ABORTION

South Carolina Targets Free Speech in Its Attempt to Limit Abortion Access

Billboards remind state residents that controversial speech enjoys First Amendment protection.

J.D. TUCCILLE | 8.19.2022 | REASON

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(Courtesy of FIRE)

One challenge prohibitionists face is that not everybody supports their prohibitions. Many people under their nominal authority want access to what's forbidden, no matter what the law says.

Aware that the procedure remains available elsewhere, South Carolina lawmakers seeking a near-complete ban on abortion propose to forbid speech about terminating pregnancies to prevent residents of the Palmetto State from learning of such services. The recently rebooted Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is reminding `them that speech that politicians don't like is not only the best speech but is also protected by the First Amendment.

"Speech about abortion is free speech–The First Amendment," reads the advertisements placed across South Carolina in "a six-figure billboard campaign" by FIRE, which recently adopted a new name and expanded its scope beyond academia to embrace broad civil liberties advocacy.

The billboards are going up in Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, and Myrtle Beach as South Carolina lawmakers debate not just new restrictions on abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, but also restrictions on informing women about how to terminate pregnancies beyond the law's reach. Ambitious and almost certainly unconstitutional proposed legislation would prohibit "providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, internet, or any other mode of communication regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion." Violation of the law would be a felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison depending on the specific offense.

The proposed censorship of abortion information comes as state legislators consider tighter restrictions in the wake of Dobbs. Language now being debated would ban all abortions, except for those necessary to preserve the life and health of the mother. Even some anti-abortion lawmakers find that too restrictive and are holding out for the inclusion of exceptions for abortions in the case of rape or incest.

Whatever the final form, though, tighter restrictions on abortion are likely to send some women looking for abortion-inducing drugs, or for information on traveling out of state to end pregnancies. Preventing such end runs is the goal of the companion bill banning information "regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion." The language was clearly inspired by model legislation crafted by the National Right to Life Committee as "a robust enforcement mechanism" to ensure that state-level abortion bans are effective. That model has already been dismissed by legal experts as almost certainly unconstitutional.

"In Bigelow v. Virginia (1975), the Supreme Court struck down a state law that prohibited encouraging or prompting an abortion by the sale or circulation of any publication," First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere noted last month for Reason. "The Court held the First Amendment protects such speech. It observed that, just as Virginia lacked constitutional authority to prevent its residents from traveling to New York to obtain abortions, it could not, 'under the guise of exercising internal police powers, bar a citizen of another State from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that State.'"

Even as they consider a ban on speech that might help women end their pregnancies, many South Carolina lawmakers seem to understand that the project is a non-starter, destined to perish in the courts after the inevitable challenge.

"[Sen. Richard] Cash's bill has received a lot of attention since he introduced it June 28, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of precedent on abortion rights and left the legality for state lawmakers to decide," reports the Post and Courier, which notes significant opposition even among pro-life lawmakers. "But it's not expected to get any traction.

So, if the censorship bill is not expected to pass, why is FIRE making a fuss? Well, legislators have a history of surprising people by enacting legislation that observers consider ridiculous, but which become law despite all predictions and common sense. Right now, youth shooting teams and publications are awaiting the outcome of lawsuits against the state of California over a broadly written law that bans "marketing" guns to minors but encompasses speech about policy and shooting sports.

"A gun magazine publisher, for instance—or a gun advocacy group that publishes a magazine—would likely be covered as a 'firearm industry member,' because it was formed to advocate for use or ownership of guns, might endorse specific products in product reviews, and might carry advertising for guns," UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh cautioned in testimony before the legislation passed.

Holding the line now is a good policy so that somebody doesn't have to risk a felony conviction in the future in order to wage an after-the-fact legal battle. Complacency is just a bad idea when liberty is at stake.

Plus, the debate over the censorship measure is an opportunity to remind Palmetto State residents that there are alternatives to obeying restrictive laws. Discussions of free speech about abortion can quickly turn into conversations about the content of that speech, pointing women towards out-of-state clinics and resources like Plan C, maintained by the National Women's Health Network, which offers advice for getting mail-order abortion pills. That is, an attempt to muzzle speech becomes a means of amplifying the targeted speech to reach a wider audience.

Fundamentally, though, whatever your opinion of abortion or other controversial issues, frustrating control freaks' efforts to muzzle the sharing of information should be something we can all get behind.

"These proposals are a chilling attempt to stifle free speech in South Carolina," points out FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley. "Whether you agree with abortion or not is irrelevant. You have the right to talk about it."

Interestingly, South Carolina lawmakers' efforts to tighten abortion restrictions may falter based on the state's own constitutional protections. On August 17, the South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocked enforcement of a 2021 law limiting abortions that went into effect with the Dobbs decision.

"At this preliminary stage, we are unable to determine with finality the constitutionality of the Act under our state's constitutional prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy," the court unanimously ruled.

Abortion may or may not stay legal in South Carolina, but the state's residents are destined to a vigorous and very informative conversation about the issue, and about speech itself.

DOME SWEET DOME
Buckminster Fuller’s Greatest Invention
His vision of a tech-optimized future inspired a generation. 

But his true talent was for burnishing his own image.

ILLUSTRATION BY CAT SIMS

Rebecca Onion

If you have any mental image of Buckminster Fuller, you might picture him as a white-haired, bespectacled old man, standing in front of a chalkboard, holding up a model of a geodesic dome: a visionary, explaining his invention. This is how he appears in the second-and-a-half–long clip that Apple used in its “Think Different” commercial in 1997. Fuller’s image flashes on the screen as part of a parade of some of the most famous figures of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” the voice-over, by actor Richard Dreyfuss, intones. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”

Fuller may have been the least famous person in that lineup, but to his fans, he was a towering influence. In a new biography, Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, Alec Nevala-Lee recalls becoming a teenage Fuller fan himself, steadily working through his writings after discovering him in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Over his 60-year career, Fuller collected admirers, from the college students he taught to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak—who saw in Fuller’s ideas the blueprint for a new synthesis of technology and culture. (Wozniak called Fuller “the twentieth century’s Leonardo da Vinci.”) Leaders of universities and nations flew Fuller around the world to lecture on his vision of a tech-enabled future in which humans would “do more with less,” and the public followed along through features on Fuller’s work in middlebrow mass-audience magazines like Time and Life.


Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Dey Street Books, 672 pp., $35.00

Nevala-Lee is something of an expert in a very specific type: twentieth-century men, working on the fringes of stem careers, who channeled the technological optimism of the years between World War Iand the 1970s into careers as media icons. His last book was a group biography of three science-fiction authors (Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Isaac Asimov) and the writer-editor John W. Campbell. These men, like Fuller, interpreted advances in specialized fields for the public, making forceful arguments about the future, which they said would be science-driven, tech-enabled, (mostly) better in every way. This worked, in part, because these guys had something: preternatural confidence, and personal charisma.

In order to specialize in writing about this type, you need both love and skepticism. It’s a labor of love to take on a subject whose personal archive—called the Dymaxion Chronofile, and amounting to 270 feet worth of paper, now held at Stanford—was intended to provide maximum possible documentation of a human life. You don’t do that kind of work for somebody you don’t respect. Yet Nevala-Lee’s meticulous and clearly written 400-plus–page biography presents an engineer whose inventions largely didn’t stick, a sometime prophet who fundamentally misunderstood politics and human nature, and a person who floated on the good graces of others around him—collaborators, students, his wife—who often seemed to be worse off for having known him.

Born to a fancy Massachusetts family, complete with an intellectual celebrity for an ancestor (the nineteenth-century author and feminist Margaret Fuller was his great-aunt), Buckminster Fuller was a familiar American type: a precocious boy, always tinkering, who didn’t get good grades. He was expensively and privately educated, but dropped out of Harvard (where four generations of his family had gone) as an undergrad, due to an inability to manage his coursework and balance his allowance with the demands of his social life. He was sent to work in a mill in Quebec, to turn his life around, and came out not recommitted to his education, but the opposite. As Nevala-Lee puts it: He was meant to come out appreciating Harvard, but “identified with the machinists instead.”

Nevala-Lee splits Fuller’s adult life into two eras: before and after 1948. In the 1920s, Fuller first thought of applying himself to the problem of housing, developing a prototype of his round, aluminum “Dymaxion house,” which was never produced on a large scale. (The name “Dymaxion”—a portmanteau combining “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension,” which Fuller would apply to many of his projects—was the invention of a marketing professional who worked with Fuller in the late 1920s.) In the 1930s, he got funding from a socialite friend (one of many such infusions of cash from his allies and acquaintances) to execute another of his ideas, the Dymaxion car, a streamlined silver bullet of a vehicle with a single rear wheel and some sobering safety issues. In late 1933, a Dymaxion car rolled over in an accident in Chicago, killing one passenger and severely injuring two others. Nevala-Lee documents several more accidents that took place in Dymaxion cars, including one carrying Fuller’s wife and daughter, who were not seriously hurt.

The car had great publicity value, despite these accidents, and marked the beginning of Fuller’s evolution into a brand: a futurist and innovator whose projects drew coverage in magazines and newspapers, and who could (most important to Fuller) attract funding from patrons who would allow him to do as he pleased with their money. While conducting “independent research” for the government in World War II,Fuller invented the Dymaxion map: a cartographical innovation that could preserve the continents’ relative sizes, even when presented in two dimensions. The map used a unique projection onto an icosahedron—a 20-faced polyhedron—which then unfolded to lie flat, looking more like a partially finished patchwork quilt than the familiar, distortive Mercator projection. The map became the subject of a story in Life magazine, which celebrated its novelty and included a version of the map printed on a pullout section on thick paper, which readers could cut and fold into a three-dimensional object.

But it was in 1948 and 1949 that Fuller perfected the idea of the geodesic dome, and his career as a talker and influencer—the most successful of his jobs—really began. The dome was a response to the U.S. wartime and postwar housing crisis, which began when men left the building trades for the service, and continued as they returned home, and the population, scattered for years, shifted and reconfigured itself across the country. Fuller saw the dome—so lightweight that its materials could be quickly flown by airplane to building sites; so simple that it could be put up quickly, with minimal labor needed; and so energy-efficient that it would save homeowners from high electricity bills, and the nation from wasting precious energy—as a possible magic bullet for this postwar housing crunch.

The design reflected Fuller’s idea that human life was tending toward “ephemeralization,” or the tech-enabled tendency to (as he often repeated) “do more with less.” The idea that human activity was moving from the physical to the abstract turned out to be prophetic, and is responsible for some of Fuller’s continuing popularity among those who credit him with extraordinary foresight. But the dome would become Fuller’s visual legacy. With its science-fictional roundness and fly’s-eye paneling, it looked nothing like a colonial, a Craftsman bungalow, or even the more modern ranch house, the silhouettes of which made up the landscape of the American neighborhood. While some of Fuller’s past inventions—the Dymaxion house and car—were cool-looking as well, they were much more difficult to reproduce and disseminate. The dome, on the other hand, presented a ready-made symbol of postwar American society.

They also became tools in the Cold War. As Fuller’s wife, Anne, wrote in a letter to his student and protégé Peter Floyd in 1957, geodesic domes were used by Marines in combat, farmers on the “first line of agricultural offense,” in auditoriums (what Anne called the “first line of cultural offense”), and even in playgrounds, where kids on the “infantile frontier” hung from “playdomes.” Not only could domes house a growing populace, Anne argued, they could develop young muscles, win hearts and minds, and extend the military’s ability to operate in far-flung places. This proud list of militaristic, nationalistic applications would startle the hippies who later came to see the dome as a symbol of off-the-grid self-sufficiency, and used the underground Dome Cookbook (published by Steve Baer in 1968) to construct round dwellings on their communes. But over the course of its twentieth-century career, the geodesic dome combined all of these meanings, becoming a marker of the “space age” equally at home at Disney World and in the hills of Santa Cruz.

