On Black Friday, one of Amazon’s busiest periods, Amnesty International released a new briefing, Amazon,Let Workers Unionize, 

documenting the company’s treatment of workers in France, Poland, the UK and USA. 

It is alarming that Amazon has treated attempts to unionize with such hostility – as one of the most powerful companies in the world, it should know better 

Barbora Černušáková, Amnesty International’s Researcher and Advisor on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Researchers found that Amazon has undermined attempts by workers to unionize and collectively negotiate, including through surveillance in the US and threats of legal action in the UK, and that it has failed to engage on key health and safety issues in Poland and France. 

“All through the pandemic, Amazon workers have been risking their health and lives to ensure essential goods are delivered to our doorsteps, helping Amazon achieve record profits. In this context it is alarming that Amazon has treated attempts to unionize with such hostility – as one of the most powerful companies in the world, it should know better,” said Barbora Černušáková, Amnesty International’s Researcher and Advisor on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

“As Amazon approaches its busiest time of year with Black Friday and Christmas, we are urging the company to respect the human rights of its workers and comply with international labour standards, which state clearly that workers have a right to unionize. Amazon must refrain from breaching its workers’ rights to privacy, and stop treating union activity as a threat.” 

Productivity targets resumed

Amazon suspended its stringent productivity targets for workers in March 2020, in the face of concerns that they were incompatible with health and safety measures required to prevent COVID-19 infections. However, ahead of the end of year holiday season, in October, Amazon told workers in the US, UK and elsewhere that it was reintroducing them. 

Workers in the UK reported receiving a text message stating that, “starting 21 October we will resume measuring and delivering productivity performance feedback to ensure we are ready to deliver for customers in the coming weeks.” 

Unions threatened and disciplined 

International human rights law and standards are clear that workers have rights to join and form trade unions, enjoy safe working conditions and have their right to privacy respected.  

Although Amazon says it respects employees’ rights to join or form a labour union, it has consistently undermined the ability of trade unions to operate. Not only did it identify the existence of unions as a “risk” factor in its 2018 and 2019 annual reports, Amazon also advised managers in a 2018 training video to look for “warning signs” of union activity. 

In March and April, there was uproar in the US when Amazon fired workers who spoke out about health and safety conditions during the pandemic. 

In the UK, GMB Union staff have been repeatedly threatened with injunctions for “trespassing” when trying to access Amazon facilities to recruit new members. Legal notices sent to union staff in 2018 and 2019 also illustrate that Amazon monitors the social media profiles of the union members, as their screenshots are attached as evidence of “planned” demonstrations. 

In Poland, the Workers’ Initiative reported disciplinary action against its members, including a woman who was reprimanded for recruiting union workers during working hours.  

Surveillance 

Another source of concern is the surveillance of Amazon’s workforce. In September, Vice News reported that Amazon had put out job advertisements for intelligence analysts to track risks including “labor organizing threats against the company”. Amazon has since removed the job adverts and stated that their posting was an error.  

In the same month, Vice News published details of internal Amazon documents showing that the company had been secretly monitoring and analyzing Amazon Flex drivers’ private Facebook groups, including for the purpose of tracking plans for strike actions or protests. 

This kind of sinister “Big Brother” behaviour is totally unacceptable, and interferes with workers' freedom of expression and right to organize 

Barbora Černušáková

On 21 September 2020, Amnesty International wrote to Amazon asking it to clarify its position on allegations of inappropriate surveillance and data collection from its workforce. In its response of 12 October 2020, Amazon did not answer specific questions about such practices. It did say, however, that Amazon places “enormous value on having daily conversations with each associate. Direct engagement with our employees is a strong part of our work culture.” 

According to leaked internal documents, made public in October 2020, Amazon appears to be using technology to monitor its workforce in the USA, including secretly tracking social media accounts for signs of plans to organize protests or strikes.  

In October, Recode reported that a leaked internal memo included plans by Amazon to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor union “threats” through a new technology system called “geoSPatial Operating Console”. 

“This kind of sinister “Big Brother” behaviour is totally unacceptable, and interferes with workers' freedom of expression and right to organize,"  said Barbora Černušáková.  

Failure to engage with unions on health and safety during the pandemic 

As COVID-19 continues to infect hundreds of thousands of people every day, the health and safety of Amazon workers remains a key concern. 

In Poland, the Workers’ Initiative told Amnesty International that in March 2020, Amazon refused to discuss health and safety concerns with them. In France, the trade union Solidaires successfully launched a legal challenge that forced a temporary halt in operations and the introduction of more stringent health and safety measures.   

This festive period comes at the end of a long and difficult year for Amazon workers, who have had to fight for their rights at work in the midst of a pandemic 

Barbora Černušáková

Unions have also raised concerns about hazard pay. While some increased hazard pay for Amazon employees was introduced in Europe and North America, it was withdrawn in most countries at the end of May 2020 despite the pandemic continuing.  

“This festive period comes at the end of a long and difficult year for Amazon workers, who have had to fight for their rights at work in the midst of a pandemic," said Barbora Černušáková.  

"Amazon is facing increasing scrutiny for its treatment of its workers, and we are urging the company to step up and fully comply with its responsibilty to respect workers’ rights.” 

Background

The briefing, Amazon, let them unionize! Respect for workers’ rights is not a choice, is available here.

