Editor’s note: Changing the face of a globalist, imperialist organization whose mandate is the equitable exploitation of “the common heritage of mankind” will not stop deep sea mining. We will need to stop the first attempt at enclosure and destruction of the sea floor, by any means necessary. Delegitimize, discredit and scuttle this operation. If you would like to help contact Deep Sea Defenders.
Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho will be the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N.-mandated organization that oversees deep-sea mining activities in international waters. She won the election with 79 votes, while her predecessor, 64-year-old Michael Lodge, who served as the ISA’s secretary-general for two terms, received only 34 votes. Lodge has previously been accused of siding with mining companies, which went against the duty of the ISA secretariat to remain neutral and may have influenced the direction of the prospective deep-sea mining industry.
Carvalho previously told Mongabay that she would work to make the ISA more transparent and rebuild trust within the organization.
Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho has been named the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) after winning an election that could change the course of the deep-sea mining industry.
Carvalho, 50, who currently works as an international civil servant for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), was declared the winner of the race on Aug. 2, the last day of the twenty-ninth assembly meeting of the ISA. She won the election with 79 votes, while her predecessor, 64-year-old Michael Lodge, who served as the ISA’s secretary-general for two terms, received only 34 votes.
Carvalho will begin her term at the ISA, the U.N.-mandated organization that oversees deep-sea mining activities in international waters, in January 2025. She will be the first woman, the first oceanographer, and the first representative from Latin America to serve in this position.
Commercial-scale deep-sea mining has not yet begun anywhere in the world, but mining companies have been pushing for an imminent start of this activity — and Lodge has been accused of doing more than he should to help this process along.
During his time as secretary-general between 2016 and 2024, Lodge pushed for the finalization of a mining code, a set of rules that would allow deep-sea mining exploitation to begin. However, this code was not ultimately finished over his tenure. Lodge has also been accused of advocating for mining companies, which goes against the ISA secretariat’s duty of remaining neutral and keeping the ISA’s processes and procedures unnecessarily opaque. More recently, Lodge was also embroiled in allegations that he misused agency funds and that one of his supporters tried to bribe Carvalho to drop out of the election in exchange for another high-level position within the ISA. Lodge, however, has refuted all of these claims.
In a previous interview with Mongabay, Carvalho said that if elected, she would work to make the ISA more transparent and rebuild trust within the organization.
“For me, the mission of the ISA and the leadership of the ISA is to be a trustee — an honest broker that brings decision-makers together, offering space that belongs to the whole of humankind,” Carvalho told Mongabay in July. “It should offer transparency of its own procedures, on the decision-making processes, on the management of the budgets — all of this.”
One mining company, Canadian-based The Metals Company (TMC), has repeatedly expressed its intention to apply for an exploitation license later this year, even before the mining code is finished. However, Carvalho has said that she believes granting such a license before regulations are in place would be a “source of litigation.”
Advocates of deep-sea mining say seabed minerals are needed to fulfill metal shortages and provide materials for renewable energy technologies like electric car batteries. Yet critics say deep-sea minerals are unnecessary for such technologies and that deep-sea mining could irreparably damage the seabed and overall marine environment.
A Deep-sea Exploration by NOAA. The nodules seen here and strewn across the seafloor were deposited here millions of years ago and grow about 2 millimeters every million years. Image by NOAA.
A recent study in Nature found that polymetallic nodules, metal-rich rocks found on the seafloor, produced a kind of “dark oxygen,” which experts say gives valid reason for slowing down the race to commercially extract nodules from the deep ocean.
During the recent ISA meetings, Austria, Guatemala, Honduras, Malta and Tuvalu joined a group of nations calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining. There are now 32 countries calling for such measures.
Matt Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a group of NGOs that campaign against deep-sea mining, said he was surprised by the number of country delegates that came to this year’s ISA meeting or sent in their proxy votes for the election, and also that “such a large majority” voted for Carvalho.
“This is a historic moment for the ISA and we congratulate Leticia Carvalho and the government of Brazil [for] her election,” Gianni said in a statement. “The ISA has an opportunity to champion a new way forward for sound ocean governance that prioritizes the precautionary principle and secures the health of the deep sea and its benefits for future generations.”
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay’s Ocean Desk. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
How a lack of imagination perpetuates this ecocidal way of life
I’ve recently read three books, all of which I’m glad I read, and all of which have the same fatal flaw: they are all constructed around a faulty premise.
A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of plastic. The book describes how micro- and nanoplastics are everywhere: they are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, the food we eat, the soil, our bodies (brains, blood, lungs, placentas, fetuses, testicles; everywhere we’ve researchers have looked, they’ve found plastic), and the bodies of every living being on the planet including plants. These microplastics are leaking CO2, contributing to climate change; leaking toxics, poisoning us and all living beings who ingest these plastics; clogging our veins, our lungs, our brains.
The book’s fatal flaw? That we “need” plastic in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of plastic rather than eliminate plastic entirely.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of roads. The book describes the mass killing (murder?) of wildlife and humans the world’s 40 million miles of roads perpetrate on a daily basis; the habitat fragmentation, the pollution, the noise, the isolation that roads cause, no matter what is driven on them. It is an entire book about the nightmare that is roads for all living beings on the planet.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” roads in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of roads rather than eliminate roads entirely.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of mining, primarily cobalt but also copper, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The book describes in devastating detail the destitution of the lives destroyed by cobalt mining; the drudgery, slavery, pollution, health impacts, environmental ruination; the horrors that one can barely believe but are real, all to supply materials for our tech gadgets and electric vehicles.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” this technology in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms caused by mining rather than eliminate mining entirely.
In each case, the author has written a book describing why plastic, roads, and mining are untenable for a future of life on planet Earth. In each case, the author excuses and rationalizes the very thing he’s just written an entire book explaining why they cannot be excused; cannot be rationalized. It is truly astonishing.
Plastic
In A Poison Like No Other, Simon writes:
“Plastics aren’t going anywhere—they’re just too useful and too omnipresent. And even if a virus killed every human next week, our plastic would still decay and flush out to sea and take to the air, until one day a long time from now it will all have decomposed as far as it can go, wrapping the planet in a perpetual nanoplastic haze. But there are ways to at least thin that haze by slowing the emission of plastics of all sizes.”
In one paragraph, Simon manages to explain why any new plastic added to the plastic already in the environment is a disaster, and simultaneously suggest that we can somehow reduce the impacts by “slowing the emission” of plastics.
No. All new plastic added to the existing plastic in the world will add to the haze. Slowing the emission of plastics is better than not slowing it, but Simon’s book lays out a compelling case for why we need to entirely eliminate plastic and then he concludes that we should slow emissions of plastic, thus compounding the plastic pollution, just a bit more slowly.
This is like the people who think that by slowing CO2 emissions we can mitigate climate change. No. CO2 emissions are cumulative, like plastic in the environment is cumulative. Anything but zero emissions makes the problem worse. Slow is better than fast, but zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much plastic should we continue to make?” just like zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much CO2 is acceptable to emit from burning fossil fuels and destroying the land?”
Zero.
Simon notes that “in the grand scheme of human existence, it wasn’t that long ago that we got along just fine without plastic.” He’s so close to seeing that we could exist without plastic again! And then he ruins it by saying “There’s a path in which we rein in single-use packaging, fix the busted economics of recycling, and get a microfiber filter in every washing machine.”
Reining in single-use plastics? Get a microfiber filter on every washing machine? Sure, that’s better than nothing, but will do little in the big scheme of things. Recycling, we now know, is a farce: it is down-cycling, not recycling, and it essentially turns macroplastic into micro- and nanoplastic at incredible rates. New research shows recycling may actually be the number one source of microplastic, greater even than clothes and tires which were the number one and two sources when Simon wrote his book.
Using less plastic would be great. And the only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Simon’s book is that zero plastic is what we should be aiming for. Anything more is not acceptable.
Roads
In Crossings, Goldfarb writes:
“‘A thing is right,’ Aldo Leopold famously wrote in his call for a land ethic, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’ By that standard roads are the wrongest things imaginable, agents of chaos that shatter biotic integrity wherever they intrude.”
Like Simon, Goldfarb is so close to seeing that roads are so wrong that we should and could eliminate them. The future will be small, local and low-tech. It has to be, because large, global and high-tech have pushed us into catastrophic ecological overshoot, are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and are destroying the biosphere. That way of life cannot last. So the roads we’ve built as part of a large, global and high-tech way of life will soon become mostly useless.
There are 40 million miles of roads on Earth today, and as Goldfarb writes, “More than twenty-five million miles of new road lanes will be built worldwide by 2050, many through the world’s remaining intact habitats, a concrete wave that the ecologist Willam Laurence has described as an ‘infrastructure tsunami.’”
The existing roads are a catastrophe; building more roads will only compound that catastrophe.
The author writes:
“The allure of the car is so strong that it has persuaded Americans to treat forty thousand human lives as expendable each year; what chance does wildlife have?”
“A half-century ago, just 3 percent of land-dwelling mammals met their end on a road; by 2017 the toll had quadrupled. It has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway.”
“More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”
How can someone write these words and conclude anything but that roads must be eliminated? And yet, somehow Goldfarb then writes that we need a “road ethic”, and waxes lyrical about a tiny number of wildlife over- and underpasses existing and planned that, yes, are better than doing nothing, but will do very little to stop the slaughter of living beings on roads, and absolutely nothing to stop the 25 million new miles of roads planned through some of the world’s last remaining intact habitats.
Cars are terrible for the environment, no matter what powers them. The roads they are driven on are terrible for the environment. Goldfarb’s book makes this crystal clear. How does he not conclude that we need to eliminate roads? It’s so obvious we must. I find this astonishing, given that it is the environment that keeps us all alive.
Humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years. Obviously we drove horse- and donkey-pulled carts on roads for millennia before cars were invented; there were far fewer roads, the roads that existed were dirt tracks rather that fossil fueled-concrete and asphalt, and those roads had far fewer impacts, just like carts have far less impact than cars. Perhaps most important, human population was far, far lower so the overall impact of the roads that existed before industrial civilization was correspondingly lower.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Goldfarb’s book is that zero new roads and dismantling existing roads is what we should be aiming for, along with a phase-out of cars and trucks. Anything else is unacceptable.
Cobalt
In Cobalt Red, Kara writes:
“Since about one-fourth of CO2 emissions are created by vehicles with internal combustion engines, the expansion of battery-powered transportation provides the only solution.”
Not only is this false, it displays a stunning lack of imagination on the part of Kara.
Again: humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years, out of our 300,000 year existence on Earth. We’ve had cobalt-containing lithium-ion batteries for only about 40 years. This ecocidal way of life is so alluring, so pervasive, so addicting that we—and Kara, specifically—simply cannot see out of the prison it is holding us in.
If we cannot even imagine a life without cars, without batteries, without technology, then we have absolutely no hope of stopping or even slowing the destruction of our only home.
Cobalt Red is primarily about the desperation of artisanal miners, adults and children, in DRC. It describes an industry that treats people as cogs in a machine and throws them away casually:
“Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you?
‘They kicked us from our homes!’ an elderly man with patchy skin, Samy, exclaimed. ‘We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out and now we cannot find enough food to find our families.’”
It is secondarily about the devastating environmental impacts of mining. These impacts occur whether it is men in machines or children with pickaxes and rocks in their hands doing the mining. The end result is the same: land, air, water, and natural and human communities destroyed:
“A thick cloud of fumes, grit, and ash suffocates the land. Sky and earth meet vaguely above the hills at some obscure and unattainable frontier. Villages along the road are coated with airborne debris. Children scamper between huts like balls of dust. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain. This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.”
Mining for the materials to make everything from our gadgets to our cars; materials to build roads, to make plastic; materials to create the things we all take for granted every single day, is destroying the planet. The author notes:
“We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo?”
Here in the U.S. with our environmental laws, we don’t allow children to work in mines. But we do allow men driving massive mining machines to destroy the land that the families of nearby children have foraged on for generations; to create air pollution that nearby children will breathe; to stack or dam toxic tailings, contaminating the soil and water for eons, soil and water the children need to survive and grow up healthy.
We allow mining companies to “take” golden eagles and pygmy rabbits and other endangered and threatened species; to destroy the homes of wild beings who are just trying to raise their own children on land that holds the same materials the children in the Congo mine with their bare hands.
Kara concludes that “If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal mining would be done.”
Yes, helping the artisanal miners would be better than nothing. Stopping the child trafficking, the sexual assaults, the sickness, the injuries, the penury, and the deaths is critically important. But that won’t stop the mining; that won’t stop the pollution and environmental devastation that mining causes.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Kara’s book is that zero artisanal mining is what we should be aiming for. An especially perceptive person reading his book will conclude that zero mining should be the real goal. Anything else really is unacceptable.
Connections
The faulty premise behind all three of these books is that this ecocidal way of life can and should continue. This is false. It can’t, it shouldn’t; ultimately, of course, it won’t.
Not only are these books connected by the stunning lack of understanding by their authors of the implications of their own work; they are also connected in that they describe just three of the many devastating implications of modern life. One can imagine a thousand books just like these, about every aspect of modern life we take for granted.
All three of these books are well-worth reading if you, dear reader, want to know the truth about what this ecocidal way of life is doing to us, to the natural world, to other people, and to the planet as a whole. Each of these books is absolutely devastating to read, if you truly take in what they are saying and deeply understand what we have done, and what we are doing, right now. The perversion of all that is good in the world in service to industry and consumption will wreck you to your core, if you let it—and I implore you to let it.
Why? Because only if we truly understand the implications of the horrors these books describe will we be able to make change. Real change. Not the half measures, the compromises, the ineffectual so-called “solutions” suggested by the authors of these books, but major, life-altering change that is what we need to stop the slaughter of the planet.
I will leave you with this last quote from Cobalt Red that says pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say in this essay:
“A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.”
Banner: Covers of the books discussed in this essay.
Editor’s note: We can no longer continue to deny the evidence. We are living through the end stage of the Pyrocene. We have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions from anywhere else but to slow down. Unfortunately, the necessary change will not come from us, rather something external will bring us down. But we should give it a push whenever possible. Dying and being reborn is a natural process, we must contract when faced with hard times.
“The best type of degrowth is practiced as a pre-emptive measure at a time of health and abundance, not when it is too late, to ensure that maximum resource is conserved for the difficult times ahead.” – George Tsakraklides
Ancestral Future’, a book by Ailton Krenak, the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), was published in English on July 30, 2024.
An Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Krenak advocates for a paradigm shift away from modern Western notions of progress, development and unrestrained economic growth that are the root cause of global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.
He says he believes we can change course and that several possible sustainable futures exist if humanity reconnects with ancient wisdom, recognizes Earth as a living organism and lives in harmony with nature.
