Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

How does consciousness arise in mere flesh and blood? To the neuroscientist Anil Seth, our organic bodies are the key to the experience.


In his laboratory at the University of Sussex, the neuroscientist Anil Seth monitors brain activity for clues to the origins of consciousness.
Tom Medwell for Quanta Magazine

LONG READ

Dan Falk
Contributing Writer
September 30, 2021

Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do — but he knows that the puzzle of consciousness spills over from neuroscience into other branches of science, and even into philosophy.

As he puts it near the start of his new book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (available October 19): “Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?”

This puzzle — the mystery of how inanimate matter arranges itself into living beings with self-aware minds and a rich inner life — is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness. But the way Seth sees it, Chalmers was overly pessimistic. Yes, it’s a challenge — but we’ve been chipping away at it steadily over the years.

“I always get a little annoyed when I read people saying things like, ‘Chalmers proposed the hard problem 25 years ago’ … and then saying, 25 years later, that ‘we’ve learned nothing about this; we’re still completely in the dark, we’ve made no progress,’” said Seth. “All this is nonsense. We’ve made a huge amount of progress.”

Quanta recently caught up with Seth at his home in Brighton via videoconference. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why has this problem of consciousness been so vexing, over the centuries — harder, it seems, than figuring out what’s inside an atom or even how the universe began?

When we think about consciousness or experience, it just doesn’t seem to us to be the sort of thing that admits an explanation in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. There’s a suspicion that scientific explanation — by which I mean broadly materialist, reductive explanations, which have been so successful in other branches of physics and chemistry — just might not be up to the job, because consciousness is intrinsically private.


In this study of “displaced perception” in Seth’s lab, a volunteer wears a virtual reality headset that provides a view of a mannequin’s chest. This setup can trick the brain into “feeling” touches that aren’t on the body.
Tom Medwell for Quanta Magazine

That leap from the physical to the mental is something that philosophers have grappled with for centuries. René Descartes, for example, famously argued that nonhuman animals were akin to machines, while humans had something extra that made consciousness possible. In your book, you mention the work of a less familiar figure, the 18th-century French scholar Julien Offray de La Mettrie. How did his views differ from those of Descartes, and how do they bear on your own work?

La Mettrie is a fascinating character, a polymath type of figure. I think of him as basically taking Descartes’ ideas and extending them to their natural conclusions, by not being worried about what the [Catholic] Church might say. Descartes was always trying to finesse his arguments in order to avoid being burned alive, or otherwise being subject to harsh clerical treatment. Descartes considered nonhuman animals as “beast-machines.” (This is a term I re-appropriate and hope to rehabilitate in my book.) The beast-machine for Descartes was the idea that nonhuman animals were machines made of flesh and blood, lacking the rational, conscious minds that bring humans closer to God.

La Mettrie said, “OK, if animals are flesh-and-blood machines, then humans are animals, too, of a certain sort.” So just as there is a beast-machine, or a bête machine, you also have l’homme machine — “man machine.” He just extended the same basic idea without this artificial division.

How does consciousness play into that picture? How is consciousness related to our nature as living machines, in a way that’s continuous between humans and other animals? In my work — and in the book — I eventually get to the point that consciousness is not there in spite of our nature as flesh-and-blood machines, as Descartes might have said; rather, it’s because of this nature. It is because we are flesh-and-blood living machines that our experiences of the world and of “self” arise.
You’re clearly more drawn to some of the approaches to consciousness that researchers have put forward than others. For example, you seem to support the work that Giulio Tononi and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have been doing on “integrated information theory” (IIT). What is integrated information theory, and why do you find it promising?

Well, I find some bits of IIT promising, but not others. The promising bit comes from what Gerald Edelman and Tononi together observed, in the late ’90s, which is that conscious experiences are highly “informative” and always “integrated.”

It is because we are flesh-and-blood living machines that our experiences of the world and of “self” arise.

They meant information in a technical, formal sense — not the informal sense in which reading a newspaper is informative. Rather, conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other experience you ever have had, ever could have, or ever will have. Each one rules out the occurrence of a very, very large repertoire of alternative possible conscious experiences. When I look out of the window right now, I have never experienced this precise visual scene. It’s an experience even more distinctive when combined with all my thoughts, background emotions and so on. And this is what information, in information theory, measures: It’s the reduction of uncertainty among a repertoire of alternative possibilities.

As well as being informative, every conscious experience is also integrated. It’s experienced “all of a piece”: Every conscious scene appears as a unified whole. We don’t experience the colors of objects separately from their shapes, nor do we experience objects independently of whatever else is going on. The many different elements of my conscious experience right now all seem tied together in a fundamental and inescapable way.

So at the level of experience, at the level of phenomenology, consciousness has these two properties that coexist. Well, if that’s the case, then what Tononi and Edelman argued was that the mechanisms that underlie conscious experiences in the brain or in the body should also co-express these properties of information and integration.



Video: The neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex discusses the principles, philosophy and experimentation that have brought scientists closer to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness.
Emily Buder/Quanta Magazine; Harry Genge for Quanta Magazine

Then is integrated information theory an attempt to quantify consciousness — to attach numbers to it?

Basically, yes. IIT proposes a quantity called phi which measures both information and integration and which according to the theory is identical to the amount of consciousness associated with a system.

One thing that immediately follows from this is that you have a nice post hoc explanation for certain things we know about consciousness. For instance, that the cerebellum — the “little brain” in the back of our head — doesn’t seem to have much to do with consciousness. That’s just a matter of empirical fact; the cerebellum doesn’t seem much involved. Yet it has three-quarters of all the neurons in the brain. Why isn’t the cerebellum involved? You can make up many reasons. But the IIT reason is a very convincing one: The cerebellum’s wiring is not the right sort of wiring to generate co-expressed information and integration, whereas the cortex is, and the cortex is intimately related to consciousness.

I should also say the parts of IIT that I find less promising are where it claims that integrated information actually is consciousness — that there’s an identity between the two. Among other things, taking this stance makes it almost impossible to measure for any nontrivial system. It also implies that consciousness is sort of everywhere, since many systems, not just brains, can generate integrated information.
You also seem fascinated by Karl Friston’s “free-energy principle.” Can you give a layperson-friendly explanation of what this is, and how it can help us understand minds?

I think the simplest articulation of the free-energy principle is this: Let’s think about living systems — a cell or an organism. A living system maintains itself as separate from its environment. For example, I don’t just dissolve into mush on the floor. It’s an active process: I take energy in, and I maintain myself as a system which maintains its boundaries with the world.

This means that of all the possible states my body could be in — all the possible combinatorial arrangements of my different components — there’s only a very, very small subset of “statistically expected” states that I remain in. My body temperature, for instance, remains in a very small range of temperatures, which is one of the reasons I stay alive. How do I do this? How does the organism do this? Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it’s in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so I don’t dissipate into all kinds of states.

I think you can tell a rich story about the nature of consciousness and perception while retaining a broadly realist view of the world.

The free-energy principle is not itself a theory about consciousness, but I think it’s very relevant because it provides a way of understanding how and why brains work the way they do, and it links back to the idea that consciousness and life are very tightly related. Very briefly, the idea is that to regulate things like body temperature — and, more generally, to keep the body alive — the brain uses predictive models, because to control something it’s very useful to be able to predict how it will behave. The argument I develop in my book is that all our conscious experiences arise from these predictive models which have their origin in this fundamental biological imperative to keep living.
In your book, you discuss how things become less mysterious as we understand the science behind them better, and you wonder whether the mystery of consciousness might go away more in the manner of the mystery of “heat” or more like the mystery of “life.” Can you expand on that a little bit?

There may be another connection between consciousness and life, but in this case the connection is more historical than literal. Historically, there is a commonality between the apparent mysteries of “life” and of “heat,” which is that both eventually went away — but they went away in different ways.

