Candida auris is infiltrating hospitals, clinics and nursing homes and killing immunocompromised patients at a prodigious clip, up to 40-60 percent of those who suffer bloodstream infections.

The CDC reports that ninety percent of C. auris infections are clocking-in resistant to one antifungal drug and 30 percent to two or more. 

A report published by the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps investigates how these drug-resistant fungi have come to haunt the modern hospital and jeopardize the sterile spaces that asepsis addressed 150 years ago. 

Drug resistance 

In the rooms of the infected and the dead, the fungus appears intransient to nearly all attempts at eradication. The fungus survives even a floor-to-ceiling spray of aerosolized hydrogen peroxide.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that C. auris’s resistance, and that of many other fungi species, is traceable to industrial agriculture’s mass application of fungicides. 

Eighty percent of US antibiotics are applied to promote livestock and poultry growth and protect the animals from the bacterial consequences of the manure-ladened environments in which they are grown. That’s a staggering 34 million lbs a year as of 2015. 

Agricultural applications help generate drug resistance across multiple human bacterial infections, killing 23,000-100,000 Americans a year and, with an increasing amount of antibiotics applied abroad, an estimated 700,000 people worldwide.

The fungicides select for resistant strains across crops – wheat, banana, barley, apple, among many others – that find their way into hospitals where they are also resistant to the drugs administered to patients there. 

Candida auris has evolved resistance to a suite of azole antifungals, a type of  broad-spectrum fungicides that are used in both crop protection and medical settings and annihilate a wide range of fungi rather than targeting a specific type. 

Emerging independently

CDC’s Tom Chiller hypothesizes that C. auris has likely been circulating on its own for thousands of years. 

The fungus was first isolated in humans from the ear canal of 70-year old Japanese woman at a Tokyo hospital in 2009 (although a 1996 isolate was subsequently identified). Later isolation found the yeast capable of bloodstream infection. 

In an effort to identify the source of the infection, an international team sequenced resistant isolates collected from hospitals across Pakistan, India, South Africa, and Venezuela from 2012–2015. 

Against expectations, the team found divergent amino acid replacements associated with azole resistance among the ERG11single nucleotide polymorphisms, one among several such SNPs, over four geographic regions. They weren’t the same strain, indicating that each resistant phenotype had emerged independently. 

Strains isolated by distance from each other evolved unique solutions to the fungicides to which they were exposed. This might indicate molecular adaptations to different exposures. But it also might indicate that in response to such wide exposure to fungicides in the field, each strain evolved its own unique solution to the problem.  

Resistance evolution 

Even though fungi do not horizontally transfer their genes (or receive them) at rates that virus and bacteria do, the migration of patients and fungi alike – the latter by way of agricultural trade – can help increase local diversity in fungicidal resistance in the field. 

To add to the complexity, there also appear multiple mechanisms by which resistance emerges. 

Dominique Sanglard summarizes three: decreases in intracellular drug concentration, alterations of the drug target, and compensatory mechanisms that depress drug toxicity. 

On top of these, the three can be arrived upon by a variety of genetic events. Alongside SNPs are insertions into the genome, deletions, and structural changes, including gene or chromosome copy events. 

One study found that 51 genes related to how sensitive circulating strains of a Fusarium blight were to propiconazole, only a single class of triazole fungicide. 

Resistance evolution in fungi can be quite elaborate. 

Other fungi 

In 2015, researchers found that the C. auris genome hosts several genes for the ATP-binding cassette transporter family, a major facilitator superfamily (MFS). 

MFS transports a large variety of substrates across cell membranes and been shown to effectively dispose of broad classes of drugs. It permits C. auris to survive an onslaught of antifungal drugs.

C. auris is hardly the only deadly fungus converging upon drug resistance. The nearby map shows multiple species overlapping in plant and human drug resistance. 

One, Aspergillus fumigatus, may offer a conditional preview of C. aurus’s trajectories present and future. 

Azole antifungals itraconazole, voriconazole, and posaconazole have long been used to treat pulmonary asperillogosis, the infection caused by Aspergillus fumigatus. The fungi causes approximately 200,000 deaths per year. In the past decade, it has rapidly developed resistance to antifungal drugs. 

Antifungal cocktails

Studies comparing long-term azole drug users and patients just beginning to take azole have shown that drug-resistant Aspergillusfumigatus was prevalent in both groups, suggesting that resistance evolved in agricultural rather than medical settings.

