Bright green is a phrase that means that they believe that this culture can be made to be sustainable with some technological fixes. One of the ways we see this would be they believe that wind and solar will save the planet from global warming. Wind and solar can run the economy and not harm the planet. The lies are, well, that.
The fundamental lie is that we can have this level of consumption and a planet too. That you can eat the planet and still have a livable planet. More specifically the lies would be that wind and solar and geothermal, etc. don’t harm the planet. That they can run an industrial economy, neither of which is true. Even in their own terms, they’re not being accurate.
The fundamental problem with all of this is they’re solving for the wrong variable. What do all the so called solutions to global warming, that you here in the mainstream media, have in common? What they have in common is that they take industrial civilization is being given. The natural world as having to adapt to industrial capitalism, to conform to industrial capitalism.
I remember a line in some paper or another where they said that the rule of nature is adapt or die. They were talking about some species being driven extinct by this culture. That’s saying that everybody has to adapt to this way of living or die.
That’s literally insane in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. Because the landbase has to be primary. The health of the planet has to be primary. Without the planet, you cannot have a social system whatsoever. Every social system that has ever existed is based on the health of the land. And if you have a way of life that is based on destroying the health of the land, that is, not a planet with a future.
The fundamental lie is that we can continue this way of living with just a change in what fuels the destructive activities. I don’t think it really matters. It doesn’t matter to the fish being caught in the drift net, whether the ships are fueled by bunker fuel or solar, apart from the fact that solar wouldn’t do it anyways.
The book tackles the greenwashing surrounding so much so-called “green” technology and other false solutions. The authors read excerpts from the book, discuss it’s themes, and answer audience questions.
You can order the book into your local bookstore (or for delivery) here.
Music: Trick or Treat (instrumental) by RYYZN Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0.
In this article, originally published on feministcurrent, Brenda Brooks describes how transgender ideology pushes more and more girls and young women into “gender reassignment” by dangerous surgery and hormone treatment.
Impressions formed around the delivery of bad news have a way of sticking around,
and I suppose this is why, to use a well-worn phrase, I still remember where I was the day a friend informed me that lesbians were being harassed for rejecting men as dating partners. I laughed, at first, and probably said something like, “You sure know how to inject a dose of warped humour into a relaxing coffee break.” For the next half-hour my friend’s solemn, intense explanation left me unwilling to absorb the news that men who “self-identify” as women feel entitled to add lesbians to their dating pool. I watched her grow edgy, fevered around the eyes, and anxious. She reminded me of that terrified guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as he dodged cars on the noirish highway, warning belligerent travellers: “They’re after you! They’re after all of us! You fools!”
Why was I so reluctant to believe the news, aside from it being as unbelievable as it was true? It might be that I had let down my guard, and even gone a little bit “post-lesbian.” I mean this in a lightly humourous way, because it seemed to me that for a while, back in the olden days, it became possible to apply a touch of irony to the matter of “identity,” as people sometimes do when the worst of times are over and a relaxed atmosphere offers perspective — even jokes. I guess you could say I’d relaxed into the fair weather.
But over lunch that day, as my friend grew more emphatic, and I grew less relaxed, I soon found myself thinking: “What fresh hell is this”?
Now, a few years later, I know a heartbreaking amount about the nature of “fresh hell.” I know the number of American girls attempting to escape being female by seeking surgery quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Journalist Abigail Shrier addresses this trend in her book, Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which transactivists and Big Tech have done their best to shut down. Her first publisher cancelled the book after threats from staff, and Amazon refused to allow Regenery, her new publisher, to sponsor ads on its site.
The phenomenon of girls transitioning to become “male” isn’t limited to the US.
A shift has been noted in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the UK, the number of children being referred for gender reassignment went from 77 in 2009 to 2,590 in 2018-19. But most striking of all is who is being referred — in 2017, according to TheGuardian, 70 per cent of referrals were female.
I’ve also apprised myself of the dangerous health projections for girls who proceed along the route from puberty blockers to surgery, which reminded me that I had once explored the idea of having my ovaries removed in order to escape the hormone-generated migraines that plague the women in my family until menopause. My doctor was quick to state the impossibility of that notion, stressing that surgery wasn’t available to “someone so young” (I was 35 years old). Why? Because my hormones protected me from heart disease and bone loss, among other things.
