Monday, July 27, 2020

Opinion: After the Covid-19 masks are gone, will we breathe cleaner air?

Dr Karen Moore of the Green-Schools programme wonders if despite Covid-19 and the lockdown, can we take some long lasting benefits from it all – for the air we breathe, our health and quality of life


Dr Karen Moore
https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/air-pollution-5156739-Jul2020/

CLEAR BLUE SKIES over the world’s cities have become a visible mark of one of the changes this pandemic has brought. As lockdowns have shut down factories and kept cars off the roads, global pollution levels have fallen drastically.

Potentially positive outcomes of this crisis include opportunities to make lasting changes that will save lives and increase our resilience in the long-term. Improving air quality is one opportunity.

According to the World Health Organisation, air pollution causes approximately seven million premature deaths every year, mainly due to stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer and respiratory infections.

More than 1,000 people in Ireland die prematurely each year because of poor air quality, according to the Environment Protection Agency.

The impact of the lockdown on air pollution levels is complex, but the general global trend was less air pollution. According to this year’s Air Quality Index, Particulate Matter (PM2.5) decreased by 44% in Wuhan, 54% in Seoul and 60% in New Delhi.

Other studies also show levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2)and particulate matter pollution over China, Western Europe, and the United States have fallen dramatically during the lockdown. In Ireland, pollution from cars dropped by 50% during the lockdown.

Air pollution and Covid-19

Air pollution not only causes or contributes to premature death but exacerbates a wide range of respiratory illnesses and Covid-19 appears to be no exception. Many researchers around the world are now reporting that air pollution may have significantly worsened the Covid-19 pandemic and led to more deaths.

As well as predisposing people who live with polluted air to succumb to the virus, scientists are also suggesting that air pollution particles may act as ‘vehicles’ for viral transmission.
Opinion: After the Covid-19 masks are gone, will we breathe cleaner air?

A study of air quality in Italy’s northern provinces, that have been hardest hit by Covid-19, found a correlation between mortality rates and high levels of pollution. A US study found people who had lived in areas with long-term pollution exposure for 15-20 years had significantly higher mortality rates from Covid-19.

As much research on coronavirus to date, these studies are just emerging and many still need to go through the peer-review process, ensuring the quality of the research. Air pollution is an established contributor to underlying disease, although correlations do not yet prove there is an additional effect on Covid-19 mortality.

However, the findings of these studies when finished could have a significant impact on how governments choose to ease lockdowns in the coming months; improving air quality could play an important role in overcoming the pandemic and protecting against future outbreaks.

Scientists have said the fall in polluting emissions is just a short-term result of lockdown and they warn that pollution levels must be limited into the future as much as possible to protect human health both during and after the Covid-19 crisis. We cannot leave this crisis with the same levels of pollution as before.

We have to plan a sustainable recovery that will be true to the definition of sustainable development in ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

Undesirable pre-Covid ‘normal’

Perhaps unsurprisingly it is reported that air pollution in China has climbed back to pre-pandemic levels, led by an oil and coal-powered ‘recovery’. Data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) shows concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) across China are now at the same levels as one year earlier.

European cities have also seen a big dip in air pollution during the virus outbreak, but pollution is expected to rebound as lockdown eases. In Ireland, as we move around more with the easing of the restrictions, we cannot help but notice increases in vehicle traffic.
There is an opportunity to leave this crisis with some things being better than before. We need a sustainable recovery that will be true to the definition of sustainable development in ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

Around the world experts, bodies like the UN, environmental and equality campaigners and local people are calling on governments for action to help retain the air quality benefits of lockdown.

Air pollution comes from many sources— how we generate power, manufacture products, provide services and move things and ourselves around. But a key contributor to improved air quality in lockdown was the reduction in commuting due to remote working arrangements and travel restrictions.

Our habits need to change if we are to future-proof against further viral outbreaks and help maintain improved air quality. Every day most people need to move somewhere or something, so perhaps we can start there.



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27.05.20Fall in air pollution from traffic since Covid-19 restrictions

An important factor that is not yet known is how people’s travel habits will change post–Covid-19. Will we avoid mass transport and walk or cycle more or rely on the private car? Working from home may become more mainstream and dreaded commutes a thing of the past for some. There is a need to act quickly and provide safe alternatives to the private car to avoid gridlock and increased air pollution.

Differences being made

Many places worldwide are acting decisively to re-organise their mobility networks in response to the crisis. To accommodate more bikes and walkers, while facilitating social distancing, temporary cycle lanes and streets closed to cars have been popping up in cities like Berlin, Budapest, Mexico City, New York and Bogotá.
Milan, in Italy’s worst-hit region of Lombardy, will help people stay out of their cars, by building 35km of new cycle paths that connect the 220km existing path network to make cycling and scooter transport, both foot and electric powered, more accessible. There will be incentives for purchasing a bike and scooters and new bike parking.

In Brussels, the city centre is a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians since May and will stay for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, other city councils have reallocated road space to make social distancing easier for those walking and cycling. Among them are Berlin, Budapest, Vancouver, Calgary, Wi
nnipeg, Mexico City, Washington DC, Brookline MA, and Hackney in London.

What about Ireland?

With the strong possibility that social distancing may have to be maintained for some time, what plans are there in Ireland to emerge from lockdown with cleaner transport options in place? Covid-19 Mobility Frameworks, focused on supporting people switching to walking and cycling and facilitating social distancing are formed or in progress by some County Councils.

However, the majority are only around larger towns and cities. Also, many of the changes are outlined as ‘temporary’ but for many locals and commuters, it is hoped that once installed these measures will prove so successful that they will become permanent. Dublin and surrounds are expanding 30 km/hr zones. Paths are being widened.

Pedestrian priority at junctions and enforcement of no pavement parking is being improved. Temporary bike lanes are being installed and, importantly, protected from cars and parking. Nationwide residents are writing to their County Councils requesting traffic diversions from popular active travel routes that have become so important during this pandemic. ‘Quietways’ or low-traffic streets that accommodate walkers and cyclists are also being implemented.

Some of these changes need a lot of support to ensure their success.
It is one thing to put up slower speed signs and quite another to actually see reduced speeds which require a mix of awareness-raising, traffic-calming measures and enforcement.

What will happen as lockdowns are lifted? What is planned for major congestion points like the approach and entrances to public transport hubs and schools? In Ireland, before Covid-19, space outside most schools was often constricted and very busy, sometimes to the point of putting pupils at risk of being knocked down by a car.

We were just starting to see School Street zones successfully installed around some schools. School Streets/School Zones allow only walking or cycling at school start and finish times.

Already where car, bus and train journeys have been dwindling, cycling has been picking up the slack. As a form of solo transport, it has become appealing for many, especially in and around streets with decreased car traffic. Many places are planning for more cyclists. Dublin City Council plans to treble of the number of people cycling into the city.

But if this is to become a reality the council needs to improve cyclists’ safety around dangerous junctions, cycle lanes that come and go and bike lane car parking issues. For mass transport on buses and trains, there will need to be strong communication on the hygiene of transport and how to commute safely.