Researchers recently found azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus related to the use of triazole fungicides in agricultural fields outside of Bogotá, Colombia. Soils were sampled from an array of crop fields and A. fumigatuswas grown on agar treated with itraconazole or voriconazole fungicides. 

In more than 25 percent of cases, despite the fungicide treatment, A. fumigatus persisted.

That is, due to agricultural practices, Aspergillus is entering hospitals already adapted to the slew of antifungal cocktails designed to check its spread. Dumping azoles to control for fungi on grapes, corn, stone fruit, and a myriad of other crops generated the conditions to accelerate drug resistance in human patients. 

While extensive phylogenetic and biogeographical research remains to be conducted, a quick perusal of existing distribution maps suggests geographic similarities between Aspergillus fumigatus and its younger (and now more infamous) cohort C. aurus.

Agricultural development 

With zones of overlapping human and crop resistant cases of Aspergillus fumigatus, the rising spectre of a new azole resistant fungi that is ravaging clinical settings and evolving at lightning speed, one would hope that azole fungicide use would be closely monitored if not phased out. 

The dangers of continuing upon this path of agricultural development are profound. 

Medical and agricultural azole fungicides share similar modes of action, so when resistance pops up in one arena it is easily transferable to another. 

Agricultural azole fungicides comprise a third of the total fungicide market. Twenty-five different forms of agricultural azole demethylation inhibitors are in use, compared to just three forms of licensed medical azoles.

We shouldn’t be surprised that in applying such fungicides at the landscape scale in the millions of pounds annually, the medical use of triazole antifungals, using the same mode of action, would rapidly turn ineffective. 

Preventative use

In 2009, fungicides were applied on 30 percent of corn, soybean, and wheat acreage in the US, totalling 80 million acres. 

Preventative use of fungicides to control soybean rust quadrupled between 2002 and 2006, despite dubious economic rationale. Global sales continue to skyrocket, nearly tripling since 2005, from $8 billion to $21 billion in 2017. 

Fungicides expanded not only in sales but also in geographic distribution.

Tetraconazole, an agricultural triazole, moved from isolated usage in the western Plains in the late 1990s to massive application throughout California’s Central Valley, the upper Midwest, and southeast. 

Boscalid, a popular fungicide used in fruit and vegetable crops, has increased from around 0.15 to 0.6 million pounds from 2004 to 2016, a 400 percent increase, and is now widely applied across the country.

From within each new locale, the fungicides percolate into the local environment.

In 2012, USGS scientists studied 33 different fungicides used in potato production and found at least one fungicide in 75 percent of tested surface waters and 58 percent of ground water samples. With half-lives stretching to several months, azole fungicides are able to easily reach and persist in aquatic environmentsthrough runoff and spray drift, becoming highly mobile.

Climate change 

As climate change fundamentally reshapes the US, bringing higher overall temperatures and extreme oscillations between drought and heavy rainfall, fungi are predicted to expand outside of their current ranges while also responding specifically to new climate regimes. 

With the market treated as a force of nature stronger than climate or public health, under current agricultural production, broad-spectrum fungicide use is likely to increase.

A 2016 UK report, citing agricultural overapplication of fungicides as a major issue, recommended increased surveillance of antibiotic usage overall and a regulatory apparatus orchestrated by the WHO, FAO, and OIE to create a list of critical antibiotics that should be disbarred from agriculture use. 

But aside from collecting more information, what is to be done?

Alternative solutions

Given recent travails in antibiotic and herbicide resistance, it seems likely that chemical companies and their farming clients will pursue developing new fungicides based on targeted molecular research, multiple drug cocktails, and gene-edited resistance. 

The conjoined motives of powerful medical and agricultural companies are almost certain to promote ‘solutions’ that exacerbate an arms race between toxic drug applications and fungal resistance, spew increasingly lethal chemicals into the environment, and further consolidate and privatize agricultural and medical technology sectors. 

But a quick review of agroecological examples suggests that a combination of disease modeling and cultural practices such as crop rotation and cover cropping can greatly reduced the presence of fungal diseases and thus dependence on fungicides. 

In the California’s Central Valley, strawberry producers accustomed to fumigating soils with fungicides to control incidence of Verticillium wilt, a pathogenic soil fungi, have found that planting broccoli crops in between rotations of strawberry crops greatly reduced levels of Verticillium. 

