by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 10, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Wanted9867 / Reddit
I have lived on 300 acres in west central Florida near the coast for 29 years. I could write a book about what I have seen growing up, but now…now I don’t want to talk about what is left there. Perhaps though, I should.
Little…nothing. The land was a sawmill between 1903-1915 but before and since it was untouched. Signs of the old sawmill are still there, the stills to boil out turpentine are still standing. The woods are quiet now. There are no squirrels left in the trees. The undergrowth is perpetually dry when it’s not raining every day. There is no in-between. The giant Pileated woodpeckers that used to float beneath the canopy between the trees are long gone. The monkey sized fox squirrels disappeared around 2000. I recall seeing the last one in January of 2001, his big bushy tail flowing behind him as he ran up a tall pine tree. I didn’t at the time know of the change that this indicated. The fireflies that would fill the yard beneath the oak trees by the tens of thousands during those steamy late summer evenings are gone now. I haven’t seen one of the fly looking variety since 1997. My dad used to tell me stories that as a kid he’d pull those glowing tails off and stick them on the headlights of his model cars. And how I’d roll my eyes and complain how I’d heard that story before…Jesus, Dad I miss those days now. I found one single firefly this summer- but a different variety…some type of beetle and the first in near two decades. I frantically scrambled to catch him and hold him carefully in my hand. “Where are the rest of you?” I cried.
The tortoise holes are still there- abandoned. The rattlesnake dens beneath the palmettos are empty. The vile bugs I feared so much I now miss. The palmetto bugs, the spiders, the beetles, the variety…where did all the moths go? How heartbreaking it is to remember falling asleep hearing that old purple bug zapper light buzzing downstairs on the porch. In the mornings I’d pick through the hundreds of dead moths. Now there is nothing. At night…now only mosquitoes. 20 years ago the night sky would be filled with bats eating the moths and other flying insects. We had a single apparently sick and very very small bat nest in the back shed back in the winter of 2008. He was so small. He hung there for weeks before finally leaving as well. He never came back. None have returned since.
In the woods there were once deer, boar, turkey, foxes, bobcats and all manner of Florida wildlife. They have all gone now. In the sandy patches I would walk to as a child to look at the hundreds of animals tracks there are now none. No animals cross these areas any longer aside from the occasional raccoon or opossum. The variety is gone, there seems to be nothing left. The trees are still there…for now. The woods are still alive, but their heartbeat is faint. The animals within are now gone. Its soul.
It is sterile and frightening. Echoing like an empty gym.
This property was the last bastion for miles around. Untouched for a hundred years. Then, siege was laid upon it. Roads border this chunk of land on three sides. Across these roads used to be vast stretches of similarly untouched land where I assume these vanished animals would roam to. The streets used to be silent at night, traffic during the days was always minimal. Currently these roads are being widened and traffic is dense. There is nowhere left for the animals to roam to, and they died as a result.
Now these adjacent stretches of land were wiped clean. In 2006 they began developing thousands of acres into subdivisions. Scouring the earth clean and wiping out any trace of anything that came before. Thousands of acres wiped clean, fire hydrants and sewers dug in, roads lain, street signs erected…but then something funny. The bubble burst. The paper chase, the thoughtless, senseless, sickening race that resulted in this utter rape ended. The contractors put up their tools and went home. It was over, completed. Now everything was quiet.
This was an extremely rural area. Land was readily available but nobody had any real reason to come here. 2008 came and these enormous empty plots of planned land sat empty save for 3 or 4 model homes. It is like some sort of Orwellian dystopia. Three homes spaced out across a 200 acre planned and laid out subdivision. I can think of at least five major subdivisions within 5 miles of the house that fit this description. It makes me feel sick. Such destruction, such immense waste. Sometimes I want to scream and beat my fists on the ground. Gas stations and hotels and strip malls and retail centers all erupted from the earth long after the housing bubble burst. The corporate boom would continue its rape of my home town for some time yet. Now they too are empty. FOR RENT signs in the windows of the empty strip malls. Gas stations boarded up. The Taco Bell that closed and has traded hands 10 times between various failed franchises…the waste of it all crushes my soul.
I no longer feel comfortable going into the woods I grew up in. It is too empty and it feels different. It always feels as if something is watching me. I feel it may be the trees gazing upon me knowing the destruction, the hideous things we have done to them. I feel guilt.