In her 2018 study of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), Lisa Littman determined that, “Without the knowledge of whether the gender dysphoria is likely to be temporary, extreme caution should be applied before considering the use of treatments that have permanent effects, such as cross-sex hormones and surgery.” Who could argue with erring on the side of being careful, responsible — ethical? Many, apparently, who have done just that, dismissing Littman’s suggestion that some cases of gender dysphoria may be “socially contagious,” accusing her of bias and promoting misconceptions about trans people. Among the young people she studied (83 per cent of whom were girls), more than one-third were in friendship groups in which half or more began to identify as trans in a similar time frame.
Despite all this, nothing affected me more than Dysphoric — a four part documentary series by Vaishnavi Sundar, an independent filmmaker, feminist, writer, and activist. Subtitled, “Fleeing womanhood like a house on fire,” Sundar’s film elucidates the way young women’s dysphoria is heightened through social media, as well some branches of the medical and therapeutic community, and of course trans activist ideology itself. There are a few clips in the film of social media personality Jeffrey Marsh, who refers to himself as an “internet mom,” offering a sort of alternative family (at least online) for the young, lonely, and confused. But the thing is, he is not a “mom.” Marsh, the author (ironically) of, How to be You, is a man — a gay man (who identifies as “non-binary” and “queer”) and his current metier involves promoting himself on YouTube — an activity actual mothers rarely have time for.
In Sundar’s film, endocrinologist Dr. William Malone stresses that most girls who experience dysphoria will outgrow the symptoms post-puberty, and psychiatrist Dr. Roberto D’Angelo reminds us that many of these girls will grow up to be lesbian. But, until then, they are simply young, vulnerable, and confused about how to handle their attraction to other girls.
I thought we had broken the back of this problem decades ago
— encouraging girls to be themselves, and grow up to accept their sexualities without shame. But that hard-won fight has been set back. And now the repercussions may mean the sacrifice of countless girls who are abandoning their bodies to a devastating illusion.
If this process of turning lesbian girls into straight boys isn’t conversion therapy, I don’t know what is. But now that “gender” has been added to the definition of the term, things have become confused. Now it is claimed that protecting young girls from rushing into body modification in an attempt to enter boyhood (and a life of medical intervention) is the real crime — the authentic “conversion therapy.”
I recently received a ballot from my local MP inquiring how I would like him to vote on Bill C-6, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy.) If conversion therapy still meant making it illegal to impose “correctives” on those who are attracted to the same sex, my position would be straightforward, and I’m sure many politicians feel they are being progressive in voting to prohibit such practices. But adding “gender identity” has changed things to mean that prohibiting “conversion therapy” pressures therapists and medical professionals to validate a child’s feeling that they have been “born in the wrong body” and require irreversible medical treatments. The Cassandra Project, a coalition of women’s organizations concerned about Bill C-6, have articulated a number of worries, not the least being that “services and therapy that do not encourage hasty transition” will be criminalized.
Considering the daily realities faced by so many girls in today’s world, there is a kind of logic to their transformative wishes — if only they could become wild horses instead, and run far away.
Teaching girls to believe in repressive and obsolete gender stereotypes — encouraging them to believe it is possible to be born in the wrong body because they don’t look, feel, or act the way a girl “should” — is the actual conversion therapy. The most authentic betrayal is leading girls into surgeries that remove their healthy breasts, endanger their health, and doom them to a lifetime of medical oversight. That is the true conversion therapy, and its message is as it ever was, except that now bodies are ruined along with minds — the message is that it is better to betray and renounce body and spirit than to be a lesbian (or a woman).
So much for being “post-lesbian.”
It seems I was too optimistic about the future. I failed to imagine its profound loss of soul. I grew complacent. I let down my guard. And now I am a member of the authentic counterculture once again. My primary surprise is that the repugnance and contempt for women is still great, and the example we set as lesbians is fragile.
Invoking Invasion of the Bodysnatchers feels eerily accurate. The urge to dart out onto that rain-slashed highway and implore fellow travellers to see what is in front of their faces — Look,you fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see?! —is almost irresistible. One can only be grateful to those who have been running into traffic for some time. I only wish somebody could assure me that this dystopian reality will be put right. Meanwhile I’ll hold my wish that young girls could become wild horses that no one can break.
