“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.” – Malcolm X

Somewhere between the Bay Area’s environmental non-profit bubble and multi-million climate march planning in New York City, 21 people in the Utah desert took action to shut down the first tar sands mine in the United States.

They’d been part of a larger encampment on the eastern plateau, where local organizers educated over 80 student climate activists about the Utah tar sands as well as trainings on organizing, direct action and anti-oppression.

Utah tar sands fighters have spent the summer living in the area as a constant protest against Canadian-based company US Oil Sands’ extraction efforts on the plateau.

Every night, black bears raided the camp looking for food and every day local and state police agencies harassed the camp with veiled threats and innuendo derived through Facebook stalking.

On the earth, for the Earth

Despite the harassment and surveillance by the state, actions happen. This particular arrest action gained lots of national media attention and a number of larger environmental organizations put out statements of support of the activists. It also included a number of escalated felony charges on some of the activists.

Utah tar sands fighters living on the ground on the plateau, in Moab and in Salt Lake City live and breathe the campaign against the Utah Tar Sands. They strategize and organize it the same way that Appalachian mountain defenders organize the struggle against mountaintop removal coal mining.

They live it the same way that the Tar Sands Blockade lived the campaign against the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline in east Texas and Oklahoma.

In all of these campaigns, it’s been an alliance of unpaid radical organizers working with local landowners and community members fighting to save homes, forests, water supplies and more. Furthermore, these campaigns have defined risk and sacrifice.

All ignored by the green establishment

In Appalachia, after numerous actions on strip mine sites, coal companies filed lawsuits against those participating in civil disobedience actions. West Virginia law enforcement imposed huge bails to further deter actions on mine sites.

In Texas, TransCanada sued numerous individuals and three grassroots organizations for over $20 million after the same sort of action. The Canadian oil giant also compiled dossiers on noted organizers and briefed local and federal law enforcement agencies with possible crimes and charges for stopping work on its work sites.

Texas law enforcement obliged TransCanada’s hard work with felony charges and violent brutalization of peaceful protestors.

In each of these campaigns, bold and effective organizing against oil, gas and coal companies has created moments to stop egregious practices and projects at the points of destruction – only to be abandoned or ignored by the larger environmental establishment.

In the wake of that abandonment, hundreds of Appalachian Mountains have been leveled while oil flows through the Keystone XL pipeline from Cushing, OK to the Gulf Coast, and ground is now broken on the first tar sands mine in the United States.

Liberal reformism is hope over experience

The liberal reform agenda of the environmental establishment continues to dominate the climate movement. Organizations sitting on millions of dollars in resources and thousands of staff are now engaged in a massive ‘Get Out The Vote’ style operation to turn out tens of thousands to marches before the September 23rd United Nations’ Climate Summit in New York.

Their hope is to impact the summit framed as UN Secretary General Bai-Ki Moon’s dialogue with global politicians on climate change in the lead up to the 2015 climate talks. Civil society’s demands include passing meaningful climate legislation and signing binding agreements on carbon regulation.

History continues to repeat itself as the environmental establishment had similar demands in Copenhagen at the 2009 climate talks.

After spending millions of their donors’ dollars and thousands of hours of staff time, successes included an email campaign that got President Obama to travel to Denmark and personally witness the failure of those climate talks.

Almost simultaneously, legislation to regulate carbon emissions failed in the US Congress as well. After outspending the climate liberals 10 to 1, the political will of Big Oil and Big Coal remained unbreakable.

Meanwhile, these same companies continue to drill, mine, frack, pollute, poison, build pipelines and burn coal in neighborhoods and communities from coast to coast.

Justice cannot be compomised

However, there is recent precedent for movements to effectively confront power-holders that moves beyond traditional liberal solutions of compromise and polite advocacy with grassroots organizing, direct action and meaningful solidarity with communities seeking clean and just solutions to pollution and exploitation.

In 1999, the North American anti-corporate globalization movement partnered with peoples’ movements in the Global South to literally end business as usual at the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Seattle.

A grassroots spirit dedicated in solidarity with anti-austerity, human rights and environmental movements around the world spread like wildfire.

