Biodiversity

Animal Extinction Protesters Blockade McDonalds Factory

July 17, 2021 Charlene Rodrigues, The Independent. Resist! Amazon, Biodiversity, Deforestation, McDonald's

Animal Rebellion protesters have barricaded a McDonald's factory in Scunthorpe in a move to get the burger chain to switch to an entirely "plant-based food menu by 2025." The ‘animal and climate justice’ movement said that around 100 protestors set up a blockade using trucks, tents, bamboo structures in the early hours of Thursday morning to stop the facility from distributing burgers. Trucks with the sign “McMurder” stood outside the factory while police vans encircled the area. The campaigners, urging others to join in, said they will stay as long as it takes until McDonald’s commits to changing towards a plant-based menu. Accusing the global fast-food chain of poor labour conditions and wreaking havoc on the environment, the activists said that they would end the blockade if McDonald’s makes the first step towards this goal by committing to becoming 20 per cent plant-based within one year.

Red Alert: Only One Earth

June 6, 2021 The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Biodiversity, climate crisis, Environment, pollution

Ecosystem degradation is accelerated by capitalism, which intensifies pollution and waste, deforestation, land-use change and exploitation, and carbon-driven energy systems. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, Climate Change and Land (January 2020), notes that only 15% of known wetlands remain, most having been degraded beyond the possibility of recovery. In 2020, the UNEP documented that, from 2014 to 2017, coral reefs suffered from the longest severe bleaching event on record. Coral reefs are projected to decline dramatically as temperatures rise; if global warming rises to 1.5°C, only 10-30% of reefs will remain, and if global warming rises to 2°C, then less than 1% of reefs will remain.

We Hug The Trees Because The Trees Have No Voice

June 5, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Biodiversity, Climate Change, Environment, pollution

At the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the delegates decided to hold an annual World Environment Day. In 1974, the UN urged the world to celebrate that day on 5 June with the slogan ‘Only One Earth’; this year, the theme is ‘Ecosystem Restoration’, emphasising how the capitalist system has eroded the earth’s capacity to sustain life. The Global Footprint Network reports that we do not live on one Earth, but on 1.6 Earths. We live on more than one Earth because, by encroaching and destroying biodiversity, degrading land, and polluting the air and water, we are cannibalising the planet. This newsletter contains a Red Alert from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on the environmental catastrophe that befalls us. Several key scientists have contributed to it. It can be read below and downloaded as a PDF print out here; we hope that you will circulate it widely.

The Healing Web Of Solidarity

May 31, 2021 Alice F. Thompson and Kenneth S. Thompson, MD, Working-Class Perspectives. Create! Biodiversity, Brazil, Community organizing, Health Care

As most of us sat at home during the past year, seeking safety from the pandemic and isolated from each other, we had little to protect us from the onslaught of historic national traumas and anxieties. We watched in horror as over half a million Americans died, millions lost their livelihoods while others had to face the virus at work, an unarmed Black man was slowly murdered by a policeman on camera, and our President encouraged a white rightwing insurrection. All of this is superimposed on the global existential crisis of climate change and the economic abandonment of many places across the country. If years can be ranked by their impact on the mental health and well- being of people, 2020-2021 would easily be near the top of the list.

Youth Launch ‘Stronger Campaign’ For UN Biodiversity Day

May 25, 2021 Alison Kentish, Inter Press Service News Agency. Organize! Biodiversity, climate crisis, United Nations, Youth Activism

International Day for Biological Diversity is observed on May 22 under the theme ‘we’re part of the solution.’ A network of youth groups is informing policymakers that young people are tired of the same old rhetoric and platitudes.

Species Solidarity: Rediscovering Our Connection To The Web Of Life

May 12, 2021 Michelle Nijhuis, Yale 360. Create! Biodiversity, Extinction, Nature, Solidarity

If it wasn’t already clear, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it painfully obvious that our lives are entwined with the lives of other animals. Our health depends on theirs, not only because viruses from their bodies can enter ours, but because we survive thanks to the soil they fertilize and the plants they pollinate. And as climate disruption escalates, it’s evident that many animals are buffering us from its worst effects, maintaining ecosystems that absorb carbon and help mitigate the effects of sea-level rise. Conservationists have long cared deeply about the survival of other plants and animals, often for reasons that go well beyond self-interest. But sociologist Carrie Friese, a researcher at the London School of Economics, speculates that in this era of intersecting crises, conservationists and others will be more and more motivated by a sense of multispecies solidarity — a profound understanding that, as Rachel Carson warned in 1963, humans are “affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species.”

Love Letter For Our Afflicted Earth

April 22, 2021 Intemerate Earth. Create! Biodiversity, Earth, Earth Day, Finance and the Economy

Dear Earth, in this journey that we call our existence, we produce, consume, we eat, drink, breathe and survive because you are the very essence of life. Your voice is clearer than our words, stronger than our laws, and more just than our principles. How do we renew the promises of our Original Trust, and restore the confidence that you gave to past generations? Dear Earth, this Original Trust is an agreement. You have whispered its many names and have warned us of deep contradictions in our understanding of that trust. Now a poison threatens you, us, our home. Its identity might be cloaked but its name is not a mystery. Some have listened, but mostly we have ignored the signs. We have inflicted a deep wound on our own house, and don’t seem to know how or if we will heal. We stand for justice and liberty, but too often brought to our knees by tyranny, alienation and frustration. How do we come to shiver under the hypocrisy of our own principles in practice?

‘Ecocide’ Movement Pushes For A New International Crime

April 8, 2021 Nicholas Kusnetz, Katie Surma and Yuliya Talmazan, NBC News. Resist! Biodiversity, climate crisis, Ecocide, International Criminal Court

In 1948, after Nazi Germany exterminated millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II, the United Nations adopted a convention establishing a new crime so heinous it demanded collective action. Genocide, the nations declared, was “condemned by the civilized world” and justified intervention in the affairs of sovereign states. Now, a small but growing number of world leaders including Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron have begun citing an offense they say poses a similar threat to humanity and remains beyond the reach of international criminal law: ecocide, or widespread destruction of the environment. The pope describes ecocide as “the massive contamination of air, land and water,” or “any action capable of producing an ecological disaster,” and has proposed making it a sin for Roman Catholics.

British Columbia Urged To Protect At-Risk Old Growth Forest

March 17, 2021 Canadian Press, Vancouver Island News. Create! Biodiversity, Canada, climate crisis, Forests

The most at-risk ecosystems should be set aside from logging while British Columbia shifts its forestry policies toward a more sustainable system, says a forester who helped write a provincial report on old-growth forests. The report last April co-written by Garry Merkel urged B.C. to act within six months to defer harvesting in old forest ecosystems at the highest risk of permanent biodiversity loss. “There (are) some of those ecosystems targeted for harvesting right now,” he said in an interview this week, six months after B.C. released the report and pledged to implement the recommendations from the panel of two independent foresters who were commissioned to write it. “I do share the impatience of a lot of folks.”

New Environmentalism Must Demand Systemic Change

February 8, 2021 James Gustave Speth, Truthout. Strategize! Biodiversity, climate crisis, Environmental Movement, System Change

Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other U.S. environmental groups have racked up more victories and accomplishments than one can count. But here’s the deeply troubling rub: As our environmental organizations have grown stronger, more sophisticated and more global in reach, the environment has continued to slide downhill. And not just slightly downhill. Climate change is coming at us very hard. Worldwide, we are losing biodiversity, forests, fisheries and agricultural soils at frightening rates.

Protesters Say Mine Expansion Ignores Nunavut Agreement

February 8, 2021 Beth Brown, CBC News. Resist! Biodiversity, Canada, Indigenous Sovereignty, Mining

Protests continue in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, on Saturday, as a two-week environmental hearing on an expansion at the Mary River iron ore mine wraps up. At noon Saturday, around 50 residents gathered outside the community hall where the hearings are happening. It was – 32 C with the windchill, according to Environment Canada. "We protested and chanted, 'Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, protect our rights, protect our people, protect our animals'," said resident Sheena Akoomalik. At the protest, she brandished a copy of the Nunavut Agreement. She said the legal agreement between Nunavut Inuit and the Canadian government, and its protections for land and harvesting rights, are being ignored.

It’s Now Or Never — We Stare Into The Abyss

February 3, 2021 Lee Camp, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Biodiversity, Capitalism, mass extinction

This column is hopeful. I promise. The northern white rhinoceros is now functionally extinct. Sudan — the last male of his kind — passed away recently. There are two females remaining but obviously they can produce no more of their species without a male — and mating with nearby giraffes is not something in which they seem interested. This is not the end but the beginning. This is still the beginning of a great extinction, the sixth great extinction in earth’s history and the first one caused by humans. The others were caused by things like massive asteroid impacts creating damage equivalent to a million nuclear bombs, and judging by the humans I’ve met, I could picture us wreaking an equivalent amount of havoc.

Forest Service: Cutting Snags To Eliminate Endangered Species Habitat

January 22, 2021 Chuck Burr, Culturequake. Educate! Biodiversity, Endangered species, Federal Government, Forests

It is an intentional act to seek out and cut large diameter dead trees to prevent them from becoming spotted owl and other endanger species habitat. Annual census of known spotted owl trees are conducted. Owls must be seen living in the trees. If the owls are scared off by nearby clear-cutting, road building, or the tree is downed, the habitat is delisted as critical and may now be clear-cut. If there are no potential habitat trees, owls are prevented from moving into an area. This is an intentional act. Cutting large diameter dead trees is being conducted on gated locked Forest Service and BLM lands. Only staff and contractors can access these areas with vehicles. Not during clear-cuts, the trees are found, cut and left. Small diameter non-habitat trees are skipped.

EPA Approves Pesticide, Then Finds It Harms Endangered Species

November 10, 2020 the Center for Biological Diversity. Educate! Biodiversity, Endangered species, EPA, Pesticide

Washington, DC (Nov. 5, 2020) - The Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment today finding that the endocrine-disrupting pesticide atrazine is likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals. The finding is a result of the agency’s first-ever nationwide assessment of an herbicide’s harm to protected species, an analysis that’s required by the Endangered Species Act. The assessment’s release comes just two months after the EPA reapproved the pesticide’s use for another 15 years.

Reasons To Rethink The Future Of Dams

October 30, 2020 Tara Lohan, The Revelator. Educate! Biodiversity, Clean Energy, climate crisis, Hydropower

The tide has shifted on dams. Once a monument to our engineering prowess, there’s now widespread acknowledgment that dam-building comes with a long list of harms. Some of those can be reversed, as shown by the 1,200 dam removals in the past 20 years. But the future of our existing dams, including 2,500 hydroelectric facilities, is a complicated issue in the age of climate change. Dams have altered river flows, changed aquatic habitat, decimated fish populations, and curtailed cultural and treaty resources for tribes. But does the low-carbon power dams produce have a role in our energy transition?

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