The bizarre push to kill more of Montana’s wolves, explained

Four new hunting bills in the Big Sky State are reigniting a centuries-old debate.

MONTANA WOLVES ARE FROM CANADA THEY ROAM THE ROCKIES SOUTH

Amanda Northrop/Vox

By Benji Jones Apr 12, 2021, 11:20am EDT
Illustrations by Amanda Northrop/Vox

This story is part of Down to Earth, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

Late this winter, Greg Gianforte, Montana’s recently elected Republican governor, trapped and shot a male wolf just outside the boundary of Yellowstone National Park at a private ranch owned by his pal Robert E. Smith, a director of the conservative Sinclair Broadcasting Group (a former campaign donor).

Hunting wolves is legal in Montana, and Gianforte later told the Helena Independent Record that he’d been after one for five years. “I put a lot of time in over many, many years and not every sportsman is fortunate to ultimately harvest a wolf,” said Gianforte, who added that he planned to mount it on his wall.

Not everyone who initially knew about the governor’s trophy was impressed, apparently. In the weeks after the hunt, someone tipped off a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau that not only had the governor killed one of the 94 wolves that frequent Yellowstone, but he’d also failed to comply with a state regulation requiring hunters take a wolf-trapping course before catching an animal.

Nate Hegyi, the bureau reporter, also learned that the wolf had a name, “1155.” It had worn a radio collar since 2018 when National Park Service biologists began to track his movements in and out of the park.

The timing of the governor’s hunting protocol gaffe was disconcerting to conservationists already worried about the fate of Montana’s wolves. Gianforte, the first Republican governor in 16 years, would soon be deciding on several hunter-friendly bills to relax restrictions on killing wolves.

The argument behind those bills — which seek to legalize a range of new hunting methods and offer reimbursement to trappers for their expenses — is that wolves in Montana are killing too many game species like elk and deer, which people like to hunt. As of 2019, there were almost 1,200 wolves in Montana, according to the state’s Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Department. (The agency hasn’t yet released numbers for 2020.)

“Wolf numbers need to be reduced,” Paul Fielder, a Republican state representative behind two of the four bills, told Vox. One of them legalizes the use of snares, which catch and choke animals to death.

“Allowing the snaring of wolves in Montana by licensed trappers will give wildlife managers another tool to reduce wolf numbers — especially in areas where ungulate populations are stressed by wolves,” Fielder said at a state hearing in February.

There’s just one problem: This isn’t true. Parks department data doesn’t indicate that hoofed wildlife populations are stressed by wolves. Many wildlife biologists — and even the Montana Wildlife Federation, a pro-hunting conservation group — agree.

“The truth is, we have record numbers of elk in the state of Montana, including in areas with wolves,” said Nick Gevock, the federation’s conservation director. What’s more, critics of the bills say hunting methods like snares are cruel and indiscriminate.

On this highly charged issue with a complex history, the governor appears sympathetic to wolf hunters, many of whom have ties to his party. Gianforte recently signed Fielder’s two wolf bills into law.

“I think trapping is an important tool for predator control and for wildlife management,” he told the Independent Record in March. “I’m proud to be a trapper.”

But the wolf debate doesn’t seem to have much to do with science-based management. Instead, it comes down to how people view wolves across the state — and how their politics inform those views.

The rise and fall and rise of the gray wolf, briefly explained

Indigenous communities had, of course, been living with wolves for centuries before European settlers arrived.

“Traditionally, in the tribal views, when you look upon wolves, we look at them as kin, as helpers,” Letara Lebau, a resident of Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, said last October during a presentation about human-carnivore coexistence. “We really look at the wolves as deserving of respect.”


Settlers and their early descendants held a vastly different view.

They saw wolves as villains that posed a threat to valuable livestock. And so in the 19th and 20th centuries, the US led a campaign to exterminate them. It was wildly effective: By the mid-20th century, only two populations of wolves remained in the lower 48 states.

In the decades that followed, we learned about the animal’s integral role in ecosystems — a fact Indigenous people already knew — causing attitudes toward the predator to shift. What started as a campaign to eradicate wolves became a campaign to save them. And in 1974, they were added to the newly minted Endangered Species Act, setting the stage for their recovery.

