Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.
The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.
For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
Editor’s note: It’s a coast – not a beach, we forget that when our society talks about going to the beach. A beach is for basking in the sun, getting a drink, and dabbling in the water. But a coast is far more than an entertainment place for humans, it’s a habitat for a variety of animals and plants. Sand mining is a threat to these ecosystems and criminals operate it illegally. Construction companies need sand for their concrete as the demand for buildings soars. They seal the planet by destroying coastlines – and beaches.
While beaches are being stolen in poor places, they are being nourished(replenished) in wealthy places. Beach nourishment is the process of placing additional sediment on a beach or in the nearshore. A wider and higher beach can provide storm protection for coastal structures. Sediment is commonly dredged offshore and pumped directly onto the beach, dumped nearshore by a hopper dredge, or occasionally sourced from an inland location. It is an exercise in futility that destroys natural ecosystems and subsidizes wealthy beachfront homeowners at taxpayers’ expense, particularly as worsening storms resulting from climate change demand investment in more permanent solutions to beach erosion. The sea level will rise and people living there will have to move.
It is time to stop building infrastructure and trying to control nature.
Increasing demand for this seemingly abundant and common material harms human and natural communities — and fuels a lucrative and dangerous illegal industry.
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This article looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
We need to talk about sand
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
The Building Blocks of Modern Society
Sand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Yet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco, criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
How to Solve the Problem
UNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping the waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, by retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
Shifting Sands, Shifting Thinking
William Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
Melissa Gaskill is a freelance science writer based in Austin, Texas, whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Mental Floss, Newsweek, Alert Diver and many other publications. She is the co-author of A Worldwide Travel Guide to Sea Turtles and author of Pandas to Penguins: Ethical Encounters with Animals at Risk.
Editor’s note: Sharks are beautiful, intelligent creatures, but they have been overexploited for decades. Because of their “high market value” industrial fisheries hunt sharks for their fins and other body parts. But it’s difficult to control the protection of the sea predators when they move to unprotected zones or international and local fleets fish in other countries’ fishery zones. The brutal killings of adults, babies, and even pregnant sharks happen while our culture is focused on buying more stuff and attending distracting events.
If sharks went extinct, it would set off a chain reaction. Sharks play an important role in the food chain. Smaller animals like shellfish may go extinct if there were no sharks to eat seals, for example. That would create a ripple effect, causing mass die-offs of otters, seals, and many types of fish due to food scarcity. The chain reaction would continue until its effects were felt on land, with fisheries collapsing in a matter of years. When will humanity wake up and start living with – not against other precious beings?
Every year on July 14th, we celebrate Shark Awareness Day. It is not just a tribute to one of nature’s most misunderstood creatures; it is a call to action. Sharks have cruised the oceans for over 450 million years, playing a vital role in keeping marine ecosystems healthy. But today, these apex predators find themselves under increasing pressure, with many species teetering on the brink of extinction.
Sharks: More Than Just Jaws
Hollywood might portray sharks as mindless killing machines, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sharks come in a staggering variety of shapes and sizes, from the filter-feeding giants like the whale shark to the sleek and speedy blue shark. They possess incredible senses, like electroreception, that allows them to detect electrical fields emitted by prey, and an amazing ability to navigate vast distances.
As apex predators, they help maintain the balance by regulating the populations of species below them in the food chain. This includes controlling the numbers of mid-level predators and helping to ensure species diversity among smaller fish and invertebrate populations. Their feeding habits help keep marine ecosystems healthy and functional. For instance, by preying on weak or sick individuals, sharks help prevent the spread of disease and ensure a healthier gene pool within the prey population. Their disappearance could have devastating consequences, leading to population explosions of prey species and ultimately, the collapse of entire ecosystems.
A Cause for Alarm: Why Are Sharks Endangered?
Despite their importance, many shark species are alarmingly close to extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), over one-third or 30% of shark species are either vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. Some of the most threatened species include the Great Hammerhead, the Oceanic whitetip, and the Basking shark.
The main culprit behind this is overfishing. Driven by demand for shark fins (a prized ingredient in shark fin soup) and meat, millions of sharks are caught every year, often through unsustainable practices like finning, where fins are removed and the body discarded.
