by DGR News Service | May 12, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land, Repression at Home, White Supremacy
This article, originally published on Resilience.org, describes the dangers of the modern, western conception of “untouched wilderness” and its drastic consequences for the last human cultures still inhabiting dense forests. Calling the forests their home for millenia, they are not only threatened by mining and logging companies, but by modern “environmental” NGO’s and their policies of turning forests into national parks devoid of human presence, pushing the eviction of their ancestral human inhabitants.
Featured image: Pygmy houses made with sticks and leaves in northern Republic of the Congo
One of the oldest myths impressed into the minds of modern people is the image of the wild, virgin forest.
The twisted, gnarled and dense trees, complete with ancient ferns, silent deer and patches of sunlight through gaps in the canopy. In this vision there are no people, and this is a striking feature of what we mean by ‘wilderness’. We have decided that humans are no longer a natural part of the wild world. Unfortunately, these ideas have real world consequences for those remaining people who do call rainforests and woodlands their homes. Approximately 1,000 indigenous and tribal cultures live in forests around the world, a population close to 50 million people, including the Desana of Colombia, the Kuku-Yalanji of Australia and the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa and the Congo. This is a story about those people of the Congolese forests, about how their unique way of life is threatened by the very people who should be defending them and how rainforests actually thrive when humans adapt to a different way of life.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has to be amongst modernity’s greatest tragedies.
Almost no-one knows that the ‘Great African War’, fought between 1998 and 2003, saw 5.4 million deaths and 2 million more people displaced. Very few can grasp the bewildering complexity of armed groups, of the ethnic and political relationships between the Congo and Rwanda or the sheer scale of the conflict, which at its height saw 1000 civilians dying every day. And yet this is also a country of staggering beauty, a sanctuary to the greatest levels of species diversity in Africa. It is home to the mountain gorilla, the bonobo, the white rhino, the forest elephant and the okapi. Roughly 60% of the country is forested, much of it under threat by logging and subsistence farming expansions. The Congolese Pygmy peoples have been living here since the Middle Stone Age, heirs to a way of life over 100,000 years old. A note here on naming – the term Pygmy is considered by some to be offensive and the different people grouped under the title prefer to call themselves by their ethnic identities. These include the Aka, the Baka, the Twa and the Mbuti. The Congolese Pygmy people are grouped under the Mbuti – the Asua, the Efe and the Sua. In general these all refer to Central African Foragers who have inherited physical adaptations to life in the rainforest, including shortened height and stature.
The Mbuti people are hunters, trappers and foragers, using nets and bows to drive and catch forest animals. They harvest hundreds of kinds of plants, barks, fruits and roots and are especially obsessed with climbing trees to source wild honey, paying no heed to the stings of the bees. In many ways theirs is an idyllic antediluvian image of carefree hunter-gatherers, expending only what energy they need to find food and make shelters, preferring to spend their lives dancing, laughing and perfecting their ancient polyphonic musical tradition. Of course, this is an edenic view and the reality of their lives is much more complex and far more tragic, but it is worth highlighting the key environmental role they play as stewards and denizens of the forests. The Mbuti have been in the Congolese forests for tens of millennia, living within the carrying capacity of the land and developing sophisticated systems of ecological knowledge, based on their intimate familiarity with the rhythms and changes of the wildlife and the plants. Despite other groups of hunter-gatherers eating their way through large herds of megafauna, the Mbuti can live alongside elephants, rhinos and okapi without destroying their numbers.
In spite of this, the Mbuti and other Pygmy peoples have been attacked and evicted from their forests for decades.
In the 1980’s, the government of Congo sold huge areas of the Kahuzi Biega forest to logging and mining companies, forcibly removing the Batwa people and plunging them into poverty. To this day, many of their descendents live in roadside shanties, refused assistance from the State, denied healthcare and even the right to work. Many have since fled back to the forests. Alongside the mining and logging companies, conservation charities have been targeting the Baka peoples for evictions. In particular the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been lobbying to convert the Messok Dja, a particularly biodiverse area of rainforest in the Republic of Congo, in a National Park, devoid of human presence. This aggressive act of clearance is rooted in the idea that a ‘wilderness’ area should not contain any people, thus rendering the original inhabitants of the forests as intruders, invaders and despoilers of ‘Nature’. The charity Survival – an organisation dedicated to indigenous and tribal rights – has been campaigning for WWF to stop their activities. In particular Survival has successfully documented numerous abuses committed by the Park Rangers, whose activities are funded by WWF and others:
“notwithstanding the fact that Messok Dja is not even officially a national park yet, the rangers have sown terror among the Baka in the region. Rangers have stolen the Baka’s possessions, burnt their camps and clothes and even hit and tortured them. If Baka are found hunting small animals to feed their families they are arrested and beaten”
Outside of the forest, the Baka and other Pygmy peoples face widespread hostility and discrimination from the majority Bantu population.
Many are enslaved, sometimes for generations, and are viewed as pets or forest animals. The situation is no better within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the endless cycles of violence have seen the most shocking abuses against the Mbuti populations. Even in the most peaceful areas, park rangers regularly harass and abuse Mbuti hunters and villagers, illegally cutting down trees for charcoal or shooting animals for meat. In some places the Batwa people have formed militias, often armed with little more than axes and arrows, to defend themselves against slaving raids by the neighbouring Luba people.
