Indigenous peoples worldwide are the 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 humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
Featured image: Aerial view of Biopalma’s Castanheira mill and palm plantation just a few meters away from the Acará River, in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Producers say their supply chains are green and sustainable, but prosecutors cite a long record of land grabbing, deforestation, pollution, and human rights violations
Palm oil, a crop synonymous with deforestation and community conflicts in Southeast Asia, is making inroads in the Brazilian Amazon, where the same issues are playing out.
Indigenous and traditional communities say the plantations in their midst are polluting their water, poisoning their soil, and driving away fish and game.
Scientists have found high levels of agrochemical residues in these communities — though still within Brazil’s legal limits — while prosecutors are pursuing legal cases against the companies for allegedly violating Indigenous and traditional communities’ rights and damaging the environment.
Studies based on satellite imagery also disprove the companies’ claims that they only plant on already deforested land.
TOMÉ-AÇU, Brazil — Guided by an Indigenous leader, we drove down dusty roads in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve, a “green island” encircled by oil palm plantations in the Brazilian Amazon.
Uniform rows of oil palms cover huge swaths of land here in the northeast of the state of Pará, once home to a vibrant expanse of rainforest. Our Mongabay reporting team was there to discover if the palm oil business, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is sustainable and ecologically responsible, as industry representatives told us.
Federal prosecutors have pursued the country’s leading palm oil exporters in the courts for the past seven years, alleging the companies are contaminating rivers, poisoning the soil, and harming the livelihoods and health of Indigenous and traditional peoples, charges the companies deny.
The stories of abuse we heard from our guide seemed almost unbelievable. After hearing dozens of claims of water contamination in the Indigenous villages, the local chief, Lúcio Tembé, led us to a mill run by Biopalma da Amazônia — Brazil’s top palm oil producer and exporter — close to the Acará River, which meanders through the forest for almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) before spilling out into the Amazon gulf.
“Look,” Tembé said, “they will throw [palm oil] residue in the river!”
Leaving our car, we watched from the riverbank, filming as unmarked trucks, and then a man with a shovel, dumped waste into the waterway. Tembé told us that the dark brown residue was a toxic sludge of organic materials, insecticides and herbicides from local palm oil mills. Every day, dozens of trucks dump this waste into the Acará River, he added.
Industry representatives would later tell us that such things do not happen, and that palm oil production isn’t harmful to human health or to the environment. But the dumping we saw, as well as the rapid onset of coughing, shortness of breath, nausea and headaches when we inhaled the fumes from palm trees doused with pesticides, was enough to convince us that these claims were worth pursuing.
Over the past year we investigated allegations made by local communities of widespread abuses by palm oil companies in Brazil, discovering what appears to be an industry-wide pattern of brazen disregard for Amazon conservation and for the rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities.
“The oil palm only brought a lot of problems. First of all, it brought destruction of our fauna, our flora, our rivers,” Tembé said as he looked out over the Turé River, close to the Turé-Mariquita reserve, an Indigenous territory about 250 km (150 mi) south of the city of Belém on Brazil’s north coast. “This water isn’t clean. But in the past we drank it. This river and the forest around it were like a supermarket for the population; it was where we fished, where we hunted.”
The rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities are protected under Brazil’s Constitution and international accords to which Brazil is a signatory. The Constitution also establishes that all Brazilians have the right to an “ecologically balanced environment.”
But laws issued by Pará state have often overshadowed these commitments in practice. Biopalma’s mill and one of its plantations lie adjacent to the Acará River and were constructed without a buffer zone as is required by law, according to documents seen by Mongabay.
Since 2014, federal prosecutors have faced a legal battle to approve a forensic investigation into pesticide contamination and the socioenvironmental and health impacts in Biopalma’s production zone in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve. “These are not minor problems faced by Indigenous peoples,” Felício Pontes Júnior, one of the federal prosecutors, wrote in a legal filing in the case. “The defendant [Biopalma] is aware of the Indigenous complaints.”
The claims date back to 2012, when Indigenous and traditional communities first raised the alarm. When the lawsuit was filed, a judge rapidly issued an injunction allowing a forensic investigation, but this was later overturned by another judge. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office appealed and a final ruling is yet to be issued.
“The company says it has no impact. So, if it says it doesn’t have [an impact] and we say it does, let’s do the forensic report,” Pontes Júnior told Mongabay in a phone interview in January.
A troubled industry booms
Palm oil has become ubiquitous in consumer societies. It’s one of the primary vegetable oils produced and traded worldwide. That’s partly because of its immense versatility: 80% of its production is channeled into the food industry, where it’s a key ingredient in consumer products made by conglomerates like Unilever and Nestlé.
Though most of us will never see it in its raw state, many of us will eat it in some form today. Various derivatives of palm oil are found in chocolate, ice cream, cookies, margarine and countless other products. It’s found in hygiene, beauty and cleaning items and even at the gas pump in the form of biodiesel. Rich in vitamins A and E and the best substitute for trans fats, which were banned in the United States in 2018, it is the oil of choice of global capitalism.
But researchers are growing increasingly concerned over the socioenvironmental crises its popularity has brought to many rural communities in tropical nations. The damage done to rainforests, wildlife, Indigenous peoples and water supplies in Malaysia and Indonesia, which together account for 85% of global palm oil production, is well documented, as are problems in Africa, where the industry has grown in recent years. Less studied and publicized to date are its impacts in the Brazilian Amazon.
Though Brazil accounts for just 1% of global palm oil production (about 540,000 tons in 2020), the industry is spreading rapidly here. Oil palm coverage in northern Pará — today responsible for about 90% of Brazilian production — increased almost five-fold to 236,000 hectares (583,169 acres) between 2010 and 2019. While national production dipped slightly in 2018, production in Pará rose by 47,653 tons (3.2%) over the same period.
Despite a push by the government of then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to stimulate palm oil production in 2010 by mandating its use as a biofuel, almost all Brazilian production is still used in the food industry, mostly as a soybean oil substitute. Lula also launched a national biodiesel program in 2004, and a sustainable palm oil production program in 2010, which further stoked demand.
When it was launched, the sustainability policy aimed to guarantee the supply of biofuel while protecting the environment by banning deforestation in native forest areas for the expansion of corporate plantations.
Pará has the highest deforestation rate in Brazil. Although cattle ranching and soy cultivation are the top drivers of deforestation, there are increasingly concerns about the damage associated with palm oil in the region. Researchers expect a massive expansion of the Amazon oil palm crop by 2030, driven by a government target to double the proportion of biodiesel used in the country and phase out fossil fuels.
Most of Brazil’s palm oil production is controlled by eight companies. The top producer, Biopalma, was a subsidiary of Brazilian mining giant Vale, which is responsible for the two most catastrophic environmental disasters in Brazil’s history in terms of affected area. As part of a divestment plan, Vale sold Biopalma at the end of 2020 to Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF), an energy company. In a document sent to Brazil’s antitrust regulator, Cade, BBF said all its oil palm is used for power generation.
Brazil exported almost 90,000 tons of palm oil in 2017, mostly to Colombia, the European Union, the U.S. and Mexico, according to Trase, a research group run by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the NGO Global Canopy. Biopalma accounted for almost three-quarters of these exports. The company, which has operated in Pará since 2007, has announced an ambitious goal of becoming the largest palm oil producer in the Americas.
‘Poisoned’ water
As the palm oil industry expands in Brazil, the threat of water contamination has become a growing concern. We visited Turé-Mariquita in the Amazon’s dry season, when companies spray agrochemicals in huge quantities. Activists say that in the rainy season, when river levels rise substantially and flood the land, all the accumulated toxins enter the river system, polluting the water and killing fish and other aquatic life.
We weren’t the first visitors to experience the impact of the oil palm plantations. Researchers Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva and Brian Garvey told us how they had bathed in a stream near the Acará River where it flowed past a pesticide-drenched field.
“Our skin itched and we stayed sick for two, three weeks,” says Garvey, a researcher with the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. “Several studies show that the water is contaminated. We witnessed them [Biopalma staff] dumping poison just a few meters from the river.”
A 2014 analysis by a federal laboratory under the umbrella of the Ministry of Health identified banned pesticides like endosulfan in rivers and streams near oil palm plantations in the Acará region. Researchers collected data from 18 aquatic locations and identified the presence of pesticides in 80% of samples collected during the rainy season, with some agrochemicals linked to hormonal disorders and cancer.
There’s no lack of anecdotal evidence regarding pesticide poisoning. “My husband’s aunt died of cancer,” Indigenous leader Uhu Tembé told Mongabay in the Yriwar village. “We say that’s because of this [oil palm-linked pollution], because these diseases didn’t exist in our village before. And today there is a lot of disease in our village … In the summer, we have a lot of headaches because that’s when they [the companies] throw poison.”
Cíntia Tembé, another resident of the Turé-Mariquita reserve, speaks of witnessing a previously healthy young man, whose job it had been to spray chemicals over the oil palms, fall ill and die in the local hospital. “He arrived there with exaggerated pain in the abdomen,” she said at his home in the Arar Zena’i village. “It was terrible. Blood started to come out of his ear, nose, eyes … as if something had burst inside him.”
Brazil is the largest consumer of agrochemicals on the planet, purchasing about a fifth of all pesticides produced globally. Dr. Peter Clausing, a toxicologist at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) in Germany, said four out of nine pesticides approved for use in oil palm plantations in Brazil are listed as “highly hazardous.” Two of them — glufosinate-ammonium and methomyl — are banned in the European Union.
Waste generated during palm oil production contains a considerable amount of organic nutrients and heavy metals that can contaminate rivers, pollute the air and generate greenhouse gases. The effluent is typically released into rivers as a cheap and easy disposal method, according to Clausing.
Alleged palm oil residue being dumped in the Acará River, close to Biopalma’s Castanheira mill in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
“My sister died of cancer because she drank water from the [Turé] river,” Emídio Tembé, chief of the Tekena’i Indigenous village, told Mongabay in 2019, during our visit to the Turé-Mariquita reserve. “She died of cancer [three] years ago due to poisoned water,” he added, referring to the pesticides sprayed by Biopalma. “It’s been nine years since we could not drink water from the river because it’s polluted with poison.”
When Biopalma began planting its oil palm crop in the Turé-Mariquita area in 2010, residents told us, locals experienced a mysterious wave of chronic, debilitating, and sometimes fatal, symptoms: headaches, itching, skin rashes and blisters, diarrhea and stomach ailments. Many of the health complaints arose shortly after drinking from or bathing in local streams and coincided with the annual pesticide-spraying season.
The accounts of the impact of oil palm pesticides on Indigenous and traditional communities are supported by a 2017 study that found traces of three pesticides (two of them typically listed among those used in oil palm cultivation) in the major streams and wells used by the Tembé people in Turé-Mariquita.
According to research from the University of Brasília (UnB), the number of reported cases of skin disorders in 2011 and 2012 increased considerably. “About a year after planting, there were many complaints of skin diseases and headaches. It was quite intense for about six months,” a local health worker told the researchers. “In 2005, the rates of skin diseases, diarrhea, flu and headaches were almost zero.”
Among the pesticides found in surface and underground water in the reserve were glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate has been shown to be carcinogenic and has been banned or restricted in more than 20 nations, although not in Brazil. Also detected in samples of surface water and sediment taken by the researchers was the insecticide endosulfan, a persistent organic pollutant banned in Brazil in 2010.
“The most important scientific finding of this study is the identification for the first time, at least as far as we know from the scientific literature, of glyphosate-based herbicide residues in environmental water samples, both superficial and underground, in an Indigenous reserve surrounded by oil palm,” Sandra Damiani, the UnB researcher who conducted the study, told Mongabay. “In addition, our data also corroborates the presence of residues of other organic contaminants in the environment, this time not only in water, but also in sediment samples collected in the same water bodies studied.”
Damiani said they found contaminant residues in all six sampled streams and 40% of the wells sampled. Residue presence in groundwater samples was considered “particularly worrying” because these water sources are the only alternative to streams for Indigenous people in the area.
“We noticed a very large increase [in the number] of water wells after the company arrived,” Damiani told Mongabay. “And the presence of residues in the wells was a surprise, and it was something that caught our attention and requires great care because the [Indigenous] population uses either the stream directly or underground wells. If both have contaminants, what will they do?”
The maximum levels of glyphosate and endosulfan residues found in the water by the researchers were 45.5 micrograms per liter (μg/L) and 0.03 μg/L, respectively. While these are within the legal bounds in Brazil, they are well above the much stricter levels set by the European Union. “This is a controversial discussion,” Rosivaldo Mendes, a researcher at the laboratory that analyzed the samples, told Mongabay. “For me, the safe limit is having nothing [in the water].”
Following the disclosure of her findings to the authorities, Damiani says, she was told that the companies agreed to not use pesticides around Indigenous reserves in the future.
BBF, the energy company that acquired Biopalma, said in a statement it was unable to assess the accuracy of the academic studies since it did not have access to the results of the analysis. The company said it “faithfully complies with the environmental standards and procedures applicable to palm oil production and is unaware of the situation reported in such a study.”
Legally, the glyphosate limit for drinkable water in Brazil is 500 μg/L. “Water is [only] considered unsafe if it is above [this level],” Mendes said, adding he disagrees with this parameter.
Brazilian legislation sets no limits for any pesticide residue found in sediments, even though they could potentially contaminate crops and pose a public health risk. Damiani’s sampled sediments were found to contain DDT and its degradation products at levels that greatly exceed the thresholds established by the National Environment Council, a regulatory body. DDT is banned in more than 40 countries, including Brazil and the U.S. There is no national limit on sediment contamination with endosulfan.
Damiani said they found residues of at least one contaminant in almost a third of the 33 samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, with a much higher percentage for glyphosate-based herbicides in water collected during the dry season. Two-thirds of the groundwater samples and more than a third of surface samples contained traces of glyphosate-based herbicides.
Research from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) also detected glyphosate in water samples collected in the municipality of Tailândia, another key oil palm cluster in Pará’s northeast. The 2018 study also found atrazine, a widely used weedkiller, and the presence of aquatic plants, indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers. Its use is not allowed for palm oil in Brazil but family farmers often refer to atrazine as one of the main pesticides used in palm crops, researchers told Mongabay.
In this region, the top palm oil producers are Agropalma, the country’s second-largest producer and exporter, and Belem Bioenergia Brasil (BBB).
Agropalma is the only Brazilian company certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the world’s leading palm oil sustainability certification scheme. It is a subsidiary of the Brazil-based Alfa conglomerate, a major player in the finance, insurance, agribusiness, building materials, communications, leather and hotel sectors.
BBB previously counted Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, the firm at the center of the Lava Jato corruption scandal that landed former president Lula in jail, as one of its main shareholders. It is now controlled by Portuguese oil company Galp and Ecotauá Participações, a holding company.
The UFPA study, led by Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz, collected nine water samples in the tributaries of sub-basins of the Anuerá and Aui-Açu rivers. The toxicological tests, carried out by the same laboratory that analyzed the samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, found “significant levels of glyphosate,” but still within the regulatory limits, from two collection points in the outflowing streams from BBB’s plantations, Cruz said.
