“For years, land and environmental defenders have been the first line of defence against climate breakdown. Yet despite clearer evidence than ever of the crucial role they play, far too many businesses, financiers and governments fail to safeguard their vital and peaceful work.” Globalwitness.org
Colombia, is a country with amazingly diverse ecosystems.
There are also a huge diversity of cultures. In 2019, Colombia was the worst country to be an environmental activist. There was hope this would improve in 2020 but sadly this was not the case. Worse still, Colombia started on new year’s day in 2021 with the murder of young people who were who fought with the guerrilla organization The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and had demobilized to return with their family after the peace agreement was signed in June 2016. FARC signed a ceasefire accord with the President of Colombia. A year later, FARC handed over its weapons to the United Nations. At this point it ceased to be an active, armed group.
The first day of this year started with the execution of a former member of the FARC, Yolanda Mazo aged only 22 and Reina her 17 year old sister. They were murdered in the early morning Friday, January 1st 2021. Yolanda is one of hundreds of activists who have been killed since the signing of the Accords between the Colombian state and the FARC. In addition to the deaths of two young women two union leaders have also been murdered.
Environmental activist found dead.
Most recently, Gonzalo Cardona, the first environmental activist and forest ranger who worked in the protection of the paramo ecosystem was murdered. These ecosystems are regions considered to be “evolutionary hot spots“. The ranger worked to protect this area and several endangered species of birds. He stood for the conservation of the habitat of the yellow eared parrot “loro orejiamarillo” and for the preservation of the natural world from the mining the deforestation and the industrial agriculture.
The systemic and systematic violence on the land and towards the Colombian people is brutal. It is the consequence of the capitalist system, of greed and profit over the health of the natural world and the humans and non-humans that inhabit it. The dominant, violent system depends upon inequality, poverty and repression of social movements to remain in power and when the profit or the power is threatened, they remove the threat.
Who is responsible?
The Colombian government, the military forces, the paramilitary groups and other armed groups are responsible for these deaths, for these murders. All this violence has its roots in land control, exploitation of natural resources and silencing of social movements. The Colombian government, in collusion with national and multinational corporate interests, continue to profit from the destruction of the natural world. They gain political benefits through mining contracts, fracking developments and widespread industrial agriculture. Those in power ensure the elites own the land, reducing the power of the poeple to defend land.
The Colombian government and those who benefits on the land exploitation, continue to attack and discredit social and environmental movements and when they feel threatened people die.
Derrick Jensen interviews activists each week. This week Derrick interviews Cayte Bosler.
Cayte is an investigative environmental journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University. She researches solutions for protecting biodiversity and has worked with land-based communities and wildlife defenders throughout Latin America. Her interest is in chronicling community-led resistance to exploitation and ecological abuse to inspire resistance elsewhere. Today we talk about whales.
[Whales] are some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. They spend 99% of their lives under water, far beyond any of our observational tools. Even with the sliver of what we do know, it’s so fascinating.
We’ve only barely begun to understand their rich languages and music. It wasn’t a common knowledge until 1970s that whales could sing. We heard them singing on these amazing recordings that were release then and were part of what inspired this very effort to save them.
We don’t even know their migration routes or where they go in the oceans. A few years ago, we discovered – I’ve trouble with the word discovered. It’s not like out there waiting for us to discover them. But, they were discovered to science, off the coast of Japan species species of beaked whales.
There are about 89 species of cetaceans known to science. Cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises. They’re generally categorized into baleen whales and toothed whales.
Baleen whales are the massive gentle giants. The blue whales, which is one of the biggest creatures ever to exist on planet Earth. Some fun facts: Their heart is the size of a car. Their tongue alone weighs more than an elephant. It’s said that they can fill 2000 balloons with a single breath. (I hope no one actually goes out and tries to test this. That will be a lot of plastic pollution we don’t want.) Some other baleen whales are right whales, humpback whales, or some of the most studied ones, minke whales, grey whales.
Even to understand where their feeding grounds are, we’re using tools like GPS to locate them. That’s really important so we can avoid collisions with ships and some other threats.
They’re just so intriguing. They have some of the biggest brains. We’re starting to try to come up with all these experiments to interact with them, have conversations even. It’s really a shame because I studied lots of different animals and I fall so in love with them and what they are capable of, and at the same time, I’m learning how we’re losing them, and the richness they bring to the world and how that’s being ousted as well.
I have been asked to write a letter to someones grandchildren for the solstice. I think this fitting since i have no children. Sometimes i think of the movement as my children and is certainly a consideration when devoting to this path. 7 generations.
