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Several weeks after the UN event, on June 21st, Dr. Robin Kimmerer, the well-known Potawatomi restoration ecologist, gave a deeper perspective on this mandate to work with indigenous communities during the opening plenary talk of the 9th World Conference of the Society of Ecological Restoration: “This idea of mutual healing, of cultures and land, is the practice under the really big idea of how do we enact land justice…
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A more pronounced disruption occurred over a year ago when Covid outbreaks forced many meatpacking plants, food processing plants, and farms to close for several weeks and months. The Food and Environment Reporting Network reports that as of June 21, 2021, at least 91,140 workers have tested positive for Covid-19; at least 464 workers have died. In addition to these tragedies, the pandemic forced farmers to euthanize animals and dump milk because while production continued, meat and milk processing did not.
The meat industry, like other agricultural sectors, has become increasingly consolidated over the past four decades. Four giant companies, including JBS, control more than 80% of the U.S. beef supply. Poultry, pork, dairy, and field crop operations have experienced similar consolidation. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that there were 2.02 million U.S. farms in 2020, down from 2.20 million in 2007, and 6.8 million farms in 1935, with the largest farms accounting for more than 70% of the cropland in the United States. The number of Black farmers has decreased to just under 50,000 in 2017 from its peak of 1 million in 1920.
Industrialized farming operations grew out of a need to accommodate these large-scale corporate processors. Bolstered by discriminatory USDA programs, monoculture farms and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have displaced traditional farming operations. Prioritizing productivity and profits, these industrialized operations use techniques that harm farmworkers, impact public health, degrade the environment, and perpetuate inequality.
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Ed. note: This excerpt from the Web of Meaning is published with the permission of the author.
As our civilization careens toward a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview has passed its expiration date: it’s based on a series of flawed assumptions that have been superseded by modern scientific findings.
The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published this week in the UK, next month in the US), offers a coherent and intellectually solid foundation for an alternative worldview based on deep interconnectedness, showing how modern scientific knowledge echoes the ancient wisdom of earlier cultures.
Here is the Introduction.
We could call it The Speech. You’ve probably heard it many times. Maybe you’ve even given it. Every day around the world, innumerable versions of it are delivered by Someone Who Seems to Know what they’re talking about.
It doesn’t seem like much. Just another part of life’s daily conversations. But every Speech, linked together, helps to lock our entire society up in a mental cage. It might occur anywhere in the world, from a construction site in Kansas to a market stall in Delhi. It can be given by anyone old enough to have learned a thing or two about how it all works. But it’s usually delivered by someone who feels they’ve been around the block a few times and they want to give you the benefit of their wisdom.
Because I grew up in London, I’ll zoom in there to a particular version of The Speech that reverberates with me. It’s an occasional family gathering—one of those events where toddlers take center stage and aunties serve second helpings of cake…
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Transcript
Jason Bradford
Hi, I’m Jason Bradford.
Rob Dietz
I’m Rob Dietz,
Asher Miller
and I’m Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where residents are feeling nostalgic about 1950s era fallout shelters.
Rob Dietz
The topic of today’s episode is net energy. And please stay tuned for an insightful interview with Alice Friedemann.
Rob Dietz
Hey, Asher, Jason, welcome to another fine episode of Crazy Town. I would like one of you to volunteer to answer a question. Who’s it going to be?
Jason Bradford
Wanna roshambo for that?
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If we modern humans are, in effect, addicted to power, perhaps we need something like a collective twelve-step program.
This article, the third in a series, is based on the author’s forthcoming book, POWER: LIMITS AND PROSPECTS FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL. You can read the first article in the series here, and the second here. For information about the book and how to join a pre-release reading and discussion group, please go to postcarbon.org/power.
Do some people have too much power over others? Do we humans have too much power over the natural world? These questions get to the heart of our biggest global problems. They also force us to think critically about the way society is organized, and about our own behavior. We often tend to give knee-jerk answers, but too much is at stake for that. We need to think critically and contextually.
First, what do we mean by power? While the word is used many ways, there are primarily just two kinds of power: physical power and social power. Physical power can be defined as the rate of energy transfer, or as the use of energy to do something; social power is the ability of one person or a group to influence the thoughts and behavior of others.
Nature provides examples of excessive physical power. The wildfires in Sonoma County, California, where I live, can burn with many gigawatts of power. A gigawatt of electrical power that’s controlled via power lines, transformers, and circuits can supply light, heat, and internet connections to a small-to-medium-sized city. A gigawatt of radiative power unleashed in a firestorm can torch that same community in just a few hours. We humans can likewise physically overpower our surroundings by using the concentrated energy of fossil fuels to over-harvest natural resources, or by dumping wastes in quantities that nature can’t harmlessly absorb.
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Transcript
Jason Bradford
Hi, I’m Jason Bradford.
Rob Dietz
I’m Rob Dietz
Asher Miller
and I’m Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where the sanist guy around is protesting the local gas station in a Santa suit.
Rob Dietz
The topic of today’s episode is runaway money. And please stay tuned for an interview with Nate Hagens.
Asher Miller
Did I ever tell you about the time where I had to spend five nights sharing a bed with a 6’9” guy?
Rob Dietz
No, I thought that was Jason’s story.
Asher Miller
No, Jason’s story if I recall correctly is he was up on top of a mountain and he was spooning with two guys.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
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The fossil fuel age had begun over a century prior to 1953, and it was known by then that coal, oil, and natural gas represent millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight. At the start, these fuels had appeared capable of supplying useful energy to society in seemingly endless quantities. Since everything we do depends on energy, having much more of it meant we could do far more farming, mining, fishing, manufacturing, and transporting than was previously possible. The result was an economic miracle. Between 1820 and today, human population has grown eight-fold, while per-capita energy usage has also grown eight-fold. We went from horse-drawn carts to jetliners in just a few generations.
But there were a couple of snags. One was that, though initially abundant, fossil fuels are nonrenewable and therefore subject to depletion. The second was that extracting and burning these fuels pollutes air and water, subtly but surely changing the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere and oceans. Neither issue seemed compelling to the majority of people who first benefitted from coal, oil, and gas.
So, back to Putnam’s book. This thick tome wasn’t a best seller, but it was considered authoritative, and it found a place on the desks of serious policy makers…
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Ed. note: This article first appeared in Spanish here. This is an interview with an expert (Ferran Puig Vilar) and award-winning author of a climate blog on tipping points. Photo credit: Ferran Puig Vilar. CEDIDA POR EL ENTREVISTADO
The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The last time the axe hits the tree before it falls. The last profitable barrel to be extracted from an oil well. There are many examples of Tipping points (TP). Although tipping points and points of no return are the buzzwords of our times, we should probably be using them more than we are.
A range of studies have long indicated that attention should be paid to the effects of climate change on subsystems such as the Amazon, Greenland ice or permafrost. These effects have been debated for more than 20 years. Since then, thousands of pages have been written describing their interrelationships, warning of a coming disaster. As in this article published in Nature by key figures in climate science, or this article published in National Geographic. However, despite the seriousness of the issue, mainstream media silence remains thunderous. We can even hear climate change deniers on prime time TV.
We ask engineer and climate journalist Ferran Puig Vilar, who is publishing a special report on tipping points, and has been doing amazing work on climate education in his prestigious, prize-winning blog for more than a decade:
What is a climate tipping point?
It is an inflection point in the equilibrium of a significant element or subsystem (permafrost, Amazon, thermohaline current, Greenland) whose overshoot destabilizes it and generates a phase change, bringing the system to a new state that may – or may not – be one of equilibrium. There are 15 specified, 9 of which are in the degradation phase or have already been passed. They interrelate with each other causing knock-on effects.
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Starting last summer, people from several organizations have been working to update a booklet on false solutions to climate change (I was involved with this effort for awhile and wrote the first draft of a couple of the sections). Now Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resisting False Solutions to Climate Change has been released as a PDF, available free. A print edition will be available later in May. You can read the whole thing through, or go directly to whichever elements most interest you.
Here is the table of contents:
Introduction 1
Gopal Dayaneni, Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project
Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network
Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Indigenous Climate Action
Ananda Lee Tan, Just Transition Alliance
Carbon Pricing 7
Dylan Gibson
Tamra Gilbertson, Indigenous Environmental Network
Gary Hughes, Biofuelwatch
Nature-Based Solutions 13
Tamra Gilbertson, Indigenous Environmental Network
La Via Campesina
Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch
Bioenergy 19
Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch
Natural Gas 23
Randi Pokladnik
Mary Wildfire
Hydrogen 26
Mike Ewall, Energy Justice Network
Landfill Gas to Energy 27
Mike Ewall, Energy Justice Network
Waste Incineration (“Waste-to-Energy”) 29
Mike Ewall, Energy Justice Network
Ananda Lee Tan, Just Transition Alliance
Neil Tangri, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
Nuclear Power 33
Tim Judson, Nuclear Information and Resource Service
Renewable Energy 37
Mary Wildfire
Hydroelectricity 41
Meg Sheehan, North American Megadam Resistance Alliance
Annie Wilson, North American Megadam Resistance Alliance
Geoengineering 45
Gopal Dayaneni, ETC Group
Cynthia Mellon
Carbon Capture 50
Tamra Gilbertson, Indigenous Environmental Network
Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch
Real Solutions for Climate Justice 53
Shehla Arif
Ananda Lee Tan, Just Transition Alliance
Gopal Dayaneni, Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project
Endnotes 63
Glossary 69
Imagery Credits 76
First of all, regardless of what we do to offset these shifting trends, the oceans will continue to rise and ice will still melt at the poles, in Greenland, the Himalayas, Andes, Alps and elsewhere. We have already set things in motion that won’t be reversed or restored for thousands of years. Just bringing back icecaps and glaciers alone will take millennia, just like their time for creation. We have squandered an irreplaceable asset that we took for granted, not knowing it was at stake.
Second, there are things we can do to reverse these tides of change on the ground. We need to cover the planet in greenery and restore our soils to full health. This calls for changing our ways of fertilization and corporate agribusiness, which have alienated us from the flowering source of fruitful largesse from an earth grown by Nature. We must come to understand our environment in all its urgent demands on us to engage with it through alliance and not in adversarial combat. This is a war in which we will all lose the bounties by which we are borne. We need to open our eyes.
