Editor’s note: “There is an ambitious plan to ‘protect’ Northern California’s Plumas National Forest from wildfires. Their plans were aimed at making communities safer and forest stands more ‘resilient’ to drought, insects, and other climate-driven disturbances. Community protection was the first priority, forest resilience the second. The urgency of imminent wildfire caused the Plumas Forest officials to pare down the environmental analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead of conducting full environmental impact statements, with scrutiny of cumulative impacts and years-long public comment periods, officials used less rigorous environmental assessments. Work on at least 70,000 acres was fast-tracked under emergency declarations, which eliminate public objections. NEPA processes that would normally take as long as seven years took an average of about 20 months. Forest Service officials have held few public meetings and refused to provide basic details of the project with reporters.”
Why the forests needs dead trees. Dead trees are not “wood waste.” They provide vital energy and habitat for the whole forest ecosystem. Those who want to remove dead trees from the forests are depriving the forest of what it needs to live and thrive. Here’s how that works.
Are the tools to blame?
But a primary contention of active management skeptics like DellaSala is that applying the same tools that caused the problems in the first place is illogical.
“That’s circular reasoning,” DellaSala says. “You can’t ignore the consequences, the collateral damages to ecosystems, the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere from logging to contain natural disturbances.”
He and his colleagues question the broad application of these tools. They say that thinning, for example, is often used as an excuse to take out larger, more valuable trees for commercial logging, when these trees should be left behind because of their importance in biodiversity and carbon storage. Old-growth trees not only anchor ecosystems, but are often the most resistant to climate-driven shocks like fire, drought and beetle infestations.
“When we do active management, we choose which trees die, which ones remain, and we probably have it mostly wrong,” says Diana Six, a forest entomologist and professor at the University of Montana who collaborated on two recent articles with DellaSala. Removing resistant trees means that their genes won’t filter down to the next generation, she adds, potentially setting up even greater vulnerabilities later on.
“Natural fires are as essential as sun and rain in fire-adapted forests, but as humans encroach on wild spaces, fear, arrogance, and greed have shaped the way that people view these regenerative events and given rise to misinformation that threatens whole ecosystems as well as humanity’s chances of overcoming the climate crisis.
Scientist and activist Chad T. Hanson explains how natural alarm over wildfire has been marshaled to advance corporate and political agendas, notably those of the logging industry. He also shows that, in stark contrast to the fear-driven narrative around these events, contemporary research has demonstrated that forests in the United States, North America, and around the world have a significant deficit of fire. Forest fires, including the largest ones, can create extraordinarily important and rich wildlife habitats as long as they are not subjected to post-fire logging.
The federal government has recently rolled back protections on more than half of our national forests, opening the door to widespread logging. These industrial operations replace biodiverse forests with flammable tree plantations, often sprayed with glyphosate, which kills soil microbes and dries out the land. The result? Drier forests, more intense fires, and greater threats to people, homes, wildlife and the ecosystems that sustain us.”
Proforestation: The case for leaving trees alone. How do you save a rainforest?
Leave it alone. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
In 1994, for example, the Forest Service issued a study finding that the agency’s successful elimination of wildfires for more than a century was actually killing the sequoia groves and threatening their survival. The old “monarch” sequoias were slowly dying off, and new sequoia seedlings and saplings were almost completely absent, resulting in a “massive failure of sequoia reproduction.” The study found that, in order to maintain stable or increasing populations, giant sequoias depend specifically on high-intensity fire in patches, noting that the “giant sequoia is what is known as a ‘pioneer species,’ requiring canopy-destroying disturbance to complete its life cycle.”
“While some ponderosa pine stands historically burned at frequent intervals that reduced fuels, and today have higher density and are burning more intensely than in the past, this does not apply to most plant communities in the West. Indeed, it doesn’t even apply to many ponderosa pine stands.
Nearly all the fire-dependent plant communities in the West, including aspen, sagebrush, juniper, fir, spruce, hemlocks, cedars, and even many pines, have very long intervals between wildfires of decades to centuries. They are not “overly dense” and naturally accumulate biomass over time, thus burning as “intense, large wildfires.” Even if it were practical, fire suppression has had little influence on these plant communities.
In other words, most wildfires in the West are burning at absolutely normal conditions under their ecological regimes.”
The ultimate cause of our large fires is climate warming. Solutions proposed by agencies and politicians like thinning forests and even prescribed burning ultimately fails when there are extreme fire weather conditions. In some cases, this kind of “active forest management” can even enhance fire spread. For instance, one review article found that protected landscapes where logging is prohibited, like parks and wilderness, tend to have lower severity blazes compared to lands where logging and other “active management” is permitted.
The myth and reality of Indian burning landscape management
Logging doesn’t prevent wildfires, but Trump is trying it anyway. The Agriculture Department is opening more than 112 million acres of federal forests to logging in a misguided bid to prevent fires and boost timber production.
Forest management approaches promoted as “resilience,” “restoration,” “fuel reduction,” and “forest health” often degrade natural systems and reduce carbon stocks.
Over the past few years, many decisionmakers and forest managers have increasingly called for “active management” of natural forests — human intervention via mechanical thinning and other forms of commercial logging and road building — in response to increasing wildfires, beetle outbreaks, and intense storms. Many activists oppose these methods, saying they do more harm than good. For instance, actions that seek to suppress naturally occurring wildfires may make those fires more intense when they happen.
But active management activities have scaled up in response to economic drivers, misinformation on natural disturbance processes, and more climate-driven extreme events that trigger large and fast-moving fires.
“Active management” via mechanical thinning and overburning has type-converted this dry pine forest in the Santa Fe watershed to a weed-infested, overventilated savannah where remaining trees are exposed to blow down (Photo: D. DellaSala)We have published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and books on the impacts of active management on natural disturbance processes in forests. As active management begins to take on an even bigger role, conservation groups frequently call upon us to submit testimony, legal declarations, and science support. Meanwhile our key findings are often neglected by well-intended researchers who promote widespread active management but do not fully acknowledge the dramatic and often cumulative ecosystem consequences.
The active management activities we are most concerned about include:
Clearcut logging of live and dead patches of trees, especially over large areas.
Mechanical thinning of large trees via commercial removal.
Too-frequent burning of forest understories, especially of logging slash in dense piles that cook soil horizons and encourage weeds.
Post-disturbance logging that removes biological legacies (e.g., large live and dead trees) and damages natural processes and soils.
Construction of major road networks that alter forest-hydrological connections, some of which are supposed to act as firebreaks.
Active management impacts depend on the intensity of removals, frequency and duration of impacts, and scale (site, landscape, ecoregion, biome) that often combine with the natural disturbance background in exceeding disturbance thresholds that degrade ecological integrity. Such practices have been widely accepted on at least three continents — North America, Australia, and Europe — where our research has been exposing severe impacts.
