Coronavirus rarely kills people directly—so why are people dying? This piece from Paul Feather, animist farmer and writer, challenges simplistic, reductionist thinking, and proposes a synthesis approach to understanding the current crisis.
Sixty five thousand, six hundred and fifty two. As of this writing, John Hopkins reports this death toll from coronavirus [the official death toll is now above 100,000].
It’s strange to me, the way we count these deaths. I would like to count them differently. I would like to use science, even though the scientists won’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you count things, but this particular number—or rather its rate of growth—has lost us our constitutional right to assemble. A third of the world’s population is on lockdown with more to come no doubt, and I fear for the suffering that results from these restrictions.
So maybe we should check our numbers.
Our culture has a strange idea of cause and effect.
It’s very reduced; we have a tendency to explain very complex situations with very singular causes. (This is often useful: reduction is the key to controlling things, and to placing blame.)
However, reducing everything down to single causes—like cause of death from a virus—isn’t helpful for deep understanding of complex situations, nor is it good science. I’ll be cautious of speaking for cultures that aren’t mine, but a broad study of language and culture would probably show that there are other ways to perceive the world and better forms of science. This reduced view just happens to be the one we’re born into.
There are many reasons that people die. This is especially true in a situation as complex as global pandemic where economic factors clash with public health and culture; where death can result or be prevented by membership in a privileged group or by access to technology.
In such a complex system, we must resist the temptation and habit to reduce the cause of death to a single root and throw out every other contributing factor no matter how important it may be. Many of the reasons that people are now dying are long-term, structural problems that make us fragile to pandemic. These are the macro-causes of death, but we tend to ignore them in favor of short-term micro-causes, such as the presence of this particular virus at this particular time.
Here’s a metaphor. If I remove 90% of the structural members in your house and then the wind blows your house down, should we say that the wind caused your house to fall? Would that be good science? And if many houses had been sabotaged in this way, but we published statistics about house failures due to wind damage (mentioning nothing about sabotage), wouldn’t these be misleading statistics? And any policy based on those numbers bad policy?
Our health has been sabotaged. The saboteurs continue to profit. Death was coming. This disease is only the wind.
Cause of Death: The Chronic Health Crisis
There are many studies showing that people are much more likely to die after coronavirus infection if they already suffer from one of the many chronic health problems that plague our civilization such as diabetes, hypertension, COPD, cancer, and more. In some studies, as many as 99% of patients who died after contracting COVID-19 had a comorbidity of this kind (and that wouldn’t even include unreported asymptomatic cases). Further, it’s also clear that comorbidities make us more likely to contract the virus in the first place.
What this means is that tens of thousands of people are dying from complex situations involving at least two causes—virus and chronic condition—but we are reducing that situation to a single cause when we report the cause of death as COVID-19. These chronic conditions inflate COVID-19 death tolls, and the roles of Pepsi-co, Nestlé, and McDonald’s; Philip Morris, Bayer, and Pfizer; Monsanto, Sinopec, and Shell—the role of the poisons produced by these companies are not accounted for. These factors are being distilled out of the death tolls.
If we accounted for comorbidity as a very well-documented factor in deaths that have occurred over the past several months—as well as for those that will occur in the upcoming months—we would not attribute these deaths to the virus. We would, in fact, see a sharp rise in death rates associated with the chronic diseases of civilization. Policy initiatives and public response to that spike in death rates might look more like shutting down the local Frito-Lay plant than taking our right to assembly and confining abused women in homes with their now unemployed abusers.
Please Note: for some reason, when I’ve made this argument people seem to hear that I think the deaths of sick people don’t count, because they were sick anyway, or they were old, and they don’t matter. That is NOT what I am saying at all. I am refusing to distill the cause for these deaths into a virus when people have been dying all along and will continue to die from poisons that corporations produce and shove down our throats or release into our waters and soils. I insist that these deaths be counted, but I refuse that they should be counted so wrongly. It is true that COVID-19 is a factor in these deaths, but co-morbidity is an almost necessary condition for death as well, and our death tolls do not reflect this.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and forty four. I step away from my writing for a few hours, dig a little in the garden, plant a row of potatoes, and 3,792 people have died “from coronavirus.”
There are other, perhaps less well-studied factors in these deaths as well. It is particularly strange how we’ll reduce cause of death to a virus, but then suddenly open our minds to other factors when it suits our political agenda or narrative. So for instance, my liberal friends will dispute the above argument about chronic disease as a cause of death but blithely attribute (and perhaps rightly) any number of deaths to Trump’s early denial of the crisis and his refusal to mobilize infrastructure to produce more ventilators.
Why don’t we have enough ventilators?
It would be possible to have a culture that was prepared for this tragedy. Many experts have foreseen it, and the only real answer to our lack of preparation is that we didn’t care. We do not value caring. Riane Eisler, in her book The Real Wealth of Nations, sketches the structure of a caring economy that would—among other things—reduce incarceration, empower women, and fairly compensate caregivers, healthcare workers, and educators. Such a structure would certainly value preparedness for pandemic.
Humans in other places and times have demonstrated caring societies. For instance, in The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler finds that Neolithic European societies were unmarked by social stratification or accumulation of private wealth. For thousands of years, these matrilineal goddess worshiping people developed technologies to “enhance quality of life” rather than for weaponry. However, towards the beginning of the historical period, invaders conquered these ancient partnership societies, and an unfortunate cultural transformation took place.
After a series of invasions, metalwork in this era began to be increasingly used for spears, swords, and daggers rather than fishhooks, awls, and woodworking tools; ‘chieftain graves’ appeared, in which an elite strongman was buried among rich gifts and the skeletons of his slaves and concubines. The symbols uncovered after this conquest indicate a patriarchal dominator culture that worshipped the blade, and who perceived power not as a generative force, but as the power to destroy, conquer, rape, and plunder. Modern civilization was born when the conquering dominator/patriarchy co-opted the symbols, myths, stories, laws, and writing of the matrilineal, goddess worshipping, egalitarian culture that they subjugated to create the society in in which we live today.
So we may blame Trump for his failure to mobilize our infrastructure to produce masks and ventilators, and I certainly believe in holding uncaring leaders accountable for their failures. But, we should not confuse this placement of blame with a ‘cause’ of death, for the systems that created this situation arose from what Friedrich Engels described as, “The world historical defeat of the female sex,” thousands of years ago. Irrespective of individual leaders, our dominator culture will never care if we have enough ventilators or enough doctors, nurses, and caregivers, or even if people die as long as there’s profit to be made. It’s slightly harder to know how to adjust COVID-19 death tolls to account for our uncaring culture than it is for well-studied chronic conditions, but I’d take any deaths that result from exceeding the capacity of our healthcare system, and chalk those up to the patriarchy.
Cause of Death: Colonization / Extraction
Certainly some number of otherwise healthy people with access to healthcare and a ventilator will be killed by this virus. But what caused the virus? (One problem with reduction is that it always leads to an endless chain of ‘causes.’) As endlessly hungry industrialized nations force their way into wild lands (or force people off of their native lands so that they flee into wild lands) multinational corporations expose us to more and more zoonotic diseases. This has become such a problem that the US Agency for International Development has financed a project called Predict to anticipate these outbreaks in order to rape these lands without such inconvenience. (Pandemic isn’t good for the bottom line after all.)
So, what portion of pandemic death tolls can’t be attributed to the prevalence of chronic health problems or our uncaring economic system starts to look like the exported cost of colonization by multinational corporations destroying what remains of the wild.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and seventy nine. In the time it took me to write these last paragraphs, John Hopkins reports thirty-five more people died of civilization.
Cause of Death: Hierarchy
I do wish people would stay at home. However complex these systems may be, and however nuanced or broad our analysis, we should act to slow the progression of this disease. And if we did so voluntarily, there need be no attack on our rights. Why don’t we do this?