Similar results dating back several decades have been found in the diversification of potato crop rotations.

Ecological complexity

In general, organic farming supports mutualistic fungi to a much greater degree than conventional farming due to crop rotations, incorporation of legumes, and development of soil aggregates supporting ecological niches for soil microbiota. 

Reducing chemical fertilizers and limiting tillage, two agroecological practices with major benefits for reduced pollution and enhanced carbon storage, also select for beneficial strains of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi which form mutualistic relationships with plant roots and can confer resistance to soil pathogens.

What emerges is a picture of ecological complexity in which fungicidal warfare would be exactly the wrong tool. 

Instead, fungicides are applied in a system in which diseases thrive out of landscape simplification, vast and uninterrupted genetically identical monocultures, rapidly accelerating global warming, and an ever quickening pace of global trade. 

In a cruel irony, fungicide application places evolutionary pressure on pathogens to develop resistance at the same time that industrial management provides the near-perfect conditions for fostering and spreading these virulent mutations.

Food activists

Farmers and food activists have complained industrial agriculture offers little more than nutrient and carbon mining.

Companies are compelling farmers to grow so much so fast that production squeezes carbon out of the soil in the form of food commodities. As a result, land and water are polluted into such oblivion that food safety cannot be accounted for.

By said pollution, occupational exposures, outbreaks of increasing virulence and extent, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, antibiotic resistance, and now the growing threat of fungicide resistance, carbon mining now extends to digging out global public health.

These Authors

Alex Liebman is a plant-soil and political ecologist writing and researching agri-food systems in U.S. and Colombia and lithium and copper extraction and indigenous territorial struggles in Chile. 

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist, agroecologist, and public health phylogeographer.

This article is a modified version an in-depth report published by the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. Read the full version here.

Climate change activists will end their demonstrations in central London after days of protests with Extinction Rebellion (XR) confirming it will “voluntarily end the Marble Arch and Parliament Square blockades” in the capital on Thursday.

Eco-protesters have been urging the Government to declare a climate emergency to avoid what it calls the “sixth mass extinction” of species on Earth. Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, pictured, addressed a small group of Extinction Rebellion protesters in Parliament Square.

In a statement, XR said: “We would like to thank Londoners for opening their hearts and demonstrating their willingness to act on that truth. We know we have disrupted your lives. We do not do this lightly. We only do this because this is an emergency.

Ceremony

“Around the planet, a long-awaited and much-needed conversation has begun. People have taken to the streets and raised the alarm in more than 80 cities in 33 countries. People are talking about the climate and ecological emergency in ways that we never imagined.”

The group added: “It is now time to go back into our communities, whether in London, around the UK or internationally.”

XR also said to expect more actions “very soon”, adding that there will be a “closing ceremony” at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park on Thursday at 5pm.

Glued

More than 1,000 people have been arrested during XR protests which started on April 15, while more than 10,000 police officers have been deployed. As of Tuesday evening, Scotland Yard had charged 69 people in connection with the protests.

They were charged with offences including breach of Section 14 Notice of the Public Order Act 1986, obstructing a highway and obstructing police. Three others have been charged by British Transport Police and have appeared in court.

XR action has seen Waterloo Bridge and Oxford Circus blocked and a “die in” at the Natural History Museum. Elsewhere, activists have glued themselves to trains, chained themselves to objects, and some could even be seen perching in hammocks up trees overlooking Parliament Square.

Extinction Rebellion’s key demands are:

1. Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
2. Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
3. Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

 

This Article

This article was supplied by the Press Association. 

More than 1,000 harbour porpoises are dying in UK waters each year having been caught in fishing nets, according to conservationists.

The shy and elusive cetaceans are accidentally trapped in gillnets – nets that are set at the surface or on the seabed – causing them to suffocate and die.

A report by WWF and Sky Ocean Rescue estimated that between 587 and 2,615 porpoises were killed in 2017. The estimate is based on numbers recorded by observers onboard larger vessels using gillnets.

Shocked

The conservationists said the scale of the problem could be far greater as smaller boats – under 10 metres in length – make up the majority of the gillnet fleet.

The report found that the South East and South West of England, as well as waters west of Shetland, saw a large number of fatalities. These areas are rich in marine life, which in turn attracts both high numbers of porpoises and gillnet fisheries.

