A Portuguese language version of this report is published on Mongabay Brasil

TOMÉ-AÇU, Brazil — Guided by an Indigenous leader, we drove down dusty roads in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve, a “green island” encircled by oil palm plantations in the Brazilian Amazon.

Uniform rows of oil palms cover huge swaths of land here in the northeast of the state of Pará, once home to a vibrant expanse of rainforest. Our Mongabay reporting team was there to discover if the palm oil business, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is sustainable and ecologically responsible, as industry representatives told us.

Federal prosecutors have pursued the country’s leading palm oil exporters in the courts for the past seven years, alleging the companies are contaminating rivers, poisoning the soil, and harming the livelihoods and health of Indigenous and traditional peoples, charges the companies deny.

The stories of abuse we heard from our guide seemed almost unbelievable. After hearing dozens of claims of water contamination in the Indigenous villages, the local chief, Lúcio Tembé, led us to a mill run by Biopalma da Amazônia — Brazil’s top palm oil producer and exporter — close to the Acará River, which meanders through the forest for almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) before spilling out into the Amazon gulf.

“Look,” Tembé said, “they will throw [palm oil] residue in the river!”

Leaving our car, we watched from the riverbank, filming as unmarked trucks, and then a man with a shovel, dumped waste into the waterway. Tembé told us that the dark brown residue was a toxic sludge of organic materials, insecticides and herbicides from local palm oil mills. Every day, dozens of trucks dump this waste into the Acará River, he added.

Industry representatives would later tell us that such things do not happen, and that palm oil production isn’t harmful to human health or to the environment. But the dumping we saw, as well as the rapid onset of coughing, shortness of breath, nausea and headaches when we inhaled the fumes from palm trees doused with pesticides, was enough to convince us that these claims were worth pursuing.

Over the past year we investigated allegations made by local communities of widespread abuses by palm oil companies in Brazil, discovering what appears to be an industry-wide pattern of brazen disregard for Amazon conservation and for the rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities.

“The oil palm only brought a lot of problems. First of all, it brought destruction of our fauna, our flora, our rivers,” Tembé said as he looked out over the Turé River, close to the Turé-Mariquita reserve, an Indigenous territory about 250 km (150 mi) south of the city of Belém on Brazil’s north coast. “This water isn’t clean. But in the past we drank it. This river and the forest around it were like a supermarket for the population; it was where we fished, where we hunted.”

The rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities are protected under Brazil’s Constitution and international accords to which Brazil is a signatory. The Constitution also establishes that all Brazilians have the right to an “ecologically balanced environment.”

But laws issued by Pará state have often overshadowed these commitments in practice. Biopalma’s mill and one of its plantations lie adjacent to the Acará River and were constructed without a buffer zone as is required by law, according to documents seen by Mongabay.

Since 2014, federal prosecutors have faced a legal battle to approve a forensic investigation into pesticide contamination and the socioenvironmental and health impacts in Biopalma’s production zone in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve. “These are not minor problems faced by Indigenous peoples,” Felício Pontes Júnior, one of the federal prosecutors, wrote in a legal filing in the case. “The defendant [Biopalma] is aware of the Indigenous complaints.”

The claims date back to 2012, when Indigenous and traditional communities first raised the alarm. When the lawsuit was filed, a judge rapidly issued an injunction allowing a forensic investigation, but this was later overturned by another judge. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office appealed and a final ruling is yet to be issued.

“The company says it has no impact. So, if it says it doesn’t have [an impact] and we say it does, let’s do the forensic report,” Pontes Júnior told Mongabay in a phone interview in January.

A troubled industry booms

Palm oil has become ubiquitous in consumer societies. It’s one of the primary vegetable oils produced and traded worldwide. That’s partly because of its immense versatility: 80% of its production is channeled into the food industry, where it’s a key ingredient in consumer products made by conglomerates like Unilever and Nestlé.

Though most of us will never see it in its raw state, many of us will eat it in some form today. Various derivatives of palm oil are found in chocolate, ice cream, cookies, margarine and countless other products. It’s found in hygiene, beauty and cleaning items and even at the gas pump in the form of biodiesel. Rich in vitamins A and E and the best substitute for trans fats, which were banned in the United States in 2018, it is the oil of choice of global capitalism.

But researchers are growing increasingly concerned over the socioenvironmental crises its popularity has brought to many rural communities in tropical nations. The damage done to rainforests, wildlife, Indigenous peoples and water supplies in Malaysia and Indonesia, which together account for 85% of global palm oil production, is well documented, as are problems in Africa, where the industry has grown in recent years. Less studied and publicized to date are its impacts in the Brazilian Amazon.

Though Brazil accounts for just 1% of global palm oil production (about 540,000 tons in 2020), the industry is spreading rapidly here. Oil palm coverage in northern Pará — today responsible for about 90% of Brazilian production — increased almost five-fold to 236,000 hectares (583,169 acres) between 2010 and 2019. While national production dipped slightly in 2018, production in Pará rose by 47,653 tons (3.2%) over the same period.

 

Despite a push by the government of then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to stimulate palm oil production in 2010 by mandating its use as a biofuel, almost all Brazilian production is still used in the food industry, mostly as a soybean oil substitute. Lula also launched a national biodiesel program in 2004, and a sustainable palm oil production program in 2010, which further stoked demand.

When it was launched, the sustainability policy aimed to guarantee the supply of biofuel while protecting the environment by banning deforestation in native forest areas for the expansion of corporate plantations.

Pará has the highest deforestation rate in Brazil. Although cattle ranching and soy cultivation are the top drivers of deforestation, there are increasingly concerns about the damage associated with palm oil in the region. Researchers expect a massive expansion of the Amazon oil palm crop by 2030, driven by a government target to double the proportion of biodiesel used in the country and phase out fossil fuels.

Most of Brazil’s palm oil production is controlled by eight companies. The top producer, Biopalma, was a subsidiary of Brazilian mining giant Vale, which is responsible for the two most catastrophic environmental disasters in Brazil’s history in terms of affected area. As part of a divestment plan, Vale sold Biopalma at the end of 2020 to Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF), an energy company. In a document sent to Brazil’s antitrust regulator, Cade, BBF said all its oil palm is used for power generation.

Brazil exported almost 90,000 tons of palm oil in 2017, mostly to Colombia, the European Union, the U.S. and Mexico, according to Trase, a research group run by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the NGO Global Canopy. Biopalma accounted for almost three-quarters of these exports. The company, which has operated in Pará since 2007, has announced an ambitious goal of becoming the largest palm oil producer in the Americas.

 

‘Poisoned’ water

As the palm oil industry expands in Brazil, the threat of water contamination has become a growing concern. We visited Turé-Mariquita in the Amazon’s dry season, when companies spray agrochemicals in huge quantities. Activists say that in the rainy season, when river levels rise substantially and flood the land, all the accumulated toxins enter the river system, polluting the water and killing fish and other aquatic life.

We weren’t the first visitors to experience the impact of the oil palm plantations. Researchers Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva and Brian Garvey told us how they had bathed in a stream near the Acará River where it flowed past a pesticide-drenched field.

“Our skin itched and we stayed sick for two, three weeks,” says Garvey, a researcher with the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. “Several studies show that the water is contaminated. We witnessed them [Biopalma staff] dumping poison just a few meters from the river.”

A 2014 analysis by a federal laboratory under the umbrella of the Ministry of Health identified banned pesticides like endosulfan in rivers and streams near oil palm plantations in the Acará region. Researchers collected data from 18 aquatic locations and identified the presence of pesticides in 80% of samples collected during the rainy season, with some agrochemicals linked to hormonal disorders and cancer.

There’s no lack of anecdotal evidence regarding pesticide poisoning. “My husband’s aunt died of cancer,” Indigenous leader Uhu Tembé told Mongabay in the Yriwar village. “We say that’s because of this [oil palm-linked pollution], because these diseases didn’t exist in our village before. And today there is a lot of disease in our village … In the summer, we have a lot of headaches because that’s when they [the companies] throw poison.”

Cíntia Tembé, another resident of the Turé-Mariquita reserve, speaks of witnessing a previously healthy young man, whose job it had been to spray chemicals over the oil palms, fall ill and die in the local hospital. “He arrived there with exaggerated pain in the abdomen,” she said at his home in the Arar Zena’i village. “It was terrible. Blood started to come out of his ear, nose, eyes … as if something had burst inside him.”

Brazil is the largest consumer of agrochemicals on the planet, purchasing about a fifth of all pesticides produced globally. Dr. Peter Clausing, a toxicologist at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) in Germany, said four out of nine pesticides approved for use in oil palm plantations in Brazil are listed as “highly hazardous.” Two of them — glufosinate-ammonium and methomyl — are banned in the European Union.

Waste generated during palm oil production contains a considerable amount of organic nutrients and heavy metals that can contaminate rivers, pollute the air and generate greenhouse gases. The effluent is typically released into rivers as a cheap and easy disposal method, according to Clausing.

“My sister died of cancer because she drank water from the [Turé] river,” Emídio Tembé, chief of the Tekena’i Indigenous village, told Mongabay in 2019, during our visit to the Turé-Mariquita reserve. “She died of cancer [three] years ago due to poisoned water,” he added, referring to the pesticides sprayed by Biopalma. “It’s been nine years since we could not drink water from the river because it’s polluted with poison.”

When Biopalma began planting its oil palm crop in the Turé-Mariquita area in 2010, residents told us, locals experienced a mysterious wave of chronic, debilitating, and sometimes fatal, symptoms: headaches, itching, skin rashes and blisters, diarrhea and stomach ailments. Many of the health complaints arose shortly after drinking from or bathing in local streams and coincided with the annual pesticide-spraying season.

The accounts of the impact of oil palm pesticides on Indigenous and traditional communities are supported by a 2017 study that found traces of three pesticides (two of them typically listed among those used in oil palm cultivation) in the major streams and wells used by the Tembé people in Turé-Mariquita.

According to research from the University of Brasília (UnB), the number of reported cases of skin disorders in 2011 and 2012 increased considerably. “About a year after planting, there were many complaints of skin diseases and headaches. It was quite intense for about six months,” a local health worker told the researchers. “In 2005, the rates of skin diseases, diarrhea, flu and headaches were almost zero.”

Among the pesticides found in surface and underground water in the reserve were glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate has been shown to be carcinogenic and has been banned or restricted in more than 20 nations, although not in Brazil. Also detected in samples of surface water and sediment taken by the researchers was the insecticide endosulfan, a persistent organic pollutant banned in Brazil in 2010.

“The most important scientific finding of this study is the identification for the first time, at least as far as we know from the scientific literature, of glyphosate-based herbicide residues in environmental water samples, both superficial and underground, in an Indigenous reserve surrounded by oil palm,” Sandra Damiani, the UnB researcher who conducted the study, told Mongabay. “In addition, our data also corroborates the presence of residues of other organic contaminants in the environment, this time not only in water, but also in sediment samples collected in the same water bodies studied.”

Damiani said they found contaminant residues in all six sampled streams and 40% of the wells sampled. Residue presence in groundwater samples was considered “particularly worrying” because these water sources are the only alternative to streams for Indigenous people in the area.

“We noticed a very large increase [in the number] of water wells after the company arrived,” Damiani told Mongabay. “And the presence of residues in the wells was a surprise, and it was something that caught our attention and requires great care because the [Indigenous] population uses either the stream directly or underground wells. If both have contaminants, what will they do?”

The maximum levels of glyphosate and endosulfan residues found in the water by the researchers were 45.5 micrograms per liter (μg/L) and 0.03 μg/L, respectively. While these are within the legal bounds in Brazil, they are well above the much stricter levels set by the European Union. “This is a controversial discussion,” Rosivaldo Mendes, a researcher at the laboratory that analyzed the samples, told Mongabay. “For me, the safe limit is having nothing [in the water].”

Following the disclosure of her findings to the authorities, Damiani says, she was told that the companies agreed to not use pesticides around Indigenous reserves in the future.

BBF, the energy company that acquired Biopalma, said in a statement it was unable to assess the accuracy of the academic studies since it did not have access to the results of the analysis. The company said it “faithfully complies with the environmental standards and procedures applicable to palm oil production and is unaware of the situation reported in such a study.”

Legally, the glyphosate limit for drinkable water in Brazil is 500 μg/L. “Water is [only] considered unsafe if it is above [this level],” Mendes said, adding he disagrees with this parameter.

Brazilian legislation sets no limits for any pesticide residue found in sediments, even though they could potentially contaminate crops and pose a public health risk. Damiani’s sampled sediments were found to contain DDT and its degradation products at levels that greatly exceed the thresholds established by the National Environment Council, a regulatory body. DDT is banned in more than 40 countries, including Brazil and the U.S. There is no national limit on sediment contamination with endosulfan.

Damiani said they found residues of at least one contaminant in almost a third of the 33 samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, with a much higher percentage for glyphosate-based herbicides in water collected during the dry season. Two-thirds of the groundwater samples and more than a third of surface samples contained traces of glyphosate-based herbicides.

Research from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) also detected glyphosate in water samples collected in the municipality of Tailândia, another key oil palm cluster in Pará’s northeast. The 2018 study also found atrazine, a widely used weedkiller, and the presence of aquatic plants, indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers. Its use is not allowed for palm oil in Brazil but family farmers often refer to atrazine as one of the main pesticides used in palm crops, researchers told Mongabay.

In this region, the top palm oil producers are Agropalma, the country’s second-largest producer and exporter, and Belem Bioenergia Brasil (BBB).

Agropalma is the only Brazilian company certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the world’s leading palm oil sustainability certification scheme. It is a subsidiary of the Brazil-based Alfa conglomerate, a major player in the finance, insurance, agribusiness, building materials, communications, leather and hotel sectors.

BBB previously counted Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, the firm at the center of the Lava Jato corruption scandal that landed former president Lula in jail, as one of its main shareholders. It is now controlled by Portuguese oil company Galp and Ecotauá Participações, a holding company.

The UFPA study, led by Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz, collected nine water samples in the tributaries of sub-basins of the Anuerá and Aui-Açu rivers. The toxicological tests, carried out by the same laboratory that analyzed the samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, found “significant levels of glyphosate,” but still within the regulatory limits, from two collection points in the outflowing streams from BBB’s plantations, Cruz said.

Atrazine within Brazil’s regulatory limit of 2 μg/L was also detected at two points — outflowing streams from BBB site and in a community closer to Agropalma’s plantations, the researcher noted — including an intersection between oil palm, corn and soybean crops. Banned in the EU, the herbicide is still often detected in water samples two decades after its use was prohibited. Atrazine is quite toxic, and potentially carcinogenic to humans, and persists in the environment, especially in water bodies.

“There is no way to say that there is no water contamination,” Cruz said. “We came to the conclusion that this pesticide glyphosate is being used. But as they are pesticides that are under the ground, in the water, it will be diluted.” She added that no previous data on river contamination for Tailândia were available.

No traces of pesticides were detected from collection points inside Agropalma’s plantations, where the researchers were escorted by company minders.

“BBB didn’t let us enter the company [plantation area], only Agropalma. But we were accompanied all the time,” Cruz told Mongabay, adding that the collection points were chosen by the company. “Two people were assigned to accompany us and at the same point where we did the collection, they did it too. But then there is this doubt: I don’t know if they really took us to the points where there is leaching into the soil… They wanted us to do my analysis inside their laboratory, they wanted us to stay inside Agropalma, paying for [our] lunch, coffee, dinner, all support, but we didn’t accept it.”

Agropalma’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said the company does not use atrazine. He also challenged the research, claiming that the points where Cruz detected atrazine do not have any connection with Agropalma’s area.

“They are far from Agropalma and … they are upstream… So, there is no way, even if I had sprayed… an atrazine truck at a stream of Agropalma, it would not reach this point,” Brito told Mongabay in an interview in February.

Geographer Daniel Sombra, coordinator at UFPA’s Laboratory of Environmental Analysis and Cartographic Representations, disagrees. Although the natural watercourse is upstream, he said, it could also flow downstream, given the high level of variation of the tides of the Amazon rivers.

“[This point] is 2 km upstream on the Aiu-Açu river… It may be that they [the pesticides] came from upstream plantations, which are from other properties, including family farms cultivating oil palm, some linked to BBB. But it is not impossible that the effects deposited downstream could move 2 km upwards,” noted Sombra, who built the maps for Cruz’ thesis. “So, it is undetermined whether it really came from upstream or downstream. The fact is: the pesticides collected are typical residues of palm monoculture.”

Brito also challenged the research’s allegations about the presence of aquatic plants as indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers, claiming that the photos from the study didn’t show any macrophyte superpopulation; the existence of many factors in the area could have triggered macrophyte growth, including sun incidence and a nearby road, while laboratory testing for these substances was lacking. Brito also argued that none of the collection points are close to Agropalma, adding that other factors should be taken into account.

Brito says Agropalma has collected water samples from the outflowing streams and within its area as well to check the presence of phosphorus and nitrogen at eight pre-selected points since 2015, as one of the requirements of the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), an industry group. The results of the sampling are recorded and published in the company’s annual sustainability report.

“When comparing streams that cross the palm plantation, we compare them with streams that only cross primary forests,” Brito said. “The species composition is not exactly the same: some populations are favored, others are disadvantaged, but the ecological function is fulfilled. And the water quality is adequate, it is good.”

Moreover, he said that Agropalma has monitored watercourses within its farms in partnership with NGO Conservation International and UFPA’s department of biological sciences, which monitor water quality and aquatic fauna on company property. “So far, we have not received any indication of contamination,” he noted. He also cited a UFPA study that found that oil palm plantations “appear to be one of the least deleterious for native fauna” compared to the different options available for use of soil in the Amazon basin.

According to Brito, Agropalma only uses herbicides, mostly glyphosate, but is testing other compounds. “Our mission is not to use [glyphosate] anymore,” he said. “But it is very difficult because we have to keep the crown of the plants clean. And we also publish every year the amount of active ingredients that we use.”

Smallholders quoted in Cruz’s research said that glyphosate, known locally as mata-mato, was the main pesticide used in oil palm cultivation in Tailândia, even though they said the risks are unknown.

