Struggle against hoarding of reservoir water by agro-industry sees five days of action, culminating in a 10,000-strong march on the commercial port of La Rochelle
The French environmentalist movement Soulevements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Land) is carrying on its campaign against mishandling of water resources. This phase of action began on July 16 with the “Village for Water and Land Defense“, a meeting bringing activists from around the world to discuss strategy. This assembly of culminated in two demonstrations of around 10,000 people on the July 19 and 20, despite severe repression by police including teargas, blockades, and police charges at protesters.
The demonstrations July the 19 proceeded in a pattern not dissimilar to previous protests against the expansion of magabasins in France. 10,000 protesters on foot marched on Cerience, a seed subsidiary of the agro-industrial group Terrena. Parallel to this a group of 600 cyclists accompanied by campaigners from another group, Naturalistes des Terres, used kites to drop duckweed into nearby megabasin reservoirs to clog their pumps and pipes. The reservoirs they targeted provide water for the poultry factory farms of the Pampr’ouef group, who have recently been facing legal challenges over animal cruelty in their farms.
Demonstrations on July 20, however, marked a shift in the group’s focus towards a more global stage. Aiming to block the commercial port of La Pallice, farmers in tractors began to block the port at 6 a.m. followed by a larger demonstration beginning at 10 a.m which included people moving both on foot and by boat. Here, the focus was not directly on the expansion of reservoirs , but rather on the companies who profit from the government-funded privatisation of water. In a statement from the Soulevements de la Terre the group outlined how “competition from French cereals” prevents countries in Western Africa, a central destination of the port’s exports, from achieving food independence. Thus the expansion of their protests from megabasin reservoirs to ports marks an expansion of the fight to “abolish free trade, commercial predation and speculation” to a new arena.
While Soulevements de la Terre continue to bring attention to the centralisation of French agriculture and inflict millions of Euros in damage to the largest companies, their continued existence faces immense legal and political pressure. In 2023, after a mass action against the construction of a megabasin reservoir at Sainte Soline that resulted in the injury of 200 activists, the French government outlawed the organisation. Although this has been temporarily suspended by the Council of State (France’s Supreme Administrative Court), it hasn’t stopped the anti-terrorism section of the police making multiple arrests related to the sabotage of Lafarge cement factory.
“The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution,” said one campaigner.
Biodiversity advocates on Wednesday called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject a new geoengineering project spearheaded by researchers in Massachusetts that one critic said would do “nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth.”
Friends of the Earth (FOE) and other groups warned that an experiment called LOC-NESS by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) carries “potentially catastrophic risks” for the Atlantic Ocean, where researchers have proposed dumping more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide near Cape Cod to test a “carbon dioxide removal approach” called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE).
WHOI’s website states that the experiment would involve the release of “nontoxic, fluorescent Rhodamine WT dye into the ocean from a research ship,” with researchers tracking the dye’s movement over 72 hours in order to determine whether the ocean’s alkalinity could be enhanced.
If so, the scientists say, they could ultimately help to regulate atmospheric carbon.
The EPA’s notice about the proposed study from last month, however, says that the project “would involve a controlled release of a sodium hydroxide solution”—which is “essentially lye, a substance known to cause chemical burns and one that must be handled with great care,” according to Tom Goldtooth, co-founder and member of the board of directors of the national Climate Justice Alliance.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles.”
“Altering the chemical composition of the ocean under the guise of increasing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is misleading and dangerous,” said Goldtooth. “An experiment centered on introducing this caustic substance into the sea should not be permitted… The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution.”
Friends of the Earth pointed out that WHOI’s permit application to the EPA acknowledges that after changing the ocean’s alkalinity, the researchers “have no direct way of measuring how much carbon dioxide will be removed by the experiment.”
“The production of alkaline materials is extremely energy-intensive, releasing similar or even higher levels of greenhouse gasses than they remove upon being dumped into the ocean,” said the group. “The researchers have declined to analyze how much carbon dioxide was released in the production, transportation, and dumping of the sodium hydroxide, making it impossible to know whether the technology even reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”
Despite these lingering questions, said FOE, the EPA has issued tentative approval for a permit for the experiment, with a public comment period open until July 1.
The caustic sodium hydroxide solution the researchers plan to use, warns FOE, “causes chemical burns upon contact with skin or marine animals, setting the stage for potentially extreme damage to local ecosystems.”