At the close of Sundar’s film, she speaks of the various political, social, and religious dangers to girlhood: “We have this one life, and we must have the opportunity to live it the way we want. But this industry of hate that gaslights girls into turning against themselves infuriates me.” The one question that keeps Sundar awake at night, as posed by a future generation of girls, is this: “Where the hell were you?”
Brenda Brooks’ novel Gotta Find Me An Angel was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her 2019 book, HONEY, was shortlisted for the U.K. Staunch Book Prize, an award for thrillers “where no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, or murdered.”
Also listen to an interview of Vaishnavi Sundar in Resistance Radio.
For 50 days, the Protect Thacker Pass camp has stood here in the mountains of northern Nevada, on Northern Paiute territory, to defend the land against a strip mine.
Lithium Americas, a Canadian corporation, means to blow up, bulldoze, or pave 5,700 acres of this wild, biodiverse land to extract lithium for “green” electric cars. In the process, they will suck up billions of gallons of water, import tons and tons of waste from oil refineries to be turned into sulfuric acid, burn 11,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day, toxify groundwater with arsenic, antimony, and uranium, harm wildlife from Golden eagles and Pronghorn antelope to Greater sage-grouse and the endemic King’s River pyrg, and lay waste to traditional territories still used by people from the Fort McDermitt reservation and the local ranching and farming communities.
The Campaign to Protect Thacker Pass
They claim this is an “environmentally sustainable” project. We disagree, and we mean to stop them from destroying this place.
Thus far, our work has been focused on outreach and spreading the word. For the first two weeks, there were only two of us here. Now word has begun to spread. The campaign is entering a new stage. There are new opportunities opening, but we must be cautious.
How Corporations Disrupt Grassroots Resistance Movements
Corporations, faced with grassroots resistance, follow a certain playbook. We can look at the history of how these companies respond to determine their strategies and the best ways to counteract them.
Corporations like Lithium Americas Corporation generally do not have in-house security teams, beyond basic security for facilities and IT/digital security. Therefore, when faced with growing grassroots resistance, their first move will be to hire an outside corporation to conduct surveillance, intelligence gathering, and offensive operations.
Private Military Corporations (PMCs) are essentially mercenaries acting largely outside of government regulation or democratic control. They are hired by private corporations to assist in their interests and act as for-hire businesses with few or no ethical considerations. Some examples of these corporations are TigerSwan, Triple Canopy, and STRATFOR.
PMCs are often staffed with U.S. military veterans, and employ counterinsurgency techniques and skills honed during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or other military operations. And in many cases, these PMCs collaborate with public law enforcement agencies to share information, such that law enforcement is essentially acting as a private contractor for a corporation.
Disruption Tactics Used by Corporate Goon Squads
PMCs can be expected to deploy four basic tactics.
Intelligence Gathering
First, they will attempt to gather as much information on protesters as possible. This begins with what is called OSINT — Open Source Intelligence. This simply means combing through open records on the internet: Googling names, scrolling through social media profiles and groups, and compiling information that is publicly available for anyone who cares to look.
Other methods of information gathering are more active, and include physical surveillance (such as flying a helicopter overhead, as occurred today), signals intelligence (attempting to capture cell phone calls, emails, texts, and website traffic using a device like a Stingray also known as an IMSI catcher), and infiltration or human intelligence (HUMINT). This last is perhaps the most important, the most dangerous, and the most difficult to combat.
Disruption
Second, they will attempt to disrupt the protest. This is often done by using the classic tactics of COINTELPRO to plant rumors, false information, and foment infighting to weaken opposition.
During the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, one TigerSwan infiltrator working inside the protest camps wrote to his team that
“I need you guys to start looking at the activists in your area and see if there are individuals who are vulnerable. They’re broke, always talking about needing gas money or whatever. Maybe they’re disillusioned, depressed a little. Life is fucking them over. We can buy them a bus ticket to any camp they want if they’re willing to provide intel. We win no matter what. If they agree to inform for pay, we get intel. If they tell our pitchman to go f*** himself/herself, the activist will start wondering who did take the money and it’ll cause conflict within the activist groups and it won’t cost us anything.”
In 2013, there was a leak of documents from the private intelligence company STRATFOR, which has worked for the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, Northrup Grumman, Coca Cola, and so on. The leaked documents revealed one part of STRATFOR’s strategy for fighting social movements. The document proposes dividing activists into four groups, then exploiting their differences to fracture movements.
“Radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists [are the four categories],” the leaked documents state. “The Opportunists are in it for themselves and can be pulled away for their own self-interest. The Realists can be convinced that transformative change is not possible and we must settle for what is possible. Idealists can be convinced they have the facts wrong and pulled to the Realist camp. Radicals, who see the system as corrupt and needing transformation, need to be isolated and discredited, using false charges to assassinate their character is a common tactic.”
As I will discuss later on, solidarity and movement culture is the best way to push back against these methods.
Other examples of infiltration and disruption have often focused on:
Increasing tensions around racist or sexist behavior
Targeting individuals with drug or alcohol addictions to become informants
Using sex appeal and relationship building to get information
Acting as an “agent provocateur” to encourage protesters to become violent, even to the point of supplying them with bombs, in order to secure arrests
Spreading rumors about inappropriate behavior to sew discord and mistrust
Intimidation
The third tactic used by these companies is intimidation. They will use fear and paranoia as a deliberate form of psychological warfare. This can include anonymous threats, shows of force, visible surveillance, and so on.
Violence
When other methods fail, PMCs and public law enforcement will ultimately resort to direct violence, as we have seen with Standing Rock and many other protest movements.
As I have written before, colonial states enforce their resource extraction regimes with force, and we should disabuse ourselves of notions to the contrary. Vigilante violence is also always a concern. When people seek to defend land from destruction, men with guns are usually dispatched to arrest them, remove them from the site, and lock them in cages.
How to Resist Against Surveillance and Repression
There are specific techniques we can deploy to protect ourselves, and by extension, protect the land at Thacker Pass. These techniques are called “security culture.”
Security culture is a set of practices and attitudes designed to increase the safety of political communities. These guidelines are created based on recent and historic state repression, and help to reduce paranoia and increase effectiveness.
Security culture cannot keep us 100% safe, all the time. There is risk in political action. But it helps us manage risks that do exist, and take calculated risks when necessary to achieve our goals.
The first rule of security culture is this: be cautious, but do not live in fear. We cannot let their intimidation be effective. Creating paranoia is a key goal for PMCs and other repressive organizations. When they make us so paranoid we no longer take action, reach out to potential allies, or plan and carry out our campaigns, they win using only the techniques of psychological warfare. When we are fighting to protect the land and water, we are doing something righteous, and we should be proud and stand tall while we do this work.
The second rule of security culture is that solidarity is how we overcome paranoia, snitchjacketing, and rumor-spreading. We must act with principles and in a deeply ethical and honorable way. Work to build alliances, friendships, and trust—while maintaining good boundaries and holding people accountable. This is the foundation of a good culture.
In regards to infiltration, security culture recommends the following:
It’s not safe nor a good idea to generally speculate or accuse people of being infiltrators. This is a typical tactic that infiltrators use to shut movements down.
Paranoia can cause destructive behavior.
Making false/uncertain accusations is dangerous: this is called “bad-jacketing” or “snitch-jacketing.”
Build relationships deliberately, and build trust slowly. Do not share sensitive information with people who don’t need to know it. There is a fine line between promoting a campaign and sharing information that could put someone at risk.
Good security culture focuses on identifying and stopping bad behavior.
Do not talk to police or law enforcement unless you are a designated liaison.
Secure communications are an important part of security culture.
Here are some basic recommendations to secure your communications.
Email, phone calls, social media, and text messages are inherently insecure. Nothing sensitive should be discussed using these platforms.
Preferably, use modern secure messaging apps such as Signal, Wire, or Session. These apps are free and easy to use.
We recommend setting up and using a VPN for all your internet access needs at camp. ProtonVPN and Firefox VPN are two reputable providers. These tools are easy to use after a brief initial setup, and only cost a small amount. Invest in security.
We must also remember that secure communications aren’t a magic bullet. If you’re communicating with someone who decides to share your private message, it’s no longer private. Use common sense and consider trust when using secure communications tools.
Security culture also warns us not talk about some sensitive issues, including:
Your or someone else’s participation in illegal action.
Someone else’s advocacy for such actions.
Your or someone else’s plans for a future illegal action.
Don’t talk about illegal actions in terms of specific times, people, places, etc.