Brito said Agropalma only provides glyphosate after carrying out the due training with farmers.

In a statement, Gilberto Cabral, a BBB spokesman, said the company observes “the best practices applicable in environmental terms” and “without substantial change in land use.” According to him, the trees were planted between 2011 and 2015 in areas that had been used as pastures or areas that were already degraded before 2005.

However, he noted, Tailândia’s land is also used by independent palm producers and by producers of other crops, such as corn and soybeans, “with recurrent use of pesticides in all areas sown.”

As a means of environmental monitoring, Cabral said, the company periodically analyzes surface waters, upstream and downstream, and underground, in order to detect any changes.

“The company strictly observes the dosages and other instructions expressed on the labels and package inserts of the few pesticides it uses, since we prioritize preventive, mechanical (brushing) and biological (Bacillus thuringiensis) means of control on a large scale,” he wrote.

Roberto Yokoyama, the head of the Brazilian Association of Palm Oil Producers (Abrapalma), said if the contamination of watercourses has indeed occurred in Pará, there should be an official investigation.

Yokoyama challenged Cruz’ research, claiming the levels of atrazine found in watercourses and the fertilization period were misrepresented. He also challenged the methodology used by the researcher and argued that the study did not present evidence that proved palm oil plantations were the source.

“The data and results that the master’s thesis presents, in fact, do not indicate that oil palm plantations were responsible for the application of atrazine and glyphosate in their plantations,” Yokoyama wrote.

Scientific evidence of health impacts

Several studies provide evidence of the harmful health impacts of the contaminants found in Turé-Mariquita and Tailândia. Endosulfan levels of 0.01 μg/L (a third of the concentration found in the water in Damiani’s study), for example, have been shown to be lethal to fish. Studies also detected serious health issues linked to exposure to DDT, diuron and glyphosate-based herbicide residues. There is also growing evidence for atrazine’s carcinogenic potential.

Another concern is the possible proliferation of cyanobacteria and the generation of cyanotoxins in streams containing glyphosate-based herbicides. Cyanotoxins are powerful natural poisons, and some can cause rapid death by respiratory failure.

The regulations governing the use of pesticides in Brazil apply only to the active ingredients, and fail to consider the toxicity of the complete formulation, as well as the interaction between contaminants, whose health impacts can be worse but are often not studied or poorly understood. Lab tests using human cells have shown that glyphosate formulations can be up to a thousand times more toxic than just the active ingredient alone, which means that individual analysis of active ingredients can underestimate the risks to living organisms.

Brazil banned the use of endosulfan in 2010 and DDT in phases from 1985 to 2009, citing their high toxicity and the capacity for bioaccumulation and persistence in the environment. Both are considered persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty.

It’s thought the DDT found in the Turé-Mariquita samples may have originated from its widespread use to control malaria-bearing mosquitos in the Amazon.

At least seven herbicides and 16 insecticides are currently used in oil palm cultivation in Brazil and other countries that grow the crop. Damiani notes the lack of transparency regarding agrochemicals used by Brazilian palm oil companies, as well as the amounts and periods of application — a lack of publicly available data that could potentially conceal much higher exposure of Amazonian communities to oil palm pesticides.

Damiani obtained access to pesticide data collected by prosecutors from Biopalma and other palm oil firms. “Scientific research corroborates the Tembé’s claims,” she said. But “this data we obtained is [just] a snapshot of a reality that requires more frequent monitoring.”

Another study in 2014 by the Instituto Evandro Chagas (IEC), the federal laboratory that carried out the testing for Damiani’s and Cruz’ studies, found endosulfan residues and cyanobacteria, but no pesticide residues, in another oil palm-growing area. According to Mendes, the lab researcher, further systematic analysis of the impacts of oil palm plantations’ pesticide use in Pará is needed, but previous attempts to secure funding have failed.

While the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve’s residents can point to Damiani’s study to corroborate their claims, their neighbors, including in the Tembé Indigenous Reserve, have voiced similar contamination and disease concerns, but lack any scientific evidence to support their accounts.

Their ancestral lands abut oil palm plantations owned and operated by BBB. The reserve’s Indigenous inhabitants say BBB is shirking its obligations by denying the existence of a tributary of the Acará-Mirim River that runs inside one of their oil palm plantations. Mongabay visited the area and verified the existence of a river inside the property.

In the nearby village of Acará-Mirim, Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, has set up a water supply system at the center of the community. But it doesn’t reach Nazaré Coutinho Pereira’s house by the banks of the Acará-Mirim River. “We keep drinking this water because there’s no [other] option,” Pereira said. “We consume a lot of water to drink, to wash, [but] the body always becomes itchy and we need to take medicine.

“[When] we fill a can with this water, in a few hours we can see a finger of mud in the bottom of the pan,” she added. Come the rainy season, she said, “all the poisons, all the dirt comes … dead animals on top, oxen, horse, they throw everything in the river … and we drink the juice from it all.”

Pereira said she has experienced symptoms including diarrhea after drinking the once-clean river water, something that didn’t happen in the past. “I feel my stomach get big, it gets full, unwilling to eat,” she said. “I also have urinary infections very often.” Residents who drink from Funai’s water supply also describe similar symptoms, she added.

In a statement, BBB denied the use of pesticides, saying it only used “mineral fertilizers that contribute to the growth of plants, both cultivated and native.” The company acknowledged the existence of a river called “Rio Pequeno” near its farm, but said that its plantations “are within a regulatory distance from this water body.”

It added its technicians are investigating the situation, including “rigorous analysis of all water bodies near the plantations.” The company said it received on February 18 a complaint from the Tembé Indigenous Association of Vale do Acará about the carrying of liquid effluents, distributed in the planting plots as complementary organic fertilizer, for streams that flow into the river that serves the community in which they live.

A decade-long legal battle

Local communities have frequently pursued legal action against Brazil’s major palm oil players. Biopalma has been targeted by the Tembé people of the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve and by small farmers and Afro slave-descendant quilombola communities.

The Tembé say they were not properly consultated before Biopalma’s oil palm venture got up and running. “We were not listened to for this project; when we saw it, the project was already established around our territory,” Lúcio Tembé, chief of the Turé Indigenous village, said. Pontes Júnior, the federal prosecutor, points to a loophole in Brazilian law that requires a buffer zone of 10 km (6 mi) and a socio-environmental impact study for ventures around conservation areas, but not around Indigenous reserves.

For large development projects, like dams, such a buffer zone is also mandatory for Indigenous reserves, given the potentially harmful impacts of these types of developments. But palm oil plantations are considered an “agrosilvopastoral culture” with “low polluting and degrading potential” by the state environmental council, and so are not required to go through the same licensing process, instead qualifying for a simplified licensing process.

Brazil is a party to international conventions that require consultation with, and consent by, Indigenous and traditional communities who will be impacted by major development projects. In this case, however, there was no prior consultation, and the impact was not assessed, Pontes Júnior said. “Everything depends on [getting] this forensic report. From this forensic report, a series of other actions will be triggered… [But] without this forensic report I have my hands tied in this action,” he said.

In a statement, the Federal Circuit Court for the First Region in Brasília said a ruling may be made in March.

Another enabling factor in the oil palm industry’s environmental violations can be found in the plantation licensing process. In Pará, the state government didn’t acknowledge the presence of Indigenous or traditional communities when granting licenses for oil palm cultivation, prosecutors say.

The Turé-Mariquita reserve, for example, was demarcated in 1991, 16 years before Biopalma arrived in the region. The Tembé themselves have been present in Pará since the second half of the 19th century, when they were forced to migrate from neighboring Maranhão state.

Since their first recorded contact with Portuguese colonizers in 1615 in Maranhão, the Tembé have had to face forced proselytization by missionaries, slavery, infectious diseases, persecution, conflict, and extreme droughts that devastated the land. A branch of the Tupi-Guarani family, they called themselves Tenetehara but in the migration process came to be called the Tembé in Pará; those who remained in Maranhão are called the Guajajara.

The presence of several quilombola settlements, or quilombos, also dating back more than a century was similarly ignored during the licensing process. State and federal prosecutors say this renders the process invalid, given the lack of attention paid to the impacts on these communities. Pontes Júnior and state prosecutors Eliane Cristina Pinto Moreira and Raimundo Moraes have also called on the Pará state environmental council, Coema, to reform its palm oil licensing policy to introduce more regulation, but the requests have been rejected.

Researchers at UFPA have found that Biopalma’s Castanheira processing mill, next to the Acará River, received two separate licenses — one from the municipality of Acará and one from the state — yet neither defines any buffer zone requirements. “The conditions are ridiculous, i.e., annual reports of activities, something that the legislation already establishes… The environmental authority simply relies on the companies’ self-monitoring procedures,” lead researcher Elielson Pereira da Silva told Mongabay. He added that the environment secretary in Acará had only shown him the documents on condition he not make any copies or photograph them.

In a statement, Pará’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainability (Semas-PA) said
it carried out inspections from May to December 2019 in six municipalities, including Acará and Tomé Açu, and at the time “there were no violations of current environmental standards.”

In relation to the pollution of watercourses, Semas-PA said it plans to inspect the area; there are also scheduled inspections for Tailândia’s oil palm farms, but monitoring rivers and streams within Indigenous Reserves is the responsibility of the federal government, it added.

Brazil’s Ministry of Health, Funai, and the municipalities of Acará and Tailândia did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

‘Desperate’ strategy to be heard

Brazilian companies like Biopalma portray their operations as sustainable to consumers in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. But palm oil companies the world over have long been accused of destroying traditional livelihoods, leaving poverty and social deprivation in their wake. In Pará, the industry has left many Indigenous and traditional residents feeling estranged from their culture, which is deeply intertwined with the natural world.

By 2019, Biopalma’s plantations had encircled the Tembé’s lands, and local resistance morphed into campaigns of direct action against the company. Tired of nearly a decade of fruitless campaigning for compensation through official channels, the Tembé took direct action, seizing company vehicles in the hope of forcing Biopalma to hear their concerns. Uhu Tembé, an Indigenous leader, told Mongabay how she and her husband seized a Biopalma tractor during the protest and used it to bulldoze oil palm trees near the village of Yriwar in the Turé-Mariquita reserve.

“We have been asking for [Biopalma’s] help for a long time to clean the area so we can plant; they never answered. Then we decided to get their machinery to do it ourselves … because we’ve been asking them for ten years,” Uhu said, pointing to the tractor that sat outside her home for three months. “We are cleaning it up here to plant our cassava, corn, rice. We don’t eat this here,” she added, pointing to oil palms. “They did not respect our land, our area. That’s why we feel outraged.”

Frustration with palm oil companies has grown across the region over the last years, and the seizure of company property by the Turé-Mariquita residents is not an isolated case.

Like the Indigenous communities, the quilombolas have also protested against Biopalma, blocking roads to call for development assistance. But such actions may have provoked violence, including the murder of a quilombola leader in 2018, and an arson attack on the home of another.

The Mongabay team visited the village of Acará-Mirim in the neighboring Tembé Indigenous Reserve the day after residents had seized tractors and a car from BBB. Indigenous leader Valdevan Evangelista dos Santos Tembé said their goal was to force a dialogue with the company, and that they would return the vehicles once an agreement was reached. In the meantime, residents used the machinery to prepare the area to plant crops.

“All Indigenous leaders in Acará-Mirim and Cuxiu-Mirim villages agreed to do this protest. We agreed to put on war paint [over] our bodies, take our bows and arrows and seize the company’s … tractors,” Valdevan Tembé said. “What was our objective? To bring the company’s manager to our village to talk to us and sign an agreement. We would only give them back their machines after they start the construction works they promised us.”

The protests have had some successes. For Valdevan Tembé and his neighbors, BBB committed to conducting a social and environmental impact study to determine if the plantations had damaged the Indigenous communities. BBB said the study was contracted and is being carried out at the moment, with completion expected for the first semester of this year to be “the basis for the adoption of measures to mitigate any impacts.”

BBB also made some improvements to the road requested by the Acará-Mirim villagers, Lúcio Tembé said.

In Turé-Mariquita, Biopalma went to court to get its machines back. The villagers handed them back three months after seizing them, with the company agreeing to pay each community 30,000 reais (about $5,600) quarterly for three years to finance local development projects, according to Urutaw Turiwar Tembé, chief of the Yriwar Indigenous village. “It is not enough for us, but it was what they gave us. We fought for more, but we failed,” he said.

But none of these projects have been completed so far, Urutaw Tembé said, due to higher costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, instead of paying the quarterly amount, Biopalma only paid annually.

The Indigenous have tried to seal a new deal to replace the amount for the obligation for carrying out the projects, regardless of the amount but “it became very complicated to negotiate” after Biopalma’s sale to BBF, Urutaw Tembé noted.

In a statement, BBF said its relationship with Indigenous communities close to palm plantation areas “is always maintained in a spirit of technical and social cooperation” under agreements made last year that included providing clean drinking water, ensuring food security, and educational and cultural schemes.

November 2015 saw the first major mobilization of Indigenous people, quilombolas, ribeirinhos (traditional riverside dwellers) and residents of neighboring communities against the palm oil firms. About 140 people came together and occupied Biopalma’s Vera Cruz headquarters, paralyzing the company for 11 days.

The protest began when Biopalma started operating a ferry on the Acará River, close to the Vila Formosa quilombola community. The quilombolas asked if they could also use the company ferry to travel to other communities or even to the city, but were rebuffed, leading to the occupation. Days later, a judge intervened and the protesters left peacefully. Biopalma denounced the occupation, alleging its property had been looted, and a judge in Acará ordered the arrest of the leaders of the associations involved in the occupation. One quilombola leader was jailed for eight months.

However, in a counterargument of appeal signed in early 2020 in defense of the Tembé’s November 2019 protests against Biopalma, federal prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva said the demonstration was a legitimate act of Indigenous resistance made in response “to the years of illicit conduct by the company, which severely damages their health,” and was carried out “in a desperate attempt to at least be heard [in] a dispute over Indigenous rights.”

The prosecutor encouraged both sides in the conflict to engage in mediation over Biopalma’s omission of environmental impacts and the need for corrective environmental licensing, among other points of contention. “For these issues, the company omits and tries to criminalize the demonstration of the Indigenous people through lawfare and police procedures,” Silva wrote.

In a statement, Biopalma said it filed a repossession suit given “the repeated undue seizures of agricultural machinery” through “serious threats like wielding melee weapons against Biopalma employees.”

Fewer game animals, more pests

The arrival of the oil palm plantations in the Amazon has driven out the wildlife that Indigenous and traditional communities often hunt for food and ushered in an influx of disease-carrying insects and venomous snakes, the communities say.

Before the plantations encircled the reserve, “we [easily] found, very close to here, paca, armadillo, a lot of fish,” said Nazaré Coutinho Pereira from Acará-Mirim village. “Hunting has changed because there are no more [animals]. It is difficult for us to find [animals to hunt] … There’s nothing else [left], neither hunting nor fish.”

In Yriwar village, residents say game animals like tapir and tortoise have disappeared since Biopalma arrived. And even when they do catch animals, they are afraid to eat them due to the risk of pesticide poisoning. The few animals that remain, such as foxes, reportedly also suffer symptoms such as hair loss, while many others have been found dead from no obvious cause, according to Lúcio Tembé.

The cultivation of oil palms close to Indigenous reserves affects livelihoods and lifestyle quality in other ways beyond depriving residents of hunting and fishing. Urutaw Tembé said they have seen an increase in the number of insects and snakes.

The plantations “touched our territory [and] didn’t respect the buffer zone. This has brought us a lot of damage today: insects, lizards … that we had never seen [before]. Venomous snakes, many snake species … flies, flies that bother us. It ends up hurting the children’s bodies, triggering allergies,” he said.

According to Indigenous residents, the swarms of pests are caused by the loss of native vegetation and the large number of rodents attracted by fallen palm leaves. The snakes, in turn, are drawn by the abundance of the rodents, posing a serious health threat to residents, for whom the nearest clinic is an hour’s drive away and the closest hospital about four hours away.

Urutaw Tembé also complained about the damage caused by the planting of pueraria (Pueraria phaseoloides), a crop in the pea family that is used by the oil palm companies to fix nitrogen in the soil, control weeds, and reduce erosion. The Tembé say it attracts insects during the dry season that burrow beneath the skin, causing rashes.

Forests replaced by palm crops

Biopalma has said in the past that it established its plantations only on already cleared land, but Indigenous residents and researchers dispute this.

Sandra Damiani from UnB, who investigated the pesticide use in the area, said she found evidence of about 300 hectares (740 acres) of deforestation for oil palm around Turé-Mariquita, where old-growth forests were felled as loggers first encroached, followed by agricultural settlers, a mining company whose pipeline crosses the reserve, and finally by Biopalma.

Studies have shown that the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations is a major problem, not only locally, but across northeast Pará. Research suggests between 9% and 39% of oil palm production occurred in deforested areas in Pará between 1989 and 2014, raising concerns about future expansion. This casts into doubt Biopalma’s claim, and that of other companies, that their oil palm production stems only from previously cleared land.

Another study found that 40% of oil palm expansion in Pará had replaced woody vegetation, despite the government’s ban on oil palm plantations expanding into forests and lands deforested before 2008.

The use of heavy machinery on the plantations also has an impact on biodiversity by scaring off game animals, Damiani said. The reduction in both abundance and diversity of animals was noticed immediately by Indigenous people after the planting of palm oil crops bordering their land, she said. Numerous bird species, for example, were no longer seen after the conversion to oil palm.

The native vegetation in the now-deforested territory outside the Indigenous reserve was important for the community to collect non-timber forest products, including herbs and honey that are used as medicines, vines for making of utensils, seeds for handicrafts, and fruits such as pequiá (Caryocar villosum), uxi (Endopleura uchi), bacuri (Platonia insignis) and bacaba (Oenocarpus bacaba).

The Indigenous people initially welcomed the increased access to urban centers that the new roads laid by Biopalma facilitated. But the roads also increased exposure to outsiders, making them feel that they were losing control of their territory. Another consequence of more roads has been an increase in illegal logging in the area. Numerous studies in the Amazon have identified road construction as an important vector of deforestation, and the Mongabay team regularly saw trucks loaded with timber passing through the area.

