To Be Effective, Zero-Deforestation Pledges Need a Critical Mass, Study Shows


The importance of rapidly halting tropical deforestation to achieve net-zero emissions was a key message at this year’s climate summit, but corporate efforts to this end have stalled for decades.

December 31, 2022 by Mongabay


By Sarah Sax

The importance of rapidly halting tropical deforestation to achieve net-zero emissions was a key message at this year’s climate summit, but corporate efforts to this end have stalled for decades.

Cattle, soy and palm oil are the main commodities driving deforestation and destruction of other important ecosystems. Zero-deforestation commitments from the companies that trade in those commodities are seen as an important way to reduce deforestation globally.

A new study compares the effectiveness of corporate commitments to reduce soy-related deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, showing that zero-deforestation commitments can reduce deforestation locally, but only if there is widespread adoption and implementation among both small and big soy traders.
Overall, the study points to the limitations of relying just on supply chain agreements to reduce regional deforestation and protect biodiverse ecosystems, and highlights the need for strong public-private partnerships.

At the recently concluded COP27 climate summit in Egypt, 14 major agricultural commodity companies, including Cargill, ADM and JBS, released a plan to end deforestation associated with the production of soy, palm oil, beef and cacao by 2025. It was an important announcement from some of the largest traders of agricultural commodities: after the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture is the biggest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down forests for pasture and oil palm plantations, or plowing up savannas to plant soy is a key driver not just of climate change but is also primarily responsible for the biodiversity crisis and at the heart of violent and deadly conflicts over land.

The road map was swiftly criticized by environmental groups, who said that not only were the commitments not ambitious enough, but that they also gave companies carte blanche to continue deforesting until the cutoff date with no repercussions.

“The roadmap’s insistence that individual companies undertake best efforts to establish individual cut-off dates for deforestation no later than 2025 means the bulldozers will keep running and the destruction will continue,” Mighty Earth, a global environmental advocacy organization, wrote in a statement.

For critics of the announcement, there’s a sense of frustration at the same companies that have been promising to end deforestation for years, with little to show to date. In 2010, more than 400 companies promised that their supply chains would be “zero net deforestation” by 2020. None of the companies met that goal, according to The New York Times.

In 2014, dozens of large agricultural commodity trading companies joined the New York Declaration on Forests, pledging to end the conversion of natural forests and to restore 350 million hectares (865 million acres) of degraded forest by 2030 — an area larger than India. But little progress has been made since then, according to Corporate Knights magazine.

Separately, a slew of new studies is trying to discern both what is required to make such zero-deforestation commitments effective and the limitations they face. A new study published in Environmental Letters on Oct. 28 adds to this debate, assessing the effectiveness of soy zero-deforestation commitments in Brazil and their limitations. The authors found that soy traders in the Amazon who had signed on to the Amazon Soy Moratorium, the first sectoral-wide zero-deforestation commitment, were able to more than halve deforestation in municipalities where the majority of soy traders had also signed up.

Had companies with zero-deforestation policies for soy implemented their commitments with the same effectiveness in the neighboring savanna biome, the Cerrado, as in the Amazon, they could have reduced direct deforestation from soy by 46% and avoided around 5% of overall deforestation between 2006 and 2015 in the Cerrado. Instead, the area converted to soy production in the Cerrado has more than doubled over the past 20 years, threatening an important global carbon stock and reservoir of water for the country, as well as thousands of traditional and Indigenous communities impacted by soy expansion.

“The findings draw attention to two key gaps in corporate sustainability efforts by trading companies in the soy sector: The many smaller companies who have not yet made sustainable sourcing commitments, as well as the larger traders who have made commitments, but only partially implement them,” Erasmus zu Ermgassen, a researcher at Louvain Catholic University in Belgium, who was not involved in the study but works with commodities-tracking platform Trase to improve the transparency and sustainability of supply chains, told Mongabay by phone. “The authors also highlight that the soy sector cannot tackle deforestation on its own. Cross-sectoral collaboration is essential, so that deforestation for soy is tackled alongside other drivers of deforestation, including cattle ranching and land speculation.”

‘They can make a difference’

After cattle, soy is one of the biggest drivers of land-use change in South America. Worldwide, 8.2 million hectares (20.3 million acres) of forest were replaced by soy crops between 2001 and 2015, almost all of them in South America. And demand is only growing. Soy production in Brazil is projected to expand by 12.4 million hectares (30.6 million acres) from 2021 to 2050, with most of this in the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna that is at the forefront of Brazil’s agricultural expansion.

Using data from Trase to look at the supply chains of soy-trading companies in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, the study compared deforestation in municipalities where the majority of soy traders buying soy had zero-deforestation commitments, to those dominated by companies without zero-deforestation commitments. They found that traders in the Amazon were able to reduce deforestation by 57% in municipalities where more than half of the buyers had a zero-deforestation commitment.

“This paper shows that implementing zero-deforestation commitments is not homogenous across space,” study co-author Kimberly Carlson, an assistant professor of environmental science at New York University who studies commodity crops and land-use change, told Mongabay in a video interview. “They can make a difference but will make more of a difference in places where there is higher uptake across the whole sector.”

Another limitation the authors point to is the gap between adoption and implementation. In the Cerrado, seven large companies that control around two-thirds of the soy market have adopted zero-deforestation commitments, but have not implemented them along their full supply chain, putting both native vegetation and the habitat of threatened species at risk.

The study comes as important tools for monitoring and reporting on corporate supply chain efforts become more widely available, and regulatory and financial pressure from investors and policymakers come into force. Soy-importing countries are proposing new policies such as the EU due-diligence proposal and the new regulation on deforestation-free products Companies are also increasingly recognizing how essential achieving zero-deforestation is for reaching their net-zero emissions goals.

“The article makes a compelling point as to why companies need to implement zero-deforestation commitments,” Philip Rothrock, head of ESG analytics at Satelligence, which uses satellite technology to advocate for sustainable agriculture, told Mongabay by phone. “Increasingly there will be regulatory pressure, financial pressure from investors, and pressure from consumers. Companies need to anticipate and adapt.”

A recent study from the nonprofit charity Carbon Disclosure Project showed that deforestation poses a massive financial risk to companies, identifying more than $79.2 billion of forest-related risks among 211 disclosing companies. Zero-deforestation commitments are also essential for many corporations’ net-zero commitments. The number of corporations in the agriculture, forest and land sector that have committed to net zero has increased fivefold over the past several years, but only nine out of 148 have made strong progress on slowing deforestation to date, according to a U.N.-commissioned study released in July.

“The companies that are our target companies — large food and agricultural companies — it’s 100% crystal clear that they can’t reach their net-zero commitments without zero deforestation,” Leah Samberg, lead scientist at the Accountability Framework Initiative, told Mongabay by phone.

But focusing on zero-deforestation commitments is only a small piece of what needs to happen, study co-author Rachael Garrett, an assistant professor of environmental policy at ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, told Mongabay in a video call. Strong local forest governance and land rights, monitoring tools, accountability, and emphasis not just on carbon but on conservation and biodiversity are also crucial to both making zero-deforestation policies successful and halting deforestation, Garrett said. “Expanding [zero-deforestation commitments] is important, but it’s only part of the puzzle.”

—

This post was previously published on news.mongabay.com and under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.

Why Veterans are Lining Up for Legalized Magic Mushrooms

FIGHTING NEW BATTLES

In January, Oregon will be the first state to offer controlled use of magic mushrooms. Veterans forced overseas for psilocybin therapy say they will be among the first in line.

Deborah Bloom
Published Dec. 30, 2022

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty

In 1995, Amanda joined the U.S. Air Force when at the height of her confidence. Originally a shy kid from central Oregon, she’d spent most of her adolescence building up her self-esteem, performing in pageants, and high school theater, choir and debate. At 20 years old, she marched into her local recruitment office to enlist in the military, ready to travel the world and build self-discipline.

By the time her service was over in 2000, her confidence had “unraveled,” as she describes it. Amanda, whose last name is being withheld for privacy concerns, was sexually assaulted by a fellow military member a year into her enlistment. Her mental health suffered, and after years of tumultuous relationships with other service members, she was honorably discharged close to four-months pregnant, with severe symptoms of undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder.

She would eventually return to Oregon angry, irritable, twice-divorced, and with a new infant. More than 20 years later, Amanda is working as a grief counselor in Medford and has most of her PTSD symptoms under control.

After taking a class on psychedelic therapy, she became interested in trying psilocybin, the hallucinogenic substance derived from magic mushrooms, to try rooting out some of the more deeply embedded trauma. “I really believe that psilocybin therapy can reconnect or even change those neural pathways, because I need a reset,” Amanda said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “I’ve done all the hard work, but I don’t know how to fix that part and I really need to.”

Amanda will soon get her chance. In January, Oregon will become the first state to offer controlled use of magic mushrooms, thanks to Measure 109, which voters passed in 2020 and allows for the legal manufacture, delivery and administration of psilocybin in licensed facilities. The state will begin processing licenses in January, and organizations that connect veterans to psychedelics will be watching the rollout closely, hopeful the Beaver State will be home to future psilocybin retreats, where new cohorts of facilitators can be trained, and where many of those trained facilitators are likely to be veterans themselves.

The Heroic Hearts Program currently offers ayahuasca retreats in Mexico and Peru to veterans with a history of military combat and/or sexual assault. Founder Jesse Gould said he hopes to set up an outpost in Oregon within the next year. An Army veteran who credits ayahuasca for helping him heal from PTSD, Gould envisions a pilot program where veterans are treated with magic mushrooms in a group therapy setting led by veterans who’ve done their own healing through psychedelics.

“We’re trying to create this self-supporting ecosystem to keep costs down, make it scalable and take the burden off of therapists,” Gould said. “The veterans can help support their brothers and sisters who they relate to. It’s training communities to heal themselves.”

Jesse Gould is the founder of the Heroic Heroes Project.
Jeremy Lock

The Synaptic Institute, an organization that trains new psychedelic facilitators, recently announced plans to earmark scholarship funds for veterans entering the training program, which can cost upwards of $8,000. Veterans of War, a program that offers fellowships to service members for psychedelic retreats in Peru and Costa Rica, intends to train veterans as facilitators at a future service site in Oregon. The Mission Within, which runs psychedelic retreats in Mexico for special operations veterans, also plans to establish a training program in Oregon for service members.

“A lot of people, when they go through a retreat and experience healing through psychedelics, they want to give back and they want to get involved,” said TMW founder Dr. Martin Polanco.

Though there are numerous studies proving the efficacy of psilocybin when treating symptoms of depression, addiction, and PTSD, the Food and Drug Administration still classifies psilocybin as a Schedule 1 Drug—of no known medical value. Oregon and Colorado have both legalized the controlled use of psilocybin, with Colorado’s program scheduled to roll out in 2024. Other cities, such as San Francisco and Washington DC have passed ballot measures to decriminalize the drug.

Veterans looking to try magic mushrooms without breaking U.S. law must travel to either Latin America or the Caribbean to find a retreat. Armand Lecomte, a marine corps veteran who claims psychedelic-assisted treatment saved his life, helps orchestrate psilocybin retreats in Jamaica several times a year for MycoMeditations. A Portland resident, Lecomte urged state and local leaders to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin. He said he plans to get trained as a licensed facilitator in Oregon.

“It’s ridiculous these veterans have to leave the country they served to get the healing they need,” he said. To date, 30 men in Lecomte’s battalion have died by suicide. “If some of my brethren had access to this, they’d still be here.”