The domes had clear potential, but the truth is, as Nevala-Lee understatedly shows through example, they had significant problems. Fuller built his own home in one in Carbondale, Illinois, where he had a professorship for a while. It was not a snap to put up, as he had promised. Although erecting the shell took only one day of work (during which Fuller continually lectured the workers and any curious onlookers), the rest of the construction stretched over “months, as electricians and plumbers struggled to make sense of a house that lacked conventional angles.” Anne tried to hang pictures from the walls, but they would be “just sort of dangling out from the curve,” and the dome leaked until Fuller gave up and covered it with shingles. After all, wrote architect, writer, and erstwhile dome advocate Lloyd Kahn in 1973, 90-degree walls had their advantages: “They don’t catch dust, rain doesn’t sit on them.… It’s easy to build in counters, shelves, arrange furniture, bathtubs, beds.” And Stewart Brand wrote in 1994, in a mea culpa for having promoted the idea of the dome in the Whole Earth Catalog: “The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high … Worst of all, domes couldn’t grow or adapt.”

The domes’ failures could easily serve as a metaphor for Fuller’s story about his own life and work, which proves to be extremely leaky at the seams. Nevala-Lee finds omissions, errors, and overstatements at every turn: in Fuller’s account of what happened when he dropped out of Harvard; in his shifting explanations of how key discoveries were made; in the way he covered up the problems with the Dymaxion car; in his claim that his work had influenced Manhattan Project scientists; in his head-turning, Time-magazine-article–generating claim that he followed a schedule he called “Dymaxion sleep,” which involved taking a half-hour nap every six hours, resulting in two hours’ total rest in every 24. Fuller presented himself as a kind of visionary cyborg, an embodiment of tech-optimized living; the self-mythologizing, as the existence of the Chronofile archive shows, was part of the job.

A generalist who strenuously believed in generalism, Fuller tried to do so many things at once that he might have done none very well. Inventor of the Future is peppered with negative evaluations of Fuller’s work from more strictly disciplined professionals: the architect Philip Johnson, who said the Dymaxion house had “nothing at all to do with architecture”; the panel of cartographers who recommended Life be wary of publishing the Dymaxion map, which seemed “pasted together”; a collaborator on a project who said, “He may have been a machinist, but he was scary around the equipment”; the press director at Southern Illinois University who resisted publishing his books on the grounds that they weren’t written in English. “The author has sound knowledge of one thing and mere opinion on a thousand things,” wrote William Marias Malisoff, reviewing Nine Chains to the Moon in The New York Times Book Review in 1938.

These protests from professionals, Fuller would have said, merely proved his point. Generalism, Fuller thought, was the key to human advancement, and he saw himself as something of a singular savior for pursuing it. When Fuller wrote a letter to Albert Einstein in 1948, hoping to secure a meeting that never happened, it included the incredible sentence, “In all humility, I state that I seem to have articulated aright the ‘open-sesame’ to a comprehensive system of sublime commensurability”—a statement that confirms the opinions of both Malisoff and the poor director of that university press.

Fuller prided himself on his ability to talk; but, as those who hired him at universities warned one another, he was no teacher. Conversation with Fuller was a one-way street. When Calvin Tomkins profiled Fuller for The New Yorker in 1965, Fuller shared a story about his encounter with a Maori anthropologist in New Zealand. This anthropologist told Fuller that he was the Keeper of the Chants for his people, and that the chants were a more than 50-generation oral history of the Maori, and as such would never be recorded on tape for scholars to hear. Fuller told Tomkins that he lectured the man on the principles of celestial navigation, and claimed that he had been a Maori at some point, and had sailed into the sea and been unable to find his way back, and therefore “had a personal interest in seeing that the chants got recorded.” Tomkins writes: “We have Fuller’s assurance that the anthropologist is now engaged in recording all the chants, together with their English translations.”

Fuller, the anecdote suggests, could convince anybody to give him anything. This apparently irresistible gift of gab, even more than individual inventions like the dome, the map, or his idea for a World Game intended to figure out an answer to the problem of overpopulation, became the engine for his fame. “Fuller’s lectures,” Brand wrote in the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, explaining how Fuller’s work had inspired the Catalog, “have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.” Toward the end of his life, Fuller traveled and lectured incessantly, which was often his one reliable method of supporting his household. His reports of these lectures, which went on many hours, to apparently rapt audiences, can be hard to believe. Fuller claimed, for instance, that an incarcerated audience at San Quentin supposedly sat through a lecture over five hours long, risking missing head count and being put in solitary in order to hear him “talk for another minute.”

Nevala-Lee deploys this kind of story with a sublime gentleness, showing how Fuller bent reality to fit his own ideas. Fuller’s futurism, while containing some prescient forecasts about automation, climate change, and remote work and schooling, often failed to consider other people’s realities and desires. To create his prototypes and carry out local construction of some dome projects, he used dispersed networks of student laborers, which accorded with his ideas about ephemeralization but also allowed him to get people to work for free (he never thought much of unions). He believed protesters against the Vietnam War must be influenced by foreign agents pursuing a new kind of ephemeralized warfare. He “had nothing useful to say about institutionalized racism,” as Nevala-Lee puts it, and thought racism itself was being “swiftly eradicated.”

In explaining the inevitability of ephemeralization, he seemed to assume that all humans wanted to float as free as he did, living in light domes, flying around the world, and learning and working using computers. He often exclaimed that man was born with legs, not roots, for a reason. In the twentieth century, these ideas seemed futuristic and appealing; now, when we have begun to live in a world defined by them, we have much more mixed reviews of their desirability. Mobility and novelty, we see, are not always gifts, and stability, safety, and community have their benefits, especially in times of stress and struggle.

Yet despite his shortcomings as a thinker and a person, Inventor of the Future insists, many brilliant people—from the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, his longtime friend and collaborator; John Cage and Merce Cunningham, his colleagues at Black Mountain College; designer Edwin Schlossberg, his later-in-life protégé; Nevala-Lee himself—have loved Fuller, and found something in his ideas. This must mean something, but what?

