In Ukraine, Saving Wildlife Harmed by War

In Ukraine, Saving Wildlife Harmed by War

by | Aug 21, 2024 | ACTION, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, The Problem: Civilization

Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.

The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.

By John R. Platt/The Revelator

For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.

Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.

“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”

Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.

Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.

They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.

“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.

And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.

But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.

A Crime Against Nature

UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.

“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”

Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”

Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.

UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”

While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”

Moving Forward

UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.

“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”

The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.

In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”

And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.

“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”

It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.

“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”

More Information here: UAnimals

This article is published under CC BY-NC-SA

Photo by Balkhovitin/Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-NC-SA

The Ukraine War: What Caused It and How to End It

The Ukraine War: What Caused It and How to End It

by | Mar 7, 2022 | NEWS

Editor’s note: In the chess match that is imperial politics, entire nations and ecosystems are pawns that are bargained with and sacrificed. As war tears across Ukraine, we insist that neither the U.S. nor NATO or Russia is innocent. The dire truth is that empires produce wars, and thus the path towards peace ultimately means dismantling empires.

By Richard Rubenstein

Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is undoubtedly illegal and immoral.  From the point of view of Russian interests, it is also likely to prove a costly mistake.  The primary question now, however, is what to do about this, and the answers presented thus far by those outraged by the invasion are dangerously counterproductive.

“Putin must be punished,” the Americans and Europeans insist.  But the forms of punishment now being implemented – severe economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine – are designed to prolong the military struggle and to cripple the Russian economy, apparently on the theory that Russia’s discontented masses and oligarchs will then replace Putin with a leader more to the West’s liking.  Pardon me, but this makes little sense.  Prolonging the conflict will kill more Ukrainians and Russians, inspire their compatriots and loved ones to seek revenge.  It may also bring the world close to nuclear war.  Moreover, making a whole people suffer usually unites them against their adversary rather than turning them against their leader.

The array of punishments administered and proposed also indicate that many Westerners consider Putin analogous to Adolf Hitler and a return to the negotiating table the equivalent of Munich-style appeasement.  But this betrays a profound misunderstanding of what drives the conflict and who the conflicting parties really are.  Vladimir Putin is not an evil mastermind bent on world domination and the genocidal destruction of “inferior” races.  He is the brutal leader of a once great empire playing the imperial game in a world of competitive empires.  More brutal than Harry Truman in Korea, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, or George W. Bush in Iraq?  Obviously not.  Then why consider his bad character the primary cause of the struggle?

One reason seems clear.  As conflict analysts recognize, it is common for each side in a violent struggle to consider the opponent’s malice and cruelty to be the conflict’s sole cause.  “They are evil aggressors who choose to fight.  We are virtuous defenders who fight because we have to.” This is exactly how the editors of the New York Times describe the war in Ukraine.  They put it like this:

. . . none of the pretexts for war that Mr. Putin churned out in recent days and weeks contained much truth or any justification whatsoever for waging war on a weaker neighbor. This is a war of choice for all the wrong reasons, and Mr. Putin and his coterie are solely and fully responsible for every drop of Ukrainian – and Russian – blood, for every livelihood destroyed and for all the economic pain engendered by the conflict.[1]

I suppose that half a truth is better than no truth at all, and this is precisely half the truth.  Putin did invade Ukraine without being militarily attacked.  Some of the reasons for war he offered (for example, the alleged non-existence of a Ukrainian nationality) were fabrications.  Other reasons, such as the U.S./European refusal to halt the expansion of NATO, were quite true, but they do not justify bombing and killing innocent people.

Where the Times editorial goes off the tracks, however, is in asserting that the Russian leaders are “solely and fully” responsible for the violence engulfing Ukraine.  In fact, they are one of the responsible parties, but only one.  The causes of this struggle go far beyond Mr. Putin’s bad choices, and solving the problems that produced the conflict go far beyond punishing the Russians.  The causes of this conflict are systemic, which means that others in addition to Putin and his cohorts must share responsibility for the current violence.

“Systemic” means that there is a system – a form of social organization supported by patterns of thought, speech, and behavior – that structures the relations between states and peoples involved in conflict.  The word that best describes our current system is imperial.  Four major empires currently compete for regional hegemony and global superiority.  In order of economic and military power, they are the multinational blocs dominated by the United States, China, Europe, and Russia.  Several up-and-coming regional powers like Turkey and Iran have also asserted their influence in imperial style, but the major players in the Ukraine crisis are the U.S., Europe, and Russia, with China a potential participant.

The eruption of violence in this case should not have come as a surprise.  Imperial systems produce violent conflict as a regular product of their operations.  Often, subject peoples rebel, inciting imperial leaders to repress the dissidents, and enticing competing empires to come to their support.  Often, empires challenge each other’s right to rule, particularly in disputed boundary areas – a form of competition that has produced both proxy wars and world wars.  Ukraine is a prize in the competition between the American empire, assisted by its European junior partner, and Russia, morally supported by its Chinese ally.  There are many historical analogies to this situation, some of them quite frightening.  For example, the competition over independence-seeking Serbia between the Austro-Hungarian empire, supported by imperial Germany, and the Russian empire, supported by Great Britain and France, led directly to World War I.

Of course, empires do not always assert their interests by going to war.  Negotiations can be used to settle their disputes at least temporarily, even if the system as a whole tends to generate mass violence. The current tragedy befalling Ukraine was avoidable, but avoiding it required more than patience or a change of heart by Mr. Putin. The invasion could almost certainly have been averted if the Americans and Europeans had agreed to stop expanding NATO and to treat Ukraine as a neutral buffer state, as they did after World War II in the cases of Austria and Finland.  As in those cases, Ukraine’s rights to autonomy in certain spheres (e.g., economic decision-making) could have been recognized while restricting its right to become a military ally of either empire.  But there is no evidence that the Western powers took the Russian demands seriously enough to entertain any such proposal.

Why not?  On Putin’s watch NATO doubled its size, established army and air bases throughout Eastern Europe, and created two “super-bases” including missile facilities in Poland and Romania.  Meanwhile, the U.S. continued to maintain more than 800 military bases around the globe and to modernize its nuclear facilities with the aim of threatening (or “deterring”) its Russian and Chinese competitors. The rationale for this aggressive posture was the adversary’s alleged tendency to aggress – a classic piece of circular conflict reasoning.  In 2013, Ukraine’s elected leader supported a move to link his nation more closely with Russia than with Europe.  In response, an uprising backed by the West overthrew him and installed a pro-Western regime in Kyiv.  Russia responded to this apparent aggression by seizing Crimea, a former Russian territory inhabited by Russian-speakers, and by supporting separatists in the Donbass region. This alleged aggression then became a reason for Ukrainian and Western leaders to intensify their campaign to bring Ukraine into the Western orbit.

All this was part of a larger pattern of conflict between empires.  What Putin had been demanding for years was an end to the post-Cold War system that treated Russia as a defeated but hostile power forbidden to assert its own security concerns and to increase its influence in the world.  In 2019, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, hardly a pro-Russian organization, summarized this policy accurately:

U.S. policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War is a story of different administrations pursuing essentially the same set of policies. Two aspects stand out as major irritants in the bilateral relationship: a refusal to accept Russia as it is, as evidenced by repeated initiatives to reform and remake its political system; and the extension of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture into the Eurasian space surrounding Russia. Both of these highly ambitious pursuits have been attempted repeatedly and unsuccessfully, yet both continue to be cornerstones of official U.S. policy toward Russia. In retrospect, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a less ambitious U.S. approach to dealing with Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union could have established a better basis for a less rocky U.S.-Russian relationship.[2]  (Emphasis added)

What the Carnegie analysis did not recognize, however, was that this is how empires customarily operate.  If they do not entirely erase their enemies, as the Romans did to Carthage, or remake their societies from the ground up, as the U.S. did to the Axis powers after World War II, they treat them as political and military adversaries that must be kept weak and dependent.  Unsurprisingly, those subject to such restrictions and humiliations resent their subordination, dream of restoring lost glory, and insist on holding fast to what remains of a diminished empire.  Untrusted and scorned by their victors, they return that distrust and view the weapons pointed at them as intolerable existential threats.

For this reason, Vladimir Putin’s cruelly mistaken decision to invade Ukraine was not only the result of the Russian leader’s hubris and insecurity.  It was also the result of a desperation created by the hubris and insecurity of the Western empires.  To ignore that conflict’s deeply structural nature is to take sides in a game of “blame the evil enemy” that attributes violence to a leader’s bad character rather than holding the imperial system itself responsible.  Moreover, it impoverishes our understanding of the conflict by simplifying the narrative to the point that the only relevant issue seems to be Ukraine’s right to self-determination.  In a world dominated by competing empires, movements for national self-determination frequently trigger violent conflicts – and sometimes world wars.

What can be done in this case to head off an increasingly destructive and dangerous escalation of the conflict?  The immediate answer is to continue the peace negotiations now taking place between Russia and Ukraine.  Despite propagandistic depictions of the Russians as engaged in an all-out war to kill civilians and destroy Ukrainian society, their relatively slow and discriminating advance, at this point without air support, suggests a continuing willingness to negotiate a solution that does not require either “shock and awe” military tactics or occupation of the country.  If these negotiations do achieve a cease-fire, the next step will be to convene a peace conference that could reconsider Russia’s original demands, as well as dealing with the new fears and concerns created by the war itself.

This sort of negotiation is clearly preferable to continued escalation, but one must recognize that, in a world still dominated by competing empires, power-based negotiations are unlikely to resolve conflicts sustainably.  The imperial system itself, linked to an elite-driven, predatory capitalism and militarism, desperately needs to be transformed.  Popular movements to dismantle the empires and to create a more democratic and peaceful world order are the only real alternative to a competition that is likely to end in nuclear war.

To some, this hope may seem like “pie in the sky,” but there is far more support for anti-imperial, pro-human mobilizations than you may think.  To stop demonizing leaders and shine the full light of criticism on the empires could be a first step toward unleashing this potential.

Notes.

[1] “Mr.Putin Launches a Sequel to the Cold War,” New York Times, February 24, 2022.

[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/06/20/thirty-years-of-u.s.-policy-toward-russia-can-vicious-circle-be-broken-pub-79323

Rich Rubenstein was educated at Harvard College (B.A. 1959), Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar (M.A. 1961), and Harvard Law School (J.D. 1963). Before joining the George Mason faculty in 1987, he practiced law in Washington, D.C., taught political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and was professor of law at the Antioch School of Law. He is the author of eight books, including REBELS IN EDEN (1970), ALCHEMISTS OF REVOLUTION: TERRORISM IN THE MODERN WORLD (1985), and three books about religious conflict: WHEN JESUS BECAME GOD (1999), ARISTOTLE’S CHILDREN (2003), and THUS SAITH THE LORD: THE REVOLUTIONARY MORAL VISION OF ISAIAH AND JEREMIAH (2006).

Rich is an expert on American foreign policy, religious conflict, terrorism, and methods of resolving serious international and domestic disputes. He teaches courses at ICAR on Critical Conflict Theory, Religion and Conflict, Popular Narratives of War and Peace, Political Violence, and other subjects. He has lectured throughout the U.S.A. and Europe on topics ranging from the philosophy and practice of conflict resolution to the war on terrorism and current conflicts in the Middle East, and has appeared on numerous radio and television shows and in filmed documentaries discussing these issues. He is a frequent speaker at churches, synagogues, mosques, and religious seminaries, as well as universities and NGOs. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Image Courtesy: www.kremlin.ru, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported | Wikimedia Commons.

Chris Hedges: Why is There War in Ukraine?

Chris Hedges: Why is There War in Ukraine?

by | Feb 26, 2022 | ANALYSIS

Editor’s note: Proxy war and geopolitical jockeying are innate to superpower politics. The war in Ukraine is the direct result of NATO working to, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes,” and of Russia working to expand its imperial influence.

The prize is Ukraine: a wealthy country with massive reserves of oil and gas, minerals, and the most valuable agricultural land in Europe. Ukraine has been a trophy of empires for centuries. To imperialists, land is to be seized and controlled, not revered and respected. For more on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which dates back decades, check out this Green Flame episode from 2020 with Ukrainian-American anti-war activist Sergio Kochergin:

Putin is using the same playbook the United States has used for many years: claiming to be fighting for freedom and self-determination. And he, like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden, is a war criminal.

Now, as Russian protesters are thrown in jail and the U.S. warhawks beat the drums of intervention, the Ukrainian and Russian people and the whole planet will pay the price, and the threat of nuclear war hovers over the world once again. If NATO joins battle with Russia, nuclear strikes become a distinct possibility. The U.S. and Russian militaries have, between them, more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. The strategic doctrine of both call for nuclear options if a conventional war is going poorly.

Finally, we must note that death and destruction is not abnormal within civilization. Forty percent of all human deaths are premature and caused by pollution. Tens of millions die each year due to cars, global warming, mass starvation, and diseases of civilization. War is hell. Modern industrial civilization, dominated by capitalism and patriarchy, is itself a war on women, on the poor, on the planet, and on the future.

Aggressive wars, whether they are waged on nations or on the planet, and whether the weapons are bombs, politics, or bulldozers, are deplorable.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

by Chris Hedges / Counterpunch

I was in Eastern Europe in 1989 reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.

How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.

There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment. If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.

In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over the Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into the Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.

The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to the Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.

The conflict in the Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from the Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness.  The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.

Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO.  Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in the Ukraine became unstoppable.

The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab the Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.

I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.

This first appeared on ScheerPost.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. His books include American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Death of the Liberal Class, and War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, a collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Sergio Alexander Kochergin on Ukraine, Iraq, and the United States

Sergio Alexander Kochergin on Ukraine, Iraq, and the United States

by | Sep 18, 2020 | Colonialism & Conquest, Worker Exploitation

For this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Sergio Alexander Kochergin, a filmmaker, organizer, former U.S. Marine, and native of Ukraine. He did two deployments to Iraq in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and testified before members of Congress in 2008 as part of the new Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sergio lives in Michigan City, Indiana where he is the co-founder of Politics Art Roots Culture, or the PARC center, which is an event and community space.

We speak about Sergio’s childhood in Crimea, his experiences emigrating to the U.S. and joining the military, his time in Iraq and how he came to oppose the war, and the political situation in Ukraine over the past decade. Sergio draws fascinating parallels between the civil war in Ukraine and what is happening in the U.S. today.

PARC Media (Produced by Sergio): https://www.patreon.com/PARCMEDIA

Music for this episode: “Fragments” by AERØHEAD https://soundcloud.com/aerohead Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0

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The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.

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Subsidies That Harm the Environment Reach $2.6 Trillion Per Year

Subsidies That Harm the Environment Reach $2.6 Trillion Per Year

by | Sep 21, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

Editor’s note: This article does not mention the subsidies going to “renewable” energy, which is in the trillions, and its environmentally harmful implementation. Also not mentioned are the costs associated with the loss of livelihood for those humans affected by these unsustainable “developments”, not to mention the harm done to more than human species.

By Edward Carver staff writer for Common Dreams.

Governments across the world now spend a total of $2.6 trillion per year on subsidies that harm the environment, jeopardizing global climate and biodiversity targets, according to an analysis released Tuesday.

The analysis came in an updated report from the research group Earth Track, which found that harmful fossil fuel subsidies top $1 trillion annually and harmful agricultural subsidies top $600 billion. Governments also fund pollution and destruction in sectors such as water, construction, transport, forestry, and fisheries.

The $2.6 trillion total, which the report authors said was likely an underestimate, marked an $800 billion increase—or about $500 billion in real dollars—from $1.8 trillion cited in the initial report, released in February 2022.

In December 2022, the world’s nations agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal that included, as target 18, a commitment to identify environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) by 2025 and reduce them by $500 billion by 2030.

“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ chief climate diplomat when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, told The Guardian. “Estimates are higher than previously thought—with at least $2.6 trillion now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals.”

Private interests usually benefit from the harmful subsidies. Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at University College London, responded to Earth Track’s findings by spelling out this out.

“Want to know how criminally insane our political-economic system is?” he wrote on social media. “We are actually paying corporations to destroy the planet.”

The report shows the massive scale of government investment in EHS across the world, with the $2.6 trillion total for 2023 amounting to about 2.5% of global gross domestic product.

Other estimates of EHS have been even higher. An International Monetary Fund working paper last year estimated that fossil fuel subsidies alone amount to $7 trillion annually. Subsidies are difficult to quantify as some are implicit, such as not applying an excise tax on fossil fuels that damage the environment.

Report co-author Doug Koplow of Earth Track told Common Dream that the IMF paper included more externalities “rather than just fiscal subsidies,” based on his recollection.

The Earth Track report found that increased global fossil fuel subsidies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine were the main reason for the $800 billion increase since the last report was written. “This example highlights the sensitivity of EHS to macroeconomic conditions,” the report says.

In a statement, Koplow emphasized the importance of the cross-sectoral analysis, arguing that sectors, such as agriculture, are too often looked at in isolation. “It is the combined effect of subsidies to these sectors that compound to drive loss of nature and biodiversity resources,” he wrote.

The analysis comes amid an onslaught of extreme weather this year that’s been made more likely by fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown. Large-scale flooding devastated Central Europe this week, killing more than 20 people. The planet has seen record temperatures for 15 straight months.

Biodiversity loss also continues apace, with experts calling for strong action as the COP16 meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is set to begin in Colombia on October 21.

Photo by Chris Leipelt on Unsplash