A half hour interview on the dangers of genetically engineered trees and their relation to climate mitigation schemes. With Climate Challenge host, Karen Strickler:
(click on the link above–we were not able to embed the video in this blog post)
Category Archives: Biodiversity
Climate Challenge Media With GJEP’s Anne Petermann on GE Trees
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, UNFCCC
Forest Cover: The Official Newsletter of Global Forest Coalition
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE (Download the 10 Page PDF by clicking here)
From standing trees to boiled, bleached pulp in one day. Photo: Petermann/GJEP-GFC
Rio+20 must Recognize the Role of Civil Society
by Fiu Mataese Elisara/ Chair of the Board, Global Forest Coalition
REDD and the Feeling of Standing Barefoot in a Peatswamp By Simone Lovera, Sobrevivencia, Paraguay
San Mariano Biofuel Project Should be Rejected as CDM Project By Feny Cosico, Advocates of Science and Technology for the People (AGHAM), the Philippines
Genetically Engineered Tree Developments: GE Cold Tolerant Eucalyptus in the US By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project; North American Focal Point, Global Forest Coalition
African Faith Leaders get Organized for Durban COP17 By Nigel Crawhall, Director of the Secretariat of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) and member of the Western Cape Provincial Religious Leaders Forum
Calendar of Forest-related meetings
About Forest Cover
Welcome to the thirty-eighth issue of Forest Cover, newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition (GFC). GFC is a world- wide coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Indigenous Peoples Organizations (IPOs). GFC promotes rights-based, socially just and effective forest policies at international and national level, including through building the capacity of NGOs and IPOs in all regions to influence global forest policy.
Forest Cover is published four times a year. It features reports on important intergovernmental meetings by different NGOs and IPOs and a calendar of future meetings. The views expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views of
the Global Forest Coalition, its donors or the editors.
For free subscriptions, please contact Yolanda Sikking at: Yolanda.sikking@globalforestcoalition.org
Global Justice Ecology Project is the North American Focal Point of the Global Forest Coalition
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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, GE Trees, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, REDD, UNFCCC
Mother Nature has rights, say speakers
Note: I just returned from a strategy meeting in San Francisco on ways to use the “Rights of Mother Earth” as a tool for advancing justice and opposing false and market-based solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises. Natalia Greene, of Fundación Pachamama, quoted below, was one of the participants. While there are a lot of divergent opinions on the best ways to utilize this tool, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, has been using it to marked success in stopping fracking in Pennsylvania. CELDF assisted the Congress of Ecuador in creating their new constitution, which recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples and Nature, and strips corporations of the rights of personhood.
–Anne Petermann, for the GJEP Team
Cross-Posted from The Saint Albert Gazette, Alberta, Canada, July 30, 2011
Local youth hear about Earth’s legal rights
By Kevin Ma |
In Ecuador, Mother Nature can take you to court.
It’s right in the country’s constitution, says Natalia Greene, who spoke to about 200 local youth at the University of Alberta this week, and it’s one of the many ways that indigenous knowledge can help us protect water.
“Nature is a slave right now,” she says.
While there are laws that ban pollution, those laws all treat nature as an object to be used by people. In 2008, her country became the first in the world to explicitly recognize the rights of nature in its constitution — an idea that came from Ecuador’s indigenous population.
Nature is like a plane, she says, and if we keep taking parts out of it, eventually it will crash.
“We are a part of nature,” she says. “If we don’t respect nature, we’re not respecting our rights.”
Aboriginal lessons
Greene is an environmentalist with the Fundación Pachamama in Ecuador, a group that helped rewrite the country’s constitution in 2008. She was one of many speakers in Edmonton this week to take part in the Global Youth Assembly, a youth conference meant to promote justice and human rights.
Ecuador is home to the Amazon rainforest and the Galapagos Islands, Greene says, and puts great value on its biodiversity. Recent deforestation and oil spills have caused the nation to rethink the nature of development.
Ecuador has about 14 different nationalities, many of which have close relations with nature. When Greene and other negotiators spoke to indigenous groups during constitutional talks, they realized that these people viewed nature as a person — a concept foreign to Western law.
“The judicial system we had developed with had forgotten nature,” she says.
Canada’s aboriginals have a similar view of nature, notes Danika Littlechild, a lawyer from the Ermineskin Cree Nation near Hobbema who specializes in water governance. The Cree word for “water” is “nipiy,” which is short for a phrase that means “I am life.”
“When you say ‘water’ in [Cree], you know it is alive,” said Littlechild, who also recalled one meeting where the elders actually brought water from a local water body to act as a representative of nature at the negotiations.
Nature goes to court
Ecuador decided to give nature the highest legal protection possible by putting it in its constitution, Greene says. The constitution makes specific reference to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and says that nature is subject to all the rights outlined in it. It also allows any resident to take the government to court on behalf of nature if he or she feels its rights have not been defended.
The first big test of this law came in the case of the Vilcabamba River last March, Greene says. A company had been building an illegal road by the river for three years, and had dumped so much rock into it that it had actually changed its course, causing floods. When a local group took the government to court over its inaction, the judge ordered the company to get the permits needed for the development and to repair the harm it had done.
The law hasn’t chased investors out of Ecuador, Greene says, as all it does is ask them to develop responsibly. But the government has been backsliding on it lately, as it was seeking mines and oil development for money to fund social programs.
About 100 American communities have now recognized the rights of nature, she notes, including Pittsburgh. She encouraged delegates to lobby their own governments and get the conversation about nature’s rights started.
“We need to have people understand that we are part of nature,” she says.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Biodiversity, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean
KPFK Earth Minute on USDA Attempt to Deregulate GMO Plants
To Listen to this week’s Earth Minute on the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Los Angeles, click on:
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110726_070010sojourner.MP3
And forward to minute 26:00
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, Earth Minute, Genetic Engineering, Posts from Anne Petermann
Turning the Lacandon Jungle Over to the Carbon Market
Cross-Posted from Z Magazine
By Jeff Conant
All Photos by Orin Langelle/ GJEP-GFC
In A Land to Plant Dreams, historian Yan de Vos describes the history of the Lacandon jungle of Chiapasas a series of dreams that have obsessed and overtaken those who come upon this remote mountain rainforest in the southeastern corner of Mexico. A jungle so dense and mysterious only a century ago that it was named “the Desert of Solitude,” de Vos declares that “the Lacandon is not a single reality, but a mosaic of multiple Lacandonas conceived and made concrete by many and varied interests.”
The Lacandon’s dreamers include the commercial interests that, for centuries, have extracted mahogany, rubber, minerals, petroleum, and genetic material, leaving about 30 percent of the original forest, of which only 12 percent is said to retain its ecological integrity. Then there are the diverse communities who live there—Mestizo settlers along with Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Ch’ol, and Mam indigenous farmers, some who originated there and many others who arrived over the course of centuries, escaping forced labor on the fincas or war in neighboring Guatemala, seeking a plot of land to cultivate.
Then there is the group that has been given title to the largest swath of jungle—a small tribe called the Caribes whose ancestors migrated from nearby Campeche two centuries ago and who, through a complex history involving European anthropologists, American missionaries, and Mexican government officials, became known as the Lacandones. In direct conflict with the Lacandones, and with transnational capital, are the jungle’s best-known dreamers, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who, beginning in the 1990s, occupied vast portions of the jungle and declared it autonomous territory.
Now, after centuries defined by its potential for producing goods, the Lacandon has entered the 21st century where it is being dreamed anew as “the lungs of the earth.” This jungle’s new dreamers include the state of California, market-oriented “environmental” groups like Conservation International, and the United Nations. Their dream is to harness the power of the burgeoning carbon market to preserve the Lacandon—the container for one-fifth of the biodiversity of all of Mexico—by turning it into a virtual carbon sink.
Enter the Governor of California
In 2006, the state of California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), which mandates that the state reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The law was hailed as landmark environmental legislation for its aggressive action to reduce global warming emissions while “generating jobs, and promoting a growing, clean-energy economy and a healthy environment for California at the same time.”
Under the implementation plan for AB32, which was approved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in December 2010, but held up in court three months later, up to 20 percent of the state’s total mandated emissions reductions would be achieved through carbon trading, rather than through actual cuts in industrial pollution at the source. This means that industries would be permitted to delay efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions—along with the associated toxic co-pollutants—by purchasing carbon allowances from outside California. As one of his last acts in office, just a week before the UN Framework Convention on Climate in Cancún, Mexico last November, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a carbon-trading agreement with the state of Chiapas as part of AB32. The agreement is predicated on an emerging global policy mechanism known as “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” or REDD.
Mary Nichols, the chairperson of CARB, announced California’s initiative at a high-level event in Cancún where pilot REDD projects were hailed by a gamut of global figures, including primatologist Jane Goodall, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and Sam Walton, the CEO of Walmart. Nichols called the plan “a way for California to help the developing world by investing in forests. Saving our forests is good not only for the atmosphere,” she said, “It’s also good for indigenous peoples.” But many in Chiapas disagree. Gustavo Castro, Coordinator of Otros Mundos, a small NGO based in Chiapas, sees this as the leading edge of a new onslaught of forest carbon offsets and part of a broader trend of privatization of territories and natural resources. “Enter the governor of California, saying, ‘We’re going to approve a law in which California, the fifth largest economy in the world, is obliged to reduce its CO2, so we need to buy the fresh air from the forests of the South.’ When a natural function like forest respiration becomes a product with a price, it’s easy to see who’s going to end up with control of the forests.”
The law has also stirred up controversy in California where environmental justice advocates charge that such carbon trading schemes—reducing emissions on paper only—leaves lower-income communities of color to continue bearing the brunt of industrial pollution. Alegria de la Cruz, one of the lead attorneys for San Francisco’s Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE), whose lawsuit has successfully challenged the cap and trade component of the bill, says that, “The overarching goal of a pollution trading system has serious implications for fence-line communities.” Her co-counsel, Brent Newell, is more explicit: “Poor people are getting screwed on both sides of the transaction,” he said. “Only the polluters are benefiting.”
In late May, a ruling by the San Francisco superior court forced the California Air Resources Board to bring its cap and trade plan back to the drawing board in order to review alternatives. But as the spearhead of efforts to forge a pathway for carbon markets, the dream of converting the Lacandon into international carbon currency will not be disrupted so easily. “Our goal,” says Chiapas Governor Juan Sabines “is that the entirety of the surface of Chiapas will enter into the market for carbon credits and methane credits, beginning through agreements with polluting sub-national states, like California.”
Selling the Forest for the Trees
REDD projects are being piloted in many countries under the auspices of the United Nations REDD Program, the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other global bodies. The California project is one of a small handful of REDD agreements between sub-national entities. The armature of REDD is still very much in development, but in broad strokes it works like this: because trees capture and store CO2, maintaining intact forests is essential to mitigating the impacts of climate change. Under REDD, those who protect forests can earn carbon credits—financial rewards based on an assessment of the amount of CO2 a forest can store and a market-derived price per ton of carbon. They can then trade these credits to industrial polluters in order to generate revenue that, in theory, gives developing world countries and the forest-dwelling communities in those countries an incentive not to cut down trees.
Policymakers at the global level see REDD as offering a viable chance—“perhaps the last chance,” says World Bank President Robert Zoellick—to save the world’s forests, while simultaneously addressing the climate crisis, without jeopardizing economic growth. The major multilateral institutions support REDD and its growing list of spin-offs with dizzying acronyms, such as REDD+ and REDD++, which allow the policy to include aspects such as reforestation with exotic species, and offset credits for biodiversity. But many forest-dependent communities, environmental justice advocates, indigenous peoples’ organizations, and global South social movements oppose it. “It comes to seem very amiable for the governments and corporations of the North to say, ‘We’re going to pay you not to deforest,’ Gustavo Castro argues. “But in reality they’re saying. ‘We’re going to pay you so we can continue polluting’.” Tom Goldtooth, director of the Indigenous Environmental Network has called REDD “a violation of the sacred, and potentially the biggest landgrab of all time.”
To read the rest of the article, please go to Z Magazine
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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Carbon Trading, Chiapas, Climate Justice, False Solutions to Climate Change, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle, Pollution, REDD
Forests Threatened by Billions of GMO Tree Clones
Genetically Engineered Eucalyptus Trees–Like Flammable Kudzu
Dear GJEP Friends and Supporters,
July 20, 2011
When I watched GE tree company ArborGen’s presentation at the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference two weeks ago in Brazil, it was clear that they are determined to grow and sell their GE eucalyptus tree clones–at a rate of half a billion per year–for plantations across the U.S. South from Texas to Florida.
We are even more determined to stop them. You can help us stop this menace by sending a donation to the STOP GE Trees Campaign. We need to raise $20,000 before the end of the summer to meet the rapidly rising need for this campaign. Please help us achieve this goal by sending a gift today.
Donate securely through our Network for Good donation page, or through our Paypal account (especially for international donations).
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| A “green desert’ eucalyptus plantation with pile of logs |
“Healthy forests are absolutely critical for providing breathable air, drinkable water and the biodiversity and protection from climate change. The variety of ecosystems found in U.S. Southern forests- from Cumberland Plateau hardwoods, to coastal wetlands to the cypress swamps of the deep south–nurture specific animal and plant species that are important to maintaining a balanced and healthy environment. They are places of breathtaking natural beauty.” –Dogwood Alliance
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| Native Southern Forest, Courtesy Dogwood Alliance |
These amazing forests are under threat. Right now, one in five acres of these forests have been converted to pine plantations-about 42 million acres. International Paper, a joint owner of ArborGen and one of the largest timber multinationals in the world, wants to double the acreage of timber plantations in the South to 84 million acres-using GE eucalyptus trees. Many animal and plant species will be put at grave risk.
GE eucalyptus plantations are notoriously invasive, flammable and dry up ground water. Already, large areas of the Southern U.S. are facing drought conditions. Even the U.S. Forest Service has expressed concern about ArborGen’s GE eucalyptus trees impacting on water. Because these plantations would be heavily sprayed with toxic herbicides and pesticides, they would also contaminate water sources.
In Brazil eucalyptus plantation are called “green deserts” because they are devoid of other plant or animal life.
Because these GE eucalyptus trees have been modified for cold tolerance, they could be sold all over the world for planting in regions currently too cold for eucalyptus. Forests worldwide would be threatened.
Please help us stop this nightmare before it is too late, send a contribution today.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved ArborGen’s plan to plant large outdoor field trials of GE eucalyptus across seven southern U.S. states, from Texas to Florida. The USDA ignored overwhelming public opposition and several government agencies that expressed serious concerns.
For this reason, Global Justice Ecology Project, Dogwood Alliance and Sierra Club have joined attorneys at the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity to sue the USDA to stop these field trials.
ArborGen admits these field trials are the next step toward “deregulation” of GE eucalyptus trees-which would allow GE eucalyptus trees to be grown anywhere by anyone with no oversight.
This is one fight to save the forests that we can win. You can help us stop GE trees. But we need your help today.
Donate securely online through Network for Good , or our Paypal account , or send a check made out to GJEP to The STOP GE Trees Campaign, PO Box 412, Hinesburg, VT 05461.
P.S. Don’t forget to consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can do this simply by clicking the button below. It will take you to a secure donation page where one of your options is to make a “recurring” donation either monthly or quarterly. And if you want to receive our occasional email updates, be sure to send us your email address.
Thanks very much for your support,
Anne Petermann
Executive Director
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Land Grabs, Posts from Anne Petermann
Photo Essay from the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference Field Trip Hosted by Veracel
On Wednesday, July 29th, around 200 participants divided into 4 groups toured various facilities owned by pulp company Veracel. This photo essay explains what we learned on the field trip.
Photos and commentary by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project (Exception: the last two photos are by GJEP Co-Director/Strategist Orin Langelle)
First Stop: Veracel Forest Preserve where children and visitors are “educated” about the importance of eucalyptus pulp and the “greenness” of Veracel. Note that the human figure in the poster is exhibiting total dominance over the trees.
On the way into the forest preserve, children and visitors are presented with a native forest monster and representations of some of the scary wildlife that live in forests.
Veracel forest monster
Scary forest raptor
On the way through the 6,000 hectare forest preserve (80% of which is forested), a mixture of formerly logged lands and primary forest, participants were treated to a canopy rope bridge and photo shoots with 4 large trees we encountered on the path. Most of the forest contained very young trees.
canopy rope bridge
one of the four big trees
The primary Mata Atlantica forest once stretched over much of the eastern edge of Brazil. Large swaths of it have been eliminated and replaced with eucalyptus plantations. Veracel took us next to the tree nursery where they propogate the 17 million eucalyptus clones they produce annually. Henry Ford would have been proud. The nursery was a very efficient assembly line operation.
Taking Cuttings to propagate new clones
"Clonal Garden"
Assembly line for clones 1
Assembly line for clones 2
Assembly line for clones 3
All the happy clones together
The next step for these clones, of course, is to be transformed into large-scale monoculture eucalyptus plantations. Veracel harvests 11,000 of these 7 year old eucalyptus trees every day for their pulp mill. Virtually the entire timbering operation is heavily mechanized to employ the fewest people possible, and uses an assortment of chemicals, from a petroleum-based hydrophilic polymer that is planted with the seedlings, to glyphosate-based herbicides that are applied to keep out competition plants, to the insecticides used to control “pests.” In this way, Veracel can maximize its potential for profits.
The eucalyptus plantation
The mechanical harvester rapidly gobbles up the trees
The jaws of the harvester up close and personal
This employee, clearly bored, awaits his cue to show the visitors how the mechanized planter works
After a couple of tries, they were finally successful in showing how the mechanized planter works
The result. Note the petroleum-based polymer gel at the base of the seedling
Despite several quotes from Rachel Carson, John Muir, Emerson and other naturalists posted at the nature preserve, the plantations rely heavily on chemical applications. The guide informed me that the trees get three applications of toxic herbicide over their 7 year life span. As a result, the plantations of non-native trees are devoid of understory plants or biodiversity. Social movements in Brazil call them “green deserts” for this reason.
the ground beneath the plantation is barren of other life forms
Rachel Carson quote in the Veracel forest preserve. Too bad they don't listen to her.
The ultimate purpose for the clones:
massive pile of eucalyptus chips at the Veracel pulp mill
From standing trees to boiled, bleached pulp in one day
The reason Veracel needs to greenwash their image: their giant stinking, polluting pulp mill
The stench of the pulp mill. "It smells like money".
Veracel's vision for the future: Make more money!
One of the obstacles, according to Veracel, of their achieving maximum productivity, is people breaking into their plantations. On the way to the plantation, we passed what appeared to be an MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) encampment–black plastic shelters with a red MST flag flying high over them. Indeed, elsewhere in Brazil, the MST as well as indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani populations, have taken over eucalyptus plantations and found better uses for the land. In the case of the MST, as encampments for landless peasants. In the case of the Indigenous Peoples, as a retaking of their ancestral lands from which they were forcibly removed when the timber company was given the land for plantations. The cases we had previously documented were on Aracruz Cellulose land in Espirito Santo, but it seems to be occuring here in Bahia as well. Below are photos from the encampments in Esprito Santo:
MST encampment in former eucalyptus plantation. The sign says "Eucalyptus plantations are not forests". Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC
Indigenous community re-takes traditional lands, removes eucalyptus plantation. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC
Eucalyptus plantations have been such a smashing success in other parts of the world, that now GE tree company ArborGen is trying to engineer them to be cold-tolerant so that the joy of eucalyptus plantations can be spread to new and untrammeled lands. In the United States they hope to sell half a billion GE cold tolerant eucalyptus trees annually for plantations from Texas to Florida. They’re invasive? Flammable? Dry up ground water and worsen droughts? So? What’s your point. They will make a lot of money for a few powerful people.
To learn more or to sign our petition to the US Department of Agriculture opposing GE eucalyptus in the US, click here
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Greenwashing, Latin America-Caribbean, Pollution, Posts from Anne Petermann
Wednesday Blog Post from the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference: Which Side Are You On?
By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Today was the conference field trip sponsored by Veracel—the pulp giant of Bahia, Brazil. Over the course of the 11 hour field trip I snapped about 350 photos—of everything from their greenwash “forest preserve” to their stinking smoking pulp mill, to their eucalyptus nursery assembly line, to their endless eucalyptus plantations and everything in between. They were just as friendly as can be…
Now, However, it is going on 8:30pm. So I will save my blog post and photo essay from this little treasure trove until tomorrow. For now, some thoughts that demanded to be written down on Monday night—2 nights ago. I hope you enjoy this little rant of mine.
—–
Monday, June 27, 2011
Thoughts have been pouring through my head this evening, and so I decided to try a little “Breakfast of Champions” Vonnegut-style stream of consciousness writing. Course it won’t have his cool pictures. Though I can at least draw an asshole *. But its hard to write stream of consciousness with this new computer whose keyboard is ever so slightly smaller than the one I am used to—which had a problem with the key with ? and / on it. It kept falling out at the most inopportune moments. One doesn’t realize how much one counts on the ? and / key until it falls out.
So I am here in this little “hippy” tourist town of Arraial d’Ajuda (don’t ask me to pronounce it) on the coast of Bahia, Brazil. I am here to monitor and learn from a conference of tree geneticists, tree engineers and foresters gathered from the far reaches of the planet—many to practice their English, as they listen to highly technical presentations by native English speakers reciting their powerpoints as though they were a sports announcer describing a horserace.
The one thing I have most enjoyed about this place is the nights when I can enjoy the dark and secret hammock of my balcony next to the beach resort where the conference is being held.
It is peaceful out there on the terrace and the wind makes light ruffling noises with the palm fronds that reminds me of the sound of rain dripping from maple leaves after a downpour.
The simple things are what thrill me now. The quiet secret escapes. At one time travel was thrilling—the newness of it all, the adventure of not knowing what came next. Well, that wore off a LOOONNGGG time ago. Now the idea of sitting in stale overcrowded airports or big surreal metal tubes that hurtle through the sky at some ridiculous velocity is just not something I look forward to anymore.
And this is my…hmmm…fourth, fifth time to Brazil? Which is all well and good but truth be told I’d rather be in Chile. Even though I barely understand a word of the heavily accented Spanish there and the taxicab drivers are most unpleasant, the people there—the Mapuche people—are amazing. We went there after our first trip to the bizarre and incomprehensible world of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) in Buenos Aires—where we first made the argument to UN delegates that GE trees should be banned globally. We brought over a Mapuche representative named Lorena to testify to the delegates about the impacts that tree plantations and their associated toxins were having on rural Mapuche communities—and how this would only worsen with GE trees. And we formed a partnership with them to stop GE trees. But we haven’t been back in a while. Too long.
But that trip to Buenos Aires was when we got a real taste for how the UN actually works. The reason that GE trees were permitted in carbon offset forestry projects, we found out, was because Norway had tried to get them banned. Brazil and China objected strenuously, and hence, since they could not be banned, they were de facto allowed. Welcome to the UN FCCC, boys and girls.
We then brought our demand to ban GE trees globally to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-8) in Curitba, Brazil in 2006.
The demand got surprisingly far considering it was our first time there. We caught the industry off-guard. They would not allow that to happen again. When we confronted them a second time at the next CBD in Bonn (COP-9) in 2008, they would be there with their hench men, the PRRI—pro-industry scientists posing as public interest researchers—who would present intervention after intervention about why GE trees were the best thing since sliced bread and would surely be the salvation of the world’s forests (despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary).
Industry even wheedled their way into the delegations of governments. GE tree company ArborGen got themselves on the official delegation of Brazil. As these UN meetings are based on consensus decision-making (or so they say), when Canada, New Zealand and Brazil formed a block to reject any decision to restrict GE trees, the best we could get was a reaffirmation of language from the previous COP warning of the dangers of GE trees and urging countries to adopt precautionary measures regarding GE trees.
But because the decisions of the CBD are all voluntary in their complicity and the number one driver of GE trees—the US—isn’t even signed onto the CBD (just as they are the number one producer of greenhouse gas emissions but are not signed onto the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement; and just as they are the biggest consumer of all things crap on the planet yet will not sign on to commitments to end child labor, or landmines, or basically anything that doesn’t totally suck…) Wonderous place this ole U S of A.
And all so the rich can get richer and the poor poorer, the planet and all of its inhabitants continue to suffer. Meanwhile so-called “scientists” natter on endlessly about their findings on how the now believe they now have evidence that environmental conditions and/or environmental changes contribute to genetic changes in various lifeforms. Holy crap. Ecosystems, web of life, hello? Oh, but the web of life was covered on the first night by the main speaker. He presented it as a paradox. He said,
1) we all know everything is connected to everything else.
2) If this were true, evolution would be impossible
3) Therefore we need to understand genetic interactions.
What the…
I have to admit that he lost me on that one. From an ecological standpoint there can be no evolution without first the premise that everything is interconnected. What would drive evolution otherwise? Species evolve according to the stresses or changes in their environment–because there are inherent connections between and among those species and their environment. It ain’t called the web of life for nothin’.
Then you add onto that cellular knowledge, instinct and intuition—oh and life itself—the unmeasurable aspects to species interactions and behaviors—and, THAT my friends is the great paradox of reductionist thinking in the natural world. The natural world is the opposite of reductionist, the opposite to compartmentalization. It is encompassing, it is diverse, it is unpredictable and wild. It will never conform to the maps and equations and mathematical models that are imposed upon it. It may tolerate them for a while, but ultimately life will break free of the shackles of human thought limitations and do its thang. Anyone who doubts this has not been paying attention to the history of the rise and fall of empires throughout human history. They rise, they devastate or eat up their natural surroundings in the pursuit of their lust for more, more, more. Then they exceed the limits of their ecological boundaries, cannot adjust, and pass from existence.
Can we, as the present race of dominant humans, change this trajectory? Can we redirect our meager existences to shift the dominant paradigm to one that is harmonious with, rather than in constant conflict with, the non-dominant-human world? Now is the time to find out. There is no time to lose.
As the old Wobbly slogan demands, “Which side are you on?”
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Greenwashing, Posts from Anne Petermann
