This article offers clarity regarding the risks of continuing in an ‘economic growth mindset’. All life on earth needs a stable climate, healthy soil, and protective ozone layers. Without significant, meaningful, global change humans remain on a course that invites climate collapse, this includes pandemics.
By Tom Pegram, Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL,
and Julia Kreienkamp,Researcher at the Global Governance Institute, UCL
As governments around the world roll out COVID-19 vaccine programmes and seek to kickstart their economies back to life, recovery seems to be within reach. However, hard questions must not be sidestepped. How did this pandemic happen? And how resilient are we to future global risks, including the possibility of deadlier pandemics?
Importantly, COVID-19 was not a “black swan” event – an event that cannot be reasonably anticipated. As Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s emergencies programme, made clear in an impassioned address in February, COVID-19 is very much a human-made emergency. By continuing to privilege economic growth over environmental and social sustainability, “we are creating the conditions in which epidemics flourish … and taking huge risks with our future”.
Human civilisation is on a collision course with the laws of ecology.
Experts have long warned of zoonotic diseases jumping the species barrier as a result of growing human encroachment on nature. A 2019 landmark global biodiversity assessment showed that species and ecosystems are declining at rates “unprecedented in human history”.
Biodiversity loss is accelerating, driven by multiple interrelated forces, all of which are ultimately produced or greatly amplified by practices that push economic growth. These include deforestation, agricultural expansion and the intensified consumption of wild animals.
Climate change often steals the headlines, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the prospect of mass biodiversity loss is just as catastrophic. Crucially, these two challenges are deeply interlinked. Global warming is putting massive pressure on many of our most diverse natural ecosystems. In turn, the decline of these vital ecosystems weakens their ability to store carbon and provide protection from extreme weather and other climate-related risks.
These effects cannot be captured in simplified metaphors such as “the war on carbon”, which may be politically expedient but obscure the complexities involved in protecting life-sustaining ecosystems. There is no single measurement that captures the “the variability among living organisms from all sources including … terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part”. In fact, many of the living organisms on Earth are still unknown to humans.
Uncharted territory
Although it has long been argued that there are hard limits to unsustainable economic growth on a finite planet, these arguments have been largely dismissed by western economic powers. But market forces will not abolish natural scarcity or do away with planetary limits.
Belatedly, driven in part by growing public awareness of environmental destruction, economic planners are waking up to our ecological interdependence. As the recent Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the UK Treasury, puts it:
“Our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing all depend on our most precious asset: nature. We are part of nature, not separate from it.”
Buoyed by school climate strikes and the declaration of climate and nature emergencies around the world, UN Secretary General António Guterres has declared 2021 as “the year to reconcile humanity with nature”. However, the lack of progress is sobering. Of the 20 global biodiversity targets agreed in 2010, none have been fully met a decade later.
The international community remains way off track when it comes to implementing the Paris climate agreement. And although the COVID-19 crisis has led major economies to make commitments to build back better and greener, much of the recovery spending is flowing into business-as-usual economies.
A fundamental shift in thinking
How can political reality be brought into alignment with biophysical reality to ensure our societies do not prosper at the expense of the ecological life support systems upon which they ultimately depend?
Economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut-shaped economic model for human development provides one prominent plan of action, placing social and planetary boundaries at the core of governance redesign. In other words making sure that no human being is deprived of life’s essentials (food, shelter, healthcare and so on) while collectively ensuring that we don’t put damaging pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which all humans depend (a stable climate, healthy soil, a protective ozone layer).
But this is just one in a long line of ecological economic blueprints stretching back to at least the 1960s. The question remains: is society ready to relinquish its deep-seated will to power over nature for a different accommodation – one where we live in agreement with nature?
As ecologist Gregory Bateson observed: “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” The COVID-19 pandemic is a canary in the coalmine; more are sure to follow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the environmental challenge requires
“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
What is perhaps less clear from this statement is that the mindset, models and metaphors which shape society’s goals and aspirations must also change. Where might we look for inspiration? According to the Yale Environmental Performance Index, Botswana and Zambia rank first and second in the world for biodiversity and habitat protection. In fact Botswana is unique in that most of its biodiversity remains intact. Such examples hold lessons for how we can converge towards a reconciliation with nature.
Political scientist William Ophuls argues that political struggle must now urgently focus on making ecology the master science and Gaia the key metaphor of our age. In other words, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow above or outside the natural systems that support us. Humanity’s efforts to embrace the politics of ecology could well prove to be the defining story of this century if we are to avoid indulging the tragedy of homo (in)sapiens.
