10 years ago, Allan Savory gave a TED Talk and sparked a global craze about healing the climate with ranching.

His claims have been exhaustively refuted, but not many have asked — where does this myth originate?

Join me for a horrifying history. 🐘🧵

authorrise.org/blogpost/18d58… Our story begins in Rhodesia: a now-extinct British colony in Southern Africa.

As Britain had little land and high demand for meat, ranching cattle and sheep for export became an important sector of the Rhodesian economy.

But colonists met some challenges…

Historic buffalo populations only produced around 1/3 the methane emissions of US cattle ranches today, according to population reconstructions and industry feed trial data.

Here is a great article on this:

mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bis…

Let’s break it down in this thread:
🦬🐄🧵

https://twitter.com/magazinerange/status/1655358631603474433

First, there were not 100 million bison in the 1840s, nor at any point in recorded history.

The max estimate is around 60 million, but the mean is more like 45.

smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

THE CAMPAIGN TO GREENWASH FACTORY FARMING IN THE AMAZON

A $10+ million JBS ranching firm backed by McDonald’s & Bain Capital is pitching industrialization of the Brazilian ranching sector as the solution to deforestation.

This company’s PR work is all over the media.

🐂🌳🧵:

https://twitter.com/canarymediainc/status/1648410864993574913

PECSA, a Portuguese acronym for Amazon Sustainable Cattle Ranching, was cofounded by meat giant JBS & ICV Capital Ventures, a Bain-backed nonprofit trading in solutions to Amazon deforestation. It’s headed by former Bain consultant Laurent Micol.

jbs.com.br/wp-content/upl…

One thing I wish they taught more explicitly in school is the way we see the colors we do *because* they’re the brightest wavelengths emitted from our star.

This understanding was a huge epiphany for me in terms of appreciating our place in the Universe.

wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mob… For instance, if we had evolved in another solar system, or at another stage in our star’s evolution, we’d see different wavelengths.

Notice the Sun peaks in blue/violet, but after bluer sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere, it transmits in a spectrum we perceive as white.

HUGE document leak on the world’s biggest soil carbon credit scheme — spoiler: it’s a scam.

But it’s worse than that: it’s a human rights atrocity — and it’s directly linked to the regenerative ranching myth. 🧵

https://twitter.com/herrfischer/status/1638189226272358402

Just over a year ago, this investigative report by the Oakland Institute described widespread police brutality inflicted on Kenyan pastoralists by the Northern Rangelands Trust, a “community conservation” charity partnered with The Nature Conservancy.

oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandi…

Climate journalism is losing its salience. You can feel it. IPCC reports don’t hit like they used to.

Everybody knows. That’s good, though. So where do we go from here?

This is my suggestion: we have the science and the diplomacy covered. Start covering the ground battles. 🧵 Part of what this means is expanding our idea of what constitutes a climate story. The battle for the Atlanta Forest is the most important and consequential national climate story since Standing Rock. Media have failed to connect it to the climate crisis.

pbs.org/newshour/natio…

I generally agree with Parrique, but I don’t think this is the right way to communicate degrowth.

It feeds into misconceptions that degrowth means economic decline or divorce from technology. 🧵

https://twitter.com/timparrique/status/1635573164431355905

I’ve noticed a trend in discourse where degrowth is increasingly framed as the antithesis of “ecomodernism”, as opposed to orthodox economics.

Many people now think that degrowth means “anti-tech”. I think many proponents are inadvertently fueling this misconception.

80% of this soy will be fed to farmed animals.

globalforestatlas.yale.edu

https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1631737178488176641

78% of it will be exported, supplying animal farms around the world.

sei.org/featured/conne…

One of Earth’s greatest migrations takes place on the North American West coast, where thousands of grey whales travel ~12,000 miles to return here each winter — Magdalena Bay.

For millennia, this migration has shaped the ecology of our planet, but now it’s in peril.

🐋🧵: Every winter, thousands of grey whales return from feeding grounds as far-flung as Kamchatka — 14,000 miles round trip — to breed and give birth in a few protected lagoons, like Magdalena, on the Baja peninsula.

livescience.com/50487-western-…

I reverse-searched this image and traced it to a ranch in Northern Queensland, one of the top deforestation hotspots in the world.

This is not a regenerative pasture. It’s a subtropical forest razed for ranching and prevented from recovering. 🧵

mla.com.au/research-and-d…

https://twitter.com/samdknowlton/status/1617636690432266240

73% of deforestation in Queensland and 94% of deforestation in the Great Barrier Reef watershed is due to the ranching industry.

A @UE investigation in 2021 found that half of those destroyed forest were designated as habitat for endangered species like koala.

https://twitter.com/ue/status/1471034103155904519

In Oct, an activist chainsawed a fence in Point Reyes Nat. Seashore, freeing a starving herd of endangered tule elk enclosed by ranches on public land.

On Jan 2, this account posted this anonymous letter to the @NatlParkService from the activist and was restricted by twitter. 🧵

https://twitter.com/iliketuleelk/status/1610057324521218050

These tule elk on the National Seashore are trapped on a small meadow w/ inadequate food & water. Since 2020, a third of the herd has died of starvation and thirst.

They are enclosed because the Park Service leases 1/3 of this public land to dairy farms.

kqed.org/news/11878963/…

Corporate media are clamoring to manufacture this narrative about the death of plant-based food.

The sector’s sales declined 1.1% in 2022. Impossible reported a 50% increase in sales. Tofu is up. Tempeh is up. Tabitha Brown is selling out in Targets. This is contrived.

https://twitter.com/bw/status/1616046749218390016

Yes, Beyond stocks went down — sucks for some rich investors. The stock market is not the economy.

There are also a ton of rich and powerful people who want these companies to fail. Look at the tortured framing of @BW’s stats — excluding freezer products, “plummeted 14%”…

IS WIND ENERGY KILLING WHALES?

The fossil fuel-funded media machine blames everything on renewable energy and has kicked into overdrive following a recent string of humpback whale strandings near offshore wind prospecting activity.

Should we be taking this seriously?
🐋🧵

https://twitter.com/Congressman_JVD/status/1613936320870584331

Whales washing up dead on the Atlantic coast is by no means a novel phenomenon and many of the whales that have died recently show clear injuries from vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglements.

https://twitter.com/gothamwhale/status/1612494040611815426

TOP NATURE DOCUMENTARIES OF 2022 COUNTDOWN:

So many incredible documentaries came out this year, with the fight to protect our last ancient forests taking center stage.

Here’s a sneak peak at my top picks. Keep reading for the countdown: 🧵 13: THE HUMBOLDT CURRENT

From the Patagonian subantarctic to the tropical Galapagos, this series illustrates how the unique ecosystems of the Chilean coast are connected and born from one of the world’s most incredible oceanographic phenomena.

The similarity of Ca(HCO₃)₂ in concrete and the CaCO₃ structures built by corals enables biochemical compatibility.

It may seem a bit angular now, but in time, this artificial reef will accrete into complex organic forms as living coral colonies build a new home here. 🪸🧵

https://twitter.com/allgeierlab/status/1607753294448922627

Unfortunately, some science communicators denigrate coral restoration as a practice of “rearranging the deck chairs” on the titanic of climate change. How wrong they are!

Not only do these bricks provide refuge for marine life, but the corals that grow on them sequester carbon.

Thank you all for a great year. A look back at the articles:

1: A history of the regenerative ranching myth, from Allan Savory’s war crimes in Rhodesia to the funding from Shell & McDonalds seeding academic research & films like Kiss the Ground:
@jacobin

jacobin.com/2022/03/big-ag… Each article comes with a thread. Here is one of my many deconstructing regenerative ranching — in this case, the central myth of replacing the ecological role of buffalo with cattle ranching:

https://twitter.com/unpop_science/status/1500507599577534472

A thread on a decades-long experiment comparing buffalo v. cow grazing on the Konza Prairie:

🦬 v.🐄

The other day, I posted this new abstract. A lot of people questioned or disbelieved the results. I contacted the author for the PDF.

It changed my understanding…🧵

https://twitter.com/unpop_science/status/1602693037754392576

Ratajczak et al.’s 2022 study found buffalo had more than double the beneficial effect on grass biodiversity than cattle. But some people correctly pointed out the methods weren’t controlling for grazing pressure.

Interestingly, this study was an augmentation to one that did…

A wool supplier for @thenorthface and other major fashion labels has talked a big climate game and everyone from the media to the USDA has taken their word for it.

But data show the corporation is an environmental disaster… and it’s not an anomaly.

My latest investigation: 🧶

https://twitter.com/sentient_media/status/1602332496250785794

The farm is called Bare Ranch, but the sheep actually spend most of their time on public land. Its parent company, Estill Ranches, operates across 4 federal grazing allotments in the Great Basin at the CA-NV border.

Interactive GIS map by @wildadvocate:

arcgis.com/home/webmap/vi…

Ticketmaster has recently come under long-overdue scrutiny for its price-gauging techniques, but coverage has generally failed to criticize the monopoly’s venue arm, LiveNation, for the ways it takes advantage of artists. 🧵

Merch cuts are a particularly egregious one:

https://twitter.com/badomenscult/status/1599249733431615488

With companies like Spotify leeching streaming revenue dry, merchandise is often the primary income stream for bands.

But promoters like LiveNation demand a cut of that too. When that cut exceeds the venue’s guarantee to the band, they are effectively paying the venue to play.

https://twitter.com/badomenscult/status/1599450363941179394

It’s time to revise the estimated contribution of animal agriculture to global greenhouse gas emissions. The 14.5% statistic is nearly a decade old and its methods are outdated.

New, more robust and independent research puts the figure at 19-20%.

Let’s review the statistics: 🧵 One of the latest global life cycle analyses for agricultural emissions estimates the sector contributes 35% of GHGs, “of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food”.

35%*57%=20%

Both of these figures are corroborated by other studies.

fao.org/publications/c…

For the past several months, I’ve been investigating the case of the Arctic crab collapses.

I interviewed observers, whistleblowers, fishermen, government officials, and marine biologists. Here is my published story and a thread of final thoughts:

nautil.us/where-have-all… In my initial thread, I laid out the case that fishing impacts had been downplayed in government communications. I now have even more evidence to support this.

However, I came across a fascinating new hypothesis — many of the crabs never existed. Hear me out…

https://twitter.com/unpop_science/status/1581660239501283329