WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 6092
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2023-11-17 08:44:43
    [post_date_gmt] => 2023-11-17 08:44:43
    [post_content] => 

Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind.

“I can’t get up!”

It was 5 a.m. when the dawn chorus was interrupted by a cry for help. An elderly woman had fallen while sneaking into a field with 25 other nanas, and the group rushed to her aid. “Are you alright?” one asked. They helped her stand up, brushing off her clothes and smoothing her hair. After ensuring she was fine to walk, the group pushed forward.

No nana could be left behind: These women were setting up an occupation.

It was a balmy August morning in Lancashire, a county in North West England known for its sweeping landscapes and greenery. But back in 2014, their idyllic community was facing an outside threat: Cuadrilla, an oil and gas giant and the only company in the United Kingdom with a license to frack, was about to commence shale gas exploration. If the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, went ahead, then the site beneath the nanas’ feet would soon become an industrial wasteland—and the county’s residents would be forced to live with the consequences, unless someone was able to stop it.

A close-up photograph of a bee that has landed on a bit of yellow fabric that has been knotted on a fence.
(Rory Payne)

The nanas clambered over fences, quickly putting up signs and wrangling tent poles. By 6 a.m., the first tent was up. The women sat on the ground, drinking tea and watching the sun rise above the field that would be their home for the next three weeks. Technically, they weren’t all grandmothers, but before long, this group of anti-fracking activists from Lancashire would be known as the Nanas, both at home and abroad. They’d regularly stage demonstrations, roadside tea parties, and eventually, even a protest outside Buckingham Palace.

And they wouldn’t be alone: In other communities being torn apart by fracking, older people around the world have also been taking the fight into their own hands, spending their golden years in protest. But what makes someone dedicate their later life to activism? To give up the dream of pottering around the garden, pushing grandchildren on swings and enjoying long vacations and their long-awaited retirement?

As it turns out, many of them felt they didn’t have a choice.

Becoming an Activist

In the weeks leading up to their field occupation, the UK Nanas meticulously planned their invasion. What would they wear? How would they get there? Who would bring tea and cake? On the big day, at 3 a.m., they secretly gathered in a hotel basement nearby. Those in charge of wardrobe revealed what would become the Nana uniform: yellow tabards with a graphic of the red rose of Lancaster, proclaiming “Frack Free Lancashire,” alongside matching yellow headscarves. Tina Rothery, now 61, looked on with pride. She was a recent convert to activism, and her role was public relations. Just before leaving the hotel, she hit send on the press release announcing the Nanas’ 21-day field occupation to the world—having no idea that their fight against injustice was about to hit headlines and dominate her life.

As the women adapted to living in a field and spending their nights under canvas, the local milkman began making morning deliveries. Neighbors arrived at the site to indulge their curiosity, bringing ice to help the Nanas keep their food from spoiling or, in some cases, Tina says, to vent their anger.

“Why would you do this? It’s private land,” some of them would ask. But Tina was ready.

“Here’s the thing: You get us, 26 women with a bunch of tents and tent pegs—that’s bad, yeh?” she'd reply. “Or, you get at least a decade of drill rigs, and man camps, and all that goes on, and the noise, and the pollution, the threat to your water and all of that. These are your choices.”

“We’re here to let you know you do have a choice,” she’d continue. “You can stand up, and you can object.”

Older women in yellow tabards dance in a circle in front of a former fracking site, holding hands. The photo is reminiscent of Matisse's La Danse.
The UK Nanas. (Rory Payne)

Besides a few naysayers, though, Tina says the protest was relatively peaceful. She recalls the police weren’t too bothered by the presence of 26 older women, and largely left them alone. She says the police were, however, very concerned about the dozens of activists who soon descended on the field next door in support of them. These new protestors were from a group called Reclaim the Power, and they were organized. They brought solar panels, wind turbines, and compost toilets. On the final day of the Nanas’ occupation, they also led a pier-to-pier march, decked out in classic Nana-yellow with placards held high.

That same day, after three weeks of sleeping under canvas, soaking up activism knowledge from Reclaim the Power, and sharing their fears with a growing anti-fracking community, the Nanas took down their tents and searched the field to make sure they’d left nothing behind. They stuck a note on the farmer’s house, whose property they’d been occupying, and notified the police that they’d left. Despite nearly a month sleeping on the scratchy ground in makeshift beds, they felt stronger than ever.

The next day, they were sued by Cuadrilla. The legal papers said they were being fined thousands of pounds for the "eviction,” despite the fact they’d left of their own accord and had informed the landowner, press, and police. One of the Nanas would need to put their name forward and take on the cost. Though she couldn’t afford the fine, Tina stepped forward.

“You can’t get blood from a stone,” she says.

Still, they tried. Cuadrilla embroiled Tina in a legal battle for two years, first serving her the court papers at the Buckingham Palace protest. They wanted more than £55,000 (over $78,000) in legal fees and threatened her with a stint in prison if she didn’t pay up. After Tina finally provided evidence that she couldn’t pay the fees, the case was eventually dropped.

A portrait of Tina Rothery, an older woman with long, straight strawberry blonde hair, wearing a yellow tabard and standing in front of a fence with yellow ribbons tied across it.
Tina Rothery. (Rory Payne)

Before getting involved with the Nanas, Tina had little experience in activism. She’d recently spent a year and a half caring for her sick mother, staying by her bedside and reminiscing about when they’d globe-trotted from London to Australia to Hong Kong together. This powerful woman, once a leading business executive, was dying, and there was nothing Tina could do. The feeling of helplessness consumed her. She couldn’t help her mother, and she couldn’t change the state of the world beyond her, which at the time, felt like it was spiraling towards further and further injustice. Both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street dominated the news. She watched as uprisings against ruling parties unfolded, and looking to regain some semblance of control, Tina finally decided to join Occupy London in 2011, ending up as a de facto spokesperson.

By the time she received a leaflet on Cuadrilla’s fracking plans from a local residents' action group, Tina had zeroed in on how best to fight the whole system: You had to start closer to home. Until now she’d been trying to get to what she calls the “belly of the beast,” but this new awareness of fracking on her doorstep shifted her mindset—this single issue told the whole story of a broken system. The way she saw it, fracking was one very specific example of how the government was taking risks with people’s lives and affecting individual communities. The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore. Instead of returning to London to join more protests aimed at the government and the wider system, Tina remained in Lancashire to fight Cuadrilla.

She was right about fracking’s impact on her community. In 2019, researchers Anna Szolucha from the University of Bergen, Norway and Damien Short from the University of London carried out a study published by research journal Geoforum to examine how people’s lives were affected during the fracking planning and approval process in Lancashire—and the results were harrowing. They called what they found a collective trauma: a slow-burn shock that ripped apart social lives and damaged the feeling of community.

"You can stand up, and you can object."

“Some residents experienced severe stress and anxiety. Many reported that they lost trust in the police and democracy,” Szolucha says. Residents felt a sense of loss, fear, betrayal, guilt, and anger as the fracking consultation went through its various stages. Notably, Fylde, the area of Lancashire where Cuadrilla planned to drill, has a high population of older people. Residents feared their once quiet country lives would change overnight, punctuated by trucks, drills, and an influx of workmen. The people of Lancashire objected strongly to this, and the County Council voted against moving forward with the fracking. But the Secretary of State overrode their decision, sweeping aside resident wishes, and approved the work. Residents felt betrayed and powerless.

They mounted a legal fight, but even as the case made its way through the courts, Cuadrilla continued preparing the worksite. The locals couldn’t stay silent. They did everything they could to delay the drilling, from slowing down the trucks to showing up to the site every day. Although it wasn’t a specific part of their research, Szolucha says she noticed older campaigners seemed more traumatized than their younger counterparts.

“Older campaigners, many of whom used to be Conservative voters or simply had a pretty Conservative outlook, were often enraged or in tears when they spoke to me about how disappointed they were with their political representatives and the police, who, in their eyes, allowed fracking to happen,” she says.

A photograph pointing at a blue sky, from the center of a circle of UK Nanas, holding their hands to the sky.
(Rory Payne.)

A Big Fight in a Small Town

The residents in Fylde aren't the only ones to have experienced this collective trauma, although not every town has been so unanimously against it. In Gloucester, Australia, when energy companies AGL and Halliburton began “consulting” with the locals about fracking for coal seam gas in 2009, it splintered the community—and made enemies out of neighbors.

“Don’t come near my place,” one woman in her eighties yelled at Dominique Jacobs and her foster children during a protest. “I’m going to fucking shoot ya!”

Dominique is a 59-year-old resident of Gloucester, and for nearly a decade, she’s dedicated herself to the fight against fracking—something not everyone agrees with. Sometimes, this means being on the receiving end of her neighbors’ threats during a peaceful demonstration through the town center. She brushes off these encounters with a laugh often bubbling under her voice. But in a town where so few people speak out against fracking, she feels like a pariah. It’s a small town, a farming community of around 3,000 residents. Everyone knows everyone’s business—and many don’t like hers. Even now, there are people her husband has worked with for 15 years who won’t speak to her because of her anti-fracking activism. There are shops she doesn’t go into. People were banking on the jobs fracking had been promising, and as they saw it, people like Dominique were standing in the way. But Dominique says the fracking companies don’t actually care about the community, and that part of why she became such a vocal activist against them was to prove it.

A portrait of Dominique Jacobs standing in a field, wearing a yellow t-shirt, a couple necklaces, and her sunglasses on her head.
Dominique Jacobs. (Derek Henderson)

“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them,” she says.

Where Tina discovered activism in her later years, Dominique’s inner activist had been bubbling under the surface for most of her life. In her 20s, she was desperate to join the Franklin River blockade against a proposed dam, but couldn’t afford the travel expenses to get there. Instead, she and her husband spent the following years taking part in environmental campaigns and learning about climate change, but as soon as they became parents, their activism took a back seat. Three decades disappeared. Then, the protests appeared on her doorstep, and Dominique couldn’t sit back and watch any longer.

At first, Dominique didn’t know much about fracking. When it first arrived in Gloucester, she had been working in a preschool, and she recalls one of the parents who worked for the energy company trying to sell her on the benefits of allowing fracking in their town. There would be more job opportunities, for starters, they said. At the time, Dominique didn’t know any better, so she believed what they’d told her.

But soon, the big machinery arrived, care of Australian energy company AGL, drilling four wells in their once quiet town after initially proposing 110. In 2011, a group of local residents blockaded the corner of a dairy farm to prevent four more. Dominique started joining the protestors for a few hours at a time. The work slowed down, and as everyone awaited the results of a court challenge, the frackers eventually disappeared. By 2014, though, they’d returned.

“By then, we were really up to speed. We knew exactly what it was all about by then,” Dominique says. The local activists were no longer naive. They had a body of knowledge about what would happen to the landscape, the environment, and the people if the fracking were allowed to continue.

In October 2014, people gathered on the main road of Gloucester in a peaceful protest, populating the area with signs raising awareness about the negative impacts of fracking, like the contamination of land and water. As the small group of anti-fracking locals got into the swing of their protest, Dominique’s eye caught two yellow-clad women sitting on folding chairs, knitting needles clicking away. Fascinated, she walked over. The women were the Knitting Nannas Against Gas—a separate group from the UK Nanas, with similar motivations, tactics, and uniforms (but a slightly different spelling to their name). They were using what they called “gentle activism” to peacefully protest fracking.

If she wanted to join them, they told her, she should put on some yellow and get to knitting. So she did.

The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)

Dominique started spending three days a week manning a peaceful vigil in a little rotunda with a few other members of the community, but soon, knitting didn’t feel like enough: They wanted volunteers for arrestable actions. Dominique was fearful. She was a foster parent, and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that and lose her children. She chose to stick to the peaceful vigil, while others in the group went down to the gates of the fracking site and locked themselves onto it—a tried and true way to kick up a fuss. Dominique watched on as police arrested around 30 people.

Then, something happened that transformed Dominique from gentle activist to risk-taker; an experience that opened her eyes to the environmental devastation fracking could soon cause in her community. In January 2015, she and her family took a trip to Tara, Queensland, where fracking was much more developed than in Gloucester—and she was horrified.

“There was really no life anywhere,” she says of the ravaged areas she drove through. She describes two or three kilometers of road lined by huge ponds holding fracking wastewater. Forests were blocked off by metal fences. “Private property. No trespassing,” signs were plastered on the gates. Trailers, rigs, and grey infrastructure dotted the landscape. She was surprised by how industrialized it had become. Less than a decade earlier, it had been a farming community. Now, it was a wasteland.

“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them."

Driving through Tara, Dominique thought of the image the fracking company had sold the people of Gloucester. A little well, some cows grazing out on a green field, perhaps, and everyone enjoying a peaceful life, with no discernible difference to their community.

“When you go up there to Queensland, you go, ‘Oh my god. We've got no idea,’” Dominique says.

What she saw in Queensland was bleak, and a stark contrast to the traditional portrayal of Australia, one of sprawling landscapes teeming with biodiversity. But what happened in Queensland was far from unusual. Travel to Oklahoma, where fracking first began, and you’ll find a similar picture. Drills, industrialization, and wastewater ponds abound. Phillips 66, which used to be a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips but split in 2012, fracks the land there, and has become one of the largest energy exploration companies in the world. They produce millions of barrels of oil a day and are estimated to be worth around $50 billion—and some of its residents are furious about it.

Fracking and the Ponca Tribe

Environmental ambassador Casey Camp-Horinek has lived in Ponca City her whole life. She’s an Elder and Hereditary Drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, and has recently turned 74.

When hundreds of people were arrested at Standing Rock in 2016, Casey was there. The Ponca people once lived further along the Missouri River, in a different region, and on that particular day, Casey was at a Tribal Historic Preservation Office meeting around 20 miles away. Mid-prayer, they got news that militarized police were heading to Standing Rock. They were going to forcefully evacuate the people at Treaty Camp who were standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

A portrait of Casey Camp-Horinek wearing a feather headpiece and beaded earrings. She's wearing a red velvet turtleneck with a white vest over it.
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)

Casey and the other Elders from the meeting arrived as observers, and found hundreds of people peacefully praying. Over the hill and across the road, militarized police lined up shoulder to shoulder, advancing. As they came closer, Casey stood in prayer with the other Elders. Her son was in a nearby prayer circle of around 50 people. Others were singing, drumming, or in ceremony. The peace was soon shattered. Armored trucks and tasers invaded the scene; peaceful protestors were blinded with pepper spray as they prayed. A security helicopter thundered overhead. Sound cannons erupted.

“It was a scene from a horror movie,” Casey says. She speaks slowly and deliberately, frequently pausing to think. “It was like what happened to us all throughout history, going through it again.”

The police reached the Elders. Casey was pulled down and her hands zip tied behind her back. Her son called out, asking them to at least leave the Elders alone. That day, 142 people were arrested by armed police in riot gear, numbers written on the detainees’ arms. Casey was Standing Rock 138. She had to watch as her son was beaten and dragged away, unsure of when she would see him again.

In the cells, tear gas hung on their clothes. Dozens of women were bundled into what Casey describes as dog cages.

“We sang prayer songs and victory songs, and we celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery,” Casey says.

In many ways, it was nothing new. Casey’s stand against fracking and the extractive industries is inseparable from the disastrous consequences of colonialism that the Ponca Nation has suffered: the forced removal to Oklahoma from northeastern Nebraska, the children harmed at the boarding schools they were made to attend. There’s no short answer, she says, to explain how she got to where she is today.

“I guess one has to begin with the fact that I'm a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter, and a survivor of a holocaust of when the Europeans came to these shores,” she says, speaking in her calm, grandmotherly tone. While Tina was new to environmentalism, and Dominique had spent decades as an activist in waiting, the struggle forced on Casey encompassed not only her whole life, but generations before her.

"We celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery."

Casey uses strong words to describe what has been done to the Ponca Nation. She calls it a genocide. Nearly a third of the Ponca Tribe died due to their forced removal in the late 1800s. This history has been passed down through generations using oral traditions, which is how she continues to pass them on today. Many of the abuses she details have been well documented, ranging from colonizers gifting Indigenous people blankets laced with smallpox, to countless treaties made and broken, and the Ponca Nation’s 1.5 million acres being reduced to just a small township in Nebraska.

When the Ponca people were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, Casey’s grandparents were only around five or six years old. Their tribe was made to walk hundreds of miles, and many lives were lost along the way.

“At that time, Oklahoma was called Indian Territory. And it was to be the dumping grounds, the killing grounds, of all Native Americans,” Casey says. The Ponca people reached Oklahoma without their seeds and hunting instruments and were newly vulnerable to foreign diseases. Many of those who survived the journey did not survive the new territory.

And then, in 1911, the extractive industries arrived on Ponca land, looking for oil. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency designed to manage relationships between the government and Indigenous communities, made decisions about their land without their consent. She says the extractive industries created “killing fields.”

A portrait of Casey Camp-Horinek wearing a feather headpiece and beaded earrings, and holding a small purse with a red flower on it. She's wearing a red velvet turtleneck with a white vest over it, a layered skirt, and beaded shoes.
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)

As it was for Dominique’s community in Gloucester, fracking was presented to Indigenous communities with a positive spin. Today, energy giant Phillips 66 describes itself as “engaging with our communities in an environmentally just way.” A sustainability web page says that they are committed to “providing energy today with an eye on tomorrow,” and that they have the highest levels of responsibility and ethics. Their 2023 sustainability report makes bold claims of supporting biodiversity and restoring park land, and even has a section on connecting with Indigenous peoples “to build meaningful relationships, honoring them and their connection to the land in the regions where we do business.” The front cover of the report shows a sprawling refinery against a blue sky, with a solitary bird soaring overhead, assessing its industrial habitat.

But once the companies arrived, a different reality emerged.

Casey had heard many sustainable claims like these before learning the truth about how water is used in the fracking process. To start, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water are injected into the earth, per well. The pressurized water, along with chemicals and sand, break open cracks below the surface and release gas. The unusable wastewater is then held in tanks, laced with fracking chemicals like hydrochloric acid, methanol, and petroleum distillates. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report shows this toxic cocktail can leak into drinking supplies from unlined pits or spills, or even be injected directly into groundwater resources. Across a six year period ending in 2012, there were 151 spills in 11 states, according to the EPA’s analysis. They don’t have enough data to definitively say how much this is happening on a national level.

In the US, an average of over 3 million gallons of water were used per well between 2005 and 2015 and at least 239 billion gallons have been used across the US since 2005. This is according to a report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, an organization which researches and educates about environmental issues. At this scale, the potential harm is monumental: A report published in Nature Communications shows that fracking can increase radiation levels by as much as 40% over the background level, putting those living within about 12 miles of fracking sites at increased health risk. Casey says she has seen countless cancer cases in Ponca families, and that many children have developed breathing difficulties since fracking began in Oklahoma. Similar symptoms have been seen elsewhere, as well, with researchers at the Yale School of Public Health finding carcinogens from fracking could be contaminating air and water, increasing the risk of childhood leukemia. The Center for Environmental Health has also warned of how pollutants from fracking might impact children’s respiratory health.

“They don't tell you that it's creating radiation that they're going to dump into your yard,” Casey says.

It isn’t just humans who have felt the impact, either. Casey says that deer are sick from living off the polluted land, echoing a link made by the Bureau of Land Management between fracking and the sudden reduction in deer in Pinedale Mesa, Wyoming, whose herds have declined by 36% since fracking began. Ponca residents have also witnessed fish lying dead on the river banks, and since then, images of catfish floating lifeless in the water have been plastered on local media year after year. Wastewater from local wells is pinned as the most likely cause, according to the Department of Wildlife Conservation.

“We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide,” Casey says.

But however hopeless it might seem, Casey refuses to give up on fighting for this planet and its inhabitants. She is a part of nature, too, and that’s why she keeps pushing back.

"We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide."

She’s not the only one fighting back in North America. Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of Keepers of the Water, a group of Indigenous communities and environmental groups working together to protect nature, works with Elders responding to extractive industries across the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin.

“The thing with the Elders is they remember a life where you can drink water without it having to be treated; they remember drinking straight from the streams; they have lived that life,” she says. They have seen the increase in sickness, mental health issues, and loss of culture, both since colonization and during this current period of extraction. Many Indigenous communities across North America are surrounded by lakes, streams, and creeks, but they are buying bottled water: We’re living in a time now, she adds, where our children don’t know that you can drink pure water.

“The Elders are amazing because having seen all this and lived through all this, they're still the voice of reason, and they're telling people what needs to be done,” Cardinal, who is from the Kikino Métis Settlement in Canada, says. She explains how they attend the rallies, go to meetings, and participate in workshops. “They know right from wrong,” she continues. “They also know that their time is going to end soon, and they don't want to leave this behind for future generations. They're so desperately trying to make change where they can before they leave this place.”

This sentiment seems to be a universal one for fracking’s elder protestors, whether in North America or elsewhere: They’ve lived the past, and many feel they have no choice but to protect the future. The only difference is in how they choose to do it.

With a key role in the UK Nanas, Tina tries to be the voice of reason and to speak up about what needs to happen to stop fracking. She leads demonstrations and raises her voice until she can’t be ignored—but does so in a way that welcomes others to join: She uses gentle protest.

The Craft of Gentle Activism

During the demonstrations in Fylde, Lancashire, the UK Nanas would meet at the community hub every Wednesday around 9:30 a.m., all dressed in white. Together, they would walk up the hill, arrive at the gates of the fracking site, and form a long line. They would then stand in silence for fifteen minutes in what they termed the “Call for Calm.” It was a moment of peace between the police and activists: The women tied ribbons to the gate, singing groups joined, and then they broke into a choreographed dance. People brought stews, quiches, vegan chocolate fudge cake. Once, actor Emma Thompson even made an appearance.

A close-up of one of the UK Nanas' yellow tabards, for "Nana Julie." It has various pins for Frack Free Lancashire, and "FRACK FREE EVERYWHERE" written in Sharpie.
(Rory Payne)

To help bolster their efforts during this period, Tina heavily utilized social media, where she regularly live streamed the daily lives of the Nanas and their demonstrations. Across roughly 1,000 days between 2014 and 2019, Tina shared livestream after livestream on her Facebook page, where she cracked jokes, argued with police, captured people dancing and venting, and fumbled with the technicalities of filming in a beautifully human way. Most importantly to Tina, anyone could easily watch these videos and write comments in real time—wherever and whoever they were.

“I want anyone watching to think, ‘I could do that.’ So if you're eighty, and you're sat at home, I want you to feel it's accessible,” Tina says.

While the UK Nanas relied heavily on social media, in Australia, the Knitting Nannas have so far utilized a more unusual approach to their gentle activism: They play on people’s assumptions about sweet old ladies and use it to their advantage. They turn up to work sites, politicians’ offices, and anywhere else where a demonstration is needed, and they knit. While police officers might assume the Nannas are harmless, it can be a split second before they’re caught off guard and an elderly woman has chained herself to a fence.

In Oklahoma, Casey has a different approach to spearheading change: She is using legal frameworks to her advantage. Although the Ponca Nation passed a moratorium on any future fracking on their land, Casey says this was ignored, and fracking continues to this day. She grew frustrated. Then, she learned about the Rights of Nature.

At first, Casey was skeptical. She was at a meeting of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, where around 100 women from across the world spoke and presented solutions to various environmental issues. It was the co-founder of Movement Rights, Shannon Biggs, who introduced her to the Rights of Nature: a legal framework that recognizes that ecosystems have the right to exist, in the same way that humans do. Within this law, nature is no longer treated as property, and communities could stand up in court and fight for the rights of ecosystems.

