By Olivia Rosane, staff writer for Common Dreams.
Almost 200 people were killed in 2023 for attempting to protect their lands and communities from ecological devastation, Global Witness revealed Tuesday.
This raises the total number of environmental defenders killed between 2012—when Global Witness began publishing its annual reports—and 2023 to 2,106.
“As the climate crisis accelerates, those who use their voice to courageously defend our planet are met with violence, intimidation, and murder,” Laura Furones, the report’s lead author and senior adviser to the Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign at Global Witness, said in a statement. “Our data shows that the number of killings remains alarmingly high, a situation that is simply unacceptable.”
At least 196 people were murdered in 2023, 79 of them in Colombia, which was both the deadliest country for defenders last year and the deadliest overall. In 2023, more defenders were killed in Colombia than have ever been killed in one country in a given year since Global Witness began its calculations.
While the government of left-wing President Gustavo Petro has promised to protect activists, organizers on the ground say the situation has only gotten worse for defenders in the past year. Colombia will host the 16th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in October and has promised to highlight the role of defenders in protecting nature. This presents a “historic opportunity” to stand up for the rights of environmental activists, Global Witness said.
Overall, Latin America is the deadliest region for defenders, making up 85% of killings in 2023. It was home to the four deadliest countries for defenders—Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico—which together accounted for 70% of all killings. Honduras also saw the highest number of killings per capita, both in 2023 and over the past 11 years.
“It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk.”
The fifth deadliest country for defenders in 2023 was the Philippines, which saw 17 people killed. Overall, nearly 500 people have been murdered in Asia since 2012, with the Philippines remaining the deadliest country in the region during that time. Global Witness recorded four deaths in Africa in 2023, and 116 since 2012, but noted that this is likely a “gross underestimate” as killings on the continent are more difficult to document due to a lack of information.
Global Witness cannot always link a particular industry to the murders of the land defenders who oppose environmental harm. In Colombia, for example, it estimates that half of people killed in 2023 were killed by organized criminal elements. However, for the deaths it was able to connect, most people died after opposing mining operations at 25. This was followed by logging (5), fishing (5), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (4), and hydropower (2).
The threat of even more mining-related violence looms as nations scramble for the critical minerals necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable forms of energy. This dovetails with another component of Global Witness’ findings: the disproportionate violence borne by Indigenous communities for defending their homes. Of the defenders killed in 2023, nearly half were Indigenous peoples or Afro-descendants, and almost half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located on or near Indigenous or peasant land.
Jenifer Lasimbang, an Indigenous Orang Asal woman from Malaysia and executive director of Indigenous Peoples of Asia Solidarity Fund, explained the situation her community faces:
In Malaysia, as in many other countries, we Indigenous Peoples have been subject to wave after wave of destruction. First came the logging and oil palm companies. As a result, nearly 80% of the land surface in Malaysian Borneo has been cleared or severely damaged.
Now, as the world moves away from a fossil-fuel based economy, we’re seeing a rush for critical minerals, essential to succeed in the transition to a green economy.
With Malaysia the regional leader in aluminium, iron and manganese production, extracting rare minerals isn’t new to us. But our experience so far has been that this comes at a huge environmental cost.
The Malaysian government is issuing an increasing number of prospecting and mining licenses. We know what this new “green rush” means for us. We know it’s going to get worse while demand for resources remains high.
Lasimbang said that her community did not oppose development itself, but an “unsustainable and unequal global system” predicated on ever-increasing consumption, and that world leaders should learn from Indigenous communities like hers how to sustain a society without destroying the environment.
“There is only really one thing left to say: Trust us. Let us lead. We will take you with us,” Lasimbang said.
While global awareness of the climate crisis and commitments to address it should have translated into greater protections for those on the frontlines of defending biodiversity, that has not been the case. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, at least 1,500 defenders have been murdered, Global Witness said.
Even in wealthier countries like the U.K., E.U., and the U.S. where killings are less frequent, governments have increasingly repressed environmental activists by criminalizing protests. In 2023, Global Witness observed that the “global surge in anti-protest legislation persisted.”
For example, in 2023 the U.K. expanded its Public Order Act to allow police to prosecute certain protests that disrupted national infrastructure or caused “more than a minor” disturbance. In November of that year, police arrested at least 630 people for marching slowly on a public road to protest new fossil fuel projects.
In the U.S., more than 20 states have passed “critical infrastructure” laws that target protests against fossil fuel projects like pipelines. E.U. countries have passed similar laws as well.
Even in the developed world, the criminalization of protest can turn deadly: In January 2023, police in Georgia shot and killed 26-year-old defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or Tortuguita, as they were camping out in a local forest to prevent it from being bulldozed to facilitate the construction of a “Cop City” training facility.
To protect defenders worldwide, Global Witness called on governments and businesses to document attacks and hold perpetrators to account.
“Governments cannot stand idly by; they must take decisive action to protect defenders and to address the underlying drivers of violence against them,” Furones said. “Activists and their communities are essential in efforts to prevent and remedy harms caused by climate-damaging industries. We cannot afford to, nor should we tolerate, losing any more lives.”
Nonhle Mbuthuma of South Africa, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2024, wrote in the report’s forward that both defenders and governments had a role to play in creating a more just and sustainable world as it teeters on the brink of climate and ecological breakdown.
“Now it is my role, as a defender, to push elite power to take radical action that swings us away from fossil fuels and toward systems that benefit the whole of society,” Mbuthuma wrote. “It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk. This is the responsibility of all wealthy and resource-rich countries across the planet.”
Photo by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash
Editor’s note: Our current society is based on standards that lobbyists, financial markets, and industries target. That way the powerful can lead secret wars against human and non-human animals without the majority questioning their strategy. Any political or economic decision is based on these standards, not on the values of functioning ecosystems or healthy families. If our society wants to maintain and build a brighter future for young people, it needs to put the wild world as its basis to flourish. It also needs to prevent domestic violence from happening in the first place and make sure that babies have the birthright to a thriving ecocentric society in which informed people have the actual freedom to consent. Power to the people not to a few mighty people at the top requires civil disobedience, something that only empowered people can implement. But without civil disobedience, we won’t end the secret wars against our living planet.
Inequitable family planning and illogical pro-growth policies are taking away every child’s right to a fair start in life.
By Carter Dillard
There is a conflict between ecocentric people struggling for freedom, and anthropocentric people threatening that freedom. This conflict, which happens beneath the surface of most media, constitutes a “secret war” for what the future of Earth will be.
