Hundreds of millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation. Will the first U.N. conference on water in nearly 50 years make a difference?
Archive for category: Ecology
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40 percent by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.
Governments must urgently stop subsidizing the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.
Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbors for water supplies, and overuse, pollution, and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report’s authors say.
Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world’s neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.”
“There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water,” said lead author Johan Rockstrom. “And we never talk about water.”
Rockstrom’s fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: “We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it’s not just a technological or finance problem.”
The report marks the first time the global water system has been scrutinized comprehensively and its value to countries—and the risks to their prosperity if water is neglected—laid out in clear terms. Like with the Stern review of the economics of the climate crisis in 2006 and the Dasgupta review of the economics of biodiversity in 2021, the report authors hope to highlight the crisis in a way that policymakers and economists can recognize.
Many governments still do not realize how interdependent they are when it comes to water, according to Rockstrom. Most countries depend for about half of their water supply on the evaporation of water from neighboring countries—known as “green” water because it is held in soils and delivered from transpiration in forests and other ecosystems, when plants take up water from the soil and release vapor into the air from their leaves.
The report sets out seven key recommendations, including reshaping the global governance of water resources, scaling up investment in water management through public-private partnerships, pricing water properly and establishing “just water partnerships” to raise finance for water projects in developing and middle-income countries.
More than $700 billion of subsidies globally go to agriculture and water each year and these often fuel excessive water consumption. Water leakage must also be urgently addressed, the report found, and restoring freshwater systems such as wetlands should be another priority.
“It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, and phosphorus.”
Water is fundamental to the climate crisis and the global food crisis. “There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water,” said Rockstrom. “Behind all these challenges we are facing, there’s always water, and we never talk about water.”
Many of the ways in which water is used are inefficient and in need of change, with Rockstrom pointing to developed countries’ sewage systems. “It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, phosphorus—and then need to have inefficient wastewater treatment plants that leak 30 percent of all the nutrients into downstream aquatic ecosystems and destroy them and cause dead zones. We’re really cheating ourselves in terms of this linear, waterborne modern system of dealing with waste. There are massive innovations required.”
The UN water summit, led by the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, will take place in New York on 22 March. World leaders are invited but only a few are expected to attend, with most countries to be represented by ministers or high-ranking officials. It will mark the first time in more than four decades the UN has met to discuss water, with previous attempts stymied by governments reluctant to countenance any form of international governance of the resource.
Henk Ovink, a special envoy for international water affairs for the Netherlands, told the Guardian the conference was crucial. “If we are to have a hope of solving our climate crisis, our biodiversity crisis and other global challenges on food, energy and health, we need to radically change our approach in how we value and manage water,” he said. “[This] is the best opportunity we have to put water at the centre of global action to ensure people, crops and the environment continue to have the water they need.”
Seven calls to action on water
- Manage the global water cycle as a global common good, to be protected collectively and in our shared interests.
- Ensure safe and adequate water for every vulnerable group, and work with industry to scale up investment in water.
- Stop underpricing water. Proper pricing and targeted support for the poor will enable water to be used more efficiently, more equitably, and more sustainably
- Reduce the more than $700 billion of subsidies in agriculture and water each year, which often fuel excessive water consumption, and reduce leakage in water systems.
- Establish “just water partnerships” which can mobilize finance for low- and middle-income countries.
- Take urgent action this decade on issues such as restoring wetlands and depleted groundwater resources;, recycling the water used in industry; moving to precision agriculture that uses water more efficiently; and having companies report on their “water footprint.”
- Reform the governance of water at an international level, and including water in trade agreements. Governance must also take into account women, farmers, indigenous people and others in the frontline of water conservation.
Our bodies consist of about 30 trillion human cells, but they also host about 39 trillion microbial cells. These teeming communities of bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi in our guts, in our mouths, on our skin and elsewhere — collectively called the human microbiome — don’t only consist of freeloaders and lurking pathogens. Instead, as scientists increasingly appreciate…
This story was originally published by the Star Tribune.
During the 2021 drought, nearly 800 Minnesota farmers with high-capacity wells pumped 6.5 billion more gallons of water than their permits allowed, state records show.
Farms on land owned or operated by R.D. Offutt Co., a potato-growing giant that has become one of the biggest water users in the state, were responsible for 23 percent of the excessive pumping.
“That’s quite a bit of overuse,” said Randall Doneen, a section manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “We’re trying to get people back into compliance.”
The overpumping in 2021 put more stress on already depleted aquifers, lakes, and streams and raised the risk that neighboring wells would run dry.
A Star Tribune review of water permit data reported each year to the DNR found more than three of four water users who violated their permits were agricultural irrigators. But they are unlikely to face fines or other consequences because of laws that the DNR says are too lenient. Many irrigators may not even have to pay for the extra water they used, based on the tiered fee system the state charges heavy users.
In some cases, farmers needed to go over their permits to keep their crops alive, said Jake Wildman, president of the Irrigators Association of Minnesota.
“Nobody wants to have to pump as much we did,” Wildman said. “We all understand rules and regulations are there for a reason. We all want to follow them. I truly believe we did the best we could with the tools we had and climate we were given.”
The permit violations on R.D. Offutt farms is particularly concerning to neighbors and water quality advocates, because many of them are located in the Pineland Sands region of central Minnesota. The same sandy porous soil that makes the land attractive for growing potatoes also makes it vulnerable to pollution.
When too much water is drawn from the ground for crops, it allows pollutants to seep into the soil, potentially contaminating drinking water.
Based in Fargo and founded 60 years ago, R.D. Offutt is one of the largest potato growing operations in the world. Much of their produce is cut into French fries, and the company is a major supplier to McDonalds restaurants.
It rapidly expanded in Minnesota in the past two decades. Many forests and timberlands in the Pineland Sands area, which covers parts of Hubbard, Wadena, Cass, and Becker counties, were cleared and turned into irrigated cropland.
By 2018, the company’s growth concerned DNR officials to the point that the agency stopped approving its well permit applications. The DNR said a comprehensive study was needed to find out whether increased water use was drying up lakes and streams, or hurting water quality in wells in the region. R.D. Offutt had dozens of pending well applications at the time.
Rather than fund the study, the company reached a deal with the DNR that withdrew all but five permit applications. The DNR asked lawmakers to fund the study. They did not, and it was never done.
By 2021, R.D. Offutt was the registered landowner or agent of more than 650 high-capacity well permits in the state. Together, those farms pumped 22 billion gallons of water — about 2.5 billion more than was used by the entire city of Minneapolis’ water treatment plant, which serves about 500,000 people.
The overuse was a result of just how bad the 2021 drought was, R.D. Offutt spokeswoman Jennifer Maleitzke said. It was the state’s most severe dry spell since at least 1988.
“Without measurable rainfall, farmers like us relied on irrigation to make sure crops across the state survived and there were no disruptions to the food supply chain,” she said.
In the years before the drought, R.D. Offutt farms complied with their permits. Less than 1 percent of the company’s permit holders went over their limit in 2020 and 2019.
“Every single growing season is different,” Maleitzke said. “We take our responsibility seriously to preserve the water supply in Minnesota, and we’ve made significant investments during our 60 years of farming potatoes to do just that.”
The overuse shows how irrigators and high-capacity water users face few repercussions if they violate a permit, said Mike Tauber, who lives in the Pineland Sands region in Backus, Minn., and has helped organize petitions demanding in-depth water quality studies.
“They’re thumbing their nose at the agencies,” Tauber said.
Everyone with a permit to draw more than 1 million gallons of water a year is required to report how much water they use. But that reporting is largely done on the honor system. There are no compliance checks.
The city of Blaine opened three new wells and pumped millions of gallons in 2021 and 2022 without getting permits. The DNR learned about it only after 141 nearby private well owners complained about running dry.
Blaine, too, likely won’t face any fines. Lawmakers have given the DNR few ways to penalize anyone that violates the permits.
The DNR could issue an “administrative penalty” ranging up to $20,000, depending on the severity of the breach. But the fine would be forgiven as soon as the user comes into compliance, Doneen said.
The DNR only typically issues a penalty in the most egregious cases, Doneen said. He doesn’t except any fines to be issued for farmers who overpumped during the drought.
But dry spells are precisely when the state should be more aggressive in protecting water supplies, said Carrie Jennings, research and policy director at the St. Paul-based Freshwater Society.
“That’s the critical time when you would want to do it,” she said.
DNR administrators have asked lawmakers in each of the last two years to allow them to increase the fines they can impose on permit violations. A bill in the House would let the agency fine up to $40,000. The agency also would get more discretion over whether fines are forgiven.
“The tools we have aren’t what we need,” said Bob Meier, assistant DNR commissioner.
Permit holders that exceeded the limits would still need to pay the same tiered water-use rates as everyone else. All permit holders pay $140 a year to pump up to 50 million gallons of water. They’re charged $3.50 for every million gallons after that. The price rises again after 100 million.
The average R.D. Offutt permit that was violated had a limit of 43 million gallons in 2021. Those that went over, but still pumped less than 50 million gallons, wouldn’t have to pay any more than the $140 minimum. The users that exceeded the permits did so by an average of 10 million gallons. If they were only permitted to pump 43 million gallons, those users would need to pay an extra $10.50 — roughly the cost of a Big Mac with large fries.
This story was shared with permission through the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Fighting drought, potato farmers in northern Minnesota overdrew their water permits by tens of millions of gallons on Mar 11, 2023.
Not Good
It’s not exactly news that bee populations have been suffering, especially those that live in or nearby human-populated areas.
But according to a new long-term study, published in the journal Current Biology, even pollinators that live in remote, human-free forests, away from humans and aren’t directly exposed to harmful behaviors like chemical pesticide use and habitat destruction, are disappearing in pretty horrifying numbers — yet another troubling sign that our much-needed pollinators are disappearing at alarming rates.
Bees, as The Bee Conservancy puts it, “lie at the heart of our survival.” Human agricultural processes rely on these precious pollinators, which play a critical role in growing the crops that we and our livestock eat; they play a similarly critical role in natural food systems, too.
In short, if we lose bees, we lose a lot of plants, which means that we lose a lot of animals, habitats, and crops in turn. Not good.
The 15-year study, which concluded last year, closely tracked bee and butterfly populations in three different remote, forested areas in northern Georgia’s Oconee National Forest.
After analyzing the data, the researchers were able to conclude that roughly 62.5 percent of the original bee population was lost, while butterfly populations shrank by a similarly shocking 57.6 percent.
The number of bee species dropped too, with the area losing 39 percent of its species biodiversity.
“Our results suggest,” the study’s authors warn, “that sharp declines in pollinators may not be limited to areas experiencing direct anthropogenic disturbances.”
Pollination Assassination
Though there’s no clear-cut explanation for why these remote populations are shrinking, the researchers did present a few hypotheticals. For instance, the presence of invasive species, notably an invasive wood-nesting ant, may be damaging to the area’s carpenter bee population.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers listed “increasing minimum temperatures” — in other words, climate change — as the other likely culprit for the pollinators’ troubling plight. And considering that we don’t exactly have that problem under control, it’s hard to see a scenario where the bees and butterflies of the region recover in significant numbers, at least not in the short term.
It is worth noting that above-ground nesting bees fared worse than below-ground nesters, though all populations, as noted by the researchers, showed a sharp decline.
Again, it’s not surprising news — but for the worst of reasons.
READ MORE: Bee and butterfly numbers are falling, even in undisturbed forests [Science.org]
More on bees: Court Rules That Legally, Bees Can Be Classified as Fish
The post Bad News: Bees Are Dying At a Shocking Rate appeared first on Futurism.
Fuzzy bumblebees, like tiny orange sheep, flit between the lilies that blanket the understory of an Argentinian forest, fertilizing the flowers and getting nourishment for themselves. In an ancient hay meadow in England, dance flies — looking more like bulky mosquitoes than ballerinas — hunt for blossoms with pollen, ignoring the nectar-rich flowers nearby. On a rocky island in the Seychelles…
Antifascist researcher Spencer Sunshine offers a critical look at ecofascism and Peter Staudenmaier’s book, Ecology Contested.
The increasing embrace by White Supremacists of environmentalism, which they use to justify their racist ideologies—dubbed “ecofascism”—is on the lips of many today. This has been driven by its mention in the manifestos connected to White Supremacist massacres in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019; between the two, 74 were murdered. Additionally, the new interest paid by fascists in Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, also shows rising interest in this trend.