"We're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself."

Casey was reminded of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. At the time of its introduction, her brother had scoffed and said, “If religion were truly free, why would they need to put a law around it?” She felt the same way about the Rights of Nature. But over time, as Casey talked to Shannon more, she began to see its potential. With the Ponca’s ability to create their own laws within their tribal jurisdiction, it could be a form of protection.

At the time, Casey was on the tribal council. She created a resolution, the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature, and it became law in their court—the first time ever that an Indigenous community had recognized the Rights of Nature in tribal law. But Casey describes it as an old concept that’s just new on paper.

“This land is here forever. This water is here forever. These winds that blow are forever. You cannot eat, drink, or breathe that paper money or that plastic money. So the only way to go forward is for all of us, all human beings, to get on board and become those water protectors and land defenders. Because again, we're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself,” she says.

This approach to activism is a different path from the ones Tina and Dominique have chosen. While their activism is about creating impactful moments and disrupting the system, Casey’s is about finding and implementing solutions—and loopholes. But for all of them, it’s ultimately about protection. When fracking threatens the natural world, these women have felt they have no choice but to be its protector.

The Switch

In a research paper on what they term “Nannagogy,” Larraine Larri and Hilary Whitehouse set out to discover what motivates older women to step out of their comfort zone to fight for the planet they will soon leave behind.

“What we found were women who had been marginalized due to age and gender, who were determined to be productive and creative social change agents taking action for a low-carbon future. Our data show many of these women had never done anything like this before,” they wrote.

When it comes to the specifics of that activism, Larri and Whitehouse refer to the Knitting Nannas’ activities as “Craftivism,” a term originally coined in 2003 by crafter and activist Betsy Greer, the “godmother of Craftivism.” In another paper, Larri writes, “In the case of the Nannas, Craftivism emboldens and empowers older women to challenge gender and age-related stereotypes to become vibrant and central actors in the broader social movement.”

Five of the Knitting Nannas stand in front of a fence, each wearing at least one item of yellow clothing and holding signs from various protests they've participated in.
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)

But are gentle actions enough? Tina says the UK Nanas all had moments where they “switched,” where they decided that they were going to become more defiant. A lot of these women, she says, grew up in an era where they had to be obedient to their husbands, and during their activism, they had this moment of realization: Enough is enough.

Tina’s moment came in 2018, when she decided to take part in her first arrestable action. Up until that point, in all of their demonstrations, Tina had never technically done anything illegal. But as anti-fracking efforts started ramping up, eventually, she was asked to take part in a lock-on, where she would physically attach herself to a static object and block the gates to the fracking site in Lancashire. This would put more pressure on Cuadrilla. It would also break the law: Jail time would be imminent for anyone blocking the fracking site.

“I had always said no because I still want to set the example that you don't have to break the law to win,” she says.

Still, she thought, what if it made all the difference? If Tina was going to do a lock-on, it was now or never. With an upcoming injunction that would prevent trespassing on the exploration site, she was running out of time. So, she and her niece both said yes. The demonstration was called the Caravan of Love, and took months of planning. A group known as The Cooks invented devices for the protestors to lock onto, using hard to cut materials like cement and elevator cable. Lock-ons often end with police cutting through similar contraptions, power tools whirring close to activists’ arms. They were hoping that wouldn’t happen by creating something too dangerous for the attempt—not that this had stopped police before.

Tina remembers hiding up at the camp near the fracking site gates on the day of the demonstration, trying to keep away from the glare of security.

The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore.

“We knew that at just after 2 a.m., someone was going to dump a whopping great caravan in the middle of the entranceway,” she says. The caravan concealed six men who were each locked onto a large household appliance, and once in place, would drop a huge cement foot from inside. The trailer was going nowhere. Its arrival was their cue. Two women ran up and thrust their arms into the vehicle, clipping themselves onto the men inside. Another pair locked themselves onto one side of the trailer together, and then, on the other side, Tina and her niece reached their arms through either end of a torpedo-shaped lock-on device with “love to my mum” written on it. They each clipped themselves onto a hook inside.

Tina stayed like that for 21 hours wearing incontinence pads and battling the discomfort of the outdoors. Eventually, she felt she couldn’t breathe, and the activists hatched a plan to help her escape. First, they’d distract the police, who were watching close by. Next, they’d make the switch.

“When you’re ready,” one of the other activists said.

“Quick, quick, I need some help with my pad,” Tina called out, doing her best to pretend that she really did need help, while the Nana who was attending to their personal care rushed to her “aid.”

This made the policeman standing nearby so uncomfortable, she says, that he walked off. Two other activists ducked under the tarpaulin covering Tina and her niece’s connected arms, taking their place as the two women snuck out. Tina stood up and tried to casually walk away from the scene. She was, of course, immediately arrested.

While Tina had been reluctant to do anything illegal in her anti-fracking efforts, however, after what she’d witnessed in Queensland, Dominique had been ready. Only a couple of years after becoming a Knitting Nanna, she traveled to the town of Pilliga in New South Wales, roughly 250 miles away from her home, to join their local fight against fracking—and jumped at the chance to escalate her actions.

“You kind of get to the point where you've done everything you possibly can do,” Dominique says. “What is there left to do except that? You've written so many letters, you've signed petitions, you've talked to your politicians, and they just leave you with no options. It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something.”

In a field, an abandoned white building with a rusty roof that reads "MINING KILLS COMMUNITIES."
(Derek Henderson)

Early in the morning one January day in 2016, with yellow parasols in hand to defend against the sweltering heat, Dominique and two other Nannas snuck up to the wire gates outside the fracking site, unfolded their chairs, and looped bike chains around their necks, attaching the opposite ends to the gate. Dominique settled into the lock-on and got out her knitting. Each Nanna had a buddy to support her, and eventually other Nannas arrived, throwing out tablecloths and setting up a high tea.

The police eventually ordered the buddies to leave, and tried to persuade the Nannas to do the same, Dominique recalls, telling them they’d made their point.

The Nannas didn’t budge. They knew they were likely to get arrested, but they weren’t going to give in.

The police got out the bolt cutters. They gave the Nannas one more chance to leave, and when they refused, each Nanna was arrested. They walked themselves to the police van. At the station, they weren’t put into cells but sat in the main office while their papers were processed, still wearing the straw hats that had protected them from the sun. When they finally left, it was to the sound of cheers as all the other Nannas lined the path in a guard of honor.

Dominique makes light of the situation now, but makes it clear that it was a desperate measure. They were out of options. Fracking was still happening, and gentle protest wasn’t making a big enough impact. Like Tina, she felt the same mounting pressure to force someone to listen.

"It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something."

But for both women, that risk had been a choice—while for others, like Casey, even quiet protest was enough to be considered an offense. When she was arrested at Standing Rock, it wasn’t for something she'd chosen; it wasn’t for a moment of defiance. She was arrested while praying, arrested in spite of her peaceful presence, arrested in spite of the fact she was participating in the exact same vein of quiet protest that Tina and Dominique and countless other nanas around the world had participated in without punishment.

“I applaud the bravery of anyone who chooses to do nonviolent, direct actions. If that involves chaining themselves to equipment, I applaud that,” Casey says, making a particular point that she’s behind those other nanas in their actions. “I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary.”

In her younger years, Casey took part in similar actions that she describes as “pushing the envelope.” But now, as an Elder, her activism looks different. As an Indigenous woman, putting herself in the way of police would come at a higher price for Casey than it would for white activists.

“It always has,” she says. “I don’t see that as a changing trend.” Indigenous people have the second highest incarceration rate of any racial group in the United States. Casey says that if she drives her car to town with tribal tags on it, she knows she’s more likely to get stopped than if she had an Oklahoma tag.

“Yes, racism is alive. And Indigenous men and women on the front line are flagged by racist laws that are being put in place in places like Oklahoma, South Dakota, and many other places where there's large Indigenous populations,” she says. Specifically, Casey is, in part, referring to a law where anyone protesting against fossil fuels can face $100,000 fines or 10 years in prison. In stark contrast, both Tina and Dominique’s cases were eventually dropped, both still have clean criminal records, and both were treated with respect, even while getting arrested. Casey was not.

Something else happened for both Tina and Dominique and their local communities, too: Eventually, the fracking stopped. The same cannot be said for Casey and the Ponca Nation.

A drone shot of a former fracking site in Gloucester, now bright green.
Gloucester. (Derek Henderson)

A Fight That’s Never Won

In summer 2019, people in Lancashire felt their homes shaken by tremors measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale. They were the UK’s largest fracking-related earthquakes to date. That November, the government halted procedures following a damning safety report that concluded there was no way to predict the probability or magnitude of future earthquakes. It finally felt like the fight was over—but Tina isn’t convinced.

“It's only a moratorium, and all we did was keep them at bay until we had enough seismic events and time to diminish their resources for it to impact them,” she says. Today, Tina stays vigilant because she still feels a responsibility to make the most of her time. “I feel like I got here really late, and so I've got a lot to do before I go,” she adds.

There are certainly still people in government who aren’t on the Nanas’ side: In the fall of 2022, during her short stint as UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss promised to lift the UK’s ban on fracking. While just a few weeks later, the new Prime Minster Rishi Sunak reversed the decision, it was definitive proof the fight is far from finished in the UK.

Meanwhile, in Australia, less than a month after Dominique’s lock-on in Pilliga, she was at home when the phone rang: The fracking in Gloucester was over. The energy company AGL was withdrawing, citing disappointing production volumes. It was so sudden and unexpected that she could barely believe it. She remembers feeling euphoric. The activists all hurried into town, gathered in the street, and popped bottles of champagne.

“No one could wipe the smiles off their faces. It was so beautiful,” she says. It was a small group of people from a small town who had fought something bigger. She says a lot of people called it the mouse that roared. But not every battle has been won.

"I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary."

In Oklahoma, fracking continues.

“We have so many societal ills caused by these colonists that it is just shameful. And that's not on us. I will not allow my people to ever feel guilt,” Casey says.

She continues to speak about solutions to environmental destruction and the Rights of Nature. She fights fracking because she has not been given any other choice. As of 2020, Oklahoma was the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the US. There are 43,232 wells in the state, according to US Energy Information Administration data from 2019. The number of rigs is falling, but slowly; and earlier in 2021, a natural gas pipeline exploded in northwestern Oklahoma. But Casey is not giving up the fight.

None of them are. For Tina, Dominique, and Casey, their work will never truly be over, even if the battles in their hometowns have been won—or will be. For all three women and the hundreds of others fighting fracking, there will always be another energy company arriving, another community being ignored, another generation facing a threat. They persist because they feel they must, because they want to leave a better world behind. They fight because they feel you must do everything you can to stop injustice, even if you might not see the change in your own lifetime.

Which is why Tina has stayed so vigilant, even four years after the last work truck left Lancashire. It’s why Casey still leads prayer walks, taking her strong and peaceful demeanor directly to Phillips 66 refineries across Oklahoma. And it’s why every couple of weeks, you’ll find Dominique stationed outside the Federal Politician’s Office in New South Wales, Australia. Fracking in Gloucester might be over, but the drills are still in the ground in much of the country, and for as long as they are, she will be there—dressed in her yellow clothes, forcing the government to listen, and knitting.

A gate for one of the former fracking sites in the UK. The Nanas have tied dozens of yellow ribbons on the fence, and separately wrapped yellow ribbon so that it spells FRACK FREE.
(Rory Payne)

Photography by Rory Payne, Derek Henderson, and Ryan Red Corn. Additional editing by Mariana Heredia. Fact checking by Tadhg Stevens.