Let’s take heat first. Some years ago I read this brilliant book called Inventing Temperature by the philosopher and historian of science Hasok Chang. Until then, I had not realized how complicated and rich and convoluted the story of heat and temperature was. Back in the 17th century, efforts to understand the basis of heat depended on ways to measure hotness and coolness — to come up with a scale of temperature and things like thermometers. But how do you build a thermometer until you have a reliable benchmark, a fixed point of temperature? And how do you get a temperature scale until you’ve got a reliable thermometer? It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that was really problematic at the time. But it was managed: People, bit by bit, bootstrapped reliable thermometers into existence.

Once the ability to measure was in place, the story of heat turned out to be a maximally reductive scientific explanation. Previously, people had wondered whether heat was this thing that flowed between objects. Well, it’s not. Heat turns out to be identical to something else — in this case, the mean molecular kinetic energy of atoms or molecules in a substance. That is what heat is.

Life is very different. Nobody measures how “alive” something is; it didn’t get resolved in that way. But people still wondered what the essence of life really was — whether life required some élan vital, this “spark of life.” Well, it does not. The key to unlocking life was to recognize that it is not just one thing. Life is a constellation concept — a cluster of related properties that come together in different ways in different organisms. There’s homeostasis, there’s reproduction, there’s metabolism, and so on. With life there are also gray areas, things that from some perspectives we would describe as being alive, and from others not — like viruses and oil droplets, and now synthetic organisms. But by accounting for its diverse properties, the suspicion that we still needed an élan vital, a spark of life — some sort of vitalistic resonance — to explain it went away. The problem of life wasn’t solved; it was “dissolved.”

“The free-energy principle is not itself a theory about consciousness,” Seth said, “but I think it’s very relevant because it provides a way of understanding how and why brains work the way they do.”
Harry Genge for Quanta Magazine


Which of these two ways do you suppose the puzzle of consciousness will play out?

Let’s be optimistic and say that this problem, consciousness, will go away too. We’ll look back in 50 years or 500 years, and we’ll say, “Oh, yeah, we understand now.” Will it be a story much like temperature and heat, where we say that consciousness is identical to something else — let’s say, something like integrated information? IIT is in fact the theory that goes most strongly with the temperature analogy. Maybe it will turn out that way, if Giulio [Tononi] is right.

And what if consciousness ends up being more like life?

This, for me, is the more likely outcome. Here, it’s going to be a case of saying consciousness is not this one big, scary mystery, for which we need to find a humdinger eureka moment of a solution. Rather, being conscious, much like being alive, has many different properties that will express in different ways among different people, among different species, among different systems. And by accounting for each of these properties in terms of things happening in brains and bodies, the mystery of consciousness may dissolve too.
You describe perception in your book as a “controlled hallucination.” This gets us into somewhat philosophical territory. How do we decide what’s “real” and what’s an illusion?

I don’t want to be misinterpreted, as I sometimes have — especially from the title of my TED Talk, “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality” — which has led to some people saying, “Go and stand in front of a bus and you’ll revise that opinion.” I don’t need to revise it; that’s already my opinion: Buses will hurt you. At the level of macroscopic, classical physics that we and buses inhabit, buses are real, whether you’re looking at them or not.

I don’t think we should be even trying to build a conscious machine. It’s massively problematic ethically.

But the way we experience “bus-ness” — that which we experience as being [the qualities of] a bus — is different from its objective physical existence. Let’s say the bus is red; now, redness is a mind-dependent property. Maybe bus-ness itself is also a mind-dependent property.

I don’t go all the way to what in philosophy you might call some version of idealism — that everything is a property of the mental. Some people do. This is where I diverge a little bit from people like [the cognitive scientist] Donald Hoffman. We line up in agreeing that perception is an active construction in the brain and that the goal of perception is not to create a veridical, accurate representation of the real world, but is instead geared toward helping the survival prospects of an organism. We see the world not as it is, but as it’s useful for us to do so.

But he goes further, ending up in a kind of panpsychist idealism that some degree of consciousness inheres in everything. I just don’t buy it, frankly, and I don’t think you need to go there. He might be right, but it’s not testable. I think you can tell a rich story about the nature of consciousness and perception while retaining a broadly realist view of the world.

Where do you stand on the question of conscious machines?

I don’t think we should be even trying to build a conscious machine. It’s massively problematic ethically because of the potential to introduce huge forms of artificial suffering into the world. Worse, we might not even recognize it as suffering, because there’s no reason to think that an artificial system having an aversive conscious experience will manifest that fact in a way we can recognize as being aversive. We will suddenly have ethical obligations to systems when we’re not even sure what their moral or ethical status is. We shouldn’t do this without having really laid down some ethical warning lines in advance.

One of the important qualities of consciousness that needs to be accounted for is that it is integrated. “The many different elements of my conscious experience right now all seem tied together in a fundamental and inescapable way,” Seth said.
Tom Medwell for Quanta Magazine


So we shouldn’t build conscious machines — but could we? Does it matter that a conscious machine wouldn’t be biological — that it would have a different “substrate,” as philosophers like to put it?

There’s still, for me, no totally convincing reason to believe that consciousness is either substrate-independent or substrate-dependent — though I do tend toward the latter. There are some things which are obviously substrate-independent. A computer that plays chess is actually playing chess. But a computer simulation of a weather system does not generate actual weather. Weather is substrate-dependent.

Where does consciousness fall? Well, if you believe that consciousness is some form of information processing, then you’re going to say, “Well, you can do it in a computer.” But that’s a position you choose to take — there’s no knock-down evidence for it. I could equally choose the position that says, no, it’s substrate-dependent.
I’m still wondering what would make it substrate-dependent. Living things are made from cells. Is there something special about cells? How are they different from the components of a computer?

This is why I tend toward the substrate-dependent view. This imperative for self-organization and self-preservation in living systems goes all the way down: Every cell within a body maintains its own existence just as the body as a whole does. What’s more, unlike in a computer where you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software — between substrate and what “runs on” that substrate — in life, there isn’t such a sharp divide. Where does the mind-ware stop and the wetware start? There isn’t a clear answer. These, for me, are positive reasons to think that the substrate matters; a system that instantiates conscious experiences might have to be a system that cares about its persistence all the way down into its mechanisms, without some arbitrary cutoff. No, I can’t demonstrate that for certain. But it’s one interesting way in which living systems are different from computers, and it’s a way which helps me understand consciousness as it’s expressed in living systems.

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But conscious or not, you’re worried that our machines will one day seem conscious?

I think the situation we’re much more likely to find ourselves in is living in a world where artificial systems can give the extremely compelling impression that they are conscious, even when they are not. Or where we just have no way of knowing, but the systems will strongly try to convince us that they are.

I just read a wonderful novel, Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is a beautiful articulation of all the ways in which having systems that give the appearance of being conscious can screw with our human psyches and minds. Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina does this beautifully. Westworld does it too. Blade Runner does it. Literature and science fiction have addressed this question, I think, much more deeply than much of AI research has — at least so far.

'Tremendous feeling of justice' as San Jose apologizes for discrimination

Connie Young Yu's grandfather was working in the fields of San Jose, California on May 4, 1887, when he saw thick smoke rising from the thriving Chinatown of 1,400 people.

© Courtesy History San Jose Research Library and Archive

s An arson fire destroys San Jose's Chinatown in 1887.

By Natasha Chen 

"He was looking up and he could see smoke. The smoke... just covered the sky," Young Yu said.

The arson fire which destroyed the neighborhood was just one of a shocking list of wrongs for which the city of San Jose formally apologized in late September, marking the first time in about 130 years the city has documented its historical role in passing anti-Chinese policies.