• Amazon Inc. Protect frontline workers during COVID-19 crisis

AMAZON, LET WORKERS UNIONIZE! RESPECT FOR WORKERS’ RIGHTS IS NOT A CHOICE

27 November 2020, Index number: POL 40/3275/2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on societies and economies around the world. But Amazon has boomed, cementing its position as the most used consumer-facing platform in the world. This rapid expansion, occurring during an unprecedented global health crisis, has exacerbated longstanding concerns about the US-based corporation’s approach to health and safety and its adversarial relationship with trade unions. As Amazon approaches its busiest time of the year between Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday and Christmas, Amnesty International has gathered information relating to these concerns from four countries where the company has major operations: France, Poland, the UK and USA.

View report in English

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Tell Amazon to let workers unionize

Amazon is targeting and intimidating workers who are asking for better, safer working conditions. Email Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, and tell him to respect workers’ rights.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon’s profits have soared, with CEO, Jeff Bezos, becoming the world’s richest person. At the same time,COVID-19 brings new risk to those working in enclosed spaces and Amazon workers have struggled to get safe working conditions.

It’s your human right to join a union. Unions are vital - helping workers to negotiate with employers over wages, hours, and other working conditions. Unions have been critical in protecting the human rights of Amazon’s workforce, especially during this pandemic.

But allegations are mounting that Amazon has been squashing workers’ attempts to unionise in several countries. Allegations include the company monitoring and analysing workers’ private Facebook groups - a claim they haven’t denied. There is also evidence that Amazon spent thousands of dollars on an invasive new technology system to spy on workers. Some workers who have raised concerns about poor working conditions during COVID-19 have faced disciplinary action or have been fired.

International human rights law is clear. Everyone has the right to form and join a union.

Show your support for Amazon workers. Jeff Bezos says he personally reads the emails in this inbox – send him an email today telling him that workers’ rights are human rights! We’ll also send your email to Amazon’s board members.

Tell Amazon to let workers unionize | Amnesty International

A Job for Life, or Not? 

A Class Divide Deepens in Japan

Makiko Inoue and Ben Dooley
Sun, November 29, 2020

When Japan's economy faced its worst months in late spring and early summer, companies cut loose tens of thousands of nonregular workers, with women bearing the brunt of the job losses. (Noriko Hayashi/The New York Times)

TOKYO — For more than a decade, Setsuko Hikita spent her working days selling snacks and newspapers in the bowels of Tokyo’s bustling metro system.

Amid the chaos of morning commutes and the scramble to catch the last train home, she kept her employers’ tiny kiosks a haven of well-ordered commerce. Her company once awarded her a citation for her dedication and hard work.

What it did not give her was equal pay.

Over a 10-year period, Hikita earned about $90,000 less than many of her co-workers, and she was denied benefits like a retirement allowance. It wasn’t because they had more experience or were more competent. It was just that they had lifetime employment status and she did not.

So Hikita sued. Last month, after more than six years, the country’s Supreme Court rendered a verdict: Her employer was under no obligation to provide her with the same retirement allowance — a lump-sum payment on leaving the company — it gave colleagues who did identical work.

The ruling is one of two recent court decisions that threaten to further entrench the long-standing divide in Japan between so-called regular workers, who have lifetime employment and attendant benefits, and the growing ranks of nonregular workers, many of whom are women.

The effects of these divisions have been especially pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic. When Japan’s economy faced its worst months in late spring and early summer, companies cut loose tens of thousands of nonregular workers, with women bearing the brunt of the job losses. Many regular employees were put on furlough, retaining their positions.

Concerns about the precarious state of nonregular workers long predate the pandemic.

Employers have for years chipped away at the system of lifetime employment that evolved in Japan after World War II, arguing that increased flexibility to hire and fire employees will increase economic efficiency. Now, nearly 37% of the country’s labor force, or more than 20.6 million workers, are nonregular employees, according to the latest government statistics, up from around 16% in the early 1980s.

Among Japanese women in the workforce, more than half are nonregular employees — an example of the limits of Japan’s push in recent years to elevate women in the workplace, a program known as womenomics.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, addressing parliament this month, emphasized the need to fight rising unemployment among nonregular workers, and women in particular, pledging to “firmly take necessary measures.”

Promises like these sound all too familiar to labor activists. They fear that the Supreme Court’s decisions have “thrown cold water” on such vows to reform the system, said Shigeru Wakita, professor emeritus of labor law at Ryukoku University.

Japanese law mandates that companies avoid “unreasonable” differences in how they treat employees, but the meaning of the term is ill-defined. In the case of Hikita’s lawsuit and a separate suit brought by a female employee at a medical school in Osaka, judges ruled that the organizations had not violated that standard despite vast gaps in compensation and other benefits.

“If the courts don’t recognize this case as unreasonable, then what on earth is unreasonable?” asked Mitsuteru Suda, chairman of a labor union in Tokyo.

A tentative answer to that question came when the court issued a third ruling last month on conditions for nonregular workers. The judges ruled in favor of plaintiffs who had sued their employer, Japan Post, after it refused to pay them overtime to help with the spike in deliveries around New Year’s, Japan’s most important holiday.

But even that ruling is likely to further legitimize the prevailing employment system, Suda said. While the ruling will force the company to reassess its employment practices, it found fault only with the degree of discrimination, not the practice itself.

“The ruling stands on the side of the employers, giving a stamp of approval of discrimination,” he said. “That is unacceptable.”

In the Japanese employment system, the line between regular and nonregular workers is drawn early, and the result is a sharp class divide.

Each fall, companies across the country hold recruitment drives for high school and college students who will graduate in the spring. For many, the monthslong process is the most important period of their lives.

Those who find jobs will win employment for life. Those who do not are cast into the wilderness of irregular employment.

Regular workers, known as seishain, receive two annual bonuses, each typically worth at least one month’s salary and sometimes much more. They have benefits, which can include housing. They are nearly impossible to fire. And they get a generous pension plan.

By contrast, nonregular workers can be fired much more easily. They are paid less, and employers are not required to provide them with the same level of benefits that their regularly employed colleagues receive.

Midcareer hiring that brings nonregular workers into the regular workforce has increased in recent years, said Andrew Gordon, a professor at Harvard who specializes in the history of labor in Japan. But it remains rare.

Businesses employing regular workers right out of school like to argue, he said, that “we’re not hiring people with specialized knowledge and experience, but we’re hiring human capital that can be formed.”

“They fear that somebody from the outside won’t be able to adjust to their particular company’s way of doing things even though, functionally speaking, it might not be that different,” he added.

Lifetime employment is an artifact of the postwar era. As Japan tried to rebuild its devastated economy and demand for labor skyrocketed, the country’s companies made a pact with its workers: They would guarantee that their material needs would be met until the day they died. In exchange, employees would stay with their company for life and devote themselves entirely to its success.

The jobs went mostly to men. Their wives were expected to stay home and support their husbands’ grueling schedules.

Through the 1980s, Japan’s humming economy meant that most employees landed in lifetime employment. But the system began to change in the 1990s, after the country’s economic bubble popped and companies demanded more freedom in labor decisions.

In the following years, laws began changing to favor employers. By the end of the 2008 financial crisis, the number of nonregular workers had risen drastically.

A 2013 law attempted to address this disparity, mandating that employers convert nonregular workers to seishain after five years and that differences in their employment conditions should not be “unreasonable.”

But the law has had little impact because of loopholes and its loose definition of what constitutes “unreasonable” differences.

Those weak points became the basis for the lawsuit filed by Hikita and three others against their employer, Metro Commerce.

Several decades ago, the company routinely hired 20 to 30 lifetime employees annually. Now, it adds only two or three each year.

For Hikita, her life as a nonregular employee began at the age of 54, when she moved back to Tokyo after a divorce. Her starting wage at Metro Commerce was 1,000 yen an hour, or less than $10 an hour at current exchange rates. Ten years later, she was making only 1,050.

“When I started at the company, I thought everyone was equal,” she said. But she quickly discovered that “there was a difference between contract employees and lifetime employees.”

She decided to sue in 2014 after learning that her co-workers were getting annual bonuses four to five times as large as hers.

After she left the company the next year, she was working three jobs to cover the payments on her home, she said. She worked every day that year.

Since filing her suit, Hikita said, she has learned that “there are an incredible number of us across the country” facing employment discrimination. The message from the Supreme Court, she added, is clear: “We’re all disposable.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

A Rush to Expand the Border Wall That Many Fear Is Here to Stay

“I try to look at it as a temporary art installation,” 

said Hasselbach

Simon Romero and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Sun, November 29, 2020

An aerial view of the border wall, which is a thin black line separating the United States and Mexico, seen from the Coronado National Monument in Arizona, on Nov. 18, 2020. (Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times)

DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Four years ago, President Donald Trump took office with a pledge to build a towering wall on America’s border with Mexico — a symbol of his determination to halt immigration from countries to the south and build a barrier that would long outlast him.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he hopes to halt construction of the border wall, but the outgoing administration is rushing to complete as much wall as possible in its last weeks in power, dynamiting through some of the border’s most forbidding terrain.

The breakneck pace at which construction is continuing all but assures that the wall, whatever Biden decides to do, is here to stay for the foreseeable future, establishing a contentious legacy for Trump in places that were crucial to his defeat.

In southeastern Arizona, the continuing political divisiveness around the president’s signature construction project has pitted rancher against rancher and neighbor against neighbor in a state that a Democratic presidential candidate narrowly carried for the first time in decades.

The region is emerging as one of the Trump administration’s last centers of wall building as blasting crews feverishly tear through the remote Peloncillo Mountains, where ocelots and bighorn sheep roam through woodlands of cottonwoods and sycamores.

“Wildlife corridors, the archaeology and history, that’s all being blasted to oblivion or destroyed already,” said Bill McDonald, 68, a fifth-generation cattleman and former lifelong Republican who voted for Biden. “Tragedy is the word I use to describe it.”

Even those like McDonald who loathe the wall are bracing for the possibility that it could endure for decades to come, basing their assessments on signals from Biden’s transition team.

While the president-elect has said he will halt new wall construction, other immigration priorities like ending travel bans, accepting more refugees and easing asylum restrictions are eclipsing calls to tear down portions of the wall that already exist.

Advisers involved with the transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning for the incoming administration, rejected the notion that there would be any attempt to dismantle the existing border wall, with one adviser calling the wall a “distraction.”

Customs and Border Protection officials are still rushing to meet Trump’s mandate of 450 miles of new wall construction during his term, nearly doubling the rate of construction since the start of the year. The administration had built 402 miles of wall as of Nov. 13.

Of that, about 25 miles had no barrier before Trump took office. The rest replaced much smaller, dilapidated sections of wall, or sections that had only vehicle barriers, which border officials say did not deter migrants crossing on foot.

Some of the costliest and most invasive construction is unfolding this month in Guadalupe Canyon, an oasis-like habitat for rare species of birds like the buff-collared nightjar and tropical kingbird.

Until the blasting crews showed up this year, the canyon was so remote — about 30 miles outside of Douglas, the closest town, on largely dirt roads — that ranchers in the area say illegal crossings by migrants were extraordinarily infrequent.

Now parts of the canyon resemble an open-air mining operation. Work crews are blasting cliff sides on a daily basis to build the wall and access roads to it in one of the costliest portions of construction anywhere on the border.

Jay Field, a spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers, cited the canyon’s “4.7 miles of challenging, rugged and steep terrain” in a statement explaining that the cost per mile for this segment is about $41 million, roughly double the border wall’s estimated average cost per mile laid out in a 2020 CBP status report.

“This isn’t just heartbreaking but totally pointless,” said Diana Hadley, a historian whose family’s ranch includes much of Guadalupe Canyon. She said natural barriers had long served as a deterrent against crossings in the remote area.

Such critical views of the wall are far from unanimous along this part of the border. One prominent supporter of the wall is the Republican mayor of Douglas, Donald Huish, whose family migrated to the United States from Mexico after the Mexican Revolution.

“Once the government does something this big it’s very hard for them to take it back,” said Huish, adding that he believed that the wall had made the town safer by pushing migrants to cross the border in stretches of desert relatively far from Douglas.

“We’d reached the saturation point of finding illegal aliens in our back alleys, and now that situation has changed,” Huish said, citing the impact of both the wall construction now underway and portions of the wall that were built before Trump took office.

Another outspoken wall supporter is Belva Klump, 83, whose family has ranched in Arizona’s borderlands for generations.

“All I can say about the wall is that I’d like to see more of it,” Klump said. When asked to expand on what she meant, Klump used a slur to refer to people who cross the border from Mexico without authorization.

“That’s what the wall is good for,” she said.

One of her grandsons, Timmothy Klump, 31, put it another way.

“The wall is a common-sense thing that improves our security and keeps my cows from wandering into Mexico,” he said. “The ranchers opposed to the wall are in the minority.”

In their remaining time in office, Trump administration officials are promoting the wall while criticizing Biden’s immigration proposals.

Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, has said the wall allows the agency to funnel migration into certain areas and strategically deploy agents in places where they can make apprehensions.

Morgan said Biden’s plan to stop construction of the border wall was “going to have a dramatic negative impact.”

“This is nothing but politics,” Morgan said of the continuing controversy over the wall. “It’s really unfortunate and in fact quite disgusting that our ability to protect the American people is going to be negatively impacted because of politics.”

The border agency has thus far concentrated construction in areas owned by the federal government, much of it in areas with terrain that already impedes migration, such as some of the stretches of border in Arizona where work crews are blasting. The government has accelerated construction in some of these places by waiving dozens of laws, including measures protecting Native American burial sites and endangered species.

Rodney Scott, chief of the Border Patrol, said last month that the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, an area with historically high illegal crossings, was a higher priority for the agency. But the construction there has been slow going because the planned path for the wall runs through privately owned land.

While few miles of border wall have been constructed in South Texas, it has had immense impact on landowners there. The administration has filed more than 117 lawsuits against landowners this year to survey, seize or potentially begin construction on property, an increase from 27 lawsuits filed in 2019, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Richard Drawe, a 70-year-old landowner in the area near Progreso, Texas, voluntarily signed over his land to the administration to avoid facing the government in court, conceding that the administration could eventually use its eminent domain authority to take the land anyway.

A year ago, the wall was just a looming presence in the distance. The steel bollards now stretch past his home, cutting him and his wife off from the sunsets and the roseate spoonbills they loved to watch.

“I’m used to living out in the open, no fences, doing what I want to do,” Drawe said. “I don’t want to see a damn wall when I step out the door.”

But while Drawe, who voted for Trump earlier this month, does not want the border wall on his property, he agrees that it will help Border Patrol agents slow illegal migration.

Brian Hastings, Customs and Border Protection chief for the Rio Grande Valley sector, said the wall has given the agency more flexibility to strategically place agents in areas that lack barriers or surveillance technology.

“We will see the benefits greatly once this wall system is in place without a doubt,” Hastings said in an interview. “It allows us to be able to respond quicker.”

Still, as construction intensifies, some say it is premature to accept the premise that the wall is here to stay.

Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said the next administration could not only halt construction but start taking down some sections, especially those that are harmful to Indigenous traditions or endangered species.

“Look at how destructive the Prohibition era was and how the country moved on,” said Gaubeca, whose group was part of a coalition that this year won a federal appeals court ruling that the Trump administration did not have the authority to transfer $2.5 billion from the Pentagon for wall construction, sending the matter to the Supreme Court.

“New leaders,” Gaubeca said, “can pivot away from bad ideas.”

But even if Biden wants to do so, he could face logistical and financial challenges including the payment of termination fees for canceling some contracts. A single contract in November 2019 for 33 miles of fence replacement in Arizona, currently valued at about $420 million, could cost the government nearly $15 million to terminate, according to ProPublica, which first reported on the fees for altering the contractual agreements.

If the project is halted, border authorities will also likely need to do further work on the river levee where the wall was planned to be built to ensure it is resistant to flooding and approved by the International Boundary and Water Commission, according to Customs and Border Protection. The wall was part of the flood control plan previously approved by the commission, and portions of the levee have already been altered to prepare for the construction of the border wall.

While others seem resigned to living in the wall’s shadow, Karen Hasselbach, who lives on another stretch of the border in Arizona near the San Pedro River, sees things differently.

She said work crews had destroyed the solitude she sought when moving from Maine to the border 23 years ago. Hasselbach can now gaze at the wall from her front yard.

Hasselbach said she had begun likening the border wall, which she despises, to the work of Christo, the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist known for epic-scale environmental projects.

“I try to look at it as a temporary art installation,” said Hasselbach, 69, who owns a thrift store in the town of Palominas. “My hope is it gets torn down.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

The Ghosts of Warmia-Masuria 
Demons and Spirits from Polish-German Folklore

Przekrój
Warmia-Masuria is the home of the Polish lake district and a popular holiday destination. 
2020-04-21  Marcel Kruger

Illustration by Igor Kubik


Imagine it is winter, and you are late for an appointment. You wanted to make a shortcut through the old park that had been in the centre of the town since Prussian times, but now it’s getting dark and the paths all seem to be longer and more winding than you expected; there are not enough street lamps to light the falling dusk. In the bare trees around you, crows are sitting, cawing menacingly. You cross the small bridge that leads across the lake in the centre of the park, and suddenly there is movement in the water, strange motions under the surface – too many to be those of fish. You stop and lean over the railing to see what it might be. Then you see two eyes staring back at you.

The Polish province of Warmia-Masuria is a wonderful place, full of pleasant rolling fields and wooded hills, hundreds of deep lakes and rivers, big and small. This is a pleasant holiday destination and extremely popular with summer visitors who flock here for swimming, kayaking and sailing; who can enjoy the amazing food of this mostly agricultural area, namely fresh fish, mushrooms, blueberries and the delicious local beers brewed here.

When the summer visitors are gone, however, this is a very different place, especially in the autumn and winter. Dark, cold, the lakes frozen over and the trees on the shores no longer giving shade, but instead resembling menacing scarecrows. In between the rolling hills sit dark moors; the rivers no longer gurgle pleasantly, instead taking on a threatening air. It is a landscape that demands respect in all seasons, and the people living here have always known this. In winter, they hide inside to weather out the snowstorms, like they have done for centuries. The time spent inside is a good opportunity to retell the stories about the moors and lakes and the ghosts that inhabit them – folklore dressing danger as the supernatural to make it palatable for children, perhaps. No wonder, then, that this landscape breeds spirits and demons.

Maybe the inhabitants make this place special. Warmia and Masuria have seen many people make it their home. The original inhabitants (who gave their name to Warmia and Prussia itself) – the pagan Prūsai, Pruzzen or Old Prussians – were conquered by the German Teutonic Order of knights in the 13th century. The knights, who had slaughtered many of the Old Prussians, then in turn brought in German settlers from the West and Polish colonists from the region of Masovia, who became locally known as Masurians, Mazurzy. The myths and beliefs of the Old Prussians in nature deities merged with the new population over the centuries. Across a period of almost 200 years, the region saw various partitions, displacements and population exchanges, most recently when the borders of newly-independent Poland were drawn following the German defeat in World War II. During and after the war, almost all of the German population of Masuria either fled or was relocated to Germany. Yet many of the Warmian and Masurian families here – who spoke a Polish dialect and were often active in the cultural activities of the Polish minority before 1939 – stayed on and mixed with the newly-arriving Polish expellees from the East.

And so the old stories live on, the myths of Germans, Slavs and Old Prussians all intertwined. Little wonder, then, that a large part of Warmian and Masurian folklore to this day paints a dark, almost demonic picture of the landscape. Natural phenomena are demonized and appear as places of unpredictable dark forces. The horror of dark woods, black and menacing moors, of the frightening deep of the lakes is present in many folk tales. Ghost stories about wood spirits and the spirits of the dead that wander around the villages and haunt or lead the living astray is another popular theme in the local folklore. Here are some of the creatures (with their names given first in Polish, then in German) that you might want to avoid the next time you visit Warmia-Masuria:

Topnik or utopiec; Toppich – the drowned demon

The spirits of human souls that died drowning, residing in the element of their own demise, always looking for fresh victims. It is horrible to spend eternity alone as a topnik, the tortured spirit of one who has met a watery death – and so with a desire for company in its suffering, it waits for unsuspecting walkers in its quiet pond or moor, before grabbing and pulling them below the surface, where it holds them tight while the last bubbles of air and life escape from their lungs… According to some stories, the topnik can take the form of a child or a child-sized man in soaked, muddy clothes. It sometimes wears a red cap, which it can also use to draw its victims in by hanging it on on a tree branch or bush. Whoever wandered by and plucked it off would be grabbed by the demon and pulled to a watery death. It can also take on a more terrifying look: a hairy human torso supporting a red head.

Zmora; Smora – the life-sucking demon

Vicious half-demonic creatures. They draw energy from the living by feeding on their vital forces, but aren’t able to kill them directly. A zmora is a person alive or dead, such as a sinful woman, someone wronged, or someone who died without confession. They can take a variety of living and non-living forms: human, cat, dog, frog, and even threads, straws or apples. Activities such as going out to the stable with damp hair or washing dishes on Thursday after dinner might result in a zmora being brought into the house. Other signs of someone being a zmora include being the seventh daughter, having one’s name pronounced wrongly while being baptized, or having multi-coloured eyes. If a woman was promised to marry a man, but he then married another, the spurned woman could also become a zmora during the night.

Many German and Polish folk myths often describe the zmora as sitting on a sleeping person’s legs or chest, thereby causing sleep paralysis or breathing problems. The zmora would also harass animals, especially horses or cows. A horse visited by a zmora at night would be sweaty and visibly exhausted in the morning. To keep it away from the stable, you should place an axe under your doorstep. People can also protect themselves from zmora by fumigating the bedroom with special herbs, keeping holy water close to the bed, or going to sleep with an axe or another sharp metal object closeby. In an old tale from Hohenstein/Olsztynek (recorded in Superstitions in Masuria by the German folklorist Max Toeppen and printed in 1867), two travelling journeymen discover that the three daughters of the keeper of the inn where they are staying are all zmora, as the women are sleepless and can be overheard talking about their hard fate of being forced to draw life energy from humans, cattle and trees. They are healed by their father baptizing them again, which draws out the evil.

