Climate collapse: The people who fear society is doomed

No scientific study has found that climate change is likely to wipe out civilization, but for many even the possibility is terrifying enough to upend their lives.



Rich countries like the US and Australia have seen apocalyptic images of climate change after smoke from wildfires darkened skies above big cities

When Typhoon Vamco battered the Philippines in November last year, unleashing a month's worth of rain on the capital Manila in less than 24 hours, Mitzi Jonelle Tan was on her way home from work. Her mother, scared for Tan's safety as roads flooded, warned her not to come back.

That was the last she heard from her mother for three days.

"We had no electricity, we barely had any cellular signal," said Tan, who stayed with a friend during the storm as people clambered onto rooftops to escape two-storey high floodwaters. "I had no idea if my mom was OK, if I had a home to come home to."

Like most Filipinos, Tan is no stranger to devastating cyclones — Typhoon Goni, one of the strongest storms ever recorded, barely missed Metro Manila and its 13 million residents when it made landfall just two weeks earlier. But Tan, co-founder of Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines, also carries a mental burden: She knows such storms will grow stronger as the planet heats up.

"Even today, without runaway climate change, we're already suffering," said Tan, a 22-year-old math graduate who remembers helping her parents scoop floodwater out of the house as a child and weeks of doing homework by candlelight when storms cut off electricity. "I have fears of drowning in my own bedroom when I hear another typhoon is coming."


Mitzi Jonelle Tan, pictured left, lives in the second-most dangerous country for environmental activists, according to NGO Global Witness


Citizens of the Philippines are adjusting to tropical cyclones that are growing even stronger

The emotional toll of climate change is often made worse by an existential debate riddled with misinformation: Just how much can society take before it breaks down?

Before Tan reaches the age of her mother, who is 58, sea levels will have risen so high that coastal floods that used to strike once a century will swamp Manila and dozens of other cities every single year. Wildfires that smother towns in the US and Australia with choking smoke will feast on plants dried to a crisp by hotter, longer heatwaves. At least one-quarter of the ice in the Hindu Kush Himalayas will have melted, raising tensions for 1.5 billion people who already rely on its rivers for water in three countries armed with nuclear weapons: India, China and Pakistan.

Heatwaves and drought leave dry fuel that helps wildfires spread out of control

Groups like the Deep Adaptation Forum — an online support group for 12,000 people — believe climate-fueled societal breakdown is "inevitable, likely or already unfolding." Their claims have tapped into a wider public fear that collapse is on the cards.

A YouGov poll at the start of the coronavirus pandemic found that three in 10 US adults think there will be an apocalyptic disaster within their lifetime. A separate poll of five countries in 2019 found that more than half of respondents in France, Italy, the UK and the US think civilization as they know it will collapse in years to come. In Germany that figure was slightly lower, at 39%.

Tan said she cried "night after night" upon reading reports that world leaders are likely to miss their target of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century. "For a time, I lost hope, thinking: Is everything really just impossible now?"

In February a landslide in the Himalayas that melted ice sent floods downstream that killed scores and trapped hundreds in tunnels

Will climate change cause the collapse of civilization?

Despite widespread fears, no peer-reviewed research finds that the breakdown of society or the collapse of civilization is likely, let alone inevitable. Scientists used to debunking myths from climate deniers say they must also fight off claims of collapse that hinge on distorted science.

Still, climate disasters could disrupt politics in some regions enough that "the glue that holds society together doesn't work very well anymore," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at the University of Princeton. "But that's where we're getting into the realm of things that are unpredictable."

"We know that we won't be fine, but there's a lot of space between fine and doomed," said Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of Paleoecology at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute. "That space is our greatest asset because it allows us to choose our future."

Breeding conditions for the locust swarms that ravaged farms across East Africa were made more likely by climate change

Renewable energy has grown so cheap that world leaders could cut fossil fuel emissions swiftly

'To avoid collapse, we have to talk about it'

In December, 250 people from a range of mostly academic backgrounds signed an open letter that described the collapse of civilization as a credible scenario this century. "It's not a scientific position, it's a philosophical one," said Raphael Stevens, an independent researcher who helped draft the letter. "To avoid [collapse], we have to talk about it."

Climate scientists are experts in the physical phenomena, "but who has the expertise about what those physical changes are going to cause to happen in the world?" asked Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and activist who has written a self-help book about the climate emergency.

DOOMSDAY TOURISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE: VISITING NATURAL WONDERS BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR

Transient treasure

Of the 2 million-odd people who visit the Great Barrier Reef annually, a 2016 survey found that 69 percent were coming to see the UNESCO World Heritage site "before it's too late." And no wonder. The IPCC says that even if we manage to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, 99 percent of the world's coral will be wiped out. Tourists can hasten their demise by touching or polluting reefs. PHOTOS 12345678

"The burden of proof is assumed to be with the collapsologists," said Salamon, "but I would like to see proof that 1 billion people can be refugees and not have that collapse." She was referring to a widely publicized report in September that claimed 1.2 billion people will become climate refugees by 2050.

But migration experts from three organizations told DW the report misused data by summing snapshots of internal displacement to arrive at an exaggerated figure of cross-border migration. The Institute for Economics and Peace, the think tank behind the study, quietly deleted a graph with the incorrect analysis but did not retract the estimate.

"The figure itself, to put it pretty politely, is fiction," said Sarah Nash, a political scientist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.

Cities like Karachi, Pakistan, have already been forced to adapt to increasingly extreme weather

How does the climate crisis make you feel?

The prospect of collapse has forced scientists and activists to confront a practical question: Does talking about climate change in extreme terms inspire people to act urgently or push them deep into despair?

"Doom-mongering, ironically, is one way to disengage us," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University who argues in a new book that it has overtaken denial as a threat to the climate. "If we are led to believe it's too late to do anything, then why do anything?"

