When it comes to Monsanto’s controversial herbicide, both the mainstream scientific community and our regulatory establishments have failed us.

By Stephanie Seneff, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

The following excerpt is from Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment by Stephanie Seneff, PhD (Chelsea Green Publishing, July 2021). It is reprinted with permission from the publisher and has been adapted for the web.

In September 2012, I attended a nutrition conference where Dr. Don Huber from Purdue University was speaking on the topic of “glyphosate.” Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. While glyphosate isn’t a household name, everyone has heard of Roundup. Drive across the United States and you’ll see vast fields marked with crop labels that say “Roundup Ready.” Monsanto, the Missouri-based company that was Roundup’s original manufacturer, was acquired by the Germany-based company Bayer in 2018 as part of its crop science division. Monsanto has touted glyphosate as remarkably safe because its main mechanism of toxicity affects a metabolic pathway in plant cells that human cells don’t possess. This is what—presumably—makes glyphosate so effective in killing plants, while—in theory, at least—leaving humans and other animals unscathed.

But as Dr. Huber pointed out to a rapt audience that day, human cells might not possess the shikimate pathway but almost all of our gut microbes do. They use the shikimate pathway, a central biological pathway in their metabolism, to synthesize tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, three of the twenty coding amino acids that make up the proteins of our body. Precisely because human cells do not possess the shikimate pathway, we rely on our gut microbiota, along with diet, to provide these essential amino acids for us.

Perhaps even more significantly, gut microbes play an essential role in many aspects of human health. When glyphosate harms these microbes, they not only lose their ability to make these essential amino acids for the host, but they also become impaired in their ability to help us in all the other ways they normally support our health. Beneficial microbes are more sensitive to glyphosate, and this causes pathogens to thrive. We know, for example, that gut dysbiosis is associated with depression and other mental disorders. Alterations in the distribution of microbes can cause immune dysregulation and autoimmune disease. Parkinson’s disease is strongly linked to a proinflammatory gut microbiome. As has become clear from the remarkable research conducted on the human microbiome in the past decade or so, happy gut bacteria are essential to our health, including in ways that researchers have yet to fully understand. It’s worth remembering that Roundup hit the market—and was declared safe—before much of this groundbreaking research on the human microbiome was ever conducted.

Dr. Huber also explained that glyphosate is a chelator, a small molecule that binds tightly to metal ions. In plant physiology, glyphosate’s chelation disrupts a plant’s uptake of essential minerals from the soil, including zinc, copper, manganese, magnesium, cobalt, and iron. Studies have shown that plants exposed to glyphosate take up much smaller amounts of these critical minerals into their tissues. When we eat foods derived from these nutrient-deficient plants, we become nutrient deficient, as well.

Glyphosate also interferes with the symbiotic relationship between plant roots and soil bacteria. Surrounding the roots of a plant is a soil zone called the rhizosphere that is teeming with bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. Glyphosate kills the organisms living in the rhizosphere, which then interferes with a plant’s nitrogen uptake, as well as the uptake of many different minerals. This interference further translates into mineral deficiencies in our foods. Glyphosate also causes exposed plants to be more vulnerable to fungal diseases. And fungal diseases can lead to contamination of our foods with mycotoxins produced by pathogenic fungi.

I came away from Dr. Huber’s lecture convinced that I needed to learn a lot more about glyphosate.

Fable for tomorrow

Both of my parents grew up on family farms in small towns in southern Missouri. The area is now an environmental and economic wasteland, because large agrochemical farming has forced most small farmers into bankruptcy. As a child, I visited my grandparents on their farms, gathering eggs from the chicken coop, marveling over the cows and their calves in the fields, and helping with the fruit stand where my dad’s parents sold apples and peaches. When I was 13, my grandfather was discovered dead on his tractor, with a split-open bag of DDT by his side.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans were told that herbicides and insecticides, such as DDT, were safe. DDT is an organochloride first used by the military during World War II to control body lice, bubonic plague, malaria, and typhus. While DDT was effective at preventing malaria, the environmental consequences of its use were devastating, especially as people began using it more and more, in broader and broader applications, for pest control.

I read Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, shortly after it was published. A marine biologist by training, Carson condemned the chemical industry for its irresponsible disinformation campaign. She painted a grim picture of no birds singing in the spring. She called it a “fable for tomorrow,” a phrase that haunts me to this day. Silent Spring explores in detail how DDT and other chemicals were poisoning wildlife—from earthworms in the soil to juvenile salmon in the rivers and oceans. Carson’s book had a profound effect on me and helped me understand my grandfather’s untimely and unexpected death.

Around the same time, I also learned about the thalidomide disaster. Thalidomide, manufactured by a German pharmaceutical company, was prescribed to pregnant women to help with morning sickness and difficulty sleeping. It was aggressively marketed and advertised as safe. But thousands of children whose mothers took thalidomide during pregnancy were born with birth defects, including missing arms and legs. Studying the photographs of these deformed and unhappy children in a magazine, I realized that sometimes the products that purport to improve our lives can have major adverse effects—and that the companies that sell them cannot necessarily be trusted to tell us the whole truth about the risks their products pose.

The United States avoided this disaster, which devastated the lives of at least 10,000 children in Europe, because of a brave scientist named Frances Oldham Kelsey. Dr. Kelsey was a Canadian-born reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, responsible for approving or rejecting the application for a license to distribute the drug in the United States. Although she faced enormous pressure, and although thalidomide was already approved for use in Canada, Great Britain, and Germany, Dr. Kelsey rejected the application after she determined that there was insufficient evidence that it was safe to use during pregnancy. At the time, I was young, optimistic, and patriotic. I remember thinking how lucky I was to live in the United States, a country that protected its citizens from such a catastrophe.

Hiding in plain sight

In the 1950s, in the small town in coastal Connecticut where I grew up, living treasures were everywhere: ladybugs, dragonflies, butterflies, bumblebees, grasshoppers, lightning bugs, giant beetles we called pinching bugs, toads, and dozens of chittering playful squirrels. Praying mantises were a rare delight, but fireflies could be counted on in the evening, along with bats overhead as the shadows grew. Today I live outside Boston, in a place that has a similar climate to the Connecticut town where I spent my childhood. Yet it’s rare to see wildlife on our suburban street. An occasional squirrel, and one or two butterflies in the spring. No longer do we have to clean the windshield of all the dead bugs that accumulate on a summer’s day. Children, of course, don’t realize what they’re missing out on. This change appears to have happened slowly enough that almost nobody has noticed.

Yet, there’s no question that something devastating is going on, even if it’s difficult to name it precisely. The rate of species going extinct today is hundreds or even thousands of times faster than it has been during the past tens of millions of years. Environmental scientists warn that we have already entered the sixth mass extinction. Human health is also suffering. Over the past few decades an alarming rise in many chronic diseases across the globe has occurred, especially in countries that adopt a Western-style diet based on industrialized agriculture. Many of these diseases have an autoimmune component. They include Alzheimer’s disease, autism, celiac disease, diabetes, encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and obesity.

Something terrible seems to be affecting every living thing on the planet—the insects, the animals, and the health of human beings, including children. Something hiding in plain sight. While we can’t reduce all environmental and health problems to one insidious thing, I believe there is a common denominator. That common denominator is glyphosate.

This problem is too important to ignore. My goal is to convince anyone who eats, anyone who has children, and anyone who cares about the health of humans and the planet that we need to look much more closely and much more carefully at the impact of glyphosate on and beyond the food supply. Both the scientific community and our regulatory establishments have failed us. It is time to shine light onto the shadows—to convince the world about glyphosate’s diabolical mechanism of toxicity and give ourselves the tools we need to understand how glyphosate harms us and what we can do to protect ourselves and our families.

Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in food and nutrition, and a master’s degree, an engineer’s degree, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science, all from MIT. She has authored over three dozen peer-reviewed journal papers on topics relating human disease to nutritional deficiencies and toxic exposures. She has focused specifically on the herbicide glyphosate and the mineral sulfur. Dr. Seneff is the author of Toxic Legacy (Chelsea Green Publishing, July 2021) and she lives in Hawaii.

Take action…

Several environmental, public health and consumer advocacy groups, including Friends of the Earth Action, Food & Water Action, Progress America and Corporate Accountability have sponsored a public petition urging the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of glyphosate.

Urge the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of glyphosate.

Cause for concern…

“The deadly collapse of a 12-story condominium tower on a barrier island north of Miami Beach early Thursday morning has spurred new calls to survey buildings in areas vulnerable to sea level rise and subsidence, highlighting one of the lesser-known threats of climate change,” report Alexander C. Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo for HuffPost.

• Miami tower collapse stokes new fears of rising seas (Alexander C. Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost)
• Unprecedented heat wave in Pacific Northwest driven by climate change (Anne C. Mulkern, E&E News via Scientific American)
• Bipartisan infrastructure deal omits big climate measures (Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman, New York Times)
• Dispossessed, again: Climate change hits Native Americans especially hard (Christopher Flavelle and Kalen Goodluck, New York Times)
• EPA watchdog says Trump appointees kept fired employees on payroll (Alex Guillén, Politico)

Round of applause…

“Congressional Democrats have approved a measure reinstating rules aimed at limiting climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas drilling, a rare effort by Democrats to use the legislative branch to overturn a regulatory rollback under President Donald Trump,” reports Matthew Daly for the Associated Press.

• Congress votes to reinstate methane rules loosened by Trump (Matthew Daly, Associated Press)
• Shawnee reclaim the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio (Mary Annette Pember, Indian Country Today)
• Mapping quest edges past 20% of global ocean floor (Jonathan Amos, BBC News)
• 3,000 hospitals and schools add vegan burgers to menus (Nicole Axworthy, VegNews)
• How to reduce energy use during heat waves and peak demand days (Harvard University)

ICYMI…

“The southwestern states, in particular, have faced frequent and ongoing droughts over the past two decades, and traditional water supplies are failing,” writes Earth | Food | Life reporter Frederick Clayton, who explores how turning wastewater into drinking water can make existing water supplies go further (“The Southwest Offers Blueprints for the Future of Wastewater Reuse,” Truthout, April 17). “How a city can recycle wastewater depends largely on the geography of the area, financial resources—and, perhaps most importantly, the attitudes of the public.”

Parting thought…

“In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.” —Sylvia Earle

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, Counterpunch, 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.

Some climate solutions can actually harm biodiversity. But there are synergistic solutions that can tackle both issues.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

The natural world is undergoing two enormous crises that are currently threatening the natural world: climate change and biodiversity loss. These crises are intertwined. Climate change is cur­rently impacting 19 percent of species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the world’s catalog of endangered species. We are currently experiencing the Sixth Extinction, the sixth major extinction event in Earth’s history and the only one caused by human activity. The Sixth Extinction is not only itself accelerating—it is also accelerating climate change, creating a destructive feedback loop. Now scientists are beginning to understand that another kind of destructive feedback loop is happening: Our own efforts to protect the climate could actually harm biodiversity.