Atrazine within Brazil’s regulatory limit of 2 μg/L was also detected at two points — outflowing streams from BBB site and in a community closer to Agropalma’s plantations, the researcher noted — including an intersection between oil palm, corn and soybean crops. Banned in the EU, the herbicide is still often detected in water samples two decades after its use was prohibited. Atrazine is quite toxic, and potentially carcinogenic to humans, and persists in the environment, especially in water bodies.
“There is no way to say that there is no water contamination,” Cruz said. “We came to the conclusion that this pesticide glyphosate is being used. But as they are pesticides that are under the ground, in the water, it will be diluted.” She added that no previous data on river contamination for Tailândia were available.
No traces of pesticides were detected from collection points inside Agropalma’s plantations, where the researchers were escorted by company minders.
“BBB didn’t let us enter the company [plantation area], only Agropalma. But we were accompanied all the time,” Cruz told Mongabay, adding that the collection points were chosen by the company. “Two people were assigned to accompany us and at the same point where we did the collection, they did it too. But then there is this doubt: I don’t know if they really took us to the points where there is leaching into the soil… They wanted us to do my analysis inside their laboratory, they wanted us to stay inside Agropalma, paying for [our] lunch, coffee, dinner, all support, but we didn’t accept it.”
Agropalma’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said the company does not use atrazine. He also challenged the research, claiming that the points where Cruz detected atrazine do not have any connection with Agropalma’s area.
“They are far from Agropalma and … they are upstream… So, there is no way, even if I had sprayed… an atrazine truck at a stream of Agropalma, it would not reach this point,” Brito told Mongabay in an interview in February.
Geographer Daniel Sombra, coordinator at UFPA’s Laboratory of Environmental Analysis and Cartographic Representations, disagrees. Although the natural watercourse is upstream, he said, it could also flow downstream, given the high level of variation of the tides of the Amazon rivers.
“[This point] is 2 km upstream on the Aiu-Açu river… It may be that they [the pesticides] came from upstream plantations, which are from other properties, including family farms cultivating oil palm, some linked to BBB. But it is not impossible that the effects deposited downstream could move 2 km upwards,” noted Sombra, who built the maps for Cruz’ thesis. “So, it is undetermined whether it really came from upstream or downstream. The fact is: the pesticides collected are typical residues of palm monoculture.”
Brito also challenged the research’s allegations about the presence of aquatic plants as indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers, claiming that the photos from the study didn’t show any macrophyte superpopulation; the existence of many factors in the area could have triggered macrophyte growth, including sun incidence and a nearby road, while laboratory testing for these substances was lacking. Brito also argued that none of the collection points are close to Agropalma, adding that other factors should be taken into account.
Brito says Agropalma has collected water samples from the outflowing streams and within its area as well to check the presence of phosphorus and nitrogen at eight pre-selected points since 2015, as one of the requirements of the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), an industry group. The results of the sampling are recorded and published in the company’s annual sustainability report.
“When comparing streams that cross the palm plantation, we compare them with streams that only cross primary forests,” Brito said. “The species composition is not exactly the same: some populations are favored, others are disadvantaged, but the ecological function is fulfilled. And the water quality is adequate, it is good.”
Moreover, he said that Agropalma has monitored watercourses within its farms in partnership with NGO Conservation International and UFPA’s department of biological sciences, which monitor water quality and aquatic fauna on company property. “So far, we have not received any indication of contamination,” he noted. He also cited a UFPA study that found that oil palm plantations “appear to be one of the least deleterious for native fauna” compared to the different options available for use of soil in the Amazon basin.
According to Brito, Agropalma only uses herbicides, mostly glyphosate, but is testing other compounds. “Our mission is not to use [glyphosate] anymore,” he said. “But it is very difficult because we have to keep the crown of the plants clean. And we also publish every year the amount of active ingredients that we use.”
Smallholders quoted in Cruz’s research said that glyphosate, known locally as mata-mato, was the main pesticide used in oil palm cultivation in Tailândia, even though they said the risks are unknown.
Brito said Agropalma only provides glyphosate after carrying out the due training with farmers.
In a statement, Gilberto Cabral, a BBB spokesman, said the company observes “the best practices applicable in environmental terms” and “without substantial change in land use.” According to him, the trees were planted between 2011 and 2015 in areas that had been used as pastures or areas that were already degraded before 2005.
However, he noted, Tailândia’s land is also used by independent palm producers and by producers of other crops, such as corn and soybeans, “with recurrent use of pesticides in all areas sown.”
As a means of environmental monitoring, Cabral said, the company periodically analyzes surface waters, upstream and downstream, and underground, in order to detect any changes.
“The company strictly observes the dosages and other instructions expressed on the labels and package inserts of the few pesticides it uses, since we prioritize preventive, mechanical (brushing) and biological (Bacillus thuringiensis) means of control on a large scale,” he wrote.
Roberto Yokoyama, the head of the Brazilian Association of Palm Oil Producers (Abrapalma), said if the contamination of watercourses has indeed occurred in Pará, there should be an official investigation.
Yokoyama challenged Cruz’ research, claiming the levels of atrazine found in watercourses and the fertilization period were misrepresented. He also challenged the methodology used by the researcher and argued that the study did not present evidence that proved palm oil plantations were the source.
“The data and results that the master’s thesis presents, in fact, do not indicate that oil palm plantations were responsible for the application of atrazine and glyphosate in their plantations,” Yokoyama wrote.
Aerial view of palm crops in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 11, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Scientific evidence of health impacts
Several studies provide evidence of the harmful health impacts of the contaminants found in Turé-Mariquita and Tailândia. Endosulfan levels of 0.01 μg/L (a third of the concentration found in the water in Damiani’s study), for example, have been shown to be lethal to fish. Studies also detected serious health issues linked to exposure to DDT, diuron and glyphosate-based herbicide residues. There is also growing evidence for atrazine’s carcinogenic potential.
Brazil banned the use of endosulfan in 2010 and DDT in phases from 1985 to 2009, citing their high toxicity and the capacity for bioaccumulation and persistence in the environment. Both are considered persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty.
It’s thought the DDT found in the Turé-Mariquita samples may have originated from its widespread use to control malaria-bearing mosquitos in the Amazon.
At least seven herbicides and 16 insecticides are currently used in oil palm cultivation in Brazil and other countries that grow the crop. Damiani notes the lack of transparency regarding agrochemicals used by Brazilian palm oil companies, as well as the amounts and periods of application — a lack of publicly available data that could potentially conceal much higher exposure of Amazonian communities to oil palm pesticides.
Damiani obtained access to pesticide data collected by prosecutors from Biopalma and other palm oil firms. “Scientific research corroborates the Tembé’s claims,” she said. But “this data we obtained is [just] a snapshot of a reality that requires more frequent monitoring.”
Another study in 2014 by the Instituto Evandro Chagas (IEC), the federal laboratory that carried out the testing for Damiani’s and Cruz’ studies, found endosulfan residues and cyanobacteria, but no pesticide residues, in another oil palm-growing area. According to Mendes, the lab researcher, further systematic analysis of the impacts of oil palm plantations’ pesticide use in Pará is needed, but previous attempts to secure funding have failed.
While the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve’s residents can point to Damiani’s study to corroborate their claims, their neighbors, including in the Tembé Indigenous Reserve, have voiced similar contamination and disease concerns, but lack any scientific evidence to support their accounts.
Their ancestral lands abut oil palm plantations owned and operated by BBB. The reserve’s Indigenous inhabitants say BBB is shirking its obligations by denying the existence of a tributary of the Acará-Mirim River that runs inside one of their oil palm plantations. Mongabay visited the area and verified the existence of a river inside the property.
In the nearby village of Acará-Mirim, Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, has set up a water supply system at the center of the community. But it doesn’t reach Nazaré Coutinho Pereira’s house by the banks of the Acará-Mirim River. “We keep drinking this water because there’s no [other] option,” Pereira said. “We consume a lot of water to drink, to wash, [but] the body always becomes itchy and we need to take medicine.
“[When] we fill a can with this water, in a few hours we can see a finger of mud in the bottom of the pan,” she added. Come the rainy season, she said, “all the poisons, all the dirt comes … dead animals on top, oxen, horse, they throw everything in the river … and we drink the juice from it all.”
Pereira said she has experienced symptoms including diarrhea after drinking the once-clean river water, something that didn’t happen in the past. “I feel my stomach get big, it gets full, unwilling to eat,” she said. “I also have urinary infections very often.” Residents who drink from Funai’s water supply also describe similar symptoms, she added.
In a statement, BBB denied the use of pesticides, saying it only used “mineral fertilizers that contribute to the growth of plants, both cultivated and native.” The company acknowledged the existence of a river called “Rio Pequeno” near its farm, but said that its plantations “are within a regulatory distance from this water body.”
It added its technicians are investigating the situation, including “rigorous analysis of all water bodies near the plantations.” The company said it received on February 18 a complaint from the Tembé Indigenous Association of Vale do Acará about the carrying of liquid effluents, distributed in the planting plots as complementary organic fertilizer, for streams that flow into the river that serves the community in which they live.
A decade-long legal battle
Local communities have frequently pursued legal action against Brazil’s major palm oil players. Biopalma has been targeted by the Tembé people of the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve and by small farmers and Afro slave-descendant quilombola communities.
The Tembé say they were not properly consultated before Biopalma’s oil palm venture got up and running. “We were not listened to for this project; when we saw it, the project was already established around our territory,” Lúcio Tembé, chief of the Turé Indigenous village, said. Pontes Júnior, the federal prosecutor, points to a loophole in Brazilian law that requires a buffer zone of 10 km (6 mi) and a socio-environmental impact study for ventures around conservation areas, but not around Indigenous reserves.
For large development projects, like dams, such a buffer zone is also mandatory for Indigenous reserves, given the potentially harmful impacts of these types of developments. But palm oil plantations are considered an “agrosilvopastoral culture” with “low polluting and degrading potential” by the state environmental council, and so are not required to go through the same licensing process, instead qualifying for a simplified licensing process.
Brazil is a party to international conventions that require consultation with, and consent by, Indigenous and traditional communities who will be impacted by major development projects. In this case, however, there was no prior consultation, and the impact was not assessed, Pontes Júnior said. “Everything depends on [getting] this forensic report. From this forensic report, a series of other actions will be triggered… [But] without this forensic report I have my hands tied in this action,” he said.
In a statement, the Federal Circuit Court for the First Region in Brasília said a ruling may be made in March.
Another enabling factor in the oil palm industry’s environmental violations can be found in the plantation licensing process. In Pará, the state government didn’t acknowledge the presence of Indigenous or traditional communities when granting licenses for oil palm cultivation, prosecutors say.
The Turé-Mariquita reserve, for example, was demarcated in 1991, 16 years before Biopalma arrived in the region. The Tembé themselves have been present in Pará since the second half of the 19th century, when they were forced to migrate from neighboring Maranhão state.
Since their first recorded contact with Portuguese colonizers in 1615 in Maranhão, the Tembé have had to face forced proselytization by missionaries, slavery, infectious diseases, persecution, conflict, and extreme droughts that devastated the land. A branch of the Tupi-Guarani family, they called themselves Tenetehara but in the migration process came to be called the Tembé in Pará; those who remained in Maranhão are called the Guajajara.
The presence of several quilombola settlements, or quilombos, also dating back more than a century was similarly ignored during the licensing process. State and federal prosecutors say this renders the process invalid, given the lack of attention paid to the impacts on these communities. Pontes Júnior and state prosecutors Eliane Cristina Pinto Moreira and Raimundo Moraes have also called on the Pará state environmental council, Coema, to reform its palm oil licensing policy to introduce more regulation, but the requests have been rejected.
Researchers at UFPA have found that Biopalma’s Castanheira processing mill, next to the Acará River, received two separate licenses — one from the municipality of Acará and one from the state — yet neither defines any buffer zone requirements. “The conditions are ridiculous, i.e., annual reports of activities, something that the legislation already establishes… The environmental authority simply relies on the companies’ self-monitoring procedures,” lead researcher Elielson Pereira da Silva told Mongabay. He added that the environment secretary in Acará had only shown him the documents on condition he not make any copies or photograph them.
In a statement, Pará’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainability (Semas-PA) said
it carried out inspections from May to December 2019 in six municipalities, including Acará and Tomé Açu, and at the time “there were no violations of current environmental standards.”
In relation to the pollution of watercourses, Semas-PA said it plans to inspect the area; there are also scheduled inspections for Tailândia’s oil palm farms, but monitoring rivers and streams within Indigenous Reserves is the responsibility of the federal government, it added.
Brazil’s Ministry of Health, Funai, and the municipalities of Acará and Tailândia did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
‘Desperate’ strategy to be heard
Brazilian companies like Biopalma portray their operations as sustainable to consumers in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. But palm oil companies the world over have long been accused of destroying traditional livelihoods, leaving poverty and social deprivation in their wake. In Pará, the industry has left many Indigenous and traditional residents feeling estranged from their culture, which is deeply intertwined with the natural world.
By 2019, Biopalma’s plantations had encircled the Tembé’s lands, and local resistance morphed into campaigns of direct action against the company. Tired of nearly a decade of fruitless campaigning for compensation through official channels, the Tembé took direct action, seizing company vehicles in the hope of forcing Biopalma to hear their concerns. Uhu Tembé, an Indigenous leader, told Mongabay how she and her husband seized a Biopalma tractor during the protest and used it to bulldoze oil palm trees near the village of Yriwar in the Turé-Mariquita reserve.
On November 12, 2019, Indigenous leader Uhu Tembé told Mongabay in village of Yriwar in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve how she and her husband seized a Biopalma tractor during a protest and used it to bulldoze oil palm trees near hear house. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
“We have been asking for [Biopalma’s] help for a long time to clean the area so we can plant; they never answered. Then we decided to get their machinery to do it ourselves … because we’ve been asking them for ten years,” Uhu said, pointing to the tractor that sat outside her home for three months. “We are cleaning it up here to plant our cassava, corn, rice. We don’t eat this here,” she added, pointing to oil palms. “They did not respect our land, our area. That’s why we feel outraged.”
Frustration with palm oil companies has grown across the region over the last years, and the seizure of company property by the Turé-Mariquita residents is not an isolated case.
Like the Indigenous communities, the quilombolas have also protested against Biopalma, blocking roads to call for development assistance. But such actions may have provoked violence, including the murder of a quilombola leader in 2018, and an arson attack on the home of another.
The Mongabay team visited the village of Acará-Mirim in the neighboring Tembé Indigenous Reserve the day after residents had seized tractors and a car from BBB. Indigenous leader Valdevan Evangelista dos Santos Tembé said their goal was to force a dialogue with the company, and that they would return the vehicles once an agreement was reached. In the meantime, residents used the machinery to prepare the area to plant crops.
“All Indigenous leaders in Acará-Mirim and Cuxiu-Mirim villages agreed to do this protest. We agreed to put on war paint [over] our bodies, take our bows and arrows and seize the company’s … tractors,” Valdevan Tembé said. “What was our objective? To bring the company’s manager to our village to talk to us and sign an agreement. We would only give them back their machines after they start the construction works they promised us.”
The protests have had some successes. For Valdevan Tembé and his neighbors, BBB committed to conducting a social and environmental impact study to determine if the plantations had damaged the Indigenous communities. BBB said the study was contracted and is being carried out at the moment, with completion expected for the first semester of this year to be “the basis for the adoption of measures to mitigate any impacts.”