Note: Nonviolent civil disobedience is illegal, but can sometimes be discussed openly. In general, the specifics of nonviolent civil disobedience should be discussed only with people who will be involved in the action or those doing support work for them. It’s still acceptable (even encouraged) to speak out generally in support of monkeywrenching and all forms of resistance as long as you don’t mention specific places, people, times, etc.
Conclusion
Security is a very important topic, but is challenging. There are so many potential threats, and we are not used to acting in a secure way. That’s why we are working to create a “security culture”—so that our communities of resistance are always considering security, assessing threats, studying our opposition, and creating countermeasures to their methods.
This article is only a brief introduction to the topic of security culture. Moving forward, we will be providing regular trainings in security culture to Protect Thacker Pass participants.
Most importantly, do not let this scare you, and do not be overwhelmed. Simply take one security measure at a time, begin to study it, and then implement better protocols one by one. We use the term “security culture” because security is a mindset that should be developed and shared.
Editor’s note: DGR strongly opposes the three new farm laws that have inspired the farmer’s protests in India. However, we do not necessarily agree with all of the demands of the protestors.
This article original appeared on the People’s Archive of Rural Indiaon January 28, 2021. Written By Shraddha Agarwal.
Featured image by the Author
“We borrowed a 1,000 rupees from the seths [farm owners] to come here. In return, we will work in their fields for 4-5 days,” said Vijaybai Gangorde, 45.
She arrived in Nashik on January 23 at noon, in a tempo painted blue and orange – one of the first to reach the Golf Club Maidan in the city, to join the vehicle jatha (march) to Mumbai.
Vijaybai’s 41-year cousin, Tarabai Jadhav, was also travelling with her from Mohadi, their village in Nashik district’s Dindori taluka. They both work as farm labourers there for a daily wage of Rs. 200-250. The cousins came to Nashik to join other farmers – about 15,000 from mainly Nanded, Nandurbar, Nashik and Palghar districts of Maharashtra – going to Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, about 180 kilometres away, to protest against the new farm laws.
“We are marching for our upajivika [livelihood],” said Tarabai.
A sit-in and a march to Raj Bhavan, the Governor’s residence, in south Mumbai have been organised by the Samyukta Shetkari Kamgar Morcha on January 25-26, to express solidarity with the protesting farmers at Delhi’s borders. Farmers from 21 districts of Maharashtra, assembled together by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), are gathering in Mumbai for these protests.
For over two months, lakhs of farmers, mainly from Punjab and Haryana, have been staging protests at five sites on the borders of Delhi. They have been protesting against three farm laws that the central government first issued as ordinances on June 5, 2020, then introduced as farm bills in Parliament on September 14 and hastened to become Acts by the 20th of that month.
The farmers see this legislation as devastating for their livelihoods by expanding the space for large corporate to exercise even greater power over farming. They also undermine the main forms of support to the cultivator, including the minimum support price (MSP), the agricultural produce marketing committees (APMCs), state procurement and more. The laws have also been criticised as affecting every Indian as they disable the right to legal recourse of all citizens, undermining Article 32 of the Indian Constitution.
Vijaybai and Tarabai, who belong to the Koli Malhar Adivasi community, a Scheduled Tribe, paid Rs. 1,000 each for a seat in the hired tempo to Mumbai and back. They borrowed the amount because they had no savings. “We had no work during the [Covid-19] lockdown,” said Tarabai. “The state government had promised 20 kilos of wheat free for each family, but only 10 kilos was distributed.”
This is not the first time that Vijaybai and Tarabai are marching in protest.
“We had come on both the marches – in 2018 and 2019,”
they say, referring to the Kisan Long March from Nashik to Mumbai in March 2018, and the follow-up rally in February 2019, when farmers voiced their demand for land rights, remunerative prices for produce, loan waivers and drought relief. It is also not the first jatha from Nashik to protest against the new farm laws. On December 21, 2020, around 2,000 farmers had collected in Nashik, of which 1,000 set out to join their northern counterparts on the outskirts of Delhi.
“The only way we Adivasis can be heard is by marching [for our rights]. This time, too, we will make our voices heard,”
said Vijaybai, making her way with Tarabai to the centre of Golf Club Maidan, to listen to the speeches of AIKS leaders. After all the vehicles had assembled, the convoy left Nashik at 6 p.m. that evening. At Ghatandevi temple in Igatpuri taluka, Nashik district, the marchers halted for the night. Many of them had packed a simple meal – bajrarotis and garlic chutney – from home. After dinner, they spread out thick blankets over tarpaulin sheets on the ground beside the temple and fell sleep.
