Decolonizing ecology? How to adopt practices that make science more equitable

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Research News

 

IMAGE: FIVE INTERVENTIONS TO BUILD A MORE ANTI-OPPRESSIVE AND DECOLONIAL ECOLOGY. view more 

CREDIT: KEREN COOPER

Knowledge systems outside of those sanctioned by Western universities have often been marginalised or simply not engaged with in many science disciplines, but there are multiple examples where Western scientists have claimed discoveries for knowledge that resident experts already knew and shared. This demonstrates not a lack of knowledge itself but rather that, for many scientists raised in Western society, little education concerning histories of systemic oppression has been by design. Western scientific knowledge has also been used to justify social and environmental control, including dispossessing colonised people of their land and ways of life and discounting existing knowledge systems.

But how can those in the ecological discipline slowly begin to practise ecology in a more creative, reflective, equitable and inclusive way? According to a new paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution there are five interventions to build a more anti-oppressive and decolonial ecology:

• Decolonise your mind to include multiple ways of knowing and communicating science;

• Know your histories to acknowledge the role research has played in enabling colonial and ongoing violence against peoples and nature, and begin processes of restorative justice;

• Decolonise access by going beyond Open Access journals and data repositories to address issues of data sovereignty and the power dynamics of research ownership;

• Decolonise expertise by amplifying diverse expertise in ecologies from local experts and giving due credit and weight to that knowledge; and

• Practice ethical ecology in inclusive teams by establishing diverse and inclusive research teams that actively deconstruct biases so all team members are empowered participants in developing new knowledge.

"These actions are not offered as a checklist capable of undoing unjust systems worldwide, nor to overshadow long histories of place-based anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle, but as connection points to action for practising ecologists," said Dr Chris Trisos, from the Africa Climate and Development Initiative based at the University of Cape Town and co-author of the paper Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology.

"Because settler-colonial processes have increased vulnerability of people and other species by displacing them into unfamiliar or lower quality landscapes, the concept of ecological vulnerability to environmental change intersects with environmental justice," he added.

Co-author Dr Jess Auerbach from the Department of Anthropology at North-West University shared that access to scholarly literature and data resources is a global issue. Data and research papers are often locked behind a paywall or housed in servers and museums in the Global North even when the data collected was from the Global South. "This makes it inaccessible to scholars from under-resourced institutions who are often compelled to use pirate websites to read scientific publications. Publishing only open access resources is part of the solution but the issues run much deeper and consideration must be given to where data repositories are held, who holds the right to this data and what is needed to access it," she said.

One area the researchers highlight is the use of English as the dominant form of knowledge communication in science which can lead to publication bias against non-native English-speaking scientists. When one reads, writes and thinks in English, it is easy to forget that for the majority of people ecological knowledge is produced and tested in other tongues. It is ironic that in many ecology departments, knowing Latin names of species is met with admiration, whereas speaking living languages of sites of data origination is a 'nice to-have' skill.

Ecological scholarship must thus develop methods to include multiple languages in evidence synthesis and could require that scholars gain fluency in relevant languages as an essential entry point for understanding rich bodies of local knowledge on ecosystems and cultivating a more inclusive way of knowing and studying ecology. More inclusive teams are also needed to lead these projects and actively deconstruct biases. Diverse teams that include and amplify the voices of indigenous communities result in more innovative and effective problem solving and richer datasets.

CAPTION

Map showing the minimum estimate for each country of the number of bird species for which the Latin binomial name is based on a European person. Hundreds of bird species have been named after European surnames, with most of these species occurring outside Europe in formerly colonized countries.

CREDIT

Keren Cooper

Co-author Associate Professor Madhu Katti from North Carolina State University in the USA shared an example: "The Amazon Conservation Team works with Indigenous communities in several South American countries in participatory projects to promote self-governance and biodiversity conservation. They have developed a methodology of collaborative cultural mapping by providing technology such as mobile phones and apps to Indigenous communities. The Kogi people, among the last surviving civilizations from the pre-Columbian period started using a mobile phone app to create geo-referenced maps of their land within the framework of their own cultural knowledge, resulting in a richer dataset than a parachuting Western ecologist or conservationist might be able to gather.

"Analysis of change in social-ecological systems must consider the impacts of colonial histories and offer solutions in a decolonial framework. More opportunities for historically marginalized groups to set research agendas is an important way of redressing ongoing power imbalances," he added.

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Access the paper: Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology

To unpack colonial influence on ecology, researchers propose five strategies

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

Ecology, the field of biology devoted to the study of organisms and their natural environments, needs to account for the historical legacy of colonialism that has shaped people and the natural world, researchers argued in a new perspective in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

To make ecology more inclusive of the world's diverse people and cultures living in diverse ecosystems, researchers from University of Cape Town, North West University in South Africa and North Carolina State University proposed five strategies to untangle the impacts of colonialism on research and thinking in the field today.

"There are significant biases in our understanding of ecology and ecosystems because of this colonial framework of thinking," said perspective co-author Madhusudan Katti, associate professor for leadership in public science, and forestry and environmental resources at NC State. "We are challenging ecologists to understand and address the legacies of colonialism, and to start engaging in an active process of 'decolonizing science.'"

The researchers described emerging research documenting impacts of European colonialism - the migration, settlement and exploitation of the Americas, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world by people from Europe - on people and the natural world, and on ecology.