[post_title] => Meet the Anti-Fracking Nanas [post_excerpt] => Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => anti-fracking-nanas-nannas-older-women-protesting-activism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6092 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
A composite image of three portrait photographs of members of the UK Nanas. All three are older women wearing bright yellow tabards. The woman in the left photograph is mid-chant, with her fist in the air; the center portrait is an extreme close up of a woman looking directly into the camera; the portrait on the right is of a third woman, standing stoically in her yellow tabard, which she has decorated with various buttons, and the text "Nana Dancing Queen." Behind the women is a fence adorned with tied scraps of yellow fabric.

Meet the Anti-Fracking Nanas

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3637
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-12-20 18:10:17
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-12-20 18:10:17
    [post_content] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship.

Hundreds of thousands of people flocked onto the streets of Chile’s cities on Sunday night to celebrate a history-making presidential election. The sounds of cheers and honking car horns were everywhere as, with 97 percent of the votes counted, Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader who headed the leftist coalition Frente Amplio, became the country’s youngest president. The final polls heading into the election predicted a very close result, with the far-right Jose Antonio Kast, 55, slightly ahead of the much younger, progressive Boric. But the final tally was not even close: Boric won with 55.9 percent of the vote—12 percentage points ahead of Kast, who called Boric to concede at 7.10 p.m., after only 30 percent of the ballots had been counted.

[caption id="attachment_3644" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Jubilant Boric supporters poured onto the streets of Santiago on December 19, 2021.[/caption]

On Election Day I was in Concepcion, in south-central Chile, feeling anxious but also hopeful that the Chilean people would elect Gabriel Boric, the humane, democratic and environmentally conscious candidate. I was at a polling station as ballot counting began, watching as the numbers showed a consistent advantage for Boric. When the announcement was made that Gabriel Boric had been elected, becoming Chile's youngest president, I was euphoric.



The two candidates campaigned on polarized visions for their country.

Kast, a conservative Catholic with nine children, is a Pinochet supporter. He ran a right-wing populist campaign that promoted a continuation of neoliberal economic policies and climate change denial. He vociferously opposed gender equality and abortion rights and incited against impoverished Venezuelans and Haitians who sought a better life in Chile.

Read more: Chile faces its most consequential election since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship

Boric is a former leader of the 2011-13 student movement, which sought better and more affordable education for all; as a young politician, he was one of the architects of the 2019 Agreement for Social Peace, which led to the 2020 referendum for a new, more equitable constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one. His platform calls for an overhaul of the economy, ending the neoliberal policies that have made the country deeply unequal; Boric campaigned on making Chile a more unified society—one fully transitioned away from the legacy of the Pinochet regime.

The campaign

Sunday’s election marked the end of a long process that began with the July primaries. Boric surprised everyone by winning the leadership of the leftist coalition over the Communist candidate, Daniel Jadue. The polls had projected a win for Jadue, but he made some serious missteps with various gaffes, including antisemitic statements; Boric, meanwhile, came off as inclusive, charismatic, and knowledgeable during the debates. With his moderate yet innovative positions, like the importance of finding a balance between economic growth and a response to the climate crisis, he attracted the millennial voters who played a decisive role in his becoming the leftist coalition's candidate. A high turnout for the primaries, with more than 1.7 million voters casting a ballot, created a solid electoral base for the first round of the presidential election. Kast, on the other hand, did not participate in the right-wing party’s primary elections; nor was he a favorite in the polls at the beginning of the election campaign. His candidacy emerged from a political pact between conservative Christians and the new far-right Republican Party; he then went on to perform well during the first debates against Sebastian Sichel, his rival for leadership of the right-wing coalition. Sichel positioned himself as a center-right candidate, a move that proved to be a mistake: He pushed right-wing voters toward Kast, whom they saw as an “authentic” right-wing candidate. For the far-right, who supported the Pinochet dictatorship and opposed a new constitution, Kast represented both their natural political home, and the man who was more likely to bring a right-wing government to power. The center-right moved toward Kast because they saw him as the man most likely to be elected and they wanted a right-wing government at all costs, even if that meant tacitly supporting xenophobic proposals such as the construction of ditches in Chile’s north to prevent impoverished and desperate Venezuelan migrants from entering the country.

The race

In the weeks before Election Day on December 19, polls consistently showed Kast just slightly ahead of Boric in a very tight race. International legacy media outlets painted a picture of Chilean society polarized between two extremist candidates, although Boric’s views are hardly extreme—they would put him somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In Chile, the influential right-wing media outlets played an outsized role in promoting Kast’s campaign with fake news that incited against Boric. Kast, for example, claimed several times that the bearded, tattooed leader of the leftist coalition used illicit drugs, a baseless lie that the right-wing media amplified until it gained such wide credence that Boric felt compelled to respond. During the December 13 debate against Kast he released lab results that proved he had no cannabis, amphetamines, or cocaine in his bloodstream. Besides creating a divisive and polarized atmosphere during the campaign, the far right’s aggressive rhetoric and fake news also disseminated fear of Boric’s purportedly “socialist” agenda. For example, Kast claimed that the Communist Party’s support for Boric was indicative of a dangerous, far-left agenda; evoking Venezuela’s socialist bogeyman, he said that Boric, if elected, would drag Chile into chaos. In fact, Boric is very much a moderate who has attracted broad support with a political platform that advocates policies similar to those of European social democratic parties. Voter turnout in Chile hovers at 50 percent, which increased this time in the second round. Some analysts predicted that Boric would inspire a surge in the youth vote, propelled by their concerns about the climate crisis and rising authoritarianism. While there is no data yet about age groups, overall voter participation did increase by more than one million over the first round. This election saw the highest electoral turnout in Chilean history, with Gabriel Boric receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in previous elections.

A historic election

Kast’s extreme views on women’s rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights inspired a diverse political movement in support of Boric’s candidacy. One of his proposals, for example, was to allow police to detain suspects for five days in undefined “confinement centers.” The far-right candidate thus galvanized significant sectors of voters to find common cause in combating the threat of far-right populism. The close relationship between the far right and religious fundamentalists alarmed feminists and other progressive movements, mobilizing them to organize and get out the vote.
But Chileans remain divided about the causes and outcomes of the 2019 social movement that sparked nationwide protests, which in turn led to a political agreement for the establishment of a constitutional process. The far-right opposes any structural change to Pinochet’s system. Boric and his broad coalition represent Chile’s majority, who aspire to a stable social and political transformation. They support the constitutional process and want a more equitable economic system that will replace Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy with a welfare state and sound environmental policies. Boric’s administration will seek to introduce an ecological approach to governing, and to implement transformative policies to pensions and healthcare, two of the pillars of the unequal and segregated Chilean system. Boric represents hope for a nation that wants more dignity, a fact that puts positive pressure on the future government: it needs to be humane, fair, and efficient. I believe the newly elected President Boric is more than ready to take on this immense challenge. [post_title] => Gabriel Boric becomes Chile's youngest president on a progressive mandate [post_excerpt] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => gabriel-boric-becomes-chiles-youngest-president-on-a-progressive-mandate [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://conversationalist.org/2021/11/18/chile-faces-its-most-important-and-most-polarized-presidential-election-since-the-end-of-pinochets-rule/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3637 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Gabriel Boric becomes Chile’s youngest president on a progressive mandate

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3531
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-12-02 22:17:42
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-12-02 22:17:42
    [post_content] => Future COPs will bring about successful results only if organizers make the conferences more democratic, fair, and equal.

There were high hopes for COP26.  After years of disappointing climate conferences, many observers hoped that this one, held in Glasgow from October 31-November 13, would end with ambitious pledges and meaningful actions—particularly after both China and the US raised hopes with significant announcements going into the global event. China pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060, while the US pledged to double its financing to poorer countries for combating climate change. However, in the end COP26 fell short. Once again, the decisions taken at the UN Climate Change Conference brought a few advances, but mainly perpetuated the dangerous stagnation that we cannot afford at this critical time of rapid global warming.

I was an observer at COP26 under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh and Nuestra América Verde, a Latin American NGO. Although I studied climate law for both my LLM and now my doctorate, this was my first COP—and a totally novel experience, as can be seen in my description and analysis of events in this article.

Deeply unequal

Equity constitutes an essential element, in both procedural and substantive ambits, for achieving a successful UN climate change conference. Unfortunately, neither the conference organizers nor the state actors who attended COP26 took equity into account. Civil society organizations that came to observe were met with restricted  access to negotiations due to a combination of circumstances that included  the UK’s onerous and restrictive visa requirements; the high cost of accommodation in Glasgow; and vaccine apartheid. The absence of thousands of observers and climate activists from poorer countries in the global south, which are disproportionately affected by climate change made this extremely important global event that deeply unequal. State representatives engaged in important negotiations on critical climate issues with insufficient transparency, and in the absence of observers from civil society groups. The lack of equity and fairness had a strong impact on the substantive outcomes of the COP26, particularly on climate finance. [caption id="attachment_3535" align="aligncenter" width="640"] COP26 Climate Change Conference on November 4, 2021.[/caption] COP (Conference of the Parties) is the decision-making body for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Signed in 1992, the Convention tasks COP with realizing the UNFCCC’s agenda as it responds to the evolving challenges of climate change. COP1 took place in Berlin in 1995. Since then, the climate conferences have been held every one or two years; their purpose is to define the global path toward confronting the climate crisis. Some of the best-known COPs include: The success of each meeting is measured by the ambition and equity of its goals and their implementation. In this sense, many experts have pointed to the Paris Agreement as the perfect balance between ambition and equity, illustrated by its broad support among states. Lavanya Rajamani, a professor of environmental law at the University of Oxford Law School, said that the Paris Agreement “contains ambitious goals” and “is firmly anchored in the common but differentiated responsibilities principle” that are an expression of equity between states.

The importance of civil society groups

In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the Sixth Assessment Report, with climate scientists issuing dire warnings about imminent climate collapse resulting from faster-than-predicted global warming. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the report “a code red for humanity.”  In September, the NDCs Report of the United Nations further warned that the signatories of the Paris Accords were not meeting emissions control goals fast enough to stave off catastrophic global warming.  Both reports stipulated that there was a narrow window of opportunity for strong, efficient actions to reduce emissions and implement adaptation. As if to illustrate the warnings from scientists, 2021 saw several climate-related disasters—devastating floods, forest fires, unprecedented high summer temperatures—in Europe, India, China, and the US. Climate activists and civil society groups came to COP 26 hoping that the dire events of 2021 would inspire constructive and ambitious agreements to slow global warming and stave off climate catastrophe.
Civil society groups play a decisive role in creating truly cohesive and ambitious agreements at the COPs. The Paris Agreement, for example, is based on the preliminary work of civil society organizations that raised issues such as transparency, adaptation, mitigation and finance. The Climate Action Network was a key actor in achieving an agreement on global stocktake and transparency.  NGOs and grassroots movements can play a crucial role in pressuring their governments to improve climate commitments and actions domestically whereby reaching agreements that are more powerful. Every COP receives official delegations, observers, and what are known as “overflow parties”; these last two are usually representatives of NGOs or organizations that fight climate change. The reality of advocacy within COP is more complex. The limited time and restricted opportunities for civil society to engage with officials makes it difficult to exert real influence. In addition, observers and civil society have a very limited voice at the negotiating table, where only those presiding at the discussion can invite NGOs to talk which is extremely rare. In sum, civil society and NGOs must act as spectators at talks defined almost entirely by governments. COP26 was heavily criticized for unfair access to negotiations. It was the most attended COP in history, but non-state observers were not given proper access to negotiations. The Climate Action Network represents more than 1,500 organisations, but were given only two tickets to enter the negotiating area for the first two days of COP26, which was considerably fewer than the number they had received for previous COPs.  Organizers blamed pandemic restrictions, which limited the number of people who could gather in a single room. I saw dozens of observers barred from entering negotiation rooms, purportedly to comply with COVID-19 restrictions. But the COP presidency could have pre-empted this situation by providing larger conference rooms with proper ventilation so that civil society members could participate fully.  Limiting access to negotiations is particularly unfair in the case of the vulnerable communities that assisted in organizing and consulting to COP26, only to find themselves barred from observing the negotiations. Restricted access to negotiations aggravates the structural exclusion that is already an issue for vulnerable communities and indigenous people. But these limitations did not stop civil society from exerting much-needed pressure on the negotiations. On Friday, November 12, hundreds gathered inside the COP26 venue to express their dissatisfaction with the draft decisions that had been published. The weak and unclear wording regarding support for developing countries was at the core of climate justice claims inside and outside the COP venue. Access restrictions were somewhat lifted toward the end of the conference due to pressure from civil society.  The next COP presidency must do more to ensure broader access to the negotiations. The UNFCCC must work on new guidelines to ensure an effective method for including the participation of civil society organizations at global climate negotiations.

Poor countries gonna get what's theirs

Unequal climate burdens provide the context for every COP gathering and Glasgow was no exception. Since the Paris Agreement, COPs have tried to make further progress on the implementation of past agreements, but so far have failed. Issues like “climate finance,” article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and “loss and damage” are among the most complicated ambits the COP must grapple with; equity is an important element of those debates. Wealthy industrialized nations arrived at COP this year having failed to comply with a commitment they made in 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen, to transfer $100 billion annually to poorer nations for finance mitigation and adaptation actions. Through funds such as the “Adaptation Fund,” the “Global Environment Facility,” or the “Green Climate Fund,” climate finance can support projects to increase the resilience of vulnerable coastal lands, or for coping with severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. Enhancing the adaptive capacity of the poorest communities across the globe is essential for climate justice; that is why developing nations at COP26 pushed for an acknowledgement in the final statement that wealthy nations had reneged on their financial commitment. Climate mitigation and adaptation actions are costly and developing countries simply do not have enough money. This scarcity of resources creates a vicious circle, whereby poorer nations cannot afford to make more ambitious commitments until the wealthier nations accept their historical responsibility by sharing the necessary financing with those who need it. [caption id="attachment_3534" align="alignleft" width="640"] Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at at COP26 on November 2, 2021.[/caption] India’s last-minute demand for a change to the wording of the conference resolution caused an enormous uproar. The original wording called upon signatories to “accelerate (…) efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power”; India said it wanted it changed to “phasedown of unabated coal power.” COP decisions require consensus, so the president was forced to capitulate. But while wealthy countries were vociferous in their criticism of this move and the media blamed India for playing an obstructive role, there is more to India’s position than simple obstruction or lack of purpose. The country’s negotiators were responding to a lack of commitment from rich countries to supporting the needs of poorer ones. From India’s perspective, the richer nations were historically for climate change and were therefore ethically obligated to cooperate with those who were poorer, carried far less responsibility for climate change, and were more vulnerable to its impact. Ambition and equity mark a delicate balance in every climate negotiation, a fact that Glasgow demonstrated once again. Future COPs must better consider how to navigate this precarious balancing act.  The urgency of the situation precludes further setbacks. It will be very difficult for anyone who attended COP26 to forget the sight of Alok Sharma, the president of COP,  struggling to hold back tears at the final plenary as he acknowledged that the conference had failed to produce the climate commitments needed to avert global climate collapse.
COP26 fell short because it failed to integrate the principle of equity into its decisions. To bring about the ambitious change we desperately need, civil society must play an equal role to state actors in negotiations. Future climate agreements need to push harder for more significant cooperation and concessions from wealthier nations. This is not about charity; it is a matter of justice and responsibility that should be shouldered by those who created this climate emergency. If future COP climate agreements follow these steps and ensure true global equity, it may still be possible to attain the goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees. [post_title] => COP26 fell short, but ended with a ray of hope [post_excerpt] => Conference organizers failed to include the civil society activists who do the hard work on the ground, but they still managed to have an impact. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => cop26-fell-short-but-ended-with-a-fragile-ray-of-hope [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3531 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

COP26 fell short, but ended with a ray of hope

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 2802
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-06-22 18:07:31
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-22 18:07:31
    [post_content] => For corporate loggers, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

Holly Friesen has spent most of her life documenting nature’s beauty. The Montreal-based landscape artist recently spent some time in British Columbia as the Artist in Residence at Eden Grove on Vancouver Island, and was awe-struck by the stunning ancient forest.

“The air was thick with moisture and dense silence and the forest was dripping with a thousand shades of green,” she said. “Giant cedars, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce were thrumming with life, some of them 1,000 years old and more.”

The Eden Grove protection camp, established in 2020 to prevent road building by the Teal-Jones logging corporation, is five minutes from the residency. The corporation is currently locked in a months-long dispute with forest protectors at Fairy Creek, a nearby old-growth watershed.

Moved by the forest’s beauty, Friesen auctioned off a large painting she made of Eden Grove, with all the money going toward the Fairy Creek blockades. “These forests help us to remember who we are and where we come from,” she says. “Their protection for future generations is essential. This is sacred land.”

[caption id="attachment_2829" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Amy Iredale dwarfed by one of the ancient trees at Fairy Creek.[/caption]

Some, however, don’t see anything holy here. For them, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

A growing environmental movement

At the heart of the Fairy Creek dispute is, on one hand, a logging company that wants to exploit the land in what it claims is a sustainable way and, on the other, environmental protectors who don’t believe that profit should come at the expense of these precious ecosystems. A group that calls themselves the Rainforest Flying Squad has blockaded the watershed on unceded Pacheedaht First Nation’s territory for the past 10 months. Their goal is simple: to stop Teal-Jones from cutting down rare intact old-growth forest. Protesters have been camped here since last summer, demanding that the provincial government put an immediate end to old-growth logging and transition to an ecologically responsible forest economy. The movement to protect these ancient forests is not new, but it was the widely shared photo of a massive, ancient spruce tree being hauled down Vancouver Island on a flatbed truck that garnered international publicity. Even those least inclined to label themselves tree-hugging environmentalists knew there was something wrong with a tree older than many of the world’s most famous historic landmarks being reduced to a lifeless stump in order to supply lumber for someone’s deck. Lorna Beecroft, the woman who took the photo and posted it on her Facebook wall, said: “It’s like watching someone shoot the last dodo.” The international outrage attracted the support of Hollywood celebrities and activists. Marc Ruffalo and Leonardo di Caprio recently used their online platforms and considerable media clout to raise awareness. Margaret Atwood, Bryan Adams, Jane Fonda, and Greta Thunberg were among the 100 prominent people who signed a letter calling on John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, to stop old-growth logging. The letter begins: “Some things can’t be replaced.”

The crux of the dispute

Renowned for its natural, untamed beauty, British Columbia is home to 60 million hectares of temperate coastal rainforest. The provincial government claims that 25 percent of the province’s forests are composed of old-growth trees; but the Old Growth Strategic Review, an independent study commissioned by the government in 2020, found that only 3 percent of the province is capable of supporting large trees. Within that small portion, old trees represent only 2.7 percent. Logging has cannibalized the ancient forests. “These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old-growth forests. They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging,” concluded the authors of the report from Veridian Ecological Consulting. [caption id="attachment_2821" align="alignleft" width="400"] Freshly cut old growth trees in the Caycuse River Valley.[/caption] Old-growth forests cannot be replaced because replanted forests—referred to as second growth—do not recreate the rich conditions and biodiversity of the ancient trees. The study urged the government to “immediately place a moratorium on logging in ecosystems and landscapes with very little old forest.” The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs also passed a resolution last year calling on the government to do the same. Fairy Creek’s 12.8 hectares of unlogged ancient old-growth forests are in fact extremely rare, making up less than 1 percent of what remains in the province. And yet, despite their importance and rarity, these ancient trees are still being cut down. Teal-Jones still has government approval to log in mostly old-growth forests. The Supreme Court of British Columbia granted an injunction in April for the RCMP to come in and remove protesters and tree-sitters at a string of blockades on logging roads in the area. Over 185 people have so far been arrested, but Canada’s legacy media has given the story little coverage. Independent media outlets Ricochet and The Narwhal have filled the vacuum. Teal-Jones has set up a roadblock of its own to block media and public access to Waterfall Camp. Reports from the frontlines and from independent media outlets confirm that the RCMP are preventing access to accredited media and legal observers, as well as Indigenous leaders on their own lands. The Canadian Association of Journalists, along with a coalition of news organizations and press freedom groups, announced last week that it’s taking the RCMP to court over its decision to restrict media access.

Chainsaw massacre

Fairy Creek is near Port Renfrew, a tiny community that touts itself as the “Tall Tree Capital of Canada.” The area includes the world’s largest Douglas fir and Canada’s largest Sitka spruce, as well as endangered animal species like Western screech owls, Northern Goshawk, and Northern Red-legged frogs. The residents have built up a recreational tourism brand with its tree tourism, a reminder that conservation and commerce can coexist successfully. With proper infrastructure and policies in place, these beautiful trees can be worth more to the local economy standing than cut down. “I moved to BC after taking one of these big-tree tours and I live here because of their beauty,” says Michael Simkin, a lawyer originally from Montreal. “I can understand the intellectual tension between the access provided to these areas because of logging, and the consequences of logging. I understand that many people’s livelihoods depend on this industry.” Simkin insists the issue is complex and involves many angles: economic, cultural, environmental, employment, social, and climate change, as well as Indigenous land claims. “But factually speaking,” he said, “There just aren’t many of these trees left, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.” It’s not hard to see why so many people are invested in protecting them. Pictures of old-growth forests are mesmerizing. The soaring height of these trees gives visitors some perspective on the tiny importance humans have on this planet. Images of massive tree trunks chopped down, with humans looking like tiny Lilliputians next to them, only add to the looming sense of devastation.

Growing resistance

Premier Horgan promised to implement the Old Growth Strategic Review Panel’s 14 recommendations to work with Indigenous leaders and environmental organizations during his electoral campaign. More than a year later, none of those proposed changes have been fully implemented. “In fact,” says Simkin, “old-growth logging permits have increased by close to 50 percent in the past few years.” The government’s failure to act has sparked widespread resistance by long-standing local environmental protection agencies. Among them, the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit that aims to enact province-wide legislation ending the logging of endangered old-growth trees, and Stand.earth, a Vancouver-based environmental advocacy organization. Tzeporah Berman—Stand.earth’s International Programs Director—was among the people recently arrested for defending old-growth forests near Fairy Creek headquarters. In early June, tired of the inaction, the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations formally gave notice to the province to defer old-growth logging for two years in the Fairy Creek and Central Walbran areas while the nations prepare resource management plans. “For more than 150 years they have watched as others decided what was best for their lands, water, and people,” they wrote in their statement. The BC government, under increasing pressure, agreed on June 9 to a two-year moratorium on logging in the Fairy Creek watershed and Central Walbran areas. Land protectors see this as a good first step, but they are pushing for more permanent solutions.

We’ve lost our connection to nature

Amy Iredale is a kindergarten teacher in Cumberland on Vancouver Island. She teaches nature kindergarten, which means that her students do at least 50 percent of their learning and growing outside in the forests surrounding the schools. She has spent time at the blockades and has also raised awareness and funds for those on the front lines. Seeing the area through the eyes of children has given her a newfound appreciation for the forests. “Children have this innate connection to the natural world around them that so many of us adults have lost,” she says. “Spend a day in the forest with a five-year-old and you will notice and learn more than you have in a long time. This connection, for whatever reason, is severed as we grow up.” Iredale and her class spend most of their time in their Cumberland second-growth community forest, a forest that was protected after millions of dollars of fundraising and decades of community love and support. “This is a community that was built on coal mining and logging,” she explains, “but they also understand that forests provide much more value standing, they are not anti-logging, they’re pro-balance.”

This great, big, interconnected world

Ross Reid, an outdoor adventure sports filmmaker, runs a popular website, Nerdy About Nature, where he combines his passion for nature with his storytelling skills. In his videos, Reid educates and motivates people to protect their surroundings. He believes that it’s possible to be both pro-logging and pro-environment. The fight isn’t “loggers vs. environmentalists” but “people versus systemic wealth, power and greed.” The goal, he says, should be to create sustainable forest management with Indigenous and local communities for the long-term benefit of everyone. Reid emphasizes that, beyond their beauty, old-growth forests are vital for mitigating climate-related disasters like flooding, droughts, fires, and heatwaves. Clearcutting exacerbates heatwaves and increases the number and size of forest fires. It also increases the risk of flooding, erosion, and landslides. By protecting endangered old-growth forests, restoring intact forests, and reforming forest management, the government can support the health and safety of communities by mitigating climate-related disasters before the climate crisis worsens. “I'd say the most crucial thing we all need to understand about these forests is that they are so much more than just the trees,” he says, when I ask what his most vital message is about Fairy Creek. “They are complex, intricate, integrated and interconnected ecosystems that have evolved over millions and existed for thousands of years, whose functions are so far beyond the scope of our comprehension that we're only just now beginning to scratch the surface of understanding their role in the grand scheme of life on this planet. We can't even begin to understand the way that our actions will impact the rivers, the waters, the hydrological flows across both micro and macro climates for the next few thousand years to come.” He worries that many can’t see the forest for the trees. “Considering that our 'modern society' is only a couple hundred years old and that our calendar alone is only 2021 years old, when we cut these ecosystems down, we are literally erasing them from the planet forever, in human time-scale terms, and replacing them with tree plantations that we expect to grow back on 70-year rotations, essentially creating a cornfield where a forest used to be.” “This,” he says, “jeopardizes the ability for life on this planet to survive— including ours.” If you would like to add your voice to those calling for a stop to old-growth logging, Greenpeace Canada has compiled a handy list of 12 ways you can do so. You can find it here. [post_title] => 'Irreplaceable': the battle to save the last ancient trees of Canada's temperate rain forest [post_excerpt] => At the heart of the Fairy Creek dispute is, on one hand, a logging company that wants to exploit the land in what it claims is a sustainable way and, on the other, environmental protectors who don’t believe that profit should come at the expense of these precious ecosystems. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => irreplaceable-the-battle-to-save-the-endangered-ancient-trees-of-british-columbia [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/47068/saving-fairy-creek-and-why-ancient-forests-are-worth-more-standing/#action [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2802 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

‘Irreplaceable’: the battle to save the last ancient trees of Canada’s temperate rain forest

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1767
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-05-14 22:00:58
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-05-14 22:00:58
    [post_content] => A scientist-turned-businessman believes he can make a profit by harvesting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into synthetic limestone.

In 2006 Brent Constanz, a marine biologist who had studied corals for over 20 years, founded a company called Calera to produce cement with carbon dioxide. Constanz believed he could make a profit from harvesting toxic emissions to make the world’s most in-demand product with a method that was not only environmentally sound – but which actually helped reduce carbon emissions. He later thought using carbon dioxide to create concrete was the way to go and in 2012 launched Blue Planet, with the aspiration to pull 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually out of the air’s foul breath and turn it into synthetic limestone. Blue Planet manufactures synthetic limestone out of carbon dioxide – the toxic gas that is an industrial byproduct.  Synthetic limestone, when broken down into small pebbles and added to water and cement, becomes concrete, the second largest commodity in the world after water.

Today, carbon in the atmosphere has hit 415 parts per million—the highest level in the 800,000 years for which we have reliable data. In the pre-industrial era, it was below 300 parts per million. The excess carbon in the atmosphere traps heat on Earth, turning up the global thermostat.

Sanjeev Khagram, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, said that Blue Planet’s method of turning carbon into synthetic limestone was an effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. While presenting a paper on the subject at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, Khagram said that “carbon farming” was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to “turn a profit of $1 to $10 trillion” per year.

“Blue Planet’s is indeed a market-based approach to tackling climate change,” said Rick Parnell, CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration,  an organization that aspires to restore atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels by 2050. Parnell also advocates private sector initiatives like that of Constantz’s. “You can't wait for the governments to act, we need to act now,” he said. His partner, MIT graduate Peter Fiekowsky, said that until now Bill Gates was the only person funding carbon removal. He added that recent government initiatives were “at one tenth the scale we need.”

Carbon farming on a large scale would indeed solve a major environmental issue while creating a whole new industry, said Casper Ohm, a data scientist in the field of environmental sustainability. Ohm is editor-in-chief of Water Pollution, an online resource about water and the environment. “The investment to pull 25 billion tons of C02 per year would require a huge amount of capital,” he said.  “It all depends on money.”

For other experts, carbon trading is controversial for ethical and environmental reasons.

“It is kind of like enabling other companies to release more carbon carbon dioxide [so that] another company can take it out of the atmosphere, [which allows] the first company to keep creating more carbon dioxide,” said Lisa Schaefer, a systems engineer who founded Thinq.tv, a video streaming platform developed at Arizona State University that hosts live grassroots conversations about current events.

The first company, explained Schaefer, could be investing in making its infrastructure and processes greener, but instead will now pay a contractor to clean up what they are putting out into the atmosphere.  Schaefer also believes the amount of carbon Blue Planet promises to pull out of the atmosphere might have the counter-productive effect of encouraging the production of more concrete.

“Only 10 billion tons of concrete are produced every year, not including the recycling of old concrete and other cheaper materials for making concrete,” she said. There appears to be no demand for 25 billion tons. She added: “We certainly don't want to encourage companies to manufacture more concrete even if it is a ‘green one.’”

Constantz was, until January 2020, in discussions with a wide range of industrial emitters, including cement and steel plants about initiatives to establish manufacturing plants around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought those discussion to a temporary halt, but Constanz expects them to resume once the crisis has passed.

But even in these times of insecurity, global stasis, and introspection, Fiekowsky, who invested in Blue Planet years ago (Leonardo DiCaprio and  Don Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, are also investors), says there are parallels to be drawn between how different countries are addressing climate change and Covid-19.

“Singapore and South Korea decided they wanted to control the virus. The US and the UK said, well, let's just minimize the impact of the virus,” Fiekowsky said. As of this writing, the US has reported 1,259,108 cases and 75,781 deaths and the UK 207,977 cases and 30,689 deaths, while South Korea reports 10,822 cases and 256 deaths and Singapore 21,707 cases and 20 deaths. “Obviously, it's horrible. To just minimize what you really want to get rid of,” said Fiekowsky.

Governments were giving short shrift to the urgent need for policy to deal with climate change before the pandemic, which has since drowned out the conversation about the issue.  Constanz pointed out that while the United States government has allocated $2 trillion to address the Covid-19 emergency, far more will die from climate change.

Ismail Serageldin, the former  Vice-President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development at the World Bank, famously said in 1995 that "if the wars of [the twentieth century] century were fought over oil, the wars of the [twenty-first] century will be fought over water — unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource."

Climate change will continue to ravage the Earth even after a vaccination for the Covid-19 virus becomes available. It is thus a crisis that we cannot afford to sideline, even during a global health crisis. To that point, climate expert Professor Robert Devoy of Ireland’s Coastal Marine Research Center issued a stark warning in a 2015 interview. “The last time the planet warmed this much,” he said, “88 percent of life disappeared.”

 
    [post_title] => Can private industry save the environment with for-profit green initiatives?
    [post_excerpt] => Harvest carbon and turning it into synthetic limestone could be an effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => can-private-industry-save-the-environment-with-for-profit-green-initiatives
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1767
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Can private industry save the environment with for-profit green initiatives?

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1703
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-04-16 23:53:08
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-04-16 23:53:08
    [post_content] => Even with ridership down by 90 percent and fare collection suspended, public transportation is considered an essential service.

In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has forced transit systems worldwide to suspend fare collection to keep workers and riders safe. These changes were implemented to protect the public in a crisis, but the idea that urban areas should provide at least some free public transit is not new—roughly 200 cities around the world already do. Most of those cities are in Europe, but even in the United States, cities as disparate as Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Miami, Oakland, Olympia, and Pittsburgh have made some public transit fare-free for some or all riders.

According to An Van hamme, a spokeswoman for the Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company (STIB), public transit ridership in Brussels, Belgium, has fallen to about 15 percent of its normal level. “Price setting…is the prerogative of the Brussels government,” Van hamme responded to questions in an email. “There haven’t been any changes in the price setting since the coronavirus crisis began.” STIB has, however, taken steps to protect staff and riders, including banning payment aboard vehicles and implementing a “protection zone” around drivers, prohibiting the use of cash in STIB ticket sales, and taking extra measures to clean every tram, bus, metro, and terminal.

Verena Löw and Elke Krokowski, two spokeswomen for the transport association that serves Germany’s Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region (VBB), said in an email that they estimate a very sharp decline in the use of public transit since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, “between 50% and 90% depending on the line and mode of transport.” Despite this drop in ridership, they wrote, “public transit is rightly considered to be systemically relevant” and the region’s transit operators are committed to keeping it “up and running for those who need it.”

The front parts of buses in Berlin and Brandenburg are now closed to passengers to protect workers, and direct contact between riders and workers is strongly discouraged. All doors open automatically. Passengers must still buy a ticket before boarding a train, but they can no longer purchase tickets directly from transit staff (they are encouraged to use vending machines or apps instead). According to Löw and Krokowski, public transit is running “as much and often as possible in order to be able to offer lots of space for the passengers who do use it.”

Compare these measures to the situation in New York City, where ridership has declined by 87 percent on subways and more than 70 percent on buses. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that it would reduce subway service by at least 25 percent. At least 59 MTA employees have died, over 6,000 have fallen ill or self-quarantined, and nearly 1,900 of the agency’s 72,000 workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, including the agency’s chairman, Patrick J. Foye.

Foye recently told The New York Times that the MTA has provided workers with 460,000 masks, “thousands” of face shields, and 2.5 million pairs of gloves; that they disinfect train cars and buses every three days; and have eliminated cash transactions between booth clerks and riders. According to workers, the agency did not implement many aspects of its own pandemic response plan, which was adopted in 2012, until nearly a month after the virus hit New York.

Ridership has declined throughout the city, but it has dropped by significantly less in areas like the Bronx, where most residents are black and Latino. Many hold jobs in health care, social services, retail, or food service, and few have the option of working from home. As The New York Times recently reported, many “say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus” and the MTA’s service reductions have led to crowded conditions, “making it impossible to maintain the social distancing that public health experts recommend.”

The coronavirus crisis is proving that governments can always find alternative ways of funding essential services when they must. I asked the VBB spokeswomen how the agency plans to compensate for the sharp decline in revenue and how it has been able to continue offering high-quality service at a time when so few riders are paying to use it.

“That’s indeed the challenge many sectors are facing right now,” Löw replied via email. “In general, the financing of public transit is quite complex in Germany. Local public transit is financed roughly 50:50 through passenger fares and state subsidies.” The German government, she added, “has set up funds for companies facing financial difficulties due to the current crisis,” and the VBB is working with transport operators and the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg on various financing schemes as well.

In the U.S., Congress recently passed a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill which included $25 billion in federal funding for public transportation systems. The money is intended to fund daily operations, make up for lost revenue, and sustain transit workers’ jobs. Similarly, in Canada, transit experts concerned that a steep decline in ridership could cost the country's transit authorities millions of dollars are calling on Ottawa for federal support.

Fare collection is itself a waste of time and money. It’s expensive to purchase and install state-of-the-art ticket machines. It’s expensive to pay and ensure the safety of workers tasked with collecting individual fares. Most frustrating of all to the average city dweller, it causes delays

Criminalizing fare evasion and enforcing laws against it contributes to growing inequality. In 2015, the New York City Police Department arrested more New Yorkers for fare evasion than for any other offense. Of the 29,000 people arrested for fare evasion, 94 percent were people of color. From October 2017 to June 2019, black and Hispanic people—who account for slightly more than half of New York City’s population—made up nearly 73 percent of those ticketed for fare evasion and more than 90 percent of those who were arrested, rather than issued a ticket.

