I went to the community meeting a few days ago. Around 25 people there, listening to two guests around a community bill of rights, for Lane County (Oregon). You know, the people, citizens, having the say on who and what can come into their communities.
‘…A say in what can and cannot be sprayed on their food, land, bodies, water, soil….’
I’ve done this before, and I’ll cut and paste an older old piece below, from Spokane on that town’s community rights.
But first, the angst:
Infanticide, first, in Gaza. Hell on Earth, not because this hasn’t happened before in history, but because we are here now, 2023, with Telegram and instant videos. We are supposedly ruled by the Chosen People of Israel and the Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Garland-Kagan-Dirty-Hellion-Bargain.
Those dirty White House Thugs look like cancerous Homo Bellum. Rotting faces, slag for eyes, like a George Soros or Larry Fink or Larry Summers.
HELL on earth.
Oh, the Monster, the Oppen-Monster-Heimer:
“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945.
For sure, there has been great difficulty in estimating the total casualties in the Japanese cities as a result of the atomic bombing. The extensive destruction of civil installations (hospitals, fire and police department, and government agencies) the state of utter confusion immediately following the explosion, as well as the uncertainty regarding the actual population before the bombing, contribute to the difficulty of making estimates of casualties. The Japanese periodic censuses are not complete. Finally, the great fires that raged in each city totally consumed many bodies.
The number of total casualties has been estimated at various times since the bombings with wide discrepancies.
The Manhattan Engineer District’s best available figures are:
TABLE A: Estimates of Casualties
Hiroshima …………………………. Nagasaki
(Pre-raid pop.): 255,000 ………. 195,000
Dead: 66,000 …………………….. 39,000
Injured: 69,000 ………………. 25,000
Total Casualties: 135,000 ….. 64,000
Hydrogen bombs, or just plain old Greek Fire!
Fire, whether from Jewish Whiskey Pete (white phosphorus) or U$A napalm, it kills kills civilians.
Katsumoto Saotome, 87, came to the door of his home in the outer reaches of Tokyo wearing a herringbone blazer, a black wool scarf tucked neatly into a vest and a black beret that he reckons makes him look like Che Guevara, the guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution. Saotome has practiced radicalism of a much quieter kind, insisting on preserving memories that many may prefer to forget.
Seventy-eight years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome (pronounced SAH-oh-toe-meh) survived the brutally effective American firebombing of Tokyo. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.
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I am sick to my stomach, but I soldier on: because the corporations, their lawyers, their hitmen, their PR spinners, their pimped-out politicians and lawmakers, all the Eichmann’s and Faustian Bargain Basement Mother Fuckers, they kill us with 10,000,000 cuts daily. We are firebombed by their sanctions, rules, fines, tickets, evictions, eminent domain, fees, taxes, interest rates, non-disclosure agreements, contracts, code enforcements, bust, arrests, bonds, bails, foreclosures.
Read closely how death is measured deploying better cancerous living through chemistry (outside of the implosions in Gaza).
Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), one of the most common chronic metabolic diseases, involves a complex interaction among genetic, epigenetic, and environmental risk factors. The incidence and prevalence of T2DM are rapidly increasing globally. In recent years, increasing body of evidences from both human and animal studies have displayed an association between exposure to early unfavorable life factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the prevalence of T2DM in later life. The exogenous EDCs can lead to disadvantageous metabolic consequences because they interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, and metabolism of endogenous hormones. EDCs also have long-term adverse effects on newborns, children, and adolescents by causing increased susceptibility to T2DM in adults. This review summarizes the most recent advances in this field, including diabetes-related EDCs (bisphenol A, phthalates, chlordane compounds, parabens, pesticides, and other diabetes-related EDCs), EDC exposure and gestational diabetes mellitus, prenatal and perinatal EDC exposures and T2DM, adult EDC exposure and T2DM, transgenerational effects of EDCs on T2DM as well as the possible diabetogenic mechanisms.
So in my tiny neck of the woods, where a Danish guy with 260 acres which he just clear-cut, is shooting for helicopter spraying of poison on the land so the weeds go bye-bye and the Scotch Broom, et al go bye-bye. And the timber industry lies, gets tax abatements, and has a propaganda wing here paid for by Oregon taxpayers!
But lets talk about another part of the world: For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.
A massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate, the active compound in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. (source)
It’s global, the instant death and slow death and disease by 10,000,000 cuts, as Gaza burns and the UkroNazi’s burn burn burn.
Chronic fucking disease: Glyphosate, Hard Water and Nephrotoxic Metals: Are They the Culprits Behind the Epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology in Sri Lanka?
Progress has been made in recent years, but much remains to be done. Here are some examples of incremental advances in the fight to end herbicide use in Oregon forestry under the recent Private Forest Accord:
- In early 2022, the EPA banned use of chlorpyrifos on food and feed crops, and starting Jan. 1, 2024, new Oregon Department of Agriculture rules will disallow most uses of the insecticide, including spraying on forestlands.
- In 2020, then-Governor Kate Brown helped catalyze the Private Forest Accord between some environmental groups and the timber industry. Later that year, that negotiation resulted in the Oregon Legislature passing Senate Bill 1602, which increased buffers for streams and improved the system for electronic reporting and notification of neighbors within a mile of areas to be sprayed by helicopters.
But those new rules did not require any reductions in the frequency or amounts of pesticides sprayed. Environmentalists and impacted communities want the practice significantly reduced or banned altogether, and the Oregon Chapter Sierra Club will continue to work for that change. (source)
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More slogging on. Here, before the actual piece on the community meeting I attended here in Waldport, Oregon, my piece a long time ago about community bill of rights movement in Spokane when I had one of a dozen gigs surviving:
The right to community
Envisioning a new Spokane puts ‘business as usual’ on chopping block
[Photo: Local farmer Brian Estes, foreground, stands with Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1 at Estes’ Vinegar Flats garden. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspodent)]
Here’s one credo that scares guys like Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelist Francis Schaeffer and author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.”
“God’s Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house.”
Now replace the word “man” with “corporation” and you have what amounts to what many in the world – not just the U.S. – see as the dictum of the 21st century: Corporations are the head of our house.
Many are fighting back this imbalance of power and justice, including grassroots groups. Via Campesino, the Transition Cities movements, even foodies are fighting the corporate “infection” to preserve rights to safe, non-genetically modified, animal-cruelty free food.
One local impetus to give people more say in how neighborhoods form and evolve is on Spokane’s November ballot. Envision Spokane, which gained 25 percent of the yea votes in 2010, is returning.
Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1, cites several past movements in the U.S. to gain citizen rights – like abolishing slavery and giving full citizenship to people of color. He references a quote from Abigail Adams, urging her husband John in 1776 to treat women as equals in the Declaration of Independence:
“We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
A second quote,
“I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured” came in 1884 when 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton – joined by Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth – spoke at a women’s rally to gain the constitutional right to vote.
Huschke compares U.S. women getting the vote in 1920 after dozens of defeats to the heavy lifting he and his supporters must do to get a community bill of rights approved.
“Many would say that what we have today is a corporate state,” Huschke said. “Living within the corporate state there are no remedies to protecting safety, health, and welfare of communities. Adopting amendments to the Spokane’s home rule charter puts in place remedies to protect and nourish neighborhoods, river and workplaces. These amendments acknowledge our protections and that the power is with the people where it comes to significant impacts to neighborhoods and river.”
The 10 amendments to the 2009 bill of rights were defeated, Huschke said, by corporate bucks to the tune of $400,000 from Spokane Home Builder’s Association, Associated Builders and Contractors and other unlimited pro-growth groups.
Recently, the local GOP’s executive committee voted to oppose the 2011 proposition. That doesn’t faze Kai.
“The rhetoric will get turned up as the powerful, monied interests make claims about property rights being under attack and costs if the Community Bill of Rights is adopted. The same stuff was said in 2009,” he said.
“I’ve talked to people who voted against it in 2009, who said once they took the time to read it they would’ve voted yes. If I have to ask anything of Spokane voters, it’s to cover your ears and read what’s being proposed.”
When you have the Greater Spokane Incorporated throwing weight and money behind an anti-Community Bill of Rights movement, it’s easy to see the greater good.
“Spokane is long overdue in recognizing the value of our neighborhoods, our river, and workplaces,” Kai said. “We have a golden opportunity to show how to build a sustainable community. By honoring and protecting our assets we put ourselves in a position advocating for health and welfare over profit for profit sake, that other communities aren’t even close to considering.”
The history of communities gaining power back from outside agitators, carpetbaggers or corporate conglomerates is tied to public health and safety, centered around bad corporate behavior like factory farms’ waste ponds causing human and animal health issues; coal companies’ slurry lakes leaking millions of gallons of waste into rivers; quarry works that foul water; or energy companies that pollute the air along the Houston to Baton Rouge corridor where asthma and cancers are sky-high, according to CDC studies.
A community movement similar to Envision Spokane recently rose up against the energy lobby to put brakes on exploitation of shale deposits. The process known as hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas fouls the water and has been implicated in earthquakes. Arkansas has temporarily stopped this process.
The Spokane Community Bill of Rights has its roots in a larger, more holistic frame – the Rights of Nature, something that sticks in the craws of GOP party loyalists, Chambers of Commerce and business interests.
Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth was enacted by President Evo Morales January 2011. It addresses that country’s natural resources as “blessings” and grants Earth rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.
Bolivia has established a Ministry of Mother Earth, a sort of global ombudsman whose job is to listen to nature’s complaints voiced by activists and others, including the state.
“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) with rights are humans or companies, how can you reach balance?” says Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “But if you recognize nature has rights, and (if you provide) legal forums to protect and preserve those rights, you can achieve balance.”
Kai understands the power of people bicycling safely in Spokane with engineering and land use changes guided by citizens. He sees the power of community gardens and programs like Riverfront Farm putting disadvantaged youth to work in farming and landscaping experiential learning experiences. He sees corporations destroying community-based tools to fight their shock doctrine of financial wizards, disturbances created by climate change, or volatility of food and energy.
Communities under the current regulatory system are poorly suited to manage under the current political system, Kai insists. It’s clear that even presidential aspirants like Mitt Romney can end up tongue-tied when a citizen at a rally asked about the power and rights of corporations: “Corporations are people, my friends.”
For Envision Spokane’s backers this line of logic is a slap in the face of our own bill of rights and democratic institutions tied to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Kai said this effort is a vital one.
“The assault on public workers from corporate interests has been daunting. There is no reason not to believe that this attack won’t carry into the private sector. In the spring the Spokane City Council passed a resolution supporting collective bargaining for city employees. The Community Bill of Rights would protect that right with binding law for all unionized city workers. There is a power grab happening across the country, and Spokane needs to make sure it protects its workers.”
Photo: Kai Huschke is building a straw bale house in the Vinegar Flats area near the Vinegar Flats community garden area. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspondent)
(The previous column is the opinion of columnist Paul K. Haeder and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Down to EarthNW, The Spokesman-Review or the Cowles Company.)
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That was 2011!! Twelve fucking years ago. Today?
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Community Rights, Agency Capture, Corporations as People?
I’m at the Waldport Central Oregon Coast Fire and Rescue (10/15) with twenty-two other residents listening to Holman and David Tvedt discuss the work of Lane County Community Rights.
It is a room full of gray-haired men and women, anxious to hear from these two gray panthers on their work to codify a bill of rights for Lane County citizens to write laws.
I’ve been in this rodeo before – El Paso, Seattle and Spokane, where I covered the work of Envision Spokane, a bill that would’ve enshrined on voters the right o determine the community’s health, safety and welfare.
I was hosting a radio show focused on sustainability, social justice, and environmental stewardship. I had two regular news columns – in the weekly and a monthly magazine. I was sustainability coordinator for the community college.
It was a lot of work getting people out to participate in events around clean water, clean air, food, transportation and ecosystems.
My biggest goal after codifying guest authors, film festivals, teach-ins, and Earth Day festivals was to get the so-called “younger generation” involved. It was somewhat easy since I taught at Gonzaga and SFCC, and had cohorts at Whitworth and WSU and Eastern Washington University.
Even so, I had to solicit help from local musicians, local restaurants, and merchants for entertainment, food, swill and swag.
Here, today, years later, I am in a room with older folk who are concerned to aerial spraying of herbicides on a clear cut along Beaver Creek. Tvelt has been working on forest issues since 1970. His degree in forestry informs his fight to galvanize common sense into forest management and logging.
For many in the audience they learned about the value of forests– mixed species of trees, shrubs and even weeds – as a way to help with water flows.
Hard logging reduces water flow because organic matter, downed trees and other forest dynamics are eradicated by timber companies. Tvelt recalled taking a chain saw on a four-foot downed log for a clearway on a path near Sweethome whereupon the cut produced “a full-blast flow of water . . . like a water spigot was turned on.” It lasted for two minutes.
Wells and springs are drying up in summers and in many cases year round. Pressure on watersheds can be located directly to the growth of human populations. Additionally, clear cutting and other heavy logging practices reduce the natural flow of things. This is not rocket science, and the memo on this was written decades ago.
The community meeting centered around spraying of chemicals. The News Times has run stories, letters to the editor and editorials debating acreage along Beaver Creek scheduled for helicopter herbicide application.
It’s no secret that our state’s timber industry’s practice of spraying herbicides — all of them dangerous to humans, fish and animals — has been highly controversial for decades. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the pesticides sprayed onto forestland by helicopters is blown off course from its targets (drift).
These toxic sprays — used by the timber industry to kill insects, weeds and vegetation in areas that have been clear cut — drift onto land on or near homes, farms, streams and lakes.
While many of the inert ingredients and specialized mixes are industry secrets, the main pesticides include triclopyr, chlorpyrifos, Diuron and 2,4-D (one of the so-called “Agent Orange” chemicals).
Study after study has show all of these singularly or synergistically are linked to diseases and health issues, including respiratory problems, liver and kidney damage, miscarriages, and cancer.
Regulating how much poison should be allowed in food, air and water is antithetical to Michele Holman’s ethos. She’s lived 47 years in the Coast Range, tossing out the activist script of going to the state capitol to beg for redress on any range of environmental concerns.
“I got tired of the retort, ‘It’s legal . . . well settled in law.’ Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s just.”
Agency capture, lobbying influence, campaign meddling/contributions, and propaganda on a massive scale work in favor of rich corporations, whether it is Boeing and planes or Weyerhaeuser and logging.
A recent push is for a community rights movement to catch like wildfire throughout the state. Protect Lane County Watersheds is spearheading the Rights of Nature law (supported by CELDF, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) to protect drinking water and watersheds throughout the county.
The old adage, ‘you can’t fight city hall,’ has dangerously morphed into: “Corporations are considered people, so you can’t stop them from doing business as usual because they have equal rights . . . and then some.”
I’ve been studying these chemicals for decades. Rosemary Mason from England is an amazing researcher who does on the ground work as well as collates hundreds of scientific field studies on that infamous weed killer used on clear-cut’s – glyphosate. You can read a journal article like this one, “The Effects of Clearcutting and Glyphosate Herbicide Use on Parasitic Wasps in Maine Forests.”
Or, a recent Duke University report, “Roundup Ingredient Connected to Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease.” You can spend years digging through the science that never gets in front of mainstream media’s unwatchful eye.
Citizens involved in Stop the Spray at Beaver Creek are concerned for their health, as well as the health of children, grandchildren and the entire life web of our ecosystem.
Countless studies which are looking at pesticides and herbicides produce chilling findings: “For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure.”
This massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate.
When it’s in your backyard, the alarm goed off. Chilling: November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Here we go again, more reading: “Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life.”
Community Rights Fight-State and Federal Preemption
“One of the first things an elected official does upon taking office is to swear an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately for local communities and the environment, the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states …” is an integral part of that constitution. According to the Cornell School of Law, “Congress has often used the Commerce Clause to justify exercising legislative power over the activities of states and their citizens, leading to significant and ongoing controversy regarding the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Commerce Clause has historically been viewed as both a grant of congressional authority and as a restriction on the regulatory authority of the States.”
Imploring Oregon Governor Kate Brown to say “NO” the aerial spraying or to Jordan Cove’s LNG project is literally asking her to violate her oath of office and assumes she has plenary authority (or the balls) to stand up to federal preemption. She does not.
The Community Doesn’t Have the Legal Authority to Say “No”!
The existing structure of law ensures that people are blocked from advancing their rights, governing their own communities and acting as stewards of the environment, while protecting corporate “rights” and interests over those of communities and nature.
Community Rights work is a paradigm shift. It moves away from unsustainable practices that harm communities by moving towards local self-government.
Today, policy-makers have told communities across the country that they don’t have the right to make critical decisions for themselves. They’re told they cannot say “no” to GMOs or aerial spraying. They’re told they cannot say “yes” to sustainable food or energy systems.
Through the Community Rights Movement, communities are working with CELDF to create a structure of law and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That structure recognizes and protects the inalienable rights of natural and human communities.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent. Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them. It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of mankind”, a concept pioneered in the 1960s, has retained some force.
Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting. The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts as freedom of navigation and trade (commeandi commercandique libertas), terms that have come to mean as much assertions of power as affirmations of international legal relations.
The thrust of his argument was directed against the Portuguese claim of exclusive access to the East Indies, but along the way, statements abound about the nature of the sea itself, including its resources. While land could be possessed and transformed by human labour and private use, the transient, ever-changing sea could not. It is a view echoed in the work of John Locke, who called the ocean “that great and still remaining Common of Mankind”.
With empires and states tumbling over each other in those historical challenges posed by trade and navigation, thoughts turned to a relevant treaty that would govern the seas. While there was a general acceptance by the end of the 18th century that states had sovereignty over their territorial sea to the limit of three miles, interest in codifying the laws on oceans was sufficient for the UN International Law Commission to begin work on the subject in 1949.
It was a project that occupied the minds, time and resources of nation states and their officials for decades, eventually yielding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Brought into existence in 1982, it came into effect in 1995. UNCLOS served to define maritime zones, including such concepts as the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, the continental shelf, the high sea, the international seabed area and archipelagic waters.
What was missing from the document was a deeper focus on the high sea itself, lying beyond the “exclusive economic zones” of states (200 nautical miles from shore) and, by virtue of that, a regulatory framework regarding protection and use. Over the years, environmental concerns including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution became paramount. Then came those areas of exploration, exploitation and plunder: marine genetic resources and deep-sea mining.
The High Seas Treaty, in its agreed form reached by delegates of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity and Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, retains the object of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. The goal is in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) which was adopted at the conclusion of Biodiversity COP15 in December last year. This, it is at least hoped, will partially address what has been laboriously described as a “biodiversity governance gap”, especially as applicable to the high seas. (To date, only 1.2% of the waters in the high seas is the subject of protection.)
The Treaty promises to limit the extent of a number of rapacious activities: fishing, busy shipping lane routes and exploration activities that include that perennially contentious practice of deep-sea mining. As the Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority explained to the BBC, “any future activity in the deep seabed will be subject to strict environmental regulations and oversight to ensure that they are carried out sustainably and responsibly.”
Laura Meller of Greenpeace Nordic glowed with optimism at the outcome. “We praise countries for seeking compromises, putting aside differences and delivering a Treaty that will let us protect the oceans, build our resilience to climate change and safeguard the lives and livelihoods of billions of people.” There were also cheery statements from the UN Secretary General António Guterres about the triumph of multilateralism, and the confident assertion from the Singaporean Conference president Ambassador Rena Lee, that the ship had “reached the shore.”
The text, however, leaves lingering tensions to simmer. The language, by its insistence on the high seas, suggests the principle of “Freedom of the High Seas” having more truck than the “Common Heritage of Humankind”. (The ghost of Grotius lingers.) How the larger powers seek to negotiate this in the context of gains and profits arising out of marine genetic resources, including any mechanism of sharing, will be telling.
The text also lacks a clear definition of fish, fishing and fishing-related activities, very much the outcome of intense lobbying by fishing interests. Given the treaty’s link to other instruments, such as the Agreement on Port State Measures, which defines fish as “all species of living marine resources, whether processed or not”, the risk of excluding living marine resources from the regulatory mechanism is genuine enough.
Then comes the issue of ratification and implementation. Signatures may be penned, and commitments made, but nation states can be famously lethargic in implementing what they promise and stubborn on points of interpretation. Lethargy and disputatiousness will do little to stem the threat to marine species, complex systems of aquatic ecology, and disappearing island states.
The post The Ghost of Hugo Grotius: The UN High Seas Treaty first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Source: Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries
I was calling it many variations on the theme, greenwashing, many many propagandistic things, like green-scamming, green-sheening, and eco-porn. Here, a 1992 article, man, so long long ago, almost forgotten :
Eco-pornography is the advertising of a product as “environmentally friendly,” when in fact, some unmentioned aspect of the product (or its production and distribution) has notably deleterious effects on the environment. Ecological impact is such a difficult thing to define in terms of the processes of production (as further discussed below), one is hesitant to single out specific corporations as ecopomographers, lest they be unfairly vilified, but it might be informative to mention some egregious examples of false environmental advertising.
According to Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age Weekly, the most offensive environmental advertisement “is a General Motors corporate ad in which [the company is] congratulating America for 20 years of environmental progress. After spending three decades doing everything in [its] power to weaken, inhibit, and delay environmental legislation…,” this ad is arguably misleading. General Motors is not the only auto manufacturer guilty of greenwash. Adweek chose a Toyota commercial in which a young woman lauds recycling and her Toyota in the same breath, as one of the worst advertisements of 1990. Said Adweek, “The only Earth-minded tie-in…is the woman’s declaration that, until she can save the world, she’ll buy a Tercel and save money.” (source)
This all seems pretty mild, some 32 years later. It is the driving concept of an Al Gore in his 10,000 square foot mansion flying around the world in private jets, going to Davos and the World Economic Forum and COP#Infinity, lecturing us, we the people, on why Styrofoam and regular lightbulbs are bad bad bad. Well, darn, he has several mansions, one in Tennessee and then one in California: Al Gore’s California home consumes more electricity in 1 year than the average US family uses in 21 years.
Now that’s some eco-porn, man. It’s THAT finger, man, you all know it: from cops to teachers, to city council persons to DMV workers, that FINGER.
Man, Liz Warren, another pornographer —
Elizabeth Warren believes that strengthening the “effectiveness” of the U.S. military is consistent with the Green New Deal. Her bill doesn’t demand that the U.S. military be reduced in size or scale. Nor does it mention that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter and user of oil and fossil fuels. Instead of turning the Green New Deal into concrete policy, Warren has placed her attention on renovating the one thousand U.S. military bases that exist domestically and abroad. The so-called “policy wonk” of the 2020 elections appears to be more concerned with creating “green” bombs than a “green economy.”
The U.S. drops a bomb on another nation every twelve minutes . It is no wonder that U.S. military, which serves as the armed body of the state responsible for protecting the interests of Wall Street, fossil fuel corporations, military contractors, and monopolies of all kinds, is treated as a trophy by all sections of the U.S. political class. The U.S. military embodies American exceptionalism claiming to spread democracy and freedom to lands near and far. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day are designed to remind Americans of all races and classes that the U.S. is exceptional because of its large military footprint. Instead of seeing this footprint as bombs, sanctions, or deadly raids, Democrat and Republican politicians alike believe that the U.S. military permanently signifies American greatness. (source)
Green bombs, man, and cleaner jet fuel for bombers. That’s the green deal, the eco-porn at its pinnacle? Though we have more, as in the figure of the actual “Greens” of Germany:
A motion seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine and another opposing the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev were overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. Green Member of the European Parliament, Sergey Lagodinsky, lambasted the argument of one delegate who warned that Europe would be wiped out after the first nuclear bomb dropped, saying that Ukrainians “cannot defend themselves with sunflowers.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vehemently advocated the delivery of more weapons and heavy battle tanks to Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, not despite the fact that we are a party of peace and human rights, but because we are a party of peace and human rights,” she stated to justify her advocacy of war.
Party leader Ricarda Lang supported her, saying, “I am convinced we have to deliver more weapons, we have to react faster. The time for hesitation is over.”
Well well, recall how Germany “got rid of” coal and smelting and all of that fun carbon positive polluting stuff. It’s called offshoring your carbon footprint. All those Southern Hemisphere nations (and Russia) do all the cooking, blasting, mining, milling, and welding of Germany’s fancy bridges and highrises. This is Anna:
Now that is real eco-pornography. Not to the max, but really, this is what the greening of the world means — flights to Ukraine, trillions dumped into weapons, trillions put into satellites, trillions here and trillions there, now that is green pimping to the max. You know, keeping the bankers safe with those diesel and gasoline powered metal and titanium battle tanks, missile launchers, helicopters, jets.
Now here is some real violent eco-porn. Just the headline is triggering. A warning: “Green New Army? NATO Wants Eco-Friendly Tanks — NATO’s tanks may be getting solar panels.” (sources sources)
We get the triple pornography, right, as the USA, the US military, occupies one-third of Syria and steals the oil (uses Syrian soil as an Israeli proving grounds bombing area). Now that is icing on the pornography cake. “The United States forces present in Syrian territory without the consent of the government or the approval of the United Nations, today looted a new batch of oil and transferred it to Iraq.” (source)
Man, I am feeling the “green” in that raping of a country’s resources. And those hootches above, with solar panels? Nah, not for Haiti, or Syria or Turkey:
Sure, this rant was precipitated by an article from a real “legit” source, Yale 360 Environment. Title: “As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In.” The entire green pornography has captured the EU, Canada, USA, other outfits of empire until we have the lunacy of solar panels galore, but with the unintended (nah, very intended, very predictable) consequences of unfettered capitalism pushing the dirty panels (check out the lifecycle and embedded energy and external costs of that solar panel — again, stuff has to be mined, moved, milled, smelted, cooked, chemicalize, and shipped AND then, darn, into the landfills they go after 25 years of use) into the entire eco-pornography game.
Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.
This process offers a glimpse of what could happen to an expected surge of retired solar panels that will stream from an industry that represents the fastest-growing source of energy in the U.S. Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
You see the trifecta here of green porn? Selling panels as a panacea, of course, that means SELLING (profitting from the so-callled “helping reduce/mitigate/stave off the planet’s climate heating”) the goods, mining the minerals and then, yep, they have an end life cycle, and instead of mandating recycling them and making better and longer (durable) solar panels, it’s “let the market pimp, prostitute, steal, hoard, tax, fine, certify.” ALL for profit. What could go wrong, no, profitting from green washing?
Again, the word “value” comes into play with eco-pornography: By 2050, the value of raw materials recoverable from solar panels could exceed $15 billion.
It gets wonky, this LCA just for ONE type of photo-voltaic panel: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of perovskite PV cells projected from lab to fab” Ah, note that this is only to the fabrication level. Not all the embedded energy and expelled energy to mine, smelt, move, chemicalize, produce, move, install, AND then uninstall and then either throw away or “recycle.” No cradle to cradle shit here.
Like I said, wonky: cradle to gate is yet more of this eco-pornography terminology.
Perovskite photovoltaic cells (PVs) have attracted significant worldwide attention in the past few years. Although the stability of the power conversion is a concern, there is great potential for perovskites to enter the global PV market. To determine the future potential of perovskites, we performed a cradle-to-gate environmental life cycle (LCA) for two different perovskite device structures suitable for low cost manufacturing. Rather than examining current laboratory deposition processes like dipping and spinning, we considered spray and co-evaporation methods that are more amenable to manufacturing. A structure with an inorganic hole transport layer (HTL) was developed for both solution and vacuum based processes, and an HTL-free structure with printed with back contact was modeled for solution based deposition. The environmental impact of conventional Si PV technology was used as a reference point. The environmental impacts from manufacturing of perovskite solar cells were lower than that of mono-Si.
However, environmental impacts from unit electricity generated were higher than all commercial PV technology mainly because of the shorter lifetime of perovskite solar cell. The HTL-free perovskite generally had the lowest environmental impacts among the three structures studied. Solution based methods used in perovskite deposition were observed to decrease the overall electricity consumption. Organic materials used for preparing the precursors for perovskite deposition were found to cause a high marine eutrophication impact. Surprisingly, the toxicity impacts of the lead used in the formation of the absorber layer were found to be negligible. Energy payback times were estimated as 1.0–1.5 years.
So for the average greenie, well, this stuff is WAY beyond their “green washing wet behind the ears” knowledge base: “Deposition Process – The PLD process involves the use of high-power laser energy focused on a target to evaporate its surface in vacuum or different low-pressure ambient gas. From: Laser Surface Modification of Biomaterials, (2016)
The pornography is also in the rhetoric, the motivations of technologists, technocrats, scientists, the lot of them working on these highly technical projects. It is driven by the bizarrely human quest to see if we can do it mentality. That quest is of course driven by profit motives. Not so much about saving the world.
Dystopia is the end product of having billionaires and collective lobbies of Eichmann’s and Mengele’s and Edward Bernay’s and Tom Friedman’s rule the world, as Top Dog Green Pimps but also Top Green Bordella Owners.
Look how superficial this marketing crap is — “raw materials.” What’s the energy, cultural, economic, and societal outlay for that?
The most commonly used photovoltaics consist of monocrystalline or multicrystalline silicon. The main negative environmental impact of these panels comes from the production phase and include:
- The energy consumed during production of the panels and the emissions released during production
- Water consumption
- The release of some hazardous byproducts [18].
The environmentally relevant substances released during the production phase of silicon solar panels are fluorine, chlorine, nitrate, isopropanol, SO2, CO2 and respirable silica particles and solvents.
However, over the course of their lifetime, crystalline solar panels generate 9-17 times the energy used to produce them, depending on their placement and efficiency. Also, depending on the type of PV technology, the clean energy pay back takes place in one to four years. Once in place, solar systems using photovoltaics are 100% emissions free. The production of 1,000 kWh of solar electricity reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. (follow the money, the financing, the banking, the investing, the scamming of government-taxpayer funds)
Talk about some slick green porn? So all that renewable energy just comes from heaven. Those dams, those solar panels, those wind turbines, all the wires, plastics, rubbers, strategic metals, transportation, MINING. Whew!
You want to get wonky? I’ve written about this before — the single-use shopping bag legislation/laws. The reality is that paper bags are bad bad bad. And, in reality, the single use bags, if used properly, go into a small gabage pail in the house, and many are used as bags for produce int the fridge and for poop/cat liter. Triple reunse, as opposed to us buying heavier small bags for pails and poop. Again, unintended consequences. Countless millions of lifetime hours spent just one aspect of greening the economy:
Summary and recommendations The authors are satisfied that they have achieved their goal to provide a comparative assertion among the six types of grocery carrier bags included in the report based on their respective potential environmental impacts. The carrier bags selected were those in most common use in the United States and the underlying data were, as far as is possible, based on United States data.
Our results are based on a study of twelve environmental impact categories. Our results show that reusable LDPE and NWPP bags will have lower average impacts on the environment compared to PRBs if the reusable bags are reused for a sufficient number of grocery shopping trips. However, according to a recent national survey, a majority of consumers do not reuse their reusable bags for this sufficient number of trips, especially for LDPE bags. Moreover, 40% of people forget to bring their reusable bags with them to the store and half the people who prefer NWPP bags used PRBs at their most recent shopping trip. In addition, only 15% of people follow the recommended cleaning procedures to ensure safe use of reusable bags.
Our results also show that Paper bags, even with 100% recycle content, have significantly higher average impacts on the environment than either of the reusable bags or PRBs. Many of the regulations now in place or being considered in the United States encourage consumers to use reusable bags through banning PRBs and imposing a fee on the use of Paper bags. (Californians Against Waste, 2013) (Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2013) A number of grocery chains in non-legislated areas provide Paper bags and sell various reusable bags. Our results in this study show that these regulations and policies may result in negative impact on the environment rather than positive.
Even though Paper bags come from a renewable resource and are easily recycled, it is likely that they are not the best environmental choice. Reusable bags should only be preferred if consumers are educated to use them safely and consistently, and reuse them enough times to lower their relative environmental impacts compared to PRB alternatives.
Our recommendation, based on our work in this study, is that consumers should be given a choice between reusable bags and PRBs and that any of these should be preferred over Paper bags. Most important is that much more attention should be focused on educating consumers to make an informed choice of which bags to use by providing them facts—facts about reusable bag use, facts about proper recycling or disposal of PRBs, facts about the potential environmental impacts of their choices—based on sound scientific evidence. (check it out — 194 pages just for the PRB — plastic retail bag)
I was a sustainability director for a community college in Spokane, the first in the town with several colleges as anchors there. I did a lot of fairs, talks, teach-ins; I had famous authors come into town to speak, to be on my radio show, and I featured many in my articles for the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine and a blog with the daily newspaper.
Yeah, I was skeptical of all the rah-rah, and I was lambasted for putting down COPs and Gore and Obama and the so-called new deal for climate-nature-ecosystems. I even was trained in sustainability education and monitoring. American Planning Association:
When I was in Vancouver, for the Summer Institute for Sustainable education, I was the ONLY person questioning the motives of big outfits like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and others tied to this “sustainability” initiative. I like being in that position, questioning, pushing, but really, there can be sort of an emptiness in being around these people at any university, especially at the University of British Columbia. I talked to mayors, planners, business leaders, and others who were hyper glassy eyed about sustainability — Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing. They listened, and some of the stuff I brought up to them was like speaking Greek. You know, caring for communities and their cultures FIRST, as opposed to making green on green!
Green washing, green pornography, green sheening, and now, green hushing: A trend known as “green hushing” is growing as companies are increasingly choosing not to publicize details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing, a new study showed. This of course is a double whammy:
“If green hushing becomes a trend, it will make inspiring some of the climate laggards even harder,” she said. “As long as companies are transparent about their progress, and communicate that in a transparent way, then they can’t go wrong.”
The reality is that this is triple green washing, almost coming back as the dirtiest game in town — killing people: “Why the New Deal for Nature is a disaster for people and planet.”
The conservation industry says 2020 is its “super year.” It wants to set aside thirty percent of the globe for wildlife, and divert billions of dollars away from reducing climate change and into “natural climate solutions.” This would be a disaster for people and planet. Conservation was founded in the racist ideology of 1860s USA but it committed thirty years ago to becoming people-friendly. It hasn’t happened. There will be more promises now, if only to placate critics and funders like the U.S. and German governments, and the European Commission, which are paying for conservation’s land theft, murder and torture. More promises will be meaningless. No more public money should go for “Protected Areas” until the conservation bodies recognize their crimes, get rid of those responsible, and hand stolen lands back, with compensation. Conservation NGOs must also stop cozying up to mining, logging, oil, and plantation companies.
And it only gets worse, much worse. Reading articles and watching videos from Alison’s Wrench in the Gears site can take us all to a more nano-level of the green washing/pornography/gestapo to the max, as in profits on data, on wearables, on digital dungeons. Here’s a recent one, but go backwards and catch up on that entire investing and AI-VR-AR scheme: “God’s Eye View Part 6 – Every Man Thus Lives By Exchanging“
You will get very few people going into these weeds:
Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I’m picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they’re in or comprehending what the stakes are. (McDowell)
More weeds? Silicon Icarus:
Here, a typical piece from Silicon Icarus: “Programmable Freedom – Smart Contracts, Blockchain and the Holy Grail of Central Banking” Let’s call this digital green washing:
The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible. The move towards robust CBDC networks by central banks all over the world, provides even more momentum to this future. (source)
Yikes, I am going deeper and deeper off-topic, except it really isn’t off topic. It’s all about “who makes the money, who controls the food, who controls the data, who controls the ants/prols/Us?”
Elites, man, rubbing elbows with technocrats and coders and geniuses: From Wrench in the Gears:
Adam Smith opens his “Wealth of Nations” with a story of the efficiencies created in a pin factory where workers were assigned discrete tasks along the production line, the division of labor expanded production netting significant profits for the factory owner. Later, in chapter four, Smith writes, “Every man thus lives by exchanging,” a quote inscribed on one side of a luxurious bronze gas lamp located in the atrium just outside the Debate Room at Old Parkland in Dallas, the city’s most elite corporate address.
Building off energy futures trading, the Dallas old guard is making its move to set up markets in human capital management, led by the Commit! Partnership with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan standing in the shadows. That lamp stands opposite an elaborately carved portico topped by a large gilded owl. On either side are four paintings. The upper tier shows Watson and Crick and their DNA model on the one side and on the other side Steve Jobs with an orange Apple desktop showing the Pixar movie “Up.” Below is FDR and Eisenhower on one side and Churchill and Truman on the other. What this says to me is that we’re being pulled into a new “war,” a war on consciousness and human agency even as we are being told mythic stories about scientific progress.
The last couple of generations has amply demonstrated that meetings of corporate heads, NGOs, politicians, and celebrities are not going to solve the crises of climate and biodiversity. Those attending are amongst the major contributors to the problems, and least willing to accept any change which might threaten their position. They argue over statements that no one actually applies, or even intends to, and which are replete with clauses ensuring “business as usual.” The meetings and declarations attract an enormous media circus, but are akin to the emperor’s workshop, with hundreds of tailors busily cutting suits of such rarefied material that they don’t cover his nakedness. (source)
Cory Morningstar, investigative journalist and environmental activist explains how the Green New Deal for Nature was created by the UN in 2009 to monetise nature and create economic growth, Cory points us to build local resistance, to build strong alliances and to protect our lands, waters and communities with No Deal for Nature. The post Green Death: Love in a Time of Green Pornography first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was a good live crowd — over a hundred folk, November 30, at Hatfield’s new classroom building, Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building Auditorium. And another 100 in “attendance” on the Zoom Doom.
I’m a member of the Cetacean Society International, and the American Cetacean Society, and unfortunately for the Oregon group, their meetings and live speakers have retreated to the digital dungeons, never having face-to-face meetings anymore in Newport. That is the sham and the shame of this new abnormal. Even this OSU event had the live component, with a bistro in this overpriced new building, and beer and wine, also available. Fancy auditorium, no?
I did a story on this building in its construction stage, here:
I covered a conference, too, again, three years ago, when the local rag let me write a long form column on a regular, paid basis: “Should We Trust Science? (Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures”)
I have written about my love of ecosystems, marine systems, and my dive bum days, and, of course, I have also written stories on ecosystems and marine biology, etc. There are many stories still to be told, but last night’s talk by Leigh Torres, Associate Professor, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Oregon Sea Grant, was a recap of all the work she and her graduate (PhD and MS) students have been doing on gray whales, including the distinct Pacific Coast Feeding Group, numbering around 250.
There were other scientists there, and there were many young students from the OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center. Older retired folk were there, and I had a sense that most people there were somehow associated with the university, with marine sciences, directly or through a relative engaged in that avocation.
As I’ve said before, there are many women going into the sciences, and you can see Leigh below with her skiff and her female graduate students working on drone surveillance and other forms of research to get more data on the gray whales on our coast.
A talk like this is all about loving those cetaceans, and our PCFG draws people from around the country to our coast for whale watching. May through October, they are here feeding. Depoe Bay is a great spot to watch.
Below images and videos, and at the end, is the actual Power Point Presentation from the November 30 presentation.
These scientists want to know why the Pacific Group is sticking around our coast and not heading to the Arctic with the majority of gray whales. The whales all calf in the waters of Baja. Then, the trip north. They number for all groups around 20,000.
Basic ecology and animal-mammal biology mean looking at how they “are” in their environment, what their hormones show, and what is happening to their prey. The fact this Pacific Feeding Group is in highly human-influenced/disturbed waters is also a point of research. Then, of course, we have their prey as well as in noise and as in boats coming up to them, and as in the crab pots that cause entanglements.
And, those strikes, those hulls and propellers hitting whales:
Diet for these whales?
As part of the research they look at the energy of whichever species the gray whale eats, as seen above. And, since 70 percent of the prey is mysid shrimp, the scientists want to know what those animals have in their bodies.
We are THE plastic species, as is the entire ocean. The gray whales have small fiber plastic — microplastics — and then beads in their feces. They are eating prey that has plastic in their bodies, and they also scoop up water and dirt that also have plastic in it.
In pregnant and lactating females, the amount of this zooplankton they have to consume is 1.5 to 2 tons of prey a day. The bio-accumulative effect of the plastics is huge under those tonnage numbers.
The underwater Go Pro Cameras give some cool images of gray whales in action. The poop or fecal samples give the scientists the cortisol levels — stress hormone — in the animals. There are unusual mortality events, one big one happening in 2014 in Mexico. Many of those animals were emaciated. Many animals die, and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The estimated 14.3 million to 23 million microparticles of plastic per ton of shrimp they eat HAS to have an effect on total physiology of the animals.
Then we have the entire web of life — sea stars, kelp, urchins, the zooplankton, all of that.
We have urchins going up in population, as the health of kelp, zooplankton, and gray whales feeding zones is declining. Sea stars eat urchins, as do sea otters. We have no marine otters here on the coast of Oregon, and the sea star wasting disease has decimated that species, allowing for more urchins, which eat young kelp. Kelp beds are rookeries, and the zooplankton/meroplankton need that web of life.
The grays need that zooplankton to survive.
The end goal is to get this PCFG categorized as a distinct subspecies, to have them protected.
Again, science in a time of climate disruption, pollution, over-harvesting, and disturbances in food webs is both interesting and reliant upon year after year of more and more data, more and more bearing witness to declines in species. As the scientists get smarter with smarter tools, the general population and politicians at large get dumb and dumber.
Here’s a fact: One of the most dynamic and depressing jobs in the world is being a sea turtle expert. I remember him at the Bioneers events I was a part of, Wallace J. Nichols. Here, quotes:
Ocean plankton provides more than half of our planet’s oxygen.
Education should be based on simple awareness: Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water.
Since the sun is hot, it gives off energy in the form of shortwave radiation at mainly ultraviolet and visible wavelengths. Earth is much cooler, so it emits heat as infrared radiation, which has longer wavelengths.
Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have molecular structures that enable them to absorb infrared radiation. The bonds between atoms in a molecule can vibrate in particular ways, like the pitch of a piano string. When the energy of a photon corresponds to the frequency of the molecule, it is absorbed and its energy transfers to the molecule.
But back to whales! We have a planet that is under huge stress. The lifestyles of the rich and famous and disgustingly insane billionaires and millionaires, and, of course, the upper part of the collective west, they are the killers. WE throw away giga tons of food, products, things each year. WE do not build for durable and long-lasting effect anymore. Throw it all away, and out with the semi-used, in with the new style. Planned and perceived obsolescence. What is the embedded and life cycle of everything? We are wasteful and dirty.
It’s cheaper to toss the helicopter overboard than to bring it home. Agriculture is at war with nature, with ecosystems, with all the real natural services mother earth gives.
But the yammering and yammering about how greenhouse gasses do nothing to warm the planet, to acidify the oceans, or that pollution doesn’t cause acid rain, all of that, plus how many species of meat for humans are destroyed because of Avian flu or salmonella or lysteria or, well, you get the picture, none of it is put together to look at what capitalism is, really. Barbarism, savagery.
Oh, the isle of rabid men: The Whole Foods decision comes after the Marine Stewardship Council and Seafood Watch recently pulled their lobster endorsements over concerns about risks to rare North Atlantic right whales from fishing gear. Entanglement in gear is one of the biggest threats to the whales, they said.
Yep, those democratic governors, and jobs, and, a way of life:
“Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King, Representatives Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, and Governor Janet Mills today released the following statement after the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced plans to temporarily suspend their certification of Maine’s lobster fishery. In their decision, MSC acknowledges that while the Maine fishery meets standards for sustainability and environmental impact and is unlikely to cause harm to right whales, it is unable to certify any fishery that is not in compliance with federal regulations – a standard MSC believes the fishery does not meet due to the ongoing litigation in CBD v. Ross.”
Today’s decision by the Marine Stewardship Council to temporarily suspend certification of Maine’s lobster fishery is the result of a years-long campaign from misguided environmentalist groups who seem to be hellbent on putting a proud, sustainable industry out of business without regard to the consequences of their actions. While the Maine industry met the highest standards for environmental sustainability and impact, the current pending CBD v. Ross court case led by the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane Society of the United States made certification impossible. This litigation is based more on activism than evidence and is putting livelihoods in jeopardy.
So, designating the PCFG as a distinct and need-to-be-watched/protected species will then, hit not just the crabbers, but our Makah:
Makah Whaling – A Gift from the Sea
Whaling and whales are central to Makah culture. The event of a whale hunt requires rituals and ceremonies which are deeply spiritual. Makah whaling the subject and inspiration of Tribal songs, dances, designs, and basketry. For the Makah Tribe, whale hunting provides a purpose and a discipline which benefits their entire community. It is so important to the Makah, that in 1855 when the Makah ceded thousands of acres of land to the government of the United States, they explicitly reserved their right to whale within the Treaty of Neah Bay.
Makah whaling tradition provides oil, meat, bone, sinew and gut for storage containers: useful products, though gained at a high cost in time and goods.
The Makah Whale Hunt
To get ready for the hunt, whalers went off by themselves to pray, fast and bathe ceremonially. Each man had his own place, followed his own ritual, and sought his own power. Weeks or months went into this special preparation beginning in winter and whalers devoted their whole lives to spiritual readiness.
Men waited for favorable weather and ocean conditions and then paddled out, eight in a canoe. They timed their departure so that they would arrive on the whaling grounds at daybreak.
Paddling silently, whalers studied the breathing pattern of their quarry. They knew from experience what to expect. As the whale finished spouting and returned underwater, the leader of the hunt directed the crew to where it would next surface. There the men waited.
We are in weird and broken times. War, war makers, war manufacturers, billionaires in Monaco with Lamborghini’s with Ukraine licensce plates. Sunny place the size of Central Park but with shady deals. Billions disappeared for ZioAzovNaziLensky. Billions, man, and the money is being made vis-a-vis crypto currency; the scams, all of the money laundering, and we sit and watch the world burn.
Jobs of whalers, jobs of tobacco farmers, jobs of gun-bullet-missile makers, jobs of all those alphabet agencies, jobs of the hedge funders, jobs jobs jobs on the chopping block . . . and what about that way of life jeopardized — the survival of the dirties, meanest, most monster-like species. One giant Faustian Bargain on a planet that, well, you climate change deniers, you techno fascists, you gurus of WEF and great reset, disbelieve then that the planet is in bad shape.
And, the auditorium was filled with middle and upper middle class folk, probably more PhD’s in one room ever along the Oregon coast, and they had the fancy salads, triple Americanos, hoppy drafts and local wines.
For a talk, man, and Leigh is good, but to be truthful, the talk was high school level, really. And, she’s given the same talk three years ago, live, in the Newport library, for the local American Cetacean Society, before those people went underground, in the Zoom Doom Rooms, never to be seen again at a live event.
These are strange times. Whale watching for a feel-good touristy cause, but whale watching boats are part of the problem. There are calls to curb the watcher boats in Puget Sound. Here, a great interactive series:
Man-Woman, versus beasts. All that hi-tech equipment, all the plastics in the scientists’ tool kit, all the gasoline and diesel and electricity expended to research. Yes, these people have their hearts in the right place, but scientists are still data freaks, and they do not have hard spines when the world needs steeled spines in the mix. All that state-funded, taxpayer-paid-for bricks and mortar and all the money spent to create these institutions of higher learning, yet, these smart people are not on the front lines, and god forbid we talk about CAPITALISM, because, colleges, all the grants, all the bells and whistles, it’s still about CAPITALISM.
But the Makah?
The 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay could not be clearer: The U.S. government agreed the Makah Tribe, natives of the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, had “the right of taking fish and of whaling.”
Yet across nearly a century, the tribe has organized just one whale hunt, a much-protested outing in May 1999. Starting in the 1920s, the Makah stood down from whaling because of global over-harvest of whale populations. With the once-endangered Eastern North Pacific gray whale population now flourishing, the tribe should be allowed to resume the traditional, treaty-guaranteed hunts around which generations of Makah built a culture.
The traditions of the tribe’s canoe-based whale hunts are held sacred and passed down within families. Yet regular hunts have been stymied for 20 years by protests, bureaucracy and legal objections.
Species survival is no longer a reason to stop the Makah from hunting whales. Researchers estimate there are almost 27,000 Eastern North Pacific gray whales today, though the Western North Pacific population remains endangered. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked the status of these pods of whales for years and considers the current Eastern numbers approximately the maximum the habitat can sustain. (source)
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“When you have a power that is designed to be unaccountable and has been unaccountable for so damn long, the reforms that stick to it just make it stronger and more efficient as they cover it in a veneer of legitimacy,” says author Brendan McQuade. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with abolitionist criminology professor and activist Brendan McQuade about how securitization has shaped popular ideas about what it means to be free, and how we can build something better.
Music by Son Monarcas and Amaranth Cove
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot of this show about building the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. Well, today, we are really going to nerd out. Because in addition to talking about the abolition of prisons, we are going to talk about the abolition of security. Some of our listeners are probably nodding, and some are probably wondering what I’m smoking, but yes, we are going to talk about the anti-security critique, Karl Marx, mutual aid and more. But I think we’re ready for this, because as my friend Ruth Wilson Gilmore recently said, “Activists throughout the history of struggle have been nerds.” My guest Brendan McQuade and I definitely fall within that proud tradition, so here we go.
As regular listeners know, I am a prison-industrial complex abolitionist, so for me, winning means building a world where there would be no perceived need for the prison system. People’s needs would be met, from health care to food, housing, education and conflict resolution. When harms occurred, we would have developed responses that are not rooted in punishment. And of course, the monstrosity that is the prison system would no longer exist. But the carceral state is bigger than the prison system. So in addition to cages, what would we have to eliminate in order to end the system of control that punitively monitors people’s lives and manages their movements? Surveillance and control, as extensions of state power, are ever-growing in our health care system, schools, workplaces, in the family regulation system (often referred to as the “child welfare system”), and other areas of our lives as well. These manifestations of policing are tentacles of the prison industrial complex tightening to maintain order in an unstable world, devoid of safety nets. Securitization, as exercised by modern states, creates systems of exclusion, containment and disposal. These efforts supposedly reduce insecurity – at least for protected member groups, like U.S. citizens. But whose interests and well-being are really being protected by measures defined as “security”?
I know many of us have been conditioned to think of “security” as a good thing. When I organize marches and actions, we use the word “security” to describe our collective safety planning efforts, because we have come to understand security as the creation of safety, organized in response to potential threats. But what about when the word “security” is used to describe the maintenance of conditions that ensure suffering? And what if the maintenance of that kind of “security” is destroying the world?
My friend Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine and the author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Surveillance. Brendan was the first person to introduce me to the concept of anti-security and its relationship to abolition, and I asked him if he could try to break that idea down for our audience a bit.
Brendan McQuade: Anti-security is a collective project of critique. We’re a small group, mostly of academics in the U.K., Canada, U.S., and Turkey. And we’re trying to understand and write about security without becoming part of security. So when we talk about security, we usually talk about it as if it’s an unambiguous good. Who doesn’t want to be secure? How could anyone possibly have a problem with the idea of security? But the problem isn’t so much what security promises, namely safety, but how it packages that promise. “Security” communicates an entire world view. In liberal theory, which forms most of the apparent common sense in contemporary politics, liberty, security and property are linked concepts. Everything revolves around the idea of the self-contained and property owning individual, which is often simply asserted as human nature.
So think of foundational works of Western political thought by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke or Adam Smith. All of them start with the premise that humans are individual. We are born alone, we die alone. And in this conception, we can only be free if we’re liberated from the demands of others. We can only be free if we’re separate from them. We can only meaningfully be individuals if we own property. And we can only maintain our property if we’re secure against the threats of others. So when we talk about security, we accept the premise that we are alone in a cruel world and already and always at war with each other. Individuals and households, peoples and nations are always at odds. That’s just what it is to be human.
Of course, that’s a lie, a fabrication. As Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist and naturalist argued over 100 years ago, mutual aid is a factor in human evolution. We’re social creatures and as such, we’re collaborative, we’re not alone. In fact, if you consider the grand sweep of human history, the idea of an individual that owns property is the exception. The rule is communal living on commonly held land. So let’s think about those three classic European thinkers I mentioned a minute ago, Hobbes, Locke and Smith. What they were describing was not human nature, but the nature of humans in a particular moment of history. They were describing an emergent order. They were describing capitalism.
So capitalism begins with a separation of people from the land and people from each other. The bourgeoisie needs free and right-less proletariat to work for a wage, not peasant communities connected to the land and with customary rights to subsist upon it. Capitalism also individualizes skills and knowledge, and turns them both into property. Those peasant communities shared, reproduced and passed on knowledge about their environment and the skills needed to live within it. Capitalism not only takes control over the organization of work, it revolutionizes it. It makes it as efficient and profitable as possible and makes people as powerless and interchangeable as possible.
So to put it crudely, there’s a progressive de-skilling. The craft of peasants and artisans is broken up into the simplest tasks, technology replaces humans in the name of efficiency, and different forms of work are transformed from communal practices into alienated drudgery that workers have little to no control over. As this process unfolds, the basic needs of the population are increasingly separated from their capacity to provide for them. So in previous modes of organizing human life, basic needs were usually met by the people themselves in some kind of communally organized subsistence economy.
Under capitalism, however, all the accoutrements of life from the basic necessities of survival to the most silly and vulgar consumer thing are provisioned to the population through the market, through commodity exchange or by the state through social policy. What this means is that capitalism is an order of relentless change. Capitalism is a generalized order of insecurity that requires a politics of security. So here we return to that connection between a particular conception of liberty, understood as individual freedom from others, the right to own property, and the need for security.
This is why Marx wrote in 1843 that security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society. The concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property. So this line comes from a piece called “On the Jewish Question” where Marx was responding to claims being made in Germany that Jews had to renounce their Jewishness, become German and fight with Germans in order to gain political rights. Marx’s response to this was that the freedom won by gaining recognition from the state is an unreal universality. Jews can’t simply renounce their Jewishness. We can’t volunteer away history. These differences will persist and will be used to discriminate against each other.
So this argument should be very familiar to people on the left. Okay, Black people have the right to vote in the U.S., but that didn’t end racism because racism persists in the accumulated power differences between Black people and white people. The right to vote and anti-discrimination laws don’t erase the racial wealth gap. The right to vote on paper is an unreal universality. It exists as a formal right but it doesn’t mean that Black and white people are really substantively equal in their life chances and choices.
So the point about security as the supreme concept of bourgeoisie society takes this argument one step further. It’s not just that legal recognition by the state, political emancipation from masters is not freedom. This recognition actually deepens capital’s control over our lives. So again, the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, his property. Freedom then is the freedom to compete in the market, to accumulate property, and importantly, to call on the state and its violence to keep that property secure.
So that’s the brief intellectual history of security as it’s been defined since what we refer to as the enlightenment. It’s important because when we hear security invoked today, we’re not hearing what we think we’re hearing. The state will not protect you because your life has inherent value. The state will protect you if you can control enough property to really count.
KH: In our conversations, Brendan introduced me to a document called Anti-Security: A Declaration. It was written in 2010 by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. The document begins with the words:
The purpose of this project, put simply, is to show that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion. Less simply, that security is a dangerous illusion. Why ‘dangerous’? Because it has come to act as a blockage on politics: The more we succumb to the discourse of security, the less we can say about exploitation and alienation; the more we talk about security, the less we talk about the material foundations of emancipation; the more we come to share in the fetish of security, the more we become alienated from one another and the more we become complicit in the exercise of police power.
As someone who has spent long hours studying the trappings of security in the United States, from the Shotspotter microphones in my city to the high-tech hunting grounds of the southern border, those words resonate deeply with me. The idea that security is a fetish that we participate in may be unsettling, but to me, it feels undeniable. Everyday, people in the U.S. accept the conditions that generate violence as inevitable, while fixating on responses to violence that serve next to no purpose. Our government has de-legitimized investments in the common good, while pouring seemingly infinite amounts of money into the military and police without question. In a society that has slashed its social safety nets, with no plan of reconstructing them, we are told more surveillance and control will stabilize our situation. When those interventions fail to generate safety, we are told deeper investments in surveillance and control are needed. Consequently, many people, even those negatively impacted by this cycle, begin to think in these terms, demanding more police surveillance. The creation of a different social context, in which our own insecurity is not maintained by the state, by way of the maintenance of inequality, is almost unimaginable to most people. So they cry out for surveillance, control and violence to repair their situation. It’s a failing approach, and we all bear witness to that, but in most people’s minds, there is no alternative.
As Neocleous and Rigakos wrote:
Security colonizes and de-radicalizes discourse: hunger to food security; imperialism to energy security; globalization to supply chain security; welfare to social security; personal safety to private security. Security makes bourgeois all that is inherently communal. It alienates us from solutions that are naturally social and forces us to speak the language of state rationality, corporate interest and individual egoism. Instead of sharing, we hoard. Instead of helping we build dependencies. Instead of feeding others we let them starve… all in the name of security.
So how did we get here? To understand that, we need to talk about the evolution of policing.
BM: Most accounts of police begin in the 19th century with the first uniformed public police departments, but the word has a longer and incredibly revealing history. The term police was first used in 15th-century Europe. At this time, police meant what we’d now call social policy. It encompassed welfare, education, urban planning, workforce development, and of course, policing. This is the original expanded concept of police that Marx mentioned in “On the Jewish Question.” This is what’s sometimes called the “older police science.” It’s a pre-disciplinary conversation, so this is before social science was a thing, and it was a conversation among statesmen, jurists, moral philosophers and proto political economists. Their main concern was order in prosperity in the broadest sense.
So my friends and I in the Anti-Security Collective — we’ve returned to this original and expanded concept of police in an effort to grasp the expansive set of institutions through which policing takes place. Policing is not just law enforcement, it’s order maintenance in the broadest sense. The work of this order maintenance cuts across the public and private. The state does it; private actors do it as well. There’s also something important about the moment when policing emerged. I mentioned the term was first used in the 15th century. This was the beginning of what historians called the “early modern period.” This was an extended epic of systems transition when the modern order of things was still being consolidated and older ways of living were still being systematically destroyed.
The plebs and the proles and the working class in the making were entangled in both circuits of capital accumulation and the vestiges of pre-capitalist’s economy centered on the commons. The idea of police emerged to organize the violent intervention of the state to transform the commons into private property, dispossess and uproot the people from the land, and rebuild social order through the market. Police power is thus the patriarchal discretion of the head of household applied to the problems of the city or polis, the Greek word for city and root of both police and policy. So while the meaning of the word police has changed over the centuries, the basic nature of police power has not. The police are not here to protect you. They’re here to protect the order of private property and the continued accumulation of private wealth.
So the essence of police power is not violence but discretion, the ability to decide whether to use violence in any conceivable situation. So consider the most basic police interaction: the stop. The reasons for it have never been clear. Walking too fast, walking too slowly, being stationary are all grounds for a stop and have always been used unfairly and unequally. The courts have always refused to define discretion because to define discretion would be to limit discretion. So this isn’t just an individual matter; it’s institutional. The courts won’t tell police they can’t drop a bomb on a house as they did in Philadelphia in 1985, or use a robot to kill an active shooter with a bomb as they did in Dallas in 2016, or use lethal force against an autistic man having a mental health crisis as they did in Augusta, Maine, in October 2021. The courts won’t tell police ahead of time what is reasonable or necessary since all situations are always and forever unpredictable.
So what is police? Discretion, or the expression of state power as an executive prerogative to act as seen fit. The discretionary nature of police power means that police do not enforce the law and are not accountable to it. Police handle the law after the fact to justify the way they decided to restore order. So law is based on a liberal conception of society composed of free, self-governing individuals. The exercise of state power is legitimated through the rule of law which respects individual rights. Police power, however, is based on a classic conception of society as a household and the state as the master. The defining characteristics of police power is the discretionary and virtually unlimited power of the householder over his household. Police then don’t deal with law; they deal with threats.
The law will never hold police accountable because the police are not meant to be accountable to the law or enforce the law. Police is the patriarchal power to manage people and things in the name of good order. So this is why abolition is the only logical response to the police. When you have a power that is designed to be unaccountable and has been unaccountable for so damn long, the reforms that stick to it just make it stronger and more efficient as they cover it in a veneer of legitimacy.
KH: In Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, Truthout’s editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law describe the many ways prison reforms have further extended the surveillance and control of the carceral state, exerting power over targeted communities within the medical system, public schools, their neighborhoods, and within their own homes. As Maya and Victoria write, “Some people are surveilled from birth — whether the eye that’s on them is that of the police, child protective services, a parent’s parole officer, or state welfare agencies.”
This landscape means that some people live their entire lives navigating dragnets of the carceral state. The Anti-Security Collective calls the deeper set of relations at the core of those dragnets the security capital nexus.
BM: So there’s a relationship between capitalist economies, which are premised on infinite and endless growth, and thus infinite and endless change. There’s a connection between that and the varied apparatuses of security that are used to administer this order, to keep it creaking along, to keep it from pulling itself apart. And I think one of the basic things that the state does is it subsumes all conflict within it. It turns all forms of resistance into something that can expand and enliven and relegitimize state power. The Democrats are in office and we see that all over, the selective appropriation of radical language and radical critiques to on the one hand mollify descent and on the other hand relegitimize the system.
So I think when we reject security, we reject this idea that the state is going to help us and we start thinking about what we can do to not just help ourselves but to transform the state and transform the work of the state from administering poverty and assuring that we live atomized lives apart and transforming it into a communal anti-state so to speak where the separation between people’s needs and their capacity to meet them is eliminated and people have the freedom to take control of their lives in the most basic way.
KH: Prison abolitionists have a long history of organizing projects to create safety in their communities without the intervention of the carceral state. The Creative Interventions Toolkit, for example, was the product of a years-long effort, in which abolitionists worked with people who were facing interpersonal violence, to create a new vision for violence intervention. As an organization, Creative Interventions sought to “strengthen community-based systems to resist
violence in all of its forms.” As the group wrote in the toolkit: “For CI, the community-based approach is one in which everyday people such as family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, members of community organizations such as faith institutions, civic organizations or businesses are the people who take action to intervene in violence.”
Many more examples of community-based safety strategies can be found in One Million Experiments, which is a virtual zine project co-organized by Project NIA and Interrupting Criminalization. Readers can use the project’s website to explore “snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.” In fact, I highly recommend checking out the One Million Experiments podcast, which is a collaboration between AirGo and Interrupting Criminalization that really explores the ideas behind the project and some of the efforts that it uplifts.
We’ve also talked about Get In Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit on this podcast, which is a resource from Vision Change Win that helps organizers and activists with safety planning for protests and much more. Its authors refer to that work as security, but if we can hold that contradiction for a moment, remembering that language is a grappling process, rather than a finite set of conclusions, I would ask you to grapple with me a bit further. Because Brendan has a way of referring to these kinds of efforts, and to mutual aid more generally, that I find fascinating. He describes these projects as “commoning against security.”
BM: Abolition is closing the prisons and defunding the police, but it’s also something bigger. It’s creating different institutions to manage the problems that we now leave to the police and prisons. And I think the way we build those different institutions is by commoning against security, by coming together to take responsibility for ourselves and for each other, to care for each other, to build systems to care for each other that don’t rely on the intervention of the state, whether through the armed police or the soft social police, for the state to come in and fix the problem for us or make the problem go somewhere else and disappear and preserve our right to live atomized lives apart.
And I think the one thing I would say is, like, sometimes when you talk about abolition, it’s viewed as an extremist position. Like it’s just an off the wall position. But I can think of nothing more extreme than accepting the routine violence and now under COVID, like just mass death that is normal. In my perspective, abolition is not an extreme position, it’s an incredibly sensible one and it’s one that starts with incredibly practical things and opens up to systems transition. What do I mean by this? If we think about police abolition, we start with the obvious defund the police, reduce police budgets by 50 to 80 percent, narrow the mission of police departments to the investigation of reported crimes, create non-police alternatives for so-called problems of public order connected to things like drug use and mental health.
But then from there, it’s what I was talking about as commoning against security, work to recreate the commons and work towards a new order based on cooperation not competition, based on meeting human needs and not advancing the endless and infinite accumulation of private wealth. So I think this begins with a certain social democratic common sense, a universal right to housing, health care, livelihood, unemployment, but it doesn’t end there. Our mutual friend, Mariame Kaba, often says that defunding police is the floor. And to this, I will add that the ceiling is communism. I don’t mean 20th-century state socialism, but I mean the communism of the commons. So a world of decentralized communal life where we all work together to care for each other.
KH: I know we have wandered pretty far into abolitionist nerd territory, so for those who are not aware: Many prison abolitionists are socialists, some are communists, some are anarchists, and some don’t identify as any of those things. We all share the goal of eliminating systems of social disposal and annihilation, which means ending capitalism. We have a lot of friendly disagreements about how to do that. But I have learned a lot from abolitionists who hold all of those ideological perspectives, so I think it’s important for us to explore these ideas together. Because I don’t think anyone among us is carrying around a universal formula for justice-making in an era of collapse.
But circling back to the matter at hand, something about that phrase “commoning against security” really resonated with me. Because I think it captures something about the work that many of us are doing, and also, the moment and context in which we’re doing it. We are isolated in so many ways, and our experiences of one another are so often reduced to the commercial. When we create new social pathways, reclaim space, and extend aid to one another, we are organizing life-giving projects, but we are also acting against disposability. We are acting against our atomization and isolation. We are overriding the impulses that individualism has ingrained in us and recommitting ourselves to compassion in a cynical era. In the face of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment, we are embracing what Monica Cosby has called a “refusal to abandon.” I believe in that work.
In his book Pacifying the Homeland, Brendan wrote, “While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites us to consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.”
I hope we will all accept that invitation, because I think it’s an important one. We have the power to generate modes of safety and care within our communities, and to work together to address root causes of harm. Many of us have been turned against one another, very effectively at a time when we need each other the most. There are many disasters on the horizon, politically and environmentally, and I think “commoning against security” is the kind of energy we are going to need in these times. I also hope you all will check out One Million Experiments, the Critical Interventions Toolkit and other resources that we will be including in the show notes on our website. These projects are a great source of inspiration, and you just might discover something that you want to join or create in your own community. And don’t forget to check out Brendan’s book Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. Trust me, it’s an essential resource.
I want to thank Brendan for joining me today, and I would like to thank all of our listeners for nerding out with us about abolition and anti-security. Please take care of yourselves this week, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision by Brendan McQuade
- Ant-Security: A Declaration
- Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law
- Understanding E-Carceration: A Book Launch (featuring James Kilgore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore)
- You can explore snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe at One Million Experiments.
- You can check out the One Million Experiments podcast here.
- You can find the Creative Interventions Toolkit here.
- Whose Security Is It Anyway? is a toolkit created by Project NIA that shares strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Wall Street investors have hit the jackpot. Soon they’ll be able to buy, own, and dictate The Commons, public lands, the world of Mother Nature. In fact, a pilot project is already in the works with ecosystems up for sale as Wall-Streeters anxiously prepare to gobble up the valued benefits of Mother Nature.
According to the NYSE PR Dept. they’ll IPO nature: “To preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” What? Really?
And, according to NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund: “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”
Then, does this mean that neoliberal capitalism is becoming nature’s beneficent caretaker so environmentalists can stop wringing their hands about the horrendous loss of wild vertebrate life, down a whopping 68%, and loss of wetlands and loss of huge chunks of rainforests these past few decades, all of which echoes a guttural sound of impending extinction? Answer: Don’t count on it.
For starters, there’s something extraordinarily distasteful and downright disgusting about Wall Street buying control of nature’s resource capabilities. It bespeaks of an upside down world where the ludicrous becomes acceptable, but is it really acceptable? Is it?
The main character in this new scheme to own the world is a new asset class with a very plain name that says it all: Natural Asset Company or NAC. Yes, if you are a billionaire, get ready to buy up to 30% of the world’s natural resource beneficence to society. It’s going to be offered on the biggest auction block of the world, the New York Stock Exchange under the cover of sustainability of nature and protection of biodiversity, wink, wink!
Of course, this prompts a series of questions, headlined by when does Mother Nature morph into a tollbooth?
In simplest of terms, NACs allow for the formation of specialized corporations the hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land. The services might be sequestration of carbon or clean water or possibly rare Tibetan mountain air or maybe a lake teeming with trout in the wilderness. The possibilities are endless when auctioning off major chunks of an asset as big as the planet.
The NAC will maintain, manage and grow the natural asset that it has commoditized, working towards maximizing the profit potential of the natural asset, although, of course, this is not emphasized in the PR material. Nevertheless, it could lead to near-infinite profits. After all, the living Earth does rejuvenate and replenish and service ecosystems on its own accord, a natural process that goes on forever. Why not own it?
If ever there has been a time for the people of the world to drop whatever they are doing and focus on one issue, now is that time. The Commons is for sale! Think long and hard about that proposition, study it, discuss it, and decide whether to agree that Mother Nature should be monetized. If not in agreement, then do something, tell everybody, tell anybody who’ll listen, carry poster boards in the street, join a protest march, bang pots and pans, do something to relieve that breakneck pressure building around your temples!
The Intrinsic Exchange Group, in partnership with the NYSE, is currently working with the Costa Rica government on a pilot project of NACs in the country in order to institute its protocol for ownership of forests, lakes, waterfalls, mountains, meadows, caves, wetlands, in essence, all of nature. Costa Rica is the proving grounds for ownership of Mother Nature, whether she likes it or not.
First, NAC identifies a natural asset, like a forest, for example, which is quantified using special protocols that have already been developed by various coalitions amongst multinational corporations, which in and of itself is remarkably terrifying. The NAC decides who has the rights to the natural asset’s productivity and how it is to be managed. It is then monetized via an IPO on the stock exchange. Thus, the NAC becomes “the Issuer” to potential buyers of the natural asset that the NAC represents. Essentially, NAC is a real estate agent of Mother Nature. The buyers are institutional investors, or the occasional billionaire, that want to own the rights to the benefits of wetlands or rainforests or natural water springs or rarified mountainous air or hot springs or whatever they want to own. The world is their oyster to buy, own, enjoy, and profit by.
Throughout all human history nature has been The Commons or the cultural and natural resource for all of society inclusive of natural processes like air and water. But now private investors are deleting The Commons with claims of “conservation and sustainability” of 30% of what’s called “protected areas” of our precious worldwide assets.
According to initial calculations, NACs will unlock $4Quadrillion in assets as a new feeding ground for Wall Street investors to buy the rights to clean water and clean air and trout streams and bass-laden lakes and gorgeous picturesque waterfalls and lagoons, an entire forest, or maybe eventually extend into the oceans. Who knows the range of possibilities once nature is transacted on Wall Street.
Monetizing nature!
What’s next, what’s left?
The Commons is property shared by all, inclusive of natural products like air, water, and a habitable planet, forests, fisheries, groundwater, wetlands, pastures, the atmosphere, the high seas, Antarctica, outer space, caves, all part of ecosystems of the planet.
The sad truth is Mother Nature, Inc. will lead to extinction of The Commons, as an institution, in the biggest heist of all time. Surely, private ownership of nature is unseemly and certainly begs a much bigger relevant question that goes to the heart of the matter, to wit: Should nature’s ecosystems, which benefit society at large, be monetized for the direct benefit of the few?
The post Mother Nature, Inc. first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30” – 30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030 – a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.
A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”:
Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.
The vehicle is allegedly designed to preserve and restore Nature’s assets; but when Wall Street gets involved, profit and exploitation are not far behind. Webb writes:
[E]ven the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize….
Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation”, media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.”
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with nearly $9.5 trillion under management. That is more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the U.S. and China. BlackRock also runs a massive technology platform that oversees at least $21.6 trillion in assets. It and two other megalithic asset managers, State Street and Vanguard (BlackRock’s largest shareholder), already effectively own much of the world. Adding “natural asset companies” to their portfolios could make them owners of the foundations of all life.
A $4 Quadrillion Asset — The Earth Itself
Partnering with the New York Stock Exchange team launching the NAC is the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), major investors in which are the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, notorious for imposing neo-colonialist agendas through debt entrapment. According to IEG’s website:
We are pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital. These assets are essential, making life on Earth possible and enjoyable. They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.
The potential of this asset class is immense. Nature’s economy is larger than our current industrial economy ….
The immense potential of “Nature’s Economy” is estimated by IEG at $4,000 trillion ($4 quadrillion).
Webb cites researcher and journalist Cory Morningstar, who maintains that one of the aims of creating “Nature’s Economy” and packaging it via NACs is to drastically advance massive land grab efforts made by Wall Street and the oligarch class in recent years, including those made by Wall Street firms and billionaires like Bill Gates during the COVID crisis. The land grabs facilitated through the development of NACs, however, will largely target indigenous communities in the developing world. Morningstar observes:
The public launch of NACs strategically preceded the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade. Under the pretext of turning 30% of the globe into “protected areas”, the largest global land grab in history is underway. Built on a foundation of white supremacy, this proposal will displace hundreds of millions, furthering the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.
The UN’s “30 x 30”
The land grab of which Morningstar speaks is embodied in a draft agreement called the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,” currently being negotiated among the 186 governments that are signatories to the Convention for Biological Diversity. Part I of its 15th meeting (COP15) closed on October 15, just ahead of COP26 (the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) hosted in Glasgow from October 31 through November 12. COP26 focuses on climate change, while COP 15 focuses on preserving diversity. Part II of COP15 will be held in 2022. The draft text for the COP 15 nature pact includes a core pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.
In September 2020, 128 environmental and human rights NGOs and experts warned that the 30 x 30 plan could result in severe human rights violations and irreversible social harm for some of the world’s poorest people. Based on figures from a paper published in the academic journal Nature, they argued that the new target could displace or dispossess as many as 300 million people. Stephen Corry of Survival International contended:
The call to make 30% of the globe into “Protected Areas” is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it’ll bring as much suffering and death. Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity or avoiding pandemics – in fact it’s more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all out assault on human diversity. This planned dispossession of hundreds of millions of people risks eradicating human diversity and self-sufficiency – the real keys to our being able to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.
30 x 30 in the United States
The 30 x 30 target was incorporated in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad dated January 27, 2021, which includes at Sec. 219 “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”
How that is to be done is not clearly specified, but proponents insist it is not a “land grab.” Critics, however, contend there is no other way to pull it off. Only about 12% of land and water in the U.S. is now considered to be “in conservation,” including wilderness lands, national parks, national wildlife refuges, state parks, national monuments, and private lands with permanent conservation easements (contracts to surrender a portion of property rights to a land trust or the federal government). According to environmental expert Dr. Bonner Cohen, raising that figure to 30%, adding 600 million acres to the total, “means putting this land and water (mostly land) off limits to any productive use in perpetuity. To accomplish this goal, the federal government will have to buy up – through eminent domain or other pressures on landowners making them ‘willing sellers’ of their property – millions of acres of private land.”
In July 2021, 15 governors wrote to the Administration opposing the plan, led by Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Ricketts said in a press release:
This requires restricting a land area the size of the State of Nebraska every year, each year, for the next nine years, or in other words a landmass twice the size of Texas by 2030.
This goal is especially radical given that the President has no constitutional authority to take action to conserve 30% of the land and water.
The Real Threat to Mother Nature
The federal government may have no constitutional authority to take the land, but a megalithic private firm such as BlackRock could do it simply by making farmers and local residents an offer they can’t refuse. This ploy has already been demonstrated in the housing market.
According to a survey reported in The Guardian on October 12, 2021, nearly 40% of U.S. households are facing serious financial problems, including struggling to afford medical care and food; and 30% of lower income households (those earning under $50,000 per year) said they had lost all their savings during the coronavirus pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. home sales went to large corporate investors including BlackRock, which beat out families in search of homes just by offering substantially more than the asking price. Sometimes whole neighborhoods were bought up at once for conversion into rental properties.
BlackRock’s chairman Larry Fink is on the board of the World Economic Forum, which until recently featured a controversial promotional video declaring “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
We all want a clean environment, and we want to preserve species biodiversity. But that includes human biodiversity – acknowledging the rights of rural landowners and Indigenous peoples, the land’s natural stewards. The greatest threat to the land is not the people living on it but those well-heeled investors who swoop in to buy up the rights to it, financializing the earth for profit.
Not just private property but those public lands and infrastructure once known as “the commons” are now under threat. We face an existential moment in our economic history, in which accumulated private wealth is acquiring carte blanche control of the essentials of life. Whether that juggernaut can be stopped remains to be seen, but the first step in any defensive action is to be aware of the threat at our doorsteps.
• This article was first posted under a different title on ScheerPost. Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
The post Conservation or Land Grab? The Financialization of Nature first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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)
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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.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.