The following is an extract from Derrick Jensen’s 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy. From the book jacket: “In this impassioned polemic, radical environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail—from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth.” Visit Derrick’s website to buy the book.
By Derrick Jensen
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t talked about the origins of human supremacism. Some say it began with the domestication of nonhuman animals, as we came to think of these as our dependent inferiors, as our slaves, our beasts of burden. Some say it began with agriculture, where the entire landbase was converted to human use. Some say the model for human supremacism is male supremacism: women are physically differentiable from men, and some men decided that differentiability meant inferiority, and validated their own superiority by repeatedly violating and controlling women; this model was then applied across racial, cultural, and species differences. Some say human supremacism really got its start with the creation of a monotheistic sky god and the consequent removal of meaning from the material earth.
These questions of origins, while interesting and on some levels important, are not vital to the current discussion. Right now this narcissistic, sociopathic human supremacist culture is killing the planet, and we need to stop it. Asking where it started feels a bit to me like wondering about the childhood traumas of the axe murderer who is tearing apart your loved ones. Sure, it’s a discussion to be had, but can we please stop the murderer first?
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Because human supremacism—like other supremacisms—is not based on fact, but rather on pre-existing bigotry (and the narcissism and tangible self-interest on which all bigotries are based), I don’t expect this book will cause many human supremacists to reconsider their supremacism, just as books on male or white supremacism don’t generally cause male or white supremacists to reconsider theirs. The book isn’t written for them. This book is written to give support to the people—and there are a lot of us—who are not human supremacists, and who are disgusted with the attitudes and behaviors of the supremacists, who are attempting to stop the supremacists from killing all that lives. It is written for those who are appalled by nonhumans being tortured, displaced, destroyed, exterminated by supremacists in service to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who are tired of the incessant—I would say obsessive—propaganda required to prop up human supremacism. It is written for those who recognize the self-serving stupidity and selective blindness of the supremacist position.
It is written for those who prefer a living planet to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer democratic decision-making processes to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer life to machines.
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I’m sitting again by the pond. The wind still plays gently among the reeds, plays also with the surface of the water.
This time I do not hear the sound of a family of jays softly talking amongst themselves. This time I hear the sound of chainsaws.
The forests on both sides of where I live are being clearcut. I don’t know why. Or rather, on a superficial level I do. The people who “own” both pieces of land had a “problem” they needed to “solve.” “Problem”? They needed money. Or they wanted money. Or they craved money. It doesn’t matter. “Solution”? Cut the trees and sell them.
Never mind those who live there.
So for weeks now I’ve been hearing the whine of chainsaws and the screams of trees as they fall. For weeks now I’ve been feeling the shock waves when the trees hit the ground.
Such is life at the end of the world.
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We end on the plains of eastern Colorado, where as I write this a friend is trying desperately to protect prairie dogs. A “developer” wants to put in a mall on top of one of the largest extant prairie dog villages along Colorado’s Front Range. The village has 3,000 to 8,000 burrows.
Prior to this human supremacist culture moving into the Great Plains, the largest prairie dog community in the world, which was in Texas, covered 25,000 square miles, and was home to perhaps 400 million prairie dogs. The total range for prairie dogs was about 150,000 to 200,000 square miles, and population was well over a billion.
Now, prairie dogs have been reduced to about five percent of their range and two percent of their population.
Yet because yet another rich person wants to build yet another mall (in this economy, with so many empty stores already?), much of this prairie dog community will be poisoned. That community includes the twenty or more other species who live with and depend upon prairie dogs. The prairie dogs (and some others) who are not poisoned will be buried alive by the bulldozers, then covered with concrete. This includes the pregnant females, who prefer not to leave their dens.
If you recall, prairie dogs have complex languages, with words for many threats. They have language to describe hawks, and to describe snakes, and to describe coyotes. They have language to describe a woman wearing a yellow shirt, and different language for a woman wearing a blue shirt. They have had to come up with language to describe a man with a gun.
Do they, I wonder, have language to describe a bulldozer? Do they have language to describe the pregnant females of their community being buried alive?
And do they have language to describe the murderous insatiability of human supremacists? And do others? Do blue whales and the few remaining tigers? Do the last three northern white rhinos, all that’s left because some human supremacists believe their horns are aphrodisiacs? Do elephants? Did the black-skinned pink-tusked elephants of China? Did the Mesopotamian elephants? And what about others? What about the disappearing fireflies? What about the dammed and re-dammed and re-dammed Mississippi? What about the once-mighty Columbia? What about the once-free Amazon? Do they have language to describe this murderous insatiability?
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And perhaps more to the point, do we?
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By the time you read this, the prairie dogs my friend is fighting to protect will probably be dead, killed so someone can build yet another cathedral to human supremacism. And by the time you read this, yet another dam will have been built on the Mekong, on the upper reaches of the Amazon, on the upper Nile. By the time you read this there will be 7,000 to 10,000 more dams in the world. By the time you read this there will be more dead zones in the oceans. By the time you read this there will be another 100,000 species driven extinct.
And all for what?
To serve authoritarian technics, to serve an obsession to validate and re-validate a self-perceived superiority that is so fragile that each new other we encounter must be violated, and then violated, and then violated, till there is nothing left and we move on to violate another.
