RIP

Viral Virunga National Park Gorilla Dies in the Arms of Her Caretaker: 'I Loved Her Like a Child'

Ashley Boucher 

A beloved gorilla at the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park has died after a prolonged illness.

© Provided by People Brent Stirton/Getty

Ndakasi had been cared for at the park's Senkwekwe Center for more than 10 years, and died in late September. She was 14 years old.

"On the evening of 26 September, following a prolonged illness in which her condition rapidly deteriorated, Ndakasi took her final breath in the loving arms of her caretaker and lifelong friend, Andre Bauma," the park said in a press release on its website.

Ndakasi had been featured in multiple television shows and movies, including the 2014 Netflix documentary Virunga, in which she won over viewers with a fit of laughter while being tickled by a caretaker.

RELATED: Watch Zoo Gorilla Mom Share Sweet Moment with Mother Carrying Her Newborn Baby at Boston Zoo

She was also the star of a 2019 Earth Day selfie that went viral, showing her and gorilla pal Ndeze standing up straight with their bellies out.

"Their playful nature was a reminder to the world of how much we see ourselves in these animals and it's one of the reasons Andre Bauma will miss her so dearly," the park said.

Ndakasi was orphaned in 2007 when she was just two months old after her mother was shot and killed by armed militia. Luckily, rangers found her hours after the tragedy and took her to a rescue center in Goma.

It was at the rescue center where Ndakasi met Bauma, who "held the baby close to him, keeping her tiny body tightly against his bare chest for warmth and comfort." Thanks to Bauma, Ndakasi survived, but the trauma of losing her mother so young meant that she could not be returned to the wild.

When the Senkwekwe Center was created in 2009, Ndakasi and Ndeze were transferred there and have lived there ever since.

In a statement, Bauma said that it was "a privilege to support and care for such a loving creature, especially knowing the trauma Ndakasi suffered at a very young age."

"One could say that she took after her mother, Nyiransekuye, whose name means 'someone happy to welcome others.' It was Ndakasi's sweet nature and intelligence that helped me to understand the connection between humans and Great Apes and why we should do everything in our power to protect them," he continued.

"I am proud to have called Ndakasi my friend," the caretaker said. "I loved her like a child and her cheerful personality brought a smile to my face every time I interacted with her. She will be missed by all of us at Virunga but we are forever grateful for the richness Ndakasi brought to our lives during her time at Senkwekwe."

LEONARDO, the Bipedal Robot, Can Ride a Skateboard and Walk a Slackline

October 06, 2021

LEO carves out a new type of locomotion somewhere between walking and flying

Researchers at Caltech have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of complex movements.

Part walking robot, part flying drone, the newly developed LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne, or LEO for short) can walk a slackline, hop, and even ride a skateboard. Developed by a team at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), LEO is the first robot that uses multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters to achieve a fine degree of control over its balance.

A paper about the LEO robot was published online on October 6 and was featured on the October 2021 cover of Science Robotics.

"We drew inspiration from nature. Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines," says Soon-Jo Chung, corresponding author and Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems. "A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying. We wanted to understand and learn from that."


"There is a similarity between how a human wearing a jet suit controls their legs and feet when landing or taking off and how LEO uses synchronized control of distributed propeller-based thrusters and leg joints," Chung adds. "We wanted to study the interface of walking and flying from the dynamics and control standpoint."

Bipedal robots are able to tackle complex real-world terrains by using the same sort of movements that humans use, like jumping or running or even climbing stairs, but they are stymied by rough terrain. Flying robots easily navigate tough terrain by simply avoiding the ground, but they face their own set of limitations: high energy consumption during flight and limited payload capacity. "Robots with a multimodal locomotion ability are able to move through challenging environments more efficiently than traditional robots by appropriately switching between their available means of movement. In particular, LEO aims to bridge the gap between the two disparate domains of aerial and bipedal locomotion that are not typically intertwined in existing robotic systems," says Kyunam Kim, postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and co-lead author of the Science Robotics paper.

By using a hybrid movement that is somewhere between walking and flying, the researchers get the best of both worlds in terms of locomotion. LEO's lightweight legs take stress off of its thrusters by supporting the bulk of the weight, but because the thrusters are controlled synchronously with leg joints, LEO has uncanny balance.

"Based on the types of obstacles it needs to traverse, LEO can choose to use either walking or flying, or blend the two as needed. In addition, LEO is capable of performing unusual locomotion maneuvers that even in humans require a mastery of balance, like walking on a slackline and skateboarding," says Patrick Spieler, co-lead author of the Science Robotics paper and a former member of Chung's group who is currently with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA.

LEO stands 2.5 feet tall and is equipped with two legs that have three actuated joints, along with four propeller thrusters mounted at an angle at the robot's shoulders. When a person walks, they adjust the position and orientation of their legs to cause their center of mass to move forward while the body's balance is maintained. LEO walks in this way as well: the propellers ensure that the robot is upright as it walks, and the leg actuators change the position of the legs to move the robot's center of mass forward through the use of a synchronized walking and flying controller. In flight, the robot uses its propellers alone and flies like a drone.

"Because of its propellers, you can poke or prod LEO with a lot of force without actually knocking the robot over," says Elena-Sorina Lupu (MS '21), graduate student at Caltech and co-author of the Science Robotics paper. The LEO project was started in the summer of 2019 with the authors of the Science Robotics paper and three Caltech undergraduates who participated in the project through the Institute's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program.

Next, the team plans to improve the performance of LEO by creating a more rigid leg design that is capable of supporting more of the robot's weight and increasing the thrust force of the propellers. In addition, they hope to make LEO more autonomous so that the robot can understand how much of its weight is supported by legs and how much needs to be supported by propellers when walking on uneven terrain.

The researchers also plan to equip LEO with a newly developed drone landing control algorithm that utilizes deep neural networks. With a better understanding of the environment, LEO could make its own decisions about the best combination of walking, flying, or hybrid motion that it should use to move from one place to another based on what is safest and what uses the least amount of energy.

"Right now, LEO uses propellers to balance during walking, which means it uses energy fairly inefficiently. We are planning to improve the leg design to make LEO walk and balance with minimal aid of propellers," says Lupu, who will continue working on LEO throughout her PhD program.

In the real world, the technology designed for LEO could foster the development of adaptive landing gear systems composed of controlled leg joints for aerial robots and other types of flying vehicles. The team envisions that future Mars rotorcraft could be equipped with legged landing gear so that the body balance of these aerial robots can be maintained as they land on sloped or uneven terrains, thereby reducing the risk of failure under challenging landing conditions.

The paper is titled "A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard." Coauthors also include Alireza Ramezani, former Caltech postdoctoral scholar and currently an assistant professor at Northeastern University. This research was supported by the Caltech Gary Clinard Innovation Fund and Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies.