It is only 2018. What have we done? How were we all so blind? The Matrix struck far closer to home than I think we all gave it credit for.
The way it was was the best it was ever gonna get. I realize that now looking back on my childhood.
We do not have much time left, I hope. I am rather confident of it.
Editor’s note: this originally appeared as commentary titled “Trust your senses. We are all front-line observers to species/habitat destruction in our own backyards” on the Reddit community r/collapse, and has been republished with permission of the author.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 5, 2018 | The Problem: Civilization
Featured image: satellite photograph of wildfire raging in Greenland, as seen from space. NASA Earth Observatory
by Pray for Calamity
It is easy to get lost. The digital world exists parallel to the real, and just by flicking a finger across a piece of glass, one can open a doorway to all of the happenings any other human has written of, or photographed, or filmed. My morning ritual includes making a cup of tea, hopefully before my daughter has woken, and through the steam that rises from my cup I read what news of the wider world has come through my various feeds.
Fires rage in the Arctic, and in Greece, and in the American West. Heat has gripped the globe from Japan to Algeria to Portugal. There are floods, and parched farm fields, desperate refugees, and the most grotesque horror show of state sponsored famine and homicide in Yemen.
Pounding footsteps move across the floor from my daughter’s bedroom through the kitchen. I exit the digital. My daughter lumbers to me with tired eyes and I know she wants to be picked up, and to be held.
“Oh, my girl. My wonderful girl.”
She doesn’t say anything, her head on my shoulder, facing away so that I can smell her long hair. My exhale is deep and satisfied. She is right where I want to be. An hour later as we walk our stone driveway to go feed our chickens and ducks, I watch her small legs plodding along in pink plastic rain boots. The air is cool, actually, and I realize that this is my real, and that all of those terrible things I read about in the quiet dawn are far away, if they exist at all.
—
I have a fascination with orienteering. A while back a friend gave me his compass, which his father had given to him. I already had a compass, a cheap one that stayed packed in my camping bag. This new one my friend gave to me is much nicer. It has a weight to it that makes it feel significant and truthful, like the weight of a proper kitchen knife or an old, leather bound dictionary.
Upon receiving this gift from my friend, I realized I only ever used a compass to figure out which direction was which, but that I really had no idea how to properly use a compass in accordance with a map. So I began to read instructions on how to do so online, and even watched some videos on orienteering.
The word “orient” is saddled with an enormous historical and social burden. It is a derivation of the latin word for “east,” (the opposite being “occident,” a derivation of “west”) and is typically used to refer to the continent of Asia. Of course, what is “east” (or west, for that matter) really depends on where you are standing, so to conceive of the orient as Asia is to be speaking from a European perspective geographically, or at least as one influenced by European perspective. This is all rather contemporary though, as in Ancient Rome, anything south of the city of Rome was the Orient, as they had drawn in their minds an east-west line running through that city, and made determinations based on whether one lived above or below it. We seem to often set ourselves as a fixed point, the pivot of the spinning needle that whirls around us.
A map is wonderful, as it is a representation of terrain. But if you don’t know where you are, a map can be worse than useless. A compass is very useful, as it can point you in a cardinal direction. But without a map, the name of any given direction becomes trivia.
To “orient” seems to literally mean to find east, the direction we know we can reliably look to find the rising sun. When lost, one must orient themselves or remain so. One must align the compass with the map before shooting a bearing and heading out into the wilderness.
—
In my moments of greater clarity, I want to absolve myself of all political inclination. If I ask myself, point blank, “what is it I am most concerned about?” the answer comes quite quickly: Ecology, the living world. My great worry regarding the world at large centers on the fact that human industrial civilization is every day bringing the web of life closer to the brink of total collapse. Through climate change, extinctions, pollution, the promulgation of invasive species, and the conversion of wild spaces into regions managed and exploited for extraction and production, human civilization is destroying everything upon which it stands. With such an insurmountable threat bearing down, it seems silly to get drawn into conflicts over petty human arguments. Of course, most of what is trumpeted by the TV and print news seems to be just this, at least in comparison to the storm looming over us.
