Environmental history

Honduran activist Juan Lopez (murdered September 2024) in a photo taken in front of portrait of fellow Honduran Carlos Escaleras (murdered 1997). (Photo by Lucy Edwards).

Every year, land and environmental defenders around the world are brutally murdered for daring to resist environmental exploitation. In 2023, Global Witness  documented 196 defender killings.

The number this year tips the official total to over 2,000 globally since Global Witness started reporting data in 2012. The organization now estimates  that the total stands at 2,106 murders.

Global Witness published “Missing Voices: the violent erasure of land and environmental defenders”  in September 2024.

Killings in Peru have also been tied to environmental crimes in the Peruvian Amazon,  Mongabay, an environmental webzine, reported in September 2024.

A 2024 journal article on Ecopoliticide. by Delon A. Omrow & Peter Stoett from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, argues that the strategic murder of environmental activists “is a fundamental threat to human and environmental security.”

Environmental history cannot ignore these atrocities, and this site still attempts to keep track of developments.   

Thirty years ago, when David Helvarg wrote “The War Against the Greens,”  both major political parties agreed that serious efforts to protect the environment were needed.  Most of the opposition to environmental protection, at the time,  came from polluting  corporations and the extreme far right of the political spectrum.  Today, that war has expanded into a global effort led by the American Republican party, says Helvarg in an April 2024 Daily Kos article.

Helvarg writes:

The rightwing Heritage Foundation has written “Project 2025,” a plan for what it hopes will be a second Trump administration.  The plan calls for rapidly expanding fossil fuel emissions and includes a chapter on opening up the Department of Interior’s lands to mineral mining and oil drilling written by Wise Use veteran, William Perry Pendley…

In just the last decade 1,700 environmentalists and land-defenders including many indigenous leaders around the world have been murdered according to a recent report put out by the investigative group Global Witness.

In the U.S. one of the nation’s two major political parties has effectively merged with the fossil fuel industry and made climate denial a litmus test of loyalty.  Donald Trump says if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one in order to, “close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up.” — BioScience, Oct 24, 2023, State of the Climate Report. 

Humpback whale off the US Atlantic coast.  (By Pierre Gleizes, © Greenpeace). Audio: Songs of the Humpback Whale, 1972, recorded by Roger Payne.

By Chris Greenberg,  Source: Greenpeace 

Whales could always speak for themselves. Humans just didn’t hear them.

Roger Payne changed that with a simple, empathetic act: He listened. And then we all did.

In 1970, Payne (1935-2023) made sure the world finally paid attention to the “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” Payne’s landmark 35-minute album of recorded whale song in the wild deepened humanity’s connection with the natural world, catalyzed the global movement to stop commercial whaling, and had a lasting impact on the growing ecology movement, including Greenpeace.

Payne, who passed away in June 2023 at age 88 at his home in Vermont, founded Ocean Alliance in 1971 and was an inspiration and friend to Greenpeace activists during and far beyond the iconic “Save The Whales” campaign that garnered international in the 1970s and played a key role in the adoption of an commercial whaling moratorium in 1986.

Born in New York City, educated at Harvard and Cornell, Payne’s pioneering whale song recordings and decades of study of their communications have arguably done more to dispel the Moby Dick myth of the violent and solitary whale than anything else. His first record of what he described as an “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound,” made with the help of researcher Scott McVay, would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies, making it the bestselling environmental album of all time.

“My idea was, if you can move people emotionally, you can also get them to act,” Payne told Nautilus in 2021. “To see if I was right, I started playing humpback whale sounds to friends and other small audiences, and soon it became very clear that these sounds moved people deeply. In fact, some friends wept when they heard them—they’re that powerful.”

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Excerpts from a Paul Krugman opinion piece in the New York Times about the June 30, 2022 Supreme Court climate decision:

“Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests… Ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action… The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?

“It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations… The United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.”

Patrick Parenteau

Professor of Law, Vermont Law School

In a highly anticipated but not unexpected 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2022, that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

The ruling doesn’t take away the EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, but it makes federal action harder by requiring the agency to show that Congress has charged it to act – in an area where Congress has consistently failed to act.

The Clean Power Plan, the policy at the heart of the ruling, never took effect because the court blocked it in 2016, and the EPA now plans to develop a new policy instead. Nonetheless, the court went out of its way to strike it down in this case and reject the agency’s interpretation of what the Clean Air Act permitted.

Having said what the EPA cannot do, the court gave no guidance on what the agency can do about this urgent problem. Beyond climate policy, the ruling poses serious questions about how the court will view other regulatory programs. Continue reading →

Keith Johnson (Jamaica), Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference (left), United Nations Secretary-General U Thant (center) and Maurice F. Strong, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (right). (UN photo).

By Peter Dykstra
Environmental Health News

In 1972, world leaders had gathered in Stockholm in an unprecedented acknowledgement that we were running into trouble. The gathering hammered out a weighty Statement of Principles. It was the first draft of an owner’s manual for planet Earth, but it left much to do.

Two decades later, the site was Rio de Janeiro. World leaders addressed the hopes for Rio:

“There are those who say economic growth and environmental protection are not compatible. Well, let them come to the United States.″ – U.S. President George H.W. Bush

″The ecological debt should be paid, not the foreign debt. Hunger must disappear, not man.” – Cuban President Fidel Castro

“We are ready to assume our share and hope other industrial countries will do the same. … We are determined to live up to our responsibilities to developing countries.” – German Chancellor Helmut Kohl

″Developed countries have a greater obligation to find solutions and to transfer technology. … Protection of the environment must respect the sovereignty and independence of each country.” – Chinese President Li Peng

Journalist George Monbiot was a tad more cynical about Rio’s rhetoric and intentions:

“It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It could be illustrated with rainbows and psychedelic unicorns and stuck on the door of your toilet. But without any

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