On June 10, two separate United Nations bodies—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)—released a joint report that they hope will alter the way society is tackling these crises. The report is the result of a four-day virtual workshop convened by the Scientific Steering Committee assembled by IPBES and IPCC and attended by 50 of the world’s preeminent climate and biodiversity experts who examined how climate and biodiversity policies and strategies relate to each other, work at odds with each other, and can be dovetailed to maximize positive impacts.

The report’s authors call for a “new conservation paradigm [that] would address the simultaneous objectives of a habitable climate, self-sustaining biodiversity, and a good quality of life for all. New approaches would include both innovation, as well as the adaptation and upscaling of existing approaches.”

Within the scientific community, discussions about climate and biodiversity are often separate, creating silos of information that are ultimately not helpful in solving these interrelated dilemmas. (Case in point: The UN joint report represents the first-ever collaboration between the two intergovernmental science-policy bodies.) The report found that policies have generally addressed the two issues independently of each other, which has led to missed opportunities that can maximize efforts on both fronts while meeting global development goals.

“Human-caused climate change is increasingly threatening nature and its contributions to people, including its ability to help mitigate climate change. The warmer the world gets, the less food, drinking water and other key contributions nature can make to our lives, in many regions,” said Professor Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of the Scientific Steering Committee. “Changes in biodiversity, in turn, affect climate, especially through impacts on nitrogen, carbon and water cycles.”

One of the ways that society can protect both the climate and the planet’s biodiversity is to preserve and restore land and marine ecosystems that are rich in both carbon and species. By leaving such regions untouched by human development—or bringing them back to their natural state—the carbon stored in them remains out of the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming, and the species that live there would benefit from healthy, functioning habitats. In addition, by leaving forests intact, for example, human society would continue to benefit from the ecosystem services they provide, like regulating floods, protecting coasts, enhancing the quality of water resources, preventing soil erosion and supporting plant pollination. The report found that reducing deforestation and forest degradation can contribute to lowering annual greenhouse gas emissions, by as much as 5.8 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide every year.

An increase in sustainable agricultural and forestry practices—which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase carbon sequestration and enhance biodiversity—is also a way to tackle both issues. By improving the way farmlands are managed, particularly by conserving soil quality and reducing the use of fertilizer, we could prevent as much as 6 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions every year, according to the report.

The report’s authors point out that while the creation of protected areas has been essential for species protection, these areas are not nearly enough to prevent the rapid decline of species on a planetary scale, with only a paltry 15 percent of land and 7.5 percent of the ocean currently protected. And even in many of those areas, laws are not properly enforced. “Not only are protected areas too small on aggregate (and often individually), but they are also frequently sub-optimally distributed and interconnected, inadequately resourced and managed, and at risk of downgrading,” the report states.

In April 2019, a group of 19 prominent scientists published the “Global Deal for Nature” (GDN), a “time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth,” which, when paired with the Paris Climate Agreement, is meant to “avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services.” The GDN’s main objective is to conserve “30×30”: 30 percent of the Earth in its natural state by 2030. The idea has become an international rallying cry, with 50 nations joining the movement to defend big swaths of intact ecosystems from exploitation, extraction and development.

The Wyss Foundation, a private charitable foundation based in Washington, D.C., “dedicated to… empower[ing] communities… and strengthen[ing] connections to the land,” has joined forces with National Geographic to launch the Wyss Campaign for Nature—“a $1 billion investment to help [nations], communities, [and] Indigenous peoples” mobilize to achieve the 30×30 goal. The campaign has launched a public petition urging immediate action to protect those ecosystems that have not yet been completely despoiled by the unrelenting expansion of humanity. “Protecting 30 percent of our entire planet by 2030 (30×30) is an ambitious but achievable goal,” the campaign says. “To achieve it, all countries must embrace the goal and contribute to it; Indigenous rights must be respected; and conservation efforts must be fully funded.”

Similarly, the UN report calls for the “external recognition of Indigenous peoples’ and community conserved territories and areas (ICCA), initiated, designed, and governed by Indigenous communities,” as well as “enhanc[ing] financing for nature” through a “[s]ubstantial upscaling” of financial resources.

The report also brings up concerns that some climate change mitigation strategies can actually harm biodiversity. For example, growing corn for biofuel or burying captured carbon requires land-use changes that would reduce or compromise wildlife habitats. (Conversely, the scientists did not find any species protection measures that had a negative impact on the climate.)

“The evidence is clear: a sustainable global future for people and nature is still achievable, but it requires transformative change with rapid and far-reaching actions of a type never before attempted, building on ambitious emissions reductions,” said Pörtner. “Solving some of the strong and apparently unavoidable trade-offs between climate and biodiversity will entail a profound collective shift of individual and shared values concerning nature—such as moving away from the conception of economic progress based solely on GDP growth, to one that balances human development with multiple values of nature for a good quality of life, while not overshooting biophysical and social limits.”

Simon Lewis, chairman of global change science at University College London, did not participate in the UN report, but he called it “an important milestone.” “Finally the world’s bodies that synthesize scientific information on two of the most profound 21st-century crises are working together,” he said. “Halting biodiversity loss is even harder than phasing out fossil fuel use.”

Cause for concern…

“G-7 leaders vowed Sunday to move away from public financing of coal projects worldwide and to make good on their long-standing commitments to help vulnerable nations bear the rising costs of climate change. But activists who had hoped for more concrete and ambitious pledges raised a key question: Where are the details?” reports Brady Dennis reports for the Washington Post​​​​​​

• G-7 leaders vow to move away from fossil fuels, but offer few details (Brady Dennis, Washington Post)
• Below aging U.S. dams, a potential toxic calamity (James Dinneen and Alexander Kennedy, Undark)
• Ice shelf protecting Antarctic glacier is breaking up faster (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)
• U.S. water and power are shockingly vulnerable to cyberhacks (Kartikay Mehrotra, Bloomberg Environment)

Round of applause…

• Biden plans to restore Alaskan forest protections stripped under Trump (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• Biden moves to restore clean-water safeguards ended by Trump (Matthew Daly, Associated Press)
• How returning lands to native tribes is helping protect nature (Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360)
• Blockchain tech could turn tide for sustainable fishing (Anna Turns, Guardian)

Parting thought…

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” —George Bernard Shaw

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, Counterpunch, 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.

Unsustainable logging by the forest products industry is driving massive carbon emissions.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

Covering a third of the planet’s land surface, forests are massive carbon sinks, absorbing and storing carbon dioxide and keeping it out of the atmosphere where it would contribute to global warming. Only the world’s oceans store more carbon. Keeping forests intact has long been considered essential to maintaining a healthy planetary environment, but scientists are now beginning to understand just how critical they are in the fight against climate change.

A recent study conducted by a team of international researchers from several institutions, including NASA, the World Resources Institute, California Institute of Technology, Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia, integrated ground data and satellite imagery to map the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s forests. They found that between 2001 and 2019, the world’s forests stored about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted. “[F]orests provide a ‘carbon sink’ that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually,” write two of the report’s authors, Nancy Harris and David Gibbs of the World Resources Institute. “Overall, the data show that keeping existing forests standing remains our best hope for maintaining the vast amount of carbon forests store and continuing the carbon sequestration that, if halted, will worsen the effects of climate change.”

“[T]ropical forests alone absorb up to 1.8 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year,” according to WWF, an international nongovernmental organization based in Switzerland working to preserve the Earth’s wilderness. “However, agriculture, forestry and other land uses are responsible for nearly a quarter of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions… Ending forest conversion, preserving the forest carbon sink, and restoring forests [have] the potential to avoid more than one-third of global emissions.”

In March, dozens of environmental advocacy groups, including the John Muir Project, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and Alaska Wilderness League, submitted a letter to John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, and Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, urging the Biden administration to protect the nation’s carbon-dense forests in the United States’ Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), which are climate action plans created by states that have signed the Paris climate agreement. The NDC is currently being drafted by President Biden’s climate team and will be presented to the United Nations later this year. The coalition specifically highlighted the need to protect the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. Spanning nearly 17 million acres, the Tongass is the largest national forest—and the largest carbon sink—in the U.S. It is also the largest remaining temperate rainforest on the planet.

“Article 5 of the Paris Agreement encourages Parties to conserve and enhance sinks and reservoirs, including forests,” the letter states. “The United States’ NDC cannot approach the needed commitment level without strong, science-based natural climate solutions that include protecting all of our remaining old and mature forests, like those in the Tongass. Including the Tongass and other old forestlands in our NDC will send a signal to the world that the U.S. is ready to lead on protecting critical natural climate solutions.”

In addition to sequestering carbon and protecting the Earth’s climate, forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, from supplying food, fuel, timber and fiber, to purifying the air, filtering water supplies, maintaining wildlife habitats, controlling floods and preventing soil erosion. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear to the public something that scientists have been warning for decades: Deforestation is linked to the spread of zoonotic diseases. But those services are threatened when forests are cleared for wood products and land-use changes, like making space for climate-destructive industries like the meat industry.

For decades, U.S. federal forest policy has served the interests of the forest products industry by permitting and even subsidizing unsustainable logging. And that, in turn, is driving massive carbon emissions. Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit based in Asheville, North Carolina, that is working to protect the nation’s Southern forests across 14 states, has launched a public petition urging the Biden administration to “hold the forestry industry accountable for its climate, biodiversity, and community impacts” and “establish strong, ecologically sound, and environmentally just protections” for forests.

The economic benefit of healthy forests is significant. According to Dogwood Alliance, the ecosystem services that wetland forests provide are worth more than $500 billion, which could reach nearly $550 billion if an additional 13 million acres of wetland forests were protected and logged sustainably. “The ecosystem service value of an intensively manage[d] wetland forest is just $1,200 per acre,” says the group, which has been working to inform the public about the dangers of the wood pellet industry. “But wetland forests left alone are worth over $18,600 per acre. By shifting the focus of management from timber production to native ecosystem health, wetland forests increase in value over fifteen times.”

“Forests have rapidly become a primary source of biomass fuel in the EU,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Danna Smith, the founder and executive director of Dogwood Alliance, on Truthout. “Flawed carbon accounting assumes burning trees is carbon-neutral if a tree is planted to replace the one that has been chopped down, but biomass imported from the U.S. to the EU is never properly accounted for. This faulty logic has led to massive renewable energy subsidies for biomass under the EU Renewable Energy Directive program. It has further encouraged countries like the U.K., Netherlands and Denmark to subsidize the destruction of forests for fuel at a time when we need to let forests grow to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, protect biodiversity and shore up natural protections against extreme flooding and droughts.”

“Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours,” the German-Swiss poet and novelist Hermann Hesse wrote in his 1920 collection, Wandering: Notes and Sketches. “They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.” As nearly 200 of the world’s nations attempt to achieve the Paris climate agreement’s goals of keeping global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it’s time to listen to the wisdom of trees.

Cause for concern…

“The number of red knots visiting the Delaware Bay beaches during this spring’s northbound migration unexpectedly dropped to its lowest since tallies began almost 40 years ago, deepening concern about the shorebird’s survival and dealing a sharp setback to a quarter-century of efforts to save it,” reports Jon Hurdle for the New York Times.

• ​​​​​Red knots in steepest decline in years, threatening species’ survival (Jon Hurdle, New York Times)
• Global cactus traffickers are cleaning out the deserts (Rachel Nuwer, New York Times)
• Florida solar plans stoke fight over environmental racism (Kristi E. Swartz, E&E News)

Round of applause…

“U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to list lesser prairie chicken under the Endangered Species Act could impose restrictions on drilling in the Permian Basin,” report Joshua Partlow and Juliet Eilperin for the Washington Post. 

• Biden administration calls for new protections for endangered prairie chicken (Joshua Partlow and Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)
• Restore land the size of China to meet climate and nature goals: UN (Michael Taylor, Thomson Reuters Foundation)
• Beekeeper shares incredible video of her rescuing an entire colony with her bare hands (Annie Reneau, Upworthy)
• How high-end restaurants can turn their menus completely vegan (Angely Mercado, Popular Science)

Parting thought…

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” —Hermann Hesse

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, Counterpunch, 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.

By focusing the climate fight on what we emit, not what we consume, we are destined to fail—net-zero emissions policies aren’t enough to prevent catastrophe.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

13 min read

Solving the global climate crisis is not going to be easy. So when the seemingly simple “net-zero” concept was proposed, it quickly became a popular rallying cry in the fight against climate change. “Net-zero” is based on the idea that human society can continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, provided that there is a way to “offset” the emissions. It makes sense that the main thrust of the climate fight is to drastically slash our carbon emissions: Global average temperatures are around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer today than before the Industrial Revolution caused Earth’s carbon cycle to speed up, building the carbon bomb that we are seeing explode today.

It has been widely accepted that net-zero is a major objective that is required to achieve the Paris climate agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In their special report on global warming released in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, nations must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. This target has been embraced by nations, politicians, academics, activists, farmers, and even oil and gas companies.

The Lowy Institute’s annual survey of climate sentiment in Australia, published in May, found that eight out of ten Australians support “setting a net-zero emissions target for 2050.” Similarly, a separate poll, also published in May, conducted by Leger 360 in conjunction with the Association for Canadian Studies, found that the majority of Canadians and Americans support their respective nations meeting that target.

To realize the net-zero 2050 dream, society must hit a perfect combination of technological advances, climate-driven policies and lowered emissions. Ingredients in the recipe for success include the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the rapid increase in the use of electric vehicles, and the maturation of early-stage technologies like carbon capture and storage. “Addressing climate change will require investment in technologies that help to limit future emissions,” said Tom Crowther, a professor of global ecosystem ecology at ETH Zürich and the chief scientific adviser to the United Nation’s Trillion Tree Campaign. “[B]ut we will need thousands of solutions in combination.” Overall, we need nothing less than a fundamental change in how humanity operates. The Financial Times argues that “[m]eeting this goal… would require a total transformation of the global economy over the next three decades.” That is a tall order.

In May, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2050 roadmap for the global energy sector. “We are very happy to note that many governments now are making commitments to bring their emissions to net-zero by 2050,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, in a press briefing on May 18. “Very encouraging, those commitments.” He also pointed out how the IEA has “already made special cases and analyses on this 1.5 degrees future to understand our modeling capabilities, data and how we can make an energy world which is compatible with [a] 1.5 [degrees future].”

“Efforts to reach net-zero must be complemented with adaptation and resilience measures, and the mobilization of climate financing for developing countries,” says the United Nations. This multilayered approach, while necessary, makes it even more difficult to track progress on a global scale, with each nation, state and local government working on separate methods, with different definitions, and with varying degrees of legal obligations. While more than 120 nations have made the “net-zero by 2050” pledge, only six countries—France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary and New Zealand—have made that target the law of the land. Canada, Chile, Spain, South Korea, Fiji and the European Union are considering doing the same. President Joe Biden made the 2050 pledge. China said it will hit the target before 2060.

By midcentury, perhaps we can finally live as harmoniously with the planetary ecosystem as we did before the Industrial Revolution. Well, that’s the hope, at least. The problem is that the net-zero plan is a fantasy. By letting governments and the polluting industries make vague commitments without any legal requirement to meet them, society is placing a lot of trust in a mirage. By relying on future technologies, we are shifting the ultimate solutions to the next generation. By making our emissions the culprit, and not our overconsumption, we are missing the chance to truly align an ethical, balanced and sustainable human lifestyle with the requirements to maintain healthy, functioning ecosystems—of which we are a primary beneficiary. And thinking that renewable energy will save the day is simply delusional when 84 percent of the global economy is currently powered by fossil fuels, while renewables account for a meager 5 percent share of the world’s overall energy consumption.

Beyond that obvious and massive hurdle, “[i]mportant questions are being overlooked,” write climate researchers Joeri Rogelj, Oliver Geden, Annette Cowie and Andy Reisinger, in a commentary published in March in the journal Nature. “Should some sectors, such as electricity generation, reach [net zero] earlier to counterbalance harder-to-abate sectors including heavy industry? Is it fair to expect emerging economies to reach [net zero] on the same schedule as long-industrialized ones? Without careful attention to such issues, individual achievements risk being too weak to deliver the collective climate goal of the Paris agreement.”

Another part of the net-zero fantasy is the illogical and irresponsible reliance on technologies that have not yet been tested or even developed. Writing in the Conversation, climate scientists James Dyke of the University of Exeter, Robert Watson of the University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr of Lund University admit that they were “deceived” by the “deceptively simple” premise of net-zero. They warn other scientists not to fall prey to this “dangerous trap” that “helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.”

Even slashing emissions now would not solve the problem. More than 90 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that have been created over the past 50 years are currently stored in the world’s oceans, and are eventually and slowly being released into the atmosphere as global warming heat. If society were to cut all emissions today, this drawn-out process of heating the air above locks the world into what the Economist calls “inevitable warming” in the years ahead.

There’s another deeper, philosophical problem. The concept that reducing emissions is the way out of the climate crisis is a convenient way to maintain society’s current levels of rampant overconsumption. By tagging emissions as the culprit, and not our personal behaviors, those of us who can afford to will continue to possess massive homes, multiple cars, and a myriad of electronic devices—as long as they use renewable energy. We can continue to traveling around the globe and taking cruise ships and buying food and goods that originate thousands of miles away—as long as those emissions are offset elsewhere.

The reality is that we don’t need more electric vehicles; we need fewer vehicles, period. Just think of all the materials that go into making an electric vehicle: steel, iron, aluminum, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, carbon fibers, polymers, graphite, glass, and a variety of rare-earth minerals like dysprosium, neodymium, niobium, terbium and praseodymium. The mining, processing and manufacturing industries required to extract and use these materials are highly destructive to ecosystems around the world—even deep-sea environments that are being ruined when waste rock and sediment from mining is dumped into the ocean—and emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In a report released in May, the IEA found that in order to meet global climate targets, the demand for minerals to supply the electric car industry may increase by at least 30 times by 2040. And that requires more mining and more manufacturing, which requires more fossil fuel combustion, and that means more emissions. A 2019 study published in the journal Energy by researchers in China found that manufacturing a single electric car emits about 2.5 more metric tons of carbon dioxide than manufacturing a car with an internal combustion (fossil fuel) engine. “The data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to [realizing] those ambitions,” said IEA’s Birol after the release of his agency’s minerals report.

“The details behind ‘net-zero’ labels differ enormously,” write Rogelj, Geden, Cowie and Reisinger. “Some targets focus solely on carbon dioxide. Others cover all greenhouse gases. Companies might consider only emissions under their direct control, or include those from their supply chains and from the use or disposal of their products. Sometimes the targets do not aim to reduce emissions, but compensate for them with offsets.”

Another issue that net-zero and climate discussions rarely include is our broken, polluting and unethical animal-based food system. Together, the meat and dairy industries account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. And these industries are not poised to reduce their emissions to the degree that is required to meet the Paris agreement goal. The IPCC report concedes that in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, negative emissions technologies (NETs)—technologies that remove carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere—will need to be deployed. “Even with rapid mitigation efforts, it is likely that NETs will be required to offset emissions from sectors that cannot easily reduce their emissions to zero, research shows,” according to Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering climate science and energy policy. “These sectors include rice and meat production, which produce methane, and air travel.”

“We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said ecologist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”

There is no telling what humanity’s meat consumption will be like in 30 years, but the trendlines are not promising. While interest in veganism hit an all-time high last year (driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic) and there has been strong support for ending federal bailouts for factory farms, global meat consumption is expected to increase 1.4 percent per year through 2023. “Dietary shifts could contribute one-fifth of the mitigation needed to hold warming below 2°C, with one-quarter of low-cost options,” according to the IPCC report. “There, however, remains limited evidence of effective policy interventions to achieve such large-scale shifts in dietary choices, and prevailing trends are for increasing rather than decreasing demand for livestock products at the global scale.”

“Although the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transport garners the most attention, activities relating to land management, including agriculture and forestry, produce almost one-quarter of heat-trapping gases resulting from human activities,” writes Quirin Schiermeier for the journal Nature. “The race to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels… might be a lost cause unless land is used in a more sustainable and climate-friendly way.”

The oil and gas industry has been happy to support the net-zero myth, using it as a smokescreen to project abstract pledges while still increasing their production of fossil fuels. Last year, for example, BP announced what the New York Times described as “the most ambitious climate change goal of any major oil company.” Yet the London-based firm, which netted an income of more than $20 billion in 2020, “provided few details on how, exactly, it would achieve that difficult feat.” It helps to put into context the sheer magnitude of emissions that are generated from BP’s product. Including extraction, refinement and combustion, the annual emissions of the company’s fossil fuels amount to 415 million tons—a footprint nearly equivalent to that of the state of California. And the company has not made any firm commitments to stop extracting fossil fuel.