The next day, the plan was to walk down the Kasara ghat near Igatpuri and reach the Mumbai-Nashik highway.
As they prepared to leave at 8 a.m., a group of farm labourers discussed their children’s future in the agriculture sector. “Even though my son and daughter have both completed their degrees, they’re working on farms for a meagre income of Rs. 100-150 [per day],” said 48-year-old Mukunda Kongil, from Nandurkipada village in Trimbakeshwar taluka, Nashik district. Mukunda’s son has a BCom degree, and his daughter has done a BEd, but they both work as farm labourers now. “The jobs go only to non-Adivasis,” says Mukunda, who belongs to the Warli (or Varli) Adivasi community, a Scheduled Tribe.
“My son worked so hard in his college and now he works on farms every day,” said 47-year-old Janibai Dhangare, also a Warli Adivasi from Nandurkipada. “My daughter finished her pandhravi[Class 15, that is, a BA degree]. She tried to get a job in Trimbakeshwar, but there was no work for her. She did not want to leave me and go to Mumbai. That city is too far and she will miss home-cooked meals,” she said, packing away her leftover bhakris and loading her bag into the tempo.
The farmers and farm labourers walked for 12 kilometres from the ghat to highway with their flags, raising slogans against the new farm laws.
Their demand is for a repeal of the three laws as well as of the new labour codes, while also seeking a law to guarantee remunerative minimum support prices (MSP) and countrywide procurement facilities, said AKIS president, Ashok Dhawale. “This march is an important contribution to the historic nationwide struggle of lakhs of farmers in Delhi and all over the country against the neoliberal and pro-corporate policies of the central government,” said Dhawale, who is travelling with the group.
Upon reaching the highway, the farmers took their places in the vehicles and proceeded towards Thane. Along the way, various organisations supplied them with water bottles, snacks and biscuits. They stopped for lunch at a gurudwara in Thane. It was 7 p.m. on January 24 when the jatha reached Azad Maidan in south Mumbai. Tired, but with their spirits intact, some farmers from Palghar district entered the ground singing and dancing to the tune of the tarpa, a traditional Adivasi wind instrument.
“I am hungry. My whole body is hurting, but I’ll be fine after some food and rest,” said Vijaybai, after settling down with her group of farm labourers. “This is not new for us,” she said. “We have marched before and we will march again.”
Shraddha Agarwal is a reporter and content editor at the People’s Archive of Rural India
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption and accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: The Belo Monte hydroelectric complex is the third-largest in the world in installed capacity, able to produce 11,200 megawatts. Copyright: PAC-Ministry of Planning, Brazil [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0].
The company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam claimed in a letter to the New York Times that the company respects Indigenous peoples, the environment and international conventions.
The Arara Indigenous people contest the company’s claims and call attention to a series of broken promises.
The Belo Monte Dam is notorious for having violated international conventions and Brazilian laws regarding consultation of Indigenous peoples, and for its massive environmental and social impacts.
This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
Even in this era of “alternative facts,” the letter to the New York Times from Norte Energy (the company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam) will surely be remembered as a classic.
The letter opens by claiming that “From the beginning, the deployment of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant in the Brazilian state of Pará has been guided by respect for the local Indigenous populations and by laws, ratified protocols and conventions.” News of Norte Energia’s letter reached the local Indigenous populations, and they are rightly enraged. A response from the Arara People (Figure 1) is translated below. For whatever reason, the New York Times declined to publish it.
Letter from the Arara People to the World
We the Arara Indigenous People of the Iriri River are tired of being deceived by Norte Energia. We want respect! Ever since the Belo Monte Dam arrived, our situation has only worsened. Our territory has become the business counter of the world. Our forest is suffering a lot. With each passing day we hear more noise from chainsaws eating our territory. Our river is growing sadder and weaker every day. This is not normal. We are being attacked from all sides. We have never been in such need. We are very concerned about the future of our children and grandchildren. How long will Norte Energia continue to deceive us? Why hasn’t the disintrusion [removal of invaders] of our Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land been carried out until today? We ask everyone to help us build a great campaign for the defense of our territory.
The Arara People will never abandon our territories. Our warriors will not allow our forest to be destroyed. Together we will protect our Iriri River.
