What we take from earth
What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity’s use of resources. What our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.
Naomi Klein
Mineral matters
Chasing uranium
In 2011, a professional toxic tour brings me to the legacy of the Bulgarian uranium industry. The ex-mayor of Buhovo walks us – Geiger counter in hand – to the long-closed uranium mine at the edge of the city. At new and nicely sheltered picnic tables, the machine goes through the roof. Stones that fit in a child’s hand are a hundred times more radioactive than the normal background radiation. Cows chew on radioactive grass. It’s here that people from Sofia often come to on Sundays, eating lunch in between a walk or mountain bike ride. The sun is not guaranteed, but a radiating earth is.5
The scientists and activists who follow Todor Dimitrov are united in the European EJOLT project, which investigates and supports the battle of victims of environmental impacts around the world. Also in our international group is the French nuclear engineer Bruno Chareyron. Bruno’s job is to perform independent radiation monitoring in order to improve information and protection against radiation. While using his own devices, Bruno tells us that there are still problems in France with the inheritance of more than 200 closed uranium mines. After a long campaign, the big French company AREVA was obliged to clean up dozens of sites. But in Bulgaria, the damage of the nuclear industry isn’t even mapped yet. Bruno hopes to help change that.
Our group of uranium disaster tourists follows the route the uranium used to take: from Buhovo’s uranium mine, which still contains about 12,000 tonnes of uranium, to the processing plant on the other side of the city. There, uranium-containing rock blocks were converted into yellowcake, which then went to Russia to make nuclear fuel. The liquids needed to separate they uranium from the rock remain radioactive, almost into eternity. They lay in dark puddles and pools, behind a clumsy dam next to the factory. Over 10,000 people live directly downstream. But if the dam breaks, the radioactive sludge would draw a trace from Buhovo across the plains around Sofia all the way to Romania.
To avoid a nightmare scenario, the European Union (EU) paid the Belgian company Bitumar Soils Joint Venture 3 million euros to strengthen the dam. But after a downpour in 2009, local residents claim that a piece of the dam came loose. “We did not get permission to check that up close,” says Bulgarian environmentalist Todor Slavov. We too can’t get closer than 100 meters from the dam. Slavov points to a patrolling pick-up truck between us and the toxic sludge and tells us that it is dangerous to approach closer.
The inheritance of the mine, the factory and the toxic pools require a quasi-perpetual cash flow to prevent a disaster. Is there going to be enough money in 10 or 100 years? The yellowcake factory has been closed since the turn of the century, but the promised decommissioning has not yet taken place. Guardians block access to the complex, a complex that Dimitrov believes is in the hands of a new private investor. He adds that nobody in Buhovo knows why a private business invests in a heavily polluted rusting former uranium plant, in a country that has had no working uranium mines since 1992. When our minibus pulls up to the gates, the armed guards need no words to make it clear that we’re not going to find out now. I quickly shoot a few pictures but the driver smells trouble and makes a U-turn. There are questions here that you can’t even ask.There are plenty of questions. Who will and who should pay for the quasi-perpetual costs associated with the management of the radioactive wastes left after uranium production? Taxpayers in the country that bought or the one that dug the uranium? European citizens or a private company?
I wonder if Buhovo’s uranium ever reached the nuclear power stations that still drive my commuting train to Brussels. To my surprise, I learn that the reverse road is more likely: “The nuclear power station in Bulgaria uses uranium that you used first.” At least, that’s what Georgi Kotev says, a nuclear physicist and former employee of the Kozloduy nuclear power station. He became known as the whistleblower of the Bulgarian nuclear industry. Kotev: “I calculated the time between two refuels of our reactor. When I noticed something abnormal, I was told to adjust the software so that everything would look normal. That was suspicious so I looked into the safety report and it showed that we had changed fuel without the normal procedure being followed. Since I knew too much I was fired and ever since I get threats.” If I ask Georgi what the reason would be for secretly changing the kind of fuel. Georgi:
Money. Bulgaria still pays Russia the new fuel price, but in practice we get the cheaper, more risky and more radioactive recycled fuel. Probably fuel you’ve used in the West and exported to Russia for processing. Following my complaint with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a so-called independent investigation was instituted under the supervision of a Bulgarian who pre-selected the fuel to be checked. Look, there are powerful people behind this, who now carry a defamation campaign against me.
Bulgaria is still in the EU, so the country has environmental standards to comply with and a watchdog above it. This makes the extraction of uranium more expensive because it has to invest to protect people from poison and death. Therefore, it is cheaper for the nuclear industry to exploit uranium in Namibia and import it. The boss of the Australian uranium producer Paladin, who is active in that country, is honest about that. He said that Australian and Canadian environmental and social standards are over-sophisticated. But even the much tighter European standards are not protective enough, according to CRIIRAD. One example: the norm for the presence of radioactive tritium in drinking water is a factor 70 stricter in Europe than in Canada.6 But in Canada there’s at least a norm. In countries such as Namibia, there are simply no standards.
If we continue to put non-European uranium in European nuclear power stations, we don’t resolve but export uranium extraction problems. Whose deaths are the deaths from pollution around uranium mines in Africa? It’s a question few nuclear energy proponents dare to ask.
Bertchen Kochs – the Namibian activist in our group – asks these questions all the time. She says that mining in Namibia consists of open pits from which the wind blows radioactive matter across the national park. France is full of uranium and depends on nuclear energy like no other European country, but it now extracts all its uranium from foreign countries such as Niger. Much mining and also dirty industry moved from Europe in the last half century. This applies not only to uranium, but also to digging coal or producing steel or pesticides. All this was encouraged by instances like the one at the World Bank. Lawrence Summers was the chief economist of the World Bank when he spoke about the need to move dirty extraction and production to the under-polluted countries. He used that term in a leaked internal note. The cited reasons for moving polluting mining and industry were that wages and standards are lower and that the deaths by pollution are less costly.7 Lawrence Summers, in addition to being director of Harvard University, was also a key adviser to various US presidents. But while he became infamous for that leaked memo, his opinion was and still is the mainstream opinion that steers policies in that direction. Of course, in language for the general public this becomes “efficiency gains” and “bringing development to poor countries”.
Years after our Bulgarian toxic tour I’m still in touch with Bruno Chareyron. His cool scientific approach to a controversial political theme arouses my curiosity. Bruno loathes ideological or emotional debates, he rather works with facts and evidence. In those days we spend on toxic tour in Bulgaria, he makes me doubt about the dividing line between scientists and activists. Maybe Bruno is a factivist: an activist for whom only the facts count. The story of the person Bruno is therefore hard to find. And yet I wanted to know who the man is that the newspapers in Africa write about when he arrives with his appliances to measure radioactivity. And especially: how he came to that point. The facts about Bruno himself can be short. Bruno is a French engineer in energetic and nuclear physics with a master in particle physics. For over 25 years now he’s been the director of the CRIIRAD Laboratory (CRIIRAD).8 CRIIRAD was founded as an NGO in 1986 by disappointed French citizens. Their government lied about the actual impact of Chernobyl on their country – just like Belgium’s weatherman Armand Pien had to lie when he gave the weather report on the day of the disaster. In order to be able to do independent measurements, CRIIRAD started its own lab. Soon, civil society associations who suspect a serious impact of nuclear industry in their environment found their way to the professional team. Bruno studied radioactive contamination in Europe, Africa, Brazil and Japan. After the disaster in Fukushima, he traveled to the disaster area. I ask him what he thought about nuclear energy when Chernobyl exploded:
I did not have a clear opinion on nuclear energy at the time, only an intuition that this energy form would be too strong to be controlled by human beings. At the time I was unaware of fraudulent lobbies. After the Chernobyl disaster, the French government lied. By stating there was absolutely no danger in France. At the engineering school, the professors said that too. I was curious to learn more about it and worked for 2 years as a researcher for EDF (Electricité de France) on the protection against radioactivity and reactor physics. Later, I learned at the French Embassy in Ireland to work with renewable energy sources, after which I started working for a company that made solar cells.
When it comes to energy, Bruno is both a generalist and specialist. His driving motive: learning about the best energy source for all the energy needed by humanity. Bruno’s son was 2 when the family found that he had leukemia. They lived and worked in Normandy, not far from the AREVA processing plant in La Hague, on the north French coast. That plant treats radioactive waste and dumps large amounts of radioactive substances into the air and the sea. In the hospital, Bruno discovered that people were saying that children living close to the factory had a higher risk of leukemia. There and then he decided to apply for research into the impact of radioactivity on the environment and health. At CRIIRAD he started a long-term field research that has been ongoing for a quarter of a century. In 2016, Bruno received the Nuclear Free Future Education Award for his extraordinary efforts.9 I ask what his classmates do and what they think of his work. Most seem to work for the nuclear industry, and according to Bruno, most are pleased that there is something like CRIIRAD. They feel that there is a need for companies and government to keep an eye on safety and pollution, “but most of my colleagues working for the nuclear industry know little to nothing about radioactivity and even less about the whole chain. They also know nothing about the conditions of the environment around the places where the uranium is coming from.” One result of globalizing the chain from uranium mine to nuclear energy is that both the end users and professionals at the end of the chain have lost touch with the realities at the start of the chain. When I ask Bruno on what energy his inner engine runs he immediately responds with the lies distributed by the nuclear industry. But he also says he hates these so-called experts, who feel better than Joe Sixpack. Suddenly, we’re talking about his Protestant background, where one learns that every person is unique and must be able to form his or her own opinion.
That culture was also nurtured in the college where I went to school. The good thing about our current work is that we help communities to better protect their rights. We provide them with the knowledge and arguments they need when they face companies and government. They need that info to better protect themselves from damage to their environment and health. In doing this work I made connections with people from France, Niger, Mali, Japan and so many other countries.
Bruno’s most emotional memory of his fieldwork is a conversation with an old Japanese lady.
We had measured the radioactivity on her farm, near Fukushima. The government had said that they could return, but our measurements showed that this would be very unhealthy. With our device, we were able to show her how wild the Geiger counter went on her field. It is thanks to these measurements that she decided to stay away from her former farm. She told us, “You’ve come from far to help us. I was in the darkness and you brought the light in.” She looked a little like my own grandmother. The feeling I then had cannot really be described.
Bruno changes subject. How frustrating is it to be in the business of bringing bad news? To say to people: you cannot live here anymore. Bruno admitted that he sometimes struggles with it, even after 25 years working for CRIIRAD. “Promoting renewable energy would be a lot more fun than always investigating the negative impact of the nuclear industry. But I know that in many places we have been able to improve people’s protection. With our campaigns, we have been able to force companies to clean numerous sites in France, Niger and other countries. We can’t stop the whole industry, we cannot do that alone. But helping people to not get sick and giving them the information they are entitled to, that’s enough motivation for me.”
A year after my interview with Bruno, I join him on his visit to the European Parliament. His goal: to expose AREVA’s myths about the impact of its uranium mining activities in Niger and call for help at the European Commission. AREVA’s own study showed that 16 percent of a sample of houses in a city of 200,000 are built with radioactive material. According to Bruno, people living in the area are exposed to radioactivity and death rates from respiratory diseases twice as often as in the rest of the country. Bruno, Almoustapha Alhacen from a local NGO in Arlit, and Michèle Rivasi, a French member of the European Parliament from the Green faction, tried to convince people from the European Commission to at least go on a fact-finding mission in Niger. It all seemed to fall on deaf ears.10
France and Belgium are entirely dependent on imports of uranium and derived products. We do not extract uranium, but half of our electricity comes from nuclear power. Through AREVA, for example, we get our stuff from Niger, where a lot of people live without flowing water or access to electricity but with a radioactive environment. Even within the well-regulated EU, there are cases of secret deals in radioactive fuels and horror stories around radioactive waste. The precise cost tags are unpredictable, but the one thing that’s sure is that they are almost ad infinitum. Outside the EU, the situation is even worse. Or was it a coincidence when French troops went to Mali in January 2013, just when some rebels came near to AREVA’s most important uranium mine in neighboring Niger?
My home country, Belgium, depends on the French nuclear industry. We never debate about the problems in our supply chain, but we do debate the risks at home. The Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany have all asked Belgium’s government to close Belgium’s most risky reactors with immediate effect. Thirty cities are suing Belgium for not closing them. Here’s why.
After pushing a long due retirement back from 2015 to 2025 it took 2 days into 2016 before the first incident took place in one of Belgium’s nuclear power plants. Back in 2012 it became known that the mantle around the old Tihange 2 reactor showed signs of erosion. Further research in 2015 concluded that there are thousands of cracks of up to 15 cm in the mantle. Later that year, ten security incidents were recorded in Tihange in just 6 weeks, leading Belgium’s nuclear safety agency to suspend four members of staff and raise serious questions about the safety culture. In 2015, Belgian’s nuclear plants spent longer in shutdown or “maintenance” than in being operational. Despite all that, Belgium’s government decided to postpone the already agreed retirement in 2015 by 10 years. But if Tihange is a basket case, it is the Doel plant that really reads like a horror story. There are a staggering number of cracks in the mantle that is supposed to keep the Doel 3 reactor in check: 13,047. The cracks are on average 1 to 2 cm wide, but the largest ones are up to 18 cm. And with 35 years of operational history, the researched Doel 3 is the second “youngest” of Doel’s four reactors. Belgium’s nuclear safety agency concluded after the tests in Tihange and Doel that the erosion of the mantle was due to normal reactor activity. But the German government no longer trusts the Belgian Nuclear Safety Agency.
Ageing is one worry, terrorism another. Doel was sabotaged in 2014. The culprit(s) remain unknown. In 2015 police found hidden cameras that followed the movements of a nuclear researcher, raising questions about criminals extorting staff. France has already experienced a series of undeclared drone flights over various nuclear power stations. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that drones can easily carry AK47s and drop them inside the territory of the plant at night. They also explained that drones can attack the power lines and then the diesel generator back-up system. Belgium also seems to be a great hide-out for terrorists.
In terms of potential impacts, Doel is by far number 1 in Europe. The major Fukushima disaster knocked 2 to 10 percent from Japan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but when Doel goes into meltdown, the cost is estimated to be 200 percent of the GDP of Belgium. Not that GDP will matter at that point. Most of Flanders would become an inhabitable zone, sending millions of refugees to France, the Netherlands and Germany. That is, if they don’t close the borders.
Policymakers are taking this gamble because they and their voters are not experiencing any of the real-life consequences of nuclear energy yet. To speed that process up, I have a suggestion for Almoustapha Alhacen: next time you visit Belgium, take a few bottles of so-called drinking water from Arlit with you. Go to a popular place in the port city of Antwerp, ideally a place from where the Doel nuclear power plant is visible in the background. Take a TV news crew with you. Address all political leaders in Belgium who decided to postpone a long overdue retirement with another 10 years, thus guaranteeing continued mining of uranium. Just look into the lens and invite them to drink the bottle with you.
Gold fever in Greece11
Greece has been reeling under the spread of TBC, malaria and malnutrition. According to The Lancet, the medical journal, Greece is experiencing a humanitarian disaster and, according to the authors, this is a direct consequence of the policies imposed by Greece’s creditors.12 They demanded a criminal halving of the pharmaceutical expenses. The pensions also halved within a few years and for half of the youth there is simply no work on offer.
Greece is grounded, while the ground is full of gold. If you judge on that basis, Greece is a treasure trove. The solution seems simple: get the gold out and make the Greeks rich. The reality is anything but simple. At the end of 2016 I went to some Greek gold mines in construction, to what is a relatively hot frontline for European standards.
This story has a very long history, but I’ll fast forward to January 2015. The left party Syriza wins the elections and makes a government in record time. A key promise was to cancel the planned gold mines. Syriza started by telling Hellas Gold, daughter of the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold, to redo their homework to get the proper licenses.
After a year with Syriza in power, Eldorado Gold wrote off more than 1 billion dollars of expected revenues, after which the company’s course crashed. Between the arrival of Syriza at the end of January 2015 and the end of January 2016, Eldorado Gold’s share fell from 8 to 2 dollars. But in the spring of 2016 a number of secondary permits were given, through the court. The main license, for the gold and metallurgy factory, is still missing, but Eldorado Gold is still trying to get it.
Enough poison in the ground to kill everyone on earth
Officially, the issue is simple: can Hellas Gold convince the Greek government that flash melting with Halkidiki ores is safe? This method of separating gold from ore (as a by-product in the mining of copper) is common. The procedure is in the environmental permit of the project. The only other option, using cyanide, was once granted to a previously disastrous mining company (TVX, also Canadian) but never used. Why? Because the use of cyanide was later prohibited by the highest Greek court due to the expected environmental impact. So only flash melting is an option.
Arsenic. That summarizes the problems of Hellas Gold. Ore of the planned Skouries mine would be melted together with ore of the nearby Olympia mine, rich in arsenic. The process will produce 20,000 tonnes of arsenic. Annually. The arsenic content in the soil is 16 times higher than that allowed for flash melting in China and is almost 30 times above the EU average. The total amount of arsenic would be sufficient to deliver a deadly dose to every human being on earth. Three times.
How the Greek government can be convinced that all this can be done in a safe manner is unclear – not least because Hellas Gold tried to cheat earlier on, sending the government false ground samples. The anticipated storage for all that arsenic is mind-blowing. A seismological expert of the Aristotelian University completely destroyed the so-called earthquake-resistant character of the 150-meter-high dam behind which the lake of arsenic should come.13 A tectonic fracture line with a lot of seismic activity lies right below it. In 2002, acid mine waste water, laden with heavy metals from the Stratoni mine, was discharged into the Stratoni bay, coloring it red. Swimming and fishing in the bay have been forbidden since 1980 because of mine pollution.
Despite all this, Hellas Gold is already storing arsenic wastes from other mines on that earthquake prone site, although the dam itself is not finished. Putting the cart before the horse seems part of a tactic. Hellas Gold also used a license for merely placing heavy machines to build the foundations of the metallurgy plant, to cut very large pieces of forest and to top off a mountain. During a visit on October 17, 2016, a flurry of activity by large cranes, bulldozers and lorries made loud noises where previously only some birds were singing and bees were buzzing. The dust made today is peanuts compared to the dust that will be released when the mine is operational. Eldorado Gold itself estimates that 2162 tons of dust will spread around the area. Per hour. That seems impossible and is probably due to a typo error in their report. But even if they meant 2162 tonnes of toxic dust per year, the unit used elsewhere in their report, it still implies that the bees, olive trees and sheep in the wide area will be covered with arsenic poison, putting the whole bio-economy out of business.
Enough natural wealth above the ground to give everyone a good life
The bees in this area are not ordinary bees. They make the best honey in the world, witnessed by a beekeeper from nearby Arnaia who received this honorary title for his product. The 1059 beekeepers in Halkidiki are an export economy in their own right. The whole sector is threatened by the mining plans. Idem for the many olive producers, shepherds and the tourism industry. Thousands of jobs will be lost. Giorgos Karinas (41) is such a beekeeper. He survives in Megali Panagia, the nearest village to the planned Skouries mine. Karinas says he would not agree if I wrote “lives in Megali”. He says his life is at a permanent pause. “We live in eternal uncertainty, for so many years. I have bees and make olive oil, but I cannot invest as long as I do not know if the mine comes. If their toxic substance and water ruin this village, how can I still sell my honey and olive oil?” We take a small tour of beautiful places with tourist value and we drink from what is now still healthy spring water. He turns melancholic when talking about the resistance: “In 2006, 5000 people signed the petition against the mine, more than the entire population of this village! But in the 2008 crisis, many lost their jobs in the construction sector, and some began to work for Hellas Gold. Now the village is divided. I myself think of emigrating.” That radical option is shared by many people, though nobody knows where to go. It’s a sad decision in a rich region, a region with a lot of renewable natural capital like forests, bees and beaches.
And then came Canada
Giorgos Vlachos (50) is the latest shepherd in a long family line – and probably also the last. His village, Palechori, had 20 dozen shepherds who made Greece’s famous feta cheese. Giorgos: “In this village, fathers now tell their daughters to marry a miner. This village chooses temporary jobs and ignores asbestos.” For a long time, Hellas Gold kept secret that the soil is also full of asbestos – until the geological institute confirmed and published it in January 2016. Everybody here now knows it. When you enter the neighboring village of Megali Panagia, a big banner welcomes you by saying: “Asbestos is a slow killer, but don’t forget: he’s coming.”
There are more things Hellas Gold is trying to keep secret. Vlachos tells about what happened to two colleagues with herds close to the Olympiada mine: “Their milk was so full of heavy metals that they could no longer sell it to the company where I know the boss. Through him I know that they got silence money from Hellas Gold. The company later bought their herd and is trying to convince all shepherds to sell their sheep and goats to them.”
Suddenly and to my great surprise, this shepherd in jeans, which were probably not worn out by design but by hard labor, begins to talk to me about a free trade agreement: the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU (CETA). At the time, CETA could get the green light at any time. “When they sign CETA it is game over for me.” My first thought: The Greek government has issues with Canada for making feta cheese, a Greek specialty that Canada wants to produce on an industrial scale. But that’s not what this sheep shepherd has on his mind. “If CETA comes, the mine will come and if the mine comes, I can close my books.” How he makes that connection? Well, the gold mining planned by the Canadian company Eldorado Gold in the region would destroy the conditions for Vlachos’s business to thrive. CETA will make it extra hard for any Greek Government to pull out of the mine – because they then risk a fine to the tune of billions, which they then most likely will have to pay.
Back in the regional capital of Thessaloniki, Maria Kadoglou (48) taps into her 19 years of experience in this struggle to give me more elements of this frontline story.
It’s a guess how much compensation they would enforce through CETA, but look at Romania. The Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources demands 4 billion euros of the state for not allowing the Rosia Montana gold mine. The company is using the arbitration mechanism of a bilateral trade agreement between Canada and Romania that is very similar to what is foreseen in CETA.14 And in Romania, they did not even get to the stage of an approved environmental impact assessment. Hellas Gold claims that they already spend 700 million euros on the Skouries gold mine in construction and that the potential profit is 10 billion euros, so the fine they can ask thanks to CETA will be somewhere in between.
Maria also points to other gaps in my story: “The European Water Directive was also violated here. The former Greek government just gave the whole mining region an “exception” status. WWF Greece submitted a report to the European Commission at the beginning of 2015, but they did not respond.”15 The Kakavos forest was threatened by the gold mine. Kakavos means “the mountain that can never burn”. That’s because there is so much water in the ground that the forest never dries out. It is the most important freshwater source of the whole region. There is no way the mine can be made without destroying that.
Who benefits from whom?
The biggest creditors of Greece, gathered in the troika, have big plans with the country. The troika consists of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The loans they give to Greece also lay down strict conditions in addition to interest rates. The EC intends to improve the entrepreneurial climate. The IMF claims that it wants to attract foreign investment again. Therefore, in 2013 Greece had to sign a memorandum that has a curious passage in it: “To facilitate investment...we will… streamline…licenses and permits (operational, environmental, land use...) by reducing their number.”16 With the troika knife at its throat, Greece signed what in practice boils down to a pledge to circumvent European environmental legislation. For the IMF, this is not entirely new. For many decades, the IMF has imposed similar conditions on developing countries when “helping” them with loans. For decades, the IMF paved the way for the big mining companies to do cheap and harmful mining – free from costly environmental and social protections. They’ve done that in what they call the “under-polluted” countries. The novelty is that this is now happening in the EU.
It helps the troika that Greece is no longer a democracy. The creditors will not put it that way, but anyone looking at the facts can hardly claim that Greece is a democratic country. Rituals such as elections and referenda are still there to keep up appearances. But during the Greek elections in January and September of 2015, government leaders in Europe scrambled over each other to shout that Greek voters can just as well stay at home. Because, so they said, whatever the result will be, the reforms and conditions imposed on Greece – which define virtually ALL aspects of their policies – will in any case continue. People in the country where the word democracy was invented sure know that democracy is something else than that.
Take the former Dutch Minister of Finance Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the chairman of the Euro group, which brings together all finance ministers in the eurozone. He and his German colleague Wolfgang Schäuble said in their first meeting with their new Greek colleague Yanis Varoufakis that he just had to carry out what had already been decided by the elected representatives before him who were just punished by voters in the most crushing way possible. The two most important people of financial Europe added that they will destroy the Greek banks and thus the distribution of money in Greece if he didn’t. Varoufakis calls this “fiscal waterboarding”. In the summer of 2015, the Greek people rejected the troika’s proposals in a referendum. The troika reacted by adding insult to injury plus extra pressure until the Greek government agreed with what the people had just rejected. You can compare that to holding a European summit 10 days after the Brexit referendum, in which the UK’s Prime Minister is held hostage in Brussels until an agreement for closer cooperation with and more payments to the EU is signed. Under the EU’s conditions. Unimaginable? What happened to Greece was worse.
How the European elite plunders the Greek state treasury
Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Jean-Claude Juncker are both wearing two hats in this. The Netherlands and Luxembourg are the two largest foreign direct investors in Greece. Strange, for such small countries far from Greece. Until you realize that 80 percent of Dutch investment in Greece comes from companies that only have a mailbox in the Netherlands. The Dutch Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) discovered that Eldorado Gold has at least 12 mailbox firms at one address in the Netherlands. Just one of these 12 companies avoided paying nearly 2 million euros to Greece.17
It’s made complex on purpose, but the route the money follows is pretty simple. This is how it works. Hellas Gold, a subsidiary of the Canadian company Eldorado Gold, finances its activities in Greece through the issuance of bonds. A mailbox company based in the Netherlands buys that. A Barbados-based company buys that off the Dutch mailbox company. And that company in Barbados is owned by Canadian Eldorado Gold. The Canada-Barbados-Netherlands-Greece detour has one goal: bypassing the Greek state treasury. Both the CEOs of Eldorado Gold and Hellas Gold have admitted to avoiding paying taxes, adding that it was a legal practice and that everybody did it.18
In the Netherlands, these mailbox companies flourished thanks to Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who was the Minister of Finance from 5 November 2012 to his party’s historic election defeat in March 2017. Tax avoidance is the only function of these mailbox companies. The Netherlands has some 20,000 of them that together offer a detour from state coffers for around 4000 billion euros each year. The defunding of states to pay for schools and hospitals and roads is called “optimalization”, by the likes of Dijsselbloem, a caviar socialist.19 The Netherlands has a world record of this kind of tax evasion in its name. That brings me to the key question in all this: with what moral authority does Dijsselbloem tell his Greek counterpart to get its finances in order?
The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, doesn’t do any better. As Prime Minister of Luxembourg, he also stimulated the prosperity of mailbox companies in his country and that has also come at the cost of the Greek state. LuxLeaks alone showed that Greece lost billions in Luxembourg thanks to Jean-Claude Juncker. As President of the European Commission, Juncker sells a story of solidarity and sympathy with Greece, that naughty boy from his class that had deviated from the right path, but that he, Jean-Claude, was bringing back on track again. When the Greek Prime Minister Tsipras came to Brussels and held a press conference with Juncker, the latter was giving him little slaps in the face, literally. The body language was obvious: you’ve listened to daddy and now you’re a good brave boy again.
Syriza: mosquito bites on a mining giant
Before Syriza came to power in 2015 the mining business in Greece was on a roll. Violations of building regulations, hazardous waste legislation, heavy metal pollution in rivers: none of that stopped the urge to get at the Greek gold. In 2011, former Minister of Finance George Papaconstantinou became Minister of Environment. He immediately gave Hellas Gold its missing license. Later, he tried to delete names of his relatives from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. In 2014, the Greek Parliament tweaked forest law during the summer recess. At the eleventh hour a clause was added which allowed the construction of a crucial part of Eldorado Gold’s mining infrastructure in a pristine forest. For journalists and nature conservationists, the Greek law is applied with a lot more vigor. Articles and tapped telephone conversations from journalists are used as “evidence of criminal activities”. The journalist Kostas Vaxevanis published who evaded taxes in Greece on the basis of information given to the Greek government by Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s boss. Not the tax evaders, but the journalist was brought to justice.20 In total, more than 450 anti-mining activists have been charged, often just for participation in a protest march. For 38 of them, prosecutors are asking for a 30-year jail sentence for “participation in terrorist activities”. Sometimes, penalties for the real criminals do materialize. Former Development Minister Akis Tsoxatzopoulos, who signed the concession for Hellas Gold, was arrested for money laundering and on 7 October 2013 he flew behind bars for 20 years. Former Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs, Christos Pachtas, was taken out of office after he converted 17 hectares of protected primeval forest around Halkidiki to luxury homes. But the real top, those that make the draining of the Greek state treasury possible like Dijsselbloem and Juncker remain untouched. They’re not even considered to do harm. Draining the Greek state coffers is considered a bonafide thing to do.
Since Syriza is in power, there’s new hope that Halkidiki will receive the protection that the area deserves under Greek and European laws. In January 2016, the Ministry of Environment gave Hellas Gold a fine of 1.7 million euros for 21 environmental offenses, such as a discharge of heavy metal wastes. The permitted arsenic standards were already exceeded at several water sources. Incidents such as these were never reported. But what is 1.7 million euros? If the mine is finished, Hellas Gold expects the first 7 years, 4000 and the next 20 years, 2550 kilos of gold. At the early 2017 gold price, that brings the total turnover to almost 3 billion euros. Another mine, in Olympia, should create a similar revenue from 2020. In total, Eldorado Gold hopes to generate about 10 billion euros in Greece. For the moment, nothing really guarantees that even the anti-gold mine party Syriza will be able to do more than make some mosquito bites on a mining giant. And even that seems difficult to implement. In January 2018 the fine was annulled by an administrative court.
The Greek professor Giorgos Kallis is a political ecological economist. With his many peer reviewed publications, he is a leading voice in the growing discipline of alternative macroeconomics. Kallis tells me that what Greece is experiencing today is a regression from a developed country to a developing country, similar to the process that many Latin American countries passed through in the 1980s and now continue to be in. “The sole function of a developing country is to provide the global economy with cheap raw materials, often at the cost of its own people and its own development.” Kallis says it is not a coincidence that the gold – which has always been there – is dug out in this time of crisis. The crisis lowered costs by reducing the cost of labor (25 percent) and reducing the monetary cost of externalities: the health, visual or environmental impacts are no longer valued thanks to the troika conditions. Kallis: “Economic crises are necessary for creating new exploitable territories when limits have otherwise been reached. They achieve it by the devaluation of economic, social and environmental capital. Having a crisis like Greece is having creates an economic opportunity for the gold miners.”
Kallis goes one step further than most of his countrymen. He says that the crisis is a prerequisite for profitable gold mining in Greece. And according to Kallis, people are actively working to meet that condition in spaces outside of Greece. He said that before WikiLeaks published in April 2016 the transcript of a phone call in the IMF. In that call, two of the IMF’s top officials, Poul Thomsen and Delia Velkouleskou, talk about the best timing for the next Greek credit crisis.21 You can of course also interpret it as an open-minded conversation between people who see the inevitable: that Greece cannot repay its debts. Even a top figure inside the troika told the Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis, in a private conversation, that the program imposed on Greece “could not work”. Indeed, for the Greeks it does not work. But for the Canadian Eldorado Gold and for large German companies – taking over the obligatory privatized regional airports and urban water facilities – it works very well.
Mothers with courage
The anti-gold movement wants the official revocation of Eldorado Gold’s activities around Halkidiki, restoration of the environmental damage in the region and the declassification of the region as a mining region. Expressing these demands is not without risk. On March 20, 2012, 30 members of the community who held a peaceful sit-in were beaten up by a mob of Hellas Gold employees, with the assistance and encouragement of the management. Eight locals had to go to hospital. In October 2012, the police attacked and chased peacefully protesting women for a full 7 kilometers – enough for Amnesty International to launch a human rights violation case against the Greek state. In March 2013, more than 200 well-armed police attacked the village of Ierissos, known for its resistance to the mine. Teargas bombs ended up in homes and in the local school, where a student was seriously injured. Dozens of people needed first aid, including a baby. In reaction, 20,000 people marched in Thessaloniki. Towards the Canadian Consulate.
Halkidiki is not the only Greek frontline that suffers from gold fever. Years ago, I came into contact with Elena – a fake name that I use to protect her identity, on her insistence. Elena lives in Kilkis. A mining company wants to transform a large fertile area where 15,000 people live into a poisonous pit. Against the will of the majority. Elena emphasizes that she is not a tree hugger. “When it first learned about the proposed gold mine, I was totally in favor. I was annoyed by the people who had reservations about the plans because I found that finally something positive was coming to the city.” Elena attended a debate by the city council of Kilkis, who explained how the ministry was doing this against their will.
These were people of the same parties who were in power in Athens! I understood that when mining companies claim that they are low cost gold producers – like Eldorado Gold does – they do not mean the low costs for the environment and the people living in the neighborhood. They mean that they use methods that are much more toxic, to give the shareholders more profit.
Since then, it’s Elena who’s been faced with the incomprehension of people who do not yet know what a gold mine entails – and the prejudices towards activists in general. Her family is concerned. “My own mother once said: ‘If you want to go to that demonstration and get injured or arrested, take your son. I will not take your role as a mother if you’re not there anymore.’” However, Elena eventually managed to take her mother along for such a demonstration. “Afterwards, she told me she was scared but also proud on me!” In Greece, mothers and grandmothers are going to risky demonstrations. Not because activism is in their blood or because they enjoy it, but because they see the full scale of the threat and because they want to keep the community together. Their mother instinct wins it from their fear. Elena is often asked the question: is there an alternative? Her countryman Giorgos Velegrakis has an answer. He wrote a doctorate on the Halkidiki conflict, but until June 2015 he also served as a member of the Syriza party, in charge of writing an alternative development strategy for the area. His proposal contained four main points: cancellation of the project in Halkidiki, environmental restoration of the area, the gradual abolition of the “old” gold mining projects in the region and reconstruction of the local economy based on agriculture, ecotourism, forestry and fisheries. At present, that still seems a far way off. In 2018 the unfinished Skouries mine was still in “care and maintenance” with Eldorado stuck in legal cases and waiting for a government willing to bend the law.
Charlotte Christiaens of the Belgian non-profit organization CATAPA, which works with communities around the world on protection against mining impacts, is also convinced that the local economy can have a totally different base than gold: “Halkidiki is one of the most paradoxical places I ever visited: clear blue water, long sand beaches, rich fishing grounds, ancient forests, good goat farmers, beekeepers with the best honey, delicious olives...but also a toxic legacy of gold mining.” What the Greeks especially need is not a new gold fever, but the right of self-determination. Through smart use of their renewable resources, the good life is within reach.
Undermining the middle class
Whether it’s bauxite, uranium or gold: Congo has it all. What sets the Congolese frontline apart from the frontlines in India, Bulgaria and Greece is not the raw material – but the violence level of the struggle. In Congo, a terrible civil war caused over 4 million deaths. Claiming that this was a war over scarce resources is, however, a too simple explanation.
In March 2007 I travel to Katanga, in the southeast of what is very euphemistically called the Democratic Republic of Congo. My job is not just mapping the positions of the warring parties, but especially to map the motives of all those who are fighting. In its most literal sense.
A sort of minibus with wings and a front seat that passes for the cockpit drops me from Lubumbashi to a grass strip made in the jungle next to the village of Mitwaba. Without the flight, it would take weeks to reach the place. The next day I find myself standing right between a former Mai Mai warrior and a Congolese soldier. On other days they used to kill each other, but I’m in a rare safe place. The three of us are lining up for a plate of curry with lentils. The Indian UN Blue Helmets in Mitwaba are practicing curry diplomacy. All you need for that is a well-prepared aloe gobi, a generous portion of dhal and a mountain of basmati rice. According to the Indians, it’s their garam masala that brings people together. The next day, a few of the Indian Blue Helmets bring me to a refugee camp, where the disarmed Mai Mai try to survive. I soon understand why eating a curry is a reason for smoking the peace pipe. Between the undernourished mass of children, a woman tries to brew something in a cooking pot: leaves that are normally only for cattle.
In 2007, those Mai Mai still hiding in the surrounding forests had no good reputation. Some of their so-called wizards treat their fighters until they believe they are bulletproof. In a report from local human rights organizations, I read that, until 2003, this and their ritual cannibalism was used to scare off the opponent. The cover of their report is a picture where a crowd, including children, is looking at a pile of flesh. At the top of the pile there’s a stick with a head pierced on it.22 The still-fighting Mai Mai carried out sporadic raids on villages, after which they retreated into the dense jungle. The army controlled the villages and especially the mines.
The soldiers of the Congolese army were often not paid for months in a row. Many thus provided for their needs by using their gun to exhort all kinds of imaginary tolls and taxes from local traders. But their chiefs also encourage them to do that, because they want a piece of it. After all, they need to pay their superiors as well. If the commander of an army unit doesn’t collect enough money for his superior, he’s punished by being sent to a less lucrative area. That’s called “reporting” and it’s making money throughout the Congo flow from the bottom to the top, with AK47s as a lubricant. Police and military do not protect the people, they plunder the people. The state itself is an empty box: the structures and papers are there, but not the idea that the state exists to protect and help people. In theory, the army has the task of securing the mines. In practice, our maps showed that the army focused mainly on mines from which they can make more money, even if there are no rebels in the area. The really dirty work in the mines is done by the “artisan miners”. That’s a euphemism for kids as young as four who break their backs with heavy physical labor every day, for a starvation wage. Who you don’t meet here in Katanga are the people who get filthy rich from all this. These are, for example, the fat cats of the diamond industry of Antwerp – the same people who go tell our government what tax rates they find okay to pay and even then evade those by going to Panama. They get to their Congolese source of wealth through a shady network of brokers in Rwanda and Congo.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Memorial Economics Prize winner, told on November 9, 2007, in a conversation with Gie Goris at Belgium’s biggest book fair, that developing countries with plenty of resources and poverty need no foreign aid. According to Stiglitz, they need special help to get the full price for their raw materials. Because most Congolese wealth does not reach the state treasury, the Congolese state remains an empty box at best, but more a parasite on its own people in reality.
The research done by Steven Spittaels and this author resulted in a series of maps and the report Mapping interests in conflict areas: Katanga, which we wrote during our service at the International Peace Information Service, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.23 We rejected the all too simplistic idea that all actors are merely fighting to enrich themselves with the riches of the earth. Our maps showed a different story. After many years of war, Mai Mai lost the courage and power to attack large mines, but they could no longer return to their villages, after their terrible way of recruiting and their many attacks on the civilian population. Their positions showed that. They were not at all strategically important places for commodities, but areas that are difficult to access for the army. They hid in forests, on steep slopes and far from the roads, where the army is at a disadvantage. Their battle in the years 2003 to 2007 was one of despair and survival, consisting of raids in villages and shelters in hideouts. But our research also showed that the Congolese army itself was a major threat to the local population.
These motifs are not cut into stone, they evolve over time. For example, certain Mai Mai groups in the run-up to the 2012 elections suddenly appeared to commit attacks in the regional capital Lubumbashi, which indicates political motives. The struggle by everyone to enrich themselves with commodities is in any case a too simplistic representation of what happens in Katanga. Like in India, Bulgaria and Greece, there is a large group of people who lose wealth and well-being due to the mineral resources. This pattern is so prevalent that researchers call it the resource curse: the paradox that countries with many natural resources, especially minerals and fuels, have less economic growth, less democracy and less development. Academics have been discussing this paradox for at least half a century. My personal interest in this matter is the cross-border connections that appear to have a major and, in my view, defining influence on the local situation in India, Bulgaria, Greece and Congo. Another issue that fascinates me are the parallels in the broadest sense, between the war in Katanga and the world in general.
Is Katanga in a sense not the utopia for the most purist capitalists? The ingredients are the following: a shell state with no rule of law but where those with most money and guns rule. Where a desperate class does all the dirty work for close to no money. There is almost no big and well-known company with activities on the frontline itself, yet there is a lot to be gained behind the scenes. And if a serious journalist exposes shady deals, there are still lawyers to pay to sue them, as happened with MO* magazine.24
On dark days, I sometimes fear that humanity evolves towards this kind of deregulated capitalist utopia, which is of course a dystopia for the vast majority as well as an ecological nightmare. It’s a state of consciously maintained chaos and survival with extreme contrasts between rich and poor. In 1994, Robert Kaplan wrote the groundbreaking article The Coming Anarchy, which explains how, among other things, scarcity and overpopulation will give rise to an all-around anarchy of violent nature.25 He said that environmental problems and scarcity of natural resources will be THE security issues for the beginning of the twenty-first century. I do find Kaplan way too mild for the influence of mighty companies, institutions and political leaders in the West but he is good at connecting a certain geographical reality with associated deeper political and economic conflicts.
Are the contours of a Congolese dystopia recognizable at the global scale? Maybe some elements are already upcoming. You have a class of people banned from their birthplace and system. In Katanga this is the Mai Mai. In India, it’s the dozens of millions of people who had to make way for a reservoir, factory or mine. But even in England, the number of people on the street doubled between 2010 and 2015. For them, there is no place in our society. They survive by hiding in the crusts of the earth; from the forested slopes in Katanga to the slums of Mumbai and the train stations of Europe. They’re in a struggle to survive, which often forces them into begging or sporadic raids on society. Not to get rich, but to survive. This wreckage in a turbulent ocean is faced with coastlines that consist of ever higher walls. In the slums of society, you are anonymous, stateless and powerless. This class is unfortunately booming.
Professor Saskia Sassen describes in Expulsions how in the last 2 decades a fast-growing number of people have arrived in that class. It’s not a natural process. She connects dots like the removal of the unemployed from the social welfare state and the rise of mining techniques that remove life from the biosphere to the number of people who are on the run. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of people fleeing war doubled, to well over 60 million. By 2016, a record number of 65 million refugees couldn’t go home. To them you have to add the 15 million people who are displaced each year for the purpose of large-scale development.26 This displaced class grows further each year, fueled by the decommissioning of the social welfare state and by companies that put profit before people and that are faced with ever more big-business supportive states.
Above this “lowest” class of “stateless people” you have in the East Congo the subclass that works for the state. In the few months Kinshasa has not forgotten them, they get some starvation wages. But they do have weapons and stamps that enable them to rob people of money. That money is necessary to make their patrons happy, but they are getting some comfort prices. These Congolese soldiers – but also many workers and servants who have the luxury of a more legitimate means of income – do that in return for that little bit of security, a minimalist form of control and freedom. They do that in service of people above them who claim a growing part of the pie. Their subordinate role behind the PC, factory band or AK47 is frustrating but a strike here and an armed revolution there allow for the occasional sense of ownership over one’s own destiny. In the past, strikes delivered many useful things in the West, such as paid holidays, less working hours and voting rights. They helped to create what we now know as the workers class. But far more power is in the hands of people above this group – which too often talks about the workers class as parasitic, greedy, lazy and too stupid or too weak to gain the kind of wealth they enjoy. And because that small group above the workers class also pays most of the media, we hear that a lot. This is the class of lieutenants, the lower boardroom and the better off self-employed people who’ve made it and have hired a handful or more people. Over the past few decades, this upper class has been able to see their profits rise faster than the workers class. They’ve often gathered enough money to let the money work for them and make them even richer while sleeping – thus breaking free from the trap that most people below them are in. These 2 or 10 or 30 percent (depending on the region) saw their share of the cake in the last 40 years of increasingly deregulated capitalism increase exponentially. I would like to refer the lover of more precise figures to Thomas Piketty’s highly-honored reference work: Capital in the twenty-first century.27 Within this group you have people who sometimes work twice as much as the average, but get ten times as much as the average. Often they regard themselves as the essence of the economy, and think that if it’s going well with them, it’s going to be good with the economy and with everyone. These myths spread through media and political friends.
And then you still have that real 1 of often just 0.1 percent at the top. The hedge fund shareholders and CEOs who are simply not interested in the blood sticking to their diamonds because it’s way too far removed from their world. These are the fat cats that have earned the same amount on January 2 which we in the workers class work for the whole year. They raced ahead even faster. A CEO of one of the 500 largest US companies now earns 204 times more than the payroll member in his company. Half a century before that was 20 times more.28 And the trend is not limited to the US. This global jet set live in a bubble that takes more and more space.
The people in that bubble rarely see that the number of needles around them are increasing. But some do see it. One billionaire – who calls himself an “unapologetic capitalist” – wrote a long article in which he warns his friends from the plutocrat class. The title of the article was “The pitchforks are coming...for us plutocrats”.29 If we continue with capitalism, that is not unthinkable.
Of course, I admit all this is a rudimentary division. In reality, a much greater degree of complexity and regional differences exists. But the class issue exists, cannot be ignored and the connections with the way we extract resources to meet the ever growing demands at the top are a death or life issue for millions and maybe even billions of people. It’s a conscious choice to take the “middle class” out of this rudimentary division. Professor Saskia Sassen concluded after her investigation that there is a difference between capitalism a few decades ago and capitalism now: capitalism no longer creates but destroys a prosperous middle class. Professor Jonathan Holslag is also sure: “The middle class, she’s dying.”30
Europe’s middle class is eroding, especially in Germany.31 The International Labour Organization claims this is due to privatization. In countries with major austerity programs, such as Spain and Greece, the middle class melted like snow before the sun. In the US, she’s been on the way back for decades. The choice is simple: either we make a political U-turn on the causes of this great decline of the middle class or we keep moving in the direction of the class divisions in Eastern Congo – a kind of capitalist Walhalla with no middle class. I’ll be blunt on the latter option: you don’t wanna go down that route (unless you’re a dirty diamonds trader).
The good news is that even in the current period of degradation there are also signs of an upcoming major turnaround. The number of people pulling the emergency brake on the austerity train increases. With Trump as US president it’s easy to forget how close the socialist Bernie Sanders was to the presidency. In the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Iceland, England and all over southern Europe the people who propose a systemic change in progressive direction are surfing on a momentum, despite the enormous pushback by the better funded systemic players.
Less visible than those political alternatives – which we sure need – are the many groups of people who are building the economy of the commons. This economy is mostly detached from both the free market and the state. Once you understand that the self-destructive extractive economy is doomed to collapse – even though it is not clear when and how – you might want to prepare for that in two ways. First: build up an extensive back-up system for yourself, your family and your community, which can keep going once the GDP economy collapses. Second: keep working on a larger policy alternative and make sure as many countries as possible already test, develop and refine it as often as possible. A political plan B in which a majority can thrive without slowly destroying the air, water and soil on which all life on earth depends. More on these parallel pathways that make a U-turn and lead us away from the edge in the last part of this book. First, we continue the journey along the many frontlines that capitalism keeps opening up. Bauxite, uranium and gold are far removed from most people’s daily reality, or hidden in some aluminum frame, an electric wire or your phone. But we all know and see sand. Let’s travel from (perhaps) the poorest place on earth to (probably) the richest: Dubai.
Sand: one big Fata Morgana
In 1995, I leapfrogged the then still-powerful middle class, vaulting from relatively poor (but not desperate) directly to rather filthy rich. For a full 2 weeks that is. A much wealthier friend had moved to Dubai and, as a 15-year-old teenager, I was invited there to spend the Easter holidays. One day his kind mother took us to a five-star hotel, private beach included. We played golf in mind-bogglingly lush greenery in the middle of the desert. If you, like me, associate the word “holiday” with a nearby campsite, Dubai is a fairytale world.
The potential for fun in Dubai is endless. The only other competitor for infinity status is the sand. A 4-wheeler took us to a region where your life could depend on not getting a flat tire: the Empty Quarter. The capital E and Q are well deserved. Think Lawrence of Arabia, camels and a thirsty death. This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world. The English explorer Wilfried Thesiger described the Bedouins roaming the desert as a hospitable, courageous people of amazing endurance. That was just as well, because the Empty Quarter has been one of the hottest, driest and most inhospitable places on earth for thousands of years. Sand dune after sand dune stretch over an area larger than France.
Today, you do not need Bedouin blood to traverse the landscape. An air-conditioned jeep springs across dunes like an Arab charger. In Dubai everything lulls you into believing that nature can be controlled at the touch of a button. Whether it is the speed and stability of a jeep zooming across the dunes, the ubiquitous air conditioning or the towers that seem to defy the laws of gravity. The scorching sandbox has been reduced to decor on a movie set and we are the stars of the picture.
Returning to Dubai in 2013 by plane, I glimpse a mile-long artificial peninsula created in the form of a palm tree extending way out to sea. The strip is thick with hotels. A little further down the coast and a sort of world map has been made out of artificial islands. They were slowly sinking into the sea. When the global recession of 2008 came to Dubai, the world stood still. Well, the project with that name experienced a sudden lack of funding as the taps of global finance ran dry. By then, ships had already spurted 321 million tonnes of sand into place.
Elsewhere, construction continued. Dubai now has the Burj Khalifa, the highest tower in the world. Standing at 828 meters, it offers neck pain and dizziness just looking to its heights from ground level. How much concrete does it contain? About 330,000 cubic meters according to the building’s website. A major component of the concrete is sand, which is easy peasy to score, what with so much of it lying around.
But as it turns out, the sand in the Burj Khalifa all came from Australia. That is because there is not enough sand for concrete available in the region.32 Unimaginable as it may seem, the fact is that the largest continuous sand desert in the world is unsuitable for concrete. It is not even good enough to build those palm islands. The wind has free rein in the desert and has made sand grains too round, so much so they do not stick together. Not all sand was created equal. Think of trying to make a sand castle with the dry sand where the high tide never reaches. If you have ever been a kid on a beach or a parent that takes beach fun seriously, you know that does not work.
Marine sand is much better for the job, but the lion’s share of the local stuff has already been used up for the palm islands. What is more, the salt in dredged sand is a bad match for steel in reinforced concrete. Dubai desalinates its drinking water, but even with its fabulous wealth, this would be way too costly for cleaning marine sand. It also requires oil, and unfortunately for Dubai, its oil stock is dwindling.33 The city already imports more petroleum products than it exports and in a decade or two its wells will run dry.34
The potential for a collapse of Dubai is kept well-hidden as the city radiates self-confidence. In many ways, this seems just a concentrated case of a more global discrepancy. Host of The World Expo in 2020, Dubai will probably put up one of the world’s most profligate shows. A tower even higher than the Burj Khalifa is being built to be ready by the time of the event. In 2012, Barclays Capital subverted the popular saying “pride comes before a fall” with a study pointing out that “high-rises come before a fall”.35 The study says there is a strong chance of financial crashes following a boom in the construction of skyscrapers. If you look past the palaces in Dubai and its sinking oil, water and good sand reserves, the question seems to be not whether, but when, the desert will blast Dubai’s bling into a set suitable for an apocalyptic film.
Nearly 6000 kilometers east of Dubai is Singapore, a nation that stockpiles sand.36 It imports massive amounts and keeps it as a reserve, comparable to a strategic stock of oil. Singapore needs sand to literally continue to grow. The city-state has grown its landmass by a fifth in the last half century.
Initially, this was an easy task, as Singapore’s neighbors were willing to sell their sand. Things changed in 1997 when Malaysia stopped the trade. Indonesia and Cambodia followed suit in 2007, Vietnam in 2009. The entire international sand business became a political minefield. Singapore was growing at the cost of destroyed beaches and rivers in other countries. Populations of these countries tend to dislike the mere idea of selling pieces of their country for the purpose of expanding another country, especially if violence against them and their environment is involved. In some cases, the export went underground, no pun intended. Global Witness found that in Cambodia, the most corrupt country in South East Asia according to anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, officials continued pushing export contracts worth millions.37 Investigative reporting has shown that a very similar scam was going on in Vietnam, also for export to Singapore.38
Sand tends to be extracted from vulnerable natural areas, a process that effectively stops local fishermen from reaching their most important resource, fish. They are forced to avoid the troubled waters that the sand-mining in rivers creates.
The sand mafia is capable of staggering feats of engineering. In Indonesia, 24 entire islands were sucked up and removed from the map in order to sell sand to Singapore.39 The disappearance caused a bizarre dispute over the exact location of the international border between Singapore and Indonesia.40 So hungry is Singapore for sand that it was prepared to pay $0.19 per kilo. To put that into perspective: In January 2016 the price for one liter of crude oil went down to $0.17 per liter. In Singapore, sand is the new oil.
The sand mafia in India
Scarce but valuable resources attract conflicts and as with oil, some of them turn violent. Vince Beiser, a journalist and author with a solid track record of covering the sand issue, wrote that battles waged by sand mafias have killed hundreds of people in recent years in India alone, “including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people”.41 Through a contact in India I find someone who has so far survived the locking of horns with this mafia.
In Bollywood’s backyard lives an activist that even blockbuster movie writers would struggle to invent. Sumaira Abdulali, or the minister of noise, as the media have dubbed her, is a 55-year-old public figure in India. She won the title for her activism against noise pollution in the city.42 But she actually won her spurs fighting the sand mafia. In 2004, she noticed that the beach near her house in Alibaug, near Mumbai, was shrinking. She heard trucks at night that she suspected were carting the sand away and decided to take action. She called the police, took her car and drove to where the road ended at the beach, expecting to meet them there. “Instead of rushing to the crime scene, the police apparently warned [off] the illegal sand miners,” said Abdulali. As she waited in her car for the police to arrive, the men present at the beach pulled her out and assaulted her.43 She survived, but was hospitalized As she was beaten, a man from the mob asked: “Do you know who I am?” His father was the owner of a construction materials company with a near-monopoly in the area and an important local politician. The point he hammered down was: don’t mess with us.
But that’s exactly what Abdulali did. Two years later, she started a lawsuit. With success. In 2010, the Bombay High Court banned sand extraction, a ban which remained in place until 2015.44 Abdulali tots up the cost of sand extraction in India: soil erosion, landslides, falling water tables, infertility of farmland, disturbances of ecosystems and marine life, beach disappearances and collapsing infrastructure. Once Abdulali made a surreal video of a train crossing the Vaitarna railway bridge while machines were illegally extracting sand from the nearby riverbed.45 This imposing colonial-era bridge is in Virar, north of Mumbai, and remains the city’s sole rail link to north India. Railway officials went on record with concerns that the Vaitarna bridge’s foundations had been weakened by sand-mining.46 A senior Western Railways officer told The Hindu newspaper: “We believe there is a nexus between the sand mafia and certain state government departments. Due to the illegal sand-mining, the flow of the Vaitarna has been altered, which is a dangerous sign for the bridge’s health.”47 In August 2016 the Mahad bridge across the Savitri river collapsed, killing at least 28 people.48 Several activists, including Abdulali, blamed the incident on sand-mining of the riverbed.49 Sand excavating equipment was discovered under the bridge, which is in close proximity to the attack by the sand mafia on her in 2010. In spite of this, the Government, without conducting any investigations, dismissed the possibility that sand-mining may have had anything to do with the collapse of the bridge. Even now, mining continues in the area.
Abdulali didn’t stay in splendid isolation. Other courageous people have started exposing a dirty secret. In early 2017, journalist Sandhya Ravishankar wrote a four-part series on illegal sand-mining along Tamil Nadu’s southern beaches for the online magazine The Wire.50 She has since received death threats and online abuse.51 Ravishankar is in no doubt about whom she believes is behind the harassment – the sand-mining company named in her reports. In March, she filed a complaint with the Chennai police.52 In India, anti-sand mining activists are often attacked and even killed.53 Journalists are not safe either.
In 2010, Abdulali took a journalist and photographer to visit Raigad, a Maharashtra district where sand extraction was in progress, despite the ban.54 The three posed as real estate agents and began filming the illegal extraction taking place on an industrial scale. Their cover was soon blown and what followed was a nightmare return to Mumbai that they were lucky to survive. Their returning car was pursued by two cars that tried to ram them into a ravine. As they sped back down a dirt trail, they knew that overseeing any of the many potholes would be fatal. At the main road, a truck was waiting. While crossing a bridge the driver tried to overtake and bump them in the river but fortunately he didn’t get further than her bumper.
“What saved our lives that day is that my husband is a professional rally driver and he taught me some of his driving skills,” said Abdulali. “Again, the police were in cahoots with the mafia. I wanted to report this murder attempt, but they wanted to give me a speeding ticket!” Once again, a powerful local politician controlled the illegal trade in sand.
The Bombay High Court later severely criticized the police for how they dealt with the attack on Abdulali and her companions.55 “India’s sand mafia usually co-opt the local village council or higher political figures”, Abdulali says. One local sand miner went on to become a minister of state in Maharashtra. His portfolio? Environment. The fox was well and truly put in charge of the hen house. Abdulali: “He claims he is out of the sand business now, but still owns the largest sand storage site in the state. He has shifted his business interests to the next construction industry cash cow: stones.” When asked for solutions, Abdulali says the recycling potential in India’s construction sector is by and large untapped.
To reduce demand for new sand, you need to evolve into a circular economy. Big cities in India crush many old buildings to make room for the new, but the debris ends up at landfills. In some countries, the use of primary material is only allowed after the demolition waste is used up. In the Netherlands, 90 percent of all demolition waste is recycled. Even poorer countries like Vietnam are now reusing demolition waste. You can build roads with a lot less sand by recycling plastic as a resource.56 We have to do that. If we continue like this, India will dig a grave for itself and pay a very high price. The circular economy is a much better option.
A circular economy creates some novel scenarios. One beer company now claims you can drink (their) beer for the sake of saving beaches.57 Empty beer bottles can be turned into a kind of sand that is useful in construction. Of course, a circular economy also needs energy and if the energy used in the circular loop is of fossil nature, questions need to be raised whether it is part of the solution or part of the problem. But the beer company does have a point. Beaches worldwide are in trouble. Beaches are made by rivers gradually shifting sand to the sea. Take the sand out of the river and you end up without a beach. In Sri Lanka, they found that out the hard way. The country’s most eroded coastline is around the delta of the Maha Oya river, which is where most sand-mining takes place. In some places the beach recedes by 12 to 15 meters each year.58 Thousands of families here have seen their land erode into the sea. When the damage became too rampant and too evident to be ignored, a ban on mechanical sand extraction was issued. But here too, that did not stop the sand mafia from continuing to dig deeper.
Sand mafias exist not only in India, Sri Lanka or Asia in general. In Elmina Bay in Ghana, it even digs sand just in front of the few beach resorts the country has. Hotels have lost 30 meters of beach. The sea now laps at their doorsteps.59 The Environmental Justice Atlas charts at least 71 conflicts triggered by sand, gravel and quarrying. They exist in all continents. And so I wondered: has a sand conflict arrived at my doorstep as well?
Flanders digs a grave for itself
Dubai, Singapore, India, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Ghana: so far it may sound like sand supply is an exotic problem. Belgium has just 60 kilometers of coastline, but millions of people visit it every year. On any given weekend with temperatures above 25°C, hundreds of thousands scramble to secure a spot on the small strip of extremely valuable, micro-managed beach. If there is one beach that should be doing just fine, it must be ours, right? Just to be sure, I checked with an expert in our coastal ecosystem: Katrien Van der Biest. We studied geography together and shared a passion for observing the forces of nature up close. The last time we stood on a Belgian beach together we were skipping class in order to witness a fierce storm making landfall. Katrien honed her passion towards oceanography and a doctorate on the many benefits of healthy coastal ecosystems, not least their many sand dunes and banks.
Digging holes in densely populated Belgium is rarely a great option. Therefore, from the mid-1970s onwards, extraction started to move offshore. In the first 10 years, machines dug about half a million tonnes a year from our limited zone of the North Sea. Now it vacuums up 3-5 million cubic meters a year and the next 35 million cubic meters are already scheduled.60 Katrien says that sand is a finite raw material; that North Sea stocks are shrinking and that the industry is aware of it. Meanwhile, parts of sand banks close to the coast are now closed for mining after reaching their legal capacity. They are not recovering as hoped, so the current trend is to move to sandbanks further out to sea; the next frontier. But behind that wait the sand-poor international waters and the end of story for sand-mining in Belgium.
The industry is sucking up hidden treasures, according to Katrien. She describes how they provide invaluable services, such as breaking the back of oncoming waves that might otherwise cause problems on land. A lot of North Sea sand is used to reinforce beaches and provide coastal protection in general. That is until the next storm sweeps it back out to sea. Demand for this application has been rising rapidly since the mid-2000s and shows no sign of slowing. As in Asia, treated North Sea sand is also used by the construction industry; specifically coarse sand, a much scarcer resource than fine sand. Legal limits placed on extraction are currently being debated. The sand tzars are, of course, hungry for more.
Vera Van Lancker, senior researcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, emphasizes that Belgium is a global leader in mapping marine sand, a precondition for managing it sustainably. A well-respected expert on the subject, she explains that: “if the government adjusts the 5-meter limit [on extraction], it will do so because we now understand better which kind of extraction causes more or less damage”. But she too warns that: “In the long run, we’re looking at a shortage of sand and we’ll probably have to import it from the Netherlands.”
So we are currently going by the assumption that once we have exhausted all legal sand stocks in Belgium, we will import it from our neighbors But is that not a reckless assumption? The Netherlands recently announced it will stop selling gas to Belgium no later than by 2035 because its stocks are running out and it wants to use what little remains for itself. While the Netherlands has much more sand than Belgium, they too have experienced an exponential rise in sand-mining and with a rising sea, they’re going to need a whole lot of it in the future. Van Lancker also highlighted new research showing that sandbanks do not recover as well as previously thought. The stocks of the more valuable coarse sand in particular are declining. “It all shows that we need to take more circular economy measures, while fully realizing that in the end, that alone will not be enough,” Van Lancker said.
The man responsible for tackling some hard questions on the topic, Belgian state secretary for the North Sea, Philippe de Backer, says that for him, the economic potential of sand extraction is the top priority. “We have to make use of the economic potential of the North Sea without losing sight of the ecological importance,” said de Backer. But when de Backer speaks of “ecological importance”, he means the local marine environment, not the impact of sand-mining in the sea on the coastline. He points out that he is not responsible for coastal defense and refers questions on this to his Flemish counterpart. Welcome to Belgian surrealism: one governance level of the federalized state shamelessly digs a grave for the other.
Of course, de Backer does have a point: it is in Belgium’s short-term economic interest to go for growth, meaning more extraction from the North Sea. After all, Belgian companies Jan De Nul and DEME are global players, taking numbers two and three in the worldwide dredging sector. A few of my former classmates now work for them, but none are willing to speak about sand scarcity or their employer’s take on the issue. With shortages forecast, heads in the sand seems to be the order of the day.
Jan de Nul’s PR department gives me short shrift: they want nothing to do with this book. I found just one insider willing to give me some background. We talked at length but when asked if I can use some of it for this book my source refused. “It’s a small world and if you give details, they’ll know it’s me who leaked,” the source said, unwilling to go further. Some journalists did manage to find some dirt, though, for example about Jan de Nul’s record in Indonesia, where the sector has a rotten reputation.61
Meanwhile, a study from back in 2008 shows that widening the navigation channel to Oostende harbor to allow bigger ships has seen waves grow by 10 percent during storms.62 That was before the extraction industry upped its take from 0.5 to more than 5 million cubic meters of sand per year. This weakening of our natural storm defenses is coming as sea levels are rising exponentially and storms are getting more frequent and extreme. Just when we need more coastal protection, we are removing them for short-term and very private gain.
Neither the so-called free market nor the Belgian government seem willing or able to see this perfect storm brewing, let alone deal with it. It is a textbook example of massive future public costs for current private gains. All this happens despite a major warning. In 1987, the Herald of Free Enterprise sank shortly after leaving the port of Zeebrugge. The captain was in a hurry and motored out to sea with the ferry’s rear doors wide open. A court later concluded there was a “disease of sloppiness” and negligence at every level of the corporation’s hierarchy, with vital equipment not installed in order to cut costs. The Herald of Free Enterprise sank in 90 seconds and took 193 people to the bottom of the sea.
Today, we are facing a kind of mega version of the Herald of Free Enterprise. After all, the free enterprise economy is much more mature now than back then. Powerful dredging companies are currently opening the back doors of Belgium. Often on behalf of the government. It will take longer this time, but there are a few hundred thousand Belgians aboard.
Some people see the perfect storm coming. Flanders has a spatial planner. His job is to figure out what Flanders could look like in 2100. He hedged his bets somewhat by coming up with four scenarios for the Belgian coastline. Two of these are sure to give homeowners a sinking feeling. A new dike starting at the midway point of the 60 km long coastline would go straight into what is now inland while the sea engulfs the Flanders west of it in a major but planned way.63 The whole western half of the coast and the fertile low-lying polders in its hinterland would be underwater by 2100. In the report, this is framed as “active re-wilding” and “innovating” but one can doubt whether the hundreds of thousands of people who now live there will ever make that terminology theirs.
Now, I can explain to my 8-year-old daughter that if she wants seawater to flow into the moat around her sandcastle at high tide, she needs to dig a big gully directly towards the sea so that the waves wash inland faster. Every year we enjoy this classic beach holiday ritual. But the spades of Jan De Nul and co are slightly bigger than ours, and the castle is West Flanders.
I asked Katrien if there is something wrong with my childish logic. I want to know whether there are any scientific studies that substantiate the parallel between gullies dug in front of a sand castle to get the water more inland and the extraction of sand banks as a way to get the sea more inland in a big way. Katrien responded, “We know there’s an impact on the environment, but the scientific evidence of the precise effects on ecosystem services such as coastal security is still lacking.” That is odd for a state that endorsed the UN precautionary principle back in 1992.64 It is also odd for a state that is the biggest supplier of marine sand.
It only makes sense when you apply a capitalistic logic, that a massive cost in the future should be discounted and thus not included in the price of today’s sand. The assumption is that we will keep adding GDP so fast that these future costs will be peanuts compared to the size of the economy we will have in 2100. Another option would be to look at the whole ecosystem and think about the coming and going of the sand itself. A state that aims to protect its people would want to ensure that in these times of climate change, the net balance of the protective sand banks guarding the coast is positive, not negative. The only thing standing in the way is the dominant political climate. It is the die-hard belief in the invisible hand of the free market, even if that hand is busy sabotaging the floodgates.
The coming sand wars
I found no hint of a sand mafia in Belgium. But even a so-called leader in sand stock management, like the Belgian state, is facing a dire future. There are many more local stories to tell, even within Belgium, but I want to zoom outward to the bigger picture.
Worldwide, we use twice as much sand as is transported in all the rivers throughout the entire world. Our insatiable hunger for sand has seen us start to dig elsewhere. The majority of all the sand we now use is marine sand, and as a result, two-thirds of all beaches in the world are in the process of either retreating or disappearing. In northwest Europe, more than 100 million cubic meters of marine sediment is extracted from the North East Atlantic, mainly sand from the shallow North Sea.65 Because this marine sand is less suitable for concrete, it needs to be washed with fresh water. That poses another problem.
Fred Pearce, the acclaimed author of W hen the Rivers Run Dry: Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century, points out that if everyone lived like the average meat, beer and milk consuming Westerner, all the water in all the rivers in the whole world would not be enough. Forget the one or two liters of water you drink every day. Making an average scoop of ice cream uses up to 1000 liters of water. One steak swallows up 5000 liters.
The world’s soils provide twice as much food today as they did a generation ago. But in that period we have also diverted three times as much water from rivers and lakes to agriculture. At some point, choices will need to be made between using fresh water for food crops or for washing sand from the sea. In June 2017, something remarkable happened in rainy Belgium. After a dry streak, the government issued a temporary ban on using water for agriculture in West-Vlaanderen, Belgium’s coastal province. Competition with the water demand from its massive tourism sector is fierce there. The interests of the construction industry, the tourism industry and those of farmers are clashing. We have come to the point where even in Belgium, where it rains almost equally the whole year round, water is occasionally scarce.
The choice between the beaches and buildings is also a hard one. The US opted for beaches some time ago, at least when it comes to preserving its own. A federal ban was put on sand-mining of beaches to keep them intact. Yet there is still one company openly digging away on a beach in California thanks to an obscure legal loophole it is exploiting. The construction company that is literally making America smaller again has its headquarters in Mexico.66
This cheeky jab in the eye would surely drive President Trump to a flurry of Twitter invective. But the big man has other conflicts to worry about. Despite being a former construction mogul, he might not know that sand will play a role in a much bigger and upcoming conflict. The friction with Mexico is a sideshow compared to that between the world’s two superpowers, the US and China. China’s demand for sand increases annually by more than 5 percent, mainly due to rapid urbanization. In 20 years, the production of cement, which requires sand, has tripled. China uses about half of all sand used globally and makes more than half of all the cement in the world. Shenzhen, a booming city in China, added more skyscrapers in one year than the whole of the US and Australia combined.
The Chinese hunger for sand is immense. Ordinary sand mines on the mainland are low-hanging fruits, most of which have already been eaten by now. To whet its appetite further, Poyang Lake, China’s largest lake, has become the largest sand mine in the world.67 Two hundred and thirty-six million cubic meters of sand are extracted from the lake every year, causing a massive drop of the water table and all kinds of trouble for fauna, flora and local residents. China has used more sand in 4 years than the US has in the last century and it still wants a whole lot more.68
As a consequence, the massive and largely untapped sand deposits in the South China Sea are of a major strategic importance to China. Since World War II, the US has been the dominant naval power in that region. However, the recent and massive construction of Chinese artificial islands there is accompanied by an expansion of its military presence. Although most media attention regarding those troubled waters is related to potential oil sources and the strategic importance of the disputed islands to China in military terms, The Economist wrote in February 2015 that there is another reason why China is so eager to control that sea: sand.69
China has been busy creating and fortifying artificial islands in the South China Sea, thus securing shipping lanes and providing access to oil and gas reserves. Tensions between China and other countries around the South China Sea have increased in recent years, sometimes resulting in clashes and fatalities, such as the conflict between China and Vietnam. After China acted in a way that Vietnam considered to be an aggression in its territorial waters, some mobs killed Chinese people based in Vietnam. Still, the much bigger issue is the rising tension between China and the US. The Trump administration does not seem very willing to accommodate China as the superpower it has become. Trump’s former strategist and right-hand man Steve Bannon once said that the US and China will be at war within 5 to 10 years, and that such a war would begin in the South China Sea.70 Trump’s former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, formerly the CEO of oil giant Exxon, claims that China should not be allowed access to the islands it is building in that sea. This prompted China to remind Washington that the US was not a party to the conflict in the South China Sea and it would be wise to keep it that way.71
All of this is uncomfortably reminiscent of a classic work of science fiction from the 1930s. In that era of emerging fascism, Nobel Prize-nominated author Karel Capek wrote War with the Newts.72 The book satirized the shortsightedness of the then prevailing appeasement towards an essentially evil and destructive regime – the one led by Hitler. Capek wrote about the erosion of vigilance towards a growing evil which in the end led to the erosion of the world’s coastline and the collapse of human society – by the very same Newts that the evil regime had first created to work for them. He used prose, a metaphor and a rich imagination to illustrate how a raw imperialist expansion strategy quite literally eats itself up from the inside out. In other words: karma is a bitch. Little could Capek know that one century down the road, his absurd fiction was in a way coming true in real life. Humanity has created monsters that are eating our coastlines and rivers, that are bringing us ever closer to a collapse of civilizations and that are doing this as part of their function in a self-destructive system: capitalism. The Newts are simply replaced by the sand mafia.
Fossil fuel
Chevron’s “Shock and Awe” doctrine
October 2014. I call an Ecuadorian friend visiting The Hague. “We are about to walk into the International Criminal Court. I’ll call you back when we’re ready.” He hangs up, steps in and leaves an explosive package. Forty minutes later he calls again. “We did it!”
Julio Prieto had struck a direct hit with a bombshell that could end up doing untold damage to one of the world’s largest oil firms. He penned the report of 50 explosive pages from the heavily polluted jungle of northeastern Ecuador. An area baptized by locals as “the Chernobyl of the Amazon”. Decades of oil extraction by Texaco (bought in 2000 by Chevron) left a much bigger explosive package than Julio ever could: somewhere between 16 and 20 billion liters of highly toxic “oil-mud” laying waste to an area larger than Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, not the city. The death toll of that poison has reached over 10,000 souls and counting. As it continues to seep into water courses and food chains, Texaco/Chevron’s insidious chemical warfare will continue to claim the lives of subsistence farmers and indigenous forest people. This will continue until a major cleaning operation is carried out, the kind of clean-up Ecuador’s supreme court has ordered Chevron to pay for. But Chevron’s CEO, John Watson, prefers to spend a few billion dollars on lawyers, PR firms and spies rather than on saving the lives of thousands of victims. This makes him – according to prosecution lawyers – personally and criminally responsible for all the body count that has continued rising ever since Chevron decided to stonewall the historic 2013 ruling. If Julio and co ever succeed in nailing Watson, it would have enormous implications for the oil industry and beyond. Judges in The Hague are not known for breaking speed records in delivering justice but they signaled they are opening up to environmental crimes and they might take this case on as a test-case. So while the 50 pages are only the metaphorical bomb, there are good reasons to give their potential to jail the Chevron CEO a superlative adjective.
I spoke with a determined Julio Prieto in Brussels, the day before he went to deliver his explosive package in The Hague. The soft-spoken lawyer represents the Afectados, a band of 30,000 affected Ecuadoreans fighting to make the polluters clean up the mess they left behind. Julio is the right-hand man of the charismatic Pablo Fajardo, who leads the legal efforts, and together they face one of the giants in the oil industry. Julio makes a humble impression for a lawyer, preferring jeans and a jacket over a sharp suit.
I help with the legal actions abroad. The victims opened a lawsuit in New York in 1993, but Chevron wanted to be judged in Ecuador. After many years of legal battle, they obtained this right. However, the New York judge added that the condition for that is that Chevron would respect the outcome in Ecuador. By 2013, the supreme court in Ecuador finally decided that Chevron has to pay $9.5 billion plus interests for cleaning up the mess they left behind in Ecuador. Chevron refuses to pay. So, we convinced lawyers in Brazil, Argentina and Canada, where Chevron still has enough assets, to enforce the legal decision in those countries.
Legally speaking, the case is over. Chevron lost. But what does the poisoning of a habitat affecting tens of thousands actually mean? A sense of the carnage emerges from the 220,000 pages of court papers; more than 100 expert reports, plus the reports of 54 independent field inspections ordered by the court. The oil operator was found guilty of using substandard techniques to store the waste from the oil extraction. This saved them money, but caused massive leaks. The court demanded $5.4 billion be paid to clean up heavily polluted soils, $1.4 billion to meet health costs, $600 million for research and eventual treatment of groundwater pollution, $200 million for ecological restorations other than soil and water, and $150 million for a drinking water s ystem. A paltry $100 million was reserved by the court as compensation for the 30,000 victims.
Nine billion dollars – actually more than 12 billion today due to interest – is a lot of money. But not to Chevron, which rakes this in every 20 days. In fact it took the firm just a few days to earn the $2 billion it diverted into a fightback campaign against the Afectados. This dirty war was prosecuted by a 2000-strong legion of lawyers, PR ringers and spies. The aim was simple: delegitimize the opposition and turn the tables on who’s the victim in this case. The offensive became perhaps the most comprehensive persecution of affected people and their lawyers in the oil industry’s long and dirty history. Chevron deployed a legal strategy normally reserved for mafia groups and terrorists. It accused its opponents of being a financial extortion outfit and used the anti-mafia Racket Influenced and Corrupt Organizations laws to put a stranglehold on the opposition. Dozens of marginal players were hauled into court in an effort to choke off support for the Afectados. The company made headway when it convinced a judge in New York to convict opposing lawyers. The victory was a sham; the prosecution and verdict a travesty of the US legal system. It later transpired that the judge was a Chevron shareholder and more importantly that the company had spent $2 million bribing the most important witness to commit perjury – a fact he admitted after the ruling. Nevertheless, the Afectados legal team had been hamstrung. Julio:
They gave us the treatment that is normally given to terrorists. As a result, we had to dissolve our legal team of four, due to the lack of financial resources. But this will not stop us. Pablo, I and many volunteers will continue this until the end. Before all this we were not wealthy lawyers either. Many of my former classmates work in business law. I’m that one romantic human rights lawyer they probably joke about. However, I have been doing this for 12 years and I would do it again. Only in the past 3 years, Chevron’s counterattack made our life really difficult. It’s hard to swallow your pride and, at the age of 34, ask your father for an advance on the rent of your flat. But my parents and friends support me. This trip to Europe, for example, is fully paid by donors. This is all a matter of time. There are three countries where we will eventually win: Canada, Brazil and the United States. And we only have to win one.
As our conversation becomes more informal we exchange stories of unpaid activism and how our partners, parents and friends react to our struggles. I want to know more about how Julio deals with internal struggles that are rarely seen or talked about. About his partner’s reaction, he says: “In the past, she sometimes said, ‘you are a lawyer, when will you find a real job?’” He laughs. “I just asked for patience. But now she really supports me. She was a business lawyer, but she also stopped her job and now she also works around human rights, finding it more rewarding in non-financial terms.” The sterile setting of the room I had booked for the interview starts to annoy me. So I ask the Belgian Solidarity Committee volunteers with whom Julio travels if there is time to sneak out to the bar before he needs to move on to an evening lecture. A freshly tapped Belgian beer in one of Belgium’s most hipster hangouts, café Belga, helps to learn more about the man behind the lawyer.
Julio’s parents cannot have been poor, since they were able to pay for his studies at the best university of Ecuador’s capital, Quito. His teacher was already acting as a lawyer for the Afectados and one day he was asked to join him. Julio: “I didn’t think or doubt but just went. After a few years, my teacher had to bow out, but I stayed.” In those first years, a mere career opportunity became a lifetime struggle. I ask how hard it is to go from the best law school in the capital to working with indigenous people in the jungle?
In the beginning, I just did the legal work in Quito. But eventually I began to go to the jungle and meet people. I began to listen to their story. If you listen long enough, you get involved. Once you see the pollution and know the sick people, there is no way back. In the jungle I also met Chevron. We arrived with a team of four in a small van, they arrived with 20 lorries. Their well-paid business lawyers screamed lies about Chevron here and Chevron there. It was utterly arrogant and disgusting.
I asked if the experience riled him.
Well, one week after setting up a local office, someone broke in. Of course, Chevron did not leave a note to say “we were here”, but nothing was stolen, not even the easy to find money in a drawer of the desk. Then there were a couple of conversations with people on the street who asked us weird questions and others who took pictures of us all the time. We went to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and we received personal protection through the Ecuadorian state. But those escorts soon became a burden. Wherever we went, we had to pay their hotel and costs and we simply could not afford it. So after a while, we said “Thank you very much, but we will do it without you.”
Julio showed me the sticker he had placed over the camera on his laptop and added:
If I could jam the microphone too, I would. Did you know that Chevron paid spies from Kroll to follow us? Kroll is one of the largest private intelligence services in the United States. Until 2013, it paid $14 million to spies who followed me and Pablo. From at least one apartment we are sure we were being bugged. Our website gets so many cyberattacks that we had to hire our own IT person to keep the correct information online. Chevron has paid 2000 professionals around $2 billion to fight us and their spokesman swears that Chevron will continue to fight the case “until hell freezes over”, and then we will fight it out on the ice.
It turns out that hell did freeze over and Chevron found itself fighting on ice. The company is responsible for several hellish landscapes and the next stage in Julio’s fight shifted from sweltering jungle to the chilly northern tar sand regions of Canada for a David versus Goliath confrontation. The part of David was played by Julio, Pablo, a few native Ecuadorean and Canadian activist leaders as well as Steven Donziger, another human rights lawyer who had been going toe to toe with the firm in the US since 1993.
Despite the years, Steven is still astonished how ugly the fight has become. “When Chevron began to understand that they would lose on the merits of the case, they began to attack us. They rented six PR companies and rolled out a ‘shock and awe’ doctrine. This military doctrine is simple: show you are infinitely more powerful than your opponent so that he just stops resisting.”
Aside from a massive smear campaign, Chevron also went ballistic on the legal front. The laboratory that investigated the soil samples from Ecuador for pollution was sued in one of over 30 court cases that Chevron opened. Steven was one of the other victims, with the firm demanding an astonishing $60 billion in damages from him. An absurd record figure. After Chevron bribed the key witness for $5m in cash and benefits (the witness later admitted that) and managed to secure a verdict from a corrupted judge (who held undisclosed assets of Chevron), they bullied the New York bar to characterize him as an “immediate threat to the public order” and suspend his law license. By September 2018 Steven filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) claiming that US judicial authorities have failed to protect him from Chevron’s vicious retaliation campaign. He explains how Chevron tried to imprison him and froze his bank accounts. Chevron also went after his family.
For weeks there were three cars, with two spies each, at the exit of my apartment. They followed me wherever I went. They even followed my child and wife to school. Maybe they hoped that my wife would feel intimidated and that she would put me under pressure to let go of the matter. But it just brought us together.
Julio Prieto also stayed strong.
The case was won by us, but there’s still suffering because of the lack of implementation. We will not be able to clean the jungle with a court paper saying that Chevron needs to pay $9.5 billion for a massive clean-up. Some people lose faith in justice, but we are determined to prove that those people are wrong. We have no choice. The Afectados do not stop crying, getting sick and dying. It’s not the case that the problem disappears when we stop watching.
That is something that all frontline heroes in this book seem to have in common. No matter how hard things get, they keep going.
Keep the gas under the grass
Ecuador is not the only place where Chevron is in conflict with tens of thousands of local residents. We move from Ecuador to Romania, one of at least 30 places where Chevron has stirred up conflict.73 In this case, it is all about gas. And the heroic actions of one man.
When Alexandru Popescu walked away from a comfortable apartment in Ploieşti in the summer of 2014, his 84-year-old father thought his son had gone crazy. Alexandru, a 46-year-old antiquarian, had been cultivating a reputation for doing strange things. Growing organic vegetables on a plot outside the city was seen as odd by friends and relatives, as was joining anti-mining protests. But for his latest plan, his father had only one word: madness. Alexandru had decided to march to Brussels.
On November 25, 2014, after 3 months of walking, Alexandru ended his journey to Belgium with swollen knees and a few missing toenails. He wore a dirty t-shirt that read “No Against Cyanide and No Against Fracking”.
Fracking is a relatively new drilling technique that sucks out gas from underground beds of shale. That gas has to be unlocked first, though, in a smash and grab operation that violently injects a cocktail of 596 chemicals deep into the ground, a number of which are carcinogenic. So violent is the process that it causes earthquakes, damaged buildings and gas to seep into groundwater. Drinking water is now so saturated with gas that many people can actually set fire to the water coming from their kitchen taps. This is a messy process that releases a lot of methane, a gas far more harmful to the climate than CO2. So much is leaking out from US fracking hotspots that a methane cloud is now easily detectable from space. Fracking also requires a huge amount of our old friend sand.74 In short, fracking is both a weapon of mass destruction and a booming industry.
For me, Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland at once touched a nerve.75 Put simply, it made me angry to see what seemed to be the poorer section of American society opening their tap, holding a lighter to the water coming out and a gas flare right in their kitchens. I accept that anger is often my first step towards action. Love can also spur action, whether it be for fellow human beings or the natural beauty at stake. But in the face of the multitude of attacks on the ecosystems we all depend on, anger is more important. In my previous book Walking with Flora, I wrote a lot about bonding with nature and how important it seems to cultivate this connection from a very early age. But if there’s no anger involved, what will our resistance to the enemy that attacks us look like? We are not going to stop the Chevrons or Eldorado Golds of this world with a “free hugs” or by sending them for a spell in the natural beauty they care so little about trashing.
Fracking is a good example of what makes not just me but millions of people angry, all over the world. That should be seen as good news. In Europe, resistance to fracking has spread like an oceanic oil spill. As with the Greek goldmines, this has seen moderate citizens converted into passionate environmental activists. Mothers have blocked the path of trucks advancing through English villages like Balcombe. In France and Bulgaria, resistance has resulted in a national ban on fracking. In other places protests have delivered serious delays and sparked mainstream public debate.
Alexandru had fire in his belly when he began his 2900-kilometer odyssey, and for good reason. I wanted to know what lit that fire in him and arranged to meet him near the European Parliament building in Brussels, the symbolic end point of his long journey. In between the tailored suits of the clientele of the posh sandwich bar, an unshaved muscular man appears. My hand only slowly returns to its normal size after his mighty hand lets mine loose. Alexandru is a black coffee kind of guy. No sugar, no cookies and not much by way of small talk. His smile, however, hints at integrity, or empathy. I have a hard time kicking off the interview. Alexandru seems more a man of deeds than words. But after some time, and with the help of Michaela and Daria, two Romanian expats helping the big man to advance his cause, his story emerges, much more of a story than I had bargained for. “I worked for 3 years in the Romanian ministry of defense, so I am not easily impressed.” The chuckle that accompanies his statement suggests I need to do some heavy reading between the lines about the things that go on there.
But what I saw in the village of Pungeşti really hurt me. The people there are opposed to Chevron’s exploration into gas, which they would get out of the ground with fracking. Chevron initially tried to create social support, but they did that fraudulently. They started with a fake survey, but they had the bad luck that a few of the local people were well informed. Peaceful resistance started with an occupation camp but then on 2 December 2013 I read on Facebook that the riot police had attacked their camp in the middle of the night. Suddenly it was as if Pungeşti was no longer in the EU. The village was surrounded by 1200 cops and no one was allowed in or out. The police behaved like a private bodyguard for Chevron.
Alexandru then tells me how he got through the police cordon and into the village, but a few days after our conversation he asks me not to tell this detail in my book as he realized it might get people into trouble. The whole event did seem to have a profound impact on him.
I decided to go on a hunger strike. I went to the University of Bucharest and stayed 22 days at its entry. This was in the open air, in winter, with temperatures that were dropping to -20°C. Supporters of my cause joined me for 2 weeks, others for 11 days. When my mother became ill, I stopped. But I immediately started making other big action plans.
At that point in the conversation, I steer the Terminator-come-Gandhi figure towards his punishing journey from Romania to Brussels.
I twisted my ankle and had pain in my knees. I lost some nails. But my pain is not important, only my message is. The people who oppose fracking in Romania, they are the ones that suffer. In Pungeşti, they receive fines and many were detained. Their children are traumatized They could not go to school for a long time, while their parents were unable to feed the cattle. All that because they didn’t want to have their water poisoned.
By now I no longer need to ask questions, as his story picks up speed and emotion. “I walked alone, but I always had these people in my heart, so I never felt lonely. It also helped me to know that a British activist, known under his activist name Gayzer Frackman, also started a march to Brussels.” Frackman handed a letter signed by 205 British NGOs to David Cameron, a letter calling for a fracking moratorium, before going to the European Parliament. Alexandru also participated in a large meeting with Romanians living in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and other countries, all of whom are members of a movement against fracking or against the planned cyanide gold mine in Rosia Montana, right on a 2000-year-old village that has requested UNESCO World Heritage Status. Afterwards, a delegation of 20 activists met three members of the European Parliament. The group of the Greens / European Free Alliance made a brief video of the meeting, saying that the trips made by Gayzer Frackman and Alexandru were two examples of the growing movement against shale gas and fracking in Europe. European Parliamentary member Stefan Eck for the European United Left / Norwegian Green Left Group promised to plead for a European ban on fracking in the European Parliament’s Environment Committee. Alexandru:
We were ignored by the Brussels media. But we know that our opponents saw us. Someone wrote an article about us in a magazine for the gas industry. In Romania there were four articles about my trip and my message for Europe, also in the country’s largest newspaper. But let me be clear: I did not quite go to Brussels to solve a Romanian problem. We need a European ban on fracking and the use of cyanide in mining and we are building a movement to get that ban.
Alexandru’s protest has been lost on the European Commission. Its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, gives fracking a coded thumbs up every time he points to the war in Ukraine and the need to be less dependent on Putin and Russia’s natural gas resources. But even aside from the massive problem for the climate: Europe is not the US. Peopl e live much closer together and there are few places where you can still explode the underground and thus poison the water table without affecting entire communities. Europe also lacks the extraction infrastructure. Above all, Europe simply does not have the shale gas reserves that the US has. During a European Parliament debate, I hear all this from a scientist delivering a stark message about fracking’s limitations to the auditorium via video message. Unconventional gas supplies in the EU are ridiculously low, he says. Even if you invest tens of billions of Euros on infrastructure to tap it at its full potential and try to ignore the popular protests, you would only ever be able to deliver 1 to 2 percent of the volume needed to supply European gas demand. And so the EU did what it so often does: it exported the problem. In the summer of 2018 Juncker pulled a rabbit out of his hat: in the middle of an escalating trade war with the US, he visited Trump and came back with an agreement to make the flow of liquified fracked gas from the US to the EU easier.
Meanwhile, ever better organized citizens are ready to put their bodies in front of gas facilities. In August 2018 I joined a group who blocked a crucial gas infrastructure of Europe’s largest gas field, in the Netherlands. In this case, Shell and Exxon were the bad guys. Gas-related earthquakes had stirred the local Groningers into action a long time ago, but they were now joined by over 700 activists from all over Europe. Mathias (30) is one of the busloads of participants that came from Belgium. This is not a first for him. He said: “Here I do not feel so powerless or alone anymore, in relation to the climate breakdown. But it’s not just about that positive energy, our collective strategy is also working.” To keep it that way, Mathias gives trainings. “This is about peaceful collective civil disobedience to tackle the climate problem at source: the exploitation of fossil fuels. There is no room for rioting machos here,” he said.
This was clear at the last training session before the blockade, where I walk with the Belgian student Stephanie Colling Woode Williams (27). She discusses with her “buddy” what they are going to do if one of them is pushed to the ground by a police officer. Stephanie radiates positivity, calmness and care, clearly helping the woman she teamed up with. Stephanie’s affinity group of ten people was just one of ten such groups that jointly practiced a so-called “finger” exercise where a total of about 100 disobedient citizens break through a cordon of a dozen acting cops. At the training three real police officers were watching, but plenty more awaited the activists on Tuesday. Despite some of them beating peaceful protesters who simply sat on the ground with their hands raised, the blockade succeeded in stopping tankers and trains in a bottleneck facility for a full 50 hours. The problem for police forces and for the governments they work for is that activists learn from each other and are getting better at this.
Gas production in Groningen has already caused more than 1000 earthquakes affecting more than 100,000 people living in now damaged to unsellable homes. Compensations are a farce.
Groninger Jan Dales (58) is someone like that. “My father died of a heart attack that I directly associate with the corruption at the institution that refused to acknowledge the damage to his house.” Jan paid 2000 euros to a certified researcher who proved that the house did indeed need considerable stability repairs – only to hit a brick wall of unwillingness. With his lawsuit, he made it to national TV and managed to get Prime Minister Mark Rutte to visit him in Groningen. “My troubled lawsuit suddenly caught a bizarre momentum. The day before Rutte came, the judge decided that my complaint was inadmissible, after which the Prime Minister came to tell me that he could do nothing.” Jan had made up his mind: “Elections do not change anything here and the rule of law is rotten, so we’re left with direct action.” That assessment was widely shared in Groningen.
Hanneke (40) is the spokeswoman for Code Red, the movement that organized this action. She saw the will to action grow rapidly. “Code Red was created in the wake of the more established environmental organizations, in whose business model this kind of direct action to keep fossil fuels in the ground does not fit. People are tired of soft action, they want to take action right now. We make that possible.” The Code Red action was the largest ever in the Netherlands.
While the Dutch government is preparing slowly, although still too slow, for the end of gas – new houses are no longer allowed to get a connection to the gas grid – many other European governments are busy expanding gas infrastructure. Belgium’s cities and communities use public money to invest in new gas pipelines and LNG terminals, through the company Fluxys. The UK is continuing with a push for gas, fracked or not. European money is used to subsidize new gas infrastructure across the EU and Juncker is a big buddy of Trump when it comes to gas.
Meanwhile, German researchers from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation concluded that gas is not a so-called bridge fuel, but a bridge to nowhere. With declining stocks, longer supply chains, increasing violence to get at the gas and the fast-increasing resistance in mind, I would add that gas is a bridge to nowhere that is about to collapse. We better get off it before it does so.
Climate Change? System Change!
The action in Groningen was part of a bigger trend. In 2015, around a thousand people stormed a dirty brown coal mine in Germany to halt extraction for 24 hours. A year later, four thousand again stormed it and this time held the fort for 48 hours. This is all part of a broader “break-free from fossil fuels” movement that has spread like a wildfire across the globe. It has attracted citizens of all stripes who have seen through the greenwash of governments and the fossil fuel industry. Like the multinationals they face, this movement is so vast and global that it escapes crackdown by any single state. Oil, gas and coal companies use more destructive power than before in their fracking, deep-sea drilling and tar sands mining. Meanwhile the counter-movement is getting better at the constructive power of mass direct action.
This book is not focused on climate change – which is of course a major issue but also just one symptom of a deeper problem in our relations with this earth. But as the merchants of doubt and most political leaders are so good at spewing fog I briefly have to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to the facts and the challenge we’re facing. The debate worthy of such a name about who is the key culprit for rapid change to our climate is over. It is by far and away us, humans. I’m not even going to discuss this, as the science on that is settled. What remains is the debate about the scale, speed and consequences of the problem. Here I argue that the climate breakdown, and given the historic changes a breakdown is actually a better word than climate change or warming, is still underestimated in most media and public debates. Here’s why.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) measures the scientific consensus on climate change and in its progressive reports, the forecasts are getting worse. The sea and temperature rise faster than predicted. One of the reasons why reality is always ahead of the reports is that there are 5 to 7 years between actual measurements and their appearance in IPCC publications. A second underestimation is because politicians have to approve the reports, which puts the whole scientific consensus around climate change under pressure and self-censure to remain within the realm of the politically correct. A third reason for the consistent underestimation is the existence of an army of salesmen pushing only one product: doubt. These are people, such as bribed scientists, who are paid by polluters to question the media, public and politicians about the scientific consensus. They are doing everything they can to try and maintain a long-settled debate about what is causing all the weird weather we are seeing. Their quack science dose of doubt is inserted into political and TV debates on a paid-by-the-hour-to-lie basis, quite literally.76 In peer reviewed science, the highest form of quality control, only 1 to 2 percent of all published articles raise any doubt about the human causes of climate change. But the merchants of doubt spread their poison everywhere: in the media, universities and even in some big organizations that claim to be environmental NGOs.77 It aggressively labels honest scientists as alarmists to such an extent that they have grown overcautious and prone to errors of underestimation, according to a 2013 peer reviewed paper.78
This potion of corrosive doubt has worked its magic with cold efficiency. It can be traced in the gap between what is reported by scientists to the IPCC and what that body makes of it all, erring on the side of caution and political acceptability. It is again evident in the gap between what the IPCC puts out and what politicians decide to do at climate summits. It all adds up to impoverished settlements like the Paris Accord that do nothing to really deal with the problem. So while the IPCC forecasts a worst case scenario of a 1-meter sea level rise by 2100, a solid scientific publication explained that the sea level has in the distant past risen by 5 meters in 50 years and that it is likely that this will also happen this century.79 While most climate scientists have already written off Miami and Bangladesh, most politicians and the public at large have not got to grips with that yet.
Another study showed that the temperature could increase by 5°C in 13 years, an eye-watering level of change in terms of impacts, but one that has happened in the past.80 Most scientists agree that such a sudden increase would lead to a collapse in global food production. In a widely discussed New York Magazine cover story The Uninhabitable Earth, top climate scientists were asked what the worst-case scenario would look like. Some express doubt whether homo sapiens will survive at all.
But maybe even more unsettling than worst-case long-term predictions are concrete measurements from the here and now confirming that warming is happening much faster than expected. According to NASA, measurements dating back to 1880 show that the temperature rise has picked up to its fastest ever rate in the last 3 years. The polar ice is breaking record lows. The North Pole could be ice-free around the year 2050, the IPCC warned in 2001.81 But by 2012, this was almost a reality and sailing a boat on to the North Pole will be a possibility in just a few years from now.82 Reality is catching up with even the most dire of IPCC scenarios and revealing the merchants of doubt for the charlatans they are.
The really uncomfortable truth is that the politically feasible today is inadequate to deal with the climate breakdown and that the price of this failure could even be omnicide: the extinction of all humans as a result of human action. There’s no political failure bigger than that. The greenhouse genie is already out of the bottle and to get that back in the bottle, no amount of Tesla cars or tofu eaters will do. The more you look at the physical science of climate change, the more you understand the inevitability of a political and economic revolution – or death by a thousand cuts.
The scale of the revolution needed is actually rather well known. The Economist was on the money when it wrote: “Either governments are not serious about climate agreements, or fossil fuel companies are overvalued.”83 In 2016, The Sky’s Limit study showed how many new wells we can still drill to get at fossil fuel reserves that we already know about, provided we hold to the agreement not to warm up by more than 2°C. The result of this study: zero.84
That knowledge is so disruptive that financial markets prefer to ignore reality for as long as possible. Shareholders and financial analysts want to see all fossil fuel companies hold a 100 percent reserve replacement ratio, meaning they continue to expand their reserves by continually searching for new resources. If we allow them to keep doing that, things will only end in tears.
You cannot convince The Shells and Chevrons of this world with moral arguments about “unburnable” fossil fuels in their portfolio. Their function is to make a profit, not to care for the climate. But it turns out you can convince the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the vast pension funds of countries like Norway. They seem to understand the risks and are just a little more sensitive to public pressure. To keep in line with climate targets that command us to keep around four-fifths of all reserves in the ground, up to four-fifths of today’s stock values will need to be written off. That’s about 30 trillion euros (30,000 billion euros). To be serious about climate change means acknowledging the need for either nationalizing or pushing into oblivion and probably bankruptcy most of the largest companies on earth. Either way, there’s no longer an economic-shock-free way out of this mess.
The largest pension fund in the world is Norwegian. Worth a whopping €1000 billion, it holds around 1 percent of all shares in the world and almost 2 percent of all shares in Europe. That is more than any other entity, making the fund the most powerful player at the global casino table. Yet despite its power and prestige, its fund managers soon yielded to some intense arm twisting by an international campaign bent on forcing it to drop its dirtiest coal industry investments. That was bad news for king coal, which saw around €5.5 billion of its value go up in smoke with the stroke of a pen.85
Norway marked a turning point for a worldwide divestment movement spearheaded by 350.org. It was aided by the Guardian Media Group, one of the world’s leading media houses, which has since 2014 run a series of articles called Keep it under the ground. It ran one great piece after another on why fossil energy should remain locked up underground. Is this the kind of neutral and objective reporting we expect from a serious newspaper? Is it not too political? I do not think it is. It is merely bringing a scientific reality to the real world and standing up to the army of merchants of doubt, who have been very successful in convincing plenty of journalists and media houses who do not take the time to read up on the latest scientific findings.
The divestment campaign is inspired by a similar campaign against the apartheid regime of South Africa. A campaign against investments in the country certainly helped deal a death blow to the regime. In the US and later in Europe as well, the fossil-free divestment movement has gone viral in universities, cities and churches. But as my own experience showed, the banks still have a long way to go.
Me vs my banks
Here’s a somewhat uncomfortable confession: I save money for my pension. Baited with tax breaks, I did what many people in Belgium do and channeled a couple of hundred Euros each year into a private pension fund. I trusted my favorite bank, Argenta, to do the right thing with my money. Argenta is like the ordinary people’s bank. They are friendly and speak my kind of language. They have no hidden costs and their offices were simple rather than opulent. Unlike the big banks, Argenta is not even traded on the stock market. A safe haven in turbulent times. I trusted them. I even kind of liked them, for their simplicity and transparency. Then I read their pension fund’s annual report. That was the moment I made the horrifying discovery that through that fund, I was betting my money on...Chevron.
In all my naivety, I somehow assumed the fund had been busy investing in things we will sure need in the future: storm protections, old age homes and wind turbines. But in the autumn of 2011, it decided to invest my money in oil: Chevron, Statoil and Premier Oil, an oil exploration company looking for new reserves. I was angry enough to start my own little crusade, dammit.
First to feel my wrath was the Argenta ombudsman. I mailed and asked if Argenta knew about Chevron’s enormous pending liabilities in Ecuador and the worldwide divest movement and whether the fund had ethical investment guidelines. A faltering answer suggested the ombudsman was a stranger to this kind of questioning. The fund’s prospectus says there is no sectoral constraint. Investments in the oil sector had been made to offset risky investment in the financial sector. Frying pan or fire, in other words. On Chevron, Argenta’s ombudsman wrote: “At this stage, however, there is no actual indication that the complaint against Chevron is legitimate.” This surely qualifies as an “alternative fact” from before that term took flight. Argenta thus claimed that the Supreme Court of Ecuador and its 220,000-page verdict is not legitimate.
Since my discovery, I no longer save for my retirement. I found that all Belgian pension funds have investments in fossil energy and some are in it up to their necks. On the upside: I know people who, after my first media publication on this, have also quit Argenta’s fund in disgust. That motivated me to step up a gear. I would rather be the naive and arrogant busybody than the blissfully ignorant financier of a malignant system. What will we do with extra pension money our unethical funds leveraged when, 30 years from now, there is no habitable planet to enjoy? In the fund’s 2014 annual report I find Shell listed as an investment. This is a company that wants to drill oil in the Arctic. Millions of people filed a petition against Shell’s plans, including thousands and thousands of Belgians. How many of these people own Shell shares without knowing? How many will sell them once they find out?
A few years later, in June 2015, I launched round two of my campaign to purge my bank of its odious investments. They are still my bank as I need to have an account somewhere and after all, fossil fuels are only a relatively small part of its portfolio. They do quite well, compared to other banks. This time I ask why Argenta still invests in companies like Chevron, Seadrill and Royal Dutch Shell. I refer to a report by the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel), which warned that rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch continue to make massive assessment errors when rating the value of fossil fuel companies, errors so serious they could trigger a new global financial crisis.86 For good measure, I add arguments by The Economist, the Norwegian pension fund, the IPCC, the world’s largest insurer Allianz, and even the Pope. These are not crackpots, back to the landers or fringe pressure groups, but bastions of the establishment that ought to draw a lot of water among bankers. OK, I am not saying my bank should set its financial compass by what the Pope in Rome says. But just think of what the Oslo Principles say. They were made by a team of prominent judges, lawyers and professors from around the world. That team set out a number of principles that form the legal basis for bringing states and companies to court if they do not make sufficient efforts to limit global warming to the agreed 2°C. Article 30 states: “Enterprises in the banking and finance sectors should take into account the greenhouse gas effects of any projects they consider financing.”87 If they do not, they risk legal action being taken against them. I kindly ask if Argenta is aware of all this.
The first positive sounding noises started emerging from the bank in 2016. For people with enough money to invest thousands of euros in all kinds of funds, Argenta will offer a new and sustainable option. But for those who just want to save a couple of hundred a year for their retirement, 37 more excuses are needed to say they cannot exclude Shell, because it is spending a few percent on solar energy and because for the time being it withdrew from Nigeria and from the Arctic. There was better news when it came to Chevron. The company was blacklisted because of “a whole series of controversies with local populations and a lot of litigation on environmental damage”. I will never know for sure if my actions contributed to blacklisting Chevron, but I commend them for taking this stand. More importantly: as there’s a chance that this was due to my emails, there’s also a chance that your emails to your bank on blacklisting the Chevrons of this world will have an effect.
However, Argenta is small potatoes compared to the big banks. Would it not have been fairer for me to go after one of the big boys? Then, all of a sudden, I get a golden opportunity to do just that.
Someone nominated me to become part of a select club of “transition pioneers”. As a member of this Generation T (with the T for transition), I get the opportunity to challenge some of the largest companies active in Belgium. Generation T is a project from The Shift, a large network that brings together NGOs and large companies around what they call corporate social responsibility. That is how a handful of Generation T’ers, including myself, end up at the headquarters of KBC, Belgium’s largest bank and recently also Europe’s most profitable.
At the tour-de-table we are expected to say more than our name and organization. What would we do if we had the KBC group profit at our disposal? I say that I would invest half of it in lawyers who sue states and companies that do not do enough on climate change and use the other half to switch all KBC investments from fossil fuel to renewable energy companies. Name card delivery: check. During a break-out group I interrupt the man speaking about how they promote cycling to work to talk about their lignite coal investments and those in oil companies with a very bad reputation, like Total. I wheel out the arguments I had honed with Argenta. Again I am told that a sustainable investment fund (not a pension fund) is available, the prospectus for which is probably gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, and that people have the choice to take it. They are doing their best to inform their staff that this option exists, he says. Again, as with Argenta, I stress that people still have no choice in shaping their pension fund and that pension savings are used much more by the average Belgian with his few hundreds of euros a year to put aside than investment funds in sustainable companies for those who have 1000s to put aside at once. He said KBC will think about it and get back to me later.
A little later we are invited by The Shift to lunch with a bunch of CEOs from major companies like IKEA and KBC. I kindly ask Thomas Leysen, Chairman of KBC’s board of directors, why the bank scores so badly compared to others when it comes to financing climate mayhem. I tell him about the new cooperative NewB: 50,000 Belgians who are investing together in the creating of what should one day become a cooperative bank in the hope that one day there will be a bank that will offer products that are not as toxic as KBC’s. I flash my NewB card from my wallet, give it to him to have a look. “That’s not a bank card but a market signal,” I say. Johan Thijs, KBC’s CEO, joins us. I seem to have made an impression because Thomas challenges his CEO straight away. Thijs says that KBC will soon propose a new climate policy. From a good source, I also learn that Thomas Leysen contributed to a class action lawsuit against the Belgian State for not doing enough on climate change. The same source tells me that his contribution was modest, but he has been engaging on the climate topic for many years and appears sensitive to divestment arguments.
A few months later, KBC invited me to a presentation of their new sustainability plan, adding that it would soon stop financing coal fired power stations. At the event, Thomas Leysen and Johan Thijs are joined by sustainability manager Vic Van de Moortel and KBC’s entire corporate social responsibility team. After a presentation it is time for questions. I am given the honor of going first.
Very nice you stop investing in coal plants. Except for in the Czech Republic. But what about your investments in unconventional fossil fuel operations in fracking, tar sands oil and deep-sea drilling as well as exploration for new conventional fossil fuels? The scientific journal Nature says that this is incompatible with climate agreements. And secondly, very nice that you want to better promote your sustainable investment fund that only makes sense when you have thousands of euros available, but why don’t people with an average income like me get a choice? Why are the majority of your customers still stuck with a pension fund that is hastening climatological Armageddon? Why not take this golden opportunity to become the first bank in Belgium to offer a sustainable pension savings option to everyone?
Murmurs rise from the audience and I see some uncomfortable smiles from the panel. Thomas seems rather amused, but passes the mic’ to his sustainability manager, Vic. He gives a jargon heavy technical explanation about “small-caps” and that there are too few really sustainable companies to invest their billions in. The argument goes that it would be too difficult for customers to understand that they all fall into one of two categories of sustainable investors. One is green people with a considerable amount of savings who only want to invest in pioneering green companies. Then there are the masses, who would already be happy with avoiding the worst companies. This impoverished explanation from Vic, that such a distinction is impossible to make, assumes there is no marketeer smart enough to segment and target these two groups separately.
The problem is in no way a Belgian problem. Most bankers are still living in a bubble. A carbon bubble. The fact that no president in the history of the US has surrounded himself so openly with fossil energy fat cats as Trump has, is according to some a sign that this huge carbon bubble is about to burst, with the industry engaging in a last desperate attempt to postpone the burst.88
Once it dawns upon a critical mass of investors that up to four-fifths of the stock value of fossil fuel companies is tied to what scientists call unburnable fuels and what investors call frozen assets, the shit hits the fan. As we all know from recent experiences: that critical mass ain’t big either. It requires only one card in the house of cards to fall – say, Chevron – to get into panic mode and a rush to the exit while you still can. When the carbon bubble bursts, KBC, like almost all banks, is going to get hammered big time.
In the summer of 2018 I get a call from someone in KBC’s sustainability team: they just decided to do it: they will put the first pension fund with no fossil fuel companies on the market. It is now available, I read the prospectus and it’s real. One and a half years after KBC’s sustainability manager claimed that a fossil-free pension fund was impossible, the bank did the so-called impossible. This was communicated just a few hours after Greenpeace successfully managed to pimp KBC’s headquarters right on the day of their annual shareholder meeting. Credit for this policy change should sure go to them and other groups and people who lobbied for this.
But this little personal crusade with the banks sure taught me a couple of things. It seems the ombudsman, ethics and sustainability people, CEO and board chairman of a major bank are at least open to their customers asking awkward questions on their part of funding the climate breakdown. You don’t need to speak the financial jargon nor be part of a pressure group to challenge those who you trust your money to. You’re a client asking and repeating a legitimate question and that puts you in a position of power, now that the race for the most fossil-free bank seems to have opened up. I think the potential for moving banks away from their exposure to fossil fuel companies is huge and the moment is ripe.89 So after reading this book, if the urge has taken hold of you, sit down for a moment, read that prospectus of your pension fund and start with “Dear Banker,...”
Profession: Lawyer. Client: Our climate
In December 2014, a group of famous Belgian citizens wrote to the four ministers responsible for addressing climate that the country of surrealism has.90 Their letter asked the ministers to say for the record that, by 2020, the country would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent compared to 1990 levels, as per the scientific advice. They did not. The episode sparked a class action case in April 2015 against the Belgian state. After some campaigns, the number of plaintiffs increased to almost 40,000. The government raised procedural issues leading to a long delay of the actual court case but also to three victories at three judicial levels just to get the actual case opened. When the lawsuit finally begins, thousands will attend the court sessions. It’s going to be massive.
Nic Balthazar, one of the 11 public personalities who started the case, told me: “I think we should not waste too much time on discussing about the hard or soft strategy. Or about the sympathetic or sabotage solutions to the climate crisis. We have to do it all, and the legal side was missing.” The importance goes beyond winning a court case as such. Cabinets are already freaking out now that they are being sued and as Nic also said: “A lawsuit is a lot more juicy for journalists than a report by the IPCC. That media attention really is important: it creates the necessary social support.”
The Belgians were inspired by a very similar climate case in the Netherlands – where it all began with one man: Roger Cox. I met him in the European Parliament at an ecocide conference and stayed in touch to get his story on record. During one month, in 20 cities in the Netherlands, everybody who wanted to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth could go and watch the movie for free. Roger paid all the bills. But he will always be remembered as the first person in the world who accused a government of having a climate policy incompatible with international law, or more specifically: as the first who won a climate court case against a state. In June 2015, a judge in the Netherlands accepted his argument and ordered the Dutch State to implement a policy in line with what the science says is needed. A week before that milestone, I spoke with Roger.“The cradle to cradle principle shows we can do something about the light bulbs in our office, but that’s just not enough to deal with climate change.” Roger’s law firm did have some money, so they set up the Planetary Prosperity Foundation.
I began to read IPCC reports, Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Friedman, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, Fareed Zakaria...Then it became clear to me that the influence of the big multinationals is huge. Look at the top 20 of the world’s largest companies; all of them are in the fossil fuel sector. That calls for a very strong counterforce. Enter the judiciary.
After writing Revolution Justified, NGOs jumped on it and sent the book to all ministers and the queen of the Netherlands – many of whom reacted. In his book, Roger explained how the state could be sued for not doing what it needs to do on climate change. Soon afterwards, he started the case, with the support of 886 citizens.
Asked about how he juggles his work and private lives, Roger smiles before revealing that his wife had encouraged him to write the book so she couldn’t really complain. He also talks about their children as a motivation to do something. But Roger stresses that the lawsuit is not personal and is not about getting his way on policy either. “We only ask the government to have a certain level of ambition, not how it should achieve that ambition. I have my ideas about renewable energy or nuclear energy, but they do not matter. How politicians pursue the ambition that science considers necessary, that’s their concern, not mine.”
Anger is the first emotion Roger can think of when I ask about his deeper drive. Anger about disinformation. “As a consequence of disinformation, many people still do not understand the effects of the warming. That is why we have promoted Al Gore’s film. And if you read how a relatively small group of companies and people steer our ship the wrong way, that too makes me angry.”
A pattern emerges as I consider what spurs frontline earth defenders into action. A love of their children is certainly a factor, but is not what tips them into action. It is more often a certain anger, pent up anger in need of a lightning rod to release its energy. There are no end of causes out there to drive such anger: disinformation about radioactivity; corruption and international blackmail in Greece; Chevron’s grotesque shock and awe tactics; the forked tongued merchants of doubt, and so on. The art of being a conscious and caring human in the modern age, it seems, lies in taking anger that threatens paralysis, depression or madness and finding a cause that converts it into a force for good. Maybe anger should not automatically be seen as a negative, but rather recognized as an essential energy source driving frontline heroes on.
When well directed, anger is followed by joy. One week after talking with Roger, I follow the court verdict in the Netherlands through livestream. The tears of happiness, the hugs and the citizens beaming with joy flood my living room in Belgium. The judge simply ordered the Netherlands to reduce its emissions more than it had or was planning to do. The state appealed, but in October 2018 the verdict was confirmed. Roger’s victories activated counterparts in Belgium, Australia, Brazil, Austria, England, Ireland, US and Norway, all of whom now have the jurisprudence they were waiting for.
I talked with Roger Cox and Nic Balthazar not just about the court cases themselves, but also about their mental fights. There’s no point denying that those who dig themselves into the climate change issue are faced with not just the limits of the planetary system but with the limits of the human brain itself. Psychologists like Harald Welzer analyzed how our brain tries to keep these facts out that are just too unsettling – whether it is an ongoing holocaust or an ongoing climate breakdown. So how do they deal with that? Nic Balthazar told me something I’ve since used quite often in conversations on this topic: “The best way to get me out of that depression is to do something. A doctor who sees a cancer will not start crying, will he? He will wonder what he can do.”
Above ground: Life on earth
The white man’s burden
Imagine a young man with an odd skin color suddenly standing in your vegetable garden. In his right hand is a device full of buttons and a screen. In his left hand, a white paper filled with boxes in all shades of red. Imagine this intruder looks to his device, to his paper, to your vegetable garden and back to his device. He then takes a pencil from behind his ear, scratches something on the paper of his and pushes a button or two. Then he walks on 30 meters and repeats his ritual.
That man was me, in 2002, in some godforsaken volcanic part of Uganda. The Ugandan at the edge of the Ntambi crater lake who witnessed this scene approached me and asked what the hell I was doing in his vegetable garden. At least, that is my best guess at what he was saying in Swahili or whatever language he spoke. I was simply doing research for a Master’s thesis on land use changes that involved comparing different satellite images.
Look, you see that red block on this page? That corresponds to the banana plantation over there. This device tells me that I’m on this red block on my paper. This sheet is the infrared radiation of this area. That rosy block over there will be your meadow there. Less biomass means less infrared radiation and thus rather a pinkish color. That’s how I map this area. Cool, don’t you think?
I probably understand as much from his reaction as he from my story. But I take the furrowed brow and disgruntled sounds as signs of trouble. In hindsight, who would not be pissed off if, all of a sudden, a black man in weird garb is found wandering through your garden taking strange measurements. I decide to hop it and he decides not to chase me off his land. I was probably taken for mzungu, a slightly crazy, but otherwise harmless white person.
There were other uncomfortable encounters during my fieldwork in rural Uganda, but this one really left a knot in my stomach. Was this expedition more than just a childhood dream of mapping remote corners of the world coming true? Why was he so angry? Was my dream his nightmare and if so: why? A peasant farmer somehow pulled me from my cloud to his situation of abject poverty – which would remain not only unsolved but even unseen, after we enriched ourselves with the data we needed, in his garden. He confronted me with simmering doubts. What did he make of me and our team of three white men and a white woman, trekking across his land with canoes and mud sample tubes, heading directly for the holy crater lakes? What good could ever come from four mzungus boring holes in the realm of the gods?
When I read Frank Westerman’s book Choke Valley many years later, I got closer to answering these questions. We as scientists were arrogant trespassers, meddling with lakes that are the pantheon of their gods. After reading Choke Valley I’m pretty sure that if something bad happened to the village during our presence, the wrath of these gods would have been a powerful narrative and put us in serious trouble.
Dirk, the expedition leader, never seemed to descend from the cloud called scientific research. The mud samples we took from the bottom of the crater lakes would allow us to reconstruct the local climate stretching back hundreds of years and learn the cycles of droughts and floods. He justified our invasion for data by arguing that our scientific foray would eventually benefit local farmers. I found it easier to see a direct connection to our career prospects. After all, none of our team would later explain to the local people how to use our information in their favor but all of us would go home advancing our careers thanks to these data.
Dirk later asked me to do a PhD on land use change around crater lakes in Central Africa, to help his research. As a 22-year-old student, the offer was almost impossible to resist. I loved the adventure of these expeditions. Adrenaline would sometimes keep me up the whole night. I was finally mapping pieces of earth, something I had dreamed of doing since childhood days spent in my grandfather’s treasure room, where he kept a cabinet filled with his maps and a mammoth Times Atlas. I can still recall the feeling from when I was pouring over them. From the comfort of his desk, I began making my first mental trips to the edges of the world. I crossed the Siberian rivers Ob and Lena looking for the least-mapped regions that were in need of a cartographer. From a very early age I felt the urge to go right into the great unknown, to beat all the odds and come home with new knowledge about this wonderful planet of ours. As a teenager I classified thousands of stamps from exotic corners of the world, kept all foreign currencies I could take hold of and never missed an opportunity to score a national geographic magazine from no matter what year. In hindsight, I had prepared for this moment for all my life. It really was a childhood dream coming true.
But the more excited I got, the more I also wondered about the fate of the Ugandan people we met. They had zero interest in my fantasies. Why should they? It seemed so selfish. It was selfish. When I returned, I decided not to write a doctorate, but to study something different: development aid. And with that, the only disease I caught while in Uganda was an infection that does not feature in the annals of tropical medicine; it was the white man’s burden.
The white man’s burden was the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, a work that served as a call to civilize the “less-developed people” of Africa, in particular. Today, it is known as an ideological underpinning for wholesale racism, colonialism and imperialism. It was up to the superior whites to lift the darker races out of the swamp. The mindset persisted even as quasi-religious colonization morphed into pseudo-science development programs in the mid-twentieth century. A patronizing mindset was sanitized by a thin layer of philanthropy and altruism. From now on, the white man’s burden would be morphed into a strictly noble task. Wise whites would guide ignorant blacks to advance their civilization – with the assistance of loans at friendly rates. But the motive driving certain private companies has been less high-minded. They have sucked the blood of this romantic paradigm for all it is worth. They count on white man’s burden patients like I became when I was 22 to do the fieldwork in Africa for them. They need employees who believe in this myth. But what they have created is a global unequal exchange of goods, whereby Africa has become the cheap provider of raw materials for others. More worrying still: this is a trend that only grew once decolonization came to an end. That should set off alarm bells about the hidden agenda behind so many projects in Africa.
The white man’s burden is a piece of the puzzle to understand why we whites succeeded in allocating much more than our fair share of natural riches to the West. While I wasn’t exactly doing the prospection for mining companies or land grabbers, I was doing a rather similar mapping in Africa job and was busy building up a good CV for just that kind of work. It was many years later when I started to connect the white man’s burden, the urge to map the unknown, capitalist expansion and a wave of terrible land grabs going on in Africa.
Lying labels
What was going on around the Ntambi crater lake in Western Uganda in 2002 was in a way very similar to what happened in much of Sub-Saharan Africa by 2008. A global food crisis was reaching a climax. Prices of staples such as rice and wheat had gone through the roof. Foreign actors were buying vast areas of farmland. Measurements differ, because many land deals are not transparent, but Professor Saskia Sassen put the figure at more than 200 million hectares of land bought by foreign firms and governments between 2006 and 2014, with a peak in 2008.91 That is an area equivalent to almost 70 Belgiums or eight times the United Kingdom. And there are still many deals in the pipeline. Big names from the Brazilian agro industry had wanted a 35-million-hectare stake in Mozambique to create a farm ten times the size of Belgium.92 On their satellite images, Mozambique had seemed the ideal spot for a giant soy farm. Soy for export, not home consumption. Soil scientists and other technical experts gave a thumbs up. They probably prospected the land just like I did in Uganda: connecting satellite imagery with the local situation – minus the population. At that point, obstacles on the ground, such as 100,000 local residents, were merely problems to be fixed. You promise them work. They will only find out that it is slave work when it is too late anyway.
In practice, land grabs impoverish locals to enrich shareholders on the other side of the world. The precedents are so numerous that this can be stated with confidence. Let us take an example that is well known. In London, at the headquarters of the New Forests Company, someone decided to transform “abandoned land” in Mubende, Uganda into a cash cow. In England or Europe, you cannot earn money by growing forest on farmland. But in Uganda, this makes you profitable and a role model. The New Forests Company became Uganda’s investor of the year. Its Ugandan plantation complied with Forest Stewardship Certificate (FSC) standards. Less than 10 percent of all the world’s managed forests meet FSC standards, the gold standard for ethical timber production. The project should have been a safe bet.
The reality was different. More than 22,500 people were evicted from land they had been farming for generations, according to testimonies. Oxfam recorded the horror associated with the construction of this “exemplary” tree plantation.93 To ensure nobody tried to return to their land, soldiers destroyed the school, set fire to several houses and in the process killed an 8-year-old.94 Families were forced to leave on foot, carrying whatever they could wear and without compensation.
This horrible episode caught the attention of big media like The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera.95 The World Bank ombudsman stepped in and negotiated a compromise, 2 years later. The New Forests Company gave money to a cooperative to help the affected people to new land and new infrastructure like schools. But the community will never regain the living standards it has lost. If this is a promising practice by the investor of the year and later a successful campaign to prove that the FSC logo is working, then how bad is it for those affected by the thousands of other projects that failed to gain media attention?
Beatings, scorched earth tactics and eviction of communities without compensation. The Ugandan project is a win-win of sorts, except the London company wins twice: once for the FSC wood and once for the carbon. Trapping the latter through tree planting earns carbon credits, credits that have been invented to keep our lifestyles unchanged while the difficult work of reducing emissions is left to the poor. Also invented to keep up the pretense that we are “dealing with the climate problem”. This is how the so-called solution to a global problem created by industrialized countries poses a new problem for the people in non-industrialized countries, who are often already most affected by the first problem.
The main argument of the development community is that the project provides jobs. Indeed, the brutally deprived people were offered work. Not for the promised $100 per month, but for $30. That is one dollar a day. “But they did not even have that dollar beforehand,” is what the development crowd will say. In the past, these people were self-employed. Farmers rich in self-esteem, togetherness and everything that is essential to them: crops, animal products, plant medicine, fresh water. Now that they are “developed”, they exchange all that for a dollar a day. That is good for the World Bank statistics: they will show that thanks to “development” people have gone “out of poverty”.
Needless to say, this story sounds different at the consulting company that gave New Forests Company the FSC label. In this case the consultancy happened to be Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS), which was paid by the New Forests Company to give it the label. Why should SGS, a company that depends on profits, bite into the hand that feeds it? Of course, to maintain the illusion that there is also the certifier of the certifier. Accreditation Services International (ASI) checks the certification companies. In Uganda, they also checked SGS and concluded that all was by the book.96 But if scorched earth tactics, torture and expulsion are in the script, why do Western consumers pay an additional fee for their FSC wood?
A tougher question is whether it would have made a difference if ASI concluded that big mistakes were made? The watchdog organization FSC-Watch claims it would not. ASI has identified multiple violations that have all gone without penalty, it says. Phony certificates continue to be awarded.97
I check the FSC story with Filip De Bodt from Climaxi, the Flemish chapter of Friends of the Earth. We have known each other for years and if there is one activist in Belgium with a specialization in exposing greenwash, I think it’s Filip. “As a label agency you have to choose,” he says.
Either you are strict and expensive, or your criteria are flexible to make sure that the consumer buys “green” for only a small additional price. Most labels start with good intentions but then make the latter consideration. Most of them don’t even count the number of kilometers their product is traveling. FSC was also founded by NGOs with good intentions. But when the label moved from paper only to wood, it began to allow industrial tree plantations to apply for the logo. These are anything but sustainable.
Filip explains who is behind FSC labeling:
The WWF is the driving force behind most labels such as FSC for wood and paper, but also for fish, soy and palm oil. And who is on the WWF board? People from banks and industry, such as Coca-Cola. As I see it, WWF is the environmental organization of the employers and an instrument for large companies. Their hidden agenda is to maintain the flow of biomass to the core consuming areas of the world. Securing the supply chain is about securing profits and they feel that our increase in consumption should not be jeopardized. Now that there are more critical consumers, more sustainable packaging and propaganda is needed. The labels are necessary to keep the reality of an ever-larger attack on our remaining natural capital hidden. The labels also function to kill debates. The biggest enemies of label-producing green NGOs such as WWF, as well as Conservation International, are the people who question the whole chain and who want to replace labels with a peer-to-peer model of lending instead of buying, a local model or a circular economy.
Resistance to labeling often brings awkward tensions, according to Filip.
Unfortunately, few people ask the open question whether those labels do not contribute to maintaining a flow that inherently can’t be sustained. Within the NGO community, questioning labels is like cursing in church. When we published our report Fish and Run, with a critique of the WWF promoted label for fish, this caused a lot of tension and attempts to cope with critical sounds within the environmental movement through a so-called pax ecologica – to silence us. At Climaxi we look beyond the labels. For example, we set up a solidarity campaign to import a large amount of Greek products that come from a good cooperative. They produce in a fair way, but don’t have the money to label their products as such. I see a future in bringing together production cooperatives like them across Europe. This already happens in the fisheries sector, with pro-life.
It also exists in the renewable energy sector with REScoop. Filip: “The free market is problematic but nationalizing everything is not the solution. I believe more in connecting local cooperatives and control from below than in bureaucratic socialism.”
Filip is not alone in criticizing FSC. Anyone with a little understanding of the FSC field and free from conflicts of interest says that they want to dismantle the FSC myth. Those in NGOs that established or maintain the FSC system defend its label. They have to do that, of course, out of loyalty. An FSC boss gave a scathing critique of the system he presided over for years, but only after his departure. He said that the entire FSC certification system is a myth.98
The report Who watches the watchmen? did for the RSPO label (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) what Filip and others did for the FSC label: destroy the myth.99 None of the big NGOs dare to admit the mistake they made and keep making. Their story goes like this. The label encourages good practices, is already better than all the rest and if there is a problem, we will solve it.
Simon Counsell of the NGO FSC-Watch does not buy the bad apple narrative. “FSC members have lost control of their own label.” he says. “The real power lies with the certifiers and they are private companies and only interested in selling as many certificates as possible. I do not know one FSC label that was withdrawn as a result of a formal complaint.” This quote comes from a strong piece of research journalism called Sustainable on Paper, written for one of Belgium’s top magazines. It sure caused some long overdue debate in Belgium, with many media jumping on it.100 One of the authors, journalist Leo Broers, recalls the period with interest.
My experience with most media is that our story and the criticism of the FSC was usually well received. But our content was often twisted and the articles in the press always ended in favor of the FSC. Journalists simply have a lack of time to do some fact checking and they also suffer from a bias to end articles with a positive note. The story usually ended with the FSC apparently learning from its mistakes. Of course, the FSC used its right of reply to spin the case and to dispute facts. But the regrettable truth is that nothing has changed in the field and that the label must be maintained to mask our overconsumption and sweep our environmental crimes and human rights violations under the carpet.
Leo and co-author An-Katrien Lecluyse were told to report their findings through the official complaints procedure. That is exactly what they did, only to find 2 years later that the complaint procedure is also biased in favor of FSC. In a follow-up article, the authors exposed how a firm wiped out 1200 hectares of Atlantic rainforest, yet was still awarded a so-called ethical timber label from the FSC.“The language used in the certification reports is also interesting,” Leo said. And here he gets to the fundamental issue with labels like the FSC.
Certifiers talk about “illegal occupiers”, while those people have land titles. In Africa, like in South America, it often happens that the same piece of land is claimed by two or three owners. And the certifiers always choose the side of the company that requests the FSC label. That is the core of the problem. And that is confusing for the consumers in the West, who believe that FSC is in favor of the rights of local residents and for nature. In practice, the FSC label not only violates their rights, it also kills the debate about it.
The very raison d’être of the FSC – and similar labels like RSPO for palm oil – is that the consumer pays a premium to not have to bother with debates about the injustices in the supply chain. Take away those consumers who don’t care plus those who’ve already paid to prove they do care and few people are left to debate with.
One of the founding organizations behind FSC, RSPO and other labels is the World Wildlife Fund or WWF. According to them, the good news is that RSPO palm oil was produced in an environmentally friendly way, “so we should not give up on those products”.101 To “not give up” seems to be at the heart of the creation of WWF. This organization was established by rich European princes, who feared losing their hunting rights as countries in Africa gained independence. So it was no coincidence that the honorary president of WWF Spain is the country’s king. He’s holding the traditional WWF values high. That is, until he fell and broke a leg while on an elephant hunt in Botswana.102 Another line of founding fathers of WWF are the Rockefeller family, who made their fortune with oil. With such origins, how did we come to see WWF as the organization protecting life on earth? Even their President and CEO comes from Mars.
Palm oil is only cheap thanks to the cheap evictions of animals and humans, extortionately low wages, cut price transportation (more on that later) and the willful neglect of the environmental costs of its production. As it is only on the back of these injustices that palm oil has boomed, I believe we do need to talk about giving up a practice that we developed and later justified with some window-dressing labels.
Palm oil is also blended with fossil fuels to make biodiesel, along with rapeseed and soy. While Western governments continue to back biodiesel as sustainable, they are making insufficient investment in real renewable energy, according to Anne van Schaik of Friends of the Earth Europe. The EU’s policy of using biodiesel for transport has actually increased its overall transport emissions instead of cutting them, according to a highly embarrassing study from the European Commission itself.103 It found that because virgin forests are churned up to grow crops for biodiesel, that biodiesel actually emits more greenhouse gases than ordinary diesel. Because most people associate the term “bio” with “good for nature” the word “biofuels” is consumer fraud. Biofuels are an “alternative fact” to borrow a term from the Donald Trump establishment, used in EU propaganda to show that it is busy “saving the climate”. EU countries pump billions of tax money into what is not just a fake solution, but a net transfer of biomass from the tropics to car users in the EU. When it comes to biofuels, EU countries act as vegetarian bloodsuckers telling its flock that sucking the lifeblood from others is an act of sympathy and sacrifice.
It is not just our tongues, hair and cars that are drenched in tropical blood. An increasing amount of our stoves deforest tropical jungles and displace people and animals as well. Having a warm house is a basic human need, but one may wonder if it is a good idea to chop a rich primeval forest in the Amazon, plant an industrial tree plantation and make wood pellets out of that to burn in the EU. Fuel from pellets as a residual product of a sawmill seemed like a good idea at first. That biomass would otherwise be “lost”, even though there are many other applications than heating. But today, the demand for pellets is so high and European subsidies are so generous that pellets are now being imported from Brazil to Europe, some carrying the FSC label.
The next step for the marketeers of green capitalism is to reassure consumers. Do not worry, they will say. The chainsaws cutting up that ancient rainforest for your pellets were running on ethical biofuel. And all of our products are panda-free.
Personally, I found one figure pretty shocking when it comes to the problem of tropical biomass extraction for use in industrialized countries: industrial tree plantations have grown fourfold, from 15 to 60 million hectares, in just 20 years. This has mostly been at the expense of rainforests and mostly for products exported to industrialized countries – such as paper. In a tropical tree plantation, whether it is for paper, palm oil, biofuel or pellets, biodiversity is reduced from staggering diversity down to close to zero. People who used to harvest fruits and medicinal plants and hunt in the forest lose everything they need for survival. We get the things from the shop, pharmacy or simply by turning on a tap. But for them, it is, or was, the forest that provided it all.
The fact that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations continues to classify plantations as forest is a scandal. Hundreds of organizations and scientists from all over the world wrote an angry letter about it.104 A tree plantation is a green desert, not a forest. If a plantation is a forest, then North Korea is a thriving democracy.
Let us take a step backwards. Demand for wood and derived products has exploded. Labels facilitated that expansion. The EU supports the rapid growth with mandatory targets and its member states put billions of subsidies into expanding the use of wood from other continents. In 2012 alone, the EU also imported €6 billion of meat, leather, palm oil and soya produced on land that used to be occupied by tropical rainforest.105 Between 1990 and 2008, the EU was the world champion of importing deforestation products, far ahead of North America and China.106 The money spent on policing the +100 billion dollar a year market in illegal trade of wood is a bad joke. All of this makes it fair, in my view, to call the EU’s policy regarding the world’s trees a subsidized ecocide, repackaged and resold to the general public as an altruistic sacrifice for the greater good.
Water, the source of life
The story of humanity on planet earth is closely linked to who gets access to what parts of fertile land, biomass and water. Water shortages will become one of the major twenty-first century crises.107 In some areas in Spain, the crisis is very tangible.
For a man who came to Brussels to get attention for the ongoing ecocide in his village, 66-year-old David Dene leaves a happy impression. This British globetrotter radiates energy and happiness. Since the late 1990s, David has lived in Rio de Aguas, an eco-village in the hinterland of Spain’s Almeria region. He may look like a hippie but the highly educated David convinced the European Parliament, European Commission, the EU Petitions Committee and the UN’s Human Rights Council of his case. I met him during a debate in the European Parliament on getting ecocide recognized as a crime against humanity and was intrigued by the man.
The Rio de Aguas Valley has been inhabited since the Neolithic. Just 7 kilometers away, westerns are filmed in the barren Tabernas desert. But Rio de Aguas is blessed with an abundance of flora and fauna thanks in large part to numerous groundwater springs. Compared to the desert next door, it is a little garden of Eden. And it’s not the only oasis in the (semi-) desert. Some 35,000 people depend on the aquifer that David is defending with everything he’s got.
Rio de Aguas saw its population rise in the late-twentieth century. This was mainly due to an influx of European immigrants who started a new eco-friendly life. A life with due respect for the fragility of the local environment and with a few new technologies such as solar panels. A few dozen people turned one ghost village into an international meeting place where knowledge was shared on how to build an eco-village from scratch. Rio de Aguas was flourishing once more.
That was until the Ministry of Environment declared the country upstream suitable for agriculture. A license for an industrial olive tree plantation on 3600 hectares was issued. Businessman Juan Carrion Caceres bought 2300 hectares and planted millions of olive trees.108 The over-exploitation culminated in 2017 with an estimated 6 million super-intensively grown olive trees, who drink 10 liters of water per day and per tree. That’s 60 million liters per day going to the olives.
Now, there is a lot to like about olives. Mediterranean people are reputed to live longer than average thanks to a diet that is big on olives. Olive trees are also a cultural heritage. But planting 6 million thirsty trees in a semi-desert with a very delicate water balance cannot go without consequences.
The new trees drink around five times more than the total rainfall across the entire valley. The only way for this plan to succeed was to quickly use the groundwater reserves that had accumulated over millennia. The business model boils down to water robbery. Groundwater and surface flow levels in Rio de Aguas have declined rapidly since the planting of the first half million trees. The ecosystem began to resemble the nearby Tabernas desert. “Bulldoze, poison, pierce, suck water and harvest the crop. That’s the summary of the business model,” David says, visibly upset. The over-exploitation of the aquifer is already causing a new exodus, with populations of nearby villages collapsing quickly.
To my surprise, David quickly regains his calm. “I don’t believe in bad people and bad intentions, I don’t condemn anyone. I can only assume that some people are not yet aware of what is happening”.
The story of Rio de Aguas fits a pattern that forest communities in Brazil, Cameroon or Indonesia will recognize. As usual, it is an unequal battle. David Dene:
In Andalusia, contracts are often given to friends and families, to companies closely linked to politicians. Threats from them to not complain are normal here. As a result, most people don’t want to be mentioned in any form of protest, not even in a petition They are afraid to fight the rich and powerful. But that’s exactly why you have to make it clear to this mafia that you are not alone in your protest and that there are thousands of people behind you.
David reminds me of the biblical story of young David in his battle against the mighty Goliath. In that story too, David was not alone. A large army was standing right behind him.
But how do you get a campaign rolling from a few pioneers to a mass movement?
We had some rain in 2012, so the situation with the water was a bit better. But 6 months later the river ran empty, as if someone had pulled the bath plug. I emailed pictures to Almeria University and in July 2014, Professor Jose Maria Calaforra confirmed what the villagers had long known. The new olive plantations are extremely harmful to Rio de Aguas.109 But as early as 2011, a report funded by the EU showed that our aquifer is overexploited by 330 percent.110 I started a campaign and 3 months later, the Facebook page, Ecocide in Rio de Aguas, counted 23,000 followers. We distributed 7000 leaflets, got local newspapers interested and received support from a global End Ecocide coalition of NGOs and experts. Legal support arrived from various countries. We have experienced that if you make a clear call for help worldwide, many people answer that call.
One organization that joined the fight was The Grupo Ecologista Mediterráneo, GEM or Group of Greens in the Mediterranean Region. They opened a criminal investigation into one specific part of the olive tree estate, which was planted without an environmental impact assessment. You don’t need to dig into the legalistic arguments to understand that this estate is more like an industrial activity than a traditional agricultural activity, and that the impact of this industrial activity on the water balance can and should be measured.
But how does David deal with all the destruction of this little paradise on earth he helped to create, on a personal level?
“It helps that I worked in Ecuador for a long time, where the situation is much worse. The leaders of the resistance there are incredibly brave and strong.” How true these words are became clear soon after our interview. José Isidro Tendetza Antun, one of the Ecuadorian friends of David and a leader of the Shuar, a group that opposed the Mirador mining project, was kidnapped on his way to the 2014 climate conference in Lima and tortured to death. David sees him as a martyr for the Ecuadorian Amazon, and for the Shuar population.
It’s great to see how the Shuar live in harmony with mother nature. They treat Pacha Mama like their mother. I do not see how I could feel depressed when I see how those people in Ecuador live, so respectful while under so much pressure. For me in my fight in Spain, it also helps that there is a strong sense of solidarity here in Rio de Aguas. I live in an international circle of friendship, trust and help, a circle that keeps fear at bay. Our whole campaign is about facts and awareness. It’s important to enjoy what we do. We are planning a music festival for 300 to 500 people because our resistance is like a party. We are going to enjoy the intensity of this experience of cooperation, at every step of the way.
India’s water millionaires
The state of the water table is often a good measure of the state of prosperity. This is the case in Rio de Aguas, but also in most of India. The small village of Hiware Bazar realized this very well, changed how it did things and as a result, its average income is now 20 times higher than 15 years ago. This is an example that shows what kind of prosperity is possible if we live in harmony with nature.
Hiware Bazar is located in the Indian state of Maharashtra. In 1995, more than 90 percent of all residents lived below the poverty line of less than one dollar a day and it was dependent on federal development programs. Twenty years later, it has no poor people. Their recipe for success has three ingredients: investing heavily in the local ecosystem, building a strong local and inclusive democracy, and focusing on a long-term vision. The three are inextricably linked. In a country with 4 very wet and 8 very dry months, you mainly need to find a way to keep the soil fertile and moist for as long as possible, fight erosion and floods and prevent water shortages. A series of very small earthen dams and reservoirs made by the villagers catch the water during the monsoon and avoid soil erosion during downpours. But the village council of Hiware Bazar did more: it decided to intervene wherever it noticed a threat to the water cycle. The village issued a ban on cutting trees, an obligation to replace channel irrigation with drip irrigation, a ban on water-intensive crops and, finally, the replacement of goats by cows. Goats pull up plants including their roots, causing more runoff erosion of soil that goes on to fill the reservoirs and threaten the whole system. The village argued that to succeed, you have to be holistic. So after intensive discussion they decided to invest their village’s 5-year federal development grant not in roads or schools but entirely on water management. This stimulated an immediate employment boom, with landless families given priority access to paid work. The decline of the water table was reversed and, as a result, the grasses flourished and fodder yields for livestock soared by a factor of 60 between 2000 and 2004.111
Agriculture and animal husbandry took such a positive turn that migration to the overcrowded Indian cities ceased. Now, each year the village council makes a water budget, one that cannot be written in red ink. It is clear to them that their wealth is gauged less by money, and more by the security of their biomass, soil and water resources. Ecological economists call the availability of these resources the GDP of the poor.
The people in Hiware Bazar and Rio de Aguas both understand that water is the basis of a good life. They know that environmental care is not a high-minded intellectual fad. They are the living proof that debunks the myth that you must first be rich before you can afford to care about the environment. According to this Western maxim, citizens must first meet their basic needs, whose definition can then be stretched to the extreme. But in Hiware Bazar, Rio de Aguas and so many other places, reality shows the opposite: citizens must first have a healthy ecosystem. In their peer reviewed article Is India too poor to be green?, Leah Temper and Professor Joan Martinez Alier take apart the idea that environmental care is only for the rich.112 They show that the West did not clean up its act. It merely exported the polluting production of its goods to countries like India. Martinez Alier is also the author of the book Environmentalism of the poor: a heavily underestimated area in the environmental movement, especially in the richer countries. While the poor usually don’t frame their actions as environmental, the health of our planetary ecosystems depends a whole lot more on their successes than on the environmentalism of the mining CEO who switches from a Hummer to a Tesla car.
In 2006, I spent a few months in Indian villages in the state of Chhattisgarh, where I examined micro-credit systems controlled by women’s groups. After talking with hundreds of villagers a certain pattern emerged: most of these women were sensible long-term thinkers, loved engaging in cooperation and managed the scarcely available raw materials in the most sustainable way possible. Too often they were just not allowed to implement their ideas – usually by a group of male short-term capitalists with more resources and better political connections. These women did not need anyone to deliver to them “development” from some external source, they needed more of an opportunity to do what they do well. They needed access to resources like water. I recall how a group of women told me about their fight to manage a fishery in some local ponds – involving a stick fight by dozens of angry women against some wanna-be outside businessman that had set his eyes on the same village pond. The women won the stick fight, got rich from selling the fish and the village was flourishing because of their micro-business.
Amartya Sen would say the unfreedoms of caste and gender should be broken. A local NGO that brought the women together in small saving groups could help to do that. No patriarch could stop them once a level of confidence had been reached in the group. But however far sighted they may be, the sad reality is that sustainable ecological management in villages around the world is increasingly threatened by global forces and the mega projects that come with it: large dams, mines, factories and plantations. These trends have come to light in recent decades as capitalism has expanded. The West’s “green consumption” is not always helping; on the contrary, because in the unconscious mind of too many green consumers the conclusion will be that they have bought off any feelings of guilt or care for the bigger injustice of the system of unequal ecological exchange they still benefit from, at the cost of others. If there is no global democratic correction to this destructive process, can we expect undemocratic forms of reaction to gain more ground? Is it not naive to assume that we can continue to benefit from the wholesale plundering of others without any consequences?
Europe is like an adolescent in their thirties still living comfortably in Hotel Mom and Dad. The parents still make their spoiled kid’s food and clean up their rubbish, but are growing quit e literally sick and tired of doing so.
What I learned about water in Pakistan
After Hiware Bazar and Rio de Aguas, I am ending this journey along water’s frontlines at Borith Lake. This little lake is in Pakistan, a country that lives in a tense standoff with its neighbor, India. With one and a half billion inhabitants in need of water, it has not escaped political notice. When tensions between the two countries rose again in the fall of 2016, India’s Prime Minister Modi weaponized water (again) by threatening to divert the one key river flowing from India into Pakistan. After Egypt, no other country in the world is so dependent on one river as Pakistan, a river that has its source in the lands of its arch enemy. The Indus is a lifeline, a miracle and a key origin of our civilization. From space, you can recognize the Indus as a long blue and green snake winding itself through otherwise brown desert. So if Modi says he will divert the Indus, he is brandishing something worse than a nuclear warhead.
In the spring of 2008, I traveled along this Indus, on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. I was on honeymoon and the trip rarely felt dangerous. But on this stretch we grew scared. It had nothing to do with religion, Taliban or bombs. At the time, Pakistani Kashmir was still relatively free from these troubles, but sadly not free from water and climate change troubles.
Above Karimabad the Ultar glacier sends its meltwater through a narrow gorge. The only way through is to follow narrow irrigation channels built into the vertical cliffs on either side of the canyon. This is not the trip for anyone suffering from vertigo. A squat wall channels water along a cresting canyon wall. On the other side is a sheer drop into the abyss. According to the locals, more than 100 people have died while maintaining this channel. Yet it is essential to keeping Karimabad the oasis it has been for centuries.
Scoping out the perilous route ahead of us, we come across a man armed with bags of sand and a shovel. He succeeds in sealing a leak and then rushes to the next. For us, covering this stretch is a personal choice and a bit of an adventure (although more than we asked for). But for the Kashmiri living here, it is a matter of life or death for the community. A few days later and a little further downstream, we see at Borith Lake what happens when an oasis community in a mountain desert is cut off from the glacial meltwaters. A canal and fields lie dry and idle. We learn that nine families had to abandon the area after the canal ran dry. Despite daily efforts to keep the waters flowing, they simply could not catch up with the rate of melting and thus the ever-changing position of the entry point of the channel.113 The Himalayan mountains are warming three times faster than the world average. When the channel is not fed with water, the people are not fed with food and flee. Yet it had all looked so promising on the billboard next to the lake. A map shows a new village with 125 pieces of land, canals, a school, a medical post, a playground and so on. Pakistan invests a lot of money in Kashmir, but not enough to reckon with climate change. This cruel fact would become even more apparent when the Indus flooded in 2010. This was a flood beyond our normal understanding of the word. A total of 20 million people were affected – almost twice the population of Belgium, $44 billion of damage was caused in what is a poor country. And of course much of that year’s harvest was destroyed. Climate scientists later linked this epic disaster to climate change.114
The odd silver lining of this mega flood was that the dying Indus Delta finally received some water again. In recent decades, it has dried out as all the water of the Indus was used before the mighty river reached the sea. In their period as colonial masters of the Indian subcontinent, the British laid 100,000 kilometers of irrigation channels around the country, much of it around the Indus. The waters nurtured cereals, as well as cotton for the British textile industry. Britain imported significant amounts of Indian cotton between 1815 and 1900.115 Pakistan inherited this vast infrastructure, but also a fast-growing population to feed. By using so much water for cotton and food production, the Indus Delta dried up, which drove hundreds of thousands out of the delta and into urban slums. In the 1990s, Karachi became the fastest growing city in the world. Karachi swelled to 10 million inhabitants as environmental refugees flocked to the city, an exodus documented in Fred Pearce’s book When the rivers run dry. These lawless slums became a breeding ground for Al Qaeda. Water is life and a lack of it leads to war in short order. Another example is the recent Syrian war. Its originals can be traced to the worst drought in the history of the country, a disaster that saw millions flow to urban slums, but precious little support came from the country’s leadership. This happened right before the Arab Spring and the arrival of Islamic fighters – who found a fertile recruiting ground among the millions driven to despair. War and water are connected by bright red lines. Pulitzer prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman has analyzed the links, which have been recognized by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.
One of the things I learn from all this is that between water shortages and ecocide or even war is a strong community. But in my experience, that is also no guarantee for success. When the ongoing climate breakdown wreaks havoc, even a model village can be swept away in minutes. The world no longer consists of a series of oases like Karimabad. In my book Nepal, New pathways in the Himalayas, I highlight the growing number of ticking time bombs climate change has created in the Himalayas. Growing glacial lakes there will one day swell to bursting point with meltwater driven by climate change, disasters that will sweep villages and fields downstream. In some valleys, as I learned while walking thousands of kilometers through the Himalayas, that has already happened. The most resilient of communities are no match for a tsunami. And that’s why I’m convinced that resistance to the causes of disruption need to be both small and big: change needs to happen both at the local and the global level.
Soil: When the ground beneath our feet disappears
By sheer weight, humanity consumes ten times more earth materials now than it did a century ago. Exports have multiplied twelvefold, a faster rate than the economy as a whole.116 Transporting such a massive amount of goods from one world region to another has led to some serious exploitation. Columbus and King Leopold were small beer compared to what is taken from others today. Stocks of essential but finite resources are dwindling. Who still believes that most trade transactions are fair, that information is evenly distributed and that the price of a product corresponds to the true cost of production, warts and all?
The number of states declaring war on each other seems to reach historical lows, but conflicts for scarce commodities have increased. Depletion of soil, water and biomass in the tropics happens under the guise of development aid. While that doesn’t fit in the standard definition of war, it is a global attack on the ecosystems we depend on – in true Shock and Awe style. The white man’s burden tries to transform this attack into some benevolent act and the labels greenwash ecocides. In reality, all these processes together form an unparalleled net transfer of biomass from non-industrialized to industrialized countries. This is not an opinion or ideological point of view, but a calculation. Andreas Mayer and Willi Haas, to name just two, quantified the material flows on earth by looking at everything that has weight and is traded: raw materials, fuels, biomass etc. They concluded that from 1950 to 2010, North America, Europe and China used significantly more resources than they extracted from their own environments.117
There’s a pattern emerging. Industrial tree plantations mainly robbed the global south of water and smashed its biodiversity to meet demand in the global north.118 It is an identical story for food. The Patterns of global biomass trade report states that almost all new agricultural land since 1986 has been for food exports.119 Trade in agricultural products has grown three times faster than agricultural production itself. This despite the fact that yields have grown rapidly, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. If we eat much more than we did in 1950, it is not because we produce more in Europe, but because our farms have sprawled into other parts of the world, flattening forests and churning up landscapes. Today, 40 percent of the food that Europeans eat comes from a non-European soil.120 No other continent has grown so dependent on food imports.
The result is a form of imperialism, as I have already flagged. But besides that, there is a more chilling consequence still. Nature cannot keep up with demand. Consumption of food, wood and fuel has doubled in the last century. The human appropriation of net primary production – so of all biomass that nature makes – went from 13 to 25 percent.121 By the middle of the twenty-first century, humans could take 44 percent before any other living being can take it, if we continue to invest in biofuels. If we undercut the material needs of other lifeforms on this planet, you would expect a decline in those species. That is exactly what is happening. Scientists speak of a sixth mass extinction of all life on earth. We are literally gobbling up the food of all the other animals, like a swarm of hedgehogs taking the cat’s food while the cat stands by, watching and hoping something will be left for him. What scientists also say is that once a certain threshold of taking the food from other animals is exceeded, the food chain rapidly collapses, with severe to deathly consequences from the smallest amoeba to the top predator. During the fifth mass extinction, the top dog was the T-Rex. Now, at the sixth, it is us.
Flemish people are increasingly hungry. They now buy 2.8 kilos of food each day, and rising.122 Yet half of it is not eaten. This is partly due to losses in the long chain from some far away farmer to the local supermarket. But it is also because we throw away more than 89 kilos of food a year. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it is only 25 kilos per year.123 Tristram Stuart explains in his TED lecture how “The global food waste scandal” came about: in the ever-lengthening chain from field to fork, inefficiencies arise, he explains. Flemish people really depend on food imports. Without imports, Flemish stomachs would moan and groan like an emptying sink. Should the transfers to Flanders stop on some black Monday, a run on the supermarkets would occur. In normal circumstances, a supermarket would be empty in a few days, but during a panic it will be emptied in a few hours. Hard to imagine, but there would be food riots. But with agricultural area falling in Flanders and food consumption still rising, the dependency continues to grow.
Popular ignorance is occasionally illustrated and even encouraged in the media. An op-ed by farming syndicate leader Hendrik Vandamme explained why he is sticking to his diet of delicious Belgian steak. Climate activists are urban hipsters, he railed before applauding Belgian farmers for applying the circular economy. He neglected to mention that half the country’s cattle feed is foreign and not rarely comes from where a part of the Amazon rainforest used to be.124
Climate change has nothing to do with being “hip”. It is outrageous that the Trump administration is censoring the use of the words climate change in relation to agriculture. The conservative IPCC is unambiguous about our climate challenge. If nothing is done, this century we will see an implosion of agriculture. And because the IPCC lags behind the facts for political reasons, it is much more likely that this will happen before the middle of this century. And it’s not just crops that need time to adapt to a changing climate. “Some people say we can adapt with the help of technology. But that’s a belief system, it’s not based on facts. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal with a body temperature of 37°C will be able to evolve so rapidly. Insects can do that, but not people.” I quote Professor Will Steffen, the lead author of two studies on planetary ecosystem boundaries.125 In fact, dozens of scientists worked on Steffen’s studies for 5 years, and Steffen was allowed to present them to the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Seven times, no less. His groundbreaking study published in Science says that we are breaking the limits of what the ecosystems we as humans depend on can cope with at four levels: climate change, biodiversity, biochemical flows and land use change.126 In these four domains, we have already strayed dangerously out of the safe zone.
According to the Food and Agriculture organization, our farmland is good for another 60 years.127 The number 60 cropped up again when researchers looked at the intensification of agriculture in the last century. Soil erosion has accelerated 60-fold.128 Only a generation ignorant of scarcity could be comfortable with the sword of Damocles hovering over our heads. When push comes to shove, mankind is little more than an upright chimp nurtured by a thin atmosphere above and an even thinner band of soil beneath. It needs both.
There is a report with a long but relevant title: Wake up before it’s too late. Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate. I will sum it up in one sentence: “Small farms are the only way to feed the world.”129 The authors are not pastoralists with goat-wool socks, but a committee of scientists brought together by the UN’s Trade and Development Agency. Another study showed that people who work small vegetable gardens produce four to 11 times more food per hectare than large-scale farmers.130 Monsanto and the Farmer’s Syndicate want us to believe that only genetically modified crops and large-scale agriculture will drive hunger out of the world. The reverse is true: these methods cause land grabbing and soil depletion, making poor people go hungry. I learned how small farms are the future, by joining one.
Common sense farming
Tom Troonbeeckx is a farmer who occasionally mingles with top level CEOs, at home and abroad, to explain his miracle farm. His story has inspired thousands. At first, Tom did not see any future in farming: “Starting a normal agro-company requires too high an investment and too high risks.” But a cycling tour through Eastern Europe aroused his love of growing food to levels that made him think outside of the box. “In Hungary and Romania, there is still an agricultural culture, unlike the cultural desert created by the rise of industrial agriculture.” During Tom’s bio-farm studies, a visit to a special farm in the Netherlands inspired him.
Tom: “I have a green-minded mother and a businessman as a father. The perfect genetic pool to start a biological farm.” Tom started by buying a small old cherry orchard in Belgium with a piece of land next to it. The Open Field became Belgium’s first Community Supported Agriculture farm or CSA farm. Participants, numbering 50 at first, paid Tom once a year for a share of his produce, which the members harvest themselves.
Tom’s one-man business soon ramped up to 320 clients and a long waiting list. Other CSAs started to emerge, clearly inspired by Tom. Around the provincial city of Leuven there are already five such outfits and over 40 in Belgium.
Tom feeds 320 people with his 1.5 hectares of fertile soil. The risks of poor harvest are spread across all participants, making farming less risky. But the participants also win a lot. They can harvest over 100 different vegetables. There are no tomatoes year-round, but once the tomato season is there, you will find up to ten varieties, from red to yellow. And yes, you can taste the difference with the tomatoes from the supermarket. Everything is organic and as fresh as it is possible to be. There will be no fossil fuel for transport, cooling or for plastic packaging. There is no parking for cars, so people come on foot or by bike.
Compare this to the four barrels of oil per year that the average citizen needs to deliver him his food and drink. That is what it takes to fuel and make agricultural machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, packaging, truck cooling, supermarket heating, the plastic of shopping carts and finally the drive home. Now imagine a world where that fuel no longer exists.
Tom stores more carbon in the ground than he and his 320 customers emit, thanks to his cultivation method. He also maintains seed diversity by adding some old and almost extinct local crops to the mix. That is not unimportant when you consider that between 1903 and 1983, 93 percent of seed species were abandoned and lost forever, thanks to our changing buying habits.131
But there is more. The Open Field is not only an ecological, but also a social and democratic project. On that front, we can choose our contribution to this sweet deal within a price fork, and with an average contribution needed to run the farm as a guideline. Tom leaves it to us to consider if we find ourselves below average, average or above average earners. So we decide how much we pay for his work. This is so hard to fathom that I’ve had to confirm to the editors of this book that this really is the case. In addition, members of the farm decide about Tom’s income and the farm’s main policies. His income depends on how happy his customers are, people he meets on a daily basis. Compare this to farmers dealing with big supermarket chains who rarely give a hoot.
On the social side: Tom also works with school drop-outs, kids in need of time-out from the formal education system. For them, it is a chance to be outside working with their hands, away from the pressure and the high expectations that society imposes on them. And then there are the memorable evenings during the three annual festivities with delicious local food, music, a campfire and a harvest that money cannot buy: a sense of community.
Like in Hiware Bazar, the key is to think long-term, ecologically holistic and about community building. It is a total revolution in the raw material, transport, production, consumption to waste lifecycle, a revolution that goes miles beyond the exotic vegetables with organic labels that you can buy in a plastic bag in a supermarket.
This best practice is a welcome relief from all the bad news in this chapter, so allow me to wax on. Tom also keeps bees. Mainly to nail the pollination of his fruit and veg, but also for the delicious honey. A few sheep and cows provide necessary grazing and fertilizing. Rainwater is harvested for a modest scale irrigation system. The Open Field is a vibrant, local circular economy. If the world economy suffered a heart attack tomorrow, it would have little effect on the healthy food supply of the 320 people who eat from a 1.5-hectare plot within cycling distance of their homes.
Tom is particularly fond of the transparency and directness of his food chain; meeting the people that eat as a result of his hard work. “It’s really encouraging to hear a nice story from time to time, for example from someone who says that his children are eating vegetables now that they come from this field. If you work for the supermarket chains, they will never give an encouraging word and will only want to get the price down.”
This short food chain had another advantage. I became a member when my first daughter turned 2. That is just old enough for strawberries and raspberries to follow the shortest chain possible: plant to mouth. By the time she turned 5, Flora understood that something was wrong with kids-TV-star-branded strawberries shipped in plastic tubs to supermarkets in the middle of January. Tom’s farm is sometimes cold and wet, but for our family it has become something of a spiritual place. Our weekly visits feel like a mini-pilgrimage. Whenever I return, I feel blessed and light on my feet. I can imagine experiencing emotions similar to many Sunday church goers.
Here’s one last thing to consider regarding CSA farms. On 15 September 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went bust, bankers made frantic calls to their wives instructing them to drop everything and stock up on supermarket supplies. No joke. Joris Luyendijk recorded several such confessions by London bankers who were convinced supply chains would grind to a halt within hours.
In 40 or 60 years we may well experience a crash in industrial agriculture, brought down by a lack of oil and soil. But long before that, the risk of an acute shock to the system increases daily from unfettered capitalism based on a fragile financial system. In these conditions, the smartest thing to do is to jump on the CSA bandwagon before such a crash happens.
How we take what the earth gives us
From Au (gold) to Zn (zinc) and from tree to soil, Part I was about what we as humanity take from the earth. We not only take more than we need, we take more than we can afford. Consumption of what we take rises way faster than population. The “we” in all this hides much more complex and worrying class division trends, as well as historic geographical shifts. Always more violence seems to accompany the unaffordable part of extraction, from underground chemical warfare to squeeze gas out of the earth to above ground warfare against earth defenders. The inequality and injustice we are creating are both growing and ever more hidden from view, especially for those on the pampered end that are shielded from reality by phony ethical labels. In cartoons, the EU is oft portrayed as a fragile lady upholding justice but through my journey I found that outside the EU she’s not that different from the American eagle or Donald Trump. She grabs uranium in Niger to fuel French and Belgian nuclear power plants, destroys Indonesia for our shampoo and chocolates or chops trees in the Amazon to fire EU stoves. The EU is acting more like a bitch than a lady.
This uncomfortable reality of modern existence is usually hidden from us and when some of it makes the news, blame is quickly shifted to others – often the victims themselves. But exporting pollution to “under-polluted” countries and grabbing their resources on scales never seen before is the bedrock of the economic “success” of the post-war period.
Outside this reality there is a parallel universe that is also too little known. People like Bruno, Julio, Alexandru, Roger, Sumaira, David, Tom and millions of others are very busy resisting and forging alternatives. They are busy with building a future where organized citizens win power back at the cost of private companies and states. This is often referred to as the commons economy. On top of that, I see a degree of cooperation emerging between previously isolated small groups of earth defenders. They form a brand-new kind of multinational, international groups of resistance. Some political scientists are calling this the global movement for environmental justice.
Both the stories of destruction and those of positive alternatives are hidden but real and valuable. If you only look at the destructive story, you risk a point of total inaction, lethargy, cynicism or depression. If you focus only on the nice but small alternatives to run-away capitalism, a naive bliss will take hold of you. That may look like the most attractive choice, but given the urgency to change ways, we simply can’t afford too many people doing that.
The choice is not black or white. A bit of schizophrenia seems necessary. Not just for understanding the world but also for looking at your own life. Most days I will eat a banana or something with chocolate from Africa. I probably use some palm oil from Indonesia now and then and coffee from God knows where, but certainly not nearby. My office printer runs on FSC paper. I use uranium imported from Niger, transformed by nuclear power plants into the electricity that powers my train. I have made more flights in my life than a fair share would allow me to. Call me a hypocrite, but I can and will not shut my mouth about our unsustainable existence. If only the Gandhis and modern hermits have the right to speak about our environmental problems, it is gonna be damn quiet on our collective walk towards the abyss.
These contradictions will not surprise the psychologists among us. They know that behavior and knowledge are miles apart. Harald Welzer wrote fascinating things about mass psychology, both about Holocaust denial by Germans in its midst, and the popular denial of a climate breakdown and the sixth mass extinction happening all around us in the present day. According to Welzer, it is totally absurd to think that people’s thinking and actions align:
Ninety-five percent of what we do is also embedded in the infrastructure of our daily habits and routines. We do not think about it anymore. There are not always the circumstances to behave in accordance with our conviction because we have several functions to fulfill. I have to answer different requirements for my profession, others for my family and still others for my relaxation.
I am with Welzer in believing that if we want a truly big change, we cannot just count on educating people with knowledge. If that only impacts 5 percent of what we do, it’s just not effective enough.
That said, knowledge needs to get people to actions and solutions. It should be seen as a starting point, a means to an end. Avoiding denial and keeping our eyes and ears open to unpleasant truths is a mental battle that is probably easier to take if you also know some of the solutions to the many environmental problems. It’s for that reason that I’ll end this book with solutions. But maybe more important than being open to knowledge is being open to new experiences. Knowledge is surface level stuff for our brains, while strong emotions get deeper. Experiences often stir those deeper emotions, which are much more capable of bringing about change. So when I am asked, in a lecture or by readers, what they can do, I usually answer by telling them to just DO something. Do something you feel strongly about. Get a ball rolling. Or a spool. I once rolled a wooden spool two meters in diameter through the streets of Leuven. It was just rotting away on the pavement. Countless times I cycled passed it, thinking how it could be a great garden table. In the end I did not make a calculation about how many trees I was saving from the axe, I just jumped the mental hurdle of rolling the spool through the streets. The knowledge made me act but only the emotions kept the spool rolling. This turned out to be fun not just for me, but for those smiling at me as I passed them by. As David Dene said: “We’re going to fight and we’re going to enjoy every single step of it.”
Resisting the destructive forces of capitalism and consumerism starts with a mental leap that anyone can make. Leap over the oppressive harness of societal norms. In the end, your biggest enemy is that part of your own brain that keeps you from taking bold actions for the greater good. We all need to leap over that fence in our mind. That is what the mothers from Greece to Balcombe did, what one Romanian antiquarian did or what I did by penning a simple email to my bank. Just start somewhere. The more people discover how exciting, fun and liberating it is to participate in this great transition, the more everything will snowball. History is knocking on the door. Will you open?