This secret war involves groups of people across the world using ecocidal pro-growth and inequitable family policies, as well as anthropocentric environmentalism, to quietly undo the progress that the world seemed to be making on multiple fronts: child equity, climate crisis mitigation, animal protection, as well as ensuring functional democracies. These groups involve many nonprofits that are knowingly undoing with one hand the success they claim to be making with the other. This last category of undoing—regarding our democracies—makes these family policies a secret war on freedom as well.
The Conduct of War
Is it hyperbole to say war? The almost five children a week murdered by their own parents in the U.S. alone, some slowly tortured to death through beatings, starvation, burnings, etc. because of our pro-growth approach to family policy with no parental readiness standards are victims of that war. So are the children who lose the birth lottery bad enough to be born into horrific poverty, at best statistically destined to work for the children of millionaires and billionaires who will control their lives based on a system of random birth inequity that is backed by violence. That’s the servitude of a war.
It would feel like a war to be part of the non-human animal families and communities, parents and their children, exterminated by the trillions as the wave of human growth rolls over them. And who has the ability to change any of this? Not the average citizen. It’s irrational to even vote in things like national elections where, thanks to family policies, there are so many voters that each vote is pretty much irrelevant. In such cases, money—made on the same unsustainable growth—is what speaks.
Constitutive Policies Counter the Children’s Rights Convention
These family policies (which might be called constitutive or de-constitutive) do nothing to ensure that all children are born into conditions that comply with the United Nations Children’s Rights Convention—the minimum children need to comprise democracies—but instead push children into horrible conditions with no minimum levels of welfare, something done to ensure economic growth and to avoid “baby busts” or declining fertility rates. This puts wealth in the hands of a few, argues Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.
These policies operate under the lie that the act of creating other persons is a matter of the personal freedom or privacy of the creators; i.e., parents. In fact, creating new human beings is not personal; rather, it is interpersonal in nature. Bringing new people into the world shapes the future we all share. The notion that this is a private matter was created by the wealthy and powerful elites who do not want to pay their fair share to ensure children’s equality of opportunity.
Unsustainable Growth
These policies, designed around a system premised on unsustainable growth, aim to prepare children, already suffering from vast inequality, to become consumers and workers for shopping malls rather than preparing them equitably to grow up to become effective citizens in democratic town halls. These inequitable policies have created a fantasy world of self-determination—freedom to take part in markets—while stealing the power each voice should have in true democracies.
Groups like Fair Start Movement (where I serve as policy adviser), Stable Planet Alliance, Rejoice Africa Foundation, and others are blowing the whistle on these policies and their devastating impacts, and treating the right to an ecosocial fair start in life for all children now and in the future—as an overriding basis to take back the wealth—by all means effective—in order to fund better family policies as the most effective way in the long run to protect children, non-human animals, democracy, and the environment.
Why “by all means effective?” Before some of the recent literature delving into the history of population policy, most academics and policymakers assumed political obligation—the need for citizens to follow the law—came from top-down systems like constitutions or the United Nations. But if systems of governance should actually derive from the people, that would make no sense. Instead, the systems that account for how we are born and raised would primarily or even exclusively account—bottom up—for our power relations, power rising up from the people themselves. And it’s very clear the top-down systems in place now have failed to protect us from things like the climate crisis and vast inequality. Why did they fail?
Constitutive Fallacy
They committed what is called the constitutive fallacy—basing our obligation to follow the law on things like written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people to constitute just nations. To do that, to constitute, means being sufficiently other-regarding or ecocentric enough (perhaps using the baseline test below) to respect the agency of, rather than to exploit, other people and the nonhuman world our mutual thriving requires.
They assumed the borders of human power were defined by lines on a map, rather than the norms that account for our creation and rearing. The latter is what constitutes us. They never accounted for actual power relations because they never accounted for their creation, through functional family policies (based on a simple baseline test) meant to actually empower people while disempowering no one.
For example, these top-down systems never dealt with children’s need for nonhuman habitats protected by climate restoration, nor the vastly disparate impact on impoverished children of color from refusal to meet those needs. People like Peter Singer have relied on these top-down systems that begin with the appropriation of the nonhuman world and future generations, even when they undo the sort of outcomes—like animal liberation—Singer promotes.
It’s Not About Population, but Choice
What is the hallmark of these systems? Some are empowered by disempowering others, robbing the latter of the capacity to consent to the influence others (greenhouse gas emitters, bad parents, the uber-wealthy, etc.) would have upon them.
For free and equal people to constitute a nation they must be acting, before setting down the basic rules, in one very particular way. They must be seeing growth in numbers as directly inverse to the absolute self-determination of each individual. That proves that people are actually being empowered as they join, and thus politically obligated, and sets a baseline for equitable child development and optimal population ranges.
This is not about population, it’s about choice, power, and the inseparable and antecedent nature of choices to be part of unjust and nonconsensual systems of political obligation that originate with our creation. We cannot think of or say anything that does not start with and orient from some form of political obligation, from a choice to be part of some form of power relations. And we cannot further anything we purport to value without possibly undoing the value based on our choice of fundamental political relations.
Each of us is inevitably choosing to be or not be part of such systems, given that we pay taxes, participate in a variety of official processes, benefit from these systems, etc. That is what it means for the government to derive from the people, and not from groups but rather from individuals, whose consent legitimates governance.
What Would Truly Free People Do?
Human rights compliance justifies governance, but if the first human right—the right to have children and the family policies that precede government—is not developed fairly so as to make a functional social contract, that justification never occurs. It has to come from the people, who must come from the conditions in which they were created and reared. The creation norm, and our decision to make it just or unjust, comes first and accounts for who we are and everything we do. We cannot claim to be just without making it just. A key aspect of the secret wars involves those responsible for hiding this simple fact, its role in limiting the property rights of concentrations of wealth and power, and those concentrations impeding all children’s right to an equitable beginning in life.
If you want to know whether you are free, assess what it would mean to break your nation into a constitutional convention in order to make new basic rules. How functional—or self-determining for its participants—would that process be, honestly? And while the capacity to engage in functional town halls is vital, it is the day-to-day experience of having such relations that we should truly value, versus the chaotic commercial relations—based on exploiting and imitating one another—we experience today.
Truly free people will exist in systems where such conventions are easily viable. To ensure that the state of affairs will override dysfunctional systems of rules to actually limit and decentralize the power others have over them, and to build just and consensual communities organically, through things like deeply scaled baby bond payments that move resources from rich to poor kids and that help restore equality and nature, so that obligation flows bottom-up—from the people.