In a statement, BBF said it has identified “the role of illegal deforestation gangs in areas close to its farms” since it took control of Biopalma in November 2020 and had reported the allegations to the authorities. It added that palm oil crops were “planted in the parcels of land authorized under the terms of the applicable environmental legislation.”

Deforestation in quilombola areas is also occurring as the direct result of oil palm expansion. Nearly 4,800 hectares (11,900 acres) of forest was cleared between 2007 and 2018 to make way for oil palms in the municipality of Acará, according to research by Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva at São Paulo State University (UNESP). The study looked at satellite imagery from Mapbiomas — a network of NGOs, universities and tech firms that include Google — and crosschecked them with NASA’s Landsat 5 and 8 data.

This further disproves the companies’ and government’s claims that oil palm plantations were established only on previously cleared land.

In 2010, the federal government launched an agroecological zoning program for palm oil cultivation in deforested areas in the states that make up the Brazilian Amazon. Called ZAE-Dendê, it offered benefits to palm oil companies for meeting certain sustainability requirements. But as Damiani and da Silva found in their research, some areas were deforested and overlapped onto traditional quilombola communities.

Adriano Venturieri, the researcher who led the palm oil agroecological zoning program, said the quilombola communities were not considered because their presence was not formally acknowledged at the time. He added the program may be updated at any time to include this data.

Quilombolas affected

Like the Indigenous communities impacted by the plantations, the quilombola communities in Acará — the third-largest palm oil-producing municipality in Brazil —complain about similar issues arising from the plantations, including deforestation, reduced water levels in their streams, and pesticide pollution.

“They wanted to plant oil palm here. We did not allow it,” José Renato Gomes de Gusmão told Mongabay at his home in 19 de Massaranduba, a quilombola village in the Tomé-Açu region. “People who live close [to the palm plantations] got sick [with] too much poison. The waters are gone, with so much poison that they throw. The streams are all gone.

“I don’t like it,” he added. “The palm brought a lot of income, a lot of jobs… [But] it is not healthy.”

Researchers Brian Garvey and Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva said they heard similar stories of water contamination in quilombola communities close to the Acará River. In 2016, a palm oil spill in the river left a yellow slick on the water’s surface for more than a week. Quilombola communities including Vila Formosa village, where the protest over Biopalma’s ferry began, were devastated as the fish they relied on died out. Since then, fish catches have declined, and even the river dolphins have disappeared, residents say.

In 2019, two palm oil spills near Agropalma’s plantations in Tailândia polluted the Acará River and its tributaries. The company’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said all of the oil was collected and the impact was “virtually nonexistent.”

“We have the floating barriers that surround oil in the river … We managed to surround the oil there and we managed to collect it to the last drop,” he told Mongabay. “No fish, no tree died. So, there was no environmental impact. Although the volume was a few tons of hollow oil, which is a relatively large volume, the environmental impact was zero, objectively speaking … We have all the proof: the photo before, the photo after.”

Elielson da Silva from UFPA visited the area in the days after the second oil spill in October 2019 and documented the environmental impacts, including water contamination and the death of animals and fish. “There was contamination. I was there. I photographed people, I witnessed the [damages of the] oil spill,” he told Mongabay, adding that residents said that there were three oil spills that year.

Water contamination issues derived from both pesticides and oil spills have been faced by quilombola communities close to Agropalma’s concession for several decades, but the situation worsens each year, especially the degree of fish contamination, a quilombola, who talked on condition of anonymity after receiving death threats, told Mongabay.

“The water is muddy, it’s dark; it’s so dark that we cannot have any visibility,” the source said.

After the 2019 oil spills, the source noted, one of the main impacts was scarcity of fish. The fishes are only coming back now, the source noted. “The fish eat the palm oil; it fills its belly. Then you go fishing, when you open the fish, where its tripe ends from its gills, everything is full of oil palm… The oil hardens inside the fish… The fish dies with that inside.”

Photographs from an environmental inspection released by Tailândia municipality and seen by Mongabay corroborate the allegations of negative environmental impacts from Agropalma’s oil spill. The document, dated May 2019, ordered that steps be taken to repair the rivers and streams.

In a statement, Semas-PA said it had recorded an infraction notice against Agropalma, without providing further details.

Community-wide impacts

During our investigation, we witnessed how the oil palm plantations impact the daily lives of people living in the wider Pará community — at a school, for example, which was surrounded by palm trees. Although the companies say the agrochemicals they use are not toxic, this particular school endured a forced three-day closure while the firm was spraying, residents told Mongabay.

“There was no class for three days [and] no one could pass through the area,” said Alex de Oliveira Pimentel, a local farmer. “[The company] said [the pesticide used] was organic, [that] it wasn’t unhealthy… But the requirement was that nobody could pass through the area for 48 hours.”

Beyond the contamination of the soil and water, Pimentel said farmers have lost their crops due to the spread of pests and disease from the palm plantations, including butterfly infestations destroying fruit crops like dragon fruit and cashew.

When the big agribusiness companies first came to the Tomé-Açu region, they approached several small farmers with an offer to lease their lands for oil palm cultivation. Some resisted, unwilling to turn over their land to grow a then-unknown crop.

Among them was José Edimilson Ramos Rodrigues, one of many farmers in his community who rejected the lease offer. But that has not stopped the community from feeling the impact of the plantations, which now surround them. The residents have regularly complained about water contamination, reduced fish catches, and animal deaths since the oil palms were planted close to the river.

Rodrigues said he has noticed some changes in local crops, including a vine that now grows in coconut trees and which he said didn’t exist before. He said the damage done far outweighs any benefits from the lease offer. “There’s no way. What we must do is try to avoid … so that it won’t happen again,” he said.

Lax agrochemical controls

The spread of pesticide use in Indigenous and traditional communities has once again shone a light on the lax regulatory climate governing the sales and use of harmful chemicals in Brazil. Only one company is officially approved by Pará state to sell pesticides in Tailândia, but a thriving illegal market has flourished, selling glyphosate under the local name mata-mato. The farmers’ union in Tailândia, Sintraf, told UFPA researcher Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz that the palm oil companies do not dispose of the packaging properly, opening the possibility for misuse later on. Proper package disposal is regulated by a federal law, which holds the farmer, vendor and manufacturer legally responsible for any such misuse.

Tailândia’s farmers also said they were initially given personal protective equipment by Agropalma and BBB, but the supplies were short-lived, even though people began falling ill due to the use of pesticides.

Brito, the Agropalma director, denied all the accusations. According to him, the company collects the agrochemical packaging, which is incinerated. He said Agropalma also controls all glyphosate provided to farmers and provides appropriate safety equipment.

Cabral, BBB spokesman, said it is common for farmers to plant other crops in areas adjacent to palm groves, which are managed separately. Pesticide packaging supplied by the company is “inert and recyclable” and is collected by local companies after use; the use of appropriate safety equipment is also inspected, he added.

Sintraf also told Cruz that the use of pesticides by the palm oil firms had led many local farmers to adopt new practices, heavily reliant on agrochemical use, and abandon their traditional farming methods. This has compounded the pollution of rivers, as up to half the farmers in some communities have switched to using pesticides.

The Ministry of Health launched a health surveillance program in the 1990s for people exposed to pesticides, but the system failed to produce any reports for Tailândia, Cruz noted.

For some federal prosecutors, the problems caused by the palm oil industry’s inroads into the Amazon over the past decade are a repeat of what they witnessed with the cattle, soy and mining sectors and all development projects.

“The palm oil [sector] doesn’t differ at all from the other monocultures established here in the Amazon,” prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva told Mongabay. “The modus operandi follows a primer as well, which is a primer for violating the rights of communities.”

In Tomé-Açú, game animals and fish were once plentiful. Now only oil palm trees grow, in some cases within meters of the Indigenous reserves.

“The palm oil company left us in a space like an egg … Only the company profits,” said Urutaw Tembé, pointing to oil palms just a few feet from his home in Yriwar village. “We are dying with pesticides, with water contamination. How does a company like this come from outside to enrich [itself] on our land? We don’t accept it … We will keep fighting.”

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Karla Mendes is a staff contributing editor for Mongabay in Brazil. Find her on Twitter: @karlamendes

Citations:

Damiani, S., Ferreira Guimarães, S. M., Leite Montalvão, M. T., & Sousa Passos, C. J. (2020). “All that’s left is bare land and sky”: Palm oil culture and socioenvironmental impacts on a Tembé Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon. Ambiente & Sociedade, 23. doi:10.1590/1809-4422asoc20190049r2vu2020l6ao

Da Silva, J. M. O. (2020). O território quilombola do Alto Acará/PA como resistência à expansão do agronegócio do dendê (The quilombola territory of Alto Acará / PA as resistance to the expansion of palm oil agribusiness) (Master’s thesis, São Paulo State University, São Paulo, Brazil). Retrieved from https://repositorio.unesp.br/handle/11449/194439

Kogevinas, M. (2019). Probable carcinogenicity of glyphosate. BMJ, 365, l1613. doi:10.1136/bmj.l1613

Benami, E., Curran, L. M., Cochrane, M., Venturieri, A., Franco, R., Kneipp, J., & Swartos, A. (2018). Oil palm land conversion in Parà, Brazil, from 2006-2014: Evaluating the 2010 Brazilian sustainable palm oil production program. Environmental Research Letters, 13(3), 034037. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aaa270

Cruz, R. H. (2018). Impactos socioambientais de produção de palma de dendê na Amazônia paraense: Uso de agrotóxicos e poluição ambiental nas sub-bacias hidrográficas, Tailândia (PA) (Socioenvironmental impacts of palm oil production in Amazonian Pará: Use of pesticides and environmental pollution in hydrographic sub-basins, Tailândia (PA)) (Master’s thesis, Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil). Retrieved from http://repositorio.ufpa.br/jspui/handle/2011/10316

Smedbol, É., Gomes, M. P., Paquet, S., Labrecque, M., Lepage, L., Lucotte, M., & Juneau, P. (2018). Effects of low concentrations of glyphosate-based herbicide factor 540® on an agricultural stream freshwater phytoplankton community. Chemosphere, 192, 133-141. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2017.10.128

Damiani, S. (2017). Impactos socioambientais do cultivo de dendê na terra indígena Turé-Mariquita no nordeste do Pará (Socioenvironmental impacts of oil palm cultivation in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Territory in northeastern Pará) (Master’s thesis, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil). Retrieved from https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/31503

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Myers, J. P., Antoniou, M. N., Blumberg, B., Carroll, L., Colborn, T., Everett, L. G., … Benbrook, C. M. (2016). Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks associated with exposures: A consensus statement. Environmental Health, 15(1). doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0117-0

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Pornographic distortions: The struggle for intimacy in the 21st Century

by DGR News Service | Apr 8, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Male Violence, Pornography, Women & Radical Feminism

Robert Jensen is a rare and important example of a man embracing radical feministm. As radical feminist organisation, DGR encourages men to step up against patriarchy (and this neither means to be a man-hater nor a sexual prude). As Robert Jensen states below, “Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us.”
This certainly includes pornography.

This article originally appeared on feministcurrent.

by Robert Jensen

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Let’s start with the world according to pornographers:

Sex is natural. Pornography is just sex on film. Therefore, pornography is natural.

If you do not accept the obvious “logic” of that argument, you are a prude who is sex-negative.

Any questions?

But what about the intense misogyny in pornography?

You’re a prude.

But what about the explicit racism in pornography?

You’re sex-negative.

What about the physical and psychological injuries routinely suffered by women used in pornography?

You’re prudishly sex-negative.

What about the consequences of conditioning so many men’s arousal and experience of sexual pleasure to these sexist and racist images?

You’re sex-negatively prudish.

If your concerns about pornography flow from spirituality, you must be a religious nut.

If your concerns about pornography are based in feminism, you must be a man-hater.

Sadly, this is often how attempts to discuss the social problems flowing from the production and consumption of contemporary sexually explicit media play out—especially in conversations with liberal, progressive, and leftist men, and with some feminists who describe themselves as pro-porn or “sex positive.”

My goal is to mark those responses as diversions; focus on the content of pornography and its underlying ideology; examine why such material is so prevalent; and discuss why this matters for our attempts to create a truly sex-positive society that fosters meaningful autonomy for girls and women.

So, “pornographic distortions,” refers both to the ways in which pornography distorts human sexuality, and the way in which pornography’s defenders distort the views of critics. Let’s start with the latter.

Pornography’s critics

For the record, I am not a religious nut nor a man-hater.

I am a secular progressive Christian. By that, I mean that I was raised in a predominantly Christian culture, and the narratives and ethics of Christianity remain relevant in my life, even though I don’t accept all Christian doctrines and I long ago rejected the supernatural claims associated with a conventional interpretation of the faith tradition (i.e., a virgin birth and resurrection as historical facts, the possibility of miracles, the existence of a divine entity). But those stories and moral frameworks have influenced how I see the world, in conversation with many other philosophical and political traditions that I find helpful. I see no reason to ignore this aspect of my life.

I work from a radical feminist analysis of patriarchy. By that, I mean that I recognize institutionalized male dominance as morally unjust and not only an impediment to women’s freedom but to social justice more generally (that’s feminism), and central to patriarchy are men’s attempts to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality (that’s radical feminism). I see no reason to be afraid of that analysis.

In more than three decades of work in the feminist anti-pornography movement and the larger struggle against men’s violence and exploitation of women, I have worked with a wide range of people motivated by religion and/or feminism. I have met many lovely people, from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of experiences, who reject the pornography industry’s cynical approach to human sexuality and are committed to challenging the routine abuse of women in the sexual-exploitation industries. I have yet to meet someone who is a prude or sex-negative. Such people exist, of course, but they aren’t a part of the movement I am part of. Most of us in the anti-pornography movement struggle to understand the complexity of sexuality, which is true of most people I meet. Some of us in the movement have sexual histories marked by trauma, which also makes us pretty “normal,” given how routine sexual violence is in patriarchal cultures. Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us. We struggle to make a truly sex-positive culture possible.

That’s as much time as I am willing to spend trying to persuade people that I’m not crazy or hateful. Let’s move on to the more important task of understanding how and why the pornography industry offers such a destructive picture of human sexuality.

The pornography industry

Let’s start with terminology. I used the term “sexual-exploitation industries” to include prostitution, strip clubs, massage parlors, and escort services, along with pornography and other mediated forms of commercial sex. Applying a feminist analysis, all of these enterprises are ways that men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure. Boys and vulnerable men are also exploited in these industries, but the majority of these businesses offer men the opportunity to buy women and girls.

Pornography is also a form of mass media. Applying a media analysis, we examine the production process, the stories being told, and audience reception. How is pornography made and who profits? What are the patterns and themes in pornographic images and stories? How do the consumers of pornography use the material in their lives and with what effects?

I’ll focus here on the content of pornography, but first let’s recognize the importance of understanding production and reception.

How is pornography made? Andrea Dworkin, the writer/activist so central to the feminist critique, always emphasized that what you see in pornography is not simulated sex. The sex acts being performed on a woman that appear to be uncomfortable or painful were done to a real woman. Did that woman choose that? In some sense yes, but under what conditions and with what other choices available? What constraints did she face in her life and what opportunities did she have? And whatever level of choice she made doesn’t change the nature of the injuries that women sustain. Before we even ask about women’s choices, we should focus on men: Why do men choose to use pornography that exploits women?

There are many different genres in pornography, but the bulk of the market is heterosexual sex marketed to heterosexual men, who use it as a masturbation facilitator. There is a long debate about the relationship of pornography use and sexual violence, a question with no simple answer. But, as advertisers have long observed, exposure to media messages can affect attitudes and attitudes shape behavior. We know that people, especially young people, are prone to imitating behaviors they see in mass media that are presented as fashionable or exciting. Consider the advice a university sex researcher offers to male students: “If you’re with somebody for the first time, don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.” Why would such advice be necessary? Those acts are routine in pornography, and pornography is the de facto sex education for many boys and young men.

Pornographic images

My focus here is on pornographic images, specifically those produced by the heterosexual pornography industry. We’ll use a simple definition for pornography: Graphic sexually explicit material that is designed to produce sexual arousal, with a focus on material produced for men, who are the majority of the consumers. While women’s use of pornography has increased in recent years, the industry still produces material that reflects the male sexual imagination in patriarchy.

A bit of history is useful in understanding these images. The pornography industry operated largely underground until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it began being more accepted in mainstream society. That led to a sharp increase in the amount of pornography produced, a trend that expanded dramatically with new media technologies, such as VCRs, DVDs, and the internet.

The industry’s desire to increase profits drove the development of new products, in this case a wider variety of sexual acts in pornographic films. The standard sexual script in pornography — little or no foreplay, oral sex (primarily performed by women on men), vaginal intercourse, and occasionally anal intercourse — expanded to keep viewers from becoming satiated and drifting away. In capitalism, competition for market share produces “innovation,” though more often than not innovation means a slightly different version of products we didn’t need in the first place. In that sense, pornography is a quintessentially capitalist business.

The first of those changes was the more routine presentation of men penetrating women anally, in increasingly rough fashion. Why anal? One longtime pornography producer whom I interviewed at an industry trade show explained it to me in explicit language, which I’ll paraphrase. Men know that most women don’t want anal sex, he said. So, when men get angry at their wives and girlfriends, they think to themselves, “I’d like to fuck her in the ass.” Because they can’t necessarily do that in real life, he said, they love it in pornography.

That man didn’t realize he was articulating, in his own crude fashion, a radical feminist critique: pornography is not just sex on film but rather sex in the context of male domination and female subordination, the central dynamic of patriarchy. The sexual experience in pornography is made more intense with sex acts that men find pleasurable but women may not want.

Where did the industry go from there? As pornographers sought to expand market share and profit, they continued to innovate. Here are several pornographic sex practices — acts that are typically not part of most people’s real-world sex lives but are common in pornography — that followed the normalizing of anal sex:

• double penetration (two men penetrating a woman vaginally and anally at the same time);
• double vag (two men penetrating a woman vaginally at the same time);
• double anal (two men penetrating a woman anally at the same time);
• gagging (oral penetration of a woman so aggressive that it makes her gag);
• choking (men forcefully grasping a woman’s throat during intercourse, sometimes choking the woman); and
• ATM (industry slang for ass-to-mouth, when a man removes his penis from the anus of a woman and, without visible cleaning, inserts his penis into her mouth or the mouth of another woman).

Other routine acts in pornography include slapping and spitting on women, pulling women’s hair, and ejaculating on women’s bodies (long called “the money shot”), especially on their faces (what has come to be called a “facial”).

Even pornographers acknowledge that they can’t imagine what comes after all this. One industry veteran told me that everything that could be done to a woman’s body had been filmed. “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?” he said. A director I interviewed echoed that, wondering “Where can it go besides [multiple penetrations]? Every hole is filled.” Another director worried that pornography was going too far and that porn sex increasingly resembled “circus acts.” “The thing about it is,” he told me, “there’s only but so many holes, only but so many different types of penetration that can be executed upon a woman.”

One pornographic genre that explores other forms of degradation is called “interracial,” which has expanded in the past two decades. Films in this category can feature any combination of racial groups, but virtually all employ racist stereotypes (the hot-blooded Latina, sexually animalistic black women, demure Asian “geishas” who live to serve white men, immigrant women who are easily exploited) and racist language (I’ll spare you examples of that). One of the most common interracial scenes is a white woman being penetrated by one or more black men, who are presented as being rougher and more aggressive, drawing on the racist stereotype of black men as a threat to the purity of white women, while at the same time revealing the white woman to be nothing but a slut who seeks such defilement. This racism would be denounced in any other mass media form but continues in pornography with little or no objection from most progressives.

Finally, in recent years there has been an increase in what my friend Gail Dines calls “pseudo-child pornography.” Sexually explicit material using minors is illegal and is vigorously prosecuted, and so mainstream pornography stays away from actual child pornography. But the industry uses young-looking adult women in childlike settings (the classic image is a petite woman, almost always white, in a girls’ school uniform) to create the impression that an adult man can have the high school cheerleader of his fantasy. Another popular version features stepfathers having sex with a teenage stepdaughters. This material is not marketed specifically to pedophiles but is part of the mainstream pornography market for “ordinary” guys.

Dines’ summary of contemporary pornography captures these trends: “Today’s mainstream Internet porn is brutal and cruel, with body-punishing sex acts that debase and dehumanize women.”

Radical feminist critique

For those familiar with the radical feminist critique of pornography, these trends are not surprising. If the pornography is not just the presentation of explicit sex but rather sex in the patriarchal domination/subordination dynamic, then pornographers will find it profitable to sexualize any and all forms of inequality.

This analysis, developed within the larger feminist project of challenging men’s violence against women, was first articulated clearly by Andrea Dworkin, who identified what we can call the elements of the pornographic:

• Objectification: when “a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold.”
• Hierarchy: “a group on top (men) and a group on the bottom (women).”
• Submission: when acts of obedience and compliance become necessary for survival, members of oppressed groups learn to anticipate the orders and desires of those who have power over them, and their compliance is then used by the dominant group to justify its dominance.
• Violence: “systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence.”

Although there is variation in the thousands of commercial pornographic films produced over the years, the main themes have remained consistent: (1) All women always want sex from men; (2) women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and; (3) any woman who resists can be aroused by force, which is rarely necessary because most of the women in pornography are the “nymphomaniacs” of men’s fantasies. While both men and women are portrayed as hypersexual, men typically are the sexual subjects, who control the action and dictate the terms of the sex. Women are the sexual objects fulfilling male desire.

The radical feminist critique demonstrates not only that almost all sexually explicit material is pornographic, in the sense of reflecting and reinforcing patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic, but that pop culture is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a specific genre, but those elements of the pornographic also are present in other media, including Hollywood movies, television shows, video games, and advertising.

Intimacy

Let’s ask a simple question the pornographers would prefer we ignore: What kind of intimacy is possible in a pornographic world? I don’t mean just in pornography, but in a world in which this kind of pornography is widely used and widely accepted. Let’s go back to the connection between media use and behavior, which is complex. Does repeated exposure to advertising lead us to buy products we would not otherwise buy? Do violent scenes in movies or video games lead to increased rates of violence in people with a predisposition for violence? Definitive judgments are difficult, but we know that stories have the power to shape attitudes and attitudes effect behavior. We know that orgasm is a powerful reinforcer. We have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the sexist and racist messages in pornography might influence the attitudes and behavior of pornography consumers. And we have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the normalizing of pornographic images throughout the culture might shape how we all relate to our own bodies and understand sexuality in ways we aren’t aware of.

That all seems obvious, but industry defenders continue to assert that pornography is just fantasy and we shouldn’t police people’s fantasies. They want us to believe that in this one realm of human life — the use of sexually explicit media as a masturbation facilitator, primarily for men — people are unaffected by the power of stories and images. Even if that implausible claim were true, we still should ask, why are these particular fantasies so popular? When pornographers entered the mainstream and faced fewer restrictions, why did they create so many fantasies around male domination and female subordination? Why did they sexualize racist fantasies? Why did they encourage adult men to fantasize about having sex with teenagers? Why are pornography’s fantasies so routinely cruel and degrading to women?

There isn’t a neat and clean separation of our imaginations and our actions, between what goes on in our heads and what we do in the world. Even if we don’t know exactly how mass-mediated stories and images — what the pornographers and their supporters want to label as “just fantasy” — affect attitudes and behavior, we have reasons to be concerned about contemporary pornography.

And following Andrea Dworkin, let’s also not forget the women used in pornography. For men to masturbate to a double-anal scene, a woman must be penetrated anally by two men at the same time. Do we care about that woman? Do we care about what ideas those men carry around in their head? Think back to the advice the sex educator gives to young men, counseling them to stop behaving the way that pornography taught them to behave. Do we care about the female partners of those men?

These are not problems of a few individuals. I’ve talked to many young women who have told me that when they were in middle school and high school, they conformed to boys’ pornographic notions of sex without realizing what was happening to them. Some of those same women have told me that they would prefer to date men who don’t use pornography but they’ve given up because such men are so hard to find. I’ve talked to many adult women who don’t want to ask their boyfriends or husbands whether they use pornography, or inquire about what kind of pornography they might use, because they are afraid of the answer. I’ve talked to gay men who say that some of the same problems exist in their community.

I’ve talked to a lot of men who defend their pornography use and are unwilling to stop. But in recent years I’ve talked with more men who realize the negative effects of using this pornography but find it hard to stop. They report compulsive, addictive-like use of pornography, sometimes to the point of being unable to function sexually with a partner. These men feel profoundly alienated from themselves, from their own bodies.

Heat and light

The radical feminist critique of the misogyny and racism in pornography isn’t about denying humans’ sexual nature. It is not about imposing a single set of sexual norms on everyone. It’s not about hatred of men. The critique of the domination/subordination dynamic in pornography is about the struggle to transcend the patriarchal sexuality of contemporary culture in search of a sexuality that connects people rather than alienates us from each other and from our own bodies.

I have no simple prescriptions for how to move forward, though I see no way forward without a radical feminist critique. We struggle for intimacy, for connection, for something that feels more authentic than the pornographic script. We can start by recognizing how we have all been socialized, whether through traditional religion or secular society or both, into patriarchal values. That’s bound to be painful — for men when we realize we’ve been trained to dominate sexually, and for women when they realize they have been trained to accept sexual subordination.

I will end with an idea I first articulated 25 years ago and continue to ponder. A common way people talk about sex in the dominant culture is in terms of heat: She’s hot, he’s a hottie, we had hot sex. In a world obsessed with hotness, we focus on appearances and technique — whether someone looks the way we are socialized to believe attractive people should look, and the mechanics of sex acts. We hope that the right look and the right moves will produce heat. Sex is all bump-and-grind — the friction produces the heat, and the heat makes the sex good.

But we should remember a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding—we say that such an argument “produced more heat than light.”

Heat is part of life, but what if in our sexual activity, our search for intimacy and connection, we obsessed less about heat and thought more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if that touch could be about finding a way to generate light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better?

If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path. How do we touch and talk to each other to shine that light? I am hesitant to suggest strategies; there isn’t a recipe book for that, no list of sexual positions to work through so that we may reach sexual bliss. There is only the ongoing quest to touch and be touched, to be truly alive. James Baldwin, as he so often did, got to the heart of this in a comment that is often quoted and a good place to conclude:

“I think the inability to love is the central problem, because the inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And, if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And, if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.”

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An edited version of this essay was recorded for presentation at the online Canadian Sexual Exploitation Summit hosted by Defend Dignity, May 6-7, 2021.

Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with the Ecosphere Studies program at The Land Institute in Salina, KS. Jensen is the author of The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability; The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men; Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully; Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.

Jensen is host of “Podcast from the Prairie” with Wes Jackson and associate producer of the forthcoming documentary film Prairie Prophecy: The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson. 

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw

Logging company moves into intact Gabon forest as village fights to save it

by DGR News Service | Apr 7, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Indigenous Autonomy

DGR stands in fierce solidarity with all people who resist logging. Let’s not forget that the legal system is set up by the rich and powerful to serve them, which is why it has proven ineffective in resisting the destruction by large companies in most cases.

This article was originally published on Mongabay on 31 March 2021.

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by Benjamin Evine-Binet

• Transport Bois Négoce International (TBNI), a Chinese forestry company, has built new roads in preparation to cut timber in a concession which includes a previously unlogged forest in northeastern Gabon.
• Residents of the village of Massaha, on the northern edge of this forest, have been managing hunting and other use of this forest since 2019; they formally requested reclassification of the forest as a protected area in August 2020.
• Gabon’s forest code makes explicit provision for local communities to initiate reclassification of sensitive forest as a protected area, and villagers are anxious for the government to respond before TBNI advances any further.

A forestry company in Gabon has built new roads to log a forest in the northeastern province of Ogooué-Ivindo. Villagers had applied to the government last August to reclassify this valuable forest as a protected area, and say they are alarmed by the company’s rapid advance while they wait for a formal response.

Rural communities in this area rely on local forests for fishing, hunting and gathering. These livelihoods and the wildlife populations they depend on are increasingly threatened by mining, intensive logging, and poaching for the illegal ivory trade and unregulated commercial hunting for bushmeat. A massive increase in logging by foreign companies over the last decade — around 40 companies hold logging concessions covering most of the area — and associated road building has opened access to formerly intact forests and razed local ecosystems.

In response, three Ogooué-Ivindo villages have taken steps to protect the environment and their way of life. The villages of Latta, Ebessi, and Massaha have established management plans to regulate hunting practices and delineate informal protected reserves in their forests.

Massaha village: the first Gabonese community to apply to the government to declare its forest a protected area

With logging rapidly expanding, the village of Massaha, 56 kilometers (35 miles) from the provincial capital of Makokou, has gone one step further. A portion of the forest relied on by villagers is also part of a vast 41,000-hectare (101,300-acre) logging concession (called UFG-2, Unité forestières de gestion 2) held by a Chinese forestry company, Transport Bois Négoce International (TBNI). The company was the subject of a 2019 investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which exposed TBNI’s involvement in bribery, transfer pricing and other corrupt methods to evade taxes and maximize profits.

Massaha has submitted an official request for 11,300 hectares (27,900 acres) of UFG-2 to be reclassified as a protected area with sustainable hunting management.

A pioneering application of Gabon’s Forest Code:      Under Articles 55 and 67 of Gabon’s Forest Code, an area already allocated for forestry may be declassified when “significant biological richness, high heritage value, or substantial environmental risks” are identified. The villagers of Massaha have applied for 11,300 ha (27,900 acres) of the logging concession known as Unité forestières de gestion 2 to be declassified following the procedure set out in Article 2 of Decree No. 001032-PE-MEFEPEPN of 1/12/2004, which states that such a process may be initiated at the request of a local community.

According to Gabon’s Forest Code, forest already allocated to a logging concession may be declassified if it is found to have “significant biological richness, high heritage value, or substantial environmental risks.” Outlining the procedure for such reclassification, the code explicitly states that the process may be initiated “at the express request of a local community.” This is the first time that a rural Gabonese community has launched such an appeal.

The forest in the concession area south of the Liboumba River has never been logged. It is home to threatened species such as forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis), chimpanzees, gorillas, leopards, and pangolins, as well as an abundance of centuries-old trees including protected species such as moabi (Baillonella toxisperma) and kevazingo (Guibourtia tesmannii).

The villagers use their forest for hunting, fishing, and farming; the forest here also contains ancestral villages and ritual sites of invaluable cultural wealth. Serge Ekazama-Koto, a local researcher, explains what is at stake for his community: “TBNI’s logging practices in this area will inevitably destroy the entire foundation of our village. We do not want to be a village without roots or history; our ancestors founded this village, their graves are found there, and the forest is sacred to us.”

Two new logging roads already open, sign of imminent logging by TBNI

Since 2018, authorization for logging is conditional upon companies having a state-validated wildlife protection plan, drawn up with the participation of all stakeholders and readily accessible to all interested parties. While its wildlife protection plan is still under review, TBNI has been allowed to continue logging. The company’s wildlife manager for the area, Junior Peme, told Mongabay the company is using camera traps to determine the species diversity in the area, and mapping the impacts of human activity in the area on medium-size and large mammals.

The company’s environmental integrity has been called into question by the village of Latta (whose forest lies in a section of UFG-2 that TBNI has already logged). Community patrols there have found evidence of hunting with wire snares (illegal in Gabon) by company employees inside the village’s self-designated management area, where they themselves have prohibited hunting by outsiders. The village’s management plan is not legally binding but has been acknowledged by both provincial authorities and TBNI.

Peme declined to comment on Massaha’s reclassification request, but the company has already completed an inventory of timber in a portion of the logging concession within the proposed protected area. In February 2021, it built two new logging roads there, running from the national road that passes through the village to near the northern shore of the Liboumba River. Logging could begin at any time, threatening the reclassification request before it has been formally considered. All this with the results of TBNI’s inventories of flora and fauna not available.

Massaha awaiting response from national authorities

The village delivered its request in official letters to the governor of Ogooué-Ivindo, the provincial director of water and forests, and TBNI on Aug. 6, 2020. The provincial director formally responded to the request on Aug. 19, and transferred the file to the national ministerial authority the next day. Following this, village leaders met with him several times. A string of back-and-forth correspondence among the various entities has ensued, but no concrete action has yet been taken. All the while, preparation for logging in the proposed protected area moves forward apace.

The provincial director of water and forests was unavailable for comment, as he is currently out of the province on extended business. But villagers say they are confident their request will find a favorable audience in government. In May 2020, Lee White, Gabon’s minister of forests, oceans, environment and climate change, said the country “must take ownership” of the initiative to protect 30% of lands and seas by 2030, proposed under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

At a village meeting held in Massaha on Feb. 20 this year, the villagers reaffirmed their commitment to seeing their forest reclassified as a protected area. On March 3, they delivered another letter to the provincial director of water and forests, asking for news on the status of their application.

They have yet to receive a reply. But TBNI employees have since arrived and are now staying in the village.

On March 30, the village wrote a letter addressed to the national minister stating they “reserve the right to take multifaceted actions if an answer is not given […] as soon as possible.”

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Benjamin Evine-Binet is the director of Ivindo FM community radio station in Makokou. Madeleine Barois contributed to producing this report.

Special Alert! Take Action! SEND YOUR PHOTOS OF YELLOWSTONE’S WILD BUFFALO TO MONTANA’S GOVERNOR

by DGR News Service | Apr 7, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Lobbying

Special Alert! Take Action! GOVERNOR GIANFORTE PLEASE VETO HB 318 & HB 302       SEND YOUR PHOTOS OF YELLOWSTONE’S WILD BUFFALO TO MONTANA’S GOVERNOR WITH AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE:  PLEASE VETO HB 318 AND HB 302 PLEASE POST THIS URGENT NOTICE ON YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKSOur vote counter anticipates HB 318 and HB 302 will reach Governor Greg Gianforte’s desk by Friday, April 9, and for certain the week of April 12–16. In previous legislative sessions, people from around the country who love wild buffalo rallied public pressure and persuaded Montana’s Governor to veto the worst buffalo bills from becoming law.   We need your help again. Buffalo Field Campaign is encouraging everyone everywhere to send your photos of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo to Governor Greg Gianforte with an important message:  Please recognize there are wild buffalo in Montana and efforts are needed to recover the wild migratory species by vetoing HB 318 and HB 302. Greg Gianforte Office of the Governor PO Box 200801 Helena MT 59620-0801 EMAIL:   governor@mt.gov PHONE:  406-444-3111 TOLL FREE: 855-318-1330 FAX: 406-444-5529 https://svc.mt.gov/gov/contact/shareopinion

Please act now.  Your hand written letters, postcards, phone calls, emails, and personal contacts with the Governor can change outcomes.HB 318 changes the legal definition of “wild” buffalo in a way that appears to not recognize any “wild” buffalo in Montana.  VETO HB 318! HB 302 hands veto power to county officials over any state decision to reintroduce buffalo in Montana.   VETO HB 302! A century ago, buffalo owned by Pablo–Allard and Goodnight were reintroduced into Yellowstone’s northern range and reduced to captivity on the Lamar Buffalo Ranch. Yet HB 318, a bill to change the legal definition of “wild” buffalo, would not recognize a buffalo that “has never been owned by a person.” In 2019, former Governor Steve Bullock vetoed a bill with a similar legal definition used in HB 318 because it “presents unintended consequences” for Yellowstone’s wild herds, not just individual buffalo, which “could be inappropriately deemed domestic.” HB 302 arbitrarily gives a board of county commissioners veto power over the state’s decision to reintroduce American bison.  We agree with the principle of local control for local decisions, but reintroducing American bison, a keystone wildlife species, is a state decision – one in which local communities fully participate. Montana lawmakers already impose costly, unfunded mandates impeding restoration of wild buffalo.  HB 302 further erodes and undermines Montana’s trust responsibility for recovering imperiled American bison. Check our Buffalo Bill Tracker page for timely updates on the status of HB 318 and HB 302. Thank you for taking action for American bison our beloved National Mammal.