It’s hardly reasonable to reduce the behavior of millions of people to any meaningful cause, but we could muse on this a little. Who is most at risk from this disease? Death rates increase exponentially with age above sixty years, while deaths of people under thirty are mostly anecdotal. There is a clear generational divide in the risks that people face during this crisis, and there have been many frustrated critics who’ve observed that young people disproportionally fail at social distancing. But why wouldn’t young people act to protect their elders?
That’s an easy one. Young people have grown up with bleak prospects for the future and they can see that their elders who call the shots don’t much care. Young people have faced gun violence in their schools; surveyed oceans full of plastic; heard increasingly dire predictions about climate change; numbly watched as rhinos, orangutans, and polar bears marched toward extinction, and generally try not to think about what might be in their water and food. They have been defrauded by the educational system and placed in crippling debt without being provided skills that are relevant in this rapidly changing society. I could detail a list of grievances for young people against their elders that is every bit as long as Thomas Jefferson‘s against the King of England, and young people are barely more represented in our government than were colonial Americans.
We have a hierarchical social structure that concentrates power in the hands of certain groups of people who benefit at the expense of others. It is a complex arrangement of many different and overlapping groups that each exploit or are exploited by other groups. In this system, it is not reasonable to expect that any exploited group would voluntarily sacrifice their own freedom and well-being to protect the group that exploits them. Nor should they. Young people (and their children) will suffer hardship, have fewer resources, and probably live shorter lives to pay for the excesses of their parents and grandparents; and this is an injustice that we knowingly commit. Yet people act exasperated to see young people out on the beach during a pandemic and ask, “How can they be so irresponsible?”
We are now seeing—and will soon be seeing more—the deadly results of this hierarchical arrangement. What if older generations had made a good faith effort to stand up for their own children? What if elders had ceded some power, capital, and influence to the demands of future generations—demands that were loudly and clearly spoken but ignored? This did not happen, and now our hierarchical culture cannot muster the solidarity and mutual aid that would be needed to prevent deaths in this time of crisis.
Cause of Death: Civilization
The only good reduction is a synthesis. If we were to combine all of these causal factors, would there be a word that could contain them all? Could we then reduce these deaths that they tell us are caused by a virus to something that speaks for all of these causes together—of patriarchy, chronic disease, colonization, hierarchy, along with others upon which I have not elaborated: globalization, urbanization, political infighting—and what would that word be? It could only be our culture or our civilization as a whole.
When we bring all of these causes together, we must also note that COVID-19 death tolls pale in comparison to the daily death and suffering that results from that this collection of factors.
Malnourishment alone (certainly a legacy of colonization) kills 15,000 children every day, yet English speaking people in the global North don’t bring similar urgency to this crisis or even perceive it as an emergency, because the children dying are mostly black, brown, and far away.
It is only now—when our violent civilization generates a threat capable of piercing the armor of privilege—that we act to curb the effects of this violence; and then only by seeking to suppress the most micro-causal factor in this great chain of causes. As this micro-cause directly affects the global upper class, we fixate upon it, and most of us can’t perceive the extensive scope and nature of this crisis.
What to do with this analysis?
First, I think we should hold scientific organizations such as the WHO and the CDC accountable and demand that they publish uninflated death tolls that account for well-studied macro-causes of death such as co-morbidities.
This would be simple accounting, because it merely incorporates well-published data from studies that are entirely valid even in the language spoken by the scientific community. This alone would rapidly deflate COVID-19 death tolls and ease frightened citizens’ outcry for these draconian lockdowns that might endanger more people than they protect. It would also create a basis upon which to work toward dismantling the structures that are actually killing people. (Ideally, there would be some effort to account for economic factors that embody patriarchy, externalized costs of colonization, hierarchical power distributions, etc., but that might be a bit much for the modern scientific mind to bear.)
Additionally, I think we should refuse to cede the language space that attributes these deaths to COVID-19. I think we should go a step further than some existing observations that this virus is a disease of civilization, and refuse to acknowledge the virus as being a cause of death at all—or at least the most important one. For while coronavirus infection is a necessary condition for death from COVID-19, there are many other necessary conditions as well, and there are many cases where infection carries no risk at all or goes unnoticed. I think we should maintain our focus upon structural causes that killed people before this virus ever showed up, that are killing people now, and that will certainly kill people next year if we don’t completely restructure our society and destroy the economic system that makes those deaths profitable.
Seventy thousand, four hundred, and eighty two. I typically sleep on a piece of writing before making final edits, and in that time Johns Hopkins reports one thousand and three people have died from civilization. Seven and a half thousand children died from starvation in that same period of time.
This excerpt comes from the Introduction to Dahr Jamail‘s book, The End of Ice. Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist and author who is a full-time staff reporter for Truthout.org. His work is currently focusing on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.
Featured image: a rapidly melting glacier on Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), by Max Wilbert.
Our planet is rapidly changing, and what we are witnessing is unlike anything that has occurred in human, or even geologic, history. The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, both greenhouse gases, has been scientific fact for decades, and according to NASA, “There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.” Evidence shows that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to warm ten times faster than it should, and the ramifications of this are being felt, quite literally, throughout the entire biosphere. Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates, droughts and wildfires of increasing severity and frequency are altering forests around the globe, and the Earth’s cryosphere—the parts of the Earth so cold that water is frozen into ice or snow—is melting at an ever-accelerating rate. The subsea permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, and we could experience a methane “burp” of previously trapped gas at any moment, causing the equivalent of several times the total amount of CO2 humans have emitted to be released into the atmosphere. The results would be catastrophic.
Climate disruption brings with it extreme weather, too, such as hurricanes and floods. For instance, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to an increase in the frequency of severe major rain events, such as Hurricane Harvey over Houston during the summer of 2017, which dropped so much rain that the weight of the water actually caused the Earth’s crust to sink two centimeters.
Earth has not seen current atmospheric CO2 levels since the Pliocene, some 3 million years ago. Three-quarters of that CO2 will still be here in five hundred years. Given that it takes a decade to experience the full warming effects of CO2 emissions, we are still that far away from experiencing the impact of all the CO2 that we are currently emitting. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for most of what is currently in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans. Climate disruption is progressing faster than ever, and faster than predicted. Seventeen of the eighteen hottest years [now, eighteen of the nineteen hottest years] ever recorded have occurred since the year 2001. The distress signals from our overheated planet are all around us, with reports, studies, and warnings increasing daily. Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality. Countless glaciers, rivers, lakes, forests, and species are already vanishing at a pace never seen before, and all of this from increasing the global mean temperature by “only” 1°C above preindustrial baseline temperatures. According to some scientists, it could rise as much as a 10°C by the year 2100.6
A study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that even staying within a 2°C temperature-warming limit has caused unstoppable melting in both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. This will raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.7 New York, Boston, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Jakarta, Singapore, Osaka, Tokyo, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, and Ho Chi Minh City are only a few examples of cities that will, sooner or later, have to be moved or abandoned to the sea.
Mountaineering in today’s climate-disrupted world is a vastly different endeavor than it used to be. Glaciers are vanishing before our eyes, having shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, and they are now melting faster than ever. In North America, 70 percent of the glaciers in western Canada are projected to be gone by 2100. Montana’s Glacier National Park will most likely not have any active glaciers by 2030. The Matanuska Glacier’s ancient ice is, by now, rapidly vanishing. Dramatic changes are occurring even in the planet’s highest and coldest places. Even Mount Everest (Sagarmatha/Chomolungma) is transforming, as thousands of glaciers across the Himalayas will likely shrink by up to 99 percent by 2100. A child born today will see an Everest largely free of glaciers within her lifetime.
…
Before embarking on this book, I already knew the extent to which human-caused climate disruption had advanced. I had lived in Alaska for a decade beginning in 1996 and had spent time on the glaciers there. As early as the late nineties, large portions of the holiday season would go by in Anchorage without any snow on the ground, the waterfalls that my climbing friends and I had used for ice climbing barely froze some winters, and we could see the glaciers we used to traverse to access peaks shrinking from year to year. But I wasn’t aware of what was happening in the oceans and the rain forests. I wasn’t aware of the rise in sea levels and the changing climate’s impact on biodiversity.