Third, if we do nothing, our fate is unknown and worthy of fear. The threat descending upon us is simply unfathomable in its fury. We have only just started to see our results in large storms and destructive fires that are placing our seashores and forests at risk – along with our very lives…
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The toll on the self-proclaimed water protectors stands at more than 200, higher than for any oil pipeline opposition in the country since the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance of 2016-2017. As ground and waterways continue to thaw, increased numbers of opponents and arrests are expected.
Not all detentions in the escalating law enforcement suppression response are legal. Take Michele Naar-Obed’s recent arrest for example. She was held in custody three nights for what turned out to be a junk warrant claiming her attendance at a March 3 public action violated the conditions of her release from a previous Line 3-related charge.
Michele Naar-Obed outside Aitkin County jail, March 19, 2021. COURTESY // Resist Line 3
Officers issued dozens of citations at the event, a gathering to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1991 Line 3 oil spill in Grand Rapids, Minn. In the disaster, the line now being replaced burst and spilled 1.7 million gallons of crude oil onto the frozen Prairie River. The calamity vies with that of the Enbridge Line 6B rupture, — which flushed another million or so gallons into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 —, for the title of largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.
“I’m being accused of breaking the law for participating in First Amendment activities,” Naar-Obed told sympathizers outside the Aitkin County Jail as she went in to contest the warrant and request an audience with a judge.
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Justine Anderson, Esperanza Project, water, water protectors, protests, global warming, climate change, resilience.org,
At the end of last year while the world was focused on the Corona virus a panel of experts in international law met to draw up a recognised legal definition of ecocide, which in the long term will prove to be infinitely more harmful to human civilisation than the Corona virus.
Ecocide, broadly defined, means the deliberate destruction of nature and global ecosystems by human activity – climate breakdown and the damage it has already done, and will cause in the future, being the most obvious example.
The panel’s aim is to make the deliberate destruction of the natural world a legally enforceable crime, and ultimately add ecocide to the other four already existing international offences in international criminal law: genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and crimes against humanity.
For years ecocide has been regarded by some as too abstract, and potentially unenforceable. But as the evidence mounts up around us – witness the record breaking Australian and California bush fires last year, and the even more incredible record breaking high of 38C in Siberia last summer – making ecocide a crime begins to make more sense, both legally and morally.
Just as importantly, in the long run it will make good economic sense, because without a liveable and healthy biosphere – the region of the earth where all life exists, from the bottom of the oceans to where the atmosphere meets space – economic and social life will struggle to exist in ways we have known in the past. For many this is already a lived reality.
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Mark Kernan, Resilience.org, ecocide, international law
Lesson 3: Plutocracy Is Incompatible with Addressing Climate Change
The pandemic has illuminated the brutality and inadequacy that often defines wealthy elites’ control over government, and should prompt us to consider whether we can conceivably address the climate crisis under elite rule.
We should start by recognizing the effect that the pandemic-driven economic shutdown had on carbon dioxide emissions. Daily emissions across the world in April 2020 were 17% lower than the previous year—the largest drop in recorded history. In the US, emissions dropped an incredible 32%. At the end of 2020, after scattered attempts to reopen parts of the economy, the full year’s emissions were estimated to have fallen by a record 7% globally and 12% in the US. It is valuable for us to see that rapid cuts to emissions are technically possible. But because they are not a result of conscious changes to underlying systems, the effect is temporary and causes extensive harm.
A carbon budget for keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius prescribes an annual decarbonization rate of 10% or more for wealthy countries, beginning immediately, until emissions are eliminated around 2040…
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Lesson 2: Plutocracy’s Deadly Cruelty
Many Americans recognize that their government does not represent them. Political scientists have shown that we live in a vastly unequal society where the wealthiest individuals and large corporations control not only the economy, but the political system as well. When the policy preferences of the superrich diverge from the rest of the population, those are the policies typically implemented. Though it possesses some essential elements of a democracy, the US political system often operates as a form of plutocracy. However, discussions of politics tend to explore the surface phenomenon of Democratic and Republican politicians’ approaches to social issues like the pandemic. Seldom does the public hear serious discussion about how political decisions reflect the dynamics of a profit-maximizing economy and the priorities of the wealthy elites that control both parties.
Many crises facing society can be explained simply by reference to the economic goal of profit maximization. When greed is an economy’s central organizing principle, it means that financial self-interest is pursued even at the expense of diverse public interests…
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In a recent article published in Sustainability Science, I explore how climate action and peace can be advanced simultaneously. Finding an answer, I suggest, lies in making space to imagine alternatives to our current sustainability approach: transitioning to a different economic system that focuses on people rather than profit, foregrounding broad understandings of peace, and pursuing societal change. Seeds of such change, lie with degrowth, activities and policies that recenter the economy on ecological and human well-being. Examples of degrowth provide a starting point for considering concrete steps toward tackling structural violence, fostering climate resilience, and advancing peace.
Peace, climate, and the economy
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