
PETITION: Stop Deep Sea Mining
An emerging new industry could destroy this fragile and unique deep sea environment before we truly understand its importance.
Editor’s note: We know what needs to be done but will it be done? No, the system will not allow it so the system must go. The sooner the better. Join a social movement advocating for a real energy transition, one that strives to guarantee that civilization will not emerge from this century.
By Richard Heinberg Aug 25 for Common Dreams
Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.
The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820 when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.
As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.
Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.
While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.
Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.
So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.
How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.
However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.
Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.
At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).
But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.
In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global carbon CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.
In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.
While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.
The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.
The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that it uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
Step one: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.
Step two: Manage energy demand fairly. Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.
The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQ units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.
Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact, society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.
What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.
Step four: Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.
Global population will start to decline sometime during this century. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, and China, Japan, Germany, and many other nations are already seeing population shrinkage. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should see it as an opportunity. With fewer people, energy decline will be less of a burden on a per capita basis. There are also side benefits: a smaller population puts less pressure on wild nature, and often results in rising wages. We should stop pushing a pro-natalist agenda; ensure that women have the educational opportunities, social standing, security, and access to birth control to make their own childbearing choices; incentivize small families, and aim for the long-term goal of a stable global population closer to the number of people who were alive at the start of the fossil-fuel revolution (even though voluntary population shrinkage will be too slow to help us much in reaching immediate emissions reduction targets).
Step five: Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.
Step six: Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.
Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.
Step seven: Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.
Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.
Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition and little prospect for a desirable human future.
Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash
Nick Young 26 July 2024 / Greenpeace Scientists have found a source of ‘dark oxygen’ 4,000 meters below the surface of the Pacific in the target zone for deep sea mining. The discovery could have far-reaching implications for science and the wannabe deep sea mining industry. It’s often said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the deep ocean. This new discovery of dark oxygen shows how true that is, and underlines the need to stop a new deep sea mining industry from targeting its source.
What scientists mean by ‘dark oxygen’ is that – in the total darkness of the very deep ocean – around 4,000 meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean – oxygen is being produced – in the dark.
It’s previously been thought that oxygen on Earth is produced on land and at the surface of the ocean, where sunlight makes plant photosynthesis possible.
Plants on land are the biggest producers of oxygen, but marine algae and phytoplankton also produce it. These microscopic organisms perform photosynthesis in the ocean, which covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface.
Blue-green algae – or cyanobacteria – are some of the oldest organisms on Earth and can also produce oxygen. They were among the first to do so through photosynthesis, and they also need sunlight.
The common factor in oxygen production is sunlight – until this discovery of dark oxygen showed that oxygen is also being produced in another way in the deep dark sea.
The dark oxygen discovery is being hailed as a groundbreaking scientific discovery, but it also has other implications.
Nick Owens, the director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) says: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.”
Andrew Sweetman, who was one of the SAMS scientists involved in the research, says in a video: “This research potentially sheds light on where life began on the planet. This discovery has shown that, well, maybe there was another source of oxygen a long time ago and aerobic life or life that breathes oxygen could have persisted before the rise of photosynthesis — and if it’s happening on our planet could it be happening on other planets too?”
But as well as those wider implications, the discovery has significant and immediate implications for the controversial deep sea mining industry which somewhat ironically sponsored the science.
Here’s the thing. This dark oxygen, instead of being produced by plants and sunlight, is being produced by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps found on the deep sea floor.
It turns out that these lumps – otherwise known as ‘polymetallic nodules’ – give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries! By reacting with salt water, their electrical charge produces oxygen way down there on the seabed of the deep ocean through a process known as ‘seawater electrolysis’ which splits seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
So, these little metallic lumps, which the wannabe deep sea miners have been metaphorically calling ‘batteries in a rock’ actually turned out to be just that – and they’re producing dark oxygen that could play a critical role in the deep ocean ecology.
The discovery of metallic nodules producing dark oxygen has been a huge surprise to science which could even require a new way of thinking about how life first began on planet Earth.
But it could also be the final straw in the case against deep sea mining. It could stop the industry before they begin.
The discovery was made in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a huge flat area of the seafloor that stretches between Hawaii and Mexico, where mining companies like The Metals Company have plans to start harvesting these very same nodules that turn out to be producing all this dark oxygen.
These oxygen-producing nodules could be supporting a whole range of known and unknown deep sea lifeforms. Dark oxygen could be a critical factor in the deep sea ecosystem!