I started reporting on the environment and climate in 2010, and since then I’ve published more than one hundred articles about climate disruption and given many lectures and radio interviews on the subject. This work established the foundation of my research, so by the time I began my field research for this book, I knew what to expect: that humans had already altered planetary climate systems. That is why, rather than the more commonly used “climate change,” I prefer to use the term “anthropogenic (human-caused) climate disruption.” Without question, the human race is responsible.
My original aim with this book was to provide a view of what was happening around the world: from the heights of Denali to the Great Barrier Reef; from the remote, windswept islands in the Bering Sea to the Florida coast. I wanted to explore how the forests across the western United States were impacted by drought and wildfire and investigate what was happening to the Amazon, the largest rain forest on Earth. Knowing that most people will likely never visit most of these places, I hoped to bring home to the reader the urgency of our planetary crisis through firsthand accounts of what is happening to the glaciers, forests, wildlife, coral reefs, and oceans, alongside data provided by leading scientists who study them.
The reporting in this book has turned out to be far more difficult to deal with than the years I spent reporting from war-torn Iraq. But I have come to realize that only by sharing an intimacy with these places can we begin to know, perhaps love, and certainly care for them. Only by having this intimacy with the natural world can we fully understand how dramatically our actions are impacting it.
In Nepal, the sacred mountain Machhapuchchhre rises abruptly on the eastern boundary of the Annapurna Sanctuary. As a child, I came across a photograph of this peak in a geography textbook and was immediately captivated by its majesty. Shaped like a fish’s tail, the knife-edged ridge that forms its summit is a seemingly paper-thin line of rock that drops precipitously on either side, causing the apex of the peak, which is nearly half a mile higher than the top of Denali, to be one of the more dramatic summits anywhere. It is a masterpiece of nature.
The Nepalese believe Machhapuchchhre is sacred to Shiva, one of the primary deities of Hinduism, who is known as both “the Destroyer” and “the Transformer” and believed to be without form—limitless, transcendent, and eternally unchanging. The mountain is forbidden to climbers, and to this day no human has ever stood atop that summit. I believe this is a just decision, and I have always wished more parts of Earth could be placed out of human reach.
Staring at that picture as a youth, time would cease to exist. I fell in love with Machhapuchchhre, and in the process I became enraptured with all mountains. When I was ten years old, I saw the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for the first time, their silhouettes against the setting sun, and I was awestruck. In the fall of 1995, I traveled to Alaska and drove a short way into Denali National Park and Preserve. When the afternoon clouds parted to reveal the majesty of Denali’s summit, my first inclination was to bow in wonderment. A year later I moved to Alaska and trained myself in the mountaineering skills I needed to access these sanctuaries that stand far from the violence, speed, and greed of our increasingly dystopian industrial society. The Scottish American naturalist, author, philosopher, and early wilderness-preservation advocate John Muir captured my feelings precisely: “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
A glacier is essentially suspended energy, suspended force. It is time, in that sense, life, frozen in time. But now, these frozen rivers of time are themselves running out of time. The planet’s ecosystems, now pushed far beyond their capacity to adapt to human-generated traumas and stresses, are in a state of free fall. Similar to how I watched hundreds of years of time compressed into glacial ice flash before my eyes in a matter of seconds as I fell into the crevasse, Earth’s species, glaciers, rivers, lakes, and forests are, in the blink of a geologic eye, falling into oblivion.
Modern life has compressed time and space. Through air travel or instantaneous communication and access to information you can traverse the globe in a matter of hours or gain knowledge nanoseconds after a question is posed. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives.
I venture into the wilds and into the mountains in large part to allow space and time to stretch themselves back to what they were. The frenetic pace of contemporary life is having a devastating impact on this planet. Humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the oceans from which we came. We now use more than half the planet’s readily accessible freshwater runoff, and the majority of the world’s major rivers have been either dammed or diverted.
As a species, we now hang over the abyss of a geoengineered future we have created for ourselves. At our insistence, our voracious appetite is consuming nature itself. We have refused to heed the warnings Earth has been sending, and there is no rescue team on its way.
The term “Anthropogenic Climate Disruption” is used to highlight the origins of current climate change in human activities, as opposed to other climate changes that have occurred in human history. Melting of the glaciers is one such effect of the Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.It can, in turn, cause problems like climate migration, rising sea level, etc. Learn more about the issue in Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice.
Editor’s note: on Thursday news broke that the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. is suspending enforcement of regulations due to the coronavirus outbreak.
This comes several weeks after China waived their own environmental regulations in order to re-start their economy as fast as possible, raising fears of a “pollution backlash.”
From a DGR analysis, this is predictable. Within a culture that is dependent on destroying the planet, the needs of the economy—and of the rich—will always be prioritized over the needs of the natural world.
It’s obvious that environmental regulations are failing to protect the planet. That’s partly because, as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) often states, regulatory law is written by and for corporations. Nonetheless, regulations do mitigate and slow some of the worst harms. Now, even that flimsy barrier is being dismantled.
We expect this. As Derrick Jensen wrote in Premise 20 of the book Endgame, “Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.”
Featured image: Public domain photo. Air pollution kills roughly 7 million human beings annually.
‘Holy Crap This Is Insane’: Citing Coronavirus Pandemic, EPA Indefinitely Suspends Environmental Rules
The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a “green light to pollute with impunity.”
Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies “act responsibly” to avoid violations.
“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” Wheeler said in a statement. “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.”
Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, toldThe Hill that the new policy is “essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future.”
“It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic,” said Giles. “And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was.”
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Editor’s note: This article, first published at Marx21, dives into the origin and epidemiology of the CoViD-19 virus with a socialist biologist. While it does not represent an official Deep Green Resistance perspective, it does include valuable factual information—including the essential analysis that CoViD is a “disease of civilization.” For further reading on this topic, see “Civilization Makes Us Sick” and “The Ecology of Disease.” Republished with permission.
The coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures. A talk with Rob Wallace (Evolutionary Biologist) about the dangers of CoViD-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases.
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and phylogeographer for public health in the USA. He has been working for twenty-five years on various aspects of new pandemics and is the author of the book “Big Farms Make Big Flu”.
How dangerous is the new coronavirus?
Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not?
So all this fuss about the virus is just scare tactics?
No, certainly not. At the population level, Covid-19 was clocking in at between 2 and 4% case fatality ratio or CFR at the start of the outbreak in Wuhan. Outside Wuhan, the CFR appears to drop off to more like 1% and even less, but also appears to spike in spots here and there, including in places in Italy and the United States.. Its range doesn’t seem much in comparison to, say, SARS at 10%, the influenza of1918 5-20%, »avian influenza« H5N1 60%, or at some points Ebola 90%. But it certainly exceeds seasonal influenza’s 0.1% CFR. The danger isn’t just a matter of the death rate, however. We have to grapple with what’s called penetrance or community attack rate: how much of the global population is penetrated by the outbreak.
Can you be more specific?
The global travel network is at record connectivity. With no vaccines or specific antivirals for coronaviruses, nor at this point any herd immunity to the virus, even a strain at only 1% mortality can present a considerable danger. With an incubation period of up to two weeks and increasing evidence of some transmission before sickness–before we know people are infected–few places would likely be free of infection. If, say, Covid-19 registers 1% fatality in the course of infecting four billion people, that’s 40 million dead. A small proportion of a large number can still be a large number.
These are frightening numbers for an ostensibly less than virulent pathogen…
Definitely and we are only at the beginning of the outbreak. It’s important to understand that many new infections change over the course of epidemics. Infectivity, virulence, or both may attenuate. On the other hand, other outbreaks ramp up in virulence. The first wave of the influenza pandemic in the spring of 1918 was a relatively mild infection. It was the second and third waves that winter and into 1919 that killed millions.
