“Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: Life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective.”1 LEWIS MUMFORD
There is so little time and even less hope here, in the midst of ruin, at the end of the world. Every biome is in shreds. The green flesh of forests has been stripped to grim sand. The word water has been drained of meaning; the Athabascan River is essentially a planned toxic spill now, oozing from the open wound of the Alberta tar sands. When birds fly over it, they drop dead from the poison. No one believes us when we say that, but it’s true. The Appalachian Mountains are being blown to bits, their dense life of deciduous forests, including their human communities, reduced to a disposal problem called “overburden,” a word that should be considered hate speech: Living creatures—mountain laurels, wood thrush fledglings, somebody’s grandchildren—are not objects to be tossed into gullies. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, there is no grammar after mountaintop removal. As above, so below. Coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. And the world’s grasslands have been sliced to ribbons, literally, with steel blades fed by fossil fuel. The hunger of those blades would be endless but for the fact that the planet is a bounded sphere: There are no continents left to eat. Every year the average American farm uses the energy equivalent of three to four tons of TNT per acre. And oil burns so easily, once every possibility for self-sustaining cultures has been destroyed. Even the memory of nature is gone, metaphrastic now, something between prehistory and a fairy tale. All that’s left is carbon, accruing into a nightmare from which dawn will not save us. Climate change slipped into climate chaos, which has become a whispered climate holocaust. At least the humans whisper. And the animals? During the 2011 Texas drought, deer abandoned their fawns for lack of milk. That is not a grief that whispers. For living beings like Labrador ducks, Javan rhinos, and Xerces blue butterflies, there is the long silence of extinction.
We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows’ comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial. The numbers are real. The numbers don’t lie. The species shrink, their extinctions swell, and all their names are other words for kin: bison, wolves, black-footed ferrets. Before me (Lierre) is the text of a talk I’ve given. The original version contains this sentence: “Another 120 species went extinct today.” The 120 is crossed clean through, with 150 written above it. But the 150 is also struck out, with 180 written above. The 180 in its turn has given way to 200. I stare at this progression with a sick sort of awe. How does my small, neat handwriting hold this horror? The numbers keep stacking up, I’m out of space in the margin, and life is running out of time.
Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: Agriculture is biotic cleansing. That’s not agriculture on a bad day, or agriculture done poorly. That’s what agriculture actually is: the extirpation of living communities for a monocrop for and of humans. There were perhaps five million humans living on earth on the day this started—from this day to the ending of the world, indeed—and there are now well over seven billion. The end is written into the beginning. As earth and space sciences scholar David R. Montgomery points out, agricultural societies “last 800 to 2,000 years … until the soil gives out.”3 Fossil fuel has been a vast accelerant to both the extirpation and the monocrop—the human population has quadrupled under the swell of surplus created by the Green Revolution—but it can only be temporary. Finite quantities have a nasty habit of running out. The name for this diminishment is drawdown, and agriculture is in essence a slow bleed-out of soil, species, biomes, and ultimately the process of life itself. Vertebrate evolution has come to a halt for lack of habitat, with habitat taken by force and kept by force: Iowa alone uses the energy equivalent of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year. Agriculture is the original scorched-earth policy, which is why both author and permaculturist Toby Hemenway and environmental writer Richard Manning have written the same sentence: “Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.” To quote Manning at length: “No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a mono- culture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies, because there is no other way to sustain it.”4
Agriculture is what creates the human pattern called civilization. Civilization is not the same as culture—all humans create culture, which can be defined as the customs, beliefs, arts, cuisine, social organization, and ways of knowing and relating to each other, the land, and the divine within a specific group of people. Civilization is a specific way of life: people living in cities, with cities defined as people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. What that means is that they need more than the land can give. Food, water, and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward, it doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences. Over and over and over, the pattern is the same. There’s a bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies, from which the center extracts what it wants, until eventually it collapses. The conjoined horrors of militarism and slavery begin with agriculture.
