Let's Go All Out for Universal Health Care in the US

We should continue to vigorously advocate for a universal publicly funded privately delivered health care system at every level throughout America—state as well as national.

by Philip Caper
Published on Thursday, June 03, 2021
by Common Dreams



Participants in the Medicare for All Rally in Los Angeles California on February 4, 2017. Organizers called for a single-payer system for Medicare. (Photo: Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)


The article by Ana Manilow and Kay Tillow, published in Common Dreams on May 29, 2021 sounds a cautionary note about attempts to create state-based universal health care systems, because they will certainly increase the amount of fragmentation in the Medicare program. They are almost certainly right, and more fragmentation is the last thing we need in our already too fragmented "system." I know both Malinow and Tillow, and have utmost respect for their experience and judgment.

There is no doubt that a uniform national program of Improved Medicare for All would be the best way to go, on the grounds of simplicity, efficiency, effectiveness and political sustainability. But so far I see no evidence that the Congress, as it is now constituted, has any appetite to enact anything close to Improved Medicare for All on a national scale anytime soon.

We have to persuade not only the public, but also legislators, that enacting a huge tax increase to fund health care is a good idea.

There are ongoing efforts in over twenty states to enact universal health care. Only one state, Vermont, has made a serious attempt to implement a universal health care system.

That attempt failed. Its failure was not due to economic, technical or statutory barriers, but almost entirely due to politics. Peter Shumlin, the Governor of Vermont at the time of the attempts to enact universal healthcare system there, failed to adequately inoculate Vermont voters against the shock of transferring millions of dollars of private sector spending into taxes, as would have been required by full implementation of Green Mountain Care.

Shumlin, who barely won re-election for a second term, consequently throwing his re-election into the legislature, lost his nerve in the face of the prospects of the need to ask the legislature, that was poised to vote on his own election—for a substantial tax increase to fund Green Mountain Care despite the likely savings in overall health care spending that would have resulted if the program had been implemented.

The aversion to taxes and the resultant large government that is baked into American culture, (dating back to colonial times (Thomas Paine labeled government "a necessary evil") is a major impediment to enactment of a universal health care program in the United States. It is one that proponents of universal health care, whether in the form of a state-wide or a national program, to overcome.

We have to persuade not only the public, but also legislators, that enacting a huge tax increase to fund health care is a good idea. I believe that as our healthcare system becomes increasingly dysfunctional—and increasingly expensive, voters will become increasingly willing to accept that reality. We UHC advocates must become much more effective at making the case that taxes, not private premiums and out-of-pocket payments, are the only just, merciful, and fair way to fund health care. They are likely the only way to achieve universal coverage. The U.S.is the last of the wealthy Democracies to accept this reality.

We must also be more effective about explaining the virtues of everybody being in the same program (one size does fit all), and of a simpler, more transparent health care system with public accountability and the ability to control overall system-wide costs in a less intrusive way than the current system. As the current pandemic has demonstrated, we must also have a system that encourages policy-based investments in public health, whether in a national or state-based system—that only public funding can achieve. If there is any silver-lining in the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that has exposed the need for more investment in public health, which is undeniably a public good.

We must continue our intense focus on defending against the lies we know are coming from the opponents of major systemic changes even as we continue our campaign to win over the public for the idea of a publicly funded, universal health care system.

But at the same time, we must go on offense by focusing more on the benefits of such a systemic change for the vast majority of Americans. We all agree that a Universal federally funded and managed health care system is the best way to making health care as a right a reality in the US.

This is a classic example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. The paramount question is not whether we can achieve that perfect result, but how to get there from here, given the clash of interests in our current dysfunctional health care system


Unfortunately, the current power of the medical-industrial complex in Congress is such that federal legislators must pay "tribute" to the the large health care corporations (just like the Mafia) that increasingly control the American healthcare system. The ACA is the prime example of one of the outcomes of this reality.

As an advocate for the past ten years of a state-wide program of publicly funded privately delivered universal health care in Maine, I can attest to the power of that idea to the public, if they believe it is achievable.

In reaction to the suggestion of a national solution to the problem's of our healthcare system, people often roll their eyes. They don't believe it's achievable, because they don't believe they have the power to overcome the political barriers that prevent that outcome. But when they hear about the possibility of a state-level solution, they pay attention and become activists in trying to make it happen—because they believe they may make a difference at a state-level.

Just last month, over 70 Maine voters turned out to testify at a legislative hearing in support of universal healthcare bills that have been submitted to the legislature this session. The committee of jurisdiction of one of the bills (Maine LD 1045), not quite ready to vote to pass the bill due to concern that the state would lose some of its federal healthcare funds, carried the bill forward (didn't kill it), and agreed to support it in the future on the condition that Ro Khanna's State Based Universal Health Care bill (H.R. 5010), or something like it, was passed by Congress. They plan to introduce a joint-resolution to the full legislature later this year, asking Maine's Congressional Delegation to support Representative Khanna's bill.

