Featured image: Real freedom is not found in the quest to escape limits but in deepening our understanding of our place in a world with limits. EATCUTE / GETTY IMAGES
In a routinely delusional world, what is the most dangerous delusion?
Living in the United States, I’m tempted to focus on the delusion that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world – a claim repeated robotically by politicians of both parties.
In a mass-consumption capitalist society, there’s the delusion that if we only buy more, newer, better products we all will be happier – a claim repeated endlessly in commercial propaganda (commonly known as advertising and marketing).
I’m also white, and so it’s understandable to worry about the delusion that white people are superior to non-white people. And as a man, I reflect on the delusion that institutionalized male dominance is our fate, whether asserted to be divinely commanded or evolutionarily inevitable.
But all these delusions that rationalize hierarchies within the human family, and the resulting injustices that flow from those hierarchies, are less frightening to me than modern humans’ delusion that we are not bound by the laws of physics and chemistry, that humans can live beyond the biophysical limits of the ecosphere.
This delusion is not limited to one country, one group, or one political party, but rather is the unstated assumption of everyday life in the high-energy/high-technology industrial world. This is the delusion that we are – to borrow from the title of a particularly delusional recent book – the god species.
This ideology of human supremacy leads us to believe that our species’ cleverness allows us to ignore the limits placed on all life forms by the larger living world, of which we are but one component. What we once quaintly called “environmentalism” – which too often focused on technical solutions to discrete problems rather than challenging human arrogance and the quest for endless affluence – is no longer adequate to deal with the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define our era: climate destabilization, species extinction, soil erosion, groundwater depletion, toxic waste accumulation, and on and on.
Playing god got us into this trouble, and more of the same won’t get us out.
This inability to accept the limits that come with being part of “nature” – a strange term when used to contrast with “human,” as if humans were somehow not part of the natural world – was on my mind as I read two new books about controversial topics that typically are thought of as social, not ecological, issues: Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body, edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore, and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation, by Renate Klein.
Both books offer a feminist critique of the ideology and practices of these movements that herald medical/technological “solutions” to struggles with gender norms and infertility.
Brunskell-Evans’ and Moore’s book brings together researchers, activists, mental health practitioners and parents who question such practices as puberty suppression to block the development of secondary sex characteristics as treatment for gender dysphoria. Are such disruptions of a child’s development with powerful drugs warranted, given the lack of testing and absence of a clear understanding of the etiology of transgenderism? The authors challenge what has rapidly become the liberal dogma of embracing medicalized approaches to the very real problem of patriarchal gender norms (the demand that boys must act one way and girls another) that constrain our lives.
Klein marshals research and the testimony of surrogates to point out that another liberal dogma – affluent individuals have a right to “rent a womb” so they may have a child genetically related to them – involves considerable risks for the surrogate mother (sometimes referred to as the “gestational carrier”). The author’s assessment is blunt, but well supported: modern surrogacy is a form of exploitation of women and trafficking in babies.
Both books demonstrate the enduring relevance of the radical branch of feminism that highlights men’s attempts to control and exploit women’s reproductive power and sexuality as a key feature of men’s dominance in patriarchal societies. And both are critical of the naive celebration of high-tech medicine to deal with issues that stem from patriarchy’s rigid, repressive and reactionary gender norms.
Those radical feminist challenges dovetail with a radical ecological critique that reminds us that being alive – being a carbon-based creature that exists within the limits of the ecosphere – means that we should be sceptical of claims that we can magically transcend those limits. The high-energy, high-tech, human-defined world in which we live can lull us into believing that we are like gods in our ability to shape the world, and to shape our own bodies.
Of course, drugs, surgery and medical techniques routinely save lives and improve our lives, in ways that are “unnatural” in some sense. To highlight these questions does not mean that lines are easy to draw between what is appropriate and what is ill-advised. But we invite serious miscalculations when we embrace without critical self-reflection the assumption that we can manipulate our human-centred worlds without concern for the limits of the larger living world.
Many of us have experienced this in end-of-life care decisions for ourselves or loved ones. When are high-tech medical interventions that prolong life without concern for quality of life a mistake? I have had long conversations with friends and family about where the line should be drawn, not only to make my own views clear but to search for collective understanding. The fact that the line is hard to draw, and even harder to face when arriving at it, doesn’t make the question any less relevant. The fact that there is no obvious and easy answer doesn’t mean we can avoid the question.