Other supports are coming into play for recovery though as well, such as to help the car industry recover and put more vehicles on roads. In China, some local governments have already announced subsidies for new car purchases and lifted limitations on new license numbers. In many countries, there is a strong possibility for an increase in cars and congestion and pollution post-Covid-19. Transport operators, public authorities, policymakers need to anticipate this and act before it becomes the ‘new norm’.

We now have an opportunity to ‘build back better’ and invest in the future, not the past. Our response to Covid-19 can be harnessed to create a fairer, healthier society. So after the masks are gone, we can all breathe cleaner air.

Dr Karen Moore is a Travel Officer with Green-Schools. The Green-Schools Travel programme is funded by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and supported by the National Transport Authority.
PLAN B 
What Happens If COVID-19 Vaccine Fails? Experts Emphasize Need For Backup Plans

Guneet Bhatia | Jul 27 2020,

The last couple of weeks have been a sort of good news for people battling COVID-19 pandemic. Many coronavirus vaccines, currently being tested in humans, showed positive outcomes in mid-stage clinical trials and some are even providing to be effective as indicated in early data from the last-stage clinical trials.

Even Americans received their fair share of good news last week as Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leading infectious diseases expert in the country, announced the promising early results from COVID-19 vaccine trial and the prospect of having a breakthrough soon.

However, some experts believe that Americans should not get used to the idea that a miracle vaccine or a drug is just around the corner to save them against the novel coronavirus. This would lead to complacency and further make it difficult to manage the pandemic that is already killing hundreds of people each day.

So far, the U.S. has failed at controlling the coronavirus outbreak. The positive news of promising testing results from COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials has increased hopes in people. But health experts have decided to remain skeptical and believe that there is a need to think about Plan B too, just in case Plan A does not work as anticipated.


“I think we absolutely have to have a backup plan in place,” said Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington. “It's something that’s not talked about enough.”

Bergstrom said that even in the best-case scenario, the scientific community and pharmaceutical companies are still six to eight months away from large-scale inoculations to be able to manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine for the general population. Therefore, this is the time for the public and policymakers to develop plans for the long-term.
“So far the story of the vaccine development seems to be that none of the things that could have gone wrong have gone wrong,” he said. “That doesn't mean we’re home free by any means.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has long claimed that American will have a cure “soon” or the novel coronavirus will disappear on its own. However, that does not seem likely and there is no timeline to “soon” as yet.

There is no clarity on an alternative plan available to consider just in case coronavirus vaccines fail for some reason or are deemed ineffective.

Ken Frazier, CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Merck recently warned that it is not practical and will indeed be harmful to be hoping for or creating hype for a medical breakthrough before 2021.

“The reality of the world is that this time next year very well may look like what we're experiencing now,” he said in an interview. "I think when we do tell people that a vaccine's coming right away, we allow politicians to tell the public not to do the things that the public needs to do, like wear the damn masks.”

Andressa Parreiras, Biomedic, and Larissa Vuitika, biologist, work in a laboratory during the extraction of the virus genetic material on March 24, 2020 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The Ministry of Health convened The Technological Vaccine Center of the Federal University of Minas Gerais laboratory to conduct research on the coronavirus (COVID-19) in order to diagnose, test and develop a vaccine. According to the Ministry of Health, as of Tuesday, March 24, Brazil has 1.891 confirmed cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and at least 34 recorded deceases. Pedro Vilela/Getty Images

White House brands teachers “essential workers” to force reopening of schools

By Evan Blake WSWS
27 July 2020

Under conditions in which the coronavirus pandemic is raging out of control, the Trump administration is escalating its homicidal campaign to reopen schools across the US, which is guaranteed to spike infection rates even further. At a press conference Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany branded teachers “essential workers” akin to meatpackers, one of the sections of the working class most devastated by the pandemic.

McEnany declared that “schools are essential places of business … our teachers are essential personnel.” She added, “Our meatpackers were meatpacking because they were essential workers. … And we believe our teachers are essential.”

The comparison between teachers and meatpacking workers is highly significant and must be taken as a sharp warning by teachers and all education workers.
Junior high teacher Angela Andrus at a rally Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Salt Lake City, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Since the start of the pandemic, meat processing plants have seen among the highest rates of infections and deaths of any industry in the US. In late April, following a series of walkouts and job actions over unsafe conditions, which forced the closure of 22 plants across the country, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act and deemed meatpacking plants “critical infrastructure,” requiring them to stay open. As a result, the number of cases and deaths have tripled, with well over 30,000 workers infected and more than 100 killed by the virus.

In drawing this comparison, the White House is putting teachers on notice that they intend to carry out the same dictatorial measures should there be organized strikes or mobilizations to prevent the reopening of schools.

While branding teachers “essential,” McEnany defended the deployment of at least 200 federal agents to Portland, Oregon, where they have brutally repressed peaceful protesters, in multiple flagrant violations of the Constitution. Last week, Trump threatened to deploy 75,000 agents to “any of the cities” that he chooses. The ultimate target of these shock troops is the working class, including educators, meatpackers, autoworkers and more, who are being forced to sacrifice their lives for corporate profit.

For the financial oligarchy, reopening the schools is a lynchpin in the broader campaign to “reopen the economy,” which in essence is the drive to extract ever-greater surplus value from the working class in order to pay for the mountains of debt accumulated through the bailout of Wall Street in the CARES Act.

With high rates of absenteeism in auto factories and other workplaces due to the lack of childcare, schools are “essential workplaces” to herd workers back into their workplaces so the ruling class can resume the extraction of profits. The lowering or cutting off of the $600 a week federal addition to state unemployment benefits is similarly aimed at forcing workers back to work, regardless of the dangers they face.

The number of new COVID-19 cases across the US has been continually on the rise since early June, after states lifted their final social distancing restrictions and reopened the majority of businesses. Record numbers of new cases have been repeatedly set in recent weeks, with Friday seeing a record 78,000 new cases. The number of daily new deaths has also steadily risen, reaching over 1,100 four times last week.

As part of the drive to restart production and reopen the schools, the Trump administration is hell-bent on suppressing public health experts and falsifying medical science. Following weeks during which Trump has publicly denigrated Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci stated last week that he and his family have received death threats and harassment during the pandemic.

At Friday’s press conference, McEnany repeatedly referred to the guidelines on reopening schools issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In response to Trump’s recent criticism that the original guidelines were “very tough and expensive,” the agency issued a statement last Thursday which represents the subordination of science to the profit interests of the ruling class.

Titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall,” the statement declares, “the available evidence provides reason to believe that in-person schooling is in the best interests of students.”

The statement falsely claims that “the rate of infection among younger school children, and from students to teachers, has been low.” In fact, one of the most comprehensive studies on the impact of the virus on youth was published the week prior on the CDC’s own website and came to the exact opposite conclusion. The study, conducted in South Korea, involved the contact tracing and testing of nearly 60,000 people who had contact with 5,706 COVID-19 patients, and the results “found the highest COVID-19 rate for household contacts of school-aged children.” The study warned that “young children may show higher attack rates when the school closure ends [in South Korea], contributing to community transmission of COVID-19.”

The CDC also downplayed the dangers posed to children despite increasing evidence to the contrary. “The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms,” the CDC declared.

Infection rates are skyrocketing among youth in the regions hardest hit by the virus. In Tennessee, there have been almost 4,000 cases for children ages 0-10 and an additional 9,600 for those ages of 11-20. In Mississippi, more than 4,900 children have tested positive for COVID-19.

In Florida, over 23,000 minors have tested positive, with an elevated positivity rate of 13.4 among children who have been tested. On July 17, nine-year-old Kimora Lynum succumbed to the virus, despite having no pre-existing health issues. She collapsed from a high fever after being released from a hospital, becoming the fifth and youngest minor to die from COVID-19 in Florida.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday why the CDC had not set a specific benchmark for the reduction of infection rates before schools could reopen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said, “We don't believe that there are uniform thresholds for school reopenings.” The former pharmaceutical executive added, “Each community is going to have to make the determination about the circumstances for reopening and what steps they take for reopening, but the presumption should be we get our kids back to school—and we figure out how to make that happen.”

Leaving decision-making in the hands of local authorities, who have also been threatened with the loss federal funds if they remain closed, is a recipe for disaster. There are over 13,000 school districts across the country, and each one is being told to prepare its own reopening plans, creating a highly chaotic and haphazard patchwork of plans. Districts adjacent to each other and facing a similar spread of the pandemic can have completely different plans for reopening, underscoring the irrational and unplanned nature of the capitalist response to the pandemic.

Opposition to the reopening of schools continues to mount among parents and educators, with an Associated Press-NORC poll released last week finding that fully 77 percent of Americans are opposed to the resumption of in-person learning. Forty-six percent believe that major adjustments are needed before schools reopen, and 31 percent insist that schools should not open at all. Eighty percent of those surveyed were extremely or somewhat concerned that reopening schools would produce a surge in cases in their community.

Car caravan protests and rallies have been held in a growing number of cities. On Friday, hundreds of educators and parents rallied in Des Moines, Iowa, in a “Drive for Lives” car caravan opposing Governor Kim Reynolds’ plan to reopen schools part-time. The Facebook group “Iowa Educators for a Safe Return to School” has quickly ballooned to nearly 20,000 members less than a month after being launched. In Salt Lake City, Utah, over 150 educators rallied at the state capitol Friday to protest Governor Gary Herbert’s directive that schools reopen next month.

Similar caravans and rallies have taken place in numerous cities in recent weeks, often organized through local and state Facebook groups set up by educators and parents independently of the teacher unions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) have made it clear they will help the authorities implement their reopening plans. At the same time, they are trying to channel opposition to Trump behind the campaign to elect Joe Biden, who was part of the massive assault on teachers and public education that occurred during the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration.

Both corporate-controlled parties back the back-to-school policy, along with the savage austerity measures that will be imposed on one school district after another. This only exposes the hypocritical claims by the Democrats and Republicans who claim their demand for the reopening of schools is driven by concern over the students’ needs.

The Socialist Equality Party calls upon educators, parents and students to develop a network of independent, rank-and-file safety committees and to fight to unify across districts and states to prepare for a nationwide strike against the reopening of schools. The murderous policy of the ruling elite must be countered with a broad-based mobilization of educators and all workers and the development of a political fight by the working class for socialism and a vast redistribution of wealth to meet social needs, including the right to fully funded and high-quality public education for all. 

Hurricane Hanna hits regions of Texas and Mexico devastated by COVID-19

By Trévon Austin WSWS
27 July 2020
Hurricane Hanna, the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, made landfall on Padre Island late Saturday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. Weakening rapidly after it hit land, now Tropic Storm Hannah continues to batter southern Texas and northeast Mexico with high winds and heavy rain, regions already devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to Hanna’s landfall, the National Hurricane Center issued a storm surge warning for a section of the Texas coast ranging from Port Mansfield to Mesquite Bay. Widespread flooding was reported along the coast with an average of 4-6 inches of rainfall, but some areas have seen as much as a foot of rain. The energy provider in the region reported more than 90,000 homes were without power in the region at the time of this writing.
Areas across southern Texas expected an additional 5-10 inches of rainfall throughout Sunday morning, although some localized areas saw up to 18 inches of water. Meteorologists warned that the Rio Grande Valley was especially susceptible to severe flooding. Texas Governor Greg Abbot said flooding in the region was expected to be “life-threatening.” Abbot issued a disaster declaration for 32 counties directly in the path of Hanna and has requested federal aid.
Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, Mexico’s most northeastern states took a significant hit from the storm as well. Francisco Cabeza de Vaca, Tamaulipas’ governor, tweeted that the state had prepared shelters and implemented disinfecting measures to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Additionally, Mexico’s civil protection department sent rescue boats and other equipment to Nuevo Leon in anticipation of heavy rains.
In Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, immigrant advocates worried about the hurricane’s impact on a makeshift migrant camp near the Rio Grande where approximately 1,300 asylum seekers lived. The migrants, including newborns and elderly, have been forced to wait in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy.
Before Hurricane Hanna landed, Abbot reminded Texans of the dismal state of the COVID-19 outbreak. The situation could worsen in the face of a natural disaster displacing people from their homes.
“Any hurricane is an enormous challenge,” Abbot said in a Saturday news conference. “This challenge is complicated and made even more severe seeing that it is sweeping through an area that is the most challenged area in the state for COVID-19.”
Abbot mustered seventeen COVID-19 mobile response teams and 1,000 medical personnel from the Texas National Guard to send to the area. Emergency resources were dispatched to the Rio Grande Valley and Coastal Bend region. These two areas are among those most devastated by COVID-19.
South Texas has been of particular concern to medical officials. During the first two weeks of July, the area recorded more than 2,000 new coronavirus infections each week. In Nueces County, home to Corpus Christi, at least 2 percent of the population was infected prior to the storm. As people cramp into shelters to stay safe from flooding, experts expect a rise in cases in the region.
The virus did not always have such a staggering presence in the region. Before April 30, when Texas’ stay-at-home order was allowed to expire, Nueces County only reported fewer than 100 cases and three deaths. However, Memorial Day celebrations, encouraged by Donald Trump, saw droves of people gather in the popular beachfront communities on Texas’ coast. Now, the region is experiencing a spike in cases.
Just last Friday, an infant less than six months old tested positive for COVID-19 and died soon after. Earlier this week, an intubated COVID-19 patient had to be flown some 700 miles, from Harlingen to Amarillo, due to a severe lack of ICU beds in the area.
The South Texas Health System, already inundated with a surge of sick and dying patients, tried to send the patient to closer facilities but the Northwest Texas Healthcare System was the closest hospital system that had the capacity to take the patient. The fact that no other Texas facility within 700 miles could take the patient exposes the severity of the crisis throughout the state.
Sections of South Texas, particularly the Coastal Bend and the Rio Grande Valley, have seen infections spread so quickly that local hospitals have been pushed to the limit. Four counties near the southernmost tip of the state have a total of just 21 ICU beds available for a population of approximately 1.4 million people. Ambulance drivers have reported wait times of up to 10 hours to deliver patients to overwhelmed emergency rooms. Some hospitals have begun turning away patients with a predicted low survival rate.
Areas that were relatively unaffected in the first few months of the pandemic are slowly moving towards crisis. Experts say they are seeing increases in community spread in urban and rural areas, leading to dozens of hot spots that will be difficult to contain.
The northeastern region of Mexico houses one of the main concentrations of maquiladoras— sweatshops run by transnational corporations—in the country. The region is a hotspot for infections and deaths in Mexico as thousands of workers are forced to work in unsafe conditions for the sake of profit.
The full impact of the storm on the region’s COVID-19 outbreaks has yet to be seen. However, the natural disaster reveals the impotency of the ruling in elites in the United States and Mexico which have been proven entirely unwilling to take the necessary measures to suppress the spread of the coronavirus. In combination with the devastation wrought by a natural disaster, the pandemic will continue to ravage the population under the malign neglect of the bourgeoisie.

Amadeo Bordiga 1951

Murder of the Dead


First PublishedBattaglia Comunista No. 24 1951;
Source: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/bordiga0.html;
HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden 2003.

In Italy, we have long experience of “catastrophes that strike the country” and we also have a certain specialisation in “staging” them. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, rainstorms, epidemics... The effects are indisputably felt especially by poorer people and those living at high densities, and if cataclysms that are frequently much more terrifying strike all corners of the world, not always do such unfavourable social conditions coincide with geographical and geological ones. But every people and every country holds its own delights: typhoons, drought, tidal waves, famine, heatwaves and frosts, all unknown to us in the “garden of Europe”; and when one opens the newspaper, one inevitably finds more than one item, from the Philippines to the Andes, from the Polar Ice Cap to the African Desert.
Our capitalism, as has been said a hundred times over, is quantitatively small fry, but today it is in the vanguard, in a “qualitative” sense, of bourgeois civilisation, of which it offers the greatest precursors from amidst Renaissance splendour[1], in the masterful development of an economy based on disasters.
We wouldn’t dream of shedding a single tear if a monsoon washed away entire cities on the coast of the Indian Ocean, or if they were submerged by the tidal waves caused by submarine earthquakes, but we have found out how to collect alms from all over the world for the Polesine.
Our monarchy was great in knowing to rush not to the dance (Pordenone), but to where people are dying of cholera (Naples), or to the ruins of Reggio and Messina, raised to the ground by the earthquakes of 1908. Now our puffed-up President[2] has been taken off to Sardinia and, if the stalinists haven’t been fibbing, they have shown him teams of “Potemkin workers” in action, that then run to the other side of the stage like the warriors in Aida.[3] It was too late to pull the homeless out of the flooding Po, but good play was made of MPs and ministers paddling about in their wellies after setting up cameras and microphones for a world-wide broadcast of their lamentations.
Here we have the bright idea: the state should intervene! And we have been applying it for a good ninety years. The professedly homeless Italian has set state aid in the place of the grace of God and the hand of providence. He is convinced that the national budget has much wider bounds than the compassion of our Lord. A good Italian happily forks out ten thousand lire squeezed out of him so that months and months later he can “squander one thousand lire of the government’s money”. And during one of these periodic contingencies, now fashionably called emergencies but which fall in all seasons, when the central government has scarcely initiated the unfailing provisions and fundings, a band of no less specialised “homeless” will roll up its sleeves and plunge into the business of procuring concessions and the orgy of contracts.
The Minister of Finance of the day, Vanoni, suspends by his authority all other state functions and declares that he will not provide a single brass farthing from the exchequer for all the other “Special Acts” so that all means can be addressed to dealing with the present disaster.
There could be no better proof than this that the state serves for nothing and that if the hand of God really did exist, he would make a splendid present to the homeless of all kinds by causing earthquakes and bankrupting this charlatan and dilettante state.
The foolishness of the small and middle bourgeoisie shines forth at its brightest when it seeks a remedy for the terror that freezes it in the warm hope of a subsidy and an indemnity liberally bestowed upon it by the government. But the reaction of the overseers of the working masses who, they scream, lost everything in the disaster, but unfortunately not their chains, appears no less senseless.
These leaders, who pretend to be “marxists”, have for these supreme situations, which interrupt the well-being of the proletariat derived from normal capitalist exploitation, an economic formula even more foolish than that of state intervention. The formula is well-known: “make the rich pay!”
Vanoni is thus reviled because he was unable to identify and tax high incomes.[4]
But a mere crumb of marxism suffices to establish that high incomes thrive where high levels of destruction occur, big business deals being based on them. “The bourgeoisie must pay for the war!” stated those false shepherds in 1919 instead of inviting the proletariat to overthrow it. The Italian bourgeoisie is still here, and enthusiastically invests its income in paying for wars and other disasters for which it is then repaid four fold.

Yesterday

When the catastrophe destroys houses, fields and factories, throwing the active population out of work, it undoubtedly destroys wealth. But this cannot be remedied by a transfusion of wealth from elsewhere, as with the miserable operation of rummaging around for old jumble, where the advertising, collection and transport cost far more than the value of the worn out clothes.
The wealth that disappeared was that of past, ages-old labour. To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of present- day, living labour is required. So, if we use the concrete social, not abstract, definition of wealth, we can see it as the right of certain individuals, who form the ruling class, to draw on living contemporary labour. New incomes and new privileged wealth are formed in the mobilisation of new labour, and the capitalist economy offers no means of “shifting” wealth accumulated elsewhere to plug the gap in Sardinian or Venetian wealth, just as one could not take from the banks of the Tiber to rebuild the ones swallowed up by the Po.
This is why it is a stupid idea to tax the ownership of the fields, houses and factories left intact to rebuild those affected.
The centre of capitalism is not the ownership of such investments, but a type of economy which allows the drawing from and profiting from what man’s labour creates in endless cycles, subordinating the employment of this labour to that withdrawal.
Thus the idea of resolving the war-time housing crisis with an income freeze on landlords of undamaged houses led to the provision of homes in a worse condition than that caused by the bombing. But the demagogues shout easy arguments so as not to confuse the working masses.
The basis of marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living labour. We do not define capitalism as the ownership of heaps of past, crystallised labour, but as the right to extract from living and active labour. That is why the present economy cannot lead to a good solution, realising with the minimum expenditure of present labour the rational conservation of what past labour has transmitted to us, nor to better bases for the performance of future labour. What is of interest to the bourgeois economy is the frenzy of the contemporary work rhythm, and it favours the destruction of still useful masses of past labour, not giving a tupenny-ha’penny damn for its descendants.
Marx explains that the ancient economies, which were based more on use than exchange value, did not need to extort surplus labour as much as the present one, recalling the only exception: that of the extraction of gold and silver (it is not without reason that capitalism arose from money) where the worker was forced to work himself to death, as in Diodorus Siculus.
The appetite for surplus labour (Capital Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 2: “The Greed for Surplus Labour”) not only leads to extortion from the living of so much labour power as to shorten their lives, but does good business in the destruction of dead labour so as to replace still useful products with other living labour. Like Maramaldo,[5] capitalism, oppressor of the living, is the murderer also of the dead: “But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc.” [6]
The original title of the paragraph quoted is “Der Heisshunger nach Mehrarbeit”, literally; “The voracious appetite for surplus labour”.
Small scale capitalism’s hunger for surplus labour, as set out in our doctrine, already contains the entire analysis of the modern phase of capitalism that has grown enormously: the ravenous hunger for catastrophe and ruin.
Far from being our discovery (to hell with the “discoverers”,[7] especially when they sing even the scale out of tune, then believe themselves to be creators), the distinction between dead and living labour lies in the fundamental distinction between constant and variable capital. All objects produced by labour which are not for immediate consumption, but are employed in a further work process (now one calls them producer goods), form constant capital. “Therefore, whenever products enter as means of production into new labour processes, they lose their character of being products and function only as objective factors contributing to living labour.” [8]
This is true for main and subsidiary raw materials, machines and all other types of plant which progressively wear out. The loss due to wear which has to be compensated for requires the capitalist to invest another quota, always of constant capital, which current economics calls amortisation. Depreciate rapidly, that is the supreme ideal of this grave-digging economy.
We recalled a propos “the body possessed by the devil” [9] how, in Marx, capital has the demoniacal function of incorporating living labour into dead labour which has become a thing. What joy that the Po’s embankments are not immortal, and today one can happily “incorporate living labour into them”! Projects and specifications are ready in a few days. Good boys, you are possessed by the devil!
“Sir, the drawing office of our firm has done its duty in predisposing technical and economic studies: here they are all nice and ready.” And price analysis values the stone of Monselice higher than Carrara marble.[10]
“The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital.” [11]
This value, which is simply “preserved”, thanks always to the operation of living labour, is called the constant part of capital or constant capital by Marx. But: “... that part of capital, represented by [invested in] labour-power [wages], does, [instead] in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. (...) and also produces an excess, a surplus-value...” [12]
We therefore call it the variable part, or simply variable capital.
The key lies here. Bourgeois economics calculates profit in relation to the constant capital which lies still and doesn’t move: in fact it would go to the devil if the labour of the worker did not “preserve” it. Marxist economics, on the contrary, places profit in relation only to variable capital and demonstrates how the active labour of the proletarian a) preserves constant capital (dead labour), and b) increases variable capital (living labour). This increase, surplus value, is gained by the entrepreneur. This process, as Marx explains, of establishing the rate without taking into account constant capital is like making it equal to zero: an operation current in mathematical analysis where variable quantities are concerned.
Once constant capital is set at zero, gigantic development of profit occurs. This is the same as saying that the enterprise’s profit remains if the disadvantage of maintaining constant capital is removed from the capitalist’s shoulders.
This hypothesis is none other than state capitalism’s present reality.
Transferring capital to the state means that constant capital equals zero. Nothing of the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers is changed, since this depends solely on the magnitude of variable capital and surplus-value.
Are analyses of state capitalism something new? Without any haughtiness we use what we have known since 1867 at the latest. It is very short: Cc = 0.
Let us not leave Marx without this ardent passage after the cold formula: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” [13]
Modern capital, which needs consumers as it needs to produce ever more, has a great interest in letting the products of dead labour fall into disuse as soon as possible so as to impose their renewal with living labour, the only type from which it “sucks” profit. That is why it is in seventh heaven when war breaks out and that is why it is so well trained for the practice of disasters. Car production in America is massive, but all, or nearly all, families have a car, so demand might be exhausted. So then it is better that the cars last only a short time. So that this is indeed the case, firstly they are badly built with a series of botched parts. If the users break their necks more often, no matter: a client is lost, but there is another car to substitute. Then they call on fashion with a large cretinising subsidy of advertising propaganda, through which everyone wants the latest model, like the women who are ashamed to put on a dress, even if perfectly good, “from last year”. The fools are taken in and it does not matter that a Ford built in 1920 lasts longer than a brand new 1951 model. And finally the dumped cars are not used even for scrap, and are thrown into car cemeteries. Who dares to take one saying: you have thrown it away as if it were worthless, what harm is there in me fixing and reusing it? He would get a kick up the backside and a gaol sentence.
To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses.
So while the maintenance of the Po embankments for ten kilometres requires human labour costing, let us say, one million a year, it suits capitalism better to rebuild them all spending one billion. Otherwise it would have to wait one thousand years. This perhaps means that the nasty fascist government sabotaged the Po embankments? Certainly not. It means that no one has pressed for an annual budget of a miserable million. This is not spent as it is swallowed up in the financing of other “large scale works” of “new construction” which have budget estimates of billions. Now the devil has swept away the embankments, one finds someone with the best motives of sacrosanct national interest who activates the project office and has them rebuilt.
Who is to blame for preferring the large scale projects? The fascists and the official communists. Both of them prattle that they want a productivist, full employment policy. Productivism, Mussolini’s favourite creature, consists in establishing “present day” cycles of living labour out of which big business and big speculation make billions. Let us modernise the aged machines of the great industrialists and also let us modernise the river banks after letting them collapse, all at the people’s expense. The history of the recent years of administrative management of state works and of the protection of industry is full of these masterpieces, ranging from the provision of raw materials sold below cost, to works “undertaken by a state monopoly” in the “struggle against unemployment” on the basis of “constant capital equals zero”. In a few words, let us spend it all in wages, and since the enterprise has only shovels for equipment, the Lord is convinced that it is useful to shift earth first from here to there then immediately back to here again.
If the Lord hesitates, the enterprise has the trade union organiser to hand: a demonstration of labourers shouldering shovels under the ministry’s windows and all’s well. The “discoverer” arrives and supersedes Marx: shovels, the only constant capital, have given birth to surplus value.

Today

Undoubtedly, the size of the disaster along the Po has been massive, and the estimated cost of the damage is still rising. Let us admit that the cultivated area of Italy lost one hundred thousand hectares or one thousand square kilometres, about one three hundredth or three per thousand of the total. One hundred thousand inhabitants have had to leave the area, which is not the most densely settled in Italy, or, in round figures, one five hundredth or two per thousand.
If the bourgeois economy were not mad, one could do a simple little sum. The national stock has suffered a serious blow. However, the zone was only partially destroyed. When the floodwaters recede, the agricultural soil will largely be left behind and the decomposition of vegetation along with the deposition of alluvium will partially compensate for the lost fertility. If the damage is one third of total capital, it costs one thousandth of the national capital. But this has an average income of five per cent or fifty per thousand. If for a year every Italian saved scarcely one fiftieth of his consumption, the damage would be made good.
But bourgeois society is anything but a co-operative, even if the great freebooters of native capital escape Vanoni by demonstrating that “part-ownership” of their enterprises has been distributed among the employees.
All the productivistic operations of Italian and international economy are more or less as destructive as the Paduan disaster: the water entered through one hole and left through another.
Such a problem is insuperable on capitalist grounds. If it were a question of making the arms to provide Eisenhower with his hundred divisions within a year, the solution would be found[14]. These are all short-cycle operations and capitalism is as pleased as Punch if the order for the 10,000 guns is with a delivery date in 100 and not 1,000 days. The steel pool does not exist without reasons.
But a pool of hydrological and seismological organisations cannot be formed, at least not until the great science of the bourgeois period is really able to provoke series of floods and earthquakes, like aerial bombardments.
Here it is a matter of a slow, non accelerable centuries long transmission from generation to generation of the results of “dead” labour, but under the guardianship of the living, of their lives and of their lesser sacrifice.
Let us admit, for example, that the water in the Polesine will recede in a few months and that the breach at Occhiobello is closed before the spring, only one annual harvest cycle would now be lost: no productive “investment” can replace it, but the loss is reduced.
If, instead, one believes that all the Po embankments and those of the other rivers will frequently come apart, due as much to the consequences of overlooked maintenance during thirty years of crisis as to the disastrous deforestation of the mountains, then the remedy will be even slower in coming. No capital will be invested for the good of our great-grandchildren.
Our father wrote in vain that only a few examples of virgin forest remain, growing without the intervention of human labour. The forestry system thus becomes almost man’s work despite the minimum of capital in the operation. Nevertheless, high growing trees, the most important in the public economy, always require a very long period before yielding a useful product. However, forestry science has shown that the best year to fell timber is not that at the end of the maximum life span, but that in which current growth equals average growth, one must always calculate 80, 100 and even 150 years for an oak wood. Di Vittorio and Pastore[15] would fling the book, if they had ever opened it, out of the window.
As in the operetta: steal, steal capital (love) cannot wait...
There is still worse to relate. Relatively little is said of the disaster in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. Here the geographical facts differ drastically.
The very slack gradient of the Po valley caused a build-up of water which then swamped over the clay and impermeable soils below. The same reasons in the South and the Islands, of high rainfall and deforestation of the mountains, along with the steep fall down to the sea caused the destruction. The mountain streams washed sand and gravel from the bedrock and destroyed fields and houses, all in a few hours, without, however, causing many victims.
Not only is the sacking of the magnificent forests of Aspromonte and the Sila by the allied liberators irreparable, but here also the renewal of the land swamped by the flood waters is practically impossible, not merely uneconomic for the “investors” and for the “helpers” (more self-interested than the former, if that is possible).
Not only the narrow horizons of cultivable soil, but also the thin non-rocky strata that gave it weak support have been washed away, soil which was carried up many times over decades by the grindingly poor farmers. Every plantation, every tree, the basis of a rather profitable agriculture, and industry in some villages, came down with the soil and the orange and lemon trees floated out to sea.
Replanting a destroyed vineyard takes about two years, but citrus plantations only provide a full harvest after seven to ten years and a great amount of capital is needed to establish and run them. Naturally, the good books do not give the cost of the unthinkable operation of carrying up again, for hundreds of meters, the soil brought down and, in any case, the water would carry it away again before the plant roots could fix it to the subsoil.
Not even the houses can be rebuilt where they were before for technical, not economic reasons. Five or six unfortunate villages on the Ionian coast in the Province of Reggio Calabria will not be rebuilt on their own hill sites, but down by the sea.
In the Middle Ages, after devastation had caused the disappearance of every last trace of the magnificent coastal cities of Magna Graecia, the apex of agriculture and art in the ancient world, the poor agricultural population saved itself from Saracen pirate raids by living in villages built on the mountain tops, which were less accessible and thus more defensible.
Roads and railways were built along the coast with the arrival of the “Piedmontese” government and, where malaria did not prohibit it, where the mountains ran down close to the sea, every village had its “on-sea” near the station. It became so convenient to carry timber away.
Tomorrow only the “on-seas” will remain and there they are laboriously rebuilding some houses. So what then if the peasant reclimbs the slope where nothing can ever take root and the very bare and friable rock strata itself does not permit the rebuilding of houses? And the workers by the sea, what will they do? Today they can no longer emigrate like the Calabrians of the unhealthy lowlands and the Lucanians of the “damned claylands” made sterile by the greedy felling of the woodlands which once covered the mountains and the trees that spread over the upland grazing.
Certainly, in such conditions, no capital and no government will intervene, a total disgrace of the obscene hypocrisy with which national and international solidarity was praised.
It is not a moral or sentimental fact that underlies this, but the contradiction between the convulsive dynamic of contemporary super- capitalism and all the sound requirements for the organisation of the life of human groups on the Earth, allowing them to transmit good living conditions through time.
Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize winner, who quietly pontificates in the world press, accuses man of overly sacking natural resources, so much so that their exhaustion can already be calculated. Recognising the fact that the great powers conduct absurd and mad policies, he denounces the aberrations of the individualist economy and tells the Irish joke: why should I care about my descendants, what have they ever done for me?
Russell counts among the aberrations, along with that of mystical fatalism, that of communism which states: if we have done with capitalism, the problem is solved. After such a display of physical, biological and social science, he is unable to see that it is an equally physical fact that the huge level of loss of both natural and social resources is essentially linked to a given type of production, and thinks that all would be resolved by a moral sermon, or a Fabian appeal to the human wisdom of all classes.
The corollary is pitiful: science becomes impotent when it has to solve problems of the spirit?
Those who really achieve human progress, taking decisive steps forward in the organisation of human life, are not really the conquerors and dominators who still dare to ostentate greed for power, but the swarms of insipid benefactors and proponents of the ERP[16] and brotherhood among peoples, like so many pacifist dovecots.
Passing from cosmology to economics, Russell criticises the liberal illusions in the panacea of free competition and has to admit: “Marx predicted that free competition among capitalists would lead to monopoly, and was proved correct when Rockefeller established a virtually monopolistic system for oil.”
Starting from the solar explosion, which one day will instantaneously transform us into gas (which could prove the Irishman right), Russell finishes with maudlin sentiments: “Nations desiring prosperity must seek collaboration more than competition.”
Is it not the case, Mr. Nobel Prize winner, who has written treatises on logic and scientific method, that Marx calculated the development of monopoly fifty years earlier?
If that were good dialectics, the opposite of competition is monopoly, not collaboration.
Take good note that Marx also predicted the destruction of the capitalist economy, class monopoly, not with collaboration, with which you are devoted to flattering all the Trumans and Stalins of good will, but with class war.
Just as Rockefeller came, “big moustache[17] must come!” But not from the Kremlin. That one, despite Marx, is about to shave like an American.

Footnotes

[1] “The first capitalist nation was Italy.” (Engels, “Preface to the Italian Edition of The Communist Manifesto”)
[2] Luigi Einaudi, President of Italy 1948-55.
[3] Potemkin had constructed prefabricated villages to show Catherine II on her tour of the Russian countryside. They gave the impression of rural prosperity, but after each visit they were hastily dismantled then re-assembled elsewhere on the tour.
[4] In early 1951 Vanoni introduced personal income tax to Italy. This tax entered the Guiness Book of Records as the ‘least paid tax in the world’. Still today tax evasion is widespread. (Cf. 11th. ed., 1963, p. 10)
[5] Maramaldo killed the dying General Ferrucci in 1530, the last act of Florentine independence. The British equivalent is Ivo of Ponthieu who hacked at the dying King Harold at Hastings. But he was “branded with ignominy by William and expelled from the army” (Gesta Regun Anglorum). The chivalry of nascent feudalism contrasts favourably with the squalid unscrupulousness of early capitalism.
[6] Capital Vol. I, Chap. 10
[7] Publisher’s Note — The word used in the Italian original is “troviero”. This literally means “finder” and, in the context, actually means something like “someone who thinks they’ve found something important, but they haven’t”, e.g. some bourgeois apologist who thinks they have refuted Marx. There is no obvious English equivalent so “discoverer”, with the inverted commas, will have to do.
[8] Capital Vol. I, Chap. 10
[9] In this collection.
[10] Monselice: the nearest stone quarries to the Po, Carrara: the main centre of marble production in Italy.
[11] Capital Vol. I, Chap. 8
[12] ibid.
[13] Capital Vol. I, Chap. 10, Section 1
[14] The article refers to the start of the Korean War.
[15] The “communist” and “catholic” union leaders of the period respectively.
[16] The European Recovery Programme, the “Marshall Plan”.
[17] i.e. Stalin, “Uncle Joe”.


Sunday, July 26, 2020

Almost 100 workers recover from coronavirus at locked-down farm

By Carmelo Garcia Local Democracy Reporter


OUTBREAK AT FARM

Almost 100 farm workers at AS Green and Co have now recovered from coronavirus. Picture: Rob Davies

Almost 100 people who were infected with coronavirus at the locked-down Herefordshire farm have now fought off the disease.

Rook Row Farm in Mathon was placed into lockdown two weeks ago after more than 70 cases were detected there.

Health officials conducted mass testing on more than 200 people who work for vegetable producer AS Green & Co after an initial single positive case was confirmed at the farm.

The total number of positive cases at the farm has risen to 134 but health officers say there only 12 of these cases are active.

Herefordshire's public health director Karen Wright said things were much better two weeks on from the outbreak.

“There are now 96 people who have had Covid-19 and are now well and are out of the period they need to isolate – so, people can now actually get back to work which is great really.

“Now there are 12 people who are positive on site.

“The guidance for anyone who is positive is that they have to self-isolate for seven days.

“And then in addition to that they have got to have 48 hours in which they haven’t had any symptoms of a high temperature or feeling unwell.

“People who have Covid-19 could have a cough for weeks, a loss taste or of smell which lasts for a long time.

“But as long as you’ve not had a temperature for 48 and are not feeling generally unwell that mean you are no longer infections and can get back to normal.

Ms Wright said people who have had coronavirus and recovered could still test positive weeks after fighting off the disease.

“That’s because your body can still have the virus within it but it’s no longer infectious.”

During the first days of the outbreak, three workers fled the lockdown at the farm - one of them was known to be infected.


READ MORE: All the latest on AS Green and Co's coronavirus outbreak

Workers there had visited four shops in the week, raising the possibility that they have spread the virus further.

But health officials say there will not be a review into the response of all the parties involved.

“Yes, there was a very small number of people who left the farm but that’s not surprising given the situation,” Ms Wright said.

She said most people on the site had been cooperative and they had worked well with the farm owners.

“My reinforcing message is the need to regularly wash your hands, dry them, social distancing and to get tested at any sign of symptoms.

“There can be a temptation for some businesses to think I’m not going to get my staff tested – but please do.

“To be fair, that’s what they did do at Rook Row Farm and we got that mass testing done really quickly.”
Scientists flock to mysterious 'blue hole' off Florida's Gulf Coast
The phenomenon is located about 425 feet below the water's surface.


By Karma Allen 22 July 2020,


Scientists are flocking to Florida’s Gulf Coast for a glimpse of a mysterious 425-feet-deep "blue hole" on the ocean floor.

The glowing mystery hole, about 155 feet below the water’s surface, is similar to the sinkholes seen on solid land, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The site, dubbed the "Green Banana,” has been a hot topic for scientists and deep-sea explorers who've been hoping for a glimpse of the phenomenon from afar.

Surprisingly, the first reports of blue holes came from fishermen and recreational divers, not scientists or researchers. In general, the holes appear to host diverse biological communities full of marine life, including corals, sponges, mollusks, sea turtles and sharks.

NOAA scientists already have collected 17 water samples from the area surrounding the hole along with four sediment samples.



Scientists are flocking toward the coast of Florida to explore a mysterious "blue hole" on the ocean floor.Scientists are flocking toward the coast of Florida to explore a mysterious "blue hole" on the ocean floor.Mote Marine Laboratory via NOAA

Remarkably, they also discovered two dead but intact smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of the hole, according to NOAA. Remains of one of the animals were recovered for examination.
MORE: Polar bears may be extinct by 2100 if Arctic ice melts at projected rate, according to new study

NOAA scientists plan to embark on a new mission to a second, deeper area of the hole in August. That mission will consist of a team of scientists from Mote Marine Laboratory, Florida Atlantic University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. Geological Society, according to NOAA.

Researchers are interested in studying the seawater chemistry in the holes for its unique qualities.



Divers found two deceased smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of Amberjack Hole. The deceased sawfish were intact enough to be collected for research, and Mote scientists... moreDivers found two deceased smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of Amberjack Hole. The deceased sawfish were intact enough to be collected for research, and Mote scientists quickly reported the discovery to NOAA and the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and obtained the required permit for collection of one of the sawfish, a male measuring an impressive 12 feet long.Mote Marine Laboratory via NOAA

"Little is known about blue holes due to their lack of accessibility and unknown distribution and abundance," NOAA said in a statement. "The opening of a blue hole can be several hundred feet underwater, and for many holes, the opening is too small for an automated submersible."

Researchers don’t know much about blue holes, but scientists are hoping to learn if the holes are connected to Florida’s groundwater or if there is groundwater intrusion into the Gulf of Mexico.

They're also looking to see if a particular blue hole is secreting nutrients or harbors microenvironments or new species of microbes.
Humans may have arrived in Americas much earlier than thought, research shows

Artifacts discovered in a cave in Mexico are about 30,000 years old.


By Charles Q. Choi | INSIDE SCIENCE
26 July 2020
This is an Inside Science story.

The Americas may have been home to humans for more than 12,000 years longer than previously thought, new research finds.

The arrival of humans to the Americas from Asia marked a major step in humanity's journey across the globe, but the exact timing of this entry remains hotly debated. Based on stone tools dating back about 13,000 years, archaeologists long thought the first Americans were part of a prehistoric culture known as the Clovis. However, scientists have recently uncovered many sites that suggested humans were in the New World before Clovis, up to roughly 18,000 years ago. Now new studies extend that time to more than 30,000 years ago.

In the new work, researchers focused on Mexico, which is typically on the periphery of the hunt for the first Americans, given its distance from the Bering Strait and Beringia, the landmass that had connected Asia and North America. However, recent findings have unearthed hints of an ancient human presence in Mexico.



In this 2019 photo provided by Devlin A. Gandy, assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen takes samples of cave sediments to look for DNA in Zacatecas,... moreIn this 2019 photo provided by Devlin A. Gandy, assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen takes samples of cave sediments to look for DNA in Zacatecas, central Mexico. Artifacts from the site suggest people were living in North America much earlier than most scientists think.Devlin A. Gandy/AP

The scientists investigated Chiquihuite Cave in the Astillero Mountains of central Mexico, the most promising of dozens of sites they explored in the region. They spent a number of winters excavating a 3-meter-deep pit 50 meters from the cave's mouth. They lived inside the cave for seven to nine weeks in a row during the winters, cooking in the area and sleeping meters away from the dig while wary of drug cartels, said archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico.

Ardelean and his colleagues unearthed about 1,900 stone artifacts. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating of the objects suggest humans might have occupied the area 31,000 to 33,000 years ago. Given how far away Chiquihuite is from the coasts, much less Asia, the researchers suggest humans may have first arrived in the New World during a period 29,000 to 57,000 years ago. They detailed their findings in two studies in the July 23 issue of the journal Nature.

These newfound artifacts show a tool manufacturing style, or “lithic industry,” never previously known in the New World. "Actually, all pre-Clovis sites in the Americas have lithic industries that don't match each other," Ardelean said. "This seems to be the norm."

The cave is located roughly 2,740 meters above sea level (nearly 9,000 feet), almost on the top of the highest mountain in the region. Archaeologists looking for ancient sites in the New World typically focus on lake shores, rolling hills and other areas that we might find comfortable, Ardelean said. "I wanted to search for sites in all sorts of locations, even where we wouldn't go to live as modern people. The ice age was a different world, with different minds and psychologies, more courageous than ours. They were adapted to mountains, and for them, it must have been just normal." Although the area is now part of the southernmost section of the giant Chihuahuan desert, it was more like the Pacific Northwest during the last ice age, Ardelean said.



A prehistoric stone tool found at a cave in Zacatecas in central Mexico is seen in this image released on July 22, 2020.A prehistoric stone tool found at a cave in Zacatecas in central Mexico is seen in this image released on July 22, 2020.Ciprian Ardelean/via Reuters

"We anticipate that the results will spur new interest in surveying regions like this for new sites," said archaeological scientist Thomas Higham at the University of Oxford in England, a co-author on both studies. The fact that a high-altitude site such as Chiquihuite "contains earlier human presence will invite archaeologists to widen the places they seek to look for early archaeological sediments."

When the scientists examined the age of Chiquihuite and 41 other archaeological sites in North America and Beringia, their computer model suggested humans were likely present in the Americas before, during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum -- the period around 19,000 to 26,500 years ago when the ice age was at its peak and glaciers covered roughly one-third of Earth's land. During such early times, a land passage to the New World would have been blocked by either treacherous open water or impenetrable ice sheets, suggesting "the path humans took to the Americas was likely a coastal route," Becerra-Valdivia said.

"It changes our comprehension of the settlement of the Americas considerably," said bioanthropologist Mark Hubbe at the Ohio State University in Columbus, who was not involved in this work. "There have been a few sites in South America that have claimed earlier human occupations, but most of them have been largely dismissed because of a combination of unreliable evidence and the fact that they were such chronological outliers that it is more parsimonious to assume the dates were wrong. It is nice to see that we are broadening our perspective and allowing for the possibility that the Americas may have been occupied significantly longer than we ever thought possible."

Archaeologist John Hoffecker at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who did not participate in this study, noted that "for more than a decade and half, evidence of people in Beringia before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum has been accumulating," lending credence to a possible ancient human presence in Mexico. Still, "it continues to strike me as odd that, if people were present in the Western Hemisphere outside eastern Beringia at this earlier time, the evidence for their presence is so sparse, because at this time in northern Eurasia, people are all over the place, occupying large sites with abundant artifacts, many features, and heaps of food debris."

However, sparse evidence of humans in the New World during the last ice age "is not surprising; the harshness of the Last Glacial Maximum would have kept populations low, leaving little trace behind for archaeologists to discover in the future," Becerra-Valdivia said. "Once a warming period began, humans were then able to thrive and expand across the region."

Ardelean cautioned that scientists still need to discover more similarly early sites to confirm a human presence in the New World during or before the Last Glacial Maximum. "The evidence is still very scarce and blurry," Ardelean said. "Chiquihuite is simply a very dim light in a vast darkness ignored so far." 

Future research can investigate how related or not these ancient Americans were to later groups. "Did they contribute to form Native Americans, or were they an unsuccessful attempt to occupy the continent that was later replaced by the ancestors of Native Americans?" Hubbe said.

"We need to start exploring underwater sites, as has recently been done in Australia," added geographer Umberto Lombardo, who did not take part in this research. A research program taking hundreds of core samples along the coasts of North and Central America would cost a lot, "but it could be done by a large consortium of universities."

Inside Science is an editorially independent nonprofit print, electronic and video journalism news service owned and operated by the American Institute of Physics.
Remains of Aztec Palace of Axayácatl & House Built by Hernán Cortés Discovered


Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have discovered basalt slab floors from the Palace of Axayácatl, and remains of a house built by the conquistador Hernán Cortés.

The discovery was made during works on the Monte de Piedad building in Mexico City, revealing basalt dressed stones that formed part of the palaces open plaza or courtyard.

Axayácatl reigned between 1469 and 1481 and was the father of Montezuma II, one of the last rulers of the Aztec Empire. Moctezuma brought the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés to his palace in Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City) where the Spaniards lived as his guests for several months.

Montezuma was taken prisoner and subsequently killed. Two other Aztec rulers succeeded Moctezuma, but their reigns were short-lived and the Aztec Empire quickly collapsed under them.   
Part of the house of Hernán Cortés – Image Credit : Oliver Santana

Excavations also revealed a house built for Cortés from the early Viceregal period (1521-1620 AD). The house was where the Spanish conqueror resided for several years and would also become the seat of the first Cabildo of New Spain (around 1525) and of the Marquessate of the Valley of Oaxaca, granted to the conqueror four years later.

Archaeologists excavated a series of test pits that unearthed the remains of a stone masonry wall – 1.50 meters high by 1.25 m wide wall that served as a foundation and basal platform for a series of columns from the building.

INAH said: Vestiges of that pre-Hispanic palace, and of the remains of a later house built under the orders of Hernán Cortés, with reused materials from the previous Tenochca building, revives the memory of those historical events, five centuries later.

Header Image Credit : INAH