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Wednesday, March 19, 2025

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

Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?

Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.

Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.

Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.

The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.

Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.

Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.

Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.

The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared.

After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”

Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.

Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)

Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.

Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.

Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.

The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.

Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.

By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.

“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.

In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.

There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

Read the full story here.

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Biden Administration Offshore Oil and Gas Lease in Gulf Coast Is Unlawful, Federal Judge Says

A federal judge has ruled that more than 109,000 square miles of Gulf Coast federal were unlawfully opened up for offshore drilling leases

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Love Motels and Converted Ferries: Brazil Gets Creative to Host COP30

By Manuela Andreoni and Lisandra ParaguassuBELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - Environmental activists from around the globe have eagerly awaited Brazil's...

By Manuela Andreoni and Lisandra ParaguassuBELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - Environmental activists from around the globe have eagerly awaited Brazil's turn hosting the United Nations climate summit, known as COP30, after three years where the conference of world leaders tackling global warming was held in countries without full freedom for public demonstrations. But the so-called "People's COP" may not be as welcoming as they hoped. Sky-high accommodation costs are threatening Brazil's stated goal of inclusion, and the government is racing to multiply the 18,000 beds now available in the Amazonian host city of Belem, turning to motels aimed at amorous couples, ferries that normally ply the rivers, and school classrooms to host visitors. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said his goal in bringing COP30 to the Amazon was to focus the world's attention on a forest that both offers unique solutions to climate change, by locking away planet-warming carbon, and suffers some of its gravest consequences, in the form of wildfires and drought. While many climate change campaigners have celebrated that focus, some have also expressed fears that hosting such a major event may strain the fragile region and compromise the success of the conference. Belem, a port city of 1.3 million on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is speckled with construction sites. The Brazilian government is pouring some $1 billion into new infrastructure. But much work remains to accommodate an expected 60,000-plus visitors.Two global advocacy groups who declined to be named told Reuters that scouts they hired had found accommodation prices for the November conference were several times higher than what they paid last year in Baku, Azerbaijan. Even the cheapest rooms are going for $400, and they are averaging around $1,500 a night.Lula shrugged off the hotel crunch in a recent visit to Belem, suggesting those who cannot find accommodation should sleep "looking at the sky – it will be wonderful."At the heart of the problem is a question that has become more acute as the annual COP has grown from a gathering of world leaders and diplomats to a sprawling conference mixing activists, businesses and government officials: Who is the U.N. climate summit really for? "It feels like a mundane thing, but it's actually politically very important," said Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network. "The ability to address the accommodation problems can make or break a COP."Civil society groups say their access is key to keeping pressure on negotiators, citing the role of public advocacy in breakthroughs such as the creation of the Loss and Damage Fund in 2022 to channel resources from wealthy nations to address destruction caused by climate change in poorer countries."Everybody's been waiting for the Brazil COP," Essop said. "For civil society, it is that point where once again we're going to be at the COP with space for our actions."FEW HOTELS, PLENTY OF CREATIVITY Brazil has already shifted the dates for heads of state to attend the summit to the week before the main event, trying to ease pressure on Belem's thin hotel supply. Two hotels are being built and two cruise ships for attendees will be docked in a nearby harbor.Entrepreneurs are hard at work figuring out other creative ways to accommodate the visitors. Businesses are looking to refurbish ferries with high-end suites. Developers plan to use idle land to put up refurbished shipping containers. Schools and churches have been earmarked to serve as hostels. Love motels that usually rent rooms by the hour are being advertised as options for full national delegations. Yorann Costa, the owner of Motel Secreto, said he can tone down the "more sensual mood" of his establishment by removing erotic chairs."But the poles, for example, I can't take out," he said, adding that the ceiling mirrors would also have to stay. Setting the right price was also tough, he said, because of the fierce speculation around what people were willing to pay. Valter Correia, Brazil's special secretary for COP30, said his office is planning to launch an official booking website within weeks to organize the market. He said his office is also looking for ways to discourage price gouging. Correia said the government expects around 45,000 people to attend COP and that the government has planned enough new accommodation to meet that demand.However, the People's Summit, a side-event run by activist groups, says it expects an additional 15,000. Organizers say they are planning to help with accommodation, for example by building campsites.City and state officials are also encouraging residents to travel and rent out their homes. That has unleashed a gold rush of sorts in Belem. Ads charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent apartments and houses for the month of COP have become common. Interviews with landlords, tenants and a building manager revealed dozens of cases of people who were refused renewal of their rental lease so landlords could prepare apartments for COP visitors paying ten times or more the usual rate. Rafaela Rodrigues, a businesswoman who says she was refused renewal of her rental, said she later found the apartment advertised for several times what she used to pay."It was chaos," she said. "I had 10 days to look for a new place, rent it, move and give back my other apartment."(Reporting by Manuela Andreoni in Belem and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia; Editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O'Brien)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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The most important part of the ocean you've never heard of

The Saya de Malha Bank is one of the world's largest seagrass fields and the planet's most important carbon sinks. It faces incalculable risks that threaten the future of humanity.

The most important place on earth that virtually no one has ever heard of is called the Saya de Malha Bank. Among the world’s largest seagrass fields and the planet’s most important carbon sinks, this high-seas patch of ocean covers an area the size of Switzerland. More than 200 miles from land, the submerged bank is situated in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Seychelles. It has been called the world’s largest invisible island as it is formed by a massive plateau, in some spots barely hidden under 30 feet of water, offering safe haven to an unprecedented biodiversity of seagrass habitats for turtles and breeding grounds for sharks, humpback and blue whales.Researchers say that the bank is one of the least scientifically studied areas of the planet partly because of its remoteness. The area’s unpredictable depths have also meant that, over the centuries, merchant ships and explorers tended to avoid these waters. It has long been the type of fantastical realm so uncharted that on the old maps, it would be designated “Here Be Monsters.” More recently, though, the bank is traversed by a diverse cast of characters, including shark finners, bottom trawlers, seabed miners, stranded fishers, starving crews, wealthy yachters and libertarian seasteaders.The tragedy, however, is that since the Saya de Malha Bank is mostly located in international waters, where few rules apply, its biodiversity is being systematically decimated by a huge fleet of industrial fishing ships that remain largely unchecked by government oversight. The bank remains unprotected by any major binding treaties largely due to an anemia of political will by national authorities and a profits-now, costs-later outlook of fishing interests. The question now: Who will safeguard this public treasure? Mowing down an eco-systemMore than 500 years ago, when Portuguese sailors came across a shallow-water bank on the high seas over 700 miles east of the northern tip of Mauritius, they named it Saya de Malha, or “mesh skirt,” to describe the rolling waves of seagrass below the surface. The Saya de Malha bank, which means “mesh skirt” in Portuguese, was named to describe the rolling waves of seagrass just below the surface. It is part of the mascarene plateau in the Indian Ocean and is one of the largest submerged banks in the world. (James Michel Foundation) Seagrasses are frequently overlooked because they are rare, estimated to cover only a tenth of 1% of the ocean floor. “They are the forgotten ecosystem,” said Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles ambassador for climate change. Nevertheless, seagrasses are far less protected than other offshore areas. Only 26% of recorded seagrass meadows fall within marine protected areas, compared with 40% of coral reefs and 43% of the world’s mangroves.The Saya de Malha Bank is existentially crucial to the planet because it is one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. Much like trees on land, seagrass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in its roots and soil. But seagrass does it especially fast — at a rate 35 times that of tropical rainforest. What makes the situation in the Saya de Malha Bank even more urgent is that it’s being systematically decimated by a multinational fleet of fishing ships that virtually no one tracks or polices.Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Seagrass also cleans polluted water and protects coastlines from erosion. At a time when ocean acidification threatens the survival of the world’s coral reefs and the thousands of fish species that inhabit them, seagrasses reduce acidity by absorbing carbon through photosynthesis, according to a 2021 report by the University of California. Seagrasses provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, stalked jellyfish and smalltooth sawfish. Seagrass meadows like the Saya de Malha bank absorb about a fifth of all oceanic carbon. They also clean polluted water. Acting as a dense net, they trap microplastics and lock them away in the sediment. (Greenpeace / The Outlaw Ocean Project) But the Saya de Malha is under threat. More than 200 distant-water vessels — most of them from Sri Lanka and Taiwan — have parked in the deeper waters along the edge of the bank. Ocean conservationists say that efforts to conserve the bank’s seagrass are not moving fast enough to make a difference. “It’s like walking north on a southbound train,” said Heidi Weiskel, director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.On May 23, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare March 1 as World Seagrass Day. The resolution was sponsored by Sri Lanka. Speaking at the assembly, the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, Ambassador Mohan Pieris, said seagrasses were “one of the most valuable marine ecosystems on earth,” highlighting, among other things, their outsize contribution to carbon sequestration. But recognition is one thing; action is another. As the ambassador gave his speech in New York, dozens of ships from his country’s fishing fleet were 9,000 miles away, busily scraping the biggest of those very ecosystems he was calling on the world to protect. VIDEO | 05:54 Saya de Malha: Robbing the bank Share via Plumbing seafloor wealthFor the past decade, the mining industry has argued that the ocean floor is an essential frontier for rare-earth metals needed in the batteries used in cellphones and laptops. As companies eye the best patches of ocean to search for the precious sulphides and nodules, dubbed “truffles of the ocean,” the waters near the Saya de Malha Bank have emerged as an attractive target. Black, potato-sized polymetallic nodules scattered on the seafloor in 2019 drew prospectors for their cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese. (Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration / Office of Ocean Exploration and Research / NOAA) To vacuum up the treasured nodules requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines drive along the sea floor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of pulverized nodules and seabed sediment through a series of pipes to a vessel above. After separating out the minerals, the mining ships then pipe back overboard the processed waters, sediment and mining “fines,” which are the small particles of the ground-up nodule ore. This 2020 animation demonstrates how a collector vehicle launched from a ship during deep-sea mining would travel 15,000 feet below sea level to collect polymetallic nodules containing essential minerals. (MIT Mechanical Engineering / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Most of the bank is too shallow to be a likely candidate for such mining, but cobalt deposits were found in the Mascarene Basin, an area that includes the Saya de Malha Bank, in 1987. South Korea holds a contract from the International Seabed Authority, the international agency that regulates seabed mining, to explore hydrothermal vents on the Central Indian Ridge, about 250 miles east of Saya de Malha, until 2029. India and Germany also hold exploration contracts for an area about 800 miles southeast of the Saya de Malha Bank.All of this activity could be disastrous for the bank’s ecosystem, according to ocean researchers. Mining and exploration activity will raise sediments from the ocean floor, reducing the seagrass’ access to the sunlight it depends on. Sediment clouds from mining can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, potentially disrupting the entire mid-water food web and affecting important species such as tuna. Research published in 2023 found that a year after test seabed mining disturbed the ocean floor in Japanese waters, the density of fish, crustaceans and jellyfish in nearby areas was cut in half.Proponents of deep seabed mining stress a growing need for these resources. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that the global production of minerals such as cobalt and lithium would have to be increased by over 450% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technology.However, skeptics of the industry say that because of the long transport distances and corrosive and unpredictable conditions at sea, the cost of mining nodules offshore will far outstrip the price of doing so on land. Other critics contend that technology is changing so quickly that the batteries used in the near future will be different from those that are used now. Better product design, recycling and reuse of metals already in circulation, urban mining and other “circular” economy initiatives can vastly reduce the need for new sources of metals, said Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.More recently, though, the Metals Company, the largest seabed mining stakeholder, has shifted away from talking about batteries and instead claimed that the metals are needed for missiles and military purposes.The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a group of nongovernmental organizations and policy institutes working to protect the deep sea, reports that over 30 countries have called for a moratorium or a precautionary pause on deep-seabed mining. Still, government officials in Mauritius and Seychelles seem to be eager to take advantage of the financial opportunity that seabed mining appears to represent. In 2021, Mauritius hosted a workshop with the African Union and Norad, the Norwegian agency for developmental cooperation, to look into seabed mining prospects.That year, Greenpeace, a member of the conservation coalition, chose the Saya de Malha Bank as the location for the first ever underwater protest of deep-seabed mining. As part of that protest, Shaama Sandooyea, a 24-year-old marine biologist from Mauritius, dove into the bank’s shallow waters with a sign reading “Youth Strike for Climate.” She had a simple point to make: that the pursuit of minerals from the seafloor, without understanding the consequences, was not the route to a green transition. She said: “Seagrasses have been underestimated for a long time now.” Scientist and climate activist Shaama Sandooyea boarded a ship for the first time to carry out an underwater protest at the world’s largest seagrass meadow at the Saya de Malha Bank in the Indian Ocean in March 2021, as a part of Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Futures movement. (Greenpeace / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Raking the watersIn 2015, an infamously scofflaw fleet of more than 70 bottom trawlers from Thailand fished in the Saya de Malha Bank. Their catch would be turned into protein-rich fishmeal that gets fed to chickens, pigs and aquaculture fish. At least 30 of them had arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, according to a report from Greenpeace. The Thai government was not yet a member of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement, so none of the vessels were approved to fish in the bank by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Thus, the Thai ships skirted international oversight bodies meant to protect this area of water. Thailand’s director-general of the Department of Fisheries later confirmed the vessels were “operating in an area free of regulatory control.”The impact of the Thai fishmeal fleet was “catastrophic” to the Saya de Mahla Bank, according to researchers from Monaco Explorations. “It seems remarkable that the Thai government permitted its fishing fleet to commence trawl fishing,” the organization said in its final report. “Even a cursory glance” at the existing literature should have dissuaded any trawling, the researchers added, questioning whether the Thai government’s decision to approve trawling was a “case of complete negligence” or a “deliberate policy to trawl the bank prior to joining Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.” The Thai fishmeal trawlers have continued to return annually to the Saya de Malha Bank but typically with fewer vessels than in 2015. In 2023, only two trawlers were still authorized by the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.More recently, the bigger fishing presence in the Saya de Malha Bank consists of Taiwanese tuna longliners and Sri Lankan gillnetters. More than 230 vessels fished in the vicinity of the Saya de Malha Bank between January 2021 and January 2024. Most of these ships (over 100) were from Sri Lanka and were gillnetters, according to data from Global Fishing Watch. The second-largest group were from Taiwan (over 70). At least 13 of these ships from Taiwan and four from Sri Lanka have been reprimanded by their national authorities for illegal or unregulated fishing, with transgressions including the illegal transport of shark fins or shark carcasses with their fins removed, the falsification of catch reports, and illegal fishing in the waters of countries including Mauritius and Seychelles.The presence of these ships poses a dire threat to biodiversity in the bank, according to ocean scientists. Jessica Gephart, a fisheries-science professor at the University of Washington, explained that the Saya de Malha Bank is a breeding ground for humpback and blue whales that can be injured or killed by ship collisions. The worry is that fishing vessels may not just cut down the seagrass, warned James Fourqurean, a biology professor at Florida International University. These ships also risk causing turbidity, making the water opaque by stirring up the seafloor, and thereby harming the balance of species and food pyramid.There aren’t really any laws or treaties that protect the Saya de Malha Bank. International institutions known as regional fisheries-management organizations are supposed to regulate fishing activities in high seas areas such as the bank. They are responsible for establishing binding measures for the conservation and sustainable management of highly migratory fish species. Their roles and jurisdictions vary, but most can impose management measures such as catch limits. These organizations are often criticized by ocean conservationists, however, because their rules only apply to signatory countries and are crafted by consensus, which opens the process to industry influence and political pressure, according to a 2024 Greenpeace report.The Saya de Malha, as an archetypal example of these limitations, is governed by the Southern Indian Oceans Fisheries Agreement. Sri Lanka, the home of the bank’s largest fleet, is not a signatory. Far away from human rightsWith near-shore stocks overfished in Thailand and Sri Lanka, vessel owners send their crews farther and farther from shore in search of a worthwhile catch. That is what makes the Saya de Malha — far from land, poorly monitored and with a bountiful ecosystem — so attractive. But the fishers forced to work there live a precarious existence, and for some, the long journey to the Saya de Malha is the last they ever take.Sri Lankan gillnetters make some of the longest trips in the least equipped boats. In October 2022, a British American couple encountered a Sri Lankan gillnet boat in the bank. The crew had been at sea for two weeks and had only caught four fish, so they begged the couple for supplies. After the encounter, the Sri Lankans remained at sea for another six months.Some vessels also engage in transshipment, offloading their catch without returning to shore, which can lead to prolonged periods at sea and increased risks. In 2016, six Cambodian crew members died from beriberi, a preventable disease, onboard a Thai fishmeal trawler. The Thai government linked the deaths to hard labor, long hours and poor diet, while Greenpeace found evidence of forced labor.Today, fewer vessels from the Thai fleet are traveling to the Saya de Malha Bank, but questions about working conditions on Thai vessels persist. In 2023, a crew member named Ae Khunsena died under suspicious circumstances, with his family suspecting foul play, while officials ruled it a suicide. VIDEO | 06:36 Saya de Malha: Far from shore Share via Creating a new nationVast and sometimes brutal, the high seas are also a place of aspiration, reinvention and an escape from rules. This is why the oceans have long been a magnet for libertarians hoping to flee governments, taxes and other people by creating their own sovereign micronations in international waters.The Saya de Malha Bank has been a prime target for such ambitions. Covered with seagrass and interspersed with small coral reefs, the bank is among the largest submerged ocean plateaus in the world — less than 33 feet deep in some areas. Near the equator, the water is a balmy 73.4 degrees to 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the season. Waves are broken in the shallower areas. But the biggest allure is that the bank is hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.On March 9, 1997, an architect named Wolf Hilbertz and a marine biologist named Thomas Goreau sailed to the bank. Launching from Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the voyage took three days. With solar panels, metal scaffolding and cornerstones, they began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation that they planned to call Autopia — the place that builds itself.In 2002, the two men returned to the bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building. They intended to erect their dwellings on top of existing coral, reinforcing steel scaffolding using a patented process that Hilbertz had developed called Biorock, a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This involved sinking steel frames into the shallow waters, then putting these steel poles under a weak direct electrical current. Little by little, limestone is deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals.Rushing because a cyclone was headed their way in a matter of days, the team built in six days a steel structure five by five by two meters high, anchored in the seabed and charged by a small onboard battery. In later interviews, Hilbertz, who was a professor at the University of Houston, said he hoped to use building materials with a lower carbon footprint and create a self-sufficient settlement in the sea “that belongs to the residents who live and work there, a living laboratory in which new environmental technologies are developed.” His plans ultimately stalled for lack of funds.Two decades later, a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi began promoting a new vision for a micronation in the Saya de Malha Bank. He planned to park a massive barge near the seagrass patch far from the reach of extradition and police. A gifted computer programmer, avid skydiver and motorcycle racer, Landi had been a man on the lam for roughly a decade. Accused of fraud after his company, Eutelia, declared bankruptcy in 2010, Landi and some of its executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland and skated around extradition treaties.While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, according to a New York Times profile.As he prepared this plan for moving to the Saya de Malha Bank, Landi purchased an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland. Anchoring it roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, he lived on the vessel with three sailors, a cook and five cats. In 2022, Samuele Landi bought an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland and anchored roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, where he lived with three sailors, a cook and five cats. (The Legend of Landi by Oswald Horowitz / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Aisland’s deck was fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place—living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air conditioners and a desalination system. Landi stayed there for over a year as he raised money to buy another barge twice as large as the Aisland. He even hired an architect named Peter de Vries to help design plans for the refit of the new barge so that it could sail to the Saya de Malha Bank and survive there. Landi hoped to eventually create a floating city consisting of about 20 barges, which would, by 2028, house thousands of permanent residents in luxury villas and apartments. Since the Saya de Malha Bank has been known to entice pirates and other sea marauders, Landi also planned to mount a Gatling gun on the Aisland. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute — very heavy-duty stuff,” De Vries said in an interview with the Times.The movement to create sovereign states on the high seas has a colorful history. Typically such projects have been imbued with the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. Many held a highly optimistic outlook on technology and its potential to solve human problems. The founders of these micronations — in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons — were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, the vision for these waterborne cities was part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, they have been called, in more recent years, seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.In 2008, these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal who donated more than $1.25 million to the organization and related projects. Thiel also invested in a startup venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California. Never getting beyond the drawing-board phase, Blueseed failed to raise the money necessary to sustain itself.The reality is that the ocean is a far less inviting place than architectural renderings tend to suggest. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave and solar energy, but building renewable-energy systems that can survive the weather and corrosive seawater is difficult and costly.On Feb. 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned this hard lesson. The Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers died. According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time. His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai. Vanishing protectors and predatorsIn November 2022, a research expedition by the environmental nonprofit Monaco Explorations took one of the largest and most advanced research vessels in the world to Saya de Malha. The goal was to document a seafloor famously lush in seagrass, corals, turtles, dugongs, rays and sharks. However, during the three weeks that the research team combed the waters of the Saya de Malha Bank, they spotted not a single shark. 1/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) 2/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) 3/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) The likely culprit, according to the scientists, was a fleet of more than 200 fishing ships that have in recent years targeted these remote waters.Sharks play a critical role in the ecosystem as guardians of the seagrass, policing populations of turtles and other animals that would mow down all the seagrass if left unchecked. Catching sharks is not easy, nor is it usually inadvertent. In tuna longlining, the ship uses a line made of thick microfilament, sometimes stretching as long as 40 miles, with baited hooks attached at intervals. Many tuna longliners use special steel leads designed not to break when the sharks, bigger and stronger than the tuna, try to yank themselves free.To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books. To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat (except in countries such as Sri Lanka and Ecuador where there is a market for the meat). It’s a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. When the Imula 763 returned to Beruwala port in Sri Lanka in August 2024 after fishing in the Saya de Malha Bank, another vessel, the Imula 624, was in the same port where fishermen were cutting up sharks. (Amazing Fish Cutting / The Outlaw Ocean Project) In 2015, more than 50 Thai fishing vessels, primarily bottom trawlers, descended on the Saya de Malha Bank to drag their nets over the ocean floor and scoop up brushtooth lizardfish and round scad, much of which was transported back to shore to be ground into fishmeal. Two survivors of trafficking who worked in the Saya de Malha Bank on two of the vessels — the Kor Navamongkolchai 1 and Kor Navamongkolchai 8 — told Greenpeace that up to 50% of their catch had been sharks. Since then, the Thai presence in the Saya de Malha Bank has diminished, and in 2024 only two Thai vessels targeted the area.The Sri Lankans have continued to fish the bank intensely. Of the more than 100 Sri Lankan vessels that have fished in the Saya de Malha since January 2022, when the country’s fleet first began broadcasting vessel locations publicly, about half use gillnets, according to vessel data from the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Gillnetters hang wide panels of netting in the water, keeping them attached to the surface via floating lines. These particular gillnetters operate across the Indian Ocean, and a number of the vessels were observed at the bank by the 2022 Monaco Explorations expedition. Sharks are especially vulnerable to gillnets, which account for 64% of shark catches recorded by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Sri Lankan vessels have historically targeted sharks in the country’s national waters, but as domestic stocks of sharks have been decimated, the Sri Lankan fleet moved into the high seas, areas including the Saya de Malha Bank. (The Fishcutter) Historically, Sri Lankan vessels have targeted sharks in domestic waters. Between 2014 and 2016, for example, 84% of reported shark catches came from domestic vessels, according to research into the Sri Lankan shark and ray trade published in 2021. But as domestic populations declined, vessels, among them the fleet of gillnetters, moved to the high seas, leading to a new boom in the fin trade. Sri Lanka’s annual exports of fins quadrupled in the last decade, according to UN Comtrade data, with 110 tons exported in 2023, primarily to Hong Kong, compared with just 28 tons in 2013. VIDEO | 04:32 Saya de Malha: The vanishing predators Share via Tracking data also show that more than 40 of the Sri Lankan vessels do not publicly broadcast their location while in the bank, making it impossible for conservationists to fully understand what’s going on.In August 2024, a Sri Lanka vessel that fished in the Saya de Malha between March and June 2024 was detained by Sri Lankan authorities with over half a ton of oceanic white-tip shark carcasses aboard, all with their fins removed. Catching oceanic white-tip sharks is prohibited under Sri Lankan law, as is the removal of shark fins at sea. This was not an isolated incident: Sri Lankan authorities have seized illegally harvested shark fins on at least 25 separate occasions since January 2021, according to press releases from the Sri Lankan Coast Guard.Why should anyone care about the disappearance of sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank?Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt as something that happens gradually ... and then suddenly. The extinction of species is like bankruptcy, and when it finally occurs, there’s no going back. If we keep draining the bank of one of its previous riches, a “sudden” reckoning may be soon. Additional reporting and writing by Outlaw Ocean Project staff, including Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan and Austin Brush.

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Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Causes a Deadly Oil Spill on the Black Sea

Russia’s “shadow fleet” of aging oil tankers helps fund the ongoing war but puts the region at risk of more environmental disasters. The post Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Causes a Deadly Oil Spill on the Black Sea appeared first on The Revelator.

On Dec. 15, 2024, in a raging storm, two Russian oil tankers carrying more than 9,000 tons of heavy oil collided off the coast of Port Taman in the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. A video posted to Telegram allegedly depicting the crash shows one of the tankers, with a broken bow, sinking into the sea. The second vessel reportedly ran aground closer to the port. The crash spilled thousands of tons of toxic heavy fuel oil and has harmed thousands of birds, dozens of dolphins, and other animals, and resulted in a state of emergency in Crimea. By mid-January the fuel had spread far enough that it could be seen from space. Satellite images studied by Greenpeace show coastal contamination stretching from Novorossiysk in the Krasnodar Krai to Ozero Donuzlav in the western coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. Even Russian president Vladimir Putin called the disaster “one of the most serious environmental challenges we have faced in recent years.” For a region accustomed to rough seas and choppy weather, this accident, while unfortunate, was not uncommon. Experts have raised alarms about Russian tankers in the region for years, following previous accidents that caused smaller but still significant spills. With this new crash continuing to cause damage, experts and activists warn that the region remains heavily militarized and under the control of the corrupt, autocratic Russian government, making response to the oil spill increasingly challenging. This has left a vacuum in disaster response, filled sparingly by local volunteers who’ve worked for three months to mitigate the damage. Anna, a student from Moscow, was among the first few volunteers on the scene. “I study at a university that specializes in the oil and gas industry, so I was able to find out quickly how much fuel oil was on the surface and what the government was doing to deal with the emergency,” she told The Revelator. (Anna did not disclose her full name for fear of retribution.) Heavy oil mixed with sand and shells on the polluted beach. Photo provided by volunteers and used with permission. Along with a dozen others, Anna made her way to the Anapa, a coastal resort town in Krasnodar Krai, and began coordinating with groups organizing rescue and cleanup efforts. Within days hundreds of volunteers had mobilized to help, including other students, many of whom traveled from as far as Moscow to help with the cleaning. The reaction from the Russian government has been a lot less enthusiastic. It took the government nearly two weeks to declare the state of emergency Dec. 25. Volunteers, however, have been working relentlessly. “We are catching, cleaning, and helping birds” affected by the spill, Anna said. “This is the easiest part of our work.” Volunteers also engaged in beach-cleaning efforts, but full treatment of the pollution will require specialized workers. A Heavy Problem The problems facing volunteers are not just logistical. The nature of the fuel they’re attempting to clear is itself problematic. “Fuel oil is quite heavy, so it sinks,” Anna explained. “But if the temperature rises or there are storms, it rises in the water and hits the shorelines again.” The vessels carried mazut, a type of low-quality heavy fuel oil that can be very difficult to clean in a spill. “Heavy fuel oil, also known as residual fuel, is what’s left at the end of the refining process,” explained Sian Prior, a marine science expert and lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, an organization that has advocated for tighter rules on fossil-fuel shipments in the region. “It’s used by a lot of ships in many different parts of the world. Most of the heavy fuels also have very high sulfur levels, which when burned releases sulfur oxides, which is bad for health and the environment.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Andrew Yanayt I Cameraman (@andrewyanayt) In 2020 the International Maritime Organization, which regulates global commercial shipping, introduced a limit on the amount of sulfur allowed in the fuel. But the fuel industry responded by blending fuels, mixing lighter fuels with heavy fuel to create a product that has low sulfur but still has a lot of heavy residual fuel, Prior said. The resulting mix poses several challenges after spills. “It’s very difficult to clean up, because it’s very viscous and emulsifies when it mixes with water, so its volumes actually increase,” she said. “Once this fuel is spilled … it’s virtually impossible to clean it up adequately.” The effects of a mazut spill could be worse than regular oil spills, which in themselves are disastrous. “The lighter fuels, distillate fuels, will break up much more quickly in the environment,” Prior explains. Mazut, however, remains very thick and viscous. “It can even end up forming hard balls of oil that will sink to the seabed, and get mixed into the sediment, sand, and can persist there for a very, very long time,” she said. “If there’s a storm it can get then released back into the environment, or if it gets very warm, it will become a little bit more viscous,” she said, echoing the experiences of volunteers in Anapa. “It clogs everything it mixes with…and can have a smothering effect on wildlife, marine mammals or birds if they come into contact with it. It’s also toxic, so if they ingest it, it will have an effect internally on their organs.” While Prior’s organization mainly focuses on advocacy in the Arctic Sea region, it says the events in Kerch are a warning on the dangers of transporting heavy fuel. As a result of the work by Clean Arctic Alliance, the International Maritime Organization instituted its ban on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic as of July 2024. “But not all countries have implemented it so far. Russia hasn’t yet.” Shady Oils, Shadow Vessels Russia’s transport of this already dangerous substance has become more precarious because it’s currently being navigated across continents on fleets of extremely old, poorly maintained and uninsured ships. One of the crashed tankers, Volgoneft-239, in 2024. Photo by VladimirPF – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159254368 In fact, while the total number of oil spills worldwide has declined over the past four decades, the statistics are the opposite in the Russian seas, said Dmitry Lisitsyn, a Russian environmentalist and executive fellow at the Yale School of Environment. Lisitsyn’s organization, Sakhalin Environment Watch, monitors environmental safety and wildlife preservation on the eastern coast of Russia. The Russian government has declared it a “foreign agent,” limiting their work there. Before that they worked on cleaning up after a similar, albeit less pervasive oil spill in the southwest coast of Sakhalin Island in 2015. Lisitsyn said that despite growing number of oil-spill incidents in Russia, the government has lacked the political will to enforce preventive measures or actionable laws. Following December’s crash a local court in Krasnodar Krai filed the company that owned the tankers just 30,000 rubles (about $215) last month. But more worryingly, Lisitsyn said, the stakeholders seem reluctant to learn lessons from previous spills — including one in the Kerch Strait in 2007. “A similar spill, in the same region, involving the same type of tankers in the same kind of weather conditions should have been lesson enough,” he said. “It was about 20 kilometers to the north [of the current site], near the island of Tuzla, and took place around the same time of the year, but was half the amount of mazut spilled,” said Russian environmental scientist Eugene Simonov. “It caused a lot of damage, even though the scale and geographic range was smaller.” But 2007 was not even the first time, Simonov pointed out. In 1999 a tanker, the same kind that crashed in December, crashed “in front of the Istanbul ports. The tanker split in half and heavy fuel poured out in front of some popular tourist spots,” he said. “It was the least problematic because Turkey was really good at handling that and did not even engage with Russia or anyone else. They just went ahead and cleaned it up.” The biggest takeaway from these incidents, Simonov said, is that these tankers need to be decommissioned. “They are beyond their useful working age and not well-equipped to go into the sea, even into the Black Sea,” he said. “They’re built for the river and even the smallest waves put them in a clear danger of splitting, because they are too long and too weak.” Lisitsyn agrees. “These series of tankers should not go to the sea,” he said. “They are completely unsafe in the stormy seas.” Both tankers were built during the Soviet times. The Volgoneft-212 was about 55 years old, while Volgoneft-239 was a little over 40 years old. Why does Russia still use these old, unreliable vessels? The answer lies in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the many sanctions on Russian goods, particularly oil exports. Soon after the 2022 invasion, several western countries banned or significantly reduced the import of Russian oil, sanctions implemented largely on pipeline purchases. To bypass the sanctions, Russia has employed fleets of tankers, usually very old and in poor condition with obscure details of ownership, to continue its trade with western companies. The lack of identity of these tankers, widely referred to as “Shadow Fleets,” helps Russia circumvent sanctions to continue selling its prime economic product. One report by the Carnegie Eurasia center documented 2,849 oil tankers in the first nine months of 2024. The vessels carried an estimated average of 48 million barrels of oil per day. In 2024 Greenpeace identified a list of 192 aging tankers carrying Russian oil around the world. “The list covers only crude oil tankers, which are currently not on any sanctions list but are outdated old vessels,” said Natalia Gozak, director at Greenpeace Ukraine. “The ships visited Russian ports at least three times during the observation period, which established their connection to the Russian oil trade, and it was noted that they didn’t have internationally recognized insurance which would cover costs of any potential oil spill.” Since Greenpeace released the list, Gozak said, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned about 70 of the vessels. Another 130 ships continue transporting oil for Russia. View this post on Instagram A post shared by FREE RUSSIA FOUNDATION (@freerussia_eng) The shadow fleet has several major implications, said Gozak, “the first of which is that it is financing the war and invasion of Ukraine.” Nearly 1,000 Russian tankers sailed along the Baltic coast in 2023, a Greenpeace report noted, averaging two to three ships per day, and the “highest number of Russian oil tankers ever recorded off the German coast.” As Russia increasingly moves its oil trade through shadow fleets, Gozak estimates the revenues from these exports fund approximately one third of its military budget. “It’s a huge source of income that continues fueling the war,” she said. “I’m based in Kyiv, and I can feel the impact here every day when we come under drone and missile attacks. It’s intensive.” The other prominent effect of these fleets is on the environment. “We have conducted a simulation of possible oil spill in the Baltic Sea and calculated the currents any spill in the region could spread really fast and the impact will be absolutely huge, affecting all countries bordering the Baltic Sea,” Gozak warned. He also brought up the 2007 spill in Kerch to emphasize the dangers posed by the most recent tragedy. “At the time about 1,300 tons of mazut was spilled,” much less than the current spill, he says. “But the impact was huge. Nearly 30,000 birds were killed.” The contamination also “lasted for years,” he said. “This type of oil doesn’t remain on the surface. It sinks down, especially when it’s cold, affecting bottom marine life, including filtrating organisms like mussels, and in this way could enter the food chain. We will continue to see the impact in the coming years, much like in 2007, when even two years after, studies showed high levels of contamination in the water there.” Russian War Preventing Response The conflict in the region, beginning with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and continuing through its invasion of Ukraine, has resulted in heavy militarization of the Black Sea region. This has further complicated redressal of the catastrophe. The war decreases the ability to mobilize international support, said Simonov. To make things worse, “the disputed status of occupied areas creates an incentive to hide the degree of disaster even more than in times of peace.” During the 2007 spill, Simonov said, both Russia and Ukraine participated in a cleanup. The two countries “quarreled with each other but had some joint operation” and allowed for international intervention. “Now you have a militarized area where they don’t want any eyes. So even if they lack technical capacity, they’re unwilling to seek support.” The war has already contributed to environmental pollution in the region, as Simonov wrote in a paper for the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Working Group. “Risks posed by wrecked ships have also increased, with roughly 100 additional ships, military and civilian, sinking or damaged since the war began,” he noted in the paper. “For example, evidence of a limited oil spill was visible from space at the site where the Moskva military cruiser sank. Most of its fuel reserves, which may exceed 2,000 tons, are probably still stored in its fuel tanks at a depth of 50 meters — a huge risk for the future.” Russia may also not readily admit that it lacks the technical capacity to assess the damage or conduct adequate cleanup. “There are two aspects: the political will and the technological capacity to respond. Russia lacks both,” Simonov said. “Their systems are based on false reporting,” he continued. “Even when the initial figures demanded immediate action, they had no capacity to monitor or respond. It took them ten days to make key decisions.” He pointed to recent documents he discovered from April 2024 that show the company that owned the two ships passed their environmental impact assessments positively. Additionally, Simonov said, Russian officials had a full-scale oil-spill prevention and response drill in October 2024 that was supposedly concluded successfully. “So essentially they faked the whole complex of environmental preparations, because only two months after an emergency drill, they were still unable to do anything,” he said. “They purport themselves to be a great energy empire but lack the technological capacity to deal with a situation that has occurred before, and for which there should have been plans, drills and protocols in place.” Prior said Russia is not alone in this problem. “Obviously things are very difficult in terms of engaging with Russia at the moment, because environmental groups no longer have any status there,” she said. “But they’re not the only ones by any means. Countries that have large shipping fleets tend to be more challenging in terms of getting them to work to the same level.” Assessing Future Risk Parts of the sunken vessels, still holding nearly 4,000 tons of fuel, lie at the bottom of the strait. Environmentalists have raised concerns over the potential effects. The timing of the accident made a difference, though. “It happened during a season when there wasn’t any active breeding of the marine population, or migration,” Simonov said. The colder temperatures also helped prevent some of the active pollution, he pointed out. But as the temperature rises and seasons change, the insufficient response from the government increases vulnerability. “The greatest fear right now is that those tankers still down there with remaining mazut will start actively spilling around March-April…during the active bird and fish migration. That may make things clearly much worse,” he said. With global waters already warmer than previous decades, the mazut at the bottom of the sea increases the risks of marine pollution. Volunteers have been working relentlessly over the past two months but aren’t sure yet of the extend of the damage. “I hope that we will be able to clean the beaches and catch the [affected] birds,” Anna said. “But it’s impossible to say how much has been cleaned and how much remains.” Meanwhile the damage spreads. “The emergency affected not only the city of Anapa, but also Sochi and Crimea,” Anna said. “There are also rehabilitation centers working in the area. Volunteers are helping to get rid of all this because they care.” The tragedy continues to threaten the safety of marine life three months after the initial crash. According to the Delphi Scientific and Ecological Center for Dolphin Rescue, which is operating rescue efforts in the region, at least 84 dolphins have been killed by the oil spill as of February. Anna urges the administration to take coastline health more seriously to mitigate further damage. “We need to bring equipment that can remove one and a half meters of sand at a time,” she said. “We need a system to work with landfill [owners] to remove the contaminated soil.” But most importantly, she said, “we need to improve our oil-spill response plan. We don’t know when or where it might happen again.” That’s a warning echoed by many of the experts we spoke with: Under Russia’s corrupt, autocratic system and fossil-fuel-based economy, the chances of the country’s shadow fleet causing another environmental disaster — and the people and wildlife of the area suffering because of it — remains all too high. Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator: War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar The post Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Causes a Deadly Oil Spill on the Black Sea appeared first on The Revelator.

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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, LyondellBasell, and Chevron Phillips Chemical, 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.”

Activism

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Between Clouds and Glass

A look at the monumental problem of bird collisions in Chicago, the deadliest city for birds, just ahead of Houston and Dallas. According to scientists, what happens in Chicago can affect bird populations across North America. As many as one billion birds die each year in the United States due to building collisions, but there are people who care and work hard to change this.

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The spirit of a movement that sometimes reminds us of our young revolutionary self, who still believed that he:she could change the world. This green filmed documentary mirrors the global situation and the diversity of climate change related activism.6 continents, 3 dozen filmmakers, countless activists and seasoned scientists. It is not about just one person but about many who stand up. TripleF*** is a documentary on the global climate movement, containing material from six continents (North - and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Antarctica), filmed green by cooperating film teams on site. The topic of climate activism itself as a protagonist takes us on a global journey to activists' lives and forms a dialogue within. Why did so many young people became activists? What is life as an activist like, how do they deal with political stagnation, harsh criticism and even threats and why do they still continue? Very personal but not private - to protect the activists' privacy, sensitive topics are woven in as a fictional part. This is the first of 5 Episodes. In this episode, which also stands for itself as a midlength film, the history of climate change related activism is highlighted. In its core spirit of a holistic approach, the project is been realized similarly to its topic of the climate activists' movement: independent, global, green.

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Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

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This short film marks the 20 year campaign sparked by the news that a waste company had arrived armed with plans to build a large hazardous waste incinerator at the end of a then undeveloped cul-de-sac in Ringaskiddy, the industrial heartland of Cork. As news percolated around Cork Harbour, concern and opposition, evident from the outset, consolidated, galvanised and continued to go from strength to strength over the course of the years that saw a community stuck in a battle that they didn’t invite. The campaign, at the time of completion of this film, is still ongoing. This film is a visual representation of the time that has passed - from protests, to fundraisers, to court battles, at the heart of it a community subject to much struggle. However, they have not let that stop them and have truly shown the strength in numbers and staying power.

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