usually, the media and academics pay attention when people resist such projects. A well known case is the struggle of the Ogoni people in southeast Nigeria to hold the oil company Shell to account for massive pollution. But it’s also important to notice the way corporations, governments and other elites try to pre-empt opposition.
This means looking beyond obvious conflict and repression, to the less visible and long-term efforts to shape people’s opinions and behaviour. In a recent article in Political Geography, we analyse some of these corporate attempts at social engineering.
The counterinsurgency toolbox
Many of the corporate strategies and tactics to address opposition come from the toolbox of counterinsurgency. There are “hard” techniques, such as direct and indirect coercion, and “soft” tools aimed at “pacifying target populations”.
The “softer” forms often relate to “community relations” work, such as sponsoring local events, medical clinics and other social development programmes. Social investments foster sympathy for extractive projects and dissipate criticism. How can one fight a corporation that provides so many life-affirming opportunities?
The “soft tools” of social engineering also include bureaucratic procedures and practices. One example is legislation acknowledging indigenous people’s right to consent to or reject extractive projects on their land. A growing body of research shows how this legislation eases the way for projects to expand into community territories.
Another way that extraction is made acceptable is through seemingly neutral speech. A case in point is speaking of “lessons learned” in relation to involuntary resettlement for extractive projects. In Mozambique, representatives of the government and extractive multinationals use the language of “learning lessons” from previous forced displacement efforts. This is to prevent opposition to renewed resettlement plans for liquid natural gas extraction in the north of the country.
Directing attention to the technical procedures of displacement and how they can be “improved” takes attention away from displacement itself. And local NGOs become concerned with the resettlement initiatives, instead of critically monitoring the new projects.
Bureaucratic procedures can make it look as if the people affected by resource extraction are participating, influencing decisions and sharing in the benefits. But the procedures actually channel and control dissent. They make it seem as if individuals themselves are responsible for gaining or losing from extractive operations, instead of directing attention to structural power inequalities.
The chimera of ‘green mining’
Another set of social engineering strategies is “green mining”.
Since the 1990s, large-scale extractive companies have started to profile themselves as part of a global transition to sustainability. They engage in biodiversity offsets or draw on and invest in wind and solar power. More recently, corporations have attempted to depict deep-sea mining as sustainable. They claim it has limited impact on deep-sea ecosystems, in particular when compared to the dynamic and volcanic nature of the seabed.
But it’s debatable how much “green extractivism” reduces the ecological harm of large-scale resource extraction.
Offsets are based on the idea that mining corporations can make up for damage in one place by investing in biodiversity protection elsewhere. Research shows that the net benefits of these investments are very limited. Also, it’s difficult to compare the value of what is lost and what is protected.
Biodiversity offsets can be part of political pacification, as shown by the case of Rio Tinto in Madagascar. Through a vast programme of offsetting and restoration, this corporation has managed to counter criticism of its operations. Yet offsets have created conflicts and insecurities for locals. They have also allowed the corporation to extend control over land, people and resources to multiple sites.
The green economy has not only become a way to legitimise large-scale resource extraction. It has also become a new source of profit as corporations invest in market-driven nature conservation, ecotourism, and the production of biofuels and low-carbon energy.
Going forward
Without further economic transformation, the demand for so called “clean energy” will lead resource extraction to soar. For example, the production of minerals such as lithium and cobalt is expected to increase from 2018 by as much as 500% by 2050.
“Green growth” is a false narrative that industries push to continue business as usual. Academics and social movements should expose this narrative to avoid it becoming the cornerstone of climate policy.
To address the ecological and climate crisis, policies fostering degrowth and redistribution are needed. This is the only way to acknowledge the historical responsibility of rich countries and ensure climate justice on a global scale.
by DGR News Service | Mar 4, 2021 | Climate Change, The Problem: Civilization
This article, written by Evan Lim, describes how glaciers are disappearing much faster that previous evidence based studies have estimated. Lim outlines the disastrous effects on communities.
By Evan Lim/Climate and Capitalism
Glaciers are disappearing to twice as fast as previous studies estimated, with disastrous effects on many communities.
Two new studies suggest that recent estimates of global ice melt are conservative.
