Our Planet Versus Plastic Bags—A Tale of Two Cities

Americans discard 100 billion plastic bags annually, the equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil.

By Erika Schelby, Independent Media Institute

12 min read

With oceans, countries, populations, and governments inundated by a plague of plastic worldwide, it may be useful to focus on the single-use plastic bag choices made by two cities, in the same U.S. state, located at a distance of only 64 miles (104 km) from each other. Both Santa Fe and Albuquerque share many qualities and conditions, foremost among them a distinctive cultural mix of American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American citizens. But the two communities are also dissimilar, and this is reflected in the way they have dealt with the plastic bag dilemma.

Santa Fe is the oldest capital city in the United States. It is the seat of the New Mexico government and is home to the country’s third-largest art market. It calls itself “the City Different” and has more than 250 art galleries and dealers, a dozen state and private museums, and a world-class opera, for its more than 88,000 residents.

The “costly negative implications for tourism, wildlife and aesthetics” led Santa Fe to ban single-use plastic carryout bags with Ordinance No. 2015-12 in April of 2015. The decision was also made “to protect the environment while reducing waste, litter, and pollution in order to help improve the public’s health and welfare.” In April 2016, an open letter was sent from the mayor and addressed to the local businesses explaining the project and the new rules in detail.

Nearby Albuquerque is also attractive but less rarefied and more of a workhorse city. It is much larger with a population of 562,599 as of 2021, a growth rate of 24.8 percent since 2000, and a metropolitan area population of 942,000 until 2022. It has a total of 49.8 percent Hispanic inhabitants. Most have lived here for generations. Located in the high desert along the Rio Grande, Albuquerque has several museums, an Old Town dating back to 1706, and various cultural and recreational attractions.

After long debates, Albuquerque’s Clean and Green Retail Ordinance became effective on January 1, 2020. Single-use plastic bags were banned from the point of sale. But then came the pandemic, and enforcement was deferred. Doing business at the retail level had already grown difficult and stressful for management, employees, and shoppers. Supply chains were disrupted. With the new challenges thrown up during the pandemic, these changes seemed all too much at once. The city council listened to the plight of constituents and decided to oppose Mayor Tim Keller’s progressive plastic bag ban. It voted 6-3 to revoke it. The mayor bravely vetoed the reversal. Yet on April 4, 2022, the councilors’ motion to override the veto passed with a vote of 6-3 once again. The ban on single-use plastic bags was lifted. Convenience won the battle against environmental concerns but did not win the war.

That struggle is undeniably bigger than one city council’s decision to put off what needs to be done. In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to pass a law against the use of single-use plastic bags. California followed by implementing a statewide ban in 2014. Puerto Rico and 10 states have enacted legislation to ban single-use plastic bags: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. And in contrast to Albuquerque’s reversal of the ban, a growing number of American cities have introduced plastic bag bans or bans and fees—among them are Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boulder, New York, Portland, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Internationally, a growing number of countries have launched nationwide bans on producing, using, and distributing plastic bags.

Experiencing devastating floods in the summer of 1998, Bangladesh noted that thin plastic bags were clogging hundreds of storm drains and drainage systems during flooding, worsening the situation. This caused an estimated 80 percent of the flooding blockages in cities. So in 2002, Bangladesh implemented a ban on all plastic shopping bags in the nation, becoming the first country in the world to do so. Others followed. “According to a United Nations paper and several media reports, 77 countries in the world have passed some sort of full or partial ban on plastic bags,” reported Statista.

Unfortunately, such prohibitions are not enough. Despite the fact that Bangladesh became the world’s first country to ban plastic bags, their use continued to cause environmental harm. Its Department of Environment confiscated 592,223 metric tons of polythene from 2019 to 2021. The number of illegal polybag manufacturers increased from 300 in 1999 to an estimated 700 to 1,000 by 2021. In addition, until 2019, about 1.2 million metric tons of plastic waste was shipped in from the U.S. and the UK, making a bad situation worse.

Instead of finding solutions to the issues related to plastic pollution, reports by Western nonprofits and companies have, meanwhile, helped push the blame for polluting the world’s oceans onto “a small geographical area in East and Southeast Asia.” In July of 2022, the well-known nonprofit advocacy organization Ocean Conservancy delivered an official apology for the damage done by a report it coauthored along with McKinsey Center for Business and Environment in 2015: Stemming the Tide: Land-Based Strategies for a Plastic-Free Ocean.

Impeccably written, professional in tone, and convincing in language, the report claimed research had shown that more than half of the plastic pollution entering the ocean originated from five Asian countries: China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The report claimed that “increasing economic power” and “exploding demand for consumer products” had led these countries to produce and use plastic heavily, and they lacked the infrastructure to deal with the resulting plastic waste tsunami. Consequently, the waste ended up in the ocean. The study argued that the most effective way to deal with this was through recycling. What was meant by this euphemistic term was the deployment of waste-to-energy technology: gasification, and incineration.

Yet burning plastic discharges a potent and dangerous mix of toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and into the communities unfortunate enough to be near the incinerating sites. Moreover, for a number of rich countries with environmental restrictions, the cynical hype for recycling has fostered the export of plastic trash to less developed countries like Bangladesh, resulting in the charge of “waste colonialism.” Additionally, the report created an injurious and false narrative. Although it was removed from the Ocean Conservancy website, it lingers on as a sophisticated and warning masterpiece of greenwashing. It is surprising that it took so long to acknowledge this truth, given the list of the project’s supporters: the Coca-Cola Company, the Dow Chemical Company, the American Chemistry Council, and the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa, among others.

Meanwhile, with a March 2022 UN resolution adopted during the United Nations Environment Assembly 5.2 in Nairobi to end plastic pollution, governments have started to strive for a global, legally binding agreement by 2024. It could not be like another timid 2015 Paris Agreement. It needed teeth. So from November 28 to December 2, 2022, delegates from 150 countries met for the UN’s first session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC1) in Punta del Este, Uruguay, to begin negotiations that will eventually lead to an international plastics treaty. Or so one hopes. “Turn off the tap on plastic,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “Plastics are fossil fuels in another form.”

Indeed, that’s what they are: products made from oil and gas. Americans discard 100 billion bags annually, which are manufactured from 12 million barrels of oil. And what makes these flimsy thin, light, cheap, containers especially dreadful is perhaps the fact that globally 500 billion of them are used annually, for an average of only 15 minutes. After that brief moment in time, they are thrown away. Yet they go on polluting the environment and causing health hazards for years.

What is more, most of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that have been manufactured since the 1950s remain in landfills or within the natural environment. By 2050, it is estimated that around 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste will reside in landfills or the natural environment. Plastic is a synthetic substance. It does not biodegrade. Eventually and very slowly the sun, wind, water, waves, and abrasion break it down into tiny particles. Single-use polyethylene plastic bags will take up to 1,000 years to photo-degrade. Effective recycling, specifically in the U.S., may be a pipe dream. The practical infrastructures, facilities, workers, and readiness to handle this daily flash flood of indestructible waste do not exist and would be expensive to achieve. Incineration is not a solution: it does more harm than good. Therefore it is no big surprise that globally, more than 90 percent of plastic is not recycled. The pile ends up in landfills, rivers, and oceans.

Much of the plastic waste is dumped in landfills. As it breaks down, it leaches hazardous chemicals, contaminates the surroundings, and infiltrates the food chain. According to a fact sheet from EarthDay.org, “Researchers in Germany indicate that terrestrial microplastic pollution is much higher than marine microplastic pollution—estimated at four to 23 times higher, depending on the environment.”

Nevertheless, tossing plastic garbage into the oceans proceeds at a furious pace. A lot of it is swept in from rivers. At least 10 million tons of plastic waste ends up in our oceans each year. If this continues, we may have more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.