Greenpeace and others have long said that this new extractive mining industry should not be allowed to start in the very deep ocean because the life there is so little understood, and the ecosystems are fragile and potentially vital for the health of the ocean and all life on Earth.
This new discovery underlines the point.
The timing is good because world governments are meeting in Jamaica right now to decide the fate of this new mining industry. They’ll be deciding whether or not to allow deep sea miners like The Metals Company to go ahead with their plans to drop giant mining robots onto the seafloor to start harvesting these life-sustaining nodules.
Greenpeace is in Jamaica arguing strongly that deep sea mining should not be allowed to go ahead – especially now that we know the deep ocean is another source of oxygen that could be vital for the health of the ocean and all of us who depend on it.
In the climate and biodiversity crisis, we know that nature, in all its diversity, must be protected.
PETITION: Stop Deep Sea Mining
An emerging new industry could destroy this fragile and unique deep sea environment before we truly understand its importance.
Photo by Jong Marshes on Unsplash
For more information contact Deep Sea Defenders.
Editor’s note: Environmental activism will only play a role in the lives of young people if adults are great role models and walk the talk. As custodians, we need to take the young out into nature to help them gain an appreciation for wilderness. So that they will want to protect the earth in the future. At the same time, many teenagers lose their connection to the natural world, because the lifestyle of our sedentary, technology-focused culture doesn’t give them any incentive to connect. Instead of investing in research for techno-fixes, we should find out how people will care more deeply about the planet’s ecosystems.
By Keith Kozloff/Resilience.org
I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. – Gus Speth, Founder, World Resources Institute.
At the federal level, even recent Democratic administrations have proven unable to enact policy measures ambitious enough to bend the curve of carbon emissions (at least without “help” from COVID). Nor has technology been our salvation. Although they held promise to reduce the carbon intensity of our economic output, technological advances have been offset by Americans’ consumption habits, population growth, and the energy intensity of information-processing technologies.
With each passing year, the disconnect grows ever more stark between 1) the mounting scientific evidence that global climate disruption is happening now and 2) the inadequacy of collective action to control rising carbon emissions. We do not lack for effective solutions. Rather, society and its leaders lack sufficient will and caring about future generations to implement solutions that meet the challenge. Like it or not, we find ourselves in a long game with adverse climate and biodiversity impacts baked in for decades to come.
One resource that has not yet been adequately mobilized, however, is the innate human capacity for caring, compassion, and love. Compared to technology and policy innovations, little research attention has been devoted to what makes people care enough to adopt pro-nature attitudes and behaviors and to support environmental policy initiatives that affect their lifestyles.
At the same time, people are increasingly disconnected from the environment they are being asked to help protect. The physical and psychic disconnection is due in part to urbanization and sedentary lifestyles, exacerbated by the explosive increase in time spent interacting with the physical world through a small two-dimensional screen.
To combat what some call “nature deficit disorder,” parents, schools, nonprofits, and governments have long offered a wide range of nature-based experiences for young people. Some are structured, such as outdoor education programs, forest schools, green schoolyards, community clean-up and tree-planting projects, and scouting. Others are unstructured: climbing trees, foraging, hunting, and having pets. The Children and Nature Network (C&NN), a national nonprofit that tracks and supports childhood nature activities, has documented that such activities yield significant immediate psychological, physiological and emotional benefits to participants.
But do nature-based experiences also result in their young participants developing pro-environmental attitudes, behaviors, and activism in adulthood? Given currently adverse environmental trajectories, this is clearly a question with high stakes. To explore linkages between childhood nature activities and adult environmental activism, I reviewed recent research in this field on behalf of C&NN.
Findings suggest that instilling a love for the natural world in young people does offer hope for future generations becoming better ancestors than the present one. Early experiences in nature can lead to feelings of connectedness, which can then lead to pro-environmental attitudes, and ultimately pro-environmental behavior. Many studies suggest that nature experiences and connection to nature in childhood are vital to pro-environmental behaviors in adulthood.
The link between time in nature and connectedness to nature is often explored retrospectively by asking adults to recall their childhood nature experiences. Studies taking this approach have documented significant relationships between childhood nature experience and ecologically conscious behavior later in life. These findings underscore the importance of ample time in nature during childhood. However, there are nuances that suggest various factors may result in individual variation.