You can read the original article, published in The Conversation, on the 5th March 2021 here. The authors are:
Tom Pegram Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL
It had seemed for the past half century that perhaps the worst of wolf killing was finally over. After centuries of methodic extermination had nearly completely wiped the animals out of the lower forty-eight, government agencies, scientists, and the general public began to see wolves not primarily as threats to private property, but rather, as invaluable ecological assets that stabilized the ecosystems relied upon by many in the West.
In 1974, the gray wolf was one of the first imperiled species to receive federal protections under the newly-passed Endangered Species Act, As wolves were subsequently reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the mid 1990s, and thus began migrating to regain their historic range, they slowly began to recover.
A series of recent events across the country make clear this work of wolf recovery has never been in greater jeopardy.
In January, the Trump administration finalized the removal of gray wolves from the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act and, within a matter of weeks, we witnessed a disturbing new chapter in the nation’s history of needless and irresponsible wolf killing.
In Wisconsin, just two weeks ago, over 27,000 people applied for an ill-conceived hunt during the wolves’ mating season that, in only three days, left 216 gray wolves dead. Shocked state officials had to call off the hunt prematurely, but not before the three-day slaughter led to 82 percent more wolf deaths than the state had allocated for the entire hunting and trapping season.
Meanwhile, in Montana, a state in which wolves lost Endangered Species Act protections in 2011, not by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the “Service), but by a political act of Congress, the federal delisting emboldened the state to up its efforts to eliminate wolves from the landscape. In the past month, the Montana Senate passed a bill allowing for private bounties for dead wolves and the Montana House passed a bill expanding hunting and trapping seasons (and allowing snares) in an effort to further reduce wolf populations. The traps and snares, which often prolong an animal’s death, are indiscriminate and dangerous not only to wolves but also to non-target species. In a recent six-year period in Montana, for example, at least 350 non-target animals, ranging from mountain lions to pet dogs, were caught in traps. Montana’s recent laws to incentivize and further enable wolf hunting are not simply inhumane, they severely threaten to undo gray wolf recovery efforts and destabilize ecosystems.
These recent activities follow on the heels of a similarly unsettling example of failed state-level wolf management in Idaho, where wolves have also been delisted since 2011. There, over a recent twelve-month period, trappers, hunters, and state and federal agencies killed an astounding 570 wolves, including at least thirty-five wolf pups as young as four weeks old. These wolves, some of whom died of hypothermia in traps or were gunned down from helicopters, represented nearly sixty percent of the total estimated wolf population in the state at the end of 2019. This high number of wolf kills directly reflect the state’s wolf policies: Idaho recently increased the legal limit of wolves an individual can kill in a year to thirty, and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game currently funds wolf bounty programs in the state.
Taken together, the examples of Idaho, Wisconsin, and Montana give us all the evidence we need that state-led management does not ensure the protection and recovery of gray wolves.
This horrifying slaughter of wolves in just a few states—based not on science, but on fear and hatred for a long persecuted species—is why WildEarth Guardians has joined a broad coalition of groups across the country to challenge the Service’s decision to delist wolves in court. Wolves have not recovered in the West and the decision to delist them goes against the intent of the Endangered Species Act, which not only mandates the federal government to forestall the extermination of gray wolves but also, crucially, to promote their full recovery. Although this law has played an enormous role in preventing the wholesale loss of gray wolves in the contiguous US, its work to ensure their continued survival and recovery, as these recent examples in Montana, Idaho, and Wisconsin make all too clear, is far from finished.
To let the work of gray wolf recovery go unfinished would be a tragedy hard to tabulate. Gray wolves are a keystone species that play a critical role in the ecological health of their historic range. Being listed under the Endangered Species Act has allowed gray wolves to begin to rebound in the upper Great Lakes region, yet their recovery there does nothing for the populations of gray wolves throughout the West, where the animals remain largely absent or underpopulated in their historic range. For example, in Oregon and Washington, estimates indicate less than 150 wolves in each state while in Colorado, a location in which wolves roamed across all landscapes in the 1800s through early 1900s, has only reported sightings of a handful of lone wolves in the last two years.
The example of success in the upper Great Lakes region should not be used to dismantle wolf protections, but rather, to illustrate the continued need for those protections throughout the country where wolf populations remain extremely vulnerable. Only ongoing federal protections, based on scientific data, will guarantee gray wolves a continued and healthy future in this country. To that end, please urge the Biden administration to restore Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves.