BBB also made some improvements to the road requested by the Acará-Mirim villagers, Lúcio Tembé said.
The Mongabay team visited the village of Acará-Mirim in the Tembé Indigenous Reserve the day after residents had seized tractors and a car from palm oil company Belem Bionergia Brasil (BBB). On November 14, 2019, Indigenous leader Valdevan Evangelista dos Santos Tembé said their goal was to force a dialogue with the company, and that they would return the vehicles once an agreement was reached. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
In Turé-Mariquita, Biopalma went to court to get its machines back. The villagers handed them back three months after seizing them, with the company agreeing to pay each community 30,000 reais (about $5,600) quarterly for three years to finance local development projects, according to Urutaw Turiwar Tembé, chief of the Yriwar Indigenous village. “It is not enough for us, but it was what they gave us. We fought for more, but we failed,” he said.
But none of these projects have been completed so far, Urutaw Tembé said, due to higher costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, instead of paying the quarterly amount, Biopalma only paid annually.
The Indigenous have tried to seal a new deal to replace the amount for the obligation for carrying out the projects, regardless of the amount but “it became very complicated to negotiate” after Biopalma’s sale to BBF, Urutaw Tembé noted.
In a statement, BBF said its relationship with Indigenous communities close to palm plantation areas “is always maintained in a spirit of technical and social cooperation” under agreements made last year that included providing clean drinking water, ensuring food security, and educational and cultural schemes.
November 2015 saw the first major mobilization of Indigenous people, quilombolas, ribeirinhos (traditional riverside dwellers) and residents of neighboring communities against the palm oil firms. About 140 people came together and occupied Biopalma’s Vera Cruz headquarters, paralyzing the company for 11 days.
The protest began when Biopalma started operating a ferry on the Acará River, close to the Vila Formosa quilombola community. The quilombolas asked if they could also use the company ferry to travel to other communities or even to the city, but were rebuffed, leading to the occupation. Days later, a judge intervened and the protesters left peacefully. Biopalma denounced the occupation, alleging its property had been looted, and a judge in Acará ordered the arrest of the leaders of the associations involved in the occupation. One quilombola leader was jailed for eight months.
However, in a counterargument of appeal signed in early 2020 in defense of the Tembé’s November 2019 protests against Biopalma, federal prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva said the demonstration was a legitimate act of Indigenous resistance made in response “to the years of illicit conduct by the company, which severely damages their health,” and was carried out “in a desperate attempt to at least be heard [in] a dispute over Indigenous rights.”
The prosecutor encouraged both sides in the conflict to engage in mediation over Biopalma’s omission of environmental impacts and the need for corrective environmental licensing, among other points of contention. “For these issues, the company omits and tries to criminalize the demonstration of the Indigenous people through lawfare and police procedures,” Silva wrote.
In a statement, Biopalma said it filed a repossession suit given “the repeated undue seizures of agricultural machinery” through “serious threats like wielding melee weapons against Biopalma employees.”
Fewer game animals, more pests
The arrival of the oil palm plantations in the Amazon has driven out the wildlife that Indigenous and traditional communities often hunt for food and ushered in an influx of disease-carrying insects and venomous snakes, the communities say.
Before the plantations encircled the reserve, “we [easily] found, very close to here, paca, armadillo, a lot of fish,” said Nazaré Coutinho Pereira from Acará-Mirim village. “Hunting has changed because there are no more [animals]. It is difficult for us to find [animals to hunt] … There’s nothing else [left], neither hunting nor fish.”
In Yriwar village, residents say game animals like tapir and tortoise have disappeared since Biopalma arrived. And even when they do catch animals, they are afraid to eat them due to the risk of pesticide poisoning. The few animals that remain, such as foxes, reportedly also suffer symptoms such as hair loss, while many others have been found dead from no obvious cause, according to Lúcio Tembé.
The cultivation of oil palms close to Indigenous reserves affects livelihoods and lifestyle quality in other ways beyond depriving residents of hunting and fishing. Urutaw Tembé said they have seen an increase in the number of insects and snakes.
The plantations “touched our territory [and] didn’t respect the buffer zone. This has brought us a lot of damage today: insects, lizards … that we had never seen [before]. Venomous snakes, many snake species … flies, flies that bother us. It ends up hurting the children’s bodies, triggering allergies,” he said.
According to Indigenous residents, the swarms of pests are caused by the loss of native vegetation and the large number of rodents attracted by fallen palm leaves. The snakes, in turn, are drawn by the abundance of the rodents, posing a serious health threat to residents, for whom the nearest clinic is an hour’s drive away and the closest hospital about four hours away.
Urutaw Tembé also complained about the damage caused by the planting of pueraria (Pueraria phaseoloides), a crop in the pea family that is used by the oil palm companies to fix nitrogen in the soil, control weeds, and reduce erosion. The Tembé say it attracts insects during the dry season that burrow beneath the skin, causing rashes.
Indigenous chief Lúcio Tembé poses for a photograph in front of Biopalma’s Castanheira mill, just a few meters away from the Acará River, in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Forests replaced by palm crops
Biopalma has said in the past that it established its plantations only on already cleared land, but Indigenous residents and researchers dispute this.
Sandra Damiani from UnB, who investigated the pesticide use in the area, said she found evidence of about 300 hectares (740 acres) of deforestation for oil palm around Turé-Mariquita, where old-growth forests were felled as loggers first encroached, followed by agricultural settlers, a mining company whose pipeline crosses the reserve, and finally by Biopalma.
Studies have shown that the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations is a major problem, not only locally, but across northeast Pará. Research suggests between 9% and 39% of oil palm production occurred in deforested areas in Pará between 1989 and 2014, raising concerns about future expansion. This casts into doubt Biopalma’s claim, and that of other companies, that their oil palm production stems only from previously cleared land.
The use of heavy machinery on the plantations also has an impact on biodiversity by scaring off game animals, Damiani said. The reduction in both abundance and diversity of animals was noticed immediately by Indigenous people after the planting of palm oil crops bordering their land, she said. Numerous bird species, for example, were no longer seen after the conversion to oil palm.
The native vegetation in the now-deforested territory outside the Indigenous reserve was important for the community to collect non-timber forest products, including herbs and honey that are used as medicines, vines for making of utensils, seeds for handicrafts, and fruits such as pequiá (Caryocar villosum), uxi (Endopleura uchi), bacuri (Platonia insignis) and bacaba (Oenocarpus bacaba).
The Indigenous people initially welcomed the increased access to urban centers that the new roads laid by Biopalma facilitated. But the roads also increased exposure to outsiders, making them feel that they were losing control of their territory. Another consequence of more roads has been an increase in illegal logging in the area. Numerous studies in the Amazon have identified road construction as an important vector of deforestation, and the Mongabay team regularly saw trucks loaded with timber passing through the area.
In a statement, BBF said it has identified “the role of illegal deforestation gangs in areas close to its farms” since it took control of Biopalma in November 2020 and had reported the allegations to the authorities. It added that palm oil crops were “planted in the parcels of land authorized under the terms of the applicable environmental legislation.”
Truck loaded with palm oil fruits in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Deforestation in quilombola areas is also occurring as the direct result of oil palm expansion. Nearly 4,800 hectares (11,900 acres) of forest was cleared between 2007 and 2018 to make way for oil palms in the municipality of Acará, according to research by Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva at São Paulo State University (UNESP). The study looked at satellite imagery from Mapbiomas — a network of NGOs, universities and tech firms that include Google — and crosschecked them with NASA’s Landsat 5 and 8 data.
This further disproves the companies’ and government’s claims that oil palm plantations were established only on previously cleared land.
In 2010, the federal government launched an agroecological zoning program for palm oil cultivation in deforested areas in the states that make up the Brazilian Amazon. Called ZAE-Dendê, it offered benefits to palm oil companies for meeting certain sustainability requirements. But as Damiani and da Silva found in their research, some areas were deforested and overlapped onto traditional quilombola communities.
Adriano Venturieri, the researcher who led the palm oil agroecological zoning program, said the quilombola communities were not considered because their presence was not formally acknowledged at the time. He added the program may be updated at any time to include this data.
Quilombolas affected
Like the Indigenous communities impacted by the plantations, the quilombola communities in Acará — the third-largest palm oil-producing municipality in Brazil —complain about similar issues arising from the plantations, including deforestation, reduced water levels in their streams, and pesticide pollution.
“They wanted to plant oil palm here. We did not allow it,” José Renato Gomes de Gusmão told Mongabay at his home in 19 de Massaranduba, a quilombola village in the Tomé-Açu region. “People who live close [to the palm plantations] got sick [with] too much poison. The waters are gone, with so much poison that they throw. The streams are all gone.
“I don’t like it,” he added. “The palm brought a lot of income, a lot of jobs… [But] it is not healthy.”
Researchers Brian Garvey and Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva said they heard similar stories of water contamination in quilombola communities close to the Acará River. In 2016, a palm oil spill in the river left a yellow slick on the water’s surface for more than a week. Quilombola communities including Vila Formosa village, where the protest over Biopalma’s ferry began, were devastated as the fish they relied on died out. Since then, fish catches have declined, and even the river dolphins have disappeared, residents say.
In 2019, two palm oil spills near Agropalma’s plantations in Tailândia polluted the Acará River and its tributaries. The company’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said all of the oil was collected and the impact was “virtually nonexistent.”
“We have the floating barriers that surround oil in the river … We managed to surround the oil there and we managed to collect it to the last drop,” he told Mongabay. “No fish, no tree died. So, there was no environmental impact. Although the volume was a few tons of hollow oil, which is a relatively large volume, the environmental impact was zero, objectively speaking … We have all the proof: the photo before, the photo after.”
Elielson da Silva from UFPA visited the area in the days after the second oil spill in October 2019 and documented the environmental impacts, including water contamination and the death of animals and fish. “There was contamination. I was there. I photographed people, I witnessed the [damages of the] oil spill,” he told Mongabay, adding that residents said that there were three oil spills that year.
Water contamination issues derived from both pesticides and oil spills have been faced by quilombola communities close to Agropalma’s concession for several decades, but the situation worsens each year, especially the degree of fish contamination, a quilombola, who talked on condition of anonymity after receiving death threats, told Mongabay.
“The water is muddy, it’s dark; it’s so dark that we cannot have any visibility,” the source said.
After the 2019 oil spills, the source noted, one of the main impacts was scarcity of fish. The fishes are only coming back now, the source noted. “The fish eat the palm oil; it fills its belly. Then you go fishing, when you open the fish, where its tripe ends from its gills, everything is full of oil palm… The oil hardens inside the fish… The fish dies with that inside.”
Photographs from an environmental inspection released by Tailândia municipality and seen by Mongabay corroborate the allegations of negative environmental impacts from Agropalma’s oil spill. The document, dated May 2019, ordered that steps be taken to repair the rivers and streams.
In a statement, Semas-PA said it had recorded an infraction notice against Agropalma, without providing further details.
Palm fruits stored on the road in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Community-wide impacts
During our investigation, we witnessed how the oil palm plantations impact the daily lives of people living in the wider Pará community — at a school, for example, which was surrounded by palm trees. Although the companies say the agrochemicals they use are not toxic, this particular school endured a forced three-day closure while the firm was spraying, residents told Mongabay.
“There was no class for three days [and] no one could pass through the area,” said Alex de Oliveira Pimentel, a local farmer. “[The company] said [the pesticide used] was organic, [that] it wasn’t unhealthy… But the requirement was that nobody could pass through the area for 48 hours.”
Aerial view of a school completely surrounded by oil palm plantations in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 13, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Beyond the contamination of the soil and water, Pimentel said farmers have lost their crops due to the spread of pests and disease from the palm plantations, including butterfly infestations destroying fruit crops like dragon fruit and cashew.
When the big agribusiness companies first came to the Tomé-Açu region, they approached several small farmers with an offer to lease their lands for oil palm cultivation. Some resisted, unwilling to turn over their land to grow a then-unknown crop.
Among them was José Edimilson Ramos Rodrigues, one of many farmers in his community who rejected the lease offer. But that has not stopped the community from feeling the impact of the plantations, which now surround them. The residents have regularly complained about water contamination, reduced fish catches, and animal deaths since the oil palms were planted close to the river.
Rodrigues said he has noticed some changes in local crops, including a vine that now grows in coconut trees and which he said didn’t exist before. He said the damage done far outweighs any benefits from the lease offer. “There’s no way. What we must do is try to avoid … so that it won’t happen again,” he said.
Lax agrochemical controls
The spread of pesticide use in Indigenous and traditional communities has once again shone a light on the lax regulatory climate governing the sales and use of harmful chemicals in Brazil. Only one company is officially approved by Pará state to sell pesticides in Tailândia, but a thriving illegal market has flourished, selling glyphosate under the local name mata-mato. The farmers’ union in Tailândia, Sintraf, told UFPA researcher Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz that the palm oil companies do not dispose of the packaging properly, opening the possibility for misuse later on. Proper package disposal is regulated by a federal law, which holds the farmer, vendor and manufacturer legally responsible for any such misuse.
Tailândia’s farmers also said they were initially given personal protective equipment by Agropalma and BBB, but the supplies were short-lived, even though people began falling ill due to the use of pesticides.
Brito, the Agropalma director, denied all the accusations. According to him, the company collects the agrochemical packaging, which is incinerated. He said Agropalma also controls all glyphosate provided to farmers and provides appropriate safety equipment.
Cabral, BBB spokesman, said it is common for farmers to plant other crops in areas adjacent to palm groves, which are managed separately. Pesticide packaging supplied by the company is “inert and recyclable” and is collected by local companies after use; the use of appropriate safety equipment is also inspected, he added.
Sintraf also told Cruz that the use of pesticides by the palm oil firms had led many local farmers to adopt new practices, heavily reliant on agrochemical use, and abandon their traditional farming methods. This has compounded the pollution of rivers, as up to half the farmers in some communities have switched to using pesticides.
The Ministry of Health launched a health surveillance program in the 1990s for people exposed to pesticides, but the system failed to produce any reports for Tailândia, Cruz noted.
For some federal prosecutors, the problems caused by the palm oil industry’s inroads into the Amazon over the past decade are a repeat of what they witnessed with the cattle, soy and mining sectors and all development projects.
“The palm oil [sector] doesn’t differ at all from the other monocultures established here in the Amazon,” prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva told Mongabay. “The modus operandi follows a primer as well, which is a primer for violating the rights of communities.”
In Tomé-Açú, game animals and fish were once plentiful. Now only oil palm trees grow, in some cases within meters of the Indigenous reserves.
“The palm oil company left us in a space like an egg … Only the company profits,” said Urutaw Tembé, pointing to oil palms just a few feet from his home in Yriwar village. “We are dying with pesticides, with water contamination. How does a company like this come from outside to enrich [itself] on our land? We don’t accept it … We will keep fighting.”
Karla Mendes is a staff contributing editor for Mongabay in Brazil. Find her on Twitter: @karlamendes
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Arson attacks and other forms of sabotage against cell phone towers (mobile masts) have accelerated over past months. In this piece, Max Wilbert and Aimee Wild explore why people are burning cell phone towers.
Over the past few months, there have been dozens of arson attacks on cell phone towers across the world.