Statues are falling but their colonial legacy is still killing the planet

LONG READ
David Whyte
Wed, October 6, 2021

Black Lives Matter protesters throwing the controversial statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour in June (PA)

The Black Lives Matter protests this summer widened our historical lens in a number of ways. Perhaps least recognised is how those protests dragged the names of some of Britain’s profit-making colonial corporations out from under the stones and plinths on which the statues of figures like Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes stood. Rarely mentioned in public discussion of our colonial past until June, the dubious role of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company and Colston’s Royal Africa Company, which established the foundations of the British slave trade, were being debated, among other places, in the pages of the Daily Mail. Those brands join the well known East India Company as part of Britain’s colonial folklore (think movie series Pirates of the Caribbean and the BBC’s Taboo). But though Colston’s statue may be gone, the prototype model of the corporation that made him a fortune is alive and kicking. The problem is, it is kicking us to death.

The colonial model of the “joint-stock” company is the prototype on which the modern-day corporation is based. Today the same basic model is threatening our ability to sustain the ecology and life of the planet. Most of the world’s key commodities are owned and controlled by corporations. Almost all of the plastic that is choking our oceans is produced by corporations. Most of the industrial processes causing atmospheric pollution are controlled by corporations. Our food, our transport, our energy… it is estimated that since 1965, 20 corporations have collectively produced 35 per cent of all fossil fuel emissions; since 1988, just 100 have collectively produced 71 per cent of all fossil fuel emissions. If we do not change things radically the corporate person – the artificial invention that has its roots in the slave trade – will continue in perpetuity as everything around us dies.

Indeed, many of the companies that profited from colonialism and slavery in the early days are thriving. All of the major banks in the UK can trace their direct lineage to the slave business. Barclays, Lloyds, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of England all have slave trading companies in their family tree. University College London’s extensive database of slave traders reveals both the names of individuals and the corporate names they traded under. The profits made by slave trading was simply passed through the corporate structure.

Profit-making corporations were much more significant to the British colonial project than is normally recognised. Almost every corner of the British empire was appropriated by such companies. One of the first was the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, chartered in 1553 to open up a new trade route to China and Indonesia. The East India Company, chartered in 1600, was granted exclusive rights to trade and to establish trading posts in the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia and played a critical role in establishing the forms of trading, administration and power-broking that formed the foundation of the British empire. Other colonial corporations, such as the London Company and the Plymouth Company, were established to open up monopoly trading routes to the Americas. The State of Virginia was founded by the Virginia Company in 1607 and the State of Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628. Those companies were granted charters by the crown that gave them the right to transport settlers and their supplies into the colonies, and permission to bear arms.

Colston’s notorious Royal African Company regularly engaged in armed combat as it secured trading posts on the west coast of Africa. By the 1680s the company was trading 5,000 people as slaves every year. And by the time it was wound up, it had traded almost a quarter of a million slaves; more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution.

British imperialist Cecil Rhodes with Lord Grey (left) and James Hamilton (right) (Getty)

The role of profit-making corporations in the slave trade certainly deserves more than a footnote in history. Indeed, it is unlikely that the colonial project could have developed with the same violence and intensity without the colonial corporation. Just like the slave trade, the ongoing capture of new territories and the securing of trade routes was a competitive business that required a national mobilisation of capital. Corporations enable investors to combine their resources, speeding up the time needed to develop or extract resources, enabling them to locate production across greater distances. It is this quality of organised capital that Karl Marx famously called “the annihilation of space by time” and geographers today refer to as “time-space compression”.

The basic idea is that limitations of geography and travelling distances are gradually overcome as capital is pooled and concentrated. It is this concentration of capital that intensifies the search for technological advances. In the course of the colonial project, corporations demonstrated their remarkable capacity to overcome the sizeable barriers of logistics and geography that stood in their way. All of the major European powers used joint-stock corporations to compete for colonial riches. The French West India Company was a major slave trader; the Dutch East India Company went toe to toe with Britain’s colonial claims. Prussia, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and even Denmark and Sweden all founded their own colonial companies. The basic model of those companies was the same in every European state: through the granting of monopolies, and limiting investors’ exposure to losses, they provided major incentives for the growing industrial class to channel their private wealth into the rush for colonial power. Joint-stock corporations, therefore, gave colonising states the capacity to harness private wealth with the aim of colonising faster and further afield. The colonial corporations would harness the power of private capital to overcome the geographical barriers that stood in their way.

Thousands gathered in Oxford in June to call for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes (Getty)

At the same as corporations increased states’ capacity for the annihilation of space and time, they also increased the capacity for the annihilation of nature. Capital was invested in trade, but also in plantations, the stripping of forests, mining for gold and other minerals, industrial fishing and agriculture, and latterly oil extraction. Today, the annihilation of space by time by corporate investment in all of those industries is now driving climate change. Due to the transnational nature of today’s economy, over 75 per cent of the water footprint of the UK lies overseas and approximately 40 per cent the UK’s greenhouse gases are emitted abroad.

What did corporate executives know?

The deadly effects of adding lead compounds to petrol was discovered by scientists in the 1920s. Despite this knowledge, a trio of major corporations – General Motors, DuPont (both of CFC fame) and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil) – ensured that almost all research produced findings which concluded that lead additives were not harmful. They then aggressively marketed and promoted the addition of tetraethyllead until it was banned in the 1990s.

Today’s global economy creates some jaw-dropping opportunities to profit. In the fishing industry, cod and prawns caught by Scottish fishermen are shipped to China for packing to exploit cheaper labour costs, before being sent back for sale in British supermarkets. Marine ecologist Henrik Österblom has proposed a way of thinking about the role of transnational corporations that helps us understand this lunacy. In the study of ecology, some species can be described as “keystone” because they “have a profound and disproportionate effect on communities and ecosystems” and they unexpectedly “determine the structure and function” of those ecosystems. In the fishing industry, keystone species include Alaskan pollock, which dominates the white fish market, skipjack and yellowfin tuna, which dominate the tuna market, and Peruvian anchovy, which dominates the small fish used to produce fishmeal and fish oil. Österblom argues that precisely the same thing can be said about a relatively small number of “keystone corporations” that dominate the markets in those fish: they also fundamentally restructure the ecology of their product.

In Canada and in Europe, the environmental problems caused by salmon farming are well documented, not least the virtual eradication of wild salmon through the use of chemicals and through disease in places it is farmed. The shrimp industry now accounts for the destruction of 40 per cent of the world’s mangrove forests. In many parts of the world, tuna fishing has become unsustainable. Those problems have all come about because each of those industries has been transformed by a corporate model in which capital investment can be deployed quickly, at a scale capable of revolutionising those industries. In each of those industries, a handful of corporations are determining their structure and function.