Agricultural societies end up militarized—and they always do—for three reasons. First, agriculture creates a surplus, and if it can be stored, it can be stolen, so, the surplus needs to be protected. The people who do that are called soldiers. Second, the drawdown inherent in this activity means that agriculturalists will always need more land, more soil, and more resources. They need an entire class of people whose job is war, whose job is taking land and resources by force—agriculture makes that possible as well as inevitable. Third, agriculture is backbreaking labor. For anyone to have leisure, they need slaves. By the year 1800, when the fossil fuel age began, three-quarters of the people on this planet were living in conditions of slavery, indenture, or serfdom.5 Force is the only way to get and keep that many people enslaved. We’ve largely forgotten this is because we’ve been using machines—which in turn use fossil fuel—to do that work for us instead of slaves. The symbiosis of technology and culture is what historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) called a technic. A social milieu creates specific technologies which in turn shape the culture. Mumford writes, “[A] new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control … gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization… The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics … created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts—the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable.”6
Technology is anything but neutral or passive in its effects: Ploughshares require armies of slaves to operate them and soldiers to protect them. The technic that is civilization has required weapons of conquest from the beginning. “Farming spread by genocide,” Richard Manning writes.7 The destruction of Cro-Magnon Europe—the culture that bequeathed us Lascaux, a collection of cave paintings in southwestern France—took farmer-soldiers from the Near East perhaps 300 years to accomplish. The only thing exchanged between the two cultures was violence. “All these artifacts are weapons,” writes archaeologist T. Douglas Price, with his colleagues, “and there is no reason to believe that they were exchanged in a nonviolent manner.”8
Weapons are tools that civilizations will make because civilization itself is a war. Its most basic material activity is a war against the living world, and as life is destroyed, the war must spread. The spread is not just geographic, though that is both inevitable and catastrophic, turning biotic communities into gutted colonies and sovereign people into slaves. Civilization penetrates the culture as well, because the weapons are not just a technology: no tool ever is. Technologies contain the transmutational force of a technic, creating a seamless suite of social institutions and corresponding ideologies. Those ideologies will either be authoritarian or democratic, hierarchical or egalitarian. Technics are never neutral. Or, as ecopsychology pioneer Chellis Glendinning writes with spare eloquence, “All technologies are political.”9
There exists some debate as to how many places developed agriculture and civilizations. The best current guess seems to be nine: the Fertile Crescent; the Indian sub- continent; the Yangtze and Yellow River basins; the New Guinea Highlands; Central Mexico; Northern South America; sub-Saharan Africa; and eastern North America.
T. Douglas Price, Anne Birgitte Gebauer, and Lawrence H. Keeley, “The Spread of Farming into Europe North of the Alps,” in Douglas T. Price and Anne Brigitte Gebauer, Last Hunters, First Farmers (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1995).
In this article published originally on Stop Fossil Fuels you are offered an overview of Jem bendell’s work and suggestions of how you can contribute to resilience.
Environmentalists advocate reduce, reuse, and recycle as the 3 R’s of sustainability—good practices, but incommensurate with the scope of our emergency.
To better mitigate the looming ecological and social crises, we propose superseding these R’s with resilience, relinquishment, and restoration. Along the way, we’ll look at the three I’s of denial which helped get us into this mess: ignorant, interpretative, and implicative.
We draw on Jem Bendell’s academic paper “Deep Adaptation” which urges his fellow sustainability professionals to stop tinkering with an irreparable system and instead prepare for collapse. Beneath the surface of his mostly placid, formal prose, he implies an even more radical necessity: active replacement of the industrial system. This will be less a revolution than a devolution—transferring power and decision making to local communities.
Jem Bendell
Bendell has a background in sustainable business and finance, with an impressive list of accomplishments from twenty years in the field. When he reviewed and grappled with climate science for the first time since 1994, he came to some of the same shocking realizations as have we: the 2°C warming limit was chosen more for political than scientific reasons; we’ve already overdrafted our carbon budget; “green” tech and governments and decades of environmentalism “have not produced a net positive outcome.”
Like us, he now deems catastrophic climate disruption and near term societal collapse to be inevitable, rendering his field’s traditional work mostly irrelevant. Minor progress on an agenda more concerned with industrial development than with true sustainability is pointless if the wins are dwarfed by the losses. “For instance, discussing progress in the health and safety policies of the White Star Line with the captain of the Titanic as it sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic would not be a sensible use of time.”
Bendell wrote the sober “Deep Adaptation” for colleagues unaware of the likelihood of short term societal collapse or the possibility of near term human extinction, so it’s worth reading in full if those concepts are new to you. We’ll explore some psychological underpinnings of our collective failure to change course, introduce Bendell’s deep adaptation framework, and relate his paper to our goal of stopping fossil fuels.
