Disturbing forest ecosystems opens a Pandora’s Box on public health.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

As governments continue to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and scientists continue to assess its origins, it is becoming clear that deforestation is linked to emerging diseases. When humans destroy forests to create land for human use, whether it’s for farming, mining, logging, infrastructure development or urban expansion, biodiversity is diminished. And as some species go extinct, the ones that remain and even flourish in degraded forest ecosystems—like bats, rats and birds—are those that are more likely to be hosts for deadly viruses that can jump to humans.

COVID-19, SARS and Ebola—three infectious diseases that spread across national borders since 2002—share one thing in common: They were transmitted to humans from wild animals living in tropical forests, which are losing more than 100 trees per second due to rampant, unsustainable deforestation. (It is also important to note that cutting down trees negatively impacts not only biodiversity and human health but also the climate: Deforestation is responsible for 30% of global carbon emissions.)

Researchers in England examined over 6,800 ecological communities across six continents and found trends connecting disease outbreaks to regions where biodiversity has been diminished due to human activity. Their study, published in Nature in August 2020, concluded that “global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.”

But while the study is new, scientists have been sounding the alarm, which has fallen on deaf ears “for decades,” said Kate Jones, an ecologist at University College London who was one of the study’s authors. “Nobody paid any attention.”

As the COVID-19 global death toll surges past 2.6 million people, now is the time for governments to pay attention to the science: To prevent the next pandemic, efforts must be made to rein in rampant deforestation. In an essay published in the journal Science in July 2020, a group of scientists made the case that reducing both deforestation and the wildlife trade would result in a lower risk of future pandemics. “The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events,” they write.

Epidemiologist Ibrahima Socé Fall, who heads emergency operations at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, echoes that call. “Sustainable development is crucial,” he said. “If we continue to have this level of deforestation, disorganized mining and unplanned development, we are going to have more outbreaks.”

Investing in sustainable solutions also means investing in sustainable livelihoods. And so part of reducing deforestation is understanding the needs of rural communities living in or alongside forests, including providing economic incentives to protect the natural ecosystems around them. Giving Indigenous groups legal rights to their land is one way. In 2009 in India’s Narmada District, for example, villagers were able to secure legal rights to their land and resources, which led to more sustainable land management.

“Being secure in the knowledge that they own their land has meant that these communities have an incentive to protect and improve it for the future,” writes Edward Davey, the international engagement director of the Food and Land Use Coalition, an initiative to improve the world’s food and land use systems. “Villagers can now invest in actions like levelling, terracing and irrigating farmland for greater productivity. Some villages are also taking steps to prevent illegal forest clearing and forest fires, by patrolling the forest and brokering community agreements to manage fire.”

In addition, research indicates that improving rural health care can lead to a reduction in illegal logging. In one study conducted by researchers from the United States and Indonesia, villagers in rural Borneo were given discounts to health clinic visits, which offset the medical costs that were often paid for by illegal logging. “The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages,” write the study authors. “Results suggest that this community-derived solution simultaneously improved health care access for local and indigenous communities and sustainably conserved carbon stocks in a protected tropical forest.”

The global food system is also a major culprit of deforestation, as land is cleared to raise livestock to feed a growing population. And while big banks have begun to divest from fossil fuel companies due to their climate impact, they are increasingly financing industrial agriculture firms that produce meat and dairy, the biggest sources of emissions coming from the food system. “Animal protein and even dairy is likely, and already has started to become, the new oil and gas,” said Bruno Sarda, the former North America president of CDP, a carbon disclosure framework for the corporate sector. “This is the biggest source of emissions that doesn’t have a target on its back.”

Last month, several environmental groups and advocacy organizations co-sponsored a public petition urging the Biden administration and Congress to curb deforestation in an effort to lower the risk of the next pandemic. Specifically, the petition calls for $2.5 billion in the next COVID relief bill to “to support healthcare and jobs training for indigenous people in every tropical rainforest community, and support impoverished nations to build the healthcare systems to stop outbreaks before they spread.”

The petition’s sponsors, which include the Brazilian Rainforest Trust, the Endangered Species Coalition and Mighty Earth, argue that “[e]nding deforestation is our best chance to conserve wildlife, one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to curb global warming, and absolutely crucial to prevent the next deadly, global pandemic.”

“We are all interconnected,” famed primatologist Jane Goodall told PBS NewsHour in April 2020. “And if we don’t get that lesson from this pandemic, then maybe we never will.”

• Urge President Biden and Congress to lower the risk of the next pandemic by curbing deforestation and supporting tropical rainforest communities.

Cause for concern…

“In the moments of sheer terror, before a female kangaroo is killed, she embodies the indictment of our species, each and every time the act is committed for human gains,” write Earth | Food | Life contributors Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and David G. Brooks on NationofChange. They are calling on Nike, Adidas and other shoe manufacturers to stop using kangaroo skin to make sneakers.

• Nike and Adidas are using kangaroo skin to make sneakers (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and David G. Brooks, Earth | Food | Life via NationofChange)
• An iceberg the size of L.A. just broke off from Antarctica (AJ Dellinger, Mic)
• Trump-emboldened extremists could spell trouble for Biden’s environmental agenda (Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost)
• States look to step up wolf kills, pushed by Republicans (Matthew Brown and Iris Samuels, Associated Press)
• Butterfly numbers plummeting in U.S. West as climate crisis takes toll (Oliver Milman, The Guardian)

Round of applause…

“As the Interior Department awaits its new secretary, the agency is already moving to lock in key parts of President Biden’s environmental agenda, particularly on oil and gas restrictions, laying the groundwork to fulfill some of the administration’s most consequential climate change promises,” reports Lisa Friedman for the New York Times.