But pandemic skeptics argue that far fewer patients have been infected and killed by the coronavirus than by the typical seasonal flu. What do you think about that?
I would be the first to celebrate if this outbreak proves a dud. But these efforts to dismiss Covid-19 as a possible danger by citing other deadly diseases, especially influenza, is a rhetorical device to spin concern about the coronavirus as badly placed.
So the comparison with seasonal flu is limping …
It makes little sense to compare two pathogens on different parts of their epicurves. Yes, seasonal influenza infects many millions worldwide each other, killing, by WHO estimates, up to 650,000 people a year. Covid-19, however, is only starting its epidemiological journey. And unlike influenza, we have neither vaccine, nor herd immunity to slow infection and protect the most vulnerable populations.
Even if the comparison is misleading, both diseases belong to viruses, even to a specific group, the RNA viruses. Both can cause disease. Both affect the mouth and throat area and sometimes also the lungs. Both are quite contagious.
Those are superficial similarities that miss a critical part in comparing two pathogens. We know a lot about influenza’s dynamics. We know very little about Covid-19’s. They’re steeped in unknowns. Indeed, there is much about Covid-19 that is even unknowable until the outbreak plays out fully. At the same time, it is important to understand that it isn’t a matter of Covid-19 versus influenza. It’s Covid-19 and influenza. The emergence of multiple infections capable of going pandemic, attacking populations in combos, should be the front and center worry.
You have been researching epidemics and their causes for several years. In your book »Big Farms Make Big Flu« you attempt to draw these connections between industrial farming practices, organic farming and viral epidemiology. What are your insights?
The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.
When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.
Who is to blame?
I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.
For which diseases is this the case?
There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.
What is the role of multinational companies in this process?
Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.
What effects do the production methods of agribusinesses have on this?
The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.
How so?
Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.
What!?
These companies can just externalize the costs of their epidemiologically dangerous operations on everyone else. From the animals themselves to consumers, farmworkers, local environments, and governments across jurisdictions. The damages are so extensive that if we were to return those costs onto company balance sheets, agribusiness as we know it would be ended forever. No company could support the costs of the damage it imposes.
In many media it is claimed that the starting point of the coronavirus was an »exotic food market« in Wuhan. Is this description true?
Yes and no. There are spatial clues in favor of the notion. Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held.
But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.
Covid-19 is not the first virus to develop in China that the government tried to cover it up.
Yes, but this is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a »health emergency of international concern«. Is this step correct?
Yes. The danger of such a pathogen is that health authorities do not have a handle on the statistical risk distribution. We have no idea how the pathogen may respond. We went from an outbreak in a market to infections splattered across the world in a matter of weeks. The pathogen could just burn out. That would be great. But we don’t know. Better preparation would better the odds of undercutting the pathogen’s escape velocity.
The WHO’s declaration is also part of what I call pandemic theater. International organizations have died in the face of inaction. The League of Nations comes to mind. The UN group of organizations is always worried about its relevance, power, and funding. But such actionism can also converge on the actual preparation and prevention the world needs to disrupt Covid-19’s chains of transmission.
The neoliberal restructuring of the health care system has worsened both the research and the general care of patients, for example in hospitals. What difference could a better funded healthcare system make to fight the virus?
There’s the terrible but telling story of the Miami medical device company employee who upon returning from China with flu-like symptoms did the righteous thing by his family and community and demanded a local hospital test him for Covid-19. He worried that his minimal Obamacare option wouldn’t cover the tests. He was right. He was suddenly on the hook for US$3270. An American demand might be an emergency order be passed that stipulates that during a pandemic outbreak, all outstanding medical bills related to testing for infection and for treatment following a positive test would be paid for by the federal government. We want to encourage people to seek help, after all, rather than hide away—and infect others—because they can’t afford treatment. The obvious solution is a national health service—fully staffed and equipped to handle such community-wide emergencies—so that such a ridiculous problem as discouraging community cooperation would never arise.
As soon as the virus is discovered in one country, governments everywhere react with authoritarian and punitive measures, such as a compulsory quarantine of entire areas of land and cities. Are such drastic measures justified?
Using an outbreak to beta-test the latest in autocratic control post-outbreak is disaster capitalism gone off the rails. In terms of public health, I would err on the side of trust and compassion, which are important epidemiological variables. Without either, jurisdictions lose their populations‘ support. A sense of solidarity and common respect is a critical part of eliciting the cooperation we need to survive such threats together. Self-quarantines with the proper support–check-ins by trained neighborhood brigades, food supply trucks going door-to-door, work release and unemployment insurance–can elicit that kind of cooperation, that we are all in this together.
As you may know, in Germany with the AfD we have a de facto Nazi party with 94 seats in parliament. The hard Nazi Right and other groups in association with AfD politicians use the Corona-Crisis for their agitation. They spread (false) reports about the virus and demand more authoritarian measures from the government: Restrict flights and entry stops for migrants, border closures and forced quarantine …
Travel bans and border closures are demands with which the radical right wants to to racialize what are now global diseases. This is, of course, nonsense. At this point, given the virus is already on its way to spreading everywhere, the sensible thing to do is to work on developing the kind of public health resilience in which it doesn’t matter who shows up with an infection, we have the means to treat and cure them. Of course, stop stealing people’s land abroad and driving the exoduses in the first place, and we can keep the pathogens from emerging in the first place.
What would be sustainable changes?
In order to reduce the emergence of new virus outbreaks, food production has to change radically. Farmer autonomy and a strong public sector can curb environmental ratchets and runaway infections. Introduce varieties of stock and crops—and strategic rewilding—at both the farm and regional levels. Permit food animals to reproduce on-site to pass on tested immunities. Connect just production with just circulation. Subsidize price supports and consumer purchasing programs supporting agroecological production. Defend these experiments from both the compulsions that neoliberal economics impose upon individuals and communities alike and the threat of capital-led State repression.
What should socialists call for in the face of the increasing dynamics of disease outbreaks?
Agribusiness as a mode of social reproduction must be ended for good if only as a matter of public health. Highly capitalized production of food depends on practices that endanger the entirety of humanity, in this case helping unleash a new deadly pandemic. We should demand food systems be socialized in such a way that pathogens this dangerous are kept from emerging in the first place. That will require reintegrating food production into the needs of rural communities first. That will require agroecological practices that protect the environment and farmers as they grow our food. Big picture, we must heal the metabolic rifts separating our ecologies from our economies. In short, we have a planet to win.
This interview between Derrick Jensen and Christoper Ketcham examines the U.S. government’s taxpayer-funded wildlife slaughter program. Ketcham exposes Wildlife Service’s use of poisoned bait, aerial gunning, neck snares, leghold traps (banned in 80 countries), and cyanide traps to kill millions of wild animals each year in the United States. This conversation originally aired on the show Resistance Radio.
Featured image: Wildlife Services employee or contractor holds a wolf killed by aerial gunning in Idaho. USDA photo.
Derrick Jensen:
My guest today is Christopher Ketcham. He’s a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. Today we discuss Wildlife Services – but before that – he has a new book out, a very good book, called This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. That book is a product of 10 years of research and travel across the public lands of the west.
Chris, first off, thank you as always for your tremendous work in the world and second thank you for being on the program.
What is ‘Wildlife Services’?
Christoper Ketcham:
I devote two chapters in my book to Wildlife Services because they are such a heinous operation of the federal bureaucracy. Basically, Wildlife Services is a branch of the US Department of Agriculture. Specifically, a branch of the Animal, Plant and Health Inspection Service at the USDA; whose purpose is to slaughter wildlife to protect industry.
Now on western public lands most of that slaughter is conducted to benefit one industry; the livestock industry. What we’re talking about here is a killing machine of: aerial gunships, helicopters, airplanes, cyanide landmines distributed across the landscape, poison collars placed on sheep, and all sorts of traps designed to kill those animals deemed predators and pests by the livestock industry.