Scottish-caught fish and seafood is sent to China for packing to exploit cheaper labour costs (Getty)

This is not to say that such processes would not have occurred without those keystone corps. But there is no doubt they have immeasurably speeded up the process, in some cases to the point of no return. The corporation encompasses a kind of hyper-efficient annihilation of nature as it compresses both space and time.

In 1721, English inventor James Puckle set up a joint-stock company to attract investment in a new weapon that used the first machine gun technology. He designed it to enable the operator to shoot two types of bullets for use in two types of wars. Round bullets could be shot at European Christians, and square bullets at Muslim Turks. The square bullets were designed to cause more devastating injuries. The barrel of the gun was engraved with the motto: “Defending King George, your country and lawes is defending yourselves and the protestant cause”. It was the perfect gun for a racist, colonial state.

A flyer for James Puckle’s revolving firearm, with different bullets for Christians and Muslims (Recreation magazine)

In the end, Puckle’s invention was rejected by the fledgling British government for military use, not for lack of enthusiasm for its capacity to enhance racial profiling, but more simply because the mechanism did not work properly. The lack of any prospect of a contract to make the guns meant that the company collapsed. Every penny of investment in the company had been spent on the development of Puckle’s gun. It was a typical event in an age of failed schemes. As author Oliver Burlough has documented, in the 1690s the shares of more than 150 English companies were being dealt in the coffee shops around London’s “Exchange Alley”. Many of those schemes were colonial, and many – like the infamous South Sea Company – were set up to profit directly from the slave trade.

The case of Puckle’s gun underlines the point of the shareholder model of the corporation. In the process of buying stock in a corporation, an important social relationship is established. Investors may have some ethical or principled reason for doing so. The investors in Puckle’s gun may have thought inflicting a more painful death pain on Muslims was consistent with their own religious beliefs. Or they may have thought it repugnant. In the case of the latter, of course it might have been a disincentive to invest.

Activists from Extinction Rebellion protesting outside the Bank of England (Getty)

But not necessarily. The harsh truth of the corporate model of investment is that shareholders never need consider the consequences of their investment should they choose not to. And even if they choose to, they have little say in how the corporation is run on a day to day basis. They will not decide how many people are enslaved, what people they employ are paid, or what the corporation chooses to charge its customers.

Investors commit their own wealth because they expect a good return. In the process, they do not need to have anything do with the way their money is spent. They can choose, as shareholders, to attend an annual general meeting to vote on some strategic issues, and sometimes on the composition of the board of directors. They may even push for divestment from unethical activities and for better reporting. But if they chose not to, they don’t have to have anything at all to do with the affairs of the corporation, what it does and where it does it. They do not need to think of themselves as suppliers of racist guns or slave traders or oil profiteers or responsible for the eradication of wild salmon. They merely need to think of themselves as investors. And in this respect, they can be anonymous, absent, silent, largely unaccountable for what their corporation does.

When a corporation is created as a separate entity, the process creates a degree of separation between the investors and any social damage that might be caused. The same goes for executives. In this way, the corporation enables relationships between real humans and the things they make money from, to be reconstituted as relationships with the “corporation”. This is the remarkable twist that the corporation gives to the way we organise the most basic of things. When a corporation does something that is socially damaging, it is the corporation that will be held accountable and responsible, rather than the powerful people that stand behind the corporation.

This is precisely why lawyers talk about the “corporate person”. In the early colonial period, the legal status granted to corporations quickly came to resemble the status of real, human persons. For the purposes of law, it is the corporation that enters into contracts and employs people; it is the corporation that takes decisions, makes future projections about its value and so on. Virtually everything that the corporation does, is done in its name. Writing in 1678, Scottish Lord Advocate George “Bloody” MacKenzie established the principle that the corporate person could even be held guilty of a crime: “Even these Crymes which are ordinarly committed by privat men, such as Murder, Oppression, etc. are in Law sometimes charged upon the corporations.”

The non-sentient corporate person has become a proxy for the real people standing behind it. This has major advantages when the corporation is accused of crimes and misdemeanours. As City University legal scholar Grieje Baars points out, it is the corporation’s separate personhood that allows senior executives to say “it wasn’t me who did it, it was the corporation!”

Leander Starr Jameson, a South African politician and doctor, leaving Cannon Street Hotel after being elected chairman of the British South Africa Company in 1913 (Getty)

Bloody MacKenzie’s words have come to be prophetic. When it comes to the crimes and misdemeanours of corporations, if anyone is hauled before a court of law, it is much more likely to be a corporate person, rather than a legal person. When the record fine of $20.8bn was issued for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was BP that footed the bill. In the aftermath of “dieselgate”, it was Volkswagen that was fined. It is the corporate person that takes the rap in almost every single environmental crime, no matter how large. And generally, they survive to offend again. In both cases, it took a relatively short time for each of those companies to make up their losses. Indeed, if the former chief executive of Volkswagon, Martin Winterkorn, and four of his colleagues currently on trial do go to jail, it will be for fraud and not for environmental offences. In today’s corporate world, it is almost impossible for any real person to be punished for major environmental offences.

And even when it is convicted, the corporate person has a number of carefully engineered get-outs. Corporations operating in environmentally sensitive areas often ensure they are owned by a chain of complex corporate structures which will allow strategic liquidation if needed. Corporate persons are very often granted exceptional privileges to do things that would never be applied to real human persons. In BP’s case, an astounding $10bn – almost half – of the Deepwater Horizon fine was recovered from tax write-downs.

When the record fine of $20.8bn was issued for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was BP that footed the bill (US Coast Guard/Getty)

In their classic account of the chemical industry, Toxic Capitalism, sociologists Frank Pearce and Steve Tombs argued that we should not see corporations as immoral, or, at the other extreme, as potentially good moral citizens, corporations, in so far as they are expected to make calculations without any moral bias, are amoral.

This is not an insignificant observation. All of the industrial processes that are threatening the end of the species are financed, manufactured and distributed under the control of amoral corporate persons. This is not merely a question of the fossil fuel industry, but every other industrial process that affects the Earth’s ecosystem: the production of persistent chemicals, plastics, transport, the military industry, food production, timber and mining. All of those industries have, since the latter part of the 20th century, become oligopolies. In other words, the industries that effectively control the future of ecosystems are in turn controlled by a shrinking number of hugely powerful corporate players.

Activists outside a Bristol branch of Barclays, which lends money to fossil fuel companies (PA)

One of the first warning signs about climate change came to the world’s attention when scientists began to understand the effects of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the chemicals used in a range of products including aerosols and fridges, air conditioning and in all-purpose packaging and furniture products like Styrofoam. In 1974, two significant scientific studies demonstrated that a build-up of CFCs was responsible for depleting the ozone layer, essential for absorbing the sun's ultraviolet radiation and cooling down the earth. Indeed, the studies concluded that the effects were most probably irreversible.