In other words, ice is melting much more rapidly than experts thought. As a result, sea levels are rising faster as well.
The first study combines various observations from satellites, on-the-ground measurements, and model-based estimates to create a clearer picture of the state of Earth’s ice between 1994 and 2017. Essentially, it captures a global tally of change in ice mass over that time period. The resulting measurements of ice loss and sea level rise fall in the upper range of scenarios forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body within the United Nations meant to provide objective science related to climate change. The IPCC’s scenarios were laid out in their 2019 special report on oceans and the cryosphere, itself a recent overview of assessment work.
Faster sea level rise means that more areas will experience devastating floods sooner, and we are already seeing more of such events.
The second study zooms in on a particular region, rather than compiling measurements at the global scale. Focusing on Greenland, this study investigates how warmer ocean water affects marine terminating glaciers — those that end at the ocean. The authors identified at least 74 glaciers with retreats strongly influenced by warmer ocean waters, which expedite mass loss by undercutting a glacier’s base. Thus, the rest of the glacier is weakened and can collapse. Importantly, glacial melt contributes to rising sea levels; icebergs calving as glaciers thin adds water to the oceans.
The authors of the first study emphasized that there is little doubt that the majority of ice loss is due to climate warming. In an interview with GlacierHub, Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and a professor of glaciology and geomorphodynamics at the University of Zurich who is not affiliated with the study, stated that “Overall, the data show that climate change is happening and impacts are only increasing.”
Zemp also highlighted the complexity of systems in the cryosphere, emphasizing an important dynamic between the two studies in question. Broadly, the driving force of increased ice melt is climate warming. However, within glaciated regions around the world, there are specific characteristics that need to be taken into consideration.
For example, as the Greenland study demonstrates, the region’s glaciers are losing mass much more quickly as the ocean waters melt them from below, making it more easy for pieces to break and fall off. As this regional phenomenon affects the glaciers so significantly, the study authors point out that “projections that exclude ocean-induced undercutting may underestimate mass loss by at least a factor of 2.”
From the different characteristics of each region to the various measurement types (satellite, on-the-ground, modeling) to the time periods in which measurements are observed, models of the cryosphere have much to incorporate. Zemp notes that reports by the IPCC, which attempt to pull data from many different studies, can suffer as a result of the challenges of incorporating wide-ranging factors.
When asked how to reduce ice melt, Walter Immerzeel, a professor at Utrecht University, answered,
“the only real option is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ASAP. The re-entry of the U.S. in the Paris climate agreement is a hopeful sign.”
Zemp’s conclusion echoed Immerzeel’s:
“the response is not easy, but still very simple. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris Agreement will hopefully help with this.”
The Greenland study notes that from 2008-2017, there was a cooling period in the ocean near Greenland. Despite this cooling, grounded ice (ice on land) continued to retreat significantly. As a result of previous warming, the glaciers have already been removed from their state of equilibrium, meaning the balance between mass gain and loss is gone. Even if emissions stopped immediately, there would still be lingering effects and mass loss as a result of the damage that has already been done. If emissions stopped, global temperatures would still be high enough for ice to continue to melt.
“It [climate change] was already urgent, but these conclusions further emphasize this. We need to act now and invest in both mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (being prepared for the impact),” Immerzeel told GlacierHub.
He also noted that increased ice melt has significant implications for communities which rely on glaciers as sources of fresh drinking water and water for irrigation. For example, villages in Peru rely heavily on the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. The mountains and glaciers provide a rich cultural history, economic benefits through tourism and water used for irrigation, tourist guesthouses and household consumption. As the glaciers melt, the traditions of the culture that rely on the glaciers disappear, and people’s livelihoods are threatened by the impacts on tourism and agriculture and the sudden appearance of floods.
While certain damages are unavoidable, there can absolutely be more harm to come if significant action is not taken now.
Whether action is undertaken to protect current vulnerable communities or future generations, reducing emissions can shrink the burden people will inevitably have to bear. Communities are being affected as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, but the extent to which these damages will occur is still uncertain and can still be changed if the right measures are taken.
This article was written by Evan Lim, Columbia University Earth Institute, and published in Climate & Capitalism on February 17th, 2021. You can read at source here.
GlacierHub.