This is not the future I want. This is not the future I will accept.
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What I want from this book is for readers to begin to remember what it is to be human, to begin to remember what it is to be a member of a larger biotic community. What I want is for you—and me, and all of us—to fall back into the world into which you—and me, and all of us—were born, before you, too, like all of us were taught to become a bigot, before you, too, like all of us were taught to become a human supremacist, before you, too, like all of us were turned into a servant of this machine culture like your and my parents and their parents before them. I want for you—and me, and all of us—to fall into a world where you—like all of us—are one among many, a world of speaking subjects, a world of infinite complexity, a world where we each depend on the others, all of us understanding that the health of the real world is primary.
The world is being murdered. It is being murdered by actions that are perpetrated to support and perpetuate a worldview. Those actions must be stopped. Given what is at stake, failure is no longer an option. The truth is that it never was an option.
So where do we begin? We begin by questioning the unquestioned beliefs that are the real authorities of this culture, and then we move out from there. And once you’ve begun that questioning, my job is done, because once those questions start they never stop. From that point on, what you do is up to you.
Editor’s note: The oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped on planet earth due to global warming. Greenhouse gases are also absorbed into the ocean which has increased the acidity of ocean water significantly. Increased heat and acidity makes reproduction and survival more difficult for calcifying organisms such as corals and other marine life. It should be no surprise to anyone that we see coral reefs dying globally. So are plankton populations, fish populations, and countless other species. What is surprising is that efforts to halt and reverse greenhouse gas emissions have thus far been so tepid and ineffective. We must change that.
Article summary:
In 2003, a marine heat wave devastated coral reef communities in the Mediterranean Sea, including the reefs in the Scandola Marine Reserve, a protected region off the coast of Corsica.
More than 15 years later, the coral reef communities in Scandola still have not recovered.
Researchers determined that persistent marine heat waves, which are now happening every year in the Mediterranean, are preventing Scandola’s slow-growing coral reefs from recuperating.
Human-induced climate change is the culprit; persistent rising temperatures in the ocean have normalized marine heat waves, not only in the Mediterranean, but in the global oceans.
For years, Joaquim Garrabou donned scuba gear and dove into the waters of the Scandola Marine Reserve in Corsica to find a paradise. Twenty meters (66 feet) beneath the surface, there were reef walls draped with soft red coral (Corallium rubrum) and red gorgonian sea-whips (Paramuricea clavata), all swarming with fish and other sea creatures. But in 2003, a marine heat wave hit Scandola, leading to the death of many coral reefs. More than 15 years later, the reefs have still not recovered.
Now when Garrabou dives at Scandola, he’s greeted by the skeletons of once-thriving corals.
“It’s like seeing someone who is ill, who has a disease that you cannot find the solution for,” Garrabou told Mongabay in a video interview. “You hope that someday there will be a [solution] but you see that there’s not much hope.”
After the 2003 marine heat wave, Garrabou and colleagues began monitoring Scandola’s coral reefs to track their recovery. But after accumulating reef survey data and temperature data over many years, they eventually realized they were actually tracking the reefs’ collapse. The results of their long-term study were recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“We knew something bad was happening to the corals around the world, but we weren’t expecting a collapse in all of the populations that we studied,” study lead author Daniel Gómez-Gras, a marine ecologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar in Barcelona, told Mongabay in a video interview. “The point of tracking these populations for such a long time was to show recovery in the long term because we expected that the populations — maybe not in five years, but in 15, 20 years — [would be] able to recover. However, we saw a collapse.”
A researcher monitoring a red coral population in the Mediterranean. Image by Medrecover.
‘We don’t call it bleaching’
The data showed that marine heat waves were happening every year in different parts of the Mediterranean between 2003 and 2018. For 12 of those years, the water temperature at a depth of 20 m reached more than 23° Celsius (73.4° Fahrenheit), which is considered a sublethal threshold for corals. And for four of those years — 2009, 2016, 2017 and 2018 — temperatures at that depth breached the lethal threshold for corals at 25°C (77°F).
The researchers found that the ceaseless heat wasn’t allowing these slow-growing coral reefs to recover.
“Frankly, I never thought that I would be seeing it,” Garrabou said. “And it’s happening really fast.”
Soft coral species in the Mediterranean don’t “bleach” the way that tropical corals do, Gómez-Gras said. That’s because Mediterranean corals don’t have a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae, the algae that tropical corals expel when they experience heat stress.
“We don’t call it bleaching here in the Mediterranean for these coral species, since they don’t bleach,” he said. “They directly die with a loss of tissue and skeletons being exposed.”
While the results of the study are relevant to many coral communities across the Mediterranean, the researchers chose to focus their study on Scandola because the area had been established as a marine protected area (MPA) in 1975, and had been relatively free from other human pressures such as fishing and pollution. This helped them eliminate other possibilities for the coral reef population collapses and to pinpoint marine heat waves as the reason for their demise.
Researchers used to think that deeper reef communities might shelter coral species from heat stress. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this isn’t the case, not only in the Mediterranean, but in other parts of the world, including coral reef sites in the Pacific.
“We are witnessing that if you go deeper, [there is still] impact,” Garrabou said.