Benjamin Day, FOE’s senior campaigner for its Climate and Energy Justice Program, said the group “unequivocally” opposes the LOC-NESS geoengineering experiment in the fragile ecosystem off the coast of Cape Cod.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles,” said Day.
Mary Church, geoengineering campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, said “speculative technologies” like OAE are “a dangerous distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis,” which scientists around the world agree requires a rapid reduction in planet-heating fossil fuel emissions through a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources.
“Marine geoengineering does nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth,” said Church. “Outdoor experiments could not only cause immediate harm to marine life but are also a slippery slope to potentially catastrophic impacts of large-scale deployment.”
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has placed a moratorium on geoengineering techniques like OAE until there is “adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic, and cultural impacts.”
Editor‘s note: This review from the book “Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet” talks about why the energy transition from fossil fuels to so-called renewable energy is slow and not that profitable. We at DGR believe it is not a transition – worldwide we see an increase in fossil fuel consumption. But the use of electricity from wind and solar power increases are just as strong, especially by digital companies like Amazon whose carbon emissions go up while powering with electricity. The public should get much more skeptical towards the “energy transition” and question the profit-making energy corporations.
Review of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’ by Brett Christophers.
Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No: completely wrong.
The fallacy that ‘market forces’ can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, a highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.
Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, Christophers argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.
Zeitgeist
Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.
The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains.
The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this ‘externality’ in prices.
This narrative became paramount against the background of neoliberal reforms: electricity companies were broken up into parts, typically for generation, transmission, distribution and supply; private ownership and competition in markets became the norm.
However prices do not and can not reflect all the economic factors that drive corporate decision-making.
Smooth
The measure that has become standard, the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), is the average cost of a unit of electricity produced by different methods. But for renewables, 80 percent-plus of this cost is upfront capital investment – and the fate of many renewables projects hinges on whether banks and other financial institutions are prepared to lend money to cover that cost. And on the rates at which they are prepared to lend.
The volatility of wholesale electricity markets does not help: project developers and bankers alike have to hedge against that. “We don’t like to absorb power price volatility”, one of the many financiers that Christophers interviewed for the book said. “We’ll take merchant price risk – right now we often don’t have a choice – but we’ll charge three times more for it. […] No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns”.
Christophers writes in an exemplary, straightforward way about markets’ complexities. He details the hurdles any renewables project has to get over before it starts: as well as securing finance, it needs land and associated rights and licences, and – increasingly a problem in many countries including the UK – a timely connection to the electricity grid.
If we confront, confound and supercede capitalism a future in which electricity is used equitably and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change is surely plausible.
Corporate and financial decision-makers are concerned not so much with costs, compared to those of fossil fuel plants, as with “an acceptable rate of financial return”. Does the project meet or exceed that rate?
“The conventional transition model […] assumes an effortlessly smooth trade-off between fossil fuels and renewable electricity sources, just as stick-figure mainstream economics more widely assumes all manner of comparable smooth trade-offs, not least between present and future goods.
“But real-world processes of production and consumption involving real-world businesses do not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs.”
Revival
The clearest illustration of the argument that profit is the main driver of investment, not price, is the big oil companies’ behaviour.
Christophers writes: “[T]he returns ordinarily associated with wind and solar power are much lower than those to which fossil fuel companies are accustomed in their core businesses.”
He adds: “The big new hydrocarbon projects still being initiated by the international oil majors in the 2020s, in the face of widespread public fury and dismay, promise significantly higher rates of return – and, of course, on a significantly greater absolute scale – than renewables ever do.”
So tiny renewables businesses are used solely to greenwash the companies’ continuing investment in fossil fuel production. Shell, which in 2020-22 dabbled in slightly larger renewables investments, found that the rate of return for shareholders was the lowest of all its businesses.
“Chastened by Wall Street’s savage indictment of his company’s erstwhile turn – effectively – away from profit, [Shell chief executive Wael] Sawan spent the first half of 2023 pivoting Shell back to oil and gas. Hence the horrific spectacle of a significant revival in upstream exploration activity on the part of the European majors, with Shell to the fore. […] At the same time, Shell and its peers were busily scrapping projects (including in wind) with ‘projections of weak returns’.”