Truly free people will condition their obligation to follow the law (including recognizing property rights) on actually being empowered, and there is no other way to do that but through changing how we have and raise children to actually—in a measurable way using a simple baseline test—empower them. They will focus on empowerment in the creation of people and their actual relations, the people from whose consent things like constitutions derive their authority. That condition—of needing to empower—enables significant civil disobedience to achieve, something preferable to the violence disempowerment causes, the violence usually impacting the least culpable rather than the most.
Fair Start Planning
We can also effectively move towards fair start planning and optimal population and power relation ranges as envisioned by Partha Dasgupta and others, through things like constitutional litigation meant to ensure climate restoration through birth equity “loss and damage” redistributions, steeply progressive baby bonds, corporate reforms that level the playing field for employee’s kids, requiring family policy and related conflict of interest disclosures (including having to change positioning) as part of ESG frameworks, furthering labor reforms to eliminate child inequity, a discourse and role modeling that centers family planning on birth and developmental equity, and by urging leaders to adopt a fair start as the first and overriding human right.
One clear step towards compliance with the best interpretation of these norms would be to urge that programming around the education of young women—around the world—begin with ensuring they understand that all children’s right to an ecosocial fair start in life (defined by concrete climate restoration and birth equity measures), overrides all competing rights and interests as the first and peremptory human right, including any conflicting property rights. This truth, which reverses the lie about family policy at the base of the misunderstandings of freedom that plague our world, shows a true unity of value to students.
That right must become the standard or baseline for cost/benefit analysis (using concrete metrics), and the guide for priority use of evolving loss and damage payments for climate crisis impacts—with a key use being socially equitable and ecologically restorative family planning entitlements that capture the true cost of all wealth. The standard for knowing whether something is good or bad is being in a group of people capable of determining the question in a fair and inclusive way. That’s freedom through democracy.
Disclosure Is Key
How do we win the secret wars? The easiest path may simply be to urge everyone to disclose their views on these issues—including their views on climate restoration, birth equity redistribution, and other matters discussed above. Those blocking freedom for future generations win the secret wars by keeping them secret.
It’s trite to say that all things are interconnected. It is not trite to say that this is so not because of what we do, but because of who we should be. Changing the way we plan families is the only way to ensure that connection is just.
Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.
It’s a chilly spring night in early March in Gruenheide, which is around 40 km (25 miles) away from Berlin. A few determined people walk across a flat meadow surrounded by pine forests at a wintry zero degrees. They stop at a high-voltage pylon, ignite the cables, then trigger a short circuit with water. Flames shoot up with the help of car tires, the high-voltage pylon spits fire into the darkness of the night.
It may have happened roughly like this when the environmental activists from the Vulkangruppe Tesla Abschalten! (Volcano Group Switch-off Tesla!) successfully committed an act of sabotage on March 7 against the Gigafactory Tesla, Europe’s only E-car factory.
The power at the nearby plant goes out immediately and it’s assembly line producing 500,000 vehicles a year, comes to a standstill.
The Volcano Group, which published a letter of confession rated as genuine, calls it a “total failure of a seemingly unassailable giant”.
A few days later employees gather in solidarity in front of the Tesla plant to show that they stand by their employer, as if he needed that empathy. Elon Musk though knows how to twist the opinions in his favor, stating that “the dumbest eco-terrorists in the world […] are puppets of those who have no good environmental goals,” in other words: he’s the one with excellent environmental goals and clearly not a puppet but a master.
Today, on March 12, the Gigafactory is running again in slow capacity, but these five days of production stoppage have caused a loss in the “high nine-digit range”, although according to a podcast by the FAZ newspaper this refers to profit rather than turnover. Car bodies had to be scrapped and robots repurposed. Tesla shares slumped by 3%.
Not bad for one burning high-voltage pole.
There were 5,000 households and small businesses cut off from the power supply for several hours. The environmental activists apologize for this and said that there would have been no other way to shut down Tesla without risking a power outage in other areas. However, they would have ensured that no human lives were put at risk.
The activist group is not alone in its criticism of the Gigafactory: the Gruenheide Citizens’ Initiative and Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen! (Turnoff Tesla’s Tap) have been protesting against environmental poisoning and water shortages since the car manufacturer’s launch. Now Musk wants to expand the plant by 170 hectares.
A week before the sabotage, environmentalists joined forces to protest against the expansion by occupying a woodland where they set up a camp in the region, the police have approved the protests until Friday. Most of Gruenheide’s residents also oppose the expansion, for which Tesla wants to clear 100 hectares of forest.
The Volcano group is now accused of anti-constitutional sabotage and will be prosecuted severely. But it was worth it, because our society needs these wake-up calls of property damage that temporarily paralyze the infrastructure of corporations.
The batteries for electric cars require rare earths and lithium, which are produced under the most catastrophic environmental and working conditions, so we cannot look the other way and leave it as it is without reacting.
It takes sabotage to leave a statement that makes international news. Common people see the industries and their power as untouchable, as natural, when in fact they’re only manmade so men (and women) can undo the damage that has been done to our only and sacred planet.
With the attack of the Volcano Group we see that powerful corporations are not as powerful as they seem. That small acts can have big impacts.
We stand up for this sabotage action, because the exploitation of nature and people has reached a level that we have to fight from all kinds of levels.
Here you can find some photos of the attack
Protests on March 10 against Tesla’s expansion
We sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau eats up earth, resources, people, manpower and spits out 6000 SUVś, killer machines and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8 is to shut down Tesla.
Because the complete destruction of the Gigafactory and with it the cutting off of “techno-fascists” like Elon Musk is a step on the path to liberation from the patriarchy.
The Gigafactory has become known for its extreme conditions of exploitation. The factory contaminates the groundwater and consumes huge amounts of the already scarce drinking water resource for its products. The state of Brandenburg-Berlin is being dug up for Tesla without any scruples.
Critics at the waterworks, local residents and eco-activists are being silenced. Figures are embellished. Laws are being bent. People are deceived. Yet a large part of the population around Grünheide rejects the Gigafactory because of water theft and gentrification. The protest and resistance continues unabated. And it is growing, because there is more than one reason. In addition to the dirty battery factory, Tesla now wants to expand its factory site by a further 100 hectares, including for a freight yard. An expansion of the storage and logistics areas directly at the plant (including the possibility of intensive rail logistics) is intended to help stabilize supply chains and production. This is currently impaired because deliveries from the forced labor camps in China cannot take the direct route through the Red Sea. The Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs is eating out of Tesla’s hand, despite many reasons for refusing any approval. The only important thing is that Brandenburg is flourishing as a business location.