In 1985, chemists Robert Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley, by aiming a laser at a graphite target, saw carbon rearrange itself in large, stable clusters of atoms that they were then able to observe and describe for the first time. Thinking of the Fuller domes, the group made the interpretive leap (later borne out through testing) that this molecule might look like one: a closed cage structure, with icosahedral symmetry. This was a breakthrough in the field that landed them the Nobel Prize in 1996, and they called the molecule buckminsterfullerene.

But then, there’s the fact that George Mitchell, who pioneered hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, claimed that Fuller’s ideas inspired him to work on the problem of resource scarcity. When a person like Fuller channels the zeitgeist, especially one as new and fervid as the twentieth-century American affection for science, technology, and engineering, the effects can be unpredictable. Fracking makes energy; fracking also extends our bad habit of fossil fuel consumption. Apple gave us the iPhone; it also gave us the human rights–violating factories where the iPhone is produced. Ideas like Fuller’s—optimistic, far-reaching, ungrounded in politics and material reality—can do anything and everything, this book insists. And they do.

PHOTO REFERENCE: BETTMANN/GETTY (X2)
Rebecca Onion @rebeccaonion
Rebecca Onion is a senior editor at Slate and the author of Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States.
Read More:
Magazine, September 2022, Culture, Critical Mass, Books & The Arts, Buckminster Fuller, Geodesic Dome, Technology, Dymaxion

Prince William GREEN charity invests in bank tied to fossil fuels

Britain's Prince William speaks during a meeting with Earthshot prize winners and finalists at the Glasgow Science Center on the sidelines of the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 2, 2021. The conservation charity founded by the prince, who launched the Earthshot Prize, keeps its investments in a bank that is one of the world’s biggest backers of fossil fuels. 

(AP Photo/Alastair Grant, Pool, File)

LONDON (AP) — The conservation charity founded by Prince William, second in line to the British throne and who launched the Earthshot Prize, keeps its investments in a bank that is one of the world’s biggest backers of fossil fuels, The Associated Press has learned.

The Royal Foundation also places more than half of its investments in a fund advertised as green that owns shares in large food companies that buy palm oil from companies linked to deforestation.

“The earth is at a tipping point and we face a stark choice,” the prince, a well-known environmentalist, is quoted saying on the websites of the Earthshot Prize and Royal Foundation.

Yet in 2021, the charity kept more than 1.1 million pounds ($1.3 million) with JPMorgan Chase, according to the most recent filings, and still invests with the corporation today. The foundation also held 1.7 million pounds ($2 million) in a fund run by British firm Cazenove Capital Management, according to the 2021 filing. As with JPMorgan, it still keeps funds with Cazenove, which in May had securities linked to deforestation through their use of palm oil. The foundation invested similar amounts in both funds in 2020, its older filings show. As of December 2021, the charity also held more than 10 million pounds ($12.1 million) in cash.

The investments, which the Royal Foundation didn’t dispute when contacted by the AP, come as top scientists repeatedly warn that the world must shift away from fossil fuels to sharply reduce emissions and avoid more and increasingly intense extreme weather events.

Financial experts say investments like those of the foundation can be blind spots for charities and philanthropies. As climate change is an increasing area of attention for foundations and others, organizations have sometimes struggled to recognize where their own investments lie and align them with more environmentally friendly choices, despite growing numbers of ways to steer clear of funds linked to fossil fuels.

Like the Royal Foundation, in recent years other foundations, including high profile British charities like the National Trust and Wellcome Trust, also have faced criticism for investments with strong connections to fossil fuels or environmentally harmful practices. Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates announced that he divested his foundation’s direct oil and gas holdings in 2019.

Charities that are talking the talk “also need to walk the walk,” said Andreas Hoepner, professor of Operational Risk, Banking and Finance at University College Dublin, who helped design several European Union climate benchmarks and has sat on its sustainable finance group.

“There are funds that are more sustainably oriented,” Hoepner added, pointing to a dozen alternatives to the JPMorgan product that are marketed as sustainable.

There are also alternatives to Cazenove’s sustainability fund. For example, funds manager CCLA caters to churches and charities and does not invest in businesses that get more than 10% of their revenue from oil and gas. Another option is Generation Investment Management, founded in part by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

The Royal Foundation said by email that it had followed Church of England guidelines on ethical investment since 2015, and goes beyond them.

“We take our investment policies extremely seriously and review them regularly,” the statement said.

The foundation said management fees paid to JPMorgan were small, but declined to provide a figure.

It’s not clear what role, if any, Prince William had in investment decisions, as he did not respond to AP requests for comment. JPMorgan Asset Management in an email declined to comment on questions about charities investing in their products despite its record of financing fossil fuels.

Bloomberg data show JPMorgan has underwritten more bonds and loans for the fossil fuel industry and earned greater fees than its competitors in the five years up to 2021.

Environmental NGO Rainforest Action Network looked at direct loans and stock ownership along with bonds and estimated that between 2016 and 2021, JPMorgan’s banking arm financed fossil fuel companies with some $382 billion. This was more than any other bank.

“Major investors have their pick of companies to manage their assets, and mission-driven institutions have options well beyond the world’s worst fossil fuel bank,” said Jason Disterhoft, senior energy campaigner with Rainforest Action Network.

As one of the world’s biggest banks, JPMorgan is also a leading financier of green projects, and has set a target of investing $1 trillion in these over the next decade. However, it made about $985 million in revenue from fossil fuels compared to $310 million from green projects since the Paris Agreement in 2015, about three times more, according to Bloomberg Data.

Compared to some other charities, the Royal Foundation’s investments are small, with little impact on climate change. But they are not in line with the ethos of the foundation, which lists conservation and mental health as main points of emphasis, or Prince William’s public statements. His Earthshot Prize, a “global search for solutions to save our planet,” awards grants of up 1 million pounds ($1.2 million) each year to projects confronting environmental challenges, according to the the charity’s website, which suggests banks as among potential recipients. In July, the Royal Foundation announced that the Earthshot Prize had become an independent charity and Prince William would be its president.

