More knowledge is being gained about and more attention is being given to the harm caused to our health and the planet by plastics, from the start of their production to their disposal as waste that doesn’t ever go away. Clearing the FOG speaks with Yvette Arellano, the founder and director of Fenceline Watch, an environmental justice organization based in Houston, Texas. Yvette explains that the Gulf Coast is not only the home of the oil and gas industries, but also the plastic industries that use petroleum, and how they impact mostly Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking communities. They describe the global effects of plastics, how we can best stop them and the work to create alternatives. Once you know about the problems with plastics, you will understand that stopping their production is imperative for a livable future.
On 27 May 2021, a significant event took place in Rwanda where French President Emmanuel Macron asked for forgiveness from the people of Rwanda after admitting for the first time that France bore a “terrible responsibility” for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the 1994 genocide.
“France played its part and bears the political responsibility for the events in Rwanda. France is obligated to face history and admit that it caused suffering to the Rwandan people by allowing itself lengthy silences at the truth exam …”
On the other hand, the French government assumes no liability for the genocide and ecocide perpetrated in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia)- the “crown jewel” of France’s overseas territories.
The French administration is living in denial concerning its responsibility to the Ma’ohi Nui people vis-a-vis the impact of nuclear tests in the region.
Former French President Hollande said in 2016 that: “I recognise that the nuclear tests between 1966 and 1996 in French Polynesia have had an environmental impact, causing health consequences.”
Further, Hollande added that the issue of compensation for health consequences would be examined — but that statement fell flat as a series of empty promises. That speech has no political or compensatory weight since every five years the reset button is activated during the French presidential elections.
Promises turn stale
Promises made by politicians usually turn stale unless they are seeking another electoral mandate.
France projects an image of itself as a responsible nation in the world at large — but France has treated the issues concerning Rwanda and Ma’ohi Nui differently.
The Rwanda population received a confession of guilt whereas the Ma’ohi Nui populations have received a slap in the face.
Mā’ohi Nui is still waiting an admission of guilt from the French administration — especially after the publication of the investigative book Toxic that discredited all the French governments’ discourse concerning “safe and clean” nuclear tests.
The French government refuses to tell the truth concerning the harm successive administrations have committed upon Ma’ohi Nui.
Moruroa investigation … French Polynesian pro-independence campaigner Oscar Temaru says meeting in Paris would be “a sham”. Image: APR file
Ma’ohi Nui standing up in protest
The release of the book Toxic has injected a renewed energy among civil and political groups in Mā’ohi Nui who are reminding the French state that discussions concerning accountability are long overdue. The book focused on the degree to which the radioactive fallout from an atmospheric nuclear test named Centaur contaminated nearly the entirety of the Mā’ohi Nui Islands.
France has used the local Ma’ohi Nui population as guinea pigs to advance its national ambition of becoming a nuclear power while ignoring the rights of the local population and their environment.
Marches in commemoration of the more than 100,000 Ma’ohi Nui people affected by the radioactive cloud from the Centaur explosion will take place in the streets of Pape’ete in Tahiti, on July 17 — the very date when Centaur exploded in 1974.
Marches in Pape’ete are also a response to the stand taken by French President Macron. The French leader has organised a meeting this week when, once more, discussions concerning the modality of potential compensation are taking place along with new rules to be drafted for victims of radioactivity.
However, instead of holding the meeting in Mā’ohi Nui, where most of the contamination has occurred, the meeting is being held in the colonial capital of Paris. Locating the meeting in Paris appears to be yet another way for the French administration to try to control the narrative surrounding the Centaur blast.
Faa’a mayor Oscar Temaru, a former French Polynedsia territorial president, is under no illusion that most of the participants attending the Paris meeting will be pro-French, including Tahiti’s current government which has responded positively to the invitation.
A past anti-nuclear march in Pape’ete … banner shows a “banned” map of fissures damage to Moruroa atoll. Image: Moruroa e Tatou
The main anti-nuclear Mā’ohi parties have rejected the invitation from Paris for France’s lack of transparency concerning process, and because these parties believe France’s capital is an inappropriate venue for discussing the horrendous nuclear tests that took place in Mā’ohi Nui.
Total transparency
Temaru says that the way to demonstrate total transparency would be to call upon a neutral arbitrator such as the United Nations to mediate between the French government and Mā’ohi Nui representatives.
Temaru asks for this despite knowing well that the French practise a policy of the “empty chair” at the UN. The International Court of Justice in the Hague would be another appropriate place to discuss decolonisation: especially since Macron said in 2017 that colonisation was a crime against humanity.
According to Temaru, pro-French representatives of the local Tahitian government are trying to undermine the resolution of 2013 that reinscribed French Polynesia onto the UN list of non-self-governing territories. These Tahitian representatives are asking for the 2013 resolution to be overturned: that is very unlikely to happen.
In consequence, Oscar Temaru and his people are organising a day of action for July 17 in Pape’ete, Tahiti. They will march in commemoration of the day the 1974 Centaur nuclear test was initiated — for reparation for damage caused to the Ma’ohi Nui environment and people as a result of nuclear testing, and for the decolonisation of Ma’ohi Nui.
Temaru has invited Moana peoples to stand beside him in solidarity. Nuclear capability is the colonial weapon par excellence and this issue cannot be separated from indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination.
Organisers in Aotearoa have responded to Temaru’s call and have organised a rally to take place in Auckland on July 18 at the same time as protests occur in Tahiti.
Tahitian researcher Ena Manuireva with a photograph of Oscar Temaru in David Robie’s book Eyes Of Fire … “Temaru says that the way to demonstrate total transparency would be to call upon a neutral arbitrator such as the United Nations to mediate.” Image: David Robie/APR
Organising the diaspora around Ma’ohi Nui protest
Members of the Tahitian community living in Auckland will add their voices and feet to support their countrymen/women in Tahiti and rally in a show of solidarity. This rally acknowledges that Ma’ohi Nui communities have fought for redress from France over the nuclear issue for long decades.
Rally organisers seek the active support of communities and civil society groups committed to the rights of the Ma’ohi Nui people in their fight against colonialism and neo-colonialism. The Auckland gathering recognises the suffering of other smaller communities in the Pacific in the face of ecological and political colonialism.
The action for Ma’ohi Nui in Auckland will be a cross-generational endeavour aiming to bring together young activists with more experienced ones-so that the new generation can work alongside those who have gone before.
Organisers recognise they stand upon the shoulders of Māori, Pacific, and Pakeha giants who have fought for nuclear justice for Moana peoples in years gone by. The consequences of nuclear testing in the Pacific are intergenerational.
This rally seeks to bring together all the Pacific people (and all other supporters) who live by the Moana-Nui-a-Hiva. Nuclear testing, climate change, and deep-sea mining all imperil our ocean. We must respond to these threats collectively as peoples of the “Sea of Islands”.
The Ma’ohi Nui peoples’ struggle for their rights concerning nuclear issues is an Oceanic issue.
The rally will send a strong message to the French administration that people will not rest until there are concrete efforts made by the French colonial power in Mā’ohi Nui to:
• Recognise responsibility for the 30 years of nuclear testing
• Compensate the whole of Mā’ohi Nui who have carried the sanitary cost of contamination
• Repatriate the unstable nuclear waste buried under the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa
• Clean up both atolls
• Start the process of de-colonisation as stated in the 2013 resolution of the UN Charter
An atmospheric nuclear test at Moruroa atoll in 1971. Image: Young Witness file
Auckland rally plans
The Auckland rally for Mā’ohi Nui has two components. Firstly, we will gather in the “Elizabeth Yates” room at the Ellen Melville Centre to watch live video of the Tahitian day of action in Pape’ete. Oscar Temaru will address his people in Tahiti and those gathered in Auckland.
Secondly, we will go to nearby Bernard Freyberg Square where there will be poems, songs, and speeches given in honour of Mā’ohi Nui and her struggle for reparations and decolonisation.
In this work, organisers are guided by the wisdom of assassinated Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou:
“The Pacific, with its ocean and its islands, is a gift of the gods to the peoples of Oceania, past and present. The ocean, the islands, the air and the light, the fish, the birds, the plants and mankind together comprise the Life which is our supreme heritage as Pacific people. Everyone is responsible for his own fulfilment.”
“This responsibility is becoming more and more difficult to exercise as the dangers assume ever greater dimensions:
• The danger of denial of the indigenous peoples and their heritage;
• The danger of denial of the greatest dignity of all: control of one’s
life and destiny;
• The danger of blind industrialisation smothering the earth with
tar and concrete;
• The danger of tentacular multinationals which suck the substance;
of our countries to nourish other bellies and other minds…; and
• the danger of nuclear weapons.”
Ena Manuireva is a Mangarevian originally from the south of “French” Polynesia who has lived in New Zealand for many years and is currently a doctoral studies candidate in Te Ara Poutama at Auckland University of Technology. He contributes articles for Asia Pacific Report. He is organising the Auckland rally with colleague Tony Fala.
Organisers:
Ena Manuireva (Ma’ohi Nui lead organiser). Email: jmanuireva@gmail.com Cellphone: 02102575958
Tony Fala (support organiser). Email: tony_fala@yahoo.com Cellphone: 0220129381
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. — Hans Rosling1
There are a thousands images each hour, if one were to scour the world wide net, and the news services, wires, that would put a pit in the stomach of any humane human.
You have one 9 minute video of hog-tied, tasered, knee-on-back, then flip over to a story on how Idaho is murdering wolves the US and taxpayers set out as “protected” to the tune of millions of dollars. No water for Southern/Northern California farms and ranches, then flip to a mass shooting in San Jose.
Forget about the click-bait of celebrity-millionaire-billionaire-perverse politician/athlete/ actor/musician blurbs/features/stories on all the major and minor mush head “news” outlets, actually, news organs, as in the alimentary canal.
Blinded by the images, brought you/us via Yahoo, Bing, Google, you name it.
For months, Turkish fishermen in the Sea of Marmara have been running into a problem: They can’t catch fish.
Concerns that the unappealing mucus could discourage tourism abound, and some have called for the government to do more. Ismet Cigit, a columnist for the newspaper Ses Kocaeli, lamented that humans had “betrayed this world’s most beautiful sea” by allowing chemical storage facilities, fuel tanks, factories and other industrial sites to be built along the coast.
“Clearly, there are no deterrent penalties for those who pollute the sea,” he wrote in Turkish, adding, “Marmara is dying.” (Source)
That, of course, in a nutshell, is the crux of the world — “no deterrence for those who pollute . . . the sea . . . soil . . . fetuses . . . air . . . food . . . the airwaves . . . humanity’s brain (collectively).”
“Polluted” as a term goes a long way in retail capitalism. Homo retailopithecus and Homo consumo erectus are the vessels for every known and soon-to-be-developed pollutant.
Given the images one might see to illustrate the rapacious, inhumane, murderous ways of big and little man business, and of the corporations, and of the law makers (thugs in a protection racket for the corporations), compared to the murders of Palestinians over a 10-day bombing campaign seem small in comparison.
That’s the point, then, for those images after bloody images to mean, well, nothing in the end. We are in a constant chaotic and self-dellusional mindset, collectively, and those that resist, well, you know the story of Man/Woman against Nature; against God; against Culture; against Self; against Man/Woman; against Artificial Intelligence/Robotics/Internet of Things. Stirring a few wet tears, gulps, and then onto the next thing. Because capitalism is about stealth distraction, stealth and mostly overt ways to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone. Even those who doubt governments and corporations and so-called experts, yet, well, yet — Covid-19 Jab; Covid-19 Booster Jab; No Jab, No Job; Covid-19/SARS-CoV2 a Novel Man/Woman made (engineered) SUPER virus; Lockdown; Masks; Social 3, 6, 10, 20 feet Distancing.
Sometimes the wool is easily pulled over one’s eyes when that person wants no conscience. When the media and the mob/bandwagon pushes whichever narrative to force compliance, well, that is Capitalism. Things Go Better with Pfizer Jabs, err, better with CocaCola.
Tobacco kills, no? USA “aid” to Israel kills, no? Even those double cheeseburgers kill, no?
You think there’d be people on the streets protesting against and vying to stop the fast-food killers, no? It is so clear, however, if we put the brakes on bad stuff, which is all of capitalism, then there will be blood to pay. Even a small pumping of the brake pedal means war:
A chilling documentary released a few years ago, Fed Up, narrated by Katie Couric, highlighted how the U.S. government capitulates to Big Food lobbies such as the sugar industry and followed the money involved in keeping people fat. Moreover, labs across the country ensure that such junk food is addictive. Finally, Big Food has launched aggressive campaigns, sanctioned by governments, to cast obesity as “lack of exercise” and not something they cause. (Source)
Think about this — if there were campaigns to cut the eating of bad food, fast food, by, oh, say, one-third, or even one-fifth, well, again, there would be blood. Capitalism is all about the business of making money any way possible, and once that money stream is steady — fats, sugars, salts, high calorie foods, nicotine, opioids — no amount of action and citizen uprising could do shit. Kids born into one to six generations drive-thru, fast-food, Uber Eats normality (baseline), well, the eating and the wrongs of capitalism are baked into DNA. How many times were penny or three penny taxation bills against soda companies (so-called sugar taxes) fought and shot down? We are talking a few pennies tax.