As our nation reckons with its story of conquest, recent killing sprees of gray wolves in the remote forests of Wisconsin or the northern Rockies should not go unnoticed.
The brutal and bloody history of gray wolves—along with other native megafauna such as bison—in our country is inextricably tied to the larger history of colonization and violence that continues to shape our society. Our country has a deep history of White settlers demonizing the animals in folklore and frontier mythology and equating Native Americans to wolves and other animals within the broader project of colonization. Seen in this light, recent wolf hunts such as what we recently witnessed in Wisconsin are not merely mismanaged debacles, they are part of a much deeper, far more tragic, story.
“Wolves symbolized the frustrations and anxieties of colonization,” as historian Jon T. Coleman has written regarding wolf history in this country, “and the canines paid in blood for their utility as metaphor.”
As we are painfully aware, the history of colonization, and of White frustrations and anxieties surrounding colonization, is ongoing. Gray wolves, sadly, may continue to be part of the story. But gray wolves, and the unsound policies and unethical practices aimed at killing them, also present a way to dive deeper into the nation’s history of colonization and violence in search of ways to reconsider a better future. Wolves are “living reminders of colonization,” in Coleman’s words, that “embody an unbroken history of conquest worth pondering and protecting.” As the nation grapples with its history, protecting the gray wolf is not simply about ensuring healthy ecosystems; it is also about preserving a living historical monument to our nation’s violent past and reaffirming a commitment to rise above that legacy of conquest.
This article is the second part of a series that originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism. You can read the first part here.
by Ian Angus
“In the sixteenth and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode.” — Karl Marx[1]
Accounts of transatlantic trade in the 1500s typically focus on what Perry Anderson calls “the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance” — the plunder of precious metals by Spanish invaders in South and Central America.[2] Year after year, well-guarded convoys carried gold and silver to Europe, simultaneously enriching Spain’s absolute monarchy and destabilizing Europe’s economy.
Spain’s treasure fleets certainly played a big role in the long-term development of European capitalism, but they were not alone in creating a disruptive transatlantic economy. While Spanish ships carried silver and gold, a parallel trade involving far more ships developed far to the north. Historians of capitalism, including Marxists, have paid too little attention to what Francis Bacon called “the Gold Mines of the Newfoundland Fishery, of which there is none so rich.”[3]
‘Swarming with fish’
Remarkably little is known about the Venetian navigator who sailed from England to North America in 1497. His real name was Zuan Cabotto, but he was known as Juan Caboto in Spain and John Cabot in England. In 1496, Henry VII granted him letters patent “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”[4] With financial backing from Italian bankers and merchants from the west England port of Bristol, he sailed west on May 2, 1497, in a small ship with about 18 crew.[5] Thirty-five days later, he “discovered” new territory on the far side of the Atlantic.
Of course, the large island that became known as Newfoundland had been discovered long before: there is evidence of human settlement on the island nine thousand years ago, and the Beothuk people had been there for 1500 years when Cabot claimed it for the English king and the Catholic Church. Cabot wasn’t even the first European — Viking explorers briefly settled in Newfoundland around 1000 CE, and it is possible that Basque and Portuguese fishers sailed to the cod-rich waters earlier in the 1400s. Nevertheless, Cabot’s rediscovery of Newfoundland is important to the history of capitalism, because it alerted Europe’s fast-growing merchant class to a major opportunity to profit by expropriating nature’s free gifts.
Like Columbus, John Cabot was seeking a direct route to Asia — as historian Peter Pope writes, he “sought Japan, but his greatest discovery was cod.”[6] Shortly after the Matthew returned to Bristol in August 1497, the Milanese ambassador in London wrote to the Duke of Milan:
“They assert that the Sea there is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with the net but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water. I have heard this Messer Zoane [Cabot] state so much. These same English, his companions, say that they could bring so many fish that this Kingdom would have no further need of Iceland, from which there comes a very great quantity of the fish called stockfish.”[7]
Gold rush
Within a decade of Cabot’s return, fishing “opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush.”[8] By 1510, dozens of ships from France, Spain and Portugal were travelling to the land of cod every spring, and by mid-century there were hundreds. The Newfoundland fishery drove “a 15-fold increase in cod supplies … [and] tripled overall supplies of fish (herring and cod) protein to the European market.”[9] Cod, formerly a distant second to herring, comprised 60% of all fish eaten in Europe by the late sixteenth century.[10]
Some accounts of early modern fishing give the impression that Newfoundland cod were caught by brave independent fishers who crossed the Atlantic in tiny boats. A few may have done that, but not enough to a cause the immense leap in commodity fish production that historians have dubbed the North Atlantic Fish Revolution. That was accomplished by thousands of skilled fishworkers who crossed the ocean in large ships that were financed by merchant capitalists. Transatlantic fishing was big business from the beginning.
