By Speranta Dumitru, Associate Professor, Paris Descartes University. First published on The Conversation

In France, the concern for inequality makes poverty invisible. For example, the organization Oxfam, whose name is related to the famine ( Ox ford Committee for Fam ine Relief), focused his campaign on the rich. The media gave the names of billionaires who would own as much as half of humanity but did not say a word about the poor. Yet, naming poor people increases their sympathy for them and promotes altruistic decision, as many studiesshow.

The invisibility of the poor could be explained by the current context. After long months of saying that yellow jackets "suffer", that they are "in distress" and can not "make ends meet" or "fill their fridge", can we still talk about those who live on $ 1.90 a day?

There is certainly good news: the proportion of the world's poor has fallen drastically. Forty years ago, it was over 40%. Today, only 10% of the world's population lives on $ 1.90 a day. Half of these people live in Africa.

So, imagine that you have 100 euros to give. You can give them to Christian, one of my students, born in Burkina Faso: he will send them to his family who live with $ 1.90 a day, as nearly half of Burkinabe. But you can also give them to Eric, father and driver, who earns a little more than 54 euros per day, the value of the daily smic.

How are you going to spend those 100 euros?

The national preference

Like most French people, you are tempted to give Eric the money. Admittedly, you know that 100 euros are worth a lot more for Christian. And you know that with the same money, you would help more people because family solidarity is more widespread in Africa. But something bristles you in this reasoning.

The temptation to favor his relatives and, by extension, his compatriots, is quite natural. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments , Adam Smith noted that any European of humanity would deplore an earthquake that touches a distant country. But despite the intensity of the disaster and the millions of inhabitants concerned, his personal belongings seem to him more important.

Now this attention to ourselves and to our surroundings perverts our moral sense. With the emotions that play tricks on us, we lose, as this European of whom Adam Smith speaks, any sense of the measure:

"If he were to lose his little finger, he would not sleep at night; but he would snore with the deepest sense of security in spite of the ruin of a hundred million of his brothers, provided he had never seen them. "

To avoid being trapped by our inclinations, John Rawls has found a solution. He called it "veil of ignorance". His idea is that it is not enough to want to be impartial (because our inclinations can take over). In terms of social justice, we must rather reason as if we did not know what social position would be ours. Basically, we could have been born in a rich or poor family. Our birth is more a matter of luck than merit.

This changes the problem a bit: imagine that you no longer have to give 100 euros but to receive them. But tomorrow morning, the birth lottery will be played again and you will wake up either in Christian's life or in Eric's life. You do not know how luck will turn, but you will have to live this life, drawn by lot, to the end - whether in France or Burkina Faso. In the meantime, tonight, we ask you where to send the 100 euros, in France or Burkina Faso?

Is living in France a chance?

Many people think that living in France is not really a chance when you are part of the working class.

The economist Branko Milanovic is the first to have estimated the extent of inequality of opportunity globally. He analyzed household disposable income in 118 countries. For each country, it divided the population into 100 shares and recorded the income of each 1%, or percentile. In total, he had 11800 centiles. But he wanted to know if the poorest 1% in Brazil, for example, are richer than the poorest 1% in India. To be able to compare these incomes, he converted them using purchasing power parity (PPP). Then, he reordered them by percentiles around the world.

For France, data from the World Bank show that 62% of French people belong to the richest 10% of the world.

But public opinion is interested in the very rich. In the graph below, each point represents 1% of the French with its rank in the national (on the horizontal axis) and the global (on the vertical axis) income distribution. On the right of the graph, we see that the richest 3% of the French are among the richest 1% in the world. In the United States, 12% belong to this category.

If public opinion is more interested in the poor French, it would look, for example, the first point on the left: it is the poorest 1%. She would be surprised then that despite their position, rather away from the rest of the national distribution, nobody cares. With their close proximity to the global distribution community, their buying power resembles that of the world's middle class , most of whom live in China.

Above the 3% poorest in France, the situation is improving rapidly, so that 97% of the French belong to the 30% richest in the world. Then, 90% of the French are among the richest 20% in the world.

Therefore, if the lottery has awarded you the life of Eric in France, you are literally lucky. Because, whatever your personal efforts, the country where you are born determines your income prospects. Branko Milanovic estimated that place of birth accounts for 80% of global inequalities . His book, Global Inequalities , has just been translated into French.

At such a level of inequality of opportunity, one can not hesitate between Eric and Christian. Christian's family will almost certainly live on less than $ 5.50 a day, like 92% of Burkinabes . For Eric's child, the probability of having such income is 0.2% in France.

These comparisons take into account prices in each country, as indicated by the term "purchasing power parity". If the purchasing power of yellow vests justifies anger, how to call the feeling that the Burkinabés smother?

How to reduce inequality of opportunity?

Two solutions are often discussed in the public debate: the opening of the labor market to foreigners and redistribution.

Milanovic defends the first solution: to increase labor migration. This is the classic solution in development economics. Lant Pritchett , Harvard professor, has dedicated a book to him, Let Their People Come , which he left in free access. My study, "Visas, not help! " , Provides an overview of these issues.

Milanovic is aware of the rise of the extreme right and proposes a compromise: increase the number of economic migrants in exchange for the reduction of their rights. For example, they could pay more taxes. But my students who read his book and are not migrants have deemed this proposal of discrimination repugnant. Their reaction suggests that a compromise between the extreme right that no longer wants migrants and young French, committed to equal treatment on the territory, is not easy to find.

Another solution: the massive redistribution of income. Oxfam, like many others on the left, consider that the rich should be taxed more. But now the tax is collected nationwide and most billionaires live in rich countries. Taxing the rich more in rich countries is obviously not a solution for Africa.

Moreover, public opinion considers any tax exile as illegitimate, as if only their compatriots were entitled to benefit from the tax collected on these billionaires. At no time does one wonder whether the exile of the rich benefits the poor.

For the moment, the two solutions envisaged to reduce the inequality of chances lead to dead ends. On the one hand, the Milanovic compromise is difficult to obtain in a context of strong polarization of opinion. On the other hand, public opinion cares more about taking to the rich than improving the lives of the poor.

As for Emmanuel Macron, his solution is to promote access to the French labor market. Thus, the measures proposed in the crisis of yellow vests encourage work: increase of 100 euros for those who work for 0.5-1.5 of the smic and tax exemption of extra hours of work. It is clear that these measures will increase the inequality of opportunity at the global level.

While waiting for better times, we will have to redouble our efforts. We are more than half of the French to be part of the 10% richest in the world. Our efforts should be aimed at helping the poorest and the associations that fight poverty effectively.

By Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia. First published on The Conversation.

Populism and environmentalism are words seldom seen in the same sentence. One is associated predominantly with nationalists and charismatic leaders of “real people”, the other with broadly-based collective action to address the world’s single most pressing problem.

Differences don’t get much starker, it would seem. But we are increasingly seeing the two strands combine in countries around the world.

Exhibit A in support of this thesis is the remarkable growth and impact of Extinction Rebellion, often known as XR.

When I finished writing a book on the possibility of environmental populism little more than six months ago, I’d never even heard of XR. Now it is a global phenomenon, beginning to be taken seriously by policymakers in some of the world’s more consequential democracies. Britain’s decision earlier this year to declare a climate emergency is attributed in part to 11 days of Extinction Rebellion protest that paralysed parts of London.

Greta Thunberg, the remarkable Swedish schoolgirl who has rapidly become one of the world’s leading climate activists, is another – rather inspiring – example of a rising tide of popular opinion demanding political leaders take action before it is too late. It is also a telling indictment of the quality and imagination of the current crop of international leaders that schoolchildren are taking the lead on an issue that will, for better or worse, define their future.

It is striking that so many prominent figures in international politics are not just buffoonish, self-obsessed and ludicrously underqualified for the positions they hold, but are also rather old.

I speak as an ageing baby boomer myself, and a childless one at that. My rather ageist point is that I simply don’t have the same stake in the future that young people do, who have perhaps 70 or 80 years yet to live.

The world will be a very different place by then. Without action on climate change, it could be positively apocalyptic. A “progressive” variety of bottom-up, populist political mobilisation of precisely the sort that XR is developing could encourage even the most obdurate elders to take note.

Even if there’s merit in the point that younger leaders might take climate change more seriously than leading members of the gerontocracy such as Donald Trump, does this make the redoubtable Ms Thunberg a populist? Not if we subscribe to the views of some of populism’s more prominent critics.

Political scholar John Keane described populism (in The Conversation, as it happens) as “a recurrent autoimmune disease of democracy”, and a “pseudo-democratic style of politics”.

He’s got a point. The idea one person is uniquely capable of representing the otherwise inarticulate and neglected will of the people is highly implausible, not to say potentially dangerous.

History is replete with examples of things going badly wrong under the leadership of messianic megalomaniacs. There is a growing number of populists and demagogues in our own time, and many – especially among the young – are losing faith in democracy.

When democracies can be captured by powerful vested interests and even the most compelling scientific evidence can be deliberately undermined and discredited, such scepticism is understandable.

But there is also a “progressive” version of populism championed by some on the Left (if such labels actually mean anything anymore) as a potential way forward. The anti-globalisation movement and the re-emergence of radical politics in Europe are seen as positive examples of this possibility. However, given the demise of Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece, the collapse in support for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and the disappearance of the Occupy movement, such claims look increasingly unpersuasive.

And yet there are two features of climate change activism that make it different from normal politics, if such a thing exists any longer.

First, climate change transcends class, race, nationality, gender and religion – even if you don’t believe it’s actually happening, it will affect all of us (although it will disproportionately weigh on poorer nations, and the poorest within those nations). The good news is even some of the more conservative groups in our society are beginning to accept the evidence, if only of their own eyes.

Second, the unambiguous impact of climate change is only a foretaste of what’s to come. Things are going to get a lot worse, as Australia’s strategic thinkers are beginning to recognise.

It is not clear whether the climate change movement is popular enough, however, as our recent federal election showed. Although it’s unlikely any of our major political parties will go the polls offering ambitious policies in the foreseeable future, eventually the climate will change politics everywhere. The only question is in what way.

Political pressure is one thing; meaningful change is quite another. The scale of the transformation needed in the way we collectively live and organise economic activity is formidable and frankly unlikely – especially in the very short time available to take collective action on an historically unprecedented scale. Policy change on this scale will inevitably create winners and losers.

What is to be done? Enlightened populism is – or could be part of – the answer. If our leaders are too dim, compromised or gutless to act, we have to keep nagging them until they do – or vote for someone who might.

Indeed, democracies are still fortunately positioned in this regard, and we should take advantage of that.

A “lucky country” like Australia could actually play a leadership role by championing a Green New Deal and retrofitting the entire economy along sustainable lines. (If we were serious, it would also mean closing down the coal industry.)

While climate activists might conceivably pressure governments to act, it might be harder to win over the average voter. These are big issues. Unlikely as it might sound, the necessary counterpart of environmental populism is a micro-level engagement with the large numbers of people who either don’t know or don’t care.

Beyond lip service, we need to mobilise truly popular support for change. Now is a good time to start.

By Marion Hourdequin, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College. First published on The Conversation.

Even if you’ve never heard of Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmentalist who crossed the Atlantic on a sailboat to attend a Sept. 23 United Nations summit on the climate, you may have heard about the student-led Global Climate Strike she helped inspire, planned for Friday, Sept. 20.

People from more than 150 countries are expected to head to the streets to demand climate action. According to the organizers, the strike aims “to declare a climate emergency and show our politicians what action in line with climate science and justice means.”

The strike was galvanized by a global youth movement, whose Friday school walkouts over the last year were themselves inspired by Thunberg’s own three-week strike in August 2018 to demand climate action by the Swedish parliament.

People of all ages will be joining this year’s protests at the United Nations, and adults – with their environmental organizations, climate negotiations and election campaigns – are gradually getting on board. The Union of Concerned Scientists even published an “Adult’s Guide” to the climate strike to help parents of participants get up to speed.

But the kids are clearly leading on climate change – and they’re changing the way we talk about this global challenge, putting ethics at the center of the debate.

Climate change is an ethical problem

Economic assessments of climate change, such as cost-benefit analysis, have for years helped justify political procrastination. By discounting the importance of anticipated harms to people in the future, policymakers can argue that taking actions to address climate change today are too costly.

Short-term thinking by today’s “grown-ups” ignores her generation, Thunberg says.

“When you think about the future today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050,” she said in a 2018 TED talk. “What we do or don’t do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren.”

Youth climate activists argue that “our house is on fire” and insist that world leaders act accordingly. They are attuned to the ecological consequences, intergenerational implications and international unfairness of climate change for all people living today.

Scholars in my field of environmental ethics have been writing about climate justice for decades. The arguments vary, but a key conclusion is that the burdens of responding to climate change should be divided equitably – not borne primarily by the poor.

This notion of “common, but differentiated responsibilities” is a fundamental principle of equity outlined in the 1992 United Nations climate change treaty, which laid the groundwork for the many international climate negotiations that have occurred since.

Philosophers like Henry Shue have laid out the reasons that wealthy countries like the United States are morally bound not just to significantly cut their own carbon emissions but also help other countries adapt to a changing climate. That includes contributing financially to the development of climate-friendly energy sources that meet the pressing and near-term basic needs of developing countries.

Historically, wealthy countries have contributed the most and benefited the most from fossil fuel emissions. These same countries have the greatest financial, technological and institutional capacity to shift away from fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, poor countries are often most vulnerable to climate impacts like rising seas, more intense storms and eroding coastlines.

For these reasons, many environmental ethicists hold, wealthy high-emitting countries should lead the way on mitigation and finance international climate adaption. Some even argue that rich countries should compensate affected countries for the climate loss and damage.

Practical, not ethical

Political leaders tend to dodge questions of ethics in their policymaking and global debates on climate change.

According to Stephen Gardiner, a philosopher at University of Washington, climate policy often focuses on “practical” considerations like efficiency or political feasibility.

U.S. climate negotiators in particular have for decades pushed back against ethically grounded differentiated responsibilities and resisted top down mandatory emissions cuts, seeking a more politically palatable option: Voluntary emissions cuts determined by each country.

And some legal scholars say a climate policy based not on ethics but on self-interest might be more effective.

University of Chicago law professors Eric Posner and David Weisbach have gone so far as to suggest, on efficiency grounds, that developing nations should pay wealthy countries to emit less, since poorer and more vulnerable nations have more to lose as a result of the climate crisis.

The kids aren’t buying it

Young activists like Greta Thunberg are reversing the marginalization of ethics from climate conversations.

With their focus on challenging “systematic power and inequity” and respect and reciprocity, they recognize that virtually all decisions about how to respond to climate change are value judgments.

That includes inaction. The status quo – a fossil fuel-dominated energy economy – is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Sticking with business as usual, the argument goes, places more importance on near-term benefits enjoyed by some than on the longer-term consequences many will suffer.

Polls show the youth are concerned and engaged. Youth activists are explicitly calling attention to the harm climate change is causing now and the harm it threatens for the future – and demanding action. And they are working internationally, in a global movement of solidarity.

Scholarship on climate ethics is robust, but it has had limited effects on actual policy. Young people, on the other hand, are communicating the ethical issues clearly and loudly.

In doing so, they are demanding accountability from adults. They are asking us to consider what our resistance to change means for the world they will inherit.

Recently, my high school-aged daughter pulled a wrinkled climate strike flier out of her backpack, asking, “Can I skip school and go?”

I asked myself, “What am I saying if I say no?”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a sweeping plan on Thursday, the day before 1000 Amazon Seattle employees will join colleagues at Google and Microsoft in walking off their jobs to support the September 20, 2019 Global Climate Strike and marches around the world. The sweeping new plan unveiled by Bezos commits the company to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years ahead of schedule.

As part of the announcement, Amazon will purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian. They will be on the road as early as 2021, giving the company a big boost in keeping its climate policy promise to make Amazon carbon neutral by 2040. All 100,000 vans should be on the road by 2024. Note that Amazon has already invested $440 million in Rivian, which raised as part of its $700 million February 2019 round of funding.

Rivians will be built in Michigan in Normal, Illinois, alongside the SUVs and pickups Rivian plans to build in a former Mitsubishi plant, reports The Detroit News.

"This provides an opportunity for mega-tech, through the sheer size and capital available, to invest in electric vehicle and accelerate EV penetration," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a Thursday note to investors.

When Mitsubishi ran the Illinois plant, it churned out around 250,000 vehicles annually, Abuelsamid said. Between the pickup, SUV and Amazon van, Rivian would likely be approaching 100,000 vehicles per year in the early years of the plant, which should be fully operating by the end of next year. There's also an as-yet-unnamed vehicle that Rivian and Ford Motor Co. plan to partner on that might run on the line..

Bezos expects 80% of Amazon’s energy use to come from renewable sources by 2024, before transitioning to zero emissions by 2030. The current rate of renewable energy usage is 40%

“We want to use our scale and our scope to lead the way,” Bezos said at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “One of the things we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that it’s a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large physical infrastructure. So, if we can do this, anyone can do this.”

The richest man in the world also promised that Amazon is committed to examining its political campaign contributions to determine whether they include “active climate deniers.” Bezos also said that Amazon will step up its lobbying efforts in Washington in search of political solutions to climate change.

Amazon is also asking other companies to join them in committing to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Bezos had quite a presentation,  also announcing a $100 million donation to The Nature Conservancy to form the Right Now Climate Fund, which will work to restore and protect forests, wetlands and peatlands around the world, with the goal of removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Dara O’Rourke, a senior principal scientist on Amazon’s sustainability team, said the company built a “comprehensive” carbon accounting system that helps it pull data from its various businesses.

“Amazon is as complex as many companies combined,” O’Rourke said. “That forced us to build one of the most sophisticated carbon accounting systems in the world. We had to build a system that had the granular data, but at an Amazon scale.”

CNBC News reports that “in February Amazon announced it would make half of all its shipments carbon neutral by 2030 by using more eco-friendly packaging, using more renewable energy like wind power, as well as using electric vans for package deliveries. As part of that effort, which it calls “Shipment Zero,” Amazon said then it would share its company-wide carbon footprint for the first time later this year. That presentation concluded today with an impressive ToDo list.

By Meine van Noordwijk, Distinguished Research Fellow, World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). First published on The Conversation.

“Agroforestry” – the practice of having trees as part of farms – is as old as agriculture itself. But as a field of scientific enquiry and policy making, it’s now marking its 40th birthday.

In 1978 the International Council for Research in Agro-Forestry was created to document the use of trees on farms – as a source of income, food and for a healthy environment – and spread information about it. Research gradually became a stronger focus and today it is known as the World Agroforestry Centre.

It’s an important area of research because more than 40% of the worlds’ agricultural lands have at least 10% tree cover. Because the interactions between trees, soils, crops and livestock can be positive or negative, their relationship must be balanced and understood.

To mark this anniversary my colleagues and I from the World Agroforestry Centre, launched a book which takes stock of the science produced and what else needs to be done. A total of 80 authors looked at approaches to agroforestry and how it has contributed to the transformation of rural livelihoods and landscapes. (Note from Anne: you can read this entire book online for free, so follow the link.)

The key lesson from agroforestry is that tree cover needs to be understood and managed as part of a landscape, harmonising agricultural and forestry policies. This is important because they cover so much land and are vital for the environment and livelihoods.

Having trees on farms has huge benefits for farmers. It could mean more income, a more buffered climate, shelter from winds and rain and, because of tree roots and leaf litter, soil is protected and nurtured.

With the current global push for “climate-smart” policies, agroforestry has presented itself as a way forward.

The beginnings

The first section of the book reviews the science of trees, soils and their interactions with crops.

Agroforestry research had to first establish that, contrary to the way agriculture and forestry was presented by policymakers and in policy as separate worlds, it exists.

There’s a relationship between trees and crops that happens in many places, in many forms, involving at least 600 species of trees worldwide.

But because agriculture and forestry were treated separately in policies, there were challenges in how trees on farms should be managed. For instance, farmers with a lot of trees on their land often got caught in forestry rules in terms of how they could use them.

An example of this was that many francophone African countries inherited laws at independence which declared that all trees belonged to the state. This meant farmers started to remove them where they could, because trees compete with crops for resources like water, leading to soil degradation.

The policy only changed after farmers in Niger found ways to circumvent the rules and show that farmers could own trees and land would regenerate as a result. Other countries in the Sahel followed suit.

Policymakers eventually began to change their views when they understood how farmers, trees, forests and water interacted at the landscape scale.

Transformations

The second section of the book looks at six landscapes around the world where agroforestry actions by farmers, supported by scientists, helped local transformations to happen.

One example, where local projects inspired change elsewhere, was in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania. Drought, overgrazing and political changes had led to forest loss and land damage. A project – between government, the World Agroforestry Centre, International Union for Conservation of Nature and local partners – successfully restored 370,000 hectares of land.

Key lessons from this project were to use land practices that contributed to livelihoods (like planting trees that would bear fruits) – and linking planning to national policies.

Examples like this began to show policymakers that bridges are needed between forest-based institutions and agricultural ones. It also showed how agroforestry can contribute to current global issues of focus – like climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, growing plants with oil-rich seeds, like Jatropha curcas a flowering plant native to the American tropics, which can produce biofuel (fuel produced from living matter). Or growing certain trees in areas because they can help manage water flows.

The future

The final part of the book suggests a way forward for the communication between science and policymakers.

Scientific knowledge can help in four stages of a policy process:

• Exploring new issues and sorting out which ones deserve to be on the agenda for public discussions

• Identify the underlying causes that need to be addressed in policy commitments

• Clarify the trade-offs that any policy implementation will face, and ways to make these manageable

• Setting up ways to monitor change, so that there still is space for innovative solutions.

The book highlights that land use policies must connect local action with global concerns. It demonstrates the potential that agroforestry has for the Sustainable Development Goal agenda.

By Joshua Conrad Jackson, Doctoral Student, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michele Gelfand, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland. First published on The Conversation.

Two trends have defined the past decade and both have been on display at this year’s session of the United Nations General Assembly.

One has been the escalating effects of climate change, which were the focus of the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit. Forest fires, floods and hurricanes are all rising in their frequency and severity. Eight of the last 10 years have been the warmest on record. Marine biologists warned that coral reefs in the U.S. could disappear entirely by the 2040s.

The other trend has been the surge of right-wing nationalist politics across Western nations, which includes Donald Trump’s election in the U.S., and the rise of nationalist political parties around the world.

Indeed, the first four speeches of the United Nations general debate were given by Brazilian right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, Trump, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and far-right Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

These two trends are rarely discussed together. When they are, their correlation is sometimes viewed as an unfortunate coincidence, since many nationalist politicians actively obstruct climate change solutions.

However, our new research suggests that these two trends may be closely related, and not in the way you might think. The effects of climate change – and the way it makes societies feel threatened – may be one of the elements fueling the rise of right-wing nationalism.

How climate shapes culture

To understand how climate shapes culture, it’s important to step away from current events and consider the way the climate has influenced societies throughout human history.

Cultures can vary in what’s called their “tightness” – the strictness or flexibility of their rules and traditions, and the severity of their punishments for rule breakers.

The Fellahin people of Egypt, for example, were one of the tightest cultures that we analyzed. For centuries, they’ve enforced strict gender norms and strong expectations for how children should be raised.

When cultures feel threatened – whether by war, disease or economic upheaval – they tend to become tighter.

But ecological threats can be just as strongly connected to tightening.

In one analysis, we showed that rates of famine and land scarcity predicted cultural tightness in historical societies. The Fellahin people have faced a constant threat of flooding, and have endured frequent earthquakes, sand storms and rockslides.

Centuries of climate catastrophe can also predict differences in the cultural tightness in societies today. In another study we found that nations that have endured the highest rates of drought, food scarcity, natural disaster and climate instability have the tightest cultures today.

Even within the U.S., the states most vulnerable to climate disasters have the tightest cultures. A 2014 study found that states like Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama – which have the highest criminal execution rates and corporal punishment rates in schools – also have the highest historical rates of natural disasters such as tornadoes, floods and hurricanes.

Evolutionary analyses suggest that cultural tightness can be functional – even necessary – in the face of climate disaster. It can make people more cooperative, and more likely to follow protocols, like rationing, during a drought.

But our latest studies examined a darker side of cultural tightness. We wanted to know whether tightness also made people less tolerant of minority religions, ethnicities or sexual orientation. In other words, we explored whether prejudice thrives in tighter societies.

This dynamic would have serious consequences for our understanding of geopolitical events. If climate anomalies such as hurricanes and forest fires have a “tightening” effect on cultures – and these catastrophes are happening more frequently – it might be driving more people toward politicians who espouse xenophobic, homophobic or racist rhetoric.

Environmental threat and prejudice

To test these ideas, we brought together a group of 19 researchers from eight different nations. With expertise in economics, psychology and anthropology, our team was well-suited to study the effect of environmental threats and culture on prejudice and political nationalism.

We ended up studying 86 historical societies, 25 modern nations and the 50 U.S. states, analyzing data on more than 3 million people.

The results were strikingly consistent across these populations. The cultures most vulnerable to climate threats had the strictest cultural norms, and the highest levels of prejudice against minorities. For example, in American states with histories of climate threat and cultural tightness, white respondents reported the highest levels of aversion to marrying someone who was black, Asian or Hispanic. Turkey and South Korea had the tightest cultures, and also showed the most aversion to living near someone who was a different ethnicity, sexuality or religion.

We next tested whether we could cultivate these social and political attitudes in a laboratory setting. We recruited 1,000 people from around the world. We had some write about a threatening event in their environment, including – but not restricted to – climate. Others wrote about a threatening event in their personal life. The final group wrote about what they had for breakfast.

Subjects who wrote about a threatening event in their environment reported the highest support for stricter societal rules and regulations. These same people also reported the most prejudice toward ethnic minorities. This study showed that even brief reminders of an ecological threat could have an effect on people’s political leanings and make them less tolerant.

Finally, we explored how these issues tied into modern elections. We recruited American and French individuals during their respective countries’ most recent presidential elections.

We found that voters who felt the most threatened were most likely to support harsher punishments for rule-breakers, more adherence to traditional norms and expressed the highest levels of prejudice. Voters who felt threatened were also most likely to vote for Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, each of whom ran on law-and-order, anti-immigration platforms.

One feeds the other

According to just about every estimate, climate change will only worsen. Without serious and immediate reform, temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise, along with the risk of destabilizing climatic events.

The natural perils of climate change are evident to many people already. But our research underscores a less visible geopolitical peril. As climate change increases the level of environmental threat, cultures around the world may become tighter, and the exclusionary rhetoric of far-right nationalist politicians may sound more and more appealing.

Since far-right nationalists are notorious for ignoring climate change, the rise of these politicians may also exacerbate the effects of environmental threat. This may create a vicious cycle, in which the threat of climate disaster and far-right nationalism encourage one another over time.

In this way, bipartisan action on climate change may not just be necessary to save the environment. It may also be an important way to ensure values like free speech and tolerance are preserved in countries and cultures around the world.

By Timothy D. Lytton, Distinguished University Professor & Professor of Law, Georgia State University. First published on The Conversation

Mass shootings have become a routine occurrence in America.

Gun-makers have long refused to take responsibility for their role in this epidemic. That may be about to change.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 12 refused to block a lawsuit filed by the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting victims, clearing the way for the litigation to proceed. Remington Arms, which manufactured and sold the semiautomatic rifle used in the attack, had hoped the broad immunity the industry has enjoyed for years would shield it from any liability.

The prospect of more claims from victims of mass shootings puts new pressure on the gun industry to reconsider the way it does business.

My research over the past 20 years on lawsuits against the gun industry examines how the threat of civil liability has the potential to promote safer gun designs, encourage more responsible marketing practice and reduce the risk of illegal retail sales.

The end of immunity

A 2006 law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act grants gun manufacturers broad immunity from civil lawsuits that arise out of the criminal misuse of a weapon.

However, this immunity does not apply where a manufacturer “knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of a firearm.

The Sandy Hook families allege that Remington, by marketing certain guns to civilians, engaged in “unethical” business methods in violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act. Specifically, they argued Remington “marketed, advertised and promoted the Bushmaster XM15-E2S for civilians to use to carry out offensive, military-style combat missions against their perceived enemies.”

Remington asked the court to throw out the lawsuit based on the federal immunity statute, but the Connecticut Supreme Court held that a violation of the state’s unfair trade practices law qualifies as an exception to the industry’s liability shield.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear Remington’s appeal, the case will move into discovery and, potentially, trial in a Connecticut state court.

Since many states have unfair trade practices laws like Connecticut’s, gun violence victims are likely to bring similar claims elsewhere, effectively ending the gun industry’s federal immunity from civil lawsuits.

Reducing gun violence

In other industries, the threat of civil liability has encouraged manufacturers to take steps in design, marketing and retail to reduce the risk of injuries associated with their products. Lawsuits have prompted automakers to develop safer car designs, vaping companies to end marketing aimed at teens and opioid manufacturers to take responsibility for oversupplying pills to irresponsible retailers.

Similarly, exposing gun manufacturers to civil liability is likely to encourage them to consider reducing the lethality of their civilian weapons. The popularity of semiautomatic firearms increases the risk that gun violence incidents will cause multiple gunshot wounds to large numbers of victims. Companies may wish to limit their liability exposure by reducing the firepower of their products.

Additionally, companies may wish to reconsider marketing campaigns that extol the combat characteristics of weapons they sell on the civilian market. Such campaigns are likely to give rise to more lawsuits alleging that such promotional tactics increase the risk that their guns will be the weapon of choice for mass shooters.

Finally, lawsuits may encourage gun companies to work harder to teach retailers how to spot and prevent illegal straw purchases, in which a person buys a gun for someone else who is legally prohibited from purchasing it. The industry’s trade association – the National Shooting Sports Council – has long had a training and certification program for retailers to reduce the risk of illegal straw purchases. Beefing up that effort is another way to reduce the industry’s liability exposure.

None of these actions would weaken the Second Amendment or undermine the commercial viability of the gun industry.

Only the beginning

Regardless of whether the Sandy Hook families ultimately prevail, the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an appeal in the case appears to have blown a giant hole in the gun industry’s immunity from civil litigation.

However, this may not be the court’s last word on the subject. The justices might have another opportunity to review the case if the Sandy Hook plaintiffs win and the case works its way back up to the high court. The Supreme Court could then decide that the exception to federal immunity applies more narrowly.

Moreover, there is no guarantee that other state courts will adopt the Connecticut Supreme Court’s interpretation of the immunity exception. Federal courts in New York and California have rejected similar lawsuits. Also, unfair trade practices laws in other states frequently limit lawsuits to product consumers, excluding claims by others injured by the products.

In addition, gun violence victims face other challenges in winning their claims. They must convince judges and juries that routine industry marketing strategies constitute unfair trade practices and prove that those practices played a role in enabling criminal attacks. Prior to passage of federal immunity, no plaintiff ever won a lawsuit against a gun manufacturer for an injury arising out of criminal misuse of a weapon.

Finally, litigation is not a panacea. Stemming the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. will require a concerted effort by industry, government and organized citizen groups across the political spectrum.

Lawsuits can help jump-start this process, but they are only the beginning.

Related Reading

By Andrea Michelson via Smithsonian.com

Even as the legal cannabis industry booms, the black market persists with competitive prices and a lack of red tape on its side. As Jodi Helmer reports for JSTOR Daily, illegal growers set up an estimated 14,000 grow sites on federal and private lands in 2018—and that was just in Humboldt County, California.

Illegal cannabis growing operations pose a huge threat to the ecosystems of public forests, Eric Westervelt reports for NPR. Without any sort of regulations, illegal growers can use banned insecticides and other chemicals to shield their crops from pests. Using these substances excessively can have devastating consequences for nearby wildlife and water supply.

At one illegal growing site in California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest, ecologists and law enforcement agents found evidence of toxicants like Bromethalin, a rat poison, and carbofuran, an insecticide that is banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. Speaking about carbofuran, wildlife ecologist Greta Wengert of the Integral Ecology Research Center (IERC) tells NPR, "It is incredibly toxic. A quarter teaspoon could kill a 600-pound black bear. So obviously just a tiny amount can kill a human. It remains in an ecosystem for a long period of time."

The effects of these toxicants can move through the ecological food chain, much like the long-term harms once posed by DDT. When the prey base—rodents, in this case—comes into contact with dangerous chemicals, every species that eats them is at risk of ingesting the chemicals as well. Some species, like a carnivorous weasel called the Pacific fisher, also pass the toxins to their offspring in utero and through the mother’s milk. The Pacific fisher is under consideration to be listed as an endangered species, in part due to high exposure to toxic rodenticide at illegal grow sites in the forests where it lives.

Mourad Gabriel, an IREC wildlife disease ecologist, tells NPR that he’s already seeing signs of contamination in aquatic ecosystems as well. Grow sites located uphill run the risk of poisoning nearby waterways with chemical runoff. What’s more, JSTOR Daily’s Helmer reports that trespassing growers will often divert water from streams to irrigate their plants, threatening local fish populations.

But even legal cannabis growing outfits have a high environmental toll. Cannabis a particularly thirsty plant, so the water cost is not limited to outdoor operations or illegal growing. Each individual plant requires almost six gallons of water per day, reports Clayton Aldern for Grist. That’s two gallons more than it takes to run one load in an energy-efficient dishwasher. To limit water use, the California State Water Resources Control Board has established strict guidelines, with prohibitions on using surface water for irrigation during the dry season, JSTOR Daily reports.

That’s not the only environmentally-conscious regulation on the legal weed industry. JSTOR Daily reports that growing cannabis can contribute to air pollution, as cannabis plants emit volatile organic compounds that contribute to ground-level ozone, or smog, which is dangerous for humans to breathe. Cannabis growers in Washington state are required to submit plans for how they intend to mitigate the air pollution that comes with outdoor cannabis growth. And in Colorado, the Department of Public Health and Environment is tracking water and energy used, as well as waste created, by the cannabis industry, report Brenna Goth and Tripp Baltz for Bloomberg Environment.

While outdoor cannabis grow sites threaten animals’ habitats, indoor cultivation comes with a massive carbon footprint. Bloomberg reports that legal cannabis production in the United States consumes enough electricity annually to power 92,500 homes for a year. That’s 472 tons of electricity-related carbon—and the number is growing as the industry expands.

As of 2019, 33 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of cannabis use. And as states continue to legalize cannabis, they will be able to impose more regulations to mitigate the environmental impacts of the industry. However, Jennifer Carah, a senior scientist in the water program at the Nature Conservancy of California, told JSTOR Daily that bureaucratic barriers to entry may prevent growers from going legal.

“The black market is not going away,” Carah says. “But to the degree that we can entice growers into the legal market, their agricultural practices can be regulated like other agricultural crops, which will go a long way to addressing potential environmental impacts.”

By Aphrodite Kantsa, currently a postdoc researcher at ETH Zurich. First published on The Conversation.

Watching plants and pollinators such as bees can teach us a lot about how complex networks work in nature.

There are thousands of species of bees around the world, and they all share a common visual system: their eyes are sensitive to ultraviolet, blue and green wavelengths of the light spectrum.

This ancient colour visual system predates the evolution of flowers, and so flowers from around the world have typically evolved colourful blooms that are easily seen by bees.

For example, flowers as perceived by ultraviolet-sensitive visual systems look completely different than what humans can see.

However, we know that flowers also produce a variety of complex, captivating scents. So in complex natural environments, what signal should best enable a bee to find flowers: colour or scent?

Our latest research uncovered a surprising outcome. It seems that rather that trying to out-compete each other in colour and scent for bee attention, flowers may work together to attract pollinators en masse. It’s the sort of approach that also works in the world of advertising.

Daunting amount of field work

Classic thinking would suggest that flowers of a particular species should have reasonably unique flower signatures. It makes sense that this should promote the capacity of a bee to constantly find the same rewarding species of flower, promoting efficient transfer of pollen.

So a competition view of flower evolution for different flower species with the same colour – for example purple – would suggest that each flowering plant species should benefit from having different scents to enable pollinator constancy and flower fidelity. By the same logic, flowers with the same scents should have different colours so they’re easily distinguished.

To know for sure what happens requires a daunting amount of field work. The challenges include measuring flower colours using a spectrophotometer (a very sensitive instrument that detects subtle colour differences) and also capturing live flower scent emissions with special pumps and chemical traps.

At the same time, in order to record the actual pollinator “clientele” of the flowers, detailed recordings of visits are required. These data are then built into models for bee perception. Statistical analyses allow us to understand the complex interactions that are present in a real world evolved system.

Not what we thought

And what we found was unexpected. In two new papers, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution and in Nature Communications, we found the opposite to competition happens: flowers have evolved signals that work together to facilitate visits by bees.

So flowers of different, completely unrelated species might “smell like purple”, whilst red coloured species share another scent. This is not what is expected at all by competition, so why in a highly evolved classical signal receiver has this happened?

The data suggests that flowers do better by attracting more pollinators to a set of reliable signals, rather than trying to use unique signals to maximise individual species.

By having reliable multimodal signals that act in concert to allow for easy finding of rewarding flowers, even of different species, more pollinators must be facilitated to transfer pollen between flowers of the same species.

Lessons for advertising

A lot of research on advertising and marketing is concerned with consumer behaviour: how we make choices. What drives our decision-making when foraging in a complex environment?

While a lot of modern marketing emphasises product differentiation and competition to promote sales, our new research suggests that nature can favour facilitation. It appears that by sharing desirable characteristics, a system can be more efficient.

This facilitation mechanism is sometimes favoured by industry bodies, for example Australian avocados and Australian honey. En masse promotion of the desirable characteristics of similar products can grow supporter base and build sales. Our research suggests evolution has favoured this solution, which may hold important lessons for other complex market based systems.

A successful colour–scent combination targeted at attracting bees can be adopted by several different plant species in the same community, implying that natural ecosystems can function as a “buyers markets”.

We also know from research that flowers can evolve and change colours to suit the local pollinators. Colours can thus be changed by flowers if instead of bees pollinating flowers, flies, with different colour perception and preferences, dominate the community.

These findings can also prove useful for identifying those colour-scent combinations that are the most influential for the community. This way, the restoration of damaged or disrupted plant-pollinator communities can become better managed to be more efficient in the future.

When next enjoying a walk in a blooming meadow, remember plants’ strategies. The colourful flowers and the mesmerising scents you experience may have evolved to cleverly allure the efficient pollinators of the region.

By Cat Kutz. First published on Smithsonian Magazine.

Peter Byck is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, in both the School of Sustainability and the Cronkite School of Journalism. He is the director, producer and writer of carbon nation. He is currently helping to lead a $6.3 million research project focused on Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing; collaborating with 20 scientists and 10 farmers, focused on soil health and soil carbon storage; microbial, bug and bird biodiversity; water cycling and much more. Byck has currently completed carbon cowboys, a feature-length documentary (in ten parts) focused on regenerative grazing: www.carboncowboys.org and is in production on a long-form documentary on the AMP grazing research project.

The trailer for carbon cowboys premiered during the 2020 Earth Optimism Digital Summit during which Byck also shared a bit more about the film as a speaker for a ‘Telling the Story’ session. Ahead of the premiere of carbon cowboys, Earth Optimism Communications lead Cat Kutz chatted with him to learn more about the regenerative farming the film highlights and how it can shift the way we think about food, climate and the future of farming.

The first question that I had for you is hopefully an interesting one. If you were to tell us about the film in just a tweet, How would you describe it? So that's less than 280 characters…

I would say, 'Meet the American farmers who are regenerating their soils and discovering solutions to climate, food security and water security. While finally making money growing us healthy food.'

That's perfect. It's engaging and it definitely sets people up for something that they'd want to learn more about. I like that. Now, can you explain soil carbon storage and how this impacts agriculture?

Sure. Organic matter, the things that were once alive and have now died in the soil, are built of carbon – old microbes, old roots. And when you have a system that has a lot of microbes and a lot of roots and those things die, they actually create the structure for the soil, besides all the mineral material. And that structure actually has air in it and it's squishy like a sponge. The carbon within those dead microbes and in those dead roots is very durable and lasts for decades or centuries.

And so that carbon was taken out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis from the leaves of the plant. The plant then burps out oxygen, keeps the carbon, mixes the carbon with water and creates these sugars that then go down through the plant’s roots and feeds the microbes. And so when you have a system that has a lot of different plants, it ends up having a lot of different microbes in the soil. Biodiversity above ground equals biodiversity below ground, and all of that material as it dies off, becomes actual soil structure and then that soil then becomes the home for the next round of life.

The dead stuff is still food for the plants and that structure actually is like a sponge, so healthy soil is not compacted, it’s absorbent. So if you have a system with great plant cover and great healthy soil structure, when you get eight inches of rain in a day it all soaks into that farm, but across the fence, they are in flood conditions. Where the next day that farmer can be out in the field working, across the fence they're out for two weeks with that eight-inch unusual rainfall that we're getting more and more of.

But what's also amazing about that spongy quality of the soil that's made up of so much former life and full of carbon, is that it's got so much surface area that it actually holds water longer so the water doesn't evaporate as quickly. So in drought conditions, again, because the plants are covering the soil, the soil doesn't overheat and the overheating doesn't cause evapotranspiration beyond what normally happens to the plants. You've got the soil that's holding onto water longer, so on the side of the fence where the farmers focused on soil health, they're growing forage for their animals, a month or months longer than their neighbor in the drought. The neighbor has to go buy hay or sell their animals, while this farmer is still growing food. And so there is a huge economic benefit to having healthy soil.

The more carbon in the soil, the more plants and more photosynthesis and more drawing down of the CO2 from the atmosphere. The more you're putting that carbon into that soil system, it's still going to cycle. It's still going to get back out into the atmosphere. But it's going to take decades and centuries, rather than when you plow it – that's the immediate release of carbon from the soil that binds with the oxygen, you’ve got CO2 building up, leading to climate change. So right now, there's just a heck of a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and that carbon – they think like a fifth or more of the carbon that's up in the atmosphere right now – came from the soil systems.

And so let's get that carbon back in a place where it's part of a very healthy cycle as opposed to where it is right now, in the atmosphere – where it's part of a cycle, but it's a warming cycle beyond what we have grown accustomed to. We have coastal cities, we'd like to keep them.

So we're talking about farmer resiliency and right now in the current global crisis, we're seeing a huge effect on them because of the food waste and other issues that are rising from the pandemic. Does regenerative farming help protect them from these effects?

I think you're seeing a lot of that food waste in really bad situations. It's happening in the meatpacking industry, but I don't think you're seeing that from the regenerative farming community. I think you're seeing that from the industrial farming community.

The farmers that I know of that sell directly to customers and some farmers in our films their sales are up between 300 and 1,000% They're selling out.

There are places that I ordered from online that are sold out of meats where they were never sold out of these things. And so, so they're actually much stronger right now – the ones who are either already selling to customers or pivoted to selling to customers. And so I think this is a pretty amazing sign that focusing on soil health is actually a great business plan.

I have one farmer who has a farm store and he said he's never seen lines out the door before -- he's had lines out the door. And I'm sure he's keeping everyone six feet away from each other.

But you know, people had to pivot... One of the farmers in our film, Allen Williams, he has a company called Joyce farms. He's part of that company, and overnight, they lost 75% of the business selling meat produced in a regenerative way to Disney. So all those cruises, Disney World, all that stuff just went away overnight and they pivoted and they started having these parking lots. Sales selling out all over the southeast.

Wow. It's almost as if people are kind of relearning how to get good quality food as a result of the pandemic. A lot of the public is gaining this awareness by seeing firsthand how important farming is… so do you think that this is a climate solution and these kinds of initiatives are going to become more bipartisan as time goes on?

I would hope so. I don't know anyone who doesn't want soil health. But there's a whole lot of farming going on in the country right now that doesn't lead to soil health. And so how do you change that and how do you change that quickly? That's, that's the stuff that I think about and collaborate with people about and plan. Try to come up with more game plans and pilot programs. That's, that's sort of where my focus is right now. But I think people trust nature. I know people trust nature. And when you get into a stressful situation, you want to, you want to go to what you know works. And these farmers are working with nature and their customers are coming to them.

When I was on the road with carbon nation, I mean, one guy said, because he heard I was making a film about solutions to climate change, he said to me, ‘You and I are going to disagree about everything.’ And then we dug into it, and we agreed on about 70% of how we'd run the country. That blew us both away. We realized that there's a lot more common ground than any newscast will tell you. Back then I was looking at solar and geothermal and energy efficiency and the reasons that the Department of Defense should be concerned about climate change and national security and all those things.

But then when I started working specifically on soil and healthy soil and rejuvenating soil and seeing what was happening with me and the farmers that I was meeting; we were getting along, in total agreement about soil heath. And we definitely have different politics. Then I realized that the common ground… is the ground. I've always been hunting for where people already are in agreement. It's just they haven't had the opportunity or taken the time or broken through the noise to find out that there is an agreement, and people agree about healthy soils.

We're working on helping more and more people rejuvenate their soils. It's so important, it touches so many issues. It's what the Smithsonian always talks about – it's what Earth Optimism is all about.

Yes! And definitely sharing the solutions… We like to think that the more you share solutions, the more solutions then come from that. It's like the greatest aggregator of positive change is being able to share your story.

Exactly, and farmers will learn from our films. That would be a home run for us if it's already happened. Some of the parts of our documentary, called paddocks, have been in festivals as standalone short films and farmers have called us to ask how they can do this and can we hook them up.

So we're hoping this big film will inspire more of that, and wouldn't it be amazing if a lot of farmers wanted to learn about this because they saw it's just good business?

Are there any barriers that you have to overcome to get farmers to watch your films particularly because of the climate change element?

Our films aren't climate-focused, they’re farmer-focused. Yeah, the climate piece is my driver, but it's not all over the films at all. Partly because we wanted to communicate with farmers, and we know it makes sense – a farmer wants to listen to a farmer.

And so we wanted to make films that would highlight those conversations so that farmers could learn from farmers, but we also wanted these films to speak to a consumer and remind them to know where they’re getting food – go meet your farmer.

People are now spending so much time in their area now. Maybe they'll understand meeting their farmers is a part of being in your local area and that farmers can produce food that they know is going to be eaten by the people in their local area, kind of like it was 60-70 years ago.

It's like what Will Harris says in 100,000 Beating Hearts: He doesn't have to feed the world; he just has to feed his community. This idea that every farm is supposed to be some big monolithic industrial complex because they have to feed the world – that's a construct. That's not a truth.

There are some farmers that are going to produce enough food so that we could export it to Canada and Japan and England and elsewhere... Great. That's fantastic. But if every farmer really focused on feeding their community, the world would get fed. Something like 85% of farmers are smallholder farmers with an acre, or two acres, or half an acre. So the idea that you have to feed the world with any method that hurts our soils doesn't make sense to me.

Farming to regenerate soils, farming so that next year the soils are in better shape than they were last year. That makes sense to me. To me, the scale is not the goal, but profit per acre – that would be a great metric for farmers. How much profit did you make per acre? Not how many bushels did you produce per acre? And when farmers do well, they feed us.

Well, since you bring that up, it's interesting to think about it from the consumer side too. Do you think that this film is a good way of explaining to consumers that this is a way that they as an individual can help mitigate climate change by supporting our community soils?

Absolutely. There's a lot of consumers who have stopped eating meat because they didn't like the way they saw the larger meat industry going. But then when they find out how these animals are treated in all of our films by these farmers – there are a lot more regenerative farmers than what we filmed, obviously, and it's growing – I've seen and heard of a lot of people who've come back to eating meat because they know where the meats being produced, and they can meet the farmer and they could see it’s a different situation.

So at the end of this farm is medicine (one of our paddocks), the farmer tells a story where these people come to his farm and they hadn't eaten meat in years and years. But they looked at how he was treating the animals and how his operation looked and they bought some meat from him and he was surprised. So that's the end of one of our films

But then a buddy of mine, who wrote the music for 100,000 Beating Hearts, was vegan, his wife's vegan, and they are raising three incredibly cool kids that are all vegan. And so when I called him and said, ‘Hey, I want you to work on the music for this section of the film. Are you up for it? It's about meat.’ He looked at a rough cut and goes, ‘Wow, these animals are really well treated. Of course, I'll work on this.’ And then a couple of years after he did the music, he told me that he had started eating meat again. And it was because he'd met a farmer after the experience he had working on this film. And he saw a system that was working, that was making things better. And he was happy to participate in that.

I've got plenty of friends who don't eat meat and I wouldn't ever have suggested to my composer friend that he should eat meat – never in a million years. Everyone should eat what they want to eat. But I can say that if you're going to be eating vegetables, your vegetable nutrient density will be a lot higher if they're grown in soil that's really, really rich with soil microbes and all the biodiversity of all the little critters in the soil that feed the plants and make sure the nutrients get to the plants.

And one of the quickest ways to get those soils healthy is adaptive grazing and so even if you don't eat meat, you sure do want your row crop production combined with your animal production - in a very old fashioned way - to get those soils as healthy as possible because that makes healthy food. Makes sense?

Yes definitely! It's interesting that as more people try to eat a diet with the planet in mind how often and how easy it is to forget the best way to do that is just to go find a farmer.

Yeah, and it's the processed foods that will get you as far from a farmer as possible. I haven't really seen a highly processed food that's good for the planet, although some folks might say they are.

Yeah, maybe better in some cases than some of the alternatives, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good. Perhaps it's the lesser of two evils in some cases, and so it's just an interesting way to look at it...

According to a buddy of mine, a scientist at Michigan State, if you add up the three major crops we grow the United States – corn, soy, hay – you put that on one side of a scale and then you put on the other side of the scale the soil we lose every year to erosion… the soil will weigh more. Our top export from our major farming industries in this country is soil, that can never be used again. That can't last, and so there's a lot of concern and worry about our soils becoming less and less robust, less full of carbon, less able to produce food... and then even the food that’s produced is less nutrient-dense.

This type of grazing is a phenomenal way to read rejuvenate and regenerate soils. It's getting attention now – we're seeing it. And there are people who have been working for decades on this. I've been working for seven or eight years on this from my perch. But things are changing. I really do think things are changing.

Architect Ronald Rael delivered a thought-provoking 10 minute TED talk in Dec. 2018 about borders in general and the Mexico-US border specifically. It's an excellent watch in these complicated times.

Rael built the famous Prada, Marfa store in the middle of nowhere. I've written about Marfa but never understood until now -- with further reading -- that 1) Prada, Marfa is made primarily of dirt; and 2) Prada, Marfa was a deliberate political installation, as well as an art installation in an upscale, educated, artistic place in Texas. You MUST read the next two paragraphs. Marfa link also in comment:

Visiting Rael’s website, I learned so much more about the political experience of creating the Prada Marfa store.

“ On July 13, 2005, 22 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border, patrol agents from the Marfa Sector of the United States Border Patrol surrounded five people traveling through the Chihuahua Desert in West Texas. Suspecting illegal activity, the agents had been informed that illegal immigrants were detected by the tethered aerostat radar system hovering overhead that provides counter-narcotics and border crossing surveillance and can distinguish targets down to a meter across at ground level.

It is not uncommon that coyotes, smugglers involved in the profession of human trafficking, drive the desolate roads searching for “wets”, the derogatory term for illegal immigrants, in the vast desert expanse surrounding Marfa. When the five suspects were questioned on the nature of their business the answer was not so clearly comprehended by the Border Patrol. The suspects were a gallery curator, a photographer, an artist, and two architects who were discussing the selection of the future building site of Prada Marfa, a minimalist sculpture that replicates the luxury boutique where the Fall 2005 line of Prada shoes and bags were to be displayed."

In 1970, only three countries – Italy, Japan and Mauritius – banned corporal punishment in schools. By 2016, more than 100 countries banned the practice, which allows teachers to legally hit, paddle or spank students for misbehavior.

The dramatic increase in bans on corporal punishment in schools is documented in an analysis that we conducted recently to learn more about the forces behind the trend. The analysis is available as a working paper.

In order to figure out what circumstances led to bans, we looked at a variety of political, legal, demographic, religious and economic factors. Two factors stood out from the rest.

First, countries with English legal origin – that is, the United Kingdom as well as its former colonies that implemented British common law – were less likely to ban corporal punishment in schools across this time period.

Second, countries with higher levels of female political empowerment, as measured by things such as women’s political participation or property rights – that is, women having the right to sell, buy and own property – were more likely to ban corporal punishment.

Other factors, such as form of government, level of economic development, religious adherence and population size, appear to play a much less significant role, if at all.

We are experts in education policy, international policy and law. In order to conduct our analysis, we constructed a dataset of 192 countries over 47 years using country reports from the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children and the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child. Then we matched it to data from the Quality of Government Institute.

It is true that the trend of banning corporal punishment in schools aligns with the passage of the 1990 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child – a treaty now ratified by all countries except the United States. The treaty requires nations to “take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity.” However, as our analysis reveals, it wasn’t the treaty alone that spurred the bans.

Global shifts in corporal punishment norms

Worldwide, 732 million children attend schools where corporal punishment is allowed.

Social norms surrounding this issue have shifted over time from viewing corporal punishment as an appropriate disciplinary method to viewing corporal punishment as less acceptable. In the last several decades, for instance, experts have found that corporal punishment is harmful to children socially, cognitively and emotionally.

Consequently, many countries have adopted new laws banning corporal punishment in schools. South America and Europe have made the most progress toward outlawing corporal punishment in schools. Africa and Asia have had more mixed results. There are no bans against corporal punishment in schools in the United States, India and Australia. In the United States, corporal punishment in public schools is legal in 19 states. It is also legal at private schools in 48 states.

While we found that countries with English common law systems were less likely to ban corporal punishment in schools, the reason why requires a closer look.

Common law countries abide by the principle of stare decisis – that is, the idea that similar cases should be decided upon similarly and should rely upon precedent. This means in practice that policies on a given issue are slower to change and become somewhat “locked in” because court cases and appeals take significant time.

Conversely, countries that are based primarily in civil code are often able to change the laws mostly through legislation, which often can be nimbler and swifter. Of course, some nations, like the United States, change laws through both methods.

Our analysis found that the proportion of countries with bans increased steadily after the passage of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. We also found that not a single country with English legal origin banned corporal punishment in schools prior to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Even among countries that ratified the convention, those with English legal origin were 38% less likely to adopt a ban.

Female political empowerment and corporal punishment bans

The degree of female political empowerment in a country is also strongly associated with how likely the country is to ban corporal punishment in schools. Why is this the case?

One possible explanation is that women in general show lower support for the use of corporal punishment. Women also more generally prefer compassionate policies over violence. And finally, female political empowerment can reflect the progressiveness of society itself, given the clear links between women’s rights and human development. Societies in which women have greater rights tend to have more progressive policies in other domains as well, such as environmental protection.

The future of corporal punishment in schools

In sum, it appears that international agreements such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child might nudge some countries to make progress on specific human rights issues – in this case, the right for children not to be physically punished in schools. Yet, the ratification of an international treaty has limited influence, it seems, in comparison to a country’s legal structure and the level of its female political participation.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled the practice of corporal punishment in schools unconstitutional. In fact, it issued a decision in 1977 that noted both the historical traditionof corporal punishment in U.S. schools, and the common-law principle that corporal punishment is permissible as long as it’s “reasonable but not excessive.”

By Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Counsel for the Justice Program at The Brennan Center for Justice.First published on Common Dreams

The private prison industry is under renewed scrutiny, and things are not going well for it. Prison companies were already under fire, accused of putting profits above the well-being of incarcerated individuals and staff at the dozens of federal and state prisons and local jails they run around the country. Currently, about 8 percent of state and federal prisoners are held in privately operated facilities across 27 states and the federal system.

But these companies aren’t only in the business of housing people convicted of crimes. As of July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had almost 53,000 people in its custody, and private prison firms are responsible for detaining more than 70 percent of them. Now the industry is getting more attention because of President Trump’s immigration detention policies, such as separating children from their parents, and because of the terrible conditions in many detention facilities, many of which are run by the government and not private firms.

Ironically, because of the Trump administration’s focus on building a border wall and keeping immigrants out, a Republican administration thought to be a boon to the private prison sector has proved one of its biggest problems. As resistance to current immigration policies mount, here is a roundup of some of the high-profile actors targeting the industry.

Presidential election politics

At least 11 Democrats running for president want to eliminate private prisons. Sen. Kamala Harris of California recently tweeted, “One of my first acts of business as president will be to begin phasing out detention centers and private prisons.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts issued a sweeping plan to eviscerate the industry by attempting to phase out federal contracts for private prisons and by reducing states’ reliance on the industry through cutting federal funding to states that contract with these companies. Other candidates have expressed support for immediately canceling all federal contracts with the industry and phasing out the government’s reliance on private prisons.

Banks

One surprising development in 2019 has been the banking industry’s withdrawal of financial support for two of the largest private prison firms, Geo Group and CoreCivic. These two firms restructured in 2013 to become Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), allowing them to benefit from a lower tax rate. But as I’ve written about in Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration, REIT status requires the companies to distribute a minimum of 90 percent of their profits to shareholders. This leaves them with little cash on hand to cover costs, which is why they rely on financial lenders to raise cash to operate.

So what happened?

The big banks started to distance themselves from a sector that received a lot of negative attention amidst an outcry over the Trump administration’s detention policies. It’s the latest example of big banks cutting ties with companies in response to activism, which we also saw when Bank of America and Citigroup announced they would limit business with gunmakers.

In January, Wells Fargo announced that it would roll back its relationship with the private prison industry. Two months later, JPMorgan Chase made headlines with its announcement that it would move away from financing private prison firms. The news came days after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, said that she wanted to hold banks “accountable” for their connections to companies that operate immigrant detention facilities.

JPMorgan Chase’s announcement was consequential because it was one of the first Wall Street banks to take a public stance on private prisons. As of March, the move was considered mostly symbolic, or at least until other lenders or investors in prison companies followed suit.

But that’s exactly what happened, and a domino effect ensued. In June, Bank of America announced that it would stop lending to the industry. A few weeks later, SunTrust became the fourth major bank to stop financing private prison firms. And on July 12, France's BNP Paribas became the first foreign bank to announce that it would no longer finance U.S. private prison firms.

Nevertheless, ties between banks and the private prison industry are not completely severed, as there are still outstanding loans to the companies (in the form of revolving credit that provides them with cashflow) that won’t be paid off for years.

State and federal legislation

Both federal and state policymakers have tried to rein in private prison industry this past year. In Congress, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) re-introduced a bill in June that would stop private prisons from qualifying as REITs and receiving tax subsidies unavailable to other corporations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, recently opened an investigation into the accreditation process for private detention facility operators.

Currently, only three states legislatively ban private firms from operating state prisons: Illinois, New York, and Iowa. Illinois passed its ban in 1990. This year, the state went one step further by enacting a law that prohibits state and local agencies from entering into an agreement for the detention of individuals in a facility owned, managed, or operated by a private firm. The new law makes it difficult for private firms to build an immigrant detention facility in the state. The reason is that while ICE can still contract with private firms to manage facilities, these contracts tend to rely on local governments to serve as an intermediary between ICE and the corporations, especially if firms want to build a new facility.

New York state law prohibits private prison firms from operating state correctional institutions. The state legislature passed the law in 2007, partly out of concern about training and wages offered to private guards, and about how privatization would function at times of “crisis.” This year, state legislators focused their attention on banks funding the industry by attempting to prohibit New York-chartered banks from investing in or providing financing to private prisons. The state Senate passed legislation, but it failed in the Assembly.

Looking ahead

Despite the proposals to curb our government’s reliance on private prisons, the banks running for the hills, and legislators passing laws to make it challenging for the industry to operate, its future appears to be a mixed bag.

Geo Group and CoreCivic can still use their revolving credit for the next four or five years to build more facilities. And if a Democrat takes the White House, it’s even possible that banks reverse their position once the furor over Trump’s immigration policies die down.

Either way, shrinking the size of both our prison and immigration detention populations is the most effective and humane way to ensure that fewer people remain behind bars in America. That can only be done by changing state and federal policy.

By James Dyke, Associate Professor of Sustainability Science, University of Southampton; Tim Lenton, Director, Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter. First published on The Conversation

We will likely never know how life on Earth started. Perhaps in a shallow sunlit pool. Or in the crushing ocean depths miles beneath the surface near fissures in the Earth’s crust that spewed out hot mineral-rich soup. While there is good evidence for life at least 3.7 billion years ago, we don’t know precisely when it started.

But these passing aeons have produced something perhaps even more remarkable: life has persisted. Despite massive asteroid impacts, cataclysmic volcano activity and extreme climate change, life has managed to not just cling on to our rocky world but to thrive.

How did this happen? Research we recently published with colleagues in Trends in Ecology and Evolution offers an important part of the answer, providing a new explanation for the Gaia hypothesis.

Developed by scientist and inventor James Lovelock, and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis originally proposed that life, through its interactions with the Earth’s crust, oceans, and atmosphere, produced a stabilising effect on conditions on the surface of the planet – in particular the composition of the atmosphere and the climate. With such a self-regulating process in place, life has been able to survive under conditions which would have wiped it out on non-regulating planets.

Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis while working for NASA in the 1960s. He recognised that life has not been a passive passenger on Earth. Rather it has profoundly remodelled the planet, creating new rocks such as limestone, affecting the atmosphere by producing oxygen, and driving the cycles of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon. Human-produced climate change, which is largely a consequence of us burning fossil fuels and so releasing carbon dioxide, is just the latest way life affects the Earth system.

While it is now accepted that life is a powerful force on the planet, the Gaia hypothesis remains controversial. Despite evidence that surface temperatures have, bar a few notable exceptions, remained within the range required for widespread liquid water, many scientists attribute this simply to good luck. If the Earth had descended completely into an ice house or hot house (think Mars or Venus) then life would have become extinct and we would not be here to wonder about how it had persisted for so long. This is a form of anthropic selection argument that says there is nothing to explain.

Clearly, life on Earth has been lucky. In the first instance, the Earth is within the habitable zone – it orbits the sun at a distance that produces surface temperatures required for liquid water. There are alternative and perhaps more exotic forms of life in the universe, but life as we know it requires water. Life has also been lucky to avoid very large asteroid impacts. A lump of rock significantly larger than the one that lead to the demise of the dinosaurs some 66m years ago could have completely sterilised the Earth.

But what if life had been able to push down on one side of the scales of fortune? What if life in some sense made its own luck by reducing the impacts of planetary-scale disturbances? This leads to the central outstanding issue in the Gaia hypothesis: how is planetary self-regulation meant to work?

While natural selection is a powerful explanatory mechanism that can account for much of the change we observe in species over time, we have been lacking a theory that could explain how the living and non-living elements of a planet produce self-regulation. Consequently the Gaia hypothesis has typically been considered as interesting but speculative – and not grounded in any testable theory.

Selecting for Stability

We think there is finally an explanation for the Gaia hypothesis. The mechanism is based on “sequential selection”, a concept first suggested by climate scientist Richard Betts in the early 2000s. In principle it’s very simple. As life emerges on a planet it begins to affect environmental conditions, and this can organise into stabilising states which act like a thermostat and tend to persist, or destabilising runaway states such as the snowball Earth events that nearly extinguished the beginnings of complex life more than 600m years ago.

If it stabilises then the scene is set for further biological evolution that will in time reconfigure the set of interactions between life and planet. A famous example is the origin of oxygen-producing photosynthesis around 3 billion years ago, in a world previously devoid of oxygen. If these newer interactions are stabilising, then the planetary-system continues to self-regulate. But new interactions can also produce disruptions and runaway feedbacks. In the case of photosynthesis it led to an abrupt rise in atmospheric oxygen levels in the “Great Oxidation Event” around 2.3 billion years ago. This was one of the rare periods in Earth’s history where the change was so pronounced it probably wiped out much of the incumbent biosphere, effectively rebooting the system.

The chances of life and environment spontaneously organising into self-regulating states may be much higher than you would expect. If fact, given sufficient biodiversity, it may be extremely likely. But there is a limit to this stability. Push the system too far and it may go beyond a tipping point and rapidly collapse to a new and potentially very different state.

This isn’t a purely theoretical exercise, as we think we may able to test the theory in a number of different ways. At the smallest scale that would involve experiments with diverse bacterial colonies. On a much larger scale it would involve searching for other biospheres around other stars which we could use to estimate the total number of biospheres in the universe – and so not only how likely it is for life to emerge, but also to persist.

The relevance of our findings to current concerns over climate change has not escaped us. Whatever humans do life will carry on in one way or another. But if we continue to emit greenhouse gasses and so change the atmosphere, then we risk producing dangerous and potentially runaway climate change. This could eventually stop human civilisation affecting the atmosphere, if only because there will not be any human civilisation left.

Gaian self-regulation may be very effective. But there is no evidence that it prefers one form of life over another. Countless species have emerged and then disappeared from the Earth over the past 3.7 billion years. We have no reason to think that Homo sapiens are any different in that respect.

Related: Life on Earth is hard to spot Timothy M Lenton, Sebastien Dutreuil, Bruno Latour May 16, 2020

Abstract

The triumph of the Gaia hypothesis was to spot the extraordinary influence of Life on the Earth. ‘Life’ is the clade including all extant living beings, as distinct from ‘life’ the class of properties common to all living beings. ‘Gaia’ is Life plus its effects on habitability. Life’s influence on the Earth was hard to spot for several reasons: biologists missed it because they focused on life not Life; climatologists missed it because Life is hard to see in the Earth’s energy balance; Earth system scientists opted instead for abiotic or human-centred approaches to the Earth system; Scientists in general were repelled by teleological arguments that Life acts to maintain habitable conditions. Instead, we reason from organisms’ metabolisms outwards, showing how Life’s coupling to its environment has led to profound effects on Earth’s habitability. Recognising Life’s impact on Earth and learning from it could be critical to understanding and successfully navigating the Anthropocene.

By Philip Donkersley, Senior Research Associate in Entomology, Lancaster University. First Published on The Conversation

When you think of bees, a hive humming with activity probably comes to mind. But most of the world’s 20,000 bee species don’t call a hive home. These wild species lead solitary lives instead, and around 70% of them build nests underground where they raise their offspring on the nectar they gather from flowers.

Incredibly, almost all scientific understanding of how pesticides affect bees has came from testing domesticated honeybees, and, more recently, bumblebees. That’s largely because these species tend to be easier to work with in lab conditions. How non-social bees cope with these chemicals is largely understudied, despite them making up the vast majority of bee species worldwide.

Neonicotinoids are a family of pesticides which have been used in farming across the world. Their chemical structure resembles nicotine and they’re designed to kill crop pests by targeting the insect nervous system. Neonicotinoids can be sprayed on plants, but are most commonly used to coat seeds. Since their introduction in the late 1980s, robust scientific evidence has emerged to suggest these chemicals impair learning and memory, foraging behaviour, and pollination in bees. The EU banned neonicotinoids in 2019, and while the UK government pledged to follow suit, it granted a special exemption for sugar beet farmers to use the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam in January 2021. Thankfully, it wasn’t used.

Because honeybees don’t spend much time on the ground, environmental risk assessments for neonicotinoids often neglect to consider how exposure to these chemicals in the soil affects all pollinators. But in a landmark study published in Nature, researchers have shown how neonicotinoids affect bees not just by accumulating in the plants pollinators visit, but in the ground where most wild bees build their nests.

Down on the farm

Working over three years in Ontario, Canada, the researchers mimicked the conditions on a real farm by growing crops of squash plants in large polytunnels. Before planting, common neonicotinoid pesticides were applied to the seeds and later the leaves, while one chemical called imidacloprid was applied to the soil. This is used in Ontario to control the striped cucumber beetle.

Mated female bees were introduced when the crop came into bloom. They dug nests in the earth around the plants and began foraging for nectar from the large, yellow squash flowers, which they’d bring back to offspring tucked away in special chambers underground.

These were hoary squash bees – a ground-nesting species found on farmland throughout North America. Squash bees are uniquely suited to pollinating the flowers of squashes, pumpkins and cucumbers thanks to special leg hairs that fit the size and shape of their pollen grains. They tend to forage earlier in the day than most bees too, to match the early morning flowering of these plants.

The researchers studied nest building, foraging and reproduction in these bees and found imidacloprid in particular – one of the most widely used neonicotinoids worldwide – had a devastating effect on all aspects of squash bee life. Compared to insects living on untreated cropland, the hoary squash bees exposed to imidacloprid in the soil created 85% fewer nests, left 5.3 times more pollen unharvested and produced a staggering 89% fewer offspring.

Imidacloprid appeared to rob squash bees of their usual industrious attitude towards the laborious work of building nests, foraging for food and rearing young. These non-social bees lack the support of relatives in big hives, and must face these essential tasks alone. By reducing the amount of pollen they collect, the pesticide could leave squash bees and their offspring with less energy to do so.

But it’s not just bees which are in trouble. Pumpkins, squashes and gourds are entirely dependent on pollination by bees to set fruit. Without an influx of new bees or a recovery in their reproduction, farm productivity could suffer too.

Hoary squash bees, like many bee species, are specialists. Unlike generalist honeybees which are comfortable pollinating a wide range of plants, specialists co-evolved with their host plants and are uniquely adapted to pollinating them. Generalists can sometimes step in to do their work, but they’re unlikely to manage it with the same kind of skill.

Due to their wild nature, non-social insects are far harder to protect on farmland than domestic species. Honeybees hives can be moved around the countryside if an area is no longer able to support them. Squash bees and other non-social bees build small nests throughout the landscape, making it impossible to pinpoint and protect them all. Protecting honeybees from pesticides is already difficult. For wild bees which forage and nest among a wide variety of crops worldwide, it may be impossible.

By Liz Kimbrough, March 19, 2021. First published on Mongabay.com.

Most of the conversation about climate change is dominated by carbon dioxide. While CO2 plays a critical role in the complex climate equation, other forces such as methane, nitrous oxide, aerosols and black carbon are also factors.

In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of 31 scientists calculated the balance of all natural and human-caused greenhouse gases coming in and out of the massive Amazon Basin. The team concluded that warming of the atmosphere from agents other than CO2 likely exceeds the climate benefits the Amazon provides via CO2 uptake. Or more simply: due to humans, the Amazon Basin is now a net greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter.

“I would highlight that that natural greenhouse emissions from ecosystems aren’t causing climate change,” the study’s lead author, Kristofer Covey, an assistant professor at Skidmore College told Mongabay. “It’s the many human disturbances underway in the basin that are contributing to climate change.”

Earth receives constant energy from the sun. Climate-forcing factors in the atmosphere, such as greenhouse gases, act like a blanket, trapping that heat energy on Earth. When there’s more energy coming in from the sun than is being reflected back out into space, the planet warms and our climate is thrown out of balance.

A healthy forest ecosystem sucks in CO2 and keeps other climate-forcing factors in relative balance. But in the Amazon, where forests have faced increased logging, mining, dam construction, and clearing for agricultural (typically using fire), the system is drying and degrading. One study found that the amount of aboveground plant tissue in the Amazon was reduced by roughly one-third over the past decade.

In short, the ability of the Amazon to absorb CO2 is declining.

At the same time, other climate-forcing factors are on the rise. When trees burn, for instance, they not only release their stored CO2, but also release methane — a GHG more than 80 times as potent as carbon, which sticks around in the atmosphere for much longer, amplifying the warming.

Warming, especially of the soils and sediments in the Amazon’s seasonally flooded forests, contributes to increased emissions of methane and nitrous oxide—a GHG with 300 times the warming potential of CO2. “Of the impacts that may increase the strength of sources in the Basin, wetland warming and reservoir construction [dams] could be the most significant,” the paper says.

Black carbon, small particulate matter from fires and the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, settles and darkens the surface of the Earth, causing it to absorb more heat. Soot from Amazon fires has been found in the Andean glaciers, reducing the albedo, or reflectiveness of snow, thereby increasing melting and altering hydrology.

“Parsing the complex interactions between the Amazon, its effects on climate, and human influences is a bit like trying to predict the stock market,” said study co-author Fiona Soper, an ecologist at McGill University in Canada. “[I]t’s made up of moving parts: multiple climate forcers, not just carbon but also methane, nitrous oxide, particulates and biophysical effects, each being acted on by human stressors that range from dam building and hunting to climate change…Synthesizing these changes is a huge challenge.”

Evapotranspiration, the natural exchange of gases and water from plants into the atmosphere; aerosols, small particles produced both naturally and by burning; ozone, a trace gas usually produced from urban emissions and fires; and biogenic volatile organic compounds, trace gasses produced by plants, are all accounted for in the study.

However, despite their best estimates, researchers note some uncertainty in the magnitude of emissions from the Amazon Basin, disagreements about the best way to compare the climate forcing of non-CO2 factors relative to CO2, and the exact roles of these climate-forcing factors.

“I think this paper does a great service by highlighting how much there is to learn about the biogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin, particularly about non-CO2 greenhouse gases and other forcing factors on climate,” Ruth DeFries, a professor of sustainable development at Columbia University who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay.

“Forests might not be able to sequester enough carbon to provide a net benefit for climate mitigation, which suggests that efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases depend on alternatives to fossil fuel burning — the largest and well-quantified source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”

Many climate experts agree that reducing emissions is an essential focus to address climate change. But this doesn’t mean the services of the Amazon Basin are a wash. The remaining forests are still doing a mammoth job of stabilizing the climate, not to mention supporting rich biodiversity, cultures and livelihoods.

“The main take away from this work,” Soper said, “should be a call to arms to prevent further degradation of the Amazon system.”

Citation:

Covey, K., Soper, F., Pangala, S., Bernardino, A., Pagliaro, Z., Basso, L., … Elmore, A. (2021). Carbon and beyond: The biogeochemistry of climate in a rapidly changing Amazon. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 4, 618401. doi:10.3389/ffgc.2021.618401

By George Wittemyer, Associate professor of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University. First published on The Conversation.

Humans have been over-exploiting African elephants for centuries. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire’s demand for ivory led to the extinction of genetically distinct elephant populations in northern Africa. But in recent times, population increases among southern African elephants and declines across the rest of the continent have made it hard to clearly assess how threatened the species is overall.

I serve on a team of scientists that recently reviewed African elephants’ status for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). We compiled data from over 400 sites across Africa, spanning 50 years of conservation efforts – and our results were grim.

The number of African savanna elephants – the largest subspecies of elephants – has declined by 60% since 1990. And forest elephants, which the IUCN is treating as a separate species for the first time, have declined in number by over 86%. Based on our assessment, the IUCN has changed its listing from “vulnerable” for all African elephants to “endangered” for savanna elephants and “critically endangered” for forest elephants.

Two Species

By separating savanna and forest elephants into independent assessments, our report reveals the critical state of the more elusive forest elephants, which was obscured in previous reviews that lumped all of Africa’s elephants together. Scientific evidence for separating the species has been building over the past two decades, and many taxonomists felt this recognition was long overdue.

Increased research on forest elephants highlights the dramatic declines these secretive giants are undergoing. Studies also show that they are among the slowest-reproducing mammals on the planet. This means that even if they receive adequate protection, their recovery will take decades.

Global Threats, Global Solutions

Scientists believe that elephant populations across Africa actually increased during the early 20th century, when nations were entrenched in global wars and consumption of ivory and other luxury items declined. After World War II, however, conspicuous consumption surged. Over-hunting for ivory drove severe declines in the number of elephants in the 1970s and 1980s.

Thanks to interconnected global trade networks, along with porous and unregulated borders in many parts of Africa, rising ivory demand in one part of the world quickly translates into higher black market ivory prices in Africa. And these higher prices lead to poaching.

Removing elephants from an area can pave the way for converting forests and grasslands to agriculture. This cycle has led to the depletion of much of African elephants’ historic range.

Habitat loss also brings elephants and humans closer together, leading to more human-elephant conflict. Such clashes lead to the direct loss of elephants. They also are a burden for local communities that can erode their interest in and support for conservation.

While the scale of decline in Africa’s elephant populations is overwhelming, there are many examples of successful conservation efforts across the continent. The KAZA (Kavango-Zambezi) Transfrontier Conservation effort, anchored by Botswana, holds the largest contiguous elephant population on the continent, and that population has experienced strong growth over the past 50 years. This success reflects government collaboration across borders and work with local communities.

Joint international efforts to reduce the illegal ivory trade are raising awareness of the problems with ivory consumption. China banned domestic ivory trade in 2017, and concurrently ivory poaching across many elephant populations in Africa declined – including in the largest populations in Tanzania and Kenya, which were under severe pressure less than 10 years ago. The core population of forest elephants in Gabon, which declined by 80% between 2004 and 2014, has stabilized with increased government investment and reduced poaching pressure.

Innovative work with communities in countries such as Namibia and Kenya to enhance people’s livelihoods by developing wildlife-supported economies has led to the protection of enormous tracts of lands as conservation areas. And researchers and conservationists are working to find solutions to conflicts between human activities and elephant needs that can be applied across Africa.

By highlighting the precarious state of Africa’s two elephant species, my colleagues and I hope that this Red List Assessment can help motivate African countries with elephant populations and the international community to invest in measures that support elephant conservation.

Elephants provide much more than just aesthetic benefits. Recent studies show forest elephants also play an important role in fighting climate change by enhancing carbon storage in central African forests, among the most important carbon reserves on the planet. The elephants disperse seeds and thin out young trees as they forage, which makes room for larger trees to thrive.

Elephants also are a linchpin of the wildlife-based economy across Africa. And elephants, in compliment with fire, are considered to be ecosystem engineers that structure the balance between trees and grass on Africa’s savannas. Along with many other conservation experts, I see reversing their decline as a global imperative that requires concerted global support.

Additional Disclosure: George Wittemyer is a member of the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group and serves as the Chairman of the Scientific Board for Save the Elephants, a Kenyan non-governmental organization.

Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex guest edits British Vogue’s September 2019 issue, considered the most important issue of the year. Editor-in-chief-Edward Enninful invited Meghan to appear on the cover, but she declined, saying it would be considered “boastful”. With minions clamoring to criticize the Duchess at every turn in the road, declining was absolutely the correct decision.

Instead, the September 2019 British Vogue cover features 15 women who are “trailblazing changemakers, united by their fearlessness in breaking barriers”, according to a statement issued by Buckingham Palace.

The female ensemble of “trailblazing changemakers” includes activist actor Jane Fonda, climate change advocate, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and supermodel now maternal health advocate Christy Turlington Burns.

Markle has worked on the project for seven months, connecting with Michelle Obama and persuading her husband Prince Harry to join the dialogue with world-renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall.

Rounding out the list are Adwoa Aboah, mental health campaigner and model; Adut Akech, Model and former refugee (although she says she will always be a refugee); Ramla Ali, boxer; Sinead Burke, diversity advocate and lecturer; Gemma Chan, campaigner and actor; Laverne Cox, LGBTQIA+ advocate and actor; Salma Hayek Pinault, actor, producer and women’s rights advocate; Francesca Hayward, royal ballet principal dancer; Jameela Jamil, body positivity advocate and actor; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author and feminist; and Yara Shahidi, founder of Eighteen x 18 and actor (and adored by Michelle Obama).

Meghan said: “These last seven months have been a rewarding process, curating and collaborating with Edward Enninful, British Vogue’s editor-in-chief, to take the year’s most-read fashion issue and steer its focus to the values, causes and people making impact in the world today.

“Through this lens I hope you’ll feel the strength of the collective in the diverse selection of women chosen for the cover as well as the team of support I called upon within the issue to help bring this to light.

“I hope readers feel as inspired as I do by the forces for change they’ll find within these pages.”

"To have the country's most influential beacon of change guest edit British Vogue at this time has been an honour, a pleasure and a wonderful surprise," said Enninful. The September 2019 issue hits newsstands on Friday, August 2.

The cover is photographed by Peter Lindbergh — his first British Vogue cover since September 1992. Many of the women were photographed via video links.

The 16th spot on the cover will appear in print as a silver reflective mirror, to show how you, the reader, are part of this extraordinary moment in time – and to encourage you to use your own platform to bring change.

The Duchess will introduce Forces for Change in her own words in her guest editor’s letter, in addition to her interview with America’s former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Last week ended on a positive note for protesters and artists committed to forcing the resignation of Warren B. Kanders as vice chair of the board of New York’s Whitney Museum.

Protesters were adamant that his ownership of Safariland, a defense-manufacturing company that supplied state-of-the-art tear gas to quell protesters everywhere in the world disqualified him as any kind of representative of artists opposed to global militarization. Evidence mounted that Kanders’ stake in Sierra Bullets,linked him directly to high-velocity ammunition allegedly used by Israeli soldiers in Gaza against Palestinian civilian protesters.

With Kanders out at the Whitney and no specified game plan on how to move forward, all parties involved from artists to activists, patrons and buyers of art are asking what happens next. ARTnews writes that the Kanders’ resignation is a sign “of the shifting balance between museum boards and their critics, with protesters believing that they have won the day.

Don’t overthink the situation, say many of the critics, who have generally taken a stand against defense contractors and fortunes made from armaments worldwide. The Sackler family also has been the target of protests as they are tied deeply — if not exclusively — as profiteers tied to America’s epidemic drug crisis launched by OxyContin.

Among the artists at the Whitney Biennial who best symbolized the contradictions for artists involved in the conflict was San Juan–based artist Nibia Pastrana Santiago. was not among the eight artists who had withdrawn from the Whitney Biennial. But she was among the citizens of Puerto Rican citizens who protested the official residence of Puerto Rico’s then Governor Ricardo Rosselló, before he also resigned at week’s end.

“I couldn’t breathe, my eyes are burning, we were following each other…running and holding strangers hands…’cause you can’t see,” Santiago told artnet News of the impact of the tear gas. “I felt like drowning, I felt like fainting. Fortunately there were colleagues with remedies. Once I caught my senses again, ’cause really the gasses disorient you, we went back to the line.”

The artists explained that the protests were all peaceful and she was stunned to see tear gas used. She had no way of knowing if Kanders’ company Safariland had manufactured the tear gas or not, although both Hyperallergic and the Nation argue for a connection.

From his point of view Kanders argued that it was his job to manufacture the tear gas for law enforcement agencies, not determine the ethics of situations in which it was used.

Speaking about the Kanders resignation, Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said: “Here’s a man who has given a tremendous amount of his time and money to young, often edgy and radical artists — somebody who is very progressive — that’s one of the ironies of all this.” Weinberg continued:

“The Whitney Museum is one of the most progressive, the most diverse, the most engaged, open programs of any major institution in the country,” Mr. Weinberg added. “Every museum director is looking at us right now and saying, ‘Gee, if the Whitney is being targeted, what’s going to happen to us?’”

artnet reminds us that conflicts about museum boards are hardly new, sharing this 1969 image from the Guerrilla Art Action Group, who protested then-MOMA trustee Nelson Rockefeller’s ties to weapons used in the Vietnam War.

The conflicts that exist on museum boards are not found in other institutions, also reliant on donations. A donor to Harvard clearly get his or her name on a building or lecture hall. The university president will surely take a call from a big donor without delay, and children and grandchildren are given preferential treatment. But donors aren’t sitting on the governing board of the university in most cases. Professionals with expertise run those institutions.

In art museums, donors serve as the institution’s primary governing body, the reward of making major donations. One can argue that their own art investments can increase in value through their efforts in planning museum shows and making and breaking certain artists. These same donors are also charged with policing the very institutions they are governing — which is an impossible ethical situation, say critics.

After researching the 2016 US elections and publishing ‘Museums, Money, and Politics’, artist Andrea Fraser wrote that her project “developed out of my personal sense of horror at discovering supporters of radical right-wing politicians serving on the boards of arts organizations with which I work and whose missions are directly threatened by the policies these politicians advance.”

Fraser asks why museums should be governed by donors, when there is no good reason. artnet writes:

Such a shift, she (Fraser) says, would also make museums more aligned with other fields, like medicine, science, social services, and education, where board members are selected based on professional expertise, scholarship, and their ability to further the institution’s mission. “The arts appear to be at the extreme of prioritizing wealth over all other criteria,” she notes. “It is easy to see how major decisions like the hiring of directors and architects are impacted in many museums by the lack of a range of stakeholders on boards.”