At least half of the large-scale infrastructure projects being proposed today are a bad idea, argues a leading scientist who has spent nearly forty years studying building around the world.

“And when I say ‘bad’, I don’t just mean bad for the environment,” says Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance from James Cook University in Australia. “I mean bad for economies, bad for societies, and bad for project investors.”

Professor Laurance has summarised decades of research on the costs and benefits of big infrastructure projects – such as major highways, railroads, hydropower dams and industrial mines – in an article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Just plain foolish

“It’s vital to understand the realities because we’re living in the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history,” said Laurance.

“Most new infrastructure projects are occurring in developing nations, which direly need smart development and investment. But many proposed projects are just plain foolish.

“For starters, widespread corruption completely distorts things. Projects that should never proceed get approved because government decision-makers are being paid off by project proponents.

“And the economic benefits of big projects are often grossly unfair—a few power brokers and their cronies are becoming fabulously wealthy, while most people see little benefit or even fall behind. That’s not smart development.”

He added: “In environmental terms, we’re seeing new projects tear into the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet.

Hidden risks

“For example, in parts of the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, our research team is seeing Chinese-backed roads, dams, and mines happening in places that no rational investor should be touching.

“Investors assume they understand the risks and rewards of big projects. But far too often there are shoals of hidden risks, and projects that sound highly promising can turn into shipwrecks.

He concluded: “Just look around. You see big projects failing all the time. Nations are incurring big debts, investors are losing money, the environmental damage is appalling, and most of all, the average person isn’t getting ahead.

“The vital thing is to slow down the big projects. Delay them so there’s time for vital information to be disclosed and the public to debate the merits of each project.

“When the public understands what’s happening—what’s really happening—you’ll see a lot of bad projects disappear.”

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from James Cook University, Australia. 

A huge motive for the systems approach is to explain why our social structures go wrong: systems we’ve created, but which turn against us.

This is nowhere more evident than with international politics and economics, which have caused so much damage, to environment and society alike. Understandably, we aspire to order and stability…but not in some form which entrenches injustice.

Over recent decades, we’ve grown accustomed to a certain world order, which today is suddenly challenged – from multiple, maybe contradictory directions. 

Exploitation of nature

We’re entering unfamiliar territory, which opens up many possibilities – some bad, but others potentially good.  We need to understand Trump, the EU, the rise of Asia, what all this signifies, and how we might transition to a just and sustainable world.

So let’s explore some tools from systems theory.

Here, I specially want to emphasise the hidden ecological dimension which underpins all issues of international order/disorder.

Both nationalism and liberalism typically fail to recognise this – but if we take this into consideration we may find a way through the impasse.

Game theory offers an interesting insight into the – often unintended – logic unleashed by our decisions. Each strategy attracts rewards, called ‘payoffs’. What the theory usually fails to articulate is how the payoffs are funded by the exploitation of nature, we’ll return to this in a moment.

Improved efficiency

A purely competitive situation is called ‘zero-sum’.  One side gains exactly what the other loses (+1-1=0).  An example is the ‘mercantilist’ policy, which prevailed under nascent capitalism  during the 16th-18th centuries.

Governments strove for a trade surplus at all costs.  Logically, it’s not possible for everyone to achieve this at the same time – so the result is to unleash a highly conflictual politics.

The founders of liberal theory sought a way to avoid this. Their goal was laudible: to replace all-out nationalism/conflict with tolerance and cosmopolitanism.

If only you could show that co-operation is a win-win situation, unlike zero-sum, which is win-lose. Early 19th-century economist David Ricardo believed he’d solved this problem. 

Free trade generates an ‘extra’ value, derived from the improved efficiency when each country specialises in producing what it ‘does best’, rather than vainly seeking to produce everything. He called this comparative advantage.

Someone’s anvil

But this goal was hard to attain in practice. The reason is explored through another insight from game theory: the prisoners’ dilemma (PD): although a co-operative strategy would objectively benefit all parties, it’s generally too dangerous for one party to be first to implement it.

The system therefore remains locked in a bad equilibrium which benefits no-one, but is extremely hard to escape. Accordingly, right through the 19th century and first half of the 20th, capitalist countries remained competitive, economically and militarily.

Around the turn of 19th -20th centuries, there occurred a major phase-change: the advent of what’s known as imperialism, part of which was a feverish colonial expansion.

Most obviously, this seemed to augur even more intense competition. A quote from Goethe, popular with early imperialists, nicely depicts both the zero-sum situation and the PD: ‘Be hammer or anvil’.

You either do the bashing, or you get bashed. Goethe wasn’t advocating this, he just found a poetic way to express it! You may not relish hammering others, but it’s the only way to avoid being someone else’s anvil.

International game

The Malthusian interpretation of ‘limits’ perfectly fits this argument, depicting a resource ‘pot’ whose size is constant.

Funnily enough, the early imperialists – from around 1900 – thought in quite an ecological way. One of them,  Halford Mackinder, spoke of “human history as part of the life of the world organism,” within which “nature in large measure controls”.

They respected nature’s limits…as an incentive to grab those finite resources for themselves!

Predictions of intensified conflict were confirmed by two World Wars. Nonetheless, Ricardo’s promise of escaping the zero-sum trap remained tempting.

But to achieve this, it seemed, the ‘pot’ for the international game must no longer be finite: it would need to grow. This is actually one of the main incentives for economic ‘growth’.

So let’s consider – what would be the source of the enlarged pot?

Joint hegemony

Supposedly, the greater efficiency of specialisation under conditions of free trade. But actually – I would say –  it is the intensified plunder of nature. We can see this in two ways:

First, economically. The Ricardian model liquidates any localism and self-sufficiency: it implies an extreme alienation and loss of place, destruction of natural commons and of all the ways in which societies traditionally stewarded resources and shielded them from unbridled depletion.

And there’s social depletion too, because you’d be wiping out whole communities and cultures which grew up around particular productive traditions.

Added to this, is the immense environmental cost of transportation, if balanced economies are dismantled and everyone has to import everything.

Second, politically. If imperialist states could co-operate instead of fighting each other, they could exploit the global South – and its resources – more intensively through a kind of joint hegemony.

Ultimate enforcement

The advent of such a collective dominance was anticipated by one of the most astonishing contributions to the critique of imperialism, from around 1900: the work of J.A. Hobson.

Hobson predicted the advent of a parasitic alliance/federation of the Western States to control a world order in which semi-colonial countries performed the labour and imperialists reaped the benefits.

This order was effectively realised post-World War II, when the North/West gradually – via the Bretton Woods system – introduced free trade, leading eventually to full-scale globalisation from the 1980s onwards.

Although there’s nothing wrong with trade if it’s really free, globalisation actually meant something altogether different: privatising commons and public goods – such as water – so they could be bought by global conglomerates, privatising ideas – ‘intellectual property’ – with the same result, getting the South to pursue a phoney comparative advantage in poor working conditions and lax environmental rules.

This takes us to the tragedy of Obama.  The only way he could imagine to preserve the cosmopolitan project, was a fuite en avant toward the ultimate enforcement of open world economy.

Food sovereignty

The nightmare result is seen in treaties like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), negotiated secretly with Europe, which would virtually outlaw any local defence against the corporate plunder of nature.

In this way, the good face of socio-political liberalism had become so much subordinated to market fundamentalism, and the enslavement of the globe to the parasitic Western federation, that progressives couldn’t really defend it.  Hence the backlash: Trump, exclusion, xenophobia in Europe.

Our task today is to rescue tolerance and cosmopolitanism from this debacle, and establish them on a new basis. Luckily, such a basis exists in social movements.

An example could be grassroots campaigns for ‘food sovereignty’ which, while not a finished concept, open up a fascinating debate.

Alternative pathway

This is interrogating sovereignty in new ways, and is no longer about exclusionist nationalism or dominating nature within a national territory. Rather, it is about autonomy and a rediscovered, non-exclusionary, localism. 

From the narrow standpoint of economic liberalism, it’s hard to find any escape from conflict over scarce resources, other than an inexhaustible environmental ‘pot’.

But if we transcend this, the way forward becomes clear: commons approaches to stewarding and preserving nature – rather than depleting it – unleash an abundant free energy which opens up an alternative pathway to win-win solutions.

This Author

Dr Robert Biel teaches political ecology at University College London and is the author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. He specialises in international political economy, systems theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture.

Vartan Melkonian was taken to the Lebanon by his refugee parents.  His mother died until he was eight and he was taken to the Birds’ Nest Orphanage. From there he was subjected to living rough in the slums of Beirut.

“I can only look at it dispassionately from an adult point of view now,” Vartan told The Ecologist. “At that age, you accept it is your life. You are constantly on the lookout for the authorities, but that seemed normal then. You make decisions crucial to your own existence.”

Life as a child on the streets was an everyday struggle for Vartan. What may be seen as beautiful moments for most, were times of worry for him.

Musical beginnings

“People take moments of pleasure by looking at the sunset. For us, for me, it was the worst time of the day, there was nowhere to go.

“We, the children of the streets, were often chased away with sticks and stones, even by the police, so we were not seen on the street, as if we were some sort of living plague.”

Vartan taught the other street boys how to harmonise in order to raise money by busking. Later, he moved from job to job working as an illegal fisherman, and then becoming a mechanic. When he fled the civil war in Lebanon in 1972, Vartan’s life changed.

“When I was in Lebanon I used to play the guitar, and I thought I was really good. Arriving in the UK in the early 70s, I went to Kings Cross Station and I saw a busker playing the guitar and my eyes widened. I thought ‘I know nothing!’ It was like being born again at the age of 26.”

He added: “My first experience of the UK was overwhelming; it was like entering into a heaven.”

Real struggle

Vartan’s musical beginnings from teaching harmony and playing the guitar stood him in good stead, and from being entirely self-taught, he went on to become a singer and producer in the West End. 

It was when he wrote a symphony that was eventually performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that his life changed for good.

Since that moment he has gone on to conduct all over the world in some of the grandest music halls.

Aside from this huge achievement, he has also became a spokesman for the UN, working as a humanitarian ambassador for street children.

He said: “I feel sorry for people who have not lived on the street and found food in the rubbish bins, and cooked spiders legs on the beach and experienced that struggle.

“That’s when you really appreciate what you have. Then every day I feel it’s a blessing, we are guests and we have to behave like guests. I am very grateful and I ask others to be grateful.

Investing in children

“I look with wonder at my own children and the way they come back from school and throw their back packs down on the floor and ask ‘what’s for dinner?’ Being a child on the streets really impacts your life, but it gives me great pleasure to see my children having such comforts.

“Children are like money. Money has no power to do bad or evil on its own. It cannot be bad or good, only the authorities have that choice to use it for bad or good. Children are not to be seen as trouble, but as future investments.

“They have as much potential as anyone else. It’s up to authorities to use it.”

Vartan doesn’t bat an eyelid when he’s rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Clooney and the Prince of Wales because, he said, when you have nothing, that’s when your imagination is at its greatest.

Proud of his past

“When you don’t have things, your imagination flourishes and when you achieve something, you’ve already lived it. For me, I’d already experienced the marble staircases of palaces in my dreams.

“Street children have lived in a different world than those in a sheltered life and I am so grateful to have lived on the streets.”

Now Vartan can look back and be proud of where he came from, and spread the message that orphans and refugees are to be nurtured.

He said: “When my daughter was about six years old, we were driving in the car with her friend. The friend said to her, ‘my daddy’s in the Army’. To which my daughter said proudly, ‘my daddy’s an orphan’.”

This Author

Laura Briggs is a freelance reporter. She tweets @WordsbyBriggs. Find out more about World Refugee Day.

The most important thing you need to run successful social media accounts is to keep learning from what you do. Measure the results your content gets and draw lessons from it.

Look back at your objectives. Are you getting what you wanted? Welcome to Part 3 of The Ecologist social media guide…

Read Part 1 right here and Part 2 here.

4. Measure, learn and refine

If you want to put thousands of user comments on a politician’s Facebook page, but your content is only getting you ‘likes’, it’s a good indication that you’re doing something wrong. And pick yourself up, it happens.

The key to success isn’t to get everything right from the start, but rather to keep a testing, experimental attitude. “I mainly learn through doing,” says the person who asked to remain anonymous. “A lot of social media is trialling what works. Testing things is important, it allows you to learn what works for your audience.”

Tweak algorithms

Test different ideas, words, formats and track how they perform, for example through link tracking. Then look at hits and misses, and draw conclusions about what is working and why. And if you’ve got any doubts about a post, test those too! 

When we did the New Internationalist’s CSO campaign, we thought our readers would like the endorsement we received from Billy Bragg.

Within a few seconds of us posting the picture with Bragg’s endorsement, somebody commented with a picture: two champagne glasses and a communist flag. Not ideal to establish the credibility you need to raise money. Other endorsements brought back a little more, so we went with them.

Testing is an incredibly valuable process. It teaches you a huge amount about both your audience and the social network you’re on. Companies tweak algorithms constantly, and testing things is the only way you’ll find out about their changes.

5. Keep learning

There’s no way around learning the hard way – through testing. But also, learn from the best – listen to experts, read articles and keep an open mind about things. 

Here are some resources to get you started:

Act Build Change provides free training to people who want to ‘change lives’.
Blueprints for Change is an open library of ‘how-tos’ put together by campaign innovators. 
VideoRev provides tools and training to make viral videos for social change.
The 101 Most Useful Websites on the Internet.
The E-campaigning Forum is an email discussion group that includes some of the most successful people in the digital campaigning field.

This Author

Alessio Perrone is a freelance journalist and digital native.

“The biggest mistake we make when we create content is trying to make something for the general public,” says Richard Roaf, a filmmaker who specialises in viral videos, and runs the VideoRev project – which provides tools and training to make viral videos for social change.

Read Part 1 right here. 

This therefore, one more step before you create content: thinking about who will see it. Welcome to Part 2 of The Ecologist guide to social media…

2. Who is your audience?

Savvy social media users understand the people they want to reach: their interests, their worries and their hopes. Don’t despair: you don’t need market research or Cambridge Analytica tactics to find out a few things about them.

Tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics, together with looking up accounts similar to yours will already give you plenty of information.

How old is your audience? What people do they admire? Who else do they follow? What causes are they passionate about? What are their values and worldview? What do they hate?

Celebrity endorsements

It’s worth answering these on a piece of paper or document, as they will tell you a lot about the content you need to win them over. Importantly, they might also tell you where to find them. Instagram and Snapchat might be more popular than Facebook among under 30s, most UK journalists will be on Twitter, etc.

I was part of the team that raised over £500,000 in New Internationalist’s Community Share Offer. Before we produced content, some members of the team spent time to understand our readers.

The analysis drove decisions about our posts and about the celebrity endorsements we wanted. It also told us our readers would probably not be on Instagram or Snapchat. Some may be on Twitter, but most would be on Facebook – so we focused on it.

3. Tips for your content

Successful posts are short, clear and compelling. They tap into your audience’s values and give them a sense of empowerment.

“People are really busy, Facebook says they spend on average about 2-3 seconds looking at a piece of content before they move on,” says Richard Roaf. So make your posts succinct, striking and simple. Choose fresh images and words – or you’ll lose potential readers/watchers. “For videos, unless the first two seconds gives them a strong reason to watch, and peaks their curiosity, they’re not going to hang around,” Roaf says. 

Successful content also taps into your audience’s worldview and offers them something they value – it could be emotional value, new information, or a sense of empowerment. Michael Hamilton, Digital Communications Organiser at Safe Passage, says the latter is very powerful. “The key thing is make people feel that they really can make a difference,” he says.

Roaf agrees. “There are a lot of people who already care about your campaign and know about the issues. The job isn’t convincing people that there is a problem: if you tell them how they can act to solve it, that’s really powerful.” 

A good example is 5 Ways to Disrupt Racism, a video Roaf produced with a very tight budget after a rise in racially motivated incidents in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Instead of telling people about the incidents, the video gave them concrete tips on what they could do about it. It was watched over 30 million times.

Likeminded influencers

A viral post is not an end in itself – remember that it must also take you closer to your goals. For this, try explicitly asking readers to do something – eg share a post, sign up for a newsletter, or donate money, depending on your goal. As rudimental as it sounds, it works: if you’re targeting the right audience, they already know your campaign and support it. So your job is to facilitate their work. 

You do this by keeping your asks clear and succinct, too. Also, engage them with some motivation. For example, if you want people to share the video above, your post might read: “Share to change the narrative together”. In a fundraiser, you might say: “Join in: donate to make more videos like this.”

You won’t achieve your goals with one post, so brainstorm ideas and formats, and build a lot of content. Don’t worry about presenting the polished side of the campaign – social media is about authenticity. 

“[If you don’t have many resources], don’t waste your time making something that is very polished,” suggests Safe Passage’s Michael Hamilton. “People really engage with something that is authentic and current. Just focus on creating lots of content and being a bit rough and ready with it. People will engage with it.”

If you are short of resources to create lots of content, you can share somebody else’s, if it taps into your audience’s key values. And vice-versa, network with likeminded big accounts and influencers: asking them to share your best posts can grow your audience.

This Author

Alessio Perrone is a freelance journalist and digital native.

A new study into the effects of agrochemicals on bees across the UK and Europe is due to be carried out by a consortium of academics, governmental organisations, industry, and NGOs.

This will be the first study of its kind to incorporate the knowledge and experience of local beekeeping, farming organisations and academic researchers – including the EU RefLab for bee health – and will provide the first comprehensive pan-European assessment of the exposure hazard of chemicals.

Mark Brown, Professor in Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation at Royal Holloway will lead the research consortium, called POSHBEE. The team will study honey bees, bumble bees, and solitary bees, which all face declining around the globe. It has a grant of €9million.

Keeping bees healthy

The study will look at the mix of chemicals that bees are exposed to, as well as their co-occurrence with pathogens and nutritional stress for solitary, bumble, and honey bees across two major cropping systems.

Professor Brown said: “I’m very excited to be leading this new study, especially as it will examine many species of bee, from our well-known social honey bees to much less well-known, but equally vital solitary bees.

“With 42 partners working on POSHBEE across the UK and Europe, and with the help of experts from science to bee keepers and farmers, we aim to make ground-breaking findings and start to work on ways to keep bees healthy.

“We hope that by the end of the five year study we will have a good understanding of the threats that bees face, as well as a range of advice and tools for policy makers and practical bee keepers and conservation organisations that will keep our bees healthy into the future. After all, they are our best pollinators and are essential for our human well-being.”

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor to The Ecologist.  This story is based on a news release from Royal Holloway, University of London. For more information, follow the team on Twitter @poshbee_eu.

Social networks have become vectors of change, beyond what we used to fathom. A few years ago, we derided the lazy, trivial gestures we called them hashtag activism.
 
Today, social networks are being used to swing elections, spread awareness and crowdfund exciting projects – and not-so-exciting ones.

Digital campaigners

But their potential as motors of social progress is still untapped. Most progressive NGOs and campaigners keep a social media presence, but many have no clear idea of how to make the most of it.

According to the 2018 Global NGO Online Technology Report, 93 percent of NGOs were on Facebook, 77 percent on Twitter and 50 percent on Instagram. But only 32 percent had a written social media strategy.

Let’s fill that gap: The Ecologist interviewed people who work as digital campaigners to get some tips on how to use social media to promote social change. Here’s what they said.

1. Think, think, think

“There are many dangerous myths around social media: many think that if they’ve got a Twitter handle, their organization will have instant success,” a digital campaigning specialist who asked to remain anonymous said. “But that’s not how it works. Good use of social media is about what you want to achieve.”

Think of social media as tool to an end: before you do anything, stop for a moment and think about your goal. 

Four centuries ago, essayist Michel de Montaigne used to say: “No wind favours him who has no destined port”. It still holds true for social media today: having no clear objective will result in unfocussed work and untargeted posts – ultimately, a waste of time.

Broader campaign

So, set tangible goals. List them, as there may be more than one – eg reaching new audiences, targeting a politician to stop a dam, fundraising, etc. If you have many, prioritise them.

Make them concrete, something you can measure. Don’t say ‘Reach new audiences’, say ‘Increase my Facebook followers by 10 percent’. Don’t say ‘Target a politician to stop a dam’, say ‘Get 10,000 user comments on his/her Facebook page to change his mind on the dam’.

Don’t skip this step – it’s vital. Your social media goals aren’t just important for the role they play in your broader campaign; they also serve as a compass that tells you what is working for you and what isn’t. (See tip number 4.) And be realistic – an unachievable goal is as bad a compass as having no goals at all.

Next up – tomorrow – Who is your audience?

This Author

Alessio Perrone is a freelance journalist and digital native.

We, The Tomicks, played an anti fast fashion gig outside the Oxford Street branch of Primark in London this month: the protest was called #FckFastFashion and is just the beginning of a series of similar peaceful demonstrations against fast fashion retailers whose ethos undermines our beautiful planet and its people.

Our protest concerts will continue at 7pm on Thursday 21 June 2018 outside Topman by the Oxford Circus tube station in central London.

Why was the decision made to take to the streets of London to rally against this apparently unstoppable fashion phenomenon? It comes down to two key questions.

Child labour

Firstly, have fast fashion retailers actually improved conditions for their workers in the five years since the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh killing more than 1,000 and injuring over 2,000 clothing factory workers – have they eliminated child labour and ensured that everyone involved in their supply chain is paid a fair living wage?

According to recent statistics by the International Labour Organisation, more than 218 million children are working and 73 million of them in an environment that “directly endangers their health, safety, and moral development.”

An increasing number of fashion manufacturers and brands include lengthy sections on the use of child labour within their supplier codes of conduct but then fail to take steps to ensure these policies are put into practice.

And 426 fashion industry workers died in “workplace incidents” in 2017 alone, with workers’ rights remaining compromised. To form any kind of workers’ union and protest against unfair treatment can sometimes mean risking death, as demonstrated by the murder of a union leader in Bangladesh earlier this year and the killing of activists by Cambodian police officers.

Abuse of women

Indeed, the fashion industry is still rife with the abuse of women, unpaid wages and toxic chemicals. The gender pay gap has become a focus for Hollywood but in developing countries where the fashion industry can often have predominantly female workforces, misogyny and sexism is shamefully prevalent, with many women underpaid, overworked, bullied and harassed.

Facts and figures on sustainability progress in the fashion industry invariably focus on the environmental impact of textile production and often obscure equally important social issues that the industry still needs to sort out.

Carry Somers, the founder of Fashion Revolution, says: “Five years on from Rana Plaza, both people and the environment still suffer as a result of the way fashion is made, sourced and consumed.

“Most companies are still operating in broadly the same way that enabled the Rana Plaza disaster to occur, relying on auditing for basic legal compliance. Fashion brands had repeatedly audited the factories in the Rana Plaza complex, but the risks went either undetected or ignored.”

Mass consumption

Secondly, what do fast fashion retailers think about the environmental impact of the attitude of treating clothing as quickly disposable, which they clearly promote through their pricing structure and collection release cycles?

Their business model has resulted in the industry becoming the world’s second most polluting, with billions of tonnes of discarded garments in landfill.

There might have been some level of progress but the fact remains that such is the level of waste being produced by fast fashion that we may never reach the utopia of a “quality quantity equilibrium”.

It is also becoming increasingly likely that by as early as 2030 natural resources will have become so jeopardised that any move towards a more sustainable future will be near impossible.

Business Insider recently reported that millennials are tiring of the ethos of brands like H&M and Forever 21 and that thrift shops are thriving. But they then highlight that this is partly due to the success of rivals such as ASOS and Missguided whose supply chain times are as low as one week. This does not point to a change of attitude to clothing consumption.

Buying better

The pressure to constantly be seen in something new is as pervasive and entrenched in Western society as it ever was. 

The grim reality is that the gross exploitation of the world and its resources means that no Instagram addicted adolescent need suffer the unthinkable “FOMO” that would be induced as a result of wearing something twice due to the fact fast fashion is so cheap.

This mass produced clothing is of such decreased quality it will invariably have a shorter life cycle and, therefore, will not be recycled but end up in landfill.

Are consumers any better off with fast fashion or would they, in fact, be wearing higher quality clothing, saving money in cost per wear, reducing their impact on the environment and supporting fairly paid and ethically treated workers in the fashion industry by opting to #FckFastFashion?

This Author

Tom Cridland is the founder of the Tom Cridland sustainable fashion brand. Tom and his partner Debs Marx started the brand in 2014 and it’s now a Fortune Magazine Cool Company, listed on the Sustainia100. They also perform in the band The Tomicks.

Multinationals had turned the Aloha State in Hawaii into the global center of genetically modified (GM) corn over the past 15 years.

Activists and voters have been trying for years to get the giant agro-chemical companies that grow experimental corn there to disclose which toxic pesticides they spray and to create buffer zones between fields and schools.

The communities had been given no protection – even after it was reported in The Guardian that there was an unexplained spike in birth defects near the plantations. But now, three years later, the political winds have shifted. 

Taking on the agro-chemical giants

The state legislature last month passed a bill that will force the companies to disclose once a year exactly what they have sprayed, where and when. They are also required to set up buffer zones of 100 feet around schools when they are in session.  

Better yet, the new bill will make Hawaii the first state in the United States to phase out the use of Dow Chemical’s chlorpyrifos, a particularly toxic insecticide, on food crops, notably corn.

The bill will be a poke in the eye for Scott Pruitt, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. 

The EPA had decided under Barack Obama, the former president, to ban chlorpyrifos’ use on commercial crops. But Pruitt reversed this move.

So how did a group of determined activists and politicians manage to reverse two centuries of the Hawaii government coddling Big Ag? This is an object lesson in persistence that other states and countries could emulate.

Exploiting the land

The British explorer James Cook discovered Hawaii in 1778. American businessmen, dominated by export-oriented sugar plantation owners, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, dissolved the independent Kingdom of Hawaii and persuaded Washington to annex the archipelago a century later. It became a full state in 1959.

Sugar growers were joined by pineapple plantations in farming the best lands for export crops. As a result, once self-sufficient Hawaii was importing two-thirds of its food by the 1930s. 

But competition from Asia for both crops led the companies to close down many operations. So when giant multinational companies came knocking in the early 2000s with offers to take over the land, they were welcomed with open arms and generous tax breaks.

But Monsanto, DuPont-Pioneer, Dow Chemical, Syngenta and BASF were not interested in producing food in Hawaii. They were attracted by the balmy climate because it allowed them to grow three or four crops of experimental corn a year, versus one or two in the continental United States. 

Pesticide drift

Their goal was to test new varieties of industrial corn, genetically engineered in their labs to tolerate the pesticides they would sell with the corn to the farmers.

Far greater amounts of restricted-use pesticides are used per acre for GM corn in Hawaii than by ordinary commercial farming on the mainland – 17 times higher in Kauai, according to the Center for Food Safety.

Kauai is the island with the largest number of people living near the biggest concentration of GM fields, which are, as in the other islands, far from the tourist beaches. 

The entire Hawaii production of these new varieties of corn is sent to the mainland US to be turned into seed corn, whose offspring is sold to farmers with the pesticides it requires. 

Over the years, opposition grew to the multinationals’ frequent spraying of some two dozen toxic pesticides, of which they won’t disclose exactly which are sprayed when and where.

Frequent cases of pesticide drift into houses, schools and well-travelled roads went unpunished, even though pesticide drift is a crime punishable by up to six months in jail.

Lack of transparency

Bennette Misalucha, executive director of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, the companies’ lobbying group, declined through a spokesman to say why the companies strongly opposed detailed disclosure.

And asked about the frequency of drift, she wrote: “Farmers use pesticides only as necessary and within the strict rules established by the EPA.”

The then-councilman Gary Hooser, one of leaders of the movement in Kauai, said the opposition reached critical mass in the run-up to the 2012 elections. “Everywhere I went, people told me, Gary, we gotta do something about this.”

Many who complained were descendants of plantation workers who lived in houses abutting the frequently sprayed fields. After an intense campaign, the Kauai county council passed an ordinance that ordered the companies to create buffer zones and to disclose what they sprayed.

Companies fight back

Meanwhile, another group was organising a voter initiative in the islands of Maui and Molokai, which form one county. The proposition called for an end to all pesticide spraying until an environmental impact study could certify that it caused no harm.

It was the first such initiative in the county’s history and it passed by 51 percent, despite Monsanto spending $5 million to fund opposition to it. 

On the Big Island, which has no GM corn, the county council passed a resolution that forbade the companies from starting corn seed farms there.

And in Honolulu, Josh Green, a physician who was then chairman of the state senate’s health committee, drafted two laws, one stronger than the other, with similar restrictions, which were approved by the Senate.

He said in an interview at the time that he expected at least the weakest one to pass the House. Marches held in support of these efforts attracted tens of thousands of people.

But the company-friendly chairman of the House agriculture committee, Clifton Tsuji, didn’t even allow a vote on the bills. 

Power to the people

Meanwhile, the companies sued the counties on the grounds that only the State of Hawaii had the power to regulate pesticides, even if it manifestly wasn’t doing so (for instance, the state registry of birth defects stopped in 2005, so there is no data on their correlation with pesticide exposure). The companies won in federal district court and again on appeal. 

The score in 2016 stood at companies 4, people 0.

Undeterred, the disparate activists gathered to focus all their energy on the legislature. “Thousands of people from across the state were sending emails, knocking on legislators’ doors and filling up their voice-mail boxes with messages to pass the bill,” said Hooser, a former state senate majority leader.

“Eventually, they realised the issue wasn’t going to go away, so the house leadership proposed a reasonable bill that included annual disclosure for all users of restricted-use pesticides, and modest buffer zones around all schools in Hawaii,” he continued. The campaigners threw their support behind the bill. 

The new head of the state House agriculture committee, a physician named Richard Creagan, even added a clause banning the insecticide chlorpyrifos in Hawaii within four years – the first U.S. state to do so.

“It helped that the EU had banned chlorpyrifos,” he said. “The evidence that it damages the brains of children and fetuses has become overwhelming,” Creagan told The Ecologist.

“Finally we emphasized that if we banned it in Hawaii, it would mean our produce was safer than California’s and the bill would support Hawaii-grown, chlorpyrifos-free produce.” Chlorpyrifos, a nerve toxin, makes up two-thirds of the restricted-use insecticides used in Kauai.

Just the beginning

The bill passed unanimously in both houses. Gov. Ige signed it on June 13 after he was briefed by Dr Virginia Rauh of Columbia University, the author of a landmark study on chlorpyrifos’ effect on children.

For Hooser, this is just the beginning. “What we really need is detailed prior notification – what chemicals will be sprayed where and when,” he said.

“Doctors need to know exactly what their patients may have inhaled, and people who live near the fields need to know what they and their children could be exposed to.”

This Author

Christopher Pala is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. and a former New York Times correspondent in Hawaii.

Many Australian mining projects in Africa are outposts of good governance – this is what Julie Bishop, the country’s Foreign Minister, told the Africa Down Under mining conference in Western Australia in September 2017.

The Australian government “encourages the people of Africa to see us as an open-cut mine for lessons-learned, for skills, for innovation and, I would like to think, inspiration,” the minister said.

But such claims sit uneasily with the highly critical findings arising from a detailed investigation by the International Consortium of Independent Journalists (ICIJ). 

Uranium mines

The ICIJ noted in a 2015 report that since 2004, more than 380 people have died in mining accidents or in off-site skirmishes connected to Australian mining companies in Africa.

The ICIJ report further stated: “Multiple Australian mining companies are accused of negligence, unfair dismissal, violence and environmental law-breaking across Africa, according to legal filings and community petitions gathered from South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Ghana.”

Paladin Energy’s Kayelekera uranium mine in Malawi provides a case study of the problems with Australian mining companies in Africa. 

Western Australia-based Paladin exploited Malawi’s poverty to secure numerous reductions and exemptions from payments normally required by foreign investors. 

United Nations’ Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter noted in a 2013 report that “revenue losses from special incentives given to Australian mining company Paladin Energy, which manages the Kayelekera uranium mine, are estimated to amount to at least US$205 million (MWK 67 billion) and could be up to US$281 million (MWK 92 billion) over the 13-year lifespan of the mine.”

Paladin’s environmental and social record has also been the source of ongoing controversy and the subject of numerous critical reports. 

Standards at Kayelekera fall a long way short of Australian standards ‒ and efforts to force Australian mining companies to meet Australian standards when operating abroad have been strongly resisted. 

The Kayelekera project would not be approved in Australia due to major flaws in the assessment and design proposals, independent consultants concluded.

Care-and-maintenance

Kayelekera was put into care-and-maintenance in May 2014, another victim of the uranium industry’s post-Fukushima meltdown. And just last month, Paladin announced that its only other operating mine ‒ the Langer Heinrich mine (LHM) in Namibia ‒ will be put into care-and-maintenance.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the decision to mothball LHM is that Paladin claims it is the lowest cost open-pit uranium mine in the world.

Moreover, the company wasn’t even paying to mine ore ‒ mining ceased in November 2016 and since then ore stockpiles have been processed. Thus a low-cost mine can’t even turn a profit processing mined stockpiles.

The cost of production was US$23.11 / lb uranium oxide in December 2017, and the average realised sale price in the second half of 2017 was $21.82.

Anticipating the decision to mothball LHM, Paladin Energy CEO Alex Molyneux said in late-April: “The uranium market has failed to recover since the Fukushima incident in 2011, with the average spot price so far in 2018 the lowest in 15 years. 

“It’s deeply distressing to have to consider suspending operations at LHM because of the consequences for our employees, and the broader community. 

“However, as there has yet to be a sustainable recovery in the uranium market, and with the aim of preserving maximum long-term value for all stakeholders, it is clearly prudent to consider these difficult actions.”

Paladin hopes to resume mining at LHM and Kayelekera following “normalization” of the uranium market, which it anticipates in the next few years. But with no operating mines, Paladin may not survive for long enough to witness a market upswing.

Paladin was placed into the hands of administrators in July 2017 as it was unable to pay French utility EDF a US$277 million debt. 

In January 2018, Paladin’s administrator KPMG noted that an Independent Expert’s Report found that the company’s net debt materially exceeds the value of its assets, its shares have nil value, and if Paladin was placed into liquidation there would be no return to shareholders. 

The company was restructured, with Deutsche Bank now the largest shareholder, and relisted on the Australian Securities Exchange in February 2018.

Perhaps LHM will be sold for a song, either before or after Paladin goes bankrupt. A subsidiary of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) has held a 25 percent stake in LHM since January 2014. 

Last year, the CNNC subsidiary considered exercising its contractual right to buy Paladin’s 75 percent stake in LHM, but chose not to exercise that right following an independent valuation of US$162 million for Paladin’s stake.

Mine-site rehabilitation 

Paladin hopes to resume mining following “normalization” of the uranium market ‒ but low prices could be the new normal. 

Former World Nuclear Association executive Steve Kidd said in May 2014 that the industry is set for “a long period of relatively low prices”. Prices were far higher in 2014 than over the past twelve months. 

Paladin’s CEO Alexander Molyneux said that “it has never been a worse time for uranium miners” in 2016 and the situation has worsened since then for the industry ‒ prices have fallen further still.

Sooner or later ‒ probably sooner ‒ both the LHM and Kayelekera mine-sites will need to be rehabilitated. Yet it is extremely doubtful whether Paladin has set aside adequate funds for rehabilitation. Paladin’s 2017 Annual Report lists a ‘rehabilitation provision‘ of US$86.93 million to cover both LHM and Kayelekera.

One problem is that the funds might not be available for rehabilitation if Paladin goes bankrupt. A second problem is that even if the funds are available, they are unlikely to be sufficient. 

For comparison, Energy Resources of Australia’s provision for rehabilitation of the Ranger uranium mine in Australia ‒ also an open-pit uranium mine, like LHM and Kayelekera ‒ is US$403 million (A$526 million). 

That figure is additional to US$346 million (A$452 million) already spent on water and rehabilitation activities since 2012 ‒ thus total rehabilitation costs could amount to US$749 million (A$978 million) … and the current cost estimates could easily increase as they have in the past.

Rehabilitation of LHM and Kayelekera could be cheaper than rehabilitation of Ranger for several reasons, such as the relative size of the mine-sites. However it stretches credulity to believe that the cost of rehabilitating both LHM and Kayelekera would be an order of magnitude lower than the cost of rehabilitating one mine in Australia.

Paladin was required to lodge a US$10 million Environmental Performance Bond with Malawian banks and presumably that money can be tapped to rehabilitate Kayelekera. But US$10 million won’t scratch the surface. According to a Malawian NGO, the Kayelekera rehabilitation cost is estimated at US$100 million.

Paladin has ignored repeated requests to provide information on the estimated cost of rehabilitating Kayelekera (and also ignored an invitation to comment on a draft of this article), but the figure will be multiples of the US$10 million bond and it is extremely unlikely that Paladin’s provision of US$86.93 million for the rehabilitation of both LHM and Kayelekera is adequate.

If Paladin goes bankrupt, it seems likely that most of the costs associated with the rehabilitation of LHM and Kayelekera will be borne by the Namibian and Malawian governments (with a small fraction of the cost for Kayelekera coming from the bond) ‒ or the mine-sites will not be rehabilitated at all. 

Even if Paladin is able to honour its US$86.93 million provision, additional costs necessary for rehabilitation will likely come from the Malawian and Namibian governments, or rehabilitation will be sub-standard.

Problems most acute for Kayelekera

The problem of inadequate provisioning for rehabilitation is most acute for Kayelekera ‒ it is a smaller deposit than LHM and more expensive to mine (Paladin has said that a uranium price of about US$75 per pound would be required for Kayelekera to become economically viable ‒well over twice the current long-term contract price). Thus the prospects for a restart of Kayelekera (and the accumulation of funds for rehabilitation) are especially grim.

Is it reasonable for Australia, a relatively wealthy country, to leave it to the overstretched, under-resourced government of an impoverished nation to clean up the mess left behind by an Australian mining company? 

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to a 2013 UN report, more than half of the population live below the poverty line.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop should intervene to sort out the situation at Kayelekera and to prevent a repetition of this looming fiasco.

The conservative Minister’s eyes might glaze over in response to a moral argument about the importance of Australia being a good global citizen. But there is also a hard-headed commercial argument for intervention to ensure that the Kayelekera mine-site is rehabilitated.

It does Australian companies investing in mining ventures abroad no good whatsoever to leave Kayelekera unrehabilitated, a permanent reminder of the untrustworthiness and unfulfilled promises of an Australian miner and the indifference of the Australian government.

Australia is set to become the biggest international miner on the African continent according to the Australia-Africa Minerals & Energy Group. But Australian companies can’t expect to be welcomed if problems such as Kayelekera remain unresolved.

This Author

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a version of this article was originally published. He is co-author of a new report titled ‘Undermining Africa: Paladin Energy’s Kayelekera Uranium Mine in Malawi’.