Poland has just registered with the European Commission as an official GM-free zone. This makes it the tenth EU member state to opt out of cultivating genetically modified (GM) crops.

It joins France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Slovenia, Lithuania and Latvia in either filing the necessary papers with the Commission, or announcing their intention to do so.

Within the UK Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have also decided to prohibit the cultivation of GM crops – leaving England as the odd man out’. Belgium has also restricted the use of GM crops to particular territories.

“We have already dealt with applications issued by Greece and Latvia, in other cases, our work is still in progress”, said Enrico Brivio spokesman for the EU’s environment commission. The deadline for countries to submit their application is this Saturday, 3rd October.

While not an EU country, Serbia has also announced that it will not permit the cultivation of GM crops, mainly in order to protet its successful soyabean sector. The country is currently a major exporter of non-GM soyabeans for which demand is increasing worldwide.

Russia has also signalled its intention to block the cultivation and use of GM crops. “As far as genetically-modified organisms are concerned, we have made decision not to use any GMO in food productions”, Deputy PM Arkady Dvorkovich recently told an international conference on biotechnology.

An ugly compromise at the EU

The right for EU countries to opt out of GM cultivation was agreed in March 2015 and came into force in April as a compromise between pro and anti-GM countries. The agreement allows countries to opt out of GM crop cultivation as a safety measure to protect health and environment, or to protect consumer interests and the internal market.

The Commission’s proposal was denounced by politicians and campaigners on all sides, with pro-GM UK Conservative MEPs insisting that decisions on the cultivation and sale of GM food “should be based purely on scientific assessment of their benefits or potential risks …

“GMOs authorised at EU level by food safety watchdog EFSA are already deemed safe. It is a dark day when the EU’s executive is happy to sit by and watch its own basic freedoms, trade commitments, farmers and consumers suffer while ignoring the scientific advice that taxpayers themselves are paying for.”

Meanwhile Greenpeace’s food policy director Franziska Achterberg complained that the proposed reform would allow the Commission to authorise the import of GMOs – even when opposed by most national governments, the European Parliament and the public:

“The Commission’s proposal is a farce because it leaves the current undemocratic system untouched. It would allow the Commission to continue ignoring major opposition to GM crops, despite president Juncker’s promise to allow a majority of EU countries to halt Commission decisions on GMOs.”

Can the EU’s single market survive the GMO split?

The effective split of Europe into two camps – those who do grown GM crops and those that do not – presents a challenge to Europe’s single market and may prove hard to maintain as GM seeds inevitably come to contaminate crops in supposedly GM-free countries.

A parallel proposal, agreed in April, allows EU countries to decide whether or not to allow the import of GM crops for human food and animal feeds – but exercising the GMO opt-out is no simple matter. As the Commission explained at the time:

“Once a GMO is authorised for use as food or feed in Europe, Member States will have the possibility to decide on whether to opt out from allowing that particular GMO to be used in their food chain.

“Member States will have to justify that their opt-out measures comply with EU law, which includes the principles of the Internal Market, and EU’s international obligations of which the EU’s WTO obligations are an integral part.

“Opt-outs shall be based on legitimate reasons other than those assessed at EU level, i.e. risk to human or animal health or the environment.”

Given the vast volume of cross border trade in agricultural seeds, crops, foods, animal feeds and farm produce between EU countries – which takes place without border controls under the EU’s single market – it is hard to see how the inevitable tensions will be resolved.

All the more so as the law surrounding the member opt-outs is highly complex, technical, framed within the wider context of EU law, and has yet to be tested in the courts.

A huge mess in the making? Without a doubt. Can the single market survice the strain? Very possibly not.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Shell’s decision last Monday to abandon its often chaotic and always controversial Alaskan Arctic project caught everyone by surprise.

Rumours had been swirling of a supposed ‘big find’ in early September; news reports on 17th September quoted Shell CEO Ben van Beurden talking about the timing of any final investment decision.

And the company had been adamant about returning to Alaska in 2016 if an oil find was made to assess its value.

So, Shell’s announcement that it was cutting its losses and soaking up the $1.1 billion already committed for 2016 drilling despite finding “indications of oil and gas“ has led people to question the official company topline that there just wasn’t enough oil to justify further exploration.

Shell cited three factors for its decision to walk away from Alaska: poor results from the well, high costs of drilling in the Arctic and the regulatory environment in the US.

Those of us focused on investor campaigning on Shell’s Arctic plans have long been of the view that no single factor – other than the complete lack of oil – would lead Shell to walk away from its exploration phase.

That they did in fact make a find but chose to retreat suggests that the scale marked ‘RISK’ had simply become too heavy for Shell to balance – even for its already paid for 2016 plans.

So what tipped the scales?

Pesky wildlife protections

In 2012 when Shell first embarked on its Arctic foray, the ultimately doomed plan was to drill five wells in that year alone.

By 2015 the company’s ambitions had been slashed in part through its and its contractors’ incompetence and the enforcement of walrus protecting regulations to one well – at a cost of $1.1bn.

Uncertain returns on investment

With the current low oil price impacting company cash flow and with Shell already committed to maintaining the dividend through 2016, the idea of maintaining such disproportionate levels of capital expenditure for uncertain return cannot have been an appealing prospect for the Shell board.

Damage to reputation

But Shell’s Arctic ambitions weren’t just costing it cash – the company was losing its credibility and reputation both among its corporate peers and the general public. Lego was the first to break ranks ending a decades-long partnership with Shell.

The Guardian reported that Shell’s attempts to establish credibility on climate change were being hampered by its Arctic plans and they were also said to the root cause of Shell’s departure from the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, over 7 million people around the world had sprung into action in opposition to Shell’s Arctic plans. The project became a symbol of the fight to tackle climate change and ultimately the most controversial and scrutinised oil project in the world.

The Guardian and the FT reported that sources inside Shell were “taken aback” by public protest. The prospect of a building current of pressure from at least another year of inspiring physical opposition of the type seen in Seattle and Portland and other countless centres of energy and daring during 2015 further loaded the ‘risk’ scale.

Investor incredulity at Shell’s persistence

Investor attitudes to this project moved rapidly from resignation to its inevitability in 2012 to incredulity in 2015 at Shell’s dogged determination in the face of all evidence questioning the economic, environmental and reputational wisdom of this project.

The Arctic soon became the priority topic of dialogue with Shell for many mainstream investors. The company’s plans were scrutinised and challenged by investors both privately and in public – the consequences of Shell’s repeated missteps on investor confidence in this project being made clear to the board.

It’s long been rumoured that Shell was a divided company when it came to Arctic drilling. While the pro-drilling camp had a find of some description to place on the reward scale, those more concerned about the project came laden with

• wasted capital;
• uncertain return;
• growing reputational damage;
• investor and leading US presidential candidate opposition;
• peer group isolation;
• the risk of a spill;
• and climate change.

The scales had irreversibly tipped and Shell’s Arctic adventures were at an end.

Arctic misadventure – in reverse

Ben van Beurden’s personal journey on Arctic drilling ultimately concluded in a dead-end. He and Shell took the only course available – reverse.

So, after four years, 7 billion wasted dollars and a shredding of its reputation among peers and the public, Shell once again finds itself at a strategic crossroads.

Climate change; political pressure

Much has changed in those four years, not least the positive signs of progress among international politicians towards a climate deal and general public attitudes to fossil fuel companies.

The direction Shell chooses now will determine its fate – there is no more time for wasteful detours. The arc of inevitability has been bent away from Arctic drilling and an ever-expanding oil industry and it bends now towards climate action.

Shell and its peers must follow that arc if they are to have any role in a clean energy future.

Louise Rouse is an investment campaign consultant to Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

Shell’s decision last Monday to abandon its often chaotic and always controversial Alaskan Arctic project caught everyone by surprise.

Rumours had been swirling of a supposed ‘big find’ in early September; news reports on 17th September quoted Shell CEO Ben van Beurden talking about the timing of any final investment decision.

And the company had been adamant about returning to Alaska in 2016 if an oil find was made to assess its value.

So, Shell’s announcement that it was cutting its losses and soaking up the $1.1 billion already committed for 2016 drilling despite finding “indications of oil and gas“ has led people to question the official company topline that there just wasn’t enough oil to justify further exploration.

Shell cited three factors for its decision to walk away from Alaska: poor results from the well, high costs of drilling in the Arctic and the regulatory environment in the US.

Those of us focused on investor campaigning on Shell’s Arctic plans have long been of the view that no single factor – other than the complete lack of oil – would lead Shell to walk away from its exploration phase.

That they did in fact make a find but chose to retreat suggests that the scale marked ‘RISK’ had simply become too heavy for Shell to balance – even for its already paid for 2016 plans.