What Are the Ecological Costs of Active Management?
As we’ve shown in our recentstudies, scaling up these types of activities comes with severe costs to natural ecosystems. The impacts of active management can even approach the effects of deforestation as they ramp up in application and intensity.
In the United States, this is especially apparent in relation to the recent executive orders that President Donald Trump announced under the rubric of a national timber emergency, cloaked in wildfire prevention. Even some progressive states, like California, have taken drastic measures to log vast areas with minimal environmental reviews in response to wildfires. Canada and European nations also have been driving up the active management rhetoric.
We used a series of case studies that demonstrated substantial negative and prolonged impacts of active management on a broad suite of ecological integrity indicators (including soil integrity, species richness, forest intactness, and carbon stocks) relative to more natural areas (reference sites). Active management, we found, is particularly consequential in high conservation value forests such as old-growth forests, intact watersheds, and complex early seral forests (“snag forests”) that follow severe natural disturbances but are rich in biodiversity. Such forests collectively play a pivotal role in maintaining ecological integrity while serving as natural climate solutions.
Natural disturbances are part of the necessary cycle of renewal and aging that has occurred in forests for millennia. There are well-documented patterns of forest rejuvenation following natural disturbances, even the severe ones, although we acknowledge that climate change is interacting with logging in a way that’s altering forest dynamics in places where forests may not come back on their own.
Natural disturbances create a pulse of biological legacies that sustain forest ecosystems for decades, including dead trees, surviving shrubs, fallen logs, and other structures that are associated with complex early seral forests and are not replicated by forest management. Many species, including some rare and threatened ones, are dependent on these legacies. The post-disturbance environment places the pioneering stage following a disturbance on a trajectory to old growth and then back again to the early stage when naturally re-disturbed.
We describe this process as “circular succession.” Active management can disrupt the natural flow of forest trajectories by breaking the cycle between rejuvenation and aging of forests such that forests never become old again (as in industrially logged landscapes).
Repeated thinning operations also remove key elements of stand structure such as large trees that are important habitats for a wide range of forest-dependent species. Often the large trees are relatively fire resistant and contain important adaptations such as epicormic branching near the crowns that allow the tree to survive and post-disturbance sprouting.
Our studies in Australian and western North American forests demonstrate that activities like commercial logging of large, old trees that are intended to reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires may have the opposite effect and increase fire severity and fire spread.
Similarly, there are cases where too-frequent prescribed burns on a site can alter the ecological condition of forest ecosystems in ways that, in the event of a subsequent wildfire, lead to significantly impaired forest regeneration and ecosystem type conversions to savannahs. This ostensibly is already underway in low productivity dry forests of the southern Rockies, which face a hotter, drier, and more frequent fire environment from natural and prescribed fires that together are ostensibly retarding forest renewal in places.
Active management may also increase the risk of high-severity wildfire by creating drier conditions that shift fuel types and fuel distributions, increasing fine fuels that dry quickly, while over-ventilating forests from the unravelling of intact canopies that otherwise buffer forests from high wind speeds associated with fast moving flames (as in the photo above).
Similarly, the construction of roads and firebreaks (chronic and cumulative disturbances) fragment landscapes and wildlife populations, paving the way for invasive species, and increasing the risk of human-caused ignitions (such as arson or accidental burns).
Impacts like these highlight the importance of understanding the overall disturbance burden in an area that accumulates from the combination of large tree logging, over-burning, livestock grazing, off-road vehicles, and road building, in addition the natural disturbances running in the background. Disturbance burden is a key issue that we highlighted in our recent research paper that is often neglected in active management circles.
An additional problem with active management is that tree removal or retention based on forestry prescriptions, particularly old growth or young trees establishing after disturbance, may reduce adaptation potential that would otherwise occur via natural selection that favors surviving trees better suited to the novel disturbance regimes resulting from climate change and insect outbreaks.
Simply put, foresters do not consider the genetic adaptations that are so crucial to forest persistence over time.
When Is Active Management OK to Use?
We acknowledge there will most certainly be cases where active management is a necessary part of ecological restoration practices that seek to improve ecological integrity and follow the internationally accepted precautionary principle (do no harm to native ecosystems).
Some examples include the control of invasive species that have colonized natural forests; removal of livestock and feral animals; replanting forests with native species where there has been natural regeneration failure or ecosystem type shifts underway; obliterating roads to increase connectivity and hydrological functions; upgrading culverts to handle storm surge; and reintroducing extirpated and keystone species (such as beavers).
However, other kinds of active management — like commercial thinning in high conservation value forests — may inadvertently accelerate degradation of these critical ecosystems with perverse impacts on biodiversity and carbon stocks. And while there are certainly cases where light-touch thinning (below-canopy, noncommercial) or prescribed fire alone can reduce high severity fire effects, the efficacy of tree removal in a changing climate is dependent on many factors, including extreme fire weather that is increasingly overwhelming treatment efficacy.
What’s Needed to Avoid Degradation?
Our precautionary approach to active management also underscores the significance of completing protection efforts that set aside large, representative protected areas (such as 30×30 and 50×50 campaigns) which, at a minimum, can serve as reference areas to gauge the efficacy and impacts of active management.
As we state in our research, this can be done using standardized metrics to assess the degree of degradation in comparison to reference sites along a continuum of relative loss. However, it must be understood that a complete assessment of active management on high conservation value forests, particularly attempts to recreate the later stages of succession, may not become realized for decades, if not centuries. Importantly, in some areas, reference conditions free of industrial activities and fire suppression may no longer exist and thus semi-natural areas may have to suffice as the reference for restoration.
We suggest that decisionmakers and managers invest in research that expands the understanding of natural disturbance regimes in forests, the effects of active management on ecological integrity (ecological restoration vs degradation), and that supports adaptive management strategies that are consistent with ecological integrity and conservation biology principles.
The bottom line: Active management needs a proper cost-benefit analysis to minimize trade-offs, lest the treatments may be much worse than the problems they seek to resolve. Our research daylights the expanding active management footprint while creating science support for decision-makers to choose more prudently on behalf of maintaining or restoring integrity and for activists to push back when policy is inconsistent with conservation science principles.
We are coming up to the final court date for Sleydo’, Shay and Corey. Sentencing for their criminal contempt charges will be October 15-17, 2025 in Smithers, BC.
Since winning the Abuse of Process application brought against the RCMP and proving they violated their Charter Rights, Judge Tammen stated it will be considered during their sentencing. Over the three days we anticipate that the Crown and Defence will make court arguments for their positions and then a decision will be made.
Considering the Abuse of Process win we are hopeful that our land defenders will avoid jail time and Tammen will determine they have served their time. The Crown is asking for 30 days in jail. The outcome will come down to Justice Tammen.
We are asking for support for them regardless of the outcome. We want them to be able to rest and heal from this gruelling process that has taken one year and nine months! It has taken years to get to this place after the brave actions taken to uphold ‘Anuk niwh’iten (Wet’suwet’en Law). We are preparing for the Crown to be ruthless in their arguments. Please give whatever you can and share this page so our three land defenders can rest and not worry about their housing and income afterwards. Should things not go our way we want to ensure their families and loved ones are taken care of, and if we have a favourable outcome we want them to have the resources to start their healing process from this prolonged battle with the colonial court.
Tabï misiyh everyone that has continued to show up and support during these difficult times, we ask for one more rally to put this behind us.
Post Court Decision Statements for Abuse of Process Application
DECISION FOR ABUSE OF PROCESS APPLICATION
On February 18th, 2025 Justice Michael Tammen read his decision on the application brought by Sleydo’, Shaylynn Sampson and Corey Jocko against the RCMP/CIRG after over a year in the colonial courts.
Tammen ruled that the RCMP/CIRG did breach our Charter Rights and abused the process of the courts. We had filed eight counts and while Tammen only legally confirmed two of the Charter Rights in his decision, one of them being he found that the racist comments about the handprints were “grossly offensive, racist, and dehumanizing” and undermine the integrity of the judicial process. This is a win. Although Tammen found that the warrantless entry into the tiny house and cabin breached the defendants’ section 8 and section 9 rights, he found that the breach was minor because the arrests were “authorized and inevitable”. He found that the removal and destruction of Sleydo’s and Shay’s cultural items caused great emotional distress but did not breach their section 15 rights but he would take the trauma they endured as result of this into account when he considers sentencing. We have asked for an alternate remedy of time served.
So while there are clear Charter violations we will still be proceeding to court sentencing. We are disappointed that we are still being criminalized for upholding ‘anuk niwh’iten. However, as Sleydo’ states:
“The colonial courts are not where our ability to live out our laws and ways of life should be determined. And yet here we are, over 3 years later, in a show down between Wet’suwet’en law and colonial law after years of police violence and repression by the RCMP/CIRG with no accountability… We will never see justice from the courts for the amount of violence we have experienced over the last six years of repression by the state. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Indigenous people have been experiencing and what we have experienced at the hands of the RCMP… My hope is that this decision will signal to the RCMP that they can no longer violate their own laws and act with impunity. Today I chose to celebrate the Yintah, for her resiliency throughout all the destruction and for continuing to provide for us and keeping us safe.”
We know that the RCMP have always been mandated to oppress and criminalize us. The state has always wanted secure access to our yintah since the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Delgamuukw-Gisdayway in 1997. Then they created the Community Industry Response Group (CIRG) in 2017 specifically to repress any land defence from extraction projects. They attempted to rebrand this as the Community Response Unit (CRU) after heavy criticism and a federal investigation in 2024. The corporate project of canada continues. We continue to uphold our responsibilities. As Corey states:
“We have seen this process in court, out of court, on the land, off reserve, we’ve seen in it books, documentaries, movies, every piece of knowledge that’s been carried and passed down through all these thousands of years these stories have been repeated. We’re in the position right now where we understood that, we know that and we did it for the right reasons so there is no reason to not feel proud of what we did. To stand here proud right now and to be relatives with the Wet’suwet’en, and to be Haudenosaunee out here it’s just an honour regardless of what they throw against us because we know we are doing it for the right reasons.”
We know we couldn’t have done this without all our allies and accomplices. There are so many beautiful relationships built in the last decade of protecting Wedzin Kwa and there is nothing that can be taken away from that. We know we are all stronger together. Our young Gitxsan relative has upheld an ancient alliance standing and fighting beside us, as well as many others. She reflects on the past fives years on the yintah:
“I believe in the fight for our territory and our land, in the celebration of the yintah and the lax’yip, and the unique relationship that our nations have […] We breathe life into our governance every day we are allowed to stand on our territory, and we bring our families there, that we can drink the water from Wedzin Kwa. I feel a lot of honour and am thankful for Sleydo’ and her family, for all of the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en for all of their support and for my family that I have built here, that I was born with and that continues to support the work that we do […] We will see our land free and nourished again.”
We thank everyone for their support and statements of solidarity as we continue to fight for our sovereignty. S’necalyegh to everyone that has fought beside us with boots on the ground and feet in the street. We will always stand strong. We expect that it will be months before we see Judge Tammen again for sentencing. We will continue to walk in our ancestors footsteps. Awitza, misiyh.
📢 Community Call-Out from the Wet’suwet’en Divestment Team: Host a Screening of the documentary Yintah!
We’re excited to invite YOU to bring this powerful and inspirational documentary to your community however big or small! This film dives deep into over a decade long Wet’suwet’en resistance against the Coastal GasLink pipeline(CGL). Yintah is a must-see that sparks vital conversations and action!
On February 18th 2025, Sleydo’, Molly Wickham (Gidimt’en), Shaylynn Sampson (Gitxsan), Corey Jocko (Haudenosaunee) will hear colonial judge Tammen’s final decision in their Abuse of Process application against the RCMP/CIRG.
At the same time, Wet’suwet’en members and Hereditary Chiefs oppose and reject CGL’s proposed phase 2, including the construction of massive compressor stations on the Yintah to double the pipeline’s capacity. Wet’suwet’en Land Defenders also stand in Solidarity with our neighbors from the Gitxsan nation, including the Gitanyow as they stand against Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project🔥To learn more from Land Defenders on the ground, join an upcoming webinar hosted by Change Course and Decolonial Solidarity February 24th 2025 7pm est/4pm pst. Link to register in the bio.
🎬 How to Get Involved:
Sign up to host a screening. We’ll help you with resources, including event materials and support.
Host a Screening: Gather your community, friends/family, or colleagues to watch and discuss the film together.
Raise Awareness: Share the message of the documentary and help amplify the voices of Indigenous communities.
Engage in Dialogue: After the screening, have an open conversation about the film’s themes, lessons, and ways you can support Indigenous Land Defenders and their sovereignty.
Unite and stand in Solidarity with Indigenous Land Defenders and allies as they continue their fight.🌱 Yintah is more than just a film – it’s an invitation to stand together and kick some colonial ass for Mother Earth and future generations.
Our feature length documentary film won the prestigious Audience Award as voted by festival attendees at the Hot Docs 2024 Film Festival in Toronto! This award will ensure a further reach and opportunities for the distribution of Yintah.
This comes with a $50k cash award sponsored by Rogers.
We are so grateful for everyone that has seen the film, written about it, and shared!
Wedzin Kwa. This is what we are fighting to protect. Clean drinking water. Salmon spawning beds. Everything depends on her. Please consider joining us.
.
There are many different ways to support! You can take action where you are, support local issues that raise Indigenous sovereignty or donate. You can also come to the yintah where there are always projects and builds happening to reclaim and reoccupy our territory.
Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first.