Despite all this, renewable electricity generation is expanding. Christophers forensically dissects the economics, showing that ‘market forces’ have played little or no part in this.
Many renewables projects only go ahead when they have signed long-term sales agreements (power purchase agreements or PPAs), that shelter sellers from choppy markets and provide good PR (“green” credentials) for buyers.
In many countries, PPAs with utility companies that provide electricity to households are being superceded by those with corporate buyers of electricity, and above all big tech firms that wolf down electricity for data centres and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
And then there is state support – not only overt subsidies such as the tax credits offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act, but also schemes such as feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference, market instruments that shelter projects’ income from volatility.
China’s new megaprojects are “about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable”, Christophers writes. So too are those in Vietnam, mammoths given the total size of the economy, that soared with a special feed-in tariff in 2020, and slumped to zero in 2021 when it was withdrawn.
“That investment plummets when meaningful support for renewables investment is substantially or wholly removed demonstrates precisely how significant that support in fact, and also just how marginal – or even downright unappealing – revenue and profitability prospects, in the absence of such support, actually are.”
Pretences
Christophers concludes that the state has to champion rapid decarbonisation, and “extensive public ownership of renewable energy assets appears the most viable model”. But this should not be done in a fool’s paradise, where it is presented as a means for taking profits from renewable electricity generators (what profits?!) and returning them to the public purse.
This is how the Labour Party is portraying its proposed state-owned renewable electricity generator, Great British Energy. Labour’s claims that GBE will benefit the state and taxpayers “betray a deep and perilous misunderstanding of the economics of renewable energy, and of the weak and uncertain profitability that actually plagues the sector”.
By way of contrast, Christophers points to the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the US state of New York in 2021 in response to years of campaigning by climate action groups – which rests on the assumption that it is precisely the market’s failure to produce renewable energy projects on anything near to the timescale suggested by the climate emergency that necessitates state intervention.
All this prompts the question: don’t we need to challenge the whole idea of electricity being a commodity for sale, rather than a requirement of 21st-century living that should be provided as a public service?
Yes, we do, Christophers writes in his conclusions, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s idea of “fictitious commodities”, that under capitalism are bought and sold, but only in markets that are fashioned by “props, rules, regulations and norms”, and are therefore essentially pretences. The description fits the electricity markets ushered in by neoliberalism well.
Monopoly
The commodification of electricity, and other energy carriers, raises the prospect that, with a perspective of confronting and superceding capitalism, it should be decommodified.
Renewables technologies have opened up this issue anew, since they have hastened the trend away from centralised power stations and made it easier than ever for people – not only through the medium of the state but as households, community organisations or municipalities – to source electricity from the natural environment, without recourse to the corporations that control the market. How this potential can be torn from those corporations’ hands is a central issue.
The analysis by Christophers of the “props, rules, regulations and norms” used to bring renewables to neoliberal markets certainly convinced me. So too did his point that the returns from developing oil and gas, relatively higher historically, “are not ‘natural’ economic facts” either.
On the contrary, government economic support has always characterised the oil and gas business: in fact the line between state and business is often blurred.
In many countries they are “the selfsame entities, actively assembling monopolistic or oligopolistic constrol specifically in order to subdue volatility, stabilise profits and encourage investment”; indeed these “established institutional architectures of monopoly power” that scaffold oil and gas are a key distinction between it and renewables.
Corporate
We badly need a comparative analysis of state support for renewables and for fossil fuels – not just the bare numbers, which are available in many reports, but an understanding of the social dynamics that drive it, and that are deliberately obscured by oceans of greenwash manufactured by the political class everywhere.
Themes that Christophers touches on, such as governments’ failure to phase out fossil fuel plants, even as they make plans to expand renewables need to be developed. The appallingly slow progress of renewables and the weight of incumbency that favours fossil fuels can not be separated.
This understandable book, which brings dry capitalist realities to life so well – and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the transition away from fossil fuels is so disastrously slow – raised some questions in my mind about electricity demand.
Take the steep increase in demand for renewably generated electricity from big tech. Amazon is the world’s biggest buyer of solar and wind power under corporate PPAs, and an even bigger promoter of its own “green” image. But its carbon footprint continues to grow, Christophers points out, especially that of its “energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business”.
A big-tech-dominated fake energy transition? “It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism.”