Globally, people generate so much filth and debris that these waste products are now beginning to accumulate and occupy significant space, sometimes larger than the size of whole cities and countries. One such example is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), which “is a collection of marine debris” spanning “waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan.” It is already enormous—estimated to be some 1.6 million square kilometers, about twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France—and may spawn a whole family of floating trash concentrations that drift and travel with ocean currents and thereby can reach additional bodies of water. The relentless energy of the sea grinds portions of these garbage vortexes into microplastics. This produces a thick, cloudy gumbo in which larger items are suspended. A share of this mess sinks down to the seafloor. As a result of this, algae and plankton are deprived of sunlight and wiped out, which leads to fish and turtles growing hungry and weak. Many perish. This causes less food for tuna, sharks, and whales, leading to the marine food web being destabilized.

Humans already eat—literally—five grams of microplastics and nanoplastics, or a credit card’s worth of plastic, every week. That amounts to between 39,000 and 52,000 particles of plastic added to our diet every year. Microplastics can be found in animals, fish, and birds, and also in human blood and organs. They even invade the placentas of unborn babies. They are everywhere.

Plastic is affecting human health and reproduction and might have irreparable consequences for the human species, even leading to “human extinction” if uncontrolled use of plastics is not prevented. In mice, research has already shown a decrease in the quantity and quality of sperm and a reduction of total follicles in the ovaries of females. So far, investigations into the effects of microplastics absorbed into the human body have barely begun. Science needs another 10 to 15 years to come up with answers.

The wish for a clean, safe personal space—a home—is hardwired into humans. Indeed, many individuals want to make their homes as beautiful as possible according to their means and their taste. But each person also generates waste and is responsible for it—that’s the flip side of our way of life. In contemporary households, the waste is flushed away or picked up in a trash bin by the waste management services of a city. Residents pay fees for this convenience. But the waste is still theirs. It has simply been relocated—it’s out of sight, out of mind.

That is where the problem lies. Municipalities and landfills are overwhelmed with plastic waste. In 1960, the U.S. generated 88.1 million tons of solid waste; by 2018, this had increased to a whopping 292.4 million tons. America had become a wasteful society that throws stuff away. In 2022, it became the second largest per capita generator of solid municipal waste in the world—surprisingly after Denmark, which is often cited as a model global citizen. Other highly developed countries produce far less waste than the U.S. A special case is Australia’s city of Adelaide, which may have the most effective waste program anywhere. A recent article in the Guardian tells the story of Alice Clanachan, a woman who applied the city’s “reduce, reuse, recycle” plan so resolutely, that for a total of 26 months, she didn’t need to put her rubbish bin out for collection.

Here in the United States, in the state of New Mexico, the city of Santa Fe succeeded in banning single-use plastic bags years ago. Its residents understood that you cannot maintain a beautiful home for long without caring for the surroundings. If individuals loathe the idea of befouling their own interior spaces, they can also leap to the wider view of detesting the squalor inflicted on the entire planet—our common home. Perhaps this was easier to do in Santa Fe. It’s a small place that knows its own mind.

For Albuquerque, the American can-do attitude may reassert itself sometime soon. Civic pride and civic duty will remind the residents that the ban on single-use bags is a rare thing they can control and do right here and now, at the local level. People have done just that before the plastic plague began. And we can even do our shopping by adopting the uncomplicated routine of bringing our own durable and reusable bags. This simple step could help decrease plastic waste and help promote a cleaner way of living and supporting all life on Earth.

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Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

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 Meat Industry Has Created a False Dichotomy That Pits People Against Animals

Image: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media

Factory farms are harmful to animals, the environment, local communities, and public health. We need a more logical and just food system.

By Vicky Bond, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

It’s a common narrative that factory farming—despite animal cruelty, environmental destruction, and human health impacts—has net positives that make it an important part of society, especially in rural America. It provides affordable meat to our populations, creates jobs in small towns, stimulates local economies, and helps families prosper.

This narrative has made it easy for the meat industry to create a false dichotomy that pits people against animals: “Do you care more about a pig than my family’s livelihood?” 

It’s now been decades with factory farming as the dominant industry, but have rural communities actually experienced their purported economic benefits? Has factory farming made life easier for the people in small towns?

A 2022 report by Food and Water Watch suggests the opposite. The report takes pig farms in Iowa as a case study of how our corporate-controlled food systems are failing environments, animals, and communities.

Until the late 20th century, most pigs were raised for food on family farms. But, a combination of government policies in the 1970s and grain price crashes in the 1980s resulted in Iowa losing almost 90% of its pig farms over three decades as small-town farmers struggled to stay economically viable.

Meanwhile, across the state, the behemoth of controlled animal feeding operations—facilities that raise thousands of animals in extreme confinement to maximize production and profit—began to rise.

These factory farms—operated by multibillion-dollar corporations like Smithfield and JBS—now dominate the meat market. These facilities control the food going into our restaurants, like Dunkin Donuts, Sonic, Bob Evans, Ingles Market, and Cracker Barrel, as well as our schools, hospitals, and stadiums from food service providers like Sodexo and Compass Group.

In 1980, the top four pig farm firms slaughtered one out of every three U.S. pigs. That market share has now doubled. At the local level, Food and Water Watch found that these companies have an even tighter grip on the market, with the top four firms slaughtering 9 of 10 Iowa pigs between 2004 and 2011. Factory farms use this dominance to set the terms for pig prices, preventing fair pricing, contributing to market volatility, and pushing down the real price of pigs.

The fact that these enormous corporate firms and their equally enormous factory farms control the market is irrefutable. But are they at least providing more jobs on the ground for the community? Despite years of claiming the contrary, the answer is straightforward: absolutely not.

The study found that between 1982 and 2017, real median household income and total wage jobs declined in the counties that sold the most pigs and had the largest farms. The population also took a steep drop, at twice the rate of Iowa’s more rural counties. Job losses, too, were commonplace. Statewide, total farm employment dropped 44% between 1982 and 2017—the boom years for factory farming.

The results of this study are clear: Factory farming is bad for the economy, driving up the price of pigs without returning profits to local farmers. It puts local farms out of business and results in net job loss. Families suffer hardship as incomes decline, and property values diminish due to rampant pollution from factory farms.

On top of this, it ensures that factory-farmed pigs grow up and die in misery, while our climate catastrophe worsens, human health deteriorates, and local communities suffer.

Not only does meat consumption increase the risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia, and more, the meat industry’s routine use of antibiotics to protect their bottom line results in antibiotic resistance in both farmed animals and the people who eat them.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections—a number that could soar to 10 million by 2050. Who are factory farms good for? Large corporations, which continue to sell us the lie that we need them.

Corporate factory farms threaten that, if they can’t maintain their monopoly over the industry, the small towns they operate in will lose jobs and economic prosperity. This is simply misinformation. Factory farms are not good for anyone, especially local communities that exist in their shadows.

But, not all hope is lost. When we advocate for small farmers using more sustainable agriculture, plant-based agriculture, and cell-based technology, new vistas open up for a more just food system. 

This food system would be better for our planet, allowing us to recover from years of agriculture-driven pollution and deforestation, and good for people, too. Smaller farms that treat animals humanely could prosper. Food and agriculture projects could be led by and for the people in their communities. 

Let’s demolish the boxing ring the meat industry built—one that positions people and animals as opponents, instructing us to support one side by brutalizing the other. But factory farming—and its corporate chokehold on rural communities—is just as brutal to humans as it is to animals.

We need to put pigs and people back where they belong—on the same side.

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Vicky Bond is a veterinary surgeon, animal welfare scientist, and the president of The Humane League.

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.

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

An Entire Decade of Benefits Denial for Vets After Toxic Chemical Exposure?

American veterans poisoned at Camp Lejeune can finally seek justice, thanks to a new law.

