Editor’s note: Large scale agriculture, especially the industrial form with its dependence on heavy machinery, highly toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops is incredibly destructive. It’s also remarkably undemocratic since it is pushed by large multinational cooperations and their exclusive institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN. If we as humans want to have a future on this planet (it looks like we don’t), we need to shift radically to more community based, small scale, democratic food systems and locally applicable techniques for ecological restoration, since large scale agriculture will inevitably fail and leave toxic, deserted landscapes behind.
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome.
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.
A Growing Culture would like to ask all readers to help raise the dialogue about this upcoming summit. Re-share this article, re-post, tweet and amplify this issue. You can learn more about A Growing Culture here: https://www.agrowingculture.org, on Twitter: @agcconnect or Instagram: @agrowingculture.
In this article, originally published on The Conversation, three scientists argue that the concept of net zero which is heavily relying on carbon capture and storage technologies is a dangerous illusion.
By James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter, Robert Watson, Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.
The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.
Steps towards net zero
On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.
By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
If we had acted on Hansen’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.
Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.
It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.
They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.
Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.
Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.
Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.
It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.
That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.
But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.
This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The rise of net zero
When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.
First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.
The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.
Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.
With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.
So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.
With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.
A Parisian false dawn
As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.
But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.
Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.
Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.
Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.
The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.
Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.
It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.
And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.
As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.
Pipe dreams
Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.
Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.
Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.
It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realise net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.
One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.
Difficult truths
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realisation that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank cheque for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilisation at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.
The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.
Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.
But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In February, IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency permitted Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia to drastically reduce flows to the Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu River for at least a year. That decision reversed an earlier ruling to maintain much higher Xingu River flows and the fishery — as legally required.
The flow reduction will leave 70% of usually-flooded forest dry this season, causing massive fish mortality and diminished reproduction, experts say. Community group Xingu Vivo Para Sempre denounced the decision as “a death sentence for the Xingu” and demanded IBAMA’s and Norte Energia’s presidents be “criminally prosecuted.”
Norte Energia has funded projects to mitigate the reduced flow, collecting and dropping fruit into the river for fish to feed on, and releasing captive-bred fish. But scientists say these approaches are unscientific and will likely be ineffective, and can’t make up for the loss of the river’s seasonal flood pulse, upon which fish depend.
Residents say the government has spread misinformation, telling Brazilian consumers that their electricity bills would go up if Belo Monte released more water to maintain the Xingu’s ecosystem — something Norte Energia is obligated to do. At present, water levels on the Volta Grande have not been restored.
Bel Juruna, of the Juruna (Yudjá) Indigenous people, points her camera at the Xingu River, beside which she lives in Mïratu village in the Paciçamba Indigenous Territory on the 130-kilometer (81-mile) Volta Grande (Big Bend), in Pará state, Brazil.
The video shows a shoulder-high, light-colored waterline streaking a dark exposed boulder. Just days before, that boulder was mostly submerged and the river ran at a much higher level, but its flow has been drastically, suddenly, intentionally, and possibly illegally, reduced — threatening the Xingu’s fishery and the people who depend on it for food and livelihoods.
On February 8, Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia received permission from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, to immediately reduce river flows to less than 13% of normal — shifting the water to the dam’s electricity-producing turbines. This dramatic flow reduction was completely unanticipated by riverine Indigenous and traditional peoples, Bel’s video shows the effects: canoes with outboard motors stranded on dry rocks, aquatic vegetation exposed to the air.
“These plants are usually on the bottom [of the river]; they are water plants. And because the water won’t come [here] any more, they’re all going to die,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s action comes during the piracema, a time of year when fish should be traveling on seasonally rising waters, deep into the flooded forest to feed and spawn. The government’s water reduction decision effectively closes the door on this reproductive window — an opportunity that comes but once a year.
“The Volta Grande will turn into a cemetery. A cemetery of fish, a cemetery of dead trees,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B permitted
In the second week of February, Norte Energia diverted more than 85% of the Xingu’s normal flow away from the Volta Grande, where thousands of Indigenous and traditional fisherfolk live. The company’s diversion to the Belo Monte dam reduced river flow abruptly from early-February speeds of 10,900 cubic meters per second (m3/s) to 1,600 m3/s. (The historical average flows before the dam was built were 12,736 m3/s.)
On February 8, IBAMA president Eduardo Fortunato Bim signed an agreement allowing Norte Energia to implement the company’s so-called Hydrogram B, an artificial hydrological regime that will remove 73% of normal annual Xingu River flows from the Volta Grande.