One of the most common reactions is that abandoning agriculture is tantamount to committing many billions of people to death, since the planet can’t support billions of hunter-gatherers—especially given the dire toll on ecological health already accumulated.
Such a reaction definitely contains elements of truth, but also a few unexamined assumptions. The outcome need not be reprehensible for several reasons.
We All Die
Presumably this doesn’t come as a shock to anyone, but the 8 billion humans now on the planet are all going to die: every last one of them. This will happen no matter what. It’s inevitable. No one lives forever, or even much beyond a century.
Are we mortified by this news, intellectually? Of course not: our individual mortality comes as no great surprise. Some even accept it emotionally! So, there we go: whatever (realistic) proposal anyone else might offer for how humanity goes forward has the exact same consequence: OMG: you’ve just committed 8 billion people to die! You decide to have toast for breakfast? 8 billion people will end up dying. Nice going. Monster.
Timescales
I suspect that many strongly-negative reactions to suggestions that we adopt a “primitive” (ecologically-rooted) lifestyle trace to an implicit assumption about timescales. Maybe this is a result of our culture’s short-term focus on quarterly profits, short election cycles, or any other political proposal that tends to promise short- or intermediate-term results. So, perhaps it is assumed without question or curiosity that I am talking about a radical transition taking place over years or decades rather than centuries or even millennia. I would never…
Maybe I need to be better about pre-loading my discussion with this temporal context, since the assumption of short-term focus is so universal, and I get accused of misanthropy for something I never said—a running theme in this post. Abandoning agriculture need not happen overnight (and can’t, reasonably)!
Hypocrite!
Some of the angrier reactions suggest I volunteer to be one of those killed dead as part of my assumed/conjured “program,” or that I get my hypocritical @$$ out into the woods to eat lichen, naked. First of all, normal attrition, accompanied by sub-replacement fertility, is all it takes to whittle human population down, without requiring even a single premature death. And suppressed fertility needn’t be programmatically mandated like it was in China for a few decades: it’s happening on its own volition right now, around the globe. Roughly 70% of humans on the planet live in countries whose fertility rate is below replacement. It’s not a niche phenomenon, and presages a nearly-inevitable population downturn once the already-rolling train reaches the reproductive station in a generation’s time.
Part of the “you first” reaction, I believe, relates to our culture’s emphasis on the individual self. People automatically translate that I am asking them, personally, to become a hunter-gatherer or die. Again, I never said that, but it’s not unusual for people conditioned by our culture to take things personally, given ample reinforcement that we are each the deserving center of our own universe and little else matters. It is therefore understandable that members of modernity would assume (project) the same outlook is true for me. For those operating under this narrow (self-referential) assumption of how all others work, many valuable voices in the world must become baffling—or suspected of being disingenuous—which is a little sad.
When I point my passion toward avoiding a sixth mass extinction (which I interpret to include humans), I am not thinking about myself at all, but humans not yet born and species I don’t even know exist. My concern is focused on the health and happiness of a biodiverse, ecologically rich future. I myself am practically a lost cause as a product of modernity still trapped within its prison bars, and sure to die well before any of this resolves. Moreover, I can’t decide to roam the local lands hunting and gathering as long as property rights prevail and I do not enjoy membership in an ecological community operating outside the law. But, what I cando is try to get more people to wish for freedom, so that when opportunities arise good things can germinate in the cracks and force the cracks wider—even if I’m long gone when the crumbling process is complete. To repeat: it’s not about me. Talk of hypocrisy misses the boat entirely, by decades or centuries.
Not Even a Choice
Even if my audience gets over the shocked misimpression that I’m not talking about them personally, or a transition in their lifetimes, the objection can still remain strong. Isn’t keeping something like 8 billion humans alive indefinitely (via replacement in a steady demographic) far superior to something like 10–100 million hunter-gatherers living in misery?
First, the Hobbesian fallacy of believing foraging life to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” is so far off the mark and ignorantly uninformed as to be pitiable—but certainly understandable given our culture’s persistent programming on this point. Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death does a fantastic job dismantling this myth based on overwhelming anthropological evidence. Turns out we don’t get to fabricate stories of the past out of whole cloth (i.e., out of our meat-brains), without one bit of relevant knowledge or experience.
More broadly, if one’s worldview is that of a human supremacist (nearly universal in our culture, after all), then preservation of a ∼1010 human population makes complete sense: can’t have too much of a godly thing.
But we mustn’t forget that 8 billion humans are driving a sixth mass extinction, which leaves no room for even 10 humans if fully realized, let alone 1010. Deforestation, animal/plant population declines, and extinction rates are through the roof, along with a host of other existential perils. We have zero reason or evidence to believe (magically) that somehow 8 billion people could preserve modern living standards—reliant as they are on a steady flow of non-renewable extraction—while somehow not only arresting, but reversing the ominous ecological trends.
No serious, credible proposals to accomplish any such outcome are on the table: the play is to remain actively ignorant of the threat, facilitated by a narrow focus on this fleeting moment in time during which the modernity stunt has been performed. If ignorance did not prevail, we’d see retreat-oriented proposals coming out of our ears for how to mitigate/prevent the sixth mass extinction—but people say “the sixth what?” and go back to focusing on the Amazon that isn’t a dying rain forest. Most people know about climate change, but the dozens of “solutions” proposed to mitigate climate change amount to maintaining full power for modernity so that we motor-on at present course and speed under a different energy source. The IPCC never recommends orders-of-magnitude fewer humans or abandoning high-energy, high-resource-use lifestyles…because it would be political suicide—which says a lot about the limited value of such heavily-constrained institutions.
Saying that the planet (and humans as a part of it) would be better off with far fewer people can result in my being labeled a misanthrope, though I’ve never said I dislike people. I’ve heard it put nicely this way by several folks: I don’t hate people. I love them—just not all at the same time.
Quantitatively, 10–100 million humans on the planet for the next million years seems far preferable to 10 billion for only 100 or so more before the dominoes fall in a cascading ecological collapse at mass-extinction levels. Factoring in infant mortality and life expectancy among pre-historic people, a population of 10–100 million for a million years translates to roughly 200 billion to 2 trillion adults over time—far outweighing the total human life of 10 billion over a century or two.
Perhaps, then, I’m justified in turning the tables: reacting in horror to those who would propose to maintain a population of 8 billion, as this effectively condemns humans to a short tenure before mass extinction wipes us out. Why do proponents of maintaining present population levels hate humans so much? I’m actually serious!
Try this on: people love their kids, right? Let’s say that parents having 1–10 children are capable of expressing adequate love and providing adequate resources for all their kids. But if kids are so great, why not have 800 per family? You see, even great things cease to be great when the numbers are insane. 10–100 million humans can know a love and provision from Mother Earth that 8 billion surely will not. It’s madness, and our nurturing mother is being ravaged by the onslaught of the teeming, unloved—thus unloving—masses. Indeed, our culture wages war against the Community of Life, erroneously convinced that it was at war with us first. Yet, it created us, and nurtured us, or we would not be here!
Allowing normal demographic reduction to a sustainable population maximizes the total number of humans able to enjoy living on Earth. Now, I can’t really justify that as a valid metric—especially given our crimes against species—but I’m exposing my bias as a human (short of human supremacy: just expressing a preference that humans have some place on Earth rather than none). Not all human cultures have acted as destructively as ours, by a long shot, and many have considered Earth to be a generous, nurturing partner. Sustainable precedents liberally spread across a few million years at least somewhat justify the belief that humans canenjoy living on Earth without killing the host, and I’ll take what I can get.
Space Parallel
Tipped off by Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute, I listened to a fantastic podcast episodecalled “The Green Cosmos: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia”. In the last four minutes, professor of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein reported that her students held an inverted sense of the impossible. To them, it was utterly impossible to imagine living on Earth with “nothing” (tech gadgets) as our ancestors actually really definitely did for millions of years, while not doubting the possibility that we could build space colonies in the asteroid belt and keep our devices and conveniences—despite nothing remotely of the sort ever being demonstrated. The delusion is fascinating, reminding me of Flat-Earthers, as featured in the insightful documentary “Behind the Curve.” Just as the earth looks flat to us on casual inspection, a few expensive stunts make it look to the faithful like we could someday colonize space. That’s right: I’m lumping space enthusiasts in with Flat-Earthers: enjoy each other’s company, folks!
But the base disconnect is very similar, here. Maintaining 8 billion human people on Earth is no more possible than invading space. It’s not an actual, realizable choice—beyond transitory and costly stunt demonstrations.
Hating the Likes?
The other head-exploding facet to the proposal of a much-reduced population living in something closer to our ecological context is that it would seem to amount to a callous repudiation of precious products of modernity: opera, symphony, great art, lunar landings, modern medicine, David Beckham’s right foot… Why do I hate these things? Well, I never said I did. Again with the words in my mouth… What I—or any of us—might like or dislike is completely irrelevant when it comes to biophysical reality and constraint.
What makes us think we have a choice to separate the good from the bad, when they are most decidedly a package deal that we’ve been wholly unable to separate in practice, all this time? The following tangled figure—itself a staggering oversimplification of the actual mess—is repeated from an earlier post on Likes and Dislikes.
The fundamental flaw is that when faced with an unfamiliar landscape, our brains instantly and automatically assign separate qualities and features to a reality that in truth is inseparably inter-linked. Because the connections are numerous and often far from obvious, we are tricked into believing the entry-level mental model of separability. It’s the most basic and naïve (often adaptively useful) starting point to recognize a bunch of “things” without delving into the Gordian Knot of relationships. But that’s the easy part, and many stop there before it gets hard—often too hard for the very limited human brain, in fact. No blame, here: we all do it.
The Likes and Dislikes are a single phenomenon, having multiple interrelated aspects. Despite initial unexamined impressions, apparently we don’t actually get to choose to have modern medicine without advancing a sixth mass extinction. I’d give up a lot to prevent such a dire outcome—including modern medicine, since preserving it appears to translate to its own terminal diagnosis. Living seven decades is not rare in hunter-gatherer cultures; dental health is far better without agricultural products like grains and sugars dominating diets; and the chronic diseases we know too well in modernity are effectively absent for foraging folk (and notbecause lives are too short to expose them to the possibility—look deeper!). Modern medicine has extended adult life expectancy (once surviving infant mortality) maybe a decade or two, but at orders-of-magnitude greater per-capita ecological impact: a fatal “bargain” that calls to question our judgment.
Let the Standing Wave Stand
Some cloud patterns stay fixed relative to terrain—a coastline or mountain range/peak—even though the wind whisks along (see orographic and lenticular cloud formations). Moist air condenses at the leading edge, droplets careen through the formation, then evaporate on the trailing edge. These “standing wave” patterns are at once stationary and dynamic, with individual constituents playing a transitory role in a larger, more persistent phenomenon.
Human lives are similar: we flow into and out of life, while genetic patterns preserve a slowly-evolving human form across generations. The problem is that the magnitude and practices of the phenomenon are destroying the ecological conditions that allowed the phenomenon to arise and get so large in the first place. Our 8-billion-strong “cloud” is grossly unsustainable, so that it will collapse via its own downpour if not allowed to shrink. It’s possible to do so by natural attrition and generational transformation of lifestyles. While many factors threaten to make such a transition turbulent and “lossy,” the endpoint itself does not inherently demand a tortured path. Again, given modernity’s structural unsustainability, where we end up is not reallyan open choice. So, it’s best do what we can to make the only real positive outcome emerge as smoothly as it might: by embracing it and leaning into it rather than putting up a futile and destructive resistance that will hurt (all) lives far more than on the gentler path. Either way, 8 billion people will die. The bigger question is: will millions still live?
Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises everything wrong with the industrial food system’s vision for our future. It represents a dystopian roadmap to a world where our most fundamental connection to nature and culture — our food — is hijacked by corporate interests and mediated through a maze of unnecessary and potentially harmful technologies.
The wild predictions and technological ‘solutions’ presented in the report reveal a profound disconnection from the lived experiences of ordinary people and the real challenges facing our food systems. Its claim (in 2019) that a quarter of Britons will be vegetarian by 2025 seems way off the mark. But it fits a narrative that seeks to reshape our diets and food culture. Once you convince the reader that things are going to be a certain way in the future, it is easier to pave the way for normalising what appears elsewhere in the report: lab-grown meat, 3D-printed foods and space farming.
Of course, the underlying assumption is that giant corporations — and supermarkets like Sainsbury’s — will be controlling everything and rolling out marvellous ‘innovations’ under the guise of ‘feeding the world’ or ‘saving the planet’. There is no concern expressed in the report about the consolidation of corporate-technocratic control over the food system.
By promoting high-tech solutions, the report seemingly advocates for a future where our food supply is entirely dependent on complex technologies controlled by a handful of corporations.
The report talks of ‘artisan factories’ run by robots. Is this meant to get ordinary people to buy into Sainsbury’s vision of the future? Possibly, if the intention is to further alienate people from their food sources, making them ever more dependent on corporate-controlled, ultra-processed products.
It’s a future where the art of cooking, the joy of growing food and the cultural significance of traditional dishes are replaced by sterile, automated processes devoid of human touch and cultural meaning. This erosion of food culture and skills is not an unintended consequence — it’s a core feature of the corporate food system’s strategy to create a captive market of consumers unable to feed themselves without corporate intervention.
The report’s enthusiasm for personalised nutrition driven by AI and biometric data is akin to an Orwellian scenario that would give corporations unprecedented control over our dietary choices, turning the most fundamental human need into a data-mined, algorithm-driven commodity.
The privacy implications are staggering, as is the potential for new forms of discrimination and social control based on eating habits. Imagine a world where your insurance premiums are tied to your adherence to a corporate-prescribed diet or where your employment prospects are influenced by your ‘Food ID’. The possible dystopian reality lurking behind Sainsbury’s glossy predictions.
The report’s fixation on exotic ingredients like jellyfish and lichen draws attention away from the real issues affecting our food systems — corporate concentration, environmental degradation and the systematic destruction of local food cultures and economies. It would be better to address the root causes of food insecurity and malnutrition, which are fundamentally issues of poverty and inequality, not a lack of novel food sources.
Nothing is mentioned about the vital role of agroecology, traditional farming knowledge and food sovereignty in creating truly sustainable and just food systems. Instead, what we see is a future where every aspect of our diet is mediated by technology and corporate interests, from gene-edited crops to synthetic biology-derived foods. A direct assault on the principles of food sovereignty, which assert the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.
The report’s emphasis on lab-grown meat and other high-tech protein sources is particularly troubling. These technologies, far from being the environmental saviours they are promoted as, risk increasing energy use and further centralising food production in the hands of a few tech giants.
The massive energy requirements for large-scale cultured meat production are conveniently glossed over, as are the potential health risks of consuming these novel foods without long-term safety studies. This push for synthetic foods is not about sustainability or animal welfare — it’s about creating new, patentable food sources that can be controlled and monetised by corporations.
Moreover, the push for synthetic foods and ‘precision fermentation’ threatens to destroy the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and pastoralists worldwide, replacing them with a handful of high-tech facilities controlled by multinational corporations.
Is this meant to be ‘progress’?
It’s more like a boardroom recipe for increased food insecurity, rural poverty and corporate monopolisation. The destruction of traditional farming communities and practices would not only be an economic disaster but a cultural catastrophe, erasing millennia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about sustainable food production.
The report’s casual mention of ‘sin taxes’ on meat signals a future where our dietary choices are increasingly policed and penalised by the state, likely at the behest of corporate interests.
The Issue of Meat
However, on the issue of the need to reduce meat consumption and replace meat with laboratory-manufactured items in order to reduce carbon emissions, it must be stated that the dramatic increase in the amount of meat consumed post-1945 was not necessarily the result of consumer preference; it had more to do with political policy, the mechanisation of agriculture and Green Revolution practices.
“Have you ever wondered how ‘meat’ became such a central part of the Western diet? Or how the industrialisation of ‘animal agriculture’ came about? It might seem like the natural outcome of the ‘free market’ meeting demand for more ‘meat’. But from what I have learned from Nibert (2002) and Winders and Nibert (2004), the story of how ‘meat’ consumption increased so much in the post-World War II period is anything but natural. They argue it is largely due to a decision in the 1940s by the US government to deal with the problem of surplus grain by increasing the production of ‘meat’.”
Kassam notes:
“In the second half of the 20th century, global ‘meat’ production increased by nearly 5 times. The amount of ‘meat’ eaten per person doubled. By 2050 ‘meat’ consumption is estimated to increase by 160 percent (The World Counts, 2017). While global per capita ‘meat’ consumption is currently 43 kg/year, it is nearly double in the UK (82 kg/year) and almost triple in the US (118 kg/year).”
Kassam notes that habits and desires are manipulated by elite groups for their own interests. Propaganda, advertising and ‘public relations’ are used to manufacture demand for products. Agribusiness corporations and the state have used these techniques to encourage ‘meat’ consumption, leading to the slaughter and untold misery of billions of creatures, as Kassam makes clear.
People were manipulated to buy into ‘meat culture’. Now they are being manipulated to buy out, again by elite groups. But ‘sin taxes’ and Orwellian-type controls on individual behaviour are not the way to go about reducing meat consumption.
So, what is the answer?
Kassam says that one way to do this is to support grassroots organisations and movements which are working to resist the power of global agribusiness and reclaim our food systems. Movements for food justice and food sovereignty which promote sustainable, agroecological production systems.
At least then people will be free from corporate manipulation and better placed to make their own food choices.
As Kassam says:
“From what I have learned so far, our oppression of other animals is not just a result of individual choices. It is underpinned by a state supported economic system driven by profit.”
Misplaced Priorities
Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s vision of food production in space and on other planets is perhaps the most egregious example of misplaced priorities. While around a billion struggle with hunger and malnutrition and many more with micronutrient deficiencies, corporate futurists are fantasising about growing food on Mars.
Is this supposed to be visionary thinking?
It’s a perfect encapsulation of the technocratic mindset that believes every problem can be solved with more technology, no matter how impractical or divorced from reality.
Moreover, by promoting a future dependent on complex, centralised technologies, we become increasingly vulnerable to system failures and corporate monopolies. A truly resilient food system should be decentralised, diverse and rooted in local knowledge and resources.
The report’s emphasis on nutrient delivery through implants, patches and intravenous methods is particularly disturbing. This represents the ultimate commodification of nutrition, reducing food to mere fuel and stripping away all cultural, social and sensory aspects of eating. It’s a vision that treats the human body as a machine to be optimised, rather than a living being with complex needs and experiences.
The idea of ‘grow-your-own’ ingredients for cultured meat and other synthetic foods at home is another example of how this technocratic vision co-opts and perverts concepts of self-sufficiency and local food production. Instead of encouraging people to grow real, whole foods, it proposes a dystopian parody of home food production that still keeps consumers dependent on corporate-supplied technologies and inputs. A clever marketing ploy to make synthetic foods seem more natural and acceptable.
The report’s predictions about AI-driven personal nutrition advisors and highly customised diets based on individual ‘Food IDs’ raise serious privacy concerns and threaten to further medicalise our relationship with food. While personalised nutrition could offer some benefits, the level of data collection and analysis required for such systems could lead to unprecedented corporate control over our dietary choices.
Furthermore, the emphasis on ‘artisan’ factories run by robots completely misunderstands the nature of artisanal food production. True artisanal foods are the product of human skill, creativity and cultural knowledge passed down through generations. It’s a perfect example of how the technocratic mindset reduces everything to mere processes that can be automated, ignoring the human and cultural elements that give food its true value.
The report’s vision of meat ‘assembled’ on 3D printing belts is another disturbing example of the ultra-processed future being proposed. This approach to food production treats nutrition as a mere assembly of nutrients, ignoring the complex interactions between whole foods and the human body. It’s a continuation of the reductionist thinking that has led to the current epidemic of diet-related diseases.
Sainsbury’s is essentially advocating for a future where our diets are even further removed from natural, whole foods.
The concept of ‘farms’ cultivating plants to make growth serum for cells is yet another step towards the complete artificialisation of the food supply. This approach further distances food production from natural processes. It’s a vision of farming that has more in common with pharmaceutical production than traditional agriculture, and it threatens to complete the transformation of food from a natural resource into an industrial product.
Sainsbury’s apparent enthusiasm for gene-edited and synthetic biology-derived foods is also concerning. These technologies’ rapid adoption without thorough long-term safety studies and public debate could lead to unforeseen health and environmental impacts. The history of agricultural biotechnology is rife with examples of unintended consequences, from the development of herbicide-resistant superweeds to the contamination of non-GM crops.
Is Sainsbury’s uncritically promoting these technologies, disregarding the precautionary principle?
Issues like food insecurity, malnutrition and environmental degradation are not primarily technical problems — they are the result of inequitable distribution of resources, exploitative economic systems and misguided policies. By framing these issues as purely technological challenges, Sainsbury’s is diverting attention from the need for systemic change and social justice in the food system.
The high-tech solutions proposed are likely to be accessible only to the wealthy, at least initially, creating a two-tiered food system where the rich have access to ‘optimized’ nutrition while the poor are left with increasingly degraded and processed options.
But the report’s apparent disregard for the cultural and social aspects of food is perhaps its most fundamental flaw. Food is not merely fuel for our bodies; it’s a central part of our cultural identities, social relationships and connection to the natural world. By reducing food to a series of nutrients to be optimised and delivered in the most efficient manner possible, Sainsbury’s is proposing a future that is not only less healthy but less human.
While Sainsbury’s Future of Food report can be regarded as a roadmap to a better future, it is really a corporate wish list, representing a dangerous consolidation of power in the hands of agribusiness giants and tech companies at the expense of farmers, consumers and the environment.
The report is symptomatic of a wider ideology that seeks to legitimise total corporate control over our food supply. And the result? A homogenised, tech-driven dystopia.
A technocratic nightmare that gives no regard for implementing food systems that are truly democratic, ecologically sound and rooted in the needs and knowledge of local communities.
The real future of food lies not in corporate labs and AI algorithms, but in the fields of agroecological farmers, the kitchens of home cooks and the markets of local food producers.
The path forward is not through more technology and corporate control but through a return to the principles of agroecology, food sovereignty and cultural diversity.
This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food (Global Research, 2024). It is the third book in a series of open-access ebooks on the global food system by the author. It can be read here.
Colin Todhunter is an independent researcher and writer.
Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” – Derrick Jensen Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?
China’s already vast infrastructure programme has entered a new phase as building work starts on the Motuo hydropower project.
The dam will consist of five cascade hydropower stations arranged from upstream to downstream and, once completed, will be the world’s largest source of hydroelectric power. It will be four times larger than China’s previous signature hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtse river in central China.
The Chinese premier, Li Qiang, has described the proposed mega dam as the “project of the century”. In several ways, Li’s description is apt. The vast scale of the project is a reflection of China’s geopolitical status and ambitions.
Possibly the most controversial aspect of the dam is its location. The site is on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. This is connected to the Brahmaputra river which flows into the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh as well as Bangladesh. It is an important source of water for Bangladesh and India.
Both nations have voiced concerns over the dam, particularly since it can potentially affect their water supplies. The tension with India over the dam is compounded by the fact that Arunachal Pradesh has been a focal point of Sino-Indian tensions. China claims the region, which it refers to as Zangnan, saying it is part of what it calls South Tibet.
At the same time, the dam presents Beijing with a potentially formidable geopolitical tool in its dealings with the Indian government. The location of the dam means that it is possible for Beijing to restrict India’s water supply.
This potential to control downstream water supply to another country has been demonstrated by the effects that earlier dam projects in the region have had on the nations of the Mekong river delta in 2019. As a result, this gives Beijing a significant degree of leverage over its neighbours.
One country restricting water supply to put pressure on another is by no means unprecedented. In fact in April 2025, following a terror attack by Pakistan-based The Resistance Front in Kashmir, which killed 26 people (mainly tourists), India suspended the Indus waters treaty, restricting water supplies to Pakistani farmers in the region. So the potential for China’s dam to disrupt water flows will further compound the already tense geopolitics of southern Asia.
Background layer attributed to DEMIS Mapserver, map created by Shannon1, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Concrete titans
The Motuo mega dam is an advertisement of China’s prowess when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects. China’s expertise with massive infrastructure projects is a big part of modern Chinese diplomacy through its massive belt and road initiative.
This involves joint ventures with many developing nations to build large-scale infrastructure, such as ports, rail systems and the like. It has caused much consternation in Washington and Brussels, which view these initiatives as a wider effort to build Chinese influence at their expense.
The completion of the dam will will bring Beijing significant symbolic capital as a demonstration of China’s power and prosperity – an integral feature of the image of China that Beijing is very keen to promote. It can also be seen as a manifestation of both China’s aspiration and its longstanding fears.
Harnessing the rivers
The Motuo hydropower project also represents the latest chapter of China’s long battle for control of its rivers, a key story in the development of Chinese civilisation.
France 24 report on the construction of the mega dam project.
Such struggles have been embodied in Chinese mythology in the form of the Gun-Yu myth. This tells the story of the way floods displaced the population of ancient China, probably based on an actual flooding at Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River in what is now Qinghai province in 1920BC.
This has led to the common motif of rivers needing human control to abate natural disaster, a theme present in much classical Chinese culture and poetry.
The pursuit of controlling China’s rivers has also been one of the primary influences on the formation of the Chinese state, as characterised by the concept of zhishui 治水 (controlling the rivers). Efforts to control the Yangtze have shaped the centralised system of governance that has characterised China throughout its history. In this sense, the Motuo hydropower project represents the latest chapter in China’s quest to harness the power of its rivers.
Such a quest remains imperative for China and its importance has been further underlined by the challenges of climate change, which has seen natural resources such as water becoming increasingly limited. The Ganges river has already been identified as one of the world’s water scarcity hotspots.
As well as sustaining China’s population, the hydropower provided by the dam is another part of China’s wider push towards self-sufficiency. It’s estimated that the dam could generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year – about the same about produced by the whole UK. While this will meet the needs of the local population, it also further entrenches China’s ability to produce cheap electricity – something that has enabled China to become and remain a manufacturing superpower.
Construction has only just begun, but Motuo hydropower project has already become a microcosm of China’s wider push towards development. It’s also a gamechanger in the geopolitics of Asia, giving China the potential to exert greater control in shaping the region’s water supplies. This in turn will give it greater power to shape the geopolitics of the region.
At the same time, it is also the latest chapter of China’s longstanding quest to harness its waterways, which now has regional implications beyond anything China’s previous dynasties could imagine.
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s national human rights commission has found a slew of legal and rights violations in a government-backed project to establish large-scale plantations in the eastern region of Papua.
The so-called food estate project, categorized by the government as being of strategic national importance, or PSN, aims to clear 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land in Merauke district, two-thirds of it for sugarcane plantations and the rest for rice fields — an area 45 times the size of Jakarta.
The rights commission, known as Komnas HAM, launched an investigation after receiving complaints last year from four Indigenous tribes whose ancestral lands overlap with the food estate. The tribes — the Malind, Maklew, Khimaima and Yei — alleged that the project violated their land rights and impacted their livelihoods.
Komnas HAM, which is funded by the government but operates independently, quizzed officials involved in the project from the local and national governments. Based on these inquiries, it said it had found indications of land grabbing, environmental degradation, militarization and intimidation.
For one, Komnas HAM said the Indigenous communities hadn’t given consent to transfer or use their customary lands for the project. When the government zoned their areas for the food estate project, it never properly consulted them, the inquiry found.
However, these communities lack strong legal standing to defend their territories, as their land rights aren’t formally recognized by the government. The only basis for their Indigenous territorial claims is participatory mapping — carried out by themselves — of their lands.
The Indigenous communities also complained of the intensified presence of the military in their areas. Papua has long been the most militarized region of Indonesia, the result of a long-running insurgency. But while Jakarta maintains that the heavy security presence there is to counter what it calls “criminal armed groups” affiliated with the West Papua independence campaign, the military is now engaged in the food estate project.
On Nov. 10, 2024, 2,000 troops arrived in Merauke to support the project; military posts had already been established beforehand. And earlier last year, the military also provided a security escort for a fleet of heavy equipment to build infrastructure for the project in Ilwayab subdistrict.
“The addition of military forces around forests and Indigenous lands affected by the PSN creates heightened tension,” Komnas HAM wrote in a letter detailing its findings. “Although their official role is to support the project, their large-scale deployment increases fear among Indigenous people, who feel watched and physically threatened.”
Satya Bumi, an environmental NGO that’s been monitoring the project, said the government’s decision to deploy armed forces to Merauke indicates the state views Indigenous peoples as a threat to the nation who must be subdued.
Threat to forests and people
The plantation project’s large-scale monoculture model also threatens Merauke’s biodiverse forests and ecological balance, Komnas HAM found. These ecosystems are vital to the livelihood of the Indigenous communities, providing traditional food crops like sago and tubers, the commission noted.
Franky Samperante, director of the Pusaka Foundation, an NGO that works with Indigenous peoples in Papua, welcomed Komnas HAM’s findings.
“They confirm that there is indeed a potential for human rights violations — starting from the formulation of the laws and policies themselves, which were done without consultation or consent from local communities, to the potential impacts on their way of life,” he told Mongabay.
Based on these findings, Komnas HAM concluded that the food estate project contradicts multiple national regulations protecting Indigenous rights.
It cited the 1999 Forestry Law, which requires permits and consultation for the use of customary forests — a requirement that in this case wasn’t fulfilled. Similarly, the exclusion of Indigenous peoples violates the principle of participation under the 2012 Land Procurement Law.
The project also goes against international human rights and environmental standards. While Indonesia hasn’t ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Komnas HAM emphasized that the principles it enshrines — particularly the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination and free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) — should serve as a benchmark.
The project’s ongoing deforestation and disruption of Indigenous territories also run counter to Indonesia’s commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework, both of which oblige the government to uphold forest conservation, climate resilience and Indigenous rights.
List of rights violations
In all, Komnas HAM identified five human rights violations in the food estate project.
The first of these is the right to land and customary territory, which is guaranteed under Indonesia’s Constitution.
The second is the right to a healthy environment, also enshrined in the Constitution and the 2009 Environmental Protection Law.
The third is the right to food security, guaranteed by the Constitution and the 2012 Food Law, which mandates that food policies be based on community needs and participation, including of Indigenous peoples.
The fourth is the right to participation in decision-making, guaranteed by the 2012 Land Procurement Law.
And the fifth right violated in the project is the right to security, as the heavy presence of the military creates psychological pressure and increases fear of intimidation or violence among Indigenous peoples, Komnas HAM said.
Recommendations
Given these multiple rights and legal violations, Komnas HAM issued a number of recommendations for the government, at local and national levels.
It said the government should first increase Indigenous participation in the project planning by ensuring local communities’ active involvement to obtain their FPIC. Consent must be obtained not only from tribal or clan chiefs, but from all traditional stakeholders, it said. The government must also provide an effective complaint mechanism to address Indigenous communities’ complaints about the project.
Second, the government must work with Indigenous communities to carry out legally sound and transparent mapping of customary lands to prevent unauthorized land transfers and ensure legal recognition of the communities’ land rights, Komnas HAM said.
The rights commission also said the government should strengthen policies that acknowledge Indigenous rights to land and territories, including decisions over forest use and agricultural land use.
In addition, the government must ensure that projects involving Indigenous land provide fair benefits and promote sustainable development for Indigenous peoples, it said.
Komnas HAM’s final recommendation is for the government to evaluate the issuance of permits and concessions to companies operating on customary lands, prioritizing the interests of Indigenous communities in land-use policies in their areas.
Calls to end the project
Uli Parulian Sihombing, a commissioner at Komnas HAM who issued the recommendation letter, said the commission will continue its inquiries of government officials to ensure the recommendations are carried out. However, the commission’s recommendations are not legally binding.
Satya Bumi called for the more drastic step of ending the Merauke food estate project entirely. “The Komnas HAM recommendation must serve as a loud alarm,” the group said.
Evaluating the project alone isn’t enough, given its potential to wreak systematic destruction of the environment, living spaces and the socioeconomic fabric of local communities, the NGO said.
It added similar measures must be taken to halt other PSN projects elsewhere in the country, which have similarly been the target of human rights violations, such as a solar panel factory on Rempang Island and an oil refinery in Air Bangis, both in Sumatra.
And since land grabbing and environmental destruction have already occurred in Merauke, the government must restore the rights of the affected communities through compensation and the recovery of customary forests, Satya Bumi said.
“Efforts to restore rights and guarantee the welfare of communities can serve as evidence that the government upholds its constitutional duty to promote public welfare, as written in the 1945 Constitution,” Satya Bumi said. “If not, then all nationalist claims and rhetoric about prioritizing the people’s interests are empty slogans, mere political fiction.”
The group also demanded the withdrawal of military and police forces from PSN locations like Merauke, saying their presence has endangered local communities and instilled ongoing fear.
“The many reckless approaches the government has taken in managing the country through the PSN [designation] reflect how it sees Papua: as empty land,” Satya Bumi said. “The promise of equitable development is a sham, when in fact the intended beneficiaries, the people, feel threatened and are forced to face an increasingly difficult existence.”
Franky from the Pusaka Foundation said it was unlikely the government would heed any of the calls by civil society groups or even Komnas HAM. He said the central government has a track record of ignoring grievances raised by communities and civil society, and instead prioritizing the interests of investors and fast-tracking their large-scale projects.
“The national government must also implement the recommendations, because they are responsible for the project,” Franky said.