Elective cosmetic surgery is perhaps the best example of the culture’s rejection of limits. All living things eventually die, and human appearance changes as we age, yet many people search for ways to stave off that aging or to change their appearance for other non-medical reasons. In 2017, Americans spent more than $15 billion on cosmetic procedures (surgical and nonsurgical), 91% of which were performed on women. The two most common surgical procedures are liposuction and breast augmentation. Although some people who get liposuction are overweight, it is not a treatment for obesity, and breast augmentation is rarely related to physical health. These procedures typically are chosen by people seeking to conform to social norms about appearance.
With this humility about high-tech human intervention in mind, how should we understand the experience of feeling at odds with gender norms? How should we reconcile the physical inability to bear children with the desire to have children? There are no obvious or easy answers, but I believe that as a culture we are better served by starting with the recognition that we are not gods, that we cannot endlessly manipulate the world without risking unintended consequences for self and others. How does the rejection of limits impede our ability to first examine and then resist the impositions of patriarchy, to find new understandings of sex/gender and new social relationships for caring for children?
At the planetary level, we have considerable evidence that our faux-god attempts to dominate the ecosphere – which started most dramatically with the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago and intensified with the exploitation of fossil fuels – now make the future of a large-scale human population uncertain. The lesson some of us take from that is to turn away from the “technological fundamentalism” that leads us to see all problems as having high-energy/high-tech solutions and consider different ways of living within the biophysical limits of the planet.
That same perspective is compelling on the level of these questions around gender and fertility. Here’s a sensible place to start: We should step back from the hyper-individualism of neoliberal ideology and examine more deeply how the institutionalized male dominance of patriarchy has shaped our collective thinking about gender and identity, and about women’s status and parenting. Such reflection reveals that the liberal ideology on transgenderism and surrogacy embraces the technological fundamentalism that embraces medical and market “solutions” rather than enhancing the sense of integrity that we seek.
Integrity is a key concept here because of its two meanings – adherence to moral principles and the state of being whole. We strive to act with integrity, and to maintain the integrity of both the living body and the larger living world. In hierarchical systems that reward domination, such as patriarchy, freedom comes to be understood only at the ability to control, others and the world around us. Andrea Dworkin captures this struggle when she writes:
“Being an object – living in the realm of male objectification – is abject submission, an abdication of the freedom and integrity of the body, its privacy, its uniqueness, its worth in and of itself because it is the human body of a human being.”
Freedom in patriarchy is granted only to those in control, and that control turns other living things into objects, destroying the possibility of integrity-as-moral-principles and integrity-as-wholeness. Real freedom is not found in the quest to escape limits but in deepening our understanding of our place in a world with limits.
Featured image: The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale is a species of utmost concern should seismic airgun blasting be allowed off the Atlantic coast. Photo Credit: Moira Brown and New England Aquarium.
The Trump Administration has unveiled its plan to open nearly all of the United States’ coastal waters to oil and gas drilling.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2019-2024 yesterday, which includes a proposal to open up more than 90 percent of the country’s continental shelf waters to future exploitation by oil and gas companies. The draft five-year plan also proposes the largest number of offshore oil and gas lease sales in U.S. history.
“Responsibly developing our energy resources on the Outer Continental Shelf in a safe and well-regulated way is important to our economy and energy security, and it provides billions of dollars to fund the conservation of our coastlines, public lands and parks,” said Secretary Zinke. “Today’s announcement lays out the options that are on the table and starts a lengthy and robust public comment period. Just like with mining, not all areas are appropriate for offshore drilling, and we will take that into consideration in the coming weeks.”
The Obama Administration blocked drilling on about 94 percent of the outer continental shelf, but, in April 2017, Trump issued an executive order that called for a review of the 2017-2022 Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program finalized under Obama in favor of implementing Trump’s so-called “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.”
The draft five-year plan that has just been released by the Trump Administration’s Interior Department would open up 25 of 26 outer continental shelf regions to drilling. The North Aleutian Basin, which lies off the northern shore of the Alaska Peninsula and extends into the Bering Sea, was the only region exempted from drilling in the new plan, the New York Times reports.
The Interior Department proposes to hold 47 lease sales in those 25 regions — including 19 off the coast of Alaska, 12 in the Gulf of Mexico, nine in the Atlantic Region, and seven in the Pacific Region. “This is the largest number of lease sales ever proposed for the National [Outer Continental Shelf] Program’s 5-year lease schedule,” the Interior Department said in a statement.