The myth of green growth is just a dirty ideological magic trick to close the ranks against domestic criticism. It suggests a way out of the climate catastrophe. But “green capitalism” stands for colonialism, land theft and an exacerbation of the climate crisis! Lithium batteries come from toxic mines in Chile and devour other rare metals, which means misery and destruction for the people in the mining areas. The battery factory in Grünheide near Berlin, for example, requires the rare raw material lithium, which is also mined in Bolivia. Musk puts his cards on the table to push through lithium mining in Bolivia: “We will coup if we want to”, commenting on the indigenous resistance to mining. Mineral resources are being ripped from the earth under brutal conditions. The “green deal” is merely the expansion of economic growth without limits. In Portugal, too, the rural population is resisting the forced extraction of lithium.
Just as the earth is used and raped on a daily basis, Tesla does the same with people. And has forced laborers all over the world, such as Uyghur people in China, working (to death) for it (just like VW), whom the racist Chinese regime serves up to the company for its production. Even in Grünheide, the working conditions are considered catastrophic. Only recently, a works council member of IG Metall in Grünheide was dismissed. Despite a yellow works council installed by Tesla, the conditions in the factory are leaking out. In order to improve accident statistics, people are taken to hospital by cab instead of by emergency call and ambulance. Internal opponents are dismissed and if they take legal action, they are forced into a legal settlement. The compensation is then used as a muzzle, for example to stifle public discussion of a racist dismissal by threatening contractual penalties. The terminated employee has to shut up for the money – that is the calculation.
The totalitarian technological attack then looks like this.
It is equipped all around with high-resolution cameras from Samsung. Samsung is a company that is a leader in weapons technology, among other things.
According to the manufacturer, the cameras record up to 250 meters away. In “guard mode”, they film everything in the vicinity of the vehicle and guarantee that the driver is also monitored while driving. The driver is already a free integral part of the Telsa universe and a guinea pig. Artificial intelligence will register every movement and every mistake made by the driver and monetize it in order to train the software for autonomous driving with the data.
Tesla is militarizing the road. Its moving tanks are weapons of war. The car as a weapon. The road is the battlefield.
Instead of 9mm, Tesla has now introduced 856 hp to the world: “If you get into a fight with other cars, you will win,” says Elend Musk.*
*Elend means misery in German, a word play for Elon (comment by the editor)
A Tesla is a status symbol, statement and propaganda at the same time: for contempt for humanity, boundless destruction through “progress” and an imperial, patriarchal way of life.
Anyone who buys an SUV is most likely a supporter of an imperial way of life who wants to profit from this madness to the bitter end. Every activist’s secret poetry album should include a scrapped Tesla. No Tesla in the world should be safe from our flaming rage. Every Tesla that burns sabotages the imperial way of life and effectively destroys the ever-tightening network of seamless smart surveillance of every expression of human life.
For example in Ukraine. Russia’s army also accesses Starlink satellite terminals from third countries to carry out attacks. Israel also uses the Starlink satellite system to murder people in Gaza. Tesla’s Starlink infrastructure is a military player. Rolled up like a string of pearls of garbage, they plow through the sky to make surveillance total.
Let’s talk about a man who will crumble to dust, even if he would rather be immortal: Elon Musk.
For men like him, the swear word has not yet been invented that could aptly describe them in their arrogance, contempt for humanity and anti-social greed for power and recognition.
He makes no secret of his chauvinism. His propaganda platform X is the means to an end. This is where he gathers supporters of an imperial way of life. This is where anti-Semites, anti-feminists, authoritarians, chauvinists, fascists and supporters of hatred against “foreigners” reassure themselves. This is where they organize themselves with their elitist view of the world and as master race. This is where the Aryans of the AfD meet their peers.
When Elon Musk cheers the anti-feminist and neoliberal president of Argentina on X, it is because they are united. There is no shyness in this regard, they have decided to stand on the side of a deadly masculinism and drag a trail of blood behind them like a man-eating monster.
It is an invasive zeitgeist that uses the self-fabricated economic crises of valorization in order to tackle the next destruction. It is only following in the prepared brown footsteps of other patriarchal pioneers. Even the “carmaker” Henry Ford was an admirer of the Nazis with their “Volkswagen” and their efficient organization of industry. The plant in Wolfsburg was run on the backs of forced laborers. Every German was to be able to get a Volkswagen in order to reach their destination by car or tank on the new autobahn. Ford, inspired by the efficiency of German labour organization, transferred the ideas to his empire in the USA. The attack on workers and the economization of exploitation became known as “Fordism”.
This included work organization and assembly line work – mass production with simultaneous mass consumption of the car. The model, also known as Taylorism, was also a class struggle from above. Elon Musk combines the invasive technological possibilities of our time with his mysogynistic world view, patriarchal extremism and the totalitarian attitude typical of his caste. As a “car manufacturer”, he is a revenant in historical tradition. In keeping with the times, he acts as a “techno-fascist”.
Instead of scrapping the car on the garbage heap of history and expanding free public transport, only the drive technology is being changed, from combustion engines to electric motors, in order to save individual transport. The imperial way of life is economically more lucrative.
The positions of power allow patriarchal “visionaries” such as Elon Musk to experiment with the most “advanced” forms of exploitation and with the available resource of “human beings” in the most terrible sense.
Into space, into the sky, into public space, into our heads – the rapist leaves nothing untouched. The neurotechnology company Neuralink aims to link human brains with machines. It is using animals to test how streams of thought can be read. Just like SpaceX and Tesla, Neuralink is also aiming for a long-term perspective in which people are worth different things. In which some people are entitled to a better life within the ecological catastrophe that is already underway.
Even if you are not on X, formerly Twitter, if you are just walking through the public streets, you will still be touched by this wretched man and his cameras and propaganda. The positions of power allow a permanent encroachment, an invasive relationship towards all life that can only be stopped by resolute resistance. The “technological progress” of the epochs offers them, the “techno-fascists”, a tool of possibilities with which the exploitation and indescribable destruction of the planet is always topped off.
They have the necessary means of production and the “human” resource to make political decisions. This type can buy heads of state or bring parties to power, even if they are called Hitler. This type is the mastermind behind the alleged decision-makers of governments. They can impose conditions on states or reduce heads of state to supplicants. The patriarchal system churns out tons of people like this, they strive for the top because that corresponds to the patriarchal model. They stage coups when things don’t go their way. They are replaceable. Only their power gives them these opportunities – without power they are just pompous, ridiculous egomaniacs. They have been driving millions of people to their deaths for centuries, destroying nature as if it belonged to them. If we don’t destroy the system that produces such egomaniacs, new ones of their kind will emerge. So it is not (only) about misery Musk – but about an imperial way of life – that these men are imposing on us. It’s about a showdown between an imperial way of life versus freedom for all people.