Rooted in direct action, direct democracy and anti-capitalism of movements both in the US and abroad, the global justice movement had been built over decades to stop the privatization of labor, environmental and human rights protections across the globe.

The Seattle shutdown happened in defiance of Democratic politicians, Big Labor and other large organizations dedicated to reaching agreements with Corporate America in the WTO talks.

In 2011, after decades of pickets and strikes, of budget cuts, layoffs and evictions, the movement for economic justice in the United States rose to a new level as Occupy Wall Street began to occupy parks and public spaces across the nation.

This happened after decades of politicians creating policies that benefited the rich and powerful while harming poor and working people. These occupations against the power of the ‘1%’ created such a dramatic tension that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a massive crackdown that ended many Occupy camps.

Creating a toxic environment for fossil fuels

Throughout the Global South, they fight back against the polluters and the profiteers as well. In states across India, residents living near coal plants regularly engage in direct action and street fighting against authorities defending the right of corporations to poison their communities.

In China’s Hainan and Guandong provinces, tens of thousands have taken to the streets in resistance to coal polluting their air and water. In 2011, Bolivia passed the rights of mother earth into law in defiance of companies in western democracies profiting from destroying the planet for financial gains.

While the liberal climate agenda is rooted in compromise with policy-makers and playing nice with corporations, a radical climate agenda must take the small disparate pieces of the existing climate movement and grow them exponentially to become a fierce counterbalance to the fossil fuel industry.

It must include strategies that create an environment so toxic for the climate pollution industry, its executives, its politicians and the financial institutions that back them that business as usual becomes impossible.

Furthermore, this agenda must be rooted in principles of justice and ecological sanity as well. Lastly, it must be willing to take risks, do jail time and say what doesn’t want to be heard by friends and enemies alike.

People are hungry to do more than send emails to President Obama asking him, once again, to do the right thing or march in a permitted march.

Real change won’t come from professional activists rooted in the existing political and economic system; it’ll come from a mobilization of people willing to engage in risk and sacrifice.

Scott Parkin is a climate organizer working with Rising Tide North America.

Follow him on Twitter: @sparki1969

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Outside the semi-arid area of the north-east, Brazilians have never had to worry about conserving water. Year in, year out, the summer has always brought rain.

But that has changed dramatically. São Paulo, the biggest metropolis in South America, with a population of almost 20 million, is now in the grip of its worst drought in more than a century – a water crisis of such proportions that reports on the daily level of the main reservoir arefollowed as closely as the football results.

The lack of rain is also affecting the dams that produce most of Brazil’s energy, highlighting the urgent need to diversify power sources.

And yet the state governor, wary of the effects on his prospects in forthcoming elections, has refused to introduce measures to ration, or even conserve, water.

Mighty rivers are running dry

Brazil is blessed not only with the mighty Amazon and all its huge tributaries, but also with dozens of other lengthy, broad rivers – once the highways for trade and slaving expeditions, but now providing waterways for cargo, power for dams, and water for reservoirs. It has at least 12% of the world’s fresh water supply.

But five of the principal rivers – the Tiete, Grande, Piracicaba, Mogi-Guaçu and Paraiba do Sul – that cross or border São Paulo, Brazil’s wealthiest state, have less than 30% of the water they should have at this time of year, according to data from the regional Hydrographic Basin Committee and from the National Electric System Operator (ONS).

Other major water sources – such as the Paraná, South America’s second biggest river, and the Paranapanema – are also suffering from the long dry period. The ruins of towns flooded for dam reservoirs have reappeared, fishermen’s boats are beached because the fish have disappeared, and navigation is at a standstill.

The transport of grain and other cargos to the port of Santos, via the river network, had to be suspended after the water level fell by up to eight metres. The equivalent of 10,000 lorryloads of cargo have been transferred by road so far.

Many industries have suspended their activities because of lack of water, and the drought has resulted in the loss of part of the coffee, sugar cane and wheat crops in one of Brazil’s most important agricultural states.

The hydrological period lasting from October 2013 to March 2014 was the driest for 123 years, according to the Agronomic Institute of Campinas, the oldest institute of its kind in Latin America.