Earlier moves by the Trump Administration to open the U.S. Atlantic coast to drillinghave already drawn fierce opposition. An alliance of more than 41,000 businesses and 500,000 fishing families from Florida to Maine was joined by fishery management councils for the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and the South Atlantic regions in speaking out against oil exploration and development in the Atlantic. One of their chief concerns is the incredibly disruptive exploration technique known as seismic airgun blasting, which would need to be used to determine how much oil is actually underneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. East Coast given that oil drilling has been banned there for decades.
Drilling in the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast has been banned since a 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Local officials there also vowed to fight the Trump Administration’s move to open their coastal waters to the oil and gas industry: “For more than 30 years, our shared coastline has been protected from further federal drilling and we’ll do whatever it takes to stop this reckless, short-sighted action,” California Governor Jerry Brown, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, and Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a joint statement.
Featured image: The American Chestnut giants were known as the sequoias of the east. Genetic engineering is no gift to future generaltions and will be the death knell of delicate and essential biodiveristy on which all life on Mother Earth depends.
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose…” We don’t even have to provide the score for you to hear this song clearly in your head. “The Christmas Song” written in 1945 by Bob Wells and Mel Tormé is a classic. However, by that time in history, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) trees had almost completely vanished. They had fallen victim to an airborne fungus introduced by the import of an ornamental chestnut from Japan.
This was an epic loss. Before Europeans clearcut huge swaths of eastern woodland forests, chestnut saplings and large sheets of bark were used to build naturally strong and weather resistant Longhouses for the Haudenasaunee and many other tribes. And in most cases, it was done without killing the trees. The leaves provided medicine for countless generations who lived up and down the eastern seaboard. The nuts were ground into flour, boiled, and eaten raw.
But American chestnut trees were quickly targeted as the wood of choice beginning with the first boat-load of immigrants. They dominated the forests of the New World and were felled to build ships, settlements, and furniture. Huge beams were cut for dwellings of all sizes. The wood was dense, naturally rot resistant, and prized by woodworkers across the North American continent. The nuts were roasted and ground into flour for cakes, puddings, and breads.
Today, chestnuts are still a staple during the holidays and winter months, and the majority of these come from European or Chinese stock.
There is no question why decades of dedicated and extensive research has been done to return the American chestnut to the forests it once dominated. The most promising to date has been the conventional breeding techniques done to combine the disease resistance of a Chinese variety with surviving American chestnut trees to produce a hybrid that will be unaffected by the airborne fungus that still lives on other tree species.
But is our meddling risking further damage to already fragile ecosystems that have since compensated for the loss of the American chestnut tree? And how should we go about reintroducing it? Conventional wisdom would indicate that any reintroduction in a natural setting should be done slowly, with changes monitored closely, outcomes assessed, with contingency plans in place to quickly address any negative consequences.
ONCE RESEARCHERS HAVE A RESISTANT CHESTNUT, THE QUESTION IS WHERE TO PLANT IT. FOREST ECOSYSTEMS HAVE TRANSFORMED IN THE PAST CENTURY, AND REINTRODUCING THE CHESTNUT COULD UPSET THE NEW ECOLOGICAL BALANCE. “YOU CAN’T ASSUME THAT A FOREST WITH CHESTNUT IS BETTER THAN A FOREST WITHOUT. YOU CAN’T ROLL THE CLOCK BACK.” STEVE HAMBURG, CHIEF SCIENTIST AT THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND IN BOSTON, NATURE.COM
The development of a hardy 100% American chestnut backcross has also shown promise, but conventional breeding takes time, time that geneticists claim we don’t have. But rushing this delicate and complex process in order to begin the reintroduction of this once king of the forest is classic human hubris.
Learn From Our Mistakes?
It was, in the early years, the rush to salvage-log the wood from an estimated 3-million American chestnut trees, whether they were sick or not, that may have unwittingly destroyed trees resistant to the fungus. If more time was taken or even possible to assess the situation, we might have avoided the near loss of these trees. Young American chestnuts remain scattered throughout the forests of the east, though few make it to maturity. These are the ones that researchers from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY/ESF) will be cross pollinating (contaminating) with their genetically engineered (GE) version.
Deregulation of the GE American Chestnut
William Powell, lead American chestnut scientist at SUNY/ESF recently announced his team is almost ready to apply for Federal deregulation to allow them to distribute their GE trees, free of charge, in hopes they will be planted in great numbers. Some of these GE trees, modified with a wheat gene, will be planted near surviving disease resistant non-GMO American chestnut trees. The goal is for the GE tree to cross pollinate with the others and create the next generations of disease-resistant offspring.