The principal studies referenced in this article:
by DGR News Service | Mar 2, 2021 | Climate Change, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
Written By Paul Street and published in CounterPunch on February 19th 2021, this article provides seering analysis of capitalism and ongoing environmental collapse in the current politic climate.
By Paul Street/CounterPunch
We could stop being surprised by terrible things if we paid more attention to past and current history.
We could also remember that we are part of Nature and cannot survive much longer in a state of capitalist war on the web of life.
Shocking, Yes; Surprising, No
No Empathy Joe
Yes, it’s terrible that Joe Biden has refused to forgive more than a pittance of student debt. But do we not recall him telling a Los Angeles Times host that he had “no empathy, give me a break” for the plight of Millennials in the savagely unequal and environmentally unsustainable world he’d helped create over decades of Congressional service to corporate and financial America? No surprise.
Fascists Doing Fascist Stuff
The Trump-instigated January 6th fascistic Attack on the Capitol was shocking. Contrary to the “oh my God I can’t believe this is happening in America!” response of dismayed cable news talking heads, it was hardly surprising. As the historian Timothy Snyder noted in its aftermath, “When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march to the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of the American version.”
That’s because Trump was and is a fascist, as was clear well before he was elected. So are many of his backers. Nobody who paid attention to the real record of this white-supremacist racial- nationalist authoritarian and his Amerikaner base (please see my chapter on “the Trumpenvolk” in this excellent volume) should have been astounded by January 6th. It was the final crazed act in a rolling coup campaign that had been underway for months.
A Predicted and Predictable Pandemic Nightmare
The COVID-19 pandemic has been shocking. It should never have been surprising. Public health experts had been warning about such an event for many years from their observation of global capitalism’s encroachment into new geographic and biological spheres and the remarkable speed and scale with which the world capitalist system spreads people and germs across planetary space.
The special virulence with which the virus hit the United States is shocking but unsurprising. It was to be expected given the nation’s extreme attachments and captivity to corporate power, extreme class disparity savage racial inequality, and military empire. The U.S profits and war system is incapable of protecting public health. American “democracy” is about the upward concentration of wealth and power, with disastrous consequences for the common good. The terrible outcomes include a for-profit health care system wired to serve only the rich and a poisoned food system and environment that feeds rampant co-morbidities across the land. The steepest health price is paid by poor people of color, who have died to a disproportionate degree.
Of course COVID-19 made the U.S. its most favored nation. It’s the extreme capitalism, the over-the-top individualism, and the related acute racial oppression that made this predictable.
Capitalogenic Ecocide
The ongoing collapse of livable ecology, whose symptoms include ever more extreme weather (like the recent and ongoing polar cold snap within and beyond the U.S. South) is shocking. It is proceeding as predicted by environmental scientists who have warned for many decades about the exterminist consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The climate we used to know is being blown up by carbon capitalism, as predicted even by Exxon-Mobil.
The capital order is addicted to perpetual “growth,” that is accumulation, to sustain its rate of profit and to paper over its inequalities. It’s an environmentally unsustainable dependence. If we don’t break our dependence on capitalism, we are done for (we may already be done for). Capitalism is wired for the termination of livable ecology.
This Kills Everything
On this last point, this would be a good time for us to stop avoiding the little mater of ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. I enjoyed the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff’s recent reflection on how the accumulation and investment centers of global capitalism are “migrating away from the U.S., Europe, and Japan.” By Wolff’s analysis, which strikes me as correct:
The blunt truth of modern economic development is this: capitalism is leaving its old centers and relocating to its new centers. About this leaving we can and should borrow the phrase: this changes everything…. On the one hand, the movement of capitalism from old to new centers plunges the old into a long-term decline evident in decaying industries and cities. Politics shifts away from prioritizing growth, adjudicating internal conflicts in ways that reproduce growing capitalism, and shaping the world into a distinctive center-periphery pattern. Instead, policies shift toward maintaining the global status quo against the many forces eroding it. For many politicians that shift of focus degenerates into scapegoating amid cascading social divisions and decay…On the other hand, capitalism finds profitable new territory in its new centers. Growth there offsets a decline in the old centers. The global 1 percent get richer because they draw increased wealth from both the old and new centers (emphasis added).