And, let it be known, that High Fructose Corn Syrup has many wonderful things cooked into it to create an addiction cycle, and creates the “I am never full even after four Big Gulp Mountain Dews” biophysical reality. There are studies on the RNA of papa’s sperm baking in obesity for offspring. Oh, the epigenetics of bad food, chemical food, and high density calories, the like, well, I would have to say after decades of reading and being on the front lines, that obesity is actually cooked into the gene code, the epigenetics of it all.
Don’t be fooled by the lie after lie coming from industry lobbies and those sons of bitches who would file lawsuit after lawsuit against any citizens’ group or government group tying fast-food to faster death and plethora of chronic illnesses on the way to that death.
Svelte Biden and Svelte lawmaker x or y are all part of the show. The disease is the dollar, and each pinch of the profit margin precipitated by real sanctions and laws and regulations is a poke into the hornets nest that is rapacious capitalism.to
Oh, those Ivy Leaguers, all those beautiful people, running the show, they must get a kick out of the overweight, limping, ragged masses. It is a tale of two worlds. They get stem cell cocktails, plasma and blood doping, IV’s full of herbs and vitamins and, well, the rest of us, we get, hmm, disease maintenance by USA Big Med/Big Pharma/ Big Insurance.
There is no “choice” for this child. I have been in the schools, people, for more than 48 years. This is it for choice (habituation). It is criminal what we do to their minds, but absolutely sadistic what we do to their bodies:
But the images are rarely tied to deep stories, deeper analyses, and deeper regard that the system is sick — that “system” is industrial food, education, media, social media, advertising, the entire system of “capitalism makes right” any form of “offering” or “choice” these Mengele Types continue to bark anytime groups of people decide to question their narrative, the entire wasted system of exploitation.
The exploitation is at the cellular level, at the nanoparticle level, even the electromagnetic waves exploit us, to the tune of profits galore, gushing in every which way possible under the mantel of dirty capitalism.
So we just continue to cruise the insanity of the wasteland, and here, in my neck of the woods, successionists: The proposed new border would encompass 18 full and three partial Oregon counties and account for about 860,000 people in Oregon, which is 21% of the state’s population; however, that chunk would represent 70% of its land.
The land of the original people’s — imagine if those Yanquis/Stars’n’Bars dudes and dudettes really looked at the land, the original benefactors and stewards of the land. Again, redneck, mean as cuss, and, yes, Portland is mean as cuss, sure, and this is what we have looking forward to. This is 2021, major snowpack deficits, major government subsidies to these big old tough independent farmers wanting to create a bigger Aryan Brotherhood Idaho. It ain’t your land, boys and girls.
This is the reality of the White Settler/Colonial/Racist/Slave Embodied people. It may seem hickster out in Idaho, but you can find the same DNA and big mouthed whites in the Fatherlands — Germany, Nordic countries, France, Belgium, UK. The amount of hate for anyone other than white, well, this is a disease throughout the land throughout the EU Zone.
Real issues of crop failures, cancer rates out the roof (all those poisons for all that farmland), extreme weather, and, well, just whose land and whose farms and ranches and goods and services are those?
The sham is the American system of bowing to two corrupt parties, allowing the elites and the riff-raff corrupt ones to run the society, through electoral politics, which is just a giant bribery scheme. All those sniveling Rachel Maddow freaks, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, well, they do not give a shit:
“Biden says his hands are tied.”
The absence of a strong and well organized movement means that harm reduction is always a fantasy. The Democratic Party establishment chose Biden to be the nominee and didn’t get the pushback that was needed against their backroom deal making. Unscrupulous Black operatives derided anything other than obedience to their bosses. We were told to go along and be quiet and that any other response meant the return of Trump. The lack of demands set us up for failure, propaganda about cutting poverty, and phony progressives taking a dive instead of standing up for the people. Black people have nothing to show for a Biden presidency despite turning out in droves to put him in office.
The moment is ripe to acknowledge that this system is a complete sham and exists only to help the 1% do as much as they can to oppress the 99%. We will live with a cycle of Republicans and Democrats who use different methods but always end up working against our needs. (Black Agenda Report)
The capitalists paint us all into their corners, while they reap the benefits of billions in bribery. We are children, unorganized, malcontents, wasted lives in their eyes. It’s how they see ‘us versus them.’ They as a collective go to the same schools, believe in the same propaganda, and tout the stupidity of patriotism and exceptionalism. Arrogant and dumb, this is the America we all have been sucked into. By birth, for fuck sake, some of us.
The scam is the scam, really, all those spinning bullshit and good cheer amongst themselves at their Aspen Institute conferences, or what have you. They have no plan, except for shoveling with front end loader, the cash they make in the big scam. There is no Green Deal for the Environment when it goes through the jagged teeth of the rich and superrich capitalists.
To the scientists’ warnings, there have been rumblings of concern from some financial investors, businesspeople (in non-oil-producing industries), and local politicians. But overall, the response of conventional politicians has been business-as-usual. The main proposals for limiting climate change has been to place some sort of taxes on carbon emissions. From liberals to conservatives, this has been lauded as a ”pro-market” reform. But, as Richard Smith (2018) has explained, these are inadequate, and even fraudulent, proposals. “If the tax is too light, it fails to suppress fossil fuels enough to help the climate. But…no government will set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in carbon emissions because they all understand that this would force companies out of business, throw workers out of work, and possibly precipitate recession or worse.” (Source)
Richard Wolff: The reason the U.S. government takes in less than it spends is because it chooses not to tax corporations and the rich at the rates applied to them in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the government turns around and borrows money. It borrows from foreign governments, but also from banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and rich individuals who purchase Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities. In effect corporations and the rich can not only keep more tax dollars; they can then turn around and loan the money they kept to the government and earn interest on it. The interest that must be paid to them comes either from taxes levied upon the mass of Americans or from the savings the government achieves by cutting its payrolls and programs. So the rising deficits are a result of an unjust tax system. Eventually, as the financial burdens grow and the public grasps why, social tensions will rise. The U.S. tomorrow could look like Greece today. [9 years ago, interview by David Barsamian]
Oh boy, recall the Suez canal container ship logjam?
Now, this Singapore-flagged ship carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals that were loaded at the port of Hazira, India, on May 15, is burning, baby, with a 25-member crew includes Philippine, Chinese, Indian and Russian nationals.
Globalization! Daily scene. How many oil spills, how many chemical spills, how many barrels of DDT or radioactive sludge are leaking? Christ, do the math.
[You’ll notice “Evergreen” is written across the Ever Given’s body, but confusingly, that’s branding for the Taiwanese company that operates the ship. (Julianne Cona/Instagram)]
All of this is unsustainable, way beyond insane, and, until we do more localized work big time, and until we stop cruise ships, container ships like these on a second to second basis; until we stop cutting down North American forests, to send logs (full trees, delimbed) to overseas markets, and then have that come back in another container ship as cardboard, fiberboard and wood products; until we stop California orange juice tankers meeting up with Florida orange juice tankers in Houston on their east-west crisscrossing journeys; until we go way beyond any new or old green deal; until we actually work with the poor, the subsistence farmers and fishers, and work on real harvest, real sustainable ecologies, with restorative conservation AND anti-poverty programs and peasant worker cooperatives; until, until and until.
I contacted this film maker/scientist/professor, and complained about how white, how “great white burden” like his short piece on net carbon zero, zero dark 2030, or what have is you coming off. No response, yet, however, we need to pushback on these people who always work within the frame of Capitalism. They will never see that, Capitalism, for how polluted, globally heating, water scarce, amazingly diseased the world and our food and sisters and brothers in flora/fauna land.
James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter — I doubt he will respond.
Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 2018.
Butterflies are a symbol of beauty and metamorphosis, and one of few universally beloved insects. Indeed, few would think twice at squashing a fly or spider, yet butterflies inspire reverence. Both ancient Egyptians and Aztec believed that butterflies wouldgreetthe virtuous in the afterlife; multiple cultures around the world associated butterflies with the soul. In Western culture, they’re an eternally popular (if clichéd) tattoo decision.
So embedded are butterflies in human culture that it is hard to imagine a planet without them. Yet that seems like the kind of world that we are headed for, at least based on current ecology trends.
“In the last 50 years, our moth and butterfly populations have declined by more than 80 percent,” writes Josef H. Reichholf, an entomologist who recently penned a book, The Disappearance of Butterflies. “Perhaps only older people will recall a time when meadows were filled with colorful flowers and countless butterflies fluttered above.”
Reichholf’s recent book is a paean to these beloved insects. In it, he regards butterflies not merely as a symbol for sensuality or visual splendor, but as animals with personalities. As Reichholf explains, they experience a complicated life cycle, their bodies constantly transforming and changing, an existential ordeal likely incomprehensible to the human mind.
They are also, Reichholf says, astonishingly sophisticated in unappreciated ways. For instance: their penchant for drugs.
“Butterflies can get drunk to some degree by sucking substances with psychopharmacological effects,” he told Salon.
I interviewed Reichholf over email about his book and the future of butterflies. As always, our interview has been condensed and edited for print.
Can you explain the contrast between butterfly populations when you started studying them in the late 1950s with what they are now? What have you personally observed?
Quite vividly. I remember the lots of butterflies flying over the meadows when I was walking towards the river to observe birds [at] the River Inn in southeastern Bavaria in the early 1960s. The butterflies were of all the different kinds, from swallowtails to the then-very abundant blues, not only cabbage whites as now it is the case. However, studying diversity and abundance of night-flying Lepidoptera, the “moths,” revealed the ongoing trends over the next decades.
While average species diversity decreased roughly by half in the last ten years, abundance fell to a level as low as 15 percent, compared to the numbers of the years from 1969 to 1979, at the margins of the village in the southeastern Bavarian countryside.
Whereas this place of study borders directly the agricultural landscape, which had been exposed to extensive changes in use and input of fertilizers as well as in agrochemicals, there happened no significant changes in species diversity and abundance of Lepidoptera and other insects in the river and forest close by, where I kept running the same type of light traps in the same nights from the early 1970s onwards. And similar investigations which I made in the city of Munich in the 1980s and from 2002 to 2010 revealed no decrease despite some major fluctuations in the abundance of night-flying insects. It is important to note that now in Munich the level abundance of insects is higher than on the countryside dominated by the agricultural landscape.
At one point you describe how purple emperors get drunk, literally, on toad poison. Can butterflies get “drunk” in the same way that we do? Why do they do this?
Not only butterflies can get drunk to some degree by sucking substances with psychopharmacological effects, but as it is well known also to beetle collectors that many beetle species can be lured with alcohol-containing saps, some of which develop naturally if sugar-containing sap ferments by virtue of microbes present in nature. A number of mammals “like” alcohol-containing fruits, and birds do that as well. They have an enzyme in their livers which enables the decomposition of the alcohol, called alcohol-dehydrogenase.
Can you break down the life cycle of the average butterfly? Most people believe that it’s as simple as a caterpillar creating a cocoon and transforming into a butterfly, but your book complicates that a bit.
We have to look a bit closer into the life cycles of the butterflies and moths, which are much more dominated by the needs of the caterpillars than by those of the adult flying stage. The caterpillars are the “feeding stage,” which precedes the “mating stage” of moths and butterflies when they emerge from the pupae. There are two very basic requirements of the feeding stage — namely the proper food plants, as many Lepidoptera are quite specialized in their food choice; and a favorable microclimate in their habitat, conditions of which can be very different from that officially measured at the meteorological stations.
For completing the annual cycles, the different species also must be able to survive through the winter, which may be in either stage as an egg, a caterpillar, a pupa or even as a hibernating butterfly (like the brimstone). General meteorological trends, therefore, reveal little about the weather’s real influence on the insects.
Like so many ecological catastrophes, this one can be linked to industrial agriculture. What can we do to save them?
My studies reveal, like so many others, the overwhelming influence of agriculture on insect populations. It is better now for butterflies and moths to try to live in cities than on a countryside dominated by agriculture.
Reducing the amount of pesticides, however, as necessary and desirable as it certainly is, will not be followed closely enough to become convincing by increases of insect abundance. The predominating factor, at least here in Central Europe, is the over-fertilization of the landscape. The availability of nitrogen compounds in wide excess of the real demand favors the growth of a few plant species besides the field crops, thus reducing food plant diversity, and creating much wetter and cooler microclimates than normal for the sites due to the excessive growth of vegetation. Greatly reduced food plant diversity and too cold a microclimate are the key factors in the demise of butterflies and of most moth species and a lot of other insects, which aren’t agricultural pests.
Reducing the amount of fertilizers, therefore, would be paramount in the political strategy for more insect conservation. Our nature reserves are too small and too subject to side effects from the modern agriculture to enable thriving populations of butterflies, moths and other desirable insects.
Confronted with the fact, that more than a third of the agricultural products which people in Germany by in the supermarkets are disposed into the garbage, a lowering of the agricultural production level by some 25 per cent would not influence the food security for people, but greatly reduce the amount of fertilizers and pesticides used for maintaining the now so extremely high production level.
It was World Oceans Day on 8 June. To mark the event, the Ocean Conservation Trust released the results of a survey on ocean literacy in England and Wales. The poll suggests that the majority of people in these countries believe ocean protection is important, including for humanity’s well-being. But it also revealed a blindspot in the actions Britons’ are taking to ensure its protection.
Blindspot
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) commissioned the survey, which Natural Resources Wales also collaborated on. It polled over 8,000 people in England and Wales with the aim of understanding ocean literacy levels in the two countries. The Ocean Conservation Trust describes ocean literacy as:
the understanding of our individual and collective impact on the Ocean and its impact on our lives and wellbeing
The survey found that 94% of people believe to some extent that “the fate of the ocean and humans is inextricably linked”, signalling a high level of recognition of the interconnectedness of the ocean and humans. 85% of those surveyed said that protecting the oceans is either important or very important to them.
However, the pollsters also questioned people on the actions they had taken to protect the oceans. And while 39% said they had made changes to their lifestyle “to benefit it”, only 14% of people claimed to have “voted for political parties with strong policies to protect it”. This is a blindspot in terms of what’s needed to ensure ocean protection.
Pollution
National policies are key to ocean health. Governments, for example, determine policies relating to pollution of marine environments. Ocean pollution involves numerous substances, such as plastics, oil, manufacturing and pharmaceutical chemicals, sewage, and more. Agricultural practices also contribute to marine pollution, including through the use of fertilisers and pesticides which can run-off into waterways and the ocean.
In the UK’s case in particular in relation to such pollution, the government has introduced legislation aimed at curbing agricultural water pollution. But the Guardianrevealed in February that the Environment Agency had issued no fines or prosecutions in relation to the legislation, despite documenting 243 violations of it since 2018.
Over-fishing
Many people identified pollution and over-fishing as top threats to the marine environment in the poll. In October 2020, the UK’s governing party thwarted attempts to strengthen the Fisheries Bill in relation to over-fishing. Conservative MPs defeated a proposed amendment to the bill that would have committed the UK to keep fishing quotas within sustainable limits based on scientific advice. They also rejected a proposal to stop supertrawlers – industrial scale boats capable of catching “hundreds of tonnes of fish” a day – from operating in areas designated as marine reserves.
This is despite the fact that the government is generally an advocate of marine protected areas. It’s also claimed the Fisheries Bill “sets in stone our commitment to improving the health of our seas”.
As of 2015, 90% of fish ‘stocks’ around the world were fully or over-exploited, as per the orthodoxy regarding sustainability. Fully exploited means that people are removing fish from a certain area at rates “at or close to an optimal yield level, with no expected room for further expansion”. As the Fisheries Economics Research Unit (FERU) at the University of British Colombia has explained, fishing subsidies are drivers of over-exploitation. It said subsidies encourage over-fishing because they:
artificially increase profits, incentivize further investment and lead to increased catches
These increased catches can deplete fish populations to unsustainable levels, whereby people don’t give fish the necessary time to repopulate. The perpetual provision of subsidies then depletes populations further because, as FERU says, fisheries keep fishing because the subsidies ensure doing so remains “profitable despite diminishing returns and dwindling fish”.
90% of subsidies globally go to large-scale, industrial fisheries. The financial support enables them to travel further to operate and over-fish in vast swathes of the ocean. This harms not only fish, but also the livelihoods of small scale fisherfolk – and people reliant on that fish for food – in poorer countries too. Small-scale fisheries employ 97% of fishers globally, and they tend to be more sustainable.
Subsidies crackdown
In December 2020, 14 countries – not including the UK – pledged to tackle over-fishing. The 14 countries are members of the High Level Panel for Sustainable Ocean Economy. Their plan includes the axing of subsidies that contribute to the practice. The countries have called on other nations to join them. At the time, the UK government said it would “consider” the Panel’s recommendations.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is also currently negotiating a treaty that could eliminate fishing subsidies that lead to over-fishing. In February 2020, the UK government said it supported the prohibition of “certain subsidies that contribute to overfishing and overcapacity”. It also expressed approval of the elimination of “subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing”, which is also part of the treaty talks.
Senior research and fisheries specialist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Rainer Froese warned during a recent discussion on the treaty that there are loopholes in the current text that could render it “moot” in practice.
Climate crisis
50% of people surveyed, meanwhile, named climate change as the biggest threat to the ocean. Indeed, the climate crisis is having profound effects on almost every aspect of the marine environment. The ocean has absorbed huge amounts of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that people have produced, mainly through activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation. If it hadn’t, a 2015 analysis asserted that the world could be 36C hotter already if that CO2 had ended up in the “bottom ten kilometres” of the atmosphere.
That CO2 absorption has come at a high cost for the ocean, though, with its chemical balance highly affected. The acidity of the marine environment – known as ocean acidification – has increased and threatens the existence of a number of ocean-dwelling life-forms. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that ultimately “the entire food web” of the ocean could be at risk due to these changes in its chemistry.
Words vs actions
As such, dramatically curbing CO2 emissions is essential for ocean health. The UK government regularly claims to be ‘leading the world’ on the tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. But it also regularly acts in ways that run counter to that claim, such as approving new oil and gas explorations. Recent analysis for Carbon Brief , meanwhile, asserted that the UK’s emissions dropped significantly – by 42% – between 1997 and 2019. But it found that:
well over half of the drop in UK emissions, or 25 percentage points, was due to socioeconomic factors rather than deliberate climate policy
All connected
In short, the Britons surveyed appeared to overwhelmingly view the ocean as important to them, recognise the threats it faces, and have an awareness of the interdependence between its “fate” and theirs. Yet they don’t appear to be acting on those insights at the ballot box. However, people need to start doing so if they want to ensure the health of the marine environment because national policies largely dictate that health.
In turn, the ocean’s health is closely tied to that of most life on earth. The ocean provides half of all oxygen and regulates the climate. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has pointed out, it also holds:
about 97% of the Earth’s water, supplies 99% of the Earth’s biologically-habitable space, and provides roughly half of the primary production on Earth
So a healthy ocean is good for all life because our fates are indeed completely tied together.
Activists from the Fukushima Anti-Nuclear Indonesia (IANFU) movement in Indonesia have held an action commemorating International Ocean Day demanding that the Japanese government not dispose of nuclear reactor coolant waste into the Pacific Ocean, reports Liputan6.
The protesters also staged street theatre outside the Japanese Embassy on Jalan MH Thamrin and in front of the Ministry for Fishing and Maritime Affairs office in Central Jakarta.
“We from Fukushima Anti-Nuclear Indonesia are holding an action against the Japanese government in relation to the disposal of waste, because the disposal of this waste into the sea will damage the Pacific Ocean’s ecosystem,” said IANFU action coordinator Zaki.
Zaki said the Japanese once dumped dangerous nuclear waste in Minimata in Kumamoto, a case which resulted in birth defects and the death of local people exposed to mercury in the Japan sea in 1956.
As many as 2000 people out of 10,000 suffered damage as a result of the pollution of the Minimata sea.
Because of this, the planned disposal of coolant waste from the Fukushima nuclear reactor into the Pacific Ocean must be halted because it would be highly dangerous to human health and the Pacific Ocean ecosystem, including biological diversity in the oceans, said Zaki.
Zaki hopes that the Indonesian government as a maritime country will take a firm position by lodging its objections and opposition to the Japanese government’s plan.
“Our country is a maritime country whose seas are very extensive. The distance between Japan and Indonesia is indeed far, but waste dumped in the sea will impact on the livelihoods of Indonesian fisherpeople,” said Zaki.
Zaki said protests against nuclear waste dumping would continue if the Indonesian government failed to take firm measures.
Critics have hammered the Climate Change Commission’s agriculture goals in New Zealand, saying it has missed the mark on methane targets.
In a final 419-page report handed to Parliament yesterday, the commission urged the government to get tough on the way New Zealanders live, move and work, through implementing 33 recommendations.
To help keep global warming below 1.5C it said there should be no more new or used petrol or diesel cars imported, made or assembled in New Zealand by 2035.
The commission asked for substantially more government investment in cheap, accessible public transport, cycle paths and walkways, and no more coal boilers “as soon as possible”, with at least 95 percent renewable electricity used by 2030.
Greenpeace head of campaigns Amanda Larsson said it was all a bit disappointing because the report missed a major weak spot.
“Despite thousands of submissions in favour of climate action, despite huge public mandate out there for climate action, the commission has failed to really take responsibility for the industry that is causing the most climate pollution in New Zealand – and that is the dairy industry,” she said.
“There’s been no real change in its recommendations and the dairy industry still gets basically a free pass to pollute.”
Mechanism to reward farmers
The commission wants the government to decide next year on a pricing mechanism for rewarding farmers who reduce emissions.
It suggests technologies including methane inhibitors – vaccines which can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide burped by cows into the atmosphere – could reduce the country’s biogenic methane emissions by more than 50 percent.
It also sets an overall biogenic methane reduction target of 10 percent by 2030 – which Dairy NZ called “incredibly challenging” and a “big ask” for farmers, saying New Zealand milk already had the lowest carbon footprint in the world.
“We do remain concerned agriculture may be asked to do the heavy lifting if we don’t see urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions. We are all in this together and we must have a fair and balanced plan that requires our communities to contribute equally,” its chief executive Dr Tim Mackle said.
Dairy NZ chief executive Dr Tim Mackle … “We are all in this together and we must have a fair and balanced plan.” Image: RNZ/Victoria University of Wellington
However, Larsson said there could have been strict limits on stock numbers, among other measures.
“We need to cut synthetic fertiliser and we need to cut imported feed and we need to support farmers to transition to regenerative and organic ways of farming.”
Hard-line approach in other sectors
Oxfam New Zealand campaign lead Alex Johnston said the commission was already taking more of a hard-line approach for other sectors.
“The pathways for reducing emissions in agriculture are simply not consistent with keeping to 1.5 degrees,” he said.
“Even if we go as hard as we can on transport and other sectors, if we don’t directly regulate emissions from agriculture and step up our actions in that area, then we’re not going to be able to do our fair share to contribute to this global problem.”
Forest & Bird spokesperson Geoff Keey agreed that agriculture was still getting “a bit of an easy ride” and the measures should be stricter, but he believed there was another blind spot in the report.
He wanted kelp and shellfish beds re-established on coastlines, and measures to stop wetlands drying out, to ensure more carbon did not go into the atmosphere.
“One of the big things that comes out of the report is once we start looking beyond 2030 and 2040, we’re going to need to protect our carbon stores in forests, in the sea and in wetlands. Right now the rules are not strong enough to allow that to happen,” he said.
Someone who felt more optimistic about the report was Niwa chief scientist Dr Sam Dean, who called it “a breath of fresh air”.
Traction on policies
He said there was finally traction on a more “comprehensive” range of climate policies.
“Up ’till now we’ve based our response on the emissions trading scheme, which is incentivised plantation and forestry. Moving away from that to a broader range of policies that are going to actually reduce emissions, especially carbon dioxide, is especially important. It’s something we’ve not managed to do, to date. And it’s something we’re going to have to do really quickly,” he said.
Dean said the difficult part was not writing the report – it was up to the government to rise to the challenge.
He said his plea for the government was to embrace all the recommendations with urgency and he challenged all New Zealanders to show their support and willingness to make changes.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
French Polynesia’s pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru says high-level talks on France’s nuclear legacy due in Paris this month should be held at the United Nations in New York instead.
He warned those attending that the French Polynesian people and its resources were not for sale.
While French Polynesia’s delegation is being finalised, the leading politicians of the late testing era, Temaru and Gaston Flosse, will not be present.
In the lead-up to the talks, the French social security agency CPS again called on the French state to reimburse it for the medical costs caused by its tests.
It said since 1995 it had paid out US$800 million to treat a total of 10,000 people suffering from any of the 23 cancers recognised by law as being the result of radiation.
Temaru said the money was a debt, pointing out that if a crime was committed it was not up to the victims to have to pay.
Between 1966 and 1996, France carried out 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia.
The test sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls remain excised from French Polynesia and are French military no-go zones.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
French Polynesian pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru … will not be at the nuclear talks. Image: Johnny Blades/RNZ
All too often, the issue of plastic pollution is reduced to plastic straw bans led by clipboard-carrying college students, VSCO girls, and bracelets made with a promise of saving turtles. It conjures images of a wad of plastic grocery bags or perhaps a garbage island floating in the middle of the ocean somewhere.
The problem is that plastic pollution isn’t just an issue of waste accumulation — plastics are also manufactured and often incinerated in communities where poor people and people of color are rarely consulted or alerted to the risks. Our communities are living this pollution every day and understand the connections between air, water, land, ocean, and human health in very personal and concrete ways.
The Clean Air Task Force estimates that 1.8 million Latinx people in the U.S. live within half a mile of an oil and gas facility, increasing odds of preterm birth and respiratory illness. The production of plastic feedstocks and the raw fossil fuels used to make most plastics affect communities’ immune, reproductive, developmental, and respiratory systems, starting right outside factory fence lines. It is no surprise that our communities have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, as our immune systems are already compromised. Plastic pollution violates our human right to breathe without fear.
Plastic also fuels the climate crisis and contributes to climate change at every step of its life cycle, from extraction to refinement, manufacture, transportation, disposal, and waste. If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, emissions from plastic production could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030, equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. Ninety-nine percent of plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and the direct impact its production has in our communities is the real global crisis. Studies have shown how rampant the plastic crisis is, finding microplastics in deep sea animals, in fish, in our bodies, and even in rain.
We stand up for solutions that will protect our communities and families from toxins in our air, water, and soil and will continue to fight for these solutions because justice demands it. But we often have no idea what is being built in our communities until it’s too late because of relaxed notice requirements for plastics facilities. Even if we make it to the public meeting, the language barriers are clear. We have watched children translating technical information while their parents lean over to ask, “Que dijo?” Places like California that are reducing plastics through legislation on producer and consumer responsibility still have two incinerators operating in Latinx communities. Facilities in communities of color have almost twice the rate of toxic release incidents than those in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Fortunately, the level of public awareness and political will to address these issues is starting to shift toward action. At least a dozen states are now considering plastic producer responsibility laws, forcing plastic makers to plan for the full plastics lifecycle before they put one bottle, bag, or spoon to the mold. Some of those states are including language justice requirements for any new or increased production so that Spanish-speaking communities like ours can have a say. And people are waking up to simple alternatives to single-use plastics, and the cultural significance of reuse that Indigenous and Latinx communities were practicing long before it was a trend.
Many local solutions to the plastics problem are bubbling up to the national level. Recently, California Rep. Alan Lowenthal and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley re-introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act (BFFPPA) of 2021 (HR2238/S984) to tackle the crisis of plastic pollution from beginning to end.
The legislation builds on state laws that reduce one-time plastic use, forces large plastic producers to take responsibility for post-consumer plastic waste, requires a pause on new and expanded industrial facilities including plastic production, chemical recycling, and incineration facilities, and institutes a nationwide bottle bill. Dozens of states such as California, Washington, Oregon, and New York have legislation for producer responsibility moving through their legislatures. New Orleans unanimously passed a resolution that opposed the proposed Formosa Plastics megaplant in St. James Parish and further petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley. There are over 20 states — including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Montana — that have active bottle bills.
The BFFPPA essentially turns off the tap on expanded industrial facilities until the EPA can update or create new environmental and health regulations. It also requires any new permits to undergo environmental justice reviews and to deliver them to local communities early in the process. The bill would ensure that publications are translated and that live interpretation is provided at hearings. We can ensure that our communities know what is happening locally through written and oral communication that they can understand, in their native languages.
States, the federal government, and consumers need to hold companies accountable by incentivizing them to innovate, demanding that they use less packaging, consider reusable or refillable options, and take the plastic lifecycle into account in purchasing. Initiatives that appear across the state and federal efforts include:
Incentivising shower gel manufacturers to offer refills or reusable options and to manage any waste they produce with a goal of recycling at least 65% by 2027.
Starting as early as 2023, requiring hotels and motels to have bulk stations for shampoo and conditioner instead of the mini shampoo, soap, and lotion containers.
Requiring restaurants and food vendors to only give out compostable utensils and plastic straws upon request.
The plastic industry lobby, backed by the fossil fuels industry, is already pushing back on these state and national efforts. We need to hold accountable those who profit the most from pollution and these bills across the nation and in Washington, D.C., are a great start. The truth is that plastic isn’t cheap. Its cost is externalized to those at the fence lines of extraction, production, and waste.
It’s time to address the plastic pollution crisis at the national level. Thousands of GreenLatinos and members of the global Break Free From Plastics movement are calling on Congress to break our society’s addiction to plastic. Our Latinx communities have long-standing practices that demonstrate to society ways to live without plastics. We must strive to end the harm that plastics are having on our health, our lives, our climate and our culture.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.
When Ramona Hernandez turns on her kitchen faucet in El Adobe, an unincorporated town just a few miles southeast of Bakersfield, the water that splashes out looks clean and inviting. But she doesn’t dare drink it.
“You worry about your health,” she said in Spanish as she sat in her tranquil front yard one morning early this spring, her elderly mother-in-law working in the garden behind her.
“I’m scared,” Hernandez said, “of getting sick from the water.” Drinking the tap water in this tiny community of dusty ranches and unpaved roads could expose Hernandez to arsenic. So, for years, she and her husband, Gerardo, have shuttled twice a week to the nearby town of Lamont to load up on bottled water. At a cost of about $80 a month, it’s enough for drinking and cooking. If they had the money, Hernandez, 55, would buy bottled water to shower with and use for her chickens. But given her husband’s salary as a farmworker, she says, that’s not a realistic option.
Like more than 300 communities across California, El Adobe lacks safe drinking water. Since 2008, the arsenic levels in one of its two wells have regularly exceeded the safety standards set by federal and state authorities, often by more than double. Long-term exposure to arsenic in drinking water is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer.
Contaminated drinking water affects an estimated 1 million people in California, many of whom rely on private wells or small community water systems like El Adobe’s. A majority of these residents live in the Central and Salinas valleys. These are largely low-income, rural and Latino communities, where lack of access to clean water exacerbates the health disparities that already exist due to structural inequities. Since 2012, California law has recognized that access to safe and affordable water is a human right, but action has lagged behind the language.
Arsenic levels in El Adobe’s other well are currently deemed safe, but the well can’t provide enough water to meet year-round demand. That means that many residents of the unincorporated town, including the Hernandezes, continue to pay for water they can’t drink. The El Adobe Property Owners Association charges households $125 a month for tap water, money that also covers streetlights and road maintenance (although only one road is paved). Most residents also buy bottled water at the store. Others take their chances and drink the tap water despite the risks. Many townspeople are low-income farmworkers and retirees, and buying bottled water is a significant expense.
“I can’t afford bottled water all the time,” said Kyle Wilkerson, 40, a father of three who lives on a fixed disability income. He’s also president of the El Adobe Property Owners Association, a small cadre of community members who manage the town’s water infrastructure almost entirely as volunteers.
Wilkerson said he worries about his own health as well as that of his family. “But what am I going to do?” he said. “You get to the point of, it is what it is.”
And indeed, residents in towns like El Adobe have few options. Arsenic can be removed from water, but it’s prohibitively expensive for most small towns. An arsenic treatment facility requires millions of dollars to build and another $100,000 or more per year to operate, said Chad Fischer, an engineer who works at the California Division of Drinking Water’s district office in Visalia, which regulates water in the region.
El Adobe is so small — just 83 homes — that if community residents split the cost of a treatment system, they’d spend tens of thousands of dollars each and face dramatically increased water rates. “The math is awful,” Fischer said. “It ends up being unaffordable.”
It’s possible for individual users to install an advanced filtration system, such as reverse osmosis, in their homes, usually under the sink, to remove arsenic. But these systems can cost hundreds of dollars to install and maintain. Some small water systems do install these in people’s homes, passing on the cost to consumers, but the state considers this a temporary fix. Inexpensive pitcher-type filters do not remove arsenic.
A permanent solution was supposed to be coming for El Adobe. In 2013, with funding from the California State Water Resources Control Board, El Adobe commissioned a report that concluded that the best option for the community was to connect with the larger water system in Lamont. According to Scott Taylor, general manager of the Lamont Public Utility District, the state promised to grant Lamont enough money to build the connecting pipeline, service lines and new wells needed to accommodate the increase in users and replace aging infrastructure.
“Eight years, it still hasn’t happened,” said Taylor. “I think it’s bureaucracy. For example, when we submit any kind of a document, a cost estimate, an engineering report … for whatever reason, it takes them two to three months to review it. If it took any of my staff a month to review a document, I don’t care if it’s 100 pages, I’d fire them.”
Blair Robertson, a spokesman for the California State Water Resources Control Board, said the state is still waiting for Lamont to purchase land for the new wells and drill test wells to see if water at the proposed sites is contaminated. There is currently no start date for the project, which is estimated to cost between $13 and 22 million and will likely be split into several construction phases. Formal state approval of the project will likely be in 2022, Robertson said, but there’s currently no timeframe for when El Adobe residents will have clean drinking water.
Planning and implementing a water system consolidation takes time, Fischer said, especially when the community, like El Adobe, is small and lacks a team of engineers and other professionals to manage the water supply. Lamont has its own water problems with contaminants and aging wells, which have added to the difficulties of the project, he said. Projects usually take five or more years to accomplish, he said, depending on their complexity. But it has already been eight years, and construction has yet to begin.
More Than 100 Others
Beyond those delays, dozens of other communities in California are also waiting on construction projects for clean water. Approximately 110 other out-of-compliance water systems in the state are planning or considering consolidation with another system. Sometimes, the larger communities resist appeals to absorb the smaller systems because they fear it will increase costs and strain their own water supply, particularly as droughts continue. The state often offers financial incentives to encourage consolidation, and can mandate it, if necessary. Other times consolidation isn’t even an option because a community is too remote.
In 2019, California passed a law that established a program called Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER), designed to help fund water improvements for communities that struggle to provide clean water to their residents. The state water board is working to complete a needs assessment to determine which water systems need help and to what extent, according to a recent report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. However, the state is still “in the very early stages of implementation,” and “much work remains to be accomplished” before all Californians have access to safe and affordable drinking water, the report stated.
Cheryl Blackhawk, 67, and her husband Edward, 69, are fed up with not having safe water in El Adobe. They moved to the town four years ago from nearby Greenfield, seeing it as a quiet and affordable place to retire. At the time, the seller assured them the water connection to Lamont would happen within a year. They’re still buying water bottles by the caseload from Walmart.
“You can’t go to the faucet to get water to drink,” said Edward Blackhawk. “You can’t cook.”
Contaminants aren’t the only problem. Like innumerable systems across California and the country, El Adobe’s wells, pipes, pumps and other water infrastructure are showing their age. El Adobe’s most critical well, the one without arsenic, was built in 1967, the same year Ronald Reagan became governor of California and labor activist Cesar Chavez initiated a nationwide boycott of the state’s table grapes. The community’s arsenic-laced well was built in 1985.
The life of a well depends on the chemicals in the local soil and water, and the quality of the well materials and construction, said Dave Warner, community development manager at Self-Help Enterprises in Visalia, which helps low-income communities access funding for water projects. But a well as old as 1967 “is really pushing it,” he said. Over time, the casing inside the well corrodes, and sand and other contaminants can get into the pump, causing it to fail. Still, drilling a new well costs more than $1 million, according to water officials. Securing state funding for it can take more than a decade, Warner said.
The precariousness of the situation is not lost on Edward Blackhawk. Without functioning wells and pumps, people’s faucets would run dry. Toilets wouldn’t flush.
“If these wells go down, we’re out of luck,” he said. “We’re out of water.”
Widespread Water Woes
Three miles down the road, Lamont has its own water struggles. Five of the town’s eight wells are contaminated with a highly toxic chemical called 1,2,3-trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP. The chemical was added to soil fumigants used in agriculture during the 1940s through the 1980s. It persists in the environment indefinitely and is recognized as a carcinogen by the state of California. The state started regulating the chemical in drinking water in 2017, which meant communities like Lamont had to find a way to remove it.
Just like arsenic, 1,2,3-TCP is expensive to get rid of. A treatment system costs over $1 million per well, plus about $100,000 a year to change the filter, said Taylor. Lamont has installed treatment on four wells, using money from a settlement with Dow Chemical and Shell Oil, the companies allegedly responsible for the contamination. But two of the treatment systems are leased, and the utility district still doesn’t know how it will pay for them long-term. Two other wells still need 1,2,3-TCP and arsenic treatment systems, respectively.
Lamont’s population of 15,000 is almost entirely Latino, and many residents are farmworkers. The average per capita income is just over $13,000 a year. Plans to raise water rates last year to help cover some of the district’s expenses were delayed because of the pandemic. Even so, dozens of accounts fell into delinquency as people lost jobs and struggled to pay bills. The district is now short about $70,000 from delinquent accounts, Taylor said.
Lamont’s wells are also nearing the end of their lifespan. Last year, shortly after the district installed a $1 million filtration system for 1,2,3-TCP on a 60-year-old well, the well collapsed. Taylor said he “raised holy hell” with the state water board and obtained emergency funding to build a new well, which is now under construction. Another three wells need replacing, he said. Those new wells may also need treatment systems. Funding for that is supposed to be included in the consolidation project with El Adobe.
So far, Lamont has managed to provide clean water to residents, but that could change if another well breaks or demand increases enough to require making a contaminated well operational, said Taylor.
“It’s a little discouraging,” said district board member, Miguel Sanchez. “You’re trying to comply with all these regulations and the system is crumbling.”
A Reason for Hope?
But Californians now have a reason to be optimistic: A $2 trillion proposal by President Joe Biden to fund infrastructure improvements across the nation, including for clean water, could provide their state with more money for these types of projects. Biden’s plan — if approved by Congress — would include $111 billion dollars in clean water investments. The proposal seeks $10 billion to monitor and remediate new drinking-water contaminants and to invest in small rural water systems like El Adobe’s. The plan also requests $56 billion in grants and loans to upgrade and modernize America’s aging drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems. Support for low-income communities and communities of color is a big focus of the proposal.
It’s not yet clear how much of the money would go to California. However, Gov. Gavin Newsom has called Biden’s plan “a game changer.”
And Warner, with Self-Help Enterprises, agreed. Right now, there’s not enough state and federal money available to efficiently tackle all of California’s water contamination and infrastructure problems, he said. Biden’s plan “gave me a lot of hope,” he said. “But it’s got to get approved.”
Meanwhile, Susana De Anda, co-founder of the Community Water Center, an environmental justice organization based in Visalia, applauded California’s SAFER program, but said communities need help faster. A short-term solution would be for the state to implement a rate-assistance program for low-income residents who are struggling to pay their water bills, including those who pay for water twice because their tap water is contaminated, she said.
“We want solutions now,” she said. “It’s a huge problem, and we have generations that have been condemned to this reality.”
In El Adobe, Hernandez worries that she may be inhaling contaminants or absorbing them through her skin when she showers. The concentration of arsenic in the water is still safe for bathing, according to state regulators, and arsenic does not evaporate into the air, but Hernandez remains distrustful, particularly since she and her husband both have lung problems.
If only officials in Sacramento could spend a day in her shoes, she said. “How would they like it?” she asked. “They don’t have to worry about having a shower, about drinking the water.”
At the edge of the community, Cheryl and Edward Blackhawk checked on El Adobe’s second well, the arsenic-laden one, and its water tank, which sits inside a small enclosure littered with tumbleweeds. Cheryl Blackhawk, who serves as financial secretary for the property owner’s association, said she fears that drought conditions this year will lead to falling water levels that result in higher arsenic concentrations in the well.
Her husband, standing quietly beside the aging pump, confessed he’s beginning to doubt the connection to Lamont will actually happen.
“There’s a lot of people out here who think it’s dead in the water,” he said softly. “And it’s not just us. There are hundreds (of communities) like us in the state.”
This story was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, with support from Ensia and the Institute for Nonprofit News’s Amplify News Project.
The U.S. Senate recently passed the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act. The legislation creates a $35 billion fund that will allow states and tribes to make urgently needed upgrades to their water systems, with additional considerations made for frontline communities. This kind of commitment to commitment to environmental justice is welcome, but also long overdue.
Clean water infrastructure has experienced systemic neglect in communities across the U.S. In Jackson, Mississippi, residents recently had to boil water for drinking, and thousands lacked access to non-potable water for flushing toilets. Unfortunately, these upsetting circumstances are common, particularly in communities of color.
Millions of Americans experience the dire consequences of toxic drinking water, which negatively affects quality of life, and can lead to a lifetime of debilitating health effects.
Black and Brown communities feel the brunt of this burden. Research shows that drinking water systems in communities of color are 40 percent more likely to violate clean water standards than in non-Black and non-Brown communities. This is environmental racism. And it’s destroying countless lives.
Like most forms of racism, high-profile tragedies like Flint, Michigan, grab headlines. But often, it’s a slow, quiet and deadly progression that devastates communities of color.
A recent study found Black children of families living below the poverty line are more than twice as likely to have elevated levels of lead in their blood than white or Hispanic children living under the poverty line.
For decades, petroleum refineries along the Mississippi River have polluted local waters with cancer-causing petrochemicals. In majority-Black Louisiana communities, there are more than 150 of these refineries, located between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in what has been ominously dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the refineries that spew dangerous chemicals into the water.
Environmental racism also persists within the vulnerable communities surrounding chemical storage and industrial sites, where toxic floodwaters caused by storms or climate-related events carry heavy metals, oils and gas into local waterways. Individuals affected by these floods often face immediate health problems, including headaches, dizziness, and irritation to the eyes and throat.
These toxic floodwaters most often impact Black and Brown communities. A report co-written by the Center for Progressive Reform and the James River Association found more than 473,000 Virginians live in communities that are both high in social vulnerability and contain flood-exposed industrial facilities. Like the harm caused by petroleum refineries, this flooding can leave communities with significant long-term health challenges.
We’ve made slow progress in addressing other forms of institutional racism, but we’re only beginning to reckon with the cost of environmental racism. Flint was a wake-up call, but not nearly enough has been done to address the root problems or hold the perpetrators accountable.
Black and Brown communities don’t have the luxury of sweeping the problem under the rug. These communities live with the consequences of environmental racism daily. The quality of life and health impacts are only beginning to be detected.
The federal government has acknowledged the peril caused by environmental racism — the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Center for Environmental Assessment concluded that non-white communities are disproportionately put at risk of health effects from pollution. Thankfully, we now have an administration that is signaling its intention to make decisions based on truth, facts and science. President Biden has expressed that environmental justice will become a central tenet of his administration, and has prioritized clean water infrastructure investment and combating climate change impacts in his Build Back Better plan.
Yet environmental racism is a decades-long abuse in this country. Action must come now. It’s imperative that Biden continue to take immediate executive action to reverse this horrific and systemic damage. The administration must also make up for lost time by prioritizing enforcement of our environmental laws to benefit the communities whose health and well-being have too often been afterthoughts.
The Biden administration has offered signs of hope. A reversal on Bears Ears National Monument and the Keystone XL pipeline are encouraging. The appointment of Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a cabinet position, to lead the Department of Interior, is another good start.
But these good intentions must become a firm reality.
The Biden administration must immediately implement its own agenda, including empowering a more aggressive EPA to expedite hazardous waste remediation and cleanups in frontline communities that have long carried the burden; establishing an Environmental and Climate Justice division at the Department of Justice to ensure environmental tragedies like those experienced in Flint do not occur again and that environmental lawbreakers are held fully accountable for the violence they unleash on their victims; overhauling and empowering EPA’s External Civil Rights Compliance Office with more staff and resources and a directive to focus on environmental justice to protect communities from climate change; and mandating stricter monitoring. A more fully engaged Office of Environmental Justice would also help address these urgent and necessary changes.
There’s too much at stake for Black and Brown communities. Too many lives have been expected to cede priority to the profits of polluters. Just look at Flint, or the other marginalized communities where something so vital as drinkable water is not guaranteed.
Enough is enough.
Clean water is a human right. It’s time to start treating it as such.
U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett should support legislation that would result in carbon dividends being paid to Americans while saving lives.
By: MARK REYNOLDS AND JAN BERRY
“Climate change action without carbon pricing is like running with shoe laces untied, much harder,” explained Dr. Charles Sims, the director of the Energy and Environment Program for the University of Tennessee’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy in Knoxville. “I want to learn more about it,” said U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett.
Volunteers for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby were meeting with Burchett and his staff to discuss the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 2307). It hit the House of Representatives on April 1 and already has over 40 cosponsors. We hope Burchett will join his colleagues in the House and support this legislation. This policy will quickly slash our climate-changing emissions and save American lives by reducing pollution — and that’s not all. It will also spur business innovation and lead to affordable clean energy, and it will do all of this while putting money in people’s pockets. Let’s explore how.
First, the policy puts a steadily rising price on carbon pollution. This price signal will steer our economy away from fossil fuels, leading to a 30% reduction in carbon emissions in just five years. With this policy in place, America will be on the path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — a critical target, according to the scientific community. That deadline comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s game-changing 2018 report, where the authors also specified that carbon pricing, such as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, is “a necessary condition of ambitious climate policies.”
As fossil fuel use drops and emissions decline with this policy, public health will also benefit. We could save 4.5 million American lives over the next 50 years by replacing pollution with clean air. That’s why the Lancet Commission endorses carbon pricing, calling it “the single most powerful strategic instrument to inoculate human health against the risks of climate change.”
Carbon cash-back payments
While driving these massive benefits, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act will also provide economic benefits to Americans.
Each month, people will receive a carbon dividend or “carbon cash-back” payment. In other words, the carbon fee revenue will go into people’s pockets to spend with no restrictions. With this policy in place, 85% of Americans would come out ahead or essentially break even.
Sims enlightened us: “There is pent-up demand for investment. Business and industry are sitting on their capital waiting for a consistent market signal on how the U.S. government will tackle climate change.” That’s why the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s report states, “Financial markets will only be able to channel resources efficiently to activities that reduce greenhouse gas emissions if an economy-wide price on carbon is in place at a level that reflects the true social cost of those emissions.”
The Business Roundtable, a major trade association of CEOs of companies with collectively over $7 trillion in revenues, and the American Petroleum Institute have come out in favor of a “market-based mechanism” to curb greenhouse gas emissions with pricing carbon as an essential step in that plan.
Burchett has expressed interest in market solutions when it comes to addressing carbon emissions. His legislation, the Opportunity Zone Extension Act, incentivizes business investment and redevelopment in economically distressed areas, and also creates jobs in East Tennessee. The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act is in the best interest of businesses as well. With this bill, the government simply sets a predictable direction for businesses to move away from carbon emissions. Then it’s up to businesses how to move in that direction.
People in the Burchett’s district are ready to see results. Public polling shows 60% want Congress to do more to address global warming. That desire defies partisanship, with majority support for climate action from Republican and Democratic voters across the country. The Energy Innovation Act is a good step forward to put America on the fast track to a healthy, prosperous future.
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About the Author: Mark Reynolds is the executive director of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and Jan Berry is its Tennessee state coordinator.
French Polynesia’s opposition and nuclear test veterans organisation will boycott talks in Paris next month on the legacy of French testing.
The high-level roundtable was proposed in March in response to an outrcry over a study which alleged France had misled the public about the seriousness of fallout after a 1974 atmospheric blast at Moruroa.
Territory President Édouard Fritch said this was the first time the French president had invited French Polynesia for face-to-face talks on the issue.
“I told him that I intended to lead a delegation of 20 to 30 people there because I want all the country’s forces to be able to express themselves, in their political and societal diversity,” he told the French Polynesian assembly last week.
“The state has a duty of truth and justice towards the Polynesians.”
But the leader of the pro-independence Tavini Huiraatira, Oscar Temaru, said his side would only join if the United Nations was present as an arbiter.
Temaru said that after 60 years of lies on the part of the French state, it could not be trusted.
More than ‘closed-door’ interview
“It will take a lot more than a closed-door interview here in Tahiti, or even a ‘high-level round table’ organised in the hushed and soundproofed offices in Paris, without witnesses,” wrote the pro-independence leader in a statement.
He said that for 50 years France had used any means to claim its tests were clean, and like other test opponents, he was personally denigrated and humiliated.
“Our people have a right to the full truth about the health consequences, genetic, environmental and societal of these crimes perpetrated during 30 years on its lands,” Temaru added.
The Mororua e Tatou veterans organisation said discussions can only start once the French state had paid compensation for its errors.
Decades after the nuclear tests, Moruroa and Fagataufa remain nuclear no-go zones. Image: AFP
Fritch, however, conceded that it was not easy to reverse 60 years of propaganda, denials, intimidation and arrogance, but added: “This round table is not an end in itself. This is a historic milestone.”
Between 1966 and 1996, France carried out 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia and until a decade ago, France claimed its tests were clean and caused no harm to humans.
Limited compensation has been paid out on the basis of national solidarity with the victims, not because the French state recognises any liability.
The test sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls remain excised from French Polynesia and are French no-go zones.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A new study from a group of agricultural researchers found that nearly 18,000 deaths occur annually in the United States due to air pollution coming from farms.
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that gases associated with manure and animal feed are producing particles that are able to drift hundreds of miles away from their source. Most of the deaths attributable to farm pollution, however, come from animal-based agriculture, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths the study uncovered.
Chronic exposure to increased levels of fine particulate matter (sometimes shortened to PM2.5) that is released from farms “increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke,” an analysis of the study noted.
Notably, deaths associated with farm pollution are more localized than deaths that occur with greenhouse gas pollution. Communities upwind from farms discharging the pollutants are at greatest risk, said Jason Hill, University of Minnesota professor and a lead author of the study. In other words, the health effects from agriculture-based air pollution tend to be more localized, dependent upon local weather patterns and other factors.
While that reduces the risk from these pollutants at the national and global levels (areas most affected by this type of pollution are in eastern North Carolina, California’s Central Valley and the Upper Midwest), the annual number of deaths caused by farm pollution now exceed deaths caused by pollution from coal power plants in the U.S.
The biggest culprit behind the deaths from farm pollution, in the study’s estimation, is ammonia, a chemical that’s released by manure and fertilizer, and which often combines with other pollutants found on farms, including nitrogen and sulfur. Hill, speaking with The Washington Post about the study, pointed out that animal waste is often stored in “lagoons” on farms, where huge amounts of ammonia are generated by the breakdown of animal feces. Ammonia is also created when farmers apply too much fertilizer on crops.
According to the study, livestock waste and fertilizer overuse likely accounted for about 12,400 deaths per year. While particulate matter emanating from “dust from tillage, livestock dust, field burning, and fuel combustion in agricultural equipment use” accounted for around 4,800 more deaths annually.
Agriculture industry leaders were quick to push back against the study’s findings. “U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” claimed Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council.
A spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, which runs industrial hog operations in North Carolina, agreed with Monroe’s contentions, citing a study from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which said it didn’t find air quality problems in the areas where they had farms. But that study has some noteworthy flaws, including the fact that monitors used to detect ammonia levels were set up far away from the farms themselves.
Ammonia is a reactive chemical, and is difficult to detect unless a significant amount is released at one time.
“Air quality–related health benefits … can be achieved through the actions of food producers and consumers,” the study’s authors said. Reducing particulate-related emissions, promoting dietary shifts in animals, reducing food loss and waste, and other methods are cited in the study as helpful to reducing the number of deaths from agricultural air pollution.
“The greatest benefits are from changes in livestock waste management and fertilizer application practices,” the study said. “Producer-side interventions in the 10 percent of counties with the highest mitigation potential alone could prevent 3,600 deaths per year.”
Methods based out of regenerative agriculture — described as “a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm” by the Climate Reality Project — could also be beneficial for scaling back farm-based air pollution, particularly in California, where such efforts could potentially reduce the impact of wildfires in the state. Such methods (including encouraging animals to graze natural plants, shrubs, or grass on the land, rather than animal feed, and engaging in no-till farming strategies to increase moisture levels in the soil) have been cited by farmer Alexis Koefoed as helping her family’s farm survive a wildfire last year.
“I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.
For more than half a century, 441 Bauchet Street has been the address where Los Angeles’ most stark social and environmental inequalities converge. It’s the location of L.A.’s Men’s Central Jail, the largest facility in the most populated county jail system in the country. On any given day, about 5,000 people are incarcerated there.
A block south from the jail is the 101 freeway, one of the most traveled highways in America, which generates dangerous levels of air pollution linked to a slew of birth defects. A block east is the L.A. River, home to at least 20 different pollutants, from feces to oil, at levels that violate federal standards. Another 100 yards east is the SP Railyard and Union Pacific Transportation Center, which operate at all hours, receiving big rig diesel trucks that spew an estimated 40 tons of particulate matter into the air annually.
Legendary environmenal activist Diane Wilson has been called “an unreasonable woman.”
As a shrimper, Diane learned firsthand about tremendous pollution damaging the waters near her hometown of Port Lavaca and fought to defend the Bay from Formosa and Alcoa, major chemical companies. In 2019, Diane was plaintiff to a court case brought against Formosa on account of the shocking amount of plastic pollution – called nurdles – that Diane found littered around the Bay. That case resulted in a $50 million settlement against the company that is being used for environmental projects.
Now, as of May 5th, Diane is on Day 29 of a hunger strike protesting the dredging of the Matagorda Ship Channel, a channel first dredged in the 1960s to provide a means for ships to travel between the Gulf of Mexico and the industry along Lavaca Bay.
Texas shrimper, fisherwoman and internationally known environmentalist Diane Wilson is on Day 22 of her hunger strike to gain national solidarity and publicity for pressure on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rescind its permit for big oil to dredge a channel in mercury laden Matagorda Bay, Texas. The dredged channel would allow massive oil tankers into the bay to take on crude oil that will be exported from the U.S.
“I am risking my life to stop the reckless destruction of my community. Oil and gas export terminals like the project I am fighting pollute our air, water, and climate — only to pad the pockets of fossil fuel CEOs,” said Diane Wilson. “The Biden Administration needs to stop the dredging and stop oil and gas exports.”
Texas – Seventy-two-year-old, fourth-generation retired shrimper Diane Wilson has been without food for 16 days. Her 1995 red Chevy, nicknamed “Rosie,” has become a mobile campsite, and each morning she posts up on a causeway at the waterfront of Texas’ Lavaca Bay, expending just enough energy to switch out a sign displaying the number of days she’s been on hunger strike and drape a banner off the side of the truck blaring the message: “STOP THE DREDGING. STOP OIL EXPORT.”
She hopes her hunger strike will draw enough attention to pressure the Biden administration stop Houston-based oil and gas firm Max Midstream’s plans to invest $360 million to deepen and widen the Matagorda Ship Channel by 2023.
In the age of the Anthropocene, the simple act of taking a healthy breath has become a luxury. In spite of ongoing industry efforts to thwart elected officials into allowing for “business as usual” no matter the social and environmental toll, activists are no longer the only ones calling for dramatic drops in emissions: now, even corporate leaders and power companies have called on the Biden administration to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration signaled it plans to do just that. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, countries need to nearly halve emissions by 2030 to stay on track to keep warming below 1.5 Celsius, though many groups say the U.S. should commit to cutting emissions by 70 percent, given its disproportionate contributions. But the target is largely symbolic, and concrete domestic policies — like closing loopholes that allow fossil fuel companies to release toxic emissions at certain times — are needed to clean up the pollutants ravaging the climate and human health.
Each day, 9 out of 10 people across the world breathe polluted air as they work, catch sunshine on their stoops, prepare meals and even as they sleep. Shaina Oliver is an Indigenous peoples’ rights advocate and field organizer with Moms Clean Air Force, a group of 1 million mothers in the United States determined to protect children from air pollution and climate change. Oliver, who was born in Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico, was diagnosed with asthma as an infant. Now, she told Truthout, she can’t sleep without an air purifier in her bedroom. Residents of Shiprock have been exposed to poor outdoor air quality on account of atmospheric conditions that trap plumes of emissions from nearby coal-fired power plants, in combination with poor indoor air quality related to the burning of coal for heat.
Later in life, Oliver and her family found out she had been born with a slew of congenital medical issues that resulted in hearing and speech difficulties. “Many of my people are impacted by these same disparities and are being told that these disparities are genetic traits,” Oliver said on an April 15 panel hosted by Moms Clean Air Force and the National Tribal Air Association (NTAA). “Our people know these health disparities are caused by contamination related to the industries that have encroached into our reservations where our treaty rights are abused.”
More than 50 years ago, when the Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed, it required state and federal governments in the U.S. to collaborate for the first time on clearing the skies by requiring the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set limits on ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and lead, many of which we now know contribute to the climate emergency and harm human health. Amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, or “good neighbor” requirements, instructed the EPA to hold states accountable for preventing air pollution generated in their jurisdiction that might drift downwind across state lines, dirtying air many miles away.
But the gains have not been linear or comprehensive. After declining 27 percent from 2009 to 2016, the annual average level of asthma-triggering particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) increased by 5.7 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to a 2021 study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers. Wildfires likely contributed to the increase, as did lackluster enforcement during former President Trump’s first two years in office. The increase in PM2.5 — which is smaller than 1/30 the width of a human hair and thus able to enter organs, including the brain, through the bloodstream — resulted in 9,700 additional premature deaths, according to the study.
Another study published July 2020 in the journal Science shows that advancements in pollution control are not happening equitably in terms of spatial distribution. The groups of people who were most exposed to pollution in 1981 are largely the same groups who were most exposed in 2016, the authors explain. “More populated, whiter, higher income, and less Hispanic areas at baseline in 1981 are associated with reductions in [PM2.5 percentile ranking levels] over time,” the study explains; while poorer, less white and less educated census tracts saw increases in percentile ranking over the same years.
On tribal lands, such as the part of New Mexico where Oliver was born, ongoing disparities are in part attributable to a failure of federal and state governments to honor treaties that require free, prior and informed consent of tribal governments before permitting industrial projects, and a lack of adequate funding, Oliver said, pointing out that “what happens to tribal communities affects all communities.”
The Clean Air Act specifies that tribes be treated as states in carrying out clean air programs. But according to the NTAA, a coalition of tribal governments that works closely with the EPA to advance air quality management, the EPA’s strategic plan and budget for fiscal year 2020-21 included “little to no indication of support” for tribal air priorities, such as a desire for indoor air quality monitoring programs and addressing climate change. The plan also failed to address concerning decreases in funding for some tribes.
Given ongoing disparities, individuals and organizations have taken it upon themselves to do what they can to clean up the air. Haven Coleman is a 15-year-old climate activist who organized the first weekly climate strikes in the U.S. in early 2019. Coleman lives in Denver, Colorado, which ranks in the 10 most ozone-polluted U.S. cities, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report.Ozone, the main ingredient in smog, forms as a result of a chemical reaction when volatile organic compounds mix with nitrous oxide in the presence of sunlight. Ozone often shows up downwind from where the original pollutants were emitted, and is a powerful lung irritant.
For Coleman’s 15th birthday, she launched a GoFundMe aiming to raise $15,000 to purchase air purifier kits for households where wildfire smoke and other emissions occur near the state’s remaining coal plants and oil refineries. “It shouldn’t be up to fundraisers to deal with structural crises like this, but as we push for government action to reduce pollution at source, communities need cleaner air right now,” Coleman explained on the fundraiser’s homepage.
In many U.S. cities and towns, access to granular, neighborhood-level data is still lacking, and relying on broad calculations, like average PM2.5 levels across full states or cities, obscures the impacts of harmful exposure to residents on a certain street. San Francisco-based Aclima, a public benefit corporation that makes air quality sensors and uses its own fleet of Google street view cars to measure air pollution on a block-by-block basis, set out in 2015 to change that. A March 2021 study using Aclima’s data found a near-40-fold difference from neighborhood to neighborhood in the Bay Area. In West Oakland, the study found, half of childhood asthma cases are linked to nitrogen dioxide from traffic-related air pollution, in comparison with only one in five cases of childhood asthma in the predominantly white Oakland Hills. Understanding these inequities is key to eliminating them, Susan Anenberg, professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University, told Popular Science.
In April, Aclima announced it would add seven new advisors to its board, including leading environmental justice figures Peggy Shepard, co-founder of WE ACT; Heather McTeer Toney, former southeast regional administrator for the EPA and director of political organizing for Moms Clean Air Force; and University of Maryland professor Sacoby Wilson. “This is a unique opportunity to help the business sector do more to address environmental injustice instead of how many in the sector cause environmental injustice,” Wilson said in a statement.
Still, neither individuals nor private companies are capable of coordinating the vast scale of change needed to avert the most dangerous impacts of the climate emergency, which include the worsening of human health. Luckily, researchers and environmental and climate advocates have plenty of ideas for what the Biden administration can do next.
For the first time since it began publishing an annual air quality analysis 22 years ago, the American Lung Association specifically names transitioning away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy and zero-emissions transportation as priorities in a brand new “what needs to be done” section of its 2021 State of the Air report, released today. The Center for Biological Diversity and 350.org want the EPA to set a greenhouse gas pollution cap. Another coalition of 95 environmental groups including the Coalition for a Safe Environment in Los Angeles, and Texas Environmental Justice Advisory Services, says the Biden administration should close a loophole that allows polluting facilities to release unlimited quantities of air pollution that far exceed Clean Air Act limits during startup, shutdown and malfunction incidents. According to the legal petition, 63 million pounds of illegal air pollution was released from Texas facilities in 2019 during routine “breakdown” events.
“For every moment our country delays response to this emergency, we become more and more responsible for the business livelihoods lost and families destroyed because we failed to act when we had both science and fact to back our actions,” former EPA Southeast Regional Administrator Heather McTeer Toney said in an April 15 hearing before the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. “There are so many overlaps of social justice inequities and climate such that inaction is inconceivable.”
Magali Sanchez-Hall, usually in motion, pauses for a moment on the sidewalk to gaze through a chain-link fence at the massive new construction project: tanks shaped like giant tuna fish cans that will store crude oil.
The Los Angeles refinery has been her troublesome neighbor for a quarter of a century, but she finds this latest turn particularly perplexing.
“Right now, we are supposed to be moving to clean energy,” she says.
Sanchez-Hall, 50, raised her children here before getting a master’s degree in public policy. When Tesoro, now Marathon Petroleum Corp., first proposed the new tanks in 2016, she opposed them, citing sickening fumes from the ones already there.
Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.
Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.
In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.
This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pinpricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.
Paradox and mystery
Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.
But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.
The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.
At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.
And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.
Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.
Breaking News: Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle is being influenced by forms of matter and energy that are not yet known to science but which may nevertheless affect the nature and evolution of the universe. https://t.co/8cwwhlPCOe
Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.
There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.
The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.
When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.
Mind and matter
Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.
Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.
Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.
Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.
We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.
Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.
Science and power
Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.
The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.
Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.
But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.
In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
Things like this raise an obvious question we have been ignoring at our peril:
How do we trust an entirely commercially driven world in which a small group of people who constantly enrich themselves also control the information universe the rest of us inhabit?
But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.
In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.
But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.
Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.
Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.
But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?
Fear and quick-fixes
For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.
So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?
Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.
Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.
Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.
Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.
Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.
In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.
This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pinpricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.
Paradox and mystery
Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.
But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.
The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.
At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.
And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.
Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.
Breaking News: Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle is being influenced by forms of matter and energy that are not yet known to science but which may nevertheless affect the nature and evolution of the universe. https://t.co/8cwwhlPCOe
Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.
There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.
The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.
When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.
Mind and matter
Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.
Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.
Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.
Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.
We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.
Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.
Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.
The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.
Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.
But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.
In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
Things like this raise an obvious question we have been ignoring at our peril:
How do we trust an entirely commercially driven world in which a small group of people who constantly enrich themselves also control the information universe the rest of us inhabit?
But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.
In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.
But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.
Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.
Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.
But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?
Fear and quick-fixes
For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.
So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?
Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.
Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.
Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.
President Joe Biden’s administration has portrayed its immigration policy as a humane departure from recent precedent. In a March briefing at the White House, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that his agency was coming “out of the depths of cruelty” in which it operated during the Trump administration. But as the new administration prepares to detain thousands of migrant children at sites with histories of toxic contamination, environmental justice advocates are questioning whether such circumstances can truly be considered humane.
Last month, hundreds protested in the Miami-area suburb of Homestead, where the once-largest youth migrant detention center in the U.S. was slated to reopen, despite the fact that it had been deemed too environmentally toxic for humans by the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Air Force, and Miami-Dade County. The Homestead Migrant Detention Facility, which former President Donald Trump temporarily closed in 2019 neighbors a Superfund site where 16 sources of highly contaminated military waste, including arsenic, lead, and mercury, are still found. (It was also notorious for reports of sexual abuse by staff.)
In a move to quell the ruckus, Biden told the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency charged with caring for migrant minors in U.S. custody, to find other options. However, two of the sites they went on to offer instead, Texas’ Fort Bliss and Joint Base San Antonio, are themselves known to be contaminated with toxic chemicals that exceed government safety thresholds. While Joint Base San Antonio is still waiting on new arrivals, 500 unaccompanied youth were moved to El Paso’s Fort Bliss last week.
After the Trump Administration first began toying with the idea of using Fort Bliss as a holding site in 2019, the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice released government documents showing that the facility’s grounds had a history of cancer-causing chemical contamination far above official safety thresholds — and that cleanup of these toxic areas had not been verified. In 1998, some carcinogenic volatile organic compounds were found at more than 460 times the level deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. Since then, at least 80 toxic sites on the base have been identified and remediated, but even after the cleanup effort sites were found to contain levels of arsenic as high as 19 times the EPA’s maximum safe level for residential soil.
At Joint Base San Antonio on the other side of Texas, the water is contaminated with the so-called “forever chemicals” known as PFAS at levels two times higher than what the EPA deems safe, thanks to the military’s decades-long use of toxic firefighting foam. The air pollution levels on the base and in the surrounding community are some of the worst in the country.
The administration’s move to open these new holding sites comes in the middle of a period that has left roughly 20,500 unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody as of Thursday, according to Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. Reports from the border have described overcrowded facilities that have left hundreds of children younger than 13 jailed for longer than the maximum 72 hours permitted by law.
In response to concerns from environmental justice activists about the new holding sites, HHS told Grist that the agency continues to take “the safety and health of unaccompanied children referred to [its] care with the utmost seriousness” and that it would conduct environmental assessments before children enter any new facilities, in accordance with its longstanding policy.
News reports and administrative leaks show that other toxic sites are under consideration as new holding sites as well. Since 2018, Earthjustice has identified at least six youth facilities, either in active use or under consideration for future use, that are home to levels of toxins and chemical waste considered unfit for residential use. Many of them are current or former military bases. Earthjustice says that HHS’s environmental assessments are insufficient and that many past sites were deemed safe by the department despite evidence showing contamination levels that were potentially harmful to humans.
“These children don’t deserve to be sentenced to cancer and other consequences of environmental hazards within these facilities,” said Raul Garcia, a legislative director at EarthJustice. “They shouldn’t be punished for something that isn’t their fault and is out of their control.”
Garcia called it ironic that many of those displaced by natural disasters are subjected to a new form of environmental violence once they reach the U.S. A large portion of youth arriving at the border are from Central American countries that were devastated by Hurricanes Eta and Iota in November.
“Poor people of color generally tend to receive all the burden of the racist system that already exists within the United States,” said Garcia. “There is this cycle of environmental trauma for immigrants.”
Historically, Earthjustice and other advocacy groups have found more success blocking the use of migrant detention sites that are privately-owned, rather than military bases. In addition to the canceled reopening of the Homestead Migrant Detention Facility in Florida, two other detention sites have been nixed for their environmental failures over the past month. A site in Midland, Texas, was briefly closed to new arrivals after the state warned that its water wasn’t drinkable due to chemical contamination. A proposed holding location at a NASA research center in Moffett, California, was also scrapped after activists highlighted its proximity to a known Superfund site with high levels of toxic chemicals.
In a statement following the opening of Fort Bliss, Earthjustice said that the Biden administration’s recent moves show that the country has failed to create conditions to keep those in custody safe. Pointing to reports of forced sterilization, the use of industrial chemical disinfectants at other migrant detention facilities, and uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19,” the group is calling on Biden to immediately halt the use of both private and government-owned sites that “place children in such unsafe facilities” and find options that don’t use “toxic sites, military sites, or detention-like settings” to house children.
President Joe Biden’s administration has portrayed its immigration policy as a humane departure from recent precedent. In a March briefing at the White House, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that his agency was coming “out of the depths of cruelty” in which it operated during the Trump administration. But as the new administration prepares to detain thousands of migrant children at sites with histories of toxic contamination, environmental justice advocates are questioning whether such circumstances can truly be considered humane.
Last month, hundreds protested in the Miami-area suburb of Homestead, where the once-largest youth migrant detention center in the U.S. was slated to reopen, despite the fact that it had been deemed too environmentally toxic for humans by the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Air Force, and Miami-Dade County. The Homestead Migrant Detention Facility, which former President Donald Trump temporarily closed in 2019 neighbors a Superfund site where 16 sources of highly contaminated military waste, including arsenic, lead, and mercury, are still found. (It was also notorious for reports of sexual abuse by staff.)
In a move to quell the ruckus, Biden told the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency charged with caring for migrant minors in U.S. custody, to find other options. However, two of the sites they went on to offer instead, Texas’ Fort Bliss and Joint Base San Antonio, are themselves known to be contaminated with toxic chemicals that exceed government safety thresholds. While Joint Base San Antonio is still waiting on new arrivals, 500 unaccompanied youth were moved to El Paso’s Fort Bliss last week.
After the Trump Administration first began toying with the idea of using Fort Bliss as a holding site in 2019, the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice released government documents showing that the facility’s grounds had a history of cancer-causing chemical contamination far above official safety thresholds — and that cleanup of these toxic areas had not been verified. In 1998, some carcinogenic volatile organic compounds were found at more than 460 times the level deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. Since then, at least 80 toxic sites on the base have been identified and remediated, but even after the cleanup effort sites were found to contain levels of arsenic as high as 19 times the EPA’s maximum safe level for residential soil.
At Joint Base San Antonio on the other side of Texas, the water is contaminated with the so-called “forever chemicals” known as PFAS at levels two times higher than what the EPA deems safe, thanks to the military’s decades-long use of toxic firefighting foam. The air pollution levels on the base and in the surrounding community are some of the worst in the country.
The administration’s move to open these new holding sites comes in the middle of a period that has left roughly 20,500 unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody as of Thursday, according to Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. Reports from the border have described overcrowded facilities that have left hundreds of children younger than 13 jailed for longer than the maximum 72 hours permitted by law.
In response to concerns from environmental justice activists about the new holding sites, HHS told Grist that the agency continues to take “the safety and health of unaccompanied children referred to [its] care with the utmost seriousness” and that it would conduct environmental assessments before children enter any new facilities, in accordance with its longstanding policy.
News reports and administrative leaks show that other toxic sites are under consideration as new holding sites as well. Since 2018, Earthjustice has identified at least six youth facilities, either in active use or under consideration for future use, that are home to levels of toxins and chemical waste considered unfit for residential use. Many of them are current or former military bases. Earthjustice says that HHS’s environmental assessments are insufficient and that many past sites were deemed safe by the department despite evidence showing contamination levels that were potentially harmful to humans.
“These children don’t deserve to be sentenced to cancer and other consequences of environmental hazards within these facilities,” said Raul Garcia, a legislative director at EarthJustice. “They shouldn’t be punished for something that isn’t their fault and is out of their control.”
Garcia called it ironic that many of those displaced by natural disasters are subjected to a new form of environmental violence once they reach the U.S. A large portion of youth arriving at the border are from Central American countries that were devastated by Hurricanes Eta and Iota in November.
“Poor people of color generally tend to receive all the burden of the racist system that already exists within the United States,” said Garcia. “There is this cycle of environmental trauma for immigrants.”
Historically, Earthjustice and other advocacy groups have found more success blocking the use of migrant detention sites that are privately-owned, rather than military bases. In addition to the canceled reopening of the Homestead Migrant Detention Facility in Florida, two other detention sites have been nixed for their environmental failures over the past month. A site in Midland, Texas, was briefly closed to new arrivals after the state warned that its water wasn’t drinkable due to chemical contamination. A proposed holding location at a NASA research center in Moffett, California, was also scrapped after activists highlighted its proximity to a known Superfund site with high levels of toxic chemicals.
In a statement following the opening of Fort Bliss, Earthjustice said that the Biden administration’s recent moves show that the country has failed to create conditions to keep those in custody safe. Pointing to reports of forced sterilization, the use of industrial chemical disinfectants at other migrant detention facilities, and uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19,” the group is calling on Biden to immediately halt the use of both private and government-owned sites that “place children in such unsafe facilities” and find options that don’t use “toxic sites, military sites, or detention-like settings” to house children.
Greenpeace USA responded critically on Wednesday after the U.S. Department of the Treasury released a new report offering more details about President Joe Biden’s Made in America tax plan — part of the $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure proposal that the president unveiled last week.
Specifically, the environmental advocacy group took aim at the Biden administration’s approach to subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, arguing that it falls short. As senior climate campaigner John Noël put it: “Not a dime of our tax dollars should go towards corporations that poison our communities and wreck our climate.”
Biden faces global pressure to end all subsidies for polluters. The Treasury report (pdf) notably came on the heels of Yale University economist Matthew Kotchen publishing a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesrevealing that U.S. fossil fuel companies are getting about $62 billion in implicit subsidies annually.
“Today the tax code contributes to climate change by providing significant tax preferences and subsidies for the oil and gas industry,” the Treasury report says. “The president’s tax plan would remove subsidies for fossil fuel companies, while providing incentives to reposition the United States as a global leader in clean energy and to ensure that our infrastructure is resilient to storms, floods, fires, and rising sea levels. Targeted investments in a clean and resilient energy future would also boost jobs for American workers and address environmental injustices.”
The report continues:
Estimates from the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis suggest that eliminating the subsidies for fossil fuel companies would increase government tax receipts by over $35 billion in the coming decade. The main impact would be on oil and gas company profits. Research suggests little impact on gasoline or energy prices for U.S. consumers and little impact on our energy security.
The Made in America tax plan would advance clean electricity production by providing a 10-year extension of the production tax credit and investment tax credit for clean energy generation and storage, and making those credits direct pay. Together with non-tax initiatives, like the Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard, the plan sets the country on a path to 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035. In addition to addressing climate change, analysis by an independent think tank suggests that plans like the president’s would also lead to a dramatic reduction in local air pollution, reducing premature deaths from breathing polluted air by at least two-thirds. Low-income and minority households are more likely to live in communities with poor air quality, so these benefits would help address equity concerns as well.
The plan, as the report explains, would further create and expand tax incentives for clean energy infrastructure as well as carbon capture and sequestration projects. It would also “penalize polluters through tax disincentives,” restoring a tax that goes toward the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to clean up Superfund sites.
On the subsidies front, Noël urged decision-makers to support a bolder proposal.
“Biden’s proposal to eliminate just $35 billion in tax credits and loopholes over a 10-year period is simply not good enough,” he said. “Fossil fuel corporations receive $15 billion in direct subsidies from the federal government every year.”
“We urge Congress to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would save taxpayers $150 billion over the next decade and allow us to invest in the clean energy economy of the future,” he continued, referencing legislation sponsored by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Noël added that “the End Polluter Welfare Act is the most comprehensive legislation to address fossil fuel subsidies and close existing tax loopholes. It will be reintroduced in Congress later this month.”
The goal of the tax plan is to make American companies and workers more competitive by eliminating incentives to offshore investment, substantially reducing profit shifting, countering tax competition on corporate rates, and providing tax preferences for clean energy production.
Sanders — a former Democratic presidential primary candidate who ultimately backed Biden — and Omar first introduced the bill in July 2020, long before Biden took office, and a few months into a public health crisis that has persisted.
“At a time when we are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and an economic decline,” Sanders said last summer, “it is absurd to provide billions of taxpayer subsidies that pad fossil fuel companies’ already-enormous profits.”
While Greenpeace is calling on Congress and the current administration to go further to end subsidies for the dirty energy sector, Reutersnoted Wednesday that the tax plan “is expected to face resistance from fossil fuel lobbyists.”
Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president for policy, economic, and regulatory affairs at the trade association American Petroleum Institute (API) put out a statement last week welcoming some of the administration’s American Jobs Plan — the broader infrastructure proposal — but opposing other elements of it.
“Targeting specific industries with new taxes would only undermine the nation’s economic recovery and jeopardize good-paying jobs, including union jobs,” he said. “It’s important to note that our industry receives no special tax treatment, and we will continue to advocate for a tax code that supports a level playing field for all economic sectors along with policies that sustain and grow the billions of dollars in government revenue that we help generate.”
Climate campaigners and reporters have pushed back against Macchiarola’s comments.
“Those costs are absorbed by society. So instead of paying for the real cost of gasoline at the pump, we pay for it with the deterioration of our health, climate, and environment, and the costs associated with that collective deterioration.” https://t.co/3FkLayLB2A
As journalist Emily Atkin noted Tuesday in her newsletter HEATED, Kotchen of Yale said his paper “helps clarify what the domestic fossil fuel industry has at stake financially when it comes to policies that seek to address climate change, adverse health effects from local pollution, and inefficient transportation.”
“That’s true,” Atkin wrote. “But it also helps clarify what we have at stake financially when it comes to those same policies. Because even though we’re giving fossil fuel producers a $62 billion annual benefit from implicit subsidies, that’s not even close to how much they cost. According to Kotchen’s study, implicit subsidies cost society an average of $568 billion per year. That means they cost 89% more to provide than they do to accept.”
In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals (a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too.
All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water.
Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal.
Florida workers over the weekend rushed to prevent the collapse of a reservoir wall containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater from a defunct phosphate mine, a looming environmental catastrophe that prompted mandatory evacuation orders and a declaration of emergency by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
A leak in the Piney Point reservoir was first reported late last month, sparking fears of a complete breach and possible upending of stacks of phosphogypsum, a radioactive waste product of fertilizer manufacturing. During abriefingon Saturday, a public safety official for Florida’s Manatee County warned that “structural collapse” of the storage reservoir “could occur at any time.”
To prevent a full-fledged breach and contain spillage, local work crews on Sunday continuedactively pumpingtens of thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater per minute into Tampa Bay. AsThe GuardianreportedSunday, Manatee County officials “warned that up to 340 million gallons could engulf the area in ‘a 20-foot wall of water’ if they could not repair” the leak.
Let’s be clear. This “mixed saltwater” is industrial wastewater. Acidic, full of nitrogen and phosphorus and oh yeah, radioactive! #PineyPointhttps://t.co/8vYu1mIXsE
Justin Bloom, founder of the Sarasota-based nonprofit group Suncoast Waterkeeper, said in a statement Sunday that “we hope the contamination is not as bad as we fear, but are preparing for significant damage to Tampa Bay and the communities that rely on this precious resource.”
“It looks like this is turning out to be the ‘horror’ chapter of a long, terrible story of phosphate mining in Florida and beyond,” Bloom added.
Aerial footage posted to YouTube by a local news outlet shows the leak at the Piney Point reservoir as of Sunday morning:
The Environmental Protection Agencysaidlate Sunday that it is “actively monitoring the ongoing situation at Piney Point” and has “deployed an on-scene coordinator” to work with local officials.
Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Sunday that the crisis was “entirely foreseeable and preventable” and cries out for immediate intervention by the federal government.
“With 24 more phosphogypsum stacks storing more than one billion tons of this dangerous, radioactive waste in Florida, the EPA needs to step in right now,” Lopez said. “Federal officials need to clean up this mess the fertilizer industry has dumped on Florida communities and immediately halt further phosphogypsum production.”
Amy Townsend-Small has been chasing methane her entire professional life. The quest has taken her from Southern California freeways to sewage plants to animal feedlots. Sniffing out the potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide after it’s emitted into the atmosphere, has required her to breathalyze cows and take chemical measurements at large manure lagoons. When fracking took off around 2010, Townsend-Small shifted her focus to a new and growing problem: methane leaks from oil and gas activity.
Natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane, was pitched as a fuel that could transition the U.S. to renewable energy, since it burns more cleanly than coal and is naturally abundant — and, thanks to fracking, newly inexpensive to extract. But the thinking at the time missed an important detail: The thousands of wells drilled, the millions of miles of pipeline that transported natural gas, and the refineries that processed it all leaked methane. Natural gas plants emit about half as much carbon dioxide as coal plants, but without knowing how much methane leaks when extracting and moving natural gas, the true climate effects cannot be assessed. As regulators and policymakers caught on to this fact, Townsend-Small’s work began to take on new significance.
“That sort of catalyzed a giant push for more research on methane emissions across the whole supply chain,” Townsend-Small said.
Amy Townsend-Small and her research assistant, Jacob Hoschouer, surveyed 40 wells in West Texas and found several were quietly belching methane. Christopher Collins
Townsend-Small began trying to quantify just how much methane was leaking from wells and pipelines. She investigated whether methane from fracking sites may have tainted groundwater in rural Ohio and collected data on pipeline and compressor station leaks in Colorado. The work of Townsend-Small and other environmental scientists tracking greenhouse gases culminated in a 2018 study finding that 2.3 percent of the natural gas extracted in the country either leaked or was directly released into the air — the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emitted by all coal plants operating at the time.
Distressingly, a small but unknown volume of those emissions come from wells that no longer produce fossil fuels at all, because the companies responsible for them have walked away from their legal obligation to seal them with cement after use. As a result, hundreds of thousands of holes in the ground are direct conduits between the atmosphere and vast reserves of fossil fuels underground, allowing them to quietly belch methane for years with no one being the wiser.
In 2016, Townsend-Small found that 40 percent of unplugged wells she tested in Colorado, Wyoming, Ohio, and Utah were emitting methane. On average, each unplugged well was leaking about 10 grams of methane each hour, contributing the annual carbon equivalent of burning more than 2,400 pounds of coal each year. The EPA used her research to estimate that the nation’s approximately 3.1 million abandoned wells were spewing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to burning more than 16 million barrels of oil.
Such attempts to quantify methane emissions nationally come with fairly large margins of error, primarily because research on this front is scarce and what does exist is based on surveys in the Appalachian Basin. No two geological formations are the same, so without more detailed data from major oil- and gas-producing states, it’s impossible to say precisely the damage that abandoned wells may be doing to the planet. That’s why Townsend-Small recently set out to fill a Texas-sized hole in the research: The Lone Star State is the largest producer of oil and gas in the country and has thousands of abandoned wells, but its methane emissions have never been systematically measured.
Last year, after Grist and the Texas Observer introduced Townsend-Small and a research assistant to West Texas landowners with inactive wells on their properties, the researchers used a U.S. Interior Department grant to conduct what they believe is the first-ever academic study of methane emissions from abandoned wells in Texas. Their findings, which were recently published in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, suggest Texas’ inactive wells could be emitting enough methane to power more than 15,000 homes for a year. Their findings provide more granular data for the EPA and state regulators to rely on when assessing the oil and gas industry’s contribution to climate change.
To conduct her research, Townsend-Small drove down to Pecos County, Texas, from Ohio, where she is now an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, and spent three days surveying 40 wells, nearly half of which were actively leaking methane. Most of the sites, which are connected by thin dirt pathways just wide enough for a truck to pass through, are rough-cut openings in dense mesquite. There, Townsend-Small and her assistant knelt in the sand to set up their equipment: a computerized instrument housed inside a briefcase that’s attached to a vacuum hose. The hose is secured to a section of the oil well that’s open to the atmosphere, and the computer tells the researchers how much methane the sampled air contains. They collected specimens by using a syringe and plunging it into a glass vial. Sometimes they had to use strips of plastic and elastic bands to trap enough wellhead gas to measure.
Townsend-Small and Hoschouer take methane measurements at abandoned wells in Pecos County. Christopher Collins
Of the 17 wells where methane leaks were detected, the emission rates ranged from 0.2 to 132 grams an hour. Just three wells at the high end of that range were responsible for 94 percent of all emissions. The phenomenon — in which a handful of especially leaky wells that Townsend-Small and other researchers call “super emitters” are responsible for the vast majority of emissions — is a pattern that’s also been observed in the Appalachian Basin and other oil fields in the country.
“If you want to make a big impact, you only have to fix the big leakers,” Townsend-Small told Grist and the Texas Observer.
If Texas’ roughly 102,000 inactive and abandoned wells leak at a rate similar to the wells Townsend-Small sampled, they could be emitting more than 5.5 million kilograms of methane into the atmosphere each year. That’s the equivalent of burning more than 150 million pounds of coal.
A subset of the wells examined by Townsend-Small’s research are so-called shut-in wells, which are not technically abandoned because their operators claim they may someday revive them, but nevertheless often lie idle for several years when oil prices are low. Of the 26 shut-in wells surveyed, 12 were emitting methane. All three “super emitter” wells were shut-in. Last year, as a global decline in demand sent oil prices plummeting, a large number of legacy wells were idled.
“There’s a record number of shut-in wells in the United States right now, especially these older conventional wells, which were already producing a very small amount,” said Townsend-Small.
Townsend-Small said that more research is required to understand the volume of particularly toxic chemicals, like benzene and toluene, that may be leaking from abandoned and idled wells alongside methane. Research has demonstrated that living near active oil and gas sites leads to poorer health outcomes, including a higher risk of cancer, increased odds of underweight newborns, and a higher likelihood of preterm birth. But whether those trends hold true for those living near abandoned wells is an open question. A 2020 study by a group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that women who lived close to inactive wells were more likely to give birth to underweight and preterm babies. Their findings are inconclusive, but they hypothesized that a slew of toxic chemicals that are often released in tandem with methane may be driving the health effects. (Editor’s note: One of the paper’s co-authors is Rachel Morello-Frosch, who is a member of Grist’s board.)
At some of the well sites Townsend-Small visited, the stench of hydrogen sulfide, a gas that is deadly to humans in large quantities, hung heavy in the air. She described being overwhelmed by the smell during at least six well site visits. Those wells were leaking methane as well as releasing chemical-laden water. After those visits, Townsend-Small and her assistant felt nauseous for several hours, waking up multiple times in the night. The wells are just a few miles away from Buena Vista High School as well as the Pecos River, a source of irrigation water in the area.
“That needs to be investigated further,” she said.
This story is part of the project “Waves of Abandonment,” a collaboration between Grist and The Texas Observer, an Austin-based nonprofit news organization that strives to make Texas a more equitable place by exposing injustice through investigative journalism, narrative storytelling, and cultural coverage. The project was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Plastic pollution isn’t just a threat to non-human life like turtles and whales. It’s also a major environmental justice problem.
That’s the conclusion of a new report released Tuesday from the UN Environment Program and ocean justice non-profit Azul, titled Neglected: Environmental Justice Impacts of Plastic Pollution.
“Plastic pollution is a social justice issue,” report coauthor and Azul founder and executive director Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš said in a press release. “Current efforts, limited to managing and decreasing plastic pollution, are inadequate to address the whole scope of problems plastic creates, especially the disparate impacts on communities affected by the harmful effects of plastic at every point from production to waste.”
