“Men understood what it is to be in a war and you gotta’ be armed. Women don’t have that knowledge.” – Phyllis Chesler.
. . .
“But humour, after all, in patriarchy, is just seeing the way things are, you don’t have to try.[…]Meanwhile rape increases out there, the destruction of the environment increases out there, in here, but women are dealing and dealing. And think of the consequence of the therapeutic[. W]hat happens is objectification of the speaker[. I]nstead of real passion, they offer plastic passion.[…]When I feel passion, I feel: Love, for example, Joy, Sorrow, Rage, Hope, Despair. These are passions that are real. I name them, they have an object; they have an agent or a cause, right? You enrage me[. H]e did this and I hate it; I’m enraged at him, at them, etcetera. You can name the agent with real passions. Now, consider the plastic passions of therapy. You know, I see them as floating blobs, sort of bubbles. There’s never any cause out there. If there’s any problem it’s you. You have to deal with it, this blob that’s floating around. For example depression: depression, I suggest, is a man-made passion. I don’t think we have it. I just think[: ‘]Oh, I’m feeling depressed today. You see, I had familia for breakfast and . . . and I just can’t seem to get my shit together.’” – Mary Daly
. . .
Part of being effective in an organization is knowing where you belong in it. What are you good at?
For my part, I cannot say my strength is organizing others, but spectacle and argument in the most political sense. That doesn’t let me off the hook for trying to organize, which I do also, it just means that trajectory is best served by interest and aptitude. Recently, it was pointed out that my interest in male violence and environmental destruction is concerning from the outside. How many hours a week do I spend investigating all the crazy? I didn’t know. Okay, 80 hours+ is an unhealthy lacks balance, maybe I can scale it back. My experience in Policy Debate, was seasoned by a life where argument was an impassioned, often dangerous risk. As far back as I can remember, any serious discussion, of any kind, has been accompanied by a body reaction wherein I shake and weep. It does not impair my ability to listen or argue, but it does happen every time; I know why, it is non-negotiable. My body can be understood and interpreted, but not overridden.
Coming into the tournament practice of three hour debates was something I had stamina for. Success was a direct benefit of being able to ‘spar’ in a way that risked so little as to allow for the development of skill. Now, I know how to be an effective agitator. Which brings me to twitter. Last year was my first to really experience a social-medial platform, largely where public policy and debate have moved. Although it has proven to be a uniquely valuable resource, it was designed to be addictive to its traumatized product: the users. It is enemy territory.
There are specific reasons for entering that are a danger to forget.
It was not a place to move my real friendships into; it was a place to find strangers; it’s a place where the ethos is: fight me. These are sparring partners. From the insulated attempts at consciousness raising done here spring the people we don’t know we deal with every day: who mandate the policy of our lived lives by each interaction. From the ethereal melting pots of YouTube, and now twitter, I found common allies with the natural world and moved those relationships into physical reality. So many organizations awaited, about which I would otherwise have no awareness. Glad is not the right word, but I do not regret the time I have spent there, learning about who we have become.
If debate taught me anything, it’s that the person with the most evidence wins; and here we get to the messy stuff. On what grounds is truth provable if not by the self-evident nature of itself? We try definitions. Sometimes that doesn’t work. Why not? Why does the power of naming need to be as individuated as experience? Does it? What power do I have to name if I am not bothering to brave the conversation with people I don’t agree with, in places I don’t like?
Usually, if I see unironic pronouns in someone’s bio, it doesn’t matter how hilarious their tweet was, I cannot bring myself to follow them. Nowhere on my list of things to do today is getting doxxed by a misogynist; I’m busy. Monika Lewinsky gets a pass, because the thing is, it does matter what happens to our collective minds. Bean Dad doesn’t have a name anymore. His life is different now, because of a collective of people. Someone had retweeted a particularly vile passage saying, “this is psychotic behavior.” I thought, “Oh yeah?” and read all the way down. All the comments. Down to the bottom.
It was impossible to look away because it was a spectacle.
Some childless fathers outed themselves and everyone else – including all the colourful pronoun people and the radical feminists and the right-wing housewives and the left-wing teachers – we all came together and said “no”. It felt good because, psychotic, evil, psychopathic or complicit, we all know what wrong is, but also because the platform is addictive and fighting is a rush. It is an affront to need to fight, to feel a boundary violated (as anger induction has brilliantly been identified). It feels good to make it stop, to make it right, to fight back. To say no.