Katti said examples of how ecological research reflects the impact of colonialism include patterns of vegetation in cities that reflect patterns of racial segregation and discrimination, or in the use of names of prominent European scientists or their patrons in the scientific names for bird species and other organisms rather than names used by Indigenous people.

"Indigenous names are often based on observations of behavior or ecology, or represent cultural significance of species, but that traditional ecological knowledge is lost when names are changed," Katti said. "This is bad for both the colonized people and the science of ecology itself."

The researchers challenged the field to address colonial legacies using five strategies:

* Decolonize the mind. Researchers said this should be done by understanding other knowledge systems from colonized cultures.

* Know your history, or understand the history of colonialism in influencing Western ecology, and its role in promoting oppression of other people and in shaping the environment. "Ecology is about organisms living in their ecosystems - that's what we study," Katti said. "If you want to study ecology, that includes people. To understand how people shape ecosystems, we have to understand how political power works. Western ecologists have to acknowledge how science has been aligned with colonial power, and how it has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression that continue to this day."

* Decolonize information. They suggest this should be done by increasing access to academic information, and understanding power dynamics in the way data is owned and disseminated.

* Decolonize expertise by recognizing more diverse voices in the field of ecology.

* Establish diverse and inclusive teams to help overcome biases in future research. "The world is enriched by diverse perspectives," Katti said. "We need scientific teams where everybody is equally empowered to set a robust research agenda, and ensure more robust testing of these ideas. If the person with a different hypothesis is not in the room, then you're never challenged to test and prove their hypothesis, and you're subject to your own bias."

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The perspective, "Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology," was published online in Nature Ecology & Evolution on May 24, 2021. It was authored by Katti, Christopher H. Trisos and Jess Auerbach. Trisos acknowledges funding from the National Socio Environmental Synthesis Center under funding received from the National Science Foundation (DBI-1639145) and FLAIR fellowship programme - a partnership between the African Academy of Sciences and Royal Society, funded by the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund.

-oleniacz-

Note to editors: The abstract follows.

"Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology"

Authors: Christopher H. Trisos, Jess Auerbach and Madhusudan Katti.

Published online May 24 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Abstract: Ecological research and practice are crucial to understanding and guiding more positive relationships between people and ecosystems. However, ecology as a discipline and the diversity of those who call themselves ecologists have also been shaped and held back by often exclusionary Western approaches to knowing and doing ecology. To overcome these historical constraints and to make ecology inclusive of the diverse peoples inhabiting Earth's varied ecosystems, ecologists must expand their knowledge, both in theory and practice, to incorporate varied perspectives, approaches and interpretations from, with and within the natural environment and across global systems. We outline five shifts that could help to transform academic ecological practice: decolonize your mind; know your histories; decolonize access; decolonize expertise; and practise ethical ecology in inclusive teams. We challenge the discipline to become more inclusive, creative and ethical at a moment when the perils of entrenched thinking have never been clearer.

Evacuating under dire wildfire scenarios

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Research News

 

IMAGE: IN 2018, THE CAMP FIRE RIPPED THROUGH THE TOWN OF PARADISE, CALIFORNIA AT AN UNPRECEDENTED RATE. MUCH OF THE TOWN WAS DESTROYED IN THE TRAGEDY. view more 

CREDIT: THE WHITE HOUSE VIA WIKICOMMONS

In 2018, the Camp Fire ripped through the town of Paradise, California at an unprecedented rate. Officials had prepared an evacuation plan that required 3 hours to get residents to safety. The fire, bigger and faster than ever before, spread to the community in only 90 minutes.

As climate change intensifies, wildfires in the West are behaving in ways that were unimaginable in the past--and the common disaster response approaches are woefully unprepared for this new reality. In a recent study, a team of researchers led by the University of Utah proposed a framework for simulating dire scenarios, which the authors define as scenarios where there is less time to evacuate an area than is required. The paper, published on April 21, 2021 in the journal Natural Hazards Review, found that minimizing losses during dire scenarios involves elements that are not represented in current simulation models, among them improvisation and altruism.

"The world is dealing with situations that exceed our worst case scenarios," said lead author Thomas Cova, professor of geography at the U. "Basically we're calling for planning for the unprecedented, which is a tough thing to do."

Most emergency officials in fire-prone regions develop evacuation plans based on the assumptions that wildfires and residents will behave predictably based on past events. However, recent devastating wildfires in Oregon, California and other western states have shown that those assumptions may no longer hold.

"Wildfires are really becoming more unpredictable due to climate change. And from a psychological perspective, we have people in the same area being evacuated multiple times in the past 10 years. So, when evacuation orders come, people think, 'Well, nothing happened the last few times. I'm staying,'" said Frank Drews, professor of psychology at the U and co-author of the study. "Given the reality of climate change, it's important to critically assess where we are and say, 'Maybe we can't count on certain assumptions like we did in the past.'"

CAPTION

Dire evacuation scenario category based on a score.

CREDIT

Cova et. al. (2021) Nat Hazards Rev

How to predict the unprecedented

The framework allows planners to create a dire wildfire scenario--when the lead time, defined as the time before the fire reaches a community to respond, is less than the time required to evacuate. The authors developed a scoring system that categorizes each scenario as routine, dire, very dire or extremely dire based on many different factors.