Powell and his team hope that the government agencies charged with reviewing their research results will modify the process to make it much easier to obtain permission to release novel GMOs like their GE chestnut. And with government agencies now managed by anti-regulation leadership coming directly from industry boardrooms and research facilities, chances are good that requirements for scientific review or public input will greatly diminish– at our peril.
Powell and his team, along with researchers from North Carolina State University, have spent considerable time with stakeholders from the Oneida Nation in New York State. They, along with their brother nations of the Haudenasaunee, hold vast swaths of eastern woodland areas where a majority of the wheat-altered GE chestnuts could be planted. Support for this plan has been mixed. Traditional elders remind us that communication with these natural entities is a key element in medicinal efficacy. By changing its genetic makeup it is a totally different and foreign organism. Tom Goldtooth, an elder and executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network has said that GE trees have no soul. Others, however, are cautiously optimistic and are taking a wait and see approach.
WHEN WE LOOK AT GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS, AND WE WE LOOK AT GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TREES A LOT OF OUR PEOPLE SAY THERE’S REALLY NO LIFE TO THAT TREE, THERE’S NO SPIRIT TO THAT TREE, IT’S ALREADY BEEN CORRUPTED AND IT EFFECTS ON WHETHER YOU USE PARTS OF THAT TREE – YOU KNOW HOW CAN THAT SUSTAIN THE VITAL LIFE CYCLE OF MOTHER EARTH ITSELF AND THAT’S OUR MESSAGE WE’RE TRYING TO GIVE AS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES.
TOM BK GOLDTOOTH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK
GE Chestnuts Have Far Reaching Consequences
Deregulation of this tree could very well become the first step to public acceptance of other GE trees. But the deployment of any GE trees conveys a great risk for the destruction of biodiversity wherever GE trees are grown. Whether planted willy-nilly in the forest with no controls, as in the plan to reintroduce the American chestnut or in vast, water-intensive industrial plantations, like ArborGen’s GE freeze-tolerant eucalyptus trees are predicted to cause great harm.
Under the guise of protecting remaining natural forests, biotech and related industries are running public misinformation campaigns that make ambitious and largely false claims. Proposals include the biological manipulation of trees and forest fauna to combat the damaging effects of disease, drought, and related symptoms of climate change. Large regions of the country are witnessing widespread die-offs of oaks, ash, and hemlock from non-native pests and microorganisms. Diseases we could have avoided if not for an ever-expanding system of economic globalization that embraces trade in whole logs and wood chips.
Industrialization of GE American chestnut
SO, I PUT THIS WORD COMMERCIALIZATION IN THERE, AND I’VE KIND OF ALREADY…SPILLED THE BEANS, GEE THIS ISN’T JUST ABOUT RESTORATION ANYMORE, YOU THINK MAYBE YOU COULD GET A LOT MORE TREES PLANTED IF LANDOWNERS SAID ‘HEY I’D LIKE TO PLANT ABOUT YOU KNOW, 10,000 CHESTNUTS TREES ON MY PROPERTY,’ WELL THAT’S NOT JUST RESTORATION ANYMORE, THAT IS COMMERCIALIZATION BECAUSE EVENTUALLY PEOPLE ARE GONNA WANT TO PLANT CHESTNUTS FOR TIMBER AND FOR NUTS.” SCOTT MERKLE, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PROFESSOR OF FOREST BIOTECHNOLOGY
Millions of acres of tropical and subtropical forests and rainforests in the global south have been and continue to be destroyed. Tree plantations are rapidly replacing these primeval forests. These plantations are harvested every 5 to 7 years for wood chips, pulp or charcoal. They are doused in toxic agrochemicals to control pests and competing vegetation–risking human health and polluting groundwater, streams and rivers. Could this be the real future of “restoring” the GE American Chestnut?
Genetically engineered trees haven’t been properly studied and by inserting these foreign trees into an ecosystem we risk unwanted and unpredictable damage to plants, insects, animals, soils, water, and the foundational bacterial and fungal organisms that create a healthy ecosystem.
In regard to the GE American chestnut, it is possible that they will live for centuries like their wild predecessors. During a tree’s life cycle they produce pollen year after year that can travel for miles, via wind and pollinators, and seeds (nuts) that are distributed unchecked across a wide area. Genes activate and deactivate in response to environmental stresses leading to unpredictable consequences. Besides which, there have been no long-term studies on the effects on humans or animals consuming the GE chestnuts–not to mention what happens when GE American chestnuts contaminate existing non-GE and organic chestnut orchards.
