There’s A Future Beyond Economic Growth – Let’s Build It

We have to say no to extractivism - before it tears apart the fabric of our world.

By Robin Boardman

August 19, 2024

Source: RobinBoardman.com


Yesterday in Kiel, Germany I joined the global movement against extractivism – the harmful exploitation of natural resources. Across the globe, communities stood up for the action wave against new, dangerous mining projects. Hundreds marched in Barroso, Portugal and thousands more in Serbia. The movement is growing.

This is a transcript of my speech on the Kiel waterfront:

It’s time for the hyper-consumption of our society to die. The endless grasping for more, more, more is exhausting the human spirit. We are so much more than what we consume—the cars, the gadgets, the clothes. They are all symptoms of the loneliness capitalism instils in us. We search for safety in material gain and status. Advertisers hunt for our emotional weaknesses, like vultures, ready to strike on the fearful and vulnerable.

It’s in the wake of their wanton waste—an eye-watering amount of pollution clogging up the arteries of our planets—that we attack the status quo. We tell them that they can’t have their cake and eat it. The elite can’t have hyper-consumption and renewable energy at the same time. The two can’t be combined. As soon as you rape ancient woodlands for lithium, you are destroying nature’s chances of survival. In other words, you are destroying our chances of survival.

This overexploitation, this destruction of all we hold dear, this isn’t the way forward. Destroying nature’s right to exist and creating so-called ‘renewables’ is a toxic waste to our planet. There’s another way. There’s a simpler, easier, more loving way forward. It’s the way my grandparents taught me. It’s the way Indigenous people have lived for centuries—to live in harmony with the world around us, to not take more than what you need, to repair what’s broken, to allow time for healing.

I have been to Barroso, the Portuguese camp against a massive lithium mine— the project will destroy a beautiful World Heritage site in the name of so-called progress, of so-called green growth. It’s a lie. It’s a corrupt, toxic lie. The amount of water they need to pump this mine will wreck Portugal, a country that’s already being destroyed by desertification and climate breakdown.

T

he Lakes around Barroso. My snap from visiting last year.

People there have a simple way of living, a way that should be a role model to us here in Kiel, here across the Western world —a way of living simply with our natural surroundings. Instead, the lithium mine will kill off their culture and their way of living. We’re seeing it all across the world—Indigenous land is being colonised once again by neo-colonial forces. This is an attack on the guardians of precious knowledge. Knowledge that can really protect this blue, precious sphere that we call home. Beyond that, there’s just the dark cosmos – nothing else.

Across the world, we are in resistance to such delusion and violence. The odds are so stacked against us. We’re not millions of people right here now, we’re not even hundreds, and it breaks my heart. But we are in resistance. The Portuguese grandmothers in resistance in Portugal shared the same saying as the Serbian grandmothers – numbers don’t matter, community matters. Whatever happens in the struggle, at least we got to meet each other. At least we got to meet other caring, compassionate people.

Sometimes the challenge seems insurmountable but that community is a new, revolutionary way of living. I say “new” to us here in the isolated, atomized, capitalist West, but actually, it’s a very old system of living, a very beautiful way of living in harmony as a community.

As a community, we can resist encroaching fossil fuel fascism. We can resist the death of endless species. As we stand here in Kiel, a trigger point of the 1918 German revolution, I want to call on you to rise up against imperial power once again. To recognize our strength as a community and to flourish in the honesty of our truth. In other words—to really live our lives.

The corrupt state will throw everything they’ve got against us. We are revolutionaries, after all. In the UK, 26 of my friends are currently in prison for resistance. As they were locked away they were told they had no defence. That mentioning climate change or fuel poverty in court is illegal. It’s outrageous. It’s the slow corruption of our system by fascism, which will destroy massive parts of the world if we allow fossil fuels and these mining projects to continue.

But together, we can resist. We can make a new world possible. We can start right here in Kiel. It’s time to put our bodies on the line. It’s time for a revolution.

Thank you.

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Robin Boardman is a languages student and one of the cofounders of Extinction Rebellion. He helped to lead a successful campaign to get the University of Bristol to divest its portfolio of £2m from fossil fuels and has been an XR spokesperson on various outlets such as the BBC, LBC and Sky News. He blogs at: robinboardman.com

 

Turkey vultures fly faster to defy thin air

How large turkey vultures remain aloft in thin air

The Company of Biologists

Mountain hikes are invigorating. Crisp air and clear views can refresh the soul, but thin air presents an additional challenge for high-altitude birds. ‘All else being equal, bird wings produce less lift in low density air’, says Jonathan Rader from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, USA, making it more difficult to remain aloft. Yet this doesn’t seem to put them off. Bar-headed geese, cranes and bar-tailed godwits have recorded altitude records of 6000 m and more. So how do they manage to take to the air when thin air offers little lift? One possibility was that birds at high altitude simply fly faster, to compensate for the lower air density, but it wasn’t clear whether birds that naturally inhabit a wide range of altitudes, from sea level to the loftiest summits, might fine-tune their flight speed to compensate for thin air. ‘Turkey vultures are common through North America and inhabit an elevation range of more than 3000 m’, says Rader, so he and Ty Hedrick (UNC-Chapel Hill) decided to find out whether turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) residing at different elevations fly at different speeds depending on their altitude. They publish their discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology that turkey vultures fly faster at altitude to compensate for the lack of lift caused by flying in thin air.

First the duo needed to select locations over several thousand meters’ altitude, so they started filming the vultures flying at the local Orange County refuse site (80 m above sea level); ‘Vultures on a landfill… who would have guessed?’, chuckles Rader. Then they relocated to Rader’s home state of Wyoming, visiting Alcova (1600 m) before ending up at the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie (2200 m). At each location, the duo set up three synchronized cameras with a clear view to a tree that was home to a roosting colony of turkey vultures, ready to film the vultures’ flights in 3D as they flew home at the end of the day. ‘Wyoming is a famously windy place and prone to afternoon thunderstorms’, Rader explains, recalling being chased off the roof of the University of Wyoming Biological Sciences Building by storms and the wind blurring movies of the flying birds as it rattled the cameras.

Back in North Carolina, Rader reconstructed 2458 bird flights from the movies, calculating their flight speed before converting to airspeed, which ranged from 8.7 to 13.24m/s. He also calculated the air density at each location, based on local air pressure readings, recording a 27% change from 0.89kg/m3 at Laramie to 1.227 kg/m3 at Chapel Hill. After plotting the air densities at the time of flight against the birds’ airspeeds on a graph, Rader and Hedrick could see that the birds flying at 2200m in Laramie were generally flying ~1m/s faster than the birds in Chapel Hill. Turkey vultures fly faster at higher altitudes to remain aloft. But how do they achieve these higher airspeeds?

Rader returned to the flight movies, looking for the tell-tale up-and-down motion that would indicate when they were flapping. However, when he compared how much each bird was flapping with the different air densities, the high-altitude vultures were flapping no more than the birds nearer to sea level, so they weren’t changing their wingbeats to counteract the effects of low air density. Instead, it is likely that the 2200 m high birds were flying faster simply because there is less drag in thin air to slow them down, allowing the Laramie vultures to fly faster than the Chapel Hill birds to compensate for generating less lift in lower air density.

 

IF REPORTING THIS STORY, PLEASE MENTION JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AS THE SOURCE AND, IF REPORTING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A LINK TO: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.246828

REFERENCE: Rader, J. A. and Hedrick, T. L. (2024). Turkey vultures tune their airspeed to changing air density. J. Exp. Biol. 227, jeb246828. doi:10.1242/jeb.246828

DOI: 10.1242/jeb.246828

Registered journalists can obtain a copy of the article under embargo from http://pr.biologists.com. Unregistered journalists can register at http://pr.biologists.com to access the embargoed content. The embargoed article can also be obtained from Kathryn Knight (kathryn.knight@biologists.com)

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Journal

Journal of Experimental Biology

DOI

10.1242/jeb.246828 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Turkey vultures tune their airspeed to changing air density

Article Publication Date

1-Aug-2024

 

Flamingos don’t preen more than other waterbirds

University of Exeter

 

image: 

Caribbean flamingo preening

view more 

Credit: Dr Paul Rose

Despite their famously fancy feathers, flamingos don’t spent more time preening than other waterbirds, new research shows.