Through launching and awarding the prize and in other public appearances, Prince William has been outspoken on the environment for years. He has argued that entrepreneurs should focus their energies on saving the Earth before investing in space tourism, encouraged parents to consider how their children don’t have the same outdoor opportunities they had and urged conservation.

“Today, in 2022, as the queen celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, the pressing need to protect and restore our planet has never been more urgent,” the prince said in June during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.

The policies of the Royal Foundation do not allow ownership of stock in oil companies, tobacco or alcohol. But profits from the Royal Foundation’s account could enable JPMorgan to loan more money to the many oil companies it backs, allowing their expansion. In the same way, investing in companies tied to problems with palm oil supply could help fund unsustainable practices.

While the Cazenove fund is marketed as “sustainable,” as of May 31 the fund held almost $6 million of shares in Nestlé, and shares worth $8.1 million in Reckitt Benckiser, according to Morningstar Direct data. Both Nestlé and Reckitt Benckiser have faced controversy over their palm oil supply. Clearing rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations is one of Southeast Asia’s biggest drivers of deforestation.

Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage manufacturer, while Reckitt manufactures popular U.S. brands including Lysol and Woolite, and Vanish and Dettol, familiar in the U.K.

A 2021 investigation by the environmental NGO Global Witness said both companies were sourcing palm oil via intermediaries from illegally deforested areas in Papua New Guinea. The plantations responsible were also accused of corruption, use of child labor and paying police to attack protesters.

Another 2021 report, by sustainability analysts Chain Reaction Research, said both companies purchased palm oil from an Indonesian firm that has an affiliated mining project accused of deforestation in an orangutan habitat.

An investigation in 2020 by Chain Reaction Research found that more than 500 hectares (1,235 acres) — over 1,000 American football fields — of rainforest in Indonesia’s Papua province were felled by a supplier to Wilmar, a giant food and oils producer, from which both source their palm oil.

David Croft, head of sustainability at Reckitt, said no tainted palm oil entered its products from the Papua New Guinea properties, while conceding their mills were previously in its supplier list. An intermediary company linked Reckitt to the Indonesian mining conglomerate in its supply chain, he said, and it was investigating. Croft said they have had “active discussions” with Wilmar, which stopped sourcing from the Papua plantation in January 2022. In a public statement published in response to Chain Reaction’s investigation, Wilmar disputed the cleared area was high conservation value forest.

Despite being a “relatively small user of palm oil,” Reckitt knows there is more to do, said Croft, and is accelerating its progress. Croft said Reckitt could not get all the product it needs from certified producers before 2026.

Emma Keller, head of sustainability at Nestlé U.K. and Ireland, said the Wilmar case was to be investigated. Nestlé engages with suppliers that fall short to help them change and monitors performance, she said.

Sixty percent of Nestlé’s palm oil supply was certified as sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry-organized effort, in 2021, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. For Reckitt, that figure was 15.3%.

Keller said that by winter 2021, more than 90% of Nestlé palm oil was deforestation-free and it will achieve zero-deforestation status by the end of 2022. It uses supply chain maps, on-the-ground verification and satellite monitoring for verification. Nestlé was moving towards “a model for conserving and restoring the world’s forests,” Keller said.

Lily Tomson, of the responsible investment charity ShareAction, said Cazenove had shown some leadership on sustainable investing, but there “remain areas charities such as the Royal Foundation can push them on.”

Investors can vote on key environmental issues in companies where they hold shares, for example setting targets to align with the Paris Agreement, or on climate lobbying. Yet Cazenove’s parent company, Schroders, voted against 22% of environmental resolutions last year, ShareAction research has found.

Kate Rogers, head of sustainability at Cazenove Capital, said the company engaged with Nestlé and Reckitt, and has seen progress on deforestation.

Environmental factors are ingrained in the company’s decision-making, she said, every investment assessed for sustainability. Cazenove has committed to eliminating commodity-driven deforestation from its investments by 2025 and said a new voting policy meant that as of June 2022, the firm had voted against 60 directors of companies it invests in over a lack of climate action.

Dr. Raj Thamotheram, former head of responsible investing at both a $109 billion British university pension fund and AXA Investment Managers, said foundations should be better regulated, with annual reports made to detail how well their investment strategy aligns with their mission.

Thamotheram, now an independent adviser, called unsustainable investments a “cultural and governance blind spot of huge proportions,” and said they were endemic in the charity sector.

“It’s the status quo approach and it needs shaking up,” he said.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Prince William to attend New York climate summit


By Robert Jobson

T

he Duke of Cambridge flies to New York next month for a climate summit on his first trip to the US since Harry and Meghan moved there.

William will make the solo trip on September 21 to attend an Earthshot Prize innovation summit which aims to amplify calls to speed up efforts to repair the planet.

The duke, who will be joined by previous winners of his £50 million global environmental competition, will make a speech alongside billionaire media mogul and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But William is unlikely to make the journey from the East Coast to the West Coast to see his brother, the Duke of Sussex.

The pair are also not expected to meet during the Sussexes’ whirlwind trip to the UK at the start of September.

It is the first time William has visited America since Harry and Meghan decamped across the Atlantic to California in March 2020 after quitting the working monarchy.

The second Earthshot Prize awards ceremony is set to be held in Boston in December, after the inaugural event at Alexandra Palace in north London last year.

Mr Bloomberg, a key backer of the Prize, said, “Accelerating the world’s climate progress requires us to take urgent, ambitious action from every angle.

“As global leaders get set to gather in New York, the Bloomberg team is working with our partners Prince William and The Earthshot Prize to showcase the most innovative climate solutions and help them spread more quickly.”

