Ice, plunging temperatures and harsh winds – it doesn’t seem like the right time for vulnerable, soft new life.

My daughter was born at this time of year, in the midst of a big freeze. My dad, a farmer, had been on standby in case I needed a tractor to get me through the deep snow to hospital. Luckily, the roads thawed just in time for her arrival.

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Now she is seven and my companion, along with her older brother, on our yearly pilgrimage to Horsey. Together we battle the coastal wind to climb the dunes, along with crowds of other people. We are rewarded with our favourite Nature spectacle: hundreds of grey seal pups and their parents on the beach.

Haul-out

Every year, the seals come here to give birth. It’s known as a rookery, but having experienced the heavy, ungainly feel of late pregnancy myself, I prefer the other descriptive term: a haul-out. About half the world’s population of grey seals are found around Britain, and this site is really important.

It’s got cute factor, with the fluffy white pups rolling over and seeming to wave at us with a flipper, their dark, liquid eyes like pools of innocence. Their perfect, white fur is a reminder that they evolved thousands of years ago and would originally have been born in a colder climate, onto snow.

There is plenty of humour here as well, with the comical lolloping of the adults, flopping themselves onto the sand with clumsy movements, but there is sadness too, as we notice the carcass of a pup.

I think the children enjoy it best of all when the male bulls fight, bumping each other with their blubbery chests and making strange barking grunts. It’s a scene that gets recreated in my living room for weeks afterwards.

The males are vying for a space nearest the females, for soon after the pups are weaned it will be the mating season. Any pup who gets in the way of a bull could be injured or killed.

Ensuring protection 

It seems like a peculiar time of year to bring babies into the world, but after a summer of feasting on fish the mothers should be in peak condition for the challenges of rearing their young. They need to be.

The milk they produce is so rich – containing 60 percent fat – that a mother can lose over 50kg in weight in the few weeks she feeds her pup. Meanwhile, the pups can put on 2kg each day, building the thick layer of blubber they require for survival in the winter sea.

After the pups are weaned, the mothers return to the waves and leave them on the beach. This often causes well-meaning members of the public to panic that they have been abandoned. The pups still have a bit of growing up to do before they can take to the water. In three weeks or so, that fluffy white fur will moult, turning mottled grey and, crucially, waterproof.

Then the pups can head for the sea and learn to catch food. Mind you, it’s tough out there. The Friends of Horsey Seals report that more than half of the pups born won’t make it through their first year.

The seals need our protection, while on land and at sea. However adorable they look, we must keep our distance, with dogs strictly on leads. This beach operates a voluntary closure for the haul-out season, with appropriate viewing areas. We can think about marine life as a whole too, by reducing our plastic consumption, helping with beach litter picks and using marine-safe washing detergent.

Thankful for that blast of fresh air, cuteness and pure natural wonder, we head back to the warmth of home. We’ll be back to visit the seals next year.

This Author 

Kate Blincoe is a freelance nature and environment writer, and author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Parenting. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Our planet has an abundance of animals that help ecosystems around the world thrive. What happens when they start to become endangered and even extinct?

In 2018 alone we saw three bird species go extinct: the Cryptic Treehugger, Alagoas Foliage-gleaner and the Hawaiin Po’ouli. We also saw the last male northern white rhino die at a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya in 2018 – with just two females left, there is no way to reproduce and continue this species now.

The Center for Biological Diversity has said: “We’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago”. We must do something to fix this mass problem.

Survival rate

Giraffes have been added to the endangered species list, and numbers of the long-necked mammals have gone down by 40 percent over the last three decades, mostly as a result of human activity in their habitats. There survival rate is threatened by human poaching. 

eCo2 Greetings has created an interactive map that highlights some of the most endangered and critically endangered species around the world.

All of these animals play a vital part in our ecosystems and their existence is in our hands. So, how can we as a planet improve the future of their existence?

Take a look at the map here to see just what species are endangered and how each country can work together to save them.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from eCo2 Greetings.

Symbiosis – an expanding network of revolutionary organisers and local initiatives –  is assembling a confederation of democratic community institutions across North America.

The emerging network consists of diverse groups and member organisations, from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi to Olympia Assembly in Washington, who are participating out of a recognition of the need to carry the movement for radical democracy beyond the local level.

The project has been gathering support over the past year and will be launched at a continental congress in Detroit from 18 September of this year.

Shared vision

Z, a co-founder of Black Socialists of America (BSA), said: “It is imperative that any groups or organisations moving in a social or economic sense on the vision we share for a democratic and ecologically sound world not struggle on their own, but instead under a global support system aimed at both dismantling our exploitative socioeconomic system (Capitalism), and building a democratic, cooperative system in its place.

“Symbiosis is in a position to build this support system.” 

Symbiosis has now released a launch statement announcing the congress, initially signed by 14 organisations.

It states: “Over the course of the past year our organisations have been strengthening our relationships with one another, learning from each other, generating shared resources, and honing a common vision of how to create together the genuinely democratic world that we need.”

Beyond the shared vision of radical democracy and egalitarianism, what unites these groups is a common political strategy, of building institutions of popular power from below to challenge and replace the governing institutions of capitalist society.

Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, said: “We have to move beyond the limitations of bourgeois democracy, particularly its representative forms, which intentionally limit the agency and power of communities and individuals in our societies.

“To get beyond these limitations we have to build democratic formations and practices in every facet of our lives—where we work, live, play, and pray — and utilize these formations to exercise dual power, that is utilising our own power and agency to govern our own lives beyond the limitations imposed upon us by the state and the forces of capital.” 