But it feels better to say yes and mean it. Strife is complex. The complexity is ever compounded by the emergent nature of life and time. What is going on between the living planet and industrial civilization may not be rightly classified as war until effective resistance has been established to fight back. While it closely resembles many things termed ‘war’ in the recent past, it is industrial civilization acting upon: destroying the living planet, while the living planet continues to provide industrial civilization with the capacity to do so. What do we call this? I am not the first to appreciate the parallel here to battery. We are, as Earthlings, wild things, born into enemy territory.
Industrial civilization has changed every landscape.
There has to be some calm, radiant center from which no strife emerges, a source of real Joy, some benevolence in which to thrive for survival to be worth it. Retreat into the ethereal is one psychological strategy, when even the body is colonized. Retreat into identity politics or lifestyle activism or isolated, survivalist enclaves may serve, for those afforded it. Always, always this escape, this endless exploration of colonized frontiers to flee. What if we weren’t afraid to say that we have real, physical enemies that we could defeat? What would that change? Inside such a whirlwind, it can be difficult to negotiate all the feelings alone and impossible to relate, if thoughts and feelings are able to condense enough to crystallize, with so many of the necessary terms made forbidden as negative or even the ignorance with which we all come to new terrain.
Why not start with hate? Who hasn’t heard that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is indifference? Bullshit. Men don’t make torture porn of appliances. Love has never been required for the avalanche of revulsion and Rage that I understand as the experience of hating someone. They are not a food that just hasn’t grown on me. I don’t merely dislike them. It most often precluded any chance of love. How can I – why should I pretend to anyone that I have not felt this way, that, if so confronted with a gross boundary violation, I should not feel this way? What does it mean when someone hates back? Is it speak-able? Is it different somehow? How? I think about what it has taken for me to be able to say, “fight me,” and not mean ‘I hate you’: for disagreement to be a reason to engage, rather than refuse to listen or share, to neither presume to be the final arbiter of reality, nor assume bad faith, but to risk a little; or, to say, “hate me,” and mean it: to be able to withstand someone. Practice helps.
Better yet, Rage.
I think the reason Rage is so vilified is that, like Fear, it is no longer a personal experience, but a collective, spiritual, chemical one. The Fear. The Rage. Possessions of a sort: coming from somewhere, there for a reason and eventually something else’s food. When I feel Rage, I feel it overtake me. Often, I lose vision, or it darkens and pinpoints. I say things in a loud, clear voice that I do not remember after. I cannot hear the voices of strangers. When it breaks, it is like a disrupted spell. I shake afterwards. Rage has done heroic things through me, but with a steep tax.
Much like Fear, it is not because, in my subconscious, I am my own oppressor and I just need to love myself enough to love others. It is about pain aversion, death aversion; it is because our inner, ancient brain has signaled that there is a legitimate threat it does not find itself capable of matching right off. It is my amygdala saying “get out now”. That is not to suggest these states are incapable of being distorted into paralysis or unjudicious application, or that they are without their own character and momentum.
Rage can be blind, and has done less than heroic things through me.
Having an enemy is a hard thing to admit when the stronger urge is to give as the Earth does, to love as mothers do, but that doesn’t stop them from existing. Mothers know what to do when their children are threatened. The Earth becomes less generous daily. Having an enemy does change you; it draws out characteristics capable of matching the things our amygdala tells us are scary. That biology developed to address periodic threats, but not to run all day every day; we are supposed to change back. To resist, to truly stand our ground, we must know where we are. Not who we think, but what is functional, where we physically are. That is in our bodies, as part of the land. That is the territory from which we can no longer afford to retreat. Our visions of ourselves will change as arguments move through us. Truth, the singular, is something we will catch glimpses of and try to piece together. Doing that as a collective is language.
We cannot be punished out of or persuaded into what we observe. We can only listen as we are able and share with those who’ll listen. Conversationally. Physically, to resist takes good health: strength, endurance and flexibility. Fighting is a tough one. Having been in fights, I don’t get ideological about this. Being in a fight is a physical experience, different than sparring, horsing around, different from heated discourse. Once in a fight, verbal or physical, it’s almost got its own world. Inter-dimensionality makes so much sense in fights. Everything is distorted, sharp and slow. Waves of fight wash in an ebb, leaving tired, heaving creatures who want to slink off and lick wounds but aren’t sure if it’s done yet. It is very important to pick your enemies and your battles. I say this because I need to hear it. Who is really prepared to have a conversation about something, and who is a drone? Who is a dangerous drone: know when to walk away; know when to run. Practice helps, but practice sucks and is expensive.
When I think about The Sorrow of war, and of warriors, I do not pathologize it.
Sorrow is not a sickness or a pastime of the feeble. Sorrow is the reasonable expression of experiencing loss and pain. To be forbidden the experience of our own grieving stifles our health and ability to heal. You feel your own real feelings all day. I say to me. Being emotionally resilient cannot mean repression, which only putrefies whatever is being buried, but a capacity to be uncomfortable, to reflect and change.
In the service of making Sorrow an illness, the language of ‘internalization versus externalization’ and of ‘self-esteem’ or ‘self-loathing’ has emerged to replace the terms ‘oppressed versus oppressor’ and ‘trust in others to listen’ or ‘desire to cease pain’. Fuck ‘em. Do you. Healing requires a nurturing environment, with the cause of harm removed, wherein you are not forced to react to villainy. That is not universally afforded to everyone. To whatever extent you can, balance between the work against and the work for. That ‘for’ is you too: your Joy, your Love, which all dies with you, or before, if it is not nurtured, lived and shared. Once hurt, healing takes time and can hurt more than the injury. Take your time. Feel your pain. Heal. Remember.
When The Bards used satire, they deposed kings.
They would only ever use satire for this reason and only when absolutely necessary. What kind of power is that? The remaining shadow of this tradition, in lore, is the Jester: the only court member who can get away with telling the truth. What kind of power is it when the king doesn’t get your jokes, but the rest of the court does and they do nothing? When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he did it as a work of satire. Today his name is synonymous with authoritarianism as a ruling strategy. What power is it when no one gets your jokes? Theory is important, but action more so. As our actions are stifled, so our thoughts about potential actions. How to get free? Together. While spectacle might hold attention, only collaborative, permeable theory has the strength to make action inevitable, even desirable by far over the alternative: that we will continue to degenerate into increasingly stratified cybernetic zombies until we drive to extinction every last Earthly biome. What power?
Unfortunately, the sociopathic and necrophilic are better at war; unclouded and unbothered by the ramifications, those traits are designed to win wars. Clinical psychopathy was previously thought to be rare. Now, the very structure of modernity demands sociopathy as a baseline business model while the vast, common traumas of peoples’ personal lives are made unspeakable and left to fester. That is a recipe for a populace physically incapable of empathy on a massive scale.
So, back to being part of something worthwhile:
can there be legitimate honour in some twitter feeding frenzy? Where does honorable conduct live? What does empathy feel like when the person across from you has none? Are they an enemy? How to keep from catching? How to know? Without the capacity to feel shame: to know when we have done wrong, used The Rage unjudiciously, been paralyzed when we should have acted, or nursed an addiction, we would have no sense of our accomplishments. Workaholism has not delivered The Joy of accomplishment like pornography does not deliver The Joy of relationships. Maybe integrity is not something we are born with or into, but something slowly earned by learning to recognize its absence. Without the capacity to feel that vacuum, we wouldn’t have sought.
Joy guides. In shared pleasure, laughter, play, in being among beloved, I learn the codes of social conduct from people who can say, “fight me,” and mean ‘I love you’. Without the capacity to reflect, in discomfort, we cannot recognize patterns. Bean Dad is not my friend, but he is not my real enemy either. That flash community dispersed and the Earth remains largely undefended.
After switching from Debate, to Drama, then Humour, and then Duo, I tried Poetry.
If the performance arts taught me anything, it’s to know your audience. The judges didn’t care who was right, who had the evidence, whose argument was impenetrable, they wanted you to make them cry, and they wanted to love you. It helped if you made them laugh, but they had to want to see you at finals: you couldn’t bore them. The best way to do that was not universal, but that is, nearly universally, the way people judge.
Gloria Steinham’s work wasn’t popular because she was the best writer in the second wave, but because she was able to infiltrate male exploitation of poor women with her beauty and expose it to the middle class. Andrea Dworkin’s work wasn’t unspeakable. She spoke it; it was unhearable because she shouted it in overalls, with a big mouth and crazy hair. They were the spectacle. Not because they wanted to be, not because they particularly enjoyed the attention, but because they were women. What they had to say barely got through the endless attention given to their appearances. Because they were women: without the spectacle, we wouldn’t have even that much.
Marry Harris Jones wasn’t ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America,’ at 83 years old, because she organized people, although she did that also, but because she put people to shame.
Her power was in stamina. My power will never be in being a body in the street, although I do that also, but in being one of many, in the sheer amount of evidence collected, in being able to illustrate an argument that can stand for itself, in knowing an audience well enough to make sure that they can hear it, in remembering our place in the Earthly legacy of women this side of the burnings.
My place is to float away alongside them, like ash, when my time comes, to forfeit all my names back into dust and droplets. Until then, I will fight and convalesce and it will mean ‘I love you’.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
Climate activists Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek are pleading guilty in federal court in the legal action against their sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
On July 24th, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek released a press release admitting that they had carried out multiple acts of sabotage against the then-under-construction Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Spring 2017. The two activists set fire to heavy machinery and used blow torches to damage the oil pipeline and valves in an effort to decisively halt the project. While the DAPL was ultimately finished, their actions singlehandedly delayed construction for weeks or months. Their eco-sabotage resulted in millions of dollars of damage.
In September 2019, Jessica, 39, and Ruby, 30, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage to an energy facility, malicious use of fire, and other felonies. Montoya and Reznicek are now set to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. The other charges will be dismissed, with sentencing due in May 2021. Pleading guilty may result in up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Both Montoya and Reznicek were seasoned activists and knew sabotage may carry consequences. However, they were clear that direct action was a must, if we are to protect the planet and future of life. They asserted they were in support of indigenous sovereignty and were resisting corporate power.
“Our conclusion is that the system is broken and it is up to us as individuals to take peaceful action and remedy it, and this we did, out of necessity,” Montoya said.
Although the direct action undertaken by Montoya and Reznicek may have been controversial, Deep Green Resistance stands in support of Ruby and Jessica and remains opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and any development that destroys the natural world.
Please listen to Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek talking with Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert during this 2017 interview, or read the transcript here. Their understanding and commitment is inspiring. We salute Ruby and Jessica and will keep readers up-to-date on their sentencing and where people can send support.
Editors note: DGR supports The REAL Green New Deal Project, which is “setting forth a realistic alternative to the commonly accepted narrative about renewable energy and sustainability. That narrative – for which the Green New Deal has become emblematic – leads us to believe that the renewable energy future will look just like the fossil fueled present, but simply electrified and “decarbonized.” We’re pushing back against this dangerous myth. ” realgnd.org Consistent with the biophysical evidence, REALgnd acknowledges the following. . .
the fallacy of human exceptionalism. H. sapiens is an evolved biological species that is part of nature and therefore subject to the same natural laws and limitations as other living things, particularly the laws pertaining to energy use and material conservation.
that, like all other species, H. sapiens has a natural propensity to expand into all accessible habitat and consume all available resources. However, in the case of humans, “available” is constantly being redefined by technology.
that, in the absence of rational controls, humans will use any source of abundant cheap energy to (over)exploit ecosystems.
that the human enterprise (people and their economies) is an embedded subsystem of the ecosphere and that decoupling it from Nature is not even theoretically possible.that modern techno-industrial society is an unsustainable blip in the history of human civilization, made possible only by a one-off inheritance of fossil fuels (FF), which will either run out soon (i.e., they will become too financially and energetically costly to extract and use) or which we must choose to stop using: 1) in preparation for their eventual depletion, 2) to avoid the continued ecological impacts of their extraction, transportation, and processing, and 3) to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Consider that one barrel of oil is the energy equivalent of about 10 years of human labor.
To supply the average American with his/her economic goods and services requires 6,806 kg of petroleum (~50 barrels) per year. Which means that the average American has about 500 “energy slaves” – mostly fossil fuels – working for him/her around the clock (one energy slave = the energy output of one person).
that so-called renewable energy technologies (namely solar, high-tech wind, large-scale hydropower, and nuclear) are not renewable. They rely on 1) techno-industrial processes that are not possible without FFs, 2) a dwindling supply of non-renewable metals and minerals, 3) ecological destruction and pollution, 4) and terrible working conditions in the mining industry, much of which are offshored to the Global South. At the end of their short lives (ranging from 15 to 50 years, depending on the technology), they have to be decommissioned and transported – using FFs – to waste sites, only for the entire process to start all over again.
that calls for “net zero” carbon emissions 1) rely on unproven technologies that can only be manufactured through FF-based, techno-industrial processes, 2) entail significant ecological damage (the injection of toxic substances into the ground), and 3) belie the need to abolish FF use for the above reasons.
that human society is in overshoot, meaning that humanity has exceeded the regenerative capacity of ecosystems and become parasitic on the ecosphere. Any species that maintains itself through the continual depletion of the biophysical basis of its own existence is inherently unsustainable.
Consider that there are only about 12 billion hectares of ecologically productive land and water on Earth. For 7.6 billion people, this is about 1.6 global average hectares (gha) of biocapacity per capita. However, humanity is currently consuming about 2.8 gha per capita – 75% more biocapacity than is available given the size of our current population (5). In other words, humans currently use the equivalent of 1.75 Earth’s worth of resources and assimilative capacity each year. Species can exist in a state of overshoot only temporarily and at a great cost to the ability of ecosystems to provide life support services in perpetuity.
The one-Earth lifestyle of 1.6 gha per capita for 7.6 billion people mentioned above equates to the current lifestyle intensity of countries such as Myanmar, Ecuador, Mali, and Nicaragua. By contrast, in 2017, it took over 8 gha to support the average North American lifestyle – meaning Americans and Canadians have overshot their equal share of global biocapacity by a factor of 400%.
that climate change is only one of many symptoms of overshoot. Thus, carbon is only one indicator or metric to consider.
that a state of ecological overshoot does not resemble, and greatly constrains, what is possible in a steady state at or below the carrying capacity.
that (un)sustainability is a collective problem requiring collective solutions and unprecedented international cooperation.
that if humanity does not plan a controlled descent from its state of overshoot, then chaotic, painful collapse is unavoidable.
that gross income and wealth inequality is a major barrier to sustainability. Socially just, one-Earth living requires mechanisms for fair income redistribution and otherwise sharing the benefits of eco-economic activity.
that life after fossil fuels will look very much like life before fossil fuels.
Consistent with these biophysical and social realities, our goal is to assist the global community to:
accept that short-term, self-interested economic behavior at the individual and national levels has become maladaptive at the long-term, global level.
formally acknowledge the absurdity of perpetual material growth and accumulation (the hallmarks of capitalism) on a finite planet.
commit to devising and implementing policies consistent with a one-Earth civilization, characterized first by a controlled contraction of the human enterprise and a re-configuration of its material infrastructure, with the end goal of an ecologically stable, economically secure steady state society whose citizens live more or less equitably within the biophysical means of Nature.
develop and implement a global fertility strategy to reduce the human population to the billion or so people that a non-fossil energy future can likely support in material comfort on this already much damaged Earth.
identify which types of energy are actually renewable, or largely dependent upon, renewable resources, and what this will mean for the re-design of society’s infrastructure.
begin the planning necessary to eliminate fossil energy by 1) rationing and allocating the remaining carbon budget to essential uses, de-commissioning unsustainable fossil-based infrastructure, and re-building critical renewable-based infrastructure and supply chains, and 2) reducing material consumption consistent with Global Footprint Network estimates of ∼75 % overshoot.
understand that life after the luxury of fossil fuels holds many gems and should not be feared.
An absence of material luxury need not equate to an absence of a good, comfortable lifestyle.
Lacking the energetic slaves of fossil fuels will involve more physically active lives in closer contact with each other and Nature, both of which will improve our overall well-being and restore our shattered sense of connection.
Emphasis can shift from material progress to progress on the mind and spirit, which are unlimited.
This article was originally published on January 13, 2021 in The Conversation, known for academic rigour. The authors fight disinformation with facts and expertise.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.
The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades.
The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own. Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists, including those from Flinders University, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Our message might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But scientists must be candid and accurate if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face.
Getting to grips with the problem
First, we reviewed the extent to which experts grasp the scale of the threats to the biosphere and its lifeforms, including humanity. Alarmingly, the research shows future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe.
This is largely because academics tend to specialise in one discipline, which means they’re in many cases unfamiliar with the complex system in which planetary-scale problems — and their potential solutions — exist.
What’s more, positive change can be impeded by governments rejecting or ignoring scientific advice, and ignorance of human behaviour by both technical experts and policymakers.
More broadly, the human optimism bias – thinking bad things are more likely to befall others than yourself – means many people underestimate the environmental crisis.
Numbers don’t lie
Our research also reviewed the current state of the global environment. While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:
a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago. Overall, humans have altered almost two-thirds of Earth’s land surface
about 1,300 documentedspecies extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded. More broadly, population sizes of animal species have declined by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, suggesting more extinctions are imminent
about one million plant and animal species globally threatened with extinction. The combined mass of wild mammals today is less than one-quarter the mass before humans started colonising the planet. Insects are also disappearing rapidly in many regions
85% of the global wetland area lost in 300 years, and more than 65% of the oceans compromised to some extent by humans
a halving of live coral cover on reefs in less than 200 years and a decrease in seagrass extent by 10% per decade over the last century. About 40% of kelp forests have declined in abundance, and the number of large predatory fishes is fewer than 30% of that a century ago.
Major environmental-change categories expressed as a percentage relative to intact baseline. Red indicates percentage of category damaged, lost or otherwise affected; blue indicates percentage intact, remaining or unaffected. Frontiers in Conservation Science
A bad situation only getting worse
The human population has reached 7.8 billion – double what it was in 1970 – and is set to reach about 10 billion by 2050. More people equals more food insecurity, soil degradation, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.
High population densities make pandemics more likely. They also drive overcrowding, unemployment, housing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure, and can spark conflicts leading to insurrections, terrorism, and war. Essentially, humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme. Consumption, as a percentage of Earth’s capacity to regenerate itself, has grown from 73% in 1960 to more than 170% today.
High-consuming countries like Australia, Canada and the US use multiple units of fossil-fuel energy to produce one energy unit of food. Energy consumption will therefore increase in the near future, especially as the global middle class grows.
Then there’s climate change.
Humanity has already exceeded global warming of 1°C this century, and will almost assuredly exceed 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052. Even if all nations party to the Paris Agreement ratify their commitments, warming would still reach between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by 2100.
The danger of political impotence
Our paper found global policymaking falls far short of addressing these existential threats. Securing Earth’s future requires prudent, long-term decisions. However this is impeded by short-term interests, and an economic system that concentrates wealth among a few individuals.
Right-wing populist leaders with anti-environment agendas are on the rise, and in many countries, environmental protest groups have been labelled “terrorists”. Environmentalism has become weaponised as a political ideology, rather than properly viewed as a universal mode of self-preservation.
Financed disinformation campaigns, such as those against climate action and forest protection, protect short-term profits and claim meaningful environmental action is too costly – while ignoring the broader cost of not acting. By and large, it appears unlikely business investments will shift at sufficient scale to avoid environmental catastrophe.
Changing course
Fundamental change is required to avoid this ghastly future. Specifically, we and many others suggest:
revealing the true cost of products and activities by forcing those who damage the environment to pay for its restoration, such as through carbon pricing
rapidly eliminating fossil fuels
regulating markets by curtailing monopolisation and limiting undue corporate influence on policy
reigning in corporate lobbying of political representatives
educating and empowering women across the globe, including giving them control over family planning.
The true cost of environmental damage should be borne by those responsible.Shutterstock
Don’t look away
Many organisations and individuals are devoted to achieving these aims. However their messages have not sufficiently penetrated the policy, economic, political and academic realms to make much difference.
Failing to acknowledge the magnitude of problems facing humanity is not just naïve, it’s dangerous. And science has a big role to play here.
Scientists must not sugarcoat the overwhelming challenges ahead. Instead, they should tell it like it is. Anything else is at best misleading, and at worst potentially lethal for the human enterprise.
Authors
Corey J. A. Bradshaw Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University
Daniel T. Blumstein Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Ehrlich President, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University
News Release: there have been arrests of water protectors in Fond Du Lac . Direct action was forced in order try and prevent damage to a pipeline, due to poor practices, which would ultimately lead to further environmental damage.
Late Monday afternoon, three water protectors were arrested for blocking construction of Line 3. Two of the protestors were arrested while blocking the entrance to the site, while the third, Jeff Nichols, climbed onto a section of the pipeline dangling over a trench. Jeff sat on the pipe for nearly five hours, preventing workers from putting the pipe onto frozen sand bags which would have damaged the structural integrity of the pipeline.
In a Facebook livestream from Camp Migizi, a water protector camp based out of Fond Du Lac, Jeff shared that he felt compelled to act when he saw the workers were about to put the pipe into the ground onto frozen sand bags. In the livestream, it was also shared that OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, put out a mandate ordering Enbridge to not use frozen sandbags, as they force the pipe to bend, causing fractures and leading to spills.
On the livestream, Jeff can be heard saying,
“It’s not even a question. This one will leak. The sandbags are frozen. You guys have already received violations for that” while other protestors shouted “all pipelines leak.”
Line 3, if built, would cross over 200 hundred bodies of water in Northern Minnesota, including the Mississippi River. Enbridge itself is responsible for numerous oil spills in Minnesota, including the largest ever inland oil spill in North America when nearly 1.7 million barrels of crude oil spilled in Grand Rapids.