In this interview, Krenak discusses his newly translated book and what he thinks our possible futures look like.
For decades, scientists have been warning that the world is heading toward catastrophic scenarios due to climate change. But Ailton Krenak refuses to think about an apocalypse. On the contrary, he argues that there are several possible futures — but they will only be achievable when we realize that “being is more important than having.”
For the Brazilian Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Western society is facing an urgent need for a paradigm shift that challenges the ideas of progress and development themselves.
“I’m not a pessimist, but I’m sure that the only way to move forward in this world is to reconnect with ancient wisdom. We have long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth,” Krenak said in an interview with Mongabay.
Born in Itabirinha, in the state of Minas Gerais, the 71-year-old Indigenous leader has been a prominent figure and an advocate for Indigenous rights for decades. In the late ‘80s, he became famous for his appearance at Brazil’s National Constituent Assembly, where he functioned as a representative of Indigenous peoples in constitutional debates.
While giving his speech at the Congress in 1987, he stood on a platform, in front of those who threatened the land rights and culture of Indigenous peoples, and painted his face in black jenipapo paste (from the genipap fruit, Genipa americana). It was a form of protest against the setbacks and violent attacks on his rights and those of his Krenak relatives by the Brazilian dictatorship. The following year, a new Constitution was put into law, establishing fundamental rights for Brazil’s Indigenous peoples for the first time in history.
From then on, Krenak’s efforts to raise awareness around the world about the need to rescue ancestral values intensified. His profound ideas have been disseminated through lectures, educational courses and articles. He has been awarded with honorary doctorates from three esteemed Brazilian universities, published more than 15 books — some of them have been translated into more than 13 languages. And, in 2024, he became the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).
Well known for thinking outside the box and being provocative, Krenak has a deeply skeptical view of capitalist progress and agues it devalues the natural world. He says he believes humanity is facing an urgent need to reconnect with the biocentric approach that dethrones humanity from its pedestal and roots us back to our origin. This is the main argument of his most recent book, Ancestral Future. Published in Portuguese in 2022, it is a compilation of five essays in which Krenak deals with the preservation of rivers as a way of conserving the future. The English translation of the book is now available and was published on July 30.
To mark the new release of his translated book, Mongabay spoke with the Indigenous academic by phone for more than an hour about spirituality, modern Western society, ancestral values and his ideas for possible futures.
Mongabay: In your books and lectures, you advocate for an eco-centric perspective that recognizes intrinsic value in all life forms and seeks to de-emphasize human prominence. This is similar to how many Indigenous peoples live, but it is very distant from modern Western mentality, which centers humans and treats nature primarily as a resource. Why do you believe this radical paradigm shift in the Western world is so urgent and necessary?
Ailton Krenak: We are all experiencing a rupture in our sense of belonging to life. We are now perceiving everything as a threat: rains, floods, temperatures. But we don’t realize that what we are experiencing is the fever of the planet. This is the Earth responding to human actions that have long placed us at the center. It is what scientists define as the ‘Anthropocene,’ a theory suggesting that human activities have profoundly altered the functioning of the planet and that could mark a new geological era.
This scares us because we’re not accustomed to not having control over the planet. We struggle to accept that the Earth is a living, intelligent organism that cannot be subjected to anthropocentric logic. Yet, this reality asserts itself, and that’s why we live in constant tension. What we are experiencing today is a phenomenon of the 21st century, arising because we treated the 20th century as if it were a period where we could be on an industrial binge on the planet.
(Left) Ancestral Future by Ailton Krenak in English (available in English on July 30, 2024). (Right) Futuro Ancestral by Ailton Krenak in Portuguese (published in 2022).
Mongabay: Do you mean by ‘living irresponsibly’?
Ailton Krenak: Yes. The 20th century was very prosperous. The world experienced what the United Nations and other major organizations called global development, which resulted in the term ‘globalization.’ We spent the 20th century euphoric with this idea of a global village. But no one paid attention that if harm came to this village, everyone would be affected. The idea of a single global economy resulted in finance capitalism, which we experience today, which is an unsustainable way of living.
It’s frightening to observe that today, wealth isn’t where valuable things are. It’s not where rivers, mountains or forests are. It’s in large cities, in major industries. We’ve become accustomed to a false sense of well-being.
This Western worldview is very different, for example, from that of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains in South America. They have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Good Living is a translation of the Quechan phrase sumaq kawsay. Sumaq means plenitude and kawsay means living. This is what I call a cosmovision, a lifestyle that considers only what the land has to offer us in the place we live in. For many peoples, this perspective has been sufficient for thousands of years. The idea of wealth is perceived differently — not from the experience of having things, but from belonging to a place. I see life on Earth as a cosmic dance. But this is only possible in communities that have this ancestral wisdom, that have managed to persevere with the Earth.
Mongabay: And why have modern Western societies moved so far away from this way of life?
Ailton Krenak: Western society has long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth. This divorce from interconnection with Mother Earth has left us orphans. While humanity is moving away from its place, a bunch of big corporations are taking over and subjugating the planet: destroying forests, mountains and turning everything into merchandise.
In the West, what we experience is the constant stimulus to have, to buy, but not to be. If we look at human history, we see that it is impossible for everyone to have everything. When a few have a lot, thousands of others are materially poor. This is very easy to understand but very difficult to accept. Propaganda does that to us. More than a hundred years ago, when Henry Ford discovered that he could awaken everyone’s desire to own a car, he made the first billboard of a car with a slogan that said something like, ‘You will have one.’ That was the most disgraceful promise anyone has ever made to humanity. Fordism created the illusion that we can mass-produce the world. We have become a huge crowd of people wanting the same things.
I honestly don’t know if we will be able to reeducate ourselves for a world where what matters is life and the quality of life. It is not the clothes you wear or how much money you can show off. We are hostages of a broad and socially experienced condition that is an illusion. This results in tragedies, and they are everywhere. A river that you destroy never comes back. A mountain that you cut down to make laminate turns into a plain.
A group of women from a Quechan community spinning and dyeing fibers. Krenak talks about how the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains, including the Quechan, have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Image by Shawn Harquail via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Mongabay: What are the premises of this ‘ancestral way of life’ that need to be rescued to create possible futures?
Ailton Krenak: These cosmovisions are not theories, they cannot be presented in a literary work or in a document because they represent a way of being in the world. A collective way of living. If we were to answer in one sentence, it would be: We must learn to live with only what is necessary. In the children’s story The Jungle Book, all the creatures in the forest talk. At one point, the bear says to the boy that lives in the forest, ‘Only what is necessary, only what is necessary.’ It is beautiful because children understand what is necessary, but adults often do not. When we become adults, we go beyond the limits of what is necessary; we think we can force the Earth to give us what we want, not what it can sustainably provide. The phrase ‘only what is necessary’ is the first thing we will have to relearn. We have drawers to store everything we do not need. Maybe the first step is to imagine a world without drawers.
Mongabay: In 2024, you were elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and became the first Indigenous person to occupy a chair at the century-old institution. Do you consider this to be a sign that Indigenous culture and thoughts are beginning to be valued?
Ailton Krenak: I believe so. Indigenous literature is not only gaining relevance in Brazil but is also being translated in various countries. I believe this is likely because the Western repertoire has been exhausted. I see this movement as a desire to find some way out, a desire to think about the future. It’s as if we have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions elsewhere.
For a long time, Brazilian educational institutions were subservient to European knowledge and literature. The majority still seek to transplant dominant thinking here. Brazil has not managed to shake off its ‘mongrel complex’ [an inferiority complex Brazilians feel in relation to the rest of the world] and continues to wait for a white boss to come and teach people how to live, even within the forest. Everyone, except for the deniers, knows that our modern relationship with nature is leading us to very difficult experiences in the coming years due to rising global temperatures.
If we are already highly vulnerable with current climate conditions, imagine when we reach temperatures unbearable for human life? We are undergoing changes that were not planned. We are experiencing a disruption within ourselves that was not programmed. If we wish to envision a future possibility, we need to put a limit on our relentless pursuit of development, of technology at any cost. This drive has been encouraged since childhood. You no longer see children building their own toys. In most schools, childhood is being shaped for a dystopian future, where toys are even influenced by the military industry. You see children playing with guns made out of plastic, pretending to kill each other. How can we cultivate a future like this? I understand that the world is realizing this is unsustainable and searching elsewhere for future possibilities.
Uros people harvesting some “totora” (Schoenoplectus californicus ssp. tatora) on Lake Titicaca, Peru. Image by Christophe Meneboeuf via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
Mongabay: Is it obsolete to think about economic development and growth in today’s world? Or can a cosmovision complement the idea of economic development?
Ailton Krenak: The planet’s economic development is what is destroying life on Earth. We do not need economic development anymore. The wealth of the world is at least 8-10 times bigger than what we actually need. There are about 110 armed conflicts happening worldwide because the military industry needs to produce weapons. War is what boosts the economy the most in the world. It’s not life, it’s war. We invest trillions in war, not in protecting biodiversity. The discourse of progress and development is foolish because if you ask where humans will get water and food for everyone, they will tell you it’s from the land, as there’s no other place to get it from. Yet, they persist in ignoring adequate policies for land access.
Before talking about more development, it would be necessary to consider greater engagement with environmental issues, territorial issues, land management and the privatization, destruction and degradation of river basins. Otherwise, it is unsustainable. This paradigm shift is needed. I thought humanity would begin to reconsider the idea of development and globalization after the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic because, as a global event, it paralyzed everyone. I thought we would emerge as better human beings from this horror. But I am impressed by how we have worsened.
Mongabay: How do we change this paradigm? The signs are all there that we are heading for trouble, yet it seems that nothing much is happening.
Ailton Krenak: We should be skeptical of any expert, philosopher or global leader who claims to have a solution, because it’s a lie. It took us a long time to build the scenario we find ourselves in, and we won’t be able to undo it with a magic wand. If we had learned anything from the pandemic, which was a global experience, we would have changed our behavior. For example, greenhouse gas emissions would have decreased. But nothing has changed.
That’s why I fear that what will provoke this change that we need will be something external, it will not come from us. It could be another virus, an extreme weather event. Something that collapses our ability to move, our ability to live as we do now. Perhaps then we will undergo a cognitive rupture that stops us from being this consumerist metastasis and leads us to experience another way of living. I believe we have reached our limit and will be thrust into a different situation, a different reality. This could be very tragic though.
Mongabay: This seems like a rather pessimistic view …
Ailton Krenak: Yeah, it seems like we’ve gathered here to talk about the apocalypse. I don’t want to nurture that feeling within myself, nor do I want to cultivate it in others as if it were a declaration of surrender, but we can’t continue to deny the evidence. If we have climate events altering the weather, why should we continue to overspend on things nobody needs? When I published the bookIdeas to Delay the End of the World, I announced my distrust of the idea that development and progress would be the path to the future. I explained that a biocentric vision — an ethical perspective that holds every life as sacred — would be a path to the future.
But for that, we need to renounce the materialistic apparatus that surrounds us. Today, life has become solely focused on consumption, on economic growth at any cost. When I denounce this kind of end of the world, I’m not renouncing hope. But I also don’t want to promote a ‘placebo hope,’ one where you pat someone on the shoulder and say everything will be fine. It won’t be fine. We’re going to get worse for a while. But after that, we can improve, as long as we learn to renounce.
Mongabay: You say we will get worse for a while. Yet, you insist on the idea of possible futures. Do you really believe this is possible?
Ailton Krenak: Our planet is so wonderful. We cannot lose sight of the fact that life is everywhere. No one is a separate cocoon in the cosmos living this experience alone. You experience this with all the organisms that are in the planet’s biosphere. It is as if we were diluted in everything. We need to relearn how to walk softly on the Earth. When we learn to walk like this, we will experience wonder and nothing else will be needed. We must accept Nature’s invitation to dance with life. If we could have an organic mindset, which connects us with bees, ants, the grass that grows, the trees that shake in the wind, that shed their leaves and bring forth new shoots, we would understand that everything is constantly sprouting, growing, dying, being born.
Homo sapiens is the only animal that wants to be eternalized, wants to mummify itself, wants this monoculture way of eating the world. The Earth, Gaia, Pachamama, this living organism is intelligent, and we will have to negotiate with it our possible way out of this hole we have dug. Perhaps the answer lies in the capacity for affection, for embracing all other nonhuman beings.
Mongabay: When you close your eyes, what future do you see?
Ailton Krenak: When I’m on my land, cleaning the yard, I meditate. I detach from the harshness of daily life, close my eyes, and imagine a landscape where waters emerge from the mountains and form small streams. I become such a tiny organism that I dissolve into water. In this place, the concept of future isn’t something you problematize. You experience being the future. This is the ancestral future.
Editor’s note: Humans have lived in balance with nature for millions of years. It was only in the last ten thousand years, with the advent of civilization, that humans have become unbalanced. If we continue on this course, we will reach our destination in less than a hundred years.
Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the information for the most part is still packed obscurely in the worlds of science and academia.
Some experts have tried to make the work more accessible, but Deborah Barsky’s new book, Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is one of the most authoritative yet. The breadth and synthesis of the work are impressive, and Barsky’s highly original analysis on the subject—from the beginnings of culture to how humanity began to be alienated from the natural world—keeps the reader engaged throughout.
Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a well-established philosophical creed that things go better for humanity the more we try to know ourselves.
Barsky, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, who came to this field through her decades of studying ancient stone tool technologies, writes early in her book that lessons learned from the remote past could guide our species toward a brighter future, but “that so much of the information that is amassed by prehistoric archeologists remains inaccessible to many people” and “appears far removed from our daily lives.” I reached out to Barsky in the early stage of her book launch to learn more.
Jan Ritch-Frel: What would you suggest a person consider as they hold a 450,000-year-old handaxe for the first time?
Deborah Barsky: I think everyone feels a deep-seated reverence when touching or holding such an ancient tool. Handaxes in particular carry so many powerful implications, including on the symbolic level. You have to imagine that these tear-shaped tools—the ultimate symbol of the Acheulian—appeared in Africa some 1.75 million years ago and that our ancestors continued creating and re-creating this same shape from that point onwards for more than a million and a half years!
These tools are the first ones recognized as having been made in accordance with a planned mental image. And they have an aesthetic quality, in that they present both bilateral and bifacial symmetry. Some handaxes were made in precious or even visually pleasing rock matrices and were shaped with great care and dexterity according to techniques developed in the longest-enduring cultural norm known to humankind.
And yet, in spite of so many years of studying handaxes, we still understand little about what they were used for, how they were used, and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they carry with them some kind of symbolic significance that escapes us. There is no doubt that the human capacity to communicate through symbolism has been hugely transformative for our species.
Today we live in a world totally dependent on shared symbolic thought processes, where such constructs as national identity, monetary value, religion, and tradition, for example, have become essential to our survival. Complex educational systems have been created to initiate our children into mastering these constructed realities, integrating them as fully as possible into this system to favor their survival within the masses of our globalized world. In the handaxe we can see the first manifestations of this adaptive choice: to invest in developing symbolic thought. That choice has led us into the digital revolution that contemporary society is now undergoing. Yet, where all of this will lead us remains uncertain.
JRF: Your book shows that it is more helpful to us if we consider the human story and evolution as less of a straight line and more so as one that branches in different ways across time and geography. How can we explain the past to ourselves in a clear and useful way to understand the present?
DB: One of the first things I tell my students is that in the field of human prehistory, one must grow accustomed to information that is in a constant state of flux, as it changes in pace with new discoveries that are being made on nearly a daily basis.
It is also important to recognize that the pieces composing the puzzle of the human story are fragmentary, so that information is constantly changing as we fill in the gaps and ameliorate our capacity to interpret it. Although we favor scientific interpretations in all cases, we cannot escape the fact that our ideas are shaped by our own historical context—a situation that has impeded correct explanations of the archeological record in the past.
One example of this is our knowledge of the human family that has grown exponentially in the last quarter of a century thanks to new discoveries being made throughout the world. Our own genus, Homo, for example, now includes at least five new species, discovered only in this interim.
Meanwhile, genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared the same territories. This situation continued up until the later Paleolithic, when our own species interacted and even reproduced together with other hominins, as in the case of our encounters with the Neandertals in Eurasia, for example.
While there is much conjecture about this situation, we actually know little about the nature of these encounters: whether they were peaceful or violent; whether different hominins transmitted their technological know-how, shared territorial resources together, or decimated one another, perhaps engendering the first warlike behaviors.
One thing is sure: Homo sapiens remains the last representative of this long line of hominin ancestors and now demonstrates unprecedented planetary domination. Is this a Darwinian success story? Or is it a one-way ticket to the sixth extinction event—the first to be caused by humans—as we move into the Anthropocene Epoch?
In my book, I try to communicate this knowledge to readers so that they can better understand how past events have shaped not only our physical beings but also our inner worlds and the symbolic worlds we share with each other. It is only if we can understand when and how these important events took place—actually identify the tendencies and put them into perspective for what they truly are—that we will finally be the masters of our own destiny. Then we will be able to make choices on the levels that really count—not only for ourselves but also for all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue life on digital and globalized levels. We can’t undo the present, but we can most certainly use this accumulated knowledge and technological capacity to create far more sustainable and “humane” lifeways.
JRF: How did you come to believe that stone toolmaking was the culprit for how we became alienated from the world we live in?
DB: My PhD research at Perpignan University in France was on the lithic assemblages from the Caune de l’Arago cave site in southern France, a site with numerous Acheulian habitation floors that have been dated to between 690,000 and 90,000 years ago. During the course of my doctoral research, I was given the exceptional opportunity to work on some older African and Eurasian sites. I began to actively collaborate in international and multidisciplinary teamwork (in the field and in the laboratory) and to study some of the oldest stone toolkits known to humankind in different areas of the world. This experience was an important turning point for me that subsequently shaped my career as I oriented my research more and more toward understanding these “first technologies.”
More recently, as a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, I continue to investigate the emergence of ancient human culture, in particular through the study of a number of major archeological sites attributed to the so-called “Oldowan” technocomplex (after the eponymous Olduvai Gorge Bed I sites in Tanzania). My teaching experience at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona) helped me to articulate my findings through discussions and to further my research with students and colleagues.
Such ancient tool kits, some of which date to more than 2 million years ago, were made by the hands of hominins who were very different from ourselves, in a world that was very distinct from our own. They provide a window of opportunity through which to observe some of the cognitive processes employed by the early humans who made and used them. As I expanded my research, I discovered the surprising complexity of ancient stone toolmaking, eventually concluding that it was at the root of a major behavioral bifurcation that would utterly alter the evolutionary pathways taken by humankind.
Early hominins recognizing the advantages provided by toolmaking made the unconscious choice to invest more heavily in it, even as they gained time for more inventiveness. Oldowan tool kits are poorly standardized and contain large pounding implements, alongside small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.
Meanwhile, increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness, and stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into teaching these technologies to enable them to pass onwards into each successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that was later coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language that would ultimately favor our capacity for exponential development. This also had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are indeed the very building blocks of culture. In addition, neuroscientific experiments undertaken to study the brain synapses involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the Acheulian (for example, handaxes).
Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed during abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric planning. I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity.
JRF: Did something indicate to you at the outset of your career that archeology and the study of human origins have a vital message for humanity now? You describe a conceptual process in yourbook whereby through studying our past, humanity can learn to “build up more viable and durable structural entities and behaviors in harmony with the environment and innocuous to other life forms.”
DB: I think most people who pursue a career in archeology do so because they feel passionate about exploring the human story in a tangible, scientific way. The first step, described in the introductory chapters of my book, is choosing from an ever-widening array of disciplines that contribute to the field today. From the onset, I was fascinated by the emergence and subsequent transformation of early technologies into culture. The first 3 million years of the human archeological record are almost exclusively represented by stone tools. These stone artifacts are complemented by other kinds of tools—especially in the later periods of the Paleolithic when bone, antler, and ivory artifacts were common—alongside art and relatively clear habitational structures.
It is one thing to analyze a given set of stone tools made by long-extinct hominin cousins and quite another to ask what their transposed significance to contemporary society might be.
As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.
In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.
Editor’s note: It’s a coast – not a beach, we forget that when our society talks about going to the beach. A beach is for basking in the sun, getting a drink, and dabbling in the water. But a coast is far more than an entertainment place for humans, it’s a habitat for a variety of animals and plants. Sand mining is a threat to these ecosystems and criminals operate it illegally. Construction companies need sand for their concrete as the demand for buildings soars. They seal the planet by destroying coastlines – and beaches.
While beaches are being stolen in poor places, they are being nourished(replenished) in wealthy places. Beach nourishment is the process of placing additional sediment on a beach or in the nearshore. A wider and higher beach can provide storm protection for coastal structures. Sediment is commonly dredged offshore and pumped directly onto the beach, dumped nearshore by a hopper dredge, or occasionally sourced from an inland location. It is an exercise in futility that destroys natural ecosystems and subsidizes wealthy beachfront homeowners at taxpayers’ expense, particularly as worsening storms resulting from climate change demand investment in more permanent solutions to beach erosion. The sea level will rise and people living there will have to move.
It is time to stop building infrastructure and trying to control nature.
Increasing demand for this seemingly abundant and common material harms human and natural communities — and fuels a lucrative and dangerous illegal industry.
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This article looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
We need to talk about sand
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
The Building Blocks of Modern Society
Sand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Yet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco, criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
How to Solve the Problem
UNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping the waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, by retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
Shifting Sands, Shifting Thinking
William Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
Melissa Gaskill is a freelance science writer based in Austin, Texas, whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Mental Floss, Newsweek, Alert Diver and many other publications. She is the co-author of A Worldwide Travel Guide to Sea Turtles and author of Pandas to Penguins: Ethical Encounters with Animals at Risk.
“The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution,” said one campaigner.
Biodiversity advocates on Wednesday called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject a new geoengineering project spearheaded by researchers in Massachusetts that one critic said would do “nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth.”
Friends of the Earth (FOE) and other groups warned that an experiment called LOC-NESS by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) carries “potentially catastrophic risks” for the Atlantic Ocean, where researchers have proposed dumping more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide near Cape Cod to test a “carbon dioxide removal approach” called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE).
WHOI’s website states that the experiment would involve the release of “nontoxic, fluorescent Rhodamine WT dye into the ocean from a research ship,” with researchers tracking the dye’s movement over 72 hours in order to determine whether the ocean’s alkalinity could be enhanced.
If so, the scientists say, they could ultimately help to regulate atmospheric carbon.
The EPA’s notice about the proposed study from last month, however, says that the project “would involve a controlled release of a sodium hydroxide solution”—which is “essentially lye, a substance known to cause chemical burns and one that must be handled with great care,” according to Tom Goldtooth, co-founder and member of the board of directors of the national Climate Justice Alliance.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles.”
“Altering the chemical composition of the ocean under the guise of increasing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is misleading and dangerous,” said Goldtooth. “An experiment centered on introducing this caustic substance into the sea should not be permitted… The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution.”
Friends of the Earth pointed out that WHOI’s permit application to the EPA acknowledges that after changing the ocean’s alkalinity, the researchers “have no direct way of measuring how much carbon dioxide will be removed by the experiment.”
“The production of alkaline materials is extremely energy-intensive, releasing similar or even higher levels of greenhouse gasses than they remove upon being dumped into the ocean,” said the group. “The researchers have declined to analyze how much carbon dioxide was released in the production, transportation, and dumping of the sodium hydroxide, making it impossible to know whether the technology even reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”
Despite these lingering questions, said FOE, the EPA has issued tentative approval for a permit for the experiment, with a public comment period open until July 1.
The caustic sodium hydroxide solution the researchers plan to use, warns FOE, “causes chemical burns upon contact with skin or marine animals, setting the stage for potentially extreme damage to local ecosystems.”
Benjamin Day, FOE’s senior campaigner for its Climate and Energy Justice Program, said the group “unequivocally” opposes the LOC-NESS geoengineering experiment in the fragile ecosystem off the coast of Cape Cod.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles,” said Day.
Mary Church, geoengineering campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, said “speculative technologies” like OAE are “a dangerous distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis,” which scientists around the world agree requires a rapid reduction in planet-heating fossil fuel emissions through a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources.
“Marine geoengineering does nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth,” said Church. “Outdoor experiments could not only cause immediate harm to marine life but are also a slippery slope to potentially catastrophic impacts of large-scale deployment.”
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has placed a moratorium on geoengineering techniques like OAE until there is “adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic, and cultural impacts.”
