Tag Archives: climate crisis

Living in the era of mass extinction

2025/02/02 faiksoristos

Sometimes these realisations sneak up on you, like a quiet memory – just the slightest hint that something isn’t right.

When I was growing up in Eswatini, the small country in southern Africa formerly known as Swaziland, my family had a rickety old Toyota pickup – the kind that was ubiquitous in the region in the 1980s. After long drives it was my job to help clear the front grille of all the insects that accumulated there. Sometimes they were piled three deep: butterflies, moths, wasps, grasshoppers, beetles of every conceivable size and colour – dozens if not hundreds of species. I remember my dad telling me that the insects on Earth weighed more than all the other animals put together, including humans. I marvelled at this idea, and found it somehow heartening. As a child I worried about the fate of the living world, as I think many children do – so this story about the insects made me feel that everything was going to be OK. It was comforting to be reminded of the seemingly inexhaustible abundance of life. This fact would drift to mind on hot nights while we sat outside on the porch, hoping for a breeze, watching moths and beetles swarm around the light, dodging the bats that would sometimes swoop through to snatch a meal. I became fascinated with insects. At one point I tried to identify all the different species around our home, running about with pen and little notebook in hand. In the end I had to give up. There were too many to count.

My dad still shares that old story about the insects from time to time – always in an excited tone, in the way that dads do, like it’s a new fact he’s just discovered. But these days it doesn’t quite ring true. Things feel different, somehow. When I’ve returned to southern Africa for research in recent years, the car turns out more or less clean even after long journeys. Maybe a few flies here and there, but nothing at all like before. Perhaps it’s just that the insects loom large in my childhood memories. Or perhaps there’s something more troubling afoot.

In late 2017, a team of scientists reported some strange and rather alarming findings. They had been meticulously counting insect numbers in German nature reserves for decades. This is something that very few scientists had taken the time to do – the sheer abundance of insects makes such an exercise seem unnecessary – so everyone was curious to see what would come of it. The results were devastating. The team found that three-quarters of flying insects in Germany’s nature reserves had vanished over the course of twenty-five years – due, they concluded, to the conversion of surrounding forests to farmland, followed by the intensive use of agricultural chemicals.

The study went viral, capturing headlines around the world. ‘We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon,’ one of the scientists said.

‘If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.’1 Insects are essential to pollination and plant reproduction, and as a food source for thousands of other species. As insignificant as they may seem, they are key nodes in the web of life. As if to confirm these fears, a few months later two studies reported that falling insect populations had caused a dramatic decline of birds on farmland in France. Average numbers had fallen by a third in only fifteen years, with some species – like meadow pipits and partridges – collapsing by as much as 80%.2 In the same year, news out of China reported that insect die-offs had triggered a pollination crisis. Absurd photographs emerged of workers going from plant to plant, pollinating crops by hand.

The problem isn’t unique to these regions. Insect decline appears to be happening everywhere. A global review of evidence published in 2019 found that at least 10% of insect species are at risk of extinction, and probably more.3

It’s even happening in some of the remotest parts of the world. In 2018, a team of scientists published a study of insects in the El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico, a protected zone far away from highways, farms and factories: about as wild as you can hope to get. And yet even in the heart of the jungle, they found that insect biomass had declined by up to 98% over a thirty-six-year period – almost total population collapse. ‘We couldn’t believe the first results,’ one of them reported to the Economist. ‘I remember in the 1970s, butterflies were everywhere after the rain. On the first day back, in 2012, I saw hardly any.’4 Worse still, the collapse in insect numbers had in turn triggered the decline of a wide range of species that rely on insects for food: everything from lizards to birds. The whole system seemed to be unravelling.

What could cause such calamity to strike in the middle of a jungle? In this case, scientists pinned it on climate change. Rainforests in Puerto Rico have warmed by about 2 degrees Centigrade over preindustrial levels – twice as much as the world average. Two degrees is enough to push many tropical insects beyond their thermal limits. The American entomologist David Wagner said that the study was one of the most disturbing he had ever seen. Disturbing, because what’s happening in Puerto Rico’s rainforests gives us a glimpse of what might happen in the rest of the world as global warming accelerates. Average global temperatures are up by 1°C so far. As we begin to approach 2°C, insect populations could start collapsing everywhere. Those dying butterflies in the El Yunque forest are the canaries in the coalmine.5

This is not a book about doom. It is a book about hope. It’s about how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world. But before we begin that journey, it’s important that we grasp what’s at stake. The ecological crisis happening around us is much more serious than we generally assume. It’s not just one or two discrete issues, something that could be solved with a targeted intervention here and there while everything else carries on as normal. What’s happening is the breakdown of multiple, interconnected systems – systems on which human beings are fundamentally dependent. If you’re already familiar with what’s going on, you may want to skim over this part. If not, brace yourself. It’s not just the insects.

***

It seemed like a good idea at the time: transfer land to big companies, rip up any hedges and trees and plant it all with a single crop, spray it from aeroplanes and harvest with giant combines. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, whole landscapes were remade according to the totalitarian logic of industrial profit, most of it for livestock feed, with the goal of maximising extraction. They called it the Green Revolution but, from the perspective of ecology, there was nothing ‘green’ about it. By reducing complex ecological systems to a single dimension, everything else became invisible. Nobody noticed what was happening to the insects and the birds. Or even to the soil itself.

If you’ve ever picked up a handful of rich, dark, fragrant soil, you’ll know that it’s crawling with life: worms, grubs, insects, fungus and millions of microorganisms. That life is what makes soils resilient and fertile. But over the past half-century, industrial agriculture, with its reliance on aggressive ploughing and chemical inputs, has been killing soil ecosystems at a rapid clip. UN scientists have found that 40% of the planet’s soils are now seriously degraded. Agricultural soil is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed.6 In 2018, a scientist from Japan made the effort to sort through evidence on earthworm populations from around the world. He found that on industrial farms earthworm biomass had plunged by a dramatic 83%. And as the earthworms died off, the organic content of soils collapsed by more than half. Our soils are being turned into lifeless dirt.7
The consequences are worrying, to say the least. Crop yields are now declining on a fifth of the world’s farmland.8 If this continues, scientists warn, the Earth will be able to support only another sixty years of harvests.9 The very soils that have formed the foundations of human civilisation for tens of thousands of years are suddenly, in a matter of decades, on the verge of collapse.

Something similar is happening in our oceans. When we go to the supermarket, we take for granted that we’ll find all the seafood we love: cod, hake, haddock, salmon, tuna – species that are central to human diets all around the world. But this easy certainty is beginning to crumble. Recent figures show that around 85% of global fish stocks are now depleted or facing collapse. Haddock have fallen to 1% of their former volume; halibut, those magnificent giants of the sea, to one-fifth of 1%. Fish catches are beginning to decline around the world, for the first time in recorded history.10 In the Asia-Pacific, fishery yields are on track to hit zero by 2048.11

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CORPORATIONS VS INDIGENOUS

2024/10/29 faiksoristos

RULING THROUGH HUNGER

LIVING THROUGH DOMESTIC POLYCULTURE

An ecofeminist approach

As mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen stated, the circular flow model is the “original sin of modern economics” because it creates the illusion that the economy does not depend on resourses, energy, and sinks, and can thus continue to expand indefinitely[1]. Unfortunately, it is not capital that creates everything. The achievements of today’s Western consumer culture have been shaped with the blood of nature.

“Every day 200 species are being pushed to extinction, extinction rates are 1000 times higher than the normal rate. A Living Planet report two years ago said since 1970 and industrial agriculture in chemical spread we have whipped out 60%[2] of the animals on the planet and freshwater species have declined by 83%. We are in the middle of a insectigedon: More than 90% of the insect species are gone (…) Where did these chemicals come from? A century ago the fossil fuels, controlled then by one company in the world, called Standard Oil owned by Rockefeller, join hands with IG Farben, the cartel that made chemicals in Hitler’s Germany and the main purpose of making chemicals at that time -by the Bayers and the BASFs [4]- was to kill people in concentration camps. That is what the chemicals were invented for… to make explosives by burning fossil fuels in high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen. Today these chemicals are the agrochemicals that are killing the bees, they are poisoning people (…) let me run through figures of the annual costs of chronic diseases most of which are related to the chemicals in the environment – most chemicals are in the environment for growing food, under the false assumption it produces more food, and for processing food. Cancer is 2,5 trillion annually, diabetes is 2,5 trillion, endocrine disruption 549 billion, antibiotic resistance marker infections -most antibiotics are used in factory farms- 1 trillion, infertility 3,6 billion, obesity 1,2 trillion, birth defects 22,9 billion, neurological disorders 2,4 trillion, autism 171 billion (…)”[5] This is part of a Vandana Shiva speech on March 2020.

On a Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food we read the following: Defined as any substance or mixture of substances of chemical and biological ingredients intended to repel, destroy or control any pest or regulate plant growth, pesticides are responsible for an estimated 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year, 99 per cent of which occur in developing countries[6].

The estimated methane emissions of 29 meat and dairy companies analyzed in a new Greenpeace study[7] rival the emissions of the 100 largest companies in the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile, the five largest meat and dairy methane emitters according to our estimates (JBS, Marfrig, Minerva, Cargill, and Dairy Farmers of America) exceed the combined reported methane emissions of big fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and BP. Scientists agree that methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO₂). Quite a compelling reason to go vegan, I guess.

According to WHO, air pollution kills 7 million a year. In 2019, 99% of the world’s population was living in places where the WHO air quality guidelines levels were not met.[8] And as you can guess this 1% that is left, is also the richest 1%. Pesticides are to blame for most of this pollution, too. As Shiva points out in “Soil, Not Oil”, industrial agriculture and globalized food trade contributes to 50% of the atmospheric pollution.

And what does all this have to do with ecofeminism? Ecofeminism declares that this method of cultivation—industrial monoculture and all the criminal consequences it carries—is not the only way. It’s ironic that we, in our gray, glass, steel, and asphalt-covered Western cities, believe that the food stuffed into people in the twenty-first century comes from massive farms where robotic and human labor collaborate. And yet, who would have expected that in the global south, family farms based on women’s participation provide most of the food eaten in the world, as Vandana Shiva notes on her book “Who Really Feeds the World”, stating that -the destructive for the environment- monocultures used by the big corporations, are producing less than domestic polycultures. By her one words: “Industrial agriculture reliant on mechanistic science produces only 25% of the world’s food while using and destroying 75% of the earth’s resources – the soil, the water, the biodiversity.” Thus one hectare of polyculture produces what 1.62 hectares of monoculture can produce.

Polycultures also produce food with greater nutritional value. Shiva provides many such examples. Lets see one: A baranaja (twelve crop) system produces 2680 kg of food per acre compared to 2186 of a maize monoculture. in terms of protein the production is 4214 vs 242 kg, carbohydrate 1622.94 vs 1447.14, fat 131.8 kg vs 78.7 kg, and energy 9359470 kcal vs 7476120 kcal. in terms of vitamins, banana produces 1360.9 mg vs 1967 mg beta carotene in case of maize monoculture, folic acid 2206.3 mg to 437 mg. Minerals arecalcium 5052 gvs218g,iron143.9gvs50.3g, phosphorus 9505 g vs 7607 g, magnesium 3604 g vs 3038 g, potassium 11186 g vs 6252 g (ref: Study Health Per Acre, New Delhi, 2011).[9]

We are surrounded by so many bullshit jobs, as David Graeber described them in his eponymous book, referring to meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, we are stressed in our metropolises, rushing every minute of the day to complete something… so we forget the most important job. Farmers are fucking invisible, and without them, none of us would be here to be a lobbyist, telemarketer, CEO, or hold other well-paid bullshit jobs. Who would have thought that 45% of the global population is engaged in agriculture? About one in two according to FAO[10]. And what is the reward for the fact that they keep us alive and fight the climate crisis that we create? According to Science Direct, the agricultural sector earn, on average, just 20% of the (average) income of their counterparts in other sectors.[11] In India, the National Crime Records Bureau data shows that 296,438 farmers had died by suicide between 1995 and 2014. In 2022 alone, this number was 11,290 people involved in the farming sector (5,207 farmers and 6,083 agricultural laborers) meaning approximately one suicide per hour. It is common for them to be drowning in debt.

Meanwhile, 735 million people globally are victims of hunger. 60% of Africans face moderate (including not enough money for healthy food, self-sufficiency problems, having to skip meals) or severe (including no food stocks, entire days without food) food insecurity. And on top of these facts, hunger is accelerating, 10% more compared to 2017.[12] I won’t analyze “How Europe underdeveloped Africa”[13] facing an entire continent as if it is a “Looting Machine”[14]. I will focus on the fact that in the year 2024, after so many technological inventions, hunger still reigns. Decades ago, we believed that with industrial agriculture, hunger would soon become a dark past. But here we are. The problem is not that we couldn’t produce enough. Hunger exists due to political choices and events. And here we go again, hearing those in power talk about hunger as if it’s not their decision. A handful of companies, thanks to globalization, are replacing biodiverse, ecological farms with industrial monoculture, pushing native farmers to abandon their models and become tools. They pressure or force them to leave our bridge to a world without hunger. Because food is a powerful weapon that should not be left unused. We see, for example, how effectively it is being used by Israel in besieged Gaza right now to carry out genocide.

A new study by Greenpeace titled “Unchecked, unregulated and unaccountable: who are the hunger profiteers?” reveals rampant profiteering due to the invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. The 20 companies (grain, fertilizer, meat, and dairy giants) delivered $53.5 billion to their shareholders in 2020 and 2021, while the UN estimates that a smaller amount of $51.5 billion would be enough to save lives and provide food and shelter for 230 million vulnerable people around the world.[15]

And all that the rulers of states know how to say when you ask for public services is “there is no money.” The mantra of “resource scarcity” hopes to legitimize political decisions by presenting them as a one-way street. Of course, governments are concerned about the limit of money they can use, while forgetting the limit on the exploitation of the natural environment. For its murderers, however, there is always money available. According to the International Monetary Fund, subsidies for oil, coal, and natural gas are costing the equivalent of 7.1% of global gross domestic product. That’s more than governments spend annually on education (4.3% of global income) and about two-thirds of what they spend on healthcare (10.9%)[16]. We are talking about 7 trillion in 2022. The highest amount in history, even though governments have been proclaiming and ‘committing’ themselves to cut the following subsidies since 1997.[17]

Ecofeminism, however, does not simply ask for the trillions to be redirected elsewhere. It proposes a complete reconfiguration of social standards, away from rampant consumerism and the hierarchical organization of production with men at the top. Given that our dietary needs can be met by domestic polycultures, we should abolish the economic titans who enrich themselves by killing us. All these vulnerable people do not need the charity of any ruler, ecofeminism declares. We do not want your capital; we want you to abandon the notion that people are slaves to your insatiable hunger for control over everything, even our bellies. Colonialism has never ended.

In Marx’s words: Capital production disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, ie, it prevents the return to the soil its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil[18]. According to FAO, in 1995, 75% of diversity in agriculture had disappeared due to industrial monoculture -when globalization had just started[19]. Imagine the destruction of today. In 2016, Shiva said it reached 90% [3].

Deregulation is also simultaneously as I have witnessed in my country a making illegal of the daily lives of people. So when it came to the whole seed issue the talk used to be: “we have to find ways to make illegal for farmers to save seeds.”[20] That was the masters’ target. And intellectual property rights and patents were supposed to be the tool. Basically, Monsanto and Bayer are nothing but rent collectors. They are the lifelords of today, like feudalism had the landlords. They do no work. They do nothing. They don’t breed seed. They make poison, and then collect rents[21]. The Columbus, the church, the kings of yesterday are exactly these elit corporations, the top 1%. And they want to eradicate the small guys. Another Greenpeace report detects that between 2007 and 2022 the number of farms in the small-scale commercial category (with outputs between €2,000 and €49.999) dropped by 44%. This loss of almost two million commercial farms and 3.8 million jobs suggests that the model of small-scale family farming is dying out.[22]

And where is the feminist element in all this? Capitalists’ profitability depends on women’s unwaged and devalued work, as well as on the exploitation of nature. This work is primarily labour power production that includes child care, housework, food production and preparation, emotional work, health care, elder care, and regeneration.[23]

In the neoliberal doctrine, as Ariel Salleh puts it in her book “Ecofeminism as Politics”, women’s bodies and women’s labour are treated as resources, exactly like nature. Theoretically, this system needs the following two:[24]

Hierarchy: a system of inequality that places women at the bottom.

Oppositional dualisms: Men and women are not seen as different but rather as opposites. The pattern says: Men vs Women, Humans vs Nature.

The vision of returning to local production cannot ignore the fact that out of all the agricultural holders only 12% are female.[25] The society that ecofeminism aims for cannot be understood without the triptych: Gender equality – social justice – environmental sustainability.[26] The idea of inalienability[27], as the distancing of resources from cycles of financial accumulation, towards a valuation of them based on use, is central on the aiming structure. And that is why the tyrants of the free market will not accept it. If the notion of “commodity” disappears, their power disappears too. And they will move heaven and earth, governments and institutions, to prevent this from happening. [28]

Something else that has to be noted when we talk about gender inequality in this field, is that, according to the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, Indigenous women suffer an increase in violence, including rape, when extractive industries operate in or near their territories. In the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, for example, some non-indigenoys men employed by the oil industry who live in temporary man camps near three native communities are known to commit acts of violence against indigenous women and children. These men are transient; they do not have connections with or a sence of social responsibility to the surrounding community.[29]

To get it straight: We have to protect the indigenous way of life and abolish globalized capitalism. Lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity[30]. Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Amazon are effective carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon than they release. Also, lands legally held or titled to Indigenous peoples have lower deforestation rates than untitled Indigenous lands. Rainforest Foundation’s work integrates scientific evidence, technology, and Indigenous knowledge to effectively protect rainforests and tackle the climate crisis.[31]

More than 1,910 of these defenders of the environment were killed, according to a new report by Global Witness.[32] As Avaaz notes: Life in the Amazon is cheap. It costs less than €100 to have someone killed. The bloody battles between the indigenous people and the companies that want to ravage the land for profit have been ongoing for decades.[33] Companies do not have particularly strict limits when it comes to protecting their interests.[34]

And, accordingly, there is no limit for Zionist state’s crimes. Over the last 40 years, over a million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees have been destroyed in Palestinian lands.[35] There are zero convictions and nobody is held accountable, as the indigenous victims -more than 80,000 families depend on the olive harvest- suffer.

Nevertheless, can humanity prevail? Let’s look at some hopeful examples of ecofeminist resistance…

A Coca Cola plant was shut down in south India after a five year resistance campaign. The plant used 1.5 million liters a day leaving the water that remains toxic. Among other evidence against Coca Cola, tests by the CSE revealed that pesticide levels in its products exceeded global standards by 30-fold. [36]
Nous Sommes la Solution (NSS, We are the Solution), is an ecofeminist movement of more than 500 rural women’s associations in Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Mali [37]. The movement promotes sustainable agroecology and fights large-scale industrial farming. In Senegal, the network is made up of nearly 10,000 women in more than 100 local associations across the south.[38]
Chipko is a Hindi word meaning hugging. The Chipko is one of many “people’s” ecological movements that have sprung into being over the past 10 to 20 years. These movements are fundamentally different from ecological movements in the industrialized world. There, industrial pollution and even “development” are seen as threats, but threats primarily to present lifestyles. In the Chipko Movement, however, the basic concern is the very survival of the people in the hill areas. Rather than using the media to try to influence government policies, the people here have had to resort to a popular struggle. It managed to stop the Simon Company plans for deforestation with the blessings of the government. It was a powerful successful movement, into which women played a decisive role. [39]
Since Wangari Maathai started the Green Belt Movement in 1977, more than 51 million trees have been planted, and more than 30,000 women have been trained in forestry, food processing, bee-keeping, and other trades that help them earn income while preserving their lands and resources. The GBM started to respond to the needs of rural Kenyan women who reported that their streams were drying up, their food supply was less secure, and they had to walk further and further to get firewood for fuel and fencing. GBM encouraged the women to work together to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood, and receive a small monetary token for their work.[40]

[1] M. Schmelzer, A. Vetter, A. Vansintjan, The Future is Degrowth, Verso, 2022

[2] According to the Living Planet 2024 report, the percentage has risen to 73%. https://livingplanet.panda.org/en-US/

[3] Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World (2016), North Atlantic Books

[4] BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik) είναι χημική βιομηχανία, σήμερα η μεγαλύτερη του κόσμου. Στο πεδίο δράσης της συμπεριλαμβάνονται προϊόντα χημικά, πλαστικά, γεωργικά, χημικά κατασκευών, καθώς και αργό πετρέλαιο και φυσικό αέριο.

[5] https://youtu.be/hVbbov9Rfjg?si=bQUsFz8mVKcn1Hp_&t=1371

[6]https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g17/017/85/pdf/g1701785.pdf

[7]https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-sweden-stateless/2024/10/2996f732-2024.10.07_turning-down-the-heat-report-with-design_english.pdf

[8]https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health

[9]https://assets.fsnforum.fao.org/public/discussions/contributions/bija58_27-5-2011[1]_0_1.pdf

[10]https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/almost-half-the-world-s-population-lives-in-households-linked-to-agrifood-systems/en

[11] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/agricultural-population

[12] https://www.statista.com/chart/27885/change-in-share-experiencing-food-insecurity-by-world-region/

[13] The title of Walter Rodney’s book, first published in 1972.

[14] The title of Tom Burgis’ book published in 2016.

[15]https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stateless/2023/02/0787c8e5-food-injustice-2020-2022.pdf

[16]https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies-surged-to-record-7-trillion