“BP is one of the companies most responsible for the climate emergency,” said 350.org campaigner Ellen Gibson, who works on fossil fuel divestment. “They say they want their business model to align with the Paris Agreement, but simply put: it is not possible to keep to a [2°C] warming limit—let alone [1.5°C]—while continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Unless BP commits clearly to stop searching for more oil and gas, and to keep their existing reserves in the ground, we shouldn’t take a word of their PR spin seriously.”

In February, Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, announced details of how it will achieve its net-zero emissions pledge by 2050. But, reports Inside Climate News, “[t]he day after Shell announced its net-zero ambition, the company also announced it would build a $6.4 billion gas project in Australia that is expected to operate for nearly 30 years, part of a joint venture with PetroChina. That project alone would draw more investment from Shell than all of its renewable energy ventures to date.”

“Getting to net-zero doesn’t require us to stop looking for, extracting and burning fossil fuels—a major driver of the climate crisis. It might require some reduction, but it would definitely not keep fossil fuels in the ground where they belong,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Patti Lynn, the executive director of Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Boston, on NationofChange. “In short, aiming for net-zero is a far cry from getting to the roots of the climate crisis. It certainly does nothing to shift an unjust economy that relies on unlimited extraction and burning of fossil fuels for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Without getting to the root of the problem, we will never truly solve it.”

There’s still another sad reality that is tied to the net-zero fantasy. Tying its success to technologies that aren’t yet proven at scale (like carbon capture technologies, which today capture a paltry 0.1 percent of global emissions) or even here yet (like Bill Gates’ head-scratching scheme to dim the Sun—more an exercise in hubris than in logic) amounts to kicking the climate ball down the field, to be solved by the next generation. Many of those who will be in charge in 2050 have not yet been born. By trying to change our emissions, but not our behavior, we are doing those future leaders and their constituents a grave disservice. “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said climate youth activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

The IEA’s goal of making an “energy world” compatible with a 1.5 degrees Celsius future is a bit off the mark. Ultimately, the transformation of the global economy and the healing of the environment starts with making our consumption—that is, our impact—compatible with the future we want. And that begins with making the right personal decisions as consumers, homemakers, parents, travelers, drivers and eaters. “Every single day that we live, we make some impact on the planet,” said famed primatologist Jane Goodall. “We have a choice as to what kind of impact that is.”

Cause for concern…

“Heatwaves are increasing rates of suicide, extreme weather such as floods and wildfires are leaving victims traumatized, and loss of food security, homes and livelihoods is resulting in stress and depression,” reports Damian Carrington for the Guardian. “Anxiety about the future is also harming people’s mental health, especially the young, [according to a scientific] report.”

• Climate crisis inflicting huge ‘hidden costs’ on mental health (Damian Carrington, Guardian)
• People of color more exposed to heat islands, study finds (Drew Costley, Associated Press)
• Forecast: 40% chance Earth to be hotter than Paris goal soon (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)

Round of applause…

2050 is the year by which society needs to achieve net-zero emissions to avoid the worst impact of climate change. But, as the animal rights nonprofit Direct Action Everywhere points out, “The global agricultural sector will nearly double in greenhouse gas emissions (from deforestation and direct emissions) by 2050.”

• Urge Governor Newsom to issue a moratorium on new factory farms and slaughterhouses in California (Direct Action Everywhere)
• U.S. urges change in fishing practices to save endangered whales (Richard Valdmanis, Reuters)
• 30 ways to make your life more environmentally friendly (Steven Peters, 24/7 Wall Street via USA TODAY)
• These simple changes at home can help reduce your carbon footprint (NHSaves)
• Moving sustainably: The ultimate guide to eco-friendly moving (Neighbor.com)

Parting thought…

“One of the greatest gifts we can give to our home, this beautiful Earth, is to question the indoctrinated narrative that propels most of us to buy and eat foods (and products) that are derived from enslaved and abused animals. Synchronistically, it is also a terrific contribution to our society, our physical bodies, and our mental landscape as well.” —Dr. Will Tuttle

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, Counterpunch, 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 Humane Research and Testing Act seeks to move the U.S. toward more ethical methods of researching human disease that don’t involve animals.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

The life of a mouse or a rat is an unenviable one. Chances are that if you’re in the urban wild, you must contend with deadly traps, poisons and broom-wielding humans. If you’re a country-dweller, you might have it a bit easier, but then again you may be blown to smithereens by a shotgun or carried off in the sharp talons of a barn owl. Or be poisoned anyway. “The only good mouse is a dead mouse,” Australia’s deputy prime minister Michael McCormack said recently, as the nation ramped up its war on mice with a plan to poison millions of them in New South Wales.

Either way, you’d still have your freedom and be much better off than one of the more than 111 million mice and rats who are used, abused and/or killed in the name of biomedical research in the United States every year. These highly intelligent rodents are so popular among researchers that they represent 99 percent of all animals used in laboratories. Much of the horror is funded by taxpayers—more than $16 billion each year—even though a majority of Americans oppose the use of animals in scientific research, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center poll.

Sue Leary, the president of the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, which is dedicated to finding humane replacements for animal-based research, said the staggering number of lab mice and rats—the recently compiled figure of 111 million—is concerning because rodents are not protected by the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), which provides some protections for animals used in research. “If the numbers are anywhere near correct, the amount of pain and suffering that’s occurring in these animals is completely unacceptable,” she said.

There’s another reason to stop testing on mice and rats, too. Due to significant differences in biology, mice and rats are terrible substitutes for humans when it comes to medical research. Biologists Javier Mestas and Christopher C.W. Hughes studied the differences between mice and human immune responses and found that mice are poor preclinical models of diseases that impact us. In 2004, while they were researchers at the Center for Immunology and Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California at Irvine, they published a study in the Journal of Immunology showing the limitations of using mice models. “The literature is littered with examples of therapies that work well in mice but fail to provide similar efficacy in humans,” they wrote.

While rats and mice may be different from us biologically, emotionally they seem incredibly similar. “Male rats will snuggle up for a cuddle and find contentment when they are curled up in a person’s lap,” according to PETA, a nonprofit animal rights group. “Although female rats are just as affectionate, they tend to be tremendously energetic and inquisitive. Rats love seeing kind people and will often bounce around waiting to be noticed and picked up. Rats can bond with their human companions to the point that if they are suddenly given away to someone else or forgotten, they can pine away—and even die.”

Though mice and rats are the most used animals in laboratory experiments, a whole host of other animals are in the crosshairs, including birds, frogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, pigs, sheep, dogs and cats. (In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a phaseout of chimpanzees in biomedical research, though dozens of chimps formerly used in research are still locked up in labs.)

“Rodents’ capacity to experience significant pain and distress in experiments is no longer contested. With over 100 million of these sentient animals born per year for American science, it is time to revisit the adequacy of their welfare protections,” writes Dr. Larry Carbone, a veterinarian and animal welfare scholar, in a paper published in January in the journal Nature. “If the same proportion of… [rats and mice] undergo painful procedures as are publicly reported for AWA-covered animals, then some 44.5 million mice and rats underwent potentially painful experiments.”

And it’s not just mice and rats that make poor preclinical models. Conducting research on any nonhuman species to understand human disease is inherently flawed. “[A] growing body of scientific literature critically assessing the validity of animal experimentation generally (and animal modeling specifically) raises important concerns about its reliability and predictive value for human outcomes and for understanding human physiology,” writes Dr. Aysha Akhtar, a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, in a 2015 paper published in the journal Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. “The unreliability of animal experimentation across a wide range of areas undermines scientific arguments in favor of the practice.”

In designing a more ethical and more scientific future that doesn’t involve harming animals, one way to think about alternative methods is to replace or reduce the use of animals, or at least refine the way they are used to lessen their suffering. This approach is known as the “Three Rs”: replacement, reduction and refinement. But to start this change in meaningful ways, there needs to be political will for the federal government to craft a legal framework.

That framework could be enforced with the passage of a bipartisan bill, currently making its way through Capitol Hill, that would change the way federally funded research is conducted. Developed by Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research and Experimentation (CAARE), a nonprofit organization that promotes research without animals, the Humane Research and Testing Act (HRTA), H.R. 1744, is a first-of-its-kind bill that seeks to establish a separate center under NIH called the National Center for Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing. This new center would fund, incentivize and train scientists to use new, innovative, non-animal research methods. Reintroduced in Congress by the late Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) and Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), HRTA would also allow taxpayers to know more about what they are paying for by requiring NIH to disclose the total numbers of animals they are using every year. The bill also requires NIH to submit ongoing plans for reducing the number of animals used in testing, to fulfill its mandate.

The bill has “immense potential to tackle the problem of millions of animals used in wasteful and repetitive research,” says CAARE, but it “needs more cosponsors.” So the group has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 150,000 people—urging Congress to pass the bill. This legislation affords us the opportunity to move the nation to a more ethical place when it comes to animal rights. It also will stop the wasteful use of federal dollars on cruelty that most American taxpayers don’t want, while also shifting research to a more human-centered approach, which is ultimately better for human health.

“Science has advanced considerably in the 21st century so that research can be performed using non-animal methods that are more relevant to human medicine,” Barbara Stagno, president and executive director of CAARE, told IMI. “Despite that, many millions of animals continue to be used, and the U.S. is one of the largest users of animals in laboratories worldwide. The Humane Research and Testing Act holds great promise to change the current paradigm of routine overuse of [laboratory] animals in the face of available alternatives,” she added.

In March, CAARE hosted a congressional hearing in support of the bill. The hearing, titled “21st Century Innovations in Alternatives to Animals in Biomedical Research,” featured as its keynote speaker the famed primatologist Jane Goodall, who shared her first experience with the extreme suffering that imprisoned nonhuman animals are forced to endure in laboratories across the nation and the world.

“It was in 1985 that I first saw with my own eyes the cruel, inhumane, and sterile conditions in which thousands of sentient animals are kept for use in medical research,” said Goodall, who was named a Messenger of Peace by the United Nation in 2002. “On moral and ethical grounds, I found this shocking and unacceptable,” she said, adding, “Despite an abundance of exciting breakthroughs in science and technology for the replacement of animal models, and a number of laws and policies that encourage the reduction of the number of animals used in experiments, we have unfortunately not seen enough progress in this area. Creating a dedicated center under the NIH devoted to providing scientists with the funding and training to replace animals would, without doubt, lead to major change.”

Cause for concern…

“What if fatal temperatures were not the main driver of biodiversity loss in the era of climate change, but mass sterilization?” asks Becky Ferreira for Vice.

• Scientists warn of fertility loss in many species due to climate change (Becky Ferreira, Vice)
• Overwintering ‘zombie’ fires may become more common as climate changes (Yereth Rosen, Reuters)
• Wild horses adopted under federal program are going to slaughter (Fund for Horses, Tuesday’s Horse)

Round of applause…

“The world’s seven largest advanced economies agreed on Friday to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and phase out such support for all fossil fuels, to meet globally agreed climate change targets,” report Elizabeth Piper and Markus Wacket for Reuters.