But it happens. I get pulled into the gyre. Despite my desire to stay focused on the material world beneath my feet, the political nature of industrial collapse maintains itself as undeniably evident. As the conditions under which people exist continue to get worse, conflicts expand, and those in power exploit these circumstances for their own gain. Thus it is that ideologues create out groups of others – immigrants, Muslims, black folk, the poor – who they soak with blame for the downward trend lines that define our age. So it is that we have endless wars at home and abroad, with piles of dead victims of drone assassination and cages full of terrified children.
Like it or not, collapse is political. Will the downward slope of Hubbert’s peak be pocked with debt prisons or bread lines? Will the despair of climate chaos be met with concentration camps or communes? Will we slouch towards Olduvai while erecting walls or by tearing them down? Even if we believe all our best efforts will fail us, even if we believe that the wounds we have inflicted on the world are too deep to heal, and that a great suffering is certain, wouldn’t at the end of it all we prefer to fail at decency than to succeed at evil?
Of course, determining the difference can be quite tricky. All men mean well, it is said. Good and evil are meaningless terms, like north and south. If you know nothing of the terrain, if you have no map, you’re likely to just walk downhill because it’s easier.
—
“The core question that brings liberalism, conservatism, nationalism and identity politics into conflict with each other is a fundamental one: who has the authority to describe society? Whose version of history will be heard?”
This is an excerpt from a recent editorial in The Guardian by William Davies entitled, “The Free Speech Panic: How the Right Concocted a Crisis.” I was struck by the clarity of this concept. So much of the current argument, or rather, the tangled mess of arguments surrounding politics, individual identity, national identity, and so forth stems from this very conundrum. Who gets to draw the map? By whose standards do we orient ourselves?
Daily the world is changing in ways that were not foretold by those who have been tasked with explaining reality. By neglecting to confront the crisis of net energy decline, by declining to confront the crisis of debt based money on a finite planet, by declining to confront the crisis of ecological overshoot, the social caste of media makers and politicians have left people scraping to understand the knock on effects that have rippled through society because of these very crises.
People are finding themselves lost in a wilderness of information that runs contrary to the official “everything is fine” narrative put forth by the state and capital. In this rugged and dark place, people are seeking to orient themselves so that they can understand just what is required of them in order to survive and to provide a future for themselves and their families. Whether it is a young college student wondering if it makes sense to take on a debt load in order to attain an education, or a middle age worker wondering why the hell it is so damn hard to pay for a home, and food, and healthcare for their family, people eventually recognize that the explanations for the world around them that they are being fed by those in power do not match the geography of their day to day existence.
When the political narrative one has been given fails, all a person can do is look around and scan the horizon for recognizable features, looking for enough of the familiar so they can finally mark an X and at least understand where exactly they stand.
To orient oneself in a social space can be difficult, and one ultimately does so by recognizing who they are not. Other people become boundary markers, warnings of what not to do, how not to be. Group identities form, people join teams, they carry flags, we don’t necessarily know who we are, but we damn well know we aren’t them.
You’re with us or you’re against us. Better dead than red. Bash the fash! West is best. Resist! Traitor!
Who gets to draw the map? As climate change progresses and the wealth gap grows wider and the pain and struggle of every day life grows more intolerable for the average person, this question will be the hill we die on.
—
My wife plunges a knife into a dark green watermelon. It is near perfectly round and about the size of a bowling ball. The second one we pulled from our garden this summer, it is at a perfect stage of ripeness. Standing in the kitchen the three of us spit small black seeds into a glass bowl as we enjoy the sweetness of the fruit.
The rinds get dumped in the chicken paddock, and I lock the door to the coop. The sun has set behind me as I walk silently back towards the house. Even when we tell people how to get here, our little plot of land can be very hard to find.
Originally published on Pray for Calamity. Republished with permission.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 4, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. / Transition Times
We are living in epic times. Mighty planetary changes are underway, and perhaps our pop culture is so obsessed with superheroes because only legendary heroes could successfully battle the dragons we face today.
I have been writing Transition Times for seven years now. When I started this blog, I was following the lead of environmental activist writers like Bill McKibben, Mark Hertsgaard, Elizabeth Kolbert and Derrick Jensen, who were sounding the alarm about climate change and biodiversity loss, translating the sober measurements of science into terms a lay audience could understand.
In the climate change movement then, the watchwords were “mitigate” and “adapt.” We could mitigate the damage that climate change would cause by reducing carbon emissions, trying to keep things more or less under control while we busied ourselves with adapting, by, for example, shifting to renewable energy sources and hybridizing flood- and drought-resistant grains.