Beginning in the 1500s, the Newfoundland fishery developed in two main forms that continued for centuries.
Inshore: Most fishers targeted the cod that come near land to prey on smaller fish each summer. The fish were caught from small open boats and taken ashore every day for processing.
Offshore: Late in the century, French ships began working the Grand Banks, a large, relatively shallow area that extends about 300 kilometers (200 miles) south and east of Newfoundland, where cod gather to spawn. The fish were caught and preserved on the ships, eliminating frequent trips to shore.
Both fisheries developed factory-like operations, with a structured division of labor between workers skilled in the various tasks of catching and preparing fish.
The offshore fishery caught and preserved fish on ships similar to the Dutch herring busses described in Part One. In each ship, up to 20 men worked long days in production lines. The cod were caught by fishers, each working several baited lines at once. Preparers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the fish. Particularly valuable parts such as the liver were set aside, and the rest of the animal was heavily salted and stacked in the ship’s hold. When the hold was full of what was called wet or green (actually pickled) cod, the ship returned to Europe. Some made two or three roundtrips each year.
Inshore operations involved more ships and workers, but were more time-limited, because the best inshore fishing occurred from June to August, when millions of capelin (a small smelt-like fish) spawn in shallow waters, attracting hungry cod.[11]
Each spring, cargo ships travelled from western Europe to bays and inlets along the Newfoundland coast. Each ship carried up to 150 workers, many barrels of salt, and a dozen or so open fishing boats that had been built in Europe, then disassembled for compact storage. Long beaches known for particularly good fishing attracted multiple ships, so some seasonal fishing camps housed thousands of workers at a time.
After landing in May or early June, the workers assembled their boats and built wharves, sleeping huts, work sheds, and outdoor drying racks. As on the offshore ships, there was a factory-like division of labor. Three or four men rowed out in each small boat every morning. When a boat was full — each could hold hundreds of fish — it returned to shore, where skilled workers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the cod. Summers in Newfoundland were too warm for the Norwegian method of freeze-drying, so the fish was lightly salted before being laid out in the sun and turned frequently for several weeks. The result, known as salt-cod or Poor John, was tastier than Norwegian stockfish, and largely replaced it as the leading mass-produced food commodity in England and southern Europe.
The cod were so plentiful that often more were caught and dried than one ship could carry, so an intermediate trade developed in which Dutch merchants on sack ships purchased dried fish from Newfoundland beaches during the season and resold it in Europe.
Through the 16th century, cod fishing was concentrated on Newfoundland’s east and south coasts. A different extractive industry developed near the island’s northwest corner.
The world’s first oil boom
In the 1970s, Selma Huxley Barkham radically changed our understanding of the 16th century fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador. With little institutional support — she taught English part-time to pay her bills — the Canadian archivist spent years in northern Spain, digging through libraries and archives in search of references to 16th century Basque voyages to Terranova. Her discoveries rewrote the history of sixteenth century Newfoundland: she found convincing evidence that in addition to the thousands of men who came for cod, up to 2,000 Basque whalers spent each year in the area now known as the Strait of Belle Isle, between the island’s northern peninsula and the Labrador mainland. Following her leads, archaeologists have found several sunken ships and the remains of over a dozen 16th century whaling stations on the Labrador shore.
Basques from France and Spain had dominated commercial whaling in Europe for five hundred years. Hunting in the Bay of Biscay, they primarily targeted bowhead and right whales, which were large — up to 17 meters long — but much smaller than the animals that deep-sea whalers later hunted to near-extinction. Rights and bowheads were slower, and — a major advantage to the rowers who had to tow them ashore — they remained afloat when killed.