Founded by Prince William and The Royal Foundation in 2020, The Earthshot Prize aims to discover and scale up groundbreaking solutions to repair the planet.Hannah Jones, chief executive officer of the Earthshot Prize, said. “We will ask the brightest minds to turn urgent optimism into action

Among the first winners were projects restoring coral reefs, redistributing unwanted food to the disadvantaged, teaching game poachers to gain farming skills and a project battling the issues contributing to air pollution in India.

Harry Potter star Emma Watson, wearing a gown made of 10 wedding dresses from Oxfam, and Dame Emma Thompson were among those who walked the “green carpet” at the first awards ceremony last October.

The Earthshot initiative was inspired by former US president John F Kennedy’s Moonshot project in 1961 which set scientists the challenge of placing an astronaut on the moon and returning him safely — and in the process helped advance humanity’s achievements.

Prince William praises 5-year sentence for ivory, rhino horn trafficker

Moazu Kromah was extradited to the US from Uganda in 2019 after agents intercepted packages in New York containing rhino horns

By Brie Stimson | Fox News

Prince William praised a 63-month sentence for a man who trafficked in rhino horns and ivory from elephants as a "significant victory" this week.

Moazu Kromah, 49, who made millions of dollars illegally poaching and trafficking endangered animals, was sentenced to more than five years in prison Thursday in a New York courtroom.

Kromah, who lived in Uganda, had helped poach more than 35 rhinos and 100 elephants between 2012 and 2019, according to the Southern District of New York. He was extradited to the U.S. in 2019.

"Today’s sentencing demonstrates both what is possible when a coordinated international response is brought to bear against the illegal wildlife trade, and why it is essential," William said in a statement after the sentencing. "This is a significant victory and a landmark case. For over a decade, its complexity has been skilfully met by a global alliance of international law enforcement agencies, governments, NGOs and private sector organisations, including a number of brilliant United for Wildlife partners."


Prince William feeds a baby elephant in the wild elephant valley in Xishuangbanna, or Sibsongbanna Dai autonomous prefecture, southwest China's Yunnan province on March 4, 2015. (Photo credit should read STR/AFP via Getty Images)

In March, Kromah pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wildlife trafficking and two counts of wildlife trafficking.

William continued that the sentencing was "proof that we have the tools to combat this insidious crime" and a "testament to international cooperation."

He said because of those involved in the case, "hundreds of endangered animals and the communities that live alongside them have been protected, sending the strongest possible message that together we can defeat the illegal wildlife trade."

Prosecutor Damien Williams agreed. "Today’s sentence demonstrates that those who are responsible for the decimation of global populations of endangered and threatened animals protected by international agreements will face serious consequences," he said.


Kate, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge feed baby elephants during a visit to the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation at Kaziranga National Park on April 13, 2016 in Guwahati, India. (Photo by Samir Hussein/Pool/WireImage)

Kromah, along with two co-conspirators, Amara Cherif and Mansur Mohamed Surur, were members of a crime enterprise based out of Uganda and other African countries that engaged in large-scale trafficking and smuggling, including approximately 190 kilograms of rhinoceros horns and at least 10 tons of elephant ivory worth at least $7.4 million.

In March and June of 2018, U.S. agents intercepted separate packages containing rhino horns intended for buyers in Manhattan.

The prince has been a vocal advocate for conservation for years, including the nonprofit United for Wildlife, which he founded and was involved in bringing Kromah to justice, according to People magazine.

 

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Royal Patron of Tusk and President of United For Wildlife, assists rangers in northern Kenya to move "Matt", a tranquilized bull elephant, while a wildlife vet fits his new satellite tracking collar to monitor and protect him from poachers. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

William also founded the Earthshot Prize, which awards grants for environmentalism.

The Royal Foundation, a charity founded by him, however, controversially keeps investments in a bank that backs fossil fuels and also invests in a fund that advertises as green but owns shares in large food companies that buy palm oil from companies linked to deforestation.

The Royal Foundation said by email to the Associated Press that it had followed Church of England guidelines on ethical investment since 2015, and goes beyond them.

"We take our investment policies extremely seriously and review them regularly," the statement said.

Federal judge blocks part of Florida's 'Stop WOKE' Act


A federal judge on Thursday suspended Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, likening the legislation passed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to the TV series "Stranger Things." 

 Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Thursday suspended part of Florida's Individual Freedom Act, likening the legislation to the TV series Stranger Things.

The ruling now blocks parts of the law barring companies from providing workplace bias training.

"In the popular television series Stranger Things, the 'upside down' describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down," Northern District of Florida Tallahassee Division Judge Mark Walker wrote in his ruling.

The legislation is commonly referred to as the Stop WOKE Act, and "impermissibly burdens such speech," the judge wrote.

The act was passed in March and limits what companies and educators can say, train or teach when it comes to racial issues, particularly Critical Race Theory.

"Florida's Legislators may well find Plaintiffs' speech 'repugnant.' But under our constitutional scheme, the 'remedy' for repugnant speech 'is more speech, not enforced silence,'" Walker wrote in his ruling.

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, the Legal Defense Fund and a national law firm. It argues the law amounts to censorship and is motivated by racism.

Walker has blocked multiple laws signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely," Walker wrote in the ruling.

"If Florida truly believes we live in a post-racial society, then let it make its case. But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents."

Neither DeSantis nor the Florida Department of Education had issued a public comment on the ruling by 6 pm ET Thursday.

New Suit Against Florida's Stop WOKE Act

Scott Jaschik
August 19, 2022

A group of professors on Thursday sued Florida over its Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, widely called the Stop WOKE Act.

The law prohibits teaching things (including in higher education) that may make students feel uncomfortable. Also on Thursday, a federal judge blocked a portion of the law that affects private businesses.

The new suit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida ACLU, challenges the part of the law that covers higher education.

"All educators and students have a right to teach and learn free from censorship or discrimination,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “The First Amendment broadly protects our right to share information and ideas, and this includes educators’ and students’ right to learn, discuss, and debate issues around systemic racism and sexism. In an effort to prevent progress towards racial justice, the Stop WOKE Act deprives educators and students of important tools to challenge racism and sexism. We urge the court to put an immediate stop to this discriminatory classroom censorship bill.”