A shared commitment to building ‘dual power’ unites the member organisations of Symbiosis.

Formidable challenges

At the next congress delegates from grassroots organisations across North America will gather to form a confederation between their groups, to grow and coordinate a movement that can bring about a just, ecological, and free society.

Brian Tokar of the Institute for Social Ecology, a member organisation and sponsor of the event, said: “The problems we face today require a bold and unified response. We face the rising threats of authoritarianism and inequality, structural forms of domination between the haves and the have-nots, and the scapegoating and oppression of immigrants and people of color.

“We also know that the destabilization of the climate and the fossil-fuelled destruction of the Earth’s life support systems play a central role in all the problems we face.”

The idea behind the confederation is that these formidable challenges are insurmountable for individuals and small groups. Kelly Roache, a co-founder of Symbiosis, said: “By coming together, we can better recognize and organize the changes necessary to secure our future more than what any of us can do at the local level.”  

A common platform would also allow this growing movement to pool resources, raise their public visibility, and seed new organizing initiatives.

Local groups

The congress will prioritize local, democratically-run movements and organizations that are building new economic and political institutions, such as people’s assemblies, tenant unions, and cooperatives.

Local groups are invited to join the congress and sign on to the launch statement, and individuals can also join as members.

In April 2017, members of the Symbiosis Research Collective published the essay, Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond, which won first prize in the Next System Project essay competition.

Journalist and author Naomi Klein, who reviewed the essay, said that the Symbiosis vision “sketches out a flexible roadmap for scaling up participatory democracy”.

Over the past year, the network has grown to over 300 individual members, in addition to the 14 member and partner organisations who have signed onto the launch statement thus far.

The Symbiosis Research Collective has also published an ongoing series of articles with The Ecologist reaching an audience of more than 23,000 readers.

In July 2018, Symbiosis co-coordinated the Fearless Cities North America conference (NYC), which convened 300 municipalist activists from the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Latin America. In December 2018, they started a crowdfunder to fund the congress.

Currently, members are working on developing resources and information for people who wish to begin organizing where they live and work.

Endless possibilities 

Mason Herson-Hord, another co-founder of Symbiosis and co-coordinator of the research collective, said: “By the time of the congress, the Symbiosis Research Collective will have put together an in-depth primer on community organizing and dual power institution-building, including important historical examples, practical guides, and the theoretical underpinnings of our revolutionary project.” 

In their launch statement, these authoring organizations write that the congress is only the beginning.

“Ultimately, we will need such a confederation to carry our struggle beyond the local level. Ruling-class power is organized globally, and if democracy is to win, we must be organized at that scale as well. As this project advances, the possibilities are endless.”

This author 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Symbiosis. Symbiosis is a network of community organisations across North America, building a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. Find out more on their website. 

Dale Vince describes himself as a “head-down-getting-stuff-done kind of person”. This approach has certainly achieved a lot so far.

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The company he founded in 1996, Ecotricity, is Britain’s largest green energy company, supplying over 200,000 customers across Britain from a growing fleet of wind and sun parks.

Ecotricity has electric vehicle charge points in motorway service stations across the UK and funds what it describes as the world’s first vegan football team. Ecotricity’s electricity supply has been 100% green (as opposed to a mixture of green and ‘dirty’ energy) since 2013.

Political will

I spoke to Vince in the week that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its special report on climate change stating we have 12 years to keep global warming to a max­imum of 1.5 °C.

To achieve a fall in CO2 emissions to net zero, coal will need to be largely phased out by mid-century and renewables will have to meet the majority of future electricity supplies. It’s a pretty good recommendation for green energy suppliers like Ecotricity, but to achieve it requires political will.

“The current [UK] government and the previous government under David Cameron have been pulling us in the total opposite direction, shutting down the onshore wind and solar industries and promoting fracking for all it’s worth, when in fact we can’t afford to burn the fossil fuel reserves we know of,” said Vince. “We certainly don’t need to find more.”

Ecotricity provides “frack-free” green gas and has set up a People Power Fund to support activists on the front line. At the time of our interview, three men were facing jail terms for causing a “public nuisance” after taking part in an anti-fracking protest. They were later freed on appeal.

As an alternative to fracking, in 2016 Ecotricity launched its Green Gas initiative, which involves anaerobic digesters breaking down grass to produce biogas by “cropping marginal land for its grass three times a year, creating great nature habitats in the process”.

A typical 5MW Green Gasmill will require about 3,000 acres of grassland to supply 3,500 homes with all the gas they need, according to the company. “We haven’t built one yet, but we’ve got planning permission and we’re hoping to start one before very long,” Vince said.

Pushing for change

Transport is another frontier. Private electric vehicle ownership has increased a lot since the Nemesis– built by Ecotricity engineers – became the fastest electric vehicle in the UK in 2012.

Even so, we are still in the very early days of electric car adoption, according to Vince. Again, the UK government seems to be dragging its feet on pushing for change, scrapping grants to buy low-emissions vehicles just months after publishing its Road to Zero strategy. Nevertheless, Vince is optimistic.

“I think we’re heading up an exponential curve actually and next year will see a big uptake as a whole raft of new models come on the market from the major manufacturers, with ranges of 300km [and] that can charge in about 20 minutes.” Ecotricity has certainly been at the forefront of developments. It provides more than 300 charging points for electric cars. It has not, however, invested in public transport.