The worst events for the Mbuti people in recent years began during the Rwandan genocide, where the Hutu Interahamwe paramilitaries murdered over 10,000 Pygmies and drove a further 10,000 out of the country, many of whom fled into the forests of the DRC. Later, between 2002 and 2003, a systematic campaign of extermination was waged against the Bambutis of the North Kivu province of DRC. The Movement for the Liberation of Congo embarked on a mission, dubbed Effacer le tableau – ‘cleaning the slate’, which saw them kill over 60,000 Pygmies. In part this was motivated by the belief that the Bambuti are subhumans, whose flesh possesses magical powers to cure AIDS and other diseases. Many of the victims were also killed, traded and eaten as bushmeat. Cannibalism against the Pygmy peoples has been reported throughout the Congolese Civil Wars, with almost all sides engaging in the act.
Unsurprisingly under these pressures, the Mbuti and other groups have been displaced, broken up and scattered throughout Central Africa. In part this has always been the intention of these campaigns, for the Congo region is not an isolated backwater of the modern world, but an integral part of the material economy of advanced modernity. In particular Central Africa has been cursed with an abundance of precious and important metals and minerals, including: tin, copper, gold, tantalum, diamonds, lithium and, crucially, over 70% of the world’s cobalt. The intensive push for electric vehicles (EVs) by the EU and the USA has seen prices for battery components skyrocket. Cobalt in particular reached $100,000 per tonne in 2018. Tantalum is also heavily prized, as a crucial element for nearly all advanced electronics and is found in a natural ore called coltan. Coltan has become synonymous with slavery, child labour, dangerous mining conditions and violence. Almost every actor in the endless conflicts in DRC have been involved in illegally mining and smuggling coltan onto the world market, including the Rwandan Army, who set up a shell company to process the ore obtained across the border. Miners, far from food sources, turn to bushmeat, especially large primates like gorillas. An estimated 3-5 million tonnes of bushmeat is harvested every year in DRC, underlining the central role that modern electronic consumption has on the most fragile ecosystems. In this toxic mix of violent warlordism, mineral extraction, logging, bushmeat hunting and genoicide, the Mbuti people have struggled to maintain their way of life. Their women and children end up pounding lumps of ore, breathing in metal dusts, they end up as prostitutes and slaves, surviving on the margins of an already desperate society.
In Mbuti mythology, their pantheon of gods are directly weaved into the life of the rainforest.
The god Tore is the Master of Animals and supplies them for the people. He hides in rainbows or storms and sometimes appears as a leopard to young men undergoing initiation rites deep in the trees. The god of the hunt is Khonvoum, who wields a bow made of two snakes and ensures the sun rises every morning. Other animals appear as messengers, such as the chameleon or the dwarf who disguises himself as a reptile. These are the cultural beliefs of a people who became human in the rainforest, adapted down the bone to its tempos and seasons. They are a part of the ecosystem, as much as the gorilla or the forest hog. Their taboos recognise the evil of hunting in an animal’s birthing grounds, or the importance of never placing traps near fresh water. Breaking these results in a metaphysical ostracism known as ‘muzombo’, a kind of spiritual death and sometimes accompanied by physical exile from the village. As far as their voice has counted for anything under the deluge of horror that modernity has unleashed upon them, they want to be left alone, to hunt and fish in their forests, to live close to their ancestors and to raise their children in peace and safety.
The expansion of the ‘Green New Deal’ and the rise of ‘renewable’ industrial technologies may be the death knell for these archaic and peaceful people.
Make no mistake, these green initiatives – electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar batteries – these are actively destroying the last remaining strongholds of biodiversity on the planet. The future designs on the DRC include vast hydroelectric dams and intensive agriculture, stripping away the final refuges of the world. Now, more than ever, the Mbuti and other Pygmy peoples need our solidarity, an act which can be as simple as not buying that next iPhone.
Editor’s note on the last sentence of this otherwise well-written article: Personal consumer choices are no means of political action and will not save the planet. If you don’t buy the next iPhone someone else will. The whole globalized industrial system of exploitation which makes iPhones possible in the first place has to be stopped.
![Will Thacker Pass, At Last, Be Still? [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/05/SnowAtThackerPass-980x735-1.jpg)
by DGR News Service | May 5, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, Repression at Home, Toxification
On a late April morning in Thacker Pass, where some Paiute ancestors have been buried and some massacred, where some people want to dig out the dead to dig out lithium, I woke to a strange, wet snow that fell overnight a day before temperatures in the 70s were forecast. It seemed a bad omen.
By Will Falk
Paiute elders teach that very bad things happen when the dead are disturbed. I knew this must be true. So many industrial projects in so many places have destroyed so many burial sites. The cracked bones of the slain have been cracked again and again in the frantic search for coal. Old, spilled blood turned to soil has been mixed with new, spilled blood by those who murder for oil. Now, in Nevada, if the lithium miners have their way, those brave Paiute who died resisting American soldiers will finally be forced onto the reservation when machinery agitates the dust formed by those Paiute bodies and the wind blows that dust to coat the homes of Paiute descendants at Fort McDermitt.
Either these desecrations have caused the world to go to hell or the dead, disturbed, have brought hell to Earth.
I pondered this while pondering the surreality of the spring snow. As heavy as it was, the snow didn’t weigh the ghosts down. Fingers that once clawed with shock at bullet holes, clawed through mud made by their own blood. The ghosts climbed through the sage brush roots and volcanic rocks, to drift over the snow and confront the living with the reality of history. Moans moved with heavy clouds. Screams, sometimes, did too. Raven wings stirred the death hanging on the air. The wind blew with their last words in a language I never knew.
