Properly addressing the plastics problem involves not only interrogating corporate tactics but also understanding that some plastics provide societal benefits.

By Alice Mah, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

Over the past few years, the paradox of plastic as both a miracle for and a menace to society has become a platitude. There are countless stories in the media and popular culture about our fraught relationship with plastic, focusing on our addiction and dependence. However, this way of framing the problem actually serves to perpetuate it. Plastics are plural. There are tens of thousands of plastics, each with different physical properties, including not only flexibility or durability, but also toxicity. By lumping plastics together into a singular entity with both beneficial and harmful features, the double-sided narrative assumes that the two sides can never be separated. By blaming us all for our dependence on plastic, questions of corporate responsibility and unequal toxic risks are avoided. Ultimately, the paradox of plastic conveys a sense of inescapability that the industry can tap into.

“Let’s talk realistically about plastic” is the title of a campaign launched in October 2020 by the Danish Plastics Federation, featuring short videos with plastic reality-check messages: “Without plastic… cars would use more fuel”; “No plastic… no bike helmet.” The punchline: “Frankly, we need plastic where it makes sense. But a world without… creates more problems than it solves.” The U.S.-based Plastics Industry Association regularly tweets and blogs similar messages. For example, one blog post decried the public’s “knee-jerk reaction” of proposing plastic bans and substitutions to deal with plastic litter as “overly simplistic,” “outlandish,” and “impractical… like when a child proposes that the solution to global warming is eliminating cars.”

While this line of argument is “overly simplistic” itself, the industry is right in some ways. Plastic cannot be separated neatly into different piles of societal value: essential versus wasteful, or desirable versus toxic. Many plastics are indeed essential for health and safety, transport, and connectivity, yet are also toxic and wasteful. There are no easy solutions to such a complex problem. However, we can stop the plastics crisis from spiraling even further out of control. Many plastic products can and should be banned or substituted to protect health, the environment, and the climate. Policymakers, researchers, and activists have rightly focused on the need to eliminate or substitute the production of toxic plastic products (to protect health), single-use plastics (to stop the plastic waste crisis), and virgin (fossil fuel-based) plastics (to address the climate crisis). There are many barriers and dilemmas involved in such proposals, but reducing harmful plastics production is not an unrealistic goal. On the contrary, it is both possible and necessary. An important start is to interrogate corporate half-truths as well as untruths.

The industry’s “realistic versus impractical” narrative is a pragmatic twist on a related narrative that has long been popular with the industry: “reality versus fiction,” used to make truth claims about the benefits and nontoxicity of plastics. Since the beginning of the plastic age, the industry has tirelessly promoted the essential and desirable characteristics of plastic products, while denying their harmful effects. The discovery of synthetic plastics more than a century ago was seen as miraculous, saving animals by replacing ivory and tortoiseshell, and natural resources by replacing wood, silk, and glass. More importantly for a capitalist system, plastics were cheap. After World War II, new plastic household products entered the market, fostering the growth of mass consumer society. Steadfastly, the industry extended its reach into other markets, to building materials, shopping bags, medical equipment, toys, electronics, water bottles, and food packaging. People were sold not only plastics but also the idea of disposability.

Yet the public has never been fully sold on plastics. From the start, labor, consumer, and environmental groups have questioned the production and use of plastics. In fact, the petrochemical and plastics industries have often been accused of using the playbook from Big Tobacco by manufacturing doubt and uncertainty about the hazards of their products. I wish that I could say that these accusations are exaggerated, or oversimplify a more complicated situation, but if anything, they are understated. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the American and European petrochemical industries conspired to conceal scientific links between vinyl chloride, cancer, and other illnesses, in order to protect their markets. The news about vinyl chloride and cancer broke in 1974, leading to public alarm and swift regulations, but it took decades for researchers and lawyers to expose the corporate lies and cover-ups. Meanwhile, the plastics industry learned how to anticipate regulations, refining its “deceit and denial” tactics in later controversies over carcinogenic and hormone-disrupting plastics.

Beyond high-stakes battles over truth, corporations often ignore issues of toxicity altogether, especially given that the burden of proof for harm rests on communities, not corporations. In spite of decades of environmental justice struggles around the world, toxic hazards from plastics remain disproportionately located in minority, low-income, and working-class communities. In Canada, my home country, the Indigenous Aamjiwnaang First Nation is located next to a number of toxic polluting petrochemical plants in “Chemical Valley” in Sarnia, Ontario, and local residents have reported a number of illnesses. This parallels the infamous case of “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, an 85-mile stretch of former plantation land along the Mississippi River with a high concentration of petrochemical facilities and oil refineries situated in close proximity to rural Black residential communities. Indeed, around the world there are hundreds of “cancer villages” and cancer clusters related to plastics production, incineration, and disposal. Some corporations have been held to account for negligent toxic waste, and air quality regulations have been introduced in many places, but most companies have continued with business as usual. Despite the risks and negative social and environmental impacts, corporations across the plastics value chain will deploy whatever tactics they can in order to create, protect, and expand plastics markets.

This excerpt is adapted from Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Alice Mah (Polity Books, 2022) and was edited and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Alice Mah is a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick.

Take action…

Amazon is polluting the planet with its overuse of plastic packaging

A 2021 report by Oceana investigated Amazon’s use of plastic and found that “up to 23.5 million pounds of the company’s plastic packaging polluted the world’s waterways and oceans in 2020.” The report also found that the company’s “recycling promises do not help to reduce plastic pollution.”

“Our report found that Amazon’s plastic packaging pollution problem is growing at a frightening rate at a time when the oceans need corporate leaders like Amazon to step up and meaningfully commit to reducing their use of single-use plastic. Amazon has shown it can do this in large markets like India and Germany,” said Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives. “It now needs to commit to do so worldwide.”

Urge Amazon to stop using plastic packaging.

From the EFL archives…

Microplastics are contaminating the global seafood supply, but major news outlets are silent

By Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff​​​

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

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

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

[Read the full article…]

Parting thought…

“There is no such thing as ‘away.’ When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.” —Annie Leonard

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 self-destructive delusion that we are the only species that has a right to life on Earth has led to the ecological crisis.

By Baptiste Morizot, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

One species has transformed into a material backdrop for its tribulations the 10 million other species that constitute its extended family, its giving environment, and its daily cohabitants. More specifically, it is one small population of this species that has done so, the bearer of a merely historical and local culture. Making all other living beings invisible is a provincial and late phenomenon—not the product of mankind as a whole. Imagine a people approaching a land populated by a myriad of other related peoples, and declaring that they don’t really exist, and that they are the stage and not the actors (ah yes, it’s not a fiction that requires a lot of imagination, as it also comprises vast swaths of our history). How did we accomplish this miracle of blindness toward the other creatures of the living world? We could hazard here—to exacerbate the strangeness of our heritage—a rapid history of the relations between our civilization and other species, a history which leads to the modern condition: Once nonhuman living beings were debased ontologically (that is to say, considered as endowed with a second-order existence, of lesser value and lesser consistency, and thus transformed into ‘things’), human beings came to believe that they alone truly existed in the universe.

It simply took Judeo-Christianity to expel God from ‘Nature’ (this is the hypothesis of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann), to make Nature profane, then the scientific and industrial revolutions to transform the nature that remained (the scholastic phusis) into a matter devoid of intelligence or of invisible influences, available to extractivism, for human beings to find themselves as solitary travelers in the cosmos, surrounded by dumb, evil matter. The last act involved killing off the last affiliation: Alone in the face of matter, human beings nevertheless remained in vertical contact with God, who sanctified it as his Creation (natural theology). The death of God entails a terrible and perfect loneliness, which we might call the anthropo-narcissistic prison.

This false lucidity about our cosmic solitude put the final seal on the serene exclusion of all nonhuman beings from the field of the ontologically relevant. It explains the ‘prison house’ of the philosophy and literature cultivated in the great European and Anglo-American capitals. My choice of this expression is not arbitrary: Not only are these fields now a prison house or ‘closed room’ in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit”—but also the prison house is the world itself, the universe, which is populated only by us and the pathological relationships with our fellow humans entailed by the disappearance of our plural, affective, and active affiliations with other living beings, nonhuman animals and environments.

This ubiquitous theme in 20th-century literature and philosophy, which foregrounds the cosmic solitude of human beings, a solitude elevated to grandeur by existentialism, is intriguingly violent. Under cover of the heroism of the absurd (as Albert Camus defined it), under cover of having the courage to face the truth, this violence is a form of blindness that refuses to learn how to see the forms of existence of others, negating their status as cohabitants, postulating that, in fact, they have no communication skills, no ‘native senses,’ no creative point of view, no aptitudes for finding a modus vivendi, no political promptings. And this is the great cunning, and therefore the hidden violence of Western naturalism, which in fact aims to justify exploiting all of nature as a raw material lying to hand for our project of civilization—it means treating others as matter ruled by biological laws, refusing to see their geopolitical promptings, their vital alliances, and all the ways in which we share with living beings a great diplomatic community in which we can learn anew how to live.

The human subject alone in an absurd universe, surrounded by pure matter lying to hand as a stock of resources, or a sanctuary for humans to recharge their batteries spiritually, is a phantasmal invention of modernity. From this point of view, those great thinkers of emancipation, Sartre and Camus, who have probably infused their ideas deeply into the French tradition, are the objective allies of extractivism and the ecological crisis. It is intriguing to reinterpret these discourses of emancipation as vectors of great violence. Yet it was they who transformed into a basic belief of late humanism the myth that we alone are free subjects in a world of inert and absurd objects, doomed to giving meaning through our consciousness to a living world devoid of it.

This myth took away from that world something it had always possessed. The shamanists and animists described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola know very well what this lost state had involved, namely complex social relations of reciprocity, exchange, and predation which are not peace-loving or pacific, and do not follow Isaiah’s prophecy, but are political in a still enigmatic sense, and call for forms of pacification and conciliation, of mutualist and considerate cohabitation. After all, there are meanings everywhere in the living world: They do not need to be projected, but to be found, with the means at our disposal—translation and interpretation. It’s all about diplomacy. We need interpreters, intermediaries, and in-betweens to do the job of starting to speak again with living beings, to overcome what we might call Claude Lévi-Strauss’s curse: the impossibility of communicating with the other species we share the Earth with. “For despite the ink spilled by the Judeo-Christian tradition to conceal it, no situation seems more tragic, more offensive to heart and mind, than that of a humanity coexisting and sharing the joys of a planet with other living species yet being unable to communicate with them,” Lévi-Strauss said in conversation with Didier Eribon.

But this impossibility is a fiction of the moderns—it helps to justify reducing living beings to commodities in order to sustain world economic exchanges. Communication is possible, it has always taken place; it is surrounded by mystery, by inexhaustible enigmas, by untranslatable aspects too, but ultimately by creative misunderstandings. It doesn’t have the fluidity of a café conversation, but it is nonetheless rich in meaning.

As an enigma among other enigmas, the human way of being alive only makes sense if it is woven into the countless other ways of being alive that the animals, plants, bacteria, and ecosystems all around us demand.

The ever-intact enigma of being a human is richer and more poignant when we share it with other life forms in our great family, when we pay attention to them, and when we do justice to their otherness. This interplay of kinship and otherness with other living beings, the common causes they foster in the politics of life, is part of what makes the ‘mystery of living,’ of being a human being, so inexhaustible.

This excerpt is adapted from Ways of Being Alive by Baptiste Morizot and was originally published in French by Editions Actes Sud © Actes Sud, 2020. It was translated into English by Andrew Brown and published by Polity Books in 2022. This excerpt was edited and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Baptiste Morizot is a writer and lecturer in philosophy at Aix-Marseille University in France who studies the relationship between humans and other living beings. His many books include Ways of Being Alive and Rekindling Life: A Common Front, both published in English by Polity Books.

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“Wolves remain absent across most of their historic range—because they are being savagely hunted and killed. States in the Northern Rockies are making it easier for hunters to freely and legally murder wolves,” write Friends of the Earth. “Hunters have recklessly slaughtered gray wolves in record numbers by shooting, trapping, choking, poisoning, and other inhumane poaching tactics. In this season alone, over 270 wolves have been killed in Montana with another 300 wolf deaths in Idaho. If we don’t act now, these iconic canines could go extinct.”

Urge the Biden administration to restore federal protections for gray wolves.

Cause for concern…

There’s Only One Essential Role Humans Have on Earth—A Humbler Perspective Could Save the World

By Captain Paul Watson

Some species, especially the ones we call the “higher” animals (mainly the large mammals), are primarily passengers [on spaceship Earth]. Some of these passengers contribute a great deal to maintaining the machinery of the life-support system, although they are not as critical as the absolutely essential species that serve as the tireless engineers of the system. There is one passenger species, however, that long ago decided to mutiny from the crew and go its own way, content to spend its days entertaining itself and caring only for its own welfare. That species is Homo sapiens.

There are other species, both plant and animal, that we have enslaved for our own selfish purposes. These are the domesticated plants that replace the wild plants that help run the system. These are the animals that we have enslaved to give us meat, eggs, and milk, or to serve the purpose of amusing us, only to abuse, torture, and slaughter them.

As the number of enslaved animals increases, wild animals are displaced through extermination or the destruction of habitat. The plants that we enslave must be “protected” with lethal chemical fertilizers and genetically modified seeds, along with other chemical poisons, such as herbicides, fungicides, and bactericides.

We are stealing the carrying capacity of ecosystems from other species to increase the number of humans and domestic animals. The law of finite resources dictates that this system will collapse. It simply is unsustainable.

[Read the full excerpt from Urgent! Save Our Ocean to Survive Climate Change, by Captain Paul Watson (GroundSwell Books, 2021). This web adaptation was produced by GroundSwell Books in partnership with Earth | Food | Life.]

ICYMI…

PPE May Save Human Lives, but It’s Deadly for Wildlife

By Reynard Loki

One of the most distinguishable features of the COVID-19 era is the public, everyday use of personal protective equipment (PPE), mainly in the form of disposable face masks and latex gloves. And while these thin layers protect us and others from transmitting and contracting SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the lower respiratory tract disease, scientists are now beginning to understand just how harmful these objects can be for ecosystems and wildlife. …

But while these “weapons” that fight coronavirus have proved to be lifesaving for humans, an increasing number of non-human animals are finding them to be a brand-new, and often deadly, threat that has suddenly littered their natural habitat. One main problem is that face masks and latex gloves are disposable, and people often do not dispose of them properly. How many times have you seen a used mask or glove lying on the street or stuck in a bush or floating in a waterway? Welcome to the world’s new pollution problem. (As if the scourge of plastic waste weren’t enough of an issue for the global ecosystem.)

[Read the full article on EcoWatch…]

Round of applause…

Turning Discarded Face Masks Into Burnable Fuel to Produce Energy

A team of scientists from Korea University in Seoul has devised an innovative way to upcycle used face masks, millions of which are discarded daily due to the COVID-19 pandemic: Convert them to burnable fuel through pyrolysis, a process in which organic material is heated in the absence of oxygen. The researchers have shown that by collecting single-use masks and putting them through this process, they can not only avoid entering landfills, soils, and oceans but can also create fuel that can generate energy that could potentially be used to generate electricity.

“We verified that upcycling post-consumer surgical masks into value-added energy products represents a sustainable and promising route with notable environmental benefits,” said Xiangzhou Yuan, a professor at Korea University and one of the researchers behind the study.

Parting thought…

“And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” —Mary Oliver

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.

Strong social networks foster resilience to food system shocks, both within and between Pacific Island communities.

By Stacy Jupiter, Teri Tuxson, Caroline Ferguson and Sangeeta Mangubhai, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

Pacific Islanders are no strangers to disasters. For millennia, island peoples have coped with and adapted to disasters like tropical cyclones and tsunamis, as well as unpredictable shifts in precipitation patterns, leading to droughts and floods. 

Because most coastal communities across the Pacific region are found on low-lying atolls and narrow coastal margins, they are particularly vulnerable to—and adept at—coping with environmental extremes as a result of their adaptive cultural local practices and knowledge, which have made them more resilient in the face of disasters.

These subsistence practices especially helped rural Pacific Island communities cope through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. While many Pacific Island governments thwarted community transmission of the virus by closing international borders and imposing restrictions on movement, these same measures created hardships through employment losses and supply chain disruptions.

In our recent study published in the journal Marine Policy and led by partners within Teri Tuxson’s organization, the Locally Managed Marine Area Network, we found that despite early concerns, Pacific Island communities across seven countries—Papua New Guinea, Palau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Solomon Islands—remained relatively resilient through 2020, when some of the worst effects of the pandemic were being felt around the world. That’s because they were able to fall back on existing customs of food sharing and on their knowledge of food production techniques to ensure food availability during this period.

Strong social networks among Pacific Islanders have long fostered resilience to food system shocks, both within and between island communities. Historically, relationships built during ceremonial trade between islanders had the additional purpose of helping these communities to obtain or barter for goods needed during times of crop failure or disasters.

One excellent example of this is the Kula ring, first described in 1922 by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his tome, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The Kula ring refers to a traditional trade alliance joining communities of east New Guinea. The main purpose of the Kula ring was to reciprocally exchange two goods with local symbolic value—long, red shell necklaces called soulava were traded for white shell bracelets called mwali.

Through this trade, other ordinary goods such as food items were also exchanged on the side, which solidified lasting relationships between groups that could provide assistance to each other to recover from disasters.

This type of food sharing ensured survival in these communities. In addition to trade alliances, other strategies promoted resilience via bet-hedging. Examples of this include crop diversification; surplus food production, preservation and storage; maintenance of tenure boundaries (land or sea areas over which kinship groups control access and use of natural resources); and cooperation among family groups and clans under traditional governance hierarchies. Many of these practices are still in place today and are visible in communities that have been best able to weather impacts from natural disasters and sudden shocks.

For example, Tropical Cyclone Ofa hit Samoa in 1990. Although important cash crops such as coconut were severely affected during the cyclone, local communities maintained resilience through community cooperation and cohesiveness, including through food exchange. In some cases, village chiefs instructed farmers to plant fast-growing crops on available communal lands. Meanwhile, several villages revived the fading practice of pit fermentation of breadfruit immediately following the cyclones to maintain a steady food supply.

While carrying out surveys for the Marine Policy report, we also found that rural communities in Papua New Guinea who were simultaneously affected in 2020 by both the pandemic hardships and a severe drought turned to bartering for goods between communities and relying on sago palm production to supplement agricultural activities.

One man from Palau who responded to our survey noted, “It is part of our culture to share food with others,” adding that he and other fishermen “started sharing more than we normally do because we couldn’t sell our catch, especially when COVID-19 started, and there were no tourists coming.”

In Fiji, where many villages were battered by Tropical Cyclone Harold in early April 2020 just before the government imposed pandemic-related travel restrictions, a female respondent reported that, “Some farms were affected during the cyclone and, on top of that, we couldn’t go to town to buy groceries because of travel restrictions. So, we were depending on seafood.”

These sentiments were heard consistently across the Pacific, where rural residents fell back on their knowledge of salting fish, tending taro patches, and using ancestral techniques and methods handed down by previous generations.

Disasters in the Pacific region are inevitable. The eruption on January 15 of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, with more power than an atomic bomb, created a tsunami that was felt as far away as Japan and California. Moreover, it had a devastating impact on infrastructure in the low-lying islands of Tonga and destroyed crops through ash fall.

But the signs of resilience are already showing. Tongan communities around Oceania have galvanized to organize shipments of food supplies and aid—demonstrating the strength of social networks that can be nearly instantaneously activated. In the weeks and months ahead, customs of food sharing and knowledge of food preservation will most certainly be put to use to get communities through this time of hardship.

A version of this article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Stacy Jupiter is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and the Melanesia regional director with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Teri Tuxson is the assistant coordinator of the Locally Managed Marine Area Network.

Caroline Ferguson is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sangeeta Mangubhai is a 2018 Pew marine fellow with Talanoa Consulting.

Take action…

President Biden: Declare a climate emergency

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

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

Urge President Biden to finally declare a climate emergency. 

ICYMI…

The Human Mania for Roadbuilding Is a Threat to the Great Apex Predator Species

By Jeffrey Dunnink, Independent Media Institute

Designed for speed and efficiency, roadways across the globe are effectively killing wildlife whose futures are intrinsically linked to the future of the planet: apex predators, those species including big cats like tigers and leopards who sit at the top of the food chain and ensure the health of all biodiversity.

A new study I coauthored confirms that apex predators in Asia currently face the greatest threat from roads, likely due to the region’s high road density and the numerous apex predators found there. Eight out of the 10 species most impacted by roads were found in Asia, with the sloth bear, tiger, dhole, Asiatic black bear and clouded leopard leading the list.

The outlook for the next 30 years is even more dire. More than 90 percent of the 25 million kilometers of new global road construction expected between now and 2050 will be built in developing nations that host critical ecosystems and rich biodiversity areas. Proposed road developments across Africa, the Brazilian Amazon and Nepal are expected to intersect roughly 500 protected areas. This development directly threatens the core habitats of apex predators found in these regions and will potentially disrupt the functioning and stability of their ecosystems. This is particularly concerning where road developments will impact areas of rich biodiversity and where conservation gains have been so painstakingly achieved.

[Read full article…]

Parting thought…

“Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice.” —Gary L. Francione

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.

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

By Karen Davis, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take action…

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

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

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

ICYMI…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

10 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

More People, More Inequality

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

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

Failed Family Planning

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

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

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

Externalizing Costs to Women and Children

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

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

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

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

Finding a Solution

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

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

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

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

Time to Recalibrate, Not Celebrate

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

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

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

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

Take action…

Reproductive justice is environmental justice

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

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

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

Letter to the editor…

Dear Earth | Food | Life,

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

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

Jean Whitinger
Johnson City, Tennessee

Cause for concern…

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

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

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

Round of applause…

Biden may finally declare a climate emergency

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

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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