Why is this happening? Are these attacks justified? And what is the reasoning behind them?
The truth is, cell phone towers are not benign. In fact, cell towers (or “mobile masts”) harm the world in many different ways. In this article, we’ll lay out six reasons why we believe destroying cell phone towers is justified.
1. Cell Phones Are Anti-Democratic
The technology behind cell phones is anti-democratic. In other words, it both emerges from and strengthens a social, political, and economic system which concentrates power into the hands of a small number of extremely wealthy people. These people have control over the information and consumption of most of the rest of the population.
“Television not and cannot be a neutral technology, nor does it convey a neutral message. It has the power to influence large portions of the population using surreptitious psychology and inherent technology to achieve its owners’ purposes and to promote their agenda.
The medium by its very nature consolidates power and influence into the hands of a rich few. There is no democratic process by which voters and consumers may directly affect its content, or control its impact. The problems and the dangers of television are inherent in the technology itself. That means it cannot be reformed in its nature as a medium. And because the medium of television cannot be reformed, it needs to be eliminated.”
2. Cell Phones Facilitate Global Capitalism and Harm Workers
Cell phones also destroy the planet by facilitating capitalism. The global mobile phone industry is worth roughly $1 trillion per year. The modern CEO in the early 2000’s was characterized by the Blackberry. Now, business wouldn’t run nearly as efficiently without cell phones. The smartphone enables a constantly connected, always-on lifestyle that is Taylorism run wild.
Now you can be on a meeting at home, in the car, from a rest stop on the side of the road in the bath, even in designated wilderness. It’s ideal for business, but destroys the undisturbed leisure that we need as human beings. When humans work too hard, prolonged stress causes our immunity to fall, and we become more susceptible to illness. It should surprise no one that increasing addiction to cell phones makes us sick.
3. Cell Phones Enable and Reinforce a Culture of Mass Surveillance
The third major problem with cell towers and cell phones is that they are perfect tools for mass surveillance. Each cell phone is a tracking device that logs your location every minute with nearby cell towers. Quite literally, as long as your phone is turned on, with you, and has service, it can practically retrace every one of your steps. And this isn’t to speak of the surveillance facilitated by apps, advertising and cookies, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi tracking, malicious downloads, hijacking sensor data, and so on. States and corporations have shown themselves only too willing to use cell phone data to track and monetize every users and surveil and harass dissidents.
4. Cell Phones and Service Networks are Based on Polluting, Destructive Resource Extraction
The fourth reason that destroying cell towers is justified is the harm done to the natural world. Delivering cellular connectivity requires a sophisticated system of cell phone towers, routers, and networking. A 2014 estimate put the total number of cell towers globally at about 4 million. That number has exploded in the years since. As of 2019, China alone had nearly 2 million towers, and as of 2018, the United States had 349,344 towers.
These towers are connected to power lines, diesel backup generators, transformers, routers, switches, and servers. And they serve cell phones. All of these are made out of materials—steel, plastic, rare earth metals, aluminum, silicon, copper—which are produced by strip mining and destructive extractive methods. The creation, maintenance and repair of mobile phone masts, bases, and the phones themselves are part of a wider culture of consumption. And as network technology escalates, demands for raw materials will increase as well. The shorter range of 5G technology, for example, requires many more access points to provide equivalent network coverage.
Don’t believe me? Spend 10 minutes searching for “How steel is produced” and “iron ore mining pollution.” The human rights implications and devastation of the natural world caused by these industrial processes cannot be overstated. Modern cell phones cannot even be recycled—although even if they could, that would not mitigate the problem, since the number of phones produced keeps rising and recycling is itself an extremely polluting, human-rights-violating industry.
Keep in mind that corporations chronically fail to report “accidents,” and that most pollution is fully permitted and perfectly legal. Stopping those companies from polluting? Now that is illegal.
5. Cell Phones Harm Our Minds, Bodies, and Spirits
The average smartphone user spends 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their phone. In the United States, the number is nearly 5 and a half hours. The rise in cell phone use in young people has corresponded to plummeting mental health as social media, pornography, gaming, and toxic mass media are piped to young people 24/7. Unfortunately, probably everyone reading this knows how addictive these technologies can be.
The days of TV addiction seem almost quaint.
6. Cell Phone Towers Kill Massive Numbers of Birds
Cell towers also kill birds. Back in 2013, a study was published estimating that telecommunications towers of all types kill 7 million birds annually—with especially serious impacts to bird species that are already rare and struggling.
Keep in mind, the number of cell towers has possibly doubled or tripled since that time and is climbing steeply. The same cannot be said for bird populations, which have declined by 2.9 billion in the U.S. and Canada alone over the last 50 years.
Is Radiation From Cell Phones Harmful?
Cell phones and cell towers transmit information using radiofrequency (RF) radiation, a low frequency form of electromagnetic radiation. In the U.S., legal radiation levels from cell phones are set by the FCC at 1.6 watts per kilogram averaged over 1 gram of tissue.
Independent tests have shown that cell phones regularly exceed these legal limits by 2-5 times. National health institutes and cancer research organizations have researched exposure to radiation from cell phones, but have not found any conclusive evidence of increased cancer risk. But risk factors for cancer are complex and varied, and cancer is not the only potential harm. More chronic, low level health issues could be associated with increasing levels of RF radiation generated by industrial civilization. Is radiation from cell phones increasing anxiety levels? Linked to hormonal problems? Hurting our immune systems?
There is little research and less incentive—or funding—to conduct it. Regulatory bodies like the FCC are staffed by telecommunications industry veterans in a mutually beneficial “revolving door” that means policies are almost always designed to prioritize profits, not human health.
Nonetheless, even if radiation from cell phones is harmless, destroying cell phone towers is justified given the other harms listed above.
It is Justified to Burn Cell Towers
Industry never “self regulates.” Destruction and exploitation only stops when people rise up and stop it themselves. So it should come as no surprise when people attack cell phone towers or other infrastructure of industrial civilization. This way of life is not good for people and it is not good for the planet. We need a new path. And that will require dismantling the old.
Escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass left us with some of the most important words ever written: “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” Douglass said. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
The people who are attacking cell phones towers and burning mobile masts are more than justified. They are making a moral choice to resist the expansion of cellular networks and of industrial civilization in general. They are a strategic movement taking action against the communications network. Their attacks slow growth of the telecommunications industry by increasing cost and risk of expansions.
The activists involved are taking genuine risks in the interests of protecting their communities —human and non-human. The mainstream media reports portray these arsonists as conspiracy theorists who are ignorant or perhaps mentally unwell. It is interesting that they choose this angle rather than using the words criminals and terrorists. They are being ridiculed in order to downplay and devalue the reasons for these actions. Meanwhile, technological escalation and destruction of the planet is normalized. How could anyone resist this progress?
Industrial capitalism will never be stopped by destroying cell towers alone. Nonetheless, these types of underground action can be an important part of resistance movements. We hope that with proper target selection, the same passion can be directed towards infrastructure that is even more destructive and central to the industrial system.
Saboteurs: we salute you.
We Need Your Help
Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We need your help.
Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.
Monthly donors are the backbone of our fundraising because they provide us with reliable, steady income. This allows us to plan ahead. Becoming a monthly donor, or increasing your contribution amount, is the single most important thing we can do to boost our financial base.
Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.
Editor’s Note: this piece comes from the Native Youth Movement, a cross-nation warrior society for indigenous youth on Turtle Island. We do not agree with every detail of this piece, but consider it a good primer on this topic and a look at how traditionally-minded indigenous people are approaching the internet, social media, pornography, and more. Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Facebook (Fed-book): the ultimate tool for intelligence and distraction.
Indigenous People
Who are We?
We are the original people of our Lands. Some of us were born into our culture, some of us were not, some of us got taught a little, some of us got none, some of us were born in our homelands to Indian hands and greeted by the Sun, some of us where born in far away industrial war zones, slapped on the ass by a white man & put under neon lights.
So who are we now?
Although we come from different realities & have been taught different world views, deep inside we share common pre-invasion bloodlines, pre-invasion realities and pre-invasion minds. At one time we all had the same world-view as humans–we are simply another animal species no more important than other Life forms. Life is a beautiful gift which we must not take for granted. Instead, we are to respect, care for and protect it. We are born with a basic task, the same as all Life: to continue it.
Today, we are those who have united and chosen Life over death, Land, Water and Air, over industrial waste. We have a Sacred Duty, to be Earths Army.
Our Vision?
Is to raise babies who are Independent of other humans and machines, knowing the land & water, how to sustain themselves with real skills, working with the Natural Law, Food Harvesting, Building, Healing, Protecting, Clothing, Making Fire, with good Leadership Qualities, Virtues and all the skills for living on the Land in various seasons and terrains.
Our Job. What do we want?
To Provide Life. Healthy Life! No More. No Less. We demand Healthy Life, not from other people, but from ourselves. It is our Duty as Indian Men and Women to look after ourselves and continue Life forever according to our Original Instructions.
How will we get what we want?
Building our skills, and living the Natural Law. Leaving the cities and reservations and building more villages in our Lands or join existing ones.
How did we arrive where we are?
Since the beginning, humans have had to fight off other humans attempting to invade lands and utilize the resources for their own human group.
Over 500 years ago a new kind of invasion took place in our Lands, one that had been existing over the seas for thousands of years–One that attempted to exterminate our people and way of life. These attempts continued to get advanced in their quest for resources and control. It was a War against Indigenous People. The War against the human proved unsuccessful. Many were exterminated, but many survived.
The industrial revolution changed the face of battle, from primary attacks on humans, to attacks focused on the earth that humans and all Life depend on for existence. War against humanity had expanded. Industry waged war against all Life forms.
To compliment industry, psychoanalysts used their study of human thinking to go deep into the thoughts and feelings of the survivors of Tribal people to empty the original thinking and replace it with a foreign way. Missions, Boarding & Residential schools would become the way for the white man to kill the thoughts, feeling and responsibilities of the Indigenous children by taking them away from their Lands and teachers and replacing their way of being with a white mind, and body that could now be used to contribute to the destruction of the earth. After generations, that form of forced brainwashing and fear through violence and sexual abuse was so successful they now use the public schools to continue to raise robots whose only purpose in life is to get a job contributing to the industrial machine and their own destruction in the process.
Resistance to pre-mature death is nothing new; it is a Natural Law of self-preservation. When something attacks you, you do all you can to make sure the attack is unsuccessful. Today is no different. World-wide attacks on humans and the Earth are resisted, so they must advance their methods of attack.
In comes the teck-no-logic ‘revolution’. Welcome the world of ‘social’ media, known better as advanced social monitoring.
This statement will focus on facebook, which we prefer to call by what it really is: fed-book– the world’s largest database of humans and their activities. For those who are completely part of the system the service provides insight even deeper into the colonized consumer human mind and how they can sell more products in order to expand control over them.
For those who know something is wrong and must change, fed-book serves to monitor their location, activities, friends, and psychology. From those reformist views of wanting a piece of the pie (money for our lands being exploited), and those revolutionaries who don’t want the money, but want to stop the exploitation and destruction of the land, fed-book is an intelligence tool. The greatest to date, with over 1.5 billion people (and growing) making their own profile to be monitored.
This writing will focus on why it is so great for intelligence and why we are so quick to fall for it. We will start by looking at why we might be susceptible to social media, then the problems created by it–Physical Health, Social, Mental & Body aspects–then Movement Health. Finally, we will discuss what we are going to do from here on out to improve our current state.
Teck-No-Logic World & the Internet: The quest for more control
The Internet was created by the military, for military purposes, and it continues to be used for such. Business, military and governments, which are all intertwined, have always sought more efficient ways to monitor people & control them. Psychoanalysts are the leadership in this constant improvement of how to control people better so we can live & die in their vision and not in our true way of life. They are highly skilled, with the majority of our people uploading photos of themselves, shooing off smiling, stoic, innocent, noble savage, hard or duck lips faces Billions are contributing to self-made intelligence profiles.
Let’s look at why humans are so eager to show themselves to anybody and everybody who cares to look, even after proven detrimental consequences.
How to get us to be distracted
Sex, Food and Violence
Internal Trickster, Tricking Our-selves
Needs are: Air, Water, Food, Protection, Fire and depending on your region the ability to stay warm or cool. This is what we need to complete our job while living on Earth.
We are born from a seed like all other life, then die, and our body goes back into the earth and essence back into the universe. Extremely simple. So if humans are so smart why do we complicate things so much?
The trickster. The trickster exists in all facets of our life, not really to trick us, but to test us, & like all tests, once completed & passed you have a stronger understanding and knowledge of the subject you were tested on making you a better human being. Within all of us are internal tricksters, and they exist within our mind. Our job is to not let ourselves, trick ourselves.
Reward System and Energy Balance
Our Real Elders have taught us that our Brain is truly a Seed. All Life comes from a Seed. We literally are the same as all Life, full of Water, Vitamins, Minerals & Energy, compiled into another shape.
In our Brain we have a part called the Reward System. The job of the Reward System is to identify things that are pleasurable and good for us. When identified, dopamine’s are released in this portion of the brain, giving a temporary feeling of satisfaction & euphoria.
We also have another part of the brain which combines many structures and makes the Energy Balance System. In a time before industrial production, refrigeration and internet systems worked hand in hand & they complimented each other. When we encountered fresh sweet berries, fatty meat, or salty food, our reward system was triggered because we knew that we needed it for proper energy balance in our bodies.
The Earth provides naturally, the perfect amount of energy, through a process of growth and death, giving and taking, to keep the planet in balance and therefore helping us to continue orbiting in the universe how we are supposed to. On a smaller scale the Earth always provided all its animals, including humans the proper amount of energy, through food and water to keep us alive and strong. No doubt if we looked into the minds of our ancestors they would not have found competing systems but one working unit. Some humans began to go through great efforts to change this naturally perfect system of internal cohesion and recognition between the Energy Balance and Reward System, and slowly began to only feed the Reward System.
Today we are still born hardwired to be healthy and strong life forms, but that is quickly disturbed and our brain separated by only getting offered physical and emotional things that benefit the Reward System and put us completely out of touch with Energy Balance. At the root of the Reward System is the thought that it needs certain things to continue healthy Energy Balance.
Now, when we see sweet, salty and fatty foods our Reward System finds them hard to resist because they used to benefit our Energy Balance system & when used in moderation were what we really needed to live. For example, when people see someone of the opposite sex they are attracted, not because they crave the feeling of orgasm, but because the feeling of orgasm signals to the reward system something good is happening for energy balance; a new life is being made, which is essentially why we are all here–to help Life continue.
Today, everything is superficial and instead of having just the right amount to live in energy balance, we are forced to have too much. Excess things trick our Reward System into thinking we are doing what is right, but really we are nowhere near proper Energy Balance. Realizing we are out of balance can explain why there is more obesity, drug addicts, sex addicts, technology addicts, gambling addicts, gaming addicts, chemicals, pollution, pre-mature deaths, physical & sexual abuse, overall sickness, and more war and destruction than any time before us on the planet. It can also help explain why, today, humans are the weakest in the story of humanity. Never before have we been so physically, mentally & spiritually weak.
How can we improve that? As Hidatsa-Arirkara Michael Yellowbird says, “In order to successfully de-colonize our harmful & obstructive emotions, thoughts & behaviors we must understand this imbalance & have the courage to confront it.”