Maps showing the location of Scandola within the Mediterranean, as well as the location, species and depth of the five monitored populations within Scandola MPA. The graph shows the number of marine heat waves that occurred between 1982 and 2018, and severity of each event. Image by Gómez-Gras et al (2022).
Raised temperatures
Human-induced climate change is responsible for the heating of the oceans — and it’s becoming hotter and hotter in the water. According to another study, the global oceans have broken a heat record for the sixth year in a row. As the oceans warm, heat penetrates downward — and this heating trend will continue even if emissions stop tomorrow, Kevin Trenberth, co-author of this separate study, told Mongabay in January.
A related study also found that marine heat waves have become the new normal for the global oceans as climate change rapidly transforms our world.
The Mediterranean may be feeling the impacts of climate change even more intensely than other parts of the world. A report published last year by WWF found that the Mediterranean was warming 20% faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.
Gómez-Gras said the accelerated warming in the Mediterranean has partly to do with its semi-enclosed shape. While this is unique to the region, he added that the Mediterranean shows what will happen in other parts of the ocean due to climate change.
“Marine heat waves are becoming the new normal in the Mediterranean Sea,” Gómez-Gras said. “So you can guess that in the future, it can become the new normal [elsewhere] in the world.”
Georgios Tsounis, a marine biologist at California State University, whose work was based in the Mediterranean for 11 years, but who was not involved in this research, praised the new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B for its “valuable approach.”
“We need more long-term demographic studies such as this one to better understand where our environment is heading in the future,” Tsounis told Mongabay in an email.
While the study is focused on the soft coral communities of the Mediterranean, Tsounis said the research can help us understand how other coral communities “may or may not recover from repeated stress over a period of 15 years.”
“We are seeing coral mortality in other parts of the world as well,” he said. “The tropical coral reefs make sad headlines every year. But in the tropics we are mainly concerned with reef-building hard corals (as opposed to the soft corals in this Mediterranean study). The temperature range and entire cause-effect mechanism differ between these two examples. What is common to most of these scenarios is that the corals have adapted to a narrow set of environmental conditions, such as temperature, over a long period of time, and are sensitive to changing climate.”
A red coral population with dead colonies after a marine heat wave in 2016. Image by Olivier Bianchimani.
Seeking refuge
The researchers said they are searching the Mediterranean for “refugia,” places that offer coral reefs protection from thermal stress. One possible place could be the waters off the coast of the Calanques near Marseille, France, which seems to get enough cold water to protect its corals, Garrabou said. That said, the coral reef communities here experienced mass die-offs during marine heat waves in both 1999 and 2003. But since then, the region hasn’t had any major warming, and the corals have been able to slowly recover, he said.
While there are currently many places of refugia for coral communities across the world, a new study found that most of these places will disappear once the world reaches 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming above pre-industrial levels, which is likely to happen within the next decade.
But it’s not just climate change placing pressure on the Mediterranean — fishing and pollution are additional stressors to the region. Because of this, Garrabou said it’s important to establish MPAs with strict protective measures to enhance the resilience of coral reef communities.
Currently, there are more than 1,200 MPAs in the Mediterranean, but only about 0.02% of the area they cover is closed to fishing year-round.
While the future looks grim for coral reefs, Garrabou said he feels hopeful about the momentum that’s building for the establishment of MPAs, especially with global efforts to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.
“When we provide the right conditions and the right tools, nature can be really generous and nature has demonstrated that it can bounce back,” he said.
But he said that MPAs need to be urgently established for the oceans to reap their benefits. “It has to happen,” he said, “and it has to happen fast.”
Citations:
Bongaerts, P., Ridgway, T., Sampayo, E. M., & Hoegh-Guldberg, O. (2010). Assessing the ‘deep reef refugia’ hypothesis: Focus on Caribbean reefs. Coral Reefs, 29(2), 309-327. doi:10.1007/s00338-009-0581-x
Cheng, L., Abraham, J., Trenberth, K. E., Fasullo, J., Boyer, T., Mann, M. E., … Reagan, J. (2022). Another record: Ocean warming continues through 2021 despite La Niña conditions. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. doi:10.1007/s00376-022-1461-3
Dixon, A. M., Forster, P. M., Heron, S. F., Stoner, A. M., & Beger, M. (2022). Future loss of local-scale thermal refugia in coral reef ecosystems. PLOS Climate, 1(2), e0000004. doi:10.1371/journal.pclm.0000004
Gómez-Gras, D., Linares, C., López-Sanz, A., Amate, R., Ledoux, J. B., Bensoussan, N., … Garrabou, J. (2021). Population collapse of habitat-forming species in the Mediterranean: A long-term study of gorgonian populations affected by recurrent marine heatwaves. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288(1965). doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.2384
Tanaka, K. R., & Van Houtan, K. S. (2022). The recent normalization of historical marine heat extremes. PLOS CLIMATE. doi:10.1371/journal.pclm.0000007
Banner image: A red gorgonian coral (Paramuricea clavata) partially dead due to a marine heatwave. The lefthand side is still alive, while the righthand side is dead and the skeleton is exposed. Image by Eneko Aspillaga.
Editor’s note: Hydroelectric dams are not green energy, despite many claims that they are. Hydropower kills rivers, displaces millions of human beings, drives anadromous fish and other life dependent on free-flowing rivers extinct, and actually releases substantial greenhouse gasses. This post includes a short excerpt from Bright Green Lies as well as an article detailing a destructive dam proposal in Bolivia.
