by DGR News Service | Jan 28, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation
Activists Occupy Site of Proposed Lithium Mine in Nevada
By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, originally published by Macska Moksha Press Reproduced here with permission, thank you.
On Friday, January 15th, two activists drove eight hours from Eugene, Oregon, to a remote corner of public land in Nevada, where they pitched a tent in below-freezing temperatures and unfurled a banner declaring:
“Protect Thacker Pass.”
You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the place—it’s seriously in the boonies—but these activists, Will Falk and Max Wilbert, hope to make it into a household name. One of the activists is Will Falk, a writer and lawyer who helped bring a suit to US District Court seeking personhood for the Colorado River in 2017. He describes himself as a “biophilic essayist” and he certainly lyrical in describing the area where they set up:
“Thacker Pass is a quintessential representation of the Great Basin’s specific beauty. Millions of years ago a vast lake stretched across this land. Now, oceans of sagebrush wash over her. If you let the region’s characteristic stillness settle into your imagination, you’ll see how the sagebrush flows and swells like the ancient lake that was once here. On the north and south ends of the Pass, mountains run parallel to each other. The mountains feature outcroppings of volcanic rock left by the active volcano that was here even before the ancient lake. The mountains cradle you with the valley’s dips and curves up to the ever-changing, never-ending Great Basin sky. During the day, the sun shines down full-strength creating shape-shifting shadows on the mountain faces. At night, the stars and moon shine with such intensity and clarity that you can almost hear the light as it pours to the ground.”
I’ve spent enough time in the Great Basin to attest to its beauty myself: the dramatic ranges, the expansive flats, the gnarled trees, the stiff-stemmed wildflowers, and the lean, sinewy jack rabbits; they are all expressions of endurance in a landscape imbued with the echoes of the ancient. How long ago it must have been, when waves lapped the foothills, yet the shapes they left are unmistakable. The sense is palpable of being elevated, inland, and isolated from the ocean—the waterways here don’t run to the sea, hence the name “basin.”
Austere as it all is, humans have lived in the area for many thousands of years, digging roots, gathering seeds & berries, harvesting pinenuts and hunting game.
These traditions, though assaulted, survive.
To the Europeans seeking fertile valleys to farm or dense forest to cut, the Great Basin offered little to nothing, so most of the folks from “back east” just passed through. But ranching and mining cursed the region since the invasion began, and its grasses were razed and its rocks ripped open. Still, many areas, especially up the slopes, were spared the hammering that befell the tallgrass praries of the Midwest and the old growth forests of the West, which were extirpated to the degree of 95% or more. In fact, some of the last best wildlife habitat in the lower 48 still hangs on in the Great Basin, ragged though it might be around the edges.
Yet it seems the time has come when these “wastelands,” as so many erroneously consider them, will be put on the chopping block for a new kind of exploitation: “green” energy development. Massive solar arrays and huge wind farms have been taking the lead in this latest wave of exploitation, and now mining is being imposed. Not coal for fuel or gold for wealth but lithium for electric car batteries.
The Proposal
Thacker Pass is the site of a proposed lithium mine that would impact nearly 5700 acres—close to nine square miles—and which would include a giant open pit mine over two square miles in size, a sulfuric acid processing plant, and piles of tailings. The operation would use 850 million gallons of water annually and 26,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day. The ecological damage in this delicate, slow-to-heal landscape would be permanent, at least on the human scale. At risk are a number of animal and plant species including the threatened Greater Sage Grouse, Pygmy Rabbits, the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, a critically imperiled endemic snail species known as the Kings River Pyrg, old growth Big Sagebrush and Crosby’s Buckwheat, to name just those that are locally significant. Also present in the area are Golden Eagles, Pronghorn Antelope, and Bighorn Sheep.
A cultural heritage also exists in this area. In describing the north-south corridor immediately to the east of Thacker Pass, wildtender Nikki Hill says:
“This pass in Nevada is a bridge of great importance. My auntie, Finisia Medrano, would speak of how this was the way one would travel by horse or foot from the wild gardens of Eastern Oregon to continue into Nevada and still be supported, finding food and water for the journey. She would speak of how there was no other real good way to make this crossing, due to a lack of resources in the surrounding landscape. If this is the case for a human, it is the case for all the non human people traversing this area as well. There is so much fragmentation, in landscape, mentality and relations, all stemming from a displaced sense of belonging. How will we know our way back to places, both in spirit and in touch, without threads of continuity to weave together?”
It’s industry vs. ecology once again, and there’s nothing “sustainable” about it for the thousands of creatures who will lose their lives or homes if the mine is allowed to happen.
The reason that Will Falk and his fellow activist Max Wilbert rushed to the site on January 15th was because that’s the day the Bureau of Land Management issued it’s “record of decision,” which greenlighted this horrific project. The BLM considered four alternatives and admitted that it did not choose the “environmentally preferable” one—which was no mine—because it would not have satisfied the “purpose and need”—which was obviously the mine itself. I point this out to illustrate that US land management decisions are primarily made in favor of development not preservation. Typically, what environmental regulations do exist are weak, poorly enforced, and increasingly watered down. Hence, Falk and Wilbert’s decision to take direct action.
This is not the most comfortable time of year to be camped out in northern Nevada, so I admire them for making this choice. Overnight lows are in the teens and twenties at this time of year, and daily highs in the thirties and forties. Snow is possible. But it’s the truth that showing up is often the only way to make a difference.
They sent out a press release on Monday, January 18th, announcing their encampment. Said Falk:
“Environmentalists might be confused about why we want to interfere with the production of electric car batteries.”
Here, Falk is speaking to the fact that over the last twenty years, the focus of mainstream environmentalism has narrowed in on carbon pollution as a central concern, too often to the exclusion of issues like industrial development, technological consumption and other forms of pollution. Specifically, the topic of automobile use has been reduced to a question of emissions when, in reality, cars and car culture are problematic for many other reasons:
- Car-related deaths in the US are typically around 40,000 per year, and far more people are injured, sometimes maimed for life.
- Cars kill countless animals annually in both urban and rural settings. Whether the vehicle is gas-powered or battery-powered doesn’t make a difference to the poor squirrel, cat, coyote, skunk or deer who is taken out.
- Roads themselves demand a tremendous amount of resources for their construction and upkeep. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of carbon in the world.