So let’s confront it.
Mental & Physical Health
Social Health
The want for social attention and recognition
White man wants us to think there is a need for social recognition, not on the same level as basic needs, but a need none the less. However, we did not think like that, and shouldn’t today. There was not a need for social recognition. A need is necessary for existence. Some may have wanted it, but social recognition is not necessary to live.
If we are equal to all creation then to call it a need is as silly as a plant needing recognition to do its job. A plant that grows from a sprout into a beautiful flower, whose petals fall off, then withers and dries, drops its babies (new seeds) into the ground to continue life, then falls and feeds the earth, eventually becoming another layer of the dirt, does not need other plants to tell it what a good job it is doing to continue and complete its job. Some plants may want it (doubt it though), but a need? I don’t think so.
The want for social recognition can only happen if a person has their basic needs met. Today, although extremely poorly, the majority of Native people think they get their needs met through government programs put in place to maintain control. Although all Native communities have a shorter life expectancy than non-native communities, some as low as 42 years old, basic day-to-day needs appear to be met, but aren’t sufficient. If they were we wouldn’t die so young. But the appearance exists, giving our people the time to begin and worry about social recognition & status in a false reality, & today, a virtual one.
A long time ago your social status had to do with your deeds, your actions and how beneficial they were to the larger group. The society you lived in would determine what actions would help you achieve social recognition.
For the white-man, the deeds of george washington won him great social recognition. His society wanted all Indians dead, he was good at massacring them, therefore granting him the highest social status in white amerikkka.
For Native People fighting to continue our way of life, the actions of Crazy Horse to defend Indigenous people against destruction and defend the Land made him a person of high social standing. So much so that many Indigenous people, even outside of the Lakota Nation, know this name. To be high status in our society was different than the white-man, it did not mean you were better than others, it meant you did great deeds, knew the story of your people since creation and had a vision of what needed to be done for the future.
Skills & Self-esteem
Today our people seek social status and recognition not because they are deserving of it, but because they have an empty void they are trying to fill; a void caused by the invasion of our lands, the murder of our people, the destruction of our resources, the systematic erasing of our knowledge of how to provide for ourselves, the rape of our woman & men, the molestation of our children, machismo and feminism, & the continued poisoning of our bodies and minds with substances & colonial mentality.
In order to escape these realities, people turn the want for recognition into false need, just like the drug addict who now thinks they ‘need’ a substance. It develops an addiction that can enter for numerous reasons all having to do with voids caused by oppression. This void cannot be filled with lots of compliments and fed-book friends, although it may feel like it. To add to the dysfunction is the fact that social recognition in a virtual reality that isn’t real. Social media is not a real life community; it is a virtual one– fake.
People have developed a low self-esteem because of inter-generational trauma. Thinking attention and social recognition can help boost our self-esteem, is a false feeling. Only skills can improve self-esteem.
Compliments and attention are a quick release of dopamine in the reward system, just like substances (drugs), it is like a hot air balloon, a false heat that will come down when hot air is gone and needs more to get you feeling good again. This leads humans to become extremely narcissistic, in other words, have extremely inflated ego’s & think they are so beautiful & great & the whole world should know this. Greatness based on what deeds? Beauty, according to whose standard? Those who are truly beautiful & great, do not think so themselves, cause as soon as they do, their beauty and greatness are gone.
Narcissism is the medical term that can explain why humans love fed-book so much. We can recognize that this is just another form & layer of colonization. Let’s look at it so we may confront and improve it.
Narcissism
Narcissist was a greek youth who fell in love with his own image and spent hours of the day staring at himself, developing a huge ego & becoming extremely selfish. He eventually died from not taking care of daily needs & just staring at himself, but to make the story sound good, they say he turned into a flower which today bears his name.
Since 2000, psychological tests designed to detect narcissism have been done across the country, and the scores of residents of the united states have continually increased. Psychologists have linked the increase to social media. This is one of the reasons for creating social media: to get people consumed with themselves so they cannot function as normal human beings, let alone be a threat in an organized resistance to the industrial world.
Signs of narcissism are:
Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
Lack of empathy: The capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another.
Problems distinguishing them self from others: others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all.
Hyper-sensitivity to any insults or imagined insults.
Feeling Shameful instead of remorseful or guilty.
Haughty Body Language: a physical posture which implies & puts out an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. The narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, also keeping space & posturing up.
Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them.
Detesting those who do not admire them.
Using other people without considering the cost of doing so. Usually the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible.
Pretending to be more important than they really are.
Bragging (Subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements.
Claiming to be an “expert” at many things.
Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people.
Pathological lying, making false promises.
Lacks values; easily bored; often changes course.
Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered a “controlling” or “difficult” person. Defiance of their will can trigger Narcissistic Rage.
Inability to engage emotionally with their children’s needs, often choosing their own wants over time with children.
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Narcissistic Abuse
“At the core of a narcissist is a combination of entitlement and low self-esteem. Feelings of inadequacy are projected onto the victim. If the narcissistic person is feeling unattractive they will belittle their romantic partner’s appearance. If the narcissist makes an error, this error becomes their partners. Narcissists also engage in insidious, manipulative abuse by giving subtle hints and comments that result in the victim questioning their own behavior and thoughts. Any slight criticism of the narcissistic, whether actual or perceived, often triggers narcissistic rage and full blown annihilation from the narcissistic person.
The discard phase can be swift and occurs once the narcissistic supply is obtained elsewhere.
In romantic relationships, the narcissistic supply can be acquired by having affairs. The new partner is in the idealization phase and only witnesses the ideal self; thus once again the cycle of narcissistic abuse begins. Narcissists do not take responsibility for relationship difficulties and exhibit no feeling of remorse. Instead they believe themselves to be the victim in the relationship.” Wikipedia
Fed-book & all social media is helping to increase this selfish and egotistical behavior in our people, hitting us in the deepest root of who we are…the inner self. Bringing two dysfunctional people together will contribute to dysfunctional Nations. To be Strong again, we must confront these dysfunctions & stop feeding into them. We must change them.
Trying to find yourself through Social media
Personal realization is crucial in the development of a human. But is Fed-book really helping with it, or creating an illusion about it?
Having lots of fed-book friends may help you temporarily feel good about yourself, but a study called, ‘Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control’, (by Keith Wilcox, a professor at Columbia University & Andrew Stephen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) shows that fed-book also makes you fat, broke, lazy and depressed. This ego boost has an ‘unintended psychological consequence.’ Fed-bookers relax their self-control making them more likely to make purchases and over eat junk food that they know is bad for them.
“Simply browsing Facebook makes people feel better about themselves and momentarily enhances their self-esteem,” Wilcox told Today.com. “It’s that enhanced self-esteem that ultimately lowers your self-control. The loss of self-control can result in self-indulgence. When you feel good, you can rationalize ordering dessert or buying something you don’t really need. ‘I feel good today,’ you tell yourself. ‘I deserve a treat.’ “
The results of the study found that Fed-book users had a higher body-mass index (BMI) (fat), were more prone to binge eating, carried more credit card debt and had lower credit scores. Fed-book use ‘is causing people to have reduced self-control in a variety of situations.’ They believe the ‘Facebook effect’ is subtle and develops over time and only gets worse the more a person is on it.No matter how many people like your self-moulding photos, or comment on your picture or post, it will not make you a better human being. You are not a good person because you appear to be attractive by cosmopolitan standards.
Social-Media has helped contribute to sexual dysfunction and is teaching another new generation that attraction is based on appearance.
Another recent study shows that social media makes the section of the brain connected with emotions grow, but not in healthy ways. It grows uncontrollable sensitivity, overly affected by what people think about, even if they do not even know the people and had no real life interactions with them.
Effects on marriages and romantic relationships
With the ability to be turned on at every corner of the web, social media is the leading cause of break-up and divorces today.
Emotional cheating is when you allow your thoughts (usually caused by viewing images), to drift from your real life partner and family, to somebody else you may or may not know as a real human being. Emotional cheating is still cheating, and often, more times than not leads to physical cheating, even if not with the person or people the emotional cheating started with.
It open’s a Pandora’s box into the human mind & the craving to satisfy the Reward System, not to create more life, but just to feel good, without any benefit on energy balance. The person online doesn’t contain any of the imperfections as your real life human partner. A person may feel completely attached to this idea of meeting someone perfect for them, & their real life partner is made into an evil enemy in the mind of the cheater to justify this new found ‘love’ & ‘freedom’.
When emotional cheating turns physical, most, if not all, will soon realize there is no such thing as a perfect person. They don’t exist, sorry, in case you didn’t know, you are not perfect either.
Over one third of divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” or “social media” according to a report from a legal services firm, Divorce Online.
Lookin’ for Love on fed-book
Divorce and break-up rates due to fed-book and other social media sites are extreme, but what about ‘meeting’ someone and creating a relationship that is based on something as shallow as appearance and not real human interaction?
When Fed-book was invented so was crush-stalking.
It’s a quiet and seemingly innocent art that everybody does, so it must be ok, right? The silent accumulation of massive amounts of information about a person whose appearance you like, quietly plotting how you will arrange to see them again, dropping-in on the events they announced they will be at, at the same time adding more mutual Fed-book friends, eventually sending them a friend request, then start liking what they like (even if you really don’t), start commenting how great & pretty they are, then ask for their phone number & eventually set up a face-to-face meeting. Before fed-book, you met someone who may interest you, maybe talk for a couple of minutes, not long enough to ask for a number, and it’s done. There is no ability to learn about their life, interests, hobbies, favorite music, who all their friends are, where they’ve travelled, & you damn sure wouldn’t be able to view their family photos. By looking at their pictures and videos you learn their different facial expressions, moods and share in their emotion at the time and place of the photo or video.
There would be no way that a person you just briefly met or just saw in the street would give you their personal journal & give you an open door into the inner most feelings of who they are. In so many ways it would be seen as high risk, for the heart & security, if a complete stranger had all that information. Now any & all who wish, can have access to all that information, without ever having to get to know the person in real life.
In Fed-book you can be whoever you want, only exposing the positive characteristics of yourself. As your virtual personality you don’t ever look tired with bags under your eyes, you don’t shit, you don’t fart, you don’t get sick, you don’t throw up or ever have diarrhea, your perfect, & your self-esteem is skyrocketing cause everyone ‘likes’ what you have to say & everybody ‘likes’ the photos of you. You are looking at that Photoshopped version of yourself — your favorite flattering photos, your witty comments, your epiphanies that came to you on your recent vacation — all reinforcing the version of who you want to be, having a positive but very temporary effect on your self-esteem.
You get that ego lift because you self-select the information that is included in our Fed-book profiles and posts on your wall . That skyrocketing self-esteem goes up fast and strong, but it always has to come down, and when it does the landing is never smooth. But with quick glance at the most beautiful photos of yourself, you can get that hot air balloon back up and running. But soon it will be deflated yet again, often leading to a new but real medical term, “Facebook-Depression.”
Those enormous egos may have already taken over your bodies and minds, a temporary escape from reality, & if you have access through your phone it is one you can visit all the time, even more than living in real reality.
The ability to be constantly connected means that those fragile relationship beginnings can be fast-tracked: You’ve only hung out once, but you Fed-book Chat throughout the day and like each-others uploads at a crazy pace. It’s too much, too soon, and can be addictive. Constantly chatting means that you can get to know someone seemingly faster and can quickly turn into a phase where you spend hours talking about your childhoods, families, and futures.
Then, you get stuck with a false intimacy.
Fed-book does not just confuse people about how ‘great’ they are, but looking at ‘friends’ pages, posts and updates also negatively affects the views of yourself, because like you they put only their best up & it can make people feel depressed & sad thinking others have a better life than theirs. So now to improve your feelings you gotta out do them to make yourself feel sufficient. Constantly self-modeling & announcing the newest cool things you’ve done.
In other words, the computer or cell phone it is not a healthy place to look for Love.
Sexting and Virtual Sex
Real Life Sex must happen to create more Natives. Sex is not an act for the release of dopamine’s and daily expulsion of sacred energy. When two humans, a man and woman exchange their energy it is a sacred union of these two energies: Water & Fire, Earth and Sky, Sun & Moon, pure balance that can potentially lead to a larger responsibility, a new Life.
In our pre-invasion world it was seen very different than today, very Sacred; the most Sacred of our ceremonies, the one that is universal. By exploiting sexuality, we exploit our Essence as Life forms. By colonizing & changing our sexuality they colonize our first & oldest ceremony, so sacred every man & woman had their own and it was only viewed, attended & participated in by them, an internal union of duality.
It is now controlled by the perverted minds of the colonizer. If they control what arouses people and when, through imagery, they can make a person think about sex and control the oldest part of us.
The Hind Brain is older and Stronger than any other portion of the brain. We share it with all other backboned animals. It is associated with the 5 F’s: Fighting, Feeding, Fearing, Fleeing & Fornicating; The Hind Brain Defends Territories & their husbands or wives from others who may want them. Being aggressive to protect is an important job of the Hind Brain.
“Sexual Behavior is instinctive, responses are automatic & our emotions are more stimulated, negativity & anxiety flow easily.” – Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Minds Only.
When Hind brain is in charge, accessing neural networks that are responsible for compassion, self-awareness & emotional intelligence is harder. The place where our deepest Love comes from can be quickly overridden by the Hind Brain. Today most People in the industrial world function in this mental state of the five F’s. A continued state of Narcissism. Self-Modeling & sexting are perfect examples of this portion of the brain not just in charge but controlled through imagery and violent sexual trauma.
In other words, they have sexualized our world as a way to control the oldest thought process of survival.
Sexting and Pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. While sex is thought of as a curse word in public & our communities, dysfunctional sexuality is a behind closed doors addiction that is available for the whole virtual world to see. In 2012 the Internet Watch Foundation found that an “estimated 88% of self-made explicit images are stolen from their original upload location and made available on other websites, in particular porn sites collecting sexual imagery of children and young people”. When the person who originally sexted the photo finds out everyone has access to it they can go into depression & there have been many cases of suicide.
Young children are even sexting & very few adults want to talk about how wrong & against Natural Law it is because they are doing it or have done it too. We must question what is going on, not just follow the crowd because the cool kid or prettiest girl is leading the way.
Indigenous views of sexuality must be revived as a Sacred teaching to our Young ones.
We did not stare at asses, which is really the upper portion of the legs where you shit comes out of.
“Titties” are the physical tissues where food exits for the new life to eat.
Muscles are what give us form, the clay on sticks.
Sexual organs are for the exiting of turbid fluid (piss) & for exchanging seed to egg to make Life.
This shit is not funny or giggly, it is real. We all have the same bodies, with fluids, organs, tissues & energy. Smartin’ up, this is not a joke, the future of Indigenous People are at stake. Body parts were not objects, just as the human they are part of, are not objects, they are sacred Life forms that must be treated good & engaged respectfully. Physical appearance is shallow. A person’s mind must be in good health to be healthy. Looks are temporary. This did not drive the reason you are with somebody & choose to make a new Life.
Not only does the enemy control our feelings and emotions through screens they get us to attempt to satisfy them with material objects. No matter who we are, now they seek to make all consumers of our own colonization and destruction of the Land.
Study, Experiment & Execute- The creation of the Consumer
Today’s industrial world uses the old roman philosophy of bread & circus for control. Entertainment (Circus) & Welfare (food).