Dams are Not Green Energy
Excerpted from Chapter 11: The Hydropower Lie of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert
Once upon a time, dams were recognized for the environmental atrocities they are. Human beings understood that dams kill rivers, from source to sea. They understood that dams kill forests, marsh- lands, grasslands.
In the 12th century, Richard the Lionhearted (King Richard I of England) put in place a law forbidding dams from preventing salmon passage. In the 14th century, Robert the Bruce did some- thing similar for Scotland. His descendant Robert the III went even further, declaring that three convictions for killing salmon out of season would be a capital offense.
Fast-forward to today, when dams are claimed to provide “clean” and “green” energy.
Where’s Robert the III when you need him?
As recently as three decades ago, at least environmentalists still consistently opposed dams. But the coup that turned so much environmentalism away from protecting the real world and into a lobbying arm of favored sectors of the industrial economy has rhetorically turned dams into environmental saviors. And climate change activists are among the most relentless missionaries for the gospel of the green dam.
This issue is urgent. While here in the United States, no new large dams have been built in many years (although many shovel-ready proposals are waiting for public funding), large hydropower dams are being built around the world as quickly as (in)humanly possible.
Once again, environmental engineer Mark Jacobson is an exam- ple, as he always seems to be, of someone working hard to kill the planet in order to save it. His 100 percent “renewable” transition plans—and remember, bright greens and many mainstream environmentalists love this guy—call for building about 270 new large hydroelectric dams globally, each at least the size of the Hoover or Glen Canyon dams.6 He also calls for major expansions to existing dams by adding new turbines. His models rely heavily on hydro because solar and wind facilities are by their nature intermittent and unreliable.
In Bolivia, Indigenous groups fear the worst from dam project on Beni River
More than 5,000 Indigenous people would be impacted by flooding from the construction of two dams in Bolivia, according to Indigenous organizations and environmentalists.
Successive governments have mulled the Chepete-El Bala hydroelectric project for more than half a century, and the current administration of President Luis Acre has now revived it as a national priority.
While Indigenous groups have successfully rejected the plan in the past, this time a group of 10 Indigenous organizations have signed an agreement with the state energy company approving feasibility studies.
If completed, the reservoirs for the project would cover a combined area larger than Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, and inundate an area that’s home to thousands of plant and animal species.
The Bolivian government has revived a long-held plan to build a hydroelectric plant in a corner of the country’s western La Paz department, sparking concerns about the potential displacement of more than 5,000 Indigenous people from the area.
The affected communities live in two protected areas, Madidi National Park and Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Communal Lands, parts of which would be flooded for the twin dams of the Chepete-El Bala hydroelectric project.
President Luis Arce, who served as minister of the economy in the earlier administration of Evo Morales, is following the same road map as his predecessor, who in July 2007 announced the original plans for the hydroelectric dams as a national priority.
Since 2018, there have been concerns that around 5,000 Indigenous people would be impacted by dam construction. Image courtesy of Chema Formentí.
The idea to generate hydropower in the Beni River Basin, specifically in El Bala Gorge, has been around for more than 50 years and given up on numerous times due to its economic unfeasibility and high environmental cost. The last time it was rejected by Indigenous communities was during the Hugo Banzer government in the late 1990s, before being nearly resurrected under Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president.
Since then, the issue had largely faded for the six Indigenous communities that live in the area: the Mosetén, Tsiman, Esse Ejja, Leco, Tacana and Uchupiamona. The groups are now speaking out against the hydropower project, saying it would “cut off” the three rivers vital to their existence: the Beni and two of its tributaries, the Tuichi and Quiquibey.
“This would mean forced displacement and that means taking away our territory. We would be forced to leave our space, our ancestral domain,” said Alex Villca, a member of the National Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous Peasant Territories and Protected Areas (Contiocap) of Bolivia. “We would be giving up what is most important: without territory there are no Indigenous peoples. This would be accepting a silent death. Wherever they take us, it would never be the same.”
The Indigenous leader said the problem goes even further. He said that in the Chepete mountains, some Indigenous peoples live in voluntary isolation — believed to be Mosetén, although there aren’t many studies to confirm this — and that they would be “totally” affected if the dams were constructed in the area. “We know from our brothers that there exists, in the peaks of the Chepete, a community in voluntary isolation that must be unaware of all these plans. Imagine how that would affect them if this project comes to fruition,” Villca said.
Tenders resumed
In 2021, Bolivia’s National Electric Energy Company (Ende) resumed the commissioning of the Chepete-El Bala project, announcing tenders for geological and geotechnical studies. The state-owned company said that in the case of the Chepete plant, the planned reservoir area would flood 46 square kilometers (18 square miles) of the total area of 3,859 square kilometers (1,490 square miles) of the Pilón Lajas reserve. The reservoir at El Bala, meanwhile, would cover 94 km2 (36 mi2) of the 18,895-km2 (7,295-mi2) Madidi park.
El Bala Gorge on the Beni River. Image courtesy of Chema Formentí.
In August, the Office of Indigenous Peoples of La Paz (Cpilap) signed an agreement with Ende authorizing the final design studies for the Chepete-El Bala project.