Diet is also a big theme for the company. Vince himself has been vegan for “three or four decades”. This year the company announced accreditation from The Vegan Society. “It began with a story about dead fish in fish farms in Scotland being used by [Scottish energy company] SSE. We dug further and found slurry in pig farms and abattoir waste [being used in anaerobic digesters].” This, he said, affected millions of people.

“We knew the use of slurry went on, but the extent of it was a surprise.” As a response, the company audited its supply chain to make sure it was free of these ingredients, instead using ingredients like vegetable waste, maize and grass, and in July announced the ‘world’s first’ vegan tariff.

Anaerobic digestion

In response, the anaerobic digestion industry said the process was there to make the best of agricultural and other organic wastes, not to cause them in the first place. “In an ideal world, there would be no need for our industry,” said Charlotte Morton, chief executive of the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association.

“But where these wastes are produced – and they are, in huge quantities – it’s critical that they are recycled through anaerobic digestion, which gets by far the most out of them compared to other waste treatment technologies, into renewable energy and soil-restoring biofertiliser rather than left wasted and untreated to release climate-change-inducing methane into the atmosphere.”

Vince said the response from the industry had been “kind of a lame defence. The intensive farming of animals is an abomination and the conditions they are kept in is appalling,” he said.

“It’s also having a huge impact on the environment. So they were defending something that I think is indefensible, saying we produce all this slurry so we’ve got to do something with it, when we say don’t produce it in the first place.”

Facing the realities of climate breakdown is terrifying, so I ask Vince how he stays upbeat and motivated. “I don’t let stuff get me down,” he said. “There are too many things to do, too many battles to fight.” In the challenging months ahead, the world will need much more of this positive energy.

This Author

Marianne Brown is editor of Resurgence & Ecologist. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now! You can listen to the interview on the Resurgence Voices podcast: resurgence.podiant.co

The potential for technological development to play a positive role in future societies has been enjoying a revival in alternative political discussions of late.

Optimistic, imaginative conceptions of the future are important, and provide a much needed source of hope and inspiration in the context of impending environmental catastrophe and the continued dominance of capitalism. They’re a welcome change from ecological perspectives that suffer from a somewhat dim view of technology and the future in general.

But these new visions can too easily mistake technology as the solution to ecological problems, rather than accompanying and supporting  broader social and political approaches.

Capitalist realism

So how can we free our imaginations from the grip of capitalist realism – the idea that capitalism is the only viable option for organising society?

How can we picture possible future worlds and the role that technology will play in them, while keeping our imagined worlds grounded in social and ecological realities?

For example, not forgetting that we are living on a planet with limited natural resources or that we have to consider how to make these imagined futures real.

Three recently written pieces explore some of these themes: “Fully Automated Green Communism” by Aaron Bastani,“Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows” by Aaron Vansintjan and “Pulling the Magic Lever”, by Rut Elliot Blomqvist.

Initially a tongue in cheek provocation, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) has morphed into a serious proposition about how technology and automation could be used to provide for everyone’s needs and free people from the drudgery of wage labour.

Bastani’s piece attempts to counter some of the ecological critiques of the idea, arguing that FALC can be green. Instead of trying to halt the progress of technological development and reduce energy consumption, Aaron argues that we should ride the technological horse to move beyond scarcity, proposing a kind of accelerationism where technology is rapidly advanced in order to bring about radical social change.

Shared ideas

In “Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows”, Aaron Vansintjan looks at accelerationist ideas like FALC and compares them to ‘degrowth’, evaluating the similarities and differences between the two frameworks.

Degrowth is a movement that has emerged from environmentalism and alternative economics and is focused on theorising and creating non-growth based economies and societies.

Although accelerationism and degrowth are apparently opposed, Vansinjtan finds some shared ideas, including their recognition of the need for deep, systemic change, their calls for democratisation of technology and their rejection of ‘work’ (or at least the idea that work is inherently good).

The key differences centre around accelerationism’s focus on reappropriating technology to achieve a resource-unlimited society, versus degrowth’s aim of limiting the development of certain forms of technology and staying within resource constraints.

Degrowth also seeks to slow the metabolism of society, whereas accelerationism aims to increase the pace of social change. Ultimately, while supportive of accelerationism’s inspiring vision, Vansinjtan finds it seriously lacking in dealing with ecological critiques.

Design fiction

Rut Elliot Blomqvist examines three different visions of possible future worlds and the role that technology plays in them. ‘Pulling the Magic Lever’ is a reference to how technology is used to answer social or ecological problems without explaining how it will do so: you simply ‘pull the magic lever’ of technology and hey presto, it’s all solved. It’s a running theme in all three of the imagined futures Blomqvist chooses to analyse.

The first is in The World We Made, a novel by environmentalist Jonathon Porrit, then The Venus Project, a technology based political proposition, and finally Fully Automated Luxury Communism. In their analysis, Blomqvist uses a World Systems Theory approach to evaluate the ideas, critiquing the story of modernisation by framing it around colonialism.

The World We Made is based on Design Fiction, where fiction inspires possibilities of new designs. It sees the human species in general as the villain responsible for destroying the environment. In the novel’s fantasy scenario, however, humans manage to turn things around and start to use technology and various existing world institutions for the common good.

As Elliot points out, this book flags up an important discussion around the idea of the ‘anthropocene’ (a proposed name for a new human-affected geological epoch), which may support the view that the human species in general is the problem, rather than certain humans or, say, a capitalist growth-based economy. They also describe the book’s tendency towards technological optimism: it presents technology as providing the answers, without explaining how, and ignores the socio-cultural-political reasons for current ecological destruction.

