3352. The Earth Day Fifty Years Ago and Today

By Richard Heinberg, Post-Carbon Institute, April 22, 2020 Earth Day in New York City, April 20, 1970 Editor's note: The following letter was sent to the subscribers of Resilience, the online magazine of the Post-Carbon Institute.   *      *     * April 22 was supposed to be a day of global celebration and protest. Fifty years ago, up to ten percent of Americans participated in thousands of local events on the first Earth Day. That mass action, which would have been widely commemorated this year, propelled early environmental policy victories that, in the U.S., included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), as well as the passage of the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973). But nature threw a curveball—a virus that has us all huddling indoors and physically distancing ourselves when we occasionally venture out for food or exercise. Instead of massing in parks and at city halls on a spring day, North American nature lovers will be clicking and swiping to attend online digital Earth Day events. A revival of interest in this annual occasion was long overdue. The past five decades saw early policy successes fade gradually into an apathetic status quo. New regulations, passed in the 1970s up through the ’90s, had reduced sulfur dioxide pollution from coal power plants, cleaned up rivers, and greatly reduced the smog in big cities like Los Angeles. Pro-business commentators took this as evidence that the world’s environmental problems were essentially solved. But most pollution had just moved overseas to China and India, where so many of our products are now manufactured. On the whole, Earth is far more polluted today than it was in 1970. Indeed, so much plastic is accumulating in the oceans that, by 2050, it may outweigh all the fish. During those same 50 years, populations of vertebrates (animals with backbones) declined by 60 percent on average. It’s been estimated that humans—along with our cattle, pigs, and other domesticates—now make up 96 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass. The other four percent include all the songbirds, deer, foxes, elephants and on and on—all the world’s remaining wild land animals. We inherited a planet of astounding beauty, which we share with millions of amazing creatures—and, one by one, we’re crowding them out. Meanwhile, climate change, the scariest environmental trend of all, has snowballed from a little-discussed theory to an impending global threat. In 1970, the average CO2 levels at Mauna Loa, where Charles Keeling was monitoring them, were 325 parts per million; last year they hit 419 ppm. The most recent decade was the warmest on record. Droughts, wildfires, and floods are becoming more frequent, severe, and costly. And, right up until the arrival of COVID19, carbon emissions were continuing to increase year by year. In response, climate activism has mushroomed, and there have been more victories to celebrate—such as the divestment of many wealth funds from fossil fuel companies, and rapidly declining costs for renewable energy. Pipelines have been blocked by protesters and courts, and a global youth movement has coalesced to demand action from complacent governments.

But none of this was enough. Over all, the trends threatening future generations and millions of other species are worsening. While it was too much to hope that the semicentennial Earth Day could reverse those trends, it might have been an occasion for re-committing to action. But now, suddenly, we are in a different moment. The global economy is in freefall—not because of climate impacts, and not because we tried to redesign manufacturing and consumption to forestall those impacts; rather, it’s due to rapidly spreading sickness and death. Pandemics have been with us since the earliest days of civilization, and until recently there was no obvious reason for most people to think they posed a risk similar in scale to climate change or crashing biodiversity. However, as Laurie Garrett and other public health experts have warned, population growth, urbanization, increasing global trade, rapid global travel, and wild animal markets on civilization’s fringes together provide ingredients for a pandemic on a scale perhaps unprecedented. If you’d asked an ecologist a decade ago which of all the dire environmental trends (including climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, overpopulation, and pollution) would likely be the first to bring civilization to its knees, she probably wouldn’t have ranked pandemic near the top of the list. But here we are. As ecologist Carl Safina put it in a recent essay, “Humans caused [a] pandemic by putting the world’s animals into a cruel blender and drinking that smoothie.” The coronavirus pandemic reminds us that we are vulnerable biological organisms, strands in Earth’s web of life. Due to our special human gifts—notably, our linguistic and tool-making abilities—we have come to think of ourselves as special and apart, more gods than critters. We have used our unique powers to kill off the macropredators that once threatened us—the lions, tigers, and bears. But a micro-predator, far too small to be seen even with a powerful optical microscope, has shown up unexpectedly to remind us that we are still links in the food chain. If something good is to come from the terrifying experience we are all sharing this fiftieth Earth Day, perhaps it will be the reminder that our survival depends not on defeating nature (something we can never really do, because we are nature), but instead on learning to live in a state of intelligent, dynamic balance within Earth’s nourishing yet fragile and perilous complexity. It’s good to have a special day to remind ourselves of the exquisite blue planet that really should be foremost in our thoughts every day of the year. And it’s appropriate to celebrate what’s been accomplished to safeguard our shared home. But will there be an Earth Day 100? It’s looking just a little doubtful. I really want to end on a hopeful note, so here goes. It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re perfectly capable of increasing our happiness without piling on more environmental harms. Tired old promises about green growth won’t get us there. What we need instead is a collective change of heart and mind that leads to fundamental shifts in institutions and norms, prioritizing well-being and life satisfaction over ever-more consumption—just as we’re prioritizing health over economic activity by quarantining ourselves during the pandemic. The fact that we’ve put off that shift for 50 years doesn’t mean we have to continue doing so. Maybe the pandemic, along with the resulting temporary shuttering of travel and commerce, is an opportunity to rethink and reboot both our individual lives and our collective ways of being on this precious planet. That would make this Earth Day a truly meaningful occasion.

With appreciation, Richard Heinberg PCI Senior Fellow

2507. Environmentalism Was Once a Social-Justice Movement

By Jedediah Purdy, The Atlantic, December 7, 2016

Standing Rock No Dakota Access Pipeline protest

The incoming Trump administration is likely to see the greatest revival of environmentalism as a confrontational, grassroots, sometimes radical movement since at least 1970, when more than a million people took part in the first Earth Day.

The vigil at Standing Rock, which surprised nearly everyone by blocking the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline through traditional Sioux lands, was a far cry from the litigation and high-level lobbying that are so much of the environmental movement’s work these days. As courts and lawmakers continue to falter in addressing climate change, with professional climate-change denier Myron Ebell heading the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team, and Scott Pruitt tapped to lead it (Pruitt is an ally of the fossil fuel industry and key architect of the legal strategy against President Obama's climate policy) and the prospect of public lands opening to expanded mining and drilling, ever more people who believe that environmental responsibility has become a life-or-death issue are going to start acting like it.

A more confrontational environmentalism will find new allies, like the Native American activists of Standing Rock and the military veterans who showed up there just before the Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not approve the controversial pipeline route. It may also strain some of the relationships with wealthy funders and corporate partners that have become central to mainstream environmentalism. Activists will have to decide whether to cultivate alliances with other movements that have sprung up in recent years: the Movement for Black Lives, which has called for divestment from fossil fuels and pointed out that incinerators, waste facilities, and other pollution sources are often concentrated in poor and heavily non-white neighborhoods, or whatever comes after Bernie Sanders’s campaign, which blamed the fossil-fuel industry for blocking climate progress and promised to “keep it in the ground” in a rapid transition to renewable energy.

Joining environmentalism to movements for economic and racial justice wouldn’t be new. It would shift the movement toward what you might think of as its left wing, often called the environmental-justice movement, which emerged in the 1980s as an internal criticism of “mainstream environmentalism” for being too elite, too white, and too focused on beautiful scenery and charismatic species. But it would also point toward a longer history, now mostly forgotten. For decades, environmentalism and what we now call environmental justice were deeply intertwined. Care for the earth and for vulnerable human communities belonged together. Empowering workers, protecting public health, and preserving landscapes were part of a single effort. Maybe it’s time to reclaim that older environmental movement, and see that it was an environmental-justice movement all along.

Modern environmental law is defined by a set of statutes that were adopted in a burst of legislation in the 1970s: the NEPA on New Year’s Day, 1970; the Clean Air Act later in 1970; the Clean Water Act in 1972; the Endangered Species Act in 1973; laws governing waste disposal and reworking the management of federal public lands in 1976.

Environmentalism is also defined by a set of advocacy organizations that grew up in the same years: the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Club (which later became Earthjustice, the major environmental litigation group), and the Environmental Law Institute either appeared or took their current form in these years. The advocacy groups are an important part of the story because they help to define the field.

Environmental law has always been susceptible to identity crisis. It doesn’t have the unifying textual basis of constitutional law, the doctrinal coherence of tort or contract, or the straightforward topical boundaries of antitrust or tax. Instead, it has an organizing principle that might be thought of as “everything is connected.” What counts as environmentalism has always been partly a matter of the priorities of movements and advocates.

Environmentalism has faced existential challenges before Trump. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration appointed anti-environmentalists to run the EPA and the Department of the Interior, and only litigation and political pressure kept them from gutting the environmental agenda of the 1970s. There have always been pockets of resistance to the legitimacy of environmental law, sometimes quite radical: There are plenty of Westerners who deny that the federal government has constitutional power to manage federal lands or to regulate private activity through laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Some of those radicals were involved in the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon at the beginning of this year.

Donald Trump will challenge environmental law in new ways, but there is another challenge to modern environmentalism that has come from within the movement, or from nearby it. This is the challenge that comes from the modern environmental-justice movement, a network of activists and scholars that has arisen since the 1980s to make fundamental objections to what its advocates call “mainstream environmentalism,” the version of environmentalism that came to be in the 1970s.  

         

Environmental justice scholars and advocates and have made three big criticisms of what they call mainstream environmental law:

First, that it doesn’t speak to how environmental harms and benefits are distributed, which is especially important when distribution follows the lines of poverty and race. This criticism comes from the grassroots fights that produced the environmental-justice movement: fights about decisions to place garbage dumps, toxic waste sites, incinerators, and power plants in neighborhoods where disproportionately poor and non-white people lived. The environmental statutes of the 1970s accomplish many things, but they did not prohibit these disproportionate impacts.

Second, environmental justice critics challenge the mainstream environmental idea of what environmental problems are in the first place. They say it’s focused on the beautiful outdoors, it has an anti-urban bias, it isn’t engaged enough with artificial human environments like neighborhoods and workplaces. As one important pair of environmental justice scholar-activists wrote, the environments we most care about should be “the places where we live, work, learn, and play,” whether they are natural or built. And while more prosperous people tend to take clean and safe living spaces for granted and be able to escape to wild places that feel “ecological” or “natural,” poor people often have very little choice but to spend their lives in compromised artificial environments.

Third, critics say mainstream environmentalism over-values elite forms of advocacy, like litigation and high-level lobbying, and doesn’t make enough room for popular engagement. It creates a movement of professionals and experts: lawyers, economists, and ecologists who have limited interaction with, and do relatively little to empower, the people who live with the most severe environmental problems.

These criticisms have a historical and institutional context. When environmental justice scholars and activists take aim at what they call mainstream environmental law, they are addressing the statutes, agencies, and professional and advocacy organizations that were built into their more or less current form in the 1970s and early 1980s. The environmental-justice criticisms are very important, but they often forget that the mainstream environmentalism whose narrowness they criticize was a recent development, and maybe one that could have turned out very differently. If we draw back the historical lens, a “long environmental-justice movement” comes into view. In this movement, for more than a century, activists and scholars have been engaging the themes of fairness, inequality, and political and economic power in the human environment.

What was this movement? Here are some key examples. Two iconic environmental developments of the 1960s were the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring between 1960 and 1962. The Wilderness Act has protected more than 100 million acres of public land for hiking, camping, and solitude. It was a great victory for a long political drive to preserve public land that went back to the first national park, Yellowstone, which was created in 1872. But its central value—wilderness, untouched land, set aside from all human contamination—seemed to prove that the movement that loved wild nature didn’t care much about the places where people lived, worked, played, and learned.

Carson’s book described a poisoned world, where pesticides passed through the air, water, and soil, to enter the flesh of animals and people, and spread sickness and death everywhere. She helped to create a widespread ecological consciousness, and also to connect that consciousness with a sense of fear and crisis that helped to spur the 1970s anti-pollution statutes. But her great book, which followed pesticides through almost their whole cycle of destruction, ignored the mainly Latino farm workers of California and Florida, who were directly exposed to pesticides in their work the fields. The human victims of pesticides, in Carson’s telling, lived in iconic small-town and suburban America. They were implicitly white and Anglo. They were not workers. So Carson, like the Wilderness Movement, can seem to prove that the narrowness as well as the power of mainstream environmentalism are there at the beginning.

But Silent Spring and the Wilderness Act were late chapters in earlier movements that made them possible. Those precursors were at the heart of the long environmental-justice movement at work. The movement for wilderness was centered on the Wilderness Society, which was founded in 1935. A typical founder was Benton MacKaye, a planner and interdisciplinary intellectual who is also credited with the idea behind the Appalachian Trail.  MacKaye defined “environment” as the built and industrial environment, just as much as the wild and natural one. His great example of ecological thinking was an image of New York City as composed of what he called “flows”: the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, the prevailing winds out of the west, but also barges of steel from the Great Lakes, ships full of grain steaming off to Europe, and the highways and railroads that brought workers pulsing into the city every day and exhaled them again at night. He saw the struggles of factory workers and wilderness advocates as two parts of a movement with very large goals: to make the whole human environment, from the workplace to the untouched woods, welcoming and stimulating, a good place to be alive. He thought this required extensive and intensive public planning of cities, transport networks, and regions. For him, wilderness was one essential note in a larger composition of landscapes and living-places.

You could draw similar portraits of the broad concerns of other wilderness activists. MacKaye’s co-founder and the president of the Wilderness Society was Robert Marshall, a forester who was also head of the Washington, D.C., branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, an avowed socialist, and a major player in reforms that increased that sovereignty and cultural autonomy of Native Americans. Marshall’s devotion to preserving wilderness was part of a broader vision of a just society. He believed that mental and spiritual freedom required the chance to escape to a place radically separate from everyday life, but there was nothing escapist in his politics. The Wilderness movement that Marshall and MacKaye built was intensely concerned with the whole human environment, the condition of factory workers and people living in cities, and the role of the state in the economy and social life.

And what about Carson? Well, the scholar whose previous research runs all through Silent Spring is Wilhelm Heuper, an industrial toxicologist who devoted his career to understanding the effects of workplace exposure to what he called “the new artificial environment” of synthetic chemicals. His goal in understanding what the new poisons were doing to people was to secure “a healthful living, not merely for a small, select, and socially privileged class,” but for everyone. He was working in a tradition of industrial toxicology that was pioneered a generation earlier by Alice Hamilton, the first woman faculty member at Harvard, a public-health scholar who went into factories and worked with workers to understand what lead, phosphorous, and other chemicals were doing to their bodies. Also in the background were movements like the Workers’ Health Bureau, which was a joint creation of women public-health activists and independent unions, which researched workplace hazards, as they put it, “from the point of view of the worker.” Carson’s work was rooted in industrial toxicology, and that, in turn, was rooted in movements for social reform and effort to build both workers’ power and systems of industrial governance in the early 20th century.

Why did these broader concerns not come into the environmentalism that took shape in the burst of statutes and institution-building in the 1970s? It is not that the architects of the modern environmental laws and institutions didn’t care about these questions of equity and the total human environment. It is that they thought they were addressing them. As Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, who was a primary drafter of those laws, explained at Earth Day 1970, “Man’s environment includes more than natural resources. It includes the shape of the communities in which he lives: his home, his schools, his places of work.” Muskie went on to argue that, “the only kind of society that has a chance” is “a society that will not tolerate slums for some and decent houses for others, rats for some and playgrounds for others, clean air for some and filth for others.” And he insisted that, “Those who believe that we are talking about the Grand Canyon and the Catskills, but not Harlem and Watts are wrong.”

The environmental statutes were passed in a world where, from the point of view of their architects, they were environmental justice statutes. But that world was disappearing as soon as the new environmental laws were written. They were written in a time that was more economically equal than the US had ever been, and they believed that trend was going to continue, and that therefore economic inequality was a problem that had been solved. We now know, thanks to the work of economist Thomas Piketty and others, that they were living at the end of an anomalous period of widely shared growth that lasted across the North Atlantic between the end of World War Two and the beginning of the 1970s. Inequality was about to reassert itself, and it has been growing more or less ever since.

Just as today’s environmental-justice critics say, the laws that govern pollution and dumps for hazardous materials don’t address how those get distributed. Leaving out distribution was a mistake that was much easier to make if you believed that the country was steadily getting more equal. The more recent environmental-justice movement arose in response to the fact that environmental harms are distributed along very familiar lines of race and poverty. Those lines were expected to become less important in the years ahead. Legislators like Muskie also said that they expected the environmental laws to be supported by other reform legislation to overcome poverty and isolation, foster public health, and make workplaces safer and communities more livable. Instead, the 1970s brought the return of inequality and the end of political support for bold social reforms.

Then it got worse. The Supreme Court removed an essential protection against disparate environmental impacts in the form of constitutional Equal Protection challenges. Between 1976 and 1979, after the major environmental statutes were largely written, the Court adopted the current constitutional standard, which requires plaintiffs claiming they have been treated unequally to show that the government action they object to was affirmatively motivated by discriminatory purpose. It isn’t enough to show that, in fact, burdens are distributed in a grossly unequal way. So unequal harms that would once have been open to constitutional challenge are now legally clear unless they violate environmental statutes—which were not written with this kind of inequality in mind.

The other charge that today’s environmental-justice movement makes is that mainstream environmentalism overemphasizes elite advocacy. This, too, is not a perennial feature of environmental law, but developed in the 1970s because of specific institutional decisions.  A key part of the story is that the Ford Foundation made critical investments to shape the new groups that helped to make the field of environmental law: the Environmental Law Institute, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and others. Ford picked and cultivated its grantees to advance a vision of lawyers’ role in advocacy and social reform that historians call “legal liberalism.” Legal liberalism saw lawyers as channels for marginal voices that otherwise wouldn’t be heard in pluralist democracy. The ideal was that, if you could just get these marginalized voices their day in court, in front of an impartial decision-maker, you could ensure that their interests were respected in the decision process. In this respect, the institutions of environmental law were shaped by a conception of the legal profession that Ford was also helping to spread at the same time through law-school clinics, ABA pro-bono guidelines, and poverty-law services.

The reformist goals of legal liberalism could be quite robust, but as a model of social change, it had some defining limitations. It was elite-driven and relied on expertise. Its advocates were inclined to imagine they spoke for a consensual “public interest” that responsible decision-makers, like judges and agencies, could pursue. And, in the end, it tied its reformist goals to the courts—at the same time that judges were retreating from their role in the 1960s as drivers of structural change. These institutions helped to make environmentalism intensely a movement of lawyers and experts, funded by middle-class mass-membership groups and wealthy donors, and not driven by large-scale mobilization or engagement. It took much of the fire out of a movement that had begun, in Earth Day 1970, with the largest mass mobilization in American history.

In the 1970s, as in the 1930s, there were versions of environmentalism that were less expert-driven and more confrontational than the versions that won out. In the early 1970s, an insurgent labor organization called the Miners for Democracy briefly took over the United Mine Workers of America. They were fighting a corrupt union leadership that had literally murdered one of their leaders and his family in their home. They were pressing for safety regulations in mines that killed hundreds of people every year in disasters and thousands more slowly through black-lung disease and other industrial illnesses.

And—although this is usually forgotten even by the few people who remember them at all—they argued that if mining could not be done in an environmentally responsible way, without destroying mountains or killing streams, then miners should refuse to do it. They proposed that both safety regulations and environmental principles should be directly enforced in the workplace by strikes. They showed how this could work when 90 percent of the miners in West Virginia walked out of the mines in an unauthorized strike that shut down the coal industry for months, until they won serious medical benefits for retirees and disabled miners who were dying from black-lung disease. For them, just like for the 1930s activists who stood in back of Rachel Carson, the workplace and the woods and waters were all part of the environment, and working people should defend both to defend themselves.

They were not as unusual as you might think. One of the major funders of the first Earth Day was the United Auto Workers, whose president, Walter Reuther, was a strong environmentalist who believed in using the union to advance a progressive social agenda that built on but went well beyond his members’ interests. (Reuther also helped to fund the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, among other causes.) When he died in a plane crash in the early 1970s, he was preparing a proposal to the union leadership to include environmental issues in the union’s collective-bargaining agenda with management, so that organized labor would have been an anti-pollution force within the industry.

All of this is so far gone now that it is hard to recover the sense of possibility of that time. There were later tactical alliances between the new environmental groups and organized labor, especially over workplace chemical exposure, but labor never went green, and environmentalism never became a working people’s movement.  By 1977, the UAW opposed amendments that strengthened the Clean Air Act. On November 8, the coalfields came out strongly for Donald Trump’s climate-denialist campaign, as they did in 2000 to help defeat Al Gore’s environmentalist presidential candidacy.

By the early 1980s, the major environmental groups were coordinating their efforts around an agenda that put little emphasis on social and economic inequality, the disparate environmental vulnerability of marginal populations, or the special environmental threats to working people. This was the “mainstream environmentalism” that the environmental-justice movement arose by attacking. In many ways, the environmental-justice advocates were right to attack it. But no one seemed to realize what a recent development it was. Mainstream environmentalism, with the limitations that environmental justice advocates pointed to, was not much older than the environmental-justice movement that criticized it. Ironically, the critics tended to imagine mainstream environmentalism as a perennial thing, a movement that had always been narrow in its concerns, its constituency, and its tactics. In the later 1980s and 1990s, this view was replicated in advocacy and politics, from seminal and attention-getting reports on the unequal distribution of environmental hazards to touchstone scholarship like environmental historian Bill Cronon’s watershed essay, The Trouble with Wilderness, which diagnosed environmentalism as the product of a narrow woods-and-waters agenda and narrowly elite constituency going all the way back to the country’s origins. And so the long environmental-justice movement was lost from view.

What difference does remembering it make today?

Well, first, could things have gone differently? Maybe if supporters like Reuther, or even the Ford Foundation, had built stronger connections, say, between early environmentalism and the civil-rights movement, then a greater emphasis on structural inequality, and some healthy doubts about liberal optimism, might have gone into the design of both the statutes and the institutions that came to define environmental law. If some parts of organized labor had taken militant and socially-minded environmentalism into its agenda in the early 1970s, and funded and supported new environmental groups alongside the liberal organizations like Ford and the wealthy donors that became the groups’ lifeblood, mainstream environmentalism might have been something more like an environmental-justice movement all along.

Then again, maybe not. The narrowing of the environmental agenda during the 1960s, and the Ford Foundation’s legal-liberal vision for advocacy, were connected with the whole political economy and political culture of the US during the Cold War. Labor’s retreat into economic self-defense and zero-sum contests with environmentalists was part of a general return of inequality and scarcity in the 1970s, which affected the whole North Atlantic. The loss of the broad reform agenda that senators like Muskie expected to buttress the new environmental laws was part of general political revolt against the 20th-century welfare state. The structural inequality that guides environmental harms along familiar racial and class lines runs very deep.

But there are ways to retrieve the spirit of the long environmental-justice movement in this time of fresh mobilization and new alliance. Environmental activists and progressive state and local governments can press for enforcement of environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in ways that are consistent with the broadly egalitarian vision that informed their creation. To give just one example, lax regulation of industrial agriculture, especially animal-feeding operations where thousands or tens of thousands of livestock are jammed together in factory-like conditions, exposes people living nearby to a bunch of hazardous pollutants. These are concentrated in pervasively poor and significantly non-white areas of the country. Aggressive enforcement of anti-pollution laws against facilities like these would simply make these statutes do the environmental justice work they were originally intended to do.

Activists and administrators should also look for problems of inequality that are not conventionally treated as environmental. Consider the way that that the Farm Bill, which is currently pumping more than $65 billion dollars in subsidies into the farm economy over five years, makes calories from corn syrup and soybean oil relatively cheap and healthy calories more expensive. This price skew has controversial but plausible effects on obesity and related diseases like diabetes, which are all tied to poverty and race. Environmentalists should see the food system as a medium of risk exposure, like air and water. The fact that food intake always involves a personal choice doesn’t wash out the question of justice. Like deciding where to work, deciding what to eat is a choice made under constraint, and the background of law and economic inequality does a lot to define the constraints. The members of the long environmental-justice movement, who believed the fact that your job could make sick or kill you was no less an environmental issue because you had chosen your job, would say the same thing today about your meal.

Activists and scholars should also look at cases where environmental policy is making explicitly distributional decisions and ask what standards of justice and political accountability should guide those. California’s recent climate-change legislation produces a large pool of revenue that is meant to be spent in ways that address communities’ environmental challenges. Who will decide what that means, and what will the criteria be? Will one goal be to go beyond preventing new pollution and climate-change hazards, to address different places’ and communities’ different baseline levels of contamination and vulnerability, to remediate their inherited inequality? The same questions attach to spending the remediation fund from the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and would attach to the revenue from many kinds of national or trans-national carbon tax or cap-and-trade schemes.  

These are just some starting points. Other priorities may come from new allies. Maybe even the labor movement, now both battling for its life and being reborn in grass-roots efforts like Fight for Fifteen, will find new points of commonality. There’s no need for environmentalists to stop being experts, or to abandon the institutions and establishment alliances they have painstakingly built up over decades. But they should be clear that their mission is more than technical. They are working to defend a living world that is under assault at every point, from the global climate to the most vulnerable communities. Economic power, racial inequality, and the struggles of indigenous peoples are not optional or supplemental. They are at the heart of the work.

2351. Cuba Reduces Use of Ozone Depleting Substances

By Orfillio Pleáez, Granma, June 17, 2016

Siguaney cement factory in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba will be transformed into the region's first incineration plant for substances harmful to the ozone layer (Photo: Escambray) | Photo: Escambray

Fulfilling commitments made as a signatory of the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances (ODS), Cuba has entirely eradicated chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in commercial and domestic refrigeration, as well as those used in the manufacture of medical and industrial aerosols, according to Nelson Espinosa Pena PhD, director of the country's Ozone Technical Office (OTOZ), during the opening of the CONTAT 2016 workshop, taking place at the Cuban Meteorology Society's headquarters. The event is sponsored by the Meteorology Institute's Center for Research on Pollution and Atmospheric Chemistry.

He described the country's efforts to progressively reduce ODS, which include the complete elimination of methyl bromide in the fumigation of warehouses and in the cultivation of tobacco, coffee, ornamental plants, tomato, and other crops; the removal of carbon tetrachloride from laboratories; and the replacement of halon-based fire extinguishers, except on airplanes.

This significant effort, Dr. Espinosa reported, required the modernization of industrial plants with the introduction of new ODS-free technology; the fabrication of new products with more environmentally friendly characteristics; training in best practices for refrigeration mechanics and technicians; and the development of alternative biological pest control methods in agriculture.

He explained that currently being implemented is an accelerated timetable for the elimination of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC) by 2030, noting that a 10% reduction in their use had been achieved as of 2015.

Natacha Figueredo Valdés MSc, OTOZ expert, noted that, this past year, Cuba began the destruction of ODS at a modern facility equipped with Japanese technology, located within the Siguaney cement plant in the province of Sancti Spíritus.

These efforts have allowed Cuba to join a small group of nations in the region with the capacity to address the complicated issue of ozone depleting substances.

2246. Why Was Berta Cáceres Assassinated?

By Beverly Bell, Other Worlds, March 16, 2016

Berta Cáceres

A few numbers begin to reveal why Honduran indigenous leader and global movement luminary, Berta Cáceres, was assassinated on March 3, 2016. 

According to the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), more than 300 hydroelectric dams are planned for Honduras, of which 49 are on COPINH lands. Eight hundred seventy-two contracts have been handed out to corporations for mining alone, with many others created for mega-tourism, wind energy, and logging projects. The majority of these are planned for indigenous lands. Of those, all are in violation of International Labor Organization Convention 169, to which Honduras is a signatory, allowing free, prior, and informed consent by indigenous peoples before development may take place in their territories.

The many planned extraction projects – in a country slightly larger than the state of Virginia - add up to the need of the Honduran and US governments to subjugate the population. Quiescence and compliance are essential for the national elite and multinational corporations to make their profits. So here are a few more relevant numbers. Honduras has 12,000 soldiers – one for every 717 people, for a county not expected to go to war. Its 2013 “defense” budget was $230 million. Since 2009, the US has invested as much as $45 million in construction funds for just one of those bases, Soto Cano, commonly known as Palmerola. Last year, US taxpayers footed $5.25 million in direct military aid, and much more in training for 164 soldiers at the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Operation. Three hundred seventy-two US military personnel are in the country.

Given that state control is often attained through violence, a few more figures become relevant. One hundred one environmental activists were killed in Honduras between 2010 and 2014, making it the most dangerous country anywhere in which to try to defend the Earth.

Nine land defenders were attacked just yesterday, March 15, between the time we began writing this article and when we completed it. COPINH member Nelson Garcia, who had been helping recover lands on Rio Lindo, was assassinated in his home on March 15 while the Rio Lindo community was forcibly evicted. This brings to 14 the number of COPINH members who have been murdered since the group was founded in 1993. A member of COPINH’s coordinating committee, Sotero Echeverria, was threatened with capture by police. Echeverria is one of the 3members of the group who have been framed by the government for Berta’s murder.

Also yesterday, early in the morning, police agents arrested 7 members of United Campesino Movement of the Aguan (MUCA by its Spanish acronym), including the president, Jose Angel Flores. Flores and 6 other MUCA activists, including his family members, were arrested and taken to the police station. Flores has protective measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights because of the danger he, like all those organizing in the Bajo Aguan region, face. Berta did, too. Protective measures have the weight of toilet paper with the Honduran government.

Despite the ongoing violence, COPINH, MUCA, and other Honduran organizations and movements – workers, campesinos, feminists, and more – have resisted the attempts to subdue them. As Berta loved to say about the movement, “They fear us because we are fearless.”  

Of the countless Hondurans who put their bodies on the line every day, no individual has more prominently encouraged or strategically organized dissent than Berta. No Honduran has more visibly spread the message of rebellion to the Americas, nor more audibly urged that rebellion to spread throughout the Americas. “Our call to this continent is that we really push the need to unite ourselves and to create strategies between social movements and left governments,” Berta told a large international gathering of prominent leftists in Havana in 2009.

Berta’s last stand was against a dam being illegally constructed on the sacred Gualcarque River in the community of Rio Blanco. In addition to the internationally financed company DESA, behind the dam was the World Bank, and the largest dam company in the world, Sinohydro, which is owned by the Chinese government. For more than a year and a half, the villagers of Rio Blanco were able to halt the dam construction with nothing more than their bodies, a small trench and fence across the road leading to the river, and their political militance. Berta and others, meanwhile, took the case to the world, building worldwide alliances which brought enough pressure to force the World Bank and Sinohydro to pull out. 

Adding insult to injury to those seeking to control water, minerals, forests, and lands, for her work in stopping the dam Berta won the 2015 Goldman Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel for environmental defense. With the award, Berta’s prestige skyrocketed, further threatening domination by the political and economic powers that be.  In her acceptance speech, knowing that behind her stood tens or hundreds of thousands of other Hondurans toiling for justice, Berta dedicated her prize in part, to “rebellion.”

This was too much for DESA and the Honduran government. The multi-year efforts to eliminate Berta - through threats, kidnaping attempts, charges of sedition, and more – finally succeeded in the form of a bullet piercing her flesh. Who hired the assassin is unknown. What is known - given very explicit statements and actions of the company and the government in the days and weeks preceding her assassination – is that both were behind the act.    

Yet even death cannot subdue Berta. In the days since her murder, the notoriety of her person and her message has multiplied exponentially around the word. The current level of global action against Honduran government impunity, US government’s support for it, and pillaging by transnational capital has reached heights that Berta could only have dreamed of. Click here for actions you can take in solidarity.

Below, we rerun excerpts from the story of COPINH’s fight for Rio Blanco, as told through a photo-essay published in 2013.   

We Don’t Negotiate Life: The Defense of Indigenous Lands and Waters in Honduras

September 9, 2013

Defending Lenca lands. A flag in a community center of COPINH shows Lempira, the Lenca chief who led the resistance to Spanish colonists in the 1530s. The text reads: “500 years of struggle, we will continue resisting. Lempira lives! The struggle continues!”

This installation was installed illegally on the sacred Gualcarque River in Rio Blanco by the Honduran-owned, foreign-supported damming company DESA. The complex has been base of operations for building and running a dam in the community. The installation was constructed against the will of Rio Blanco’s inhabitants, in violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and International Labor Organization Convention 169, which require that indigenous peoples give free, prior, and informed consent to development projects on their lands.

A tree at the entrance of Rio Blanco hosts the message, “God gave us this land and we will defend it.” The community of Rio Blanco declared its road closed to the dam construction. It has been blockading access to the company for five months.

The indigenous movement in Honduras lacks the global attention and left glamour of similar movements elsewhere. Continual deaths and attacks by the military and company-paid goons go largely unpublicized and unnoticed. Yet COPINH feels deeply connected to indigenous autonomy movements around the world, especially the Zapatistas, as seen at the entrance to their national radio station.

As is happening throughout the country, indigenous people in Rio Blanco are being attacked physically, politically, and legally. On July 15, a soldier shot community leader Tomás Garcia multiple times at close range. He died immediately. A member of the Indigenous Council and of COPINH, Tomás had been offered 20,000 Lempiras (US$980) to support the dam project. Despite being extremely poor and needing to provide for his large family, he refused to sell out. Tomás was laid to rest in the community cemetery, surrounded by the riches of Mother Earth he had fought to defend. Here, one of his six children places flowers on his grave.

Company goons shot one of Tomas’ young sons twice, just in front and behind his heart., and hacked Tomas’ sister and brother-in-law with machetes. When we gave our condolences to Tomas’ sister, she looked down and said, “We’re going to take care it doesn’t happen again.” Then her expression sharpened and she said, “Screw the company trying to take our river, and the government. We’re going to defend our community and our lands. If I die, I’m going to die defending life.”  

One of the charges brought against COPINH leader Berta Cáceres is illegal possession of a weapon “in contravention to the internal security of Honduras.” She and two others, Aureliano Martínez and Tomás Gomez, have also been charged with “continual danger” to the security of the nation and “invasion of land” against the company… never mind that the company invaded Lenca land. The government’s goal is to decapitate the movement, putting Lenca leaders in jail so that the corporations can continue their extractions unimpeded. The trial of the three is September 12, 2013. Here, Berta is shown signing in at the local courthouse, as she has been ordered to do each Friday. She has also been prohibited from going to the “scene of the crime” – the river in Rio Blanco – and leaving the country.

The Rio Blanco community at its blockade of the dam. COPINH member Aureliano Molina, one of the three who will go to trial on September 12 for being a danger to the nation, said, “We don’t negotiate life.”

The community turned out to support Berta in front of the courthouse in La Esperanza in one of the numerous times she has been the victim of trumped-up charges. Berta said, “We always hold the spirit high, as Lempira did. And we remember the spirits who live in the Gualcarque River. Nature has living spirits, too, and they know that we are struggling to support them.”

On August 30, DESA withdrew its damming equipment from the Rio Gualcarque. This is a victory for the resistance of the community, but it may be Pyrrhic. COPINH has learned of secret plans, if the right-wing party wins the November elections, for the government and company to move forward with the dam and to crack down even more viciously against indigenous peoples who refuse to submit. Meanwhile, residents of Rio Blanco swim in the river.     

       

 

The three COPINH members facing prosecution for being a "continual danger" to the nation. WE ARE ALL TOMAS, BERTA, AND AURELIANO.

2115. United Kingdom: Storm of Ignorance

By George Monbiot, monbiot.com, December 8, 2015

George Monbiot

It’s as if it had come to remind us of what’s at stake. While the climate negotiations in Paris trudge their dreary road, Storm Desmond takes a great boot to our backsides. Yet still we fail to make the connection. The news records the spectacle and ignores the implications.

Rainfall on this scale used to be described as a one-in-100 year, or 200-year, or 1000-year event. But in Cumbria, where some 30cm of rain fell in 24 hours, this is the third such catastrophe since 2005. Exceptional events are, perhaps, no longer exceptional.

If so, we should scarcely be surprised. More heat means more energy in the system, and more moisture in the atmosphere. An analysis by scientists at the Met Office, published last month, found that global warming raised the odds – by a factor of seven – that a string of storms of the kind the UK suffered two winters ago would result in exceptionally wet weather.

Just as remarkable is the collective lack of interest in what happens when rain hits the ground. The government boasts that “we are spending £3.2 billion in flood management and defences over the course of this parliament – half a billion pounds more than in the previous parliament.” Yet almost all the money devoted to freshwater flood relief is being spent at the bottom of river catchments. This means waiting until the wall of water arrives before seeking to contain it; a perfect formula for disappointment.

A rational policy would aim to prevent the flood from gathering in the first place. It would address the problem, literally and metaphorically, upstream. A study in mid-Wales suggests that rainwater’s infiltration rate into the soil is 67 times higher under trees than under sheep pasture. Rain that percolates into the soil is released more slowly than rain that flashes over the surface. But Cumbria’s hills are almost entirely treeless, and taxpayers, through the subsidy regime, pay farmers to keep them that way.

Rivers that have been dredged and canalised to protect farmland rush the water instead into the nearest town. Engineering works of this kind were removed a few years ago from the River Liza in Ennerdale. It was allowed to braid, meander and accumulate logs and stones. When the last great storm hit Cumbria, in 2009, the Liza remained clear and fordable the following day, while other rivers roared into furious spate. The Liza’s obstructions held the water back, filtered it and released it slowly. Had all the rivers of Cumbria been rewilded in this way, there might have been no floods, then or now.

During the last deluge, in the winter of 2013-2014, the government’s Environment Agency published a presentation called River Dredging and Flood Defence. It remarked that “Dredging of river channels does NOT prevent flooding during extreme river flows.” Dredging, it noted, makes rivers more dangerous, destabilises bridges, banks and weirs and requires endless expense to maintain.

All copies of this presentation have now been deleted from the web (we republish it exclusively on the Guardian’s site today). It is not hard to see why. In June 2014, in pursuit of its primary mission – appeasing the farming industry – the environment department proposed to deregulate dredging, allowing landowners to strip the structure and wildlife habitat out of ditches and rivers. It will also permit them, with minimal oversight, to extract gravel from the riverbed and to build culverts. There could be no better formula for disaster downstream. Once water is in the rivers, it has to go somewhere. If you don’t hold it back in the fields, it will bowl up instead in people’s homes.

But no one in power seems interested in the causes; all focus is on the outcomes. For the past three years, Cumbria’s two most prominent MPs, Rory Stewart, now a minister at the environment department, and Tim Farron, leader of the Lib Dems, have denounced those who call for the better management of watersheds to prevent flooding. In 2013, Rory Stewart blasted the National Trust because it “allows water to ruin the lowland pastures of their small tenant farms, apparently on the advice of the Environment Agency.” In 2014, he mocked the RSPB and the water company United Utilities for managing their land “in a way that ‘increased biodiversity, decreased flooding, increased carbon capture.’”

In 2013, Tim Farron pronounced himself “delighted that Natural England are readjusting their approach to the uplands, with the recent dropping of their Uplands Vision”. This vision (called Vital Uplands) proposed that there should be more vegetation in the hills to reduce “the risk of downstream flooding”. It noted that “Intensive grazing can cause soil erosion and compaction, and prevent regeneration of scrub and trees, thus speeding water run-off.” The report was publicly denounced by the head of the government body that had commissioned it, Natural England, who happened to make his living as a farmer. Once again, the online version was deleted and the hard copies were pulped. Is this how democracies behave?

Now Messrs Stewart and Farron wring their hands and wring out their clothes, lamenting this inexplicable act of God. On Saturday, Tim Farron was trapped in the floodwaters while driving his car, and had to be rescued. The car, apparently, is a write-off. There is relief that he and his four children came to no harm. Still, parables have been told about men like him.

Meanwhile the talks in Paris have become a festival of empty gestures. The pledges governments have brought fall short of those required to prevent disasters on a much greater scale, and even they are broken as they are made. By pursuing a new dash for gas, while closing down its carbon capture and storage, renewable power and energy efficiency programmes, David Cameron’s government makes a mockery of its promises. Worse still, the collective refusal even to discuss keeping fossil fuels in the ground condemns the talks to futility.

Nothing is learnt, crucial discussions are avoided or buried. We are drowning in ignorance; ignorance manufactured by an illiterate media and a hostile government. Every time disaster strikes we respond with bewilderment. Our understanding of what confronts us seems scarcely to have advanced since we responded to catastrophe by burning old women.