Trashing
Which is reason to interrogate the way society uses electricity – and the way that capitalist social relations turn use – to fulfil needs, to make people’s lives good into demand – an economic category no less ideologically-inflected than other ‘market forces’.
Amazon and the rest are sharply increasing their electricity demand, which in the US and elsewhere has led to shutdowns of coal-fired power station being postponed – while hundreds of millions of people in the global south still have no electricity at all.
Furthermore: the “green transition” envisaged by most politicians will see the economic sectors in the global north that gulp down the greatest quantities of fossil fuels – road transport, the built environment, and industry – switching many processes to electricity. The classic example is the shift from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. And this will increase electricity demand.
Christophers takes no view on these issues: “[R]ight or wrong, good or bad, electrification largely is what is happening and what will continue to happen”.
While I agree that, under capitalism, the dominant political forces take this for granted, I think that we should not. To stick with the example of road transport, none of the scenarios that assume swapping petrol vehicles one-for-one for electric vehicles can happen without trashing meaningful climate targets.
Catastrophic
The economic transformations that tackling climate change implies must include reshaping – for collective social benefit, and with a view to rapidly reducing emissions – the huge technological systems, like road transport, that account for the largest chunks of fossil fuel use. Simply electrifying them is not enough.
Moreover, with the current level of technology, including the prospects opened up by decentralised renewables, there is potential to establish completely new relationships between production and use – which are currently controlled by big capital, but need not be.
Hopes of energy conservation implied in the International Energy Agency’s latest net zero report “border on the Pollyannaish”, Christophers writes. Yes, granted – if the perspective is limited to one dominated by capital.
But insofar as it is possible to confront, confound and supercede capitalism, a future in which electricity is used less wastefully, more equitably, and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change, is surely plausible.
That is where hope lies – outside the matrix of profit-driven relationships that Christophers skewers so exquisitely.
Title photo by Matthew T Rader/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.
Editor’s Note: Brave activist throughout the world risk their lives to protect the environment. We honor and respect their courage and realize that they are truly heroes. May they remain safe and in our thoughts to give them strength to carry on. Are you working with an organization that protects the environment?
Over nearly 30 years, Carlos Zorrilla and the organizations he co-founded helped stop six companies from developing open-pit copper mining operations in the Intag Valley in Ecuador. As a leader and public figure, Zorrilla is often for advice from communities facing similar struggles, so in 2009 he published a guide on how to protect one’s community from mining and other extractive operations. The 60-page guide shares wisdom and resources, including mines’ environmental and health risks, key early warning signs a company is moving in, and advice on mitigating damage if a mine does go ahead. The most important point, Zorrilla says in an interview with Mongabay, is to stop mining before it starts. Carlos Zorrilla is a leader in what locals say is the longest continuous resistance movement against mining in Latin America.
Zorrilla’s family fled from Cuba to the U.S. in 1962 when he was 11 years old. He moved to the Intag Valley in Ecuador in the 1970s, citing his love for the cloud forest ecosystem there. Soon after he arrived, so did the first of the mining companies.
Over the following decades, Zorrilla and the organizations he co-founded, including DECOIN (Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag), helped block five transnational mining companies and a national company from developing operations in one of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems.
In the process, Zorrilla and community members say they faced personal threats, smear campaigns, arrests and violence. But the movement also notched historic wins, including a constitutional case upholding the rights of nature against Chilean state-owned miner Codelco and the Ecuadorian national mining company in 2023.
Community members holding a sign that says, “let’s save Intag.” Communities in Intag Valley have been resisting mining for nearly 30 years. Photo by Carlos Zorrilla.
As a leader and public figure, Zorrilla is often sought out for advice by people facing similar threats. In response, he and two co-authors published Protecting Your Community From Mining and Other Extractive Operations: A Guide for Resistance in 2009 and an updated version in 2016. (The guide is also available in Spanish, French and Bahasa Indonesian).
“After getting rid of two mining companies, I was constantly being asked how the hell we did it,” Zorrilla tells Mongabay. “Rather than keep answering individuals, I wrote the manual. It’s much easier to just say, ‘Read the manual!’”
The 60-page guide shares experiences and resources, including the environmental and health risks of mines, strategies to prevent mining before it starts, key early warning signs a company is moving in, and advice on mitigating damage if a mine goes ahead.
Zorrilla says the most important point is to stop mining before it starts. To emphasize this point, he also published Elements for Protecting Your Community from Mining and Other Extractive Industries, which focuses on preventing mining from gaining a foothold.
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“Stop the companies before they corrupt your communities and before they discover economically viable mineral deposits,” he says. “Once they start investing in exploratory activities it becomes progressively harder to get rid of them.”
Mining is a divisive issue within Indigenous and local communities. Some see economic benefits to address poverty, own their own mining projects, and highlight the need to negotiate better benefit-sharing agreements or collaborations with mining projects as a form of self-determination.
“But these memorandums only work with ethical mining companies and they are as rare as chicken teeth,” Zorrilla says.
Zorrilla’s opinions on mining are contentious. After the publication of the resistance guide, Ecuador’s president at the time, Rafael Correa, denounced it on public television as “destabilizing” and a foreign-led interference, in a move that Zorrilla says was “great publicity for the manual.”
Former Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, holds up Zorrilla’s resistance guide on public television in 2009, denouncing it as “destabilizing”.
As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, the demand for critical minerals to feed “clean” energy technologies such as electric cars is rising. Thus, mining is also increasing.
However, many experts say mining in Ecuador, especially in the Intag Valley, is just a bad idea. Aside from the earthquakes, rainfall, steep slopes and lack of infrastructure, it’s a country with a wealth of other options for development, such as ecotourism potential or sustainable agriculture.
“It’s really a poor choice to develop large-scale mining in such a rich country,” says William Sacher, professor and researcher at Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito, who studies large-scale mining and its impacts. “If you actually do the math just in terms of cost and benefit, if you take into account the costs of large-scale mining, they outweigh the benefits.”
Zorrilla’s work with DECOIN resisting mining as well as restoring forests and watersheds has been internationally recognized with awards, including the United Nations Development Programme’s Equator Prize in 2017. This year, Zorrilla won the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature’s award for defending nature’s rights.
It’s his connection to nature, he says, that keeps him motivated. “It is hard to put into words the connection I feel with the land and people, with the biological community I am part of,” he says. “What else could someone do that feels to be an integral part of a community? How could one not defend it against forces that would destroy it?”
In an interview with Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough, Zorrilla discusses the guide and his experiences.
An open pit copper mine in DRC. Image by Fairphone (CC BY S.A. 2.0)
Mongabay: What inspired you to write this guide?
Carlos Zorrilla: I think two main reasons motivated me to write the guide. The first and most important was that we had gone through a lot in confronting a Japanese and a Canadian mining company in the 1990s and the early 2000s and had to do so without any idea of how to go about it. I kept wishing there was some concrete information on the best ways for communities to confront the presence of these companies. Much as I looked around, I was unable to find anything.
I thought other communities could benefit from our experience in successfully standing up to two transnational mining corporations and blocking mining development in our area (as of early 2024, civil society in Intag has been able to block five transnational mining companies and a national one from opening a mine).
The second reason is much more practical. After getting rid of two mining companies, I was constantly being asked how the hell we did it. Rather than keep answering individuals, I wrote the manual. It’s much easier to just say, “Read the manual!”
Mongabay: You mention that preventing a project in the exploration phase is much easier than stopping it once mining has started. What are some early warning signs that communities should look out for?
Carlos Zorrilla: First, it helps to clarify why it’s so much more difficult to stop a mine once it has opened. A large mining company can incur hundreds of millions of dollars in exploration costs — costs that, in most cases, the country issuing the licenses could be held liable for if the mining company is unable to develop the mining site. This is a result of a country signing bilateral investment treaties with other countries to protect the investments of private companies.
So, in essence, the more a company invests in a project, the more expensive it is for a signatory country to pay off the mining company to go home.
The other reason is that the longer a mining company is a territory, the more likely they are to learn how to co-opt people and institutions, and they waste no time doing so. It’s similar to contracting cancer or other similar diseases: you’ve got to treat its soon as possible, otherwise it becomes deadly or ravages your body so badly that it becomes unable to defend itself.
Another reason it is imperative to stop a company in its initial stage or before is that the longer a mining company explores, the greater the possibility of finding an economically viable ore deposit. If they are successful, companies are much more likely to convince governments to allow all permits and look the other way in cases of illegal activities. It is also much easier for the company to find investors if they can show they have a viable mine to develop.
Mongabay: What are the first signs a company is interested in exploring territory?
Carlos Zorrilla: You may find strange people wandering around the community asking questions. Another is if you suddenly find that private individuals start to buy large tracts of land. Your community could be subjected to social and economic surveys carried out by a government agency under the guise of social or economic development or identifying health needs.
Keep in mind that it’s essential for the companies to find out as much as they can about the communities and the inhabitants they will be dealing with. This also goes for local government needs. For example, they may identify basic needs, such as the lack of basic health services, road and school infrastructure that needs repairing, lack of safe drinking water, etc. Once these needs are mapped out, they will offer the community and/or subnational governments financial help to address them. They often even offer to create so-called development groups or organizations, such as farming co-ops or women’s groups, and provide initial funding to address some of the needs. Companies may sign financial agreements with local or state governments to help cover the costs of supplying communities with basic necessities.
Needless to say, the funding always has strings attached to it, the least of which is that the subnational governments and community groups support the mining company’s presence and, later, the development of the mine.
The most important thing to remember is that the main objective of the companies is to create complete dependency on what they provide, whether it is jobs, road maintenance, drinking water, or basic health services. The inhabitants become so accustomed to having the services provided by the companies that they forget that they have lived without these things all their lives or that it is the state or national government’s responsibility to provide them. The dependency can become so instituted that the locals stop petitioning the local or national governments to provide the services and rely solely on the companies. This can also apply to subnational governments, especially when the national governments purposely reduce their funding as a strategy for the mining projects to gain support from the local populace.
At the same time, the companies are gathering basic information about the community, they are also identifying key players within the community. These are persons who have influence or could be groomed to hold a position of authority. They are the first ones co-opted. It could be someone successful in business or a well-respected community leader. They, in turn, will do a lot of the work for the company, such as convincing their neighbors that mining is the best way for the community and families to get out of poverty. Or it’s really silly not to accept the company’s support to build that road everyone always wanted. That propaganda is infinitely more effective when espoused by individuals you know and respect.
Community members in Intag protest mining in the forest. Image courtesy of Carlos Zorrilla.
Mongabay: What do you believe are some of the best ways to stop a mine before it starts?
Carlos Zorrilla: The best way to know what you’re up against is to find out all that you can about the company: things like who the owners are, the company’s history, main sources of funding, and where the company’s stocks are traded (if it is a publicly traded company).
Once you know all that you can about the company, your main objective is to stop it before it starts gathering information, hiring community members, or buying land — certainly before it holds meetings in your community.
As soon as you suspect a company is interested in your territory, hold public meetings or assemblies where, hopefully, most of the community’s adult population can participate in deciding whether to meet with the company. It can help to invite knowledgeable people to discuss some of the problems the community will have to face if they open the door to mining.
It is absolutely essential that no one accepts meetings with company officials or government employees promoting mining development unless it’s in a public setting with everyone from the community invited.
It is strongly recommended that the bylaws of the community include provisions for any approval of activities affecting the natural environment or social peace of the community be approved by two-thirds majority of the community members. It is dangerous to let the board members of the community (president, vice president, secretary, etc.) represent the community when it comes to allowing activities that could have such terrible and long-lasting social and environmental impacts.
Mongabay: The guide says mining companies use many tactics to divide communities and quell opposition. What’s the most difficult company tactic to counter that you’ve encountered? What should communities be aware of?
Carlos Zorrilla: The companies can use multiple tactics to neutralize the opposition. We’ve experienced just about all. Anywhere from making up criminal lawsuits to try to imprison effective opposition leaders and hiring paramilitaries to violently access the mining site, to death threats, outright buying community leaders, to terrible smear campaigns aimed at discrediting resistance leaders and/or the organizations that support the communities.
Then there are soft tactics. One of the hardest to counter is the easy money that the companies offer to the leaders and, eventually, community members when they start working for the company. This is especially effective in areas where making a living off the land is difficult.
Needless to say, this will lure people away from the fields and the normally hard work that is agriculture. Remember, the company offers steady paychecks, often accompanied by social security and health coverage. One of the things we must do is point out that these jobs will not last more than a few years or until the mine opens. Only qualified personnel are required once a mine opens, with few exceptions. But the company will never admit to it.