By Jonathan Sharp, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

Camp Lejeune, a military base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was established in 1942 to train future Marines for World War II. While it is known as the home of “Expeditionary Forces in Readiness,” the facility also has a long history of contamination with toxic chemicals such as perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride, trichloroethylene, and benzene. In 1982, volatile organic compounds—gasses released by these solvents—were found at Camp Lejeune.

Furthermore, since 1966, military firefighters and trainees have been using the fire suppressant known as Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF) to extinguish jet fuel and petroleum fires, which only worsened pollution. This firefighting foam contains PFAS, a group of over 5,000 dangerous substances often dubbed “forever chemicals,” in a concentration of up to 98 percent. With each use, AFFF contaminates the environment with these chemicals. Some take over a thousand years to break down, hence their nickname.

The highest PFAS level at Camp Lejeune was 170,000 parts per trillion, which exceeds the safe exposure limit by 2,450 times. Currently, at least 14 sites of Camp Lejeune where these chemicals lurk, despite the relentless cleanup endeavors of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy. Because PFAS are extremely difficult to remove from the environment, the military base is expected to be completely safe within a few decades.

In 1985, the greatest trichloroethylene level was 280 times over the safe exposure limit, whereas the highest perchloroethylene level eclipsed the safe exposure limit by 43 times. The dry-cleaning firm ABC One-Hour Cleaners was responsible for perchloroethylene contamination. As for the other industrial solvents, they ended up polluting Camp Lejeune as a result of the military recklessly using these chemicals to clean weapons and equipment.

Exposure to toxic chemicals may cause debilitating health problems, including liver cancer, renal toxicity, prostate cancer, leukemia, female infertility, pancreatic cancer, and scleroderma. Between 1953 and 1987, roughly one million people lived at Camp Lejeune, and all had a high risk of developing severe disease. Until recently, veterans affected by toxic exposure could only receive benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Today, due to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, they can also obtain financial compensation from the U.S. government.

VA Keeps Rejection Rate High for Camp Lejeune Vets

The VA had been aware of the horrific diseases veterans might contract at Camp Lejeune since the beginning. Still, it was only in 2012 that Congress passed the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act. This comprehensive, bipartisan legislative package was meant to grant veterans and family members who lived at the military base access to better healthcare, education, housing, and memorial services, as well as disability, social security, and indemnity compensation.

A decade ago, veterans were able to file disability compensation claims for health problems stemming from toxic exposure at military bases. Nevertheless, the VA began using alleged “subject matter experts” in 2012 to review these cases. Recently, the fact that these “experts” were nothing but general and preventive doctors with no proper expertise in assessing the complex afflictions Camp Lejeune veterans were struggling with came to light. Due to their lack of knowledge, the claim approval rate abruptly plummeted from 25 percent to only 5 percent.

In 2017, the VA deemed eight diseases as presumptive conditions resulting from Camp Lejeune’s toxic contamination, slightly increasing the claim approval rate to roughly 17 percent over the last decade. Nonetheless, this is still below the former average, and thousands of veterans suffering from terrible diseases are regularly denied the compensation and healthcare services they deserve. While veterans acknowledged the significance of this minor improvement, they believed the list should include a broader range of health problems.

Currently, the VA’s list of health issues related to toxic exposure at Camp Lejeune includes the eight presumptive conditions, but also 15 conditions for which veterans and family members will receive financial compensation to cover the costs of their healthcare and treatment. Filing a claim for VA disability compensation as a Camp Lejeune veteran is significant. After a medical evaluation, those assigned a 100 percent disability rating will receive monthly compensation of over $3,000. Additionally, veterans impacted by toxic exposure can now obtain financial compensation from the U.S. government due to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act.

How the Camp Lejeune Justice Act 2022 Can Help Veterans Impacted by Toxic Exposure

On March 26, 2021, Representative Matt Cartwright (D-PA) introduced the Camp Lejeune Justice Act bill. The goal of the bill is to allow veterans, military families, and civilians who lived at the military installation between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987, for at least one month to seek reparations outside the Department of Veterans Affairs. Furthermore, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act prohibits the U.S. government from asserting immunity from litigation in response to the claims filed by toxic exposure victims.

“When we send our men and women overseas, we make a promise to care for them when they come home. We failed our veterans […], and it is up to us to make it right. Our bipartisan bill […] eliminates burdensome red tape to ensure that those exposed to toxic chemicals, including servicemembers, Marine dependents, civil servants, and contractors, can receive their day in court,” said Representative Greg Murphy (R-NC), a supporter of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act. To put it differently, the bill enables veterans to exercise their constitutional right to legal recourse.

On August 2, 2022, the Senate voted to pass the bill with a final vote of 86-11. Nine days later, President Joe Biden signed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act into law. The bill is now part of the Honoring Our PACT Act, which is meant to improve healthcare access and funding for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. According to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has exclusive jurisdiction over any claim filed by toxic exposure victims.

“After years of commitment to this issue, I am grateful that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle agreed to pass this crucial legislation so that poisoned Camp Lejeune veterans can finally seek justice,” said Rep. Cartwright. It is worthy of note that punitive damages will not be awarded in any lawsuit under this new law. Therefore, veterans struggling with health problems caused by toxic exposure at Camp Lejeune can only receive financial compensation from the federal government. The settlement payout ranges between $25,000 and $1 million, depending on the severity of the plaintiff’s diagnosis.

Before the Camp Lejeune Justice Act became law, veterans could only receive disability compensation and healthcare benefits from the Veterans Affairs, while civilians had no right to legal recourse. The cost of treatment for the crippling diseases toxic exposure victims suffer from is exceptionally high—for instance, people with thyroid cancer usually have to pay up to $40,000 for surgery. Consequently, veterans and civilians who spent time at Camp Lejeune have been struggling financially. Even though money will not cure most of the health issues toxic exposure victims develop, the financial compensation they can obtain will be of tremendous help.

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Jonathan Sharp is the chief financial officer at Environmental Litigation Group, PC. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, the law firm specializes in toxic exposure cases for veterans and their families.

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.

Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival

Future leaders: Young climate activists with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future group demonstrate in Berlin in February 2019. (Photo credit: Leonhard Lenz/Wikmedia Commons)

The climate crisis is a form of oppression by a wealthy few.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, tropical coral reef die-off, the abrupt thawing of Northern permafrost, the loss of Barents Sea ice, the melting of mountain glaciers, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and changes to the West African monsoon that will impact the Sahel region of Africa.

These points launch the world into the unknown and unknowable, as they engage feedback loops the consequences of which we cannot accurately predict. And yet those predictions concern the mass suffering and death of tens of millions, and maybe more. We are at a tipping point. And President Biden has yet to declare the climate emergency he publicly pondered in July 2022. He likely (and legitimately) fears a political backlash; populism is seen now as a barrier to climate reforms.

What’s wrong? Threats to our species as a whole, and to our survival, are amorphous things. They are too large, and too slow, for us—for the slowly evolving human brain—to see properly. But threats framed as originating from other persons, from the people around us are not. Our species is quite accustomed to dealing with such threats—this is the history of war. And in the case of things like pandemics, where amorphous threats like contagions were framed as threats by the government to deprive us of liberty, they have triggered terrifying populist responses.

The climate crisis certainly is a form of oppression, exacted upon a vast majority of middle and low-income folks by a wealthy few in a fossil fuel industry that knew and hid the facts of what it was doing, and the relatively few politicians and world leaders that authorized and enabled their acts. And while we are accustomed to scientists and those same politicians framing news regarding the crisis, or very young persons like Greta Thunberg with their angry but relatively muted responses centered on the rights of future generations, we can imagine other framings.

What if the news that climate crisis-driven heat waves are killing people were not framed as a study or science at all, but the still true vision of a handful of wealthy elites and the few thousand political cronies that protect their profits by committing the indiscriminate killing of children, of grandmothers, and of pregnant women. Why not see it this way, in the terms our brains might react to? Why not frame it in terms of class, which triggers action on the right and left, often beyond the margins? Yes, climate change is an ethereal thing we cannot touch, like the bullets of Putin’s army, but that’s merely a choice of how we perceive it. Who pays the price of the crisis and who benefits from it, and the science that shows such a flow of responsibility, is a fact.

It could be that we do not frame it in this way because that framing does not present any particular solution, any better solution, than more amorphous frames. We still need to go to courts and other bodies to determine liability. We still need governments, and their processes to regulate emissions or build systems of sequestration. We still need massive regulatory networks to implement climate mitigation plans.

All of this is true, but it is also true that—like the trials at Nuremberg—the world has faced unprecedented threats and the situations that followed them with unprecedented systems of justice. Perhaps climate change is such an unprecedented threat, justifying solutions—like the demanding particularly culpable corporations follow the lead of companies like Patagonia—and begin to transform their structure accordingly to start to repair the damage they have caused.

That sort of demand, regardless of governments, would be particularly appropriate were the repairs treated as reparations and the beneficiaries future generations—the most likely class of persons to be harmed. Future generations could be best compensated through effective family planning incentives, entitlements, and reparations awarded to their parents through novel devices like private baby bonds that encourage sustainably sized families likely to maximize the resilience of their children. If we believe that government derives from the people, these solutions—ones that involve the creation of those people—precede and exceed the ability of governments, and the companies they protect, to refuse.

Moreover, how we frame the crisis can trigger the governmental processes described above by motivating officials to act, much the way the framing of the pandemic created massive political backlashes. There are many other examples of amorphous threats transformed into tangible ones. Certainly, the harms caused by the crisis, and the irreversible harms the tipping points promise, are cause for a populist backlash, if we just find a way to see it as the oppression of many by a few that it is.

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

More by Carter Dillard:

The Global Push for Population Growth Shows We’re Not Grappling With the Climate Crisis

8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real

What Pundit Ezra Klein Doesn’t Get About Parenting in a Looming Climate Crisis

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 Global Push for Population Growth Shows We’re Not Grappling With the Climate Crisis

And more on the way: Spectators fill the seats at a rugby sevens match in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2009. (Photo credit: Nikolay Loubet/Wikimedia Commons)

Progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, with a host of men who perch atop pyramids of power—from Elon Musk to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hungary’s strongman Victor Orban—pushing women to have children as a means of growing the base of those power pyramids and further elevating the men at the top.

Corporations in the U.S., through targeted media, push for the same by sensationalizing the idea of an economic “baby bust” that threatens the nation. Contrast the scant media coverage of studies showing the massive impact a universal ethic of smaller families would have on the climate crisis, with the ubiquitous and not-so-stealthy advertising we see across popular media platforms. The rhetoric of the constant need for more workers, consumers, and taxpayers goes beyond just pushing women to have children and supports recent successful moves to ban contraception and abortions.

It does not help that civil society organizations that purport to protect children, equity, animals, the environment, and human rights and democracy often ignore these issues, fearing the ugly framing of population issues from the past rather than pivoting towards the existential justice of socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms. In each one of these areas of need, progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.

Putin’s and others’ push for constant growth—and the silence of many nonprofits around the issue—reveals the lie at the base of the climate crisis: that population growth and the expansion of the Anthropocene is sustainable, or even desirable.

That lie is fundamental because it is existential, preceding more practical questions like how to limit emissions. The lie (and the growth it enables) is undoing attempts to limit emissions as growth takes over. The lie encompasses an existential worldview that sees Earth as a human resource, children deserving of no particular level of welfare at birth (like those conditions that the United Nations Children’s Convention purports to provide), treats being born crushingly poor or ultra-rich as an act of god rather than a product of inequitable family planning policy, and treats democracy as more of an abstract concept that an actual process whereby people meaningfully influence the rules under which they are forced to live. 

That population growth is not sustainable should be painfully obvious now, as the population-driven climate crisis unfolds, killing people worldwide in unprecedented heat waves.

Some push back on the connection between population growth and the climate crisis, but these analyses mistake population growth as simply a matter of numbers. Population growth entails the exacerbation of all of the unjust power relations described above—between parents and their children, between rich and poor, between people and their political leaders, etc.—in which power flows top-down, rather than bottom-up, as truly participatory human rights and democracy actually require. Population growth entails relatively few extracting wealth and power from the majority—again something that should be obvious as the ecological costs of our economic growth are slated to fall on the vulnerable majority: future generations.

Is growth, in and of itself, desirable? 

Growth is enabled by not ensuring, through things like family planning incentives, that all children have minimum levels of welfare. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by not ensuring children equal opportunities in life. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by ignoring the value of participatory democracy and scrapping any minimum level of connection between democratic “representatives” and the people subject to their rules. Is that desirable?

The alternative to Putin’s and others’ pyramids—in which a few are empowered by disempowering the majority—involves reversing the flow of power, first and foremost by making family planning universally a child-centric process. That move makes us—in the most basic way—truly other-regarding, and changes the direction of power so that would-be parents are not lording over future generations and the ecologies of our planet, but working together to ensure all children are born in social and ecological conditions that satisfy the requirements of the Children’s Convention. That act—of becoming fundamentally other-regarding—enables us to physically constitute future communities as free and equal people, the ideal of consensual governance that many theorists have envisioned but rarely achieved.

Child-centric planning is the epitome of shifting the flow of power from the powerful down upon the vulnerable—which enables exploitation—towards a flow from the vulnerable up to the powerful, aligning children’s interests in conditions of birth and development in which they will thrive, with women’s interest in the elimination of life-hobbling pronatalism, with the average person’s interest in more equal opportunities in life as well as smaller and more functional democracies where the average person is actually empowered, with nonhumans’ interest in the restoration of nonhuman habitat, restorative environmentalism, and more empathetic persons inclined to treat animals well (what nonhumans value most of all).

We might be inclined to resist such radical reforms because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that is those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.

We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do—including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.

Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them through Fair Start family reforms like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance where people are actually empowered to make the ultimate rules under which all must live. And there is only really one way to do that: Parental readiness policies that avoid things like parents torturing their children to death, birth equity redistribution of wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of smaller families.

Changing the flow of power in this way is fundamental, or existential, justice in action. It is the antithesis of Putin’s move to grow and centralize Russian power by exploiting future generations (or the move Musk, Khamenei, or others are trying to make) and instead takes our most basic values and uses them to structure power relations for the future majority, ensuring that we begin to orient from a just and genuinely inclusive place.

Putin’s policy shows us the lie, that growth is sustainable and desirable, at the base of the climate and so many other crises. The lie hides top-down power over the most vulnerable and has created the crises we face today. Let’s unlearn that lie and reverse the flow.

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

More by Carter Dillard:

8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real

What Pundit Ezra Klein Doesn’t Get About Parenting in a Looming Climate Crisis

Kamala vs. Mitt: Two Different Viewpoints of Family Planning Prefigure Different Futures for Planetary Health

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.

Across Africa, Water Conflict Threatens Security, Health, and the Environment

Bone dry: Usually submerged by water, tree stumps and sand are exposed as South Africa’s Theewaterskloof Dam ran dry in 2018. (Image credit: Zaian/Wikimedia Commons)

A changing climate and population growth are fueling water-based conflicts across the African continent

By Robin Scher, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

Water is a finite resource on our planet. We can only rely on what we have, which translates to about 2.5 percent of drinkable fresh water. Of that amount, only 0.4 percent currently exists in lakes, rivers, and moisture in the atmosphere. The strain of this limited supply grows by the day and as this continues, the detrimental impact will continue to be felt in places least equipped to find alternative solutions—in particular, the African continent.

The global population is estimated to reach around 9.6 billion people by 2050. This is triple the number of humans on the planet just a few decades ago, having to exist with the same amount of water, not taking into account the nonhuman animals and plants that also rely on water to survive.

More than a third of the planet’s population living without access to clean, safe water live in sub-Saharan Africa. And nearly two-thirds—some four billion people—live in water-scarce areas. With this number set to steadily rise, the United Nations predicts that around 700 million people across the world might be “displaced by intense water scarcity” by 2030.

Scarcity-Led Conflict and Crisis

Each year, the world is seeing extreme water-related events including heatwaves and droughts. In 2021 on the African continent alone, Madagascar, Kenya, and Somalia experienced severe water shortages. And with scarcity, conflict tends to follow.

A number of African conflicts are being fueled by competition for dwindling natural resources. At a state level, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan have been engaged in a continuing dispute over fresh water in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Similar issues are playing out across every level of society.

Cameroon, for instance, experienced a violent dispute over water between fishermen and herders in a town near the border of Chad in December 2021. The disagreement over rights to water found in a shrinking Lake Chad led to the death of 22 people and a further 100,000 people displaced from their homes as the two groups fought.

“Once conflicts escalate, they are hard to resolve and can have a negative impact on water security, creating vicious cycles of conflict,” said Susanne Schmeier, senior lecturer in water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft.

This negative feedback loop fueled by conflict is further compounded by the effect on water quality, agriculture, and forced migration. “With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst,” said Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water.” 

This insight speaks to the complex interplay between water shortage and conflict. According to research from the Pacific Institute, the impact of water on agriculture plays an even greater role in contributing to conflict—a view backed up by the fact that agriculture accounts for 70 percent of fresh water use in Africa.

Another conflict-causing factor is the social impact of water shortages. With up to a quarter of the world’s population facing serious water scarcity at least one month of the year, people are being forced to migrate. In 2017, at least 20 million people from Africa and the Middle East left their homes due to food shortages and conflict caused by serious drought.

Food Insecurity Due to Impact on Wildlife and Agriculture

Food insecurity caused by water shortages is being compounded by the loss of wildlife. With a drop in their rainy seasons, Kenya’s sheep, camels, and cattle have been in decline. This has led to a threat of 2.5 million people potentially going without food due to drought, according to the United Nations.

The impact of drought is taking a severe toll on agriculture, particularly in counties where this forms the mainstay of their economy. In South Africa, for instance, agriculture is key to the functioning of the country when it comes to job creation, food security, rural development, and foreign exchange.

Water shortages in the country impact both commercial and subsistence farmers. But it is the subsistence farmers who are hardest hit by the droughts, according to a 2021 paper published by a group of international scientists in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

While commercial farmers are able to offset a lack of rain through alternative water supplies, as well as storage and irrigation technologies, subsistence farmers who are reliant on rain, the scientists write, “are particularly susceptible to drought as they highly depend on climate-sensitive resources.” They also point out that the impact is worsened by the fact that this form of farming is tied to farmers’ own food security.

Adaptation

There is no way to avoid the impacts of water scarcity and drought. The best thing to do is manage and mitigate risk where possible. A tool proposed by the group Water, Peace and Security is an early warning monitor capable of tracking information on rainfall, crop yields, and political, economic, and social factors. According to the group, this tool would “predict water-related conflicts up to a year in advance, which allows for mediation and government intervention.”

Another common de-risking approach to conflict is water-sharing agreements. Since the end of World War II, 200 of these agreements have been signed. Despite this, the UN has consistently failed to introduce a Water Convention that would see over 43 countries sharing transboundary rivers and lakes.

A good example where a water-sharing agreement helped avoid conflict can be found in Southern Africa. In 2000, with tensions rising over shared resources, an agreement was reached between Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia that helped avoid further issues.

Reducing water loss remains the most recommended method countries should adopt to avoid future catastrophes. Agriculture and mining, in particular, are two industries that could do more to limit their water wastage. Another policy, suggested by Iceland, is to increase the price of water in relation to its supply, as a way to help curb water wastage.

Desalination is also a popular method used to free up more water, using seawater to increase supply. Saudi Arabia, for instance, uses desalination to supply the country with at least 50 percent of its water supply. Water recycling, known as “gray” water is another low-cost alternative used by farmers to offset the impact of drought.

As water scarcity continues to become more commonplace, so too will these mitigation and adaptation strategies. The question is, will they be enough?

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.

Is the Energy Transition Taking Off—or Hitting a Wall?

Forecast cloudy: Solar panels are wiped off for peak performance at The Wash Basket Laundromat, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, in 2011. The business qualified for U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Energy for America Program assistance to add 72 photovoltaic panels to reduce electrical demand by a third. (Photo credit: Lance Cheung, USDA/Wikimedia Commons)

With the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is illogically encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels—in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

By Richard Heinberg, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) constitutes the boldest climate action so far by the American federal government. It offers tax rebates to buyers of electric cars, solar panels, heat pumps, and other renewable-energy and energy-efficiency equipment. It encourages the development of carbon-capture technology and promotes environmental justice by cleaning up pollution and providing renewable energy in disadvantaged communities. Does this political achievement mean that the energy transition, in the U.S. if not the world as a whole, is finally on track to achieving the goal of net zero emissions by 2050?

If only it were so.

Emissions modelers have estimated that the IRA will reduce U.S. emissions by 40 percent by 2030. But, as Benjamin Storrow at Scientific American has pointed out, the modelers fail to take real-world constraints into account. For one thing, building out massive new renewable energy infrastructure will require new long-distance transmission lines, and entirely foreseeable problems with permitting, materials, and local politics cast doubt on whether those lines can be built.

But perhaps the most frustrating barriers to grid modernization are the political ones. While Texas produces a significant amount of wind and solar electricity, it is unable to share that bounty with neighboring states because it has a stand-alone grid. And that’s unlikely to change because Texas politicians fear that connecting their grid with a larger region would open the state’s electricity system to federal regulation. Similar state-based regulatory heel-dragging is pervasive elsewhere. In a report posted in July, the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center noted that, so far this year, Texas regulators have approved only $478.7 million out of the $12.86 billion (3.7 percent) in grid modernization investment under consideration, due to fears of raising utility bills for local residents.

But grid modernization is only one area in which the energy transition is confronting roadblocks in the U.S.

Certainly, as a result of the IRA, more electric vehicles (EVs) will be purchased. California’s recent ruling to phase out new gas-powered cars by 2035 will buttress that trend. Currently, just under 5 percent of cars sold in the U.S. are EVs. By 2030, some projections suggest the proportion will be half, and by 2050 the great majority of light-duty vehicles on the road should be electric. However, those estimates assume that enough vehicles can be manufactured: Supply-chain issues for electronics and for battery materials have slowed deliveries of EVs in recent months, and those issues could worsen. Further, the IRA electric-vehicle tax credits will go only to buyers of cars whose materials are sourced in the U.S. That’s probably good in the long run, as it will reduce reliance on long supply chains for materials. But it raises questions about localized environmental and human impacts of increased mining.

Many environmentalists are thrilled with the IRA; others less so. Those in the more critical camp have pointed disapprovingly to the bill’s promotion of nuclear, and note that, in order to gain Senator Joe Manchin’s vote, Democrats agreed to streamline oil and gas pipeline approvals in a separate bill. In effect, the government will be encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels … in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Despite the flaws of the Inflation Reduction Act, it is likely the best that the federal government can accomplish in terms of climate progress for the foreseeable future. This is a country mired in institutional gridlock, its politics trapped in endless culture wars, with a durable Supreme Court majority intent on hampering the government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.

Climate leadership is needed in the U.S., the country responsible for the largest share of historic emissions and is the second-biggest emitter (on a per-capita basis, the U.S. ranks far ahead of China, the top emitter). Without the U.S., global progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be difficult. But the American political system, pivotal as it is in the project, is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of problems with the shift from fossil fuels to renewables. The barriers to meeting climate goals are global and pervasive. 

Global Inertia and Roadblocks

Consider Germany, which has been working on energy transitionlonger and harder than any other large industrial nation. Now, as Russia is withholding natural gas supplies following its invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s hostile reaction, German electricity supplies are tight and about to get tighter. In response, Germany’s Green Party is leading the push to restart coal power plants rather than halting the planned shuttering of nuclear power plants. And it’s splitting environmentalists. Further, the country’s electricity problems have been exacerbated by a lack of, well, wind.

Unless Russia increases natural gas supplies headed west, European manufacturing could largely shut down this winter—including the manufacturing of renewable energy and related technologies. UK day-ahead wholesale electricity prices have hit ten times the last decade’s average price, and Europe faces energy scarcity this winter. French President Emmanuel Macron recently warned that his people face the “end of abundance.”

Inadequate spending is also inhibiting a renewables takeoff. Last year, EU member states spent over $150 billion on the energy transition, compared to about $120 billion by the U.S. Meanwhile, China spent nearly $300 billion on renewable energy and related technologies. According to the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute, the country will install 156 gigawatts of wind turbines and solar panels this year. In comparison, the U.S., under the Inflation Reduction Act, would grow renewable energy annual additions from the current rate of about 25 GW per year to roughly 90 GW per year by 2025, with growth rates increasing thereafter, according to an analysis by researchers at Princeton University.

The recent remarkable increase in spending is far from sufficient. Last year, the world spent a total of about $530 billion on the energy transition (for comparison’s sake, the world spent $700 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2021). However, to bring worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to be net zero by 2050, annual capital investment in the transition would need to grow by over 900 percent, reaching nearly $5 trillion by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg writer Aaron Clark notes, “The one thing public climate spending plans in the U.S., China, and the EU all have in common is that the investments aren’t enough.”

There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude.

The requirement to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels represents the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever faced. To avoid the emissions pulse just mentioned, we must reduce energy usage in non-essential applications (such as for tourism or the manufacture of optional consumer goods). But such reductions will provoke social and political pushback, given that economies are structured to require continual growth, and citizens are conditioned to expect ever-higher levels of consumption. If the energy transition is the biggest technical challenge ever, it is also the biggest social, economic, and political challenge in human history. It may also turn out to be an enormous geopolitical challenge, if nations end up fighting over access to the minerals and metals that will be the enablers of the energy transition.

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Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. His previous Earth | Food | Life article, “Can We Abandon Pollutive Fossil Fuels and Avoid an Energy Crisis?” was published earlier this year.

Take action…

Promises, promises: President Biden delivers remarks at the Innovation event at the international COP26 climate talks in Glasgow on November 2, 2021. (Photo credit: COP26/Flickr)

President Biden: Declare a climate emergency

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

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

Urge President Biden to declare a climate emergency.

Parting thought…

Screenshot via @Dolphin_Project/Twitter

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

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

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

Why Are Wild Horses Brutally Uprooted From Public Lands While Private Livestock Can Stay?

Taken: Healthy, sleek wild horses in the Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area during a Bureau of Land Management roundup on July 19, 2022. (Photo credit: Ginger Fedak/In Defense of Animals)

The Bureau of Land Management is misleading the American people about the nation’s wild horses and burros.

By Ginger Fedak, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

Every year, thousands of wild horses and burros are chased by helicopters and ripped from their native land in terrifyingly brutal, and often deadly, roundups. After capture, they are corralled in crowded dry lot holding pens, where many contract diseases or injuries and some then die or are killed. Some of the captured wild horses and burros are adopted out or sold to questionable buyers. Many of these horses are in turn sold to slaughterhouses. These horrendous actions are perpetrated by the U.S. government while using taxpayer dollars to protect the vested interests of cattle and sheep ranchers.

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the government agency responsible for “managing” public lands and the wild equids who live on them. It practices cruel and egregious methods of removing wild free-roaming horses and burros from public lands, even though these lands have been set aside by law for their “principal use.”

The roundups are physically tortuous and indiscriminate. Young, old, and heavily pregnant mustangs are forced into a violent stampede over rocky and dangerous terrain. Low-flying helicopters chase the terrified horses into traps. Young animals collapse in exhaustion or are rendered helpless from injury as they run in fear for their lives. Spontaneous abortions and stillbirths can occur among pregnant mares. Bonded family bands are shattered in the chaos marking the end of their freedom.

Many of these federally protected wild horses are eventually shipped to the killing floor of horse slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada. The federal protections afforded to these horses in the U.S. are stripped as soon as they become the property of a buyer or adopter with the transfer of title from another country.

The unanimously passed Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 was meant to protect these “living symbols of historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” Yet, instead, the government seems more interested in protecting the interests of cattle and sheep ranchers. Wild horses and burros are scapegoated by private ranchers for the degradation of public lands caused by their own exploited livestock. Ranchers blame the wild equids so that these absurdly unnecessary roundups will leave more resources for their private use. After wild horses are rounded up, more cattle and sheep are put on the public land.

Terror from above: A helicopter chases wild horses into a trap at the Piceance-East Douglas roundup on July 17, 2022. (Photo credit: Ginger Fedak/In Defense of Animals)

Many Americans might be disturbed by the plight of wild horses and burros on our public lands for various reasons. Not only are helicopter roundups inhumane and deadly, but they are also costly to American taxpayers. Every year several millions of taxpayer dollars are paid to helicopter contractors and private holding facility contracts. If that wasn’t bad enough, many more millions are lost in the subsidized grazing leases that corporate ranchers insidiously benefit from.

The BLM acknowledges that public land livestock grazing leads to the loss of millions of dollars every year. Corporate ranchers currently pay only $1.35 per animal unit month (AUM). An AUM is the amount of forage that would be consumed by one cow-calf pair, or five sheep in one month. Meanwhile, the average going rate for grazing leases on private land is about $22.60 per AUM. This constitutes a taxpayer subsidy of approximately $21 for feeding every cow-calf pair per month. During the 2015 fiscal year, the BLM’s grazing program lost $22 million, without even counting the costs of other management activities. The agency spent $36 million on administration costs for the grazing program, while only bringing in $15 million in grazing fees.

Many United States citizens might say that the country needs to subsidize these livestock ranching operations to provide affordable meat products for Americans. However, while more and more Americans are including plant-based proteins in their diets, large taxpayer-subsidized livestock operations are selling the vast majority of their product to foreign markets where meat prices are much higher. There is no economic sense to be found in a grazing program that destroys our public lands to ensure profits for the large corporate ranchers selling meat abroad while losing millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

It has been widely proven in scientific studies and research by various government agencies that cattle and sheep are highly destructive to public lands due to the grazing practices private ranchers use. Cattle and sheep are non-native species to North America, who came from moist, humid climates in Europe and elsewhere. They are not suited for arid and semi-arid landscapes. A 1977 report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) titled “Public Rangelands Continue to Deteriorate” stated, “The Nation’s public rangelands have been deteriorating for years and, for the most part, are not improving. Deterioration can be attributed principally to poorly managed livestock grazing.” Even though the report was a scathing rebuke of the BLM’s policies, which allowed the overgrazing of public lands, and called for additional and updated management plans, little has been done in the 45 years since this report was published. Required management plans are sorely lacking.

Conversely, wild horses are a native species to North America because they evolved on this continent, beginning 55 million years ago. Over the millennia, they evolved on this continent from a small deerlike figure to what we now see as the modern horse. They are well suited to the climate and topography of the Western states.

We should also be concerned because livestock contributes significantly to global warming and the climate crisis. The digestive systems of wild horses and burros do not contribute to greenhouse gases. According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation.”

Wild horses and burros have also been shown to improve their habitat and range. Their simple digestive tracts allow whole seeds to be deposited in their manure whereas cows’ four-stomach system destroys any ability to reseed the land. Wild equids can also help the land in other ways, such as naturally maintaining grass and brush at safer levels and acting as a mitigation to potential wildfire occurrences, thus saving lives and millions or even billions of dollars in destruction.

With all the positive effects that wild horses and burros have on public lands, their contributions to local economies from wild horse viewing eco-tourism and photography, and their beloved status among American citizens and people all over the world, why are they then so harassed and mismanaged by the BLM? Especially when it is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sadly, the livestock and extractive industries have a stranglehold on the BLM and Congress. Taxpayer subsidies enrich these private companies allowing them to make political contributions to maintain their influence. Backed by big Ag, gas, oil, and mining, the BLM scapegoats wild horses instead of removing ranchers whose cattle and sheep degrade the land and vastly outnumber horses; often by 30 to 1 in many places. Disinformation and carefully selected partial information are fed to the American public in a profuse propaganda campaign. This is done to purposely present misleading information to justify “emergency” roundups in many wild horse herd areas, including the world-famous Onaqui and Sand Wash Basin herds in Utah and Colorado, respectively. This propaganda campaign seems to be continuing.

Now the BLM is claiming that the herd from Colorado’s Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area must be drastically reduced due to the health of the horses and the rangeland. With prolific amounts of photographic evidence and testimonials to the contrary, the BLM ignores it all and has forged ahead with the roundup. Despite evidence showing these horses and their range are in good condition and calls from the public and political figures to stop this roundup, the agency moved forward with its plans. It is Colorado’s largest roundup to date. The BLM removed more than 800 horses, dangerously running them down with helicopters during the hottest days of summer.

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Ginger Fedak is the wild horse and burro campaign director at In Defense of Animals. A lifelong animal welfare advocate and horse professional, Fedak has spent decades teaching about and advocating for domestic and wild horses.

Take action…

This land is their land: Wild horses amidst flowers in Mt. Crested Butte, Colorado. (Photo credit: Larry Lamsa/Flickr)

America’s wild horses and burros deserve justice ​​​​

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) wild horse and burro program has recently come under fire due to the extraordinarily large number of wild horse deaths occurring at its Cañon City holding facility. Experienced advocates know, however, that these kinds of deaths are nothing new. For decades, wild horses and burros have been suffering and dying under this inhumane “management” system.

The plight of wild horses and burros is rapidly worsening because the BLM has become more empowered by getting away with its misinformation campaigns and deceitful practices. The purposeful misrepresentation of facts from the BLM to the American public, media, and Congress is disgraceful. The agency refuses to take responsibility for its monumental failures and consistently changes the narrative to place the blame elsewhere.

What can we Americans do to help wild horses and burros and the planet? We can continue to call and write to our congressional legislators and advocate for truth, science, and our wild equids.

Urge your federal legislators to order a full and independent investigation leading to the overhaul of the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse and burro program.

Parting thought…

(Photo credit: David DeHetre/Flickr)

“If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man.” —Chief Seattle

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.

Zoo Troubles: The Plight of Two Pandas Lays Bare the Flaws

False advertising: Under the guise of education and conservation, animals in zoos—like LeLe (above), a giant panda held captive at the Memphis Zoo—suffer greatly and are exploited for entertainment. (Photo credit: Panda Voices)

Vested interests and hidden agendas often determine the treatment of animals in zoos, which heavily impacts the animals’ welfare, mentally, physically, and emotionally.

By Florence Foo, Si Cheng, Taciana Santiago, and Brittany Michelson, Independent Media Institute

9 min read

Zoos are often viewed as places of entertainment where humans can appreciate the beauty of the various species that can be found in different ecosystems on the planet. Many parents take their children to visit these facilities to let them experience being close to animals, educate them about the species, and emphasize the importance of protecting them. The reality of this seemingly ideal scenario is, however, much more complex and appalling. Animals in zoos suffer greatly and are exploited for entertainment under the guise of education and conservation.

While zoos claim they help to educate the public by giving people an opportunity to observe diverse animals and are also commonly seen as having a role to play in species conservation since they often conduct research and breed animals, at the end of the day they are businesses, and like any other business, they are mainly driven by profits. Vested interests and hidden agendas often determine the treatment of animals in zoos, which heavily impacts the animals’ welfare, mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Animals in captivity do not face the challenges and the different stimulations that their counterparts who live in the wild encounter daily. Consequently, they need special enrichment such as toys, different foods and smells, and artificial challenges—like food hiding—to mentally stimulate their senses, deal with boredom, and help these animals live as happily and comfortably as they can in captivity.

Apart from the requirement of providing high-quality food and nutrition for the animals, the quality of enclosures and yards is also extremely important, as small areas and the lack of enrichment leads to stress, suffering, and the development of a mental illness calledzoochosis among animals living in captivity. This is commonly seen in zoos when animals display stereotypical behaviors. These are abnormal and repetitive behaviors such as pacing, walking in circles, banging their heads, excessive licking, playing with their own tongues, walking backward, self-harm, and other atypical habits. These behaviors are the ways in which zoo animals cope with the stress of captivity, be it related to small enclosures, long hours of caging, insufficient quality/palatable food, and several other factors.

In the case of pandas who are confined in small enclosures that often lack enrichment or any kind of stimulus or challenge for long periods, are often kept in the enclosures without access to larger external yards where they can roam, and are not given the opportunity to meet and interact with others from their group, these circumstances often lead to challenges in mating and therefore breeding. Consequently, zoos often use invasive methods like artificial insemination to maintain breeding programs.

The consequences of depriving animals of their natural habitats and forcing them to face experiences that go against their instinctive behavior can cause great harm to them, which can sometimes be irreversible. In the name of human entertainment, these zoo animals are deprived of everything “that [makes] life interesting and enjoyable” for them.

Moreover, like humans, the diet requirements, health needs, and even tastes of these animals may change as they get older. If the costs of caring for the animals are high, zoos may not be able to meet these requirements for aging animals. Consequently, it is common that these facilities do not follow the age-appropriate diet/nutrition required, resulting in animals appearing thin and malnourished, which leads to serious health problems as shown in a video of the female giant panda YaYa at the Memphis Zoo. YaYa is one of a pair of giant pandas both suffering from zoochosis and malnourishment; the other panda is a male called LeLe.

YaYa and LeLe’s heartbreaking agony and distress in Memphis Zoo has received enormous media attention, especially in February 2022 when Oscar-winning singer Billie Eilish tweeted her support for animal protection organizations who are asking for the immediate return of the pandas to a sanctuary in their home country of China. The vegan singer and songwriter’s support, followed by an official statement released by Memphis Zoo claiming that their pandas are given excellent care “and were both in good health,” brought on heated debates on social media with many questioning the definition of “good” treatment for captive animals, and whether zoos really are the best place to keep them.

The female giant panda YaYa, born in August 2000, and the male giant panda LeLe, born in July 1998, were sent to Memphis Zoo in 2003, and ever since then, for almost two decades, they have been living in small internal enclosures and sharing just one external yard. As pandas are solitary animals, YaYa and LeLe take turns using the yard.

Over the years, panda lovers have noticed a significant deterioration in both pandas’ appearance as a result of the zoo’s negligent treatment. It is apparent to visitors that their enclosures are lacking in enrichment. Interactions between the keepers and YaYa and LeLe are rarely seen. They are both very thin and often show signs of mental distress. YaYa has mites all over her body and patches of shedding fur. She has experienced several artificial inseminations over the years and had at least three miscarriages. As far as food is concerned, the quality of bamboo given to them is often yellow and dry. Consequently, they refuse to eat it and keep begging for food every day. Pandas tend to be very particular about their food as they have a good sense of smell and only eat selective types of fresh bamboo. Ninety-nine percent of pandas’ diet is bamboo so the bamboo has to be fresh; “[P]andas turn up their noses at dry or wilted leaves and discolored stalks.”

In a statement released by the Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens (CAZG), one of the institutions responsible for the loan contract of pandas between Memphis Zoo and China, the association raised important concerns related to the pandas’ health. The text stated that after medical examinations conducted in 2021 and January 2022, it was concluded that both pandas are underweight, especially YaYa; the female also has fur loss due to chronic Demodex mites, and Lele has several broken molars.

There are signs of stereotypical behaviors displayed by both animals, which is their way of expressing their mental suffering. It is not hard to witness YaYa pacing around her enclosure over and over while shaking her head and displaying self-harming behavior, or LeLe sitting and playing with his tongue and even roaring in anger after a long wait without any response. More alarming is how long both pandas’ suffering has lasted. A clip on YouTube shows that the pandas’ mental distress and abnormal behaviors began as early as 2007. With no mention of actual intervention and in-depth in situ investigations having been conducted into these behavioral patterns, the inaction of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) contributes to the zoo’s neglect of the animals’ natural demands and well-being.

Memphis Zoo claims that the pandas have aged, and therefore, their appearance and problems are normal as per their age since YaYa is 21 years old and LeLe is 23 years old. However, YaYa and LeLe are actually among the youngest pandas among the six adult pandas in the U.S., and there are many examples of older pandas in China who look much healthier than YaYa and LeLe.

Compared to their counterparts in the wild, pandas in captivity have much longer life spans. The oldest captive panda lived to 38 years of age. This, therefore, demonstrates that YaYa and LeLe’s age does not justify their frail health. This raises questions about whether Memphis Zoo has at any point customized their diet according to the age, health, and dietary needs of both pandas. For example, elderly pandas in China who have dental issues are provided with a nutritious soft diet, such as a certain amount of bamboo shoots, a salad-like combination of vegetables, grains, bamboo leaves, dietary supplements, and pre-cut bamboo culm, which is easier to bite. On the contrary, at Memphis Zoo, most times the bamboo given to both pandas is non-preprocessed bamboo culm which is hard and thick and sometimes even yellow and dry. Not only is the bamboo hard to bite, especially for LeLe who has dental issues, but also the yellow bamboo also appears stale.

YaYa and LeLe will, no doubt, have a better life at the Dujiangyan base of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, their home country, which features the best environment for pandas, the best bamboo for them, and hosts the best panda vets and experts. In one video, it is possible to see that pandas are treated with love, kindness and respect in this sanctuary, which is the world’s largest nursing home for pandas. The indoor enclosure is merely an indoor room that has bars as a barrier to protect the keepers while they feed the pandas. The pandas have spacious external yards located near their natural habitat in the mountains.

The absence of suitable enclosures, enrichment, proper customized diets, and health care for these aging animals in the Memphis Zoo calls into question any benefits that the zoos claim they bring to species conservation and education. More often than not, animals in zoos are merely on display for human entertainment. The animals pay the price to entertain humans.

Animals who are born and bred in captivity, unfortunately, may not have the skills to survive in their natural habitats in the wild. However, instead of caging them and merely allowing them to survive, humans have the responsibility to help them feel at home and be themselves, so that they can thrive. This is even more important when they age and experience more challenges in their daily activities. Therefore, the animal sanctuaries that care for them with love and respect, and simply let them be themselves, are a better home for elderly animals and the ones who show obvious signs of not coping within the zoo environment. Rescued animals are given space in natural sanctuaries to heal in their own time and at their own pace.

Memphis Zoo is not necessarily representative of every zoo; however, it is a telling example of how much these animals suffer in these kinds of facilities. Captive animals need appropriate enclosures that are as natural as possible and provide plenty of space, a proper diet, good health care, and plenty of enrichment. Animals are much happier and healthier in places that focus on these aspects instead of profits. For example, enrichment is part of the experience at Gengda Wolong Panda Center, another sanctuary in Sichuan, China, which is near their natural habitat. Sanctuaries seem to provide the best environment for captive animals, as they respect animals, care about their mental and physical health, and customize their food according to age and dietary needs. Sanctuaries are where YaYa, LeLe, and other captive animals need to be to enjoy a life catered to their happiness instead of one meant to ensure their use for human entertainment.

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Florence Foo, Si Cheng,and Taciana Santiago are members of Panda Voices, created in early 2021 by an international group of panda fans from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, brought together by concerns over pandas YaYa and LeLe. The organization is committed to giving voice to the voiceless and promoting the humane treatment of animals in captivity through advocacy and services.

Brittany Michelson is the captive animals campaigner at In Defense of Animals. She is a dedicated animal rights activist, the founder of Desert Oasis Turtle & Tortoise Sanctuary, and the author/editor of the anthology Voices for Animal Liberation: Inspirational Accounts by Animal Rights Activists (Skyhorse Publishing, 2020).

Take action…

#FreeYayaLele: More than 85,000 people have signed a public petition calling for the release of two giant pandas who have been held captive under inhumane conditions for nearly two decades at the Memphis Zoo. (Photo credit: Panda Voices)

“In 2003, giant pandas YaYa and LeLe were sent to Memphis Zoo in Tennessee as lovely, impressionable little fur-balls. After 19 years of serving the zoo, they are extremely malnourished and sickly. YaYa’s fur has been shedding profusely. Yet Memphis Zoo claims they are perfectly healthy,” said Panda Voices and In Defense of Animals.

“YaYa and LeLe not only suffer physically from disease and hunger, which is already incredibly heartbreaking, but they also suffer psychologically from being caged in a small ‘den’ every day for up to 18 hours. … Consequently, both show severe signs of stereotypical behaviors, a mental impairment caused by an abnormal environment.”

Sign the petition then write to Matt Thompson, the president and CEO of Memphis Zoo, to return YaYa and LeLe back to their hometown where food is abundant and medical care is accessible.

Letter to the editor…

Standing with Ukraine: Anti-war protesters gather in Hanover, Germany, on February 26, 2022. (Photo credit: pix-4-2-day/Flickr)

Dear Earth | Food | Life,

Thank you for the excellent article on U.S. military spending and the devastation of the war in Ukraine on the environment and contribution to (ignoring) increasing climate change (“As the War in Ukraine Devastates the Nation’s Ecosystems, the World Reaches Record-High Military Spending,” by Erika Schelby, August 5, CounterPunch). I doubt our descendants will do or be any better than us. They may look back with horror at our present behavior but will repeat it in their own way.

Karen Davis
Machipongo, Virginia

What we’re reading…

Unforgettable: A wild fox started showing up on the author’s property every day at 4:15 pm, and sat next to a lone forget-me-not. (Photo credit: Catherine Raven)

How I Found Myself Befriending a Wild Fox

By Catherine Raven

For 12 consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Opening a book, I pretended to read. Nothing but 2 meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. Someone may have been watching us—a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa—but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the 13th day, at around 3:30 and no later than 4 p.m., I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show.

Read the full excerpt from Catherine Raven’s Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship (Spiegel + Grau, 2021).

Parting thought…

All the world’s a stage: Three six-spot burnets (Zygaena filipendulae), a species of day-flying moths, gather on ragwort flowers in the United Kingdom’s North Norfolk District. (Photo credit: It’s No Game/Flickr)

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

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 Plastics Paradox Facing Humanity

Necessary evil: Plastics are used to fabricate a wide array of tools and devices used by the medical, health and laboratory industries, including surgical gloves, syringes, insulin pens, IV tubes, catheters, inflatable splits and other products made to be used only once to prevent contamination and the spread of disease. (Photo credit: Fernando Vega/Flickr)

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

By Alice Mah, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take action…

Amazon fail: All of this plastic was used to pack a single bread knife. (Photo credit: Kari Sullivan/Flickr)

Amazon is polluting the planet with its overuse of plastic packaging

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

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

Urge Amazon to stop using plastic packaging.

From the EFL archives…

Catching plastic: There are nearly 40,000 commercial fishermen in the United States, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The fish they catch are increasingly contaminated by microplastic. (Photo credit: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health)

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

By Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff​​​

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

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

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

[Read the full article…]

Parting thought…

Screenshot via Oceana/YouTube

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

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

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

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