To all the grandchildren i have this message for you. As some of you know the world is in dire condition. Many of you have been born into a world where your existence and quality of life is questionable. Despite this please try to rise to the occasion and meet the challenges of your generation head on with dignity and determination. Defend your communities and the natural world. Challenge yourself to learn your roots. It helps to know where your coming from to know where your going. Try to get back to your roots before industrial civilization. Form sustainable habits. Find ways to give back to the earth who truly is our mother and source of your true power. Benefit and restore her whenever possible. Stick up for people. Stick up for all the creatures of the world the swimmers, the four legged, those crawlers and those who fly. Extinction is a major issue you will face in your lifetime. It will be difficult. Do it anyway. More people are coming to join you because there is no turning away from this truth. You will face climate catastrophe. Over 200 species go extinct each day. In the Anishinaabe wolf story it explains that what happens to the wolf will also happen to human kind. Remember not to be so worried about what people think of you that it prevents you from making a stand. On difficult days try to remember the animals and forests you fought for. Your causes. Put some water or tobacco on the ground from time to time.
If there was any wisdom i wanted to leave the youth was that we set out to prove wolves are sacred to the tribes of Turtle Island and they are. Wolves like humans in their ancient forms are what science calls a keystone species. This means they benefit the natural world around them. Its a compass telling you where to go, where to return to. How to find your way home.
Regularly study martial arts. One of the most useful things you can do for this world. Keep your self capable, and fortified. Do this for the planet so you can respond in defense of her, do this for your community, your family, lastly do this for yourself. This way you can protect. Solve problems as they arise. Build your mind and your spirit by building your body. Do this so your as a responsibility to pull your own weight. Be your own security. This is especially important for women so you don’t have to run to a man or the system for help, you can handle it right there on the spot. This is a huge and overlooked solution to many of the problems we face today.
At times it will seem difficult to work with other people and the people will be divided. Seek unity and collaboration where you can and hold it in high regard. The wolf teaches us to work together. That we are strong together. Community. This is the same for humans. Individuality is a lie. Contribute to the lives and well being of others. Seek to deeply understand the meaning of family in life. Be present for them. This is a very important time to be alive. Embrace it.
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote.“That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”
Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides, it was a cri de couer against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.
Yet five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction, or even slowed it. In those same decades, global animal populations have dropped by 70 percent. Right now, we are losing about one football field of forest every single second. Looking forward provides no solace: the oceans are projected to be empty of fish by 2048.
A salient reason for this failure is that so much environmentalism no longer focuses on saving wild beings and wild places, but instead on how to power their destruction. The beings and biomes who were once our concern have disappeared from the conversation. In their place we are now told to advocate for projects like the Green New Deal. While endangered ecosystems get a mention, the heart of the plan is “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in the service of industrial manufacturing.
This new movement is called bright green environmentalism.
Its advocates believe technology and design can render industrial civilization sustainable, and that “green technologies” are good for the planet. Some bright greens are well-known and beloved figures like Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben as well as organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Audubon. These committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into consciousness, a huge win as glaciers melt and tundra burns. But bright greens are solving for the wrong variable. Their solutions to global warming take our way of life as a given, and the planet’s health as the dependent variable. That’s backwards: the planet’s health must be more important than our way of life because without a healthy planet you don’t have any way of life whatsoever.
The bright green narrative has to ignore the creatures and communities being consumed. Take the Scottish wildcat, numbering a grim 35, all at risk from a proposed wind installation. Or the birds dying by the thousands at solar facilities in California, where concentrated sunlight melts every creature flying over.
Or the entire biome of the southern wetland forest, being logged four times faster than South American rainforests. Dozens of huge pulp mills export 100 percent of this “biomass” to Europe to feed the demand for biofuels, which bright greens promote as sustainable and carbon-neutral. The forest has a biological diversity unmatched in North America, lush with life existing nowhere else and barely hanging on. This includes the Southeastern American Kestrel. They need longleaf pine savannahs, and longleaf pine have been reduced to 3% of their range. The kestrels depend for their homes on red-cockaded woodpeckers, who exist as a whisper at 1% of historic numbers. Last in this elegiac sample is the gopher tortoise. Four hundred mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects cannot survive without the protective cover of the burrows dug by tortoises, tortoises now critically endangered. All these creatures are our kin: our fragile, wondrous, desperate kin, and environmentalists would have them reduced to pellets, shipped to Europe, and burned, while calling their slaughter “green.”
Facts about renewable energy are worse than inconvenient.
First, industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy. Second is that fossil fuel — especially oil — is functionally irreplaceable. Scaling renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, hydro, and biomass, would constitute ecocide. Twelve percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet electricity demand alone. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72% of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. Meanwhile, solar and wind development threaten to destroy as much land as projected urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined by 2050.
Finally, solar, wind, and battery technologies are, in their own right, assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on a geologic timescale, extirpation of vulnerable species, and use of fossil fuels. In reality, “green” technologies are some of the most destructive industrial processes ever invented. They won’t save the earth. They’ll only hasten its demise.
There are solutions, once we confront the actual problem.
Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let the world come back. A recent study in Nature found we could cut the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in half by reverting 30% of the world’s farmland to its natural state. This would also preserve 70% of endangered animals and plants. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit when it comes to combating climate change and healing our planet. Everywhere there are examples of how the wounded are healed, the missing appear, and the exiled return. Forests repair, grasses take root, and soil sequesters carbon. It’s not too late.
The green new deal has reforestation as one of its goals, but it’s not the main goal, as it should be. If environmentalism is going to help save the planet — and if it’s going to respond to global warming commensurate with the threat — it needs to return to its roots, and remember the love that founders like Rachel Carson had for the land. We need to pledge our loyalty to this planet, our only home.
There’s no time for despair.
Wildcats and kestrels need us now. We have to take back our movement and defend our beloved. How can we do less? And with all of life on our side, how can we lose?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. The book will be available March 16th, but you can pre-order to your local bookstore or library via IndieBound now.
Reconnaissance Energy Africa, an oil and gas company with headquarters in Canada, has recently begun exploratory drilling in northern Namibia.
Conservationists and local communities are concerned over the potential environmental impact that oil and gas extraction could have on such an important ecosystem.
Northern Namibia and Botswana have a number of interconnected watersheds including the Okavango Delta – the potential for pollutants to enter watercourses and spread throughout the region are a particular concern.
On December 21, Reconnaissance Energy Africa (Recon Africa) announced that it had begun exploratory drilling for oil and gas in the Namibian portion of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA). The move has alarmed environmental campaigners and community groups who are concerned about the impact this could have on the region’s watercourses, people and wildlife.
Recon Africa is the holder of a licence to explore a 2.5 million hectare area (6.3-million-acres) of northeastern Namibia, granted to a predecessor company in January 2015. The majority of the area covered by Petroleum Exploration Licence (PEL) 73 sits in the KAZA, a conservation initiative covering 520,000 square kilometres (201,000 square miles) of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The company also has a licence to prospect for oil in another section of KAZA, 1 million hectare area (2.5 million acres) of northwestern Botswana, where it hopes to begin drilling in 2021.
Concerns
The KAZA conservation area is home to the largest remaining population of African elephants and is one of the last remaining strongholds of the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus). Recon Africa’s exploration areas in both Botswana and Namibia fall largely within the Okavango River Basin which flows into the richly-biodiverse Okavango Delta — a UNESCO World Heritage site. Conservationists are particularly concerned by the potential impact drilling for oil and gas here could have on the interconnected watercourses of the river basin.
“There is a serious lack of knowledge on groundwater resources in the target oil and gas extraction area,” said Surina Esterhuyse, a geohydrologist at the University of the Free State, South Africa. “In Botswana, the Okavango river basin is still relatively pristine, but the planned exploration and extraction could have serious impacts on the [Okavango] delta.”
Recon Africa is drilling into a 9,000-meter-deep sedimentary basin known to geologists as the Kavango Basin to establish whether there is actually oil beneath the KAZA, and if these resources can be economically exploited. Daniel Jarvie, a geochemist consulting for Recon Africa, estimates that the basin holds a similar potential quantity of extractable oil and gas as the Eagle Ford Basin in Texas, USA. Since production there began in 2008, over 20,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled at Eagle Ford.
Use and contamination of water.
“The possible impact that oil and gas extraction would have on the water resources in Namibia and Botswana is the biggest concern,” says Esterhuyse, whose research focuses on the impact of oil and gas extraction on groundwater resources. The two main areas of concern are the use of water, particularly in areas such as northern Namibia, where water is a scarce resource, and possible contamination of water sources through oil and gas extraction.
The risks posed by oil and gas extraction are greater if unconventional hydraulic fracturing techniques, commonly known as fracking, are used. Regular references to “unconventional plays” in Recon Africa’s marketing material and the hiring of experienced fracking engineers have led to concerns that this may be the company’s intention.
So far the Namibian government has only approved the drilling to two test wells approximately 55km south of the town of Rundu. Any further activity would require additional environmental impact assessments and approval from the Namibian government, which has a 10% share in the oil exploration venture through the state oil company, NAMCOR. Whilst they await the outcome of the current operations, communities in the region are growing increasingly concerned.