Meanwhile, wildlife biologists were keeping track of the grim march of the Sixth Great Extinction, already well underway—not only for animals but also for marine life and plants on land and sea.
Seven years on, the scenarios I was absorbing with shock, outrage and fear at the beginning of Transition Times have come true, and then some. Monster storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, melting glaciers and tundra at the poles, staggering biodiversity loss, climate refugees (both human and non-human)—all of this has moved out of the realm of science fiction into the daily headlines.
Hence our desperate casting about for superhero help.
In the United States, the Gilgamesh crowd is in power—you remember Gilgamesh: the brawny young king who murdered the guardian of the cedar forest and cut it all down to build his grand city. Later in his epic he wanders around the world searching unsuccessfully for a route to immortality, strangely symbolizing the downfall of all humans who think only of short-term gain: you can’t take it with you.
Those at the helm of the U.S. economy today are willing to cut it all down. Who cares about helping endangered species? Who cares about national parks or ocean sanctuaries—drill, baby, drill! Who cares about the national debt? Print some more paper, acquire some more debt, let the suckers who come after us figure out how to pay.
And pay we will. The entire Earth community will pay for the savage destruction of climate and environment underway now. It’s not just the Sixth Great Extinction, it’s also a planetary reset we’re witnessing in these early years of the 21stcentury, on the scale of the shift from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic eras, when the dinosaurs went extinct.
But this time, it’s not a meteor shaking things up on Earth. It’s the planet’s most successful species, homo sapiens—the smart apes—ruining things for everyone.
I am not proud to be a human being these days. I am not proud to be an American.
But I do cling to a tattered shred of hope in remembering the much-vaunted ethical, moral compass of humans, and the legendary innovative ingenuity of Americans.
If climate change, habitat and species loss continue unabated, we will be the first species on the planet to knowingly bring about our own destruction. For make no mistake, humans will go down with everything else on the planet. A few may survive—but civilization as we have created it, a la Gilgamesh, will go down.
Is this something we are really willing to have on our collective conscience?
Especially when we could have prevented it?
I take hope from the fierce rhetoric of Pope Francis, and other activists who are firing up environmental protection with religious fervor: Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a great example of a scientist who is appealing to the faithful, and also using pop culture to reach the masses.
What’s needed now is a dramatic shift in cultural worldview: from Gilgamesh to Noah, from swash-buckling drill-slash-burn to the moral and technological leadership that gets an Ark built before the floods come.
Because the floods, they are a’comin’. They’re already here, along with the wildfires and droughts and heat domes and all the rest of it. The wild animals are feeling the stresses as much or more than humans…there’s no AC or helicopters coming for them.
Meanwhile our politicians are still busying themselves with archaic ideas like national borders and tariff tit-for-tats. Climate change knows no borders. Noah didn’t ask to see passports as he loaded the climate refugees, human and non-human, into his ship.
We are all Earthlings now. If there’s any upside to climate change, it may be that the fact of our global, interspecies interdependence is now blazingly clear and undeniable.
In the epic of the 21stcentury, we’re at a crossroads. Who will we follow, Gilgamesh or Noah? If we want to save ourselves and as many other beloved Earthlings as possible (plants, insects, birds, animals, marine life), there is no time to waste.
Noah is in all of us, and we’re all in this together. If we have the will, we can find ways to mitigate and adapt and survive what’s coming.
Can we find the will?
Every day is a cliffhanger lately…tune in next time for the next chapter of “Gilgamesh vs. Noah: The Epic Battle for the Future, No. 2018.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 25, 2018 | Male Violence
by Eric London / World Socialist Web Site
Lost among the wall-to-wall press coverage of allegations of Russian interference in US politics is a recent revelation that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 1,310 reports of rape and sexual assault of immigrant detainees by ICE officials between 2013 and 2017 alone.
On July 17, Emily Kassie of the New York Times published a short documentary with interviews with two women who were sexually assaulted by guards at immigrant detention facilities in Texas and Pennsylvania.
An ICE agent was driving one immigrant woman from T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas after she was released on bond. Kassie wrote: “After gathering her belongings, she was escorted to a loading area fenced with razor wire and placed into a cage inside a van. The driver was a male guard named Donald Dunn. Shortly after leaving Hutto, Dunn pulled off the road.