This type of person and their economic concept represent a minority on this planet who believe that this imperial way of life is the only right one. What is new is that the tipping points that show us the finite nature of this destructive way of life have been passed in many cases. Other tipping points are approaching at breathtaking speed. Year by year, month by month, day by day.
(If all else failed, Elon Musk and a handful of slaves and his ilk would flee the consequences of his imperial way of life and insult Mars with his presence. But our strong extra-planetary allies are already waiting for him; solar storms would crash his rocket, as they have done to 30% of his satellites in space before. So we will win.)
Many people, clouded and misguided, confuse possessions and material wealth with freedom and happiness. Ignorance, manipulation and fear characterize generations of many people. We are reduced to work and consumption and degraded to an imperial way of life. This material wealth at the expense of other people is an indictment of “civilization”. This way of life does not make its beneficiaries happy either. The alternatives are made invisible or destroyed in the making. Approaches that could benefit humanity without generating money or power are delegitimized. Indigenous ways of life that relate to nature and its protection have been and are being wiped out. Emancipatory approaches that go to the roots have been drowned in blood in all eras. Or revolutionary movements are corrupted, infiltrated, their “leaders” bought in order to secure domination and the progress of destruction for decades to come.
We counter the ongoing rape of the earth with sabotage. The ideology of limitless economic growth and a belief in progress based on destruction have reached their end. In order for Europe to become a “first-class investment location with a strong industrial ecosystem”, giants like Tesla are still being rolled out of the way. But something is slipping. We, a broad and colorful resistance, are rolling them back down. We are the heaps of rubble and grains of sand in the gears of a machine that is stamping inexorably forward. We are disruptive factors in the engine room. We are the desperate and the outcasts. We are middle-class people in Germany or migrants on the run. We can be many people in the forest and in the tree houses and on the street, we can be covert sabotage groups like ours. It can also be people in the gigafactory who take revenge on their foreman’s machines for his working conditions. We can be caught, beaten, humiliated, raped or murdered – but we are in the right. Only violence can keep us down. But we will get up again. And others will come after us.
With our sabotage, we have set ourselves the goal of the largest possible blackout of the Gigafactory. We have ruled out endangering our lives and the lives of others. The shutdown of production in the automotive industry is the beginning of the end of a world of destruction. Our bonfire of liberation was aimed at supplying Tesla with electricity. We wanted to hit the overhead line of a high-voltage pylon in the connection to the underground cables at the watertight cable sleeves and short-circuit the six 110 kV cables inside. To do this, we opened the shaft to the cable joints, half of which was under water. We still flamed the exposed power cables and, in combination with the water, may have caused a short circuit. Damage to cable joints is often time-consuming and expensive to repair. At the same time, we set the fire large and high with lots of car tires to weaken the steel structure and cause the mast to become unstable.
A steel mast only melts at around 1300 -1500 degrees. As we were working with a heat development of around 900 degrees, the aim was to change the mechanical properties of the mast. As a steel structure under load, a rapid, large fire from 500 degrees upwards can lead to a loss of strength and change the stiffness, yield strength and elasticity of the metal. This can lead to buckling effects, twisting or deflection. That was our intention.
We feel connected to all the people who will not let Tesla turn off the tap. If we want to win against such giants as Tesla, we need many forms of resistance. Ours is one of many. Unpredictable and diverse, only together can we force the Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs to respect the will of the people. Minister of Economic Affairs Jörg Steinbach (SPD) sees the result of the vote by the residents of Grünheide (71% against the expansion of the Tesla factory site) as just one important vote. Above all, he sees the vote as a “healing opportunity”, which means that Tesla has not succeeded in convincing people and the company still has to do its homework in order to divide, buy, cajole and persuade the population. He does not accept the public’s “no” and calls on Tesla to soften the “no” by May.
Everyone is free to be openly or secretly happy about our action. Anyone who feels compelled to distance themselves should ask themselves why? And who has an interest in this?
Together we will bring Tesla to its knees. Switch off for Tesla.
Share the declaration. Translate it and send it to other people in the global struggle.
Volcano Group switch-off Tesla!
Open letter to the citizens’ initiative in Grünheide and the alliance “Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen” (Turnoff Tesla’s Tap).
To the various organizations and action groups. To the squatters.
To the private households affected by the power outage.
We, the “Shutdown Tesla Volcano Group!”, speak only for ourselves. We do not speak for other Volcano Groups. Nevertheless, we have been inspired by the content of the actions of other Volcano Groups and have adopted formulations and content that have convinced us. By and large, we share the actions that have been carried out by Volcano Groups since 2011. So much for the many speculations about our group “Shutdown the Tesla Volcano Group!”.
We do not speak for the citizens’ initiative in Grünheide, nor for the “Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen” alliance, nor for other organizations and action groups that criticize Tesla, protest and develop resistance for various reasons. What we have in common is the intention to put up barriers to Tesla and prevent the planned battery factory and other corporate logistics, even if our approach goes far beyond that. This is not a problem for us. We see no reason to distance ourselves from public groups and respect your work.
We read many statements as uncertainty rather than distancing. We also understand the concern about the status of the occupied site in the forest or the worry about acceptance among the population. Why allow yourself to be put under pressure and not react calmly to blatant calls to distance yourself? There is no reason to distance yourself from our action, for which you are not responsible. Distancing yourself from each other is not very helpful. Everyone is free to be openly or secretly happy about our action and the shutdown at Tesla. Anyone who feels compelled to distance themselves should ask themselves why? And who has an interest in this?
Nor do we believe that we have harmed the “cause”. For one thing, the “cause” is seen differently. For another, we are proposing a different perspective:
We have been able to implement “Stop Tesla” in the short term. The total failure of a seemingly unassailable giant should bring tears of joy to all our eyes and give us courage beyond the pressure that weighs on us. The nimbus of the unassailable has been broken by this action. And as important as the regional level is, the international context is just as important. The resistance against Tesla has been put in an international light by the action and has also brought attention, encouragement and support to the local resistance.
We have the greatest pressure. The head of Brandenburg’s CDU has expressed the strategy of the investigating authorities at the highest level. The aim is to catch the perpetrators and punish them severely in order to deter others from coming up with similar ideas.
The accusation of “anti-constitutional sabotage” is countered by the “right to resist”. The idea is in the world, even if we could be caught.