Twenty years later, that recovery got a huge boost: Biologists reintroduced 31 gray wolves from Canada into Yellowstone National Park (and some more into Idaho). It remains one of the most significant moments in the history of carnivore conservation in the US.

The recovery worked, and Montana was central to its success. By 2009, there were enough breeding pairs for the wolf to be delisted in Montana and in a few other regions, though the wolf remained on the federal ESA for another decade. (The Trump administration delisted it last year, much to the chagrin of environmental groups, citing a “successful recovery.”)

“The restoration of the gray wolf in the Northern Rockies is arguably the most successful wildlife reintroduction in United States history,” said Gevock.

Tim Williams/Vox

It’s still not easy to stumble upon a gray wolf in Montana — there are about 1,160 of the animals across the Big Sky State, just a fraction of their historic population. Yet the number is safely above the federally mandated minimum, set at 15 breeding pairs and 150 wolves.

Fielder, the state representative who sponsored the two bills that Gianforte signed and a retired wildlife biologist, says that to maintain 15 breeding pairs you need about 285 wolves, because not all packs have breeding pairs. So, in his view, 1,160 is way too many.
Critics say the anti-wolf bills hark back to the extermination campaign

The bills, in short, would make it easier to kill more wolves.

One of them, sponsored by state Sen. Bob Brown, would provide reimbursement for trapping expenses — which critics call a bounty. The Senate bill is currently making its way through the House.

“Montana’s territorial legislature first offered a wolf bounty in 1883, and the goal was to reduce the wolf population,” said Jennifer Sherry, an environmental scientist and wildlife advocate at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “Here we are over 100 years later talking again about the need for a wolf bounty to reduce the wolf population.”


Another bill, also sponsored by Brown, allows individual hunters to shoot an unlimited number of wolves and legalizes nighttime hunting using spotlights that temporarily blind the animals, with the intent of reducing the wolf population. Brown did not respond to a request for comment.

The other bills — both of which Fielder sponsored and the governor signed — extend the trapping season and allow hunters to use snares. (Montana allows for the snaring of some other animals, including bobcats.)

The reasoning that Fielder and Brown use to justify their bills is simple: Wolves in some parts of the state are eviscerating deer, elk, and moose populations. “Wildlife is suffering,” Fielder said in the hearing.

But the data tells a different story.

Elk and most other game species are doing just fine across Montana — and throughout the West

“The numbers don’t add up,” Sherry said. “Elk numbers are consistently strong across the state. Hunter success rates are consistently strong.”

In fact, the number of deer and elk killed by hunters across Montana has actually gone up overall in the past decade, according to Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Department hunting estimates.

Tim Williams/Vox

“These are good times for elk hunters, as Montana elk populations continue to be strong across most of the state,” said the agency’s 2020 hunting forecast.

Moose are an exception — their numbers are trending down — but there’s no evidence that wolves are to blame. The state commissioned a 10-year study in 2013 to pinpoint a culprit.

“Despite widespread speculation that adult moose are being killed by wolves and other carnivores, the study shows that the main culprits are health related,” Tom Dickson, the editor of the parks department’s newsletter, wrote in 2019, in reference to the study.

Fielder, however, argues that the problem is most severe in western Montana — where wolves are, by far, most abundant. But again, the evidence is sparse to tie the predator to any ungulate decline.

If you zero in on the northwest, home to the highest densities of wolves, you find that deer kills by licensed hunters have hovered around 2,000 a year for more than a decade (though they were much higher if you go back to 2004), according to parks department data. And while elk harvest numbers have fluctuated, there doesn’t seem to be a clear downward trend in the last decade either.


“White-tailed deer numbers have been on an upward trend in general,” the hunting forecast says about deer in the West.

Not surprisingly, the number of moose killed by hunters in the northwest is falling, but again, that may not have much to do with wolves. For one, the population of wolves isn’t growing, at least through 2019, the most recent year for which there’s data; it’s actually about the same as it was a decade ago. Plus, there are several other factors that shape the population of game animals, including forest fires and weather.

“Fire and winter have a much more significant impact than all the predators combined,” said Diane Boyd, a renowned wolf biologist and former parks department wolf specialist in northwest Montana. Prey have other predators, too, such as bears and mountain lions.