On tour, Pakistan's first Grammy winner defies boundaries with her music

This year, Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy for her rendition of a famous ghazal by the legendary Mehdi Hassan. She spoke to DW about the challenges she faced on her way.

Arooj Aftab performing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California this year

"I wanted to make music that I crave, that I hadn't really found, that I wanted to hear," singer Arooj Aftab told DW. However, making the kind of music she wanted to hear required musical tools and a vocabulary that she lacked as a young person in Lahore, where music was not really a career option for most. 

To make things worse, she felt she didn't fit in. “When I was growing up, I felt that to dress or look different, to think differently, caused a lot of friction and made me feel like I wasn't fully accepted. Not being able to imagine freely or be yourself is not healthy, and is like death for an artist," said Aftab.

Arooj Aftab defies the duality of identity: the Pakistani expat in the US

 views identity as something complex and nuanced

She did, however, have the power of the internet at her fingertips: At the tender age of 18 in the early 2000s, she recorded a raspy jazz cover of Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah." Her cover was shared widely via file-sharing sites like Napster, MySpace and Limewire. 

The song went viral in Lahore and, most importantly, gave Aftab confidence in her voice and expression. This success encouraged her to take out a student loan and apply to Boston's Berklee College of Music, where she was accepted.  

Inclusive music  

Since then, Aftab has learned the tools of the trade, becoming a music composer and producer in addition to a singer based in the US. She can completely transform preexisting songs into new, complex pieces with their own unique character.

Yet her music is not just rehashing old numbers, she says. "I get irritated when my music is called a 'cover,' because it's not that. When you render something, especially if it is so old that is almost public domain, you are taking its root but building something original, something that is new and not done before; it is in the now," she stresses.  

After studying music in Boston, Aftab found another home in New York

Constructing a sense of place is important for Aftab's music because of its transnational quality. Her music doesn't feel quite Pakistani nor Western. It transcends duality, provoking the listener to imagine a new place: one of inclusion.   

"This generation is really bold and demands things, they want equality," she asserts, adding that young people now don't want to be limited to fixed categories. "For years, Asian artists were pushed to the sidelines — but now there is an emerging space, opening up the world to more to beautiful things, which always existed but weren't known," Aftab says. 

Urdu is 'beautiful' 

Aftab's third album,"Vulture Prince," features her most commercially acclaimed rendition of Pakistan's legendary ghazal singer Mehdi Hassan's song, "Mohabbat" ("love" in Urdu).  

Arooj Aftab, here in New York, reflects that Urdu is 'a beautiful language'

The ghazal is a musical rendition of couplets that poetically engage with the trials and tribulations of love. Arooj's interpretation of the song won her the 2022 Grammy for Best Global Music Performance. It had also landed her a spot on former US President Barack Obama's 2021 summer playlist. Now, Arooj and "Mohabbat" are as good as mainstream. 

The artist is committed to singing in Urdu, as she feels it is a "very beautiful and a good language to sing in. I get to do the things I want to do with my voice, the vowels. The poetry is nostalgic, playful, light — but haunting as well," says Aftab. 

As a composer and producer, Aftab understands the intricacies of music, and puts much thought into "the amalgamation of sounds and instruments that spin a complex web."

Bringing disparate and diverse instruments together helps open up her music to a wider audience. "Whoever is listening can hopefully hear something they identify with or like, like jazz or pop. For the people who understand Urdu or Hindi, it's like a secret for them to enjoy," Aftab explains. 

Trying to fit in

In 1997, her compatriot, the famous sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, was nominated for two Grammys, but did not win.

Arooj Aftab at the Grammys in April 2022

To her credit, Aftab is the first Pakistani to have ever won a Grammy. Now that she has won the highest accolade in music, she has received high praise for her hard work also at home.  

"My family loves music and is quite liberal, but they did not understand what I was trying to do. It is a bit sad that it took winning a Grammy for some people to finally think that what I was doing for so many years was worthwhile," she shares candidly.

However, after returning to Pakistan following the Grammy victory, Aftab realized how the city of Lahore is offering more space and acceptance to emerging musicians.  

Currently, Aftab's is touring "Vulture Prince" in Europe and the US, and she is returning to Germany after almost seven years to perform. She has a concert on August 18 in Cologne alongside other shows in Berlin and Hamburg later in the month.

"The German audience is really great. They really listen so closely with respect and integrity, because they are one of the societies with the privilege of having the resources, time and energy to appreciate music and build a thriving industry," she says. 

Edited by: Manasi Gopalakrishnan and Louisa Schaefer

This article has been updated to clarify the tour location and dates.

Ukraine: Are attacks on nuclear plants legal under international law?

As fears rise that there could be a nuclear disaster at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia plant, DW looks at the Geneva Conventions, to which both Russia and Ukraine are signatories. Targeting nuclear plants is not actually banned.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is the biggest in Europe

Since March, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine has been under Russian occupation. Since late July, the largest nuclear plant in Europe has been shelled repeatedly, with Kyiv and Moscow blaming each other for the attacks. This has sparked fears of a nuclear disaster. Last week, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on the situation without getting any closer to a solution.

It is not the first time in this war that the question of nuclear safety and security has been raised. This is not only about the potential use of nuclear weapons — Russian President Vladimir Putin has openly expressed this thought — but also about nuclear power stations being used as military targets.

The Ukrainian president has accused Russia of nuclear blackmail

Geneva Conventions regulate conduct of war

What does international law say about this? The 1949 Geneva Convention and its subsequent Additional Protocols regulate the conduct of armed conflict and seek to limit its effects. Article 56 of the Additional Protocol (1) of 1977 pertains to the "Protection of works and installations containing dangerous forces" and explicitly mentions "dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations."

Since the Russian Federation and Ukraine are both parties to the agreement and have not expressed reservations about the Additional Protocol (1), the regulations apply to both states.