The process of inserting foreign DNA into an organism, or even non-transgenic genetic manipulations like CRISPR, causes permanent damage to the genome that leads to unanticipated and unpredictable mutations which have unanticipated and unpredictable impacts on the delicate web of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. All the studies on GE chestnut should be made widely available so the public can see for themselves what is and is not being taken into consideration regarding the release of GE trees into the environment. Already the Earth is suffering the effects of unchecked climate change. Why should we add to the risk the future collapse of natural systems that have sustained life on this planet because of ill-advised meddling with tree genomes? We must subscribe to the tenets of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risking irreversible damage to what we barely understand to begin with.
The organic food movement suffered a major setback recently, when the US National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted in favor of allowing hydroponically-grown products to receive the “organic” label. This decision should not have come as a surprise to those who have watched the organic movement steadily taken over by big agribusiness – a process that began in 1990 when Congress required the USDA to create a single set of national standards that would define the meaning of “organic”.
Previously, “organic” meant striving for a healthy relationship among farmers, farm animals, consumers, and the natural world – with soil-building seen as central to the long-term health of agriculture. Organic farms were certified by statewide or regional organizations using locally-defined standards, with the understanding that food production was necessarily diverse – reflecting local climates, soils, wildlife, pests, and so on. A one-size-fits-all national standard wasn’t needed to protect consumers who purchased food from local or regional organic farms, but it was required if global trade in organic products was to expand. The all-but-inevitable result has been a takeover of the organic market by corporate agribusinesses, along with a steady watering down of the standards – which have been largely reduced to a list of proscribed chemicals and required practices meant to apply everywhere. (At Local Futures we continue to believe that localizing food production offers the best way for consumers to know how their food was produced.)
After the decision to allow hydroponics under the “organic” label, National Organics Standards Board member Francis Thicke delivered the following farewell message to the Board:
There are two important things that I have learned during my five years on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). First, I learned that the NOSB review process for materials petitioned for inclusion on the National List is quite rigorous, with Technical Reviews of petitioned materials and careful scrutiny by both NOSB subcommittees and the full board.
The second thing I learned, over time, is that industry has an outsized and growing influence on USDA – and on the NOSB (including through NOSB appointments) – compared to the influence of organic farmers, who started this organic farming movement. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the growing value of organic sales. With organic becoming a $50 billion business, industry not only wants a bigger piece of the pie, they seem to want the whole pie.
We now have “organic” chicken CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] with 200,000 birds crammed into a building with no real access to the outdoors, and a chicken industry working behind the scenes to make sure that the animal welfare standards – weak as they are – never see the light of day, just like their chickens. The image consumers have of organic chickens ranging outside has been relegated to pictures on egg cartons.
We have “organic” dairy CAFOs with 15,000 cows in a feedlot in a desert, with compelling evidence by an investigative reporter that the CAFO is not meeting the grazing rule – not by a long shot. But when USDA does its obligatory “investigation,” instead of a surprise visit to the facility, USDA gives them a heads up by making an appointment, so the CAFO can move cows from feedlots to pasture on the day of inspection. This gives a green light to that dairy CAFO owner to move forward with its plans to establish a 30,000-cow facility in the Midwest.
We have large grain shipments coming into the US that are being sold as organic but that lack organic documentation. Some shipments have been proven to be fraudulent. The USDA has been slow to take action to stop this, and organic grain farmers in the US are suffering financially as a result.
We have a rapidly growing percentage of the fruits and vegetables on grocery store shelves being produced hydroponically, without soil, and mostly in huge industrial-scale facilities. And we have a hydroponics industry that has deceptively renamed hydroponic production – even with 100% liquid feeding – as “container” production. With their clever deception they have been able to bamboozle even the majority of NOSB members into complicity with their goal of taking over the organic fruit and vegetable market with their hydroponic products.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that big business is taking over the USDA organic program, because the influence of money is corroding all levels of our government. At this point, I can see only one way to bring the organic label back in line with the original vision of organic farmers and consumers. We need an add-on organic label for organic farmers who are willing to meet the expectations of discerning consumers who are demanding real organic food.
A while back I wouldn’t have supported the idea of an add-on organic label because I, like many others, saw the USDA organic label as the gold standard, and hoped that through our vision of the process of continuous improvement we could really make it into that gold standard. Now I can see that the influence of big business is not going to let that happen. The USDA is increasingly exerting control over the NOSB, and big business is tightening its grip on the USDA and Congress. Recently industry representatives have publicly called on the US Senate to weaken the NOSB and give industry a stronger role in the National Organic Program. And sympathetic Senators have promised to do just that.
I now support the establishment of an add-on organic label that will enable real organic farmers and discerning organic consumers to support one another through a label that represents real organic food. I support the creation of a label, such as the proposed Regenerative Organic Certification, that will ensure organic integrity; for example, that animals have real access to the outdoors to be able to express their natural behaviors, and that food is grown in soil. My hopes are that this add-on certification can be seamlessly integrated with the NOP certification, so that a single farm organic system plan and inspection can serve to verify both NOP and the higher level organic certification, by certifiers that are accredited by both certification systems.
I also am pleased that organic farmers have recently organized themselves into the Organic Farmers Association (OFA), to better represent themselves in the arena of public policy. Too often in the past the interests of big business have overruled the interests of organic farmers – and consumers – when organic policies are being established in Washington. I hope this will allow organic farmers to gain equal footing with industry on issues that affect the organic community.
In summary, organic is at a crossroads. Either we can continue to allow industry interests to bend and dilute the organic rules to their benefit, or organic farmers – working with organic consumers – can step up and take action to ensure organic integrity into the future.
Francis Thicke is a pioneering organic farmer who – with his wife Susan – operates a 730-acre farm in Fairfield, Iowa. He has served as a National Program Leader for soil science for the USDA-Extension Service, as a board member of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, and as a board member of the Cornucopia Institute. His 5-year term with the National Organics Standards Board just ended.
Steven Gorelick is the author of Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized, co-author ofBringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of The Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgencemagazines. He frequently teaches and speaks on local economics around the US. He also runs a small-scale organic farm with his wife and two children in Vermont.
Originally published in Local Futures. Republished with permission.
Featured image: Representatives from Haul No and the Havasupai Tribe march to the gates of the Canyon Mine which lay upon grounds sacred to many indigenous nations in the region. Photo: Garet Bleir
Any day now, Energy Fuels (EFR) will resume drilling for high-grade uranium ore at the Canyon Mine just six miles south of the Grand Canyon. The risks of the mine have never been fully investigated, but it doesn’t take much to see the potential consequences.
The Canyon Mine sits directly above the Redwall-Muav Aquifer in close proximity to the sacred site of Red Butte. This aquifer supports the Grand Canyon’s delicate ecosystem and provides the Havasupai Tribe with a steady supply of potable water that supports their livelihoods, their medicine and their cultural practices.
If the Redwall-Muav became too contaminated to drink, the Havasupai’s way of life would be diminished beyond measure. We’ve already caught a glimpse of how easily it could happen. Earlier this year, millions of gallons of clean water that sat above the aquifer fell into the depths of the Canyon Mine. According to data that EFR reported to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) in its 2016 Annual Report, that water now contains dangerously high levels of uranium and arsenic.
To make matters worse, the ADEQ–the government agency that issued EFR’s water permits– doesn’t require monitoring of deep aquifers like the Redwall-Muav. Nor does it require remediation plans or bonding to prevent deep aquifer contamination.
Additionally, according to Fred Tillman, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) lead hydrologist investigating uranium mining impacts on water resources near the Grand Canyon, no one knows how the region’s groundwater flows. “Basic hydrology questions” still need answers, he said.
“We first have to study the potential impacts between these systems. We don’t know what the direction of the flow is or if there is recharge of the water between the mine and the canyon from elsewhere, because then their pumping might have no impact at all, but it’s really an unknown science question due to depth of the system and the lack of wells and observational data up there.”
“Does the perched water eventually go down and reach the regional aquifer and become part of that? We absolutely do not know that,” he added.
This is precisely what the Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust and other conservation groups argue. “There is risk and you need to have a more stringent Aquifer Protection Permit, because we don’t know enough about this area,” Alicyn Gitlin, Program Manager of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, told IC.
The risk became all too clear when Energy Fuels drilled through the Coconino Perched Aquifer, which led to the mine shaft flooding, equipment breaking down, and millions of gallons of clean drinking water becoming contaminated.
Tillman, who took samples from the Canyon Mine shaft in June 2016 and sampled the new USGS Canyon Mine Observation Well in July 2017, told us that, “The water coming in at the Coconino level is or was fairly low in most trace elements including uranium… The Coconino water was originally in the single digits of parts per billion that they were reporting to ADEQ.”
After the water entered the shaft, the mixed solution was 18 times higher in uranium levels – 3 times the maximum safety standard for drinking water recommended by the EPA. The water also contained 30 times more arsenic and exceeded the standard for radium, according to Gitlin.
Millions of gallons of the contaminated water have now been hauled off site in trucks or evaporated in an already water-starved climate.
The flooded mine shaft and resulting offsite disposal of water initiated a robust debate among conservation groups, the company, and governmental organizations about whether or not this could have been anticipated and the legality of the company’s actions.
Energy Fuels and public affairs representatives of the Forest Service allege that the need to dispose contaminated water off site couldn’t be predicted due to climatic changes in the area. Jacqueline C. Banks, Public Affairs Officer for the Kaibab National Forest Service, told IC, “We had an extremely wet winter, with lots of precipitation and lower than normal evaporation, so to prevent overflow from the evaporation pond, Energy Fuels implemented that emergency plan,” said Banks.
However, even with the unpredictable nature of the wet winter, this would have been a breach of the 1986 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Canyon Mine, which requires that “Holding pond(s) in the mine yard must be adequate to receive local runoff from a 100-year thunderstorm event, plus normal annual runoff and water that may be pumped from the mine. The volume of water in the pond(s) must be maintained at a level that will allow a reserve pond capacity to accommodate unforeseen and normally expected runoff events.”
Mark Chalmers, the President and COO of Energy Fuels and other company officials point toward the weather to help explain the flooded shaft. “This year was a very very wet year in Northern Arizona and we had more water than expected, so we hauled water to our mill to prevent our pond from overflowing,” Chalmers said.
However, there is no substantiated evidence from the USGS to support or refute this rationale. In fact, the current data available points away from any claims of climate driven water.
“EFR has put forth that possibility that there’s been a wet winter and more recent recharge of the aquifer,” Tillman observed. “We are still evaluating our sample results, and waiting for some more to come in (i.e., tritium results), but our first take on the carbon-14 result of 17.52 percent modern carbon is that there is at least some portion of quite old water down there. We’ll want to look at the tritium results to see if there is some recent water mixing as well, and then verify everything with another round of sampling (or two or three).”
Gitlin believes that other issues contributed to the flooded shaft, including a lack of scrutiny from ADEQ as well as the contents of the company’s Environmental Impact Statement and Plan of Operations that have remain unchanged since they were approved by the the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in 1986.
The Sierra Club, Havasupai Tribe, Center for Biological Diversity, and the Grand Canyon Trust are in apending lawsuitagainst the U.S. Forest Service. They are arguing the legality of USFS’s decision to permit the Canyon Mine’s operation without updating the Environmental Impact Statement and Plan of Operations or completing the required formal tribal consultations with the Havasupai required for allTraditional Cultural Properties.
According to Gitlin, if this Environmental Impact Statement and Plan of Operations was updated, the possibility of the shaft flooding would have been exposed. “The fact is that when Energy Fuels drilled the supply well on site for the mine in the 1980s, at about a thousand feet down they hit a significant amount of water at the Coconino Aquifer,” she said.
Back then, Energy Fuels was experiencing a flow rate of about five gallons per minute. This is enough water for the company to realize the lens of water can yield a significant flow, she said. “But unfortunately, Energy Fuels and the Forest Service are acting like they had no idea. It’s really frustrating,” Gitlin said. She argues that a new EIS would have revealed the company was going to hit the water, but a lack of scrutiny from ADEQ allowed them to continue.
However Chalmers told us that the geology of the area was simply too unpredictable to know the amount of water the company would hit at the Coconino Aquifer and to his knowledge, the nearby City of Tusayan has never found a continuous aquifer at that level.
“It’s always a little bit of a wild card about how much water there is and how long it is and everything about that,” Chalmers said.
Gitlin argues that this is one more reason why the company is not ready to drill. She says more research still needs to be carried out, there needs to be more monitoring wells in the region, and a more stringent Aquifer Protection Permit (APP) needs to be in place.
Energy Fuels refuted the severity of the Sierra Club’s claims. “Yeah, we found some perched water in the ‘80s. Yeah it was noticed in some of the drilling that there was some perched water, and we found more perched water recently, but we do not believe that it is continuous,” said Chalmers. “The environmental documents actually expected that we would hit perched quantities, and that if we had water we would either evaporate it or that we would treat the water to manage it and that’s what we are doing.”
Despite Chalmers’ confidence, there are more questions than answers. In addition to the unverifiable claims of climate driven flooding and the lack of knowledge surrounding the region’s groundwater, no one knows the uranium ore body’s ability to contaminate the Redwall-Muav Aquifer and other local water bodies.
As far as most indigenous peoples in the region are concerned, the mining company’s actions are criminal.