Parks department spokesperson Greg Lemon said the agency provided information to the legislature but declined to comment on aspects of the legislation.

“We find these bills to be based on misinformation about wildlife, misinformation about the effects of predators on prey species, and a lack of understanding about the complexity of natural environments in Montana,” residents and wildlife biologists, including Boyd and 16 former parks department employees, wrote in a March 16 letter to the state legislature and governor. “These bills are not based on science.” (Fielder disputes this claim.)

So if the bills aren’t based on science, what are they based on?

That’s a more challenging question to answer. Boyd, a hunter herself, pointed to politics. Far-right conservatism has surged in the last few years, she said, emboldening lawmakers with anti-wolf views. The stance among some conservatives on issues like gun and property rights often conflict with wildlife protections, she added.

But the relationship between far-right ideology, which flourished in the US in the Trump years, and wolf conservation isn’t so clear cut. One survey from 2012 found that while hunters tend to lean Republican or independent, and support gun rights, they also highly value conservation and access to the outdoors. To say conservative values are aligned with these bills would be an oversimplification.

“We’re really not sure why this extreme anti-wolf sentiment is here,” Gevock said, adding that he believes much of it comes from far-western Montana. Both Brown and Fielder hail from Thompson Falls, a small town about two hours northwest of Missoula.

Others say the new push to kill wolves with more brutal measures is rooted in antiquated views of these predators. Some influential lawmakers simply don’t believe in the inherent value of wolves, said Mike Phillips, a retired Democratic state senator and director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, who was involved in reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone.
All four bills are likely to become law, but that doesn’t mean Montana’s wolves are headed off a cliff

Gianforte has already signed two of the wolf bills, another is headed to his desk, and the fourth is still going through the legislature. Gevock says all four bills are likely to become law, whether or not Gianforte puts his signature on them.

“The governor will carefully consider any bill that the legislature sends to his desk,” Brooke Stroyke, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement to Vox.

But as Gevock and others point out, that doesn’t necessarily mean wolves are imperiled across the state, even if their numbers fall. As history has demonstrated, wolves are highly resilient animals.

“Wolves are a very elastic species, meaning they can take some pretty extreme measures and survive,” Gevock said. “Yes, we will kill more wolves, but they can bounce back quickly. They can take a pretty aggressive hunt.”

What’s harder to stomach, at least for Phillips, is what he calls a “disregard for life.”

“This is a moment defined by people of authority who don’t value large carnivores much at all,” Phillips said. “Why would we ever sanction needless killing?”

Marijuana legalization has won

Marijuana legalization is sweeping states from Virginia to New Mexico. The writing is on the wall.

By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Apr 12, 2021

 

A marijuana-themed US flag flies during a 2019 protest at the US Capitol. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

The US is nearing a tipping point of sorts on marijuana legalization: Almost half the country — about 43 percent of the population — now lives in a state where marijuana is legal to consume just for fun.

The past two months alone have seen a burst of activity as four states across the US legalized marijuana for recreational use: New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and, on Monday, New Mexico.

It’s a massive shift that took place over just a few years. A decade ago, no states allowed marijuana for recreational use; the first states to legalize cannabis in 2012, Colorado and Washington, did so through voter-driven initiatives. Now, 17 states and Washington, DC, have legalized marijuana (although DC doesn’t yet allow sales), with five enacting their laws through legislatures, showing even typically cautious politicians are embracing the issue.

At this point, the question of nationwide marijuana legalization is more a matter of when, not if. At least two-thirds of the American public support the change, based on various public opinion surveys in recent years. Of the 15 states where marijuana legalization has been on the ballot since 2012, it was approved in 13 — including Republican-dominated Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota (although South Dakota’s measure is currently held up in the courts). In the 2020 election, the legalization initiative in swing state Arizona got nearly 300,000 more votes than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Legalization has also created a big new industry in very populous states, including California and (soon) New York, and that industry is going to push to continue expanding. One of the US’s neighbors, Canada, has already legalized pot, and the other, Mexico, is likely to legalize it soon, creating an international market that would love to tap into US consumers.

The walls are closing in on this issue for legalization opponents — and quickly.