The agreement establishes that Cpilap must “allow the entry of Ende Corporation and its contracted companies to the areas of direct and indirect influence in order to carry out research, information gathering, socialization and data collection that allows studies, the creation of projects, to finalize the design to implement electric power generation, transmission and distribution.”
Villca spoke out against the signing of the agreement. “What worries us is that the tenor of the agreement is that it not only allows for complementary studies but also, in the future, allows Ende to start construction of the Chepete and El Bala hydroelectric plants. This is much more serious.”
Cpilap is a regional organization that brings together 10 Indigenous organizations in La Paz department: the Indigenous Council of the Tacana Peoples, the Office of the Indigenous Leco de Apolo, the Leco Indigenous People and Larecaja Native Communities, the Mosetén Indigenous Peoples Organization, the Indigenous Peoples of de San José de Uchupiamonas, the Esse Ejja of Eiyoquibo Indigenous Community, the Regional Council of T-simane Mosetén of Pilón Lajas, the Native Agroecological Community of Palos Blancos, the Tacana II Indigenous Communities of Rio Madre de Dios, and the Captaincy of the Araona Indigenous People. All of these organizations, according to Villca, are connected to Arce and Morales’s ruling party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS).
Gonzalo Oliver Terrazas, president of Cpilap, said five of the six affected Indigenous communities agreed with the hydropower project. The sixth community are the Mosetén, who didn’t sign the agreement. “This agreement doesn’t mean that the dam will be built,” he said. “The goal is to determine the feasibility or infeasibility of the project. Another important aspect that the agreement has is the social component, which we have included so that there can be electricity and housing projects.”
The Association of Indigenous Communities of the Beni, Tuichi and Quiquibey Rivers, an organization started in 2001 to defend the ancestral territories of the six Indigenous communities impacted by the project, has demanded that a prior consultation be carried out with the communities to approve or reject the project. The communities met over one weekend and decided to reject the government initiative, demonstrating that there are leaders for and against conducting feasibility studies for the project.
The hills of El Bala near the town of Rurrenabaque. Image courtesy of Chema Formentí.
“We remind [the government] that in 2016 there was a 12-day vigil and the expulsion of the Geodata and Servicons companies that had started work and studies in the territory without fulfilling a free, prior and informed consent [FPIC] consultation in good faith so as to receive the consent of the communities,” said a document published by the association.
Terrazas said the signing of the agreement with Ende doesn’t mean there won’t be consultation with Indigenous communities. He said that if the feasibility of the project is approved, a consultation will be carried out with the communities to approve or reject the construction of the hydropower plants.
In January 2018, Ende returned the prefeasibility study to the Italian company Geodata Engineering for correction. Geodata recommended “to postpone the development of the El Bala 220 hydroelectric plant until the conditions in the Bolivian energy market and abroad indicate that it is convenient to start its implementation.”
City-size reservoir
The project, which would start after a public tender is launched, would flood at least 662 km2 (256 mi2) of land for the two dams, according to Indigenous groups. Combined, the two reservoirs would cover an area five times bigger than Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. And if the dried-out salt lake of Poopó, in the department of Oruro, doesn’t recover, Chepete-El Bala would be the second-biggest lake in Bolivia after Titicaca.
The project calls for building the first dam in the Beni River’s Chepete Gorge, 70 km (43 mi) upstream from the town of Rurrenabaque, in the department of Beni, and the second near El Bala Gorge, 13.5 km (8.3 mi) upstream of the same town.
The town of Rurrenabaque, which would have two dams upstream. Image courtesy of Chema Formentí.
The Chepete dam would raise the water level to 158 meters (518 feet), forming a lake that would be 400 m (1,312 ft) above sea level. The dam at El Bala would raise the water level by 20 m (65 ft) and its reservoir would be 220 m (721 ft) above sea level. Unlike the Chepete dam, which would be a concrete wall, the dam at El Bala would consist of gates and generators in the middle of the river.
Extinction and displacement
According to the Solón Foundation, an environmental NGO, a total of 5,164 people would be relocated for the project, the majority of them Indigenous. The area is also home to 424 plant species of plants, 201 land mammals, 652 birds, 483 amphibians and reptiles, and 515 fish species. It’s not clear which species are most likely to go locally extinct as a result of the flooding, or how many would be affected.
The main fear of the Indigenous communities in the area is that the construction of both dams would mean forcibly displacing more than 5,000 residents. The construction of the second reservoir at El Bala, according to the Solón Foundation and Indigenous organizations opposed to the project, would flood the entire community of San Miguel del Bala. There’s no official information on a displacement plan for the communities more than 1,000 residents.
And with the construction of the Chepete reservoir, a little more than 4,000 Indigenous people would be displaced. All the populated areas affected by the reservoir, according to Geodata, have collective titles belonging to the Tacanas, Lecos and Mosetén peoples. Additionally, development on the river could interfere with the livelihoods of many residents, who fish and farm and, in more recent years, oversee communal tourism activities.
Chepete Gorge on the Beni River would be dammed to power a hydroelectric plant. Image courtesy of Alex Villca.