So what tipped the scales?

Pesky wildlife protections

In 2012 when Shell first embarked on its Arctic foray, the ultimately doomed plan was to drill five wells in that year alone.

By 2015 the company’s ambitions had been slashed in part through its and its contractors’ incompetence and the enforcement of walrus protecting regulations to one well – at a cost of $1.1bn.

Uncertain returns on investment

With the current low oil price impacting company cash flow and with Shell already committed to maintaining the dividend through 2016, the idea of maintaining such disproportionate levels of capital expenditure for uncertain return cannot have been an appealing prospect for the Shell board.

Damage to reputation

But Shell’s Arctic ambitions weren’t just costing it cash – the company was losing its credibility and reputation both among its corporate peers and the general public. Lego was the first to break ranks ending a decades-long partnership with Shell.

The Guardian reported that Shell’s attempts to establish credibility on climate change were being hampered by its Arctic plans and they were also said to the root cause of Shell’s departure from the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, over 7 million people around the world had sprung into action in opposition to Shell’s Arctic plans. The project became a symbol of the fight to tackle climate change and ultimately the most controversial and scrutinised oil project in the world.

The Guardian and the FT reported that sources inside Shell were “taken aback” by public protest. The prospect of a building current of pressure from at least another year of inspiring physical opposition of the type seen in Seattle and Portland and other countless centres of energy and daring during 2015 further loaded the ‘risk’ scale.

Investor incredulity at Shell’s persistence

Investor attitudes to this project moved rapidly from resignation to its inevitability in 2012 to incredulity in 2015 at Shell’s dogged determination in the face of all evidence questioning the economic, environmental and reputational wisdom of this project.

The Arctic soon became the priority topic of dialogue with Shell for many mainstream investors. The company’s plans were scrutinised and challenged by investors both privately and in public – the consequences of Shell’s repeated missteps on investor confidence in this project being made clear to the board.

It’s long been rumoured that Shell was a divided company when it came to Arctic drilling. While the pro-drilling camp had a find of some description to place on the reward scale, those more concerned about the project came laden with

• wasted capital;
• uncertain return;
• growing reputational damage;
• investor and leading US presidential candidate opposition;
• peer group isolation;
• the risk of a spill;
• and climate change.

The scales had irreversibly tipped and Shell’s Arctic adventures were at an end.

Arctic misadventure – in reverse

Ben van Beurden’s personal journey on Arctic drilling ultimately concluded in a dead-end. He and Shell took the only course available – reverse.

So, after four years, 7 billion wasted dollars and a shredding of its reputation among peers and the public, Shell once again finds itself at a strategic crossroads.

Climate change; political pressure

Much has changed in those four years, not least the positive signs of progress among international politicians towards a climate deal and general public attitudes to fossil fuel companies.

The direction Shell chooses now will determine its fate – there is no more time for wasteful detours. The arc of inevitability has been bent away from Arctic drilling and an ever-expanding oil industry and it bends now towards climate action.

Shell and its peers must follow that arc if they are to have any role in a clean energy future.

Louise Rouse is an investment campaign consultant to Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

I start this job at a time when the stakes could not be higher. Energy is the backbone of our economy. 

How we source and fund our energy determines the jobs we do, the lives we can afford to lead, and the success of our businesses. But it is also one of our greatest challenges.

Affordable, reliable energy matters to working people here and across the world. But the pollution caused by our existing energy system poses one of the greatest risks to our health, our wellbeing and our collective future.

The transition to clean energy is one of the biggest challenges this country has ever faced. It’s comparable in scale to the industrial revolution. 

And it requires the same shared determination and collective will to act that helped us to rebuild Britain after the war. It demands that we draw on the creativity, innovation and talent that Britain has to offer. But it also demands leadership.

With our historic global ties, our dynamism and our expertise, it’s a leadership Britain is uniquely placed to offer. But instead, our ministers are failing our people at home, and they’re trashing our historic legacy of international leadership.

Only this week Al Gore said: “It is time for the UK government to honour and live up to that legacy, and return to its global leadership position, domestically and abroad.”

We must keep up the fight for climate and environment

He’s right. It is a British legacy. And it’s a Labour legacy. And I am not prepared to let it go without a fight. Because it was John Prescott who, in his own unique way, banged heads together at Kyoto to create the world’s first legally binding climate treaty.

And it was Ed Miliband who worked patiently through set back after set back to push for a new global climate change deal fit for the challenges we now face. And now here we are, at this critical moment in history, where for the first time the world’s largest economies are on threshold of an agreement.

The Paris Summit in December can be historic. It can give an absolutely transformational signal to investors and businesses around the world that the age of polluting energy is over, and that the transition to a new, clean, energy model is inevitable, irreversible, universal.

Paris can build on Labour’s Climate Change Act and return us to the negotiating table every five years, increasing our efforts, until the job is done. Conference we should be proud that the UK and its Labour Government helped build the road to Paris.

But this part we’ve played, as a global force for higher ambition, is in danger of becoming the story of our past, not the story of our future.

Under David Cameron, Britain’s influence abroad has diminished quicker than at any period in living memory. It’s left us relegated to the margins of the global conversation, while others set the agenda and the pace.

Joining the global fight for a clean energy future

Their refusal to look outwards has undermined our ability to tackle shared global challenges. From climate change to the movement of refugees it is co-operation not isolation that will allow us to shape and own the future. Other nations are already investing in the future.

In China, the government is taking bold steps to reduce dirty coal and invest in renewable energy because its billions of citizens urgently need an end to chronic air-pollution. In India, the government is pioneering clean tech innovation using solar energy to connect millions of people to light and power for the first time.

George Osborne insists our economic future lies in trade with these countries – and yet he has turned his back on our own wind and solar industries.

But what if we could build a new clean energy system that would reduce our dependence on imported fuel, create the skilled, well-paid jobs we so badly need, and bring down sky-high energy bills?

It would mean a dramatic change of course. The actions of this government have left the poorest households in Britain paying six times more of their disposable income on green taxes than the richest. This is a national scandal.

But don’t let them tell us we can’t heat our homes and protect the environment. Of course we can. By minimising the costs of going green, sharing those costs fairly, and capturing the industrial benefits to improve the lives of working people. The guiding principle of our energy plan is the pursuit of social justice.

The Tory manifesto promised to “cut carbon emissions as cheaply as possible.” But what have they done instead? Ruled out using more of the cheapest low-carbon power available to us, from wind farms, even where there is strong local support.

• Pulled the rug out from under the British solar industry just at the moment that solar power is on the cusp of offering cheap, subsidy-free energy.
• Wasted billions on an energy efficiency plan that failed to insulate the homes of our pensioners and poorest families.
• And negotiated a deal that will leave us paying over the odds, for decades, to subsidise Chinese and French companies for a nuclear power station on course to be the most expensive ever built anywhere in the world.

It’s been estimated that Hinkley C would cost bill payers more than the 2012 Olympic Games, Heathrow Terminal 2, and Cross Rail combined. All of this less than six months since David Cameron promised he would “keep bills as low as possible.”

Our vision: making energy clean, affordable, secure, democratic

The Tories’ energy policy isn’t just putting the security of household budgets at risk, but our economic security too. Our green economy has been outstripping the growth of the UK economy by a factor of more than three to one.

But just this month, the head of the CBI warned that “from the roll back of renewables to the mixed messages on energy efficiency, these changes send a worrying signal about the UK as a place for low-carbon investment.”

Last month we learned that for the first time ever the UK no longer ranks among the top 10 countries in the world to invest in clean energy. A British industrial success story deliberately put at risk by a Chancellor pandering to his backbenchers even when skilled British jobs are on the line.

Family security. Economic security. And now we face an energy security crisis. This winter British energy reserves will be at such low levels we could be forced to buy in emergency supplies. Once again families and businesses ripped off because of energy decisions beyond their control. 

Well we want to put people back in charge. But Jeremy and I don’t want to nationalise energy. We want to do something far more radical. We want to democratise it. There should be nothing to stop every community in this country owning its own clean energy power station.

Across the country schools are already taking the initiative and going solar. Generating power and heat for their own use. With the right support, community-based energy companies and cooperatives could be a new powerhouse, and a path to a more secure energy future.

Labour in local government is already leading the way, effectively bypassing the big six entirely.

• Labour leaders in Nottingham have created their own city energy company to cut bills and go green.
• Oldham is spearheading collective switching schemes.
• Cardiff is rolling out cutting-edge smart technologies to cut demand because the cheapest power is the power that isn’t used.