After reading this, I had two reactions. First: “brilliant, this helps us demystify a lot of recent economic, social, and political history.” Second: “fine but guess/so what?” Wherever its leading control, investment, and growth centers are located, capitalism has now so completely polluted and cooked the entirely planetary ecosystem that we will be fortunate to survive another half century as a species if we don’t get off this lethal growth-/accumulation-/profit-addicted system.
I might feel less compelled to offer this criticism if Wolff hadn’t referenced the title of the leading environmentalist Naomi Klein’s important book This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. The Climate.
Here’s a little secret about capitalism: it kills everything no matter where its leading centers are located. It’s not Marx’s midwife to socialism; it’s a malignant cancer ready to bring about “the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Interesting, Even Exciting Times!
More disturbing on this and related scores was the brilliant and (I think justly) celebrated American historian and political commentator Rick Perlstein’s recent dialogue with Salon’s Chauncy de Vega, who deserves special recognition for having properly identified and denounced Trump was a fascist from the start:
De Vega: “How are you feeling given the Age of Trump and all that mayhem and pain, a pandemic and an overall surreal state of affairs? How are you making sense of this?”
Perlstein: “For all the horror of seeing one of America’s two major parties descend into fascism, the fact is that I am a writer and a historian. That we are living in the middle of a time that people will probably be talking about in a hundred years is interesting and exciting to me.”
Where to begin in responding to this? To start with, Perlstein might have wanted to tell de Vega, “hey, I was wrong and you were right about Trump” since Perlstein engaged in some brilliant but (as it turned out) wrongheaded denial of Trump’s fascist essence in the fall of 2015, by which tine de Vega was correctly identifying the orange monster for what it really was.
Then there’s the horrific candor of Perlstein finding recent American fascist politics and history “interesting and exciting” (on an intellectual level). Perlstein’s comment struck me as an elegant version of Tourette’s Syndrome. This is something you don’t say even if you think it. “Interesting and exciting” (to a well-off white professional American author)? Tell it to the immigrants penned up in Amerika’s concentration camps, the parents whose children were stolen from them at the southern U.S. border, and the survivors of the 450,000-plus Americans who have died from the pandemic Trump fanned across the nation, dismissing its significance (he said it “affects virtually no one” even after he survived it with the help of the best taxpayer-funded socialist medicine and treatment available).Tell it to the survivors of people murdered by white-nationalist killers triggered by Trump’s hateful rhetoric (e.g., Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, the victims of the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre, and the Tree of Life killings in Pittsburgh), and the people of Puerto Rico, who Trump left to suffer without adequate federal relief (while downplaying the extent of death and destruction) in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Tell it to the people of Iran. Tell it to the Muslims and others from Muslim countries who were unable to visit loved ones because of Trump’s racist travel ban. Tell it to the survivors of the hundreds of prospective migrants who have died in the southwestern U.S. desert (including 227 people whose remains were found along the U.S,-Mexico border last year) thanks to Trump’s intensified border enforcement and partial wall construction.
Mad Max if We’re Lucky
As my fellow historian and journalist Terry Thomas comments: “I think one might place more emphasis on the ‘horror’ of the Republican Party’s descent into fascism than the business about it being a time people will be talking about in a hundred years. … in a hundred years it could be something like a Mad Max movie, because we failed during this historical juncture. I don’t know how ‘exciting’ that is.”
But back to the environmental matter: it does not look good for a 22nd Century historian being able to look back smartly on the “interesting” and “exciting” times experienced in the US during the Trump years and their aftermath. There’s this little problem of the Antarctic melting around 2050 or 2060, under the pressure of growth-addicted global capitalism, whose key centers shift across geographic zones and nation states while rain forests are felled, arctic ice sheets collapse, and methane bubbles up in mass quantities from melting permafrost.
That changes everything.
I’d say its Mad Max if we’re lucky, to partly paraphrase Istvan Meszaros who (thinking of the environmental crisis) updated Rosa Luxembourg by writing “it’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” two decades ago.
On a small but happy note, the epic fascist hate machine Rush Limbaugh has finally been silenced by Mother Nature. Vatican geologists report one of the fastest descents into Perdition on record.