The Venus Project is found to be even further along the techno-optimist spectrum and again ignores how its proposed technological utopia might be brought into existence. As well as highlighting its fetishisation of the scientific process, Elliot explains how The Venus Project often engenders conspiracy theories, a number of which are dangerously close to anti-Semitism.

Non-capitalist automation 

Continuing the trend, FALC is found to involve similar techno-utopianism, where the working classes seize the means of production and use automation to create a world of plenty.

Elliot points to a blind spot, as FALC doesn’t consider the limits of post-industrialism beyond the western world. Elliot describes how all three rely heavily on ‘pulling the magic lever’, and while they show imagination, they are also limited by the fossil-fuelled mentality they seek to criticise.

To finish, here are a few general questions reflecting on these discussions around technology and the role it might play in future ecologically sustainable societies.

The role of human agency is often missing in visions of techno utopias, so how can control of and production of technology be changed, how will these imagined futures be made real? How can technology’s potential within the ecological and degrowth movements be highlighted and developed, promoting positive future visions and countering environmentalism’s ‘hair shirt’ image?

Should it be assumed that technologies will inevitably be developed, or should certain developments be hindered or prevented, and if so, how? For example, can we change the basis on which automation takes places and is implemented? Is non-capitalist automation possible, and if so, do we want it? How could it be made non-capitalist?

Finally, instead of being seen as competing positions, how can ecological and technologically based visions of the future back together?

This Author 

Corporate Watch is a not-for-profit co-operative providing critical information on the social and environmental impacts of corporations and capitalism. Since 1996 our research, journalism, analysis and training have supported people affected by corporations and those taking action for radical social change.

Corporate Watch is currently working on a technology project, if you are interested in knowing more or collaborating on future work, please email contact@corporatewatch.org.

If you’ve decided to try Veganuary this year, congratulations and thank you. You’ve taken up a resolution that not only benefits yourself but also saves the lives of others.

The Ecologist’s very own editor, Brendan Montague, is currently trying a vegan diet for the month, prompted and helped by wonderful Ecologist readers. He’s not alone – 200,000 people have joined his this year so far, with numbers growing rapidly.

It’s important, particularly for those of us who care about the environment, to really consider the impact that our food choices have on the planet and those living on it – going vegan is one of the most significant actions an individual can take to combat climate change.

Even mainstream retailers like Greggs and McDonald’s have recognised that there is demand for vegan products, with their respective launches of a £1 vegan sausage roll and a vegan Happy Meal last week. No more excuses that vegan living is inconvenient or expensive!

Being vegan can be extremely rewarding when done right – so here are my tips how to make this happiness last beyond Veganuary.

1. Keep it exciting

The world of vegan food is more exciting than most people think – it’s an amazing opportunity to build on what you consider as food and learn new recipes.

As meat-eaters, we probably took food for granted and simply saw it as part of our daily routine but when you go vegan, every meal is a joy.  

If you’re not the cooking type, don’t worry because there are plenty of ready-made quick vegan meals available too.

Make sure to look into supermarket frozen sections for burgers and sausages; refrigerated sections for lunch on the go and meat alternatives; and snack aisles for a wide range of vegan friendly products.

On your next trip to the supermarket, why not look out for soya milk instead of cow’s milk? Trying out all the different options is an exciting experiment. If you don’t like soya or want a change you could always try almond, coconut, oat, hemp, hazelnut or rice milk next.

2. Make it easy 

Some people see going vegan as a challenge because they think it involves learning a whole lot of new recipes and using a range of new ingredients they don’t have the time to find.

But there is a simple and fun shortcut to going vegan – you can just replace the few non-vegan ingredients in your recipes to still enjoy the good old favourites.

You probably don’t realise this, but you actually eat a lot of vegan food already and anything you eat can be made vegan.

There are cruelty-free, delicious alternatives to anything you can think of from dairy-free spreads, to plant milk and yogurt, to vegan meat alternatives and cheeses.

Becoming a vegan isn’t about limiting or depriving yourself so make sure you start by replacing animal products; after a couple of weeks it will become as natural as anything.

3. Ingredient-swapping 

Whether at home, at a friend’s, or eating out, meals can often be easily veganised by removing one or two ingredients, or replacing them with their vegan counterparts. It’s handy to know what and how to do this, so here are some ideas:

• Swap the cheese on pizza for vegan cheese (available in most supermarkets) and top with lots of vegetables and olives
• Swap meat or seafood in a curry for chickpeas or lentils
• Cashew nuts can be used to add protein and flavour to stir-fried vegetables and rice noodles
• Dairy-free spread (such as Flora, Pure or Vitalite) and soya milk can be used to make mashed potatoes creamy
• Try houmous instead of butter in sandwiches
• Vegetable soup can be served with a swirl of soya cream or coconut milk
• Garlic bread can be created using dairy-free spread or olive oil
• Replace eggs, including banana, jam, apple sauce and tofu
• A lot of ready-made roll-out pastry is accidentally vegan.

4. Know where to eat out

There’s a good chance these days that the outlet you’re visiting already has vegan options but check online if it’s your first time there. If they don’t have anything exciting, the chef should be happy to prepare something for you. Make sure to call in advance and request this to make things easier.

Travelling or new to the city? Just download the app HappyCow – an online directory of vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants, cafés, shops and more – or check their website.

South and East Asian (particularly Thai, Chinese and Indian) cuisines are most likely to be rich in vegan options. Being nice to the waiter and explaining what you’re expecting from them can go a long way. Can you spot a menu item that’d be it vegan if it wasn’t for an ingredient or two? Ask them to swap or remove it for you and voila, you’ve created yourself a vegan meal. Don’t forget to check all the side dishes too – some may be real gems.

Zizzi, Pizza Hut and Pizza Express serve pizzas topped with vegan cheese, with the former sporting a huge vegan menu, while YO! Sushi, Bella Italia, Prezzo and Pho all provide great options. Wagamama, Frankie & Benny’s, Nando’s and ASK Italian all have delicious vegan menus.

In terms of pubs, Wetherspoons paves the way with its dedicated vegan menu, followed by Loungers, Harvester, Cosy Club, Sizzling Pubs, and even the meat-heavy places like Toby Carvery and Beefeater. Subway, YO Sushi, Wasabi, LEON and Bagel Nash are all great for lunch. If you’re looking for something more standard, you can head to coffee chains or supermarkets – every one of them offers vegan lunch options now.

5. Make vegan friends

Whether it’s in real life, through Facebook groups, apps, or local vegan meet-ups, making friends with similar interests is important.

Why not reach out to that person who keeps posting vegan food on Instagram?

They’re likely more than happy to chat to you about veganism.

If you want to be a little more pro-active, you can try searching for local meet-ups and surfing through forums, posting about wanting to meet up.

After all, who best to exchange recipes, ideas and talk about vegan problems with!

6. Find help online

Vegans are a very welcoming and helpful bunch, always ready to answer all the difficult questions or vegan dilemmas.

There are online forums and Facebook groups to join – it’s a good idea to search Facebook for a group in your area, e.g. ‘vegan London’.

There are some great resources out there, such as The Vegan Society’s VeGuide app which is free to download on Android and iOS devices.

Users receive a combination of daily informational videos, motivational quotes, quizzes, recipes and discounts, all of which aim to help you ease into vegan living.

If the tips above still leave you puzzled, feel free to contact us at The Vegan Society and we’ll be more than happy to help on your vegan journey – we’re on info@vegansociety.com or 0121 523 1730.

This author

Dominika Piasecka is media and PR officer at The Vegan Society and a keen vegan activist. If you care about the environment and want to learn about how veganism benefits it, take our seven-day planet-saving challenge here.

Environmentalists and community activists have claimed a major victory after the closure of an incinerator in Commerce, a city in the state of Los Angeles, USA –  a location as famous for its smog as its celebrities.  

The burner has been emitting contaminants above the legal maximum ever since it began operating in 1986, damaging the lives of people in the already overburdened surrounding community, they argue. But the people fought back and finally convinced Commerce to not renew its contract with the facility.

Unfortunately, there are still 76 similar garbage-burning plants across the US, notorious for emitting way too much. Another pattern is that the lower income communities and communities of color are disproportionately hit.

“No community should have to breathe in the pollution from other people’s garbage,” says Laura Cortez of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, the community organization that led the charge to defeat the Commerce incinerator.

Renewable energy

Her colleague Whitney Amaya added: “Communities have always been at the forefront of enacting positive change by standing together and fighting against facilities that threat our health and environment. The Commerce Incinerator shutdown not only serves as a model for other communities facing similar issues, but is also another clear example of community power and victory.”

Opportunities for ending incineration are rising, as a generation of incinerators is coming to the end of their normal lifespans. Cities hold the key. They need to choose between a lock-in of decades of harmful pollution or leaping forward by closing the incinerators. That’s not as hard as it may seem.

Studies show that more than 90 percent of materials currently disposed of in incinerators and landfills can be reused, recycled, and composted. Incineration actually destroys valuable resources and causes emissions of dangerous chemicals like mercury, dioxins and ultra-fine particles.

Contrary to the claims made by the big companies who run them, incinerators make our climate change problem a lot worse. Compared to coal, waste incineration produces twice as much carbon pollution per unit of energy.

Amazingly, these companies get subsidies for causing climate change because they brand themselves as renewable energy producers. In that process, they take money away from investments in real renewable energy like solar and wind.

Another incinerator

To make things worse, they locked both greenhouse gas emissions and waste production in, by writing in the contracts that the cities provide a minimum amount of waste in order to keep the facilities operational.

On top of that, incinerators are so costly that they even contributed to the bankruptcy of cities like Detroit and Harrisburg. Detroit’s incinerator is so bad that it exceeded emissions limits more than 750 times over the last five years.

When the health costs are included, the costs go ballistic. As an example: healthcare expenses related one facility’s emissions has costed Maryland $21.8 million annually. That is over half a billion during a normal lifespan of 30 years.

The good news is that people are fighting back against the dinosaur waste-burning machines and they are winning significant gains.

In Baltimore, a group of high school students won against the incinerator company Energy Answers, who wanted to build yet another incinerator in Baltimore.

Subsidies

The proposed plant would have burned 4,000 tons of solid waste per day, making it the largest incinerator ever built. It would have been built right next to schools, parks and homes in a neighborhood that already suffers the worst air pollution levels in the state. This madness was fortunately stopped before it ever became a reality.

Destiny Watford, one of the key leaders in the fight, won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in 2016. She didn’t stop there.

After founding the student group Free Your Voice, she and her fellow students and community members are building recycling programs and working with the city to install other zero waste systems that would make the existing incinerator, BRESCO, obsolete.

