July 15th, 2006
Animal cruelty is in fact, a symptom, of problems in the wider society, that continue to permit oppression and domination to occur to animals, women, indigenous peoples, refugees, non-whites, the poor and the natural environment. It comes of a certain kind of logic – what ecofeminist philosopher Karen Warren calls, “the logic of domination”, which allows power holders to justify their behaviour by rationalising themselves into a position of superiority. The basis of that superiority differs with different forms of oppression, but the process is the same and leads inexorably to the degradation and objectification of the other. I think that many social justice activists are seeing oppressions as linked in this way – conceptually – and that the conceptual links provide grounds for solidarity.
As Kavita Ramdas, an Indian feminist activist says, “there is not a single issue in the world today that is not a women’s issue.” , or rather, I would say, there is not a single issue in the world that women are not concerned about and find relevant to themselves. How women’s rights connects to other social justice issues like animal cruelty, indigenous rights, refugee rights, racism, war, health, poverty and environmental degradation is evident in fact. I probably don’t need to spell that out to you here!
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Indigenous rights : Rape continues to be used to control ethnic Shan and Karen women by fear, under the Burmese military regime (WLB).
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Refugee rights: here are approximately 50 million uprooted people around the world, Between 75-80 per cent of them are women and children. (UNHCR). Many of them are fleeing gender-based violence including DV (AIUS)
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Racism: Women in indigenous and migrant communities bear the double burden of racism and sexism: they earn less than white women, are more likely to be discriminated against in the justice system, healthcare, housing and more often the victims of sexual assault and violence.
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War and militarism: Women and children do not make the decisions to go to war, but are always victims. Eighty per cent of casualties by small arms are women and children, who far outnumber military casualties. (UNHCR) Rape as a weapon of war is increasing. Seventy percent of the Rwandan women were raped during the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic war; More than 20,000 Muslim women were raped in Bosnia in a single year during the Bosnian war. DV within US army families is rife.
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Health: In Africa, women are 58% of those infected with HIV, in the US girls aged 13 to 19 represented the majority of new HIV infections (AIUS)
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Poverty: Seventy percent of the world’s labour is done by women, yet women own less than 1 percent of the world’s assets; According to the US National Crime Victimisation Survey the poorer you are the more likely you are to be a victim of violent crime. Women represent 70% of people living in poverty (AIUS)
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Animals: Domestic violence is the leading cause of death among women worldwide - 88% of domestic violence victims in the US report that their abuser threatened, abused or killed their pets to control them (HSUS).
I hope of have suggested to you how easy it is to connect the many forms of activism that women are involved in with feminism, and the nature of that connection, I think, is this “logic of domination”. For the use of force against women, animals, indigenous peoples, the locking up of refugees, the systemic devaluing of non-whites, the ignoring of women’s view on war, the marginalisation of their health issues and the poverty that many women find themselves in are all tools of domination and oppression that time and again are used to justify privilege and mistreatment.
However, the main issue I want to talk to you about today is related to how we treat animals our society and in the environment. I chose animals, not because I think any one struggle is more important than others, but because it is one I know a lot about. It is also directly related to my phd thesis, which is about ecofeminist activism and the role of compassion therein.
The rise of environmentalism as an issue on the public agenda in the 70s has meant that many activists have found themselves torn between human rights activism, of which women’s rights is of course a major stream, and environmental activism, which has been portrayed by the mainstream as less important than pressing issues like security, economics and employment. But gradually the realisation that the issue of our treatment of the environment and the creatures in it has a profound affect on how we can live our lives, has led to a humanisation of the environment movement to a certain extent. Certainly ecofeminists have strongly made this claim since the 80s that womens rights and environmental preservation are inseparable. Environmental Justice has become an important factor in earth preservation.
The extent to which women dominate the environmental activist movement demonstrates the concern that women do place on preserving the environment. A survey conducted in Queensland by Peter Daniels and Lex Brown in 1990 found that women had “more favourable attitudes to the environment… females have statistically significant higher environmental index scores than their older, and male, counterparts” (1990:v). (However, since John Howards 1996 ‘rationalisation’ of record keeping at the bureau of statistics, a deliberate move by his govt to make women invisible, it is rather difficult to find gender specific statistics on environmental attitudes in Australia. If anyone knows of any I would be very grateful).
Indeed, in many cases women lives are personally badly affected by environmental degradation first and to a greater extent than the lives of men. An increase in miscarriages, still-births and birth defects is often the first indication of toxics in the environment. Environmentalism becomes a survival cause when your native forests that you gather food and firewood are begin cleared for industrialised agriculture, when your community is so affected by salinity or deforestation that you have to spend many hours a day seeking wood and water, or when your environment that you are daily in close contact with is under threat from pollution, causing illness to your children to be born with defects and your family to become ill and unable to work or be happy. Women, who worldwide are the primary care givers to children, the ill and the elderley, always bear the greater burden of these kinds of environmental costs. Little wonder women are so firmly placed in the environment movement.
Motivated by caring for there families and their communities, women have joined the environmental activist community in droves. However, much of the ‘high-end’or government sponsored environment movement is not necessarily motivated by compassion at all, but by politics and technological science. Technology is providing what I would call end-of pipe solutions to environmental problems and to the extent it is dominated by environmental engineers and hence men. Political expedience and technological solutions do not deal with the root causes of environmental problems at all, but attempt band-aid measures that don’t change the status quo. The recent defection of Peter Garrett to the Labour party and the watering down of his views towards environmental sustainability indicate this quite clearly. So perhaps that is why many women remaining grass-roots activism instead of moving up the corparatisation ladder. And it is at the grass roots that people feel intimately their relationships with nature, where they are perhaps more likely to experience directly the effects of environmental problems and develop preventative solutions. It is also where you needn’t compromise your deeply felt values.
However, in line with much government policy on natural resource management, there is a lot that is not compassionate about the Environment movement. For instance many environmentalists espouse zero population growth and reduced immigration, many mainstream env orgs are so dependent on govt funding that they may be reticent to criticise the govt.
One of the most glaring examples of the contrast between compassion and what is considered environmentally sane, is wild animal control. Introduced animals are demonised by farmers, government and many environmentalists as THE cause of economic failure of farms, stifling the economy and reducing biodiversity. However, despite the rhetoric, the eradication of introduced and other wild species that are pests are not done for biodiversity reasons, but to increase the profitability of agriculture and forestry. Thus the possums and wallabies, kangaroos and dingoes are as much targets of the ‘control’ regimes as introduced animals. And the real barriers to the economic survival of the farm are deflected by blaming the impact of wild animals – factors like farmers debts to banks, fluctuations in a now globalised market for meat and other animal products, the effects of climate change and salinity on profitability and poverty constraining the farmers inability to plan ahead: all factors that the govt has much responsibility for contributing to through their trade liberalisation policies.
In addition Ecocentrists/Deep ecologists and Ecofeminists take the idea that human beings can manage something as complex as an ecosystem given our tendency thus far to damage it, sometimes irreparably. This has certainly been the case in the ‘management’ of wild and feral animals where, despite our best efforts to eradicate them where we perceive they are a problem, we have often introduced new problems.
The ways in which wild and introduced species are controlled in Australia have environmentally and socially dangerous outcomes.
For instance, the use of 1080 poison in widespread in Australia. It has become well known because of it’s heavy-handed use in Tasmania where foresters use it to kill off wildlife to protect new tree plantations after the old-growth forests have been cleared, it has been used by farmers there for many ears to kill wallabies and possums that eat their pasture. 1080 is disseminated on carrots to kill rabbits, cats, wallabies and possums or dropped from planes in bait for wild dogs, foxes, pigs and dingoes. This careless distribution of 1080 means that many non-target species are also killed, including quolls, Tasmanian devils and people’s pets also die. Secondary poisoning can occur to wildlife that eat the bodies of animals killed by 1080, in particular it endangers raptors and quolls. It also affects populations of native carnivores because it kills off their food source. But worst of all it is cruel.
The animals die as a result of ‘cardiac failure, progressive failure of the nervous system, or respiratory arrest following prolonged convulsion.’ 1080 poisoning results in a very slow and very painful death.
The RSPCA position paper says:
There is also considerable variation in the time from ingestion of the poison to death, ranging from less than an hour in some species to several days in others. In general Australian native carnivores die the most quickly, followed by herbivores and introduced carnivores, then reptiles and amphibians.
Previous arguments that 1080 is humane are flawed for a range of reasons. They are based on a limited selection of early toxicology papers that did not set out to address humaneness. They have concentrated on the perception of pain to the exclusion of distress. The statements about humaneness are not made in an objective manner. Broad generalisations are made between diseases with similar symptoms or related metabolic bases.
So it’s not even based in good science, which is often the argument govt department use against animal advocates. The RSPCA have been calling for it’s ban since 1987.
The other most widespread form of wild animal control in Australia is shooting. In Tasmania forestry companise have shot nearly 50,000 wallabies and possums to protect forests and plantations over 2003-2004.
In 2003/2004 over 7 millions kangaroos were under quota for shooting. Kangaroos are supposed, by code of practice, to be killed with a single shot to the head to be humane. However, in a 1985 study the RSPCA said that 15% of the recovered carcasses were not head-shots, this has decreased to 4% in 2003 which the RSPCA states “represents around 100,000 kangaroos every year.” Because females with joeys can also be killed, it is estimated that possibly millions of joeys starve to death every year. Farmers have less stringent rules and do not even need to prove their case to be permitted to shoot ‘roos. THE RSPCA wants to see farmers banned from shooting ‘roos because of anecdotal evidence that cruelty incidents like herding into fences and shooting on mass are occurring. Farmers are allowed to ‘shoot and let die’, meaning that thousands of kangaroos bleed slowly to death every year. In one incident witnessed by Pat O’Brien of the Wildlife protection Association of Australia, who also happens to be on the fed govts Kangaroo Management Advisory committee, says hundred of kangaroos were herded by jeeps and motorbikes into barbed wire fences and shot, those that didn’t die were left to die and the carcasses left out to attract wild dogs and dingoes which were then shot the next night.
Perhaps just as dangerous are the social effects of Australia’s wild animal control regimes. Encouraged by a sensationalist media, landowners are encouraged to think of any animal that competes with their livestock is not only their enemy, but wilfully so. The media often has a tendency to demonise the animals as some kind of invader, especially because most of them are introduced: “they are often portrayed as invading villains, when, of course, they are merely doing what animals do. Control strategies must avoid using inappropriate moral interpretations that suggest any type of control can be justified as a form of punishment” (Jones 2003:7). A recent Reuters story on the drought describes kangaroos as “terrifying drought-stricken Australian communities for months, gathering in school yards, invading towns and …raiding gardens” (Byrnes 2003).
And just think of the kind of viciousness with which people go after cane toads.
It is no secret to social service workers that people who kill for a living, or who are witnesses to killings, as many children are in farm situations, are emotionally damaged by that witnessing. The psychological effects of the repeated killing of animals has in recent years been the subject of study. It is well documented that meatworkers and hunters have higher incidence of domestic violence in their families, that animal abuse is directly related to human abuse and that children should be discouraged from harming animals for the bad repercussions this has on their development (Clifton 1995, Arkow 1998). Some of the worst serial killers in the world have childhood histories of being abused by adults, but of also abusing animals (Ascione 1995). The killing and harming of others has a brutalising effect on the perpetrators, a brutalising effect that carries over into their relationships with other human beings that makes them lessen or ignore the suffering of others.
The acceptance of this has secured police powers in the United Kingdom to investigate the families of convicted animal abusers for signs of domestic violence and child abuse. The maltreatment of animals is considered a warning signal for abuse in the family. In one study, researchers found that
Nearly three-quarters (71 %) of the women with pets reported that their male partner had threatened to hurt or kill and/or had actually hurt or killed one or more of their pets.” Examples of the former included threats to put a kitten in a blender, bury a cat to its head and “mow” it, starve a dog, and shoot and kill a cat. Actual harm or killing of animals was reported by 57% of the women with pets and included acts of omission (e.g., neglecting to feed or allow veterinary care) but most often acts of violence (Ascione 1995:1).
A 1997 survey of 50 of the largest shelters for battered women in the United States found that 85% of women and 63% of children entering shelters discussed incidents of pet abuse in the family. Children who have witnessed domestic violence or who have been the victims of physical or sexual abuse may also become animal abusers themselves, imitating the violence they have seen or experienced.
Psychologists for the Ethical treatment of Animals observed that in the recent spate of high school shootings in the US, including the famous Columbine incident, each one of the young perpetrators had tortured and killed animals including their own pets. Sociological researcher Clifton Flynn (2001) reports that the perpetrators of animal cruelty are overwhelmingly male. The social implications of this for the criminal justice system go well beyond the immediate concerns of animal welfarists and extend into an understanding of violence and masculinity that is rarely considered in ethical examinations of animal or environmental issues. It is certainly the task of Ecofeminists to highlight the implications that violence against animals has for the feminist project as much as it interconnects with this and the wider non-violent peace movement.
And that is exactly what Debbie and I have tried to do with AFAR and AAQ. AFAR exists to help promote awareness about the link between human violence and animal cruelty and Animal Activism Queensland (AAQ) is a grassroots network of activists dedicated to the exposure of practices that cause cruelty to animals.
AFAR’s main objective, at this point in time, is to see in place a program like the HSUS’s First Strike Program. The First Strike campaign was created by the Humane Society US in 1997 to raise public and professional awareness about the connection between animal cruelty and human violence and to help communities identify some of the origins of violence, predict its patterns, and prevent its escalation. Each year, the campaign works with local animal protection agencies around the United States to bring together animal shelter workers, animal control officers, social service workers, law enforcement officials, veterinarians, educators, and others to learn about the violence connection and to promote inter-agency collaborations to reduce animal cruelty, family violence, and community violence.
First Strike also provides investigative support, rewards, expert testimony, and information on the animal-human cruelty connection to law enforcement and prosecutors in high-profile animal cruelty cases. We also work jointly with legislators and activists throughout the United States to press for the passage of well-enforced, felony-level anti-cruelty laws. I am currently in communication with PETA and HSUS about how we might go about making a program like First Strike a reality in Australia.
Encouragingly, recently the RSPCA in Queensland has launched a program designed to teach children to be kind to animals of which we a fully supportive. In Brisbane we are trying, on a more practical level, to organise a pet fostering network because many women are reticent to leave an abuse situation because of their pets or children’s pets.
speech delivered at NOWSA 2006
Categories: environment |
Tags: animal rights, feminism | No Comments
May 24th, 2006
In 2002 6.1 million kangaroos and wallabies will be legally exterminated in Queensland: the largest quota EVER. Who knows? Who cares? In this article I ponder these questions and begin to understand why wars and ethnic cleansing are also possible.
The year two thousand and one marked a nadir for the world in many ways. Terrorism has become the universal justification for the oppression of free speech everywhere. Human rights that we have taken for granted in the western world are being whittled away in the name of security. Our minds have been focused on fear, in part generated by actual events, but magnified out of proportion by the mass media. While we are cocooned in this fear the world goes on, perhaps a bit more violent and intolerant than it was before, as we reject record numbers of refugees and our government suppresses so called ‘illegals’ like they are criminals without compassion for their all too human suffering.
In this climate of fear and intolerance the plight of suffering animals gets scant attention. Indeed, it may be, as human rights are being crushed everywhere, so too has the systematic slaughter of animals become more socially acceptable. The value of life has become less sacred, more relative.
The State of Queensland has excelled itself in the oppression of animals in the past few months. Hot on the heels of the extermination of Fraser Island’s dingoes (visitors are reporting no sightings at all now, six months later) the state government embarked on an all out assault on the wild dog population. Aerial baiting with 1080 took place state-wide, indiscriminately killing wild dogs and dingoes alike, despite QNP&WS alleged intention to preserve the dingo in certain areas. Little wonder that this baiting took place, for if the state refused to acknowledge the farmers claims of the plague status of these dogs, after they so enthusiastically ‘culled’ the Fraser dingoes, they would be labelled hypocrites.
And hypocrites they continue to be, giving kangaroos protected status with one hand and taking away their lives with the other. The Queensland Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee has declared a quota of six million macropods for 2002 for this state alone. This figure equates with last years quota for the whole nation. Farmers are claiming plague numbers of kangaroos, and the state is agreeing with them.
Putting aside an aquaintance and prominent kangaroo advocates recent claim that “farmers look out the window and see twenty ‘roos and they call it a plague”, let’s look at the evidence for plague numbers as the state sees it. Until 1983 kangaroo quotas were not set by any scientific method, but arbitrarily. The ACF policy staement reports:
Australian authorities claimed a total population of 32-35 million in 1980, implied this had grown to 36 million in 1982, and even suggested it could be as high as 60 million in 1983. In June 1983 a comprehensive estimate for the years 1980 to 1982 revealed the kangaroo population “peaked” in 1981 at only 19 million. (Grigg, Caughley and Short 1983)
The 1982/83 drought was the most severe on record in eastern Australia and caused an overall mortality of 43% in inland New South Wales kangaroo populations. Applying the known mortality rates to relevant areas of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia reveals that the post-drought kangaroo population would not exceed 13 million. Australia’s human population exceeded 15 million in 1983. The post-drought floods in western Queensland and north west NSW caused additional heavy post-drought kangaroo mortalities. (ACF 1999)
Kangaroo numbers are calculated by a simple algorythm: for every kangaroo you see in a given area multiply by roughly 3.2 (the figure varies slightly for species of macropod). On the assumption that the quota is usually between 15 and 20% of actual numbers, this gives us roughly a total state-wide population of 35 million. Previous estimates of the total kangaroo population of Australia have varied wildy, but do assume it fluctuates between 15 and 35 million. (Grigg 1999). What flaws are there to this erstwhile ’scientific’ method of macropod guesstimation? The small matter of a margin of error of about 2.2. (Bigwood in Wilson, 1999) The possibility exists that not only have they grossly overestimated the numbers, but that the current quota could lead to local extinctions of some species. Not something that would trouble farmers greatly.
In July 2001 a symposium on Recent advances in the Scientific Knowledge of Kangaroos was held at the Universtiy of NSW. Studies indicate that we are now exterminating Red kangaroos at a rate faster than they can breed. The average age of a Red is now 2 years, yet they do not reach sexual maturity until they are 10. How are they to continue to exist when quotas advocating their deaths get bigger every year? Yet they are declared pests by farmers and conservationists alike. Pest because they want to eat and breed and live in the country that has always been theirs, but has been usurped by the invading forces of introduced species (cattle, sheep and human beings) and the unjustifiable devaluing of their lives over other native animals based on more hearsay than science. There is no assesment process to validate the claims of landowners requesting damage mitigation permits. All figures are based on an aerial survey using the ‘guesstimate’ process I described above.
Apparently the extermination of kangaroos is not something that troubles the average Australian greatly either. Year after year stupendous numbers of macropods are killed in Australia, ostensibly as ‘pest management’, and few of us bat an eyelid (see Table 1). We have become so used to the proclaimations of ’sustainable users’ and the myths of the farming lobby that we believe it. Kangaroos, our national icon and most recognised native marsupial, are massacred with impunity year after year on the weakest of scientific evidence. However, profit often wears the guise of science. Kangaroo meat and skins earn the Kangaroo Industry Association (now euphemistically called the ‘Wild Harvest’) millions in export dollars every year.
The arguments of ‘roo killers are now widely supported by conservations groups too. Conservation by ‘managing’ populations has become a panacea for ecological problems.
So too the public has been led to believe that not only is managment of nature a possibility (laughable, and from my ecocentric p-o-v, the ultimate in human arrogance) but that is positively good for species to be culled. The idea that kangaroos are going to suffer unduly because of their high numbers by eating out their range is the logic behind this argument. Yet historical records show that the early explorers reported huge mobs of kangaroos comparable with the bison of Northern America. There have always been lots of kangaroos, they live lightly on the land just like their indingenous human contemporaries would have. After a year of drought it is far more probably that farmers are now wanting to cull them not because of a population explosion, but because they have already so overstocked their land with cattle that they can’t tolerate the least bit of vegetation being eaten by a native animal. Better to scapegoat the indigenous animals than blame their own bad land use practices.
It is suggested that kangaroos will cause land degradation as a result of overpopulation. Come on now, is anyone who knows that this county has 180 million cattle obliterating flora under hoof (about 70% of our land mass) so naïve as to say it is the kangaroo that is responsible for land degradation? And those that do recognise the damage cattle do, suggest ‘roo farming as an alternative. The ‘roo meat trade, as it currently operates, is based firmly in the pest culling paradigm. Is it any surprise that as beef consumption plummets overseas in the after effects of foot and mouth and BSE and export sales of ‘roo and Australian beef are on the increase that we now see the highest quotas in the history of the industry?
The parallels with the human history of genocide are many. Genocide, as it is defined by Jared Diamond in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, is done primary for four reasons: ideology, power, psychology and land or combinations of these. That we have power over native animals is beyond question, it is the other three that provide some explanation of why we pursue their eradication.
The ideology that sees kangaroos as pests, as resources, is no different to that which led to the massacre and slavery of the Tasmanian aborigines. It makes compelling reading, it’s parallels to contemporary pest animal management astounding:
With the declaration of martial law in November 1828, soldiers were authorised to kill on sight any Tasmanian in the settled areas. Next, a bounty was declared …’Black Catchin’, as it was called…became big business pursued by private as well as official roving parties. At the same time a commission…was set up to recommend an overall policy towards the natives. After considering proposals to capture them for sale as slaves, poison or trap them, or hunt them with dogs, the commission settled on continued bounties and the use of mounted police. (Diamond 1991: 252-53)
When the Tasmanian aborigines were close to extinction, scientists became interested in them. Such was the competition between scientists for this ‘missing link’ research that they desecrated burial sites, and cut off body parts for souvenirs. One even went so far as to make a tobacco pouch of a man’s skin. Indifference is the psychological effect that this trophying has on the attitudes of people towards those they seek to exterminate. Walk into any tourist shop in Australia today and you will find trophies of extermination: kangaroo paw back-scratchers, scrotum purses, travesties of koalas stitched from kangaroo fur. Koalas are fortunate to have achieved the ‘cute and cuddly’ category well before we exterminated them. Though in truth we came very close to it in the early 1900s. Koala skin rugs are now museum pieces, testimony to our grisly pasts.
The original Tasmanians were named ‘primitive’, ’savage’, ‘heathen’ and hence ‘not like us’; just as select of the original animal natives of Australia are labelled ‘pests’ and in ‘plague’. The combination of this language of inferiority and disrespect with trophyism and you have powerful tools to promote acquienscence to mass murder in the wider society.
As the ideology that kangaroos are pests continues to assuage the consciences of Australians, the grab for their land provides a very real excuse for their continued slaughter. In this same way, the Tasmanian aborigines were usurped of their land and then their lives by greed. Greed too is behind the one added act of profiteering that would be unconscionable in a human genocide: meat. While the debate rages as to whether kangaroo meat is safe for human consumption or a decent thing to do to our national symbol, the guts of the matter is largely overlooked. We have stolen their land, we are stealing their lives and making trophies of their skins, and now in the final act of desecration, we want to eat them.
A sense of history can tell us much about why we human beings are capable of what we do to each other and other species. Perhaps it can also help us to circumvent tragedies of extermination before it’s too late. So long as we remain ignorant of our mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. Let’s hope we can save the remaining orginal Australians from the same terrible fate that befell the original Tasmanians.
References:
Animal Liberation South Australia 2001, Kangaroo Slaughter visited November 2001 at http://www.animalliberation.org.au/comkang.htm
Australian Conservaton Foundation 2001, Policy Statement No. 39 Kangaroo Harvesting visited September 2001 at http://www.acfonline.org.au/asp/pages/document.asp?IdDoc=207
Caughley, Grigg & Short (1983) “How Many Kangaroos?” Search 14: 151-154
Diamond, J 1991 The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage Science Press: London
Environment Australia 2000 Wild Harvest of Native Species - Kangaroos (1991-2000), visited September 2001 at http://www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity/trade-use/wild-harvest/kangaroo/yearly.html
Grigg, G & Pople, T 1999 Commercial Harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia Environment Australia
Rajecki, DW, Rasmussen, J and Craft, HD 1999 “Labels and the Treatment of Animals: Archival and Experimental Cases” at Society & Animals website http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa1.1/rajecki.html
Seymour, F & Oogjes, G 2001 “The Risky Politics of Scape-goating the Victim”, Animal Australia, unpublished manuscript
Wilson, M (ed) 1999 The Kangaroo Betrayed, Hill of Content: Victoria
Categories: environment, indigenous rights, philosophy |
Tags: kangaroos | Comments Off
May 16th, 2006
Robert Friedland
Status: Chairman Ivanhoe Mines
Reputation: Specialises in high risk mining operations, Billed as “King of the Canadian Juniors” by his friends, “Toxic Bob” by environmentalists
Robert Friedland is a ’self-made’ billionaire, number 645 on the Forbes richest 400 Americans in 2006, with wealth close to $1.2 billion. Described as “arrogant, petulant, insulting” but also “intelligent”, “flamboyant”and “an evil genius” by his friend Doug Casey, Friedland’s colourful corporate career has included wild speculations, spectacular pollution scandals, shady deals with governments and military regimes and alleged links to mercenary groups. In 2003 he won the “Award For Mining’s Biggest Renegade” at the Dirty Digger Awards initiated by social justice watchdog by Mines and Communities.
Billed as “King of the Canadian Juniors” by stockbrokers, Freidland’s companies specialise in mining where others fear to tread: Military dictatorships, places of political instability or where mining is politically contentious. Friedland’s mining adventures have thus taken him to places like Burma and a partnership with the local military regime the the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC now called State Peace and Development Council (SPDC); Angola and Sierra Leone during 1980s civil uprising when mercenaries “Executive outcomes” were defending corporate interests there (even suggestions that one of Friedman’s companies, Branch Energy, owned the mercenary group); Papua New Guinea, where it is alleged he had connections to mercenary group Sandline International, isolated and poverty-stricken Mongolia, and now Australia during the current contentious uranium boom.
Friedland is remembered as a hippie in his youth, dealing drugs and tripping through India on money he allegedly misappropriated from his student union. According to Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch, Friedland was dubbed Toxic Bob “in 1969 when he was busted for trying to peddle 8,000 “hits” of the hallucinogenic drug LSD to an undercover drug agent in Portland, Maine” although it is generally attributed to his mining activities. He got his start in mining in the mid eighties with some fast talking and a loan from a relative eventually garnered him a joint venture with Rio Tinto Zinc to open up a gold mine in Nevada.
How Friedland attracts investors can be credited to his great showmanship, bullish predictions of profits and well placed friends. Outlandishly, his Oregon ventures were based on his clai that a Hindu god had told him there were rich deposits to be found there. His friend Doug Casey says, “He builds arguments and tells the story of his deals in such a compelling way that you feel like you have to own the stock.” Friedlands’ really big break came in 1994 in Newfoundland when his prediction that Voisey Bay was “the richest nickel, copper and cobalt deposit on the planet Earth” got investors very excited, boosting the stock from $4 to $167 a share in two years. Today he is saying similar things about mining prospects in Mongolia despite having produced no goods whatsoever, actually having spent millions on public projects to raise his profile with the locals.
His creativity in luring speculators took a fall in the early 1990s when his prediction for Venezuelan Goldfields, which made the biggest stock float ever at $31m, collapsed after public protest by local indigenous groups. In 1997 the Tasmanian government practically gave the Savage River iron mine to Freidland for a $13m ‘deferred’ payment, then changed the law to exempt them from responsibility for environmental damage the mine might cause. In 2006 Freidland is waxing lyrical about the potential size and profitability of a uranium deposit he alleges to have found in western Queensland, Australia – a speculation made all the more dubious in the face of a ban on uranium mining in that state and widespread local opposition.
Perhaps his most infamous business dealings involve the partnership his company Ivanhoe Myanmar Holdings and later Indochina Goldfields (renamed Ivanhoe Mines in 1999) forged with the Burmese regime SLORC. In 1994 SLORC and Ivanhoe began a lucrative joint venture in the Monywa copper mine, reputed to be the most profitable copper mine in the world. SLORC has a record of forcing labour on Burmese villagers, forcing workers to pay a part of their output to the state or taking their land in return for not forcing them to labour for the regime. This behaviour has led many multinational corporations, including Rio Tinto, to refuse to do business there. Mining Watch Canada say SLORC are being well supported by funds from Ivanhoe’s mining activities. With no environmental laws mining operations in Burma can be expected to be dirty, people downstream reported skin irritation from water discharged from the plant running bright blue with copper sulphate.
But his willingness to do dodgy deals with military autocrats and greedy governments notwithstanding, he has left a stunning trail of environmental wreckage behind him. He earned his nickname ‘Toxic Bob’ after a spectacular cyanide spill from his gold mine in Summitville, Colorado in 1993, which has been called the biggest cyanide disaster in U.S. History, named the ‘Exxon-Valdez’ of the mining industry. He avoided legal responsibility for that disaster by a timely resignation. Friedland tried to sue the USEPA and Justice Department for “damages for conspiracy, abuse of process, libel, breach of disclosure duties, loss of business opportunities and damage to reputation”, but failed. Friedland subsequently moved his assets out of the country, but reached a settlement with Friedland in 2000 for $27m, a fraction of the $150m needed to clean up the mess.
In 1995 the Omai gold mine holding pond collapsed, spewing 3.2 billion litres of cyanide-laced tailings into two rivers in Guyana, perhaps the biggest cyanide disaster in world history, for which no reparations have been made. The ‘independent’ report on the disaster denied the damage, saying,”no dead fish or animals were found”, despite news photographs and eyewitness accounts of hundred of dead fish, pigs and crocodiles. The Omai mine had been a joint venture with the World Bank, the Guyana government and Freidland’s South American Goldfields Inc. Once again a timely resignation saved Friedland from legal culpability.
The threat of similar incidents was one of the reasons people took to the streets against Ivanhoe Mines in April 2006 in Mongolia, burning an effigy of Friedman and camping in the capital for three weeks. The Ivanhoe Mine venture in Mongolia covers 82,000 sq/km, an area bigger than many countries, relatively untouched by industrial intervention. Even potential investors are a bit skittish on Mongolia, due to it’s isolation, lack of power, and the questionable quality of the mineral ores, according to Forbes magazine. As I write this, Ivanhoe’s fortunes in Mongolia look shaky, the Mongolian government imposing a heavy new ‘windfall tax’ to curb Friedland’s profits. In fact, Ivanhoe mines posted a loss of $23.2m in the first quarter of 2006. Let’s hope Friedlands’ karma is finally catching up with him.
Sense of Humour: in 2005 Friedland told an investor conference about his Mongolia prospect, “So we’re coming in from outer space and landing at Oyu Tolgoi in this version in the G5. And the nice thing about this, there’s no people around, the land is flat, there’s no tropical jungle, there’s no NGOs, we’re only 70 km from the Chinese border. It does not snow here. You’ve got lots of room for waste dumps without disrupting the populations and we are building the biggest new mine in the world.”
Sly cunning: “What he does - trying to find the diplomatic words for this here - he brings the movers and shakers and the decision-makers in the country to his table as partners before anything is discovered. For example, his partners in Indochina Goldfields in Burma would appear to be the Burmese Generals. Now he forms the partnerships with the Burmese Generals that run the country before he goes and, well should he be so lucky, discovers anything worthwhile” - John Woods, Canada Stockwatch talking to ABC’s Background Briefing 1997.
article written for New Internationalist magazine ‘Worldbeaters: Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful’ -
References:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation., 1997. “Robert Friedland: The King of the Canadian Juniors” on Radio National, Background Briefing broadcast Sunday, April 6. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s10601.htm
Burton, B. 1997. “Toxic Bob buys Savage River” Mining Monitor, MPI Newsletter, June.
http://users.nlc.net.au/mpi/mm/editions/mining_monitor_vol2no2pp1-6.pdf
Casey, D 2003. “Doug Casey Looks At Mongolia” http://www.escapeartist.com/OREQ6/Mongolia.html
Chaterjee, P. 1996. “Investor Beats Mining Disaster charges” in Albion Monitor, December 11.
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9612a/friedland.html
Chaterjee, P. 1998. “The Man with the Midas Touch” Project Underground at http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/motherlode/gold/fried.html
Distelhorst, L. 2006. “Civil Movements Burn Effigies, Start Hunger Strike” in The UB Post, April 20.
http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/mining.php?subaction=showfull&id=1145498400&archive=&start_from=&ucat=37&
Ivanhoe Mines 2006. http://www.ivanhoe-mines.com
Jodah, D.K. 1995. “Courting Disaster in Guyana” in Multinational Monitor, November.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm1195.04.html
Forbes.com “#645 Robert Friedland” http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/QXNL.html Friedland, R 2005. “Nothing Like it on Planet Earth - Robert Friedland’s Tour d’ Tolgoi”address delivered at the BMO Nesbitt Burns 2005 Global Resources Conference, Tampa, Fla. in Resource Investor http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=9010
Moody, R 1994 “The Ugly Canadian: Robert Freidland and the Poisoning of the Americas” in Multinational Monitor, http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/11/mm1194_08.html
Moody, R. 1997. “Grave Diggers: A Report on Mining in Burma” Mining Watch Canada http://www.miningwatch.ca/updir/Grave_Diggers.pdf
Roberts, J. 1995. “Eyewitnesses Report on Rainforest Cyanide Disaster” in Albion Monitor, September 18. http://albionmonitor.net////9-18-95/eyewitness.html
Williams, M. 1995. “Summitville Mine Disaster” Department of Geography, University of Colorado.
http://snobear.colorado.edu/Markw/Intro/Summitville/summitville.html
Categories: environment |
Tags: mining, queensland, uranium | No Comments
December 11th, 2005
Why did it take so long for people to realise climate change was already happening? What can we do about it?
Indymedia activists put the blame squarely on the mainstream media and their devious global corporate buddies.
Consensus is nearly unanimous amongst the world’s scientists that climate change is happening as a result of our use of oil, coal and petroleum. Yet only recently have politicians come to the party. George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard have finally conceded the fact.
Yet, under the guise of ‘unbiased reporting’ the mainstream media have too often given voice to the climate critics. Many of them financed by big oil, these so-called climate scientists have created a skewed debate on climate that put sufficient doubt in the minds of readers to allow governments to continue to do nothing to mitigate climate change.
The connections of climate sceptics with mining corporations and big oil is so dazzling, one wonders that they even got a serious hearing in the media. One notable Australian example is Hugh Morgan. Morgan was CEO of Western Mining Corporation from 1986 to 2003, and director of Alcoa from 1977 to 2001. He launched his own ‘think tank’ (the Lavoisier Group) in 1999 to legitimise his claims that climate change is the product of green extremists and ‘nazi propaganda’, and that they Kyoto protocol is a challenge to Australia’s sovereignty. The Lavoisier Group continues to publish and promote the interests of his CO2 emitting mining business. Alcoa’s aluminium smelter is the single biggest emitter of GHG in Queensland. His corporate buddies include Rupert Murdoch and John Winston Howard. Morgan is now President of the Business Council of Australia, through which he continues to criticise attempts to get industry to reduce emissions. Morgan is but one of a handful of vocal and well-financed climate critics who have gotten more than their fair share of publicity. Morgan’s former company Alcoa still proclaims on their website that the science of climate change is ‘incomplete’.
Another Australian organisation notable for it’s climate scepticism is the Institute for Public Affairs, a right-wing think tank with an avowed goal to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The IPA often get published in the Murdoch rags in Australia, boasting former members like publisher and journalist Michael Duffy and commentator Ron Brunton. Their members include and some former Liberal party and industry heads like Tim Duncan formerly of Rio Tinto. One of the IPAs other main goals is to “defund the left” by undermining their charity status and removing government funding of environment groups, the latter the Howard government has already done in 2004. In 2005 the IPA launched a front group, The Australian Environment Foundation, to protect the interests of the timber industry. It includes former TV presenter Don Burke, who says, “The greatest threat to the world’s environment is the conservation movement.”
With such powerful and influential friends like Murdoch and mining money on their side, one wonders also why the US oil industry needed to spend millions of dollars on the services of PR giants. In the late 80s corporations including Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil, Texaco, Chevron, Chrysler, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Exxon, General Motors, Ford Motor Company and more than 40 other corporations formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). The GCC’s objective was to create positive publicity for big oil and create doubts about climate change to prevent reform.
Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton at PR Watch note that,
“The GCC recognized early on that Australia would play a key role in its campaign against global warming reform. Rapid economic growth in the Australasian region has seen Australia emerge as an important regional staging post for the PR industry. Most major US firms–Edelman’s, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, Shandwick and others–have established a presence there to work on local issues and the regional implementation of international issues….
Australia also accounts for more than 30 percent of world trade in coal, and has major metal smelting industries which also belch out greenhouse gases. As a result, it has Asia’s highest per capita emission of greenhouse gases, even though its population comprises only one percent of the region’s 2.5 billion people.
In 1988, when Australia held a Greenhouse ‘88 conference, there was great public interest in the issue. At the time, Australia had one of the “greenest” governments in the world. Since then, however, corporations and their front groups have systematically manipulated public opinion through frequent pronouncements in the media by (Patrick) Michaels and other industry-funded scientists.” PR Watch 1997.
In 2002 the GCC disbanded. All that money spent, so little success.
Governments are now talking action on climate change. In 2005 British PM Tony Blair said that climate change was the biggest challenge facing humankind and that action was necessary. Even George Bush has admitted they must act, despite his loyalties lying with his oil funded family. However, he never went so far as to say he’d do anything about it: “A government report to the UN says that global warming exists, that it is man-made, and that it will transform the environment - all points that the current US government, while never actually denying, has been reluctant to accept. However, the report suggests that the country will have to accept the changes, rather than take any action to try to avert them” reports the Guardian.
So now corporations are concentrating on getting their lobbyists into government positions to weaken decisions, adulterate policy and influence personnel postings. PR Watch report that the Bush administration, Exxon-Mobil and other energy companies successfully connived in 2002 see climatologist Robert Watson rejected as leader of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2003 Paul Harris reported “government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.” In June 2005 the New York Times reported that “U.S. government climate research reports had been edited by a White House official, Philip A. Cooney, to emphasize doubts about climate change. According to the memo Cooney, a former “climate team leader” and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, changed one 2002 document to “create an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about climate change and its implications.” (PR Watch 2005). There are so many more examples of the covert manipulation of data, and the democratic process as to boggle the mind with the lengths big oil will go to, to protect their profits even at the price of the world through climate change.
While lobbyists and science critics continue to try to undermine the science of climate change, some corporations are embracing it. The Nuclear industry thinks it’s renaissance lies in promoting itself as a solution to climate change. Power provision from coal-fired power stations creates 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But the nuclear industry are not letting facts stand in their way. And they’ve sold themselves to Australia in particular, because of the big uranium deposits here. And it seems it was an easy sell. Dollar signs light up in the eyes of PM John ‘It’s all about the Economy’ Howard, and his pro-nuclear cronies including Foreign Minister Alexander ‘We Know Our Uranium Isn’t Being Used for Bombs’ Downer, Defence Minister Robert ‘Jabiluka Uranium Mine’ Hill and Science Minister Brendan ‘Australia is Open for Business on Uranium Mining’ Nelson.
Australian Activists and citizens have a big task a head of us. With so much bias in government and media on the side of corporations, we need to be the voice of reason and solutions to climate change. If we leave it up to the media to deliver the facts, skewed by PR companies, oil and nuclear lobbyists and profiteers, we won’t survive.
It’s already happening. No climate meeting anywhere goes without grass roots protests and alternative conferences often accompany the biased and selfish money-making decisions of government convened events. The D3 International Day of Action is one of these, timed to provide an alternative to the COP meetings of late November, the common people have had enough of the lies, the bias, and the inaction of governments colluding with rich bastards with vested interests. The vested interests of all of us lie in the survival of the planet and it’s people.
Indymedia have been providing an alternative news forum for activists since the 1999 Seattle protests. This November an international group of media activists have come together to create a forum for sane solutions and critique of the behaviours and policy of governments and corporations on the subject of climate change. Climate Indymedia hope to provide that forum. Climate Indymedia will be launched in support of the D3IDA. If you’re interested in the issue, have been involved in constructive grass roots action or just want to tell your story, visit us at www.climate.indymedia.org
Further Reading:
www.exxonsecrets.org
www.prwatch.org
www.corpwatch.org
Categories: environment |
Tags: climate change, corporations, fossil, greenwashing, oil, spin | No Comments
November 20th, 2005
November 19 marks a dark day for the indigenous community of Queensland. It marks the first anniversary of the death of indigenous man, Cameron (Mulrinji) Doomagee, after a brutal beating at the hands of the Palm Island police. Doomagee’s death sparked riots in the Palm Island community during which the police headquarters was burnt to the ground.
To date no charges have been laid against the perpetrators despite eyewitness evidence of police mistreatment and medical evidence indicating that Doomadgee bled to death in police custody without medical treatment. Police have been accused of hiding evidence in an alleged surveillance tape of the night Doomagee died. A Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation cleared police involved and an inquest has failed to lead to any convictions.
The anniversary comes at a bad time for the Palm Island Community who face 95% unemployment, severe housing shortages that have resulted in an average of 17 people per house and water shortages that may result in evacuation of the island. The QLD government has ineffective at solving these problems that indigenous people say are intentional and genocidal. These living conditions continue to alienate people from their culture and deprived of decent human living conditions which most Australians take for granted.
A vigil was held outside Queensland Parliament House in Brisbane on Friday. Attended by Doomagee’s relatives and supporters from the local community, people called for and end to police racism and the continuing crimes of aboriginal deaths in custody at a rate of one a day nationally.
Aunty Jean, from the local indigenous spokeswoman called for the reinvigoration of the black power movement to see their rights recognised. She also called for the help from the white community to help them fight back against the neglect of the Queensland government. She spoke a prayer for the family and all aboriginal people touched by deaths in custody.
Doomagee family members were present. Alec Doomadgee, Cameron Doomagee’s cousin and local Brisbane media activist with 4AAAfm said that it was ‘horrible’ being black, because there is so much racism in the community. He said that Cameron Doomagee was “good man, he wasn’t a trouble maker he wasn’t a small man though it’s hard to believe his liver could have been split in half by a fall on some steps.”
Local Brisbane indigenous activist Sam Watson noted that the Qld government could be easily mobilised by a bomb scare on the buses, but seemed unable or unwilling to prosecute the killers of Doomagee. The police officer implicated was in fact, promoted to a better post on the Gold Coast a fact that has had no attention from the mainstream media.
The Redfern mob sent a statement of solidarity, calling for justice for all aboriginal people “who seem to die so easily in police custody”.
Brisbane indigenous activists are calling for a big national mobilisation for aboriginal rights for Human Rights day December 10.
Categories: indigenous rights, social justice |
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