The socio-environmental consequences, say experts, will be catastrophic. Hydrogram B “will cause the end of the cyclical, ecological phenomenon of the [annual] flood pulse, which guarantees fishes’ and turtles’ access to their feeding areas. There will be high amounts of mortality and, in those [aquatic animals] who survive, loss of nutritional condition,” Juarez Pezzuti from the Federal University of Pará wrote in an email to Mongabay,
Turtles, of “extremely high cultural significance” to the Juruna and other riverine people, “will no longer be able to accumulate the energy necessary to produce eggs. The number of times they lay eggs and the number of eggs per nest will be drastically reduced.”
In a note to Mongabay on Hydrogram B’s effects, Norte Energia states, “There is no technical-scientific proof, nor any indications at present, that the flow [regime] practiced by Belo Monte can cause mortality of fish or turtles,” citing “robust monitoring.” Independent scientists allege Norte Energia’s monitoring studies are flawed.
Lorena Curuaia, a leader of the Curuaia people, of Iawá village, sent Mongabay audio commenting on IBAMA’s decision: “This is absurd. Once again, we see the fauna, the flora, totally threatened, especially all the biodiversity. We know that the normal flow of water on the Volta Grande and the whole Xingu Basin doesn’t work that way.
“So they are assaulting nature again. To do what?,” she asks. “To generate energy, to generate financial gain for them, unfortunately leaving biodiversity to the wayside? We are indignant.”
The leader demands, “We want a response from IBAMA itself, saying why they accepted this from Belo Monte.” IBAMA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Norte Energia’s studies on Hydrogram B rejected as faulty
In 2009, IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s extreme low flow Hydrogram B proposal as being unable to maintain life on the Volta Grande, something the Belo Monte dam operator is legally mandated to do. In December 2019, IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to study alternative hydrological regimes.
But when IBAMA reviewed the new studies, submitted in December 2020, they found that Norte Energia had only presented an analysis of Hydrogram B versus the historical natural flow, and had offered no alternative flow plans. This limited comparison made it impossible for experts to analyze alternative hydrological regimes, says Pezzuti. Agreeing with that assessment is Camila Ribas of the National Institute for Amazon Research and the American Museum of Natural History, after she had access to the studies.
Consequently, on February 2, 2021 IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s studies as “faulty” and incomplete.
What should have happened next, says Ribas, is Norte Energia should have had to redo its studies, addressing IBAMA’s critiques, and then resubmit. Until then, IBAMA’s “provisional hydrogram,” with higher river flows — in place since April 2019 — should have continued.
Political pressure on IBAMA and misinformation
But IBAMA allegedly received intense pressure from other ministries within the Jair Bolsonaro administration, lobbying it to reverse its expected upcoming decision to maintain provisional hydrogram water releases to the Volta Grande. For two months, IBAMA had signaled that Norte Energia would have to return significant amounts of water to the river to prevent further ecosystem harm.
Meanwhile, Ribas recalls that the Mines and Energy department and the electricity agency ANEEL “leaked supposedly internal documents” to the press, claiming that if IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to divert less water from the Volta Grande, then Brazilian consumers’ electricity bills would jump dramatically in cost.
That claim, according to Ribas and Pezzuti, is false.
According to Pezzuti, “The company claimed [Belo Monte’s] non-production of energy would make it necessary to produce energy by activating thermoelectric plants” to make up an energy shortfall, which would supposedly greatly raise costs. But, he says, Norte Energia had presented outdated data on Brazil’s hydroelectric reserves, giving a false picture of Brazil’s current hydroelectric energy potential.
In fact, in the current rainy season, Amazon hydroelectric reservoirs are full. “The majority of hydroelectric plants [in Brazil] have a good level and flows, and so less energy [coming from] Belo Monte won’t generate the [electricity] deficit that’s being threatened by the press and the government,” says Pezzuti. Norte Energia did not respond to Mongabay’s question on this matter.
Political interference and an environmental crime?
Apparently, IBAMA president Bim contradicted his own technical team’s conclusions to strike the February 8 agreement with Norte Energia’s president, Paulo Roberto Pinto, allowing the company to immediately implement Hydrogram B.
Bim is thought to have circumvented IBAMA organizational procedures and overruled his own director of licensing Jônatas Souza da Trindade, who should have made the decision, notes Pezzuti. In a note to Mongabay, Licensing General Coordinator Régis Fontana Pinto stated, “The decisions pertinent to the application of the Belo Monte [dam] hydrogram are taken in the purview of IBAMA’s president, though supplied with information by the technical team, by me as General Coordinator, and by the Environmental Licensing director.”