Timbektodem Arara – President of the Arara People’s Association – KOWIT
Mobu Odo Arara – Chief
Norte Energia’s claim of being “guided by… laws and ratified protocols and conventions” is an amazing rewrite of the history of building Belo Monte a dam that managed to be completed despite massive efforts both within Brazil and abroad, to have those conventions respected. Belo Monte violated Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO-169) and the Brazilian law (10.088 of Nov. 5, 2019, formerly 5.051 of April 19, 2004) that implements the convention. These require consultation of affected Indigenous people to obtain their free, prior and informed consent. Note that the operative word is “affected,” not “submerged.” The claim was that the Indigenous people did not need to be consulted because they were not under water.
Downstream of the first of the two dams that compose Belo Monte is a 100-km stretch of the Xingu River from which 80% of the water flow has been diverted. Largely disappeared are the fish that sustained the populations of the two Indigenous lands along this stretch, plus a third located on a tributary. Both the ILO and the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States recognized violation of ILO-169 by not consulting Indigenous peoples impacted by Belo Monte. Over 20 cases against Belo Monte are still pending in Brazilian courts; only one case has been decided, and this was in favor of the Indigenous people. However, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court where it languished while the dam was built and has still not been judged.
Bribes paid by construction companies for the contracts to build Belo Monte were a star feature in Brazil’s “Lava Jato” (“Car Wash”) corruption scandal, with confessions from both the side that paid and the side that received. This scandal helped explain why Belo Monte was built despite the Xingu River’s long low-flow period when no or very few turbines at the main powerhouse can operate (2020 was a dramatic example). Climate change will make this worse still.
The Norte Energia letter asserts: “The plant has a valid operating license and generates energy for millions of Brazilians, grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice in deference to the culture of the local Indigenous populations.”
Mention of the “valid operating license,” reminds one of the Federal Public Ministry in Belém describing Belo Monte as “totally illegal.” The dam forced its way past multiple legal challenges by means of “security suspensions,” a relict of Brazil’s military dictatorship that allows projects to go forward despite any number of illegalities if they are needed to avoid “damage to the public economy” (originally law 4348 of June 26, 1964, now law 12,016 of August 7, 2009).
With respect to Norte Energia’s boast that Belo Monte “generates energy for millions of Brazilians,” the dam does indeed produce electricity, although industry gets the biggest share: only 29% of Brazil’s electricity is for domestic consumption. Much more electricity would be available if the billions of dollars in subsidies that the country’s taxpayers gave Belo Monte had been used for other options, such as energy conservation, halting export of electricity in the form of aluminum and other electro-intensive products, and tapping the country’s enormous wind and solar potential.
Norte Energia’s letter concludes that Belo Monte is “grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice.” This is certainly a most memorable “alternative fact.” The implications for environmental justice of Belo Monte and other Amazonian dams are dramatic (see here in English and Portuguese).
Editors note: DGR supports The REAL Green New Deal Project, which is “setting forth a realistic alternative to the commonly accepted narrative about renewable energy and sustainability. That narrative – for which the Green New Deal has become emblematic – leads us to believe that the renewable energy future will look just like the fossil fueled present, but simply electrified and “decarbonized.” We’re pushing back against this dangerous myth. ” realgnd.org Consistent with the biophysical evidence, REALgnd acknowledges the following. . .
the fallacy of human exceptionalism. H. sapiens is an evolved biological species that is part of nature and therefore subject to the same natural laws and limitations as other living things, particularly the laws pertaining to energy use and material conservation.
that, like all other species, H. sapiens has a natural propensity to expand into all accessible habitat and consume all available resources. However, in the case of humans, “available” is constantly being redefined by technology.
that, in the absence of rational controls, humans will use any source of abundant cheap energy to (over)exploit ecosystems.
that the human enterprise (people and their economies) is an embedded subsystem of the ecosphere and that decoupling it from Nature is not even theoretically possible.that modern techno-industrial society is an unsustainable blip in the history of human civilization, made possible only by a one-off inheritance of fossil fuels (FF), which will either run out soon (i.e., they will become too financially and energetically costly to extract and use) or which we must choose to stop using: 1) in preparation for their eventual depletion, 2) to avoid the continued ecological impacts of their extraction, transportation, and processing, and 3) to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Consider that one barrel of oil is the energy equivalent of about 10 years of human labor.