The scale and impact of the action is already huge. Even before our letter on the arson became known, Tesla shares fell by 3%. The market does not forgive vulnerability and weakness. After all, an international “global player” of the “technological attack” on society was severely hit and demonstrated. This signal was not only immediately understood by the country’s economically liberal politicians, but was also evaluated at the highest levels of business representatives and politics. Within hours of the letter becoming known, the various institutions attempted to avert the damage to Brandenburg’s and Germany’s image as an investment paradise and took countermeasures. Jörg Steinbach from the Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs immediately phoned Elon Musk. They assured each other of their common interests for the future.
And less influenced by the pressure to distance themselves, and instead study the reactions of politics, the state and ultimately the economy more closely.
Because here it becomes clear how determinedly the opponents are trying to push through the further Tesla settlement. It is clear how resolutely the social model of “destructive progress” is being adhered to. We will not go into the content of the latter here. Some older texts by other Volcano Groups and many other militant groups have said something about this.
We don’t just want to prevent something. Together, we are all in a position to initiate a change of direction. Tesla can become one of the crystallization points of this confrontation with the global social model of “destructive progress”. So it goes far beyond the regional.
In these dark times, our action is a small beacon that, with the old tires and our measurements on site, came to around 1000 degrees. Sabotage groups like ours are an important part of the resistance, even if the priorities of other important groups are different. No small militant group alone, no regional group and no non-violent action group that has traveled here can defeat this major opponent. Stopping Tesla can only be done together.
We are not distancing ourselves.
In order to divide the movement against Tesla, politicians and the investigating authorities have resorted to the familiar rhetorical tricks. “Left-wing extremists”, “Green RAF”, “terrorism”, “stupidest eco-terrorists in the world”, “children of the RAF”, “blind destructive rage”, “close to terrorism”, “internationally operating criminal gang”, “terrorist organization” are all attempts at stigmatization. Rather, it is also about a desolidarization within the population! This rhetoric misses the core of the problem. We are not terrorists and will not become terrorists. We don’t work for Rheinmetall. We are not called Elon Musk. We don’t let people mine lithium under horrific conditions. We are not destroying the earth. We don’t trade grain on the stock exchange. We don’t want to kill other people or accept their deaths to maximize profits.
We even save the snails on the electricity pylon before we light it on fire minutes later.
We have ruled out any risk to human life. The operation would never have been carried out if we had had the slightest doubt about it. We bore the greatest risk. Here, too, we could not afford to make a mistake.
In contrast to Tesla, hospitals and old people’s homes with medical equipment, for example, are equipped with a redundant system. As our action was clear in its objective and consequences, the other side must try everything possible to publicly discredit the successful arson. They gratefully seized on the “stupidest eco-terrorists in the world” slogan from the “techno-fascist” Elon Musk. Within a few hours, Brandenburg’s politicians tried to get a grip on the power of interpretation over the attack. The reception of the action in the media was often revealing.
All of us in the protest and resistance can learn a lot from the action. And crucially, none of the substantive arguments put forward publicly have been able to refute our position so far.
There is only one thing for which we would like to apologize. We didn’t see any way to carry out the action without about 5,000 households and small businesses being without electricity for five hours. According to the media, all private households had electricity again at 10:22 a.m. If we had seen another option, we would have acted differently. Before the action, we were not able to check whether only Tesla was hanging from the high-voltage pylon that had been specially converted for it or whether private households were also hanging on it. It was about Tesla, not about our homes where we live. We apologize to all those affected.
Greeting and kiss
Your “dumbest eco-terrorists in the world” in the Volcano Group Switch-off Tesla!
On the Philippines, two young women – Jonila Castro (21) and Jhed Tamano (22) – were abducted on Saturday night (September 2). Both are organizing against the Manila Bay Reclamation Project. Jonila Castro is a dedicated volunteer with AKAP Ka Manila Bay, Jhed Tamano is a committed program coordinator for the Community and Church Program for Manila Bay under the Ecumenical Bishops Forum. They were on their way to conduct important consultations with coastal communities when they were snatched by armed individuals in Barangay Lati, Orion, Bataan.
When an action successfully challenges the status quo, those in power will do anything to stop them. Abducting and torturing activists not only affects them, but also scares others who want to voice their opinions against the destruction and oppression. Philippines has been one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders. The last president, Rodrigo Duterte, was a vocal and staunch believer in stopping anyone who would challenge his actions. He was succeeded by Bongbong Marcos since 2022. However, the situation for environmental defenders have not yet improved. It has been over six days since the abduction and no news have yet surfaced about the situation of the two women. The failure of the law enforcement agencies to protect and rescue them breeds impunity among the perpetrators, which increases the likelihood of such events to take place in the future.
DGR Asia Pacific has been actively involved in the anti-reclamation actions. The following are some updates on the actions taken.
August 26, 2023
This consultation and information sharing session was arranged and organised by Kamusta Ka, a senior citizen collective of Mutual Aiders in coordination with the Fisherfolk organizations called Tulungan ng Mangingisda ng Bernabe and Parish Church of Bernabe with the help coming from Local Autonomous and Mutual Aid Network (LAMAN) and Alyansa Tigil Mina.
Our partner community invited some resource speakers who can share information that tackles these issues of concern related to fisheries, rights & policy, Reclamation Project and Seabed Quarry. More than 80 people participated and have engaged with the discussion concerning their situation about the encroaching Reclamation Project in their coastal communities of Las Pinas.
From the people’s direct participation, they have come up with the following demand and suggestions:
September 5, 2023
A focus group discussion and consultation with Fisherfolks Organization of Cavite City was organized. These fisherfolks are the people who have directly been affected by Seabed Quarrying and Reclamation Projects. According to them, the number of catch began to decrease immediately after the destructive activities started on their municipal water. The seabed quarrying has destroyed the reefs. Their fishing equipment, like the fishing nets have also been ruined by the boats operating on their fishing ground.
Despite the announcement by the Philippine President that all reclamation projects were suspended, the fisherfolks can see that the operation in their area is still ongoing. They want to fully stop this destructive activity that directly devastates the environment, the marine ecosystem of Manila Bay, and their livelihood.
This activity was organized by KALASAG, a local alliance in the province of Cavite where DGR Asia Pacific was only part of it.
You can support the campaign by signing the petition.
For more on the story, refer to the following links:
Photo by Michael Buillerey on Unsplash
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in 2021, but is timely today as the new Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer” has just been released. As people are coming to realize the Bright Green Lies of “renewable” energy, they are looking for other ways to continue their unsustainable lifestyles. Many people are seriously considering risking more nuclear reactor accidents, waste and nuclear winter as the war in Ukraine continues to escalate.