One big factor affecting the direness is the ignition location, as one closer to a community offers less time than one farther away. A second major factor is the wildfire detection time. During the day, plumes of smoke can cue a quick response, but if it starts at night when everyone is asleep, it could take longer to get people moving. Officials may delay their decisions to avoid disrupting the community unnecessarily, but a last-minute evacuation order can cause traffic jams or put a strain on low-mobility households.

Alert system technologies can create dire circumstances if residents do not receive the warning in time due to poor cellphone coverage or low subscription rates to reverse 911 warning systems. If the community has many near misses with wildfire, the public's response could be to enact a wait-and-see approach before they leave their homes.

Using a dire scenario dashboard, the user assigns various factors an impediment level--low, minor or major--that can change at any point to lessen or increase a situation's direness.

"Usually when we run computer simulations, nothing ever goes wrong. But in the real world, things can get much worse half-way through an evacuation," said Cova. "So, what happens when you don't have enough time? The objective switches from getting everyone out to instead minimizing casualties. It's dark."

"More people began working remotely from home during the pandemic, which then led to them moving out of large cities into rural areas," explained assistant professor Dapeng Li of the South Dakota State University Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences, a co-author and U alumnus who helped develop the computer simulations. "These rural communities typically have fewer resources and face challenges in rapidly evacuating a larger number of residents in this type of emergency situation."

CAPTION

Anatomy of a dire scenario due to sudden increase of fire spread rate.

CREDIT

Cova et. al. (2021) Nat Hazards Rev

Reducing dire scenarios

Simulating dire wildfire scenarios can improve planning and the outcomes in cases where everything goes wrong. For example, creating fire shelters and safety zones inside of a community can protect residents who can't get out, while reducing traffic congestion for others who can evacuate. During the 2018 Camp Fire, people improvised temporary refuges in parking lots and community buildings. Modeling could help city planners construct permanent safety areas ahead of time.

A common human response during wildfires are improvisations and creative thinking, which are difficult to model but can be literally lifesaving. For example, during the 2020 Creek Fire in California, a nearby military base sent a helicopter to rescue trapped campers. Another crucial component is individuals helping others, such as people giving others rides or warning neighbors who missed the official alert. During the Camp Fire, Joe Kennedy used his bulldozer to singlehandedly clear abandoned cars that were blocking traffic.

"It is very common for families and neighbors to assume a first responder role and help each other during disasters," said Laura Siebeneck, associate professor of emergency management and disaster science at the University of North Texas and co-author of the study. "Many times, individuals and groups come together, cooperate, and improvise solutions as needed. Though it is difficult to capture improvisation and altruism in the modeling environment, better understanding human behavior during dire events can potentially lead to better protective actions and preparedness to dire wildfire events."

Studying and modeling dire scenarios is necessary to improve the outcomes of unprecedented changes in fire occurrence and behavior. This study is the first attempt to develop a simulation framework for these scenarios, and more research is needed to incorporate the unpredictable elements that create increasingly catastrophic wildfires.

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MOONSHINE

Corn ethanol reduces carbon footprint, greenhouse gases

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Research News

 

A study conducted by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory reveals that the use of corn ethanol is reducing the carbon footprint and diminishing greenhouse gases.

The study, recently published in Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining, analyzes corn ethanol production in the United States from 2005 to 2019, when production more than quadrupled. Scientists assessed corn ethanol's greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity (sometimes known as carbon intensity, or CI) during that period and found a 23% reduction in CI.

According to Argonne scientists, corn ethanol production increased over the period, from 1.6 to 15 billion gallons (6.1 to 57 billion liters). Supportive biofuel policies -- such as the Environmental Protection Agency's Renewable Fuel Standard and California's Low-Carbon Fuel Standard -- helped generate the increase. Both of those federal and state programs evaluate the life-cycle GHG emissions of fuel production pathways to calculate the benefits of using renewable fuels.

To assess emissions, scientists use a process called life-cycle analysis, or LCA -- the standard method for comparing relative GHG emission impacts among different fuel production pathways.

"Since the late 1990s, LCA studies have demonstrated the GHG emission reduction benefits of corn ethanol as a gasoline alternative," noted Argonne senior scientist Michael Wang, who leads the Systems Assessment Center in the laboratory's Energy Systems division and is one of the study's principal investigators. "This new study shows the continuous downtrend of corn ethanol GHG emissions."

"The corn ethanol production pathway -- both in terms of corn farming and biorefineries -- has evolved greatly since 2005," observed Argonne analyst Uisung Lee, first author of the study. Lee pointed out that the study relied on comprehensive statistics of corn farming from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and of corn ethanol production from industry benchmark data.

Hoyoung Kwon, a coauthor, stated that U.S. corn grain yields improved by 15%, reaching 168 bushels per acre despite fertilizer inputs remaining constant and resulting in a decreased intensity in fertilizer input per bushel of corn harvested: reductions of 7% in nitrogen use and 18% in potash use.

May Wu, another co-author, added that ethanol yields increased 6.5%, with a 24% reduction in ethanol plant energy use.

"With the increased total volume and the reduced CI values of corn ethanol between 2005 and 2019, corn ethanol has resulted in a total GHG reduction of more than 500 million tons between 2005 and 2019," Wang emphasized. "For the United States, biofuels like corn ethanol can play a critical role in reducing our carbon footprint."