The apology and resolution, read by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, came as the city looked for ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hate during the past year.

Reported hate crimes against Asians in 16 of the nation's largest cities and counties increased 164% in May 2021, compared to May of the previous year, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University-San Bernardino.

Through listening sessions in San Jose, community members raised an idea of reckoning with the city's past.

"It's a tremendous, tremendous feeling of justice," Young Yu said.

Read the apology here.

Smoldering racism leads to arson

The apology and resolution describes a time when San Jose's critical agriculture and railroad industries relied heavily on Chinese immigrant labor, while anti-Chinese conventions were held in the city.

It continues to list ways San Jose had played a role in anti-Chinese violence: the city had condemned all Chinese laundries, declared its Market Street Chinatown as a public nuisance, and when arsonists burned it down, refused permits for the Chinese to rebuild in another location.

Young Yu's grandfather, Young Wah Gok, was part of the community. She told CNN he had immigrated to San Jose at age 11 from a village in Southern China, joining the Market Street Chinatown, a home base for Chinese immigrants

.

© Courtesy History San Jose Research Library and Archives A birds-eye view of San Jose's Chinatown in 1887 before it was destroyed by fire.

Her grandfather had told her of his fun adventures, like when a gambler called him over to the table and said, "'You pick out those numbers for me.' Here he is, a kid who just arrived from China after a couple of weeks, and he picks out the winning numbers."

But the stories of racism and harassment Young Yu later learned from her father: how her grandfather was chased by White boys in the neighborhood where he worked as a house boy, how rocks were thrown at him.

An atmosphere of hate was rampant, when the San Jose City Council condemned the Market Street Chinatown

.

© Courtesy Connie Young Yu Young Wah Gok immigrated to San Jose at age 11.

Young Yu said there were "people coming into Chinatown with I guess orders, saying you know you have two weeks. And there was this feeling already that the Chinatown... that they'd have to leave, but they always had the hope that they could fight this off. But I don't think they expected a fire."

A San Francisco Daily Examiner article about the arson fire called it "San Jose's Joy" and a "gala day in San Jose."

A photograph of the fire shows crowds gathered to watch. Another shows an aftermath of crumbled buildings as onlookers pass by. Young Yu said the water tower, which was always full, had somehow been emptied, making it near impossible to fight the fire.

"This was really a sense of doom. Because after the fire, then what? Are they going to come after the individual?" Young Yu said.

Rebuilding in an era of anti-Chinese policy

The Chinese immigrants in San Jose had an ally in John Heinlen, a German immigrant. Shortly after the fire, Heinlen helped the Chinese community rebuild on his property, an area which is now Japantown in San Jose.

But he was met with resistance from the city, who declared his requested permits "out of order."

In fact, a protest erupted near his property, where a resolution drafted by the mayor and city council read a Chinatown would be "a public nuisance, injurious to private property adjacent thereto, dangerous to the health and welfare of all citizens who live and have homes in its vicinity, and a standing menace to both public and private morals, peace, quiet and good order, and etc."

© Courtesy History San Jose Research Library and Archives Residents of San Jose survey the destruction of the city's Chinatown in 1887.

Despite vehement opposition, Heinlen finished construction on "Heinlenville," San Jose's final Chinatown, which lasted until 1931.

© Courtesy History San Jose Research Library and Archives A park near San Jose's Chinatown in 1887.

Events in San Jose weren't isolated. During the 1870s, an economic depression in the U.S. prompted Chinese immigrants to become scapegoats. In October 1871, a mob of rioters in Los Angeles hanged 18 Chinese immigrants after one of them allegedly killed a popular saloon owner. In September 1885, White miners in Wyoming, led by the Knights of Labor, killed 28 Chinese people and wounded at least 15. And in November 1885, a mob of Whites in Tacoma, WA, led by the mayor and supported by the city police, invaded Tacoma's Chinatown and ordered its residents out of the city.

© Courtesy History San Jose Research Library and Archives A view of Market Street in San Jose's Chinatown in 1887.

All these events happened with the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first and only federal law to prevent a specific nationality of people from becoming U.S. citizens for more than half a century.

Because of the law, Young Yu's grandfather never became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was not allowed to do so until 1943, just a few years before his death.

© Courtesy Connie Young Yu Young Wah Gok holds his granddaughter Connie Young Yu.


Artifacts found a century later

About 100 years after the Market Street Chinatown arson, people beginning construction on the new Fairmont Hotel in San Jose discovered artifacts underground.

© Courtesy Connie Young Yu Young Wah Gok's certificate of U.S. residence, issued in 1892.

When toothbrushes, ceramic kitchenware and whiskey bottles surfaced, the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project was formed to house the items in a new museum.

Gerrye Wong, one of the organization's co-founders, taught public school in California for 30 years but never found a mention of the anti-Chinese events in any text or curriculum about California history.

"I grew up in the city of San Jose, but I did not know anything about the five Chinatowns that stood here," Wong said. "So finding pieces like this, it was just like opening a horizon of what was life like for those people."

© Courtesy Connie Young Yu Young Wah Gok is pictured in 1891.

In 1991, the Chinese American Historical Museum opened, in a building designed to be a replica of the last-standing structure in Heinlenville called Ng Shing Gung. The original building was a school, a temple, a gathering place, and even a hotel for Chinese visitors who were not allowed to rent a hotel room elsewhere.

Ng Shing Gung is also mentioned in San Jose's apology, as the city recognizes its role in destroying the structure and letting its ornate altar suffer damage, as it was stored outdoors under the Municipal Stadium for decades.

Wong's father had tried to save the building in the 1930s.

But she said the city of San Jose "took it by eminent domain and destroyed the building, which was very crushing to my father," Wong said. "But it was also a revelation to me, because how did I start thinking about building a replica of this building, not knowing that he had tried to save it 30 years before that?"

After painstaking restoration, the original altar now sits on the second floor of the museum. Wong said she enjoys showing the history to school children on field trips, which she was never able to do as a school teacher in a classroom.


Leadership sets the tone, then and now

Councilmember Raul Peralez, whose district includes the former Heinlenville, was not aware of the horrific details of the city's past before this resolution, either.

As the city tried to grapple with rising anti-Asian hate emerging along with the coronavirus, "one of the things we wanted to do was just pull the community together and find out what more we could do to be able to provide some support, and specifically to make statements as a city as a local government here," Peralez said.

And statements matter.

Peralez said the rhetoric of former President Trump during the pandemic emboldened people to act out in vicious anti-Asian attacks, both verbal and physical. Likewise, the leadership of San Jose in the 1880s, he said, set the tone for racist acts.

"We have to learn our history, right? Or we're doomed to repeat it," Peralez said.

With the apology officially on the city record, attention now turns to a development under construction on the land where Heinlenville once stood. In the center, will be a new Heinlenville Park.

Young Yu will be involved in developing medallions and plaques there, to explain what happened centuries before.

"It's a sense of overcoming," she said.

Climate justice: Rich nations dodge finance pledge


A hundred billion dollars every year –- that's the aid promised more than a decade ago to help developing nations curb their carbon pollution and adapt to devastating climate impacts.

 

© Ina FASSBENDER The promise to gradually ramp up aid for the Global South to $100 billion per year by 2020 was first make at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen

© MIGUEL MEDINA 

Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate speaks during an interview with AFP on the sidelines of the Youth4Climate event on September 29, 2021 in Milan

But rich countries have not delivered on that pledge, a failure that could undermine a critical COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month already riven with tensions, experts say.


- The Context -

The vow to gradually ramp up aid for the Global South to $100 billion (86.5 billion euros) per year by 2020 was first made at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

A decade later, wealthy nations were still far from the mark, with the total below $80 billion in 2019, according to the OECD, which took on the role of tracking climate finance.

If only outright grants and not loans are considered, the amount drops by almost half, say NGOs that monitor money flows.

With a Democrat back in the White House, the US has doubled its aid and promises $11.4 billion per year by 2024, but it's still not enough to close the gap. Canada and Germany are expected to announce enhanced commitments before the Glasgow summit opens on October 31.

China may be the world's top carbon polluter today, accounting for more than a quarter of global emissions, but the United States and other rich countries are historically the main emitters of greenhouse gases.

COP26 host Boris Johnson recently reminded leaders at the UN that Britain had pioneered the industrial revolution and was the first country "to send enough acrid smoke into the atmosphere to disrupt the natural order".

"We understand that when developing countries look to us for help, we have to shoulder our responsibilities," the British Prime Minister continued.

- Stakes high at COP26 -

One of the biggest challenges facing climate negotiations is a deficit of trust among parties, and climate finance may be the most fraught issue on the table.

"The shortfall in funds is costing lives and livelihoods," Sonam Wangi, chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiating bloc, said in a statement.

"Developed countries delivering on their decade-old commitment to support vulnerable countries ... will be critical for building trust and accelerating the global response to climate change."

UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa agrees that living up to those promises could be a key for unlocking other logjams.

"The complexity of the outcome of COP26 is that it is not one or two or three decisions, it has to be a package," she told journalists.

"If we can get a good perspective regarding the $100 billion, that would ... give us the means to make progress on some other issues."

- $100 billion a floor, not a ceiling -

In 2009, $100 billion sounded like a lot of money, but the recent crescendo of heatwaves, flooding caused by extreme rainfall, drought and evermore powerful storms has made it clear that it's not nearly enough, experts agree.

The sum seems especially paltry compared to the multi-trillion dollar Covid recovery packages that have been cobbled together to prop up rich economies.

"A combined global fiscal response to the crisis of close to $12 trillion begs a question," climate finance experts commissioned by the UN wrote in a recent report.

"If a pandemic can provoke such a rapid and far-reaching response, at scale, surely the world can muster the necessary will to act with similar decisiveness and urgency in response to the climate crisis?"

"The $100 billion target therefore needs to be seen as a floor and not as a ceiling," the added.

Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, representing the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 48 countries home to a billion people, said financing should be broadened to include sovereign debt relief.

"We are so threatened that we might not have an island or a country much longer, so it's hardly possible for us to pay the debt if we are not around," he said.

"Is it not then reasonable for climate vulnerable countries to call upon debt holders to restructure their debt?", he added, saying he would be taking this proposal to the Glasgow talks.

- Symbols of justice -

The $100 billion figure -- earmarked for emissions reduction and preparing for future climate impact -- has become a symbol of the perceived need for "climate justice", many observers point out.

The failure of rich nations to honour their pledge is especially galling in light of a separate track in the negotiations over "loss and damage", meant to cover the costs of climate-enhanced damages that have already occurred.

"The people and communities the least responsible for the rise in global emissions are facing the worst of the climate crisis right now," said Vanessa Nakate, a young climate activist from Uganda.

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CANADA
Antisemitic rhetoric continues to be used by some opponents of COVID-19 measures

Rachel Bergen CBC

© Jaison Empson/CBC Protesters are seen holding masks at an anti-mask rally at the Manitoba legislature in Winnipeg in August 2020, including one sign that equates public health orders with Nazism. Comparisons to the Nazi era are becoming a common sight at…

Belle Jarniewski leaned back from her computer, seething with anger after she finished watching a video on Reddit showing a Winnipeg restaurateur accosting public health enforcement officers.

"I'm still shaking after listening to that rant. That was unbelievable," she said.

The video shows Shea Ritchie, the owner of Chaise Lounge locations on Corydon Avenue and Provencher Boulevard, speaking with officers giving him tickets on Sept. 24 for allowing diners who choose not to be vaccinated to dine inside his restaurant.

"If they're so dangerous, shouldn't we be identifying them with something bright, like a yellow star?" Ritchie says in the video, which he filmed and posted to his personal Facebook page and that has since been circulating on social media.

"Why don't you put them in a camp until they finally comply?"

© Trevor Brine/CBC Belle Jarniewski, executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, says it is 'unconscionable' to compare vaccine mandates and passports and other COVID-19 restrictions to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.

Jarniewski, the executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre and a member of the Canadian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said this type of rhetoric has become more rampant during the pandemic.

"We've seen these anti-vaxxer protests that are trying to compare the restrictions for COVID to the Holocaust," she said. "I have to say, he's gone much further than anyone I personally have seen or heard about."

Jarniewski is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, Jarniewski said, and her father was taken to six different concentration camps.

"To suggest that these restrictions in any way, shape or form are comparable to the suffering of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust is unconscionable. It's also a distortion of history," she said.

"The comparison is disgusting."

Antisemitic rhetoric surfaced at pandemic protests

Though Jarniewski found Ritchie's comments to be a particularly extreme version, they are representative of what seems to be a shared belief among a fringe of those vehemently opposed to COVID-19 restrictions: that vaccine mandates and passports and other rules to curb the spread of the coronavirus are similar to the ways the Nazis mistreated Jews and other ethnic groups.

Across Canada, some protesters have called public health orders genocide, worn yellow stars like those Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe and even attended protests displaying images of Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp and whose diaries were posthumously published and read around the world.

© Anis Heydari/CBC Protesters in Calgary held signs comparing the plight of Jewish victims of the Holocaust to workers who are being asked by their employers to get vaccinated for COVID-19 (and who can access medical or religious exemptions) at a protest in September.

CBC News spoke with Ritchie via text message about the video and what happened in his restaurant. When asked about being fined for breaking public health orders, he said it was done in an effort to "honour [those who died in the Holocaust] by taking personal responsibility to ensure never again."

"We have suspended charter rights, and it very well could happen again."
Conspiracy narratives share similarities

Some of the most vocal protesters against vaccine passports and other pandemic measures have used or have a history of using antisemitic rhetoric.

Toronto's Chris (Sky) Saccoccia, for example, who's been arrested in Winnipeg for breaking public health orders, has a record of doing so, says retired sociologist and hate group scholar Helmut-Harry Loewen.

© Evan Mitsui/CBC Chris 'Sky' Saccoccia, who is a leader in the COVID-19 conspiracy movement, has made numerous comments downplaying the Holocaust.

"Those who accept aspects of one conspiracist narrative tend to gravitate to other conspiracy theories," Loewen said in an email.

"In the case of the COVID-19 conspiracy movement, some of the most prominent leaders — in particular, Chris Sky — have a record of claiming that the number of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide are inaccurate."

He has also quoted from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf on his Facebook page, calling parts of it "bang on, like he had a crystal ball into the future" in one 2014 post, according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an agency that monitors and researches hate groups.

Saccoccia again questioned the number of people who died during the Holocaust in a July interview with Rebel News, storming out midway through after accusing the host of implying he's a Holocaust denier and "feeding every narrative that they're using to attack me."

CBC News reached out to Saccoccia for comment on this story but has yet to receive a response.
Yellow vest, anti-Muslim movements shifted focus to COVID

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network said the kind of rhetoric now on display didn't start 18 months ago when the pandemic was declared.

Executive director Evan Balgord argues it's an evolution from previous movements associated with various causes seen as fighting against the erosion of individual rights and liberties.

Some, he said, have been affiliated with the far right, which has been sowing discord for years.

The network says some anti-Muslim groups, for example, started pushing a narrative of encroaching "Shariah law," the influx of foreign terrorists into Canada and a number of other unfounded fears after a motion to address Islamophobia and other forms of systemic racism, known as M-103, was brought forward in the House of Commons in 2016.

"There was no Shariah law and Shariah courts, and all the things they were fear mongering about didn't come to pass, so they needed a new issue," he said.