Another major threat is habitat loss. Sharks rely on healthy coral reefs and mangroves for breeding and feeding. However, these vital ecosystems are being degraded by pollution, climate change, and coastal development.
A Ray of Hope: Conservation Efforts Underway
The silver lining in the story of sharks is the growing awareness and effort towards their conservation. Governments, NGOs, and international bodies are working together to protect these magnificent creatures:
Protected Areas: Many marine protected areas (MPAs) have been established to provide safe havens for sharks where fishing is restricted or banned. One notable example of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) that provides a safe haven for sharks is the Chagos Marine Reserve in the Indian Ocean. This reserve is one of the world’s largest marine protected areas and encompasses a variety of marine environments. It offers significant protection to various shark species, among other marine life, by enforcing strict regulations that limit fishing and other extractive activities.
Another example is the Jardines de la Reina National Park in Cuba, which has been particularly successful in conserving shark populations. This MPA provides a refuge for several species of sharks and has implemented strict no-take policies and eco-tourism guidelines that help maintain the health and biodiversity of its waters.
Deadly Predators
Deadly predators, Under the sea and on land But, what’s more deadly? A razor sharp, swimming shark Or the end of marine life?
Poem by @saf_begum
Regulations and Bans on Shark Finning: Shark finning, the brutal practice of removing a shark’s fins and discarding the rest of the body, has prompted global action through stringent regulations and international cooperation. Many countries now enforce laws that require sharks to be landed with fins naturally attached, enhancing sustainable practices and compliance. Furthermore, international agreements like CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) play a critical role in regulating the trade of endangered shark species to ensure their survival. These efforts are crucial in curbing unsustainable exploitation, promoting marine conservation, and supporting the recovery of shark populations worldwide.
Sustainable Fishing Practices: Minimizing bycatch, the accidental capture of non-target species in fisheries, is crucial for preserving marine biodiversity, including sharks. Sustainable practices such as gear modification, implementing time and area closures, and employing bycatch reduction devices can significantly reduce unintended catches. Regulations that require fisheries to use circle hooks and turtle excluder devices (TEDs) help prevent the capture of non-target species like sharks and turtles. Additionally, real-time management of fisheries based on immediate data and promoting consumer awareness through eco-labeling, as mandated by organizations like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), can drive demand towards sustainably harvested seafood. These strategies not only help conserve marine species but also enhance the overall health of marine ecosystems and support the economic stability of fishing-dependent communities.
This Shark Awareness Day, let’s not only admire the majestic Great Whites and the elusive deep-sea dwellers but also ignite a global commitment to safeguard their future. Every shark species plays a pivotal role in marine ecosystems, balancing marine life and ensuring the health of our oceans.
Today, we must transcend admiration and take decisive action. Let’s pledge to protect these magnificent creatures, understanding that saving sharks is fundamentally about preserving the entire marine ecosystem. By protecting sharks, we are not just saving individual species; we are investing in the health and sustainability of our entire ocean. Join us in this crucial mission—educate, advocate, and participate. Together, we can turn the tide for sharks and secure a vibrant future for our blue planet.
BioDB
BioDB is a new, non-profit website that serves as a dynamic hub for wildlife conservation enthusiasts while advocating for protecting our planet’s invaluable biodiversity. With a primary goal of raising awareness and mobilizing funds for selected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to wildlife conservation, BioDB offers a comprehensive platform for individuals and organizations passionate about positively impacting our natural world. https://biodb.com/
Editor’s note: A pandemic in our backyards – The squirrel walked a bit wobbly, it wasn’t as agile and funny as these small creatures often move. It had its eyes rather closed which gave it a tired look. I was concerned and called a squirrel rescue station, luckily there was one closer to me. The poor squirrel got worse meanwhile and couldn’t jump anymore. Lastly, it just sat in the corner of the roof with its head down.
