Women on the Front Lines Fighting Fracking in the Bakken Oil Shale Formations

By Emily Arasim and Osprey Orielle Lake
There are some crystalline moments in which the challenges we face as a civilization become brutally clear. Moments in which corrupt aspects of American democracy and the fractures in our social, economic and political systems are exposed with unsurpassed clarity.
Moments in which we are reminded of how fundamentally ruptured our dominant culture's relationship with the Earth has become and in which we see before our eyes how this split has led to almost unfathomable acts of violence against the Earth, against women and against the original inhabitants of North America.
Standing on the sweeping, golden prairie of North Dakota with the noxious flames of the Bakken fracking fields visible in all directions, one such moment descended with heavy weight.
Rape of the Land, Rape of the Women
"The Bakken" is a shale formation that spans some 25,000 square miles and covers much of western North Dakota, eastern Montana and the southern parts of two Canadian provinces. Since the early 2000's, a boom in oil extraction has taken place in the region thanks to newly available hydraulic fracking technologies used to extract sticky, heavy oil from deep within shale rock. In less than a decade, North Dakota has become a fracking epicenter and the second largest U.S oil-producer after Texas.
For millennia before becoming the center of the fracking industry, northwest North Dakota served primarily as rich agricultural grounds and as the home of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples.
For the Three Affiliated Tribes, the social and environmental destruction wrought by the fracking industry is but the latest wave of historic oppression and colonization. In 1947, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara were forcibly moved from their traditional lands to make room for the construction and flooding of Lake Sakakawea on the Missouri River.
Of the 12 million acres promised to the Three Affiliated Tribes by an 1851 treaty, less than 1 million acres have been delivered in the form of the Fort Berthold Reservation and now these remaining acres are being eaten away by destructive development, cultural dislocation and irremediable ecologic damage cause by the fracking industry.
Williston, a mid-sized town just outside of Fort Berthold Reservation, has officially adopted the new town slogan "Boomtown, USA" and has been taken over by the industry to the point that it is almost unrecognizable to residents, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, whose families have lived there for generations.
The population of Williston has doubled , maybe even quadrupled since 2010, however exact numbers are too hard to track due to the transient flow of labor and utter inability of local government to keep up.
Law enforcement and social services have been stretched far past their limits, leaving many, especially Indigenous women and girls, exposed, vulnerable and without proper legal protection.
While there are some families and women moving to the area to partake in work on the fracking fields and sprawling hotels and strip malls that have popped up to service the workers, the majority of the tens of thousands of new residents are men. In recent years the demographic has changed to the point that there are now more men concentrated in North Dakota than anywhere else in the U.S outside of Alaska.
Workers are housed in ever-expanding mobile home complexes called "man-camps," ranging from unregulated trailers in farmers' fields to sprawling complexes housing and feeding more than 1,000 workers at a time.
Conditions for fracking workers are cramped and have proven to be breeding grounds for violence, drug use and sexual abuse. The population influx and housing demands had driven up rents to exorbitant rates rivaling New York City and San Francisco, squeezing out long-term residents and putting many at risk of homelessness.
According to the state's Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime, including murder, aggravated assault, rape and robbery increased by 125 percent between 2005 and 2013.
In September 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified two small towns in the Bakken alongside four major cities (Boston, Houston, Atlanta and Oakland), as the places in the U.S most in need of assistance to combat rampant sex and human trafficking.
In North Dakota, as in many places across the world, violence against women intersects with and is multiplied by deep racism and a legacy of exploitation, systemic violence and genocide of Indigenous peoples.
According to U.S Department of Justice records, one in three Native American women are raped in their lifetimes, a figure that is two-and-a-half times greater than the average for all U.S. women.
In an astounding 86 percent of cases of rape of Indigenous women and girls, the assailant is non-Native, which has proven to be a fatal catch-22 allowing many crimes to go uninvestigated by either U.S or Tribal officials.
Williston's rape rate is now nearly four times the national average and in 2014, shelter workers reported a more than four-fold increase in domestic violence cases.
From the biggest industry supporter to the staunchest critic, everyone in the North Dakota Bakken is quick to admit that the region feels like an uncontrolled, "wild west." This violent lawlessness bears down upon Indigenous women and girls with unmatched brutality.
In April of 2015, a coalition of Indigenous and women right's organizations, led by Honor the Earth, filed a request with the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, demanding a UN intervention in the epidemic of sexual violence brought on by extreme fossil fuel extraction in Bakken fracking fields and the Alberta, Canada tar sands region.
While violence against Indigenous and other local women in the region continues to be pushed under the cover, the very visible rape of the Earth happening across North Dakota is harder to ignore.
The North Dakota Industrial Commission cites nearly 2,000 spills, leaks, ruptures, fires and blowouts over the past 12 months and the Associated Press recently uncovered at least 750 "oilfields incidences" hidden from the public since January 2012. More than 75 tons of oil waste is generated in the state every day, one third of which is highly radioactive.
Radioactive "frack socks," used to filter solids from toxic fracking water, are produced by the hundreds of thousands every day. Waste disposal sites in North Dakota are not allowed to accept these radioactive materials, the result being that thousands of filters are being illegally dumped by industry workers, most notably on back roads, dumpsters and playgrounds of the Fort Berthold reservation.
While fracking is happening across the U.S, there are a several elements of the North Dakota industry that set it above the rest when it comes to devastation of the land and the health of local communities.
The massive worker influx and targeting of Indigenous communities are two such factors—flaring or the burning off of the natural gas extracted during the fracking process, is another.
Across the U.S, an average of just 1 percent of gas is flared, while the rest is captured and used as productive energy. In North Dakota, upwards of 26 percent is burned off, creating an additional source of volatile pollution and waste and serving as a testament to the industries flagrant disregard for the health of people and Earth in North Dakota.
Carbon dioxide, methane and many other hydrocarbons and carcinogens have been identified in samples, however companies are not required to disclose the exact chemical composition of the flared gases, which compromise local air quality, have been linked to cancer, asthma and respiratory disease, and astonishingly, can be seen glowing from space in the previously dim, sparsely populated North Dakota plains.
Flares are highly toxic when lit, but even more devastating when the flames go out and gases pour out unseen, creating gas plumes over local communities for hours, days or weeks.
The global warming inducing methane and carbon dioxide released by flaring is a double threat not just for North Dakota, but for worldwide efforts to curb run away climate change.
Fracking is a violent assault on all of Earth's vital systems, but most immediate and pronounced on the water cycle.
The process drills some 2,000 to 10,000 feet deep, often passing through and contaminating vital aquifers. For each frack well, 1 to 8 million gallons of fresh water is mixed with undisclosed chemical "fracking fluids" and forcefully injected into the ground to break the rock and release the gas and oil.
Despite corporate secrecy, it has been established that more than 600 chemicals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, are common components of the water/chemical concoction. Many of the chemicals used by the fracking industry have been exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws, despite the fact that they are being directly injected into the Earth and drinking water sources.
Elementary school science, which taught us that the water cycle is a closed loop—that no water is ever gained or lost—is no longer an ultimate truth, as water used in the fracking process is contaminated with oil and hydrocarbons, radioactive materials, carcinogens and biocides to the point of no return.
At a time of global water crisis, the fossil fuel industry is permanently destroying billions of gallons of pure water in a race to dig up non-renewable resources. The imperative of action to keep fossil fuels in the ground could not be clearer.
Women Speak from the Frontlines
In September of 2015, a delegation from the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network traveled to Williston, North Dakota to take part in the Fifth Annual Stop Extreme Energy Conference, support advocacy efforts and bear witness to the conditions being experienced in and around the community of longtime Indigenous, women's and climate justice activist, Kandi Mossett.
Mossett, native energy and climate campaign organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, was born and raised in New Town, a once small, close-knit community just inside the borders of Fort Berthold Reservation.
Mossett led a diverse group of educators and activists on a "toxic tour" of the region around New Town, Williston and Fort Berthold, visiting contaminated sites and passing seemingly endless open flares, oil derricks and drills, processing sites, train depots,"'man camps" and supporting infrastructure from hotels and truck stops, to strip clubs and liquor stores.
The phrase "national sacrifice zone" came to the lips of many of the witnesses, struggling to describe the dangerous deregulation, debase pursuit of corporate profit and callous disregard for the health and safety of local communities, and the soil, water, air and lives of future generations.
Driving just outside of Watford City, the group passed an elementary school and playground. Mere meters away from the school on the other side of the road, Mossett pointed out a torn up road and a newly constructed building, to serve as a radioactive storage facility for the fracking industry. According to Mossett, the permits for the building had been officially issued just weeks previously, however construction had been started many months before.
This is only one of many incidences involving direct threats to local children and their right to life. In the town of Mandaree toddlers were found playing with radioactive "frack-sock" filters dumped in a field, prompting residents to immediately begin campaigning and plastering nearby towns with flyers identifying the danger and making sure parents and children knew to stay away and immediately report dumping of radioactive waste.
With tears and heart-wrenching grief, Mossett also recounted the story of a young girl, less than five years old, found running, naked, away from a man-camp after having been sexually violated by a worker.
In the windswept, rolling plains of North Dakota, companies like Halliburton, Hess, Crestwood Energy, Whiting Petroleum Corp. and Enbridge, to name but a few, have crowned themselves king and are acting with a level of impunity beyond measure.
They are using the complex overlay of sovereign tribal, federal and state jurisdictions, as well as questionable webs of subcontractors, to evade responsibility for atrocious social and ecologic damages—however their air of confidence and inevitability is more and more in-question everyday.
There is a saying of the Global South that speaks to the change that must now come to the Bakken oil fields: Neither the land nor women are territories of conquest.
Hope Amidst Devastation
There are many compelling reasons for hope.
For one, the profitability of the industry is plummeting. In the first weeks of 2016, Flint Hills Resources LLC, the refining arm of the Koch's brothers industries, offered to pay just $1.50 per barrel of North Dakota crude, down from $13.50 one year ago and $47.60 in January of 2014.
The same collapse is happening just north in the Canadian tar sands and investors are fleeing rather than risk stranded assets.
While the growing financial instability and risk facing the extreme energy industry in North Dakota and around the world, is a major victory for the global climate and #KeepItIntheGround movement—it was vividly apparent in travels around North Dakota that deep and sustained attention must be given to ensure that our transition away from fossil fuels is a just one and that those communities whose lives have been uprooted by the industry are not once again made disposable when the fracking boom collapses.
As the industry unravels towards its own demise, resistance movements, local initiatives and powerful narratives speaking out against the industry are also growing in strength.
After learning that their land was slated for industry expansion, the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa people moved unanimously to ban fracking on their 77,000-acre reservation, located in the north-central part of the state, just 190 miles from the fracking epicenter in Forth Berthold.
The Standing Rock Sioux Nation in the southern part of the state have also issued a ban.
As on Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara land, the movement to ban fracking amongst the Chippewa was led by local women, acting in alignment with their traditional role as providers and protectors of water. Since their success in passing the initial ban, they have been taking the next steps to ensure continued protection and the development of systemic alternatives through the use of abundant solar and wind energy.
North Dakota has the sixth largest wind resource potential in the U.S., totaling 770,000 megawatts—which is more than that of all fossil fuel powered plants in the U.S. combined.
While still plagued by an unresponsive tribal council, Mossett's own community is stepping up and taking action of their own accord.
In 2015, local grassroots women including Lisa DeVille and Theodora and Joletta Birdbear, founded Fort Berthold Protectors of Water & Earth Rights (POWER), through which the have been lobbying and directly pushing back against their local officials and the liable corporations.
They have no intention of stepping down in their campaign to stop fracking in North Dakota, bring an end to violence against local women and Indigenous communities and lift up respect for the vibrant Earth.
In December of 2015, Mossett was one of the leading activists and most prominent Indigenous voices present during the United Nations COP21 climate negotiations in Paris. She helped present the "Keep It In the Ground Declaration" with global allies, delivered a Frontline Women's Press Conference with the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network and led countless other workshops, conferences and stunning direct actions, including a high-profile demonstration to call out fracking inside of the so-called COP21 "Solutions 21" exhibition, where French fracking company Suez was promoting their business as climate friendly.
It should be well noted that at COP21 the U.S., along with 195 countries, pledged to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists have stated that we must keep 80 percent of global fossil fuel reserves in the ground to avoid climate catastrophe. Continued fracking will thus contribute to the negation of the Paris agreement and the demands of science—underscoring the need for serious scrutiny and immediate action to halt this extreme extraction.
In 2016, Mossett will be working to document and expose the connections between fracking and asthma and other local health impacts and will be taking on the heroic task of founding a nonprofit to promote, teach and manifest food sovereignty and renewable energy on tribal lands across Montana and North and South Dakota.
Mossett is an inspiration not only in her fierce work to challenge brutal prevailing forces of environmental and cultural destruction, gender violence, compromised health and a dangerously dysfunctional legal system—but also in her tender work to heal and nourish alternatives.
She stands with countless other Indigenous women who are working not just to expose injustice, but to actively build the healthy world we seek.
Until we are accountable to the women and the communities on the frontlines of environmental impacts, there will be no social justice or climate solutions.
It is time to urgently end the injustice and racism of sacrifice zones in the U.S. Instead, we must build hope, build solutions and follow the guidance and experience of frontline women leaders like Mossett, as she and others work for a just transition to a clean energy future that works for the Earth and all it's people.
Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International and co-chair of International Advocacy for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. She is the author of the award-winning book Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature. Follow on Twitter @WECAN_INTL.
Emily Arasim has served as WECAN International's media and communications coordinator and project assistant since 2014. She is an avid photojournalist, writer and farmer from New Mexico.
A weather research station on a bluff overlooking the sea is closing down because of the climate crisis.
The National Weather Service (NWS) station in Chatham, Massachusetts was evacuated March 31 over concerns the entire operation would topple into the ocean.
"We had to say goodbye to the site because of where we are located at the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge, we're adjacent to a bluff that overlooks the ocean," Boston NWS meteorologist Andy Nash told WHDH at the time. "We had to close and cease operations there because that bluff has significantly eroded."
Chatham is located on the elbow of Cape Cod, a land mass extending out into the Atlantic Ocean that has been reshaped and eroded by waves and tides over tens of thousands of years, The Guardian explained. However, sea level rise and extreme weather caused by the climate crisis have sped that change along.
"It's an extremely dynamic environment, which is obviously a problem if you are building permanent infrastructure here," Andrew Ashton, an associate scientist at Cape-Cod based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told The Guardian. "We are putting our foot on the accelerator to make the environment even more dynamic."
This was the case with the Chatham weather station. It used to be protected from the drop into the ocean by about 100 feet of land. However, storm action in 2020 alone washed away as much as six feet of land a day.
"We'd know[n] for a long time there was erosion but the pace of it caught everyone by surprise," Nash told The Guardian. "We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn't have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem."
The Chatham station was part of a network of 92 NWS stations that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction and other data in the upper atmosphere, The Cape Cod Chronicle explained. The stations send up radiosondes attached to weather balloons twice a day to help with weather research and prediction. The Chatham station, which had been observing this ritual for the past half a century, sent up its last balloon the morning of March 31.
"We're going to miss the observations," Nash told The Cape Cod Chronicle. "It gives us a snapshot, a profile of the atmosphere when the balloons go up."
The station was officially decommissioned April 1, and the two buildings on the site will be demolished sometime this month. The NWS is looking for a new location in southeastern New England. In the meantime, forecasters will rely on data from stations in New York and Maine.
Nash said the leavetaking was bittersweet, but inevitable.
"[M]other nature is evicting us," he told The Cape Cod Chronicle.
By Douglas Broom
- If online deliveries continue with fossil-fuel trucks, emissions will increase by a third.
- So cities in the Netherlands will allow only emission-free delivery vehicles after 2025.
- The government is giving delivery firms cash help to buy or lease electric vehicles.
- The bans will save 1 megaton of CO2 every year by 2030.
Cities in the Netherlands want to make their air cleaner by banning fossil fuel delivery vehicles from urban areas from 2025.
"Now that we are spending more time at home, we are noticing the large number of delivery vans and lorries driving through cities," said Netherlands environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, announcing plans to ban all but zero-emission deliveries in 14 cities.
"The agreements we are setting down will ensure that it will be a matter of course that within a few years, supermarket shelves will be stocked, waste will be collected, and packages will arrive on time, yet without any exhaust fumes and CO2 emissions," she added.
She expects 30 cities to announce zero emission urban logistics by this summer. City councils must give four years' notice before imposing bans as part of government plans for emission-free road traffic by 2050. The city bans aim to save 1 megaton of CO2 each year by 2030.
Help to Change
To encourage transport organizations to go carbon-free, the government is offering grants of more than US$5,900 to help businesses buy or lease electric vehicles. There will be additional measures to help small businesses make the change.
The Netherlands claims it is the first country in the world to give its cities the freedom to implement zero-emission zones. Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht already have "milieuzones" where some types of vehicles are banned.
Tilburg, one of the first wave of cities imposing the Dutch ban, will not allow fossil-fuelled vehicles on streets within its outer ring road and plans to roll out a network of city-wide electric vehicle charging stations before the ban comes into effect in 2025.
"Such initiatives are imperative to improve air quality. The transport of the future must be emission-free, sustainable, and clean," said Tilburg city alderman Oscar Dusschooten.
Europe Takes Action
Research by Renault shows that many other European cities are heading in the same direction as the Netherlands, starting with Low Emission Zones of which Germany's "Umweltzone" were pioneers. More than 100 communes in Italy have introduced "Zonas a traffico limitato."
Madrid's "zona de baja emisión" bans diesel vehicles built before 2006 and petrol vehicles from before 2000 from central areas of the city. Barcelona has similar restrictions and the law will require all towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants to follow suit.
Perhaps the most stringent restrictions apply in London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which charges trucks and large vehicles up to US$137 a day to enter the central area if they do not comply with Euro 6 emissions standards. From October, the ULEZ is being expanded.
Cities are responsible for around 75% of CO2 emissions from global final energy use, according to the green thinktank REN21 - and much of these come from transport. Globally, transport accounts for 24% of world CO2 emissions.
The Rise of Online Shopping
Part of the reason for traffic in urban areas is the increase in delivery vehicles, as online shopping continues to grow. Retailer ecommerce sales are expected to pass $5billion in 2022, according to eMarketer.
The World Economic Forum's report The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem, published in January 2020, estimates that e-commerce will increase the number of delivery vehicles on the roads of the world's 100 largest cities by 36% by 2030.
If all those vehicles burn fossil fuels, the report says emissions will increase by 32%. But switching to all-electric delivery vehicles would cut emissions by 30% from current levels as well as reducing costs by 25%, the report says.
Other solutions explored in the report include introducing goods trams to handle deliveries alongside their passenger-carrying counterparts and increased use of parcel lockers to reduce the number of doorstep deliveries.
Reposted with permission from the World Economic Forum.
A bill that would have banned fracking in California died in committee Tuesday.
The bill, SB467, would have prohibited fracking and other controversial forms of oil extraction. It would also have banned oil and gas production within 2,500 feet of a home, school, hospital or other residential facility. The bill originally set the fracking ban for 2027, but amended it to 2035, The AP reported.
"Obviously I'm very disappointed," State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of the bill's two introducers, told the Los Angeles Times. "California really has not done what it needs to do in terms of addressing the oil problem. We have communities that are suffering right now, and the Legislature has repeatedly failed to act."
The bill was introduced after California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would sign a fracking ban if it passed the legislature, though his administration has continued to issue permits in the meantime, Forbes reported. Newsom has also spoken in favor of a buffer zone between oil and gas extraction and places where people live and learn, according to the Los Angeles Times. The latter is a major environmental justice issue, as fossil fuel production is more likely to be located near Black and Latinx communities.
Urban lawmakers who want California to lead on the climate crisis supported the bill, while inland lawmakers in oil-rich areas concerned about jobs opposed it. The oil and gas industry and trade unions also opposed the bill.
This opposition meant the bill failed to get the five votes it needed to move beyond the Senate's Natural Resources and Water Committee. Only four senators approved it, while Democrat Sen. Susan Eggman of Stockton joined two Republicans to oppose it, and two other Democrats abstained.
Eggman argued that the bill would have forced California to rely on oil extracted in other states.
"We're still going to use it, but we're going to use it from places that produce it less safely," Eggman told The AP. She also said that she supported the transition away from fossil fuels, but thought the bill jumped the gun. "I don't think we're quite there yet, and this bill assumes that we are," she added.
Historically, California has been a major U.S. oil producer. Its output peaked in 1986 at 1.1 million barrels a day, just below Texas and Alaska, according to Forbes. However, production has declined since then making it the seventh-most oil-producing state.
Still, California's fossil fuel industry is at odds with state attempts to position itself as a climate leader.
"There is a large stain on California's climate record, and that is oil," Wiener said Tuesday, according to The AP.
Wiener and Democrat co-introducer Sen. Monique Limón from Santa Barbara vowed to keep fighting.
"While we saw this effort defeated today, this issue isn't going away," they wrote in a joint statement. "We'll continue to fight for aggressive climate action, against harmful drilling, and for the health of our communities."
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World's 5% 'Polluter Elite' Responsible for 37% of Global Emissions Growth, Study Concludes
By Brett Wilkins
As world leaders prepare for this November's United Nations Climate Conference in Scotland, a new report from the Cambridge Sustainability Commission reveals that the world's wealthiest 5% were responsible for well over a third of all global emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.
The report, Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis, found that nearly half the growth in absolute global emissions was caused by the world's richest 10%, with the most affluent 5% alone contributing 37%.
"In the year when the UK hosts COP26, and while the government continues to reward some of Britain's biggest polluters through tax credits, the commission report shows why this is precisely the wrong way to meet the UK's climate targets," the report's introduction states.
The authors of the report urge United Kingdom policymakers to focus on this so-called "polluter elite" in an effort to persuade wealthy people to adopt more sustainable behavior, while providing "affordable, available low-carbon alternatives to poorer households."
The report found that the "polluter elite" must make "dramatic" lifestyle changes in order to meet the UK's goal — based on the Paris climate agreement's preferential objective — of limiting global heating to 1.5°C, compared with pre-industrial levels.
In addition to highlighting previous recommendations — including reducing meat consumption, reducing food waste, and switching to electric vehicles and solar power — the report recommends that policymakers take the following steps:
- Implement frequent flyer levies;
- Enact bans on selling and promoting SUVs and other high polluting vehicles;
- Reverse the UK's recent move to cut green grants for homes and electric cars; and
- Build just transitions by supporting electric public transport and community energy schemes.
"We have got to cut over-consumption and the best place to start is over-consumption among the polluting elites who contribute by far more than their share of carbon emissions," Peter Newell, a Sussex University professor and lead author of the report, told the BBC.
"These are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most, and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they're well insulated or not," said Newell. "They're also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels if they wanted to."
Newell said that wealthy people "simply must fly less and drive less. Even if they own an electric SUV, that's still a drain on the energy system and all the emissions created making the vehicle in the first place."
"Rich people who fly a lot may think they can offset their emissions by tree-planting schemes or projects to capture carbon from the air," Newell added. "But these schemes are highly contentious and they're not proven over time."
The report concludes that "we are all on a journey and the final destination is as yet unclear. There are many contradictory road maps about where we might want to get to and how, based on different theories of value and premised on diverse values."
"Promisingly, we have brought about positive change before, and there are at least some positive signs that there is an appetite to do what is necessary to live differently but well on the planet we call home," it states.
The new report follows a September 2020 Oxfam International study that revealed the wealthiest 1% of the world's population is responsible for emitting more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorest 50% of humanity combined.
Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.
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By Paul Brown
It may come as a surprise to realize that a plant struggling for survival in a harsh environment is also doing its bit to save the planet from the threats of the rapidly changing climate. But that's what Mexico's cactuses are managing to do.
Research published in the journal The Science of Nature shows that desert soils supporting a high density of cactus contain large quantities of stored bio-minerals (minerals produced by living organisms), formed by the action of the plants in extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Not only that. Cactuses can also be harvested, processed and turned into a form of leather used to make fashion accessories like purses and wallets.
These two attributes have been turned into a successful business by a Mexican/American company, CACTO. It claims to be the first "carbon negative fashion company in the Americas" − in other words, its activities remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it creates in making and marketing its products.
No Animals Involved
This is a bold claim in an industry struggling with its poor environmental record. According to McKinsey and Co. the worldwide fashion industry emits about the same amount of greenhouse gases as France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined. But CACTO gives Mexico's cactuses special treatment.
CACTO's products are vegan and so allow a growing class of consumers to buy leather objects that are made without any animal products.
The research into the ability of cactus to extract carbon from the atmosphere and store it was carried out on one cactus species, the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea), which can grow to 40 feet.
It is native to the Sonoran desert in Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, and shares with all other cactus varieties the same abilities for dealing with carbon. This has proved a bonus for CACTO because cactuses are the most numerous plants in Mexico.
CACTO's plantations are organic, fed by rainwater, free of herbicides and pesticides, and renewable, and after the ears, or leaves; of the cactus are harvested, the plant grows a replacement in six to eight months. This regeneration allows repeat harvesting. The leaves are then sun-dried to avoid using any electricity. The company's products (available only in green or black) are on sale in more than 100 countries.
CACTO was founded by Jesus Chavez, a climate campaigner, and was designed to have sustainability as a guiding principle at the core of its operation. The entire production cycle is closely monitored by its staff, from the sourcing of materials to production, packaging, distribution and shipping.
Through a partnership with a Swiss non-profit organisation, On a Mission, CACTO says its staff have measured and offset 150% of its CO2 emissions through sustainable reforestation worldwide.
The measurement and offsetting process will take place every six months for the next 10 years. Through several emergent partnerships, the company says it aims to offset at least 1000% of the emissions it generates by the end of 2021.
Engaging Entrepreneurs
Jesus Chavez said: "If we want to succeed in reaching net zero carbon emissions well before 2050 and avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we must all work in concert in whatever capacity we are able to.
"Industries across the board need to benefit from existing technology and offsetting programs to become carbon-negative, and to invest in new research and innovation to reach that goal faster. The decisions we make this decade will determine the fate of humanity for centuries to come. It is up to us now."
He said customers around the world wanted alternatives to materials that increased pollution and to unethical manufacturing processes.
CACTO hopes to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs to make clear what has been evident to specialists for decades, that decoupling emissions from economic growth is not only feasible, but is the smartest, fastest and most responsible way to grow. Mexico's cactuses bear a heavy responsibility on their ears − or leaves − or branches.
Reposted with permission from Climate News Network.