The Argonne team used Argonne's GREET® model for this study. Argonne developed GREET (the Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies) model, a one-of-a-kind LCA analytical tool that simulates the energy use and emissions output of various vehicle and fuel combinations. Government, industry, and other researchers worldwide use GREET® for LCA modeling of corn ethanol and other biofuels.

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The work is funded by DOE's Vehicle Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy supports early-stage research and development of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies to strengthen U.S. economic growth, energy security, and environmental quality.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

New study shines light on hazards of Earth's largest volcano

Researchers find that a large earthquake could set off eruption of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE

Research News

 

IMAGE: STANDING 9 KILOMETERS TALL FROM THE BASE ON THE SEAFLOOR TO THE SUMMIT, MAUNA LOA IS THE LARGEST VOLCANO ON EARTH. view more 

CREDIT: USGS

MIAMI - Scientists from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science analyzed ground movements measured by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) satellite data and GPS stations to precisely model where magma intruded and how magma influx changed over time, as well as where faults under the flanks moved without generating significant earthquakes. The GPS network is operated by the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaii Volcano Observatory.

"An earthquake of magnitude-6 or greater would relieve the stress imparted by the influx of magma along a sub-horizontal fault under the western flank of the volcano," said Bhuvan Varugu, a Ph.D. candidate at the UM Rosenstiel School and lead author of the study. "This earthquake could trigger an eruption."

The researchers found that during 2014-2020 a total of 0.11 kilometers3 of new magma intruded into a dike-like magma body located under and south of the summit caldera, with the upper edge at 2.5 - 3 kilometers depth beneath the summit. They were able to determine that in 2015 the magma began expanding southward, where the topographic elevation is lower and the magma had less work to do against the topographic pressure. After the magma flux waned in 2017, the inflation center returned to its previous 2014-2015 horizontal position. Such changes of a magma body have never been observed before.

"At Mauna Loa, flank motion and eruptions are inherently related," said Varugu. "The influx of new magma started in 2014 after more than four years of seaward motion of the eastern flank - which opened up space in the rift zone for the magma to intrude."

The researchers also found that there was movement not associated with an earthquake along a near-horizontal fault under the eastern flank, however, no movement was detected under the western flank. This led the researchers to conclude that an earthquake under the western flank is due. Motions along near-horizontal faults under the flanks are essential features of long-term volcano growth.

Will the volcano erupt in the near future? "If magma influx continues it is likely, but not required," says Varugu. "The topographic load is pretty heavy, the magma could also propagate laterally through the rift zone".

"An earthquake could be a game changer," said Falk Amelung, a professor at the UM Rosenstiel School's Department of Marine Geosciences and senior author of the study. "It would release gases from the magma comparable to shaking a soda bottle, generating additional pressure and buoyancy, sufficient to break the rock above the magma."

According to the researchers there are many uncertainties. Though the stress that was exerted along the fault is known, the magnitude of the earthquake will also depend on the size of the fault patch that will actually rupture. Additionally, there are no satellite data available to determine movements prior to 2002.

"It is a fascinating problem," said Amelung, "We can explain how and why the magma body changed during the past six years. We will continue observing and this will eventually lead to better models to forecast the next eruption site."

Standing 9 kilometers tall from the base on the seafloor to the summit, Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth. In the 1950 eruption, it took only three hours for the lava to reach the Kona coast. Such rapid flows would leave very little time to evacuate people in the path of its lava. Another large eruption of Mauna Loa occurred in 1984.

The combination of earthquakes and eruptions is nothing unusual. The 1950 eruption was preceded by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake three days prior, and was followed by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake more than a year later. The 1984 eruption was preceded by a magnitude 6.6 earthquake 5 months prior.

The satellite data were acquired by the Italian Cosmo-Skymed satellites in the framework of the Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratories (GSNL) initiative of the Group on Earth Observation (GEO), an international umbrella organization to enhance the use of Earth Observation for societal benefits. Several space agencies pool their satellite resources to enable new studies of hazardous volcanoes. Other volcano supersites include the Icelandic, Ecuadorian and New Zealand volcanoes as well as Italy's Mt. Etna.

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RMRS scientists recommend approach to adapt to uncertainty in wildland management

USDA FOREST SERVICE - ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESEARCH STATION

Research News

 

MISSOULA, Mont., May 24, 2021 -- Scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station collaborated to explore how research and management can confront increasing uncertainty due to climate change, invasive species, and land use conversion.

Wildland management and policy have long depended on the idea that ecosystems are fundamentally static, and periodic events like droughts are just temporary detours from a larger, stable equilibrium. However, ecosystems are currently changing at unprecedented rates. For example, bark beetle infestations, droughts, and severe wildfires have killed large numbers of trees across the western United States. In many cases, these changes may be irreversible.

In new research published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, Dr. Kevin McKelvey and colleagues from several Rocky Mountain Research Station science programs suggest ways for managers to respond. As ecosystems change in increasingly unpredictable ways, we will need more flexible and adaptive approaches to manage them. Rather than relying on knowledge of what ecosystems once looked like, we will need to learn and adjust to new conditions quickly. To achieve that goal, the authors recommend a more inclusive and collaborative governance model that would increase public and stakeholder participation, integrate research and management, and incorporate multiple forms of knowledge, including from indigenous communities. Such an approach, they argue, will encourage collaborative learning, increase trust in management, and allow for more efficient responses to change.