And they are surprisingly detailed. In principle, according to paragraph 1, nuclear power plants "shall not be made the object of attack, even when these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." Radioactivity is certainly what is meant here.

The issue here is one of the principles of international humanitarian law as consolidated by the Geneva Conventions: The difference between military and civilian targets. These provide for the "general protection of civilian objects, restricting attacks to military objectives."

The first Geneva Conventions were signed in 1949 in Switzerland

Nuclear power stations are not off-limits

But paragraph 1 of the Additional Protocol (1) does not state that nuclear power plants are always off-limits, only to the extent that an attack "may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." In other words, if it is not expected to cause "severe losses among the civilian population," then it might be permitted under certain circumstances.

Paragraph 2 suggests that a nuclear power plant could become an objective "if it provides electric power in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support […]"

However, this is of course a matter of interpretation. In times of war, almost all nuclear power plants will provide electricity to civilians as well as to the military. It is hard to separate the two. But does this entail a "significant and direct support of military operations?" Thus, it is up to the discretion of the observer to evaluate whether a nuclear power plant is a legitimate military target or not.

It is also difficult to prove that an attack is "the only feasible way to terminate" support for acts of war. A potential aggressor has to deliberate and observe the principle of proportionality: Does the military value clearly prevail? What impact would my actions have on the civilian population? And would there not be a less grave means of rendering a nuclear power plant inoperable? Such as destroying power lines so that electricity can no longer be supplied — without entailing the risk of causing radiation? That said, for a population in winter, a power supply disruption can also be grave.

Russian soldiers seized the nuclear power plant in March

Civilian population must be protected

But even if circumstances do justify an attack, the Additional Protocol states in paragraph 3 that in all cases "the civilian population […] shall remain entitled to all the protection accorded them by international law." A warring party would have to do everything possible to protect civilians from radiation, for example, by evacuating the surrounding areas before launching an attack on a plant.

Paragraph 5 is also relevant to Zaporizhzhya: "The Parties to the conflict shall endeavor to avoid locating any military objectives in the vicinity of the works or installations mentioned in paragraph 1." Ukraine accuses Russia of hunkering down at the power plant, effectively using it as a shield to avoid Ukrainian shelling. While Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-backed local official, claimed that Ukraine had launched artillery strikes using US-made howitzers near the power plant and in residential areas.

Qualifying the restrictions, however, the Additional Protocol also states: "Nevertheless, installations erected for the sole purpose of defending the protected works or installations from attack are permissible and shall not themselves be made the object of attack." Russia will surely depict its military as only acting defensively.

In conclusion: The states that have signed the Geneva Conventions and its Additional Protocols — and that includes Russia and Ukraine — have set a high bar for attacks on nuclear power plants. But they are not ruled out entirely, even if the circumstances, in which they are permitted, are very narrowly defined.

But in practice Article 56 of the Additional Protocol (1) is limited. It remains a matter of interpretation as to whether circumstances allow for a concrete case. Moreover, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, Russia has a veto and can prevent any attempts by the body to sanction it for violating international law.

This article was originally written in German.

 Poland says toxic algae may explain Oder River fish die-offs

The Polish government says experts have found toxic algae in water samples from a river on the Polish-German border. Thousands of dead fish have appeared along the Oder River after mass die-offs in recent weeks.

Some 36 metric tons of dead fish have been recorded on the German side of the river alone

Polish Environment Minister Anna Moskwa announced on Thursday that lab tests showed toxic algae in water samples from the Oder River, which straddles Poland and Germany.

The discovery could explain the mass deaths of fish along parts of the river that had left experts baffled about the cause.

What's the latest?

The discovery of toxic algae could explain the fish deaths, but raises another question about what caused the algae to be present in large numbers.

"After further investigations, the Institute of Inland Fisheries in Olsztyn has found rare microorganisms, so-called golden algae, in water samples from the Oder river," Environment Minister Anna Moskwa said.

Moskwa said the blooms could cause the appearance of toxins that kill fish and clams. However, they are not harmful to humans.

German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke on Wednesday said the disaster had killed an estimated 36 tons of fish tallied in Germany alone.

What is golden algae?

Many species fall under the golden algae umbrella, but the term generally refers to just one in relation to fish deaths through toxicity — Prymnesium parvum.

The species produces several toxins, including ichthyotoxin — which specifically affects gill-breathing organisms such as fish, bivalves, crayfish, gilled amphibians, and also some species of plankton.

High levels of salinity, sulfate, and chloride have the greatest influence on golden algae distribution and bloom formation in inland waters.

Climate change could play a role, with higher temperatures leading to more water evaporating from inland waters and higher salinity levels.

The die-offs come as Germany experiences one of its driest summers in recent memory, with river levels falling across much of the country.

A puzzling phenomenon

Experts were left scratching their heads over the death of thousands of fish last week in the Oder River that borders Germany and Poland, near the eastern city of Frankfurt an der Oder.

Just two weeks earlier, Polish anglers had reported removing tons of dead fish from the Oder near the town of Olawa, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) upstream.

At the time of the reports in Poland, water authorities based in the nearby Polish city of Wroclaw detected a toxic substance in two locations on the Oder, thought to be the solvent mesitylene, which is known to have a harmful effect on fish. However, subsequent tests showed no trace of the substance.

Mercury was also identified as a potential culprit for the more recent die-off, but tests for the element and other heavy metals proved negative. Lab tests did show high levels of salinity in the water.

Play Video  2:18 min Chemical pollution suspected in Oder River fish deaths

Local authorities have warned residents, along with their pets and livestock, not to touch the river water.

Warsaw has also previously said a chemical dump could be to blame — and offered a reward for information.

The European Commission on Thursday welcomed the establishment of a joint German-Polish task team and said it was prepared to send its own experts to work with the group.

"The sooner we can identify the cause of this ecological disaster, the sooner we can start to manage and limit the further consequences for nature, for fisheries, for agriculture, and for recreation," a spokesperson said.

Edited by: Kieran Burke