Because of this, historian and anarchist Peter Staudenmaier’s book is a timely reminder that ecofascism is not just not a new problem, but also one that provides a bridge between the far-Right and the Left and anarchists. His book is a call, in the best radical environmental style, to blockade that bridge and stop fascists from entering radical circles.
Since the early 1990s Staudenmaier has been associated with the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). The school was co-founded in 1974 by anarchist theoretician Murray Bookchin, and is best known for promoting what he dubbed social ecology—a fusion of Hegelianized Marxism, classical anarchism, and ecological thought. But ISE members have also been some of the earliest to warn anarchists about the danger of Red/Brown politics, especially in the radical environmental movement.
For example, Staudenmaier co-authored the 1995 book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience with Janet Biehl. His half was one of the first treatments in English documenting the “green wing” of the original Nazi Party, clearly showing how the fascist embrace of environmentalism has a long history and impeccable pedigree. But—especially in the context of Bookchin’s occasionally injudicious, and sometimes downright vicious, attacks on rival radical environmental currents—Ecofascism was controversial when it was published. Today it stands as a prescient warning of what was to come.
(The term “ecofascism” itself is muddy because of the different ways it’s invoked. Staudenmaier, following the clear understanding of different far-Right factions which antifascist work requires, uses it to refer to genuine fascists who embrace environmentalism. Other leftists use it to refer to all right-wingers who oppose environmentalism. Meanwhile, many conservatives use it to smear environmentalists themselves!)
Ecology Contested is yet another warning about the thriving postwar ecofascist currents. In the increasingly crowded field of writings about this subject, Staudenmaier’s book stands out by its focus on the relationship between the Left and Right on environmentalism, but also anti-tech and animal rights politics. He does so by showing their overlapping theoretical, but also in some cases existing political, relationships. Like his 1995 book, Ecology Contested is sure to ruffle feathers. Some may even see it less as a warning of potential right-wing incursions and more as an attack on their own politics.
The five essays in this anthology were written over a period of two decades. The first and last ones, “The Politics of Nature from Left to Right” and “Blood and Soil Revived: Ecological Politics on the far-Right,” provide copious examples of the history of these ideas on the far-Right, from the 19th century on. He focuses on the notion of “blood and soil,” one of the main Nazi ideas the Alt Right later embraced (it was famously chanted in 2017 at Charlottesville) and which remains popular today.
In support of this, he documents a dizzying array of groups, spanning many decades and countries, which have embraced ecology and/or animal rights. Just some of these include both pre-and post-war Nazis and sympathizers in Britain and Germany (including Nazi agriculture minister Richard Walther Darré); crypto-fascist “National Anarchist” Troy Southgate; Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly Front National) in France; Casa Pound in Italy; the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Norway; and Golden Dawn in Greece. Last, U.S. groups include the multiple organizations in the Tanton Network, which influenced Donald Trump’s administration; the White Order of Thule; and Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com.
But still there are so many more examples. He does not address how a formerly imprisoned Earth Liberation Front activist, “Exile,” became an Evolian fascist. And he only mentions Dave Foreman, one of the founders of the radical environmental movement Earth First!, in the footnotes. Foreman embraced anti-immigration politics and was pleased about the mass deaths of Ethiopians during a major famine in the 1980s.
Staudenmaier’s short “Disney Ecology” from 1998 is aimed at misanthropic environmentalists who see nature as wild and pure, and humans as a cancer. Staudenmaier argues that this is a colonial viewpoint, a view that is widely acknowledged today. Rather than an ‘untouched’ wilderness discovered by Europeans, almost all of the areas seen this way had previously been occupied by indigenous people, who in turn formed and shaped the land—at least until their genocide.
But more importantly, the piece places front and center the nub of one of the book’s main arguments: Staudenmaier holds that notions of a purity that must be defended is a theme found on both the Left and the Right, and as such can link the two in disturbing ways. The answers he offers to the criticisms he makes here, and elsewhere in the book, all draw from social ecology. And so, depending on their own attitudes about this theoretical perspective, readers will likely find them either compelling or annoying
Social ecology sees humans and the natural world as inescapably intertwined. Following this insight, Staudenmaier argues that philosophically separating humans and nature makes for a wrong-headed theory at best, while at worst harmonizes with fascist views. The answer to all these problems is the neo-Hegelian dialectic which drives social ecology: If humans can acknowledge this reciprocal relationship, they have an opportunity to self-consciously create a social and ecological politics that brings (what only appear to be) two separate spheres into harmony.