"Because all paths forward are fraught with uncertainties, limitations, and the likelihood that plans will fail due to unforeseen events, we need a much broader public not only involved in the decision process, but additionally to understand the limits both to knowledge and to achievable actions," said McKelvey.

The authors also explore priorities for research under this new model. For example, they note that rapidly changing ecosystems will increase our dependency on predictive modeling - and therefore will require better models. As a result, research should focus on collecting the types of data that support model development and validation.

Finally, the scientists offer a set of concrete recommendations to pivot toward accepting uncertainty - from conducting landscape-level assessments to focusing on retaining species that are resilient to disturbances.

"The implications for management and particularly for planning are profound," said McKelvey. "We need to vastly accelerate the planning process to keep pace with rapidly changing landscapes. We need much more local flexibility to find out what works and what doesn't. And we need to change the process for data collection and analyses - in many landscapes, 5-year-old data and analyses are already obsolete."

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90% SUCCESS RATE

The Costly Success of Israel’s Iron Dome

The country’s missile-defense system tells a national story.

ANSHEL PFEFFER

ADAM MAIDA / THE ATLANTIC / ABIR SULTAN / GETTY


In the 12 days that preceded Thursday’s announcement of a cease-fire, the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched 4,369 rockets of various sizes and ranges from Gaza toward Israel. According to Israel’s military, nearly two-thirds of these missed their target, hitting fields and other open areas, or malfunctioning and falling short. That still leaves about 1,500 rockets that headed for built-up areas. Remarkably, this barrage resulted in only a dozen deaths: More than 90 percent of the rockets were intercepted by Israel’s missile-defense system, Iron Dome.

If you’ve been watching coverage of the latest round of fighting in Gaza and Israel, you won’t have escaped the Iron Dome pyrotechnic display, astonishing especially at night as the rockets arching northward from Gaza are picked out of the sky in a litany of mid-air explosions. When it was first established more than a decade ago, Iron Dome had its skeptics, both in Israel and abroad, but over time, they—and the world—have seen it work. Literally.

It is a system that was designed for the challenge facing Israel—specifically, organizations on its borders, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, that do not have the personnel or firepower to invade and challenge Israel’s army, but that have accumulated large arsenals of rockets that, although rudimentary and inaccurate, can target most of a small country like Israel. Each Iron Dome battery protects a relatively small parcel of territory, but Israel now has sufficient mobile batteries to protect the areas that are threatened at times of tension.


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This architecture is, however, just one of the ways in which Iron Dome is unique. In fact, its very strengths and weaknesses reflect those of the country that developed it, epitomizing Israel’s interminable conflict with the Palestinians.

“On the one hand, Iron Dome is the perfect example of Israeli ingenuity and improvisation,” the journalist Yaakov Katz, who co-wrote The Weapon Wizards, a book about Israel’s arms industry, told me. “But its very success is a reflection of Israel’s biggest problem. Iron Dome allows you to almost ignore the fact that you have a neighbor just across the border with thousands of rockets pointed at you, because they can no longer really harm you. Iron Dome allows you not to find deeper solutions for that problem. And that’s very Israeli as well.”

Read: Bibi was right

Iron dome is incredibly popular among Israelis, and understandably so. Although Israel suffered a dozen fatalities during this month’s fighting, more than 240 Palestinians died. That discrepancy, largely due to the effectiveness of Iron Dome, also bears itself out in physical damage to homes, buildings, and infrastructure more broadly. Even during an intense conflict such as this one, the missile-defense system provides a sense of security.

But it also means many Israelis do not feel the urgency, or sufficient enough optimism, to press their leaders to solve the underlying problems causing the long-term crisis facing Gaza, where 2 million people live in a fetid, crowded coastal strip, under near-total blockade by Israel and Egypt since Hamas took over in 2007. Nor do many feel the need to address the wider historic conflict with the Palestinians that has been going on since before Israel’s founding in 1948. According to the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, Israelis rank security first on their list of priorities, followed by financial concerns; resolving the conflict with the Palestinians typically ranks fifth or sixth, and is seen by Israelis as separate from the feeling of security. “You’ve got to ask yourself,” Scheindlin told me, if Israelis focus on security as defined by a piece of military hardware rather than on the core problem itself, “isn’t that a false sense of security?”

Much of what provides that sense of security is the visible deterrent that Iron Dome offers, cutting off rockets in the sky. What Israelis don’t see is the true heart of the system—not the interceptor missiles or the mobile batteries, but the mathematics. The algorithm that has been coded into the system, and that is constantly being improved upon, enables Iron Dome’s control center to track and predict the trajectories of incoming missiles, working out where they can be expected to fall, and issuing interception orders only if the point of impact is a built-up area, so as not to waste expensive interceptor rockets on harmless projectiles.

This level of calculation is also often attributed to Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in office for the past 12 years. Netanyahu—much like Iron Dome itself—has been able to mask smaller failings in a greater success; he has, like the missile-defense system, warped the notion of how much time he and his country have to respond to threats; and he has, similar to Iron Dome, used technology to hide deep, structural societal flaws.