By Max Wilbert/Substack
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
― Albert Einstein
At 8:15am on August 6, 1945, cameras began to click on board the Necessary Evil, a military flight over southern Japan. Necessary Evil’s mission was to photograph the first atomic bombing in history. Nearby, on board another plane, the Enola Gay, bombardiers opened hatches on the belly of the plane and pulled levers to release the bomb.
It was called Little Boy. Ten feet long and 28 inches in diameter, it weighed 9,700 pounds, 141 of which were enriched uranium. The bomb dropped out of the plane and began falling. It took about 12 seconds to reach terminal velocity, which, for a big oblong object like Little Boy is around 1,000 feet per second. But the extra 12 seconds of time for spend accelerating meant that it took 53 seconds to fall from 31,060 feet to 1,900 feet, where it detonated.
The explosion began directly above a hospital, Shima byōin. Within a fraction of a second, the 80 residents and staff of that building, and perhaps 20,000 other people, were dead. The first died from thermal radiation, which travels at the speed of light and causes “flash burns.” Within seconds, the blast wave followed, traveling at 300 meters per second, rupturing eardrums, shredding lungs, tearing blood vessels, and flattening buildings.
Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on another city in southern Japan, Nagasaki. Within 4 months, as casualties from radiation burns and firestorms mounted, the death toll from these two bombs reached 200,000, with as many again injured.
Mass destruction was not new. Earlier that year, in March, 325 U.S. Air Force planes bombed Tokyo with napalm, igniting a firestorm that destroyed a quarter of the city and killed 100,000 people. But Hiroshima marked the beginning of the nuclear age. Now, the same destruction could be executed with a single plane and a single bomb.
Ever since, historians have argued over whether or not these bombings were necessary. The U.S. Military’s own review concluded “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts… [that] prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.” Many have concluded that the bombings were, as Nobel-prize winning scientist Patrick Blackett wrote, “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”
That Cold War began with 200,000 deaths, and the atrocities would continue over the coming decades, all around the world: coups, assassinations, political purges, gulags, McCarthyism, proxy wars, and brutal economic combat.
While World War II and The Cold War have ended, the threat of nuclear war has not, and neither has the danger posed by nuclear power generation. And while the dangers of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and especially Chernobyl [and the risks around Zaporizhzhya, today] cannot be underestimated, nuclear waste is perhaps a bigger danger than accidents.
This trifecta of horrors—nuclear war, nuclear accidents, and nuclear waste—still haunts our world today.
Immediately following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists from the Manhattan Project created a non-profit organization called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists dedicated to educating about the dangers our world faces “at a time when technology is outpacing our ability to control it.”
In 1947, members of the Bulletin launched “The Doomsday Clock” — a metaphorical representation of the likelihood of global catastrophe. Each year, a team of scientists, Nobel laureates, and others experts meets to consider the current state of man-made global threats from nuclear weapons, global warming, and disruptive technology, and set the time on the clock accordingly. The closer to midnight, the higher the level of danger.
The doomsday clock currently is set 90 seconds to midnight.
This is the direst warning the Bulletin has ever issued.
In explanation, the Bulletin’s scientists write that “Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory [over the past year]… Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension… Nuclear nations… have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war—an ever-present danger over the last 75 years—increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats… tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”
Last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”
The link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is long established. The enriched uranium and plutonium, as well as other so-called “fissionable material” used in nuclear weapons, can be sourced from nuclear reactors, which is why Iran’s creation of a civilian nuclear power program has been so contentious over the past decade.
Proponents of nuclear power argue that it is a safe, low-carbon energy source. There are nearly 500 nuclear power reactors in the world today, with more under construction. But beyond the risks of nuclear accidents and the nightmare of nuclear waste (who thinks it is a good idea to intentionally unearth and enrich materials that will be highly toxic for billions of years?), each of these reactors is a potential vector for dangerous weapons-grade nuclear materials to be lost, stolen, or knowingly redirected into weapons programs.
According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, there were 46 cases of nuclear materials being stolen between 2010 and 2016, as well as 57 cases of lost material, and dozens of other concerning incidents. There are already nearly 900,000 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium stored around the world, most of it in Russia and the United States.
You may wonder how this is connected to Thacker Pass (Peehee Mu’huh” in the Paiute language). For the past 31 months, I have been working to protect this part of remote Northern Nevada from a proposed 28-square mile lithium mine. The mainstream environmental organizations weren’t doing anything about it, so I decided I had to.
Joining with my friend Will Falk and working to find other allies, we set out to stop the Thacker Pass lithium mine. Supporters of lithium mining believ it’s an essential mineral to help move away from fossil fuels and help, global warming. We disagree. Lithium is dangerous, for many reasons.
Climate change is, indeed, a serious threat to our planet. But that changing climate is a symptom of our consumeristic, earth-destroying culture—not the root of the problem. Electric vehicles won’t save the planet because a typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car. The truth is, producing both electric and gas-powered cars is incredibly harmful to the planet. And lithium isn’t even possible to extract without massive quantities of fossil fuels. For example, oil from the “tar sands,” the world’s largest and most destructive industrial project, would be required for processing the lithium from the Thacker Pass mine.
Electric cars are not eco-conscious planet saving gadgets; they are luxury goods destined only for the wealthiest people on the planet.
I’ve explained in previous essays how this mine is actually about the money; how a greed so deep it is like lust underlies projects like this one. Similar feelings underlie community concerns about missing and murdered indigenous women and a rise in drug abuse that’s projected to accompany the mine. I’ve written in the past about the golden eagles who nest near Peehee Mu’huh, the meadowlarks, and the other wildlife who live in the pass and are threatened by this mine proposal.
In February 2021, we began to uncover the history of “Thacker Pass.” Over the spring, elders from the Fort McDermitt Tribe began to share with us the oral history of a massacre that gave the place it’s Paiute name, Peehee Mu’huh. And in August and September, evidence began to emerge documenting an 1865 massacre of Paiute men, women, children, and elders committed by the US Cavalry directly adjacent to the mine site. Two years ago, I challenged Lithium Americas CEO Alexi Zawadski’s characterization of his company as a good neighbor, asking if good neighbors usually dig up ancestors’ graves?
This work hasn’t been easy. We’ve endured winter storms, blistering temperatures, physical and legal threats, three years of long days and late-night work sessions, and the BLM is attempting to fine me and my friend Will Falk $49,890.13 for defending this land. Now, we’re being sued for defending the land. The forces arrayed against us are powerful. But we persist.
