Archive for category: Ecology

Kohei Saito is an associate professor at Tokyo University and an erudite Marxist scholar. Not a candidate for a best-seller in the non-fiction book world, you might think. But you would be wrong in this case. Saito’s new book (currently in Japanese), which analyses the relationship between capitalism and the planet, has been a smash hit in Japan, with over half a million sales already.

In the English version out shortly, the book is entitled, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The book’s message is stark and clear. Capitalism’s rapacious drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth. Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism.

Saito is deeply sceptical of some widely accepted strategies for tackling the climate emergency. “In my book, I start a sentence by describing sustainable development goals [SDGs] as the new opium of the masses,” he said in reference to Marx’s view of religion. “Buying eco bags and bottles without changing anything about the economic system … SDGs mask the systemic problem and reduce everything to the responsibility of the individual, while obscuring the responsibility of corporations and politicians.”

He continues: “We face a very difficult situation: the pandemic, poverty, climate change, the war in Ukraine, inflation … it is impossible to imagine a future in which we can grow the economy and at the same time live in a sustainable manner without fundamentally changing anything about our way of life. “If economic policies have been failing for 30 years, then why don’t we invent a new way of life? The desire for that is suddenly there.”

Saito reckons it is necessary to end mass production and the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion. In his earlier more academic text in English, called Capital in the Anthropocene, Saito also advocates decarbonisation through shorter working hours and prioritising essential “labour-intensive” work such as caregiving. In effect, Saito promotes what could be called ‘de-growth Communism’.

Saito’s uncompromising message has seemingly captured the imagination of Japan’s youth. “Saito is telling a story that is easy to understand,” says Jun Shiota, a 31-year-old researcher who bought Capital in the Anthropocene soon after it was published. “He doesn’t say there are good and bad things about capitalism, or that it is possible to reform it … he just says we have to get rid of the entire system.”

In his academic work, Saito has followed John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, in showing that it is wrong to claim, as some Greens do, that Marx and Engels ignored the impact of capitalism on the planet and the environment. In particular, Saito won the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2018 for his learned analysis of Marx’s notebooks on agriculture and the exhaustion of the soil revealing Marx’s deep interest in ecology.

In this earlier work, Saito points out that his approach “is a clear continuation of the “metabolic rift” theory advocated by Foster and Burkett.” Saito argues that it is quite apparent today that mass production and consumption under capitalism has tremendous influence upon global landscape and causes ecological crises. So Marxist theory needs to respond to the situation with a clear practical demand that envisages a sustainable society beyond capitalism. Capitalism and material conditions for sustainable production are incompatible. This is the basic insight of ‘eco-socialism’. The antagonism between red and green needs to be dissolved.

In his earlier book on Marx’s notes on agriculture under capitalism, Saito reckons that Marx attempted to analyze how the logic of capital diverges from the eternal natural cycle and ultimately causes various disharmonies in the metabolic interaction between humans and nature. Marx analysed this point with reference to Justus von Liebig’s critique of modern ‘robbery’ agriculture — Raubbau — which takes as much nutrition as possible from the soil without returning any. This ‘robbery agriculture’ is driven by profit maximisation, which is simply incompatible with the material conditions of the soil for sustainable production. Thus, there emerges a grave gap between the logic of capital’s valorisation and that of nature’s metabolism, ie ‘metabolic rifts’ in human interaction with the environment.

In the key passage on the concept of the metabolic rift, Marx wrote that the capitalist mode of production “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, and trade carries this devastation far beyond the bounds of a single country (Liebig).” With an expansion of capitalist accumulation, the metabolic rift becomes a global issue. So for Saito eco-socialism argues that the ecological crisis and metabolic rift is the central contradiction of capitalism.

According to Saito, in The German Ideology, written in 1845, there was a turning point in Marx’s travel towards an ‘ecological dimension’ in his critique of capitalism. Saito reckons this is when he begins to use the term ‘metabolism’ and refines his understanding of the concept as the general metabolic tendency of capital. Saito argues that Marx progressively realises that capital’s continuous expansion exploits not just labour, but also nature in the search for profit, leading to the destruction of the soil, deforestation and other such forms of the degradation of natural resources. Capital wants more and more value and, in particular, surplus value. That becomes the purpose of production and the metabolic harmony that existed between humans and nature before capitalism is broken. There is now a metabolic rift caused by capitalism.

Now there is a debate arbout whether using the term ‘metabolic rift’ is useful because it suggests, at least to me, that at some time in the past before capitalism there was some metabolic balance or harmony between humans, on the one hand, and ‘nature’, on the other. Any emphasis on rifts or ruptures has the risk of assuming that nature is in harmony or in balance until capitalism disturbs it. But nature is never in balance, even without humans. It is always changing, evolving, with ‘punctuated equilibriums’ to use the term of Marxist paleaontologist Stephen Jay Gould – such as the Cambrian explosion, with many species evolving as others go extinct. The rule of the dinosaurs and their eventual extinction had nothing to do with humans (despite what the movies may depict). And humans have never been in a position to dictate conditions on the planet or with other species without repercussions. ‘Nature’ lays down the environment for humans and humans act on nature. To quote Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.’

It’s true that Marx refers to the robbing of the soil by capitalist production. In Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 on machinery Marx says: “Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasingly the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development … the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. “(Marx, 1995 [1887])

Saito argues that “Marx’s critique of political economy, if completed, would have put a much stronger emphasis on the disturbance of the “metabolic interaction” between humanity and nature as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism.” That may be Saito’s view, but was it Marx’s? Is the ‘metabolic rift’ the “fundamental contradiction of capitalism”? In my view, Saito does not offer a justification for this claim.

For Marx, capitalism was a system of “brutal exploitation” of labour power in production for profit, not one of robbery or dispossession. For Marx, agriculture under capitalism is a sector that exploits labour in the same way as industry. Marx rejected the Ricardian theory that the profitability of capital tended to fall because of diminishing returns in agriculture. Marx’s law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall depended on a rising “organic” composition of capital (the word “organic” perhaps taken from Liebig, as Saito suggests), where the material value of machinery and natural materials rises in cost relative to the exploitation of labour power. But contrary to Saito’s conclusion, Marx rejected Liebig’s soil exhaustion theory of the limits of capitalism and rejected the implied Malthusianism that population would outrun the availability of food and the necessities for human life.

Saito’s book is subtitled: ‘Towards the idea of de-growth communism’. De-growth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of de-growth, defines it like this: ‘The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption.’

There is a big debate here – as expressed in the critique by ex-World Bank chief economist and expert on global inequality, Branco Milanovic. Milanovic argues that any proposal to redistribute income and wealth to the global South by stopping or even reducing accumulation and GDP growth in the rich countries is economically irrational and politically infeasible. De-growth proponents like Hickel says Milanovic is misrepresenting the de-growth argument because he has a ‘blind faith’ in economic growth. I leave the readers here to consider the arguments.

Suffice it to say now that, under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, to invest more and thus to make more profits without a plan and purely in the interests of private profit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially expand ‘green’ productive forces to build say, more (and better) schools, public transportation etc.? Shouldn’t socialists strive to repair the underdevelopment created by imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonised world?

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist.” (Marx). The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by ‘personal’ choice but are system-induced.

But the proponents of de-growth seem to argue that there are absolute ‘planetary limits’ and a fixed ‘carrying capacity’ that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. Here there’s no distinction between socially produced limits and natural limits. But degrading nature, exterminating species and threatening to destroy the atmosphere of the planet are the result of the contradictions to be found in the capitalist mode of production itself, not in some existential threat from outside the system. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists should distinguish between the instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

In a socialist de-growth scenario, the goal would be to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production (what some might call the exchange value part of the economy), while protecting and indeed even enhancing parts of the economy that are organised around human well-being and ecological regeneration (the use value part of the economy).

Saito is right that ending the dialectical contradiction between humans and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels (1896) said, “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.” Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order” (ibid.)

The development of “green capitalism” forms the subject of Adrienne Buller’s new book, The Value of a Whale. According to Buller, the ideology of green capitalism seeks to “preserve existing capitalist systems and relations in response to an unprecedented threat” while at the same time “ensuring new domains for accumulation in the transition to a […]

Pigs on a farm in Cambodia. Over the last 60 years, meat production has exploded in high-income countries and is projected to do the same in low-income countries in coming decades. | Universal Images Group/BSIP via Getty Images

A new report shows a drastic decline in wildlife. But farmed animals could have it even worse.

If you could choose to be alive at any point in human history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better moment than right now. We’re living longer, richer lives with better access to clean water, education, electricity, and basic human rights than ever before.

We can celebrate human progress without becoming complacent — after all, there’s never any shortage of bad news to report, and gaping disparities between rich and poor countries will remain far into the future. But McCartney and Lennon were onto something when they sang about things getting better all the time, even if they were talking about love, not life expectancy.

But for just about every animal species besides Homo sapiens, today is probably the worst period in time to be alive. According to a new World Wildlife Fund report, wild species populations have shrunk on average by 69 percent since the 1970s. And it’s due in large part to the demands of food production: Commercial fishing in the sea, and deforestation on land to make room for cattle grazing and the production of palm oil and animal feed crops.

As the report suggests, a not-insignificant amount of human improvement has come at the direct expense of these animals, with rapid human population growth — and all those people leading longer, richer lives — creating a surge in demand for cheap meat over the last 60 years. And producing all that cheap meat uses up a lot of land once occupied by wildlife.

The irony is that while populations of wild animals are clearly declining, numbers of domesticated animals — chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish — have been booming to meet the demands of a rising human population. Yet many of those farmed animals live lives of such intense, concentrated suffering in our industrialized agriculture system that they arguably have it even worse than their disappearing wild cousins.

Human prosperity and animal suffering exist in a kind of twisted symbiosis: Economic growth leads to more food production and consumption, which in turn results in faster population growth and longer life expectancy, which then requires more intensive, factory-farmed meat to satiate growing populations.