It is unlikely that chemical companies manufacturing CFCs knew, or could have known, the irreversible effects of their product before 1974. In 1980, as soon as it became obvious that a global ban was on its way, DuPont withdrew all research funding for its safe alternative. It was not until 1986, after British scientists had discovered a gaping hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, that DuPont re-committed to finding an alternative, and later the company was to support a phase-out of CFCs by 2000. We remember the name of the British scientist who first exposed the problem. It was James Lovelock. We will never know the name of the corporate executives that delayed the development of alternatives and lobbied against the global ban.

The manipulation of the science of ozone depletion reveals a pattern of corporate denial and deliberate cover-up that is a story that has been repeated in the cases of all of the most dangerous persistent chemicals that are destroying the planet’s eco-systems. The knowledge that could have protected us from those toxins has been distorted, devalued and very deliberately buried. And countless bodies have been buried along with this knowledge. History is much more likely to recognise the names of the scientists that tried to warn us, than the executives who used the corporate veil to keep on killing us.

We now know that Exxon executives were presented with evidence by the company’s own scientists in 1977 which estimated that “a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius”. They then embarked on an intensive programme of research that sampled CO2 emissions and conducted rigorous climate modelling. In 1981, the research programme concluded that an “expanded R&D programme does not appear to offer significantly increased benefits” and was quietly ditched. From the early 1990s onwards corporate funding by Exxon and by the Koch Family Foundations, switched tack and began to finance groups that attacked climate change science and any constructive policy solutions. This research sowed enough polarisation and doubt around climate change science to ensure that political recognition of the problem of climate change was significantly downplayed.

When the Paris Agreement was being drawn up, it was estimated that in order to reach its targets, Big Oil would lose more than 30 per cent of known oil reserves and 50 per cent of known gas reserves. The oil companies would also need to abandon all exploration and drilling in the Arctic. Yet they did something rather predictable. At the same time as collectively supporting the agreement, they were doubling down on a strategy to weaken and distort its targets.

Activists pour mock oil over themselves in protest against BP’s role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe (Getty)

In fact, the slave owners of the 18th and 19th centuries arrived at precisely the same point in their history. When it was clear that the abolitionists in the British parliament would win the case, the planters and merchants of the West Indies began to lobby for their own “amelioration plans” that would slow the process and allow them to retain profits. According to historian Angelina Osbourne, the powerful slave traders’ association, the West Indies Committee, adopted the language of its progressive opponents “in an attempt to represent itself as sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved workers”. History repeats itself indeed.

The stakes are far too high to trust the job of protecting the planet to investors and corporate managers. Yet in many ways, the issue of who we can and can’t trust is not really the point. The corporation was, from its early history, always a means to ensure the fast and uninhibited reproduction of profit, with little regard for the human and environmental costs.

It is the profit-making corporation that forms the umbilical link between slavery and the ecocide. The African holocaust wiped out millions of people from the face of the planet, and changed the ecological balance that had enabled African peoples to live sustainably for millennia. We will not survive as a species if we continue to allow the same basic organisational form that set the blueprint for the slave trade to occupy a central role in our economy and in our society. This is why it does not seem too outlandish to propose that perhaps we will need to think about killing the corporation before it kills us.

David Whyte is the author of the upcoming book ‘Ecocide: kill the corporation before it kills us’ (Manchester University Press)

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Post-colonial theorist Mbembe helping with Africa-France summit


Cameroonian philosopher and theorist Achille Mbembe is helping with preparations for the Africa-France summit (AFP/Guillem Sartorio)


Claire DOYEN
Tue, October 5, 2021

Achille Mbembe says his first experience with France was when French colonial forces killed his uncle, an activist fighting for an independent Cameroon.

Now, after more than three decades dissecting European colonialism as a historian and philosopher, Mbembe is working with French President Emmanuel Macron to help prepare for the 29th annual Africa-France summit.

The Cameroonian author of several books including "Critique of Black Reason" has taken on the controversial role for a different kind of summit, which takes place on Friday in the southern French city of Montpellier.

For the first time, no African heads of state have been invited to the summmit, which will be organised on round tables on the economy, culture and politics, and youngsters, travelling from Africa, will comprise a third of the 3,000 participants.

The format is the fruit of Mbembe's seven months of deliberations with African civil society groups on future relations between Africa and France -- the country that shepherded the enlightenment but whose colonisation left scars that are visible today.

"I'm exhausted," Mbembe, 64, told AFP.

"I have been a bit like a therapist, sitting around absorbing things that are sometimes ugly," he said, his hand resting on his forehead.

He drafted a report, which has been submitted to the Elysee Palace and is still confidential, at his house in an upmarket Johannesburg suburb where the scent of fresh water lilies wafts from a bouquet in a vase on a table.

"If in Montpellier we manage to move the debate beyond recrimination and denial, then we will have paved the way for a small cultural revolution," he said.

- Banned from Cameroon-

Born in July 1957, Mbembe grew up one of seven children in a nationalist and Christian family on a farm in southern Cameroon. He envisaged himself growing up to be a footballer or working "in the prefecture," the office for local bigwigs.

But he eventually studied history, which took him to Paris.

In his suitcases were texts by his father, Cameroonian independence fighter Ruben Um Nyobe, who was killed by French troops in 1958.

Even after Cameroon gained independence in 1960, mentioning Um Nyobe's name was prohibited for decades.

"I have in my head and in my documents people whose existence have been erased. And my struggle is to prevent this," Mbembe said.

Mbembe's first book, "Le Probleme national kamerunais" ("The Cameroonian National Problem", 1985) contained extracts from Nyobe's prohibited work and resulted in him being banned from his native country for 10 years.

He missed his father's funeral as a result.

He continued his studies in Paris at the Sorbonne and the prestigious Sciences Po, hardly going out, spending the nights hunched over his typewriter in a small apartment near a metro station.

He recalled attending seminars of philosopher Michel Foucault's readings, sometimes neglecting his studies.

"I was a bad student," he said.

Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was his mentor, while he drew inspiration from Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant.

After completing his thesis, Mbembe was poached by American universities. But the US had never been on his "intellectual radar", and he soon returned to Africa.

- 'I had to relearn everything' -

In 1996 he took over running the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in the Senegalese capital Dakar, aiming to turn it into a "competitive" global institute.

"I had never worked in Africa, I had to relearn everything," he said, referring to the "old school" resistance he encountered.

His friend, Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, said Mbembe's "writing was postmodern, not committed enough to Marxism," which was traditionally associated with independence struggles in Africa at the time.

"It caused clashes," Diagne said.

Four years later Mbembe resigned and moved to South Africa, which was in the early post-apartheid years.

