U.S./Western Sanctions On Syria Hamper Relief-and-Rescue Work After Earthquake

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. 50 out of 100 train cars ran off the tracks, igniting a massive fire that could be seen from miles away. Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an evacuation order on February 5, due to the possibility of a major explosion. Local community members and activists across the country have sounded the alarms regarding the impacts the incident could have on public health and environment. Many have pointed to reports of animals dying en masse as evidence. Yet, despite the public outcry over the environmental and public health catastrophe, the actions of Ohio authorities reflect an attitude of concealment.

A reporter with NewsNation was recently violently arrested while covering one of Governor DeWine’s news conferences regarding the derailment. Police officers claimed that the reporter, Evan Lambert, was being too loud while the governor was speaking and in response, tackled him to the ground and handcuffed him. Lambert was released from jail the same day. “No journalist expects to be arrested when you’re doing your job,” Lambert told NewsNation.

Ohio officials claim that they have received no reports of animals dying in or near East Palestine, despite multiple public reports of local animal deaths. NewsNation obtained a video of dead fish in the Ohio River near East Palestine. According to Wildlife Officer Supervisor Scott Angelo, these fish could have died due to toxic fumes dissolving oxygen in the water, although the causes have not been confirmed. Farmer Taylor Holzer claims that his foxes have fallen mortally ill after the derailment.

Many concerns of East Palestine residents, as well as those of the rest of the nation, stem from the fact that the derailed train had 20 cars carrying hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern Railroad conducted a “controlled release” on February 6 of several tankers that ran the risk of explosion. State officials are yet to inform residents of East Palestine about what effect this “controlled release” of toxic fumes, combined with a massive fire burning for five days, will have. Five of the derailed cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen linked to various forms of cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is monitoring two other toxic chemicals: phosgene and hydrogen chloride. Public health experts have already indicated that the effects of these chemicals could last decades. “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Silverado Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, told NewsNation. Most recently, the EPA discovered that three other toxic chemicals were present in the derailed train.

Railroad Workers Point to Cost-Cutting As the Culprit

For unionized rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety. Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union workers’ organization, writes, “in the last 10 years, the Class One carriers [rail companies with the highest revenues] have dramatically increased both the length and tonnage of the average train, while cutting back on maintenance and inspection, and we have a time bomb ticking.”

A report by The Lever highlighted that in 2017 during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency, Norfolk Southern lobbyists successfully rescinded regulations aimed at improving railroad safety regulations. Specifically, the company successfully beat back measures that would require train cars carrying hazardous, flammable materials to be equipped with electronic brakes which can stop trains more effectively than conventional brakes. Railroad company donors delivered over USD$6 million to Republican Party campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, but still claimed that safety regulations would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”

Norfolk Southern made a record of over USD$12 billion in revenue last year, and recently announced a USD$10 million stock buyback program.

Last year, railroad workers in the United States were on the cusp of a strike, which would have shattered the U.S. economy as rail workers are some of the most essential workers in the nation. Workers were demanding more sick leave to combat the effects of “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” a corporate scheme to cut costs by demanding more work from fewer workers. Infamously, U.S. President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress blocked rail workers’ right to strike by rapidly passing legislation that forced workers to accept an agreement without sick days.

Railroad Workers United argues that Precision Scheduled Railroading, and the overworking, lay-offs and lack of safety measures that unionized workers were fighting for last year were a primary reason for the derailment. One of the causes of the derailment, RWU argues, is that a damaged car was allowed to leave a terminal due to cut inspection times and layoffs. The train was also not blocked properly, the group claims, because blocking a train properly takes longer and therefore has been mostly done away with by rail companies. More Perfect Union has pointed out that rail companies have cut 22 percent of railroad jobs since 2017. Unionized workers were planning to use their right to strike to combat this trend in 2022. Instead, they were forced back to work on penalty of arrest.

Editor’s Note: This article was produced by Globetrotter.

“This is not a regular airport,” Margaretta D’Arcy said to me as we heard a C-130T Hercules prepare to take off from Shannon Airport in Ireland after 3 p.m. on September 11, 2022. That enormous U.S. Navy aircraft (registration number 16-4762) had flown in from Sigonella, a U.S. Naval Air Station in Italy. A few minutes earlier, a U.S. Navy C-40A (registration number 16-6696) left Shannon for the U.S. military base at Stuttgart, Germany, after flying in from Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia. Shannon is not a regular airport, D’Arcy said, because while it is merely a civilian airport, it allows frequent U.S. military planes to fly in and out of it, with Gate 42 of the airport functioning as its “forward operating base.”

At the age of 88, D’Arcy, who is a legendary Irish actress and documentary filmmaker, is a regular member of Shannonwatch, comprising a group of activists who have—since 2008—held monthly vigils at a roundabout near the airport. Shannonwatch’s objectives are to “end U.S. military use of Shannon Airport, to stop rendition flights through the airport, and to obtain accountability for both from the relevant Irish authorities and political leaders.” Edward Horgan, a veteran of the Irish military who had been on peacekeeping missions to Cyprus and Palestine, told me that this vigil is vital. “It’s important that we come here every month,” he said, “because without this there is no visible opposition” to the footprint of the U.S. military in Ireland.

According to a report from Shannonwatch titled “Shannon Airport and 21st Century War,” the use of the airport as a U.S. forward operating base began in 2002-2003, and this transformation “was, and still is, deeply offensive to the majority of Irish people.”

Article 29 of the Irish Constitution of 1937 sets in place the framework for the country’s neutrality. Allowing a foreign military to use Irish soil violates Article 2 of the Hague Convention of 1907, to which Ireland is a signatory. Nonetheless, said John Lannon of Shannonwatch, the Irish government has allowed almost 3 million U.S. troops to pass through Shannon Airport since 2002 and has even assigned a permanent staff officer to the airport. “Irish airspace and Shannon Airport became the virtual property of the U.S. war machine,” said Niall Farrell of Galway Alliance Against War. “Irish neutrality was truly dead.”

Pitstop of Death

Margaretta D’Arcy’s eyes gleam as she recounts her time at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, located in Berkshire, England, and involving activists from Wales, who set up to prevent the storage and passage of U.S. cruise missiles at this British military base. That camp began in 1981 and lasted until 2000. D’Arcy went to jail three times during this struggle (out of a total of at least 20 times she was in prison for her antiwar activism). “It was good,” she told me, “because we got rid of the weapons and the land was restored to the people. It took 19 years. Women consistently fought until we got what we wanted.” When D’Arcy was arrested, the prison authorities stripped her to search her. She refused to put her clothes back on and went on both a hunger strike and a naked protest. In doing so, she forced the prison authorities to stop the practice of performing strip searches. “If you act with dignity, then you force them to treat you with dignity,” she said.

Part of this act of dignity includes refusing to allow her country’s airport to be used as part of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2002, several brave people have entered the airport and have attempted to deface U.S. aircraft. On September 5, 2002, Eoin Dubsky painted “No way” on a U.S. warplane (for which he was fined); and then on January 29, 2003, Mary Kelly took an axe onto the runway and hit a military plane, causing $1.5 million in damage; she was also fined. A few weeks later, on February 3, 2003, the Pitstop Ploughshares (a group of five activists who belonged to the Catholic Worker Movement) attacked a U.S. Navy C-40 aircraft—the same one that Mary Kelly had previously damaged—with hammers and a pickaxe (a story recounted vividly by Harry Browne in Hammered by the Irish, 2008). They also spray-painted “Pitstop of Death” on a hangar.

In 2012, Margaretta D’Arcy and Niall Farrell marched onto the runway to protest the airport being used by U.S. planes. Arrested and convicted, they nonetheless returned to the runway the next year in orange jumpsuits. During the court proceedings in June 2014, D’Arcy grilled the airport authorities about why they had not arrested the pilot of an armed U.S. Hercules plane that had arrived at Shannon Airport four days after their arrest on the runway. She asked, “Are there two sets of rules—one for people like us trying to stop the bombing and one for the bombers?” Shannon Airport’s inspector Pat O’Neill replied, “I don’t understand the question.”

“This is a civilian airport,” D’Arcy told me as she gestured toward the runway. “How does a government allow the military to use a civilian airport?”

Extraordinary Renditions

The U.S. government began illegally transporting prisoners from Afghanistan and other places to its prison in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and to other “black sites” in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. This act of transporting the prisoners came to be known as “extraordinary rendition.” In 2005, when Dermot Ahern, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, was asked about the “extraordinary rendition” flights into Shannon Airport, he said, “If anyone has any evidence of any of these flights, please give me a call and I will have it immediately investigated.” Amnesty International replied that it had direct evidence that up to six CIA chartered planes had used Shannon Airport approximately 50 times. Four years later, Amnesty International produced a thorough report that showed that their earlier number was deflated and that likely hundreds of such U.S. military flights had flown in and out of the airport.

While the Irish government over the years has said that it opposes this practice, the Irish police (the Garda Síochána) have not boarded these flights to inspect them. As a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights (signed in 1953) and the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (adopted in 1984 and ratified in 1987), Ireland is duty-bound to prevent collaboration with “extraordinary rendition,” a position taken by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. In 2014, Irish parliamentarians Mick Wallace and Clare Daly were arrested at Shannon Airport for trying to search two U.S. aircraft that they believed were carrying “troops and armaments.” They were frustrated by the Irish government’s false assurances. “How do they know? Did they search the planes? Of course not,” Wallace and Daly said.

Meanwhile, according to the Shannonwatch report, “Rather than take measures to identify past involvement in rendition or to prevent further complicity, successive Irish [g]overnments have simply denied any possibility that Irish airports or airspace were used by U.S. rendition planes.”

In 2006, Conor Cregan rode his bicycle near Shannon Airport. Airport police inspector Lillian O’Shea, who recognized him from protests, confronted him, but Cregan rode off. He was eventually arrested. At Cregan’s trial, O’Shea admitted that the police had been told to stop and harass the activists at the airport. Zoe Lawlor of Shannonwatch told me this story and then said, “harassment such as this reinforces the importance of our protest.”

In 2003 and 2015, Sinn Féin—the largest opposition party in the Northern Ireland Assembly—put forward a Neutrality Bill to enshrine the concept of neutrality into the Irish Constitution. The government, said Seán Crowe of Sinn Féin, has “sold Irish neutrality piece by piece against the wishes of the people.” If the idea of neutrality is adopted by the Irish people, it will be because of the sacrifices of people such as Margaretta D’Arcy, Niall Farrell, and Mary Kelly.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Editor’s Note: This article previously specified the species of wolf, as well as the time frame, to which it was hunted to extinction. What experts say is a missed opportunity in a European Commission proposal has been clarified. Captions for the first and third photos have been corrected.

The Swedish government is planning to cull the country’s wolf population by half. The plan faces little to no resistance in the Swedish parliament, given a majority are in favor of the proposal. But conservationists, other experts and Green Party MPs have warned the move could be a breach of biodiversity laws in the European Union (EU), risking the country being dragged to court. The issue, though, is part of a much larger and graver problem.

Europe has lost most of its mega herbivores (those weighing more than 1,000 kilograms or 2,204 pounds), 75 percent of species weighing more than 100 kg (220 pounds) and a little over half of its terrestrial mammals weighing more than 10 kg (22 pounds), a new paper points out.

And, of the species that survive today, many have reduced ranges and numbers. Suffice to say, proposals to further cull wildlife populations can only accelerate the extinction crisis. But all is not lost. At least, not yet.

How Large Mammals Can Make a ‘European Comeback’

The paper charts a path for re-wilding Europe with large mammals, or those weighing more than 10 kg (22 pounds), both for conserving biodiversity and restoring ecosystems. It lists species, state of extinction risks, and ways of restoration, such as natural recolonization and reintroduction.

And, all this, the paper argues, is a legal obligation for Europe in light of a host of EU and international laws, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that requires Europe to restore both the diversity and density of its megafauna. More specifically, Article 8(f) of CBD states every party that has signed onto the agreement “shall, as far as possible and as appropriate … rehabilitate and restore degraded ecosystems and promote the recovery of threatened species, inter alia, through the development and implementation of plans or other management strategies.”

Additionally, the paper states, Europe has a moral obligation to re-wild in solidarity with the Global South, which is currently doing the heavy lifting when it comes to biodiversity preservation.

“Legal obligations have definitely played a role in some real-life scenarios, such as the legal protection of wolves which has clearly aided the species’ European comeback,” Arie Trouwborst, lead author of the paper and associate professor at Tilburg Law School, told Toward Freedom.

However, in the context of general commitments to restore ecosystems, “large mammals, especially those which disappeared from Europe long ago, like elephants and lions, have largely been a blind spot—wrongly so, as our paper aims to show,” he added. No examples exist of European governments undertaking such a feat with the Global South in mind.

‘Life Goes On After Wolves Come Back’

Large mammals play a critical role in ecosystem restoration or even in ecosystem functions in general. Elaborating on the same, Jens-Christian Svenning, co-author on the paper, listed out three key reasons why:

1. Large herbivores tend to promote heterogeneity in vegetation structure and composition as well as in soil conditions, while large carnivores contribute to this effect by modulating herbivore assemblage composition, densities and behavior, in complex ways;
2. megafauna constitute and generate microhabitats for numerous other species, dependent on their living bodies, their carcasses, and their dung; and lastly,
3. megafauna species are mobile and play important roles in plant and nutrient dispersal, which is crucial to maintaining local landscapes and in assisting the fight against climate change.

As for ill-thought out calls to cull wildlife, like the Swedish plan to reduce wolf populations by half, the paper says in recent decades, people in countries like Germany and France have “quickly discovered that life goes on after wolves come back.” The sentiment is also true for larger mammals that are generally considered more dangerous for human life, like brown bears, which have been successfully reintroduced in Italy’s Trento region.

The expansion of wolves in Europe is also a result of strong legal protections. Wolves were not reintroduced in Europe. Rather, they naturally began expanding into areas in which they existed before. And legal instruments like the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive assisted such expansion by ensuring countries that wolves had moved into protected them. Earlier, wolves were hunted to extinction in large parts of Europe.

The Habitats Directive has been crucial for the restoration of wolves in Europe. “It’s obvious when you compare wolf numbers in EU states that are bound by the Directive—like Sweden—to those in countries which are not, like Norway,” Trouwborst said. “Wolves have been trying to make a comeback in both countries, but they have not been successful in Norway.”

The Directive provides room for enforcing conservation action, both by the European Commission and via national courts.

Regarding even more challenging species reintroduction candidates, the paper says if people in India can co-exist with lions and elephants, and people in Tanzania and Zimbabwe can do so with hyenas and hippos, “then surely this is also possible in Europe.”

India’s population density stands at 464 people per square kilometer (or 0.38 of a square mile), as opposed to 34 people per square kilometer in Europe. And yet, the paper points out, people in India still share the landscape with elephants, rhinos, gaur (Indian bison), tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, caracals (a wild cat), brown bears, wolves and others.

Addressing Equity in Restoration Models

Apart from CBD and EU biodiversity laws, another campaign demands decadal commitments and efforts. The United Nations has recognized the years between 2021 and 2030 as the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” A guidebook on such restoration efforts points to re-wilding in Europe where “there is enough space and opportunity to introduce species that have been lost.”

But the question is “restore to what?” In other words, what is the reference point or model that could illustrate what the world needs to go back to?

“Large mammals play a key role in ecosystems and many of them disappeared due to human interference. So the big picture… the model must be the healthy ecosystems that occurred before humans wiped out many of the largest of species,” Trouwborst explained. Such models can be found today, which could be the basis for restoration in Europe. Some European ecosystems looked like versions of modern-day east and south Africa, as well as India, with elephants, hyenas, lions, rhinos and hippos.

“As Europeans we cannot keep expecting those in the Global South to continue conserving and even restoring healthy ecosystems abundant in megafauna and not take that seriously ourselves,” Trouwborst said. In addition to solidarity with the Global South, another moral argument is “you should restore what you destroyed,” he added.

The reference in Article 8(f) of CBD to “as far as possible and as appropriate,” is about equity, legal scholars point out. It is equivalent to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR-RC) enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The principle refers to developed countries being held responsible for undertaking a majority of climate action because of their historical greenhouse gas emissions. That, plus their capacity—financial in particular—to shoulder such burdens.

Carina Bury, a PhD candidate in International Environmental Law at the University of Hamburg in Germany, explained that qualifiers such as “as far as possible” that are often encountered in international environmental law should be read in light of CBDR-RC. In practice, what this also means is if someone says elephants in Europe is not plausible, then, Trouwborst argued, “I’d say look at India. If it’s possible in India, then why not in Europe? It would take some small and some big sacrifices but it’s not impossible. It’s a question of priority.”

Other researchers also have pointed out the question of equity is absent when international environmental law has been implemented.

“I found that Germany omitted to implement the treaty in the manner required by the constitution. The consequence is that the treaty remains largely inapplicable, but it puts pressure on states of the global South—such as Montenegro—to implement the same treaty,” she said of her research that found Germany neglected to conserve its wetlands. Ramsar Convention is an international treaty signed in 1971 that regulates the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands.

This reporter reached out to the federal environment ministry in Germany for a response. The copy will be updated if and when a response is received.

Considering Germany is a country with significantly above-average levels of wealth and technical know-how, it is “possible, and indeed reasonable to expect that wetlands located in German territory be managed as green infrastructure,” Bury said. She also added that when countries with sufficient resources and technical knowledge start to neglect their international obligations, less-advantaged countries are less likely to comply.

New Hope with Europe’s New Nature Restoration Law?

On June 22, the European Commission put forth a proposal for a new “Nature Restoration Law” that aims to halt both biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems. The draft law aims to address a variety of ecosystems—including agricultural lands, marine habitats and urban areas—and it lays out targets to be met by 2030, 2040 and 2050.

But experts have pointed out a huge missed opportunity because the proposal does not highlight the importance of megafauna for ecosystem restoration. Plus, the proposal only focuses on those species that are included in the Habitats Directive, not those that had long ago disappeared from the European landscape. The European Commission is yet to respond to these critiques.

So while there are legal hooks in the proposal that could help restoration efforts for some large mammals,” the proposal ignores current scientific knowledge as to what healthy and well-functioning European ecosystems really looked like,” Trouwborst pointed out.

This story was developed as part of a journalism residency program at Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg, Germany.

Rishika Pardikar is an Indian journalist who reports on climate change and biodiversity. She is currently a journalist-in-residence at MPIL in Heidelberg, Germany.