Valentín Luna is an Indigenous Tacana leader and head of the San Miguel del Bala community. Currently, there are at least 20 eco-lodges that have been built in the Madidi and Pilón Lajas protected areas. Most of these initiatives are managed by the local communities. Four of these eco-lodges would be flooded by the dams, according to Luna: one in Chalalán overseen by the Uchupiamonas, one run by San Miguel del Bala residents, one in Villa Alcira, and one run by the Chimanes and Mosetén of Asunción del Quiquibey.
For the Indigenous people who don’t want the dams in their area, the main worry isn’t the end of tourism. They fear that the six Indigenous groups will disappear along with it.
Banner image of Chepete Gorge on the Beni River, located 70 kilometers (43 miles) upstream of the village of Rurrenabaque. Image courtesy of Alex Villca.
Editor’s note: This piece draws links between struggles against extraction projects and other land destruction related to fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewable energy technologies alike. Around the world, people are struggling to protect the land and water in global resistance to extractive industries. We encourage our readers to join these struggles—or to begin a new campaign if one is not already happening.
People the world over are opposing fossil fuel extraction in an incalculable number of ways. It is now clear that burning fossil fuels threatens millions of Life forms and could be laying the foundation for the extermination of Humanity. But what about “alternative” energy? As progressives stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those rejecting fossil fuels and nuclear power, should we despise, ignore, or commend those who challenge the menace to their homes and their communities from solar, wind and hydro-power (dams)? The Green Party of St. Louis/Gateway Green Alliance gave its answer with unanimous approval of a version of the statement below in May, 2021.
Global Conflicts Over Fossil Fuels, Nuclear and Alternative Energy
The monumental increase in the use of energy is provoking conflicts across the Earth. We express our solidarity with those struggling against extraction, including these examples.
We stand in solidarity with the on-going Native American protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota protesting environmentally irresponsible and culturally damaging pipelines that transport crude oil extracted from tar sand, destroying their ancestral lands. So-called “clean” and “renewable” energies depend on the climate killer oil for their production.
We stand in solidarity with the Movement for Survival of Ogoni People against Shell. The Niger-Delta was devastated and traditional culture weakened by soil, surface and groundwater contamination that makes farming and fishing impossible. Local communities still seek to receive denied compensation, clean-up, a share of the profits and a say in decision-making.
We stand in solidarity with the Centre for Policy Research in India as it opposes efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to open 41 new coal mines because burning coal is a major factor in climate change, leads to asthma, premature births, and spreads toxins (including mercury) by air, water and land.
We stand in solidarity with the Green Party of Pennsylvania which has opposed fracking since 2008 when it realized that use of volatile chemicals could harm local communities and waterways and contribute to climate instability. Local residents have become ill and major waterways and delicate ecosystems have been damaged.
We stand in solidarity with the No Nukes Action Committee of the Bay Area who are demonstrating against the Olympic Games slated for Tokyo in order to raise awareness of the ongoing disaster of Fukushima nuclear power since nuclear power is deadly and intimately connected with the potential for nuclear war.
We stand in solidarity with “Solidarity Action for the 21 Villages” in Faléa, Maliagainst the French multinational COGEMA/Orano. After years of struggle, this NGO defeated a uranium mine through community mobilizing. Aware of the detrimental effects on health, environment, agricultural land, water sources and cultural heritage, they are still fighting to undo already done infrastructural damage.
We stand in solidarity with rural Klickitat County, WA residents who are being invaded by industrial solar facilities which would exceed 12,000 acres and undermine wildlife/habitat, ecosystems, ground/water, and food production because solar panels and lithium ion batteries contain carcinogens with no method of disposal or re-cycling and could contribute to wildfires from electrical shorts.
We stand in solidarity with the Broome Tioga Green Party’s fight against industrial wind turbine projects that would increase drilling and mining, dynamite 26 pristine mountain tops, and destroy 120,000 trees while requiring precious minerals and lithium for batteries and being dependent on fossil fuels for their manufacture, maintenance and operation.
We stand in solidarity with the indigenous Lenca people opposing the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River in Honduras whose leader Berta Cáceres was murdered for uniting different movements to expose how dams destroy farmland, leave forests bare, disturb ancestral burial sites, and deprive communities of water for crops and livestock.
We stand in solidarity with activists aiming to stop Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass open-pit mine (Nevada). Essential for electronic devices including electric cars, the mine would destroy rare old-growth big sagebrush, harm wildlife including many endangered species and lower the water table. Its operation would require massive fossil fuel use and toxic waste ponds.
We stand in solidarity with the child laborers slaving and dying in Democratic Republic of Congo cobalt mines. Cobalt is an essential ingredient for some of the world’s fastest-growing industries—electric cars and electronic devices. It co-occurs with copper mining, used in construction, machinery, transportation and war technology worldwide.
Most of all, we stand in solidarity with thousands upon thousands of communities across the Earth opposing every form of extraction or transmission for energy which seeks to cover up human health and environmental dangers.
If you would like to join those spreading the word regarding the need to challenge all forms of energy extraction because we can provide better lives for every society on Earth by reducing the global production of energy, please contact the author at the email below.
This article was first published Green Social Thought. The version adopted by the Gateway Green Alliance differs only by referring to its organizational name in the text.
Editor’s note: one of the worst environmental disasters that nearly no-one has heard of is “habitat fragmentation.” Many ecologists believe that habitat fragmentation is the single most serious threat to biological diversity and is the primary cause of the present extinction crisis.