The Three I’s of Denial
We often process information according to “perspectives we wish for ourselves and others to have, rather than what the data may suggest is happening.” Social norms exacerbate this self-censorship, as people fear disturbing the peace with the truth of how bad things are. Sustainability professionals risk careers if they question an upbeat resilience narrative of “development” and “progress.”
Sociologist Stanley Cohen built a theoretical framework of denial in his book States of Denial. More recently, sociologist Ron Kramer and author John Foster have each applied his ideas to global warming denial.
Ignorant denial
Ignorant denial is used actively, to justify apathy or to shield against reality. Comfortable citizens give in to entertainment and diversions while knowing they’re disengaged from reality. Distractions include not only TV sitcoms and sports, but also corporate news and political spectacle. Accepting prepackaged memes from one’s subculture or political tribe, without employing critical thinking, is as much an avoidance of difficult truths as is refusing to think at all.
Interpretative denial
Interpretative denial accepts the facts, but gives them different meaning than is normal. The denier may honestly believe this unusual interpretation, or may cynically undermine discourse. Global warming “skeptics” employ interpretive denial when they admit industrialism’s warming impact, but claim it will yield net benefits in plant growth and happier days basking in mild winter sunshine.
Implicative denial
Environmentalists don’t commonly indulge in ignorant or interpretative denial, but do in implicative denial—accepting and fully understanding the facts, but avoiding the logical conclusions. Of course reasonable people can debate those conclusions, but most would agree with Foster’s assessment: “From dipping into a local Transition Towns initiative, signing online petitions, or renouncing flying, there are endless ways for people to be ‘doing something’ without seriously confronting the reality of climate change.” Living a moral, fulfilling life requires honestly contemplating the implications of our environmental crises. Only by rejecting the well-traveled road of denial can one choose a meaningful path.
Not just individuals, but entire environmental organizations engage in implicative denial. From Big Green NGOs thriving on donations towards influencing legislation, to scrappy radicals fostering a reputation for obstructive lock downs, groups want to feel and appear effective. But ecological destruction is intimidatingly vast in scale and deeply entrenched within business as usual; in contrast, typical aboveground, attrition based actions can rarely achieve substantive change.
Activists come to accept environmentally fatal compromise as the only realistically achievable outcome, or abandon long-term systemic goals to pursue occasional small wins against one project at a time. Few acknowledge that we’re losing the war; fewer contemplate the implications for their future actions. Individuals and groups dodge analysis of their efficacy with the platitude that at least they’re “doing something.” Though such self deception is understandable as a morale boost amidst thankless work and heartbreaking losses, it undermines the movement. Denying reality in order to feel that our work counts for something is dangerous and ultimately unfulfilling. We must make our actions truly effective.
Choosing Our Framing
Humans aren’t as rational as we like to believe. Bendell outlines a range of scenarios imagined by those who accept some form of collapse as likely:
Transition to a beneficial post-consumerist way of life
Catastrophic descent without hope of a tolerable future
Near term human extinction
People choose from and assign probabilities and timings to these alternatives based more on their preferred story than on data and analysis. Bendell himself chooses to interpret the facts as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe, and possible human extinction.
Our psychological need for purpose influences the stories we choose around collapse.
George Marshall explains that humans “invest our efforts into our cultures and social groups to obtain a sense of permanence and survival beyond our death.” We subconsciously fear not only the immediate personal danger of collapse, but the total death threatened by loss of the entire society to which we might contribute.
Some reject the idea of societal collapse because acceptance would strip all meaning and purpose from life; others embrace it as an excuse for inaction and self-indulgence. In contrast, those ready for adult responsibility might welcome the opportunity to leave a legacy of unprecedented reach and longevity. They can impact not only their immediate society, but the future of all life.
We can’t know humanity’s fate with certainty—whether we’ll transition relatively smoothly through a long descent, or suffer a painful collapse, or go altogether extinct. But barring an extremely unlikely—and entirely preventable—scenario of life wiped out down to the bacteria, our actions matter. The more biological abundance and biodiversity which make it through the bottleneck of industrialism, the healthier will be the future for survivors. If society as we know it collapses, then the more intact the biosphere, the easier will be the lives of those humans picking up the pieces. If our species goes extinct, then the less damage we’ve inflicted on the way, the faster others can rebound. With recovery from mass extinctions taking millions of years, saving a species or habitat from destruction leaves a permanent legacy.
We are given both a heavy responsibility and a unique opportunity for purpose in life.