Basque merchants sold salted whale meat, which could be eaten on holy days because the whales were thought to be fish, and baleen, a flexible cartilage that was used to make corsets, buggy whips, umbrellas and such. But the big money maker was whale oil, produced by slowly heating blubber in large cauldrons. Barrels of Basque whale oil were used as far away as England and Germany for textile manufacturing, lighting, soap-making, and caulking ships.[12]
At some point, probably about 1530, Basque fishers discovered that each summer and autumn bowhead whales migrated in large numbers through the Strait of Belle Isle, where they could be caught relatively easily.[13] Intensive whale hunts soon began, with hundreds of teams of Basque whalers travelling annually to the Strait in “ships as large as anything afloat … some of them were capable of carrying up to two thousand barrels of whale oil, which weighed three hundred pounds each.”[14] For four to six months each year they lived and worked in whaling stations that were similar to the temporary cod fishing villages, with a major exception: instead of drying racks they built tryworks — rows of large stone ovens sheltered by tile roofs, where blubber was boiled down.
Whaling was dangerous work for the men and brutal for the whales. When whales were sighted from shore, several teams set out in chalupas — 8-meter long open boats — each crewed by a harpooner, a steersman and four or five oarsmen. Archaeologist James Tuck describes the usual method of attack:
“Whales were approached by rowing the boats to within as close as a meter, at which point the whale was harpooned with a barbed iron harpoon .… [on a rope that was attached] to a “drogue” or drag which the whale towed through the water until it tired…. Often several harpoons were thrust into the same whale and even then the chase might have taken hours and covered miles before the whale could be approached safely and killed by repeated thrusts of a razor-sharp lance. … Once the whale was killed it was towed by several boats — often against tide and wind — to one of the shore stations for processing.”[15]
On shore, flensers (whale butchers) removed the whale’s blubber in long spiral strips and cut it into thin pieces. Tryers heated the blubber slowly in copper cauldrons, controlling the temperature to avoid burning, and periodically skimming off oil and moving it to cooling pots, a process that required days of constant attention and work. The cooled oil was stored in 200-liter barrels that coopers assembled onsite.
Barkham’s research showed that whaling operations in the Strait of Belle Isle were “a resounding financial success from their inception.” She estimated that the Basque whalers produced upwards of 15,000 barrels of whale oil each year, and sold most of it on the way home in Bristol, London and Antwerp.[16]
But as so often happens when natural resources become mass commodities, the exploitation of whales in Newfoundland soon undermined the very basis of the industry. It’s obviously impossible to get exact numbers, but an authoritative study estimates that “as many as a third of the western Atlantic bowhead’s pre-hunt numbers were killed during the course of the 16th century.”[17] Bowhead whales reproduce slowly — females take 15 years to reach sexually maturity, and typically they have only one calf every 3 or 4 years — so the removal of a third of the migrating whales in a few decades had devastating effects.[18] By the early 1680s, overhunting had so reduced the bowhead population that some ships returned to Europe half-empty.
Over the next two decades, whalers shifted their hunts west to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and north to the Arctic, and intensive whaling in Newfoundland’s coastal waters ceased for nearly 300 years.
England vs Spain
Declining catches undoubtedly motivated Spanish Basques to hunt elsewhere, but the geographic shift was made more urgent by conflicts on the far side of the Atlantic.
For most of the 1500s, English ships and fishers were a distinct minority in the Newfoundland fishery, but by the end of the century Spanish ships had all but disappeared, and the English presence was growing rapidly. In the 1570s, about 50 English ships travelled to Newfoundland each year; by 1604 the number had tripled.[19] To understand how and why that happened, we must take a brief detour into European geopolitics.
Part 3 of this article will discuss how England replaced Spain, the role of the Newfoundland fishery in the development of English capitalism, and the environmental impact of early capitalist fishing.
You can find the original publication of Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism here: Part 1Part 2
Notes [1] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, (Pelican, 1981) 450-1.
[2] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 61.
[3] Quoted in D. W. Prouse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records (London: MacMillan & Co., 1895), 54.
[4] “First Letters Patent granted by Henry VII to John Cabot , 5 March 1496,” The Smugglers’ City, Department of History, University of Bristol.
[5] By comparison, five years earlier Columbus had sailed from Spain with three ships and a crew of 86.
[6] Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (University of Toronto Press, 1997), 176.
[7] Quoted in Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington: Island Press, 2007), 33. Stockfish was dried cod.
[8] Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker Publishing, 1997), 51.
[9] Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 2.
[11] Although the cod are gone and capelin stocks are much reduced, the annual “capelin roll” still attracts large numbers of seabirds, whales, and tourists to beaches in Newfoundland and Labrador. The fish swim close to the beach, where they can be easily caught in small nets or even buckets.
[12] Brad Loewen, “Historical Data on the Impact of 16th-Century Basque Whaling on Right and Bowhead Whales in the Western North Atlantic,” Canadian Zooarchaeology, no. 26 (2009): 4.
[13] Until recently, historians believed that Basque whalers caught right whales in summer and bowhead whales in autumn, but DNA analysis of whalebones shows that bowheads made up almost the entire catch. B. Mcleod et al., “Bowhead Whales, and Not Right Whales, Were the Primary Target of 16th- to 17th-century Basque Whalers in the Western North Atlantic,” Arctic 61, no. 1 (March 2008), 61-75.
[14] Frederick W. Rowe, A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), 46.
[15] James A. Tuck, “The World’s First Oil Boom,” Archaeology 40, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), 51.
[16] Selma Huxley Barkham, “The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536-1632 — A Summary,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (December 1984), 518.
[18] The population impact was increased by the common practice of targeting mother-calf pairs: the calf was easy to kill, and the mother could then be harpooned when she approached to save her child.
[19] Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577-1660 (University of Toronto Press, 1969), 602, Kindle.
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In February, IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency permitted Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia to drastically reduce flows to the Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu River for at least a year. That decision reversed an earlier ruling to maintain much higher Xingu River flows and the fishery — as legally required.
The flow reduction will leave 70% of usually-flooded forest dry this season, causing massive fish mortality and diminished reproduction, experts say. Community group Xingu Vivo Para Sempre denounced the decision as “a death sentence for the Xingu” and demanded IBAMA’s and Norte Energia’s presidents be “criminally prosecuted.”
Norte Energia has funded projects to mitigate the reduced flow, collecting and dropping fruit into the river for fish to feed on, and releasing captive-bred fish. But scientists say these approaches are unscientific and will likely be ineffective, and can’t make up for the loss of the river’s seasonal flood pulse, upon which fish depend.
Residents say the government has spread misinformation, telling Brazilian consumers that their electricity bills would go up if Belo Monte released more water to maintain the Xingu’s ecosystem — something Norte Energia is obligated to do. At present, water levels on the Volta Grande have not been restored.
Bel Juruna, of the Juruna (Yudjá) Indigenous people, points her camera at the Xingu River, beside which she lives in Mïratu village in the Paciçamba Indigenous Territory on the 130-kilometer (81-mile) Volta Grande (Big Bend), in Pará state, Brazil.
The video shows a shoulder-high, light-colored waterline streaking a dark exposed boulder. Just days before, that boulder was mostly submerged and the river ran at a much higher level, but its flow has been drastically, suddenly, intentionally, and possibly illegally, reduced — threatening the Xingu’s fishery and the people who depend on it for food and livelihoods.
On February 8, Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia received permission from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, to immediately reduce river flows to less than 13% of normal — shifting the water to the dam’s electricity-producing turbines. This dramatic flow reduction was completely unanticipated by riverine Indigenous and traditional peoples, Bel’s video shows the effects: canoes with outboard motors stranded on dry rocks, aquatic vegetation exposed to the air.
“These plants are usually on the bottom [of the river]; they are water plants. And because the water won’t come [here] any more, they’re all going to die,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s action comes during the piracema, a time of year when fish should be traveling on seasonally rising waters, deep into the flooded forest to feed and spawn. The government’s water reduction decision effectively closes the door on this reproductive window — an opportunity that comes but once a year.
“The Volta Grande will turn into a cemetery. A cemetery of fish, a cemetery of dead trees,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B permitted
In the second week of February, Norte Energia diverted more than 85% of the Xingu’s normal flow away from the Volta Grande, where thousands of Indigenous and traditional fisherfolk live. The company’s diversion to the Belo Monte dam reduced river flow abruptly from early-February speeds of 10,900 cubic meters per second (m3/s) to 1,600 m3/s. (The historical average flows before the dam was built were 12,736 m3/s.)
On February 8, IBAMA president Eduardo Fortunato Bim signed an agreement allowing Norte Energia to implement the company’s so-called Hydrogram B, an artificial hydrological regime that will remove 73% of normal annual Xingu River flows from the Volta Grande.
The socio-environmental consequences, say experts, will be catastrophic. Hydrogram B “will cause the end of the cyclical, ecological phenomenon of the [annual] flood pulse, which guarantees fishes’ and turtles’ access to their feeding areas. There will be high amounts of mortality and, in those [aquatic animals] who survive, loss of nutritional condition,” Juarez Pezzuti from the Federal University of Pará wrote in an email to Mongabay,
Turtles, of “extremely high cultural significance” to the Juruna and other riverine people, “will no longer be able to accumulate the energy necessary to produce eggs. The number of times they lay eggs and the number of eggs per nest will be drastically reduced.”
In a note to Mongabay on Hydrogram B’s effects, Norte Energia states, “There is no technical-scientific proof, nor any indications at present, that the flow [regime] practiced by Belo Monte can cause mortality of fish or turtles,” citing “robust monitoring.” Independent scientists allege Norte Energia’s monitoring studies are flawed.
Lorena Curuaia, a leader of the Curuaia people, of Iawá village, sent Mongabay audio commenting on IBAMA’s decision: “This is absurd. Once again, we see the fauna, the flora, totally threatened, especially all the biodiversity. We know that the normal flow of water on the Volta Grande and the whole Xingu Basin doesn’t work that way.
“So they are assaulting nature again. To do what?,” she asks. “To generate energy, to generate financial gain for them, unfortunately leaving biodiversity to the wayside? We are indignant.”
The leader demands, “We want a response from IBAMA itself, saying why they accepted this from Belo Monte.” IBAMA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Norte Energia’s studies on Hydrogram B rejected as faulty
In 2009, IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s extreme low flow Hydrogram B proposal as being unable to maintain life on the Volta Grande, something the Belo Monte dam operator is legally mandated to do. In December 2019, IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to study alternative hydrological regimes.
But when IBAMA reviewed the new studies, submitted in December 2020, they found that Norte Energia had only presented an analysis of Hydrogram B versus the historical natural flow, and had offered no alternative flow plans. This limited comparison made it impossible for experts to analyze alternative hydrological regimes, says Pezzuti. Agreeing with that assessment is Camila Ribas of the National Institute for Amazon Research and the American Museum of Natural History, after she had access to the studies.
Consequently, on February 2, 2021 IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s studies as “faulty” and incomplete.
What should have happened next, says Ribas, is Norte Energia should have had to redo its studies, addressing IBAMA’s critiques, and then resubmit. Until then, IBAMA’s “provisional hydrogram,” with higher river flows — in place since April 2019 — should have continued.
Political pressure on IBAMA and misinformation
But IBAMA allegedly received intense pressure from other ministries within the Jair Bolsonaro administration, lobbying it to reverse its expected upcoming decision to maintain provisional hydrogram water releases to the Volta Grande. For two months, IBAMA had signaled that Norte Energia would have to return significant amounts of water to the river to prevent further ecosystem harm.
Meanwhile, Ribas recalls that the Mines and Energy department and the electricity agency ANEEL “leaked supposedly internal documents” to the press, claiming that if IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to divert less water from the Volta Grande, then Brazilian consumers’ electricity bills would jump dramatically in cost.
That claim, according to Ribas and Pezzuti, is false.
According to Pezzuti, “The company claimed [Belo Monte’s] non-production of energy would make it necessary to produce energy by activating thermoelectric plants” to make up an energy shortfall, which would supposedly greatly raise costs. But, he says, Norte Energia had presented outdated data on Brazil’s hydroelectric reserves, giving a false picture of Brazil’s current hydroelectric energy potential.
In fact, in the current rainy season, Amazon hydroelectric reservoirs are full. “The majority of hydroelectric plants [in Brazil] have a good level and flows, and so less energy [coming from] Belo Monte won’t generate the [electricity] deficit that’s being threatened by the press and the government,” says Pezzuti. Norte Energia did not respond to Mongabay’s question on this matter.
Political interference and an environmental crime?
Apparently, IBAMA president Bim contradicted his own technical team’s conclusions to strike the February 8 agreement with Norte Energia’s president, Paulo Roberto Pinto, allowing the company to immediately implement Hydrogram B.
Bim is thought to have circumvented IBAMA organizational procedures and overruled his own director of licensing Jônatas Souza da Trindade, who should have made the decision, notes Pezzuti. In a note to Mongabay, Licensing General Coordinator Régis Fontana Pinto stated, “The decisions pertinent to the application of the Belo Monte [dam] hydrogram are taken in the purview of IBAMA’s president, though supplied with information by the technical team, by me as General Coordinator, and by the Environmental Licensing director.”
This agreement directly violates Article 231 of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, Pezzuti says, which states that hydroelectric plants can’t impact Indigenous lands. It also appears to violate international conventions such as ILO 169, ratified in Brazil as Decree 5,051, which protects traditional activities such as fishing as essential for cultural preservation. Further infringed regulations may include Law 11,346 ensuring Nutritional and Food Security, Law 9,985 protecting “the natural resources necessary for traditional populations’ subsistence,” and Decree 6,040 guaranteeing “traditional peoples’ access to natural resources for their physical, economic, and cultural reproduction.”
Concerning projected losses to the diets of Amazon fisherfolk, Lorena Curuaia told Mongabay, “No company has the right to take away another’s dietary sustenance. The fisher people’s culture is fish. To remove their food, is to remove their life.”
On February 18, dozens of fisherfolk organizations, all members of the Xingu Vivo Para Sempre association, formally demanded Eduardo Fortunato Bim and Paulo Roberto Pinto be “criminally prosecuted” for environmental damages resulting from IBAMA’s decision.
“In my understanding, if the president of the environmental organ takes a decision that contradicts the technical position of the institution itself, he is failing in his duty. He is committing a crime in failing to act in accordance with his function, which is to protect the environment,” Pezzuti states.
In a note to Mongabay, Norte Energia states, “There is no crime practiced — since there do not exist any environmental damages, but rather impacts [already] predicted” in the environmental licensing stage. In 2020, federal judges and IBAMA’s team documented that impacts of the dam, characterized by IBAMA as “grave and irreversible,” were greater than projected during licensing.
Norte Energia offers mitigation plans
In its February 8 IBAMA agreement, Norte Energia also committed $R 157 million (US$ 28 million) to river flow mitigation plans. Three projects were approved: to send teams to collect fruit and leaves from the forests that should have been flooded, then throw these into the reduced area of the river where fish are trapped; to build floating platforms with bushes for fish to feed from; and to breed fish in captivity and then release them into the Xingu.
Pezzuti rejects the plan as scientifically unproven: “It’s an absurd pseudo-project, impossible to be executed on a scale that compensates for the [absence of] flooding of tens of thousands of hectares.” He notes, “The first two [projects] aren’t based on any kind of precedent,” and the raising of fish in captivity in the hopes of repopulating the river “already has proven to be ineffective in several studies.”
Alexander Lees, of England’s Manchester Metropolitan University, concurs that these are unworkable solutions, “a waste of money” better spent on maintaining the ecosystem.
“Messing around with chucking fruit into rivers or floating trees is just throwing money away,” says Lees. “It just looks like good publicity,”
Bel Juruna says Norte Energia’s present efforts are ineffectual. “There are lots of companies [contracted by Norte Energia] here that go around, visit, hold meetings, but despite that, there aren’t any projects from the [original] Basic Environmental Plan that are working here.”
Pezzuti explains that Norte Energia’s fisheries mitigation plan was “signed off on by professors employed by public research universities, contributing to this scientific makeup, as if there were a solution for the tragedy that Hydrogram [B] will cause.” However, he adds, independent researchers, not paid by Norte Energia, “experts in fish ecology and aquatic turtles… vehemently protested… this bizarre proposal,” as did “IBAMA’s analysts, who rejected it” on February 2.
Ribas adds, “The research Norte Energia and its consultants do is already directed toward a certain end goal.” She believes that the company-contracted researchers’ finding that Hydrogram B is viable resulted from a conflict of interest which, she says, might explain why the firm’s experts didn’t present analysis of alternatives. “That’s not science,” she says, but Ribas is concerned the Brazilian public will accept the flawed research as valid.
What’s needed, she concludes, is independent monitoring. Ribas and her fellow scientists are seeking funding to monitor the effects of Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B on the Volta Grande in 2021.
As for the Juruna people, Bel Juruna says they will endure:
“We will be here. We want to resist in this place, fighting so that we, too, won’t turn into a cemetery in our village.”
This article was published in Mongabay on the 8th March 2021. You can access the article here.
Derrick Jensen returns to The Stoa, along with Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, his co-authors of the new book: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living).
This event caps our meta-crisis symposium and it also serves as a book launch party.
The second event will start right after the first at 5pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles) and will be hosted on Facebook:
The authors of the book “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” are hosting a virtual launch party. The event will feature the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Max Wilbert.
WHAT: You are invited to an online event with Facebook Live
DATE: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 5 PM Pacific Time