Now they’ve mashed them together making everything circus, flashy entertainment that tells us what to buy, whether it’s food, jewelry, shoes, clothes, toys, games, music devices, phones, computers, household items or whatever they can to get us to continue this perpetual cycle of buying things. Humans are now in a constant state of wanting something else, always getting the itch to buy something else. It is yet another product of low self-esteem, always trying to fill a void, one that can only be filled with Land and Water & living by Natural Law.
Turning humans into buyers of things is called Consumerism. It is another advanced form of colonization. Psychoanalysts have learned they can control people through the selling of stuff. They study the oldest desires in the Hind Brain of individuals then try to fulfill them with products. There are always new products to fulfill those desires in a better way.
Public relations are utilized to control Life in every aspect: the constant sight & sound of bright flashy things, then wanting them & getting them.
The core of white civilization is Individualism, so study groups were set up over generations to find what appeals to the individual human mind & how they can make people Narcissistic, so companies can appeal to that desire & control through products.
In the 1980’s business stopped dividing people by social class and started classifying them by what their inner psychological wants were.
Those who wanted Security & Belonging are Mainstreamers. If they sought Status & Esteem of Others they are Aspires.
If it is Control they seek they are Succeeders,
or if it is self-esteem they are Reformers.
They market products to fill the wants of these people.
Now through social media they mine all the information they can get about people & market to them directly for their individual wants and desires. It is called Data Mining, and is the newest tool used to help advance control through buying & debt.
Data Mining is used by corporations, police and intelligence.
Wikipedia says: “With this data, companies create customer profiles that contain customer demographics and online behavior. A recent strategy has been the purchase and production of ‘network analysis software’. This software is able to sort out through the influx of social networking data for any specific company.It is used to help companies improve their sales and profitability. Facebook has been especially important to marketing strategists. Facebook’s controversial ‘Social Ads’ program gives companies access to the millions of profiles in order to tailor their ads to a Facebook user’s own interests and hobbies. However, rather than sell actual user information, Facebook sells tracked ‘social actions’. That is, they track the websites a user uses outside of Facebook through a program called Facebook Beacon.”
That shit is crazy! Data mining is the next advancement of colonization
We were not born to be data mined consumers!
Are We Stronger Social Beings because of Fed-book?
Controlling our inner most feelings, when we are hungry, sexually aroused & scared due to violence, are at the root of control. At one time these feelings would come naturally, when needed. When our body needs more energy, it tells us, and we eat or drink, when we are alone with our partners we are in an intimate space we get sexually aroused, when some form of confrontation or violence occurs we make the decision to fight or get out of the situation somehow if we can. These are not feelings that should be turned on and off by movies, internet, images, billboards or games. By controlling our emotions & feelings, we are like a puppet or a toy that can be turned on & off at the will of the enemy.
“We strengthen our brains neural circuits of fear, anger and helplessness when we engage in negativity, faulty thinking, feeling and behavior…
Our brain changes depends on how we train our minds to engage the world…
A Healthy well balanced mind and brain are essential to engage in proactive, creative & successful decolonization activities” – Michael Yellow Bird
So are we stronger and better human beings because of fed-book. Are we socially advanced? Do we live the good stress free life of our ancestors?
When you log on you may feel like it, but that is all it is, a feeling, not real Life. Get real. Get a Real Life and Real friends who you know and trust and won’t be attracted to you because of physical appearances, what you type & false virtual status.
When phones first entered our communities, elders started to see the break down of personal interaction. People no longer talked to each other face-to-face, just over the phone. Visits and social gatherings became less frequent due to the ease of the phone. Now Internet has taken over, so instead of talking, people are typing and texting, another deeper level of social breakdown with absolutely no human interaction, just writing and reading through a screen.
We have been told we are more social than ever, learning how to speak a language of typed acronyms. Social implies interaction, not typed interaction, but physical interaction.
Children are the primary targets of it all. If children can be taught from a young age, you can control them as adults.
The majority of kids and teens spend about 75% of their awake time attached to some sort of screen.
What type of human is this going to be as an adult? What skill sets will that child learn? Will any of them be applicable if there was no electricity? Will any of these children be functional without electricity?
Addiction is the continued use of a substance or continuation of a behavior despite extremely negative consequences.
Not being able to function without electricity is an extremely negative consequence, a suicidal one. In the world of cyber war, whole Nations electrical systems can be turned over with the switch. On average approximately 7.5 hours per day are spent using some form of entertainment/electrical media. Most people think they need constant audio or visual stimulation.
Doctors have recently set general guidelines recommending that children under the age of two should not watch TV or any form of screen entertainment at all, because television “can negatively affect early brain development” & that children of all ages should not have a television in their bedroom. If it’s bad for child humans in cannot be good for adult ones either.
Where there are humans there are screens, screens have quickly replaced missionaries to colonize those who are uncivilized (not of the city). It is a world-wide disease, one that people slave in jobs to get and give to their children.
Bright flashy loud T.V. & games is how they get children’s attention; Using our instinctive sensitivity to movement and sudden changes in vision or sound. The human naturally orientates itself to screens, it is proven almost from birth: infants, when lying on their backs on the floor, will crane their necks around 180 degrees to watch TV.
Through stylistic techniques, they activate this orienting response by increasing the rate of cuts, edits, zooms, criticism, sudden noises & camera changes in the same visual scene to increase the persons physiological excitement along with attention to the screen. The content of the program is irrelevant. Screen based entertainment is the flavor enhancer of the audio-visual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation.
Research from China and Mexico identified television exposure as an independent factor in obesity. Mexico’s health ministry has reported that obesity has risen by 170 per cent in a single decade, 12 per cent higher for each hour of television watched per day. Eating when watching TV is a main factor, humans continue to salivate unnaturally in response to more and more food when normally they would not. 75 per cent of meals are eaten in front of the television.
Other studies have shown that for every hour of television watched there were an increase in attention problems. The younger and more TV watched the more serious the attention disorders become.
The latest research on communication disorders suggests that early childhood television viewing may be an important trigger for autism (communication disorder), which is steadily increasing.
Children get less sleep than previous generations had & have a harder time getting into a deep sleep. Passive exposure to TV creates sleeping difficulties in all age groups, from infants to adults.
A 25-year study, tracking children from birth has recently concluded that television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 30 years of age. Early exposure to television has long-lasting bad consequences for educational achievement and later, the socio-economic status and well-being.
Not that we are promoting the white worlds view of educational and socio-economic status, but it goes to show that screens produce a dumbing effect on the population no matter what their goals are in Life.
Watching screens together, whether TV, Computers or cell phones, is a main pastime of families in the industrial world taking up more time than any other activity but sleep and even that is getting over powered by screen time.
Toys & Games
As Indigenous children we used to play with toys designed to help us learn coordination & the skill sets necessary in our world to Provide & Protect as adults. For example, little bows & arrows, hand-woven dolls to care for as if they were babies & many others that began to teach, from a young age, the jobs we would need to learn to be a beneficial member of our Community & Nation.
After colonization, we began playing with plastic & rubber toys which had very little significance to our way of Life & the Natural world. Now, kids are playing video games, learning how to be electrical killers & consumers, undoubtedly preparing them for a robotic world, whether in War or Purchase.
Recent estimates put the number of people playing video games worldwide at around 1.2 billion. This is mostly children & teens, not including the millions of adults sitting in front of slot machine screens, also known as adult gaming. These addictions are causing children & adults to ignore their own basic necessities of Life, such as Hygiene, Health & Humanity.
Dr. David Greenfield Director of the Center for internet and technology Addiction in Connecticut says people have died or killed others because their games were taken away.
“There are people who have died of deep vein thrombosis, starvation, repetitive motion injuries, heart attacks, malnourishment, and bowel restrictions because they refuse to go to the bathroom,” he said. At a Computer Addiction Services center in Richmond, bc, excessive gaming accounts for 80% of youth counsellor’s caseloads. Overuse of social networking and gaming also makes children more susceptible to depression and anxiety.
Globally, there have been deaths caused directly by exhaustion from playing games for excessive periods of time. Again it is the release of dopamine’s in the Reward System driving these cravings & addictions in Youth. Teck-no-logic addiction through screens is the most addictive thing on Earth and the materials used to make them are causing more diseases than any plague or pandemic know to Life.
Where do screen and computers come from & what are they made of?
Each screen and computer comes from somewhere. It is a compilation of materials that come from the Earth. These materials are acquired through mining.
Mining is when they blow holes into the Earth to access rocks below the surface that contain various metals they use for products. Mining has gone on for thousands of years. The industrial revolution enabled mining to reach a whole new level. Most products around the world are derived from mining, whether for metal or oil. In the process of separating the metal from rock they use toxic and hazardous chemicals, which leak into the ground & ground water. The metals that are mined are hazardous themselves, they are in the ground for a reason & when exposed to the surface have terrible effects on all Life.
There are over 40 individual materials that make up most electrical products, and are all toxic chemicals ranging from hazardous flame retardants such as PVC & brominated flame retardants (BFRs), including PBDEs (tri- to deca- brominated congeners), PBBs (tetra- to deca-brominated congeners), HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane) and TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A) to heavy metals like lead, tin, chromium, mercury, cadmium, tantalum, tin, tungsten, niobium, gold, copper, bauxite, steel, glass, crystalline silica, phosphorous & many more.
These chemicals are linked to birth defects, impaired learning and numerous other serious health problems.
After they stop working, and they all stop working at some point, they are discarded & become electronic waste, continuing poisoning & leeching poison into Life. Literally billions of electronic products are thrown away each year & billions more are produced to continue the never ending supply & demand. But the Earth only has a limited amount of these materials, leading to very serious discussions around mining other planets and even the Moon.
What do these hazardous & toxic materials do to our Bodies?
Physically, electricity is the greatest cause of sickness around the world and in the story of humanity. It is the greatest weapon for not only monitoring humans, it is the greatest weapon of sickness & disease ever known to the Earth. It is causing millions of pre-mature deaths and making whole generations dependent on a white medical system that has no concern with healing.
The use of electrical products by children is killing whole generations earlier than ever before, starting at the core of Life, the cellular structure.
“The body conducts electricity that enters it. When this happens, the body’s electrical processes are disturbed, & cell functioning is disrupted. The electricity in electrical wiring and appliances changes the atomic structure of the cell and breaks the bonds that exist in and between cells. This triggers changes in blood chemistry, induces free radicals, disrupts the cells ability to control PH levels, enzyme activity, cell reproduction, synthesis, functioning and energy transfer. A healthy and permeable cell membrane wall is needed for effective communication and coordination of activity between cells, tissues, organs and nerves. When exposed, to EMFS, the protein in the cell membrane wall is weakened and the cells react as though threatened by an invader and elicits a state of emergency (fight or flight response) in the body. In this state of emergency, non-vital processes are delayed, and blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels increase. The cell enters into a state of emergency. Besides impaired communication and coordination, the reduced membrane permeability also makes it difficult for nutrients to enter and for toxins to exit. As a consequence, the body does not benefit from nutrients and healing therapies as it should, When the cell is in a state of emergency, instead of producing water and carbon dioxide, the cell produces hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide. In short, the cell begins to ferment. The state of emergency behavior is passed on to each subsequent generation of cells.”- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
VLF (Very Low Frequency) & ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) & EMF (Electric Magnetic Frequency) are emitted from all electronics. They cause what scientist call PEMR (Pulsed Electro Magnetic Radiation) which disturbs the balance of living cells. PEMR exist around all screens & continue shooting out of them even when turned off and unplugged. Magnetic Radiation travels through absolutely everything, walls, metals, flesh, screen filters…everything.
Magnetic Radiation creates electric smog which is everywhere, affecting all Life & doing irreversible harm to all, especially those who are around it all the time. Those who keep cellphones in their pockets, talk or text on them, watch TV or spend time on computers are the most affected.
Magnetic Radiation affects the whole body. The Pineal Gland is the organ most impaired by EMF exposure. This organ produces hormones and neurotransmitters that tune and regulate the hypothalamus, central nervous system, and immune system. EMF exposure suppresses the pineal gland activity leading to the reduction of two important chemical messengers: Melatonin and Serotonin. Both are involved in regulating numerous processes and functions in the body. Serotonin has enormous influence over many brain functions. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant needed to keep the body healthy and strong.
Serotonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; memory and learning disorders; mood disorders; eating disorders; depression; obesity; panic attacks; alcoholism; headaches; ADD; aggression; fibromyalgia; PMS; deficits schizophrenia and deficits in executive, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, anxiety, memory and learning disorders, and impairments in functions that are collectively known as executive functions.
Our body has sixty trillion cells. Each cell is a tiny organism and can easily be damaged by the action of electromagnetic wave lengths which interfere with your body & reproductive abilities, menstrual cycles. For example, sperm & egg count are greatly affected by electrical products.
Obviously electrical products are not a good for health, but putting laptops, i-pads cellphones or any screen product on your lap is even worse. Some people do it daily, all day.
Watch out Narcissists, it’s not just what is inside that is affected, computers also cause wrinkles in the skin and premature aging. What about close to your head? It’s no coincidence cell phone are called cell phones, they affect the cells & when put close to the head all the time cause Cellular Death.
Cellular Death
Your cell phone emits and receives signals. There is an electromagnetic field around each cell phone, damaging memory, endocrine secretions, sexual abilities; gout & can cause dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease & severe neurological diseases & tumors. Scientists admit there is a direct relationship between brain cancer and cell phone use. Brain cancer tumor risk has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years- particularly among the 20 -29 year olds.
What will it be like in the next 10 years with more & more children having i-pods & cell phones? Some scientists believe whole generation to come will be crazy in the head & brain tumors will be common in teenagers. Before you decide to allow your kids to have or even touch cell phones, look at the dangers involved.
Radiation in general & radiation from cell phones in particular penetrate much deeper into the tender skulls of kids than into adults. Tissues in their brains and limbs are still growing and their cells are rapidly dividing. Without a doubt it will decrease their life span. Once it penetrates your kids’ heads, it enters their brain and eyes at an absorption rate far greater than it does in adults. Up to 9 times higher. What does it mean for your kids? It means that their risks for cancer & mental sickness are far greater.
Cell phones for kids are death traps, ensuring them an unhealthy Life. They may seem normal only because we live in this time of worldwide radiation & really do not know what normal health is. Damage to the genetic material in kids’ growing cells can result in disruption of cellular functions, cell death, development of tumors, and damage to the immune functions and the nervous systems.
Many nations around the world have banned cell phone use to children. For Indigenous People, our children are everything & we should do the same. Also beware of all electronics near babies & children. Most baby monitors use digital wireless technology that produce more powerful EMF’s than living near a cell phone tower.
When EMF exposure is reduced, healing energies flow freely & the body begins to heal itself & get stronger. The nervous system & acupuncture meridians are unblocked. Our Natural flow begins again, the pineal gland increases production of hormones & chemicals that control & effect mental, emotional & physical functioning. Clarity, concentration, understanding and calmness set in. There is control of impulses & increased Energy.
Social Media: A scary place of Strangers, Predators & Perverts
Besides the effects on the body itself, children are at the greatest risk from social networking. Social Media is the perfect place for predators to hide.