Peter Harrison, who is challenging long-time incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 12th congressional district, has put forth the “Freedom of Movement in America Plan,” which would require the federal government to invest $1.7 trillion in public transportation over the next decade and provide $17 billion in federal funding to cover fare revenue and make transit fare-free throughout the country. He recently told City Limits that his plan’s name was the result of his desire to start a conversation about what “freedom” means.

“I don’t think you’re free if you can’t walk down the stairs to get on the subway to go to a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “I don’t think you’re free if you’re one flat tire or missed car payment from losing your car, triggering losing your job and losing your house, and that’s the reality for a lot of people in New York City and for a lot of people in America.”

If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding? Harrison and other proponents of free transit believe the money is already there.

“We spent $6 trillion on 20 years of endless wars…and we have spent a trillion dollars annually on deficits for taxes,” he told Town & Village in February. “Republicans have shown that we have enough resources in the federal government to pay for the types of infrastructure investments that we want. Putting money into our sustainable transportation system will unleash an immense amount of economic growth.”

“During a pandemic,” Harrison told me in a recent phone interview, “the least we can do is make subways and buses free and reduce touchpoints to make [mass transit] safer for the people operating and using it.” But in order to achieve fare-free transit throughout the United States, he acknowledged, we need to have a “deeper conversation” about restructuring our entire society. Our freedom of movement depends on it.
    [post_title] => The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge
    [post_excerpt] => If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding?
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-global-pandemic-shows-that-cities-can-afford-to-make-public-transport-free-of-charge
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1703
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1627
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-02-20 20:35:00
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-02-20 20:35:00
    [post_content] => A band of First Nations people have won national and international support for their refusal to allow a pipeline through their land.

Until cross-country rail blockades by Indigenous activists and their allies made front-page news earlier this month, few Canadians noticed the protests against a pipeline in We’tsuewet’en territory. Opposition to the project from First Nations people in northwestern British Columbia has, however, been consistent—and years in the making. The dam that had been holding back a slow and steady bubbling of resistance burst late last month when heavily armed militarized police moved to enforce a court injunction and tear down a blockade against Coastal GasLink, the company that wants to run its 670-kilometre gas pipeline through unceded native land.

Hereditary chiefs of We’tsuewet’en territory maintain they have jurisdiction over this unceded land and that both Coastal GasLink/TC Energy and the government are in violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Complicating matters: under the Indigenous system of governance, hereditary chiefs from each clan are title holders of the land; meanwhile the band councils (created through the government-imposed Indian Act) have control over the land that the government allotted to reserves. The issue of who controls the land has never been settled legally, nor resolved by negotiation or litigation.

This is not the first time a confrontation between Canadian authorities and Indigenous people has made international news. In 1990, Mohawk people in Quebec held off for 78 days against a golf club developer who wanted to construct condos on traditional burial grounds. The confrontation led to the Oka Crisis, with the provincial and federal governments, in a rare show of unanimity, working together to deploy the military against the barricaded Mohawk. Like the current We’tsuwet’en standoff, it sparked a global solidarity movement in support of Indigenous communities fighting a centuries-old battle against colonialism.

This, however, is the first time Indigenous protests over land rights has garnered popular support among non-Indigenous Canadians.
  • The Idle No More protest movement, founded in 2012 to honour Indigenous sovereignty and protect the water and land, sensitized non-Indigenous Canadians to the grievances and concerns of Indigenous communities.
  • The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls demonstrated the direct connection between the violation of Indigenous rights and Canada’s staggering rates of violence against women and girls of the First Nations.
  • The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada opened the nation’s eyes to the horrific and lasting impacts of the residential school system on Indigenous students and their families.
Add to all of the above a rising global awareness about the effect of climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy systems and it’s easy to see why popular support for the protests has grown—despite the economic cost of forcing the railway to shut down. We’tsuwet’en advocates and hereditary leaders have been warning for years about the possibility of a showdown. Critics of the train blockades, however, are now saying that few Indigenous groups are involved in the protests. They point the finger instead at white eco lobbyists, allegedly funded by foreign groups with nefarious intentions. John Ivison, a columnist for the right-wing National Post, went so far as to claim “millennial eco-activists are the new colonialists.” This is a bold take, given that land protectors have for decades been defending the environment from corporations intent on ramming pipelines through unceded land. Activists for Indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals. Shale gas development, pipelines transporting oil, the polluting effects of extraction for a country’s biodiversity, water and land, are issues that are not limited to Indigenous communities. Nor is opposition to pipelines uniquely Canadian: TC Energy has faced major opposition in Mexico and the United States. As long as the industrialized world refuses to transition to renewable sources, they will continue to expropriate Indigenous land and exploit the natural world for fuel. This is why Indigenous activists around the world —Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia — are fighting against mining, logging, and other exploitation of community lands, often at the cost of their own lives. The UN has warned of a “drastic increase” in violence against Indigenous people because of their resistance. According to UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “67 percent of the 312 human rights defenders murdered in 2017 were defending their lands, the environment, or Indigenous rights, nearly always in the context of private sector projects.” But there are success stories, too. Just last week, the Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, won a ruling against a Canadian-owning mining company operating in the town. The company had obtained permits to exploit local mineral and precious metal deposits without first consulting the community and, as a result, the environmental protection agency ordered the mine closed. Political activism raises awareness, which in turn inspires conversations, and helps public sentiment turn in favour of the marginalized— and this is when the vilification begins. Smear campaigns and hate speech painting Indigenous people as obstacles to economic development, lawless “thugs” and “paid protesters” have already commenced, with some of these comments coming directly from the House of Commons in Ottawa. Outgoing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who has repeatedly referred to the democratic protests as illegal, instructed Indigenous protesters—many of whom still live with boil-water advisories in communities that lack basic amenities—to “check their privilege.” Scheer recently stood up in the House of Commons to demand the protestors be removed by police force if necessary. Peter MacKay, the man currently vying for Scheer’s job, chimed in by posting a video declaring Indigenous protesters and their supporters “a small gang of professional protesters” and “thugs” holding “innocent Canadians hostage.” The Post Millennial, a pro-Conservative media platform, blamed CN Rail’s recent layoffs on Indigenous activists— ignoring both the fact that the company had announced upcoming layoffs in late 2019 and that unions and workers have expressed solidarity for We’tsuwet’en protests. “Rail blockades could see cities run out of chlorine for water treatment,” read another headline. But the article itself attributes the claim to a lobbyist for chemical distribution companies. Most cities in fact have their chlorine trucked in; and The Post Millennial did not mention that 60 Indigenous communities have been living with boil-water advisories for decades. In Canada, as in many other countries with significant Indigenous populations, the policy for decades has been to deny or ignore their legitimate rights and titles. Now, once again, a private company wants to invade unceded territory and exploit its land for economic gain at the expense of the people who live on it. Because those people have little legal or economic power, they are engaging in peaceful civil disobedience as a means to be heard. But instead of listening, the authorities are treating them like criminals. Faced with escalating pressure from the blockades and the people outraged by them, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled a trip to Barbados, where he was expected to pitch Caribbean leaders on why Canada should be granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Instead, he held an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers Monday in Ottawa. To his credit, he denounced the calls for force, making it clear that a solution could only be found through discussions. Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller reiterated that sentiment, stating that “the pathway to de-escalation is a painful one, and it’s an hour-by-hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.” Violence and suppression are easy and respectful dialogue is tedious and long, but it’s the latter that is required now. Canada has yet to engage fully with its grim colonial legacy. This is a country founded on the often-violent seizure of Indigenous land; the displacement of communities via  state-sponsored residential schools; and the banning and hoped-for extinction of Indigenous culture, languages, and culture. This legacy is responsible for countless deaths and for generational trauma that manifests in high rates of suicide, incarceration, and substance abuse; it has also played an instrumental role in settler privilege and prosperity. Canada can no longer afford to prop up polluting industries that threaten our biodiversity and the viability of our land and water. It’s unconscionable to do so. Indigenous concerns should be our concerns also. They are one and the same. The discourse and increasing support around the We’tsuewet’en protests and train blockades is evolving rapidly because public awareness is rising. Canadian attitudes toward environmental issues are evolving. We’re now starting to realize as a global community that Indigenous people are leading the way in a battle we must wage together.   [post_title] => A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action [post_excerpt] => Activists for indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-standoff-over-a-gas-pipeline-has-become-a-call-for-environmental-action [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1627 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1094
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-06-07 14:32:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-07 14:32:51
    [post_content] => Celebrity chefs and food manufacturers are setting an example for us all in reimagining and repurposing discarded food

When I first began to cook, learning to discriminate between what I could and could not eat was essential to understanding my way around the kitchen. Dark green tops of leeks, for instance, are considered waste. Radish roots are for salad, but the greens are usually discarded. As a cook and an avid eater, I generated a significant amount of unused vegetable matter. Eventually, I began composting those food scraps. But what if those radish greens and leek tops had value? What if they were not considered waste?

Unused food product has become a major environmental issue. One third of the food produced globally goes to waste every year, along with all the resources spent on its production, even as 1 billion people around the world starve. Meanwhile, the methane produced by food discarded in landfills contributes 8% of greenhouse gases that are rapidly warming our planet to dangerous levels.

When restaurants, food manufacturers, and caterers break down raw ingredients, peel vegetables, and trim cuts of meat, they generate enormous quantities of scraps. Supermarkets, meanwhile, throw away produce just slightly past its aesthetic prime, sending wilted lettuce and imperfect-looking bananas to the landfills.

In 2016 ReFED, a U.S. non-profit consortium that is committed to reducing food waste, produced a report called “Rethinking Food Waste through Economics and Data: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste." Among their findings: in the United States, $218 billion is spent each year just to grow, process, distribute, and then dispose of food that nobody ate. Landfills receive 52.4 million tons of food in a year. Restaurants in the United States alone produce 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, worth about $25 billion. The quantity of waste is mind-bending.

Problem of perception

Now some celebrity chefs are setting an example for us all in reducing waste with creative methods. Massimo Bottura, owner of the Michelin three-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, is a famous advocate of using discarded food scraps rather than throwing them away. In his cookbook Bread Is Gold, published in 2015, he provides recipes that reclaim unused food items, including one for chutney made from banana peels. Plenty of foods considered inedible in some cultures are part of the diet in others. Koreans, for example, make a tea from corn silk. Many chefs today appreciate the woody flavor corn husks add to broths. The green tops of leeks can be used for soups, and radish greens add a peppery bite to salads. “Waste,” says Chef Douglas McMaster of Silo, the U.K.’s first zero waste restaurant, “is a failure of the imagination.” Waste is also a byproduct of affluence and privilege. I often think about the disconnect between my grandmother’s kitchen sense and my mother’s: My grandmother survived the Second World War with her family in Siberia, where food was scarce and hunger widespread. When she speaks of that period, she often recounts digging in the ground to find discarded potato peels, which for her were a nutrient-rich food. When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey during the 1980s and ‘90s, we never thought twice about discarding our potato peels — or most food, for that matter.

Converting organic waste into soil

Composting — the process of converting organic materials into densely nutrient-rich topsoil — is a commonly practiced solution to food waste. San Francisco is one of several American cities that has established a municipal program to collect and treat organic waste. New York City currently requires commercial kitchens to dispose of organic matter in separate bins. Huge digesters, essentially in-house machine-operated composters that convert food scraps into soil using special enzymes, help offset the volume of waste generated by large food establishments that would otherwise be hauled away and processed off premises. To be sure, alleviating the burden on landfills and turning organic matter into soil is an incredibly important solution for cities and companies to pursue. But, as many food waste entrepreneurs are realizing, a better solution is to limit the creation of waste in the first place and compost only what is truly inedible. In the case of commercial composting, hauling tons of food scraps in tractor-trailers across state lines to commercial facilities (sometimes great distances) and operating fossil fuel-powered machinery to process waste expends energy and places carbon in the atmosphere. Profit is another incentive: according to a recent report, restaurants save seven dollars for every dollar invested in methods to limit food waste.

Turning liabilities into assets

By rethinking how we cook and what we consume, we can create innovative solutions that bring huge ecological and social benefits. Some new food companies have already implemented systems to prevent nutrient-rich foods from being thrown away. Take, for example, the case of acidic whey. A byproduct of Greek-style strained yogurt, it cannot legally be disposed of by throwing it down the drain or into natural waterways, because it sucks up the oxygen in water and destroys aquatic life. The whey is, however, tangy, probiotic, and nutrient-rich. And so large yogurt-manufacturing companies like Chobani pay to have it transported in bulk to farmers, who feed it to their animals. Homa Dashtaki, the owner of White Moustache, a Brooklyn-based artisanal yogurt brand, calls whey, which is full of vitamins but contains no calories or fat, a “golden elixir.” She has begun supplying restaurants with whey for their own experiments, like specialty cocktails, but still has a significant quantity left over. Rather than pay someone to haul it away, Dashtaki created innovative products, like a probiotic tonic made of flavored whey, and a probiotic popsicle infused with fresh fruit. On a much larger scale, the New York-based specialty foods distributor Baldor has pursued a zero waste strategy by creating an entirely new business ecosystem. Thomas McQuillan, the company’s vice president of strategy, culture, and sustainability, understands the value of carrot peels. “Food product has to be consumed by human beings, it has to be consumed by animals or it has to be turned into energy or compost,” he said recently, while giving a lecture at New York’s Food Waste Fair. He added that food “should never go to landfills.” In 2016, Baldor set into a motion a program called SparCs (scraps spelled backwards) to eliminate food waste from their fresh produce processing facility. It takes the150,000 pounds of fruit and vegetable by-product it generates each week and turns it over to animal or human consumption. Baldor partners with chefs to create baked goods, broths, juices, and sauces with these scraps, and with farmers who use them for feed. Since its inception, the program has diverted 6,000 tons of produce from landfill. Baldor has thus not only generated new revenue streams, but also reduced its waste haul by 73%. It is now a zero organic waste company.

A new consciousness

While not every food service company can afford to rethink its business model, companies with the resources to do so must take the lead. This is the only way to create a cultural shift that will set the standard for small food businesses. When companies like Baldor and White Moustache notice inefficiencies in the existing structures and begin looking for creative and environmentally sustainable solutions, they change how we as a culture understand the value of food. By strategically intervening and reframing the idea of waste while reasserting the value of the whole vegetable, for instance, we not only limit food waste, but we also ease the burden on our environment and maximize the nutrition of food to reach more people. These ideas and policies can affect how we all cook and eat in our own homes, so that we create a more sustainable and innovative food culture.  We already have the capacity to feed the entire world. Reframing waste as food is the first step toward ensuring a more just and sustainable food system. [post_title] => We would have enough food to feed the planet if we stopped wasting so much of it [post_excerpt] => One third of the food produced globally every year goes to waste, even as 1 billion people starve. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => we-would-have-enough-food-to-feed-the-planet-if-we-stopped-wasting-so-much-of-it [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1094 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

We would have enough food to feed the planet if we stopped wasting so much of it

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1027
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-05-23 14:09:50
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-23 14:09:50
    [post_content] => Authoritarian politics has become a global crisis that requires creative, new thinking

Far-right, nationalist, populist, illiberal, authoritarian: However one might describe these politicians, they are increasingly dominating the world stage. They've been called a "security threat" and compared to climate change — a global crisis in need of a global response. The outline of what such a response might look like is beginning to take shape, as seen in these articles from prominent media outlets.

Authoritarian politicians are a “global security threat,” writes Jonah Shepp in a recent op-ed for New York Magazine. To know the near-future, he suggests looking to recent events in Austria, where government officials sympathetic to far-right groups illegally seized records from a domestic intelligence agency, including the identities of informants within far-right, extremists groups, jeopardizing domestic terrorism investigations. And yet, as Shepp demonstrates, Austria is far from a global outlier. “So don’t look at what’s happening in Austria and say it couldn’t happen here,” Shepp writes, “it already is.”

For The Nation, John Feffer characterizes rising authoritarianism as a global crisis that requires international cooperation. Feffer worries that progressive tactics rely too much on the “guardrails” of democracy, which authoritarians begin to erode as soon as they step foot in office. “Environmentalists understand that unprecedented change requires an unprecedented response,” Feffer writes. “To deal with the threat of political climate change, a similarly international, broad-based, and fundamentally new approach is called for.”

Polish activists Karolina Wigura and Jaroslaw Kuisz might be the example to follow in combatting illiberalism. In a recent New York Times op-ed, they share three lessons gleaned from their work: First, to find areas of consensus among non-right-wing, populist parties, and to set aside differences in favor of compromise. Second, to spend less time reacting to political provocations on social media, and more time building a long-term strategic plan. Finally, to invigorate voters with stories of optimism and hope that goes beyond a return to the way things were “before the illiberals.” These suggestions can be applied locally, but they could also form the basis of the kind of global strategy Feffer outlines.

In other news:

Is the answer to global warming to reduce the work week to a mere nine hours? That’s the conclusion of one study by the think tank Autonomy. Read more at The Guardian. A recent win on same-sex marriage in Taiwan could have reverberations throughout Asia, as the country demonstrates that LGBTQ movement can be in alignment with traditional Asian values. Read more in The Washington Post. Magnolia Mother’s Trust is a model for an unconditional income: small amounts of regularly distributed financial support without any work requirements or other demands. The pilot is small: 20 families in Jackson, Mississippi, are each receiving $1,000 a month for 12 months. But the program could pave the way for more systemic racial justice programs. Read more in The New York Times. [post_title] => More effective than punching a Nazi: tactics that work [post_excerpt] => The outline of an effective response to authoritarianism is taking shape. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => more-effective-than-punching-a-nazi-tactics-that-work [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1027 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

More effective than punching a Nazi: tactics that work

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 981
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-05-09 15:23:43
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-09 15:23:43
    [post_content] => On Monday the UN published a devastating report, which identifies human activity as the reason that millions of species are disappearing at a rate “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years.”  The bottom line of the report, which summarizes the work of 145 researchers from 50 countries, is that the damage we humans are doing to our environment might be irreversible — if we fail to take immediate action and heed its main conclusions:
  • Current global response is insufficient;
  • Transformative changes’ are needed to restore and protect nature;
  • Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good.
The following articles offer various responses to the report’s conclusions. It’s not too late to prevent the extinction of over 1 million animals and plants, reports Seth Borenstein for the Associated Press. In order to stop or even reverse this trend, we need to change how we produce food and energy, reduce waste, and address climate change — all monumental tasks that will require cooperation between governments, companies, and people. If you’ve been hearing a lot about this report but need a little context to understand its significance, The Guardian published an excellent back-to-basics explainer on biodiversity. It explains how one species can be an integral part of an entire system; the financial toll that biodiversity loss takes on humans; and the benefits humans have reaped for centuries from the diverse animal and plant species that cover the earth. The call for a Green New Deal in the United States is spreading. A proposal to rework Canada’s economy in order to battle climate change has the support of environmentalists, youth organizers, Indigenous groups, and others. Learn more here. The Green New Deal, while ambitious and promising, won’t be enough on its own to save the environment. Ben Adler argues, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, that the Green New Deal must include support for developing nations to invest in more expensive clean energies as they industrialize. These countries have already said they are open to more ambitious energy goals — if they receive support from more financially secure nations. Cooperation is possible. Read more here. Finally, your ICYMI author recently published a how-to for Lifehacker on growing a bug-friendly garden anywhere — no matter how much or how little outdoor space you have. Insects are an integral part of the food chain, and pollinators are essential for growing fruits and vegetables; any small amount you can do for them is a help. Learn how here.   [post_title] => How to pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe [post_excerpt] => The Green New Deal, while ambitious and promising, won’t be enough on its own to save the environment. It must include support for developing nations to invest in more expensive clean energies as they industrialize. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-to-pull-back-from-the-brink-of-environmental-catastrophe [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=981 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

How to pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 897
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-04-25 16:50:36
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-04-25 16:50:36
    [post_content] => In honor of Earth Day this week, we’ve collected stories about environmental activists who are having an impact on policy. These individuals, companies, and organizations are refusing to succumb to inertia and fatalism 

Mass-produced cleaning solution tablets that consumers mix with water at home can drastically reduce the environmental damage caused by toxic chemicals. Several new companies are now producing those tablets, which consumers can use in reusable cleaning bottles instead of relying on disposable plastic. A little change can go a long way. Learn more here.

In London, climate activists showed that the act of disruption is a powerful tactic. After police arrested more than 1,000 protesters with the Extinction Rebellion movement, the movement leaders “paused” the protests, saying they have enough momentum and support to “enter into negotiations with those in power.” Read more.

The Guardian profiled nine of the “ordinary people” arrested for standing up for the climate. Read those here.

Disrupting business as usual doesn’t always take the form of marching in the streets. The increasing number of climate-change-related lawsuits suggests that the sheer volume of such cases could force corporations and governments to change their ways. Read more here.

Researchers are using mushrooms to clean up toxic messes, like oil spills. Check out this fun infographic to find out how it works.

Can science fiction help us envision better worlds? This article looks at what the world would look like after we’ve solved climate change. On a practical level, it could help policy-makers and politicians set appropriate goals and priorities. Read about the possible future here.

 
    [post_title] => Climate change disrupted
    [post_excerpt] => This week's roundup is about environmental activists whose disruptive tactics succeeded in changing policy
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => climate-change-disrupted
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=897
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Climate change disrupted

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 720
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-03-13 14:45:52
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-03-13 14:45:52
    [post_content] => The power of the individual to halt global warming is the major theme of this week’s curated articles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she wants to “rediscover the power of public imagination" as we begin to address our changing climate.


 
  • “It’s 2050 — how did we stop climate change?” This is the question posed at the opening of a recent NPR report. Instead of focusing on the monumental challenge facing the world, the reporter asks what actions we as individuals can take right now. The result is an optimistic road map for a more climate-friendly future, relying almost entirely on technology and capabilities that we already have. Listen to the story here.
 
  • A grassroots campaign in Britain convinced Walkers, the manufacturer of the country’s most popular brand of potato chips, to create a recycling scheme for its excessive packaging. The company’s response to the popular campaign shows that consumers have the power to influence corporate policies. Read The Independent op-ed.
 
  • Case in point: Greta Thunberg, the adolescent activist who skipped school to protest climate inaction outside of the Swedish parliament building. What began as her lone crusade has become a global movement with Thunberg at the helm, inspiring her teenage peers and adult activists alike. Read The Guardian’s profile of this remarkable girl.
 
  • In finding a way to get the Green New Deal passed by the Senate, there’s a case to be made that the left wing of the Democratic Party has embraced tactics more effective than those of the moderates. While the moderates are searching for a sensible compromise, progressives want to eliminate structural impediments to real action. “This might seem like fantastical thinking, but it actually carries a greater dose of realism about both the current political situation and about the opposition in the Republican Party,” writes David Atkins. Read his op-ed in The American Prospect.
 
  • A vegan reporter faced an online backlash from dairy farmers after appearing on a national Canadian radio show to talk about veganism. But instead of throwing up her hands in frustration at the incivility of social media, she took the opportunity to learn from her so-called opponents, and modelled the ideal social media conversationalist for people on either side of the issue. Read her account for Vice.
[post_title] => Harnessing the imagination to address climate change [post_excerpt] => The power of the individual to halt global warming is the major theme of this week’s curated articles. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => harnessing-the-imagination-to-address-climate-change [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=720 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Harnessing the imagination to address climate change