• Reversing Trump, Interior Department moves swiftly on climate change (Lisa Friedman, The New York Times)
• House passes historic public lands bill protecting nearly 3 million acres (Annette McGivney, The Guardian)
• Civilian Climate Corps is a government plan that all Americans can back (Jim Lardner, The New Yorker)
• Burger King UK says 50% of menu will be plant-based by 2031 (Tanuvi Joe, Green Queen Media)
• New post-Brexit ban on ‘barbaric’ foie gras set to be implemented in the next few months (Sarah Keane, Euro Weekly News)

Parting thought…

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

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.

Richmond, California, has long been a battleground for environmental justice.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

A public health warning was prompted when approximately 600 gallons of petroleum mixed with water leaked from a Chevron tanker terminal into California’s San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay on February 9. The source of the leak is believed to be Richmond Long Wharf, a major tanker terminal and port facility located in Richmond, California. The terminal receives petroleum imports bound for the Chevron Richmond Refinery at San Francisco Bay, which processes about 240,000 barrels of crude oil every day.

Responding to the incident, Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said that Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of California’s 15th district “plans to introduce a bill to increase fines and penalties in order to provide more effective deterrence.” Noting that the toxic mix was being dumped at the rate of five gallons per minute, Gioia said that the spill was “unacceptable,” warning that it “will harm wildlife and marine life.”

Home to whales, dolphins, seals and sharks, the waters of San Francisco Bay make up a critical ecosystem that “supports nearly 500 species of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and invertebrates,” according to the San Francisco Department of the Environment. “It is an essential resting place, feeding area and wintering ground for millions of birds.” The agency notes that “[n]early two-thirds of the state’s salmon pass through the Bay during their migration.”

“[T]he impact on local wildlife will be felt for some time,” Laura Deehan, state director of the nonprofit Environment California, said in a statement. “The oil from the spill has already washed up onto Keller Beach and into the shoreline and saltwater lagoon of Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline. This area is home to vibrant birdlife, including the great blue heron and double-crested cormorant, which migrate up the Pacific Coast. … These will all be immediately threatened by this spill.”

​​In a statement released on Twitter, Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, said it was “fully cooperating with authorities, including the U.S. Coast Guard and OSPR [California’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response].” However, in a statement, Oakland-based environmental watchdog group San Francisco Baykeeper called out fossil fuel giant’s “pathetic response,” releasing photos to back up its claim that “lots of oil [has] already spread beyond the boom into the Bay and onto nearby shorelines and beaches.”

“The people of Richmond already carry a disproportionate environmental burden, and spills like this add life-threatening exposure to toxic pollutants,” the group said. “Now the beaches are closed, the water is contaminated, and the whole area smells like a gas station. And then there’s the possibility of long-term, unknown damage to the Bay itself, and to all the wildlife that depend on it. Events like Chevron’s pipeline rupture underscore how critical it is that we make a just transition away from toxic dirty fuels like oil and coal, and move as quickly as possible towards clean energy like wind and solar.”

In California, that transition is well underway. According to a recent report, local demand for renewable energy is boosting the Golden State’s green portfolio, helping it surpass its clean energy goals. Conducted by the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, the report, which was released in October 2020, notes that more than 10 million customers—representing nearly a third of the state’s households and businesses—now have the option to choose a community choice aggregators as their electricity provider, up from less than 1 percent in 2010. This option allows consumers to choose their sources of their power.

“Despite a lack of action at the federal level, the transition to carbon-free energy is becoming a reality across the United States. At the local level, community choice aggregators (CCAs)—which offer communities public control over their electricity purchasing decisions—are accelerating this transition,” the report states. “Through these electricity providers, member communities can choose how much renewable energy is offered to their residents and businesses.”

“Community choice in energy has largely fallen under the radar, but it is rapidly reshaping the energy sector in California,” said Kelly Trumbull, a researcher at the Luskin Center and lead author of the report.

The acceleration toward renewables that is happening in California is something that President Biden wants for the entire nation. His clean energy plan seeks a historic investment of $400 billion over 10 years to mobilize clean energy and innovation, which includes the creation of a “new research agency focused on accelerating climate technologies.” Gallup polling reveals that a growing number of Americans are behind Biden’s mission to transition away from fossil fuels like oil and coal, and toward renewable energy sources like wind and solar. In 2019, 70 percent of Americans said the United States should put more emphasis on wind energy, while 80 percent believed more emphasis should be put on solar energy.

Sadly, last month’s spill is just the latest episode of Chevron’s long history of environmental and public health hazards in Richmond. The oil giant has been operating in Richmond for nearly 120 years, keeping the city on the front lines of the environmental justice fight. Unsurprisingly, the spill has revived activists’ demands for its closure. “These refineries are a clear, present and ongoing danger to the residents who are forced to live near them,” said Andrés Soto, an organizer at Communities for a Better Environment, a nonprofit. “These are mostly communities of color,” he added, “and this is disproportionately impacting African Americans, Latinos, working-class and immigrant Asians and working-class and poor whites.”

The spill serves not only as a reminder of the dangers of fossil fuel, but that society’s continued reliance on dirty energy threatens to upend life across the planet as we know it. According to United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have less than 10 years to act in order to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. In a 2018 report, the IPCC warned, “Without increased and urgent mitigation ambition in the coming years, leading to a sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, global warming will surpass [1.5 degrees Celsius] in the following decades, leading to irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems, and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies.”

• Sign a petition to hold Chevron accountable for their Richmond oil spill.

Cause for concern…

“The pandemic has exposed the weakness of the industrialized global food system, which depends on long, complex transportation chains and cross-border travel,” writes EFL reporter Robin Scher on Truthout. But, he adds, “[i]t didn’t take the pandemic to reveal the inefficiency and injustice of our food system: Globally, a third of all food is wasted, while nearly 690 million people were undernourished in 2019—almost 60 million more people than in 2014.”