Would you send your young children into the middle of a populated prison yard unattended? Or a busy city full of every kind of weirdo known to man-kind? Knowing full well that perverts & predators are lurking all around just waiting to find prey to abuse? Hell No. So why would you allow them to have any social media accounts? This is essentially what parents are allowing by allowing their children to make accounts online. Just because “everybody is doing it,” it has become normalized, much like the gas chambers & smallpox blankets humans are blindly following with no thought of what it is they are doing. It is absolutely crazy! Protect your babies by keeping them off social media & away from sickos.
Building a Society of Cyborgs
Many walk around constantly looking at a screen like zombies, having no situational awareness & knowledge of what is happening around them. Go anywhere with large human populations, whether on the street, a city bus or shopping mall & you will observe the majority of everyone constantly looking down at their cell phones, or as we prefer to call them, little poisonous electrical boxes. But why look down all the time? Why not just have it as a part of your body? That makes more sense, right?
Cyborgs may sound sci-fi, but they are actually real & gaining in popularity.
Cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism” is a being with both organic and artificial parts. They are currently making cyborgs for all sectors of industrial society, humans that are not full humans, full of electrical chips with the ability to stay constantly connected to the internet. Some cyborgs have their eyeglasses implanted into their head with screens on in their glasses so they can always see their social media sites. Even better, some have fake eyes with cameras & screens built into them.
Cyborgs are a part of the movement to replace humans with robots. Militaries are at the most advanced stages of robotics, some planning to have up to 1/3 of military vehicles unmanned within the next few years.
Constant cell phone & social media updating may seem innocent enough but it is normalizing the constant presence of technology which is leading to the normalcy of cyborgs & all robotics, or TI (Teck-No-Logic Intelligence).
Movement Health
“The most important thing was security. What you knew you held in your heart.” – Companaero Raul, EZLN Warrior
“Everything was for security.”
“Above all we had to be discreet about things.”- Commandante Abraham, EZLN Warrior
“In the first place, we learned Security measures without Security you can’t do anything”…
“As the work grew, we had even more security”
“…We always put security first” – Companero Gerardo, EZLN Warrior
“He was also very strict about security…” – Capitan Lucio, EZLN Warrior, speaking about subcommandante Pedro
“They were told how to be careful because everything was underground” – Major Moises, EZLN Warrior
Security Effects of fed-book
Making Gathering Intelligence Easy & More Efficient
Social media is an intelligence operation, which has completely changed the jobs of intelligence groups. Before social media, spies had to put much more effort into gathering information about those they want information from, and it would take an extensive amount of time to put complete profiles together on targets.
Today, everybody gives them all the personal and group information they need on their own, and all the intelligence community has to do is monitor and organize the information. Social Media use, combined with cell-phone conversations and text are enabling oppressive regimes around the world to monitor people more than ever, maintaining & gaining more control in every way.
Everything you do on social media stays on social media, regardless of your security settings, or if you can still see it or not. Whatever you post is somewhere, forever. There is no such thing as deleting your account– all info can be recovered at any time.
With over 2 billion people (and growing daily) on some sort of social media site it is the best known surveillance technology that has ever existed. For an intelligence organization, the most difficult & time consuming job is the collection and organization of data. With social media people make their own intelligence profile and update it constantly, sometimes multiple times a day.
Social media makes us think that record keeping and documentation of our lives & locations is normal. We have begun to normalize surveillance and even make excuses why it is ok.
People give government and business access to information that they would never have the time or resources to get on their own. There is no controversy about surveillance because the targets of it are not only the ones producing the information they are also distributing it.
Fed-books privacy policy states: “We may share your info in response to a legal request if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so…we may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity…” What the hell is a “good faith belief”?
Fed-book gives a trail of information on people from physiological wants and valuable information about the reading, listening, viewing & buying habits & attractions of its users.
In 2006, Newsweek reported that myspace had nearly 800 agencies and a 24-7 law enforcement team helping surf the site and monitor its users, their activities, and locations. In 2 years of launching the site it was contributing to 150 investigations a month. “Under Justice Department guidelines anything posted is fair game,” according to myspace vice president Jason Feffer. And that was years ago. myspace was shut down and made way for dozens of social media sites, and ever improving law enforcement monitoring and investigations.
The US Department of Justice uses social media to, “Reveal personal communications, establish motives & personal relationships, provide location information, prove & disprove alibis, and establish crime or criminal enterprises.” In the same Justice Department, documents say their purpose is to go undercover on fed-book and other social media sites to “communicate with suspects/targets, gain access to non-public info & map social relationships/networks.”
A department of Homeland Security memo states, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of friends link to their page and many of these people accept ‘cyber friends’ that they do not even know… Once a user posts online they create a public record & timeline of their activities.”
Every year (since 2009) law enforcement has a gathering called SMILE-Social Media Internet & Law Enforcement. The gathering is held to “emphasize the relationship between Law enforcement, social activist and traditional media.” They also teach & share techniques regarding “maintaining public order & mass surveillance in an open source world”.
Infiltration into movements depends on believability of the informant. With social media you just have to type the right words your targets want to hear, post pics & videos they will like. They can just simply like the posts of their targets & gain enough trust to start engaging targets in typed conversations and if they really want to get close, soon enough they can get a phone number from target and start to have phone conversations, which can lead to face to face meetings. Profiles & posts offer law enforcement all the information they would ever need to pose a recruit or real member of the targeted organization.
The number of social media sites & users give the impression that there are too many people to keep track of. In reality, law enforcement is becoming better than ever at dealing with massive amounts of information. The NYPD (New York Pig Department) said they plan to “mine social media sites like facebook, twitter, myspace, linked in, in order to find criminals bragging about a crime they’ve committed or planning to commit.” Data mining is not just limited to policing. The CIA follows up to 5 million tweets a day. Analysts then cross-reference the data with other available intelligence and create reports for the white house.
Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal says, “The illusion of privacy is simply self-delusion on the part of young people.” Fed-book uses facial recognition software that automatically identifies people in photos. Opting out does not keep them from gathering data and recognizing your face- it just keeps people from tagging you. A person does not even need to be a Fed-book user to be identified.
There are over 90 billion (and counting) photos that fed-book hosts have access to, which they can then give to anybody they have “a good faith belief” should have it.
The US Army states that one of the ‘key tasks of counterinsurgency are to understand how members of a targeted population interact with each other’. The FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers/profiles (a collection of documents about a particular person, event, or subject.) on u.s. citizens tying together surveillance outside a drug store, credit card transactions, cell-phone call records, texts, emails, airplane travel info & web-search information.
Communications, along with public data like Facebook profiles, GPS location information, tax data, and other commercial data, were used to create “sophisticated graphs of some american’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information,” said The New York Times.
In addition to phone records and email logs, the National Security Agency (NSA) uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections. A policy change in November 2010 gave the NSA the ‘legal’ right to chain together info on targets, and discover & track connections from all other intelligence services. Julian Asange, founder of whistleblower wiki-leaks says, “Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,”
Find ‘Em, Fix ‘Em, Flank ’em, Fuck ’em is a common military term used when engaging an enemy.
With social media we lead to our own demise.
We get found every time we log in, and you’re always found if you stay logged in. Your location is always picked up.
We are fixed, because they know our attention is on a screen in specific location.
We can get flanked at any time we are in a virtual world because we never see them coming.
We get fucked whenever they want, or better yet they let us fuck ourselves by giving us an open line to incriminate ourselves by thinking we have some form of freedom.
Building your house on the sand.
Organizing through fed-book-the illusion of being organized.
“People in the movement are falling for that shit?”
-Wolverine, Secwepemc Warrior, response when told about Fed-book.
Being involved in any Movement or Organization you must have strong ties. Connections & trust is of the utmost importance. Fed-book & social media in general promotes weak ties, the weakest possible, so weak that people accept support from anybody who types the right words; they could be cops, intelligence analysts, rapists, molesters, crazies or just everyday pieces of shit.
Some people promote that the social movement is more organized than ever before, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There has never been a time in our story that we have been so un-organized.
Making connections around the world at the click of a friend confirmation is so fake it’s a bad joke. You do not know them, they are not your friend, ally or supporter, you cannot confirm or deny anything substantial about the people you connect with on social media, only thing that you know for sure is that you don’t really know them, or even really know if it is the person whose pictures you are looking at. Some think they can learn about the supposed person they are friending by checking out their photos, friends & posts, but learning about anybody through a screen is impossible.
Virtual reality is just that, it is virtually real, but it isn’t really real. Our Movement for the Liberation of our Lands and People is Real, not virtual, so we cannot claim to be part of this Movement through a virtual reality, it’s fake, a figment of imagination. Let’s get real.
Are you Fed-book Down or Really Down? The rise of the Internet Warrior
“There is no excuse for weakness.” – Sakej, Mik’Mak Warrior
Narcissism not only plagues the average fed-book user but it is what contributes to the continuing exposing & monitoring of so-called ‘movement’ members & organizers. Many think they are so beautiful, but the only real beauty is for Intelligence & police, through social media they make themselves a beautifully easy target for monitoring & surveillance.
Being a celebrity & well-known is promoted by society, even in Indigenous Movements that are supposed to be fighting for Land & Water. There are constantly people who are seeking to be fed-book famous, using the fight for the Land as a way to get attention to try to boost that low self-esteem. There is now an enormous amount of people, who are ‘down’ with the cause online, but they’re real Life actions & lifestyle is everything but down; just another unhealthy consumer contributing daily to the destruction of the Earth.
Celebrities are not Leaders. Leaders lead humans through example & influence. We must revive our real teachings & do away with pre-madonna celebrities craving attention who have no real life skills. Posting & posing are not skills, sorry.
A Lakota War Leader constantly reminds his Warriors that “the most important time to be a Warrior is when nobody is looking.” Fed-book is the opposite. People just play Warrior when they think people are looking. That’s all they are doing, playing. But this game is real Life & real Struggle involving real Life consequences too.
Educating people about current situations is great, but there are far better, more secure & less self-incriminating ways than social media to do it. In the current teck-no-logic world many may have forgotten how to really organize with humans, or for the younger ones they were most likely never taught.
Internet defenders often bring up the Zapatistas as a ‘great’ example of how effective the internet can be. To a certain extent, they are right. But, the Zapatistas spent 10 years organizing secretly, meeting with real humans, building a Movement from the ground up, and never informing intelligence services or the world about their organizing or their plans. They did not exist in the virtual world until they chose to & they did not choose to until they had a strong enough force to take over 7 cities & 650 ranches all while maintaining their home bases & villages. They did not organize their Movement through internet & damn sure not through social media (monitoring) if they did we would have never heard of them cause they wouldn’t exist anymore– they would have never even been able to get started.
“…The fact that people see social media as a tool for social change is more a triumph of marketing than the result of some digital revolution. Social media is a powerful tool for the very institutions that we are at war with, the people that seek to exploit & oppress us. Embracing it has resulted in our willing participation in a process of surveillance that we should be actively resisting”
-Evan Tucker, ‘Who needs the NSA when we have facebook’ Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter Insurgency
Reactionary Mentality vs. Pro-Active Thinking
We have been strategically raised to only address symptoms and not causes. To look at the pain & not the source of the pain. When we have a skin rash, we get a topical cream to put over it, never stopping to ask, what caused the rash, if we have a cough, we get something to sooth the cough, not addressing what caused the cough. When have no more food we go to a store. Before industrialization we were pro-active, we would go & harvest more food while we still had food, so we would never risk having none. They need our mind to react to situations & conditions they’ve created & not proactively work on fixing them.
Campaigning & protesting are reactionary actions. This is a mind-state promoted by the system, being a reactionary. We must get out of the campaign mentality. Protesting & freedom of speech are legal for a reason, because they produce no genuine change to the destruction of Mother Earth. While some campaigns may be successful in stalling some projects or achieving some legal legislation in colonial governments, no campaign has ever stopped this beast from swallowing the Earth, Water, Air & Universe. Even if they stop for a while, you can guarantee they will be back at some point to get the resources.
Social Media campaigns are a perfect way to keep those who could be potential in the building of a real Movement distracted with Narcissistic Celebrity views of getting known by ‘fighting’ the corporate world. They are in fact not really fighting but becoming another hindrance to real substantial Movement that led the Zapatistas to have a Land Base with clean Water to operate & Live from.
This industrial world does not limit their mind to single projects–industrial projects are a small part of how they keep this society functioning. The systems thinking & vision are very large; ours must be as well. The more we get caught into a campaign to campaign, or event to event mentality, the less we are thinking about the big picture, which may include stopping these projects, but cannot be limited to it. Projects and campaigns to stop them are the symptoms that arises out of industrialization. It’s not the cause. In an organized movement if we want real change we must address the root cause of the problem, a false man-made way of life based on mining, oil, electricity & greed.
Now people are virtually protesting, letting off steam through comments & posts, having even less effect than previous generations, thinking the Movement is in the latest image and movie. Instead of being on the Land protecting the Earth, many are concerned with getting the newest camera & computer to help get their word out. Everybody is a producer & photographer in the digital age. Technology has become a great excuse for in-action & building a real Movement with actual humans.
In order to fight industry, first we must not need industry, or else it’s called suicide. To fight mining we cannot live mining. To fight oil, we must not live oil. To fight industry, we must not need industry. How can we not need industry? By replacing it with Indigenous ways of living. They replaced our ways with white ones & they do not work. Now we will replace white ones with ours again.
Time & Energy is all we have while on Earth, we must spend it wisely, every breath that we spend on fedbook, twitter or linked-In, is one we cannot get back. It is wasted time. We must use our time being productive for the real world we live in & the one we want to create. Use your time to learn how to provide for yourself in every part of living, this is the biggest fight of all, this is the Movement, being a Real Indigenous Person.
Whatever english term you prefer, Indigenous, Indian, Native or Original these are just english words to describe those who still live on the Land without Industry. If you do not live this way, you are not really Indigenous. Right? All humans were people of the Land at one time, even in europe. Can europeans claim Indigenous Identity because they’re ancestors used to live with the Land? Is Indigenous just having ancestors that lived with the land? That would mean the world was Indigenous, right?
But the world is not. To use the term Indigenous you must recognize your Responsibilities to continue Life with Natural Law & Live by them. Does that mean a white hippy in north amerikkka can say they are Indigenous? We’re not saying that. But what we are saying is that we cannot just continue to be consumers & slave to the white-man’s possessions. We must recognize our Duties & work hard to fulfill them. Fed-book makes Life seem easier, less work. But is less work good? Does it make you Stronger? Does it make you a better Human?
As Bruce Lee says, “Do not pray for an easy Life, pray for the Strength to endure a difficult one”
Where do we go from here without Social Media?
“…if we’re going to be revolutionaries we have to be revolutionary to the last, because if one doesn’t accept the full consequences or abandons the people, it’s no good…
…If you say you have to Struggle, you have to go through till the end.” –Major Moises, Zapatista Warrior
So what can we learn from all of this? Well for one thing, social media is not advancing us in our daily lives to be better humans, it is not helping our families become better families, it is not helping our bodies become stronger & it is not helping our Movements for Land & Water. So what should we do about it? We can start by unplugging.
Deactivate your social media accounts. Take it as a loss while you still can.
Malcolm X says it best: “Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern, once you change your thought pattern you change your attitude, once you change your attitude it changes your behavior pattern & then you go into some action.”