To supply the average American with his/her economic goods and services requires 6,806 kg of petroleum (~50 barrels) per year. Which means that the average American has about 500 “energy slaves” – mostly fossil fuels – working for him/her around the clock (one energy slave = the energy output of one person).
that so-called renewable energy technologies (namely solar, high-tech wind, large-scale hydropower, and nuclear) are not renewable. They rely on 1) techno-industrial processes that are not possible without FFs, 2) a dwindling supply of non-renewable metals and minerals, 3) ecological destruction and pollution, 4) and terrible working conditions in the mining industry, much of which are offshored to the Global South. At the end of their short lives (ranging from 15 to 50 years, depending on the technology), they have to be decommissioned and transported – using FFs – to waste sites, only for the entire process to start all over again.
that calls for “net zero” carbon emissions 1) rely on unproven technologies that can only be manufactured through FF-based, techno-industrial processes, 2) entail significant ecological damage (the injection of toxic substances into the ground), and 3) belie the need to abolish FF use for the above reasons.
that human society is in overshoot, meaning that humanity has exceeded the regenerative capacity of ecosystems and become parasitic on the ecosphere. Any species that maintains itself through the continual depletion of the biophysical basis of its own existence is inherently unsustainable.
Consider that there are only about 12 billion hectares of ecologically productive land and water on Earth. For 7.6 billion people, this is about 1.6 global average hectares (gha) of biocapacity per capita. However, humanity is currently consuming about 2.8 gha per capita – 75% more biocapacity than is available given the size of our current population (5). In other words, humans currently use the equivalent of 1.75 Earth’s worth of resources and assimilative capacity each year. Species can exist in a state of overshoot only temporarily and at a great cost to the ability of ecosystems to provide life support services in perpetuity.
The one-Earth lifestyle of 1.6 gha per capita for 7.6 billion people mentioned above equates to the current lifestyle intensity of countries such as Myanmar, Ecuador, Mali, and Nicaragua. By contrast, in 2017, it took over 8 gha to support the average North American lifestyle – meaning Americans and Canadians have overshot their equal share of global biocapacity by a factor of 400%.
that climate change is only one of many symptoms of overshoot. Thus, carbon is only one indicator or metric to consider.
that a state of ecological overshoot does not resemble, and greatly constrains, what is possible in a steady state at or below the carrying capacity.
that (un)sustainability is a collective problem requiring collective solutions and unprecedented international cooperation.
that if humanity does not plan a controlled descent from its state of overshoot, then chaotic, painful collapse is unavoidable.
that gross income and wealth inequality is a major barrier to sustainability. Socially just, one-Earth living requires mechanisms for fair income redistribution and otherwise sharing the benefits of eco-economic activity.
that life after fossil fuels will look very much like life before fossil fuels.
Consistent with these biophysical and social realities, our goal is to assist the global community to:
accept that short-term, self-interested economic behavior at the individual and national levels has become maladaptive at the long-term, global level.
formally acknowledge the absurdity of perpetual material growth and accumulation (the hallmarks of capitalism) on a finite planet.
commit to devising and implementing policies consistent with a one-Earth civilization, characterized first by a controlled contraction of the human enterprise and a re-configuration of its material infrastructure, with the end goal of an ecologically stable, economically secure steady state society whose citizens live more or less equitably within the biophysical means of Nature.
develop and implement a global fertility strategy to reduce the human population to the billion or so people that a non-fossil energy future can likely support in material comfort on this already much damaged Earth.
identify which types of energy are actually renewable, or largely dependent upon, renewable resources, and what this will mean for the re-design of society’s infrastructure.
begin the planning necessary to eliminate fossil energy by 1) rationing and allocating the remaining carbon budget to essential uses, de-commissioning unsustainable fossil-based infrastructure, and re-building critical renewable-based infrastructure and supply chains, and 2) reducing material consumption consistent with Global Footprint Network estimates of ∼75 % overshoot.
understand that life after the luxury of fossil fuels holds many gems and should not be feared.
An absence of material luxury need not equate to an absence of a good, comfortable lifestyle.
Lacking the energetic slaves of fossil fuels will involve more physically active lives in closer contact with each other and Nature, both of which will improve our overall well-being and restore our shattered sense of connection.
Emphasis can shift from material progress to progress on the mind and spirit, which are unlimited.