Just this fall, the city was awarded a scholarship to build a new program to reduce food waste through waste reduction, composting, and food donations.

Thanks to community efforts to educate policymakers on the dangers of the city’s incinerator, the Maryland Congress considered a bill to strip incinerators in the state of their “green energy” label that makes them eligible for subsidies.  

Zero waste

Back in Detroit, the group Breathe Free Detroit recently delivered a petition to Mayor Mike Duggan with nearly 15,000 signatures demanding he shut down the incinerator.

They also released a comprehensive report detailing the many emissions violations and other issues since it began operating in 1986.

At the same time, people know that just saying ‘no’ is not enough. Locals are also building solutions that focus on conserving natural resources, not burning them.

In 2014 the coalition Zero Waste Detroit worked with the city to roll out its first curbside recycling program. It helped to increase household participation to 20 percent, ahead of schedule.

Although communities continue to face incinerator pollution, the drumbeat for environmental justice and a transition to zero waste grows stronger every day.

Incinerators are closing across the country and cities are creating zero waste plans. There’s a sense of rising awareness that disposing waste and disposing whole communities are intertwined and that clean air is not a luxury but a right for all.

This Author

Claire Arkin is the Campaign and Communications Associate for GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives). For more information on failing incinerators across the country, visit: no-burn.org. You can find more information on the Detroit incinerator in the Atlas of Environmental Justice.

The UK’s long-term food security will be in doubt if the agriculture bill does not include tough targets on animal welfare and the farming landscape, and to reverse the decline in natural resources, campaigners said this week.

The agriculture bill aims to establish a new system for farm payments once the UK leaves the EU. Environment secretary Michael Gove says that farmers will be paid for providing public benefits, including to the environment.

But campaigners fear that it does not go far enough on issues such as chemicals and contains no detail on implementation.

New talent

The Nature-Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) wants clear minimum standards to safeguard, maintain and enhance animal welfare, the farming landscape and the agricultural industry; measures to improve sustainability across the industry and reverse the declines in natural resources and ecosystems; and a requirement for the government to publish a progress report every five years.

Martin Lines, chair of the NFFN, said: “We can only guarantee long term food security by protecting and managing the natural assets which enable food production. If the Government does not amend the Bill to include minimum standards – and put a stop to the environmental degradation caused by intensive farming – British farmers will be in danger of losing their livelihoods.”

The NFFN, which has over 2,000 members a year after it was created, made the call at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, an event running alongside the more traditional Oxford Farming Conference but focusing on sustainability.

Strong regulation

Gove spoke at both conferences. He said that the UK was undergoing a fourth agricultural revolution, which needed to factor in environmental and social factors.

“This fourth agricultural revolution will require us to change the way we work on the land and invest in its future, will force us to reform the role of government in regulating and supporting farming; will demand new thinking and new talent in food production, and will, inevitably, require tough choices to be made,” he said.

He has commissioned Henry Dimbleby, founder of healthy fast food chain Leon, to draw up a new food strategy for the UK, he said.  A spokesperson for the environment department (Defra) said that its new farming policy would maintain strong regulation alongside proportionate enforcement.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

Stand at a certain point along the dusty highway on the northern outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, a town in the Peruvian Amazon, and you’ll see trucks transporting huge quantities of wood regularly pulling up and stopping.

Sometimes there are as many as five or six trucks there, some carrying unprocessed logs, some sawn timber. The drivers, often with a wad of paperwork in one hand, climb down and potter off towards a nondescript regional government office.

This can happen all day, some days more than most, depending on the season. The wood is cut from logging concessions, indigenous communities and other harvest areas to the north – the heart of Peru’s great Madre de Dios region stretching all the way to Bolivia and Brazil. 

Widespread illegalities 

What the truck drivers are doing, there in a district called El Triunfo, is calling at a timber sector control post run by the regional government. They need to have their paperwork stamped by an official. Various exceptions aside, no wood in Peru should ever be transported unless it is accompanied by permits stating its point-of-origin, among other things.

At least, that’s the theory. But what if the permits have been falsified and the wood doesn’t really come from where they say it does? That means the wood is illegal and laundered: it appears to come from point A, perhaps a logging concession or indigenous community, when actually it comes from point B, C or D, such as a national park, communal reserve or a logging concession where no permission to log has been granted. 

For the last ten years, the only people consistently in a position to know if wood hasn’t come from where the transport permits say has been an independent government agency called the Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre (OSINFOR).

That is because OSINFOR inspectors, unlike anyone else, have regularly travelled into the Amazon to visit the harvest areas where the wood is purportedly extracted and to find the specific locations where each tree was standing, according to the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinates given in the harvest areas’ operating plans. How otherwise can you tell if the wood is really legal or not?

In making these inspections, OSINFOR has done more than anyone to expose the widespread illegalities and laundering that have dominated Peru’s timber sector for decades – and generated some powerful, well-organised and sometimes violent opposition.

Stripped of independence 

The statistics – up there on OSINFOR’s website for all to see – make for fascinating reading: thousands of inspections made, over 130,000 trees effectively “faked” in operating plans, and at least 2.5 million cubic metres of “unauthorised” wood identified.

Earlier this year it reported that 67 precent of the timber purportedly from the harvest areas that it inspected in 2016 and 2017 was “unauthorised” – down from a previous figure of almost 90 percent. 

The result of such impressive endeavours? To be stripped of its independence – so crucial to its effectiveness – by president Martin Vizcarra last month when he signed a Supreme Decree moving OSINFOR to the Ministry of Environment, following several years of such a threat knocking around.