“Not only as indigenous people, but white people, black people, all people, they don’t realize that [they’re] killing themselves in search of this mighty dollar that they’re digging out of ground,” commented Milton Tso, Cameron Chapter President of the Navajo Nation. “You shouldn’t need to be warning people about the risk of contamination in their water.”
Tso knows a thing or two about the risk of uranium mines polluting local land and water sources. The Navajo Nation is currently dealing with more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on their reservation.
Nearly a third of the reservation is now forced to haul water from unregulated wells and many have no choice but to live adjacent to these radioactive mining sites.
The Navajo Nations’ uranium legacy serves as a cautionary tale that fuels the Havasupai’s fight to prevent a similar fate on their land.
Garet Bleir is an investigative journalist working for Intercontinental Cry documenting human rights and environmental abuses surrounding uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region. To follow along with interviews and photos highlighting indigenous voices and to receive updates on his 12 part series for IC, follow him on Instagram or facebook.
This article is a part of #GrandCanyonFutures, an ongoing deep journalism series published by Intercontinental Cry in partnership with Toward Freedom.
The Trump administration released on Wednesday its long-overdue recovery plan for Mexican gray wolves, one of the most endangered mammal species in North America with an estimated wild population of just over 100. However, the plan charts a course for extinction rather than recovery, cutting off wolf access to vital recovery habitat and failing to respond to mounting genetic threats to the species.
“It’s a ‘recovery plan’ in name only. Without additional habitat and greater genetic diversity, the wolves will continue to teeter on the brink of extinction. The plan provides none of these essential needs,” said Heidi McIntosh, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental legal organization, Earthjustice, which sued the federal government on behalf of conservation organizations.
The Trump administration refused to listen to the tens of thousands of people who asked them to fix their awful draft plan before finalizing it. Among the people who weighed in asking for stronger protections for the wolves were concerned citizens, business owners and scientists.
“Lobos waited decades for a plan to save them, only to be given one that does not guarantee recovery,” said Bryan Bird, Southwest director for Defenders of Wildlife. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had the opportunity to build a plan on a foundation of science and conservation, but instead decided to let politics rule.”
“Instead of moving forward with a plan based on legitimate, science-based recommendations, the Service collaborated exclusively with the very states that have gone to extraordinary lengths to obstruct Mexican wolf recovery,” said Maggie Howell of the Wolf Conservation Center. “Critically endangered lobos deserve better.”
“The Fish and Wildlife Service published over 250 pages of supporting ‘scientific’ justification, used a sophisticated model to predict extinction probabilities, then tossed the science aside and asked the states how many wolves they would tolerate with no scientific justification whatsoever,” said David Parsons, former Mexican wolf recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Using the states’ arbitrary upper limit as a population cap in the population viability model and forcing additional recovery needs to Mexico, the plan will guarantee that from now to eternity no more than a running average of 325 Mexican wolves will ever be allowed to exist in the entire U.S. Southwest. This plan is a disgraceful sham.”
The best available science indicates that recovery of the Mexican gray wolf requires at least three connected populations totaling approximately 750 individuals, a carefully managed reintroduction effort that prioritizes improving the genetic health of the animals and the establishment of at least two additional population centers in the southern Rockies and in the Grand Canyon area.
“This isn’t a recovery plan, it’s a blueprint for disaster for Mexican gray wolves,” said Michael Robinson, conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Limiting recovery to south of Interstate 40 keeps wolves out of the Grand Canyon and southern Rocky Mountains, areas that would greatly benefit from having wolves back and that scientists have determined are absolutely essential to their recovery.”
The recovery plan just released by the Trump administration ignores the science and falls short in several key and interrelated ways:
Fails to establish the additional population centers and limits wolves to inadequate habitat with low recovery potential;
Does not provide for sufficient releases of wolves into the wild;
Fails to ensure conservation and enhancement of genetic diversity to ameliorate inbreeding;
Relies excessively on Mexico for recovery, where habitat is unpromising.
“It is critical for the health of the Mexican wolf population to obtain a sound, scientifically reviewed and based recovery plan. Politics should not play a role in management of an endangered species,” said Virginia Busch, executive director of the Endangered Wolf Center.
The critically endangered Mexican gray wolf almost vanished from the face of the earth in the mid-20th century because of human persecution. The entire population of Mexican wolves alive today descends from just seven individuals that were captured and placed into a captive breeding program before the species was exterminated from the wild.
In 2014, Earthjustice on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, retired Fish and Wildlife ServiceMexican Wolf Recovery Coordinator David R. Parsons, the Endangered Wolf Center and the Wolf Conservation Center, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to develop a recovery plan.
