Amid Devastation in the Amazon, Diamonds Were Their Best Hope

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.

This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.

The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.

In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.

As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.


Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet.

Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.

Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.

The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years.

“New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.

In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.

In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.


The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforest

“Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors.

He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”

As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.

When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.”

The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right.

The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.)

The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism.

Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?

Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.

At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.

Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.

As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

Read the full story here.
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Community activists plead to be heard through “closed doors” outside nation’s top energy conference

HOUSTON — Climate activists expressed concern that discussions behind closed doors at the nation’s largest energy conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, will further contribute to environmental health risks. As energy executives and political leaders across the nation convened for the conference in Houston, Texas this week to discuss the future of energy, representatives from the Gulf Coast, Rio Grande Valley, Ohio River Valley, and Cancer Alley highlighted the fossil fuel industry's impact in their communities. “It is our communities that are being harmed and hurt,” Yvette Arellano of the Houston environmental organization Fenceline Watch said. “It is our children that are having to play in playgrounds across the street from chemical plants and oil refineries.”Despite attempting to purchase conference tickets at costs of up to $10,500, activists have been barred from the conference in recent years, Arellano said.“The conference has shut out civil society from entering and understanding the projects that are coming to harm our communities,” Arellano said at a press conference at a park about 10 minutes from the convention center on Monday. “We demand transparency.” S&P Global has not responded to Environmental Health News’ request for comment. Health concerns and “energy additions”Some sessions at CERAWeek were devoted to climate discussions, like Monday’s session about climate change priorities featuring industry voices from S&P Global and the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), alongside environmental advocacy groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation.The panel tackled questions about whether climate change will remain a priority for the industry and how the energy transition will continue under the Trump administration. Bob Dudley, chairman of the OGCI, repeatedly rephrased his own statements about the energy transition to “energy additions,” emphasizing the continued use of fossil fuels. “Oil and gas operators in the U.S. alone waste $3.5 billion worth of methane a year through leaks, flaring, and other releases, enough to supply the energy needs of 19 million American homes,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in the same conference session. Less than a mile away from the CERAWeek convention, the Buffalo Bayou flows through downtown and into the Houston Ship Channel, which facilitates global access to the “energy capital of the world” for many of the companies in attendance at the conference. According to the Greater Houston Partnership, 44 of 128 publicly traded oil and gas companies and nearly one-third of the nation’s oil and gas jobs are located in Houston. With more than 600 petrochemical facilities, this single area produces about 42% of the nation's petrochemicals. Last year an Amnesty International report dubbed the area a “sacrifice zone,” where fenceline communities, predominantly populated by people of color, are exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution. In these areas, chemical disasters, climate-warming emissions, and higher cancer risks are common. Several high-profile companies, including ExxonMobil, receive substantial tax breaks despite having poor environmental track records.“We have people who are over there who are making these decisions for our community,” said Breon Robinson, organizer for Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas at the environmental group Healthy Gulf, motioning toward the conference center. “They see us as scraps, they see us as a sacrifice zone … but we tell them hell no.”Protesters arrestedAfter the press conference, hundreds of protestors made their way toward a second public park just steps away from the CERAWeek convention center. Some held banners with messages like “No faith in fossil fuels” and “We need clean air, not another billionaire.” Others held cardboard cutouts or piñatas made in the likeness of oil and gas executives. Alexis Ramírez, Corpus Christi resident and elementary music teacher, played music during the march.Protesters arrestedAfter the press conference, hundreds of protestors made their way toward a second public park just steps away from the CERAWeek convention center. Some held banners with messages like “No faith in fossil fuels” and “We need clean air, not another billionaire.” Others held cardboard cutouts or piñatas made in the likeness of oil and gas executives. Alexis Ramírez, Corpus Christi resident and elementary music teacher, played music during the march.“I want to spread the joy of music and the power of music through this protest for my students,” Ramírez said. “They’re going to be our doctors, our teachers, whatever they are, they are going to take care of me and you when we are old. And that’s why I’m here, to take care of them.”The protest was escorted by dozens of police officers in vehicles and on horseback. As the protesters neared the convention center the group split in two as eight individuals interlocked arms briefly in front of traffic. After asking them to move and pressing forward with their horses, police officers arrested eight protesters, including Arellano of Fenceline Watch.While many groups said their concerns existed before the presidential administration change, some expressed worry that Trump’s policy shift toward “energy dominance” will further exacerbate environmental risks with promises of fast-tracked permitting processes and the repeal of pollution and climate rules.Despite these shifts, local activists are still calling for a just energy transition.“We get there together, or we never get there at all,” the protestors sang. “No one is getting left behind this time.”

HOUSTON — Climate activists expressed concern that discussions behind closed doors at the nation’s largest energy conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, will further contribute to environmental health risks. As energy executives and political leaders across the nation convened for the conference in Houston, Texas this week to discuss the future of energy, representatives from the Gulf Coast, Rio Grande Valley, Ohio River Valley, and Cancer Alley highlighted the fossil fuel industry's impact in their communities. “It is our communities that are being harmed and hurt,” Yvette Arellano of the Houston environmental organization Fenceline Watch said. “It is our children that are having to play in playgrounds across the street from chemical plants and oil refineries.”Despite attempting to purchase conference tickets at costs of up to $10,500, activists have been barred from the conference in recent years, Arellano said.“The conference has shut out civil society from entering and understanding the projects that are coming to harm our communities,” Arellano said at a press conference at a park about 10 minutes from the convention center on Monday. “We demand transparency.” S&P Global has not responded to Environmental Health News’ request for comment. Health concerns and “energy additions”Some sessions at CERAWeek were devoted to climate discussions, like Monday’s session about climate change priorities featuring industry voices from S&P Global and the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), alongside environmental advocacy groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation.The panel tackled questions about whether climate change will remain a priority for the industry and how the energy transition will continue under the Trump administration. Bob Dudley, chairman of the OGCI, repeatedly rephrased his own statements about the energy transition to “energy additions,” emphasizing the continued use of fossil fuels. “Oil and gas operators in the U.S. alone waste $3.5 billion worth of methane a year through leaks, flaring, and other releases, enough to supply the energy needs of 19 million American homes,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in the same conference session. Less than a mile away from the CERAWeek convention, the Buffalo Bayou flows through downtown and into the Houston Ship Channel, which facilitates global access to the “energy capital of the world” for many of the companies in attendance at the conference. According to the Greater Houston Partnership, 44 of 128 publicly traded oil and gas companies and nearly one-third of the nation’s oil and gas jobs are located in Houston. With more than 600 petrochemical facilities, this single area produces about 42% of the nation's petrochemicals. Last year an Amnesty International report dubbed the area a “sacrifice zone,” where fenceline communities, predominantly populated by people of color, are exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution. In these areas, chemical disasters, climate-warming emissions, and higher cancer risks are common. Several high-profile companies, including ExxonMobil, receive substantial tax breaks despite having poor environmental track records.“We have people who are over there who are making these decisions for our community,” said Breon Robinson, organizer for Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas at the environmental group Healthy Gulf, motioning toward the conference center. “They see us as scraps, they see us as a sacrifice zone … but we tell them hell no.”Protesters arrestedAfter the press conference, hundreds of protestors made their way toward a second public park just steps away from the CERAWeek convention center. Some held banners with messages like “No faith in fossil fuels” and “We need clean air, not another billionaire.” Others held cardboard cutouts or piñatas made in the likeness of oil and gas executives. Alexis Ramírez, Corpus Christi resident and elementary music teacher, played music during the march.Protesters arrestedAfter the press conference, hundreds of protestors made their way toward a second public park just steps away from the CERAWeek convention center. Some held banners with messages like “No faith in fossil fuels” and “We need clean air, not another billionaire.” Others held cardboard cutouts or piñatas made in the likeness of oil and gas executives. Alexis Ramírez, Corpus Christi resident and elementary music teacher, played music during the march.“I want to spread the joy of music and the power of music through this protest for my students,” Ramírez said. “They’re going to be our doctors, our teachers, whatever they are, they are going to take care of me and you when we are old. And that’s why I’m here, to take care of them.”The protest was escorted by dozens of police officers in vehicles and on horseback. As the protesters neared the convention center the group split in two as eight individuals interlocked arms briefly in front of traffic. After asking them to move and pressing forward with their horses, police officers arrested eight protesters, including Arellano of Fenceline Watch.While many groups said their concerns existed before the presidential administration change, some expressed worry that Trump’s policy shift toward “energy dominance” will further exacerbate environmental risks with promises of fast-tracked permitting processes and the repeal of pollution and climate rules.Despite these shifts, local activists are still calling for a just energy transition.“We get there together, or we never get there at all,” the protestors sang. “No one is getting left behind this time.”

What’s happening to EPA-funded community projects under Trump?

PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration pledged more than $53 million to community groups across the country for air monitoring projects in 2022, many of which were just getting underway when Trump took office. Trump issued executive orders that temporarily froze federal funding for environment-related projects (along with other key services and programs across the country), then fired and re-hired staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has caused confusion and delays in the implementation of key environmental health programs nationwide. The uncertainty has only been intensified by the news that the agency is repealing dozens of environmental regulations and plans to close all of its environmental justice offices. Programs facing a funding freeze included the 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states slated to receive $53.4 million in federal funding, which represent the agency’s largest investment in community air monitoring to date. Western Pennsylvania is one of a handful of geographic regions that received funding for multiple community air monitoring projects under the program. The region is home to numerous pollution sources that impact environmental health, including fracking, steel mills, petrochemical plants, and other industrial manufacturing. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, heart and respiratory disease, premature death, and even mental illness. “I think there’s a misconception about abuse and waste of these federal funds that is so important to counter,” Ana Tsuhlares Hoffman, director of the air quality program at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, told EHN. The CREATE Lab is managing and analyzing the data collected from all of the federally-funded community air monitoring projects in western Pennsylvania. Organizations receiving federal funding, Hoffman said, need to be “open and up front about what we stand to lose if we lose this funding.” EHN spoke with Hoffman about how the Trump administration’s actions have impacted air monitoring projects in the region, and environmental health research and advocacy more broadly. Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. EHN: What impacts on local environmental health research and advocacy have you seen from the federal funding freeze? Hoffman: We had four weeks of waking up not knowing if we’d be able to pay salaries for key staff or keep our promises to community members while our funds weren’t accessible and EPA staff were not allowed to communicate with us at all. It was a long, difficult process to administer the grants for the EPA’s community air monitoring projects. I’m so grateful to the nonprofits that took on this role — they’re all tiny compared to the organizations that usually receive federal funding, but they stepped up to figure out how to administer these grants on behalf of smaller grassroots organizations and individuals who’d been doing this work on their own for decades. Local nonprofits including FracTracker Alliance, Protect PT, GASP, and the Breathe Project worked together to decide who would represent different geographies and specific industrial polluters that had concerned residents for a long time. There was a lot of pressure to comply with the EPA requirements, which included a long list of quality assurance concerns we’d never encountered before. Securing those grants was hard-won and painful to achieve, but at the end of the process we felt like we’d leveled up our air monitoring capabilities in a meaningful way. We spent years getting to this place, and were just starting to collect air monitoring samples and process data when we learned about the funding freeze. It felt like years’ worth of activists’ and researchers’ time and effort was hanging in the balance. The big concern was whether we’d be able to pay people who were just hired to conduct new, federally-funded air monitoring projects, and whether we’d be able to keep the commitments that we’ve made to residents. That was a horrible moment where we had to go to residents to say, “We know we’ve been telling you for years that we’re working to get you answers about what you’re breathing next to this compression station or factory, but we’re not sure if we can follow through on that commitment.” EHN: What’s the status of those air monitoring projects now? Hoffman: As of right now, our grants have been un-suspended and reinstated, and we are able to access our funds, so we’re resuming the work. Our legal advisors have reminded us that we need to stay in compliance with our grant funds by continuing the work, even if it seems like there’s a chance the rug will be pulled out from under us. There’s a national network of federal funding recipients that’s facilitated by the Environmental Protection Network, which has been providing pro bono legal assistance to groups impacted by the federal funding freeze. They helped us organize instead of panicking, and groups across the country were able to successfully win back access to our funding by working in a coordinated way. Speaking as a university representative, there are labs like the CREATE Lab all across the country that serve local environmental research needs and are funded by federal dollars that are in much worse straits than we are. In cases like that, universities will have impossible decisions to make about whether to continue to support those initiatives as they lose funding for the administrative staff that keep universities running. EHN: How do you think Trump's rollbacks of environmental and health regulations could impact enforcement of those regulations at the federal, state, and local level? We’ve always had to use a combined effort of people power and legal support to effectively watchdog industrial polluters. But now we have less hope that our already significantly-underfunded agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, will be able to respond to concerns and conduct inspections in the way that they need to. There already aren’t enough investigators to come out when watchdogs produce evidence of pollution events that are worthy of investigation, and I do think enforcement is now being deprioritized. We’ll have to be more thoughtful and diligent in our data collection and evidence collection efforts. We’ll have to be systematic as best we can to try and help fill those gaps. EHN: How are environmental health advocates changing course to adapt to the new political landscape? I think we will have to adjust our hopes for engagement with the EPA. We’ll have to collectively change gears to hold polluters accountable as best we can while federal agencies lose access to the resources they need to properly enforce environmental regulations. We’ll have to accept that “energy dominance for America” means that any push to shift to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy is going to be hampered, and that our hopes for building a better future will likely need to be put on pause while we focus on defending our previous progress. We’ll really need to work together. We all only have so many brain cells and so many hours in the day, but when we work collectively we’re much more powerful.

PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration pledged more than $53 million to community groups across the country for air monitoring projects in 2022, many of which were just getting underway when Trump took office. Trump issued executive orders that temporarily froze federal funding for environment-related projects (along with other key services and programs across the country), then fired and re-hired staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has caused confusion and delays in the implementation of key environmental health programs nationwide. The uncertainty has only been intensified by the news that the agency is repealing dozens of environmental regulations and plans to close all of its environmental justice offices. Programs facing a funding freeze included the 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states slated to receive $53.4 million in federal funding, which represent the agency’s largest investment in community air monitoring to date. Western Pennsylvania is one of a handful of geographic regions that received funding for multiple community air monitoring projects under the program. The region is home to numerous pollution sources that impact environmental health, including fracking, steel mills, petrochemical plants, and other industrial manufacturing. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, heart and respiratory disease, premature death, and even mental illness. “I think there’s a misconception about abuse and waste of these federal funds that is so important to counter,” Ana Tsuhlares Hoffman, director of the air quality program at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, told EHN. The CREATE Lab is managing and analyzing the data collected from all of the federally-funded community air monitoring projects in western Pennsylvania. Organizations receiving federal funding, Hoffman said, need to be “open and up front about what we stand to lose if we lose this funding.” EHN spoke with Hoffman about how the Trump administration’s actions have impacted air monitoring projects in the region, and environmental health research and advocacy more broadly. Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. EHN: What impacts on local environmental health research and advocacy have you seen from the federal funding freeze? Hoffman: We had four weeks of waking up not knowing if we’d be able to pay salaries for key staff or keep our promises to community members while our funds weren’t accessible and EPA staff were not allowed to communicate with us at all. It was a long, difficult process to administer the grants for the EPA’s community air monitoring projects. I’m so grateful to the nonprofits that took on this role — they’re all tiny compared to the organizations that usually receive federal funding, but they stepped up to figure out how to administer these grants on behalf of smaller grassroots organizations and individuals who’d been doing this work on their own for decades. Local nonprofits including FracTracker Alliance, Protect PT, GASP, and the Breathe Project worked together to decide who would represent different geographies and specific industrial polluters that had concerned residents for a long time. There was a lot of pressure to comply with the EPA requirements, which included a long list of quality assurance concerns we’d never encountered before. Securing those grants was hard-won and painful to achieve, but at the end of the process we felt like we’d leveled up our air monitoring capabilities in a meaningful way. We spent years getting to this place, and were just starting to collect air monitoring samples and process data when we learned about the funding freeze. It felt like years’ worth of activists’ and researchers’ time and effort was hanging in the balance. The big concern was whether we’d be able to pay people who were just hired to conduct new, federally-funded air monitoring projects, and whether we’d be able to keep the commitments that we’ve made to residents. That was a horrible moment where we had to go to residents to say, “We know we’ve been telling you for years that we’re working to get you answers about what you’re breathing next to this compression station or factory, but we’re not sure if we can follow through on that commitment.” EHN: What’s the status of those air monitoring projects now? Hoffman: As of right now, our grants have been un-suspended and reinstated, and we are able to access our funds, so we’re resuming the work. Our legal advisors have reminded us that we need to stay in compliance with our grant funds by continuing the work, even if it seems like there’s a chance the rug will be pulled out from under us. There’s a national network of federal funding recipients that’s facilitated by the Environmental Protection Network, which has been providing pro bono legal assistance to groups impacted by the federal funding freeze. They helped us organize instead of panicking, and groups across the country were able to successfully win back access to our funding by working in a coordinated way. Speaking as a university representative, there are labs like the CREATE Lab all across the country that serve local environmental research needs and are funded by federal dollars that are in much worse straits than we are. In cases like that, universities will have impossible decisions to make about whether to continue to support those initiatives as they lose funding for the administrative staff that keep universities running. EHN: How do you think Trump's rollbacks of environmental and health regulations could impact enforcement of those regulations at the federal, state, and local level? We’ve always had to use a combined effort of people power and legal support to effectively watchdog industrial polluters. But now we have less hope that our already significantly-underfunded agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, will be able to respond to concerns and conduct inspections in the way that they need to. There already aren’t enough investigators to come out when watchdogs produce evidence of pollution events that are worthy of investigation, and I do think enforcement is now being deprioritized. We’ll have to be more thoughtful and diligent in our data collection and evidence collection efforts. We’ll have to be systematic as best we can to try and help fill those gaps. EHN: How are environmental health advocates changing course to adapt to the new political landscape? I think we will have to adjust our hopes for engagement with the EPA. We’ll have to collectively change gears to hold polluters accountable as best we can while federal agencies lose access to the resources they need to properly enforce environmental regulations. We’ll have to accept that “energy dominance for America” means that any push to shift to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy is going to be hampered, and that our hopes for building a better future will likely need to be put on pause while we focus on defending our previous progress. We’ll really need to work together. We all only have so many brain cells and so many hours in the day, but when we work collectively we’re much more powerful.

Opinion: I live in Flint, Michigan. Shuttering environmental justice at EPA hurts communities like mine.

Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water. Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents. But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector. Credit: SHTTEFAN on Unsplash NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question. On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.

Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water. Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents. But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector. Credit: SHTTEFAN on Unsplash NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question. On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.

Under Trump, Texas firm pushes to restart Santa Barbara oil drilling. Is it skirting California laws?

A Houston-based oil company has rebuffed the authority of the California Coastal Commission in a bid to revive drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.

More than 50 years ago, a catastrophic oil spill along Santa Barbara’s coastline served to galvanize the modern environmental movement and also helped to usher in one of the state’s strongest conservation laws: the California Coastal Act. Now, as the Trump administration seeks to encourage oil and gas production within federal lands and waters, that watershed conservation law is being tested along the same stretch of coastline — and in a way it never has before. For months, a Texas-based oil company has rebuffed the authority of the California Coastal Commission — the body tasked with enforcing the act — and has instead pushed forward with controversial plans to revive oil production off the Gaviota Coast.Ten years after another spill brought oil production here to a halt, Sable Offshore Corp. has begun repairing and upgrading the network of oil pipelines responsible for that 2015 spill, without Coastal Commission approval and ignoring the commission’s repeated demands to stop its work, officials say. Crews bag oiled sand and kelp at Refugio State Beach in May 2015, after a ruptured pipeline near Santa Barbara leaked an estimated 140,000 gallons of crude oil. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) “This is the first time in the agency’s history that we’ve had a party blatantly ignore a cease and desist order like this and refuse to submit a permit application,” Cassidy Teufel, deputy director of the California Coastal Commission, told a packed town hall recently. Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science. Sable has accused the commission of “overreach” and insists that it has acquired the necessary approvals for its work.The company intends to revive operations at three oil platforms known as the Santa Ynez Unit, which connects to pipelines that have been the focus of the ongoing repair work after a corroded section of those pipes ruptured near Refugio State Beach in 2015. That pipeline failure, which occurred under different ownership, spewed an estimated 140,000 gallons of crude oil, harmed hundreds of miles of coastline and cost millions to clean up. In a new report, Coastal Commission staff allege that Sable’s activities — which include excavation, grading, removing vegetation and placing cement bags on the seafloor — “have adversely impacted, and continue to adversely impact, coastal resources as a result of Sable’s outright refusal to comply with the Coastal Act.” The report recommends that commissioners fine Sable almost $15 million, issue another cease and desist order for all development along the pipelines and require restoration work.The requested sanctions will be considered next week at a public hearing — one of the first such venues for citizens to weigh in on reactivation of the offshore oil rigs and how that could affect the local environment, which has long concerned Santa Barbara residents and climate activists. Sable insists it does not need to comply with the latest Coastal Commission requests. “The repair and maintenance work done to ensure the safe condition of the Santa Ynez Unit and onshore pipelines was fully authorized by coastal development permits previously approved by the California Coastal Commission and Santa Barbara County,” Steve Rusch, Sable’s vice president of environmental and governmental affairs, said in a prepared statement. “Commission staff’s unreasonable overreach is an attempt to exert influence over the planned restart of the Santa Ynez Unit oil production operations.”In a statement of defense submitted to the Coastal Commission, Sable noted that due to updated requirements, “this pipeline will meet more stringent environmental and safety requirements than any other pipeline in the state.”The company called the commission’s findings on environmental impacts exaggerated, and noted that it has “implemented several construction best management practices to limit impacts to coastal resources, biological resources, and archaeological resources,” Sable wrote. Cleanup workers pile bags of oil-soaked sand at Refugio State Beach in Goleta after a 2015 oil pipeline rupture. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) So who’s in charge of such projects?If Sable succeeds in restarting operations, it would mark a surprising reversal for California’s oil and gas industry in recent years, as climate-focused policies have slowly reduced the state’s production of fossil fuels. The Houston-based company estimates that once the Santa Ynez Unit is fully online, it could produce an estimated 28,000 barrels of oil a day, according to an investor presentation.The unit has three offshore platforms — Hondo, Harmony and Heritage — located in federal waters a few miles off the coast. These platforms are connected to the Las Flores Canyon processing facility, inland from El Capitan State Beach, and other distribution lines that run onshore. The 2015 Refugio oil spill was caused by the rupture of a buried onshore pipeline. Sable has said it anticipates restarting offshore oil production in the second quarter this year, but the company acknowledges that some regulatory and oversight hurdles remain. Most notably, its restart plan must be approved by the state fire marshal. Though Sable has already cleared some of that agency’s major regulatory steps, State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant has said the company’s final restart plan wouldn’t be approved without agreement from a handful of other state agencies, including the Coastal Commission. “Before we would ever sign off on a pipeline, [we will make] sure that each of these departments has agreed that all of the rules have been followed,” Berlant said at the March town hall.Berlant also assured Santa Barbarans that since the 2015 spill, the fire marshal’s office has implemented more stringent standards for oil infrastructure, which are part of Sable’s plan. He said his office requires 67 new conditions focused on safety and corrosion protection, stricter and more frequent monitoring and repair standards.Sable, however, has most heavily relied on recent approval from Santa Barbara County Planning & Development, which in October said the company could proceed with its corrosion repair work under the pipeline’s original county permit from the 1980s. The company contends it is still relevant because its work is only repairing and maintaining an existing pipeline, not constructing new infrastructure.After concern from the Coastal Commission and environmental groups, county officials confirmed its position in February, concluding that Sable’s repair work on the corroded pipeline “is authorized by the existing permits ... [and] was analyzed in the prior Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement.” A worker cleans oil from the rocks and beach at Refugio State Beach in Goleta, Calif. in 2015. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images) Coastal Commission staff have questioned how a permit from nearly 40 years ago can adequately take into account current technology, requirements to remedy corrosion issues and environmental conditions. “The removal of the pipeline’s insulation and implementation of this new strategy for managing corrosion risk represents such a fundamental shift in the pipeline’s design and operation that resuming operations under this new system would not be consistent with the existing permit,” the staff report said. It also argues that old permits don’t take into account current habitats or sensitive species in the area, including those newly considered endangered or threatened, such as the steelhead, the tidewater goby and the California red-legged frog.Ultimately, the matter may be determined in court. In February, Sable sued the Coastal Commission claiming it doesn’t have the authority to oversee its work.“Sable’s representatives have told us that they’ll only stop if a court makes them, so we’ve been working with the attorney general’s office for the past month to move in that direction,” Teufel said at a town hall last month in Santa Barbara. The event drew hundreds of attendees — clearly divided between those donning Sable hats and others holding signs that read, “No polluting pipeline” and “No coastal permit, no restart.”But as of yet, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta hasn’t weighed in. A spokesperson for the office declined to respond to questions from The Times, referring inquiries to the Coastal Commission. A controversial legacySince 1969, when the blowout of on an offshore oil platform spewed more than 3 million gallons of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel and devastated the coastline, environmentalists have fought to shut down offshore oil rigs along the Gaviota Coast. In their view, Sable’s behavior has been beyond the pale. “So far this has been happening with no environmental review,” said Alex Katz, the executive director of the the Environmental Defense Center, which was founded after the 1969 spill. “For a project that’s this big and has this much risk, it’s very strange.”At the same time, other residents see economic value in oil extraction. Santa Barbara County Supervisor Bob Nelson has called much of the concern around the pipeline “political theater.” He said he generally agrees that Sable has the necessary permits to restart oil production, and noted that local oil is better than the alternative, especially when there’s still demand for such fuel. “If you really cared about climate change, you’d want to use this oil,” Nelson said in an interview, arguing that it’s better to use local resources than oil shipped from around the world, where there are likely fewer environmental regulations and no local tax revenue or jobs. Sable has reported it expects the project to initially generate $5 million a year in new taxes for the county and, upon restart, would support an additional 300 jobs. At the town hall last month, Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara) called on California’s attorney general to get involved in this process to uphold the state’s environmental laws, noting that there are clear risks, as with any offshore drilling project. “It is a false choice to say we have to choose between protecting our environment and growing our economy,” Hart said at the packed hearing that included representatives from at least eight state agencies.. “We have experience here in this community of the tragedies that come from companies that don’t operate responsibly. … We have some serious concerns about what’s being proposed with the Sable pipeline.”Some of those state agencies, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the State Water Resources Control Board and the California Department of Parks and Recreation, have also raised concerns about Sable’s work. The regional water board in December issued Sable a noncompliance notice for unauthorized discharge into waterways, while wildlife officials alerted the company of a potential Fish and Game Code violation. Sable’s response to those issues remain under review. Yet, the full extent of completed or possible environmental damage from this project remains unclear, the Coastal Commission argues, because Sable hasn’t shared detailed plans or applied for permits. And that’s a precedent that should be concerning for all Californians, said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center.“This is the biggest threat to the California coast,” Krop said. “They should not be allowed to operate when they’re violating state laws.”Staff writer Tony Briscoe contributed to this report.

‘Far Out: Life On & After the Commune’: An Interview with Harvey Wasserman

A new nonfiction film recounts urban “drop-outs” who returned to the land, igniting the movements for organic farming, U.S. grassroots anti-nuclear activism, and more.

A new documentary film, Far Out: Life On & After the Commune, directed by Charles Light, tells the story of a group of leftwing journalists who splintered off from what was known as Liberation News Service (LNS). With candid then-and-now footage, Light’s eighty-five-minute film reveals the communards as young hippies and senior citizens, and shows how their paths intertwined with folk/rock superstars to fight the good fight.  One of the film’s co-stars is author and historian Harvey Wasserman who is also the longest active contributor to The Progressive. His first article for the magazine, about campus protests, “Reform, Not Revolution”, appeared in August 1967, while his most recent, “Drones, Nukes, and the Myth of Reactor Safety,” was published in January. The irrepressible veteran activist was interviewed via telephone in Los Angeles for the following conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Q: What was the Liberation News Service? Harvey Wasserman: LNS was a pioneering news service that provided articles to the underground press, which consisted of about 400 counterculture newspapers burgeoning throughout the country in 1967 and 1968. We were antiwar, pro-civil rights and pro-pot legalization and known as the “Associated Press of the underground.” LNS was launched the day before the October 21, 1967, March on the Pentagon. Q: How did your commune grow out of LNS? Wasserman: It’s living proof of the law of unintended consequences. The FBI infiltrated our news service. As part of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover sent agents into LNS to break it up. We’d moved to New York City, and agents instigated horrible anti-gay attacks at our meetings against co-founder Marshall Bloom. George Harrison gave Marshall permission to screen the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour movie at Fillmore East benefits, and with that money, Marshall bought a farm in Massachusetts, where we secretly relocated with our mimeograph machine in August 1968: Montague Farm in Massachusetts.  Q: What was it like transitioning to living off of the land?  Wasserman: We didn’t know what we were doing. We were all suburban kids. We froze the first winter. Gradually, we learned how to live in the country, in a farmhouse. The first major decision came in the spring, when we were planting our garden and some wanted to spray. But one woman, Cathy Rogers, sort of the farm’s matriarch, said, “No, we’re not using chemicals.” We actually revived for our whole generation the whole ethos of organic farming. Within a couple of years, the garden was magnificent. To learn how to do it, we used a handbook on organic gardening.    Q: How were women involved in life at the communal farms?  Wasserman: They ran the place. The antiwar and civil rights movements in the early days were run by men. Women, in many cases, weren’t treated particularly well. A lot of the feminist movement came out of the communes. The environmental movement has really been a women’s movement, in touch with Mother Earth.   Q: Some of the communards were gay. How did other commune members react to that? Wasserman: You have to ask them. If you had asked me back then what it meant to be gay, I had no idea. A lot of it was new to us.  Q: What were relations like with other local residents in the area? Wasserman: All over the map. We were like aliens landing in Montague. Mostly the locals didn’t know what to make of us. We were smart enough to form relations. The farmer down the road had a maple sugar operation. He needed labor when he’d gather the maple syrup from the trees; we drove the tractors and emptied the buckets. In many cases, we formed really beautiful relations with locals.   Q: The communards went back to the land to remove themselves from a New Left factional fight. But how did the outside world catch up with you?   Wasserman: Some of us had a mindset to escape politics; others stayed active. The Vietnam War was still on. We considered our presence in the countryside to be very political. Then, as fate would have it, the world came to us. In December 1973, we opened the local paper and on the front page was an aerial photo of the Montague Plains and superimposed on it was an artist’s rendition of a nuclear power plant they wanted to build there. Collectively, instinctually, we said, “No fucking way we’re going to let them build this in our backyard.” We deepened our opposition to nuclear power by studying the books Secret Fallout by radiologist Ernest Sternglass, and Poisoned Power by Manhattan Project scientist John Gofman. Q: The film Far Out contends that the commune’s opposition to the construction of this plant sparked the U.S. grassroots anti-nuclear movement. Wasserman: The first thing is we came up with the slogan “No Nukes,” printed the first bumper sticker and T-shirt; it’s gone global ever since. Northeast Utilities put up a tower at the proposed site to test wind direction and in February 1974 Sam Lovejoy took a crowbar and knocked over the tower. Dan Keller and Charles Light, from the commune, who made Far Out, earlier also made the documentary Lovejoy’s Nuclear War.  In Seabrook, New Hampshire, you had really great antiwar activists. We’d drive up from Montague to Seabrook for meetings about a proposed nuclear power plant. The town was really against it—Seabrook voted four times to not allow the plant to be built. It became an issue of home rule. We hooked up with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston. They taught us the Quaker tradition of nonviolent resistance. On August 1, 1976, 100 people went onto the construction site; eighteen were arrested. Keller and Light made a movie about this, too, called The Last Resort. On August 22, we had a bigger demonstration; 180 people were arrested. We thought we could stop Seabrook by occupying the site. On April 30, 1977, we had a few thousand people at the rally; 1,414 were arrested at the site. The rightwing governor demanded that we post bail, so about 1,000 hippies were jailed in five National Guard Armories around the state, which became world news. At the end of two weeks, 550 people still refused to give bail.            Q: What role did musicians play in these protests? Wasserman: In the summer of 1978, we were allowed [by local authorities] onto the Seabrook site, then under construction, and we held a peaceful, illegal rally with Pete Seeger, Jackson Browne, and 20,000 people. Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Graham Nash started doing concerts [to raise awareness, and funds, for the anti-nuclear efforts]. They were already involved in the movement. They said, “We gotta do a big concert, let’s go to Madison Square Garden.” Bruce Springsteen signed on and we added concerts. The four nights sold out immediately, and we decided to add a Sunday concert and rally at Battery Park City, in Lower Manhattan. We ended up with between 200,000 and 250,000 people. It was the Woodstock of the seventies. Then demonstrations started happening all over the country.    Q: How did the success of these concerts impact the communes?   Wasserman: New York was a complete psychedelic miasma [laughs]. We’d been in the country for ten years of communal living and all of a sudden, we were in Manhattan, at Madison Square Garden, and encountered all this money, media, and fame. It really took us to another place and kinda shattered the farm. But the commune did hold together. A core community stayed at the farm through the 1980s and 1990s, and in 2003 we sold it to a Buddhist community. People from the farm who stayed in Massachusetts are still active and just defeated a bad battery facility they wanted to build nearby. We’re all still anti-nuclear.   Far Out: Life On & After the Commune will be showing at five Laemmle venues in California (Encino, Glendale, Santa Monica, Claremont and Newhall) at 10:00 a.m. on April 5 and 6 and at 7:00 p.m. on April 7 as part of Laemmle Theatres’ Culture Vulture series. There will be panel discussions with filmmaker Charlie Light, Harvey Wasserman, and musician Patty Carpenter. The panels take place after the 10:00 a.m., April 5 show at Encino; the 10:00 a.m., April 6 show at Glendale; and the 7:00 p.m. screening at Santa Monica. The panel on April 7 also includes Mom actress/activist Mimi Kennedy and Judith Rubenstein, commune member and psychologist. Far Out can also be viewed online. Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive. His novel about the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement for Indigenous rights, The Disinherited: Blood Blalahs, will be published this spring. Read more by Ed Rampell April 3, 2025 8:00 AM

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