The longest essay in Ecology Contested, “A Revolution Against Technology,” was written in 2005 and revised in 2019. (In the interest of transparency, I provided feedback on the original version). It plumbs the intellectual origins of Ted Kaczynski, dubbed the Unabomber, who was imprisoned after engaging in a bombing campaign based on apocalyptic, anti-technological politics. Living in a remote cabin in Montana, between the 1970s and ’90s his bombs killed three people and wounded about two dozen.
Staudenmaier wrote his investigation into Kaczynski’s thought at a time when there was a wide breadth of speculation on it. The reason for this uncertainty was because Kaczynski carefully hid his intellectual progenitors in his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which the New York Times published in return for him agreeing to stop his campaign.
The essay correctly dismisses the argument that the origins of Kaczynski’s thought are either in pure nihilism or leftist criticisms of modern industrial society. In particular, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, one of the most popular books in the 1960s New Left and similar in approach to Bookchin’s early works, is defended from these accusations. Staudenmaier admits that there is “little direct evidence about what Kaczynski may have read,” and therefore “such hypotheses remain speculative.” Nevertheless, he places the origins of the manifesto’s ideas in the anti-tech and anti-modernist strains of German far-Right thinkers associated with the Conservative Revolutionaries, who directly preceded the Nazis. Of these, the primary culprits fingered are Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, and Friedrich Georg Jünger, who together forwarded a “reactionary critique of civilization.” Staudenmaier claims that there are “too many telltale signs…to ignore Kaczynski’s debt to right-wing thought.”
Ultimately, Staudenmaier, like the others who tried to make sense of Kaczynski, was unable to decipher his theoretical pedigree—and for good reason. In a 2021 article, “The Unabomber and the Origins of Anti-tech Radicalism,” Sean Fleming relied on previously unavailable archival material to identify three main influences, two of which came out of left field. Fleming concluded that the “Manifesto is a synthesis of ideas from three well known academics: French philosopher Jacques Ellul, British zoologist Desmond Morris, and American psychologist Martin Seligman.” Ellul was the least surprising, and Staudenmaier did consider him as a possible influence, writing that wrote that his arguments were a “clear precursor” to Kaczynski. (However, Staudenmaier concluded that the differences between the two made the relationship inconclusive.)
Nonetheless, the evidence Staudenmaier marshaled to support his argument about the influence of reactionary politics remains important. Although Kaczynski occasionally called himself an anarchist, Staudenmaier foregrounds the right-wing nature of much of his thought, based on his own statements. This is especially important as Kaczynski has gained a following in the last few years among ecofascists, despite his own denunciation of them. According to Graham Macklin and Joshua Farrell-Molloy, ecofascists are drawn to him because his ideas reflect their interest in an anti-tech, völkisch worldview; a rejection of a modern decadent society through the use of violence; and anti-leftist views. He is frequently praised in writings and made into memes.
Staudenmaier foregrounds how Kaczynski sounds every bit like today’s Republicans who denounce an illusory notion of ‘antifa,’ using it as a catch-all to include everything from Nancy Pelosi to (post) insurrectionist anarchists. Kaczynski denounces the Left as a whole, a label which he says encompasses “socialists, collectivists, ‘politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists, and the like.” Staudenmaier points out that he also condemns “sexual perversion” and reserves “a special animosity for feminism.”
Staudenmaier also takes this opportunity to tie Kaczynski to three strands of anarchist thought he opposes: Stirnerite individualism, anti-leftism, and primitivism. Supporters and sympathizers who are named and shamed include Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (AJODA), Bob Black, and of course John Zerzan, who championed Kaczynski after his arrest.
So while Staudenmaier’s speculative piece does not stand as intellectual history, it explains much about why Kaczynski’s thought has been embraced by a new wave of very online fascists. Here, Staudenmaier is convincing that, at least on social issues, Kaczynski easily has more in common with the ecofascist crowd then, say, anarcho-primitivists like Zerzan, who—and this is a good thing!—show their leftist origins by embracing feminism, sexual liberation, and anti-racism.