The Three R’s of Collapse
Bendell’s “deep adaptation” accepts near term collapse as inevitable, and avoids implicative denial by asking “what to do?” with eyes wide open. His answers revolve around identifying the core values we want to retain as we build new cultures. He doesn’t attempt to explore specifics of a deep adaptation agenda (so as not to reinforce the illusion that we can control or manage conditions), but he provides a framework:
Resilience: How do we keep what we really want to keep?
In institutional discussions, “resilience” planning often aims to maintain a close approximation of business as usual, complete with “development” and economic growth. But if material “progress” is incompatible with sustainability, its pursuit is counterproductive.
We might draw instead from a psychological understanding of resilience as the ability to “bounce back” from hardship or loss. In this framing, we prioritize valued societal norms and behaviors to retain (or on which we can even improve). These might include security and stability, physical and mental health, relationships with family and friends, meaningful work, spirituality, and interaction with the non-human world.
Relinquishment: What do we need to let go of in order not to make matters worse?
Our current lifestyle brought us to this point of collapse. If we cling to it, we’ll go down that much harder. To keep what we really want, we must let go of many expectations and customs. We need to put an end to industrial mining, fishing, logging, agriculture, transportation, manufacture, and consumption. We may have to withdraw from dense settlements, coastlines, deserts, and other areas uninhabitable in an overheated world.
One way or another, our unsustainable practices will cease. Giving them up voluntarily, sooner rather than later, promises individuals, families and communities the most autonomy and time to learn from mistakes.
Restoration: What can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?
Bendell suggests rewilding landscapes, changing diets, rediscovering non-electronic forms of play, and relocalizing. Industrialism has eroded the foundations not only of non-human life, but of human cooperation. Anywhere you look, there’s work to be done rebuilding topsoil, establishing perennial polycultures, reforesting, bringing down dams, and defending species and habitats. Human communities need post-carbon skills, practice working together, and localization of everything, including food, energy, education, decision making, construction, trade, and enforcing norms.
Conclusion: Get Proactive
“In abandoning hope that one way of life will continue, we open up a space for alternative hopes.” — Tommy Lynch
Bendell and other critical thinkers anticipate inevitable societal collapse, probable catastrophic break down of human communities, and possible near term human extinction. Elites want to “protect” the public from such analysis, in fear of instigating hopelessness, dismay and despair. Such paternalism makes sense in Hollywood movies, where disasters befall passive victims with scripted fates often ending in gruesome death. But in reality, hopelessness and despair seem appropriate responses to our predicament, and may be necessary precursors to grounded action. Bendell finds that sharing his analysis with students in a supportive environment leads not to apathy or depression, but to a positive focus on moving forward. Whichever scenario unfolds, we can still minimize and mitigate risks and damage. By choosing what to retain, what to relinquish, and what to restore, we shift from victims to actors in our and the planet’s destiny.
On a small scale, people can embrace voluntary simplicity, better preparing themselves and their communities for collapse. Tragically, at the international scale, society shows no sign of willingly transforming to a sane and sustainable way of living—in fact, it’s escalating its experiment in madness. 7.7 billion humans cling to an overcrowded extension ladder supported by ecological systems and secured by the web of life. Yet every day our society tears at that web and blasts away chunks of the ladder’s foundation, while squeezing on 227,000 more humans than the day before. For each step that proactive individuals descend towards solid ground, global industrialism extends the ladder ten higher.
A radical yet inescapable implication runs through Bendell’s piece: with collapse inevitable, the sooner it occurs, the gentler will be our collective transition.
He suggests people must “com[e] together in solidarity to either undermine or overthrow a system that demands we participate in environmental degradation.” It’s not enough to relinquish solely as individuals; we must also forcibly loosen industrialism’s death grip. Freeing human and non-human communities from fossil fueled exploitation will open space for localization and restoration. Saving habitat and species from extermination will benefit all future beings, human and non-human.
If you’re ready to bring on devolution and leave behind the richest and most permanent life legacy possible, then read more about how to stop fossil fuels and how you can get involved.
In these brief series, Max Wilbert explores the #ThackerPass Litium Deposit in Humboldt Count, Nevada which will serve as a lithium clay mining development project proposed by the Nevada government and federal agencies. This project will compromise the flora, fauna and streams of the area just for the sake of “clean” energy and profit.
