Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – study

Survey of 600 people finds some parents regret having offspring for same reason

NOT EVERYONE WANTS KIDS

Born into a dying world? Children at a climate protest in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Isopix/Rex/Shutterstock


Damian Carrington Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN Fri 27 Nov 2020 

People worried about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children because of fears that their offspring would have to struggle through a climate apocalypse, according to the first academic study of the issue.

The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

These views were based on very pessimistic assessments of the impact of global heating on the world, the researchers said. One respondent, for example, said it would “rival world war one in its sheer terror”. The research also found that some people who were already parents expressed regret over having their children.

Having a child also potentially means that person going on to produce a lifetime of carbon emissions that contribute to the climate emergency, but only 60% of those surveyed were very concerned about this carbon footprint.

“The fears about the carbon footprint of having kids tended to be abstract and dry,” said Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, of Yale-NUS College in Singapore, who led the study. “But the fears about the lives of existing or potential children were really deep and emotional. It was often heartbreaking to pore through the responses – a lot of people really poured their hearts out.”

The number of people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans was likely to grow, Schneider-Mayerson said, as the impacts of global heating became more obvious. “To address this, we really need to act immediately to address the root cause, which is climate change itself,” he said.

The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found no statistically significant difference between the views of women and men, though women made up three-quarters of respondents. A 31-year-old woman said: “Climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children. I don’t want to birth children into a dying world [though] I dearly want to be a mother.”

The researchers found that 6% of parents confessed to feeling some remorse about having children. A 40-year-old mother said: “I regret having my kids because I am terrified that they will be facing the end of the world due to climate change.”

Schneider-Mayerson said: “I was surprised – for parents, this is an extremely difficult statement to make.”

BirthStrikers: meet the women who refuse to have children until climate change ends


The study is the first peer-reviewed academic study of the issue and analysed a large group of concerned people. The survey was done anonymously so people could express themselves freely.

“It is an unprecedented window into the way that [some people] are thinking and feeling about what many consider to be the most important decision in their lives,” said Schneider-Mayerson.

Other findings were that younger people were more concerned about the climate impacts their children would experience than older respondents, and that adoption was seen as a potential alternative to having biological children.

The study indicated that climate-related fears for their children’s lives were rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the future. Of the 400 respondents who offered a vision of the future, 92.3% were negative, 5.6% were mixed or neutral, and just 0.6% were positive.

One 42-year-old father wrote that the world in 2050 would be “a hot-house hell, with wars over limited resources, collapsing civilisation, failing agriculture, rising seas, melting glaciers, starvation, droughts, floods, mudslides and widespread devastation.” Schneider-Mayerson said he thought the pessimistic views held were all within the range of possibilities, if not necessarily the most likely outcome.

However, he said further research was needed on a more diverse group of people and in other parts of the world. The self-selecting group in the study all lived in the US and were largely white, more highly educated and liberal.

Previously, opinion polls of the general public indicated people were connecting the climate crisis and reproduction, with one poll in 2020 finding that among 18- to 44-year-old US citizens without children, 14% cited climate change as a “major reason” for not having children. In 2019, scores of women in the UK said they were starting a “birth strike” until the climate crisis was resolved.


A-Z of climate anxiety: how to avoid meltdown

Seth Wynes, of Concordia University in Canada, whose 2017 study found having one less child was the greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change, said the researchers had properly stressed that the sample was not representative of all Americans. But he said the distress over the decision to have children made sense. “Climate change is already affecting our world in frightening ways and so it’s certainly reasonable to account for the climate crisis when thinking about the future of one’s family.

“As climate change continues to worsen, it is important to understand how perceptions of the future can change the way everyday people plan their lives,” Wynes said. “This study is an initial step in growing that understanding.”

There is also growing evidence of climate anxiety affecting mental health and earlier in 2020 more than 1,000 clinical psychologists signed an open letter warning of “acute trauma on a global scale”. Last week, a survey revealed that more than half of child and adolescent psychiatrists in England were seeing patients distressed about the state of the environment.

Platypuses Lost 22% of Their Habitat Over Last 30 Years
The startling finding comes in a report that documents the iconic Australian animal’s decline and recommends increased legal protections

A new report finds platypus numbers are declining in Australia, prompting the authors of the report to call for the species to be listed as endangered. 

(Stuart Cohen)

By Alex Fox
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
NOVEMBER 25, 2020

One of Australia’s most adored animal oddities is under threat, reports Lisa Cox for the Guardian. A new report estimates that the platypus has disappeared from at least 22 percent of its former habitat over the past three decades, and recommends the duck-billed, egg-laying mammal be added to the country’s list of threatened species. The loss is equivalent to platypuses disappearing from an area larger than the entire state of Washington.

This formal assessment, a collaboration between researchers with the University of New South Wales, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the World Wildlife Foundation and the Humane Society, calls for Australia to classify the species as nationally threatened. The assessment echoes troubling findings reported earlier this year, which projected that the platypus population could decline between 47 and 66 percent by 2070.

Internationally, platypuses are listed as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN). The new report recommends that the severity of the species’ listing be increased to “vulnerable” to respond to evidence of past and projected future declines in the platypus population.

Only found in Australia, platypuses inhabit rivers and streams on the country’s eastern seaboard from Queensland to Victoria and across much of Tasmania. Despite being warm blooded, furry and nursing their young with milk, the platypus lays eggs, making it—along with the two types of echidna—one of just three known species of monotreme on Earth. Combined with their appearance, these traits would be plenty to make the platypus a truly singular animal, but the details of their physiology only make them stranger and more fascinating.

For starters, their signature duck-shaped bill is fleshy rather than hard like a bird’s and can detect electromagnetic fields underwater, which helps the platypus find food in murky waters. Males have a venomous spur on their hind legs, and females lactate by sweating on their tummies. Recent research has even revealed that they glow turquoise under ultraviolet light.

But this uniquely Australian creature’s riverine habitat is being threatened by climate change, in the form of more severe and more frequent droughts, as well as by water diversion and extraction. Other threats mentioned by the report include land clearing, pollution and predation by feral dogs and foxes, reports Michael Slezak for Australia’s ABC News.


