Black farmers have faced additional setbacks. Though the year started off with a first-of-its-kind hearing by the US House Committee on Agriculture on the impact of systemic racism on Black farmers, and the allotment of $4 billion in debt relief under the American Rescue Plan to begin redressing decades of discrimination and system racism, things took a turn when White farmers sued to stop payments under the plan. The case is currently making its way through the courts.
But it’s not all bad news. Despite the steep barriers they face to entry, there’s also evidence of renewed interest in farming among young African Americans. Queer millennials, too, are returning to the land, connecting queer oppression to environmental concerns and challenging the conventional images of farmers.
Billionaire Spaceboys
There is no Planet B that we know of but our dreams of technofixes and colonizing other planets persist. To that end, billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk took super carbon-expensive joyrides into the space this year (an 11-minute space flight can create as much as 75 tons of emissions, more than the average person creates during their entire lifetime.) Space, it appears, in the new playground of the super rich. Musk’s SpaceX mission involved paying tourists spending three days in orbit. And earlier this month, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa became the first space tourist sent to the International Space Station by Russia in more than a decade.
Both Bezos and Musk have said they see their space adventures as part of a mission to address climate change and ecological decline. While Musk plans to take a “futuristic Noah’s Ark” to Mars, Bezos wants to offload carbon-heavy industries onto other planets. In order to preserve Earth “we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy,” Bezos’ space company Blue Origi states. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic says its rockets are reusable and the company aims to “transform the current cost, safety and environmental impact of space-launch.”
But even the general public isn’t quite buying the billionaires’ protestations about Earth-care.
As Deepak Xavier, Oxfam International’s global head of Inequality Campaign, said: “We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation… This is human folly, not human achievement.”
Postscript: We would like to acknowledge the loss several conservation giants this year whose work helped us reach a greater understanding of the natural world and our connection to it:
Paul Crutzen, 87, the Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the ozone hole and is known for popularizing the theory of “the Anthropocene.”
Edward O. Wilson, 92, the Alabama-born naturalist and writer, nicknamed “Ant Man” who help raise public awareness and understanding about biodiversity and conservation and was often called Charles Darwin’s “natural heir.”
Tom Lovejoy, 80, the American biologist who is said to have coined the term “biological diversity.” Lovejoy spent a lifetime on an ongoing project to save the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and educating the public and US politicians about the perils of climate change.
Credit: Source link