“The local community are in darkness, they don’t have clues on what is going on,” said Max Muyemburuko, chairperson of the Muduva Nyangana Conservancy that lies in PEL 73. “They want their voices to be heard.”
Muyemburuko says they have not been contacted by Recon Africa or the Namibian government about potential plans for oil and gas production in the region. Residents of the Muduva Nyangana Conservancy rely on tourism income and natural resources from the land. Muyemburuko fears these could be jeopardised by pollution from oil and gas production.
“Kavango is the only land that we have,” he said. “We will keep it for the generation to come.”
The ministry of mines has said that proposed oil exploration activities will not harm the Okavango ecosystem in any way and highlight the potential economic benefits of a major oil discovery. The ministry also says that no oil and gas exploration will be allowed in national parks, but this does not include the KAZA conservation area which does not enjoy the same level of environmental protection as parks.
Recon Africa’s carefully crafted responses to challenges over environmental questions strike a sharp contrast to the company’s bold claims of an “unprecedented opportunity” in its marketing materials. If the Kavango Basin proves to have the lucrative potential that Recon Africa’s shareholders are hoping for, the Namibian government will face difficult questions over how to balance the allure of oil dollars against environmental protection for one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
In this reflective writing Will Falk offers his thoughts on the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, human civilization and his thoughts on the natural world.
I viewed the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn from my parents’ back porch in Castle Rock, CO, a Denver suburb.
It took my dad and I several minutes to locate the planets amongst the streaking, blinking lights of airplanes crossing the southwestern sky. I wanted the experience to be more joyful than it was. But, it was hard to marvel at the heavens while the earth around me was being destroyed. Automobiles on Colorado Highway 86, about a hundred yards from where I stood, sped their way to their drivers’ homes at the end of the work day. Construction workers putting in a new high-pressure gas line across the street wrapped work up for the day. With their boots and Carhartt jackets covered in an early winter slush, the men bantered with the relieved voices that workers who hate their job always banter with at 5 pm.
All this commotion created a harsh soundtrack for my Great Conjunction. It was hard to focus on the tiny specks of light that the internet told me were planets hovering just above the sunset. The noise the highway traffic made dominated all other sounds. I heard the friction between spinning tires and hard asphalt as it keened. I heard the screams of forests clearcut for the rubber plantations that tire production requires. I heard the wailing of long-dead algae in the oil ripped from its underground resting place and blended with shattered stones to form asphalt. I speculated whether these sounds were chastising me for my lack of wonder.
Being December 21, it was difficult not to think about Jupiter and Saturn’s reaction to viewing the perverse electric constellations humans have hung on the Earth like the suburban Christmas lights surrounding me. Feeling this bitterness, I thought about asking my dad what was wrong with me, why I always seem drawn to ugliness and pain, and if he thought I was ungrateful.
I did not want to disturb his enjoyment of this historic astronomic event.
This experience quickly reflected something I’ve been confused about for a long time: Why do so many people find it so easy to see the beauty surrounding us when we must overlook so much destruction when viewing that beauty? As the stars intensified in the deepening evening and this question banged around in my head, a blue jay landed in the snow below one of my mother’s bird feeders.
I confess that I found the blue jay to be infinitely more fascinating than the distant planets. The feeder had been recently filled and a sizable pile of seeds sat in the snow and mud. The blue jay could have gorged himself on a huge meal, but instead he pecked at the ground here and kicked at the snow there with relatively no concern about the pressure I assumed winter would place on him to consume calories. His movements were lazy and nonchalant. I realized the blue jay could not care less about worlds a bird could never fly to, about two pinpricks of light representing places that, as far as any of us know, do not produce a speck of bird feed.
As Jupiter and Saturn silently disappeared over the horizon, I wondered if they simply could not bear to witness the scars lacerating the skin on their sister’s continents. My attention returned to the blue jay who continued to ignore the sunset and the stars. I was tempted to conclude that the abused beings of the world are bored with beauty, annoyed by the current human insistence on aesthetic appreciation.
The sun’s dying light was pretty.
But, it was also entirely commonplace for those who live beneath the sky. The stars were magical, but their enchantment was distant. Besides predicting romantic compatibility and sending a wayward meteor every few million years, the stars only exert so much influence over earthly affairs.
The sun’s very last orange detonated in a thin line across the west. I hoped that, beyond beauty and ugliness, explosive rage has its place, too.
Will Falk is a DGR member, lawyer for the natural world and is currently journeying in conversation with the Ohio River. You can read about Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.