Mamuna or dziwożona – the swamp demon

Another swamp demon – a female one this time, but again a human soul turned monster. Most at risk of becoming a mamuna after death are midwives, old maids, unmarried mothers, pregnant women who die before childbirth, as well as abandoned children born out of wedlock.

The mamuna lives in thickets near rivers, streams and lakes, and can take the form of an ugly, old woman with a hairy body and long straight hair. However, she is also a shape-shifter and can appear as a beautiful nymph capable of luring men to their watery deaths. She often kidnaps human babies just after birth and replaces them with her own changeling offspring. A changeling can be recognized by its uncommon appearance: it has a huge abdomen, a head that is too small or too big, a hump, thin arms and legs, a hairy body and long claws. Mothers can prevent their children being abducted by the mamuna by tying a red ribbon around the child’s hand, placing a red hat on its head, or shielding its face from the light of the moon.

Diabeł; Teufel – the Devil

As Christianization approached the region, it needed another fiend, so it’s no wonder that the devil (diabeł or Teufel) makes an appearance in many Warmian-Masurian folk tales, too. A story about him was recorded by Priest Groß in Klaussen/Klusy in 1786, referring to older church records: in 1640, during mass, Pastor Wisniewski expelled the devil from a local woman who was possessed by it. The fiend appeared on the church threshold as a horrible shape, and was finally forced to flee when Wisniewski accused him of his sins, over which the devil became so irate that he shouted, “I have stopped torturing the woman, but as true as I am the devil, you should have a souvenir from me!” before slamming his crooked foot down on the threshold. To this day, four human toes and the heel of a rooster can be seen in the stone.

The news of this exorcism, in connection with the imprint of the devil’s foot, prompted the Poles and Tartars not to burn this church when they invaded in 1656. When the church was rebuilt in 1754, the stone was removed from its previous location in front of the church door so that pregnant women no longer had to step over it.

Kłobuk; Kaubuk – the benevolent chicken spirit

Speaking of chicken, the kłobuk is a benevolent spirit; a household deity like the Russian domovoy, and very popular in Warmia to this day. Instead of looking like the little old man that is the domovoy, the Warmian kłobuk is feathered and is said to mostly resemble a large chicken (or other birds, such as the magpie or duck). A kłobuk can be brought into the house, which it will then accept as its own if tempted with food – including its favourites, boiled eggs and noodles – or through the owners hugging a chicken. It is also possible to ‘grow’ a kłobuk, by burying a miscarried fetus under the threshold of the house, which after seven days, seven months or seven years will turn into the chicken-like spirit. The kłobuk ensures that the possessions of its homeowners will multiply, but does this mostly through stealing from neighbours. It can be extremely irksome and tenacious though, meaning that those living with a kłobuk should tread carefully. If they offend the creature, it might unexpectedly leave the house, or take revenge on the owners by setting fire to their abode.

Kautek; Kobold – the minuscule house spirit

Another friendly house spirit, but not in chicken form this time. These creatures have the appearance of men only a few centimeters tall, sometimes dressed in red clothes or wearing a red hat. The name allegedly derives from the Old Prussian language, where kauks means ‘the devil’. Yet despite its name, the kautek is actually quite benevolent once it picks a house to live in – it will do many small household chores overnight while the humans are asleep.

Like the kłobuk, it is somewhat capricious and has a darker side: it usually likes to play pranks on neighbours, and might bring illnesses to certain family members. It might even swap one of its own children with the babies of the host, leaving a changeling to grow up as a human child.

The landscape of Warmia-Masuria has left an imprint on its people and their imagination, both in the past and modern times. Indeed, up until this day, its inhabitants playfully and respectfully engage with their mythology: there are kłobuk statues made from wood strewn around many villages here, the Olsztyn arts magazine VariArt dedicated a whole issue to its artistic representation, and last year a topnik-themed exhibition took place in Olsztyn, where Polish artists not only engaged with monsters from folklore, but also with the German experience of flight and expulsion. The demons and spirits have seem to have finally found a less threatening place in the artistic culture of Warmia-Masuria, no longer luring people into the moors.


Or maybe they still do – so be careful next time you walk too close to a quiet and dark Masurian lake. You never really know what lurks beneath the surface…



While researching this article, I used the following texts and resources:


Max Toeppen, Aberglauben aus Masuren [Superstitions from Masuria], 1867


Sagen aus Pommern (Ermland, Masuren) [Legends from Pomerania (Warmia-Mazuria)], online


Agnieszka Grochocka, Masuren – vom Naturparadies zum Atlantis des Nordens, 2015 [Masuria – From Natural Paradise to the Atlantis of the North]


Online Encyclopedia of Warmia and Masuria (Polish)

KOBOLD ARE MINING CREATURES FROM ROLE PLAYING GAMES

Kobold

A kobold was a reptilian humanoid, standing between 2' and 2'6" (60cm – 75cm) tall, weighing 35 to 45 pounds (16 – 20kg), with scaled skin between reddish brown and black in color and burnt orange to red eyes. Their legs were sinewy and digitigrade. They had long, clawed fingers and a jaw …

 

Kobolds are aggressive, inward, yet industrious small humanoid creatures. They are noted for their skill at building traps and preparing ambushes, and mining. Kobolds are distantly related to dragons and urds and are often found serving the former as minions. Kobolds have specialized laborers, yet the majority of kobolds are miners.

Alignment: Lawful Evil

Classes: Various

Homeland (s): Various temperate forests

Type: Natural humanoid (draconic)

Kobold (D&D) | Officialbestiary Wiki | Fandom

The Limits of Clean Energy

Jason Hickel

The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans—at last—for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

This is a welcome shift, and we need more of it. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that warrants our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that it will pave the way to a utopia of “green growth.” Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there’s no reason we can’t keep expanding the economy forever.

This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes—but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium—an essential element in wind turbines—extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium—an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four—all for the entire period from now to 2050.

The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent.

Take silver, for instance. Mexico is home to the Peñasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that’s 7 miles around and as high as a 50-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone.

To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Peñasquito. Just for silver.

Lithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing problems. In the Andes, where most of the world’s lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada to Tibet, killing off whole freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely even started, and it’s already a crisis.

And all of this is just to power the existing global economy. Things become even more extreme when we start accounting for growth. As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive—and the higher the growth rate, the worse it will get.

It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global south. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.

If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies—buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way.

Some hope that nuclear power will help us get around these problems—and surely it needs to be part of the mix. But nuclear comes with its own constraints. For one, it takes so long to get new power plants up and running that they can play only a small role in getting us to zero emissions by midcentury. And even in the longer term, nuclear can’t be scaled beyond about 1 terawatt. Absent a miraculous technological breakthrough, the vast majority of our energy will have to come from solar and wind.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates.

Of course, we know that poorer countries still need to increase their energy use in order to meet basic needs. But richer countries, fortunately, do not. In high-income nations, the transition to green energy needs to be accompanied by a planned reduction of aggregate energy use.

How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput—legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions.

Reducing energy demand not only enables a faster transition to renewables, but also ensures that the transition doesn’t trigger new waves of destruction. Any Green New Deal that hopes to be socially just and ecologically coherent needs to have these principles at its heart.


This article was originally published on 6th September 2019 at Foreign Policy.

The Subterranean Brain of the Forest 

How Trees Communicate

Under the forest litter, trees build a network of connections that could be the envy of humans. It transports not only nutrients, but also information – about fires, droughts and environmental conditions. This speech of trees, and the relationships connecting them, were discovered by a certain persistent Canadian.

2020-10-15 Maria Hawranek, translated by Marta Dziurosz

Daniel Mróz – drawing from the archives (no. 470–471/1954)

In one of the chapters of his book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben gives a rather enigmatic description of how it was proved that various trees species can communicate. He doesn’t, however, refer us to the research. The secret behind that mysterious experiment is an extraordinary woman and her ground-breaking discoveries from 35 years ago, which permanently changed our perception of trees. They initiated a whole range of research regarding the symbiosis of trees and mushrooms at the Faculty of Forestry (University of British Columbia, Vancouver). On Polish Wikipedia, almost every other piece of information concerning mycorrhizal networks refers to the research co-authored by the Canadian. Recently she also inspired Richard Powers, author of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. The writer used her biography to create the fictional character of the dendrologist Patricia Westerford.

Meet Suzanne Simard, who was the first to prove that trees communicate.

Simard – the granddaughter of a logger who ferried trees out of the forest using horses (which is still considered the best method for the ecosystem) – grew up in the woods of British Columbia, which take up 70% of this westernmost Canadian province. Canada has the third largest forest surface in the world, after Russia and Brazil. Incidentally, it’s worth knowing that more than half of the Earth’s forests grow in just five countries.

As a girl, Suzanne would lie down and watch the crowns of cedars, spruces and Douglas firs – some of the tallest trees in the world. Her playground was shaded by those giants. No wonder that she studied forestry, like her grandfather and uncles. However, she soon realized that her work contributes to the clearcutting of trees with industrial monster-machines which take seconds to topple a tree. She decided to leave the forest and return as a researcher.

At that time, a laboratory discovered that a pine root is able to send carbon to another root. Suzanne decided to check whether this also happens in a real forest. “Some people thought I was crazy, and I had a really hard time getting research funding. But I persevered,” she recalls in her TED Talk. The recording has been viewed more than a million times.

In a forest, Simard grew 80 young trees of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir and western red cedar. She covered the plants tightly with plastic bags, under which she pumped CO2 isotopes with huge syringes: the birch was surrounded by the radioactive isotope carbon-14; the fir with the stable carbon-13. After an hour, she took the bag off the birch and tested it with a Geiger counter. As expected, it beeped: the birch had absorbed the radioactive isotope. Simard approached the Douglas fir, removed the bag, moved the Geiger counter close and held her breath for a second. Then she heard the characteristic beeping again! Because both trees were covered with plastic foil, the radioactive carbon could have reached the Douglas fir only through the root system.

The counter’s buzz was evidence of the subterranean communication of trees. Simard reported: “The birch said: ‘Hey, can I help you with anything?’. And the fir said: ‘Yes, please, send me some carbon, because someone put a bag on me and I can’t photosynthesize.’.” Excited, she ran from one tree to the other, and each measurement confirmed her discovery. The Geiger counter was silent only at the western red cedar: those trees turned out to be disconnected from the network of birches and firs.

Soon various relationships started becoming apparent: the more shaded the fir was in the summer, the more carbon the birch sent it. But later, in autumn, the coniferous fir had a surplus of carbon, because it was still photosynthesizing, so it helpfully sent it to the birch, which was already losing leaves. “I knew I discovered something huge that would change the perception of trees in a forest: no longer as competitors, but also as collaborators. I found hard proof of a huge underground network of communication, a different world,” said the researcher.

This was 30 years ago. Since then, Simard and her team have published hundreds of papers. Thanks to them, we know more about what happens under the litter, where tree roots take up an area that can be many times the size of their crowns.
A network of relationships

Simard has a clear recollection of the moment when she understood that the forest is more than its visible, terrestrial part. She was with her grandfather at their allotment. Her dog fell into the hole under the outhouse, and grandpa started to dig next to it to save the animal. The young Suzanne saw twisted roots, white mycelium, reddish and greenish minerals. The dog was saved, and Suzanne became fascinated with the underground world.

Trees often connect directly via their roots, but the most important part of mass communication is played by fungi, which create so-called mycorrhizal networks. The toadstool-shaped mushrooms that we collect are just the fruiting bodies, the tips of icebergs: the vast majority of the fungus, its mycelium, extends underground and suffuses every bit of the surrounding soil. There are about 100 species of mycorrhizal mushrooms. Their hyphae create a network so dense that one tablespoon of soil could fit a few kilometres of it, and we could find a few hundred kilometres under a footprint. The mycelium works a bit like the internet; scientists have long been calling it the Wood Wide Web.

The fungus cells conduct barter with tree cells – fungi cannot photosynthesize, so they draw sugar from trees. They exchange it for nutrients, which they obtain from soil more successfully than trees. At the same time, they enable the transport of various other substances and communication. It’s not really clear why they throw in this latter service. Perhaps it is profitable to the fungus to have connections with many trees? Or maybe it’s that trees reduce the amount of sugar dispatched if the fungus does not allow them to connect with others?

What do trees give each other? It turns out that it’s not just carbon, but also phosphorus, nitrogen, water and information in the form of chemical and electric impulses. For example, they send warning signals about a pest attack, so that other trees can prepare and fend it off with defensive enzymes

At mother’s knee

The network created by fungi and trees has hubs and links. Hub trees or mother trees are the most important: the oldest and largest, connected with up to a few hundred other trees. They are the guardians of the sylvan community. They check in with their neighbours; share food and knowledge acquired throughout a long life. Thanks to the underground network, they send surplus carbon to young seedlings, which quadruples their chances of survival. What’s more, they can recognize their kin – they provide more food to youngsters with a similar genetic profile (although this doesn’t mean that they completely ignore seedlings unrelated to them). When mother trees get injured or are preparing to die, they bestow their wisdom on the next generations, especially those related to them. Although we don’t yet know which part of trees houses their memory, it definitely exists – the oldest trees remember bygone droughts and can adjust themselves and their environment to the changing climate. This is why in non-supervised forests, old stumps – which have no leaves, and hence no ability to photosynthesize – are still alive. Their neighbours nourish them via the underground pathway, because the knowledge those trunks have may be of use to surrounding plants. Tree stands behave like old human communities: they care both for the youngest members and the oldest, wisest ones.

“After years of work in the forest, I started to see what happens underground as the tree’s brain,” reveals Simard in a documentary entitled Intelligent Trees, where she speaks about her discoveries and observations along with Peter Wohlleben.

Priceless legacy

The dense underground network enables sylvan ecosystems to regenerate more easily and directly affects the health of the whole forest. This is why Suzanne does more than research. She also campaigns for balanced forest exploitation management, making use of ancestral wisdom and her own experiences as a forester.

Canada, so densely forested, also has one of the highest levels of tree cutting. Deforestation affects hydrological cycles, the distribution of gases and the lives of forest inhabitants. Seen from a satellite, large-scale clearcutting looks like bald spots left by alopecia, and it weakens the forest. The gaps are usually re-planted with just one tree species, frequently aspen or birch. Those forests are more prone to infections and more weakly communicated: the soil, damaged by huge machines, no longer transmits information, and there are no old trees around from which to learn. This means that a certain species of woodworm (Dendroctonus ponderosae) proliferates more freely in British Columbia than elsewhere, and there are unusually large fires. In 2014, more than three million hectares of forest burned down; it was the biggest fire in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 30 years.

Simard proposes a change in the way forests are managed. In her opinion, instead of clearcutting (completely cutting down patches of forest), it is better to leave behind a legacy: mother trees that are able to pass their knowledge on to new generations. “You can cut down one or two such trees, but there’s a critical moment: you cut down one too many and the whole system collapses,” she argues. Instead of planting one or two species, she recommends introducing diversity in new forests, and giving them time to establish their own order. She emphasizes that we need to save primaeval forests, as they are depositaries of genes. They no longer exist in Europe – apart from the Białowieża Forest in Poland. According to FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), since 1990 we’ve lost 80 million hectares of this type of forest globally.

One of the oldest known trees, a Swedish spruce, is around 9500 years old. A healthy tree in a forest lives for around 400 to 500 years, if undisturbed. It has a chance to survive longer if it grows in a stand. Wohlleben writes that beeches which grow more densely – although they have small crowns and would seem to be rather uncomfortable – are healthier and more productive than the ones growing solo. Like people, trees growing in solitude usually have shorter lives, cut off from the live network of information and their care system.

In one of her interviews, Simard shared a personal story: “A few years ago I had breast cancer. Today I feel great. I survived it mainly thanks to my connections – the friendships I created. I felt that I’m experiencing what I study in forests. A tree is also going to be all right if only it stays a part of its own community.”

In writing this article, I used the following materials: a TED talk entitled “How trees talk to each other”, interviews with Suzanne Simard for the portal Yale Environment 360 and www.ttbook.org, the documentary “Intelligent Trees”, Peter Wohlleben’s book “The Hidden Life of Trees” and the article “It’s Not the Trees That Need Saving” at Earthisland.org.

Translated from the Polish by Marta Dziurosz

The Subterranean Brain of the Forest - Przekrój Magazine (przekroj.pl)