That would likely would not have happened if Maine AllCare, the state-level universal health care advocacy group I helped establish in 2010, had not been conducting educational programs for the public explaining the benefits of universal health care and organizing for support of a state-based plan. In addition, we developed the language of and are advocating for the passage of a Resolve that we hope to put on the 2022 ballot expressing public support for a publicly funded, privately delivered universal health care plan in Maine.

We believe such a program would not only be a step towards towards Medicare for All, but may be the only way to achieve such a program in the foreseeable future.

I share the concerns of Manilow and Tillow. I wish it was not so difficult to do the right thing in the U.S. I wish our country did not suffer from the systemic racism that has contributed so much to the difficulties they point out in their essay, and wish the American public had not been so susceptible to the anti-government propaganda from the right wing we have endured for the past 45 years. I wish we had not experienced the massive takeover of our health care system by profit-driven multi-national corporations. I wish the political class and some members of The Supreme Court didn't think corporations are equivalent to people and money is equivalent to speech. But that is the reality we are living in, and we have to find a way around it.

The idea of state-level universal health care, despite its shortcomings, is a powerful and compelling tool for education and for organizing the power of the people that will be absolutely necessary to overcome the power of the medical-industrial complex.

People, at least here in Maine, respond differently to initiatives that are seen as local as opposed to national and near as opposed to distant, because they feel there's a better chance they, as individual voters, can have a positive impact on the outcome.

Mobilizing the power of the people is the best shot we have to halt the destruction of our patient-focused healthcare system, and to preserve Medicine as a self-regulating profession governed by the Hippocratic Oath, rather than the pursuit of maximum profitability,

We should continue to vigorously advocate for a universal publicly funded privately delivered health care system at every level throughout America—state as well as national. That may be the only way to effectively reach and motivate enough of the American public to finally achieve our common goals as a nation—health care as a right for every resident of the U.S.—a goal that is already a reality in most wealthy, industrialized democratic societies, but remains only an aspirational vision in our own. Let's use every tool at our disposal to turn that aspiration into a reality.

Philip Caper is a physician and founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and currently serves on the Board of Maine AllCare.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

CANCEL CULTURE, CRT, THE NEW RED SCARE IN AMERICA

More Than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don't Learn About from Their Textbooks

Our students deserve to know that anti-communist repression has always been about a lot more than Russian spies, a blustering senator from Wisconsin, and a blacklist in Hollywood.

by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Published on Thursday, June 03, 2021
by Zinn Education Project




American politician Joseph McCarthy (1908 - 1957), the US Senator from Wisconsin, addresses the 1952 Republican National Convention at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, July 1952. (Photo: Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

In legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are introducing bills to curtail what educators—in public schools and universities—can say and teach about racism and sexism. Idaho Representative Ron Nate explained his sponsorship of a bill that was recently signed into law:

House Bill 377 is a great win for Idaho because it prohibits the promotion of Social Justice programming and advocacy for Critical Race Theory (CRT) in our schools and universities. CRT, rooted in Marxist thought, is a pernicious way of viewing the world. It demands that everything in society be viewed through the lens of racism, sexism, and power. . .

Rep. Nate said that this initiative "is only the beginning of removing the cancer of CRT from universities and preventing it from spreading into our K–12 education."

This latest moral panic from the Right comes on the heels of recent legislation dangerously curtailing the rights of transgender people—especially young people—and enacting another round of voter suppression. It is paramount that we organize to defeat these threats to the health and safety of LGBTQ people, voting rights, and the freedom of educators to tell the truth. It is also worth reminding ourselves—and our students—of other times in U.S. history when powerful politicians manufactured threats and whipped up fear to neutralize progressive challenges to the status quo—the McCarthy Era being a well-known high-water mark of state repression.

"The long Red Scare of the 20th century was a scorched-earth policy against the country's most progressive forces."

Unfortunately, the version of this era that students get from mainstream textbooks obscures more than it instructs. Every high school textbook I consulted places the section on McCarthyism in its Cold War chapter and includes the following set pieces: Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, and the Rosenbergs. It starts with a definition like "Anti-Communist attitudes and actions associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, including smear tactics and innuendo" (Pearson), closes with a heading like "McCarthy's Fall" (National Geographic), and a final sentence about the man himself: "Joseph McCarthy, suffering from alcoholism, died a broken man" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Contrary to this standard narrative, the "second Red Scare," launched immediately following World War II, was a time when the government and powerful elites conspired to stamp out the efforts of some of the United States' most dynamic activists and political organizations, like Sojourners for Truth and Justice, founded in 1951 by Louise Thompson Patterson and others. But repression of radical organizing in the United States was never confined to the so-called McCarthy era. Consider the attacks on radical activists like Emma Tenayuca, who led the 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers strike; and Hallie Flanagan, who headed the Federal Theater Project during the Great Depression. Whenever organizers challenged the status quo—racism, sexism, capitalism, militarism, and colonialism—its defenders screamed "communism." Our students deserve to know that anti-communist repression has always been about a lot more than Russian spies, a blustering senator from Wisconsin, and a blacklist in Hollywood.

Understating the Scope

The textbook periodization of anti-communist repression, which posits the Red Scare in the years following World War I, and the second Red Scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s, erases the continuity and pervasiveness of anti-communist politics and policies throughout the 20th century. It suggests to students that anti-communist political repression was exceptional, tightly bound into two discrete decades. But between the Palmer Raids and McCarthy, there were the Fish Committee and the Dies Committee (HUAC), and after McCarthy there was COINTELPRO. Indeed, anti-communist persecution targeted the same people in more than one era.

Another problem is the term "McCarthyism" itself, which makes it virtually impossible not to overstate the centrality of Joseph McCarthy, the man. Textbooks show us photos of McCarthy at a map depicting communist infiltration of the military (National Geographic) and acknowledging the cheers of a crowd of flag-waving supporters (Glencoe). Textbooks tell us that "He drank too much and could get offensive and even violent at times. He was not well-liked; but he learned how to be feared" (Glencoe). Students walk away with a sense of McCarthy as a kind of boorish joke, so extreme and incompetent he might easily be dismissed as an outlier. That may be true of the man, but not of his politics. As historian David K. Johnson has written: "To attribute the purges to McCarthy serves to marginalize them historically. It suggests they were the product of a uniquely unscrupulous demagogue, did not enjoy widespread support, and were not part of mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party."

Erasing the Victims

Not a single one of the McCarthyism sections in the five different middle and high school textbooks I consulted mentions anti-communist attacks on the civil rights movement or Black activists. Organizations like the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Sojourners for Truth and Justice were harassed out of existence by the government's attacks. Even Paul Robeson, arguably the most famous target of the Red Scare's attack on Black activists, shows up only in a chapter hundreds of pages removed from the one on McCarthyism, celebrating the "advances of African Americans on stage and screen" during the Harlem Renaissance (National Geographic). The textbooks give equal space—that is, virtually none—to other targets of anti-communist political persecution: radical labor unions, anti-war activists, feminists and LGBTQ people, Jews, and immigrants.


Dodging Politics

The words are repeated again and again in the textbook accounts of the Red Scare: communist and communism.

The Korean War reinforced the second Red Scare. . . . Legitimate concerns about espionage mixed with suspicions that Communist sympathizers in high places were helping Stalin and Mao. (Pearson)

The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the Communist takeover of China shocked the American public. These events fueled a fear that communism would spread around the world. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Astonishingly, four of the five textbooks I reviewed provide no definition of communism in the entire McCarthyism chapter.

For the most part, "communism" in textbooks is used in precisely the same way it was used by the anti-communist hatchet men: a kind of catch-all boogeyman, always dangerous and foreign (Mao! Stalin! China! Korea!) but never examined in the context of actual political struggles. For Claudia Jones, being a communist meant finding a way to organize against a racist criminal justice system that had recently sentenced eight Black teenagers to death for a crime they didn't commit; for Louis Jaffe, a teacher in the radical New York City Teachers Union, communism meant working for the elimination of racist curricula and for well-resourced schools for even the city's poorest children; and for Lorraine Hansberry, communism was a way to analyze the connection between the violence against Black Americans at home and the violence perpetrated by the U.S. military abroad, and a means to organize against both. For these activists, communism was not something foreign, but rooted in struggles for justice, at home and abroad. Were they to rely on their textbooks, students would have no way of knowing this arena of U.S. communist politics, since "communism" is siloed in a Cold War chapter, emphasizing foreign threats, and devoid of a single story of activists like those mentioned above.

Teaching the Red Scare

As a high school U.S. history teacher for 20 years, I struggled to find a good way to teach McCarthyism. So most of the time—I am embarrassed to admit—I skipped it altogether. "Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare" is a lesson I wish I had written earlier in my career. In it, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression. Some are communists (or Communists), some are not. Most are politically engaged in some form of organizing, but not all. They are men and women, immigrants and native-born, young and old, racially diverse, in government and outside it, affluent, middle class, and poor, Queer and straight. Students analyze why these disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign. What kind of threat did they pose in the view of the U.S. government? And why do most textbooks leave them out?

The long Red Scare of the 20th century was a scorched-earth policy against the country's most progressive forces—labor unions organizing across racial lines; civil rights organizations offering intersectional critiques of capitalism, racism, and gender oppression, generations before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined that term; writers, artists, and journalists who advocated internationalism and peace. Red-baiting has not gone away, but it lacks the same destructive power it once had. When Sen. Ted Cruz slings the word "socialist" at one of his opponents, it may induce a little cortisol burst in his supporters. But in the minds of many younger people, "socialism" more likely evokes northern European nations with free college, universal health care, and paid family leave—not exactly the stuff of nightmares—than Stalinist Russia.