Paul Street’s new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.
by DGR News Service | Feb 26, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, The Problem: Civilization
This article was written by Morgan Erickson-Davis.
Morgan describes how biodiverse wetlands are, she asserts we need a change in law to restore them begin to look after and to recreate balance between people, wetlands and biodiversity.
By Morgan Erickson-Davis
- Wetlands provide many benefits to ecological and human communities alike, from nutrients and nurseries to flood control and climate change mitigation.
- However, as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands has been lost over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900.
- In response, nations banded together and in 1971 ratified the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world.
- But 50 years on, researchers say the convention has not led to effective protection and wetlands continue to blink out.
Swamps, sloughs, marshes, bogs, fens; water purification, flood control, wildlife nurseries, nutrient providers, carbon sinks: wetlands have many names and serve many environmental purposes. But for centuries they have been viewed simply as hindrances to human development, obstacles to drain and dredge to make room for progress.
Few have escaped this pressure.
Research indicates the world may have lost as much as 87% of its wetlands over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900. But in the mid-20th century scientists started grasping just how ecologically – and economically – important wetlands are, and the global environmental community rushed to protect those that still remained.
The result was the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world. Named after Ramsar, Iran, where it was first signed in 1971, the convention today protects 2,413 wetlands encompassing some 2.55 million square kilometers (985,000 sq mi) and has been ratified by 170 countries.
And yet, wetlands are still disappearing. In an article published in the journal Nature earlier this month, researchers Peter Bridgewater at the University of Canberra and Rakhyun Kim at Utrecht University say the convention has not been the protective force it was intended to be.
“Over the 50-year lifetime of the convention, at least 35 percent of wetlands globally have been lost,” Bridgewater and Kim said in a press release.
That number was revealed during the Ramsar Convention’s first-ever Global Wetland Outlook in 2018, which also found that the world’s wetlands were disappearing three times faster than its forests. According to the outlook, the major driving forces behind wetlands loss are climate change, population increase, urbanization and changing consumption patterns like shifts towards a more meat-heavy diet, which requires the clearing and cultivation of larger areas of land.
In addition to supplying vital habitat and “biological supermarkets” for wildlife, wetlands provide important ecosystem services for human communities around the world. They reduce the likelihood of flooding by soaking up excess water from swollen rivers, they filter pollutants from groundwater before it enters aquifers, and they are one of the most effective natural carbon storage systems on the planet. According to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel, wetlands store 35% of the world’s land-based carbon – despite covering just 9% of the its surface.
“Without wetlands, the global agenda on sustainable development will not be achieved,” said Martha Rojas Urrego, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, in a statement. “We need urgent collective action to reverse trends on wetland loss and degradation, and secure both the future of wetlands and our own at the same time.”
In their article, Bridgewater and Kim acknowledge the Ramsar convention has achieved positive results such as increasing awareness and attracting membership of most of the world’s nations, as well as establishing a global network of Wetlands of International Importance. However, they say it is not really working as intended.
“One of its major flaws is the Ramsar’s site-based approach,” they said, referring to the convention’s focus on identifying and protecting individual wetlands. All too often this protection exists only on paper, Bridgewater and Kim say, explaining that there is generally little on-the-ground change when a site is officially demarcated as a Wetland of International Importance.
“Clearly, expanding the Ramsar list has not been sufficient to improve the conservation status of wetlands,” they write, “although its absence may likely have produced even worse results for wetland conservation.”
To truly protect the world’s wetlands, Bridgewater and Kim say the convention needs to better connect with other global conservation schemes, shift its focus from simply collecting sites to ensuring that those already established are more effectively managed, and implement a more holistic understanding of wetland ecology and hydrology that considers the influence of the surrounding landscape.
“Some structural change in governance and implementation mechanisms is necessary,” they write. “Only more adaptive and dynamic global governance mechanisms will help take global decisions through to implementation and action locally, nationally and regionally; restoring the balance needed between people, wetlands and the rest of their biodiversity in the Anthropocene.”
This article was written by Morgan Erickson-Davis and originally published on Mongabay on 13th February 2021. You can read the original here.
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Citation: Bridgewater, P., Kim, R.E. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands at 50. Nat Ecol Evol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01392-5