What do they mean by predators and pests? Well, the livestock industry generally asks Wildlife Services to kill out wolves by the tens of thousands, when the wolves threaten cows and sheep. Coyotes are slaughtered every year to protect livestock. Black beers, grizzly bears, cougars, and then a host of other animals that you wouldn’t think would make the death list for the livestock industry but do. Animals like beavers and prairie dogs.
You know both of these are keystone species in western ecosystems. Beavers because obviously they dam water, they create meadows, and they are incredibly important in arid land ecosystems for the simple fact of creating water retention in the uplands. Prairie dogs create habitat for many other species. Their burrows are said to allow water to more efficiently percolate into aquifers. Generally, when you see prairie dogs on the landscape in the west, you are looking at healthy grasslands.
The livestock industry wants to kill out beavers because beavers dam up water that stockman want to use to water the cattle and grow hay. Prairie dogs have to be eradicated in massive numbers because the prairie dogs are considered competitors for forage with cows.
And on, and on and on.
During the 20th Century it is estimated that Wildlife Services killed something like tens of millions of animals across the west to benefit this one industry: the livestock industry. It is a campaign of destruction, poisoning, and bloodshed that is paid for by the US taxpayer, to the tune of something like 150 million dollars a year.
04:55
DJ:
To be clear, taxpayers pay 150 million dollars a year to slaughter wildlife?
CK:
Yes. It is very efficiently done. We often castigate the US government for being inefficient. This is a well-run program, a smoothly-oiled machine of mayhem.
DJ:
You’ve talked about wolves and coyotes. I want to come back to that, but something I think about every time I throw out birdseed is that they also kill birds. It’s extraordinary to me that they kill birds who are feeding on the farms where they grow birdseed so I can have a bird-feeder in my back yard.
They kill lots and lots of, say for example, red-wing black birds, or is that a different organization?
CK:
That’s Wildlife Services. The bird kills are often done to protect agriculture. Not to protect livestock but cropland operations of all types. But they also slaughter birds that threaten air traffic. If you have large flocks of starlings or sparrows (whatever it might be), they may get caught in the engines of jets. Well, Wildlife Services will go in and make sure that those birds do not pester air traffic.
DJ:
Before we get back to wolves, coyotes etc., can we talk for a second about 1984 and just the name Wildlife Services? Is this not a beautiful name?
CK:
It is the perfect Orwellian name. Wildlife Services has its origins in the 1890s when it’s predecessor, called the Bureau of Biological Survey, would go around and identify, specifically wolves, that were considered a threat to stockman in the west.
The Bureau of Biological Survey really got its teeth into this business in Colorado, where the stock industry and wolves had gone head to head for many years. The stockman could not successfully eliminate the wolves. They turned to the US government for help to kill these wolves. So from 1905, we see the Bureau of Biological Survey is aiding the US Forest Service so that the forest rangers can go out and kill the wolves.
After 1931 Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act that basically established the Bureau of Animal Damage Control – a far less Orwellian name right. That name at least sort of says what the agency does – controls animal damage, controls the animals.
In the 90s (I believe) Animal Damage Control got its name changed to Wildlife Services via some inventive bureaucrat who figured, “hey we are going to service the wildlife with a shotgun!”. So that’s the history in brief of the naming of Wildlife Services.
08:48
DJ:
Right now when I look out the window and I see a couple of bears, literally at this moment, and I know bears get killed a lot.
How does it actually work that an animal gets targeted for killing? Is this just routine, or does it usually take a request by the rancher? Are they basically acting as taxpaid servants of individual ranchers, or do they go out and kill the wolves, coyotes etc. prophylactically?
09:32
CK:
What happens is yes you can have an individual rancher who determines, through questionable means, that some of his livestock have been killed say by a pack of wolves ranging locally on the public lands nearby, or even on private lands. So, he calls up Wildlife Services, “I’ve got a problem. You’ve gotta come in an investigate”.
A Wildlife Services trapper will come in and do a quote “investigation”. Now I’ve written in my book about what these investigations amount to. They are in fact usually cursorily, incompetently done, and designed almost always to substantiate the initial claim of the rancher regardless of the evidence.
The rancher can say these cows died by wolves and the trapper will look around and say, “well it doesn’t look like there’s any evidence of a wolf attack, but we’ll call it a wolf attack anyways”. Thereafter, the whole machine starts going into gear and after that you’ve got aerial gunships prowling the area and you’ve got traps laid out.
These are steel leg-hold traps. They are extremely painful. When an animal gets trapped in these things there’s incredible suffering that goes on. Especially given that the trap-shut-times for Wildlife Services are not regulated. You can leave a trap out and just check it every week instead of every day or every other day as required by a certain federal statute.
This rancher who called in Wildlife Services usually gets satisfaction in that Wildlife Services is generally pretty good at tracking down and killing the wolves who supposedly did the crime. Even though, as I mentioned earlier, there’s often not much proof of that (so called) crime.
13:01
On the other hand, you have what’s called prophylactic killing. In which Wildlife Services will go out and just start hammering local populations, say of coyotes. This involves flying around, usually in an airplane, and just gunning down coyotes on sight. They call this prophylactic killing “preventative”. Whereas, killing that occurs after there is evidence, that’s called corrective. So, you’ve got preventative and corrective.
Most of the killing by Wildlife Services is preventative. In that there is no actual evidence of the pack of coyotes in question say having actually attacked anything. They are just killed preemptively. Because they might go after livestock some day in the course of their life.
At this point, you get, you understand, that this absurd. This is crazy. But this is how the system operates.
14:14
DJ:
That reminds of that famous line from a slaughter in France many hundred years ago. A town in France was going to wipe out a certain radical sect of Christians. They couldn’t figure out who was which sect and the person who ran the town commanded his troops, ‘kill them all and let God sort them out’.
It’s the same sort of thing.
CK:
Yup that is exactly the mentality.
DJ:
I want to go back to the wolves, but I want to comment something; when it is shown that the wolf killed a cow or a sheep, the ranchers get paid. Can you talk abut that?
CK:
Right, that is the depredation compensation program for want of a better phrase. Yes, the federal government will reimburse a rancher for the dead cow if it is proven that the cow was preyed upon by say a wolf or a cougar, or whatever predator, might be a grizzly bear or a wolverine. This incentivizes cattlemen to falsify their claims of depredation.
Cows and sheep are open-range animals. They are subject to all sorts of inclement weather conditions, rough terrain, and accidents: a cow falls off a cliff, gets caught in a slot canyon or struck by lightning, or just lost; a baby ewe gets lost and dies. There are many, many ways for livestock to perish on open range. But if you can show they perished from predators then you get paid. This is obviously a recipe for corruption of the system because of that incentivizing.
17:11
DJ:
Don’t they also get paid higher than market value for ones that have been shown to be a predator kill or purportedly shown?
CK:
No, I think they get paid full market value. For example, this could be a calf that was killed, but I think they would get paid for the full market value of the calf as if it were to have grown to full maturity for sale.
DJ:
My point on this is ultimately, this is something I’ve never understood. The only way I can understand this is a hatred of nature. That honestly if I were running cows, I don’t care if I sell it to a slaughterhouse of if I get money [from the government]. It doesn’t matter. It seems like it would be just a fine business. I wouldn’t care if my cows got eaten as long as I got paid. I don’t understand why the ranchers get to cry victimization when they’re getting paid for the dead cow anyway. That’s what I’m getting at. It makes no sense to me. From the rancher’s perspective it’s like, “yea I don’t care if wolves eat all of them. That means I just sold my entire crop of cows”.
