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These power athletes are shifting attitudes about what vegans can look like
Eating a plant-based diet is one of the highest-impact actions a person can take to reduce their personal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. A broader cultural shift toward plants in some of the meat-eatingest countries could lead to more efficient land use, less strain on water systems, and reductions in methane, the potent greenhouse gas that cows famously belch. Still, that’s easier said than done. On the individual level, people might have all sorts of reasons for clinging to animal products — including the concern that cutting them out will lead to nutritional deficiencies.
But one group of people is challenging the idea that a plant-based diet can’t be perfectly sufficient: the swole vegans of powerlifting, strength athletics, and personal training circles. My colleague Joseph Winters wrote a feature last week exploring the stories of some of these stereotype-smashing athletes.
While it’s difficult to put definitive numbers on the growth of veganism, Winters said, proxies indicate that the diet is gaining popularity generally — the plant-based meat market has grown hugely over the past few years, as has the prevalence of vegan restaurants and signups for “Veganuary” challenges (going vegan for the month of January).
“It’s definitely more normalized,” Winters said, adding that he had a lot of fun finding media coverage of vegan athletes from decades past. A 1974 Time magazine article that he cited in the piece exemplified the scrutiny that vegan and vegetarian athletes have often received; in describing the performance of NBA player Bill Walton, the article noted, “The vegetarian tiger played as if he had dined on red meat all week.”
“I think it’d be really weird if outlets covered vegan athletes like that nowadays,” Winters said. “Enough athletes have proven that you can cut out animal foods from your diet and still perform at a high level.”
In fact, one of the nutritionists he spoke to said that intense athletes are of the least concern when it comes to switching to a vegan diet. Because they’re already hyper conscious of protein and micronutrients like iron and B12, they should have little issue getting those things from plants instead of animal products. By contrast, “regular Joe” vegans might be at risk of deficiencies if they aren’t accounting for the protein and micronutrients lost by cutting out meat, dairy, and eggs. But another medical source Winters quoted said that most people don’t need to worry about hitting their daily protein requirement, as long as they’re eating a diverse diet without too many processed foods — whether those foods come from plants or critters.
“Personally, I think that Americans’ obsession with protein is misplaced, and I was very worried that I was going to be feeding that with this article,” Winters said. What Americans are more likely to lack is fiber — and eating more plants could help with that. (In fact, although this detail didn’t make it into the final piece, one of the vegan athletes Winters spoke to eats banana and orange slices with the peels still on, for an extra dose of fiber and micronutrients.)
By and large, the athletes Winters spoke to didn’t choose this diet to maximize their physical fitness — although many of them are performing at the top of their chosen fields. “They’re vegan mostly for concern about animals and the environment,” he said. “They also have this other part of their identity that’s focused on being an athlete, and they want to show that they don’t have to give up that part of themselves. They can have both at the same time.”
Vegan strength trainers are just one tiny niche of the population, but, Winters said, they’re contributing to a shift in what people imagine veganism to look like. It’s something he also thinks about personally, as a vegan marathon runner and biker.
“As a skinny man, I often worry that people think, ‘Oh, that’s what happens to you if you go vegan,’” he joked. “But then, I feel like I have good race times, which I can pull out when people doubt my athletic abilities — and say, ‘Look, you can still run somewhat fast on a vegan diet.’” (Let the record show that his half marathon time is 73 minutes — far faster than somewhat.)
We’ve excerpted Winters’ piece on swole vegans below. Check out the full story on the Grist site.
— Claire Elise Thompson
Meet the jacked vegan strength athletes defying stereotypes (Excerpt)Over the past two years, Gigi Balsamico has won first place at more than a dozen strongman competitions in the eastern United States: Maidens of Might, Rebel Queen, War of the North, Third Monkey Throwdown. These events typically involve six to eight weight-lifting challenges on which competitors are scored based on criteria like the amount of weight they can handle and how many reps they can do.
Last month, Balsamico came out at the top of her weight class at Delaware’s Baddest. There, she hoisted four 100- to 150-pound sandbags onto her shoulders after completing six reps of a 315-pound dead lift. As the pièce de résistance, she harnessed herself to a Chevy Silverado — which itself was attached to a food truck trailer — and dragged it 40 feet in 40 seconds.
Balsamico is also a vegan of 11 years. It’s an identity she’s vocal about, out of a desire to push back on the notion that you need to eat meat to be strong. When she was a vegan-curious teenager, it gnawed at her that giving up animal products could mean sacrificing sports.
“I thought I was going to shrivel away to nothing,” Balsamico told Grist. Her Italian, sports-loving family had always eaten meat and dairy. “That’s what was always said to me, that you would basically get so skinny and die.”
But Balsamico’s love for animals compelled her to question these concerns. As a child, tending to neglected horses at a family friend’s farm prompted her to wonder why people didn’t see all animals as beautiful, each with its own unique personality. Horses, cows, sheep, dogs: “It was so apparent to me that there was no difference,” she said.
Meanwhile, veganism was at the beginning of a surge in popularity — concerns over the cruel conditions of factory farming, as well as the impacts of animal agriculture on the climate and environment, were helping to bring the marginalized diet closer to the mainstream. Although estimates vary, peer-reviewed research suggests that the chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals humans raise for meat and dairy contribute up to 20 percent of the planet’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Balsamico cut out all animal products from her diet at the age of 14, justifying the decision to her parents in a “39-minute PowerPoint” on the health benefits of plant-based eating. The weight lifting came a couple of years later, mostly out of curiosity: “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” she said. And she could — in 2022, she began winning first place for her age and weight class in every strongman competition she entered, racking up a streak of victories that she has yet to break.
“I haven’t had meat in 11 years of my life, and I can pick up 700 pounds on my back,” she told Grist. Balsamico now coaches other aspiring athletes at a gym in Pittsburgh, and is affiliated with an international team of vegan strength competitors called PlantBuilt.
Balsamico and her teammates are just a few of the many plant-based athletes who are using their “swole” bodies and competition results for social change, showing on social media and through word of mouth that you don’t have sacrifice “gains” — slang for muscle mass gained through diet and exercise — in order to eat a diet that protects animals and the environment. One block of tofu at a time, they’re defying expectations about what’s possible without animal protein — and weathering unsolicited criticism from those who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that “soy boys” are inherently weak.
— Joseph Winters
Read the full piece here to learn more about how endurance athletes, strength builders, and fitness coaches are championing a diet that’s lighter on the planet.
More exposure- Read: about some of the vegan athletes who will be at the Paris Olympics this summer (Bon Appétit)
- Read: about how chefs are veganizing the beloved Caesar salad, 100 years after its creation (Grist)
- Read: about the growing popularity, and acceptance, of vegan and vegetarian diets (Forbes)
- Read: about Joey Chestnut, the winner of the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest 16 years running, being banned from the competition after signing an endorsement deal with a competitor — Impossible Foods (New York Times)
Behold: Gigi Balsamico, one of the vegan strength athletes Winters interviewed, pulling a Chevy Silverado and food truck trailer as part of Delaware’s Baddest, a strength competition she competed in last month.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These power athletes are shifting attitudes about what vegans can look like on Jul 17, 2024.
Global Warming Funnies
Think climate change isn’t funny? Try telling that to cartoonist Tom Toro. The frequent New Yorker contributor, who also writes and draws a comic strip called “Home Free,” often points his pen at the pain and hypocrisy behind the climate crisis and other environmental issues, with blistering results.
It’s not just about mocking the systems and people behind the problems. As Toro tells The Revelator, humor provides worried readers with a laughter-induced catharsis.
At the same time, he points out, humor serves a vital form of resistance.
Platt: This is a tough time for the planet — but also for political cartooning. Most newspapers don’t have staff cartoonists anymore.
Toro: Still, this is a boom time for journalism. There’s plenty of material out there. People are really seeing, more than ever now, the value of the fourth estate and holding power accountable.
Yeah, journalism as the co-equal fourth branch of government. But it’s almost like cartooning should be the fifth branch.
Cartooning is definitely a good part of it. I think people are just really hungry for satire.
It’s tricky, though. You don’t want to minimize things and you don’t want to trivialize. But there’s a way of clarifying an idea in a single panel with a caption. The power, the clarity of that, I think is what’s really appealing.
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Cartooning is so well suited to the sort of media diet that people have nowadays. The short captions appeal to kind of the Twitter mentality. It’s just ideally suited to the way that people receive media.
You are always looking for the pithiest caption. Wordiness is kind of the death of a quip. You’ve got to cut like a knife.
But marrying those words with art — how does that shape the satire in comics form?
For the cartoonist — editorial cartoonist, New Yorker cartoonist, whatever — you’re really looking for the stuff that you can attack with the strengths of your own art form. What can I do in a cartoon that they can’t do on Saturday Night Live? That’s the kind of stuff that you really try to hone in on.
Every day I catch up on what Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert did, and SNL — it’s something funny that we all watch, and everyone kind of attacks the same material. There’s a little bit of repetition that goes into it.
With the cartoonists, it’s like, well, what can I do? Because in cartoons you don’t have to obey physics. You don’t have the sort of constraints of a production of Saturday Night Live. They might shy away from an idea just because it’s not necessarily worth it to create an entire set.
And sometimes those “sets” for you are just a moment in cartoon time.
Yeah. Probably my most popular one was the one that was the sort of postapocalyptic landscape and the guy who’s kind an investment banker talking to some children around a fire saying, “yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.” That’s probably been my most popular one. And I was surprised when the New Yorker took it.
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That brings up something I hear from freelance or staff journalists, who still have challenges getting editors to accept environmental topics.
I’ve submitted a lot of carbon footprint stuff. I have this one they just refuse to buy where there’s two women sitting on the table and she’s saying, “my heart says Jack because he has a private jet, but my head says, date Don, because he has a small carbon footprint.”
There’s that sort of stuff where it’s, like, lifestyle choices that yuppies can make based on trying to have a low impact on the Earth kind of thing. So you’re trying to find humor in environmental stuff. It’s a little bit hard to sell as a gag.
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It’s not that the New Yorker is not environmentally conscious, but they sometimes don’t want their jokes to address the same stuff that the journalism is addressing. The jokes have to kind of live in their own world and not necessarily be comments on what they’re approaching in their articles. So whenever you manage to slip one in there, the planet got destroyed, it’s gratifying.
Are there other reasons why more cartoonists don’t address environmental issues?
Maybe because it’s just uniquely hard to find levity in that. Or there’s something about climate change that’s hard to particularize because it’s such a sweeping thing and the actual impact on our first-world lives is not entirely evident.
Whereas with politics, it’s right in our face all the time. Maybe if global warming was on the front page every single day. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be something that was more addressed in the culture of humor. But I think we’re still in denial.
And it’s tough. I mean, climate change is the death of a thousand paper cuts, and it’s hard to be that scalpel blade cutting through the humor of a particular thing when it’s all this slow incremental change that adds up over time.
Right? Yeah. There’s no smoking gun and there’s only so many polar bears you can draw on shrinking ice floes. That’s the stereotypical image. Not a lot of political cartoonists are addressing it.
There would probably be more of a variety of topics you could address if we were living in more of a sane political environment. But yeah, it’s like you were saying, it’s the death of a thousand cuts and how you particularize that?
I mean, I have kind of a silly one where there’s an Eskimo, and the ice is receding. And so they’re saying, “well, one good thing about climate change is I can find all my lost pens” — and all the pens are on the ground that’s cleared by the melting ice. There’s stuff like that that I try to do.
You’ve got to give people that catharsis.
Yeah, bringing up catharsis is interesting. Do you think cartoons can be useful in today’s mental environment in terms of changing people’s minds about anything? I mean, you can also go back to the original editorial cartoons taking down all the New York City bosses and things like that. Obviously, they had a political edge, and they did have an effect. Do you think cartooning still has any of that power on individuals or society?
I think it is powerful in terms of just giving fuel to what’s become known as the resistance. I think people are hungry for it, and it has a way of lending force to the ideas that are going into the resistance. I don’t know if humor can necessarily change the world, but it can definitely buoy up the movements that will change the world.
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The power of jokes is that they’re truth-telling, but they do it in a way that’s surprising and funny. At the core of it, they’re demystifying something. They’re telling some truth. They’re pointing out a hypocrisy in people who are in power. And so I think the more that you can lend humor to the cause of the resistance, the more that you stack facts on that side of the argument — because there’s such a countervailing force against the resistance to call it fake news, to keep the shroud of doubt around things that are self-evidently true, that you have to keep pushing that boulder uphill.
And I think that cartoons, in the way that they can really clarify an idea in a simple form and be memorable in that way, sort of put the shoulder to the wheel in terms of keeping the energy on the side of truthfulness and factuality. Because jokes don’t work unless they’re true.
That’s something that I’ve found really to be useful in terms of clarifying what I’m trying to do. And I’ve also found it to be, in itself, a true statement.
The reason we find jokes funny, and particularly the Daily Show kind of jokes or political cartoons, is because it’s almost that sort of burst — just opening the window and getting that breath of fresh air. It’s like, “oh, that is true.” It’s sort of an epiphany moment when a joke works.
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Previously in The Revelator:Seeds of Truth: Johnny Appleseed’s Context and Legacy
The post Global Warming Funnies appeared first on The Revelator.
The people who feed America are going hungry
Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family.
It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish.
Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old.
This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said.
Now, she’s grappling with rising food prices, a burden that isn’t relieved by state or federal safety nets. Her husband works as a roofer, but as climate change diminishes crop yields and intensifies extreme weather, there’s been less work for the two of them. They have struggled to cover the rent, let alone the family’s ballooning grocery bill. “It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.
Rosa Morales, left, and Amadely Roblero, right, work in the Apopka garden in their free time. Ayurella Horn-Muller / GristHer story highlights a hidden but mounting crisis: The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52 to 82 percent), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change.
The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.
“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli.
Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.
There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.
“Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”
A migrant worker tends to farmland in Homestead, Florida, in 2023. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty ImagesHistorically, hunger rates among farmworkers, as with other low-income communities, have been at their worst during the winter due to the inherent seasonality of a job that revolves around growing seasons. But climate change and inflation have made food insecurity a growing, year-round problem.
In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.”
As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembers how, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse.
“I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.”
Supporters of farmworkers march against anti-immigrant policies in the agricultural town of Delano, California, in 2017. Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty ImagesThe floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said.
The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.
Read Next As heat becomes a national threat, who will be protected? Nate RosenfieldThe impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries.
It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.” Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.
Los Angeles Food Bank workers in California prepare boxes of food for distribution to people facing economic or food insecurity during the COVID pandemic in August 2020. Mario Tama / Getty ImagesThe expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.”
Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.
“My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.”
The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.
However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.
Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings, and our society is treating them like they’re not.”
A hand-painted sign at the Apopka garden highlights the poor conditions farmworkers say they experience in the fields, despite growing the food that helps to feed the nation’s population. Ayurella Horn-Muller / GristTackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.
The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy.
“For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said.
Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer.
The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.
Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.”
Read Next Community fridges don’t just fight hunger. They’re also a climate solution. Max GrahamLater this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.
Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers.
In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.
In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.
Those include the Voice for Farm Workers Act, which would shore up funding for several established farmworker support initiatives and expand resources for the Agriculture Department’s farmworker coordinator. This position was created to pinpoint challenges faced by farmworkers and connect them with federal resources, but it has not been “adequately funded and sustained,” according to a 2023 USDA Equity Commission report. Another bill would create an office within the Agriculture Department to act as a liaison to farm and food workers.
These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.
Migrant workers pick strawberries south of San Francisco in April. Visions of America / Joe Sohm / Universal Images Group via Getty Images“As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”
Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said.
“I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?”
For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.”
“Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”
Jesús Morales views plants like moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments, as “the gift of God.” Ayurella Horn-Muller / GristHe came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers.
The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest.
“The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.”
Ernesto Ruiz kneels in the Farmworker Association of Florida’s garden in Apopka, which he oversees. He opens the site twice a month to people living nearby, who are encouraged to take home anything they care to harvest. Ayurella Horn-Muller / GristThroughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.
But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.
Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The people who feed America are going hungry on Jul 17, 2024.
Tribes in Minnesota are paying the steepest price for the steel industry’s mercury pollution
Demand for steel is on the rise globally, driven by population growth and the expanding economies in developing nations. The material will also be important to the green energy transition, forming the backbone of infrastructure like wind turbines, solar panels, and hydroelectric dams. Every part of the steel supply chain is heavily polluting, and the places in the U.S. where the steel industry is concentrated are disproportionately low-income and nonwhite, highlighting yet another instance in which the promises of development and climate solutions come at a steeper cost for some communities. What’s more, the country’s steel production is dominated by just two companies: U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs.
For both companies, much of their production begins with taconite, a low-grade iron ore mined in the northeast Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, which is processed into pellets that get shipped to the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. The extraction of the ore from taconite rock releases a slew of toxic pollutants into the air, including mercury, lead, and dioxins. In this region, the most concerning of these emissions is mercury.
Studies have connected mercury to a litany of negative health effects. It’s a neurotoxin that can interfere with brain development in unborn children and an endocrine disruptor that can weaken the immune system. Scientists have yet to determine a quantity of mercury that is safe for human consumption. One recent study found that there is “no evidence” for a threshold “below which neuro-developmental effects do not occur.” And while the taconite industry releases less than a ton of mercury into the atmosphere every year, the metal is toxic in extremely small quantities: A fraction of a teaspoon can contaminate a 20-acre lake.
The nation’s six taconite plants, all in this region of Minnesota, are owned by U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs. In May 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a regulation that would require the companies to cut their mercury emissions by around 30 percent. In order to meet that standard, the companies would have to install equipment that would inject carbon atoms into their industrial chimneys so that the carbon would attach itself to the mercury atoms, making the pollution particles bigger and allowing them to get trapped in a filter before they would be released into the atmosphere. The agency estimates that its regulation would cost the industry $106 million in capital costs and $68 million per year thereafter.
Last month, when the standards were finalized, both companies sued. They argue that the regulation would pose “irreparable harm” to the industry, because of the steep costs of implementation. They also argue that the EPA’s proposed method for reducing mercury pollution would actually be worse for public health, causing a 13 percent increase in the amount of the toxic metal deposited in the local environment.
“EPA is not only requiring industry to restructure its operations and build new pollution-control facilities at unprecedented costs, it is requiring facilities to commit to associated disruption of their current operations, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and risk their productive capacity and, indeed, ability to operate completely, to design, permit, and install a technology with no demonstrated ability to actually work,” the companies wrote.
Jim Pew, a lawyer at Earthjustice who has litigated multiple lawsuits against the EPA for its failure to curb pollution from the taconite industry, pointed out that the costs of implementing the required equipment would be a tiny fraction of the companies’ annual sales, which totaled $40 billion in 2023. Pew noted that U.S. Steel recently initiated a $500 million stock buyback program, the mark of a healthy income revenue stream. As for the companies’ claim that the technology would increase mercury pollution, Pew called it “meritless.” The companies are “relying on a premise they know to be false” — that taconite plants would add the carbon technology without also improving their filtration system.
“I find this reprehensible and shameful,” Pew said. “While it’s claiming that it can’t spend money to clean up historic pollution, U.S. Steel is just handing out money to its shareholders.”
In an email, a spokesperson from U.S. Steel told Grist that the company’s lawsuit was meant to ensure that the EPA’s new regulations are “in line with sound science and regulatory procedures.” The spokesperson went on to say that the company had tested the available emissions-reduction technology at one of their plants in Minnesota and determined that it would not be in compliance with the mercury limits established by the agency. “We remain committed to environmental excellence, as do the nearly 2,000 hardworking men and women of our Minnesota Ore Operations.” Cleveland Cliffs did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Pew sees the lawsuit as part of a multipronged attack by the steel industry against federal regulation. Over the past several years, the EPA has also proposed standards for the other types of facilities involved in steel production. These two companies have threatened litigation at every turn, recently petitioning a bipartisan group of lawmakers to send a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, asking him to loosen the new standards for steel mills.
Taconite is dumped from railroad cars in Minnesota, 1965. Minnesota Historical Society via Getty ImagesBy the terms of the Clean Air Act, the EPA was supposed to propose standards to control toxic releases from taconite plants in 2003. When they failed to do so, environmental advocates from the Save Lake Superior Association and other groups sued the following year. In a federal circuit court, the EPA acknowledged that it had fallen short of its duties and promised to move with “all due process and speed” to fill the gaps in its regulations.
Years passed without a federal rule, and in 2007, Minnesota initiated an effort of its own, setting a standard for mercury pollution in water and, two years later, becoming the first state to develop a plan to achieve it. The standard required industries across the state to slash their emissions by a cumulative 93 percent, and over the following decade, power plants, crematoria, and other mercury emitters achieved major reductions. Emissions from the taconite industry, however, remained exceptionally high. Its share of the state’s total mercury releases jumped from 21 percent to 46 percent between 2005 and 2017.
Mercury contamination is particularly worrisome for tribal nations like the Fond du Lac Band, which fish and grow wild rice throughout the state’s vast network of rivers, lakes, and streams. “We find that across a lot of ceded territory, there’s a lot of good regulation but there’s been a lot of flexibility in enforcement,” said John Coleman, an environmental scientist at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Tribes repeatedly petitioned the EPA to make good on its 2003 promise. They had good reason to be concerned: One study had found that 10 percent of babies born on the north shore of Lake Superior have elevated mercury levels in their blood.
It took the agency until last May to finally propose its regulation, which, of course, is under challenge. Still, for the tribes of northeast Minnesota, the EPA’s rule was a resounding disappointment. Even if U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs reduce their mercury emissions by 30 percent, the companies’ operations would still allow hundreds of pounds of mercury to enter the state’s waterways each year.
“It is of our view that these proposed standards do not go far enough toward restoring and protecting the health and well-being of the environment and our community,” wrote Paige Huhta, the Fond du Lac’s air program coordinator in a letter to the EPA last July. She pointed out that the EPA itself had found that exposure among specific subpopulations, including some tribes, may be more than twice as great as that experienced by the average American. But when the agency finalized the rule this past March, it did not budge from its original reduction requirements.
“Water is an important part of the landscape up here,” said Nancy Shuldt, the Fond du Lac Band’s Water Projects Coordinator. “We have a water-rich landscape and water resources form the foundation of tribal lifeways.”
And because it is a metal, mercury does not break down into less toxic substances like other industrial pollutants. It stays in the environment for hundreds of years. In northeastern Minnesota, and to a specific group of people, much of the damage has already been done.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tribes in Minnesota are paying the steepest price for the steel industry’s mercury pollution on Jul 17, 2024.
No World Order: Lebanon on the Brink
As Hezbollah and Israeli forces continue to trade fire in the wake of October 7, the possibility of a full-blown war between Israel and Lebanon has never seemed stronger. Given the extremely high stakes and the gravity of the situation, the EU must do everything in its power to defuse tensions, prioritising Lebanon’s long-standing needs over its own short-term benefits.
On June 19, 2024, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened Cyprus with retaliation if it allowed Israel to use its airports and bases to attack Lebanon.
Cyprus, the European Union’s (EU) easternmost member, is within range of Hezbollah’s missiles. This means that in the event of a spill-over from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the island nation – and by extension the EU – could be drawn in. Aware of that risk, Nicosia promptly assured Lebanon that it would not allow attacks against it from its territory.
These developments highlight Lebanon’s delicate position: tensions with Israel have continued to simmer following the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border amid a heavy exchange of fire. Recently, with strikes growing more frequent and the Israeli army positioning itself for potential conflict, fears of a full-blown have increased.
These concerns are worsened by the tumultuous and conflict-ridden history of the Israel-Lebanon relationship. The 1982 Lebanon War took tens of thousands of lives and led to the rise of Hezbollah. Nearly 25 years later, an intense 34-day conflict triggered by a Hezbollah cross-border raid on an Israeli patrol resulted in more than 1000 casualties and widespread destruction.
Further escalation could be disastrous for the Middle East and the EU, especially as other countries might get involved. Hezbollah has strong ties to Iran, which has suggested its full support in the event of an Israeli aggression against Lebanon. The Iranian mission to the UN threatened that “an obliterating war will ensue” and warned that “all options, including the full involvement of all Resistance Fronts are on the table.”
The Resistance Front is an alliance of Iran-backed armed groups, including Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis and Iraqi Shiite militias. Iran’s new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has signalled that there will be no change in his country’s policy towards Israel, while also reiterating the Islamic Republic’s support for Hezbollah.
In addition, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently said that his country stands in solidarity with Lebanon and urged other regional countries to do the same. Two other important regional actors, namely Syria and Jordan, could also be pulled into the conflict due to their proximity and historical tensions with Israel.
Beyond the Middle East, the US – Israel’s closest and most powerful ally – could also be drawn into the conflict, even though it has warned Israel that it might not be able to defend it against an all-out war with Hezbollah.
For the EU, the stakes couldn’t be higher. While the threat of a Hezbollah attack on Cyprus currently appears more like inflammatory rhetoric than a realistic possibility, if such an attack were to occur, it would have far-reaching consequences. An escalation of this sort would trigger the EU’s collective defence obligations, which would require a bloc-wide response at a time when internal cohesion is already strained, with leaders like Hungary’s Orbán blocking decision-making processes.
To prevent that scenario, the EU has been keen to maintain Lebanon’s stability. In January, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell visited Lebanon to discuss the border situation and stress the importance of avoiding regional escalation. Last month, Borrell further expressed support for the ongoing mediation efforts, “led by the US and France to mitigate confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, and for Lebanon and Cyprus, which have been threatened by Hezbollah.”
Failed diplomacy, displaced peopleAn Israel-Lebanon war would represent another significant diplomatic failure for the EU and the West, further eroding their global credibility in the wake of the Gaza conflict. Moreover, it would likely trigger a devastating humanitarian catastrophe, with the potential for extensive civilian casualties. The toll could be dramatically higher if additional regional actors join the conflict.
Lebanon would be particularly vulnerable, given Hezbollah’s strategic presence in villages and civilian areas and Israel’s superior military capacities. Civilian infrastructure would also likely suffer severe damage, making post-war reconstruction extensive and costly.
The impact of a war between Israel and Lebanon on the EU would be multifaceted. Beyond endangering the security of Cyprus, an all-out conflict could mean a substantial refugee influx for the EU as Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita in the world. Apart from Syrian asylum seekers, Lebanon has also historically hosted a large Palestinian refugee population, with around 475,000 registered with the UN in Lebanon. They have been forced into Lebanon in successive waves since 1948, when many Palestinians fled or were expelled by Zionist forces.
An Israel-Lebanon war would represent another significant diplomatic failure for the EU and the West, further eroding their global credibility in the wake of the Gaza conflict.
Moreover, a war between Hezbollah and Israel could also have a domino effect, triggering a massive exodus of refugees – Israeli, Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, and potentially from across a destabilised Middle East– towards the EU. This would mirror the Syrian civil war when millions of refugees fled to the EU, challenging the bloc’s ability to manage aid as well as integration and resettlement processes.
The EU’s current diplomatic efforts in the region are narrowly centred on preventing migration. Brussels recently signed a deal with Beirut providing one billion euros over three years to support the Lebanese economy and enhance border management cooperation, in exchange for preventing irregular migrants from coming to Europe. Three-quarters of the funds were earmarked for assisting Lebanon as a host country for Syrian refugees and other displaced people.
The agreement was announced amid a surge of Syrian refugees coming to Cyprus from Lebanon, which pressured the EU to intervene. In the first three months of 2024, over 2,000 people arrived in Cyprus by sea, compared to around 80 in the same time frame in 2023.
Similar agreements with Egypt and Tunisia reveal a broader EU strategy: deflect migrant processing to third countries and keep migrants from entering the EU, as the bloc further tightens its borders.
Critics argue that the EU’s recently brokered migration deal primarily serves its own interests, neglecting Lebanon’s need for significant economic and structural reforms. They warn that “any deal that avoids tackling Lebanon’s deep problems will fail to stabilise the country and will not address the reasons that push people towards Europe.” The deal does not even properly cover the cost of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon: According to the Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Hector Hajjar, handling Syrian asylum seekers costs the country 1.5 billion Dollars a year.
While the effectiveness of the EU’s approach is questionable, one thing is certain: Lebanon urgently needs support for handling its migrant and refugee population. The current level of assistance, with Lebanon receiving only 27 per cent of global funding for the Syrian refugee response in 2023, is woefully inadequate.
Energy turmoilApart from a widespread humanitarian crisis, an Israeli-Lebanese war could also lead to extensive and severe economic ramifications by disrupting trading routes and affecting energy supplies. The EU has already taken a heavy hit in this area following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Hezbollah and its allies have the ability to disrupt the Red Sea energy route, which is crucial for international oil and natural gas flows into the EU. Already under attack by the Houthi fighters since the start of 2024, with a full-fledged war, the route could be completely compromised, especially if Iran involves the Houthi fighters in a possible war.
Recent moves from key energy players underscore the gravity of the situation in the Red Sea. In January 2024, QatarEnergy, a major supplier to Europe, quickly halted shipments through the crucial waterway to consider alternative routes. Similarly, the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company temporarily suspended passages through the Red Sea due to the Houthi attacks.
These trade disruptions could fuel inflation by driving up energy costs, similar to what happened after Russia invaded Ukraine.
A struggling stateLebanon’s problems are further complicated by the fact that the country is teetering on the brink of failed statehood. Beirut has been crippled by a political and economic meltdown since 2019, with the Lebanese Pound losing more than 90 per cent of its value. This has led to soaring prices for basic goods and services and pushed almost 80 per cent of the population under the poverty line.
The ongoing crisis has led to social unrest and a growing sense of despair, leaving Lebanon vulnerable to factions and militant groups. As the government has been unable to provide people with basic needs such as electricity and fuel, Hezbollah has used the opportunity to fill the void and boost its popularity.
The EU’s actions, or inactions, will have a profound impact on Lebanon’s future and, perhaps, the Middle East.
What’s more, Lebanon faces rampant corruption at all levels, ranking near the bottom globally – 149 out of 180 – in Transparency International 2023’s Corruption Perception Index. For instance, despite international pressure, no government official has been held accountable for the devastating explosion that rocked Beirut airport in 2020, killing 2018 people.
To make matters worse, Lebanon has not had a president since 2022, when former head of state Michel Aoun’s term ended. Since then, the deeply divided Parliament, with different factions opposing each other, has failed to nominate a candidate with enough votes to succeed him. While presidential vacuums are not new in Lebanon, this one coincides with a simmering border crisis with Israel and a devastating four-year economic meltdown, creating a perfect storm of instability.
How can the EU help?As the spectre of escalating tensions hangs heavy over Lebanon, the EU faces a critical question: can it prevent a devastating conflict that would send shockwaves through the Middle East (and beyond) and trigger a massive refugee crisis?
Without a doubt, Brussels must ramp up its current diplomatic efforts, fostering dialogue between all parties involved in the ongoing tensions. This means that the EU should approach even countries that have proven difficult to cooperate with – like Iran – but which have a stake in the situation nonetheless. These regional actors have an undeniable influence on the developments in and around Lebanon, and their voices must be heard at the negotiating table.
At the same time, the EU should strongly advocate for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. This urgent step must be coupled with sustained efforts towards a viable long-term solution for Palestine. Resolving the Palestinian issue is not only critical in its own right but would also significantly reduce tensions between Israel and Lebanon, averting a potential wider conflict.
However, diplomacy alone won’t suffice. To prevent Lebanon from collapsing entirely, the EU needs to invest in the country’s future. It cannot simply funnel resources into areas of its own interest, like the recent migration deal. Lebanon’s needs must take centre-stage in any cooperation.
The foundation for a stronger relationship already exists. Since 2006, the EU and Lebanon have been partners through their Association Agreement. This deal granted Lebanon free access to the EU market for its industrial goods and most of its agricultural exports. By 2022, the EU had become Lebanon’s biggest trading partner, accounting for nearly a third of the country’s total trade.
Other initiatives, like the 12-million-euro project launched in 2023 to enhance the integrity, transparency, and accountability of the Lebanese public administration, must be further bolstered. The EU should also apply targeted sanctions against the Lebanese elites undermining democracy and the rule of law in the country, as the EU framework for such a move has been in place since 2021.
The EU’s actions, or inactions, will have a profound impact on Lebanon’s future and, perhaps, the Middle East. Whether the bloc will step up and help Lebanon weather this storm remains an open question. One thing, though, is certain: time is short, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Labour pains
Harnessing Economic Competition for a Sustainable Europe
From a raging pandemic to war on its doorstep, the EU has experienced multiple costly crises over the past few years. As the economy has taken a hit, the green transition has lost impetus in the public debate, and competitiveness has dominated the conversation instead. But can competition policy actually help the EU achieve its sustainability targets?
As the dust of the European elections is slowly settling on the continental right-wing drift, the fate of the Green Deal haunts the EU conversation. This ambitious set of comprehensive strategies and detailed policies aiming at the carbon neutrality and ecological transition of the EU’s economic model of production and consumption ranked very high among the concerns that drove the mobilisation of defiant, disgruntled voters to the polls.
Despite the recent changes in Europe’s political landscape, the Green Deal has already set the trajectory for radical change. However, whether the goals of the landmark legislation can be achieved depends entirely on how member states deliver on their obligations. A key element in this effort is finance, and the Green Deal requires a massive budget.
Yet, as the EU and its member states can only finance so much, the regulatory environment they provide for private economic actors is also critical. Successfully pairing public funding with private investment in service of the Green Deal will require a sweeping paradigm shift in economic regulation. The need for change is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the foundational principles of market competition itself, embodied in the legal framework of EU competition law.
A challenging obligationHistorically a driver of European integration and a pillar of the Union’s original social market economy model, competition policy was, in principle, supposed to allow the EU to balance the benefits of its market economy with the protection of the democratic fabric of society from unchecked corporate power.
That has not, however, been the case. Under the EU’s competition policy, there have been massive levels of industrial consolidation across the economy. This has led to an increase in unsustainable practices across many industries, such as in the seeds and agrifood sectors – or the media industry (to the point of prompting action from the Commission), to mention another aspect of the continuum.
This growing concentration of corporate power has led to calls for meaningful changes to the EU’s competition policy, but the European discussion on this matter seems to focus exclusively on economic notions of European and global “competitiveness.” Social and climate sustainability are rarely part of the conversation.
In 2023, the European Council commissioned former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta to write a key report on the single market. The report came out earlier this year, calling for an improved and reinforced single market to meet the EU’s pressing challenges, namely the sustainability of its economic model and its defensive autonomy. However, when the Council discussed its “new competitiveness deal” in April, member states mostly focused on competition between themselves and neglected most of Letta’s other recommendations; namely to put “a fair, green, and sustainable transition at the core of the EU’s Single Market”, integrating social and ecological goals into it.
The obsession with national and European competitiveness seems to overshadow the urgency of putting sustainability at the core of the reflection on economic competition.
Additionally, a highly expected report on the future of Europe’s competitiveness due in September and entrusted to the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is set to recommend the consolidation of national industries into more European ones with the aim of enhancing the Union’s competitiveness on the global stage. Again, the ecological crisis seems to come only second as a priority.
In the current political landscape, the general obsession with national and European competitiveness seems to overshadow the urgency of putting sustainability at the core of the reflection on economic competition. Thus, it is important to ask if the EU’s competition policy can serve the transition to a sustainable economy, and to what extent.
The global competition powered by the strategic rivalry between the US and China, two heavily subsidised economies scrambling for supremacy over green technologies and industries, has intensified the pressure on the EU and its member states to catch up to the race.
However, the EU faces significant hurdles on this path. Cash-strapped national budgets are still affected by the financial consequences of the pandemic and a prolonged economic crisis, which means that financing the green transition is beyond the capacities of both the EU and individual member states. What is more, the social and political risks of a complete overhaul of the current industrial production structure are posing further challenges. To achieve a higher level of sustainability, the EU must address the structure of the economy, the organisation of the market and, potentially, the emergence of new economic players challenging the dominant position of established entities.
As the shift towards a more sustainable economy challenges our industrial organisation, it inevitably raises the issue of the EU legal framework. Whether it is about the Stability and Growth Pact imposing austerity on eurozone balances, the preference for market instruments, or the principles of competition policies, the set of rules that have driven the EU’s economic model for seven decades are being brought into question by the new “climatic regime”.
Redesigning the EU’s competition policyIn this context, the legal niche that is competition law could prove to be much more important for the European Green Deal than is currently recognised. Competition policy has the potential to act as a fundamental element – or complement, or catalyst – for broader industrial policy, and there are various ways in which the green transition can engage with competition.
Firstly, in the EU, state investment into private enterprise must comply with rules on state aid and foreign subsidies, whether it is a direct grant, tax relief, or another kind of benefit. However, the EU has demonstrated a willingness to show some flexibility on its competition rules to accommodate green initiatives, as has been the case with the approval of funding for Swedish and German decarbonisation projects. We can expect to see governments wielding many such enticing carrots over the coming years.
Second, climate adaptation will stimulate sectoral reorganisation and, thus, trigger mergers and acquisitions (M&A) which will come under review by competition authorities. Up to now, the benchmark used to authorise M&As has been the “consumer welfare standard,” which purports to protect consumer interests. In reality, though, the consumer welfare principle embodies a bias towards concentrated power which can harm consumers, citizens and businesses.
However, the EU Commission has updated its position vis-à-vis M&As through the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which entered into force in 2023. The new rules require companies to provide more comprehensive and transparent sustainability reporting in line with the Green Deal, and to avoid mergers that reduce green innovation.
Third, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we witnessed another instance of sustainability being prioritised over competition due to a need for exceptional collaboration, with the EU temporarily greenlighting alliances to address the need for improving the supply and distribution of scarce products. In the face of increasingly recurrent extreme weather events, we could again find ourselves having to bend competition laws to mitigate harm and speed up climate adaptation.
While few are paying attention beyond the technocratic circle, current debates around the intersection of competition law and climate have generally focused on the narrow question of whether and to what extent relatively superficial collaborations between big companies should be permitted. Although this didn’t happen in the EU, a good example is an agreement by a coalition of the UK’s biggest supermarkets to jointly purchase Fairtrade bananas and coffee, which the country’s competition watchdog has greenlighted.
At the same time, competition policy is generally hostile towards looser, more decentralised forms of coordination, such as cooperatives of small businesses. This bias is also being called into question by anti-monopoly activists in favour of a more decentralised, resilient, and democratic market economy. One can easily imagine circumstances in which dispersed and localised forms of coordination may need to become commonplace. For example, there could be an urgent need for local food production and distribution cooperatives in the event of a food shortage.
Again, the content of the rules for permissions and exemptions on the one hand and prohibitions on the other will determine the resulting mix of collaborations. It is time to bring a broader group of commentators, embodying a wider set of values, into the debate on collaboration.
Fourth, the current competition laws could allow companies to occupy a temporary position of monopoly when there are supply chain disruptions as a result of climate-driven economic emergencies. This is similar to what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when profiteering led to an increase in the price of hand sanitisers, face masks, and certain food products.
Oligopolistic firms use such circumstances as a cover for tacit collusion to create excess profit, as captured by the term “sellers’ inflation” or “greedflation.” These practices can lead to macroeconomic consequences, and it falls on competition authorities to investigate them. In turn, these probes can then contribute to sustainability by forming the basis for taxing excess profits or imposing windfall tax policies. The mandate of competition authorities currently includes such responsibilities, but there is a risk that companies could avoid accountability with the help of regulatory loopholes.
Fifth, competition law is a powerful tool, giving authorities and courts formidable powers of discovery and remedy. The European Commission can fine law-breaking companies up to 10 per cent of their worldwide turnover, and it has, for example, initiated proceedings against tech giants Meta and Apple for their alleged infringements of the EU’s anti-trust rules and unsustainable market practices. As a result, companies pay attention to competition law because it goes right to the heart of their business model, financial planning and bottom line.
Competition policy is a board-level concern, meaning that it has the potential to be used as a powerful tool for reordering the economy. This raises crucial questions about the use and potential misuse of competition law. In the US, for example, the threat of antitrust action has been weaponised by lobby groups to intimidate coalitions of investors engaging in perfectly legal, commercially self-interested decisions to divest from fossil fuels.
There is also a sixth reason why competition policy can serve the transition to a sustainable economy: in systemically important sectors – such as fossil fuels, food, transportation, shipping, and banking – concentrated market structure and the resulting market failures impact emission levels, land use, and ecosystem protection, and determine the viability of potential solutions. For instance, just 57 countries have been responsible for 80 per cent of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere since 2016. Within the existing EU framework, competition policy acknowledges its role in influencing market structure to an extent, but not in contributing to other market failures.
Lastly, economic conflicts are often accompanied by intense interest group lobbying. A cautionary example is how the agricultural lobby, representing large, multinational agrochemical companies, has channelled the justified anger of farmers in Europe into a false dichotomy between farmers’ livelihoods and the protection of nature. In reality, it is multinational enterprises and their representatives, not the farmers, that oppose the Green Deal because the existing system serves them well; and eventually, when the current system does inevitably change, these large firms will also be the ones with the resources to adapt.
Meanwhile, small-scale farmers see their incomes and way of life threatened. Many of them are already unable to continue with their profession and are leaving farming altogether, even without the added costs of complying with green regulations.
Competition policy shapes market structures and has enabled the relentless consolidation in the agricultural sector over recent decades. By allowing unrestrained economic growth, competition laws are indirectly responsible for the lobbying power of agrochemical companies, as well as dominant players in other climate-relevant sectors. This means that competition policy can also be indirectly leveraged to address existing imbalances by targeting the economic power of market giants.
In other words, competition policy can be used to ensure that the private sector remains governable and accountable to the public, and that it does its part in the efforts to bring sustainability to the European economy.
But there are limits to what can or should be achieved through competition policy. Competition law comes with its own doctrinal baggage, and there is nothing as difficult to dislodge as a set of bad ideas embedded amongst an international community of technical experts and academics.
Without democratic oversight, the competition regime has evolved in harmful ways. In the name of “freedom”, markets around the world have become dominated by powerful actors; a “competitive” market can be one dominated by just a few behemoths; “consumer welfare” is sought through low prices, even if that implies low wages and appears to serve corporate welfare better; big companies are regarded as “more efficient” even if they are better able to exploit workers and nature.
That international community of experts will not willingly relinquish their hold on the highly powerful lever of economic policy that they currently wield, even as they disclaim their responsibility for the social, economic, and ecological consequences of the mass consolidation of industry that their policies have created.
Competition in a time of crisisFundamentally, competition policy is part of a wider set of tools for capital governance that will shape, both passively and proactively, how economic resources are channelled in the context of the green transition, and the responsibilities and obligations of companies for their role in it.
In addition, current and future competition enforcement will have a bearing on some crucial questions: What will food distribution look like beyond 2030? What technologies will we use to connect with each other and share information when weather or health events make it impossible to meet in person? How is AI being used to spread climate disinformation?
All this raises the issue of democratic accountability. While the urgency of the green transition is undeniable, it may be used to override the objections of local communities to projects like power plants, wind farms or mining operations. Although the European fossil fuel energy system has been undoubtedly technocratic and top-down, the transition towards a decarbonised energy system and a more sustainable economy presents an opportunity to empower citizens and local communities.
However, the EU still needs to address the democratic dimension of its Green Deal. Across Europe, grassroots citizens’ initiatives are increasingly demanding a say in the implementation of the green transformation. Competition policy tends to see citizens only as consumers, but there might be another dimension to entertain in the face of our current crises.
Still, the trend remains towards centralisation. Notably, the current EU legal framework does not guarantee NGOs or the public a right to challenge European decisions on granting state aid when they are contrary to environmental laws. As such, the EU is not in compliance with the Aarhus Convention when it comes to citizens’ right to live in a healthy environment. (A pillar of environmental democracy, this international agreement to which the EU is part of requires that the public – whether NGOs or citizens – are granted access to information, participation and even justice, should they consider that EU decisions do not comply with EU environmental law.)
Interestingly, the Commission could – under the pretence of complying with the Aarhus convention and seeking to protect citizens’ right to a healthy environment – choose a procedure that would exclude the European Parliament from the legislative process to the benefit of the EU Council. This would likely result in a structural power imbalance in favour of national governments, practically limiting the reach of civil organisations.
It is true that a citizen or NGO petition to the European Parliament can only have a limited impact. However, bypassing the only democratically elected body of the EU would ensure that competition policy remains in the dark, closed rooms where corporate interests meet governments’ (not necessarily democratic) preferences.
Averting, mitigating, and adapting to climate catastrophe and biodiversity collapse will demand an unprecedented deployment of resources and economic coordination, whether through private or public means. The crucial policy questions of our generation revolve around the mix of resources we deploy, and how and when we do it. Whether the green transition is just and democratic depends on who decides on the deployment of those resources, and in whose benefits those assets are mobilised. Competition policy might very well be where the next battle for a sustainable European economy takes place.
A right to roam – but for whom?
Coastal Restoration: Saving Sand
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This series looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
We need to talk about sand.
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
The Building Blocks of Modern SocietySand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
Not surprisingly, UNEP calls management of sand one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Removing sand also affects water quality in the ocean and depletes groundwater.
Stolen SandYet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
By Sumaira Abdulali – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
How to Solve the ProblemUNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
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The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
Shifting Sands, Shifting ThinkingWilliam Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
Previously in The Revelator:Coastal Restoration: Recycled Shells and Millions of Larvae — A Recipe for Renewed Oyster Reefs
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Pay the polluter?
Compounding a Crisis: When Public Health Solutions Worsen Climate Change
In Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where the air is thick with pollutants and asthma rates are alarmingly high, a troublesome irony is unfolding.
This region is home to sprawling petrochemical plants and toxic fossil fuels that disproportionately affect the respiratory health of the area’s majority-Black residents.
Here, inhalers — one of the key tools for managing diseases like asthma — play a dual role: alleviating symptoms of pollution while also contributing to environmental degradation. This paradox has underscored the urgent need for sustainable solutions that holistically address environmental justice, health, and race equity issues in frontline communities like Cancer Alley.
Inhalers, often viewed as life-saving devices, have a profoundly negative impact on the environment. The most popular of the two main varieties of inhaler, metered-dose inhalers, release a gas that warms the earth hundreds of times faster than carbon dioxide.
A recent investigation by NPR revealed that the cumulative amount of climate-damaging gasses released from traditional inhalers is the equivalent of driving half a million gas-powered cars for a year. This means that each puff contributes significantly to climate disintegration. And as pollution damages more people’s lungs, the need for inhalers increases.
This 85-mile stretch of land wasn’t always referred to as Cancer Alley. Older residents recall a thriving community where many people lived off the nutrient-rich land. However, corporate greed and negligent politicians have irreparably damaged the soil, the land, and the air, leading to some of the highest cancer rates per year for residents.
Dozens of new cases each year are believed to be linked to severe air pollution. That pollution has also led to high rates of asthma in the area. Even more concerning is data showing the link between pollution, asthma, and cancer is visible in neighborhoods with high poverty rates — but not in more affluent communities, proving again that poverty kills.
The implications of the inhaler paradox are staggering. Not only do frontline communities bear the brunt of pollution-related health burdens, but they also face the ironic reality of using medical interventions that perpetuate the cycle of environmental degradation. Addressing this issue requires collective advocacy and action between healthcare professionals, environmental advocates, policymakers, and community leaders.
We have long approached environmental and public health solutions with a bandaid instead of a cure. The unique problem posed by inhalers releasing toxic gasses that increase climate change is one example why short-term solutions are no longer an acceptable way to manage our climate’s deteriorating health. Frankly speaking, it’s too costly to keep operating under this model when it is costing lives, the health of our planet, and our collective future.
Beyond encouraging the use of other inhalers and safe recycling, it is critical that government agencies do more to address greenhouse gas emissions so that we can proactively focus on prevention efforts instead of doing damage control.
While recent EPA rules on clean vehicles and emission reduction efforts are encouraging, it is not enough to combat the damage we have already done to the planet.
That is why my organization, the Hip Hop Caucus, is working with communities on the frontlines of these issues, uplifting their stories through The Coolest Show. Together we’re pushing back against attempts to roll back the minimal regulations protecting these communities and advocating to shut down operations that disproportionately put Black and brown lives at risk.
We’ve witnessed the effects of corporate greed and climate denial on our planet. It’s untenable to keep proposing short-term public health solutions without addressing the underlying causes of disease. Reports have shown how creating climate friendly policies can save taxpayer dollars in the long run — and more importantly, save lives.
It’s not too late to do right by the 20,000 residents of Cancer Alley. But we must act before it’s too late.
This op-ed was produced by Inequality.org and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.
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Raccontare l’Amazzonia
La più grande foresta tropicale e uno dei principali serbatoi di anidride carbonica al mondo, l’Amazzonia gioca un ruolo chiave nel mantenere abitabile il nostro pianeta. Sebbene la minaccia ambientale ai danni del bacino amazzonico sia nota, i dati scientifici da soli non bastano a cambiare percezioni e comportamenti. Lo scambio culturale, quando va oltre i pregiudizi e le prospettive coloniali, aiuta a colmare quel vuoto.
Lo spettacolo teatrale Antigone in Amazzonia, del regista svizzero Milo Rau, è la riproduzione e il racconto di un adattamento della tragedia di Sofocle che è stato realizzato in Brasile con interpreti indigene. Questo sdoppiamento degli eventi è rispecchiato da uno sdoppiamento sensoriale: parte dell’azione è svolta da attori europei sul palco, mentre la parte amazzonica è registrata e proiettata su uno schermo, introdotta e commentata dalla testimonianza degli attori presenti. La scena di Antigone che muore si vede due volte, in video e dal vivo.
Nel raccontate il mito di Antigone, Milo Rau lo sovrappone anche a un evento storico recente: la strage di Eldorado do Carajás, nello stato del Parà, dove la polizia, nel 1995, uccise 19 manifestanti del Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (“Movimento dei Lavoratori Agricoli Senza Terra”, MST). Durante lo spettacolo, uno striscione del movimento è appeso sopra l’ingresso della platea.
La storia dei lavoratori del MST uccisi dopo aver occupato un ranch privato è molto diversa da quella di Antigone, entrata in contrasto con le leggi della città di Tebe per aver deciso di dare sepoltura al fratello Polinice, reo di aver combattuto contro la città. Entrambi i casi, tuttavia, riguardano il conflitto tra ordine civile e principi di giustizia che lo mettono in discussione.
La trasposizione del classico greco in un contesto geografico e storico diverso serve quindi a metterne in evidenza l’attualità e la rilevanza politica: oggi, le lotte dei lavoratori e dei popoli indigeni contro l’appropriazione e lo sfruttamento dell’Amazzonia hanno un’importanza decisiva per le sorti del pianeta.
L’azione teatrale subisce però un’interruzione: dal palco viene letta la dichiarazione di una delle interpreti indigene, che afferma di aver rifiutato di venire a recitare la sua storia in uno spettacolo destinato al pubblico europeo. Si pone così un problema: come raccontare oggi la più grande foresta del pianeta? Chi può farlo? Come tenere insieme la prospettiva di osservatori esterni al mondo amazzonico e quella dei popoli indigeni che da secoli lo abitano?
Politica e savanizzazioneL’Amazzonia, la più grande foresta tropicale della Terra, ospita il 10 per cento delle specie viventi. Sul piano ecologico, il bacino amazzonico ha una funzione fondamentale per l’umidificazione e il raffreddamento dell’atmosfera, e nel suo bacino immagazzina l’equivalente di 15-20 anni di emissioni globali di CO2.
Da decenni, tuttavia, oltre il 20 per cento del territorio amazzonico è stato disboscato o si è inaridito a causa dello sfruttamento agricolo (piantagioni e pascoli per l’allevamento intensivo) e dell’estrazione mineraria. Questo processo, insieme al riscaldamento globale già in atto, ha ridotto l’umidità della foresta e la sua capacità di assorbimento. Diversi studi prospettano il rischio che circa la metà del territorio amazzonico diventi una savana arida nel giro di trent’anni, con conseguenze su tutto il pianeta. Inoltre, l’industria dell’allevamento, presente soprattutto nell’Amazzonia brasiliana, è responsabile del 3,4 per cento delle emissioni globali.
La presidenza di Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) ha consentito un’accelerazione senza precedenti della deforestazione. Il governo Bolsonaro ha ignorato le appropriazioni illegali di terreno, legalizzando successivamente molte di esse in base a una retorica della “bonifica” di un territorio presentato come incolto e non civilizzato (negando quindi l’esistenza delle civiltà che da millenni abitano la foresta).
Il negazionismo climatico e il razzismo di Bolsonaro, sostenuto dagli interessi di aziende multinazionali che operano in Amazzonia, sono un modello della linea adottata da altri esponenti politici, come l’ex-Presidente e attuale candidato alla Casa Bianca Donald Trump. Con il ritorno al potere di Lula nel 2023 il ritmo del diboscamento è calato, e le comunità indigene hanno ottenuto maggiore rappresentanza, ma lo sfruttamento della foresta non si è interrotto, e rimane un caso esemplare dello stretto rapporto tra politica, economia e ambiente che riguarda tutta la Terra.
Ascoltare le voci amazzonicheIn questo contesto, l’obiettivo primario dello spettacolo di Milo Rau è il pubblico occidentale. Il regista sostiene che “l’ordine simbolico dell’Occidente debba essere messo in discussione e cambiato dall’esterno, dalle periferie del sistema capitalistico.”
L’approccio di Rau si pone in continuità con una tradizione secolare di discorsi e rappresentazioni che hanno mirato a far pensare l’europeo evocando figure altre: dai cannibali del saggio di Montaigne al “nobile selvaggio” del teatro di John Dryden, dall’americano del romanzo L’ingenuo di Voltaire all’“uomo naturale” del Discorso sull’origine della disuguaglianza di Rousseau, fino a tanti personaggi esemplari dell’etnologia del Novecento.
Comprendere la realtà delle persone a cui quei discorsi si riferivano, delle loro civiltà distrutte, del loro territorio occupato, pone il compito di ricostruire il loro autentico pensiero oltrepassando i limiti delle narrazioni tutte europee. Tentativi recenti in questo senso sono la ricerca storica di David Graeber e David Wengrow sulle testimonianze dei missionari sugli indigeni nordamericani ne L’alba di tutto, o il film Todos Los Males della compagnia Anagoor, che cerca di ricostruire le figure degli Incas partendo dal libretto dell’opera-balletto settecentesca Le Indie galanti del compositore Jean-Philippe francese Rameau. Ma quel che si ricava dall’esperimento di Milo Rau è che ascoltare direttamente la parola dei nativi dell’Amazzonia è ormai un passaggio inevitabile per evitare di ricadere in schemi di pensiero d’origine coloniale.
Questo rischio è ancora evidente in molta etnologia contemporanea, anche quando questa intende rovesciare il senso di superiorità che attraversava la disciplina un secolo fa, “decolonizzare il pensiero”, e rivalutare le prospettive amazzoniche sulla realtà. Un esempio è la ripresa della categoria di “animismo” nell’opera di uno dei più importanti etnologi francesi, Philippe Descola. Per Descola, l’animismo è uno “schema” di pensiero radicalmente diverso dal “naturalismo” scientifico dominante in Occidente, il, e consiste nell’attribuire agli altri animali un pensiero in tutto e per tutto analogo a quello degli umani. Questa concezione intende salvaguardare l’irriducibile originalità della visione indigena, che già il maestro di Descola, Claude Lévi-Strauss, ammirava per il fatto che nega l’eccezionalità dell’uomo in natura.
Simili rivalutazioni, che hanno portato diversi etnologi a celebrare la saggezza “ecologica” dei popoli amazzonici, risentono però di una tendenza a ridurre la dinamica storica di questi ultimi. Come hanno mostrato studiosi come Susanna Hecht e Alexander Cockburn, conoscere la storia millenaria delle civiltà amazzoniche mette in luce profondi mutamenti che hanno coinvolto le popolazioni native in secoli di incontri e scontri con gli occidentali. Chi oggi va in Amazzonia osserva il risultato di queste vicende: le varie forme tradizionali di “animismo” non sono che un elemento, spesso enfatizzato in contesti turistici, di società composite e in rapida trasformazione, dove saperi e tecnologie d’origine coloniale sono quasi sempre fatte proprie.
Io stesso l’ho osservato in diverse regioni: oggi le comunità amazzoniche usano vestiti di fabbricazione industriale, cellulari, pannelli solari e barche a motore, gestiscono ecolodge per il turismo sostenibile, organizzano procedimenti legali contro chi ha inquinato il loro territorio, gestiscono piattaforme giornalistiche. I loro portavoce scrivono libri, rilasciano interviste, parlano in radio, , espongono dipinti nei musei delle città di tutto il mondo.
Del resto – come riconoscono gli stessi etnologi – animismo e scienza non possono essere considerati come forme di pensiero esclusive che apparterrebbero rispettivamente alla mentalità amazzonica e a quella europea. Da un lato i popoli della foresta comprendono la mentalità scientifica; dall’altro, pensiero magico, miti e animismo attecchiscono profondamente nelle nostre società. Il rischio è che, invece di “decolonizzare il pensiero”, l’apologia dell’animismo e la sua rivalutazione in chiave ecologica finiscano per rirpodurre fantasie d’età coloniale sulle società arcaiche dei “selvaggi”, tanto immutabili quanto affascinanti.
Dalla foresta alla città (e ritorno)Da secoli va avanti un doppio movimento di persone: quello degli indigeni che vanno a studiare, a vendere e comprare merce nelle città, e quello dei bianchi – funzionari, missionari, minatori, giornalisti, etnologi, turisti – che entrano nella regione con diversi scopi. Solo a partire da questo scambio è possibile una comprensione reciproca, come confermano diversi episodi.
Un esempio è il lavoro congiunto dello sciamano Davi Kopenawa e dell’etnologo Bruce Albert, confluito tra l’altro nei volumi La caduta del cielo (2020) e Lo spirito della foresta (2023). Kopenawa appartiene al popolo Yanomami, che vive tra Venezuela e Brasile, ed è stato uno dei protagonisti di una lotta che nel 1992 ha portato al riconoscimento delle terre indigene da parte dello stato brasiliano. Nel corso della sua vita ha imparato il portoghese e appreso il cristianesimo, ha vissuto con i bianchi lavorando come lavapiatti, poi come interprete per la FUNAI (la Fondazione Nazionale dell’Indio). Ha osservato quella società diversa, poi ha deciso di tornare nella foresta. Il risultato di questa esperienza è un confronto che Kopenawa ha sviluppato in discorsi pubblici, divenendo una personalità nota a livello internazionale. A fronte del continuo disboscamento e dell’occupazione illegale delle terre Yanomami per l’estrazione mineraria, Kopenawa ha deciso di far trascrivere le sue parole su dei libri, o “pelli di carta”, con la collaborazione di Albert.
Nei suoi discorsi, Kopenawa contrappone le parole dei bianchi, “popolo della merce”, a quelle tradizionali del suo popolo, che ispirano la protezione della foresta. Teme che i giovani indigeni siano sedotti dai beni materiali, che “si preoccupino troppo di discorsi e delle merci dei bianchi”, e prendano “paura della forza della polvere yãkoana”, col risultato di non vedere più gli spiriti. La polvere yãkoana è una sostanza psichedelica ricavata da una pianta, che tradizionalmente è assunta per produrre le visioni degli spiriti della foresta. Queste visioni costituiscono il fondamento di tutta la cosmologia Yanomami, fondata sul rispetto per una foresta vivente popolata dagli spiriti.
Insomma, Kopenawa teme che i giovani si facciano tentare da un impiego tra i bianchi, per potersi comprare delle merci, e abbandonino il consumo degli psichedelici. Questa posizione si comprende nel suo contesto storico: il risultato distruttivo dell’arrivo dei bianchi con la loro civiltà fondata sul valore della merce, dalle epidemie che hanno decimato gli indigeni alla deforestazione, è la prova che conservare la “parole” Yanomami è questione di sopravvivenza. Ma il discorso di Kopenawa non è rivolto solo ai giovani Yanomami: il confronto tra società fondate su diversi principi – il valore della merce e quello della foresta, la produzione di beni e lo scambio con gli altri esseri viventi – è parte di un dialogo e di una sfida alle civiltà d’origine europea.
La cosmologia Yanomami assume in questa doppia prospettiva un valore anche ecologico e politico. Kopenawa sottolinea questo punto, giocando con abilità con una nostra parola, ecologia: “Nella foresta, siamo noi esseri umani a essere l’ecologia. Ma, come noi, lo sono anche gli xapiri [gli spiriti della foresta], la selvaggina, gli alberi, i fiumi, i pesci, il cielo, la pioggia, il vento e il sole! È tutto quello che è venuto all’esistenza nella foresta, lontano dai Bianchi; tutto ciò che non è stato ancora circondato da recinzioni. Le parole dell’ecologia sono le nostre antiche parole. Gli xapiri difendono la foresta da quando esiste. I nostri anziani non l’hanno mai devastata perché li hanno al loro fianco. I Bianchi, che in passato ignoravano queste cose, oggi iniziano a capirle […]. Adesso dicono di essere gente dell’ecologia perché sono preoccupati di vedere che la loro terra sta diventando sempre più calda.”
Alcuni etnologi, come Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, hanno sottolineato la difficoltà di una traduzione tra diverse prospettive sul mondo. Come mostra il caso del discorso ecologico di Kopenawa, la traduzione delle parole non è mai priva di scelte e possibili fraintendimenti – com’è inevitabile – ma la traduzione è senz’altro possibile, in base all’omogeneità di specie che rende capaci di oltrepassare o trasformare gli schemi di pensiero.
Violenza di statoEliane Brum, giornalista e scrittrice brasiliana bianca, segue un cammino inverso a quello di Kopenawa: dalla metropoli di San Paolo si trasferisce ad Altamira, nel cuore dell’Amazzonia. Altamira è una cittadinatr di sfruttatori della foresta e di sfollati, vittime della costruzione della diga di Belo Monte sul fiume Xingu, che ha cancellato le loro case. Brum va quindi a vivere alla frontiera di una terra contesa e brutalizzata, dove lei stessa è straniera, trovandosi come vicini di casa gli stessi perpetratori dei crimini di cui si occupa come giornalista e attivista. La sua esperienza, raccontata nel libro Amazzonia. Viaggio al centro del mondo (2023), è prima di tutto corporea: ammalarsi, com’è inevitabile nella foresta, è un risveglio del “corpo cittadino, abituato a fingere di non esistere, così da potersi robotizzare davanti a un computer.”
Brum descrive la violenza subita dalla foresta come uno stupro, simile a quelli praticati su tante donne indigene durante la dittatura militare che ha governato il Brasile dal 1964 al 1985. In proposito, Brum riporta la retorica degli sfruttatori, che hanno descritto la foresta come un “deserto umano”, negando la civiltà indigena. Erwin Kräutler, missionario e vescovo dello Xingu dal 1981 al 2015, celebrò la costruzione del primo tratto dell’autostrada Transamazzonica, che doveva finalmente portare vita in quel deserto, abbattendo un albero di noce alto cinquanta metri. Brum ricorda con parole aspre questo episodio simbolico, osservando che il luogo di quella celebrazione è noto ad Altamira “con un nome rivelatore: Pau del Presidente, il Cazzo del Presidente.”
L’Amazzonia è descritta così come la vittima di una violenza sessuale di Stato, che Brum vive in prima persona: “La deforestazione, la distruzione della natura, la contaminazione del fiume con il mercurio e gli agrotossici sono diventate un’esperienza vissuta come violenza anche sul mio corpo, in me.”
Per Brum, la vicenda che ha come epicentro Altamira – non lontana dal luogo del massacro dei lavoratori del MST – ha un rilievo globale. L’Amazzonia è il centro di una guerra tra “forze di distruzione”, incarnate dalla politica e dall’industria dei bianchi, e “forze di resistenza”, incarnate dai popoli della foresta, sia quelli originari sia quelli arrivati in seguito attraverso migrazioni interne al Brasile, come gli abitanti dei fiumi, i beiradeiros. La foresta è anche il luogo di un conflitto di interpretazioni e valori, per cui la ricchezza degli occidentali è considerata povertà, poiché è povero non chi manca di ricchezza accumulata ma chi è alienato dai propri desideri, per esempio sottoposto a un padrone per il proprio lavoro. Per gli abitanti della foresta, “la vita è vivere, non accumulare.” Povertà non è quindi scarsità di merce, ma “non avere scelta”.
Da scrittrice e bianca, Brum si pone però un problema analogo a quello di Antigone in Amazzonia: chi può raccontare la foresta? La scrittura è stata il mezzo di un potere oppressivo, che col diritto e altri codici ha costruito barriere escludenti e legittimato l’appropriazione – un processo che non si è mai arrestato. Fare della scrittura uno “strumento per denunciare la violenza” apre una contraddizione inevitabile.
Lo storico Carlo Ginzburg sostiene nel saggio “Etnofilologia” che scienze provenienti dalle civiltà dei colonizzatori, come filologia e storia, possono nondimeno essere rivolte a una migliore conoscenza di quelle oppresse. Ma il lavoro sul campo di Brum mira a favorire una presa di parola diretta dei “popoli-foresta” attraverso progetti come Sumaúma, una piattaforma giornalistica indipendente web e radio, trilingue, basata “sia sulla scienza climatica all’avanguardia, sia sul pensiero indigeno tradizionale”. L’ambizione di Brum è portare la democrazia a chi non l’ha mai davvero vissuta: non soltanto ai popoli-foresta, ma anche alle altre entità che compongono la foresta. A questo scopo è necessario che avvocati e pubblici ministeri non si occupino soltanto dei diritti delle popolazioni umane, ma possano “agire in nome di una persona non umana o di una foresta o di un fiume o di una montagna o anche degli oceani.”
Qui animismo e diritto occidentale si fondono. Ma il progetto di Brum passa anche per una scrittura narrativa in prima persona, in cui i discorsi si incarnano nelle storie e le sensazioni degli individui.
Dalla parola all’azioneKopenawa e Blum indicano una via alla diffusione di una nuova sensibilità rispetto all’Amazzonia che ha implicazioni e potenzialità politiche globali. Riattivare un dialogo interculturale andando oltre miti del passato, tradurre i saperi indigeni per innestarli nell’educazione della cittadinanza occidentale, e riconoscere la dinamica sociale e economica che ci lega all’Amazzonia sono passaggi indispensabili per un’azione politica che non si limiti alla riduzione dei danni ecologici.
Come ha affermato il filosofo e attivista americano Dale Jamieson, fondatore del Dipartimento di Environmental Studies alla New York University, di fronte al cambiamento climatico “non c’è alternativa ai fatti, nessun sostituto per l’evidenza, nessun rimpiazzo per la ragione.” Eppure, sostiene Jamieson, “anche se riusciamo a pensare che qualcosa sia una minaccia, siamo meno reattivi che se sentiamo che è una minaccia.” Solo la ragione ci fa capire davvero cosa sta succedendo; ma senza il sentimento la ragione è inerte. A formare un diverso sentimento della natura dovranno contribuire non soltanto le conoscenze ecologiche, ma anche l’arte e la narrativa, i discorsi degli sciamani, gli spettacoli, le voci del giornalismo e dell’attivismo.
Calling all wild swimmers, surfers, paddlers
Reversing the Trend: The Case to Improve European Climate Diplomacy
In recent years, the EU has faced criticism for its approach towards greening trade, with third countries accusing Brussels of imposing rules on them unilaterally and without sufficient consultation. In light of this dissatisfaction from partner countries and fierce competition from the US and China, the EU needs to offer better solutions to its partners and take bolder steps to help them in their green transition. An interview with Hanne Knaepen and Alfonso Medinilla of the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM).
Xenia Samoultseva: In April, the EU reached an agreement on the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which will oblige businesses to conduct environmental and human rights due diligence in their value chains. How will this affect the EU’s climate diplomacy?
Alfonso Medinilla: We have already seen a lot of opposition from third countries. This resistance is not linked solely to the directive, but more broadly to the EU’s trade-related climate measures and bills. These measures are usually applied unilaterally by the EU, but they may disproportionally affect businesses in third countries. There is a sense of under-consultation, with countries and businesses feeling that they are being rushed into a transition process they may not be ready for.
The big challenge for Brussels is to balance the goals of these green initiatives with effective climate diplomacy in order to get other countries on board. Ultimately, we need a collaborative approach and a significant investment in accompanying measures.
Compared to European companies, the administrative burden of the EU’s climate measures can be much heavier on local suppliers, especially in developing countries. In light of the bloc’s growing tendency to externalise European policies and regulations, it is important to create more space for dialogue with developing countries and step up efforts to pair EU trade measures with other solutions.
Hanne Knaepen: That’s true. There is currently a perception of regulatory imperialism, with the EU imposing its measures and regulations on other countries.
Another thing that affects the perception of the EU among third countries is that even within the EU there has been a lot of internal disagreement among member states about climate-related measures. Initially, CSDDD extended to companies with at least 500 employees, but this faced resistance from Germany and Italy, which were worried about increased red tape for business. Now, only enterprises with a workforce of 1000 and a turnover of 450 million euros will be required to follow the law, which will take effect in 2029.
Another landmark piece of legislation, the Nature Restoration Law, also faced fierce opposition from some member states like Hungary and the Netherlands. Germany and Belgium were blocking discussions as well because they were afraid that some businesses would have difficulty getting permits. It has been difficult for member states to reach common ground in environmental and ecological disputes, and this can affect the credibility of the whole bloc in the eyes of its partners.
So, the EU has been imposing rules without providing enough input to third countries, listening to their needs, exploring options to help with their green transition, and making sure they can comply with the bloc’s regulations. At the same time, extensive internal discussions and disagreements have weakened the credibility and, by extension, the global leadership position of the EU.
The rise of various international players has given developing countries a more diversified pool of partners to pick from, diminishing the EU’s influence. Additionally, the bloc’s protectionist policies such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and its normative approach have contributed to rising tensions. How serious is this and is the EU doing anything to address it?
Alfonso Medinilla: CBAM and the perception of protectionism that it conveys have become problematic for the EU’s partner countries. I think that, in a way, the bloc has been going through different phases as it learns from its past experiences.
For instance, the story of the Global Gateway [an EU strategy to invest in infrastructure projects worldwide, with a key focus on advancing the green transition] started as a geopolitical competition narrative from the EU. initially, Brussels expressed a sense of loss of control in the developing world and stressed the need to come up with a competing offer to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, the EU toned down its language after this bad framing, focusing more on enhancing its offering rather than emphasising competition.
That said, given the state of play with the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the narrative that Europe must shift its industrial policy to become more competitive is becoming increasingly prominent. This perspective is likely to define the EU’s external engagements in the next couple of years, and I think we will have to deal with this new reality regardless of how it is perceived by the bloc’s partners.
One big flaw in this framing is that the situation is presented as an either-or, as if developing countries must choose between trade with the West or with China. This is ridiculous and unrealistic because even Europe itself has very deep trade relations with Beijing. The EU has not yet fully followed the US model of extremely high tariffs on Chinese products. Instead, it sits in the middle. And that’s exactly why we need to look more carefully at how developing countries can position themselves within big green tech value chains.
Rather than determining whether developing countries should pick China or the West, perhaps we should ask: how can developing countries attract meaningful investments in domestic industries through their diverse partnerships? And how can they work with different partners to reach those goals? Instead of simply looking at the security of European supply and value chains, we must focus on fostering processing and manufacturing capacities within developing countries and building stronger trade relations with them.
In other words, to benefit both sides, we must explore ways to form a collaboration that is not purely extractive but works for the EU’s partners and aligns with their industrialisation objectives.
Can Global Gateway compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)?
Alfonso Medinilla: We’re comparing apples and oranges when we’re talking about the BRI versus Global Gateway. The two projects have a very different model of mobilising finance.
BRI, especially in the heyday of Chinese infrastructure finance, was closely linked to public funding but also with Chinese engineering, procurement and construction companies. Developing countries generally perceive that Chinese initiatives move much faster than those offered by Western counterparts.
Another point to keep in mind about BRI’s financing, specifically concerning energy, is that the project previously focused on fossil fuels, low-income enterprises, and large-scale projects. There is now a shift towards renewables, which was already a focus of European energy finance. Now, the question for the Global Gateway is how the EU can adapt its offers rather than emulate what the Chinese are doing, so it can better secure its interests and meet the demands of those third countries.
At the moment, there is a massive shortage of investment in some of our partners’ energy infrastructure, with many of them having outdated energy systems. In this context, the EU’s piecemeal approach is not going to cut it. Developing countries are looking for large-scale investments that can take them to the next stage. They require speed and scale, both of which Western finance has struggled to deliver in the past.
Besides the Global Gateway, what initiatives has the EU undertaken to assist developing countries’ green transition and specifically adaptation efforts and how successful have they been?
Hanne Knaepen: A lot of the EU’s finance goes to climate-related objectives. Under the current Multiannual Financial Framework for the period 2021-2027, there is a 30 per cent climate spending target. In 2022, the EU and the member states together mobilised 28.5 billion euros in public funding for developing countries. Over 54 per cent of that amount went to adaptation and cross-cutting, including climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives.
There exist success stories of European adaptation finance. The EU supports many adaptation projects in, for example, African agriculture, but they are quite scattered.
Generally, climate finance is an area where the EU has met criticism from African partners about a lack of transparency. If Brussels says 54 per cent of climate spending goes to adaptation and cross-cutting, it’s very difficult to understand how much exactly went to adaptation. Ideally, it should be 50-50.
In addition, there are concerns about the quality of finance as well. One criticism here is that the EU packages funding already allocated or in the pipeline as if it’s new funding under a big flagship initiative. This is the case with projects like the Team Europe on Adaptation (amounting to one billion euros) or initiatives announced under the Global Gateway.
African partners are tired of not having clarity and transparency about where the EU’s money flows from or how much of the committed funding will actually be disbursed. The EU has regularly talked about pooling efforts under Team Europe headings. But how beneficial will this be?
To benefit both sides, we must form a collaboration that is not purely extractive but works for the EU’s partners and aligns with their industrialisation objectives.
To carry out adaptation successfully, it is required to have access to concessional adaptation finance. At the same time, there are a lot of discussions on involving the private sector in adaptation, for instance through blending mechanisms or the EU providing various types of guaranteed windows for the private sector to (co-)invest in climate-sensitive sectors such as water or agriculture in Global South countries.
However, there are few good examples of how the EU, as a public sector, has involved the private sector in adaptation. Let’s not forget that the private sector aims to generate profit, so more effort is needed to prove that investing in adaptation can be bankable in the longer term, for instance through weather-based insurance mechanisms.
Moving forward, it is essential for the EU to couple extraction with regeneration. For example, Europe needs to work on water diplomacy efforts, such as investing in large-scale water retention and landscape restoration projects. This will enable industrial expansion in water-stressed areas and, at the same time, will create the environment needed to work on adaptation. Currently, there remains a gap between these different areas of work.
Do you think finance should be the central pillar of the EU’s climate diplomacy?
Hanne Knaepen: Although the EU member states are the biggest climate finance providers, their contributions are insufficient in the face of the challenge of climate change. Just consider the scale of the needs and the support that is required for resilience, adaptation, and the energy transition. It’s impossible to expect the EU to close the gap in finance that African countries have. Still, the EU should make its climate target more ambitious, work on mobilising the private sector to scale up finance, etc.
Climate action should be part of the entire socio-economic transition of countries. It must go beyond individual projects and instead become part of a completely integrated approach whereby climate, resilience, and energy efficiency become a central pillar of all the activities that countries undertake.
I think that Europe and Africa are not there yet, but some Asian countries are more advanced in this regard. For instance, in Bangladesh, six to seven per cent of all government spending must be on climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Climate awareness exists on the highest political level because they feel the effects of climate change on a daily basis. You can consider this a success story.
Vietnam is another good example as climate considerations are at the centre of all the country’s activities and line ministries. For the EU, it is instructive to study and understand what has triggered this attitude and how we can work towards similar models and mechanisms in African societies.
Alfonso Medinilla: This reminds me of the overall tension that we are seeing in the EU’s approach to climate action and climate financing, between narrative and practice. The narrative has evolved to emphasise the need to plan strategy-driven finance that can transform economies in a way that links them to the European market, ultimately creating opportunities for industrialisation and economic development on both sides.
The main intention here is to closely integrate European private-sector finance into climate-related projects through various means, but we are only at the start of this transition. In practice, institutions still view things through the lens of a portfolio of projects that are supposed to come together in a coherent strategic framework.
Hanne Knaepen: Of course, we are criticising the EU from our own perspective, but African countries also need to have a clear picture of their partnership with Brussels. They must be able to clearly communicate their needs and their potential to address them, as well as their expectations from the EU. There should be a two-way dynamic in all climate-related projects, and in climate diplomacy more broadly.
Could the rise of conservative factions after the European elections significantly alter the bloc’s climate diplomacy?
Alfonso Medinilla: Conservatives can be a significant blocking factor in Europe against climate measures. We have seen this already with the role of, for instance, Hungary and Poland on key green issues in the past.
I think European progressives have been trying to appeal to certain concerns around the European Green Deal by emphasising its affordances for fostering industrialisation and economic competitiveness. They have also sought to assuage fears that the landmark deal will increase net costs for societies, a concern raised often by European right-wing parties. However, I am not sure if these attempts are sufficient to bring back alienated voters.
Killing the Green Deal would render Europe globally less competitive.
European progressives are generally preparing for the worst in the climate movement. There has been a number of very important pieces of legislation, which will be difficult to dismantle. But the Right can create extended delays, and that has increasingly damaged the EU’s international credibility. It is especially bad when the EU enters global climate negotiations divided because this division will exacerbate some of the existing accusations and tensions.
What’s more, I think a lot of internal European issues linked to the energy transition, nature restoration, and agriculture will increasingly dominate the political agenda. This may further dilute external international efforts, making them harder to sustain and manage.
Hanne Knaepen: Europe already has some challenging political priorities, such as the various ongoing international conflicts and the need for the EU to build a stronger defence strategy as member states are wary of the risk of Russia’s war on Ukraine spilling out. These concerns have put a strain on the EU’s budget, and climate development assistance is likely to continue to fall victim to shifting priorities.
This reality is apparent in the EU’s strategic agenda for 2024-2029, where there is little talk about climate change, ecological transition, or biodiversity. Instead, the agenda’s focus is mostly on defence and illegal migration.
Still, now that the EU elections have wrapped up and Ursula von der Leyen seems likely to keep her job as Commission President, we can expect that the European Green Deal will stay on its course. Rolling back the measures laid out in the deal would be a major setback for European industries that have already started to invest in green and climate-proofed products. Killing the Green Deal would also render Europe globally less competitive vis-à-vis “green” frontrunners such as the US and China.
Hopefully, this economic narrative can help convince the most stubborn among us in Europe.
Climate will run AMOC across Europe
What 70 Celebrity Tortoises Can Teach Us About Conservation Stories
Last November conservationists carefully carried 70 young, critically endangered Mojave Desert tortoises to the reptiles’ natural habitat on Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The tortoises had been hatched and reared in captivity, and the team — a collaboration between U.S. Air Force officials at the base, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Springs — were hopeful that the animals would survive the rigors of life in the wild, where ravens would try to peck through their shells and coyotes could attack them.
It would take a while to learn how they fared: Soon after their release, the reptiles would hide in underground burrows and go into brumation, a state of inactivity, for the winter.
But six months later, this past April, news of their fate came out: The tortoises had emerged from their burrows healthier and stronger than ever, a notable milestone in the ongoing tortoise conservation story.
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife AllianceThe news quickly made headlines around the country. Local outlets covered the outcome, as did the Associated Press, which transmitted it internationally. Even celebrity-focused People magazine profiled the project. The media blitz demonstrated that even though conservation projects can be expensive and time- and energy-intensive, concerted efforts to help species come back from near extinction, and even thrive, can work.
Dozens of conservation success stories come out every year, from bald eagle population surges to black-footed ferret births, zebra shark releases to red wolf habitat protections. Yet few get as much publicity as the tortoises did in the spring.
So why did the story of the tortoises resonate so widely when so many other conservation stories fail to reach the public? The answer may reflect not only the state of human views on our effect on the environment, and our opinions of animals, but also the state of the news industry and what we cover.
“A Huge Downer”Research published in 2022 by Carlos Corvalan, an advisor on risk assessment and global environmental change at the World Health Organization, suggested that people often feel overwhelmed by today’s biodiversity and climate change crises, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and result in people taking less action, not more.
Bad news about habitat destruction, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere, and struggling species abound. The public, it seems, is hungry for positive stories.
“In this time, in all times, conservation can be a huge downer,” says James Danoff-Burg, director of conservation at The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. The tortoise story, however, was about how the reptiles did well in their new environment after months in brumation. “This,” he says, “is a success.”
Another reason that the tortoise story got so much traction may be because they’re cute and unthreatening. Unlike endangered predators, tortoises won’t hurt anyone or take down prey with their fangs. Studies on stories about hyenas and sharks, for example, show that conservation focused on those species is less popular among certain age groups who think of them as scary.
Although tortoises may not qualify as charismatic megafauna — typically thought of as popular, attractive, and well-known animals — they have endearing features and are charmingly awkward.
“We relate to those big eyes,” says Danoff-Burg. “Tortoises, they’re just so funny and odd and alien, but adorable. I think that sold the story as much as anything.”
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife AllianceThe groups involved also have communications departments that helped narrate the story of the species the organizations care for. Typically it’s up to the researchers themselves to relate successes in the field, but media departments can help tell those stories to a wider audience, says Melissa Merrick, associate director of recovery ecology at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
“They really did a great job in elevating the work that we’ve been doing,” she says. “Not every organization is fortunate to have such a great communications team, and that’s really something that’s overlooked in a lot of conservation work, the importance of getting the story out there and letting people know some of the wins.”
Can the Tortoises’ Media Success Be Duplicated?If conservationists or public relations professionals want to replicate the Mojave Desert tortoise story success, the task may be difficult, says Betsy Hildebrandt, senior vice president of external affairs for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “A great, compelling story often doesn’t land, while one that seems insignificant can have legs,” she says.
In her more than three decades in communications, she’s seen how uncontrollable factors often influence the amount of publicity a study or a success will have in the media. Those can include a heavy news cycle, whether a reporter or editor has interest in a particular species, or whether viewers think the species is cute and cuddly.
“The best a PR department can do is put together a compelling pitch, be smart and target reporters who may have covered something similar in the past, [and] try an ‘exclusive,’ which you can then promote on social media to get further pickup,” she says.
Success Stories Have PowerIn the void of good news, the doom and gloom stories often earn more attention, so the conservation community should promote even small victories.
“There are so many successes out there,” Danoff-Burg says. “We just don’t tell those stories very well.” We often fail to advertise minor wins in a conservation success story, such as efforts to mitigate threats like roads or poaching.
Some in the media understand that dynamic, which has led organizations like the Solutions Journalism Network to advocate for stories with a positive message that can show readers why, and how, people responded to a particular problem.
Sure, sometimes even good-news stories fail to make a splash. But even if a conservation story doesn’t grab the public’s attention the first time there’s a breakthrough, a species’ comeback could become an even more compelling narrative over time.
Take the black-footed ferret, for example. The species was thought to be extinct by the early 1980s, until a rancher’s dog found one in the wild a few years later. Biologists named the ferret Willa and collected her genetic material. Decades later they created her genetic clone in 2021 to help the species recover. The news of the genetic advance made national headlines in places like Science, National Geographic, and Smithsonian Magazine. Biologists just recently used that same genetic material to create two more younger sisters, also clones, generating yet more headlines.
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The organizations that contributed to the Mojave Desert tortoise success could have more news to promote in the future, too, as they continue their research, like what makes a tortoise clutch successful, whether specific females are likely to produce young that succeed in cold weather, and whether individual differences in behavior change how they respond to predators. That could all make conservation efforts more effective on a faster timeframe, Danoff-Burg says.
As researchers and biologists increase their knowledge of how to best protect and support lots of other threatened and endangered species — and the habitats they rely on — conservationists will have more tales to tell of their successes. That could benefit both humans and animals alike.
After all, everyone loves a good story.
Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator:The post What 70 Celebrity Tortoises Can Teach Us About Conservation Stories appeared first on The Revelator.
Sponsors' Olympic smoke rings
Farmers and residents find common ground
Grand Paris Eviction
Touted as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, the Grand Paris Express promises better connectivity and improved public transport for the French capital. However, for Roma squatters and slum residents, the colossal project has meant forced evictions and further exclusion from society. With the Paris Olympics right around the corner, the trend has only worsened.
One morning in April 2016, 27 private security agents arrived on the grounds of a rundown warehouse in Vitry-sur-Seine, a Parisian suburb, to evict the 29 people living there. All of them were Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity. The agents came with three dogs and no judicial mandate.
Daniel, a 25-year-old migrant, his wife, and their baby were among the residents who were told to leave the premises immediately.
The warehouse was a 20-minute walk from the centre of Vitry, and the site of a train stop on the future line 15 of the Parisian metro. Vitry is just one of 45 towns that will be served by the Grand Paris Express, the first metro line connecting all Parisian suburbs. The southern branch, where Vitry is located, is expected to be the first to open, at the end of 2025.
The warehouse belonged to real estate firm SCI Aten, whose owner had filed a request for the residents’ expulsion a week earlier. The court hearing was pushed to May, and the owner took matters into his own hands to remove the squatters. Before then, Daniel and his family had already been evacuated twice – in October and January 2015 – to make way for the metro line 15.
The case of Daniel, who requested to change his name for security reasons, is not an exception. In Île-de-France, the greater Paris region, the past decade has seen an increase in expulsions with the rapid urban expansion transforming the landscape. According to the Defenseur des Droits, the French constitutional human rights body, Roma communities living in slums and squats are disproportionately threatened by the construction. Experts and activists say that the Grand Paris Express, a 40-billion-euro infrastructure project, exacerbates the social exclusion of people living in shanty towns around Paris. An investigation of nearly 50 evictions of Roma families in the southern suburb of Val-de-Marne revealed that the pattern of expulsions matches urban development and transport projects of Grand Paris Express, notably along metro line 15.
“The Grand Paris Express is a project that develops with the construction of new train stops, but also with real estate speculation,” said sociologist Anne-Cécile Caseau, who wrote a report on Roma people’s access to adequate housing in Europe.
“Marginal spaces are seen as potentially attractive in the future, and that puts pressure on the near and far suburbs [of Paris]. This pressure turns terrains that are vacant and forgotten into lucrative investments. So there are more expulsions from these terrains,” explained Caseau. “This ceaselessly pushes people farther. Evicted people are then displaced towards terrains which are densely polluted or significantly farther away [from the city],” she said.
The cycle of eviction creates lapses in administrative support, employment, education, and medical services.
Decades of evictionsLarge bidonvilles, or slums, started cropping up around France in the 1930s, largely populated by Spanish, Portuguese and Italian workers. By the end of the 1970s, slum living was mostly eradicated in metropolitan France. The vast social housing programs developed over the ‘70s facilitated the relocation of these populations into permanent homes. But as new waves of migrant workers, from Eastern European and African countries, came in the late 1990s, they were relegated to improvised living conditions in bidonvilles, according to the Abbe Pierre Foundation. Today, city halls and regional administrations are still evicting people living in slums, offering them few alternatives afterwards.
Like many slum residents, Daniel wished to integrate into French society. By 2015, he had already been living in France for seven years. He worked as a metal scrap seller and construction worker. Moving from one slum to another for nearly a decade, each time having to start over.
The cycle of eviction creates lapses in administrative support, employment, education, and medical services.
In a police report filed two months after the eviction from the Vitry warehouse, Daniel recalled the security agents grabbing women and pushing children out into the street, including a crying baby in a stroller. Daniel demanded they be let in to collect their belongings, but the agents blocked the entrance.
Their official documents, 600 euros in cash, car keys, clothes, silver jewellery, and other personal belongings were inside the building. After leaving in a hurry, Daniel returned hours later to try to retrieve the items, only to watch the security agents put them into a dumpster.
“One other pretext”In the poorer suburbs in the North, East and South of Paris, near former warehouses, train tracks, and the Seine riverbanks, communities of Roma people from Eastern Europe have settled since the 1990s.
Roma people are Europe’s largest minority and have origins on the Indian subcontinent. A historically marginalised group, Roma people are confronted with high levels of housing, education, and employment discrimination in France and the rest of Europe. According to the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights of France (CNCDH), Roma people are among the most stigmatised minorities in the country.
According to official data from 2021, there are over 430 shanty towns across metropolitan France, with over 22,000 people living there; half are European citizens, mainly from Romania and Bulgaria. While French census data is not broken down by ethnicity, the EU citizens living in shanty towns are largely understood by associations, authorities and researchers to be people of Roma ethnicity.
The social exclusion caused by urban development projects has been well documented in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department to the north of Paris, which has the highest rate of people living in poverty in metropolitan France. The research shows that social inclusion projects suffer from “institutional inertia and contradictory policy goals” and that the most vulnerable populations are directly impacted by urban development.
Constructions related to the 2024 Olympics have also accelerated this process for migrants and Roma living in informal housing (squats in abandoned buildings, slums, makeshift shacks, etc.). In April 2024, riot police squads evicted the biggest squat in France, located in the south of Paris, and housing over 400 people of African origins, many of whom had refugee status. Half of those evicted in April had come there after a previous eviction from a squat near the Olympic Village in the French capital’s northern suburbs.
Le Revers de la Medaille Collective estimates that the number of evicted people increased by 38.5 per cent from one year to the other in the areas of Olympic sites. In its June 2024 report, the collective says that Paris and Île-de-France authorities have led “one year of social cleansing” of “undesirable” people in preparation for the event and its spectators.
“With the Olympic Games (…) that’s just one other pretext for pushing out people,” said Aline Poupel, president of Romeurope Val-de-Marne and a psychologist, who has worked with Roma communities in the area since the 1990s. “As soon as there’s been the start of a Grand Paris Express project, that brings evictions (…) especially around line 15. That line is going to pass everywhere, all the places where the Roma lived more than two years ago.”
Evictions trace future metro linesIn the 2010s, following the eastward expansion of the EU, the number of inhabitants in bidonvilles surged. Around then, France started deploying aggressive campaigns of slum dismantlement, which included expelling EU citizens by taking Roma families to the nearest border and putting them on charter flights to Romania.
Around the same time, the greater Paris region was lit up with the promise of urban renewal, economic prosperity, and increased connectivity for suburban residents. The Grand Paris Express, Europe’s “biggest infrastructure project”, was announced in 2012, and it aims to double the size of Paris’ metro system on a rollout schedule for 2024-2035.
Since 2014, Aline Poupel has kept files detailing expulsions in Val-de-Marne. The folders contain hundreds of pages of printed biographical data, such as emails, legal correspondence, court eviction orders, and censuses of the slum inhabitants. From these documents, we mapped out where evictions occurred in the southeast of the Parisian region, the number of people affected, and who demanded the court-ordered expulsions.
While most of the files included expulsion orders, some did not. This is not uncommon: the Observatory of the Expulsion of Informal Housing (OEIH) found that 26 per cent of eviction cases between October 2022 and November 2023 occurred without a legal basis. These are still carried out by law enforcement, and only in exceptional cases, like Daniel’s, private agents are hired by owners for an extrajudicial eviction.
A lawful eviction is not a mere deployment of police forces to a slum; it needs to be requested by a public or private actor in a court of law, which can then decide whether to issue an eviction order.
Our investigation reveals that, over the past decade, expulsions have persisted also to the South of the French capital, in a pattern that matches the Grand Paris Express construction sites. Our survey of the nearly 50 evictions in the Val-de-Marne department between 2014 and 2024 shows that 15 evictions from this period occurred one kilometre or less away from the trace of the southern branch of the future line 15 and the Southern expansion of line 14. One other evicted site is on the eastern section of line 15.
Seven other evictions occurred between one and two kilometres away from Grand Paris lines.
Note: for practical reasons this is a screenshot – Please consult the map here
Most of the expulsions were in state-run or state-owned structures, several of which are directly linked to the Grand Paris projects, such as the national railway company SNCF, Grand Paris Aménagement, or DRIEA, the public agency tasked with studying the development of the neighbourhoods around Grand Paris Express train stops.
Note: for practical reasons, this is a screenshot -please consult the interactive version here
We shared our findings about the Grand Paris Express displacing Roma communities with Societé des Grands Projets, (SGP) which leads the construction of Grand Paris Express. In response, Jérémy Huppenoire, the organisation’s press relations manager, said that the SGP “acquires only the land needed for the construction of the Grand Paris Express, and if necessary, secures it to prevent any illegal occupation before work begins. If its land is illegally occupied, SGP may have to ask the authorities to evacuate it so that work can begin.”
Huppenoire added that SGP will build 8,000 homes, 30 per cent of which will be social and intermediate housing with rents controlled by the state. Moreover, he said, the scheme will promote home ownership by selling apartments at below-market prices. Upon eviction, residents of bidonvilles are legally entitled to file a request for social housing, but people rarely receive one, according to the OEIH. 85 per cent of evictions come with no alternative solution for relocation, be it temporary or permanent.
New impetus for slum “integration”In 2018, a French government instruction promised to “give new impetus” to integrating bidonvilles inhabitants by “going beyond the evacuation-centric approach,” suggesting a more humane outlook. The government aimed to reduce the number of people living in slums, but since 2018, the number of slum residents in France increased by 37 per cent, according to the most recently available official data.
Even though a 2021 progress report on the new framework indicated that more and more slum residents have been getting access to housing in 2019 and 2020, many Roma families remained in slums across the Paris region. Sociologist Anne Cecile Case notes that there are a multitude of factors that confine communities to a shanty town.
“Roma people in makeshift housing have difficulty accessing private housing even when they have an income,” said Caseau. “We have a more general housing crisis that makes it complicated, but there is also the problem of owners discriminating against Roma tenants, but that isn’t always documented.”
Associations say that the most common “solution” for evictions is short stays in social hostels, even after the 2018 framework. These hostels are paid for by authorities but operated by private enterprises. According to Poupel, the authorities offer victims of expulsions a stay of a maximum of three nights in a hostel. After that, they are left on their own. Poupel encourages the families she works with to go to the hostel, saying that some nights of sleep in a place with running water ought to serve as a respite from the intense stress of eviction.
In 2015, when Daniel’s family was evicted from the slum on the land of the future Les Ardoines metro stop, a handful of other families were directed toward social hostels. We found records of four of them – all of whom were sent over 15 kilometres away– in hostels close to the edge of the department.
Note: for practical reasons, this is a screenshot – please consult the interactive version here.
One family was inadvertently separated by the temporary accommodation, according to Aline Poupel’s correspondence from the time. The couple and their two daughters were assigned to a hostel 17 kilometres away from their previous location, and even farther from the school where the children were enrolled.
The correspondence shows that the father was the sole breadwinner of the house, selling produce at the food market in Vitry and making upwards of 50 euros per week. But the hostel was a 2-hour drive from the market and could not be easily reached by public transport – so he stayed behind, hoping to receive closer accommodation.
“Harder and harder to reach”According to associations that intervene in these areas, living conditions in shanty towns around Île-de-France are deplorable. Representatives from Romeurope and ASAV92, which accompanies people in shanty towns across the Hauts-de-Seine and Val d’Oise departments, told us that access to water is sparse and organised trash disposal is nearly non-existent. They note a high prevalence of illnesses like lead poisoning, diabetes, hepatitis B and C, and high blood pressure, which are caused or worsened by precarious living conditions and difficult access to medical care. Bad living conditions, however, are also often used as a pretext for fast evictions and little to no delays granted, said Aline Poupel, president of Romeurope Val-de-Marne.
“Repeated expulsions have driven people further away from the urban zones,” said Luc Magistry, director of the ASAV92 association. “They are starting to settle in remote areas, [such as] around forests, and it becomes harder and harder to reach the slums and bring water [and] organise trash disposal, but also to enrol children in school and to go to work. One grave misconception is that people living in shanty towns do not work or want to work.”
Poupel and other experts maintain that authorities are reluctant to supply water, toilets, or trash disposal services as they don’t want to give people a reason to stay. When asked about the interactions with the city halls, Poupel sighed. “We feel like we’re in a state of war. We have to fight for every morsel,” she said.
Private sufficiency and public luxury
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