• Pandemic may have left over 250 million people with acute food shortages (Robin Scher, Earth | Food | Life via Truthout)
• Damming rivers is terrible for human rights, ecosystems and food security (Deborah Moore, Michael Simon and Darryl Knudsen, Earth | Food | Life via Truthout)
• New evidence shows fertile soil gone from Midwestern farms (Dan Charles, NPR)
• Minnesota Supreme Court hands victory to PolyMet copper mine (Steve Karnowski, Associated Press)
• The race to save bats from overheating as temperatures rise (Isabelle Groc, The Guardian)

Round of applause…

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.” —Gus Speth

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

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.

When it comes to electricity, Texas is isolated from the rest of the United States. When the state’s power system fails, that means trouble.​​​

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

It is impossible to know if Winter Storm Uri—which brutally raged across large swaths of the United States, Northern Mexico, Eastern Canada and the British Isles last week—is a consequence of climate change, but the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world are. And it serves as a reminder of how important it is that the U.S. has rejoined the Paris climate agreement. But for the millions of Texans who have had no electricity, many for several days, the storm has exposed another problem: Texas is the only state to have its own power grid. Because it is not connected to the nation’s two main power grids, it cannot receive energy from other parts of the country during power outages. That fact has proved to be deadly.

“Texan infrastructure has buckled. The problem is not, as some argue, that Texas has too many renewables,” according to the Economist. “Gas-fired plants and a nuclear reactor were hit, as well as wind turbines. Worse, Texas had too little capacity and its poorly connected grid was unable to import power from elsewhere.”

There is a solution that has been in the works for over a decade: the Tres Amigas SuperStation. Billed as “the first renewable energy market hub in the U.S.,” the proposed Tres Amigas seeks to unify the nation’s power system by linking North America’s three main electric transmission grids: the Eastern (Southwest Power Pool), Western (Western Electricity Coordinating Council) and Texas (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) networks. Proponents of the project argue that it will not only increase grid reliability across the nation but also support more rapid adoption of renewable energy.

Transmission & Distribution World, a news site covering the energy industry, calls the project a “first-of-its-kind power transmission hub … [that] will serve to improve power reliability and solve voltage and stability problems caused by the intermittent generation of renewable energy sources such as wind, and other renewable[s] such as solar and geothermal generation. It will have significant reactive power capability that can be controlled at each interconnection, thereby improving stability, transfer capability and transmission efficiency.”

According to the Tres Amigas website, the project—to be sited in Clovis, New Mexico, near the border between Texas and New Mexico—will provide the “first common interconnection of America’s three power grids to help the country achieve its renewable energy goals and facilitate the smooth, reliable and efficient transfer of green power from region to region.” Though the project has been hampered by a lack of financing and scale-backs, the crisis in Texas may help bring more support to it. In general, the crisis could lend support to President Joe Biden’s clean energy plan “to build the next generation of electric grid transmission and distribution,” which includes the establishment of a “technology-neutral Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard (EECES) for utilities and grid operators.”

When it was announced in 2009 that American Superconductor (ASMC), a Massachusetts-based energy infrastructure company, would provide the Tres Amigas project with superconducting wires for electrical distribution, ASMC founder and CEO Greg Yurek said, “This is a tremendous opportunity to help unify the United States power grid and achieve the nation’s renewable energy goals. He added, “The time has come to utilize the latest technologies to not only balance renewable energy flows to get more clean electricity to customers, but also to increase the reliability and security of our power grids. Tres Amigas will help achieve these important goals.” (AMSC has a minority equity interest in Tres Amigas amounting to $1.75 million in cash and AMSC stock.)

However, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the state’s top utility regulator, “has shown little enthusiasm for participating” in the project, Kate Galbraith, energy reporter for the Texas Tribune, wrote last week. Galbraith, who served as the lead writer for the New York Times’ Green blog, points out that the reason that Texas has its own grid is to remain “out of the reach of federal regulators.” She writes: “In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules.”

A new public petition on Change.org is calling for Texas Governor Greg Abbott to end his state’s energy isolation by joining the Tres Amigas SuperStation and connecting Texas to the nation’s two main primary electric transmission grids. “As an independent energy grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) must balance its own energy production and consumption within the state,” states the petition, which was launched by Dallas resident Anil Raj. “Since Texas can not borrow energy from other states, and with a drastic curtail of energy supply due to the storm, Texas citizens must bear the brunt of the consequences of this failed governance with prolonged energy blackouts.”

Winter Storm Uri has devastated Texas, making a serious case for connecting Texas to the nation’s East and West grid connections. But the crisis in Texas is also a bellwether of what could happen in other parts of the country that are faced with aging energy infrastructure. The time is ripe for meaningful change. Over the next few months, Congress will deliberate over President Biden’s plans to revamp the nation’s energy structure, which will include an infrastructure spending blueprint that includes investments to upgrade the nation’s electrical grid. That plan will work to achieve Biden’s ambitious climate plan that started when he put the U.S. back into the Paris climate agreement.

Two of the president’s main objectives are in line with the agreement’s goals of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change: ending fossil fuel emissions from power generation by 2035 and making the nation carbon-neutral by 2050. Considering that the U.S. is the world’s second-biggest source of global warming emissions after China, what happens here has the potential to change the future for the entire planet. Additionally, when it comes to the climate fight, other nations look to the U.S. for leadership in science-based policy and technological advancements like grid-scale battery storage and carbon capture and storage.

By several metrics, the nation’s energy portfolio is looking favorable toward climate resiliency, but there are caveats. As EFL contributor Elliott Negin, a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out in Truthout in 2019, “renewable electricity generation has nearly doubled over the last decade, and close to 90 percent of that expansion has come from wind and solar, which jumped more than fivefold.” He added, “If wind and solar maintain their exponential growth rate, the United States is on track to get all of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2050. Fulfilling that potential, however, will require two major advances: updating the rickety U.S. electricity grid and developing energy storage technologies that can enable the grid to incorporate more wind and solar power.”

“We are colliding with a future of extremes,” Alice Hill, who served as the senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, told the New York Times. “We base all our choices about risk management on what’s occurred in the past, and that is no longer a safe guide.”