But it would be naive to conclude there is no cause for concern. When we look at the function McCarthyism served, it is not hard to find new discourses doing similar kinds of dirty work. Whereas "communist" became shorthand for any undesirable person or belief in the eyes of the elites, so today "voter fraud" is used by Republicans to disenfranchise "undesirable" voters who threaten to upset their traditional seats of power, and Critical Race Theory acts as a sweeping indictment of white supremacy's critics. This lesson aims to help students become alert to the way shiny new terminology can advance very old forms of oppression.

Perhaps more importantly, the version of McCarthyism we offer our students should restore the powerful and inspiring stories of the activists and organizations who were its victims. The transformational social change needed in the United States and across the globe will never come from above, from presidents, CEOs, or billionaires. It will come from people like us, like our students—and like the many everyday people targeted by anti-communist repression. The Jack O'Dells, Esther Cooper Jacksons, Sam Wallachs, and Elizabeth Catletts. Although activists who call for abolition of prisons and police, or a complete moratorium on fossil fuel extraction, or a jobs guarantee for every American, are often dismissed as impractical, imprudent, and utopian, our students deserve to know there have always been savvy dreamers, clear-eyed critics of the status quo, who believe—and act like—a better world is possible.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca has taught high school social studies since 2000. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and is a Zinn Education Project organizer and writer.

© 2021 Zinn Education Project

Was There a Wuhan Lab Leak? An Inquiry Won't Dig Out the Truth. It Will Deepen the Deception

Our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.

by Jonathan Cook

Published on
Wednesday, June 02, 2021
by Common Dreams

A fireman disinfects a lab of Wuhan No. 3 Boarding School in Hanyang District of Wuhan City, central China's Hubei Province, Aug. 3, 2020. (Photo by Wang Fang/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/ via Getty Images)

A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan—a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus—was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.

Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.

Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.

For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan's have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents—often found in animals such as bats—to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.

Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan's many times before. And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?

No interest in truth

Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth—or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate media.

The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.

We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia—when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.

No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.

Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.

Virus experiments

Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.

But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.

Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world's leading virologists.

But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments—what is known, in scientific parlance, as "gain-of-function" research.

Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.

The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci—yes, the US President's chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump's reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic's saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators.

And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.

Colluding in deceit

This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.

If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO's spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.

"The events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests."

He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media's attention to Wuhan's wet market.

The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences—and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet—is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend

The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid's origins. But it mentions none of Wade's explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.

Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.

Media blackout

So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?


The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade's article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a "conspiracy theory" have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.

Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, "the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory."

The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally "viable" and that the WHO's earlier investigation had not given "balanced consideration" to both—a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.

And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)

The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade's research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade's revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.

Evasion tactic

Biden's so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic's shadow.

The Biden administration will hope the public's interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation's findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.

But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact—just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.

Illusion of truth

The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us—to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.

In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system—despite all its flaws—is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.

The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively—but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive—debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.

The media's task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year's unquestionable certainty—that the pandemic had an animal origin—to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus' emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.

What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:

* How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter—in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?

* Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?

* Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid's animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?

* And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?

Class interests

Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests—or those of their class or professional group.

Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community's failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.

Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public's faith in the "benevolence" of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.

And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.

What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.

Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook's blog.


Jonathan Cook won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include: "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (2008) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair "(2008). His website is here.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Global Task Force Says to Stop Next Pandemic Humanity Must End Destruction of Nature

"We can choose to transform this moment into an opportunity to learn from our recent tragic mistakes... We can choose to invest in prevention."

by Julia Conley, staff writer
Published on Friday, June 04, 2021
by Common Dreams

Charred remains of trees lie the Brazilian rainforest between Ariquemes and Porto Velho, Brazil. (Photo: Stephanie Maze/Getty Images)

More than a year into the pandemic that's still raging across much of the world, an independent task force of scientists said government leaders are doing far too little to stop future pandemics at their source by ending the exploitation and destruction of nature.

The task force was convened by Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE)—the academic affiliates of the Coalition for Preventing Pandemics at the Source (PPS).

By the end of the summer, scientists from all over the world plan to present the coalition with an action plan to stop pandemics "at the point of spillover of pathogens from animals to humans, well before they can become global pandemics, epidemics, or even localized outbreaks."

"Covid-19 was a warning shot from nature to our species," tweeted Dr. Aaron Bernstein of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE, who is leading the task force. "We need greater investment in science and actions to stop viruses from spilling into humans in the first place."

#COVID-19 was a warning shot from nature to our species. We need greater investment in science & actions to stop viruses from spilling into humans in the first place.

Learn more about our #PandemicPrevention task force: https://t.co/p4sdrDaVrw

— Dr. Aaron Bernstein (@DrAriBernstein) June 1, 2021

Covid-19 is only the latest disease scientists believe originated with animals, along with SARS, MERS, Ebola, and others. About 75% of new infectious diseases are of zoonotic origin, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"The current narrative is heavily weighted towards health system preparedness, containment, and vaccinations. This presumes the best we can do is prevent a disease from spreading once it emerges... The costs of actions [to prevent spillovers] are a fraction of the cost of managing a pandemic once it emerges." —Dr. Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Chan C-CHANGEAhead of the scientific task force's report, PPS has identified parts of the world where viral spillover from animals to humans is most likely to happen, including West and Central Africa and South Asia.

A Global Action Fund for Pandemic Prevention would fuel on-the-ground prevention efforts, financing the development of "cutting-edge behavior change approaches, diagnostic platforms, incentives programs, technologies, and data solutions" aimed at pushing communities around the world to end the exploitation of wildlife.

Protection measures would include ending deforestation, shutting down wildlife trade industries, better protecting farm animals from infection, and introducing rapid disease detection in animal markets like the one where Covid-19 is believed to have originated.

According to researchers at Princeton University and Duke University, the annual cost of such measures to prevent another pandemic at the source would be $26.6 billion—about 2% of what the pandemic has cost the global community so far.

The task force is convening about a month after an independent panel presented the WHO with a report on preventing another pandemic, garnering criticism for focusing heavily on how to stop community transmission of diseases rather than preventing spillover to begin with.

"The current narrative is heavily weighted towards health system preparedness, containment, and vaccinations," Bernstein told The Guardian. "This presumes the best we can do is prevent a disease from spreading once it emerges. We've learned that our salvation comes cheap. The costs of actions [to prevent spillovers] are a fraction of the cost of managing a pandemic once it emerges."

The work of the task force will inform the High-Level Panel on Prevention at the Source, which was assembled in May to advise WHO. The panel aims to adopt a "one health" approach to public health, aimed at improving the wellbeing of the whole global community and the planet by recognizing the connections between humans, animals, and nature.

"We need to focus on what science tells us, not what our existing organizations are equipped to do," Bernstein said. "The reason we have the challenge we do is because there is no WHO equivalent for planetary health."

In large part, Bernstein noted, the focus on preventing the spread of immune diseases from person-to-person is likely motivated by the drive for profits in the public health sector.

"To be perfectly blunt, there's a lot of money to be made on making better drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics," he said. "But you can't sell forest conservation for profit."

The task force aims to make clear to the WHO and policymakers around the world that "this pandemic is not something that is happening to us; rather, it is something we helped create by not properly considering the relationship between nature and our own health."

"We can choose to transform this moment into an opportunity to learn from our recent tragic mistakes, and recognize humanity's dependence on the natural systems that support us," PPS said. "We can choose to invest in prevention."

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05 June, World Environment Day: Call for Mobilization | La Via Campesina

 2 JUNE 2021  CAMPAIGN AGAINST AGROTOXICS, CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, LAND, WATER AND TERRITORIES, TRANSNATIONAL COMPANIES AND AGRIBUSINESS

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 This World Environment Day, La Via Campesina calls for actions to protect Mother Earth and demand the urgent implementation of the UN Declaration for the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

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Life Over Profits – This Planet is our Only Home!

(Harare: June 2, 2021) By now it is evident that the capitalist system causes predatory actions against the environment, leading to severe damage to our planet. The extractive industrial model, together with increased militarization to keep imperialist hegemony, destroys our lands and rivers, forests and seas, reduces biodiversity, pillages our territories and criminalizes our struggles. The effects of this model are becoming more and more serious: violent storms, cyclones, droughts, heat waves, floods, migrations, over-consumption and food waste, as well as toxic foods that cause illness and kill across the world.

Moreover, high-cost diseases (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS] such the current COVID-19 pandemic with over 3.3 million deaths so far) seem to be linked to contaminated food and livestock, and particularly affecting people with underlying health conditions such as malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes.

We can affirm that industrial farming methods have led to untold environmental and social destruction globally as they oversimplify complex systems. This has nothing to do with feeding people, since the number of people affected by hunger and malnutrition continues to raise, but it’s about accumulation of power and control by a few.

Worldwide, we the peasant and indigenous communities of every nation feed 70% of the world’s population while having access only to 25% of agricultural resources. Women and migrants represent more than 60% of labourers in agricultural production, yet they continue to suffer exploitation, racism, violence and a systematic violation of their human rights.

Enough is Enough!

We, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, migrants and rural communities want food sovereignty based peasant agroecology to reduce emissions and achieve social justice. The fight for food sovereignty is a social, political and ecological vision that brings together multiple groups within a single movement to challenge capital, build relationships with nature and defend systems of shared control over and access to the requirements of life.

No to False Solutions!

We denounce and reject all the false solutions being put on the table to face the environmental and climate crisis by our governments working closely with transnational corporations (TNCs). Climate Smart agriculture, soil sequestration programs, Nature based solutions, payments for environmental services (PES), etc., allow capitalism to keep polluting to the detriment of the environment and our rights.

These false solutions increase the risk of land grabbing the control of seed diversity by transnational corporations and the use of agrotoxics and expanded genetic manipulation. All this has led, among other things, to the emergence of superweeds and superbugs, putting the survival of life as we know it on a cliff’s edge.

Time to Transform! No Future without Food Sovereignty!

As La Via Campesina, we believe that action must be taken without delay for a complete turnaround, transforming our societies, changing the capitalist system that exploits, pollutes and uses up our commons, which are the heritage of peoples throughout the world. This urgent and much needed change must be implemented through a real social transformation that will only be possible if the rights of peasants, indigenous peoples, women, migrants and all those working in rural areas are fully respected. This means ending all forms of violence against all people and having access and democratically controlling land, water, territories and other common resources

We, therefore, call our members, activists and ally movements and organizations, on June 5th the World Environment Day, to support our actions to protect Mother Earth and our efforts to ensure the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) by national governments.

We must also urgently unite against the forthcoming corporate led UN Food System Summit as it promotes false solutions which will not only worsen the current climate and environmental crisis but will also constitute a serious attack to our rights as peasants, indigenous communities, women, migrants and rural communities.

Let’s organize solidarity actions on June 5th at 12.00 midday #InDefenseOfThePlanet, including planting trees.

Download and Read the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle Manifesto in defense of the Planet in English, Spanish, Portuguese

Globalise the Struggle, Globalise Hope

 #InDefenseOfThePlanet #NoFuturewithoutFoodSovereignty

https://viacampesina.org/en

 

Anti-imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment

 2 JUNE 2021 

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, TRANSNATIONAL COMPANIES AND AGRIBUSINESS

The planet before profits – Only one Earth

Despite our adventures into space we know that, for now, we humans have only one planet to call home. Our survival here is dependent of the survival of all living things here plant and animal.

The unrestrained extraction and exploitation of natural resources for profit by the large corporations, and the logic of the capitalist system have depleted our planet.

The destructive power of the current stage of capitalism – financial capitalism – is unprecedented. Transnational companies continue to increase their capacity to exploit common goods, pushing forward in mining projects, deforestation, and the private appropriation of water among other things. In agriculture, transnational companies apply the model of agribusiness based on mono-crops and pesticide use, that destroy biodiversity and changes the climate. The imperialists of the USA and other global north countries attack peripheral countries looking to privatize common goods that the people, the real owners of natural resources, used to take care of in each country.

The result is clear: we are experiencing the worst environmental crisis in the history of humanity and all of humanity will be affected if this unhealthy dynamic of capital continues. Climate change is already affecting people’s lives all across the world, and this is not the only consequence of the environmental crisis. The world’s water is contaminated by plastics and pesticides and the springs are drying up. We are also seeing dramatic rates of extinction of the planet’s biodiversity as well as large scale biopiracy – where commercial interests patent naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material imposing limits on how they can be used even in their naturally occurring environments. The soil is being degraded by deforestation and mono-cropping, and large regions are being completely destroyed by large-scale mining.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest manifestation of this environmental and systemic crisis. The origin of these super pathogens is directly related to the destruction of ecosystems historically conserved by peasant and traditional communities. Environmental devastation liberates microorganisms that are in equilibrium in their natural habitat. When these microorganisms encounter large industrial installations, overpopulated with various animals that are confined and bombarded with antibiotics and hormones, they reproduce like pathogens, then they come into contact with large human populations, including people with reduced natural immune defenses due to the constant agrochemical contamination from the industrially produced food they eat. This process, in addition to deforestation and the elimination of the habitats of wild animals provokes the migration of pathogens to human beings. If this mode of production continues, we will have many new viruses, leading to new pandemics

All human beings are being affected by this degradation of our planet, especially women, children, Indigenous and poorest people of the world. Today we also have more than 134,000 species of flora and fauna are under threat of extinction.

It is important also to highlight the nefarious role that military activities play in the destruction of the planet. In addition to carrying our constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, The USA military, with its allies, is one of the biggest contaminators in the world, though its toxic legacy of depleted uranium, and its use of oil, fuel for air planes, pesticides and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead.

Some corporations, instead of combatting the causes of planetary destruction, focus on green capitalism, converting natural resources into commodities and new areas for market speculation, like carbon credits, environmental preservation credits, and other false solutions that will not resolve the social and ecological needs of the people. The empire has tried to restructure its economic base with market-based projects that are built around the increased exploitation of natural resources in the global south to produce a new supposedly ‘green’ technological base.

This path will inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity and of nature as we know it. It is a project of death, domination and destruction.

The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms – not greed and profit – guide the actions of nations and peoples. It is a solution focused on agroecological production of food; the democratization of the access to land through agrarian reform; the protection and care of common goods such as water, biodiversity and land; and the transition to an energy model that responds to the real needs of the working class with social and environmental justice, overcoming patriarchy and racism.

Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time. We need to put an end to the domination of capital over life in order to create a world that is just, egalitarian and vibrant, so that we all can live well and in peace.

https://viacampesina.org/en

Ahead of Global Actions, Farmers Release 'Anti-Imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment'

"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer
Published on Wednesday, June 02, 2021 by Common Dreams

A youth environmental activist holds a placard reading "Capitalism kills the planet" during a protest outside the Spanish Parliament in Madrid on September 25, 2020. (Photo: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

As experts and research continue to make the case for overhauling humanity's destructive relationship with nature, La Via Campesina—a global movement of peasants, farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous individuals, migrants, and agricultural workers—echoed that message on Wednesday.

"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms—not greed and profit—guide the actions of nations and peoples."
—Manifesto

The movement, which was founded nearly three decades ago and is made up of scores of groups in over 80 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas that collectively represent millions of people, released an "Anti-Imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment" ahead of global actions planned for Saturday.

"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time," the manifesto declares. "We need to put an end to the domination of capital over life in order to create a world that is just, egalitarian, and vibrant, so that we all can live well and in peace."

Backed by scientific findings on the climate and biodiversity crises, the movement takes aim at "the destructive power of the current stage of capitalism," highlighting how "the unrestrained extraction and exploitation of natural resources for profit by the large corporations, and the logic of the capitalist system, have depleted our planet."

As the manifesto explains, "we are experiencing the worst environmental crisis in the history of humanity," and that it will only get worse absent global intervention:


Climate change is already affecting people's lives all across the world, and this is not the only consequence of the environmental crisis. The world's water is contaminated by plastics and pesticides and the springs are drying up. We are also seeing dramatic rates of extinction of the planet's biodiversity as well as large scale biopiracy—where commercial interests patent naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material imposing limits on how they can be used even in their naturally occurring environments. The soil is being degraded by deforestation and monocropping, and large regions are being completely destroyed by large-scale mining.

"The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest manifestation of this environmental and systemic crisis," the manifesto notes.

Since the ongoing coronavirus outbreak started, public health experts and world leaders have repeatedly called for developing, in the words of famed conservationist Jane Goodall, "a new mindset for our survival" to prevent future pandemics.

“I hope we emerge from this pandemic… with a new respect for nature, the natural world and animals.”

—Jane Goodall @JaneGoodallInst in the newly released #WeAreNature film, calling for a paradigm shift in how we view nature & the rest of life on #ForNature pic.twitter.com/SUbz859e9g

— ipbes (@IPBES) May 31, 2021

However, human exploitation of nature continues, despite the pandemic's significant death toll and economic fallout, and the clear threats of business as usual.


The manifesto—published in English, Spanish, and French—slams imperialists of the Global North, including and especially the United States, for continuing to "attack peripheral countries looking to privatize common goods that the people, the real owners of natural resources, used to take care of in each country."

"It is important also to highlight the nefarious role that military activities play in the destruction of the planet," the manifesto says. "In addition to carrying our constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, the USA military, with its allies, is one of the biggest contaminators in the world, though its toxic legacy of depleted uranium, and its use of oil, fuel for airplanes, pesticides, and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead."

The movement also blasts transnational companies for advancing a planet-wrecking agricultural model based on monocrops and pesticide use and, more broadly, for increasing "their capacity to exploit common goods, pushing forward in mining projects, deforestation, and the private appropriation of water among other things."



“. . .as principles of regenerative agriculture and soil health gain popularity around the world, pesticide companies have jumped on the bandwagon to greenwash their products.” https://t.co/qXhuqMMHD5

— Emily Knobbe (@EmilyKnobbe) June 1, 2021

"Some corporations, instead of combating the causes of planetary destruction, focus on green capitalism, converting natural resources into commodities and new areas for market speculation, like carbon credits, environmental preservation credits, and other false solutions that will not resolve the social and ecological needs of the people," the movement points out.

"This path will inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity and of nature as we know it," the manifesto says. "It is a project of death, domination, and destruction."

"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms—not greed and profit—guide the actions of nations and peoples," it asserts.

According to La Via Campesina, "It is a solution focused on agroecological production of food; the democratization of the access to land through agrarian reform; the protection and care of common goods such as water, biodiversity and land; and the transition to an energy model that responds to the real needs of the working class with social and environmental justice, overcoming patriarchy and racism."



#LVC calls for solidarity actions on June 5th, World Environment Day, #InDefenseOfThePlanet and against forthcoming corporate-led UN Food System Summit which promotes false solutions that will worsen current climate and environmental crisis. https://t.co/FwogGBeLxW pic.twitter.com/p75XEnYxu5

— La Via Campesina (@via_campesina) June 2, 2021

People across the globe are planning actions for June 5, World Environment Day, to demand the protection of Mother Earth and the "full implementation" of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), La Via Campesina said Wednesday in a statement about the upcoming #InDefenseOfThePlanet actions.

"We must also urgently unite against the forthcoming corporate-led U.N. Food System Summit," the statement noted, "as it promotes false solutions which will not only worsen the current climate and environmental crisis but will also constitute a serious attack to our rights as peasants, Indigenous communities, women, migrants, and rural communities."

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UN Agencies Call for a Decade of Restoring Ecosystems to Confront Biodiversity and Climate Emergencies

The new report "charts the losses that result from a poor stewardship of the planet."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer
Published on Thursday, June 03, 2021
by Common Dreams

Three volunteers plant sea grass in the sand dunes at Fort Walton Beach in Florida. (Photo: Sean Murphy/Getty Images)

Just ahead of World Environment Day and amid demands from scientists and grassroots organizers for global systemic changes, a pair of United Nations agencies on Thursday launched the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration with a report that serves as a call to action for everyone to join the #GenerationRestoration movement.

"Restoration is essential for keeping global temperature rise below 2°C, ensuring food security for a growing population, and slowing the rate of species extinctions."
—U.N. report

The new U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report highlights that humans are using 1.6 times the resources that the planet can sustainably provide and since the 1990s, 420 million hectares or over a million acres of forest have been lost.

Such statistics underscore the need for countries to deliver on existing pledges to restore at least one billion degraded hectares of land—roughly 2.47 billion acres or an area about the size of China—as well as make similar commitments for the world's oceans.

"We speak of two-thirds of ocean ecosystems being damaged, degraded, and modified, and if you consider that the planet is 70% ocean, that is an enormous amount, including plastic pollution which is so ubiquitous that it is very hard to avoid plastic—even in fish that we catch and eat," said Tim Christophersen, head of UNEP's Nature for Climate Branch, Ecosystems Division, according to U.N. News.

In the report's foreword, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen and FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu write that "the 2021–2030 timeline underlines the urgency of the task. Without a powerful 10-year drive for restoration, we can neither achieve the climate targets of the Paris agreement, nor the Sustainable Development Goals."

Andersen and Qu point out that "degradation is already affecting the well-being of an estimated 3.2 billion people—that is 40% of the world's population. Every single year we lose ecosystem services worth more than 10% of our global economic output."

"This report presents the case for why we all must throw our weight behind a global restoration effort," they continue. "Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, it explains the crucial role played by ecosystems from forests and farmland to rivers and oceans, and charts the losses that result from our poor stewardship of the planet."



On #WorldEnvironmentDay, join us as we launch the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and embark on a journey to rapidly restore our ecosystems.

Because people and nature can heal together. #GenerationRestoration https://t.co/4h22lT1fph pic.twitter.com/zy2ndvsSbj

— Inger Andersen (@andersen_inger) June 3, 2021

Entitled Becoming #GenerationRestoration: Ecosystem Restoration for People, Nature, and Climate (pdf), the report says that "restoration is essential for keeping global temperature rise below 2°C, ensuring food security for a growing population, and slowing the rate of species extinctions. Humanity is not outside of nature; it is part of it. We need to recreate a balanced relationship with the ecosystems that sustain us."


The agencies detail what is happening in various ecosystems, from farmlands and forests to grasslands, mountains, peatlands, savannahs, urban areas, and bodies of water. They also outline why restoration is necessary for the economy, food security, clean water, human health and well-being, the climate emergency, peace, and biodiversity.

"Unfortunately, we are still going in the wrong direction," the report warns. "People living in poverty, women, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups bear the brunt of this damage, and the Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened existing inequalities."

UNEP and FAO also emphasize that restoration must happen on a massive scale to achieve the international community's sustainable development agenda, that successful efforts will require "deep changes" but deliver multiple benefits, and that "everyone has a role to play," from governments and donors to youth organizers.

Ecosystem restoration, the report says, "is one of the most important ways of delivering nature-based solutions for societal challenges." Some of the changes it requires include natural capital accounting, eliminating subsidies that incentivize further degradation and fuel the climate emergency, reducing food waste, using agricultural land more efficiently, promoting plant-based diets, and incorporating the importance of healthy ecosystems into educational systems.

We must restore ecosystems to tackle the #ClimateCrisis, save species from extinction & secure our future

Explore our #GenerationRestoration interactive & find out what your country has committed to restore #WorldEnvironmentDay #ForNaturehttps://t.co/saXlRoGtPh

— UN Environment Programme (@UNEP) June 3, 2021

The U.N. agencies estimate that restoring lands in line with the one billion hectare commitment will require an investment of at least $200 billion per year by 2030—and while that may seem steep, the report notes that every $1 invested in restoration creates up to 30 times that amount in economic benefits.

"Restoration needs to be seen as an infrastructure investment in a country's well-being. We need imagination," UNEP's Christophersen told The Guardian. "For many people, I think restoring a billion hectares is a bit abstract. We have decades of experience of how this could work but never on the scale we're talking about. We have space program[s] and nuclear weapons—it is possible."

The report comes as 126 Nobel laureates shared a statement titled "Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action" with leaders of Group of Seven countries and the U.N. secretary-general ahead of a G-7 summit, and a day after La Via Campesina, an international movement of peasants and others, published an "Anti-Imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment." Members of that movement are among those planning global actions for Saturday, which is World Environment Day.

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