Your new frontbench team – Alan Whitehead, Barry Gardiner, Clive Lewis, Harry Harpham, Bryony Worthington, John Grantchester and I, are determined to work with other towns and cities to follow the lead these trail blazers have established. To work with our local government leaders to push for a clean energy boom in our great cities.

Because our city and county regions can lead the world. They can point the way towards a safer, brighter, more secure future. To be the light on the hill for all of us who care about the cost of our energy – to our family budgets, our businesses and our environment.

We must be part of the great energy transformation

Let’s not wait for this government. Because let’s face it, we’d be waiting forever. Let’s seize the initiative and put power into our own hands.

The transformation of the way our world powers its economy – how we turn on every light, how we drive every car, how we heat our homes and keep our phones and computers running – is already one of the great stories of human endeavour. We want it to be a story people across Britain can be proud of.

We want the names of British inventors and companies stamped on wind-turbines, solar panels, and electric cars. We want our people to own a stake in this future, and to feel proud of the contribution they have made towards the safety and wellbeing of our children, and the health of our planet. 

We want secure, affordable, energy, designed, built and owned by the people of our country, drawing on inspiration from around the world. At this historic moment, let’s change the story the Tories are writing.

Let’s make this a Labour story, a British story. Of how we can be leaders, innovators and own the future. And most of all, let’s tell it together.

Lisa Nandy is the Labour Member of Parliament for Wigan and Shadow Energy Secretary.

This article presents the speech given by Lisa Nandy to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton yesterday, 28th September 2015.

Also on The Ecologist:

• ‘Jeremy Corbyn: the green Britain I want to build‘
• ‘Jeremy Corbyn: Big Six under public control, a solar panel on every roof and no new nukes‘
• ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s innovative energy policies are no 1980s throwback‘.

If you knew that there was zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark, would you swim more often?

Rhetorical questions aside, the fear of being eaten has a profound influence on other animals too, and on the way they use marine environments.

Turtles, for example, fear being eaten by sharks and this restricts the movement and behaviour of entire populations. But when the fear of being eaten dissipates, we see that turtles eat more, breed more, and go wherever they please.

It might sound like turtle paradise, but in an article published today in Nature Climate Change we show that loss of ocean predators can have serious, cascading effects on oceanic carbon storage and, by extension, climate change.

Cascading effects

For a long time we’ve known that changes to the structure of food webs – particularly due to loss of top predators – can alter ecosystem function. This happens most notably in situations where loss of predators at the top of the food chain releases organisms lower in the food chain from top-down regulatory control.

For instance, the loss of a predator may allow numbers of its prey to increase, which may eat more of their prey, and so on. This is known as ‘trophic downgrading‘.

With the loss of some 90% of the ocean’s top predators, trophic downgrading has become all too common. This upsets ecosystems, but in our article we also report its effects on the capacity of the oceans to trap and store carbon.

This can occur in multiple ecosystems, with the most striking examples in the coastal zone. This is where the majority of the ocean’s carbon is stored, within seagrass, saltmarsh and mangrove ecosystems – commonly known as ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems.

Blue carbon ecosystems capture and store carbon 40 times faster than tropical rainforests (such as the Amazon) and can store the carbon for thousands of years.

This makes them one of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet. Despite occupying less that 1% of the sea floor, it is estimated that coastal blue carbon ecosystems sequester more than half the ocean’s carbon.

The carbon that blue carbon ecosystems store is bound within the bodies of plants and within the ground. When predators such as sharks and other large fish are removed from blue carbon ecosystems, resulting increases in plant-eating organisms can destroy the capacity of blue carbon habitats to sequester carbon.

For example, in seagrass meadows of Bermuda and Indonesia, less predation on herbivores has resulted in spectacular losses of vegetation, with removal of 90-100% of the above-ground vegetation.

Stop killing predators!

Such losses of vegetation can also destabilise carbon that has been buried and accumulated over millions of years. For example, a 1.5-square-kilometre die-off of saltmarsh in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, caused by recreational overharvesting of predatory fish and crabs, freed around 248,000 tonnes of below-ground carbon.

If only 1% of the global area of blue carbon ecosystems were affected by trophic cascades as in the latter example, this could result in around 460 million tonnes of CO₂ being released annually, which is equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of around 97 million cars, or just a bit less than Australia’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So what can be done? Stronger conservation efforts and modification of fishing regulations can help restore marine predator populations, and thereby help maintain the important indirect role that predators play in climate change mitigation.

It’s about restoring balance so that we have, for example, healthy and natural numbers of both sea turtles and sharks. Policy and management need to reflect this important realisation as a matter of urgency.

More than 100 million sharks may be killed in fisheries each year, but if we can grant these predators great protection they may just help to save us in return.

The paper: ‘Predators help protect carbon stocks in blue carbon ecosystems‘ by Trisha B. Atwood et al is published in Nature Climate Change.

Peter Macreadie is Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, Deakin University and Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney.

Euan Ritchie is Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University.

Graeme Hays is Professor of Marine Science, Deakin University.

Rod Connolly is Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University, and Trisha B Atwood, Assistant Professor of aquatic ecology, Utah State University.

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

“Agroecology means that we are free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, growing many crops together – grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds – to create biodiversity, using maximum input from the land within the farm in order to produce food.”

So says Sheelu Francis, General Coordinator of the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu in India. The Collective uses agroecology – which they also call ‘natural farming’ or ‘zero budget’ farming – to address the issues faced by women and their families.

“Natural farming was introduced to us in the late 1990s. We were working with a women’s group… and we realized, from an expense analysis of their income, that most of their income was being used for health, for medicine, because there were lots of health problems [in their families].

“When we were working with the women, we came across lots of cases of cancer, and we linked these health problems to their food intake, especially to food produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This is why we thought to go back to natural and traditional way of farming.

“This was when we were introduced to ‘zero budgeting’, using no outside inputs, but using only resources from the farm like manure and things like that. We learned first how to enhance the available farm resources, using natural products, and then we learned how to increase production.”

Building ecological resilience to climate change

At the same time as Sheelu discovered how agroecology could help women economically, she was also involved in a ‘participatory action research’ project to study the impact of climate change on farmers. Her team learned that women in the community were managing climate change through growing millet, the traditional grain of Tamil Nadu.

“We asked women farmers in the community what seeds they had. Then we learned about millet. Millet seeds could be stored for many years and still germinate. In India, the South is made up of the Deccan plateau, which is elevated and dry land, and the people for the South all ate millet.”

Sheelu and the Women’s Collective learned more about millet and realized it “is nutritious and also solves the problem of water scarcity and erratic rains.” Millet could grow without a lot of water, and water scarcity is always an issue in Tamil Nadu, so it grew well in Tamil Nadu without requiring a lot of inputs.

“We came to the conclusion that millet is the answer to climate change, for malnutrition, to water scarcity, for soil enrichment, for environmental safety, and so on. We decided that millet would be the center of our work, both in terms of production and consumption. Millet became our way of life.

“It is one of the ‘safe foods’ we focus on, and we have campaigns for government programs and policies to support these changes.”

Agroecology against the Green Revolution

Millet also grows better when pulses like lentils and other plants are intercropped with it, adds Sheelu. “And that is how people have carried out their traditional agriculture systems. It is nothing new for farmers in Tamil Nadu. But because of the Green Revolution policies and technologies, farmers gave up all of those practices.

“Farmers were encouraged to grow all [rice] paddy, paddy, paddy, because of government subsidies which promoted growing rice, especially with hybrid seeds and chemicals. Rice paddies use lots of water, so when it is the dry season or when there is drought, there is no production at all.”

“Before the Green Revolution, we had 14,000 different varieties of paddy, but the Green Revolution displaced those traditional varieties and introduced hybrid varieties which only grow if you use chemical fertilizers.

“The use of chemical fertilizers has hurt the health of the people. Not only the chemicals, but now the people rely on polished rice for their nutrition, which is not very nutritious – 46% of children are malnourished in Tamil Nadu, and women are malnourished as well.

That is why we are against the Green Revolution. It has impacted human health, children’s health, environmental health, and it erased traditional systems.”

Multi-level education in health and farming

The Women’s Collective works with families and communities to learn about the benefits of eating millet, as well as with the women farmers to discuss the reasons why they should grow millet and practice the traditional methods of saving seeds and agroecological farming.

“We are trying to educate people on different levels. Even if they are not producers, we are trying to educate them about the nutritious content of millet. Women are seeing the health of their family suffer, so when we offer millet as a nutritious alternative, they adopt it quickly. We have a high school and college program about millet, which includes a cooking contest that emphasizes nutrition.

“We say, ‘in a week, there are 7 days, 21 meals. Eat millet for 7 meals.’ In the public food distribution system people get rice, so we started a campaign to get millet into the public distribution system. Families saw that millet was improving nutrition and were more motivated to eat millet.