Communities have to know what the sacrifices are of accepting the jobs the companies offer. These include very often permanent, ongoing social conflicts; it could also lead to the relocation of whole communities to make room for the mine and its infrastructure, possibly contamination of water sources, desecrating sacred lands, and direct impacts on sustainable activities like ecotourism or agroecological farming.
It’s also been documented that there is more delinquency and violence surrounding mining projects, among many other negative impacts. The impacts are especially hard on women. Most mining jobs go to men, worsening economic inequality within households. Women often have to replace men’s work in the fields, adding even more stress to their daily lives. There also tends to be more health problems from STDs, plus more interfamily violence in mining sites.
So, when mining companies come offering jobs, communities have to consider all the impacts, not just look at the positive aspects.
That is why it is so important not to let the company get this far. Communities have to know that mining companies and government officials lie when it comes to convincing communities about mining. That is one of the most important messages. They have to lie because if they were to tell the truth about the social and environmental impacts of mining, not a single person in the community would support them.
In this light, it’s important to invite knowledgeable persons and community members from other communities that have suffered at the hands of mining companies to share with the communities what really goes on when mining companies roll into your community.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
Editor’s Note: Civilization is killing the planet. DGR believes that nature must be protected from civilization. Nature can come back from the damage that people have done but first the destruction must stop. While people can not survive without nature, nature does not need people to survive, but it could use some help to repair the damage done. That requires activism from ordinary people to counter the extractive greed of the profit motive. This is why we must organize and survive to fight another day.
Although DGR agrees with much of this article we make note that the opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service or its staff.
Climate activist Clover Hogan says environmental activists face growing challenges not just from outside their movements, but also from within.
She shares how the prevalence of unpaid labor can make young activists’ lives even more difficult in the present while they advocate for a more livable future.
Add to that criticism for perceived imperfections over lifestyle choices and infighting between colleagues that can lead some to choose not to identify as activists at all, or leave movements altogether, she says.
On this episode of the podcast, Hogan discusses these challenges in addition to direct and existential threats that environmental defenders face worldwide, and how she thinks more inclusive and effective activism can be fostered.
There’s “this myth [of] perfection within activism and I think that’s something that sort of barricades lots of people, whether they consider themselves activists or not, from even engaging in the issues,” says Clover Hogan, a climate activist and founder of the youth-led nonprofit Force of Nature.
In addition to increased criminalization of protests worldwide, environmental activists face a wide range of difficult social, financial and physical risks to their lives and careers. These are challenges Hogan speaks about on this latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
Listen here:
Hogan also speaks candidly with fellow activists about the challenges activists face both outside and within environmental spaces on the third season of her Force of Nature Podcast, Confessions of a Climate Activist, highlighting the paradoxical standards that activists are held to, when the systems upon which societies are structured make alternative lifestyle choices a near impossibility.
“It’s no accident that we spend so much of our time thinking about our individual lifestyles and not thinking about how do we actually hold these systems accountable,” she says. “One of the ways that we’ve tackled that and addressed it in the podcast is with climate confessions [to] point at how silly it is that we feel guilty about [our] individual actions … against the scale of the problem that is, frankly, being driven by these huge organizations.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.
Banner image: Clover Hogan (center) speaking in Paris, France. Photo courtesy of Clover Hogan.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.
Editor’s note: Fishermen are engaging resistance against the natural gas industry and its expansion of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals. They aim to defend their traditional work that goes back hundreds of years, their fishing habitats, and the health of their community. Europe, especially Germany, has increased its demand for LNG since refusing to buy gas from Russia when the attack on the Ukraine started. Texan gas company Cheniere delivered 70 percent of its natural gas supply to Europe last year.
At the border coast between Lousiana and Texas there is magnificent biodiversity which is barely found anywhere else in the US, such as marshes, coastal prairies and rare species like white alligators and brown pelicans. Nearly half of US wetlands in are in Louisiana.
Their LNG terminals are polluting air, the water and the soil, which is completely legal. They need to be stopped for good. This can only happen through a decrease in both economic growth and energy addiction, the elephant in the room that politicians and business people don’t want to talk about.
We wholeheartedly support this resistance against the gas conference. At the same time, we need to distinguish between subsistence fishing and commercial fishing. Subsistence fishing is a way of life where a community fishes in order for its survival. They share an understanding that their way of life is intricately intertwined with the health of the fish community. As a result, their intent is to fish in amounts that would not harm the river or oceanic community.
Commercial fishing, on the other hand, is driven by commercial interests and is, as a result, insatiable. Since the advent of industrial fishing, more than 90 percent of large fish in the ocean are gone. This ecocide is normalised as shifting baseline syndrome. In the seventeenth century, cod (from which cod liver oil was extracted) was so plentiful in the Northwest Atlantic that there was a saying that you could walk across the ocean on their backs. As a result of commercial fishing, these cod are nearing extinction. As a biophilic organization, DGR’s primary allegiance lies with the natural communities. We are against any action that harms the natural world, including commercial fishing.
In the current context of overshoot, there is also a need to reevaluate subsistence fishing. Subsistence fishing of an abundant species does not harm the fish community. However, since commercial fishing has endangered many of those once abundant species, subsistence fishing of these now endangered species might even lead to extinction.
Frontline Fishers Force Early End to New Orleans Gas Conference
Frontline fishers and environmental justice advocates forced the meeting of the Americas Energy Summit in New Orleans to end two hours early on Friday, as they protested what the buildout of liquefied natural gas infrastructure is doing to Gulf Coast ecosystems and livelihoods.
Fishers and shrimpers from southwest Louisiana say that new LNG export terminals are destroying habitat for marine life while the tankers make it unsafe for them to take their boats out in the areas where fishing is still possible. The destruction is taking place in the port of Cameron, which once saw the biggest catch of any fishing area in the U.S.
“We want our oystering back. We want our shrimp back. We want our dredges back. We want LNG to leave us alone,” Cameron fisherman Solomon Williams Jr. said in a statement. “With all the oil and all the stuff they’re dumping in the water, it’s just killing every oyster we can get. Makes it so we can’t sell our shrimp.”
The protest was part of the growing movement against LNG export infrastructure, which is both harming the health and environment of Gulf Coast residents and risks worsening the climate crisis: Just one of the more than 20 proposed new LNG terminals, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2, would release 20 times the lifetime emissions of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Activists have also planned a sit-in at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., from February 6-8 to demand the agency stop approving new LNG export terminals.
The Americas Energy Summit is one of the largest international meetings of executives involved in the exporting of natural gas. More than 40 impacted fishers brought their boats to New Orleans to park them outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where the meeting was being held. After a march from Jackson Square, the fishers revved their engines to disrupt the meeting. One attendee said the disruption forced the meeting to conclude at 11 am ET, two hours earlier than scheduled.
“Wen you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes.”
“They going to run us out of the channel and if they run us out of the channel then it’s over,” Phillip Dyson Sr., a fisherman who attended the protest with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, said in a statement. “We fight for them. We fight for my grandson. Been a fighter all my life. I ain’t going to stop now. So long as I got breathe I’m going to fight for my kids. They are the future. Fishing industry been here hundreds of years and now they’re trying to stop us. I don’t think it’s right.”
The fishers were joined by other local and national climate advocates, including Sunrise New Orleans, Permian Gulf Coast Coalition, Habitat Recovery Project, the Vessel Project, For a Better Bayou, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and actress and activist Jane Fonda.
“I thought I understood. I read the articles, I read the science, I’ve seen the photographs. But when you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes,” Fonda said at the protest. “I’ve talked to people who have lost what was theirs over generations and are losing their livelihoods, the fishing, the oystering, the shrimping…”
Fonda called on the Biden administration to take action: “If President [Joe] Biden declared a climate emergency he could take money from the Pentagon and he could reinstate the crude oil export [ban]. Once the export ends, the drilling will end. They’re only drilling because they can export it.”
The successful action came despite interference from police, who threatened to issue tickets and tow away the six boats the fishers had originally parked in front of the convention center. Some participants agreed to move their boats, but the group was able to park two boats in front of the center and persevere in their protest.
“We’re standing in the fire down there. And these people over here, the decisions that they make, for which our fishermen are paying the price. That’s bullshit,” Travis Dardar, who organized the fishers’ trip and founded the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH), said in a statement.” The police got us blocked here, they got us blocked there. But know that the fishermen are here and we’re still going to try and give them hell.”