Scientists watched five of the world’s six flamingo species to see how they spend their time.

While preening time varied, overall flamingos were roughly average compared to existing studies of other waterbirds.

The researchers also examined time spent standing on one leg – finding that captive flamingos most often do this indoors and in water.

The study was carried out by the University of Exeter and WWT Slimbridge Wetland Centre.

“It is widely believed – even among zookeepers – that flamingos spend more time than other birds preening their feathers,” said Dr Paul Rose, from Exeter’s Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour.

“But this hadn’t been tested until now – and we were surprised to find they are roughly ‘middle of the road’ among waterbirds.

“The waterbirds that spend the most time preening are actually Pelecaniformes such as pelicans, gannets and cormorants – which makes sense, as these birds spend the most time in water, and therefore need to maintain feathers for waterproofing.

“Even so, we expected flamingos to be top of the preening charts, as lush pink feathers are so important in their courtship displays.”

The study also found that captive waterbirds spend more time preening than wild birds.

Like many birds, flamingos stand on one leg to save energy and to allow half of their brain to sleep. By doing so in water, flamingos reduce heat loss (only one foot loses heat to the water, rather than two).

Rachael Kinnaird, who worked on the study as part of an MSc in Animal Behaviour at Exeter, said: “Our study shows the value of observing animals to understand their behaviour.

“In this case, a widely held belief about flamingos preening more than other waterbirds didn’t hold true.”

Commenting on the wider importance of the study, Dr Rose said: “By understanding why flamingos behave in certain ways, we can predict how climate and habitat change might affect them.

“At present, greater flamingos are seeing their range expand due to climate change. Meanwhile, mountain species such as Chilean and Andean flamingos are really suffering.

“Studying captive flamingos can help us understand what their wild counterparts need.

“We hold so many species in zoos around the world – so the opportunities to study them, to learn how and why they have evolved, are huge.”

The paper, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, is entitled: “What influences feather care and unipedal resting in flamingos? Adding evidence to clarify behavioural anecdotes.”

---

Chilean flamingo preening

hadean flamingo standing on one leg

Credit

Dr Paul Rose

Journal

Applied Animal Behaviour Science

DOI

10.1016/j.applanim.2024.106364 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

What influences feather care and unipedal resting in flamingos? Adding evidence to clarify behavioural anecdotes

Article Publication Date

1-Aug-2024

Kamala Harris, trailblazer eying America’s last glass ceiling

By

 AFP  JULY 22, 2024

For years Kamala Harris faced criticism that she was not up to the job of being a heartbeat away from the presidency. Now, she finds herself feted by Democrats as their best hope to stop Donald Trump’s comeback.

Despite blazing a trail as the first woman, Black and South Asian vice president in US history, the 59-year-old Democrat long struggled with approval ratings as bad or worse than President Joe Biden’s.

The last 12 months, however, have revealed a transformed Harris.

And with Biden’s endorsement of Harris after stunning the world by dropping his own reelection bid Sunday, she’s suddenly on the cusp of history.

Harris will hope she has done the hard work to earn her full party’s backing in the midst of the crisis.

As the ageing Biden faded over the last year, his “veep” emerged as a force on the campaign trail, pushing for abortion rights and reaching out to core voters, including suburban women and Black men.

With a fondness for the f-bomb and her family nickname of “Momala” going viral, she has also finally started to cut through the noise to voters who previously barely paid attention.

She has also won plaudits in party circles by staying loyal to the 81-year-old president during the last few weeks, even as political vultures circled over his candidacy.

She now is likely to face Trump — a brutal battle against a candidate who defeated Hillary Clinton in her bid become the first female commander in chief in 2016.