“Women, most of the women, are food producers. They cultivate vegetables, greens. The men grow cash crops, they are already lost. They want income, so they want to grow cash crops. GMOs were introduced first through cotton, a cash not food crop, and the men thought they would get income, but they didn’t. This is why there are so many men farmers committing suicide in India.”

“We tell farmers, ‘if you lose your plant genetics [by buying GMO seeds and giving up traditional seeds], it is hard to get it back. If you use chemicals, you can revive your soil, your land, etc. But if you introduce GMO seeds, there is no turning back to your traditional seeds.”

Agroecology and the struggle for Dalit and women’s rights

Sheelu points out that the Green Revolution and the agricultural policies and practices that it promoted destroyed traditional farming that ensured healthy families and sustainable economies, exemplified in the shift from producing millet to producing rice.

But she also sees that race and caste oppression are responsible for this shift as well. Many of the women in Tamil Nadu that have traditionally grown millet are ‘dalits’, whereas rice is associated with lighter-skinned and richer castes.

“Millet grains are darker in color, so they are associated with dalits. It is poor people’s food. In the temple they give rice as Prasad (a religious food offering to the gods). Paddy – white, shining rice – is seen as god’s food. Racist thinking caused millet production and consumption to be marginalized.

“If you look at Tamil Nadu, traditionally and historically, before the Green Revolution, people consumed millet and only occasionally consumed rice. Rice was eaten as a special food during major religious festivals, about twice a year. This is why the gods got rice for Prasad in temple. The poorest of the poor had millet.

“In the process of trying to reach the upper caste, you change your diet, and then you change your agriculture. And the government policies pushed hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides for rice production, as well as a minimum support price for rice. This has pushed millet out of production. And everyone is maximizing water from the ground for rice. Even the government only distributes rice and wheat for people in need of food.”

Regaining culture through agriculture

“So we link eating millet to Tamil culture, because there is a strong group identity that is based in the Tamil language and in support of Sri Lankan Tamils. So we have linked the struggle for agroecology to our culture through the story of how we are pushed out of our culture of eating, which is why we are encouraging Tamils to eat millet. At Tamil meetings, millet is being served. There is a long way to go. But I have a strong feeling that we are on the right path.

“People who try to hold onto their ways of life are marginalized from their land, their seeds, and their way of farming. Now the industries are trying to take over, and to some extent they have succeeded. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole project of GM (genetically modified) seeds.”

Caste and gender oppression also affects the women’s lives directly. In Tamil Nadu, Dalit women farmers face have limited rights as women and have very few rights to access natural resources like land, water, and seeds.

“Land is a very big issue for us. Even among our membership, only 10% have their own land. 90% are landless laborers. And even when we can get land, there are problems. It is easy to get land the first year, but after the second year, once landowners see that we are producing, they take the land back. We are now advocating for the government to give long-term leases to single women on unutilized land owned by companies.

“We organize women farmers, particularly widows that are landless, into collective farms where they lease land and they grow millet, because we organize them for food security at the household level.

“The three things that we say, the first is land, the second is traditional seeds, which is very important, and the third is animals. And of course water. These are the things we are trying to focus on.”

Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau is Program Manager in the Global Movements Program at WhyHunger, an NGO supporting social movements for food sovereignty and agroecology.

Sheelu Francis is the President of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective (TNWC) in India, which is a member of the World March of Women.

This article originally featured in WhyHunger’s ‘Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty Into Action‘. It is also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Danielle Bailey-Lash, a 40-year-old customer service representative from the sleepy lakeside community of Belews Creek, NC, never used to get sick.

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she got plenty of exercise, never smoked or drank, and took pride in looking after herself.

But in 2010, Bailey-Lash was rushed to hospital with agonizing headaches that radiated from her neck to the top of her head. Doctors conducted a scan, and found a tumor the size of a juice box growing on the right side of her brain. She was told she had just a few months to live.

Miraculously, Bailey-Lash beat the odds: after undergoing surgery, she is now in remission, with little to show for her brush with death besides an impressive scar above her right ear. But when she returned from the hospital, she got to thinking.

At least 10 of her friends in the neighborhood had recently fallen seriously ill with similar ailments – “breast cancers, strange tumors, a lot of problems with kidneys and livers” – that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“It was just really strange – we were all so young and healthy, and at 35 or 40 we’re all getting sick”, she says.

Looking back, Bailey-Lash now thinks she knows what caused the rash of unexplained illnesses: the huge Belews Creek coal-ash impoundment, run by Duke Energy, that lay just a few hundred yards from her home.

The 342-acre pond, built four decades ago to serve a neighboring 2,240-megawatt power plant, contains more than four billion gallons of ash slurry – the waste from years of coal-fired energy generation, mixed with water to make it easier to pour into an unlined hole in the ground.

‘Always on my mind‘

Like many people who live near such ponds, Bailey-Lash fears that heavy metals and other toxins present in the coal ash are seeping out of the crude pit and entering the local groundwater. That’s especially problematic in rural communities like Belews Creek, where many residents depend on wells rather than municipal pipelines for their drinking water.

Indeed, a recent inspection found elevated levels of radon – a major cause of various cancers, and one known to be present in coal ash – in Bailey-Lash’s drinking water, and she was advised by local environmental officials to avoid cooking with, drinking or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The water problems make it impossible for Bailey-Lash to sell her house and move away, and have left her afraid for her own health and that of her daughter and husband. “It’s always on my mind”, she says.

And Bailey-Lash’s plight is hardly uncommon. More than 1,700 people – of whom around a quarter are below the poverty line – live within a three-mile radius of the Belews Creek plant and ash-pond, according to EPA data. There has been no formal study of health problems in the community, but activists and residents say that anecdotal evidence makes it clear that something is wrong.

Caroline Armjio, a former neighbor of Bailey-Lash’s, rattles off a long list of cousins, neighbors and family friends who’ve been afflicted by brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other mysterious ailments.

Armjio acknowledges that without proper scientific studies it’s hard to conclusively blame such problems on pollution from the Duke plant, but she can’t think of any other explanation. “There are so many people who’re sick”, she says. “There’s just too many.”

A quiet tragedy

America’s coal plants produce 140 million tons of ash each year, making it the country’s second-largest industrial waste stream. The vast majority of that ash is blended with water to make it easier to move, and then pumped into impoundments that are often little more than holes in the ground.

There are currently more than 1,100 such impoundments in the US, of which almost half lack any kind of lining to prevent seepage, and every state that has coal-ash impoundments has also had EPA-verified water contamination incidents linked to the sites.

That’s troubling because coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, selenium, and other agents that have been linked to cancer, learning disabilities, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma, and other illnesses.

According to an EPA risk assessment, people who live within a mile of an unlined coal-ash facility have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer due to arsenic exposure alone, without even considering the other toxins to which they’re potentially exposed.

More than 1.5 million children live near coal ash storage sites in the US, and there’s a growing body of evidence that those children suffer from increased rates of a range of health problems including sleep disorders and respiratory problems.

Catastrophic ash-pond failures, like the 2008 spill that saw 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash choke 300 acres of the Tennessee countryside, or the 2014 disaster in which a Duke-operated facility spilled 39,000 tons into North Carolina’s Dan River, just 35 miles downstream from Belews Creek, have brought coal ash into the public eye.

A hidden story

Yet ongoing but largely invisible ash-pond leaks remain “a quiet tragedy” of which most Americans remain unaware, says Mary Anne Hitt, head of the Sierra Club’s national anti-coal campaign.

“It’s a hidden story of the coal pollution problem in America. People don’t realize this is going on”, she says. “There are hundreds of slow-motion Dan River spills happening all around the country, where these ponds and dams are slowly leaking.”

Last November, Will Scott, the Yadkin riverkeeper, was part of a team that surveyed High Rock Lake, an hour’s drive south of Belews Creek, where Duke maintains three coal-ash ponds with a combined capacity of around five million tons of ash.

Extremely low water levels made it possible to see ugly orange streaks on the banks below the usual waterline, where Scott says waste from Duke’s ‘50s-era ash ponds was literally oozing out of the ground. “The ash is pushing down on the water table and pushing the ash out in all directions”, says Scott.

Duke insisted that the streaks were naturally occurring iron deposits, but Scott says subsequent testing of the orange streaks and the lake’s water found elevated levels of metals including lead, arsenic, and chromium, in keeping with coal-ash pollution.

And while low water levels made the High Rock Lake seepage easy to spot, Scott says, similar leaks are taking place, albeit less visibly, at coal-ash sites across North Carolina: “At this point there are seeps at pretty much every site across the state.”

Eat as much coal ash as you want

Duke Energy currently has around 150 million tons of coal waste stored in 4,500 acres of ash dumps, of which about 70% are in North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Dan River spill, the company admitted cutting corners and ignoring engineers’ requests for better monitoring at the site, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and environmental restitution fees.

Duke also says that it will spend upwards of $3 billion to improve its waste storage facilities in coming years. “We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event”, said Duke CEO Lynn Good in a statement. “We are setting a new standard for coal ash management and implementing smart, sustainable solutions for all of our ash basins.”

Like the rest of the industry, however, Duke still denies that its ponds are to blame for health problems in surrounding communities. Coal-industry supporters point out that the EPA considers ash a non-hazardous substance, and argue that the heavy metals and carcinogens found in water surrounding coal-ash sites are naturally occurring.

“Coal ash is basically soil”, says Tom Robl, a University of Kentucky geoscientist who serves as a director of the American Coal Association. Not only is coal ash non-toxic, Robl says, it’s so safe that you could eat a brimming bowlful for breakfast without adverse consequences. “Feel free to eat as much coal ash as you want – it’s not toxic”, he says.

The root of all evil

It’s true that there’s little direct evidence that coal ash is causing health problems in humans, says Dennis Lemly, a Forest Service biologist who’s been studying coal ash’s impact on fish and wildlife since 1975. Still, there’s plenty of reason to believe that ash is bad for you.

While traces of many of the chemicals found in coal ash are naturally present in soil, the process of burning coal serves to concentrate them, Lemly explains. “The fact is coal ash is not dirt. Coal ash is a highly concentrated source, and concentration determines hazard.”

There’s no doubt in Lemly’s mind that coal-ash ponds are causing significant harm, both to people and to the environment. In an analysis of 23 coal ash sites, Lemly found that since the 1960s the facilities had jointly caused almost $3 billion in economic damage.

Causes range from lost tourism revenues to poisoned fish stocks, with most of the costs directly attributable to leaks and spills from coal-ash impoundment ponds. “Surface impoundment disposal is the root of all evil when it comes to water pollution and impacts on fish and wildlife”, he says.

There’s also growing evidence that selenium from coal ash is bioaccumulating in the food chain, even in areas that have theoretically been cleaned up. Ash spills leave behind buried sediments that are ingested by insects and microorganisms, reintroducing the toxins back into the food chain, Lemly says:

“Coal ash is highly toxic, and it poisons fish and wildlife every day. We’ve got case after case of that … the toxicity of coal ash isn’t debatable.”

Increased risks

Radiation is also a potential concern: in a study released this month, researchers found that coal ash contains ten times more radioactivity than regular coal, and warned that the tiny size of coal-ash particles means that any spills or leaks could lead to serious health impacts.

“People breathing this air may face increased risks, particularly since tiny particles tend to be more enriched in radioactivity”, lead author Nancy Lauer of Duke University told reporters.

The US coal industry has sought to downplay the risks of ash-related radiation: in the aftermath of the Tennessee spill, TVA told consumers that the ash was less radioactive, gram for gram, than table salt. Researchers subsequently found that the coal ash released during the Tennessee spill was about half again as radioactive as typical coal ash.

The Tennessee ash, moreover, was laced with radium-228 and radium-226, which when ingested is between 15 and 42 times more carcinogenic, per pico-curie of exposure, than the potassium-40 radionuclides found in salt.

And when all’s said and done, says Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices non-profit group, the anecdotal evidence for patterns of health problems in communities abutting coal ash impoundments is overwhelming:

“The health issues around these ponds are similar from community to community. We can’t say unequivocally that it’s causing these illnesses. But it’s highly consistent with what we see with heavy metal toxicity.”

A parallel universe

But even as the evidence has grown for the health impact of coal-ash exposure, utilities have remained wedded to a “primitive and archaic” approach to dealing with their waste, says Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That’s especially problematic because more sophisticated air-pollution countermeasures have increased the amount of toxins present in coal ash, Holleman explains: “We’re using 21st-century technology to remove the pollution from the air, and then we’re using 13th-century technology to store the toxins that we’ve removed from the emissions.”

Part of the problem, says Lisa Evans, an Earthjustice attorney specializing in hazardous waste law, is that coal ash impoundments were exempted from rules introduced in the 1970s to monitor and regulate coal slurry storage sites.

Coal slurry ponds now have tough structural safety rules and mandated quarterly inspections, and as a result there hasn’t been a major collapse of a slurry impoundment since 1972. “But high hazard coal-ash ponds never have to be inspected, because there’s no federal oversight”, says Evans. “It’s really a parallel universe. It’s quite incredible.”

‘A good framework’

Recent disasters are finally leading to a rethink, at least in some jurisdictions, of the rules governing coal-ash storage. Last year’s Dan River spill sparked a popular backlash against coal ash in North Carolina, says Adams, the Appalachian Voices activist.

Crucially, many of the most vocal protestors weren’t the liberals clustered in the state’s Research Triangle, far from the coal ash sites, but rather the more conservative, Republican-voting residents of rural areas bordering the ash ponds.

“It’s become a joke in North Carolina”, says Adams. “How do you turn a Republican into an environmentalist? You have a coal-ash spill in their back yard.”

The prospect of losing the support of their conservative base drove the state’s Republican lawmakers to take action: the Coal Ash Management Act, which was signed into law last September, banned the construction of new coal-ash impoundments, and created a commission to oversee the closure of existing sites.

“I think coming out of last year’s legislation there’s a good framework in place, and right now the big question is going to be how well it’s implemented”, says Robin Smith, a lawyer who served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary for the environment between 1999 and 2012.

Ticking time-bombs

Still, concerns remain: many of the sites to be ‘closed’ will simply be covered up and abandoned, without any effort to address potential leaks from the ash still stored in the unlined pits, activists say. And while some monitoring and oversight programs are now in place, prior budget and staffing cuts have left the state environmental agency without the resources and expertise to adequately enforce the law.

Federal regulators have also weighed in, with the Environmental Protection Agency due to announce supplementary regulations this week placing the first federal limits on toxic metals in wastewater from power plants, much of which comes from coal ash.

The new rule builds on a prior federal coal-ash rule, introduced last year, which disappointed campaigners by failing to declare coal ash a hazardous substance, and by establishing a ‘self-implementing’ regulatory regime in which utilities are responsible for monitoring their own efforts, and can only be held accountable through citizen lawsuits.

“It’s putting the fox in charge of the hen house”, Adams explains. “Without a fleet of inspectors to go out and check, we’re relying on industry’s good graces. And they’ve not been shown to have good graces when it comes to being honest in reporting correctly.”

Experts say the EPA’s rules will raise the bar somewhat for states that have so far ignored the coal-ash issue, but won’t drive the sweeping changes that are needed. There are also concerns that Republicans could try to roll back federal efforts, especially if they reclaim the White House: Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, has already pledged to repeal the EPA’s “new and costly” coal-ash rules if he reaches the Oval Office.

But even assuming the EPA’s standards remain in place, they’re hardly tough enough to protect public health in the absence of strong state-level regulations, says Hitt, the Sierra Club campaigner. North Carolina’s efforts in the aftermath of the Dan River spill are the exception rather than the rule, she warns:

“Most states don’t have any real state standards whatsoever. Leaving this to the states means leaving lots of ticking time bombs on the shores of our rivers and lakes.”

‘All I want to do is leave‘

Back in Stokes County, residents are waiting to hear how high a priority the new coal-ash commission will assign to closing down and cleaning up the Belews Creek ash-pond.

Belews Creek wasn’t identified as a high-priority site in the board’s first round of rulings, raising the prospect that it could ultimately receive a low-priority designation. That would allow Duke to ‘clean up’ the facility simply by capping the storage site, leaving the ash in place in its existing unlined pond, with no new measures taken to prevent coal-related toxins from entering the groundwater.

In the meantime, officials have been carrying out water testing mandated by the new regulations. So far officials have tested more than 200 wells located near coal-ash sites, including several in the Belews Creek area, and barely 10% have passed the state’s water quality standards for chemical nasties such as lead, vanadium and hexavalent chromium.

Of the handful of wells that did pass muster, it recently emerged, many had improperly been given the all-clear by labs using testing protocols that weren’t capable of detecting contaminants to the levels required by state water rules.

The state is in the process of retesting those wells, and Duke – which still denies its coal facilities are to blame for the contaminated water – has begun paying for bottled water to be delivered to homes around the state where residents have, like Bailey-Lash, been told their water is no longer considered safe for drinking or cooking.