Yet while hope is often held up as the best motivator of action, research has shown that anger and fear are also powerful drivers of change — if people feel they can shape their lives.

In cities like Jakarta, Indonesia, rising sea levels combine with sinking land to leave coastal communities vulnerable to floods

In March, a study in the Journal of Climate Change and Health found that people who felt angry about climate change were more likely to take part in collective action than those who felt anxious about it, and report better mental health than those who feel depressed by it. "We don't want people to be hopeful, we want people to be angry and we want people to act," said Tan.

Some people warning of collapse are "obviously channeling their anxieties into action and raising awareness, but they're not the majority of voters," added Gill, from the University of Maine, who has increasingly received emails from young people feeling hopeless, depressed and even suicidal because of alarmist claims.

"I'm not going to grieve a planet whose obituary hasn't been published yet."

CLIMATE CHANGE STRIKES WORLDWIDE — IN PICTURES

Diving in with the rest

Young activists in Berlin took a dip in the city's Spree River to demonstrate their desire for more action on climate change. Their protest took place as Germany's upper house of parliament passed a raft of measures aimed at cutting emissions. However, critics of the package said it did not go far enough.  PHOTOS 1

OUI

Should the EU help legalize cannabis farms in Morocco?

Political fights are delaying Morocco's legalization of cannabis. But, thanks to the rise of medical marijuana, the measure fits well with EU development aims and international drug policy.



Morocco's cannabis farms are illegal but tolerated by authorities

Should draft legislation clear the final hurdles in the next few weeks, Morocco could become the second Arab country to legalize cannabis. Lebanon was the first in 2020.

According to various international agencies, including the UN and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Morocco is one of the world's largest producers of cannabis and the biggest supplier of illegal by-products such as hashish that are bound for the EU. Legalizing cannabis for medical and industrial purposes could have a positive impact on around a million subsistence farmers, mostly in the north of the country.

The law has become one of the most divisive topics in the run-up to Morocco's national elections in September. It is hard to know whether the draft law will pass, Khalid Mouna, an associate anthropology professor at Moulay Ismail University in Meknes, northern Morocco, told DW. Mouna studies cannabis-grower communities. "The project is still up for debate in the first chamber and it is being weaponized by political adversaries," he said.

'Behind the government'

Cannabis legalization has been suggested before in Morocco. Mouna said that had mostly been a tactic to gain the support of voters in deprived cannabis-growing areas.

This time could be different, said Tom Blickman, a researcher on international drugs policy for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute. "I think it's serious because the initiative comes from the government, and behind the government is the palace," he said, referring to the Moroccan royal family. "Previous proposals came from the opposition."

MOROCCO PRODUCED BLONDE, RED AND PEPPER HASH

The majority of Morocco's cannabis is turned into hashish for recreational use

Morocco's current progress toward legalization began in December at a meeting of the UN's Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Austria. Morocco was the only member country from the region to vote with other nations who also wanted to reclassify cannabis. The World Health Organization has recommended that cannabis be removed from a list of dangerous drugs so that medical usage can be researched.

The UN vote, which saw the motion passed by a narrow margin, cleared the way for Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit to introduce the draft law on cannabis legalization in Parliament in April. The government has approved the bill: Now MPs must ratify it.

Green gold rush

Presenting the bill, Laftit said legalizing cannabis would help improve the lives of low-income cannabis farmers, extract them from international drug smuggling networks and lead to better environmental outcomes in areas of Morocco where the crop is traditionally grown.

Most of the country's cannabis comes from the economically depressed Rif region in the north, where farms are an open secret. But at the same time that farms are tolerated, the farmers themselves often live in poverty and fear.

Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit

The draft bill proposes a national agency for cannabis and farmers' cooperatives to regulate the sector. If cannabis were legalized, "Morocco would be ideally positioned to reap a huge influx in investment toward the infrastructure necessary to serve its lucrative market," a 2019 report by cannabis market research company New Frontier Data concluded. The researchers added that it would also allow the Moroccan growers to diversify into other cannabis-related products.

Morocco also has "a unique advantage, just being so close to the European market," John Kagia, New Frontier Data's chief knowledge officer, told DW. Cannabis from there is usually of high quality, he said.

Islamist objections

There are some serious political obstacles being placed in the way of an official cannabis industry in Morocco though. A senior member of the Moroccan Justice and Development Party (PJD), Abdelilah Benkirane, also a former prime minister, suspended his membership in the conservative, Islamist party this month. He did so because the PJD had dropped its opposition to legalizing cannabis cultivation for medical and industrial purposes. The PJD leads the current coalition government but has lost popular support during the pandemic.

BEAUTY, EH

Much of Morocco's cannabis comes from the mountainous northern Rif region

Politicians also vigorously debated which parliamentary committees would need to vet the draft bill. Critics said this was another way of prolonging its passage.

And, in April, farmers' groups in northern cannabis-producing regions announced that they also want to amend the draft law. Many say they were not adequately consulted.

For example, the legalization of cannabis farming may cause operations to set up in regions more suitable for agriculture, and farmers in the north want to restrict future growing to areas where the crop has historically been tended. It could also lower prices they get for their crops. The farmers have also called for an amnesty for the more than 40,000 people who have arrest warrants out for them because of involvement in the trade.

Alternatives to crime

Blickman said EU governments could do more to help support the legalization campaign in Morocco by emphasizing what is known as "alternative development."

Originally, "alternative development" came about because "the lack of success and the high financial and social costs of the ‘war on drugs' [caused] many countries to rethink their policies," according to an October 2020 strategy paper by Germany's Economic Cooperation and Development Ministry.

Medical products made from cannabis are increasingly popular

At first, alternative development meant finding other sources of income for farmers who had been involved in growing illicit drug crops, such as bananas, cocoa, coffee, livestock or even fish. Cannabis, for medical use, has recently become one of those alternatives.

