The EU’s Fight Against Global Deforestation

By Thomas Klikauer

June 29, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

By Aidenvironment, 2006 - flickr: Riau flickr user: Wakx, CC BY-SA 2.0

While most know that trees are important to us – people living in streets with trees live longer, for example – looking at a simple map that shows global deforestation makes one shiver. Oxford University’s Our World in Data has produced such a map:

Deforestation is the deliberate destruction of the environment, often for profit. Forest clearance defines the amputation and demolition of a forest from the land. Regularly, this land is converted to non-forest agricultural use – a funny word: agriculture. One wonders where the “culture” is in industrialized monoculture plantations drenched with pesticides, herbicides or, worse, Frankenstein plants that are genetically modified.

To poison soil for profits – and yes, peak soil is behind us. It is downhill from here on – deforestation means the “conversion” – the code word for annihilation – of a forest into industrial farming, ranches, or land to be used for housing and factories.

Despite capitalism’s best efforts, just about 31% of the Earth’s land is still covered by forests. Yet this is about one-third less than the forests that covered Earth before the expansion of agriculture. Worse, about half of all deforestation occurred during the last century.

Slowly, we are converting planet Earth into a Mars-like dustbin where madman like Elon Musk want to live. Even potato-shit farmer Matt Damon, in The Martian (2015), left as soon as he could. Yes, this might well be our future here on Earth.

On Earth, about 2,400 trees are cut down each minute. We are making rapid steps towards Mars-like living – or, better, dying. Recent estimates of deforestation have varied regarding the extent of deforestation in the tropics.

In 2025, nearly 90% of global deforestation was caused “by agriculture” – as if agriculture has hands to do it. Profit-driven cropland expansion and pasture creation were the primary drivers. Meanwhile, forests are also being converted into plantations for coffee, palm oil – found in almost everything we eat – rubber, and so on.

But wait, it gets worse. Livestock grazing also drives deforestation. Further drivers are the timber industry – legal and illegal logging – urbanization and, of course, mining. Among the many effects of deforestation are the acceleration of global warming and an increased risk of wildfires in the dried-up landscapes that are left behind.

Beyond all that, deforestation foremost results in habitat destruction which, in turn, not only leads to biodiversity loss but moves us ever closer to the sixth mass extinction. Deforestation leads to the extinction of animals and plants, changes to the local climate, and the dislocation of Indigenous communities who once lived not just “in” but “with” a forest. Once Indigenous people and trees are removed – thanks to Caterpillar and Stihl, for example – such regions suffer from desertification and soil erosion.

In addition to this, deforestation also diminishes the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This reduces a forest’s ability to mitigate the impact of global warming. The role of forests in capturing and storing carbon is rapidly declining. Making this all the more serious is the fact that, since 1990, 420 million hectares of forest have been destroyed. From 2015 to 2020, the rate of deforestation was 10 million hectares per year.

Based on the link between deforestation, global warming, and the expected changes for agriculture, the global food system is in danger. Roughly 12,000 years ago, when Earth’s climate stabilized, farming became possible. Once the climate becomes unstable again because of global warming, serious problems are to be expected.

These are the problems we all will have to face during our present-day Capitalocene – global warming turbocharged by capitalism. One possible attempt to address this is the EU’s regulation on the protection of forests—known as the EUDR. The regulation is officially known as Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 on deforestation-free products (EUDR).

The idea behind the EUDR – the European Union Deforestation Regulation – is perhaps twofold: first, the EU knows that neither the mythical “free market” nor the neoliberal ideology of “industry self-regulation” is working. Secondly, the EUDR is designed to ensure that only goods traded in Europe are processed and sold without destroying or damaging forests.

The majority of large companies in the EU support the objectives of the EUDR – nobody, not even corporate bosses, wants to be seen as destroying forests. To self-vanish from the crime scene, corporate bosses have outsourced this to faraway places under the motto: out of sight, out of mind. This has worked rather well for decades.

Yet the EU’s EUDR will make it hard for corporate bosses to declare their love for forests in Sunday speeches while, on Monday, destroying them for a handsome profit under slogans like “drill, baby, drill.”

In other words, the EU regulation targets “deforestation-free supply chains”. To achieve this, the European Union Deforestation Regulation follows three objectives:

1. European consumer goods – often made and/or sold by multinational corporations – should no longer contribute to deforestation or damage forests.
2. Within the European Union, the consumption and production of relevant materials should not generate more than 32 million tonnes of CO₂.
3. All forms of deforestation and forest degradation through the expansion of agriculture should be prevented.