Though the language was strange to me, the meaning was clear enough: each generation’s missing and murdered grieve for the next. A meadowlark, landed on the tip of a nearby sagebrush, and began to sing. He sang: “While there’s still time for some, there’s no time for grief.” He told me to let them grieve.
I threw some cedar on the fire and watched my prayers rise with the smoke. I wondered what the wind will do when there are no more dying words to deliver, what the dead will do when they are confident they will not be disturbed, what the ghosts will do when their lessons are remembered. I wondered: Will Thacker Pass, at last, be still?
You can find out more and support Thacker Pass:
by DGR News Service | May 1, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Education, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling, Strategy & Analysis, Toxification
In her “Letter to Greta Thunberg” series, Katie Singer explains the real ecological impacts of so many modern technologies on which the hope for a bright green (tech) future is based on.
A letter to Greta Thunberg
by Katie Singer
Even when reality is harsh, I prefer it. I’d rather engineers say that my water could be off for three hours than tell me that replacing the valve will take one hour. I prefer knowing whether or not tomatoes come from genetically modified seed. If dyeing denim wreaks ecological hazards, I’d rather not keep ignorant.
The illusion that we’re doing good when we’re actually causing harm is not constructive. With reality, discovering true solutions becomes possible.
As extreme weather events (caused, at least in part, by fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions) challenge electrical infrastructures, we need due diligent evaluations that help us adapt to increasingly unpredictable situations—and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ecological damage. I have a hard time imagining a future without electricity, refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, phones and vehicles. I also know that producing and disposing of manufactured goods ravages the Earth.
Internationally, governments are investing in solar photovoltaics (PVs) because they promise less ecological impacts than other fuel sources. First, I vote for reviewing aspects of solar systems that tend to be overlooked.
Coal-fired power plants commonly provide electricity to smelt silicon for solar panels. Photo credit: Petr Štefek
Hazards of Solar Photovoltaic Power
1. Manufacturing silicon wafers for solar panels depends on fossil fuels, nuclear and/or hydro power. Neither solar nor wind energy can power a smelter, because interrupted delivery of electricity can cause explosions at the factory. Solar PV panels’ silicon wafers are “one of the most highly refined artifacts ever created.”[1] Manufacturing silicon wafers starts with mining quartz; pure carbon (i.e. petroleum coke [an oil byproduct] or charcoal from burning trees without oxygen); and harvesting hard, dense wood, then transporting these substances, often internationally, to a smelter that is kept at 3000F (1648C) for years at a time. Typically, smelters are powered by electricity generated by a combination of coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro power. The first step in refining the quartz produces metallurgical grade silicon. Manufacturing solar-grade silicon (with only one impurity per million) requires several other energy-intensive, greenhouse gas (GHG) and toxic waste-emitting steps. [2] [3] [4]
2. Manufacturing silicon wafers generates toxic emissions
In 2016, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation issued Globe Metallurgical Inc. a permit to release, per year: up to 250 tons of carbon monoxide, 10 tons of formaldehyde, 10 tons of hydrogen chloride, 10 tons of lead, 75,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen, 75,000 tons of particulates, 10 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, 40 tons of sulfur dioxide and up to 7 tons of sulfuric acid mist. To clarify, this is the permittable amount of toxins allowed annually for one metallurgical-grade silicon smelter in New York State. [5] Hazardous emissions generated by silicon manufacturing in China (the world’s leading manufacturer of solar PVs) likely has significantly less regulatory limits.
3. PV panels’ coating is toxic
PV panels are coated with fluorinated polymers, a kind of Teflon. Teflon films for PV modules contain polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and fluorinated ethylene (FEP). When these chemicals get into drinking water, farming water, food packaging and other common materials, people become exposed. About 97% of Americans have per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) in their blood. These chemicals do not break down in the environment or in the human body, and they can accumulate over time. [6] [7] While the long-term health effects of exposure to PFAs are unknown, studies submitted to the EPA by DuPont (which manufactures them) from 2006 to 2013 show that they caused tumors and reproductive problems in lab animals. Perfluorinated chemicals also increase risk of testicular and kidney cancers, ulcerative colitis (Crohn’s disease), thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension (pre-eclampsia) and elevated cholesterol. How much PTFEs are used in solar panels? How much leaks during routine operation—and when hailstorms (for example) break a panels’ glass? How much PTFE leaks from panels discarded in landfills? How little PFA is needed to impact health?
4. Manufacturing solar panels generates toxic waste. In California, between 2007 and the first half of 2011, seventeen of the state’s 44 solar-cell manufacturing facilities produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge (semi-solid waste) and contaminated water. California’s hazardous waste facilities received about 97 percent of this waste; more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to facilities in nine other states, adding to solar cells’ carbon footprint. [8]
5. Solar PV panels can disrupt aquatic insects’ reproduction. At least 300 species of aquatic insects (i.e. mayflies, caddis flies, beetles and stoneflies) typically lay their eggs on the surface of water. Birds, frogs and fish rely on these aquatic insects for food. Aquatic insects can mistake solar panels’ shiny dark surfaces for water. When they mate on panels, the insects become vulnerable to predators. When they lay their eggs on the panels’ surface, their efforts to reproduce fail. Covering panels with stripes of white tape or similar markings significantly reduces insect attraction to panels. Such markings can reduce panels’ energy collection by about 1.8 percent. Researchers also recommend not installing solar panels near bodies of water or in the desert, where water is scarce. [9]
Solar PV users may be unaware of their system’s ecological impacts. Photo credit: Vivint Solar from Pexels
6. Unless solar PV users have battery backup (unless they’re off-grid), utilities are obliged to provide them with on-demand power at night and on cloudy days. Most of a utility’s expenses are dedicated not to fuel, but to maintaining infrastructure—substations, power lines, transformers, meters and professional engineers who monitor voltage control and who constantly balance supply of and demand for power. [10] Excess power reserves will increase the frequency of alternating current. When the current’s frequency speeds up, a motor’s timing can be thrown off. Manufacturing systems and household electronics can have shortened life or fail catastrophically. Inadequate reserves of power can result in outages.
The utility’s generator provides a kind of buffer to its power supply and its demands. Rooftop solar systems do not have a buffer.
In California, where grid-dependent rooftop solar has proliferated, utilities sometimes pay nearby states to take their excess power in order to prevent speeding up of their systems’ frequency. [11]
Rooftop solar (and wind turbine) systems have not reduced fossil-fuel-powered utilities. In France, from 2002-2019, while electricity consumption remained stable, a strong increase in solar and wind powered energy (over 100 GW) did not reduce the capacity of power plants fueled by coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. [12]
Comparing GHG emissions generated by different fuel sources shows that solar PV is better than gas and coal, but much worse than nuclear and wind power. A solar PV system’s use of batteries increases total emissions dramatically. Compared to nuclear or fossil fuel plants, PV has little “energy return on energy Invested.” [13]
7. Going off-grid requires batteries, which are toxic. Lead-acid batteries are the least expensive option; they also have a short life and lower depth of discharge (capacity) than other options. Lead is a potent neurotoxin that causes irreparable harm to children’s brains. Internationally, because of discarded lead-acid batteries, one in three children have dangerous lead levels in their blood. [14] Lithium-ion batteries have a longer lifespan and capacity compared to lead acid batteries. However, lithium processing takes water from farmers and poisons waterways. [15] Lithium-ion batteries are expensive and toxic when discarded. Saltwater batteries do not contain heavy metals and can be recycled easily. However, they are relatively untested and not currently manufactured.
8. Huge solar arrays require huge battery electric storage systems (BESS). A $150 million battery storage system can provide 100 MW for, at most, one hour and eighteen minutes. This cannot replace large-scale delivery of electricity. Then, since BESS lithium-ion batteries must be kept cool in summer and warm in winter, they need large heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) systems. (If the Li-ion battery overheats, the results are catastrophic.) Further, like other batteries, they lose their storage capacity over time and must be replaced—resulting in more extraction, energy and water use, and toxic waste. [16]
9. Solar PV systems cannot sufficiently power energy guzzlers like data centers, access networks, smelters, factories or electric vehicle [EV] charging stations. If French drivers shifted entirely to EVs, the country’s electricity demands would double. To produce this much electricity with low-carbon emissions, new nuclear plants would be the only option. [17] In 2007, Google boldly aimed to develop renewable energy that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired plants can in order to “stave off catastrophic climate change.” Google shut down this initiative in 2011 when their engineers realized that “even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adaptation of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions…. Worldwide, there is no level of investment in renewables that could prevent global warming.” [18]
10. Solar arrays impact farming. When we cover land with solar arrays and wind turbines, we lose plants that can feed us and sequester carbon. [19]
11. Solar PV systems’ inverters “chop” current and cause “dirty” power, which can impact residents’ health. [20]
12. At the end of their usable life, PV panels are hazardous waste. The toxic chemicals in solar panels include cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is also highly toxic. In 2016, The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimated that the world had 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste that year; and by 2050, the amount could reach 78 million metric tons. The Electric Power Research Institute recommends not disposing of solar panels in regular landfills: if modules break, their toxic materials could leach into soil. [21] In short, solar panels do not biodegrade and are difficult to recycle.
To make solar cells more recyclable, Belgian researchers recommend replacing silver contacts with copper ones, reducing the silicon wafers’ (and panels’) thickness, and removing lead from the panels’ electrical connections. [22]
Aerial view of a solar farm. Photo credit: Dsink000
13. Solar farms warm the Earth’s atmosphere.
Only 15% of sunlight absorbed by solar panels becomes electricity; 85% returns to the environment as heat. Re-emitted heat from large-scale solar farms affects regional and global temperatures. Scientists’ modeling shows that covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms (to power Europe) would raise local desert temperatures by 1.5°C (2.7°F). By covering 50% of the Sahara, the desert’s temperature would increase by 2.5°C (4.5°F). Global temperatures would increase as much as 0.39°C—with polar regions warming more than the tropics, increasing loss of Arctic Sea ice. [23] As governments create “green new deals,” how should they use this modeling?
Other areas need consideration here: dust and dirt that accumulate on panels decreases their efficiency; washing them uses water that might otherwise go to farming. Further, Saharan dust, transported by wind, provides vital nutrients to the Amazon’s plants and the Atlantic Ocean. Solar farms on the Sahara could have other global consequences. [24]
14. Solar PV users may believe that they generate “zero-emitting,” “clean” power without awareness of the GHGs, extractions, smelting, chemicals and cargo shipping involved in manufacturing such systems—or the impacts of their disposal. If our only hope is to live with much less human impact to ecosystems, then how could we decrease solar PVs’ impacts? Could we stop calling solar PV power systems “green” and “carbon-neutral?” If not, why not?
Katie Singer’s writing about nature and technology is available at www.OurWeb.tech/letters/. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring.
REFERENCES
1. Schwarzburger, Heiko, “The trouble with silicon,” PV Magazine, September 15, 2010.
2. Troszak, Thomas A., “Why do we burn coal and trees to make solar panels?” August, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we_burn_coal_and_trees_to_make_solar_panels
3. Kato, Kazuhiko, et. al., “Energy Pay-back Time and Life-cycle CO2 Emission of Residential PV Power System with Silicon PV Module,” Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
4. Gibbs, Jeff and Michael Moore, “Planet of the Humans,” 2019 documentary about the ecological impacts and money behind “renewable” power systems, including solar, wind and biomass. www.planetofthehumans.com
5. New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation – Facility DEC ID: 9291100078 PERMIT Issued to: Global Metallurgical Inc.; http://www.dec.ny.gov/dardata/boss/afs/permits/929110007800009_r3.pdf
6. https://www.epa.gov/pfas/basic-information-pfas; https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc/index.cfm
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/environmentalhealth/84009
Way, Dan, “Policymakers demand answers about GenX-like compounds in solar panels,” CJ Exclusives, July 16, 2018. https://www.carolinajournal.com/news-article/policymakers-largely-unaware-of-genx-like-compounds-in-solar-panels/
“Solar panels could be a source of GenX and other perfluorinated contaminants,” NSJ Staff News, Feb. 16, 2018. https://nsjonline.com/article/2018/02/solar-panels-could-be-a-source-of-genx-and-other-perflourinated-contaminants/
Lerner, Sharon, “The Teflon Toxin,” The Intercept, Aug. 17, 2015. About PFOAs, hazardous chemicals used in Teflon coating and on solar panels and found in 97% of peoples’ bodies.
Lim, Xiao Zhi “The Fluorine Detectives,” Nature, Feb. 13, 2019. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-fluorine-detectives/
7. Rich, Nathaniel, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” January 6, 2016. About attorney Robert Bilott’s twenty-year battle against DuPont for contaminating a West Virginia town with unregulated PFOAs. See also Todd Haynes film, “Dark Waters,” 2019.
8. https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/
Hodgson, Sam, “Solar panel makers grapple with hazardous waste problem,” Associated Press, Feb. 11, 2013; https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/solar-panel-makers-grapple-with-hazardous-waste-problem
9. Egri, Adam, Bruce A. Robertson, et al., “Reducing the Maladaptive Attractiveness of Solar Panels to Polarotactic Insects,” Conservation Biology, April, 2010.
10. “Exhibit E to Nevada Assembly Committee on Labor,” Submitted by Shawn M. Elicegui, May 20, 2025, on behalf of NV Energy.
11. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-solar-batteries-renewable-energy-california-20190605-story.html “California has too much solar power. That might be good for ratepayers,” Sammy Roth, LA Times, June 5, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-california-utilities-are-managing-excess-solar-power-1488628803, “How California Utilities Are Managing Excess Solar Power,” Cassandra Sweet, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2017.
12 Jancovici: Audition Assemblée Nationale: Impact des EnR – 16 Mai 2019. https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/opendata/CRCANR5L15S2019PO762821N030.html. See also video with slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr9VlAM71O0&t=1560s; minutes 45:20-48:30.
13 https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Jancovici_Mines_ParisTech_cours_7.pdf (slides 18 -19)
14 UNICEF and Pure Earth, “A third of the world’s children poisoned by lead,” 29 July 2020. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/third-worlds-children-poisoned-lead-new-groundbreaking-analysis-says
15. Katwala, Amit, “The spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction,” 8.5.18; https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact. Choi, Hye-Bin, et al., “The impact of anthropogenic inputs on lithium content in river and tap water,” Nature Communications, 2019.
16. Martin, Calvin Luther, “BESS Bombs: The huge explosive toxic batteries the wind& solar companies are sneaking into your backyard, Parts 1 and 2,” Aug. 28, 2019. https://rivercitymalone.com/win-solar-energy/bess-bombs-part-1/
https://rivercitymalone.com/win-solar-energy/bess-bombs-part-2/
17. https://jancovici.com/transition-energetique/transports/la-voiture-electrique-est-elle-la-solution-aux-problemes-de-pollution-automobile/
18. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change.
19. Carroll, Mike, N.C. Cooperative Extension, Craven County Center, updated 2020. “Considerations for Transferring Agricultural Land to Solar Panel Energy Production.” https://craven.ces.ncsu.edu/considerations-for-transferring-agricultural-land-to-solar-panel-energy-production/
20. Segell, Michael, “Is Dirty Electricity Making You Sick?” Prevention Magazine, Jan. 2009.
21.https://fee.org/articles/solar-panels-produce-tons-of-toxic-waste-literally/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/?sh=14e584e0121c
22. O’Sullivan, Barry, “Are Your Solar Panels Recyclable?” 9 Feb. 2015.
23. Lu, Zhengyao and Benjamin Smith, “Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate—here’s why,” TheConversation.com, Feb. 11, 2021. https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992
24. Gray, Ellen, “NASA Satellite Reveals How Much Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants,” Feb. 22, 2015. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants
by DGR News Service | Apr 22, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Toxification
Happening today:
Bright Green Lies the documentary premieres Earth Day – April 22nd — as a live-streaming event and Q&A with director Julia Barnes, and authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert. Tickets are available at https://www.brightgreenlies.com/
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch.
By Julia Barnes
Solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars have long been touted as solutions to the climate crisis.
The “green” image attached to these technologies masks a dark reality; they are adding to the problem of environmental destruction, failing to reduce CO2 emissions, and accelerating the mass extinction of life on the planet.
In my upcoming film Bright Green Lies, based on the book by the same name, I take a critical look at the industries that claim to be about saving the planet.
60% of the European Union’s “renewable” energy comes from biomass. Forests across North America are being clear cut and shipped across the Atlantic to be burned for electricity. Biomass is inaccurately counted as carbon neutral, when in reality emissions from biomass plants can exceed that of coal fired power plants. The burning of wood in Europe is subsidized to the tune of nearly 7 billion euros per year.
Dams have been called “methane bombs” because they produce large amounts of methane. They also harm rivers by increasing the water temperature and blocking the passage of fish who swim upriver to spawn.
So-called “renewables” like solar panels and wind turbines are made of finite materials that require mining. The materials that go into creating “green” tech range from copper and steel to concrete, sand, and rare earths. In Baotou, China, a dystopian lake is filled with toxic waste from rare earths mining. Fossil fuels are burned throughout the production process.
Wind turbines in the US kill over 1 million birds per year. Bats who fly near the turbines can die of barotrauma – their lungs exploding from the pressure differential caused by the blades.
A proposed lithium mine in northern Nevada currently threatens 5000 acres of old growth sagebrush habitat. The industry calls this a “green” mine because the lithium will be used in electric car batteries. I doubt the golden eagles, sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, rabbitbrush, or Crosby’s buckwheat who call the area home would agree. The mine would burn around 11,300 gallons of diesel fuel and produce thousands of tons of sulfuric acid per day.
There are plans to mine the deep sea to extract the materials for electric car batteries and “renewable” energy storage. It is predicted that each mining vessel would process 2-6 million cubic feet of sediment per day. The remaining slurry would be dumped back into the ocean where it would smother and burry organisms, toxify the food web, and potentially disrupt the plankton who produce two thirds of earth’s oxygen.
These are just a few examples of the environmental harms associated with “green” technology. To scale up the production of these technologies would require increased mining, habitat destruction, global shipping, industrial manufacturing, and the production of more toxic waste. “Renewables” are predicted to be the number one cause of habitat destruction by mid-century.
So-called green technologies both emerge from and support the industrial system that is destroying life on the planet.
We have been told a story that there is a baseline demand for energy, and that if this demand could be met with so-called renewables, fossil fuel use would diminish. This story runs contrary to the entire history of energy usage. Historically, as new sources of energy have been added to the grid, old sources have remained constant or grown. Instead of displacing each other, each additional source stacks on top of the rest, and industrial civilization becomes more energy intensive.
We see the same pattern today, in the real world, with the addition of so-called renewables. On a global scale, “green” technologies do not even deliver on their most basic promise of reducing fossil fuel consumption.
All the mining, pollution and habitat destruction simply adds to the harm being done to the planet. Nothing about the production of “green” energy helps the natural world.
The push for “green” energy solves for the wrong variable. It takes a high-energy, high-consumption industrial civilization as a given, when this is precisely what needs to change if we are to live sustainably on this planet.
The real solutions are obvious; stop the industries that are causing the harm and allow life to come back. Fossil fuels need our opposition. So do lithium mines, rare earths mines, copper mines, iron mines, and industrial wind and solar facilities. Fracking should not be tolerated. Neither should biomass plants or hydroelectric dams.
Forests, prairies, mangroves, seagrasses, and fish have all been decimated. They could all sequester large amounts of carbon if we allowed them to recover.
While making my first documentary, Sea of Life, I visited the village of Cabo Pulmo. The ocean there had once been heavily overfished, but within ten years of creating a marine protected area, the biomass – the mass of life in the ocean – increased by over 450%. When I arrived, 20 years after the marine reserve was created, I found an ocean that was teeming with fish.
Life wants to live. If we can stop the harm, nature will do the repair work that’s necessary. But there are limits to how far things can be pushed, and we are running out of time. Up to 200 species are going extinct every day. The destruction of the world is accelerating, thanks in part, to the very industries being touted as “green”. With life on the planet at stake, we cannot afford to waste time on false solutions.
Bright Green Lies the book is available now.
Julia Barnes is the director of the award-winning documentary Sea of Life.
by DGR News Service | Apr 12, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, Toxification, Women & Radical Feminism
Editor’s note: We are grateful to present this wonderful article by our appreciated guardian Trinity La Fey today. Original writing by DGR cadre, guardians and supporters makes the most powerful articles because it genuinely reflects our spirit, the deep empathy and love for the natural world that keeps us grassroots activists going, and gives insight into our struggles.
___________________________________________________________________________
By Trinity La Fey
When, concerned for our safety, my husband pressured me to either censor or disguise myself online, I replied, “You keep talking at me like I don’t know what kind of world this is and I am asking you: what kind of a world do you want to live in?”
I-search papers annoy me and I try not to write them, but in this, there can be no dispassionate analysis. Without relating the experience, how can this story be told? If Rebecca Wildbear, who recounted, “Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 80% of wild mammals and 50% of plants. 90% of large fish, 50% of coral reefs and 40% of plankton have been wiped out. Of all the mammals now on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans. Only 4% are wild mammals.” couldn’t convince you, or at least pique your curiosity, I doubt I will either. There are already exceptional writers and reciters of numbers and names of species. That is not what I am and that is not what this article will be.
This is about where we live.
When I hear about dams, mining, logging, drilling, fracking and industrial production, I hear about it in numbers and names: this many of that species eradicated (to use the euphemism); this much money for that company; this many jobs for which community; how many years of what material; this many of that habitat displaced.
Are these the questions we really want the answers to?
I live in my body. When I eat too much or not enough, when I’m ill dressed for the weather, when I’m careless with my movements in relation to my environment, pain and discomfort tell me, in no uncertain terms, what is wrong.
Derrick Jensen once said, “Before you laugh and say a river is just a container through which water flows and happens to be filled with other beings, let me ask you: when was the last time you had a drink of water; and let me ask you: when is the next time you’re gonna’ pee?[ L]et me remind you that more than 90% of the cells in your body don’t contain your DNA . . .”
I can tell you the kind of world I don’t want to live in and the kind of person I don’t want to be. That is a world in which dams, mines, drills, deforesters and trawlers go unfettered in their genocidal quests, the kind of person that is complicit in those atrocities by default.
If I were a rich man, maybe it would embarrass me to hear arguments to the effect that environmentalism is a luxury of the privileged. Maybe, if I didn’t know that Bangladesh is one-third under water, I could be spoken over about how, “There’s no point in trying to ‘save the planet,’ how arrogant and self-righteous it is when everything is doomed and Earth has gone through plenty of extinctions. What’s one more event?”
But I am not a rich man and I live in a country that has displaced more people than water has, so far, in Bangladesh. Will Falk once said, “Don’t ask, ‘What can I do?’ but, ‘What needs to be done?’”
So I went to Thacker Pass and asked him.
Except it wasn’t as simple as that. Before Thacker Pass, since September of 2015, my husband and I have spent but one night apart. We’re the kind of couple that really leans into the whole ‘interdependency’ concept. Though I have been a passenger near and far, being a late-blooming driver, until Thacker Pass, I’d never myself travelled more than two hours away from my home. Thacker Pass was two, eight-hour days of driving away from my responsibilities and loves, where I work for a living. As I told everyone who came to the camp, I cried all the way to Laramie. I bored everyone else to tears talking them up about him. All five of us.
Surreal doesn’t touch it. I had to rent a car, reserve an out of state hotel, two ways, with a card. I am not a rich man luxuriating in ideology. I’m at ground level out here, seeing and feeling the dire effects of pollution and poverty. Both of those acts were things I’d never done before. They were alien and beyond expensive. They are things I want gone: emblematic of a way of life that as Max Wilbert so eloquently said, “ . . .we don’t get to vote on . . . .”
Before I left, I kept thinking: this is my ‘real’ car insurance money this year.
Do I really care about the planet, or do I care about the people that I personally know?
This is my tuition for that class I have to take.
Do I really care about the environment, or do I care about my life today?
Am I betraying my relationships by leaving to do this?
Do I really care about the Earth? What do I care about?
What if something happens to one of us? I am on my little flippy phone; no use out there in the boonies.
I can barely bring myself to leave the house for work or groceries. How the hell am I going to leave my life, with my husband, in our apartment and stay away for fifteen days?
I cried
all
the way
to Laramie.
I wasn’t out there because I so much enjoy winter camping. I wasn’t out there for my good health. I had to go because I couldn’t live with not going. It was an emotional allegiance I could either live up to or shrivel. I didn’t want to leave at all. My husband had to encourage me to go because I had convinced him with my initial determination and it was too late to back out now. In one of his videos, Max spoke about native people who rejected horse riding because it moved your body faster than your soul could travel and it took time to catch up.
That is my experience also.
As soon as I got there, I wanted to go back home. Principle had made me some kind of fool to bring me out in the middle of this beautiful nowhere when I needed to be saving up and hunkering down. I set up a little calendar to count down the days. It was February 16th. At that time, there were three of us.
It would be inappropriate to speak about the others, by name, who, like me, came and stayed and left. I will say that true-blue environmentalists are some of the most attractive people it has been my pleasure to meet. They were an easy crowd to be around, easy on the eyes, easy to fall in love with. We made coffee and dreamed dreams and walked around and waited for our souls to catch up with us.
The expectation felt was that we should write some great thing to make us not euphemise genocide and then stop committing it. I’m a writer. I write. So, I know how this works. You can’t effectively write about what you don’t feel. If I wanted to be able to listen to the place, I’d have to get all the other stuff out of the way. I wrote love letters to my husband like it was some bygone wartime. I wrote every day, sometimes all day. There was much to get out.
Finally, the walks started yielding phrases and poem snippits. Then themes from our conversations and firelight stories gave me some language of place. I started writing love letters of parting to my fellow campers.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time outside in wild, half-wild and deadly domesticated places. I would describe Thacker Pass as half-wild. Cattle move through there; we were camped under a weather tower; roads, fences and power-lines are visible in the day; city and ranch house lights are visible at night. We were completely surrounded by mountains. From a mountainous place, I didn’t expect the desertous Nevada I remembered to have such landscapes. It really was a wonderful consolation against the cold and wind and waking up alone to piss in the cold wind to be in such a beautiful place, surrounded by so many impressive kindred. Everywhere life was teeming around us, in the ice and wind. Every night the coyotes sang from the valley below. Every day the ravens cawed and swooped down from the cliffs above. The kangaroo mice left their tracks and teeth marks on everything. I made friends with a rat. The sage was very patient with us. The rabbit brush was like the sage’s lover. These others weren’t names on a list. These are family members in a shared landscape. Once my soul caught up with me and I got all my stuff out, there wasn’t too much I missed. The number-one reason I don’t recreate in the mountains of my home is that it is Earth-expensive, but a close second is that it hurts so much to come back. The longest I’d been out before was a week. After two weeks at Thacker Pass, I was half-wild again too. Coming back is some bullshit.
There are good things. I wept with a soldier’s relief to see my husband again. Having running water, with soap, next to a toilet is amazing. Showers.
But.
What does it cost?
Do we want to live in ugly places?
Why are the places we reside and rely on made ugly and despoiled?
Lierre Keith noted, “Right now, we are losing 200 species every single day. So, all the prairies, all the forests, anyplace that you could grow those crops, has been taken over. It’s quite grim when you think about it: 99% of the forests are gone and 99% of the original prairies are gone.” What could I possibly write to convince one who would rationalize or justify? The Lorax has already been written. It’s all there. No need for an argument about numbers as ratio or names as technicality. There is only: the last one. Then: none.
Where I live, there is a beer manufacturer polluting the river; a steel refinery, a meat packing plant and a pet food company poisoning the air. You can tell which way the wind is blowing by them. There are fracking rigs everywhere. Really. Everywhere. Deserted oil derricks, mine pits, clear cuts: those are mostly in the half-wild places.
Why did I go to Nevada when there’s plenty of work to do here? Because I can’t face down a sea of denial in all human relationships. I can’t fight this alone, just like Max and Will put out the call for others to come join them: because they understood that it would take the people living in and around Thacker Pass; it would take Canadians holding Lithium Americas to account and it would take total strangers willing to sacrifice, in solidarity, to stop the mine from going through.
What if we worked together to stop all the mines?
What if we invented life insurance?
What if we stopped industrial agriculture?
What if we invented credit cards and rental cars?
What if we ended rape?
What if we charged people to live in endless toil?
What if we murdered every species until they were all driven to extinction?
What if we don’t do that?
That is the only thing that concerns me now. This is not a passive extinction event, wrought about by the inevitable breaths of algae or touch of comets. We are doing this, as one species, to every other. Rather, some humans, with names and addresses, are profiting enormously (short term, of course) from massive social inequality among humans and human indifference or contempt for our only home and fellow Earthlings. This is not a series of accidents. These are devastating acts, deliberated over and intentionally carried out by people for whom they have been structurally incentivized.
What if we restructured?
I’ve been back now for longer than I was gone and still, I am not acclimated back into my normalized civilian life, because it is unnatural. I can’t unpack. I just walk around in my camping clothes, waiting to go back.
Even in the half-wild, even without my better half, even sometimes feeling pain and discomfort, re-wilding happened effortlessly. My stance widened. I grew two inches back from my working years. It felt good to do a hard, right thing: to put my time and money and body where my mouth was. My speech grew free and bold among new friends. I had a good time.
What if we were mammals inexorably bound to and interdependent with a larger, encompassing body?
What if, instead of quantifying, justifying, rationalizing, minimizing or qualifying global genocide, we stopped being genocidal?
What if we continue being genocidal?
What if we call the abuse of women and girls ‘sex’ and feed the footage of it to the limbic systems of men and boys for a few generations?
What will happen?
What has happened?
The expectation is that I should write something to make it stop.
You make it stop.
The Lorax has already been written.
Rebecca, Derrick, Will, Max, Lierre and I are part of an organization trying to do together what we cannot do alone. We need your help. In every way, we have to stop extracting and start re-wilding. There is no effective isolationist approach. We cannot buy into or out of it. We cannot escape from civilization anymore than we can the climate. We have to change.
We have mutilated ourselves into whatever kind of cyborgs we are now. Certainly, we can do something else instead, perhaps extending some humble curiosity toward the other species who do not destroy all life on the planet as a matter of course, but contribute to the possibility and furtherance of life, or our human ancestors who did the same.
I’m not feeling numbers and names when I feel the pull back to the half-wild place, but the same pang of love that is concerning one’s self with another. Not one inch of that place is appropriate to sacrifice further. Not one of our kindred species is it okay to push closer to the euphemism.
I don’t want to be the kind of person that says, “I tried to stop the mine at Thacker Pass. I spent two weeks there, but I had a life and couldn’t afford to go back.”
I want to be the kind of person who can say, “There aren’t mines anymore. We made sure of it.”
That takes living in the kind of world where you’re prepared to make sure of it too.
As Chumbawamba said it best:
“when the system starts to crack
we’ll have to be ready to give it all back
and when the system starts to crack
we’ll have to be ready to give it all back
and when the system starts to crack
we’ll have to be ready to give it all back”
Rebecca Wildbear, Premise One, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0IT4e4gMCA
Derrick Jensen, Earth At Risk 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr2_Gbuo3OE
Will Falk, Protect Thacker Pass, https://twitter.com/ProtectThPass/status/1370621991598755848/photo/1
Max Wilbert, Premise One, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0IT4e4gMCA
Lierre Keith, Premise One, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0IT4e4gMCA
Chumbawamba, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, Invasion, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7LwXoaj5q4
You can find out more and support Thacker Pass:
