Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are

“Often the places we grow up in… influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her lyrical love letter to her native Highlands, echoing an ancient intuition about how our formative physical landscapes shape our landscapes of thought and feeling. The word “genius” in the modern sense, after all, originates in the Latin phrase genius loci — “the spirit of a place.”

I find myself thinking about Shepherd as I return to the Bulgarian mountains of my own childhood, trekking the same paths with my mother that I once trudged with tiny feet beside her, astonished at the flood of long-ago feelings rushing in with each step, astonished too at how effortlessly I navigate these routes I have not walked in decades.

The psychological, neurocognitive, and geophysical underpinnings of these astonishments are what M.R. O’Connor explores in Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (public library) — a layered inquiry into the science and cultural poetics of how we orient in space and selfhood, illuminating the stunning interpenetration of the two.

“View of Nature in Ascending Regions” by Levi Walter Yaggy from Geographical Portfolio — Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography, 1893. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

In a passage evocative of Rebecca Solnit’s memorable observation that “never to get lost is not to live,” O’Connor takes the telescopic perspective of evolutionary time to consider the cognitive handicap beneath this existential gift:

Life on earth has created millions of Ulyssean species undertaking epic journeys at scales both large and small. Getting lost is a uniquely human problem. Many animals are incredible navigators, capable of undertaking journeys that far eclipse our individual abilities. The greatest migration on earth belongs to the Arctic tern, a four-ounce argonaut that travels each year from Greenland to Antarctica and back again, a distance of some forty-four thousand miles. Flying with the wind, the tern’s return itinerary is a globe-trotter’s fantasy, circumnavigating Africa and South America.

[…]

One of the devices that an animal needs to navigate is a “clock” — an internal mechanism for measuring or keeping time. The daily mass migration of zooplankton in the world’s oceans requires them to know when dawn and dusk are approaching. It would seem this is a simple response to light stimuli, but deep-sea zooplankton, which live at depths below where light penetrates, also migrate in accordance with the length of day at different latitudes. Even slightly more complex migrations can demand multiple clocks.

Perhaps the most astonishing internal clock belongs to the bioluminescent Bermuda fireworm, which swarms the tropical waters precisely fifty-seven minutes after sunset on each third evening after the full Moon in the summer. Such a feat suggests that this tiny marine organism, with a fraction of a fraction of the cognitive capacity of a human, is internally equipped with three different timekeeping devises: a regular twenty-four-hour diurnal clock, a lunar clock with a 27.3-day cycle, and an interval timer to tick out the exact minutes past sunset.

Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

O’Connor marvels at the staggering evolutionary array of timekeeping devices that allows migratory species to keep partaking of the dance of life:

Animals that complete annual migrations or multiyear migrations have to possess a yearly clock, one that is finely attuned to the lengths of days and nights and their changes across each season. In all, evolution seems to have produced annual clocks, lunar clocks, tidal clocks, circadian clocks, and, perhaps for those that migrate under cover of darkness, a sidereal clock — which measures the time it takes a star to appear to travel around the earth.

Besides their intricate internal timekeeping mechanisms, many nonhuman animals are endowed with equally intricate space-mapping mechanisms. Each migration season, humpback whales travel more than ten thousand miles far from land to return to the precise place where they were born. There are bird species — European pied flycatchers, blackcaps, and indigo buntings among them — that appear to orient by the pole star in their nocturnal flight; there are insect species — ants and bees among them — that perform triumphs of trigonometry with their light-sensitive photoreceptors, calculating spatial distances by polarized light to find the most direct route home after a winding pathway of foraging. With their mere milligram-brains of one million neurons — a grain of sand to the Mont Blanc of our eighty-six billion — and 20/2000 vision that renders them blind by human standards, honeybees make hundreds of foraging trips per day, meandering many miles from home, then compute the “beeline” back. African ball-rolling dung beetles, Namibian desert spiders, and southern cricket frogs use the stars of the Milky Way as their compass, just like some of the most courageous members of our own species once used the constellations to find their way to freedom from the moral cowardice of tyranny: To ensure they were moving northward, migrants on the Underground Railroad were instructed to keep the river on one side and “follow The Drinking Gourd” — an African name for Ursa Major, or The Big Dipper.

“Planetary System, Eclipse of the Sun, the Moon, the Zodiacal Light, Meteoric Shower” by Levi Walter Yaggy from Geographical Portfolio — Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography, 1887. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

Like all reality-radicalizing discoveries that defy the limiting creaturely intuitions we call common sense, the notion that animals might use magnetism for navigation was long derided as something more akin to spiritualism than to science. Humphry Davy — the greatest chemist of the Golden Age of chemistry, charismatic pioneer of the scientific lecture as popular entertainment — was keenly interested in the mystery of animal magnetism. A century after him, Nikola Tesla — a dazzling mind epochs ahead of his time in myriad ways, whose legacy shapes so much of our daily lives and whose name is now the measuring unit of magnetic fields — stood a chance of cracking the mystery, given with his twin passions for pigeons and magnetism, but the opprobrium of the scientific establishment was too impenetrable and the technology was not yet there. It wasn’t until 1958 that a young German graduate student — Wolfgang Wiltschko — was tasked with disproving animal magnetic navigation once and for all. Instead, he ended up proving it: In the then-dubious experiment he was asked to replicate, the birds he let loose in a space with no light source could, just like in the original experiment performed by a fellow student, still orient effortlessly.

O’Connor writes:

The notion that animals have a bio-compass that can “read” the earth’s geomagnetic field has now emerged as the most promising explanation of animal navigation. In addition to those marathon migratory species, nearly every animal that has been tested thus far demonstrates a capacity to orient to the geomagnetic field. Carp floating in tubs at fish markets in Prague spontaneously align themselves in a north-south axis. So do newts at rest, and dogs when they crouch to relieve themselves. Horses, cattle, and deer orient their bodies north-south while grazing, but not if they are under power lines, which disrupt the magnetic field. Red foxes almost always pounce on mice from the northeast. These organisms must all have some kind of organelle that functions as a magneto-receptor, the same way an ear receives sound and an eye receives space.

Magnetism with Key by Berenice Abbott, 1958, from her series Documenting Science.

We human animals navigate the world not only by orienting in space, but by orienting in time. Mental time travel — the ability to rememeber and reflect, to imagine and plan for the future — is what made us human. It is also the pillar of our personal identity — the narrative string that links our childhood selves to our present selves to make us, across a lifetime of physical and psychological changes, one person.

That string is known as autonoeic consciousness, from the Greek noéō: “I perceive,” “I fathom” — our capacity for mental self-representation as entities in time that can reflect on our own lives as continuous and coherent phenomena of being. In the blink of evolutionary time since the dawn of neuroscience in the 1930s, one area of the brain has emerged as the crucible of both our autoneoic consciousness and our spatial navigation: the hippocampus. O’Connor writes:

The hippocampus has sometimes been described as the human GPS, but this metaphor is reductive compared to what this remarkable, plastic part of our minds accomplishes. While a GPS identifies fixed positions or coordinates in space that never change, neuroscientists think what the hippocampus does is unique to us as individuals — it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood.

An astrocyte in the human hippocampus. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known ink drawings.

Because a self is a pattern of experiences, memories, and impressions, constellated according to an organizing principle, and because sleep is when the hippocampus consolidates memories to draw from them those organizing patterns, sleep is essential to our sense of self. O’Connor quotes MIT neuroscientist Matt Wilson:

During sleep you try to make sense of things you already learned… You go into a vast database of experience and try to figure out new connections and then build a model to explain new experiences. Wisdom is the rules, based on experience, that allows us to make good decisions in novel situations in the future.

The hippocampus is a hard-won glory of evolution, but it is not singular to us — rudiments of it and variations on it are found in some of our fellow animals across the rungs of neural complexity:

Even birds, which last shared an ancestor with humans 250 million years ago, as well as amphibians, lungfish, and reptiles, have what is called a medial pallium. Similar to the mammalian hippocampal formation in vertebrates, the medial pallium is also involved in spatial tasks in these species, raising the possibility that certain properties of spatial cognition were conserved as organisms diversified and split, while other properties adapted to particular ecologies or selective forces. But despite the profound evolutionary commonalities between humans and other vertebrates and the way the hippocampus relates to cognitive functions of memory and navigation, the question remains: why did we make such a leap in terms of hippocampi’s size and role in our lives? Or as psychologist Daniel Casasanto puts it, “How did foragers become physicists in the eye blink of evolutionary time?”

Part of the answer might lie in the remarkable plasticity of the hippocampus. After the now-iconic 2000 study of the brains of London taxi drivers — which found that their elaborate qualification exam, requiring the memorization of thousands of city landmarks and 25,000 streets, resulted in significant increase in synapses and gray matter in the hippocampus — scientists have been studying what we can do to protect and even bolster our primary instrument for navigating space and selfhood.

O’Connor points to the work of McGill University neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot, who has devised a hippocampal health regimen of recollection and navigation exercises of incrementally increasing difficulty that deliver marked structural growth of gray matter. VeboLife — the neurocognitive fitness training program she has devised — teaches people to navigate the familiar environment in deliberately novel ways, challenging trainees to reconfigure their default routes by taking new paths that require them to attend to new details and make new mental maps in the process.

Optimal hippocampal health appears to be — like the optimal experience of life itself — a matter of paying active and mindful attention, interrupting the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” our brain has evolved to be, savoring the specifics of each unrepeatable moment.

With an eye to how our hippocampal acuity determines the quality of our lives, O’Connor wonders:

Maybe wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvelous fact of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with our surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place.

And yet as much as we throb with wanderlust, we are animated by an intense connection to the landscapes and topographies of our formative years. An emotion known as topophilia, which I experienced while revisiting those mountain trails of my childhood, furnishes this affective-spatial memory that renders childhood as much a time as a place.

Major rivers and mountains of the world compared by length and height, from Atlas de Choix, ou Recueil des Meilleures Cartes de Geographie Ancienne et Moderne Dressees par Divers Auteurs by J. Goujon and J. Andriveau, 1829. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

O’Connor writes:

Often the places we grow up in have outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us — they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others. Maybe it’s because of the vividness of their sensory impressions, their genius for establishing deep relationships to their early environments, that children have a strong capacity for the human emotion called topophilia.

[…]

Across cultures, navigation is influenced by particular environmental conditions — snow, sand, water, wind — and topographies — mountain, valley, river, ocean, and desert. But in all of them, it is also a means by which individuals develop a sense of attachment and feeling for places. Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.

In the remainder of the thoroughly fascinating Wayfinding, O’Connor maps the most thrilling shorelines of our evolving territories of understanding: astounding findings indicating that people from migratory populations have measurably longer alleles of the dopamine receptor gene associated with exploratory behavior than people from sedentary communities; ancient feats of navigation passed down the generations in native cultures to challenge the Western social theory of culture; music as a metaphor for the relationship between organisms and their environment. For a lyrical counterpart, complement it with Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost.

America's unemployment system is broken. With millions of workers still without jobs, it's time to finally fix it.

insider@insider.com (Julia Raifman,Will Raderman) 

© Provided by Business Insider Unemployed people at a rally last year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Federal pandemic unemployment insurance provided essential support to unemployed workers.

Now that it's gone, the disjointed unemployment insurance system once again excludes most who need help.

If it doesn't act, Congress risks making porous unemployment insurance a silent crisis until the next recession.

Julia Raifman, ScD is an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and leads the COVID-19 US State Policy database.

Will Raderman is a research fellow at the Boston University School of Public Health and contributor to the COVID-19 US State Policy database.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

How many families might never experience food insecurity if permanent improvements were made to unemployment insurance? As unemployment shot up to historic highs because of the pandemic, new Census data show that the poverty rate went down. Congress protected people who lost work with legislation that included necessary expansions to unemployment insurance. Reforming unemployment insurance will ensure similar safeguards are in place at all times.

Federal pandemic supplements supported millions of workers and their families during a period of intense tumult. Gig workers and those in less conventional positions, who are typically ineligible for state unemployment insurance, could qualify for federal assistance. The higher benefit amounts distributed were associated with reduced food insecurity, and the improved benefit durations allowed for financial stability across many months of unalterable unemployment. Such enhancements reduced risk of depressive symptoms and helped prevent long-term health damage to workers and their children.

The upgrades were a major divergence from the pre-pandemic norms, when millions of unemployed workers were left stranded with insufficient access, amounts, and lengths of assistance. This month's expiration of federal unemployment programs ensured the immediate resumption of that inadequate system, hurting ten million workers now and tens of millions more in the years to come. Without implementing improved and lasting national standards in the reconciliation bill, Congress once again risks making porous unemployment insurance a silent crisis until the next recession. Out of sight and out of mind, except for those out of work.

Major economic downturns, like the past year and a half, result in extended periods of unemployment. These moments typically receive intensive media attention and legislative responses. Less discussed is the fact that there is a constant cycle of job churn even in normal years, with numbers of job separations comparable to the past twelve months. In 2019 alone, the equivalent of 11% of the total labor force went from employed to an unemployed designation at some point. Meanwhile, state unemployment insurance systems excluded most by design.

Workers in the United States require the same consistent income protections provided to people transitioning between jobs in other nations. This is the time to enact three key changes to improve regular unemployment insurance in the upcoming reconciliation bill: larger weekly payment amounts provided to unemployed workers, easier rules to qualify, and longer eligibility periods.
Workers need improved programs

Bigger benefits are needed. In the first quarter of this year, the average unemployment insurance amount provided by regular state programs was below a full-time federal minimum wage job for workers in 16 states. Zero states guarantee a minimum weekly benefit amount equivalent to the federal minimum wage. Without the now-expired federal supplements, insurance meant to provide safe financial continuity between jobs does not ensure security.

That assumes the worker even qualifies. Just over 1 in 4 unemployed workers received benefits in 2019. More people were excluded than included. Recent entrants to the labor force, those returning to work after raising children, gig workers, and self employed individuals are among the tens of millions of people typically unable to qualify. Many who were ineligible for regular unemployment insurance were able to receive payments through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, but it expired on Labor Day in states that kept it active through the summer. Normal eligibility must be broadened to help a greater number of lower-income workers and those in nontraditional employment situations.

Those who are struggling to find new jobs for more than 6 months - presently 3.18 million individuals - have now lost virtually all remaining support except those in the few states with Extended Benefits programs still running. As the volume of recent research indicates, the financial cut-off is unlikely to impact overall employment levels or speed of labor recovery, but will force families to drastically reduce their spending.

Officials argue there's been sufficient time to find work, but this doesn't reflect the current state of affairs - the dangerous Delta variant, inconsistent childcare, and climate disasters in regions across the country - nor does it address the challenges facing workers whose duration of unemployment is over 26 weeks, the maximum span which state unemployment insurance benefits generally last for. This group of the long-term unemployed has grown in size during the pandemic, but in every single month since November 2001, there have been over a million long-term unemployed workers.

Finding a job is challenging. As time stretches on, it gets harder and harder to be considered for positions, and the probability of employment in the future worsens. The longer someone is unemployed, the weaker their attachment to the job market becomes. Unemployed workers' likelihood of withdrawing from the workforce completely goes up. Unemployment insurance gives them a reason to keep searching and reduces their risk of death. The length of benefit eligibility needs to be extended.

In addition to better baseline levels, linking benefit enhancements to unemployment data would ensure that unemployment insurance is automatically extended in recessions without the need for congressional action or susceptibility to politics as seen this summer. Policymakers ignored relevant evidence with harmful consequences. Despite firm declarations that unemployment insurance was slowing job growth, states that retained the federal expansions saw more employment growth in August than states that cut benefits.

High pandemic unemployment revealed cracks in the system that have long existed. Federal programs that temporarily fixed that damage serve as an example of how we can make enduring improvements to policies.

'Right-to-work' legislation may sound nice, but it's actually terrible for workers and has a deeply racist history

insider@insider.com (Paul Constant)

© Provided by Business Insider "Right-to-work" laws can interfere with the ability of unions to negotiate for better pay, adequate breaks, and safe hours. 

Drazen_/Getty Images

Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures and cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast.

He recently spoke with Shane Larson of Communications Workers of America about 'right to work' laws.

Larson says these laws leave workers with lower pay and less employer-provided health insurance.

In politics, sometimes naming is everything. If the widely accepted name for a policy or position has a strong emotional connotation, it can leave supporters with an uphill battle to persuade voters before they've even opened their mouths. One framing that has plagued progressives for decades, for instance, is "gun control." Nobody wants to be controlled, so audiences are already subconsciously primed to be opposed to any proposal so-called "gun control" advocates put forth, which is why advocates have long preferred "gun safety" or "gun responsibility" to describe their position.


So let's give credit where it's due: Whichever nameless business lobby operative came up with the name "right-to-work laws" deserves a raise. Just on the basis of the name alone, "right-to-work" (hereafter RTW) sounds like a robust worker protection law, when in reality it's the exact opposite - a way to give employers more power and money at the expense of workers.

The reality of 'right to work'

RTW laws basically interfere with the ability of unions to collect dues from workers who enjoy union protections. Trickle-down politicians in the 28 states that have passed RTW bill these laws as a way to save workers money, but really they starve unions of funds, power, and bargaining capability - the unions who have successfully gotten the workers better pay, adequate breaks, and safe hours.

That's bad news for workers. A large body of evidence proves that as unions continue to lose power, economic inequality grows: CEOs and shareholders take home more profits while worker paychecks shrink. Studies show that worker wages are 3.1% smaller in states with RTW laws, and despite the fact that trickle-downers promise that they will inspire employers to create jobs, there's no evidence that RTW laws spur employment growth.

In Friday's episode of the "Pitchfork Economics podcast," Shane Larson, the legislative and political director of Communications Workers of America, argues that RTW laws should be called "right-to-work-for-less" or "right-to-mooch" laws.

Larson says RTW "was concocted by a bunch of Southern segregationist white supremacists as an effort to try to stop unions" in the 1930s and 1940s as "a way to keep workplaces from being integrated." The policy push "was bankrolled by corporations to really whip up this racist hysteria into campaigns to pass these 'right-to-work' laws in states all throughout the south."

(And if you think Larson's language is inflammatory, you should know that the leading advocate for RTW laws in response to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a Texan corporate lobbyist named Vance Muse, was described by his own grandson as "a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.")
Workers in RTW states earn less

In the years since the Civil Rights movement, corporations have scrubbed the overt white supremacy from their RTW campaigns, but they've continued to advocate for the law with all their estimable power.

"If you are a worker in a 'right-to-work' state," Larson explained, "not only do you make about $1,600 less a year than [workers in non-RTW states], you have less employer-provided health insurance, and significantly lower retirement plans or pension plans. It's a pure, clear benefit for corporations" at the expense of workers, he said.

The House of Representatives passed a bill this spring that could change all that. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, strengthens the rights of American workers to unionize without employer interference and reverses RTW legislation that defunds unions. The bill is now gridlocked in the Senate, so passage would either require the unlikely support of 10 Republican Senators, or filibuster reform allowing the Democratic majority to pass the bill without Republican support.

The PRO Act is wildly popular, with nearly 60% of likely voters, including an impressive 40% of Republicans, supporting the bill. This is the kind of broadly popular economic legislation that Democrats need to pass if they want to hold on to Congress in the 2022 elections. It puts money in workers' pockets, it improves peoples' lives - and it's got a pretty good name, too.

Election results unveil worrisome divide between urban and rural Canadians: experts


OTTAWA — The results of the federal election have shown a deepened divide between Canadians living in urban areas who mostly chose Liberal candidates and those living in rural areas who voted for the Conservative party, experts say.

Allan Thompson, the head of Carleton University's journalism program, said the results of Monday's election have revealed increasing polarization between rural and urban Canadians.

The division was very clear in Ontario where the Liberals picked up almost all the seats in the urban ridings and the Conservatives flipped some rural ridings and increased their lead in ridings they'd held before.

"What worries me is just the polarization, that it seems to be more and more split, more of a division where it's virtually automatic what the outcome is going to be," Thompson said.

"I think parties do start to make that part of their strategy. I'm concerned that they're not really even making a serious effort to appeal to voters in the ridings that they have decided are unwinnable, and that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Before returning to his non-partisan position as a university professor, Thompson led a task force for the Liberals to propose ways to better connect with rural voters. He also ran as a Liberal candidate in Ontario's rural riding of Huron-Bruce twice, losing to Conservative MP Ben Lobb by about 3,000 votes in 2015 and by about 9,000 votes in 2019.

On Monday, Lobb was re-elected over the Liberal candidate by a margin of more than 15,000 votes.

Conservative Michelle Ferreri defeated incumbent Liberal gender equality minister Maryam Monsef in the largely rural riding of Peterborough-Kawartha and Conservatives Anna Roberts also defeated Liberal seniors minister Deb Schulte in King–Vaughan on the outskirts of Toronto.

The Conservatives also flipped the riding of Bay of Quinte in Ontario, Miramichi–Grand Lake in New Brunswick, Cumberland–Colchester and South Shore–St. Margarets in Nova Scotia and Coast of Bays-Central-Notre Dame in Newfoundland and Labrador, while maintaining or extending their leads in most of Canada's rural ridings.

Meanwhile, the Liberals held onto their strongholds in Canada's largest cities, wining 22 out of 24 ridings in the Montreal area and all of Toronto's 25 ridings, including Spadina–Fort York where Kevin Vuong emerged victorious even after being disavowed by the Liberal party.

The party dropped Vuong as a candidate two days before election day over the revelation that he'd been charged in 2019 with sexual assault, a charge that was later withdrawn. His name remained on the ballot, however, and the party now says he'll have to sit as an Independent MP.

The Liberals also won nine out of 10 seats in the Ottawa-Gatineau area and flipped three ridings in the Vancouver area. They also won all the ridings in the Halifax area and picked up a riding in each of Calgary and Edmonton.

Thompson said the Liberals and Conservatives have become so entrenched in their respective strongholds that "you start to wonder are they satisfied with devoting their resources and campaign strategy to those communities where they feel they have the best chance of winning?"

Carleton University political science professor Jonathan Malloy said the pattern of Liberals winning in urban areas and Conservatives winning in rural areas is not new. It emerged about three decades ago when the Conservative party splintered with the creation of the Reform Party, which later morphed into the Canadian Alliance before reuniting under the Conservative banner.

That drew the Conservatives more towards rural areas while the Liberals became more entrenched in the cities, Malloy said.

"Toronto used to be quite a Tory center of voting, that's like 50, 60 years ago," he said.

"The trends we have today have been growing, accelerating, particularly in Ontario, I would say, for the last 20 or 30 years."

Malloy said it's hard to determine when this trend started exactly, partly because some communities have grown so much in last few decades.

"Brampton, (Ont.) used to be a fairly small town, maybe 50 years ago you would maybe call it mainly rural and a small town. Now of course Brampton is the city of about 600,000 people," he said.

Malloy said the polices each of the two parties propose during their campaigns play a role in increasing the divide.

For instance, the Liberals' promise of $10-a-day childcare was more appealing to people living in the cities where the cost of child care is more of a concern than the availability of the service.

"It really plays out differently in different areas and for a lot of rural and suburban areas, ... and remote areas, it's just about the capacity of supply of government services not the cost," Malloy said.

There was also a very clear distinction between the Liberals and the Conservatives on the issue of guns that played out differently between urban and rural populations, he added.

"No one has a need for a gun in a Canadian city. And so, the Liberals tend to be fairly restrictive on firearms, because most urban people don't own firearms, they have no need for firearms and so they're happy to support strong restrictions on them.

"In rural areas, firearms are more practical, whether for hunting or for protecting your farm animals. There's practical reasons to have guns in rural areas."

Malloy said both the Liberals and Conservatives are aware of these differences and they tend to build their policies to appeal to their bases.

Whether voters view the party leader as a city or a rural person also plays a role in their choice, he believes.

"Urban voters view Mr. (Andrew) Scheer and Mr. (Erin) O'Toole as relatively rural even though they are properly kind of urban or suburban," he said. "Mr. (Justin) Trudeau, fair to say, is identified with urban. I don't think anyone would disagree with that."

While both parties try to attract voters from one another's bases, Malloy said they do so only after making a strategic calculation on whether attracting new voters might potentially cost them some of their existing support.

Thompson said the pattern of division between rural and urban Canadians is jeopardizing the effectiveness of democracy in Canada and parties should put more effort into bridging the gap.

"It's as if you live in a particular riding you don't get a chance to consider the other point of view, and that's not healthy," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2021.

—

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship

Maan Alhmidi, The Canadian Press

Lava from La Palma eruption has burned almost 400 structures so far

Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Slow-moving lava from a volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands has so far destroyed close to 400 structures this week and 500 acres, authorities said in an update Friday.

The eruption, which began Sunday, is still spewing lava from fissures in the ground -- but the spread has slowed and seismic activity has reduced, according to Maria Jose Blanco, director of Spain's National Geographic Institute.

Blanco told The Canary News that the front of the lava flow is about 1,600 feet wide at some parts and rises as high as 40 feet.

Columns of gas and smoke have climbed as high as 14,000 feet, officials said, and several miles of roads have been destroyed.

The eruption is the first major explosion on La Palma in 50 years. Some researchers believe the lava might continue flowing for several weeks.

"The main uncertainty is how long this will last," said Arnau Folch, a volcanologist at the Spanish National Research Council, according to The New York Times. "It seems that what is happening now will resemble pretty closely what happened 50 years ago."

Folch said the 1971 eruption on La Palma lasted for about three weeks.

Volcanic ash cloud closes La Palma airport; new vent emerges

MADRID (AP) — The airport on the Spanish island of La Palma shut down Saturday because of an ash cloud spewing out of a volcano that has been erupting for a week, and scientists said another volcanic vent opened up, exposing islanders to possible new dangers

  

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The intensity of the eruption that began Sept. 19 has increased in recent days, prompting the evacuation of three additional villages on the island, part of Spain's Canary Islands archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa. Almost 7,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes.

The recent volcanic eruption is the first since 1971 on La Palma, which has a population of 85,000.

La Palma Airport operator Aena said the airport was “inoperative” due to the accumulation of ash. Other airports in the Canary Islands were still operating Saturday but some airlines were suspending flights, Aena said.

Emergency crews pulled back from the volcano Friday as explosions sent molten rock and ash over a wide area. The Canary Islands Volcanology Institute said another vent opened early Saturday.

Rivers of lava have been sliding down the mountainside toward the southwestern coast of the island, destroying everything in their path, including hundreds of homes. The speed of the flow has slowed down considerably, however, and the lava is now barely moving forward, with about 2 kilometers left to reach the sea, said Miguel Ángel Morcuende, head of the Canary Island Volcanic Emergency Plan.

“I don't dare to tell you when it's going to get there, nor do I dare to make a forecast,” Morcuende told reporters in a news conference.

A more immediate concern for the residents of La Palma is the huge ash cloud that is rising from the volcano and being carried by the wind to other parts of the island. In addition to being a significant danger to aviation, he said volcanic ash can cause damage to people's airways, lungs and eyes. The local government has urged residents in affected areas to avoid going outside and only do so wearing masks and goggles.

The Associated Press

Mali approaches 'Russian private companies,' slams France at UN

Mali has asked private Russian companies to boost security, Russia's foreign minister confirmed Saturday, as the Malian leader accused France of abandoning the conflict-ridden country by preparing a large troop drawdown.

© MICHELE CATTANI As some countries draw down their forces in Mali, the government is looking elsewhere to shore up its fight against jihadists

European countries have warned the Malian government on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week against hiring paramilitaries from the controversial Wagner group.

But with Paris set to reduce its military presence in Mali, Sergey Lavrov told reporters that the Malian government was turning towards "private Russian companies."

"This is activity which has been carried out on a legitimate basis," he said during a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York.

"We have nothing to do with that," he added, saying the Malian government estimated that "its own capacities would be insufficient in the absence of external support" and initiated the discussions.

According to reports, Mali's army-dominated government in Bamako is close to hiring 1,000 Wagner paramilitaries.

France has warned Mali that hiring the fighters from the Russian private-security firm would isolate the country internationally.

But Mali PM Choguel Kokalla Maiga accused France of abandoning his country with the "unilateral" decision to withdraw troops as he addressed the UN General Assembly.

He said his government was justified to "seek other partners" to boost security and slammed a "lack of consultation" by the French.

The Wagner group is considered close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Western countries accuse it of acting on behalf of Moscow.

Russian paramilitaries, private-security instructors and companies have grown increasingly influential in Africa in recent years, particularly in the conflict-ridden Central African Republic, where the United Nations has accused Wagner contractors of committing abuses.

Moscow admits having deployed "instructors" to CAR but says they aren't active in fighting. Russia insists there are no paramilitaries in Libya, despite Western claims to the contrary.

The UN, which has some 15,000 peacekeepers in Mali, has also expressed concern at the possible involvement of Wagner fighters.

The EU, which trains Malian troops through its EUTM Mali mission, made up of 700 soldiers from 25 European countries, has warned that Wagner's involvement would "seriously" affect its relations with Bamako.

"To say, 'I was there first, get out,' it's insulting, first of all for the government in Bamako which invited foreign partners," insisted Lavrov.

France, which has lost 52 soldiers in the Sahel since it began engagements in January 2013, has decided to reorganize its military presence around a tighter unit centered on targeted strikes against jihadist leaders and on supporting local armies.

- Coups -

Soldiers are due to leave some bases by the end of the year and French troops in the Sahel should fall from around 5,000 currently to 2,500 or 3,000 by 2023.

France's defence minister, Florence Parly, reaffirmed Monday that France was not abandoning Mali and that it remained "determined" to continue the fight against terrorism alongside the Malian forces.

Germany, which also has troops in the country, has warned Bamako it will reconsider its deployment should the government strike a deal with Wagner.

Already battling a jihadist insurgency, Mali slid into political turmoil last year, culminating in a military coup in August 2020 against president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

Under the threat of sanctions, the military then appointed an interim civilian government tasked with steering the country back to democratic rule.

But military strongman Colonel Assimi Goita overthrew the leaders of that interim government in May -- in a second putsch -- and was later declared interim president himself, drawing international condemnation.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced his troop reductions in July in the aftermath of the second coup.

Following his press conference, Lavrov sharply criticized Paris and Berlin during his address to the annual General Assembly.

He accused them of wanting to impose their vision of the world on the rest of the planet without considering different opinions.

prh/pdh/bfm

UNGA: Migration will continue as long as inequality persists, Haiti PM says as Del Rio bridge crisis ends


The tens of thousands of people sheltering in the shadow of Texas's Del Rio bridge have gone, but their trials continue. And they will not be the last, as Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry warned on Saturday

.

 United Nations/AP Ariel Henry, Prime Minister of Haiti, remotely addresses the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in a pre-recorded message, Saturday Sept. 25, 2021 at UN headquarters. (UN Web TV via AP)

By Caitlin Hu, CNN 

Some have been expelled to Haiti by force, others convinced to cross the border back to Mexico. A number remain in limbo in the US -- luckier than most, because they will have the chance to make their case before an American immigration judge.

Addressing the border crisis before the UN General Assembly on Saturday, Henry pointedly reminded the world that "many countries which are prosperous today have been built through successive waves of migrants and refugees."

Global inequality is the fundamental driver of such crises, he also said. "The problem of migrants must remind us that human beings, fathers and mothers, will always flee misery and conflict and strive to offer better living conditions to their children," he said.

"Migrations will continue as long as there are pockets of wealth on the planet, while the majority of the world population lives in precarity."

For many Haitian migrants, this past week was only one more hardship in a series that had begun months and even years ago. Some of those who made their way to Del Rio had originally fled Haiti after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, and worked in South America for years, supporting families back home with their earnings.

But racism, tightening immigration laws and the economic fallout of the pandemic have forced Haitians in countries like Chile and Brazil to look for something new, say migrants and advocacy groups. Those pressures have not gone away, which raises the prospect of future crushes of migrants at the US border.

"Haitian migration has been roaming Latin America for more than a decade," said the interior ministry of Chile in a statement to CNN. "In Chile, their exodus is increasingly notorious, given the current working conditions that do not favor their insertion in the market, even with a visa and work permit."

Djimy Delice, a Haitian migrant activist who lives in Valparaiso, Chile, says the recent passage of a new immigration law has made it difficult for undocumented migrants to regularize their status, and to access education, housing and health services. "What we know is that if (migrants) have a very uncertain journey (to reach the US), nothing here is certain either," he said.

In Brazil, another common origin country for Haitian migrants, Gilbert Lafortune says he is still contemplating heading for the US.

The 49-year-old father, who lives in Sao Paulo, says soaring inflation has made everyday survival impossible for those who are also supporting families back home in Haiti.

"With the rising inflation, the cost of everything has gone up: light, gas, water, food ...The minimum wage in Brazil is 1,100 reais (a little more than $200), so you can't pay rent, food and also help your family," he said. "Therefore, a lot of people need to leave and go to the US."

Concerns over speed

"As of this morning there are no longer any migrants in the camp underneath the Del Rio bridge," US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced Friday -- a logistical feat, but one that raised concerns in NGO and advocacy circles over how humane the processing of nearly 30,000 people in so short a time could have been.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi earlier this week slammed the expulsion of some migrants under Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allows border officials to quickly expel migrants as a pandemic public health precaution. The policy was ruled illegal by a judge but remains in effect until the end of the month.

"The summary, mass expulsions of individuals currently under way under the Title 42 authority, without screening for protection needs, is inconsistent with international norms and may constitute refoulement," Grandi said, referencing a principle in international law that forbids returning migrants to countries where they would face irreparable harm.

Haiti is wracked with an epidemic of violent crime, political turmoil and devastation from a recent earthquake. Large swathes of its capital city, Port-au-Prince, are controlled by gangs, who operate sprawling kidnapping-for-profit operations.

More than 2,580 Haitians -- including 563 children -- had been sent back to Haiti as of Friday, according to the International Organization for Migration. The agency, alongside the Haitian government, is scrambling to receive all the people being dropped off by US planes.

But it is unclear whether local officials and humanitarian workers are equipped to deal with complicated individual cases, given the scale and speed of the expulsions. The IOM and the UN point to UNHCR as the agency responsible for any refugee claims among the deported, but the refugee agency on Friday told CNN its presence in Haiti is "very limited."

Meanwhile, Haitians who eventually crossed back into Mexico -- an estimated 8,000, according to Mayorkas -- also face an uncertain future. In the southern town of Tapachula, where many migrants have been sent, Haitian women describe xenophobia and discrimination, said Gretchen Kuhner, director of Mexico's Institute for Women in Migration. "People don't stop for them to cross the street, even if they're carrying a baby or even if they're pregnant," she said.

'Shocking images'

Haiti Foreign Minister Claude Joseph traveled to New York on Thursday, meeting with US State Department officials ahead of his country's appearance at the UN General Assembly.

At the top of the agenda was recent footage of American Border Patrol officers on horseback raising whips toward migrants earlier this week, Joseph said. "Shocking images. We expressed our concerns about the mistreatment of Haitians, Haitian migrants."

"They deserve better treatment and we are very appreciative to the American people who have spoken up," he also said.

Mayorkas on Friday told press that he recognized the images "painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation's ongoing battle against systemic racism" and insisted that they "do not reflect who we are." The officers involved are no longer with migrants and an investigation into the incident is ongoing, he also said.

Haitian officials were negotiating with the US about the migration crisis "on a daily basis," according to Joseph. He sees it as a diplomatic victory that some Haitians have been allowed to remain in the US and be heard by an immigration judge. Approximately 12,400 are expected to get a chance to appear in immigration court.

But some of those who are already back in Haiti are furious with their leaders, whom they say failed to stand up to Washington and should not have accepted the deportations.

"All other countries humiliate us as Haitians. We have no respect; we have no value," deportee Eddy Teverme told CNN upon arriving at Port-au-Prince airport this week.

"They told us to accept the reality and board the plane. They said life does not end when you return to your country," he said. "But the only question I need to ask my leaders, the official who signed the deportation agreement, do they have jobs for all these Haitians who have been sent back to the country?"