“‘He grabbed my breasts … He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts,’ she said. ‘He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.’”
Many women who seek asylum in the US are escaping sexual assault and rape at the hands of their persecutors—in many cases the US-backed police and paramilitary forces of Central America.
Kassie interviewed another asylum seeker who was 19 years old when a detention center guard raped her. “‘I didn’t know how to refuse because he told me that I was going to be deported,’ the asylum seeker said. ‘I was at a jail and he was a migration officer. It’s like they order you to do something and you have to do it.’”
Cristina Parker, communications director for the Texas immigrant rights nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, told the World Socialist Web Site: “It’s terrible to say, but this report doesn’t shock me. Those of us who know these facilities thought, ‘That’s about right.’ It’s a common thing we hear. It’s been a problem. It’s not just at [T. Don] Hutto [detention center], it’s endemic and pervasive in the system.”
The corporate media has largely ignored the reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse by US immigration officials. The New York Times buried Kassie’s video shortly after it was published, while the Washington Post made only a passing reference to it at the conclusion of an article summarizing the day’s news. Otherwise, the story was not covered in the bourgeois press. The fascistic abuse of immigrants has been drowned out by the hysterical anti-Russia campaign dominating the airwaves.
“It’s disturbing that this doesn’t get more coverage and isn’t met with more outrage,” Parker said. “The media is more interested in the reality television show that is our current federal administration and not the impact that it’s having on individuals and human beings on the border. Even though immigration has fallen off the national radar, only a fraction of the children separated from their parents have been reunited. The detention system is operating at a mass scale.”
The bulk of the reports of rape and abuse were made from 2013 to 2017—mostly during the Obama administration. In an effort to cover up widespread abuse, ICE found roughly 60 percent of the abuse claims to be “unsubstantiated.”
“I do not believe there is a culture of abuse, for the past six years it’s been less than 1 percent of our population that has reported an incident,” Philip Miller, former deputy executive associate director of ICE, told Kassie.
Hundreds of thousands of people have passed through immigration detention centers in recent years, indicating that tens of thousands have been raped or assaulted. The legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes it extremely difficult for inmates—especially immigrants—to file lawsuits against guards.
The total number of assaults is much higher than the number reported, as most detainees are too fearful of retribution to step forward.
The report comes one month after the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) sent a letter to ICE demanding internal records about two immigrant women who were sexually abused by a prison supervisor at T. Don Hutto detention facility in 2017.
In addition, the letter states that four immigrant detainees saw the supervisor “on multiple occasions, masturbate in the dorm area while staring at detainees in a lewd manner.”
An ACLU report released in May exposed widespread physical and sexual abuse of detained immigrant children from 2009 to 2014. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents forced one 16-year-old girl to strip and “forcefully spread her legs, and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed.”
Employing the depraved and brutal language of fascist thugs, agents put another child in a room and said, “Right now, we close the door, we rape you and f*** you.” A male and female agent forced another child to get naked while they watched her for 15 minutes, threatening to lock her in a room with a large male inmate to force her to be “his wife.”
Kassie’s documentary, which deals with complaints brought by both adults and children, proves that the abuse did not stop in 2014. Among the exposures included in the ACLU report is the fact that the Obama administration actively covered up the abuse of immigrant children.
Responding to a complaint by one immigrant child in 2014, an Obama administration inspector wrote, “Are we sure we want to open this given the huge amount of more serious complaints we have?”
The CBP responded to the ACLU report by claiming allegations of abuse are “unfounded and baseless.” Reports of sexual assault “equate allegations with fact,” the report said.
None of the leaders of the #MeToo movement have made public statements about the US government’s rape and abuse of the most impoverished and oppressed. While figures such as actresses Rose McGowan, Asia Argento, Ashley Judd and former State Department official Ronan Farrow engage in endless acts of self-promotion on Twitter, their pages remained silent about Kassie’s report.
The #MeToo campaign has no interest in the fate of refugees who are the victims of US imperialism’s wars in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. The focus of the wealthy initiators of that anti-democratic campaign is not on halting “abuse of power,” but advancing their own careers and inflating their own bank accounts.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 24, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
“Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.”
