Eco-Roundup: Could climate conspiracy theories be doing the work of divide and conquer?

Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep up my independent reporting.

Since I finished the SLAPP’d podcast for Drilled I’ve been resting, recuperating, re-igniting latent projects, and re-connecting with sources and friends I’d fallen out of regular touch with. It’s been lovely all-around. But something came onto my radar that left me feeling worried. Someone I know shared with me a film called The Agenda: Their Vision — Your Future.

There were things in there that I agreed with — for example the film raised questions about surveillance capitalism, and the ways companies are increasingly collecting data about every move we make and every angle of our faces. It criticized what I would consider to be false solutions to the climate crisis, like carbon offsets and geoengineering. But it quickly turned to arguing that the climate crisis isn’t real, that the COVID pandemic was an op aimed at social control, and that educators who teach students to accept trans people are unethically pushing kids to be trans themselves.

Intellectually, I knew this type of misinformation had been circulating for awhile on all sides of the political spectrum. I knew conspiracy theories had fully infiltrated the White House under Trump. And I was aware of this 180-degree conspiracy theory loop-di-loop — driven in part by social media — that can suddenly flip someone who started with progressive values into alliance with the extreme right. Naomi Klein wrote a whole book about it, Doppelganger, which I guess I’m going to have to go back and finish reading now.  

I knew this stuff was out there, but I was surprised it popped up where it did – from someone who I respect, and whose opinion is respected in their community. (I’m being cryptic, because most of the relationships and encounters I have in the world are not for public consumption — go figure.) And it’s forcing me to rethink how I engage with misinformation in my daily life.

The filmmakers argue that a global push to “net zero” carbon emissions is driving efforts to control people’s behavior. They promote the idea that everyone is going to have to track their carbon footprint on their phone and that people may even someday be denied groceries if they don’t have enough carbon credits. Trains and mass transit, too, are a tool for social control. In fact, the climate crisis is fake (an argument that goes further than most fossil fuel executives these days). And people who participate in the climate movement — especially Greta Thunberg — are puppets of “the agenda.” It links all this to anti-trans and anti-vax talking points.

I was surprised and worried to find myself watching this. But I wasn’t angry at the people who chose to show it, because, in a way, I get it.

My mind kept going back to this other movie I saw recently — Still Life, directed by Jia Zhang-ke. It’s this slow-moving film set in China, along the Yangtze River, where the massive Three Gorges Dam is being built. It centers on two failed love stories, shaped by the dam’s construction. A man arrives to look for his estranged wife, and learns that her address is underwater, submerged by the dam’s floods years ago. In fact, the entire community is being evicted to make way for new floodwaters caused by the dam’s next phase. As the story unfolds, buildings collapse in the background and central characters are suddenly evicted and forced to move away or killed while working on a demolition crew.

The strangest part of the movie: every so often a UFO appears in the sky — but the characters barely seem to notice. I don’t know the director’s intent, but in a place where an entire world can be submerged overnight, anything is believable — why would UFOs be any crazier or less possible?

In a world where white settlers in big sailboats could arrive out of nowhere and overturn every aspect of life, where drones could assassinate by remote control, where carbon pollution could forever change the weather, and robots could take over our jobs and identities — why not these other conspiracy theories?

I thought of a story reporter Nina Lakhani wrote for The Guardian last winter about the unprecedented storms that flooded southern Appalachia. While interviewing survivors, she heard conspiracy theories about weather manipulation, a dam failure, and child trafficking, among other things. The climate crisis was on few people’s minds.

I know from my work with Drilled that parts of the story the film is telling align with a narrative intentionally pushed by a whole network of fossil fuel companies and industry-influenced think tanks. As Naomi Klein and others have argued, all of this misinformation is muddying the waters and making it difficult to distinguish the real conspiracies from the fake ones. It all gets supercharged and mutated by social media. And it has real potential for harm. It can do the work of divide and conquer, splitting people in climate disaster-impacted communities from those organizing for critical policy changes — and from journalists, trying to tell the truth. (And that’s not even getting into the potential impacts for trans people and the immunocompromised.)

I have this uncle, who I love, who spends a lot of evenings letting the YouTube algorithm carry him on a journey. He’s shared conspiracy theories with me in the past, but I haven’t really bothered trying to argue with him too much. I’ve always had different political beliefs from that side of my family, and a lot of the time it doesn’t feel worth spending the rare time we have together fighting about politics. (And there have been fights, and they haven’t been pretty.) But my encounter with The Agenda is making me realize that this everyday misinformation has a pull too powerful for me to duck and dodge. It’s not just my right-wing uncles anymore and hasn’t been for awhile – I’ll admit that I’m late to the game.

I’m not one of these people who believes that if we all just talk across the aisle more, everything will be healed. But I wonder if maybe I play into the “agenda,” as I see it, by changing the subject when someone starts telling me their conspiracy theory. So I’ll go back, I guess, and try something different — see if me and my friend can talk “agendas” without ending up divided and conquered. 

Other stories I’m following:

“The Government has opted for war and blood instead of listening to the just demands of the people.” 

On Sunday, community leader Efraín Fueres, age 46, was shot and killed during Indigenous-led protests in Ecuador. The protesters demands include “the repeal of the gasoline price increase, government compliance with a nationwide referendum to end oil production in a part of the Amazon rainforest and an end to the criminalization of Indigenous and environmental activists,” according to a report by Katie Surma at Inside Climate News. Her reporting gets into the broader context of the assassination and is worth a read. Under the administration of President Daniel Noboa, a Trump ally, government officials have launched financial investigations and frozen the bank accounts of several Indigenous, anti-mining, and environmental organizations. Last year, terrorism charges were filed against over 70 environmental and human rights defenders after a big protest against a Canadian-owned mine. And last week, an Indigenous media outlet, TV MICC, was suspended by the Noboa administration.

“How safe can you really be when you know powerful people want you dead?"

Global Witness released its annual report on assassinations of land defenders internationally, which counted 146 murdered or disappeared. Eighty-two percent of them were in Latin America, and Guatemala had the highest per capita rate of killings. The report delves into the disappearance of Mapuche land defender, Julia Chuñil. It describes Nkukorli forest defenders’ fight against timber companies in Nigeria. And it features the voice Jani Silva, an activist from Colombia, who discusses how extractivism and militarization go hand-in-hand in the region of Putumayo, and the toll it takes to live under flawed state protection measures. Global Witness’s count and its definition of “land defender” is limited of course. They acknowledge that they did not count the over 59,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli government operations, as genocide in Gaza persists.

“The FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.”

A report by Dell Cameron at WIRED describes how FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate collaborated with the Animal Agriculture Alliance, a trade group, to “surveil, discredit, and suppress animal rights organizations.” The nonprofit Property of the People collected extensive public records documenting the close relationship between Big Ag and law enforcement. Undercover spies — some working for contracted private intelligence firms including Afimac Global — infiltrated activist groups on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, which passed what they learned to law enforcement. The industry was especially focused on the organization Direct Action Everywhere or DxE and was bent on asserting that the activists represent a biohazard. The FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction unit eventually sent around a memo titled “Animal Rights Extremists Likely Increase the Spread of Virulent Newcastle Disease [vND] in California,” which analysts at the multi-agency Northern California Regional Intelligence Center later debunked.

“Perhaps the most insidious aspect of ecocide is its indefinite temporal reach.”

Last summer, the Israeli military destroyed Palestine’s only national seed bank in the West Bank city of Hebron. The bank held over 70 heirloom seed varieties. Writing in Truthout, Ilā Ravichandran  calls this a “temporal amputation.” They write, “The destruction of seed banks eliminates not just current agricultural capacity, but future possibilities for food sovereignty.” That temporal aspect, makes the destruction of the seed bank a genocidal tactic. All is not lost, of course. For her award-winning article in The Guardian, journalist Whitney Bauck spoke to researcher and conservationist Vivien Sansour last year about another Palestinian seed library that Sansour started. “Seeds from the library have already begun to ‘grow wings’ and make their way around the globe, from the yakteen in upstate New York to eggplant in California,” Bauck wrote.  

“As for Gaza, I was absolutely baffled by the lack of response in the movement as a whole.”

Climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa spoke this summer with the outlet SUMAÚMA about the fissures within the Fridays For Future movement over Gaza. She said that the largest chapter, based in Germany, has sought since 2021 to prevent the movement from taking action related to Palestine. Siddiqa says that this long-simmering conflict “has been one of the massive reasons why this movement has fizzled.” This interview raises a lot of questions for me. For one, what really is the point of fighting for climate justice, if climate justice is compatible with genocide? But also if the climate crisis is going to increasingly fuel conflict and violence, then how are we supposed to confront all of the compounding injustices at once?

Palate Cleansers

I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.

Something Delicious: cake / ice cream / sauce / fruit / repeat

It’s been a whole year of eating fast and easy and a little bit boring. But three times in a row this month, I had what I claimed at the time to be the best desserts I’d ever eaten. They all involved cake / ice cream / sauce / fruit. One was a secret family recipe lemon pound cake with vanilla ice cream and fresh peaches and the crunchy black sesame butter that I love. The second was a cornmeal olive oil cake from one of Claire Saffitz’s effing delicious cookbooks, with the same ice cream and peaches and a miso caramel that my friend concocted out of thin air. And the third I can’t even say what the hell it was – maybe a hazelnut cake? Maybe blackberries? But it came from Superiority Burger in Manhattan and it blew my mind. I ate bay leaf ice cream there, too – who knew that such a thing could be the best thing.

Garden Update: Strange September Strawberries

It’s a warm late September in New York, and the cherry tomatoes keep turning golden; the raspberries we thought would never arrive are coming in sweet, and little yellow strawberries are peeking out from their container. I thought they belonged only in June, and I don’t know what they mean to say. Some things have gone brown and dry, but the marigolds and the cosmos are bursting in orange, and the morning glories are still pink whenever I wake up.

Community Updates: Indigenous Martha's Vineyard

I just finished Joseph Lee’s book Nothing More of This Land, and I encourage you to check it out. Joseph is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer from what is now known as Martha’s Vineyard — best known as a vacation destination for wealthy elites, but also the Indigenous nation's homeland. With the island so expensive, most of the tribe’s members can’t afford to live there, but they’ve continued to fight for their land and to build community in diaspora. The book is an exploration of Joseph’s mixed identity and his journey to understand what Indigenous sovereignty really means on Martha’s Vineyard and around the world. It’s written to resonate with Indigenous readers, but what I like to imagine is that some hapless tourist or wealthy summertime resident of Martha’s Vineyard will pick up the book imagining they’re going to get a 500-year history of Wampanoag presence on the island — and instead get schooled in Indigenous sovereignty and resistance.

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