Before neuroscience recognized the brains ability to change according to thoughts & experiences we have, Malcolm knew it through his own experience. Today they call it Neuro-plasticity. Knowing our brain has the ability to change its destructive thoughts, feelings, memories & narcissistic behaviors is the first step to getting strong real Life people. Only real Indigenous Men & Woman will make real change for the future. No change or strength lies in the virtual world, just confusion, weakness & disease.
We must not hold other humans up as the standard we strive to be like. Things are not ok because ‘respected’ people do them. We must think critically, examine what is going on around you, question it & if need be, change it. As long has we’re breathing it’s never too late.
Remember Tecumseh was just a Man & Lozen was just a Woman, with the same Organs & Bodily Fluids, Tissues & Energy as all of us. What made them different? First it was their Mind, how they thought & then their training. Because they thought different, they acted different, they trained hard to survive and Live in a Strong way. We too have the same potential to be like them, not just the same potential, but we have a Sacred Duty to be like them, they must be our standard, we must all be like Crazy Horse & Geronimo.
Next time you feel that temptation of weakness creeping in just ask yourself what would Tecumseh & Geronimo do? What would they think of social media & making our own intelligence profile for the enemies of the Earth?
A Movement is comprised of many individuals who in order to be successful must have a common vision and a plan on how to make that vision come to fruition. If our vision is re-building our Indigenous Nations, then we must have strong families to do this. When a man and a women make babies they have now knowingly or unknowingly engaged in a Sacred responsibility to care for these new lives, to guide them & protect them to the best of their ability regardless of the consequence. No matter what prior dreams and thoughts a person had as an individual with no children, the primary job now is to feed, cloth, protect and keep those new lives warm in cold and cool in hot. The child needs teaching & knowledge of the Land & Universe to be Strong, not screen time. We must Raise Warriors not addicts.
Get your mind out of screens. Come back to reality. If you were never in it, come & join us.
Real Warriors don’t sext, text, message, post, like, friend, comment, poke or any of the other slave talk in social media, they don’t were skinny jeans or self-model, they live and die according to Natural Law and walk the Lands in every part of the World.
Take Courage, be humble, this fight did not start with us & will not end with us, it is a Generational Struggle, our Duty is to continue Natural Law by Any Means Necessary. Love Life. It is Beautiful.
By Max Wilbert / Featured Image: San People in southern Africa making friction fire. Photo by Isewell, used under the CC BY-SA 2.5 license.
Are humans inherently destructive?
Are we, as a species, some sort of cancer on the planet?
Are we “destined” to destroy the planet because we are “too smart” and “too successful”?
No. I reject this idea completely. Humans are not inherently destructive, and claims to the contrary represent intellectually lazy and culturally myopic thinking. Even more dangerously, these claims lead to the conclusion that nothing can be done to reserve the destructiveness of civilization. The claim that humans are a cancer is a cop-out.
It is clear that humans can be extremely destructive. But is is equally clear that, given the right social system, humans can live in balance for tens of thousands of years.
The Claim: “Humans Are a Cancer”
Back in July, we published an article entitled “Practical Sustainability: Lessons from African Indigenous Cultures.” The article contained an interview between Derrick Jensen and Dr. Helga Vierich.
Helga Vierich did her doctorate at University of Toronto, after three years of living with Bushmen in the Kalahari. Then she was hired as principal anthropological research scientist at a green revolution institute in West Africa. Subsequently she has been teaching at the University of Kentucky and the University of Alberta. Her website is anthroecology.wordpress.com.
Some readers responded to Dr. Vierich’s interview negatively, claiming that humans are inherently destructive and are a cancer on the planet. Here’s a representative comment from our YouTube channel:
“Dr. Vierich obviously observed and learned quite a bit from her experiences. But this idea that humans are some blessing on the Earth as engineers or anything else is ridiculous, and is nothing but anthropocentric fantasy. The FACT is that humans fit the medical definition of being a cancerous tumor on the Earth, growing out of control and consuming everything. Even the hunter-gatherers, who are the only humans who don’t destroy the natural world just by their way of life, are not necessary for any ecosystem. The comparison to wolves in Yellowstone is thus badly misplaced.”
The Reality: “Sustainability is an Adaptive Trait”
“Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Westerners like to pretend, but is better understood as a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the proper moment. So far as humans are concerned, because we came last, we are the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms, and therefore have to learn everything from these other creatures. The real interest of old Indians would then be not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality, but rather to find the proper road down which, for the duration of a person’s life, that person is supposed to walk.” – Vine Deloria Jr.
Dr. Vierich saw Hoffman’s comment, and responded (also on our YouTube channel). We want to publish her brilliant response in full here. She wrote:
“I’m sorry you see all human economies as equally bad for the planet. I would agree with you that the current industrial economy is “growing out of control and consuming everything”. But this is hardly a fitting description of the sustainable economies typical of tribal peoples like the hunter-gatherers, the long-fallow swidden forest gardening systems, and certainly does not apply to traditional nomadic herding societies either. Why would Pleistocene hunter-gatherers have adopted practices that caused the dramatic reshaping of the global bio-sphere in ways that so often caused extinctions and harmed species diversity?
Surely this would have been a short-lived mal-adaptive strategy? After all, why would the evolving human creature, unlike all others who have constructed ecological niches for themselves, do so in a destructive way? Every other keystone species and ecosystem engineering species creates positive effects on ecosystem diversity; many other creatures gain, after all, by evolving their specialized behavioral and dietary niches, even if they are not playing key roles. Why should humans be any different? Is this the human niche? To be a “plague” species?
The short answer to that is clear: No. If anything, the human way was the opposite: which is why hunting and gathering was a long-lived and highly successful adaptive strategy, and why even the inception of plant and animal domestication did not stray far from these fundamentals. Indeed, everywhere we see “development” proceeding in rural areas today, even vast “wild” forests, jungles, steppes, and savannas bursting with wildlife, it is safe to assume that virtually all these landscapes are – or were until recently- managed for hundreds, even thousands of years by foragers, subsistence farmers, and nomadic pastoralists.
Is it any wonder then, that all over the world indigenous people are rising up to defend the last of their landscapes and watersheds from dams, oil infrastructure, logging, mining, commercial agriculture, especially oil palm and soybeans, expanding into tropical forests today? Given the overwhelming military power deployed by such states, resistance has often proven futile; ecosystems go down like dominos. Civilization is clearly a cultural system capable of distortion by social stratification. By seizing control of resources, institutionalizing use of force and debt “within the law”, even a tiny minority can offload the costs and risks of unsound economic ventures unto the majority – who may be unaware, poor informed, or even lied to. So far, the main effect, of vesting political and economic power in tiny elites, is “legal” shielding of their own sources of income.
By developing narratives that stress their own superiority of blood, minds, and manners, over the “common people”, these authorities meanwhile create cults of national destiny, and patriotic fervor, which facilitate war, ecocide, and ethnocide. The narrative of domination over nature arises in parallel with ecocide. What we are seeing today is the finale act in long endgame called “civilization”, whereby all that had been sustained for over thousands of years of careful tending, by the remaining hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and nomadic herders in the world, is being destroyed by plows, mines, logging, and road-building.
Acceptance of what ALL the research reveals, about human evolution the impact of civilizations on ecosystems, need not descend to where the data does not follow: no, humans are not a “plague” species that always destroys ecosystems. This kind of hyperbole makes the unbearable merely incomprehensible.”
Humans Can Increase Biodiversity
Are humans really “not necessary for any ecosystem”? The question is more complicated than you might think. Any natural community is a dynamic, adaptive system, constantly in a state of change. But there have been countless examples of natural communities “regulated” or “managed” into a higher level of biodiversity and abundance through human interaction.
As her book explains, her research has found that human interaction with the land can be highly beneficial for biodiversity or productivity of ecological communities. Here’s the book jacket description:
“John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously detailed and beautifully written, Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California’s natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts.
M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California’s indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.”
In the book, Anderson writes:
“About halfway into the [seven] years of fieldwork, I began to ask native elders, ‘Why are many plants and animals disappearing?’ Their answers… always pinned the blame on the absence of human interaction with a plant or an animal… [N]ot only do plants benefit from human use, but some may actually depend on humans using them. Human tending of certain California native plants had been so repetitive and long-term that the plants might very well have become adapted to moderate human disturbance. The idea had a very practical corollary: the conservation of endangered species and the restoration of historic ecosystems might require the reintroduction of careful human stewardship rather than simple hands-off preservation. In other words, reestablishing the ecological associations between people and nature might be appropriate in certain areas.”
This is not cherry picking. In fact, similar relationships between human societies and nature can be found among many indigenous and subsistence people around the world. We do not claim that indigenous societies are “perfect” or that native peoples have never harmed the land. The truth is more nuanced.
The Problem is Civilization—Not Humans
Civilization is based on violence. Every bit of steel in these towers was ripped from a rainforest or a mountainside. Every ton of concrete was strip mined. Trace the origins of the material of civilization itself: what you will find is blood and devastated nature.
The idea that humans are a cancer is a reductionist, simplistic, and biological essentialist position that is not supported by evidence. It is telling that this position is most commonly supported by people from inside settler-colonial culture; by civilized people.
What is certain is that civilization—the culture of empire—is not sustainable. Civilization has also worked to systematically destroy indigenous peoples and knowledge of how to live sustainably. This is a requirement for civilization, because when people have access to land and knowledge of how to live sustainably, they will refuse to be slaves, serfs, wage laborers, etc. They will prefer freedom.
Therefore, it is no surprise that it is the civilized who believe that destruction is inevitable. That this belief is so widespread is the result of civilized education systems and propaganda. It is only possible to believe that destruction is inevitable if you are raised from birth inside a destructive system. This mindset is what some indigenous people of Turtle Island have called “wétiko” sickness, which Lenape scholar and activist Jack D. Forbes describes (in his excellent book Columbus and Other Cannibals like this:
“Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution… the wétiko [is] an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.”
Further Reading
In the comment shared above, Dr. Vierich also shared four links for additional reading on this topic:
Editor’s note: the following is a good reminder why privacy is so important for the average person. Revolutionaries need to take these considerations even more seriously.
DNA testing is a booming global business enabled by the internet. Millions of people have sent samples of their saliva to commercial labs in hopes of learning something new about their personal health or heritage, primarily in the United States and Europe. In some places, commercial tests are banned. In France, you could face a fine of around $4,000 USD for taking one.
Industry giants Ancestry.com, 23andMe, MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA market their services online, share test results on websites, and even offer tutorials on how to search for relatives in phone directories, or share results in social media. They often also claim rights to your genetic data and sell access to their databases to big pharmaceutical and medtech companies.
In terms of internet health, it’s part of a worrying trend of corporations to acquire personal data about people and act in their own best interests, not yours. OK, so test results can also lead to important discoveries about your personal health, and can also be shared for non-profit biomedical research in the public interest. But before you give in to your curiosity, here are 23 reasons not to reveal your DNA – one for each pair of the chromosomes in a human cell.
The results may not be accurate. Some outputs on personal health and nutrition have been discredited by scientists. One company, Orig3n, misidentified a Labrador Retriever dog’s DNA sample as being human in 2018. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote after taking the test, “Nothing I learned was worth the price-tag and privacy risks involved.”
Heritage tests are less precise if you don’t have European roots. DNA is analyzed in comparison to samples already on file. Because more people of European descent have taken tests so far, assessments of where your ancestors lived are usually less detailed outside of Europe.
Your DNA says nothing about your culture. Genetic code can only tell you so much. As Sarah Zhang wrote in 2016, “DNA is not your culture and it certainly isn’t guaranteed to tell you anything about the places, history and cultures that shaped you.”
Racists are weaponizing the results.White nationalists have flocked to commercial DNA companies to vie for the highest race-purity points on extremist websites.
DNA tests can’t be anonymous. You could jump through hoops to attempt to mask your name and location, but your DNA is an unique marker of your identity that could be mishandled no matter what.
You will jeopardize the anonymity of family members. By putting your own DNA in the hands of companies your (known or unknown) relatives could be identifiable to others, possibly against their wishes.
You could become emotionally scarred. You may discover things you weren’t prepared to find out. A fertility watchdog in the United Kingdom called for DNA testing companies to warn consumers of the risks of uncovering traumatic family secrets or disease risks.
Anonymous sperm and egg donors could become a thing of the past. The likelihood that anonymous donations will remain anonymous decreases with every test taken, which could dissuade donors and negatively affect some families.
A pair of socks is a better gift. You may be tempted by special offers around holidays such as this one, offering 30% off genetic tests for Father’s Day: “What do you share with Dad? This Father’s Day, celebrate your DNA connection with Dad”. Perhaps the man who has everything would prefer not to become your science experiment.
You will become the product. Your genetic code is valuable. Once you opt in to sharing, you have no idea what company gets access to it, nor for what purpose.
Big pharma wants your DNA. 23andMe revealed a $300 million USD deal with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2018 that gives them access to aggregate customer data. Calico Life Sciences, a medtech company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is the primary research partner of Ancestry.com.
Companies can change their privacy policies. You might be asked to give your consent again, but policies of companies can still change in ways you may not like.
A company (and your DNA) can change hands. Companies are bought, sold, go out of business or change their business models. And then what happens with your genetic info?
Destructing your DNA can be difficult. An investigation into how to delete your DNA from Ancestry.com found that it is possible to erase your record and allegedly even destroy your physical sample. But they don’t make it easy.
You have no idea how long they will keep your sample. Some companies say they keep samples for 1-10 years. Regulations governing DNA databases differ from country to country. Do you know the rules where you live?
Police can access your DNA. There’s crime solving potential, but also human rights risks. Authorities can seek court approval to access consumer DNA databases, but investigators have also been known to create fake profiles using a suspect’s DNA.
Your results could become part of a global database. Law enforcement in several countries have unrestricted access to genetic profiles. Some scientists argue that creating a “universal genetic forensic database” would be the only way to make unwanted intrusion less likely through regulation.
Your data could be hacked, leaked or breached.Third party sharing is common practice among companies. The more people have access to your DNA, the more vulnerable it is to being hacked. As companies amass more data, they will become increasingly attractive to criminals and vulnerable to cyber theft.
Genes can be hacked. Scientists have discovered how to store data and even animated GIFs in DNA, and even believe malware could be placed in DNA to compromise the security of computers holding databases. Still trust them?
You are signing away rights. When you use services like AncestryDNA the default agreement is to let them transfer your genetic information to others, royalty-free, for product development, personalized product offers, research and more.
Companies profit from your DNA. Testing isn’t the only way companies make money. They profit from data sharing agreements with research institutes and the pharmaceutical industry. If your DNA helps develop a cure for a disease, you’ll never know. And you certainly won’t earn royalties from any related drug sales.
If you still decide to submit your DNA for testing, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission offers sound advice to consumers: compare privacy policies before you pick a company, choose your account options carefully, recognize the risks, and report any concerns to authorities. To counteract the dominance of commercial companies, you can also contribute your data to non-profit research repositories like All of Us or DNA.Land that are open to public scrutiny.
If you regret a choice you made in the past, you could have your DNA data deleted and request that your sample be destroyed. Consumer DNA testing is an example of why strong data protection laws are so important. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) offers some protections, but elsewhere you have few rights when you hand over sensitive data.