This agreement directly violates Article 231 of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, Pezzuti says, which states that hydroelectric plants can’t impact Indigenous lands. It also appears to violate international conventions such as ILO 169, ratified in Brazil as Decree 5,051, which protects traditional activities such as fishing as essential for cultural preservation. Further infringed regulations may include Law 11,346 ensuring Nutritional and Food Security, Law 9,985 protecting “the natural resources necessary for traditional populations’ subsistence,” and Decree 6,040 guaranteeing “traditional peoples’ access to natural resources for their physical, economic, and cultural reproduction.”
Concerning projected losses to the diets of Amazon fisherfolk, Lorena Curuaia told Mongabay, “No company has the right to take away another’s dietary sustenance. The fisher people’s culture is fish. To remove their food, is to remove their life.”
On February 18, dozens of fisherfolk organizations, all members of the Xingu Vivo Para Sempre association, formally demanded Eduardo Fortunato Bim and Paulo Roberto Pinto be “criminally prosecuted” for environmental damages resulting from IBAMA’s decision.
“In my understanding, if the president of the environmental organ takes a decision that contradicts the technical position of the institution itself, he is failing in his duty. He is committing a crime in failing to act in accordance with his function, which is to protect the environment,” Pezzuti states.
In a note to Mongabay, Norte Energia states, “There is no crime practiced — since there do not exist any environmental damages, but rather impacts [already] predicted” in the environmental licensing stage. In 2020, federal judges and IBAMA’s team documented that impacts of the dam, characterized by IBAMA as “grave and irreversible,” were greater than projected during licensing.
Norte Energia offers mitigation plans
In its February 8 IBAMA agreement, Norte Energia also committed $R 157 million (US$ 28 million) to river flow mitigation plans. Three projects were approved: to send teams to collect fruit and leaves from the forests that should have been flooded, then throw these into the reduced area of the river where fish are trapped; to build floating platforms with bushes for fish to feed from; and to breed fish in captivity and then release them into the Xingu.
Pezzuti rejects the plan as scientifically unproven: “It’s an absurd pseudo-project, impossible to be executed on a scale that compensates for the [absence of] flooding of tens of thousands of hectares.” He notes, “The first two [projects] aren’t based on any kind of precedent,” and the raising of fish in captivity in the hopes of repopulating the river “already has proven to be ineffective in several studies.”
Alexander Lees, of England’s Manchester Metropolitan University, concurs that these are unworkable solutions, “a waste of money” better spent on maintaining the ecosystem.
“Messing around with chucking fruit into rivers or floating trees is just throwing money away,” says Lees. “It just looks like good publicity,”
Bel Juruna says Norte Energia’s present efforts are ineffectual. “There are lots of companies [contracted by Norte Energia] here that go around, visit, hold meetings, but despite that, there aren’t any projects from the [original] Basic Environmental Plan that are working here.”
Pezzuti explains that Norte Energia’s fisheries mitigation plan was “signed off on by professors employed by public research universities, contributing to this scientific makeup, as if there were a solution for the tragedy that Hydrogram [B] will cause.” However, he adds, independent researchers, not paid by Norte Energia, “experts in fish ecology and aquatic turtles… vehemently protested… this bizarre proposal,” as did “IBAMA’s analysts, who rejected it” on February 2.
Ribas adds, “The research Norte Energia and its consultants do is already directed toward a certain end goal.” She believes that the company-contracted researchers’ finding that Hydrogram B is viable resulted from a conflict of interest which, she says, might explain why the firm’s experts didn’t present analysis of alternatives. “That’s not science,” she says, but Ribas is concerned the Brazilian public will accept the flawed research as valid.
What’s needed, she concludes, is independent monitoring. Ribas and her fellow scientists are seeking funding to monitor the effects of Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B on the Volta Grande in 2021.
As for the Juruna people, Bel Juruna says they will endure:
“We will be here. We want to resist in this place, fighting so that we, too, won’t turn into a cemetery in our village.”
This article was published in Mongabay on the 8th March 2021. You can access the article here.
In this latest video from Thacker Pass, Max explains why he is protesting against lithium mining for the so called green energy.