The cycle has been miraculous for humans. For all the problems of our global food system — including a recent rise in world hunger due to the Covid-19 pandemic and price hikes for grain caused by the war in Ukraine — far fewer people are undernourished today than they were in the 1970s, and the specter of famine has largely diminished. But the cycle has been disastrous for the environment and animals, as hundreds of billions of them are now raised on factory farms each year, accounting for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Growing prosperity and human population have also meant that more and more animals are being used in testing for drug development and consumer products, and that deforestation of massive areas of wildlife habitat is increasing — primarily for beef and livestock feed.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. An exception to this rule — that some of human flourishing has come at the cost of animal welfare — is pets; US euthanasia rates at pet shelters have plummeted since the 1970s. Despite a general decline in wildlife populations, many wild species’ populations are stable or increasing. And perhaps more consequentially, we’re at the start of what might be a moral revolution in our relationship to other animals. Countries are passing laws to ban the worst factory farming practices; leading philosophers are calling for an expansion of who we include in our moral circle; and scientists are building technologies that could one day eliminate the use of animals for food, medical research, and textiles.

Though currently low levels of meat consumption across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are projected to skyrocket in the coming decades, they’ll likely still be much lower than consumption in the West. But meat eating seems to have more or less peaked, or will at least grow very slowly, in richer parts of the world like the US and Europe.

Some countries, like Germany and Sweden, are actually starting to eat less of it overall, thanks in part to heightened campaigning over the environmental toll of meat production. The European Commission projects a 4 percent decline in per capita meat consumption within the bloc by 2031.

However, declining consumption is relative. Recent figures show Sweden’s per capita meat consumption is almost five times that of Pakistan’s, while the average German eats about as much meat in a month as the average Nigerian does in a year.

But just as some countries have figured out how to decouple greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth — improving quality of life while lowering the national carbon footprint — someday we might do the same for animal welfare.

We’ve made 11 charts that lay out the grim case for how human progress has too often come at the expense of animal welfare, while indicating some hope for a future where both humans and domesticated animals can flourish together.

In 1961, there were 2.5 land animals farmed for each human; in 2020 there were 9.5, a 280 percent jump. There’s now 74 billion of them churning through our farms and food systems each year.

But meat from all those animals is not consumed equally around the world: The average American consumes around 273 pounds of meat per year while the average Ethiopian purchases just 12 pounds.

It’s not just sheer numbers, however. As demand for meat has risen, conditions for animals have worsened. To raise those tens of billions of chickens, pigs, and cows, farmers and meat companies have prized efficiency over animal welfare and environmental conservation. The resulting factory farming model, first built in the United States and Europe in the post-World War II era, has since spread across the globe.

By one estimate, almost three-quarters of farmed land animals in the world are reared in factory farms, in which they’re crammed tightly into industrial warehouses and given little to no fresh air, sunlight, or access to the outdoors. And nearly all of the land animals raised for food are chickens — around 95 percent of them.

The rising demand for meat, especially beef, doesn’t just mean more animals suffering on farms. It has also destroyed wildlife habitats in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics.

Agriculture — clearing trees for farmland — is the overwhelming cause of deforestation. In 1700, just 9 percent of the world’s forests and wild grasslands had been cleared for agriculture. Today, it’s 46 percent, primarily for livestock grazing, growing crops like soy to feed pigs and chickens, or for the production of palm and other oils.

Meat production doubly affects climate change, too. Not only do the animals we farm emit greenhouse gases, all that related deforestation releases carbon stored in trees, contributing to climate change and accounting for up to 10 percent of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.

The world produces around 200 million tons of seafood each year, but we don’t know how many animals that represents, as fish are measured by weight, not individual animals. But one group — appropriately called Fish Count — estimates that anywhere between 1 trillion to 3 trillion fish and crustaceans, like shrimp and crabs, are eaten each year (though this figure excludes wild-caught crustaceans, which the group hasn’t yet calculated).

The farming of land animals is a mere rounding error when compared to seafood production.

To put that into perspective, there are far more fish and crustaceans raised and caught for food each year — 1 trillion on the lower end — than there are humans who’ve ever existed, which is estimated at 117 billion people.

Seafood production is unusual in that it relies on both catching fish in the wild, and farming them on land or in offshore pens. For most of human history, wild-catch was the dominant method. The fish we caught lived normal fish lives and only experienced pain for the minutes or hours it took to catch and slaughter them. Then, in the 1980s, fish farming took off over fears of declining wild fish populations.

Now, more than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms. They are essentially underwater factory farms, repeating many of the same problems found in farms on land: overcrowding, disease, and injuries.

Just as agriculture has transformed natural landscapes through deforestation, commercial fishing and fish farming have transformed oceans through pollution and overcatching. Discarded fishing gear accounts for around 10 percent of plastic found in the ocean, offshore fish farms pollute oceans, and the fishing industry is a leading threat to coral reefs, according to the US National Ocean Service.

If the demand for meat and seafood keeps rising, the toll on both the environment and animal welfare, including that of wildlife, will be immeasurable. But there’s some early evidence that at least some countries may have hit their peak of meat consumption.

Over the last decade, Germany’s per-capita meat consumption fell 12.3 percent. Experts attribute much of the change to the country’s environmentalists, especially the younger set, who’ve raised a big stink about meat’s contribution to climate change. Other factors may have contributed to the drop too, such as increased awareness of animal cruelty and labor issues in the meat industry.

