By Tanya Núñez, National Co-coordinator

(this report was originally published as part of the latest episode of our Eco-Solidarity Update on YouTube)

Brazilian Trade Unionist and Ecologist Chico Mendes once said, “Ecology, without class struggle, is just gardening.” As we enter an era of unprecedented ecological devastation, a rise in fascism, threat of nuclear war, and where full-scale genocide and ecocide are happening as we speak, now more than ever it’s crucial to understand what he meant. At the heart of all political and economic struggles is the issue of land (water, resources, etc) and labor. Vice versa, focusing on environmental issues without addressing the underlying power dynamics of class and capitalism is insufficient to address the root causes of ecological problems.

When we look at nature itself, the health of the plants is determined by how healthy the roots are. The same can be said of our system, if we do not take a radical approach in addressing the most pressing issues of our times, grasping at the roots, as Angela Davis once said, the future of humanity and our planet looks bleak. For Chico Mendes, environmental issues, workers’ rights, and broader political goals were central to the struggle he was waging as a leader of the local union of rubber tappers, an active member of the growing Workers’ Party, and an advocate of “socialist ecology”.

Taken from the book Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in his own words, Chico says

“My dream is to see this entire forest conserved because we know it can guarantee the future of all the people who live in it. Not only that, I believe that in a few years the Amazon can become an economically viable region not only for us, but for the nation, for all of humanity, and for the whole planet… We realized that in order to guarantee the future of the Amazon we had to find a way to preserve the forest while at the same time developing the region’s economy. We accepted that the Amazon could not be turned into some kind of sanctuary that nobody could touch. On the other hand, we knew it was important to stop the deforestation that is threatening the Amazon and all human life on the planet. We felt our alternative should involve preserving the forest, but it should also include a plan to develop the economy. So we came up with the idea of Extractive Reserves”

I recommend you watch the interviews we’ve done with Gilvania Ferreira from Brazil and Erick Saenz from Peru regarding the current threats to the Amazon and popular movements in the area that are standing up in defense of the rainforest.

It shouldn’t be a surprise by now that Trump is escalating, at full throttle, the threat of another world war, despite a campaign of peace many of his followers believe him to be taking. Sure, Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Palestinian students, China, and others seem unprecedented, and in a lot of ways, they are. We should denounce it vehemently because it is an extremely chaotic, irrational, and violent approach. But as we like to say, Trump is only a symptom of a larger disease, the disease of capitalism and imperialism. Trump, along with all the other billionaires, is a result of a system upheld and reinforced by all previous U.S. presidents, whether they’ve been republicans or democrats. Let us not forget the horrific images of Border Patrol agents on horseback at the Texas border, unleashing violence on Haitian refugees during the first year of Biden’s presidency, when he continued to enforce Title 42, a policy imposed by Trump during his first term as president, and that resulted in the mass deportation of thousands of people. Or how Barack Obama was coined the “Deporter in Chief” for deporting the record number of people during his administration, and building the ICE infrastructure to make mass incarcation and deportation possible under Trump’s regime.

Also notable is the fact that it was Obama’s administration that attempted to quell, through militarized police, the movement led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and water protectors to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The largest indigenous led movement since Wounded Knee. Despite multiple court orders to try to stop the construction and operation of DALP throughout the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations, as of now, the pipeline is fully operational. Moreover, what is most outrageous is that in March a jury of nine in North Dakota ordered the environmental campaign group, Greenpeace, to pay more than $660 million in damages to Texas-based oil company Energy Transfer, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The attacks on migrants, the militarization of the border, and the repression of liberation movements in defense of human and environmental rights have always been a bipartisan effort. Not just
that, but while climate-induced migration is becoming more of a reality, the world’s wealthiest nations, which historically are the most responsible for the climate crisis, are prioritizing borders over climate action.
A 2021 report by the Transnational Institute found that rich countries spend more on militarising their borders than on providing climate finance to enable the poorest countries to help migrants. Key findings in the report also show that the border security industry is profiting from climate change, with top border contractors boasting of the potential increase in their revenue from climate change. One of the largest weapons manufacturing companies in the world, Raytheon, says it anticipates “demand for its military products and services as security concerns may arise as a result of droughts, floods, and storm events as a result of climate change”. The report also shows that the border security industry provides security to the oil industry, which is one of the main contributors to the climate crisis and even sits on each other’s executive boards.

Trump’s agenda over the last few months has been clear: tax breaks and incentives for his billionaire friends at the expense of the working people of the entire world. From Elon Musk, to Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, Trump is rounding up all his favorite dictators and war criminals of the world to be in cahoots with him.
Notably, in February, Trump’s meeting at the white house with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky reaffirmed Henry Kissinger’s famous quote that being America’s enemy was dangerous, but being America’s friend is fatal. Trump wants to turn Ukraine into a U.S. colony to exploit it of its “raw-Earth” minerals, as the POTUS repeatedly stated. The U.S. believes that Ukraine’s deposits of rare-earth and other critical minerals necessary for advanced technologies like phones and batteries would bring in tens of trillions of dollars in profit and help break its dependence on China’s supplies.

In a peer-reviewed article published in 2024, scientific experts warned that the “long-term, large-scale mining and utilization of rare earths has caused serious environmental pollution and constitutes a global health issue, raising concerns regarding the safety of human health”. I recommend checking out Ben Norton’s report on Geopolitical Economic Report to learn more details about Trumps plans on Ukraine.

Like with past administrations, Ukraine is a pawn that has been used repeatedly by the US to pressure one of its biggest adversaries, Russia. It’s not about keeping peace but about maximizing profits. Trump is willing to not only treat Ukrainians as cannon fodder for the U.S.’s bipartisan NATO proxy war on Russia but also as canaries in his colonial mineral-mining fantasies. But his fantasies don’t end there. Another recent visitor to the white house has been war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who has resumed, with the help of the Trump administration, the vicious bombardment of Gaza in the last few weeks, already killing hundreds. Netanyahu even reportedly took a longer flight route, roughly 400 kilometers more, to avoid running the risk of arrest in a country that could potentially enforce the ICC arrest warrant.

In February, Trump posted a bizarre AI video of his vision for Gaza on his social media website, Truth Social, where you see Elon Musk making it rain on a beach while Trump and Netanyahu sunbathe at a Trump Gaza Hotel swimming pool. Trump has continued the U.S. and Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing in Gaza so he can fulfill his dream of building a luxury real estate development on the war-torn land he called a “demolition site”.

But his luxury resort fantasies could not be further from the reality on the ground in Gaza. As we’ve previously reported, scorching war on Gaza has inflicted unprecedented environmental destruction, which, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, “will take tens of billions of dollars and decades to reverse”.

According to an article published on Yale Environment 360:

The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot and the crossroad for wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It has more than 250 bird species and 100 mammal species, from wild cats and wolves to mongooses and mole rats, according to research conducted over the past two decades by the foremost expert on the territory’s fauna and flora, Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou of the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City.

Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves, but with a growing population and ongoing occupation and war, the public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action.

The systematic destruction of Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure is a calculated act of environmental warfare, pushing the region into an irreversible humanitarian and ecological crisis. The collapse of sanitation systems is not just a side effect of war – it is a deliberate strategy to make Gaza uninhabitable. After the short-lived ceasefire a few months back, farmers were returning to their lands to find scorched trees and toxic soil. Analysis from UN satellite data suggests 41 percent of the Gaza Strip comprises cropland. For Gaza, agriculture was once “one of the most important components” of Gaza’s gross domestic product, contributing $343 million to its economy, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. The bureau now estimates that every day, Gaza’s agricultural sector loses nearly $2 million, as nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s croplands have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Despite all this, thousands of Gazans will not be stopped in their efforts to return to their destroyed homeland, steadfast on staying, rebuilding, and continuing to work the land, which in itself is a form of resistance.

Cuba, another nation that has been a top target for U.S. aggression, also continues to resist, and is putting substantial efforts toward ecological sustainability with the help of the communist government of China. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel inaugurated the first of 92 solar parks in February as part of a Chinese-backed plan to ease hours-long blackouts across the Caribbean island nation. For decades, sanctions and the U.S. blockade have suppressed the country’s economic development, preventing Cuba from repairing its energy infrastructure by blocking the importation of necessary materials and technology. Now, with the help of China and countries like Russia and Turkey, the recent park in Havana is one of 55 expected to come online this year, generating 1,200 megawatts, with the remainder opening by 2028. Cuba is making efforts to expand its national energy production and is looking to renewable energy to solve its energy problem. Already, Cuba has been recognized as the most sustainably developed country in the world based on the Sustainable Development Index (SDI), which considers human development alongside ecological impact.

And course, I cannot end this without talking about China. China has become the main target for Trump’s global trade war, most recently imposing 125% tariffs on Beijing. However, it didn’t take long for Trump to be forced to issue exemptions for Chinese-made cellphones, computers, semiconductors, and other electronics, because the U.S. cannot make them and depends on China more than China depends on the U.S. China’s state-led economic development model and robust industrial policy have transformed it into the world’s sole manufacturing superpower, with diversified market and control of strategic materials, according to European think-tank. The US is also reliant on China for many rare earth metals essential for modern manufacturing, such as in electric vehicle batteries. Beijing controls more than two-thirds of global rare earth production and more than 90 per cent of processing capacity. China has become a leader in industries such as tech, agriculture, and of course green energy and environmental sustainability.

In an article published in the Monthly Review called Marxist Ecology in China “From Marx’s Ecology to socialist eco-civilization Theory, Chen Yiwen describes China’s critical examination of the modern environmental crisis and engagement in Marxist ecology research beginning in the 1980s. Chinese research has primarily concentrated on the assertion that “the logic of capital is the root cause of the ecological crisis.” The article also discusses China’s construction of socialist eco-civilization theory as a distinctive product of Chinese Marxist ecology, which emphasizes the necessity and superiority of socialist principles, systems, and ideologies in effectively addressing environmental challenges. One of the most fundamental proposition—perhaps the most pivotal, Chen Yiwen writes, is encapsulated in the phrase “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.”

The full statement of this proposition was made by Xi in 2013, saying “we want to have not only mountains of gold, but also mountains of green. If we must choose between the two, we would rather have the green than the gold. In any case, green mountains are themselves gold mountains.”

Indeed, Xi is correct, nothing is more important to the welfare of humanity than the preservation and care of our planet Earth. The only thing getting in the way of this reality is the ruling class of capitalist billionaires, who would prefer to wage wars, destroy the environment, and suppress movements in defense of the land, to maximize profits for themselves, than address this existential threat that is affecting EVERYONE in some way or form. Now more than ever, we must resonate with Chico Mendes’ words because the war being waged on the environment is a class war.

You cannot claim to be for the environment without standing up against war.

Now is the time to stand side by side with the land defenders, with the water protectors, the national liberation fighters, if we want to save the planet.

We must fight like hell against those waging war on our people and the planet.