Despite 56 percent of Oregonians voting in favor of Measure 109 in 2020, a majority of counties voted this November to opt-out of its implementation. Back in July, while commissioners in rural Deschutes County considered adding a ban on legal psilocybin to the ballot, retired Navy SEAL Chad Kuske urged local leaders to consider veterans.

After 12 combat deployments and years of suffering from PTSD, depression and anxiety, Kuske sought psilocybin therapy in Mexico. “It radically changed my life,” he said at the meeting. “If you’re a veteran struggling with a traumatic brain injury or PTSD, going to a foreign country can be a monumentally terrifying thing to do,” Kuske told county commissioners. “Especially when you're going to embark on a healing journey.”

Once voters passed Measure 109, Rose Moulin-Franco moved to Ashland, Ore. to pursue her dream of opening up a wellness center, where she hopes to offer psilocybin treatment in addition to floatation tank therapy, sound baths, group meditation, and other forms of treatment. A military veteran who served during the Vietnam Era, she began exploring the use of psychedelics following the death of her husband, who had suffered “horrendous PTSD” after three tours in Vietnam.

Moulin-Franco found hallucinogens helpful in letting go of past trauma. She, like Amanda in Medford, was living with the trauma of being sexually assaulted in the military. (Almost one in every four women in the military face sexual assault while in the service, according to a New York Times analysis.) After her husband’s death, Moulin-France became a trauma specialist.

Shrooms Fight Depression Better Than Normal Meds, Study Says
HAVE A NICE TRIP
Tony Ho Tran


Until recently, she’d been eyeing a tract of remote land in Jackson County as a potential wellness center site. But the county commissioners voted to restrict psilocybin service centers from rural parts of the county and put the kibosh on that plan. Moulin-Franco is frustrated, but is determined to build a service center wherever she’s allowed. “My county wants me to treat veterans with PTSD and TBIs alongside noisy freeways? Fine, but it’s not ideal,” Moulin-Franco said.

Describing herself as traditional, veteran airwoman Amanda says she hopes to one day be able to legally try psilocybin in a safe, clinical setting. She doesn’t think she’d feel comfortable finding magic mushrooms on the black market, Amanda said. And the idea of traveling outside the country for the treatment is a no-go.

“I didn’t do drugs growing up. I don’t like doing stuff that’s illegal,” Amanda said. She said she wants to try magic mushrooms with a trained, credentialed facilitator she knows and trusts.“I want to do it in a way that is clinically appropriate and evidence based. Otherwise, I won’t have much belief in it.”

13 Bison Die After Being Struck by Truck Near Yellowstone National Park

Police initially said all three vehicles struck the bison but later reported that only the truck did.

AP Photo/Janie Osborne, File

 Thirteen bison were killed or had to be euthanized after their herd was struck by a semi-truck involved in an accident with two other vehicles on a dark Montana highway just outside Yellowstone National Park, authorities said Friday, Dec. 30, 2022. 

Thirteen bison were killed or had to be euthanized after their herd was struck by a semi-truck involved in an accident with two other vehicles on a dark Montana highway just outside Yellowstone National Park, authorities said Friday.

The semi-truck struck the bison after dark on Wednesday night. Some bison were killed in the crash, and others were put down due to the severity of their injuries, the West Yellowstone Police Department said in a statement.

No one in the truck or in the two other vehicles was hurt, said Police Chief Mike Gavagan.

Authorities said they were investigating the cause of the accident, which occurred at about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday on U.S. Highway 191, just north of the town of West Yellowstone. The town serves as a western entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

Police initially said all three vehicles struck the bison but later reported that only the truck did.

Speed may not have been a factor in the accident, police said, though “road conditions at the time would dictate traveling below the posted speed limit.”

Bison in the region often congregate near roadways in the winter, where it's easier for them to navigate amid heavy snow, the police department said. The animals can be hard to see at night because of their dark brown color and because their eyes don't reflect light, including headlights, like deers' eyes do, it said.

What is Covid's new variant XBB.1.5, responsible for over 40% of US cases?

Xbb.1.5 is one of the most immunity-evasive variants to date and appears to spread much faster than old XBB or BQ, virologist Dr Eric Feigl Ding tweeted.

Published on Dec 31, 2022 

Covid variant XBB.1.5 accounts for over 40% of cases in US(AP)

ByPoulomi Ghosh

Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that over 40% of Covid-19 cases in the United States are now caused by Omicron XBB.1.5 -- a variant which has concerned experts. "Ironically, probably the worst variant that the world is facing right now is actually XBB," Dr Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, told Reuters.

Here is all you need to know about XBB.1.5

1. Virologist Eric Feigl Ding called XBB.1.5 a 'super variant', the 'next big one', which is causing a surge in hospitalisation in New York.

2. XBB.1.5 is a new recombinant strain and is both more immune-evasive and better at infecting than BQ.1 and XBB, the virologist said adding that it is not 'typical Omircon', but a special recombination mixture variant that is further mutated.

3. The R-value of XBB.1.5 is much worse than the previous variants. "Multiple models show XBB.1.5 is much worse in transmission R-value and infection rate than previous variants — faster by LEAPS and BOUNDS," Eric Fiegl Ding tweeted.



4. According to data, XBB.1.5 is 120% faster than BQ.1

5. "XBB.1.5 is likely an American-originated recombination variant that is 96% faster (worse) than old XBB. The XBB.1.5 popped up in the New York area in October and has been causing trouble," the virologist tweeted.

6. All US states where XBB.1.5 is dominant are witnessing a surge in hospitalisation leading to the explanation that this variant is behind the increased rate of hospitalisation.