Married with children, the professor has lived in Johannesburg for 20 years where he now heads the Wits Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Hailed as one of the most influential thinkers on post-colonialism -- a term he calls "empty and pompous" -- Mbembe says he simply "deals with things that interest him".

cld/ger/sn/dl/ri

Trump's former Russia advisor says he didn't consider her 'part of his team' because she was a woman

Fiona Hill, former senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council, takes her seat to testify at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump.

 Loren Hill/Reuters


Trump's ex-Russia advisor said he didn't consider her a "part of his team" because she was a woman.


"As far as President Trump was concerned, my academic and professional credentials and expertise were irrelevant," Fiona Hill wrote.


"For all intents and purposes, as a woman and an outsider, I was not part of his team," she added.


The top Russia expert in the Trump administration said then President Donald Trump didn't consider her a "part of his team" in large part because she was a woman.

That's according to Fiona Hill's new book, "There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century."

Hill, who served as the senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council under Trump, wrote that it became clear in her first couple of weeks on the job that she was never going to get a one-on-one meeting with the president.

"I was never going to have any kind of sit-down with Donald Trump to talk about Vladimir Putin or Russia, or pretty much anything else in my portfolio," she wrote. "One of the major reasons was that I was a woman, and a completely unknown quantity at that. These two factors became critical in shaping my time in the NSC."

Hill said those factors became the main obstacle to her "doing the job" she had been hired for.

"As far as President Trump was concerned, my academic and professional credentials and expertise were irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, as a woman and an outsider, I was not part of his team," she wrote.

She said that her work was further complicated by the fact that her boss, H.R. McMaster, was also unfamiliar to Trump.

"He was in the process of figuring out for himself how to navigate the White House when I came on board," Hill wrote. "Our mutual lack of familiarity with Trump and his team would prove to be a huge obstacle in the year ahead."

Hill maintained a relatively low profile after joining the Trump administration in April 2017. But she catapulted into the spotlight in 2019, amid the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry into Trump's efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching politically motivated investigations targeting the Bidens.

Hill was one of several career officials who testified about Trump's pressure campaign against Ukraine. Among other things, she told lawmakers that she was "shocked" and "saddened" when she read a transcript of a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky to "do us a favor" and investigate the Bidens.

"I sat in an awful lot of calls, and I have not seen anything like this. And I was there for 2 and a half years. So I was just shocked," Hill testified. She also told lawmakers that her boss, then national security advisor John Bolton, referred to the pressure campaign as a "drug deal" he didn't want to be a part of.

Read the original article on Business Insider

CURFEW MEN
I’m sick of society telling women we must protect ourselves from violent men

Tayo Bero
Wed, October 6, 2021

Photograph: Chasity Maynard/AP

Here we go again. Every time a woman is a victim of male violence, there is a major public discussion on how they can “protect” themselves.

Last week, a British police commissioner said that Sarah Everard, an English woman killed in March by a police officer, “never should have submitted” to the false arrest that led to her rape and murder. “Women, first of all, need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can’t be arrested,” the commissioner said. Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens, had falsely arrested her for supposedly violating London’s Covid regulations.

This week, Florida police found the body of a missing woman, Miya Marcano. Marcano was being harassed by Armando Manuel Caballero, a maintenance worker in her building whose advances she had turned down several times before she went missing. Police are pretty sure that Caballero, who killed himself before he could be arrested, was responsible for Marcano’s death.

As news of Marcano’s disappearance and death spread, my social media timelines were flooded with posts about how other women can prevent a similar fate from befalling them. While I can understand women’s instinct to figure out how to protect ourselves in a society that clearly won’t, this endless focus on women’s actions is tantamount to victim-blaming, and perpetuates the bizarre idea that women can somehow have agency over the actions of violent men.

It’s also a completely useless way of trying to address gender-based violence. Statistics show that one out of every six American women has been a victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, and poor, trans and racialized women are disproportionately affected by this. Almost 85% of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced some form of sexual violence, stalking or aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime. In 2015, Black women were two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than white women.

Society infantilizes men, treating them from an early age like mere victims of their uncontrollable urges while constantly telling women to smarten up so we don’t fall victim to said urges

No amount of senseless finger-wagging is going to stop harmful men from taking advantage of their positions, feeling entitled to women’s bodies, and enacting the kind of violence that they know society will ultimately blame women for. This finger-wagging also does little to address the root cause of this issue – male violence.

It’s a frustrating but predictable cycle – frustrating, because any woman will tell you there are very few ways to stop a man from attacking you (without consequence) if he really sets his mind to it, and predictable, because we live in a world that will do anything to absolve men of responsibility. Society infantilizes men, treating them from an early age like mere victims of their uncontrollable urges while constantly telling women to smarten up so we don’t fall victim to said urges.

In reality, focusing on preventative interventions for men and boys is the only way to stop male violence. The criminal justice system fails women so often that the justice system is simply not a good deterrent, and many women are understandably hesitant to report the fact that they have been victimized by men. Frankly, by the time the police show up to arrest a bad man, the damage has usually already been done.

Another infuriating element to this are the ways that the media and society tend to frame stories like Marcano’s. Numerous publications referred to Caballero as “spurned” and called his harassment of Miya “romantic overtures”. There is nothing romantic about being stalked by someone who has a key to your apartment and no regard for your boundaries. Women have said this over and over again, but somehow society is more comfortable empathizing with a man trying to “get the girl” than naming something for what it is – stalking and harassment.

I don’t want to learn a new trick for how to protect my drink in a club, or how to use a pocket knife hidden in my lipstick, or have to buy some strange contraption to make sure my hotel room door stays locked. I want to live in a world where women don’t have to live in constant fear for their own safety, and where I can turn down a man and not be killed for it.


Tayo Bero is a freelance journalist

ANOTHER AMAZING FIND IN THE MUSEUM STORAGE ROOM

'Chief dragon' is UK's oldest meat-eating dinosaur


Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Tue, October 5, 2021,

More than half a century after first being unearthed from a Welsh quarry, four small fossil fragments have finally been assigned to a new species of dinosaur.

Researchers from London's Natural History Museum say Pendraig milnerae is the oldest meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in the UK.

It existed over 200 million years ago, their analysis suggests.

The name Pendraig means "chief dragon" in Middle Welsh.

AS IN 'PENDRAGON' KING ARTHUR'S TITLE/NAME (BEING WELSH)

The animal was very likely the apex, or top, predator in its environment. That said, it wasn't exactly a giant. Think of something chicken-sized with a very long tail.

"It was a typical theropod; so, a meat-eating dinosaur that walked around on two legs, like T. rex or Velociraptor that you'll know from the movies, but much earlier in time," explained the NHM's Dr Stephan Spiekman.


Artwork: Pendraig probably had sharp teeth and predated on other small reptiles

This is one of those classic fossil stories.