Featured image: Pygmy rabbit by Travis London
The small Pygmy rabbit is Thacker pass and Thacker Pass is Pygmy rabbits. This small rabbit is a target of many predators at Thacker Pass. The rabbits find their refuge in the form of the sagebrush plant or in the burrows that it makes in deep, soft soil. Much like the sage grouse, the pygmy rabbit relies on sagebrush not only for protection but for more than 90%. of its diet. The pygmy rabbit requires large expanses of uninterrupted shrub-steppe habitat. Unfortunately, right now the pygmy rabbit faces many threats. Conversion of indispensable sagebrush meadows for agriculture and development for oil and natural gas extraction, and now the lithium boom, are depleting an already fragile ecosystem. One more reason to resist.
For the past 25 days, there has been a protest camp set up behind me, right out here. This place is called Thacker Pass, in Northern Nevada, traditional territory of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshoni.
This area here is the proposed site of an open pit lithium mine, a massive strip mine that will turn everything into a heavily industrialized zone.
This site, right now, is an incredibly biodiverse Sagebrush habitat. There are Sagebrush plants over a hundred years olds, cause it’s oldgrowth Sage. There’s Sage-Grouse. This is part of the most important Sage-Grouse population left in the entire state, Around 5-8 percent of the entire global population of Sage-Grouse live right here.
This is a migratory corridor of Pronghorn. One of the members of the occupation saw about 55 Pronghorns in an area that would be destroyed for the open pit mine.
There are Golden Eagles here, multiple nesting pairs. We’ve seen them circling over head. We’ve seen their mating flights, getting ready to lay their eggs in the spring.
There are Pygmy Rabbits here. There are Burrowing Owls. There are Gopher Snakes and Rattle Snakes. There’s Rabbit Brush. There’s Jack Rabbit.
There’s Paragon Falcon, or actually the desert variant of the Paragon Falcon, what’s known as the Prairie Falcon.
There are Mule Deer. We see them feeding up on these hills. There are Ringtail living behind this cliff behind me. There are Red Foxes. There are Kangaroo Mice. There are an incredible variety of creatures that live here. Many of whom I don’t know their names.
All this is under threat to create to create an open pit mine for lithium. To mine lithium for electric car batteries, and for grid energy storage to power these “green energy” transitions.
I’m not a fan of fossil fuels.
I’m not a promoter of fossil fuels. I’ve taken direct action for many years against fossil fuels. I’ve fought tarsands in Canada. I’ve fought tarsands pipelines in the US. I’ve fought natural gas pipelines, methane pipelines. I’ve stood on front of heavy equipment to block tar sands and fossil fuel mining in Utah. I’ve stood in front of coal trains to stop them from moving forward, to try and blockade the industry. I’ve fought the fossil fuel industry for many many years and will continue to do so.
What we need to recognize that the so called green energy transition that is being promoted is not a real solution. That’s why we’re out on the land. This is the place that is at stake right now. This is the place that is up to be sacrificed for the sake of this so-called green energy.
It was about a 175 years ago that the colonization of this region really began in earnest. That was when the first European settlers started coming across in Nevada. really setting up shops out here, in the mid-1800s. They mostly came for mineral wealth. They came for the gold, the silver. They came for mining. Nevada has been a mining state from the very beginning, and mining still controls the state.
I’ve spoken with some of my Shoshoni friends, my Goshute friends about the history of this: the invasion for mining. What happened was, the settlers came and they forced the indigenous population onto reservation. And they cut down the Juniper trees and the Pinyon pine trees. These were the main sources of medicine and food for many of the Great Basin Indigenous Peoples. I’ve heard it said that the Pinyon pines were like the Buffaloes to the Indigenous People out here.
Just like in the Great Plains, the settlers destroyed the food supply of the indigenous people. They forced them to participate into colonial economy using this violence. They forced them to participate in the capitalist system, in the mining system, in the ranching system. People were going to starve otherwise.
What happened in the mid 1800s was that men with guns came for the mountains. They started digging them out, blowing them up, turning mountains into money, carding that money away, and leaving behind a wasteland. That’s what’s been happening in Nevada ever since. It hasn’t stopped. That’s what we’re gonna see here unless it’s stopped.
The Lithium Americas Corporation, Canadian mining company that wants to build this mine: they raised 400 million dollars in one day a few weeks ago to try and build this mine.
Meanwhile the grassroots struggles to raise a few hundred dollars to help support people coming out here, camping, getting supplies, getting things we need, the travel to get people here. The camp is about a mile or mile and a half from here. There’s about seven or eight people out there.
We need more people to come out to camp. We need people to join us, to draw the line, to hold the line against this mining project.