7. In the UK too, XBB.1.5 is spreading fast.

(With agency inputs)

 Toyin Falola: A Transcendental Academic Giant At 70

NOTES FROM ATLANTA WITH FAROOQ KPEROGI

By On Dec 31, 2022

IT isn’t usual for me to devote an entire column to celebrate the birthday of an individual. But Professor Toyin Falola, a far-famed endowed professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin whom I have called the patriarch of African academics in North America, isn’t an everyday individual. He is an institution, a pan-human, pan-African, and pan-Nigerian icon who will turn 70 on January 1, 2023.

Professor Falola is most probably older than 70. He was born in Ibadan to parents who had no Western education, so his birth wasn’t recorded. Like many people in his generation, he chose an arbitrary date that, in his estimation, approximates his probable date of birth.

Many people outside academia would probably wonder I am celebrating the birthday of a fellow academic whose fame and footprints are mostly in pedagogy and scholarship. Well, first of all, Falola is a fundamentally good human who is abidingly complaisant, who derives the greatest joy when he helps others to succeed, who has advanced the careers and life trajectories of hundreds of strangers across the length and breadth of Africa without expectation of reward, and who is an inspiration to thousands.

He has the placid, self-actualized temperament of Nelson Mandela and the restlessly fiery intellect of Wole Soyinka. With nearly 200 single-authored, co-authored, and edited books, he has written more books in the humanities and social sciences than any African academic alive. He is also one of Africa’s most cited scholars and one of its most visible voices. Yet, he is profoundly humble, down-to-earth, and approachable.

With his record of superhumanly prodigious scholarly productivity, you would expect that he is some hermit who lives in splendid seclusion, who devotes his entire holed up in his study or in libraries. He isn’t. He is a profoundly contagious social butterfly who lubricates his enormous social networks with unswerving physical or technological presence. To this day, he hasn’t satisfactorily answered my questions about how he manages to be a normal human being with such an uncannily supernormal intellectual output.

Most people with Falola’s scholarly productivity usually don’t have a life outside academia. They are often socially awkward, emotionally stunted solitudinarians. That’s why people who know him jocularly call him alijannu (the Yoruba rendering of the Arabic jinn, i.e., genie) behind his back.

Falola’s larger-than-life intellectual exploits on the global stage (he has held professorships in almost every continent of the world) is particularly remarkable because he got all his degrees in Nigeria and started his academic career there. He got his BA and PhD in history from the Obafemi Awolowo University (which used to be called the University of Ife when he earned his degrees) where he also taught. He is also the firstrecipient of the University of Ibadan’s first academic D. Litt. in Humanities exactly two years ago today, which is supremely symbolic in many ways.

His intellectual prodigiousness started right from when he was a lecturer and later professor at Ife. He played in the global scholarly big league from Nigeria. He left Nigeria because the progressively shrinking intellectual space in the country couldn’t contain the unstoppable vastness of his productivity.

But he really hasn’t left Nigeria. He has multiple programs and projects, particularly in history departments, in several Nigerian universities, and spends considerable time in the country mentoring budding scholars. He sometimes spends more time in Nigeria than he does in the United States. You can do that when you are Toyin Falola, a much sought-after scholar that most well-regarded universities across the world want to have on their faculty just for the symbolic heft that his presence confers.

His love for what he does is indescribably deep. After more than four decades in academia, he has never held an administrative position. He has successfully resisted invitations to be head of department, dean, or any other administrative academic position. He finds more joy in teaching (in which he has won multiple prestigious awards) and scholarship (where his output is unrivalled) than in administration even though he is a charismatic and charming person who gets along with most people.

I became personally acquainted with Professor Falola in 2004 through my friend and Bayero University classmate Professor Moses Ochonu who teaches history at Vanderbilt University here in the United States. I wrote a travelogue about my visit to Ireland in 2004, which Moses liked and shared with members of the USA Africa Dialogue Series, a discussion group of Africanist academics that Falola moderates.

Falola reached out to me by email after reading the travelogue and sought my permission to subscribe me to the discussion list. I was flattered. I obliged his request immediately. Our relationship graduated from exchanging views on the list to exchanging personal emails. In June 2010 when my wife died, I received my first phone call from him. Seven years later, he paid me a personal visit in my home. Now, he isn’t just an intellectual mentor. He feels like a father. Most people who know him feel the same way about him.

He has a special gift for connecting with people at a deep, emotional level. He is endowed with the capacity to make people he knows feel way more special than they are, than they deserve to be. He calls people “great ones,” compliments their work with high praise and censures with the gentlest tone. He invites criticism of his own work from intellectual inferiors like me and seems to have no capacity to be offended.

People have misunderstood him and lashed out, but he never requites harsh words with harsh words. He disarms his critics with his compulsive grace and generosity of spirit. That is why most of his fiercest critics often end up becoming his friends.

Although he has been knighted as the Bobapitan of Ibadanland by the Olubadan of Ibadan and honored with the Member of the Order of the Niger (MON) award by the Federal Government this year, I think he has not been sufficiently celebrated in Nigeria outside academia. Give the depth and breadth of his contribution to explaining Nigeria to the world, he is worth more than an MON.

For example, Sabiu “Tunde” Yusuf, a former recharge card settler who became an aide to Buhari because of his biological relationship to him, has been conferred the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) honor, which ranks higher than MON.

In which world does it make sense to give a higher national honor to a 30-something-year-old former recharge card seller who is a presidential aide through the accident of birth than a globally garlanded, accomplished scholar who has written close to 200 books and who has been awarded nearly 20 honorary doctorates across the world?

Well, even with all he has already accomplished, Falola isn’t done yet. He is working on multiple books as write this and is member of African Union’s eminent group of intellectuals fashioning ways to salvage the continent.

I once asked him when he will retire. “Retire? What will I be doing when I retire? I am a restless person,” he told me. He reminds me of my English professor at the University of Louisiana by the name of Barbara Ricardo who told me she would rather die teaching or researching than retire. She died at 76 while teaching. I hope and pray Falolo lives to be 100 and beyond in service of Nigerian and the world.

I invite my readers to join me in wishing Professor Toyin Omoyeni Falola a warm and joyous birthday and many happy returns!

 NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

'It's going to change the Bugaboos forever': large rockfall found on Snowpatch Spire

INVERMERE, B.C. — Mountain guide James Madden was flying over Snowpatch Spire in Bugaboo Provincial Park last week surveying weather conditions when he saw dust clouds.


'It's going to change the Bugaboos forever': large rockfall found on Snowpatch Spire© Provided by The Canadian Press

He then snapped photos of a huge rockfall on the northeast side of the iconic peak in southeast British Columbia, which has shocked the climbing community.

"It was a surprise," he said. "To see something that large is quite surprising."

Madden, who has used the park for nearly 20 years, said the loose rocks left behind will be a hazard for anyone walking in the area for years to come.

"From the climbing industry, it's going to change the Bugaboos forever," he said.

Climbers from around the world travel to the provincial park in the Purcell Mountains every year. Snowpatch Spire, at more than 3,000 metres tall, is considered the centrepiece of the Bugaboos mountain range and is a well-known granite alpine climbing area.

Tim McAllister, who also guides in the park, said he felt dismay when he learned of the rockfall.

"It was such a large event that demolished a very famous and beautiful landmark," he said. "It's scarred Snowpatch Spire forever."

McAllister said while dozens of climbing routes on the west side of the spire are still intact, it was a "special chunk" that fell off. He said his friend Will Stanhope, a climber and mountain guide, free climbed the Tom Egan Memorial Route with partner Matt Segal, which is now gone.

"It became one of the great ascents of the year, if not the decade," he said.

Marc Piche, who has co-authored several guidebooks on the Bugaboos, said Snowpatch Spire was one of the last spires to be climbed in the mountain range.

Some of the routes that fell off were "world class," including one deemed one of the world's hardest alpine rock climbs, he said.

"It took a lot of history with it."

Piche said the rockfall was shocking, but not totally surprising.

"The Bugaboos have kind of got a long history of pretty major rockfalls," he said. "It just seems like it's inevitable that there will always be big rockfall events up in the mountains, in particular in the Bugaboos."

Drew Brayshaw, a climber and senior hydrologist and geoscientist with Statlu Environmental Consulting, said the rockfall affected about a dozen climbs.

He estimates it was roughly 30,000 to 50,000 cubic metres in size.

While that's large, he said, it pales in comparison to other recent rockfalls in British Columbia.

Two landslides on Joffre Peak in Joffre Lakes Provincial Park in 2020 had a combined volume of five million cubic metres, says an analysis published in the Journal of the International Consortium on Landslides.

In general, Brayshaw said mountain permafrost is thawing because of climate change.

There have been "major temperature swings" in the region, creating cracks in granite that expand as water freezes, causing portions of rock to break off, he added.

"The frequency of mountain landslides is increasing and it's directly related to climate change and thawing alpine permafrost," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 28, 2022.

— By Emily Blake in Yellowknife

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

The Canadian Press

RIP
Ian Tyson, half of Ian & Sylvia folk duo, dead at age 89

Canadian folk singer Ian Tyson, who wrote 'Four Strong Winds,' died following a series of health complications, his manager said

Associated Press

Ian Tyson, the Canadian folk singer who wrote the modern standard "Four Strong Winds" as one half of Ian & Sylvia and helped influence such future superstars as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, died Thursday at age 89.

The native of Victoria, British Columbia, died at his ranch in southern Alberta following a series of health complications, his manager, Paul Mascioli, said.

Tyson was a part of the influential folk movement in Toronto with his first wife, Sylvia Tyson. He was also seen as a throwback to more rustic times and devoted much of his life to living on his ranch and pursuing songs about the cowboy life.


"He put a lot of time and energy into his songwriting and felt his material very strongly, especially the whole cowboy lifestyle,″ Sylvia Tyson said of her former husband.

STARS WE’VE LOST IN 2022



Ian Tyson, the Canadian folk singer who wrote "Four Strong Winds" as one half of Ian & Sylvia, died Dec. 29, 2022, at age 89. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

He was best known for the troubadour's lament "Four Strong Winds" and its classic refrain about the life of a wanderer: "If the good times are all gone/Then I’m bound for movin’ on/I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way."

Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings and Judy Collins were among the many performers who covered the song. Young included "Four Strong Winds" on his acclaimed "Comes a Time" album, released in 1978, and two years earlier performed the song at "The Last Waltz" concert staged by the Band to mark its farewell to live shows.

Tyson was born Sept. 25, 1933, to parents who emigrated from England. He attended private school and learned to play polo, then he discovered the rodeo.

After graduating from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958, he hitchhiked to Toronto. He was swept up in the city’s burgeoning folk movement, where Canadians including Young, Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot played in hippie coffee houses in the Bohemian Yorkville neighborhood.

Tyson soon met Sylvia Fricker and they began a relationship — onstage and off — moving to New York. Their debut album, "Ian & Sylvia," in 1962 was a collection of mostly traditional songs. Their second album, 1964′s "Four Strong Winds,″ was the duo’s breakthrough, thanks in large part to its title track, one of the record's only original compositions.


His manager, Paul Mascioli, says Tyson died at his ranch in southern Alberta following a series of health complications. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Married in 1964, the pair continued releasing new records with regularity. But as the popularity of folk waned, they moved to Nashville and began integrating country and rock into their music.

In 1969, the Tysons formed the country-rock band Great Speckled Bird, which appeared with Janis Joplin, The Band and the Grateful Dead among others on the "Festival Express" tour across Canada in 1970, later the basis for a documentary released in 2004.

They had a child, Clay, in 1968, but the couple grew apart as their career began to stall in the ’70s. They divorced in 1975.