This is arguably illegal under Peruvian law and violates the country’s so-called “Trade Promotion Agreement” (TPA) with the US, which states that OSINFOR must be “independent and separate.” 

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. 2018 marked the ten-year anniversary of OSINFOR becoming independent, and the Decree was emitted at the same time as the United Nations climate change talks were taking place in Poland. Earlier in the year, UN Climate Change’s first Annual Report stated that deforestation and forest degradation “account for approximately 17 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than the transport sector.” 

Punitive measures 

No doubt about it, this has happened precisely because of what OSINFOR has been exposing. It is a major step back in protecting the Peruvian Amazon – the fourth biggest tropical forest worldwide after Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. 

But might Vizcarra et al backtrack? And how might the US respond? A statement by various organisations including the Environmental Investigation Agency and Global Witness – for whom I was working as a consultant until recently – is calling on “the Peruvian government to reconsider its decision and restore OSINFOR’s independence, while strengthening it in order to guarantee that no similar attempt will succeed in the future.” 

Politicians in the US are making similar calls. Just before Christmas, six Democrats, including John Lewis and Richard Neal, wrote to the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer urging him to “insist that this brazen, bad faith decision be reversed formally”, describing it as a “flagrant attack” on the US-Peru TPA.

According to the Associated Press on 4 January, Lighthizer has responded to Neal by calling the decision “unacceptable” and saying the US has “forcefully communicated” its position to Peru. This case, the AP claims, “could mark a first for the US in taking potential punitive measures against an international partner accused of violating environmental protections in a free trade deal.”

This Author 

David Hill is a freelance journalist focusing on human rights and environmental issues across Latin America.

In the fifteen years since the Canadian ore mining company Dundee Precious Metals (DPM) began extracting ores in Bulgaria, the company’s relationships with the public and authorities have really evolved. 

Lyubomir Haynov, operation director of the local branch of the Canadian DPM, argues that the technologies applied in the new gold mine in Krumovgrad rate among the most advanced in the world.

Konstantina Gradeva-Vassileva, the Director for Sustainable Business Development, agrees: “We have learnt a lot about the environmental and social impact of mining”.

Local response

DPM is controlled by the Canadian billionaire Ned Goodman. The company bought the concession rights of the Chelopech ore mine – one of the big deposits of gold in Europe – in 2003. 

The price was set at 26 million dollars, and in several years the mine scored annual sales of hundreds of millions. Due to stark public dissent, the company failed to expand its Bulgarian production with cyanide technologies.

Instead, the Canadians acquired a smelter in Namibia, to which they ship the Chelopech concentrate containing gold, copper, and large amounts of arsenic. The ore mine in Krumovgrad, Bulgaria, in the Eastern Rhodope Mountain is the next phase of DPM expansion.

Initially, the locals opposed the mine, but a cunning PR strategy and some pressure from the authorities gradually changed their attitudes. Vasvi Ibriam, the mayor of the Sarnak village near the gold mine, said: “It’s true, people get annoyed by the rock blasts and the dust. But we have to endure this for the jobs’ sake.”

According to Vasvi, every man who wants to work now may get a job in Krumovgrad – not only at Dundee and its contractors but also at the new rubber factory or in the big municipal projects.

Environmental impacts

Unofficially, the operation in Krumovgrad will commence in full in the spring of 2019 with the opening of the flotation factory. The technology envisages lower environmental impacts: there will be no tailing pond, and the water used in the production process will be purified to drinking quality before being poured back into the nearby river. 

Haynov proudly stated that they are “certainly the first ore mine in Bulgaria to do this”.

The online system for environmental monitoring developed by the company reveals many cases of overshooting the permissible limits of fine particles around the mining site.

In addition, DPM created a fund worth $5 million to back up small and medium-scale local businesses. This social support might be inspired by the EBRD – last year the development bank entered the Dundee family by swapping an extended credit line for a 10-percent share in the company.   

No doubt, the investor’s efforts in Chelopech and Krumovgrad deserve praise. Still the Canadian company cannot turn into a saint overnight – neither in environmental nor social or fiscal senses.   

Arsenic levels 

In the summer of 2015, a mission of Bulgarian environmentalists visited the town of Tzumeb in Namibia to get a firsthand view of the DPM smelter situated there.

Unlike the Bulgarian branch – for whom public communications seem to be of highest priority to the company – the management of the African branch denied a meeting with the guests.

Nevertheless, with the help of local activists the mission proceeded to explore the biggest problem in Tzumeb – arsenic dust. The above photograph is an aerial picture of the arsenic dumpsite in Tzumeb.

The polymetallic ores of Chelopech have over five percent arsenic content, and the technology used in the Namibian smelter is not suited to process them safely.

When the high-grade arsenic concentrates from Bulgaria started to enter in the 2010s, the smelter’s workers felt the difference and energetically protested. The authorities intervened, and production volumes were halved. Yet from the beginning of 2014, the production volumes were set at two times the initial level.  

Toxic dust

In 2012, on the request of the union activist Oscar Kakunga (latter dismissed) a full-scale health examination of the smelter’s workers took place. 1,722 probes were taken, and in 69 percent of the cases the concentration of arsenic in the workers’ blood and urine exceeded 100 μg/g.

In the neighboring South Africa, the reference value for over-exposure to arsenic is 50 μg/g. The World Health Organization (WHO) holds that “a safe level of arsenic cannot be established”, since any exposure is extremely hazardous.