18:32
CK:
Yea now look what we are talking about is not a cost-benefit analysis. There is a cultural ground from which these ranchers are reacting to predators. That culture is about domination of the natural world. The livestock industry’s always been about domination and control of nature, and subjugation of the western landscape: so that cattle can be safe in a place where it’s to arid really for this invasive species (Bos Taurus) that evolved in humid Europe. And where there are tons of predators that will kill the cows as they naturally should, because you know, wolves are going to prey on sheep. Always, it’s always been done.
When they see this predator come in and kill their cows and their sheep, it’s an offense to the moral order. To the cultural moral order of their universe. That, to a certain extent, explains the level of hysteria on the part of stockman when confronted with the presence of predators on the western landscapes.
20:08
DJ:
When we talk about ranchers on the western landscape, we are not generally talking about some homesteader running three cows. This is actually big business, right?
CK:
If you look at the number of permittees who take out a permit to run cows on public lands, most of the permittees are either corporations looking for tax breaks, hobbyists like Ted Turner (so rich people who view these cows as playthings), or mining companies that run cattle in order to also secure the water rights that come with cattle permits. So, for the for the most part we’re not talking about hard scrabble range clans, the little guy eking out survival on the public lands. Those people do exist, but for the most part, public lands ranching is corporate business or is the stuff of rich people.
Rich people who do own herds will contract with local cattlemen, local cowboys, to manage the range, the herd and the public land. These guys aren’t the real owners of the property, they’re just servants for the wealthy who actually own the cattle. It’s the ranch hands and ranch managers who’ll be the most pestiferous and most angry when confronted with predators on the public lands, because they grew up with the culture (public lands ranching culture) and in order to keep a job, while they serve the absentee gentry, the aristocracy who owns most of the cattle on public lands.
DJ:
You keep saying public lands and I think a lot of people in the west know this but maybe people in the east don’t, maybe even in the west don’t. We are not talking about a wolf or grizzly bear crawling up onto your porch and taking the sheep that is sitting two feet from your door. We are actually talking about people who are making a living off of grazing their cows or sheep on land that actually belongs to the public and is rented out to these corporations at sub-market values. We are talking about a huge subsidy even if they weren’t given the additional subsidy of killing predators.
23:33
CK:
Yea that’s right. Let’s make this clear, we are talking our land, the common land. Owned by every American citizen. In fact, a co-sovereign on these lands, for determining how they should be used, or not be used. How they should be protected and preserved. A lot of the so-called depredation on livestock does occur on public land in very wild places in the back country, far from people’s homes, far from people’s private land. And yes, Wildlife Services is yet another subsidy extended to the public lands ranching industry.
The total value of that subsidy, with all the inputs accounted for – everything from road maintenance, fence building, water diversions, to sub-market leasing rates for cows, to the operation of Wildlife Services – one estimate has the total subsidy for public lands ranching coming out to something like a billion dollars a year. One billion dollars. And the remarkable thing here is that public lands ranching only accounts for two percent of all the beef produced in this country. So, a billion dollars for two percent of the beef nationally.
At the same time, you have a regime of incredible waste and destruction to protect public lands ranching producing that meager two percent of beef. Wow, again this is just crazy when you think about it. But there it is, it is the fact of American life and it has been so for a long, long time.
25:38
DJ:
I want to mention something that happened I believe a year or two ago that has just horrified me even more than all the wolf killings. A grizzly bear killed some chickens in somebody’s ranchette in Montana and so they shot the grizzly bear. It blew me away because chickens are one of the most common creatures on the planet and grizzly bears are endangered. I used to raise chickens when I lived in Spokane and coyotes would get them once and a while. That’s the cost having chickens run free in coyote territory. It offended me on a whole other level that you would kill an endangered species because it killed a couple of pet chickens of somebody who’s wealthy enough to own a ranchette. To kill an endangered species, especially under those circumstances, seems horrific to me.
CK:
I agree. It’s a reflection of the deranged values of our society. No other way to put it.
DJ:
In Washington state, there has been every year multiple members or entire packs wiped out, and it is all to serve one ranching outfit. I’m sure there are others to serve as well, but every year for the last six or seven years, there’s a guy [Len McIrvin] who absolutely refuses to take any payment for any wolf kills and any time a cow dies, he wants the entire wolfpack wiped out. You’ll see sympathetic articles about him in the newspaper saying it is driving him out of business etc.
But I did a little research and the guy only claims to lose like two or three cows a year and he runs 4,000 cattle. Honestly if you can’t survive two cows out of 4,000 lost then you’re doing something wrong. In this particular case, they’re serving one guy who is wealthy enough to run 4,000 head of cattle.
Take any of that any direction you want to go.
Note: there’s less than 125 wolves total in Washington state according to news media.
CK:
One comment I can make among several that can be made, there is a simple fact that public lands ranchers are constantly promoting themselves to be the paragons of self-reliant business: that they are the hard-scrabble individual who is out on the range. Yet, they are constantly whining and complaining and calling in the federal government to help them out with the slaughter of these evil wolves or the other subsidies that we mentioned earlier.
Meanwhile, the actual rates of depredation are very low compared to the total number of cows going out on the range. For example, a former Wildlife Services tracker named, Carter Niemeyer, told me something like you have millions of beef cattle going out in the northern Rockys Range and something like a quarter of a percent of them are lost to predators. A quarter of a percent.
Again, the hysterical reaction of this Washington rancher [Len McIrvin] can be explained by a cultural background in which these wolves are seen as an offence against the order of things. And conveniently at the same time he can trick unwary journalists into believing that this is not just a threat to the moral order but an economic threat to his very survival. But both are just lies, convenient lies.
It is incredible to me that this tiny minority in the west, public lands ranchers, exercise such outsized influence on how we manage our lands. It’s really incredible. Talk about capture by a tiny minority against the interests of the broad majority.
31:51
DJ:
The people you talk to, in your experience, do the frontline workers at Wildlife Services, are they fueled by ‘it’s just a paycheck’ and the Upton Sinclair ‘it’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.’?
Or do they think they’re doing a great thing, have a claim to virtue, or do they feel bad about killing so much wildlife?
CK:
I think it depends on the trapper. I’ve interviewed a number of ex-trappers and read documents and media coverage of trappers in the past, who had quit the agency in horror at what they had done. There’s as incredible variety of experience out there.
There are some trappers I think who are passionately engaged in killing predators to protect the livestock industry. Which is what they believe, they believe they are protecting the livestock industry. Hence their passion. These are people who grew up in small rural communities where livestock ranching was a way of life.
I interviewed a guy in Wyoming for my book. I just called him ‘Bob’ because he was very much afraid of being outed in his community and being even physically threatened if he spoke out against the ranching industry. He wrote a letter to Brooks Fahy, who is an activist who has for many years worked to expose Wildlife Services.
Bob wrote that he, “quit because of the unethical and brutal methods I was required to do as a trapper. A lot of stock people are the most bloodthirsty, animal-abusing people you could ever find.” Bob also said that he was, “all for defunding Wildlife Services as it is nothing more than a government subsidy for a bunch of murderous ranchers.”
When you hear that, that’s a guy who was a trapper for many, many years.
He goes on, “it’s the sheep men I can’t tolerate. They’re just bloodthirsty rotten. A coyote or wolf to them, just something to be killed. In the county I’m in (that is in Wyoming), the sheep men are brutes, bullies, either you do what they want, you kowtow to them or you quit or get fired. The ranchers think they’re your boss and they are. It’s a dirty deal and it’s been going on for a long time. Most of the guys at Wildlife Services aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be. But they’re pushed into a lot of things they don’t want to do.”
So, there you have it, I think that answers your question.
There are the guys who are themselves as bloodthirsty as the ranchers. There are others who are just getting a paycheck, and they’re like ‘goddam I don’t want to do this, but I need the money’.
DJ:
We have talked about the horrors of the cyanide, landmines and everything else. We are not simply talking about adults, but I have heard about denning. Killing entire dens of pups of various wildlife species.