Many politicians have played it cautiously in response to these trends. While some high-profile Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have come out in support, Biden continues to oppose legalization. Republicans, including Trump, are almost entirely opposed.

But at this point, their refusal comes off more like a last gasp than a movement that can hold back the tide of change. At a certain point, lawmakers will have to follow public opinion or risk losing an election. And the public has spoken very clearly, time and again.

What’s less clear is how it’ll happen. Maybe it’ll be a slow, state-by-state battle before the federal government ends its own prohibition on cannabis, or maybe federal action will lead to a flurry of states legalizing. What has become clear is that legalization will eventually win, and the vast majority of states, if not all, will soon join the ranks of the legalizers.

Marijuana legalization is very popular

In the span of two decades, marijuana legalization has gone from a fringe issue to one the vast majority of Americans embrace.

In 2000, just 31 percent of the country backed legalization while 64 percent opposed it, according to Gallup’s public surveys. By 2020, the numbers flipped: The most recent Gallup poll on the topic showed that 68 percent supported legalization and 32 percent were against it.

There are a few possible explanations for the flip. The general failure of the war on drugs to actually stop widespread drug addiction (see: the opioid epidemic), as well as backlash to the punitive policies the drug war brought, left a lot of Americans craving new approaches. The public has come to see marijuana as not so bad — less harmful than legal drugs such as alcohol or tobacco. The advent of the internet likely sped up some of these conversations, too, and the spread of medical marijuana might have shown more Americans that the US can handle the drug’s legalization.

Gallup

Regardless, the trend toward support is found in basically every major survey on this issue, with polling groups consistently finding a strong majority backing of legalization, from the Pew Research Center (67 percent in 2019) to the General Social Survey (61 percent in 2018).

The trend toward legalization is found in the real world, too. Oregon voters rejected a legalization measure in 2012, only to approve a separate initiative two years later. Arizona voters said no to a legalization measure in 2016, only to approve another one four years later.

There’s even solid Republican support for legalization. Gallup found that a slim majority of Republicans supported it in 2017, 2018, and 2019; a majority opposed it in 2020, but the difference was within the margin of error, and a sizable minority of 48 percent still backed legalization. Pew also found a majority of Republicans — 55 percent — backed legalization in 2019.

This Republican support is also seen in the real world. In the 2020 election, Trump won Montana by 16 points and South Dakota by 26 points. In both states that same year, most voters approved legalization initiatives, with pretty strong margins of around 8 percentage points in South Dakota and 16 percentage points in Montana.

To put this another way, marijuana legalization has appeared on the ballot in four states dominated by Republicans: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It’s won in three of them, losing only in North Dakota. Marijuana legalization is 3-1 in solid red states!

There’s little reason to think that any of these trends will change soon.

There’s not much that can turn this around

There’s a world in which you could envision growing support for marijuana legalization suddenly collapsing. Maybe after Colorado, Washington, or a few other states legalized, things went really badly. Teen use went up, along with car crashes, crime, ER visits related to pot, and other bad outcomes. Voters see the error of their ways and change course.

But that just hasn’t happened. In the states that have legalized, things have generally gone fine. There were some concerns about marijuana-laced edibles in the early days, but those worries died out quickly as regulators instituted some new rules and retail outlets bolstered their advice to newbies about how to consume edibles. The gigantic rises in all the problem outcomes legalization opponents warned against never came to fruition.

A big tell here is how often politicians flip-flop to support legalization once their state legalizes and things go basically fine. In Colorado, then-Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2012 said he opposed the ballot measure, only to fully support legalization and brag about how his administration implemented it by the time he ran for senator in 2020. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who opposed legalization during his 2012 run, said in March that the one thing he’d do differently is “[embrace] this position of decriminalizing it earlier, had I known how successful this has been with not any really large increase in juvenile usage, which was a concern while we were debating this.”

There are also major forces that will continue to support legalization and encourage its expansion. The US marijuana industry is now valued at more than $18 billion, supporting the equivalent of over 300,000 full-time jobs, more than the total number of electrical engineers or dentists, according to the 2021 Leafly Jobs Report.