Take his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The whole world by now is aware that Israel was the fastest country to roll out COVID-19 vaccines and to have a majority of its population vaccinated. The program has been a tremendous success, and Netanyahu has sought to claim the political credit. What’s less known, or at least overlooked, is that before vaccines became available, he presided over a shambolic set of coronavirus policies. For long periods in 2020, Israel had the highest per capita rate of new reported infections in the world; only the comparatively low median age of its population kept the death toll down.

There are multiple reasons for Netanyahu’s COVID-19 failings. Because of political pressure, from both the Trump administration and special-interest groups within Israel, he was slow to shut off air travel to and from the United States, the source of most of his country’s early COVID-19 cases. And he refused to force Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, his key political allies, who live in de facto autonomy within Israel, to abide by lockdown rules, allowing the virus to run rampant in their schools and synagogues.

And similar to how Iron Dome has changed how Israelis see time—in terms of how much of it they have to respond when projectiles are fired—Netanyahu has changed how they view time when it comes to the long-term prospects for resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. For decades, politicians and pundits at home and abroad have warned that Israel is running out of time to resolve the conflict—that international condemnation, pressure, and even boycotts and sanctions would isolate it; and that internally, it could not deal with the challenges of Palestinian population growth and resistance.

Read: Netanyahu brought nationalism to the 21st century

Netanyahu has insisted the opposite: that if Israel remains steadfast, the world, including Arab states, will give up on the Palestinian cause. He wrote in his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, that “for the foreseeable future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence,” and that such a strategy would have to suffice until the Arab world realized that it “stands to gain as much from making peace with Israel as Israel stands to gain from making peace with the Arabs.” Iron Dome is one of his tools for keeping the peace of deterrence and making time work in Israel’s favor.

And then there is Israel's—and Netanyahu’s—dependence on technology to make up for more intrinsic flaws. When early COVID-19 vaccines were about to be authorized by the United States, he bombarded Pfizer’s chief executive with dozens of phone calls to secure early shipments for Israel. Here, as with Iron Dome, Israel’s high-tech prowess came to his aid: Israel’s public health-care providers, which were to be in charge of administering the vaccine, have advanced digital medical records, and Netanyahu was able to offer Pfizer real-time data on how the vaccine was working in return for early shipments. In his office in Jerusalem, he now has two glass cases: In one is a model of an Iron Dome “Tamir” interceptor missile; in the other is the syringe that was used to inoculate him.

Yet behind this technological marvel is creaking national infrastructure and failing social services, for both Jewish and Arab citizens. That’s why, when the few rockets from Gaza did get through the Iron Dome shield this month, those who were killed were in nearly all cases old, disabled, poor, homeless, or residents of Arab villages without government services and therefore no bomb shelter. And while Israel’s air force simultaneously operated Iron Dome and kept up a steady rate of air strikes in Gaza throughout the recent campaign, within Israel’s cities there were insufficient police to deal with the riots that broke out between Arabs and Jews. Here we see another structural flaw in the Israeli state that Netanyahu has neglected.

With its remarkable success rate, Iron Dome is as close as possible to being the perfect defense system. It illustrates Israel’s remarkable technological prowess and the country's unwavering focus on the defense of its citizens. But Iron Dome's tremendous capabilities paper over more fundamental challenges—ones that Israel’s leader seems unwilling to resolve.

ANSHEL PFEFFER is a journalist based in Jerusalem for Ha’aretz. He is the author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.

A Clue to Why the 1918 Pandemic Came Back Stronger Than Before

Three 103-year-old-lung samples hinted at how the flu mutated to become more deadly.

SARAH ZHANG

A converted warehouse that was used to isolate 1918 flu patients

UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE / UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP / GETTY

The three teenagers—two boys and a girl—could not have known what clues their lungs would one day yield. All they could have known, or felt, before they died in Germany in 1918 was their flu-ravaged lungs failing them, each breath getting harder and harder. Tens of millions of people like them died in the flu pandemic of 1918; they happened to be three whose lungs were preserved by a farsighted pathologist.

A century later, scientists have now managed to sequence flu viruses from pea-size samples of the three preserved lungs. Together, these sequences suggest an answer to one of the pandemic’s most enduring mysteries: Why was the second wave, in late 1918, so much deadlier than the first wave, in the spring? These rediscovered lung samples hint at the possibility that the virus itself changed to better infect humans.

This might sound familiar. The no-longer-so-novel coronavirus is also adapting to its human host. With modern tools, scientists are tracking the virus’s evolution in real time and finding mutations that have made the virus better at infecting us. More than 1.4 million coronavirus genomes have now been sequenced. But the database for the 1918 flu is much smaller—so much so that the comparison feels unfair. This new study brings the number of complete 1918 flu genomes to a grand total of three, plus some partial genomes.

Hundred-year-old lung tissue is incredibly hard to find. Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer, a virologist at the Robert Koch Institute, in Berlin, came across the samples in this newest study in a stroke of luck. A couple of years ago, he decided to investigate the collections of the Berlin Museum of Medical History of the Charité. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but he soon stumbled upon several lung specimens from 1918, a year he of course recognized as a notable one for respiratory disease. Despite the flu pandemic’s notoriety, the virus that caused it is still poorly understood. “I thought, Well, okay, so it’s right here in front of you. Why don’t you give it a try?” he told me. Why not try to sequence influenza from these lungs? (This work is not dangerous: The chemically preserved lung specimens do not contain intact or infectious virus; sequencing picks up just fragments of the virus’s genetic material.)