This is the first video dispatch from my trip to the area of two proposed lithium mines in Nevada. I’m working to build awareness of the threats these projects pose and resistance to them. I’ll have more to share next week.
This video comes from the top of a ridge directly to the east of the proposed Rhyolite Ridge open-pit lithium mine in Southern Nevada. After arriving by moonlight the night before, I scrambled up this rocky ridge in the dawn light to get an overview of the landscape. Everything that you see here is under threat for electric car batteries.
This is habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat, cholla cactus, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, prairie falcon, desert bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbit, ring-tailed cat, and literally hundreds of other species.
Is it worth destroying their home and their lives for electric cars?
This is the traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
What killed 14,000 critically endangered buckwheat plants at the site of a proposed lithium mine to supply critical minerals for the so-called “green” electric vehicle industry?
This video reports from Rhyolite Ridge in western Nevada, traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
Was it rodents, or was it vandalism? Climate catastrophe or eco-terrorism?
Benjamin R. Grady, the President of the Eriogonum Society, said in a letter that “As distasteful as it is to consider, intentional human action may have caused the demise of thousands of E. tiehmii individuals over the course of two months from July to September 2020. Having studied this genus since 2007, I have visited hundreds of different Eriogonum populations across the American West. Never once have I seen this type of directed small mammal attack at any of those sites. To me, the widespread damage to just E. tiehmii plants was remarkable. The timing of this attack is also suspicious. The threat of a large-scale lithium mine has recently thrust E. tiehmii into the spotlight. This species has been monitored since the early 1990’s and this type of widespread damage has not been documented. While on site on the 23rd of September, I did not notice any scat, with the exception of a few scattered lagomorph pellets. I carefully examined uprooted plants and no actual herbivory was noticed. The green to graying leaves were unchewed and intact. Eriogonum species likely offer little reward of water or nutrients at this time of year.”
Either way, this video is a crime-scene investigation from the middle of the proposed open-pit lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge, in western Nevada on traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
We don’t know what happened to these plants, but it is clear that they deserve protection. Ioneer’s plan to build an open-pit lithium mine at this site must be resisted.
Reporting from #ThackerPass#Nevada – site of a massive proposed lithium mine. Nevada government and federal agencies have fast-tracked the sacrifice of this mountainside in favor of a $1.3 billion dollar mine that could produce tens of billions in profits. Meanwhile, local streams will be polluted, Lahontan cutthroat trout spawning grounds will be smothered under radioactive sediment, Pronghorn antelope migration routes blocked, Greater sage-grouse habitat blasted to nothing, local people will have to deal with acid rain, ancient cultural sites will be desecrated, and this quiet wilderness will be turned into an industrialized zone — unless the project is stopped.
This article is based on communication from a comrade in the Negros province of the Philippines. There is ongoing destruction of the natural world in this area due to road construction, a planned airport, and clearing of the rainforest. The people on the front lines, being most affected, are calling for international solidarity and support.
On October the 18th this year, the first direct action regarding the Northern Negros National Park was taken by a group of concerned people. Food Not Bombs Bacolod Volunteers and concerned citizens have started a campaign to raise awareness about the ongoing destruction of the rainforest in the Negros area of the Philippines. The group has begun disseminating information to ensure other know about the ongoing harm being caused and to stand firmly IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE FOREST.
The group, focused their work in the city of Bacolod distributing printed placards, information flyers & leaflets and have been clear they are in direct opposition to any act of destruction. Food Not Bombs Bacolod condemns these injustices and the actions of the Local Government of Negros Island which sanctions the destruction of the remaining rainforest of the island.
The Northern Negros Natural Park is a protected area of the Philippines located in the northern mountainous forest region of the island of Negros in the Visayas. It is spread over five municipalities and six cities in the province of Negros Occidental and is the province’s largest watershed and water source for seventeen municipalities and cities including the Bacolod metropolitan area.
The park belongs to the Negros–Panay Biogeographic Region. It is one of two remaining lowland forests on Negros island, the other being in the Dumaguete watershed area in Mount Talinis on the southern end of the island in Negros Oriental.
The park is a habitat to important fauna including the Visayan spotted deer, Visayan warty pig, Philippine naked-backed fruit bat, and the endangered Negros shrew.
Number of endemic and threatened species of birds have been documented in the park, which includes the Visayan hornbill, Negros bleeding-heart, white-winged cuckooshrike, flame-templed babbler, white-throated jungle flycatcher, Visayan flowerpecker and green-faced parrotfinch.