Germany isn’t alone — Sweden’s meat consumption has been on the decline since 2016.

Sweden’s per-capita meat consumption fell 9.2 percent from 2016 to 2021 (with a slight uptick from 2020 to 2021).

Anna Harenius of Djurens Rätt, a Swedish animal protection group, told me environmental awareness also played a role in the country’s shift to plant-based eating (after all, Sweden is home to perhaps the most notable vegan environmentalist, Greta Thunberg).

Harenius also says Swedes are unusually fond of boycotts. They even boycotted the company that put Sweden on the plant-based map, Oatly, for taking investment from Blackstone, a private equity firm that’s linked to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and whose CEO has been a donor and adviser to Donald Trump.

The two countries demonstrate that change is possible even without forceful government policy, which goes against the idea, often floated among some environmentalists, that individual choices don’t matter all that much. Germans and Swedes just kept hearing the arguments for reducing meat consumption and seemed to take it to heart. (There’s no doubt that in order to move the needle on meat and dairy production’s environmental impact, governments will need to take stronger action at some point, as they have on energy production and transportation.)

Humanity has become accustomed to eating a lot of meat, and cheap meat at that. Campaigns to persuade people to eat less of it might work in some countries, but for most consumers, rich or poor, it’s a hard sell. Enter alternative protein products that aim to provide the taste and nutrition of meat and dairy without killing animals.

Alternatives to animal meat have been around for centuries, but only in recent years have they become more like meat than plants. Now, investors — and a growing ecosystem of scientists and advocates — are eager to make them taste much better and come down in cost.

Until 2016, a few companies dominated the plant-based meat market. Then, burgers from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods changed the game. Suddenly, consumer interest in plant-based meat spiked, and investors followed. In 2013, meat and dairy alternative startups received just $23 million in funding. In 2021, it was $5 billion.

Much of that went to plant-based startups, but companies that are racing to commercialize cell-cultured or “cultivated” meat — meat grown from animal cells — have gotten in on the frenzy. So have companies using different methods of fermentation.

Some governments, including the US, are funding alternative protein research, while others are even investing in plant protein companies. But it’s going to take awhile to see if all that investment pays off and actually changes how we eat; plant-based meat is still estimated to comprise less than 1 percent of total meat produced in the US.

For years, sales of plant-based meat grew at a rapid clip. But in 2021, that growth stalled. That’s partly because the growth in 2020 was unusual — the pandemic, and all the panic-buying it induced, sent all grocery sales to the moon, plant-based meat included.

But now, repeat purchase rates are lower than companies anticipated. Maple Leaf Foods, a big plant-based meat (and animal meat) producer in Canada, walked back some of its ambitious plans to scale up plant-based meat production after lagging sales, and Bloomberg has reported disappointing trials of veggie burgers at fast food chains.

But the global outlook for plant-based meat alternatives appears rosier than North America’s.

A lot of the noise about the plant-based meat market comes out of the US, where some of its biggest companies are headquartered. But Asia and Europe are also major producers and consumers of meat alternatives.

According to an analysis from the Good Food Institute, using data from market research firm Euromonitor, grocery sales of plant-based meat are estimated to have doubled around the world from 2017 to 2021.

The growth is expected to steadily continue. Bloomberg Intelligence is forecasting global plant-based food sales to more than triple from 2022 to 2030.

The meat and milk alternatives industry hasn’t made a dent in displacing conventional animal agriculture, but it’s still quite young. Advocates for a more humane food system aren’t putting all their eggs in that basket, though, and have been steadily working toward regulations that make factory farming a little less awful.

The US egg market looks a lot different today than it did at the start of 2015. Back then, only about 6 percent of hens raised for eggs were cage-free. The rest suffered miserably in what the industry calls battery cages, where each hen is given less space than a sheet of paper. They’re forced to live that way for 1 or 2 years until their productivity wanes and they’re turned into soup stock, animal feed, or pet food.

But in 2015, a California law that bans cages for hens went into effect. Big food companies, like Panera Bread and Starbucks, started sourcing more and more cage-free eggs following pressure from activists. Then more states banned cages and more companies moved on the issue, creating a virtuous cycle. Now 35 percent of hens in the US are cage-free, showing that progress can be made on the welfare side of things, and that it can happen quickly.

Still, it will be important to keep an eye on a pending case in the Supreme Court about another California animal welfare law that bans the use of crates for female breeding pigs — if it’s struck down, it could have lasting negative effects on efforts to improve farm animal welfare in the US.

A word of caution: Cage-free, while superior to conventional farming practices for the chickens’ welfare, does not equate to cruelty-free. Most cage-free hens never have access to the outdoors. Many still die prematurely from disease. They live in their own waste in cramped barns. But it’s progress nonetheless, and that progress has moved even faster across the Atlantic.

Some of Europe’s biggest countries have a majority of cage-free hens, like Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The rest of the continent is catching up; in 2017, 47 percent of hens were out of cages, and by 2021, it had risen to 55 percent. That equates to millions fewer hens in cages over the last few years.

And the effort might accelerate over the next decade. From Vox contributor Jonathan Moens:

The European Commission — the executive branch of the European Union — announced in June [2021] a ban on cages for a number of animals, including egg-laying hens, female breeding pigs, calves raised for veal, rabbits, ducks, and geese, by 2027. The plan would cover hundreds of millions of farmed animals raised in 27 countries. It puts Europe on track to implement the world’s most progressive animal welfare reforms within the decade. If ultimately enacted, it could turn out to be a pivot point in the decades-long fight to ease animal suffering.

There’s no doubt that the spread of factory farming across the globe, and the rise in meat consumption in lower-income countries, erodes the effects of many changes afoot in Europe and the US, as developing nations try to catch up with Western lifestyles.

But there is also strong public support for farm animal welfare across low, middle, and high-income countries, and there are budding animal advocacy movements and plant-based food startups sprouting up across the Global South, all trying to head off what could be a looming tsunami of industrialized meat production on the horizon.

Update, October 13, 12:30 pm: This story was originally published on September 12, and has been updated to reflect new data about the state of wild animal populations.

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The World Economic Forum has released a new video warning of the cataclysmic consequences that anthropomorphic climate change will trigger over the next century if humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels is not severed.

The two-minute spot navigates the extensive impacts that unchecked global warming will have on various regions of the planet through the coming decades as well as how drastically terrestrial life will be affected.

The sobering forecasts, while not exhaustive, have been extrapolated from cited accredited research.

The 2030s:

Ice caps and crucial ice sheets continued to melt, swelling sea levels by 20 centimeters [7.87 inches]
90 percent of coral reefs are threatened by human activity, while around 60 percent are highly endangered
Dwindling crop yields have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty
Climate change-related illnesses are killing an extra 250,000 people each year

The 2040s:

The world has already shot past its 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7-degree Fahrenheit] Paris Agreement temperature rise limit
Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand are threatened by annual floods, sparking mass migration
Eight percent of the global population has seen a severe reduction in water availability
The Arctic is now ice-free in summer
Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters [two feet] in the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes now deliver devastating storm surges

The 2050s:

Two billion people now face 60-degree Celsius [140 degrees Fahrenheight] temperatures for more than a 10th of the year
In much of the world, masks are needed daily – not for disease prevention, but to protect your lungs from smog
The Northeast United States now sees 25 major floods a year, up from one in 2020
140 million people are displaced by food and water insecurity or extreme weather events

From 2100 and beyond:

The average global temperature has soared more than four degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] – and even more in northern latitudes
Rising sea levels have rendered coastlines unrecognizable, and Florida has largely disappeared
Coral reefs have largely vanished, taking with them a quarter of the world’s fish habitats
Insects have also been consigned to history, causing massive crop failures due to the lack of pollinators
Severe drought now affects more than 40 percent of the planet
An area the size of Massachusetts burns in the US every year
Southern Spain and Portugal have become a desert, tipping millions into food and water insecurity

The ad concludes with a reminder that these bleak outcomes are preventable:

Today, ‘business as usual’ is making our planet unlivable. But by making the transition to a nature-positive economy, we could generate 395 million jobs – one-fifth of the predicted labor force increase.

It also encourages viewers to consider what they can do to contribute toward a prosperous future for all of Earth’s inhabitants.

Watch below or at this link.

u201cThis is what the world will look like over the next 100 years…if we do nothing. We have no time for business as usual.nnNo time to waste, no planet B. #ActOnClimate nn#climateemergency #climate #energy #tech #solar #wind #GreenNewDealu201d

— Mike Hudema (@Mike Hudema)
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Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s new standards put pressure on the UK to extend its animal welfare laws to fisheries

One of the world’s leading organisations for farmed seafood is to introduce new welfare rules after accepting fish can feel “pain, stress and anxiety”.

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), which oversees a global certification scheme for farmed fish, is consulting on new draft welfare standards, including more humane slaughter practices. The ASC provides certification labelling for British supermarket fish, from sea bass to smoked salmon.

Among companies claiming the mantle of most responsible corporate citizen, the outdoor clothing chain Patagonia has always seemed a nose ahead. It hasn’t hurt that it’s tough imagining the ecocidal antichrist wearing a fleece vest and technical climbing pants as it pillages the earth. But Patagonia has also had the enduring myths of its founder, Yvon Chouinard, to ride on; how could we not believe the good intentions of a guy who supposedly once lived off of canned cat food just so he could read Thoreau and climb all day and night in Yosemite using gear he made himself?

Recently, Patagonia added to that mythos by outdoing itself. On September 14, the company announced that it would soon be giving away not just a certain percentage of its earnings to help protect the planet, but pretty much all of them. The entirety of the company’s stock will be transferred to trusts and nonprofits devoted to “fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature.” Corporate dividends will keep the business going while otherwise being directed toward environmental initiatives. “Compassionate capitalism” at work.

Cue neoliberal talking heads on both sides of the aisle waxing effusive about this new ceiling for market-based goodwill. To be sure, it’s an impressive relinquishment of private wealth for the supposed greater good. And among companies engaged in this type of thing, Patagonia surely is a cut above. But we do ourselves and our predicament no favors by pretending as though a capitalist enterprise giving away its profits is really going to help solve an existential problem that was caused, and continues to be worsened, by the profit motive itself.

The basics bear repeating: There is no form of capitalism — “compassionate” or otherwise, profit relinquishing or otherwise — that isn’t structurally incentivized to exploit and exhaust the capacities of both workers and the planet, and all while leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. It doesn’t matter if the product is SmartWool or smart phones: Capitalism is at heart an economy of “unpaid costs,” to quote the economist Karl William Kapp. Corporate profits — whether used to plant lilies or gild them — can only come from taking more than is given, and without replenishment or repair.

But isn’t Patagonia an exception? Isn’t it committed, as we read in painstaking detail on its website, to minimizing its expropriation of nature through all manner of recycled and “sustainably sourced materials”? In degree, maybe not. In kind, definitely not. Even the most ethically minded for-profit companies participate in an economy of market share and competition that, directly or indirectly, encourages this race to the exploitative bottom. Regardless of what Patagonia is doing with its profits, it still has to remain competitive in order to make them. And that, as capitalism requires, means continuing to bleed land and labor dry.

It’s also important to remember that Patagonia isn’t exactly small. The company has over 70 stores, keeps offices in seven countries, and at one time had contracts with 100 factories, all in support of one of the most polluting industries on the planet. The fact that it bends over backwards to excuse itself, for instance, in a 30-paragraph statement explaining how it’s trying — really trying! — to minimize the impact of microplastics pollution, changes nothing. It’s all talk after a point. Whatever Patagonia’s efforts are toward sustainability, they pale in comparison to the impact it makes on land and labor due to its size.

It should be no surprise that, despite the implicit mea culpa of its recent divestment, the company tries to downplay all of this. Seemingly everywhere on its website, it mitigates the sense of its corporate largess by using the classic leveling device of capitalist greenwashing: the carbon footprint — a concept invented by oil giant BP nearly 20 years ago precisely to deflect attention away from the disproportionately large ecological responsibilities held by corporations. But the carbon footprint device also allows Patagonia to frame its ecological responsibilities in relation to individual consumers as though those responsibilities existed on the same plane — as though the solution required of the company was merely reducing rather than changing its structural relationship to what was being reduced. Yet the sentimental “all in this together” manipulation runs thick: “If we have any hope of a thriving planet — much less a business,” they write, “it is going to take all of us doing what we can.”

Whatever Patagonia’s efforts are toward sustainability, they pale in comparison to the impact it makes on land and labor due to its size.

Then there’s the company’s use of the classic and equally manipulative Malthusian rhetoric of planetary limits: “Despite its immensity,” the company’s hands wring, “the Earth’s resources are not infinite, and it’s clear we’ve exceeded its limits.” The implication, both here and with the carbon footprint concept, is once again that we’re all equally culpable. Yet limits like these are political constructs, and those who invoke them in this way do so to conceal their inequitable contributions toward reaching them. There is no real “we” here, in other words. There are profit-driven corporations whose productive forces unleash immense creative-destructive power, and then there is the rest of us. The excessive consumption of millionaires and billionaires aside, if a limit has been exceeded anywhere, it is overwhelmingly because of corporations.

But the company’s most frustrating greenwashing is maybe its most subtle. In a statement on the recent decision, Patagonia writes that “instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.” Notice the sneaky substitution: The company is no longer “extracting value from nature” but simply “using the wealth Patagonia creates.” It’s a classic mystification concealing the fact that you can’t have one (corporate wealth) without the other (extracting value from nature). Using profits generated via capitalism to protect the planet will always be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And quite literally. Because human beings are, of course, the other form of nature that capitalism — Patagonia included — exploits for value. In yet another long statement on its website, this one recounting its decades-long attempts to ensure more ethical labor practices, we learn about the company’s relationship with the Fair Labor Association, NAFTA’s role in tanking the American textile industry, and other matters. But by paragraph 16 in this substantial read, things still haven’t progressed very far: “The next big task,” the company writes after all of that, “will be to secure a living wage for all workers making Patagonia goods.”

A living wage. The next big task. In paragraph 16. As if this shouldn’t have been in the first sentence.

There is nothing about a living wage for Patagonia’s workers in the company’s recent bleeding-heart statement about its decision to give away its profit.

There is nothing about a living wage for Patagonia’s workers, of course, in the company’s recent bleeding-heart statement about its decision to give away its profits. We read about the planet multiple times, but not so much about people. Lest critics insist that one always implies the other, we should consider the fact that what the company sells in its stores is in part an ideology that insists otherwise. Patagonia is in many ways a technology company: It sells clothing that mediates our relationship with nature, allowing us to experience it more easily as something benign and conquered that exists for human consumption, not as something with which human survival is inextricably bound. This privileged, bourgeois conception of nature — nature as something “out there” to explore and enjoy, separate from human well-being — is bought for the price of a Patagonia sweater; it’s a class-inflected framework that insulates more privileged people — both literally and figuratively — from experiencing nature as involving and implicating human suffering.

But compare this, for instance, with how Patagonia’s garment workers in the Global South might experience nature. If they’re being deprived of a living wage, they are markedly more vulnerable to floods and fires, heat waves and droughts, all worsened by climate change. Nature for them isn’t so much pretty vistas to enjoy and consume as something that could further immiserate or kill them. That makes low wages every bit as much a cause of climate disasters as pollution from plastic plants pumping out raw materials for performance socks. And yet those wages probably won’t be going up much any time soon. After all, they’re a precondition of the fat dividends that will supposedly now be going to such great, green things. Greenwashing, built as always on the backs of the poor.

With its recent news, which will no doubt be a huge boost to sales, Patagonia is banking on all of us forgetting this. It is hoping that the ideology of nature it sells, underwritten by capitalism’s own incentives to hide its conditions of production, will prevail, and that the only thing its customers will think about when buying a new base layer is the wilderness they’ll possibly be saving, not the workers who will continue to be exploited just so the sham ethics of green capitalism can have another day in the sun.

We must resist this. How? Not by refusing to shop at Patagonia. That kind of consumer politics accomplishes nothing. Instead, we must remember in our movements, in our policy, and in the voting booth that it is capitalism’s mandate of endless accumulation that is killing our ecosystem, not what is or isn’t done with the resulting profits.

This story was published in partnership with Capital B News.

Nestled in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley, the intersection of Transport Road and Rockefeller Avenue holds the story of the city’s toxic past — and potentially poisonous future. Once the home of a massive oil refinery, the plot is now the potential new home of a $700 million jail in the heart of Cleveland’s industrial corridor.

County officials say the new jail is needed to provide a safer and better-resourced facility after more than one dozen detainees died in county custody in recent years. But the plan has ignited a movement to block construction of the jail on a site that the Ohio government once deemed too toxic for a state prison.

“It’s a slap in the face,” said Yvonka Hall, a member of the coalition to stop the Cuyahoga County Jail.

The potential Cleveland facility underscores a trend across the Midwest, which has seen a boom in jail construction in recent years. At least 23 jails — totaling $3.6 billion — have been either proposed or constructed on toxic and contaminated lands since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Capital B analysis of local news reporting and federal data from the National Institute of Corrections. All but three of these facilities also were located in their state’s toxic air corridors, where the most harmful health risks from air pollution, including COVID-19 and cancer, are found.

The trend has unique implications for Black folks. In states where the 23 projects are located — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin — Black people are nearly six times more likely than other racial groups to be incarcerated, making up more than 40 percent of those locked in jails and prisons.

The construction of detention facilities on contaminated lands reinforces an often forgotten form of environmental racism, said David Pellow, director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“It’s literally putting these folks in double jeopardy, putting them in an inherently unsafe place that causes health and mental health problems by design. Then you’re going to layer environmental, chemical toxicity on top of that,” Pellow said.

“This practice is an amplified case of environmental racism,” he added. “Because incarcerated folks are completely powerless, most people in society embrace this disenfranchisement and environmental violence.”

Jail Construction Booms

Those environmental health harms, ironically, have been partially funded by billions of dollars of federal COVID relief made available since 2020. At least nine of the counties found in Capital B’s analysis have either used or planned to use federal pandemic funds to build the detention facilities. Meanwhile, jails drove millions of COVID-19 infections during the first year of the pandemic, according to a 2021 study.

Across the country, counties in at least 18 states have used or want to use COVID funds to build new jails, a recent investigation by The Nation found.

In the U.S., jail spending is higher than ever, with the country spending more than $25 billion annually on county detention facilities, according to the latest nationally available data in 2017 — a 13 percent increase in spending over the previous decade.

Since 1970, America’s jail capacity has grown from 243,000 beds to roughly 1 million. An outsized amount of this growth has occurred in Midwestern states, according to a University of Nebraska study.

While municipalities have a documented history of building detention centers in heavily polluted areas from Los Angeles to New York, the Midwest has become a hub for the practice as industrial cities have moved through urban revitalization. With formerly industrial sites sitting empty for years and cash-strapped counties needing new sources of revenue, these locations have been rezoned for businesses, homes, and jails.

In Wayne County, Michigan, a new $600 million jail is sandwiched between a waste incinerator, a hazardous waste treatment plant, and the former site of an incinerator frequently cited for exceeding emissions standards. The practice is found in rural areas, as well. In Ohio’s Appalachian region, Coshocton County officials have proposed a $30 million, 120-bed jail on top of a former steel plant.

The construction of new jail facilities has grown in conjunction with poverty levels in formerly industrial communities. In Indiana, where poverty has increased by 30 percent since 2005 as more than 50,000 industrial jobs have disappeared, a recent investigation by the Vera Institute found that 40 percent of the state’s 92 counties are building jails or planning jail construction.

Building in these areas has come with significant environmental risks, particularly for Black Americans. In urban Dane County, Wisconsin, a new 1,000-bed, $175 million jail is being built in an area with the worst health risks from air pollution in the state. As of August 11, 53 percent of the county jail’s population was Black, despite the county being less than 6 percent Black.

Just 150 miles south of Cleveland, Franklin County, Ohio’s new 1,300-bed, $360 million jail — which the county wants to fund through COVID relief money partially — is built in an area where residents have a higher cancer risk from air pollution than 99 percent of the state and a lower life expectancy than 98 percent of the country.

With this trend, the connections between incarceration and environmental justice have been pushed to the forefront of a social movement. In Wayne County, Michigan, and Vigo County, Indiana, for instance, activists have attempted to use environmental laws to block the construction of new jails.

Cleveland’s Industrial Valley

Cleveland’s toxic past is hard to escape. With the Civil War raging on, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller purchased his first oil refinery in 1863, located at what is now known as 2700 Transport Road. Operating for four decades before the country had uniform pollution standards, this refinery, one of Rockefeller’s 21 oil refineries in Cleveland, was his company’s flagship.

Fast forward nearly a century to the early 2000s, the site, now an industrial waste recycling plant, was once again one of the city’s most environmentally toxic. For years, the industrial plant violated federal clean-air standards and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of fines before abandoning the operation altogether. After a high-octane gasoline tank explosion at the plant injured six workers, the plant’s operators, General Environmental Management, decided to close rather than pay $1.2 million to bring the site up to environmental, health, and safety standards.

Today, the site is home to a shipping container storage yard and elevated levels of diesel pollution. Given its current industrial use, it’s not surprising that, despite multiple rounds of environmental remediation, it is still home to levels of the cancerous chemical benzene and the climate change-causing methane gas at levels well above standards.

Hall, the activist involved in trying to stop the county jail, questions how placing the facility on a toxic site will solve the issue of inhumane conditions that county officials often highlight.

“You force people into areas with contaminated soil and high levels of particulate matter where they’re going to get sick, but won’t get the medical attention they need or the food they need,” said Hall, director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. “What does this do except set them up for a lifelong engagement in the justice system?”

Earlier this year, a county consultant claimed despite this site’s toxic past, it would not be viable to look for other sites and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per site on testing. It’s not a “scary property,” the consultant said, adding that placing a jail on the site would be an example of “normal urban redevelopment.”

The rhetoric, one that argues that most potential sites in urban areas will have some elements of environmental contamination, is dangerous, Pellow says. “If it is so hard to keep people safe and find land that is not toxic, then maybe we need to start looking beyond incarceration,” he said.

The state’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to give its ruling on the potential site soon.

Cleveland’s environmental health impacts are wide-reaching. Although millions of dollars have been allocated to address lead exposure, children living in Cuyahoga County continue to have the country’s highest risk. In 2016, about 10 percent of kids in Cuyahoga County were exposed to lead at or above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s standards. Within Cleveland city limits, children have lead poisoning rates nearly four times the national average.

This public health catastrophe, which is twice as widespread as the lead poisoning emergency caused by the Flint Water Crisis, is caused by soil contamination through the city’s industrial past and aging housing stock. In Cuyahoga County, 80 percent of the housing stock contains lead; in Cleveland, it is nearly 90 percent.

“We need to talk about the cyclical impact this has on our communities,” Hall said. “We’re poisoned starting as children, we find lead in our blood and bones. Then, it stops our ability to fully develop cognitively, causing poor decision-making.”

“Then, you add the fact that many of our communities are poor. They’ve created a jail and prison pipeline.”

According to 130,000 years' worth of mammalian food webs and extinction patterns, we're in the midst of a mass biodiversity crisis. Very chill.

Tangled Web

According to 130,000 years’ worth of data on what mammals have been eating, we’re in the midst of a mass biodiversity crisis. Not great!

This revelation was borne of a new study, conducted by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Science, that used machine learning to paint a detailed past — and harrowing future — of what happens to food webs when land mammals go extinct. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty grim stuff.

“While about 6 percent of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50 percent of mammal food web links have disappeared,” Evan Fricke, ecologist and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past and now, are key for mammal food web complexity.”

All Connected

Ecosystems rely on interconnectedness — bees pollinate the flowers, predators eats prey, and so on. But these webs, though highly evolved, can be delicate. One link goes missing, and a ripple effect is felt throughout the entire system. As more species are lost, that balance becomes increasingly fragile, sometimes to the point of collapse.

“When an animal disappears from an ecosystem,” Fricke added, “its loss reverberates across the web of connections that link all species in that ecosystem.”

Back to the Future

The researchers utilized a machine learning system — trained “using data from modern observations of predator-prey interactions,” according to the release — to reach their conclusions. It’s worth noting that machine learning isn’t always perfect, though the authors of the study at hand claim that their program has shown promising accuracy.

“This approach can tell us who eats whom today with 90 percent accuracy,” ecologist Lydia Beaudrot, a senior co-author, noted in the press release. “That is better than previous approaches have been able to do, and it enabled us to model predator-prey interactions for extinct species.”

In other words, this machine has offered a glimpse back in time — and as looking backwards often does, a glimpse into our potential future, should we fail to intervene in the ongoing extinction crisis.

More on mass extinction: A Mass Extinction Has Already Started, Scientists Say

The post The Entire Food Chain Has Started Collapsing, Scientists Warn appeared first on Futurism.

Scientists are trying to better understand the origins of agriculture, and how we coevolved with our favored crops

The short answer: No, not even close! Nations of the world are only too aware that fossil fuels need to be phased out for two reasons. First, oil is a finite commodity. It’ll run out in time. Secondly, fossil fuel emissions such as CO2 are destroying the planet’s climate system. However, a recent study puts a damper on the[Read More…]