CK:
Oh yes. The practice, I’m not sure if it’s still ongoing, but the practice for many years was to track down a coyote den where the pups were holed up and smoke them out. Set a fire around the mouth of the den and as the pups come out, they get clubbed or they themselves burn up. They also used a phosphorus compound called a den smoker.
Dick Randel was a Wildlife Services trapper in Wyoming, like the aforementioned Bob who I also interviewed. Dick Randel used this den smoker, “suffocating the pups was the theory” he wrote. “But they’d often scramble for cracks of light at the entrance. You could hear them howling when they hit the flames and burned alive. The pups ran into the chemical fire trying to get out and it would eat through their tissue, hiss and smolder right into their guts. And they were still clawing at the blocked entrance.”
That’s one of the practices, again paid for by the US government. Our government on our land. Guess we should be proud right?
37:27
DJ:
Just last week Wildlife Services was poisoning prairie dogs in Colorado. I’m presuming that where they kill blackbirds, they also use poison? How do we convey to people the utter horror of what is happening at public expense on public lands?
CK:
Think of those coyote pups having their guts burning from phosphorus compounds, and just think of that over and over and over again.
Then do you want to do something about it, call your congressperson and ask, “are you voting to allocate money to Wildlife Services operation year after year?” Because most congresspeople are. Call up the USDA and call up the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) that runs and oversees directly the Wildlife Services program.
Call up congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, who is one of the few representatives in Congress who has stood up to Wildlife Services. He has attempted to pass legislation to defund their programs and to substantially change the congressional mandate that Wildlife Services got with the Animal Damage Control Act 1931 – basically revise it if not repeal it.
I think the thing here is you have stockmen who are very politically engaged. They are constantly complaining to local officials, country officials, the county commissioners, their state elected officials, and their congressionals that, “these goddam predators are a problem”. You have a lot of people in officialdom listening to this very vocal constituency. What you don’t have opposing that vocal minority is the great majority of Americans who are aghast at these very cruel practices.
What you need is civic engagement. I repeat this over and over again in my book. You need a citizenry that is enraged and engaged. Until that happens, Wildlife Services will continue on and on slaughtering and killing with your money and with not much scientific basis for the killings. This is irrational killing.
41:10
DJ:
I have heard that killing coyotes paradoxically leads to coyote population explosions because they reproduce. Is that correct?
CK:
That’s in my book as well. I interviewed a guy, Robert Wilgus, of Washington State University, who looked into that. He found that if you disrupt pack structures of wolves and coyotes, you actually increase the amount of attacks on livestock. That is quite helpful to Wildlife Services right, so they kill more coyotes, that produces more depredation on livestock, meaning you have to come pack and kill more coyotes, which produces more depredation of livestock. It’s a closed circle where they always get more funding and there’s more killing to be done.
42:30
DJ:
It destroys local social structures and often older members of the predator community will keep crazy younger members in check. A great example happened earlier this year. I mentioned earlier that I see bears all the time, well there was a mother bear who showed up with a baby and she was around for a while and then the baby disappeared. Sometimes males will kill babies to bring the female into heat.
That was seeming kind of weird to me. Someone did some research for me and it ends up normally there will be females who have territory and then males have sort of a meta territory. A big male will make sure that other younger males don’t kill the babies. He’ll basically keep the youngsters in check. But if somebody shoots the old male, and then there’s chaos for a while, you’ll end up with younger males killing the babies.
So, the point is that if you had Wildlife Services come in and kill a pack leader or disrupt a pack, I’m just validating what you just said, it’s going to create chaos, which is going to create some more strange behavior that’s harmful to everybody around.
CK:
Well that’s exactly right. That is what Rob Wilgus found out. That the social structure disruption of predators – whether it be coyotes, wolf packs, local mountain lion populations, or as you remarked also black bear populations – leads then to all sorts of behavior that wasn’t occurring previously. For example, the adult mountain lions will indeed prevent younger mountain lions from going after livestock.
If you were going to approach all the slaughter with a scientific method, that doesn’t justify the slaughter, but it would at least make sense from a bureaucratic perspective. But they’re not even approaching it with a scientific method. It is just randomized violence meted out against predators without any ecological or behavioral understanding.
45:45
DJ:
Let’s pretend that you are able to do one thing and but not another. The thing you’re not able to do is eliminate public lands ranching on the west. You don’t get to do that. But you do get to completely defund Wildlife Services. What do you think would happen? What would that lead to?
CK:
I think you would have a lot of vigilantism. A lot of ranchers going out and killing these predators themselves.
The three S’s: shoot, shovel and shut up. I think you’d have widespread illegal distribution of poisons, such as banned thallium sulphate and sodium fluoroacetate (1080). I think you’d have a lot more sodium cyanide spread across the landscape. I think you’d find more carcasses of animals poisoned with those compounds. I don’t think that would accomplish much frankly, just getting rid of Wildlife Services.
You get rid of Wildlife Services then you also have to have an accompanying regime of enforcement for protection of predators. We don’t have that.
DJ:
You want people to call their congressperson and get engaged. If it’s not merely to dump Wildlife Services, are you suggesting this problem won’t be solved until public lands ranching is also eliminated in the west?
CK:
Yea that’s ultimately where we have to go with this. You really have to eliminate public lands ranching if you want to protect predators on a widespread scale in big ecologically-relevant landscapes. It begins with searing into your consciousness that image of the coyote pups’ guts burning with that phosphorus compound and go from there. Use that as your inspiration, because that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about the livestock industry in the west.
DJ:
Thank you for that. I want to reiterate something you said earlier. Even if you got rid of all public ranching in the west, that’s only two percent of beef production in the US.
CK:
If you’re a meat eater, it’s not going to affect the price of steak. OK, you still get your hamburger.
DJ:
Which probably came from Georgia anyway.
CK:
Right [laughs]. One of the biggest public lands ranching states if Nevada. The little state of Maryland produces like five-ten times as much beef, some incredibly big figure I forget exactly. That much more beef than all the expanses of Nevada.
DJ:
This is as they say, really low-hanging fruit in terms of environmental reward for economic cost.
Is there anything else you want to say about Wildlife Services?
CK:
Just that they need to go. The only way to get them to go is for the public to make them go.
DJ:
Thank you so much for your constant advocacy for wild nature.
From Zoos to Concentration Camps, A Culture of Cages
From chattel slavery to modern immigrant concentration camps to zoos and aquariums to private prisons, we live in a culture of cages. Understanding this system, and the ideology behind it, is essential to fighting it.
This statement on zoos and aquariums comes from the Deep Green Bush School. The Deep Green Bush School is a participatory, technology-free, evolutionary and revolutionary school in Aotearoa (New Zealand) designed to raise intelligent, healthy, mature, responsible young adults who can think for themselves, meet their needs, live a meaningful life and challenge the current system in order to bring about a healthy world.
Statement on Zoos and Aquariums
The Deep Green Bush-School curriculum is opposed to zoos and aquariums* and therefore the school will not take students to zoos or aquariums as a field trip. The DGBS recommends that parents also not to take children to the zoo. This document highlights how zoos and aquariums contradict and undermine efforts towards a healthy culture and a healthy world.
First of all, we can ask ourselves, would WE want to be kidnapped from our family, taken far away and locked up for our entire lives, to be stared at, photographed, harrassed and teased daily by thousands of people? Of course not. Yet that is what we subject animals to in a zoo or aquarium.
The fact is, a zoo is a miserable place for animals. They are not in their natural habitat, they are stressed by humans visitors and stressed by crowding. They never have enough of their own species to interact with – and more important, they do not have their families or herds or packs that they would normally be living with. All animals are social, even animals we normally don’t think of as social (Bradshaw 2017) – even trees and plants are social. (Fleming 2014, Simard 2016, Wohlleben 2015) Yet in zoos they are all locked up, often alone.