• Urge Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Public Utility Commission of Texas to connect the Texas power grid to the East and West interconnections to increase power reliability throughout the state.

Cause for concern…

“The 18,000 types of fish living in rivers make up a quarter of all vertebrate species,” reports Eric Roston for Bloomberg News. “After two centuries of industrial development, 23% of them are now threatened with extinction.”

• Almost a quarter of all freshwater fish species are in peril, thanks to humans (Eric Roston, Bloomberg News)
• 4 more states propose harsh new penalties for protesting fossil fuels (Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPost)
• U.S. needs to brace itself for more deadly storms, experts say (Matthew Daly and Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press)
• Wind farms aren’t all ready for icing amid changing climate (Bobby Magill, Bloomberg Law)
• After pork giant was exposed for cruel killings, FBI pursued its critics (Lee Fang, The Intercept)

Round of applause…

“New legislation would ban all fracking in California by 2027, taking aim at the powerful oil and gas industry in the state already planning to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035,”​​​​​​​ reports Adam Beam for the Associated Press.

• California lawmakers propose ban on fracking by 2027 (Adam Beam, Associated Press)
• Biden’s EPA nominee must act on forests to be an environmental justice champion (Scot Quaranda, Earth | Food | Life via Truthout)
• White patriarchy won’t solve the climate crisis: Antiracist, feminist leadership is what we need right now (Jennie C. Stephens, Island Press)
• ‘Piecing together a broken heart’: Tribes rebuild territories they lost through the real estate market (Hallie Golden, The Guardian)
• This new KitKat is completely vegan (Andrea Romano, Travel + Leisure)​​

Parting thought…

“You don’t need compassion running in your blood to understand that you can make a difference. You can take the very real compassion, consideration, and respect you already have for cats and dogs … and extend that to farm animals.” —John Oberg, Earth | Food | Life on NationofChange)

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

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 new report exposes the outsized and growing impact of Europe’s animal agriculture industries on the climate.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

A recent analysis conducted by Greenpeace has come to an extremely worrying conclusion: If the European Union (EU) doesn’t put checks on the greenhouse gas impacts created by the expanding animal agriculture industry, the bloc risks missing its Paris climate agreement targets, which are intended to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Published in September, “Farming for Failure: How European Animal Farming Fuels the Climate Emergency” crunches data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other peer-reviewed research to find that animal farming in the EU is responsible for the equivalent of 704 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually — mostly through methane emissions resulting from the digestive processes of ruminants like cows and sheep — representing 17% of the bloc’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The authors note that this amount is more than the total amount of CO2 produced yearly by all the cars and vans currently on the roads in the EU.

In order to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. But current national commitments are insufficient, say scientists. “The Paris Agreement is not enough. Even at the time of negotiation, it was recognized as not being enough,” says Alice C. Hill, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It was only a first step, and the expectation was that as time went on, countries would return with greater ambition to cut their emissions.”

To make matters worse, the ongoing expansion of the EU meat and dairy industries threatens to upend the bloc’s climate goals. Between 2007 and 2018, the EU’s meat and dairy production saw a 9.5% increase, which, according to Greenpeace, resulted in a 6% increase in annual emissions — the same impact as putting 8.4 million new cars on the road.

Steep reductions in the EU’s production of animal-based agricultural products could significantly reduce the bloc’s climate impact. According to the report, a 50% reduction in animal farming would prevent the equivalent of 250 million metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. That is equivalent to the combined emissions, across all sectors, of the 11 lower-emitting EU nations. “Regardless of whether European climate ambition stays low or rises to match what’s scientifically necessary, one fact remains crystal clear: achieving emissions reductions requires radical changes in the agriculture sector, particularly in animal farming,” the report states.

Of course, we need to eat. But when it comes to the environment (and frankly, animal rights), it’s what we decide to eat that really matters. And one dietary change can help immensely: moving from meat-based to plant-based diets. “Plant-based foods usually have a lower impact than meat,” write Julia Moskin, Brad Plumer, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart for the New York Times, adding that it is “more efficient to grow crops for humans to eat than it is to grow crops for animals to eat and then turn those animals into food for humans.” They note that a recent study by the FAO found that “on average, it takes about three pounds of grain to raise one pound of meat.” A separate study by Our World in Data found that emissions from plant-based foods are 10 to 50 times lower than those from animal products.

The connection between animal agriculture and the climate crisis isn’t just a problem in the EU; it is a global issue. Worldwide, meat and dairy production is responsible for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Science by zoologist Joseph Poore of the University of Oxford and agroecologist Thomas Nemecek of Zurich University of Applied Sciences, “the impacts of animal products can markedly exceed those of vegetable substitutes to such a degree that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use ~83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56 to 58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories.”

To put it another way — considering the planet’s limited resources and the outsized impact of animal agriculture on the environment — raising animals for human consumption is illogical. Then, of course, there is the terrible impact that factory farming has on the health and well-being of the animals trapped in this cruel system.

The Greenpeace report urges European policymakers to “acknowledge the magnitude of animal farming emissions and commit to immediate and lasting reductions in industrial meat and dairy production and consumption.”

• Urge the European Union to stand by Paris climate commitments and reduce reliance on animal agriculture.

Cause for concern…

President Biden’s EPA nominee Michael Regan supported the wood pellet industry in North Carolina, where he currently serves as secretary of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. That industry has devastated the health of rural low-income communities of color, argues EFL contributor Scot Quaranda on Truthout.

• Biden’s EPA nominee must act on forests to be an environmental justice champion (Scot Quaranda, Earth | Food | Life on Truthout)
• Fossil fuel pollution causes 1 in 5 premature deaths globally: study (Matthew Green, Reuters)
• State-owned fossil firms’ plan to invest $1.9 trillion threatens Paris climate agreement hopes (Fiona Harvey, The Guardian)
• Wisconsin judge orders start to wolf hunt this month (Associated Press)
• Appeals court rebuffs youth climate activists in novel case against government (Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill)

Round of applause…

“Some whale songs can give scientists valuable information about the ocean’s geography, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science,” reports Molly Taft for Earther. “What’s more, their songs can be used as a form of seismic testing, which uses blasts of sound to map out the ocean floor. Forms of this technology can be harmful to whales and other marine life. If we’d only listened more closely to whales, we may have not needed to develop certain practices that hurt them.”

• How whale songs can help us explore the ocean (Molly Taft, Earther)
• U.S. Interior Department postpones sales of oil drilling rights (Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg)
• Judge: Trump’s lifting of mining ban in U.S. West was wrong (Matthew Brown, Associated Press)
• EPA again orders Amazon to stop selling illegal pesticides (Katherine Khashimova Long, Seattle Times)
• If you’re an animal lover there has never been a better time to go vegan (Anthony Elder, Kent Wired)

Parting thought…

“Humans are adept at categorizing particular species according to cultural norms: in the United States, for instance, dogs and cats as ‘pets’; rats, mice and cockroaches as ‘pests’; cows, pigs and chickens as ‘food.’ These categorizations maintain hierarchies in which humans are situated at the top, and they justify human use and treatment of other species in particular ways.” —Kathryn Gillespie, “The Cow with Ear Tag #1389” (The University of Chicago Press, 2018)

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

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 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has given short shrift to a White House directive to use science in reviewing Trump’s decision to strip endangered species protections from the gray wolf.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

In one of the Trump administration’s final insults to science and the natural world, the endangered gray wolf in all lower 48 states was taken off the Endangered Species list on January 4, going against experts who say the species has not yet recovered and still requires federal protection.

Thankfully, on his first day in the White House, President Joe Biden ordered a broad review of his predecessor’s destructive anti-wildlife policies, including Trump’s decision to take Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections away from gray wolves in the lower 48 states—protections they have had since 1973, which have helped them return to parts of their former range. But just one week after Biden’s order, on January 28, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) asserted in a brief, three-paragraph letter to conservation groups that the Trump administration’s decision to delist the gray wolf was valid.

“There is no way the Fish and Wildlife Service followed President Biden’s directive and completed its review in just five business days,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “It’s baffling that they went rogue by not even waiting till there was a new secretary of Interior to assess what happened under Trump. This is a slap in the face to the American public, who want scientific integrity restored to the government and to ensure that wolves are protected till they’re recovered across this country.”

According to WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit that launched a public petition urging the Biden administration to put the gray wolf back on the ESA list, the most recent data from the USFWS and its state partners says that there are only an estimated 108 wolves in Washington, 158 in Oregon, and just 15 in California. The group also points out that while “Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have had a few wolf sightings over the past three years … wolves remain functionally extinct in these states,” adding that they “remain absent across vast swaths of their historical habitat in the West, including in Colorado and the southern Rockies.” The group joined a coalition of conservation and environment groups in filing a lawsuit challenging the USFWS decision.

“We have seen what happens when ‘management’ of wolves is returned to hostile state wildlife agencies disinterested in maintaining robust, stable, and genetically diverse wolf populations,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director at WildEarth Guardians. “Idaho, which allows an individual to kill up to 30 wolves annually, saw the slaughter of nearly 600 wolves and wolf pups in a recent 12-month period. Now other states are gearing up to allow wolf hunting and trapping this fall. Returning this type of unscientific and barbaric ‘management’ to states at this early juncture would spell disaster for true gray wolf recovery, plain and simple.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit, filed a separate lawsuit against the USFWS, saying that the agency’s removal of the gray wolf from the ESA list was “unlawful,” and urged the court to throw out the agency’s decision and to order the reinstatement of federal protections. “We urged the last Administration to maintain federal protection for wolves and to implement a national wolf recovery plan,” said Sylvia Fallon, wildlife conservation project director at NRDC. “Instead, they removed protections that are critical to the future of the species at a time when they are still missing from much of their original habitat, and as the planet faces a biodiversity crisis that threatens the fate of humanity.” In addition, the group pointed out that the government has “failed to complete a national recovery plan as required under the Endangered Species Act.”

That biodiversity crisis was detailed last year in a United Nations report that found that around 1 million animal and plant species are currently at risk of becoming extinct, mainly from relentless human activity including climate change and habitat destruction. Many of these species are threatened with extinction “within decades, more than ever before in human history.”

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said report co-chair Prof. Josef Settele of the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

The gray wolf delisting is a gift to the meat industry. Though wolves primarily hunt wild deer and elk, they are also opportunistic and will occasionally prey on livestock. It is this behavior that has made wolves a pariah for ranchers, who are now able to kill them now that they no longer have protection under the Endangered Species Act. However, the best way to prevent wolves from preying on livestock isn’t to kill them, but to use proven and effective non-lethal management tools like turbofladry, a basic kind of electric fencing, or employing “range riders” to patrol cattle grazing lands on horseback, or simply using guard dogs. The bottom line is that there are humane ways to help wolves and livestock coexist in the same area.

In addition to threatening the recovery of gray wolves, Trump’s move is also bad for the environment at large, and even human health. “The delisting of gray wolves is a direct attack on ecosystems across the country where the apex predator can keep wildlife populations balanced and healthy,” said Dr. Fallon, in an email. “And healthy ecosystems aren’t just essential for wildlife—they also mean cleaner air, cleaner water and healthier people. The fate of humanity is intertwined with the fate of species and healthy ecosystems.”

“President Biden has made clear that listening to the science will be the hallmark of his administration. It’s sad the Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t get the memo,” said Hartl of CBD. “We won’t be able to take on the extinction crisis or the climate crisis if federal agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service feel free to routinely ignore science whenever it suits them.”

Urge the Biden administration to restore Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves.

Cause for concern…

“Crops currently occupy about 11% of the world’s land surface, with active grazing taking place over an additional 30%,” write Peter H. Raven and David L. Wagner, in a new study connecting the spread of agriculture during the past half century to “[m]ajor declines in insect biomass and diversity.”

• Agricultural intensification and climate change are rapidly decreasing insect biodiversity (Peter H. Raven and David L. Wagner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• The human victims of factory farming (Lindsay Patton, One Green Planet)
• Sea levels are rising faster than most pessimistic forecasts (Jonathan Tirone, Bloomberg Green)
• Global heating-driven ice melt could result in blooms of potentially toxic plankton algae in the Arctic. (Oceanographic)
• ​​​​​U.S. cities are vastly undercounting emissions (John Schwartz, The New York Times)

Round of applause…

“The Biden-Harris transition team identified COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change as its top priorities. Rivers are the through-line linking all of them,” writes EFL contributor Katy Neusteter on Truthout. “The fact is, healthy rivers can no longer be separated into the ‘nice-to-have’ column of environmental progress. Rivers and streams provide more than 60 percent of our drinking water—and a clear path toward public health, a strong economy, a more just society and greater resilience to the impacts of the climate crisis.”

• Restoring our water systems should be top priority for Biden administration (Katy Neusteter, Earth | Food | Life on Truthout)
• Yellen signals action on climate change a top treasury priority (Sarah Ewall-Wice, CBS News)
• Justice department tosses Trump-era environmental directives (Ellen M. Gilmer, Bloomberg Environment)
• Judge orders U.S. officials to weigh coal mine’s climate costs (Matthew Brown, Associated Press)
• Russian court orders mining giant to pay $1.96 billion for Arctic spill (Celine Castronuovo, The Hill)

Parting thought…

“Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs—and the journey to get there—before finally leaving their miserable world, only too often after a painful death.” —Jane Goodall

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

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 approved the use or expanded use of dozens of pesticides that threaten public health and the environment. It’s up to the Biden administration to reverse these unjust and unscientific decisions.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

In his first days in the White House, President Joe Biden has used the power of his pen—through executive order—to undo much of the damage done by his predecessor, like rejoining the Paris climate agreement and rescinding Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration. The Biden administration also has a chance to undo the myriad threats unleashed by Trump’s EPA over four years that saw the expansion of a number of dangerous pesticides used on crops across the nation.

According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, Trump’s EPA “approved more than 100 pesticide products in 2017 and 2018 that contained ingredients widely considered to be the most dangerous still in use, including some that have been banned in multiple countries or targeted for phaseout in the United States.”

“When [Trump’s] EPA is approving 94% of applications that come across its desk, including for some of the planet’s most dangerous pesticides, it’s obvious the safety review process is completely broken,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist specializing in pesticide policy at CBD who conducted the analysis.

Among the pesticide products approved by Trump’s EPA in 2017 and 2018 were products containing neurotoxic chemicals, including chlorpyrifos, which has been shown to disrupt nervous system development in children. Notably, Trump’s efforts to revoke an Obama-era EPA proposal to ban chlorpyrifos came just weeks after the pesticide’s manufacturer, Corteva (formerly DowDuPont), contributed $1 million to the Trump inauguration.

The Trump administration also approved the use of 17 new products containing atrazine—a weedkiller used in corn fields—adversely affects the development of larval amphibians and the reproductive systems of adult amphibians. One study found that male frogs exposed to atrazine “were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults.” A 2001 study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey found that atrazine was the most prevalent pesticide detected in U.S. drinking water. The Trump administration also approved the use of 69 new pesticide products that the EPA has listed as “known” or “likely” carcinogens.

In the final days of the Trump administration, the EPA received a request by the manufacturer of aldicarb for approval to apply the neurotoxic insecticide across some 400,000 acres of orange, grapefruit, lemon and lime trees in Florida and Texas. Aldicarb, which has been linked to brain damage in infants and young children, has been banned in more than 100 countries. The CBD notes that the agency’s ultimate ruling on this controversial chemical could be the “first major pesticide decision under the Biden Environmental Protection Agency.”

“The fact that U.S. regulators would even consider expanding use of this dangerous, widely banned pesticide is a stunning indictment of our broken regulatory system,” said Donley. “This application vividly reaffirms why the pesticide industry considers us the dumping ground for the world’s worst pollutants. We’ll be watching closely to see whether the Biden administration steps up and puts public health before pesticide company profits.”

A welcome sign that things will be changing at the EPA is the fact that last week President Biden made a strong case for a science-based executive branch, establishing an “advisory council on science, technology, and innovation” to help “make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”

To encourage swift action on the current threats posed by approved pesticides to public health, wildlife and the environment, Pesticide Action Network, an international coalition of more than 600 nongovernmental organizations “working to replace the use of hazardous pesticides with ecologically sound and socially just alternatives,” has launched a public petition urging the Biden administration to “protect farmers, farmworkers, rural families, children and pollinators from harmful pesticides that were approved for use—or expanded uses—by the outgoing administration.”

• Urge President Biden and Acting EPA Administrator Jane Nishida to protect Americans from dangerous pesticides that were unleashed by the Trump administration.

Cause for concern…

“Elephants are highly social animals, living in large family groups with strong bonds to family members and friends,” writes Christina Swanlund on Elephant Journal. “Though she is only in her early 40s, she looks and no doubt feels so much older as she struggles through the freezing cold winters all alone … [with] arthritis and respiratory issues.”

• 40 years in quarantine: Why we need to help Lucy the loneliest elephant (Christina Swanlund, Elephant Journal)
• Backed by big oil, Manchin holds the keys to Dems’ climate agenda (Alyce McFadden, OpenSecrets)
• Climate ravaged West with heat and drought last year—will 2021 be worse? (Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News)
• Air quality regulators in ‘Cancer Alley’ have fallen dangerously behind (Mark Schleifstein, New Orleans Times-Picayune and The Advocate)
• Sea lions are dying from a cancer caused by herpes and toxic chemicals like DDT and PCBs (Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times)

Round of applause…

Male chicks—considered useless to egg farmers—are sent straight into grinders to their deaths. But thanks to new draft legislation in Germany and technologies that can identify the sex of chicks before they hatch (the latter of which EFL contributor Linda Tyler recently wrote about in LA Progressive), this terrible cruelty could one day come to an end. 

• Germany approves draft law to end mass culling of male chicks (Agence-France Presser’s via the Guardian)
• Biden says he will ask Congress to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels (Jeff Mason and Nandita Bose, Reuters)
• General Motors will sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035 (Neal E. Boudette and Coral Davenport, The New York Times)
• Dutch court orders Shell Nigeria to compensate farmers whose land was polluted by oil leaks (Mike Corder, Associated Press)
• Indigenous women are championing climate justice (Kavita Ramdas and Laura Garcia, Open Society Foundations)

Parting thought…

“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.” —Black Elk

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

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 Trump administration rollback allowed logging and road-building in the pristine Tongass National Forest. President Biden must reinstate protections for this critical ecosystem.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

Generally unharmed by human activity, old-growth forests are able to reach colossal proportions with trees of advanced age, which makes them the most effective carbon sinks, safely storing large amounts of carbon dioxide and keeping it from entering the atmosphere and mitigating the effects of climate change. In addition, old-growth forests have more fallen and decaying trees, as well as large, old trees with extensive root structures, both of which support more biodiversity than younger forests.

The Tongass National Forest is one of these forests, the largest remaining intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world. But last October, the Trump administration launched an attack on this critical ecosystem by exempting it from the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which was adopted by the U.S. Forest Service in 2001, under the administration of President Bill Clinton, in order to ban most logging and road construction from nearly 60 million acres of untouched national forests and grasslands across the nation.

Covering 16.7 million acres across most of Southeast Alaska, the Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States, capturing at least 8 percent of all the carbon stored in all of the continental U.S. forests combined. onserving it is key to the nation’s—and the planet’s—climate fight. Audubon, a nonprofit conservation organization based in New York, argues that the Tongass “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 … [and] 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.”

The group also notes that the Tongass “houses some of the oldest trees in the nation—many over 800 years old—and provides essential habitat for the largest population of bald eagles in the world.” In addition, it provides critical habitat for grizzly bears, wolves and all five species of Pacific salmon. The Trump administration rollback of the Roadless Rule effectively opened more than 9 million acres of the Tongass—about half of its entire area—to industrial logging, road-building and other potential resource extraction such as mining. Once roads are built for one kind of development, others often follow.

“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.”

In an attempt to stop the repeal of the Roadless Rule, nine Alaskan tribes filed a petition last year with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, saying that the Tongass “can no longer be viewed as stands of timber waiting for harvest; it must be viewed as a cultural resource that must be managed for the benefit of its local people, for the long-term productivity of its salmon streams and wildlife habitat, and to help mitigate impacts from climate change.”

“This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Roadless Rule,” write Wanda Kashudoha Loescher Culp, a Tlingit artist and activist, and the Tongass coordinator for the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), and Osprey Orielle Lake, the executive director of WECAN, in a recent opinion piece on Grist. “While we are seeking a legal remedy, we are also looking to the Biden administration to show bold climate leadership. We are calling on President-elect Biden to swiftly initiate a new rule-making process within the Forest Service to reinstate roadless protections in the Tongass. If we are to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, which Biden has pledged to rejoin, we need to protect old-growth forests — thus protecting the Tongass should be at the top of the Biden administration’s agenda.”

• Urge the Biden administration to reinstate the Roadless Rule to protect the Tongass National Forest.

Cause for concern…

“We need to all move together, because today very few are on a trajectory of the steep reductions needed to meet even current [Paris climate] goals, let alone the targets we need to avert catastrophic damage,” said John Kerry in his first remarks as the United States’ new climate envoy.

• Kerry commits U.S. to climate crisis fight but warns world is way off pace (Oliver Milman and Fiona Harvey, The Guardian)
• China’s 2020 coal output highest since 2015, undermining climate pledges (Muyu Xu and Shivani Singh, Reuters)
• Curbing population growth to tackle climate change a tough ask (Michael P. Cameron, Stuff.co.nz)
• Groundbreaking court case argues U.S. climate denial policy violates Americans’ right to be free (Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute via EcoWatch)
• Some northwest salmon species on the brink of extinction (Marie Fazio, The New York Times)

Round of applause…

“The Biden administration announced Thursday a 60-day suspension of new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits for U.S. lands and waters, as officials moved quickly to reverse Trump administration policies on energy and the environment,” reports Matthew Brown for the Associated Press. ​​​​​​​

• Biden halts oil and gas leases, permits on U.S. land and water (Matthew Brown, Associated Press)
• How one European museum is quietly reversing air pollution (Betsy Blumenthal, Condé Nast Traveler)
• These non-lethal methods encouraged by science can keep wolves from killing livestock (Max G. Levy, Smithsonian Magazine)
• ‘I’m ready to be 100% vegan’, Katy Perry tells 109 million followers (Vegan Food and Living)
• Surprising things your didn’t know could be vegan—and chic (Monisha Rudhran, ELLE Australia)

Parting thought…

“What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in, whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly understood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a profound understanding and appreciation for trees and forests and the vital role they play, for they are among our best allies in the uncertain future that is unfolding.”

—Jim Robbins, “The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet” (Penguin Random House, 2015)

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

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.

Children are working on palm oil plantations to supply an ingredient in cookies that other children are selling thousands of miles away.

by Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

An Associated Press (AP) investigation has revealed that Ferrero, one of two makers of the popular Girl Scout cookies, is sourcing their palm oil, an ingredient in the cookies, to plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia where tens of thousands of children are estimated to work alongside their parents. The investigation bolsters a campaign launched last year by Olivia Chaffin, a 14-year-old girl scout of the Southern Appalachian council, urging Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, to remove palm oil from Girl Scout cookies. Chaffin and some of her fellow scouts in Troop 543 have stopped selling the cookies. In her petition on Change.org, Chaffin writes:

“I have sold Girl Scout cookies for many years and have been a top seller in my troop, but I no longer feel I can sell Girl Scout cookies because they contain palm oil. Rainforests are destroyed to grow the palm plants that palm oil comes from. In 2017, I wrote to the president of Girl Scouts concerning palm oil in Girl Scout cookies. She wrote back and told me that it was sustainable palm oil, meaning rainforests were not destroyed to grow the palm plants that that palm oil comes from, but on the box it says mixed sustainable palm oil. I did some research and found out that mixed sustainable means only a portion of the palm oil is sustainable, meaning it is unknown how much sustainable palm oil is in the cookies, it could be a large amount. The reason palm oil is normally used is because it is cheaper than most other oils, but that doesn’t justify destroying such a valuable part of life.”

The AP story was published in September by Robin McDowell and Margie Mason, investigative reporters who were part of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for the series “Seafood from Slaves.” The duo took nearly two years to uncover extensive human and labor rights abuses on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia that produce the ubiquitous ingredient found in 50% of all packaged consumer products, from snack foods to cosmetics and soaps.

The palm oil industry is a primary driver of deforestation, which not only exacerbates climate change by releasing into the atmosphere carbon that was previously safely stored in trees cut down to make room for plantations, but also threatens wildlife and biodiversity. “Rapid and relentless deforestation for industrial-scale agriculture, particularly palm oil and timber plantations, leaves orangutans without food and shelter, exposing them to hunters who kill orangutans and capture their babies to sell as pets,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Alan Knight, chief executive of International Animal Rescue, an animal rights nonprofit based in England. “The apes are also in danger of coming into conflict with local people as they stray into villages and onto farmland in search of food. Fires started on an annual basis as part of land clearance operations in Indonesia are also responsible for the loss of thousands of acres of rainforest and the lives of hundreds if not thousands of orangutans.”

But while palm oil’s toll on the environment and wildlife is well established, less is known about the impact of the $65 billion industry on the humans toiling away at the plantations. Using U.S. Customs records and the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers, the AP journalists traced the provenance of the palm oil found in the cookies, found that most of the children “earn little or no pay and are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals and other dangerous conditions.” They also noted, “Some never go to school or learn to read and write. Others are smuggled across borders and left vulnerable to trafficking or sexual abuse. Many live in limbo with no citizenship and fear being swept up in police raids and thrown into detention.” In addition to Ferrero, they singled out some major brands involved in this supply chain, including Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg’s and PepsiCo.

McDowell and Mason “found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children from some of the poorest corners of Asia, including stateless Rohingya Muslims sold onto plantations after fleeing persecution in their homeland. The fruit they harvest makes its way into the supply chains of the planet’s most iconic food and cosmetics companies.”

As part of their investigation, the AP reporters interviewed “more than 130 current and former workers from two dozen companies across wide swaths of Malaysia and Indonesia, which together produce 85% of the global supply.” Ten-year-old Ima, who led her class in math and dreamt of becoming a doctor, was pulled out of school by her father because he needed help to meet the company targets on the plantation where she was born. McDowell and Mason write that Ima “sometimes worked 12 hours a day, wearing only flip flops and no gloves, crying when the fruit’s razor-sharp spikes bloodied her hands or scorpions stung her fingers. The loads she carried, sometimes so heavy she would lose her footing, went to one of the very mills feeding into the supply chain of Olivia’s cookies.”

Following the investigation, U.S. senators demanded governmental action to address the abuses in the palm oil industry by banning the import of products tied to child or forced labor. “The federal government needs to enforce this law and investigate all instances of forced labor in supply chains and block imports made with forced labor from coming into the U.S.,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who spearheaded the effort along with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). “In addition to strong government enforcement, corporations need to hold themselves accountable,” said Brown.

When she was named the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA in 2017, Acevedo said, “Throughout my career, I have been deeply committed to helping girls cultivate the skills they need to excel in life. I firmly believe they can change the world, and that at this decisive moment in time, we need their courage, confidence, and character more than ever.” Olivia Chaffin has shown the courage to stand up and call out the abuses in the palm oil industry, and its connection to the cookies she and her troop members sell. Now it’s up to Acevedo to support that courage.

Urge Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, to remove palm oil from Girl Scout cookies.

###

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

Cause for concern…

“South Asia has the highest burden of pregnancy loss globally and is one of the most PM2.5 polluted regions in the world,” said Dr. Tao Xue, a researcher at China’s Peking University and lead author in a new report on the health impact of air pollution. “Poor air quality could be responsible for a considerable burden of pregnancy loss in the region.”

• Air pollution in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh could be causing hundreds of thousands of stillbirths and miscarriages annually (Brian Bienkowski, Environmental Health News)
• San Diego Zoo Safari Park gorillas test positive for COVID-19 (Jonathan Wosen, San Diego Union-Tribune)
• ​​​​​What we’ve lost: The species declared extinct in 2020 (John R. Platt, The Revelator)
• Insect populations suffering death by 1,000 cuts, warn scientists (Damian Carrington, The Guardian)
• VVideo of cruel bear beating goes viral amid call to protect Pakistan’s wildlife (Daily Pakistan Global)

Round of applause…

“A purported briefing note from the Biden transition team mentioning the plan [to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline permit] was widely circulated over the weekend after being shared by the incoming president’s team with U.S. stakeholders,” reports Kyle Bakx for CBC News.

• Biden plans to cancel Keystone XL Pipeline permit on first day in office (Kyle Bakx, CBC News)
• Survey finds majority of voters of both parties support efforts to fight climate change (John Schwartz, New York Times)
• 2021 could be the year for environmental justice legislation as states lead charge (Kristoffer Tigue, Inside Climate News)
• 50 countries vow to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030 (Sylvie Corbet, Associated Press)
• Vegan egg is having a major moment in China (Charlotte Pointing, LIVEKINDLY)

Parting thought…

“Having respect for animals makes us better humans.” —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.