The book’s most contentious piece is undoubtedly “The Ambiguity of Animal Rights,” a critique of animal rights/animal liberation (he uses the two terms interchangeably), which received pushback even inside the ISE. The heyday of these politics among anarchists was in the 1990s, soon before the essay’s original publication in 2003. Staudenmaier recognizes this, and starts by taking great care to separate his intellectual critique from his respect for his comrades, including fellow social ecologists.
The piece is hampered by an uneven kitchen sink approach. Staudenmaier is critical of animal-rights narratives, describing them as politically confused. He condemns elements within the milieu for being liberal, self-righteous, anti-humanist, colonialist, racist, classist, Western elitist, parochial, and—perhaps the ultimate insult—phylumist (the privileging of animals with a central nervous system).
The essay would have been a much stronger if he had left most of these out and concentrated on two approaches. The first, as with the other essays, is his marshaling of historical examples of how fascists, including the Nazis but also latter day groups, embraced animal rights.
(My personal “favorite” of these was his recounting of the “hardline” subgenre of straight-edge hardcore; it brought back a flood of repressed memories of the Dayton, Ohio scene in 1993 and 1994. Hardline insisted on veganism, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, homophobia, and opposition to abortion; those in the scene also played terrible music and sported even worse fashion. It was rumored that hardline kids would roll drunk people leaving Dayton bars. True or not, it was definitely in the spirit of their approach.)
The second of approach which I found the most compelling was that animal rights draws a problematic line by attributing rights to certain animals while ignoring smaller living creatures like micro-organisms, as well as things that are commonly seen as ‘non-sentient,’ like trees, rocks, rivers, and ecosystems. From an ecological perspective, Staudenmaier rightfully points out the interconnection of all animals and organisms, a pillar of social ecology. Yet his answer falls short because he doesn’t present how social ecology would theorize or resolve the concerns of animal rights activists.
Overall, this short book—I read it in about five hours—is strongest as a warning about fascism’s environmental wing and its appeal to those outside its ideological quarters. It conclusively provides numerous examples for the unconvinced, and contains important warnings for activists who are not right-wingers but are enamored by figures such as Kaczynski. In particular, Staudenmaier’s careful discussion of the similarity between Kaczynski’s ideas and far-Right thought is illuminating, and even the animal rights essay raises a few good points. Last, Ecology Contested shows that Bookchin’s influence today is not solely limited to Rojava and direct democracy. As Staudenmaier so clearly illustrates, it extends into the realm of antifascism as well.
photo: Daniel Lincoln via Unsplash
Limits to growth in the American West were always there. Now residents are having to face them.
The recently released Disney computer animated feature Strange World (Don Hall, 2022) revels in political correctness. From the get-go, viewers are acquainted and sympathize with Ethan Clade (Jaboukie Young-White), the teenage gay son of the interracial couple, Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Meridian Clade (Gabrielle Union). Plus, the happy family has a three-pawed dog, seemingly unhampered by its disability. But beneath this tolerance-soaked façade, we find nothing short of environmental fascism.
Fascism is, of course, a term that is notoriously difficult to define. Very often, the label is thrown around as an accusation against various strands of authoritarian politics or against political opponents, whether on the right or on the left, whom one intensely dislikes. But, at the bare minimum, fascism (especially in its traditional versions dating back exactly one century) postulates an organismic totality of the state or the nation, where individual members assume the role of thoroughly dependent cells or organs. Represented by the Leader, the unified whole subordinates its parts, without leaving any remainder. The totality replicates an animal organism, which, in this respect, is distinct from plants that proliferate in open-ended and constantly self-rearranging assemblages. We could say, with regard to biological models for political regimes, that animality tends toward fascist totalization, while vegetality points in the direction of anarchist multiplicities.
And that’s where, through a spectacular inversion of a plant-centered perspective, Strange World prompts viewers to take the side of an animal organism and its totalitarian structure. Everything begins with a literal embrace of green energy—the abundant fruits of a plant called Pando, discovered by Searcher Clade during one of the expeditions he undertook with his father, the legendary explorer, Jaeger Clade. Searcher settles down to cultivate Pando crops and supply the entire community of Avalonia with electricity. Unlike contemporary biodiesel or plant-derived ethanol, this method of procuring fuel does not require the burning of entire vegetal monocultures; harvesting fruits does not destroy Pando. {Spoiler alert!} But it turns out that, secretly, the miraculous plant is destroying the livable world as a whole.
The avowedly green ideology, with which the initial portion of Strange World is awash, sours when Pando plants show signs of suffering from what appears to be a fast-spreading disease. As a result, its fruits no longer bristle with electric energy and, instead, grow dull and dry. But what presents itself as a problem affecting these miraculous plants turns out to be a vexing issue with the vegetally-based proposals to save humanity and the planet. The plant cure for our energy dilemma flips into a poison: as the movie’s heroes go deeper into the strange world penetrated by Pando’s roots—looking for the afflicted “heart” of Pando in a weird animal transposition, which is far from accidental—they realize that it is the subterranean portion of the plant that suffocates the heart of the planetary organism. Plant life is cast in the light of a parasite, eviscerating the whole it parasitizes upon.
Here, a few words on “Pando” are in order. Rather than a Disney invention, the name pertains to an actual clonal colony of Populus tremuloides, or quaking aspen, growing in Utah, USA. One of the oldest and biggest currently living entities on earth, this colony is over 10,000 years old. Although its members growing above ground give the impression of individual trees, their underground root system is shared, giving rise to different iterations of the same vegetal being. From the Latin “I spread,” Pando occupies over 43 hectares of land. It is this spread, uncontrollable and disobedient toward the demands of an organismic totality, that instills either fear or awe in all those who are used to the reassuringly self-delimited animal organization. After all, Pando (both the super-colony growing in Utah and its filmic homonym) stands for all plants, for their signature activity of spreading, be it through growth and propagation, through dissemination, or the maximization of vegetal surfaces, unfurling and opening up toward the outside.
By contrast, the team of Strange World is fascinated with interiority and depth, the province of animal physiology and psychology. Descending beneath the mountains in a movement reminiscent of mining activities, their vessel probes the viscera of a planet-wide organism, whose every part is alive—in an allusion to Plotinus, Leibniz, and Spinoza—serving the needs of the whole. The state of aliveness, too, is uniquely associated with animality; plant life is, at best, a perverse vitality that counteracts, rather than supports, the animal. The film’s obsession with depth coincides with its focus on the heart, an organ (the Leader), without which the entire organism cannot function. The same cannot be said about most roots that, in their dispersion, rhizomatic tangles or branching out, cannot be destroyed all at once. (Even if they were, plants are capable of growing other types of organs, such as roots, from stalks, leaves, and virtually any other one of their parts).
The world humanity lives in is predominantly vegetal; land plants account for 80 percent of total biomass on Earth. It is not so much against the plants themselves that Strange World reacts as it does against the vegetalization of our relation to the world: our practices of procuring energy, of imagining ways of assembling among ourselves and with other-than-human beings, of communicating, of conceiving possible modes of economic, social, and political organization without the towering animal figure of the Leviathan or the Behemoth, the state as a grand organismic totality.
Searcher, the middle figure in the three generations of Clade family, chooses to cultivate plants (first Pando, then tomatoes), but he is a vanishing link between his father and his son, both avid explorers, roaming animal-like within the unimaginably large animal representation of the environment. The future-oriented projection implicit in this generational chain is clear: looking to plants for guidance and environmentally friendly practices or modes of symbiotic coexistence is a passing fad, soon to be replaced once again by tried-and-tested animal prototypes. The underlying hope is that the uncontrollable, exuberant, anarchic proliferation of plants independent of the totality would no longer serve as a social and political blueprint, either. This hope is thoroughly fascist.
The release of Strange World coincided with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Fascist Blackshirts’ march through the streets of Rome in October 1922, soon after Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. With new fascisms thriving all over the globe today, what the film revives is their totalitarian logic extending all the way to biology—specifically, to the animal kingdom as harboring the ideals of genuine life, power, interiority, and total organization, as opposed to the parasitism, weakness, exteriority, and dispersion prevalent in the vegetal kingdom. In the replay of an ancient mythology, the final shot of the film reveals that the world is a turtle, surrounded by a boundless ocean. It is a cinematic X-ray of a pernicious political fantasy.
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In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, More
The post The Global Push for Population Growth Shows We’re Not Grappling With the Climate Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.