Tyson moved back to western Canada and returned to ranch life, training horses and cowboying in Pincher Creek, Alberta, 135 miles south of Calgary. These experiences increasingly filtered through his songwriting, particularly on 1983′s "Old Corrals and Sagebrush.″

In 1987, Tyson won a Juno Award for country male vocalist of the year, and five years later, he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame alongside Sylvia Tyson. He was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.

Tyson was a part of the influential folk movement in Toronto with his first wife, Sylvia. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Despite damage to his voice resulting from a heart attack and surgery in 2015, Tyson continued to perform live concerts. But the heart problems returned and forced Tyson to cancel appearances in 2018.

He continued to play his guitar at home, though.

"I think that’s the key to my hanging in there because you’ve gotta use it or lose it,″ he said in 2019.

 

Britons’ Growing Buyer’s Remorse for Brexit

With the Tory government shackled to a Brexit policy that is losing support, an angry new populism may resurge.

By Matthew Goodwin

Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty

DECEMBER 15, 2022

The conventional wisdom after the two major populist revolts of 2016—the United Kingdom’s referendum vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president—was that few, if any, of their respective supporters would have a change of heart. Contrary to the classic understanding of populism as an ephemeral protest, this view insisted, the votes for Brexit and for Trump reflected a profound and enduring clash over identity.

Six years later, the argument looks less convincing. In America’s recent midterm elections, Trump Republicans clearly underperformed, and in Britain, public regret over Brexit—or “Bregret”—is emerging as a major theme in politics and national life. As the U.K. is engulfed by a wave of strikes by ambulance workers, nurses, railway workers, and others that has been dubbed a new “winter of discontent,” a larger disaffection has come into view

When Britons are asked whether they think the vote for Brexit—a slim 52–48 majority—was right or wrong, the share of those who say it was wrong has climbed to a record high of 56 percent, while the share that says it was the right decision has fallen below a third of those polled. Considering the relative stability of Brexit enthusiasm after the landslide Conservative election win in December 2019, when Boris Johnson triumphed with the promise to “get Brexit done,” the recent decline in approval for leaving Europe is stark. Believing in Brexit has become a minority pursuit.

Ask voters how they think Brexit is being managed, and about two-thirds now say badly. Ask them how they think Brexit has gone, and only one in five says well; close to two-thirds say not well. And ask them how the reality of Brexit compares with their expectations of it, and seven in 10 now say that it has gone either as badly as they expected or worse than they expected. Je ne Bregrette rien? Not so much.

This creeping sense of Bregret helps explain why the British have also become more supportive of what is still unsayable by political leaders at Westminster: that the country should consider rejoining the EU. Neither of Britain’s two major parties supports this, and neither is committed to offering what would be the country’s third referendum on European membership, after 1975 and 2016. But if you ask people today how they would vote at such a referendum, an average of 57 percent say they would vote to rejoin. In the past year alone, there has been a 10-point swing toward rejoining the EU.

Read: The never-ending Brexit crisis

What explains this change of heart? The first factor is the sheer pressure of the demographic shifts sweeping through Britain’s electorate. In much the same way that the 2016 result caught the establishment off guard, the divides submerged beneath the opinion surveys suggest that some big shocks to the status quo are coming once again.

The mood is changing not simply because some of Britain’s Leave voters have morphed into Rejoiners—the number of actual converts is modest. Fewer than one in five Brexiteers admit to buyer’s remorse. Far more significant is the fact that people who chose not to vote in the original referendum, and young people who were too young to vote in 2016 but are now flooding into the electorate, are heavily against Brexit.

Of the 18-to-24-year-olds of Generation Z, who came of age during the populist turmoil marked by the rise of Trump in the U.S. and Johnson in the U.K., as well as the prolonged and polarizing gridlock over Brexit in Parliament, no less than 79 percent say they would vote to rejoin the EU. (This is a view shared by only 24 percent of the oldest Britons.) For these Zoomers, only 2 percent of whom plan to vote Tory at the next election, this opposition to Brexit is just one aspect of an emerging progressive identity, which also includes a strong emphasis on climate change and social justice, as well as support for immigration, greater diversity, and more assertive anti-racism.

Similarly to their Gen Z counterparts in Scotland, 73 percent of whom back the call of the Scottish Nationalist first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to leave the U.K. and rejoin the EU, Zoomers elsewhere in the U.K. seem convinced that Brexit was a historic mistake. And according to the latest YouGov polling, a majority of every age group under 65 in the U.K. now thinks this way.

Bregret is also being stoked by voters’ shifting assessments of its costs and benefits. The original vote for Brexit was powered by a belief that leaving the EU would enable Britain to reclaim sovereignty from Brussels, lower immigration, and, per the Leave campaign slogan, “Take back control” of the country’s borders and security. But since the referendum, voters have seen Brexit become enmeshed in a succession of crises. Even if Brexit was not their main cause, the blunt reality is that it has become the blameworthy backdrop to the post-pandemic economic malaise of low growth, rampant inflation, and cost-of-living misery.

Read: For Britain’s Tories, the answer is always Margaret Thatcher

Instead of paving the way for a dynamic high-growth, low-tax economy—in the most boosterish version promised by Leave’s promoters, Britain reborn as “Davos-on-Thames”—Brexit is now associated by many with the opposite: a low-growth, high-tax economy. Worse, the country is laden with debt, its industry is stuck in a cycle of low productivity, and its borders are overwhelmed by unchecked immigration. Britons are about to witness the sharpest fall in living standards on record, and their economy is forecast to fall behind those of most major world powers.

Britain’s status as the “sick man of Europe” in the 1960s and ’70s was what originally helped persuade the country to join with Europe. If the U.K. continues to lag behind its competitors, this “benchmarking effect” of invidious comparison will only strengthen Bregret in the years ahead. That effect is already clear. Brexiteers will argue that quitting Europe was never really about the economy but about sovereignty and identity. This was certainly true in 2016—but in 2022, the economic downturn is undercutting support for their cause.