Calvignac-Spencer and his colleagues ultimately tested 13 lung specimens and found evidence of flu in three. One was from a 17-year-old girl who died in Munich sometime in 1918. The two others were from teenage soldiers who both died in Berlin on June 27, 1918. This work is described in a new preprint, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The team was able to recover a complete flu-virus genome from the 17-year-old girl’s lung tissue—only the third ever found. The two other full 1918 flu genomes both came from the United States, from the lungs of a woman buried in Alaska and from a paraffin-wax-embedded lung sample of a soldier who died in New York. With another genome in hand, the researchers moved to investigate how they differed. Several changes showed up in the flu’s genome-replication machinery, a potential evolutionary hot spot because better replication means a more successful virus. The team then copied just the replication machinery of the 17-year-old’s virus—not the entire virus—into cells and found it was only half as active as that of the flu virus found in Alaska.

The obvious caveats should apply here: tiny sample size, the limits of extrapolating from test tube to human body. The exact date of the girl’s death in 1918 is also unknown, but this finding hints at the possibility that the virus’s behavior did change during the pandemic. Scientists have long speculated about why the 1918 pandemic’s second wave was deadlier than the first. Patterns of human behavior and seasonality could explain some of the difference—but the virus itself might have changed too. “And this starts to put some meat on the bone” of that hypothesis, Andrew Mehle, an influenza researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, told me.

The lungs of the two young soldiers in Berlin provide another clue. The teenagers’ June 1918 deaths were squarely in the pandemic’s first wave. These two samples yielded only partial genomes, but the team was able to reconstruct enough to home in on changes in nucleoprotein, one of the proteins that make up the virus’s replication machinery. Nucleoproteins act like scaffolds for the virus’s gene segments, which wind around the protein like a spiral staircase. They are also extremely distinctive, which can be a weakness: The human immune system is very good at recognizing and sabotaging them.

Indeed, the 1918 flu virus’s nucleoprotein seems to have mutated between the first and second waves to better evade the human immune system. The first-wave viruses’ nucleoproteins looked a bit like those in flu viruses that infect birds—which makes sense because scientists suspect that the 1918 flu originated in birds. But bird viruses are attuned to bird bodies. “When it jumps to humans, the virus is not evolved to be optimally resistant” to the human immune system, Jesse Bloom, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, told me. Bloom and others have identified specific mutations that make the nucleoprotein better at resisting the human immune system. The first-wave flu viruses did not have them, but the second-wave ones did, possibly because they had had the time to adapt to infecting humans.

This mutation-by-mutation analysis of the 1918 flu virus would have been impossible to imagine at the time of the pandemic. Doctors then hadn’t even figured out that influenza was caused by a virus. “There’s no way the individual who saved these samples in 1918 had any idea of what could be done to them,” Mehle said. “To my mind, this is a beautiful example of fundamental research.” Without the pathologist who painstakingly preserved these samples and the museums that kept them for decades before science caught up, our understanding of the 1918 flu would be all the poorer.

Unfortunately, many historical samples have been lost as pathology collections have fallen out of fashion over the past century. “If we had started these kinds of studies in the ’60s, we would have had no problems finding thousands and thousands of specimens,” Calvignac-Spencer said. “And now we’re really fighting to assemble a collection of 20.” He’s been in touch with more than 50 museum collections around the world in the hunt for more pandemic-flu samples. He recently found one from Australia, but the work is slow. Calvignac-Spencer has also looked for other viruses, including measles, which he and his colleagues previously found in a 100-year-old lung from the same medical collection in Berlin.

The further back in time researchers must go, the harder the samples are to find—but Bloom told me he’s especially intrigued by the possibility of finding pre-1918 flu genomes in the archives. When the 1918 pandemic swept through the world, it apparently completely replaced whatever flu existed before. Its modern-day descendants continue to infect us today as seasonal flu. In this way, the 1918 flu is familiar to us and our immune systems. What came before is still a mystery.

'The end of Enlightenment': Historian explains why Republican discourse is 'the very antithesis of Reason'

Image via Gage Skidmore.

Robert Freeman and Common Dreams May 24, 2021

The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual ferment in the Western world following the Middle Ages. Its ideas gave birth to the modern world.

We know the Enlightenment from the names of its most brilliant expositors: Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and others. We know its ideas as the foundation of our social world: the social contract, the rule of reason, the rule of law, consent of the governed, natural rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and others.

The Republican agenda is a direct assault on all of that. It literally aims to return America to the pre-modern, pre-Enlightened darkness of the Middle Ages. If it succeeds, it will reverse more than three hundred years of human progress.

The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.

Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.00:0201:44

The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of "alternative facts." It's been downhill since.

Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the "Deep State." A pandemic that would "disappear, like a miracle." The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden's hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.

The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.

It's easier to trigger hatred and fear than thinking and logic. That's why Republicans do it. That's why their base—and increasingly, their "leaders"—sound like zombies, like robots, like members of a cult when they're interviewed for the evening news. They are. They've been programmed to fear and hate and blame, and the reinforcement is unending, because, to work, it has to be. Otherwise, they become unprogrammed.