Flora documented within the park include hardwood tree species (Dipterocarps), as well as palms, orchids, herbs and trees with medicinal value. Very rare is the local species of the cycas tree (locally called pitogo), probably a Cycas vespertilio, considered living fossil from the times of dinosaurs. Another prehistoric flora is present in the park like the tree ferns and the also protected Agathis philippinensis, (locally known as almaciga).
While We Were Distracted
As we know during 2020 most nations have been preoccupied trying to survive lockdown. During this time the local government of Negros Island, Protection And Management Board, Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) failed in its responsibilities to protect the remaining watershed and rainforest. Road construction on the island started in the midst of Global Pandemic.
Instead the DENR legitimized the road construction on the Island and in doing so has increased the likelihood of communities on the island being destroyed in the medium to long term. The DENR, along with the Department of Public Works and the Department of Highways have acted in a way that swept aside the needs of local communities, that ignored the rights of the natural world and in doing so have colluded to strengthen their power. In short they have become the mechanism and tool of destruction for the island.
The Aerotroplis Project
The plans to build a new International Airport in Manila has also hit the radar of environmental activists. The people and environmental groups in Bulakan and Bulacan have shared concerns about the devastation this will cause to the natural world, to wildlife (including fish) populations, bird populations, air pollution, and airplanes flying in the sky. As always the focus is on economic benefits rather than the health of planet or people. There has been little or no analysis of the environmental impact.
Leon Dulce, national coordinator of Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE), told the BusinessMirror that the presence of the bird populations are bioindicators of good ecological health. He stated “This is of crucial importance in these times when there are multiple epidemiological risks from pandemics, socioeconomic loss, and climate emergency all emerging from the disrupted environment. Massive land-reclamation activities in Manila Bay threatens the last remaining wetlands where migratory birds roost. The Bulacan Aerotropolis is one of the biggest threats that will destroy 2,500 hectares of mangroves and fisheries. It is outrageous that transportation mega infrastructure is being touted for economic recovery when global transportation is expected to remain disrupted until 2021.”
Critical Mass Ride
Following the actions from Food Not Bombs Bacolad, on November 8th Local Autonomous Networks held a discussion to consider the ongoing problem. They agreed to organize a coordinated Critical Mass Ride. The ride involved concerned people in the Archipelago from the different islands of the Philippines gathering to travel around the main city to raise awareness.
Food Not Bombs and Local Autonomous Networks have issued a call to action to support them in opposing the road construction and the subsequent destruction of the Rainforest that will kill the livelihood of hundreds of families.
The call to action in the Archipelago is just a start. They have been clear they will not stop nor be silenced until the destruction planned has been stopped. They are calling for International Solidarity to all readers.
Join The Resistance. Join The Fight!
Save the Remaining Forest & Watershed of Northern Negros Natural Park, Stop the Patag-Silay-Calatrava-Cadiz Road Construction. STOP the Bulacan Aerotropolis Project.
On October 12th, 2020, Indigenous People’s Day, a group of indigenous people and allies gathered in Illahee (Portland, Oregon) to confront the Sierra Club and 350.org for their corporate ties and advocacy of false solutions as outlined in the film Planet of the Humans.
These groups were informed that they had breached trust with the grassroots environmental movement and local indigenous people, and had betrayed their own stated goals.
Sierra Club was informed that their promotion of “green investments” in massive multinational corporations via their “sustainable investing funds” represent a fundamental opposition to life on the planet.
350.org was informed that even their name and stated goal, 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide, is incompatible with life for the small island nations. As the Association of Small Island States write in their 2009 briefing as part of the Copenhagen climate conference, “350 ppm is a death sentence. . . . The safe level of CO2 for SIDS (Small Island Developing States) is around 260 parts per million. . . . CO2 buildup must be reversed, not allowed to increase or even be stabilized at 350 ppm, which would amount to a death sentence for coral reefs, small island developing states, and billions of people living along low lying coastlines.”
Both of these groups have and continue to advocate for false solutions, including “green” technology, “green” investments, and other greenwashing schemes. Both groups failed to sign the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth created at the 2010 Cochabamba World People’s Conference on Climate Change, despite the opportunity to do so.
On October 12th, 2020, both groups were informed that they are no longer welcome, and were asked to cease operations in Oregon and across Turtle Island in favor of true grassroots resistance.