It’s not just about this project here. I was at a panel discussion recently with some folks from the Andean Altiplano, what’s called the lithium triangle in South America. Argentina, Bolivia and Chile have this high desert region where the three countries meet. It contains about half the world’s lithium reserves. Lithium mining has been going on there for decades and it’s left behind a wasteland.
Indigenous People have been kicked out of their land. They’ve been dispossessed. Their lands have been poisoned. Their water has been taken.
Water usage is one of the major issues there, because it’s an extremely dry place, just like here. Nevada is the driest state in the US. And they wanna pump 1.4 billion gallons of water and use it to refine the lithium into its final product. 1.4 billion gallons a year.
The Queen River in the valley is already dry. The water’s already being overused.
You go back 200 years and there would be water there. There would be beaver dams. There would be fish. There would be wildlife in abundance.
This land is already in an degraded state compared to where it used to be, compared to where it needs to be.
The atrocities associated with this mine go on and on. This is an important cultural site for the Indigenous People of this region. This has been a travel corridor, through what’s now called Thacker Pass for thousands and thousands of years, an important gathering side. If you walk across this land, there’s obsidian everywhere across the ground. There’s all kind of flakes on the other sides of valleys, where indigenous people would gather obsidian and use it to make tools
This has been an important place for thousands of years.
Shoshoni signed a treaty, but they never ceded their land to the United States.
This is unceded land.
The Western Shoshoni never gave away their land. The US does not have legal title to this land. And the US government rejects that. They have appropriated something like a 175 million dollars, and set it aside to give it to the Western Shoshoni, if they will agree that the land was given to the United States. The Western Shoshoni has said “No. We won’t take your money. We want the land.” They have been fighting this fight for decades.
This is unceded territory. This land does not belong to the Bureau of Land Management. This land does not belong to the federal government.
This land belongs to the inhabitants of this land, people whose ancestors are in the soil. I don’t just mean humans. This land belongs to the Sagebrush, and the Pygmy Rabbits, and all those who have
Why don’t their voices get a say? Why don’t we take their preferences into account? What do you think they would say if we ask them, “Can we blow this place up?”
If Lithium America showed up and sincerely asked the Burrowing Owls, and the Sage-Grouse, and the Coyotes, and the Pronghorn Antelopes, “Can we blow up your home? Can we blow it up? Can we turn it into dust? Can we bathe the ground in sulfuric acid to extract this lithium which we’ll take away and make people rich, leaving behind a wasteland? Do we have your permission to do this?”
What do you think the land will say? What do you think the inhabitants will say? Do you think they will say it’s green? Do you think they’ll say:
“This is how you save the planet, by destroying our home?”
I think this is an important issue, not just because of what’s happening here, but because of what it means. Because of what it symbolizes.
When I was a young person, I was very concerned about what was happening to the planet. I was very concerned about the ecological crisis: the rainforest being chopped down, global warming, ocean acidification, the hole in the ozone layer.
I care about these things. I’ve cared about them ever since I was a little kid.
It’s hard to be a human being and have a heart, and not care about it unless you’re broken in some way.
I wanted to figure out what could be done. So I started reading about these issues. And of course what I was taught from a very young age was that solar panels and electric cars were going to save the world. That’s what I learned. That’s what the green media taught me. They taught me implicitly it’s okay to sacrifice places like this. They taught me it’s okay to sacrifice places like this if it means we can have electric cars instead of fossil fuel cars.
We don’t need cars at all. That’s the thing. And this is a hard message for people to hear because people don’t want to be told No. We’re not used to being told No in this culture. You can’t have that. It’s not okay for us to continue in this way.
We’re not used to this message. We’re used to getting whatever we want, whenever we want it.
That’s for the most part across the board. The average person in the American society lives with the energy equivalent of a hundred slaves. We live a life of luxury, like we had a hundred slaves working for us for twenty four hours.
That’s what the fossil fuel has brought to the modern era. That’s what this energy glut has brought to us. This mindset that we could have whatever we want, whenever we want. That’s something we need to get over. That’s something we need to change.
For the past five or six years, I was working on a book called Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost It’s Way and What We Can Do About It. My co-authors and I, in this book, really dive into these problems with details of the so-called green technology in great details. Things like solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, energy storage, batteries.
Not only these things, but a lots of the other “solutions” that are accepted as dogma in the environmental movement, like dense urbanization. We debunk these things in the book. These things are not going to save this planet. We can’t get around the problems we have found ourselves in.
We’re in a conundrum. This culture has dug itself into a very deep hole.
A lot is going to need to change, before we find ourselves in any resemblance of sustainability, of sanity, of justice, of living in a good way.
Earlier, I came around the corner in the mountains, and it felt like a punch in the gut because I had the premonition of no longer seeing this swab, this rolling expanse of old-growth Sagebrush, but of seeing an open pit. Seeing a mountain of tailings, of minewaste, of toxified soil. I had the premonition of seeing a gigantic sulfuric acid plant and processing facilities all through what is now wild. Where the Foxes run, where the Snakes slither between the Sagebrush, where the Golden Eagles wheel overhead.
That’s why I’m here to fight. I don’t want to see this turn into an industrial wasteland.
I don’t think many of us do. I think a lot of people are befuddled and confused by all these bright green lies. A lot of people buy into this crap. But a lot of people don’t. A lot of people understand that we need to scale down. A lot of people understand that we need to reduce our energy consumption, that we need to degrow the economy. That the latest and greatest industrial technology isn’t going to save us, magically.
This isn’t a tooth fairy situation, where electric cars will appear under our pillows and save the day. A lot of people understand this. That’s why for me, a big part of the battle is not education. A big part of the battle is power. A big part of the battle is actually stopping them.
In this two part article Sarah describes her experiences of direct action, of insight into the harm caused to mother earth and offers the reader sharp analysis regarding the dominant culture. The second part will be published on the 14th February 2021
My friend Tyler told me he was heading to Minnesota to join Indigenous Water Protectors protesting an oil Pipeline. I felt sad as I could not go. Tyler and I spent 4 months at Standing Rock. The Indigenous led resistance was strong, aiming to protect the sacred from the onslaught of destruction.
I took to Facebook to ask if anyone could go in my place. No one has volunteered (so far). I caught wind of another resistance camp. On January 15th, activists Max Wilbert and Will Falk stationed themselves on public land at Thacker Pass, Nevada, an area that is part of the Great Basin (the largest watershed in North America, spanning much of Nevada and into parts of Utah, Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Mexico).
I always say that the alien invasion is already here because we live like homesick aliens visiting and trashing a foreign Planet with no respect for the local customs, not realizing that Earth is our estranged motherland!
For today’s installment of ‘Know the Goddamn Planet You Live On’
In a closed endorheic watershed, such as The Great Basin, water is retained within the area with no water flowing out to other external bodies of water, such as rivers and oceans. Instead the water drains to form seasonal and permanent lakes, ponds and swamps, and relies primarily on evaporation to keep moisture balance.
Max and Will are camped in Thacker Pass to protest the Lithium America’s right to develop a huge Lithium mine. Lithium is a lightweight metal used in the industrial manufacturing of everything from cell phones and laptop batteries to ceramics to high tech military equipment to prescription drugs. The Lithium stores at Thacker Pass, if mined, will mainly be used for making batteries for electric cars, all part of the plan to usher in the transition away from fossil fuels to ‘green energy’.
“Well what’s wrong with that?” you may ask, “Aren’t electric vehicles better for the environment?” “Better for the environment” may be a euphemism for “slightly less horrifically devastating for life on Earth but also may have unknown consequences that could end up being worse for the environment than the original thing that was supposed to be the worst thing ever”. THAT is hard to brand, so just stamp “SUSTAINABLE”!
It may be possible for one woman’s experience of rape to not be as horrific as another woman’s but it is still rape. The U.N. pass an international law saying nuclear weapons are illegal. The majority of nations sign up, but the nine countries known to have nuclear warheads of course did not. The U.S. and Russia are roughly tied with having the most weapons, somewhere around 125,000 between them. The other 7 countries with nuclear weapons have less than 2000 weapons between them. In any case, a small fraction of these weapons are enough to destroy all life on earth.
It is estimated that the amount of Life lost due to Industrial Civilization will already take Mother Earth millions of years to restore. The current trajectory due to industrial civilization could result in life being unable to be restored to full health.
“….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 King’s 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.”
Sometimes you have to break eggs to make an omelet, right?
Right now all we have is a shit ton of broken eggs and no omelet, all for nothing! Well, except for making a handful of white men extraordinarily wealthy while they build their gigantic metal penises in the form of buildings and towers and missiles. In the process of breaking all these eggs we also broke many of the birds who were laying the eggs, the insects the birds relied on for food, the plants the insects eat, we broke the watersheds that fed the plants. We broke the water that fed the watersheds!!!!! That is right, people…we broke water!
We have been led to believe that when it comes to the environment being damaged the means justify the ends. We are approaching the end and I would challenge anyone to find even a crumb of justification. The “means” turned out to be pretty mean in the end.
Just over 20 years ago there were over 1,200,000 Monarch butterflies counted in California. Last year, there were fewer than 2,000. Butterflies are considered by ecologists to be a strong indicator of ecological health. Rut Roh.
It is estimated that a billion animals died in the Australian fires of 2019.
We are losing species at a faster rate than when dinosaurs went extinct!
I wonder how much longer anyone will be around to record these things?
As Mother Earth’s body is ravaged, we make scientific notes on how she reacts. I think it is safe to say at this point that record keeping is not enough of a motivation to make us stop the torture. We do not realize we’re in the throes of THE END mainly because a false sense of security, being generated by the artificial life support systems we are on. Those who benefit the least from securities are busy surviving. Those who DO have the luxury to think about it need to step up NOW. We cannot keep using fossil fuels to run artificial life support systems nor keep the machines going. The natural life support systems are being destroyed at an increasing rate for short term profit and unnecessary luxuries.
It is time to pull the plug on artificial life support systems and see what happens. The fact is, the plug will be pulled one way or another. If we pull the plug TOGETHER the transition may be smoother as everything collapses. It is likely, we probably won’t voluntarily pull the plug, so get ready for a world of pain…one that lots of people (and non-human beings) are already experiencing.
While at Standing Rock, part of me had to overlook the narrative that stopping these fossil fuel projects included replacing them with “green, sustainable, and/or renewable” energy. I happen to disagree with this Buckminster Fuller quote:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
This quote speaks to the kind of logic driving the push to replace fossil fuels with green energy. The logic says we have to keep using “low carbon” fuels like fracked gas and Nuclear energy as a way to “transition” to the “good, pure, guilt-free, rainbow-powered” fuels. We have bought the false premise that green energy will make fossil fuels obsolete by using a better DIFFERENT model.
The ‘new model’ is an illusion.
Green Energy is a different WAY to power the existing model. Mother Earth is shouting “I can’t breathe!” as the weight of Industrial Civilization’s knee digs into Her back. Switching to “renewables” will still leave us in the same situation. A system that extracts without replenishing, exploits, destroys, creates inequality and degrading human hierarchies. The same system that strengthens patriarchy and reinforces human supremacy over nature, promotes competition and conflict instead of cooperation and peace, that keeps us separated from Earth, from one another and ourselves. This system categorizes us as either master, consumer, or slave.
A sentiment like the Buckminster Fuller one can only come out of a culture that is disconnected from reality, from intuition and our ancestral wisdom. We are no longer standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. We are paving over and trampling on their unmarked graves.
Nature is the model that works!
All this fanfare over Biden returning to the Paris Climate Deal (PCD) can fuck off, it is “too little too late”. It will not be anywhere near enough to make a difference. It does not matter if we return to the Paris Agreement or not. We need to return to the agreement we used to have with Mother Earth! She gave us Life. We promise not to take more than we need. We offer respect, thanks and praise. We need to return to the systems that She set up, systems we arrogantly think we can control/improve. Systems humans have lived within for over 90% of our existence as a species.
We must come to understand that it is not the way that cars are powered that is the problem. Cars are the problem. There is no “sustainable” number of cars. There is no such thing as “good” gas mileage. The reality is that cars are killers. Car culture makes killers out of us. There is no way to live with killers. They must be stopped. Using non-renewable resources in the current infrastructure while we wait for a better solution means we pollute and kill the Earth. There is no “better” to be had within the context of industrial civilization.
Why bother if it’s over?
You only say that because you have been trained to look in all the wrong places for all the wrong points. The solutions being proposed by the system to “save the planet” are moot points. We have just been disconnected from the truth. The point is both painfully obvious and mysteriously elusive.
The point is spiders using electricity to magically fly through the air!
The point is the whimsical Maui dolphin, the smallest Dolphin in the world who never hurt anyone but SOMEHOW there are only about 50 left due to “overfishing”.
The point is that when a tree falls in the forest, other trees keep the stump alive in a process scientists call hydraulic coupling.
We must let go of doing what’s “better” for the environment. What it needed is to completely and immediately stop ALL means of production that is not necessary. This may not happen if we keep believing in money. I remember once seeing this headline in the fake parody newspaper ‘The Onion’ that read:
‘U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion’
We are facing our own death and the death of countless other beings and still, we refuse to face the reality. As Terrence McKenna says,
“The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”
Electric and hybrid cars are not the solution to our dying world, this ‘solution’ is not addressing the root problem.
It reminds me of that old children’s book ‘There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.’ Its grotesque imagery is a cautionary tale. To make even one more new car (electric or otherwise) at this point in the collapse of the biosphere is literally insane. The amount of resources, by-waste, and pollution involved in the PRODUCTION of a vehicle is so great that it will NEVER be able make up for the damage incurred by its production.
We must greatly reduce and then eliminate the need for cars by creating localization of every aspect of our lives. We must stop calling alternative sources of energy “renewables”! The lithium mine may result in the land needing hundreds of years to renew. I took some of these roadkill photos while walking from Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 after the BP Oil Spill. The dead animals from my Roadkill photo album did not care if they were killed by 100% renewable energy instead of by gas guzzlers. Walking all day long for 3 months drastically altered my perception of time and space.
I remember reading somewhere how there were some Native American tribes that were very resistant to adopting Horse travel, which was not part of their culture until the Spanish brought horses to the American continent in the 16th century. These tribes strongly believed humans were not meant to travel that fast and doing so would propel our body forward while leaving our spirit behind resulting in a fractured state of being.
I felt this the first time I rode in a car after my long walk had finished. It felt dangerous, I adapted.
Something essential and elemental is missing in environmental activism culture.
I will admit that I am afraid that something might be on the verge of being lost forever. Taking action can be a good way to re-activate what is left of the magic of the natural world and that same magic within us. There are still humans left who are the guardians of that magic, but they are greatly outnumbered. Industrial Civilization is closing in on them by the day. It can’t just be about stopping bad things and bad people, like pipelines and presidents. Western Environmental activism needs to evolve past this. Max and Will are embarked on that next chapter of activism evolution. This evolution must be centered around a brutal obliterating honesty, so sharp that it cuts straight through the fat of hope and the tendons of delusion and muscles of bargaining. Right down to the bone.
If we do not break free from the mental and emotional prisons of Industrial Civilization, we will not be able to get past false diagnosis and solutions. Green New Deal is bogus. We need is a ‘Get Real Deal’. It’s truth telling time. We must admit we don’t always know what the truth is. I used to think solar panels and wind turbines were the answer until I learned more and the truth changed.
The final permits for this lithium mine were fast tracked by Trump before he left office in a way that is more difficult to reverse through presidential orders. It is unlikely Biden would stop it, he already has a “save the environment” token, due to his executive order to halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This will serve as a powerful pacifier for liberals. To highlight this point: we have a MLK Day so we do not need a Malcolm X or a Fred Hampton Day. Plus we would not want to offer a radical view now, would we?
Biden is being lauded for stopping Keystone XL.
This culture greatly praises men for doing the t simplest things. I am aware the Biden administration has suspended new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits on U.S. lands and waters. But only for 60 days. Naomi Klein speaks of the tactic of “Shock and Awe” that the ruling elite uses as a means to wear us all down so we give up. The strategy of “Balk and Stall” (copyright, Sarah Baker) is where those in power make a big deal out of decreeing something to be bad to stall while they figure out how to get out of stopping the bad thing.
“FOR 60 DAYS” the permits will be suspended, says the Biden people. It is the fine print that we must see. The “Balk and Stall” I witnessed at Standing Rock, was impressive, after the Army Core of Engineers announced that the DAPL pipeline construction would have to stop until an environmental impact statement was conducted. The celebrations were so intoxicating that it was as if people could not see the continued construction. Similarly, Trump’s wall is still being built even though Biden said he would stop it! The Cleveland Indians announce they will consider changing the name of their team. I have a name for you: how about the Cleveland Colonizers. Their mascot can be a Smallpox infested Blanket.
I was going to post this essay on Inauguration Day but figured I’d wait until the tranquilizing effects of that patriotism packed lullaby for liberals started to wear off. I didn’t see the entire pageantry of that day, but what I did see was quite spew worthy. There was this overall sentiment of: “Shhhhhh, it’s ok, you just had a bad 4 year long nightmare but everything’s fine now, a Democrat is in charge again, so here’s a glass of water made from the joy filled tears of all the Latin American mothers who have been instantaneously reunited with their children at the border. Now let us get you tucked in so you can go back to sleep and dream about Impeachment hearings and Bernie memes.”
A longtime environmental activist, Sarah lives in Ohio US, she loves writing and refusing to mow her lawn. You can read her article published in the Washington Post here.
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