Fences, roads, utility corridors, and other linear human disturbances increasingly shatter habitats into smaller and smaller pieces, with drastic consequences. This crisis is not being addressed, and it gets worse every day. This article explores one part of this problem: the effects of fencing on Pronghorn.
By Tara Lohan
With the arrival of spring each year, pronghorn that winter in the Upper Green River Valley of Wyoming begin a journey of more than 100 miles to their summer habitat near Grand Teton National Park.
It’s one of the longest migrations of large mammals remaining in North America. But their trek — and a similar one made by mule deer — is made more difficult by human developments along the way, particularly fences.
“The total length of fencing around the world may now exceed that of roads by an order of magnitude, and continues to grow due to a global trend towards land partition and privatization,” wrote researchers of new U.C. Berkeley-led study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
Wyoming is no exception. There the researchers found nearly 3,800 miles of fences in their study area alone — twice the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their research tracked GPS-collared pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) during two years of their migrations to better understand how fences affect the animals’ movements and which kinds of fences may be most difficult.
Fences aren’t always bad for wildlife — some can keep animals off roads, for instance — but they can also pose threats. [Editor’s note: to use precise language, these fences aren’t “good” for wildlife; they partially mitigate some of the harms of roads]
For animals like pronghorn and mule deer, fences can halt or change migration routes. Animals that attempt to go over or under also risk becoming entangled and perishing. Juveniles are particularly at risk. A 2005 Utah State University study of ungulate migration across Colorado and Utah found the youngsters died in fences 8 times more often than adults. Many others died of starvation or predation when they weren’t able to cross fences and were separated from their mothers.
A radio-collared pronghorn perishes after being tangled in unmodified barb-wire fencing while trying to cross. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Borderlands Research Institute (CC BY 2.0)
Most of the fences the animals encounter run along the edges of livestock pastures, private property lines or roads, and are composed of four or five strands of barbed wire. Some have woven wire at the bottom, the most common type of fence for corralling sheep but also the most lethal to wildlife.
“A better understanding of wildlife responses to fencing is … critical to conservation,” the researchers of the U.C. Berkeley study wrote.
But here’s what we do know: The study found that both pronghorn and mule deer “were extensively affected by fences.”
Each year an average mule deer encountered fences 119 times and pronghorn 248 times. In about 40% of those encounters, the fence changed the animal’s behavior. And that behavior, they found, was more complex than simply crossing or not crossing the fence.
Often the animals “bounced,” or rapidly moved away from the fence when they couldn’t quickly cross. “Such avoidance of fences can drive animals away from high‐quality resources and reduce habitat use effectiveness,” they wrote.
Other times the animals paced back and forth along the fence line, a behavior that could strain energy resources. And occasionally they became trapped in areas with a high concentration of fences, like livestock pastures.
This can create other problems.
“Constraining animal movements for prolonged periods within limited areas may trigger human–wildlife conflicts,” the researchers found. Pronghorn, for example, have been seen in new developments in Colorado Springs, where they’ve been hit by cars and shown up at the airport.
Mule deer and pronghorn also behave differently when encountering fences. Mule deer are more likely to jump a fence, and pronghorn to crawl under.
“The reluctance to jump means that pronghorn movements can be completely blocked by woven‐wire sheep or barbed‐wire fences with low bottom wires — the two most common types of fences across their home range in North America,” the researchers found.
Considering that the American West may have upwards of 620,000 miles of roadside and pasture fences, “fence modifications for conservation might be more urgent than currently recognized,” they wrote.
Efforts are underway to encourage or require more “wildlife-friendly” fences that “are very visible and allow wild animals to easily jump over or slip under the wires or rails,” according to recommendations from Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife agency.
Further guidance from Sustainable Development Code, an organization that works on sustainability issues with local governments, recommends using smooth, instead of barbed wires; limiting the height of fences 42 inches; allowing 16 inches of clearance at the bottom; and including wide spacing between wires.
Raising net-wire fencing to a height that pronghorn can crawl under. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Borderlands Research Institute (CC BY 2.0)
“There are other forms of wildlife-friendly fencing, including ‘lay-down’ or temporary fences that permit wildlife crossing during critical migratory seasons,” the group reports.
Making fence lines more visible is also helpful to other animals, including birds. Low-flying birds, like grouse, also die in fences across the West’s rangelands.
That’s why wildlife managers are beginning to push for removing or modifying fences, but the effort can be costly. To address this concern, the researchers developed a software package, available to wildlife managers and other researchers, that highlights fences posing the biggest threats to animal movement. They hope it will help make the best use of limited conservation funds and help protect critical migration pathways.
“We demonstrate that when summed and mapped, these behaviors can aid in identifying problematic fence segments,” they wrote. And that could help save a lot of pronghorn, mule deer and other animals.
Ths story first appeared at The Revelator. Banner image: Pronghorn encounter a fence line in New Mexico. Photo: Johnida Dockens (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Editor’s note: Already threatened by overfishing, acidification, overheating, the collapse of coral reefs, declining plankton populations, plastic pollution, and deep sea oil drilling, the world’s oceans now face a new threat: mining, disguised as “green.”