"More and more countries, including Germany, are adopting laws to regulate the medical use," the government's strategy paper noted. "This might increase the demand for legally cultivated medical cannabis and open up development potentials in regions in which cannabis has only been grown illegally to date."

Kagia said there was a strong connection between the idea of development and the commercial market. Most of the countries that are currently trying to legalize cannabis cultivation plan to export to Europe, he said. "And without the commercial markets in Europe, cannabis as a tool for development does not work. A well-regulated medical cannabis market is going to be the principle catalyst for the industry's growth."

Toxic atmosphere

"It would be good for Europe to be more open to seeing how they can assist in setting up this industry by, for instance, importing medical cannabis from Morocco to Germany — the biggest medical cannabis market at the moment," Blickman said. "A favorable statement from countries with medicinal cannabis programs could help."

Driss Benhima, a former director of the government-run Development Agency of Northern Morocco who has led multiple studies of cannabis farming in the area and advised the government on the topic, agreed that if Europe facilitated imports, it would help his country.

Firstly, he says, it will help preserve the natural environment, "which is deeply harmed by the intensive agriculture used in the illicit cannabis production." And secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it will help in terms of what he describes as "the toxic lack of confidence between cannabis farmers and national public institutions," which has handicapped past development projects in this area.

"I hope legalization will change all of that," Benhima told DW, "and lead to decent revenues, social integration and protection of environment."

How Yemen's solar power revolution could drain the whole country of water

During the war, Yemenis have turned to solar power for homes and hospitals as well as water pumps. But new research says that too much water is being pumped and the whole country is at risk.

THEN THE PROBLEM IS THE PUMPS AND WATER PLANNING NOT SOLAR


Yemen is already one of the most water-poor countries in the world

Not much good news has come out of Yemen since the country's civil war began in late 2014. But one thing generally seen as positive has been the country's overwhelming adoption of solar power.

A paper by the Berlin-based Energy Access and Development Program (EADP) describes Yemen's move to solar power as a "revolution."

Even before the current conflict started, the country was described as "energy poor" compared to other Middle Eastern nations. Then, during the ongoing conflict, over half of the country's electricity infrastructure was damaged and official power supplies plummeted further.

At first, locals substituted this loss with their own, often-diesel-powered generators. But after fuel supplies became more difficult to access because of blockades, and diesel prices rose accordingly, many Yemenis have been forced to switch to solar power.

Solar power saves lives

According to the EADP, which focuses on access to clean and affordable energy, solar power went from being a niche product, used in just a few households in 2012, to the main source of energy for Yemeni households. From 2016 onwards, its use has rocketed: "75% of the urban population and 50% of the rural population are estimated to receive solar energy," EADP researchers concluded. That even included some communities that had never had electricity before.

Experts say Yemen is one of the best located countries in the world for solar power

The solar power revolution in Yemen has clearly saved lives — it has, for example, powered hospitals and medical clinics. It has also transformed lives. Young Yemeni women have made international headlines for setting up solar micro-grids for their own communities, a UN study suggests that solar-powered schools have reduced pupils' drop-out rates, and farmers have replaced polluting diesel generators with solar-powered pumps to irrigate crops.

Unfortunately this is where the story takes a darker turn. A report published this week by the Conflict and Environment Observatory in the UK has concluded that, while the lights may be on all over Yemen now, very soon there might be no water. And, they suspect, it is solar power that is to blame.

Water-tracking satellites

The organization, known as CEOBS, uses open source information to monitor the impact conflict has on the environment. CEOBS researchers Leonie Nimmo and Eoghan Darbyshire actually started their work in Yemen in 2019, looking at agriculture and also at groundwater — that is, water trapped underground in soil and rocks, rather than rain or river water — using satellite remote sensing.


The latest version of NASA GRACE satellite launched in 2018

To remotely sense groundwater, CEOBS used a set of satellites called GRACE, short for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, first launched by NASA in 2002. The satellites don't take pictures of waterways, instead they measure the world's water movements — things like melting ice caps and ocean levels — by measuring earth's gravity.

Whenever a mass shifts, it changes earth's gravity just a little. When there's less groundwater, there's also less mass. The GRACE satellites are affected by earth's gravity while in orbit so when gravity changes, they move a little. The satellites register this movement and relay that back to scientists on earth, who convert the data to track changes in water.

Dangerously low water levels

The CEOBS researchers were using satellite remote sensing when they discovered that groundwater in western Yemen was at its lowest level since satellite records started in 2002. It was only later that they concluded that the increased availability of solar power was probably playing a big part in those worryingly low levels.

As one of the most water-poor countries on earth, Yemenis are heavily dependent on groundwater. When people there were using diesel-powered pumps to get water out of the ground, fuel was expensive, so the pumps couldn't be run for so long. This led to reductions in crops and played a part in the current famine.

Agricultural irrigation using solar pumps has depleted water resources in Yemen

However solar-powered water pumps can keep running as long as the sun shines and, once set up, they're almost free. This was better for agriculture, emissions and the environment, but far worse for groundwater levels.
Groundwater may run out

Nimmo and Darbyshire told DW that they came to this conclusion because of several factors. Firstly, rainfall was above average yet groundwater was still going down. "That's the opposite of what you might expect," Darbyshire said.

Secondly, there had been huge growth in use of solar panels in the country. And thirdly, statistics from Yemen officials suggested that, in 2019, there was a large increase in local agriculture after a serious decrease due to the war. The assumption was that people were watering their crops more.

The increase in solar-powered pumping is "where all the evidence was pointing," Nimmo told DW. Both researchers are certain of their findings. But they also say that to absolutely confirm their hypothesis, more research and more testing inside the country is needed, even if this is difficult because of the current conflict.

Yemenis are heavily depedent on water stored in the ground

For one thing, they say, it's hard to know when the groundwater supplies will run out or become inaccessible.

Out of control

Past experience suggests that their theory makes sense, confirmed Hans Hartung, a German expert on water and energy who has consulted on this topic for governments around the world for over 30 years. In particular, this aspect of solar power has been getting more attention recently, he told DW.

Hartung authored a 2018 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization on the topic and he believes we will hear more about problems with solar-powered water pumps in the near future.

For one thing, solar power technology used to be too expensive, Hartung explained. "It's only in the last four or five years that it's become more widely available," he said. And for another, climate change has meant less rain, which means more people are being forced to use groundwater for irrigation and they need to pump this out of the ground.

Hartung himself has recently been evaluating Tunisian water resources. "There, [authorities] are very worried because they're seeing more illegal wells and more people using solar powered irrigation," he noted. "If somebody is connected to the electricity grid, then you can, for example, restrict the power supply in order to avoid excessive irrigation. But with solar power, you don't have any control anymore."
Move or die

Hartung notes that some governments and aid organizations have focused on solar power without considering the potential disadvantages. "It's important to install solar power where it makes sense," Hartung argues.

Experts say more attention needs to be paid to traditional ways of irrigation in Yemen

Solar power isn't the problem, added Neno Kukuric, a hydrogeologist and director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center, based in the Netherlands. "The main issue is enforcement," he told DW. As his organization's online briefing on solar-powered pumps warns, "it is crucial to have clear regulations and effective monitoring of groundwater. Without a proper groundwater monitoring network it is not possible to control pumping."

All the experts DW talked with warned that the situation in Yemen is precarious. "If Yemen runs out of groundwater, they have to move," Kukuric puts it blankly. "Or they're going to die. It's as simple as that."

"But we don't want to come across as though we are against the deployment of solar power," CEOBS' Nimmo concludes. "We recognize that it's absolutely critical and the Yemeni people need it. The goal is to make water use more sustainable," she argues. "We are just calling for more expertise to be directed at the subject."

 WAIT, WHAT?

German project helps refugees find work in Mexico

Many people flee South and Central America to get to the US, but some are forced to stay in Mexico. A German woman has set up an organization to help them find work.

    

Hannah Töpler founded Intrare to help refugees find jobs

Leydis Mirelis Delgado, a 41-year-old Venezuelan mother of two, is particularly grateful to one German woman, Hannah Töpler, for having been able to settle in Mexico. She is also pleased that she happened to be in the right place last year when she found out that there was an organization called Intrare that might help her find work.

She had run a cyber-café in the Venezuelan city of Maracay for many years and knew about people and business, so she had the right profile for a Mexican company that was looking for customer services personnel.

She became the first Venezuelan woman to be employed by the firm and now earns enough money for herself and her children. She can also send something to her family back in Venezuela each month.

'Light at the end of the tunnel'

"Hannah Töpler and the Intrare team helped me so much," she told DW. "They were the light at the end of the tunnel." 

Intrare is short for "Incubadora de trabajo para Refugiados y Retornados" (incubator for refugees and returnees). Töpler, who needed weeks to figure out Mexico's laws and regulations before setting up Intrare, came up with the name over breakfast with friends. "Many of them thought that I was completely crazy spending so many nights and weekends building up Intrare," she said. "They thought I was a super nerd and a workaholic."

She had done a Master's in political science in London before finding a job in Mexico with the non-profit group Oxfam. Mexico is a transit country for hundreds of people who set off daily for El Norte, northern America. But many fail to get across the border. Even if they do, it's not easy to remain in the US. In March alone, the US authorities arrested 171,000 refugees and sent them back to Mexico.

"There is far too much concentration on refugees integrating," Töpler told DW. "Hardly anybody is asking how society can be actively supported to be more open, to develop acceptance," said Töpler. "So, I said to myself, I want to at least try to solve this."

Leydis Delgado says she feels "one third Mexican already"

Right now, Intrare is still a small organization that connects refugees with potential employers but Töpler has ambitious plans. In two years, the organization has already helped almost 50 people to find jobs. "It's a win-win solution," said Töpler. "While many people think that refugees are taking jobs away from the locals and are criminals, more and more companies want to work with us." 

German dual system

The project works according to a dual system set up to help refugees integrate in Germany. Special education and vocational programs prepare them for the workplace, with priority being given to teamwork, communication, problem-solving skills and personal development.

Intrare has also set up a system of mentors for the refugees. Otherwise, the organization, which receives support from GIZ, the German Agency for International Cooperation, and the International Organization for Migration, works as a mediator, forwarding the refugees' job applications to companies.

Particpants who trained with Intrare in Mexico

Melina Cruz, who fulfilled a dream when she set up her own company, did not hesitate when she was approached by Intrare. Her cleaning firm Homely has just turned five and she is particularly pleased about this because two out of three Mexican firms go out of business before making it this far.

"With us it doesn't matter how old you are, what gender you are or whether you're a refugee. What's important is that our staff members are able to become financially independent. And it makes sense to work with a start-up like Intrare because they have a social focus just like we do."

More Mexican companies joining

Homely pays its workforce more than the normal rate and provides health insurance. The company now operates in five cities, providing cleaning staff to private individuals and businesses, and employs over 800 people, including two refugees who got the job via Intrare.

Melina Cruz's Homely company is one of a growing number of Mexican firms joining Intrare

Cruz hopes that other company heads will follow her example and give jobs to refugees. "It's very strange that we Mexicans, who are subject to discrimination in other countries, are not accepting refugees, who just like us are looking for a better life for themselves and their families."

Such thoughts reassure Töpler that she's doing the right thing. "When refugees tell me that they've been given a contract and feel part of a team, it's a special moment. They've lived through so much and it's very important for me to know that they have a feeling of having made it at last."

Intrare is currently working on a digital and automated platform, which will connect refugees and companies even faster. It will work with matching algorithms, like a dating platform.

