Featured image: Local residents and kids enjoy the recreational benefits of the flowing river resulting from the planned water releases. PHOTO COURTESY OF RAISE THE RIVER, JESÚS SALAZAR
“It’s not only about wildlife, or birds and trees. It’s also about the people.”
In late spring, Antonia Torres González’ tears rolled freely at the rare sight before her: the Colorado River flowed again in what is usually a parched delta.
Torres González, a member of the Cucapá tribe who grew up in the river delta, couldn’t help but relive memories of childhood romps in the once-lush waterway in northwestern Mexico. “It was like seeing the river come back to life,” she says.
On May 1, 2021, the river once again flowed in its delta thanks to an agreement between the United States and Mexico dubbed Minute 323. Through Oct. 11, a total of 35,000 acre-feet of water (11.4 billion gallons) will be released downstream from Morelos Dam on the U.S.-Mexico border to quench the thirst of this long-withered ecosystem.
The mammoth endeavor to rejuvenate the river delta was years in the making and involved dozens of people, including water managers, policymakers, scientists, conservationists, and nonprofits from both sides of the border.
In March 2014, a planned release from Morelos Dam sent water into the dry Colorado River Delta, connecting this river to the sea for the first time in many years. Photo courtesy of Raise the River, Peter McBride.
“We provide a lot of brainpower and blood, sweat, and tears, and commitment to this,” says Nancy Smith, Colorado River Program conservation director at the Nature Conservancy.
A History Dried Up
The decadeslong deterioration of the Colorado River Delta began with the diversion of most of its water to farms and growing city populations in the United States, and by the early 1960s, very little flow made it to the river’s lower reaches. Under a 1944 treaty, 1.5 million acre-feet of water—about 10% of the river’s annual flow—was required to reach Mexico each year, though most of that drenches farmland in the valley of Mexicali, Baja California, without ever reaching the delta that should reconnect the river to the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez.
From the air, the green of a restored site provides a stark contrast to the arid landscape of today’s Colorado River Delta. Photo courtesy of Raise the River, Jesús Salazar.
Recent agreements between the countries, including this year’s pulse as well as another eight-week pulse of water back in 2014, ensure collaboration in restoring the delta and managing river water, sharing surpluses and shortages.
The restoration work that grassroots organizers jump-started in the delta region some two decades ago—including the removal of nonnative vegetation and reforestation of thousands of acres of willow, cottonwood, and mesquite trees—would in time become a key factor in the cross-border undertaking. “We had a vision that someday the Colorado River could be connected again to the sea and to local communities,” says Francisco Zamora of the Sonoran Institute in Tucson, Arizona. The nonprofit, which also has offices in Mexicali, works with communities to revive dying ecosystems.
Beginning in May 2021, strategic releases of water into the network of restoration sites in the Colorado River Delta were designed to maximize the impact of limited resources. Photo courtesy of Raise the River, Jesús Salazar.
To see the river flowing into the delta today, albeit temporarily, gives him hope that local communities may one day again rely on it for sustenance and recreation. Over the years, restoration work not only has provided local residents with jobs, but also inspired them to believe that the delta can flourish again. Zamora says seeing the river flowing has reinforced that notion, even for young people who had never seen it happen before.
“It’s not only about wildlife, or birds and trees,” he says. “It’s also about the people.”
People-Centered Conservation
Torres González remembers the Colorado River delta as an abundant source of water that sustained multiple generations of Cucapá families living on its banks. “When I was a child, the river was still flowing,” she says. “We bathed in it, we played games, we fished there. We used to drink water from the river, and most of our families used the water to do the wash and for other household chores.”
Gradually, the fish and the water flows diminished, as did the lush, native trees, and other vegetation that families traditionally used for food and medicine, recalls the tribal elder who now lives in a Mexicali neighborhood. “We no longer consume what grew naturally in the wetlands that were there,” Torres González says.
This year’s water delivery will allow nearby communities to enjoy the river again for five months, and directly benefits about 700 acres of restored landscape, Zamora says. “This is an area where you can find many species of birds and some are what we call target species, like the yellow-billed cuckoo.” To thrive, target species require mature cottonwood and willow forest, so their presence in the delta is a good indicator that the habitat is improving and suitable for such birds, he says.
The Laguna Grande Interpretive Center explains the strategic restoration process implemented at this site by the Sonoran Institute. Photo courtesy of Raise the River, Lynne Bairstow.
The Sonoran Institute and the Nature Conservancy are part of Raise the River, a coalition of environmental groups from Mexico and the U.S. working to restore the river delta. “The Colorado River Delta used to cover 2 million acres,” Smith says. “It was this vast, watery landscape teeming with birds—really quite extraordinary.”
Smith has no doubt the delta can make a comeback. “One of the really wonderful things we learned from the 2014 pulse flow is that with water, the ecosystem responds,” she says. “The birds return, the cottonwoods and willow trees return, the local and migratory birds have increased—many of which are endangered.”
The 2014 pulse flow released downstream, known as Minute 319, was roughly 105,000 acre-feet of water (about 1% of the river’s annual flow) and transformed the dry delta into a river again for eight weeks. Subsequent scientific studies showed the water release was a boost to vegetation, greening restoration areas and increasing certain bird species—at least for a while. Even though the abundance of birds later diminished, levels remained higher than before 2014, according to a 2018 report from the International Boundary and Water Commission.
By mid-June 2021, the strategic releases of water enabled the Colorado River to once again connect with the Gulf of Mexico, reviving its dormant estuary. Photo courtesy of Raise the River, Jesús Salazar.
Lessons learned from the first water surge helped design the current water delivery to maximize benefits to the delta, Smith says. To keep the water from seeping into the ground early on, which happened in 2014, existing irrigation canals are being used to direct the flow toward restoration sites. Nonprofits and grassroots groups also fund on-the-ground projects in the delta and contribute donor resources to match those of the U.S. and Mexico governments.
“We work hand in hand with the government to do all the science necessary to make sure that we keep making progress and to make sure that whatever environmental water comes across the border is put to the best use,” Smith says.
A Hopefully Wetter Future
For Torres González, seeing the river flowing again, if only briefly, restores her hope in the delta’s resiliency—just like it did her mother, Inocencia González, before she died in June 2021.
“It would benefit us a lot if the water reaches the delta regularly again,” she says. “In this water flow we saw that there were a lot of small fish that could have grown in this river, and it would’ve meant good fishing for the Cucapá.”
As drought and climate change further strain a dwindling Colorado River and other natural resources around the globe, Smith says, international agreements may become more important. She hopes the U.S.-Mexico collaboration will bring about similar arrangements elsewhere.
“If we can restore the river, it will benefit a lot of people, but it also shows that we can protect nature, we can restore nature,” she says. “And if we can do it in the Colorado River, we can do it in other parts of the world.”
LOURDES MEDRANO is an independent writer covering the U.S.-Mexico border. She focuses on illegal immigration, underserved communities, the environment, health, and matters of importance in both the U.S. and neighboring Mexico. She previously worked for daily newspapers, including the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. She is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, NAHJ, and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Lourdes is based in Tucson, Arizona, and speaks English and Spanish. She can be reached via Twitter direct message or LinkedIn.
The world’s biggest furniture retailer, Ikea, has for years sold children’s furniture made from wood linked to illegal logging in protected forests in Russia, an Earthsight investigation has found.
The brand’s popular Sundvik children’s range are among the items likely tainted with illegal wood. Investigators estimate that shoppers around the world have on average been purchasing an Ikea product containing the suspect Russian lumber every two minutes.
Using undercover meetings, visits to logging sites, satellite imagery analysis and scrutiny of official documents, court records and customs data, Earthsight traced wooden furniture on sale in Ikea stores around the world to forests in Siberia, finding that they were controlled by companies owned by one of Russia’s wealthiest politicians, Evgeny Bakurov.
This article originally appeared in Mongabay.
Featured image: Evgeny Bakurov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen-politicians, ranked 44th on a Forbes list of Russia’s highest-earning civil servants or legislators in 2019. Source: Forbes.ru / Earthsight
Ikea has allegedly been sourcing timber for its products from Russian companies engaged in illegal logging of pine trees in Russia’s protected Siberian boreal forests, a new investigation has revealed.
In a year-long probe by London-based investigative group Earthsight, the Swedish flatpack furniture manufacturer was the most well-known of several Western firms found to have sourced lumber for its products from ExportLes Group, a collection of companies owned by Evgeny Bakurov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen-politicians.
Bakurov reportedly once boasted that an Ikea representative said the company chose to do business with him because he sent Ikea “logs faster than we can transfer the money.”
“Earthsight estimates that shoppers have been purchasing an Ikea product containing the suspect Russian lumber somewhere on earth every two minutes,” the group said.
Ikea said it had ended purchases from ExportLes in June after Earthsight shared its findings with the company, though it maintained the timber was “legally harvested” and said it had dropped Bakurov’s firm from its list of suppliers over unspecified “practices of concern”.
Russia’s boreal forests, also known as the taiga, include a majority of the world’s conifers and store about half of the northern hemisphere’s terrestrial carbon, so play a vital role in regulating climate change. The country is one of the world’s largest timber exporters, shipping almost a quarter of all lumber traded globally in 2019.
ExportLes had justified its logging of the trees in a protected area through a process known as “sanitary felling”, where loggers falsely claim trees are already dead, diseased, dying or damaged and so need to be cleared to preserve a forest’s health.
In late June, Ikea said it was placing a temporary ban on sourcing timber from firms engaged in “sanitary felling” in Russia’s Far East and Siberia.
Bakurov, a prominent figure in Russia’s Irkutsk region, had managed to secure the stamp of approval of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading global sustainable timber certification body. Bakurov did not respond to the findings.
But Earthsight’s investigation alleges that the politician had signed several illegal deals to secure harvesting rights to more than 2 million cubic meters of timber in protected forests.
In response to the findings, the FSC denied wrongdoing but also invalidated Bakurov’s certifications.
According to the report, many of the trees entered the Ikea product chain primarily via an Indonesian manufacturer that supplies stores in western Europe and North America. Russian and Chinese intermediaries were also used.
Many of the products likely made with the illegal timber were marketed for children, the findings showed, with Earthsight drawing attention to the popular Sindvik line of children’s furniture.
A previous Earthsight investigation, published last year, linked the FSC and Ikea to the sale of illegally sourced wood from Ukraine.
“These are systemic problems, requiring systemic solutions, which go beyond one buyer, one supplier or one country,” Sam Lawson, Earthsight’s director, said in a statement. “Governments in Europe and the US need to act urgently to stem the flow of stolen wood once and for all.”
Welcome to the cruel world of wildlife killing contests, family events where children play amidst piles of slaughtered animals—and legal in 42 states.
Featured image: Killing contest contestants bring their dead coyotes to be weighed and counted, Williamsport Fire Department, Williamsport, Indiana, December 6, 2020. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
By Katie Stennes
You would really have to try hard to find anything more depraved than a wildlife killing contest, which targets coyotes, foxes, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons, crows and even wolves and cougars in some states, for the sake of a prize that could range from cash to hunting equipment. These contests are responsible for the mindless killing of an inconceivable number of animals, all under the guise of sport.
Contests like these should be relegated to history books; instead, these events still take place in nearly all of the 42 states where wildlife killing contests are legal and result in the killing of thousands of animals every year.
Participants in these events, billed as family-friendly and often sponsored by bars, churches, firehouses and other local groups, compete with each other for prizes for killing the largest or smallest animal or the highest number of animals. Hundreds of animals may be slaughtered during a single contest. After the bloody piles of animals are weighed, prizes are awarded and the celebration ends, the bodies of the dead animals are often dumped like trash. Contestants frequently use cruel electronic calling devices to lure animals in for an easy kill and then shoot them with high-powered rifles—including AR-15s.
Referring to a custom-built rifle, a competitor in the De Leon Pharmacy and Sporting Goods’ Varmint Hunt told an investigator from my organization, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), that these rifles, “they’re like a .22-250 on steroids.” He had just used the rifle to gun down animals during the 21-hour contest that culminated in the pharmacy’s parking lot on a January morning in Texas. The rifles are “not very fur-friendly,” he added as he stood over a row of bloody bodies he had killed. “I wouldn’t use something like that if you want to save the fur.” To illustrate his point, he nudged a coyote, bragging, “I shot this one up here in the throat from high up and it blew out the whole bottom of his chest.”
Other participants at the contest unloaded more dead animals from the trucks, which were outfitted for prime killing with raised decks, cushioned chairs and gun mounts. A team of three men, who called themselves “Dead On,” won the event, killing five coyotes, two bobcats, a fox and a raccoon. Contest organizers handed out more than $3,000 in prize money.
At another killing contest in December 2020 that took place 1,000 miles north of Texas, an HSUS investigator saw firefighters helping to drag dead coyotes to the weighing station in the parking lot of the fire department in Williamsport, Indiana. The grand prize went to those who killed the five heaviest coyotes, with side pots awarded to those who killed the greatest number of coyotes, the “big dog” and the “small dog” (referring to the size of the coyotes). The winning team, which had all its teammates dressed in matching jackets, killed about 16 of the roughly 60 animals lined up for display when the contest ended. One competitor told investigators from the HSUS that he used an AR-15 rifle with night vision, adding, “I enjoy it.”
Some of these contests are high stakes. At the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest in January, participants vied for $148,120 in prize money. The jackpot for “Most Grey Fox” killings went to a four-man team that killed 81 foxes in 23 hours.
Competitors spend thousands of dollars on equipment to achieve an almost absurd advantage. Electronic calling devices amplified across a field by a loudspeaker lure unsuspecting animals into the open using the sounds of dependent young in distress. These animals can hardly be expected to compete with a team of people armed with spotlights and AR-15-style weapons fitted with precision thermal night vision scopes that “troll” habitat areas, obliterating anything that comes their way.
Killing contests have a cousin in the old-school pigeon shoots—another contest based on indiscriminate animal slaughter. At a pigeon shoot, the birds are stuffed into spring-loaded boxes, thrust into the air at the shooter’s command and then shot from a short distance—all for thrills and prizes. Only one state—Pennsylvania—still openly holds these pigeon shoots.
Just like pigeon shooters, participants in wildlife killing contests spout false claims that they’re doing some act of service for society by ridding the landscape of animals they deem as “varmints” and “pests.” But it is a fact that these events are for fun and games and serve no legitimate wildlife management purpose. The best available science shows that randomly killing animals, especially coyotes, creates problems where there were none.
It sounds counterintuitive but killing coyotes causes them to proliferate. In an unexploited coyote pack, typically only the dominant pair reproduces. Kill off a few members, and the pack splinters apart to find other mates. More breeding pairs means more coyotes—and this adds yet another wrinkle. While most coyotes avoid livestock and prefer to munch on rodents, more pups mean more mouths to feed, forcing adult coyotes to find easier targets like sheep just to survive.
It’s a “paradoxical relationship”—kill more coyotes, lose more livestock. Haphazardly removing coyotes who haven’t been proven to threaten livestock before leaves voids that may be filled by coyotes who are more likely to prey on livestock. Most coyotes can even serve as “guard coyotes” for ranchers, keeping other carnivores at bay.
Native carnivores like coyotes and foxes provide a range of free ecological services to our communities—including controlling rodent and rabbit populations, indirectly contributing to the boosting of plant and bird biodiversity, and scavenging animal carcasses, which keeps our environment clean—and removing them en masse upsets the natural balance of our ecosystems.
We can’t make wildlife management decisions based on anecdotes or intuition or cater to misinformation that competitors use to justify their actions—we must follow the science. State wildlife agencies recognize that ethics must come into play, too. The Arizona Game and Fish Commissionoutlawed these killing contests in 2019. When the commission was still considering the ban, its chairman, Jim Zieler, who is also a hunter, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “There has been a lot of social outcry against this, and you can kind of understand why. It’s difficult to stand up and defend a practice like this.” Sportsmen and state wildlife agency professionals and commissioners across the country have echoed similar sentiments, and some have noted that these contests are damaging the reputation of hunters and jeopardizing the future of hunting. It’s a reasonable fear—society’s values about wildlife are shifting in favor of greater harmony with nature.
Making matters worse, the pandemic has added another element: virtual competitions where the killing persists but the judging and participation are online. Contestants living anywhere in the United States can submit videos of the animals they have killed nearby, and in these videos the contestants are seen shaking the bodies of the dead animals to show that they have been killed recently. These virtual competitions have also led to new prize categories like “best video of a kill.” People from more than 40 states have joined these contest websites, including from states where the contests have been banned. These virtual events take place nearly every weekend.
We certainly can’t let this continue without challenge, especially since many hunters share the growing public disdain for wildlife killing contests. They understand that no animal’s life should be taken in this cruel manner, and like countless other Americans, they believe that there are limits to what we should permit when it comes to the treatment and use of animals.
The good news is that bills and regulations to prohibit wildlife killing contests are emerging at both the federal and state levels. The reasons to ban these events are supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who oppose these contests will have increasing opportunities to register their viewpoints and convictions about this senseless killing of American wildlife, in letters to Congress and to state legislatures and state wildlife management agencies (contact your HSUS state director to find out what’s happening in your state), and to their local government. Wildlife is important to everyone, and our public policies and practices should reflect that.
Katie Stennes is the program manager for wildlife protection at the Humane Society of the United States. She has worked in the animal protection field for over eight years.
Editor’s note: We are very thankful to George Price for his wonderful review of the book Bright Green Lies.
Book Review: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert
By George Price, originally published on his blog learningearthways.
This book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, will probably be the most important book published anywhere in 2021, on the most important issue facing all Life on Earth—why we must end the prevailing human economic and industrial practices and the anthropocentric cultural worldviews. It will probably also be the most reviled, attacked, suppressed, censored, dismissed, misrepresented, and slandered book published this year, as well, for some of the same reasons that many people virulently attacked and censored the documentary film, “Planet of the Humans,” last year. Why?
The authors answer the question of why these facts are so difficult to hear, and why they are also so difficult for many of us reluctant messengers to tell, at many points throughout their book, including this passage from the chapter on green energy storage:
“We are being sold a story, and we are buying it because we like it. We want it to be true. We want to believe that our lives can go on with all the ease and comfort we accept as our due. How painless to believe that a simple switch of wind for oil and solar for coal and we can go on with our air conditioning and cell phones and suburbs. Every time we hit a trip wire of unsettling facts or basic math, we soothe ourselves with our faith in technology. If all that stands between us and the end of the world is a battery that can store 46 MJ/kg, surely someone is working on it.”
Most modern humans have been taught all of their lives, by most of the voices of their culture, that their own comfort, pleasure, purpose, social standing, legacy, avoidance of pain, and continued survival depend upon the perpetuation of, and their conformity to, western industrial technological capitalist civilization. That teaching has been reinforced within their psyches by a long series of painful and pleasurable personal experiences. Therefore, they do not want to hear convincing, factual arguments which clearly demonstrate that nearly everything that they have been taught to value and have devoted their lives to is intertwined within a path toward the imminent destruction, collapse, and extinction of not only their so-called “way of life,” but also the real, natural world upon which all biological life on Earth depends. Besides that, most humans of this culture and era do not want to hear that there is no viable and actually existing technological “fix” for this predicament—which the authors of Bright Green Lies make painfully clear—and many do not want anybody else to hear or declare that either. In addition to all of that, most modern, capitalist, technophile humans are not (yet) prepared to engage with the solutions offered in this book: ending most industrial technological activities and allowing Nature and the few humans who still have such knowledge to teach us how to live without those destructive entities, by her truly sustainable laws and systems, (like we did for 97% of the time of our species’ existence), thus enabling all that remains of natural Life to heal and continue. Bright Green Lies also asks its readers—especially those who identify themselves as “environmentalists” or “environmental activists”—to face up to the fact that they must choose whether they value and seek to protect what the authors refer to as the “real world” (the natural, life-giving, life-sustaining world), or, instead, protect the human-made civilizations that order and constrain their lives, because, with what the world has now come to, we cannot save both. Is such a potentially life-shattering choice more than most people can deal with, even when presented with an overwhelming preponderance of factual evidence persuading them that the choice is unavoidable?
Putting aside (for now) the human tendencies toward acting on faith, auto-conformity, or the herd mentality, and assuming that when making the most serious, life or death, joy-or-perpetual-misery types of decisions, most people will still place some value in actual facts and bother to do a little research, we should expect such people to proceed with such appropriate caution when determining how to answer the challenges presented in this book. Knowing that, and being acutely familiar with the reactions of many politically moderate/liberal, save-civilization-first (before the natural world) people to their previous publications and to similar publications by others, such as Ozzie Zehner’s Green Illusions, back in 2012, and to Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans documentary, the authors of Bright Green Lies obviously “did their homework,” while drawing also from their decades of expertise on these topics. Nearly every one of the 478 pages in this illuminating volume contain several footnotes citing a variety of relevant and reliable sources for the multitude of little-known, seldom-mentioned facts about the extent of toxic destruction and ecocide that are routine impacts from our commonly-engaged industrial technologies, as well as from the production of solar panels, wind turbines, lithium batteries and other products that are alleged to be “green” and even “100% renewable!” Beginning with solar power, and moving on from there to wind turbines, “green energy” storage (especially lithium), “efficiency,” recycling, “green” cities, “green” electric grids, hydropower, carbon capture, geoengineering, and several other false and misrepresented “solutions,” Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert repeatedly and clearly assist us in the difficult process of discerning and untangling truth from lies.
Here is a summary outline of some of the more potent revelations (for the not-yet-informed) brought forth in this book:
Promoters of solar, wind and other allegedly “green” technologies have repeatedly and misleadingly conflated the words “energy” and “electricity” when making their claims. The reason that is significant is that electric grid production, which is what solar, wind, hydropower and biofuels are primarily used for, makes up only about 20% (in Germany, the “green” energy technology advocates’ favorite showcase, 15% in the U.S., and ranging between 12 and 35 % elsewhere) of the actual total energy used to power the machinery of modern industrial society. So when they give a figure for how much of Germany’s “energy” is provided by “green renewables,” that figure has to be reduced by 80%–and that still might be too high, due to other falsehoods.
Of the 20% of energy use that goes to electricity (in Germany), only about 14.8% comes from “green renewables,” with wind accounting for 3.5 % and 1.6 % for solar, for a total of 5.1 % between them. (These are 2019 statistics, the most recent available when the book went to press.) Biomass (including logged forests) provides 7.6 % of Germany’s electricity; waste products incinerated along with the biomass provide another 1%; 0.5% comes from geothermal heat pumps; and 0.6% comes from hydro power. In addition to those “renewables,” Germany gets 6.4 % of its electricity from nuclear power. Those are the actual figures for the “green showcase” nation, and the renewable electricity figures are generally lower for the rest of the world. Solar and wind enthusiasts have sometimes claimed that Germany gets as much as 75% of its “energy” from renewables.
Elon Musk, multi-billionaire producer of the Tesla electric car, admitted to a broadcast journalist in July of 2020 that he supported the coup that overthrew Bolivian President Evo Morales in November of 2019. The Tesla car runs on rechargeable lithium batteries and Bolivia has one of the largest lithium deposits on the planet, which many industrialists, including Musk, hope to mine under terms favorable to their interests. Morales is a socialist whose interest is in what is best for his people and their homeland, and who led an international conference in 2010 that produced the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth. Musk told the journalist, “We’ll coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (TeleSUR English, July 25, 2020 https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-lithium-coup-in-bolivia-20200725-0010.html )
Lithium mining is just one of scores of very toxic industrial activities described in gory detail in this book, along with the names of the chemicals involved in these processes and the various harms and damages that they inflict upon many species of life, human and non-human. The processes involved in producing so-called “green energy” devices, including mining the raw materials, transporting them to factories, refining and forming the materials into more machines and consumable products, transporting it all over the world, clearing the land of the living beings who already live where the devices are to be installed, operation, maintenance, removal after expiration, and replacement, are all just as destructive to Life on Earth as most other modern industrial activities. None of that activity is truly “green” or beneficial to natural ecosystems or living organisms.
Biofuel, a renewable energy source that is much more widely in use than wind turbines or solar panels, depends mostly on deforestation and the creation of vast monoculture tree farms that replace biodiverse natural habitat, causing death, misery and extinction for many species of life, just to grow trees that will be burned for fuel. And what are they fueling? Very often it is energy for industrial factories that will produce more machines to make more toxic and unnecessary consumer products. All “green” energy devices will continue to contribute energy to the rest of the industrial infrastructure, by the dictates and customs of the current economic system and culture.
In their chapter questioning the value to life on Earth of “efficiency,” the authors clearly demonstrate how and why efficiency is no incentive for the reduction of CO2 and other harmful by-products of modern industrialism, when carried out within an economic system devoted to unlimited growth and competition (capitalism) and a culture devoted to maximizing convenience and consumption. Using examples based on Jevon’s paradox (basically that efficiency in manufacture and/or use tends to increase the production and consumption of that thing, rather than providing us more time to do other things besides producing and consuming) and on the facts regarding what has actually occurred with the gradual increases in renewable energy devices—not replacing, but, instead, accompanying continued increases in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions—their point is made clear, as seen in the following chart:
(If you look for charts like this on the internet, you will have a hard time finding ones that end at 2019. Instead, you will see many charts that project beyond, usually up to 2050, showing that somehow the dismal reality portrayed above will magically explode into a dramatic increase in the use of solar and wind technology, even with industrial capitalism remaining intact. They do concede, though, that fossil fuel use—and, of course, CO2 emissions—will still be a considerable part of the picture by then, because of the energy “needs” of industrial capitalism that renewables just cannot provide. That is a difficult fact to admit, but the main reason that it must be faced is found in a combination of basic physics and the capitalist imperative for the maximization of profit. The physics can be summed up in the fact that the average energy density for fossil fuels is 46 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) and “the best lithium battery can only store 1 MJ/kg.” The authors also report that “a diesel semi-tractor can haul 60,000 pounds of freight 600 miles before refueling. To get a similar range [with an imaginary, not-yet-invented electric semi-truck], that tractor would have to have about 55,000 pounds of batteries.” So, which truck would any capitalist distributor of products who wants to maximize efficiency and profit prefer to use? In addition to all that, many climate scientists now say that still using fossil fuels past 2030 means unstoppable bio-system collapse. But people have to have something they can believe in, right? And they cannot be allowed to believe in an end to capitalism or replacing that system with many local, truly democratic, community economic systems that are based in cooperation with Earth ecosystems and Nature’s laws.)
One of the grandest forms of deception, exposed repeatedly in several parts of Bright Green Lies, especially the chapter titled, “The Green City Lie,” revolves around a practice called “pollution outsourcing” or “carbon footprint outsourcing.” When measuring a country or city’s pollution or CO2 output, it is common practice to only count what is emitted locally, within the city or nation’s boundaries, omitting completely the emissions made in other countries around the world (typically in relatively poor countries outside of Europe and the U.S.) by citizens and corporations residing in the nation or city being measured. Examples include the facts that the U.S. “annually imports about $500 billion worth of products from China,” and Seattle (considered by many to be possibly the “greenest” city in the U.S.) imports “more than 60% of its food” from countries outside the U.S. After describing the horrific amount of pollution and CO2 emissions created by shipping, trucking and train transport, the authors report that when we do “account for imported products and services, cities are responsible for 60 percent higher carbon emissions than previously thought.” The failure to measure the impacts to other ecosystems of this kind of outsourcing, “allows a city to exist without its occupants coming into contact with the land they depend on, building, in essence, a ‘phantom carrying capacity’ based on the consumption of soil, forests, grasslands, water, and so on from other locations.”
The last example of “bright green lying” given in this book that I will mention here (although there are so many more!) involves the horrific potential impacts to life on Earth from attempting to implement green energy technologies at the scale required to run this ever-expanding, long-ago-overshot, capitalist industrial economic system, replacing the use of fossil fuels. The necessary infrastructure creation for that alone is not only mind-boggling and physically impossible, but also clearly ecocidal. For example, “12 percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet current electricity demands. But electricity is only one-sixth of the nation’s energy consumption. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms.” A slightly more conservative estimate is given in a recent report by a pro-green-energy team of researchers, stating that, if we combined wind farms and solar panel installations to replace all fossil fuel electricity production, we would only have to cover 10 % of the surface of the U.S. (The Race to Zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?, by Oliver Milman, Alvin Chang and Rashida Kamal, The Guardian, March 15, 2021) That figure does not take into account the amount of additional land surface (and habitat destruction) required for all of the necessary increase in transmission lines, which the authors of the Race to Zero… report estimate would be “enough new transmission lines to wrap around Earth 19 times.” (and that’s just for the U.S.!) To put that amount of Earth surface destruction into some familiar perspective, currently about 2% of the surface of the U.S. is covered with asphalt and concrete pavement. We all have some sense of what that much pavement (on roads, sidewalks, parking lots, freeways, etc.) looks like. Imagine then, 10 to 70 times that much ground covered with wind turbines and solar panels, and much more land than that converted to accommodate new power transmission lines. Do you need any more material than that for new nightmares to keep you awake at night? And I didn’t mention all of the resulting dead birds, tortoises, trees and other wildlife, which Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert also describe in painful detail. Who needs horror movies when we have these kinds of visions springing up all around us? Would such a repulsive scenario be worth submitting ourselves to just to preserve a so-called “way of life” for just a little while longer? It would not last long with most of the natural ecosystems and species of life that keep us all alive destroyed or extinct.
I cannot end this book review without mentioning the love for all inter-connected natural Life that is a continual thread throughout its pages and is clearly the supreme motivating force behind the book’s creation. Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert are what I would call “old school” environmentalists—people who put Earth and all of her interconnected Life first, and have no fondness for any human system or culture that must continually harm and even destroy our living world in order to exist. I also appreciate the authors’ acknowledgement, in their “Real Solutions” chapter, that traditional Indigenous peoples have known the answers to our predicament all along. By following the first ways and the guidance of our natural Earth relatives (of all species), we can help the living world to heal all of our interrelated beings. I will close here with a few top quotes from the book:
“So many indigenous people have said that the first and most important thing we must do is decolonize our hearts and minds. We must grow, they’ve told me, to see the dominant culture for what it is: not as the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to human beings, but instead as a way of life that provides conveniences—luxuries—to one set of humans at the expense of everyone else—human and non-human.”
“Because the earth is the source of all life, the health of the earth must be the primary consideration in our decision-making processes.”
“Often people are so shocked by the idea of their lifestyle disappearing completely that they honestly can’t imagine what could come next. They care deeply about the planet, but what they want to know is: ‘Can’t we find a solution that leaves our way of life intact?’”
“’How can we continue to harvest industrial quantities of energy without causing harm?’ is the wrong question. The correct question is: What can we do to help the earth repair the damage caused by this culture?”
“The truth is that we can debunk each and every piece of bright green technology, and ultimately it won’t make a bit of difference to bright greens or anyone else whose loyalty is not to the earth but to the economic and social system that is dismantling the earth.”
“The best way to prepare for this [systemic collapse] is also the best way to prepare to bring about just human societies after collapse: not by leaning even more into industry, but by building communities based on self-sufficiency, biological integrity, and human rights. This is work anyone can support.”
One morning in 2009, I sat on a creaky bus winding its way up a mountainside in central Costa Rica, light-headed from diesel fumes as I clutched my many suitcases. They contained thousands of test tubes and sample vials, a toothbrush, a waterproof notebook and two changes of clothes.
I was on my way to La Selva Biological Station, where I was to spend several months studying the wet, lowland rainforest’s response to increasingly common droughts. On either side of the narrow highway, trees bled into the mist like watercolours into paper, giving the impression of an infinite primeval forest bathed in cloud.
As I gazed out of the window at the imposing scenery, I wondered how I could ever hope to understand a landscape so complex. I knew that thousands of researchers across the world were grappling with the same questions, trying to understand the fate of tropical forests in a rapidly changing world.
Bonnie Waring conducting research at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, 2011.
Author provided
Our society asks so much of these fragile ecosystems, which control freshwater availability for millions of people and are home to two thirds of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. And increasingly, we have placed a new demand on these forests – to save us from human-caused climate change.
Plants absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, transforming it into leaves, wood and roots. This everyday miracle has spurred hopes that plants – particularly fast growing tropical trees – can act as a natural brake on climate change, capturing much of the CO₂ emitted by fossil fuel burning. Across the world, governments, companies and conservation charities have pledged to conserve or plant massive numbers of trees.
But the fact is that there aren’t enough trees to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be. I recently conducted a review of the available scientific literature to assess how much carbon forests could feasibly absorb. If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold, we’d sequester enough carbon to offset about ten years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates. After that, there could be no further increase in carbon capture.
Yet the fate of our species is inextricably linked to the survival of forests and the biodiversity they contain. By rushing to plant millions of trees for carbon capture, could we be inadvertently damaging the very forest properties that make them so vital to our wellbeing? To answer this question, we need to consider not only how plants absorb CO₂, but also how they provide the sturdy green foundations for ecosystems on land.
How plants fight climate change
Plants convert CO₂ gas into simple sugars in a process known as photosynthesis. These sugars are then used to build the plants’ living bodies. If the captured carbon ends up in wood, it can be locked away from the atmosphere for many decades. As plants die, their tissues undergo decay and are incorporated into the soil.
While this process naturally releases CO₂ through the respiration (or breathing) of microbes that break down dead organisms, some fraction of plant carbon can remain underground for decades or even centuries. Together, land plants and soils hold about 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon – about three times more than is held in the atmosphere.
Because plants (especially trees) are such excellent natural storehouses for carbon, it makes sense that increasing the abundance of plants across the world could draw down atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.
Plants need four basic ingredients to grow: light, CO₂, water and nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus, the same elements present in plant fertiliser). Thousands of scientists across the world study how plant growth varies in relation to these four ingredients, in order to predict how vegetation will respond to climate change.
This is a surprisingly challenging task, given that humans are simultaneously modifying so many aspects of the natural environment by heating the globe, altering rainfall patterns, chopping large tracts of forest into tiny fragments and introducing alien species where they don’t belong. There are also over 350,000 species of flowering plants on land and each one responds to environmental challenges in unique ways.
Due to the complicated ways in which humans are altering the planet, there is a lot of scientific debate about the precise quantity of carbon that plants can absorb from the atmosphere. But researchers are in unanimous agreement that land ecosystems have a finite capacity to take up carbon.
If we ensure trees have enough water to drink, forests will grow tall and lush, creating shady canopies that starve smaller trees of light. If we increase the concentration of CO₂ in the air, plants will eagerly absorb it – until they can no longer extract enough fertiliser from the soil to meet their needs. Just like a baker making a cake, plants require CO₂, nitrogen and phosphorus in particular ratios, following a specific recipe for life.
In recognition of these fundamental constraints, scientists estimate that the earth’s land ecosystems can hold enough additional vegetation to absorb between 40 and 100 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. Once this additional growth is achieved (a process which will take a number of decades), there is no capacity for additional carbon storage on land.
But our society is currently pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere at a rate of ten gigatonnes of carbon a year. Natural processes will struggle to keep pace with the deluge of greenhouse gases generated by the global economy. For example, I calculated that a single passenger on a round trip flight from Melbourne to New York City will emit roughly twice as much carbon (1600 kg C) as is contained in an oak tree half a meter in diameter (750 kg C).
Peril and promise
Despite all these well recognised physical constraints on plant growth, there is a proliferating number of large scale efforts to increase vegetation cover to mitigate the climate emergency – a so called “nature-based” climate solution. The vastmajority of these efforts focus on protecting or expanding forests, as trees contain many times more biomass than shrubs or grasses and therefore represent greater carbon capture potential.
Yet fundamental misunderstandings about carbon capture by land ecosystems can have devastating consequences, resulting in losses of biodiversity and an increase in CO₂ concentrations. This seems like a paradox – how can planting trees negatively impact the environment?
The answer lies in the subtle complexities of carbon capture in natural ecosystems. To avoid environmental damage, we must refrain from establishing forests where they naturally don’t belong, avoid “perverse incentives” to cut down existing forest in order to plant new trees, and consider how seedlings planted today might fare over the next several decades.
Before undertaking any expansion of forest habitat, we must ensure that trees are planted in the right place because not all ecosystems on land can or should support trees. Planting trees in ecosystems that are normally dominated by other types of vegetation often fails to result in long term carbon sequestration.
One particularly illustrative example comes from Scottish peatlands – vast swathes of land where the low-lying vegetation (mostly mosses and grasses) grows in constantly soggy, moist ground. Because decomposition is very slow in the acidic and waterlogged soils, dead plants accumulate over very long periods of time, creating peat. It’s not just the vegetation that is preserved: peat bogs also mummify so-called “bog bodies” – the nearly intact remains of men and women who died millennia ago. In fact, UK peatlands contain 20 times more carbon than found in the nation’s forests.
But in the late 20th century, some Scottish bogs were drained for tree planting. Drying the soils allowed tree seedlings to establish, but also caused the decay of the peat to speed up. Ecologist Nina Friggens and her colleagues at the University of Exeter estimated that the decomposition of drying peat released more carbon than the growing trees could absorb. Clearly, peatlands can best safeguard the climate when they are left to their own devices.
The same is true of grasslands and savannahs, where fires are a natural part of the landscape and often burn trees that are planted where they don’t belong. This principle also applies to Arctic tundras, where the native vegetation is covered by snow throughout the winter, reflecting light and heat back to space. Planting tall, dark-leaved trees in these areas can increase absorption of heat energy, and lead to local warming.
But even planting trees in forest habitats can lead to negative environmental outcomes. From the perspective of both carbon sequestration and biodiversity, all forests are not equal – naturally established forests contain more species of plants and animals than plantation forests. They often hold more carbon, too. But policies aimed at promoting tree planting can unintentionally incentivise deforestation of well established natural habitats.
A recent high-profile example concerns the Mexican government’s Sembrando Vida programme, which provides direct payments to landowners for planting trees. The problem? Many rural landowners cut down well established older forest to plant seedlings. This decision, while quite sensible from an economic point of view, has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of hectares of mature forest.
This example demonstrates the risks of a narrow focus on trees as carbon absorption machines. Many well meaning organisations seek to plant the trees which grow the fastest, as this theoretically means a higher rate of CO₂ “drawdown” from the atmosphere.
Yet from a climate perspective, what matters is not how quickly a tree can grow, but how much carbon it contains at maturity, and how long that carbon resides in the ecosystem. As a forest ages, it reaches what ecologists call a “steady state” – this is when the amount of carbon absorbed by the trees each year is perfectly balanced by the CO₂ released through the breathing of the plants themselves and the trillions of decomposer microbes underground.
This phenomenon has led to an erroneous perception that old forests are not useful for climate mitigation because they are no longer growing rapidly and sequestering additional CO₂. The misguided “solution” to the issue is to prioritise tree planting ahead of the conservation of already established forests. This is analogous to draining a bathtub so that the tap can be turned on full blast: the flow of water from the tap is greater than it was before – but the total capacity of the bath hasn’t changed. Mature forests are like bathtubs full of carbon. They are making an important contribution to the large, but finite, quantity of carbon that can be locked away on land, and there is little to be gained by disturbing them.
What about situations where fast growing forests are cut down every few decades and replanted, with the extracted wood used for other climate-fighting purposes? While harvested wood can be a very good carbon store if it ends up in long lived products (like houses or other buildings), surprisingly little timber is used in this way.
Similarly, burning wood as a source of biofuel may have a positive climate impact if this reduces total consumption of fossil fuels. But forests managed as biofuel plantations provide little in the way of protection for biodiversity and some research questions the benefits of biofuels for the climate in the first place.
Fertilise a whole forest
Scientific estimates of carbon capture in land ecosystems depend on how those systems respond to the mounting challenges they will face in the coming decades. All forests on Earth – even the most pristine – are vulnerable to warming, changes in rainfall, increasingly severe wildfires and pollutants that drift through the Earth’s atmospheric currents.
Some of these pollutants, however, contain lots of nitrogen (plant fertiliser) which could potentially give the global forest a growth boost. By producing massive quantities of agricultural chemicals and burning fossil fuels, humans have massively increased the amount of “reactive” nitrogen available for plant use. Some of this nitrogen is dissolved in rainwater and reaches the forest floor, where it can stimulate tree growth in some areas.
As a young researcher fresh out of graduate school, I wondered whether a type of under-studied ecosystem, known as seasonally dry tropical forest, might be particularly responsive to this effect. There was only one way to find out: I would need to fertilise a whole forest.
Working with my postdoctoral adviser, the ecologist Jennifer Powers, and expert botanist Daniel Pérez Avilez, I outlined an area of the forest about as big as two football fields and divided it into 16 plots, which were randomly assigned to different fertiliser treatments. For the next three years (2015-2017) the plots became among the most intensively studied forest fragments on Earth. We measured the growth of each individual tree trunk with specialised, hand-built instruments called dendrometers.
Dendrometer devices wrapped around tree trunks to measure growth.
Author provided
We used baskets to catch the dead leaves that fell from the trees and installed mesh bags in the ground to track the growth of roots, which were painstakingly washed free of soil and weighed. The most challenging aspect of the experiment was the application of the fertilisers themselves, which took place three times a year. Wearing raincoats and goggles to protect our skin against the caustic chemicals, we hauled back-mounted sprayers into the dense forest, ensuring the chemicals were evenly applied to the forest floor while we sweated under our rubber coats.
Unfortunately, our gear didn’t provide any protection against angry wasps, whose nests were often concealed in overhanging branches. But, our efforts were worth it. After three years, we could calculate all the leaves, wood and roots produced in each plot and assess carbon captured over the study period. We found that most trees in the forest didn’t benefit from the fertilisers – instead, growth was strongly tied to the amount of rainfall in a given year.
One of the baskets for catching dead leaves.
Author provided
This suggests that nitrogen pollution won’t boost tree growth in these forests as long as droughts continue to intensify. To make the same prediction for other forest types (wetter or drier, younger or older, warmer or cooler) such studies will need to be repeated, adding to the library of knowledge developed through similar experiments over the decades. Yet researchers are in a race against time. Experiments like this are slow, painstaking, sometimes backbreaking work and humans are changing the face of the planet faster than the scientific community can respond.
Humans need healthy forests
Supporting natural ecosystems is an important tool in the arsenal of strategies we will need to combat climate change. But land ecosystems will never be able to absorb the quantity of carbon released by fossil fuel burning. Rather than be lulled into false complacency by tree planting schemes, we need to cut off emissions at their source and search for additional strategies to remove the carbon that has already accumulated in the atmosphere.
Does this mean that current campaigns to protect and expand forest are a poor idea? Emphatically not. The protection and expansion of natural habitat, particularly forests, is absolutely vital to ensure the health of our planet. Forests in temperate and tropical zones contain eight out of every ten species on land, yet they are under increasing threat. Nearly half of our planet’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, and forest clearing for cropland or pasture is continuing apace.
Meanwhile, the atmospheric mayhem caused by climate change is intensifying wildfires, worsening droughts and systematically heating the planet, posing an escalating threat to forests and the wildlife they support. What does that mean for our species? Again and again, researchers have demonstrated strong links between biodiversity and so-called “ecosystem services” – the multitude of benefits the natural world provides to humanity.
Carbon capture is just one ecosystem service in an incalculably long list. Biodiverse ecosystems provide a dizzying array of pharmaceutically active compounds that inspire the creation of new drugs. They provide food security in ways both direct (think of the millions of people whose main source of protein is wild fish) and indirect (for example, a large fraction of crops are pollinated by wild animals).
Natural ecosystems and the millions of species that inhabit them still inspire technological developments that revolutionise human society. For example, take the polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) that allows crime labs to catch criminals and your local pharmacy to provide a COVID test. PCR is only possible because of a special protein synthesised by a humble bacteria that lives in hot springs.
As an ecologist, I worry that a simplistic perspective on the role of forests in climate mitigation will inadvertently lead to their decline. Many tree planting efforts focus on the number of saplings planted or their initial rate of growth – both of which are poor indicators of the forest’s ultimate carbon storage capacity and even poorer metric of biodiversity. More importantly, viewing natural ecosystems as “climate solutions” gives the misleading impression that forests can function like an infinitely absorbent mop to clean up the ever increasing flood of human caused CO₂ emissions.
Luckily, many big organisations dedicated to forest expansion are incorporating ecosystem health and biodiversity into their metrics of success. A little over a year ago, I visited an enormous reforestation experiment on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, operated by Plant-for-the-Planet – one of the world’s largest tree planting organisations. After realising the challenges inherent in large scale ecosystem restoration, Plant-for-the-Planet has initiated a series of experiments to understand how different interventions early in a forest’s development might improve tree survival.
But that is not all. Led by Director of Science Leland Werden, researchers at the site will study how these same practices can jump-start the recovery of native biodiversity by providing the ideal environment for seeds to germinate and grow as the forest develops. These experiments will also help land managers decide when and where planting trees benefits the ecosystem and where forest regeneration can occur naturally.
Viewing forests as reservoirs for biodiversity, rather than simply storehouses of carbon, complicates decision making and may require shifts in policy. I am all too aware of these challenges. I have spent my entire adult life studying and thinking about the carbon cycle and I too sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. One morning several years ago, I was sitting on the rainforest floor in Costa Rica measuring CO₂ emissions from the soil – a relatively time intensive and solitary process.
As I waited for the measurement to finish, I spotted a strawberry poison dart frog – a tiny, jewel-bright animal the size of my thumb – hopping up the trunk of a nearby tree. Intrigued, I watched her progress towards a small pool of water held in the leaves of a spiky plant, in which a few tadpoles idly swam. Once the frog reached this miniature aquarium, the tiny tadpoles (her children, as it turned out) vibrated excitedly, while their mother deposited unfertilised eggs for them to eat. As I later learned, frogs of this species (Oophaga pumilio) take very diligent care of their offspring and the mother’s long journey would be repeated every day until the tadpoles developed into frogs.
It occurred to me, as I packed up my equipment to return to the lab, that thousands of such small dramas were playing out around me in parallel. Forests are so much more than just carbon stores. They are the unknowably complex green webs that bind together the fates of millions of known species, with millions more still waiting to be discovered. To survive and thrive in a future of dramatic global change, we will have to respect that tangled web and our place in it.