“To build a green future, in the next couple of decades the world will need to mine more metal than we’ve mined in our entire history” says Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company.
There’s some truth to that statement – if we wish to meet the rising demand for new technologies, we’d need to see a sharp increase in metal extraction. After all, electric vehicles require 4x the amount of metals found in standard cars, and a single wind turbine requires 340 tonnes of metal.
Here’s the problem: the ‘green future’ he’s selling us is a lie, because what Barron fails to divulge in his upbeat sales pitch, is the ecological upheaval that his company’s plans would surely wreak.
The Metals Company plans to mine the seabed for polymetallic nodules; potato-sized objects containing metals like nickel, copper, and cobalt; essential in the production of the lithium-ion batteries being used for electric cars and (so-called) renewable energy storage.
They’re located (among other places) in the Clarion-Clipperton zone, an area of the Pacific Ocean equivalent in size to the entire Indian Subcontinent. The seabed here (despite the claims of company officials) isn’t simply a ‘vast marine desert’, it’s home to a wide variety of species whose existence depends upon the presence of these nodules.
So, what would the mining process actually look like?
They’re building house-sized machines which would indiscriminately vacuum-up the contents of the seabed and send it to a ship on the surface. This includes an estimated 2 to 6 million cubic feet of marine sediment (granulated rock) per day for every machine in operation, only then to be subsequently dumped right back into the ocean.
It’s been stated that the sediment will be returned to a depth below 1200m. That’s called the Bathypelagic zone (Midnight Zone) – and some animals who live there include viperfish, anglerfish, frill sharks, eels, and sperm whales. These would be among the first creatures to acquire a gill-full of gravel.
But furthermore, the floating particles could be carried throughout the entire water column by powerful currents in a natural process called ‘downwelling’ & ‘upwelling’ – damaging (perhaps fatally) the respiratory systems of billions of fish.
This, plus the impact that light & sound disturbances from mining equipment would have on creatures adapted to conditions of silence & darkness, raises the likelihood of ecosystem collapse. Ocean ecosystems are already threatened by multiple stressors like overfishing, ocean acidification, & plastic pollution – do we really want to add anything else to the list?
The Metals Company claims that seabed extraction is a more ‘sustainable’ method of sourcing metal than land-based mining. Whenever anyone pulls-out the ‘sustainability’ buzzword, two premises need to be addressed:
#1: what are they sustaining? – clearly not biodiversity.
#2: how long do they wish to sustain it for?
The answer to the first question: an industrial way of life. The way of life which propels us to greedily squander nature’s bounty.
The answer to the second question: for as long as there’s anything left of the living world to convert into commodities.
This isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about creating new technologies which will prolong & exacerbate the destruction of the planet, and a false narrative that this is all somehow morally justifiable. Here’s a basic rule: if we consume the Earth at a rate faster than it can regenerate – eventually there won’t be anything left to take. Even Gregory Stone (chief scientist at The Metals Company) acknowledges this:
“On-land commodities are being exhausted…and [the deep sea] is the natural next place to look…these are some of the last resources that the Earth has to give us”.
Are we really prepared to blow-through everything that’s left? To leave no stone (or nodule) left unturned, just so that we can continue driving around in cars & tooting our horns?
The ends don’t really justify the means. Any right-minded, white westerner can reflect upon the cruelty of the transatlantic slave trade and conclude: “Yikes, my ancestors should’ve left the people of West Africa alone”.
Jazz music probably wouldn’t have existed without the transatlantic slave trade. Do I like jazz music? Sure, but you know what I like better? Thriving communities living in environments to which they’re socially and biologically adapted.
Communities like the ocean-dwelling phytoplankton who generate 80% of the Earth’s oxygen, who play a crucial role in atmospheric carbon regulation, and whose future hangs in the balance should deep-sea mining go ahead.
So, what can we do to stop this from happening?
The country of Nauru, which (having signed a contract with The Metals Company) would stand to benefit financially from deep sea mining, have declared that operations will go ahead in 2024, within waters assigned to them by the ISA (International Seabed Authority) – that means we have about two years to stop this.
So far, campaigners such as Greenpeace, WWF, and the government of Fiji have collaborated on a proposed 10-year moratorium (temporary ban) on deep sea mining until more is known about its effects on deep sea ecosystems.
Going a step further, organisations like Blue Planet Society and Pacific Blue Line are calling for an outright ban.
You (the reader) can help by educating yourself more on the subject, by spreading awareness, by signing online petitions, and by joining or organizing demonstrations against deep sea mining…but before you go and do those things, let me finish with a final appeal:
As environmentalists, we might not instinctively care quite as much about the deep sea as we do about other landscapes like rainforests or prairies. We’re land mammals after all; we don’t belong down there, and neither should we strive to assimilate. However, it’s important that we look beyond our human bias, because the deep sea comprises 60% of Earth’s surface. This means that the wellbeing of the ocean is crucial for the wellbeing of the planet as a whole.
Industrialists can’t understand this. They look upon the deep sea as a challenge, as another frontier just waiting to be conquered, and none of the native beings who live there will stand in their way.
We can stand in their way.
Help to stop deep sea mining, before it starts.
Joshua Clinton is a long-term environmental devotee, campaign organizer, & freelance writer. He can be reached at: tr33tantra@gmail.com.