It’s unclear how long it will take for officials to determine the future of Belews Creek and North Carolina’s other coal-ash ponds. While regulators weigh their decision, Bailey-Lash and her family remain stuck in their now-unsellable home, fearful for their health but unable to move out of the shadow of the coal plant.

“All I really want to do is leave, but I can’t”, she says. “I feel like a bad parent. But we don’t have anywhere to go.” 

Find out more:

• Grassroots non-profit Appalachian Voices is a powerful voice taking on coal ash in the Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina area.
• The Sierra Club is one of the leading national pressure groups, especially through its influential Beyond Coal campaign.
• Coal Ash Chronicles, run by journalist Rhiannon Fionn, is a valuable source of online news and commentary on the US coal-ash sector.

Ben Whitford is The Ecologist‘s US correspondent. He tweets – occasionally – at @ben_whitford, and can be found online at BenWhitford.com.

If you knew that there was zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark, would you swim more often?

Rhetorical questions aside, the fear of being eaten has a profound influence on other animals too, and on the way they use marine environments.

Turtles, for example, fear being eaten by sharks and this restricts the movement and behaviour of entire populations. But when the fear of being eaten dissipates, we see that turtles eat more, breed more, and go wherever they please.

It might sound like turtle paradise, but in an article published today in Nature Climate Change we show that loss of ocean predators can have serious, cascading effects on oceanic carbon storage and, by extension, climate change.

Cascading effects

For a long time we’ve known that changes to the structure of food webs – particularly due to loss of top predators – can alter ecosystem function. This happens most notably in situations where loss of predators at the top of the food chain releases organisms lower in the food chain from top-down regulatory control.

For instance, the loss of a predator may allow numbers of its prey to increase, which may eat more of their prey, and so on. This is known as ‘trophic downgrading‘.

With the loss of some 90% of the ocean’s top predators, trophic downgrading has become all too common. This upsets ecosystems, but in our article we also report its effects on the capacity of the oceans to trap and store carbon.

This can occur in multiple ecosystems, with the most striking examples in the coastal zone. This is where the majority of the ocean’s carbon is stored, within seagrass, saltmarsh and mangrove ecosystems – commonly known as ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems.

Blue carbon ecosystems capture and store carbon 40 times faster than tropical rainforests (such as the Amazon) and can store the carbon for thousands of years.

This makes them one of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet. Despite occupying less that 1% of the sea floor, it is estimated that coastal blue carbon ecosystems sequester more than half the ocean’s carbon.

The carbon that blue carbon ecosystems store is bound within the bodies of plants and within the ground. When predators such as sharks and other large fish are removed from blue carbon ecosystems, resulting increases in plant-eating organisms can destroy the capacity of blue carbon habitats to sequester carbon.

For example, in seagrass meadows of Bermuda and Indonesia, less predation on herbivores has resulted in spectacular losses of vegetation, with removal of 90-100% of the above-ground vegetation.

Stop killing predators!

Such losses of vegetation can also destabilise carbon that has been buried and accumulated over millions of years. For example, a 1.5-square-kilometre die-off of saltmarsh in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, caused by recreational overharvesting of predatory fish and crabs, freed around 248,000 tonnes of below-ground carbon.

If only 1% of the global area of blue carbon ecosystems were affected by trophic cascades as in the latter example, this could result in around 460 million tonnes of CO₂ being released annually, which is equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of around 97 million cars, or just a bit less than Australia’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So what can be done? Stronger conservation efforts and modification of fishing regulations can help restore marine predator populations, and thereby help maintain the important indirect role that predators play in climate change mitigation.

It’s about restoring balance so that we have, for example, healthy and natural numbers of both sea turtles and sharks. Policy and management need to reflect this important realisation as a matter of urgency.

More than 100 million sharks may be killed in fisheries each year, but if we can grant these predators great protection they may just help to save us in return.

The paper: ‘Predators help protect carbon stocks in blue carbon ecosystems‘ by Trisha B. Atwood et al is published in Nature Climate Change.

Peter Macreadie is Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, Deakin University and Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney.

Euan Ritchie is Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University.

Graeme Hays is Professor of Marine Science, Deakin University.

Rod Connolly is Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University, and Trisha B Atwood, Assistant Professor of aquatic ecology, Utah State University.

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

“Agroecology means that we are free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, growing many crops together – grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds – to create biodiversity, using maximum input from the land within the farm in order to produce food.”

So says Sheelu Francis, General Coordinator of the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu in India. The Collective uses agroecology – which they also call ‘natural farming’ or ‘zero budget’ farming – to address the issues faced by women and their families.

“Natural farming was introduced to us in the late 1990s. We were working with a women’s group… and we realized, from an expense analysis of their income, that most of their income was being used for health, for medicine, because there were lots of health problems [in their families].

“When we were working with the women, we came across lots of cases of cancer, and we linked these health problems to their food intake, especially to food produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This is why we thought to go back to natural and traditional way of farming.

“This was when we were introduced to ‘zero budgeting’, using no outside inputs, but using only resources from the farm like manure and things like that. We learned first how to enhance the available farm resources, using natural products, and then we learned how to increase production.”

Building ecological resilience to climate change

At the same time as Sheelu discovered how agroecology could help women economically, she was also involved in a ‘participatory action research’ project to study the impact of climate change on farmers. Her team learned that women in the community were managing climate change through growing millet, the traditional grain of Tamil Nadu.

“We asked women farmers in the community what seeds they had. Then we learned about millet. Millet seeds could be stored for many years and still germinate. In India, the South is made up of the Deccan plateau, which is elevated and dry land, and the people for the South all ate millet.”

Sheelu and the Women’s Collective learned more about millet and realized it “is nutritious and also solves the problem of water scarcity and erratic rains.” Millet could grow without a lot of water, and water scarcity is always an issue in Tamil Nadu, so it grew well in Tamil Nadu without requiring a lot of inputs.

“We came to the conclusion that millet is the answer to climate change, for malnutrition, to water scarcity, for soil enrichment, for environmental safety, and so on. We decided that millet would be the center of our work, both in terms of production and consumption. Millet became our way of life.

“It is one of the ‘safe foods’ we focus on, and we have campaigns for government programs and policies to support these changes.”

Agroecology against the Green Revolution

Millet also grows better when pulses like lentils and other plants are intercropped with it, adds Sheelu. “And that is how people have carried out their traditional agriculture systems. It is nothing new for farmers in Tamil Nadu. But because of the Green Revolution policies and technologies, farmers gave up all of those practices.

“Farmers were encouraged to grow all [rice] paddy, paddy, paddy, because of government subsidies which promoted growing rice, especially with hybrid seeds and chemicals. Rice paddies use lots of water, so when it is the dry season or when there is drought, there is no production at all.”

“Before the Green Revolution, we had 14,000 different varieties of paddy, but the Green Revolution displaced those traditional varieties and introduced hybrid varieties which only grow if you use chemical fertilizers.

“The use of chemical fertilizers has hurt the health of the people. Not only the chemicals, but now the people rely on polished rice for their nutrition, which is not very nutritious – 46% of children are malnourished in Tamil Nadu, and women are malnourished as well.

That is why we are against the Green Revolution. It has impacted human health, children’s health, environmental health, and it erased traditional systems.”

Multi-level education in health and farming

The Women’s Collective works with families and communities to learn about the benefits of eating millet, as well as with the women farmers to discuss the reasons why they should grow millet and practice the traditional methods of saving seeds and agroecological farming.

“We are trying to educate people on different levels. Even if they are not producers, we are trying to educate them about the nutritious content of millet. Women are seeing the health of their family suffer, so when we offer millet as a nutritious alternative, they adopt it quickly. We have a high school and college program about millet, which includes a cooking contest that emphasizes nutrition.

“We say, ‘in a week, there are 7 days, 21 meals. Eat millet for 7 meals.’ In the public food distribution system people get rice, so we started a campaign to get millet into the public distribution system. Families saw that millet was improving nutrition and were more motivated to eat millet.

“Women, most of the women, are food producers. They cultivate vegetables, greens. The men grow cash crops, they are already lost. They want income, so they want to grow cash crops. GMOs were introduced first through cotton, a cash not food crop, and the men thought they would get income, but they didn’t. This is why there are so many men farmers committing suicide in India.”

“We tell farmers, ‘if you lose your plant genetics [by buying GMO seeds and giving up traditional seeds], it is hard to get it back. If you use chemicals, you can revive your soil, your land, etc. But if you introduce GMO seeds, there is no turning back to your traditional seeds.”

Agroecology and the struggle for Dalit and women’s rights

Sheelu points out that the Green Revolution and the agricultural policies and practices that it promoted destroyed traditional farming that ensured healthy families and sustainable economies, exemplified in the shift from producing millet to producing rice.

But she also sees that race and caste oppression are responsible for this shift as well. Many of the women in Tamil Nadu that have traditionally grown millet are ‘dalits’, whereas rice is associated with lighter-skinned and richer castes.

“Millet grains are darker in color, so they are associated with dalits. It is poor people’s food. In the temple they give rice as Prasad (a religious food offering to the gods). Paddy – white, shining rice – is seen as god’s food. Racist thinking caused millet production and consumption to be marginalized.

“If you look at Tamil Nadu, traditionally and historically, before the Green Revolution, people consumed millet and only occasionally consumed rice. Rice was eaten as a special food during major religious festivals, about twice a year. This is why the gods got rice for Prasad in temple. The poorest of the poor had millet.

“In the process of trying to reach the upper caste, you change your diet, and then you change your agriculture. And the government policies pushed hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides for rice production, as well as a minimum support price for rice. This has pushed millet out of production. And everyone is maximizing water from the ground for rice. Even the government only distributes rice and wheat for people in need of food.”

Regaining culture through agriculture

“So we link eating millet to Tamil culture, because there is a strong group identity that is based in the Tamil language and in support of Sri Lankan Tamils. So we have linked the struggle for agroecology to our culture through the story of how we are pushed out of our culture of eating, which is why we are encouraging Tamils to eat millet. At Tamil meetings, millet is being served. There is a long way to go. But I have a strong feeling that we are on the right path.

“People who try to hold onto their ways of life are marginalized from their land, their seeds, and their way of farming. Now the industries are trying to take over, and to some extent they have succeeded. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole project of GM (genetically modified) seeds.”

Caste and gender oppression also affects the women’s lives directly. In Tamil Nadu, Dalit women farmers face have limited rights as women and have very few rights to access natural resources like land, water, and seeds.

“Land is a very big issue for us. Even among our membership, only 10% have their own land. 90% are landless laborers. And even when we can get land, there are problems. It is easy to get land the first year, but after the second year, once landowners see that we are producing, they take the land back. We are now advocating for the government to give long-term leases to single women on unutilized land owned by companies.

“We organize women farmers, particularly widows that are landless, into collective farms where they lease land and they grow millet, because we organize them for food security at the household level.

“The three things that we say, the first is land, the second is traditional seeds, which is very important, and the third is animals. And of course water. These are the things we are trying to focus on.”

Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau is Program Manager in the Global Movements Program at WhyHunger, an NGO supporting social movements for food sovereignty and agroecology.

Sheelu Francis is the President of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective (TNWC) in India, which is a member of the World March of Women.

This article originally featured in WhyHunger’s ‘Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty Into Action‘. It is also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Danielle Bailey-Lash, a 40-year-old customer service representative from the sleepy lakeside community of Belews Creek, NC, never used to get sick.

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she got plenty of exercise, never smoked or drank, and took pride in looking after herself.

But in 2010, Bailey-Lash was rushed to hospital with agonizing headaches that radiated from her neck to the top of her head. Doctors conducted a scan, and found a tumor the size of a juice box growing on the right side of her brain. She was told she had just a few months to live.

Miraculously, Bailey-Lash beat the odds: after undergoing surgery, she is now in remission, with little to show for her brush with death besides an impressive scar above her right ear. But when she returned from the hospital, she got to thinking.

At least 10 of her friends in the neighborhood had recently fallen seriously ill with similar ailments – “breast cancers, strange tumors, a lot of problems with kidneys and livers” – that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“It was just really strange – we were all so young and healthy, and at 35 or 40 we’re all getting sick”, she says.

Looking back, Bailey-Lash now thinks she knows what caused the rash of unexplained illnesses: the huge Belews Creek coal-ash impoundment, run by Duke Energy, that lay just a few hundred yards from her home.

The 342-acre pond, built four decades ago to serve a neighboring 2,240-megawatt power plant, contains more than four billion gallons of ash slurry – the waste from years of coal-fired energy generation, mixed with water to make it easier to pour into an unlined hole in the ground.

‘Always on my mind‘

Like many people who live near such ponds, Bailey-Lash fears that heavy metals and other toxins present in the coal ash are seeping out of the crude pit and entering the local groundwater. That’s especially problematic in rural communities like Belews Creek, where many residents depend on wells rather than municipal pipelines for their drinking water.

Indeed, a recent inspection found elevated levels of radon – a major cause of various cancers, and one known to be present in coal ash – in Bailey-Lash’s drinking water, and she was advised by local environmental officials to avoid cooking with, drinking or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The water problems make it impossible for Bailey-Lash to sell her house and move away, and have left her afraid for her own health and that of her daughter and husband. “It’s always on my mind”, she says.

And Bailey-Lash’s plight is hardly uncommon. More than 1,700 people – of whom around a quarter are below the poverty line – live within a three-mile radius of the Belews Creek plant and ash-pond, according to EPA data. There has been no formal study of health problems in the community, but activists and residents say that anecdotal evidence makes it clear that something is wrong.

Caroline Armjio, a former neighbor of Bailey-Lash’s, rattles off a long list of cousins, neighbors and family friends who’ve been afflicted by brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other mysterious ailments.

Armjio acknowledges that without proper scientific studies it’s hard to conclusively blame such problems on pollution from the Duke plant, but she can’t think of any other explanation. “There are so many people who’re sick”, she says. “There’s just too many.”

A quiet tragedy

America’s coal plants produce 140 million tons of ash each year, making it the country’s second-largest industrial waste stream. The vast majority of that ash is blended with water to make it easier to move, and then pumped into impoundments that are often little more than holes in the ground.

There are currently more than 1,100 such impoundments in the US, of which almost half lack any kind of lining to prevent seepage, and every state that has coal-ash impoundments has also had EPA-verified water contamination incidents linked to the sites.

That’s troubling because coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, selenium, and other agents that have been linked to cancer, learning disabilities, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma, and other illnesses.

According to an EPA risk assessment, people who live within a mile of an unlined coal-ash facility have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer due to arsenic exposure alone, without even considering the other toxins to which they’re potentially exposed.

More than 1.5 million children live near coal ash storage sites in the US, and there’s a growing body of evidence that those children suffer from increased rates of a range of health problems including sleep disorders and respiratory problems.

Catastrophic ash-pond failures, like the 2008 spill that saw 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash choke 300 acres of the Tennessee countryside, or the 2014 disaster in which a Duke-operated facility spilled 39,000 tons into North Carolina’s Dan River, just 35 miles downstream from Belews Creek, have brought coal ash into the public eye.

A hidden story

Yet ongoing but largely invisible ash-pond leaks remain “a quiet tragedy” of which most Americans remain unaware, says Mary Anne Hitt, head of the Sierra Club’s national anti-coal campaign.

“It’s a hidden story of the coal pollution problem in America. People don’t realize this is going on”, she says. “There are hundreds of slow-motion Dan River spills happening all around the country, where these ponds and dams are slowly leaking.”

Last November, Will Scott, the Yadkin riverkeeper, was part of a team that surveyed High Rock Lake, an hour’s drive south of Belews Creek, where Duke maintains three coal-ash ponds with a combined capacity of around five million tons of ash.

Extremely low water levels made it possible to see ugly orange streaks on the banks below the usual waterline, where Scott says waste from Duke’s ‘50s-era ash ponds was literally oozing out of the ground. “The ash is pushing down on the water table and pushing the ash out in all directions”, says Scott.

Duke insisted that the streaks were naturally occurring iron deposits, but Scott says subsequent testing of the orange streaks and the lake’s water found elevated levels of metals including lead, arsenic, and chromium, in keeping with coal-ash pollution.

And while low water levels made the High Rock Lake seepage easy to spot, Scott says, similar leaks are taking place, albeit less visibly, at coal-ash sites across North Carolina: “At this point there are seeps at pretty much every site across the state.”

Eat as much coal ash as you want

Duke Energy currently has around 150 million tons of coal waste stored in 4,500 acres of ash dumps, of which about 70% are in North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Dan River spill, the company admitted cutting corners and ignoring engineers’ requests for better monitoring at the site, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and environmental restitution fees.

Duke also says that it will spend upwards of $3 billion to improve its waste storage facilities in coming years. “We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event”, said Duke CEO Lynn Good in a statement. “We are setting a new standard for coal ash management and implementing smart, sustainable solutions for all of our ash basins.”

Like the rest of the industry, however, Duke still denies that its ponds are to blame for health problems in surrounding communities. Coal-industry supporters point out that the EPA considers ash a non-hazardous substance, and argue that the heavy metals and carcinogens found in water surrounding coal-ash sites are naturally occurring.

“Coal ash is basically soil”, says Tom Robl, a University of Kentucky geoscientist who serves as a director of the American Coal Association. Not only is coal ash non-toxic, Robl says, it’s so safe that you could eat a brimming bowlful for breakfast without adverse consequences. “Feel free to eat as much coal ash as you want – it’s not toxic”, he says.

The root of all evil

It’s true that there’s little direct evidence that coal ash is causing health problems in humans, says Dennis Lemly, a Forest Service biologist who’s been studying coal ash’s impact on fish and wildlife since 1975. Still, there’s plenty of reason to believe that ash is bad for you.

While traces of many of the chemicals found in coal ash are naturally present in soil, the process of burning coal serves to concentrate them, Lemly explains. “The fact is coal ash is not dirt. Coal ash is a highly concentrated source, and concentration determines hazard.”

There’s no doubt in Lemly’s mind that coal-ash ponds are causing significant harm, both to people and to the environment. In an analysis of 23 coal ash sites, Lemly found that since the 1960s the facilities had jointly caused almost $3 billion in economic damage.

Causes range from lost tourism revenues to poisoned fish stocks, with most of the costs directly attributable to leaks and spills from coal-ash impoundment ponds. “Surface impoundment disposal is the root of all evil when it comes to water pollution and impacts on fish and wildlife”, he says.

There’s also growing evidence that selenium from coal ash is bioaccumulating in the food chain, even in areas that have theoretically been cleaned up. Ash spills leave behind buried sediments that are ingested by insects and microorganisms, reintroducing the toxins back into the food chain, Lemly says:

“Coal ash is highly toxic, and it poisons fish and wildlife every day. We’ve got case after case of that … the toxicity of coal ash isn’t debatable.”

Increased risks

Radiation is also a potential concern: in a study released this month, researchers found that coal ash contains ten times more radioactivity than regular coal, and warned that the tiny size of coal-ash particles means that any spills or leaks could lead to serious health impacts.

“People breathing this air may face increased risks, particularly since tiny particles tend to be more enriched in radioactivity”, lead author Nancy Lauer of Duke University told reporters.

The US coal industry has sought to downplay the risks of ash-related radiation: in the aftermath of the Tennessee spill, TVA told consumers that the ash was less radioactive, gram for gram, than table salt. Researchers subsequently found that the coal ash released during the Tennessee spill was about half again as radioactive as typical coal ash.

The Tennessee ash, moreover, was laced with radium-228 and radium-226, which when ingested is between 15 and 42 times more carcinogenic, per pico-curie of exposure, than the potassium-40 radionuclides found in salt.

And when all’s said and done, says Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices non-profit group, the anecdotal evidence for patterns of health problems in communities abutting coal ash impoundments is overwhelming:

“The health issues around these ponds are similar from community to community. We can’t say unequivocally that it’s causing these illnesses. But it’s highly consistent with what we see with heavy metal toxicity.”

A parallel universe

But even as the evidence has grown for the health impact of coal-ash exposure, utilities have remained wedded to a “primitive and archaic” approach to dealing with their waste, says Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That’s especially problematic because more sophisticated air-pollution countermeasures have increased the amount of toxins present in coal ash, Holleman explains: “We’re using 21st-century technology to remove the pollution from the air, and then we’re using 13th-century technology to store the toxins that we’ve removed from the emissions.”

Part of the problem, says Lisa Evans, an Earthjustice attorney specializing in hazardous waste law, is that coal ash impoundments were exempted from rules introduced in the 1970s to monitor and regulate coal slurry storage sites.

Coal slurry ponds now have tough structural safety rules and mandated quarterly inspections, and as a result there hasn’t been a major collapse of a slurry impoundment since 1972. “But high hazard coal-ash ponds never have to be inspected, because there’s no federal oversight”, says Evans. “It’s really a parallel universe. It’s quite incredible.”

‘A good framework’

Recent disasters are finally leading to a rethink, at least in some jurisdictions, of the rules governing coal-ash storage. Last year’s Dan River spill sparked a popular backlash against coal ash in North Carolina, says Adams, the Appalachian Voices activist.

Crucially, many of the most vocal protestors weren’t the liberals clustered in the state’s Research Triangle, far from the coal ash sites, but rather the more conservative, Republican-voting residents of rural areas bordering the ash ponds.

“It’s become a joke in North Carolina”, says Adams. “How do you turn a Republican into an environmentalist? You have a coal-ash spill in their back yard.”

The prospect of losing the support of their conservative base drove the state’s Republican lawmakers to take action: the Coal Ash Management Act, which was signed into law last September, banned the construction of new coal-ash impoundments, and created a commission to oversee the closure of existing sites.

“I think coming out of last year’s legislation there’s a good framework in place, and right now the big question is going to be how well it’s implemented”, says Robin Smith, a lawyer who served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary for the environment between 1999 and 2012.

Ticking time-bombs

Still, concerns remain: many of the sites to be ‘closed’ will simply be covered up and abandoned, without any effort to address potential leaks from the ash still stored in the unlined pits, activists say. And while some monitoring and oversight programs are now in place, prior budget and staffing cuts have left the state environmental agency without the resources and expertise to adequately enforce the law.

Federal regulators have also weighed in, with the Environmental Protection Agency due to announce supplementary regulations this week placing the first federal limits on toxic metals in wastewater from power plants, much of which comes from coal ash.

The new rule builds on a prior federal coal-ash rule, introduced last year, which disappointed campaigners by failing to declare coal ash a hazardous substance, and by establishing a ‘self-implementing’ regulatory regime in which utilities are responsible for monitoring their own efforts, and can only be held accountable through citizen lawsuits.

“It’s putting the fox in charge of the hen house”, Adams explains. “Without a fleet of inspectors to go out and check, we’re relying on industry’s good graces. And they’ve not been shown to have good graces when it comes to being honest in reporting correctly.”

Experts say the EPA’s rules will raise the bar somewhat for states that have so far ignored the coal-ash issue, but won’t drive the sweeping changes that are needed. There are also concerns that Republicans could try to roll back federal efforts, especially if they reclaim the White House: Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, has already pledged to repeal the EPA’s “new and costly” coal-ash rules if he reaches the Oval Office.

But even assuming the EPA’s standards remain in place, they’re hardly tough enough to protect public health in the absence of strong state-level regulations, says Hitt, the Sierra Club campaigner. North Carolina’s efforts in the aftermath of the Dan River spill are the exception rather than the rule, she warns:

“Most states don’t have any real state standards whatsoever. Leaving this to the states means leaving lots of ticking time bombs on the shores of our rivers and lakes.”

‘All I want to do is leave‘

Back in Stokes County, residents are waiting to hear how high a priority the new coal-ash commission will assign to closing down and cleaning up the Belews Creek ash-pond.

Belews Creek wasn’t identified as a high-priority site in the board’s first round of rulings, raising the prospect that it could ultimately receive a low-priority designation. That would allow Duke to ‘clean up’ the facility simply by capping the storage site, leaving the ash in place in its existing unlined pond, with no new measures taken to prevent coal-related toxins from entering the groundwater.

In the meantime, officials have been carrying out water testing mandated by the new regulations. So far officials have tested more than 200 wells located near coal-ash sites, including several in the Belews Creek area, and barely 10% have passed the state’s water quality standards for chemical nasties such as lead, vanadium and hexavalent chromium.

Of the handful of wells that did pass muster, it recently emerged, many had improperly been given the all-clear by labs using testing protocols that weren’t capable of detecting contaminants to the levels required by state water rules.

The state is in the process of retesting those wells, and Duke – which still denies its coal facilities are to blame for the contaminated water – has begun paying for bottled water to be delivered to homes around the state where residents have, like Bailey-Lash, been told their water is no longer considered safe for drinking or cooking.

It’s unclear how long it will take for officials to determine the future of Belews Creek and North Carolina’s other coal-ash ponds. While regulators weigh their decision, Bailey-Lash and her family remain stuck in their now-unsellable home, fearful for their health but unable to move out of the shadow of the coal plant.

“All I really want to do is leave, but I can’t”, she says. “I feel like a bad parent. But we don’t have anywhere to go.” 

Find out more:

• Grassroots non-profit Appalachian Voices is a powerful voice taking on coal ash in the Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina area.
• The Sierra Club is one of the leading national pressure groups, especially through its influential Beyond Coal campaign.
• Coal Ash Chronicles, run by journalist Rhiannon Fionn, is a valuable source of online news and commentary on the US coal-ash sector.

Ben Whitford is The Ecologist‘s US correspondent. He tweets – occasionally – at @ben_whitford, and can be found online at BenWhitford.com.