Friday, June 04, 2021

Humanity’s #1 environmental problem is consumption—climate change is just one of the byproducts

By focusing the climate fight on what we emit, not what we consume, we are destined to fail—net-zero emissions policies aren’t enough to prevent catastrophe.

By Reynard Loki
-June 3, 2021
SOURCE
Independent Media Institute
Carbon bomb: More than four-fifths of the global economy is powered by fossil fuels. (Photo credit: Damian Bakarcic/Flickr)  

Solving the global climate crisis is not going to be easy. So when the seemingly simple “net-zero” concept was proposed, it quickly became a popular rallying cry in the fight against climate change. “Net-zero” is based on the idea that human society can continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, provided that there is a way to “offset” the emissions. It makes sense that the main thrust of the climate fight is to drastically slash our carbon emissions: Global average temperatures are around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer today than before the Industrial Revolution caused Earth’s carbon cycle to speed up, building the carbon bomb that we are seeing explode today.

It has been widely accepted that net-zero is a major objective that is required to achieve the Paris climate agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In their special report on global warming released in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, nations must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. This target has been embraced by nations, politicians, academics, activists, farmers, and even oil and gas companies.

The Lowy Institute’s annual survey of climate sentiment in Australia, published in May, found that eight out of ten Australians support “setting a net-zero emissions target for 2050.” Similarly, a separate poll, also published in May, conducted by Leger 360 in conjunction with the Association for Canadian Studies, found that the majority of Canadians and Americans support their respective nations meeting that target.

To realize the net-zero 2050 dream, society must hit a perfect combination of technological advances, climate-driven policies and lowered emissions. Ingredients in the recipe for success include the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the rapid increase in the use of electric vehicles, and the maturation of early-stage technologies like carbon capture and storage. “Addressing climate change will require investment in technologies that help to limit future emissions,” said Tom Crowther, a professor of global ecosystem ecology at ETH Zürich and the chief scientific adviser to the United Nation’s Trillion Tree Campaign. “[B]ut we will need thousands of solutions in combination.” Overall, we need nothing less than a fundamental change in how humanity operates. The Financial Times argues that “[m]eeting this goal… would require a total transformation of the global economy over the next three decades.” That is a tall order.

In May, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2050 roadmap for the global energy sector. “We are very happy to note that many governments now are making commitments to bring their emissions to net-zero by 2050,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, in a press briefing on May 18. “Very encouraging, those commitments.” He also pointed out how the IEA has “already made special cases and analyses on this 1.5 degrees future to understand our modeling capabilities, data and how we can make an energy world which is compatible with [a] 1.5 [degrees future].”

“Efforts to reach net-zero must be complemented with adaptation and resilience measures, and the mobilization of climate financing for developing countries,” says the United Nations. This multilayered approach, while necessary, makes it even more difficult to track progress on a global scale, with each nation, state and local government working on separate methods, with different definitions, and with varying degrees of legal obligations. While more than 120 nations have made the “net-zero by 2050” pledge, only six countries—France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary and New Zealand—have made that target the law of the land. Canada, Chile, Spain, South Korea, Fiji and the European Union are considering doing the same. President Joe Biden made the 2050 pledge. China said it will hit the target before 2060.

By midcentury, perhaps we can finally live as harmoniously with the planetary ecosystem as we did before the Industrial Revolution. Well, that’s the hope, at least. The problem is that the net-zero plan is a fantasy. By letting governments and the polluting industries make vague commitments without any legal requirement to meet them, society is placing a lot of trust in a mirage. By relying on future technologies, we are shifting the ultimate solutions to the next generation. By making our emissions the culprit, and not our overconsumption, we are missing the chance to truly align an ethical, balanced and sustainable human lifestyle with the requirements to maintain healthy, functioning ecosystems—of which we are a primary beneficiary. And thinking that renewable energy will save the day is simply delusional when 84 percent of the global economy is currently powered by fossil fuels, while renewables account for a meager 5 percent share of the world’s overall energy consumption.

Beyond that obvious and massive hurdle, “[i]mportant questions are being overlooked,” write climate researchers Joeri Rogelj, Oliver Geden, Annette Cowie and Andy Reisinger, in a commentary published in March in the journal Nature. “Should some sectors, such as electricity generation, reach [net zero] earlier to counterbalance harder-to-abate sectors including heavy industry? Is it fair to expect emerging economies to reach [net zero] on the same schedule as long-industrialized ones? Without careful attention to such issues, individual achievements risk being too weak to deliver the collective climate goal of the Paris agreement.”