They said that the full extent of bycatch – wildlife, such as seabirds and turtles, accidentally captured in the nets – was unknown due to lack of monitoring.

Helen McLachlan, WWF fisheries programme manager, said: “The tragic deaths of harbour porpoises are a national scandal that can no longer be ignored.

“Many Brits will be horrified to learn of the scale of the issue and shocked that these beautiful mammals could be dying in the very nets used to catch the fish on their dinner plates.

Gillnets

“Yet UK governments have so far failed to combat this important threat to marine wildlife, despite aspiring for the UK to be a world leader in environmentally responsible fisheries.

“We need to see governments step up and work with the fishing industry to introduce effective mitigation or new capture methods that don’t harm porpoises or other marine wildlife.

“They also need to open up the secretive world of our fisheries by putting in place effective monitoring so that bycatch deaths no longer go unreported.”

In 2015 it was estimated the UK was home to around 177,000 harbour porpoises and two years ago six dedicated special areas of conservation were identified to protect the species across the UK.

The new report recommends that alternative gear should be reviewed for potential use in all UK gillnet fisheries, rather than trying to limit the damage that the gillnets themselves cause.

Bycatch

Ms McLachlan added: “What’s happening in UK seas echoes what’s happening on land: the governments are simply not doing enough to protect wildlife.

“We desperately need to take action now to protect and restore nature.”

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: “It is vital we manage our seas in a more sustainable way for future generations, which is why we’re committed to protecting cetaceans from bycatch in our waters and beyond.

“We are working closely with stakeholders, including the UK fishing industry, to find ways of tackling this problem together.

“Only last month, we held a UK bycatch workshop to look at ways to effectively mitigate this problem and over the coming months will be working hard to develop and trial practical solutions to this critical issue.”

This Author

Increased prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, as well as heightened obesity and birth abnormalities were found in the offspring of lab rats exposed to glyphosate, a scientific study has found.

The new research is the first of its kind to look at the transgenerational effects of the world’s most commonly used herbicide, first sold as Roundup, showing its carcinogenic properties are passed down at least three generations.

“This study provides alarming new evidence supporting our public health call to take glyphosate off the European market,” said Génon Jensen from the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).

Banned

“If a pesticide is showing harm which only occurs generations down the line, surely this is an opportunity for the European Commission to take more precautionary measures to protect our health.”

Despite the fact the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be a ‘probable human carcinogen’ in 2015, the herbicide was reauthorized on the European market for a period of five years in 2017.

A European Citizens’ Initiative petitioning to ban glyphosate has already been signed by 1.3 million people, and the European Commission recently appointed France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden to assess whether or not the pesticide should be banned after its current licence expires in 2022.

Toxicology

In theory it would be possible for the EU to take glyphosate of the market before 2022. “As an emergency measure, both the EU and individual member states have the power to end the current glyphosate approval before the five year periods,” explains Yannick Vicaire from HEAL.

The organization Pesticide Action Network recently released a report listing a wide range of more environmentally friendly alternatives to glyphosate, showing a ban of the herbicide would also be technically feasible.

“The ability of glyphosate and other environmental toxicants to impact our future generations needs to be considered, and is potentially as important as the direct exposure toxicology done today for risk assessment,” the authors of the study stated.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist who writes about climate change, environment, health and migration. He tweets from @ArthurWyns. 

Increased prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, as well as heightened obesity and birth abnormalities were found in the offspring of lab rats exposed to glyphosate, a scientific study has found.

The new research is the first of its kind to look at the transgenerational effects of the world’s most commonly used herbicide, first sold as Roundup, showing its carcinogenic properties are passed down at least three generations.

“This study provides alarming new evidence supporting our public health call to take glyphosate off the European market,” said Génon Jensen from the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).

Banned

“If a pesticide is showing harm which only occurs generations down the line, surely this is an opportunity for the European Commission to take more precautionary measures to protect our health.”

Despite the fact the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be a ‘probable human carcinogen’ in 2015, the herbicide was reauthorized on the European market for a period of five years in 2017.

A European Citizens’ Initiative petitioning to ban glyphosate has already been signed by 1.3 million people, and the European Commission recently appointed France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden to assess whether or not the pesticide should be banned after its current licence expires in 2022.

Toxicology

In theory it would be possible for the EU to take glyphosate of the market before 2022. “As an emergency measure, both the EU and individual member states have the power to end the current glyphosate approval before the five year periods,” explains Yannick Vicaire from HEAL.

The organization Pesticide Action Network recently released a report listing a wide range of more environmentally friendly alternatives to glyphosate, showing a ban of the herbicide would also be technically feasible.

“The ability of glyphosate and other environmental toxicants to impact our future generations needs to be considered, and is potentially as important as the direct exposure toxicology done today for risk assessment,” the authors of the study stated.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a biologist and science journalist who writes about climate change, environment, health and migration. He tweets from @ArthurWyns. 

Theresa May hopes to get Brexit talks moving again this week, but faces an uphill struggle.

There’s little sign that the deadlock will be broken, even though many of us outside Westminster may be sick to the back teeth of backstops and pulling our hair out over Brexit extensions. It’s reasonable to ask: why?

This week Jeremy Corbyn gave his take on what, precisely, this is all about. In his words: “The government doesn’t appear to be shifting the red lines because they’ve got a big pressure in the Tory party that actually wants to turn this country into a deregulated, low-tax society which will do a deal with Trump.”

Toxic trade

For all the Brexit micro-positioning, Corbyn’s point deserves to be taken seriously. 

The hard-Brexit wing of the Conservative party have long seen “taking back control” as meaning nothing less than taking away hard-won protections such as the NHS and food safety standards, in order to grant even more control to big business.

Hard-Brexiters have also always been clear on the crowning glory of this frenzy of deregulation: a trade deal with Donald Trump.

Take trade secretary Liam Fox, whose hopes for a US-UK trade deal are at the heart of his long-term support for Brexit. Fox is so set on trading with Trump that the Trade Bill he is attempting to force through Parliament fails to give MPs any meaningful vote over future trade agreements.

Fox knows full well that a toxic trade deal with Trump would be nigh on impossible to force through Parliament. So his Trade Bill (which we’re fighting hard to reform) dodges this bullet by shifting power over future trade agreements to ministers, in effect writing himself a blank cheque to negotiate any deal he likes. Parliamentary sovereignty anyone?

Thatcherite project

Why, then, are Brexiteers like Fox so set on trading with Trump?

Former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson gave us a clue when, back in 2016, he declared that, free from the shackles of EU regulation, we could “finish the job that Margaret Thatcher started.”

No matter that de-industrialised and divided Brexit Britain is nothing other than a testimony to the failures of the Thatcherite project, Fox and his ilk remain committed to extreme free-market ideology and the powerful interests this serves.

While the role of the market within contemporary Britain is already less “invisible hand” and more clunking great boot, these economic extremists simply will not rest until our schools and health services have been completely privatised.

Until fossil fuel companies are free to extract and burn whatever they like. Until supermarkets are stacked with products farmed as intensively and toxically as big agribusiness want.

Until our rights at work are diminished to the extent that employers offering poverty pay demand. Until the NHS is stripped of any power to negotiate on the prices it pays to big pharma.

Negotiating objectives

Or, in other words, until our economic policy is as dominated by uncontrolled commercial interests as it is in the US.

This, after all, is what a US-UK trade deal would really be about: undoing the regulation that, for decades, has restricted the abilities of US multinationals to enforce their business models on our shores.

Don’t believe it? Just have a read of the US negotiating objectives for the deal, which include “reduce or eliminate barriers to US investment in all sectors in the UK” and “increase opportunities for US firms to sell US products and services to the UK”.

US agriculture firms, for instance, have long been frustrated by EU standards that kept their highly processed and chemically treated products off our shelves – products like chlorine-washed chicken andhormone-injected beef. 

The British public do not want to touch this kind of produce, and for good reason. The risks for public health and our environment are far-reaching, from the failure of chlorine-washing to kill listeria and salmonella, through to compounding the crisis of antibiotic resistance through their usage on livestock.

Empire 2.0

Chlorinated chicken, though, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Because under a US-UK trade deal, if US food imports start to make us ill, our healthcare system will be less equipped to make us better.

American healthcare firms are eyeing up our NHS as a new source of profitable investment. US senators have already said they hope a future US-UK deal could open up the NHS – asked about a potential US-UK deal, Republican senator Todd Young said he was: “Always looking for opportunities to open up foreign markets”.

There is no question that this is an “America first” deal. The US’s negotiating objectives leave no doubt on this. Neither do the suite of US lobbyists invited to submit their priorities for the deal. And nor, of course, does Trump himself.

Giddy on his disquieting dream of Empire 2.0, Liam Fox has an inflated sense of the UK’s power in all this. The reality, though, is that Britain’s standing on the international stage has rarely been more shambolic. The US, meanwhile, boasts the most experience negotiating team in the world.

People power

With Brexit negotiations stalling, we’re being held to ransom by a cabal of market fundamentalists hell-bent on taking control away from ordinary people and handing this over to US-based multinationals.

Just as with Trump’s election in the US, Brexit shows what happens when toxic racism and anti-immigrant hysteria become intertwined with a toxic economic agenda designed to consolidate the wealth and power of the 1 percent against the 99 percent.

These are deeply disturbing times. But, just a few years ago, people power stopped the US-UK trade deal’s predecessor, TTIP, in its tracks.

If, together, we raise our voices loud enough once again, we can make sure that the hard-Brexit fantasy of trading with Trump remains just this: a fantasy.

This Author

James Angel is trade campaigner at Global Justice Now.

Polly Higgins was a great dreamer. Her dream was to see the whole world recognise the sanctity of the earth and live in harmony with her.

She was also a warrior. She was fighting to make the destruction of land, devastation of forests, pollution of oceans and contamination of atmosphere a crime against nature. In her view ecocide is as serious a crime as genocide.

She was a lawyer by profession. But instead of working for her personal success she devoted her entire life in the service of the earth.

Unconditional commitment

The earth herself was Polly’s client and she worked day and night defending the rights of nature.

There are thousands of lawyers defending human rights but Polly was one of the few who made unconditional commitment to defend the rights of the earth.

She was only 50 years old when she was taken ill with incurable cancer. It spread fast and her body was unable to cope with it.

Many thousands of her friends around the world were praying for her recovery. But in the end she had to let go and move on. Her body is gone but her legacy of fighting for the cause of the earth lives on.

Polly was a great supporter and frequent contributor to Resurgence & Ecologist. The interview published in the May/June issue of R&E was, I believe, the last interview of her life.

We will miss her hugely but we will carry on the task of defending the earth and serving the cause of mother nature.

This Author

Satish Kumar is editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Image: Priit Siimon, Flickr. 

The past five months have not been encouraging for those hoping to see the end of whale hunting in our time.

Japan announced that it would withdraw from the International Whaling Commission in order to resume commercial whaling in its territorial waters. Iceland increased its self-allotted whaling quota to two thousand whales over the next five years, including over one thousand endangered fin whales.

Most recently, the US National Marine Fisheries Service proposed to allow the Makah Tribe to resume hunting gray whales after seventeen years of regulatory gridlock.

Federal approval 

I have spent much of the last nine years studying the Makah whaling conflict — including ten months of research on the Makah Reservation — and I am not at all surprised by the federal government’s decision.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, Contesting Leviathan (University of Chicago Press, 2019): “The default outcome, given the current structure of US law, will always be federal approval for a tribal whale hunt.” 

This is one of the most important and least understood aspects of the situation around whales and whaling in the world today: when it comes to the legal and political status of whales and dolphins, they were never really saved at all.

The IWC’s moratorium on commercial whaling is technically just that, a temporary restriction meant to assure the recovery of whale “stocks” for later “harvest”. The IWC is an organization originally built for the management, not the abolition, of whaling. 

For several decades, the delegations of anti-whaling nations, some of which include animal rights organizations, have been using the IWC’s platform to enact a whale protectionist agenda — creating whale sanctuaries, funding non-lethal science, and restricting whaling to certain aboriginal or scientific exceptions.

Now that some whale populations have recovered to their pre-industrial whaling levels, some member nations say the commission lacks the moral or bureaucratic authority to further restrict whale hunts.

‘Sustainable populations’

The domestic situation is very much the same. The US places the management of whales and dolphins under the purview of the National Marine Fisheries Service within the Department of Commerce, which oversees whale populations in terms of “stocks”.

The US federal government continues to look upon whales essentially as if they were large fish, like any other marine resource to be managed, despite the iconic status of whales and dolphins in the popular imagination. 

Like fish, decisions about whales depend almost entirely on periodic “stock assessments”. Like fish, potential “harvests” are based on estimates of “sustainable yield”.

Consider the Makah whaling conflict and the causes of the nearly two decades of delays.

The hunt has been held back by a federal court order that required the tribe to seek a waiver to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, a 1972 piece of legislation that places its own moratorium on the “takes” (a euphemism for killing or extreme harassment) of all marine mammals in US waters (the hunt has already been approved by the IWC).

But as one attorney with ties to the US IWC delegation observed four decades ago: “Once scientists have determined that a population of a species is at or above its ‘optimum sustainable population level,’ the Secretary of Commerce can permit the taking of animals from this population for virtually any use so long as the population is not reduced below the  level.”

Save the whales

Anti-whaling activists, of course, are not motivated solely by concerns over dwindling populations.

One could argue that the entire Save the Whales movement, which helped usher in the era of environmental protection in this country nearly fifty years ago, was driven not by concerns over “sustainable harvests” or catch limitations, but by the conviction that whales were uncommonly intelligent, majestic, and peaceful beings whose deaths in whaling are almost unavoidably grisly, prolonged, and painful.

Polling data in 1997 showed that over three-fourths of Americans opposed whaling for any reason, regardless of whether the species was endangered.

US and international law never caught up with this common public sentiment. Today, as we see the retrenchment of whaling by a number of countries, we find the anachronistic mechanisms in place for dealing with whales — and, really, for almost all nonhuman animals — do not just guarantee an outcome to debates about whaling, but preclude the very possibility of even having the conversation. 

Anti-whaling activists in the Makah whaling conflict have learned to adapt themselves to the language and logics of fisheries management. They have focused on the conservation of smaller and smaller subpopulations of gray whales, hoping to show that the risk of a hunt to these more vulnerable groups constitutes environmental harm.

As one activist told me, one cannot write a comment to the government saying, “you just don’t kill whales [because] it’s not right”. But why can’t you? This is a question we need to ask ourselves.

Intrinsic rights

It isn’t easy to shift an entire legal system away from the default assumption that whales and other beings are resources to be treated as commodities.

The long, slow struggle of nonhuman personhood projects can attest to this. But in the case of whales, no one is even having that conversation.

With the exception of new tools for managing whale stocks using population genetics, not much has changed since the days of commercial whaling. 

Now is the time to discuss intrinsic rights for whales and dolphins, not so that all whaling will be rendered illegal, but so that we can finally have the debate that Makah whalers and anti-whaling activists have not been allowed to have.

This Author 

Les Beldo is a cultural anthropologist specializing in morality, science and the environment. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at Williams College and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and he is currently a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Oberlin College. He is the author of Contesting Leviathan: Activists, Hunters, and State Power in the Makah Whaling Conflict.

Schoolgirl climate activist Greta Thunberg has told MPs her future has been “stolen”, adding “We probably don’t even have a future any more.”

Miss Thunberg visited the Houses of Parliament to speak to opposition leaders and make a speech to MPs.

The 16-year-old told a packed room in the Palace of Westminster that her future and those of her fellow children had been “sold”.

Inescapable

She added: “That future has been sold so that a small number of people can make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said ‘the sky is the limit’ and ‘you only live once’.”

Miss Thunberg spoke alongside a panel of MPs, including Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Green MP Caroline Lucas, former Labour leader Ed Miliband and Lib Dem MP Layla Moran.

The schoolgirl said she knew politicians did not want to listen, as she started to experience microphone problems. She asked: “Is this microphone on? Can anybody hear me? Is my English OK? I am starting to wonder.”

She added: “The basic problem is the same everywhere and the basic problem is that nothing is being done. You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”

Gove told Miss Thunberg she had been heard as he admitted “we have not done nearly enough”. He went on:”Suddenly in the past few years it has become inescapable that we have to act.

Denial

“The time to act is now, the challenge could not be clearer – Greta you have been heard.”

Before her speech, Miss Thunberg had held a roundtable with party leaders, where prime minister Theresa May was empty-chaired after she declined to attend.

But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn met the young activist and tweeted an image of himself with her in front of a portrait of Tony Benn. He wrote: “It was a pleasure welcoming UK youth climate strikers and @GretaThunberg to parliament. 

“Young people will be the most affected by climate change – seeing them take charge of their future is inspiring.”Labour’s committed to working with young people campaigning to save our planet.”

After her speech, Miss Thunberg was asked what she would say to US President Donald Trump to steer him away from climate change denial. But the schoolgirl said there was nothing she could say as he would not listen.

Small steps

She said: “If I were to speak to Donald Trump today I don’t think there is much I could say to make him change his mind. Obviously he must have scientists coming to talk to him all the time, so he is obviously not listening to the scientists.

“There is nothing I could say.”

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said that she and other politicians at the roundtable – Mr Corbyn, Liberal Democrat Sir Vince Cable, the SNP’s Ian Blackford and Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville-Roberts – had agreed to hold further cross-party discussions with youth climate strikers.

They would also support the UK Youth Climate Assemblies and to seek a common framework to ensure party policies are in line with international global warming recommendations.

Ms Lucas said: “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time and it is only right that we work across party divides to show leadership on this issue. It is therefore deeply disappointing the Government refused to take part in today’s discussion.

“Today, we have agreed a few small steps. The task ahead of us is to put into action real changes that will ensure young people are guaranteed a secure, safe and prosperous future. We must do what is scientifically necessary, not what’s deemed politically possible.”

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Jennifer McKiernan is a Press Association political staff reporter. 

A 20-year-old who is believed to be the first climate activist successfully prosecuted over the fresh wave of Extinction Rebellion protests has been spared a fine.

Elliott Cuciurean was the youngest of four XR supporters who appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, with the eldest being 70.

Cuciurean, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs after pleading guilty to a public order offence, but he avoided a fine of up to £1,000.

Arrest

In a jovial and mild-mannered scene, three other protesters who later appeared together before District Judge Devinder Sandhu denied separate charges and face trial this summer.

Meanwhile, XR’s action over man-made climate destruction is continuing despite more than 1,000 arrests and 74 people being charged since the protest began on April 15. Hundreds who were arrested have been released under investigation.

The allegations under Section 14 of the Public Order Act faced by the four who appeared in court on Tuesday all follow a similar pattern.

Misba Majid, prosecuting, said Cuciurean’s order was imposed in Oxford Circus on Saturday after he caused a “great deal of disturbance” to tourists and shoppers by being chained to another activist.

The breach came the following day with his second arrest when he continued to protest in Parliament Square despite being ordered to contain his action to Marble Arch, where the protest is permitted.

Proud

Judge Sandhu sentenced him to a six-month conditional discharge and ordered him to pay £85 in costs to the CPS and a £20 victim surcharge.

“This country has had a longstanding respect for the rights of people to protest,” she told the activist. “But when it crosses into criminal law then the courts have to take action.”

Godfrey Whitehouse, a 70-year-old retired energy manager at Exeter University, and Tristan Strange, 37, were arrested on Waterloo Bridge, while University of East Anglia student Saul Kenrick, 22, was detained near the Houses of Parliament.

Kenrick was supported in court by his policy adviser father, Justin, who told the Press Association he was arrested three times over the past week but is yet to be charged.

“I’m very proud at the fact he’s willing to say this is a completely intolerable situation we’re in, heading towards climate extinction,” the 59-year-old father from Edinburgh said.

Human rights

The protest has drawn supporters from a wide cross-section of society, ranging from young and elderly citizens to Hollywood actor Emma Thompson and former archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.

In court, Mr Whitehouse, a bespectacled veteran activist, had to cup his ear to hear the judge between exchanging friendly words with Kenrick, who had bleached blond hair, and Strange, who smiled and waved to supporters.

After polite discussions with staff in order to not offend the judge, activists sitting in the public gallery quietly held up fluorescent XR flags as Cuciurean appeared in the dock alone.

Strange, of Swindon, Whitehouse, of Exeter, and Kenrick, of Norwich, are expected to rely on a human rights defence when they go on trial at Hendon Magistrates’ Court on June 28 for the summary-only offence they could be fined over if convicted.

They were released on bail on the condition that they do not rejoin any protests at Oxford Circus or Waterloo Bridge.

Activism

Outside court, Cuciurean said it was “quite a relief” to avoid a fine and that he plans to rejoin the sanctioned protest at Marble Arch.

Asked what led him to activism he said: “Seeing the news of climate science coming to the surface and realising that we are having an incredibly damaging impact on the planet and watching nothing being done about it.”

The CPS said it was not aware of any successful prosecutions over the latest XR protest ahead of Cuciurean’s plea.

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Sam Blewett is a journalist with Press Association.