- In rural areas, roads fragment habitat, preventing natural pattern of foraging, hunting and migration.
- Car tires contain toxic substances that are harmful to wildlife, and as the Guardian recently reported, Salmon in the Pacific Northwest are being killed by a chemical being washed into rivers and streams by the rain.
- City life is made far less hospitable by the quantity, speed, and dominating presence of cars. Streets and parking lots can take up 50% of a US city. Much of that would be better be used for other purposes like pedestrian plazas, green spaces and urban agriculture.
- Then there are the cultural aspects of car culture. The car-based suburbs struck a terrible blow to localized communities in the US, breaking up close-knit urban neighborhoods and replacing them with atomized subdivisions, in which each household (now reduced to its “nuclear” form, without extended family) was isolated with a propaganda machine. The “conveniences” imposed on us then ended up having a far higher price tag than advertised, and the resulting consumer culture is now swallowing up the world. From a mental health stand point, the alienation the suburbs inflicted on our society still tortures us to this day.
- More subtle, but very real, is the way our perception is shaped by observing the world from inside a metal box at great speed. From a vantage of insulation and separation, other objects—including people—are reduced to mere obstacles. The dehumanization that is imprinted this way doesn’t immediately end when we get out of the vehicle.
Replacing gas stations with charging stations is not going to address any of this. Though the globalized system of extraction that supports all of this is itself running out of fuel, I fear that electric vehicles will only draw out the agony.
Some will argue that electric cars are beneficial regardless of all of the above, because they do reduce emissions while driving, and doesn’t that make them worth it? That’s unclear. The entire calculus must include the damage incurred by lithium mining, and by all the other extractive activities needed specifically for electric cars. The air might indeed be fresher in the city, but at the cost of habitat destruction, pollution and human suffering in another place—in somebody else’s home.
In a statement issued by the Western Watersheds Project about the BLM approving the Thacker Pass lithium mine, Kelly Fuller, their Energy and Mining Campaign Director warned:
“The biodiversity crisis is every bit as dire as the climate crisis, and sacrificing biodiversity in the name of climate change makes no scientific or moral sense. Over the last 50 years, Earth has lost nearly two thirds of its wildlife. Habitat loss is the major cause. Humans can’t keep destroying important wildlife habitat and still avoid ecosystem collapse.”
Human rights issues are also in the mix. Lest we forget, the US-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia in late 2019 was motivated in part by desire to control the lithium deposits in the Andean highlands, a place of otherworldly beauty. (See “Coups-for-Green-Energy added to Wars-For-Oil.”) Though the Bolivian people have since taken back their government, they experienced violence and suffering in the meantime. Unfortunately, the socialist party returned to power also favors mining the lithium. Their model is Venezuela, where oil profits were used to fund social programs. So, US leftists should take note that overthrowing capitalists does not automatically translate into “green” policy.
As Falk said: “It’s wrong to destroy a mountain for any reason – whether the reason is fossil fuels or lithium.”
The real answer, of course, is fewer cars.
Plenty of activists, academics and planners have been talking about how to do that for years, and there’s plenty of solutions to pick from. What’s been lacking so far is the political will and the vibrant movement needed to force that will.
Nikki Hill further commented:
“The answer to the climate crisis is not ramping up new, more, green energy. This ‘green’ is just a word coloring the vision of insatiable growth, peddled by green greed. The green we need so desperately is the one that fills our hearts with connected wonder with the rest of the living world. And that requires slowing the fuck down.”
Indeed. And as of Friday, January 15th, two activists are camped out in Thacker Pass, Nevada, to slow down—and hopefully stop—that insatiable growth.
To follow or support the campaign, visit the Protect Thacker Pass website at protectthackerpass.org or follow them on Facebook or Instagram.
This article draws on a podcast interview I did with Will Falk on January 18th. Listen to it here.
by DGR News Service | Jan 27, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Direct Action, Obstruction & Occupation, The Problem: Civilization
This is an excerpt from a news article originally published on Mongabay.
Featured image: Sinjajevina, by JYB Devot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Montenegro’s military — and maybe NATO — want the Sinjajevina Highlands for maneuvers; traditional herding communities want these biodiverse alpine pasturelands conserved.
BY John C. Cannon
- A 2019 decree by the government of Montenegro sets forth the country’s intention to set up a military training ground in the highland grasslands of Sinjajevina in the northern part of the country.
- But the pastures of Sinjajevina have supported herders for centuries, and scientists say that this sustainable use is responsible in part for the wide array of life that the mountain supports; activists say an incursion by the military would destroy livelihoods, biodiversity and vital ecosystem services.
- A new coalition now governs Montenegro, one that has promised to reevaluate the military’s use of Sinjajevina.
- But with the country’s politics and position in Europe in flux, the movement against the military is pushing for formal designation of a park that would permanently protect the region’s herders and the environment.
Mileva “Gara” Jovanović’s family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, and they’ve provided her family not only with milk, cheese, and meat, but with an enduring livelihood and the means to send five of her six children to university.
“It gives us life,”
said Gara, an elected spokesperson for the eight self-described tribes who share the summer pasture. But, Gara says, this alpine pasture — “the Mountain,” she calls it — is under serious threat, and with it the tribes’ way of life. Two years ago, Montenegro’s military moved ahead with plans to develop a training ground where soldiers would carry out maneuvers and artillery practice in these grasslands. No stranger to the daunting challenges of life as an alpine herder, Gara said that when she first heard of the military’s plans, it brought her to tears.
“It’s going to destroy the Mountain because it’s impossible to have both the military polygon there and cattle,”
she told Mongabay.
Anthropologists who have studied the region say that pastoralists have been bringing their herds to the Sinjajevina grasslands for around 3,000 years.
Now, Gara fears that the military’s use of the land will utterly disrupt the current natural balance that 250 local families have carefully cultivated. The tribes are all part of the same ethnic group, and they meet periodically to discuss the management of the pasturelands. Thanks to their nurturing efforts, verdant grasses carpet the Mountain each spring that feed not only their cattle, sheep and horses. The long-sustained partnership between natural and human communities also engenders a unique and richly specied landscape, while snowmelt flowing down from Sinjajevina supplies Montenegro with water and supports its human population.
“Maintaining a diversity of uses and practices up there is helping conserve some very valuable stuff,”
Pablo Domínguez, an environmental anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Toulouse, told Mongabay.
The battle over Sinjajevina’s future — whether it remains a rare example of nature coexisting alongside humanity, or becomes a proving ground for kitted-out troops and heavy artillery — has embroiled not just Gara, the eight tribes, and the government of a small Balkans nation; it may also figure significantly into the global geopolitics of NATO and the European Union.
To many, including Gara, the two paths are incompatible.
That stance led to a 51-day protest in late 2020. Around 150 farmers and activists camped on the Mountain in the fall, blocking the military’s deployment with little more than their presence and sheer determination. For now, at least, they’ve succeeded, coinciding with a seismic, generational political shift in Montenegro. Today, the challenge that preservation proponents like Gara and Domínguez face is to parlay this ephemeral triumph into permanent protections for Sinjajevina and its people.
A highland and homeland of surprising diversity
The Sinjajevina grasslands cover a rocky, rolling plain in northern Montenegro of more than 450 square kilometers (147 square miles), according to the government, amid the craggy dolomitic peaks and limestone karsts of the Dinaric Alps. Average elevations of 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) mean that impassable snows blanket the high pastures for five or six months each year. During that time, herders vacate their katuns — small, seasonal alpine outposts — until the warmth of late spring returns.
These grasslands border Durmitor National Park and the Tara River Basin Biosphere Reserve, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites where the rivers that drain these heights converge, plunging into Europe’s deepest river gorge.
At first glance, Sinjajevina appears boundless and quiet — even barren. In the military’s view, “It is empty,” said Petar Glomazić, a documentary filmmaker. Since 2019, Glomazić has co-led a coalition of international and local human rights groups, environmental NGOs and the European Union’s Green Party in a push to stop Montenegro’s military from commandeering the heart of Sinjajevina.
Those initial impressions of the region’s emptiness can be deceiving. Sinjajevina’s pastures are capable of fattening 10,000 cattle and 70,000 sheep each summer, according to estimates by agricultural scientists. But through the ages, these “semi-natural” grasslands — a designation given because the ecosystem’s persistence depends in part on human activities — have remained an oasis of ecological stability.
“That way of life, that very sustainable way of life, has been there for centuries,”
Glomazić said.
Beyond Sinjajevina, in the lands below, the people and the environment alike have been hammered by centuries of human-induced tumult in a politically turbulent region. The Balkans sit at the nexus of trade routes connecting Europe and Asia and along the borders between now-defunct empires and religious divisions.
That location has led to repeated conflicts amid shuffled power structures over many centuries.
Gara’s tribe, the Bjelopavlići, trace their legal claim to Sinjajevina back to the 1880s. After a war with the Ottoman Empire, King Nikola I gave the Bjelopavlići the legal right to graze their herds there in recognition of their efforts and sacrifice in holding off the Turks.
Gara and her six children descend from that line of pastoralists who have shepherded their flocks to the Mountain, first by foot, a journey that took three to four days, and now with trucks. They’ve endured two world wars, the formation and disintegration of nation-states, the rising and falling tide of Communism, and a vicious ethnic conflict that brutalized the Balkan Peninsula in the 1990s.
For their part, Gara’s children remain committed to preserving the way of life that their mother and others have kept alive, said her daughter, Persida Jovanović.
The eight tribes feel certain that stripping human influence from the grasslands would trigger an immediate change in the landscape, Gara said — one that could bankrupt the ecosystem and profoundly disrupt the balance that exists there today.
“Our ancestors, and us today, have unwritten laws how to keep the Mountain clean, especially the spring water,”
Gara said. This code governs how early in the season people can bring their livestock to the high pastures, the number of animals allowed, where they can drink to keep waters free of pollution, and other considerations to encourage the renewed production of grasses year after year.
These handed-down strategies have in turn helped preserve wild animal and plant life.
“It is really a beautiful example of symbiosis of humans and nature. That nature would be different without the humans,” Glomazić said, “and vice versa.”
Vanishing global grasslands
Maintaining this time-honored balance requires a delicate dance between traditional pastoral livelihoods and nature — a dance that’s dying out around the world, especially on grasslands as humanity converts them for industrial agribusiness and other modern uses.
In 2020, a team of researchers in Japan, led by Taiki Inoue of the University of Tsukuba in Nagano, looked at plant communities in the Sugadaira Highland grasslands. Japan’s Sugadaira, like Sinjajevina, has hosted herders for thousands of years. More recently, pastoralists have abandoned parts of these Asian grasslands, as they find it harder to make a living herding in today’s world.
The researchers compared the number of plant species living in the grasslands with those living in the forests that sprung up in the herders’ absence and in new grasslands created after loggers cleared some of those forests. They found that the old grasslands — at least 160, and in some cases thousands, of years old — had the widest plant variety by far. Younger grasslands, stemming from deforestation over the past 52 to 70 years, had fewer plant species, but still more than the forest itself.
The authors note that, globally, grasslands are diminishing.
About 13% of Japan’s land area was covered by grassland in the early 20th century, a figure that dropped to 1% by the early 2000s. Likewise, in recent decades, Brazil lost half of its vast Cerrado savanna biome, the largest grasslands now left on Earth. Given these precipitous declines, the authors suggest that conservation efforts should target the oldest “hotspot grasslands” where biodiversity is greatest — places like Sinjajevina.
Part of what makes the hotspots “hot” stems from their susceptibility to takeover by powerful institutions such as modern governments or corporations, which in turn derives from how grasslands are typically managed by traditional communities, Domínguez said. Grasslands are often communally shared, rather than being privately owned by a single individual, family or other legally deeded entity.
Domínguez noted that it doesn’t make much sense to divide up a grass-covered landscape among herders for individual exploitation. In expansive range systems like Sinjajevina, livestock need vast spaces so they do not overexploit the grasses available on a single plot. Sometimes, these commonly managed pastoral areas are even pejoratively referred to as “badlands.” He said this misnomer is due to the incorrect assumption that land is only good when it can be exploited intensively. In fact, he added, such so-called badlands often sustain many times more natural and cultural values than does intensive farming.
In contrast with conventional modern agriculture, the herders of Sinjajevina share the sprawling pastures, across which they move their animals from place to place, adhering to a strict code of self-imposed regulations to avoid overtaxing any one location. As a result, the pastures can offer people sustainable livelihoods almost indefinitely. Gara’s family is living proof that this approach to caring for the commons works, Domínguez said.
But the small population — 250 families in the case of Sinjajevina — leaves these herders in a position where they can “hardly oppose a central state or NATO in their land grabbing,” he said.
Humans and nature in concert
Though Sinjajevina has thrived in balance for centuries, it turns out that the “beautiful” symbiosis” found there — so rare, and becoming more so in the world’s grasslands, rainforests, and other landscapes — isn’t well understood by scientists. Ecologist Vladimir Pešić said that the dearth of data on Sinjajevina makes it “very difficult to talk [about] from a scientific point of view” what would happen if the military turns part of it into a training ground.
“We can only speculate,” said Pešić, a professor at the University of Montenegro. But, he added, “For sure there will be an impact on the Tara River canyon ecosystem.” Milan Sekulović, the secretary-general for the Montenegrin NGO Save Sinjajevina Association, still walks with his family’s herds to the Mountain every spring. He noted that the military incursion risks ruining “one big ecological resource because we still don’t know what we exactly have.”
In fact, the government’s Agency for Nature and Environmental Protection of Montenegro (EPA) probed the ecology of Sinjajevina before the military had — publicly, at least — shown interest in the Mountain. That research, released in 2018, was an initial step toward protecting the Sinjajevina Highlands as a regional nature park.
The study revealed a striking amalgam of plant and animal species, many found in few other places.
Researchers recorded 1,300 plant species, 56 of which live only on the Balkan Peninsula. The massif boasts dozens of bird and mammal species, as well as a handful of protected amphibian and reptile species, including the karst viper (Vipera ursinii macrops), a small, venomous snake that thrives in mountain grasslands but whose numbers have dwindled along with its favored habitat. The EPA study led to the promise of funding from the European Union to establish a park that would protect both the ecosystem and the herders’ way of life.
Other government documents attest to Sinjajevina’s ecological value. A 2015 report from the Montenegrin Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism notes that Sinjajevina is a bulwark for threatened mammals, of both the wild and domesticated sort, including the Piva sheep that local shepherds developed.
What’s more, scientists say Sinjajevina feeds Montenegro’s other regions. Every spring, alpine rivers swell with melting snow, gushing down from limestone peaks and providing a vital source of clean freshwater for Montenegro’s population. Pešić, the lead editor of a book called The Rivers of Montenegro, explained that the snowfall on the Mountain was a “very important” water source for the Balkan nation.
Zdravko Krivokapić, the country’s new prime minister, recently acknowledged this reliance, noting the urgent need to better understand how altering Sinjajevina will impact not just the immediate environment and the people who live there, but also the broader population of Montenegro.
“We have to be very careful about everything that we are doing,” Krivokapić told NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at a joint press conference on Dec. 15, 2020. “We have to find the best solution in order to meet the needs of NATO requirements and our [national] plans, and to preserve the essential value, which is, first and foremost, our environment.”
Gara was more forthright in her assessment.
“If they do the military exercises in Sinjajevina, they’re going to pollute our rivers and mountains,” she said. “The waters that come from Sinjajevina — I think they go to half of the country. If those waters are polluted, everything else is polluted.”
References
Inoue, T., Yaida, Y. A., Uehara, Y., Katsuhara, K. R., Kawai, J., Takashima, K., … Kenta, T. (2020). The effects of temporal continuities of grasslands on the diversity and species composition of plants. Ecological Research, 36(1), 24-31. doi:10.1111/1440-1703.12169
Pešić, V. (2020). The Rivers of Montenegro. Springer Nature.
by DGR News Service | Jan 26, 2021 | Human Supremacy, Toxification
This writing by Will Falk outlines the harm anticoagulant rodenticides can do to our non human kin and why they must be stopped.
By Will Falk
The first time I saw a coyote with mange my heart broke.
Most of her fur was gone. Her skin, covered with scabs and lesions, had a sickly pink pallor. Her tail seemed stuck between her legs. And, her movements, as she stumbled through a ditch next to a Colorado country road, were lethargic and listless. Just the sight of her made my own skin chafe and itch. As I hugged myself to ward away the horror, my fingernails dug into my own skin, scratching at the backs of my arms. The experience educated me in the realest ways about what the phrase “it made my skin crawl” truly means.
After witnessing this, I had to know more about what I had seen. I learned that this coyote was suffering from what scientists call sarcoptic mange, which is caused by mites who live in the skin of many wild canids. In burrowing into the animals’ skin to lay their eggs, these mites cause intense irritation and itchiness, scabbing, and hair loss. An animal affected by mange can develop secondary bacterial skin infections, too. Worst of all, mange can be fatal for animals if left untreated. With the loss of their fur, animals affected by mange often freeze to death. And, if the cold doesn’t kill them, those secondary bacterial skin infections exacerbated by excessive scratching will.
While mange does occur naturally,
recent research suggests that the widespread use of anticoagulant rodenticides – a type of rat poison – weakens the immune systems of animals and makes them more susceptible to mange. A 2017 study linked anticoagulant exposure to mange in bobcats, for example. Notoedric mange – which affects felines and is closely related to the sarcoptic mange that affects coyotes – ravaged the population of urban bobcats at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in southern California from 2002-2005. After mange was detected in 2001, the average annual survival of these bobcats plummeted by 49%. Mange-infected bobcats were necropsied and 98% of infected individuals had been exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides. These bobcats also had greater amounts of anticoagulant rodenticides than bobcats who did not die with mange.
After reading the results of the bobcat study, and against my better judgment, I was compelled to find images of bobcats with mange. I was met with the stares of blue-eyed bobcats, stripped of fur and looking like hairless, Sphynx cats. Unlike Sphynx cats, these bobcats weren’t bred selectively to be hairless. Their hair had been stripped and their skin ravaged by mites because they had eaten rodents who had eaten too many anticoagulant rodenticides.
What exactly are anticoagulant rodenticides?
Anticoagulant rodenticides are widely used as a cheap and effective means for killing rodents. These rodenticides disrupt coagulation and cause fatal hemorrhaging. In simple terms, rodenticides cause the creatures who eat them to bleed more easily. Similar to the way a minor wound to a human taking a blood-thinner can cause a human to bleed out, rodents who have ingested anticoagulant rodenticides bleed to death.
Rodents exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides don’t just bleed to death – they bleed to death slowly. Rodents are very intelligent. They are so intelligent, in fact, that the use of toxins that immediately harm a rodent have proven to be completely ineffective because rodents learn not to eat things that instantaneously kill their kin. Anticoagulant rodenticides are effective because they can be mixed with rodents’ favorite foods as bait and the 3-7 days it takes for exposure to kill rodents makes it very difficult for them to understand what is killing them.
Anticoagulant rodenticides have been in use since the late 1940s, and by the early 1980s, genetic resistance to what are now called “first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides” was reported in rats and mice around the world. These first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides include the chemicals diphacinone, warfarin, coumatetralyl, and chlorophacinone and they killed rodents only after prolonged or repeated exposure. Due to genetic resistance, second-generation anticoagulants developed. These chemicals – which include difenacuom, brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone, and flocoumafen – are much more potent, have a longer half-life, and can kill rodents after only one feeding. This potency poses an increased risk of harm non-target species.
Inevitably, predators who eat rodents are exposed to the rodenticides ingested by their prey.
In one study, 70% of mammals tested in California were found to have been exposed to anticoagulants. Anticoagulant rodenticides were detected in 49% of the raptors tested in New York City, including in 81% of the great horned owls tested. A study of three species of owls in British Columbia and the Yukon detected anticoagulant rodenticides in 62% of barn owls, 92% of barred owls, and 70% of great horned owls. In sum, the Canadian researchers detected anticoagulant rodenticides in 70% of 164 owls. They also confirmed that rodenticides killed two barn owls, three barred owls, and one great horned owl.
As described above, rodents usually do not die for several days after consuming a lethal dose. This means they may continue to move through habitat shared with predators and they may continue to feed on poisoned bait. Additionally, rodents – exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides and who may be hemorrhaging internally – spend more time in open areas, stagger as they move, and sit motionless before death. All of this makes them easier prey for predators.
Coyotes, and especially urban coyotes, rely heavily on rodents for food.
It appears anticoagulant rodenticides are harming coyotes. Scientists in the Denver metropolitan area, for example, researching the effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on coyotes, found a dead juvenile male with no obvious external injuries or other signs of trauma. However, when they necropsied the young coyote, they “found free blood in the abdominal cavity” and “a puncture wound [that] was present on the left side of the body overlying the spleen but not penetrating the abdominal wall.” They determined that the coyote died from “acute severe hemorrhage, disproportionate to the amount of trauma observed.” The coyote’s liver tested positive for an anticoagulant rodenticide. In other words, it’s likely that the rodenticide in the coyote’s body turned a minor injury lethal.
These scientists found another young male coyote dead on a two-lane road “with minor evidence of skin tearing over the ventral neck and chest.” When they necropsied the coyote, they found that the coyote’s chest was filled with blood and they concluded that the coyoted was killed by “severe acute hemorrhage, disproportionate to the mild to moderate trauma received from being hit by a vehicle.” The scientists suspected rodenticide exposure. And, sure enough, the coyote’s liver tested positive for two types of anticoagulant rodenticides. Again, rodenticides turned a small injury into a coyote’s death.
There have been many more studies demonstrating the harmful effects anticoagulant rodenticides have on non-rodent species.
Some of these studies include harmful effects on buzzards, mountain lions, otters, endangered European mink, polecats, and, even, freshwater fish. Anticoagulants, in fact, act on all vertebrates – not just the rodents they’re intended for. Scientists have also discovered anticoagulant rodenticides in raw and treated wastewater, sewage sludge, estuarine sediments, and particulate matter suspended in the air.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll stop here. But, it bears mentioning that as I sifted through study after study describing the havoc anticoagulant rodenticides wreak on natural communities and felt my stomach grow increasingly sour, I learned the literal meaning of another phrase: ad nauseum. It is also important to remember that, despite the amount of studies being conducted on the effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on non-target wildlife, scientists caution us that most of this poisoning remains undetected because the necropsy and liver analysis required is labor and cost intensive. Similarly, unless an animal is being tracked through radiotelemetry, finding dead animals in a non-decomposed state, is difficult.
***
After learning about problems with anticoagulant rodenticides, the torturous manner in which these chemicals kill, and how they are making predators of rodents more susceptible to mange, most people want to know:
What can I do?
This is the wrong question. Don’t ask: What can I do? Ask: What needs to be done? What do bobcats – blue eyes unblinking despite the pain of internal hemorrhaging – need us to do? What do coyotes – scraping their inflamed skin against fence posts, the corners of concrete walls, and rough tree trunks – need us to do? What do rodents – intelligent, sociable, and bleeding to death – need us to do?
Rodents, and all those who eat them, need us to stop the manufacture and application of anticoagulant rodenticides. And, they need this to happen as quickly as possible. This is, of course, much easier said than done.
Individual home or other property owners, as opposed to government or business entities, account for a portion of total anticoagulant rodenticide use. If these individuals could be convinced to live and let rodents live, or to employ non-lethal, non-toxic measures such as blocking holes and other openings rodents use to access buildings, practicing better sanitation, or trapping rodents and removing them to better habitat, then the total use of anticoagulant rodenticides could be reduced.
There are barriers making it unlikely that individual property owners will forego the use of anticoagulant rodenticides:
First, fear of rodents is so pervasive in the dominant culture that there are multiple words to describe this fear including musophobia (fear of mice specifically), murophobia (fear of the taxonomic family Muridae, which includes mice and rats), and suriphobia (which comes from the French souris meaning “mouse”). Similarly, calling someone a “rat” is a grave insult.
Second, anticoagulant rodenticides are simply more economical. Sealing up holes in a house and live-trapping rodents can be costly and can require much more labor than using poison. In fact, a member of California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, Structural Pest Control Board recently estimated that pest control services employing only sanitation, exclusion of rodents, and removal of harborage can be 2-5 times more costly than using rodenticide due to labor and material costs.
I want to be clear here: I am not saying we shouldn’t try to convince everyone we can to stop using anticoagulant rodenticides. This is, of course, one reason I wrote this piece. I am saying, however, that coyotes, bobcats, other predators of rodents, and rodents, themselves, need us to do much more than to simply refuse to stop using anticoagulant rodenticides in our own homes.
Many people assume that if homeowners stopped using these rodenticides the problem would go away. Unfortunately, this is not the case. National and global anti-rodenticide market data are protected by business privacy laws as
“confidential business information.”
However, it’s safe to say that while individual, residential use of anticoagulant rodenticides accounts for a portion of global rodenticide use, governments and agricultural corporations are likely the biggest users of anticoagulant rodenticides.
Statistics from California tend to support this point. In 2012, California imposed stricter regulations on second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides including restricting sales of these chemicals to the general public. Then, in 2014, they imposed a new round of restrictions that were specifically intended to restrict the access of homeowners to second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides. But, using data from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s Pesticide Use Reporting database, it does not appear that the amount of second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides applied between 2012-2017 was significantly reduced despite the new regulations.
So, if homeowners are only part of the problem, and governments and corporations are the worst offenders, how do we stop governments and corporations from using anticoagulant rodenticides?
A common response is: change the law. It is highly unlikely, however, that governments will ever impose a true ban on anticoagulant rodenticides. The agricultural lobby is one of the most powerful political forces in American politics. Meanwhile, in the United States, rodents are responsible for an estimated $19 billion in economic damages annually through the consumption and contamination of stored grains. Rodents don’t just pose a threat to agricultural interests, either. A British study, which attempted to determine the cost of physical damage to the built environment caused by rodents, estimated that rodents cost the British economy £200 million per year.
An astute reader may be saying to herself: “Didn’t California recently ban anticoagulant rodenticides?” And, of course, despite the headlines, California did not ban anticoagulant rodenticides. To understand this, we must look to the actual text of the California Ecosystems Protection Act of 2020 (also known as Assembly Bill No. 1788). Courts applying law do not rely on newspaper headlines – they rely on what a piece of legislation actually says.
The pertinent section (12978.7(c)) reads:
“Except as provided in subdivision (e) or (f), the use of any second generation anticoagulant rodenticide is prohibited in this state until the director makes the certification described in subdivision (g).”
So, first, the prohibition only applies to second generation anticoagulant rodenticides and excludes the less potent but still deadly first generation anticoagulant rodenticides.
Second, if we scroll down to the exceptions provided in subdivisions (e) and (f), we see how hollow this “prohibition” really is. Subdivision (e) declares that the prohibition does not apply to governmental agency employees who use second generation anticoagulant rodenticides for public health activities or for protecting water supply infrastructure and facilities; to mosquito or vector control districts; to efforts to eradicate nonnative invasive species on offshore islands; to efforts to control an actual or potential rodent infestation associated with a public health need, as determined by a declaration from a public health officer; or for further research into the dangers posed by second generation anticoagulant rodenticides.
Subdivision (f) creates exceptions to the prohibition for medical waste generators and for “agricultural activities” conducted at warehouses used to store foods for human and animal consumption; slaughterhouses; canneries; factories; breweries; an agricultural production site housing water storage and conveyance facilities; and agricultural production sites housing rights-of-way and other transportation infrastructure.
The power of agricultural interests should be clear from these lists of exceptions to this so-called “prohibition” on second generation anticoagulant rodenticides.
It should also be clear that the California Ecosystems Protection Act of 2020 has not banned anticoagulant rodenticides. At best, the law simply prevents individual homeowners and property owners from using a subset of anticoagulant rodenticides while exempting those who likely use second generation rodenticides the most.
To repeat, it is unlikely that governments will ever truly ban anticoagulant rodenticides. This does not mean that we have no power to stop the manufacture and application of these poisons. It is true that we must raise awareness about the harms of anticoagulant rodenticides. And, anyone who reads this, please, please stop using these toxic chemicals. Similarly, pushing for legislation to limit the use of anticoagulant rodenticides can help. But, if we truly want to protect rodents, and the predators who eat them, from horrible deaths, and if we truly want to keep these poisons out of the natural communities we depend on for life, we will have to do it ourselves.
As with any truly effective tactic that impedes humans’ ability to destroy the natural world, stopping anticoagulant rodenticides will require exceptional bravery. To find that bravery, I return to the first mangy coyote I saw. If it was me, and my skin was covered in itchy sores and lesions, my organs were hemorrhaging blood, and my movements were growing ever slower, I’d likely give in, lay down, and let death take me.
But, that first mangy coyote I watched struggle to keep moving through a roadside ditch did not give up. She kept moving in an effort to fulfill her species’ ancient role as a trickster lesson-giver. She wanted us to see her. She wanted us to know what happened to her. And, she wanted us to stop those who hurt her.
Will Falk is a DGR member, lawyer for the natural world and is currently journeying in conversation with the Ohio River. You can read about Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.
by DGR News Service | Jan 25, 2021 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, People of Color & Anti-racism
In the following piece, Mark relates the population growth to patriarchy, exploitation, and capitalism.
Editor’s note: DGR does not agree with all opinions on this article.
by Mark Behrend
The population of Africa is soaring.
Since 1950, it has grown from 227 million to 1.343 billion — an increase of 590%. Over the same period, South America has grown by 425%, Asia by 330%, and North and Central America by 250%, while Europe has only grown by 35%.
There are many reasons for the disparity, though the basic factors are development, wealth, and education. With development, infant mortality generally goes down and life expectancy increases, driving population up. Development tends to increase prosperity, education, and opportunities, gradually bringing population growth to a halt. Under normal development patterns, this results in a huge population increase when an economy is fueled largely by primary industries. Population growth slows as the economy moves into secondary industries, and levels off in a tertiary economy, where wealth is amassed, service industries emerge, and domestic businesses expand into foreign markets. That’s the upside of industrialization.
The downside is that both sides of this growth curve devastate the natural world.
With an exponential increase in the consumption and depletion of natural resources, degradation of air, land, and water, an ultimately fatal attack on biodiversity, and the exploitation of cultures on the back end of the development curve. Rooted in colonialism, the immediate threat to Africa’s people is that most of the benefits of development are going to European, American, and Chinese corporations. This does not appear likely to change. According to U.N. estimates, populations in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia are expected to stabilize by 2100, while Africa’s is expected to triple.
Due to a variety of factors, including government inaction, corruption, and poor educational opportunities, birth rates remain high. To state it simply, unschooled girls and women have few options in life but to marry young and have four or more children. Ignorance can lead to the persistence of superstitions and regressive cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation, and beliefs that contraception causes promiscuity, infertility, and various health problems.
A recent news story reported that 10% of girls in Senegal are still subjected to female genital mutilation.
The practice remains common on much of the continent. A Senegalese activist said it continues, mostly among the poor and uneducated, who are afraid to defy old customs. He noted that victims often experience a high rate of lasting pain, along with a much higher than normal incidence of menstrual problems. A woman in favor of FGM, however, disagreed and said.
“If women are having problems, it’s because of contraception.”
The more obvious problem with contraception in Africa is that it is rarely used. The population of Senegal jumped from 2.4 million in 1950 to 16.3 million in 2018 — an increase of 675% in 68 years. On average, that’s the equivalent of adding 10% of a country’s current population every year, in perpetuity. The country with the greatest population growth, however, is Ivory Coast, with an astounding 978% increase over a similar period (2.6 million to 25.7 million, between 1950 and 2018). This can be linked directly to corporate exploitation, as the numbers clearly show.
Since independence in 1960, foreign corporations have virtually transformed Ivory Coast into one giant cocoa plantation, to feed the developed world’s voracious demand for chocolate. In 2019, the world cocoa market was worth over $44 billion, and is projected to top $61 billion by 2027. Along the way, Ivory Coast has become the world’s largest producer, with an estimated 38% of global production. In the process, however, 90% of the country’s forests have been sacrificed, and the illusion of economic growth has driven an unprecedented explosion in the Ivorian census.
Several foreign corporations are responsible for this, the principal offenders being Olam International (Singapore); Barry Callebaut (Switzerland); and the American companies Cargill, Nestle, Mars, and Hershey. They have much to be responsible for.
Capitalism’s guiding principle of creating an ever-growing demand at the lowest possible cost has led to more than rampant deforestation.
According to The Guardian an astounding 59 million children, aged five to 17, are working against their will in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in agriculture. Due to the refusal of some agencies and governments to include family farms in forced labor statistics, however, estimates of the number of victims vary widely. Fortune Magazine, for instance , puts the number of child laborers in West Africa at “only” 2.1 million. Additional data from the U.S. Department of Labor indicate that over a million children under the age of 12 work in the cocoa industry in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce more than two-thirds of the world’s supply.
Thousands are recruited from even poorer African countries, often with promises of good jobs and free education. Instead, they become victims of what is arguably the world’s largest human trafficking and slavery network. Even those working on family farms are often kept out of school to work in hazardous conditions, with 95% of them reportedly exposed to pesticides, and at risk of injury from using machetes and carrying heavy loads.
Pressured by organized boycotts by Europeans and Americans, the industry pledged in 2001 to reduce child labor 70% by 2020.
Instead, a new report says that since 2010, the number of West African children engaged in forced labor has increased from 31% to 45% of the total childhood population. The reason, again, is the basic mechanism of capitalism. Industry influences consumers to demand more, by producing more and advertising it at a lower price — thus enabling corporations to pay farmers even less. As a result, wholesale prices for cocoa have been cut in half since the 1970s. This has been achieved by paying West African farmers between $.50 and $.84 a day, while the World Bank’s poverty line is $1.90. Hence the 60% rise in cocoa production since 2010, the 45% jump in child labor, and the accelerated pace of deforestation. Farmers are compelled to produce more, just to make the same money they used to make for producing less.
The cocoa industry explains this by saying that it decentralized production (i.e., encouraged family farming rather than corporate plantations) to hold down costs. So, now it can’t meet its child labor goals, because family farms can’t be regulated like factory farms. Corporations call this good economics, while a neutral observer might call it legalized slavery.
A 2019 study, reported by The Guardian, says research indicates that the best way to end child labor is by educating girls and empowering women, in what remain highly patriarchal societies.
There are 18 steps in preparing cocoa for the wholesale market, and women and girls perform 15 of them. This is typical of labor patterns in much of the developing world. And it goes a long way toward explaining the poverty, overpopulation, and environmental destruction that plague the “Third World” — and, by extension, the planet as a whole. In Ivory Coast, the production demands and poverty forced on local communities has also forced roughly a million people to seek their livelihoods by illegally deforesting and farming in national forests and national parks. Recent surveys found that in 13 of 23 of these so-called “protected areas,” once thriving populations of chimpanzees and forest elephants have been totally eliminated.
At the current rate, Ivory Coast’s irreplaceable flora and fauna will soon be gone, along with a carbon sink half the size of Texas. Similar scenarios are playing out across Africa, as global agribusiness becomes more invested in African lands. Incredibly, the Ivorian government’s response has been to pass a law that would effectively put the nation’s forestry protection under corporate control for the next 24 years. The argument behind this fox-guarding-the-henhouse policy is that corporations see the “big picture,” while local farmers only see their own immediate needs. The policy would expel those one million illegal farmers from public lands, with no assistance or other apparent options, apart from migration, starvation, or lives of crime.
Such is the grim reality of corporate resource extraction in nations that were European colonies less than a century ago, and today have become virtual colonies of E.U., U.S., and Chinese business. China now has a huge and ever-growing footprint, both in East Africa and in Latin America. On the surface, Beijing paints this as a “win-win” relationship, with China building “free” infrastructure, and bringing big business to the boondocks.
The reality, however, is a far different story — with pipelines and powerplants crossing the Serengeti, a superhighway across fragile Amazon headwaters, and a rival to the Panama Canal on its way to completion, in Central America’s most environmentally sensitive wetlands. And if supposedly accountable corporations in Western democracies can’t stop child labor in West Africa, what are we to expect from a secretive dictatorship like China?
Who will feed Africa as its population doubles and triples, with much of the farmland now leased to Chinese agribusiness?
How long can Africa’s (or Indonesia’s, or Brazil’s) rich biodiversity survive, with their habitat reduced to a corporate commodity? Who would you pick to win a competition between gorillas, elephants, giraffes, and zebras, on the one hand, and global extraction industries, on the other?
As the monocrop cocoa farms of Ivory Coast become infertile and lose their productivity, the booming population will inevitably face growing poverty, and a very real threat of starvation. That isn’t the “corporate plan,” of course. The corporate plan, as one Ivorian farmer observed, is simply to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. And African farmers either play along, or the cocoa companies find those who will. The cycle thus compels Africans to make more babies to work the land, and then rape the land to feed the babies.
When it comes to Africa, ‘supply and demand’ is merely a sanitized term for ‘slash and burn’. Capitalism has no long-term plan for the continent, because the corporations are beholden to non-African investors back home. Their competitive edge is based on exceeding the year-end dividends of their rivals. From a business standpoint, the practical meaning of the profit motive is to use up the planet as fast as possible, and report it for tax purposes as normal depreciation.
Crazy as it sounds, the long-term plan of industrial civilization is simply to have a good short-term plan.
Corporations are all about the current fiscal year, just as democratic governments are all about the next election cycle. Sensible goals (relatively speaking) may be discussed and agreed to in forums like the Paris Climate Accords. But that all presumes a world working toward a common goal. When the negotiators get back home, however, they’re in a competitive race again. It’s nation against nation, corporation against corporation — the “real world” of year-end reports and election cycles, where those “sensible goals” they agreed to in principle are put off until next year. And “tomorrow,” as the song says, “never comes.”
Such are the economic realities that prompted the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to project that by 2050, the world will face between 50 million and 700 million food refugees — a polite term for starving people, coming soon to a country near you. IPBES says the most likely number is between 200 and 300 million. At any rate, it will make Europe’s current crisis of African and Asian refugees (along with Latin American migrants fleeing to the United States) look like a picnic in the park, and today’s regional crisis will become tomorrow’s global disaster. Such is the future of corporate capitalism, where the rich plunder the resources of the poor, create a baby boom for cheap labor, and then — when there is no longer any profit in it — abandon both the people and the land.
The destruction can no longer be confined to the developing world.
This time the migrants will follow us home. Indirectly, their barren land will follow us, too — in the form of climate change, sea level rise, and the other unintended consequences of globalization, in what promises to be capitalism’s last century. There is simply nowhere left to run. As Chris Hedges describes it,
“It’s all Easter Island now.”
Returning to the education factor, population experts have long recognized the link between female education and employment opportunities on the one hand, and population stability on the other. Indeed, wherever women and girls have access to higher education, equal job opportunities, and the right to say “no” to having babies, population either stabilizes or decreases slightly.
For proof, one need only look to South Korea, where this otherwise positive formula is creating an economic problem of its own. Women there have achieved relative parity, in both education and employment. But with patriarchy persisting in the home, fewer than half of South Korean women now choose to marry, and the population is plunging.
In places like Senegal, on the other hand, “women’s liberation” is a largely meaningless phrase.
Only 63% of girls there so much as finish primary school, and less than half make it to high school. After all, what do corporate exploiters need with educated masses in the developing world? How could the plunder continue, if the plundered were taught why they’re being plundered, where their resources go, who reaps the profits, and what the developing world is getting in return?
Such are the hard truths behind industrial civilization. Insane as it sounds, increased population and planetary destruction are the inevitable consequences of “progress,” when sustainability and common sense argue for reducing population, minimizing technology and energy needs, replanting forests, and restoring the land. Corporate executives, of course, denounce such sustainable ethics as wild-eyed, radical nonsense. To their thinking, perpetual growth is the only way to avoid economic stagnation and collapse.
Super-techies like Elon Musk of SpaceX and Google’s Larry Page ignore the math, arguing that we can mine the asteroids, colonize Mars, feed a growing population with hydroponic agriculture, and produce endless clean energy and green jobs. (Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich went so far as to suggest human colonies on the moon. Gingrich apparently wasn’t aware that the moon has a monthly temperature swing of 540° Farenheit, due to its two-week-long days and nights, and total lack of an atmosphere. Mars, meanwhile, has a highly toxic atmosphere, and an average temperature of -67°. Minor details.)
Technological fantasies aside, these so-called leaders leave one question unanswered:
In what school of economics is it taught that when you knowingly and systematically destroy your home planet, you get another one to plunder for free? What part of “there is no Planet B” did they not understand?
Featured image: Al Jazeera
by DGR News Service | Jan 24, 2021 | Education, Lobbying
News Alert: Land and water defenders are opposing the creation of a dam across the Zambezi River. They are requesting support to highlight concerns. We encourage you to comment on the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) before it closes on January 25th. The Zambezi River Authority needs to capture grievances for their Responses Report for the ESIA.
You can access the ESIA here and leave your comments on this email address.
The Environmental Resources Management (ERM) is in receipt of a report from a stakeholder. They have collated feedback from other stakeholders living in the Project Area of Influence in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Reports from community members living in the Project Area of Influence, have noted, that people are nervous to speak out against the BGHES Project, or even raise concerns and ask questions.
There is a strong feeling that in Zambia, largely due to historical context, that people cannot speak out against what the government is saying or doing for fear of retribution. Such retribution may be subtle or non-violent, such as having your livelihood taken away, rather than open threats/ acts of violence.
Batoka Gorge Hydro Electric Scheme (BGHES)
The proposed BGHES Project is seen as government driven and, therefore, people are not willing to question it. There is not a culture of speaking out against government, as such, people who may be opposed to the BGHES might not voice their opinion for fear of the consequences.
It has been reported that there have been threats of violence against people living in the Project Area of Influence who have opposed or questioned the BGHES Project.
There is no written documentation to ‘evidence’ or support this claim, however, it was noted that if people wanted to report threats, they do not know who they can report to. Local police, and even local traditional and government leadership, are not necessarily trusted to act on such information, and are typically seen as part of a government structure seeking to suppress opposition.
It was also noted that the ESIA report states that there are no migratory fish species that would be affected by the construction of the dam. However, stakeholders disagree with this statement, noting that there are in fact migratory fish species that would be impacted detrimentally by the presence of a dam. The stakeholder has, therefore, questioned whether the specialist report was rushed or perhaps written under instruction/coercion. Put simply, it is likely the environmental impacts have not been made clear. We suspect the author was paid to minimize the harm we know to be likely as a result of this project.
Your support is needed now.
We understand from the www.internationalrafting.com that…
“the review and comment period for the draft ESIAs will remain open until such time that the Authority and ERM are able to hold the ESIA disclosure meetings, or until further notice is given by the Authority and ERM. Your input remains key in the updating and finalization of the ESIA studies and stakeholders are encouraged to continue reviewing the draft ESIAs and to submit questions and comments to ERM: batokagorgehes@erm.com”
Stakeholders can access the draft ESIA reports and Non-Technical Summaries (NTSs) through the project website, www.erm.com/BGHES-ESIA and at the public locations previously communicated.”
Featured image: Brian McMorrow, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
For more on the issue, read this article and listen to this podcast interview.
