Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The World’s Biggest Carbon Removal Plant Just Turned 2. So, Uh, Is It Working? (HM)
Meet the company leading the climate capture race (T)
The electric grid is about to be transformed (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Infinitum, a startup creating sustainable air core motors, raised a $185M Series E led by Just Climate (BW)
Eavor Technologies, a Canada-based provider of advanced geothermal energy solutions, raised $182M in funding led by OMV AG (FN)
CMBlu, a nine-year-old German startup that builds large battery storage systems, raised a $105.7 million round. Strabag was the deal lead. More here.
Scatec, an Oslo-based renewable energy solutions provider, raised a $102M round led by Climate Fund Managers (FN)
Omnidian, an eight-year-old Seattle startup that manages solar power performance and services the panels for commercial and residential installations, raised a $25 million round. Investors included HSBC Asset Management (GW)
Fibracast, a 13-year-old Canadian company that develops and manufactures water filtration membranes and systems for companies and municipalities, raised a $32.1 million Series A round led by Cycle Capital (F)
Triplebar, a four-year-old startup based in Emeryville, Ca., that is developing animal proteins from microbes, raised a $20 million Series A round. Synthesis Capital led the round (AM)
Redex Group, a renewable energy certificate solutions provider, raised a $10M Series A led by Aramco Ventures (FN)
Circu Li-ion, a two-year-old Luxembourg startup that is attempting to automate the process of recycling batteries, raised a $4.8 million seed round led by BonVenture (SL)
CarbonFarm, a two-year-old Paris startup whose mission is to provide rice farmers and agribusinesses with access to carbon markets, raised a $2.6 million seed round co-led by Racine2, Serena, and Makesense (SC)
Green Theory
Buffalo Lives
Grazing in the western stretch of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, a small herd of American bison have wowed onlookers for over 130 years. When they were first exhibited, about 100 individuals comprised the known breeding population in the entire US.
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Once upon a time, 60 million of these magnificent mammals munched from what is now Alaska, all the way down to northern Mexico. In the 1700s, bison were still regularly seen as far east as the Carolinas. Today, while there are nearly 500,000 American bison in North America, a mere 25,000 are thought to roam freely, on public lands or sanctuaries. The total population has not even reached 1% of its pre-European colonization levels.
“kill off his food”
What caused the near-extermination of these beautiful bovids? The US government’s genocidal war against American Indians put bison in the crosshairs. As Dina Gilio-Whitaker explains in As Long As Grass Grows: “Militant Indian resistance to reservation life vexed the United States’ efforts to safely settle westbound migration populations, so a more extreme strategy aimed at starving Indians into submission ensued.” The Plains herds, especially, played an essential role in spiritual, medicinal, culinary, and material life. For these precise reasons, the US Army systematically slaughtered nearly every last bison.
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Sickeningly, the largest trees in the world are named after the very designers and enforcers of the plot to kill off the American bison, among their larger, racist evils. Gilio-Whitaker notes that “[h]istorians identify General Sherman as” the ecocide’s “main architect, and the army principally responsible for the demise of the buffalo.” While many American Indians resisted, the ruthlessness of the US Army and sympathetic militias proved overwhelming.
Some in the US government mounted a defense of the bison, through a congressional “attempt to pass legislation in 1874 to limit the buffalo slaughter,” Gilio-Whitaker continues. Nonetheless, “Sherman’s malicious genius proved triumphant when army veteran and president Ulysses S. Grant vetoed the legislation.” The cavalry and artillery slaughter of bison could then proceed through the end of the 1880s. When their wars of annihilation were complete, these bloodthirsty generals had set off over a century of knock-on ecological devastation, derived from divorcing the land of its people and animals.
Ecocide: A Crime No Matter the Time
Though the murderous US Army consoled itself that killing off herds was more humane than killing American Indians directly (which they still did, brutally), the targeting of these bison could now be considered a war crime in itself, too.
Ecocide describes mass destruction of natural life by humans. Longtime Green Bite readers will already know, environmental devastation is a crime against everyone, but especially communities who most directly depend on that ecosystem for food, water, and more. According to international law, inflicting ecocide only counts as a crime during war. Just as president Grant vetoed the bison protection bill 124 years earlier, the US, UK, and Netherlands blocked the addition of ‘peacetime’ ecocide from the 1998 Rome Statutes for the International Criminal Court.
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The tragic history of the American bison shows how genocide can be both a motivation behind, and effect of, ecocide. The US military continued to commit ecocide, such as the toxic defoliation and physical destruction of vast swathes of several nations during the Vietnam War. Still, mass environmental crime lurks in seemingly peaceful times, with corporations and governments engaging in persistent and pernicious ecocide every day. Protectors of the environment—most notably indigenous peoples—rightly demand accountability for this publicly sanctioned destruction. If we can unite humanity against ecocide, or just prevent a single ecocide from happening, imagine how much we stand to save.
“…The Sacred
Grandfathers and Grandmothers led us
for millions of years through fire and
underground paths, from angels to
neutrinos, from buffalo lives to the
common man. The hallowed Grandfathers
and Grandmother have seen us safely
through cleansing waters, to the present
existence, and we are still not done with
this earth walking…”
Excerpt from ‘They Still See Us’ by Lois Red Elk
The Closer
Paul Nicklen’s Dawn Patrol.