And Töpler is dreaming big: "I don't want to work with dozens of refugees and companies per year but with thousands. And to really help make Mexico a more open society."

'The future sucks': why the work you love won’t love you back

Capitalism is making life worse for workers yet demanding more dedication than ever. Sarah Jaffe argues that there’s another way to live

Natalia Savelyeva
30 April 2021,

OPEN DEMOCRACY HOME PAGE

OURECONOMY: INTERVIEW

Sarah Jaffe’s book encourages us to wake up from our capitalist trance |

Twenty years into the 21st century, most people in the west want to have a job that they love. And, vice versa, we expect that this love – our inspiration, devotion and care – will provide us with deep fulfillment, even satisfaction with who we are as individuals and how we lead our lives.

Yet very often the opposite happens: the “love what you do” principle supports the exploitation and devaluation of labour, as well as cutting back on social protection and welfare guarantees. You can love your work, but as US labour journalist Sarah Jaffe reminds us in her new book, it won’t love you back.

In Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, Jaffe draws on her deep experience reporting on workplace organising in the US to explore why love is not a necessary component of our jobs, how the whole idea of the “labour of love” brought us to the edge of global crises, and how we can change it for the better – by fighting for our rights as workers, and changing how our societies are organised socially, politically and economically.

What led you to problematise the way that some people love their jobs in your book, ‘Work Won’t Love You Back’?

I had crappy job experiences in all sorts of ways. In my first book, ‘Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt’, I wrote about workers – teachers, fast food workers – who were taking action at last. These stories often circled around care work and service work. And so I found myself thinking: “What is it about this idea that we should care about our job? Where did that actually come from?” In teaching and caring work, the expectation that you would care about that job is very clear – and it makes sense in a certain way. Whereas the idea that you would care very much about being a computer programmer might seem a little more strange. It became something that everybody takes for granted.

I recently read an article from 1981 about workaholics, and how this was a new problem. It’s about how everybody would just assume it is normal being a workaholic, loving your job, being there at all hours, being unhappy when you’re not at work. In 1981, this was so weird that people were calling it akin to being an alcoholic. And now we just expect everybody to be a workaholic. This is a thing that has a historical trajectory, it’s a story of change, and one that has an affect on millions of people’s experiences of their lives.

You start each chapter of ‘Work Won’t Love You Back’ with a story of a particular person who faces difficulties at the workplace, and then you go into the historical and social context of those occupations and show how we came to be where we are now. But the end of each of your stories is about empowerment. Why did you structure your chapters in this way?

Partly this is what I do as a journalist, it’s my beat: I cover labour struggles. But I also knew that people were going to ask: now that I am suggesting that loving your job is bad, what are we going to do about it? And the answer is embedded in the narrative of the book. Here’s what Anne-Marie [a worker at Toys R Us] did after she gave a place 30 years and then suddenly it was closing down and no one was getting any severance pay, and she was getting absolutely nothing. She went online, and got involved in this organic organising. It is really hard to be an organised worker in a workplace that’s closing. You can strike to get the place closed, but not to keep it open. So these workers at Toys R Us had to figure out: where can we have power? And how can we do anything about this?

There are a variety of things you can do, but they are all going to require collaborating, throwing up your hands and deciding to quit and get another job. And that’s what the labour of love discourse encourages us to do: to believe that if you have a problem at your workplace, the problem is you. You either should try harder to love it or you should just get another job that’s maybe a better fit. It’s like dating, right? Oh well, I went on a date with this person, it didn’t work out, so I’m gonna go find somebody that fits better. But it’s a workplace, it’s a little different.

I wanted to make sure that each chapter brings it back to what people are doing collectively, to point out that this isn’t an individual problem, and therefore doesn’t have an individual solution.

How did it happen that some people who initially couldn’t imagine themselves taking part in political action changed their mind later and got involved?

It depends. Some of these people had grown up in families of activists and they knew they would be activists too, whereas others had never thought of themselves in this way. Everybody gets there in a different way.

‘Necessary Trouble’ is about social movements in the US after the financial crisis – people who showed civil disobedience and got arrested, people who took part in confrontations that they never maybe thought they would have. It gets to a point when people take a risk, and once they’ve done it and realise that they can do it, it’s this huge confidence boost that changes you for life.

I don’t want to say that it’s always magical and good, but it is fascinating to see people who say: “Wow, this really changed the way I see the world”, after taking a risk.

Is “love what you do” more of an innovation, or has “love” always been present in work? Or maybe there’s something in between?

There are certain spheres of work – like women’s unpaid work and art – which for a long time we have assumed would be done out of love, passion and care. Teaching, and other jobs, were also considered outside of “real work”. And the fact that those jobs were not considered work means that the work ethic is not constructed around these kinds of work. In the US, this is one of the reasons why entire fields of work are just left out of labour protections, because they’re not really considered work. And that what happens as deindustrialisation kicks in.

‘Why Work Won’t Love You Back’ is mostly written and reported in the US, Canada and western Europe. As the factories are going away, shrinking, outsourced, the care and service sector rises in response. This is a shift from an economy focused on men’s manufacturing labour, which we had conceived of as work with all the good and the bad it entails, to care work, which should be made of love and not for money, because it’s not really work.

The same thing is happening with creative work. Instead of journalism, for instance, being considered a public service – that is, every town has a newspaper, and local journalists are going to be from that town, and they’re going to report on it, and they’re going to write about national politics through the lens of their local paper – it’s now people like me working in magazines, which are essentially luxury products.

The conditions in the industry have changed appropriately. This is what broadly I think happened. The changes in the work ethic come from changes in the shape of capitalism. Happiness at work starts to be a sort of necessary thing we should believe in. All of this is just pasting a happy mask on neoliberal capitalism, which is just getting shittier for most people actually.