According to my colleague Sir John Curtice, voters have not, in the main, become more positive about what they see as the main benefits of Brexit—such as Britain’s success in developing its own COVID-19-vaccine program, and its ability to control its own affairs and respond decisively to the Ukraine crisis—but they have become gloomier about what they see as its drawbacks. Contrary to their attitude a year ago, they have become more convinced that Brexit is damaging their wages, the national economy, and the National Health Service.

The Tory government’s disastrous experiment with “Trussonomics,” Liz Truss’s radical economic project during her 44-day tenure as prime minister, has not helped. Although her neo-Thatcherite “Liberal Leaver” vision of Brexit Britain—boosting bonuses for bankers, deregulating financial services, slashing taxes for top earners, and liberalizing immigration from outside Europe—united Tory elites and their donor class, it did not appeal to most ordinary Brexit voters.

Read: The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation

Had you asked these voters, in 2016, why they voted to leave the EU, few would have told you it was because they wanted to deregulate the financial sector, see net migration surge to more than 500,000 a year, featherbed high earners, and have the government lose control of Britain’s borders (more than 44,000 migrants and asylum seekers arrived this year in small boats from France).

Few of the blue-collar, non-college-educated, and older voters who flocked to the Conservatives after 2016 want to realize the Davos class’s dream of a finance-led economic powerhouse centered on London. The growing gulf between how Conservative elites view Brexit and how the working-class voters they won away from the Labour Party in 2019 see Brexit is also stoking Bregret. Many of those voters have been disappointed by a Tory Party they see as showing scant regard for them. Since Johnson’s emphatic election victory three years ago, his party’s support among Brexit voters has crashed by some 30 points.

Read: What is the point of Boris Johnson?

The loss of these formerly pro-Brexit voters creates a profound challenge for the Conservatives, who have completely remolded their party around one side of the Brexit divide while alienating much of the rest of the country. What began as a master class in how a center-right party can tap into a major political realignment has turned into a cautionary tale about how a governing party can alienate its own voters. The Tories’ mismanagement of Brexit and their hemorrhaging electoral support are setting the stage for a return of what the referendum in 2016 was designed to eliminate: national populism

Johnson’s initial success was partly rooted in winning over three-quarters of the people who had previously backed Britain’s populist in chief and Trump ally, Nigel Farage. But today, the Conservative government’s failure to curb immigration, control Britain’s borders, and improve the lives of non-London-dwelling Brexiteers is creating space for another populist revolt in British politics.

Read: The rise and fall of Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage

In recent weeks, Reform, a party aligned with Farage, has been creeping up in the polls to 9 percent—a level of support for a rival third party that would guarantee the Tories lose the next general election. Many more 2019 Tory voters are telling pollsters that they don’t know whom to support or prefer “none of the above”—this leaves them once again susceptible to a plausible demagogue like Farage.

Whether they identified with the right or the left, many Britons could at least agree that Brexit’s seeming resolution had killed off populism. But as disillusion grows with what getting Brexit done has meant, the assumption that Britain’s populist spasm has passed no longer looks so certain.

Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent, is the author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

UN asks world court to weigh in on Israeli occupation, ‘annexation’

UNGA resolution calls for court’s 1st Israel probe since 2004; all Arab peace partners vote yes; investigation to cover settlements, Jerusalem, ‘discriminatory legislation’

By LUKE TRESS 

Today, The Times of Israel

The Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, addresses the General Assembly at the UN Headquarters in New York, December 30, 2022. (Screenshot/UN)

NEW YORK — The United Nations General Assembly approved on Friday a resolution requesting the International Court of Justice weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli “annexation” and the “legal status of the occupation.”

The resolution promoted by the Palestinians passed by a vote of 87 in favor, 26 against, with 53 abstentions.

The resolution is titled “Israeli practices and settlement activities affecting the rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the occupied territories” and calls on the Hague-based ICJ to “render urgently an advisory opinion” on Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory.”


It also calls for an investigation into Israeli measures “aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem” and says Israel has adopted “discriminatory legislation and measures.”

The resolution demands the court weigh in on the conflict in accordance with international law and the UN charter.

The ICJ, also known as the world court, is the top UN court for mediating disputes between countries. Its rulings are binding and influence public opinion but it has no mechanism for enforcement. The court is separate from the International Criminal Court, which is also in The Hague.

The court last issued an advisory opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2004 when the General Assembly asked it to rule on the legality of the separation barrier.

Israel, the US, the UK, Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany and Italy voted against Friday’s resolution.

China, Iran, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Russia and Saudi Arabia were among those voting in favor, along with Muslim or Arab states with which Israel has relations including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Azerbaijan.

France, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland abstained.

The votes against the resolution and abstentions together amounted to 79 countries, representing a smaller margin of support than usual for anti-Israel measures at the General Assembly.

A UN General Assembly vote December 30, 2022, on a resolution requesting the International Court of Justice to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Screenshot/UN)

Some members of the 193-nation assembly, including Ukraine, did not cast a vote. Kyiv’s support for the resolution in a committee earlier this year sparked a diplomatic spat between Ukraine and Israel.

The UN has a long history of passing resolutions against Israel, and Israel and the US accuse it of bias. Israel has accused the Palestinians, who have nonmember observer state status at the UN, of trying to use the world body to circumvent peace negotiations and impose a settlement.

Earlier Friday, Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan denounced the UN for the resolution, calling it a “moral stain” on the world body. He has argued that the vote delegitimizes and demonizes Israel, including by referring to the Temple Mount only by its Arabic name, Haram al-Sharif.

The Temple Mount is the holiest place for Jews as the site of the ancient temples, and the third holiest site in Islam as the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Erdan did not appear at the vote because it took place after the start of Shabbat. A US representative voted against the resolution on behalf of Israel.

“No international body can decide that the Jewish people are ‘occupiers’ in their own homeland. Any decision from a judicial body which receives its mandate from the morally bankrupt and politicized UN is completely illegitimate,” Erdan said in a Friday statement. “The Palestinians have rejected every peace initiative while supporting and inciting terror. Instead of pushing the Palestinians to change, the UN is doing the opposite: helping them to harm the only vibrant democracy in the Middle East.”

“The decision to hold a vote that deals with Israel on Shabbat is another example of the moral decay of the UN, which prevents Israel’s position from being heard in a vote whose results are predetermined,” he said.

Erdan had his term as UN envoy extended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday in one of his first moves after returning to the premier’s office.

The Palestinian representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, applauded the resolution after it passed.

“This vote comes one day after the new Israeli government was formed pledging to accelerate colonial and racist policies against the Palestinian people,” Mansour told the General Assembly.

“We trust that, regardless of your vote today, if you believe in international law and peace you will uphold the opinion of the International Court of Justice when delivered and you will stand up to this Israeli government right now because freedom, justice and peace shall prevail,” he said.

Ahead of the General Assembly vote, the resolution calling for ICJ guidance passed in the UN’s Fourth Committee last month by a vote of 98 in favor, 17 opposed and 52 abstentions.

Israel has blasted the resolution as biased and dismissive of Israeli security concerns. Former prime minister Yair Lapid waged a diplomatic campaign, contacting over 50 world leaders, to muster opposition to the move.

Israel’s new hardline government, sworn in on Thursday, is likely to further stoke tensions with the UN and the international community. The UN secretary-general’s office and the UN Human Rights Council did not respond to a request for comment on the new government and its policies toward the Palestinians.

The UN envoy to the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, congratulated Netanyahu on Thursday, said he will continue to work with the Israeli government, and stressed the UN’s commitment to a two-state solution.

Of Netanyahu’s coalition partners, none are on record supporting a two-state solution with the Palestinians, some support annexing the West Bank without granting equal rights to Palestinians in those areas, and many also vehemently oppose coordination or strengthening the PA.

Netanyahu’s government is expected to entrench Israel’s control over the West Bank. His coalition deals included a vague commitment to annex the territory to Israel, a pledge to legalize dozens of unauthorized settlements, and the provision of large funds for road building and public transport in the West Bank.

“The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria,” the government’s overall published agenda said. Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for the West Bank.

There is no specific mention of the Palestinians or the peace process in the guidelines, which say only that “the government will work to promote peace with all our neighbors while preserving Israel’s security, historical and national interests.”

The Palestinian Authority on Thursday called for an international boycott of Israel’s new government over its hardline, right-wing agenda, saying it poses “an existential threat to the Palestinian people.”

In 2004, the court said that the separation barrier Israel built was “contrary to international law” and called on Israel to immediately halt construction.

Israel has said the barrier is a security measure meant to prevent Palestinian attackers from reaching Israeli cities. The Palestinians say the structure is an Israeli land grab because of its route through east Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank.

Israel has ignored the 2004 ruling, and Friday’s resolution demands that Israel comply with it, stop construction of the wall and dismantle it.

AP contributed to this report.

Football: Wout Faes scores two own goals in Liverpool’s win over Leicester in English Premier League

AP
30 Dec, 2022 

Leicester defender Wout Faes had an evening to forget as Liverpool ended the year by closing the gap to the Premier League’s top four.

Faes became just the fourth player to score two own goals in a Premier League game, helping Liverpool come from behind to beat Leicester 2-1 this morning in a match marked by defensive errors from both sides.

After a tough start to the season, Liverpool are now just two points behind fourth-place Tottenham heading into 2023 following a run of four straight wins.

At Anfield, Liverpool gifted the hosts the lead in the fourth minute with some calamitous defending as Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was allowed to run straight down the middle of the pitch unopposed after a long goal kick to chip the ball over Alisson Becker.

But on a night when Liverpool’s forwards were repeatedly off target, they got some much-needed help from Faes.

The Belgian centre back had disastrous seven-minute spell before halftime as he first ignored a shout from his goalkeeper Danny Ward to leave a low cross from Alexander-Arnold and lunged in to make an attempted clearance, only to mishit the ball so it looped over Ward and in at the far post.

Darwin Nunez was then played through on goal by Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and dinked a shot over Ward that bounced back off the far post.

The back-tracking Faes tried to clear the ball but only succeeded in hammering it into the net — and then had to endure taunts of “shoot” from the Liverpool fans every time he touched the ball.

“He’s a strong character, and he will get over that this evening,” Leicester manager Brendan Rodgers said.

“He has come back a little rusty having not played in a long time having got no minutes with Belgium at the World Cup.

“When he came in, he was absolutely fantastic for us and was just unfortunate today.”

It was far from a vintage performance from Jurgen Klopp’s team but Liverpool now have four successive league victories for the first time since April.

“It’s all about getting three points and trying to get into a position in the league where we feel like we need to be and haven’t been this season,” Liverpool defender Trent Alexander Arnold said. “These are the ones that you look back on and know that you needed to win it. Whether you win well or ugly, it doesn’t really matter.”

West Ham would be more than happy to get an ugly win, after outplaying Brentford for large parts of the game and still losing 2-0.

David Moyes’ team are staring at a crisis after a fifth straight loss. The London club could find themselves in last place by the end if the weekend.

The team were booed off the field after first-half goals from Ivan Toney and Josh Dasilva inflicted another damaging loss on Moyes.

“I thought we played well,” Moyes said. “The goals were completely against the run of play, we’ve lost two goals to throw-ins. We made a lot of opportunities, we just couldn’t take them.”

Brentford climbed to ninth, although the win was came at a cost as Toney left on a stretcher in stoppage time after landing awkwardly.

“He had some pain,” Brentford manager Thomas Frank said of Toney, who scored his 13th goal of the season. “It is something with the knee, we hope it is nothing serious.”