In practice, this means that “only” medium-sized and large companies in the EU trading in raw materials or products such as soybeans, palm oil, timber, cocoa, coffee, beef or natural rubber fall under the EUDR. They must adhere to the EUDR from 30 December 2026.

To make their supply chains transparent and verifiable, the EU is limiting corporate secrecy, often hidden behind the common excuse of “commercial confidentiality”. Companies are required to certify the origin of their products through documentation to ensure traceability. Hiding behind shiny corporate brochures and standard business ideologies like corporate social responsibility becomes ever harder for the overpaid corporate public relations men in dark business suits.

Meanwhile, the EUDR applies not only to individual products but to all batches. Companies are obliged to conduct a risk assessment for affected raw materials and goods. This includes an analysis of deforestation risks. Companies also need documentation and must observe their reporting obligations in relation to their duty of care.

Only after all these conditions – for each batch – are met can goods be sold inside the European market. Companies breaching these rules will face fines. This might sound harsh, but there are many cases where corporations pay such fines from the office till for biscuits, facing only minuscule levies.

The obligations of the EUDR apply from mid-2027 even for small enterprises. Naturally, corporate vandals will complain about more administration that is difficult to meet. Yet without the corporate vandalism inflicted on the Earth’s environment over decades, no EUDR would have been needed.

In other words, it is no more than the EU’s attempt to protect the environment from corporations before they kill Earth. It is just as a New Yorker cartoon once said:

“Yes, the planet got destroyed.

But for a beautiful moment in time we

created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Meanwhile, environmentally destructive corporations continue to complain that the EUDR is highly complex, bureaucratic and, in many cases, not feasible. In Germany, for example, the vast majority of companies have already prepared themselves for the EU deforestation regulation. This contradicts the corporate claim that the EUDR is not feasible when most companies have already done their bit.

Meanwhile, the EUDR applies to 57% of German companies with up to 250 employees and to 85% of companies with more employees. All in all, the EU’s regulation on deforestation and supply chains (EUDR) has the global goal of reducing deforestation and forest degradation.

It demands that many companies in, for example, the paper and food industries are obliged to make their supply chains more transparent and verifiable. The aim is that products for which no deforestation certification can be shown can no longer access the rather lucrative – profitable – EU market with its millions of consumers.

The EUDR applies to medium and large companies in the EU after 30 December 2026 and to small businesses from 30 June 2027. The regulation requires these undertakings to guarantee the forest-destruction-free origin of their products. Perhaps Greenpeace was not wrong when it told European companies: “Stop complaining, start complying!”Email

Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

For Millions of Impoverished Americans, an Unhappy National Birthday

Michael Slager

 July 1, 2026

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Photo: Michael Slager.

Many years ago, I worked at a motel as a groundskeeper. A woman—I’ll call her Anna—lived there with her children. One of her friends would sometimes come to look after the kids when she had to work or run errands. They had several cats who spent most of their time living in the family’s car since the owner would not allow the felines to stay in the room. Both the people and the cats lived there for months.

Anna was one of thousands of Americans who live in motels. Poor credit histories, high rents, and prohibitively steep upfront costs, such as security deposits, compel many to find alternative long-term lodging that at least has some basic amenities: a kitchenette (or just a microwave) and a shower.

Although weekly rates are higher than renting even modestly priced apartments, there is often little choice. The rooms can be cramped, and they are sometimes run down. Safety can be a concern, and privacy is virtually impossible. Yet, people go to work, send their children to school, and make these places temporary homes.

Out of an approximate 755,000 unhoused people in the United States, there are no reliable estimates for the number who live in motels. I have passed by the one in the picture above (I didn’t work at this particular motel) many times; it’s in the neighborhood where I now live, and it sometimes makes me think of Anna and her family. Her kids would be adults by now, yet another generation calls such places home.

What struck me was the sign someone hung on the second-floor railing. It honors 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. It’s a sort of birthday card for the country’s approaching semiquincentennial.

Birthdays are supposed to mark milestones and accomplishments. When it comes to national celebrations, the festivities are meant to be a collective, public recognition of something good we have done. Such commemorations can also demonstrate pride in having survived some national crisis.

However, concerning poverty, we are in a continuing crisis that is far from a source of pride. Growing inequality has created conditions that have generated 36 million people who live under the official poverty line. That is roughly 10 million more than the combined number of residents of the top 10 most populous cities in the United States or just under the population of California.

The sign was displayed in a place where people struggle unnecessarily, where children have to deal with obstacles to their growth and development; it is no secret that poverty takes a toll on young minds and bodies. Food insecurity and homelessness have negative effects on physical development, academic achievement, emotional regulation, and social skills.

Most egregious of all is that this state of affairs has been deliberately chosen, not by those living in it, but by those who inhabit stations in life that few can imagine. Many politicians and pundits often manage to convince somewhat better-off Americans that those who live in poverty are to blame, not the legislators themselves and certainly not the donor class, who enjoy unparalleled advantages and access to lawmakers.

They can afford to celebrate America’s birthday in grand style, safe in the belief that they are the better set of people. However, those who indulge in congratulating themselves and each other on their alleged virtues or ask for plaudits in the form of votes, have elected to make the plight of the most vulnerable in our country even worse.

For example, in 2021, the US Congress expanded eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). As a result of an extra $300 each month for newly qualified households, child poverty in the United States was nearly halved. Republicans, with the help of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, voted against renewing the expansion. Manchin, a multi-millionaire, falsely claimed that there was no means testing to receive the expanded tax credit and reportedly said that beneficiaries would use the money on drugs. In the end, lawmakers returned millions of children to poverty. It was a direct and unequivocal refusal to use the tools at their disposal to alleviate serious hardships.

The United States Congress has also consistently refused to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour. Although 19 states have passed legislation to create a 15-dollar hourly minimum, a nationwide law would lift millions more people out of poverty. Over 800,000 workers, mostly women who labor in the service industry, still try to live on $7.25 an hour, a rate that has not been raised since 2009. Oxfam estimates that a federal wage hike would mean that a quarter of the US workforce would see significant gains in pay.

Legislators also consistently refuse to address privation in indirect ways. For instance, according to Pentagon estimates from May, the Trump administration’s unprovoked and illegal war on Iran had at that time cost nearly 30 billion dollars. The number is likely to be far higher as we approach the nation’s birthday. Budgets showcase priorities, and windfalls for the defense industry are always at the top of the list.

The money we have collectively wasted on unnecessary military conflicts could have been dedicated to poverty alleviation. The funds for the Iran war, for example, could have provided sustainable housing and continued support for everyone currently living in homeless shelters across the United States. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, it would cost the US government 9.6 billion to find permanent housing for those living in shelters. That figure is roughly one-third of the Pentagon’s May estimates of the Iran war’s cost.

A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with planners’ decisions about how resources are allocated. For example, a Gallup poll shows that only about 30 percent of Americans approve of how wealth is distributed in the United States. Two-thirds believe that wealthy individuals and corporations do not pay their fair share. Polling data has consistently shown that the majority believe poverty reduction programs are generally beneficial and more should be done to help those in need.

However, many lawmakers have no intention of writing legislation that would seriously address issues of poverty and homelessness. Their priorities have demonstrated that they do not share the sentiments of the population. This is nothing new. James Madison, a Founding Father and fourth President of the United States, would likely have been appalled by twenty-first century capitalism, but he argued that it was the government’s obligation to keep majority sentiment at bay, to guard against “those … who secretly sigh for a more equitable distribution of its [the country’s] blessings” and to fight against the notion of “a levelling spirit,” an idea that he feared had already emerged even then.

Today’s leaders are in accord with the architects of a country whose 250th birthday we will soon observe. They also resist the establishment of a direct, participatory democracy that more equally distributes resources to those like Anna and her children.

Michael Slager is an English teacher at Loyola University Chicago.

Most of the World’s Wealth Belongs to All of Us. It’s Time to Start Collecting.

By Jeremy Lent

June 27, 2026

Source: Ecocivilization

Joe Piette, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s consider a fact so stark it barely registers: the world’s five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020. Meanwhile, 60 percent of humanity has grown poorer over the same period. At current trajectories, we will see the world’s first trillionaire within a decade.

We have grown so accustomed to statistics like these that they have lost their capacity to shock. But they should shock us. Extreme inequality of this magnitude — the richest one percent owning 43 percent of all global financial assets, while emitting as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity — is not merely an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise functioning system. It is the system working as designed—and it is bad for nearly everyone.

This last point is worth dwelling on, because it contradicts the intuition that inequality is primarily a problem for those at the bottom. The social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett spent decades studying health and social outcomes across developed countries and arrived at a finding startling in its clarity: the strongest predictor of a country’s overall health and wellbeing is not its level of wealth, but how evenly that wealth is distributed. More unequal societies have lower life expectancy, higher rates of mental illness, more crime, more addiction, more homicide, and more incarceration. People in Sweden are more than six times as likely to trust their neighbors as people in the most unequal countries. Inequality does not just impoverish the poor — it corrodes the social fabric that everyone depends on to live a decent life.

National Income reflects little correlation with health and social problems.

Whereas income inequality is strongly correlated with health and social problems. Source: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

Political philosopher John Rawls captured something essential about this when he proposed a famous thought experiment. Imagine you are about to be born into a society, but you have no idea where in the social hierarchy you will land — no knowledge of your parents’ wealth, your natural talents, or your social status. You’re behind what Rawls called a “veil of ignorance.” What kind of society would you design? The answer that most of us would choose is one that protects the least well-off rather than giving unlimited advantage to the fortunate few. By that standard — and it’s a reasonable one — almost no one would choose the world we have built.

Now add one more ingredient to this already volatile mixture: artificial intelligence.

The story of how wealth becomes concentrated is ultimately a story about the enclosure of the commons. Our civilization rests on a vast accumulated inheritance — millennia of knowledge, language, law, mathematics, medicine, infrastructure, and culture, built collectively by generations of human beings who are no longer alive to collect their share. When Mark Zuckerberg made a few tweaks to this edifice and collected a personal fortune of $250 billion, he did not build that wealth from nothing. He built it on top of everything that came before: the internet (publicly funded), computing (decades of academic research), literacy (centuries of educational investment), and the entire architecture of modern civilization.

Generative AI now represents the most dramatic enclosure of the commons in human history. In a matter of years, a handful of corporations have ingested virtually the entire accumulated text of human civilization — every book, article, scientific paper, poem, and conversation that could be scraped from the web — and now monetizing it as a proprietary product. The knowledge commons of humanity, built over millennia by countless anonymous contributors, has been captured for the benefit of a tiny elite. The rest of us, whose ancestors did the actual work of generating all that knowledge, receive nothing.

And that is before we account for what AI will do to labor markets. Past technologies displaced workers in waves but always left new industries in their wake. AI threatens something more sweeping: a historically unprecedented break in the capital–labor relationship, moving from software into robotics and the physical economy, displacing white-collar and blue-collar work alike. When AI can write code, draft contracts, analyze data, generate medical diagnoses, and automate factories, the bargaining power of workers in those fields collapses. The gains flow overwhelmingly to the owners of the AI systems, while the rest of the population absorbs the disruption.

We risk entering a new age of techno-feudalism — a tiny elite owning the productive systems of intelligence while the rest of humanity scrambles for precarious survival.

This is the context in which we need to discuss Universal Basic Income (UBI): not as some extended welfare payment, but as an urgent structural response to a civilizational emergency.

Thomas Paine — who helped inspire the American Revolution and wrote The Rights of Man — was also one of the first to articulate the moral logic of a UBI, and he framed it in terms that remain more precise and more radical than found in most contemporary discussions. Rather than proposing charity, he proposed justice. In doing so, he laid a cornerstone for what we can now envisage as an ecocivilization—a world that works for all.

“It is not charity but a right,” Paine wrote, “not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.” The payment he envisioned was not a basic income but a dividend. A share of the commonwealth that belongs to every person by virtue of being born into a civilization built by their ancestors.

The distinction matters enormously. Welfare carries stigma. It requires means-testing, proof of need, bureaucratic gatekeeping. It is premised on the idea that most people do not deserve support, and that those who do must demonstrate their worthiness to receive it. A dividend, by contrast, is premised on the fact that we are all stakeholders in a collective inheritance. It no more requires justification than a shareholder needs justification for receiving returns on an asset they own.

All human wealth derives ultimately from the commons: from the abundance of nature itself — the air, water, sunlight, soil, and ecosystems that sustain all life — and from the accumulated knowledge and infrastructure that our ancestors built and bequeathed to us. That includes electricity, chemistry, modern medicine, the internet, and now the digital architecture that AI is built upon. This enormous legacy is a commonwealth, and the wealth it generates belongs by right to all of us.