As it’s getting worse, the pressure to like it increases. It is broadly agreed, for example, that Amazon is a terrible place to work, both for white collar and blue collar workers. There’s none of the Google and Facebook stuff that tries to make work fun and exciting. Amazon is just straight up: “It sucks to work here and you should like it anyway.” I hope it is the end, the zenith of the labour of love that Amazon is saying: “We are going to make you piss in bottles and like it.” This is the S&M version of the labour of love.

Is ‘loving what you do’ a privilege then? At least you do something that you like and that interests you.

In comparison with somebody who is working in a garment factory in Bangladesh that might collapse on you at any moment, it is pretty damn good, absolutely. I don’t want to go back to waiting tables, which I did for eight years before I became a journalist. And I don’t want to go work in an Amazon factory or an Amazon warehouse either. Nor would I want to go work in Amazon’s white collar offices, because those sound like hell.

The point is to get people to think about work in a way that doesn’t require us to love it. If we predicate our analysis of improving work on getting people into jobs they love, there is always going to be work that sucks, but which still needs to be done.

What are the things we could do to make work better? No matter what you’re doing, no matter whether you love it or not, there are things that people need and want that broadly make work happier: more autonomy, the ability to chat with the person next to you while you’re on the assembly line or while you’re picking up things in Amazon, and not get yelled at for it. Any of these things we can think of without needing to resort to, like, “Oh well, just get a job you like better”, because Amazon owns half the world, so just telling everybody to quit is not going to solve the problem.

We can set goals for work that aren’t based on making people love it, but are based on giving people fundamental rights and dignity and the ability to say “no”. The ‘love your job’ concept obscures the fact that work is not inherently lovable and people don’t work in order to find excitement and passion. People work because we’ve got to, and we usually try to find the least miserable way to do it, but that’s not always possible. So how do we make it less miserable for everyone?

We are not going to solve that problem by feeling bad because we have privilege. We solve that by taking solidarity seriously and understanding the ways that we are all exploited in their specificity, but also in the broad, general sense of creating value for capital – and maybe we should stop.

But there still will be jobs we love and jobs we don’t love.

There is a tension, a dialectic that we have to struggle with. We could imagine a world where the crappy work is distributed. What if instead of my job being to clean toilets every day my job is to clean toilets once a month and everybody has a toilet cleaning shift once a month? Rather than some subset of people just being sentenced to life doing crappy work we can actually divide it so that everybody gets a chance to do the crappy work – because everybody should. And then other work, some of which no longer needs to be work.


Right now we live in a world that’s designed to create value for capital. What if we didn’t?


Part of the challenge is that everything has been captured by a ‘job’. If you want to write a novel, you have to find a way to make it pay or find some other way to make a living and do it on the side. I’m obsessed with the community art centres from the New Deal period [during the 1930s Great Depression in the US]. They were in every neighbourhood, and that meant everybody could make art. You didn’t have to be Jackson Pollock and get paid for it in order for it to be accessible to everybody.

Instead of the art world being a thing where a handful of very lucky people get to make a living at it, and a handful of other people get to do really crappy, exploited jobs, but are still creative in some way, and then millions of other people are just locked out of it entirely, what if we distribute that differently too so you can have access to it and it doesn’t need to be your job?

Right now we live in a world that’s designed to create value for capital. What if we didn’t? What if we lived in a world that was designed to actually make people happy?

Here we are coming back to this is a global question: how can we change it?

That’s the challenge. It can definitely get worse, but the fact that it will change is not really up for debate. So the question that we have to contest is, in what direction should it change and for who? And that’s where talking about international solidarity matters. That’s where talking about all of these different types of work, and the way that people are in contact with each other around them, matters.

The main characters in your book are all women, except one man, a programmer. Why is your book predominantly about women?

I didn’t really do it on purpose – although at some point, I just decided to commit to it. The gender character of all of this labour is bullshit. There are plenty of men who are perfectly capable of doing caring labour. And there are plenty of women in programming, although not as many as we would like. What I’m talking about is a change in the workplace that has largely happened as women went into paid work, so in that sense it is a story about women.

All the people in your book were told at some point: ‘What you do is not a real job, so why do you want it to be paid? Why do you want your rights to be protected?’ I’m wondering how this devaluation connects to ‘loving what you do’ and the gendered nature of the jobs you describe.

This devaluation is the characteristic of women’s work, right? It’s this tautology: we are women because we care and we care because we are women. Women’s jobs are paid less because they are women’s jobs. When large numbers of women move into a sector, its wages go down; when large numbers of men move into a field, wages go up. Even in fields like nursing where it’s still 90% women, male nurses get paid more. The devaluation goes way back to the designation of women as the people who would be doing jobs in the home that we aren’t going to call “work”. But it is work, and should be valued as such – and not treated as though it’s just some natural thing that comes very easily to women, because it doesn’t.

How do you see the future of labour of love?

Hopefully we can destroy it. I feel like this book came out at the right time. Over the last year, workers in the non-profit, journalism, art and museum sectors, have been organising like crazy. So in a lot of these different places where we see this narrative about loving work deployed really intensely, there’s more and more pushback from workers. I think that it is reaching a point where it’s become clear to people that work sucks, that it continues to suck, even if you get your supposed dream job. And that it’s not going to get better by quitting one job and going to the next – it has to get better on the broader, political level.

Even before COVID-19, work was getting worse. In the last year we have seen massive long-term unemployment rise in the US – and when there are more people out of work, your boss can always tell you, “Well, if you don’t like it, you can stick it and we’ll hire somebody else”. Work is going to keep getting worse until we stop letting it get worse.

The future is coming closer and closer.

My friend has a series of tweets where he just posts “the future sucks” with some article about technology. I feel that a lot these days. All of these things that we were promised, they’re not here – or if they’re here, they suck. We’re probably still doomed, but maybe things will get better?