For example, early experiences that stimulate emotional responses to nature create a deeper bond than purely information-based experiences. Emotional bonds with nature offer a pathway for inspiring future environmental action in adulthood. While cognitive understanding and environmental knowledge may influence behaviors, investigations have established stronger connections between emotional feelings for nature and increased care for nature through pro-environmental behaviors. A program that brings inner-city teens from New York into the Adirondacks for both learning and hiking inspires some participants to pursue subsequent environmental education and careers.
Childhood nature experiences are not the only path to pro-environmental behavior in adulthood. For example, an urban environmental justice or climate justice advocate might have grown up in a household that placed a high value on social justice more generally.
Overall, despite a growing body of research, this field of study is not as robust as the above question demands. Significant research gaps and methodological deficiencies persist. Empirical evidence is stronger for correlative than for causal relationships.
The challenge facing both outdoor educators and environmental advocates may be less about designing initiatives to instill a newfound love for nature than about how to retain humans’ innate tendencies to do so. At an early age, children demonstrate compassion towards each other, other animal species, and even to non-living entities. Children come into the world with the capacity to experience curiosity, wonder, and (especially at an early age) a less sharp distinction between themselves and their surrounding world. At an early age, children demonstrate the capacity to develop moral relationships with both sentient and non-sentient nature. (My then three-year-old son befriended a chicken pinata at the start of a birthday party, a friendship that did not end well.)
Creating opportunities for exposure to nature may help nurture such instincts and prevent them from withering as kids develop to adulthood. Implications for adults may thus be to focus less on fostering connections with nature than on getting out of the way of children’s “natural” tendencies. Relatedly, connection to nature tends to drop off during the teen years, suggesting that nature experiences need to be designed and targeted to teens’ developmental stage.
The pathways by which children in Western societies feel connected with nature are often different than in indigenous societies. In place-based societies that depend on natural resources for their sustenance, survival depends on practices that evolve from long-term experience in responding to the natural world. Stewardship norms and behaviors become established in children through demonstrating traditional livelihoods in which older children and adults play strong teaching roles. One largely untapped opportunity for Western society is to elevate wisdom about relationships with the natural world that are contained in indigenous traditions.
One challenge in designing nature-based initiatives is that opportunities for young people to connect with nature are becoming more constrained. Disrupted climate patterns may make it less pleasant to be outdoors, especially in ever-hotter summers. Young people today are precluded from forming connections with aspects of the natural world that have already been lost or altered from shifting baselines (insect and bird populations, white Christmas, etc.). Risk aversion and legal liability result in rules limiting the range of acceptable childhood activities — like tree-climbing or unsupervised outdoor play.
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible. That means equipping them with a suite of nature-friendly technologies and policies. It also means providing them with experiences that form the basis for an emotional and moral commitment to protect what they love.
Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture/Public Domain CC0
Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.
The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.
By John R. Platt/The Revelator
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
More Information here: UAnimals
This article is published under CC BY-NC-SA
Photo by Balkhovitin/Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-NC-SA
Editor’s note: Just substitute the word civilization for the word modernity.
By Tom Murphy – using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options / Do the Math
Having developed a perspective that modernity is fated to fail, and that many of our culture’s current pursuits and institutions are misguided efforts to prop up temporary structures, I often encounter the reaction that I am being defeatist. If what I am saying is true, then what’s the point? Yeah: what is this point that others believe justifies all the craziness? Whatever they think “the point” is could well be based on unexamined and incorrect beliefs.
I will attempt in this post to explain what I mean by this, in multiple passes. A starter example may seem a little patronizing, but could still be helpful. If your world only makes sense and has meaning on the premise that Santa Claus exists, then you’ve put yourself in an unfortunate place. Others have found ways to appreciate life without that requirement based on a falsehood.
Let’s also try generalizing the concept before getting to specific examples. We start with something I present that happens to be essentially true (or indeed comes to pass in due time), whether or not we can say so with absolute certainty. Then imagine that the reaction is: “Well, if that’s true, then what’s the point of living?” Well, we obviously are living, and if we do so in the context of this truth, then it makes little sense to say there’s no point in living. The problem must then lie in what the person believes “the point” to be, and therefore must be wrong about that. In this sense, a “what’s the point” challenge might be taken to signal a flawed worldview.
Okay. That’s the template. Let’s do a few practice cases (optional if you want to cut to the chase), and work our way toward the main event regarding modernity.
As we have no demonstrable evidence to the contrary, it is likely true that the universe operates as a quasi-deterministic symphony that writes itself in real time as the tangle of relationships described by physics play out. I say quasi-deterministic because quantum probabilities add spice to the details of the unfolding, but still in a prescriptive way. Most people have serious problems with this view, because life does not at all feel like it operates deterministically. I get it. Truly, the “undetermined” sensation is not lost on me for a second! But so what? Why would the actual real universe as it exists before us care what notions and hang-ups I construct in my brain about how it works?
Mind-bendingly complex and cool things can emerge from “the stage”—as far as we know all 100% consistent with the laws of physics that we have carefully elucidated, and to which no replicable experiment has found exception. That’s a strong bit of evidence on the side of determinism: we can’t override the physics that makes our neurons do what they do, for instance. Life certainly feels undetermined and open-ended, because the complexity is so extraordinarily insane that the only conceivable way to reveal the outcome is to play it out with the actual full universe as expressed in unfathomably rich inter-relationships between all the particles. No one—including the universe itself—knows for sure exactly what comes next in every detail (though broad brush predictions about things like sunrise tend to be pretty solid). Just because it’s deterministic doesn’t mean there’s a plan or a script: just rules and scads of interactions.
So, if in rejecting the notion of determinism, someone says “What’s the point in getting up every day if I’m just executing a script?”, then whatever they imagine the point to be is whacked in the context that determinism is actually the way of things. Something doesn’t make sense in their view of the world (which I will alternately label as worldview or cosmology), in a broken sort of way. In other words, if the only thing that makes sense to someone is to live in a world that is not deterministic, but the world is indeed deterministic, then that person’s sense-making of the world is essentially misguided. They have no authority to determine whether determinism is true or not, so what’s their coping strategy if—as mountains of evidence suggest—the universe turns out to be deterministic? Do they have a plan for that besides reactive rejection, or does it break their whole cosmology and leave them rudderless? What a shame, if they short-circuit based on their own chosen flaw: an unforced error. I suppose they can also just never accept determinism and continue to be comfortable within their cosmology, fragile as it may be.
It goes pretty similarly with the sensation of free will. Again, I get that our perception of the world convincingly fools us into mistaking agency for free will. But what if that’s wrong? Yes, we have agency in that we are actors in this self-writing script and have impacts on the rest of the performance—impacts that are hatched by our own neurons without violating any laws of physics. But there’s no sign of a “soul” that can override the relationships between all the stuff that makes us up. If physics (e.g., neurochemistry) were that easy to override, then how can drugs gain the upper hand? How can anesthesia make us go completely blank for hours without even a sense of time (where does the soul go)? Why does our sense of soul/awareness/consciousness coincide with our biological birth and subsequent development as biological beings? It’s dazzlingly impressive how resistant people can be to the notion that we are wholly corporeal beings. What a spectacle!
Anyway, it is unacceptable to many to suggest that we don’t have free will—which has every likelihood of being the case with no firm evidence to the contrary. Again, we don’t get to choose whether it’s true or not. If in someone’s mind there’s “no point” to living without free will, and indeed there’s no free will, then we have another case of a self-defeating choice of beliefs: another unforced error.
A third related piece and then I’ll move on to modernity. We are aware of ourselves, which we call consciousness. Many elect to see this as a state of transcendence. Whatever. Call this fascinating piece of emergent complexity what you like, but it seems to be a quality of many forms of life, and this totally makes sense. It is hard to see how you would stop even a moderately complex being with many sensory inputs and a brain from building a mental model in which the organism is a “self” or “entity” that needs to maneuver and perform certain functions in certain ways in order to be a successful member of the community of life. Evolution sees to it that those unable to conjure this capability are less able to operate successfully in a soup of other “entities” who can manage to do so.
If your standard-issue human supremacist has trouble accepting that consciousness is not unique to humans, but just another cool outcome of the evolution of complex organisms, then they have managed to set themselves up poorly—because loads of evidence points to (probably) universal consciousness (not all of identical form, naturally). So if the point to being human is this special power, then it’s a stupid corner to have painted oneself into. Angry reactions then boil down to anger at oneself for engineering another unforced error.
I hope these relatively brief starters laid the groundwork for understanding the main topic and weren’t just annoying tangents.
Let me attempt to frame the modernity version in a series of conjectural statements I might make, followed by reactions I might get from mainstream members of modernity.
Statement: We probably won’t have electricity or much in the way of metals in a thousand years (give or take a thousand years or so).
Response: That seems crazy and nearly impossible to imagine playing out short of nuclear annihilation: it would make all our progress to date pointless.
Statement: Earth almost certainly can’t maintain 8 billion people or anything near it for even a century or two—especially without fossil fuels.
Response: It is our ethical obligation to make it work, and we surely will via innovation and technology (fossil fuels are not what makes us amazing: we just are amazing). Otherwise, what’s the point of our having risen to this state?
Statement: Science as we practice it is a net harm: deployed for short-term human gains at great cost to the ecosphere’s health.
Response: If that were true, then what would be the point? Obviously, there’s a point to science, which expands our knowledge and provides ample benefits via technology.
Statement: Centuries from now we will have lost much of the knowledge that science has worked hard to accumulate.
Response: That would be tragic if true: then what’s the point if it’s all going to get flushed?
Statement: I spend much of my time trying to get people to see modernity as fundamentally unable to succeed in its ambitions.
Response: If you think it’s really that bad—doomed to fail—then what’s the point of bothering to write about it?
It would be interesting to collect thoughts about what such respondents do think the point is. How anthropocentric, ecologically ignorant, unrealistic, impractical, short-term, or even delusional are they? What sort of detached utopia do they dream is possible? How much context do they have to ignore or exclude to leave room for this tidy vision of artifice? Trying to remember what it was like to think this way, here are some possible answers:
Quick responses to each in turn:
I think a universal observation about these sorts of objections is that my original statements are incompatible with the cosmologies of the respondents. They fail to compute, within the worldviews of those folks. It feels like unfamiliar nonsense, when “sense” is constructed from a misguided notion of what this existence is all about and what the future promises to hold.
The distilled logic is: “if what you say were to be true, then my worldview falls apart, so what you say doesn’t seem like it can be true.” More bluntly: “I reject your premise, as preserving my worldview is more important to me—even if it’s utterly wrong (which it can’t be, somehow).”
In one sense, the “what’s the point” question is a form of progress. It acknowledges a deep disconnect. Problem identified. Maybe the real point is not at all what was imagined! I view it as similar to the fact—which I relish—that racists hate being labeled as racist. That’s a form of progress: they know it’s not okay, and get all defensive. When someone says “Then what’s the point?” they have made a big step to appreciating the incompatibility. The harder trick is to get them to re-evaluate their cosmology as the chief source of disconnect.
Once allowing the cosmology to shatter, many of my statements are far easier to entertain, and may even become obvious or seem the most likely truths—to the point of being attractive even. Cosmologies can therefore seriously distort and limit our thinking—affecting our judgment.
A quick detour about the word “progress,” which I used three times previously. The first instance was embedded in a mainstream response, used in its common form to reflect technological development, medical advances, access to economic/material “needs,” social tolerance and justice, and the like. Politically, the term “progressive” applies to those seeking expanded human rights and “fair” distribution of earth’s loot for all (humans).
But the second use reflected a much different form of evolution: questioning the traditional meaning of progress is itself progress. Abandoning “progress” as it is usually defined is, to me, progress. Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress helps paint the world in a different light.
A serious barrier to abandoning any cherished cosmology is that without anything to take its place one is left staring into an abyss. It’s scary. What meaning, or purpose could possibly exist? It feels like nihilism. Those who make it to the other side know better. There’s life after Santa Claus; life after shedding God; life without free will; life (literally) with conscious critters to keep us company; life after modernity. By life here, I mean love, joy, meaning, awe, and community. Also pain, loss, death, and other counterparts that must exist hand-in-hand to give substance to the pleasant bits. I’m not trying to sugar-coat: just indicating that rewarding experiences are every bit as possible—if not more so—without modernity.
Think of the picky-eater kid who would only ever eat chicken nuggets, pizza, and hot dogs. Frustrated parents catered to the kid’s limited palate, all the way through high school. Now imagine that during college, the kid (still earning that label) goes on an exchange trip to Thailand. It seems super-scary at first: “Nothing to eat here! I’ll starve!” But eventually, they try some of the less intimidating items, find that they’re quite delicious, and before long discover that Thai food is amazing. The door is open. The original problem, in a sense, was living in a skewed world that allowed or even promoted the maintenance of an unhealthy, limited tolerance for a broader understanding of the world of possibilities.
Once dropping the problematic cosmology that defines the point of life in terms of human “accomplishment” in the narrow context of modernity, a universe of other values systems becomes available to offer sustenance. To think otherwise is to arrogantly assume that thousands of generations of humans who came before were miserable because they had not found their “special purpose” (not referring to The Jerk movie, here). Modernists are nodding, because this sounds right according to their mythology. But that strikes me as delusional bull$#!+! Joy is part of the package of being human, and always has been! Likewise, all the other plants and animals of the world are not frikin’ miserable because they lack modernity! I could turn the tables and say that the modernity disease produces far more misery (for all life) than any other worldview that has ever existed on the planet.
If successful in sloughing off the mantle of modernity, you’ll see it as a hideous garment. Why did you love it so? It filled your head with crazy ideas that caused loads of damage and had no chance of working in the long run anyway. It was completely out of place: clashing contemptuously with the rest of the community of life. Once shot of the foul wrappings, you’ll see that something wonderful has been staring at you all along: life on Earth. It’s amazing, and quite a privilege to be a part of it. You’ll find no shortage of meaning, in a multitude of dimensions (plants; birds; mammals; amphibians; something for everyone). You’ll feel like now that you’re awake from the fever dream, you can imagine living on the planet without the evil trappings and pulls of modernity. You’ll want others to find the same hope and truth, so that you’re not stuck on the destructive treadmill that is too big for you to stop on your own. You need other people to come with you, and leave the piece of junk behind to rust and crumble, as life reclaims its prominence on the planet.
If modernity is not to last very long, what’s the point in pretending that it will? What’s the point in holding onto a worldview predicated on modernity’s survival? What’s the point of our current choices, jobs, ways of living? To what end do we pursue the things we presently do?
Just because a lot of the things we do today will turn out to be pointless does not mean there’s no point to anything! What a huge and unwarranted leap that is! In the context of a completely different lifestyle as subordinate partners among a cast of many in the community of life, one might find innumerable sources of meaning. Living, loving, caring, helping, singing, laughing, learning, respecting, offering gratitude, appreciating beauty, jabbering, teasing, playing, sharing—for instance—are all part of being human and of being one form of life among many others on this planet: lots of room to find meaning and “points” that validate life. If the meaning in your life is contingent on modernity, then maybe you’ve come to the wrong shop, and ought to look for new forms of meaning that are built to last.
Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash
By Gabriel Fonten / Freedom July 23
The French environmentalist movement Soulevements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Land) is carrying on its campaign against mishandling of water resources. This phase of action began on July 16 with the “Village for Water and Land Defense“, a meeting bringing activists from around the world to discuss strategy. This assembly of culminated in two demonstrations of around 10,000 people on the July 19 and 20, despite severe repression by police including teargas, blockades, and police charges at protesters.
The demonstrations July the 19 proceeded in a pattern not dissimilar to previous protests against the expansion of magabasins in France. 10,000 protesters on foot marched on Cerience, a seed subsidiary of the agro-industrial group Terrena. Parallel to this a group of 600 cyclists accompanied by campaigners from another group, Naturalistes des Terres, used kites to drop duckweed into nearby megabasin reservoirs to clog their pumps and pipes. The reservoirs they targeted provide water for the poultry factory farms of the Pampr’ouef group, who have recently been facing legal challenges over animal cruelty in their farms.
Demonstrations on July 20, however, marked a shift in the group’s focus towards a more global stage. Aiming to block the commercial port of La Pallice, farmers in tractors began to block the port at 6 a.m. followed by a larger demonstration beginning at 10 a.m which included people moving both on foot and by boat. Here, the focus was not directly on the expansion of reservoirs , but rather on the companies who profit from the government-funded privatisation of water. In a statement from the Soulevements de la Terre the group outlined how “competition from French cereals” prevents countries in Western Africa, a central destination of the port’s exports, from achieving food independence. Thus the expansion of their protests from megabasin reservoirs to ports marks an expansion of the fight to “abolish free trade, commercial predation and speculation” to a new arena.
While Soulevements de la Terre continue to bring attention to the centralisation of French agriculture and inflict millions of Euros in damage to the largest companies, their continued existence faces immense legal and political pressure. In 2023, after a mass action against the construction of a megabasin reservoir at Sainte Soline that resulted in the injury of 200 activists, the French government outlawed the organisation. Although this has been temporarily suspended by the Council of State (France’s Supreme Administrative Court), it hasn’t stopped the anti-terrorism section of the police making multiple arrests related to the sabotage of Lafarge cement factory.
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash