A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

During election time, everyone wants to know what the public think. Polls abound trying to gauge our mood on a host of different issues so it’s good to see that public support for wind and solar is at an all-time high according to the results of a quarterly tracking survey conducted by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. 

And as all parties finalise their manifestos they would do well to take heed the findings.

Onshore wind is backed by nearly three quarters of the public (73%), with offshore even more popular at 79% while solar has almost universal support at 86%.  Less well-known renewables are also popular with wave and tidal power supported by 79% of the public.  These are all record highs since the tracking started in 2013. 

Even biomass, another lower carbon energy source, is at its highest favourability level of 66%, with only 6% opposed. In fact only 1% of the population is ‘strongly opposed’ to renewables the survey found.

Concern about climate change seems to be a driver of this clean energy push, with 71% saying they are very or fairly concerned. The economic and environmental case for renewables has long been clear.  Getting ourselves off polluting fossil fuels is essential if we’re to meet our international obligations to decarbonise and create an energy system fit for the 21^st century.  And as far back as 2015 onshore wind became the cheapest form of electricity, beating fossil fuels even without subsidies.  

For a long time it was believed opposition to renewables came from the ‘nimbyism’ of not wanting to look at wind turbines outside the back window. But this seems to be changing with 6 out of 10 people (58%) saying they would be happy to have a large-scale renewable energy development in their area. Seventy per cent recognised that renewable industries and developments provide economic benefits to the UK.

The overwhelming support for renewables is even more stark when compared with the results for other energy options. Nuclear is pretty stable with 38% in favour and 22% against, but things really start to drop off when the public were asked about fracking: Only 19% offered support, with 30% opposed and 49% indifferent. The most common reason for opposing fracking was the loss or destruction of the natural environment at 56 per cent, which shows that there remains a high level of concern among the public for environmental protection in Britain.

The tide is clearly flowing in favour of ditching fossil fuels, not only here in the UK but also abroad.  Both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the two candidates in the run to be the next French President, have promised to ban fracking.  Front runner, Macron, has also come out strongly for renewables promising to double wind and solar capacity by 2022.   

China’s big push for renewables is well known but even in Trump’s United States the growth of renewables is striking. There are already more jobs in US solar than in generating electricity through coal, oil and gas combined and renewables are generating jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the economy.  

Like in the UK, clean energy is a hit with people across the political spectrum. If deep red Texas was its own country it would be the sixth largest generator of wind power and there are now more renewable energy projects in Republican districts than Democrat ones.

Elections are naturally divisive times for a country – this one more so than usual following the EU referendum which split the UK down the middle. But for all parties looking to find policies for their manifestos that receive widespread support and unite the country, they need look no further than embracing renewables and accelerating the big shift from dirty to clean energy.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor to The Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe 

The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) annual meeting in Yokohama Japan this week marks its 50th anniversary. Yet there is little to celebrate.

ADB operations around the world have left a trail of destruction; people displaced and negative impacts on farming lands, rivers, forests and the climate.

The bank claims to finance development with the aim of alleviating poverty in the Asia Pacific region. Despite this noble vision, the ADB fails to provide a better future for Asia’s poorest. Its neoliberal policies are grossly inadequate at addressing perhaps the greatest threat to Asia’s poor: climate change.

The ADB actually recognizes climate change as a fundamental threat to poverty alleviation. Climate change will hit the poorest the hardest as, to use ADB’s own words,

“they encounter more intense tropical storms, more severe and more frequent droughts and floods, accelerated melting of glaciers and rises in the sea level, higher frequency of forest fires, shortages of freshwater, threatened crop production and aquaculture, higher incidence of heat-related and infectious diseases.”

Yet despite this, the bank has repeatedly prioritised the financing of coal projects over renewable energy alternatives. Coal is the biggest single contributor to human induced global warming.

The ADB even recognises the role of coal fired power in exacerbating climate change. But in the last decade they have invested over $3 billion in coal projects. They are the world’s third largest multilateral public financier of coal infrastructure.

India: ‘damage to local communities’ health and livelihoods’

Perhaps their most controversial project to date is the $450 million investment in the 4,000-megawatt Tata Mundra Ultra Mega Coal plant in the Indian state of Gujarat.

The bank’s own compliance review panel exposed a lack of consultation with local communities and a failure to comply with waste and pollution management strategies. Shortcomings that resulted in significant harm to the local environment and damage to local communities’ health and livelihoods.

The Tata Mundra plant is estimated to be India’s third largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Coal dust from conveyor belts feeding the power station threaten human health and contaminate agriculture. Infrastructure has damaged groundwater systems, polluting local communities’ drinking water sources.

But thanks to the ‘legal immunity for investments’ the ADB enjoys, it cannot be held responsible for these crimes. So, after 50 years of getting away with this impunity Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific joins other social movements to demand the withdrawal of ADB immunity. This would at least enable people to sue the bank for the impacts its coal funding has on local communities and climate change.

Many multilateral banks have reduced their coal funding in response to climate obligations. Sadly none have stopped funding coal altogether.

Given the danger that burning coal poses to the global climate, it’s time the ADB took some moral leadership. The bank must ban the funding of all coal projects. It should use its influence to encourage other multilateral and bilateral public lending institutions to do the same [1].

This is a particularly pertinent point, given the emergence of new lending institutions which, sadly, seem to be embracing coal. For example, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which claims to be a “green, clean, lean” bank for the region. Yet the AIIB’s draft energy strategy states that “coal-fired power plants would be considered if they replace existing less efficient capacity.”

The ADB could therefore play a crucial role in halting coal financing.

The time to stop funding coal is now!

The Asian Development Bank is facing increasing pressure from all sides; internationally, locally and from its own shareholders. The hypocrisy of their climate action public relations spin is becoming increasingly untenable as climate change becomes a daily reality for Asia’s poor.

Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific therefore call on the ADB to:

1. Rule out funding any future coal mine or coal fired power station projects;

2. Prioritise the development and establishment of sustainable renewable energy projects and promote community energy and energy efficiency to meet the energy needs of people in the Asia Pacific

3. Use their profile to lobby other finance institutions in the Asia Pacific region to rule out funding of coal projects; and

4. Urgently review the impacts of oil, gas and unconventional gas projects on local communities and the climate, and to rule out projects that exacerbate environmental degradation and climate change.

Report: ‘Stop coal financing in the Asia Pacific‘ is published today by Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific.

Hemantha Withanage is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Centre for Environmental Justice, Sri Lanka. An Executive Member of Friends of the Earth International, he is also the Convenor of Sri Lankan Working Group on Trade and IFIs, and has been a member of the ELAW (Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide) since 1991.

References

1. Japan, China, South Korea – are the first, 3rd and 6th biggest shareholders within the ADB – their bilateral agencies are the world’s largest financiers for coal (source: NRDC and Oil Change, Nov. 2016)

It’s been over 60 years since the first nuclear power plant was switched on in Russia and now 31 years (last week) since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Yet despite the decades-long history of nuclear power, most countries still haven’t agreed on a way to safely store nuclear waste.

Leading the way is Finland with the world’s first permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel. High-level radioactive waste is to be buried 400 metres deep in the granite bedrock of Olkiluoto Island off the Finnish coast, where its operators claim it will be secure for the next 100,000 years.

Governments, on the whole, aren’t good at long term planning though. And this is a major problem for the nuclear industry where eventualities must be planned for in terms of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.

Teams of artists and philosophers are even debating how to mark repository sites to warn off future generations who may be as removed from us as we are from the first homo sapiens to arrive in Europe.

Even the more easily grasped timescales involved in nuclear waste disposal pose huge technical, economic and social challenges. Finland is to start loading the Olkiluoto repository in 2020 and the process is expected to take 100 years. That may seem like a long time, and it is considering that the first observed nuclear reaction was made less than 100 years ago in 1919.

Sweden, which is pushing forward with the same technology as Finland, is the only other European country close to such an advanced stage of planning. Favourable geological conditions and relatively small quantities of just one type of waste – spent fuel, without the additional problems of reprocessed waste – mean both countries have advantages over other nuclear nations.

For the most part,says Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, high-level radioactive waste is lying around waiting for a solution.

“Around the world, everybody is extending the spent fuel storage and reactors. Find me a reactor that’s been in operation for 20 years and I’ll find you a plant which has had its spent fuel facility increased. Every one. There’s nowhere to put it,” says Thomas.

Public resistance

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a full phase out nuclear power by 2022, making Europe’s largest economy a trailblazer in renewable energy.

Back in 1977, Germany was seen as a pioneer of disposal solutions when it began exploring a former salt mine at Gorleben as a possible repository. From the start, locals protested vehemently. A decades-long battle ensued with intense debate over whether the site was geologically suitable. Some experts claimed that with its location in a sparsely populated area close to the then border with East Germany, the site was selected more for political than scientific reasons. In 2000 the government put a moratorium on the investigation.

A bill passed this year will see Gorleben back on the agenda as a possible waste site, in a search that views the country as a “blank map”, with salt, granite and clay sites all to be considered.

Officially, a site is to be identified by 2031 and built by 2050. But the state of Saxony is already pushing to be excluded from the process and some experts say this bid looks highly optimistic.

In the UK, exploration of a potential site conveniently close to the Sellafield decommissioning and reprocessing site – home to by far the country’s worst nuclear waste problem – stalled and was cancelled following a public and scientific consultation process.

In France, the plan for a clay repository near the village of Bure is more advanced than most. French nuclear agency ANDRA plans to have it ready by 2035. But observers say there has been a lack of public consultation and public protests are heating up ahead of an upcoming parliamentary vote over the site’s future.

Unknown costs

Besides the technical and political issues surrounding final disposal there are also massive economic challenges.

In the UK, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority forecast that the current cost of clean-up is somewhere between £95 billion (840 billion yuan) and £219 billion (2 trillion yuan), based on the data available. The total planned expenditure for 2017/2018 is £3.24 billion (20 billion yuan), of which £2.36 billion (20 billion yuan) will be funded by the government and the taxpayer; £0.88 billion by income from commercial operations.

In Germany, nuclear power plant operators are largely responsible for decommissioning reactors once they are switched off – this is where spent fuel is removed and sites dismantled – a process that takes decades in itself.

Under an agreement reached last year, waste disposal is now the responsibility of the state. Utilities are to pay 23.6 billion euros (177 billion yuan) into a state-administered fund to cover this. But experts worry that ultimately, taxpayers will be left footing the bill.

“For all the waste management and disposal of waste there is no technical concept and so you cannot estimate costs,” says Wolfgang Irrek, professor for energy management at Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Instead, the calculation is based on 20-year-old estimates for the Gorleben site.

Long-term intermediate storage

Some experts say final disposal is a bit of a red herring in any case. As appealing as the idea of settling the matter once and for all might be, questions have been raised about the long-term security of even the Finnish project.

“It’s very arrogant, scientifically, to say today we have safe disposal for tens of thousands of years,” says Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear policy analyst and lead author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. “I am not convinced geological storage is good forever – I have not seen the argument made conclusively. It’s too early to say.”

Instead, Schneider advocates a focus on ensuring that interim storage is up to the job, which, for the most part, it isn’t.

“We have got into problems with waste because it has been packaged on the assumption that it would go in the ground at a certain time, and it hasn’t, and the packaging has degraded,” Thomas says.

The UK and France have used wet storage for spent nuclear fuel, meaning the waste is kept in pools for long periods of time. Schneider says if there is anything to be learned from the European experience with nuclear waste it’s to take the German route of getting the cooled waste out of the water and into dry storage as quickly as possible.

“There is absolutely no doubt that dry storage is much safer and much more secure than pool storage,” says Schneider. “If you lose the water you are in trouble because the fuel will heat up. Depending on the age of the fuel, you might get fuel fires that will dwarf the nuclear accidents we have seen so far.”

He points to the Fukushima disaster, where it was initially unclear if a spent fuel fire was on the cards; a scenario which would have called for the evacuation of at least 10 million people.

In the UK, Andrew Blowers of independent expert group Nuclear Waste Advisory Associates says the locations of planned reactors pose their own set of problems.

“A lot of dangerous spent fuel is going to be stored on new-build sites which are in vulnerable coastal locations, which stacks up to a huge problem for the next century with climate change”, says Blowers.

Tip of the iceberg

And all this concerns only a tiny fraction of the overall radioactive waste problem. “High-level waste represents the smallest volume”, says Schneider. “The biggest volumes are [found] the lower you go in the contamination levels. A single uranium mine, like the German Wismut, can generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of waste.”

Decommissioning generates huge volumes of contaminated material. Intermediate-level waste storage repositories in Germany have also been fraught with technical and public acceptance problems, while decommissioning in the UK has seen costs spiral out of control.

“Britain is an example of how to make provisions for decommissioning wrong – we have made every mistake it is possible to make and have ended up with a nuclear authority that has no money”, Thomas says.

Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power altogether. Having defined volumes of material to deal with should give it some advantage, but Thomas says there is still too little experience of decommissioning to really know what the country is in for.

“The amount of decommissioning that has gone on in the world is negligible. I think there are six plants that have been fully decommissioned that operated for a decent amount of time.”

Still, Blowers says Germany’s got one thing right. “What we don’t want is more nuclear waste created when we are not at all sure what we are going to do with what we’ve already got.”

This Author

Ruby Russell is a Berlin-based journalist whose work has been published by Deutsche Welle, Clean Energy Wire, the Guardian and the Ecologist, among others

He has been accused of being anti-development, threatened, kidnapped and jailed, but Prafulla Samantara has never given up. The 65-year-old from Bhubaneswar, Odisha State, India, has made it his life’s work to fight injustice by lending a voice to Indigenous communities and small scale farmers. Now he has won the prestigious 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize for Asia for his relentless efforts.

Most notably, he orchestrated the campaigns throughout the decade-long court battle against British mining company Vedanta, which wanted to build a massive open-pit aluminium mine on one of India’s holy mountains, which is inhabited by the Dongira Tribe. Considered by some a real-life ‘Avatar story’, it culminated in a triumphant Supreme Court ruling in 2013 which stopped the mine’s construction.  

Samantara says he felt something had to be done as soon as he heard about the plans to mine the Nyamgiri Hills in India’s north-eastern Odisha state back in 2004.

“I felt it was my duty to protect it, convince and campaign among the tribals, and help them understand what could happen in the future,” says Samantara, who mobilised the indigenous population to stand up to the company.

“Throughout my lifelong career as a social and political activist, I always feel I’m just doing my duty as a citizen of this country,” he says.

“I always thought that without the consent of the people and without the participation of the people, no development should take place.”

Sacred hills and mesmerising beauty

And there was much at stake: an area of amazing beauty and biodiversity, the densely forested slopes and deep gorges of the Nyamgiri Hills are an important migration corridor for elephants and home to the mighty Bengal tiger. Its more than 100 streams flow down from the peaks toward the Bay of Bengal.

Its rulers are the 8,000-strong Indigenous Dongira Kondh tribe which, together with the Jharania and Kutia tribes, call these hills their home. Far from the hustle and bustle of the rapidly industrialising cities, they live off small plantations on the fertile slopes. “Their habitat is on the upper side of the Nyamgiri Hills. It’s very important for their identity, culturally, socially and economically,” Samantara says.

Worshippers of the mountain god ‘Niyam Raja’ and his sacred hills – including the 4,000-metre-high Mountain of the Law (Niyam Dongar) – the tribes consider the area sacred and it must be protected at all costs, Samantara explains, adding “They live after their own laws, the law of the gods, which is of crucial cultural importance to the Dongira Tribes.”

But beneath the ground hides a large bauxite deposit, an aluminium ore, and the companies seeking to extract it weren’t going to give up without a fight. It all began in 2004, when the Odisha State Mining Company signed an agreement with UK-based Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite in the hills.

Samantara read about a public hearing to discuss the project in the papers. Having already fought a similar mining project elsewhere, he knew it would also be an environmental threat to the area.

The $2 billion open-pit mine would extract more than 70 million tons of bauxite and destroy an estimated 1,660 acres of forest. New roads would be built to reach the mine, making the forest an easy target for loggers and poachers. It could also pollute the water for millions of people, he says. “It’s an important water source to non-tribal areas too. The two rivers Bansadhara and Nagaballi are fed with water from these hills. There are 36 natural streams feeding these two rivers.”

He knew the tribes had no way of knowing about the plans and set out to tell them. When they didn’t believe him, he travelled from village to village across the hills to talk to the leaders. But his opponents were right behind him and he was intimidated, threatened and eventually kidnapped by people he suspects were hired by the mining company.

Victory at last

Determined to carry on, he travelled by train to remote stations, cycling or walking from town to town through the vast forests. Eventually the villagers got behind the cause and Samantara filed a petition with the Supreme Court’s panel governing mining activities. There followed rallies and protests, and as the case gained attention, company backers like the Norwegian Pension Fund and the Church of England began to divest funds from Vedanta.

Fast forward to 18 April 2013, and finally, after 12 years of campaigning and court appearances, the Supreme Court issued an historic ruling which empowered local communities to vote on mining projects in their areas. The vote resulted in a unanimous No vote by all 12 tribal village councils – an unprecedented victory which could now help future Indigenous groups protect their land.

But it was not all plain sailing. The miners tried to get a new vote, arguing that some tribes have since changed leaders, but it was stopped by another appeal by Samantara, and the Nyamgiri Hills are now safe in the hands of its inhabitants.

A great victory for all, but not the first time Samantara was involved in protesting injustice.

A lifetime protesting capitalism and commercialisation

Having grown up in a family of farmers in rural Odisha, Samantara has witnessed the area’s transformation from tranquil small-scale farmland to an industrialised urban neighbourhood driven by commercial growth. As a student of law and economics, he hoped to help curb the growing social injustice and inequality he saw around him in the seventies, saying: “I was part of these struggles to change the system. It was corrupt and undemocratic.”

He was once arrested at a student protest and imprisoned for a year. “There was national emergency in 1975 to 1977. As a student leader I was kept in jail for one year in January 1976 for my protest to the [state of] emergency to protect democratic and fundamental rights of citizens.”

A career campaigner, he’s had to rely on donations and his wife’s income as a geology professor at times. Now a veteran, he believes people are ultimately good, despite all the resistance he’s encountered. “I’m always optimistic, because I believe in the power of the people.”

As we speak, he’s just about to take off to London and then San Francisco for the prize ceremony. But as an advocate for minimum resource usage, he is not wowed by fancy hotels and flair. “Even when I’m offered luxury, I don’t enjoy it.”

Now, his work continues with campaigns against other mining projects and chemicals used in agriculture. The Odisha State government has given permission for four bauxite mines in the Kodingamali Hills – home to the Parja tribe which depend on the forest for their survival – and Samantara is challenging the project.

So what drives the 65-year-old to carry on? It’s all about learning to live alongside nature. “We need to preserve nature for future generations of man and animals,” he says.

His message is simple: “We must work for people that are marginalised. In India and other third world countries Indigenous people are marginalised, even though they are the owners of the natural resources, but they are being driven out in the name of development,” he says.

“When Indigenous peoples are alienated from nature, that nature is not safe.”

The Goldman Environmental Prize

Samantara is one of six winners, one for each of the continental regions, of the Goldman Environmental Prize – aka the Nobel Prize for environmentalists – awarded annually to men and women who take great personal risks to safeguard the environment. It was created in 1989 by civic leaders and philanthropists Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman. Learn more at www.goldmanprize.org

This Author

Sophie Morlin-Yron is a freelance writer based in London. Follow her on @sophiemyron

Rhinos are one of the most iconic symbols of the African savanna: grey behemoths with armour plating and fearsome horns.

And yet it is the horns that are leading to their demise. Poaching is so prolific that zoos cannot even protect them.

Some people believe rhino horns can cure several ailments; others see horns as status symbols. Given horns are made of keratin, this is really about as effective as chewing your finger nails.

Nonetheless, a massive increase in poaching over the past decade has led to rapid declines in some rhino species, and solutions are urgently needed.

One proposal is to take 80 rhinos from private game farms in South Africa and transport them to captive facilities in Australia, at a cost of over US$4m.

Though it cannot be denied that this is a ‘novel’ idea, I, and colleagues from around the world, have serious concerns about the project, and we have now published a paper looking into the problematic plan.

The first issue is whether the cost of moving the rhinos is unjustified. The $4m cost is almost double the anti-poaching budget for South African National Parks ($2.2m), the managers of the estate where most white rhinos currently reside in the country.

The money would be better spent on anti-poaching activities in South Africa to increase local capacity. Or, from an Australian perspective, given the country’s abysmal record of mammal extinctions, it could go towards protecting indigenous species there.

In addition, there is the time cost of using the expertise of business leaders, marketeers and scientists. All could be working on conservation issues of much greater importance.

Selection for domestication will undermine survival in the wild

Bringing animals from the wild into captivity introduces strong selective pressure for domestication. Essentially, those animals that are too wild don’t breed and so don’t pass on their genes, while the sedate (unwild) animals do.

This is exacerbated for species like rhinos where predation has shaped their evolution: they have grown big, dangerous horns to protect themselves. So captivity will likely be detrimental to the survival of any captive bred offspring should they be returned to the wild.

It is not known yet which rhino species will be the focus of the Australian project, but it will probably be the southern white rhino subspecies – which is the rhino species least likely to go extinct. The global population estimate for southern white rhinos (over 20,000) is stable, despite high poaching levels.

This number stands in stark contrast to the number of northern white (three), black (4,880 and increasing), great Indian (2,575), Sumatran (275) and Javan (up to 66) rhinos. These latter three species are clearly of much greater conservation concern than southern white rhinos.

There are also well over 800 southern white rhinos currently held in zoos around the world.

With appropriate management, the population size of the southern white is unlikely to lose genetic diversity, so adding 80 more individuals to zoos is utterly unnecessary. By contrast, across the world there are 39 other large mammalian herbivore species that are threatened with extinction that are far more in need of conservation funding than the five rhino species.

Conserving entire ecosystems, not just ‘big-ticket’ species

Rhinos inhabit places occupied by other less high profile threatened species – like African wild dogs and pangolins – which do not benefit from the same level of conservation funding.

Conserving wildlife in their natural habitat has many benefits for the creatures and plants they coexist with. Rhinos are keystone species, creating grazing lawns that provide habitats for other species and ultimately affect fire regimes (fire frequency and burn patterns). They are also habitats themselves for a range of species-specific parasites.

Abandoning efforts to conserve rhinos in their environment means these ecosystem services will no longer be provided.

Finally, taking biodiversity assets (rhinos) from Africa and transporting them to foreign countries extends the history of exploitation of Africa’s resources. Although well-meaning, the safe-keeping of rhinos by Western countries is as disempowering and patronising as the historical appropriation of cultural artefacts by colonial powers.

Conservation projects are ultimately more successful when led locally. With its strong social foundation, community-based conservation has had a significant impact on rhino protection and population recovery in Africa.

In fact, local capacity and institutions are at the centre of one of the world’s most successful conservation success stories – the southern white rhino was brought back from the brink, growing from a few hundred in South Africa at the turn of the last century to over 20,000 throughout southern Africa today.

A neocolonial distraction from the real issues

In our opinion, this project is neo-colonial conservation that diverts money and public attention away from the fundamental issues necessary to conserve rhinos.

There is no evidence of what will happen to the rhinos transported to Australia once the poaching crisis is averted. But there seems nothing as robust as China’s ‘panda diplomacy’ where pandas provided to foreign zoos remain the property of China, alongside a substantial annual payment, as do any offspring produced, for the duration of the arrangement.

With increased support, community-based rhino conservation initiatives can continue to lead the way. It is money that is missing, not the will to conserve them nor the expertise necessary to do so.

Using the funding proposed for the Australian Rhino Project to support locally-led conservation or to educate people to reduce consumer demand for rhino horn in Asia seem far more acceptable options.

Matt Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Conservation, Bangor University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Doctor Ghassan ‘Gus’ Abu-Sitta is the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon. He specializes in reconstructive surgery.

What it means in this part of the world is clear: they bring you people from the war zones, torn to pieces, missing faces, burned beyond recognition, and you have to try to give them their life back.

Dr. Abu-Sitta is also a thinker. A Palestinian born in Kuwait, he studied and lived in the UK, and worked in various war zones of the Middle East, as well as in Asia, before accepting his present position at the AUB Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon.

We were brought together by peculiar circumstances. Several months ago I burned my foot on red-hot sand, in Southeast Asia. It was healing slowly, but it was healing. Until I went to Afghanistan where at one of the checkpoints in Herat I had to take my shoes off, and the wound got badly infected.

Passing through London, I visited a hospital there, and was treated by one of Abu-Sitta’s former professors. When I said that among other places I work in Lebanon, he recommended that I visit one of his “best students who now works in Beirut”.

I did. During that time, a pan-Arab television channel, Al-Mayadeen, was broadcasting in English, with Arabic subtitles, a long two-part interview with me, about my latest political / revolutionary novel ‘Aurora‘ and about the state of the global south, and the upsurge of the Western imperialism.

To my surprise, Dr. Abu-Sitta and his colleagues were following my work and political discourses. To these hardened surgeons, my foot ‘issue’ was just a tiny insignificant scratch. What mattered was the US attack against Syria, the Palestine, and the provocations against North Korea.

My ‘injury’ healed well, and Dr. Abu-Sitta and I became good friends. Unfortunately I have to leave Beirut for Southeast Asia, before a huge conference, which he and his colleagues are launching on the May 15, 2017, a conference on the ‘Ecology of War’.

I believe that the topic is thoroughly fascinating and essential for our humanity, even for its survival. It combines philosophy, medicine and science.

The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict

What happens to people in war zones? And what is a war zone, really? We arrived at some common conclusions, as both of us were working with the same topic but looking at it from two different angles:

“The misery is war. The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict. A great number of people on our Planet actually live in some conflict or war, without even realizing it: in slums, in refugee camps, in thoroughly collapsed states, or in refugee camps.”

We talked a lot: about fear, which is engulfing countries like the UK, about the new wave of individualism and selfishness, which has its roots in frustration. At one point he said:

“In most parts of the world ‘freedom’ is synonymous with the independence struggle for our countries. In such places as the UK, it mainly means more individualism, selfishness and personal liberties.”

We talked about imperialism, medicine and the suffering of the Middle East. Then we decided to publish this dialogue, shedding some light on the ‘Ecology of War’ – this essential new discipline in both philosophy and medicine. The discussion took place in Beirut, Lebanon, in Cafe Younes, on April 25, 2017.

Broken social contract in the Arab World, even in Europe

Gus Abu-Sitta: In the South, medicine and the provision of health were critical parts of the post-colonial state. And the post-colonial state built medical systems such as we had in Iraq, Egypt and in Syria as part of the social contract. They became an intrinsic part of the creation of those states.

And it was a realization that the state has to exercise its power both coercively, (which we know the state is capable of exercising, by putting you in prison, and even exercising violence), but above all non-coercively: it needs to house you, educate you, and give you health, all of those things. And that non-coercive power that the states exercise is a critical part of the legitimizing process of the state. We saw it evolve in 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

So as a digression, if you want to look at how the state was dismantled: the aim of the sanctions against Iraq was not to weaken the Makhabarat or the army, the aim of the sanctions was to rob the Iraqi state of its non-coercive power; its ability to give life, to give education, and that’s why after 12 years, the state has totally collapsed internally – not because its coercive powers have weakened, but because it was robbed of all its non-coercive powers, of all its abilities to guarantee life to its citizens.

So in a way the contract between the state and the people was broken?

Absolutely! And you had that contract existing in the majority of post-colonialist states. With the introduction of the IMF and World Bank-led policies that viewed health and the provision of health as a business opportunity for the ruling elites and for corporations, and viewed free healthcare as a burden on the state, you began to have an erosion in certain countries like Egypt, like Jordan, of the non-coercive powers of the state, leading to the gradual weakening of its legitimacy.

Once again, the aim of the IMF and World Bank was to turn health into a commodity, which could be sold back to people as a service; sold back to those who could afford it.

So, the US model, but in much more brutal form, as the wages in most of those countries were incomparably lower.

Absolutely! And the way you do that in these countries: you create a two-tier system where the government tier is so under-funded, that people choose to go to the private sector. And then in the private sector you basically have the flourishing of all aspects of private healthcare: from health insurance to provision of health care, to pharmaceuticals.

Paradoxically this scenario is also taking place in the UK right now.

We see it in the UK and we’ll see it in many other European countries. But it has already happened in this region, in the Arab world. Here, the provision of health was so critical to creation of the states. It was critical to the legitimacy of the state.

Dismantling the welare state – a form of war against the poor

The scenario has been extremely cynical: while the private health system was imposed on the Arab region and on many other parts of the world, in the West itself, except in the United States, medical care remains public and basically free. We are talking about state medical care in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Yes. In Europe as part of the welfare state that came out of the Second World War, the provision of healthcare was part of the social contract. As the welfare state with the advent of Thatcherism and Reagan-ism was being dismantled, it became important to undergo a similar process as elsewhere.

The difference is that in the UK, and also in countries like Germany, it was politically very dangerous. It could lead to election losses. So the second plan was to erode the health system, by a thousand blows kill it gradually. What you ended up in the UK is the piece-by-piece privatization of the health sector.

And the people don’t know, they don’t notice that the system is becoming private. Or in Germany where actually the government does not pay for healthcare – the government subsidizes the insurance companies that profit from the private provision of healthcare.

Before we began recording this discussion, we were speaking about the philosophical dilemmas that are now besieging or at least should be besieging the medical profession. Even the social medical care in Europe: isn’t it to some extent a cynical arrangement? European countries are now all part of the imperialist block, together with the United States, and they are all plundering the rest of the world – the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia – and they are actually subsidizing their social system from that plunder.

That’s one thing. But also, the doctors and nurses working for instance in the UK or Germany are often ‘imported’ from much poorer countries, where they have often received free education. Instead of helping their own, needy people, they are actually now serving the ageing and by all international comparisons, unreasonably spoiled and demanding population in Europe, which often uses medical facilities as if they were some ‘social club’.

I think what has happened, particularly in Europe is that there is a gradual erosion of all aspects of the welfare state. Politically it was not yet possible to get rid of free healthcare.

The problem that you can certainly see in the United Kingdom is that health is the final consequence of social and economic factors that people live in. So if you have chronic unemployment, second and third generation unemployment problem, these have health consequences.

If you have the destruction of both pensions and the cushion of a social umbrella for the unemployed, that has consequences … Poor housing has health consequences. Mass unemployment has health consequences. Politically it was easy to get rid of all other aspects of the welfare state, but they were stuck with a healthcare problem.

And so the losing battle that the health systems in the West are fighting is that they are being expected to cater to the poor consequences of the brutal capitalist system as a non-profit endeavor. But we know that once these lifestyle changes are affecting people’s health, it’s too late in terms of cure or prevention.

And so what the European health systems do, they try to patch people and to get them out of the system and back on the street. So if you have children with chronic asthma, you treat the asthma but not the dump housing in which these children are living in.

If you have violent assaults and trauma related to violence, you treat the trauma, the physical manifestation, and not the breakdown of youth unemployment, or racism that creates this. So in order to sustain this anomaly, as you said, you need an inflated health system, because you make people sick and then you try to fix them, rather than stopping them from being sick.

Hence that brain drains that have basically happened, where you have more Ghanaian doctors in New York than you have in Ghana.

And you have an entire army of Philippine nurses in the UK, while there is suddenly a shortage of qualified nurses in Manila.

This is the result of the fact that actually people’s health ‘happens’ outside the health system. Because you cannot get rid of the health system, you end up having a bloated health system, and try to fix the ailments that are coming through the door.

Collapse of health care In the Middle East

You worked in this entire region. You worked in Iraq, and in Gaza… both you and I worked in Shifa Hospital in Gaza… You worked in Southern Lebanon during the war. How brutal is the healthcare situation in the Middle East? How badly has been, for instance, the Iraqi peoples’ suffering, compared to Western patients? How cruel is the situation in Gaza?

If you look at places like Iraq: Iraq in the 80’s probably had one of the most advanced health systems in the region. Then you went through the first war against Iraq, followed by 12 years of sanctions in which that health system was totally dismantled – not just in terms of hospitals and medication and the forced exile of doctors and health professionals, but also in terms of other aspects of health, which are the sewage and water and electricity plants, all of those parts of the infrastructure that directly impact on people’s lives.

Then came depleted uranium…

And then you add to the mix that 2003 War and then the complete destruction and dismantling of the state, and the migration of some 50% of Iraq’s doctors.

Where did they migrate?

Everywhere: to the Gulf and to the West; to North America, Europe … So what you have in Iraq is a system that is not only broken, but that has lost the components that are required to rebuild it. You can’t train a new generation of doctors in Iraq, because your trainers have all left the country.

You can’t create a health system in Iraq, because you have created a government infrastructure that is intrinsically unstable and based on a multi-polarity of the centers of power which all are fighting for control of the pie of the state … and so Iraqis sub-contract their health at hospital level to India and to Turkey and Lebanon, or Jordan, because they are in this vicious loop.

But this is only for those who can afford it?

Yes for those who can, but even in those times when the government had cash it could not build the system, anymore. So it would sub-contract health provisions outside, because the system was so broken that money couldn’t fix it.

It’s the same across the Middle East

The same is happening in Libya and the same is happening in Syria, with regards of the migration of their doctors. Syria will undergo something similar to Iraq at the end of the war, if the Syrian state is destroyed.

But it is still standing.

It still stands and it is still providing healthcare to the overwhelming majority of the population even to those who live in the rebel-controlled areas. They are travelling to Damascus and other cities for their cardiac services or for their oncological services.

So no questions asked; you are sick, you get treated?

Even from the ISIS-controlled areas people can travel and get treated, because this is part of the job of the state.

The same thing is happening with the education there; Syria still provides all basic services in that area.

Absolutely! But in Libya, because the state has totally disappeared or has disintegrated, all this is gone.

Libya is not even one country, any more …

There is not a unified country and there is definitely no health system. In Gaza and the Palestine, the occupation and the siege, ensure that there is no normal development of the health system and in case of Gaza as the Israelis say “every few years you come and you mown the lawn.”

You kill as many people in these brutal and intense wars, so you can ensure that the people for the next few years will be trying to survive the damage that you have caused.

Is there any help from Israeli physicians?

Oh yes! Very few individuals, but there is…

But the Israeli medical establishment is actually an intrinsic part of the Israeli establishment, and the Israeli academic medical establishment is also part of the Israeli establishment.

And the Israeli Medical Association refused to condemn the fact that Israeli doctors examine Palestinian political prisoners for what they call “fitness for interrogation”. Which is basically … you get seen by a doctor who decides how much torture you can take before you die.

This actually reminds me of what I was told in 2015 in Pretoria, South Africa, where I was invited to participate as a speaker at the International Conference of the Psychologists for Peace. Several US psychologists reported that during the interrogation and torture of alleged terrorists, there were professional psychologists and even clinical psychiatrists standing by, often assisting the interrogators.

Yes, there are actually two or three well-known American psychologists who designed the CIA interrogation system – its process.

What you have described that is happening in Palestine is apparently part of a very pervasive system. I was told in the Indian-controlled Kashmir that Israeli intelligence officers are sharing their methods of interrogation and torture with their Indian counterparts. And of course the US is involved there as well.

Conflict medicine and the ecology of war

War surgery grew out of the Napoleonic Wars. During these wars, two armies met. They usually met at the frontline. They attacked each other, shot at each other or stabbed each other. Most of injured were combatants, and they got treated in military hospitals. You had an evolution of war surgery.

What we have in this region, we believe, is that the intensity and the prolonged nature of these wars or these conflicts are not temporal – like battles. They don’t start and finish. And they are sufficiently prolonged that they change the biological ecology, the ecology in which people live. They create the ecology of war.

That ecology maintains itself well beyond of what we know is the shooting, because they alter the living environment of people. The wounds are physical, psychological and social wounds; the environment is altered as to become hostile – both to the able-bodied and more hostile to the wounded.

And as in the cases of these multi-drug-resistant organisms, which are now a big issue in the world like the multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 85% of Iraqi war wounded have multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 70% of Syrian war wounded have it …

So we say: this ecology, this biosphere that the conflicts create is even altered at the basic DNA of the bacteria. We have several theories about it; partly it’s the role of the heavy metals in modern ordnance, which can trigger mutation in these bacteria that makes them resistant to antibiotics.

So your biosphere, your bubble, your ecological bubble in which you live in, is permanently changed. And it doesn’t disappear the day the bombs disappear. It has to be dismantled, and in order to dismantle it you have to understand the dynamics of the ecology of war.

That’s why our program was set up at the university, which had basically been the major tertiary teaching center during the civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion. And then as the war in Iraq and Syria developed, we started to get patients from these countries and treat them here.

We found out that we have to understand the dynamics of conflict medicine and to understand the ecology of war; how the physical, biological, psychological and social manifestations of war wounding happen, and how this ecology of war is created; everything from bacteria to the way water and the water cycle changes, to the toxic remains of war, to how people’s bodies react …

Many of my Iraqi patients that I see have multiple members of their families injured.

Is the AUB Medical Center now the pioneer in this research: the ecology of war?

Yes, because of the legacy of the civil war… of regional wars.

Nothing less than a regional perpetual conflict…

Perpetual conflict, yes; first home-grown, and then regional. We are the referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Health, referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, so we act as a regional center, and the aim of our program is to dedicate more time and space and energy to the understanding of how this ecology of war comes about.

A permanent state of extreme poverty and misery

In my writing and in my films, I often draw the parallel between the war and extreme poverty. I have been working in some of the worst slums on Earth, those in Africa, Central America and Caribbean, South Asia, the Philippines and elsewhere.

I concluded that many societies that are in theory living in peace are in reality living in prolonged or even perpetual wars. Extreme misery is a form of war, although there is no ‘declaration of war’, and there is no defined frontline. I covered both countless wars and countless places of extreme misery, and the parallel, especially the physical, psychological and social impact on human beings, appears to be striking.

Would you agree, based on your research? Do you see extreme misery as a type of war?

Yes. At the core of it is the ‘dehumanization’ of people. Extreme poverty is a form of violence. The more extreme this poverty becomes, the closer it comes to the physical nature of violence. War is the accelerated degradation of people’s life to reaching that extreme poverty. But that extreme poverty can be reached by a more gradual process. War only gets them there faster.

A perpetual state of extreme poverty is in a way similar to a perpetual state of conflict, of a war.

Definitely. And it is a war mainly against those who are forced to live in these circumstances. It’s the war against the poor and the South. It’s the war against the poor in the inner cities of the West.

When you are defining the ecology of war, are you also taking what we are now discussing into consideration? Are you researching the impact of extreme poverty on human bodies and human lives? In this region, extreme poverty can often be found in the enormous refugee camps, while in other parts of the world it dwells in countless slums.

This extreme poverty is part of the ecology that we are discussing. One of the constituents of the ecology is when you take a wounded body and you place it in a harsh physical environment and you see how this body is re-wounded and re-wounded again, and this harsh environment becomes a continuation of that battleground, because what you see is a process of re-wounding.

Not because you are still in the frontline somewhere in Syria, but because your kids are now living in a tent with eight other people and they are in danger of becoming the victims of the epidemic of child burns that we now have in the refugee camps, because of poor and unsafe housing.

What exactly is a war injury?

Let’s look at it from a different angle: what constitutes a war wound, or a conflict-related injury? Your most basic conflict-related injury is a gunshot wound and a blast injury from shrapnel.

But what happens when you take that wounded body and throw it into a tent? What are the complications for this wounded body living in a harsh environment; does this constitute a war-related injury?

When you impoverish the population to the point that you have children suffering from the kind of injuries that we know are the results of poor and unsafe housing, is that a conflict-related injury? Or you have children now who have work-related injuries, because they have to go and become the main breadwinners for the home, working as car mechanics or porters or whatever.

Beyond the headlines – the permanent war

Or do you also consider a fact that if you come from a country where a given disease used to be treatable there, but due to the destruction of a health system, that ailment is not treatable anymore, because the hospitals are gone or because doctors had to leave, does that constitute a conflict-related injury?

So, we have to look at the entire ecology: beyond a bullet and shrapnel – things that get headlines in the first 20 seconds.

Your research seems to be relevant to most parts of the world.

Absolutely. Because we know that these humanitarian crises only exist in the imagination of the media and the UN agencies. There are no crises.

It is a perpetual state, again.

Exactly, it is perpetual. It does not stop. It is there all the time. Therefore there is no concept of ‘temporality of crises’, one thing we are arguing against. There is no referee who blows the whistle at the end of the crises.

When the cameras go off, the media and then the world, decides that the crises are over. But you know that people in Laos, for instance, still have one of the highest amputation rates in the world.

 I know. I worked there in the Plain of Jars, which is an enormous minefield even to this day.

Or Vietnam, with the greatest child facial deformities in the world as a result of Agent Orange.

You worked in these countries.

Yes.

Me too; and I used to live in Vietnam. That entire region is still suffering from what used to be known as the ‘Secret War’. In Laos, the poverty is so rampant that people are forced to sell unexploded US bombs for scrap. They periodically explode. In Cambodia, even between Seam Reap and the Thai border, there are villages where people are still dying or losing limbs.

Now many things depend on how we define them. It is often a game of words.

India is a war zone, from Kashmir to the Northeast, Bihar and slums of Mumbai.

If you take the crudest way of measuring conflict, which is the number of people killed by weapons, Guatemala and Salvador have now more people slaughtered than they had during the war.

But because the nature in which violence is exhibited changed, because it doesn’t carry a political tag now, it is not discussed. But actually, it is by the same people against the same people.

Empire of Chaos

I wrote about and filmed in Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, on several occasions. The extreme violence there is a direct result of the conflict implanted, triggered by the West, particularly by the United States. The same could be said about such places like Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti. It has led to almost absolute social collapse.

Yes, in Jamaica, the CIA played a great role in the 70’s.

In that part of the world we are not talking just about poverty…

No, no. We are talking AK-47’s!

Exactly. Once I filmed in San Salvador, in a gangland… A friend, a local liberation theology priest kindly drove me around. We made two loops. The first loop was fine. On the second one they opened fire at our Land Cruiser, with some heavy stuff. The side of our car was full of bullet holes, and they blew two tires. We got away just on our rims. In the villages, maras simply come and plunder and rape. They take what they want. It is a war.

ICRC, they train surgeons in these countries. So the ICRC introduced war surgery into the medical curriculum of the medical schools in Colombia and Honduras. Because effectively, these countries are in a war, so you have to train surgeons, so they know what to do when they receive four or five patients every day, with gunshot wounds.

Let me tell you what I witnessed in Haiti, just to illustrate your point. Years ago I was working in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They say it is the most dangerous ‘neighborhood’ or slum on Earth. The local wisdom goes: “you can enter, but you will never leave alive.”