Miners out, COVID out: Brazil’s Yanomami fight back


The Yanomami people in the Brazilian Amazon have been fighting the plague of extractivism for decades. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit

Maurício Ye’kwana
30 April 2021

Yanomami paint themselves to face illegal miners |
Maurício Ye'kuana


It is 1975. A devastating epidemic has hit the state of Roraima, in northern Brazil. It is the plague of extractivism. The first garimpeiros, small scale miners in search of gold or precious stones in the Amazon, have arrived. About 500 of them begin to climb the Serra dos Surucucus uplands. In 1980, another 2,000 enter the territory of the Yanomami indigenous people via the Uraricuera River. The epidemic rages and the garimpeiros bring other ills, not least unheard diseases like measles and malaria, which wiped out many Yanomami.

They found lots and lots of gold on our land during those years. By the time we realized what was happening, 150 airplanes were flying daily into Yanomami territory from Boa Vista to transport miners back and forth. It is a measure of the number of gold miners headed for our home that Boa Vista airport became one of the busiest in Brazil.

In 1987, Romero Jucá, president of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), a government agency, arrived in Yanomami territory. Jucá signed an agreement with an Indigenous member of another group, not a Yanomani, that allowed miners in and the moment – in which he affirms that it is necessary to bring progress to the Indigenous peoples to “maintain the family” – was recorded on video. But the wishes expressed by Jucá and the Indigenous person from another ethnic group, who came from far away to tell us he was our representative, were not the same as ours. They were not the same and never will be.

A gold rush ensued between 1987 and 1990. Miners flooded in; the air traffic increased even more. The famous garimpeiro statue in the center of Boa Vista, capital of Roraima state, is a symbol of the importance of mining in the Amazonian economy. For us, a miner should never symbolize the state when we have real natural wealth here, such as Mount Roraima.

More than a fifth of the Yanomami people died from the diseases brought to their villages by the miners in the late 1980s. According to some estimates, for every 10,000 to 15,000 Yanomami, there were roughly 40,000 miners on our land.
Garimpos out, COVID out

Davi Kopenawa, our most forceful leader so far, has led the opposition to the mining. He left his village to talk to the authorities, denouncing the influx of miners and the perilous situation of the Yanomami, who were dying. The government's response was that it lacked the resources to help.

With help from a non-governmental organization, Kopenawa held protests at the United Nations (UN) and Brazilian embassies around the world. A letter from the Yanomami people, with more than 150,000 signatures, was delivered to the UN. It asked for our Indigenous territory to be demarcated as a protected area.

A UN campaign followed. Today, there are more than 400,000 signatures on the ‘Fora Garimpo, Fora Covid’ (Illegal miners out, COVID out) petition. We want non-Indigenous people to recognize the importance of our struggle for survival.

Monday 25 May 1992 marks an important chapter in the history of our struggle for our land. On that day, the Yanomami Indigenous Territory was demarcated by Brazil’s then president, Fernando Collor. Until then, our land had been reduced to 19 ‘islands’, while the rest was government-run parks and forests, where miners could free rein.

But the following year was marked by the Haximu massacre, which we consider the beginning of the genocide of the Yanomami people. The miners hired 17 Yanomami to do the heavy lifting for a few days. All but one were shot dead. The survivor was shot in the leg but managed to escape. It is thanks to him that we know the story today.

1993 was marked by the Haximu massacre, which we consider the beginning of the genocide of the Yanomami people

The Yanomami found the miners' camp abandoned and the bodies of their people. The international support we received at the time and the reaction to the massacre put pressure on the federal police to investigate mining in the Yanomami Indigenous territory. Fast forward to 2020. The first case of COVID-19 in the Yanomami territory occurred because of the miners. The miners have not stopped exploiting the deposits of gold, tin and diamonds, even during the pandemic, thanks to easy access by the river to the state’s Waikas region.

A young member of the Ye'kwana Indigenous community, which lives near the Yanomami, contracted coronavirus in the mining region and transmitted it to his people. That is how COVID-19 began to spread in our territory.
Sanöma Babies

We also face a new tragic problem: newborn babies are dying among the Sanöma, a subgroup of the Yanomami people in the Auaris region. When the women were taken to Boa Vista, the capital, with pneumonia, their babies reportedly became infected with coronavirus in hospital, died and their bodies literally disappeared.

What happened with the Sanöma babies shows the indignity to which Indigenous peoples are subjected. The lack of respect for the death of our people, on the part of the authorities, reflects how we are treated while alive.

The victims say it is a form of genocide. One of the newborns reportedly died from complications unrelated to COVID-19, but the medical report points to acute pneumonia, one of the main symptoms of the disease.

Another victim of the coronavirus epidemic was Davi Kopenawa himself. As a child, Kopenawa had already seen his people die from two infectious diseases brought by non-Indigenous people and illegal miners: influenza in 1959 and measles in 1967.

We are counting on international mobilization of support from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people

Kopenawa was one of those who brought about the 1992 demarcation of the Yanomami Indigenous territory and in 1988 he received the United Nations Global 500 environmental award. In 2010, his book, ‘The Falling Sky’ (“A Queda do Céu”) which he wrote with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, was published in France. The shamanic manifesto, which denounces the destruction of the forest and its people, has autobiographical elements. It was published in Brazil in 2015.
The fight against mining liberalization

Today, almost 60% of the Yanomami territory is affected by legal requirements from miners, in both Roraima and Amazonas states. In February 2020, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro asked the Brazilian legislature to liberalize mining on Indigenous lands. The governor of Roraima state supports this. The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, which represents all Indigenous peoples in the country, has spoken out against it.

Some Indigenous leaders, mostly of different ethnic groups, declare themselves in favor of mining. They include some Yanomami, who claim to be leaders but barely speak Portuguese. One of them, who went to Brasilia to meet with President Bolsonaro’s administration, told me that he did not even know what he was going to say and that the other Indigenous people had forced him to express support for mining. He apologized to the Yanomami when he came back to our territory.

The Yanomami face threats now and in the future from local businessmen, politicians, and because the FUNAI has been weakened. Some of the Yanomami themselves are being co-opted.

We are counting on international mobilization of support from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Three decades ago, we achieved an enormous win by securing the demarcation of our indigenous land. It gives me hope for the Fora Garimpo, Fora Covid campaign.

We want our struggle for life to be recognized by the world. We want non-Indigenous people to know and recognize Indigenous peoples for who we are. Our aim is to defend our home, our territory; our mother, the earth. And no one sells his own mother.

Boris Johnson's government has been accused of 'Trump-like' tactics in withdrawing aid funding for vulnerable womengirls

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PAImages / Alamy S

UK accused of ‘Trump tactics’ after ‘devastating’ £131m cut to family planning aid

Millions of the world’s poorest women and girls will ‘pay the price’ of the UK government reneging on its commitments, say aid workers

Kerry Cullinan

30 April 2021,

The UK government has been accused of “using tactics reminiscent of the Trump era” after cutting millions in aid for family planning.

Boris Johnson’s government is set to slash its commitment to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) by 85% – from an expected contribution of £154m to just £23m – in an enormous blow for women and girls in the poorest countries where health services have already been decimated by COVID-19.

News of the cuts, which were announced earlier this week, has left aid leaders seething. “By breaking its manifesto commitments with tactics reminiscent of the Trump era, the UK government will undo years of progress and investment,” Alvaro Bermejo, the director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

The IPPF said the loss of funding represents “one of the most significant funding losses for IPPF since 2017 when former US President Donald Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule”, a policy that blocked US federal funding for non-governmental organisations providing abortion advice, counselling or referrals.

The IPPF, the UNPFA’s lead partner in providing family planning services, is set to lose out on £72m ($100m) as a result of the UK’s actions. Bermejo added this was “just another example of the UK government stepping back when it is needed most”.

Without additional funding, IPPF says it will be forced to close services in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Côte D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Uganda, Mozambique, Nepal and Lebanon, while services in an additional nine countries are under threat.

Will force many girls out of school and contribute to rises in unintended pregnancies, maternal deaths and unsafe abortions

An internal memorandum sent to UNFPA staff, which openDemocracy has seen, says that no staff cuts are expected yet – but insiders say this will be hard to avoid.

However, agency partners contracted to deliver services will be less fortunate. IPPF will have to cut at least 480 staff over the next 90 days.

Manuelle Hurwitz, IPPF’s director of programme delivery and capacity, warned that “millions of the world's most vulnerable women and girls in some of the poorest and most marginalized communities will pay the price” for the UK government’s decision.

“The fallout will force many girls out of school before they are even 16 and further contribute to an increase in unintended pregnancies, a rise in maternal deaths and an increase in unsafe abortions,” said Hurwitz.

The UK’s contribution would have prevented “around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions,” according to UNFPA director Natalia Kanem.

Kanem described the UK’s “retreat from agreed commitments” as “devastating for women and girls and their families across the world”.

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Unnecessary deaths

Rose Caldwell, CEO of Plan International UK, the global children’s charity described the decision as “shameful”, and would “result in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands more women and girls during pregnancy and childbirth”.

“For decades, the UK has fought for the fundamental rights of women and girls to have control over their own bodies, and now is not the time to renege on our commitments,” said Caldwell.

“COVID-19 is fuelling a hidden pandemic of gender-based violence and we are likely to see a steep rise in early and unwanted pregnancies. This is already a leading cause of death for adolescent girls around the world, as well as one of the main reasons why girls drop out of school early.”

Urging the UK government to “come to its senses and reinstate funding for these vital services”, Caldwell added that “this is not the ‘Global Britain’ we want the world to see”.

Just because there is a global pandemic, women's needs don't suddenly stop

Another programme set to lose out is WISH (Women's Integrated Sexual Health), which delivers life-saving contraception and sexual and reproductive health services for women and girls in some of the world's poorest and most marginalized communities.

Since its launch in October 2018, WISH has prevented an estimated 11.7 million unintended pregnancies, 4.3 million unsafe abortions and 34,000 maternal deaths, according to IPPF.

Luka Nkhoma, WISH programme project director in Zambia, said she is “scared for the futures” of the girls and women in the country who will no longer have access to contraception. By the age of 19, almost 60% of Zambian girls have fallen pregnant – mostly because of lack of health services in rural communities.

"When WISH came along, we helped expand much-needed contraception and sexual health services in [rural] areas, including services for youth with integrated HIV support, treatment for sexually transmitted infections and cervical cancer screening,” said Nkhoma.

"For many women, it was their first time using contraception and the first time they've ever had complete control over their bodies and fertility. WISH also helps girls stay in school to finish their education, giving them control over their futures.”

When WISH closes, the community outreach in rural areas will end and the only way women will get contraception is by making long, costly trips to clinics.

“I don't know what these women and girls will do. Just because there is a global pandemic, women's needs don't suddenly stop, and if they can't access safe services, an unsafe abortion might be the only option," said Nkhoma.

The UK is reportedly also cutting its contribution to UNAIDS, the UN’s HIV/AIDS programme by 80%, from £15m to £2.5m this year.

“These cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time for the HIV pandemic. AIDS remains the number one killer of women of reproductive age and 1.7 million people acquired HIV in 2019,” said STOPAIDS, a UK network of agencies working to end HIV globally.

A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesperson told openDemocracy: “The seismic impact of the pandemic on the UK economy has forced us to take tough but necessary decisions, including temporarily reducing the overall amount we spend on aid.

“We will still spend more than £10bn this year to fight poverty, tackle climate change and improve global health. We are working with suppliers and partners on what this means for individual programmes.”