• In climate push, G7 agrees to stop international funding for coal (Elizabeth Piper and Markus Wacket, Reuters)
• Why cities should be designed for birds (Nate Berg, Fast Company)
• The fashion house that once sewed mink pelts on sneakers is now ditching fur completely (Katherine Sullivan, PETA)
• This book changed my life and led me to veganism (Kathy Bolte, Elephant Journal)

Parting thought…

“The earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the earth and we are always carrying her within us.” —Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth (2013)

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, Counterpunch, 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.

We are to blame for the biggest extinction event in human history. But there is a solution if we take urgent action now.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

9 min read

The natural world is in a state of crisis, and we are to blame. We are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, the biggest loss of species in the history of humankind. So many species are facing total annihilation. Nearly one-third of freshwater species are facing extinction. So are 40 percent of amphibians. 84 percent of large mammals; a third of reef-building corals; and nearly one-third of oak trees. Rhinos and elephants are being gunned down at rates so alarming that they could be completely wiped out from the wild by 2034. There may be fewer than 10 vaquita—a kind of porpoise endemic to Mexico’s Gulf of California—due to illegal fishing nets, pesticides and irrigation. There are 130,000 plant species that could become extinct in our lifetimes. All told, about 28 percent of evaluated plant and animal species across the planet are now at risk of becoming extinct.

The rapid decline in species has occurred in recent years: 60 percent of the planet’s wildlife populations have been lost in just the last 50 years. Scientists warn that in the coming decades, if we don’t take action, more than 1 million species may vanish from the Earth forever.

Our fellow Earthlings are being overhunted, overfished and overharvested for our food, clothing and medicines. And the ones that we don’t kill are losing their homes as we destroy their natural habitats to make space for our farms and cities and to extract fuels, minerals, timber and other resources for human society. And the habitats that we don’t completely eradicate we pollute with a vast array of toxic elements, from pesticides and plastics to carbon dioxide, fracking chemicals and invasive species. The second biggest direct threat to species after habitat destruction is wildlife trafficking, a massive illegal business that is valued at $10 billion a year. We are even polluting wildlife habitats with our light and noise. And scientists fear that the worst is yet to come.

As the International Union for Conservation of Nature warns, the worldwide extinction crisis is “expected to worsen as the human population grows.” According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world’s human population is expected to reach 9.9 billion by 2050. That’s more than 25 percent more people on the planet than the 7.9 billion people currently living on the Earth. Other species will certainly be squeezed out.

Biodiversity isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential to the health and maintenance of the planet’s ecosystems, which, in turn, are critical to human health. In addition to providing sustenance, medicines and livelihoods to billions of people, biodiversity helps maintain the Earth’s basic life-supporting elements like clean water, clean air and crop pollination, as well as critical ecosystem services like soil fertility, waste decomposition and recovery from natural disasters.

“Whether in a village in the Amazon or a metropolis such as Beijing, humans depend on the services ecosystems provide,” writes Julie Shaw the director of communications of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, a biodiversity conservation joint initiative of the French Development Agency, Conservation International, the European Union, the Global Environment Facility, the government of Japan and the World Bank. “Ecosystems weakened by the loss of biodiversity are less likely to deliver those services, especially given the needs of an ever-growing human population.”

There is also a massive economic benefit to biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)—a three-decade-old international treaty adopted by 193 countries (not including, most notably, the United States)—points out that “at least 40 percent of the world’s economy and 80 percent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources.” Damian Carrington, the environment editor of the Guardian, writes that ecosystem services are “estimated to be worth trillions of dollars—double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone costs the continent about 3 percent of its GDP [$546 million] … a year.”

So what can be done to prevent the rapid extinction of species and protect the world’s biodiversity? In April 2019, a group of 19 prominent scientists answered that question when they published the “Global Deal for Nature” (GDN), a “time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth,” which, when paired with the Paris Climate Agreement, is meant to “avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services.” To achieve its goal of “ensuring a more livable biosphere,” the GDN’s main objective is crystallized in its “30×30” proposal: Conserve 30 percent of the Earth in its natural state by 2030. The idea has taken off, with 50 nations led by Costa Rica, France and the United Kingdom joining the movement to realize the 30×30 vision of defending big swaths of intact ecosystems from exploitation. 

“Protecting 30 percent of the planet will undoubtedly improve the quality of life of our citizens, and help us achieve a fair, decarbonized and resilient society,” said Andrea Meza, Costa Rica’s environmental minister. “Healing and restoring nature is a key step towards human wellbeing, creating millions of quality green and blue jobs and fulfilling the 2030 agenda, particularly as part of our sustainable recovery efforts.”

Nongovernmental organizations have answered the rallying cry as well. The Wyss Foundation, a private charitable foundation based in Washington, D.C., “dedicated to… empower[ing] communities… and strengthen[ing] connections to the land,” has joined forces with National Geographic to launch the Wyss Campaign for Nature—“a $1 billion investment to help [nations], communities, [and] Indigenous peoples” mobilize to achieve the 30×30 goal. The campaign has launched a public petition urging immediate action to protect those ecosystems that have not yet been completely despoiled by the unrelenting expansion of humanity. “Protecting 30 percent of our entire planet by 2030 (30×30) is an ambitious but achievable goal,” asserts the campaign. “To achieve it, all countries must embrace the goal and contribute to it; Indigenous rights must be respected; and conservation efforts must be fully funded.”

And while the U.S. is not a signatory of the CBD treaty, President Biden can take unilateral action by declaring the wildlife extinction crisis a national emergency. “The declaration, under the National Emergencies Act, isn’t just symbolic,” says the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, which has launched a public petition urging the president to take this important and powerful step. “It will unlock key presidential powers to stem the loss of animals and plants in the United States and beyond,” the group says.

Biden’s declaration would marshal the federal resources necessary to start safeguarding the hundreds of species—including the monarch butterfly, eastern gopher tortoise and northern spotted owl—that have been languishing on the waiting list to receive protection under the Endangered Species Act. Those actions could include directing federal agencies to rein in wildlife exploitation, defend critical wildlife habitat on federal land and use the nation’s economic influence to help protect wildlife habitat around the world from deforestation and environmental damage caused by the private sector.

Thankfully, there is international traction to make the 30×30 vision a reality. When the 15th Conference of the Parties to the CBD convenes in October in Kunming, China, chances are good that delegates will secure a firm multilateral commitment: The current “zero draft” of the global framework meant to steer conservation efforts through 2030 includes the 30×30 vision as an explicit aim.

“We lose a species to extinction every hour, but extinction is not inevitable,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, in December. “We can end extinction with funding and political will. We need to stop making excuses and take the bold policy actions necessary to save life on Earth.”

Cause for concern…

Even though new renewable-energy capacity grew by 45 percent in 2020 (more than Germany’s entire energy-generation capacity), fossil fuel production is expected to grow in 2021, fixing dirty, carbon-emitting energy as the world’s dominant power source for some time to come.

• Renewable energy use is accelerating, but not quickly enough to offset fossil fuel use (The Economist)
• North Carolina pets have high levels of PFAS in blood—has it made them sick? (Greg Barnes, North Carolina Health News)
• Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year: study (Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post)

Round of applause…

“These repeated incidents at the [Limetree Bay] refinery have been and remain totally unacceptable,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan in a press release Friday afternoon, after the agency ordered a temporary shutdown of Limetree Bay refinery in St. Croix. “Today, I have ordered the refinery to immediately pause all operations until we can be assured that this facility can operate in accordance with laws that protect public health.”

• Citing an ‘imminent’ health threat, the EPA orders temporary shutdown of St. Croix oil refinery (Kristoffer Tigue, InsideClimate News)
• Scientists urge restoration of federal gray wolf protections (John Flesher, Associated Press)
• How Cher helped rescue Kaavan, the world’s loneliest elephant (Rachel Nuwer, Smithsonian Magazine)

Parting thought…

“Only after I became active in women’s issues did I realize that my veganism was related to those very issues. Dairy and eggs don’t just come from cows and chickens, they come from female cows and female chickens. We’re exploiting female bodies and abusing the magic of female animals to create eggs and milk.” —Natalie Portman

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, Counterpunch, 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.

Nearly 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of a controversial oil and gas facility that has sickened residents of the U.S. Virgin Island.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

10 min read

A controversial oil refinery on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in the government’s crosshairs after a third incident in just three months has sickened people. On May 5, after gaseous fumes were released from one of the oil refining units of Limetree Bay Refining, residents of the unincorporated Caribbean territory reported a range of symptoms, including burning eyes, nausea and headaches, with at least three people seeking medical attention at the local hospital. At its peak in 1974, the facility, which opened in 1966, was the largest refinery in the Americas, producing some 650,000 barrels of crude oil a day. It restarted operations in February after being shuttered for the past decade.

A Limetree spokesperson said that there was a release of “light hydrocarbon odors” resulting from the maintenance on one of the refinery’s cokers, high heat level processing units that upgrade heavy, low-value crude oil into lighter, high-value petroleum products. The noxious odor stretched for miles around the refinery, remaining in the air for days and prompting the closure of two primary schools, a technical educational center and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), which local officials said was shuttered because its employees “are affected by the strong, unpleasant gas like odor, in the atmosphere.”

Limetree and the U.S. government conducted their own air quality testing, with different results. The National Guard found elevated levels of sulfur dioxide, while the company said it detected “zero concentrations” of the chemical just hours later. “We will continue to monitor the situation, but there is the potential for additional odors while maintenance continues,” said Limetree, which is backed by private equity firms EIG and Arclight Capital, the latter of which has ties to former President Donald Trump. “We apologize for any impact this may have caused the community.”

The May 5 incident follows two similar incidents in April at the refinery that the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources (DPNR) concluded were caused by the emission of excess sulfur dioxide from the burning of hydrogen sulfide, one of the impurities in petroleum coke, a coal-like substance that accounts for nearly a fifth of the nation’s finished petroleum product exports, mainly going to China and other Asian nations, where it is used to power manufacturing industries like steel and aluminum. Days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the company that it was violating the Clean Air Act after the April incidents, Limetree agreed to resume sulfur dioxide monitoring, while contesting the violation. “If EPA makes a determination that the facility’s operations present an imminent risk to people’s health, consistent with its legal authorities, it will take appropriate action to safeguard public safety,” the agency said in a statement. The Biden EPA withdrew a key federal pollution permit for Limetree on March 25, but stopped short of shutting down the facility altogether.