The fact that Harris has blamed much of the criticism of her by Republicans on racism and sexism would likely make a win feel even more vindicating for her.

Trump and other Republicans have notably stepped up their attacks on her as Biden’s position weakened and polls showed Harris would fare better against him than Biden. 

– ‘Ready to serve’ –

A child of immigrant parents — her father was from Jamaica and her mother from India — Harris grew up in Oakland, California, in an activist household that saw her attend her first rallies in a stroller.

Her focus on rights and justice saw her build an impressive CV, becoming California’s first Black attorney general and the first woman of South Asian heritage elected to the US Senate.

Harris then went up against Biden in the 2020 primaries. In one stinging attack, she criticized him for allegedly opposing the bussing of students to segregated schools.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me,” she said in a barbed attack on her future boss.

But as his running mate, she consolidated the coalition that helped defeat the incumbent Trump in 2020. 

Her transition to the White House, however, proved difficult.

Critics said she was underwhelming and gaffe-prone in a job that has been known to flummox many officeholders.

Struggling to carve out a role, she was tasked by Biden with getting to the roots of the illegal migration problem, but fumbled and then got defensive in response to a question during a visit to the Mexican border.

Unusually high staff turnover fed rumors of discontent in the vice presidential office.

And Republicans relentlessly targeted her as being unfit to take over should the worst happen to America’s oldest-ever president, often resorting to stereotypes her supporters branded as sexist and racist.

Harris told the Wall Street Journal in February: “I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that.”

– ‘Momala’ –

Things began to change as the 2024 race got underway. 

The Biden campaign repeatedly deployed her to battleground states to hammer home the party’s message on abortion rights, with Harris becoming the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic. 

Gradually, she began to draw warm and fired-up crowds.

Some of the outreach was, however, cringe-inducing. Earlier this year, she was mocked after she told chat show host Drew Barrymore her family sometimes called her “Momala,” and Barrymore replied: “We need you to be Momala of the country.”

But voters seemed to be switching on.

A clip of her quoting her mother as often saying “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” became a meme, with a rising sense among supporters that now could be her time.

If elected, Harris would break one of the highest glass ceilings left for women in the United States — that of occupying the country’s top office.

Her husband, Douglas Emhoff, would also be breaking new ground, moving from being the current Second Gentleman to the country’s first First Gentleman. 

How loss of India's vultures might have led to half a million deaths

Near extinction of the invaluable carrion eaters in 1990s left cattle carcasses piled up and disease spreading widely


Vultures performed a crucial public health service by clearing away carrion but a drug used to treat livestock poisoned most of the birds
(Image credit: Pascal Deloche / Godong / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

BY HARRIET MARSDEN, THE WEEK UK

Vultures have long evoked images of death, hovering over ailing animals and feeding off their rotting corpses.

But the near extinction of the scavenger birds in India during the 1990s led to the spread of disease-carrying pathogens – and may have killed half a million people, according to a new study.

The working paper, due to be published in an upcoming issue of the American Economic Review, estimates that the related public health crisis between 2000 and 2005 cost the Indian government nearly $70 billion a year.

'Nature's sanitation service'

In India, vultures are a "keystone species", said Science, "essential to the functioning of many of the country's ecosystems".

Unlike mammal scavengers, vultures do not also hunt. They only feed on carrion – and in a country with more than 500 million livestock, they perform a crucial duty of removing disease-ridden carcasses. That also helps to "reduce the populations of other scavengers, such as feral dogs that can transmit rabies".

The birds were once widespread in India, acting as "nature's sanitation service", said The Economist. They are also highly efficient. "A group of vultures can polish off a cow's carrion in 40 minutes."

But in 1994, farmers began giving their livestock a painkiller called diclofenac. When they disposed of dead livestock, the vultures who fed on the carcasses were poisoned by the anti-inflammatory drug, dying within weeks.

In one decade, India's vulture population fell from 50 million birds to just a few thousand: the fastest population collapse of a bird species in history. The worst-hit species, the white-rumped vulture, "declined by a dreadful 99.9%" between 1992 and 2007", said Bird Guides.

Cattle bodies piled up around tanneries and fields "became carcass dumps" for feral dogs and rats, said Science, leading to the spread of disease. The government also forced tanneries to use chemicals to dispose of the carcasses, which caused toxic substances to "leach into waterways used by people".

The vulture wipeout was later attributed to diclofenac, and India banned the use of the drug in 2006. Pakistan and Nepal followed suit. But India's vulture population is unlikely to ever completely recover.

The human cost of vulture wipeout

Anant Sudarshan, an environmental economist at the University of Warwick, witnessed the crisis growing up in India. Sudarshan, and Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago, co-authors of the upcoming American Economic Review paper, compared maps of vulture habitats to health records for more than 600 Indian districts between 2000 and 2005.

In districts that were "highly suitable to vultures", there was an average increase in human deaths of 4.2%. That implies about 104,386 additional deaths each year, or half a million in total. Previous research had calculated that India would spend roughly $665,000 to save one life. The economic damage, according to the team's estimates, was about $70 billion per year.

"This [upcoming paper] will be a classic in the field," said Atheendar Venkataramani, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania. It could also convince lawmakers to "push forward policy and conservation measures", said Andrea Santangeli, a conservation scientist at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies.

"Scientific evidence suggests the Earth is undergoing a mass extinction of species, caused by human activity," said Sudarshan and Frank. "Evaluating the social costs of losing non-human species is necessary to manage biodiversity and target conservation resources."

Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are also becoming "increasingly impossible to perform" because of the decline in vultures, said The Guardian. Parsi communities in India and Pakistan have for thousands of years placed their dead on top of dakhma, or "towers of silence", built above the soil to prevent contamination. Vultures "eat the flesh on the bones", which are later collected in an ossuary pit.

Offering the body to the birds is "the devout Zoroastrian's ultimate act of charity", one Karachi resident told The Guardian. The vulture's eye is believed to help the soul's transition. But there are only two remaining towers of silence in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. "We've lost a way of life, our culture," said one resident.

This year, there are "signs of stabilisation" among India's critically endangered vultures, said Bird Guides – but they are "still in a precarious situation".

Images of their "blood-splattered bills" tend to "evoke less sympathy" than "majestic tigers, adorable pandas" or other staples of wildlife conservation campaigns, said The Economist: animals that "tug at human heartstrings".

But "conserving these animals should be a priority. They may not be cute or cuddly, but they are important."

Is the drumbeat of war on the Israel/Lebanon front a prelude to all-out war?

TUESDAY 25 JUNE 2024, BY GILBERT ACHCAR

Recent weeks have witnessed a sharp escalation of the exchange of fire between the Lebanese resistance and Israeli forces in South Lebanon/North of the Zionist state. This escalation has been accompanied by an escalation of statements and threats between the two sides, with increasing Israeli threats to launch an all-out war on all areas where Hezbollah is deployed and inflict on them a fate similar to that of the Gaza Strip in terms of the intensity of destruction.

However, while Israeli army sources assert that it is fully prepared to wage this war, these assertions are contradicted by the ongoing efforts to increase the number of mobilized reservists from 300,000 to 350,000 by raising the age of exit from the reserve (from 40 to 41 for soldiers, 45 to 46 for officers and 49 to 50 for specialists such as doctors and aircrew members).

Moreover, these efforts continue to clash with the insistence of the Zionist military command on the need to end the exemption from conscription for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, which would increase the number of soldiers without increasing the burden on the families and jobs of the current recruits and hence on the country’s economy. Thus, while efforts to increase mobilization certainly indicate the determination of the military leadership to complete preparations for an all-out war on Lebanon, they indicate at the same time that the escalation of threats from the Israeli side does not reflect a real intention to launch a full-scale war on Lebanon in the current circumstances, especially since everyone realizes that the cost of such a war for the Zionist state will be much higher than the cost of invading Gaza, both in terms of human cost (even if the Zionist army refrains from invading Lebanese territory and limit itself to intensive bombardment, as is likely, the number of bombing casualties inside the State of Israel will inevitably be greater than in the war on Gaza), military cost (the type of equipment the Zionist army will need to use against Hezbollah), or economic cost.

This reality creates a serious problem for Israel, as it cannot wage an all-out war on Lebanon without massive increase in aid from the United States compared to the already great aid provided by Washington in the genocidal war waged on Gaza. Moreover, since Hezbollah is organically linked to Tehran, an all-out war by Zionist forces against Lebanon could expand to include Iran, which could fire rockets and drones into the State of Israel, as it did last April. In light of this dependence of the Israeli attack on US aid, Netanyahu’s sudden escalation of rhetoric against the Biden administration in recent days is further evidence of the Zionist government’s unwillingness to launch an all-out war on Lebanon in the current circumstances, as Netanyahu’s behaviour towards Washington contradicts his army’s need for even more American support than it has received so far.

It has thus become clear that Netanyahu is betting on Donald Trump’s winning a second term in the US elections scheduled for early November. He is acting like a gambler who decided to throw everything he had on the table playing double or quits. Besides, Netanyahu is politically benefiting from the escalation of tensions between him and the Biden administration, which increases his popularity by portraying him as a Zionist ruler who stands up to external pressures even in the most difficult circumstances. He is preparing for a new round of this political game by showing the significant political support that he enjoys in the US Congress against the Biden administration when he goes to Washington to deliver his fourth speech to a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate on July 24.

If Trump wins the election, Netanyahu will be looking for a support free from the kind of limitation and pressure that the Biden administration has recently tried to impose on him. If Trump fails to win, Netanyahu is likely to negotiate with the Biden administration and the Zionist opposition to obtain guarantees enabling him to break his reliance on the Zionist far right in his government and form a “national unity” cabinet that he would head until the next elections in 2026. The opposition, for its part, will certainly try to get rid of him, by splitting the coalition on which his current government is based in the Knesset and forcing early elections.

Do not think however that the political struggle within the Zionist political elite is between hawks and doves: it is rather between hawks and vultures. Both sides, Netanyahu and the opposition, believe that there is no third option on their northern front but for Hezbollah to acquiesce and accept to withdraw north in implementation of Resolution 1701 adopted by the UN Security Council following the 33-day war in 2006, or for them to wage a fierce war against Hezbollah at a high cost, which they all see as necessary in order to reinforce their state’s deterrent capacity, significantly diminished on the Lebanese front since 7 October.

25 June 2024

Souce Gilbert Achcar’s blog.

P.S.

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ATTACHED DOCUMENTS

• is-the-drumbeat-of-war-on-the-israel-lebanon-front-a_a8570.pdf (PDF - 907.4 KIB)
  Extraction PDF [->article8570]

Palestine

• Truce in Gaza and the dilemmas faced by Netanyahu and Hamas
• Rafah and El Fasher: Genocidal War and Duty of Solidarity
• The “Antisemitism” Smear Weaponized
• Palestine Solidarity Student Movement in the USA: An Overview
• Palestine’s fate in light of the onslaught on Gaza

Israel

• "Tehran found itself backed into a corner by the attack on its consulate."
• “Germany Canceled Me for Supporting Palestine”
• Israeli Attack on World Central Kitchen: Biden Takes Harder Line, U.S. Support for Israel’s War Continues, So Do Protests
• For the right to self-determination of Palestinians, for the withdrawal of imperialist forces from the Middle East
• What Genocide Looks Like

Lebanon

• Impact of Israeli Genocidal War in Gaza on the Middle East
• Hezbollah is increasingly isolated in the Middle East
• A persistent political and economic crisis in Lebanon
• Continuous Crisis in Lebanon
• The Other Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East

• Gilbert Achcar

  Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is currently Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. A regular and historical contributor to the press of the Fourth International, his books include The Clash of Barbarisms. The Making of the New World Disorder (2006), The Arabs and the Shoah. The Arab-Israeli War of Narrations (2012), The People Wants. A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2022). His most recent book – The New Cold War. United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine was published in 2023. He is a member of Anti*Capitalist Resistance in Britain.