© Dave Rae/CBC Yellow vest demonstrators hold a rally in Red Deer, Alta., in February 2019. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network says some members of that movement are now propagating conspiratorial comparisons between COVID measures and the Nazi era.

That's when some in the far-right movement shifted their attention to the yellow vest movement. It began in France as a populist protest against economic inequality and rising gas prices but spread to Canada and other countries, eventually encompassing a wide variety of grievances, including opposition to illegal immigration.

Balgord says the anti-hate network's monitoring of different groups suggests that at least one organization, Action4Canada, and numerous individuals with large social media followings who helped spearhead protests against M-103 became involved in yellow-vest protests and are now among the most influential opponents of pandemic restrictions.

Saccoccia, for example, was involved in the yellow-vest movement and is now against lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions, he said.

"They really set the agenda," he said. "The far right already had an established propaganda machine. It has its podcasts; it has its shows online; it has its online groups. It knows how to do this."

© Bruce Barrett/CBC Graffiti on a Toronto building alludes to conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax.

Balgord acknowledges most people who are against COVID-19 restrictions are not part of the far right but may simply share some concerns about pandemic measures and got inadvertently caught up in a web of misinformation.
Political messaging not immune

Some of the rhetoric around pandemic measures has also crept into political messaging promoted by candidates of the populist People's Party of Canada during the federal election campaign.

PPC candidates in Manitoba and British Columbia compared vaccine mandates to violations of the Nuremburg Code, a set of ethical research principles developed in response to unethical medical experimentation and atrocities of the Nazi era.

The party's leader, Maxime Bernier, also drew criticism from anti-hate groups when he used the phrase "When tyranny becomes law, revolution becomes our dutyin the context of pandemic restrictions and the rise of what he calls an "authoritarian" government.

That phrase is similar to one used by members of the Three Percenters militia group — some of whom participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.

A spokesperson for Bernier told CBC News in an email to "get lost" when reached for comment.
'I'm glad that they didn't have to experience this'

Jarniewski's parents died decades ago, but she says they would have denounced any comparisons between the pandemic and the Holocaust.

She's doing what she can to counter it by educating people about the Holocaust and pushing for stricter anti-hate laws in Canada.

"I've often said that, you know, as difficult as it is to have lost my parents so long ago, I'm glad that they didn't have to experience this, to hear this kind of hate again."

Deere workers reject six-year labor contract

(Reuters) - A majority of Deere & Co workers voted against a six-year labor contract that was tentatively agreed with the United Auto Workers (UAW) earlier this month, the U.S. tractor maker said on Sunday

.

© Reuters/Rick Wilking Equipment for sale is seen at a John Deere dealer in Denver

The deal over wages and employee benefits would have covered about 10,000 employees across 14 facilities in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas.

"John Deere remains fully committed to continuing the collective bargaining process," the company said, adding that operations would continue as normal.

The agreement reached by UAW and John Deere on Oct. 1 was rejected by "90% of the membership", UAW Vice President Chuck Browning said in a separate statement.

A strike deadline has been set at the end of Wednesday, he said.

The contract had included significant economic gains and offered the highest quality healthcare benefits in the industry, Browning had said earlier this month.

(Reporting by Aishwarya Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M.)

BC

In search of Haida Gwaii’s forest-dwelling hawk, one of the most endangered species on the planet

LONG READ

A dense fog rolls in from the ocean on a cool, wet summer morning in Gaw Old Masset, a small village at the north end of the Haida Gwaii archipelago in B.C. In a gravel parking lot pockmarked by puddles, about a dozen field workers prepare for a day in the bush looking for one of the most endangered species on the planet, stads k’un, a subspecies of the northern goshawk.

Jonas Prevost wears a backwards ball cap over his thick curls and his unshaven face sports an infectious grin. In his mid-20s, he’s been working for the Council of the Haida Nation since he was 17.

“My náan [grandmother] lives just over there,” he says, pointing to a cluster of houses. “I just kept coming and asking them for a job until they said ‘yes.’ ”

Ever since, Prevost has worked on eradicating invasive species in protected areas; he’s even witnessed marbled murrelet chicks hatch from the vantage point of his sleeping bag on the forest floor.

Lately, he’s been working with a team to monitor the breeding activity of a unique subspecies of goshawk endemic to the islands off B.C.’s north coast. In 2018, researchers published a genetics study showing the Haida Gwaii birds are a distinct subspecies that have been isolated from their mainland cousins for about 20,000 years. There are only about 50 left, making stads k’un, Haida Gwaii’s national bird, one of the world’s rarest and most threatened species.

The biggest threat to stads k’un is industrial logging. The bird — about the size of a raven — lives primarily in old-growth forests, nesting in hemlock and spruce, and relies on a diet of small mammals and birds like grouse, sapsuckers and flickers. Mature forests provide a diversity of food sources and spaces to fly and perch below the canopy in search of prey. Stads k’un hunt by ambush, flying short distances and perching while searching for the critter destined to become a meal. The bird has been described as fearless, often crashing into the forest floor at high speeds and tumbling through the understory as it grapples with its prey.

Northern goshawks are red-listed in B.C., meaning they are close to vanishing, while the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife designates the species, province-wide, as threatened. Recovery strategies were published in 2008 and the province developed a recovery implementation plan in 2018 for northern goshawks throughout the province.

But updating the status of stads k’un to reflect its genetic isolation is a slow process and, in the meantime, logging continues.

If the Haida Gwaii subspecies were listed as endangered federally, it would be possible to petition Ottawa under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, asking the federal government to protect stads k’un by stepping in and taking over activities — such as deciding whether or not to issue logging permits — that normally fall within provincial jurisdiction. Unlike six other provinces, B.C. does not have an endangered species act, so stads k’un is granted almost no protection under provincial legislation.

On the archipelago, under the Haida Gwaii Land Use Objectives Order, there is a 200-hectare reserve around any active nesting site to protect the breeding pair and its young. But finding a goshawk nest is notoriously difficult and there are no protections for crucial foraging habitat — totalling thousands of hectares — in areas slated for logging.

“We’re not protecting the bird, we’re protecting the nest,” Prevost says matter-of-factly.

In the tiny logging town of Port Clements, we pick up Xuuya k’aadjuu giis Teresa Russ and head down a small logging road on our way to visit a known nesting site in the Yaagun watershed. Russ is 20 years old and wears her long black hair tied in a tight ponytail. She grew up on the land and has been working in the forest since she was 13. Her voice is soft but quietly commanding.

After a brief tailgate safety meeting while we munch on salmon jerky, we head into the forest. Russ and Prevost kibitz as we clamber over — and sometimes under — massive trees that have fallen due to natural causes, slowly making our way into the birds’ territory. Prevost checks his iPad for the location of the nest, calls out a compass bearing and then wanders off in a random direction. Russ pulls out her compass, checks the bearing and calls after him.

“Did you even check your compass?” she asks, laughing. With a mischievous grin, he responds that he’s following his intuition, and continues up the hillside.

The area was protected for cultural reasons before the nest was discovered — everywhere around us is evidence that Haida have been using this forest for thousands of years. We pause at one tree, a towering ts’uu (cedar) with a deep hole cut in its trunk about four metres off the ground. Russ explains that cedar rots from the inside, so Haida traditionally cut a test hole to assess the core wood before felling a tree for a pole, canoe or another purpose. If the core showed signs of rot, the tree would be left standing to grow for hundreds of years, providing habitat for stads k’un and many other species.

Other trees have long tapered sections of exposed wood: evidence of bark-stripping. Cedar bark is used for a multitude of purposes, including basketry and clothing. Russ is known for her woven cedar bark roses, which she leaves in all the work trucks. (Prevost admits he once gave one to his náan to get out of trouble.)