It doesn't matter that none of the endless effusion of lies ever turn out to be true or that they are routinely, repeatedly abandoned in favor of newer lies for the next news cycle. What matters is that the lies incite indignation, and that the dopamine high that follows gets its constant, programmed, ever-increasing reinforcement.

Trump's 35,000 documented lies are the embodiment of it all. It is a leprous, insidious disease, an inability to deal with reality, but literally the one by which Republicans define themselves. Glandular excretions are the Republican formula for generating voter turnout: inciting Pavlovian rage based on a torrential fantasmia of lurid lies. It works, but it is the living, suppurating antithesis of Reason.

Another Republican assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment is the attack on Democracy. It was John Locke who, in 1689, wrote that people who were able to think could not be bullied like ignorant people could. If government wanted thinking people's cooperation it could no longer rely on the medieval divine right of kings. It needed to obtain "the consent of the governed." This, of course, became a sacrament of the American political order.

The opening words of the Constitution are, "We the people of the United States…" That is not a paean to monarchy, or to dictatorship. It is a statement that the consent of the people—and only that consent—provides a government its legitimacy. But Republicans are working feverishly to overturn the consent of the governed, to destroy Democracy.

Their assault on the Capitol on January 6th was the most conspicuous effort to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States but it was not the first and will certainly not be the last. Republicans insist that their reason-denying mobs, their goons, their Brownshirts will tell the rest of us how we will be governed. No consent involved, only submission: ours. You can see this in their fevered efforts at voter suppression, explicitly preventing majority rule and the consent of the governed.

Republicans cannot win power on the strength of their ideas and policies. They lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Large majorities favor policies backed by Democrats. So, they need to destroy Democracy itself to gain power. To do that, they need to destroy Reason as the way we know what we know. That is the core, the essence, the modus operandi of the Republican enterprise.

Constitutionalism is a third Enlightenment ideal that Republicans are intent on destroying. A constitution defines how a country is to be governed. Before constitutions, it was autocracy that called the shots. Think of Louis XIV's notorious declaration: "I am the state." Decisions were made by caprice, by the rich and powerful, in their own interests, everyone else be damned. Constitutionalism embeds the Rule of Law—another Enlightenment ideal—into a society, making "equal treatment under the law" a modern treasure, however badly it may be realized.

Besides losing all of the branches of the federal government, Republicans failed over and over and over to persuade the judicial branch to sanction their usurpation of the Constitution. So, they resort to performative charades like the farcical ballot laundering farrago in Arizona to try to undo the Constitutionally-ordained process for the peaceful transfer of power. Now, they're taking it to other states. It will not end.

We could go on. Republicans want to destroy the social contract—another Enlightenment ideal—that says you get ahead on the basis of hard work. They insist, instead, that privilege should be based on race, with the best spots reserved for whites. This violates the Enlightenment ideal of equality for all.

Remember the opening words of the Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Pure Enlightenment. In the Republican world, however, like in Orwell's Animal Farm which was an allegory of the degradation of Soviet totalitarianism, all men are created equal, but some—whites—are more equal than others.

We should be clear. This is not about peripheral protests over policy preferences. It is a broadside against the foundation, the institutional undergirding of our civilization. It is an attempt to destroy the conceptual milieu that has survived for centuries and that, however flawed it may be, has delivered the greatest freedom, expansion of rights, material progress, and human opportunity the world has ever known.

The measure of our alarm should be that Republicans, with the help of a complicit media, have managed to normalize rampant public lying, the unrestrained desecration of Reason, are carrying out an open, unabashed attack on our democracy, are carrying out notorious, savage assaults on Constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, Equality, and more. Our nation is literally under attack by anti-Enlightenment zealots determined to tear it down and it's not at all clear that they will not succeed.

It is indicative that the Republican party's highest priest is a thrice-married pathological liar, an admitted sexual assaulter, a draft dodger, a six-time filer for bankruptcy, a man who inflicted hundreds of thousands of excess deaths on the country, was twice impeached, who lost two successive popular vote counts, and who then attempted to overthrow the government. Read that sentence again and think about its implication.

The Republican hero, the man they model themselves on, the one they want us to bow down to, is a failed business man, a failed reality TV star, a failed president, a career con man who is the most corrupt, certainly the most craven and creepy individual ever known to American politics. This is the best Republicans have to offer. That is who they are, and what they insist on inflicting on all the rest of us, our consent be damned.

The Enlightenment helped the world replace monarchy with republicanism, a world ruled by theology with a world of science, autocracy with the rule of law, aristocratic privilege with the equality of all men, and feudalism with capitalism. No matter how imperfectly it may have been realized, it was as noble a vision as human beings have ever devised. The two worlds are the difference between the "Dark Ages" that went before and the modern world. That is the Republicans' promise to America.

More regression. More destruction of beautiful ideals and noble institutions. More degradation of deserving people. More humiliation of undignified people, themselves being the examples. More carnage. More chaos. More slime spewed on everyone.

There's not a syllable of inspiring vision in anything they have to say, not a word of uplifting ideals in any of it. It is all pathetic self-victimization and a lust for vengeance against those who refuse to respect them. We must all be dragged into the sewer that spawned, that is, and that sustains Donald Trump. That is his and Republicans' retaliation against a people who once had the temerity to believe in majestic ideals, the audacity to strive for them, and who once imagined that they might even be worthy of them.

A canticle for Leibowitz : Miller, Walter M., 1923-1996 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive