Welcome to the world’s new pollution problem.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

10 min read

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

The demand for PPE has put some countries on a war footing, to give governments sweeping wartime authorities to control the economy and compel private businesses to join national fights against the pandemic. “Our national plan launches a full-scale war-time effort to address the supply shortages by ramping up production and protective equipment, syringes, needles, you name it,” said President Joe Biden in January. Even the inventor of the lifesaving N95 mask favored by front-line medical workers, Dr. Peter Tsai, said that countries should stockpile PPE as if they were on a war footing. “Weapons are not profitable,” he said in August. “But they need to have the weapons and then they don’t use them for 10 or 20 years. You need to see this kind of PPE as military weapons.” A majority of U.S. states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have instituted “mask mandates” requiring people to wear face coverings in public to limit the spread of COVID-19.

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

According to the World Health Organization, the fabric masks that should be used to fight the pandemic are made of three layers of fabric: an inner layer of absorbent material like cotton, a middle layer of non-woven non-absorbent material, like polypropylene, which is a kind of plastic, and an outer layer of non-absorbent material, like polyester. That means that these masks, if improperly discarded, have the power to threaten ecosystems for many decades, even centuries, to come. Polypropylene takes 20 to 30 years to decompose in a landfill. Polyester can take up to 200 years. Researchers from the University College London Plastic Waste Innovation Hub recently released a report that estimated that about 70,000 tons of plastic waste would be produced if all Britons wore a single-use mask each day for a year.

In August of last year, during a cleanup project at a canal in the Dutch city of Leiden, scientists discovered a fish trapped in a latex glove, a finding that prompted them to investigate whether this problem was more widespread. Their fears were soon realized: In just a few months, researchers found hundreds of face masks littering the city’s historic canals. Their findings were released last month in a report published in the journal Animal Biology about the impact that PPE litter is having on wildlife. The grim conclusion: All those face masks and latex gloves are killing birds, fish and other wildlife across the globe. The researchers, from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Institute of Biology at Leiden University, and the Institute for Water and Wetland Research, all based in the Netherlands, said that animals are becoming entangled in the gear, while others, mistaking it for food, are dying from fatally ingesting it. Some animals are building homes with it.

“As always with these single-use items, you’re not really looking after them and they end up in the environment really soon. They start becoming a real problem,” Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a co-author of the report, told CNN. “I think it’s ironic that the materials that protect us are so harmful to the animals around us,” he added. 

The scientists included specific examples in their study, such as a dead perch (Perca fluviatilis) entrapped in a latex glove “with only its tail sticking out” in The Netherlands; a common coot (Fulica atra) building a nest with a face mask, also in The Netherlands; an American robin (Turdus migratorius) entangled in a face mask in British Columbia; a juvenile peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) whose talons got stuck in a face mask in Yorkshire; cygnets from a mute swan (Cygnus olor) with face masks wrapped around their beaks in Lake Bracciano, near Rome, Italy; and a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), entangled in a face mask, and a European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), entangled in a glove, both in the United Kingdom. Even stray dogs have been found with PPE in their stomachs. The list goes on and sadly, will go on and on: Hiemstra warned that the entire animal kingdom may ultimately be impacted by humans’ COVID-19 litter.

“It makes sense that birds are being reported—they’re conspicuous, and you have a lot of people looking at them,” said Greg Pauly, a herpetologist and co-director of the Urban Nature Research Center at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who suspects that PPE litter is being ingested by many wild animals—a serious problem, the impact of which we’re not going to fully understand any time soon. “Ingestion isn’t something you can easily see, and almost no one is looking at it,” he said, recommending that wildlife biologists conduct more necropsies of wildlife across all species to collect data for future studies.

More than 30 years ago, the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington, D.C., launched the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), a global trash-picking event meant to eliminate ocean trash, mainly in the form of plastic waste. Every year, volunteers from states and territories throughout the United States and more than 100 countries around the world come together to participate in a local cleanup event. The COVID-19 pandemic has broadened the event’s remit: In July of last year, Ocean Conservancy added a new category of trash to Clean Swell, the mobile app that volunteers use to log their cleanup work: “PPE.”

Last month, the group released a report on the rising threat of PPE pollution and found that, based on a survey of ICC volunteers and coordinators conducted in early 2021, 94% of respondents observed PPE pollution at a cleanup last year, during which more than 100,000 pieces of PPE—mainly masks and gloves—were picked up on beaches across 70 countries. More than half of the survey respondents said they saw PPE littering their home communities every day.

What can we do? “We really encourage people to use reusable face masks,” said Liselotte Rambonnet, a biologist at the Institute of Biology at Leiden University and co-author of the Animal Biology report, told CNN. “All the interactions we found were with single-use face masks because they are inexpensive and can be lost more easily,” she added. Unfortunately, disposable PPE cannot be recycled, so they must go into the regular trash. When doing so, make sure that all contaminated PPE is disposed of in a covered waste bin lined with a garbage bag and that they are always out of reach from children and pets. In no case should you simply toss your used PPE on the street or in a waterway.

In addition, it is critical to cut the two ear straps on each side of your mask before disposing of it to reduce the possibility of wildlife getting entangled in it. And let’s take this opportunity to look at the big picture: How all our medical and plastic waste is impacting the natural world and what we can do to reduce this global pollution crisis.

“As we protect our communities and each other in the face of this invisible threat, we can also do more to protect our communities and our ocean from the impacts of the pandemic,” writes Janis Searles Jones, the CEO of Ocean Conservancy. “Once the need for PPE subsides as the pandemic recedes, we have a real opportunity to reduce our overall plastics footprint and to ensure that the plastics that we use are recyclable, made of recycled content, and stay out of the ocean and our environment.”

But even if we change our behavior now when it comes to PPE disposal, it may be too late. According to a report by OceansAsia, a marine conservation group based in Hong Kong, an estimated 1.56 billion face masks entered the ocean in 2020 alone. “Even if we take steps tomorrow, then for hundreds of years there will be face masks floating around in the ocean, still impacting our wildlife,” said Hiemstra. “I’m afraid it will not stop very soon, and actually the problem will only get worse over time, sadly.”

Cause for concern…

A new report released by the U.S. intelligence community offers a grim forecast for the next two decades, as the planet will face devastation unleashed by pandemics and the climate crisis. “Climate change probably will exacerbate this as sea level rise or extreme heat makes certain locales permanently uninhabitable, although mainly after 2040,” the report warns, adding that the poorer nations will feel the greatest brunt, “intersecting with environmental degradation to intensify risks to food, water, health, and energy security.”

• Intel report warns of fragile future shaped by pandemics, climate change (Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill)
• Banks pledge climate fight, but their boards have deep fossil-fuel ties (Emily Holden, Floodlight, and Emily Atkin, Heated)
• Southwest braces for water cutbacks as drought deepens along the Colorado (Ian James, Arizona Republic)
• China’s plans for Himalayan super dam stoke fears in India (Patrick Baert and Bhuvan Bagga, Phys.org)
• Marine species increasingly can’t live at the equator due to global heating (Graham Readfearn, The Guardian)

Round of applause…

“Tax preferences for oil, gas and coal producers today decrease their tax liabilities relative to other firms,” the Treasury said in a statement about President Biden’s plan to eliminate subsidies claimed by oil and gas companies. “Fossil fuel companies additionally benefit from substantial implicit subsidies, since they sell products that create externalities but they do not have to pay for the damages caused.”

• Biden tax plan targets fossil fuel subsidies worth $35 billion (Kevin Crowley, Bloomberg)
• Gulf coast fish farm permit will get a second look under the Biden administration (Cathy Carter, WUSF Public Media)
• Protecting federal lands should be a no-brainer (Michael Shank, The Hill)
• Fakin’ the bacon: Shoppers flock to try new vegan butchers (Sarah Johnson, The Guardian)
• ‘If we become vegans there will be a green revolution’ (Graham Lambert, Dorset Echo)

Parting thought…

“Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” —Dylan Thomas, “Being but Men”

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 product of environmental racism, “sacrifice zones” are located near pollution hot spots and are usually communities of color.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

The Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted how systemic racism disproportionately places danger and harm on low-income and minority populations. One harsh reality of this systemic racism is the existence of “sacrifice zones,” which are communities located near pollution hot spots that have been permanently impaired by intensive and concentrated industrial activity, such as factories, chemical plants, power plants, oil and gas refineries, landfills and factory farms.

Designated by corporations and policymakers, these areas are a product of environmental racism, the systemic social, economic and political structures—including weak laws, lack of enforcement, corporate negligence and less access to health care—that place disproportionate environmental health burdens on specific communities based on race and ethnicity. Because they live in sacrifice zones, people of color in the United States are more likely to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water and be exposed to a variety of toxic chemicals and particulate matter.

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a nonprofit environmental activism group based in Falls Church, Virginia, asserts that “[d]ue to redlining, low property values, and other social factors, these communities have historically consisted of [low-income] and/or minority populations.” The group adds, “Current federal air policies regulate facility emissions one stack at a time and one chemical at a time. Impacted communities, however, are exposed to the cumulative impact of multiple pollutants released over an extended period of time from a cluster of facilities.”

In January, President Biden signed an executive order that creates a White House Council on Environmental Justice, which will specifically address the environmental impacts of systemic racism. “We must deliver environmental justice in communities all across America,” the order says. “To secure an equitable economic future, the United States must ensure that environmental and economic justice are key considerations in how we govern.” A separate executive order directed federal agencies to prioritize racial equity in their work, which incorporates racial and environmental justice across the federal government. However, without congressional action on the legislative front, the next president could reverse these orders.

President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan has provisions that address longstanding racial inequities, including $20 billion to “reconnect” communities of color to economic opportunity. In addition, the proposal includes funds to replace lead water pipes that have harmed communities of color in cities like Flint, Michigan, and to clean up environmental hazards that have harmed Hispanic and tribal communities.

On April 4, the Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofit advocacy group that tackles issues relating to health care, education and environmental and social justice, launched a public petition urging Congress to pass legislation that protects communities of color from the health risks posed by environmental degradation. The petition is co-sponsored by several other advocacy groups, including Progress America, Friends of the Earth Action, Coalition on Human Needs, Evergreen Action and the Progressive Reform Network. “Corporate polluters demand human sacrifices,” Mike Phelan, a spokesman for Progress America, wrote in a recent email about the petition. “They each have a choice between profits and pollution―and every time, they choose profits.” 

In a 2004 report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote that “the solution to unequal protection lies in the realm of environmental justice for all Americans. No community, rich or poor, black or white, should be allowed to become a ‘sacrifice zone.’” In her 2014 book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein writes that “running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.”

In 2018, scientists at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study in the American Journal of Public Health called “Disparities in Distribution of Particulate Matter Emission Sources by Race and Poverty Status.” The report confirmed that environmental racism presents a clear and present danger to people of color across the United States, as they are much more likely to live near polluters. The study found that poor communities (those living below the poverty line) have a 35 percent higher burden from particulate matter emissions than the overall U.S. population. The health burden carried by non-whites was 28 percent higher than the overall population, while African Americans had a 54 percent higher burden. The researchers cited economic inequality and historic racism as major factors in the siting of facilities emitting particulate pollution. 

Particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter that are inhaled can become embedded deep in the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Such particle pollution exposure can cause a number of health impacts, including nonfatal heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, aggravated asthma and decreased lung function. For people with heart or lung disease, inhaling these particles can even lead to premature death. 

“This report illustrates how people of color and people with limited means have been grossly taken advantage of by polluters who don’t care about the misery they cause,” said Leslie Fields, director of the Environmental Justice Program at the Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit, in a statement. “The disadvantages that come with those health issues, like missing school, create a cycle of poverty and lack of access to opportunity that spans generations and shapes every part of the experience of being a person of color or low-income person in the United States.”

Examining the study in an article for Colorlines, Ayana Byrd writes, “The findings show that ‘those in poverty had 1.35 times higher burden than did the overall population, and non-Whites had 1.28 times higher burden. Blacks, specifically, had 1.54 times higher burden than did the overall population.’ This translates to a 54 percent increase for Black people.” She adds that environmental racism “has been called the new Jim Crow and continues to target Black, Latinx, Native, Asian and other communities of color, subjecting them to generations of poor health outcomes.”

In fact, natural disasters like earthquakes, as well as those tied to climate change, like wildfires, floods and hurricanes, actually increase racial inequality. A 2018 study conducted by sociologists Junia Howell of the University of Pittsburgh and James R. Elliott of Rice University in Houston found that white Americans who experience disaster accumulate significantly more wealth than any other group after experiencing a natural disaster. “If you’re white, over time, you’re actually going to accumulate more than if you never had that disaster in the first place. But for black people, for Latinos, for Asians—it’s not true,” said Howell.

President Biden’s executive actions to tackle the environmental racism that results in the creation of sacrifice zones are a much-needed change at the top of the government. Now Congress needs to back him up with legislation that puts an end, once and for all, to sacrifice zones.

Urge Congress to enact legislation to end environmental sacrifice zones.

Cause for concern…

“Tropical forest losses hit their third-highest level in almost two decades last year, despite improved conservation in parts of Southeast Asia,” reports Michael Taylor for Thomson Reuters.

• Global rainforest loss ‘relentless’ in 2020 (Michael Taylor, Thomson Reuters)
• Study: U.S. pesticide use falls but harms pollinators more (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)
• Why a big mining project could wipe out rural villages in Indonesia (Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360)
• Don’t believe the hype around factory farm biogas (Sierra Club)
• In hotter climate, ‘zombie’ urchins are winning, kelp forests are losing (Lauren Sommer, NPR)

Round of applause…

• Nine ways Biden’s $2 trillion plan will tackle climate change (Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News)
• Biden seeks to use infrastructure plan to address racial inequities (Jim Tankersley and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times)
• Biden plan would spend $16 billion to clean up old mines, oil wells (Matthew Daly, Associated Press)
• Indigenous communities in Mexico take up arms to defend the monarch forest (Columba Gonzalez-Duarte and Manuel Ureste, Nacla)
• Philadelphia is going completely dark at night to save birds (Nate Berg, Fast Company)

Parting thought…

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.” —Eric Hoffer

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.

Wet markets are perfect breeding grounds for pathogens that can jump from animals to humans.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

The exact origin of the coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, which started the COVID-19 pandemic, is still unclear. Early reports suggested that the virus jumped from an animal to a human at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a “wet market” that sells live animals. Today, the international team of scientists assembled by the World Health Organization (WHO) published their report of their recent visit to Wuhan to investigate the source of the virus and confirmed the “zoonotic source of SARS-CoV-2.”

“Evidence from surveys and targeted studies so far have shown that the coronaviruses most highly related to SARS-CoV-2 are found in bats and pangolins, suggesting that these mammals may be the reservoir of the virus that causes COVID-19,” the WHO report states. “In addition to these findings, the high susceptibility of mink and cats to SARS-CoV- 2 suggests that additional species of animals may act as a potential reservoir. … Several samples from patients with exposure to the Huanan market had identical virus genomes, suggesting that they may have been part of a cluster.”

Virologists believe that these sites, which bring together a variety of live animals into close contact with humans, are ideal places for this sort of interspecies viral transmission. In 2002, for example, scientists identified the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus in Himalayan palm civets, a small mammal, in wet markets in Shenzen in southern China. SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of SARS.

“While there remains a need for more investigation, we are not surprised about the wildlife origin referenced in the report and we know enough to act now to reduce risks of future zoonotic pandemics,” said Dr. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian of the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a press statement. “Some 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases reported globally are zoonoses, causing about 1 billion cases of human illness and millions of deaths every year. Of the more than 30 new human pathogens detected in the last three decades, 75 percent have originated in animals. Importantly, research has shown zoonotic-origin pathogens increase along the supply chain from source to market.”

Wet markets are “unique epicenters for transmission of potential viral pathogens, [where] new genes may be acquired or existing genes modified through various mechanisms such as genetic reassortment, recombination and mutation,” according to a paper written by a team of microbiologists from the University of Hong Kong and published in the journal Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases in 2006. They add that these markets, “at closer proximity to humans, with high viral burden or strains of higher transmission efficiency, facilitate transmission of the viruses to humans.”

“Once you walk into one of these places, it’s quite obvious why they’re called wet markets,” said Jason Beaubien, NPR’s global health and development correspondent, on the radio station’s “Morning Edition” show last year. “Live fish in open tubs are splashing water all over the place. The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers’ eyes. There are live turtles and crustaceans climbing over each other in boxes. Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. So things are wet.”

In January, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) and Fred Upton (R-MI) reintroduced bipartisan legislation to address the public health risks posed by wildlife markets, called the Preventing Future Pandemics Act (H.R. 151). The bill “prohibits importing, exporting, purchasing, or selling live wild animals in the United States for human consumption as food or medicine.”

It also directs the Department of the Interior to “hire, train, and deploy at least 50 new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement attachés around the world.” Additionally, the bill obliges the United States to work with other members of the United Nations toward instituting a global ban on commercial wildlife markets and enforcement of wildlife trafficking laws. A companion bill, S. 37, was introduced into the Senate by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and John Cornyn (R-TX).

“For the sake of our health, our economy, and our livelihoods, preventing the next pandemic before it starts is perhaps the most important thing we must do,” said Rep. Quigley. “We were thrilled with the robust, bipartisan support the bill received last year and we’re committed to building on that momentum to see this bill become law.”

In addition to their threat to public health, wet markets are sites of extreme pain and suffering for so many animals. “Wild animals sold in commercial wildlife markets endure extreme stress and unsanitary conditions before being slaughtered,” according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit based in Cotati, California, that works to pass state and federal legislation supporting animal rights. “As the world continues to grapple with COVID-19, our continued exploitation of animals and our environment is fueling the next pandemic. Shutting down commercial wildlife markets—and the international wildlife trade—is critical both to reducing the risk of novel zoonotic disease and animal suffering.”

“We must acknowledge the basic tenet that the more we destroy and intrude on nature, the more likely zoonotic spillovers will occur,” said Dr. Walzer. “Zoonotic spillover events and subsequent outbreaks are inevitable, as the interfaces between wildlife and humans increase, primarily due to deforestation and agricultural expansion.”

The cruelty to animals witnessed at wet markets points to a deeper, ethical concern about how we view and treat other species. In November 2020, during an interview with Euronews, Jane Goodall, the renowned British primatologist and ethologist, said that “we, in part, brought [COVID-19] on ourselves by our disrespect of nature and our disrespect of animals.”

She added, “We push animals into closer contact with humans. We hunt them, eat them, traffic them, sell them as exotic pets around the world, we put them in factory farms in terrible close conditions and all these situations can lead to an environment where a pathogen, like a virus, can jump from an animal to a person, where it may cause a new disease like COVID-19.”

• Urge your U.S. representative and senators to co-sponsor the Preventing Future Pandemics Act.

Cause for concern…

“[P]opulations of Africa’s savanna elephants found in a variety of habitats had decreased by at least 60% over the last 50 years while the number of forest elephants found mostly in Central Africa had fallen by 86% over 31 years,” reports Emma Farge for Reuters.

• African elephants face growing risk of extinction (Emma Farge, Reuters)
• Big banks’ trillion-dollar finance for fossil fuels ‘shocking’ — report (Damian Carrington, The Guardian)
• Riders are abandoning buses and trains: That’s a problem for the climate (Somini Sengupta, Geneva Abdul, Manuela Andreoni, and Veronica Penney, The New York Times)​​​​​​
• Indigenous anti-dam activist killed in Honduras (Associated Press)
• Deer can catch and spread COVID-19 (Dave Hurteau, Popular Science)

Round of applause…

“The Biden administration handed environmental justice advocates a major victory on Thursday when it announced it was withdrawing a key pollution permit for an oil refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands that locals say has long fouled their air and water and endangered their health,” reports Kristoffer Tigue for Inside Climate News.

• Biden EPA yanks permit for St. Croix refinery over environmental justice (Kristoffer Tigue, Inside Climate News)
• Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Obama marine monument designation (Rachel Frazin, The Hill)
• Conservationists sue to save spotted owl logging protections (Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press)
• Ad agencies step away from oil and gas in echo of cigarette exodus (Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times)
• 5 ways to help save pollinators with citizen science (Eric Betz, Discover)

Parting thought…

“True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it.” —Daniel Goleman

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

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

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

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

A call for more plant-based eating draws battle lines over burgers.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

12 min read

Earlier this month, Governor Jared Polis declared March 20 as “MeatOut Day” to promote plant-based diets to his fellow Coloradans, joining governors and mayors in 40 additional states and cities who have signed similar proclamations in recent years. Originally conceived in 1985 as the “Great American Meatout” by the Farm Animal Rights Movement, an animal welfare nonprofit based in Bethesda, Maryland, to protest a U.S. Senate resolution proclaiming National Meat week, MeatOut Day has been proclaimed by state and national governments around the globe.

“Removing animal products from our diets reduces the risk of various ailments, including heart disease, [high blood] pressure, stroke, various cancers, and diabetes; and … a plant-based diet helps protect the environment by reducing our carbon footprint, preserving forests, grasslands and wildlife habitats, and reduces pollution of waterways,” said Polis in his proclamation.

The announcement was applauded by environmentalists and animal rights advocates. But there has also been significant pushback, unsurprisingly, from the meat industry and the politicians who support it. The Colorado Cattlemen’s Association (CCA) slapped back with their own call to have a “Meat In” on March 20. “On this day, CCA encourages Colorado to meet in a restaurant and order your favorite meat dish, meet your family and friends for a meal featuring meat!”

“For our governor to say that we should have a meat-free day is the last straw,” said Republican State Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer. “It’s just one more attack against my county.” Polis’s declaration also raised interstate hackles. “That is a direct attack on our way of life here in Nebraska,” Governor Pete Ricketts said at a news conference at Frank Stoysich Meats, the Omaha-based butcher shop where he announced the creation of “Meat on the Menu Day.” Colorado Public Radio dubbed the growing clash a “carnivorous culture war.”

But if Nebraska’s way of life involved a healthy and safe natural environment and stable climate, then Ricketts might take a deeper look at what eating meat is doing to the planet. “It’s tempting to believe in quick technological fixes that will let us keep indulging in burgers without the climate guilt,” Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University, and Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at Harvard Law School, wrote last week on Wired. “But the fact is that currently, the only real solution available is to produce and eat less beef.”

As Polis said, plant-based diets do help protect the environment, but that’s merely a more pleasing spin on the main, terrifying fact: Meat-based diets are having devastating consequences on the environment and climate. The emissions alone from the meat industry are reason enough to curb our meat intake. The livestock sector is responsible for 16.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is currently on target to account for nearly half of the total amount of greenhouse gases that global human activity can emit into the atmosphere from now until 2030—if we are to meet the 1.5° Celsius maximum temperature increase outlined by the Paris climate agreement.

It’s not just all the burps and farts that ruminants like cows, sheep and goats emit (which account for about 5.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse gases), but the massive deforestation occurring, primarily in the Amazon, to make room for raising cattle and the grains, like soy, meant to feed them. The grazing land used for the production of meat and dairy combined with agricultural land used to produce the animals’ feed takes up 30% of the Earth’s land area—and 80% of all agricultural land in the United States.

In April 2020, scientists from the University of Michigan and Tulane University released new research that modeled different climate outcomes between 2016 and 2030 based on varying adjustments in Americans’ diet. In one scenario, they found that if Americans were to replace 50% of animal products with plant-based foods, they would prevent more than 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution by 2030. In another scenario, in which Americans reduce their consumption of beef by 90%, that number would increase to preventing more than 2.4 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution from being emitted. That would be like taking nearly half of the world’s cars off the roads for an entire year.

The scientists write that “this diet projection exercise emphasizes the important role that changes in diet can play in climate action,” adding that such changes “will require the concerted efforts of policymakers, the food industry and consumers.”

“Moving the American appetite from our burger-heavy diet to plant-based eating is a powerful and necessary part of curbing the climate crisis,” said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, which supported the study and released a policy guide, “Appetite for Change: A Policy Guide to Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions of U.S. Diets by 2030,” to help decision-makers at the federal, state and local levels to promote the dietary shifts that must happen to prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis from happening, like deadly heat waves, sea-level rise, the spread of disease and extreme weather events, species extinction and ecosystem collapse.

“We can’t ignore that public health, sustainability, climate resilience and food security are all part of the same recipe. Our government has a responsibility to make healthy, climate-friendly foods more accessible to all Americans, and that starts with the dietary guidelines,” said Feldstein. “The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the meat supply chain’s vulnerabilities, but our food system faces even greater long-term threats from climate change. We desperately need policymakers to support sustainable diets and a resilient food system.”

In declaring Colorado’s “MeatOut Day,” Gov. Polis became one of those policymakers. And he doesn’t just have environmental and climate science to back up his decision. Health experts and animal rights advocates also have reason to cheer. In 2015, after reviewing more than 800 scientific studies, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, classified processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen for human colorectal cancer, while red meat was classified as probably carcinogenic to humans.

More recently, in a study published in the journal Diabetes Care in February 2020, researchers from Harvard University, University of Chicago, Oregon Health & Science University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine found “[c]onsiderable evidence from long-term prospective cohort studies … that diets high in red and processed meats are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D), cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer (particularly colorectal cancer), and all-cause mortality.” The researchers conclude, “For the prevention and management of diabetes and other chronic diseases, it is important to … emphasize dietary patterns high in minimally processed fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes, while limiting red and processed meats.”

There is also a powerful ethical argument supporting the shift from meat to plants, as factory farming is the largest source of animal cruelty in the entire span of human history. According to United Nations data, more than 70 billion land animals worldwide are killed for food every year. (Our fish consumption is another magnitude altogether, with commercial fish farms killing up to 120 billion fish annually, with another trillion fish caught and killed in the wild.)

“At no other time in history have so many animals died or suffered so much throughout their lives,” writes the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Animal Equality. “For many animals, the only time they see and feel the light and warmth of the sun will be during the trip to the slaughterhouse.”

“Meat has always been politicized and meat-eating tied to a lot of perceptions of American identity and masculinity, especially here in the American West,” Heide Bruckner, a professor at Colorado University, told Colorado Public Radio following Polis’s announcement. Bruckner, whose research involves alternative food systems like urban gardens, organic food and animal-welfare certified meat, supports MeatOut Day as an easy way for people to think about their food choices. “There is a large area in between that all-or-nothing approach that we really should explore,” she said. “Realistically, one day isn’t radically going to shift perception, change behaviors or reduce meat consumption. But I do believe it can provide an opening for some to consider the role that meat plays in their diet.”

Perhaps there hasn’t been a radical shift in perception regarding meat, but there has been a steady growing shift. Since MeatOut was first launched 35 years ago, Polis pointed out in his proclamation, “more than 35 million Americans have explored a plant-based diet and reduced their consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs; and major food manufactures and national franchises are marketing more vegan options in response to this growing demand.”

Young people are driving that shift. According to research conducted in 2019 and published last year by YouGov, a London-based market research firm, millennials (22%) are far more likely than Gen Xers (13%) and Baby Boomers (11%) to say they’ve adopted a vegetarian diet. In 2019, YouGov polling found that more than one in five young Americans “say they would be willing to eliminate meat from their diet in order to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.” Younger Americans have shifted to veganism at nearly double the rate of older Americans, according to data compiled by Statista, a market research firm based in Hamburg, Germany. In 2018, half of American millennials were curious about a vegetarian lifestyle. 

“Agriculture is the heart and soul of Nebraska,” said Steve Wellman, the director of the state’s agriculture department, who said meat products generate about $12 billion annually for the state. That may be true now, but he would be well-advised to look at the trendlines that show a big growth in plant-based diets—especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted food supplies, exposed the horrors of animal agriculture, and revealed the connection between the meat industry and pandemics. “[S]tartups focusing on plant-based protein—including Plantible Foods, Rebellyous Foods, Livekindly, and InnovoPro—have continued securing millions in funding amid the pandemic,” reports CB Insights, a market intelligence firm based in New York. “Demand for vegan meat soared, with sales up by a staggering 264% in the 9 weeks ended May 2, 2020.”

But it’s not just startups that are getting into the plant-based market: Eight of the top ten meat processing companies, including JBS, Tyson and Cargill, are now making or investing in plant-based meat substitutes to meet the growing demand. Last year, Arkansas-based Tyson, a meat giant that is the world’s largest food processing company, rolled out a vegan line. The company said it was part of their effort to adapt to “changing consumer demands.” After OSI North America, which produces meat patties for major fast-food chains like McDonald’s, partnered with vegan meat producer Impossible Foods in July 2020, Kevin Scott, the company’s senior executive vice president, told Reuters that plant-based meat’s “time and place is right now.”

“Just as we will evolve past racism, sexism, ageism and religious persecution, we will evolve past barbarism toward animals, too,” Earth | Food | Life contributor Nina Jackel, founder of the animal rights nonprofit Lady Freethinker, wrote on Salon. She may be right, but if we do, we will do so without the help of Gov. Pete Ricketts, whose meat-loving “way of life” is really a “way of death”—for people, animals and the planet.

Plant-curious or know someone who is? Check out and share the Reducetarian Foundation’s “Beginner’s Guide to Eating Less Meat.”

Letter to the editor…

Reply to “Meat and Dairy Industries Threaten to Derail Europe’s Commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement” (Earth | Food | Life, February 16, 2021):

“Good luck turning Americans into vegetarians. McDonald’s et. al., are too much of our national psyche. Admirable as it may be, that’s a losing uphill battle. Having worked in that industry, I know their force and American consumer patterns combined make that a losing battle. I can’t offer a solution. There must be some marketing gurus out there who have looked at this issue. See if you can find them. Any change will need to be consumer-driven. Without that, the industry cannot be changed.”
—Prof. Larry Schlatter

Cause for concern…

“More than 70% of U.S. waterways reviewed under a controversial Trump-era rule could be permanently damaged after they were not afforded federal protection, according to Army Corps of Engineers data,” reports Hannah Northey for E&E News.

• Clean Water Act: Trump rule imperils more than 40,000 waterways (Hannah Northey, E&E News)
• Trawling for fish may unleash as much carbon as air travel, study says (Catrin Einhorn, New York Times)
• Low-income and Latino neighborhoods endure more extreme heat in U.S. southwest (Ian James, Arizona Republic)
• Seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale (Stephen Leahy, The Guardian)
• NOAA warns of water cutbacks, fires, and low reservoirs amid drought (Celine Castronuovo, The Hill)

Round of applause…

“Commercial urban agriculture is on the rise,” writes EFL writing fellow Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner on AlterNet, “which reduces the amount of energy, land use and food waste in tight, underutilized spaces to produce herbs and roughage for the masses.” Eater shares a video of Bowery Farming, a network of vertical farms based in New York City, to show how urban farming can solve both the climate and food security crises.

• How a vertical farming company grows 80,000 pounds of produce per week (Eater via YouTube)
• ‘Army of environmental super voters’ is growing, and marching on city hall (Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPost)
• China has given up trying to eradicate wolves (The Economist)
• China and the United States will set up a joint working group on climate change (Tony Munroe, Reuters)
• Biden EPA revives web page on climate change deleted by Trump (Dino Grandoni and Brady Dennis, Washington Post)

Parting thought…

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide used to kill weeds and grasses that compete with food crops. First registered for use in the United States in 1974 by agrochemical giant Monsanto under the brand name Roundup, it is one of the most widely used weedkillers in the nation, from large-scale industrial farms to lawns and home gardens. The chemical is extremely effective at killing weeds, especially when used on Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” crops, such as soy, corn, canola, alfalfa and cotton that have been genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate. More than 90% of corn, soybeans and upland cotton grown in the U.S. have been engineered to be resistant to herbicides like Roundup, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But a growing volume of scientific research has pointed to the negative impact that glyphosate has on human and environmental health. In 2014, for example, researchers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, conducted a meta-analysis of more than 40 studies covering nearly three decades of research on the relationship between non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of cancer, and occupational exposure to agricultural pesticides. They concluded that there is “consistent evidence of positive associations” between glyphosate and an increased risk of NHL. The following year, IARC classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” noting that “Case-control studies of occupational exposure in the USA, Canada, and Sweden reported increased risks for non-Hodgkin lymphoma that persisted after adjustment for other pesticides.”

More recently, a meta-analysis published in 2019 conducted by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington in Seattle and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York found that glyphosate exposure raises cancer risk by 41%. The study’s senior author Lianne Sheppard, a biostatistician and environmental and occupational health scientist at the University of Washington, told CNN that she was “convinced” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic properties.

The sheer amount of glyphosate that has been used across the globe is stunning. In 2014, farmers sprayed enough of the herbicide to cover every acre of cropland in the world with nearly a half-pound of it, according to a 2016 study published in Environmental Sciences Europe. “No herbicide in the history of the world has ever been used this heavily,” said the study’s author Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist. “It’s a completely unprecedented case.”

Since the IARC classification in 2015, several countries have banned or restricted the use of glyphosate. Last year, Austria became the first nation in the European Union (EU) to vote to ban its use completely (though the European Commission (EC) blocked the planned ban). Germany announced that it will be phased out by 2023. Nearly 20 other countries currently have some legislation around glyphosate, including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Vietnam. The EC has approved its use in the EU until December 2022.

In the United States, individual states and municipalities have also moved to ban or restrict its use. In 2017, California became the first state to issue an official warning about glyphosate by adding the chemical to its Proposition 65 list of cancer-causing chemicals. Dozens of counties, cities and townships across the nation have adopted some sort of restrictions that limit or ban the use of glyphosate. Every single state has a Change.org petition requesting its governors to ban glyphosate. 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.

There are also rising concerns about glyphosate’s impact on wildlife and the natural environment. In 2019, researchers at the University of Florida published a study on the persistence of glyphosate in the environment. They found that the chemical accumulates in topsoil and has been detected in groundwater and surface water due to pesticide runoff from farms. “Owing to the relatively high mobility of glyphosate, the likelihood of a rise in surface and groundwater content in tandem with herbicide use is high,” the study authors concluded. “Hence, potential routes of exposure into the environment, as well as the consequent implications on animals and humans, need to be explored more thoroughly.”

Other research has revealed that exposure to glyphosate can impact the metabolism and reproductive functions of a variety of wildlife, including mussels, crayfish and other aquatic invertebrates. Studies also suggest that glyphosate exposure can harm the navigational ability and gut bacteria of bees, which are critical for crop and plant pollination. Researchers have also found that the herbicide causes neurological harm to mosquitoes, which are an important food source to a myriad of other species, including bats, birds, reptiles, amphibians and other insects, and also serve as plant pollinators. 

Still, much more research is needed to know the full impacts of glyphosate on wildlife and the natural environment. “We’ve barely begun to investigate the microbiomes of animals and soil as possible targets for glyphosate toxicity,” Nico van Straalen, an ecotoxicologist at Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Environmental Health News in 2019. And that’s why the current body of research should trigger the use of the precautionary principle, a philosophical and legal approach used to pause the use of a new product or process when its ultimate impacts are unknown or disputed.

“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically,” said the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), a nongovernmental organization focusing on women’s health, in a 2019 statement. The group, which holds official consultive status with the United Nations, added, “We recommend that glyphosate exposure to populations should end with a full global phase out.”

But while the pressure to eliminate glyphosate from store shelves and the food system in general mounts in tandem with the research revealing its negative effects, the market forces supporting its continued use are strong. Roundup is the bestselling weedkiller, accounting for 25% of all herbicides sold worldwide.

In 2015, Monsanto “made nearly $4.76 billion in sales and $1.9 billion in gross profits from herbicide products, mostly Roundup,” notes financial blogger Maxx Chatsko on the Motley Fool. Unsurprisingly, Monsanto mounted a massive disinformation campaign to hide Roundup’s potential link to cancer. “We now know they had pet journalists who pushed Monsanto propaganda under the guise of ‘objective reporting,’” Tim Litzenburg, a partner with the law firm Kincheloe, Litzenburg & Pendleton who represents several plaintiffs suing Monsanto over Roundup, told the Guardian in 2019. “At the same time, the chemical company sought to amass dossiers to discredit those journalists who were brave enough to speak out against them.”

In 2016, Bayer, a German multinational pharmaceutical company, took over Monsanto. But the $63-billion acquisition has been called a “merger failure” primarily due to the more than 13,000 legal claims concerning the fact that Monsanto did not warn farmers and consumers of its product’s potential carcinogenic properties.

Even if glyphosate is banned on a large scale, the majority of farmers will turn to other herbicides, the effects of which will likely also be debated. “It’s probable [the glyphosate issue] would have happened with whatever herbicide had been associated with the [genetically engineered] crop revolution,” said Benbrook. “It just happened to be glyphosate.”

And then there’s Mother Nature, who in the end, always wins. Perhaps the ultimate solution is to eliminate chemicals from the way we grow our food and move toward organic farming, which not only has the potential to be scaled up to compete with industrial farming but is much less harmful to human and environmental health—if only the political will were there to make the transition. The Rodale Institute, a nonprofit that supports organic farming research, says that “the myth that organic food can’t feed the world isn’t just wrong, it’s downright counterproductive.”

“Plants will evolve resistance to anything,” Franck Dayan, a weed scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, told ScienceMag. “Whatever we do, we’ll have to face the way nature works.”

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

Cause for Concern…

“The United States needs to set a target to slash its greenhouse gas emissions between 57% and 63% below 2005 levels by 2030 in order to achieve the Biden administration’s longer-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, according to a new analysis released on Thursday,” reports Valerie Volcovici for Reuters.

• U.S. must cut emissions by over 57% to meet Paris climate target (Valerie Volcovici, Reuters)
• Over 20 countries weakening environmental protection during pandemic (Fabio Teixeira, Thomson Reuters Foundation)
• Texas GOP lawmakers push bill to punish fossil fuel disinvestments (Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune)
• A megadrought is parching 77% of the western U.S. (Lili Pike, Vox)
• Satellite imagery shows Northern California kelp forests have collapsed (Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine)

Round of applause…

“Once on the verge of extinction, the rarest subspecies of the gray wolf in North America has seen its population nearly double over the last five years, with more gains being reported in 2020, U.S. wildlife managers said Friday,” reports Susan Montoya Bryan for the Associated Press.

• Wild population of endangered Mexican wolves keeps growing (Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press)
• Environmental justice plays key role in Biden COVID-19 stimulus package (Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News)
• State-protected dark skies could change astrotourism forever (Julia Eskins, Condé Nast Traveler)
• Cats appear to be OK with vegan diets: study (Jane Stevenson, Toronto Sun)
• 10 cruelty-free drugstore makeup brands you can find at Target (Suzana Rose, Cruelty-Free Kitty)

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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