Pendraig is described by just four, albeit beautifully preserved, bone pieces. A vertebra, elements of the pelvis and a femur. These items were originally pulled from a limestone quarry near Cowbridge in South Wales in the 1950s.

Their interesting features were occasionally discussed within the NHM, but then the fossil material somehow got lost in the vast collections of the museum, mistakenly stored with crocodilian remains.

Only recently were the bones recovered from the "wrong drawer" and recognised for their true significance.

Pendraig is really ancient. It's late Triassic in age. It could be as much as 214 million years old, putting it close to the base of dinosaur emergence.

Indeed, Pendraig would have been a fossil when the previously mentioned T. rex and Velociraptor were still strutting their stuff in the Cretaceous, just before the asteroid struck to wipe them both from the face of the Earth 66 million years ago.

"We've only got these four fragments, but the preservation is fantastic. The fossil is completely three dimensional; it's undistorted," Dr Spiekman told BBC News.

"What's so interesting and important here is that we're getting to see the very early stages of the evolution of the dinosaurs. These animals eventually came to dominate the Earth, but in the late Triassic they were only one of several groups of reptiles that were living on land."

The geological study of the British Isles tells us that during this time, what is now the Bristol Channel region of the UK was a series of islands made from much older limestone that had been folded and pushed upwards.

Pendraig would have lived somewhere across the archipelago.

How this particular specimen died, we can only speculate. But its bones were embedded in a gryke, or fissure, in the limestone. Perhaps the dino fell in; maybe it was already dead and got washed in during a flood. No-one can say for sure.

There's a bit of a puzzle related to the size of the animal, which is on the small side of what might be expected. Dr Spiekman wondered if Pendraig might be an example of dwarfism, a phenomenon you sometimes see in species that are confined to islands and their limited resources. But the analysis in this case came to no firm conclusions.

Angela Milner was perhaps best known for the Surrey dinosaur Baryonyx

The second part of Pendraig's name - its species name - recognises an influential figure in British dinosaur science: Angela Milner, who died in August.

The former deputy keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum was associated with another major theropod discovery in the 1980s - an animal called Baryonyx - and was key in helping to bring Pendraig milnerae to light again.

"It wasn't lost for very long in the collections, but it was Angela we have to thank for tracking it down. She'd remembered seeing it and went off to look through the museum's drawers. And after three or four hours she returned to say, I found it!" recalled co-author Dr Susie Maidment.

"Angela had a really influential career in UK palaeontology and was a huge loss to us here at the museum. We were some way through describing the fossil when she died, but we wanted to honour her by naming the fossil after her."

Pendraig milnerae is reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

NOT A PASSIVE PACIFIST
South Africa's Desmond Tutu turns 90 amid new racist slur

South Africa Tutu — In this March 12, 2008 file photo, Former South African President Nelson Mandela, right, reacts with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, left, in Johannesburg, South Africa, As South Africa's anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu turns 90, recent racist graffiti on a portrait of the Nobel winner highlights the continuing relevance of his work for equality. 

(AP Photo/Themba Hadebe/File)

ANDREW MELDRUM
Wed, October 6, 2021

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — As South Africa's anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu turns 90, recent racist graffiti on a portrait of the Nobel winner highlights the continuing relevance of his work for equality.

Often hailed as the conscience of South Africa, Tutu was a key campaigner against South Africa's previous brutal system of oppression against the country's Black majority. After South Africa achieved democracy in 1994, he continued to be an outspoken proponent of reconciliation, justice and LBGT rights.

The racial insult sprayed last month on a mural of Tutu in Cape Town is “loathsome and sad,” said Mamphela Ramphele, acting chairwoman of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Trust.

South Africans must continue Tutu's work for racial equality, she told The Associated Press.

“Racism is a curse South Africa must escape,” said Ramphele. “Archbishop Tutu's legacy is huge. He fought against racism and fought for the humanity of us all."

Although frail, Tutu is expected to attend a service on Thursday, his birthday, at St. George’s Cathedral in central Cape Town, where as the country's first Black Anglican archbishop he delivered sermons excoriating apartheid.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign of nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s system of white minority rule.

After retiring as archbishop in 1996, Tutu was chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated human rights abuses during the apartheid era.

Despite the serious nature of his work, Tutu brought an irrepressible humor to his frequent public appearances. Notably, he supported LBGT rights and same-sex marriage.

“I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this,” he said in 2013. "I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say ‘Sorry, I would much rather go to the other place.’”

Tutu said he was "as passionate about this campaign (for LGBT rights) as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.”

He withdrew from public life in 2010 and issued statements through his foundation. He has been treated for prostate cancer and was hospitalized several times in 2015 and 2016, and underwent a surgical procedure to address recurring infections from past cancer treatment.

At the church service Thursday, fellow anti-apartheid campaigner Alan Boesak is to speak. There will also be an online seminar about Tutu’s life and values to be addressed by the Dalai Lama; the widow of Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel; former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson; and South African governance advocate Thuli Madonsela.

COP26: The sculpture created from 1765 Antarctic air

Vincent Dowd - Arts correspondent, BBC News
Tue, October 5, 2021, 

Wayne Binitie displays his sculpture

Antarctic snowfall two-and-half centuries old forms the basis of a new artwork by Wayne Binitie, titled 1765 - Antarctic Air. It forms the centrepiece to the Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow throughout the UN climate summit COP26. Binitie says he wants his piece to provide an artistic marker of how much the earth's atmosphere has altered since the crucial date of 1765.

The slightly battered old statue of the inventor James Watt on Glasgow Green stands a couple of miles from the city's modern Science Centre. There's an obvious connection: Watt (who died in 1819) has long been acclaimed as one of the great figures of Scottish science and engineering.

But thanks to Binitie, a Royal College of Art PhD candidate, there's currently a more specific link as well.

In 1765, crossing the parkland where the statue now is, Watt successfully thought through how steam engines - increasingly vital to industry - could be redesigned to become hugely more efficient.

The year 1765 is regarded by some as the start of the Industrial Revolution.

But Binitie says it's also when humans started to do serious damage to the atmosphere which sustains us all. In an unusual artistic collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) he's built the significance of that year into the small but striking installation 1765 - Antarctic Air at the heart of the Polar Zero exhibition.

1765 - Antarctic Air

"We wanted to offer some proximity to what's quite a remote conversation now taking place about global warming," he says. "Because of COP26 the Glasgow Science Centre was the obvious place to do it. We're offering a sense of touch and what it means to be in touch with ice and air.

"As you enter the oval-shaped room there's a cylindrical glass sculpture on one side, housed in a floor-to-ceiling black steel frame. The cylinder contains a visible area of liquid silicone and above that is air, carefully extracted from polar ice dating from 1765.

The ice core mined from deep in the snow of the Antarctic

"On the other side of the room is a second cylinder of Antarctic ice. It's intact but you see it melting all the time: it will be replaced during the run of the exhibition with other ice we have in store."

Visitors can touch and hear and if they're brave even taste the second lot of ice. In addition there is a highly evocative soundtrack in the room, blending music and the sounds of nature.

The man who mined the ice for the British Antarctic Survey is glaciologist Dr Robert Mulvaney. He's been visiting the Antarctic for 25 years, staying for up to 80 weeks in a tent to drill out ice-cores before returning to the British base station.

"The essence of what we're doing as scientists is to record what happened to the ice-sheet over a period of many thousands of years: that way we can investigate what happened to the climate and to the atmosphere.

Artist Wayne Binitie documents his work with the Antarctic ice

"For instance next spring I shall be making a trip to Greenland where the ice-sheet can give a record going back around 120,000 years. But in Antarctica we've already been back over 800,000 years and a new project will we hope take us back up to 1.5 million years."

Given those mind-boggling figures the water dripping slowly from Binitie's installation - the ice had already been in storage for 30 years - may seem of minor importance. "We've done all the science on it now and it was surplus to requirements.

"So the British Antarctic Survey was delighted to cooperate on the art project because we want people to understand what's happening to the polar regions. 1765 is usually accepted as the beginning of the period in which human beings changed the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels on an industrial scale."

Robert Mulvaney (left), Graham Dodd and Wayne Binitie examine their collaboration on the sculpture

Dr Mulvaney makes uncovering ice from 256 years ago sound like child's play - once you've set up your tents around 1,000km from the home comforts of the Antarctic base station.

"Snow falls in Antarctica year by year - but there's no melting going on. So the snow builds up and compresses all the years of snow beneath. As we drill down we're driving further and further into the past - a bit like counting the rings of a big tree.

"What helps is that every so often we know that a certain volcano blew up in a particular year and we may find evidence of that. So using our drills to find a specific year isn't quite as hard as you would imagine."

Analysis shows that in 1765 carbon dioxide made up 280 parts per million in the air. By the 1960s that had already increased to 315 parts per million. But today the figure is 415 per million - an obvious increase in the rate of change.

The ice supplied for the Binitie artwork came from 110 metres down. The deepest Dr Mulvaney has drilled is around 3,200 metres.

The Antarctic gas being extracted

Binitie was meant to experience all of this courtesy of the BAS but Covid got in the way. It's obvious how much Dr Mulvaney delights in describing the experience of being there. Asked if satellite phones keep the small team safely in touch with the world he says he does his best not to use them: "It brings the troubles of the world onto the site and I need to be focused on the work."

Once the ice core was extracted, the job was to release the flecks of air trapped in the Antarctic in 1765. Binitie's concept is to establish this as a starting line: the purest possible air trapped in ice just before the modern world started to pollute it. The international engineering company Arup helped out with some of the practicalities.

Graham Dodd of Arup says encasing 256 year-old air within glass was a challenge. "After a lot of thought we decided the right technique was to make a casing with a void inside which we then filled with fluid. We had to find a way so Robert could then inject into that space the air extracted from the ice that the BAS had given us.

Antarctic air up close

"The other artistic challenge was to find a way to display the other column, which is simply ice. As an artist, Wayne needed visitors to see and hear the ice dripping away very slowly as that makes the point about global warming. Arup's engineering job was to ensure it doesn't disappear too quickly."

Binitie thinks the global warming conversation can sometimes feel too generic, with issues almost too big to comprehend. "So I hope our installation in Glasgow will persuade people that the polar regions are a sufficiently precious thing to care about. Some perspectives are political or theoretical or economic but we're trying to supply a poetic perspective too.

Binitie hopes some of the VIPs attending COP26 nearby will come to see his installation. "We'd like 1765 - Antarctic Ice to surprise them. I want to do something to encourage a collective conversation: if we move forward collectively we know we can achieve a lot."

Polar Zero is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Rivian’s Electric Truck Gets All the Attention, But Its Fate Is Tied to Amazon



Edward Ludlow and Keith Naughton
Wed, October 6, 2021

In this article:
(Bloomberg) -- (This is the second story in a series examining Rivian’s origins and its future.)

Jeff Bezos stood before a packed conference room in Washington, D.C., and declared war on climate change. It was September 2019. His secret weapon, tucked deep into a chart-heavy presentation, was a bug-eyed cargo truck built by a startup few people had heard of.

“I am incredibly excited to announce that we have just placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans,” Bezos, then chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., told the stunned crowd. "They will be built by a company called Rivian.”

Amazon would be carbon neutral by 2040, he pledged — a game-changing moment for Bezos and the millions of Prime customers. But this was an even more defining moment for Rivian. The order immediately separated the auto rookie from the parade of promising electric startups, providing backing, a big book of business and legitimacy. It also would soon start to draw in additional investment from major players, including Ford Motor Co., T. Rowe Price, D1 Capital Partners and Fidelity.

For Rivian’s founder, R.J. Scaringe, the Bezos endorsement opened doors that were inaccessible to his rival Elon Musk in the early days of Tesla. While most of Rivian’s marketing focuses on its sleek and powerful consumer models — and Scaringe's vision for creating the Patagonia of pickups — the company is driven by the business Amazon is providing. Without it, say people familiar with the company's financials, there would be no hope of the $80 billion valuation Rivian is aiming for in its upcoming initial public offering.

Amazon's primacy as a customer is underscored now as production gets underway at Rivian's Illinois factory. Scaringe has prioritized building hundreds of delivery vans this year, while production of the highly anticipated new electric pickup runs at a trickle, according to people familiar with the plan.

On Friday, Rivian shared new details of the Amazon deal in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing how closely its fate is tied to one of its biggest benefactors. The e-commerce giant will have exclusive rights to Rivian’s delivery vehicles for four years after receiving its first one, and it gets right of first refusal to buy the vans for two years after that.

Rivian’s official debut came about a year before the Bezos announcement, at the 2018 Los Angeles auto show. Scaringe, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D., used the annual event to formally unveil his company, which had been operating in stealth mode until then. He’d been working on a premium electric pickup and an SUV.

Rihanna was among the guests at the launch party the night before the event. The singer posed for pictures with Scaringe in front of the sleek pickup, offering a thumbs up. She was there with her then-boyfriend, Hassan Jameel, whose family conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel had already invested millions in the startup.

In a 22-minute pitch at the car show, Scaringe explained that every detail of the R1T pickup and its close SUV cousin, the R1S, was developed in-house: the headlamps, storage, battery management system and quad motor system. The trucks would be built at the company’s recently acquired factory in Normal, Illinois. A team outside of Detroit was refining the engineering. And in Irvine, California, workers were designing the core battery and propulsion technology.

Scaringe, it turns out, was steering his venture into an entirely empty slot in the industry’s fastest lane. Americans were rapidly ditching their sensible sedans and indulging in the bigger is better ethos. As gasoline prices plummeted, SUVs became the modern family wagon and pickups were snapped up by suburban cowboys whose heaviest load was hauling mulch for the garden. By 2015, trucks and SUVs were outselling traditional cars in the U.S. Today, they account for three-quarters of the market, prompting automakers like Ford to get out of the sedan business entirely.

“When Rivian showcased its electric trucks and SUVs, it gave the EV market hope in the sense that electric vehicles could evolve to meet more mainstream preferences,” says Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at auto-market researcher Edmunds.

Rivian started to take pre-orders for the consumer vehicles at the L.A. show. Potential customers have put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to buy 48,390 R1T and R1S models. By comparison, Ford already has surpassed 150,000 non-binding reservations for its F-150 Lightning.

The most-hyped Rivian consumer today is Bezos, who has never said publicly how the startup landed on his radar. There are several connections between the two companies that offer some clues. In mid-2018, Rivian worked with a production company owned by director Peter Berg, who knows Bezos, to film material that would later be used at Rivian’s L.A. auto show reveal, people familiar with the matter said. Some of the impressive aerial photography was shot by Black Ops Aviation, a company owned by Bezos’ now-girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, the people said. Through the companies’ interactions with Rivian, word eventually got back to Bezos about a startup with an intriguing electric truck that was worth a look.

Due diligence by Amazon followed and in the late fall of 2018, Bezos flew to Rivian’s engineering facility in Plymouth, Michigan, and met with Scaringe. The Rivian founder presented a detailed document: his vision for an electric future. Throughout Amazon’s search for an electrified fleet, a particular sticking point was just how expensive it would prove to mass-produce the electric vans, according to a person familiar with the matter. Until that point, Bezos and Amazon had found no company that could build a battery-powered van at scale. Now he had.

“We weren’t super excited about the products that were available,” Ross Rachey, Amazon’s director of fleet and product, said in an interview in August 2020. “It was a combination of established manufacturers who were maybe a year or two farther out than we wanted. And it was a host of startups, some compelling, some non-compelling.”

In February 2019, Amazon led a $440 million investment round in Rivian just days before it stood up a target of reaching net zero carbon for half of all shipments by 2030. Six months later, Bezos was in Washington with more big, green goals: a plan to get all of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and to become entirely carbon neutral by 2040. (Amazon, Rivian and Berg declined to comment for this story. Black Ops Aviation did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scaringe had built two lines of business: one reliant on a just-in-time delivery empire and the other on environmentally conscious consumers. The vans for Amazon would deliver steady revenue, while the SUVs and trucks try to keep their momentum in a fickle retail market far more sensitive to economic conditions.

There’s a clear recognition inside Rivian and with its investors that the van for Amazon is a priority and the pickup a sideshow until production can be ramped up to meaningful volumes. The deal gives Rivian visibility and guaranteed revenue, along with a deadline. An all-hands-on-deck edict has been issued to get the project up to speed — for now, the R1T is taking a back seat.

Rivian’s most immediate goal is to deliver 300 vans to Amazon by year-end, according to people familiar with the deal. The first 10,000 units are due by the end of 2022. The full order of 100,000 vans is due by the end of the decade. The vans, in different configurations, are principally for last-mile delivery. Each will have a range of up to 150 miles on a charge.

Over the summer, Scaringe fast-tracked testing on the R1T pickup to clear the decks for accelerated van production in the fall. In September, the company’s efforts refocused on building what is known internally as the Rivian Prime Van. The pickup is being produced in steady but modest numbers, according to people familiar with the plan.

The pickup has also faced multiple delays since the global coronavirus pandemic hit, most recently attributed to a global computer chip shortage. Rivian has promised each buyer a human point of contact, dubbed an “ambassador,” to set expectations before the vehicle is delivered. But to date that PR army has had little positive news to report.

Ross Gale, a car collector and business owner in New Jersey, ordered a launch green R1T pickup last November. Lately, he says, despite his excitement when he first placed the order, he’s been frustrated by the lack of communication from the company on when he can expect to receive his vehicle.

Once delivered, he plans to use the truck as his daily driver and to haul cars from his collection to auto shows. "I 100% believe in the product, having never seen one, having never touched one,” Gale says. “But I am annoyed with the failure to meet promises. I mean, just be honest. Tell us what you're doing."

Meanwhile, Rivian’s contractual requirements for Amazon may simply be an opening bid. Bezos, as he looks toward future orders, has set up a kind of bake-off (as he is known to do). In addition to Rivian, Amazon currently buys vans from Ford, Stellantis and Daimler, all companies that are quickly flipping the switch on electric models.

“You can safely assume 100,000 vans is not really the objective,” one source familiar with the deal says. “If Amazon really wants to change over their fleet — because how else are they going to become carbon neutral — then you can imagine the size of the order and how big it will be.”

The deal between the two companies is stacked in Amazon’s favor. Rivian's Oct. 1 filing details that Amazon’s logistics unit is not bound to buy any electric delivery vehicles from Rivian — and that it can still work with any other potential automotive partners it chooses.

Quantifying how much of a boost the Amazon deal will be to Rivian is tricky, as the specifics have never been disclosed. The unknown price of each van is just one part of the equation. The agreement between the two companies also includes provisions for recurring revenue for fleet management, such as software updates and running diagnostics, people familiar with the matter said.

PitchBook analysts forecast the total Amazon order could bring more than $4.5 billion to Rivian and, more importantly, additional commercial customers. “These orders are a validating signal for investors and set Rivian up well to supply electric delivery vans to other logistics companies,” said Asad Hussain, Pitchbook’s senior mobility analyst. “In the same way investors look to Tesla for the future of automotive, many investors look to Amazon for the future of logistics.”

Rivian will try to simultaneously launch three all-new electric vehicles. “Moving into the production on multiple fronts is a challenge for any automaker, let alone one that has never scaled up a single model before,” says BloombergNEF analyst Corey Cantor.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Rivian’s first customer will get a truck, the ambassadors will start booking delivery dates and Instagram will fill up with the 5,000-pound version of an iPhone unboxing video. Still, the wait for most customers will be long. Scaringe told Bloomberg in November that it would take two years to catch up on its order book.

Amazon currently is testing a handful of pre-production vans in cities across the U.S. And Bezos is no longer at the helm. He stepped down from the CEO’s perch in July and has been devoting time to his rocket company Blue Origin. Mere minutes before blasting himself into space in July, with much of the world watching, Bezos drove to the launch pad in a Rivian SUV. After touching back down to earth, his capsule was swarmed by vehicles — all Rivian pickups and SUVs, each of them shiny and dusty.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.