Global Pet Craze Is Becoming a Major

Contributor to the Extinction Crisis

BY PETER CHRISTIE   MARCH 6, 2024

Photo by Karina Vorozheeva

In 2019, an independent international science group—the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—announced that about 1 million species around the world are threatened with extinction. The number, based on a consensus by hundreds of experts and other researchers from 50 countries, made headlines around the world when it was included in the group’s global assessment of biodiversity.

One in every five backboned species we know of is at risk of being erased from the earth, and each year, say scientists, about 52 different mammals, birds, and amphibians move one species-at-risk category closer to oblivion. Many biologists believe countless other species are vanishing even before science—so far familiar with about 1.7 million of the planet’s many millions of living species—knows they exist.

Take insects, for example. Estimates suggest four out of every five insect species remain to be discovered, but researchers fear that insect declines could put more than 40 percent of these at risk of disappearing within decades, according to a 2019 study. In 2017, a German study made news around the world—the favored headline was “insect Armageddon”—when it found that the abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had fallen to just a quarter of what it was 27 years ago, as measured by weight.

Extinction Cascade: Ecological Tipping Point

It’s no small matter. Some warn of what they call an “extinction cascade,” whereby the loss of one species, such as a butterfly or a bee, leads to the secondary extinction of a plant it pollinates, which, in turn, means the end of a specialist plant-eating animal, and so on. As more and more of the living pieces in an ecosystem go missing, the system itself risks breaking down.

Try removing parts of your car one by one while still expecting it to get you somewhere. To Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, our general and seemingly growing disregard for the sanctity of life’s variety is like that. If we fail to stop more creatures from vanishing, the natural ecological functions of the world—the ones that keep our air and water clean and our food supply healthy—will most certainly falter. Some scientists warn that our mounting environmental insults may soon take us to a worldwide ecological “tipping point.” Wildlife may be feeling the worst of it now, says Ceballos during an interview, but the reckoning for our own species is probably not far off.

Ceballos, who helped introduce the world to the possibility that we’re seeing a sixth mass extinction, says that “many scientists in many different fields feel there may be a collapse in civilization if this trend continues in the next 20 to 30 years.” His matter-of-factness is chilling.

Population Explosion: Humanity Dwarfs the Wild World

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s—when Charles Dickens was chronicling the crowded squalor of London, and Charles Darwin was championing his queer notion of “descent with modification”—the size of humanity’s great mass eclipsed that of all the wild land mammals on earth.

The human population, according to one remarkable estimate, had grown until there were more of us by weight than the combined mass of all our wild mammal brethren. In the race to become the world’s greatest life force, we had finally streaked past nature. Soon, we will leave it behind in our dust.

By 1900, we weighed one-third more than wild mammals, and by the end of the following century—after the total weight of mammalian wildlife plummeted by half and the mass of people quadrupled—we became 10 times more abundant (by weight). Now, 8 billion of us dwell on this busy planet, and by 2050, the number is expected to rise close to 10 billion. We have arrived at a point at which we absolutely dwarf the wild world. Like the proverbial bull in a china shop, we can scarcely move without breaking something.

Human Impact on Earth’s Biodiversity

Unfortunately, we’re a fidgety species. More than three-quarters of the earth’s land surface (not including Antarctica) and almost 90 percent of oceans have been directly affected by what we’ve done so far. Between 1993 and 2009 alone, the total wilderness flattened to build new farms, towns, and mines around the world equaled an area larger than India. With the loss of these wild lands, we are also losing wildlife; many consider our changes to the global landscape—for agriculture and development—amount to the single greatest threat to life’s diversity in millions of years. But there are others.

Our surging population now means excessive hunting, fishing, and harvesting (that is, taking more wildlife than can replenish itself) threaten more than 70 percent of the species facing extinction around the world.

Climate change isn’t helping. A fifth of the world’s land surface is expected to see large-scale shifts in climate by the end of the 21st century, thanks to the greenhouse gas consequences of our fondness for oil. Plants and animals that can’t stand the heat will be forced to move or perish. Meanwhile, our penchant for polluting and spreading invasive species and diseases only seems to be gathering steam.

Biophilia and Pet Ownership

People, after all, will be people. And people—the growing billions of us—will keep pets.