The appropriate policy instrument for distributing a share of that commonwealth is what UBI advocates like Guy Standing call, more precisely, a “social dividend.” Every legal resident of a society would receive a guaranteed periodic cash payment — unconditional, universal, and sufficient to cover basic needs. Not as a substitute for public services, but as a complement to them: alongside universal healthcare, education, housing support, and public transportation, each person would also receive the cash equivalent of their individual share of the commonwealth.

The concern most commonly raised about UBI — that “free money makes people lazy” — turns out, on examination, to be a projection of the ideology of capitalism rather than an observation about human nature. People do not, in fact, primarily want to avoid work. What they want to avoid is degrading, meaningless, coerced work, what David Graeber memorably called “bullshit jobs.” Given financial security, people tend to invest their time and energy in activities of genuine value: caring for family members, building community, starting small enterprises, pursuing education.

The evidence from UBI pilots conducted around the world is remarkably consistent. A meta-study by the Stanford Basic Income Lab synthesizing sixteen different reviews found decisively that UBI alleviates poverty and improves health and educational outcomes across the board. In Liberia, a group of addicts and petty criminals given unconditional cash spent it on food, clothing, and medicine. In Vancouver, fifty homeless people given $7,500 with no strings attached used it for food, rent, and clothing, and remained financially stable a year later. In India, UBI recipients established fishing cooperatives, pooled income to improve village infrastructure, and enabled young women to gain independence from patriarchal financial control.

In Namibia, petty crime fell substantially because starving villagers no longer needed to steal vegetables. They began planting more, creating abundance where scarcity had generated conflict. Instead of making people passive, a social dividend empowered them to pursue their dreams.

The objection that a robust UBI is unaffordable is, upon examination, a statement about political will rather than economic reality. If every American adult received $1,000 per month — roughly the federal poverty level — the total annual cost would be approximately $4 trillion, equivalent to less than 14 percent of US GDP. That sounds large until you consider that the world’s 3,000 billionaires currently hold approximately $16 trillion in wealth. Oxfam calculates that a 12.8 percent annual wealth tax would merely have kept their wealth constant since 2016.

As Guy Standing puts it, the issue is not affordability but “what are society’s fiscal priorities?”

Here is the deeper issue: if we accept that all wealth ultimately derives from the commons — from nature, from accumulated human knowledge, from millennia of collective labor — then the current situation, in which a vanishingly small number of people have captured a wildly disproportionate share of that wealth while the majority have no meaningful stake in their collective inheritance, represents not merely inequality but more like ongoing theft. On that basis, a social dividend is not a redistribution of wealth that belongs to the wealthy but a return of wealth that belongs to everyone.

Some of the mechanisms for collecting that wealth are well understood: restoring progressive taxation, enacting internationally coordinated wealth taxes, instituting land value taxes on the unearned gains of property ownership, applying full-cost pricing that requires corporations to account for the ecological and social damage they externalize onto the commons. The G20 is already considering a proposal by economist Gabriel Zucman to ensure the world’s 3,000 billionaires pay at least 2 percent of their wealth in taxes annually — a measure that could generate $250 billion per year. It is an important first step, yet it barely scratches the surface.

A different social contract

The transformative power of a social dividend goes beyond the material. It would be based on a postulate that our civilization has not been willing to acknowledge: that each person, simply by virtue of being born into the human community, has a stake in its shared inheritance. That human dignity is not contingent on productivity and that people can be trusted to know what they need.

Martin Luther King Jr., writing shortly before his assassination, understood this: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”

Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Two vocal proponents of UBI

Future generations, looking back at this period, might struggle to comprehend that in an era of unprecedented productive capacity — when we could, for the first time in history, materially ensure that no one goes hungry or homeless — we chose instead to allow a handful of individuals to accumulate fortunes that no-one could spend in a thousand lifetimes, while billions of people remained in precarity. They might ask: why, when the inheritance belonged to everyone, did so few collect it?

The answer will define what kind of civilization we are building. Demanding our social dividend — insisting that the wealth generated by our collective inheritance be shared with all its rightful beneficiaries — is not so much a political position as a moral imperative. In an age when AI threatens to shred whatever remains of the social contract, what Paine revealed as social justice can now be understood as a foundation for an ecocivilization.

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