Veterinarians have an opportunity to uphold medical ethics—and give the nation’s factory-farmed animals a small bit of mercy when they are killed.

By Karen Davis, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is holding its annual convention in Philadelphia starting on July 29. This is an opportunity for the group to formulate a policy statement opposing a method of killing farmed animals that epitomizes the inhumane treatment of millions of birds on factory farms. The method, known as “ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+),” has become the main practice employed by the poultry and egg industries to address avian influenza outbreaks among chronically stressed and disease-prone birds.

This method “requires farmers to cut off airflow and heat their barns to 104 degrees Fahrenheit until the animals die from heatstroke,” states an article in Sentient Media. The “plus” means that, in addition to shutting down the ventilation system during VSD+, the barns are also exposed to extreme heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide (CO2) to suffocate the animals and bake them alive.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza is a recurring phenomenon in the poultry and egg industries. The current outbreak in the U.S., which began in February, has antecedents in 2015, 2006, and 2003. Low pathogenic avian flu outbreaks in chicken and turkey flocks are routine events involving the mass culling of millions of birds.

On July 21, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service reported that since February, 40 million birds from 391 flocks in 37 states have had the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus. Taxpayers fund the killing of these infected birds through USDA indemnity programs like the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Understandably, most people do not envision the slaughter of thousands of birds dying together in a single facility from suffocation and heat stroke. The occasional glimpse of a truckload of dead chickens on their way to burial or a rendering plant seldom registers unless we are poultry workers, animal advocates, or investigators at an affected farm site.

This year, two separate investigations exposed the gruesome process of VSD+ and its effect on individual birds subjected to the method.

In April, the animal advocacy group Direct Action Everywhere released an investigative video showing the killing of 5 million caged hens by ventilation shutdown at Rembrandt Farms in Iowa following an outbreak of avian influenza there. Investigators found hens “being literally roasted alive—still in their cages, running loose in the facility’s industrial sheds, even buried alive.”

Also in April, the advocacy group Animal Outlook released a video based on 10 hours of footage taken by researchers at North Carolina State University of a 2016 experiment funded by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association to study the effects of VSD+ on chickens.

The footage shows hens enclosed individually in ventilation shutdown boxes with windows to observe each hen as she died. ​​​​​Animal Outlook attorney, Will Lowrey, who obtained the footage through public records requests, said the suffering of the hens in the boxes was “extremely profound,” according to an article in the Intercept.

These revelations have swelled the number of veterinarians and animal welfare groups urging the AVMA to stop condoning ventilation shutdown, in keeping with the Veterinarian’s Oath from AVMA’s website, to protect animal health and welfare, prevent and relieve animal suffering, and uphold the principles of veterinary medical ethics.

So far, the AVMA has equivocated by condoning the use of VSD+ “in constrained circumstances,” effectively abandoning the birds to commercial expediency. Many chickens, turkeys, and ducks have died of the avian flu virus on factory farms; millions more have been killed without evidence of infection.

Although the AVMA cannot mandate or prohibit any method for exterminating farmed animals, the AVMA’s recommendation against a particular procedure carries industry weight. We believe the AVMA has a moral responsibility toward these trapped and helpless animals, and that this responsibility should transcend an accommodation of commercial priorities.

With guaranteed government indemnities to the industries added to the AVMA’s current approval of VSD+, poultry and egg producers and their trade groups have no incentive to mitigate the squalor and debilitate breeding practices that enable flu viruses to spread among the thousands of birds crammed together in the mammoth industrialized sheds.

In “Prevention of Avian Influenza at Its Animal Source,” the World Organization for Animal Health observes that “good hygiene practices are essential to prevent avian influenza outbreaks, because of the resistance of the virus in the environment and its highly contagious nature.”

In reality, industrialized animal farms cannot, by their very nature, be hygienic, although hygienic practices could be vastly improved. As of now, avian influenza epidemics are built into the heavily subsidized poultry industry with no accountability. These epidemics will continue if no action is taken, especially by the organization that has sworn to protect animals from preventable suffering.

Accordingly, the AVMA should oppose ventilation shutdown and ventilation shutdown plus. This should be a priority topic at the AVMA’s convention in Philadelphia, with a tangible moral result.

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Karen Davis, PhD, is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Davis is an award-winning animal rights activist and the author of numerous books, including a children’s book (A Home for Henny); a cookbook (Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey); Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs; More Than a Meal; and her latest book, a series of essays called For the Birds.

Take action…

“I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering,” reads the Veterinarian’s Oath on the website of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA).

At AVMA’s annual convention, beginning on July 29 in Philadelphia, the nation’s veterinarians have an opportunity to lessen the intense suffering and misery experienced by chickens trapped in our inhumane food system—and uphold their oath—by opposing the cruel method of killing known as ventilation shutdown.

Urge the AVMA to uphold the Veterinarian’s Oath and condemn all forms of ventilation shutdown to help bring an end to this brutal, inhumane practice.

ICYMI…

“How can we justify slaughtering cows to repair our hearts, when the consumption of cows is what weakens our hearts?” asks Maureen Medina for Earth | Food | Life. In 2012, Medina received a bovine valve from Edwards Lifesciences to replace her own pulmonary valve.

“It’s a vicious cycle that harms people and animals, and benefits profit-driven corporations,” writes Medina on LA Progressive. “On one side, big agribusiness is slaughtering cows for meat and dairy—foods that researchers have linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. On the other side, medical corporations are profiting from producing bovine heart valves.”

Parting thought…

“By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.” —Albert Schweitzer

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

It’s time to rethink our broken and unfair family planning systems.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

10 min read

July 11 was World Population Day, an observance established by the United Nations aiming to highlight population issues, particularly how the human population relates to the environment. The UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) marked the occasion by releasing its World Population Prospects 2022 report, which announced that the global human population is on target to reach a new milestone: 8 billion people on the planet by November 15, 2022.

While this staggering figure should alarm even the most casual observer of the various environmental and health crises stemming from the overpopulation that is emblematic of the Anthropocene—like climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, food and water shortages, plastic pollution, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and the sixth extinction—the UN has advanced a false narrative, trumpeting the “story behind 8 billion and how we’ve got here… [as] a story of triumph,” saying that reaching this milestone is “a cause for celebration” with “infinite” possibilities for growth.

“We must celebrate a world of 8 billion people,” writes Dr. Bannet Ndyanabangi, the East and Southern Africa regional director for the UN Population Fund, the UN agency tasked with improving reproductive and maternal health. Others are picking up that upbeat messaging.

The truth is that growth is undoing the progress we made in our response to the climate crisis. Also, our near-universal family planning systems have been based on a lie—that having kids is more personal for the parents than interpersonal for the future child, our communities, and our planet—a lie that maintains the generational privilege of the wealthy, and promotes unsustainable growth over birth entitlements that would have ensured all kids were born in conditions that comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The interrelated ecological and public health crises facing humanity and the planet—fundamentally driven by the Anthropocene and the population growth that defines the era—have already been causing massive harm to countless species, including people, and perhaps most problematically, children who will carry with them lifelong impacts. And we are on track to make things even worse. “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” warns NASA.

We will add billions more people to this catastrophic scenario—around 10.4 billion by 2100—with the UN itself projecting widespread famine. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report, around 670 million people (8 percent of the world population), are expected to face hunger by 2030. Sadly, as FAO points out, that figure is the same figure from 2015, when the goal of ending hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition by the end of this decade was launched under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Over this 15-year period, humanity would have made zero progress in the fight to end world hunger.

More People, More Inequality

Another concern is that the multitude of environmental and health impacts are not shared equally but depend on hard-to-grasp levels of inequality. Moreover, as the UN reports, inequality is growing for “more than 70 percent of the global population.” The people least responsible for the climate crisis—the poor and the vulnerable—are set to suffer the most, and yet the rich world is pushing for more humans that will exacerbate the crisis, with abortion bans on the rise across the United States, and wealthy nations like Australia, Estonia, Finland, Italy, and Japan offering their citizens financial incentives to have more babies.

Even the Pope doesn’t grasp the reality of our situation. In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, the pontiff lamented ecological degradation and global warming, writing that Mother Earth “cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use.” Yet he has failed to recognize that unchecked human population growth is not only damaging to the environment but also to the welfare of future generations. That failure is made clear by his encouraging young people to have more children.

Failed Family Planning

Designed in the 20th century, near-universal family planning models and systems treated the act of having children as personal rather than interpersonal, which caused human and societal growth to arc too high for the planet’s carrying capacity. Currently, humanity is using 1.8 times the ecological resources that the Earth is able to generate in a single year. This year, according to the Global Footprint Network, humans will hit “Earth Overshoot Day” on July 28. Put it another way, the current human population is so high that we need the resources of 1.8 Earths to sustain us for just one year.

The world’s broken family planning models have prevented a fair distribution of wealth among children, in particular, protecting pockets of extreme wealth and privilege and ensuring the gulf between rich and poor we see today. While many laud the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which ensures the protection, survival, and development of children without discrimination, the fact is that world leaders have never applied it to the majority of children or to future generations as a standard for birth and development conditions. Billions were born over the past several decades in conditions that blatantly violated the convention’s standards—standards we recognize as universal to develop functional societies. They were born under the myth that whether a child is born rich or poor was determined by fortune or the will of some invisible force.

What went wrong? Past models viewed children as economic inputs to grow economies, rather than empowering them to become citizens to run the town halls that must precede and regulate economies. The impact was existential: It is now a zeitgeist to see falling fertility rates as a “baby bust” or threat to economic growth and the further commodification of nature, the children’s convention be damned. The UN’s World Population Day rhetoric reflects this old modeling, and deference to the wealthy who wish to provide an advantage for their own kids. This old modeling—treating the act of having children as more personal than interpersonal—is based on what legal theorists call a baseline error.

Externalizing Costs to Women and Children

Many companies and governments worked together to adopt the Paris Agreement as the key standard for climate policy. It allows for significant emissions and global warming despite current changes in the climate causing massive harm to infants and children. The entities behind the agreement were making decisions about what the world should look like. And that vision, for them, sets a baseline against which to measure what’s the cost and what’s the benefit.

There is something wrong with that picture. If you believe in freedom under any theory of liberalism, it’s impossible for a group of people to define what the world should look like for everyone. The baseline, or what the world should look like, is instead itself a group of relatively self-determining (i.e., free) people. How can we know what’s the cost or the benefit, or the rules that allocate them, without being organized as participatory groups capable of making such decisions? How can we be self-determining or free in a world dominated by a singularly anthropocentric viewpoint in which some humans consent to the power of other humans, rather than a more logical and ethical nature-centric viewpoint?

Population growth-based economic gains were created by intentionally violating the standards represented in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ensuring children would be born and raised in unfair and unequal conditions. A small minority of mostly wealthy white men have waged a war on women’s health, made abortion less accessible, and profited by externalizing massive costs on women and children decade after decade.

In short: 1) Humans overshot, 2) the profits went to some and costs to others based on the lie that having kids was more personal than interpersonal, and 3) justice requires we compensate those harmed.

Finding a Solution

What can we do? First, we can pressure the UN to switch to nature- and child-centric family planning model as the first and overriding human right. We can give future generations a voice in their democracies, rather than just jobs in economies. Democracy—the only form of true empowerment—comes first, and groups are already asking the UN to move in this direction. The voices of young women from the Global South, some of whom are most at risk, are rising, speaking about their concerns for their future and the future of the world.

One step toward better, more sustainable, and equitable family policies involves resolving the baseline error discussed above and urging the Global North to make just climate reparations to the Global South that—rather than focusing on population—ensure that we begin moving toward a system in which all children are born into conditions that comply with the UNCRC.

The climate crisis is already causing lifelong harm to infants and children, harm that must be stopped and compensated for. Given the efficacy of family planning and climate migration reforms, one option would be family planning incentives or entitlements or reparations that will allow parents to best provide their children with the ecosocial rearing and development conditions required by the UNCRC. These payments can be funded by eliminating expensive and counterproductive pro-natal incentives (as well as expensive limits on programming for long-acting reversible contraceptives and access to abortion) in low-fertility countries in favor of climate migration reforms. Any incentivizing effect the payments might have toward large families can be offset by the universal promotion of a “smaller and more sustainable” family ethic.

We can also urge lawmakers, decision-makers, and thought leaders to publicly admit that conventional family planning models—built on a baseline error—are broken because they miscalculate the way costs and benefits are measured. We must ultimately recognize that the wealth of many was built on a system of explosive and unsustainable growth at a great cost to children, a cost that increases as the climate worsens. Because that wealth was produced under a system that externalized its costs, disadvantaged children have a moral and legal claim to part of the wealth that was accrued at the expense of their current and future health and the environment in which they live. This is a form of restorative justice. Without this change, we risk a future where the system by which many made their wealth will have done more harm to future generations than any well-intentioned philanthropy can do to help them.

Time to Recalibrate, Not Celebrate

Voices in the Global South—those with the most at stake and the least responsible for the crisis—are now joining in the call for family planning-based entitlements and reparations. It’s a just demand that will compel many to action. There are many steps we can take to recognize that something went wrong in our universal family planning and population policies and to move toward better modeling. Nothing would have a greater impact on a larger number of people.

Population expert Alan Weisman, the author of the best-selling book The World Without Us, spent two years visiting 20 countries to investigate the issue and impacts of human population growth. In an interview with Orion Magazine, he said that one of the questions he set out to answer was, “[H]ow many people can fit on the planet without tipping it over?” If we don’t fix our broken and unfair family planning systems, we will soon find out.

In 1989, when the UN established World Population Day, there were 5.1 billion humans on Earth. Since then, more than 2.5 billion humans have been added. (To put that into perspective, over the 140-year span from 1800 to 1940, we added just a little over half of that number—1.3 billion people—to the population.) As the Earth approaches its 8-billionth human, we don’t have “infinite” possibilities for growth, as the UN claims. Instead, we have infinite possibilities for environmental degradation, attacks on reproductive rights, and public health crises. It is not time to celebrate, as the UN urges. Instead, it is time to recalibrate around the ecosocial birth and development conditions that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long required.

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Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

Take action…

Reproductive justice is environmental justice

“Neither the reproductive justice nor environmental justice movements are asking for something that is outside the realm of possibility. They’re asking for equitable access to what many white, middle and upper class people already have. Environmental and reproductive justice want the ability for everyone to live in a safe environment, free to make decisions about their own bodies and health,” writes Annika Fuller, an organizer with Planned Parenthood.

“Reproductive and environmental justice are intertwined and cannot be realized without the other. Just like how their goals are very much alike, their pathways to get there are also extremely similar. For sustainable change, the foundations that environmental and reproductive oppression have been built on must be chipped away so new grass can grow instead.”

Find out how to get your members of Congress on record about abortion rights while they’re in your home state over recess.

Letter to the editor…

Dear Earth | Food | Life,

I really appreciated the recent article by Carter Dillard in response to Ezra Klein’s piece in the New York Times (“What Pundit Ezra Klein Doesn’t Get About Parenting in a Looming Climate Crisis,”​​​​​​​ Sri Lanka Guardian, June 22, 2022). I remember being astounded while reading Klein’s article and then remembered reading recently that he was on paternity leave and his column/podcast would not be available for a while. In response, I thought, “of course, he would be needing to rationalize having children.”

If Klein chose to have children in keeping with the much-aligned and forgotten zero population growth movement, okay, but there is no need to make a pitch in a public forum for others to get a “free rationalization ticket” without at least going through the angst. The psychobabble marketing prevalent in our society provides a pseudo-post-natal blanket of comfort for a generation of folks not prepared to deal with saying no to themselves and yes to others. End of story.

Jean Whitinger
Johnson City, Tennessee

Cause for concern…

Europe endures record-breaking heat wave, getting a glimpse of the world’s climate future

“Record-breaking temperatures and vicious wildfires swept through Western Europe and the United Kingdom… in what may be one of the region’s most extreme heat waves on record,” reports Chelsea Harvey for E&E News on Scientific American.

“This is the second heat wave to sweep through Europe in the past month. Climate change has led to more frequent and worsening heat waves around the world, with Western Europe particularly impacted. The region’s heat waves are increasing in frequency about three times faster—and in intensity four times faster—than in the rest of the midlatitudes, according to a recent study.”

Round of applause…

Biden may finally declare a climate emergency

After Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative “swing vote” Democrat from West Virginia (the nation’s second-largest coal producer), deep-sixed President Biden’s climate agenda last week, the president said he would take “strong executive action.” While he didn’t say what that would entail specifically, sources suggest that he may declare a climate emergency, which would unlock executive powers that include ending exports of crude oil, limiting oil and gas drilling in federal waters, and directing federal agencies to increase the usage of renewable energy.

“The President made clear that if the Senate doesn’t act to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, he will. We are considering all options and no decision has been made,” a White House official said in an email to The Hill.

Sign the Center of Biological Diversity’s petition urging President Biden to declare a climate emergency.

Parting thought…

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”―George Bernard Shaw

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Trump’s impact on the EPA reveals the frightening power of a corrupt president.

By Gregg Barak, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

This excerpt is adapted from “Criminology on Trump” (Routledge, 2022) and was produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life (a project of the Independent Media Institute).

Grasping the enormity, the breadth, and the depth of “Trump corruption” is rather astonishing. Most news junkies and politicos alike are quite familiar with the in-your-face looting, skimming, and self-dealing of the president and his family members. Beyond the family corruption, there is a much larger world of Trump corruption. A “sliminess perpetuated by literally thousands of presidential appointees from Cabinet officials to obscure functionaries,” as reporter Jim Lardner put it in his article for the American Prospect. It is certainly difficult to tabulate all the knaves, thieves, and corporate stooges as well as the nefarious schemes perpetrated.

The corruption infected many of the government bodies designed to protect the health and well-being of all Americans, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in ways that we haven’t fully reckoned with.

Former President Donald Trump’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator was one of his most controversial appointments to a cabinet-level position. This appointment, in particular, embodied the White House’s broad support for the fossil fuel industry and disdain for climate science. Prior to his appointment, Scott Pruitt had made a career—as Oklahoma’s attorney general—of attacking the very federal agency that he would someday run. As an outspoken skeptic of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, Pruitt, along with other Republican attorney generals, led the charge and, as Rebecca Hersher and Brett Neely reported for NPR in 2018, “sued the EPA to stop ozone and methane emissions rules and block regulations on coal-fired power plants.” Of course, it was not Pruitt’s anti-environmental policies that brought about his abrupt departure after 18 months in office: That was why he was hired in the first place.

Pruitt was fired (“resigned”) because of his garden-variety corruption and lavish spending on his expenses, office and travel. He also had the habit of mixing his personal and his professional lives, which led to more than a dozen investigations by the Office of the Inspector General. For example, Pruitt spent more than $124,000 on unjustified first-class air travel and $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth. He used EPA staff to land a job for his wife, rented a condominium apartment on Capitol Hill at a bargain rate from a lobbyist’s wife, and had his security detail drive him around on personal errands. As the investigations piled up several of his close aides and EPA staffers exited the shop. After all the negative publicity, pressure mounted on Trump from the Congressional Republicans to oust Pruitt.

On Twitter, Trump announced on July 8, 2018, that he was accepting Pruitt’s resignation, noting: “Within the Agency Scott had done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.” Some of Pruitt’s “outstanding” work included his response to an initial study requested by his aides from EPA economists to reevaluate the effects of the Obama administration’s clean water rule. According to a 30-year veteran of the agency who left around the same time, when the study found more than a half-billion dollars in economic benefits, these economists “were ordered to say the benefits could not be quantified,” reported the American Prospect via their Mapping Corruption project, an extensively researched interactive dossier exposing the breadth of corruption in the Trump administration. Similarly, after “a scientific advisory board questioned the basis for a proposed rewrite of the Obama administration rules on waterways and vehicle tailpipe emissions, more than a quarter of the panel members were dismissed or resigned, many of them being replaced by scientists with industry ties.”

Under Pruitt’s EPA, more generally, the agency moved to limit the use of scientific research. They excluded numerous studies that relied on confidential personal health data. Meanwhile, vacancies were left unfilled, especially in the areas of air pollution and toxic research. The Trump EPA did not miss a beat with its anti-environmental and anti-species agenda when Andrew Wheeler became the next administrator. For example, as a former coal lobbyist whose top client was Murray Energy and whose CEO was a major backer of Trump and a climate change denier, Wheeler ordered the EPA in June 2019 to terminate its funding to 13 health centers around the country that were studying the effects of pollution on the growth and development of children and other living things. As Trump wrote on Twitter announcing Wheeler as Pruitt’s replacement: “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”

While Wheeler was at the helm of the EPA, Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray prepared a policy “wish list” that was hand-delivered to Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Several of Murray’s recommendations were acted on, including, as reported by American Prospect, “abandoning an Obama administration rule barring coal companies from dumping waste into streams and waterways; making it easier to open new coal plants, and allowing higher levels of mercury pollution.” In related matters, former industry lobbyist Nancy Beck, the deputy assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, was leading the charge against an EPA proposal to halt the sale of three chemicals linked to birth defects, nerve damage and deaths. Under Wheeler, the EPA was completely absolved of any duty to address global warming.

Besides the EPA’s capture by mega-polluters, conflicts of interests, and Trump’s top appointments, the American Prospect’s Mapping Corruption project has underscored the undue influence of a dozen deputy and assistant administrators dispersed throughout the environmental protection organization. Below are the first five administrators identified by the project:

• “David Dunlap, deputy assistant administrator for research and development, is a former policy director for Koch Industries. At EPA, Dunlap has had a role in regulating formaldehyde despite the fact that one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde, Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, is a Koch subsidiary.”
• “David Fischer, deputy assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, is a former industry lawyer and senior director of the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical companies.”
• “Alexandra Dunn, assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, was also employed by the American Chemistry Council.”
• “As an industry lawyer, Susan Bodine, now assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, had defended polluting companies against Superfund cleanup responsibilities.”
• “Peter Wright, assistant administrator for land and emergency management, oversees toxic waste site cleanup. He used to work for DowDuPont, which has been implicated in problems affecting roughly one-seventh of all toxic waste cleanup sites.”

Corruption and white-collar crime reached new heights during Trump’s four years as president. Similarly, Trump introduced a level of corruption never seen before in the highest echelons of the U.S. government. It is difficult to assess the full measure of the negative impact of Trump’s EPA on our collective health and well-being, as well as the costs, time, and energy that it will take to undo the damages caused by the science denier-in-chief. And now with the Supreme Court ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency on June 30—a 6-3 vote, with all three of Trump’s appointees voting with the conservative bloc—it is questionable that the Trumpian damage to the environment can be repaired.

​​​Gregg Barak is a criminologist and author. He is a fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University. His books include Unchecked Corporate Power (Routledge, 2017), Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist (Rutgers University Press, 2020), and Criminology on Trump (Routledge, 2022). In 2020, Barak received the Gilbert Geis Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime of the American Society of Criminology.

Take action…

EPA: Make the air safer to breathe

“[D]angerous levels of particle pollution are on the rise,” warns the American Lung Association, which recently released its ‘State of the Air’ 2022 report. “Right now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering strengthening the national limits on particle pollution. If they make the standards as strong as what the scientific research shows is needed to protect health, the whole country could see health benefits.”

Urge the EPA to set strong new limits to make the air safer to breathe. 

Cause for concern…

Biden lied when he said no more drilling on federal lands

In a televised Democratic presidential debate in March 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged to end new federal oil and gas leasing. “Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore,” Biden said. “No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, number one.”

But on July 8, his administration issued a new environmental analysis that paves the way for a massive new oil drilling project in Alaska’s north slope, threatening this remote and pristine wilderness that is home to Dall sheep, caribou, musk ox, dozens of species of fish, more than 200 migratory bird species and more than 400 species of plants.

The plan, issued by the Bureau of Land Management, is “clearly inconsistent with the goals this administration has set to transition away from fossil fuels and avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” said Jeremy Lieb, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who led litigation challenging an earlier version of the plan.

“This single project, which will release a staggering amount of climate pollution, threatens to send us dangerously off track by undercutting urgently needed measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Round of applause…

A whale feeding frenzy in Antarctica signals a conservation success

For most of the 20th century, fin whales, the Earth’s second largest animals, were hunted so intensely that an estimated 725,000 were killed in the Southern Ocean, bringing their population down to just 1 percent of its size before commercial whaling began in 1904.

But according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, after 40 years of a commercial whaling ban, there has been a resurgence in their numbers. The study’s lead author, Helena Herr, a marine mammal ecologist at the University of Hamburg, told the New York Times that the finding offers “a sign that if you enforce management and conservation, there are chances for species to recover.”

“It was one of the most spectacular observations I’ve had,” said Herr about witnessing a fin whale feeding frenzy involving some 150 individuals along the coast of Elephant Island, northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula. “The fin whales seemed to go crazy because of the food load they were confronted with. It was absolutely thrilling.”

ICYMI…

The global seafood supply is being contaminated by microplastics

​​​​​According to a pair of recent scientific studies, microplastics and a class of toxic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (or PFAS) are becoming increasingly prevalent in the world’s oceans and have begun to contaminate the global seafood supply.

According to a July 2020 study published in the scholarly journal Environmental Science and Technology, PFAS—a family of potentially harmful chemicals used in a range of products, including carpets, furniture, clothing, food packaging, and nonstick coatings—have now been found in the Arctic Ocean. This discovery worries scientists because it means that PFAS can reach any body of water in the world and that such chemicals are likely present in water supplies across the globe.

Meanwhile, researchers at the QUEX Institute, a partnership between the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and the University of Queensland in Australia, have found microplastics in crabs, oysters, prawns, squid, and sardines sold as seafood in Australian markets, findings that were also first published in Environmental Science and Technology. As Robby Berman reported for Medical News Today in August 2020, the second study’s findings suggest that microplastics—small pieces of plastic “less than 5 millimeters in length, which is about the size of a sesame seed”—that are a consequence of plastic pollution have “invaded the food chain to a greater extent than previously documented.”

—EFL contributors Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff, “The Global Seafood Supply Is Being Contaminated by Microplastics, but Major News Outlets Are Silent” (CounterCurrents, January 3, 2022)

Parting thought…

“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” —Leonardo da Vinci

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

America’s highest court has limited the EPA’s authority to regulate power plant emissions.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

9 min read

Signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 with the intention of reducing and controlling air pollution nationwide, the Clean Air Act is the nation’s primary federal air quality law, giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to regulate air emissions from sources that are either stationary (e.g., power plants) or mobile (e.g., vehicles).

On June 30, the Supreme Court limited that authority with its controversial ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, dealing a heavy blow to President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. At the center of the case is Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, which establishes mechanisms that the EPA can use in order to control emissions of air pollutants from stationary sources like power plants.

Writing the opinion for the conservative majority, with the three liberal justices dissenting, Chief Justice John Roberts said that Section 111 does not give the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants by “generation shifting”—which could force power plants to move away from coal to renewable energy. The ruling removes a primary mechanism the Biden administration has for achieving the president’s goal of halving carbon dioxide emissions by 2030—and moving the nation to a low-carbon economy.

Major Questions

Roberts said that the basis for the court’s decision was the “major questions doctrine” (MQD)—a phrase that no previous Supreme Court majority had explicitly invoked. In the majority opinion, Roberts writes that the MQD has now been invoked “because it refers to an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”

He said that if lawmakers had wished to grant the EPA the power to mandate how power plants generate electricity, the law should have stated “clear congressional authorization,” adding that “our precedent counsels skepticism toward EPA’s claim” that the law “empowers it to devise carbon emissions caps based on a generation shifting approach.” Basically, the ruling states that the EPA would overstep its remit in its regulation of power plant emissions if it mandated a move to renewable energy.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, said that in using “capacious terms” in Section 111, Congress gave the EPA a wide berth in designing its emission reduction rules. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it,” she writes. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.” She further writes that the ruling “strips” the EPA of the “power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”

Cloudy: Zero-Carbon Future

If solar and wind energy are fully integrated into the global energy mix, renewable sources could provide up to 80 percent of the world’s electricity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization based in Abu Dhabi that supports nations in the transition to sustainable energy. The United States plays a central role in the global shift to a low-carbon—and ultimately, zero-carbon—economy: After China, it is the world’s second-biggest consumer of energy.

Generating electricity without emissions is one of the primary strategies we have in order to achieve net-zero emissions—something that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicines assert is technologically feasible in the U.S. by 2050. But by limiting the federal government’s ability to cap emissions by mandating a shift to renewable power generation, the Supreme Court has made a zero-carbon future more difficult not only for the U.S. but also for the world. “If the current rate of emissions continues, children born this year could live to see parts of the Eastern seaboard swallowed by the ocean,” Kagan wrote in the court’s dissenting opinion. This is not just a problem in the U.S.: Several islands in the northern Solomon Islands, a nation of hundreds of islands in the south Pacific, have already been swallowed by the rising sea levels.

“Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change,” Kagan writes. “And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

Dena Adler, a research scholar at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, also questioned Roberts’ highly irregular use of the MQD. “The major questions doctrine is in part problematic because Congress has legislated for decades with an expectation that it can broadly authorize agencies to use their expertise,” she told E&E News. “Yet, as the court applied it today, the doctrine looks skeptically on agencies regulating under this broad authorization.”

In a statement, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said he is “deeply disappointed by the decision,” but noted that the agency “will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.”

‘Supremely Stupid’

The reaction from environmentalists has been unanimous and scathing.

John Noël, a senior climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA, called the ruling “irresponsible” and “supremely stupid,” in an email. “This ruling is going to hurt people. It’s going to hurt wildlife. It’s going to make it easier for business owners to challenge clean air regulations. If there was ever a doubt that this Supreme Court favors the powerful over the people, it’s gone.”

“How much damage can a conservative Supreme Court do to our rights in just a couple of weeks? Unfortunately, we know the answer, and it’s grim,” wrote actress and activist Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an email.

“We should be outraged by what the Supreme Court has done,” said Jason Rylander of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, in an online press briefing on July 1.

Kevin S. Curtis, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit NRDC Action Fund, said in an email that the “deeply damaging” ruling “has set us back half a century—at a moment when… we have no time to lose,” adding that the decision is “radically out of step with settled law, scientific and medical consensus, and widely held public opinion.”

Biden’s Climate Toolbox

It is important to note that, while representing a significant setback to executive climate action, the ruling restricts—but does not eliminate—the agency’s ability to reduce power plants’ carbon pollution. President Biden still has an array of levers at his disposal, several of which he has yet to pull. He can, for example, declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which would unlock a variety of presidential powers. “If Biden were, for instance, to ban just crude oil exports, he could cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 165 million metric tons each year—the equivalent of shuttering 42 coal plants,” write Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner, both of the Center for Biological Diversity, in the Nation.

“President Biden must take charge as the climate president,” Gaby Sarri-Tobar of the Center for Biological Diversity and Ted Glick of Beyond Extreme Energy wrote in an email. “He’s already shown a willingness to do this by invoking the Defense Production Act to boost domestic manufacturing of renewable energy technology and advance energy justice by giving frontline and labor communities a seat at the table.”

Additionally, states and local governments can also regulate their own emissions. “A bill passed in Maine [in 2019], for example, calls for emissions at 80 percent below 1990 levels by midcentury, with a halfway goal by 2030,” writes Hillary Rosner for Audubon, a nonprofit environmental organization. “And Hawaii’s 2018 legislation sets a goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. Connecticut and California, meanwhile, have been working to curb emissions for more than a decade.”

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill could also enact far-reaching clean energy legislation—and could even amend Section 111 of the Clean Air Act to give the EPA explicit authority to move power plants toward renewables in order to meet federally mandated emission reductions. And voters could elect and support climate-focused lawmakers—and get their friends, families and community members to do the same.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get… Voting

Curtis of the NRDC Action Fund said that the ruling “[shows] us that we cannot take legal and federal protections for granted.” Part of not taking those protections for granted means participating in our democracy, and that means voting, particularly casting ballots during midterm elections when federal legislators are elected. It is the members of the House and Senate who decide the federal government’s legislative agenda.

To put the nation on a zero-carbon pathway—and to withstand attacks from a conservative, activist Supreme Court—federal lawmakers must pass clear and strong climate legislation. That means getting climate-focused legislators into office on Capitol Hill. And that means getting climate-focused voters to cast their votes during the midterm elections.

In his email, Curtis called for a midterm election “get-out-the-vote” campaign to “defeat the anti-environment legislators who could pave the way for a conservative agenda that dismantles our rights and our future.” Similarly, the EPA’s largest union, AFGE Council 238, which called the court’s decision a “colossal mistake,” urged people to “demand climate justice” from their elected representatives.

“Without meaningful legislative progress in the coming months… the country will fall far short of its international pledges, which, given the scale of American emissions, will make it almost impossible for the world as a whole to fulfill its already unlikely targets,” writes David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times. “If Republicans win control of Congress in the November midterms, then the window on the prospect of such legislation may be shut for at least a few years.”

The bottom line is that the ruling, while disheartening (and to the environment and public health, even dangerous), is not a death knell for climate action. Like pro-choice supporters disappointed by the court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, those who are concerned about the court’s EPA ruling could use this moment as a rallying cry to step up climate action. If it weren’t already abundantly clear, the Supreme Court—or rather, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court—has underscored that a fundamental part of climate action would be going to the polls during this year’s midterm elections. Ensuring a healthy environment for ourselves, our families and our fellow Earthlings—for this and future generations—means getting involved in the political process, and that means voting. Voting also means getting the right to complain. So the next time you hear someone grumbling about the “supremely stupid” Supreme Court decision, ask them: “Are you voting on November 8?”

###

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Take action…

President Biden: Declare a climate emergency

“Climate change is here, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. The recent Supreme Court decision limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate coal- and gas-fired power plants makes it abundantly clear that President Biden must declare a climate emergency,” says the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Officially declaring the climate crisis a national emergency would unlock the tools needed to steer the economy away from fossil-fueled climate catastrophe toward a sustainable, just future. Biden needs to hear from you.”

Urge President Biden to finally declare a climate emergency. 

Cause for concern…

Fail: Biden’s offshore drilling plan

“The Biden administration announced its plan for oil and gas drilling off the coasts of the United States, closing off the possibility of new leases in the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans but potentially allowing new lease sales in both the Gulf of Mexico and in Cook Inlet in Alaska,” reports Lisa Friedman for the New York Times. “The five-year plan for America’s coastal waters, required by law, risks angering both the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists.”

“The Biden administration had an opportunity to meet the moment on climate and end new offshore oil leasing,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, an environmental organization. He called the new plan’s option to include lease sales “a failure of climate leadership.”

Round of applause…

Gov. Newsom signs nation’s most far-reaching law phasing out single-use plastics

“California has passed an ambitious law to significantly reduce single-use plastics, becoming the first state in the U.S. to approve such sweeping restrictions,” reports Dani Anguiano for the Guardian. “Under the new law, which California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed on [June 30], the state will have to ensure a 25 percent drop in single-use plastic by 2032. It also requires that at least 30 percent of plastic items sold or bought in California are recyclable by 2028, and establishes a plastic pollution mitigation fund.”

ICYMI…

Can eating organic help prevent Parkinson’s Disease?

“Because fruits, vegetables and cereals harvested from organic crops have been treated with natural and synthetic pesticides, which are less likely to cause health problems, they are the perfect alternative to conventionally grown produce. Natural and synthetic pesticides are not as toxic as paraquat or glyphosate and include copper hydroxide, horticultural vinegar, corn gluten, neem and vitamin D3. Furthermore, organic products usually have more nutrients, such as antioxidants. People with allergies to foods, chemicals or preservatives can greatly benefit from such healthy food sources. They may even notice that their symptoms alleviate or go away when they eat exclusively organic food.”

—EFL contributor Miguel Leyva, “Can Eating Organic Help Prevent Parkinson’s Disease?” (New Europe, February 15, 2022)

Parting thought…

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

A scientist went against the grain on her industry’s rule against anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals—here’s what she discovered.

By Catherine Raven, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

This excerpt is from Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Copyright © 2021 by the author and reprinted with permission of Spiegel & Grau, LLC. It was adapted for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Editor’s note: At 15, Catherine Raven left home and headed west to work as a national park ranger. She later earned a PhD in biology and built an off-the-grid house on an isolated plot of land in Montana, making a living by remote teaching and leading field classes in Yellowstone National Park. One day, she noticed that the wild fox who had been showing up on her property was now appearing every day at 4:15 p.m. One day she brought a camping chair outside and sat just feet away from him. And then she began to read to him from The Little Prince. Her memoir about the relationship that developed between them, Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, is the winner of the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

For 12 consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Opening a book, I pretended to read. Nothing but 2 meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. Someone may have been watching us—a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa—but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the thirteenth day, at around 3:30 and no later than 4 p.m., I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show.

Two miles up a gravel road in an isolated mountain valley and 60 miles from the nearest city, the cottage was not an appropriate arrangement for a girl on her own. My street was unnamed, so I didn’t have an address. Living in this remote spot left me without access to reasonable employment. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place.

I had purchased this land three years earlier. Until then I had been living up valley, renting a cabin that the owner had “winterized,” in the sense that if I wore a down parka and mukluks to bed, I wouldn’t succumb to frostbite overnight. That was what I could afford with the money I’d earned guiding backcountry hikers and teaching field classes part-time. When a university offered me a one-year research position, you might think I would have jumped at the chance to leave. Not just because I was dodging icicles when entering the shower, but because riding the postdoc train was the next logical step for a biologist. But I didn’t jump. I made the university wait until after I had bought this land. Then I accepted and rented a speck of a dormitory room at the university, 130 miles away. Every weekend, through snowstorms and over icy roads, I drove back here to camp. Perching on a small boulder, listening to my propane stove hissing and the pinging sound of grasshoppers flying headfirst into my tent’s taut surface, I felt like I was part of my land. I had never felt part of anything before. When the university position ended, I camped full-time while arranging for contractors to develop the land and build the cottage.

Outside the cottage, from where I sat waiting for the fox, the view was beautiful. Few structures marred my valley; full rainbows were common. The ends of the rainbows touched down in the rolling fields below me, no place green enough to hide a leprechaun but a fair swap for living with rattlers. Still, I was torn. Even a full double rainbow couldn’t give me what a city could: a chance to interact with people, immerse myself in culture, and find a real job to keep me so busy doing responsible work that I wouldn’t have time for chasing a fox down a hole. I had sacrificed plenty to earn my PhD in biology: I had slept in abandoned buildings and mopped floors at the university. In exchange for which I had learned that the scientific method is the foundation for knowledge and that wild foxes do not have personalities.

When Fox padded toward me, a flute was playing a faint, hypnotic melody like the Pied Piper’s song in my favorite fairy tale. You remember: a colorfully dressed stranger appears in town, enticing children with his music to a land of alpine lakes and snowy peaks. When the fox curled up beside me and squinted, I opened my book. The music was still playing. No, it wasn’t the Pied Piper at all. It was just a bird—a faraway thrush.

…

The next day, while waiting for Fox’s 4:15 appearance, I thought about our upcoming milestone: 15 consecutive days spent reading together—six months in fox time. Many foxes had visited before him; some had been born a minute’s walk from my back door. All of them remained furtive. Against all odds, and over several months, Fox and I had created a relationship by carefully navigating a series of sundry and haphazard events. We had achieved something worth celebrating. But how to celebrate?

I decided to ditch him.

I poured coffee grounds from a red can into a pot of boiling water, waited to decant cowboy coffee, and thought about how to lose the fox. Maybe he wouldn’t come by anymore. I opened the door of the fridge. “Have I mistaken a coincidence for a commitment?”

The refrigerator had no answer and very little food. But it gave me an idea. I drew up a list of grocery items and enough chores to keep me busy until long after 4:15 p.m. and headed out. The supermarket was in a small town thirty miles down valley, and I had to drive with my blue southern sky behind me. Ahead, black-bottomed clouds with white faces chased each other into the eastern mountains. Below, in the revolving shade, Angus cattle, lambing ewes, and rough horses conspired to render each passing mile indistinguishable from the one before. Usually, I tracked my location counting bends in the snaky river, my time watching the clouds shift, and my fortune spotting golden eagles. (Seven was my record; four earned a journal entry.) Not today.

Now that I was free to be anywhere I wanted at 4:15 p.m., I returned to my mercurial habits and drove too fast to tally eagles. Imagine a straight open road with no potholes and not another rig in sight. Shifting into fifth gear, I straddled the centerline to correct the bevel toward the borrow pit and accelerated into triple digits. Never mind the adjective, I was mercury: quicksilver, Hg, hydrargyrum, ore of cinnabar, resistant to herding, incapable of assuming a fixed form. The steering wheel vibrated in agreement.

The privilege of consorting with a fox cost more than I had already paid. The previous week, while I was in town collecting my groceries, I got a wild hair to stop at the gym. The only person lifting weights was Bill, a scientist whom I had worked with in the park service. I mentioned that a fox “might” be visiting me. “As long as you’re not anthropomorphizing,” he responded. Six words and a wink left me mortified, and I slunk away. Anthropomorphism describes the unacceptable act of humanizing animals, imagining that they have qualities only people should have, and admitting foxes into your social circle. Anyone could get away with humanizing animals they owned—horses, hawks, or even leashed skunks. But for someone like me, teaching natural history, anthropomorphizing wild animals was corny and very uncool.

You don’t need much imagination to see that society has bulldozed a gorge between humans and wild, unboxed animals, and it’s far too wide and deep for anyone who isn’t foolhardy to risk the crossing. As for making yourself unpopular, you might as well show up to a university lecture wearing Christopher Robin shorts and white bobby socks as be accused of anthropomorphism. Only Winnie-the-Pooh would associate with you.

Why suffer such humiliation? Better to stay on your own side of the gorge. As for me, I was bushed from climbing in, crossing over, and climbing out so many times. Sometimes, I wasn’t climbing in and out so much as falling. Was I imagining Fox’s personality? My notion of anthropomorphism kept changing as I spent time with him. At this point, at the beginning of our relationship, I was mostly overcome with curiosity.

Catherine Raven is a former national park ranger at Glacier, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Voyageurs, and Yellowstone national parks. She earned a PhD in biology from Montana State University, holds degrees in zoology and botany from the University of Montana, and is a member of American Mensa and Sigma Xi. Her natural history essays have appeared in American Scientist, Mensa Journal, and Montana Magazine.

Take action…

Protect wild foxes in the United Kingdom from illegal hunting

Keep the Ban: “At least 84 percent of the U.K. population are in favor of fox hunting being illegal and yet there were attempts to weaken the act. The Hunting Act of 2004, which banned fox hunting, needs strengthening to ensure people are discouraged from participating in illegal hunting, and for those caught hunting, the penalty and arrest need to be more severe. We would like to see section 6 of the Act to be amended to add a provision for a prison sentence of up to six months for illegal hunting. Additionally, there should be a ‘reckless’ clause that will make it an offense for anyone to ‘cause or permit’ one or more dogs to seek out, chase, injure or kill a wild mammal. The widespread flouting of the ban continues to this day and these measures along with several other reforms could ensure wildlife is adequately protected.”

Urge U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to strengthen the 2004 Hunting Act to protect wild foxes.

Cause for concern…

The collapse of a major Atlantic current would cause worldwide disasters

“A shutdown of a major current in the Atlantic Ocean would rapidly transform wind, temperature, and precipitation patterns across the whole globe, according to new research,” reports Lauren Leffer for Gizmodo. “The current is already slowing, likely at least in part because of human-caused climate change. Now, scientists have found that, if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapses completely, there would be never-before-predicted impacts, according to a study published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change.”

“The northern Pacific Ocean would cool. Patches of the Northern Hemisphere would get drier, while patches of the South become wetter,” writes Leffer. “Atmospheric pressure would shift to be much higher over Eurasia and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Trade winds from the north would move farther south and get stronger. Other winds elsewhere would also intensify. Antarctic ice could melt even faster. In short: all the basics about the planet we know and love get thrown way out of whack. No corner of Earth is forecast to be unaffected by an AMOC collapse in the new research.”

Letter to the editor…

Dear Earth | Food | Life,

Last week, thanks to the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts and the Santa Barbara County Food Action Network, I was able to join the Santa Barbara Culinary Experience. There, I had the honor of speaking with Congressmember Salud Carbajal, truly one of the food and labor warriors in Congress who’s working across party lines to help farmers, workers, and eaters alike.

Whether or not the politicians we voted for are the ones who end up representing us, he said that the communication between citizens and our elected officials is vital. Rep. Carbajal told me that the stories he hears from his constituents really matter, and he takes them seriously. A lot of folks might think it’s old-fashioned to write, email, or call your representatives, senators, and governors, but it really makes a difference. Do it right now—here’s a link to contact your elected officials.

And like many of us in the food system, Rep. Carbajal has also been devoting energy and thought to the Farm Bill. Yes, it’s a messy and complicated piece of legislation. It also holds massive potential to really help farmers, eaters, and businesses in the food and agriculture sectors to do things differently. One place to start is by incorporating food security and food sovereignty more strongly into the Farm Bill. I’m invigorated by an idea I’ve heard from Ricardo Salvador of the Union of Concerned Scientists, chef Andrew Zimmern, and others: A coordinated national food policy, or even a Secretary of Food or a Food and Farm Bill to unify our national and international approaches to food.

Dani Nierenberg
President
Food Tank
May 26, 2022

ICYMI…

Thinking about chickens differently

Though chickens are polygamous, mating with more than one member of the opposite sex, individual birds are attracted to each other. They not only “breed”; but they also form bonds, clucking endearments to one another throughout the day. A rooster does a courtly dance for his special hens in which he “skitters sideways and opens his wing feathers downward like Japanese fans,” according to Rick and Gail Luttmann’s book “Chickens in Your Backyard.” A man once told me, “When I was a young man I worked on a chicken farm, and one of the most amazing things about those chickens was that they would actually choose each other and refuse to mate with anyone else.”

Sadly, the eggs of these parent flocks are snatched away and sent to mechanical incubators, so the parents never see their chicks. “Breeder” roosters and hens are routinely culled for low fertility, and also because “if a particular male becomes unable to mate, his matching females will not accept another male until he is removed,” explains the book “Commercial Chicken Meat and Egg Production.”

Little more than a year later, the parents who have survived their miserable life are sent to slaughter just like the chicks they never got to see, raise or protect, as they would otherwise have chosen to do if they were free.

—EFL contributor Karen Davis, “On International Respect for Chickens Day, Try Thinking About Them Differently” (Countercurrents, April 26, 2022)

Parting thought…

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?” —Jonathan Safran Foer, “Eating Animals”

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

How can we justify slaughtering cows to repair our hearts, when the consumption of cows is what weakens our hearts?

By Maureen Medina, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

The demand for bovine heart valves to treat cardiovascular disease—the top global killer—is rising, and there is a cruel irony—with which I have firsthand experience—in how the cattle industry has become both the problem and the solution. We rely on medical treatments procured from cows to treat cardiovascular disease in humans, which is largely caused by our consumption of cows and other animals (red meat).

Brilliant marketing campaigns by the cattle industry have shielded us from the ugly truth all along: the cattle industry is only interested in making profits at the cost of our health and well-being and the lives of other animals.

The cattle industry profits from government-funded exploitation of cows under the guise of nutrition and medicine. Corporate giants in the food industry, such as Cargill and Tyson Foods, and medical technology giants, such as Edwards Lifesciences, all profit from the cattle they slaughter for their meat, dairy and tissue.

The government subsidies that the cattle industry receives prove to be dangerous for our health while profiting the corporate subsidy recipients. “‘[C]urrent federal agricultural subsidies focus on financing production of food commodities, a large portion of which are converted into high-fat meat and dairy products’ and other items that increase the risk for cardiometabolic risks in American adults,” stated the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, while quoting from a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University.

Yet “the U.S. government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only… $17 million… each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables,” according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley paper.

It’s a vicious cycle that harms people and animals, and benefits profit-driven corporations. On one side, big agribusiness is slaughtering cows for meat and dairy—foods that researchers have linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. On the other side, medical corporations are profiting from producing bovine heart valves.

Cargill, which is one of the largest beef processors in North America and earned $134.4 billion in 2021, has been dubbed “the worst company in the world” by environmental organization Mighty Earth for its unethical and unsustainable business practices and the environmental damage it has caused. In addition to perpetuating antibiotic resistance, Cargill has repeatedly been the source of multiple outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli, over the years, and is responsible for distributing millions of pounds of contaminated poultry and beef.

Tyson Foods is the world’s second-largest meat processor and one of four companies that control more than 80 percent of beef processing in the United States. In 2020, it earned about $43.2 billion, which is mostly attributed to its sale of beef. In 2015, Tyson Foods recalled approximately 16,000 pounds of ground beef products that may have been contaminated with E. coli and had to recall 8,955,296 pounds of chicken products due to potential contamination of listeria in 2021.

Edwards Lifesciences, with reported revenue of $4.4 billion in 2020, receives pig hearts and cow tissue daily and has federal approval to sell cow-based valves in the United States. It typically takes the pericardium from three cows to create one heart valve. The company has imported more than 100,000 batches of bovine tissue from Australia since 2020. Edwards Lifesciences predicts that “the global surgical structural heart market opportunity will reach $2 billion by 2028.”

In 2012, I received a 23 mm bovine valve from Edwards Lifesciences to replace my pulmonary valve.

At only 23 years of age, I had my second open-heart surgery. My sternum was cut and spread open, my heart muscle was exposed, my heart was stopped while a machine operated in its place, and my pulmonary valve was replaced with bovine tissue. This was the most extreme experience I have ever endured, yet, according to one estimate, the prevalence of heart valve surgery will increase from 290,000 to 890,000 between 2003 and 2050.

I was given the option of a mechanical heart valve but was told that, if I did, I would require anticoagulants for the rest of my life to prevent blood clotting; the other option was getting a biological valve, which was encouraged. Though the risks of clotting in biological valves are downplayed, especially in comparison to the risks associated with mechanical valves, my cardiologists from New York-Presbyterian/Cornell Medical Center have urged me—and others who have undergone similar procedures—to take blood thinners daily for the rest of our lives. With biological valves, which are associated with easy intraoperative handling and minimal suture line bleeding, there is a risk of degradation after 15-20 years due to calcification or inflammation; the course of action if that happens is to replace the valve once it expires.

I put my fate entirely in the doctors’ hands—as most people do—and, desperate to alleviate my symptoms rather than add to them, I chose to get a biological valve made from bovine tissue.

It took almost a year to be operated on, yet no preventative measures were taken or recommended to alleviate my pain. I begged for surgery because I thought it was the only way. But was it?

While many conditions (like mine) are congenital, we can still argue about nature versus nurture.

Research presented by the European Society of Cardiology found that eating greater amounts of red and processed meat is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and death. According to a study conducted by the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, which involved more than 1.4 million people whose health was tracked for 30 years, for every 1.76 ounces of unprocessed red meat consumed per day, the risk of coronary heart disease increased by 9 percent. Heart disease claims approximately 17.9 million lives worldwide annually.

On condition of anonymity, one nurse shared with me, “Healthy people don’t make money.”

“More than 70 percent of chronic illnesses [including heart failure] can be prevented or reversed with a whole-food, plant-based dietary lifestyle,” according to the Plantrician Project. Yet, “the market for replacement heart valves is growing at a rate of about 13 percent every year globally and demand outstrips supply,” according to Stuff, a New Zealand-based news website.

There are about 10.4 million beef and dairy cattle in New Zealand, and the United States constitutes the biggest market for the pericardia extracted from these animals. One source reportedly refused to divulge to Stuff the number of cow pericardia extracted and sold per year, citing “commercial reasons.”

According to new research on the bovine pericardial market, “the market is expected to reach… $4,134.4 million by 2027 from… $1,959.7 million in 2019; it is estimated to grow at a… [compound annual growth rate (CAGR)] of 9.9 percent from 2020 to 2027.”

“[One] hurdle we cannot ignore is that there is no profit in health, while there are immense profits derived from disease; hence, the U.S. has created a ‘disease and disability’ care system, rather than a true ‘health’ care system built on the foundational pillar of prevention,” pointed out the Plantrician Project.

How can we justify slaughtering cows to repair our hearts, when the consumption of cows is what weakens our hearts? While discerning between farming corporations and medical corporations within the cattle industry, one must ask: Is there a difference?

For the good of human health, as well as the health of the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants (especially cows), it is important for each person to listen to their own body, and that they (in tandem with physicians) stay informed and explore preventative measures.

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Maureen Medina is the founder of Leave in Peace and a campaign strategist and organizer for Slaughter Free NYC. In alignment with the idea that none of us are free unless all of us are free, Maureen hopes to inspire the pursuit of collective liberation through her writing. Find Maureen’s work on Linktree.

Take action…

​​​​The worst company in the world: Cargill

“Numerous corporations are guilty of trashing nature. Major chocolate manufacturers, countless palm oil producers and global fast-food chains are all driving the decline of the world’s forests, savannas and other ecosystems. Yet when it comes to environmental destruction, Cargill dwarfs all the rest: If other corporations are piranhas, Cargill is a great white shark,” says Rainforest Rescue, a nonprofit environmental group based in Hamburg, Germany. “The U.S.-based multinational has a long and sordid history of duplicity, deception and destruction that earned it the title “worst company in the world” in a report by the NGO Mighty Earth. The report describes in detail how Cargill profits from the destruction of the environment and the exploitation of people and how it blocks urgently needed changes.

“In Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, Cargill is involved in the wholesale destruction of the Amazon, Grand Chaco and Cerrado ecosystems for the production of soy and beef,” the group states. “In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, Cargill buys cocoa that has been illegally grown in protected areas and national parks. The company also does not seem to have a problem with buying cocoa that was produced using child labor. In Indonesia and Malaysia, Cargill buys palm oil from companies that illegally clear rainforests and are involved in child and forced labor. Cargill ignores those issues: profits come before ethics.”

Tell McDonald’s, Burger King, Walmart and Unilever to drop Cargill from their supply chains.

Cause for concern…

Ship pollution is rising as the U.S. waits for world leaders to act

“As sales of electric cars increase and renewable energy proliferates, only a few shippers have begun to try zero-emission fuels and wind-propulsion technology,” reports Anna Phillips for the Washington Post. “Efforts to cut carbon emissions through international regulations have met resistance from shipbuilders, oil companies and countries aligned with the handful of major shippers dominating the industry.”

“On [June 6], the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency that regulates international shipping, brought together officials from more than 100 countries for a virtual meeting to discuss whether to raise their collective climate ambition. But the shipping and fossil fuel industries wield considerable influence in these negotiations: Financing for the IMO’s green ships initiative, for example, comes from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter.”

Round of applause…

Reversing Trump, EPA will restore Tribes’ and states’ power to oppose pipelines

On June 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule restoring power to Tribes and states seeking to oppose pipeline projects on the grounds that such projects threaten waterways and wetlands, reversing a contentious Trump-era policy that imposed strict deadlines and limited reviews.

“For 50 years, the Clean Water Act has protected water resources that are essential to thriving communities, vibrant ecosystems, and sustainable economic growth,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “EPA’s proposed rule builds on this foundation by empowering states, territories, and Tribes to use Congressionally granted authority to protect precious water resources while supporting much-needed infrastructure projects that create jobs and bolster our economy.”

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said, “The Clean Water Act quite clearly gives states, territories, and Tribes the ability to protect their water quality when projects are permitted or licensed.”

Letter to the editor…

The end of bear bile farming in Vietnam

Dear Earth | Food | Life,

I am writing to you about great news in the animal welfare and biodiversity area: Animals Asia is ending bear bile farming in Vietnam. We are presenting the last bear sanctuary in the country to save the last remaining 310 bears from farms.

After we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Vietnamese Government in 1997, bear bile farming was declared illegal in the country; and since then, we have been rescuing the remaining bears on bile farms. But our current bear rescue center in Tam Dao is now approaching its full capacity; therefore, we are about to break ground for a new sanctuary in Bach Ma. 

This 12-hectare sanctuary will be home to all rescued bears. Once the last bear is saved, this cruelty will be history for Vietnam and set a precedent for other countries in the region to follow. This is a monumental step in biodiversity since this cruel practice has been pushing moon and sun bears towards extinction in the country and is listed as “vulnerable to extinction” by International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

Best,

Nezahat E. Sevim
Global Head of Media Relations and PR
Animals Asia
May 24, 2022

Parting thought…

“Fish don’t have a three-second memory … in fact, they can be taught how to evade a trap and remember it a year later. Fish can learn from each other, recognize other fish they’ve spent time with previously, know their place within fish social hierarchies, and remember complex spatial maps of their surroundings. There’s even some evidence … that they use tools.” —Joseph Stromberg, “Are fish far more intelligent than we realize?” (Vox)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.