Two people have died and three others are injured following a confrontation between indigenous peoples and loggers of an endangered tree in Panama.
The conflict began began on March 30, when a group of Wounaan attempted to burn logging equipment that was being used by a group of loggers working for Maderera company to cut Cocobolo timber, a type of rosewood that’s prized around the world.
The endangered hardwood is often used to make gun grips, knife handles, police batons, high-end billiard cues, marine equipment, chess pieces and various musical instruments (marimbas, clarinets, xylophones, acoustic guitars). It is also sought after in China for use in furniture.
Details of the attack are still limited, but according to recent testimony, one of the loggers began firing a weapon at the Wounaan leader Aquilino Opúa was gravely injured during the attack.
The injured leader, it was said, walked through the mountains for at least an hour before making it back to his community, where he soon passed on. The enraged community quickly mobilized to confront the loggers. Upon their arrival, a second melee followed, which resulted in the death of Ezequiel Batista, one of the tractor drivers.
At least three other Wounaan were injured during the two confrontations.
Prior to these events, Wounaan leaders had issued a statement and ultimatum, giving the Panamanian government until April 19 to issue collective titles to their lands as guaranteed by Law 72 of 2008. They also demanded the complete removal of all settlers in the Chiman zone (who had already clashed with the Wounaan on two other occasions this year) and the end of all indiscriminate logging in the area.
“We demand the government to remove the settlers of our land and take responsibility for what happens, because we are willing to defend our land with blood,” said Edilberto Dogirama, president of the Embera-Wounaan General Congress.
Panama’s National Environmental Authority (ANAM) had then suspended all logging permits for two weeks to avoid any conflicts in the region. It had also ordered an eviction of all persons involved in the timber industry.
At least one logging group–that is, company–did not comply with the official order.
Javier Tejeira, Deputy Minister of Government, yesterday said that Police carried out a weekend raid to evict the remaining loggers.
An inquiry into these events is currently ongoing. So far, no arrests have been made.
Less than a year after being pulled off the Endangered Species Act (ESA), gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the western U.S. are facing an onslaught of hunting. The hunting season for wolves has just closed in Montana with 160 individuals killed, around 75 percent of 220-wolf kill quota for the state. In neighboring Idaho, where 318 wolves have been killed so far by hunters and trappers, the season extends until June. In other states—Oregon, Washington, California, and Utah—wolf hunting is not currently allowed, and the species is still under federal protection in Wyoming.
In Idaho fourteen wolves were also killed by the government using helicopters in a bid to prop up elk herds. Legislators in the state are also mulling a recent proposal to allow aerial hunting and the use of live bait to kill wolves that have harassed livestock or pets. Republican and sheep rancher Jeff Siddoway, who introduced the legislation, said he would have no problem using his dog as live bait.
Wolves are hugely controversial in the region: ranchers point to them as a cause for livestock mortalities, while hunters blame them for a decline in elk. Biologists, however, say the elk decline may be due to a combination of drought, hunting by people, and the return of wolves. By nature wolves prey on young, old, and weak animals, and likely have little overall impact on a healthy herd.
In fact, a recent study study in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains found that wolves were not a primary driver behind elk mortalities. Examining 36 elk calf kills, the study determined that mountain lions were responsible for thirteen (36 percent), black bears killed four (11 percent), wolves also killed four (11 percent), five died of natural causes (13 percent), and ten mortalities were due to unknown causes (27 percent).
However, as top predators, wolves have a big impact on elk and other prey’s behavior, which results in massive implications for the health of an ecosystem. Long-term studies in Yellowstone National Park have recorded notable changes since the return of wolves after a 70-year absence. The findings have shown that wolves are key to a healthy, diverse ecosystem.
Research has found that by keeping elk on the run and in hiding, wolves protect plants and trees that had long been over-browsed, saving some species from local extinction. The presence of wolves allowed trees to grow up along rivers for the first time in decades in Yellostone, protecting against erosion and cooling rivers through shade. In turn, the riverside trees allowed for the return of beavers, which had nearly vanished from Yellowstone. Through dam-building beavers created new habitat for fish. With more trees and shrub cover, songbird populations rose. Scavengers from bear to ravens were aided by wolf-kills. In all, biodiversity and wildlife abundance blossomed.
Less than 2,000 wolves are currently found in seven states of the western U.S., the bulk of them in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. California has only one. By contrast 3,000 wolves are found in northern Minnesota alone.
On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water.
When his first reading measured 20,000 micro siemens per centimeter squared (µS/cm), Cincotta thought his equipment was broken; he had never seen readings above 5,000. The Consol consultant took her own reading in the same location but farther from the riverbank. It registered 40,000 µS/cm. Still in disbelief, Cincotta says, “we wandered upstream and found [Consol’s mining] discharge. And in the discharge alone, straight out of the pipe our equipment registered over 50,000 µS/cm,” roughly the equivalent of seawater. Untreated acid mine discharges typically have conductance values of between 1,000 and 1,500 µS/cm.
The following day, a Friday, Cincotta sent an email to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) field office in West Virginia alerting them to the extraordinarily high conductivity levels. Then, over the weekend, the reports of dead fish began. During the next month about 22,000 fish washed ashore (some estimates say as many as 65,000 died). At least 14 species of freshwater mussels – the river’s entire population – were destroyed, wiping out nearly every aquatic species along a 35-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek. “That’s the ultimate tragedy,” says Frank Jernejcic, a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. “Fish will come back, we can get the fish back. The mussels are a generational thing.”
The scene was horrific: Many of the fish were bleeding from the gills and covered in mucous; mud puppies, a kind of gilled salamander that lives underwater, had tried to escape by crawling onto nearby rocks; three-foot long muskies washed up along the riverbanks. The die-off marked one of the worst ecological disasters in the region’s history.
“Unless you have actually seen a fish kill, it’s one of the most devastating things that you can imagine,” says Verna Presley, a retired teacher who lives on the creek. “Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
A nearly three-month-long investigation by state and federal regulators eventually tied the kill to an invasive algae species known as golden algae (Prymnesium parvum). Yet golden algae offered only a partial explanation for the disaster. It may have been the immediate reason for the kill, but it wasn’t the underlying cause. The algae itself cannot survive in freshwater; it thrives only in marine-like environments. Somehow, a freshwater, inland ecosystem had become saline enough for the algae to grow and multiply.
How did this Appalachian stream become so salty? There is no single answer, no smoking gun. The contaminated water might have come from acid mine drainage discharges – outflow of wastewater from nearby coalmines, which has been occurring for decades. It might also be tied to natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a relatively new industry in the region. Or perhaps it was a toxic cocktail of both.
The complexity of the disaster has allowed the company most likely responsible for destroying the stream, Consol Energy, to deny wrongdoing. “Working with renowned biologists, Consol Energy determined its operations were not the cause” of the fish kill, the company said in a 2010 press release. Still, Consol recently reached an agreement with the EPA to pay $5.5 million in civil penalties and construct a brine water treatment plant by 2013.
The EPA and state regulatory agencies have concluded that acid mine drainage from Consul’s coalmine led to the algae bloom. But many area residents, some local conservation officers, and the lead EPA investigator on the case have cast doubt on that assumption. They believe the stresses of coal bed methane extraction and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Marcellus Shale also contributed to the stream’s worsening condition. They argue that acid mine drainage alone doesn’t explain the changes that occurred in the stream’s composition and that illegal dumping of wastewater and water withdrawals from Dunkard Creek must have played some part in the algae bloom.
“Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
The fish kill at Dunkard Creek points to a systemic threat that could jeopardize the watersheds of an entire region. As unconventional shale gas production expands throughout the Northeast (conservative estimates are that 60,000 wells will be drilled in Pennsylvania alone over the next two decades) its rivers and streams may be forced to absorb increasingly large volumes of exceptionally salty water – water ten to twenty times more saline than seawater. “Produced water,” as it is referred to by the industry, is a mix of fracking chemicals, water, and dissolved shale formation solids; it represents the largest volume byproduct of oil and gas exploration and production in the United States.
Pennsylvania officials, at least, seem to recognize that improper disposal of produced water would lead to an environmental and public health fiasco. State regulators recently said that municipal treatment plants would no longer be permitted to accept Marcellus Shale wastewater, a major policy reversal. What the state plans to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater created during the drilling process remains unclear.
Dunkard Creek snakes along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border and eventually empties into the Monongahela River, which flows north to Pittsburgh. The creek was long considered one of the most diverse streams in the Monongahela watershed. Known for its muskellunge fishing, it also supported an unusually rich population of freshwater mussels. The area is also dotted with coalmines, many of which discharge acid drainage directly into the creek and its tributaries. Massive underground mine pools must be continuously pumped either by the companies that own them or, if they’ve been abandoned, by the state. Billions of gallons of treated wastewater are discharged into the Monongahela River basin annually.
In recent years, coal bed methane extraction – the absorption of natural gas from coal seams – along with natural gas hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale have placed further stresses on the river in the form of water withdrawals and wastewater disposal. In Greene County, through which Dunkard Creek runs, more than 250 natural gas wells have been drilled in just a few years. Consol, the largest producer of coal from underground mines in the United States, has described the fossil fuel-rich area as “the continental US equivalent of Prudhoe Bay.” Like Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the region has begun to experience the impacts of large-scale industrial development and resource extraction.
A month after the fish kill, state and federal officials pointed to acid mine drainage – Consol had been discharging the waste directly into Dunkard Creek for decades – as the cause of the algae bloom and fish kill. Found worldwide in estuarine waters, golden algae was first reported in the United States, in Texas, in 1985. Since then it has killed more than 12 million fish in Texas and has slowly spread to several other river basins. The algae responds to certain stressed environments by releasing a toxin that ruptures the tissue cells in the mouths and gills of fish, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to suffocate – hence the desperate attempts of the fish and mudpuppies to escape the river. Until the Dunkard Creek fish kill, however, the algae had never been detected north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“When the fish kill first happened, we in the research community got a lot of calls,” says Jeanne VanBriesen, director of the Center for Water Quality at Carnegie Mellon University. “‘Who do you know who knows anything about golden algae?’ And we all said the same thing: ‘In Pennsylvania why would anyone know anything about golden algae? You have to go to Texas or Florida because it hadn’t been seen here.’” Golden algae has now been found in several waterways in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
How the algae ended up in Dunkard Creek may never be known. Dr. David Hambright, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, has analyzed samples of golden algae from Dunkard Creek and is investigating the phylogenetic relationships between different strains. “It’s never going to be possible to say, okay, it was a bucket of water on the back of a drilling truck from South Texas,” he told me. “It was very likely wind borne.” Hambright isn’t surprised that the algae has been found in Dunkard Creek. “What’s surprising,” he says, “is that they would find the habitat in which they could live.” But they did. In the case of Dunkard Creek, unusually high levels of dissolved solids, nutrient-rich water, and low flows created a kind of perfect storm for the algae’s growth.
Early assessments of the kill pointed to fracking wastewater as the source of the river’s high levels of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) – a rough measure of salts and minerals dissolved in water. “The elevated levels of TDS and chlorides in the creek indicates oil- and gas-drilling wastewater,” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokeswoman Kathy Cosco said at the time. However, water samples taken later showed that the dominant ion in Dunkard Creek around the time of the kill was sulfate, which is typical of acid mine drainage, and not chloride (although chloride levels were also abnormally high) commonly found in fracking wastewater.
This led the Pennsylvania and West Virginia environmental agencies to conclude that the high conductivity levels that caused the algal bloom were largely the result of acid mine drainage. “There’s no evidence at this point – nor do I think there will be – that any of the problems in Dunkard Creek were related to the oil and gas industry,” says Pennsylvania DEP Southwest Regional Director Ron Schwartz. “There were a lot of different causes for it, but that wasn’t one of them,” he says. Scott Mandirola, director of West Virginia DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, agrees. “The Dunkard issue is mine water,” he says. “We investigated this thing from top to bottom and everything we’ve got points to the mining discharges.”
But Consol denies that it is at fault and, as part of its agreement with the EPA, has not admitted liability for the kill. “We do not believe the discharge from our mining operations caused the fish kill,” says Joe Cerenzia, PR director for the company. He points out that Consol has operated the mine for 30 years without incident. “It was the algae that did [it].” The company’s rationale – that it had discharged acid mine drainage into Dunkard Creek for 30 years without any problems – raises more questions than it answers. What, then, changed the river’s composition?
In emails obtained by The New York Times under a Freedom of Information Act request, Lou Reynolds, the lead EPA biologist on the case, wrote: “Mine discharges from those deep mines shouldn’t differ a lot from the normal mining constituents. Something has changed in the mine pools.”
The difference, many local residents speculate, was wastewater from natural gas and coal bed methane extraction. The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation that was deposited more than 350 million years ago in a shallow inland sea. These ancient rocks contain chlorides that dissolve during the process of hydraulic fracturing. Abnormally high chloride readings in Dunkard Creek could have come from improper disposal of produced water, residents say.
In 2005 Consol Energy formed a subsidiary, CNX Gas, which specializes in coal bed methane extraction and natural gas drilling. That same year it applied for a permit to operate the Morris Run injection well – part of the abandoned Blacksville #1 coalmine – to dispose of wastewater from coal bed methane extraction. The Morris Run borehole is on the Pennsylvania side of the river, just upstream from the Blacksville #2 mine in West Virginia. CNX’s permit required the company to secure the area with a fence and monitor the cumulative volume of water injected into the well.
An EPA inspection in August 2008 found that the company was violating several provisions of the permit application. Then, in the spring of 2010, one of Consol’s primary contractors, Allan’s Waste Water Service, a wastewater hauling company, was charged with multiple counts of illegally dumping toxic waste, including Marcellus Shale-produced wastewater. According to a grand jury presentment, drivers for the company testified that they dumped drilling wastewater into the Morris Run borehole and into several tributaries of Dunkard Creek. “Drivers testified that Allan’s Waste Water was responsible for receiving, transporting, and disposing of production water from gas wells owned and operated by CNX,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office noted. “According to the drivers, during the summer of 2007, CNX’s gas wells began to generate more production water than Allan’s Waste Water was capable of handling. As a result, [company owner] Shipman showed the drivers how to leave open the gas well valves and ordered them to discharge production water into the ground and/or into the nearby waterways,” including Dunkard Creek.
Before the fish kill there was a steady stream of traffic on the narrow dirt road that leads up to the borehole, local residents say. “It was 24/7 trucks going up the road to the borehole,” says Verna Presley, who lives nearby. “They even constructed areas off of the road so that one truck could pull over and another one could get past.”
Martin Niverth, who was Greene County Conservation Commissioner at the time, says that he received numerous phone calls from people living in the area complaining about the traffic on the road to the underground injection well. “There’s trucks coming and going. Well, that kind of volume, you know, what does that tell you? I know what it tells me. You know that you have Marcellus dumping going on down there.” Even Mandirola of the West Virginia DEP concurs: “A lot of Marcellus wastewater went down in that hole,” he says. “There is a separation between those two mines,” says Mandirola. “But there is seepage through the wall. I don’t think anybody really knows how much seepage is occurring, but the Morris Run borehole is right at the edge of that division.”
Presley also says that the haulers were withdrawing water from the river, presumably for use in fracking operations, which require millions of gallons of freshwater per well. “They were pumping so much out of Dunkard Creek that they just put their hoses into the water and left them there for the next truck to come and hook up and pull it out,” she says. “We literally watched the stream go down about 12 inches prior to the fish kill.”
USGS data from further downstream shows a steep decline in river flows during that period. “The decrease in flows at the end of August does look suspect,” Clinton Hittle, a hydrologist with the USGS, wrote in an email.
Niverth, whose first job was at the Blacksville #2 mine loading coal, believes that the unregulated injection of Marcellus wastewater into the Morris Run borehole, illegal dumping, and water withdrawals all contributed to the fish kill. “I fished that stream for years and years,” Niverth says, “and that’s why some of us are still very skeptical, because those mines operated for years. … Then right when the Marcellus comes in this happens. Why?”
Several months before the fish kill, the EPA was in the process of drafting a consent order to address Consol’s security violations at the injection well. But after the fish die-off the company decided to plug and abandon the well. It was still fined the maximum penalty of $157,000 for failing to secure the site, but the underground injection well was never officially linked to the kill.
Dan Cincotta, the biologist who first recorded unusually high conductivity readings on Dunkard Creek, says that salinity levels in rivers and streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are a growing concern. Over the last 30 years he’s sampled thousands of streams and conducted several statewide surveys. “All the streams around are much higher in conductivity than they used to be,” he says. Shale gas extraction will likely just add to the problem. Last year the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia released preliminary data from one of the few studies to look at the impact of shale gas drilling on rivers and streams. They found that TDS levels were significantly higher and biodiversity indicators reduced in streams exposed to high-density gas drilling. At the same time, billions of gallons of acid mine drainage must be disposed of annually.
“We’re at the assimilative capacity of the river,” says David Argent, a fisheries biologist at the California University of Pennsylvania who has conducted surveys on the Monongahela. “In other words, you can’t dilute any more in the Monongahela. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s Marcellus, if it’s mining, if it’s sewage, if it’s treated sewage, if it’s untreated sewage, we’re there. And I think it’s just a matter of what is it that’s going to tip the scale now and push us over the edge.”
In 2008, TDS levels on the Monongahela were twice as high as the historical maximum since record keeping began in the 1960s, including a period during which the river supported little or no aquatic life. That summer, during a period of low flows, there were reports of foul smelling drinking water and malfunctioning dishwashers in a residential neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. The DEP issued an advisory warning suggesting that residents drink bottled water (the Monongahela is a source of drinking water for about one million people) and later determined that nine sewage treatment plants were discharging large volumes of Marcellus Shale-produced water into the river. An internal EPA memo obtained by The New York Times described the incident as “one of the largest failures in US history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”
One year later, the high TDS and chloride levels that led to the Dunkard Creek fish kill were detected on the Monongahela, more than 40 miles downstream, in Elizabeth, PA. “I think that was kind of the alarm cry that we needed,” Argent says. “Because I think at that point people really started to question, you know, what’s going on with the water.”
Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast continue to suffer threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining.
Residents say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
This year, there have been 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to Indigenous rights groups that spoke at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel this month.
Increasing violence in northern Nicaragua this year has displaced rural families and led to calls for more drastic action from the international community, which activists say hasn’t done enough to hold the Ortega government accountable for human rights abuses.
For years, Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast have suffered threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining. This year appears to be as bad as ever, and residents say they are desperate for help.
“Urgent measures must be taken to protect these communities,” said Gloria Monique de Mees, the OAS rapporteur on the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination. “Failure to address the crisis will only embolden the Nicaraguan government to continue its repressive campaign.”
Much of the violence is concentrated within the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN), a jurisdiction communally governed and titled by Indigenous communities since the late 1980s. It’s home to Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ulwa, Ramas, Creole and Garífunas peoples, and contains mountain, rainforest and coastal ecosystems.
The area has attracted non-Indigenous Nicaraguans, known locally as colonos, looking to set up farms, logging operations and artisanal mines. Massive gold and copper deposits have also created opportunities for multinational mining corporations, with backing from the government.
Indigenous communities say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
An IACHR panel in March on unlawful arrests in Nicaragua. Photo by CIDH via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Conflicts between Indigenous communities and the colonos, who are often armed, have led to tragedy in multiple instances this year, according to witnesses who spoke at a panel hosted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this month.
“This situation was created particularly by the dispossession of our territories as part of a process of colonization that implies, in the words of the communities, an ethnocide, in which settlers deprive us of our food and exploit our natural resources, usurping Indigenous territories through acts of armed violence and strategies to destroy out traditional ways of life,” Tininiska Rivera, a community member now living in exile, said during the panel.
In the first six months of this year, there have been over 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to several Indigenous rights groups present at the panel.
Many of the communities where the violence occurred have protection measures in place from the IACHR, which involves asking for special intervention by the Nicaraguan government. Human rights advocates say officials haven’t complied.
In one instance this year, five people were killed and two were seriously injured in the Wilú community in the Mayangna Sauní As territory. During the same incident, other families saw their homes and crops burned down, resulting in their displacement. At least 75 Indigenous people have been killed in the area since 2013, according to the panel.
At least 58 of this year’s cases in protected communities involved sexual, psychological, or physical violence against women, the groups said.
There have also been 37 cases in which forest rangers have been targeted by the government while carrying out patrols, according to Camila Ormar, an attorney for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Eleven Mayangna people have been formally convicted while another 14 have outstanding arrest warrants.
Colonos have used high-caliber weapons and deprived their captors of food, according to the communities. They allegedly have connections to the government as well as various groups made up of former combatants from the revolution.
“One of the stopping points is not to engage with the dictatorship as if everything were normal, but rather to recognize the scale of the abuses that are ongoing, the imprisonment of not just the religious but the young people, the sexual violence against women and children, the dispossession of whole communities,” said OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Arif Bulkan.
In 2022, the US issuedsanctions against state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMIENAS), saying that it was “using gold revenue to continue to oppress the people of Nicaragua.” But the country’s mining concessions have continued to expand, often in Indigenous communities that struggle to find adequate legal representation or don’t understand their rights.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the government granted three Chinese companies 13 mining concessions in the country, eight of them in the RACCN, according to a Confidential investigation published earlier this year. All of them were approved within eight months, suggesting that proper environmental impact studies and consultation with the communities were never carried out.
The concessions last 25 years and gives the three companies — Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group — exclusive rights to extract minerals in the area, according to the investigation.
The companies couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The Ministry of Energy and Mines didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests.
Speakers at the IACHR panel said it’s important to continue to document the human rights abuses taking place on the northern Caribbean coast and to bring it to attention of the rest of the world. They also said that many protection measures are still working but also need to be improved.
For his part, Bulkan said that the international community has been “timid” in its response to the situation in Nicaragua. “[There has been] a shameless response from what we would think of as champions of human rights in the region,” he said. Adding, “One clear line of work has to be continuing with advocacy with the international community.”
Max Radwin is a staff writer covering Latin America for Mongabay. For updates on his work, follow him on Twitter via @MaxRadwin.
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How a lack of imagination perpetuates this ecocidal way of life
I’ve recently read three books, all of which I’m glad I read, and all of which have the same fatal flaw: they are all constructed around a faulty premise.
A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of plastic. The book describes how micro- and nanoplastics are everywhere: they are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, the food we eat, the soil, our bodies (brains, blood, lungs, placentas, fetuses, testicles; everywhere we’ve researchers have looked, they’ve found plastic), and the bodies of every living being on the planet including plants. These microplastics are leaking CO2, contributing to climate change; leaking toxics, poisoning us and all living beings who ingest these plastics; clogging our veins, our lungs, our brains.
The book’s fatal flaw? That we “need” plastic in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of plastic rather than eliminate plastic entirely.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of roads. The book describes the mass killing (murder?) of wildlife and humans the world’s 40 million miles of roads perpetrate on a daily basis; the habitat fragmentation, the pollution, the noise, the isolation that roads cause, no matter what is driven on them. It is an entire book about the nightmare that is roads for all living beings on the planet.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” roads in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of roads rather than eliminate roads entirely.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of mining, primarily cobalt but also copper, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The book describes in devastating detail the destitution of the lives destroyed by cobalt mining; the drudgery, slavery, pollution, health impacts, environmental ruination; the horrors that one can barely believe but are real, all to supply materials for our tech gadgets and electric vehicles.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” this technology in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms caused by mining rather than eliminate mining entirely.
In each case, the author has written a book describing why plastic, roads, and mining are untenable for a future of life on planet Earth. In each case, the author excuses and rationalizes the very thing he’s just written an entire book explaining why they cannot be excused; cannot be rationalized. It is truly astonishing.
Plastic
In A Poison Like No Other, Simon writes:
“Plastics aren’t going anywhere—they’re just too useful and too omnipresent. And even if a virus killed every human next week, our plastic would still decay and flush out to sea and take to the air, until one day a long time from now it will all have decomposed as far as it can go, wrapping the planet in a perpetual nanoplastic haze. But there are ways to at least thin that haze by slowing the emission of plastics of all sizes.”
In one paragraph, Simon manages to explain why any new plastic added to the plastic already in the environment is a disaster, and simultaneously suggest that we can somehow reduce the impacts by “slowing the emission” of plastics.
No. All new plastic added to the existing plastic in the world will add to the haze. Slowing the emission of plastics is better than not slowing it, but Simon’s book lays out a compelling case for why we need to entirely eliminate plastic and then he concludes that we should slow emissions of plastic, thus compounding the plastic pollution, just a bit more slowly.
This is like the people who think that by slowing CO2 emissions we can mitigate climate change. No. CO2 emissions are cumulative, like plastic in the environment is cumulative. Anything but zero emissions makes the problem worse. Slow is better than fast, but zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much plastic should we continue to make?” just like zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much CO2 is acceptable to emit from burning fossil fuels and destroying the land?”
Zero.
Simon notes that “in the grand scheme of human existence, it wasn’t that long ago that we got along just fine without plastic.” He’s so close to seeing that we could exist without plastic again! And then he ruins it by saying “There’s a path in which we rein in single-use packaging, fix the busted economics of recycling, and get a microfiber filter in every washing machine.”
Reining in single-use plastics? Get a microfiber filter on every washing machine? Sure, that’s better than nothing, but will do little in the big scheme of things. Recycling, we now know, is a farce: it is down-cycling, not recycling, and it essentially turns macroplastic into micro- and nanoplastic at incredible rates. New research shows recycling may actually be the number one source of microplastic, greater even than clothes and tires which were the number one and two sources when Simon wrote his book.
Using less plastic would be great. And the only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Simon’s book is that zero plastic is what we should be aiming for. Anything more is not acceptable.
Roads
In Crossings, Goldfarb writes:
“‘A thing is right,’ Aldo Leopold famously wrote in his call for a land ethic, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’ By that standard roads are the wrongest things imaginable, agents of chaos that shatter biotic integrity wherever they intrude.”
Like Simon, Goldfarb is so close to seeing that roads are so wrong that we should and could eliminate them. The future will be small, local and low-tech. It has to be, because large, global and high-tech have pushed us into catastrophic ecological overshoot, are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and are destroying the biosphere. That way of life cannot last. So the roads we’ve built as part of a large, global and high-tech way of life will soon become mostly useless.
There are 40 million miles of roads on Earth today, and as Goldfarb writes, “More than twenty-five million miles of new road lanes will be built worldwide by 2050, many through the world’s remaining intact habitats, a concrete wave that the ecologist Willam Laurence has described as an ‘infrastructure tsunami.’”
The existing roads are a catastrophe; building more roads will only compound that catastrophe.
The author writes:
“The allure of the car is so strong that it has persuaded Americans to treat forty thousand human lives as expendable each year; what chance does wildlife have?”
“A half-century ago, just 3 percent of land-dwelling mammals met their end on a road; by 2017 the toll had quadrupled. It has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway.”
“More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”
How can someone write these words and conclude anything but that roads must be eliminated? And yet, somehow Goldfarb then writes that we need a “road ethic”, and waxes lyrical about a tiny number of wildlife over- and underpasses existing and planned that, yes, are better than doing nothing, but will do very little to stop the slaughter of living beings on roads, and absolutely nothing to stop the 25 million new miles of roads planned through some of the world’s last remaining intact habitats.
Cars are terrible for the environment, no matter what powers them. The roads they are driven on are terrible for the environment. Goldfarb’s book makes this crystal clear. How does he not conclude that we need to eliminate roads? It’s so obvious we must. I find this astonishing, given that it is the environment that keeps us all alive.
Humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years. Obviously we drove horse- and donkey-pulled carts on roads for millennia before cars were invented; there were far fewer roads, the roads that existed were dirt tracks rather that fossil fueled-concrete and asphalt, and those roads had far fewer impacts, just like carts have far less impact than cars. Perhaps most important, human population was far, far lower so the overall impact of the roads that existed before industrial civilization was correspondingly lower.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Goldfarb’s book is that zero new roads and dismantling existing roads is what we should be aiming for, along with a phase-out of cars and trucks. Anything else is unacceptable.
Cobalt
In Cobalt Red, Kara writes:
“Since about one-fourth of CO2 emissions are created by vehicles with internal combustion engines, the expansion of battery-powered transportation provides the only solution.”
Not only is this false, it displays a stunning lack of imagination on the part of Kara.
Again: humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years, out of our 300,000 year existence on Earth. We’ve had cobalt-containing lithium-ion batteries for only about 40 years. This ecocidal way of life is so alluring, so pervasive, so addicting that we—and Kara, specifically—simply cannot see out of the prison it is holding us in.
If we cannot even imagine a life without cars, without batteries, without technology, then we have absolutely no hope of stopping or even slowing the destruction of our only home.
Cobalt Red is primarily about the desperation of artisanal miners, adults and children, in DRC. It describes an industry that treats people as cogs in a machine and throws them away casually:
“Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you?
‘They kicked us from our homes!’ an elderly man with patchy skin, Samy, exclaimed. ‘We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out and now we cannot find enough food to find our families.’”
It is secondarily about the devastating environmental impacts of mining. These impacts occur whether it is men in machines or children with pickaxes and rocks in their hands doing the mining. The end result is the same: land, air, water, and natural and human communities destroyed:
“A thick cloud of fumes, grit, and ash suffocates the land. Sky and earth meet vaguely above the hills at some obscure and unattainable frontier. Villages along the road are coated with airborne debris. Children scamper between huts like balls of dust. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain. This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.”
Mining for the materials to make everything from our gadgets to our cars; materials to build roads, to make plastic; materials to create the things we all take for granted every single day, is destroying the planet. The author notes:
“We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo?”
Here in the U.S. with our environmental laws, we don’t allow children to work in mines. But we do allow men driving massive mining machines to destroy the land that the families of nearby children have foraged on for generations; to create air pollution that nearby children will breathe; to stack or dam toxic tailings, contaminating the soil and water for eons, soil and water the children need to survive and grow up healthy.
We allow mining companies to “take” golden eagles and pygmy rabbits and other endangered and threatened species; to destroy the homes of wild beings who are just trying to raise their own children on land that holds the same materials the children in the Congo mine with their bare hands.
Kara concludes that “If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal mining would be done.”
Yes, helping the artisanal miners would be better than nothing. Stopping the child trafficking, the sexual assaults, the sickness, the injuries, the penury, and the deaths is critically important. But that won’t stop the mining; that won’t stop the pollution and environmental devastation that mining causes.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Kara’s book is that zero artisanal mining is what we should be aiming for. An especially perceptive person reading his book will conclude that zero mining should be the real goal. Anything else really is unacceptable.
Connections
The faulty premise behind all three of these books is that this ecocidal way of life can and should continue. This is false. It can’t, it shouldn’t; ultimately, of course, it won’t.
Not only are these books connected by the stunning lack of understanding by their authors of the implications of their own work; they are also connected in that they describe just three of the many devastating implications of modern life. One can imagine a thousand books just like these, about every aspect of modern life we take for granted.
All three of these books are well-worth reading if you, dear reader, want to know the truth about what this ecocidal way of life is doing to us, to the natural world, to other people, and to the planet as a whole. Each of these books is absolutely devastating to read, if you truly take in what they are saying and deeply understand what we have done, and what we are doing, right now. The perversion of all that is good in the world in service to industry and consumption will wreck you to your core, if you let it—and I implore you to let it.
Why? Because only if we truly understand the implications of the horrors these books describe will we be able to make change. Real change. Not the half measures, the compromises, the ineffectual so-called “solutions” suggested by the authors of these books, but major, life-altering change that is what we need to stop the slaughter of the planet.
I will leave you with this last quote from Cobalt Red that says pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say in this essay:
“A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.”
Banner: Covers of the books discussed in this essay.
