Performing elephants are denied all that is natural to them and are forced to endure beatings, electric shock, food and water deprivation and intimidation.

By Dee Gaug, Independent Media Institute

9 min read

No matter what political views or affiliations people in the United States might have, most of them would agree that animal abuse is just plain wrong. Animals who are kept in captivity or are forced to perform in circuses are subjected to some of the worst kinds of abuse. Among all these animals, however, elephants suffer the most in captivity as they are highly intelligent and social beings, according to experts, and have complex physical and social needs that cannot be met in any circus or zoo environment.

“Elephants who are kept in small enclosures are in increased danger of developing chronic foot disease and arthritis, both of which lead to frequent instances of death for captive elephants,” according to Dr. Toni Frohoff, a biologist and behavioral ethologist. “In fact, the most common reason for premature death of captive elephants is lack of space and standing on hard and/or otherwise inappropriate surfaces.”

Many people are unaware that circuses are still part of the American culture. The closing of the infamous Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in May 2017 did not mark the end of cruelty perpetrated on elephants, who are forced into captivity and made to perform in circuses. Between 25 and 30 traveling circuses, which include caged wild animals, continue to travel and operate in the United States. There are currently more than 60 elephants and hundreds of other animals still being used for human entertainment. Circus animal cruelty and exploitation are rampant. Some operators like Loomis Bros. Circus and Carson & Barnes Circus continued operating throughout the worst of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and were once again advertising their show schedules for the spring and summer season in 2021. Currently, Carden Circus, Loomis Bros. Circus, Carson & Barnes Circus, Tarzan Zerbini Circus, and others are back on the road with elephants and other wild exotic animals.

Performing elephants are deprived of all that is natural to them. The methods used to train a wild animal into submission include beatings, electric shock (hot shots), food and water deprivation, and brutal intimidation. Elephants do not stand on their heads, sit on stools, stand on their hind legs, or give rides to humans on their backs because they want to; they do it because they are forced to with brutal training methods, as exemplified in undercover videos that can be found on YouTube.

While the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been tasked by Congress to enforce the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), which was signed into law in 1966 and is the primary federal law that regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition and transport, the AWA provides only minimum acceptable standards and historically has rarely been enforced. A prime example of this lack of enforcement is the story of Nosey the elephant. Nosey was captured in Zimbabwe when she was two years of age in 1984 and was brought to a Florida ranch with 62 other young elephants. About two years later, she ended up in the hands of former circus clown Hugo Liebel. Liebel used Nosey to perform in his circus and dragged her all over the country in a filthy, dilapidated trailer for more than 30 years.

Over the course of the next three decades, Liebel would rack up about 200 violations of the AWA for things like chaining Nosey so tightly by both her front and hind legs that she could hardly move, failure to provide adequate veterinary care, and failure to have sufficient barriers to protect the public. Yet year after year, the USDA rubber-stamped his annual renewal license. Though Liebel was fined several times, these fines were so minimal that they hardly made a difference and were seen as a small price to pay to keep the circus operational.

Finally, in November 2017, authorities in Lawrence County, Alabama, seized Nosey after Liebel’s truck had broken down. She was subsequently placed at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee where she has been receiving much-needed veterinary care for the plethora of ailments she is suffering from as a result of her life on the road and in the care of her owners. She remains in the sanctuary and is thriving there.

Nosey’s story is unfortunately not unique. In fact, it is the norm. Many, if not all, circuses that are currently on the road have extensive histories of federal animal welfare violations related to the handling of their elephants. The USDA inaction makes them complicit in the neglect and abuse of captive elephants. As a result, captive elephants continue to suffer every day that USDA inspectors refrain from doing their jobs, either because they do not care or due to internal pressure that prevents them from doing so. “It feels like your hands are tied behind your back,” says veterinarian Denise Sofranko, who spent 20 years as an inspector, and was quoted in an article on the website of the nonprofit Lady Freethinker. “You can’t do many things you’re supposed to when it comes to protecting animals. You’re seeing inspectors so frustrated they’re walking out the door.”

Animal advocates have long demanded a change to the USDA’s policy of rubber-stamping annual renewal licenses for chronic AWA violators. Up until November 2020, exhibitors seeking an annual renewal license would sign a self-certification form stating that they were complying with the AWA. Even if the USDA had actual knowledge of noncompliance—such as recent inspections that revealed violations of the AWA—the USDA would still renew the license.

The USDA’s Animal Care division is responsible for inspecting more than 12,000 facilities and exhibitors, including circuses and zoos, to ensure these license holders are operating in compliance with the AWA. Unfortunately, the USDA appears to be more concerned with not burdening license holders than with protecting animals and the public. So pervasive is this problem that on April 4, 2019, more than 140 congressional members from both sides of the aisle signed a 16-page letter to Sanford Bishop, chairman of the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA, and Related Agencies, expressing concern that the “USDA is treating these regulated industries as customers, giving deference to those who can’t comply with the AWA’s modest requirements while giving short shrift to the animals and the taxpaying public.”

In fact, a February 2019 article in the Washington Post said that “USDA inspectors documented 60 percent fewer violations at animal facilities in 2018 from the previous year.” The number of animal welfare citations issued by the USDA fell markedly under the Trump administration, from 4,944 citations in 2016 to 1,716 in 2018, according to another article in the Washington Post published in August 2019.

It is not a stretch to say that the USDA is complicit in perpetuating animal cruelty. In February 2017, the USDA, without warning, removed animal welfare records from its website, according to an article in the Washington Post, prompting large animal welfare organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal Legal Defense Fund—along with other animal rights groups—to file separate federal lawsuits for violating a prior congressional directive and obliterating all transparency. The USDA purged from its website the searchable database of AWA inspection reports and enforcement records on thousands of licensed facilities and operators that use animals without providing any explanations, leaving the public in the dark—a public who, along with animal protection organizations, relies on this information to monitor and expose potential animal abuse at these facilities. Critics of this move stated that this was an attempt to keep the USDA’s complacency a secret from the taxpaying public, who pay for the salaries of the USDA employees and for other ancillary expenses related to the operation of the agency, and avoid accountability for enforcing the Animal Welfare Act.

This purge sent chronic AWA violators a clear message that there would be no accountability for providing not only substandard care but also outright abuse of their animals. No longer would chronic violators fear public scrutiny.

Fortunately, in December 2019, Congress enacted a provision in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations bill issuing a clear mandate to the USDA to fully reinstate its searchable database, giving the public access to all the agency’s records. The bill, signed into law in December 2019, required the agency to restore the purged records on its website within 60 days of the bill’s enactment, and continue posting such records moving forward. The records are being restored, albeit very slowly.

In response to pressure from animal protection organizations and the public, in March 2019, the USDA sought public comments on proposed updates to its current licensing procedures and received a staggering 110,000 comments. After decades, this pressure finally prompted the USDA to amend its licensing requirements to eliminate automatic renewals. A May 2020 USDA press release stated, “With this change, licensees have to demonstrate compliance with the AWA and show that the animals in their possession are adequately cared for in order to obtain a license.” Under the new rule, which went into effect in November 2020, licenses are valid for three years and applicants must demonstrate compliance before obtaining a license. This does not necessarily raise the bar set almost 55 years ago. This simply means that if a previous licensee, with a history of repeat noncompliances, wishes to obtain a new license, they would need to demonstrate that they are in compliance with the AWA regulations on the day(s) the USDA inspector is present and before a license is to be issued. It is noteworthy that the AWA’s antiquated standards are much less stringent than those of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the preeminent accreditation body in the United States. USDA inspectors will now conduct pre-licensing inspections since there will be no more renewal licenses. Under these new rules, “an applicant who fails the first inspection may request up to two reinspections to demonstrate compliance.”

Despite this development, the proverbial fox is still guarding the henhouse, and only time will tell if these new rules will have the desired effect of affording greater protection for captive elephants. Real change will come only with public awareness and legislation. What can be done? You can contact your senators and representatives and urge them to support the Traveling Exotic Animal and Public Safety Protection Act, TEAPSPA, which, if passed, will effectively end traveling acts nationwide that use exotic animals. In addition, you can make the choice to boycott circuses and zoos that use exotic animals. As journalist and former editor for Vanity Fair magazine Graydon Carter once remarked, “We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest of human traits: Empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.”

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Dee Gaug is co-founder and vice president of Free All Captive Elephants (FACE). Prior to her involvement with FACE, Dee worked as a trial attorney for 15 years. She has done pro bono legal work in both Massachusetts and Florida including for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Dee received her BA in psychology from the University of New Hampshire and her doctorate in law from Massachusetts School of Law. In 2018, she was a panelist at both the Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants Conference and the Performing Animal Welfare Society’s International Captive Wildlife Conference. She has gone undercover on numerous occasions to document the living conditions of captive elephants in both circuses and zoos.

Take action…

The Traveling Exotic Animal and Public Safety Protection Act (TEAPSPA, H.R. 2863), introduced into Congress by Representatives Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and David Schweikert (R-AZ), would amend the Animal Welfare Act to prohibit the use of exotic and wild animals in traveling performances. A companion bill, S. 2121, was introduced in the Senate by Senator Bob Menéndez (D-NJ) and cosponsored by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).

Urge your senators and representatives to support TEAPSPA to help end wild animal suffering in traveling acts across the United States.

Letter to the editor…

Replying to “Glyphosate’s Toxic Legacy Exposed: Why This Weedkiller Should Be Banned,” by EFL contributor Stephanie Seneff, CounterPunch, July 2, 2021:

“This is a demonstration of the control the Ag-chemical companies have over our government. I lived in Iowa for decades and these companies ran the state. Even though during the 1960s and 1970s it was demonstrated that a farmer’s income would not drop—just his yields, without the use of most chemicals—the ag-chem groups keep pushing their poison. Hence, Iowa has some of the nation’s worst water quality. We knew then that killing Iowa’s waterways was not necessary but the chemical companies are powerful. I would love to see an agency set up who would put the citizenry first, not the corporations, as the EPA currently does.” —Larry Schlatter, Gambier, Ohio

Cause for concern…

“We used to see our brothers and sisters in the Sahel leaving because of conflict and looking for better economic opportunities, but now it is climate change that is becoming one of the major drivers, pushing out people who can no longer cultivate their land,” said Landry Ninteretse, the Africa director for climate advocacy organization 350.org. “This is not only going to impact Africa, but also Europe, Asia, and America as well, as people seek safer places where they can live.”

• Madagascar’s famine is the first in modern history to be solely caused by global warming (Aryn Baker, TIME)
• Great Barrier Reef’s decline should be a wake-up call (Richard Leck, The Hill)
• America’s nuclear waste has nowhere to go and more is coming (Matthew Gault, VICE)
• Wildfire smoke may be even more toxic than previously thought (Yale Climate Connections)
• Is our reliance on air-conditioning warming the planet? (Richard Schiffman, Washington Post)

Round of applause…

“We have found, in our domestic and global advocacy and nutrition work, that for millions of people the suffering of animals in intensive confinement systems is a main driver of dietary shifts that are good for us, good for the planet and good for our fellow creatures,” writes Kitty Block, the president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States and CEO of Humane Society International. 

“When people see that pregnant pigs are confined in ‘gestation crates’ for months, unable to even turn around, trying to relieve stress by chewing on the bars of their crates until their mouths bleed, they can’t help but reexamine the true cost of their pork products. Both the marketplace and the public policy sector are already responding to consumer demand for healthier and more humane food choices. Giants in the food industry are diversifying their product lines and menus with plant-based offerings and a dozen states have passed laws that ban the intensive confinement systems responsible for so much animal misery.”

• Animal welfare must be central to reforming the food system (Kitty Block, Humane Society of the United States)
• Growing food justice by supporting Black farmers and a community-owned grocery store (Hannah Wallace and Tosha Phonix, Civil Eats)
• On this farm, cows don’t have to make milk and pigs sleep in (Melissa Eddy, New York Times)
• 49 delicious vegan BBQ recipes for summer parties (Kate, The Green Loot)
• These moths are so gorgeous they ‘put butterflies to shame’ (Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine)

ICYMI…

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

—Reynard Loki, “African Elephants Face Serious Risk of Extinction, Warns New Study,” Independent Media Institute, April 20, 2021

Parting thought…

“Animals should not require our permission to live on Earth. Animals were given the right to be here long before we arrived.” —Anthony Douglas Williams

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the cruel world of wildlife killing contests, family events where children play amidst piles of slaughtered animals—and legal in 42 states.

By Katie Stennes, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

You would really have to try hard to find anything more depraved than a wildlife killing contest, which targets coyotes, foxes, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons, crows and even wolves and cougars in some states, for the sake of a prize that could range from cash to hunting equipment. These contests are responsible for the mindless killing of an inconceivable number of animals, all under the guise of sport.

Contests like these should be relegated to history books; instead, these events still take place in nearly all of the 42 states where wildlife killing contests are legal and result in the killing of thousands of animals every year.

Participants in these events, billed as family-friendly and often sponsored by bars, churches, firehouses and other local groups, compete with each other for prizes for killing the largest or smallest animal or the highest number of animals. Hundreds of animals may be slaughtered during a single contest. After the bloody piles of animals are weighed, prizes are awarded and the celebration ends, the bodies of the dead animals are often dumped like trash. Contestants frequently use cruel electronic calling devices to lure animals in for an easy kill and then shoot them with high-powered rifles—including AR-15s.

Referring to a custom-built rifle, a competitor in the De Leon Pharmacy and Sporting Goods’ Varmint Hunt told an investigator from my organization, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), that these rifles, “they’re like a .22-250 on steroids.” He had just used the rifle to gun down animals during the 21-hour contest that culminated in the pharmacy’s parking lot on a January morning in Texas. The rifles are “not very fur-friendly,” he added as he stood over a row of bloody bodies he had killed. “I wouldn’t use something like that if you want to save the fur.” To illustrate his point, he nudged a coyote, bragging, “I shot this one up here in the throat from high up and it blew out the whole bottom of his chest.”

Other participants at the contest unloaded more dead animals from the trucks, which were outfitted for prime killing with raised decks, cushioned chairs and gun mounts. A team of three men, who called themselves “Dead On,” won the event, killing five coyotes, two bobcats, a fox and a raccoon. Contest organizers handed out more than $3,000 in prize money.

At another killing contest in December 2020 that took place 1,000 miles north of Texas, an HSUS investigator saw firefighters helping to drag dead coyotes to the weighing station in the parking lot of the fire department in Williamsport, Indiana. The grand prize went to those who killed the five heaviest coyotes, with side pots awarded to those who killed the greatest number of coyotes, the “big dog” and the “small dog” (referring to the size of the coyotes). The winning team, which had all its teammates dressed in matching jackets, killed about 16 of the roughly 60 animals lined up for display when the contest ended. One competitor told investigators from the HSUS that he used an AR-15 rifle with night vision, adding, “I enjoy it.”

Other undercover investigations by the HSUS—in Maryland, New Jersey, New York (in 2018 and 2020), Oregon and Virginia—showed similar chilling images of contests, including children playing among dead bodies of animals.

Some of these contests are high stakes. At the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest in January, participants vied for $148,120 in prize money. The jackpot for “Most Grey Fox” killings went to a four-man team that killed 81 foxes in 23 hours.

Competitors spend thousands of dollars on equipment to achieve an almost absurd advantage. Electronic calling devices amplified across a field by a loudspeaker lure unsuspecting animals into the open using the sounds of dependent young in distress. These animals can hardly be expected to compete with a team of people armed with spotlights and AR-15-style weapons fitted with precision thermal night vision scopes that “troll” habitat areas, obliterating anything that comes their way.

Killing contests have a cousin in the old-school pigeon shoots—another contest based on indiscriminate animal slaughter. At a pigeon shoot, the birds are stuffed into spring-loaded boxes, thrust into the air at the shooter’s command and then shot from a short distance—all for thrills and prizes. Only one state—Pennsylvania—still openly holds these pigeon shoots.

Just like pigeon shooters, participants in wildlife killing contests spout false claims that they’re doing some act of service for society by ridding the landscape of animals they deem as “varmints” and “pests.” But it is a fact that these events are for fun and games and serve no legitimate wildlife management purpose. The best available science shows that randomly killing animals, especially coyotes, creates problems where there were none.

It sounds counterintuitive but killing coyotes causes them to proliferate. In an unexploited coyote pack, typically only the dominant pair reproduces. Kill off a few members, and the pack splinters apart to find other mates. More breeding pairs means more coyotes—and this adds yet another wrinkle. While most coyotes avoid livestock and prefer to munch on rodents, more pups mean more mouths to feed, forcing adult coyotes to find easier targets like sheep just to survive.

It’s a “paradoxical relationship”—kill more coyotes, lose more livestock. Haphazardly removing coyotes who haven’t been proven to threaten livestock before leaves voids that may be filled by coyotes who are more likely to prey on livestock. Most coyotes can even serve as “guard coyotes” for ranchers, keeping other carnivores at bay.

Native carnivores like coyotes and foxes provide a range of free ecological services to our communities—including controlling rodent and rabbit populations, indirectly contributing to the boosting of plant and bird biodiversity, and scavenging animal carcasses, which keeps our environment clean—and removing them en masse upsets the natural balance of our ecosystems.

We can’t make wildlife management decisions based on anecdotes or intuition or cater to misinformation that competitors use to justify their actions—we must follow the science. State wildlife agencies recognize that ethics must come into play, too. The Arizona Game and Fish Commission outlawed these killing contests in 2019. When the commission was still considering the ban, its chairman, Jim Zieler, who is also a hunter, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “There has been a lot of social outcry against this, and you can kind of understand why. It’s difficult to stand up and defend a practice like this.” Sportsmen and state wildlife agency professionals and commissioners across the country have echoed similar sentiments, and some have noted that these contests are damaging the reputation of hunters and jeopardizing the future of hunting. It’s a reasonable fear—society’s values about wildlife are shifting in favor of greater harmony with nature.

Making matters worse, the pandemic has added another element: virtual competitions where the killing persists but the judging and participation are online. Contestants living anywhere in the United States can submit videos of the animals they have killed nearby, and in these videos the contestants are seen shaking the bodies of the dead animals to show that they have been killed recently. These virtual competitions have also led to new prize categories like “best video of a kill.” People from more than 40 states have joined these contest websites, including from states where the contests have been banned. These virtual events take place nearly every weekend.

We certainly can’t let this continue without challenge, especially since many hunters share the growing public disdain for wildlife killing contests. They understand that no animal’s life should be taken in this cruel manner, and like countless other Americans, they believe that there are limits to what we should permit when it comes to the treatment and use of animals.

The good news is that bills and regulations to prohibit wildlife killing contests are emerging at both the federal and state levels. The reasons to ban these events are supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who oppose these contests will have increasing opportunities to register their viewpoints and convictions about this senseless killing of American wildlife, in letters to Congress and to state legislatures and state wildlife management agencies (contact your HSUS state director to find out what’s happening in your state), and to their local government. Wildlife is important to everyone, and our public policies and practices should reflect that.

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Katie Stennes is the program manager for wildlife protection at the Humane Society of the United States. She has worked in the animal protection field for over eight years.

Take action…

“Wildlife killing contests are barbaric, cruel and unsporting events where participants compete to kill wild animals for cash and prizes,” says the Humane Society of the United States. “​​​​The contests often target native carnivores like bobcats, coyotes and foxes, which are important species that play a critical role in healthy ecosystems. The events do not serve any legitimate wildlife management purpose and simply make a game of killing animals.”

Urge your federal legislators to support a ban on wildlife killing contests.

Cause for concern…

• Deadly flooding ‘shows the urgency’ of climate change, EU official says (Melissa Eddy and Jack Ewing, New York Times)
• Climate scientists shocked by scale of floods in Germany (Jonathan Watts, Guardian)
• Humanity’s #1 environmental problem is consumption—climate change is just one of the byproducts (Reynard Loki, NationofChange)

Round of applause…

Writing in the Atlantic, David Treuer makes the case for returning America’s national parks to the people who were here before colonizers arrived. “The national parks are sometimes called ‘America’s best idea,’ and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you,” he writes. “But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we’d signed under duress.”​​

ICYMI…

“A new kind of leadership is emerging to confront the climate crisis in an inclusive way. We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, we know that we need to transition to a renewable-based future, and we know that we need to invest in our communities to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerabilities in the face of growing climate instability. But we are paralyzed by inadequate leadership in the United States. White, patriarchal leadership has been focusing too much on technocratic investments based on narrowly defined results and quantitative outputs. The prevalence of this rigid leadership style, based on assumptions of domination and competition, has been exacerbating the climate crisis, reinforcing racial and gender disparities, and excluding diverse voices and perspectives. But as the Squad grows, a new kind of leadership is emerging and widening the circle of power and opportunity. New coalitions of leaders are calling for public investment in collective, collaborative action that harnesses human potential, nurtures people, and builds strong communities.”

—Jennie C. Stephens, from her book Diversifying Power: Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy; web adaptation reproduced with permission from Island Press by Independent Media Institute as “White Patriarchy Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis: Antiracist, Feminist Leadership Is What We Need Right Now,” February 11, 2021

Parting thought…

“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.” —Leo Tolstoy

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

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

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

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

Americans eat more meat per capita than any other country, even though meat consumption is linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

By Jennifer Barckley, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

Bacon and eggs for breakfast, a turkey sandwich for lunch, and roasted chicken for dinner are some of the go-to meal choices in America where meat is considered an essential part of the everyday diet.

Historically, Americans have been led to believe that eating meat and other animal products is necessary to be strong and healthy. This belief was ingrained in most Americans from the moment they were born. The food industry has continuously pushed consumption of these products through ad campaigns that proclaim, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner,” and “Milk. It does a body good.” An article in Nourish by WebMD raves about chicken’s supposed health benefits, and poultry has appeared in every food guide by the United States Department of Agriculture since the 1940s. Americans have been led to believe that if they forgo these staples of the Westernized diet, they will dissolve into anemic zombies.

In truth, not only is meat consumption not necessary for humans to stay healthy, but it’s also potentially quite harmful. Consider meat’s links to heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Or the millions of people who fall sick from listeria, E. coli, and salmonella each year due to the consumption of contaminated meat. Or the more than 2.8 million Americans who contract antibiotic-resistant infections—which is a result of a nasty upshot of the rampant use of antibiotics on factory farms.

Americans eat more meat per capita than any other country, according to the World Economic Forum—which referred to the 2016 figures of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Food and Agriculture Organization Agricultural Outlook 2017-2026—but meat consumption hasn’t been a boon for the health of Americans. There is a high prevalence of obesity and diabetes and one of the highest rates of cancer among the American population. In light of these numbers, saying meat is essential makes about as much sense as saying cigarettes are essential.

Unfortunately, the notions that we can’t live without meat and that our meat supply is sacrosanct have been even further entrenched during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thanks to intense lobbying by industrial meat producers in 2020, the U.S. government had deemed meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers “essential.” While many small businesses were crippled or had to shut down in order to stem the virus’s spread during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. in 2020, the federal government forced slaughterhouses to stay open—this was despite the soaring coronavirus infection rates and employee deaths. A single Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls was linked to at least 1,294 coronavirus cases and four deaths in the spring of 2020, according to an article in National Hog Farmer. In Louisa County, Iowa, which is home to a Tyson plant, 1,301 of the 11,223 residents contracted the virus by July 2021.

Indeed, an insistence on consuming copious amounts of meat poses a grave threat to the very survival of our species. In our mad dash to curtail the virus and develop vaccines at warp speeds, we’ve overlooked—perhaps intentionally—one foundational, inconvenient fact: COVID-19—the source of which has been traced to a live animal market in Wuhan, China—is only the latest in a long line of pandemics that have arisen from our insistence on eating meat:

• Measles, which was responsible for the deaths of millions “[b]efore the introduction of [the] measles vaccine in 1963,” according to the World Health Organization, is believed to have originated from a virus in cattle that spilled over to the human population through the process of domestication.
  
• The H1N1 strain of swine flu is a combination of viruses from three different species—pigs, birds and humans—that evolved when a bird flu virus infected farmed pigs. The resulting 1957-1958 so-called “Asian flu” and the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” each caused 1 to 4 million human deaths. The 2009 H1N1 swine flu epidemic killed almost 300,000 people.
  
• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was first identified in chimpanzees in West Africa in 1989 and is suspected to have jumped to humans through the hunting, butchering and consumption of HIV-infected primates. To date, AIDS has killed more than 32 million people, according to the WHO.
  
• In 1998, the Nipah virus jumped to humans from fruit bats via intensively farmed pigs in Malaysia and killed more than half of the humans infected.
  
• Ebola, which has claimed more than 11,000 human lives in West Africa between 2014 and 2015, has been traced to fruit bats and primates butchered for food.
  
• The 2003 SARS epidemic—which originated from civet cats, via bats, from a wildlife market in Guangdong, China—infected more than 8,000 people, killed 774, and cost the global economy an estimated $40 billion during that year. At the time this amount was considered staggering, but the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could be as high as $8.8 trillion, according to the Asian Development Bank.
  

In short, nearly every epidemic or pandemic in human history has been caused by animal-origin pathogens spilling over to people, usually as a result of the myopic quest for meat by humans.

The proliferation of industrial farms—which often cram tens of thousands of chickens into a single shed—has only made things worse. “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms,” says Dr. Michael Greger, in his book “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.” The situation has become so dire and the threat to public health so acute that in the spring of 2020, a group of Chicago doctors called for a “global moratorium” on the consumption of meat. Given the facts before us, who can blame them?

As we ponder ways to enhance our well-being in the years ahead, it’s crucial to acknowledge with clear eyes the detrimental effects that consumption of meat has on our bodies and even our species at large. A plant-based diet (which, thankfully, is in higher demand these days) can deliver all the protein, fat, and calcium we need, while also reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes—three of America’s leading causes of death, and which have all been connected to meat consumption. If adopted broadly, it could even preclude the next global pandemic.

The myth that meat is essential is a deadly one. To bring about a future that’s healthier and safer for everyone, it’s time to leave chicken, beef, fish and other animal products off our plates.

###

Jennifer Barckley is the vice president of communications at The Humane League.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Take action…

“After six weeks trapped in a filthy chicken shed, her body aches. Soon she’ll reach the slaughterhouse, where she’ll risk being boiled alive,” writes The Humane League about the short, brutal life of a factory-farmed chicken. “Bred to grow unnaturally fast, these birds suffer from debilitating diseases while trapped in filthy, overcrowded sheds. In their final moments, chickens are hung painfully upside down, struggling to breathe, as they face the terror of ‘live-shackle slaughter.’ Millions will suffer broken bones in the process. Thousands are boiled alive every week. Food companies have the power to end this abuse.​​​​​​​ But many would rather keep these torturous conditions under wraps.”

Urge Costco, Buffalo Wild Wings, Cafe Rio and Church’s Chicken to end the abuse of chickens in their supply chain.

Cause for concern…

“It was a catastrophe over there,” said Christopher Harley, a zoologist at the University of British Columbia, who found countless dead mussels open and rotting in their shells recently at Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver. “There’s a really extensive mussel bed that coats the shore and most of those animals had died.”

• Extreme heat cooked mussels, clams and other shellfish alive on beaches in western Canada (David Williams, CNN)
• ​​​​​​Pacific Northwest heat wave made baby hawks hurl themselves out of nests (Hilary Hanson, HuffPost)
• As Arctic melt sets early July record, hard times ahead for ice: studies (Gloria Dickie, Mongabay)
• Sharks evolved over millions of years as an apex predator, yet are no match for humans (Megan Marples, CTV News)
• Once a rich desert river, the Gila struggles to keep flowing (Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360)

Round of applause…

• Colorado bans single-use plastic bags and polystyrene, creates bag fees (Alex Burness, Denver Post)
• Volkswagen and BMW fined $1 billion for running emissions cartel (Hanna Ziady, CNN)
• ​​​​​How school food can serve a climate solution (Theresa Lieb, GreenBiz)
• Long-awaited plant-based chicken promises to be ‘almost identical’ to the real thing (Lila MacLellan, Quartz)
• Here’s how to make those TikTok pasta chips vegan (Hailey Welch, The Beet)

ICYMI…

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

—Reynard Loki, editor, Earth | Food | Life, “U.S. Fishery Managers Are Failing to Protect Marine Habitats as Required by Law,” LA Progressive, May 8, 2021

Parting thought…

“We have to get to the point where each individual, each corporation, each community chooses low carbon, because it makes fundamental sense. It should become a no-brainer.” —Christiana Figueres

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

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

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

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

We wouldn’t say “it” or “that” when referring to humans, so why would we for other sentient individuals?

By Debra Merskin, Carrie P. Freeman and Alicia Graef, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

Happy has to be one of the most ironic names for an Asian elephant whose living conditions have prompted groundbreaking legal action on her behalf. Her advocates are certain that she is not happy at all and are seeking to free her from her current confines.

Happy was born in the wild but was captured as a calf in the early 1970s. She ended up at the Bronx Zoo in New York City a few years later, where she’s been ever since.

Given what we know about how physically and psychologically detrimental captivity is for elephants and how vastly different their lives are in the wild, it’s virtually impossible to draw the conclusion that Happy is content at all after enduring decades of confinement that include years of isolation.

We also know that she’s a sentient being, which means she is self-aware—in 2006 she became the first elephant ever documented to pass the “mirror self-recognition test”—and she’s the first elephant to be considered in court for legal personhood under a writ of habeas corpus.

Her lawyers at the Nonhuman Rights Project argue that Happy possesses such complex cognitive, emotional and social abilities and deserves fundamental rights to “bodily liberty” and “bodily integrity”—something we are automatically granted just by virtue of being born human.

If successful, her liberation would be a landmark step toward breaking down the legal wall that separates humans from nonhuman animals. Yet nonhuman animals still remain behind a wall of our speciesist perception, which also desperately needs to change.

Nonhuman animals value their own lives, have their own interests and experience a range of emotions similar to our own that run the gamut from joy and fear to pain, anger, sadness, stress and grief; they have their own cultures and dialects; they play, work cooperatively and use tools; they remember and plan for the future; they love, form long-lasting bonds and show empathy. The conclusion that they have rich emotional lives isn’t mere anthropomorphism; it’s backed up by research in multiple fields, including cognitive ethology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience.

Despite our growing knowledge about nonhuman animals, instead of appreciating them for their uniqueness, beauty and complexity, we’ve focused mostly on what utilitarian purposes they can serve.

Even as we advance technologically, human behavior becomes increasingly objectionable. We raise and kill a staggering number of land and aquatic animals every year for food in an inherently and systemically abusive system.

We confine nonhuman animals to prisons that are zoos and aquariums, force them to entertain us, and use them as test subjects in biomedical research, much of which is senseless, or aimed at treating chronic diseases that are a result of human consumption of animal products.

In the wild, species are disappearing at staggering rates. Scientists have warned that we’re facing a sixth mass extinction. Wild animals continue to be taken by traffickers to be killed for parts or sold in the exotic pet trade. They’re killed simply for fun, including by government agencies under the guise of “management,” while their habitats are being polluted, fragmented and destroyed by humans in the name of development.

Human disregard of the natural world and the species with whom we share it led to a global pandemic that has had a devastating impact around the world, which, worryingly, likely won’t be the last we see of deadly zoonotic diseases—even as we continue to face a very real climate crisis.

Much of the way humans treat nonhuman animals, both legal and illegal, happens behind closed doors and out of sight. It’s in the best interest of industries that exploit them for profit to keep it that way. While there is increasing awareness about the plight of nonhuman animals, far too much of the information we’re regularly exposed to about them, particularly in the media, doesn’t give a “voice to the voiceless.”

Instead, it both subtly and overtly reinforces speciesist views, especially by misrepresenting nonhuman animals and their lived experiences by referring to them as if they were inanimate objects, as it, that and which.

This misrepresentation perpetuates their objectification and fails to show humans exactly who these animals really are, and how they suffer from widespread institutionalized oppression and systemic injustices on a daily basis. This must change to reflect their existences as conscious beings—a nonhuman animal is a who, not a that. A someone, not a something.

The way we use words is indicative of how we relate to the world around us; our words represent our thoughts about others, convey the value we place on other lives and actively shape the course of our relationships and actions. Calling someone it distances us from them, rather than acknowledging our relationship with them. Dismissing someone as an it communicates a thoughtless reference, as if the it in question has no rightful place in this life or is somehow separate from our own existence; that they are less than and we are superior.

Our choice of words builds a framework that can encourage healing or cause harm. This is also visible during interactions between people where there is a lack of acknowledgment, which can prove to be devastating.

Using proper personal pronouns for nonhuman animals, or the gender-neutral they when we are unsure of their sex, would reflect the fact that they, like us, are sentient beings.

More than 80 leaders in animal advocacy and conservation have joined In Defense of Animals and Animals and Media in calling for this to be the standard recommendation in the Associated Press Stylebook to encourage dialogue about how to respect and protect nonhuman animals and their rights and interests, which would help shape a more equitable world.

If not for our hubris and denial of what it means to be an elephant, Happy could have lived her life in the wild among a multi-generational matriarchal herd, where she would have shared lifelong bonds with her mother, family members and others of her kind and enjoyed the simple act of making decisions about her life.

Instead, she is confined and alone, and while her case is being appealed, she can’t do anything about it but quietly wait day after monotonous day, either for us to acknowledge her reality and send her to an accredited sanctuary, or to simply die where she is.

While she is physically isolated, she is not alone in that billions of other nonhuman animals are waiting for us to see them too; to understand them; to overcome speciesist prejudices we hold; to end their oppression; to stop considering them renewable resources; to save their homes; to stop justifying our consumption of their bodies; to stop owning them as property; to stop using them as test subjects; to stop referring to them as things, and to acknowledge they, too, are conscious beings who have a rightful place in this world.

We are past the point of needing scientific evidence that animals are conscious beings, and it is time to update the way we talk and write about them to recognize this fact and to acknowledge that as humans, we exist as part of a whole on this Earth, not separate from it. We share this planet with a mind-blowing array of incredible, awe-inspiring, sentient nonhuman animals whose lives matter to them and who each deserve the dignity and respect of us acknowledging that and referring to them as who, not that.

###

Debra Merskin, PhD, is a professor of media studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and is a co-founder of Animals and Media. Her expertise is in the re-presentation of animals in media and popular culture.

Carrie P. Freeman, PhD, is an associate professor of communication at Georgia State University and is a co-founder of Animals and Media. She publishes and teaches on media ethics, activist communication, environmental communication and critical animal studies.

Alicia Graef of In Defense of Animals is a lifelong animal lover and freelance writer with a BS in animal and veterinary science. She has covered issues relating to animals for more than a decade.

Take action…

“While the scientific consensus is that nonhuman animals are conscious beings—they are someone, not something—they are often described as though they might be nothing more than a couch when they’re referred to as it, that or which,” saysIn Defense of Animals, in a public petition urging the Associated Press to update their stylebook, a guide for journalists and writers, to recommend the use of personal pronouns for nonhuman animals. “Not using personal pronouns for individual nonhuman animals is especially problematic in mainstream media, which not only has a huge impact on our perception, but a responsibility to give a voice to the voiceless.”

Urge the Associated Press to update their guidebook so that it recommends the use on personal pronouns when referring to nonhuman animals.

Cause for concern…

• Arctic’s ‘last ice area’ shows earlier-than-expected melt (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)
• Corporate studies asserting herbicide safety show many flaws: new study (Carey Gillam, Guardian)
• Horrifying massive oil pipeline blaze sets Gulf of Mexico on fire (Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost)
• The Chamber of Commerce’s sordid history of climate denial (Molly Taft, Earther)

Round of applause…

• EU aims to end caged animal farming by 2027 after petition collects more than 1.4 million names (BBC News)
• ‘Unbelievable’ super-group of whales off Australia caught on film for first time (Isabelle Rodd, BBC News)
• First African American named to lead U.S. Forest Service (Matthew Daly, Associated Press)
• How to responsibly interact with marine life (Ali Wunderman, Condé Nast Traveler)
• ​​​​Turning the lights off for a few nights each year could save millions of wild birds (Angely Mercado, Popular Science)

ICYMI…

“In August 2020, during a cleanup project at a canal in the Dutch city of Leiden, scientists discovered a fish trapped in a latex glove, a finding that prompted them to investigate whether this problem was more widespread. Their fears were soon realized: In just a few months, researchers found hundreds of face masks littering the city’s historic canals. Their findings were released in a March report published in the journal Animal Biology about the impact that PPE litter is having on wildlife.

“The grim conclusion: All those face masks and latex gloves are killing birds, fish and other wildlife across the globe. The researchers, from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Institute of Biology at Leiden University, and the Institute for Water and Wetland Research, all based in the Netherlands, said that animals are becoming entangled in the gear, while others, mistaking it for food, are dying from fatally ingesting it. Some animals are building homes with it.”

—Reynard Loki, editor, Earth | Food | Life, “PPE May Save Human Lives, but It’s Deadly for Wildlife,” EcoWatch, April 24, 2021

Parting thought…

“Animals have hearts that feel, eyes that see, and families to care for, just like you and me.” —Anthony Douglas Williams

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

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

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

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

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

By Stephanie Seneff, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fable for tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding in plain sight

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

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

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

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

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

Take action…

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

ICYMI…

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

5 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

13 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause for concern…

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

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

Round of applause…

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

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

Parting thought…

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

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

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

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