The U.S. Will Rejoin Paris Agreement—but a Divided Congress Could Stymie Biden’s Climate Plan | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

New climate: Joe Biden at Royal campaigning at Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo credit: stingrayschuller/Flickr)

President-elect Biden’s climate plan will encounter stiff resistance in the Senate if Republicans maintain their majority.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement on day one of his administration, reversing President’s Trump abandonment of the international climate accord that the United States formally left last week. Designed to avoid irreversible climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2° Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5° Celsius, the Paris agreement seeks to achieve global “climate neutrality”: net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050.

Biden’s commitment to combat the climate crisis, outlined in the “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice,” includes an enormous federal investment—$2 trillion—to drive an aggressive shift to clean energy and carbon neutrality by 2050. It will encounter stiff resistance in the Senate if Republicans maintain their majority, which they are poised to do. However, Biden campaigned as a centrist, and, having served in the Senate for 36 years, is well-positioned to advance legislation by working across the aisle, and will have the ears of moderate GOP lawmakers like senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine. In addition, he has successfully struck deals with Republicans, most notably with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on passing legislation to raise tax rates on the wealthy in 2012, during his tenure as vice president under President Obama.

​​​​​​McConnell is no friend of the environment. He opposes the Paris agreement, has not put forward his own climate plan, called the Green New Deal “nonsense,” has sent millions of dollars to support his state of Kentucky’s coal mining industry, and received a miserable 7 percent lifetime score for his votes on environmental legislation from the League of Conservation Voters, a nonprofit. But perhaps there is some hope for getting meaningful climate measures passed under a Biden administration. In addition to supporting federal budgets that include energy efficiency and saying he favors “common sense and actually attainable solutions to protect our environment, McConnell last year admitted that human-caused global warming exists.” And though Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) characterized McConnell’s admission as “real progress,” it’s the congenial, long-term relationship between the president-elect and the Senate majority leader that could prove to be the linchpin for any real progress on the climate front. Last week, McConnell called Biden an “old friend.”

While a divided Congress is likely to hamper pro-environmental legislation on the federal level, a Biden White House will set a markedly different attitude in Washington, particularly across science-based federal departments and agencies that are critical to the climate fight, many of which Trump gutted, putting them into the hands of pro-industry climate deniers. A leading example of “foxes in charge of the hen house” during the Trump presidency is the Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently headed by Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who said climate change isn’t an “existential threat” even as many leading scientists say it is exactly that. A 2019 paper published by the Melbourne-based Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration warns that climate change at present poses a “near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.”

Drawing on existing scientific research and climate modeling, David Spratt and Ian Dunlop—two longtime climate researchers who authored the paper—forecasted that if global temperatures rise 3° Celsius by 2050, 55 percent of the world’s human population across 35 percent of its land area would experience more than 20 days of lethal heat per year, which is “beyond the threshold of human survivability.” This is the kind of science-based analysis that Biden has said will underscore his administration’s decisions. After four grueling years of anti-science and anti-fact policies rolling out of Trump’s White House, scientists expressed relief that Biden won the election. “Our long national nightmare is over,” said bioethicist Alta Charo from the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, quoting President Gerald Ford’s famous 1974 remarks about the scandal that led to his predecessor Richard Nixon’s political demise. “I couldn’t say it any better than that.”

In addition to putting the federal government on a proactive climate footing, Biden can provide federal support to state and local initiatives, which some experts see as the primary levers that the nation has to combat climate change, particularly when Washington is deadlocked. Fifteen states currently have legally binding plans to achieve meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Eight states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have legally mandated goals—made through new laws or executive order—to reach 100-percent clean energy.

The president-elect will also wield a powerful tool that does not require congressional approval to use: executive orders. It is likely he will go this route to undo the majority of President Trump’s 125 environmental rollbacks, which have weakened a host of key regulations, including protections for endangered species, protections for wilderness from logging and fossil fuel development, and environmental risk assessments for building new infrastructure. Moreover, environmentalists can cheer Biden’s decision to—in his first year in office—convene a summit of the world’s major carbon emitters with the goal of making deeper and quicker reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

​​“With every bout with nature’s fury, caused by our own inaction on climate change, more Americans see and feel the devastation in big cities, small towns, on coastlines and farmlands,” Biden said in remarks on climate change outside the Delaware Museum of Natural History in Wilmington in September. “It is happening everywhere. It is happening now. It affects us all.” It remains to be seen just how much President-elect Biden can turn climate inaction into climate action. But one thing’s for certain: Mother Nature will soon have a much better defender in the White House.

  • Sign the petition telling President-elect Joe Biden—and the world—that you support the Paris climate agreement.

Cause for concern…

More clouds ahead: Clouds fill the sky over Bowman Lake at Montana’s Glacier National Park. (Photo credit: Diana Robinson/Flickr)

Supporters of national parks and world-class trout streams in Montana have raised the alarm over the election of Greg Gianforte to the state’s governorship due to his previous attempts to strip environmental protections, reports Jeff Gailus for the Guardian.

Round of applause…

Nap time: A gray wolf takes a snooze at Minnesota’s Wildlife Science Center. (Photo credit: Derek Bakken/Flickr)


Passing by the slimmest of margins, Colorado’s Proposition 114 directs state wildlife officials to bring gray wolves—which were removed from the endangered species list by the Trump administration—back to the state’s western mountains by 2024, reports NPR’s Sam Brasch.

Parting thought…

Born to run: A herd of wild horses gathers at sunset on Pine Nut Range, east of Gardnerville, Nevada. (Photo credit: Jackie Gorton/BLM Nevada/Flickr)

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 32

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.

Why Small Farming Is Essential for Creating a Sustainable Future

Smaller is better: Sauvie Island Organics is an organic community-supported agriculture (CSA) vegetable farm that has been serving the community of Portland, Oregon, since 1993. (Photo credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service Oregon/Flickr)

With more farmers in the world today than at almost any point in history, humanity’s future will most likely be agrarian. We must imagine that world into being right now.

By Chris Smaje

10 min read

This excerpt is from Chris Smaje’s book A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. It has been adapted for the web.

Let me start this journey with my feet on my farm. When people visit it I notice three main responses. One is an unbidden enthusiasm for the rural paradise we’ve created, the beauty of the place, and our great good fortune in avoiding the rat race and producing honest food from the land. Sometimes the words are spoken and sometimes I only see it in their eyes, but the sentiment that usually accompanies it is: “This is great. I wish I could do something like this, but I can’t because—”

The second response takes in our rustic accommodation, the compost toilets, the rows of hard-won vegetable beds, the toolshed speaking of the work to be done, the reek of manure and compost with a kind of recoiling pity. It seems to say: “You went to graduate school and got a well-paid job. Then this. How did it go so wrong?” Or the more actively disdainful: “Each to their own. But nobody wants to farm anymore. All that backbreaking work!”

The third response is that of the harsher critic, whose gaze homes in on specifics—the tractor in the yard, the photovoltaic panels on the roof, the tilled beds in some of the gardens. “Look how tied in you are to the global fossil fuel economy and its cash nexus.” This critique comes from both sides of the green divide. “You haven’t properly escaped and found a truly natural way of life,” from one side. “You talk about sustainability, but you’re no better than the rest of us. Besides, small farms like this can’t feed the world,” from the other.

I begin with this story because I’m going to be arguing not only that, yes, small farms like this can feed the world, but also that in the long run it may only be small farms like this that can. Therefore I’m going to have to address the other criticisms—the compromises with the status quo, the low prestige and toil associated with an agrarian life, the global flight from the land. So I have a lot of work to do in these pages. One thing that encourages me is that, of the three responses I mentioned above, the first seems much the commonest—it simply isn’t true that nobody wants to farm.

But people aren’t willing to farm under just any circumstances. Too often, farming is still a life of unrewarded toil, not because that’s intrinsically how it has to be but because farming is, as it were, the engine room of every society—including our present ones—where the harsh realities and dirty secrets of how it achieves its apparently effortless motion are locked away below decks. I argue here that they need to be unlocked and shared more widely. But for now my visitors who say “I can’t because…” are correct. A congenial small farm life is a viable option for few—not for the massed ranks of the employed, unemployed or underemployed in the cityscapes of the world, and not for its multitudes of rural poor, who can scarcely make a living from the land. But in both cases the dream of the small farm lives on, and that’s an important place to start.

Of course, it’s only a place to start, and a sketchy one at that. Notions of the agrarian good life are commonplace around the world, but often they figure as little more than bucolic symbols, empty of pragmatic content. They seem to lack the power of the urban case for supremacy, which has deep historic roots. City, citizenship, civilization, civility: so much that we value about our world shares an urban etymology.

But if we want to build good lives on lasting foundations for the future, the time has come to abandon the unilluminating oppositions of city versus country and factory versus farm, as well as associated oppositions like progress versus backwardness.

Regrettably, that’s not how public debate seems to be going. There’s a veritable industry of opinion-formers laying their bets only on the first half of those dualities and exhorting us to be “optimistic’ about a future presented as urban, capital forming, high-tech and non-agrarian. This neo-optimist or progress-literature often invokes recurrent myths of human technological problem-solving as an inspiration for transcending present problems. Take, for example, London’s Great Horse Manure Crisis in the 1890s, where it’s said that people feared the proliferation of horses would bury the streets under their feces, only to find horses were soon displaced by non-defecating motor vehicles. Or take the idea that fossil fuels saved the whales when kerosene-burning lamps displaced demand for whale oil.

I call these myths partly in the everyday sense that they’re untrue. There never was a Great Horse Manure Crisis in the 1890s. And it was the industrialized whaling of the 20th century powered by fossil fuels that really put whales in danger. But they’re also myths in the deeper sense that they’re mystifying and over-simplifying stories that reveal cultural self-conceptions. The self-conception of our modern culture that’s revealed in these myths is that the problems we face are discrete, technical ones with one-shot solutions.

These stories are mystifying because they tell tales of fossil fuel–based solutions to predicaments in the past at a point in our current history when fossil fuels present us with problems for which there are no obvious solutions. Right now, we need more than banal assertions that someone’s bound to think of something. And they’re over-simplifying because human capacities for technical innovation aren’t in doubt. What’s in doubt is the human capacity to find purely technical solutions for a plethora of current economic, political, cultural, ecological, biological and geophysical problems with complex, interrelated feedback loops exhibiting imperfect information in real time.

In this book I try to provide a different narrative that’s less impressed with techno-fixes or dominant notions of civilizational progress. I don’t deny that our contemporary civilization has its successes. But it has its failures, too. I see it in the eyes of those visitors to my farm—who in material terms must surely count among the richest people in the world, ever—which betray a life diminished, trammeled by too many of the wrong kind of obligations. More importantly, I see it in the fact that the world we live in today is just about the most unequal one ever, where somewhere between 800 million and 2.5 billion people are physically undernourished, about as many (or more) than the estimated 800 million population of the entire planet in 1750 at the dawn of the modern age.

These undernourished people haven’t missed out on progress, but in large measure are its victims. If global industrial civilization ever had the capacity to lift the poor and undernourished people of the world to something like the standard of living we experience in the richer countries, the chances of it doing so now have been extinguished in the face of the numerous internal and external threats that have emerged globally during the questionable march of modernization. So I’d counter the neo-optimist view that the world’s problems can be solved with high-tech fixes delivered by the reigning capitalist economy, not with pessimism but with an alternative optimism—an optimism that this reigning economy won’t endure much longer, and will be succeeded by something that offers a better future.

The better future I write about here is a small farm future. I’m not completely optimistic that it’s the future we or our descendants will see, but for the numerous reasons set out in the book I think it’s our best shot for creating future societies that are tolerably sustainable in ecological terms and fulfilling in nutritional and psychosocial ones. Now is a key moment in global politics where we might start delivering that future, but also where more troubling outcomes threaten. Here I try to herald the former by sketching what a small farm future might look like, and how we might get there.

The small farm isn’t a panacea, but what a politics geared around it can offer—what, perhaps, at least some of the visitors who come to our farm can glimpse in outline—is the possibility of personal autonomy, spiritual fulfillment, community connectedness, purposeful work and ecological conviviality. Relatively few farmers past or present have enjoyed these fine things. Throughout the world, there are long and complex histories by which people have been both yoked unwillingly to the land and divested unwillingly from it in ways that are misrepresented when we talk of agricultural “improvement’ or progressive “freedom” from agricultural toil. The improvements haven’t been an improvement for everyone, the freedom hasn’t been equally shared, the progress has landed us in a whole raft of other problems that we must now try to overcome. And none of it was preordained.

That’s why it’s urgent at this point in history to think afresh about a small farm future. Taking each of the three words in reverse order, we need to think about the future, because it’s clear that present ways of doing politics, economics and agriculture in much of the world are reaching the end of the line. Wise authors avoid speculating on future events because time usually makes their words look foolish, but such dignity isn’t a luxury our generation can afford.

We need to start imagining another world into being right now.

Modern thinkers have coined numerous terms for the way we now live to distinguish it from the past: the affluent society, the effluent society, industrial society, post-industrial society, Industria, consumer society, postmodern society, the information society, the virtual society. These all capture something significant about our times, but they too easily allow us to forget that in fact our modern societies are agrarian societies, just like almost all other human societies over the past few thousand years. Humanity today relies heavily on just three crops—wheat, rice and maize—all of which had been domesticated by about 7000 BCE and which are still mostly grown using techniques whose basic outlines would be instantly recognizable to any ancient farmer. Despite the recent hype over industrially cultured nutrients, the future we face is probably a farm future.

Computers nowadays have millions of times more processing power than the ones available just 50 years ago, whereas average global wheat yields are less than nine times higher than those achieved in the Roman Empire. In dimensions that matter most to our continued existence, we’re less distant from our ancient counterparts than we sometimes think. And the agricultural improvements that we’ve achieved since those times have often come through processes that draw down on non-renewable sources of energy, soil and water while imperiling climate and ecological stability.

Whether individually we farm or not, almost all of us ultimately are farming people. In fact, there are more farmers in the world today by formal definition—somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion—than at almost any point in history. There are good farmers and bad farmers. The best ones learn to produce what’s needed with a minimum of effort, without compromising the possibilities of their successors doing the same or losing sight of their obligations as members of communities. It’s about time we started trying to tell the story of our world from their perspective—not a story of how we transcended agriculture, because we never did, but of how we might transfigure it, and ourselves in the process, to deal with the problems we now face.

Chris Smaje has co-worked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 15 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he’s written for various publications such as the Land, Dark Mountain, Permaculture Magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future and is a featured author at Resilience.org. He is the author of A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2020).

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

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

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

Trump Strips Protections From ‘America’s Last Climate Sanctuary’ | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Paradise lost: A grizzly bear catches a salmon in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. (Photo credit: 
U.S. Forest Service)

For nearly two decades, America’s largest forest has been protected from logging and development. Trump has ended that.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

The Trump administration has announced plans to lift restrictions on logging and building roads in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest national forest. Called the nation’s “crown jewel” by the United States Forest Service, the Tongass is a pristine rainforest ecosystem filled with ancient trees that provides critical habitat for many species, including grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles and all five species of Pacific salmon. Covering most of southeast Alaska, the Tongass supports a host of unique ecosystems, including ice fields, glaciers, and old-growth forests, as well as islands facing the open Pacific Ocean, the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else in America’s national forest system.

The decision was announced on October 28, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the Forest Service, released a notice stating that the Tongass would now be exempt from the “roadless rule,” a federal conservation policy that prohibits timber harvest and road construction on designated roadless areas, with limited exceptions. Established in 2001, the rule has protected 58.5 million acres of roadless land—nearly one-quarter of all land administered by the Forest Service.

Spanning nearly 17 million acres, the Tongass is one of Earth’s largest remaining temperate rainforests and serves as a crucial carbon sink, storing at least 9 percent of all the carbon stored in all of the continental U.S. forests combined, according to the Washington Post, which called the move “one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.” The policy change could impact more than half of this unspoiled wilderness: Around 9.4 million acres of the forest are designated as roadless areas.

Environmental and conservation groups criticized the move and vowed to fight the decision. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, told the Post. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.”

“The Tongass National Forest provides us with the greatest opportunity in the nation, if not the world, for protecting temperate rainforest at the ecosystem scale, in the face of climate change,” said Audubon, a nonprofit conservation organization based in New York. “It sequesters more carbon than any other type of forest on Earth, providing a much-needed opportunity for climate solutions that can simultaneously bolster regional economies.”

Industry groups welcomed the decision. “There’s a handful of small operators that are working on the Tongass, harvesting timber,” Tessa Axelson of the Alaska Forest Association, a timber industry group, told Alaska Public Media. “In order to continue to survive, those businesses are dependent on a predictable supply of timber.” Frank Bergstrom, a mining consultant in Juneau, said the rollback could attract investors to mineral exploration in the region.“There’s no roadmap to these things,” he said. “Maybe it’ll lead to a little more optimism.”

The decision flies in the face of public sentiment. As Alaska Public Media reported, an information request from the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council found that Americans overwhelmingly support protections on the Tongass, with 96 percent of public comments from within and outside Alaska favoring the maintenance of the roadless rule.

“It is the crown jewel of America’s natural forests, and conservation is very much in the interest of all Americans because it is our land and we are the stewards of that land,” said Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) during Senate deliberations of Interior Department budget appropriations in 2003. “When I was up there, I saw glaciers, mountains, growths of hemlock and cedar that grow to be over 200 feet tall. The trees can live as long as a thousand years.”

Sign the petition urging Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to maintain federal protections for the Tongass National Forest.

Letter to the editor…

Cleaning up: A carbon filtration system captures historic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base near Oscoda. (Photo credit: Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy)

An EFL reader replies to “Trump Threatens to Veto First Ever Congressional Action on ‘Forever Chemicals,’” by EFL contributor Michael Green:

“This is most important work, so please keep it coming. Not enough people are reading and listening, believing.” —Harold Treinen, Portland, Oregon

Cause for concern…

Destructive presidency: Anti-Trump protesters rally at the Climate March in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2017. (Photo credit: Mark Dixon/Flickr)

“Under Donald Trump, the government has auctioned off millions of acres of public lands to the fossil fuel industry, the Guardian can reveal, in the most comprehensive accounting to date of how much public land the administration has handed over to oil and gas drillers over the past four years,” report Emily Holden, Jimmy Tobias and Alvin Chang for the Guardian.

Earth mother: Fashion designer Eileen Fisher is known for her vision of sustainability and environmental stewardship, which includes commitments to using organic and recycled fibers, green cleaning and reducing carbon emissions. (Photo credit: Matt Dunham/Flickr)

“This is one of the places where we can make a positive impact,” said fashion designer Eileen Fisher in a Vogue interview. “Rather than just pollute less or do less harm, we can actually revive the Earth through the process of making clothes.”

Parting thought…

Ebb and flow: Birds at sunset in Lisbon, Portugal. (Photo credit: chris couderc/Flickr)

“The boundary between us and the rest of the world is so fluid. So I think of myself as a song the universe is singing.” —Rebecca Henderson

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

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

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

Trump’s EPA Gives Big Oil, Big Food Permission to Dump Toxic Chemicals on Indigenous Land

Wasteland: Earl Hatley, a descendant of the Cherokee/Delaware tribe and tribal consultant, talked to Al Jazeera journalist Imran Garda in 2014 about how fracking has impacted Oklahoma while a flare roars in the background. (Photo credit: © jbpribanic for Public Herald via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

The steady erosion of Indigenous rights continues under Trump as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is—at the request of Oklahoma’s Republican governor J. Kevin Stitt—relinquishing its oversight of a number of environmental issues across 38 federally recognized tribes’ lands to the state, as Rebecca Beitsch reports for the Hill.

The July 22 request invoked for the first time a provision in a 2005 transportation bill sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) giving Oklahoma the oversight of environmental issues “in the areas of the state that are in Indian country, without any further demonstration of authority by the state.” In an October 1 letter to Stitt, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler listed several federal authorities mandated under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act that will now be overseen by Oklahoma.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. criticized the move as a “knee-jerk reaction to curtail tribal jurisdiction [that] is not productive.”

“After over 500 years of oppression, lies, genocide, ecocide, and broken treaties, we should have expected the EPA ruling in favor of racist Governor Stitt of Oklahoma, yet it still stings,” Casey Camp-Horinek, elder and hereditary drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe, said in a statement. “Under the Trump administration, destroying all environmental protection has been ramped up to give the fossil fuel industry life support as it takes its last dying breath.”

The move is a gift to the fossil fuel and agriculture industries, both of which wanted to avoid having to consult tribal governments about environmental issues related to fracking, the dumping of hazardous waste and factory farm pollution runoff. Oklahoma has a cozy relationship with the dirty fuel interests, being one of only 13 states that export more energy than they import. Indigenous lands will now be a dumping ground for a long list of poisonous waste and airborne pollutants, including smog, lead, asbestos, glyphosate and nitrates, which threaten public health and natural ecosystems.

Brook Simmons, president of the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma, an oil and gas industry trade group, expressed concern that the landmark 2020 Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which made the prosecution of crimes committed on tribal lands a matter for federal, not state, courts, could lead to a patchwork of tribal environmental regulations across Oklahoma. “The EPA decision was particularly welcomed by the state’s oil and gas industry,” reported Sean Murphy of the Republic.

“EPA’s letter grants Oklahoma’s request to administer the State’s EPA-approved environmental regulatory programs in certain areas of Indian country. EPA’s letter resolves ambiguity and essentially preserves the regulatory status quo in Oklahoma,” EPA spokesman James Hewitt said in a statement. “Additionally, if any tribe wants to apply for regulatory oversight of these environmental programs, then they can apply through EPA’s Treatment as a State process,” he added.

Stitt defended his request to the EPA, saying in a statement, “This approval helps to better protect public health and our environment by ensuring certainty and one consistent set of regulations for all citizens of Oklahoma, including those who are also citizens of one of Oklahoma’s federally recognized Tribes.”

“It’s disappointing the Cherokee Nation’s request that EPA consult individually with affected Oklahoma tribes was ignored,” said Hoskin. “Unfortunately, the governor’s decision to invoke a 2005 federal law ignores the longstanding relationships between state agencies and the Cherokee Nation.”

“The underlying law is a one-section provision surreptitiously inserted as a midnight rider in the massive (Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act) of 2005 that treats Oklahoma tribes differently than other tribes throughout the United States,” the Muscogee (Creek) Nation said in a statement. “Like the SAFETEA Act itself, this was a swift move meant to circumvent the federal government’s trust, duty and obligation to consult with the tribal nations concerned.”

  • Sign the petition to tell the EPA it must revert environmental regulatory control back to the tribes living on these lands.

Letter to the editor…

Cruelty for cheese: Calves at dairy farms are forcibly separated from their mothers within hours of their birth. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/Djurrattsalliansen/We Animals)

An EFL reader replies to “The Terrible True Cost of Milk, Cheese, Butter and Ice Cream,” by Reynard Loki, October 20, 2020:

“I have been a vegan for 20 plus years because of the terrible abuse towards sweet animals like cows, sheep and chickens. I thank you for getting this information out to everyone. Animals deserve nothing less. We must change our farming industry. We owe it to animals to stop the cruelty, because it is well researched that they feel pain just as we do. My heart goes out to all the dairy cows, to the female pigs who are crated and just have to keep birthing piglets, and to the many chickens who live in crowded disgusting conditions. I am 73 and was raised in the U.K. by my mom and dad who loved animals. I believe that if schools gave young children the opportunity to learn about how animals are like us, and how they have feelings, we could end a lot of the pain endured daily by not only farm animals but by all animals. Circuses have abused large animals for decades and still go on in spite of activism. Again, thanks for keeping information out there. Too many people are ignorant of facts.”

—Ann Marwick, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Cause for concern…

Let the people decide: An activist protests Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett outside the Senate building as the Judiciary Committee hearings began on October 12, 2020. (Photo credit: Victoria Pickering/Flickr)

Round of applause…

Comeback: The humpback whale was brought to the edge of extinction. Campaigns to save them began in the 1970s. They were placed on endangered species lists. Commercial whaling was banned. This gave them space to recover. Numbers have climbed ever since. In some parts of the world, they’re flourishing. It’s a huge ecological success. (Credit: Information is Beautiful)​​​​​​​

Parting thought…

Scarred and polluted: In areas where hydraulic fracturing is heavy, a dense web of roads, pipelines and well pads turn continuous forests and grasslands into fragmented islands. (Photo credit: Simon Fraser University/Flickr)

When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.

—Cree prophecy​​​​​​​

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 Terrible True Cost of Milk, Cheese, Butter and Ice Cream | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Cruelty for cheese: Calves at dairy farms are forcibly separated from their mothers within hours of their birth. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/Djurrattsalliansen/
We Animals)

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

For more than two years, Erin Wing served as an undercover investigator for Animal Outlook, an animal advocacy organization nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., during which time she conducted multiple investigations, including one of a dairy factory farm in 2019, after which Nestlé dropped the farm and added more vegan options. Her final assignment before choosing to leave the field was to document the cruelty to cows happening every day behind closed doors at Dick Van Dam Dairy, a massive factory farm in San Jacinto, California. Wing recently revealed her true identity, writing earlier this month, “I’m now stepping out of the shadows to shine a light on the stomach-churning horrors I witnessed.”

Using a hidden camera, she documented shocking cruelty, from cows being violently kicked, jabbed and shocked by workers, sick cows producing blood-tinged pink milk, calves covered in flies and left to languish in the mud, and a lack of euthanasia or veterinary care, leaving sick cows to slowly die, with their dead, decomposing bodies left among living cows. In addition, Wing documented “downed” or “spent” cows—cows who are so sick, injured or weak that they are no longer able to stand—dragged by chains and painful “hip clamps,” lifted over walls using tractors. These downed cows, who are no longer useful to the dairy industry, are often killed for their meat. This tragic reality is a reason that “ethical vegetarians” who consume dairy products are actually supporting the beef industry: About a third of dairy cows are ultimately killed for their meat.

“This is where milk comes from—a profit-driven industry that treats these gentle, smart and social animals like mere milk-producing machines or unwanted by-products,” Wing writes. After reviewing the investigation, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, an animal law nonprofit based in Cotati, California, filed a lawsuit against Dick Van Dam Dairy and the individuals caught on camera for violating California animal cruelty laws and the San Jacinto Municipal Code through the neglectful treatment of cows and calves.

While animal cruelty in the industrialized food system is rampant—factory farming is the largest cause of animal abuse in history—consumer views on the treatment of farmed animals changing. Nearly half of Americans would support a ban on the factory farming of animals, according to a 2017 poll, with 70 percent having “some discomfort with the way animals are used in the food industry.”

Now prominent lawmakers in Washington are taking action. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined forces to advance federal legislation that would ban large-scale factory farming in the United States over the next two decades. The Farm System Reform Act seeks to place a moratorium on large-scale factory farming. It would also strengthen the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 to require country of origin labeling on beef, pork and dairy products. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is also co-sponsoring the effort, introducing companion legislation to the House of Representatives.

These shifting public attitudes are resulting in an increased demand for plant-based (i.e., cruelty-free) milk, which is putting the future of dairy farming into question. Last year, the U.S. saw the largest annual decline in the number of licensed dairy operations in more than 15 years. “The recent acceleration of the decline reflects how difficult it is to operate a dairy, particularly in the last several years,” reported the American Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying group representing the U.S. agriculture industry, in February. “Since the end of 2014, dairy farmers have struggled with low prices resulting from large supplies outweighing demand, in the U.S. and around the world.”

Dick Van Dam Dairy supplies milk to Dean Foods, America’s largest milk processor, based in Dallas. In November, the company filed for bankruptcy. The majority of its assets, including the brands Alta Dena and TruMoo, are now owned by Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy cooperative. “Dean Foods’ business has struggled as more consumers turn to non-dairy milk,” writes Amelia Lucas of CNBC, noting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that Americans’ milk consumption has fallen 26 percent over the past 20 years.

While the steady move away from dairy is something for animal advocates to cheer about, we are a long way from reforming our broken and inhumane food system. In the U.S. alone, nearly 10 billion land animals are raised on factory farms and killed in slaughterhouses every single year, accounting for 99 percent of farmed animals in the nation. In the U.S., there are approximately 9 million dairy cows. But these cows are far from just numbers—every one of them is an individual, with an individual personality. Dr. Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He writes on Psychology Today that cows are “highly sentient and intelligent individuals with markedly different personalities … display[ing] a full range of personalities including boldness, shyness, sociability and gregariousness.”

But confined and abused in our inhumane food system, they are treated as nothing more than capitalist objects. Betty Stoneman, who teaches philosophy at Emory University, wrote an essay applying Marx’s theory of “estranged labor” (i.e., workers’ alienation from the products of their labor) to animals on factory farms. She writes: “On factory farms animals live confined to small cages, unable to enjoy the full range of their possible movements and among their own waste. Animals undergo painful physical modifications designed to enhance their productivity and to combat the stress reactions they develop due to their living conditions. Animals are deprived of being able to live their lives as they naturally would either as individuals or as members of social groups.” This misery is generally kept hidden from the public, with the factory farm industry in several states shielded by anti-whistleblower legislation, known as “ag-gag” laws.

It is also worth remembering that a dairy cow is also a mother, with maternal instincts to care for and defend her young. Forcibly impregnated so that she is kept in a constant and painful cycle of pregnancy, birth and lactation, this poor, abused mother must also suffer the relentless theft of her babies, who are taken away from her within hours of their birth. “This forced separation often causes cows to bellow for hours or even days, pacing and searching for their calves,” writes Joe Loria of Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit that, like Animal Outlook, has been at the forefront of exposing the behind-the-scenes horrors of factory farming.

“I saw abuse and neglect every single day,” Wing said about her harrowing undercover mission. “I feel a special bond toward cows now because of it, and it will always stay with me. A part of me will always be with them as well.”

  • Sign the petition urging Dairy Farmers of America to shift at least 20 percent of its supply chain (Dean Foods included) to vegan dairy alternatives, and end cruel dehorning.

Cause for concern…

Environmental racism: Industrial plants in Louisiana have increased concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in predominantly black and poor communities. (Photo credit: formulanone/Flickr)

“People across the country are waking up to structural racism and coping with police brutality and civil unrest while also living through the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Sharon Lavigne, on Truthout. “They’re mourning losses and longing for life to get back to normal. But in St. James Parish, Louisiana, where I’m from—a predominantly Black and low-income community nicknamed “Cancer Alley”—racism, brutality, loss and unrest are normal. In fact, a new plastics complex and President Trump’s decision to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stand to make things even worse.”

Round of applause…

Keeping it local: Workers at Massaro Community Farm in Woodbridge, Connecticut. As Big Food supply chains hit snags during the COVID-19 pandemic, local community-based farms have risen to the challenge, reports Earth | Food | Life contributor Elizabeth Henderson, on Truthout. (Photo credit: Alyssa DesRosier)

In a recent op-ed published by our friends at Local Futures, “big picture activist” Henry Coleman condemns the “corporate-led, techno-globalist future we are being sold,” arguing that localizing our food systems is “the single most meaningful solution to climate breakdown.”

Parting thought…

A life of suffering: Tagged cows at a dairy farm in Taiwan. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/WeAnimals)

“The grocery store became a site for mourning: the innocuous refrigerators filled with milk, yogurt, cheese, butter, and eggs; the freezers of ice cream; the cases of meat, neatly packaged and priced—these suddenly became, to me, the products of immeasurable violence.” —Kathryn Gillespie, The Cow With Ear Tag #1389 (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

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

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

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

America’s Biggest Bank Makes Climate Commitments, but Big Questions Remain | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Fossilized: Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, speaks at the JPMorgan Healthcare Investment Conference on January 8, 2013. (Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, recently announced that it is adopting “a financing commitment that is aligned to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” adding that part of this new strategy is “to help clients navigate the challenges and capitalize on the long-term economic and environmental benefits of transitioning to a low-carbon world.”

The Paris Agreement, the international climate agreement joined by 189 countries—and which Trump pulled the United States out of—sets out a global framework to avoid irreversible climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2° Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5° Celsius. At the heart of the agreement is getting the world to “climate neutrality”: net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050.

But while the announcement may sound good to environmentalists, a closer inspection reveals serious concerns. Unlike the commitment made last month by Morgan Stanley, in which the nation’s sixth largest bank said it is committed to “reach net-zero financed emissions by 2050” and also to “developing the tools and methodologies needed to measure and manage its carbon-related activities,” JPMorgan’s own announcement does not clarify that the bank will reduce its own financed emissions to net zero. Additionally, while Morgan Stanley committed to measuring and disclosing its financed emissions by joining the Steering Committee of the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), the global platform that other banks have adopted, JPMorgan made no similar promise.

“In recent decades JPMorgan has plowed billions of dollars into the very industries tearing down rainforests, trampling indigenous rights, and destroying the climate,” said Moira Birss, climate and finance director at Amazon Watch, a nonprofit. “While this is an improvement over its existing policies, the commitment fails to address the full impact of its investments on communities and our climate and grants the bank three more decades to change when we need action now.”

Notably, JPMorgan’s announcement mentioned nothing about reducing the bank’s enormous lending to fossil fuel companies. According to “Banking on Climate Change,” a report on fossil fuel financing published this year by Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a nonprofit, JPMorgan has been the biggest financier of fossil fuels in the four years following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. RAN has launched a public petition urging JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to stop bankrolling environmental destruction by ending its funding of fossil fuels.

In fact, by lending $269 billion to support of dirty fuel in 2016-2019, JPMorgan became the first bank to exceed the quarter-trillion dollar mark in post-Paris Agreement fossil financing. These dangerous investments include backing controversial fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, which not only continues our reliance on oil, but violates Indigenous sovereignty, as the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is directly downstream of the point where the pipeline will cross the Missouri River. It also poses an immediate threat to local environments, including the drinking water of nearby communities and the natural habitats of nine threatened, endangered, and candidate species, such as the swift fox and the greater sage-grouse.

Environmentalists aren’t the only ones who want the bank to get serious about its commitment to the net-zero goal. Earlier this year, nearly 50 percent of JPMorgan’s investors voted in favor of a shareholder resolution filed by As You Sow, a nonprofit, asking the bank to measure, disclose and reduce emissions aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. As You Sow withdrew similar proposals with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs after these banks made commitments to assess methodologies for measuring financed emissions toward alignment with the Paris goals.

“We are happy to see JPMorgan respond to investors’ resounding vote for climate action,” said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, in a press statement. “While this announcement is an important step in the right direction, its focus on [clients’] actions rather than its own financing decisions, is a concern. For years, JPMorgan has been the top financier of fossil fuels. Climate progress will be made only by committing to dramatically reduce financing to these high carbon companies and projects. Relying on clients to make change, without turning off the funding spigots, is not a recipe for success. We look forward to more clarity and strong interim financing reduction commitments from JPMorgan.”

Last year, 215 global companies reported nearly $1 trillion at risk from climate impacts, with many likely to happen within the next five years. While this is an alarming scenario, there is also a massive economic benefit to ramping up the fight against climate change. Limiting global warming below below 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees will save an estimated $20 trillion globally by 2100, according to a study conducted by researchers at Stanford University in California and the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The world’s largest lender to the fossil fuel industry has clearly signaled that the fossil fuel game is coming to an end,” said Alec Connon, co-coordinator of the Stop the Money Pipeline Coalition, about JPMorgan Chase’s announcement to align its financing with the Paris Agreement. “However, if [the bank] is serious about its climate commitments, it’ll need to quickly follow this up with policies that prohibit all lending to coal companies and companies still expanding fossil fuel production. 2050 vision is all well and good, but we need 2020 actions.”

Cause for concern…

Helping the helpless: Actor Joaquin Phoenix was one of the many animal rights activists who came together for the Los Angeles Animal Save vigil at the Farmer John slaughterhouse. The activists gave water to thirsty pigs who arrived in dozens of trucks. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/WeAnimals)

“Animal agriculture industry groups defending factory farms engage in campaigns of surveillance, reputation destruction, and other forms of retaliation against industry critics and animal rights activists, documents obtained through a FOIA request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal,” reports Glenn Greenwald on the Intercept. “That the USDA possesses these emails and other documents demonstrates the federal government’s knowledge of, if not participation in, these industry campaigns.”

Round of applause…

Quiet, please: A whale breaches the Atlantic waters off Boston, Massachusetts. Seismic testing for undersea oil deposits has proven to be deadly for marine animals like whales and dolphins. (Photo credit: Jose Antonio Navas/
Flickr)

“During a long battle in a South Carolina court, several government permits that allowed seismic testing and harming marine animals slowly expired,” report Darryl Fears and Dino Grandoni for the Washington Post.

Parting thought…

(Image credit: Animals Australia)

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

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

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

A Vote for Trump Is a Vote Against Endangered Species

Big target: In 1800, an estimated 26 million elephants roamed across Africa. But overhunting and illegal poaching have decimated them. Today, less than half a million elephants remain on the continent. (Brian Ralphs/Flickr)

Endangered species have a formidable enemy in President Trump.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

It is hard to ignore the dark irony behind President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. The Science-Denier-in-Chief, who has ignored facts and medical experts, has contracted the deadly disease that he has downplayed from the outset, and which has claimed the lives of more than 209,000 Americans and infected 7.4 million.

And there is another layer to this dark irony: Trump, who has significantly eroded protections for endangered species, has fallen victim to a disease that scientists believe originated with the pangolin, an endangered species that is so overhunted that it is known as “the world’s most trafficked mammal.” In the last two decades alone, more than a million pangolins were poached and illegally traded.

​​​“[I]t is likely for pangolin coronavirus to have originated from bat viruses as a result of illegal trapping of alive animals in East Asia and their sale in the wildlife market of Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China, with a subsequent human-to-human transmission,” according to an international team of researchers in a study published last month in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation. “Animals host pathogens that in normal conditions are rarely transmitted to our species. However, the abuses perpetrated on the environment at a global scale (i.e., wildlife poaching and trade, deforestation, wildfires, climate change, overfishing, etc.) increase the likelihood of interspecies transmission.”

Trump is no friend to endangered species, with his administration steadily eroding longstanding wildlife protections in favor of hunters. In July, for example, the Trump administration proposed a death blow to endangered species by announcing a new, much narrower definition of “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which will impede conservation efforts across the nation. Instead of giving struggling species enough natural habitat so that they can recover and ultimately flourish, the new definition requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to “assign weight” to industry claims of economic impacts when designating an area as critical habitat.

“The Trump administration is re-writing the definition of critical habitat solely to make it easier to drill, frack, mine, clearcut, and otherwise exploit lands and waters that endangered wildlife rely on,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, a nonprofit.. “We are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and nothing about this new definition helps animals and plants facing extinction. The Endangered Species Act is the last safety net for imperiled wildlife. Rather than just implementing a law that we know works, the Trump administration keeps taking a buzzsaw to it.”

​​​​The ESA is the nation’s bedrock wildlife conservation law, and has received strong bipartisan support since its inception in 1973, when it was signed by Republican president Richard Nixon. But Trump—who enjoys immense support from the hunting lobby and whose sons are avid trophy hunters—has weakened protections for endangered species, destructive moves that have been lauded by powerful industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute.

“Developers and polluters could basically veto any critical habitat protections for endangered species by claiming economic impacts, even without proof,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit. “Wildlife simply can’t survive or recover if they have no place to live, but that’s exactly what will happen if the Trump administration succeeds in turning over the critical habitat designation process to industry.”

In one particularly galling move, the Trump administration in 2018 overturned an Obama-era ban on big game trophy imports. The decision ignores plummeting wildlife populations, particularly keystone species like elephants, rhinos and lions. Near the turn of the 20th century, Africa was home to between three and five million elephants. Now less than half a million remain. In the early 1900s, around 500,000 rhinos roamed across Africa and Asia. Today, only around 27,000 remain in the wild. Seventy-five percent of African lion populations are in decline, with only around 20,000 individuals left in the wild.

“When a species’ greatest value is as a dead trophy, its days will inevitably be numbered, just as they are when the value of their parts—like ivory tusks, tiger skins, or rhino horn—make protection from poachers nearly impossible,” writes Jeffrey Flocken of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a nonprofit.

The Trump administration also has critically endangered polar bears in its crosshairs. Their numbers are dwindling (there are only about 4,000 remaining in Alaska) due to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice caused by global warming. But Trump wants to open up their critical habitat—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest remaining national wildlife refuge in the United States—to the oil and gas industry for drilling.

“This administration doesn’t care about anything but money, and wildlife will suffer,” said Greenwald.

Rhinos in Africa, an organization advocating against the trade in rhino horn, has launched a public petition—signed by more than 132,000 people—supporting the passage of H.R. 2245, the Cecil Act, which seeks to prohibit the import and export of threatened or endangered species.

  • Sign the petition supporting the passage of the Cecil Act to protect endangered species.

Cause for concern…

Burn notice: A fire burns at an oil storage area near Lybrook, New Mexico. (Photo credit: John Fowler/Flickr)

“New Mexico’s regulators have crafted ambitious new rules to limit air pollution from oil and gas wells, but some stakeholders worry that the flexibility they offer to operators will gut them,” reports Elizabeth Miller for the Slick, new state-based reporting project on oil, climate and politics launched by Capital & Main.

Round of applause…

Hold the olives: An adult female Eurasian blackcap, one of the many species of birds that will no longer be threatened by nighttime olive harvesting in Spain and Portugal. (Photo credit: vogelartinfo/Wikipedia)

In 2018, a report found that nighttime mechanical harvesting of olives in Spain and Portugal to produce olive oil was linked to the deaths of wild birds. But after efforts by wildlife conservationists, earlier this year the deadly harvesting method was banned. “As a European and a fan of olive oil, I can’t help but celebrate this excellent news,” writes Iván Ramírez, senior head of conservation at BirdLife International, a nonprofit.

Parting thought…

Lunchtime: A baby rhinoceros being bottle-fed by a caretaker at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a conservation organization and orphan-elephant and rhinoceros rescue and rehabilitation program, in East Africa. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur, WeAnimals)

“Humanity can no longer stand by in silence while our wildlife are being used, abused and exploited. It is time we all stand together, to be the voice of the voiceless before it’s too late. Extinction means forever.” —Paul Oxton, founder of the Wild Heart Wildlife Foundation.

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

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

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

How the Built Environment Is Damaging Children’s Connection to Nature

As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it, and we reduce our children’s time in the remaining areas of wilderness.

By Teresa Coady 

The following excerpt is from Teresa Coady’s new book “Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans” (North Atlantic Books, 2020). Reprinted with permission.

11 min read

The free-roaming range of the child has been reduced dramatically in only a few generations. About three generations ago, most children were free to travel the full range of their town, but they rarely went beyond it except when accompanied by adults. Two generations ago, children biked and walked freely within a few miles of home through developed and wild areas, often spending entire days out and about without supervision. One generation ago, most children were restricted to biking or walking a few local blocks and to playing in their back yards, and they were generally supervised for their own safety.

The current generation of children is mostly limited to the home and garden, and to supervised organized play outdoors. This restriction in range limits children’s ability to explore their world without fear and to know the complexity of the real world.

Just as the exploring range of the child has been restricted, so too has the personal mobility range of the child been restricted.

The parent is obliged to “walk” the child in a stroller, or else he might run or toddle off the narrow sidewalk into the fast traffic now rumbling down every street. Parents working on tasks cannot rely on community supervision and are forced to sit children in front of screens indoors to occupy their attention. Parents often have nowhere to take the child to play that would constitute a wild nature environ, so they move the child from stroller onto manufactured play structure. Parents must get everywhere by car, which keeps the child strapped into a car seat. When the parents have more than one child, it is much harder to protect the children, so the mobility restrictions increase.

This is not just a North American problem.

A University of Glasgow study showed that three-year-old Scottish children were spending an average of only twenty minutes a day actively mobile. The rest of the time was spent in mobility-restricted strollers or beds, or in highchairs or baby seats usually in front of some form of digital screen. Every parent knows that children need good nutrition, adequate rest, and lots of free time to play outdoors in the fresh air and sunshine in order to thrive.

Twenty minutes of activity per day?

How could we have forgotten the importance of this last piece in our universal child rearing conventions?

New evidence is linking less time playing outdoors in the sunlight with poor eyesight, specifically myopia. In China and East Asia, as many as 90% of recent high school graduates are thought to be near-sighted. There has been a 66% increase in the incidence of myopia in the Americas since the 1970s.

What is going on?

New research published in JAMA Ophthalmology indicts sunshine, or the lack of it, for changing the shape of children’s eyeballs permanently. Children spending less time outdoors and experiencing less sunshine grow up into myopic adults. I was the only person, child or adult, in my family to need glasses. I was also the least outdoorsy, so I can relate to this.

How did the exploration range and the mobility range of our children—worldwide, in all developed countries—become so restricted in just a single generation?

Much of the blame can be laid on the doorstep of the design, development, and construction industry. In a drive to increase profit, we have densified our cities to the point where children have no safe natural places to play in and no wild areas to escape to. They are reduced in many cases to a couple of lots dedicated as play-park areas that consist of grass and a bit of manufactured play equipment. The inevitable consequence of this lack of safe and engaging outdoor play space is that children are kept home for their own safety and learn to play quietly with technology.

But the issue is deeper than this.

As we remove large semi-wild parklands and play areas from our communities, we restrict the opportunity for our children—and ourselves—to explore and develop a comfort level with these environs. When we are not comfortable with wild nature, we discourage our children from exploring it. And so, we have now created a positive feedback cycle.

In many cities, children cannot name even one local bird. We do not protect what we cannot name. As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it, and we reduce our children’s time in the remaining areas of wilderness. As we reduce our own and our children’s play time in wild nature, the benefit and use of these spaces diminishes, and the protection of these spaces is reduced, allowing their unopposed destruction and development as urban areas. Because of this strange and unhealthy positive feedback, we find ourselves valuing wild lands less, even as they become much scarcer.

The children themselves are telling us through dismal school statistics around escalating special needs (now 10% of all children worldwide, per the 2015 World Happiness Report), poor physical fitness, and lowering academic scores that there is something terribly wrong with the way we have designed their world. For instance, daycares are set up to carefully provide for safe sleeping and cleaning, but the outdoor play areas are often hard surfaces with intricate manufactured play sculptures usually fenced off and opening onto parking areas.

What are these children imprinting?

As we work toward a solution, we must make sure we do not get swayed by the arguments in favor of structured sports over unstructured playtime. The hard, regular surfaces required for many sports are anathema to the creative soul. These spaces do not provide the mystery and magic needed by our exploring young minds, nor do they encompass the myriad creatures caught up in even the smallest ecosystem for the child to connect to and develop empathy for.

Just like our children, we adults refresh ourselves when we catch early morning light filtered through trees, walk green tree-lined streets filled with birdsong to work, gaze out at changing skies and landscapes from our place of employment, take breaks in beautiful gardens, walk home and indulge in a stroll after dinner, and fall asleep to the night sounds of tiny insects, breezes, and rustling leaves.

This idyllic imaginary day was the norm for most families only a generation or two ago. Now, for most of us, it is a dream unlikely to manifest. We wake to the traffic sounds and smells of a busy city, take crowded transit or a busy freeway to work, eat our lunch at our desk or in a crowded café, take transit or the freeway home, and then stay indoors in front of a screen and fall asleep to the noise of traffic and the city. For those who live in the suburbs, the home environment might be a little more connected to nature’s sights and smells, but the long commute significantly offsets the overall benefit.

New programs like the WELL Building Standard and the Health Impact Assessment Toolkit are quantifying the effects of poor urban design for us. They tell us that without access to walkable districts, adults grow fat and develop diabetes and heart disease. They also tell us that without the fresh air created by natural environs, adults develop respiratory diseases.

Further research is connecting the dots, but we know that dealing with the stress of constant crowds creates the adrenal fight-or-flight response in some adults. Chronically high levels of cortisol, released by the adrenals in response to stress, lead to cancer and heart disease and a host of other conditions, including nervous breakdown. Adult mental illness is epidemic in our developed nations, and this heartbreak is triggering a hard look at the way we force ourselves to live now in our so-called modern world.

How did we arrive at this point where so many of our children have no exposure to nature, and where time spent in a wild environment is just a memory for most adults? Where we are stressed almost from birth by roads and construction, unrelieved by trees and gardens?

In my career, I have resisted designing places I would not live or work in myself, but there is a constant pressure on all designers to make built living space smaller and to eliminate wild areas. There is additional pressure to widen roads and build deeper parking garages. We design apartments that are too small, condos that have no privacy, communities with no access to green space, schools without safe walking paths and natural playgrounds, hospitals that are completely mechanistic and inhuman, universities without daylit classrooms and adequate natural retreat spaces, and office buildings with no connection to nature at all. Our builders, developers, engineers, and architects have convinced us that we cannot afford any other option. We have come to believe this as individuals and as communities.

The truth is that we have all allowed an untenable situation to develop without questioning it. Before we explore what I think it means to address these issues, I feel it necessary to describe what natural development is not. I see an ironic trend toward unnatural green buildings worldwide. This is what happens when we use a mechanistic approach to design something “naturally.” We are so lost in a mechanistic design paradigm that we confuse imitating nature with constructing in harmony with it.

My personal experience with this was when I visited Singapore for a World Architecture Festival event. Once a year architects from all over the globe gather in a selected city to celebrate the world’s best architecture. Gardens by the Bay in Singapore took top prize for the world’s best project. They consist of a massive new island formed from dredged sand; they feature gardens built on themes from around the world. The highlight of the gardens is a series of artificial “trees,” which light up at night with a sound and light show. The trees are major constructions of steel, featuring a walkway connecting the canopies. Somewhere in the middle of the “tree canopy” there is a bar from which you can view the Singapore skyline with a drink in your hand.

While all of it is quite over the top, my disconnected moment resulted from a queer juxtaposition. The open gardens are spectacular but uncomfortable in the heat of the day so are mostly used at night. It was a hot day. I decided to go to the enclosed and cooled part of the gardens. I visited the rainforest garden to refresh myself just before my long flight home. I wandered through artificial waterfall mists, walked up a constructed mountain, meandered through transplanted rainforests, and arrived at the geodesic dome on top of it all.

Then I walked back down and flew home.

The next day my husband and I walked through a mountainside rainforest in our community for a refreshing stroll along a river, and I found myself glancing up, momentarily disoriented and looking for the dome. In crowded Singapore, the diorama may feel like the real thing, and it may even momentarily fool a rain coast hiker like me, but it is not the real thing.

A lot of so-called sustainable building has so much technology operating it that the real intent and original feel of the design is lost in the complexity of the mechanical solution. Award-winning buildings designed as machines in organic shapes so that they imitate opening shells or wings are also not natural. I believe this intensely fabricated nature ultimately has a disturbing effect on the adult human psyche, especially on the open and creative mind. We must be clear about our objectives and protect the natural systems we have. We will need to provide daily access to real nature in all communities if we are to restore our true health and vitality. This does not currently seem to be the direction we are going in.

The eVolo Skyscraper Competition invites futuristic architectural solutions to overcrowding, global warming, and environmental disaster. The 2019 winning entries were all, to my eyes, rather alarming. They are, almost without exception, fantasies based upon bizarre robotic buildings without any connection to the natural fabric of our planet.

It seems that young imaginations around the world are exploring the future as a fabricated realm of artificial skyscrapers floating or supported above the earth. The apparent disconnect with natural physics is astounding. While it is true that these are only thought experiments and not to be taken seriously as future construction projects, they nevertheless represent a current fascination with extremely artificial environments and a rejection of wild nature.

I believe imposing such exotic construction on an already stressed and fragile planet—and on our stressed and fragile psyches—is not the solution. We need to turn this ship around, now, and move in the direction of elegant and simple solutions in harmony with natural forces. I feel that this is the only way we can comprehensively address the real and complex problems of neighborhood planning for the urban populations we anticipate in the next century.

How We Might Rewild Our Cities

Contact with nature nurtures us into a state of relaxation that supports our health and the development of our intelligence, sociability, and creativity.

When we remove contact with nature from our world, we live a circumscribed existence that increases levels of anxiety and fear and compromises creativity. Social tensions arise when we are too crowded without the relief provided by parks and waterways.

As developers, designers, and builders, we need to ensure that buildings are connected to natural light, views, and sounds. We need to build communities that are garden-based with real links to waterways and to wild nature. We need to redefine the postindustrial city; we need to rewild it.

Teresa Coady is an award-winning architect and Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In addition to her work as president and CEO of BuntingCoady B+H and COO of Kasian, two of Canada’s largest design firms, Coady is also a director of the International Initiative for Sustainable Built Environments (iiSBE) and a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (UNEP GlobalABC). She received the YWCA Women of Distinction Award in 1999 and the RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Award in 2008. She resides with her family in Vancouver.

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 Presidential Debates Must Include Climate Change | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Bad omen: Smoke from the California wildfires has turned the skies orange, providing an apocalyptic backdrop for the Sierra Nevada mountain range. (Photo credit: RS2Photography/Flickr)

The climate crisis is poised to become an existential threat to humanity by 2050. It must be a main topic at the 2020 presidential debates.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

The deadly wildfires that are currently burning across the West Coast are destroying communities and displacing people and wildlife in California, Oregon and Washington. They have claimed the lives of dozens of people. And the smoke from the fires—which, remarkably, has been seen as far east as the Netherlands—has given the skies an ominous orange hue. As one California resident told the New York Times, “It looks like doomsday.” But while the color of the sky has suggested apocalyptic times, it’s the air quality from all the smoke and soot that could do lasting harm to humans and animals.

“An NPR analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality data found that nearly 50 million people in California, Oregon and Washington live in counties that experienced at least one day of ‘unhealthy’ or worse air quality during wildfire season so far this year,” report Audrey Carlsen, Sean McMinn and Jess Eng of NPR. “That’s 1 in 7 Americans, an increase of more than 9 million people compared with 2018, the worst previous year. And this year’s wildfire season is far from over.” When it comes to polluted air, the pandemic is proving to be a threat multiplier. A new nationwide study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health looked at 3,000 counties across the U.S. and found that people with COVID-19 who live in high air pollution regions are “more likely to die from the disease than people who live in less polluted areas.”

And while wildfires are a part of the natural ecological cycle in forested areas, the steady increase and intensity of them in recent years has a human cause: climate change. Tragically, wildfires are just one of many ecological disasters that are occurring with greater frequency and intensity due to climate change. Droughts, flooding, and hurricanes have been devastating cities, towns, and ecosystems across the United States and the world, disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities and people of color. And climate-related migration is already happening on a grand scale. “More than 1 million disaster-related displacements have occurred each year on average in the U.S. since 2016,” reports Samantha Harrington for Yale Climate Connections. “Some people never return home.”

Adding to the threat, the Government Accountability Office warned in November that 945 Superfund sites—polluted locations across the nation that require a long-term response to clean up contamination by hazardous materials—are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, increased precipitation or wildfires—all of which are intensifying due to anthropogenic climate change. “There’s an accident waiting to happen,” said Jim Blackburn, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Rice University.

But tonight in Cleveland, the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will not cover the ongoing crisis that that is the root cause of all of these natural disasters and public health threats: climate change. Debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News decided to omit climate change from the list the debate topics, even as a majority of Americans say the federal government is “doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change,” according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll.

“Despite recent orange skies over the West Coast and fearsome storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the 32 years since NASA scientist James Hansen’s US Senate testimony that man-made global warming had begun, the climate crisis remains a marginal afterthought in most US news coverage,” write Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for the Nation, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review. Sadly, it should not come as a surprise: In 2012 and 2016, presidential debate moderators failed to pose a single question about the climate crisis to the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

It’s not just the debates: The mainstream news media barely covers the climate at all. The figures are shocking. Major network news programs devoted barely four hours to the climate crisis over the entirety of 2019, according to a study by Media Matters. That amounts to a paltry 0.7 percent of overall evening broadcasts and the Sunday morning news shows.

And while people are currently suffering—and dying—due to climate change-related factors (the World Health Organization notes that climate change is the cause of an estimated 150,000 deaths every year), future generations will pay a heavier price if nothing is done now. By increasing the number of extreme weather events and exacerbating air pollution, climate change is already harming people’s health, according to the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, a 2019 study. “Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. Their bodies and immune systems are still developing, leaving them more susceptible to disease and environmental pollutants,” said Nick Watts, who co-led the study. “Without immediate action from all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, gains in wellbeing and life expectancy will be compromised, and climate change will come to define the health of an entire generation.”

“As young people, we will bear the greatest impacts of climate change, and we refuse to stay silent while our future is destroyed,” said Anisa Nanavati, North American continental coordinator of Earth Uprising, a youth-led nonprofit supporting climate action, in an email. “Youth climate activists are uniting to take action and demand a better future for ourselves and future generations.”

RootsAction, an online initiative promoting economic fairness, equal rights for all, civil liberties, and environmental protection, has launched a public petition demanding that the 2020 presidential debate moderators—Chris Wallace (Fox News), Susan Page (USA Today), Steve Scully (C-SPAN) and Kristen Welker (NBC News)—address the climate crisis in the debates. And last week, nearly 40 Democratic senators wrote to the Commission on Presidential Debates urging them to include questions focused on climate change in the presidential debates. 

As Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate in Cleveland tonight, Ohioans don’t need to look far to see the impacts, both real and potential, across their state. “Images of shrinking icebergs and starving polar bears are often associated with the threats of climate change, but it’s important to know that Ohioans also experience climate change, just in a different way,” writes Miranda Leppla, vice president of energy policy at the Ohio Environmental Council, a nonprofit. “For us, it all comes down to a kind of domino effect of impacts. Climate change in Ohio can mean more rain events in which massive amounts of water fall in short periods of time, leading to more flooding of city streets and farm fields, leading to more fertilizer in streams and rivers that are already averaging above-normal temperatures, which creates the perfect conditions for toxic algae that in turn hurts small businesses who rely on clean drinking water and can cause serious health issues.”

Ohio’s predicament is far from unique: Across the nation and around the world, the rapidly changing climate is upending human and non-human life, devastating ecosystems and throwing the planet’s delicate natural balance into disarray. And without decisive, meaningful action by our leaders now, the climate crisis is poised to become an existential threat to humanity by 2050. It must be a main topic at the 2020 presidential debates.

  • Sign the petition demanding that the 2020 presidential debate moderators ask the candidates to discuss their positions on the climate crisis and their environmental policy.

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

Cause for concern…

Playing dirty: A Trump supporter recognizes President Trump’s support of the dirty coal industry at Republican Party of Louisiana rally on December 16, 2019. (Photo credit: Tammy Anthony Baker/Flickr)

Round of applause…

The kid’s alright: Teen climate leader Greta Thunberg addresses climate strikers at Civic Center Park in Denver on October 11, 2019. (Photo credit: Andy Bosselman/Streetsblog Denver/Flickr)

Parting thought…

Wise one: Jane Goodall delivers a lecture at the University of Winnipeg on September 11, 2015. (The University of Winnipeg/Flickr)

“Unless we all get together to help the environment we all share, then it may be too late. The window of time is closing.” —Jane Goodall

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 Presidential Debates Must Include Climate Change | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Bad omen: Smoke from the California wildfires has turned the skies orange, providing an apocalyptic backdrop for the Sierra Nevada mountain range. (Photo credit: RS2Photography/Flickr)

The climate crisis is poised to become an existential threat to humanity by 2050. It must be a main topic at the 2020 presidential debates.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

The deadly wildfires that are currently burning across the West Coast are destroying communities and displacing people and wildlife in California, Oregon and Washington. They have claimed the lives of dozens of people. And the smoke from the fires—which, remarkably, has been seen as far east as the Netherlands—has given the skies an ominous orange hue. As one California resident told the New York Times, “It looks like doomsday.” But while the color of the sky has suggested apocalyptic times, it’s the air quality from all the smoke and soot that could do lasting harm to humans and animals.

“An NPR analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality data found that nearly 50 million people in California, Oregon and Washington live in counties that experienced at least one day of ‘unhealthy’ or worse air quality during wildfire season so far this year,” report Audrey Carlsen, Sean McMinn and Jess Eng of NPR. “That’s 1 in 7 Americans, an increase of more than 9 million people compared with 2018, the worst previous year. And this year’s wildfire season is far from over.” When it comes to polluted air, the pandemic is proving to be a threat multiplier. A new nationwide study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health looked at 3,000 counties across the U.S. and found that people with COVID-19 who live in high air pollution regions are “more likely to die from the disease than people who live in less polluted areas.”

And while wildfires are a part of the natural ecological cycle in forested areas, the steady increase and intensity of them in recent years has a human cause: climate change. Tragically, wildfires are just one of many ecological disasters that are occurring with greater frequency and intensity due to climate change. Droughts, flooding, and hurricanes have been devastating cities, towns, and ecosystems across the United States and the world, disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities and people of color. And climate-related migration is already happening on a grand scale. “More than 1 million disaster-related displacements have occurred each year on average in the U.S. since 2016,” reports Samantha Harrington for Yale Climate Connections. “Some people never return home.”

Adding to the threat, the Government Accountability Office warned in November that 945 Superfund sites—polluted locations across the nation that require a long-term response to clean up contamination by hazardous materials—are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, increased precipitation or wildfires—all of which are intensifying due to anthropogenic climate change. “There’s an accident waiting to happen,” said Jim Blackburn, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Rice University.

But tonight in Cleveland, the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will not cover the ongoing crisis that that is the root cause of all of these natural disasters and public health threats: climate change. Debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News decided to omit climate change from the list the debate topics, even as a majority of Americans say the federal government is “doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change,” according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll.

“Despite recent orange skies over the West Coast and fearsome storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the 32 years since NASA scientist James Hansen’s US Senate testimony that man-made global warming had begun, the climate crisis remains a marginal afterthought in most US news coverage,” write Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for the Nation, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review. Sadly, it should not come as a surprise: In 2012 and 2016, presidential debate moderators failed to pose a single question about the climate crisis to the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

It’s not just the debates: The mainstream news media barely covers the climate at all. The figures are shocking. Major network news programs devoted barely four hours to the climate crisis over the entirety of 2019, according to a study by Media Matters. That amounts to a paltry 0.7 percent of overall evening broadcasts and the Sunday morning news shows.

And while people are currently suffering—and dying—due to climate change-related factors (the World Health Organization notes that climate change is the cause of an estimated 150,000 deaths every year), future generations will pay a heavier price if nothing is done now. By increasing the number of extreme weather events and exacerbating air pollution, climate change is already harming people’s health, according to the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, a 2019 study. “Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. Their bodies and immune systems are still developing, leaving them more susceptible to disease and environmental pollutants,” said Nick Watts, who co-led the study. “Without immediate action from all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, gains in wellbeing and life expectancy will be compromised, and climate change will come to define the health of an entire generation.”

“As young people, we will bear the greatest impacts of climate change, and we refuse to stay silent while our future is destroyed,” said Anisa Nanavati, North American continental coordinator of Earth Uprising, a youth-led nonprofit supporting climate action, in an email. “Youth climate activists are uniting to take action and demand a better future for ourselves and future generations.”

RootsAction, an online initiative promoting economic fairness, equal rights for all, civil liberties, and environmental protection, has launched a public petition demanding that the 2020 presidential debate moderators—Chris Wallace (Fox News), Susan Page (USA Today), Steve Scully (C-SPAN) and Kristen Welker (NBC News)—address the climate crisis in the debates. And last week, nearly 40 Democratic senators wrote to the Commission on Presidential Debates urging them to include questions focused on climate change in the presidential debates. 

As Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate in Cleveland tonight, Ohioans don’t need to look far to see the impacts, both real and potential, across their state. “Images of shrinking icebergs and starving polar bears are often associated with the threats of climate change, but it’s important to know that Ohioans also experience climate change, just in a different way,” writes Miranda Leppla, vice president of energy policy at the Ohio Environmental Council, a nonprofit. “For us, it all comes down to a kind of domino effect of impacts. Climate change in Ohio can mean more rain events in which massive amounts of water fall in short periods of time, leading to more flooding of city streets and farm fields, leading to more fertilizer in streams and rivers that are already averaging above-normal temperatures, which creates the perfect conditions for toxic algae that in turn hurts small businesses who rely on clean drinking water and can cause serious health issues.”

Ohio’s predicament is far from unique: Across the nation and around the world, the rapidly changing climate is upending human and non-human life, devastating ecosystems and throwing the planet’s delicate natural balance into disarray. And without decisive, meaningful action by our leaders now, the climate crisis is poised to become an existential threat to humanity by 2050. It must be a main topic at the 2020 presidential debates.

  • Sign the petition demanding that the 2020 presidential debate moderators ask the candidates to discuss their positions on the climate crisis and their environmental policy.

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

Cause for concern…

Playing dirty: A Trump supporter recognizes President Trump’s support of the dirty coal industry at Republican Party of Louisiana rally on December 16, 2019. (Photo credit: Tammy Anthony Baker/Flickr)

Round of applause…

The kid’s alright: Teen climate leader Greta Thunberg addresses climate strikers at Civic Center Park in Denver on October 11, 2019. (Photo credit: Andy Bosselman/Streetsblog Denver/Flickr)

Parting thought…

Wise one: Jane Goodall delivers a lecture the University of Winnipeg on September 11, 2015. (The University of Winnipeg/Flickr)

“Unless we all get together to help the environment we all share, then it may be too late. The window of time is closing.” —Jane Goodall

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.