When I brought the tiny animal to the rescue station, its leader Mrs. Heimann told me that the symptoms she saw were those of an unknown virus. She said it was terrible for her to watch two cute squirrels per week die in her care because of that virus. In the last years the health of squirrels got a lot worse, she explained to me – broken bones, malnourishment, paralysis, or DNA damage. Sick animals are more prone to get infected than healthy ones. As I can see the pandemic isn’t over for birds and mammals, it’s right in our backyard and should concern us all.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
First signs of a pandemic
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
Poultry production must change
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell is a Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia
Editor’s note: Civilization is in free fall, and most people do not accept that. Humans will have to use a lot less energy. That future is hard for people to grasp. They will need to adjust their expectations of how reality is going to look. This will require going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining(excuses), depression, and acceptance. We can still create social relations that can improve the world through policy and interactions. Rememberthe win is always in the movements struggling together with others toward those victories, the fighting against the fascism of industrial civilization.
By Paul Mobbs, The ‘Meta-Blog’, issue no.14, 7th May 2020
Being ‘well known’ in eco-circles, you sometimes get strange, often unsolicited stuff arriving in your inbox. This, however, was something I’d been hoping for: A chance to view, and thus review, ‘Bright Green Lies’ – Julia Barnes’ new documentary about the environmental movement and its support for renewable energy.
‘Planet of the Humans’ (PotH) was entertaining. At a general level, it was factual, albeit a polemic expression of those points. But its protracted period of production meant that it lacked coherence, and thus left itself open to easy criticism.
Those criticisms when they came, however, fell directly into the lap of the central argument of the film: That mainstream environmentalists distort facts to promote an erroneous vision of the measures necessary to ‘save the planet’.
It wasn’t just Josh Fox, backed by green entrepreneurs, engaging in a cavalier reshaping of facts and quotations to blacken the name of the film. Our own George Monbiot engaged in his own well-honed distortion of fact and quotation via The Guardian (symbolic of a number of their recent failures) in order to try and prevent people from watching the film on this side of the pond.
‘Bright Green Lies’ is very different: Like PotH, once again it presents the personal viewpoint of the director, Julia Barnes. Unlike PotH, though, it has a very different tone, building upon the immediacy and well-researched content of the eponymous book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert – all of whom appear in the film.
You get the core of the film’s argument over the first five minutes, as the four main protagonists set out their respective take on the ‘bright green’ position [time index in the film is shown in brackets]:
Barnes: “People rarely question the solutions they are taught to embrace, but with all the world at stake we must start asking the right questions. There is a push for a 100% renewable world, and after the research I’ve done for this documentary, I want no part of it. I did not become an environmentalist to protect my way of life or the civilization in which I live. I did it because I am in love with life on this planet and because the world I love is under assault. This film is for those whose allegiance is with the living world. Those who would do whatever it takes to defend it.”[02:26]
Jensen: “You will have hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of Washington, or New York, or Paris; and, if you ask those individuals ‘why are you marching?’, they will say, ‘we wanna save the planet’. And if you ask them for their demands they will say, ‘We want subsidies for the wind and solar industry’. That’s extraordinary. I can’t think of any time in history when any mass movement has been so completely captured and turned into lobbyists for an industry.”[03:49]
Keith: “The environmental movement used to be a very impassioned group of people who cared very deeply about the places we loved and the creatures we loved. What happened, though, in my lifetime, was that this movement which was so honorable and impassioned, it turned into something completely different. And now it’s about protecting a destructive way of life, while it destroys the creatures and the places we love. It’s all become, ‘how do we continue to fuel this destruction?’ as if the only problem was that we were using oil and gas.”[03:16]
Wilbert: “The natural world isn’t really part of the conversation anymore. Kumi Naidoo, the former head of Greenpeace, I was watching him being interviewed the other day. He was saying, ‘The planet’s going to survive, the oceans are going to survive, the forests are going to survive, it’s really about can we save ourselves or not’. And I just saw that and I’m thinking, what the hell are you saying? … This is someone who’s considered to be one of the top environmentalists in the world and he’s say- ing we don’t have to worry about the forests or the oceans? I mean, that just betrays a complete lack of empathy and connection to the natural world. I don’t know how you could possibly say that when we’re in the midst of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction, and it’s being caused by industrial culture. It’s being caused by the same institutions, the same economies, the same systems, the same raw materials, the same extractive mindset, that is being used for these renewable energy technologies.”[04:36]
Environmentalism is a ‘class’ issue
My introduction to ‘environmentalism’ started before I’d seriously heard the word; growing up in a semi-rural working-class family who grew their own food, kept chickens, and foraged. Likewise, coming into contact with ‘mainstream’ environmentalism in the mid-1980s introduced me to the concept of ‘bright green’ before I’d heard that term either.