The booming demand for lithium is mainly driven by the electric vehicle industry, and demand for massive “grid-scale” batteries to store electricity from intermittent sources like wind and solar energy generation facilities. But lithium is also used in a wide variety of other industries.
This includes chemical propellants for rockets and torpedoes used by militaries and in spaceflight; in glass production; in metallurgy such as aluminum smelting, alloy production, and welding; in the production of fireworks and flares; and in the production of synthetic rubber and other plastics.
But here, I want to focus on a problem that I have not seen discussed before in regards to the Thacker Pass mine: the links between lithium and the nuclear industry.
There are two stable isotopes of lithium: lithium-6 and lithium-7. According to the World Nuclear Association, “Lithium-7 has two important uses in nuclear power today and tomorrow due to its relative transparency to neutrons. As hydroxide it is necessary in small quantities for safe operation in pressurised water reactor (PWR) cooling systems as a pH stabilizer, to reduce corrosion in the primary circuit. As a fluoride, it is also expected to come into much greater demand for molten salt reactors (MSRs).”
PWRs, or Pressurized Water Reactors, are a type of nuclear reactor that can be found in exactly two thirds of the world’s nuclear power plants. Engineers at these facilities, most of which are quite old at this point, are constantly dealing with corrosion in the components of their radioactive water cycling systems. Highly purified lithium-7 hydroxide is used in these systems “as an additive in PWR primary coolant, at about 2.2 ppm, for maintaining water chemistry, counteracting the corrosive effects of boric acid (used as neutron absorber) and minimizing corrosion in steam generators of PWRs.”
Lithium-7 is also used directly in nuclear weapons, where the reaction itself can produce the necessary tritium to fuel a runaway nuclear reaction. In 1954, the largest atmospheric nuclear weapons test in US history took place over the Bikini Atoll. Due to a shortage of lithium-6 (which is less common and hard to produce), the “Shot Bravo” nuke was built with lithium-7 instead. The bomb was projected to yield a 10-megaton blast. But due to lithium-7’s incredibly explosive features, the yield was 15 megatons—equivalent to every bomb dropped by the allies in World War II exploding at once.
One account describes the effect of the bomb: “An entire island turned into radioactive dust and the fallout seriously contaminated Bikini and two neighboring atolls. The ships of the Operation Castle task force steamed at flank speed away from the mushroom cloud, their decks covered with radioactive coral shards. The Japanese fishing vessel Fifth Lucky Dragon, sailing well outside the safety zone, suffered one death and several casualties from radiation. The bomb’s firing crew retreated to a closet in their concrete bunker for 12 hours while their Geiger counters roared.”
Lithium-6 is more rare than lithium-7 in nature, but is widely used in the nuclear weapons industry. When used as a target element in a reactor or a nuclear weapon, it reacts with a neutron to produce tritium (T), the most important thermonuclear material for weapons. According to the Institute for Science and International Security, “Lithium 6 is a critical raw material needed for the production of single-stage thermonuclear and boosted fission weapons.”
In the United States, the Tennessee Valley Authority operates three nuclear reactors. One of these, Watts Bar, uses lithium as the feedstock for producing tritium for use in nuclear weapons. This tritium is a key component in those weapons, but it needs to be constantly replenished. Tritium has a half-life of only 12.3 years and decays at 5.5% annually. That’s why tritium sourced from reactors using lithium is currently being used to rebuild and replace the U.S. nuclear arsenal as part of a 30-year, trillion dollar nuclear weapons plan launched under Obama.
Many critics of the nuclear weapons industry believe that nuclear power is, in general, little more than a civilian cover for the production of nuclear weapon material.
Meanwhile, advocates of nuclear power such as Bill Gates argue that next-generation reactors will address the problems that have plagued nuclear power—safety issues, radioactive waste, weapons proliferation, and high cost. But the Union of Concerned Scientists calls this “wishful thinking,” noting in their most recent report that serious concerns remain unresolved.
Modular Salt Reactors (MSRs), for example, produce massive amounts of radioactive waste that is exceptionally dangerous from a nuclear proliferation standpoint (U-233), and they are extremely difficult to clean up at the end of their relatively short lifespans. Current prototypes also depend heavily on lithium. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both on the verge of activating MSR reactors (perhaps with illegal assistance from the Trump Administration and U.S. corporations), which may lead directly to them becoming nuclear powers. And fusion reactors, for the foreseeable future, consume far more energy than they produce, amounting to nothing more than an exceptionally expensive and dangerous experiment (an experiment in which lithium is being used to control plasma).
The bottom line here is that the dangerous nuclear power industry, and the nuclear weapons that depend on it, require a steady supply of lithium. As nuclear tensions once again escalate, the Department of Energy is moving toward 100% U.S. sourcing of uranium in order to bypass international treaty obligations, which require the disclosure of locations and volumes of highly enriched uranium a country possesses. By cutting out foreign sourcing, the supply chain is kept more obscure. A similar consideration no doubt underlies, in part, the swift permitting of the Thacker Pass lithium mine. This mine is a part of the nuclear supply chain, and given that most U.S. lithium is now sourced overseas, war hawks no doubt prefer that this place is sacrificed.
One must step outside the halls of power to find sanity. The nuclear industry has been an unmitigated disaster from the beginning. I say this as someone who grew up in Washington State. We have seen the horror that is Hanford. And Nevadans know the perils of nuclear weapons and waste better than almost anyone else on the planet.
If the Thacker Pass lithium mine is built, lithium produced there may end up inside nuclear reactors and inside nuclear weapons. How would you feel if you were involved in a project that supplied critical material to power the next nuclear disaster?
Yes, Nevada has a bleak history of nuclear weapons testing and waste storage. Yet from the Nevada Test Site to Yucca Mountain, there is as long and as rich a history of resistance. Of sanity. Of desire for peace. I would like to invite all the activists, politicians, and regular people who fought nuclear testing and nuclear waste disposal across this region to join the fight against lithium mining as well.
There are many ways of laying waste to the Earth, and to our future. Nuclear technologies and strip mining are two of them. And in this case, they are firmly linked. That is why we must stand up against lithium mining and nuclear catastrophes alike.
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
― C. S. Lewis
The 2023 DGR conference is scheduled for late August in northern California. This annual gathering is an opportunity for our community to share skills, reflect on our work, strengthen our connections, and plan for the future. While this conference is only open to DGR members, we do invite friends and allies on a case-by-case basis. If you’re interested in attending, please contact us, and if you’d like to donate to support the conference, click here.
Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash