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A Brief History of the Khejarli Massacre

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When you hear the term "tree hugger," what-or who-do you see? What image, or images, pop into your head?

It likely starts with the vague idea of folks who are often-and perhaps overly-passionate about protecting nature.

But then, if you expand it, what do they look like? Is it a man or a woman? Are they white? Do they look like, say, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo if they were out living the #vanlife together? As touching as that movie might be, it presents an all-too-familiar picture for what we might all imagine when we think of tree huggers.

It also misses a lot.

Years ago, when I first started on my path to becoming an environmentalist, and especially an environmental justice activist, the images conjured by the word environmentalism often coincided closely with "tree huggers": i.e. white Americans from the late '70s hugging trees. The problem with this soon became clear, however. Though an undoubtedly accurate representation of much of American environmentalism, these stereotypes fail to honor the histories of people of color in the environmental space, remain a disservice to the work being done today, and wrongly suggest to some that black, indigenous, and other people of color aren't active in environmentalism.

The discrepancy between the public imagination and reality is not uncommon throughout societies. Public imagination is a fickle thing, and as time passes, words, images and topics will often morph into something new. For me, both in my personal and professional work, it's become crucial to bridge the gaps between perception and reality, and promote the new-often by first reclaiming the past.

And the term tree huggers is a clear example.

The original tree huggers, a group of women of color, inspired generations of would-be tree huggers through their sacrifice, and their story illustrates what it means for an influential history to get erased from a movement; for leadership and contributions to get largely ignored. Though parts of this history might still be known to some, it is valuable for these histories to be taught, celebrated and acknowledged continuously-so we're all aware that people of color have been leading environmental efforts throughout history, and still do.

We stand on the shoulders of indigenous people everywhere and this story is no exception.
A Brief History of the Khejarli Massacre
In September 1730, soldiers representing Maharaja Abhai Singh arrived at Khejarli, the village of the Bishnoi people, with orders to cut down the community's trees for the construction of a new palace. The Bishnoi, so named for the 29 life principles that they follow, are a religious sect who have lived in India's Rajasthan desert for centuries.

Before the soldiers could begin their harvest, a Bishnoi woman named Amrita Devi ran forward to protect the native khejri tree ( Prosopis cineraria). She did so by hugging the tree and refusing to move. When she was decapitated as a result, her three daughters promptly took her place. They too were killed in the same manner.

Inspired by their example, other Bishnoi (from a total of 84 different villages) continuously took their place until, in an event that would come to be known as the Khejarli Massacre, 363 Bishnoi had sacrificed their lives in defense of their trees.

Upon hearing of their sacrifices, the Maharaja Abhai Singh intervened and rescinded the original order, calling for a permanent ban to the felling of the Bishnoi's trees. A temple was later erected in honor of the 363 Bishnoi who gave their lives, and today many Bishnoi make the pilgrimage every September to honor this history.
200 Years Later
In 1973, the history of the Bishnoi (aka the OG tree huggers) became the key inspiration and impetus for nonviolent protests against deforestation in Northern India, in what is now known as the Chipko movement. The now broadly used tree hugger term entered our collective psyches through the popularization of the Chipko movement (c hipko, "to hug" or "to embrace"), which continued for eight years, until 1981. (This past March marked its 45 th anniversary.)

Popularization is used here intentionally-the movement was quickly subject to appropriation. In many cases, the retelling of the Chipko movement is simplified or not told at all, and it is arguably why, roughly 40 years later, the mainstream, collective imagination doesn't pair tree huggers with indigenous Indian communities, but with white, American environmentalists.

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Remember the Original Tree Huggers - Patagonia

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When you hear the term "tree hugger," what-or who-do you see? What image, or images, pop into your head? It likely starts with the vague idea of folks who are often-and perhaps overly-passionate about protecting nature. But then, if you expand it, what do they look like?

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Chytridiomycosis causes amphibian mortality associated with population declines in the rain forests of Australia and Central America

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Chytridiomycosis causes amphibian mortality associated with population declines in the rain forests of Australia and Central America

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Our friend Herman the Frog suffers from this fungus. That's why he's living in a frog hotel in Australia.

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Abstract

Epidermal changes caused by a chytridiomycete fungus (Chytridiomycota; Chytridiales) were found in sick and dead adult anurans collected from montane rain forests in Queensland (Australia) and Panama during mass mortality events associated with significant population declines. We also have found this new disease associated with morbidity and mortality in wild and captive anurans from additional locations in Australia and Central America. This is the first report of parasitism of a vertebrate by a member of the phylum Chytridiomycota. Experimental data support the conclusion that cutaneous chytridiomycosis is a fatal disease of anurans, and we hypothesize that it is the proximate cause of these recent amphibian declines.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

RESULTS

At necropsy, no consistent gross lesions were found in the sick and dying anurans. However, areas of abnormal epidermal sloughing were seen in a number of amphibians from both Australia and Central America. Examinations of fresh, unstained wet mounts of this dysecdic skin consistently revealed large numbers of spherical to subspherical sporangia of a nonhyphal, previously unreported fungus. Histologically, significant abnormalities were restricted to the skin, in which sporangia were found in the stratum corneum and stratum granulosum (Fig. 1) principally of the digits and ventral body, especially the hypervascularized pelvic patch ("drink patch"). Epidermal changes associated with these parasites consisted of irregular cell loss, erosions, and segments of marked thickening of the stratum corneum (parakeratotic hyperkeratosis). Deeper epidermal changes consisted of moderate hyperplasia of the stratum intermedium (acanthosis), but there were negligible inflammatory cell infiltrates. Sporangia were also seen on histological examination of the keratinized mouth parts of wild Panamian tadpoles (three of seven) (three genera) and in killed, otherwise-healthy, captive M. fasciolatus (three of four) and B. marinus (three of eight) tadpoles from the spawning groups that had high mortality rates after metamorphosis. In these tadpoles, the fungus was found only in the mouth parts and not in the unkeratinized skin of the body and tail.

There was no evidence of epidermal viral infection in adult anurans based on histological, ultrastructural, and culture findings, including culture attempts from 23 wild and captive frogs originating from Big Tableland (three species) and 26 wild anurans from Fortuna (8 species). A range of bacteria was isolated from these specimens, including Aeromonas hydrophila from the Australian frogs and Flavobacterium indologenes from the Panamanian amphibians. No species of bacteria was isolated from more than 44% of sick and dead amphibians in any wild group, and the histological findings were not consistent with primary bacterial disease. Aeromonas spp. were not isolated from any of 26 frozen anurans collected from the mass mortality incident in Panama. Infectious organisms were not detected on light microscopic examination of Giemsastained blood smears from 24 diseased Australian frogs received alive. No epidermal myxozoa or protozoa were detected histologically or ultrastructurally in tissues from either sick or dead amphibians. Mycological cultures of frozen tissue failed to detect chytrids.

Chytrid fungi were not found on histologic examination of the 28 archived Panamanian and Costa Rican specimens collected from the wild before population declines, or the 42 archived toeclips from healthy Australian frogs.

Scanning electron microscopical examination of the surface of digital skin from infected Australian frogs showed marked roughening and sloughing of the skin surface compared with the smooth and intact appearance of uninfected epidermis from the control frogs. Infection of the superficial keratinized cells was evident by the presence of prominent discharge tubes of the fungus protruding through the bulging cells (Fig. 2). Transmission electron microscopical examination of wild and captive Australian and wild Panamanian anurans identified this parasite as a chytrid fungus (Chytridiomycota; Chytridiales) primarily based on zoospore ultrastructure ( 17). The fungus in the epidermis of the anurans had a thallus bearing a network of rhizoids and smooth-walled, spherical to subspherical, inoperculate sporangia. Each sporangium produced a single discharge tube. Zoospores (Fig. 3) had an elongate-ovoidal body and a single, posterior flagellum and possessed a core area of ribosomes often with membrane-bound spheres of ribosomes within the main ribosomal mass. A small spur was located at the posterior of the cell body, adjacent to the flagellum. It is unknown whether this represents an artifact in these formalin-fixed specimens. The core area of ribosomes was surrounded by a single cisterna of endoplasmic reticulum, two to three mitochondria, and an extensive microbody-lipid globule complex. The microbody closely apposed and almost surrounded four to six lipid globules (three anterior and one to three laterally), some of which appeared bound by a cisterna. Some zoospores appeared to contain more lipid globules; however, this may have been a result of a plane-of-sectioning effect, because the globules were often lobed in the zoospores examined (Fig. 4). A rumposome was not observed. A nonfunctioning centriole lay adjacent to the kinetosome. Nine interconnected props attached the kinetosome to the plasmalemma, and a terminal plate was present in the transitional zone (Fig. 4). An inner ring-like structure attached to the tubules of the flagellar doublets within the transitional zone was observed in transverse section. No roots associated with the kinetosome were observed. In many zoospores, the nucleus lay partially within the aggregation of ribosomes and was invariably situated laterally. Small vacuoles and a Golgi body with stacked cisternae occurred within the cytoplasm outside the ribosomal area. Mitochondria, which often contained a small number of ribosomes, were densely staining with discoidal cristae.

DNA analyses showed that the amphibian parasite ssu-rDNA groups were among those of the chytrid fungi, with the closest match to Chytridium confervae (Fig. 5).

Between 10 and 18 days postexperimental exposure, all six frogs exposed to unfiltered skin scrapings became moribund; one died and the rest were euthanized with 0.2% tricaine methanesulfonate (Ruth Consolidated Industries, Annandale, Australia). Cutaneous chytridiomycosis was diagnosed cytologically, histologically, and ultrastructurally. The eight control frogs remained healthy and were free of chytrids when killed after 22 days and examined histologically.

DISCUSSION

The extensive pathological investigations reported in this paper provide evidence for a pathogen causing amphibian mortality in areas where declines are marked and well documented. Furthermore, the similarity between pathological findings from Australian and Central American amphibians is remarkable, and it appears that a similar fungal pathogen is present in these two widely separated regions.

The ultrastructural studies and DNA analyses firmly place the epidermal fungus within the phylum Chytridiomycota, class Chytridiomycetes, order Chytridiales ( 18, 26). It was not possible to further classify the organism by using ultrastructural characters because cultured, glutaraldehyde-fixed specimens were not available and serial sectioning was not performed. However, the occurrence of several lipid globules in the microbody-lipid globule complex with some bounded by a cisterna, is unusual within the Chytridiales ( 27, 28). These and other ultrastructural characters, together with parasitism of the amphibian epidermis, suggest that this parasite represents a new chytridialean genus. Despite extensive ultrastructural examination of zoospores and other developmental stages, no significant differences could be found between chytrids from wild and captive Australian amphibians and chytrids from wild Panamanian amphibians, suggesting that animals from both continents were infected by the same fungus.

Chytrids were observed to infect tadpoles, but the localized distribution in the only keratinized body region, the mouth parts, may explain the lack of mortality. We assume that only after metamorphosis, when the skin becomes keratinized ( 29), does the chytrid cause a widespread, fatal epidermal infection. The absence of infection in nonkeratinized epithelial surfaces of tadpoles (body, limbs, tail, mouth, gills) and postmetamorphic anurans (conjunctiva, nasal cavity, mouth, tongue, intestines) emphasizes the strictly keratinophilic affinity of this newly recognized pathogen.

Although the transmission experiment was a preliminary trial that used unpurified material, it demonstrates that chytrids are associated with a transmissible fatal disease of anurans and supports our diagnostic findings that cutaneous chytridiomycosis was the cause of the mortality events in wild amphibians. Furthermore, the failure to identify alternative causes of death after examination of the wild amphibians and their environment (refs. 13 and 30; K.R.L., unpublished data) supports our theory that cutaneous chytridiomycosis was the cause of the riparian amphibian population declines in the montane rain forests of Queensland and Panama.

The mechanism(s) by which cutaneous chytridiomycosis becomes a fatal infection in postmetamorphic anurans is not clear. The epidermal hyperplasia may seriously impair cutaneous respiration and osmoregulation, particularly as chytrids consistently infect the pelvic patch, a major site of water absorption in some anurans ( 31). Alternatively, death may be a result of absorption of a toxic product released by the fungus.

An analysis of declining amphibian species at high altitudes in eastern Australia (J.-M. Hero, unpublished data) found that affected species have low clutch sizes and occupy restricted geographic ranges. This may be consistent with the impact of a disease affecting a range of amphibian species, but with recovery of more robust populations. There are many examples of infectious disease affecting wildlife populations ( 32), including examples where introduction of pathogens has decimated populations ( 33- 35). There may be several explanations as to why chytridiomycosis has emerged as a disease of frogs in Australia and Panama. The chytrid may be an introduced pathogen spreading through naïve populations ( 7, 8), or it may be a widespread organism that has emerged as a pathogen to frogs because of either an increase in virulence or an increased host susceptibility caused by other factors, such as environmental changes or as yet undetected coinfections.

Acknowledgments

For collection of frogs and technical and other assistance we thank, in Australia, G. Russell, M. Braun, T. Wise, F. Fillipi, T. Stephens, J. Humphrey, P. Hooper, M. Williamson, G. Rowe, J. Muschialli, D. Carlson, T. Chamberlain, S. Larkin, and S. Daglas (Australian Animal Health Laboratory); K. Field and R. Ritallick (James Cook University); J.-M. Hero (Griffith University); G. Gillespie (Arthur Rylah Institute); N. Murphy (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Marine Research); J. Koehler (Townsville General Hospital); H. McCracken (Royal Melbourne Zoo); M. Tyler, R. Short, and C. Williams (University of Adelaide); L. Skerratt (University of Melbourne); D. Charley (NSW, National Parks and Wildlife Service); R Natrass and B. Dadds (Queensland Department of Environment); P. O'Donoghue (University of Queensland); M. Mahony (University of Newcastle); and members of the public who found sick frogs. In the United States we gratefully acknowledge many contributions of R. Hess, V. Beasley, B. Jakstys, L. Miller, J. Cochran, J. Cheney, and B. Ujhelyi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); G. Rabb and T. Meehan (Brookfield Zoo, Chicago), R. Mast (Conservation International); and J. Savage (CRE Collections). This work was supported by the Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Biodiversity Australia, Wet Tropics Authority, IUCN/SSC/Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and American Airlines.

Footnotes

↵ c To whom reprint requests should be addressed at: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australian Animal Health Laboratory, P.O. Bag 24, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia. e-mail: Lee.Berger{at}dah.csiro.au .

This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the Proceedings Office.

Abbreviation: ssu-rDNA, small-subunit rRNA genes.

Data deposition: The sequence reported in this paper has been deposited in the GenBank database (accession no. AF051932).

Received March 9, 1998.

View Abstract

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Chytridiomycosis causes amphibian mortality associated with population declines in the rain forests of Australia and Central America

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Epidermal changes caused by a chytridiomycete fungus (Chytridiomycota; Chytridiales) were found in sick and dead adult anurans collected from montane rain forests in Queensland (Australia) and Panama during mass mortality events associated with significant population declines. We also have found this new disease associated with morbidity and mortality in wild and captive anurans from additional locations in Australia and Central America.

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We are excited to invite you
to an Ecological Reflection Circle hosted by the CIIS Green Team. This event is free and offered to audience members of It Is What It Is. This will be a welcoming community space to share any ideas and feelings about climate crisis that came up for you in watching the performance. Please join us!

The CIIS Green Team provides leadership for CIIS as an institution in the area of sustainability by embodying ecological justice, cultivating reciprocal relationships, and inviting play and pleasure into ecological accountability. We are committed to transforming our community’s consciousness through a holistic ecological focus that engages global paradigm shifts and enables action.

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Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: It Is What It Is: Ecological Reflection Circle. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

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Please join California Institute of Integral Studies' Drama Therapy Program, Theatre for Change, and the CIIS Green Team for a reflection circle to follow up on your attendance of "It Is What It Is: A Dark & Tender Comedy for the Climate Crisis."

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Thomas Jefferson once remarked to George Washington, "Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness." We, at Banyan Roots, echo the former American President's thoughts. This thought is also endorsed in another adage that we abide by - Uttam kheti, madhyam vyapar, nikashta chakri, bhikh nidaan, which places agriculture above all other pursuits. We encourage urban consumers to get back in touch with the common roots that bind our country, and indeed all of humanity, together through our Fund a Farm Programme.

Consumers passionate about farming and conscious about making responsible food choices are invited to learn about organic farming and grow their own produce. You can choose your own plot and the duration of the lease in keeping with your lifestyle and other commitments. Banyan Roots will assist you with selecting crops, sowing seeds, planting saplings, preparing organic manure and pest repellents, watering and caring for your crop and weeding. We will also provide water and organic manure - all your budding organic farm needs is a little attention, some hard work and loads of your love.

Life in the 21st century isn't easy and is fraught with multiple challenges and responsibilities that jostle for your time and attention. We understand. That's why Banyan Roots will also tend to your farm in your absence, ensuring that your farm never wastes away from lack of care or love. You can visit your farm whenever you have the time, and even bring your family and friends along for a leisurely picnic. If you're lucky, your farm will also contribute organic vegetables to the party, which you can carry home with you as a sweet reminder of your labour of love.

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Thomas Jefferson once remarked to George Washington, "Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness." We, at Banyan Roots, echo the former American President's thoughts.

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Go to paypal.me/thevillageinoakland and type in the amount. Since it's PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don't have a PayPal account? No worries.

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To make a one-time or recurring donation, please visit the link below, which will redirect you to our fiscal sponsor (Movement Strategy Center)'s donor page.

Make sure to designate your donation to "Movement Generation". See screenshot below.

JOIN THE JUSTICE & ECOLOGY GIVING NETWORK!

Simply make an annual donation of at least $25 and you will be added (or renewed) to the network immediately. Learn more about the Justice & Ecology Network - including network special benefits - by clicking here!
Any questions about contributing to MG can be emailed to info [at] movementgeneration.org.

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To make a one-time or recurring donation, please visit the link below, which will redirect you to our fiscal sponsor (Movement Strategy Center)'s donor page. Make sure to designate your donation to "Movement Generation". See screenshot below. JOIN THE JUSTICE & ECOLOGY GIVING NETWORK!

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Full Interview with the Village in Oakland

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Full Interview with the Village in Oakland

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The cast & crew added to this playlist throughout our 9 month creation and performance period.

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Educational resources about the California Gold Rush and its impacts on California Indigenous Peoples and Environment

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The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, about 50 miles northeast of Sacramento. Hearing the news, approximately 300,000 people poured into California from the rest of the United States and around the world. The influx of miners reached its peak in 1849, resulting in the term "49'ers". California gold reinvigorated the US economy, and the sudden population increase allowed California to rapidly achieve statehood in 1850. The Gold Rush gave rise to the city of San Francisco which remains the major urban hub in Northern California to this day.

By the time the Gold Rush ended, California had gone from a thinly populated ex-Mexican territory to having one of its first two U.S. Senators, John C. Frémont, selected to be the first presidential nominee for the new Republican Party in 1856.

The Gold Rush had severe effects on Indigenous Peoples of California and resulted in a precipitous Native population decline from disease, genocide and starvation. Over 150,000 Indigenous Peoples lived in California prior to the Gold Rush with sustainable cultures and economies based primarily on hunting, gathering and fishing. By 1870, the Native population of California had declined to an estimated 31,000 with over 60 percent perishing from diseases introduced by the 49ers. Tribes were also systematically chased off their lands, forcibly relocated to missions and reservations, enslaved and brutally massacred. In 1851, the California State government paid $1 million for scalping expeditions. $5 was paid for a severed Indian head in Shasta in 1855 and twenty-five cents was paid for a scalp in Honey Lake in 1863.

Over 4,000 Indigenous children were sold with prices ranging from $60 for a boy to $200 for a girl. In the 19 th and 20 th centuries Indigenous children were also forcibly removed to government and church-run boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their languages. Many were forcibly placed in "work training programs" where they were used as slave labor in homes, farms, timber operations and other enterprises.

The legacies of these genocidal practices, including loss of land, subsistence, cultural practices, language, identity and political sovereignty, persist to this day. The good news is that work for healing, restoration and revitalization carried out by Indigenous Peoples throughout California to reverse these impacts are having notable and positive results.

Environmental & Health Impacts

During the California Gold Rush, miners dug up 12 billion tons of earth, excavating riverbeds and blasting hillsides in their fervor. They also used mercury to extract gold from the ore, releasing an estimated 7,600 tons of the toxic chemical into Northern California rivers and lakes. The amount of mercury required to violate federal health standards today would be equivalent to one gram in a small lake.

Elemental mercury is a heavy metal that persists in the environment. It transforms into highly toxic methylmercury once it is released into waterways, which then bio-accumulates in the tissues of plants, animals and humans. Methylmercury has numerous detrimental health impacts. It is a known neurotoxin that can cause serious long-term impacts on the developing brains and nervous systems of unborn and newborn babies and young children.

Mercury is a global problem. Primary sources of human exposure are eating contaminated fish, coal-fired power plants, medical and dental procedures and waste, small-scale gold mining still using mercury for ore extraction, and emissions from abandoned mines. In 2013, the United Nations completed the Minamata Convention on Mercury, which calls for countries to reduce the use and release of mercury and to clean up contaminated sites.

In 1999, the State of California celebrated the 150 th anniversary of the Gold Rush, including distributing curriculum for use in California public schools which completely omitted its impacts on the Indigenous Peoples of California. As a result, International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) worked with Project Underground to develop the Award-winning 26-mintue video "Gold, Greed and Genocide: the Untold Tragedy of the California Gold Rush" for use in Jr. and Sr. High Schools, along with an accompanying study guide highlighting the historic and continuing impacts from the perspective of California Indigenous Peoples.

In 2019, IITC received support to produce an annex providing updates on two key issues addressed in the first video: the revitalization of California Native cultures and the work being done to provide information on mercury and promote clean-up. Both videos can be watched on this page or on IITC's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFyhEwhSEY9do8KMewePRtw. Links to other relevant resources about the California Gold Rush are also posted.

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Gold, Greed & Genocide | International Indian Treaty Council

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The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, about 50 miles northeast of Sacramento. Hearing the news, approximately 300,000 people poured into California from the rest of the United States and around the world.

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Black healers collective creating spaces where Black, Indigenous, POC can remember & restore our individual & collective power, aliveness & wholeness

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ፍሬወይኒ | Freweyni [she/her]

🌼 ecosocialism 🌼 abolition 🌼

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We design solutions for a healthy ocean, grounded in social justice.

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Diversity + Community + Anti-Racism + Body Liberation Outdoors

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Anthology of wisdom from women climate leaders

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Indigenous Climate Action is an Indigenous-led org working to inspire & support Indigenous-led climate action

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Defending Redwood rainforests from industrial logging. Yurok ancestral land, so called Humboldt County.

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List: SF Local Environmental Justice Organizations

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List: SF Local Environmental Justice Organizations

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environmental justice

See also ecology human rights multiple chemical sensitivity public health racism toxics external links for environmental justice

Organizations:
350BayArea.org ( Oakland)
Asian Pacific Environmental Network ( Oakland)
Borneo Project, The ( Berkeley)
Californians for Pesticide Reform ( Berkeley)
Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems ( Santa Cruz)
Center for Creative Land Recyling ( Oakland)
Center for Environmental Health ( Oakland)
Center for Health, Environment and Justice
Citizens for Balanced Growth ( Livermore)
City and County of San Francisco Department of the Environment ( San Francisco)
Communities for a Better Environment ( Richmond)
CorpWatch ( Berkeley)
Crissy Field Center ( San Francisco)
Energy Justice Network
Environment and Human Health, Inc.
Environmental Health News
Environmental Justice Coalition for Water
Environmental Law Foundation ( Oakland)
Filipino American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity ( Berkeley)
Friends of Alemany Farm ( San Francisco)
Global Justice Ecology Project
Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice ( San Francisco)
Greenlining Institute ( Oakland)
GRID Alternatives ( Oakland)
HOMEY ( San Francisco)
Impact Fund, The ( Berkeley)
In These Times
Indigenous Environmental Network
International Indian Treaty Council ( San Francisco)
Literacy for Environmental Justice ( San Francisco)
Pacific Institute ( Oakland)
People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights ( San Francisco)
Pesticide Action Network North America ( Berkeley)
Rooted in Community
San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters
San Francisco Public Bank Coalition
San Francisco Public Bank Coalition
Sunflower Alliance
Susan Ives Communications
Tenants Together ( San Francisco)
Urban Habitat ( Oakland)
West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project ( Oakland)
Western States Legal Foundation ( Oakland)
Wild Equity Institute ( San Francisco)
Youth United for Community Action ( East Palo Alto)
[people. power. media]

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environmental justice *** Organizations Indexed Thereunder

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See also ecology human rights multiple chemical sensitivity public health racism toxics external links for environmental justice Organizations: 350BayArea.org ( Oakland) Asian Pacific Environmental Network ( Oakland) Borneo Project, The ( Berkeley) Californians for Pesticide Reform ( Berkeley) Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems ( Santa Cruz) Center for

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The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color.