If there’s one general criticism I have (in part because the book, too, glosses over it), it is the failure to explore the class bias of environmentalism. It is dominated by the middle class (and in the UK, led by the upper-middle class); and so the economically ‘aspirational’ middle-class values suffuse its agenda. That’s overlooked in the film.
That this movement should innately favor individualist materialist values, over communal or spiritual ones, should therefore be of no surprise. That does not condemn these groups, or render them incapable of change. What it makes them do is reflect a narrow focus on both concerns and solutions. More importantly, in a mass political society, it makes it difficult for them to have empathy with a large majority of the public – and that hampers their ability to make change.
That bias towards affluence informs their ideological values, which in turn have come to dominate contemporary environmentalism. As said in the film:
“Bright Green Environmentalism is founded on the notion that technology will solve environmental problems; and that you can, through 100% recycling, through wind and solar power, have an industrial economy that does not harm the planet. Deep ecology is the belief that we need to radically change the way society functions in order to be sustainable.”[05:30]
The spectre of this early ideological differentiation has haunted the movement. Just as Keith outlines, for me it became evident around 1988 to 1990. Figures such as Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin sought to divest the movement of its ‘hairshirt’ image and put it on a ‘professional’ footing. As a self-acknowledged ‘fundo’ (the pejorative term used for deep green ‘fundamentalists’ in the Green Party at that time) that didn’t enthuse me one bit.
That ‘professionalised’ approach (for which, read compromise with neoliberal values) would slowly percolate through the movement over the next decade. And with it, the compromise that has stalled more radical responses to ecological issues ever since. That failure has, in part, only escalated these historic internal tensions – tensions that this film, almost certainly, will inflame.
First ‘green consumerism’, and then ‘sustainability’, foundered on the reality that the movement’s role as a ‘stakeholder’ in government and industry programs produced little change. Today, the issue at the heart of this internecine contention is renewable energy – and whether it is a realistic response to the Climate Emergency or just another distracting ruse.
I think this film is a good contribution to that contemporary debate. If only to make many people aware that this debate exists, and so cause people to look at the academic research in more detail.
As Barnes succinctly put it: “We are told that we can have our cake and eat it too.”[01:59] And yes, this really is all about cutting the ‘cake’ of affluence. But the film’s criticism of consumerism was couched in a generic “we”, and therein lies its failing.
When it comes to consumption it is not an issue of ‘we’. It is about how an extremely narrow social and economic elite exploit the majority by giving them the ‘illusion of affluence’. Albeit one that is today precariously founded upon deepening debt and doubtful economics (a ‘deep’ issue in-and-of itself).
By not making the case that it is a highly privileged minority causing/benefiting from ecological destruction (see graph below), the film and book miss the opportunity to state arguments such as:
The most affluent 10% of the global population (OK, that’s mostly us!) cause half the pollution;
But even within these most affluent states, national inequality means wealthy households emit far more pollution than the poorest;
Hence pollution is absolutely associated with economic inequality and consumption; and,
That this skew means the most affluent states must reduce consumption by perhaps 90%!
In a situation where – both globally but also in the most polluting states – it is a minority which is causing these problems, that redefines its political ‘reality’ in different terms. To be fair, Barnes strays into this issue at points:
“The ocean is the foundation of life on this planet. The fact that we’re losing it at the rate we are is alarming. I think part of the reason we’re failing is that we ask what is politically possible more often than we ask what is necessary.”[41:37]
Simple logic demands that this minority urgently change their lifestyle, lest the majority, threatened by ecological breakdown, seek to rest it from them. It is how they do this which is another live issue. Frankly, that’s not going too well right now:
Currently, Western states are seeking to repress protests against the climate emergency, to forestall calls for more radical change; While at the same time, billionaires create bunkers in remote locations to survive any future backlash from the dispossessed majority. This creates a powerful incentive for the ‘impoverished majority’ to rest control away from the economic elite driving ecological breakdown. The reality is, though, neither Greenpeace, WWF, nor even Extinction Rebellion, are likely to pick up that banner any time soon. Their failure to recognise affluence as a driver for ecological destruction negates their ability to act to stop it. Instead tokenis- tic measures, like renewable energy, supplant calls for meaningful systemic change.