None of the Haida’s traditional forest-use imperilled stads k’un populations. That’s partly why we’re here to see this particular site; it proves humans can coexist with this bird, it just requires a light touch. Haida logged trees and benefited from forest resources for millenia, maintaining a balance between extraction and preservation that supported the area’s rich biodiversity. The problem isn’t logging — it’s how we log, and how much.

We’re standing on a ridge when we first hear a stads k’un sounding its alarm call. The nest is in a tree, below to our left, and the bird is somewhere to our right. Prevost laughs quietly, relieved to find it alive and thriving, and says you can tell it’s a juvenile because its voice cracks, just like that of a boy entering puberty. He and Russ point out the nest. Even looking right at it through binoculars, I can barely tell it’s anything more than a natural tangle of branches.

Last fall, B.C.’s chief forester, Diane Nicholls, set Haida Gwaii’s total annual allowable cut at 776,000 cubic metres. Because roughly half of the archipelago is protected in parks and conservancies, the entire cut will come from concentrated pockets on the landscape, most from habitat that could, or already does, support stads k’un.

While Nicholls acknowledged the need to protect the bird’s foraging habitat, she pointed out the species’ recovery plan “does not provide any direction, citing the need for more research.” Until that research is completed and incorporated into the plan, only the nests will be protected — and only if they can be found.

The Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development says nests are the best indicators that stads k’un occupy a territory.

“Goshawks build alternative nests, so locating active nests provides the best evidence of breeding and provides certainty sites will contribute to long-term population objectives,” the ministry tells The Narwhal in an email.

But biologist Frank Doyle, an expert on B.C. goshawks who has spent decades studying the bird and collaborating with the Haida Nation and provincial and federal governments, says that’s an oversimplified view. Goshawks will leave a nest unused for years while still using their territory, he explains. In other words, an empty nest doesn’t mean the birds are gone; Doyle says he recently visited a nest in the Yukon he found in 1992.

“It’s still there: same tree, same nest,” he laughs. It’s an important point; when the birds find suitable habitat, they can stay for generations.

Doyle was one of the authors of the genetics study and has been involved for many years in gathering scientific data to support goshawk recovery efforts. He says the science is solid; the birds need mature forests for both breeding and foraging. Breeding territories are smaller, by necessity. The birds stay close to the nest when they have babies to feed and protect. After juveniles strike out on their own, the home territories of each respective bird, including the male whose territory surrounds the nest, grow much larger. The situation on Haida Gwaii is unique, both in terms of stads k’un itself and its remaining habitat. Continuing to delay decisions on the grounds that more research is needed is playing with fire, Doyle says.

“If you get it wrong at all, then you can lose them all on Haida Gwaii.”

According to Husby Forest Products maps, there are four goshawk reserves at St’alaa Kun (Collison Point), one of the areas where the Lower Mainland-based logging company operates on Haida Gwaii. But the reserves are surrounded by landscapes fragmented by clearcuts, many more of which are proposed in the same areas. Field workers with the Council of the Haida Nation have seen an adult female using the forest in one proposed cut block — Collison 787 — but they’ve yet to find her nest.

Gerry Morigeau, a field contractor who has been closely involved with the monitoring and recovery efforts since the work started in the mid-1990s, has surveyed the area extensively.

“What worries me about places like Collison 787 is you have a female in the stand exhibiting breeding behaviour, who may or may not have been breeding, but we never found a nest,” he says, at his home north of Port Clements. “By not backing off and taking a precautionary principle and giving her the time and space to breed, and putting in cutblocks right adjacent to where she was trying to nest, you’re jeopardizing the possibility of her successfully breeding.”

Morigeau’s partner, Kiku Dhanwant, has played a leadership role in stads k’un studies and conservation efforts since the 1990s. She describes the landscape at St’alaa Kun as having “islands within islands” of habitat, with the best and most productive concentrated along the creeks and rivers.

“Because of how threatened the goshawk is — I should say endangered, even though it’s not listed that way — we absolutely have to be managing some predicted areas,” she says, noting there is sufficient science to pinpoint likely habitat. The key, she explains, is prey diversity. Where there’s prey, there’s a chance the birds can survive and reproduce.

“Industry don’t want us to have these birds on the land, not because they’re not an important species, but just because of how much area gets protected and set aside,” Prevost says.

While every stand of old-growth is different and includes several tree species, it is possible to come up with a conservative estimate of monetary value. One hectare can yield more than 1,500 cubic metres of marketable wood, which means 200 hectares of old-growth cedar could be worth close to $189 million, based on B.C.’s average old-growth prices for spring 2021. In other words, logging companies stand to lose a considerable amount of money each time a nest is found — and even more if goshawk foraging habitat is also set aside.

Morigeau says he’s concerned that provincial and federal recovery plans have been in place for more than a decade, yet the bird’s population is still declining and companies like Husby are still clearcutting. Husby Forest Products did not respond to interview requests.

“You don’t recover as an alcoholic while drinking a six-pack,” he says, questioning the efficacy of existing recovery plans. “All we’ve been doing is surveying for nests and monitoring.”

When critical habitat is clearcut or fragmented, stads k’un is left with fewer options to find a variety of prey and will eventually leave the area. The birds avoid hard forest edges, whether natural or from logging, which means the impacts of industrial activity — such as a clearcut, logging roads or blowdown on the edges of clearcuts — extend into the forest left standing.

One significant problem, Doyle says, is that no-one knows how much is too much. Every home territory is different, he explains. While there is a tipping point, past which the bird can’t sustain itself and breed, there’s no magic number decision-makers can use to limit logging in known or suspected habitat.

“Any block, potentially, would be the one that pushes you past that threshold,” he says. Greater accuracy can be obtained by figuring out how much selective logging can take place in goshawk habitat elsewhere in the province, leaving some territories intact and harvesting in others and monitoring the results, but it’s not worth the risk on Haida Gwaii, he says.

“Don’t pretend we’re God and we can get it right straight off the bat, especially if it’s Haida Gwaii,” he says. “I wouldn’t go mess with any of those … remaining territories.”

Morigeau says about 30 nest territories have been discovered to date. Four were confirmed active this year. If B.C. followed Alaska’s rules, which are set by the toothy U.S. Endangered Species Act, the evidence of bird sightings and prey remains found at St’alaa Kun would be sufficient to trigger protection, he says.

“We’ve been steering the ship towards the cliff for long enough,” Morigeau says. “We have to start changing the way we think about things, the way we define things, the way we talk about these things, or we’re going to be stuck in this patriarchal, colonial mindset that we are in charge of nature — that’s bullshit.”

He shows me an image of a juvenile goshawk he photographed on his forested property a few years ago, explaining that the opportunistic bird preys on domestic chickens.

“It’s like they look down and see a bunch of grouse, but dumber,” he chuckles. The bird’s agility in the forest means it can find its way in and out of small holes in fencing, at top speed. With so few remaining birds, each one is critically important; Dhanwant recently worked on an education campaign aimed at preventing conflicts between the birds and chicken-owning humans.

Dhanwant says she’s happy to see young Haida like Prevost and Russ stepping up to support the work.

“It has to be a Haida Gwaii-based solution,” she says. “Managing for goshawks is maintaining the land.”

The juvenile, about 25 metres away in a riparian opening in the forest, keeps sounding its alarm call. Suddenly, we spot it. Stads k’un translates to “wings brushing boughs” and the bird lives up to its Haida name. Its wings whack against branches as it moves from one perch to another, in and out of view, a noisy ghost.

It’s big for a juvenile and Prevost says that likely means it’s a female, because males are smaller. The size difference between the sexes allows the breeding pair to hunt a diversity of food sources within a territory, with the female selecting larger prey and the male targeting smaller species, he explains.

We don’t want to harass the stressed-out bird, so we move away and cross a gully until we’re under the nest, where Prevost and Russ look for signs the site is still being used and the bird is getting plenty of food. Russ starts gathering pellets — the indigestible, regurgitated remains of prey — to send away for lab analysis. Prevost quips about having a job picking up bird puke.

Both are excited about their discoveries. They pull out tiny sapsucker feathers from the pellets and pick up the bones of a small mammal. Prevost says he once absentmindedly reassembled the skeleton of a mouse, extracted from a pellet, before realizing what he was doing was gross.

He gestures around us, explaining why this is prime habitat for the bird.

“We have a lot of cedar here but there’s also a very significant portion of hemlock that are large-diameter,” he says. “They’ve got the nesting platforms, which are going to be those kinds of heavier branches that will support a nest. It could be on a single branch, typically close to the trunk of the tree, about the size of a basketball, maybe a little bit larger.”

Russ says she was here when the nest was discovered — her first.

“Kiku [Dhanwant] really wanted to have a few younger people out, just to kind of do a little bit of training as we found it and to make sure that we know what we’re looking for as we get closer to a nest,” she recalls. “We’re walking the gully down there and Kiku pretty much said, ‘I just have a feeling, this is really good habitat, I think we’re going to find the nest soon.’ ”

The connection between the bird and habitat is at the heart of the goshawk’s decline, they say. Males build the nests. Part of what makes a male desirable to a female is prey availability. Without healthy habitat, there’s no prey, and without prey, the female birds will give males the cold-shoulder.

Russ says she and Dhanwant recently discovered a new nest occupied by two healthy juveniles learning to fly and hunt. Juveniles face a 75 per cent mortality rate, so finding two is a rare and hopeful sign.

“They were hunting probably 100 metres down from us,” she says, her voice quiet but her excitement clear. “You’d see the adult coming — it’d fly super low through the canopy — and the juveniles would start begging really loud.”

She says the nest was in a similar habitat to the one we’re in: tall trees with lots of open space below a high canopy, an abundance of songbirds and plenty of snags for “plucking posts,” where adult birds remove primary feathers from prey before feeding their young.

“As we were walking up to it, we were mentioning there are so many songbirds and stuff around, flickers and sapsuckers and stuff like that,” she says. “And we’re just like, yeah, it seems like a really good area to find one — and then it was just right there.”

Finding a nest so quickly is rare. More often than not, the young Haida spend long days trudging through the bush in the rain, finding nothing — or at least not enough to trigger provincial protections.

Preserving stads k’un habitat could be simpler if the province had standalone endangered species legislation. During the 2017 provincial election campaign, the NDP government promised to enact a law, but then quietly reneged on its pledge even though it was included in Environment Minister George Heyman’s first mandate letter from Premier John Horgan.

Chris Johnson is a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Northern British Columbia and a member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife. He says watching the NDP’s commitment fall by the wayside was disappointing.

“It’s just fallen completely off the government’s radar, even though it was part of the original mandate letter for the minister of the environment,” he says. “It got buried and lots of effort, lots of resources were put into this.”

The federal Species at Risk Act “is very inefficient when it comes to actual speedy action for species that are declining,” Johnson explains.

For example, the federal recovery strategy recommends “addressing the management of northern goshawk at a landscape or watershed level to ensure that suitable breeding, foraging and wintering habitats exist throughout the landscape.”

Ross Vennesland, a senior biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, is the federal lead on the recovery of the species.

“Federally, we felt the science was there,” he says on defining habitat needs. “There’s uncertainty, of course, but given the threats to habitat and the needs of the birds, especially thinking about Haida Gwaii, that’s why we identified foraging habitat as well as breeding habitat.”

But federal protections apply almost exclusively to federal lands. On Haida Gwaii, most federal lands are already protected through designations such as the Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site.

“Because the provinces have jurisdiction over most of the land base, the onus is on them to act first,” Vennesland says. “At this point, we’re waiting to see how the province develops their program.”

Neither the provincial Ministry of Environment nor the Ministry of Forests made scientists available for an interview.

“If we had a provincial endangered species law or act and it was automatic listing and automatic protections for critical habitat, then you could see a situation where recovery would be quicker for those goshawks,” Johnson says.

While the federal legislation has limitations, action would accelerate if the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife accepted the science and designated stads k’un a subspecies at high risk of extinction, Vennesland says. The committee is currently reviewing stads k’un, but the process for assessing and listing species as endangered is notoriously slow.

“That would change everybody’s perspective on how to approach this,” he says. “The federal government would work with the Haida Nation and the province to try and make sure something solid would move forward as quickly as possible.”

There are also provisions under the federal act that allow for intervention if a province or territory is not doing enough to protect a listed species, he notes. But conservation ecologist and University of British Columbia professor Karen Hodges says they are rarely used.

“The lived experience of this law is that [the federal agency] has been immensely reluctant to invoke the safety net,” she says.

Hodges is one of a number of scientists who, for years, have been advocating for a provincial species-at-risk law. Both she and Johnson caution that the level and nature of protection would depend on what is included in such a law. Hodges makes a case for legislation that would employ a habitat version of hospital triage.

“If a species meets these criteria, then bing, bing, bing, immediately these prohibitions are going to go into place,” she explains, comparing the situation to a patient arriving in an emergency room: stabilize first, then assess and diagnose. “Then, as we go through the process of [defining] critical habitat — and maybe there’s a critical study that needs to happen, or more surveys, to get a better estimate of the population and what have you — then you can say, ‘Okay, we’re putting in this emergency injunction but then we will update that once we have the critical information that would allow us to relax some of that protection.’ ”

Morigeau warns there’s another problem on the horizon. When second-growth matures, forests can once again support stads k’un but, as the federal recovery strategy puts it, “As soon as forests become structurally mature and suitable for [stads k’un], they also become economically viable for timber harvesting.”

Haida Gwaii has some healthy stands of second-growth, but on-going public pressure to stop logging old-growth means those stands are poised to become a highly sought-after source of revenue.

Dhanwant says we need to start thinking about ways to help second-growth forests become viable territories for stads k’un, and that doesn’t preclude logging.

“We can be logging in a way that is helping to develop that structure,” she says. Thinning stands to encourage growth and create sufficient spacing could help ensure the birds have a chance of survival.

“Having goshawks nest in places where they couldn’t before because of your efforts — that’s a recovery,” Morigeau says.

Vennesland says the Haida commitment to protect the species gives him hope sufficient action will be taken to protect stads k’un.

“The Haida Nation makes me feel really confident about the situation because although the conservancies don’t necessarily cover foraging habitat explicitly, the Haida Nation in our consultation meetings were highly supportive of [protecting] critical habitat. I would expect that they would push hard for extra protection for goshawk.”

Prevost excuses himself and wanders off into the bush, compass dangling from his cruise vest (not that he ever takes a reading, laughs Russ) and we sit and talk and listen to the sounds of the forest. The colours are vivid. Hues of green look like someone turned up the saturation filter on a photo. I’m lying on a bed of sphagnum moss more comfortable than a feather mattress. Everything is wet and the calls of songbirds trill through the trees.

Russ says little is known about the connection between stads k’un and Haida crests. When smallpox was brought to the islands, the Haida population was nearly wiped out. As Haida matriarch Kii’iljuus Barb Wilson wrote, “Smallpox running through our people can be likened to a fire burning a library of 30,000 books. When you think of the knowledge that was contained in 30,000 people and then we were decimated to less than 600, the fact that we can function as a people is truly amazing.”

Russ, whose interests include traditional tattooing, Haida art and family crests, says there are hawks carved on Haida poles. Morigeau later points me to a blue hawk transformation mask held by the Canadian Museum of History, potentially a stads k’un, which has blue-grey feathers.

“We know that they’re important, especially for our culture, but we don’t actually know the whole story of it — that information was lost,” Russ says. “But at least if we do our part in making sure that these birds are on the land base, who knows, one day that information could come back.”

The juvenile is quiet and when Prevost comes back, he says it’s taking a chini nap. Chini means grandpa. After feeding, it needed a midday snooze.

We decide to leave the bird to its nap. On our way back to the road we find a felling boundary, marking the edge of planned logging, before the area was protected under cultural heritage regulations. The line of pink flags in the trees is a stone’s throw from the nest and we gaze at the massive cedars and hemlocks and lush understory.

“They would’ve clearcut all this,” Russ says.

Despite the beauty around us, the forest looks nothing like its former self, before colonizers brought invasive species to the islands.

“We wouldn’t have been able to see each other in here,” Prevost says, just a few feet away.

Black-tailed deer, a species introduced in 1878, have decimated the understory of the forest, imperilling several endemic species and triggering a chain effect that now also threatens stads k’un.

Prevost calls the small deer “the most delicious invasive species I have to deal with.” Like many islanders, he regularly hunts deer and prepares the meat before giving it to Elders and other community members.

The problem is so bad in places that deer are showing up on beaches, licking salt from rocks and eating kelp.

“The deer that you see at the beach have eaten everything within their little 100-hectare territories,” Prevost says. “Now that they’re going down and eating kelp means there’s nothing left in the forest.”

Russ says recent colourization of early contact photos show a diversity of plants that doesn’t exist anymore, except on a few islands where the Haida have partnered with Parks Canada on a project called Llgaay gwii sdiihlda, restoring balance.

We munch on ripe huckleberries, tart and sweet; Russ says the few bushes we’ve found somehow avoided being snipped off by deer when they were just a few inches tall. While none of us would enjoy hiking through the towering salal and devil’s club that characterized Haida Gwaii’s forests before colonization, the ecological implications of the changed forest are chilling.

In the truck, Prevost can’t stop talking about the imminent birth of his first child. With warm belly laughs as he navigates around ruts and potholes on the road, he says he hopes it will be a big 10-pound roly-poly Haida baby, a prospect his partner is not so keen on.

Russ talks about her brother, who passed. She says she wants to get a raven tattoo on her back because that’s her brother’s crest. She talks about skinning deer and about going away to university in the fall, where she plans to study natural resource protection.

However uncertain it may be, the future of stads k’un is in good hands.

Matt Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Narwhal

SEE Species Summary (gov.bc.ca)

25% of all critical infrastructure in the US is at risk of failure due to flooding, new report finds

As a massive investment to repair roads and adapt to climate change faces an uncertain fate in Congress, a new report finds much of the country's infrastructure is already at risk of being shut down by flooding. And as the planet heats up, the threat is expected to grow.

© Craig Ruttle/AP Vehicles were submerged in flooding in the Bronx, after the remnants of Hurricane Ida put large swaths of New York City under water in early September.

By Drew Kann and Ella Nilsen, CNN 

Today, one-in-four pieces of all critical infrastructure in the US — including police and fire stations, hospitals, airports and wastewater treatment facilities — face substantial risk of being rendered inoperable by flooding, according to a new report released today by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group that assesses the threat posed by flooding across the country.

© John Locher/AP

 Cindy Rojas cleans mud and floodwater from her driveway in Lafitte, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in September.

The report also found nearly 2 million miles of road — 23% of US roadways — are already at risk of becoming impassable due to flooding.

To provide what First Street says is the fullest picture to date of community-level flood vulnerability, the researchers examined five categories across the Lower 48 and the District of Columbia: Critical infrastructure; social infrastructure, including museums, government buildings and schools; roads; commercial properties; and residential properties.

The report used estimates of operational flood risk from official governing bodies to determine the amount of inundation it would take to knock different types of facilities or services offline. The researchers then overlaid the kinds of flood events that can be expected in an area at least once every two years to gauge community risk.

First Street's past reports have focused on the unknown risk of flooding faced by US homeowners, and the inadequate flood insurance coverage many of them have or, often, don't have. Experts say comprehensive assessments like the new report are critical as the country weighs how to adapt to a climate-altered future.

"Even if your home is safe and secure from a specific intensity of flooding, if flooding is becoming more common and destructive in your community, your property value may be threatened too," said Hamed Moftakhari, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Alabama, who was not involved with the First Street report.

Where flood risk is greatest today

If there is a ground zero for flood danger in the US, it is Louisiana.

The state is home to six of the top 20 most at-risk counties in the country. Cameron Parish in southwest Louisiana is the most vulnerable county in the US, followed closely by Orleans Parish, which includes New Orleans.

Jeremy Porter, First Street's head of research and development, said while New Orleans has adapted its infrastructure and levees to hold off stronger storms, continued sea level rise and more destructive hurricanes could eventually overwhelm the city's current defenses.

"It's going to have to continually be updated as the environment changes in the future," Porter said. "The infrastructure that's in place today isn't going to protect New Orleans in five, 10, 15 years. That's only going to get worse as sea level rises, as storms not only become more frequent but become stronger."

In both Cameron and Orleans Parish, the report finds more than 94% of all critical infrastructure — including police and fire stations, which are critical to emergency response operations after disasters like hurricanes — are at risk of being knocked offline.

Florida is also home to some of the most flood-prone counties in the country, but flood risk isn't confined to coastal areas. Many areas in Appalachia, like McDowell County in West Virginia and Johnson County in Kentucky, are also among the most at-risk because of the growing threat of heavy rain, the First Street researchers said.

As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which makes extreme rainfall events dumping massive amounts of water in short periods of time more likely.

Flooding is already the most common and costly disaster in the US, according to congressional testimony this year from FEMA deputy associate administrator David Maurstad.

"Because of the impacts of climate change, there are communities across the US that are going to have tough decisions in the years to come because of sea level rise and intensity of storms," Maurstad told CNN. "It's not just the coast of Louisiana."

A bill to help ease flood risk

President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill contains billions for flood mitigation and coastal restoration from storms. The Senate version of the bill contains $7 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers and $3.5 billion for FEMA's Flood Mitigation Assistance program, as well as millions more for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs to make coastal communities more resilient for storms.

The bipartisan bill also contains billions in funding to improve roads and power infrastructure, and to make the energy grid more modern and resilient to strong storms.

The bill was negotiated in part by Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who has been touting how it will help vulnerable coastal communities recover from storms and prepare for future ones.

But some of Cassidy's fellow Republicans in the House and Senate disagree. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who represents three out of the report's top five communities in the US with the most flood risk, is opposed to the bill.

Louisiana's lone Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Troy Carter, told CNN in a statement he wants to see the infrastructure bill passed.

"I remain hopeful that our Louisiana delegation will not throw the bipartisan history of infrastructure negotiations out the window," Carter told CNN. "I'm grateful that Sen. Cassidy stands with me in this effort. I don't plan to return to my constituents empty-handed."

Spokespeople for Scalise and Rep. Clay Higgins — a Republican who represents Cameron Parish — didn't return CNN's requests for comment on how they would prefer help flood-prone communities in their districts.


It's going to get worse

The threat of flooding is growing rapidly in the United States. A series of devastating floods this summer killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars in damages from Louisiana to Tennessee and New York City.

And as global warming melts ice sheets, raises sea levels and tilts the odds in favor of more extreme rainfall events, the risk will grow in many more communities, the First Street report found.

Over the next 30 years, the number of residential properties at risk of flooding is expected to grow from 12.4 million today to 13.6 million by 2051, the report says. For critical infrastructure and commercial properties, the number of vulnerable facilities are projected to grow by 6% and 7% respectively over the next three decades.

Geographically speaking, the report found flood threats will increase most along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but significant increases in vulnerability are also projected across large portions of the Pacific Northwest.