To mark Earth Day, Apple has launched ‘Apps for Earth’: a one week fundraiser for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

It involves 27 popular gaming and utility apps that have developed special paid-for content and an environmentally themed front page to the App store.

This partnership between Apple and WWF is symbolic of the rise of consumer environmentalism in our technological age – the idea that environmental concerns can be integrated into the production, purchase and use of consumer products and services.

The first Earth Day, held at the height of the US counterculture movement on April 22, 1970, expressed a new environmental consciousness that galvanised a rapid and high-level political response.

An estimated 20m people attended demonstrations and rallies calling for an end to polluting industries and making the point that healthy environments and quality lifestyles are interlinked. It lead to many of the environmental laws and institutions that we nowadays take for granted.

Over the decades Earth Day has had a number of successful refreshes and now claims to be the largest secular observance in the world, involving more than a billion people every year. Maintaining and broadening engagement with the environmental movement is what it is all about.

All the parties do well from the deal – but the Earth?

Apps for Earth certainly has the potential to build support among Apple’s tech-savy, global, middle-class customer base, but the direct financial contribution to WWF maybe more modest: Apple’s partnership with the Aids charity (RED) has raised US$100m since 2006. While this is a significant sum for any NGO it equates to just 0.18% of Apple’s US$53.4 billion net income in 2015.

Carter Roberts, CEO of WWF-US, sees Apps for Earth as an example of the rich creativity and the big ideas with big impact that will enable it to succeed in its work. I am not so sure.

From a business sustainability perspective this is a conventional deal: all parties benefit in terms of growth, productivity and risk management. Apple gains WWF’s endorsement for its efforts to green its supply chain along with a new ‘product’ to offer its loyal customers, thereby enhancing and protecting its brand and motivating its environmentally-minded employees.

WWF gains Apple and the tech media’s endorsement as the world leading conservation organisation and access to the tech-savy, middle class customer base of Apple’s App Store.

When it comes to saving the planet, big impact requires synergies between supporters and expertise. In a modern conservation organisation these imperatives are split between two professional ‘tribes’ working in different departments and with different educations, career incentives and ways of working.

Simple messages, messy reality

At issue is the need for fundraisers and campaigners to communicate complex issues fast and in simple and appealing ways. This may not help build the deeper understandings required to generate support for the pragmatic solutions being developed by technical colleagues in programme departments, who engage with the messy and complex realities of the world over the long-term.

A case in the point concerns the massive investments in proposed new rail lines and roads that cut across protected natural habitats. Behind the scenes, conservation policy experts are generating frameworks, metrics, financial mechanisms along with the insider trust and influence needed to reduce environmental impacts, secure compensation where destruction of areas is unavoidable and identify win-wins where they exist.

It’s a world of negotiation and compromise, of mitigation hierarchies and complex offset mechanisms, of shaping the future of the natural world as well as protecting the past.

This is modern conservation in practice, and it doesn’t translate easily into simple sound bites. It is increasingly at odds with the dominant fundraisier-campaigner narrative of ‘wonderful animals and landscapes which we will protect from the ills of the world for a small amount of your money, time and voice’.

Consumer environmentalism, such as Apps for Earth, aligns conservation with modern consumer culture. This offers fundraisers and campaigners the prospect of reaching new people and generating new funding streams – but it also carries the risk of ever more shallow public engagement and digital activism where masses of people get behind ‘solutions’ that simply make themselves feel good.

A divided movement?

For a decade or more those in conservation with the grounded, technical know-how have been working with tech giants such as Google to develop open access tools that that enable and empower better environmental management.

One of the best examples is the Google Earth Engine that allows sophisticated analysis of geo-spatial information and the development of open-source alert and decision support tools such as Global Forest Watch. Such tools are extending the reach of environmentalism into everyday corporate and investment decision making.

Apple and Google have very different corporate ethos. Apple is founded on a belief in design and that simple things work, whereas Google believes in the power of data, is more collegiate and the engineers are king. Conservation fundraisers are attracted to Apple, while their more scientific colleagues are working with Google.

Such alignments are understandable but they could also widen the gap between the popular and expert voices of environmentalism, creating a disjointed movement.

Earth Day needs to more than an opportunity for environmentalists to spread the word. It needs to be a day of coming together within the professional environmental movement. After all, the impact of half a million people marching down Fifth Avenue in April 1970 came from their demonstration of unity.