"Protecting the platypus and the rivers it relies on must be a national priority for one of the world's most iconic animals," says Richard Kingsford, an ecologist at the University of New South Wales and the report’s lead author, in a statement. "There is a real concern that platypus populations will disappear from some of our rivers without returning, if rivers keep degrading with droughts and dams."

The declines quantified by the report were most severe in New South Wales, which saw a 32 percent drop in platypus observations since 1990, followed by Queensland with a 27 percent decline and Victoria decreasing by 7 percent, per a statement. Some urban areas were even worse. In some places near Melbourne, for example, the decline in observations was as high as 65 percent.

“We have a national and international responsibility to look after this unique animal and the signs are not good” says Kingsford in the statement. "Platypus are declining and we need to do something about threats to the species before it is too late."


Alex Fox is a freelance science journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has written for Science, Nature, Science News, the San Jose Mercury News, and Mongabay. You can find him at Alexfoxscience.com.Read more from this author | Follow @Alex_M_Fox

What was the Boston Tea Party and why did it happen?

What was the Boston Tea Party and why did it happen? The events of 16 December 1773 had global origins, suggests Benjamin Carp, and have since inspired acts of non-violent civil disobedience in nations as diverse as Lebanon and China. Here's your guide to the pivotal moment in American history and its far-reaching global legacy




November 25, 2020

What happened during the Boston Tea Party?

About a hundred men boarded three ships in Boston harbour on the evening of 16 December 1773. No one knows for sure who they were, or exactly how many of them were there. They had wrapped blankets around their shoulders, and they had slathered paint and soot on their faces. A newspaper report called them “resolute men (dressed like Mohawks or Indians)”. In two or three hours, they hoisted 340 chests above decks, chopped them open with hatchets, and emptied their contents over the rails. Since the tide was out, you could see huge clumps of the stuff piling up alongside the ships.


This was in fact 46 tonnes of tea worth more than £9,659. 
At the time, a tonne of tea cost about the same as a two-storey house. The event became a pivotal moment in American history, leading to the overthrow of the British imperial government, an eight-year civil war, and American independence.

Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July?

Why did the Boston Tea Party happen?

The history of the Boston Tea Party belongs not just to the United States of America, but to the world. The Tea Party originated with a Chinese commodity, a British financial crisis, imperialism in India, and American consumption habits. It resounded in a world of Afro-Caribbean slavery, Native American disguises, and widespread tyranny and oppression. And for over 200 years since, the Boston Tea Party has inspired political movements of all stripes, well beyond America’s shores.

The history of the Boston Tea Party belongs not just to the United States of America, but to the world

To understand why tea had become so controversial in Boston, we would have to look at the history of how this plant had come to be embraced by Britons all over the world. Camellia sinensis grew among the foothills of the high mountains that separated China from the Indian subcontinent. For over a thousand years, it was the Chinese who had popularised and marketed the drink. Chinese merchants traded tea to Japanese ships, Mongol horsemen, and Persian caravans. Few Europeans had tasted tea before 1680. Yet by the 18th century, trading firms like the English East India Company were regularly negotiating with Cantonese hongs (merchants) and hoppos (port supervisors) to bring tea back to the west. As the tea trade grew, the price dropped.

Tea for two : A fashionable gentleman takes morning tea with a lady in her boudoir, while a maidservant looks on, in an 18th-century engraving. (Wellcome Collection)

The bitter taste of tea might have been unpalatable to Europeans, had it not been for the trade in another commodity – sugar. The 17th century had seen the cultivation of sugarcane in the West Indies yield an enormously profitable crop. To raise cane and process sugar, West Indian planters relied on the labour of African slaves. Britons did not organise an objection to slavery, sugar and tea until the end of the 18th century. In the meantime, tea and sugar went hand in hand.

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Tea made its way to American ports like Boston, Massachusetts, and even into the outermost reaches of the American frontier. Some of it was legally bought, and the rest was smuggled to avoid British duties. It soon became the drink of respectable households all over the British empire, although it also pained critics who worried about its corrupting effects. They lamented that tea led to vanity and pride, it encouraged women to gather and gossip, and it threatened to undermine 
the nation. Nevertheless, the British government, reliant 
on the revenues from global trade, did nothing to stand in the way of tea drinkers. Indeed, in 1767, parliament passed a Revenue Act that collected a duty on all tea shipped to the American colonies.

Timeline: From the Boston Tea Party to American Independence

16 December 1773 Protesters dump 340 crates of the East India Company’s tea into Boston harbour

January 1774 London learns of the destruction of the tea, and of other American protests

March 1774 Parliament passes the first of the so-called Coerciver Acts, the Boston Port Act, which closes the port of Boston until the town makes restitution for the tea

May 1774 Parliament passes two more laws for restoring order in Massachusetts. 
These laws limit town meetings, 
put the provincial council under royal appointments, and allow British civil officers accused of capital crimes to move their trials to other jurisdictions

1 June 1774 The Boston Port Act takes effect, and Governor Thomas Hutchinson departs for England, never to return. His replacement is General Thomas Gage, 
a military commander

Summer 1774 Massachusetts protesters resist 
the Coercive Acts by disrupting local courts and forcing councillors to resign their seats

September to October 1774 The First Continental Congress meets, declares opposition to the Coercive Acts, and calls for boycotts of British goods and an embargo on exports to Great Britain

February 1775 Parliament declares Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. Governor Gage will later receive orders to enforce the Coercive Acts and suppress the uprising

19 April 1775 British regular troops and Massachusetts militiamen exchange fire at Lexington and Concord. In response, armed New Englanders surround the British fortifications at Boston

March 1776 American forces take Dorchester Heights and the British evacuate Boston

July 1776 The Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence of the United States

These were years when Great Britain, still groaning under the debts incurred during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), began tightening the reins on its imperial possessions all over the globe. In America, this meant restrictions on westward expansion, stronger enforcement of customs regulations, and new taxes. In India, this meant increased control over the East India Company.

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The employees of the East India Company were not just traders in tea and textiles. Since the reign of Elizabeth I, the company had also been fortifying, making allies, and fighting rivals in the lands east of the Cape of Good Hope. It had a monopoly on the eastern trade, and its role took an imperial turn in the 1750s. Eight years after Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the battle of Plassey in 1757, he arranged to have the company assume the civil administration (and tax collection) in Bengal.

