Take Action Tuesday: Speak Up for Animals, Sustainable Food and Small-Scale Farmers

Robin
Egypt is definitely not for the birds: Robins are among the many species of birds that will be captured and killed along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast during their winter migration.

 

 

Reinhard Behrend, Rainforest Rescue: The 14th UN Biodiversity Conference will take place in Egypt in late November. Ironically, while the delegations gather in a luxury resort in Sharm El Sheikh, millions of migratory birds from Europe, on their journey to their winter quarters in Africa, will face a gauntlet of nets, snares, glue traps and loudspeakers playing bird calls that stretches 700 km along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Some of the captured birds are sold alive, but most are plucked and frozen. Songbirds such as robins and nightingales, as well as turtledoves, quail and wild ducks end up on the plates of “gourmets” in dubious restaurants. Some birds of prey such as falcons are sold alive to wealthy “bird lovers” in the Gulf States for their private aviaries.
>>>Tell the Egyptian government to put an end to this heinous crime against nature.

John Gilroy, The Pew Charitable Trusts: Bears Ears National Monument was designated in 2016 to safeguard one of the most significant cultural areas in the United States and to honor tribal nations that have ancestral and contemporary connections to the region. On Dec. 4, 2017, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation significantly reducing the size of the monument and breaking it up into two units. Now the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has drafted land use plans for the new smaller monument, despite active litigation regarding the action to reduce the monument.
>>>Urge BLM to protect Bears Ears’ important cultural, scientific and historic resources.

Real Meals Campaign: Instead of siding with Big Food corporations like Tyson, food service companies like Aramark, Sodexo and Compass Group should support small-scale producers, disenfranchised farmers and fishers and sustainable suppliers to help create a more just and sustainable food system.
>>>Urge Aramark, Sodexo and Compass Group to purchase at least 25 percent of the food they sell on US college campuses from sources that are local, community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane.

PETA: An eyewitness investigation of Hemopet, a canine blood bank in California, found approximately 200 greyhounds bred for and discarded by the racing industry, kept in tiny crates and barren kennels for about 23 hours out of every day so their blood could be repeatedly taken and sold. Some of these inhumane blood banks even masquerade as dog rescues.
>>>Tell the National Greyhound Association to bar its members’ dogs from being held captive in blood banks.

Center for Biological Diversity: Horrible news out of Washington state: Wildlife officials have just issued death warrants for two more wolf packs. Last week, the state authorized the killing of wolves from the Smackout pack and approved taking out the mother and remaining pup from the Togo pack. In September a helicopter sniper gunned down the sole adult male wolf of the Togo pack, pictured above. He was the father of two pups and left behind his mate to fend for them on her own. Now Washington is gunning for her. And since 2012 the state has killed 21 state-endangered wolves—17 of which were killed for the same rancher. Killing wolves is not just cruel and inhumane. It also leads to more conflicts, breaks up wolf families and reduces social tolerance for wolves.
>>>Urge Governor Jay Inslee to bring an immediate halt to the senseless wolf killing.

Environmental Working Group: Bees are dying at alarming rates worldwide—and because bees are responsible for roughly one in every three bites of food we eat, we’re all in trouble. A decade of research has made it clear that neonicotinoid pesticides are highly toxic to bees and are at least partially responsible for the pollinators dying in record numbers. Earlier this year, the EPA finally confirmed this troubling fact. The agency even concluded the benefits of one of the most common uses of neonic treatments, as a coating on soy and corn seed, are questionable for farmers.
>>>Tell the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to require farmers to use these pesticides only when they can prove they need them.

Lacey Kohlmoos, Change.org: There are so many cruelty-free ways to enjoy the world, but Fodor’s, the world’s largest publisher of English language travel and tourism information, has shamelessly decided to promote attractions that exploit and hurt elephants. Elephants don’t do tricks because they “enjoy showing off their skills,” as Fodor’s claims. They do them because they will be hurt if they don’t. The only way to teach wild elephants to paint, play instruments, roll logs and carry people on their back is by torturing them into submission using bullhooks and other cruel methods. This is well-documented, and yet Fodor’s doesn’t mention a thing about this abuse on their website or in their books.
>>>Tell Fodor’s to follow the lead of Lonely Planet by making a commitment to stop promoting elephant rides and shows on their website and in their books.

PETA: Marmosets, which comprise 22 species of New World monkeys, live high up in the canopies of rainforests in social groups composed of up to three generations of family members. They’re highly vocal, communicating with each other in complex, high-pitched calls that convey information about a wide range of emotions and situations. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the largest funder of animal experimentation worldwide—announced that it’s planning to launch “funding opportunities to support centralized infrastructure” for research on these intelligent and curious animals.
>>>Tell NIH to scrap plans to expand the use of marmosets in laboratory experiments and redirect funds to modern, non-animal research methods.

African Wildlife Foundation: Wildlife criminals are driving Africa’s wildlife to extinction. But the RAWR Act can help put an end to the multi-billion dollar wildlife trafficking industry. The act authorizes the US State Department to use rewards for any information leading to the capture and conviction of wildlife criminals. The bill has passed in the House of Representatives and is now before the Senate.
>>>Urge your senator to vote yes on the RAWR act.

Gina Florio, Hello Giggles: Eating tasty, nutritious food doesn’t necessarily mean we’re also eating sustainably. It’s just as important to ask about the sustainability of our eating habits as it is to wonder whether we’re maintaining a balanced diet. Our planet is suffering from the inflated animal agriculture industry, and we’re becoming more dependent on foreign soil for produce than ever before. We need to all take a time-out and ask ourselves how we can do our part to cook and eat in a way that will slow down the deterioration of the planet, rather than speed it up.
>>>Check out these 8 easy ways to eat more sustainably.

Parting thought…

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” — George Bernard Shaw

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature 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.

The EPA Can’t Do Its Job Until There’s a Revolutionary Restructuring

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (credit: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt may have resigned in shame, but the agency still needs to be fixed.

The following op-ed is by Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Insitute.

The Environmental Protection Agency has never been an institution whose primary allegiance was to the public interest. How do I know this? I have the agency’s own words for it. In late 2017 my organization, the Bioscience Resource Project, along with the Center for Media and Democracy, made available a vast trove of documents called the Poison Papers. These documents are two and a half tons of internal minutes, correspondence, reports, unsealed court documents, and more from the chemical industry and its regulators. Many of them originate from the EPA and date back to its inception in 1970.

The papers show many things, but one of them is that the agency has repeatedly overlooked strong evidence that independent chemical toxicity testing was fraudulent. EPA has known that laboratories skewed results in favor of applicants’ products. Sometimes, the agency has actively covered up such fraud.

EPA’s internal procedures for evaluating chemical safety were no better. Staff “cut and pasted” industry text into their reviews, failed to share evidence with external reviewers, and told applicants that products would be approved before applications had been fully evaluated. The agency also adopted reviewing procedures that make it highly unlikely that hazardous products would be identified as such. For example, data evidencing carcinogenic activity in test animals were repeatedly subjected to review and re-review until ways, as one employee wrote, “calculated to impress the uninitiated and the gullible” were found to disregard them. Meanwhile, evidence of non-carcinogenic toxicity was simply ignored. The situation was so bad in its Office of Pesticides that one EPA official accused his superior of having “downright contempt for the health of the American people.”

Having studied the documents as well as the agency itself, I would like to offer a diagnosis and propose some solutions. The inappropriate activities described in the documents are highly noteworthy on several counts. One is that they span a long time period; second, they occur across much of the agency; third, they are extremely diverse, spanning numerous procedural and scientific aspects; and fourth, they are spread across many complicit individuals. In other words, these derelictions do not demonstrate local branches gone rogue nor specific corrupted individuals, nor even specific situations. Rather, they reflect a deep conflict at the agency that is vastly more powerful than its written mandate to protect the public.

To understand why, it is necessary to get inside the head of the EPA. Imagine that zealous action on the part of EPA to protect human health from chemical toxicity or corporate malfeasance will engender strong feedback from the affected corporation, its lobbyists, and its other friends in Washington. The affected parties and its powerful friends will appeal to the president at whose “pleasure” the chief administrator of EPA serves. If that administrator does not have the president’s support for strong action, which he or she likely does not, then the best possible outcome for that agency—to avoid it suffering a damaging and embarrassing public humiliation—is for that evidence to never come to light. It should either be lost or buried, preferably as early in the evaluation process as possible.

This is the primary—unwritten—rule that has guided EPA from the beginning. The rule, known to every agency official, is that every finding of toxicity or corporate malfeasance is an institutional problem. The inevitable result is an institutional culture that regards findings of chemical toxicity as mistakes and aberrations.

The following represent some simple suggestions that, taking the above into account, would vastly improve the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency.

First, divide EPA into two agencies. One half should be responsible for lawmaking and the other for enforcement. This removes what is at present a confusion of responsibilities in which the rule makers at EPA are incentivized to create loopholes so that no successful prosecutions will occur and result in conflicts such as described above.

Secondly, the leaders of each of these separate agencies should be responsible to Congress and not, as EPA’s chief administrator is now, to the president. The reason is that presently EPA can enforce environmental laws only if the president agrees. Under such circumstances the agency can never be a better environmental and health advocate than the person in the White House. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House the danger of this should be immediately clear.

The third proposal is to protect and reward whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are potential assets to society. They are individuals courageous enough and independent enough to bring the misdeeds of colleagues and other officials to public attention. Supposing they can prove that the performance of their colleagues is truly inappropriate or illegal, then whistleblowers should be positively rewarded, which at present they are not.

Public health and the environment need effective and independent advocates, for the sake of the climate, the oceans, and communities. These changes can make EPA into an agency that truly advocates for them, rather than one that merely pretends to act in their interest.

Jonathan R. Latham, PhD, is the co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, director of the Poison Papers Project, and editor of the Independent Science News website. He holds a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology.

Climate Change Has Unleashed a Global Wave of Marine Invasions That Could Threaten Our Food Supply

Rising temperatures are pushing species into new territory, which could endanger fisheries around the world.

by Amy McDermott

Gloomy octopuses used to blend in. They were just another cephalopod, drab-gray and medium-bodied, living in the ocean off east-central Australia—until a few decades ago, when the octopuses started to spread.

They crept south, establishing populations down Australia’s East Coast, a climate change hotspot where seawater temperatures are rising almost four times faster than the global average. Gloomies love the heat—and chowing down on shellfish. If the newcomers’ appetites disrupt existing fisheries, researchers say, it could spell trouble.

In Australia and around the world, ocean animals are relocating because of climate change, often with consequences for fisheries. Gloomy octopuses are just one of many marine species on the move. Their expansion is a harbinger of what’s to come in places warming more slowly than Australia. Forget blending in: Climate consequences have arrived.

Gloomy octopuses have expanded down the East Coast of Australia in recent years. Above, one recovers after genetic sampling in Cape Conran, Australia. (image credit: Colin Silvey)

Lives in Motion

It happened fast.

Named for their ghostly white eyes, gloomy octopuses spread steadily south in the last two decades, said fisheries scientist Brad Moore of the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Gloomies are naturally found in central-eastern Australia, but appeared hundreds of miles south in Victoria after 2000, and even further down, off the island of Tasmania, in 2006. Three years later, Moore said, the species was included in Tasmania’s fisheries guidebook.

Recreational fishermen and divers also noticed gloomies out of place, and reported sightings as part of an Australian citizen science project called Redmap, which tracks marine species on the move.

“People send in photo observations,” said marine ecologist Gretta Pecl, who started Redmap as part of her research at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. “We get an early indication of what species might be shifting, and then we initiate a more targeted research study.”

In the gloomy’s case, commercial fishermen and citizen scientist observations tipped off Pecl’s team, and inspired a forthcoming genetic study, led by marine biologist Jorge Ramos, which confirms a rapid and recent expansion south.

Tentacled Tides

Gloomies can thank climate change for their new digs. Global warming affects ocean currents, including one that runs down the East Coast of Australia. The East Australian Current has extended farther and farther south over the last 50 years.

“We believe it’s moving species into Tasmanian waters,” Ramos said. Warm, strong flows act like a southerly conveyor belt for marine creatures, including the octopuses.

While gloomies are thriving, their arrival in Tasmania has some experts worried. Abalone and rock lobster are the two largest commercial wild fisheries for the island, making up more than 75 percent of landings by weight. Both could suffer, Ramos said, if the octopus eats too many of the shellfish. Abalone and oysters are already struggling through marine heat waves, caused by the growing warm current. Another problem is the last thing they need.

A gloomy octopus rests after scientist Jorge Ramos collected a small tissue sample from one of its arms for genetic analysis. Octopuses can regrow lost limbs, “so the piece of arm will grow back,” Ramos said. (image credit: Colin Silvey)

Not everyone is so worried. Craig Hardy is an octopus fisherman in Stanley, Tasmania, where he’s seen gloomies off the island’s northern tip for about 10 years—as long as he’s been fishing up there. Hardy was the first to hunt octopus in the area, he said, and suspects the gloomies were around all along; people just hadn’t seen them.

That’s possible, Ramos agreed, but he thinks the current swept more octopuses down in the last decade. Based on his forthcoming genetic work, Ramos would “guess the species was there, but in low numbers, and now it’s becoming more common.”

Octopus fishing is decent business in Tasmania. After abalone and lobster, it accounts for 11 percent of remaining landings by weight. Fishermen like Hardy haven’t historically caught gloomies. Most of their catch is a smaller, native species. But the newcomer is becoming an attractive target, Hardy said, because of its size. Gloomies are common in markets on the mainland up north, and Hardy’s found them “a good species to sell.”

The gloomy octopus isn’t the only stranger in Tasmanian waters. The East Australian Current has washed more than 70 species south in recent years. Some, like the long-spined sea urchin, have wrought havoc upon arrival. Others have been less damaging, but they all bring new considerations. Critters will keep coming down the coast in the next 50 years, fisheries scientist Moore expects, making Tasmania’s coast more like the eastern mainland’s as time goes by.

Australia and its gloomy octopus are a parable of things to come in many slower-warming places. Along the West Coast of North America, for example, some fish could shift more than 900 miles this century under a high emissions scenario. Even if change hasn’t come yet, “there’s a lot of evidence to say things will change,” Moore said. “It’s about getting ready.”

***

Amy McDermott is a science writer and web editor at Oceana, where she covers marine conservation. Previously, her work has appeared in Grist, Discover and The Atlantic, among others. Follow her on Twitter @amygmcdermott.

Top image credit: Colin Silvey

This article is part of a content partnership between Oceana and Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.