Care2 has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 96,000 people—urging President Biden to shut down the Limetree Bay Refining facility. The petition also notes the risk that the refinery poses to the island’s biodiverse wildlife, saying that “turtles, sharks, whales, and coral reefs … [are] threatened by the Limetree Bay Refining plant—both by what it’s done in the past, and by what it’s spewing right now.”

The group also frames the human rights and environmental justice aspect of the ongoing public health situation on the island in historical terms: “On top of the obvious problem that no person should be poisoned with oil, St. Croix is an island with a highly disenfranchised population. The vast majority of residents are Black, the [descendants] of enslaved Africans brought to work on sugar and cotton plantations. For generations, the U.S. government has cared little about the well-being of people there.” (One recent example happened in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which landed on the island in September of 2017. Even two months after the storms hit, many residents of St. Croix who were evacuated to Georgia were unable to return home, and felt abandoned by the government. “I feel like we are the forgotten people and no one has ever inquired how do we feel,” said one of the St. Croix evacuees at the time.)

After the May 5 incident, Limetree said, “Our preliminary investigations have revealed that units are operating normally.” Perhaps it is normal for such facilities to emit toxic fumes. But what’s not normal is the fact that such fumes should present a constant threat to people and the environment, and that, according to the environmental group Earthjustice, about 90 million Americans live within 30 miles of at least one refinery. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Black people are 75 more likely to live near toxic, air-polluting industrial facilities, according to Fumes Across the Fence-Line, a report produced by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, an air pollution reduction advocacy group. That report also found that more than 1 million African Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk “above EPA’s level of concern” due to the fact that they live in areas that expose them to toxic chemicals emanating from natural gas facilities.

You don’t need to live next door to a refinery to feel its impact on your health; in fact, you can be several miles away. A study conducted last year by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) found an increased risk of multiple cancer types associated with living within 30 miles of an oil refinery. “Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, there are more than 6.3 million people over 20 years old who reside within a [30-mile] radius of 28 active refineries in Texas,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Stephen B. Williams, chief of urology and a tenured professor of urology and radiology at UTMB. “Our team accounted for patient factors (age, sex, race, smoking, household income and education) and other environmental factors, such as oil well density and air pollution and looked at new cancer diagnoses based on cancers with the highest incidence in the U.S. and/or previously suspected to be at increased risk according to oil refinery proximity.”

In granting Limetree’s permit in 2018—a move that E&E News reported was made to “cash in on an international low-sulfur fuel standard that takes effect in January [2020]”—Trump’s EPA said that the refinery’s emissions simply be kept under “plantwide applicability limit.” But then in a September 2019 report on Limetree—which has been at the center of several pollution debacles and Clean Air Act violations for decades—the agency said that “[t]he combination of a predominantly low income and minority population in [south-central] St. Croix with the environmental and other burdens experienced by the residents is indicative of a vulnerable community,” and added the new requirement of installing five neighborhood air quality monitors. “[G]iven several assumptions and approximations… and the potential impacts on an already overburdened low income and minority population, the ambient monitors are necessary to assure continued operational compliance with the public health standards once the facility begins to operate,” the agency stated. Limetree has appealed this ruling with the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board, arguing that “the EPA requirements are linked to environmental justice concerns that are unrelated to operating within the pollution limits of the permit.”

“It is unclear when the EPA’s appeals board will rule on the permit dispute. The Biden-run EPA could withdraw the permit, and it is also reviewing whether the refinery is a new source of pollution that requires stricter air pollution controls,” reports Reuters, adding that the White House declined to comment.

President Biden has made environmental justice a central part of his policy, including the overhaul of the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex or disability. “For too long, the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office has ignored its requirements under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” states Biden’s environmental justice plan. “That will end in the Biden Administration. Biden will overhaul that office and ensure that it brings justice to frontline communities that experience the worst impacts of climate change and fenceline communities that are located adjacent to pollution sources.”

Now it is time for Biden to make good on his campaign promise. John Walke, senior attorney and director of clean air programs with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Reuters in March that the situation in St. Croix “offers the first opportunity for the Biden-Harris administration to stand up for an environmental justice community, and take a strong public health and climate… stance concerning fossil fuels.” 

Earth | Food | Life contributor Sharon Lavigne has previously written about a similar issue in another region before. Lavigne is the founder and president of RISE St. James, a grassroots faith-based organization dedicated to opposing the siting of new petrochemical facilities in a heavily industrialized area along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley.” Writing in Truthout in October 2020 about St. James Parish, Louisiana, the predominantly Black and low-income community where she lives, Lavigne pointed out that “Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentioned St. James Parish in his clean energy plan speech because we’re notorious for having the country’s highest concentration of chemical plants and refineries, [one of] the highest cancer rates, the worst particulate pollution and one of the highest mortality rates per capita from COVID-19 in the nation,” She added, “For those of us living here, it’s not just Cancer Alley; it’s death row.”

The stated mission of the EPA is “to protect human health and the environment.” When so many Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk simply by living near toxic industrial sites such as oil and gas refineries, the EPA is derelict in its duty. The Limetree Bay Refining facility has presented President Biden with an early test of his commitment to environmental justice. Considering the facility’s terrible legacy of ecological and civil rights violations, three new public health incidents in just the past three months, and the disproportionate and ongoing health risks faced by the community’s predominantly Black and low-income population, it is finally time for the federal government to revoke Limetree’s license to operate on St. Croix. This is a perfect chance for President Biden to show the country and the world just how serious he is about environmental justice.

Cause for concern…

“Idaho Gov. Brad Little has signed into law a measure that could lead to killing 90% of the state’s 1,500 wolves in a move that was backed by hunters and the state’s powerful ranching sector but heavily criticized by environmental advocates,” reports Keith Ridler for the Associated Press. “Also under the new law, newborn pups can be killed if they are found on private land.” A statement by Zoe Hanley with Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group, said that “today marks a low point for gray wolf recovery in the U.S.”

• Bill to kill up to 90% of Idaho wolves signed by governor (Keith Ridler, Associated Press)
• Humanity is almost certainly doomed, scientists say (Dan Robitzski, Futurism)
• Wyoming stands up for coal with threat to sue states that refuse to buy it (Oliver Milman, The Guardian)

Round of applause…

“Don’t be afraid or annoyed of the coming periodical cicadas,” writes Douglas Main for National Geographic. “It’s a once-in-a-17-year chance to enjoy a wondrous natural phenomenon.”​​​​​

• Trillions of cicadas are coming to the U.S.—here’s why that’s a good thing (Douglas Main, National Geographic)
• U.S. stops Trump-era effort to loosen safety rules for Arctic drilling (Reuters)
• There is hope for Southeast Asia’s beleaguered tropical forests (The Economist)
• Whale protects whale conservation scientist from shark (The Dodo)

Parting thought…

“I never met a pig I didn’t like. All pigs are intelligent, emotional, and sensitive souls. They all love company. They all crave contact and comfort. Pigs have a delightful sense of mischief; most of them seem to enjoy a good joke and appreciate music. And that is something you would certainly never suspect from your relationship with a pork chop.” ―Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood

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, Counterpunch, 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 court has ruled that the EPA must ban the controversial pesticide chlorpyrifos—or prove its safety.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

A federal appeals court has ruled that unless the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can prove that the pesticide chlorpyrifos is safe, it must be banned. The chemical, which has been widely used on agricultural crops for more than 50 years, has been linked to neurological development issues in children, with mounting evidence implicating its role in autism, ADHD, motor and loss of IQ. In the 2-to-1 ruling on April 29, judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit gave the federal government 60 days to either rescind all uses of chlorpyrifos related to food or to show evidence that in certain cases it is safe for public health.

In the majority opinion in the case League of United Latin American Citizens v. Regan, which was filed in 2007, Judge Jed Rakoff, a Clinton appointee, wrote, “[T]he EPA has spent more than a decade assembling a record of chlorpyrifos’s ill effects and has repeatedly determined, based on that record, that it cannot conclude, to the statutorily required standard of reasonable certainty, that the present tolerances are causing no harm,” adding that “EPA’s egregious delay exposed a generation of American children to unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos.” Rakoff was joined by Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, an Obama appointee.

​​​​​“Yet, rather than ban the pesticide or reduce the tolerances to levels that the EPA can find are reasonably certain to cause no harm, the EPA has sought to evade, through one delaying tactic after another, its plain statutory duties,” Rakoff wrote in the opinion, in which he stopped short of requiring the agency to ban the chemical, but left little room to keep it on the market. “The EPA must act based upon the evidence and must immediately revoke or modify chlorpyrifos tolerances.” Pregnant women and their fetuses, young children and farmworkers are particularly at risk from chlorpyrifos, which was first registered for use in 1965.

“There are numerous studies showing that exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb harms children’s brain development,” said Dr. Warren Seigel, chair of New York State American Academy of Pediatrics. “The science is clear, and this pesticide should have been banned years ago.”

The ruling “virtually guarantees” that the EPA will revoke food-related applications of chlorpyrifos, according to dissenting Judge Jay Bybee, a George W. Bush appointee, who argued that his colleagues overreached and “misread” the agency’s obligations to review specific uses of the chemical that it had previously determined were safe. He criticized the majority, saying that it “substituted its own judgment for EPA’s decision.”

The EPA is reviewing the ruling, saying in a statement that the agency is “committed to helping support and protect farmworkers and their families while ensuring pesticides are used safely among the nation’s agriculture. … EPA will continue to use sound science in the decision-making process under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act” (FIFRA).

The ruling comes nearly two years after the Trump administration rejected a proposed Obama-era ban of the controversial pesticide, keeping it on the market despite aggressive calls against its continued use by public health and environmental groups. The Trump EPA decision, made in July of 2019, was a major gift to Dow Chemical, the maker of the pesticide, in what appeared as an act of quid pro quo. On December 6, 2016, less than a month after Trump’s election, the agrochemical giant donated $1 million to his inaugural committee. Then, on January 17, 2017, just three days before Trump was sworn into the Oval Office, Dow filed a petition with the EPA to reject the Obama-era proposal to ban the pesticide. On March 29, 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced his decision to cancel the proposed ban.

“This is what we now know is the modus operandi of Trump and his EPA: corruption couched as policy,” said Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, following Pruitt’s decision. “Trump and his political appointees at the agency show nearly every day that they are not there to protect Americans’ health but to cater to the whims of polluters. If you’re looking for evidence of corrupt collusion with sinister interests, here it is in plain view.”

What a difference a new administration makes. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the EPA to review the Trump administration’s decision to deny the 2007 petition to ban food-related chlorpyrifos. It is unlikely that the Biden EPA will fight the appellate court ruling.

Environmental and farmworker groups applauded the court’s decision. “Today, we celebrate this huge victory alongside the men and women who harvest our food, who have waited too long for a ban on this pesticide,” said Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, in a statement. “We are relieved that farmworkers and their families will no longer have to worry about the myriad of ways this pesticide could impact their lives.”

The ruling could bring more attention to the public health and environmental risks of other harmful pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, which are deadly to bees and other pollinators that are key to crop pollination. Friends of the Earth, a nonprofit, has launched a public petition urging Americans to tell their congressional representatives to co-sponsor the Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act, introduced in 2020 by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.).

The bill seeks to strengthen the EPA’s authority under FIFRA to regulate the distribution, sale and use of pesticides, and ban some of the most toxic pesticides used across the nation, including all neonicotinoids, organophosphates (a class of phosphorus-based insecticides that includes chlorpyrifos) and paraquat, an herbicide that has been linked to renal, hepatic and respiratory damage, and which is already banned in 32 countries.

Are pesticides even necessary? Some experts believe that, while there are obvious trade-offs to spraying toxic chemicals on crops, using pesticides properly can actually protect some parts of the environment. Pesticides “allow us to maximize production on the smallest footprint of land. This is called ‘land sparing,’” said Tim Durham, a professor of agronomy and agricultural sciences at Ferrum College in Ferrum, Virginia. “If we decided to [forgo] pesticides, we’d need to appropriate a much larger chunk of land to do the same job and land that happens to be the most biodiverse and at-risk.” Durham, who is also part of his family’s vegetable farm on Long Island, New York, adds, “Pesticides provide some measure of predictability in the otherwise unpredictable world of farming, helping to stabilize commodity prices and keeping prices low in the grocery aisle.”

However, some advocates of organic farming, which is committed to zero pesticides, or limited pesticide use under National Organic Program standards, say that conventional industrial farming that is heavily reliant on chemical use isn’t necessary to feed the world’s population.

“The myth that organic food can’t feed the world isn’t just wrong, it’s downright counterproductive,” according to the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit based in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, that supports organic agriculture research. “Organic can compete with conventional yields and outperform conventional in adverse weather. Small farmers using organic methods have huge potential to expand global food production. And only organic methods actively regenerate resources and protect the environment from pollution and toxic waste. For a healthy future, we can’t afford anything less.”

Cause for concern…

“President Joe Biden’s nominee for the second-highest position at the Department of the Interior has a list of potential conflicts of interest that rivals that of Trump administration Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, whose ties to industry and his revolving-door experience earned him labels like the ‘ultimate D.C. swamp creature,’” reports Chris D’Angelo for HuffPost. “Tommy Beaudreau has a long list of potential conflicts of interest, including former clients in the coal, oil, gas and renewable energy sectors.”

• ​​​​​Biden’s pick for No. 2 at Interior has numerous ties to fossil fuels (Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost)
• Forest offsets actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into atmosphere (Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review)
• Nuclear waste tank in Washington state may be leaking (Nicholas K. Geranios, Associated Press)

Round of applause…

Horse racing can be a cruel, deadly affair for horses, but thanks to the use of digital non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a unit of data stored on a blockchain, horse fans who care about the welfare of horses can engage in virtual horse breeding, purchasing, and racing.

• Virtual horse breeding and racing is a win for animal welfare (Shannon McDonagh, Euronews)
• EPA expands scope of toxics inventory with eye toward justice (Bobby Magill, Bloomberg Environment)
• California just hit 95% renewable energy—will other states join it? (Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times)

Parting thought…

“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.” —William Inge

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, Counterpunch, 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.

We disrespect the Earth’s oceans at our own peril.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

There is one main U.S. law that governs the management of marine fisheries in federal waters: The Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA). Originally intended to address the concern over foreign fisheries operating near U.S. waters, the MSA, which was passed in 1976, extended the nation’s exclusive fisheries zone from 12 to 200 nautical miles from the coastline. The law was amended in 1996 and 2007 to prevent overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks, establish annual catch limits, put accountability measures in place, strengthen the use of science through peer review, and ensure the overall sustainability of the fishing industry.

Since it was passed, and through past bipartisan reauthorizations, the MSA has notched up many successes, including the rebuilding of at least 40 fisheries stocks—some of which were on the verge of collapse—in the last two decades. “Under the MSA, we are ending overfishing and rebuilding stocks, which strengthens the value of fisheries to our economy and marine ecosystems,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the Department of Commerce that is responsible for the stewardship of U.S. ocean resources and their marine habitats.

But a new report has found that the nation’s fishery managers are failing in their duty to protect designated “essential fish habitat” (EFH) as required by the MSA. Released earlier this month by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group headquartered in New York, the report is based on a detailed review of how each of the eight federal regional management councils has administered the MSA’s requirement to minimize the negative impact of fishing on EFH.

“We found that councils have generally not used the law’s habitat protection requirements to significantly reduce commercial fishing’s ongoing adverse effects on fish habitat and marine ecosystems,” write the report’s principal authors, Brad Sewell, the senior director in the Oceans Division of NRDC’s Nature Program, and Molly Masterton, a staff attorney in the Oceans Division of NRDC’s Nature Program. They point out that these ocean ecosystems provide habitat for up to “80 percent of life on Earth,” including fisheries that “feed and provide jobs to millions of people.”

But destructive fishing practices destroy marine habitats, kill countless unintended species in their massive, indiscriminate hauls (“bycatch”), and pull so many individual animals from the seas that nature cannot replenish their numbers fast enough (“overfishing”).​ Global bycatch may amount to as much as 40 percent of the world’s catch, and includes a myriad of species—many of them endangered—that fishing fleets are accidentally catching and inadvertently killing. Fishing nets kill hundreds of thousands of whales, dolphins, sea turtles and water birds every year.

“In some cases, councils have simply protected very little habitat, including particularly important or vulnerable habitat, from bottom trawls, the fishing gear most widely recognized as causing harm,” write Sewell and Masterton. “In other cases, councils have primarily closed very large, generally deep-sea, areas to potential future bottom trawling, protection that provides important but limited benefits. We also found that the councils have protected virtually no habitat from all commercial fishing gear or all fishing impacts using the EFH requirement, the strongest level of EFH protection.”

Unsustainable and destructive commercial fishing is just one of the many threats that the world’s oceans and their inhabitants must face. A range of human activities—and the byproducts of those activities—are an ever-present and increasing danger to marine species and ecosystems, including oil and gas drilling and exploration, coastal development, the wildlife trade, ship noise, tourism, plastic pollution, global warming, loss of sea ice and ocean acidification.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium offers a free “Seafood Watch” guide to help consumers make more responsible seafood decisions. But an even better idea is to simply leave seafood off of our plates. “A shrimp cocktail is not worth the life of a sea turtle,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, that supports the implementation of lifesaving “turtle excluder devices” in shrimp trawl fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic. “We have to do more to protect these extraordinary creatures before it’s too late. Devices to exclude sea turtles from shrimp nets just make sense.”

As these threats continue, Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation organization based in Washington, D.C., has sounded an alarm bell to call attention to ongoing challenges to the MSA. “Unfortunately, there have been attempts [to] weaken the very law that has improved fisheries in the U.S. A number of bills have been introduced that would extend deadlines for rebuilding stocks, relax [annual catch limits], loosen [accountability measures], and hinder the ability of the scientific advisors to provide sound scientific recommendations,” the group wrote in 2018. “These changes, if implemented, would undermine significant progress in fisheries management over the last 42 years. … Since 2009, Congressional attacks on the MSA have steadily increased, with a chorus of opponents calling for changes.”

In 2018, for example, the House of Representatives passed the Modern Fish Act (H.R. 2023), to include the priorities of recreational fishers in the MSA’s reauthorization, a move that marine conservationists opposed. “H.R. 2023 would undo many of the conservation gains made over the past 10+ years in ending overfishing and rebuilding depleted stocks by removing or loosening the requirement of setting scientifically-based catch limits,” argued the Marine Fish Conservation Network, a nonprofit group based in Arlington, Virginia, dedicated to sustaining fish populations. “The Modern Fish Act inserts too much uncertainty into the fisheries management process by adversely changing catch limits and how they are applied, muddies the waters between state and federal management, and allows political and economic considerations to override science in management decisions.”

In December, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), chairman of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife, and fellow subcommittee member Rep. Ed Case (D-HI) released the draft bill to reauthorize and update the MSA. In addition to addressing the current needs of sustainable fisheries and coastal communities that depend on healthy marine environments, the bill also tackles a threat multiplier for oceanic ecosystems and something that the Biden administration has made a main priority: climate change.

“This draft includes important and timely updates to the MSA as well as provisions to strengthen communities and support those whose lives and livelihoods depend on healthy oceans and fisheries,” said Reps. Huffman and Case. “With the growing impacts of climate change, difficulties due to the ongoing pandemic, and rapidly evolving needs in fisheries management and science, amending and reauthorizing the MSA remains a top priority. We’re looking forward to the next phase of this process and receiving constructive commentary to inform and shape the bill’s introduction [in 2021].”

Oceana has launched a public petition urging Americans to tell Congress to support the MSA, in which they warn, “Our oceans are under attack. Past attempts by members of Congress to weaken the [MSA] … have threatened to undermine years of successful work to rebuild and protect the health of America’s fisheries. … Rollbacks that take aim at cornerstone conservation safeguards and statutes such as the MSA put our oceans at risk.”

Putting the oceans at risk is illogical, unethical and ultimately self-defeating. Marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who in 1990 became NOAA’s first female chief scientist, finds a direct connection between the health of the Earth’s marine ecosystems and humanity’s survival: “We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.”

Cause for concern…

There are fewer that 400 critically endangered North Atlantic right whales left in the world. Now new research suggests that their deaths by boat strikes and entanglements in lobster fishing gear are being undercounted.

• The plight of the North Atlantic right whale (Science Friday)
• White House warns that U.S. lags behind China on developing clean technologies (Katie Rogers, The New York Times)
• American honey is radioactive from decades of nuclear bomb testing (Matthew Gault, VICE)
• Growing an ounce of pot indoors can emit as much carbon as burning a full tank of gas (Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine)

Round of applause…

“Pacific humpbacks finally got the habitat protections they’ve needed for so long. Now we need to better protect humpbacks from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, their leading causes of death,” said Catherine Kilduff, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “To recover West Coast populations of these playful, majestic whales, we need mandatory ship speed limits and conversion of California’s deadly trap fisheries to ropeless gear.”

• Biden administration protects endangered Pacific humpback whale habitat (Center for Biological Diversity)
• Canada promises to shift away from cruel ‘toxicity’ animal testing (Holly Mills, Lady Freethinker)
• Indian veganism is taking off, especially during the pandemic (Shashwathi Sudhakar, ThePrint)
• Going vegan: can switching to a plant-based diet really save the planet? (Sarah Marsh, The Guardian)

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, Counterpunch, 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.

Critically endangered elephants have been losing the battle against ivory poaching. Now they face a new rising threat: fossil fuel development.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

12 min read

Just like our own ancestors, the precursors of today’s elephants originated in Africa. But while Homo sapiens evolved from their predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, modern elephants first arrived on the evolutionary map much earlier: 56 million years ago. Our arrival ultimately presented these majestic animals with their gravest threat, as we have killed them in great numbers for their ivory and destroyed their prehistoric habitats to make room for a host of human activities, from agriculture and logging to urbanization and other forms of land development. Now a new assessment of the pachyderms has revealed a stark reality and a turning point, something that conservationists have been worrying about for the past few decades: If poaching doesn’t subside soon and humans don’t stop encroaching on their ecosystems, wild elephants in Africa could become extinct in our lifetime.

Nearly a century ago, between 5 and 10 million wild elephants freely roamed across a massive expanse of the African continent, from wide swaths of savanna grassland and arid desert to thick, impenetrable forests. But decades of slaughter and habitat loss have gutted elephant populations. By the 1990s, when their numbers had dramatically plummeted to only about 600,000 and their range was reduced to a few nations across the continent, African elephants were placed on the international list of critically endangered species.

​​​​The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international nature conservation organization with observer and consultative status at the United Nations, maintains the Red List of Threatened Species, the primary resource that keeps track of the statuses of endangered and threatened species across the planet. The IUCN African Elephant Status Report is considered to be the most reliable estimate of the African elephant population. The most recent report, from 2016, puts their numbers at around just 415,000 individuals. On March 25, the group announced that elephants in Africa face a serious risk of extinction. Before last month’s update, African elephants were considered to be a single species, listed as “vulnerable.” With their new report, IUCN has officially identified African elephants as two distinct species (following the emergence of new genetic evidence) and escalated the threat level they face. Savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) are now listed as “endangered,” while forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are listed as “critically endangered.”

“Africa’s elephants play key roles in ecosystems, economies and in our collective imagination all over the world,” said Dr. Bruno Oberle, the director-general of IUCN, adding that the new Red List assessments of both African elephant species “underline the persistent pressures faced by these iconic animals.” He added, “We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat for both forest and savanna elephants is conserved. Several African countries have led the way in recent years, proving that we can reverse elephant declines, and we must work together to ensure their example can be followed.”

Part of their iconic stature that drives our collective imagination comes from their sheer size: Elephants are the biggest land mammal. And they also have massive brains, three times the size of ours, with individual neurons up to five times larger than human brain cells. “To look an elephant in the face is to gaze upon genius,” argues Ferris Jabr, a contributing writer for Scientific American. “Here is a creature who experiences emotional intimacy with friends and family, who seems to understand death and treats its dead in a way that borders on ceremonial. Here is an animal who can recognize itself in the mirror, fashion twigs into tools, formulate and implement plans, and remember someone’s face for decades. An animal that has exquisite ways of sensing the world we can never experience firsthand and a complex language we will probably never decipher. An animal whose cleverness parallels our own, yet is in many ways unique.”

Sadly, their cleverness cannot compete with our rifles or our desire for their tusks. Broadly, IUCN found a substantial decline in elephant numbers across the African continent, with forest elephant numbers falling by more than 86 percent over a period of 31 years, while the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60 percent over the last half-century. The declines were mainly due to a significant increase in poaching to acquire their massive teeth that stick out so magnificently from their mouths: Ivory is valued at more than $2,000 a kilo in Asian markets. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), elephant tusks are used to treat a myriad of health conditions, including epilepsy, ulcers and bone tumors, though there is no scientific evidence for any medicinal value in ivory.

It’s not just the TCM market that is driving the slaughter—American trophy hunters, hiding behind the misguided logic that killing Africa’s wild animals supports conservation efforts, imported an average of 460 African elephant trophies every single year between 2005 and 2014. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have an opportunity to end some of the bloodshed. In 2019, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) introduced H.R.4804, the ProTECT Act, which would outlaw the importation of endangered and threatened species trophies.

In March of 2020, Nicole Rojas, a Chicago-based activist who founded the animal rights group Wild for Change, launched a public petition on Change.org urging Americans to tell their congressional representatives to sponsor or support the ProTECT Act. Rojas, who worked with the Humane Society of the United States and Tusk Task Force to ban the elephant ivory and rhino horn market in Illinois, believes that education is key in making the shift in consciousness on a meaningful scale. After three years of working with Illinois state legislators, the ban was made into law and she set her sights on the power of young people. “I expanded my involvement with legislation and advocacy to all animals, including wildlife, farm animals, and domestic pets,” she writes. “I created an outreach program to schools to educate children and young adults about wildlife poaching and its effects on ecosystems, people, and other wildlife.”

Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group based in Tucson, Arizona, believes that the IUCN report can be a powerful educational tool for those with the power to legislate and regulate on a federal level, saying that this new assessment “is a signal to the United States and the international community that major resources must be put into curbing ivory poaching and trafficking, closing remaining domestic ivory markets, and saving these marvelous, irreplaceable engineers of the forest and savanna from extinction.”

The assessment follows the first-ever pan-African survey of savanna elephants, which was conducted in 2013. A monumental undertaking involving 81 airplanes and 286 crew members, the Great Elephant Census took aerial surveys spanning more than 285,000 miles across 18 African countries to arrive at a tragic conclusion: Savanna elephant populations declined by 30 percent (the loss of about 144,000 elephants) between 2007 and 2014, and the current rate of decline is 8 percent per year, with poaching as the main cause. The survey saw high numbers of elephant carcasses in many protected areas, meaning that elephants are not fully safe inside parks meant to keep them safe. All told, the census revealed that, in 15 of the 18 countries surveyed, populations of African savanna elephants have plummeted.

“The IUCN’s announcement is a terrifying one, but it is also an opportunity for range nations and for those that deal in trafficked and trophy hunted products to act swiftly and pull out all the stops to protect these gentle giants,” write Kitty Block, the president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, and Sara Amundson, the president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund. “A world without them is simply unthinkable.”

The assessment comes on the heels of more alarming developments for African elephants: ReconAfrica, a fossil fuel company based in Vancouver, Canada, is exploring for oil and gas in the Kavango Basin, an eco-sensitive area in southwest Africa that sits along the border of Namibia and Botswana. This region encompasses the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to significant populations of elephants, hippos, rhinos and birds. In addition to threatening the biodiversity of the area, the oil and gas exploration project is poised to unleash what Greenpeace has dubbed a “carbon gigabomb” that would consume one-sixth of the world’s remaining carbon budget, which in turn would risk derailing the Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Ina-Maria Shikongo, a Namibian-based activist with Fridays for Future, a global climate strike group founded in the wake of Greta Thunberg’s rise to stardom, said that “under cover of COVID-19, oil and gas [companies] are rushing to cash-in on what they suspect is the last great fossil fuel find, as oil prices plummet amidst a glut.”

In response to ReconAfrica’s project, Rainforest Rescue, a nonprofit environmental group based in Hamburg, Germany, launched a public petition in December urging President Hage Geingob of Namibia and President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana to halt ReCon’s destructive plan. The petition argues that the project will not only foul the region’s limited water resources, create air pollution and cause deforestation and desertification due to land clearing—threatening a host of unique species at a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but will also create the roads that will make it easier for poachers to hunt and kill endangered elephants and rhinos. “The exploitation would be a catastrophe—not only for the global climate, but also for wildlife, water resources and the livelihoods of local people,” said Shikongo. “The oil needs to stay in the ground.”

Still, all is not lost. While the recent IUCN assessment shows the alarming overall trend of declining populations of both African elephant species, the group also pointed out that conservation efforts—including anti-poaching programs, legal protections in the form of legislation, and better land-use planning to avoid human-elephant conflict—have together made a significant impact in stemming the loss. These efforts have had a measurable impact in some conservation areas in the Republic of the Congo and Gabon, where some forest elephant numbers have stabilized, as well as in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, where savanna elephants have actually been stable for decades, and in some cases, even growing.​​
​​​​​​
Dr. Dave Balfour, a member of the African Elephant Specialist Group, part of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, offers some advice to legislators and regulators working on this crisis. While the assessment puts populations of African savanna elephants in the endangered category, he says that “it is important to keep in mind that at a site level, some subpopulations are thriving [so] … considerable caution and local knowledge are required when translating these results into policy.”

“If we can’t save the African elephant, what is the hope of conserving the rest of Africa’s wildlife?” said Mike Chase, the principal investigator of the Great Elephant Census and the founder of Elephants Without Borders, a nonprofit elephant conservation organization based in Botswana. “I am hopeful that, with the right tools, research, conservation efforts and political will, we can help conserve elephants for decades to come.”

To generate political will, perhaps elephant activists can borrow an idea from the early feminists, who embraced the concept that “the personal is political,” and look at elephants as we look at ourselves and each other. “When we look into the eyes of the elephant,” says Jabr, “we should recognize nothing less than an intellectual equal.” We should also recognize that now, on the edge of their extinction, it is at long last time to stop the poaching, stop the encroaching and do everything we can to prevent the annihilation of our extraordinarily intelligent, emotional and magnificent fellow Earthling, the elephant.

Cause for concern…

“The Endangered Species Act is incredibly successful at saving species from extinction, but only if they’re provided its protections in the first place,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that filed a lawsuit last week alleging the federal government has failed to act on petitions to protect nine species under the Endangered Species Act. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s listing program is broken and badly in need of reform.”

• U.S. government has failed to act on petitions to protect nine species under the Endangered Species Act (Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press)
• Texas’s zombie oil wells are creating an environmental disaster zone (Clayton Aldern, Christopher Collins and Naveena Sadasivam, The Guardian)

Round of applause…

“We’ve been waiting for water for more than 50 years,” Navajo Nation resident Percy Deal told Bloomberg News, after President Joe Biden released his infrastructure plan that includes $111 billion to modernize the country’s water systems, which includes grants and low-cost loans to help tribes and territories. “We never knew when we were going to get water, until now.”

• Infrastructure plan lifts tribes’ hope of turning on water taps (Tripp Baltz, Bloomberg Law)
• Here’s the first ever footage of a baby sperm whale nursing from its mother (Annie Reneau, Upworthy)
• Dr. Jane Goodall thinks we can be better travelers—for the sake of the world (Megan Spurrell, Condé Nast Traveler)

Parting thought…

“The earth does not want to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.”—Danusha Laméris, “Nothing Wants to Suffer”

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, Counterpunch, 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.