There’s the rub. In his inimitably hopeful way, biologist Edward O. Wilson imagined a growing awareness of our innate biophilia would make our species—even in our clumsy, outsized dominance of the world—more caring about the nonhuman life around us. Our hardwired wonder for other beings was supposed to add delicacy to the way we manage our shared planet. Instead, our biophilia may have found another outlet: pets.

While one estimate suggests the total number of wild backboned creatures on earth has been cut by roughly 70 percent in the last 50 years, the population of pets (at least dogs and cats in the United States) has more than doubled during the same period.

There’s no sign the trend is slowing. Thirty million puppies and kittens are born in the United States each year—a ratio of seven pets born for every human birth. More pet birds, lizards, and other exotic beasts are bred or brought from the jungle. We may finally be acknowledging our genetic need for and attachment to animals—as Wilson wished—but not in the wild; we’ve brought them into our homes instead. Our soaring numbers of pets have become, as author and University of Bristol professor John Bradshaw suggests, our wildlife on demand.

As Urbanization Grows, Pets Replace the Role of Nature

Our relationship with the natural world, meanwhile, is growing more estranged. More than half of the world’s population already dwells in cities, and by 2050, more than two out of every three of us will be leading urban lives. The proportion of people who will ever set foot in the wilderness is growing smaller. Those who’ve met a moose on a trail or watched a heron over an evening marsh are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of us. For the growing majority—among our swelling numbers in cities around the world—dogs, cats, and other pets are our chief experience and familiarity with animals.

It’s the pets we meet—and the pets we keep—that have our attention now. We’re drawn to them in the way we’ve always been drawn to other living creatures. And, as Wilson predicted, the urge remains seemingly ancient, deep-seated, and stirring. The only difference is that the animals we’re focused on aren’t wild; they live with us. Increasingly, we seem to prefer having animals in our lives to visiting them in theirs.

Pets’ Impact on Wildlife

That’s not all. Pets and the pet industry are not only replacing the role of nature in our human experience but they’re also devastating wildlife directly.

In myriad ways, pets pose a clear threat to the wonderful, wild splendor of the rest of life on earth: Cats and dogs stalk wildlife as human-subsidized killers; jungles are robbed of animals to satisfy the pet trade; diseases deadly to wild creatures are spread by globe-trotting pets; pets released in non-native habitats (such as pythons in the Everglades) eat every wild animal in sight or squeeze them out as indomitable competitors; and the pet food business, with its insatiable demand, drains our oceans of vital forage fish.

The impacts are considerable. Over the past five centuries, pets have been among the leading culprits in clobbering literally hundreds of species of threatened and extinct birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians around the globe.

Domestic cats alone have helped obliterate more than 60 species in that period—including the Stephens Island wren of New Zealand and the Hawaiian crow—creatures lost forever from the rich variety of our living planet. Dogs have been linked to the extinction of up to 11 species. Other pets, and the pet industry that supports them, have been linked to other dwindling wildlife populations around the world.

Irony: The Wild World Needs Pet People

Our biophilia has become fraught. Our love of pets is contributing to what is arguably the greatest environmental crisis faced by global ecosystems. The irony is that pet people are the same animal people the wild world needs to help get it back on its feet. Pet owners care more about animals; they’re more likely to watch birds or to become enthralled by nature documentaries. The only problem is our affection for the animals we hold close at home is obscuring our view of those out of reach in nature. We’re fond of our pets.

They’re part of our families. But the wild creatures of the world are vital, too. They’re the machinery of natural systems and hold the keys to our survival. They’re part of our evolutionary history and essential to how we think. They’re wild and, unlike pets, remain aloof from our pedestrian lives and human routine: Untamed, their mystery survives, complex, inscrutable, and tangled in nature’s vast, delicate web.

Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction © 2020 by Peter Christie is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. This excerpt was adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Peter Christie is an award-winning science journalist, pet owner, and author who writes frequently about conservation. Christie is a Science in Society Journalism Award winner (Canada), a 2008 fellow with the U.S.-based Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, and a recipient of the 2015 Schad Foundation grant for conservation journalism. He is a contributor to the Observatory.

Domestication is the Greatest Threat to Wild Bison

If there are “excess” Yellowstone bison, at the very least they should be transferred to public lands, not privatized. 

BY GEORGE WUERTHNER   MARCH 6, 2024

Wild bison, Grand Teton National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Recently news media announced the transfer of 141 of Yellowstone’s bison to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Most of the media and many conservation groups hailed this as “restoring” bison to the plains. What is not said is that this transfer to the tribe, and all other previous transfers are destroying the wild bison genome.

The second issue is the failure of the federal government to protect it Public Trust obligations. Yellowstone’s bison belong (if one can suggest wildlife belongs to anyone) to the American people. Yet they are being privatized when given to tribal reservations.

Yellowstone’s bison are of international significance in part because they have been the least domesticated buffalo in the West. They are an evolutionary heritage that is priceless.

They have been subject to native predators, harsh winters, droughts, had natural selection in breeding and free to migrate—until they reach the border of the Park.

Domestication is the biggest threat to wild bison. And nearly all government and private policies are eroding the wild bison genome.

The bison transferred to Fort Peck Indian Reservation will be held in a 13,000 acre “ranch”. Since 2019, the Yellowstone Bison Conservation Transfer Program has transferred 414 bison to Fort Peck. A record 116 animals were transferred this February: 108 males, four females and four calves. The tribe offers canned bison hunts.

These animals are likely to be artificially fed; perhaps selectively bred and killed, disrupting natural population dynamics. Since they will be held in a small enclosure (13,000 acres is nothing to a bison) they may lose the tendency to migrate which is perhaps their greatest evolutionary adaptation to an unpredictable environment.

All these non-Yellowstone herds are too small to avoid inbreeding depression and random genetic losses.

In short, on-going bison transfers and slaughter of bison at the park border will continue the erosion of Yellowstone bison wildness and they will be domesticated.

Though proclaiming bison transfers are “saving” bison is like promoting fish hatcheries and asserting we are “saving” wild salmon. In fact, numerous studies have documented that hatchery production is contributing to the decline of wild fish.

However, when bison are transferred to Indian reservations or killed on the border of the park, this removes the buffalo biomass from the ecosystem. By reducing bison population within the park, it lessens competition for forage and allows the remaining bison to be less vulnerable to predators or dying from such influences as starvation.

This in turn harms the scavengers like magpie, ravens, eagles, wolves’ grizzly bears and coyotes.

Due to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, the Federal government is not obliged to adhere to the state’s prohibition against restoration of bison on public land in Montana. The federal government can legally promote migration of wild bison to the Custer Gallatin NR and other federal holdings around Yellowstone. Indeed its Public Trust obligation means it should override state objections.

If there are “excess” Yellowstone bison, at the very least they should be transferred to public lands, not privatized. Establishing several other “wild” herds will preclude the loss of this genome if there were a disease outbreak or some other factor contributed to the loss of Yellowstone’s bison herds.

The Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge, and adjacent BLM lands like the Missouri River Breaks NM offers a superb opportunity to establish another free-ranging bison herd. There are other lands in Wyoming and Idaho that are also suitable for bison recolonization like the Red Desert, Upper Green River, and Birch Creek/INL lands in Idaho.

Wild bison deserve a better future than being turned into domesticated livestock. We don’t have to accept the current policies. We can demand that Yellowstone bison be permitted to migrate beyond Yellowstone borders without being slaughtered, as well as establishing several other large conservation herds that are subject to evolutionary processes and avoid the continuing slide towards domesticated animals.

George Wuerthner has published 36 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. 

 

The Great Election Fraud: Manufactured Choices Make a Mockery of Our Republic

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 5th, 2024

The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.

The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.

Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election, a manufactured, contrived “pseudo-event” devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.

For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that 1) their votes count, 2) the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president, and 3) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country.

Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?

The system is rigged, of course.

Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.

Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.

We’ve been down this road before.

Barack Obama campaigned on a message of hope, change and transparency, and promised an end to war and surveillance. Yet under Obama, government whistleblowers were routinely prosecuted, U.S. arms sales skyrocketed, police militarization accelerated, and surveillance became widespread.

Donald Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.

Joe Biden has been no different. If his job was to keep the Deep State in power, he’s been a resounding success.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

With each new president, we’ve been subjected to more government surveillance, more police abuse, more SWAT team raids, more roadside strip searches, more censorship, more prison time, more egregious laws, more endless wars, more invasive technology, more militarization, more injustice, more corruption, more cronyism, more graft, more lies, and more of everything that has turned the American dream into the American nightmare.

What we’re not getting more of: elected officials who actually represent us.

No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people if all we’re prepared to do is vote.

After all, there is more to citizenship than the act of casting a ballot for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.

So, what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?

Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.

Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits—groups like The Rutherford Institute—working to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.

Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.

It’s comforting to believe that your vote matters, but presidents are selected, not elected. Your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president.

The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic.

In actuality, we are suffering from what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term an “economic élite domination” in which the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dominate and dictate national policy.

No surprise there.

As an in-depth Princeton University study confirms, democracy has been replaced by oligarchy, a system of government in which elected officials represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

As such, presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

So how do we prevail against the tyrant who says all the right things and does none of them? How do we overcome the despot whose promises fade with the spotlights? How do we conquer the dictator whose benevolence is all for show?

We get organized. We get educated. We get active.

For starters, know your rights and then put that knowledge into action.

Second, think nationally but act locally.

Third, don’t let personal politics and party allegiances blind you to government misconduct and power grabs.

Finally, don’t remain silent in the face of government injustice, corruption, or ineptitude. Speak truth to power.

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved. It also takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain.

We must act—and act responsibly.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, any hope of restoring our freedoms and regaining control over our runaway government must start from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

 

The “Food Transition” Is a War on Food, Farmers and the Public

by Colin Todhunter / March 3rd, 2024

This article begins with a short video based on an interview with researcher Sandi Adams, who describes the plans for agriculture in the rural county of Somerset in south-west England and the UK in general. It’s an important clip because what she describes appears to be part of a wider United Nations agenda handed down by an extremely wealthy unaccountable, unelected elite.

This elite thinks it can do a better job than nature by changing the essence of food and the genetic core of the food supply (via synthetic biology and genetic engineering). The plan also involves removing farmers from the land (AI-driven farmerless farms) and filling much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels. Although the food system has problems that need addressing, this misguided agenda is a recipe for food insecurity that no one voted for.

Farming Crisis KEY POINTS from Sandi Adams interview (youtube.com)

Throughout the world, from the Netherlands to India, farmers are protesting. The protests might appear to have little in common. But they do. Farmers are increasingly finding it difficult to make a living, whether, for instance, because of neoliberal trade policies that lead to the import of produce that undermines domestic production and undercuts prices, the withdrawal of state support or the implementation of net-zero emissions policies that set unrealistic targets.

The common thread is that, by one way or another, farming is deliberately being made impossible or financially non-viable. The aim is to drive most farmers off the land and ram through an agenda that by its very nature seems likely to produce shortages and undermine food security.

A ‘one world agriculture’ global agenda is being promoted by the likes of the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. It involves a vision of food and farming that sees companies such as Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and Cargill working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms, laboratory engineered ‘food’ and retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and e-commerce platforms at the commanding heights of the economy.

The agenda is the brainchild of a digital-corporate-financial complex that wants to transform and control all aspects of life and human behaviour. This complex forms part of an authoritarian global elite that has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally via the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other supranational organisations, including influential think tanks and foundations (Gates, Rockefeller etc).

Its agenda for food and farming is euphemistically called a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much-promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with high-tech ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘green’ (net-zero) production – with ‘sustainability’ being the mantra.

Integral to this ‘food transition’ is the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a commentary that has been carefully constructed and promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology tied to carbon farming and carbon trading.

The ‘food transition’ involves locking farmers (at least those farmers who will remain in farming) further into a corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and institutional investors and speculators with no connection to farming who regard agriculture, food commodities and agricultural land as mere financial assets. These farmers will be reduced to corporate profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

This predatory commercialisation of the countryside uses flawed premises and climate alarmism to legitimise the roll-out of technologies to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

In society in general, we also see the questioning of official narratives discouraged, censored and marginalised. We saw this with the policies and the ‘science’ that were used to legitimise COVID-related state actions. A wealthy elite increasingly funds science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.

This elite has the power to shut down genuine debate and to smear and censor others who question the dominant narrative. The prevailing thinking is that the problems humanity face are all to be solved through technical innovation determined by plutocrats and centralised power.

This haughty mindset (or outright arrogance) leads to, and is symptomatic of, an authoritarianism that seeks to impose a range of technologies on humanity with no democratic oversight. This includes self-transmitting vaccines, the genetic engineering of plants and humans, synthetic food, geoengineering and transhumanism.

What we see is a misguided eco-modernist paradigm that concentrates power and privileges techno-scientific expertise (a form of technocratic exceptionalism). At the same time, historical power relations (often rooted in agriculture and colonialism) and their legacies within and between societies across the world are conveniently ignored and depoliticised. Technology is not the cure-all for the destructive impacts of poverty, inequality, dispossession, imperialism or class exploitation.

When it comes to the technologies and policies being rolled out in the agriculture sector, these phenomena will be reinforced and further entrenched – and that includes illness and poor health, which have markedly increased as a result of the modern food we eat and the agrochemicals and practices already used by the corporations pushing for the ‘food transition’. However, that then opens up other money-spinning techno-fix opportunities in the life sciences sector for investors like BlackRock that invest in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

But in a neoliberal privatised economy that has often facilitated the rise of members of the controlling wealthy elite, it is reasonable to assume that its members possess certain assumptions of how the world works and should continue to work: a world based on deregulation with limited oversight and the hegemony of private capital and a world led by private individuals like Bill Gates who think they know best.

Whether through, for instance, the patenting of life forms, carbon trading, entrenching market (corporate) dependency or land investments, their eco-modern policies serve as cover for generating and amassing further wealth and for cementing their control.

So, it should come as little surprise that powerful people who have contempt for democratic principles (and by implication, ordinary people) believe they have some divine right to undermine food security, close down debate, enrich themselves further courtesy of their technologies and policies and gamble with humanity’s future.

The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

 

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

Flames of Revolution: Aaron Bushnell Against Liberal Ideology

by Yanis Iqbal / March 4th, 2024

On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old Air Force service member, died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, shouting “free Palestine”. The searing moral clarity of this act of martyrdom scared the ruling class. It wasn’t long before the dominant ideological apparatuses swooped in to neutralize the force of this event. Four days after the self-immolation of Bushnell, Graeme Wood published an article in The Atlantic entitled “Stop Glorifying Self-Immolation”. The write-up criticizes Bushnell as a fanatic whose apparent “determination and sincerity” only hides his insensitivity to the violence that Israelis have faced at the hands of Hamas. Wood thinks that only a “deeply sick” person can “celebrate and encourage this behavior, or even to be moved by it”. The alternative consists in a supposedly “serene starting point”: since both Palestinians and Jews have longstanding ties to Israeli land, it is crucial for Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians to remain without coercion or mistreatment, while also ensuring the safety and dignity of Jewish residents. This form of peaceful “conversation” replaces the fanatic dangers of impassioned acts.

Wood’s base assumption is incorrect to the core. Palestine and Israel are not equivalent sides that need to be listened to in a tolerant manner. The latter is a settler-colonial entity that has an in-built drive towards the extermination of the former. In this situation of stark asymmetry, there can be no tranquil “negotiation” between Israel and Palestine. The interests of both of them stand in irreconcilable opposition to each other. This must be surprising to hear for Wood, whose liberal mind can only see “rational” individuals negotiating with each other. The pacifism of Wood is reliant on the hope that, no matter their different historical situations, individuals will ultimately come to see that conversing with each other is the most “reasonable” manner of solving disputes. However, reality is more complex than that. In concrete social formations, we are presented not with decontextualized, “rational” human beings but with individuals who are always-already enmeshed in a network of socio-historic relations. These relations shape how human beings think of themselves and articulate their interests. In relation to Israel-Palestine dynamics, this means that there are no morally pristine human beings who possess the enlightened capacity to frame their “rational” interests through dialogue. There are only concrete individuals with concrete interests, namely Zionist settlers and Palestinians fighting for their land.

In the battle against colonialism, morality is supplied not by the reasonableness of the liberal individual but by the counter-power of the resisting forces. The supreme good lies in the effective capacity of the colonized to take back their land and life from the colonizers. Every individual action is to be evaluated from the standpoint of the struggle. When this is not done, we are left with the abstract notions of “moderation” that Wood prizes so much. There can be no “moderation” in a situation that involves two diametrically opposed forces. There can only be the militant movement of the oppressed against the interests of the oppressors. “Negotiation” has to be replaced by the collective “fanaticism,” the “determination and sincerity” of the colonized people. Wood considers this anti-colonial movement to be superfluous. He basically asks: why can’t Israelis and Palestinians just talk to each other peacefully? Why couldn’t have Bushnell peacefully put forward his point instead of burning himself? The very standard of normality that Wood erects here – peaceful dialogue – is a figment of his imagination. How can Palestinians talk when they are being starved and slaughtered en masse? How can other people organize a conversation in support of Palestine when the entire apparatuses of repression and manipulation keep working against them?

Protests can’t be as comfortable as the peacefulness of dialogue. They are a source of discomfort and disruption. The situation in Palestine is not a “dispute” that can be solved through the exchange of different opinions. There are actual interests involved here, pitting the national liberation of Palestinians against the Israel-US axis of oppression. One can’t just have reasonable disagreements over the Zionist massacre of Palestinians. Any such disagreement is a material struggle between antagonistic groups that can be solved only when the oppressed overwhelm the oppressor. This antagonistic, unruly dimension of the anti-colonial struggle irks Wood. He wants to retreat into his abode of serenity. That’s why he rails against “spectacular atrocities” and the “death cultism of Hamas”. Bushnell’s self-immolation symbolized the utter disorientation that a revolutionary struggle involves. The anti-colonial movement is equivalent to the agony that Bushnell experienced in the final moments of his life. Out of this agony arises the cry of “Free Palestine,” the dream of liberation, that Bushnell kept repeating as his last words. His self-immolation invites us not to commit suicide but to realize how the struggle against Zionism involves real antagonisms that can be solved only through the destabilization of the existing reality and the deprivation of the power possessed by colonialists. Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack was a similar moment of interruption, wherein the frozen reality maintained by Israel was blasted apart by the resolve of the Palestinian people. Wood denigrates these anti-hierarchical acts of dislocation because he wants a solution without a revolution. But as Nikolai Bukharin said, “The great revolution which is turning the old world upside down cannot go smoothly; the great revolution cannot be carried out in white gloves; it is born in pain”.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by Yanis.

Mourning Two Principled Opponents of War

Aaron Bushnell and Johan Galtung both devoted their lives to ending war in different ways.

By Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan 

March 3, 2024
Source: Common Dreams

Aaron Bushnell (left) and Johan Galtung (right)


The world recently lost two principled opponents of war, but under drastically different circumstances. Johan Galtung died on February 17 at the age of 93. The Norwegian sociologist was known as the father of peace studies and spent his life researching conflicts and fostering dialog in pursuit of peace.

Aaron Bushnell was just 25 years old. He was an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force. On Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell started a live video stream as he walked toward the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell said. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

“He didn’t have thoughts of suicide. He had thoughts of justice.”

Standing at the embassy’s gate, with the video still running, he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire. His final words, shouted several times as the flames consumed him, were “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” As an officer pointed a gun at Aaron, a second officer yelled, “I don’t need guns. I need a fire extinguisher.”

Aaron was formally declared dead hours later.

Earlier that day, he posted a link to the live stream, with the caption, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Levi Pierpont was a friend of Aaron’s. They met in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, days after Aaron’s death, Levi said they both joined the military “to explore the United States, to explore the world, to meet people from other backgrounds.” He went on, “over the years, both of us shifted in our beliefs regarding war, largely because of what we saw in the military, because we were a part of it. I know that he and I both were encouraged by people on YouTube that were writing video essays about social justice movements in the United States.”

“I did end up getting out as a conscientious objector,” Levi continued. “We spoke throughout that process. And at the time that I began to make headway with the process and it began to near its end—I got out in July of 2023—he felt like he was already close enough to his own end date that he decided not to take the same path. And I understood that, because the conscientious objector process can take over a year.”

Johan Galtung was also a conscientious objector, as a young man in Norway. As a child, Nazi Germany occupied his country and imprisoned his father. In one interview, he recalled how his mother made him read the newspaper to learn the names of political prisoners who the Germans had executed the day before, to see if his father was among them, to spare her the pain of reading the list. His father survived, but the war forever changed Johan. He devoted his life to bridging divides and finding creative solutions to real-world conflicts.

“I look forward to the U.S., instead of intervening militarily, starting solving conflicts,” Galtung said on Democracy Now!, in April 2012. “You have so many bright people in this country, so many well-educated people. Solving conflict, you have to talk with the other side, or the other sides. You have to sit down with Taliban and al Qaeda people or people close to al Qaeda. You have to sit down with Pentagon people, State Department people. And you have to ask them, ‘What does the Afghanistan look like where you would like to live? What does the Middle East look like where you would like to live?’ You get an enormous amount of very thoughtful people having very deep reflections.”

Levi Pierpont mourns the loss of his friend, and wishes Aaron hadn’t taken his own life.

“I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to. I would have done anything I could to stop him. But, obviously, we can’t get him back,” Levi said on Democracy Now!. “I would have told him that this wasn’t necessary to get the message out. I would have told him that there were other ways.”

Having expressed his deep sorrow, Levi concluded, “He didn’t have thoughts of suicide. He had thoughts of justice. That’s what this was about. It wasn’t about his life. It was about using his life to send a message.”

Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Perhaps most well known as the main host of Democracy Now! since 1996. She is the author of six books, including The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America.

 

Mistakes, Misfiring and Trident: Britain’s Flawed Nuclear Deterrence

by Binoy Kampmark / March 3rd, 2024

Nuclear weapons are considered the strategic silverware of nation states.  Occasionally, they are given a cleaning and polishing.  From time to time, they go missing, fail to work, and suffer misplacement.  Of late, the UK Royal Navy has not been doing so well in that department, given its seminal role in upholding the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.  In January, an unarmed Trident II D5 nuclear missile fell into the Atlantic Ocean after a bungled launch from a Royal Navy submarine.

The missile’s journey was a distinctly shorter than its originally plotted 6,000 km journey that would have ended in a location somewhere between Africa and Brazil.  In language designed to say nothing yet conceal monumental embarrassment, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps called it “an anomaly” while the Labour opposition expressed concern through its shadow defence secretary, John Healey.  An anonymous military source was the most descriptive of all: “It left the submarine but it just went plop, right next to them.”

The anomaly in question, which Shapps witnessed on board the HMS Vanguard, took place off the coast of Florida during a January 30 exercise at the US’s Navy Port site.  Its failure is the second for the missile, which was also tested in 2016 and resulted in its automatic self-destruction after veering off course and heading to the United States.  It was therefore galling for the Defence Secretary to then claim in a written statement to Parliament that Trident was still “the most reliable weapons system in the world”, a claim also reiterated by the missile’s manufacturers, Lockheed Martin.  With a gamey sense of delusion, Shapps continued to argue that the test merely “affirmed the effectiveness of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, in which the government has absolute confidence.  The submarine and crew were successfully certified and will rejoin the operational cycle as planned.”

Reports of the misfiring were first noted in The Sun, a newspaper otherwise given to bellicose airings and tits-and-bums rhetoric.  “The government has absolute confidence that the UK’s deterrent remains effective, dependable, and formidable,” Shapps insists.  “That is why we are continuing to invest in the next generation of Dreadnought Class ballistic missile submarines, in extending the life of the Trident missile and replacing the warhead, to keep us safe for decades to come.”

This is tickling, if only for reiterating talking points supplied by the Ministry of Defence.  In its statement to The Sun, the MoD expressed much confidence that, “HMAS Vanguard and her crew [had] been fully capable of operating the UK’s Continuous At-Sea Deterrent, passing all tests during a recent demonstration and shakedown operation (DASO) – a routine test to confirm that the submarine can return to service following deep maintenance work.”

In all of this, Shapps comes across as a mock figurine and stuffed effigy, with the MoD the exemplar of wishful thinking.  If nuclear deterrence ever had any reason for existing, it would surely do so on the presumption that the platforms launching the warheads would work.  As David Cullen of the Nuclear Information Service saliently notes, “The whole point of billions we are spending on the nuclear weapons programme is that it supposed to work, and be seen to work, at the prime minister’s command. Without that assurance, the entire endeavour is a failure in its own terms.”

Even at the best of times, deterrence, as a claim, is the stuff of fluffy fiction, astrological flight and fancy. It is unverifiable, speculative, highly presumptuous.  Who is to know if a nuclear weapon will be fired at any point, at any time, against any target, on whatever pretext presents itself?

The madman theory suggests that such a weapon will be deployed, though we are not sure when this might eventuate.  Keeping company with such a theory is the rational, mass murderer type who takes comfort in the prospect that 100 humans might survive a holocaust killing billions.  Shoot and take your chances.  Human stupidity glows with the hope that errors will be healed, and mass crimes palliated.

In actual fact, the true proof of such deterrence would lie in hellish murder: weapons launched, catastrophe ensuing.  Those recording such evidence are bound to be done by coarse skinned mutants with plumbing problems.

The Trident misfiring episode can be seen in one of two ways.  First, it illustrates the point that we are here because of dumb luck, having survived error, misunderstanding and miscommunication.  In the second sense, it yields an uncomfortable reality for the war planners in White Hall: Trident may not work when asked to.

Whether a system fails because of faulty machinery or accident, the problem of misfiring does not go away.  At some point, a misfire with potency will result in deaths, though we can perhaps be assured that Trident may simply fail to live up to the heavy sense of expectation demanded of it.  We can hope it just plops.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Exploring a socio-ecocentric approach to criminal law to enforce sustainability commitments

by Radboud University

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Associate Professor of Criminal Law Sjarai Lestrade explored the possibility for a socio-ecocentric criminal justice system. She did so in a theme issue of Delikt & Delinkwent on the possible modernization of the Dutch Penal Code.

The theme issue of Delikt & Delinkwent addressed the question of how "modern" substantive criminal law should be shaped. In this context, several substantive criminal law issues were raised for discussion. Of the five articles, four came from researchers at Nijmegen's law faculty.

Since the current Penal Code dates from 1886, the participating researchers advocate an active role of academia in this discussion. For instance, Sjarai Lestrade wonders what the consequences would be of modernizing the Penal Code toward a socially ecocentric criminal justice system.

Suitable tool?

Lestrade explores the possibility of a socio-ecocentric system in which not only the individual but also the ecosystem is central. She explains, "Our current system is anthropocentrically oriented; the individual human being in the present is central. With the growing focus on sustainability and the balance between people, planet and profit, the question arises whether our criminal justice system is geared to that.

"Moreover, there is a tendency for political parties to be quick to resort to criminal law when it comes to social problems. 'We should criminalize ecocide.' It could well be that such a criminalization will eventually end up in the Penal Code.

"But then no real thought is given to the more fundamental questions behind it: how does it actually fit into criminal law and what do you want to do with it?" Lestrade therefore argues that more research is needed into whether criminal law is the appropriate tool to address sustainability challenges.

Individual and collective interests

In a socio-ecocentric criminal justice system, the focus shifts more towards safeguarding collective interests. Are there any examples of this in current criminal law? Lestrade states, "There already are, for example in the area of security. That is a collective interest that has been given wide coverage in the Penal Code. Sometimes it is also difficult to distinguish between an individual interest and a collective interest."

In her article, Lestrade illustrates possible consequences that a socio-ecocentric criminal law would entail. "Polluting surface water, for example, is also punishable now, but only if it reaches such proportions that it is dangerous for people in the present. When you move to a different system, it could already be punishable if you discharge waste when it is not directly dangerous at the time, but could have harmful consequences for future generations. When you regulate this in criminal law, the question of 'what are you allowed to just dump in your garden' suddenly becomes a lot more urgent."

An animal or mother nature as a party in criminal proceedings

Lestrade cites another example: granting rights to animals and nature reserves. "Maybe from sustainability considerations we should move towards a system where you give rights to animals or nature reserves. Only question is whether you necessarily have to do that in the criminal justice system. That's a tricky question. Ultimately, of course, that is also a political choice. But that does not alter the fact that it is up to legal science to have this discussion.

"Current criminal justice theorizing is critical of such a systemic change, but at the same time does not sufficiently answer pressing sustainability questions. If you adopt a criminal justice system that puts the ecosystem at the center, then animals or nature reserves could potentially become parties to the criminal proceedings. Then conflicting interests may arise between the (freedom of the) citizen on the one hand and an animal or a nature reserve on the other. Can murder charges be filed on behalf of a cow? Can nature reserves join the criminal process as victims of destruction?

"This has huge implications. Not only from the fundamentals of criminal law, but also in terms of practicality. It is possible that administrative law or civil law are more suitable legal systems with which to enforce sustainability policies. In any case, it is important for science to look into this from different angles and for this knowledge to be shared."

Provided by Radboud University A new tool for UK police forces to improve rape investigations