– François-René de Chateaubriand
New research in the prestigious journal Nature estimates that “the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.”
The study also suggests that about 15 billion trees are being cut down each year, and that the average age of forests has declined significantly over the last few thousand years.
The study was led by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies with contributions from scientists at universities and research institutions in Utah, Chile, the UK, Finland, Italy, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Brazil, and China.
While fossil fuels have only been burned on a large scale for 200 years, land clearance has been a defining characteristic of civilizations – cultures based around cities and agriculture – since they first emerged around 8,000 years ago.
This land clearance has impacts on global climate. When a forest ecosystem is converted to agriculture, more than two thirds of the carbon that was stored in that forest is lost, and additional carbon stored in soils rich in organic materials will continue to be lost to the atmosphere as erosion accelerates.
Modern science may give us an idea of the magnitude of the climate impact of this pre-industrial land clearance. Over the past several decades of climate research, there has been an increasing focus on the impact of land clearance on modern global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its 2004 report, attributed 17% of global emissions to cutting forests and destroying grasslands – a number which does not include the loss of future carbon storage or emissions directly related to this land clearance, such as methane released from rice paddies or fossil fuels burned by heavy logging equipment.
Some studies show that 50% of the global warming in the United States can be attributed to land clearance – a number that reflects the inordinate impact that changes in land use can have on temperatures, primarily by reducing shade cover and evapotranspiration (the process whereby a good-sized tree puts out thousands of gallons of water into the atmosphere on a hot summer day – their equivalent to our sweating).
So if intensive land clearance has been going on for thousands of years, has it contributed to global warming? Is there a record of the impacts of civilization in the global climate itself?
10,000 years of Climate Change
According to author Lierre Keith, the answer is a resounding yes. Around 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate crops. This is the period referred to as the beginning of civilization, and, according to the Keith and other scholars such as David Montgomery, a soil scientist at the University of Washington, it marked the beginning of land clearance and soil erosion on a scale never before seen – and led to massive carbon emissions.
“In Lebanon (and then Greece, and then Italy) the story of civilization is laid bare as the rocky hills,” Keith writes. “Agriculture, hierarchy, deforestation, topsoil loss, militarism, and imperialism became an intensifying feedback loop that ended with the collapse of a bioregion [the Mediterranean basin] that will most likely not recover until after the next ice age.”
Montgomery writes, in his excellent book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, that the agriculture that followed logging and land clearance led to those rocky hills noted by Keith.
“It is my contention that the invention of [agriculture] fundamentally altered the balance between soil production and soil erosion – dramatically increasing soil erosion.
Other researchers, like Jed Kaplan and his team from the Avre Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, have affirmed that preindustrial land clearance has had a massive impact on the landscape.
“It is certain that the forests of many European countries were substantially cleared before the Industrial Revolution,” they write in a 2009 study.
Their data shows that forest cover declined from 35% to 0% in Ireland over the 2800 years before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The situation was similar in Norway, Finland, and Iceland, where 100% of the arable land was cleared before 1850.
Similarly, the world’s grasslands have been largely destroyed: plowed under for fields of wheat and corn, or buried under spreading pavement. The grain belt, which stretches across the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, and across much of Eastern Europe, southern Russia, and northern China, has decimated the endless fields of constantly shifting native grasses.
The same process is moving inexorably towards its conclusion in the south, in the pampas of Argentina and in the Sahel in Africa. Thousands of species, each uniquely adapted to the grasslands that they call home, are being driven to extinction.
“Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable,” writes permaculture expert Toby Hemenway. “We can pass laws to stop some of the harm agriculture does, but these rules will reduce harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws will be repealed. There are no structural constraints on agriculture’s ecologically damaging tendencies.”
As Hemenway notes, the massive global population is essentially dependent on agriculture for survival, which makes political change a difficult proposition at best. The seriousness of this problem is not to be underestimated. Seven billion people are dependent on a food system – agricultural civilization – that is killing the planet.
The primary proponent of the hypothesis – that human impacts on climate are as old as civilization – has been Dr. William Ruddiman, a retired professor at the University of Virginia. The theory is often called Ruddiman’s Hypothesis, or, alternately, the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis.
Ruddiman’s research, which relies heavily on atmospheric data from gases trapped in thick ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, shows that around 11,000 years ago carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to decline as part of a natural cycle related to the end of the last Ice Age. This reflected a natural pattern that has been seen after previous ice ages.
