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Veterinary medicine has a factory farming problem

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Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Christina Animashaun/Vox To fight the cruel meat industry, veterinarians have to fight their own profession. The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the premier organization that represents most of America’s 121,000 veterinarians, might not seem like an obvious target for protests. But at the organization’s annual convention last summer, disruptions were anticipated — animal activists had been gearing up to protest the AVMA for months. Outside the conference in downtown Philadelphia, they unfurled an enormous banner that read, “TELL AVMA: STOP ROASTING ANIMALS ALIVE.” The protesters were referring to the AVMA’s backing of a method of mass culling animals on factory farms known as “ventilation shutdown plus.” It involves sealing off the animals’ housing and turning up the heat to lethal temperatures so that they die of heatstroke over the course of hours, like a dog dying in a hot car. The method, known as VSD+ for short, was used widely by the poultry and egg industries to cull tens of millions of chickens and turkeys during this past year’s bird flu epidemic. It is also widely thought to be the most cruel, distressing option for exterminating animals — a practice that opponents say amounts to essentially cooking animals to death. Yet it continues to be commonly deployed, in part because of AVMA policy. While the organization says ventilation shutdown alone, without the addition of extra heat or carbon dioxide, is not recommended, it deems VSD+ “permitted in constrained circumstances” if more preferred methods aren’t available. This finding became the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s bird flu containment policy, allowing VSD+ to rapidly become a meat industry default. The method’s prevalence has drawn the attention of federal lawmakers: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) both recently introduced bills to end its use. Direct Action Everywhere Activists protest outside the AVMA’s summer 2022 convention. In her past work as an emergency veterinarian, Gwendolen Reyes-Illg has cared for numerous animals suffering from heatstroke. Its symptoms are almost too disturbing to print: “chunks of mucosa and blood come pouring out of the rectum, and vomiting of blood is common as well,” as Reyes-Illg told me for a previous story. While Reyes-Illg treats her patients’ heatstroke, with VSD+, that same condition is induced on purpose, with the AVMA’s stamp of approval. “I think if you surveyed the veterinarians in the United States, the vast majority of them have no idea that this is happening, and if they knew they would be outraged,” said Reyes-Illg, who is a veterinary advisor to the Animal Welfare Institute and is among the veterinarians organizing to withdraw their profession’s support for VSD+. More than 1,500 vets have signed a petition urging the AVMA to stop condoning the method. So far, their efforts have been unsuccessful. The controversy over ventilation shutdown represents the most recent, high-profile example of long-simmering tensions over veterinary medicine’s values. While the public associates veterinarians with cats and dogs, imagining it as a job for animal lovers, veterinary medicine is also deeply embedded in the factory farm system. Veterinarians provide the research, expertise, and scientific and moral authority that allows the US to raise nearly 10 billion land animals in intensive confinement every year. “At present, the official stance of the veterinary profession in the US often serves to legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale, such as intensive confinement and the use of heatstroke as a method of mass on-farm killing,” Reyes-Illg said in an email. “The veterinary profession helps shield such practices from questioning and criticism.” But a new generation of veterinarians is challenging what they see as the “corporate capture” of their profession, as vet Crystal Heath put it, by the meat industry and other sectors that kill animals for profit. If they’re successful, they argue, they could help topple a crucial pillar of support for factory farming. While the AVMA doesn’t control what methods meat producers choose to use, the veterinary profession’s positions inform legislation and rule-making around how animals are allowed to be treated. The USDA’s rules on how to kill poultry birds due to avian flu, for example, are taken directly from AVMA guidelines. Vets are also, in my experience, the preferred excuse used by the meat industry and regulators to justify extreme cruelty. Ask an agriculture department bureaucrat why they’re condoning mass extermination via heatstroke, and they’re likely to shrug and say, it’s AVMA-approved (that is almost verbatim what I was told by Chloe Carson, who was then the communications director for Iowa’s agriculture department, in April). “The AVMA is critical in our political system for animal welfare, so Congress tends to think of the AVMA when it comes to animal things,” said livestock veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school. “Congress will take no action until the AVMA changes its position” on how animals are treated in the food system. The schism in veterinary medicine is long in the making While VSD+ has emerged as a flashpoint among vets only in the last few years, conflicts over factory farming have been long in the making. The US Supreme Court will soon release its decision on a pork industry lawsuit that could strike down one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the country. Under challenge is California’s Proposition 12, which bans the sale of pork raised using gestation crates — narrow metal cages, not much bigger than an adult pig, where pregnant pigs are kept for most of their lives, unable to turn around or stretch their limbs. Pigs are often observed biting the bars of the crates, among other signs of distress. But in a brief filed in June, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, an organization closely tied to the pork industry, urged the Court to strike down Prop 12. “Proposition 12 is likely to harm animal welfare rather than help it,” the group argued. When she read that brief, Reyes-Illg remembers, “I was horrified that this might be the sole message the Supreme Court would hear from veterinarians about gestation crates.” She led an effort to submit a brief to the court, which was signed by 378 veterinarians and animal welfare scientists, refuting the swine veterinarians’ claims as inaccurate and driven by pork industry interests. “The weight of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that gestation crates cause profound, avoidable suffering and deprive pigs of a minimally acceptable standard of welfare,” they wrote. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media Pigs inside a gestation crate facility in Canada. Gestation crates have been a topic of heated debate in the AVMA. Its policy statement on housing for pregnant pigs says they should be provided with “adequate quality and quantity of space that allows sows to assume normal postures and express normal patterns of behavior” and that there are “advantages and disadvantages” to different systems, including gestation crates. The organization hasn’t, in any document I could find, taken a position on gestation crate bans like Prop 12, but it declined to comment on a question about this. In an email in March that was obtained by Vox through a public records request, Michael Costin, assistant director of the AVMA’s division of animal and public health, alerted the AASV about the federal PIGS Act, a House bill that would ban gestation crates. “You may want to touch base with the AASV reps so they are prepared when this comes to them,” he wrote, noting that the AVMA’s animal agriculture liaison committee and animal welfare committee have representatives from AASV on them. “I assume AASV would oppose this bill.” Costin didn’t respond to requests for comment on the correspondence. The gap between veterinarians like Reyes-Illg and those aligned with industry reflects a longtime debate in veterinary ethics: Should vets represent the interests of animals, or those of the humans who own and profit from them? Veterinary medicine encompasses society’s paradoxical relationship with nonhuman animals, from love and companionship to commodification and killing. Today, most US veterinarians care for companion animals, like cats, dogs, and other pets, but it wasn’t always that way. Modern veterinary medicine has its origins in treating animals raised for food and horses used for transportation. “I don’t think there’s any question that in North America, organized veterinary medicine” — institutions like the AVMA — “by and large reflects that history,” said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School. “The people who are the national spokespeople for veterinary medicine are still very much entrenched in food production and in the agriculture industry in a way that the majority of practicing veterinarians are not.” These disparities, combined with the factory farm-ification of animal agriculture, have led to a “growing schism between the companion animal side of the field and the food animal production side of the field,” Moses said. As meat production industrialized, the profession accommodated it. “The veterinary response was largely a technocratic one, technological, and very much politically aligned with animal production,” said Susan Jones, a science historian at the University of Minnesota and a veterinarian. Economic shifts in agriculture necessarily drove changes in how industry vets viewed their patients, “seeing animals less as living sentient beings and seeing them more as production units,” Jones said. “This means that [vets] don’t see animals anymore as individuals in need of health care or welfare considerations. You see them as populations.” Professional backlash for criticizing factory farming can be steep Veterinarian Crystal Heath, who is one of the best-known critics of her profession’s relationship with the meat industry, seeks every opportunity to start conversations about how vets could end the biggest harms facing animals, like ventilation shutdown, rather than participate in them. She arrived at the AVMA convention in late July with that goal in mind. On her first day there, she and her friend Daniela Castillo, a fellow vet pushing for change in the profession, said they noticed being watched by a security guard. When they approached to ask him what was going on, he explained that he’d been told to look out for them because they might be protesting. “Obviously, we’re being surveilled,” Heath said in a video posted to Twitter that evening. “It seems like the AVMA is extremely unwelcoming and is not supportive of people who are doing animal advocacy.” The AVMA declined to comment on these allegations. Heath, a Berkeley-based shelter veterinarian who devotes much of her time to spaying and neutering cats and dogs, was used to this kind of treatment. Her advocacy has made her a lightning rod within the profession. While she’s hardly the first vet to voice misgivings about factory farming, she’s done so particularly publicly — often bringing her critiques to social media, engaging with audiences outside the profession, and posting examples of veterinarians conducting gruesome research on the meat industry’s behalf. “We should use our innovation to end the exploitation of animals instead of devising more macabre killing methods,” she said in a tweet last fall. And although she grew up steeped in animal agriculture, she’s now vegan, which can feel like an existential threat to industry veterinarians. “I was vice president of my 4H club,” an organization that trains kids in animal agriculture, Heath said. “I raised goats; I was an animal science major.” Now, she said, some veterinary colleagues view her as biased for repudiating animal agriculture, but she points out that the bias runs both ways: “I could easily argue that you have a biased perspective because you are committed to eating animal products. I look at all of these people who they consider to be unbiased, and they all work for industry.” A 2020 story in the Intercept revealed how Heath was branded an extremist and targeted for her advocacy by the meat industry. A flier of unknown provenance had circulated on Facebook, displaying her photo under the warning “BEWARE” and claiming she supported the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, radical groups from an earlier era of animal activism, which she said she knew nothing about at the time. “I got kicked out of all the veterinary Facebook groups that I relied on on a daily basis for networking,” she remembers. Some livestock vets openly berated her. “Crystal your deranged activism here and throughout the animal agriculture industry is quite annoying,” one vet commented on a post she made in a Facebook group. “[Y]ou’re literally, by name, a topic of conversation in board rooms from Ag business to organized veterinary medicine across the nation. Your name is literally toxic.” Heath regularly receives messages from vets and veterinary students who sympathize with her but say they’re afraid to speak out because of the potential consequences for their careers. Daniela Castillo, who’s worked extensively in shelters and spay-and-neuter, said that she’s been ridiculed so much for being vegan that she’s considered leaving veterinary medicine — a problem she feels is compounded by being a woman of color in an overwhelmingly white profession. “People become so defensive,” she said. “They either get angry or they treat you as a joke.” “It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning” Heath realized that veterinarians needed a support network to be able to withstand industry retaliation. In fall 2020, she founded Our Honor, a nonprofit that helps vets challenge unethical practices in their profession. It was a few months after the public learned about ventilation shutdown — not in the poultry industry, but in the pork industry. Due to meatpacking plant shutdowns at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, meat producers couldn’t slaughter as many animals as they normally do — so, instead, they killed and disposed of millions of them. Activists from the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere were tipped off that Iowa Select Farms was using ventilation shutdown plus, a then little-known method, to exterminate its pigs. In an investigation later covered by the Intercept, the activists secretly planted recorders and captured audio of the pigs shrieking for two-and-a-half hours as they were killed with high heat and steam. Direct Action Everywhere A worker moves dead pigs after a mass cull at Iowa Select Farms in 2020. These revelations, and the fact that the AVMA considered VSD+ acceptable, galvanized a coalition of farm animal advocacy groups and veterinarians who are AVMA members. They petitioned the AVMA and submitted a resolution to its House of Delegates, a voting body that guides the organization’s policy, to re-classify VSD+ as “not recommended” in its guidelines. They wrote op-eds and ran an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer ahead of this summer’s AVMA convention that read: “You wouldn’t say it’s okay to roast an animal alive. So why would the American Veterinary Medical Association?” The European Union considers any type of VSD to be a method that’s “likely to be highly painful” and “must never be used.” But the AVMA hasn’t changed its position, and there are signs that it doesn’t intend to. In 2021, the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association published a case study of ventilation shutdown plus, by veterinarian Angela Baysinger and three other vets, in which 243,016 pigs were killed with temperatures reaching as high as 170 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve heat that intense, the paper notes, “commercial-grade mobile steam generators typically used in the railroad industry to heat railcars were obtained.” The study measured the animals’ “time to silent.” “I think that report was published as a way to validate what they were doing and lend legitimacy to” ventilation shutdown, Heath said. Baysinger, who is vice president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and serves on the AVMA’s animal welfare committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment. The only research on VSD+ in poultry birds cited in the AVMA’s guidelines is an unpublished, poultry industry-funded report, which has been criticized and accused of lacking scientific validity. At the International Symposium on Animal Mortality Management this past June, Cia Johnson, the head of the AVMA’s animal welfare division, said: “We need data from you … Even if it’s not published, if it’s a case report, if it’s proprietary data, if it’s unpublished data, the panel needs it. Some of these methods are at risk of leaving the guidelines. I think you probably have an idea of what those methods might be. We need data to support them staying in the document.” Johnson didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. “This intrigues me: AVMA leadership actually put out calls for research to support ventilation shutdown. That’s not science. It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning,” said James Reynolds, the Western University professor. “Their position is completely unreasonable. Not founded on reason, not founded on science.” Footage by North Carolina State University obtained by Animal Outlook via public records request. Screenshot from footage of 2016 ventilation shutdown experiments conducted at North Carolina State University, which are cited in AVMA guidelines. Heath and her allies aren’t giving up, despite the AVMA’s intransigence. In the fall, they gathered 278 signatures to submit yet another resolution to change ventilation shutdown plus’s status to “not recommended,” for the AVMA’s House of Delegates to vote on at its next meeting this month. But the AVMA didn’t allow the resolution to move forward, citing procedural reasons. The AVMA declined an interview for this story, but said in a statement that it “believes animals should only be depopulated in emergency situations, and only after all other options are considered and found not to be viable … Alternatives are exhaustively sought, but when thousands to millions of animals are impacted by such emergencies, depopulation is sometimes the only option. In many cases, the method used to depopulate the animals is limited or dictated by the situation (e.g., containment to control disease spread, natural disaster, or other unprecedented urgent situation). Selecting a depopulation method often involves ‘least bad’ choices; however, failing to depopulate animals in a timely manner can lead to even worse suffering for those animals and/or pose unacceptable health and safety risks for the people who are caring for them.” Entrenched factory farming prevents vets from asking bigger ethical questions Even knowing how livestock veterinarians see their roles, it’s hard not to wonder how they can willingly inflict so much suffering on animals. One answer might be that they believe, or their vocation has convinced them to believe, that there’s no other choice. “Veterinarians are stretched way, way, way too thin, and are almost always inevitably overwhelmed with work,” Lisa Moses, the bioethicist from Harvard, said. “And that does not allow you to have the mental space to ask big-picture questions. You’re just trying to figure out how to get through terrible situations as best as you can.” Often in her advocacy, Heath said, livestock vets ask her: What else do you expect us to do? If meeting America’s demand for abundant cheap meat sometimes requires inflicting great suffering, their thinking goes, that’s the price we have to pay. “I personally believe [ventilation shutdown] is a compromise — a necessary compromise, and an unfortunate compromise,” poultry veterinarian Simon Shane, who criticized Heath and other opponents of VSD+ in a blog post, told me. “People who have protested against ventilation shutdown should provide a viable alternative.” Pressed on whether not raising so many animals in intensive confinement could be a viable alternative, he replied, “I’m in the business of feeding people” and, later, “I really don’t want to get involved in a fruitless discussion on ethics and morality.” Other vets argue that instead of taking the American system of meat production for granted, the profession could actively challenge it. “If the only way to ensure that large swaths of our patients are not routinely killed by heatstroke is to put in place restrictions on CAFO [factory farm] size, then core principles of veterinary medical ethics, like the duties of beneficence and nonmaleficence, require that our profession advocate for such restrictions,” Reyes-Illg wrote in a letter to the AVMA on behalf of the Animal Welfare Institute in May. In June, at a continuing education course held by the American College of Animal Welfare, Cia Johnson was asked whether the AVMA has considered studying ways to reduce the need to mass cull animals. “Not at this time,” she replied. The idea of cutting down meat production is a non-starter in the veterinary community, vets interviewed for this story agree, even though it’s considered a necessary part of addressing climate change and would surely be better for animals. When she took livestock medicine courses in vet school, Reyes-Illg said in an email, “The message I got was that pig vets had to work with industry somehow — there was never any mention that veterinarians might have a role in disrupting the ongoing expansion and intensification of animal agriculture.” Outside North America, veterinary groups often espouse a different philosophy. “At the British Veterinary Association, we encourage everyone to consider the environmental impact of their dietary choices and have long campaigned for a ‘less and better’ approach to consuming meat,” Justine Shotton, the British Veterinary Association’s then-president, told the Daily Mail last summer. This is the discussion that forward-thinking vets in the US dream of having. “If all the AVMA is doing is thinking about depopulation, then that’s all we’re going to get,” Heath said. “But the more the AVMA could put energy and thought into scaling down animal agriculture, then we have the possibility of moving things in the right direction.” For now, though, she and fellow animal advocates are laser-focused on ending the worst meat industry practices — on making the bad system we have a little less bad. She’s looking forward to the AVMA’s next conference this month, where she plans to keep starting conversations the AVMA would rather not have.

An image of two people in lab coats, their faces in shadow, looking at a clipboard. Behind them is a pig and a farm house, the sky a dramatic ombre of yellow and red.
Christina Animashaun/Vox

To fight the cruel meat industry, veterinarians have to fight their own profession.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the premier organization that represents most of America’s 121,000 veterinarians, might not seem like an obvious target for protests. But at the organization’s annual convention last summer, disruptions were anticipated — animal activists had been gearing up to protest the AVMA for months. Outside the conference in downtown Philadelphia, they unfurled an enormous banner that read, “TELL AVMA: STOP ROASTING ANIMALS ALIVE.”

The protesters were referring to the AVMA’s backing of a method of mass culling animals on factory farms known as “ventilation shutdown plus.” It involves sealing off the animals’ housing and turning up the heat to lethal temperatures so that they die of heatstroke over the course of hours, like a dog dying in a hot car. The method, known as VSD+ for short, was used widely by the poultry and egg industries to cull tens of millions of chickens and turkeys during this past year’s bird flu epidemic.

It is also widely thought to be the most cruel, distressing option for exterminating animals — a practice that opponents say amounts to essentially cooking animals to death.

Yet it continues to be commonly deployed, in part because of AVMA policy. While the organization says ventilation shutdown alone, without the addition of extra heat or carbon dioxide, is not recommended, it deems VSD+ “permitted in constrained circumstances” if more preferred methods aren’t available. This finding became the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s bird flu containment policy, allowing VSD+ to rapidly become a meat industry default. The method’s prevalence has drawn the attention of federal lawmakers: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) both recently introduced bills to end its use.

Three activists hold a large banner that reads “TELL AVMA: STOP ROASTING ANIMALS ALIVE. AVMAShamScience.com” Direct Action Everywhere
Activists protest outside the AVMA’s summer 2022 convention.

In her past work as an emergency veterinarian, Gwendolen Reyes-Illg has cared for numerous animals suffering from heatstroke. Its symptoms are almost too disturbing to print: “chunks of mucosa and blood come pouring out of the rectum, and vomiting of blood is common as well,” as Reyes-Illg told me for a previous story. While Reyes-Illg treats her patients’ heatstroke, with VSD+, that same condition is induced on purpose, with the AVMA’s stamp of approval. “I think if you surveyed the veterinarians in the United States, the vast majority of them have no idea that this is happening, and if they knew they would be outraged,” said Reyes-Illg, who is a veterinary advisor to the Animal Welfare Institute and is among the veterinarians organizing to withdraw their profession’s support for VSD+. More than 1,500 vets have signed a petition urging the AVMA to stop condoning the method. So far, their efforts have been unsuccessful.

The controversy over ventilation shutdown represents the most recent, high-profile example of long-simmering tensions over veterinary medicine’s values. While the public associates veterinarians with cats and dogs, imagining it as a job for animal lovers, veterinary medicine is also deeply embedded in the factory farm system. Veterinarians provide the research, expertise, and scientific and moral authority that allows the US to raise nearly 10 billion land animals in intensive confinement every year.

“At present, the official stance of the veterinary profession in the US often serves to legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale, such as intensive confinement and the use of heatstroke as a method of mass on-farm killing,” Reyes-Illg said in an email. “The veterinary profession helps shield such practices from questioning and criticism.” But a new generation of veterinarians is challenging what they see as the “corporate capture” of their profession, as vet Crystal Heath put it, by the meat industry and other sectors that kill animals for profit.

If they’re successful, they argue, they could help topple a crucial pillar of support for factory farming. While the AVMA doesn’t control what methods meat producers choose to use, the veterinary profession’s positions inform legislation and rule-making around how animals are allowed to be treated. The USDA’s rules on how to kill poultry birds due to avian flu, for example, are taken directly from AVMA guidelines. Vets are also, in my experience, the preferred excuse used by the meat industry and regulators to justify extreme cruelty. Ask an agriculture department bureaucrat why they’re condoning mass extermination via heatstroke, and they’re likely to shrug and say, it’s AVMA-approved (that is almost verbatim what I was told by Chloe Carson, who was then the communications director for Iowa’s agriculture department, in April).

“The AVMA is critical in our political system for animal welfare, so Congress tends to think of the AVMA when it comes to animal things,” said livestock veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school. “Congress will take no action until the AVMA changes its position” on how animals are treated in the food system.

The schism in veterinary medicine is long in the making

While VSD+ has emerged as a flashpoint among vets only in the last few years, conflicts over factory farming have been long in the making. The US Supreme Court will soon release its decision on a pork industry lawsuit that could strike down one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the country. Under challenge is California’s Proposition 12, which bans the sale of pork raised using gestation crates — narrow metal cages, not much bigger than an adult pig, where pregnant pigs are kept for most of their lives, unable to turn around or stretch their limbs. Pigs are often observed biting the bars of the crates, among other signs of distress. But in a brief filed in June, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, an organization closely tied to the pork industry, urged the Court to strike down Prop 12. “Proposition 12 is likely to harm animal welfare rather than help it,” the group argued.

When she read that brief, Reyes-Illg remembers, “I was horrified that this might be the sole message the Supreme Court would hear from veterinarians about gestation crates.” She led an effort to submit a brief to the court, which was signed by 378 veterinarians and animal welfare scientists, refuting the swine veterinarians’ claims as inaccurate and driven by pork industry interests. “The weight of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that gestation crates cause profound, avoidable suffering and deprive pigs of a minimally acceptable standard of welfare,” they wrote.

Four pigs are seen inside gestation crates — small cages about the size of their bodies. One bites the cage bars and appears distressed. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
Pigs inside a gestation crate facility in Canada.

Gestation crates have been a topic of heated debate in the AVMA. Its policy statement on housing for pregnant pigs says they should be provided with “adequate quality and quantity of space that allows sows to assume normal postures and express normal patterns of behavior” and that there are “advantages and disadvantages” to different systems, including gestation crates. The organization hasn’t, in any document I could find, taken a position on gestation crate bans like Prop 12, but it declined to comment on a question about this.

In an email in March that was obtained by Vox through a public records request, Michael Costin, assistant director of the AVMA’s division of animal and public health, alerted the AASV about the federal PIGS Act, a House bill that would ban gestation crates. “You may want to touch base with the AASV reps so they are prepared when this comes to them,” he wrote, noting that the AVMA’s animal agriculture liaison committee and animal welfare committee have representatives from AASV on them. “I assume AASV would oppose this bill.” Costin didn’t respond to requests for comment on the correspondence.

The gap between veterinarians like Reyes-Illg and those aligned with industry reflects a longtime debate in veterinary ethics: Should vets represent the interests of animals, or those of the humans who own and profit from them?

Veterinary medicine encompasses society’s paradoxical relationship with nonhuman animals, from love and companionship to commodification and killing. Today, most US veterinarians care for companion animals, like cats, dogs, and other pets, but it wasn’t always that way. Modern veterinary medicine has its origins in treating animals raised for food and horses used for transportation. “I don’t think there’s any question that in North America, organized veterinary medicine” — institutions like the AVMA — “by and large reflects that history,” said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School. “The people who are the national spokespeople for veterinary medicine are still very much entrenched in food production and in the agriculture industry in a way that the majority of practicing veterinarians are not.”

These disparities, combined with the factory farm-ification of animal agriculture, have led to a “growing schism between the companion animal side of the field and the food animal production side of the field,” Moses said.

As meat production industrialized, the profession accommodated it. “The veterinary response was largely a technocratic one, technological, and very much politically aligned with animal production,” said Susan Jones, a science historian at the University of Minnesota and a veterinarian. Economic shifts in agriculture necessarily drove changes in how industry vets viewed their patients, “seeing animals less as living sentient beings and seeing them more as production units,” Jones said. “This means that [vets] don’t see animals anymore as individuals in need of health care or welfare considerations. You see them as populations.”

Professional backlash for criticizing factory farming can be steep

Veterinarian Crystal Heath, who is one of the best-known critics of her profession’s relationship with the meat industry, seeks every opportunity to start conversations about how vets could end the biggest harms facing animals, like ventilation shutdown, rather than participate in them. She arrived at the AVMA convention in late July with that goal in mind. On her first day there, she and her friend Daniela Castillo, a fellow vet pushing for change in the profession, said they noticed being watched by a security guard. When they approached to ask him what was going on, he explained that he’d been told to look out for them because they might be protesting. “Obviously, we’re being surveilled,” Heath said in a video posted to Twitter that evening. “It seems like the AVMA is extremely unwelcoming and is not supportive of people who are doing animal advocacy.” The AVMA declined to comment on these allegations.

Heath, a Berkeley-based shelter veterinarian who devotes much of her time to spaying and neutering cats and dogs, was used to this kind of treatment. Her advocacy has made her a lightning rod within the profession. While she’s hardly the first vet to voice misgivings about factory farming, she’s done so particularly publicly — often bringing her critiques to social media, engaging with audiences outside the profession, and posting examples of veterinarians conducting gruesome research on the meat industry’s behalf. “We should use our innovation to end the exploitation of animals instead of devising more macabre killing methods,” she said in a tweet last fall. And although she grew up steeped in animal agriculture, she’s now vegan, which can feel like an existential threat to industry veterinarians.

“I was vice president of my 4H club,” an organization that trains kids in animal agriculture, Heath said. “I raised goats; I was an animal science major.” Now, she said, some veterinary colleagues view her as biased for repudiating animal agriculture, but she points out that the bias runs both ways: “I could easily argue that you have a biased perspective because you are committed to eating animal products. I look at all of these people who they consider to be unbiased, and they all work for industry.”

A 2020 story in the Intercept revealed how Heath was branded an extremist and targeted for her advocacy by the meat industry. A flier of unknown provenance had circulated on Facebook, displaying her photo under the warning “BEWARE” and claiming she supported the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, radical groups from an earlier era of animal activism, which she said she knew nothing about at the time. “I got kicked out of all the veterinary Facebook groups that I relied on on a daily basis for networking,” she remembers. Some livestock vets openly berated her. “Crystal your deranged activism here and throughout the animal agriculture industry is quite annoying,” one vet commented on a post she made in a Facebook group. “[Y]ou’re literally, by name, a topic of conversation in board rooms from Ag business to organized veterinary medicine across the nation. Your name is literally toxic.”

Heath regularly receives messages from vets and veterinary students who sympathize with her but say they’re afraid to speak out because of the potential consequences for their careers. Daniela Castillo, who’s worked extensively in shelters and spay-and-neuter, said that she’s been ridiculed so much for being vegan that she’s considered leaving veterinary medicine — a problem she feels is compounded by being a woman of color in an overwhelmingly white profession. “People become so defensive,” she said. “They either get angry or they treat you as a joke.”

“It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning”

Heath realized that veterinarians needed a support network to be able to withstand industry retaliation. In fall 2020, she founded Our Honor, a nonprofit that helps vets challenge unethical practices in their profession. It was a few months after the public learned about ventilation shutdown — not in the poultry industry, but in the pork industry. Due to meatpacking plant shutdowns at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, meat producers couldn’t slaughter as many animals as they normally do — so, instead, they killed and disposed of millions of them. Activists from the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere were tipped off that Iowa Select Farms was using ventilation shutdown plus, a then little-known method, to exterminate its pigs. In an investigation later covered by the Intercept, the activists secretly planted recorders and captured audio of the pigs shrieking for two-and-a-half hours as they were killed with high heat and steam.

Aerial view of a truck full of dead pigs, with a worker nearby moving four large dead pigs that are not the ground. Direct Action Everywhere
A worker moves dead pigs after a mass cull at Iowa Select Farms in 2020.

These revelations, and the fact that the AVMA considered VSD+ acceptable, galvanized a coalition of farm animal advocacy groups and veterinarians who are AVMA members. They petitioned the AVMA and submitted a resolution to its House of Delegates, a voting body that guides the organization’s policy, to re-classify VSD+ as “not recommended” in its guidelines. They wrote op-eds and ran an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer ahead of this summer’s AVMA convention that read: “You wouldn’t say it’s okay to roast an animal alive. So why would the American Veterinary Medical Association?”

The European Union considers any type of VSD to be a method that’s “likely to be highly painful” and “must never be used.” But the AVMA hasn’t changed its position, and there are signs that it doesn’t intend to. In 2021, the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association published a case study of ventilation shutdown plus, by veterinarian Angela Baysinger and three other vets, in which 243,016 pigs were killed with temperatures reaching as high as 170 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve heat that intense, the paper notes, “commercial-grade mobile steam generators typically used in the railroad industry to heat railcars were obtained.” The study measured the animals’ “time to silent.” “I think that report was published as a way to validate what they were doing and lend legitimacy to” ventilation shutdown, Heath said. Baysinger, who is vice president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and serves on the AVMA’s animal welfare committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The only research on VSD+ in poultry birds cited in the AVMA’s guidelines is an unpublished, poultry industry-funded report, which has been criticized and accused of lacking scientific validity. At the International Symposium on Animal Mortality Management this past June, Cia Johnson, the head of the AVMA’s animal welfare division, said: “We need data from you … Even if it’s not published, if it’s a case report, if it’s proprietary data, if it’s unpublished data, the panel needs it. Some of these methods are at risk of leaving the guidelines. I think you probably have an idea of what those methods might be. We need data to support them staying in the document.” Johnson didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

“This intrigues me: AVMA leadership actually put out calls for research to support ventilation shutdown. That’s not science. It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning,” said James Reynolds, the Western University professor. “Their position is completely unreasonable. Not founded on reason, not founded on science.”

A hen is seen inside a glass cage and hooked up to electrodes. She appears collapsed on her side and panting. Footage by North Carolina State University obtained by Animal Outlook via public records request.
Screenshot from footage of 2016 ventilation shutdown experiments conducted at North Carolina State University, which are cited in AVMA guidelines.

Heath and her allies aren’t giving up, despite the AVMA’s intransigence. In the fall, they gathered 278 signatures to submit yet another resolution to change ventilation shutdown plus’s status to “not recommended,” for the AVMA’s House of Delegates to vote on at its next meeting this month. But the AVMA didn’t allow the resolution to move forward, citing procedural reasons.

The AVMA declined an interview for this story, but said in a statement that it “believes animals should only be depopulated in emergency situations, and only after all other options are considered and found not to be viable … Alternatives are exhaustively sought, but when thousands to millions of animals are impacted by such emergencies, depopulation is sometimes the only option. In many cases, the method used to depopulate the animals is limited or dictated by the situation (e.g., containment to control disease spread, natural disaster, or other unprecedented urgent situation). Selecting a depopulation method often involves ‘least bad’ choices; however, failing to depopulate animals in a timely manner can lead to even worse suffering for those animals and/or pose unacceptable health and safety risks for the people who are caring for them.”

Entrenched factory farming prevents vets from asking bigger ethical questions

Even knowing how livestock veterinarians see their roles, it’s hard not to wonder how they can willingly inflict so much suffering on animals. One answer might be that they believe, or their vocation has convinced them to believe, that there’s no other choice. “Veterinarians are stretched way, way, way too thin, and are almost always inevitably overwhelmed with work,” Lisa Moses, the bioethicist from Harvard, said. “And that does not allow you to have the mental space to ask big-picture questions. You’re just trying to figure out how to get through terrible situations as best as you can.”

Often in her advocacy, Heath said, livestock vets ask her: What else do you expect us to do? If meeting America’s demand for abundant cheap meat sometimes requires inflicting great suffering, their thinking goes, that’s the price we have to pay. “I personally believe [ventilation shutdown] is a compromise — a necessary compromise, and an unfortunate compromise,” poultry veterinarian Simon Shane, who criticized Heath and other opponents of VSD+ in a blog post, told me. “People who have protested against ventilation shutdown should provide a viable alternative.” Pressed on whether not raising so many animals in intensive confinement could be a viable alternative, he replied, “I’m in the business of feeding people” and, later, “I really don’t want to get involved in a fruitless discussion on ethics and morality.”

Other vets argue that instead of taking the American system of meat production for granted, the profession could actively challenge it. “If the only way to ensure that large swaths of our patients are not routinely killed by heatstroke is to put in place restrictions on CAFO [factory farm] size, then core principles of veterinary medical ethics, like the duties of beneficence and nonmaleficence, require that our profession advocate for such restrictions,” Reyes-Illg wrote in a letter to the AVMA on behalf of the Animal Welfare Institute in May. In June, at a continuing education course held by the American College of Animal Welfare, Cia Johnson was asked whether the AVMA has considered studying ways to reduce the need to mass cull animals. “Not at this time,” she replied.

The idea of cutting down meat production is a non-starter in the veterinary community, vets interviewed for this story agree, even though it’s considered a necessary part of addressing climate change and would surely be better for animals. When she took livestock medicine courses in vet school, Reyes-Illg said in an email, “The message I got was that pig vets had to work with industry somehow — there was never any mention that veterinarians might have a role in disrupting the ongoing expansion and intensification of animal agriculture.”

Outside North America, veterinary groups often espouse a different philosophy. “At the British Veterinary Association, we encourage everyone to consider the environmental impact of their dietary choices and have long campaigned for a ‘less and better’ approach to consuming meat,” Justine Shotton, the British Veterinary Association’s then-president, told the Daily Mail last summer.

This is the discussion that forward-thinking vets in the US dream of having. “If all the AVMA is doing is thinking about depopulation, then that’s all we’re going to get,” Heath said. “But the more the AVMA could put energy and thought into scaling down animal agriculture, then we have the possibility of moving things in the right direction.” For now, though, she and fellow animal advocates are laser-focused on ending the worst meat industry practices — on making the bad system we have a little less bad. She’s looking forward to the AVMA’s next conference this month, where she plans to keep starting conversations the AVMA would rather not have.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

There’s a Communist Multi-Millionaire Fomenting Revolution in Atlanta

In 2021, when Keisha Lance Bottoms, then Atlanta’s mayor, revealed plans for a new $90 million police training facility, she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the project was essential “if we want the best, most well-trained officers protecting our communities.” Its classrooms, shooting range, and simulated city streetscapes would, according to the project’s website, help […]

In 2021, when Keisha Lance Bottoms, then Atlanta’s mayor, revealed plans for a new $90 million police training facility, she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the project was essential “if we want the best, most well-trained officers protecting our communities.” Its classrooms, shooting range, and simulated city streetscapes would, according to the project’s website, help law enforcement “learn de-escalation and harm reduction techniques that reduce the use of force.” But some Atlantans who had taken to the streets for the previous year’s demonstrations over the police murder of George Floyd didn’t think Atlanta needed any more cops—no matter how well trained. Protesters quickly mobilized against the project, dubbing it “Cop City” and describing it in very different terms. The facility would “allow police not just from Atlanta, but globally, to learn repressive tactics, so that protests and rebellions can be easily crushed,” warned the American Friends Service Committee. Other critics worry about the environmental impact of the facility—the woods for its proposed location are one of four forests called the “lungs of Atlanta. Nonetheless, the construction began, with the first phase set to open two years later. Then, in 2023, Georgia state troopers killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist known as Tortuguita who had taken up residence at the planned facility’s wooded site hoping to block construction. Outraged by Tortuguita’s death, organizers supercharged efforts to put the project up for a voter referendum in the fall. More radical protesters allegedly have damaged construction equipment and thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at police cars; 42 are currently facing state domestic terrorism charges. In August, 61 opponents of the project were indicted under Georgia’s RICO law—the same broad anti-racketeering measure behind Trump’s DeKalb county election interference case. A vigil in Atlanta, Georgia commemorating the life of environmental activist Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Teran on Jan. 18, 2024. Tortuguita was killed by Georgia State Troopers a year before, on Jan. 18, 2023., during a raid on a Stop Cop City encampment. Collin Mayfield/Sipa/AP Damaged equipment sits at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County, Ga., Monday, March 6, 2023. John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP The protesters, meanwhile, have doubled down, sending teams out to collect signatures for the ballot measure, chartering buses to pack events, and hiring lawyers to defend those facing charges. This kind of activism doesn’t come cheap—but luckily for the protesters, they have a deep-pocketed ally: Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)   In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested. While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian president Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me. “I think it’s a good thing that Cop City is causing increased polarization and fracturing amongst Democrats and so-called progressive politicians.” Because of these extremist views, Chambers’ generous funding of Cop City protests has repercussions beyond the training facility itself. Some Atlanta Democrats worry that his views, along with what they see as increasingly belligerent tactics by the protesters he funds, could alienate the suburban voters who helped Georgia flip the Senate blue in 2020. A poll last year showed that a majority of the state’s voters—and 43 percent of Democrats—support the facility. Last fall, former Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a Democrat who represented a metro Atlanta district from 2021 to 2023, wrote an op-ed in the Journal-Constitution: “Certainly, from my suburban vantage point, it looks like downtown progressive activists, supported and funded by national activists and donors, are going crazy over a well-intentioned effort,” she wrote. When I spoke to her, she said she worried that property-destroying protesters were a bad look. “No one should be subjected to police brutality—hard stop,” she wrote to me in an email. But “most moderate Democratic voters of my acquaintance don’t even understand why on earth this facility would generate such ferocious protest…better training would seem to be a solution to problem of police brutality.” Bill Torpy, a veteran columnist for the Journal-Constitution, put a finer point on it: The “kind of rhetoric” from the most strident protesters, he said, “is something that might get Trump reelected.” But opponents of the facility I spoke with dismissed those concerns. “I think it’s a good thing that Cop City is causing increased polarization and fracturing amongst Democrats and so-called progressive politicians” who are “more concerned with their bank accounts than they are with doing what is actually right,” argued Sam Beard, an organizer of a group called Block Cop City. Similarly, veteran Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin told me he thinks the facility “should be a wedge issue because establishment Democrats have not sided with the people when it comes to issues of cops and capitalism. Establishment Democrats are on the same side as right-wing Republicans.” Activists gather outside Atlanta City Hall, on Sept. 11, 2023, where they delivered dozens of boxes full of signed petitions to force a referendum on the future of a planned police and firefighter training center. Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP If Chambers’ rhetoric and politics are brash and unapologetic, when he speaks about his early years, he’s different—tortured, bashful, almost self-loathing. “It was very typical—sort of nepo-baby or, like, rich kid journey to find oneself,” he told me during our first phone call. While the Coxes have shaped Atlanta for generations, Chambers was raised in Brooklyn, where his father felt more at home with the Patagonia-clad upper crust of the Northeast than his family’s southern opulence. So Chambers’ exposure to Georgia as a child was limited to yearly visits to his grandmother’s house in the tony neighborhood of Buckhead. Her “crazy fancy” home was a showier version of wealth, he recalls, than the brownstones-and-progressive-private-school version in Brooklyn. He recalls thinking of Atlanta as a “weird oasis of ultra-elite people.” Chambers grew to feel uncomfortable around them, in part, he says, because of his troubled life at home. As a teenager, he got into drugs, which led to run-ins with police.   It wasn’t until Chambers was in his twenties—recently married, a Bard College dropout, and “going through a Christian phase”—that he relocated to Atlanta to attempt a conventional life. He moved to the middle-class suburb of Smyrna and took a job training managers at his family’s vehicle auction company, Manheim. By the time he was 25, he had three children. Though his role at the company was decidedly white collar, “I was friends with a lot of regular, truly working-class guys,” he said. “I related to that and wanted to fit into that.” As he told me about this chapter of his life, Chambers seemed eager to head off any accusations of slumming it. “I’m not trying to claim some class identity that I don’t have,” he said. “I’m just talking about the social environments that I’ve been in.”   Working at the plant rubbed him the wrong way—he was unsettled by the power dynamic between the white managers and the mostly Black workers and appalled by the low wages and the “incredibly poor conditions the lowest ranks of workers had.” Then, the 2008 recession hit, and the company laid off thousands of workers, yet “there was still revenue in the billions,” he recalled. “I hated it—I hated the whole thing.” Disillusioned, Chambers left Georgia later that year. For a few months, he made a half-hearted attempt to finish his degree at Bard but then decided to move his family to Russia, where his wife was born and still had family.  Surrounded by a new culture, Chambers became enthralled and dove into learning everything he could about the country and its politics. He decided to try to finish his degree at Bard, returned with his wife to upstate New York, and threw himself into working out and learning more about radical leftist movements. In 2012, Chambers was summoned to Atlanta for his grandmother’s 90th birthday, and during the trip, he met a guy selling two gyms, one in the city, and one in the Northern suburb of Alpharetta. Impulsively, Chambers bought them and relocated to Atlanta again, commuting between the two gyms. At the Alpharetta location, he remembered that one of his trainers was a “bored, wealthy housewife” who aspired to open a gym. Her name was Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a Republican member of Congress representing Georgia. At that time, Chambers recalled, Greene wanted to become “an important person in the world of CrossFit.” When I asked Rep. Greene’s office about Chambers’ account, a spokesperson responded, “We aren’t participating in any article written by Mother Jones, but for clarity, I can not confirm because it’s not true whatsoever and you should refrain from printing any nonsense about Congresswoman Greene from this avowed Communist.” Chambers’ first few months back in Atlanta were tumultuous: He got divorced, began using drugs again, became involved with another woman, got sober, married the other woman, and opened a coffee shop in the upscale enclave of Virginia Highland with his new wife. Nearby, in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of East Atlanta Village, he opened a new gym, which he advertised as “a radically aligned, left-friendly gym and community.” A posted sign offered something of an ethos: “Do whatever the fuck you want, correctly, except CrossFit cultism. No fucking cops.” But he was making inroads with the city’s radicals—especially the police abolitionists. In 2014, he traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the police shooting of Michael Brown. The trip was another turning point—and it coincided with a family transaction that, he said, took his own fortunes from “theoretically wealthy” to “immediately wealthy,” in the “single digit millions of dollars.” But Atlanta, Chambers told me, was “a difficult place to organize, because there was a really strong Democratic Party mechanism there,” he told me. “It just felt like dancing around with these NGOs.” He discovered that several of the racial justice groups he had been working with had ties to the Democrats, so he abandoned the mainstream groups and began to offer direct support to activists. During the next seven years, Chambers got divorced again and started a commune in the Berkshires, but he stayed in touch with his police abolition friends in Atlanta. In 2021, shortly after Bottoms announced plans for the police facility, Chambers learned of the need for funds to mount a robust protest. He gave generously—first in the tens of thousands, and then in the hundreds. “It was unbelievable to people—in the wake of a pretty strong decade of anti-police sentiment growing especially in Atlanta—that then this would be dropped on the city,” he said. “They were demolishing a forest—that was just totally insane.” Despite his contributions, it wasn’t easy mobilizing opposition to the facility. Specifically, Chambers saw Atlanta’s Black Democrat centrists—such as former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)—as barriers to progress. “I understand how the Black radical community views them,” Chambers told me. “You know, advancing the white corporate agenda of [Atlanta’s wealthy] North Side.” In 2021, Reed told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I support the development of a best-in-class training facility for our police officers, but I have not made a judgment on where it should be located.” Last year, Sen. Warnock criticized the protesters who destroyed property.  “I was ready to let go of whatever illusions I had about doing anything else with myself, except trying to be of service to destroying the thing that had created me.” If the protesters were going to win, they needed more people on their side. And if they wanted more people, they needed more money. So, Chambers decided to do something he had been contemplating for a while: Last July, he struck a deal with his family. Instead of inheriting a vast portfolio of investments, he received $250 million and will get more in the coming years—he declined to say how much or exactly when. Some of his money, he said, is in irrevocable trusts, so he can’t personally access it—but it’s designated to go toward the causes he cares about, including protesting the facility in Atlanta. Chambers sees his divestment as an act of protest—against capitalism, yes, but also against his own family’s elitism and greed. “I was ready to let go of whatever illusions I had about doing anything else with myself,” he said, “except trying to be of service to destroying the thing that had created me.” If Atlanta’s police and political powers have their way, Cop City will be finished by the end of this year. They appear undeterred by the protesters, except for occasional complaints about the inconvenience and expense they’ve caused. In January, city officials said 23 acts of arson had taken place at the site, resulting in a $20 million rise in costs, which they promised would not be passed on to taxpayers. The leaders of the protests claim that they’ve collected 116,000 signatures, nearly double the number they needed to bring the facility before voters as a ballot initiative. But a December analysis by four Atlanta news outlets found that as many as half of those signatures could be invalid—one signature that they found, for example, was that of “Lord Jesus” with the address of “homeless.” In February, the Atlanta City Council voted to start an official count of the signatures, which will determine the fate of the proposed ballot measure. On X these days, Chambers is prolific, musing in rapid-fire style about Palestine, the war in Ukraine, his recent conversion to Islam, and, of course, Cop City. On the January anniversary of the killing he posted that because they supported the project, “my family, the Cox family, continues to have Tortuguita’s blood on their hands.” Recently, he’s also been mocking those who suggest that Democrats must unite behind Biden to defeat Trump. “Why any of you ever put ANY faith in liberals continues to be beyond me,” he posted in January. As he later added, “The Democrat base is about as uncritical as any political bloc, ever…Thank God that base is aging out of relevance.” In Georgia, recent polls predict a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election. Bipartisan politics, Cop City, Palestine, Russia—one gets the sense that for Chambers and many of those he supports, these are all a single cause. When I spoke to Franklin, the community organizer whose demonstrations against the facility Chambers has funded, he offered similar context, telling me that his fellow protesters “see Cop City in terms of the connection that police here in the United States have with the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli policing agency” and “US imperialism driving towards Russia’s border or using Ukraine as a proxy for that.” But when we spoke, other, more personal issues demanded his immediate attention. When I asked him in December if I could join him at an Atlanta protest event sometime, he told me that would be unlikely; he had moved to Tunisia. “I just needed to take a break,” he told me. “Elements of people who call themselves the left and the state want to come after me.” I asked him what was next with the protest movement. He didn’t know, he said. “What if there’s a scandal that we don’t know about?” he wondered aloud, hoping that a political curveball could kill the project. But mostly, he just seemed overwhelmed with the magnitude of his recent inheritance. “Nobody’s used to operating with this scale of resources and, like, how to use it strategically—I need to create different trusts and, like, donor-advised funds.” He sighed anxiously. “I don’t understand this shit.” In March, when we spoke again, he was still in Tunisia; he had gotten married again the previous month, this time to the mother of his fourth child. He told me that the Cop City organizing had slowed, mostly because he is devoting more time and money to Palestine, as are many of the other activists he works with. There are, he said, “definitely murmurings of the FBI looking at me.” Still, he said he plans to keep supporting the protesters and their legal defense, to the tune of still more millions of dollars if necessary. “They’ll have really significant costs that are going to come up because it’s going to be a fairly drawn-out thing,” he said. “I know we’re going do something considerable.”

Wolf trapping must be curtailed in Idaho to protect endangered grizzlies, court rules

The ruling ends the wolf trapping season in northern and eastern Idaho between March 1 and Nov. 31, when grizzlies are out of their dens.

A federal court ruling will cut back Idaho’s wolf trapping and snaring season in large swaths of the state in response to claims that grizzly bears, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, could be killed or injured by trapping or snaring devices.U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale issued the summary judgment Tuesday as part of a 2021 lawsuit filed by environmental activist groups over the Idaho Legislature’s expansion of trapping seasons.She wrote that “there is ample evidence in the record, including from Idaho’s own witnesses, that lawfully set wolf traps and snares are reasonably likely to take grizzly bears in Idaho.”Dale’s ruling ends the wolf trapping season in northern and eastern Idaho between March 1 and Nov. 31, when grizzlies are out of their dens, unless the Idaho Department of Fish and Game obtains an incidental take permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The permit would waive potential Endangered Species Act violation liability if a grizzly is caught or killed in traps meant for another species.The Idaho Department of Fish and Game did not immediately return a request for comment on the ruling.The ruling applies to hunting units in the Panhandle, Clearwater, Salmon and Upper Snake Fish and Game regions, where current trapping seasons on public land range from mid-September to the end of March.Dale’s ruling also rolled back a portion of controversial 2021 legislation that expanded wolf trapping season on private land to be legal year-round.The Tuesday ruling cataloged several instances in which grizzly bears have been caught, injured or killed in traps and snares set for wolves. Though just three of those incidents — two in 2020 and one in 2012 — occurred in Idaho, Dale said similar scenarios in Montana and Wyoming proved the possibility that wolf traps posed a danger to the threatened bears despite Idaho trappers and Fish and Game experts calling such instances highly unlikely.In 2020, two young male grizzlies in Boundary County were killed after becoming caught in wolf snares. Fish and Game enforcement reported the first had “a wolf snare very tightly around its neck and another wolf snare wrapped around its front left paw.” The second grizzly was shot and killed by hunters that mistook it for a black bear. That grizzly had a broken wolf snare around its neck that Fish and Wildlife Service officials said “would have eventually resulted in death.”The snares in both incidents were determined to be illegally set and contained no information identifying the trapper who set them, as required by Idaho law.In 2012, a professional Fish and Game trapper caught a grizzly in a wolf foothold trap in eastern Idaho. The bear was released with minor injuries.Dale’s judgment said it’s possible other grizzlies have been caught in snares or traps intended for wolves and have managed to break free. Another Idaho grizzly was photographed in 2019 with apparent snare scars around its neck. The judge also noted that trappers may not report non-target catches. She said existing inadvertent catch reports are “woefully inadequate” and note 37 instances of bears caught in traps or snares when Fish and Game did not note the bear’s species.Dale said Idaho’s grizzly population is roughly 200 animals, with most concentrated in the Panhandle and eastern Idaho’s Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. However, the bears have also been seen in recent years wandering into the Bitterroot Ecosystem, where federal officials may try to reestablish a grizzly population. The animals have been considered extinct in that area of Central Idaho for decades, and Dale said trapping or snaring of grizzlies there could upend recovery efforts.“The reality of even one take could have profound effects upon Idaho’s grizzly bear population,” Dale wrote.©2024 The Idaho Statesman. Visit idahostatesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Mystery among the vines: Why is the FBI probing some of Napa Valley's fanciest wineries?

Among the Napa Valley luminaries whose county records have been subpoenaed in a secretive federal probe are the owners of Hall Wines, Caymus Vineyards, Alpha Omega, The Prisoner — and the list goes on.

St. Helena, Calif. —  Highway 29 winds along the floor of the Napa Valley through Yountville and St. Helena and up into Calistoga, passing by vineyards that produce some of the most celebrated and expensive wines in the world.The road, lined with rows of grapevines planted along sun-dappled hills, is justly famous for its stunning beauty — and the stunning number of Michelin-rated restaurants, spas and boutique inns that have popped up among the vineyards.And lately, for locals anyway, it is also the source of a pressing mystery: Why have so many of the fancy wineries along this road — and their rich and powerful owners — been named in federal subpoenas that were served late last year on Napa County?“Please provide any and all documents relating to the following individuals, entities, and/or projects,” one subpoena says, before unspooling a roster that reads more like a high-end tourist brochure than what is normally found in a court docket.Among the glittering names whose county records are being sought are Hall Wines, known for its bold cabernets and luxe St. Helena winery with a towering statue of a silver rabbit. Kathryn Hall, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, is also named, as is her husband, Craig Hall, a former part-owner of the Dallas Cowboys whose art collection is so revered that portions went on loan to the Jeu de Paume arts center in Paris.Caymus Vineyards, whose cabernet is a frequent favorite of Wine Spectator, and owner Charles J. “Chuck” Wagner are listed in the records request, as are Wagner’s son, Charlie Wagner, and his vineyard, Mer Soleil.The inventory of luminaries rolls on: Robin Baggett, a former general counsel for the Golden State Warriors, and his Alpha Omega Winery. Dave Phinney, whose “Prisoner” label changed the industry. Grant Long Jr. and his wineries Aonair and Reverie II. Jayson Woodbridge and Hundred Acre. Darioush Khaledi and his namesake winery. And on it goes — 40 people and businesses in total, including Napa’s exclusive Meritage Resort and Spa. The subpoena seeking records on the wineries and their owners, dated Dec. 14, 2023, is filed under the name of Patrick Robbins, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. It also references an FBI agent, Katherine Ferrato, who has experience working on complex financial crimes. Separately, a trial attorney working in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division filed a subpoena, dated Dec. 7, requesting records pertaining to the Upper Valley Waste Management Agency, a joint powers authority that manages trash and recycling services for Calistoga, St. Helena and Yountville. A third subpoena seeks records on the Napa County Airport, which local officials are seeking to modernize. A fourth was served on the county’s farm bureau, which in recent years has become a powerful political voice on behalf of wineries.If Napa County officials have any idea what’s going on, they aren’t saying. “Napa County is not being investigated,” county spokesperson Holly Dawson said. “We were issued a subpoena for records. We know nothing more.”The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco declined to comment, as did the FBI’s San Francisco office. Some of those named in the probe did not respond to interview requests. Some who did respond said they are stumped. Craig and Kathryn Hall released a statement through their director of public relations: “We are aware that there is an ongoing investigation. However, we do not know the scope or the details and it would be inappropriate for us to speculate,” the couple said. Baggett, of Alpha Omega, said his operations had “nothing pending” before the county and therefore “zero” documents that would have been turned over. He said it has been “a big waste of time daily explaining that we have done nothing wrong.” Baggett dismissed the probe as a “fishing expedition” or worse, adding: “I hope it’s not a political witch hunt.”Like several people interviewed, Baggett speculated that one person of interest could be Napa County Supervisor Alfredo Pedroza, who has generated ire among local environmental activists because he is perceived as pro-agriculture, which in Napa Valley almost always means pro-winery.Some of the entities whose records were subpoenaed have donated to Pedroza’s political campaigns. A small number were involved in a controversial land deal involving Pedroza’s family that is adjacent to property the Halls sought to develop in Napa Valley’s eastern hills.For years, Craig and Kathryn Hall had sought to construct a 208-acre vineyard on Walt Ranch, 2,300 acres of oak woodland they owned in Napa’s Atlas Peak appellation, prized for its elevation and rich volcanic soil. The property was undeveloped when the Halls bought it in 2005, but zoned for agriculture. Their efforts to clear space for a vineyard drew fierce opposition from environmental groups that said it would endanger oak trees and animal habitat, deplete limited water supplies and boost fire risk.After years of regulatory and legal wrangling, the development was tentatively approved by the Board of Supervisors in late 2021. Pedroza voted in favor of the project. His vote set off a new controversy when a local activist, documentary filmmaker Beth Nelsen, discovered that Pedroza’s father-in-law had bought property adjacent to the proposed vineyard. The San Francisco Chronicle followed with reports that Pedroza and his wife helped secure a loan for the purchase, using his Napa home as collateral. Critics said the Walt Ranch development would no doubt raise property values in the area — including the property Pedroza’s father-in-law had purchased — and that Pedroza should have publicly disclosed his involvement as a conflict of interest.Pedroza denied he had a financial interest in the property, but recused himself from subsequent votes on Walt Ranch. In late 2022, the Halls gave up on the idea of developing the vineyard, and worked out a deal to preserve the land through the county land trust.The FBI searched Pedroza’s home in December, according to the Napa Valley Register. He opted not to run for another term on the Board of Supervisors and will end his tenure later this year.Pedroza did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment from The Times. Earlier this month, he sent an emailed statement to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat : “I believe everyone should cooperate fully with all branches of federal and state government and I have always encouraged citizens in Napa and all Napa public authorities to do so. There is no reason to do otherwise.”Adding to the intrigue — and the grief — a key figure in Napa County, Ryan Klobas, died in an apparent suicide in January, weeks after the Department of Justice served a subpoena on the Napa County Farm Bureau, which Klobas headed. Klobas joined the farm bureau in 2017 as policy director and was named chief executive in 2018. Under his leadership, the bureau doubled its membership and formed a political action committee to work on behalf of the bureau that raised funds to successfully defeat a county initiative that would have limited the growth of wineries. The bureau’s interim CEO, Tawny Tesconi, confirmed the bureau had received a subpoena but declined any additional comment. As the mystery swirls, one thing is clear: The federal probe comes amid a bitter divide among longtime vintners and residents over Napa Valley’s future. Should the valley keep adding vineyards? Or has the proliferation of wineries and tourists and traffic reached a tipping point that threatens to erode its natural environment and rural charm — no matter how pretty the rows of grapes in the slanting afternoon light?“Our entire economy depends on the success of our agriculture, and our wine and hospitality,” said former Yountville Mayor John Dunbar, a supporter of the wine industry. But the fight over land use has grown “toxic,” he said. “People are being attacked because they are for or against a winery permit.” Geoff Ellsworth, a former mayor of St. Helena, is among those who believe the forces of development pose a grave risk to the valley’s environment and invite political corruption. What’s more, he worries that the influx of hotels and tourist attractions are “hollowing out” his hometown and others on the valley floor.Ellsworth, who grew up in St. Helena and returned about a decade ago after years in Los Angeles, said a breaking point for him was when he learned of a proposal to redevelop St. Helena’s City Hall into a hotel, as well as a decision that did away with tiered water rates. “I was like, ‘Wait a second,’” he said. Soon after, he decided to run for City Council and eventually became mayor.And then he started hearing about problems at the landfill in the hills above Calistoga, which takes in trash from many of the wineries, as well as waste from nearby counties. “Fires,” he said. “Radioactive waste. I’m the mayor, and I’m like what is going on?”Ellsworth eventually joined forces with another citizen concerned about the landfill, Anne Wheaton. Now a couple, they have devoted the last few years to exposing what they say is a complicated web of environmental and worker safety violations that they worry could make the landfill hazardous.In late 2020, Ellsworth said, he was sufficiently outraged that he reached out to the Department of Justice. He and Wheaton were gratified to read the subpoena the department filed with the county asking about dealings with the Upper Valley Waste Management Agency. It seeks information on contracting, as well as communications among agencies and elected officials. Ellsworth said he isn’t privy to the scope or details of the federal probe or what role the landfill might play. But he believes powerful interests have a stake in the outcome — enough so that he and Wheaton have moved out of the county. “The amount of money at stake here is billions of dollars,” Ellsworth said. “We wanted to distance ourselves from the situation.”

‘Water is worth more than gold’: eco-activist Esteban Polanco on why violence won’t stop him

Brutally attacked for his work as one of the Dominican Republic’s leading land defenders, Polanco says the next generation must fight environmental destructionWhile making his way from his home in Loma de Blanco, a mountain in the middle of the Dominican Republic, to the nearby town of Bonao, Esteban Polanco was attacked by a group of about 10 men. They threw a molotov cocktail at the car in which he was travelling with two of his children, before running off. The family survived, but Polanco suffered terrible burns.“I was close to death, and it took a year to recover,” he says of the 2007 attack. Some, but not all, of the perpetrators were later imprisoned. Continue reading...

While making his way from his home in Loma de Blanco, a mountain in the middle of the Dominican Republic, to the nearby town of Bonao, Esteban Polanco was attacked by a group of about 10 men. They threw a molotov cocktail at the car in which he was travelling with two of his children, before running off. The family survived, but Polanco suffered terrible burns.“I was close to death, and it took a year to recover,” he says of the 2007 attack. Some, but not all, of the perpetrators were later imprisoned.Polanco believes IT was brutal retaliation for his work as one of the country’s most prominent land and water defenders. The collective of farmers he leads, the Federation of Farmers Towards Progress (La Federación de Campesinos hacia el Progreso), has, for decades, challenged successive governments and powerful business interests and famously stopped an international mining company from destroying and exploiting Loma de Blanco.Polanco, 62, grew up in a remote community in Loma de Blanco. He remembers having to wade across the river 21 times to get to the nearest town. As a child, he helped his father, a farmer, before studying education and working as a teacher for 12 years. He is jovial and friendly, but his voice rises and he becomes animated when the conversation turns to defending the environment and the injustices his community has faced.Polanco was badly burned in an attack, which he believes was due to his work defending the land with the Federation of Farmers towards Progress. Photograph: Pedro Farias-Nardi/The GuardianToday, his organisation continues to defend the land, rivers and rights of local people. It also trains environmental defenders from surrounding areas and around the world.Latin America is consistently found to be the world’s most dangerous region for activists. In 2022 88% of the global total of 177 murders of land and environmental defenders occurred here.We, the people, were the barrier that would prevent the mining company from accessing the land“The situation for defenders is more dangerous than ever,” says Polanco. “[Mining companies and ranchers] exhaust more resources every day, and they are more aggressive. We have to keep fighting harder because they are going into areas much more vulnerable than those they have already damaged.”The federation’s story dates back to the summer of 1992, when the government granted an exploration permit to Hispaniola Gold Mine, a subsidiary of a Canadian company no longer in existence, in the middle of a region called Madre de las Aguas (mother of the waters). The area includes Loma de Blanco and is home to the River Yuna, the second-longest river in the Dominican Republic.It was a David and Goliath fight. Members of the federation travelled on foot or by mule from village to village alerting residents to the dangers presented by potential mining and conducting assemblies and workshops. “We, the people, were the barrier that would prevent the mining company from accessing the land,” says Polanco.They studied the law and how it related to mining and the environment. They collaborated with geologists to learn about rock. “We fed ourselves with knowledge, and we created a newsletter with 10 reasons explaining why it was impossible to allow a mine to enter,” he adds.The Pueblo Viejo gold and silver mine in Cotuí, Dominican Republic, shows the environmental impact that might have happened in Loma de Blanco. Photograph: The GuardianPolanco also asked well-known activists and environmentalists, such as Aniana Vargas, considered a national heroine, to help in their fight.In 1997, after years of relentless campaigning and protests involving thousands of people from across the country, government ministers notified the federation that the mining company had abandoned its plans.The campaigners’ triumph “opened the possibility of us having an environmental law” and “changed the nature of the environmental movement in Dominican society”, Luis Carvajal, coordinator of the environmental commission at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, later commented.Fernando Peña, of the National Space for Extractive Industry Transparency, a coalition of more than 100 organisations monitoring the impacts of mining in the Dominican Republic, says: “The federation’s conquest was huge. [Their struggle] inspired others.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Global DispatchGet a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development teamPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionToday, the federation’s headquarters lie in Loma de Blanco, overlooking mountains covered in lush, verdant greenery. The area is home to seven hydroelectric dams providing more than half of the country’s renewable energy. The federation has been there for 28 years since it was granted a resolution by the government to protect the area.Its members have been involved in new environmental battles in the country, such as gaining national park status for nearby Lomo Miranda, which has vast reserves of ferronickel.They have also built an eco lodge to generate tourism and show people some of what the natural surroundings can offer. They make their own coffee, teach farmers how to get the most out of the land and train people to make bamboo furniture.Polanco at the Ecotourism Complex in Rio Blanco where they welcome visitors and teach people sustainable farming methods. Photograph: Pedro Farias-Nardi/The GuardianIn February, Polanco was one of those invited by the ministry of the environment and natural resources to organise local communities to help forest firefighters prevent devastation and deal with fires, which, according to the authorities, are caused by humans in 68% of cases.The federation educates young people from surrounding communities about the importance of natural resources, such as water. It runs workshops and camps, invite environmental experts and academics to give talks, and is in the process of starting an agroecology school to teach people about food sovereignty and how to defend water, mountains, nature and biodiversity.Land and water defenders from across the country and Latin America have come to learn about the methods the federation used to protect themselves and the environment. Esther Giron, 28, co-founder of Aquelarre RD, a grassroots feminist collective in Bonao, is one land and water defender inspired by their work.Esther Giron (right), with a colleague. Giron has been inspired by Polanco and the federation in her work as a co-founder of Aquelarre RD. Photograph: Sarah Johnson/The Guardian“When I found out about the federation, I understood that their struggle was ancestral and anticolonial and was in the defence of water, land and life,” she says. “I realised that our political actions have to start from the community, and above all, they have to be done alongside women on a lesser privilege scale.”Although the threat of environmental destruction is ever present, Polanco is reassured that there is increased public awareness of the need to protect the environment. He looks to the next generations to continue the fight.“Today, we have young people from our community and surrounding towns who are determined that nothing is going to happen that threatens Loma de Blanco,” he says. “We cannot allow any vulnerable mountain in this country that produces water to be exploited for mining because, for us, a drop of water is worth more than an ounce of gold.”

Can we protect and profit from the oceans?

Joe Gough for Vox What the UN is missing with its plan to save the seas The ocean is home to most animal life on Earth. It’s also vital to human survival, regulating the climate, capturing 90 percent of the heat caused by carbon emissions, and producing 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. But most of the ocean is poorly regulated, amounting to a free-for-all of resource extraction — from commercial fishing to drilling for oil — that severely damages the marine ecosystems we all depend on. Now, world governments are inching closer to the most decisive step ever to safeguard the ocean’s future. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which was drafted last March and will take effect once 60 countries ratify it, aims to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. It particularly focuses on the part of the ocean that is currently least protected, the high seas, which make up about two-thirds of the ocean and are defined as any area beyond 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. The treaty intends to create “marine protected areas,” or MPAs, a legal designation that would regulate and limit the kinds of extractive activities that can happen within the high seas. Once ratified, participating governments would designate MPAs — ideally prioritizing protecting areas rich in biodiversity — and compliance would be monitored by a central body formed under the treaty. Yet MPAs are also highly limited. Though they sound like a kind of Yellowstone in the sea, they can perhaps be better thought of as “protected in name only,” as Vox’s Benji Jones put it last year, because commercial fishing, oil drilling, and mining will still happen in these areas. Instead, MPA regulations hope to prevent the worst injustices against humans and animals, while the revenue generated from permitted activities — which could range from recreational diving and fisheries to mining and drilling — would then partially pay the management fees for these zones. Another major goal of the UN High Seas Treaty is promoting the equitable sharing of ocean resources, such as new genetic discoveries that can help advance medicine, between high- and low-income countries. It also aims to create a more regulated ocean economy, with some nations able to pay off national debt if they agree to protect certain areas. Some management is better than the usual way of doing business in the high seas — a lawless place where nations do not have jurisdiction, horrors like slavery on industrial fishing vessels are common, and ocean trawlers catch and often kill billions of pounds of bycatch (unintentionally captured creatures like dolphins, whales, and turtles) every year. A deeper look, however, into the proposed management in Marine Protected Areas complicates its image as a conservation solution. The crux of it all is the trade-off between making a profit and fully protecting the ocean. We can’t have both. There’s a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean in the short term. But thinking solely of short-term profit will cost us more down the line, even in purely economic terms. The ocean economy — encompassing industries like fishing, maritime shipping, and oil drilling — generates nearly $3 trillion of global GDP every year, and its worth is estimated at $24 trillion. Its stability depends on making conservation a priority now, rather than extracting more from the ocean than it can bear. The High Seas Treaty’s 30 percent target for turning the ocean into protected areas is just a starting point if we want to conserve oceans and the future of life on Earth. But proposed regulation needs teeth. Figuring out what activities should and should not be allowed in MPAs is a broad and tough conversation about what we think the true value of the ocean is. What is a marine protected area? The concept of a marine protected area goes back centuries. “Taboo,” or tabu, as historically practiced in the Pacific Islands, has contemporary resonance as a conservation strategy. To this day, it keeps certain areas of the ocean off-limits to fishing. MPAs, as we think of them today, have been in the global conversation since at least 1962, when the limits of the ocean’s resources were discussed at the World Congress on National Parks, the international forum for creating protected natural areas. Then, at the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders agreed on a target to turn 10 percent of the ocean into MPAs by 2020, but this goal was not met. Today, just 2.9 percent of the ocean is fully or highly protected from fishing impacts. A shuffle of different targets and conversations then ensued, culminating in the 30 percent by 2030 goal set by the UN High Seas Treaty last year. Even that ambitious target represents the bare minimum needed to adequately protect the ocean, experts told me, and the agreement may take years to come into force. That’s time we do not have. Jenna Sullivan-Stack et al | Frontiers in Marine Science The size and scope of MPAs can vary widely: The largest is in the Ross Sea region near Antarctica, where 1.12 million square kilometers have been protected since 2016. The smallest MPA is Echo Bay Marine Provincial Park in Gilford Island, between Vancouver Island and British Columbia, which has just 1 acre of protection. The UN High Seas treaty, for the first time, sets out a process for states to set up marine protected areas in the high seas, outside of any nation’s direct jurisdiction. In their proposals, states must show what area they intend to protect, the threats it faces, and plans for its management. In exchange, countries could create a range of economic benefits from the ocean, like debt restructuring (as was the case with the Seychelles), benefiting fisheries, and even selling blue carbon credits. Beyond marine protected areas, the High Seas Treaty lays out a framework for the use of marine genetic resources and what fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from discovery would look like. Currently, developed nations are far outpacing developing nations in finding and commercializing marine genetic resources, such as the anti-cancer drug Halaven, which is derived from a Japanese sea sponge and has annual sales of $300 million. There’s still a lively debate in ocean politics over whether an MPA should fully protect a region of the ocean, or whether it can also be used for commercial purposes like fishing, mining, and oil extraction. Critics of the MPA approach go so far as to call them “paper parks” (or parks in name only) because, as they exist now, they allow a number of exploitative activities within protected areas. Groups like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s premier conservation organization, have proposed supplementary guidelines for MPAs that would ban extractive activities, especially at industrial scales. The UN High Seas Treaty as it stands now does not limit what existing fisheries, cargo ships, and deep-sea mining organizations can do in open waters. “We need to remove perverse incentives, and we need to rewire the world in a different way,” said Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN also advocates for an ecosystem-wide approach to conserving the ocean rather than single species protections, and for protecting species as they migrate across the ocean over time, rather than solely in one static location. Additionally, IUCN guidelines point to the fluctuating nature of the ocean and its inhabitants that travel across large distances; because of this, they suggest that there should be temporal protections in migratory paths and spawning locations. The IUCN guidelines also call for greater protection of the entire water column, from the top to the bottom of the seafloor. The UN High Seas Treaty, on the other hand, would exempt deep-sea mining operators from submitting environmental impact assessments on their proposed activities on the ocean floor. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images These black polymetallic sea nodules form naturally in the deep sea. There’s something fishy about extracting buckets of money from the ocean in order to save it Getting world leaders to agree to these terms is the challenge. Scientists and activists want full protection of the oceans now, while business interests argue that there’s too much money to be made by continuing extractive activities. The challenge for ocean advocates is to create economic incentives for conservation that can outweigh the enormous incentive to continue to allow business-as-usual pollution and exploitation of marine ecosystems. “Giving a different value to nature is one of our biggest challenges,” said marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle in a panel at the UN World Oceans Day conference last June. “Our continued existence — that needs to be on the balance sheet.” This conversation plugs into a long-running debate over whether economic incentives and market forces can promote effective stewardship of nature. The 1970s saw the emergence of the idea of “ecosystem services”: the benefits we get from functioning ecosystems. It started as a way for biologists to highlight the life support systems that keep the Earth habitable, but ecosystem services later started to be used by economists to create analyses of the monetary value of ecosystems. While these monetary valuations could be used in conservation advocacy by translating the benefits of ecosystems into the dollars-and-cents language of policy, they’re inherently incomplete and reductive. Critics of putting a price on nature have argued that this approach would put financial incentives before sound ecological measures. Environmental journalist George Monbiot has written that treating nature and its benefits as “ecosystem services” that can be paid for will make them seem fungible and make it easy for companies to destroy ecosystems by claiming they can build technological replacements that can do the same thing. And, by expressing the value of nature only in economic terms, the ecosystem services framework could consolidate decision-making power in the hands of those who have money. When it comes to conservation, practicality can be the cloak under which cynicism hides. We’re still in the early stages of knowing whether financial approaches to conservation can align with the well-being of oceans. There are some promising case studies: Following the example set by the Seychelles, for example, could let countries restructure their debt into protection of the ocean by creating MPAs. In 2015, the Seychelles sold $22 million of its debt to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit, in exchange for protecting its oceans by creating 13 marine protected areas across 30 percent of its national waters. The country has banned or restricted fishing, development, and oil exploration in these zones — regulations that are enforced with steep penalties, including imprisonment. The risks outweigh the rewards when the bait for conservation is money The High Seas Treaty’s vision of conserving 30 percent of global oceans would allocate more protection for marine ecosystems than the world has ever seen, but it has to be approached thoughtfully, conservationists say. Tessa Hempson — chief scientist at Mission Blue, a global coalition founded by Earle to support a network of global MPAs — thought of the questions we should first be asking. “Are we targeting the really essential areas that we need to be focusing on?” Hempson told Vox. “Do we know enough to make sure that we are targeting those areas correctly? And then also, you know, it’s all good and well having those areas demarcated on a map, but are they actually effectively conserved?” It’s not the first time these tensions (and their corollary benefits and consequences) have been highlighted. The idea of a “blue economy” first emerged at a 2012 UN conference, aiming to bridge the gap between conservation and treating marine ecosystems as a fungible asset. At the time, Pacific Island nations saw how the ocean could be their gateway to be included in global “green” development by highlighting the importance of the ocean and coasts to their livelihoods, culture, and economy. The blue economy, in turn, would help bolster equitable sharing of benefits between developed and developing countries. In the years that followed, the agenda of equity fell through the cracks. Framing of the blue economy turned to prioritizing growth and promoting “decoupling” — an idea that the economy can keep growing without consequences to the environment. Decoupling separates nature and economy in an intellectualized way in which the effects of capitalism and consumption can continue undeterred. Though the concept of the blue economy began with intentions of global equity and fair distribution of benefits from the use of ocean resources, we’ve landed in a wayward place where endless growth models don’t truly respect the limits of nature. The ocean stands to be mined for all it is worth unless MPAs start to guarantee meaningful protection. The high seas were long held as global commons; expressions like “plenty of fish in the sea” reflected the impression that the ocean held infinite resources for the taking. Now, it’s clearer than ever that this model won’t work anymore. If overfishing continues, we can expect a global collapse of all species currently fished by 2050 — though the lead author of the study, Boris Worm, wrote in 2021 that putting forth ocean protections could give us reason for hope. In any case, the collapse of fish stocks will have ecosystem-wide consequences, like the mass extinction of large ocean creatures, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. Another major threat to the ocean looms on the horizon: mining. Deep-sea mining is not yet occurring on an industrial scale, but it’s a major issue of discussion in the marine space because of its implications for the global renewable energy transition. Firms are hoping to mine the ocean bed in search of polymetallic nodules containing cobalt and nickel for use in renewable car batteries. Last year, the International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates the ocean floor, postponed a decision on whether to start allowing mining, citing the need for more time to understand what science-backed guidelines should be in place before moving forward. But many believe it’s only a matter of time before companies are granted licenses to begin mining the ocean floor — unleashing a drilling bonanza that could have consequences we don’t yet understand because the deep ocean has barely been explored. Arguably, the only thing we should be extracting from the ocean is knowledge. Indeed, the knowledge we have of the ocean pales in comparison to the knowledge we have of outer space, with funding for space exploration exceeding that of ocean exploration more than 150-fold. People have been debating for a long time whether greed will be the end of humanity, or whether financial incentives can be used to create protections. When it comes to the oceans, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As Sylvia Earle said at the June UN conference, “The most important thing we take from the oceans is our existence. If you like to breathe, you’ll listen up.”

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