Lowest water volumes since the 1930s

The federal government’s energy research company, EPE, found that in the first three months of 2014 the volume of rain was the third lowest since the 1930s.

It was the third consecutive year of reduction for the reservoirs of the hydroelectric dams that make up the South-east / Centre-West System, where many of Brazil’s biggest cities are located. From 88% in 2011, the volume of water in them had fallen to 38% by April 2014 – the month in which the dry season begins in this region.

By mid-August, the reservoirs of the Cantareira system, which supplies the water for almost 8.5 million of São Paulo’s inhabitants, had fallen to just 13.5% of capacity.

Yet the state government of São Paulo has so far refused even to admit that there is a crisis. The problem is the October elections, when Governor Geraldo Alkmim is running for re-election. Like most politicians, he does not want to be associated with a crisis. The word ‘rationing’ is taboo.

Instead, unofficial rationing – what might be called rationing by stealth – is in operation. At night, the São Paulo Water Company, Sabesp, is reducing the pressure in the water system by 75%, leaving residents in higher areas of the city with dry taps.

People before power? Electricity generation under threat

Over 80% of the country’s energy comes from hydroelectric power, and dozens more giant dams are under construction or planned, mostly in the Amazon basin. The government has been strangely reluctant to invest in, or even encourage, other sources of abundant renewable energy, such as wind, solar and biomass.

The over-reliance on hydropower has already led to a distortion. The back-up system of thermo-electric plants, run on gas and diesel, and designed for emergencies, has had to increase production from 8% in 2012 to cover 25% of energy demand this year – thus contributing to higher carbon emissions.

Politics have also interfered with the special crisis committee set up to monitor the drought situation, with representatives from local and federal agencies unable to agree on what to do.

The Sao Paulo energy company, CESP, unilaterally decided this month to reduce the volume of water released from the shared Jaguari reservoir to the neighbouring state of Rio de Janeiro for electricity generation, in order to keep more for its own water needs.

Dangerous precedent

For Marcio Zimmerman, executive secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, CESP’s action creates a dangerous precedent. “There will be chaos if everyone decides to rebel against the ONS”, he said.

The realisation that climate change is already leading to major changes in weather patterns has sounded alarm bells among the business community about the need to diversify energy sources and conserve water.

Early this month, at a seminar organised by the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development, the chief executives of more than 20 top companies drew up a list of 22 crisis-related proposals to be put to the presidential candidates in October’s election.

Newspaper editorials are now urging the politicians to take their heads out of the sand and involve the population in a serious discussion on the crisis and its effects on the water supply, energy generation, and food production .

The Rio newspaper O Globo declared: “They belittle the potential for efficiency available in a society accustomed to waste. When they act, it might be too late.”

Jan Rocha is a journalist living in São Paulo. She writes for Climate News Network, where this article originates.

“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists.

Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in 2010. That’s about 25 million kilometres of new paved roads – enough to circle the Earth more than 600 times.

In new research published today in Nature, we’ve developed a global ‘roadmap’ of where to put those roads to avoid damaging the environment. Our maps are also available to the public on a new website.

Roads today are proliferating virtually everywhere – for exploiting timber, minerals, oil and natural gas; for promoting regional trade and development; and for building burgeoning networks of energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams, power lines and gas lines.

Security and development versus biodiversity

Even national security and paranoia play a role. The first major roads built in the Brazilian Amazon were motivated by fears that Colombia or the US might try to annex the Amazon and steal its valuable natural resources.

India’s current spate of road building along its northern frontier is all about defending its disputed territories from an increasingly strident China.

According to the IEA, around nine-tenths of new roads will be built in developing nations, which sustain the most biologically important ecosystems on Earth, such as tropical and subtropical rainforests and wildlife-rich savanna-woodlands.

Crucially, such environments also store billions of tonnes of carbon, harbour hundreds of indigenous cultures, and have a major stabilizing influence on the global climate.

‘Killer roads’ open up forests for logging, farms and hunting

Why are roads regarded as disasters for nature?

Far too often, when a new road cuts into a forest or wilderness, illegal poachers, miners, loggers or land speculators quickly invade – unleashing a Pandora’s box of environmental problems.