This decline continued until around 8000 years ago, when the natural trend of declining carbon dioxide turned around, and greenhouse gases began to rise. This coincides with the spread of civilization across more territory in China, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and certain other regions.
Ruddiman’s data shows that deforestation over the next several thousand years released 350 Gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, an amount nearly equal to what has been released since the Industrial Revolution. The figure is corroborated by the research of Kaplan and his team.
Around 5000 years ago, cultures in East and Southeast Asia began to cultivate rice in paddies – irrigated fields constantly submerged in water. Like an artificial wetland, rice paddies create an anaerobic environment, where bacteria metabolizing carbon-based substances (like dead plants) release methane instead of carbon dioxide and the byproduct of their consumption. Ruddiman points to a spike in atmospheric methane preserved in ice cores around 5000 years ago as further evidence of warming due to agriculture.
Destruction of the land as the root
The anti-apartheid organizer Seve Biko wrote in the 1960’s that “One needs to understand the basics before setting up a remedy. A number of organizations now currently ‘fighting against apartheid’ are working on an oversimplified premise. They have taken a brief look at what is, and have diagnosed the problem incorrectly. They have almost completely forgotten about the side effects and have not even considered the root cause. Hence whatever is improved as a remedy will hardly cure the condition.”
The same could be said of much of the modern environmental movement. While coal, oil, and gas are without a doubt worthwhile targets for opposition, the “climate” movement has forgotten the primary importance of the meadows, the grasslands, the forests, the mountains, and the rivers.
Without this, the movement has been led astray. It’s no wonder that ineffective solutions and tepid reforms that actually strengthen global empire are being promoted, instead of what is actually needed: revolutionary overthrow of this system of power.
Image: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, Kate Evans/CIFOR, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cifor/35035343564
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 22, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image: critically endangered red wolves. Trump’s unprecedented rollback could doom hundreds of animals and plants to extinction.
by Center for Biological Diversity
WASHINGTON— In a massive attack on imperiled wildlife, the Trump administration announced a series of rollbacks today to the regulations implementing key provisions of the Endangered Species Act.
The three proposed rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service would severely weaken protections for hundreds of endangered animals and plants across the country. They would also ensure that hundreds of imperiled species awaiting protection — like the monarch butterfly and the American wolverine — either never get safeguards or face additional, extinction-threatening delays.
One set of regulatory changes would weaken the consultation process designed to prevent harm to endangered animals and their habitats from federal agency activities. A second set of changes would curtail the designation of critical habitat and weaken the listing process for imperiled species. A third regulation would gut nearly all protections for wildlife newly designated as “threatened” under the Act.
The proposals are part of a broader effort by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to undercut protections for wildlife and public lands.
“These proposals would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections for our most endangered wildlife,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If these regulations had been in place in the 1970s, the bald eagle and the gray whale would be extinct today. If they’re finalized now, Zinke will go down in history as the extinction secretary.”
Under the proposal relating to federal consultations, impacts to critical habitat will be ignored unless they impact the entirety of an animal’s habitat — ignoring the fact that “death by a thousand cuts” is the most common way wildlife declines toward extinction.
The proposal will also prohibit designation of critical habitat for species threatened by climate change, even though in many cases these species are also threatened by habitat destruction and other factors. The proposal will also preclude designation of critical habitat for areas where species need to move to avoid climate threats.
“This proposal turns the extinction-prevention tool of the Endangered Species Act into a rubber stamp for powerful corporate interests,” said Hartl. “Allowing the federal government to turn a blind eye to climate change will be a death sentence for polar bears and hundreds of other animals and plants.”
The regulatory proposal addressing listing and critical habitat designations will gut wildlife agencies’ ability to designate critical habitat in unoccupied areas needed for recovery. Even though most endangered species currently occupy small fractions of their historic range, those areas would effectively be precluded from ever helping a species recover.
“Ordinary Americans understand that many species of wildlife have drastically declined in recent years, and that if we are going to save wildlife, we have to let them return to places they used to roam. Denying imperiled wild animals that ability means they have no future,” said Hartl.
Editor’s note: related story at Citing ‘Common Good,’ Nearly 1,500 Scientists Demand Congress Shield Endangered Species Act From GOP Attacks