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The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing. APTP began as a project of the ONYX Organizing Committee.

APTP es una coalición multirracial e intergeneracional, liderada por gente Negra. Buscamos construir un modelo replicable y sostenible para erradicar el terror policial en las comunidades de color en los Estados Unidos. Apoyamos a las familias que están sobreviviendo el terror policial en su lucha por justicia. Documentamos los abusos policiales y conectamos a las familias y miembros de la comunidad con recursos, ayuda legal, y oportunidades para la sanación. Anti Police-Terror Project comenzó como un proyecto de Onyx Organizing Committee.

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The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing.

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YPW helps regenerate healthy passages into mature adulthood for today’s youth.

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Join us for the 4th annual Coyote's Conference West coast conference for Directors, Administrators, Program Leaders, Instructors, and Associates of nature connection and wilderness skill schools for youth. Hosted by Earth Skills Alliance 2020 Organizers: Vilda Wilderness School, Reikes Nature, Gaia Girls, 4 Elements Earth Education Who We Are We are a collective of Directors, Program Leaders and Instructors...

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Join us for the 4th annual Coyote's Conference West coast conference for Directors, Administrators, Program Leaders, Instructors, and Associates of nature connection and wilderness skill schools for youth. Hosted by Earth Skills Alliance 2020 Organizers: Vilda Wilderness School, Reikes Nature, Gaia Girls, 4 Elements Earth Education Who We Are We are a collective of Directors, Program Leaders and Instructors...

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10 Things You Can Do To Help Our Unhoused Neighbors

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10 Things You Can Do To Help Our Unhoused Neighbors

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by The Village in Oakland

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10 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP OUR UNHOUSED NEIGHBORSit-2

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Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice

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Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice

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Rest in Power Ms. Marie Harrison, your fight for clean air and legacy will continue to inspire our work for environmental justice. Read more about Marie's Legacy.

Greenaction believes that having clean air and water is a human right.Unfortunately, too many communities across the US and the world suffer from polluted air and contaminated water. Even in wealthy countries like the US, many low income and people of color communities continue to drink toxic contaminated water and breathe air with pollutants that can cause cancer, respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

Clean Water for Kettleman City

While Flint, Michigan has had contaminated water for a few years, Kettleman City's water has been contaminated with benzene and arsenic for decades. In the last few years, the benzene (contamination from old oilfield operations) is being removed but pumped into the air near homes. Drinking water continues to be contaminated with arsenic. The settlement of the civil rights complaint filed by Greenaction and El Pueblo of Kettleman City required the state to use their best efforts to bring clean water to the town. The California EPA now says that the toxic water supply will be replaced with water from the California Aqueduct and treated with a new system in the Spring of 2019.

Protect the Colorado and Green Rivers

Greenaction brought together an upstream/downstream alliance of Native Nations, grassroots Indigenous groups, environmental justice and environmental organizations to support each other and build a stronger movement to oppose ongoing and new threats to the Colorado and Green Rivers and protect them from radioactive and toxic pollution.

Key campaigns are fighting;

The proposed Green River nuclear power plant,

The White Mesa Uranium Mill,

Oil and gas operations throughout the region

Participants included Greenaction, Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, Mohave Elders of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, grassroots indigenous groups White Mesa Concerned Community (of Ute Mountain Ute Tribe), Dine CARE and Haul NO from the Navajo Nation, Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environment, tribal members from northern Utes, Skull Valley Goshute, Hopi, O'odham, and non-Native allies including Uranium Watch, Living Rivers, Canyon Country Rising Tide.

Protect San Francisco Bay's Shoreline Waters

Rising sea levels threaten contamination sites on San Francisco Bay waterfront. Greenaction is leading the fight to challenge industry and government agencies to properly clean up waterfront radioactive and toxic contamination threatened with inundation by rising sea levels caused by climate change. Our work on this issue focuses on San Francisco Bay, where government, industries and mega-developers have ignored the true threat posed by rising sea levels in Bayview Hunters Point , Treasure Island and other communities.

Radioactive and toxic contamination is already leaking into the Bay from these sites, including the notorious Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund Site. Adding to the problem is the fact that the USEPA and Navy want to leave radioactive and toxic waste buried at the Shipyard Superfund Site right on the Bay waterfront.

We Stand with Mauna Kea

The protection of Indigenous Lands and sacred sites and landscapes go hand-in-hand. The summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai'i is one of these sacred landscapes. To Native Hawaiians or Kānaka Maoli, the mountain, Mauna Kea, represents many things; a place of worship, an ancestral burial site, and a life-giving source of fresh water. The aquifer located within Mauna Kea provides fresh water for the town of Hilo and other surrounding communities. Greenaction advocates and supports the protection of Mauna Kea and is adamantly against the building of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Project. The TMT project would have devastating and irreversible environmental impacts on Mauna Kea's fresh water aquifer and desecrate sacred lands. The TMT summit is already overburdened by thirteen previously built telescopes, which have been proven to leave toxins. Greenaction stands in solidarity with the "We Stand with Mauna Kea" and "Protect Mauna Kea" movements and protective actions.

Kū Kia'i Mauna!

Click here to read more about the recent peaceful blockade at Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

TAKE ACTION NOW! C ALL NOW TO HALT THE TMT CONSTRUCTION!
Governor David Y. Ige
(808) 586-0034
Contact the Governor Online
Contact Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

(650) 213-3000

NO TMT! Protect Native Sacred Sites:
Ask them: Why are you desecrating Mauna Kea????
Tell them: "NO TMT! Protect Native Sacred Sites "Please Divest from Desecration"
For more ways to stay updated and support the Mauna Kea Protectors, please visit:
Weblinks
Use these Hashtags on Social Media
#ProtectMaunaKea#WeAreMaunaKea #MaunaKea #ProtectTheSacred #ProtectTheSource #WeStandWithMaunaKea #WeAreStillMaunaKea #NOTMT #TMTShutDown #WeStand

Stay Tuned to Greenaction for more Direct Action!

Clean Air for Kids in Fremont

Greenaction is working with parents in Fremont, California whose kids attend an elementary and middle school right next to Tri-City Rock's concrete batch plant. Emissions from the stack, diesel buses, and from the uncovered piles blow onto the school grounds constantly.

Clean Energy Now! Keep Fossil Fuels In the Ground

Visit our Energy & Climate Justice page.

Statement of solidarity;

Greenaction stands with all communities fighting all over the world to put an end to the fossil fuel industries. We stand with Standing Rock, we stand with the communities organizing to stop the XL pipeline, and Line 3 in Minnesota. We stand with those organizing to stop fracking and drilling and those frontline communities organizing to end Tar Sands mining. We stand with the communities most impacted by the Chevron Refinery in Richmond California.

DIESEL IDLING & EMISSIONS REDUCTION CAMPAIGNS

Greenaction has active campaigns to reduce the harmful and illegal idling of diesel trucks in Bayview Hunters Point/San Francisco, Kettleman City & Avenal in the San Joaquin Valley, and we are spreading this successful effort to other communities including the Salinas Valley.

Read our fact sheets on

BVHP and Kettleman City Community Air Monitoring Projects

Greenaction, in partnership our close community partners, has begun two multi-year community air monitoring project to identify, evaluate and reduce particulate matter pollution as well as exposure to harmful emissions in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco and Kettleman City in the San Joaquin Valley of California. In both communities, residents suffer high rates of health problems likely linked to pollution.

Read more about the BVHP Community Air Monitoring Project

Read more about the Kettleman City Community Air Monitoring Project

Stop Incinerators and Incinerators in Disguise:

Greenaction works with our community partners to close polluting incinerators and to stop new proposed incinerators, including plasma arc, gasification and pyrolysis technologies. Incineration does not safely or completely destroy the waste being burned, and emits a wide range of toxic contaminants, particulates, and climate change pollutants into the air we breathe.

We work for safer technologies, such as sterilization of medical waste instead of incineration.

In addition to watchdogging government and industry to learn of any new incinerator proposals, Greenaction is engaged in active anti-incinerators campaigns:

Close the Evoqua hazardous waste facility on the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Parker, Arizona

Greenaction continues to work with tribal members to shut down the Evoqua hazardous waste facility where toxic wastes shipped there from companies and government agencies across the nation are burned in a "carbon reactivation" furnace. The facility got built on the reservation in 1991 due to false information presented to the CRIT tribal government by the USEPA and company that claimed that only steam was emitted. In fact, dioxin and a wide range of other hazardous chemicals and metals are emitted into the air. Greenaction is supporting the Colorado River Indian Tribes' appeal of the permit improperly issued in 2018 by USEPA.

Shut the Stericycle medical waste incinerator in North Salt Lake City, Utah now, and stop it from moving to another community or state.

Greenaction started the campaign to close the Stericycle medical waste incinerator in North Salt Lake City twenty years ago. In 2015, the company was fined due to serious air pollution violations and submitting false emissions reports. In a clear example of Utah government's pro-polluter bias, Stericycle was told they could move to a more remote area in Tooele County and incinerate there - despite the major violations and even without a public hearing process. Greenaction joined North Salt Lake City residents and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment in demanding an immediate closure of the incinerator, and Greenaction opposed it moving to Tooele County. We are currently watchdogging the situation to ensure the incinerator is closing, and to monitor if the company tries to take their polluting incinerator operation to a different state. Medical waste should be sterilized, not burned.

Shut the Covanta garbage incinerator, Crow's Landing, California

Covanta burns solid waste at their aging incinerator in Stanislaus County in California's Central Valley, an agricultural heartland. We work with the Valley Improvement Projects and the Grayson Neighborhood Council in this effort.

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Rest in Power Ms. Marie Harrison, your fight for clean air and legacy will continue to inspire our work for environmental justice. Read more about Marie's Legacy. Greenaction believes that having clean air and water is a human right.Unfortunately, too many communities across the US and the world suffer from polluted air and contaminated water.

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Extinction Rebellion is a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

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You are the most powerful weapon we have in the fight to save endangered species.

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Use your mouse to save a grouse. Or a sea otter. Or a Mexican gray wolf. Our e-network makes the first step simple.

You are the most powerful weapon we have in the fight to save endangered species. Here's why: The fate of plants and animals threatened with extinction is largely determined by the government agencies that manage our public lands, and those agencies can be swayed by public opinion.

Messages demanding action from tens of thousands of people just like you have helped the Center influence decision makers, stop destructive practices that destroy our wild lands, and win protections for endangered species like the orca and northern goshawk.

There is strength in numbers, and every informed voice counts. Keep in the loop of important information for troubled species. Attend a public meeting, mail in your comments, or make a phone call when time is short. You'll be able to influence the future of the wild, when you know what's critical and how your advocacy can make a difference.

Once you're on board you'll receive periodic messages from the Center for Biological Diversity, including action alerts and our online newsletter.

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Use your mouse to save a grouse. Or a sea otter. Or a Mexican gray wolf. Our e-network makes the first step simple. You are the most powerful weapon we have in the fight to save endangered species.

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The Ecology Center & The Youth Environmental Academy

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The Ecology Center & The Youth Environmental Academy

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The Ecology Center’s Youth Environmental Academy (YEA) is a green leadership development program for young people ages 15-24. YEA provides structured, paid internships to youth at our offices in West Berkeley.

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The Ecology Center's Youth Environmental Academy (YEA) is a green leadership development program for young people ages 15-24. YEA provides structured, paid internships to youth, normally at our offices in West Berkeley, but now operating remotely to comply with state and local COVID-19 restrictions.

Through programming based on the nationally acclaimed Roots of Success curriculum, youth emerge with content knowledge across the following areas: 1) Health, Food Systems, Food Justice, and Sustainable Agriculture, 2) Alternative Energy, 3) Climate Change, 4) Water Conservation, and 5) Waste Management and Recycling. YEA participants "earn and learn" with opportunities to move to positions of greater responsibility and leadership - from Youth Scholars to Youth Interns to Youth Program Assistants.

YEA operates a weekly Farm Box Curbside Pickup program at the Saturday Downtown Berkeley Farmers' Market. This program provides access to fresh, wholesome food during the pandemic, supports our local food system, and provides employment for local youth. The Farm Box contents are sourced from the Berkeley Farmers' Market, and the operation is run by YEA youth. Click here to Order Your YEA Farm Box.

Like many youth advocacy programs in the Bay Area, Ecology Center's Youth Environmental Academy program is rapidly adapting to the Shelter-In-Place Order, while staying connected to our youth and furthering the progress they have made.

Out of this challenge has emerged many inspiring solutions, including a repository of Resources for Youth Food Justice Programs in the Bay Area Navigating COVID-19. If you are a youth advocate, directly or indirectly, please use, share, and add to this resource. There are resources available, if you know where to look.

Mission

Activities

Outcomes

YEA Sessions and Dates

Support for YEA

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The Ecology Center's Youth Environmental Academy (YEA) is a green leadership development program for young people ages 15-24. YEA provides structured, paid internships to youth, normally at our offices in West Berkeley, but now operating remotely to comply with state and local COVID-19 restrictions.

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LEJ promotes ecological health, environmental stewardship, and community development in Southeast San Francisco by creating urban greening, eco-literacy, community stewardship and workforce development opportunities that directly engage and support local residents in securing a healthier future.

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We are a multi-generational and multi-cultural cohort of youth, volunteers, supporters, environmental educators, habitat restoration specialists, community organizers and social justice advocates dedicated to connecting people to local urban open spaces to restore ecology, improve environmental health and strengthen community.

This year brings the the next phase of the Healthy Habitats and Lifestyles project which includes an expansion of the Native Plant Nursery. This partnership with California State Parks, offers a significant opportunity for our organization to continue to advance environmental health, ecological stewardship, and community development in Southeast San Francisco as part of the restoration of California's first urban state park, Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA).

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We are a multi-generational and multi-cultural cohort of youth, volunteers, supporters, environmental educators, habitat restoration specialists, community organizers and social justice advocates dedicated to connecting people to local urban open spaces to restore ecology, improve environmental health and strengthen community.

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With a problem as extensive as climate change, many of us do not know the best way to support. Community-based climate action has a large collective impact, but it can be challenging to figure out how to support local, community-based work. We are changing that.

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"I come from two of the most climate vulnerable cities in the world. I've lived in Miami for most of my life, but I was actually born in New Orleans. My family moved there from Nicaragua as political refugees. They lived in New Orleans for about 10 years until my dad lost his job.

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We aim to a) generate livelihoods in the Melghat region by offering trainings in bamboo handicraft & housing work and b)reestablish India’s amazing tradition of artisan and reestablishing honor & respect for Artisans in the Society.

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Various Competitions / Events - By Engineering India Group
Date: Sunday, 22th Feb 2015
Time: 9:30 AM
Venue: Maharshi Vyas Sabhagruha, Smriti Mandir Parisar, Reshimbagh, Nagpur

First Stakeholders Conclave for Social Development in Vidharbha
Date: Sunday, 15th Feb 2015
Venue: Physics Assembly Hall, VNIT, Nagpur

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Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra NGO with Vidarbha Vaibhav

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Various Competitions / Events - By Engineering India Group Date: Sunday, 22th Feb 2015 Time: 9:30 AM Venue: Maharshi Vyas Sabhagruha, Smriti Mandir Parisar, Reshimbagh, Nagpur First Stakeholders Conclave for Social Development in Vidharbha Date: Sunday, 15th Feb 2015 Venue: Physics Assembly Hall, VNIT, Nagpur

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The Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) was set up by the seniormost members of India's organic farming community in the year 2002. The association was primarily set up to promote organic farming, lobby with government agencies and departments to pay more attention to sustainable agriculture, and assist farmers using chemicals and pesticides to convert successfully to organic farming methods.

While the association has formulated programmes to assist organic farmers with organic certification and also participates fully in the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) of organic certification designed mostly for small and marginal farmers, it has steadfastly resisted becoming an agency for the procurement and distribution of organic produce. It prefers instead to promote and support individuals, communities, NGOs and networks who are in the business of organic marketing.

OFAI was formally registered under the Societies Registration Act only in 2006, after the rules of the association were discussed and vetted by several meetings of organic farmers and NGOs involved in the promotion of organic farming.

OFAI today remains the only membership-based national association of organic farmers, organic farming promoters and green stores. By charter, the President of the association will always be an organic farmer. The association will also strive to ensure gender equality in all its activities. It campaigns actively against the introduction of genetically modified organisms and seeds in India's agriculture.
Mission and goals Office Bearers Members and Membership Details Organic Certification and Labelling Scheme Intercontinental Network of Organic Farming Organisations (INOFO) Events Archive Fifth Biennial Organic Convention Chandigarh Punjab 2015

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The Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) was set up by the seniormost members of India's organic farming community in the year 2002. The association was primarily set up to promote organic farming, lobby with government agencies and departments to pay more attention to sustainable agriculture, and assist farmers using chemicals and pesticides to convert successfully to organic farming methods.

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Navdanya means “nine seeds” (symbolizing protection of biological and cultural diversity) and also the “new gift” (for seed as commons), based on the right to save and share seeds.

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By Dr Vandana Shiva - The Ecologist, 24th January 2020 | Source Dr Vandana Shiva argues that agroecology holds the key to solving the climate and ecological crisis in a just...

By Navdanya International - Comune-info, 24 November 2019 | Source Navdanya International's annual report outlines the attacks of agro-business lobbies and the negative...

Navdanya International, 12 November 2019 | Source "Do we want to work in harmony with the laws of nature, or continue with the violence against the earth by eating food...

Navdanya International, 30 September 2019 | Source It is significant that at a time in history when a global economic paradigm shift is being loudly and clearly demanded due to...

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By Dr Vandana Shiva - The Ecologist, 24th January 2020 | Source Dr Vandana Shiva argues that agroecology holds the key to solving the climate and ecological crisis in a just... By Navdanya International - Comune-info, 24 November 2019 | Source Navdanya International's annual report outlines the attacks of agro-business lobbies and the negative...

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QTPOC led Agroecology Collective in the North Bay

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QUIL | Queers United for Intersectional Liberation

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Be rejuvenated by nature and community. Be celebrated for your authentic self. Be inspired to create change in the world.

Queers United for Intersectional Liberation (QUIL) is a nonprofit dedicated to helping LGBTQ people lead healthier, more fulfilled lives and giving them to tools to create positive change in the world. We produce unique programs each year, ranging from leadership conferences to artists' retreats, and all geared towards strengthening LGBTQ individuals and communities.

LGBTQ people are three times more likely to face depression or other mental health issues. QUIL helps people heal the damage done by an often violent society by teaching them to celebrate their authentic selves. Through a mixture of workshops, retreats, skillshares, dances, collaborative projects, theatrics, and classes, our programs grow individuals' skills, knowledge, and confidence.

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About Groundswell - Ecovillage and Retreat Center

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Be rejuvenated by nature and community. Be celebrated for your authentic self. Be inspired to create change in the world. Queers United for Intersectional Liberation (QUIL) is a nonprofit dedicated to helping LGBTQ people lead healthier, more fulfilled lives and giving them to tools to create positive change in the world.

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"Settler colonial parasitic capitalism, militarized imperialist nation states, and eurocentric ideologies such as pseudo socialism and fascist neoliberalism must all be abolished and replaced with autonomous and sovereign communities centered around indigenous self-determination and Black liberation"

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We need clean land, clean water, clean air, and reparations for all colonized and oppressed peoples on the planet. Black and Indigenous Women, non-binary, trans, and queer folks are the leaders of the movement for food sovereignty and must be centered and uplifted in order to achieve true and absolute liberation. Anti-Black racial capitalism, Anti-Indigenous Imperialist Empires, and white supremacist hetero-patriarchal structures, practices, and ongoing projects are the root causes of our wretched conditions and are the obstacles in our ongoing struggles for liberation.

Settler colonial parasitic capitalism, militarized imperialist nation states, and eurocentric ideologies such as pseudo socialism and fascist neoliberalism must all be abolished and replaced with autonomous and sovereign communities centered around indigenous self-determination and Black liberation. Our communities should be able to exist in balance and respectful reciprocity at all levels, between individuals, families, and groups of people actively engaged in relations with plant and animal relatives.

We need autonomous and sovereign communities that steward and produce their own ethically harvested food without pesticides and other chemical inputs. We need active divestment from the colonial food system and the fossil fuel petrochemical industry. We need access to de-privatized clean water, and food landscapes with no tolerance for racialized and gendered domination or enslavement. We need justice and reparations for Black and Indigenous people globally.

All forms of colonial and imperial governments are illegitimate entities that were created by genocidal slave holding colonists. This includes the blood thirsty settler state of israel, which needs to be immediately dismantled to ensure the right of return for all Palestinians globally. These colonial governments massacred indigenous people, stole their land, and then destroyed and continued to destroy ecosystems to grow cash crops like sugar, tobacco, and cotton, on plantations for export and wealth building in the globalizing capitalist market. The wealth created on these plantations remains solely in the hands of land grabbing capitalists with no regard for Earth, truth, or justice. The theft of indigenous lands and genocide of indigenous peoples is ongoing.

Relationships with soil, plants, food, and medicine are direct lines of communication and connection with our ancestors. Denying people food sovereignty is an act of systemic genocide. We believe all people should have access to affordable and safe housing, and the ability to collect clean water, to produce their own food, and steward their own food systems.

The genetic modification of species to be resistant to chemicals and produce infertile seeds is an unsustainable violent project that is leading to the destruction of our planet. These genetically engineered bioweapons destroy peasant food webs and cause massive starvation, famine, malnutrition, droughts, ocean acidification, and genocide. Biotechnology corporations use these infertile seeds as tools to prevent peasants from producing their own food and saving seeds.

The privatization of land is the framework through which colonized and oppressed Indigenous people across the planet are denied access to their ancestral homelands which historically provided them with sustenance and wellness. The continual contemporary displacement of these peoples is mainly facilitated by the fossil fuel and mining corporations who frack and create pipelines across indigenous land for oil, as well as mine uranium, and other metals required to manufacture weapons, and modern technology, which causes irreparable damage to the ecosystem and Indigenous communities. Monoculture soybean and palm oil production, latifundio style cattle ranching, and construction have all desecrated sacred indigenous plains, rainforests and coast lines for the benefit of tourists and capitalist farmers. Fisher folks who have been harvesting from their ancestral coastal fisheries for centuries and millennia have been displaced from their harbors to make way for seafaring capitalists and massive hotel chains who pollute the ocean with plastic and other petrochemicals causing massive fish and coral reef die offs along with toxic algal blooms.

European imperial powers, settler colonial governments and all settler and imperial beneficiaries live on blood money, blood resources, and on the sick amassed power of stolen life with blood on their hands. Inheritors of genocidal capitalist wealth owe payment to all oppressed people on the planet in the form of land, money, labor, stolen resources, and their total effort in deconstructing these violent systems. Liberation of all colonized and historically oppressed peoples from wage enslavement, debt, prisons, jails, military service, is essential in maintaining the longevity of all living species on the planet.

The modern militarized neoliberal fascist government state system exists to exploit and oppress the people, police their movement and existence in space, and manage the social and material death of the colonized. Black and Indigenous representation in policing structure does nothing to alleviate oppression in a system that was created to catch, kill, and murder enslaved Africans that emancipated themselves from bondage. There are no good cops in a policing system designed to uphold enslavement--abolish the police.

Every community deserves a holistic healing clinic equipped with nutritional counseling, physical fitness and training provisions, free mental health services, free housing for houseless folks, and drug abuse rehabilitation centers. All Prisons must be abolished and replaced with these healing centers.

All oppressed and enslaved non-human animals and plant beings must be liberated in tandem to oppressed and enslaved peoples. Animals confined in concentrated animal feeding operations must be instantly liberated and set free.

Healing from trauma and ancestral wounds is an essential part of liberation. The colonial nation state systems have denied us access to healing and wellness. It is time to move forward in healing our minds, bodies, and spirits from this trauma. Since the western medical system has continually exploited and experimented on Black and Indigenous people, the usage of herbal and traditional medicines to ease the pain and suffering caused by capitalism are important to remember and actively put to use.

Self Determination, creativity and imagination are guaranteed human rights. Psychopathic Genocidal Racial Capitalist Hetero Patriarchy must be destroyed. It oppresses and kills women, men, non binary, LGBTQI+ folks, and children.

We are a Black and Indigenous led agroecology collective composed of skilled land stewards, spiritual leaders, healers, gardeners, farmers, builders, writers, educators, artists, musicians, and organizers. We study and spread ancestral knowledge and contemporary agroecological practices to train community members to build collectivized, autonomous, and chemical free food systems in urban and peri-urban environments throughout the Occupied Karkin Ohlone & Chochenyo Territory.

Our work regenerates our community's connection to and reverence for land and agriculture, which was partially severed from our ancestors through colonial violence, and from our elders through multinational corporate exploitation, food system consolidation, and racist actions of the usda, and u.s. government at large, perpetrated against Black farmers to evict them from their farm lands. One of our main priorities is to nullify the industrial food system and further food justice and food sovereignty for low-income, Black, and Indigenous communities, families, and individuals in Huichin (Oakland), Berkeley, San Leandro, San Francisco, and Emeryville.

Right now we are focused on establishing food sovereignty amongst our community. We grow, harvest, and deliver nutrient dense and chemical free food to low-income communities experiencing food apartheid. We also recover otherwise wasted food from organic community gardens, markets, and private residences. We make our produce accessible to all people by providing sliding scale or free produce boxes, but we prioritize the distribution of food to radical organizers, other revolutionary organizations, Black folks participating in insurrections against police terrorism and the murder of Black people, houseless folx, elderly folx, indigenous, afro, trans, and gender non conforming folx.

We consider ourselves a lighthouse organization in the Bay Area dedicated to food sovereignty. We are inspired by movements such as Cooperation Jackson, La Vía Campesina, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, The Palestinian Liberation Oganization, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Young Lords, The Zapatistas, Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), Plan Pueblo a Pueblo, and many more. Our resource page contains information about the above and other organizations that have pushed toward self determination and food sovereignty for oppressed colonized peoples globally.

Donations help sustain and grow this vision. These proceeds help us transform our connection to the land into regenerative, healthy, and intentional nutrition for our communities. We are not a nonprofit charity organization. We are a revolutionary youth coalition of militant peasants in the struggle for liberation.

We encourage all non-natives inhabiting this occupied territory to regularly pay the Shuumi Land Tax to support the Sogrea Te' Land Trust, indigenous urban-women working towards the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship. We also encourage folks to view the short film " Beyond Recogntion "to learn more about their work.

Native-Land.ca is a map of native nations occupied under settler colonial governments. We urge all non-natives in the Western Hemisphere (currently referred to as the Americas), Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) if you have not already, to acknowledge your presence on violently occupied territory and divest from willful ignorance, complicit acceptance or active perpetuation of settler colonialism. We demand that white settlers abandon the resources afforded them through colonial violence, return lands to indigenous peoples, pay ongoing reparations to black people, divest from and deconstruct white supremacy, accept and further settler social death, and support black and indigenous leadership in the ongoing struggle for liberation.

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African Indigenous Agroecology Farming | Bay Area | Black Earth Farms

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The Black Earth Farms Collective is an agroecological lighthouse organization composed of skilled Pan-African and Pan-Indigenous farmers, builders and educators focused on establishing food sovereignty amongst our community. We grow, harvest, and deliver nutrient dense and chemical free food to...

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ANV elevates life in Oakland and beyond by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming

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Our Mission
Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in Oakland and beyond by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming. Founded and led mainly by women of color from the surrounding neighborhood and larger community, ANV creates a safe and creative outdoor space for children, youth, and families in East Oakland, CA. ANV engages and strengthens young people's understanding of nutrition, food production, and healthy living as well as strengthens their ties to the community.
Our Challenge

Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project offers vital services in education, child care, economic empowerment, and access to green, safe spaces and healthy food to a community sorely lacking in these areas. The camp serves low-income African-American and Latino children in a community where local schools, Acorn-Woodland and Encompass, report that 99% of their students qualify for free and reduced school lunches. Only 60% of residents in the zip code are high school graduates or higher; only 7% have a Bachelor's degree or higher.

This densely populated urban area suffers from pollution, urban blight, and high crime rates. Many residents fear allowing their children to play outside, resulting in severed ties between children and the natural world and a significant reduction in exercise. Only 17% of Latinos and African Americans in our county consume the recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables, in part due to lack of access. Our neighborhood is a USDA-defined 'Food Desert', with only 2 grocery stores within 3 miles providing limited fresh produce. Recent studies, like a 2007 Stanford University study, show that, with extensive exposure to poverty, violence, and institutionalized marginalization, "urban youth are twice as likely as soldiers returning from Iraq to have PTSD....compared with children who suffered no adverse childhood experiences, those who experienced four or more had a 220% increase in heart disease, a 160% increase in diabetes and were 1,220% more likely to attempt suicide."

Our Vision and Strategy

Imagine a child who has never seen carrots in the ground or screams in fright at a worm. This is the reality of many children we work with. We design our camps, after-school program, and monthly farm days so youth experience nature in a safe space, playing, learning, creating, and accessing healthy, nature-based experiences that will empower them to be educated, well-rounded stewards. We incentivize parent involvement to reinforce what is learned in the home. Parents volunteer and lead field trips, like to Cal Academy of Sciences, and overnight camping trips, where kids hike, ID plants, learn Leave No Trace, tell stories around campfires, and study the stars, all within an hour of home.

Youth eat organically grown produce from the farm, gaining skills to help cook healthy meals at home. They engage in the arts, cultural programs like drumming, and outdoor activities like field games and swimming. Youth plan, plant, and harvest culturally-relevant food on the farm, stewarding local green spaces and gaining vocational skills as they market and sell produce at our Farmstand. All profits are then deposited into participating youths' educational savings accounts.
*Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project is an exempt organization as described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code; EIN:45-0935667.

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Our Mission Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in Oakland and beyond by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming. Founded and led mainly by women of color from the surrounding neighborhood and larger community, ANV creates a safe and creative outdoor space for children, youth, and families in East ...

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"We empower farmers with the tools, platforms, knowledge and support necessary for economic self-sufficiency through traditional Indian organic farming practices"

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The Jaivik Kutumbh programme encompasses various cities and farms across the country, and are aimed at both educating and enabling traditional farmers, and informing urban consumers about simple measures they can take to make more healthful food choices.

If you would like to be a part of our Javik Kutumbh programme or are interested in bringing banyan roots to a village or farming community near you, do get in touch with us. We also welcome volunteers to join us and be a part of our transformative cause, so do let us know if you'd like to contribute your time.

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The Jaivik Kutumbh programme encompasses various cities and farms across the country, and are aimed at both educating and enabling traditional farmers, and informing urban consumers about simple measures they can take to make more healthful food choices.

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5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis

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5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis

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This pandemic is a further wake up call things need to radically change and many of the emergency measures help the planet too

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Nature

The human tragedy of the coronavirus is immense. So far over 3,000 have died and more than 90,000 have been infected globally and millions have been affected. Whilst infectious disease has always been a part of the human experience, the expansion of industrial civilisation has inexorably amplified the risk of new diseases.

Uncontrolled industrial expansion also dangerously heats the planet and drives the collapse of ecosystems worldwide. Experts like Professor Jem Bendell and philosopher Rupert Read have argued that societal collapse is near inevitable and that up to 6 billion people could die. Dr Nafeez Ahmed argues the collapse of civilisation may have already begun. That human civilisation itself is at risk is an increasingly accepted reality of our times. More than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries have declared a climate emergency warning - "chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable"

Coronavirus is both a symptom of the problematic globalised economy and an important signal that things need to change. Emergency short-term measures to contain the virus also have a positive impact on decimated global ecosystems. Crisis can be an opportunity and adopting some of these measures in perpetuity could help to avert the worst case runaway climate scenarios and help to maintain the planetary conditions that humanity is adapted to.

1. Demonstrating a less industrial future is feasible

Currently, a slowing economy is a lower-carbon economy. In China, coronavirus has slowed industrial production, prompted longer holidays and the introduction of travel restrictions, all of which result in lower CO2 emissions: China's emissions alone are down by a quarter or 100 million metric tons. The decrease in output mean less material being shipped across the world, and less disposable products ending up in landfill.

The sort of precipitous and unmanaged decline coronavirus has forced on global economies can devastate people's livelihoods and living standards. However it is possible to implement such measures in a steady way, and forge societies less dependent on industrial production that not only protect livelihoods but simultaneously increase citizens' well-being. This is what economists and sustainability experts call degrowth: a 'phase of planned and equitable economic contraction in the richest nations eventually reaching a steady state that operates within Earth's biophysical limits.'

While coronavirus has resulted in a very sudden scale down in industrial production due to a public health emergency, living through this spasm may allow citizens to imagine, and policy-makers to plan, how it is possible to live differently in response to the ecological emergency. Reducing economic activity and industrial output is a means to enable global ecosystems to regenerate.
Nasa images show China pollution clear amid slowdown
2. Driving a massive contraction in demand for cruises and aviation

With the Diamond Princess now as synonymous with the virus as Wuhan province, the last place people are dreaming of being right now is on a cruise ship, bookings for the $45 billion a year cruise industry are down 40%.
Each day one cruise ship can release as much pollution as one million cars
Cruise ships emit extreme pollution in some of the world's most beloved and fragile ecosystems such as the arctic, caribbean and Galapagos Islands. Burning the world's dirtiest oil (bunker fuel) they pollute the air and cause sickness among coastline communities. The European fleet of the world's single biggest cruise company, Carnival Corporation, creates more air pollution than all of Europe's cars.

Until these giant corporations address their impacts a drop in bookings for this monstrously polluting sector can only be a good thing for planet earth.

Similarly, air travel is down due to coronavirus, declining for the first time since 2009 with an estimated cost to airlines in excess of $29 billion in revenue this year. Campaigners have been calling for limits to air travel for years highlighting the sector's massive and increasing climate impact. It seems that the coronavirus is driving the sort of reduction in air travel that lawmakers and the industry itself have thus far failed to enforce. In the face of a climate emergency and political dithering an overall reduction in unnecessary travel could promote shifts to the enhanced local economies that may help avoid the most dangerous runaway climate models.

3. Shifting towards more resilient local economies

More and more of us live in cities and eat food that has been industrially-produced elsewhere and trucked, flown or shipped in using fossil fuels. Intensive food production and perpetual long distance shipping makes the spread of disease more likely. Furthermore, the loss of nature and spread of monocultures enable " disease pathogens to thrive." A shock such as coronavirus or surges in oil price reveals just how precarious the globalised economy on which many of us depend is. For example, if fuel supplies are interrupted, London will run out of food within days. Tim Lang, a Professor of Food Policy says, "It is all on the motorway. We have a just-in-time system of food."
Community gardens, like this one in San Francisco, can help achieve sufficiency. Kevin Krejci/Wikimedia Commons
Massively boosting local food production slashes fossil-fuel emissions and reduces our dependence on this complex and precarious flow of global trade. What's more, it will make us radically happier too. Our current economic system, which maximises how much we all work and consume, has failed to translate into a rise in wellbeing: instead it has created a raft of new afflictions, running from obesity and eating disorders through to depression and a suicide epidemic in young men.

A future sustainable society would mean most of us working and commuting less, being more involved in our local communities and growing food near to where we live, with more time with our friends and families-all things found to increase human happiness. Helena Norberg-Hodge the director and founder of Local Futures said -

"By shifting towards more localised, diversified food economies around the world, we'd not only reduce the risk of diseases infecting our food supply, but we'd also keep more wealth within communities instead of siphoning it away to multinational corporations. We'd be providing livelihoods for people who are getting squeezed out of jobs by the mania for mechanising and centralising food production. And we'd be pushing back against the climate crisis as well, by reducing the need for fossil fuel-powered global supply chains to get our monocrops from place to place. Local food economies are a win-win from every angle."

4. Ending the trade in wild animals

The calamitous decline of wild species is at least as great a threat to human survival as the climate emergency. Every species that goes extinct is an irreplaceable loss. In January this year, China banned the wildlife trade nationwide in markets, supermarkets, restaurants, and e-commerce platforms due to the coronavirus outbreak. In a joint statement, the country's market watchdog, agricultural ministry, and forestry bureau also said any places that breed wildlife should be isolated, and the transportation of wildlife should be banned.

It is widely reported that the outbreak of Covid-19 may have started in a wild animal market in Wuhan. Pangolins, in particular, have been proposed as a possible host of the virus before it jumped to people via bats. Pangolins or scaly anteaters are extraordinary animals - the only mammals with scales. They are also the most trafficked creatures in the world mainly for use in Chinese traditional medicine. As with the rhino horn, their scales are believed to have medicinal properties. They don't. Banning the wildlife trade could put a brake on the relentless and pointless persecution of these animals allowing them to recover from the brink of extinction.

5. Highlighting the horrors of factory farming

Factory farms, which raise billions of animals per year in squalid, cramped and unhygienic conditions, are ideal breeding grounds for infectious diseases. The deadly 2009 swine flu pandemic sprang out of a massive pig farm in Veracruz, Mexico, where hundreds of pigs died in an outbreak that eventually moved into people.

Mandy Carter, Global Senior Campaign Manager at Compassion in World Farming, said: "Intensively farmed animals live in crowded, barren conditions deprived of even the most basic natural behaviours. Given the number of animals involved and their lifelong suffering, factory farming is one of the biggest causes of animal cruelty on the planet. And not only does it harm animals - it hurts the natural world and us too."
Cage farming is a nightmare we can end. Join the campaign today
Wendy Orent, the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease" writes -

"If we want to forestall the evolution of ever-newer, and possibly deadlier, human-adapted viruses, live animal markets must be permanently shut down... until factory farms housing millions of animals are eliminated, until we take the inevitable logic of disease evolution into account, novel, and potentially deadly, human diseases will continue to arise. Again. And again. And again."

Factory farmed animals are fed feed grown in the habitats of the world's last wild animals such as the Amazon rainforest. Factory farming animals is increasingly seen by scientists, health experts and ethical commentators as an abomination that has to be stopped.
The future is a new relationship with food and farming
Conclusion

The best way to prevent pandemics and avoid the scale human suffering we are seeing unfold in the world due to coronavirus is not self-isolation, handwashing or facemasks, but the jettisoning of our moribund economic, food and transport systems, and replacing them with structures that put nature and planet first. A world where factory farming and wildlife trade is outlawed. Where economic growth is not pursued at all costs, where our capacity to feed ourselves from one day to the next is in our own hands, rather than those of gigantically polluting multinational corporations.

Coronavirus and the ecological crisis are linked symptoms of an unjust and unsustainable global system. Steps we can take to prevent another coronavirus spreading are the same steps we need to take to tackle the ecological emergency: to live more locally, with due respect for our biosphere's limits and reverence for the precious wild creatures within it. Overall, this virus may be an important signal that human health cannot be treated independently from the health of the natural world; the two are inextricably linked.

Human civilisation can protect itself from future shocks and become more resilient by shifting to become more in tune with the natural world it is a part of. Degrowing the global economy, regenerating natural systems and ending the systematic mistreatment of animals are key.

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5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis

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Nature The human tragedy of the coronavirus is immense. So far over 3,000 have died and more than 90,000 have been infected globally and millions have been affected. Whilst infectious disease has always been a part of the human experience, the expansion of industrial civilisation has inexorably amplified the risk of new diseases.

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What the coronavirus pandemic tells us about our relationship with the natural world

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What the coronavirus pandemic tells us about our relationship with the natural world

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There are moments in life that are etched into our collective consciousness forever. When the planes struck the World Trade Center. When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. When the world ground to a halt to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

It's during moments like these that we often shift how we think about the world - and about our place in it.

It's easy to feel invincible in a modern society in which we live longer than ever before, never have to see where our food comes from and can point a phone at the sky and have it tell us what constellation we're looking at.

And yet, despite all of the technological advancements of the last century, we are still rendered powerless to nature - to hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes and, yes, viruses.

The story of COVID-19 is, at its core, a story of humanity's ever-encroaching relationship with all other living things on this planet.

"If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about," Robbins wrote.

"Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty per cent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic - they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife."

"Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases," Daszak wrote. "Plagues are not only part of our culture; they are caused by it."

He added that spillovers of diseases from animals to humans are "increasing exponentially as our ecological footprint brings us closer to wildlife in remote areas and the wildlife trade brings these animals into urban centers. Unprecedented road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development, as well as globalized travel and trade, make us supremely susceptible to pathogens like coronaviruses."

It's easy right now to get caught up in the constant news updates of cancelled flights, closed borders and death tolls - and all of those things are surely important - but there is a much grander opportunity here to transform the way we think about our place in the world as one of the many living creatures that inhabit this planet.

As human activity wanes, we are now witnessing the natural world react to the slow-down in all sorts of ways: deer wandering the streets of Japan , Venice canals so clear you can see fish , improved air quality worldwide.

It's a reminder of the tremendous impact humans have on the world around them, often without fully realizing it. It's also a reminder of the natural world's ability to rebound and our ability to shift our behaviour when we absolutely must.

Much ink has been spilled about what this all says about our ability to fight climate change, but a temporary decline in greenhouse gas emissions because of a deadly plague and a flailing economy doesn't tell us much about whether this pandemic will bring lasting behavioural changes.

Will more people work remotely when this is all over? Will we ease up on massive business conferences? Will we all realize that making puzzles with our loved ones is more fulfilling than running around buying things? Will we value our concerts and classes and sports games on a new level? Maybe. But it's too soon to say.

A few things do seem clear though.

Secondly, communities are coming together in ways we haven't seen in many decades. Community-scale solutions are going to become ever more necessary as the pandemic spreads. Gardens. Friends. Family. Neighbours. This is a moment to take stock of the simple things and, perhaps, re-adjust our priorities moving forward.

Thirdly, change is possible. Politicians are now taking bold measures unimaginable even days ago. This pandemic will leave an enduring mark on all of us as we contemplate the fragility of life, the cracks in our globalized economy, our interconnectedness with all living things and, ultimately, our ability to envision a future different from the status quo.

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What the coronavirus pandemic tells us about our relationship with the natural world | The Narwhal

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There are moments in life that are etched into our collective consciousness forever. When the planes struck the World Trade Center. When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. When the world ground to a halt to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

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'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?

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'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?

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ayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

I travelled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity "hotspots" such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities.

It took a day by canoe and then many hours along degraded forest logging roads, passing Baka villages and a small goldmine, to reach the village. There, I found traumatised people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return.

Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed the chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, like Nesto Bematsick, recovered. "We used to love the forest, now we fear it," he told me. Many of Bematsick's family members died.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity's destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise - with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

"We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants - and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses," David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. "We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it."

Increasing threat

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are able to spread quickly to new places. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.

Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, such as Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like Covid-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and Mers, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.

Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and Sars from China, which killed more than 700 people and travelled to 30 countries in 2002-03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an "increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies".

Amplification effect

In 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from animals.

Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behaviour. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanisation and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says.

The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now "a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones."

Jones studies how changes in land use contribute to the risk. "We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans," she says. "Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from."

"There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans," says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Infection and Global Health. "The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there."

The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. "We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species," he says.

Tip of the iceberg

"Pathogens do not respect species boundaries," says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University's department of environmental sciences, who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behaviour add to the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans.

"I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak," he says. "The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg."

Humans, says Gillespie, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between host animals - in which the virus is naturally circulating - and themselves. "We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic," Gillespie says.

Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. "Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans."

Gillespie sees this in the US, where suburbs fragment forests and raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. "Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria," he says.

Yet human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, says Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. He and others are developing the emerging discipline of planetary health, which looks at the links between human and ecosystem health.

"There's misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It's a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it's human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it," he says.

Ostfeld points to rats and bats, which are strongly linked with the direct and indirect spread of zoonotic diseases. "Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in," he says.

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, studies how environmental changes influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. "When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but there's also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases," she wrote in an email to Ensia, the nonprofit media outlet that reports on our changing planet.

The market connection

Disease ecologists argue that viruses and other pathogens are also likely to move from animals to humans in the many informal markets that have sprung up to provide fresh meat to fast-growing urban populations around the world. Here, animals are slaughtered, cut up and sold on the spot.

The "wet market" (one that sells fresh produce and meat) in Wuhan, thought by the Chinese government to be the starting point of the current Covid-19 pandemic, was known to sell numerous wild animals, including live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles.

Equally, urban markets in west and central Africa sell monkeys, bats, rats, and dozens of species of bird, mammal, insect and rodent slaughtered and sold close to open refuse dumps and with no drainage.

"Wet markets make a perfect storm for cross-species transmission of pathogens," says Gillespie. "Whenever you have novel interactions with a range of species in one place, whether that is in a natural environment like a forest or a wet market, you can have a spillover event."

The Wuhan market, along with others that sell live animals, has been shut by the Chinese authorities, and last month Beijing outlawed the trading and eating of wild animals except for fish and seafood. But bans on live animals being sold in urban areas or informal markets are not the answer, say some scientists.

"The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It's like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it's not fair to demonise places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia," says Jones.

"These markets are essential sources of food for hundreds of millions of poor people, and getting rid of them is impossible," says Delia Grace, a senior epidemiologist and veterinarian with the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She argues that bans force traders underground, where they may pay less attention to hygiene.

Fevre and colleague Cecilia Tacoli, principal researcher in the human settlements research group at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), argue in a blog post that rather than pointing the finger at wet markets, we should look at the burgeoning trade in wild animals.

"It is wild animals rather than farmed animals that are the natural hosts of many viruses," they write. "Wet markets are considered part of the informal food trade that is often blamed for contributing to spreading disease. But ... evidence shows the link between informal markets and disease is not always so clear cut."

Changing behaviour

So what, if anything, can we do about all of this?

Jones says that change must come from both rich and poor societies. Demand for wood, minerals and resources from the global north leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease, she says. "We must think about global biosecurity, find the weak points and bolster the provision of health care in developing countries. Otherwise we can expect more of the same," she adds.

"The risks are greater now. They were always present and have been there for generations. It is our interactions with that risk which must be changed," says Brian Bird, a research virologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine One Health Institute, where he leads Ebola-related surveillance activities in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

"We are in an era now of chronic emergency," Bird says. "Diseases are more likely to travel further and faster than before, which means we must be faster in our responses. It needs investments, change in human behaviour, and it means we must listen to people at community levels."

Getting the message about pathogens and disease to hunters, loggers, market traders and consumers is key, Bird says. "These spillovers start with one or two people. The solutions start with education and awareness. We must make people aware things are different now. I have learned from working in Sierra Leone with Ebola-affected people that local communities have the hunger and desire to have information," he says. "They want to know what to do. They want to learn."

Fevre and Tacoli advocate rethinking urban infrastructure, particularly within low-income and informal settlements. "Short-term efforts are focused on containing the spread of infection," they write. "The longer term - given that new infectious diseases will likely continue to spread rapidly into and within cities - calls for an overhaul of current approaches to urban planning and development."

The bottom line, Bird says, is to be prepared. "We can't predict where the next pandemic will come from, so we need mitigation plans to take into account the worst possible scenarios," he says. "The only certain thing is that the next one will certainly come."

* This piece is jointly published with Ensia

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'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?

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ayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness.

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Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

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Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

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t is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you're not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.

More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone - just one aspect of our central planetary crisis - kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we'll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.

While coronavirus is understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as individuals. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of the Arctic last summer there could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn't. In 2018, more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change, including more than 1,600 who perished in Europe, Japan and the US because of heatwaves and wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael inflicted $24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Residents of Bangkok, Thailand, wear masks to protect themselves against pollution. Photograph: Narong Sangnak/EPA

As the recent Yorkshire floods illustrate, extreme weather - with its terrible human and economic costs - is ever more a fact of British life. Antarctic ice is melting more than six times faster than it was four decades ago and Greenland's ice sheet four times faster than previously thought. According to the UN, we have 10 years to prevent a 1.5C rise above pre-industrial temperature but, whatever happens, we will suffer.

Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity. "It's strange when people see the climate crisis as being in the future, compared to coronavirus, which we're facing now," says Friends of the Earth's co-executive director, Miriam Turner. "It might be something that feels far away when sitting in an office in central London, but the emergency footing of the climate crisis is being felt by hundreds of millions already."

Imagine, then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? As the New Economic Foundation's Alfie Stirling points out, a strict demarcation between the two crises in unwise. After all, coronavirus may trigger a global slowdown: the economic measures in response to this should be linked to solving the climate crisis. "What tends to happen in a recession is policy-makers panic about what the low-lying fruits are; it's all supply chains and sticking plasters," he tells me. During the 2008 crash, for example, there was an immediate cut in VAT and interest rates, but investment spending wasn't hiked fast enough, and was then slashed in the name of austerity. According to NEF research, if the coalition government had funded additional zero-carbon infrastructure, it would not only have boosted the economy but could have reduced residential emissions by 30%. This time round, there's little room to cut already low interest rates or boost quantitative easing; green fiscal policy must be the priority.

What would be mentioned in that solemn prime ministerial speech on the steps of No 10, broadcast live across TV networks? All homes and businesses would be insulated, creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and reducing emissions. Electric car charging points would be installed across the country. Britain currently lacks the skills to transform the nation's infrastructure, for example replacing fuel pumps, says Stirling: an emergency training programme to train the workforce would be announced.

A frequent flyer levy for regular, overwhelmingly affluent air passengers would be introduced. As Turner says, all government policies will now be seen through the prism of coronavirus. A similar climate lens should be applied, and permanently.

This would only be the start. Friends of the Earth calls for free bus travel for the under-30s, combined with urgent investment in the bus network. Renewable energy would be doubled, again producing new jobs, clean energy, and reducing deadly air pollution. The government would end all investments of taxpayers' money in fossil fuel infrastructure and launch a new tree-planting programme to double the size of forests in Britain, one of Europe's least densely forested nations.

There is a key difference between coronavirus and climate crisis, of course, and it is shame. "We didn't know coronavirus was coming," says Stirling. "We've known the climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years." And yet - despite being inadequately prepared because of an underfunded, under-resourced NHS - the government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.

Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done - but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.

* Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? | Owen Jones

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t is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus.

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Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Reducing Pollution

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Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Reducing Pollution

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“More broadly, the fact that disruption of this magnitude could actually lead to some large (partial) benefits suggests that our normal way of doing things might need disrupting.”

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China's coronavirus lockdown likely saved tens of thousands of lives by slashing air pollution from factories and vehicles, according to a new analysis by a Stanford University scientist.

Earth Systems Professor Marshall Burke used data from U.S. government sensors in four Chinese cities to measure levels of PM2.5, the tiny particulate matter considered the primary cause of death from air pollution. He averaged the drop in pollution levels and calculated the subsequent effect on mortality nationwide.

Two months of pollution reduction "likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China," he writes on G-Feed, a blog maintained by seven scientists working on Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics.

To keep his calculations conservative, Burke assumed no additional deaths for people between the ages of 5 and 70. Burke tested his prediction with a more conservative mortality calculation and still emerged with 1,400 kids saved and 51,700 elderly.

"Even under these more conservative assumptions, the lives saved due to the pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of lives that have been directly lost to the virus," Burke writes, using statistics current on March 8.
Updated with later data, showing the pollution rebound:
MORE FROM FORBES New Satellite Video Shows China Pollution Vanishing During COVID-19 Lockdown-Then Coming Back

Burke cautions that his calculation is a prediction of mortality impacts, not a measurement. And his numbers do not include other negative consequences of the lockdown.

"But the calculation is perhaps a useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo," he writes, that is-"the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods."

COVID-19 might help us see those costs more clearly, he says.

"More broadly, the fact that disruption of this magnitude could actually lead to some large (partial) benefits suggests that our normal way of doing things might need disrupting."

The effects were most dramatic in southern Chinese cities like Shanghai and Wuhan, he said, where wintertime pollution comes mainly from cars and small industry.

They will likely be repeated across the globe as more countries enforce lockdowns. The European Space Agency captured vanishing nitrogen dioxide pollution over Northern Italy as that country entered lockdown:

"The decline in nitrogen dioxide emissions over the Po Valley in northern Italy is particularly evident," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite. "Although there could be slight variations in the data due to cloud cover and changing weather, we are very confident that the reduction in emissions that we can see coincides with the lockdown in Italy causing less traffic and industrial activities."

Deaths from air pollution should likewise decline globally, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

"These reductions in pollution just over one month could mean tens of thousands of deaths avoided from air pollution," the Centre tweeted.

"That is NOT to say that the pandemic is some kind of a blessing in disguise, with all the suffering it has imposed on people. At the most, it shows it's easy to overlook chronic, long term health threats such as air pollution, and thus, harder to muster an adequate response."

(The Centre's lead analyst, Lauri Myllyvirta, earlier reported that the lockdown wiped out 25 percent of China's carbon emissions in its first month, the equivalent of 200 megatonnes of CO2, by reducing coal consumption, oil refining, airline traffic and other sources.)

Meanwhile, the satellite has begun to record pollution levels rising again in China as the government eases its lockdown:

MORE FROM FORBES Coronavirus Lockdown May Save More Lives By Preventing Pollution Than By Preventing Infection

... Read More

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Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Reducing Pollution

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China's coronavirus lockdown likely saved tens of thousands of lives by slashing air pollution from factories and vehicles, according to a new analysis by a Stanford University scientist. Earth Systems Professor Marshall Burke used data from U.S. government sensors in four Chinese cities to measure levels of PM2.5, the tiny particulate matter considered the primary cause of death from air pollution.

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Conservationists set the record straight on COVID-19’s wildlife links

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Conservationists set the record straight on COVID-19’s wildlife links

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Conservationists set the record straight on COVID-19's wildlife links

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The World Health Organization has categorized the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a pandemic in light of its spread around the world. Ever since the first cases emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan last December, there's been much speculation - and misinformation - about the origins of the virus.

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Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge

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Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge

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Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

I traveled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity "hot spots" like tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities.

It took a day by canoe and then many hours down degraded forest logging roads passing Baka villages and a small gold mine to reach the village. There, I found traumatized people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return.

Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed a chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, like Nesto Bematsick, recovered. "We used to love the forest, now we fear it," he told me. Many of Bematsick's family members died.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity's destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise-with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

"We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants-and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses," David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. "We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it."

Increasing Threat

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases like Ebola, SARS, bird flu and now COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are now able to spread quickly to new places. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of "new or emerging" diseases that infect humans originate in nonhuman animals.

Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, like Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like COVID-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and MERS, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.

Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and SARS from China, which killed more than 700 people and traveled to 30 countries in 2002-03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an "increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies."

Amplification Effect

In 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from non-human animals.

Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behavior. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanization and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says.

The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now "a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones."

Jones studies how land use change contributes to the risk. "We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans," she says. "Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from."

"There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans," says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Infection and Global Health. "The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there."

The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. "We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species," he says.

Tip of the Iceberg

"Pathogens do not respect species boundaries," says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University's Department of Environmental Sciences who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behavior add to the risks of diseases spilling over from animals to humans.

"I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak," he says. "The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg."

Humans, says Gillespie, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between virus host animals-in which the virus is naturally circulating-and themselves. "We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic," Gillespie says.

Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. "Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans."

Gillespie sees this in the U.S., where suburbs fragmenting forests raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. "Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria," he says.

Yet human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, says Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. He and others are developing the emerging discipline of planetary health, which looks at the links between human and ecosystem health.

"There's misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It's a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it's human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it," he says.

Ostfeld points to rats and bats, which are strongly linked with the direct and indirect spread of zoonotic diseases. "Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in," he says.

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, studies how environmental changes influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. "When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but there's also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases," she wrote in an email to Ensia.

The Market Connection

Disease ecologists argue that viruses and other pathogens are also likely to move from animals to humans in the many informal markets that have sprung up to provide fresh meat to fast-growing urban populations around the world. Here animals are slaughtered, cut up and sold on the spot.

The "wet market" (one that sells fresh produce and meat) in Wuhan, thought by the Chinese government to be the starting point of the current COVID-19 pandemic, was known to sell numerous wild animals, including live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles.

Equally, urban markets in west and central Africa see monkeys, bats, rats and dozens of species of bird, mammal, insect and rodent slaughtered and sold close to open refuse dumps and with no drainage.

"Wet markets make a perfect storm for cross-species transmission of pathogens," says Gillespie. "Whenever you have novel interactions with a range of species in one place, whether that is in a natural environment like a forest or a wet market, you can have a spillover event."

The Wuhan market, along with others that sell live animals, has been shut by the Chinese authorities, and the government in February outlawed trading and eating wild animals except for fish and seafood. But bans on live animals being sold in urban areas or informal markets are not the answer, say some scientists.

"The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It's like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it's not fair to demonize places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia," says Jones.

"These markets are essential sources of food for hundreds of millions of poor people, and getting rid of them is impossible," says Delia Grace, a senior epidemiologist and veterinarian with the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She argues that bans force traders underground, where they may pay less attention to hygiene.

Fevre and Cecilia Tacoli, principal researcher in the human settlements research group at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), argue in a blog post that "rather than pointing the finger at wet markets," we should look at the burgeoning trade in wild animals.

"[I]t is wild animals rather than farmed animals that are the natural hosts of many viruses," they write. "Wet markets are considered part of the informal food trade that is often blamed for contributing to spreading disease. But ... evidence shows the link between informal markets and disease is not always so clear cut."

Changing Behavior

So what, if anything, can we do about all of this?

Jones says that change must come from both rich and poor societies. Demand for wood, minerals and resources from the Global North leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease, she says. "We must think about global biosecurity, find the weak points and bolster the provision of health care in developing countries. Otherwise we can expect more of the same," she says.

"The risks are greater now. They were always present and have been there for generations. It is our interactions with that risk which must be changed," says Brian Bird, a research virologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine One Health Institute, where he leads Ebola-related surveillance activities in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

"We are in an era now of chronic emergency," Bird says. "Diseases are more likely to travel further and faster than before, which means we must be faster in our responses. It needs investments, change in human behavior, and it means we must listen to people at community levels."

Getting the message about pathogens and disease to hunters, loggers, market traders and consumers is key, Bird says. "These spillovers start with one or two people. The solutions start with education and awareness. We must make people aware things are different now. I have learned from working in Sierra Leone with Ebola-affected people that local communities have the hunger and desire to have information," he says. "They want to know what to do. They want to learn."

Fevre and Tacoli advocate rethinking urban infrastructure, particularly within low-income and informal settlements. "Short-term efforts are focused on containing the spread of infection," they write. "The longer term-given that new infectious diseases will likely continue to spread rapidly into and within cities-calls for an overhaul of current approaches to urban planning and development."

The bottom line, Bird says, is to be prepared. "We can't predict where the next pandemic will come from, so we need mitigation plans to take into account the worst possible scenarios," he says. "The only certain thing is that the next one will certainly come."

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Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge

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Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness.

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Nature Rx: The Outdoors Can Be an Antidote to Quarantine Anxiety

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Nature Rx: The Outdoors Can Be an Antidote to Quarantine Anxiety

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Chances are, you're starting to get a little cabin fever. Bars and restaurants in many cities and states are closed, sports have been canceled, and governments from California to New York City are ordering residents to shelter in place. There are only so many programs you can binge watch or hours you can bear reading, and your news feed is full of frightening headlines. If you've got kids, the close quarters are probably making the household a little maddening.

Here's a suggestion: For an antidote to isolation, get out into nature. You don't have to go all that far. Find some way to make a trip to your nearest woodlot, creek, regional open space area, seashore, or hillside. Take the dog for a walk. Sit in your backyard or garden. As long as you're able to do so in a way that meets the recommendations for social distancing, figure out how to get outside however you can.

This pandemic has made it feel like the world has turned awry on its axis. The instincts we've learned in other crises are poorly matched to this moment. In the midst of natural disasters like floods, storms, and wildfires, we are called on to come together. Now, we're being called on to stay apart. Yet even as we must distance ourselves from one another to protect public health, nature remains one place where we can find a feeling of reconnection.

I have always felt solace in natural areas. This weekend, spending an afternoon in the woods provided an especially potent dose of relief.

On Sunday morning, my four-year-old daughter, Lily, woke up with a cough, which was obviously freaky. My Twitter feed was full of dark reports from Europe and people's stories of dodging other humans as best they could. It was difficult not to feel anxious and fearful.

Pancakes perked us all up. After I made an early trip to the farmers' market (the baker was nearly out of loaves, and the egg monger was quickly on her way to selling out), the family got motivated for a walk in the woods. Our destination was Briones Regional Park, a 6,200-acre preserve of California woodland and savanna no more than a painless 20-minute drive from Oakland.

I told Lily we were on a mission to hunt rainbows. It had been raining steadily all morning, and as the sun swung past noon, the sky was clearing, giving us excellent conditions to trap our quarry. After a trailhead snack of PB&J and apples, we crossed Bear Creek-muddy after the night of rain-and made our way into the forest of madrone, bay, and live oak.

I'm sorry to say we didn't snag a rainbow. We did, however, spend a good amount of time inspecting the languid pace of a couple of newts. And there were birds: the usual lot of sparrow flocks and juncos, chickadees, jays squealing, turkeys glimpsed in the distance. When we got to the picnic area at Homestead Valley, we finished a Clif Bar and made a salad of miner's lettuce. Lily decided to turn herself into a "mud monster."

It was nothing, really. Little more than an opportunity to feel the rhythms of the real world and a chance for some playtime. Yet I experienced an overwhelming sense of-what else to call it?-peace.

Nature's sublime has always been, for many people, a solace. Cutting-edge science has confirmed that time in natural areas helps us cope with stress and lowers anxiety. And who couldn't use a dose of calm right now, when the most virulent contagion seems to be fear? You don't have to go to some far-off national park to get the proven health benefits of nature. (And, actually, you shouldn't; the last thing that mountain towns and national park gateway communities need right now is an influx of people potentially infected with the virus. Also, Yosemite and Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks in California and Rocky Mountain National Park have closed to all visitors and portions of Point Reyes National Seashore have been shut.) Most of us find our most intimate relationships with the more-than-human in nearby nature-some path through suburban woods, the city-side beachscape, the garden full of birds. At a time like this, such places can reground us. They provide perspective: a reminder of different time scales, proof of resilience and recovery. That's a balm we need now more than ever.

In natural areas, we also get a good measure of space, a feeling of the world as big and wide. During the massive Western wildfires of recent summers, the choking smoke and darkened skies forced millions of people indoors and left many of us feeling like digital shut-ins. Above all, this crisis is characterized by an even more intense feeling of claustrophobia (at least for those of us who aren't grappling with layoffs or illness). Evacuate? Where would you go? Suddenly, there is no away.

But even in a viral pandemic, what nature provides is a space apart. That is, a place (mostly) beyond the human-built. On a hike or a beach stroll, you rarely have to worry about touching metal or glass or plastic. No matter the landscape, you'll be in the open air. Get outside and you can get a cure for the quarantine's claustrophobia. Plus, touching soil and earth has been shown to have immune-system benefits -consider it a virtuous side effect.

There's already some talk about how this pandemic could overturn long-standing cultural norms. In many ways that's frightening (who wants to give up high fives?), but in other ways, it might be salutatory. Maybe if we are able to take more relief in nature, we can create a new kind of agora, the ancient Greek ideal of the public sphere. Maybe we can create a nature-based public square that is not all about the buying and selling of stuff and the entertainment of food and drink, but instead a public square that is, truly, out in the open (and, by the way, not a square at all but something closer to the circle of natural systems). Nature can play a valuable role in this pandemic as the outdoors becomes one of the remaining places where we can connect with other people in a safe fashion-a space where we can enjoy the presence of others even as we maintain a safe distance.

On Sunday afternoon, the parking lot at the Bear Creek trailhead was as full as I'd normally expect for a rainy and cold tail-of-winter day. While we were in the park, we crossed paths with many other folks. The usual dog walkers. A teenage dude on his way to the archery range. A dad with two little kids. A family with teenagers. Some equestrians.

While everyone was mindful of keeping a careful distance, there was none of the pent-up anxiety in random human interactions I've been feeling in my neighborhood. I think I noticed more smiles. At the very least, people seemed natural with each other in a way that has already come to seem rare.

At one point, we came across a crew of older hikers-a vulnerable population, one might say-and one of the women joked about how this was "the best sort of social distancing." She was right. Only in the outdoors do we find a place to stay safely apart yet still be together.

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Nature Rx: The Outdoors Can Be an Antidote to Quarantine Anxiety

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Chances are, you're starting to get a little cabin fever. Bars and restaurants in many cities and states are closed, sports have been canceled, and governments from California to New York City are ordering residents to shelter in place.

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Carbon Tax: A Shared Global Responsibility For Carbon Emissions

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Carbon Tax: A Shared Global Responsibility For Carbon Emissions

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The complexities of global trade raise questions about how best to address the way countries fairly compensate for their environmental impact on others. Pricing carbon, specifically through a carbon tax, is one such way to address these equity issues and reduce global carbon emissions. -
more stringent fiscal measures to reduce emissions, such as increasing the carbon price or taxation to further incentivise corporations to reduce their emissions and align themselves with the The International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD) and others have recommended Paris Agreement goals. However, with these plans arise not only political complications such as aligning inconsistent national policies with international trade, but also the issue of equity. With 50% of carbon emissions attributed to the richest 10% in the world , and 10% of emissions attributed to the poorer 50% of the world, it raises the question of who contributes to the climate crisis and who really suffers the consequences of it.

The discussion around not only pricing and taxing carbon, but developing fair climate policies is not a new one, however there is an increased focus on the degree of responsibility a country should take- how much countries should be paying, and to whom. At UN climate negotiations in 2018, Chinese delegate Xie Zhenhua addressed the mismatch of cause and consequence between developing and developed countries. He said, "developing countries are not comfortable or happy. We need to see if developed countries have honoured their commitments. Still some countries have not started their mitigation efforts, or provided financial support to poor nations. We strongly urge them to pay up on their debts."
What is carbon pricing?
Carbon pricing is an approach to reducing carbon emissions that uses market mechanisms to pass the cost of emitting to emitters. Its goal is to discourage the use of fossil fuels, address the causes of the climate crisis and meet national and international agreements.

Well-designed carbon pricing can change the behaviour of consumers, businesses and investors while encouraging technological innovation and generating revenue that can be used productively.

There are a few carbon pricing instruments, such as a carbon tax and cap-and-trade programmes.
How to implement a carbon tax?
A carbon tax is imposed by a government and is defined by per-tonne tax on the carbon emissions embedded in fossil fuels or other products. It puts a direct price on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and creates a financial incentive to lower emissions by switching to more efficient processes or cleaner fuels.

A national carbon tax is currently implemented in 25 countries around the world, including various countries in the EU, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Ukraine and Argentina. However, according to the 2019 OECD Tax Energy Use report, current tax structures are not adequately aligned with the pollution profile of energy sources. For example, the OECD suggests that carbon taxes are not harsh enough on coal production, although it has proved to be effective for the electricity industry. A carbon tax has been effectively implemented in ; the carbon tax is USD $127 per tonne and has reduced emissions by 25% since 1995, while its economy has expanded 75% in the same time period.
Where should the money go?
To make carbon taxes politically feasible and economically efficient, governments must choose how to use the revenue. Options include cutting other kinds of taxes, supporting poorer households and communities, increasing investment in green energy or by giving the money back to people as a dividend.

These are already being addressed in some countries such as Switzerland, where residents receive their dividend as a rebate on a compulsory health insurance. Canada's incoming federal scheme is aiming for 90% of the carbon tax revenue to be returned to residents.
Lack of a common commitment
There is a disparity between the interconnected global economy and the disparate carbon policies in different countries (some with carbon tax, some implementing cap-and-trade systems, some without a system in place at all). For example, the EU uses their ETS system, yet the majority of the US has yet to implement a carbon tax. These factors make equilibrating the different carbon-pricing schemes on a global basis challenging yet crucial if equity is to be achieved.

and colleagues emphasise that current 'pledge-and-review' processes that came from the Paris agreement are based on self-interest and that responding only to domestic concerns will not be enough to address the problem at hand. He mentions that Paris was successful in that a collective goal was set, but that individual contributions do not add up.
Striving for shared responsibility
Cramton believes that reciprocity is key in developing policies that drive global climate cooperation. He uses an analogy of a game with a common pot of money; each country has $10, some or all of which the players may simultaneously pledge, and for every $1 (for carbon) that is put into the pot, it is then doubled (by natural climate benefits) and the surplus is redistributed to the recipients. A referee ensures that they honour their pledges. If individuals are allowed to choose their contributions into the pot, a self-interested member may contribute nothing because they will still reap the benefits, relying on others to contribute to the pot.

However, with a common commitment version of the game, players condition their contributions on others' pledges: the referee ensures that they all contribute the amount of the lowest pledge. It is a reciprocal, co-dependent model, but does not say what everyone must do - an 'I will if you will' mentality. No one is forced to contribute more than expected, yet everyone gains. If countries are completely selfish, they cannot lose but only gain if they pledge the lowest pledge. Common commitment policies can convert selfish behaviour from 'contribute nothing' to 'contribute everything' because the concept protects against free riding.

To supplement Cramton's view, a posits that to be fair for both developed and developing nations, there needs to be a shift away from a production-based approach to a shared responsibility approach in the form of carbon emission 'burden-sharing schemes'. The production-based principle means that a country should be responsible for the emissions generated by its production activities within its borders. The study views this method as outdated in the context of globalisation because it does not take international trade into account. For example, developing countries such as China would take the burden of carbon emissions associated with exporting goods to developed countries.
A uniform carbon price
Cramton believes in the implementation of a uniform carbon price instead. He compares setting different carbon prices to setting speed limits, saying that "if drivers chose their own speed limits, there would be no use enforcing them because everyone would drive at their desired speed." To ensure that enforcement strengthens a collective rather than an individual effort, Cramton proposes a global carbon price commitment decided by a voting majority. It would allow a country to choose how it complies, via taxes, cap-and-trade, or other schemes, as long as the country's average carbon price (cost per unit greenhouse gas emitted) is at least as high as the agreed price.
Incentive fund
In conjunction with the suggestions above, Economist Raghuram Rajan suggests the creation of a global incentive fund. Rajan posits that there should be a system in place where countries that produce emissions above a defined carbon threshold should have to financially compensate those countries that produce emissions below it. Essentially, countries that emit more greenhouse gases than others should pay into a fund that rewards low emitters (for example through the Green Climate Fund ). Critics of this optimistic, yet idealistic system suggest that it is oversimplistic, failing to take into account other factors such as population growth, existing ecosystems, biodiversity and GDP.
What next?
Carbon taxing is just one way of holding large emitters accountable for their role in harming the environment. It represents a departure from the West's traditional model of letting market forces guide decision-making by allowing governments to mandate emission targets, which is one of the reasons it hasn't been as widely implemented around the world as it should be. However, if the planet is to have any hope of meeting the Paris Agreement goals, drastic measures that consider both the economic and social wellbeing of nations' inhabitants must be taken.

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Carbon Tax: A Shared Global Responsibility For Carbon Emissions | Earth.Org - Past | Present | Future

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The complexities of global trade raise questions about how best to address the way countries fairly compensate for their environmental impact on others. Pricing carbon, specifically through a carbon tax, is one such way to address these equity issues and reduce global carbon emissions.

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Opinion: Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change—and how “sustainability transition policy” can help

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Opinion: Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change—and how “sustainability transition policy” can help

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Carbon Pricing Critique

Realizing deep decarbonization at the pace necessary to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change has emerged as a pressing challenge for policymakers ( 1). As a result, the debate about appropriate policy responses has intensified. Many experts and societal actors see carbon pricing as the primary way forward ( 2⇓ - 4). Some even use it to argue against other policies, such as fuel efficiency standards. Viewed as the most efficient approach to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon pricing incentivizes actors to seek the lowest-cost abatement options for their specific circumstances. Consequently, many economists argue that carbon pricing should be the cornerstone of a climate policy response.

We question this reasoning. Carbon pricing faces five major issues that limit its use for accelerating deep decarbonization. First, carbon pricing frames climate change as a market failure rather than as a fundamental system problem. Second, it places particular weight on efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. Third, it tends to stimulate the optimization of existing systems rather than transformation. Fourth, it suggests a universal instead of context-sensitive policy approach. Fifth, it fails to reflect political realities.

Given these limitations, we propose an alternative approach that targets fundamental transformations of existing sociotechnical systems, such as energy, mobility, or food (i.e., "sustainability transitions") ( 5). STP entails a mix of contextually and politically sensitive policies that simultaneously drive low-carbon innovation and the decline of fossil fuels.

Market Failure versus System Problem

The underlying rationale for carbon pricing is appealing in its simplicity: GHG emissions are viewed as a negative externality because the social costs flowing from climate change impacts are not reflected in the market price of carbon-intensive goods and services ( 6). Climate change is framed as the consequence of a market failure that can be corrected by placing a price on carbon so that actors also pay for the social cost of their carbon-intensive activities and reduce their demand for such goods and services.

Framing the climate challenge as a market failure, however, fails to seriously appreciate its scope and depth. Indeed, the climate challenge has been referred to as a "grand challenge" ( 7) or "super wicked problem" ( 8) that has thus far resisted traditional policy approaches.

We argue that climate change can be more appropriately understood as a system problem. Core societal functions, such as heating or mobility, are met through large and deeply entrenched sociotechnical systems made up of interconnected technologies, infrastructures, regulations, business models, and lifestyles ( 1). Over many decades, these systems have become increasingly locked into the combustion of fossil fuels and the associated release of GHG emissions. Consider, for instance, how the design of cities has developed alongside the diffusion of the gasoline-powered personal automobile; how norms about comfort and attire have become entwined with energy-intensive indoor temperature regulation; and how important political and economic interests have become entrenched with fossil fuel-based resource development or electricity provision.

Addressing the climate challenge, therefore, involves fundamental changes to existing systems, referred to as "sustainability transitions" ( 5). These transitions entail profound and interdependent adjustments in sociotechnical systems that cannot be reduced to a single driver, such as shifts in relative market prices. In mobility, for example, a low-carbon transition might encompass interacting developments around new vehicle technologies (e.g., autonomous electric cars), infrastructures (e.g., vehicle charging stations and high-speed rail), business models (e.g., mobility as a service and intermodal transport), and regulation (e.g., emission performance standards) but also changes in city planning (e.g., reduced urban sprawl) and lifestyles (e.g., telework and local vacations). The market failure framing fails to appreciate the broad scope of the climate challenge and the sweep of system elements that must undergo change. And so, the resulting solution orientation is far from sufficient.

Efficiency versus Effectiveness

Carbon pricing strategies are often considered to be the most efficient means of reducing carbon emissions ( 4, 6). They do so by affording heterogeneous polluters (e.g., firms from different industries) the flexibility of responding to the carbon price signal in a least-cost fashion, selecting the level of abatement and specific abatement options that are most cost-effective for their circumstances. Abatement options are then adopted in a stepwise manner in line with the carbon price. Under a series of assumptions (e.g., economic rationality, perfect information, credibility, and broad coverage), the result is that "a given level of abatement is met at least global cost" which "no other instrument than pricing is able to realize" ( 2).

We question whether efficiency should be an overriding priority of climate policy. If we are to limit global warming to less than 1.5 °C, there is little time remaining to reach carbon neutrality ( 9). The negative impacts of climate change are already undermining human prosperity and the cost of inaction will escalate the longer we wait ( 10). Despite the urgency of the problem, carbon pricing places considerable weight on seeking low-hanging fruit and, according to Patt and Lilliestam, fails to appreciate that "we must eventually pick all of the apples on the tree" ( 11). Furthermore, as of 2019, existing carbon pricing schemes only cover about 20% of global emissions and more than two-thirds of these have prices below $20 United States dollars (USD) per ton of CO ₂ equivalent.* This is far too low to be effective and increasing coverage and prices presents serious challenges, which we return to below.

Efficiency considerations must, therefore, be tempered by an immediate need to realize carbon neutrality through whatever means actually work. This implies moving beyond lowest-cost solutions to stimulate a diversity of mitigation options, including those that have considerable immediate reduction potential (e.g., phasing out coal or restoring peatlands) and others that may fundamentally transform systems in the longer term (e.g., mobility-as-a-service or biobased materials).

Optimizing versus Transforming

By increasing the relative price of carbon-intensive goods and services, carbon pricing is understood to incentivize the adoption of existing low-carbon technologies and (indirectly) stimulate the development of low-carbon innovations ( 2). Investments in low-carbon alternatives are not only encouraged through present carbon prices but also through expectations about future carbon price increases.

It is, however, unclear how strong such innovation effects actually are and whether carbon pricing can generate more than incremental changes. Tvinnereim and Mehling ( 12), for instance, review the record of several prominent carbon pricing strategies and find that they have, to date, helped realize limited opportunities for innovation and system-wide transformation. Rather, current trajectories and emission reductions deviate little from business-as-usual scenarios, even in the case of Sweden's $140 (USD) carbon price for the transport and building sectors. Others have observed similar patterns ( 13⇓ - 15). This suggests that, in practice, carbon pricing strategies tend to promote the optimization of established business models and technologies but neglect more fundamental system change necessary for deep decarbonization.

While optimization remains important, it does little to confront carbon lock-in, encourage radical innovation, or avoid dead-end paths ( 16). Indeed, research indicates that investments in long-lived, carbon-intensive infrastructures, such as natural gas, are still ongoing, even in jurisdictions with prominent carbon pricing regimes ( 12, 17). Retiring these investments prematurely in order to align with deep decarbonization pathways will be politically difficult and costly (i.e., due to compensation for affected firms and communities).

In contrast, we argue that incremental change alone is insufficient to pursue low-carbon pathways at the required pace. Established systems are characterized by deep lock-ins (e.g., large sunk costs in infrastructure and cultural conventions underpinning user practices) that encourage movement along established development trajectories ( 18, 19). Deliberately accelerating transitions, therefore, involves weakening lock-ins (e.g., removing fossil fuel subsidies and banning carbon-intensive technologies) and supporting system building for low-carbon alternatives (e.g., stimulating new innovations, business models, and markets).

Universal versus Context Sensitive Policy

Carbon pricing strategies tend to be predicated on the notion that, eventually, all emissions are covered so that all prices will be corrected such that no economic decision would escape carbon pricing's regulatory impact ( 2). This means that all jurisdictions and economic sectors should be included, ideally with uniform price signals ( 6). In the absence of uniform pricing, there is a risk that some nations will free-ride on the efforts of others and that firms will relocate to places with lower or no carbon prices (i.e., "carbon leakage").

Three issues confront this universal approach. First, the required levels of coordination and cooperation are unrealistic, as carbon pricing encounters a fragmented international climate policy landscape ( 20). In the absence of a global sovereign and considering the great diversity of national circumstances (where countries have different responsibilities for generating the problem, vulnerabilities, and resources to adapt and support mitigation), cooperation or convergence among emission pricing frameworks remain elusive. Second, a universal approach will require well-functioning institutional structures and high levels of regulatory competences and monitoring systems, which do not exist everywhere. Third, carbon pricing strategies tend to ignore that policies need to be tailored to local and/or sectoral contexts in order to address specific sources of lock-in and opportunities for innovation.

Carbon pricing functions well in sectors, such as electricity, with large, fixed-point sources, where alternative technologies are available and polluters cannot easily relocate; it's more difficult to implement in agro-food, transport, and heavy industry ( 14). Agro-food systems are characterized by manifold commodities, dispersed production (millions of farmers) in highly variable contexts (soil conditions, climate, local communities), and deeply entrenched cultural conventions, such as tastes and dietary habits ( 21), which all make it extremely difficult to assess the level of an effective carbon price and implement this throughout the system. Existing and proposed carbon prices also face problems in transport, often translating into pennies on the gallon. Such effects fall short of inducing the needed lifestyle changes or even being distinguished from standard oil market fluctuations.

This highlights the major difference between systems across different sectors, scales, and locations. The geophysical resources, infrastructures, actor networks, and availability of low-carbon alternatives diverge markedly from one system to another. Thus, the specific package of policy solutions (e.g., performance standards versus technology mandates) will also vary accordingly. And, given the above-mentioned challenges facing a uniform global response, climate policy will be defined by layered and interacting efforts within and across different contexts ( 22).

Political Realities

A transparent price signal is often considered to be a core benefit of carbon pricing strategies, as it conveys information about the external costs of greenhouse gases to consumers and firms, allowing them to internalize these costs in their decision-making ( 6). Market forces, in this view, act as the principal drivers of change. The primary role of government is to "set the right price" and "leave the rest to the market." This, however, fails to acknowledge the substantial contestation around climate policy and the political nature of markets.

Carbon pricing strategies are not politically neutral but normative endeavors (i.e., centered on what constitutes appropriate solutions and why) with major distributional consequences (i.e., who will win or lose). As with the majority of climate policies, they threaten the endowments of incumbent firms and industries. Many of these actors have responded by using their considerable influence to resist and weaken the stringency of carbon pricing measures, such as the European Union's Emissions Trading System ( 23). Carbon pricing has also attracted political resistance among the broader public, as it is perceived to challenge longstanding practices and livelihoods, such as car-based and suburban lifestyles. Political opponents have been quick to exploit these cleavages around carbon pricing, leading to important electoral victories and climate policy reversals in Canada, France, Australia, and many other jurisdictions ( 24). While some advocates propose revenue recycling from carbon pricing to encourage public acceptance ( 3), far more is needed to appreciate the "irreducibly political character" of climate policy ( 25).

In this way, we argue for more explicit engagement with the politics of climate policy. While politics tends to be regarded as a barrier to climate action, research suggests that well-designed climate policies can also generate self-reinforcing political dynamics that can set in motion transformative processes ( 26⇓ - 28). Sequences of policies designed to strengthen supportive coalitions with an interest in low-carbon alternatives (e.g., networks of innovators, communities, and civil society actors) may create conditions for political victories and more ambitious climate policies over subsequent rounds of political debate and policymaking ( 27).

Sustainability Transition Policy (STP)

Given the limitations of a climate response based on carbon pricing strategies, we offer "sustainability transition policy" (STP) as an alternative ( Table 1). Framing the climate challenge as a system problem, STP emphasizes the rapid and effective reduction of emissions, system transformation and radical innovation, the development of context-sensitive responses, and the inherent political nature of decarbonization.

Indeed, STP is predicated on the notion that a low-carbon transition will involve multiple and co-evolving social and technological changes. Many levers will need to be pulled and deliberately aligned to realize change-from supporting emerging innovations and decommissioning existing technologies or infrastructure, to building coalitions of actors and interests, to (re)designing market rules and planning processes, to legitimizing new practices and related social norms. Carbon pricing can be part of this policy mix, but should not be seen as the single best or primary instrument.

Embracing these varied levers, STP is not about a single policy intervention but a coherent sequence of policy decisions-and associated changes in technologies, business models, and practices-that together drive potential decarbonization pathways for sociotechnical systems under conditions of complexity and uncertainty ( 29). Broadly, STP targets innovation and decline ( 30). That is, it includes policies to support low-carbon innovations and their upscaling, as well as policies to exert pressure on carbon-intensive products, technologies, and practices to eventually stimulate their decline ( Fig. 1). Innovation is important to continually develop alternatives. Decline is crucial to break up lock-ins and to signal to producers and consumers that fundamental changes are necessary.

STP also acknowledges that transitions develop through different phases, from early takeoff to later acceleration and consolidation ( 31, 32). Early-stage innovations, for example, need experimentation in protected spaces (i.e., niches, which shield their development from harsh competitive pressures) ( 33). Accelerating low-carbon innovation requires diffusion and deployment policies that aim at embedding and scaling niche experiments beyond their initial boundaries, targeting, for example, the creation of new networks, entrepreneurial activities, and standards, as well as education and training.

There is a similar phase-logic with respect to decline. Destabilization and weakening lock-in mechanisms can create windows of opportunity for new practices, business models, and technologies ( 34). Policy instruments for destabilization include divestment strategies, removal of fossil fuel subsidies, carbon pricing, or stronger environmental standards. To accelerate decline, policy also has a role to play in implementing phaseouts. Otherwise, problematic technologies can persist for decades. Phase-out policies have, for instance, targeted incandescent light bulbs, coal-fired power, and nuclear power.

STP also appreciates the central place of policy and politics. Climate or transition policies are layered on top of existing institutional frameworks, which means that policy formulation and implementation is a complex, messy, and often piecemeal process that resists optimal solutions. And, in the face of political conflict and resistance, it is crucial to generate societal and business support for climate policy responses. This is why stimulating low-carbon innovations and associated supportive coalitions with a material interest in these innovations is of critical importance. Over subsequent cycles of policymaking, climate policies, low-carbon innovations, and supportive coalitions can mutually reinforce one another to drive low-carbon pathways. In general, STP calls for new modes of governance that are better-suited to the context of transformative change. Such an approach recognizes the importance of continually adapting specific measures in response to new developments and learning but also acknowledges that the overarching directionality of policy (commitments, resources, etc.) should be stabilized in order to drive a transition ( 28).

In summary, the dominant logic of contemporary climate policy, in which carbon pricing is the central policy response, is deeply flawed. Given the aforementioned shortcomings, carbon pricing should not be the primary policy strategy to combat climate change. Instead, carbon pricing should be used as part of a policy mix that promotes innovation and decline, accounts for political dynamics, varies between sectors and over time, and aims at profound system change.

Acknowledgments

D.R. would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. J.M. acknowledges the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research, financially supported by Innosuisse under Grant No. KTI 1155000154.

Footnotes

The authors declare no competing interest.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and have not been endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.

↵*Data are drawn from The World Bank Group's Carbon Pricing Dashboard.

View Abstract

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Opinion: Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change-and how "sustainability transition policy" can help

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Carbon pricing is often presented as the primary policy approach to address climate change. We challenge this position and offer "sustainability transition policy" (STP) as an alternative. Carbon pricing has weaknesses with regard to five central dimensions: 1) problem framing and solution orientation, 2) policy priorities, 3) innovation approach, 4) contextual considerations, and 5) politics.

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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

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Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) "pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions," says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 - the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established - can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks.

While companies have a huge role to play in driving climate change, says Faria, the barrier is the "absolute tension" between short-term profitability and the urgent need to reduce emissions.

A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables - in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.

CDP says its aims with the carbon majors project are both to improve transparency among fossil fuel producers and to help investors understand the emissions associated with their fossil fuel holdings.

A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report. "That puts a significant responsibility on those investors to engage with carbon majors and urge them to disclose climate risk," says Faria.

Investors should move out of fossil fuels, says Michael Brune, executive director of US environmental organisation the Sierra Club. "Not only is it morally risky, it's economically risky. The world is moving away from fossil fuels towards clean energy and is doing so at an accelerated pace. Those left holding investments in fossil fuel companies will find their investments becoming more and more risky over time."

There is a "growing wave of companies that are acting in the opposite manner to the companies in this report," says Brune. Nearly 100 companies including Apple, Facebook, Google and Ikea have committed to 100% renewable power under the RE100 initiative. Volvo recently announced that all its cars would be electric or hybrid from 2019.

And oil and gas companies are also embarking on green investments. Shell set up a renewables arm in 2015 with a $1.7bn investment attached and a spokesperson for Chevron says it's "committed to managing its [greenhouse gas] emissions" and is investing in two of the world's largest carbon dioxide injection projects to capture and store carbon. A BP spokesperson says its "determined to be part of the solution" for climate change and is "investing in renewables and low-carbon innovation." And ExxonMobil, which has faced heavy criticism for its environmental record, has been exploring carbon capture and storage.

But for many the sums involved and pace of change are nowhere near enough. A research paper published last year by Paul Stevens, an academic at think tank Chatham House, said international oil companies were no longer fit for purpose and warned these multinationals that they faced a "nasty, brutish and short" end within the next 10 years if they did not completely change their business models.

Investors now have a choice, according to Charlie Kronick, senior programme advisor at Greenpeace UK. "The future of the oil industry has already been written: the choice is will its decline be managed, returning capital to shareholders to be reinvested in the genuine industries of the future, or will they hold on, hoping not be the last one standing when the music stops?"

Top 100 producers and their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from 1988-2015

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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

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A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change

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Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

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Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

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Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital

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Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents' generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. The consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical and predicted to observable reality over the past few years, but this has not been matched by an uptick in urgency. The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and hurricanes.

Today's children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the "pro free market" wing, who argue that it's a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.
Think we should be at school? Today's climate strike is the biggest lesson of all | Greta Thunberg and others
The criticism feels ridiculous. Partly because the GND is far from truly radical and already represents a compromise solution, but mainly because the radical economics isn't a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below "absolutely catastrophic" is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is " bad, but manageable " territory. Failing to put that effort in sees the world crossing more severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes like ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal cities being flooded into inhabitability.

We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won't do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute. Perhaps even more fundamentally, we cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a tool for disciplining the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be reformed with a more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we have now.

Unfortunately for our children, the people they have to convince of all this are the people who have done very well out of this system, and are powerfully incentivised to deny that it is all that bad. Already, Joke Schauvliege, a Belgian environment minister, has been forced to resign after falsely claiming that she had been told by Belgian state security services that "ghosts" behind the scenes were behind demonstrations in Belgium.

This conspiracism of the elite, these claims that genuine mass movement can't possibly really exist and must be in some way being guided by agents provocateurs, is just one of the ways in which those currently running things have resorted to a kind of political gaslighting in an attempt to maintain their grip on power.

Gaslighting is a term I don't use lightly, because it describes a genuine form of emotional abuse, where an abuser will deny reality in an attempt to get their victim to literally doubt their own sanity, and this should not be diluted by overuse. Yet I struggle to think of another word that adequately sums up the way in which "sensible" adults are doubling down on their tactic of manufacturing a political reality which bears no relationship to the world we see around us. It's the Marxism of Groucho rather than Karl: "Who are you going to believe? The serious political professionals or your own lying eyes?"

US Senator Dianne Feinstein's meeting with schoolchildren petitioning her to take action over the issue went viral because of the way she condescended to them for, basically, asking her to leave them a planet behind to live on. "I've been doing this for 30 years," she said, "I know what I'm doing." The obvious response is, of course, that messing something up for 30 years is quite long enough, thanks. Long tenure without results is not the same thing as expertise.

This is a tough and bitter pill to swallow for the political professionals whose feet are firmly under the table. It is increasingly obvious that all their tactics have done almost nothing except run down the clock, but still they insist that it's the young who just don't get it and that things aren't that simple. They're the living embodiment of the famous New Yorker cartoon, with a suited man sat in a post-apocalyptic landscape telling his young audience "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
Capitalism can crack climate change. But only if it takes risks | Larry Elliott
This is reality v the vested interests of the powerful. Any meaningful policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor class. Any policy that doesn't upset these people will be useless. To pretend that we can compromise our way through this while we wait for a magical, technological bullet that will keep temperatures down without costing us anything is beyond wilful ignorance now. It is a question of basic morality.

Many of today's climate strikers won't even be 30 by the time the 1.5C deadline comes around in 2030. They are asking us to consider a simple question: is their future worth more than preserving our reputations? What will our response to them be?

* Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
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Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it? | Phil McDuff

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Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents' generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on.

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by Jonathan T. Park

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The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism

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The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism

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Global warming is rooted in an economic system that has a parasitoid relationship with the Earth upon which we live.

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Global Warming which is caused by human activity is rooted in a social and economic system that has a parasitoid relationship to the Earth upon which we live.

Capitalism as a system is highly exploitative of both people and planet. It is driven by a desperate need for profit and accumulation. That is the overriding priority. Companies might 'green-wash' (BP changing its logo to the green flower is the most infamous example) but we live in a world where the polar ice caps melt and then oil companies go in to tap the ground for previously unobtainable deposits of oil.

Whilst some reforms will no doubt happen as we approach the 2030 deadline, it is apparent that left on its own, our economic system will continue to destroy the basis for life on this planet until it is too late. No wonder Elon Musk is planning on establishing a colony on Mars, the 1% are already end gaming a strategy to get the hell out of here.

But there is no escape for the rest of us.

The urgency of the time we are living in has seen movements like Extinction Rebellion and the school climate strikers led by Greta Thunberg hit the streets. They are taking matters into their own hands through direct action protests to try and force policy changes in government.

Even in Labour there is a burgeoning movement for change. The Labour for a Green New Deal (LGND) initiative is going to be a major point of this year's Labour Party conference. But will it be enough?

Green new capitalism

The overarching strategy of the LGND motion is summed up as the call to include in the next manifesto the following:

"A state-led programme of investment and regulation for the decarbonisation and transformation of our economy that reduces inequality and pursues efforts to keep global average temperature rises below 1.5°C."

The inclusion of such a paragraph in the next manifesto would leave a lot of wriggle room for softening some of the more urgent political actions that will be required to save the planet from runaway global warming.

With my anti-capitalist hat on, "state led investment" and "regulation" sound thoroughly Keynesian, even moderate. Merely regulating the private sector rather than making deep inroads into socialising capital and businesses' private property doesn't remove the profit motive from the economy, it only seeks to constrain it in various ways. As long as our economy chases after profit it will seek ways to circumvent any regulation.

State-led investment is fine, but on its own it does not particularly challenge capitalism as a socio-economic system. Indeed at its worst it props it up and helps overcome aspects of capitalism's inherent instability - as Paul Krugman wrote about Keynes "he was no socialist - he came to save capitalism, not to bury it."

As we approach climate catastrophe, what will be urgently needed is a global democratic plan for the economy to ensure that what resources are left are distributed properly and we can organise our society effectively and fairly when we might be dealing with the effects of climate change for generations to come. Capitalism is simply incompatible with social justice and living in harmony with the Earth so it has to be changed, and changed quickly. The clock is ticking.

Moving on the specific demands of the motion, the first four (zero carbon emissions by 2030; Rapidly phasing out all fossil fuels; Large-scale investment in renewables; and a just transition to well-paid, unionised, green jobs available for all) are all good demands, though the debate over whether it is at all possible to have a totally zero carbon economy in the next decade is an important one. Will we have no plane flights at all in 2030? No methane producing farm animals? We will surely need some degree of offsetting even within our own national economy. Certainly Unite's climate change ignoring leadership could do with reading on this and thinking about it as they continue to lobby for the disastrous third runway at Heathrow.

The next demand is the one that no doubt will lead to huge debates and disagreements over interpretation:
"A green industrial revolution expanding public, democratic ownership as far as necessary for the transformation"
"As far as necessary". What is meant by that, only time will tell. It is in the ambiguity of such phrases that you can read anything you like. It could be read to mean a radical nationalisation plan which takes energy, transport, logistics, retail and all the other sectors that are heavy carbon emitters into public ownership to introduce plans to reduce their carbon footprint. Or it could mean a far more modest limited plan of taking bankrupt industries into temporary public ownership in order to 'green' them.

Private property and climate change

Certainly if you wanted to do more than "regulate" the petrochemical industry and actually dramatically reduce the extractive nature of those industries through socialisation and effectively shutting them down (and redeploying the workers to sustainable jobs) then taking them out of private ownership would be the most direct and effective way but that raises the question of compensation for shareholders.

Now they could also mean seizing the companies without paying compensation. There is a moral and practical case to do this in the state of a climate emergency which poses a threat to all life on the planet. If you went down the route of paying, trying to pay off shareholders and buying the company outright, then it would be prohibitively expensive. BP alone is worth billions. How to square the circle of the increasing need for socialised and democratic global solutions in a world of nation states and jealously guarded private property?

This is where a serious fight against climate change that tries to get to the root of the problem of capitalism is going to clash head-on with our political and legal system. Property is 9/10th of the law, as the saying goes, and anything which moves beyond state-led investment to actually grappling with social ownership of the means of production and distribution is going to come across either huge financial problems or legal challenges.

Of course if you see climate change from a revolutionary perspective then you rip up those capitalist laws that are protecting the ill-gotten gains of the rich who are plundering our natural environment until we are on the brink of social collapse. The question is going to be both the interpretation of "as far as necessary" and also the political will to drive through the changes that will be necessary to start to plan our economy.

Likewise with the housing crisis, we need to just seize the second homes of the rich or 'investors' and turn them into social housing to end homelessness and no doubt deal with the massive climate refugee crisis coming our way. Obeying the legal framework of capitalism where the 1% are effectively hoarding essential resources while the rest of us suffer is not going to cut it anymore.

Mass movements

Angus Satow from LGND has written a useful article in Open Democracy recently on the need for a mass movement to deliver a green new deal. This is an important point, we cannot leave it up to the politicians, they need to feel the heat (excuse the pun) from below - a mass social movement clamouring for urgent action. The current 2050 target is far too late, the 2030 deadline is what we are working towards.

There is also the question of what happens if Labour loses the next election or only secures a hung parliament. If the parliamentary route to green policies becomes blocked for the next few years then we need to take matters into our own hands. We have to stop the third runway at Heathrow, through non-violent direct action if necessary. We have to identify the most polluting companies and occupy their offices, disrupt their business and hit them in the profit margins to force them to take action. Workers need to walk out of work and force the 4 day week on their employers as a way of reducing carbon (and the climate strike on the 20th September is a great place to start!) This will no doubt mean a challenge to the anti-union laws that prevent political strike action. At this stage it is go hard or go home and wait for the planet to burn.

The debate is moving forward which is important. The question now is the relationship between policy, mass movement and how radical we need to go to save the planet. With news coming in that the irreversible feedback loops have already started which will lead directly to runaway climate change, we are not in 'business as usual' territory any more.

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The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism

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Global Warming which is caused by human activity is rooted in a social and economic system that has a parasitoid relationship to the Earth upon which we live. Capitalism as a system is highly exploitative of both people and planet. It is driven by a desperate need for profit and accumulation.

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Pandemic sidelines more than 1,000 incarcerated wildfire fighters in California

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Pandemic sidelines more than 1,000 incarcerated wildfire fighters in California

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dozen California firefighting camps that house incarcerated firefighters have been quarantined and taken out of commission after a coronavirus outbreak at a state prison, highlighting the precarious situation for these crews.

Since the second world war, California has trained and deployed thousands of prisoners to fight fires each year, recruiting those who are willing to fight wildfires at great personal risk in exchange for low wages and reduced sentences.

This year, after a historically dry winter followed by a hot spring, thousands of inmates have been among those battling blazes in the state, doing the backbreaking work of clearing the dead wood and vegetation that fuel the most destructive fires.

"Every fire season it's the same," said Romarilyn Ralston, who leads Project Rebound, a California State University program that supports formerly incarcerated students. "The pay is so little, the work is so dangerous. Now we add Covid-19 to the story, and it gets even worse."

The crews are both crucial and heavily exploited, said Ralston, who worked at a fire camp while incarcerated. In exchange for extremely dangerous work, prisoners earn time off their sentences and are paid between $2 and $5 a day, plus $1 per hour when they are on a fire. Because incarcerated firefighters are paid so little, the program saves the state of California $90m to $100m a year.

"It's a super imbalanced system; it's much like the system of slavery," said Deirdre Wilson, a master's student of social work at the University of Southern California and a member of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners. "There's a reliance on this population, on this cheap labor."

A crew of incarcerated firefighters make their way to firefighting operations to battle the Kincade fire in Healdsburg, California, last year. Photograph: Philip Pacheco/AFP via Getty Images

People choose to participate because the training camps in the California wildlands are a chance to "get out of the oppressive environment of the correctional facilities", Ralston said. For many women, the program is an opportunity to see their children more often and outside the harsh backdrop of a prison, she added.

In June, as California prisons saw a dramatic surge in Covid-19 cases and more than two hundred prisoners at the California Correction Center (CCC) in the north of the state tested positive for coronavirus, officials stopped all movement in and out of the prison and placed 12 camps that house more than a thousand prisoners training to fight fires under lockdown. There were no confirmed cases of Covid-19 at those dozen camps - though one member initially tested positive, a second test came back negative.

Across the state, devastating outbreaks at prisons have left more than 5,700 people who are incarcerated sick with the infection. Of the 192 crews of incarcerated firefighters, only 94 are currently available, Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday.

The department of corrections said the camps were placed under quarantine out of an abundance of caution, due to concern that crew members who were recently transferred from CCC to the fire camps could have caught the infection. Once they are deployed to a fire, it's nearly impossible for crew members and firefighters to stay physically distant while they station at crowded base camps near big blazes, working in close contact for days at a time, according to officials.

The pandemic has affected full-time firefighters as well. Fire stations up and down the state have temporarily shut, with firefighters required to self-isolate after outbreaks.

But incarcerated fire crews are among the most vulnerable first responders. Crew members and trainees who are injured on the job or fail to keep up have to rejoin the general prison population. "So there's a lot of pressure on folks just tough it out at these fire camps when they're sick, injured, when they're depressed," Ralston noted.

With 2020 on track to be one of the hottest and driest years on record and only 30 of the state's 77 crews of incarcerated people in northern California available to fight a wildfire, Tim Edwards, president of Cal Fire Local 2881, the union representing state firefighters, said he was worried about not having enough personnel to control fast-moving infernos. Among the casualties of the pandemic's economic fallout was the budget to hire an additional 550 firefighters ahead of this fire season.

"Nobody wants the virus to spread, and it makes sense for the inmate crews to be quarantined," one northern California crew leader, who requested anonymity so he could speak freely and without permission from Cal Fire, told the Guardian. "But it puts pressure on all of us to be missing these highly valued, highly utilized crews."

Incarcerated firefighters stand guard as flames from the Butte fire approach a containment line near San Andreas, California, in 2015. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

"California's firefighting crews are on the scale of a small nation's army," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. But even that may not be enough to battle multiple large blazes at once, and there's a shortage of workers to thin forests both manually and through prescribed burns that use controlled fire to clear out brush. A combination of global heating, decades of forest mismanagement and the incursion of neighborhoods into fire-prone areas have stretched California's fire season into a year-round crisis.

Meanwhile, options for incarcerated firefighters to finish training and become full-time firefighters after they have served their sentences are extremely limited. Most fire departments require full-time firefighters to gain EMT certification, but the state categorically bans anyone with a felony conviction from earning EMT certification for 10 years after they are released from prison, and it bars people with two or more felony convictions from the EMT program forever.

"The government would rather do what looks tough than what's right and fair," said Andrew Ward, an attorney with the non-profit Institute for Justice who is legally challenging the policy blocking two-time felons from obtaining emergency medical training.

Researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California urged officials this week to employ larger crews to clear fire-fueling vegetation and manage the state's fragile mountain forests. Thousands of formerly incarcerated Californians who served on inmate crews are among most qualified and experienced candidates for these jobs, Ward and other advocates have pointed out.

"We can protect the environment and give people opportunities to just live, if we stop stigmatizing oppressed people," Wilson said.

"It doesn't make sense that these people have risked their lives to save Californians, they've already been doing the job, and yet they're barred from these jobs after release," added Ralston. "When there's a fire burning, when your life is in danger and you can't breathe - you're not going to do a criminal background check before you let someone save you."

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Pandemic sidelines more than 1,000 incarcerated wildfire fighters in California

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dozen California firefighting camps that house incarcerated firefighters have been quarantined and taken out of commission after a coronavirus outbreak at a state prison, highlighting the precarious situation for these crews. Since the second world war, California has trained and deployed thousands of prisoners to fight fires each year, recruiting those who are willing to fight wildfires at great personal risk in exchange for low wages and reduced sentences.

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Time for Whites to Stop Dumping Their Pollution on People of Color

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Time for Whites to Stop Dumping Their Pollution on People of Color

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Dr. Robert D. Bullard, often referred to as the “father of environmental justice,  addresses environmental racism.

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A March 2019 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found whites experience 17 percent less pollution caused by their consumption of goods and services. On the other hand, Blacks and Hispanics experience 56 percent and 63 percent, respectively, more pollution than their consumption would generate. Whites experience a "pollution advantage" while Blacks and Hispanics experience a "pollution burden."

This study builds on a growing body of environmental justice literature showing racial and ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure. It shows particulate matter ( ) exposure in the U.S. is disproportionately caused by consumption patterns of whites and inhaled by people of color minority. Our Environmental Justice movement has been trying to change this and related environmental inequities for the past four decades.

While the study takes a somewhat different approach in examining disparities in air pollution exposure by examining consumption of goods and services, its findings once again reveal blacks and Hispanics bear a disproportionate "pollution burden" or costs, while whites experience "pollution advantage" or benefits. There is a clear disparity between the pollution white people cause and the pollution to which they are exposed. The study concludes, "pollution inequity is driven by differences among racial-ethnic groups in both exposure and the consumption that leads to the exposure." There's a name for this inequity. It's called " environmental racism ."

This new study findings lend further evidence that blacks and Hispanic in the U.S. have the " wrong complexion for protection ." And we know what complexion that is: Black and brown. It also reaffirms that race is a potent predictor of exposure to goods and services air pollution. These findings also confirm what most grassroots environmental justice leaders have been fighting the past four decades, "whites are dumping their pollution on poor people and people of color." The Transportation Justice Movement exposed racial disparities in car ownership and the unequal transportation-induced air pollution (which includes ozone, particulate matter, and other smog-forming emissions) borne by poor, people color and carless households in our cities.

Many grassroots and national environmental justice leaders have been fighting unfair, unjust and illegal land use policies and practices that turned their low wealth and people of color communities into toxic "hot-spots" and environmental " sacrifice zones " where even breathing the air, playing in parks and schoolyards can be dangerous to one's health. Numerous environmental justice studies over the years detail the racial dimension of "pollution dumping."

Minorities Suffer Worst from Industrial Pollution (2005). The Associated Press three-part series revealed African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live where industrial pollution pose" the greatest health danger. African Americans in 19 states are more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods with high pollution levels, compared to Hispanics in 12 states and Asians in 7 states.

Pollution is taking a heavy toll on the health of African Americans and other people of color. For example, a 2017 Harvard University found African Americans are nearly three times more likely to die from exposure to airborne pollutants than other Americans. According to the CDC, African Americans are almost three times more likely than whites to die from asthma related causes; African American children are 4 times more likely to be admitted to the hospital for asthma, as compared to non-Hispanic white children; African American children have an asthma death rate that of non-Hispanic white children. Dismantling institutional racism would go a long way in closing environmental health disparities in the United States. It's time for this immoral, unjust and illegal pollution dumping to end.

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Time for Whites to Stop Dumping Their Pollution on People of Color

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A March 2019 study published i the Proceedi gs of the Natio al Academy of Scie ces (PNAS) fou d whites experie ce 17 perce t less pollutio caused by their co sumptio of goods a d services.

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A Climate Defense Project Blog on "Invisible Climate Wars, Part I: Climate Destruction as Gender Violence" by Alice Cherry

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Climate justice and gender justice are inextricably linked.
Some fronts in the fight against climate injustice are more visible than others. Most of us agree that policymakers ought to commission studies and sponsor legislative efforts - just as scientists ought to study ice cores, create climate models, and maybe even march in the streets. Citizens ought to prod their elected representatives and rally against fossil fuel projects in their communities. And, yes, lawyers ought to support climate activists and hold political and corporate leaders accountable. The utility of those forms of engagement, as tools for combating climate change, requires no defense.

But there is another front in the climate struggle - one that exists not at the level of law, science, or policy, but in the generation and contestation of ideas. Call it the invisible climate wars. (The author recognizes the irony in the use of militaristic language but will leave it to more-skilled wordsmiths to fashion substitutes for patriarchal and colonialist modes of speech.)

Like the "peripheral" struggles described in a previous post to this blog, the invisible climate wars are a layer removed from, say, conflicts over fossil fuel infrastructure. Their invisibility - their siting in ideas and discourse rather than concrete actions - adds an additional layer of removal, and victories and losses are not always recognizable except in retrospect. But the invisible climate wars are as important as their more-visible counterparts.

This post focuses on an important front in the invisible climate wars: the fight to dismantle patriarchy and the constellation of social ills to which patriarchy is related. (See also this post on the relationship of climate injustice to racism.) Its contention is simple: fighting climate injustice requires fighting gender inequality as well.

Let's be clear: ending gender-based oppression is reason enough to fight patriarchy. The intersections between feminism and climate justice lend weight to feminist arguments but are unnecessary as justification for them, and feminist arguments that appeal to men's self-interest are lousy if they ignore the legitimacy of women's independent claim to rights, voice, power, and representation.

Still, it is worth acknowledging that all of us, men and women, would do well to move beyond our discomfort with feminism. For the fight against patriarchy is not only women's fight. It will not only have consequences for women. It will have profound consequences for all of us.

We have arrived at an age in which patriarchy - aided by racism and global neoliberal capitalism - is, quite literally, destroying the planet.

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Patriarchy is alive and well, but the term still sounds, to many people, hysterical. The term "feminism" - the very premise that gender inequality remains egregious and acutely felt - makes some people uncomfortable, if not actively hostile. In the alt-right "manosphere," frequented by younger men, misogyny has flourished.

For our purposes, bell hooks's definition of patriarchy will suffice: patriarchy is a "political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence." To emphasize the interlocking nature of the various "systems of domination" of which patriarchy forms a part, hooks prefers the term "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."

Misogyny and gender-based violence are corollaries of patriarchy. And, as hooks's terminology suggests, patriarchy has many cousins: among them are not just white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism but also compulsory heterosexuality, homophobia, and institutionalized discrimination against gay people, trans people, disabled people, and other groups. Many of those phenomena, as concepts and as critiques of dominant sociopolitical structures, will be familiar to readers. Less well understood is their relationship to climate injustice.

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The connection between patriarchy and climate injustice can be roughly summarized in six observations. (Many writers have provided more eloquent and comprehensive accounts of the climate-patriarchy link; we offer only the most cursory distillation here. Many of the themes below are excellently articulated or dramatized in the work of hooks, Rebecca Solnit, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wangari Maathai, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Adrian Parr, and others.)

In the patriarchal worldview, masculinity is a form of dominion over both women and the natural world.

The man-as-conqueror trope has a long and tired history. In religion, literature, and philosophy, that trope has occupied a central place in the Western imagination. From Bible verses to Shakespeare to Thomas Hobbes, the imperative of man's dominion over both nature and women has been implicit and, often, also explicit.

Language and imagery sometimes lay bare what cannot otherwise be pinpointed in a society. In the West, women have frequently been likened to animals - for instance, through the notion that both must be "tamed" - and, more appallingly, meat. (People of color are also dehumanized by animalistic language and representations; a subsequent post will return to that phenomenon.) Objects constructed or controlled by men, such as automobiles and boats, are given female pronouns. The term "virgin" teaches us to associate women's sexuality with undisturbed land. The verbs "rape," "degrade," "defile," "exploit," "ravish," and "subjugate" are used to describe not just sexual violence but also military conquest and ecological destruction. And it is through language that we learn to associate "taking" with violence against other human beings (as in "taking" a life, or "taking" someone hostage) as well as against nature (as in "taking" an animal as prey).

We've come to understand that women give (life, love, or nurture) or serve (maybe you've noticed that most artificial intelligence personalities - or, at least, the ones we humans have learned to boss around and ridicule - have female voices), whereas men take, kill, control, dominate, or conquer.

It is not difficult to see why patriarchal culture and modes of speech encourage men, along with the rest of us, to regard both women and nature as things to be conquered, subdued, and molded in the image of our desires.

Patriarchy encourages men to dissociate from emotions and to view them - and women, imagined as emotions' primary conduits - with condescension.

Patriarchy encourages men to see themselves as rational, dispassionate actors in pursuit of power, status, or profit. It teaches them to embrace violence and emotional callousness, especially but not exclusively in particular social contexts, such as war and competitive athletics. It asks them, in other words, to suffocate a part of themselves and to submit to a kind of emotional stuntedness. (It is ironic that patriarchy directs and limits the very agency and self-determination with which, patriarchy insists, men are or should be uniquely associated.) Perhaps the phenomenon is a device for making more palatable manifest suffering and injustice (often created or perpetuated by men); whatever the explanation, commentators have dubbed it " toxic masculinity."

By contrast, patriarchy imagines women and non-human animals as emotional beings. Emotionality, we are taught, justifies their subjugation. At least as far back as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the concept of ressentiment, those who are oppressed have been imagined as weak, vindictive, scheming, and untrustworthy. Discrimination (not always recognized as such), condescension, and violence toward women and other groups have been inseparable from their supposed weakness, emotionality, irrationality, and duplicity.

If we look for it, we can see patriarchy's condescension and emotional stuntedness woven through our structures and systems: an epidemic of violence against women; mass incarceration (in the United States); pervasive and entrenched discrimination against women, people of color, queer people, and other groups; women's lack of reproductive freedom and the world population crisis; recklessness, brinksmanship, and predatory lending at financial institutions; grotesquely inhumane practices that cause immeasurable pain and suffering to animals raised for food; extractive industries that devastate landscapes and communities dependent on them; and, of course, the global extinction crisis.

Let's pivot from emotions generally and focus on one emotion in particular: empathy.

While empathy for people who are different from us is integral to efforts to combat climate change, patriarchy discourages men's engagement with those efforts. As Rebecca Solnit writes in The Mother of All Questions, in our society "[m]en are not expected to engage in the empathic extension of identifying with a different gender, just as white people are not asked, the way people of color are, to identify with other races." That phenomenon is perhaps clearest in films, literature, video games, and other art forms, where white men disproportionately occupy the center of the story. (That white men are so often at the helm of commercially distributed creative enterprises may have something to do with the disparities.)

And it matters. It matters because patriarchy engenders more than failures of empathy; it breeds violence. Recent statistics on gender-based violence are as startling as they are grim:

Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to American women.

In the United States, a woman is beaten or assaulted every nine seconds, and more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends each day.

Nearly one in five women are raped at some point in their lives.

Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.

In 2012, an estimated 4.5 million people worldwide were trafficked for commercial sex - a form of slavery - of which 96 percent were women and girls.

One in two transgender people are sexually abused or assaulted at some point in their lives, and, between 2008 and 2014, a transgender person was killed somewhere in the world every other day on average.

There were over 2,000 reported incidents of anti-LGBT violence in the United States in 2013 alone.

In the United States, only three percent to six percent of rapists serve jail time.

Patriarchy breeds violence not just against cisgender, hetero women and trans people but also against gay people and other men - for instance, by pathologizing homosexuality and valorizing military aggression and capitalist greed.

And it breeds violence against the natural world. When empathic extension is at the heart of what it means to care about climate change and ecological destruction, patriarchy is antithetical to climate activism. It is not a coincidence that Solnit, Adrian Parr, and others have described climate change and ecological destruction as a form of violence.

(If ever you were tempted to think that, say, tar sands or mountaintop-removal mining is basically harmless - that the appellation "violence" is overblown, or merely metaphorical - think again.)

The term "climate injustice" is powerful in part because it captures the interrelationship between violence against humans and violence against nature: in addition to atmospheric warming and local environmental impacts, "climate injustice" sweeps in the economic injustice, racial hierarchy, and unequally borne health problems created or furthered by fossil fuel extraction, transport, refining, and combustion as well as the siting of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Patriarchy silences women's voices and other voices that, in a patriarchal world, are essential to averting climate catastrophe.

We turn again to Rebecca Solnit, who has chronicled the many ways in which women are silenced and their effects:

Being unable to tell your story is a living death, and sometimes a literal one. If no one listens when you say your ex-husband is trying to kill you, if no one believes you when you say you are in pain, if no one hears you when you say help, if you don't dare say help, if you have been trained not to bother people by saying help. . . . [then silence has killed you]. A husband hits his wife to silence her. A . . . rapist refuses to let the "no" of his victim mean what it should . . . . Rape culture asserts that women's testimony is worthless, untrustworthy. . . . A murderer silences forever. Other silencings take place in smaller ways: the people harassed and badgered into silence online, talked over and cut out in conversation, belittled, humiliated, dismissed.

Thus Solnit remarks, "Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and narrate."

Why does this matter? It matters because gender equality matters. It also matters because, as Solnit writes in The Mother of All Questions, "[s]ilence protects violence," in all its forms.

Researchers have long understood that women's voices are crucial to the fight against climate change, but women remain underrepresented on the world's major climate change decision-making bodies. In a world increasingly ravaged by climate disruption, in which men are socialized to inflict violence upon humans and nature and to feel numb to violence's consequences, women's silencing imperils not just women and men but any number of living things.

Contempt for women and contempt for environmental issues often accompany one another.

Our fifth observation is related to our first four, particularly the first (masculinity-as-dominion) and second (masculinity-as-anti-emotion). Both feminists and environmentalists are negatively stereotyped in the public imagination. Public health work related to environmental issues has become feminized, seen as antithetical to the male project and male self-identity (in practice often indistinguishable from the public imagination and public priorities) - mirroring a long history in which the work of caring for the sick, the ill, and the young has been regarded as women's work.

The correlation between misogyny and anti-environmentalism is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the current occupant of the White House, who, for all of his supposedly maverick tendencies, displays contempt for both women and the environment in near-perfect patriarchal fashion. President Trump and men like him seem to be perpetually confined within what some feminists have termed a "man box" - a social and behavioral straitjacket that prevents the slightest deviation from traditional masculinity, demands near-constant display of that masculinity, and inculcates fear of being seen as feminine. The President's dilemma would be poignant if its consequences were less destructive.

(Too much focus on supposedly aberrant behavior by individuals risks obscuring the larger problem. Let's call the President's misogyny, and that of so many others, what it is: an inevitable outgrowth of the culture in which we all live.)

Trump's views on the environment are no less constricted - a stance visible in his unwillingness to change his tune on coal despite overwhelming indications of the embattled industry's declining employment trends and waning economic viability. Lest anyone mistake him for an environmentalist, Trump has also moved to rescind the Clean Power Plan, lifted regulatory restrictions on fossil fuel extractive activities, and signaled his intention to end NASA's climate research, among other things.

Aside from patriarchy, who or what put Trump in his "environment box"? Global neoliberal capitalism is undeniably part of the story; for now, suffice to say that the appointments of Scott Pruitt and Rex Tillerson were exactly what they looked like: a consolidation of fossil fuel corporations' grip on state machinery.

In a patriarchal world, women disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change.

A recent New York Times article summarized this phenomenon well:

Since weather affects everyone, the idea that women are more susceptible to the effects of climate change, particularly in developing countries, may strike some as puzzling. But women are more likely to collect water, food and firewood, and to cook meals - and therefore feel the brunt of extreme weather, disappearing water resources and soil degradation more keenly, according to a 2009 United Nations report. Women also make up a large part of the agricultural work forces in many developing nations.

Research has also shown that when resources are scarce, women often give food to their husbands and sons while denying themselves and their daughters. And when air pollution causes a spike in illnesses such as asthma . . . it is typically the mother who stays home to care for the sick children, reducing her productivity and career growth.

In other words, it's not even necessary to be a feminist, or to see patriarchy as a cause of climate injustice, to understand that climate injustice is borne unequally.

Reporting on women's vulnerability to climate impacts risks reinforcing the disempowering women-as-victims narrative. We should counter that narrative: women simultaneously shoulder unfairly heavy burdens and exercise individual agency. Eschewing the women-as-victims narrative also creates space for discussion of the confinement of men's agency (see "toxic masculinity" and "man box," above).

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Is climate injustice epiphenomenal of patriarchy? We may never really know. But it is difficult to conclude that patriarchy does not create conditions in which environmental degradation, and climate injustice in particular, thrives.

If the larger climate-patriarchy connection is not always obvious, that may be in part because climate activists and feminists are not completely overlapping groups. Feminists seem to embrace climate activism more often than climate activists embrace feminism.

There are many possible reasons for this: because climate change affects everyone, even if women are currently more vulnerable than men; because technology and economics, considered key areas for climate policy, have long ignored gender; because some climate activists worry that attention to gender, or other explicitly left projects, might further alienate would-be conservative allies; and so on. There is also a well-founded desire, among many of us, to concentrate our energies on climate even at the expense of other issues we care about deeply, since climate destruction is quickly becoming a world calamity and we have precious little time to avert its worst effects.

It would be a shame if we let those considerations blind us to the possibility of using patriarchy - or white supremacy, or neoliberal capitalism - as a prism through which to view climate injustice and as a point of entry for new arguments and allies.

It's time to complete the logical loop we began threading in the previous section. Not only are patriarchy and climate injustice linked, but people ought to care about gender inequality if they care about climate injustice. (Do not misunderstand: there is no onus on feminism, vis-à-vis climate activism, to prove its worth. Women have an independent claim to rights, voice, power, and representation.)

Let's connect the dots by returning, briefly, to the six domains above - and explaining why fighting gender inequality might reasonably be expected to further climate-activist goals in each domain.

1. Man-as-conqueror. If we push back against patriarchal ways of thinking - for instance, by acknowledging and condemning the epidemic of violence against women - we might change our ways of thinking about the environment. That shift might take place at the level of language, or implicit associations. It might express itself through art, literature, or philosophy.

2. Masculinity-as-anti-emotion. If men still comprise the majority of our policymakers (and more than eighty percent of the United States Congress), and if we assume that policymakers' emotional sentience is in practice often a prerequisite for policies that meaningfully address climate change, then there is a direct causal mechanism through which the election of more women to positions of political leadership might lead to climate progress.

3. Patriarchy-as-violence. Condemning violence against women might have spillover effects on violence against the natural world. In particular, efforts to dismantle patriarchy might change the identity or priorities of those whose policies actually or potentially inflict violence.

4. Patriarchy-as-silence. Since women are socialized to feel empathy and are currently more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change, opening up space for women's voices might help de-marginalize environmental concerns in political and business decision-making.

5. Co-occurrence of misogyny and anti-environmentalism. If misogyny and anti-environmentalism are linked, and if many people have at least a vague intuition about their interrelationship, combating one might create follow-on effects for the other.

6. Women's disproportionate exposure to climate impacts. Some of the best ways to combat climate change travel through gender justice. If we're serious about fighting climate change, we need to actively enlist women's participation and elevate their voices.

It's not rocket science.

To be sure, we can make progress around the margins of the climate crisis without dismantling patriarchy - we can buy electric cars or change our light bulbs (if we can afford those things). Individual people can combat climate injustice, in their own ways, without giving much thought to patriarchy. But none of us are immune to the influence of the value systems and associational universes that surround us and make us who we are - scriptures that teach us to scorn, silence, degrade, and control women and the natural world. Those scriptures will continue to override our collective better nature unless and until we name and discard them.

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Like the climate crisis, the fight against patriarchy is daunting - because the habits and modes of thinking it targets are ingrained and numerous, because it requires upending social and economic arrangements long taken for granted, and because it will be, and has been, fiercely opposed at every turn.

(Whatever the reasons for patriarchy's predominance in recent human history, anthropological explanation does not amount to evolutionary - much less moral - justification. The notion that biological or cultural phenomena are evolutionarily adaptive simply because they are longstanding is problematic enough that evolutionary biologists coined a term to debunk it. Consider also how recent is patriarchy, evolutionarily speaking: scientists have called gender inequality an aberration and pointed to evolutionary advantages enjoyed by egalitarian hunter-gatherers. And, again, any conversation about evolution in this context is peripheral to - you guessed it - the legitimacy of women's independent claim to rights, voice, power, and representation.)

To be sure, the economic pain and social dislocation wrought by globalization, laissez-faire economics, technological advances, and other structural shifts have left many poor and middle-class men disaffected and bereft of traditional support systems. Perhaps those changes - shifts in the global distribution of power - have, incidentally, begun to erode patriarchy (leaving aside, for the moment, the raft of evidence that any such pronouncements are premature). Those changes are nonetheless very far from the end of patriarchy, and not just because of recent social and political backlash. Deeply entrenched inequality, like an economic system's dependency on fossil fuels, can only be uprooted by deliberate efforts to replace it with something else.

Our time is running short.

We must awaken from our collective delusion about the nature of gender, power, and humans' relationship to the natural world.

For men, countering gender violence requires more than identifying as allies; men must actively disavow patriarchal prerogatives, embody less-toxic forms of masculinity, help stem the crisis of violence through their actions, and lend their voices to the growing chorus of feminist, gay-rights, trans-rights, and anti-racist voices. For women, the fight against patriarchy requires solidarity (with other women and members of oppressed groups), perseverance, and refusal to be silenced. All of us, particularly straight cisgendered men and women, must resist the temptation to regard change with trepidation or to settle for the status quo.

Institutional responses are also important. Policy proposals are beyond the author's ken - see this report by the European Commission instead - but the overarching goal of institutional responses must be to treat misogyny and gender-based violence like the crises that they are. Feminists have remarked upon the frequency with which incidents of gender harassment and violence are characterized as exceptional and isolated. They are neither exceptional nor isolated, of course, and they implicate legal rights. We ought to demand that our institutions (legal, political, and otherwise) treat them that way.

In the end, our calculus is a simple one. There are many risks and uncertainties that lie ahead, but none poses a greater threat than collapse of the natural systems that have made possible life on Earth.

It has become a common feminist refrain that all of us ought to be feminists. For the sake of the planet, let's take that advice to heart.

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Climate justice and gender justice are inextricably linked. Some fronts in the fight against climate injustice are more visible than others. Most of us agree that policymakers ought to commission studies and sponsor legislative efforts - just as scientists ought to study ice cores, create climate models, and maybe even march in the streets.

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Climate change: the fault of the patriarchy

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Climate change: the fault of the patriarchy

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by Piotr Trzaskowski

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The women's movement ... I would call it the feminist movement. You can find historical examples of feminist involvement in ecology. The eco-feminist movement actually began in the late sixties, more or less with the sexual revolution of '68. It belonged to the second-wave feminist movements, which mainly grew in the United States and Western Europe, but you have to remember the non-European context, with the in India (, for example. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipko_movement) Chipko stands for "hug" in Hindi. So this is a movement, or rather a lack of movement, the refusal to leave a place, where hugging a tree is a form of protest. With this gesture, Indian women wanted to protect the forest from industrial logging in the regions where they lived, and they succeeded. That forest was indeed not felled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai) was also very effective - a Nobel laureate from Kenya mainly involved in planting trees and conserving natural resources. It seems to me that these people and acts are absolutely associated with feminist movements.

Changing the image of the Earth from mother to lover comes from the ecosexual movement represented by, for example, Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens ( http://sexecology.org), two artists active in the United States. Ecosexuality emphasises the pleasure we derive from being in nature, walking in the woods and drinking clean water, and the rudimentary empathy that we feel for non-human beings.

The views expressed and conclusions made in this interview do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

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Climate change: the fault of the patriarchy | Heinrich Böll Stiftung | Warsaw office - Poland

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The origins of the exploitation of natural resources and the climate are associated with the exploitation of minority groups, including women. Both phenomena are the result of the belief in the dominance of humanity (traditionally the white man) over nature. "Caring for the environment comes from caring for human society, and these must go hand in hand.

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Disparities in Distribution of Particulate Matter Emission Sources by Race and Poverty Status

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Disparities in Distribution of Particulate Matter Emission Sources by Race and Poverty Status

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American Public Health Association (APHA) publications

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The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA) publications

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The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)

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Project Drawdown uses different scenarios to assess what determined, global efforts to address climate change might look like.

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Here, we present the individual solutions reviewed and assessed by Project Drawdown, including their relevant sector(s) and their impact on reducing heat-trapping gases. This list is extensive but not exhaustive, and we continue to add to it as a living project.

Project Drawdown uses different scenarios to assess what determined, global efforts to address climate change might look like. Both scenarios shown here are plausible and economically realistic. Drawdown Scenario 1 is roughly in line with 2˚C temperature rise by 2100, while Drawdown Scenario 2 is roughly in-line with 1.5˚C temperature rise at century's end.

The results shown here are based on projected emissions impact globally. The relative importance of a given solution can differ significantly depending on context and particular ecological, economic, political, or social conditions. We invite a deeper dive into the many particularities and nuances of all of these solutions.

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Here, we present the individual solutions reviewed and assessed by Project Drawdown, including their relevant sector(s) and their impact on reducing heat-trapping gases. This list is extensive but not exhaustive, and we continue to add to it as a living project. Project Drawdown uses different scenarios to assess what determined, global efforts to address climate change might look like.

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Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality

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Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality

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Bullard, R. D. (2019). Dumping in Dixie: Race, class and environmental quality. London: Routledge.

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Includes videos, resources, and articles on the history of environmental justice, race- and class-based disparities in exposure to environmental hazards, and the current state of the environmental justice movement.

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Click on the links below to explore core concepts of the environmental justice movement.

Topics include the history of environmental justice, race- and class-based disparities in exposure to environmental hazards, and the current state of the environmental justice movement.

Video

News Publications

Resources

Academic Journals and Books

LaDuke, W. (2015). All Our Relations: Native struggles for land and life. Boston, South End Press.

Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (2011). Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Bullard, R. D. (1994). Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Boulder: Westview Press.

Hurley, A. (1997). Fiasco at Wagner Electric: Environmental Justice and Urban Geography in St. Louis. Environmental History, 2(4), 460-481. Retrieved from here.

Agyeman, J. (2012). Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Bullard, R. D., & Wright, B. (2012). The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities. New York: New York University Press.

University Courses

For a list of courses related to environmental justice that is periodically updated, please visit this website.

Get Involved with Environmental Justice
WashU's Environmental Justice Initiative
Dutchtown South Community Corporation (DSCC): So Fresh So Clean So Creative
The Rooted in the Community National Network
Just Moms STL (West Lake Landfill activism)
Outdoor Afro Missouri Coalition for the Environment Fit and Food Connection St. Louis MetroMarket North City Food Hub STL Green Teen Alliance CAASTLC Seeds of Hope Farm
US Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice

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Environmental Justice Self-Study Guide | Students

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Click on the links below to explore core concepts of the environmental justice movement. Topics include the history of environmental justice, race- and class-based disparities in exposure to environmental hazards, and the current state of the environmental justice movement. LaDuke, W. (2015). All Our Relations: Native struggles for land and life.

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Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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a talk by Astrophysicist, Laurance Doyle

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Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence | Laurance Doyle

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In this excerpt from the first episode of his TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan imagines how the history of the universe would look if set against a regular Gregorian calendar.

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Carl Sagan - The Cosmic Calendar [Cosmos]

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A Just Transition Zine "From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring"

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A Just Transition Zine "From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring"

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by Movement Generation

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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

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Wallace-Wells, D. (2020). The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books.

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a Huffington Post series of reported stories and essays exploring the ways climate change is affecting our relationship to one another, to our sense of place and to ourselves.

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On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal

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On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal

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Klein, N. (2020). On Fire: The burning case for a green new deal. London: Penguin Books.

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by Chapo Trap House - A discussion on climate change, a green new deal and what it must include, Naomi's new book "On Fire" and new developments in responses to ecological crisis from both the right and the left.

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World On A Wire feat. Naomi Klein | Chapo Trap House | Episode 358 FULL

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I Had a Gloriously Wild Childhood. That’s Why I Wrote ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’

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I Had a Gloriously Wild Childhood. That’s Why I Wrote ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’

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by Cressida Cowell - "We must give children the opportunity to interact with the wilderness, so that they learn to preserve the natural world."

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On other holidays, roaming unaccompanied on my bicycle near my grandmother's house in the English countryside, I used to play on the top of an Iron Age hill fortcalled the "Trundle." The view was extraordinary - I could see for miles and miles - and I had a strong feeling of what J.R.R. Tolkien called "the heart-racking sense of the vanished past." It made me wonder: Who were the people who lived here, long ago? What were their lost histories?

From the hill fort, I had a good view of Levin Down, an extraordinarily eerie, wondrous place that we called the "Fairy Hill." It stood out from the quiet country fields around it in an ominous and striking fashion, like the back of a whale surfacing in the ocean. The trees had blown there by chance, rather than being planted by human hands, and some were yew trees: I was warned not to touch them. There were places I could not go and "Beware" signs (which I always found exciting) because the area had been used as a training ground during World War II. To a sensitive child like myself, it was easy to believe that this hill was enchanted. It was intriguing, eerie, exciting and beautiful all at the same time.

The hill was covered with strange grassy mounds about the size of molehills. The adults had no idea what they were - which was very exciting to me, realizing that there were things in the world that not even the adults understood. So I filled in the blanks for myself and decided they must be burial mounds for fairies. This was the magical landscape that inspired my book "The Wizards of Once."

For the wildwood in that book, I took particular inspiration from the ancient wood of Kingley Vale in Sussex. Its trees have gnarled, expressive faces, and roots that embed into the earth with an almost visceral power. The more you learn about trees, the more magical you realize they are. Did you know, for example, that trees can communicate with each other through their roots, even when they are many miles apart?

Trees grow throughout children's books. From "Peter Pan" to "A Monster Calls," "The Lord of the Rings" to "Harry Potter," trees are refuges, prisons and symbols of nature's potency. They can be a friendly home, like the Hundred Acre Wood in "Winnie-the-Pooh," or give a sense of menace, like the snowy forest in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." They can also be symbolic, like the cement-filled dying tree in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The writers I loved when I was a child were similarly inspired by magical landscapes and nature: Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.H. White - and so many others.

Today, children have much less unsupervised access to the countryside. I worry that they may never know the magic of the wilderness, the power of trees and the thrilling excitement of exploring nature without an adult hovering behind them. And so I write books for children who will never know what the freedom of my childhood was like.

My father never found out whether the nest in the cliff belonged to a white-tailed sea eagle or a buzzard. The gust of wind that scared me brought him to his senses, and he scrambled back up the side of the cliff before I could lose my grip. We staggered back through the gale to the little stone house on the island where, in the candlelight, we dried out in front of the fire.

Cressida Cowell (@CressidaCowell) is the author and illustrator of the "How to Train Your Dragon" and "The Wizards of Once" series of children's books.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | I Had a Gloriously Wild Childhood. That's Why I Wrote 'How to Train Your Dragon.'

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On other holidays, roaming unaccompanied on my bicycle near my grandmother's house in the English countryside, I used to play on the top of an Iron Age hill fortcalled the "Trundle." The view was extraordinary - I could see for miles and miles - and I had a strong feeling of what J.R.R.

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We Built This City... On Water and Marsh?

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We Built This City... On Water and Marsh?

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by BayCurious on KQED

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When Nicole was growing up, her grandmother always told her: Don't live anywhere built on artificial fill. Her uncle also had strong memories of watching the Marina District burn after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when parts of the ground liquefied, causing buildings to collapse and gas lines to break.

Nicole wants to follow her grandmother's advice, but she needs to know a few things: "What neighborhoods and cities in the Bay Area are built on filled land? And what are those cities and neighborhoods doing to mitigate the risk of liquefaction?"

What is fill?

Often, when we colloquially refer to fill around the Bay Area, we're actually referring to two different things:

1. Artificial fill

2. Former or "reclaimed" marshlands and wetlands.

Artificial fill is land that was created by piling up soil, mud, rocks, rubble and dirt. In many cases, mud was pumped up from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay to fill in piles of rocks, then allowed to dry.

In most cases, this fill was put on top of low-lying areas or shallow wetlands and marshlands. For example, Treasure Island was made by piling rocks and mud on the shoals north of Yerba Buena Island. The land that is now the Marina neighborhood in San Francisco was originally filled in for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition - in some cases using debris and rubble from the 1906 earthquake.

Reclaimed marshlands and wetlands are not technically fill. However, building levees and draining marshes did change the coastline of the bay, allowing for more development.

Hundreds of years ago, the coastline of the Bay Area looked very different. In many places, the edges of the bay were marshland or wetlands. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, lots of that got drained. People built levees and "reclaimed" the land for what they considered useful purposes, like agriculture. These days, some of those levees have been torn down and land is being returned to tidal marshes.

Why did we use fill in the Bay Area?

Because fill in the bay let us build, live and farm on land that was previously uninhabitable.

In the mid-1800s, the U.S. Congress passed the U.S. Swamp Land Acts. These were originally designed to help Louisiana drain its swamp lands and build levees - but were quickly put to use in other states. The laws allowed people to claim wetlands or marshlands as their own property if they drained it and used it for an agricultural purpose. This led to a spree of building levees and draining wetlands.

In the late 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers did a study on the development of the Bay Area. They found 243 square miles of land "available for reclamation" had been reclaimed. That's a lot of former marshlands, wetlands and tidal lands to have drained or filled.
You can read the full study here. It's wild.
What are the problems with artificial fill?

By the 1960s, we mostly stopped filling in the Bay because of growing environmental concerns. After the Army Corps of Engineers did its study of the Bay Area, they published a map projecting what the bay would look like if we continued to fill it in. The picture so alarmed people that eventually the state Legislature put an end to bay fill.

The other major problem with artificial fill, which wasn't well known 100 years ago, is the earthquake danger.

According to Keith Knudsen of the U.S. Geological Survey, the fill built on top of bay mud or soft ground is at risk for ground failure or liquefaction during an earthquake. A lot of that old fill was not built with the best engineering practices. It was also frequently placed on top of mud or soft deposits, which amplify shaking. When you have high ground water, loose materials and heavy shaking, those deposits can stop behaving like a solid, and start behaving like a liquid, said Knudsen.

The ground turns into a sort of quicksand. Buildings on top can sink and crack. Also things that are in the ground and filled with air, like sewage pipes, can float to the surface.

"Lots of bad things can happen if the ground liquefies," Knudsen said.

What's being done to mitigate those issues?

The best way to prevent liquefaction and ground failure is to take steps when you're first creating the artificial fill.

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Large Parts of the Bay Area Are Built on Fill. Why and Where? | KQED

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When Nicole was growing up, her grandmother always told her: Don't live anywhere built on artificial fill. Her uncle also had strong memories of watching the Marina District burn after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when parts of the ground liquefied, causing buildings to collapse and gas lines to break.

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There Were Once More Than 425 Shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where Did They Go?

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There Were Once More Than 425 Shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where Did They Go?

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by BayCurious on KQED

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The mounds served many purposes.

"Shellmounds are created by my ancestors as ceremonial places and as burial sites," said Corrina Gould, spokeswoman for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-director of Indian People Organizing for Change. Lisjan is one of more than 40 native groups that call the greater Bay Area their home. As colonizers and settlers came to Northern California, they lumped these distinct indigenous groups into one. These days this larger group is most often called Ohlone.

Gould said innumerable burials were found in shellmounds: "Children buried with their mothers who had been lost in childbirth. Elders with babies."

These bodies were then covered with layers of soil, shell and rock.

Growing bigger over time, the shellmounds transformed the flatlands by the bay waters into an undulating, awe-inspiring scene.

The shellmounds also served as an active space for the living.

"People would come and they would trade with each other, and they would have ceremony at the top of these mounds," Gould said.

Archaeologists have found remnants of communal fireplaces, workshops and homes in the mounds. They were so central to community life that it seems there wasn't even time for topsoil to build up or for grasses to grow, said UC Berkeley anthropology professor Kent Lightfoot.

Their height, sometimes taller than 30 feet, served as a focal point to navigate across the bay waters, or to communicate with other tribes.

"You could send signals to other people across the bay because you could see their fires," Gould said, which could, among other things, warn groups about toxic red tide.

"There's all of these things that are in these mounds that tell us this rich history of our people for thousands and thousands of years," she said.

Gould is referring to remnants of daily Ohlone life, like the foods that sustained them: not only the mussel, clam and oyster shells that give the mounds their name, but traces of salmon and sturgeon, deer, and acorns from the ample oak trees.

How many shellmounds were in the Bay Area?

The San Francisco Bay Area was a popular place to live for Native Americans. Natural resources from both water and land were abundant here. The area from Point Sur in the south to the Carquinez Strait in the north was one of the most densely populated places for indigenous people north of Mexico, with roughly 10,000 inhabitants.

All these people meant a lot of villages, and therefore a lot of shellmounds.

But as colonizers and settlers came to California in the 1700s and 1800s, the native population was devastated. They were killed by newly introduced diseases, starvation and genocide. These killings were at times funded by the state of California and the U.S. government.

Native people began to disappear from their traditional land. When their houses of willow branches and tule reeds decomposed, the shellmounds were all that was left to mark where their villages once stood.

In 1909, a UC Berkeley archeologist named Nels Nelson counted 425 shellmounds around the Bay Area. He thought there had been many more, too, that were already worn away by water, time and development.

Corrina Gould believes that of the shellmounds Nelson documented in 1909, roughly four can still be seen, in such places as San Bruno, Fremont and Richmond.

What happened to the shellmounds?

Let's take a look at the Emeryville shellmound as an example of a larger trend. This shellmound was the biggest one recorded in the Bay Area, more than three stories high and 350 feet in diameter, Gould said.

Demolition of the Emeryville shellmound. But if you look for the shellmound today, you won't find much above ground.

In the late 1800s, developers sheared off the top to create a dance pavilion -- people were literally dancing on graves. At the base of the shellmound, they constructed an amusement park. Decades later the shellmound was leveled completely to make way for a paint factory. And in the early 2000s, the site of this once-busy native village became a busy outdoor shopping center.

This kind of destruction happened across the Bay Area.

But Gould emphasized that the shellmounds are still here, albeit underground.

"It's important for us to preserve and protect what's left," Gould said. "Even if you as human beings can't see it on top, we know that the layers of our shellmounds go way deep underneath the land."

The soil below where shellmounds stood is distinct. It's a dark, rich color from organic material, with white pockets colored by remains of shells.

The rich soil from above-ground shellmounds was used to pave roads, fill in parts of the bay and fertilize gardens. Some of the human remains met similar fates.

Gould said the shellmounds are beneath landmarks that Bay Area residents pass daily: a Burger King in downtown Oakland, or Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.

Many skeletons have been unceremoniously unearthed. Construction crews and archaeologists uncovered human bones as recently as the early 2000s, while building the Emeryville shops. Gould said most of these were reburied in an undisclosed location on the original site. In the past, remains were treated differently. Professional and amateur archaeologists sought out human bones and artifacts and sent them to universities.

UC Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has more than 5,000 sets of human remains from the Bay Area alone. A "set" could represent the remains of one or multiple people, or even just an isolated component of a person, according to a spokesman for the museum.

Two years ago, Gould and other Ohlone people viewed the Hearst Museum's collection of human remains.

"From the top of the ceiling to the floor there was all these trays with our ancestor remains up and down," Gould said. "I'll never forget that experience that this institution is holding these humans, and for what purpose? And how many is too many?"

"They were the ancestors, you know, my direct relations." Gould choked up as she spoke, describing her reaction after the visit: "I lay down in bed for three days and couldn't move. And it still hurts."

What's happening with shellmounds now?

Gould and other Native American activists are fighting to acquire land where the oldest Bay Area shellmound, nearly 5,000 years old, once stood: West Berkeley. The space is privately owned, and currently an asphalt parking lot at 1900 Fourth St., between the Fourth Street shopping corridor and the bay. The location has been designated as an archeological landmark by the city of Berkeley since 2000.

The landowners have sought to build housing here in recent years, but their proposals have been rejected by the city of Berkeley. While the owners have challenged the city, a judge recently ruled in favor of the city.

What do you wonder about the Bay Area, its culture or people that you want KQED to investigate? Ask Bay Curious.

Gould hopes eventually the land will be overseen by Ohlone and other Native Americans. She acknowledges this is just a dream right now, as the owners of the land are not willing to sell. But she said stranger things have happened.

Her vision is a space with native plants, a circular dancing structure for Ohlone ceremonies, and a 40-foot-tall mound with a spiral path and information about the Ohlone.

Gould and others regularly hold intertribal prayers here, on the current parking lot. Over her decades as an activist, Gould said Ohlone events have grown stronger, and the crowds have grown larger.

She sees this as part of a larger Ohlone resurgence: consulting for the Hearst Museum that houses bones of their relatives, reviving dance steps no one has followed in 100 years, and learning traditional languages - not spoken in generations - from tape recordings.

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There Were Once More Than 425 Shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where Did They Go? | KQED

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The mounds served many purposes. "Shellmounds are created by my ancestors as ceremonial places and as burial sites," said Corrina Gould, spokeswoman for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-director of Indian People Organizing for Change. Lisjan is one of more than 40 native groups that call the greater Bay Area their home.

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Why I Do Theatre: A TED Talk by Patsy Rodenburg

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Why I Do Theatre: A TED Talk by Patsy Rodenburg

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Patsy Rodenburg says the world needs actors more than ever. In this talk at Michael Howard Studios, she tells the story of a profound encounter that reveals the deeper role theater can play in people's lives.

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A comedic web produced by Movement Generation connecting gentrification and the climate crisis in North Oakland.

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Watch 'The North Pole' - Season 2 Available Now!

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The North Pole is a comedic web series about three best friends born and raised in North Oakland, CA, who struggle to stay rooted as their neighborhood becomes a hostile environment.

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by The Village in Oakland

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ALLSTREETLOOKS | Oakland | 510 Day Highlights/Interviews

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Follow our instagram for pics from behind the scenes :)

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An urban Indigenous women-led community organization that facilitates the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship.

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The Lisjan people have lived in the territory of Huchiun since the beginning of time.

For thousands of years, hundreds of generations, the Lisjan Ohlone people have lived on the land that is now known as the East Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area. We did not own the land, we belonged to it. Generation after generation, we cultivated reciprocal relationships with the plants and animals we shared this place with and developed beautiful and powerful cultural practices that kept us in balance.

The Confederated Villages of Lisjan is one of many Ohlone tribes, each with its own geography and history. Our tribes, cultures and languages are as diverse as the ecosystems we live within. When the Spanish invaded in the late 1700s, in their ignorance they called us Costanoan, people of the coast. In the 1960s and 70s, inspired by the Black Power and American Indian Movements, we organized and renamed ourselves Ohlone. But there are 8 different bands of Ohlone people, with connected but different territories and languages. The Lisjan speak the language Chochenyo.

The Lisjan are made up of the seven Tribes that were directly enslaved at Mission San Jose in Fremont, CA and Mission Dolores in San Francisco, CA: Lisjan (Ohlone), Karkin (Ohlone), Bay Miwok, Plains Miwok, Wappo, Delta Yokut and Napian (Patwin). Our territory includes; Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa and San Joaquin Counties and we are directly tied to the "Indian Town" census of the 1920's and the Verona Band.

Sogorea Te' Land Trust is based in Huchiun, in unceded Lisjan territory, what is now known as Oakland,Berkeley, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville and Albany, California.

We have survived over two centuries of genocide and colonization during the Spanish, Mexican and American eras. Today, we continue to inhabit our ancestral homeland, fight for our sacred sites and revitalize our cultural practices.

"All of these things that the United States tries to do to squash us have not worked. It's failed. We still know who we are. We still know how to pray in our own way. We still know where our sacred sites are. And we know how to bring back our language."-Corrina Gould, Spokesperson of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan

Ann Marie Sayers, Ruth Orta, Corrina Gould and Caleen Sisk at Living On Ohlone Land, Photo by Christopher McLeod

The colonization of this land began with the reign of terror inflicted by Spanish soldiers and missionaries who sought to convert all Indigenous people into Catholic subjects of Spain and steal their land. The Missions were plantations, built by slave labor and sustained through brutal physical violence and extractive land practices. The Spanish brought deadly diseases, invasive species and Christian ideology based on human dominion of the natural world with devastating consequences for the Lisjan people and all living beings they shared the land with.

After a brief but harrowing Mexican rancho period, Lisjan survivors faced extermination policies of the United States that aimed to eliminate California Indians entirely. In a climate of virulent racial discrimination and state-sponsored vigilante killings, most Lisjan families survived by isolating themselves and concealing their identities. Cultural and spiritual traditions were forced into dormancy or secrecy, and much knowledge perished with the passing of generations.

Despite these concerted efforts to erase our history and identity, the Lisjan community forms a diverse and vibrant constellation of tribes and families. Utilizing a wide array of survival strategies to navigate a profoundly altered 21st century world, we continue to revitalize our cultural practices and uphold our responsibilities to protect and care for our ancestral homeland. This profound process, simultaneously rooting back and reaching forward, is embodied in Sogorea Te' Land Trust's Chochenyo language program Mak Noono Tiirinikma, our language awakens.

The lack of access to traditional ceremonial grounds and to land appropriate for multi-day ceremonies is a serious challenge faced by Lisjan people today, since the tribe is not federally recognized and remains landless. A cornerstone of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust's vision is the construction of a traditional Lisjan roundhouse in the East Bay. The Round House will bring Lisjan and other Ohlone families and the broader intertribal Indigenous community together in a space for healing and spiritual renewal.

Sacred Shellmounds Around the Bay

Shellmounds are sacred burial sites of the Ohlone and Coast Miwok peoples. They are considered by Ohlone people to be living cemeteries, places of prayer, veneration and connection with the ancestors. "Shellmounds are places where we laid our ancestors to rest," Corrina Gould explains. "We actually buried them in the soil and then covered them with shell and then more soil. As the years and centuries went by, these mounds grew larger and larger. They became monuments to the people that lived here in the Bay Area."

As settlers flooded into the San Francisco area during the Gold Rush, the leveling and desecration of shellmounds began, clearing the way for development. Noticing the rate at which the mounds were vanishing, an archeologist from UC Berkeley named Nels Nelson worked to create a map in 1909 of those which remained. His map identified 425 distinct shellmound sites ringing the San Francisco Bay. Today, only a handful of those remain in a natural state. Most lie buried beneath parking lots and buildings.

"Every single time I go to a shellmound, it eats a little bit away from who I am just because I see that there's absolutely no respect for who we are as Ohlone people or who our ancestors were or anything that happened on this land prior to America being created."-Corrina Gould, Spokesperson of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan

No Federal Recognition

Officially "unrecognized" by the U.S. federal government as a tribe, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan have no reservations or protected land bases and receive none of the rights, benefits, compensations or protections afforded to Indian tribes under U.S. laws. The Lisjan have no access to federal scholarships or housing grants, and grossly inadequate protections of cultural, burial, and sacred sites.

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) policy requires unrecognized tribes to undergo an exhaustive and costly "Federal Acknowledgment Process" by submitting thousands of pages of evidence to prove who they are, at the expense of the tribe. The BIA criteria for recognition requires tribes to demonstrate an unbroken continuity of leadership, tribal culture and organization- woefully ironic, since historically, U.S. policy deliberately sought to dismantle that very continuity. The requirements of this process are so onerous that achieving recognition is virtually impossible, especially for tribes whose ancestors were enslaved in the California Missions. Of the eight petitions submitted by Ohlone tribes since 1988, not one has led to approval.

"For me, it does not matter whether or not this government recognizes us. My ancestors recognize who I am, and who we are supposed to be right now. And so, this work is for them."-Corrina Gould, Spokesperson of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan

The Emeryville Shellmound and the Bay Street Mall

In 1997, corporate developers were unearthing hundreds of Lisjan ancestoral remains at the Emeryville Shellmound to begin the construction of a giant new shopping mall. Located on the edge of the Bay at the mouth of Temescal Creek, this ancient shellmound was once the largest of all, standing 60 feet high at over 350 feet in diameter.

Although the Emeryville site had previously been bulldozed and desecrated, countless ancestors remained interred in the soil- some intact and others gravely disturbed. The site had been occupied for 70 years by industrial facilities including a paint factory, a cannery and an insecticide plant, which leached toxic wastes into the soil. In the midst of a redevelopment boom, the City of Emeryville received funding to clean up the property, which was deemed a contaminated brownfield. In the gruesome scene that unfolded, untold numbers of ancestors' remains, saturated with industrial toxins, were disposed of via incineration at hazardous waste facilities, and many more were collected and piled in a mass grave on site.

"Emeryville broke my heart," Corrina Gould recalls. Ohlone people, concerned archeologists and other community advocates vehemently campaigned for the preservation and restoration of the site in a manner that would honor its immense cultural significance and recognize the ancestors buried there. Siding with developers and the promise of increased tax revenues, the Emeryville City Council voted to pave over the entire 19-acre site to construct the Bay Street Mall. Every "Black Friday," the busiest shopping day of the year, the local Indigenous community holds a protest at the mall, educating shoppers and asking them to take their business elsewhere.

Black Friday Protest at the Emeryville Shellmound 2014

Although the Emeryville fight was a traumatic and painful period for Lisjan people, it was also a galvanizing experience in which many new relationships were formed between local activists and tribal members, strengthening the overall movement to protect Lisjan sacred places.

The Shellmound Peace Walks

Outraged by the ongoing desecration of shellmounds by developers and the striking lack of public awareness about Ohlone people and their sacred sites, Indigenous activists Johnella LaRose and Corrina Gould were inspired to start the Shellmound Peace Walks. With the aid of Nels Nelson's 1909 map, they set out to pinpoint the locations of the shellmounds and create a route by which they could walk as a group to each site, to pray with their ancestors in an act of spiritual pilgrimage.

2005 Shellmound Peace Walk

In 2005, the first Shellmound Peace Walk threaded its way through the Bay Area, starting in Vallejo at Sogorea Te', proceeding south to San Jose, and then up the western shore of the Bay to San Francisco- a 280-mile journey that took three weeks to accomplish. The walkers were joined by Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist monks from Japan and supporters from the local community and as far away as Australia, Nova Scotia and the Cape Verde Islands.

"It was an incredible journey," Corrina Gould recounts, "trying to figure out where my ancestors were, trying to figure out how we were supposed to protect them, and trying to figure out: how do we educate the Bay Area about what's right here underneath them?" Each day, in addition to the act of walking and praying at each site, the walk would bring many people together over food and conversation. "We talked about our inherent responsibility to do what is right on behalf of the ancestors and those to come," Gould explains, "really feeling like we are that bridge between the past and the future."

The Shellmound Peace Walk continued for a total of four consecutive years, each time covering new territory and visiting additional monument sites. The collective act of walking and praying with the ancestors at each location was both healing and transformative, and each year it created a larger and larger network of people who were ready to advocate and fight on behalf of the Ohlone and their ancestral places. In this way, it laid a groundwork for protective actions to come.

Direct Action at the Village of Sogorea Te'

Spiritual re-occupation of the Karkin Ohlone village of Sogorea Te' (Glen Cove), 2011

Denied their Indigenous rights, silenced by the law, and dismissed by developers and governing authorities, Ohlone people have often been forced to take matters into their own hands through outspoken community organizing and, at times, direct action. Read about the Reawakening of Sogorea Te' to learn how this activism was a seed that grew into the Sogorea Te' Land Trust.

West Berkeley Shellmound: An Ongoing Struggle

The West Berkeley Shellmound, at least 5,800 years old, is the oldest Shellmound in the Bay Area. Located along Strawberry Creek, which now runs through a culvert underground, the Shellmound remains a place of prayer for Lisjan people, despite being covered by buildings, asphalt, and a railroad. In 2016, while trenching for a new retail development, the remains of ancestors were unearthed. Despite the call of Lisjan leaders and community members to halt all development, the owners of the land are pushing forward. Currently, the City of Berkeley and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan are in a protracted court battle to protect the Shellmound.

"Protect Ohlone Lisjan Sacred Sites" mural, at the site of the West Berkeley Shellmound- painted by community as an act of resistance. (Photo: Scott Braley)

"We're saying, enough. Stop. This is not just cement, this is a place that was intended by our ancestors' ancestors to be here for us for all eternity, to put down those prayers." Corrina Gould, Spokesperson of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan

Learn more about the ongoing campaign to Save the West Berkeley Shellmound.

Indigenous Sovereignty in the 21st Century

We are in an ongoing process of recovery from the impacts of Spanish, Mexican and American policies of slavery, extermination and forced assimilation. The violent and profound disruptions brought by colonization have destroyed our balance in the world with devastating impacts on the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives here. Faced with social, ecological and spiritual crises everywhere we look, we are envisioning what work to do, what path to take to bring us back into balance.

Although there are many valuable ways to support our struggle for sovereignty, one issue stands out as paramount: the need for rematriation, returning Indigenous land to Indigenous people. There is an urgent and profound need for today's Indigenous communities to regain land bases within their traditional territories-land that can form a foundation for continued healing and restoration. The Sogorea Te' Land Trust was created as a means to realize this restorative vision in Huchiun, in unceded Lisjan territory.

Sogorea Te' Land Trust envisions life in the Bay Area in which the Chochenyo language and Lisjan Ohlone ceremonies are an active, thriving part of the cultural landscape, where Lisjan place names and history is known and recognized, and where intertribal Indigneous communities can gather, pray and practice their spiritual and cultural traditions. We seek to heal and transform the violent legacies of genocide, colonization and systemic racism that continue to impact our urban Indigenous communities. We are doing the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.

" My ancestors have always been here. That's my blessing, my grandchildren's blessing, that they were born on the land that their ancestors have always been on. And maybe my great grandchildren will be born here, too. Our umbilical cords are buried in this land. Our ancestors' DNA is in this land. And we continue to stand our ground."-Corrina Gould, Spokesperson of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan

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Lisjan (Ohlone) History & Territory - The Sogorea Te Land Trust

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The Lisjan people have lived in the territory of Huchiun since the beginning of time. For thousands of years, hundreds of generations, the Lisjan Ohlone people have lived on the land that is now known as the East Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area. We did not own the land, we belonged to it.

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Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture.

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Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. We are rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies.

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Movement Generation | Opening Eyes. Sharpening Lens. Focused on Action.

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Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. We are rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies.

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We work in service and support with 30 curbside communities (aka homeless encampments). We work in partnership with 6 curbside communities. We promote mutual-aid (aka sharing) and unity building between curbside communities.

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The Village is a movement in Oakland, CA of unhoused and formally unhoused leaders and housed allies who assert housing is a human right and homelessness is not a crime. We use a diversity of tactics to reach these two goals: direct action and policy reform; direct service and support; leadership development and education; media work and advocacy; upgrading of curbside communities and improving the quality of life of the streets; adverse possession, purchasing private property, and occupying unused and neglected public land.

check this clip about our state wide campaign.

#NoVacancyCa in Oakland started an all volunteer effort to immediate shelter unhoused seniors, families with children, and unsheltered with serious pre-existing medical conditions. Please keep our program going by sharing https://www.gofundme.com/f/hotels-not-graves with all your housed friends, neighbors, and family!
If you can comfortable survive during this pandemic, please consider using your funds towards shelter someone who may not survive this pandemic without a roof over their head and a shower to bathe daily. During this Covid19 pandemic it is absolutely clear - housing isn't just a basic human right, it is health care when we speak of the unhoused Let's be honest, this health crisis and the government's response (or lack of one) is showing not only how deep the inequalities are in our society, but how deep anti-homeless, anti-Black and anti-poverty runs thru the decision makers and power brokers. Before the pandemic, The Village was in the trenches and the halls of power fighting for the basic right and need of housing - for all! And has taken an invisible virus to shine light how essential adequate shelter is for our unhoused brothers and sisters. There are currently thousands of unsheltered people in Oakland, over 70% of whom are Black. The few hundred hotel rooms currently provided by Alameda County to house unsheltered folks who have tested positive or who are from very vulnerable demographics (seniors, immune compromised) are vastly insufficient to protect the lives of Oakland' most vulnerabel residents and prevent the spread of Covid19. Meanwhile, at least 1,500 hotel rooms remain empty and unused, while the City of Oakland has done nothing to secure even one hotel room for our unhoused neighbors. As we wait for the city and county to take meaningful and scalable action on this crisis, unsheltered residents remain unable to properly protect themselves. Only after an encampment resident was tested positive for Covid19 were other exposed residents offered hotel rooms. Waiting until people get sick or die before offering shelter goes against all public health recommendations, is immoral and deepens the health dispartities in Oakland's Black & Brown working class and poor communities. The Village in Oakland, The East Oakland Collective and Love & Justice in The Streets are already movingunhoused seniors/immune compromised/families with children into hotel rooms. There is no time to waste! The challenges and inequities aren't going anywhere, and neither are we. But this is our time to make sure the needs of adequate shelter is met in times of crisis. You can literally save lives by donating to our GoFundMe. Your contribution will enable us move dozens of unhoused brothers and sisters off the streets and into hotels to Shelter in Place.
Click the link below to hear directly from people we have been able to shelter in hotels because of your donations. Thank you!
HotelsNotGravesStatementsfromResidents
follow us on fb @TheVillageIn Oakland - #feedthepeople join one of our volunteer committees

donate towards out efforts to build emergency shelters, upgrade curbside communities, provide provisions, and share meals & groceries

1. Provide immediate support and advocacy to our curbside residents including but not limited to hot meals, groceries, provisions, connecting folks to services and resources, encampment upgrades.

2. Develop curbside residents as leaders and advocates for the unsheltered.

3. Advocate and work on policies and legislation that decriminalize homelessness, protect the human and civil rights of curbside communities, hold government bodies accountable during this affordable housing crisis and homeless state of emergency.

4. Use and make replicable The Village housing model as a new form of Rapid Rehousing - both permanent and transitional.

5. Create Supportive Housing in a holistic way that will lead towards a path of self sufficency.

6. Create a path towards financial security with financial literacy, job training, job opportunities and opportunities to be part of worker owned collectives and collective home ownership.

In the beginning...

The idea is simple and as ancient as human history - it takes The Village. We are a network of seasoned community activists and organizers, artists, unhoused leaders, grassroots and non-profit leaders, family and friends, business people and housed allies who believe homelessness is not a crime, housing a human right and that we need to ensure home for all by any and all means. Since December 2016 up until this point we have been driven thru 100% volunteerism and 100% community donations.

The Village started as a direct action that became a movement. We are now moving towards becoming a supported housing development and management agency, a non profit service provider, and a job opportunity program for our curbside residents. What will makes us different than the multitude of homeless non-profits in existence? Our approach is radical and innovative. It was informed by the current affordable housing crisis and homeless state of emergency we are experiencing and designed to help put an end to it.

We started off with a vision that was inspired by the audacity of Occupy/Decolonize Oakland and the healing powers of Standing Rock/Osechi Sakowin. We were driven by an urgency to immediately build emergency shelter and sportive services while City Hall ignored the growing crisis. It would be a radical and beautiful community labor of love that would pressure the buerocrats to DO SOMETHING. And that is exactly what we did.

Little did we know that years later we would still be building emergency homes, providing services, and pushing the beurocrats to do something humane and impactful. All while creating of a new model of temporary AND permanent rapid rehousing, employment and support services for curbside communities.

As our vision (and the political climate) becomes a reality, the depth and scope of work points to a need for sustainability. We are at a juncture - and have made a decision to establish a solid foundation so that housing security can be gained for generations to come from those in poverty to those struggling economically in The New Oakland.

The Bay Area is seeing an influx of wealth, housing and jobs like we've never seen. But none of this abundance is for Oakland's generations deep working class and low income Black and POC communities. We realize only a community driven response will be the catalyst for immediate, alternative forms to permanent housing. We realize that creating stable, full and part time positions for curbside residents and couch surfers WHILE housing them is one of the best approaches to this crisis rooted in deep inequity.

Whether it be lack of job training, a deficit of local outreach to the Oaklanders, or discrimination - not having access to this wave of employment is directly linked to not having access to this inflated housing market. How can Oakland's working class and lower income communities afford the raising cost of living if they cannot access the jobs that will support the new economic culture of their homeland?

Thru careful analysis of the economic climate coupled with extended surveys to the unsheltered, we realize that in order to achieve self-sufficiency and secure adequate permanent housing being players in a competitive job market is part of the solution to preventing and ending homelessness

As we build our future of stability, sanctuary and sustainability - we continue to remain in the trenches. We continue to provide food, provisions, advocacy, temporary upgraded housing, and education for Oakland's curbside communities. We assert, ensure, protect, advocate and co-create basic needs and rights of Oakland residents who have fallen victim of the housing crisis and homeless state of emergency. Check out our Get Active! page to plug into our on going volunteer opportunities. Housed and Unhoused folks both encouraged to join and work side by side.

We continue to believe using a diversity of tactics to reach our goals is necessary in the current political, economic and historic moment we are in: direct action and policy reform; adverse possession and purchasing lands; reparations and self-determination; serve the unsheltered and self-governance of unsheltered. We assert housing is a human right, that there are enough public resources to house all Oakland residents, and that homelessness is not a crime.

#HousingIsAHumanRight #HomesForAll #HomelessnessIsNotACrime

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The Village is a movement in Oakland, CA of unhoused and formally unhoused leaders and housed allies who assert housing is a human right and homelessness is not a crime.

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by Natural Heroes - After decades struggling to protect sacred sites now engulfed by San Francisco’s sprawl, a Native woman and her allies discover a new path- to establish the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust. Shattering stereotypes, BEYOND RECOGNITION explores the quest to preserve one’s culture and homeland in a society bent on erasing them.

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After decades struggling to protect her ancestors' burial places, now engulfed by San Francisco's sprawl, a Native woman from a non-federally recognized tribe and her allies occupy a sacred site to prevent its desecration. When this life-altering event fails to stop the development, they vow to follow a new path: to establish the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust. Shattering stereotypes, BEYOND RECOGNITION explores the quest to preserve one's culture and homeland in a society bent on erasing them.

The film tells the inspiring story of women creating opportunities amid a system that fractures Native communities across the nation. Through cinéma vérité, interviews, and stunning footage of the land, BEYOND RECOGNITION introduces Corrina Gould, Johnella LaRose, and Indian People Organizing for Change as they embark on an incredible journey to transform the way we see cities. The film invites viewers to examine their own relationship to place, revealing histories that have been buried by shifting landscapes. BEYOND RECOGNITION points to the intersection of human rights, women's rights, and environmental protection, spotlighting a California story that has national and worldwide resonance.

PURCHASE FILM
BEYOND RECOGNITION can be purchased for educational or home video use through Documentary Educational Resources (DER)- www.der.org or orders@der.org or 617-926-0491.
To set up screenings or speaking engagements, please contact michelle@underexposedfilms.com

CREDITS
Director/Producer: Michelle Grace Steinberg
Co-Producer: Robyn Bykofsky
Primary Cinematographer: Michelle Grace Steinberg
Editors: Michelle Grace Steinberg and Quinn Costello
Consulting Editor: Vivien Hillgrove
Sound recording: Ryan Stewart and Robyn Bykofsky
Cast: Corrina Gould, Johnella LaRose, Gregg Castro, Maura Sullivan, Beth Rose Middleton, Tiny Lisa Gray-Garcia
Music: Featuring songs by Andrew Bird; as well as Justin Wasterlain & Brian Wismar, Sad Bastard Book Club, Agrimonia, and T.I.W.A.E.I.S.
Motion Graphics: Peggy Hrastar

ABOUT THE PRODUCERS
Michelle Grace Steinberg is an independent filmmaker based in Oakland, CA. Via Underexposed Films, Michelle creates documentaries that reveal underreported stories with an accountability to the communities most impacted by them. Her previous film, BURIED VOICES (2012), screened at film festivals and is used as curriculum at universities.

Michelle originally hails from Washington, D.C.; she received a Bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and a Master's degree from the University of Bridgeport. Aside from filmmaking, Michelle is a nutritionist and herbalist at a Spanish bilingual free clinic that she began in 2009 at Street Level Health Project. Michelle is thrilled by the completion of BEYOND RECOGNITION and honored to have been a part of the collaborations it entailed. She looks forward to sharing this important story as widely as possible, while beginning to brainstorm her next film. When time permits, Michelle has also been known to play bass guitar and drums.

FILMMAKER CONTACT
Film website www.beyondrecognitionfilm.com
Film Facebook page www.facebook.com/beyondrecognitionfilm
Production company website www.underexposedfilms.com
Email michelle@underexposedfilms.com

AWARDS
Best Short at San Francisco Green Film Festival (2015)

Also an official selection for:

Cinequest Film Festival (2015)

Wild & Scenic Film Festival (2015)

Cine Las Americas Film Festival (2015)

Human Rights Film Festival (2015)

DC Independent Film Festival (2015)

American Indian Film Festival (2015)

Red Nation Film Festival (2015)

Native Spirit Film Festival (2015)

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After decades struggling to protect her ancestors' burial places, now engulfed by San Francisco's sprawl, a Native woman from a non-federally recognized tribe and her allies occupy a sacred site to prevent its desecration. When this life-altering event fails to stop the development, they vow to follow a new path: to establish the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust.

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Madley, B. (2017). An American genocide: The United States and the California Indian catastrophe, 1846-1873. New Haven: Yale University Press.