The Meat Industry Has Created a False Dichotomy That Pits People Against Animals

Image: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media

Factory farms are harmful to animals, the environment, local communities, and public health. We need a more logical and just food system.

By Vicky Bond, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

It’s a common narrative that factory farming—despite animal cruelty, environmental destruction, and human health impacts—has net positives that make it an important part of society, especially in rural America. It provides affordable meat to our populations, creates jobs in small towns, stimulates local economies, and helps families prosper.

This narrative has made it easy for the meat industry to create a false dichotomy that pits people against animals: “Do you care more about a pig than my family’s livelihood?” 

It’s now been decades with factory farming as the dominant industry, but have rural communities actually experienced their purported economic benefits? Has factory farming made life easier for the people in small towns?

A 2022 report by Food and Water Watch suggests the opposite. The report takes pig farms in Iowa as a case study of how our corporate-controlled food systems are failing environments, animals, and communities.

Until the late 20th century, most pigs were raised for food on family farms. But, a combination of government policies in the 1970s and grain price crashes in the 1980s resulted in Iowa losing almost 90% of its pig farms over three decades as small-town farmers struggled to stay economically viable.

Meanwhile, across the state, the behemoth of controlled animal feeding operations—facilities that raise thousands of animals in extreme confinement to maximize production and profit—began to rise.

These factory farms—operated by multibillion-dollar corporations like Smithfield and JBS—now dominate the meat market. These facilities control the food going into our restaurants, like Dunkin Donuts, Sonic, Bob Evans, Ingles Market, and Cracker Barrel, as well as our schools, hospitals, and stadiums from food service providers like Sodexo and Compass Group.

In 1980, the top four pig farm firms slaughtered one out of every three U.S. pigs. That market share has now doubled. At the local level, Food and Water Watch found that these companies have an even tighter grip on the market, with the top four firms slaughtering 9 of 10 Iowa pigs between 2004 and 2011. Factory farms use this dominance to set the terms for pig prices, preventing fair pricing, contributing to market volatility, and pushing down the real price of pigs.

The fact that these enormous corporate firms and their equally enormous factory farms control the market is irrefutable. But are they at least providing more jobs on the ground for the community? Despite years of claiming the contrary, the answer is straightforward: absolutely not.

The study found that between 1982 and 2017, real median household income and total wage jobs declined in the counties that sold the most pigs and had the largest farms. The population also took a steep drop, at twice the rate of Iowa’s more rural counties. Job losses, too, were commonplace. Statewide, total farm employment dropped 44% between 1982 and 2017—the boom years for factory farming.

The results of this study are clear: Factory farming is bad for the economy, driving up the price of pigs without returning profits to local farmers. It puts local farms out of business and results in net job loss. Families suffer hardship as incomes decline, and property values diminish due to rampant pollution from factory farms.

On top of this, it ensures that factory-farmed pigs grow up and die in misery, while our climate catastrophe worsens, human health deteriorates, and local communities suffer.

Not only does meat consumption increase the risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia, and more, the meat industry’s routine use of antibiotics to protect their bottom line results in antibiotic resistance in both farmed animals and the people who eat them.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections—a number that could soar to 10 million by 2050. Who are factory farms good for? Large corporations, which continue to sell us the lie that we need them.

Corporate factory farms threaten that, if they can’t maintain their monopoly over the industry, the small towns they operate in will lose jobs and economic prosperity. This is simply misinformation. Factory farms are not good for anyone, especially local communities that exist in their shadows.

But, not all hope is lost. When we advocate for small farmers using more sustainable agriculture, plant-based agriculture, and cell-based technology, new vistas open up for a more just food system. 

This food system would be better for our planet, allowing us to recover from years of agriculture-driven pollution and deforestation, and good for people, too. Smaller farms that treat animals humanely could prosper. Food and agriculture projects could be led by and for the people in their communities. 

Let’s demolish the boxing ring the meat industry built—one that positions people and animals as opponents, instructing us to support one side by brutalizing the other. But factory farming—and its corporate chokehold on rural communities—is just as brutal to humans as it is to animals.

We need to put pigs and people back where they belong—on the same side.

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Vicky Bond is a veterinary surgeon, animal welfare scientist, and the president of The Humane League.

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.

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

An Entire Decade of Benefits Denial for Vets After Toxic Chemical Exposure?

American veterans poisoned at Camp Lejeune can finally seek justice, thanks to a new law.

By Jonathan Sharp, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

Camp Lejeune, a military base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was established in 1942 to train future Marines for World War II. While it is known as the home of “Expeditionary Forces in Readiness,” the facility also has a long history of contamination with toxic chemicals such as perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride, trichloroethylene, and benzene. In 1982, volatile organic compounds—gasses released by these solvents—were found at Camp Lejeune.

Furthermore, since 1966, military firefighters and trainees have been using the fire suppressant known as Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF) to extinguish jet fuel and petroleum fires, which only worsened pollution. This firefighting foam contains PFAS, a group of over 5,000 dangerous substances often dubbed “forever chemicals,” in a concentration of up to 98 percent. With each use, AFFF contaminates the environment with these chemicals. Some take over a thousand years to break down, hence their nickname.

The highest PFAS level at Camp Lejeune was 170,000 parts per trillion, which exceeds the safe exposure limit by 2,450 times. Currently, at least 14 sites of Camp Lejeune where these chemicals lurk, despite the relentless cleanup endeavors of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy. Because PFAS are extremely difficult to remove from the environment, the military base is expected to be completely safe within a few decades.

In 1985, the greatest trichloroethylene level was 280 times over the safe exposure limit, whereas the highest perchloroethylene level eclipsed the safe exposure limit by 43 times. The dry-cleaning firm ABC One-Hour Cleaners was responsible for perchloroethylene contamination. As for the other industrial solvents, they ended up polluting Camp Lejeune as a result of the military recklessly using these chemicals to clean weapons and equipment.

Exposure to toxic chemicals may cause debilitating health problems, including liver cancer, renal toxicity, prostate cancer, leukemia, female infertility, pancreatic cancer, and scleroderma. Between 1953 and 1987, roughly one million people lived at Camp Lejeune, and all had a high risk of developing severe disease. Until recently, veterans affected by toxic exposure could only receive benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Today, due to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, they can also obtain financial compensation from the U.S. government.

VA Keeps Rejection Rate High for Camp Lejeune Vets

The VA had been aware of the horrific diseases veterans might contract at Camp Lejeune since the beginning. Still, it was only in 2012 that Congress passed the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act. This comprehensive, bipartisan legislative package was meant to grant veterans and family members who lived at the military base access to better healthcare, education, housing, and memorial services, as well as disability, social security, and indemnity compensation.

A decade ago, veterans were able to file disability compensation claims for health problems stemming from toxic exposure at military bases. Nevertheless, the VA began using alleged “subject matter experts” in 2012 to review these cases. Recently, the fact that these “experts” were nothing but general and preventive doctors with no proper expertise in assessing the complex afflictions Camp Lejeune veterans were struggling with came to light. Due to their lack of knowledge, the claim approval rate abruptly plummeted from 25 percent to only 5 percent.

In 2017, the VA deemed eight diseases as presumptive conditions resulting from Camp Lejeune’s toxic contamination, slightly increasing the claim approval rate to roughly 17 percent over the last decade. Nonetheless, this is still below the former average, and thousands of veterans suffering from terrible diseases are regularly denied the compensation and healthcare services they deserve. While veterans acknowledged the significance of this minor improvement, they believed the list should include a broader range of health problems.

Currently, the VA’s list of health issues related to toxic exposure at Camp Lejeune includes the eight presumptive conditions, but also 15 conditions for which veterans and family members will receive financial compensation to cover the costs of their healthcare and treatment. Filing a claim for VA disability compensation as a Camp Lejeune veteran is significant. After a medical evaluation, those assigned a 100 percent disability rating will receive monthly compensation of over $3,000. Additionally, veterans impacted by toxic exposure can now obtain financial compensation from the U.S. government due to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act.

How the Camp Lejeune Justice Act 2022 Can Help Veterans Impacted by Toxic Exposure

On March 26, 2021, Representative Matt Cartwright (D-PA) introduced the Camp Lejeune Justice Act bill. The goal of the bill is to allow veterans, military families, and civilians who lived at the military installation between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987, for at least one month to seek reparations outside the Department of Veterans Affairs. Furthermore, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act prohibits the U.S. government from asserting immunity from litigation in response to the claims filed by toxic exposure victims.

“When we send our men and women overseas, we make a promise to care for them when they come home. We failed our veterans […], and it is up to us to make it right. Our bipartisan bill […] eliminates burdensome red tape to ensure that those exposed to toxic chemicals, including servicemembers, Marine dependents, civil servants, and contractors, can receive their day in court,” said Representative Greg Murphy (R-NC), a supporter of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act. To put it differently, the bill enables veterans to exercise their constitutional right to legal recourse.

On August 2, 2022, the Senate voted to pass the bill with a final vote of 86-11. Nine days later, President Joe Biden signed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act into law. The bill is now part of the Honoring Our PACT Act, which is meant to improve healthcare access and funding for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. According to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has exclusive jurisdiction over any claim filed by toxic exposure victims.

“After years of commitment to this issue, I am grateful that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle agreed to pass this crucial legislation so that poisoned Camp Lejeune veterans can finally seek justice,” said Rep. Cartwright. It is worthy of note that punitive damages will not be awarded in any lawsuit under this new law. Therefore, veterans struggling with health problems caused by toxic exposure at Camp Lejeune can only receive financial compensation from the federal government. The settlement payout ranges between $25,000 and $1 million, depending on the severity of the plaintiff’s diagnosis.

Before the Camp Lejeune Justice Act became law, veterans could only receive disability compensation and healthcare benefits from the Veterans Affairs, while civilians had no right to legal recourse. The cost of treatment for the crippling diseases toxic exposure victims suffer from is exceptionally high—for instance, people with thyroid cancer usually have to pay up to $40,000 for surgery. Consequently, veterans and civilians who spent time at Camp Lejeune have been struggling financially. Even though money will not cure most of the health issues toxic exposure victims develop, the financial compensation they can obtain will be of tremendous help.

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Jonathan Sharp is the chief financial officer at Environmental Litigation Group, PC. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, the law firm specializes in toxic exposure cases for veterans and their families.

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.

We Just Can’t Wait for World Leaders to Fix Our Broken Food System

Time to act: Climate and animal rights activists demonstrated during Melbourne Walk against Warming, one of the many climate protests held around the globe on December 12, 2009, while the COP15 international climate negotiations were taking place in Copenhagen. (Photo credit: Takver/Wikimedia Commons)

When global leaders won’t save our food system, cities take the lead.

By Laura Lee Cascada, Nital Jethalal and Anita Krajnc, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

We’re facing an unprecedented “code red for humanity,” in the words of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—yet global action has stagnated. The world’s eyes are upon the international body now that the curtains have closed on COP27, its annual climate change convention, held in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, in November, and open at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal in December.

Amidst the lackluster headlines spanning these events, though, Guterres—whose own agencies have warned of industrial animal agriculture’s climate perils for more than 15 years—issued a more grassroots plea. Speaking to the leaders of the C40 cities who gathered last month at a climate summit of their own, he declared, “With more than half of the world’s population, cities are where the climate battle will largely be won or lost.”

Indeed, cities—where unwavering football fandoms are born, debates over classroom curricula are waged, and unique lexicons take form (yinz know what we mean, Pittsburgh)—shape the way we live, learn, and, crucially for planetary health, eat.

Guterres is no stranger to environmental inaction among his peers. In his appeal, he explained that despite decades of tireless work, current national pledges—or a lack thereof—will carry us into the next decade with a 14 percent increase in global emissions.

Facing a near-certain future of mass flooding, heatwaves, biodiversity loss, and displaced populations, he called upon these mayors: “Your citizens look to you to provide leadership, action, and protection that is often lacking at the national level.” These words came just months after a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report announced a dire need to cut methane emissions by a third. And C40 itself hasn’t minced words in advocating for a two-thirds reduction in the world’s most notorious methane emitter: meat.

For these reasons, our organizations and nearly 200 others urged the mayors of C40 to kickstart immediate action to transform our destructive food system on the eve of their annual summit (where, we noted, beef still had a front-row seat on the menu)—but not just at the event’s catered banquets.

Instead of waiting years for commitments to trickle down from above, municipal leaders around the world (and particularly those of C40’s nearly 100 major cities, constituting a quarter of the global economy) must seize a rapidly shrinking opportunity to shape food culture from the ground up by prioritizing plant-based foods.

To grasp the oft-overlooked power of the grassroots, consider the case study of Marshall, a small town in Texas cattle country: six-term Mayor Ed Smith, who reaped health benefits after shifting to a plant-based diet in 2008 following a cancer diagnosis, launched a healthy eating campaign, complete with an annual festival, community potlucks, and even visits by a troupe of plant-powered firefighters. Hailing from a ranching family, Smith was already beloved by his citizenry, and his initiative radiated outward, from local churches to the assistant fire chief who kicked his diabetes meds after going plant-based.

Meanwhile, a duo of doctors in Burin, a 2,500-person town in rural Newfoundland, have been credited with getting the population hooked on vegan foods through workshops and veggie potlucks after noticing that about 80 percent of illnesses they treated were brought on by diet and lifestyle. By supporting patients with the struggles that hit closest to home—not drought in North America’s heartland, but staving off heart disease long enough to see their grandchildren grow up—Drs. Arjun and Shobha Rayapudi have planted seeds of dietary change across their whole community.

But, of course, we need to scale up from these small towns—and quickly—to revive both our planet’s and our own health, currently clinging to life on the operating table. As C40 acknowledged in a recent report, “Eating less red meat and more vegetables and fruits could prevent annually 160,000 deaths associated with diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and stroke in C40 cities.” These concerns were front of mind with officials in New York City—where, like the world at large, heart disease is the number-one killer—as they unveiled at a recent White House conference that their entire public hospital system is now serving plant-based meals by default.

Through this subtle “nudge,” the city is actually setting a bold new paradigm, wherein patients must opt out (twice) if they don’t want the vegan chef’s special. Sixty percent are happily chowing down, adding up to nearly 800,000 meals annually. Using a model published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies, we determined that if a city serving a million meals per year implemented a program like New York’s, it could save the equivalent emissions of driving a passenger car over 1 million miles. 

New York’s not alone in this visionary initiative. Millions are collectively discovering a key ingredient to change on our own dinner tables, and these roots are growing entire forests. Within the last decade, dozens of municipal leaders, including the fifteen C40 cities who have signed the Good Food Cities Declaration, have heard the cries from their citizenry to undo the harms of the 20th century’s brainchild, the factory farm. Cities like Berkeley, San Diego, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Helsinki, Washington, DC, and Montreal (host to the upcoming COP15) have made historic commitments to reduce their own meat procurement, with DC’s mayor even issuing a proclamation in support of a global transition to a plant-based food system.

In October, Los Angeles joined 19 others, from Didim in Turkey to Buenos Aires in Argentina, in endorsing the Plant Based Treaty, an international treaty putting food systems at the heart of the climate crisis. Councilmember Paul Koretz proclaimed, “This landmark resolution marks a vital cultural shift as Americans prioritize both combating climate change and improving their health.” 

The direct footprints of city-procured meals are just the start. By putting more plants on the plates they serve in schools, hospitals, convention centers, and events, these cities are helping citizens rethink their food norms and ushering in a more resilient way of eating.

Recent polling by VegTO found that citizens are already eager to cut back on their meat intake in their day-to-day lives, with over half intending to eat more plant-based foods if their leaders make them more accessible. Cities can follow a number of best practices, like those we outlined in our letter to C40, to invest in, improve the affordability of, and incentivize plant-based options: from supporting community programs like the Toronto Vegetarian Food Bank (which has provided over 350,000 meals to people struggling with food insecurity) and school gardens like Massacussetts’ CitySprouts to running public information campaigns as Haywards Heath Town Council did for Veganuary. Beyond their own board rooms, city officials can help plant-forward eating proliferate everywhere.

In lieu of wringing our hands each night about every step forward that’s been thwarted by governmental gridlock on the world’s stage, each of us can play a profound role in changing the food landscape in our own cities and towns—the communities where we gather to eat, where we forge traditions, and where we eke out our values. We cannot, of course, let our global leaders off the hook; after all, a quilt is always stronger with all of its individual squares sewn firmly together.

But as more of us call upon our own leaders to flip their food norms, embrace the Plant Based Treaty and the Good Food Cities Declaration, and make plant-based foods accessible to all, we’ll create the unified front that’s needed to move our global leaders toward addressing animal agriculture’s massive deforestation, species extinction, water pollution, and resource depletion.

As leaders at the U.N.’s biodiversity conference debate the extinction crisis, they’ll gaze out the convention center’s windows upon the skyline of their host city of Montreal. Perhaps they’ll catch wind of a resolution recently passed by the city to curtail its dependence on meat for the sake of our imperiled planet and serve at least 75 percent vegetarian meals in its public venues, including the one in which they’re gathered. Perhaps they’ll be moved by Montreal’s bold strides to take another look at a U.N.-supported report implicating the food system as the primary driver of biodiversity loss—and they’ll return home energized about a new food future.

From bagels and poutine in the bustling city of Montreal to backyard barbeques in rural Marshall, every city’s voice is needed in the fight for our planet, and it starts with one citizen writing their council member or showing up at town hall. Piece by piece, each of our communities will become cornerstones of a new global food system centered around plants.

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Nital Jethalal is a policy analyst and economist and oversees the economics and policy sections of Plant Based Data. He also sits on the board of directors for VegTO, as president, and the Toronto Vegetarian Food Bank.

Laura Lee Cascada is the campaigns director for the Better Food Foundation and the founder of the Every Animal Project, a collection of true tales reshaping our relationship with animals.

Anita Krajnc is executive director of the Animal Save Movement, a worldwide network of Save groups bearing witness to farmed animals, and global coordinator of the Plant Based Treaty initiative. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, The Secret Life of Pigs: Stories of Compassion and the Animal Save Movement (Lantern, 2023).

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.

Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival

Future leaders: Young climate activists with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future group demonstrate in Berlin in February 2019. (Photo credit: Leonhard Lenz/Wikmedia Commons)

The climate crisis is a form of oppression by a wealthy few.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, tropical coral reef die-off, the abrupt thawing of Northern permafrost, the loss of Barents Sea ice, the melting of mountain glaciers, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and changes to the West African monsoon that will impact the Sahel region of Africa.

These points launch the world into the unknown and unknowable, as they engage feedback loops the consequences of which we cannot accurately predict. And yet those predictions concern the mass suffering and death of tens of millions, and maybe more. We are at a tipping point. And President Biden has yet to declare the climate emergency he publicly pondered in July 2022. He likely (and legitimately) fears a political backlash; populism is seen now as a barrier to climate reforms.

What’s wrong? Threats to our species as a whole, and to our survival, are amorphous things. They are too large, and too slow, for us—for the slowly evolving human brain—to see properly. But threats framed as originating from other persons, from the people around us are not. Our species is quite accustomed to dealing with such threats—this is the history of war. And in the case of things like pandemics, where amorphous threats like contagions were framed as threats by the government to deprive us of liberty, they have triggered terrifying populist responses.

The climate crisis certainly is a form of oppression, exacted upon a vast majority of middle and low-income folks by a wealthy few in a fossil fuel industry that knew and hid the facts of what it was doing, and the relatively few politicians and world leaders that authorized and enabled their acts. And while we are accustomed to scientists and those same politicians framing news regarding the crisis, or very young persons like Greta Thunberg with their angry but relatively muted responses centered on the rights of future generations, we can imagine other framings.

What if the news that climate crisis-driven heat waves are killing people were not framed as a study or science at all, but the still true vision of a handful of wealthy elites and the few thousand political cronies that protect their profits by committing the indiscriminate killing of children, of grandmothers, and of pregnant women. Why not see it this way, in the terms our brains might react to? Why not frame it in terms of class, which triggers action on the right and left, often beyond the margins? Yes, climate change is an ethereal thing we cannot touch, like the bullets of Putin’s army, but that’s merely a choice of how we perceive it. Who pays the price of the crisis and who benefits from it, and the science that shows such a flow of responsibility, is a fact.

It could be that we do not frame it in this way because that framing does not present any particular solution, any better solution, than more amorphous frames. We still need to go to courts and other bodies to determine liability. We still need governments, and their processes to regulate emissions or build systems of sequestration. We still need massive regulatory networks to implement climate mitigation plans.

All of this is true, but it is also true that—like the trials at Nuremberg—the world has faced unprecedented threats and the situations that followed them with unprecedented systems of justice. Perhaps climate change is such an unprecedented threat, justifying solutions—like the demanding particularly culpable corporations follow the lead of companies like Patagonia—and begin to transform their structure accordingly to start to repair the damage they have caused.

That sort of demand, regardless of governments, would be particularly appropriate were the repairs treated as reparations and the beneficiaries future generations—the most likely class of persons to be harmed. Future generations could be best compensated through effective family planning incentives, entitlements, and reparations awarded to their parents through novel devices like private baby bonds that encourage sustainably sized families likely to maximize the resilience of their children. If we believe that government derives from the people, these solutions—ones that involve the creation of those people—precede and exceed the ability of governments, and the companies they protect, to refuse.

Moreover, how we frame the crisis can trigger the governmental processes described above by motivating officials to act, much the way the framing of the pandemic created massive political backlashes. There are many other examples of amorphous threats transformed into tangible ones. Certainly, the harms caused by the crisis, and the irreversible harms the tipping points promise, are cause for a populist backlash, if we just find a way to see it as the oppression of many by a few that it is.

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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.

More by Carter Dillard:

The Global Push for Population Growth Shows We’re Not Grappling With the Climate Crisis

8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real

What Pundit Ezra Klein Doesn’t Get About Parenting in a Looming Climate Crisis

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.

The Global Push for Population Growth Shows We’re Not Grappling With the Climate Crisis

And more on the way: Spectators fill the seats at a rugby sevens match in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2009. (Photo credit: Nikolay Loubet/Wikimedia Commons)

Progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, with a host of men who perch atop pyramids of power—from Elon Musk to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hungary’s strongman Victor Orban—pushing women to have children as a means of growing the base of those power pyramids and further elevating the men at the top.

Corporations in the U.S., through targeted media, push for the same by sensationalizing the idea of an economic “baby bust” that threatens the nation. Contrast the scant media coverage of studies showing the massive impact a universal ethic of smaller families would have on the climate crisis, with the ubiquitous and not-so-stealthy advertising we see across popular media platforms. The rhetoric of the constant need for more workers, consumers, and taxpayers goes beyond just pushing women to have children and supports recent successful moves to ban contraception and abortions.

It does not help that civil society organizations that purport to protect children, equity, animals, the environment, and human rights and democracy often ignore these issues, fearing the ugly framing of population issues from the past rather than pivoting towards the existential justice of socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms. In each one of these areas of need, progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.

Putin’s and others’ push for constant growth—and the silence of many nonprofits around the issue—reveals the lie at the base of the climate crisis: that population growth and the expansion of the Anthropocene is sustainable, or even desirable.

That lie is fundamental because it is existential, preceding more practical questions like how to limit emissions. The lie (and the growth it enables) is undoing attempts to limit emissions as growth takes over. The lie encompasses an existential worldview that sees Earth as a human resource, children deserving of no particular level of welfare at birth (like those conditions that the United Nations Children’s Convention purports to provide), treats being born crushingly poor or ultra-rich as an act of god rather than a product of inequitable family planning policy, and treats democracy as more of an abstract concept that an actual process whereby people meaningfully influence the rules under which they are forced to live. 

That population growth is not sustainable should be painfully obvious now, as the population-driven climate crisis unfolds, killing people worldwide in unprecedented heat waves.

Some push back on the connection between population growth and the climate crisis, but these analyses mistake population growth as simply a matter of numbers. Population growth entails the exacerbation of all of the unjust power relations described above—between parents and their children, between rich and poor, between people and their political leaders, etc.—in which power flows top-down, rather than bottom-up, as truly participatory human rights and democracy actually require. Population growth entails relatively few extracting wealth and power from the majority—again something that should be obvious as the ecological costs of our economic growth are slated to fall on the vulnerable majority: future generations.

Is growth, in and of itself, desirable? 

Growth is enabled by not ensuring, through things like family planning incentives, that all children have minimum levels of welfare. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by not ensuring children equal opportunities in life. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by ignoring the value of participatory democracy and scrapping any minimum level of connection between democratic “representatives” and the people subject to their rules. Is that desirable?

The alternative to Putin’s and others’ pyramids—in which a few are empowered by disempowering the majority—involves reversing the flow of power, first and foremost by making family planning universally a child-centric process. That move makes us—in the most basic way—truly other-regarding, and changes the direction of power so that would-be parents are not lording over future generations and the ecologies of our planet, but working together to ensure all children are born in social and ecological conditions that satisfy the requirements of the Children’s Convention. That act—of becoming fundamentally other-regarding—enables us to physically constitute future communities as free and equal people, the ideal of consensual governance that many theorists have envisioned but rarely achieved.

Child-centric planning is the epitome of shifting the flow of power from the powerful down upon the vulnerable—which enables exploitation—towards a flow from the vulnerable up to the powerful, aligning children’s interests in conditions of birth and development in which they will thrive, with women’s interest in the elimination of life-hobbling pronatalism, with the average person’s interest in more equal opportunities in life as well as smaller and more functional democracies where the average person is actually empowered, with nonhumans’ interest in the restoration of nonhuman habitat, restorative environmentalism, and more empathetic persons inclined to treat animals well (what nonhumans value most of all).

We might be inclined to resist such radical reforms because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that is those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.

We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do—including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.

Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them through Fair Start family reforms like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance where people are actually empowered to make the ultimate rules under which all must live. And there is only really one way to do that: Parental readiness policies that avoid things like parents torturing their children to death, birth equity redistribution of wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of smaller families.

Changing the flow of power in this way is fundamental, or existential, justice in action. It is the antithesis of Putin’s move to grow and centralize Russian power by exploiting future generations (or the move Musk, Khamenei, or others are trying to make) and instead takes our most basic values and uses them to structure power relations for the future majority, ensuring that we begin to orient from a just and genuinely inclusive place.

Putin’s policy shows us the lie, that growth is sustainable and desirable, at the base of the climate and so many other crises. The lie hides top-down power over the most vulnerable and has created the crises we face today. Let’s unlearn that lie and reverse the flow.

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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.

More by Carter Dillard:

8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real

What Pundit Ezra Klein Doesn’t Get About Parenting in a Looming Climate Crisis

Kamala vs. Mitt: Two Different Viewpoints of Family Planning Prefigure Different Futures for Planetary Health

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.

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The Renewable Energy Transition Is Failing

Not sustainable: Vast quantities of minerals and metals are required for the renewable energy transition. (Photo credit: AleSpa/Wikimedia Commons)

Renewable energy isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy—it’s adding to it.

By Richard Heinberg, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.

The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”

After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving climate change presently); indeed, these countries got rich largely by the industrial activity of which carbon emissions were a byproduct. Now it is the world’s poorest nations that are experiencing the brunt of the impacts of climate change caused by the world’s richest. It’s neither sustainable nor just to perpetuate the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the less industrialized countries, as well as historically exploited communities in the rich countries, to maintain both the lifestyles and expectations of further growth of the wealthy minority.

From the perspective of people in less-industrialized nations, it’s natural to want to consume more, which only seems fair. But that translates to more global economic growth, and a harder time replacing fossil fuels with renewables globally. China is the exemplar of this conundrum: Over the past three decades, the world’s most populous nation lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, but in the process became the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal.

The Materials Dilemma

Also posing an enormous difficulty for a societal switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is our increasing need for minerals and metals. The World Bank, the IEA, the IMF, and McKinsey and Company have all issued reports in the last couple of years warning of this growing problem. Vast quantities of minerals and metals will be required not just for making solar panels and wind turbines, but also for batteries, electric vehicles, and new industrial equipment that runs on electricity rather than carbon-based fuels.

Some of these materials are already showing signs of increasing scarcity: According to the World Economic Forum, the average cost of producing copper has risen by over 300 percent in recent years, while copper ore grade has dropped by 30 percent.

Optimistic assessments of the materials challenge suggest there are enough global reserves for a one-time build-out of all the new devices and infrastructure needed (assuming some substitutions, with, for example, lithium for batteries eventually being replaced by more abundant elements like iron). But what is society to do as that first generation of devices and infrastructure ages and requires replacement?

Circular Economy: A Mirage?

Hence the rather sudden and widespread interest in the creation of a circular economy in which everything is recycled endlessly. Unfortunately, as economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen discovered in his pioneering work on entropy, recycling is always incomplete and always costs energy. Materials typically degrade during each cycle of use, and some material is wasted in the recycling process.

A French preliminary analysis of the energy transition that assumed maximum possible recycling found that a materials supply crisis could be delayed by up to three centuries. But will the circular economy (itself an enormous undertaking and a distant goal) arrive in time to buy industrial civilization those extra 300 years? Or will we run out of critical materials in just the next few decades in our frantic effort to build as many renewable energy devices as we can in as short a time as possible?

The latter outcome seems more likely if pessimistic resource estimates turn out to be accurate. Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey finds that “[g]lobal reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system … Mineral deposit discovery has been declining for many metals. The grade of processed ore for many of the industrial metals has been decreasing over time, resulting in declining mineral processing yield. This has the implication of the increase in mining energy consumption per unit of metal.”

Steel prices are already trending higher, and lithium supplies may prove to be a bottleneck to rapidly increasing battery production. Even sand is getting scarce: Only certain grades of the stuff are useful in making concrete (which anchors wind turbines) or silicon (which is essential for solar panels). More sand is consumed yearly than any other material besides water, and some climate scientists have identified it as a key sustainability challenge this century. Predictably, as deposits are depleted, sand is becoming more of a geopolitical flashpoint, with China recently embargoing sand shipments to Taiwan with the intention of crippling Taiwan’s ability to manufacture semiconductor devices such as cell phones.

To Reduce Risk, Reduce Scale

During the fossil fuel era, the global economy depended on ever-increasing rates of extracting and burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The renewables era (if it indeed comes into being) will be founded upon the large-scale extraction of minerals and metals for panels, turbines, batteries, and other infrastructure, which will require periodic replacement.

These two economic eras imply different risks: The fossil fuel regime risked depletion and pollution (notably atmospheric carbon pollution leading to climate change); the renewables regime will likewise risk depletion (from mining minerals and metals) and pollution (from dumping old panels, turbines, and batteries, and from various manufacturing processes), but with diminished vulnerability to climate change. The only way to lessen risk altogether would be to reduce substantially society’s scale of energy and materials usage—but very few policymakers or climate advocacy organizations are exploring that possibility.

Climate Change Hobbles Efforts to Combat Climate Change

As daunting as they are, the financial, political, and material challenges to the energy transition don’t exhaust the list of potential barriers. Climate change itself is also hampering the energy transition—which, of course, is being undertaken to avert climate change.

During the summer of 2022, China experienced its most intense heat wave in six decades. It impacted a wide region, from central Sichuan Province to coastal Jiangsu, with temperatures often topping 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and reaching a record 113 degrees in Chongqing on August 18. At the same time, a drought-induced power crisis forced Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., the world’s top battery maker, to close manufacturing plants in China’s Sichuan province. Supplies of crucial parts to Tesla and Toyota were temporarily cut off.

Meanwhile, a similarly grim story unfolded in Germany, as a record drought reduced the water flow in the Rhine River to levels that crippled European trade, halting shipments of diesel and coal, and threatening the operations of both hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.

A study published in February 2022 in the journal Water found that droughts (which are becoming more frequent and severe with climate change) could create challenges for U.S. hydropower in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, California, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, French nuclear plants that rely on the Rhône River for cooling water have had to shut down repeatedly. If reactors expel water downstream that’s too hot, aquatic life is wiped out as a result. So, during the sweltering 2022 summer, Électricité de France (EDF) powered down reactors not only along the Rhône but also on a second major river in the south, the Garonne. Altogether, France’s nuclear power output has been cut by nearly 50 percent during the summer of 2022. Similar drought- and heat-related shutdowns happened in 2018 and 2019.

Heavy rain and flooding can also pose risks for both hydro and nuclear power—which together currently provide roughly four times as much low-carbon electricity globally as wind and solar combined. In March 2019, severe flooding in southern and western Africa, following Cyclone Idai, damaged two major hydro plants in Malawi, cutting off power to parts of the country for several days.

Wind turbines and solar panels also rely on the weather and are therefore also vulnerable to extremes. Cold, cloudy days with virtually no wind spell trouble for regions heavily reliant on renewable energy. Freak storms can damage solar panels, and high temperatures reduce panels’ efficiency. Hurricanes and storm surges can cripple offshore wind farms.

The transition from fossil fuel to renewables faces an uphill battle. Still, this switch is an essential stopgap strategy to keep electricity grids up and running, at least on a minimal scale, as civilization inevitably turns away from a depleting store of oil and gas. The world has become so dependent on grid power for communications, finance, and the preservation of technical, scientific, and cultural knowledge that, if the grids were to go down permanently and soon, it is likely that billions of people would die, and the survivors would be culturally destitute. In essence, we need renewables for a controlled soft landing. But the harsh reality is that, for now, and in the foreseeable future, the energy transition is not going well and has poor overall prospects.

We need a realistic plan for energy descent, instead of foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. Currently, politically rooted insistence on continued economic growth is discouraging truth-telling and serious planning for how to live well with less.

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Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.

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.

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Across Africa, Water Conflict Threatens Security, Health, and the Environment

Bone dry: Usually submerged by water, tree stumps and sand are exposed as South Africa’s Theewaterskloof Dam ran dry in 2018. (Image credit: Zaian/Wikimedia Commons)

A changing climate and population growth are fueling water-based conflicts across the African continent

By Robin Scher, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

Water is a finite resource on our planet. We can only rely on what we have, which translates to about 2.5 percent of drinkable fresh water. Of that amount, only 0.4 percent currently exists in lakes, rivers, and moisture in the atmosphere. The strain of this limited supply grows by the day and as this continues, the detrimental impact will continue to be felt in places least equipped to find alternative solutions—in particular, the African continent.

The global population is estimated to reach around 9.6 billion people by 2050. This is triple the number of humans on the planet just a few decades ago, having to exist with the same amount of water, not taking into account the nonhuman animals and plants that also rely on water to survive.

More than a third of the planet’s population living without access to clean, safe water live in sub-Saharan Africa. And nearly two-thirds—some four billion people—live in water-scarce areas. With this number set to steadily rise, the United Nations predicts that around 700 million people across the world might be “displaced by intense water scarcity” by 2030.

Scarcity-Led Conflict and Crisis

Each year, the world is seeing extreme water-related events including heatwaves and droughts. In 2021 on the African continent alone, Madagascar, Kenya, and Somalia experienced severe water shortages. And with scarcity, conflict tends to follow.

A number of African conflicts are being fueled by competition for dwindling natural resources. At a state level, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan have been engaged in a continuing dispute over fresh water in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Similar issues are playing out across every level of society.

Cameroon, for instance, experienced a violent dispute over water between fishermen and herders in a town near the border of Chad in December 2021. The disagreement over rights to water found in a shrinking Lake Chad led to the death of 22 people and a further 100,000 people displaced from their homes as the two groups fought.

“Once conflicts escalate, they are hard to resolve and can have a negative impact on water security, creating vicious cycles of conflict,” said Susanne Schmeier, senior lecturer in water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft.

This negative feedback loop fueled by conflict is further compounded by the effect on water quality, agriculture, and forced migration. “With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst,” said Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water.” 

This insight speaks to the complex interplay between water shortage and conflict. According to research from the Pacific Institute, the impact of water on agriculture plays an even greater role in contributing to conflict—a view backed up by the fact that agriculture accounts for 70 percent of fresh water use in Africa.

Another conflict-causing factor is the social impact of water shortages. With up to a quarter of the world’s population facing serious water scarcity at least one month of the year, people are being forced to migrate. In 2017, at least 20 million people from Africa and the Middle East left their homes due to food shortages and conflict caused by serious drought.

Food Insecurity Due to Impact on Wildlife and Agriculture

Food insecurity caused by water shortages is being compounded by the loss of wildlife. With a drop in their rainy seasons, Kenya’s sheep, camels, and cattle have been in decline. This has led to a threat of 2.5 million people potentially going without food due to drought, according to the United Nations.

The impact of drought is taking a severe toll on agriculture, particularly in counties where this forms the mainstay of their economy. In South Africa, for instance, agriculture is key to the functioning of the country when it comes to job creation, food security, rural development, and foreign exchange.

Water shortages in the country impact both commercial and subsistence farmers. But it is the subsistence farmers who are hardest hit by the droughts, according to a 2021 paper published by a group of international scientists in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

While commercial farmers are able to offset a lack of rain through alternative water supplies, as well as storage and irrigation technologies, subsistence farmers who are reliant on rain, the scientists write, “are particularly susceptible to drought as they highly depend on climate-sensitive resources.” They also point out that the impact is worsened by the fact that this form of farming is tied to farmers’ own food security.

Adaptation

There is no way to avoid the impacts of water scarcity and drought. The best thing to do is manage and mitigate risk where possible. A tool proposed by the group Water, Peace and Security is an early warning monitor capable of tracking information on rainfall, crop yields, and political, economic, and social factors. According to the group, this tool would “predict water-related conflicts up to a year in advance, which allows for mediation and government intervention.”

Another common de-risking approach to conflict is water-sharing agreements. Since the end of World War II, 200 of these agreements have been signed. Despite this, the UN has consistently failed to introduce a Water Convention that would see over 43 countries sharing transboundary rivers and lakes.

A good example where a water-sharing agreement helped avoid conflict can be found in Southern Africa. In 2000, with tensions rising over shared resources, an agreement was reached between Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia that helped avoid further issues.

Reducing water loss remains the most recommended method countries should adopt to avoid future catastrophes. Agriculture and mining, in particular, are two industries that could do more to limit their water wastage. Another policy, suggested by Iceland, is to increase the price of water in relation to its supply, as a way to help curb water wastage.

Desalination is also a popular method used to free up more water, using seawater to increase supply. Saudi Arabia, for instance, uses desalination to supply the country with at least 50 percent of its water supply. Water recycling, known as “gray” water is another low-cost alternative used by farmers to offset the impact of drought.

As water scarcity continues to become more commonplace, so too will these mitigation and adaptation strategies. The question is, will they be enough?

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.

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Healthy Ecosystems Need Birds, but Billions Fatally Strike Our Windows Every Year

Transparent threat: Sheet glass is useful for human buildings but deadly for birds. This songbird survived a window strike, but billions of others a year are not so lucky. (Photo credit: Andria Lavine/Flickr)

Birds cannot see glass windows, fatally crashing in alarming numbers. That’s bad for them, humans, and the environment.

By Daniel Klem Jr., Independent Media Institute

7 min read

Glass windows have existed since as long ago as 290 CE, if only in a limited supply of small sheets. It seems fair to say that window glass has enriched human aesthetic, cultural, physiological, and psychological well-being for at least 16 centuries. Even one small pane is enough to admit a bit of the sun’s light and warmth into an enclosed space. The tendency of builders—and the willingness of their clients—to use this product in large quantities apparently resulted from the need of human society to seek safety within the solid walls of dwellings away from the reach of marauders. Sheet glass permitted viewing the out-of-doors from the comfort and protection of indoors. In the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical interests led to the lavish use of both tinted and clear panes. These windows were used in the cathedrals of Europe and then in the domestic dwellings of the rich, especially in Tudor England. The technical ability to manufacture large sheets of glass was developed at the turn of the 20th century. With the building boom that followed World War II, 1945 to the present, flat glass has become a prominent, even dominating, construction material used in the majority of human dwellings and other structures. In 2009, 6.6 billion square miles (17 billion square kilometers) ) of flat glass was manufactured worldwide, which is about the area of the U.S. state of Delaware, at a value of $23.54 billion. The amount of glass used in construction has continued to increase annually.

The history of window glass as a source of bird fatalities is similarly ancient and progressive. The confirming obituaries, however, do not begin to appear in the literature until well after 1800, with the development of modern ornithology in Europe and North America. Thomas Nuttall published the first scientifically documented window fatality in his 1832 “A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada.” He described how a hawk in pursuit of prey flew through two panes of greenhouse glass only to be stopped by a third. The next account was by Spencer F. Baird and his colleagues Thomas M. Brewer and Robert Ridgway in Volume 1 of their 1874 three-volume work “A History of North American Birds.” They described how a shrike struck the outside of a clear pane while attempting to reach a caged canary.

…

To put the scale of losses by various human-related bird killers in perspective, my speaking and writing, starting in the late 1980s, included “sound bite” tactics. The purpose was to capture the attention of anyone who might be moved to listen and take action. One such tactic involves comparing bird losses at windows to those from higher-visibility oil spills. Prominent oil spills that have captured international attention as environmental disasters include the Exxon Valdez disaster and the more recent Deepwater Horizon fire and spill in the Gulf of Mexico. By any assessment, the Exxon Valdez oil spill was a horrific environmental disaster. The oil tanker Exxon Valdez released 260,000 barrels of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. The spill was estimated to have killed 100,000 to 300,000 marine birds. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is estimated to have caused as many as 2 million bird deaths. By contrast, in the 1970s my original and lowest estimate of losses from window collisions in the U.S. alone was 100 million bird kills a year. This minimum window-kill number equals the toll from 333 annual Exxon Valdez disasters and 100 Deepwater Horizon oil spills every year. Yet those writing in the media about assaults on the Earth’s environment are either unaware, unconvinced, or willing to overlook the horrific loss of bird life occurring at windows.

…

In 2013, expressing concern and emphasizing the interconnectedness of life, Travis Longcore and P.A. Smith, writing in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, warned that avian deaths from windows and other human-associated mortality factors pose a growing deleterious effect on the world’s ecosystems and the goods and services birds provide them.

In a money-centered world, those goods and services are getting increased attention, especially considering what it might cost to have humans try to do the same work. Pest control is one service birds provide that contributes to productive yields of valuable crops such as coffee and grapes. They also provide public health benefits such as consuming insect disease vectors and scavenging the dead. They play a role in pollination and seed dispersal and provide high-quality fertilizer from seabird guano. Birds also serve as ultra-sensitive indicators of environmental health on the local, regional, and global levels. The “web of life” that Alexander von Humboldt described as essential to the health and very existence of humankind is as relevant today as it was when he wrote about it two centuries ago. Like every other living being, birds are an essential part of that complex, interacting super-organism that encompasses all life.

One of the most dramatic pest control events occurred in 1848, in what is now the city of Great Salt Lake, Utah. To many, the event was a true miracle. California gulls (Larus californicus) descended on the so-called “Mormon crickets” (Anabrus simplex), an insect that is not actually a cricket but a katydid that grows to 8 centimeters (3 inches) and voraciously consumes vegetation. Crops and even their own are on the menu during their swarming phase that can see them move across 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of agricultural fields in a day. These gulls were credited with saving about 4,000 Mormon pioneers by eating the katydids and preventing them from consuming their second harvest. As a grateful tribute, a monument to the California gull today stands prominently in Salt Lake City, commemorating the life-saving service of this bird to people.

The services of mosquito-eating birds contribute to limiting the spread and prevention of malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases. This is a particularly important aid in tropical climates, where several species, but especially martins and swallows, have protected Indigenous people from the earliest times until now. Vultures the world over are specifically adapted to removing the dead and with them the accompanying organisms that spread diseases among humans and other animals. At the turn of the 21st century, the dramatic disappearance of vultures in India virtually eliminated the service they provided in scavenging livestock carcasses. The consequence of this loss was an estimated 48,000 human deaths between 1992 to 2006 from rabies and a cost of $34 billion to the national economy. Other vulture-connected health-related costs of $24 billion were linked to the increase in scavenging feral dogs and rats that carry rabies and bubonic plague, respectively, in addition to other human-susceptible diseases.

Hummingbirds offer pollinating services for commercial flowering plants and many human foods. The dispersal of seeds by fruit-eating birds ensures reforestation and with it ecological succession that consists of a chain of changes in habitat that provides homes to variously adapted life—including diverse bird species and the food and shelter they require to survive and sustain healthy populations.

One practical service birds provide is preying on insects across the boreal and temperate forests of North America. Given the number of species preying on insects, collectively the presence of birds can have meaningful consequences for the health of the trees in these forests. Martin Nyffeler and his colleagues, writing in the journal the Science of Nature in 2018, estimated that the world’s insectivorous birds annually consume 400 to 500 million metric tons of insects per year. Forest birds account for 70 percent of this amount, or greater than 300 million tons a year. Especially for forests, the ecological and economic importance of birds eating harmful insect pests has tangible worldwide value.

This excerpt is from Solid Air: Invisible Killer—Saving Billions of Birds from Windows by Daniel Klem Jr. (Hancock House, 2021) and was edited and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Daniel Klem Jr. is the Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College.

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.

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Is the Energy Transition Taking Off—or Hitting a Wall?

Forecast cloudy: Solar panels are wiped off for peak performance at The Wash Basket Laundromat, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, in 2011. The business qualified for U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Energy for America Program assistance to add 72 photovoltaic panels to reduce electrical demand by a third. (Photo credit: Lance Cheung, USDA/Wikimedia Commons)

With the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is illogically encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels—in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

By Richard Heinberg, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) constitutes the boldest climate action so far by the American federal government. It offers tax rebates to buyers of electric cars, solar panels, heat pumps, and other renewable-energy and energy-efficiency equipment. It encourages the development of carbon-capture technology and promotes environmental justice by cleaning up pollution and providing renewable energy in disadvantaged communities. Does this political achievement mean that the energy transition, in the U.S. if not the world as a whole, is finally on track to achieving the goal of net zero emissions by 2050?

If only it were so.

Emissions modelers have estimated that the IRA will reduce U.S. emissions by 40 percent by 2030. But, as Benjamin Storrow at Scientific American has pointed out, the modelers fail to take real-world constraints into account. For one thing, building out massive new renewable energy infrastructure will require new long-distance transmission lines, and entirely foreseeable problems with permitting, materials, and local politics cast doubt on whether those lines can be built.

But perhaps the most frustrating barriers to grid modernization are the political ones. While Texas produces a significant amount of wind and solar electricity, it is unable to share that bounty with neighboring states because it has a stand-alone grid. And that’s unlikely to change because Texas politicians fear that connecting their grid with a larger region would open the state’s electricity system to federal regulation. Similar state-based regulatory heel-dragging is pervasive elsewhere. In a report posted in July, the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center noted that, so far this year, Texas regulators have approved only $478.7 million out of the $12.86 billion (3.7 percent) in grid modernization investment under consideration, due to fears of raising utility bills for local residents.

But grid modernization is only one area in which the energy transition is confronting roadblocks in the U.S.

Certainly, as a result of the IRA, more electric vehicles (EVs) will be purchased. California’s recent ruling to phase out new gas-powered cars by 2035 will buttress that trend. Currently, just under 5 percent of cars sold in the U.S. are EVs. By 2030, some projections suggest the proportion will be half, and by 2050 the great majority of light-duty vehicles on the road should be electric. However, those estimates assume that enough vehicles can be manufactured: Supply-chain issues for electronics and for battery materials have slowed deliveries of EVs in recent months, and those issues could worsen. Further, the IRA electric-vehicle tax credits will go only to buyers of cars whose materials are sourced in the U.S. That’s probably good in the long run, as it will reduce reliance on long supply chains for materials. But it raises questions about localized environmental and human impacts of increased mining.

Many environmentalists are thrilled with the IRA; others less so. Those in the more critical camp have pointed disapprovingly to the bill’s promotion of nuclear, and note that, in order to gain Senator Joe Manchin’s vote, Democrats agreed to streamline oil and gas pipeline approvals in a separate bill. In effect, the government will be encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels … in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Despite the flaws of the Inflation Reduction Act, it is likely the best that the federal government can accomplish in terms of climate progress for the foreseeable future. This is a country mired in institutional gridlock, its politics trapped in endless culture wars, with a durable Supreme Court majority intent on hampering the government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.

Climate leadership is needed in the U.S., the country responsible for the largest share of historic emissions and is the second-biggest emitter (on a per-capita basis, the U.S. ranks far ahead of China, the top emitter). Without the U.S., global progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be difficult. But the American political system, pivotal as it is in the project, is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of problems with the shift from fossil fuels to renewables. The barriers to meeting climate goals are global and pervasive. 

Global Inertia and Roadblocks

Consider Germany, which has been working on energy transitionlonger and harder than any other large industrial nation. Now, as Russia is withholding natural gas supplies following its invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s hostile reaction, German electricity supplies are tight and about to get tighter. In response, Germany’s Green Party is leading the push to restart coal power plants rather than halting the planned shuttering of nuclear power plants. And it’s splitting environmentalists. Further, the country’s electricity problems have been exacerbated by a lack of, well, wind.

Unless Russia increases natural gas supplies headed west, European manufacturing could largely shut down this winter—including the manufacturing of renewable energy and related technologies. UK day-ahead wholesale electricity prices have hit ten times the last decade’s average price, and Europe faces energy scarcity this winter. French President Emmanuel Macron recently warned that his people face the “end of abundance.”

Inadequate spending is also inhibiting a renewables takeoff. Last year, EU member states spent over $150 billion on the energy transition, compared to about $120 billion by the U.S. Meanwhile, China spent nearly $300 billion on renewable energy and related technologies. According to the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute, the country will install 156 gigawatts of wind turbines and solar panels this year. In comparison, the U.S., under the Inflation Reduction Act, would grow renewable energy annual additions from the current rate of about 25 GW per year to roughly 90 GW per year by 2025, with growth rates increasing thereafter, according to an analysis by researchers at Princeton University.

The recent remarkable increase in spending is far from sufficient. Last year, the world spent a total of about $530 billion on the energy transition (for comparison’s sake, the world spent $700 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2021). However, to bring worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to be net zero by 2050, annual capital investment in the transition would need to grow by over 900 percent, reaching nearly $5 trillion by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg writer Aaron Clark notes, “The one thing public climate spending plans in the U.S., China, and the EU all have in common is that the investments aren’t enough.”

There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude.

The requirement to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels represents the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever faced. To avoid the emissions pulse just mentioned, we must reduce energy usage in non-essential applications (such as for tourism or the manufacture of optional consumer goods). But such reductions will provoke social and political pushback, given that economies are structured to require continual growth, and citizens are conditioned to expect ever-higher levels of consumption. If the energy transition is the biggest technical challenge ever, it is also the biggest social, economic, and political challenge in human history. It may also turn out to be an enormous geopolitical challenge, if nations end up fighting over access to the minerals and metals that will be the enablers of the energy transition.

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Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. His previous Earth | Food | Life article, “Can We Abandon Pollutive Fossil Fuels and Avoid an Energy Crisis?” was published earlier this year.

Take action…

Promises, promises: President Biden delivers remarks at the Innovation event at the international COP26 climate talks in Glasgow on November 2, 2021. (Photo credit: COP26/Flickr)

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 declare a climate emergency.

Parting thought…

Screenshot via @Dolphin_Project/Twitter

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.

The Aerodynamics of Velvet: What Owls Can Teach Humans

Silent night: A barn owl in flight. (Photo credit: Jerry Skinner/Flickr)

Owl physiology can help advance technology to address noise pollution—and maybe even help the deaf hear.

By Jackie Higgins, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

This excerpt is from Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, by Jackie Higgins (Atria Books, 2022) and was produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

To the ancient Greeks, the owl symbolized wisdom, but the Romans saw it as an evil omen. Their myths tell of an owl-like strix that stalked the night and preyed on human flesh. Ovid’s poem Fasti describes how such a demon slipped into the nursery of the sleeping prince Proca and was found hunched over the cradle, sucking the newborn’s blood. This supernatural owl changed over time. In Italian, strix became strega, meaning witch; in Romanian, strigoi is a vampire; and, in Macbeth, Shakespeare once more recast the owl as ‘the fatal bellman’ whose shriek summons King Duncan’s death. Like its legendary counterparts, the great gray owl, Strix nebulosa, inhabits the shadows. It lives in the icy north, in the dense, dark conifer forests of Russia, Alaska, and Canada. By night, it hunts. Scythe-like tal­ons and hooked, knife-sharp beak make the great gray owl a fearsome predator. By day, it stays hidden. Although one of the largest of its kind, its dusky and mottled plumage blends with the tree branches to atomize the bird’s silhouette, making it as nebulous and insubstantial as mist. Moreover, on a still moonlit night where snow blankets the landscape and deadens sound, the owl swoops on its quarry and barely breaks the silence.

The quietness of the owl’s flight is unrivaled; its wing beat makes a sound so soft that it is nearly imperceptible. “While we’ve known this for centuries,” said Professor Nigel Peake of the University of Cam­bridge, “what hasn’t been known is how owls are able to fly in silence.” His laboratory is one of a few around the world trying to learn from this avian acoustic stealth. For years, the focus had been the feathers along the wing’s leading and trailing edges. Those at the front have tiny stiff barbs that point forward like the teeth of a comb, whereas those at the back are flexible and fringed. They work together to break up, then smooth the air currents as they flow over and off the wing, damping down any noisy turbulence. Recently Peake homed in on a third ele­ment: the wing’s luxuriant touch. “We were among the first to think about the aerodynamics of this velvet,” he told me. In 2016, he collabo­rated with scientists in America for a closer look at the smooth surface of wings from various owl species, including the great gray. They saw that the birds’ primary feathers were covered with a millimeter of fine fluff.

“Microscope photographs of the down show it consists of hairs that form a structure similar to that of a forest,” Peake explained. “The hairs ini­tially rise almost perpendicular to the feather surface but then bend over in the flow direction to form a canopy.” This Lilliputian ‘forest’ reduces pressure fluctuations and turbulence dramatically as the air flows over the wing. The researchers, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research, recreated this topography in plastic. Testing their prototype in a wind tunnel, they found it reduced sound so well that they patented the de­sign. This discovery promises not simply stealthier surveillance aircraft or submarines but also a significant drop in everyday noise pollution from, say, wind turbines, computer fans, and even the passenger planes daily crisscrossing the planet.

“Owls have much to teach us about mak­ing our own world quieter,” said Peake. “No other birds have wings that scatter sound so their prey can’t hear them coming.” The great gray is neither seen nor heard, and this natural specter also seems endowed with a supernatural sense. From a distance of some 30 meters (100 feet), it can pinpoint mice or voles with uncanny precision, even those hidden beneath mounds of virgin snow.

…Scientific research has coaxed the owl from the shadows and restored her to Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Through this creature, we learn what it means to hear: not simply to detect sounds but to create rich and perspectival soundscapes. We discover our talent for discerning whispers of whispers, then locating and layering them to build cathedrals of sound. The silent bird also guides us toward making this world a better place: whether through redesigning technology to subdue unwanted noise or improving the lives of those less fortunate. “I am just as deaf as I am blind,” wrote the American deaf-blind activist Helen Keller to her doctor in 1910. “The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune.” The owl sits on the shoulder of the blind, bearing the gift of earsight. One day, alongside her wider avian family, she may also offer others the gift of sound.

Jackie Higgins is a graduate of Oxford University in zoology and has worked for Oxford Scientific Films for over a decade, along with National Geographic, PBS Nova, and the Discovery Channel. She has also written, directed, and produced films at the BBC Science Department.

Take action…

Look, don’t touch: A barn owl stares into the lens at the World Bird Sanctuary, a nature preserve that treats injured birds, located in Valley Park, Missouri. (Photo credit: Mike T/Flickr)

Owls are being tortured and killed at Johns Hopkins for ADHD ‘research’

“Try saying it aloud: ‘An experimenter at Johns Hopkins University is holding barn owls captive in his laboratory, cutting into their skulls, poking electrodes around in their brains, and forcing them to watch dots on a screen—all so he can purportedly learn something about humans with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder,’” writes PETA’s Katherine Sullivan. “Sounds absurd, right? Yet that’s exactly what experimenter Shreesh Mysore is doing in his torture chamber at Johns Hopkins University.”

Join nearly half a million people and sign this petition urging Johns Hopkins to stop abusing barn owls for “ADD research.”

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.