Another part of the net-zero fantasy is the illogical and irresponsible reliance on technologies that have not yet been tested or even developed. Writing in the Conversation, climate scientists James Dyke of the University of Exeter, Robert Watson of the University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr of Lund University admit that they were “deceived” by the “deceptively simple” premise of net-zero. They warn other scientists not to fall prey to this “dangerous trap” that “helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.”

Even slashing emissions now would not solve the problem. More than 90 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that have been created over the past 50 years are currently stored in the world’s oceans, and are eventually and slowly being released into the atmosphere as global warming heat. If society were to cut all emissions today, this drawn-out process of heating the air above locks the world into what the Economist calls “inevitable warming” in the years ahead.

There’s another deeper, philosophical problem. The concept that reducing emissions is the way out of the climate crisis is a convenient way to maintain society’s current levels of rampant overconsumption. By tagging emissions as the culprit, and not our personal behaviors, those of us who can afford to will continue to possess massive homes, multiple cars, and a myriad of electronic devices—as long as they use renewable energy. We can continue to traveling around the globe and taking cruise ships and buying food and goods that originate thousands of miles away—as long as those emissions are offset elsewhere.

The reality is that we don’t need more electric vehicles; we need fewer vehicles, period. Just think of all the materials that go into making an electric vehicle: steel, iron, aluminum, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, carbon fibers, polymers, graphite, glass, and a variety of rare-earth minerals like dysprosium, neodymium, niobium, terbium and praseodymium. The mining, processing and manufacturing industries required to extract and use these materials are highly destructive to ecosystems around the world—even deep-sea environments that are being ruined when waste rock and sediment from mining is dumped into the ocean—and emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In a report released in May, the IEA found that in order to meet global climate targets, the demand for minerals to supply the electric car industry may increase by at least 30 times by 2040. And that requires more mining and more manufacturing, which requires more fossil fuel combustion, and that means more emissions. A 2019 study published in the journal Energy by researchers in China found that manufacturing a single electric car emits about 2.5 more metric tons of carbon dioxide than manufacturing a car with an internal combustion (fossil fuel) engine. “The data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to [realizing] those ambitions,” said IEA’s Birol after the release of his agency’s minerals report.

“The details behind ‘net-zero’ labels differ enormously,” write Rogelj, Geden, Cowie and Reisinger. “Some targets focus solely on carbon dioxide. Others cover all greenhouse gases. Companies might consider only emissions under their direct control, or include those from their supply chains and from the use or disposal of their products. Sometimes the targets do not aim to reduce emissions, but compensate for them with offsets.”

Another issue that net-zero and climate discussions rarely include is our broken, polluting and unethical animal-based food system. Together, the meat and dairy industries account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. And these industries are not poised to reduce their emissions to the degree that is required to meet the Paris agreement goal. The IPCC report concedes that in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, negative emissions technologies (NETs)—technologies that remove carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere—will need to be deployed. “Even with rapid mitigation efforts, it is likely that NETs will be required to offset emissions from sectors that cannot easily reduce their emissions to zero, research shows,” according to Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering climate science and energy policy. “These sectors include rice and meat production, which produce methane, and air travel.”

“We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said ecologist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”

There is no telling what humanity’s meat consumption will be like in 30 years, but the trendlines are not promising. While interest in veganism hit an all-time high last year (driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic) and there has been strong support for ending federal bailouts for factory farms, global meat consumption is expected to increase 1.4 percent per year through 2023. “Dietary shifts could contribute one-fifth of the mitigation needed to hold warming below 2°C, with one-quarter of low-cost options,” according to the IPCC report. “There, however, remains limited evidence of effective policy interventions to achieve such large-scale shifts in dietary choices, and prevailing trends are for increasing rather than decreasing demand for livestock products at the global scale.”

“Although the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transport garners the most attention, activities relating to land management, including agriculture and forestry, produce almost one-quarter of heat-trapping gases resulting from human activities,” writes Quirin Schiermeier for the journal Nature. “The race to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels… might be a lost cause unless land is used in a more sustainable and climate-friendly way.”

The oil and gas industry has been happy to support the net-zero myth, using it as a smokescreen to project abstract pledges while still increasing their production of fossil fuels. Last year, for example, BP announced what the New York Times described as “the most ambitious climate change goal of any major oil company.” Yet the London-based firm, which netted an income of more than $20 billion in 2020, “provided few details on how, exactly, it would achieve that difficult feat.” It helps to put into context the sheer magnitude of emissions that are generated from BP’s product. Including extraction, refinement and combustion, the annual emissions of the company’s fossil fuels amount to 415 million tons—a footprint nearly equivalent to that of the state of California. And the company has not made any firm commitments to stop extracting fossil fuel.

“BP is one of the companies most responsible for the climate emergency,” said 350.org campaigner Ellen Gibson, who works on fossil fuel divestment. “They say they want their business model to align with the Paris Agreement, but simply put: it is not possible to keep to a [2°C] warming limit—let alone [1.5°C]—while continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Unless BP commits clearly to stop searching for more oil and gas, and to keep their existing reserves in the ground, we shouldn’t take a word of their PR spin seriously.”

In February, Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, announced details of how it will achieve its net-zero emissions pledge by 2050. But, reports Inside Climate News, “[t]he day after Shell announced its net-zero ambition, the company also announced it would build a $6.4 billion gas project in Australia that is expected to operate for nearly 30 years, part of a joint venture with PetroChina. That project alone would draw more investment from Shell than all of its renewable energy ventures to date.”

“Getting to net-zero doesn’t require us to stop looking for, extracting and burning fossil fuels—a major driver of the climate crisis. It might require some reduction, but it would definitely not keep fossil fuels in the ground where they belong,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Patti Lynn, the executive director of Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Boston, on NationofChange. “In short, aiming for net-zero is a far cry from getting to the roots of the climate crisis. It certainly does nothing to shift an unjust economy that relies on unlimited extraction and burning of fossil fuels for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Without getting to the root of the problem, we will never truly solve it.”

There’s still another sad reality that is tied to the net-zero fantasy. Tying its success to technologies that aren’t yet proven at scale (like carbon capture technologies, which today capture a paltry 0.1 percent of global emissions) or even here yet (like Bill Gates’ head-scratching scheme to dim the Sun—more an exercise in hubris than in logic) amounts to kicking the climate ball down the field, to be solved by the next generation. Many of those who will be in charge in 2050 have not yet been born. By trying to change our emissions, but not our behavior, we are doing those future leaders and their constituents a grave disservice. “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said climate youth activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

The IEA’s goal of making an “energy world” compatible with a 1.5 degrees Celsius future is a bit off the mark. Ultimately, the transformation of the global economy and the healing of the environment starts with making our consumption—that is, our impact—compatible with the future we want. And that begins with making the right personal decisions as consumers, homemakers, parents, travelers, drivers and eaters. “Every single day that we live, we make some impact on the planet,” said famed primatologist Jane Goodall. “We have a choice as to what kind of impact that is.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s “Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow” in 2016. His work has been published by Truthout, Salon, BillMoyers.com, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

The US has the power to meet all of its clean energy needs

The stage is set for a rapid transition to renewable energy. But time is of the essence.


SOURCENationofChange

A new report was released by the Environment America Research & Policy Center and the Frontier Group this week stating the U.S. has the power to move away from fossil fuels and focus on a clean energy system run on renewables. 

Coal, oil and gas are responsible for a rapidly warming planet, for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. each year from air pollution, and for untold environmental damage. A shift to emission-free energy from the wind, sun and other renewable sources can solve many of America’s most pressing environmental and public health challenges, writes the report. 

The U.S. already has enough wind and solar resources to meet the country’s energy needs and renewable technologies are also advancing and becoming more affordable. 

“This report shows that between the sunshine and the wind, we have the potential to run our society on clean energy, today and in the future,” says Susan Rakov, chair of Environment America Research & Policy Center’s (EARPC) Clean Energy program. 

The analysis’ plan to reach a 100 percent renewable future focuses on four key areas: 

  1. Rapidly deploy clean energy.
  2. Modernize the grid.
  3. Reduce and manage energy demand.
  4. Repower everything with renewables.

The stage is set for a rapid transition to renewable energy. But time is of the essence. Policymakers must do all they can to accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels to an energy system in which the vast majority of our energy comes from renewable sources like the wind and sun, writes the report.


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.




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.


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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


 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.


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 EnglishSpanishPortuguese

Globalise the Struggle, Globalise Hope

 #InDefenseOfThePlanet #NoFuturewithoutFoodSovereignty





 

Anti-imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment

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.