General clamour

Many Britons had high hopes for this new source of revenue but then, in the autumn of 1769, Indian affairs took a horrific turn. A famine struck Bengal, killing at least 1.2 million people – this was equivalent to half the population of the 13 American colonies at the time. A horrified British public blamed the East India Company for the disaster. “The oppressions of India,” wrote Horace Walpole, “under the rapine and cruelties of the servants of the company, had now reached England, and created general clamour here.”

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The East India Company’s troubles multiplied. In 1772, manipulations of its stock were blamed for a series of bank failures that sent a shockwave of bankruptcies across the globe. The company was losing money on its military ventures in India. The Bank of England refused to keep lending it money, and it owed hundreds of thousands of pounds in back taxes. What’s more, competition from smugglers and excessive imports led the company to amass 17.5 million pounds of tea in its warehouses – more than the English nation drank in a year.

This 18th-century watercolour shows workers crushing tea in wooden crates in China, where the drink was first marketed and popularised. (Credit: V&A)

To rescue the company (and gain greater control over it), parliament passed a series of laws in 1773, including the Tea Act. This law levied no new taxes on Americans, but it allowed the company to ship its tea directly to America for the first time. The legislation, Americans feared, would have three effects. First, it granted a monopoly company special privileges in America, cutting out American merchants (except a few hand-picked consignees). Second, it encouraged further payment of a tax that the Americans had been decrying for six years. Third, the revenue from the tax was used to pay the salaries of certain civil officials (including the Massachusetts governor), leaving them unaccountable to the people.

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Americans were vitriolic in their response, and their pamphlets resounded in global language. “Hampden”, a New York writer, warned that the East India Company was “lost to all the Feelings of Humanity” as they “monopolised the absolute Necessaries of Life in India, at a Time of apprehended Scarcity”. The new tea trade, he warned, would 
“support the Tyranny of the [Company] in the East, enslave the West, and prepare us fit Victims for the Exercise of that horrid Inhumanity they have… practised, in the Face of the Sun, on the helpless Asiaticks”. John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania lawyer who gained fame as a protestor against British taxes, similarly attacked the East India Company. “Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given ample Proof, how little 
they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or 
Lives of Men.”

Having drained Bengal of its wealth, he wrote, they now “cast their Eyes on America, as a new Theatre, wheron to exercise their Talents of Rapine, Oppression and Cruelty. The Monopoly of Tea, is, I dare say, but a small Part of the Plan they have formed to strip us of our Property. But thank GOD, we are not Sea Poys, or Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty, who know its Worth, and who prize it high.”

Bostonians responded to these warnings. Under pressure from the Sons of Liberty (a group of American patriots) in New York and Philadelphia, they threatened Boston’s consignees until they fled the town. When the first of the tea ships arrived on 28 November 1773, the Bostonians demanded that the cargo be returned to London without unloading. The owner, a Quaker merchant named Francis Rotch, protested that he couldn’t do this, by law, and so a stalemate of almost three weeks ensued. Upon the stroke of midnight on 17 December, the British customs service would have the power to step in, seize the tea, and sell it at auction.

They were beginning to think of themselves as Americans rather than British subjects, as free men throwing off the shackles of empire

Therefore, the evening before, on 16 December, the Bostonians got their Indian disguises ready. These were crude costumes, not meant to conceal so much as warn the community not to reveal the perpetrators’ identities. Yet the choice of a Native American disguise was still significant. Americans were often portrayed as American Indians in British cartoons, and the colonists were often lumped in with the indigenous population and derided as savages. What better way to blunt the sting of this epithet than to assume an Indian disguise?

Did the Age of Exploration bring more harm than good?

The Bostonians may have been inspired by a New York City newspaper piece in which “The MOHAWKS” wrote that they were “determined not to be enslaved, by any power on earth”, and promised “an unwelcome visit” to anyone who should 
land tea on American shores. The tea destroyers of Boston selected a costume that situated them on the other side of the Atlantic ocean from the king and parliament. They were beginning to think of themselves as Americans rather than British subjects, as free men throwing off the shackles of empire.
Who were the key players in the Boston Tea Party?

Although most of the tea destroyers were born in Massachusetts, some had more far-flung origins. James Swan, an anti-slavery pamphleteer, was born in Fifeshire, Scotland. Nicholas Campbell hailed from the island of Malta. John Peters had come to America from Lisbon. Although there were wealthy merchants and professionals among the destroyers, the bulk of them were craftsmen who worked with their hands, which enabled them to haul the chests of tea to the decks in a short time. Mostly young men between the ages of 18 and 29, they were thrilled to make a bold statement to the world.

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And the world responded. Prints of the Boston Tea Party appeared in France and Germany. In Edinburgh, the philosopher Adam Smith shook his head disapprovingly at the “strange absurdity” of the East India Company’s sovereignty in India. He stitched his ideas together into a foundational theory of free market capitalism in 1776. A Persian historian in Calcutta would write in the 1780s that the British-American conflict “arose from this event: the king of the English maintained these five or six years past, a contest with the people of America (a word that signifies a new world), on account of the [East India] Company’s concerns.” Many years later, activists from China to South Africa to Lebanon would explain their actions by comparing them to the Tea Party. As a symbol of anti-colonial nationalism, non-violent civil disobedience, or costumed political spectacle, the Tea Party was irresistible.

In 1773, the diplomat Sir George Macartney waxed poetic about Great Britain, “this vast empire, on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained”. Bostonians tested those bounds later that year. The Boston Tea Party is often spun as the opening act in the origin story of the United States. 
Yet it is better understood as a bright conflagration on the horizon of a big world – a fire that still burns brightly.
The global legacy of the Boston Tea Party

More than two centuries after it took place, campaigners around the world are still inspired 
by the Boston Tea Party as a model of peaceful protest…

1
Temperance movement

During the 19th century, Americans periodically drew upon the Boston Tea Party as a precedent for democratic protests: labour unions, the Mashpee tribe of Native Americans, women’s suffragists, and both foes and defenders of the anti-slavery movement. As a lawyer in 1854, the future president Abraham Lincoln defended nine women who had destroyed an Illinois saloon in the name of the temperance movement. He argued that the Boston Tea Party was a worthy model for their actions.

American suffragettes picket a building bearing the name of the National Woman’s Party, c1900. (Getty images)
2
Mahatma Gandhi

After the British government in South Africa mandated that resident Indians had to be registered and fingerprinted under the Asiatic Registration Act of 1907, Mahatma Gandhi adopted the practice of satyagraha, or non-violent protest. He led the Indian community in the burning of registration cards at mass meetings in August 1908. Gandhi later wrote that a British newspaper correspondent had compared the protest to the Boston Tea Party.

3
US tax protestors

Today the Boston Tea Party is proving a rallying point for conservative Americans. American tax protesters have often invoked the Tea Party as their inspiration since the 1970s. The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul held a campaign fundraiser on 16 December 2007. In February 2009, a business news broadcaster called for a “tea party” to protest against the US government’s plan to help refinance home mortgages. With the help of national organisations and media attention, the movement stitched together local groups of protestors. The tea partiers have been calling for less federal regulation and lower taxes.

4
Republic of China (Taiwan)

In late 1923, during the struggle for power in China between the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Communist Party of China, Sun Yat-Sen, head of the Kuomintang, threatened to seize customs revenues from Guangzhou. The United States and other western nations sent warships to intervene. On 19 December (three days after the 150th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party), Sun wrote: “We must stop that money from going to Peking to buy arms to kill us, just as your forefathers stopped taxation going to the English coffers by throwing English tea into Boston Harbor.”

5
African-American civil rights


In his 1963 ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr called for a “nonviolent direct action program” in Birmingham, Alabama. Discussing his historical inspiration, he wrote: “In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.” Three years later, Robert F Williams would recall the Tea Party to rally more violent action on behalf of African-American civil rights: “Burn, baby, burn.”

Benjamin L Carp is associate professor of history, Tufts University, Massachusetts. 
His book Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale University Press) is out now.

Books: Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America 
by Benjamin L Carp (Yale, 2010); The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational 
by Nick Robins (Pluto, 2006); The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution 
by Alfred F Young (Beacon, 1999)


This article was first published in the Christmas 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine

Thanksgiving and the Myth of Native American "Savages"

Prominent scientists exaggerate the violence of Native Americans, whom European invaders ravaged.

By John Horgan on November 21, 2016  SCIENTIFIC AMERICA

Native Americans, accused of Hobbesian savagery by modern scientists, treated Europeans kindly in early encounters. This painting shows the legendary Thanksgiving feast between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, who helped the newcomers survive and were eventually driven from their land.  Credit: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris 1863-1930, U.S. Library of Congress

Note: This post first appeared on November 21, 2016. It's still relevant, of course.

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over scientists’ slanderous portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.

When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This episode seemed to support the view—often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful, “noble savages.”

Prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. “Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage,” psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, “quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.” According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes “got it right” when he called pre-state life a “war of all against all.”

Pinker expanded on this claim in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Hobbesian thesis has been advanced in other influential books, notably War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley; Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, by archaeologist Steven LeBlanc; War in Human Civilization, by political scientist Azar Gat; The Social Conquest of Earth, by biologist Edward Wilson; and The World Until Yesterday, by geographer Jared Diamond.

Referring specifically to the pre-Colombian New World, Keeley asserted, “The dogs of war were seldom on a leash.” Popular culture has amplified these scientific claims. In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull complains to a U.S. Army colonel about whites’ violent treatment of the Indians. The colonel retorts, “You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent.”

Yes, Native Americans waged war before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But as I have asserted in my book The End of War and on this site, Pinker and other Hobbesians have exaggerated warfare among early humans. These scientists have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.

In two momentous early encounters, Native Americans greeted Europeans with kindness. Here is how Christopher Columbus described the Arawak, tribal people living in the Bahamas when he landed there in 1492: “They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

How that passage—which I found in historian Howard Zinn's 1980 classic A People’s History of the United States—captures the whole sordid history of colonialism! Columbus was as good as his word. Within decades the Spaniards had slaughtered almost all the Arawaks and other natives of the New Indies and enslaved the few survivors. “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide,” wrote the historian Samuel Morison (who admired Columbus).

A similar pattern unfolded in New England in the early 17th century. After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day feast with the Wampanoag. The event my classmates and I reenacted in grade school really happened!

The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases caught from previous European explorers. Europeans had also killed, kidnapped and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, had even stolen grain and other goods from the Wampanoag, according to Wikipedia’s entry on Plymouth Colony.

The good vibes of that 1621 feast soon dissipated. As more English settlers arrived in New England, they seized more and more land from the Wampanoag and other tribes, who eventually resisted with violence—in vain. We all know how this story ended. “The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million,” Zinn wrote.

In “Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History,” a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, anthropologist Peter Nabokov notes that colonizers reduced California’s native population from 350,000 at first contact to under 17,000 by 1900. State laws allowed and even encouraged the slaughter of Native Americans. “Extermination,” Nabokov comments, was “considered no great tragedy for an entire people who were uniformly and irredeemably defined as savage and inhuman.”

Centuries earlier, the Arawak and Wampanoag were kind to us—and by us I mean white people of European descent. We showed our thanks by sickening, subjugating and slaughtering them and other indigenous people. And we have the gall to call them more savage than us.

Please ponder this dark irony as you celebrate Thanksgiving.

Addendum: U.S. government maltreatment of Native Americans continues. A United Nations human-rights official accuses “law enforcement officials, private security firms and the North Dakota National Guard” of using “excessive force” against Native Americans and others protesting an oil pipeline that “runs through land sacred to indigenous people.”

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

*Self-plagiarism alert: This is an updated version of a column posted on previous Thanksgivings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.

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Further Reading:

Was Civilization the Cure for Primordial Human Violence?

10,000-Year-Old Massacre Does Not Bolster Claim That War Is Innate.

Quitting the hominid fight club: The evidence is flimsy for innate chimpanzee–let alone human–warfare.

New Study of Foragers Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

New Study of Prehistoric Skeletons Undermines Claim that War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

Survey of Earliest Human Settlements Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

Chimp Violence Fails to Support Deep-Roots Theory of War.

Margaret Mead’s War Theory Kicks Butt of Neo-Darwinian and Malthusian Models.

RIP Military Historian John Keegan, Who Saw War As Product of Culture Rather than Biology.

War Scholar Critiques New Study of Roots of Violence

War Is Our Most Urgent Problem; Let's Solve It.

Scientists Are Becoming More Politically Engaged

Here’s what that means beyond the 2020 elections

By Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Scott Frickel, John Parker on November 25, 2020

BEHAVIOR & SOCIETY | OPINION

Credit: Getty Images


For many, the 2016 presidential election represented an existential threat to science and jolted large segments of the research workforce into street protest mode. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust scientists into global prominence, while the Black Lives Matter uprising has forced a reckoning with science’s problematic past and present. In many ways, science itself was on the ballot this Election Day. Prominent scientific journals endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, scientific societies issued statements in the wake of the George Floyd killing, and thousands of scientists went on strike in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.


With scientists and scientific organizations now more politically engaged than at any time since the Vietnam War, we sought to understand the scope and focus of their political engagement. Before the November 3 elections, we surveyed more than 1,500 researchers belonging to the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network (UCSSN)—a multidisciplinary network of more than 19,000 politically engaged scientists, medical doctors, and engineers. What we learned may have important implications beyond the current electoral season. Scientists are becoming an important mobilizing force at a time that urgently calls for their political involvement.

SCIENTISTS ARE PART OF THE BLUE WAVE

UCSSN scientists vote. Of those we surveyed, nearly everyone who was eligible to vote cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election (93 percent) and the 2018 midterms (92 percent). For comparison, just 53 percent of the voting-age population in the United States voted in the last midterm election, itself a historic high.

And they are consensus Democratic voters. Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016; only 1 percent voted for Trump.

Not surprisingly, their view of the president has not improved with time. UCSSN scientists rate the administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic very poorly, take issue with the way the administration uses science to handle the pandemic, and identify White House attacks on science generally as a serious social threat. To be sure, our respondents are highly politically mobilized and skew left ideologically; in comparison, the scientific community is more ideologically diverse, and traditionally avoids political advocacy. Nevertheless, our results suggest that a scientific blue wave was likely a factor in the election.

To be clear, scientists represent just under 5 percent of the U.S. workforce and tend to concentrate in coastal cities and regions that are already overwhelmingly blue. In this respect, scientists do not represent the kind of strategic voting bloc we find in labor, evangelical, or Latinx voters.

Yet scientists have significant emotional grievances against the Trump administration. Scientists have been disrespected, their work stifled, their data hidden or destroyed, and consensus around basic scientific ideas challenged. These grievances fueled their involvement in electoral politics, organizing, and advocacy, among other forms of political engagement.

ACTIVISM BEYOND THE BALLOT BOX

Voting is just the tip of the iceberg for UCSSN scientists, who tell us they are actively engaged in a range of political activities related to national politics. Nine out of 10 respondents engaged in at least one form of political activity in the past twelve months. Even more striking, 99 percent report engaging at least two types of science-related activism, and 83 percent report engaging in at least four. These scientists are also much more likely to have engaged in protest activities during the past 12 months than the average U.S. voter. What have they been doing?

Most UCSSN scientists have contacted an elected official (84 percent) and would like more guidance on how to engage with them, the general public and their communities. Elected officials can expect to get calls, e-mails, petitions and letters from scientists. Respondents also reported being very active on social media and protesting in the streets. Half of UCSSN respondents attended one or more demonstrations – nearly four times the national average (14 percent). Most signed a petition (94 percent) and donated to a non-profit organization (79 percent). Some have even started new organizations (7 percent).

Engaged in multiple types of political action, these scientists are far more committed to engaging politically than the average U.S. voter. These findings run counter to the perception of scientists as being “above” politics. And although this is a small population, as a group, scientists are exceptionally well connected to various kinds of organizations, including universities, think tanks, civil society groups, social movement organizations and—not least—scientific societies. Even self-described “non-political” scientific societies are mobilizing their members. Three fourths of scientists in our survey report receiving support from their employers for science-related advocacy. Less than 10 percent reported that their careers were affected negatively as a result of engaging in science advocacy, a finding that flies in the face of common wisdom suggesting that advocacy risks career suicide.

MOBILIZING SCIENTISTS BEYOND 2020
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The unprecedented high-profile endorsements of Joe Biden from prestigious academic journals signaled to rank-and-file scientists that political advocacy is no longer anathema to scientific research, but should be embraced as a central aspect of science’s social mission. An ongoing chorus of calls to defend science in the context of climate change, attacks on health care, and environmental justice, among other pressing issues only reinforce and legitimate this message.

Beyond the election, scientists and their organizations should focus on building mobilization capacity among the various the groups that they are connected to. These include scientists’ own professional communities, as well as students and staff on college campuses, members of the science and engineering workforce, and the more than 24 million workers employed in education and health services.

The Trump administration’s sidelining of science drove scientists to the streets. The real work of organizing the political capital of scientists will continue. Now that the yard signs are coming down, we must be prepared to engage with what remains and advance the political struggle in defense of science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Fernando Tormos-Aponte

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a visiting sscholar at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Political Science. His research focuses on how social movements cope with internal divisions and gain political influence.

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John Parker

John N. Parker is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oslo. He is an expert in the sociology of science, creativity, and emotions. His work has been published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Studies of Science.

EDITORIAL
25 NOVEMBER 2020

UNESCO must reform to stay relevant — and reconnect people through science
At 75, the UN agency with a focus on science cooperation is fighting for its future role.


Member states should back reforms proposed by Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general since 2017.Credit: Chesnot/Getty

UNESCO was born on 16 November 1945, just a few weeks after the end of the Second World War. Its founders had been persuaded that science — along with culture and education — could help to cement peace between countries, protect human rights and improve living standards. Now, as the United Nations and UNESCO turn 75, the Paris-based agency is struggling to determine its future.

There’s a lot to show for those 75 years. Today, UNESCO operates the system that has awarded World Heritage status to more than 1,100 important historical sites; the agency has also established a global network of more than 700 biosphere reserves. It holds nations to account on their commitments to get every child into school, and monitors threats to journalists around the world.

But among the UN’s family of specialized agencies, UNESCO has never been properly funded — and it has been trying to recover from a funding crisis for the past decade. Data supplied by UNESCO show that the agency spent US$1.1 billion in the 2-year period from 2010 to 2011, but in 2012–13, spending was down by 16% after the Palestinian Authority was granted full membership and the United States and Israel stopped their financial contributions in protest. Although its spending was back to $1.1 billion by 2018–19, inflation has greatly reduced its spending power. UNESCO is now in the middle of a transformation designed, in part, to enable it to live within its means.

When Nature spoke to UNESCO’s current and former staff, as well as to researchers who study and collaborate with it, we found immense affection for the organization and respect for its past achievements. However, there was also a sense of frustration over its future. UNESCO needs to put these concerns to rest once and for all.
Pulling together

UNESCO’s history is a stellar example of science’s power to advance both knowledge and diplomacy. In the wake of two world wars, and especially during the cold war, the agency helped to unlock the doors to international scientific cooperation, particularly in the physical sciences.

In 1951, it hosted the meeting that led to the creation of CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory. Since then, CERN has mushroomed from a project intended to reunite and stimulate Europe’s physicists to a place where scientists from all over the world can collaborate. It has spawned a number of technological spin-offs and has maintained its commitment to global knowledge-sharing.

Paris 1951: the Birth of CERN

When nations were reluctant to share their oceans data, UNESCO hosted the first meeting of the International Oceanographic Commission in 1961. The commission still has a role in international efforts to sustainably manage ocean resources. And UNESCO’s efforts to connect scientists from countries with difficult relationships continued with SESAME, the Middle East’s first synchrotron light source. That project was launched in 1999 and provides an essential tool to researchers in a range of fields, from medicine to materials science. Getting scientists from Iran and Israel, or Cyprus and Turkey — all SESAME member countries — to work together is no small achievement.

That same year, UNESCO co-organized the World Conference on Science in Budapest. One of the outcomes was the creation of SciDev.Net, one of the first open-access platforms for sharing the results of scientific research, on which Science and Nature worked together to share some of their content with low- and middle-income countries.

And all of this happened in an organization that might never have had an ‘S’ in its title. UNESCO was originally conceived to protect and promote education and culture. It made room for science after leading scientists andscience media (including Nature) helped to persuade the UN’s founding nations that their vision of a world at peace could not be a world without science.


UNESCO’s troubled drive for peace through science and culture

And yet, for all its external successes, UNESCO has faced difficulties in how it is treated by some of its larger member states. That, in turn, has affected the ability of its staff to get things done. It hasn’t helped that some countries have treated their membership of UNESCO like a revolving door, joining and leaving as they wish, with little regard for the consequences for the agency’s work when their funding stops. The United States has left twice, and the United Kingdom and Singapore have also withdrawn in the past, then returned some years later.

When richer countries stop paying, projects on the ground suffer, but so does trust in those nations’ commitment to UNESCO’s goals. It means officials at UNESCO’s headquarters are forced to spend time and energy raising funds from other sources, and reorganizing staff and management structures to fit changing priorities — and end up spreading themselves too thinly. Time spent fire-fighting is time taken away from other priorities.

In 2013, UNESCO’s leadership responded to its loss of income with a proposal that would probably have led to most of its work in its communication and information sector being abolished. But this was seen as a step too far and rejected by member states. Now, the director-general Audrey Azoulay is trying a different approach — intended, in part, to take some of the political heat out of UNESCO’s work by focusing on things more countries can agree on, and playing to the agency’s strengths as cultural guardian, ethical compass and laboratory of ideas.

Azoulay and her team have initiated a “strategic transformation” to spearhead internal reform and programme change — the latter requiring approval by member states late next year. Meanwhile, she is prioritizing five areas: rebuilding and reviving the devastated Iraqi city of Mosul; promoting open science; working on much-needed common standards on the ethics of artificial intelligence; a long-term vision for education; and biodiversity. The last of these is a belated, but much-needed recognition of UNESCO’s long-standing experience in the study of Indigenous and local knowledge across research fields. Its importance is bolstered by the results of a UNESCO survey that asked 15,000 people what they saw as the biggest threats to peace — two-thirds of respondents said biodiversity and climate change were their greatest concern.

There’s also a strong argument for reviving UNESCO’s earlier science mission. In today’s fractured world, fundamental and applied science could once again be used to help bring people and societies together. In the Middle East, for example, UNESCO could help to reconnect scientists in Qatar with those in neighbouring countries. At present, researchers are unable to collaborate because of a regional dispute. The agency could have a greater role in South Asia’s science, which is affected by the strained relations between India and Pakistan. And UNESCO could do more for researchers in Europe, where fractures are developing between members of the European Union.

UNESCO should seek to reconnect people through science, as it has done before. But there can be no illusions about how hard the task will be. After 75 years, UNESCO is facing one of its toughest tests. Member states must make every effort to pull together with the agency’s headquarters and its field staff. UNESCO’s potential in a crisis-ridden world should not be underestimated. If UNESCO ceased to exist, the world would need to recreate it.

Nature 587, 521-522 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03311-3

Published: 10 November 1945

Science and the United Nations
JULIAN HUXLEY

Nature volume 156, pages553–556(1945)Cite this article


Abstract

THE proposals for the new United Nations Educational and Cultural Organisation were first put forward by the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education, which has sat in London since 1941, and in some of its later work was assisted by a delegation from the United Nations. This body was originally concerned with the immediate and essentially short-term task of securing the educational and cultural reconstruction of those parts of Europe and Asia which had suffered cultural distortion or destruction at the hands of the Axis Powers; and in April 1944 it formulated proposals designed to meet these needs. At San Francisco, however, this aim was extended and generalized, and it was proposed that a permanent special agency of the United Nations, devoted to educational and cultural tasks, should be established. The present Conference is engaged on the problems of giving final form to the draft charter of the Organisation put forward by the Allied Education Ministers, and broadly outlining its main aims and functions and of delimiting its field of action; after which it will set up an interim commission to work out details and to prepare the ground for the first full Conference to be held about a year hence.

To lead in space, America must lead in space collaboration

SPACE RACE 2.0 CAPITALI$M IN SPACE

The new era of space competition is far more complex, but government agencies have yet to coalesce around a common campaign plan, a leading government adviser argues
Astronaut Rick Mastracchio participates in a mission on the International Space Station in 2007. | NASA via Getty Images


By STEVE ISAKOWITZ
11/25/2020 

Next year will mark 60 years since President John F. Kennedy announced the United States would send a man safely to the moon and back. A more ambitious objective — sustainable exploration and development of the moon, our solar system and beyond — currently faces America’s leaders, albeit within a more complex space landscape than the U.S.-Soviet space race.

Space is an increasingly crowded, democratized and contested environment. More than 60 countries now have space budgets, and more than 70 own or operate satellites in orbit. Myriad private organizations are launching satellites, including many smaller satellites that nevertheless have significant capabilities. Government agencies are vying for jurisdiction over space issues. Amid all this, Russia and China are investing in capabilities to threaten U.S. and international satellites.

The crowding of space reflects its enormous potential, but also necessitates action to ensure its sustainability. In the next presidential term, the U.S. will face high-level decisions on critical space policy issues with long-lasting implications. Through our role as a nonpartisan, nonprofit partner to the entire U.S. space enterprise, The Aerospace Corporation has published a comprehensive Space Agenda 2021 outlook for these issues. We work with all organizations involved in space to solve their hardest technical and strategic problems. Our success is measured by the degree to which the U.S. leads in delivering great accomplishments in the global space ecosystem.

Strategies that earned the U.S. space preeminence in the 20th century won’t keep us ahead in this century. We need new methods to achieve this. At a high level, we recommend an emphasis on stronger collaboration across the space enterprise to realize this potential and address those challenges.

Streamline government collaboration

As commercial space efforts expand and diversify, government must ensure safe and responsible behavior in space. Several federal agencies exert some space policy jurisdiction, but responsibility remains fuzzy on emerging regulatory issues, such as protecting our satellites, ensuring spaceflight safety, regulating emergent space business applications and preserving our world and worlds we explore in the future.

The U.S. should establish a national approach to space safety with clear lanes of authority and technically informed regulations. We must especially lead in developing space traffic management safety norms and standards for space operators to mitigate the growing risks of orbital debris.

To promote innovation, the U.S. government must also exchange traditionally siloed approaches for greater agency interdependence. The current National Space Strategy advocates a “whole-of-government” approach with agencies working to maximize resources under a shared mission. Translating this policy commitment into practical reality will give the U.S. government and private industry a real edge in fielding advanced space capabilities.

Strengthen defense space partnerships

Streamlined U.S. jurisdiction on space issues may strengthen defense space partnerships — a critical priority in the Pentagon’s Defense Space Strategy as Russia and China remain formidable threats. The U.S. and its close partners comprise 11 of the world’s 15 largest space budgets while operating two-thirds of all active, orbiting satellites. However, with multiple U.S. agencies working on defense space, some allies are expressing frustration that their space communities don’t have a clear path to collaborating or know with whom to engage, while information classification frequently stymies collaboration.

U.S. leaders should consider involving more, and new, partners in space exercises, lowering classification levels and improving information sharing with allies. Strengthening defense space partnerships will require higher tolerance for risk and deviations from traditional practices. It is encouraging that key U.S. defense leaders want to address these barriers.
Deepen private space partnerships

The U.S. government is no longer the sole driver for space innovation. It increasingly recognizes the advantages of relying on the private space sector while focusing its own attention on fostering a healthy market. The U.S. government should prioritize commercial capabilities and contracted services, even if key capabilities may remain government-owned and operated. Continued research and development will keep the U.S. at the forefront of space activities, promote domestic businesses and encourage new innovators to enter the market.

Private space activity also presents emerging issues for which rigid regulatory frameworks may be ineffective. Space investors and innovators seek a balance between regulatory flexibility to accommodate new ideas and reasonable levels of certainty that allow for longer-term investment planning and space sustainability. Striking this balance is a priority.
Preserve investment in space

Finally, leaders should recognize how frequent policy shifts can compromise major NASA and national security space missions, which take many years to deliver the game-changing projects that draw people to space and make a difference for the nation and the world. Major shifts should be made only with serious deliberation.

Partnerships between the federal government, the private sector and the international space community have delivered significant return on investment to the American public. This collaboration can take us to amazing places — in space and here on Earth. We must accelerate and gain momentum to maintain global leadership in space.

Steve Isakowitz is president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, which operates a federally funded research and development center for the U.S. space enterprise. He previously served as president of Virgin Galactic and as space programs branch chief at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

New discovery allows early detection of shade avoidance syndrome in plants

by Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

Raman spectroscopy and the carotenoid Raman peak allows for early detection of Shade Avoidance Syndrome (SAS) in the (a) model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and (b) leafy vegetables Kai Lan and Choy Sum. Diagrams adapted from Sng et al., 2020. Plant Methods 16: 144. Credit: Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)

Researchers from the Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) of Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) have discovered a way to use Raman spectroscopy for early detection of shade avoidance syndrome (SAS) in plants. The discovery can help farmers with timely intervention against SAS, leading to better plant health and crop yield.

SAS is an adaptive response and an irreversible phenomenon, where plants reach for more light to overcome shaded conditions. It is commonly seen in plants experiencing vegetative shade, which is detrimental to plant health, as it leads to a number of issues including hindrance of leaf development, early flowering and weakening of the plant's structure and immune system.

Thus, early detection of SAS is key for sustainable agriculture and improved crop yield. However, existing methods for detection of SAS in plants are restricted to observing structural changes, making it difficult to detect SAS early.

In a paper titled "Rapid metabolite response in leaf blade and petiole as a marker for shade avoidance syndrome," published in Plant Methods, SMART DiSTAP and TLL scientists explain their new way of detecting SAS early on, allowing farmers to intervene in time to prevent the irreversible effects of SAS. The team built a tabletop Raman spectroscopy instrument that allows measurement of carotenoid levels in plants, which can indicate whether a plant has SAS.

"Our experiments with Raman spectroscopy detected a decrease in the carotenoid contents of plants that have SAS," said Dr. Gajendra Pratap Singh, co-first author of the paper and scientific director and principal investigator at DiSTAP. "While plants with longer exposure to shade developed more severe SAS, these morphological changes were only seen after one to three days. However, changes in the carotenoid peak intensities were detected much earlier, from just four hours of shade treatment."

Using Raman spectroscopy, the scientists could non-destructively measure carotenoid content in the plant leaves. They discovered its correlation to the severity of SAS and as a peak biomarker for early diagnosis. This cuts down the time taken to detect SAS from days to a matter of hours. The method can also be used to detect SAS in plants due to high-density planting and can be particularly useful to improve urban farming practices.

"We conducted our experiments on a number of edible plants, including frequently consumed Asian vegetables like Kai Lan and Choy Sum," said Benny Jian Rong Sng, the paper's co-first author and Ph.D. student from Dr. In-Cheol Jang's group at TLL and Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore. "Our results showed that Raman spectroscopy can be used to detect SAS induced by shade as well as high-density planting. Regardless of the food crop, this technology can be applied to improve agriculture and to meet the nutritional demands of today's growing populations."

Dr. In-Cheol Jang, Principal Investigator at TLL and DiSTAP, who led the project, said the novel discovery can go a long way in assisting farmers to improve urban farming practices. "We look forward to helping urban farmers achieve higher crop yields by detecting SAS within shorter time periods. By adopting scalable, precision agri-technologies like Raman spectroscopy-enabled sensors, we can better position cities like Singapore to grow more produce with less resources, while achieving desirable nutritional profiles for global food security."


Explore further

SMART discovers breakthrough way to look at the surface of nanoparticles, accelerating nano-engineering of materials
More information: Benny Jian Rong Sng et al, Rapid metabolite response in leaf blade and petiole as a marker for shade avoidance syndrome, Plant Methods (2020). DOI: 10.1186/s13007-020-00688-0
Provided by Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

Fossils show 66 million years of insects eating kauri trees

by Cleveland Museum of Natural History

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Agathis microstachya and Agathis robusta growing near Lake Barrine, Australia. 

Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Exquisitely preserved feeding marks on fossil conifer leaves show that the same insect feeding and fungi persisted for millions of years on the same type of plant, from ancient Patagonian rainforests to the modern rainforests of the tropical West Pacific.


Over 50 million years ago, rainforests teeming with life stretched across the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, including what is now South America, Antarctica and Australia. Based on fossil evidence, many plants that now live in places like Australia, New Guinea and Borneo are survivors from the Gondwanan rainforest. Fossil leaves from the Patagonian region of southern Argentina also preserve an astonishing variety of insect-feeding damage traces like those seen in modern rainforests, showing that the Gondwanan forests were also home to diverse plant-feeding insect communities. Did those ancient plant-insect communities survive the breakup of Gondwana and the dramatic range changes of the host plants, and are they still alive today?

An international group of researchers focused on fossils of Agathis, a majestic, tall conifer commonly known as kauri, comparing thousands of modern specimens from Australasia and Southeast Asia to 482 Patagonian fossils ranging in age from 66 to 48 million years, latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene. Their findings were published today (Nov. 25) in Communications Biology.

Leaf mine on a leaf of cf. Agathis from the latest Cretaceous Lefipán Formation, Chubut, Argentina. Similar blotch mines on Agathis from before and after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (when the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct) represent the first evidence of a probable surviving leaf mine association on the same plant genus during the mass extinction. Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

"We found remarkably similar suites of insect and fungal damage on fossil and living Agathis leaves over a vast span of time and space," said Dr. Michael Donovan, Senior Collections Manager of Paleobotany & Paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and lead author of the paper.

Insects have evolved many different plant-feeding strategies, and hundreds of damage types have been recognized in the fossil record. On both the fossil and modern Agathis leaves, the team found highly specialized leaf mines that insect larvae create as they tunnel through leaves, tumor-like galls, bite marks along leaf edges from hungry insects, the waxy protective armor of scale insects, and rust fungi.

Notably, the researchers found extremely similar elongated, blotchy leaf mines on Agathis at all the fossil sites and on multiple living species of the same conifer.

Leaf mine, a tunnel made by a larval insect, on a leaf of Agathis zamunerae (a conifer in the family Araucariaceae) from Laguna del Hunco, an early Eocene fossil locality in Chubut, Argentina. Similar mines were found on fossil Agathis from the latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene in Patagonia and modern species in Australasia and Southeast Asia. 

Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

"While working on a previous study on the recovery of insect feeding after the end-Cretaceous "dinosaur" extinction, I surveyed over 20,000 Patagonian and North American leaf fossils," said Dr. Donovan. "The leaf mines on Agathis are the only evidence I found for any type of leaf mine on the same host plant surviving the dinosaur extinction."


The separation of South America from Antarctica led to cooling and drying in Patagonia, and over millions of years, the high-diversity rainforest, including Agathis, disappeared from Patagonia, replaced by the grasslands and lower-diversity temperate rainforests of today. Agathis requires consistently rainy conditions to survive and must have tracked rainforest habitats throughout its history as the Earth's plates moved, leading to its current distribution in warm, wet areas from New Zealand to Malaysia.

The researchers said that the environmental tracking by Agathis as the southern continents moved into their current positions might have provided stable conditions that led to the establishment of long-term relationships between Agathis and the insects and fungi that depend on it, even as its range has shifted massively. The scientists said it is also possible that unrelated groups of insects fed upon Agathis in similar ways at different points in its history.

"I've walked in mountain rainforests of Australia and Borneo and seen exactly the same feeding patterns on living kauri trees as in 65-million-year-old fossils that we've collected in Argentina," said Dr. Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at Penn State University and a participant in the study. "It's absolutely stunning, all the more so because these communities and the threatened biodiversity and evolutionary history they represent were never noticed before, and we're documenting them first from fossils."

Explore further Iconic Australasian trees found as fossils in South America

More information: Persistent biotic interactions of a Gondwanan conifer from Cretaceous Patagonia to modern Malesia, Communications Biology (2020). 

doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01428-9

Journal information: Communications Biology

Provided by Cleveland Museum of Natural History