The management states that after 2014 the levels of arsenic in the workers’ urine have diminished without citing numbers, the EBRD takes that at face value. 

Several thousand tons of arsenic trioxide from Tzumeb are sold to Malaysia and South Africa to be used as pesticides, a substance not allowed in the EU. The Bulgarian mission managed to get hold of photos of the storage site for the surplus arsenic. Only several hundred meters from residential buildings, thousands of tons of arsenic are stored in ordinary sugar bags in the open – decaying under the African sun.   

Genady Kondarev, who took part in the Tzumeb investigation, recalled: “There was a colossal quantity of toxic dust piled on the site. After a couple of years under the hat of Dundee, this facility had almost entirely used up its storage site for arsenic waste. Since the shocking results of the medical tests in 2012, we haven’t heard about newer health checks with publicly accessible results regarding the arsenic levels in the worker’s organisms”. 

Corporate networks 

In addition to its low environmental standards and cheap labor, Namibia attracts foreign investors with zero tax rates. The smelter of Tzumeb lies in a Special Processing Zone, freed from corporate taxes and VAT.

The Human Development Index ranks Namibia 129th in the world, yet DPM – and thus its shareholder EBRD, a bank that explicitly states its social commitments – do not feel embarrassed by the fact that they deny the national budget the funds that might be used for healthcare or education purposes. 

The Tzumeb smelter also processes concentrates from the El Brocal mine in Peru, which has even higher arsenic content, as well as other sources.

The output of the smelter is “black copper” – an alloy refined up to 98.5 percent – which contains not only copper and gold but also several valuable rare earth metals. It is a mystery where the final processing to marketable ingots is taking place and, correspondingly, who collects the value of the rare earths. The only hint we get is from DPM’s corporate website, which states that it supplies “refineries in Europe and Asia”.  

Until recently, the output of the smelter was brought to the market by the Louis Dreyfus Company, the letter “D” in the notorious ABCD group of corporations that dominate the world’s food trade.

The Metal Department of Louis Dreyfus had operations in Peru, Namibia, Australia, Mexico, China etc., and scored high profits. However, in the middle of 2018 this metal division was sold to the Chinese NCCL Natural Resources Investment Fund. Prior to this, Dundee Precious Metals had stated that it has a long-term trade contract with Louis Dreyfus. The new destination of Bulgarian gold is obviously China. 

Black tax holes  

China already buys  uranium ores and other radioactive materials from Namibia worth 100 million dollar per annum.

The UNCTAD database – the UN body for trade and development – revealed that in the last years the annual copper exports from Namibia to Switzerland averaged 150 million dollars, plus 100 million dollars in copper concentrates. This trade flow will probably now turn to Asia. 

For the six years between 2012 and 2017, the ore mine in Chelopech generated nearly 1.1 billion euro incomes and 380 million euro profits before taxes. For the whole period, the company paid the Bulgarian budget 38 million euro in corporate taxes and 30 million euro in concession fees.

Excluding the taxes and social contributions on salaries, the state manages to collect only six percent of the value of the gold extracted from its earth. 

Tax optimization gathers pace when profits leave the low-tax Bulgarian environment. The Bulgarian Trade Registry revealed that DPM has two companies registered on the Curacao Island and another company called Vatrin Investment Ltd.based on the British Virgin Islands – owned by a cooperative with headquarters in the Netherlands. According to Dutch trade law, under certain circumstances cooperatives do not pay dividend taxes; there is also an option for Dutch cooperatives to avoid paying a tax on profits.  

Dundee Precious (Barbados) acquired the concession rights of the Chelopech deposit in 2003. With such an elaborate offshore network it is no wonder that while the Chelopech mine records annual profits in order of 35-45 million euro after taxes, the mother company based in Toronto declares only tiny profits or even loss.  

Across the seas

Every year 100 thousand tons of concentrate from Chelopech travel for 9,000 miles to reach Namibia, while that same amount arrives there from other places, including the Pacific coast of South America.

This is only a fraction of the world’s huge marine trade in ores and concentrates – a practice very inefficient in the ecological sense. The world still closes its eyes for issues like noise contamination of the seas, and the quality of the ship fuels, which are the main emitter of soot, Sulphur and Nitrogen oxides.

At least, the EBRD sees nothing worrying happening between the model ore mines in Bulgaria and the shiny golden bars.

The ore trade impacts also the global development patterns: poor countries specialize in delivering raw materials, the processing remains for regions with loose environmental standards, and the surplus value in the refining and marketing goes to the advanced. The established global free trade regime just cements the inequality in industrial development of the countries.     

The Krumovgrad ores will not be shipped to Tzumeb since their arsenic content is low. Indeed, there is something different in their case. A long and hard opposition of the stakeholders at last guaranteed the acceptable quality of the DPM extractive operations.

Daniel Popov, a Bulgarian NGO mining expert, said: “The management of DPM saw potential in being environmentally responsible. Krumovgrad is a lesson of how interacting with the locals and the NGOs might alter the initial business plans until they become acceptable for the whole society”.

Still, gold industry generates over two billion tons of solid waste, in addition to chemicals used in the extraction, transportation emissions, and the health damages of thousands of workers. Just one middle-sized gold mine like that in Krumovgrad will create 15 million tons of solid waste and over six million tons of tailings during its lifetime.

This Author 

Dimitar Sabev is a Bulgarian journalist and economist. This article is the result of a long-term collaboration between Sabev and Za Zemiata (Friends of the Earth, Bulgaria).