For instance, my colleagues and I recently found that 95% of all forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon has occurred within 5 kilometres of roads. Other research has shown that major forest fires spike sharply within a few dozen kilometres of Amazon roads.

Notably, we also found that many Amazonian roads are illegal – for every kilometre of legal road, there were three kilometres of illegal roads.

The Congo Basin is reeling from a spree of forest-road building by industrial loggers, with over 50,000 kilometres of new roads bulldozed into the rainforest in recent years.

This has opened up the forest to a tsunami of hunting. The toll on wildlife has been appalling; in the last decade, for instance, around two-thirds of all forest elephants have been slaughtered for their valuable ivory tusks.

In Peru, a new highway slicing across the western Amazon has led to a massive influx of illegal gold miners into formerly pristine rainforests, turning them into virtual moonscapes and polluting entire river systems with the toxic mercury they use to separate the gold from river sediments.

The first cut is the cruellest

Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumors.

And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.

For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.

And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads – seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.

How do we balance these two competing realities – between road lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?

For those who want to know, a global roadmap

This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I‘ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.

Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas, and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.

We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.

The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.

Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.

With roads, more food is grown, and reaches those that need it

Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads.

Such roads could give them ready access to fertilizers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.

In these regions most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.

A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as ‘magnets’ – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.

In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.

Conflict zones, but reasons to hope

By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.

In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.

Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’ – where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash. Light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming.

The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.

But there are also massive conflict zones – in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.

A global plan for road expansion – in the right places

Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.

Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.

There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. In addition to his appointment as Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University, he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. This chair is co-sponsored by Utrecht University and WWF-Netherlands.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Climate Engineering Conference 2014 (CEC-14) was recently held to discuss technologies for deliberately counteracting climate change.

These include Solar Radiation Management (SRM), for example, adding sulphates to the stratosphere like a volcano, to reflect sunlight; and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques – such as planting new forests to draw down CO₂ from the atmosphere.

These technologies would allow us to exercise a degree of direct control over the climate. Unsurprisingly, the potential exercise of this God-like power is highly controversial.

Advocates say we need to be deploying these technologies urgently to save Earth from catastrophe. For opponents, they are a ‘get out of jail free’ card that would allow a business as usual approach to the profligate burning of fossil fuels, and carry huge risks of their own.

This background of controversy was no surprise to conference participants, who are well-aware that wider opinion of geoengineering is split along logical and ideological fault lines.

Delegates’ big surprise – a ready-made declaration

However knowledge of the necessary methods cannot be erased, so Pandora’s box is already open. Tough choices have to be made about what will be permitted – from basic scientific research to full deployment.

Studying this new-found power is now an important academic endeavour, and both public and academic interest is growing rapidly. CEC-14 was the first public scientific conference in the growing field of climate engineering, and similar events will likely follow.

As an academic discipline, geoengineering is here to stay. As a potential policy option, it is being carefully and publically scrutinised by experts. But sadly, that’s not the story the media reported.

What attracted journalists’ attention – and astonished delegates – was having a controversial document thrust into their hands after one of the first plenary sessions.

Demanding yet more restrictions on experimentation

This text, which became known as the ‘Berlin Declaration’, was not a draft from the conference organisers. Instead, it was a ready-made edict, promoted by attendees from the Oxford Martin School – an offshoot of Oxford University, which concerns itself with the study of socially challenging technologies and trends.

This so-called ‘declaration’ demanded yet another review process on experiments. This would further restrict a field that is already so tightly regulated that almost no faculty researchers have managed to do any outdoor experimentation at all.

In the opinion of many delegates, its effect would be to impose a de facto ‘test ban’ on most geoengineering experiments.

The assembled academics were understandably rattled by these events. A fully-formed ‘declaration’ had appeared. It seemingly awaited only a nod-through before becoming a concrete piece of governance, forever associated with the conference.

Moreover the ‘declaration’ came against a background of much pre-existing restriction on experimentation. Obviously, scientists can’t release a new superbug in a stadium, just to see what happens.

What’s less obvious is that there is a complex system of approvals for many types of experiment. This ensures that both obvious and concealed risks are carefully considered, whenever potentially-dangerous research is proposed.

We need responsible research – not a ban

In practice, this means that even completely harmless experiments in a scary-sounding field such as geoengineering are often nightmarishly difficult to get clearance for.

As Cambridge University’s SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) showed, even squirting a bathtub of ordinary water out of a hosepipe can be pretty controversial if you say the ‘g-word’ anywhere near it.

Other examples of similar controversies exist, with Ocean Iron Fertilisation (OIF) trials being a notable example. In fact, perhaps the most controversial ‘experiment’ – which involved fertilising the ocean with iron – came from outside the mainstream scientific process.

Regardless of whether one is hopeful about geoengineering or not, it’s reasonable to suggest that careful research might be a good idea. Without testing, we lack important practical knowledge, and without that knowledge, we have less ability to appraise the technology, or use it safely.

A test ban would be a very big deal indeed, especially if the banning text ruled out tiny, harmless experiments, as well as big, risky ones. Deliberately closing the door on scientific research would be essentially unprecedented, and this caused significant concern among delegates.

It’s possible that some believed that a new tier of regulation would have the opposite effect, instead facilitating responsible experimentation with a clear and dependable public process. However, this was certainly not a view which was shared widely enough to result in general support for the draft.

Sloppy journalism distorting the truth

A small uproar ensured. When scientists are in uproar, it is often barely detectable to the outside world, as they are polite people. This fretting turned into a ‘Town Hall Meeting’ – an opportunity to criticise the proposals in a thorough, public way.

This would leave the proposers in no doubt about the strength of feeling. The real story should have been this effective demonstration of good governance. But that was also not the story the media reported. As a result of some sloppy journalism, the news hit the internet in a form that was utterly mangled.

The draft declaration was wrongly attributed to the Royal Society – a body which has produced what is probably the World’s seminal report on Geoengineering. What the Royal Society thinks matters. The most influential scientific organisation in the World on the issue of geoengineering was now calling for a de facto test ban. Except it wasn’t.

This newly-invented story also needed a soundbite, and the ‘Berlin Declaration’ was born – despite the fact that the text hadn’t been declared, didn’t originate from a Berlin group, and didn’t contain the word ‘Berlin’.

The name of this sombre-sounding edict was reported and re-reported, as the story took on a life of its own. All this happened without anybody declaring anything, and with the Royal Society having had nothing to do with it at all.

Exciting-but-false stories are hard to replace with dull-but true ones. The true story of the landmark conference and its sensible scrutiny process was relegated to article corrections.

Even the shining beacon of ‘Science‘ magazine had to eat its words. But the original stories, not the corrections, are what will have had the most impact.

Meanwhile, they missed the real story

The Town Hall meeting duly arrived. Senior scientists voiced concerns about many things: how anyone would know what was or wasn’t a ‘geoengineering experiment’; why we needed to have a new tier of regulation on something that is almost regulated out of existence anyway; and why delegates from the Oxford Martin School had turned up at an international conference and promoted a pre-drafted text outside of the formal conference process.

As a result of this public, transparent and logical scrutiny, the proposal died – and nobody declared anything. This story of self-regulation is not as interesting as a formidable-sounding declaration. So that was not the story the media reported.

Without being declared, a ‘declaration’ is therefore no such thing. The grandly-misnamed ‘Berlin Declaration’ left the conference in the way it came – as just a piece of paper.

Despite this, the scientists left the conference just as tied down by the onerous approvals process as they always were. And still, global warming continues – for which we have no effective strategy in place. That is the story. But it is not what the media reported.

So is this all over? Possibly not – because bad reporting can grow legs and walk around. Even without a declaration, people may read and remember the stories, and not the corrections. They may decide that further regulation is A Good Thing. They may then join pressure groups because of it, ask politicians for it, and vote because of it – all in spite of the facts.

As a result, we may lack crucial information on geoengineering. It may end up being deployed in ignorance by future leaders – and may cause chaos as a result.

Let’s hope that’s not the story.

Andrew Lockley is an independent consultant and researcher interested in geoengineering. His current research focuses on the areas of ballistics for SRM particle delivery, methane geoengineering, and the use of computer games to research public opinions.