Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The mountain dominates the western coast of New Zealand’s North Island, also known as Aotearoa. Its peak is like the center point of a sundial, the shadows on its slopes telling time. The cloud formations drift in and out, shaping the weather.

There are several Māori stories related to the creation of Aotearoa’s geography. One tells of four mountain warriors who lived in the interior of the North Island: Tongariro, Taranaki, Tauhara, and Pūtauaki. Two of them, Tongariro and Taranaki, were in love with a maiden mountain, Pīhanga, and they fought a mighty battle over her affections. Taranaki was defeated, and in shame and sadness, he left the center of the island. He dragged his club along behind him as he left, carving a deep gouge out of the land, which filled with his tears. This tear-filled ravine became the Whanganui River. When Taranaki reached the sea, he turned north and saw the beautiful Pouākai mountain range and settled there. The offspring of Taranaki and Pouākai became the plants, trees, animals, rocks, and rivers that flow over the slope of Taranaki Maunga (Mount Taranaki) today.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Role in the Rights of Nature Movement

The Māori have fought for decades to incorporate the natural world into their national law. Through the long process of conflict, negotiation, and reconciliation between the Māori iwi and the Crown, Aotearoa New Zealand is now at the forefront of the Rights of Nature movement, with laws enacted that recognize the rights of Taranaki Māunga, the Te Urewera Forest, and the Whanganui River. These laws are among the most detailed and widely known examples of a growing global campaign to develop laws recognizing the rights—or legal personhood—of natural entities.

The most recent example was the signing of the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill on January 30, 2025. This bill granted the mountain legal personhood and gave it all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities, and liabilities of a person. The mountain’s rights are being recognized not because of its use to the communities who live in its shadow, but because the mountain deserves such recognition as a living being. These legal rights will also enable conservation efforts and prevent forced land sales.

Another famous example is the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which recognizes the values and legal personhood of the Whanganui River. Although the existence of this law has been extensively covered in news stories, the process of drafting the legislation, its history, and the implementation mechanisms have received much less attention. Understanding how the Te Awa Tupua legislation came about provides insight into whether it is possible to create a framework for successfully implementing and enforcing similar laws elsewhere.

Challenges and Lessons From Lake Erie

In a different context, half a world away, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) on February 26, 2019. This measure, which would have been added to the City Charter, was the culmination of several years of citizen-led efforts in response to the increasing number of toxic algae blooms appearing in Lake Erie. The proposal passed with 61 percent of the votes in favor, although the special election drew only about 9 percent of eligible voters to the polls. The day after the election, a local farm filed a lawsuit challenging the new law.

The complaint argued that LEBOR exceeded the City of Toledo’s authority and violated numerous constitutional protections by creating legal personhood for Lake Erie, thereby intruding on state and federal powers. On February 27, 2020, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio found in favor of the farm and struck down the proposed law in its entirety. Although the result was disappointing for those who worked hard to get LEBOR on the ballot, it provides key lessons for advocates, including the necessity of crafting laws that fit within the context and culture in which they will ultimately apply.

Rights of Nature in Colombia

In contrast to the judicial challenges Lake Erie advocates faced in Ohio, the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia has issued several decisions recognizing the rights of Nature, the most recent of which granted rights to the Colombian Amazon. The youth plaintiffs in the case, ranging in age from seven to 25, argued that they had a fundamental right to a healthy environment. They based this on constitutional provisions supported by international law.

The court agreed and further held that the Colombian Amazon is “an entity, subject of rights, and beneficiary of… protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” and that the national and local governments are obligated to protect these rights under Colombian law. In its decision, the court connected a healthy, thriving Amazon to the fundamental constitutionally protected rights of the young plaintiffs.

A Global Movement for Environmental Justice

Each of these cases is part of a growing global movement to improve environmental justice protections and develop a more holistic human-Nature relationship that treats all living things as part of a common, interconnected whole. In addition to the above examples, countries such as Peru, Ecuador, India, Bangladesh, Uganda, Panama, and Sweden, along with local communities in the U.S. and elsewhere, have crafted laws that recognize these rights through various legal mechanisms.

These new laws provide an innovative strategy to develop better protections for people, natural entities, and biodiverse ecosystems. Particularly for advocates in the U.S., where existing efforts have been local or Indigenous so far, learning from places where rights of Nature laws have been successful nationally can provide helpful insights on scaling up efforts in other communities.

Legal Recognition of Nature’s Rights Across the Globe

The growing body of rights of Nature laws draws on an array of legal cultures and institutions. It provides illustrative examples for advocates interested in developing these legal tools for environmental justice in their communities. Although each law reflects the context from which it emerges, there is a remarkable similarity in the language used to recognize the rights of Nature. In Ecuador, this takes the form of broad constitutional recognition of Pachamama, also known as Mother Earth. Ecuador’s constitution states in Article 71 that “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.”

In India and Bangladesh, public interest litigation has led to court decisions that have recognized the rights of rivers as essential for the common good of both people and the rivers themselves. Uganda implemented amendments to its national environmental legislation in 2019 to protect Nature’s right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” Across the U.S., some municipalities have passed local ordinances recognizing the rights of Nature, including in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Oregon, Colorado, and Florida. Recently, Panama enacted legislation protecting Nature’s “right to exist, persist, and regenerate its life cycles” and requiring the government to ensure its “plans, policies, and programs respect the rights of Nature.”

Indigenous Communities and the Rights of Nature

Indigenous communities have been some of the strongest advocates for creating laws regarding the rights of Nature. In 1998, the Sami Parliament in Sweden adopted a declaration supporting the “Rights of Mother Nature.” Later that year, a member of the Swedish Parliament proposed a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the rights of Nature into Swedish law.

In the U.S., Indigenous communities such as the Ho Chunk, Ponca, White Earth Band, and Yurok have explicitly incorporated the rights of Nature into their tribal laws. These Indigenous communities have taken the lead on codifying legal recognition of what has been, for millennia, a cultural and spiritual understanding of Nature’s rights to exist and flourish as an independent living entity.

Although more people recognize the need to address environmental justice issues, there are still those who are resistant to new ideas. Finding ways to address these challenges is essential and requires outside-the-box thinking that a rights of Nature framework may provide. Each successful promulgation of rights of Nature laws opens more space for the idea that we need to change how humans think about Nature, the human-Nature relationship, and current legal and policy structures. The Rights of Nature movement offers environmental advocates in the U.S. and around the world innovative legal mechanisms to do just that.

The Origins of the Rights of Nature Concept

Although developing rights of Nature laws is a growing space for environmental justice advocates, the underlying concept of Nature possessing rights is not new. Many point to the 1972 publication of Christopher D. Stone’s article “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” as the origin for this idea of Nature having legal personhood. However, the idea of Nature as an independent and interdependent entity that has the right to exist and flourish because of its own intrinsic value and life force has been around much longer.

Many Indigenous communities and cultures have cosmologies grounded in the belief that Nature, ecosystems, and biomes are independent living entities, coexisting in partnership with all living things, including human beings. In these belief systems, no living entity is more or less important than another, and all depend on each other for survival. For these Indigenous communities and others who share these beliefs, the contemporary rights of Nature movement is a manifestation of practices that have always been part of their worldviews and values.

Overcoming Resistance and Shifting Worldviews

For others, however, the idea of Nature possessing rights is contrary to a worldview that holds human beings at the apex of a hierarchy, with Nature below us and viewed as a commodity here for our use and abuse. In the U.S., and many wealthy countries, laws have developed from Enlightenment-era ideas about individual rights, including the right to own property. As a result, the concept of Nature having independent legal standing has never been part of the conversation, either culturally or legally. This presents challenges that advocates must be aware of when considering the development of Nature rights in a country like the U.S., where it is not just about changing the law but also changing the culture.

Many people who have grown up under laws and policies that view Nature simply as a resource for human use—whether in the form of industrialization or recreation—will require a shift in worldviews and values to see that Nature in all its forms has the right to exist, be free from critical damage, and protect itself through legal mechanisms. Changing cultural perceptions is often a long-term process, but developing strong laws protecting the rights of Nature can help shift conversations and accelerate the process.

A Two-Pronged Strategy for Change

Given these challenges, those who wish to fight for the rights of Nature must develop a two-pronged advocacy strategy to integrate this concept into contemporary norms. First, cultural perceptions and worldviews need to change to view human beings and natural entities as equal parts of an interconnected whole. Second, we must reinterpret existing laws and create new ones that support the concepts of rights of Nature while working to implement more sustainable systemic changes to promote a more just world.

We need to develop this advocacy strategy and create new and better ways to protect our planet and all the living things that call it home. Things won’t happen overnight. Legal change, cultural change, and shifts in worldviews all take time, but we must keep up the fight. By working together, we can ensure that all living things on this planet can continue to thrive and survive.

Excerpted from Standing for Nature: Legal Strategies for Environmental Justice © 2025 by Dana Zartner, Fabien Cardenas, and Mohammad Golam Sarwar is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. This excerpt was adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photo: Empire Wind.

Donald Trump’s lethal fossil/nuke attack on the US renewable energy industry is poised to destroy America’s ability to compete in global markets for the foreseeable future.

“Drill baby drill” and yet another “nuclear renaissance” are Trump’s siren calls for a destroyed American economy.

 Despite Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” hype, wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage and other green sources are far cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, faster to build and job producing than fossil fuels and nuclear reactors.

Thus, more than 80% of the world’s new energy production continues to come from wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage and other green sources.  Both nuclear power and fossil fuels are in steep global decline.

Though photovoltaic cells were first deployed at New Jersey’s Bell Labs in 1957, the booming solar panel industry is now dominated by China.  The U.S. does have the capacity to produce a substantial 50 gigawatts of solar panels every year.

But the GOP’s federal attacks on green regulations, tax breaks and subsidies have severely damaged the industry.  The assault has been one-upped by California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who is forcing ratepayers to eat at least $11 billion in over-market subsidies for two reactors near San Luis Obispo.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs and the MAGA Congress’s attacks on US electric car makers have also turned that industry over to the Chinese.  Newsom has made a “green” name for himself by banning the purchase of fossil-fired cars in California after 2035.  But he’s also decimated the state’s once-booming solar industry, which has covered more than 1.8 million CA rooftops.  More than 17,000 jobs have been lost in the solar industry collapse Newsom’s regulators have imposed.

Meanwhile, the EV industry’s accelerated efficiency, range and falling prices virtually guarantee that by 2035, few consumers will be buying gas-fired cars anywhere, least of all in California, whose long driving distances make petro-vehicles more costly than ever.

Thus, Trump’s attacks on green technologies—-solar panels, wind turbines, advanced battery storage and electric cars—-have made the U.S. into the world’s Dead Man Walking in the green global markets that are becoming MAGA America’s techno graveyard.

Amidst the chaos, there’s been one new green light: the huge Empire wind farm off NY’s Long Island coast. Trump has been toying with the project’s permits for months, costing the builders millions.

But now Trump’s lifted ban on Empire’s construction has prompted some in the global energy community to ask if we might be entering a true sea change in the planetary climate crisis?

After all…for many years the Donald’s hatred of wind turbines has been front and center. It may have started with his unhinged opposition to an 11-turbine off-shore Scottish array built in waters a short distance from a Trump golf course.

In January, on his first day in his second term as U.S. president, Trump ordered a “temporary withdrawal” of any new federal leasing for the billions of dollars worth of new wind turbine projects scheduled for of the Outer Continental Shelf.

He declared: “We’re not going to do the wind thing. Big, ugly windmills. They ruin your neighborhood.” Trump also has claimed the noise from wind turbines cause cancer, despite the American Cancer Society and numerous others showing that this is untrue.

Most recently the Trump anti-wind assault has focused on a giant 54-turbine farm being built by being built by Norway based Equinor. It has been in development for more than seven years and is estimated at this point to being one-third finished.

The huge project, sited 15 to 30 miles in the Atlantic south of Long Island, has been front and center of Trump’s anti-green campaign. Priced at $7 billion, it is slated to be fully operational by the end of 2027. Generating 810 megawatts, it aims to power more than 500,000 homes.

Trump’s vow to kill it has been taken as a huge blow to the global wind industry.

 Last week’s reversal has sent shock waves through the world energy future.

For many months, wind and solar have accounted for 80% or more of the world’s new energy capacity. The primary reasons are cost, time to build and security of the investment.

A recent Boston University study has shown that wind and solar are by far the cheapest and fastest to build sources of new electric power. They’re also the most secure investments.

This comes amidst yet another massive new super-hyped industry “nuclear renaissance push to build new atomic reactors, to prolong the life of old ones, and even to revive some that are already shut.

But the numbers playing out in the marketplace have pushed hard against this latest “nuclear renaissance.”

Much-hyped Small Modular Reactors have already taken massive hits. NuScale, the first company to get approval for an SMR design, saw its first order cancelled due to soaring projected costs and sagging production schedules.

The NuScale cancellation has been accompanied by industry-wide explosions in projected failure.  Despite huge government subsidies and strong support from Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Massachusetts Maureen Healey, New York’s Kathy Hochul and others, new nukes can nowhere compete with wind or solar in the projected marketplace for future electric supply.

The nuke industry’s biggest hope has been Trump’s assault on wind and solar, along with the gutting of atomic safety regulations.

But with this unexpected green light for this massive Long Island wind farm, some hope all that may be about to change.

As it was announced last week on the Empire Wind website: “On April 16, 2025, the Secretary of the Interior directed BOEM’s (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) Acting Director to order Empire Offshore Wind LLC to halt ongoing activities related to the Empire Wind project. On May 19, 2025, the order was amended to lift the halt on activities.”

However, as the Long Island newspaper Newsday reported two days later, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Bergum is “encouraged by Gov. Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity.”

Newsday also reported in the article by Mark Harrington, with the federal government reversal announcement on Empire Wind, Hochul “reaffirmed that New York will work with the [Trump] administration and private entities on new energy projects…”

And it noted a “visit earlier this month” of Burgum to Brooklyn at which he “met with National Grid which had previously supported a pipeline into the metropolitan area to relieve a gas supply shortage. The project was nixed during former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration.”

Lee Zeldin, named by Trump as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and a former member of the House of Representatives from Long Island, was on the island last month and boosting a gas pipeline that would carrying fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to a hub in Albany.

He noted that there is “a ban in New York” on fracking but pointed to Pennsylvania, where “all parties work together and they tap into the extraction of natural gas.”

There long was a major push to allow fracking in New York State drawing from the same Marcellus Shale formation that extends from Pennsylvania. Adding to the challenge to fracking—a term for hydraulic fracturing, which uses fluids under high pressure and 600 chemicals to extract oil and gas from deep underground rock formations — were journalistic investigations, most prominently two HBO TV documentaries, “Gasland,” by Josh Fox.

They found that fracking regularly leads to gas and oil migrating into water. “Gasland” includes numerous scenes of people turning on water faucets, holding a lighter to what’s coming out and flames erupting because of fracking.

In New York, fracking was banned in 2014.

Is accepting fracked gas the quid quo pro for the Trump administration reversing its new move on Empire Wind?

As Newsday also reported, environmentalists “were quick to pounce.” Food & Watch Watch, based in Washington, D.C. and active on Long Island, said Hochul’s backtracking further by giving life to a fracked gas project that was already buried once would show just how deeply she’s willing to side with corporate polluters over everyday New Yorkers.”

If Empire is allowed to go forward and demonstrates how offshore wind power provides electricity cheaper than nuclear, oil and gas (fracked or otherwise), that would be a mixed gain.

As if to underscore the illusion, Trump has followed his larger assault on America’s renewable industry with legislation meant to radically reduce the regulatory oversight of new nuclear power plants.  By making already lax permit requirements even less stringent, Trump hopes to begin pouring already hyper-expensive reactors into America’s already hyper-heavy fossil/nuclear mix.  After all….what could go wrong?

How about: the ability of the US economy to compete in global markets, along with the human ability to survive on this planet?

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Smithfield Foods gestation crates, Smithfield Foods/Murphy Brown pig breeding facility, Waverly, Virginia. Photo: Humane Society.

Pigs, intelligent and social creatures, possess a strong maternal instinct. In the wild, a pregnant pig will walk several miles to carefully select the perfect spot to build a nest for her newborns. A sow, or mother pig, is pregnant for almost four months before the arrival of her babies. Pregnancy can be an exciting and momentous time for humans as families prepare and anticipate the joy of welcoming a new life into the world. After she welcomes her babies into the world, she will spend the first few months of their lives caring for them, nursing and grooming them. They will play and forage for food together as a family unit. Mother pigs have an instinct to love, protect, and nurture their newborn babies, just like humans do.

In factory farms, however, this natural maternal bond is broken. The meat industry doesn’t see sows as mothers with the capacity to love. Instead, they treat them like inanimate breeding machines, repeatedly impregnating sows just to raise and kill their babies. These sows will spend the majority of their pregnancies trapped in a “gestation crate” (gestation is another term for the period when an animal is pregnant before giving birth). This metal cage is about seven feet by two feet, an area barely larger than the sow’s body, so small that she can’t even turn around. At the core of gestation crate use is a desire to maximize space and exercise tight control over breeding cycles. In these confined spaces, sows are reduced to production units, and their ability to exhibit natural behaviors is entirely curtailed. Trapped in this horrific contraption, a sow will never be able to feel sunshine on her skin or grass beneath her hooves. For the entirety of her pregnancy, she only knows the cold, iron confines of this crate.

After birth, mother pigs do not get a chance to care for their babies as they naturally want to. Instead, pork producers take each litter of piglets from their mother when they’re only around three weeks old, raising and killing them for food. This separation is not only traumatic for the mother and her babies, but it’s also unnatural. In nature, mother pigs nurse their babies for up to 17 weeks.

Then, this exploitative cycle starts again. The industry repeatedly impregnates sows, forcing them to give birth to new litters of piglets until their bodies are completely exhausted. When a sow is “spent” (i.e., no longer able to give birth), she is sent to slaughter at only around one and a half to two years old. In the wild, pigs can live up to 20 years. But after just two years of life, a sow will be killed for her meat, just like her offspring.

The Pork Industry: Purveyors of Intense Cruelty

Tragically, this abuse is standard practice in the pork industry, where companies view these intelligent, emotional, feeling animals merely as machines for maximizing profit. All of this is done in the secrecy of factory farms, which the vast majority of consumers will never encounter firsthand. Imagine a mother pig kept in a cage barely bigger than her body for most of her pregnancy, unable to walk or move more than a few steps, unable even to turn around, and able to interact only with the two mothers on either side of her, who are also caged. Imagine her water spouting from dirty pipes at the front of this cage, with a food trough below. Imagine floors slatted to allow excrement to flow downwards before collecting in vast outdoor lagoons. Factory farms imprison mother pigs in these conditions for the entirety of their four-month pregnancies.

While the cruelty of this system is evident, its implications extend far beyond the sows’ suffering. This practice encapsulates a range of ethical, environmental, technological, and economic dilemmas that lie at the heart of modern factory farming. Due to the cruel, horrific conditions they are forced to endure in captivity, sows are among the most abused animals on the planet. In 2022, Mercy For Animals released evidence from a heartbreaking investigation that shines a light on the cruelty that mother pigs endure trapped in factory farms.

The pork industry forces millions of sows across the U.S. and worldwide to suffer through these horrific conditions every day. Many consumers are unaware of the cruel conditions under which their pork products are produced.

Alternative Systems: Group Housing and Free-Range Models

In contrast to the intense suffering caused by gestation crates, alternative systems such as group housing enable sows to interact socially and move more freely. In group housing, pigs can engage in instinctive behaviors like rooting, foraging, and socializing, which are essential for their psychological and physical well-being.

Although these systems require careful oversight to manage issues like aggression and resource competition, they offer the possibility of a higher quality of life by restoring a degree of natural behavior.

Taking this approach a step further, free-range or pasture-based systemsallow pigs to roam in outdoor environments where they can forage, build nests, and form natural social bonds. This shift from a sterile, confined environment to one that more closely mimics nature addresses animal welfare concerns while also challenging the long-held industrial model that has defined modern agriculture. The philosophical reorientation toward respecting an animal’s intrinsic value is a central element in the debate over how best to produce food humanely.

Beyond animal welfare, the environmental consequences of intensive farming practices are profound. Traditional systems that rely on gestation crates centralize waste production in confined spaces. The concentrated waste from these systems not only disrupts the natural cycle of decomposition and nutrient distribution but also contributes to water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions. The localized accumulation of pollutants can lead to broader ecological degradation, affecting soil health, water quality, and atmospheric conditions.

In contrast, alternative systems that provide pigs with more space encourage a more natural dispersion of waste. In pasture-based systems, waste becomes part of a cyclical process where it can enhance soil fertility through natural carbon sequestration rather than acting as an environmental burden. This approach aligns with the principles of sustainable agriculture, suggesting that a system designed to work with nature rather than against it can mitigate many of the environmental impacts associated with factory farming.

The Legal Landscape: A Global Shift Away from Gestation Crates

Legislation around the world increasingly reflects a growing ethical and environmental consciousness. Numerous regions have moved to restrict or ban gestation crates, signaling a broader reevaluation of the values underpinning intensive animal production. Several countries have banned the use of cruel gestation crates, including the United Kingdom and Sweden. These legal reforms are not solely about improving animal welfare: they also acknowledge the interconnectedness of ethical treatment, environmental sustainability, and economic viability. Although alternative systems may initially entail higher production costs, proponents argue that the long-term benefits, such as improved animal health and reduced environmental impact, justify the investment.

Policies that restrict gestation crates serve as catalysts for social change, challenging both producers and consumers to reconsider the ethics of modern food production. By enforcing higher standards of animal treatment, legislators are not only protecting animal welfare but also prompting the industry to explore models of production that respect the environment and align with contemporary ethical values.

Tech for Compassion: Innovations Supporting Humane Farming

Technological innovation is a promising avenue for transforming animal agriculture. Advances in electronic feeding systems and smart monitoringtools are making it increasingly feasible to manage group housing systemswithout sacrificing efficiency. Electronic feeding systems, for instance, can deliver tailored diets to individual sows in a group setting, thereby reducing competition and minimizing conflict. Smart monitoring technologies—often utilizing artificial intelligence—track animal health and behavior in real time. By detecting early signs of stress or illness, these systems allow for prompt interventions that can enhance overall welfare.

These technological innovations demonstrate that it is possible to balance the demands of efficient production with the imperatives of humane treatment. By integrating advanced management tools into alternative housing systems, producers can maintain high productivity levels while also offering environments that respect pigs’ natural behaviors. This blend of technology and animal welfare not only supports a more ethical production model but also contributes to long-term economic sustainability.

The economic rationale for gestation crates has traditionally hinged on lower upfront costs and maximized production. However, this short-term economic calculus often overlooks the hidden costs associated with animal health issues, environmental cleanup, and shifts in consumer behavior. Alternative systems, despite requiring more significant initial investments, can offer long-term economic benefits.

Improved animal health leads to lower veterinary costs and a reduction in the negative externalities that can plague intensive farming. Moreover, as consumers become more aware of the origins of their food, there is a growing market for products that are produced through humane and sustainable methods.

This evolving consumer preference is reshaping the pork industry’s economic landscape. Modern buyers increasingly favor ethical production methods, and their willingness to support such practices is driving market forces that favor alternative systems. In this light, investing in more humane production methods is not only a moral imperative—it is also a sound economic strategy that can lead to a more resilient and future-proof industry.

Forgotten Voices: Farm Workers in Factory Farming Systems

An often overlooked aspect of the debate is the impact of intensive confinement systems on farm workers. The repetitive, high-risk tasks in factory farms mirror the restrictive conditions imposed on the animals. Workers may suffer from physical strain, hazardous exposures, and low job satisfaction as a result of these monotonous and stressful environments.

Transitioning to alternative systems, such as group housing or free-range management, could also improve working conditions. More open and dynamic production environments offer the potential for safer, more engaging work experiences. When animals are treated with respect and allowed to exhibit natural behaviors, the overall atmosphere on the farm can shift toward one that values care, safety, and dignity for both animals and the people who work with them.

A Vision for the Future: Compassionate, Ethical, and Sustainable Farming

Reimagining the pork industry through the lens of compassion and sustainability requires a comprehensive reexamination of established practices. It challenges the entrenched economic models that have long prioritized short-term gains over long-term environmental health and ethical treatment. By embracing innovative technologies and alternative management systems, the future of animal agriculture could be defined by an integration of efficiency with humane practices.

In this vision, ethical considerations become a central component of production rather than an afterthought. Producers, policymakers, and consumers are invited to participate in a transformative movement—one that redefines modern agriculture to respect the natural world and its inhabitants. This transformation is about more than eliminating practices like gestation crates; it is about forging a new relationship with nature, one that acknowledges the intrinsic value of all living beings and the importance of sustainability.

The pork industry’s reliance on gestation crates reveals a fundamental tension between the imperatives of industrial efficiency and the ethical demands of humane, sustainable production. As society becomes increasingly aware of the broader costs of intensive animal farming—both environmental and human—the call for change grows ever stronger. By shifting toward alternative systems, such as group housing and free-range management, the pork industry can move from a model of confinement and exploitation to one characterized by innovation, compassion, and resilience.

This reimagined approach respects pigs’ natural behaviors and dignity and promotes a healthier environment and improved working conditions for farm laborers. While the best way to avoid animal cruelty is to keep animals off our plates, as long as there is a demand for meat, more humane solutions need to be implemented. In the end, transforming the industry is a shared responsibility—one that involves ethical reflection, technological advancement, and a commitment to sustainability. Such a change represents not only a more humane way to produce food but also a promising model for the future of agriculture, where profit and compassion are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Mother elephant and calf, Portland Zoo. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

While many people are fascinated by nonhuman animals, most do not have the time, money, or opportunity to travel to remote natural habitats where these animals live freely. Instead, zoos relocate animals for the convenience of humans, offering guaranteed viewings and encounters that fit our schedules. Unfortunately, this convenience often comes at a high cost to the animals. For elephants in particular, captivity presents unique hardships beyond mere discomfort. The elephants experience fundamental disruptions to their natural behaviors and environments.

While wild elephants face serious threats like poaching and habitat loss, captivity is not the answer. Zoo owners argue that keeping elephants in captivity helps conserve endangered species. However, proper conservation only happens in the wild, and zoos often exploit animals for profit, prioritizing human entertainment and business interests over the animals’ well-being.

This article examines the threats to elephants in the wild, the harm caused by captivity, how zoos exploit baby elephants, and how to identify fake sanctuaries. We will also look at some of the worst zoos for elephants in the U.S. and suggest ways to alleviate the suffering of elephants still in captivity.

Wild Elephants Face Numerous Threats

Elephants are native to two continents, Africa and Asia, and their prehistoric ancestors have roamed the earth for as far back as 40 million years. Today, both species of elephants face a range of threats. Habitat loss, human-elephant conflict, and poaching are among the most significant challenges, leading to Asian and African elephants becoming endangered.

Elephants are divided into two main species—African and Asian—each with distinct subspecies. The African elephant includes the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana africana), which is the largest and roams the open plains, and the smaller forest elephant (Loxodonta africana cyclotis), adapted to life in Central and West Africa’s dense rainforests. Some scientists now consider the forest elephant a separate species due to significant genetic and physical differences.

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) has several recognized subspecies: the Indian elephant (E. m. indicus), found across mainland Asia; the Sri Lankan elephant (E. m. maximus), which is the largest of the Asian types and often has no tusks; the critically endangered Sumatran elephant (E. m. sumatranus), native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra; and the Bornean elephant (E. m. borneensis), sometimes called the Borneo pygmy elephant, which is smaller and genetically distinct, though its classification remains debated. These subspecies vary in size, habitat, and physical traits, reflecting their adaptation to different environments across Africa and Asia.

Elephants are frequently poached for their skin and ivory tusks, and in some countries, they are also targeted for sport hunting. Poaching devastates wild populations, particularly African elephants, which are most heavily targeted for their tusks. According to National Geographic, this has resulted in elephants “evolving to lose their tusks.”

African forest elephants have become critically endangered because of poaching and habitat loss. “The number of African forest elephants fell by more than 86 percent over 31 years, while the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60 percent over the last 50 years,” said the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2021 while announcing its assessment about the global extinction risks to the African elephants.

Habitat Loss and Human-Elephant Conflict

The human population is expanding into areas traditionally inhabited by elephants, resulting in habitat loss and fragmentation. This is particularly problematic for elephants as they need vast areas to roam for food and water. As their habitat shrinks, elephants are forced into closer contact with humans, leading to conflicts.

In Asia, the expansion of agricultural activities and deforestation has led to two-thirds of elephants losing their natural habitat, according to a 2023 studypublished in Scientific Reports.

In some places, elephants raid crops and even attack villages, resulting in the loss of both human and elephant life.

For example, in India, up to 400 people are killed by elephants each year,and 100 elephants die due to the human-elephant conflict, according to a 2019 article in the journal Frontiers. This conflict is also a leading cause of elephant deaths in Asia.

In Sri Lanka, food scarcity has driven elephants to seek food in garbage dumps. Elephants have been observed eating plastic and other waste, which can lead to severe health issues and even death. “Around 20 elephants have died over the last eight years after consuming plastic trash in the dump,” stated a 2022 CBS News article.

The Dangers of Capturing Elephants for Tourism

Tourism has also had a detrimental effect on wild elephant populations. Countries with elephant populations, primarily Zimbabwe, have sold baby elephants to foreign zoos, including 140 elephants to China. These baby elephants are often subjected to harsh capture methods, which can result in high mortality rates. The country also ordered the culling of 200 elephants in 2024 to tackle food shortages due to drought.

Despite conservation efforts, such as India’s ban on elephant capture for domestic use, the illegal wildlife trade continues to thrive.

In August 2019, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) imposed restrictions on the international trade of wild elephants, including a near-total ban on selling baby African elephants to zoos. The ban was passed with 87 votes to 29, with the European Union ultimately supporting the ban despite earlier concerns. However, Zimbabwe, the primary exporter, and the United States voted against it. Zimbabwe and Botswana, whose elephant populations are healthier than those of other African countries, can export elephants to “appropriate and acceptable” destinations under certain conditions.

Shortly after the CITES decision, Zimbabwe exported 32 baby elephants to China. The elephants were sent to Longemont Animal Park, where they were reportedly treated inhumanely and kept in substandard conditions.

Elephants captured from the wild for domestic use are usually kept in captivity for the rest of their lives, often in inhumane conditions, and tend to live significantly shorter lives. In a 2008 study published in the journal Science, researchers compared the lifespans of female African elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park to 800 elephants living in European zoos and found a striking difference.

Wild elephants had a median age of 56 years, while captive elephants lived only 17 years on average—a threefold difference. Similar patterns were observed for Asian elephants used in the logging industry, with captivity significantly shortening their lifespans.

The Unique Problems of Captive Elephants

Elephants in captivity face many issues specific to their species. They are highly social creatures, accustomed to living in tight-knit herds, with strong bonds among their family members. They roam vast distances in the wild, but in captivity, they are confined to small enclosures.

Captivity also leads to various physical and psychological problems for these animals. Captivity harms elephants by denying them the necessary social interaction and space to roam. In the wild, elephants live in matriarchal herds and have strong family bonds. Captive elephants are often kept in isolation or as part of groups of unrelated individuals, which is psychologically damaging for them.

Even when zoos attempt to keep elephants together, the limited space and unnatural environments make it impossible for them to exhibit natural behaviors. In the wild, elephants can walk up to 40 miles a day. However, in captivity, they are confined to enclosures that are only a fraction of their natural range. A 2016 study published in PLOS One found that elephants in North American zoos walk around 3 miles per day. And the area they have to walk in is bereft of any trees, plants, or other foliage that is essential for elephant health.

This results in elephants developing zoochosis, a term used to describe the mental illness that develops in animals held in captivity. Elephants are particularly susceptible to this condition. Zoochosis manifests through obsessive, repetitive behaviors such as pacing, swaying, or rocking back and forth. Elephants with zoochosis often bob their heads incessantly, a behavior not observed in wild elephants.

Zoos often try to mask the signs of zoochosis by administering tranquilizers or antidepressants, but this only addresses the symptoms, not the underlying cause.

Baby Elephants in Captivity

Zoos tend to highlight their elephant breeding programs as proof that they contribute to conservation. However, captive breeding programs are more about increasing visitor numbers than genuine conservation efforts. Baby elephants are a massive draw for zoos, and breeding them helps boost ticket sales.

Unfortunately, these breeding programs often involve invasive and unethical practices. For example, semen is collected from male elephants using painful techniques, and females are artificially inseminated. Forced pregnancies usually result in high infant mortality rates. Chai, an elephant in the Oklahoma City Zoo, who died in 2016, “was forcibly inseminated 112 times in her lifetime,” according to a 2024 article in Earth.org.

Elephants born in captivity die much younger than their wild counterparts, and “deaths of elephants in zoos outnumber births. As a result, zoos are net consumers of elephants rather than guardians of them as the industry would have us believe,” added the article. Living longer is no blessing either. As explained in the 10 Worst Zoos for Elephants in 2024, elephants who live past 40 suffer from zoo-related conditions, including chronic osteoarthritis and joint and foot disease. The zoos call this decline “aging out” and consider these older elephants less valuable, as they are no longer able to breed to produce ticket-boosting babies.

How to Identify a Fake Elephant Sanctuary

Some organizations claim to be elephant sanctuaries, but, in truth, exploit the animals for profit. These fake sanctuaries offer activities like elephant rides, feeding, and bathing, which are unnatural for the animals. True sanctuaries give elephants the autonomy to choose how they spend their time and do not force them to interact with humans.

Sanctuaries, unlike zoos, provide vast spaces for elephants to roam. Visitors, if allowed, can observe them from a distance or remotely via livestream cameras. In Asia, many tourist facilities that formerly allowed interactions, such as bathing and feeding with elephants, are adopting a no-contact policy to keep elephants and visitors safe.

The Worst Zoos for Elephants

According to In Defense of Animals (IDA), approximately 393 elephants are confined in North American zoos, circuses, and private properties as of 2024. This includes both elephants captured from the wild and those born in captivity. Many have endured decades of isolation, living alone without the companionship of other elephants.

IDA publishes an annual list of North America’s 10 worst zoos for elephants. These zoos are singled out for mistreating elephants, ranging from poor living conditions to unethical breeding practices. The top three offenders in 2024 include:

– Edmonton Valley Zoo: This zoo keeps Lucy, a lone Asian elephant, in harsh Canadian winters with little space and poor medical care. Despite public outcry, the zoo refuses to move her to a sanctuary.

– ABQ BioPark Zoo: This zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has had multiple elephant deaths due to an elephant virus, endotheliotropic herpesvirus(EMHV). Despite these deaths, the zoo continues its breeding program.

– Cincinnati Zoo: The elephants at this zoo are kept in a small enclosure, which leads to aggressive behavior and psychological stress. In 2024, the Cincinnati Zoo completed the renovations to their “Elephant Trek,” expanding the elephants’ habitat from 1 acre to 5 acres. Yet, this is hardly enough compared to their natural range, which spans up to 25,000 acres. The zoo imported four more elephants from Dublin Zoo, increasing its elephant population to eight, to expand its breeding program and confine yet more elephants to lifetimes in captivity.

Legal Protections

Several federal laws in the United States provide protections for elephants in captivity, though the scope and strength of these laws vary. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA), overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sets minimum standards for the care, housing, and handling of captive animals, including elephants used in zoos and entertainment. However, the AWA has been criticized for weak enforcement and outdated standards, and it does not apply to private individuals who own elephants but do not exhibit them.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA), administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also plays a role by prohibiting the import, export, and commercial use of endangered elephants, such as the Asian elephant, without a permit. This law can influence how captive elephants are transferred or sold, especially across state or national borders. Additionally, the African Elephant Conservation Act, passed in 1988, specifically targets the protection of African elephants by prohibiting ivory imports and funding conservation initiatives and anti-poaching programs in Africa.

Another layer of legal protection comes from the Lacey Act, which bans the trafficking of illegally obtained wildlife, including elephants and their ivory. While this law is primarily focused on preventing illegal trade, it can also apply to captive elephants brought into the U.S. under unlawful conditions. Similarly, the Eliminate, Neutralize, and Disrupt (END) Wildlife Trafficking Act, enacted in 2016, strengthens U.S. efforts to fight wildlife trafficking through international cooperation and programs aimed at reducing demand for trafficked wildlife products. Furthermore, a 2016 rule under the ESAimplemented a near-total ban on the commercial trade of African elephant ivory, with exceptions for preexisting antiques and specific items, such as musical instruments.

Beyond federal regulation, state and local laws are increasingly important. Several states, including California, New York, and Illinois, have enacted laws banning or restricting the use of elephants in circuses and traveling shows. Some municipalities go further by prohibiting private ownership or requiring strict permits for exotic animals. These varied legal protections reflect growing concern about the welfare of elephants in captivity and ongoing public pressure to end exploitative practices in entertainment and private keeping.

Internationally, the U.S. supports conservation through agreements such as the CITES, which regulates the trade of elephant parts and promotes global conservation. These laws and initiatives work together to address threats like poaching, habitat loss, and the illegal ivory trade. While the U.S. has these laws, it is essential to put into perspective that it still supports the export of elephants, as it voted against the proposal of a near-total ban on selling baby African elephants to zoos.

Even with these protections in place, we still need stronger enforcement and expanded measures to ensure long-term protection for wild elephants. The global ivory trade is valued at an estimated $23 billion annually, with ivory fetching around $3,300 per pound. This high market value provides strong incentives for poachers to continue killing elephants for their tusks, and poor countries like Zimbabwe to support the sale of ivory.

Solutions for Captive Elephants

The best solution for captive elephants is to move them to true sanctuaries, where they can live in more natural environments. Sanctuaries like the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in California, and Elephant Refuge North America in Georgia offer vast spaces for elephants to roam and individualized care that addresses their physical and psychological needs.

Sanctuaries provide a much-needed alternative to zoos for elephants that cannot be released into the wild. By supporting sanctuaries and advocating for better treatment of elephants, we can help alleviate the suffering of those still in captivity.

Zoos are not the solution to the conservation crisis facing elephants. Instead, they contribute to the problem by exploiting these animals for profit and, even with legal restrictions in place, manage to remove them from their wild homes.

If we genuinely care about elephants and their future, we need to advocate for their freedom. This means supporting real sanctuaries, opposing zoos, and pushing for stronger legislation to protect elephants from exploitation. By doing so, we can help ensure that future generations of elephants live free, as they were meant to.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Clearcuts, Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Every Creation of Nature that inhabits a public forest governed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is being systematically displaced, seriously harmed, and murdered in cold blood by federal government agents.

Bulldozing roads and clearcutting our public forests is incredibly barbaric. Please try to imagine the homes of pine squirrels, pygmy owls, goshawks, or migratory, interior forest songbirds raising their young in a native forest being clearcut, masticated (mechanized pulverizing of trees and brush into “mulch”), and/or burned alive. Only scorched bare earth remains.

Government forest management operates like a plantation and land-management corporation. The U.S. empire was built to dominate and exploit, not coexist. Empire’s planned collapse is now in full liquidation mode, on the ‘downlow,’ but directed and relentless.

Federal and state agents and their paid collaborators in local government, industry, and Big Green corporations (controlled opposition) all march in lockstep to a legal concept I call Presumption of Management. Presumption of management conditions (brainwashes) managers (predominantly bureaucrats, foresters, and civil road engineers) and directors (politicians who write forest management laws) to believe they are acting in the best interests of the common good and public shareholders. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Presumption of management aims to preserve artificial (man’s imaginative fictions) and commercial decisions made by those in charge. In this Alice in Wonderland world of destruction and death, forest management contains no moral consideration whatsoever or any substance of the Natural Processes of Creation and Renewal.

In 1905, the management of the forest reserves (renamed national forests in 1907) was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, which instituted our corporation nation’s colonial, utilitarian and commercial concerns. Our nation’s plantations were carved out of wilderness and expanded with criminal intent as expressed in behavioral patterns of bad faith, self-interest, reckless intent to deceive, acting beyond their regulatory authority, and blatant conflict of interest. Racketeering, corruption, and gross mismanagement is now practiced uniformly across hundreds of million acres of federal public land with relative impunity.

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”

– Michael Corleone, The Godfather.

Right now, all of Nature, all of God’s Creation, is in a state of alienation when compared to government’s clear intent and actions. Instinctively, government feels it must conquer (recreate names and purchase) all of God’s Creation by naming each part with legal names (nouns) and titles (nouns).

“Forest Health” (noun)

National public forests are not sick. However, they have sustained serious injury caused by madmen and their machines. “Forest health” is a legal term of art of man’s imagination, or in other words, a euphemism used to justify clearcutting, thinning (exploiting) old growth forests and bulldozing roads into untrammeled forest land that has not yet been domesticated and usurped into government’s failed commercial tree plantation operations. Or in other words, machines and monsters kill the native forest to convert it to a perpetually managed monoculture. Killing it again and again ensures that every square inch of Nature’s Forest is dead and gone, forever domesticated (managed).

Falsification and omission of key research and historical fire frequency data has buttressed the government’s psychotic passion for mechanical forest torture and sterilization.^[1]

This demonstrates how government is only a dead thing (noun) and necromancer extraordinaire, which worships destruction, sterilization, blood sacrifice and exploitation of the dead to gain power over the Living. Government is never a Living Being (verb). It creates no life. It is important to understand that when Nature’s verb is nouned, it’s enslaved/subjected by its man-made name to a new, fictitious (virtual) status as a thing. It becomes (legally) lifeless property, flatteringly (insincere) titled commercial property.

“Restoration” (noun)

Restoration, commonly defined as renewal, revival, re-establishment, or recovery, is another commonly abused noun, which implies a directed government management action of returning colonized/domesticated, mismanaged forestland to a former, arbitrarily selected, static condition. Presumption of management cannot fathom Nature’s infinite, incredibly powerful restorative process (verb). Government’s insistence on domination and dominion over all living beings is the principle belief (foundational source) driving this 21^st-Century, secular-technocratic Death Cult. Western “civilization” can no longer conceive of Nature’s life-sustaining powers or its supremacy in all matters of Creation and Renewal.

“(Conifer) Encroachment” (noun)

To the 21^st-Century descendants of early western settler-colonialists, conifer encroachment is perceived as a threat to the commercial production of livestock (meat).

Encroachment is another example of government’s obsession with killing natural processes by nouning Nature’s verb. The BLM and USFS are at war with conifers which are entering gradually and quite naturally onto domesticated government plantation lands, specifically categorized, and renamed “range or rangeland” (noun).

This colonization process is better understood by simply revealing the nature of the East-India Company of Great Britain, the same corporation that colonized America. Not much has changed since Plymouth, Pemaquid Point and Jamestown first seized land to establish corporate colonies along the Atlantic coast.

Encroaching conifers threaten the imagined, so-called, man-made rights or possessions of God’s chosen elite and the federal government flunkies, which both see naturally expanding conifer forests, not as a gift from God, but rather as Nature’s unlawful intrusion into territories legally stolen at gunpoint from free and sovereign American Indian nations.

Range/Rangeland (noun)

The term “range,” and later “rangeland,” was first used (1870s-1900s) to describe the vast open spaces of the American West. Rangelands are primarily natural ecosystems with native vegetation of diverse habitat types, including natural grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands, and deserts that support domestic and/or wild grazing and browsing mammals – and a multitude of other lifeforms that are never mentioned. Rangeland is all about meat!

Juniper and pinyon pine are being burned (murdered) mercilessly in the arid and semi-arid Rocky Mountain region to expand livestock herds that graze prairie ecosystems down to the dirt at below-market rates on BLM and USFS lands.^[2]

Agencies and pseudo-green collaborators almost never acknowledge the cumulative consequences of multiple management actions (“treatments”) on the whole ecosystem. Severe ecological harm to natural ecosystems can ultimately lead to deforestation and desertification.

Fire

Clearcut logging and thinning large, mature trees to reduce the severity of wildfires at some time in the future often has the opposite effect by creating drier conditions, increasing fast-drying fine fuels, and opening the forest to high winds that drive fast moving wildfires – the ones everyone is most fearful of. It’s almost as if the government is doing everything in its power to encourage “catastrophic” fires so agencies can leverage mass fearmongering into congressional appropriations for bigger and bigger fire-suppression budgets.

Prescribed burns, the latest and perhaps the greatest government management “tool,” sterilizes Nature’s sacred landscapes, diminishes ecological integrity by reducing forest ecosystems to ashes. Biological diversity is incrementally destroyed one man-made fire at a time, the same way eugenicists covertly reduce human populations. Bulldozing roads and firebreaks into the remaining roadless forests fragments landscapes, reduces habitat quality and quantity and depletes diverse wildlife and fish populations. Extinction is the feature, not an unintended consequence.

The cumulative impacts of clearcut logging, burning, livestock overgrazing, road building, motorized recreation and mountain bike use are seldom taken seriously or analyzed cumulatively by federal land managers or Congress.

It’s beyond ignorant to destroy the last functioning native prairie and forest ecosystems just to save a few random homes from fire and grow more government-subsidized meat. Our western landscapes need more protection, not more Presumption of Management, which always generates great ecological harm and a tremendous loss of net public value which Nature has provided for millennia for free.

Nothing western colonizers say can be trusted. They never let go of the future prospect of managing their possession. Domination and exploitation of land and murdering all native lifeforms is their business, their only business. Our publicly owned western landscapes will only be free when “The West” can no longer operate with impunity destroying the native ecosystems and sacred landscapes upon which all of Creation depends.

What can an individual do?

Free our national public forests and prairies. Resist don’t collaborate. Dissent (verb) vs. the Death Cults (noun)! Remember, someday you will be the ancestor young people will come to with questions about the meaning of life. Imagine now, what will you tell them?

Steve Kelly is an artist, gardener, and environmental activist living in Bozeman, Montana.

Notes.

1. See: Baker, William L., et al. “Countering Omitted Evidence of Variable Historical Forests and Fire Regime in Western USA Dry Forests: The Low-Severity-Fire Model Rejected.” Fire, vol. 6, no. 4, 2023 ↑

2. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-30/bureau-of-land-management-deforestation-pinyon-juniper-great-basin ↑

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Oil barrel washed into the Columbia River during a Pacific Storm. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

A faux profound question that Western economists occasionally ask one another to demonstrate their tribal worldview is: if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? The implication is that wealth is a function of superior skill in the form of intelligence. With very low economic mobility across much of the West, choosing one’s parents wisely (we have no choice) goes farther in explaining the distribution of American wealth than do intelligence, competence, or ‘merit.’

The widespread adoption of utopian economic fantasies like a relationship between wealth and intelligence might lead some to conclude, as the fictional character Candide was repeatedly informed, that we citizens of the West ‘live in the best of all possible worlds.’ With the rich now unambiguously ruling the West, and by virtue of their wealth being smarter., how could the world possibly disagree? Do we really want to put the stupid in charge (goes the argument)? Readers can decide for themselves if rule by the rich reflects rule by the intelligent?

Graph: the average (mean) wealth per nation shows national concentrations in the Anglosphere, Scandinavia and Japan. As per the Nature article (link below), these are the nations emitting the most per capita (per person) greenhouse gases. The Nature article ties these emissions to those experiencing the consequences of climate change most directly. These tend to be poor nations in the Global South represented in deep red in the map. Source: Credit Suisse / Wikipedia.

Over the last five or so decades, the rich have come to rule us more directly as the West has stumbled through economic crises, pointless yet unstoppable wars, environmental devastation and social upheaval. As argued below, with evidence provided, on the environmental front, the rich, both across and within nations, are uniquely responsible for rising environmental catastrophe.

A recent article in the journal Nature updated the well-documented claim that world’s richest are uniquely responsible for climate change through their outsized consumption. For instance, the US has a tad over four percent of the world’s population, but it accounts for over 25% of the world’s consumption. Moreover, wealth and incomes inside the nations of the West have become increasingly skewed over the last half-century. The rich in the West can be counted in the thousands, meaning that the problem isn’t ‘the West’ per se, but rather that it is ruled by a dictatorship of money, and with it, the power that money accrues.

The class dynamic that is unveiled is that it isn’t the West, broadly considered, that is responsible for the rapidly declining life-sustaining qualities of the world. It is the rich in the West who are. While there is a ‘consumer aristocracy’ effect of living in the West, or at least there was, whereby even the poor in the US are able to afford low quality consumer goods, this isn’t the point of the Nature article.

“The wealthiest 10% of the global population accounted for nearly half of global emissions in 2019 through private consumption and investments, whereas the poorest 50% accounted for only one-tenth of global emissions. “ Nature.com.

Given that the argument being made by Nature was a central theme of environmental protests across the West a dozen years ago, its resurrection now serves complex political interests. A large part of the purpose of making the argument back then was to fix the class relations that make environmental destruction an aspect of class warfare by the rich against the rest of us. The poor and working people who now oppose forcing the rich to clean up the environmental mess that they created trade short term economic insecurity for long term economic insecurity.

From the 1980s forward, this self-defeating aspect of liberal environmentalism was abandoned in favor of ‘market based’ solutions like ‘putting a price on carbon’ that have fueled many a financial fraud, but not very much else in terms of resolving the problem. The ‘just transition’ of the US Green New Deal was intended to preclude the capital strikes that killed the 1970s environmental movement. Structuring them as tax subsidies made the Biden administration’s ‘green energy’ additions to the executive bonus pool, and little more.

As I wrote at the time, the empirical evidence for tax subsidies is ambiguous at best. While they make logical sense within the Western economic purview, actual results haven’t followed the logic. For instance, ‘stadium economics’ have produced 1) stadiums and 2) made their developers rich while 3) benefitting few others in the process. Even though logic is on the side of stadium economics, the results predicted for the rest of us simply haven’t materialized over four decades of building stadiums.

A significant literature has now been dedicated to tying Federal and state subsidies to their predicted outcomes. Search on ‘are tax subsidies effective’ to see how little support for their effectiveness there really is. Much of this literature was written before 2021, when the Biden administration structured its environmental program almost exclusively as tax subsidies. There was no rebuttal of the literature, or even awareness expressed that it existed, by the Biden administration. This suggests that its goal was to create the appearance of environmental concern without actually doing anything about it.

Another aspect of the 1980s environmental effort was to ‘retail’ it, meaning to blame environmental decline on consumer choices. Theory had it that if American consumers really care about environmental destruction, they can buy less environmentally harmful products. What the Nature article makes clear is that this was misdirection. It isn’t ‘consumers’ broadly considered that are the problem. The rich consume so much more than the poor that if the poorer 80% or thereabouts of the US bought environmentally friendly products, the rich would still be killing us.

Question: why should the Federal government fund the transition of automaker production from ICE (internal combustion engine) to electric? If the automakers wish to stay in the automaking business, why don’t they fund the transition themselves? This would be capitalism as it was explained to me by its proponents during the Reagan administration. And if the US is post-capitalist, what is the explanation for the rich still taking all of the wealth for themselves? What is the justification?

‘Markets’ based on / in ‘merit’ had been the explanation for concentrated wealth. In that fairytale, the rich earned their livings. But the Nature article demonstrates that this simply isn’t true. And it never has been. The rich use their social power to force their costs off onto the rest of us. Environmental destruction is one method. Government bailouts are another. Lemon socialism, whereby the rich get we little people to pay all of their bills, answers the question.

As far as fixing the environment goes, ICE-based GHG emissions would fall either way. If the American automakers no longer wish to produce cars, emissions go down. If they are forced to pay the costs of the emissions themselves, emissions go down (ending the automakers would cause demand destruction). A Federal mandate to stop producing ICE vehicles would cause emissions to go down. But it would also require a plan. Without a national grid of charging stations, EVs are overpriced paperweights in much of the country.

The new information provided in the Nature article is the direct statistical mapping of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions to distinctive wealth groups across, and within, nations. What becomes clear, and much of the point of the article, is that environmental destruction represents a transfer of economic wealth from the world’s poorest to its richest. This economics of one group paying the costs of environmental destruction while another, much, much, smaller group derives the benefits, occurs both across and within nations.

The maps below and above, taken together, illustrate that the average (mean) wealth is greater than the median wealth almost uniquely for the US. A statistical mean that is greater than the median indicates skewness, in this case high wealth concentration. Amongst rich nations, the US has the most highly skewed wealth distribution per capita in the world. Given that the data supporting the map is from 2021, the result is bipartisan. Interpretation is that a small group of very rich Americans is responsible for US GHG emissions. So, why should ‘the nation’ of the US be the relevant entity for solving environmental woes rather than mostly the rich?

Graph: while this looks like the map from above, it represents a more democratic distribution of wealth because that is what it is measuring. The median is the mid-point of a distribution, with as many values above it as below it. In this map, the US is less dark green than in the map of average wealth above. Interpretation is that the US is a rich country because it has a few very rich people, and not because most Americans are rich. The difference between average and median wealth (skewness) is a measure of the disparity. Source: Credit Suisse / Wikipedia.

To tie this together, both collectively and individually, the nations of the West are more responsible for GHG emissions than are the nations of the Global South. However, within the nations of the West, the rich are uniquely responsible for most of the emissions. The framing of the US versus China as emitters misses 1) that per capita emissions from China are much lower than those of the West and 2) the rich in the US are much larger emitters of GHG than are the rest of us. Calls for ‘shared sacrifice’ are therefore a grift. The rich want for us to pay to clean up their garbage.

This intention represents a central difference between Left- and Right-wing populism. Right-wing populists tend to accept the claim that the rich pay their own way and then some. This is a basis for grievance politics where practitioners ‘kick down’ at their imagined social inferiors as the locus of social problems. The liberal version of this comes from acceptance of the national frame of environmental resolution. An analogy is George W. Bush’s tax cuts that sent $700 checks to we little people, but delivered millions and tens of millions in tax breaks to Mr. Bush’s rich supporters.

This isn’t to argue that nation-states are unnecessary entities with respect to environmental resolution. They are both 1) available and 2) crucial for crafting binding environmental agreements. It is to point out that despite decades of awareness that environmental problems are aggregating to crisis levels, the US has made but a few tweaks to its political economy in response. This is because the people who run the US— the rich, have no intention of paying a penny to clean up their own garbage. One of the greatest inefficiencies of capitalism is environmental degradation. But it doesn’t directly impact the business prospects of polluting industries. It impacts peasant farmers in central Africa.

Graph: the stock market represents the nexus between Western capital and its ability to fund itself. But the richest 1% of the US population owns half of it, and the richest 10% own eighty percent of it. Companies that do the right thing and clean up their own garbage get creamed in the stock market because environmental resolution represents a direct cost without a direct benefit. The benefit is diffuse, to the public. This lowers the value of the company’s stock, and with it the wealth of company executives. It therefore never occurs. Source: inequality.org.

Part of the social tension over environmentalism ties to who pays to clean up the messes made by the rich? Elon Musk’s Tesla makes boutique $100,000 EVs (electric vehicles) for wealthy suburbanites, whereas China’s BYD can sell functional EVs at a profit for $10,000. Teslas are close to the lowest rated vehicles in the US for reliability. This makes Musk the rough equivalent of the president of Ford in 1973. when Ford owners needed their own tow truck to move their cars from one repair shop to the next.

It also makes Musk’s light-thinking with respect to economic efficiency a farce. Consider the equation P = R – C; where P = profits, R – revenues and C = costs. With a plus sign in front of it (implied), profits rise when revenues increase and costs stay the same. Profits also rise when revenues stay unchanged and costs fall. Environmental destruction is called an ‘externality’ because its costs aren’t accounted for in the profit equation. But the Nature article just corrected this deficiency. It ties the entities creating the costs to those who are paying them. If Musk were actually interested in correcting inefficiencies, he could clean up his own garbage. But the DOGE plan is looting, not to create economic efficiencies.

Graph: as if to match the dictionary definition of an oligarchy, billionaires in the US have decided to ‘invest’ their fortunes into accruing political power. They put the most into elections in the very year (2024) that landed an alleged billionaire (Trump) in the White House and gave others unelected authority (Musk). That Democrats rolled out their own billionaires as an imagined selling point demonstrates the depravity of current US politics. Question: when will those committing environmental crimes be made to clean up their own garbage? Source: inequality.org.

The global wealth maps provided above go far in illustrating the improbability of the American political system producing a plausible environmental program. The uniparty parties pretend that doing so is a matter of electing the right party / people. Republicans tell fables about capitalism that unsurprisingly paint them as the heroes of Western economies. A central aspect of the effort is to deny that they are destroying the world which, for those of us who depend on it, is a fraught lie.

American liberals were able to bring environmental destruction to the fore of public consciousness. They then endorsed a policy of letting industrial workers pay the costs of cleaning it up with their livelihoods (jobs). Employers pretended that they were being burdened with ‘bureaucracy’ when in fact the point of contention was that they were regulated into paying a tiny bit more of their own costs. And they have whined about it ever since.

The existing uniparty frame of competing oligarchs (irrespective of AOC’s and Bernie’s sheep-dogging for the Blue Team) means that only the interests of the oligarchs will be represented in Washington. The question for 2024 was: will it be oligarchs for the Red Team or the Blue Team that run the US? What the Nature article articulates is that it is the oligarchs who are most responsible for environmental decline, irrespective of which branch of the uniparty they support. Without addressing the problem of the oligarchs, environmental destruction will never be resolved.

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Gravelly Range. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The U.S. Forest Service cancelled an illegal public land logging project due to a recently-filed lawsuit by Montana conservation group Alliance for the Wild Rockies on May 20th.  The illegal logging was scheduled to occur in the Gravelly Mountains of southwest Montana, in an area that provides a critical wildlife corridor connecting the Yellowstone area to other mountain ranges in Montana.  The area is home to endangered species including grizzly bears, lynx, and wolverines, as well as large wild elk herds.

The illegal Greenhorn logging project would have allowed wildlife habitat destruction in the form of industrial logging, road-building, and burning activities across thousands of acres of public lands in this key wildlife corridor zone in Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.  The government cancelled the project in response to Alliance’s lawsuit because the government knew it would lose in court.

The project would have been enormous. Planned in an area located about 10 miles south of Virginia City, Montana, the project called for bulldozing 28.7 miles of new and rebuilt logging roads to enable logging and burning over 17,000 acres or 26.5 square miles in prime wildlife habitat, much of it in inventoried roadless areas.

Prior to project approval, the government illegally eliminated 1.1 million acres of lynx habitat protections on the Beaverhead -Deerlodge National Forest.  The government then relied on that illegal conduct to authorize logging for the project.  Multiple federal courts have found this to be illegal, so when Alliance’s lawsuit was filed, the government cancelled the project because they knew it was illegal.  However, without Alliance’s lawsuit, the illegal project would have plowed forward.

Sage grouse populations are also in very steep decline and the federal government is desperately trying to keep from having them listed under the Endangered Species Act. Consequently, destroying their habitat with clearcutting, burning, and bulldozing simply made no sense. Nonetheless, the government never applied their own mandatory sage grouse protections to this project.

Also, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest Plan requires that 60% of the Gravellies be managed for secure grizzly habitat. Currently only 54% of the Gravellies provide secure habitat for grizzlies and the Greenhorn project would have reduced grizzly secure habitat by one third. At the same time the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks is trucking grizzly bears from the Glacier ecosystem to the Yellowstone ecosystem for genetic connectivity.  Why not just follow the law, protect the grizzly corridor, and let grizzlies walk there on their own? This government action just never made sense.

Alliance caught the government breaking the law.  Alliance sued.  The government backed down.  This is a great victory for wildlife.  With your help, Alliance will continue its fearless efforts to do this work.

Because the government cancelled the project after Alliance sued, Alliance’s attorneys will not get paid for the hundreds of hours of work it takes to file a winning lawsuit like this and protect thousands of acres of habitat for endangered species.  Similarly, Alliance won’t ever get back the costs and fees it paid to bring this critical — and victorious — case in federal court.

So Alliance must rely on the public — on you — to fund this work.  Alliance cannot bring lawsuits without your financial support.

If we had not filed the lawsuit, this illegal project would still be happening.  Please donate to help us continue this critical work — our recurring victories in court are a light that continues to shine in these dark times.

Please also consider donating to Counterpunch during their spring fundraiser for publishing columns like this.

The post Feds Cancel Illegal Logging Project near Yellowstone After Alliance for the Wild Rockies Sues appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.