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RSCPA revokes Huon salmon’s accreditation after video showing live fish being dumped in Tasmania

It means no Tasmanian salmon companies are certified as meeting the RSPCA-approved standard, its chief executive saysGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastRSPCA Australia has revoked its accreditation of major Tasmanian salmon company Huon after the release of a video that it said showed the inhumane handling of live fish.The withdrawal follows an initial 14-day suspension after the Bob Brown Foundation published drone video that showed writhing live salmon being siphoned into a tub containing dead fish.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

RSPCA Australia has revoked its accreditation of major Tasmanian salmon company Huon after the release of a video that it said showed the inhumane handling of live fish.The withdrawal follows an initial 14-day suspension after the Bob Brown Foundation published drone video that showed writhing live salmon being siphoned into a tub containing dead fish.The fish were killed by a major disease outbreak at south-eastern Tasmanian fish farms earlier this month. In the video, the tub was then sealed.Huon Aquaculture said it was “extremely disappointed” about the RSCPA decision after a “single incident of non-compliance” during an “unprecedented, challenging period”.The RSPCA’s chief executive, Richard Mussell, said no Tasmanian salmon companies were certified as meeting the RSPCA-approved standard after the decision.“While we acknowledge this was a single incident following many years of certification, the decision to withdraw a certification reflects how seriously we take incidents like this that compromise animal welfare,” he said.Footage appears to show workers pumping live salmon into a tub with dead salmon – video“Fish, including those farmed for human consumption, are sentient beings and, like other animals, can experience pain and suffering. When they’re farmed for food, the welfare of fish must be front of mind.”The announcement adds to the pressure on the state’s salmon industry after a month in which more than 1 million salmon died during an outbreak of an endemic bacterium, Piscirickettsia salmonis.More than 5,500 tonnes of fish were dumped at landfill and rendering plants in February. Fatty chunks of fish have washed up on beaches in the Huon Valley and on Bruny Island in February and March, prompting public protests.The industry is also at the centre of a political storm over Anthony Albanese’s plan to rush through legislation next week to protect salmon farming in Macquarie harbour, on the state’s west coast, from a legal challenge over its impact on the Maugean skate, an endangered fish species.Mussell said salmon was one of the most intensively farmed animals and it was “important that we can demonstrate the measures needed to ensure their welfare is considered”.Huon’s general manager of stakeholder and government relations, Hannah Gray, said the company acknowledged the seriousness of the “extremely distressing” incident and that it had put steps in place to ensure contractors upheld “high animal welfare standards”.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Breaking News AustraliaGet the most important news as it breaksPrivacy 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 promotionShe said Huon had been farming “to a standard of animal welfare that no other Australian salmon farming company has been able to achieve” for the past seven years. “We will continue to farm to this standard,” she said.Bob Brown Foundation campaigner Alistair Allan said the RSPCA decision was “the correct one” and that the drone video showed the “grim reality of factory-farmed Tasmanian salmon”.Allan said the incident showed Albanese’s support of salmon farming was “out of touch”. “He needs to walk back his support of the industry,” he said.The federal Coalition and the Australian Greens wrote to Albanese on Thursday asking to see the legislation to change national environmental law to protect the industry in Macquarie harbour that will go before parliament on Tuesday.Albanese said “people will see the legislation next week”. “We’ll be introducing it and we expect it to be carried,” he said.It is expected the bill will be designed to abruptly end a long-running legal review by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, into whether an expansion of the salmon industry in the harbour in 2012 was properly approved.

If NZ wants to decarbonise energy, we need to know which renewables deliver the best payback

The energy return on investment for wind and solar technologies in New Zealand is becoming comparable to hydropower.

Getty ImagesA national energy strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand was meant to be ready at the end of last year. As it stands, we’re still waiting for a cohesive, all-encompassing plan to meet the country’s energy demand today and in the future. One would expect such a plan to first focus on reducing energy demand through improved energy efficiency across all sectors. The next step should be greater renewable electrification of all sectors. However, questions remain about the cradle-to-grave implications of investments in these renewable resources. We have conducted life-cycle assessments of several renewable electricity generation technologies, including wind and solar, that the country is investing in now. We found the carbon and energy footprints are quite small and favourably complement our current portfolio of renewable electricity generation assets. Meeting future demand The latest assessments provided by the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation echo earlier work by the grid operator Transpower. Both indicate that overall demand for electricity could nearly double by 2050. Many researchers believe these scenarios are an underestimate. One study suggests the power generation capacity will potentially need to increase threefold over this period. Other modelling efforts project current capacity will need to increase 13 times, especially if we want to decarbonise all sectors and export energy carriers such as hydrogen. This is, of course, because we want all new generation to come from renewable resources, with much lower capacity factors (the percentage of the year they deliver power) associated with their variability. Additional storage requirements will also be enormous. Following the termination of work on a proposed pumped hydro project, other options need investigating. Wind and solar are becoming the primary renewable technologies. Shutterstock/Kyohei Miyazaki Building renewable generation The latest World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that wind and solar, primarily photovoltaic panels, are quickly taking over as the primary renewable technologies. This is also true in Aotearoa New Zealand. An updated version of the generation investment survey, commissioned by the Electricity Authority, shows most of the committed and actively pursued projects (to be commissioned by 2030) are solar photovoltaic and onshore wind farms. Offshore wind projects are on the horizon, too, but have been facing challenges such as proposed seabed mining in the same area and a lack of price stabilisation measures typical in other jurisdictions. New legislation aims to address some of these challenges. Distributed solar power (small-scale systems to power homes, buildings and communities) has seen near-exponential growth. Our analysis indicates wind (onshore and offshore) and distributed solar will make an almost equal contribution to power generation by 2050, with a slightly larger share by utility-scale solar. Cradle-to-grave analyses The main goal is to maintain a stable grid with secure and affordable electricity supply. But there are other sustainability considerations associated with what happens at the end of renewable technologies’ use and where their components come from. The IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook shows the fast-growing global demand for a suite of materials with complex supply chains. We have also investigated the materials intensity of taking up these technologies in Aotearoa New Zealand, and discussed the greater dependence on those supply chains. The challenges in securing these metals in a sustainable manner include environmental and social impacts associated with the mining and processing of the materials and the manufacturing of different components that need to be transported for implementation here. There are also operating and maintenance requirements, including the replacement of components, and the dismantling of the assets in a responsible manner. We have undertaken comprehensive life-cycle assessments, based on international standards, of the recently commissioned onshore Harapaki wind farm, a proposed offshore wind farm in the South Taranaki Bight, a utility-scale solar farm in Waikato and distributed solar photovoltaic systems, with and without batteries, across the country. The usual metrics are energy inputs and carbon emissions because they describe the efficiency of these technologies. They are considered a first proxy of whether a technology is appropriate for a given context. Beyond that, we used the following specific metrics, as summarised in the table below: GWP: global warming potential (carbon emissions during a technology’s life cycle per energy unit delivered). CPBT: carbon payback time (how long a technology needs to be operational before its life cycle emissions equal the avoided emissions, either using the grid and its associated emissions or conventional natural gas turbines). CED: cumulative energy demand over the life cycle of a technology. EPBT: energy payback time (how long a technology needs to be operational before the electricity it generates equals the CED). EROI: energy return on investment (the amount of usable energy delivered from an energy source compared to the energy required to extract, process and distribute that source, essentially quantifying the “profit” from energy production). There is much debate about the minimum energy return on investment that makes an energy source acceptable. A value of more than ten is generally viewed as positive. Life cycle assessment metrics of wind and solar power in Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, CC BY-SA For all technologies we assessed, the overall greenhouse gas emissions are lower than the grid emissions factor. Because of New Zealand’s already low-emissions grid, the carbon payback time is around three to seven years for utility-scale generation. But for small-scale, distributed generation it can be up to 13 years. If the displacement of gas turbines is considered, the payback is halved. Energy return on investment is above ten for all technologies, but utility-scale generation is better than distributed solar, with values of between 30 and 75. To put this into perspective, the energy return on investment for hydropower, if operated for 100 years, is reported to be 110. Utility-scale wind and solar being commissioned now have an operational life of 30 years but are typically expected to be refurbished. This means their energy return on investment is becoming comparable to hydropower. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Albanese to rush through new laws to protect Tasmania’s salmon industry from legal challenge

Labor will push the contentious bill through parliament next week despite concerns about the extinction of the Maugean skateFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAnthony Albanese plans to rush through contentious legislation next week to protect Tasmania’s salmon industry from a legal challenge over the industry’s impact on an endangered fish species.The future of the salmon industry on the state’s west coast has become a sharp political issue centred on whether it can coexist with the Maugean skate, a ray-like species found only in Macquarie Harbour’s brackish estuarine waters.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Anthony Albanese plans to rush through contentious legislation next week to protect Tasmania’s salmon industry from a legal challenge over the industry’s impact on an endangered fish species.The future of the salmon industry on the state’s west coast has become a sharp political issue centred on whether it can coexist with the Maugean skate, a ray-like species found only in Macquarie Harbour’s brackish estuarine waters.After lobbying by industry leaders and Tasmanian MPs, Albanese wrote to the state’s three salmon companies last month promising the government would change the law to ensure there were “appropriate environmental laws” to “continue sustainable salmon farming” in the harbour.He had expected that would be a commitment for the next term of parliament. But with the election campaign delayed by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, the prime minister plans to introduce a bill on Tuesday that could abruptly end a long-running legal review by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, into whether an expansion of the industry in the harbour in 2012 was properly approved.The bill – an amendment to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – has been listed to be introduced in the lower house next Tuesday, 25 March, when parliament will largely be focused on the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, delivering the federal budget. It is expected in the Senate the following day.With the Greens and several crossbench senators opposed, it will need the support of the Coalition to pass. Peter Dutton has previously told the industry he would guarantee its future and legislate if elected prime minister.It is understood the legislation will be broader than the salmon industry and will be intended to limit conservation groups’ powers to challenge past decisions that have allowed developments to go ahead.A spokesperson for Albanese said the government would legislate next week “to amend the flawed EPBC Act to secure jobs and local industries… We call on the Coalition to give this legislation bipartisan support to give communities certainty”, the spokesperson said.The proposal has been criticised by environment organisations. Eight conservation councils led by Environment Tasmania wrote to Albanese last month saying they had “grave concern” about his pledge. They said it would undermine Plibersek’s reconsideration of whether a salmon industry expansion 13 years ago should have been allowed without a full federal environmental assessment. The reconsideration process was triggered in 2023 by a legal request by three conservation groups.An environment department document from November 2023, released recently under freedom of information laws, showed officials considered it was “likely” the reconsideration process would lead to the expansion being declared a “controlled action”, a step that would require a full environmental impact assessment. The officials suggested salmon farming in the harbour, a third of which lies in Tasmania’s world heritage wilderness area, would need to stop while that assessment took place.The Australia Institute’s Eloise Carr said the government appeared to be stopping that legal process by “smashing through” legislation while parliamentarians were focused on the budget. “This is not how law reform should happen,” she said. “The situation in Macquarie Harbour … is a perfect example of why Australia needs stronger environment laws, not to water down already inadequate protections.”The Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young said she was “staggered” the government had adopted and planned to “ram through” through Liberal Party policy and legislation. “This shows Labor cannot be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to the environment,” she said. “Gutting environmental laws, stopping community from being able to raise concerns about what’s going on in their local environment, and ignoring the scientific advice is absolutely shameful.”A government scientific committee last year found that fish farming in the harbour had substantially reduced dissolved oxygen levels and should be scaled back or removed to save the Maugean skate – a species that marine scientists have called the “thylacine of the sea” – from extinction.In his letter to salmon bosses last month, Albanese referred to a new report by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies that said recent surveys suggested skate numbers, which crashed last decade, were likely to have recovered to 2014 levels. The report stressed the need for continued monitoring.The salmon industry has been under pressure across the state in recent weeks as more than a million fish have died during an bacterium outbreak in the south-east and been dumped at landfill and rendering plants. Fatty chunks of fish have washed up on beaches in the Huon Valley and on Bruny Island, prompting public protests.Both major parties believe the salmon industry may be a crucial election issue in the seat of Braddon, in Tasmania’s north-west, which the Liberal party holds with an 8% margin.Bob Brown, a former Greens leader, said Albanese would be legislating a “death warrant” on the Maugean skate. “Albanese cannot expect thoughtful Tasmanians to vote or preference Labor if he condemns our natural wildlife on the altar of the foreign corporations who run the rotten Atlantic salmon industry,” he said.The chief executive of industry group Salmon Tasmania, Luke Martin, said he had not yet been briefed on the legislation but hoped the issue would be resolved next week.

Woodside’s bid to expand a huge gas project is testing both Labor and the Coalition’s environmental credentials

Opposition leader Peter Dutton says a Coalition government would push for approval of the huge project, which would release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has indicated a Coalition government would quickly approve a giant gas project off Western Australia which will release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases until around 2070. Woodside Energy is leading the joint venture, which would dramatically expand offshore drilling and extend gas production at the North West Shelf project – already Australia’s largest gas-producing venture. In a statement on Wednesday, Dutton said a Coalition government would “prioritise Western Australian jobs and the delivery of energy security” by directing environment officials to fast-track assessment of the extension, later saying “we will make sure that this approval is arrived at in 30 days”. Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is currently considering the proposal. Mining and business interests have been pushing her to make a decision this month. Dutton’s support for the project is deeply concerning. Evidence suggests extending the project would undermine global efforts to curb carbon emissions and stabilise Earth’s climate. The extension also threatens significant Indigenous sites and pristine coral reef ecosystems. Federal approval of the project puts both natural and heritage assets at risk. What’s this debate all about? The North West Shelf project supplies domestic and overseas markets with gas extracted off WA’s north coast. The project currently comprises offshore extraction facilities and an onshore gas-processing plant at Karratha. Its approval is due to expire in 2030. Woodside’s proposed extension would allow the project to operate until 2070. It would also permit expanded drilling in new offshore gas fields and construction of a new 900km underwater gas pipeline to Karratha. In 2022, the WA Environment Protection Authority recommended a 50-year extension for the plant, if Woodside reduced its projected emissions by changing its operations or buying carbon offsets. This paved the way for the state government approval in December last year. Gas: a major climate culprit Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world is aiming to keep planetary heating to no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. Greenhouse gas emissions must fall to net zero to achieve the goal. But instead, global emissions are rising. Greenhouse gases – such as methane, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide – are emitted throughout the gas/LNG production process. This includes when gas is extracted, piped, processed, liquefied and shipped. Emissions are also created when the gas is burned for energy or used elsewhere in manufacturing. Australian emissions increased 0.8% in 2022–23 – and coal and gas burning were the top contributors. However, Australia’s greatest contribution to global emissions occurs when our coal and gas is burned overseas. The North West Shelf project is already a major emitter of greenhouse gases. The proposed extension would significantly increase the project’s climate damage. Woodside estimates the expansion will create 4.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime. Greenpeace analysis puts the figure much higher, at 6.1 billion tonnes. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions at this magnitude, when the window to climate stability is fast closing, threatens major damage to Earth’s natural systems, and human health and wellbeing. Woodside says it will use carbon-capture and storage to reduce emissions from the project. This technology is widely regarded as unproven at scale. Indeed, it has a history of delays and underperformance in similar gas operations in WA. Woodside proposes to reduce the project’s climate impacts by buying carbon offsets. This involves compensating for a company’s own emissions by paying for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, through activities such as planting trees or generating renewable energy. However, there are serious doubts over whether carbon offset projects deliver their promised benefits. Threats to marine life and Indigenous heritage Damage from the proposal could extend beyond climate harms. The approval would enable increased drilling in the Browse Basin, including around the pristine Scott Reef. The reef is home to thousands of plant and animal species. Scientists say the project threatens migrating whales and endangered turtles, among other marine life. Also, the onshore infrastructure is located near the 50,000-year-old Murujuga rock art precinct on the traditional lands of five Aboriginal custodial groups. The site contains more than one million petroglyphs said to depict more than 50,000 years of Australian Indigenous knowledge and spiritual beliefs. Traditional Owners suffered severe cultural loss in the 1980s when about 5,000 rock art pieces were damaged or removed during construction of Woodside’s gas plant. The Traditional Owners and scientists fear increased acid gas pollution from the proposed expansion will further damage the rock art. Acting in Australia’s interests The Albanese government has failed to deliver its promised reform of Australia’s national environment laws. This means nature lacks the strong laws needed to protect it from harmful development. At federal, state and territory levels, both major parties support expansion of the gas industry. This takes the form of policy inertia, tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. In the current term of government, Plibersek has green-lit numerous polluting projects. This includes approving several coal mine expansions last year. What’s more, Australian governments support offshore gas developments in the Tiwi Islands, new onshore shale gas extraction in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley and a new coal seam gas pipeline and wells in Queensland. Approval of the North West Shelf expansion is not in the best interests of Australia and future generations. No federal government should prioritise short-term economic gain over Earth’s climate and human health. In the past, Melissa Haswell has received research funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, FACSIA, Red Cross, Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council Priority Driven Research, Queensland Health and Queensland Department of Environment and Science. Melissa Haswell is a member of the Public Health Association Australia, Climate and Health Alliance, Sydney Environment Institute and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. She supports the Community Independent movement in the electorate of Dickson.David Shearman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Crocodile Attacks On The Rise In Indonesia And Residents Are On Edge

The country reported 180 recorded crocodile attack victims in the last year.

BUDONG-BUDONG, Indonesia (AP) — Nearly seven months after a crocodile attack almost took her life, Munirpa walked to the estuary outside her home with her husband and her children, ready to brave a reenactment.Munirpa, who like many Indonesians only uses one name, recounted how one early morning in August, she threw her household garbage into a creek about 50 meters (164 feet) away from her house, as she normally would.She didn’t see what was coming next.By the time she realized a crocodile had attacked her, the four-meter-long (13-foot) beast had already sunk its teeth into most of her body, sparing only her head. She fought hard, trying to jab its eyes. Her husband, hearing her screams, ran over and tried to pull her by the thigh out of the crocodile’s jaws. A tug-of-war ensued; the reptile whipped him with its tail. Fortunately, he saved Munirpa in time, eventually dragging her out of the crocodile’s grip.People have long feared the ancient predators in the Central Mamuju district of Indonesia’s West Sulawesi, where the Budong-Budong River meets the sea. For Munirpa, 48, that fear turned into a brutal reality when she became one of nearly 180 recorded crocodile attack victims in Indonesia last year. Residents like her are learning to coexist with the crocodiles, a legally protected species in Indonesia, as they balance conservation with looking out for their safety. But as attacks rise, several residents and experts have called for better government interventions to stop the problem from getting even worse.Communities near the crocodiles are on edgeFollowing the attack, Munirpa was hospitalized for a month and has had two surgeries. By February this year, her fear was still clearly visible, as were the scars on her legs and thighs.“I am so scared. I don’t want to go to the beach. Even to the back of the house, I don’t dare to go,” said Munirpa. “I am traumatized. I asked my children not to go to the river, or to the backyard, or go fishing.”In the villages surrounding the Budong-Budong River, like Munirpa’s, crocodiles have become a daily topic of conversation. Their presence has become so common that warning signs now mark the areas where they lurk, from the river mouth to the waterways which were once a popular swimming spot for children.In 2024, there were 179 crocodile attacks in Indonesia, the highest number of crocodile attacks in the world, with 92 fatalities, according to CrocAttack, an independent database. Social media videos showing crocodile appearances and attacks in Sulawesi and other regions in Indonesia are also on the rise.The increase in attacks began about 12 years ago with the rise of palm oil plantations around the river mouth, said 39-year-old crocodile handler Rusli Paraili. Some companies carved artificial waterways, linking them to the larger part of the Budong-Budong River. That was when the crocodiles started straying, leaving the river and creeping to nearby residential areas, such as fish and shrimp ponds, he explained.Palm oil plantations now dominate the landscape in West Sulawesi, from the mountains to the coast, and patrolling for crocodiles has become part of people’s daily routine. When residents check the water pumps in their ponds, they have no choice but to keep out an eye for the beasts — flashlights in hand, scouring up, down and across canals and waterways — resigned to the uneasy reality of sharing their home with a predator.Balancing conservation and safetyThe saltwater crocodile has been a legally protected species in Indonesia since 1999, making it an animal that cannot be hunted freely. As a top predator, there is also no population control in nature.Paraili, the crocodile handler, said that while the law protects crocodiles from being killed, the rise in attacks is a major concern. In response, he’s taken care of some of the crocs in a specially-designed farm away from human populations. He’s received some financial support from the government and community donations, as well as support from palm oil companies for the last five years.The farm has four ponds and around 50 reptiles. Some have names: Tanker, the largest, shaped like a ship, or Karossa, named after the sub-district the animal was caught after fatally attacking someone.When funds run low, he uses his own money to ensure they’re fed, at least once every four days.Amir Hamidy, who studies reptiles at the National Research and Innovation Agency, worries the rise in attacks indicates that crocodile numbers are becoming far too dangerous. Hamidy supports better population control.Being a protected species “does not necessarily mean that the population cannot be reduced when it is at a level that is indeed unsafe,” he said.Improving protection for residentsAround a year ago in Tumbu village, Suardi, who goes by one name, was harvesting coconuts when they fell into the river. When he went to retrieve them, he was attacked by a crocodile he initially didn’t notice. He’s since made a full recovery.Still, the experience has made him more cautious. “Yes, I am worried. But what else can we do,” Suardi said. “The important thing is that we are careful enough.”Along with Munirpa, Suardi is one of 10 people in the region who was attacked by a crocodile last year. Three of those attacked were killed.Suyuti Marzuki, who’s head of West Sulawesi Marine and Fisheries Agency, said the crocodile habitat shift is making people’s everyday activities — like harvesting coconuts, fishing or even disposing of garbage like Munirpa — very risky.Marzuki said the government is looking at possible options that can provide both safety and economic alternatives for residents.While he acknowledged that crocodile population numbers and ecosystems need to be protected, Marzuki also raised the possibility of bolstering the local economy through the crocodile skin trade. That industry is controversial because of conservation and animal welfare issues.Paraili, the crocodile handler, also urged serious government interventions.“This is a matter of human lives. So when the government is not serious, then our brothers and sisters in the future — in 5 or 15 years — there will be even more who will die from being attacked by crocodiles,” he said.Residents like Munirpa and Suardi are waiting for more immediate and realistic steps from the authorities to ensure their community’s and families’ safety.“It is enough that I’ve been bitten by a crocodile,” Munirpa said. “I won’t let it happen to my children.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org

Rain gave Australia’s environment a fourth year of reprieve in 2024 – but this masks deepening problems: report

Favourable short-term conditions kept Australia’s environmental scorecard high in 2024 – but long-term problems are worsening.

Lauren Henderson/ShutterstockFor the fourth year running, the condition of Australia’s environment has been relatively good overall. Our national environment scorecard released today gives 2024 a mark of 7.7 out of 10. You might wonder how this can be. After all, climate change is intensifying and threatened species are still in decline. The main reason: good rainfall partly offset the impact of global warming. In many parts of Australia, rainfall, soil water and river flows were well above average, there were fewer large bushfires, and vegetation continued to grow. Overall, conditions were above average in the wetter north and east of Australia, although parts of the south and west were very dry. But this is no cause for complacency. Australia’s environment remains under intense pressure. Favourable conditions have simply offered a welcome but temporary reprieve. As a nation we must grasp the opportunity now to implement lasting solutions before the next cycle of drought and fire comes around. This snapshot shows the environmental score for a range of indicators in Australia. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Preparing the national scorecard For the tenth year running, we have trawled through a huge amount of data from satellites, weather and water measuring stations, and ecological surveys. We gathered information about climate change, oceans, people, weather, water, soils, plants, fire and biodiversity. Then we analysed the data and summarised it all in a report that includes an overall score for the environment. This score (between zero and ten) gives a relative measure of how favourable conditions were for nature, agriculture and our way of life over the past year in comparison to all years since 2000. This is the period we have reliable records for. While it is a national report, conditions vary enormously between regions and so we also prepare regional scorecards. You can download the scorecard for your region at our website. Different jurisdictions had quite different environmental scores in 2024. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Welcome news, but alarming trends continue Globally, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. It was Australia’s second hottest year, with the record warmest sea surface temperatures. As a result, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event since 2016, while Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia also experienced bleaching. Yet bushfire activity was low despite high temperatures, thanks to regular rainfall. National rainfall was 18% above average, improving soil condition and increasing tree canopy cover. States such as New South Wales saw notable improvements in environmental conditions, while conditions also improved somewhat in Western Australia. Others experienced declines, particularly South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. These regional contrasts were largely driven by rainfall – good rains can hide some underlying environmental degradation trends. Favourable weather conditions bumped up the nation’s score this year, rather than sustained environmental improvements. Mapping the environmental condition score to local government areas reveals poor (red) conditions in the west and the south, with good scores (blue) in the east and north. White is neutral. Australia’s Environment Explorer, CC BY-NC-ND A temporary respite? The past four years show Australia’s environment is capable of bouncing back from drought and fire when conditions are right. But the global climate crisis continues to escalate, and Australia remains highly vulnerable. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather and fire events continue to threaten our environment and livelihoods. The consequences of extreme events can persist for many years, like we have seen for the Black Summer of 2019–20. To play our part in limiting global warming, Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Progress is stalling: last year, national emissions fell slightly (0.6%) below 2023 levels but were still higher than in 2022. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per person remain among the highest in the world. Biodiversity loss remains an urgent issue. The national threatened species list grew by 41 species in 2024. While this figure is much lower than the record of 130 species added in 2023, it remains well above the long-term average of 25 species added per year. More than half of the newly listed or uplisted species were directly affected by the Black Summer fires. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and invasive species continue to put pressure on native ecosystems and species. The Threatened Species Index captures data from long-term threatened species monitoring. The index is updated annually but with a three-year lag due largely to delays in data processing and sharing. This means the 2024 index includes data up to 2021. The index revealed the abundance of threatened birds, mammals, plants, and frogs has fallen an average of 58% since 2000. But there may be some good news. Between 2020 and 2021, the overall index increased slightly (2%) suggesting the decline has stabilised and some recovery is evident across species groups. We’ll need further monitoring to confirm whether this represents a lasting turnaround or a temporary pause in declines. This graph shows the relative abundance of different categories of species listed as threatened under the EPBC Act since 2000, as collated by the Threatened Species Index. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND What needs to happen? The 2024 Australia’s Environment Report offers a cautiously optimistic picture of the present. Without intervention, the future will look a lot worse. Australia must act decisively to secure our nation’s environmental future. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, introducing stronger land management policies and increasing conservation efforts to maintain and restore our ecosystems. Without redoubling our efforts, the apparent environmental improvements will not be more than a temporary pause in a long-term downward trend. Australia’s Environment Report is produced by the ANU Fenner School for Environment & Society and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), which is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Albert Van Dijk receives or has previously received funding from several government-funded agencies, grant schemes and programs. Shoshana Rapley is a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the Australian National University and has received funding from the Ecological Society of Australia and BirdLife Australia. Tayla Lawrie is a current employee of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

Southern elephant seals are adaptable – but they struggle when faced with both rapid climate change and human impacts

Protecting remaining strongholds and minimising human impacts on food sources will be crucial to avoiding further population decline of this remarkable creature.

Wikimedia Commons/Antoine Lamielle, CC BY-SASouthern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) are an iconic species of the Southern Ocean. But with rapid environmental changes in their ocean home, the seals’ population range has been shifting. Once spread across vast areas of the southern hemisphere, these apex predators are facing challenges from both climate shifts and human activities. Our new research examines ancient and modern DNA, archaeological records and ecological data. It reveals how these large marine mammals have adapted – and sometimes failed to adapt – to such pressures since the height of the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. A dynamic evolutionary history Today, the largest southern elephant seal populations are found on subantarctic islands, including South Georgia, Macquarie Island and the Falkland Islands. These colonies act as global strongholds for the species. Yet in the past, until just a few hundred years ago, many smaller populations existed on the Victoria Land Coast in Antarctica and closer to temperate zones, on mainland Australia and New Zealand. Our study focused on the Australasian lineage of southern elephant seals, drawing on samples from these ancient colonies. By analysing their genetic makeup, we pieced together a timeline of their biological heritage, including population expansions and contractions. This has crucial implications for understanding the resilience of elephant seals in the face of climate change. Subantarctic islands such as the Kerguelen islands remain strongholds for southern elephant seals. Antoine Lamielle, CC BY-SA From genetic clues in subfossil and archaeological remains, some thousands of years old, we found evidence of repeated population cycles. Expanding sea ice during cold glacial periods forced the seals northward, only for them to recolonise the Southern Ocean as sea ice retreated during warm interglacials. This history was particularly dynamic after the height of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago. The planet started warming then, which led to dramatic ecological shifts. A mummified southern elephant seal found on the Victoria Land Coast in Antarctica. Brenda Hall, CC BY-SA Elephant seals likely expanded from ice-free refuges in temperate regions such as Tasmania and New Zealand into newly available subantarctic and Antarctic coastlines. However, this range expansion wasn’t permanent. As the current warm interglacial (the Holocene) progressed, new challenges arose: Indigenous hunting and, later, extensive European industrial sealing. For Indigenous communities in New Zealand and Australia, elephant seals were a part of their diet. We know this from seal remains in middens (rubbish dumps) and material culture, including necklaces made from elephant seal teeth which have been found in early Māori archaeological sites. Archaeological remains from coastal sites in New Zealand and Tasmania indicate significant hunting and reliance on seals by Indigenous populations. Along with human-driven environmental changes, this led to local extinctions. Impacts of humans and climate change Genetically, the seals from these ancient Australasian and Antarctic colonies were distinct but related. They formed a unique lineage in the Pacific that included Macquarie Island. This genetic diversity likely resulted from periods of isolation in separate refuges at the height of the last Ice Age. However, with modern climate shifts and human exploitation, much of this genetic diversity has been lost. The colonies that once thrived on the Victoria Land Coast in Antarctica are now extinct. Meanwhile, Macquarie Island is home to a significant breeding colony facing its own challenges. Changes in Antarctic sea ice are increasing the distance between breeding grounds on the island and feeding grounds at sea. This has affected the colony’s stability in recent decades. One of the most striking outcomes of our research is how quickly these large, long-lived animals can respond to environmental pressures. Seals adapted to a shifting climate by expanding their range in response to new habitats and retracting when conditions became unsuitable. This ability to move and adapt, however, was limited when confronted by the dual pressures of rapid climate change and human exploitation, which reduced their numbers and genetic diversity drastically over a short period. This schematic shows living (solid circles) and extinct (opaque circles) southern elephant seal populations and the extent of sea ice around Antarctica (opaque blue-grey) at the height of the last Ice Age. Berg et al (2025), CC BY-SA Can the Southern Ocean ecosystem adapt? As human-driven climate change continues, the Southern Ocean is expected to continue warming. This will cause further habitat loss for species that depend on sea ice and are affected by shifts in the availability of prey. The elephant seals’ history offers a window into how marine mammals may respond to these changes. But it also serves as a warning: human impacts, coupled with environmental pressures, can lead to swift, sometimes irreversible declines. Our research underscores the importance of conserving the genetic diversity and habitats of southern elephant seals. These seals are not just a testament to adaptability in a changing world; they are reminders of the vulnerability of even the most resilient species. Protecting their remaining strongholds and minimising human impacts on their food sources and breeding grounds will be crucial if we hope to avoid further contractions in their population. The story of the southern elephant seal is one of survival, adaptation and loss. As we face our own climate challenges, we must consider the lessons embedded in their genetic and ecological history. It’s a reminder that while nature often adapts to change and can weather some ecosystem threats, human-driven impacts can push even the most adaptable species beyond the point of recovery. Nic Rawlence receives funding from the Marsden Fund. Mark de Bruyn received funding from a Griffith University New Investigator grant. Michael Knapp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Home Is Where the Unpaid Labor Is

The first time I taught Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto, “Wages Against Housework,” was during the pandemic. Federici proposes that housework—cooking and cleaning, taking care of children, spouses, the sick, and the elderly—should be compensated by the government. Most of my students, who were first-year undergraduates, Zoomed into class from their childhood bedrooms. It was a moment in the pandemic when parents of younger children were with them 24/7, and it seemed as if everyone was either sick or caring for someone who was sick. The time-consuming nature of this work, as well as its physical, emotional, and financial strains, was often in the news.Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared. After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

The first time I taught Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto, “Wages Against Housework,” was during the pandemic. Federici proposes that housework—cooking and cleaning, taking care of children, spouses, the sick, and the elderly—should be compensated by the government. Most of my students, who were first-year undergraduates, Zoomed into class from their childhood bedrooms. It was a moment in the pandemic when parents of younger children were with them 24/7, and it seemed as if everyone was either sick or caring for someone who was sick. The time-consuming nature of this work, as well as its physical, emotional, and financial strains, was often in the news.Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared. After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste

Now they're turning to the UN for help.

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.”  When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?   Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes.  “Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.”  But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums.  Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.  Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.  “By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says.  This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October.  The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.”  “We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities. A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded.  The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape. “These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted.  “DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said. That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness.  “It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages.  “We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”  The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland.  In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion.  The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land.  The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.”  “The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint.  “This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

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