Paul Jepson is Course Director, MSc Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, University of Oxford.

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

Reuters has published a hit piece on the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC.

It’s titled ‘Who says bacon is bad? How the World Health Organization’s cancer agency confuses consumers’ – and comes headed with a huge picture of sizzling bacon.

Kate Kelland’s article implies that the IARC considers almost everything it meets to be carcinogenic, with processed meats and hairdressing the prime examples.

And Kelland claims authoritative sources for her criticism: “Experts from academia, industry and public health say IARC confuses the public and policymakers. Some critics say the way IARC considers and communicates whether substances are carcinogenic is flawed and needs reform.”

But what Kelland fails to tell her readers is that most of the criticisms of the IARC that she cites are from notorious pro-industry sources.

The corporate counsellor and the tobacco defender

The first quote criticizing the IARC comes from Bob Tarone, formerly of the National Cancer Institute, now at International Epidemiology Institute (IEI).

There is no mention of the IEI’s pro-industry bent, or that it used to list “corporate counseling” and “litigation support” among its list of services, or that it took money from a Danish phone company to produce a study that said mobile phones are not linked to cancer and leukemia.

Another critic of the IARC quoted by Kelland is Geoffrey Kabat, whose affiliation is listed as the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Again, there is no mention of Kabat’s connection to industry. But Kabat partnered with tobacco defender James E. Enstrom to co-author a paper, ‘Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians 1960-98‘, published in 2003 in the British Medical Journal, which argued that second-hand tobacco smoke was less harmful than previously believed.

When the US Department of Justice settled its case against the tobacco companies in 2006, it cited this paper as a significant part of the tobacco companies’ decades-long conspiracy to deceive the American public over the dangers of tobacco and second-hand smoke.

Prior to publishing the paper, Enstrom had received funding from the Philip Morris tobacco company and the Center for Indoor Air Research (a tobacco industry front group).

The asbestos apologist

The other critic of the IARC quoted in Kelland’s article is Paolo Bofetta, who is identified as having worked for 18 years at the IARC but as now being at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the US.

There is no mention of the fact that Bofetta left the IARC in 2009 to set up a consulting company, the International Prevention Research Institute, that quickly took money to do work for industry. Also omitted from Kelland’s article is the scandal that erupted after Bofetta co-authored an IARC paper on asbestos, published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2012. Bofetta had stated on the paper that he had no conflict of interest.

Yet according to Kathleen Ruff of the human rights advocacy group RightOnCanada, in 2011, at the same time that Bofetta was co-writing IARC’s paper on asbestos, he was being paid by an Italian company to help it defeat charges of criminal negligence after the deaths of 12 workers who had been exposed to asbestos at the company’s Montefibre factory.

The workers had died of mesothelioma, a type of cancer associated with asbestos exposure. A watered-down admission of Bofetta’s conflict of interest was later published in the journal as a ‘corrigendum‘.

According to Ruff, Bofetta testified in court that repeated exposure to asbestos doesn’t increase the risk of harm, so only managers that worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s should be held responsible. In other words, Bofetta argued that once you’re exposed to asbestos, you might as well continue to be exposed for the rest of your life without the company being held liable.  

Ruff also accused Bofetta and his co-author of carefully omitting crucial data in a scientific review that they published. These data show that continued, increased exposure to asbestos does, in fact, cause additional harm to workers. Ruff concluded that the review is marked by “serious scientific and ethical flaws … The article is biased and the bias served the interests of the company that had paid them.”

Bofetta has also produced scientific articles in support of other toxic industries. These include articles questioning the carcinogenicity of dioxin and of diesel fumes, and the link between leukemia and formaldehyde, as documented by the journalist Stéphane Foucart in Le Monde.

In 2013 Bofetta was nominated to become director of France’s top epidemiology centre, the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Public Health (CESP). A number of scientists, as well as the National Association of Asbestos victims (ANDEVA), complained on the grounds of his close relationship with polluting industries, as well as improper scientific and ethical conduct. Bofetta withdrew his nomination in early 2014.

Is anonymous ‘observer’ an industry representative?

Kelland’s article also mentions “One observer, a specialist in food and animal science who attended the [IARC] working group on red and processed meats in 2015”, and who “spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity”. This person alleged that “the expert panel reviewing the scientific evidence appeared to aim for a specific result”.  

The same observer is quoted as saying, “I expected that the science would be reviewed with a high level of rigour. But quite frankly, at the end of the 10 days, from a scientific standpoint I was really quite shocked.”

There is no mention of whether the observer was a representative of the meat industry.

Glyphosate the real target

A second article by Kelland, positioned immediately under the main hit piece, makes clear what this attack on the IARC is really about. It’s not processed meat or hairdressing, but the weedkiller glyphosate. The article is titled, ‘Is your weedkiller carcinogenic?’ and it paints the row about glyphosate’s cancer causing potential as just “the latest dispute to blow up around IARC”.

The article focuses on the disagreement between the IARC, which has named glyphosate herbicide as a probable human carcinogen, and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which says glyphosate is unlikely to pose a cancer risk.

The implicit message of this pair of articles is: only people who are mad enough to think hairdressing gives you cancer would believe the IARC on glyphosate.

Kelland’s article criticizes the involvement of Dr Chris Portier in the IARC’s glyphosate decision. He is introduced into the article namelessly as “an adviser” to the IARC who is “closely linked to the Environmental Defense Fund”, which she characterises as “a US campaign group opposed to pesticides”.

Yet the article quotes a spokeswoman for the EDF as saying it neither supports or opposes pesticides, but is “strongly in favour of scientific research to assess how chemicals impact human and environmental health”. Despite this, Kelland’s misleading framing of the organisation as “opposed to pesticides” is allowed to stand.

While focusing on Dr Portier’s part-time work with the EDF since 2013, Kelland fails to mention his long and successful career in prestigious mainstream organisations. In 2010 he joined the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Before that, he was with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for 32 years, where he served as the NIEHS associate director, director of the Environmental Toxicology Program, and associate director of the National Toxicology Program.

But rather than engage with Dr Portier’s distinguished record, Kelland prefers simply to have nameless “critics” say that he is biased due to his association with the EDF.

The Mysterious Three

Kelland mentions a letter signed by 94 scientists, led by Dr Portier, that was sent to EFSA criticizing the agency’s assessment of glyphosate. Yet she fails to address any of the substantive points raised by the scientists in their detailed and heavily referenced letter.

Instead she quotes the executive director of EFSA, who dismissed the letter as “Facebook science … you have a scientific assessment, you put it on Facebook and you count how many people like it.”

Kelland also fails to mention that EFSA was heavily relying for its reassuring assessment of glyphosate on three industry studies that are considered ‘confidential business information’. EFSA refused to make them public and also did not share them with IARC, leading the scientific reviews specialist Paul Whaley to dub them “the Mysterious Three”.

Whaley argued that if the evidence for the non-carcinogenicity of glyphosate “is as strong as EFSA claims, then there is no reason for keeping the data secret. If it is not, then glyphosate may be a chemical which needs to be removed from the market because it poses a cancer hazard. Either way, we need to find out.”

Orchestrated smear campaign?

In what looks very much like an orchestrated campaign, within hours of its publication, the Reuters attack on IARC and Portier was joined by two other pro-industry sources.

One was an article for The Times by Matt Ridley, in which he called upon IARC to “Stop misusing science to scare the world”. Ridley is an anti-environmentalist commentator who loses no opportunity to hype industrialized agriculture and attack organics, or, as a key member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to argue against action on climate change.

A keen proponent of deregulation, Ridley’s major claim to fame is having presided over the collapse of the Northern Rock bank in his role as chairman.

The second IARC attack came in the form of an article by Andrew Porterfield, which claimed IARC had been “infiltrated” by NGO interests. Porterfield describes himself on LinkedIn as a “communications consultant for the biotechnology industry”.

His article was published on the website of the Genetic Literacy Project, which is run by Jon Entine, a long-time public relations operative with deep ties to the chemical industry.

Reuters pieces don’t even try for objectivity

The Reuters articles are crude hit pieces that make no pretence of objectivity. It’s particularly unfortunate that Reuters published these articles in the guise of investigative journalism under its ‘Reuters Investigates’ tag.

Reuters previously had the courage to acknowledge that its coverage had not been sufficiently open about the industry affiliations of GMO lobbyists and to amend its copy accordingly.

Let’s hope it has sufficient editorial integrity on this occasion to similarly amend Kelland’s articles in order to make clear their use of pro-industry sources with massive conflicts of interest.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

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Acknowledgement: Much of the analysis in this article came from a private email from Dr Michael Hansen.

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This article was originally published by GMWatch.

Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India recently hosted Prince William and Kate, and is famous across India for its tigers, its one-horned rhinos – and its ruthless ‘shoot to kill’ rule for suspected poachers.

Under this policy, anyone park guards suspect of poaching can be immediately shot: no trial, no jury, no judge or laws or charges.

Park guards are armed with assault weapons and are not only given legal impunity when they kill suspects, but are incentivized to do so with cash bonuses, according to Save the Rhino which opposes the policy.

To increase the guards’ reach, local people are apparently rewarded with money if they report people they suspect of poaching. This encourages snooping and local vendettas, and risks tearing communities apart.

There is no way of telling whether the people who end up being shot actually were poachers. Further, impunity allows the guards to shoot people on the merest suspicion they are planning to poach even if they haven’t actually done anything.

Nearby tribal peoples are losing their land to the reserve, and are increasingly intimidated by armed park guards. Many of them have been shot at, despite no evidence at all that they were involved in poaching, and in spite of having innocent reasons for wanting to enter the reserve, such as to retrieve cattle that had wandered just over the boundary limit.

Most of the poachers who have been found are from miles outside the area, according to the park director in a 2014 report, many from different states in India.

‘Open war’

There can be no doubt that the principal aim of Kaziranga’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy is to execute as many poachers as possible, without any involvement from outside legal authorities. Guards have a special dispensation which effectively puts them above the law, and are motivated to kill.

An acrostic featured in the park director’s report “SMART COMMUNICATION” features the lines “N: Never allow any unauthorized entry (kill the unwanted)” and “M: Must obey or get killed” – maxims which would seem extreme even in a military context, let alone one of wildlife conservation.

The report adds: “So far this year nine poachers have been killed, many arrested, and at least five poachers received fatal bullet injuries (and might have died elsewhere …) However, this is also not enough.” The aim is clearly to maximize casualties and execute as many suspected poachers as possible – without the need to find evidence of their involvement in poaching, arrest them, or put them on trial.

And all of this is taking place in a politically sensitive border region of India with a history of armed conflict and many tribal communities, who bear no responsibility for the endangerment of local wildlife by imperial British hunters and loss of habitat – but who are now being punished as part of an effort to limit the damage.

In the past decade, at least 62 people have been summarily executed under this policy. The man who oversaw it for nine years, Bishan Singh Bonal, who is now head of the Indian National Tiger Conservation Authority, described his time in charge as “open war” and has spoken about the heavy toll it took on his staff.

Nevertheless, he believes the policy to be justified, and it may well be coming soon to other parks and reserves in India. Inevitably, it will once again be innocent tribes who suffer as a result of this officially sanctioned brutality.

A serious human rights issue

The policy is not nearly as controversial as it should be. Extrajudicial execution, no matter how terrible the crime it is administered as punishment for, inevitably leads to knee-jerk violence and chaos in the areas where it takes place. It bypasses all judicial checks and balances and gives low-ranking authorities the power of life and death over fellow citizens.

Worse, it has serious implications for tribal peoples and the increasingly hard-line conservation authorities who are given power over their ancestral lands.

As far as many Indian conservationists are concerned, tribespeople are a nuisance, primitive people, likely to be involved in poaching and in direct conflict with wildlife. There is absolutely no reason to believe any of this. After all, tribespeople have lived peacefully alongside creatures like the tiger for generations and live far more sustainable lives than almost anyone in the industrialized world.

It was not tribes who decimated the population of the Bengal Tiger by hunting on a massive scale for sport. It is not tribes who are now powering the destruction of flora and fauna through extractive industries and urbanization.

Yet it is tribes who apparently must suffer the consequences of conservation policy: eviction, assault, and even death, as part of an effort to limit the damage.

The best guardians of the natural world

Of course poaching is a terrible crime. Endangered species and their habitats should be protected, and the criminal gangs who profit from the trade in their viciously procured body parts should be investigated, punished, and deterred. But to say that the solution to this problem is to have gangs of armed men patrolling the reserves and employing violence above the law is to go too far.

Conservationists should be working with local communities, not criminalizing them, stealing their land and claiming to know how to administer it better. They should certainly not be encouraging the liberal use of summary execution against often innocent people.

One Indian journalist has quipped that in the heat of the moment, park guards could not possibly know the difference between say, an environmental reporter doing their job, and a poacher stalking his prey. The policy is not only absurd, it is also deeply immoral.

This is an extremely emotive issue, but it has to be treated with a proper concern for human rights, especially for the rights of some of the most vulnerable peoples on Earth – tribes. We cannot allow our passion for conserving the environment, or the rage we feel on seeing a picture of a butchered rhino’s horn or dead tiger cub blind us to this.

At Survival, we hope that influential conservation patrons like Prince William will start to acknowledge the humanitarian side of conservation, and encourage Indian authorities to respect the rights of tribes.

Lewis Evans is a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

The European Commission has shelved a legal opinion confirming that a new breed of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must undergo rigorous safety testing and labelling.

This paradoxical decision – in effect saying that organisms whose genes have been altered using certain novel technologies are not, in fact, genetically modified – follows intense lobbying by the US government.

Internal Commission documents and correspondence obtained by NGOs under freedom of information law reveal that US representatives pushed to exempt plants and animals produced through gene-editing and other new techniques from existing EU GMO rules.

The US pressure focussed on potential barriers to trade from the application of EU GMO law. It appears the US wants the EU to drop health and environmental safeguards on GMOs to pave the way for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement. The next round of TTIP negotiations starts on 25 April 2016 in New York.

In advance of a meeting with DG SANTE’s deputy director-general Ladislav Miko, on 7th October 2015, the US mission to the EU said “it came to their attention” that the Commission’s legal opinion was going to classify the ODM gene-editing technique “as a GM technique”. The US mission warned DG SANTE that this would be “another blow to agriculture and technology”, according to a Commission briefing.

Civil society organisations, small-scale farmers and the organic sector have called on the Commission to apply EU GMO law to all products of genetic engineering, including new breeding techniques.

However US companies are heavily involved in gene-editing. For example Cibus has already brought a herbicide-resistant oilseed rape engineered through ODM to the US market. Dow Chemicals and DuPont, two US companies that recently merged into DowDuPont, also have a strong interest in gene-editing, as documented by their recent patent applications in the field.

‘Gene editing is genetic engineering!’

The Commission’s decision transparently violates the EU’s own laws on GM crops and foods that require case-by-case risk assessment, detectability and labelling. GMOs are defined as any organism, with the exception of humans, “in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating or natural recombination”. Gene-edited plants and animals should therefore be covered by the law

But in the US, GMOs are not systematically tested and can even be placed on the market without any form of testing. Labelling is not required although it soon will be in the state of Vermont. Gene-edited plants and animals are mostly unregulated. For example, US regulators ruled that Cibus’ SU Canola is exempt from regulation.

“The Commission must recognise that gene-editing is genetic engineering”, said Greenpeace EU food policy director Franziska Achterberg. “It must come out of the bushes and reassure EU citizens that it won’t allow the GM industry to bypass rigorous safety tests and labelling. There are fundamental issues of public trust and transparency at stake, and the Commission should act accordingly.”

Nina Holland, researcher for Corporate Europe Observatory, added: “The biotech industry has waged an under-the-radar campaign to get new GM products absolved from GM regulation. The TTIP negotiations are seen by industry across the board and the US government as the perfect opportunity to block EU processes that are supposed to protect public health and the environment. The regulation of new GM techniques is a case in point.”

Greenpeace trade expert Juergen Knirsch warned that the Commission’s cave-in to US pressure was a harbinger of more and worse to come:

“If TTIP is agreed, the US government will always get its way. In fact, the EU will progressively weaken its standards and safeguards to suit the US, and any plan to better protect our environment and health would be neutralised before it hits the democratic scrutiny of the European Parliament.”

The new techniques: very clever, but poorly understood

Most gene-editing techniques use enzymes to cut parts of the genome’s DNA, after which the cell’s repair mechanisms ‘repair’ the break – but in the process insert, replace or remove bits of DNA. Because the technique is not 100% reliable, unintended DNA cuts or other gene alterations can also occur, with unknowable consequences.

The techniques in question are listed on the Commission website under the industry-coined heading ‘New Breeding Techniques‘ and include zinc fingernucleases (ZFN), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) systems.

Another gene-editing technique involves the introduction of short strands of synthetic DNA that trigger cells to modify their DNA to match the introduced fragments. This technique is known as oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis (ODM).

The gene-editing process is not well understood, and can result in negative effects on the environment, and human and animal health. As little is known about how these techniques actually work, it is difficult even to identify potential hazards.