One of the most painful, abusive and torturous aspects of zoos is that the animals are ripped apart from their families and friends, or prevented from forming healthy social relations as they naturally would do. In Auckland, there are two completely unrelated Asian elephants, whereas elephants normally live in matriarchal herds based on family relations. Orcas and dolphins live in pods. Wolves live in packs. And so on. Denied these natural social arrangements, the animals are stressed, painfully alone and depressed. Many zoo animals are given anti-depressant medication. (Smith 2014) It’s like living in prison, or worse, in solitary confinement, or a concentration camp. It’s no wonder why captive animals regularly try to escape or fight back or kill their oppressors. (Hribal 2011)
On top of that, no zoo can possibly provide the natural amount of space an animal would have in thewild. Tigers and lions have around 18,000 times less space in zoos than they would in the wild. Polar bears have one million times less space. (CAPS 2006) Orcas and dolphins travel the ocean. Being in a zoo is torture for them.
The result of the torturous environment of a zoo is mental illness and trauma. Most animals in zoos suffer from anxiety and mental illness and show associated behavioural problems, such as pacing, rocking, circling, shuffling, self-mutilation, obsessive grooming, and hyper-aggression (Just like kids stuck in a classroom.)
One of the results of the torturous zoo environment is that animals don’t live as long in zoos. Just as human diseases increased once humans started living crowded together in cities, animals forced to live crowded with other animals in zoos are exposed to a wider range of diseases than in the wild. According to a report by the Captive Animal Protection Society (now called Freedom for Animals), African elephants in the wild live more than three times as long as those kept in zoos. 40% of lion cubs in zoos die before one month of age. (CAPS 2006)
Other highlights of the CAPS report include:
Zoos regularly kill “surplus” animals. Between 7,500 and 200,000 animals in European zoos are considered ‘surplus’ at any one time. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) said in 2007 that zoos were encouraged to kill the animals they don’t want, including tigers.
Most zoo animals – 70-80% of them – are still taken from the wild. Often the mothers are killed first and then the young are taken.
The fact is, what you see in a zoo is not actually the animal. An animal can only be understood in the wild. An elephant in the zoo is not an elephant, unless it is surrounded by its matriarchal herd, and it is not an elephant unless it is living in the place it evolved to live, the place it is rooted to, with all the trees, other animals and climate that shape how they live and who they are. An orca is only an orca with its pod in the ocean, swimming with all the other creatures of the oceans. A wolf is only a wolf in the wild where it has always been, with all the other animals it would interact with,such as caribou and deer.
Furthermore, all the different aspects of an animal’s intellligence, including social and emotional intelligence, as well as their entire culture, only develops in the wild, surrounded by the other members of its familial group from which young animals learn how to live, to all the other animals, plants, trees, rocks, weather, and countless other stimuli, to which the animal is constantly responding to. Thus, defense of zoos reflects a total ignorance of and disregard for ecology – that everything is connected, and an animal in a zoo is not the animal.
Zoos objectify animals. Zoos make animals a thing to be used for our entertainment or for scientific research, not as equals, not recognising they have their own desires for how to live their lives. The only way to treat animals in such a way is to think of them as objects – unthinking, unfeeling, undeserving of respect.
Zoos reflect humanism and human superiority, which is a belief inherent in civilisations, when humans live disconnected from the wild. It is a source of all destruction of the wild. Humanism/human superiority refers to the common belief that humans are superior to all other life forms, and thus we are able to do whatever we wish, with any other creature. (Jensen 2016) In fact, zoos only arose with civilisation, the first zoos being created 5000 years ago. (Jensen 2007) It is this kind of thinking which is why most wildlife is now gone, and 96% of all mammals, by weight, are humans and their livestock. (Carrington 2018) Half of all wildlife has been wiped out in just the last 40 years. (WWF 2018) Zoos are a reflection of human idiocy and cruelty.
Zoos claim to aid the cause of conservation. This is part of their PR and greenwashing. Most zoos do not engage in conservation, many animals will not breed in captivity, genetic diversity is unnaturally low, and most animals that are bred in zoos are kept in zoos or other forms of captivity. (CAPS 2006, Jamieson 1985) Furthermore, the whole notion of “conservation” comes from the humanist/human superiority ideology, in which humans determine that some areas will be for humans only – i.e., cities, which are effectively death zones, from which all of nature has been eradicated – and some areas will be for wildlife and “wilderness”. Conservation is the belief that little pockets of wildlife can thrive while surrounded by ever-growing death zones of human cities, spewing toxic waste, radioactive waste and endless rubbish. The belief in conservation is well-meaning but ultimately a reflection of total ecological ignorance. (Livingston 1991)
Many zoos portray themselves as helping to “educate” youth and the public. It’s true, they do. Zoos do an excellent job teaching:
Zoos teach that humans are superior to the rest of nature.
Zoos teach that only humans do not like to be locked up (and even then, some humans still lock up millions of other humans – in prisons and classrooms, for example).
Zoos teach that animals have no thoughts or feelings.
Zoos teach that humans can do whatever they want to nature.
Zoos teach that nature exists for our entertainment.
Zoos teach that our current way of life is acceptable.
Zoos teach our children to be cruel.
Let us remember that for more than two million years, humans did not create zoos and did not view themselves as superior to other creatures. Humans evolved living among wild animals, treating them with respect and viewing them as kin. Humans regarded all of the natural world as sacred. As Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota explained,
Kinship with all the creatures of the earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence. (McLuhan1971)
This reflects a fundamental element of the Deep Green Bush-School curriculum. In the end, the best way to help animals is to leave them alone and to make every effort to stop this civilisation from destroying all of life on the planet.
What to do instead of going to the zoo:
Allow your child freedom in any natural setting, to explore the trees, plants, bugs, birds and other animals
Take your child camping and hiking
Role model respect for the natural world. For example:
only taking dead wood
thanking trees, plants, and animals when you use or eat them
talking to the trees and animals
Give kids books about nature and that contain photos of animals
Read to them from books about wildlife and nature
Explain to them why you’re not going to the zoo
* The focus here is on zoos and aquariums. But the points made also apply to other forms of abusive animal captivity such as circuses, rodeos, factory farms and any form of animal experimentation and vivisection.
References
Bradshaw, G.A. (2017). Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are. Yale University Press.
CAPS (Captive Animals’ Protection Society). (2006). “Sad Eyes and Empty Lives: The Reality of Zoos”. Retrieved from https://mafiadoc.com/sad-eyes-amp-empty-lives_59ae88d41723ddbec5e2c4a2.html
Carrington, Damian. (2018, May 21). “Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Dasgupta, Shreya. (2015, September 9). “Many Animals Can Become Mentally Ill.” BBC Earth. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150909-many-animals-can-become-mentally-ill
Fleming, Nic. (2014, November 11). “Plants Talk to Each Other Using an Internet of Fungus”. BBC Earth. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
Hribal, Jason. (2011). Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. AK Press.
Jamieson, Dale. (1985). “Against Zoos”. Retrieved from http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/jamieson01.htm
Jensen, Derrick. (2016). The Myth of Human Supremacy. Seven Stories Press.
Jensen, Derrick. (2007). Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos. Novoice Unheard.
Livingston, John. (1991). The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. McClelland and Stewart.
McLuhan, T.C., editor. (1971). Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence. Simon and Schuster.
Sample, Ian. (2008, Dec 12). “Stress and Lack of Exercise are Killing Elephants, Zoos Warned”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/dec/12/elephants-animal-welfare
Simard, Suzanne. (2016, June). “How Trees Talk to Each Other”. Ted Talks. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
Smith, Laura. (2014, June 20). “Zoos Drive Animals Crazy”. Slate. Retrieved from https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/animal-madness-zoochosis-stereotypic-behavior-and-problems-with-zoos.html
Wohlleben, Peter. (2015). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Greystone Books.
WWF. (2018). Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). Retrieved at http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018/
“Zoos Neither Educate Nor Empower Children”. Freedom for Animals. Retrieved from https://www.freedomforanimals.org.uk/news/zoos-neither-educate-nor-empower-children