Economics versus ecological limits
About halfway through, Max Wilbert elucidates a truth that doesn’t get nearly enough exposure:
“When people talk about 100% renewable energy transition to save the planet, to save civilization, what they’re actually talking about is sustaining modern high-energy ways of life, at the expense of the natural world.”[26:38]
I’m sure a number will recognise that from many of my previous workshops. In fact, I’ve just had a Facebook post blocked for, ‘violating community standards’. The offense? It linked to a summary of the research making this same point, and it’s not the first time that’s happened. It’s a touchy subject!
In 2005, my own book, ‘Energy Beyond Oil’, visited many of the issues explored in the film/book. In far less detail though, as there was nowhere near the quantity of research evidence available back then. What that also highlights, though, is how over the interim: ‘Bright green’ environmentalism has been unable to comprehend the message from this new research; while at the same time deliberately deflecting people’s attention towards points of view which have a questionable basis for support.
On that point, I think Max Wilbert gives a most eloquent view for how mainstream environmental- ism sold itself on the altar of green consumerism:
“They want us to believe that consumer choices are the only way we can change things. But if we accept that then it means that they’ve won because we’re defining ourselves as consumers…I have to buy things within this culture to survive, and that is not something that defines me or my power as an actor in this world. I would say much more fundamentally I am an animal. I have hands. I have feet. And I can walk places. And I can do things. And I have a voice. And I have the ability to speak with people and build a relationship with people. And I have the ability to organise. And I have the ability to fight if need be. These are all much more important than my ability to buy or not buy something.”[48:28]
Since ‘Planet of the Humans’, many on the ‘bright green’ side of the aisle have learned a lesson. Their hysterical condemnation of the film, to the point of calling for it to be banned, only served to feed it greater publicity, ensuring more would see it.
Their lack of response this time is perhaps also due to how well the film exposes the fragility of their arguments. One of the bright points in the film was the way in which ‘deep green’ criticisms were dove-tailed alongside interviews with those they criticised – amplifying the substance of the disagreement be- tween each side.
I think my favorite was the segment on Richard York’s research, showing that growing renewable energy actually displaces a very minimal level of fossil fuels. When York’s point was put to David Suzuki, his reply, which I too have often received, was, ”So what is the conclusion from an analysis like that, we shouldn’t do anything?”[24:08]
The film brilliantly explodes this false dilemma. When pushed, about needing to tackle things systemically rather than just trying to influence behavior, Suzuki’s response was, “Yeah, there’s no question our major impact on the planet now, not just in terms of energy, is consumption. And that was a deliberate program…”[24:26]
When it comes to the ‘liberal’ solutions to the climate crisis generally, I think Lierre Keith gives the most perceptive criticism of the simplistic, ‘bright green’ arguments for change[1:03:23]:
“[Capitalism] takes living communities, it converts those into dead commodities, and then those dead commodities are turned into private wealth. And a lot of people think, well, if we just make that into public wealth, we all could get an equal piece of the pie, that’s the solution. The problem is that’s not go- ing to be a solution because you’ve still got the first two parts of that equation. Why are we taking the living planet and turning it into dead commodities? That’s the problem…It’s the fact that rivers, and grasslands, and forests, and fish, have been turned into those dead commodities, that’s the problem.”
Jensen then bookends Keith’s point with another, straightforward invalidation of the basic premise of the bright green approach[1:04:33]:
“What do all the so-called, ‘solutions’, to global warming have in common? They all take industrial capitalism as a given, and so conform to industrial capitalism. They’ve switched the dependent and the independent variables. The world has to be primary, and the health of the world has to be primary because without a world you don’t have any economy whatsoever. And the bright greens are very explicit about this. What they’re trying to save is industrial capitalism, industrial civilization. And that’s my fundamental beef because what I’m trying to save is the real world.”
Climate inequality meets decolonialism
Jensen makes an interesting observation towards the end of the film:
“The thing that blows me away is the lengths that people will go to avoid looking at the problem. That they will create all these extraordinary fantasies in order to do something that’s not going to help the planet so they can avoid looking at the real issue. Which is that industrial civilization itself is what’s killing the planet.”[59:40]
Likewise, Barnes astutely characterises the basic block to progress toward the near end:
“Bright green environmentalism has gained popularity because it tells a lot of people what they want to hear. That you can have industrial civilization and a planet too. It allows people to feel good about maintaining this destructive way of living and to avoid asking hard questions about the depth of what must be changed.”[1:05:04]
For me, though, it was Keith’s discussion about what it is ‘civilization’ is based upon[1:00:02] which brought a long overdue argument into circulation: Criticism of the ‘resource island’ model for the modern city, and its inherent link to the global expropriation and exploitation of land. Driven by the wealthiest ‘city’ state’s need to maintain consumption, the inherent ‘neocolonial’ aspects of international climate negotiations are something the climate lobby too often overlook. Especially in relation to issues such as carbon offsets, the global allocation of carbon budgets, and their inherent global inequality.
At some point environmental groups must call ‘bullshit’ on these whole neocolonial proceedings, and start giving equal value to all humans, irrespective of their present-day privilege. More importantly, we have to give ecological capacity, currently occupied by human societies, back to natural organisms to allow them sufficient space to live too.
Before ‘Bright Green Lies’ turned up, I had just seen Raoul Peck’s excellent, ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’. Coming to the end of ‘Bright Green Lies’, what startled me was how the two films arrived at a very similar place. Both showed similar blocks toward acceptance of the radical change required, around both ecological change and decolonialism.
To understand Peck’s film it helps to have read, ‘Heart of Darkness’. In structuring the film around the characters in that book, and contrasting it to The Holocaust, Peck shows how indifference to European and US colonialism enabled The Holocaust to take place [Episode 4, 46:57 to 54:11]:
“It is not knowledge that is lacking… The educated general public has always largely known what atrocities have been committed and are being committed in the name of progress, civilization, socialism, democracy, and the market…At all times, it has also been profitable to deny or suppress such knowledge… And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.
Everywhere in the world, this knowledge is being suppressed. Knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves. Everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted…Black Elk, holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, said after the Wounded Knee Massacre, ‘I didn’t know then how much was ended… A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. The nation’s circle is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.’”
There are uncomfortable parallels between Peck’s insights into Holocaust denial, the denial of the crimes of colonialism, and the everyday denial of the damage that affluence and material consumption are causing to the entire planet. From the horrors of resource mining to the devastation of the oceans by plastics, such evidence represents a constant ‘background noise’ in the modern media. A noise people have learned to ignore, in order to keep functioning amidst the cognitive dissonance of their everyday, disconnected lives.
As Peck says, “It is not knowledge that is lacking”. People are aware. The fact that they will not engage with the issue, as outlined in ‘Bright Green Lies’, is that people innately know the extent of their own complicity. To do so, ‘would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves’.
We do not need more ‘evidence’. The block to ecological change is not simply a lack of ‘knowledge’. It is that many all too well understand the reality of what stopping the ecological crisis would entail. Trapped by their subconscious fear of what that would mean personally, they cannot see a solution to the psychological dependency engendered by consumerism and industrial society.
Mainstream environmentalism, as the film outlines, is its own worst enemy. In advocating ephemeral, consumer-based solutions to tackling ecological breakdown, it creates its own certain failure. Unfortunately, unless the counter-point to that, the ‘deep green’ argument, is able to give people the confidence to accept and let go of industrial society, it will not make progress either. I think this film almost gets there; but we need to focus far more on the workable, existing examples of people living outside of that system to give people the confidence to make that internal, ‘leap of faith’. For those who want to follow this road, and perhaps provide those examples, this film is a good starting point to build from.
Released under the Creative Commons ‘BY-NC-SA’ 4.0 International License
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service, or its staff.