This is simply a big industry now, for better or worse. Any politician moving to shut it down risks incurring the wrath of hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs. And because it’s a promising industry, there’s a strong economic incentive — between additional jobs and tax revenue — for more states to embrace legalization.

Not to mention that this major new industry can now use its economic weight to directly back legalization measures, providing much-needed funding to help get them across the finish line. In this way, marijuana legalization’s success at the ballot box so far will lead to more success.

There are, of course, still major barriers to full legalization nationwide. Marijuana remains totally illegal under federal law, including in states that have legalized it under their own statutes. International treaties prohibit countries from legalizing marijuana for recreational uses (although with Canada, Mexico, and Uruguay moving to legalize, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares). Most of the US population still lives in a state that hasn’t legalized, and it will take a lot of time and effort in legislatures and ballot boxes to change that.

But it’s now very clear where the trends are heading. It might take several more years to become national reality, but marijuana legalization is here to stay.

What a 1,600-year-old New Zealand tree can tell us about climate change

Buried in mud for millennia, some of the hulking kauri trees in rural Northland are portals to the past, present, and future of Earth’s climate.

What the scientists get in return is something they can’t find anywhere else.
THERE’S NO OTHER WOOD RESOURCE LIKE IT FOR THIS PART OF EARTH’S HISTORY, FULL STOP.

By Kate Evans Apr 13, 2021

A massive kauri tree rests in three pieces in the parking lot of the Ngāwhā marae, or meeting house, in New Zealand’s far north, watched over by Donna Tukariri. Kate Evans


This story is part of Down to Earth, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

In February 2019, Mark Magee was scraping the bucket of his 45-ton excavator through a hillside when it hit something 30 feet down that wouldn’t budge.

It was high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Magee, a construction foreman, was clearing a platform for a new geothermal power plant near Ngāwhā, a tiny community in New Zealand’s Northland region, the long peninsula that stretches from the city of Auckland to the country’s northern tip.

He called in additional digger drivers to help. Gradually, as the machines peeled away the mudstone encasing the obstinate object, they realized it was a tree — and not an ordinary tree. More and more of it appeared, a seemingly endless log. When it lay uncovered, complete with a medusa-like rootball, it measured 65 feet long and 8 feet across, and weighed 65 tons.

It was a kauri tree, a copper-skinned conifer endemic to New Zealand. The indigenous Māori hold the species sacred and use its honey-colored softwood for traditional carvings and ocean-going canoes. Although this kauri tree had clearly been buried for thousands of years, Magee was astonished to see leaves and cones stuck to its underside that were still green.

The power company, Top Energy, called in a local sawmiller named Nelson Parker to examine Magee’s find. Parker, a champion woodchopper with powerful shoulders and a missing finger, had been digging up, processing, and selling kauri logs like this one since the early 1990s. As soon as his chainsaw bit into the bark, he knew from the color of the sawdust (dark yellow) and from the smell (subtle, resiny) that this tree was very old, and worth a lot of money.

Parker also knew that swamp kauri, as the buried trees are known, are worth a lot to science. One this large would be of special interest to a group of scientists who study the information that the ancient trees have coded into their rings. After removing the roots, he cut a four-inch-thick slice from the base of the trunk and sent it to them for analysis.

What he couldn’t know then was that this particular tree held the key to understanding an ancient global catastrophe — and how it may have shaped our collective past.

A brief history of the swamp kauri boom

The kauri tree, or Agathis australis, is one of the largest and longest-lived tree species in the world. An individual kauri can live for more than two millennia, reaching 200-feet tall and more than 16 feet in diameter. Today, the living trees grow only in remnant pockets in northern New Zealand, where the national Department of Conservation lists them as threatened, due to a century of heavy logging, forest clearing for agriculture, and, more recently, the onslaught of a deadly fungus-like pathogen.

Yet for tens of thousands of years, kauri forests dominated a vast swath of the upper North Island. As the trees grew, they recorded information in their annual rings about the climate and makeup of the atmosphere. When they fell, some of the heaviest plunged deep into nearby peat bogs, where they stayed mostly unchanged for millennia.

Itinerant 19th-century gumdiggers, who sought the swamp kauri’s preserved golden resin for use in varnish and jewelry, were the first to exploit the trees for profit, digging up fields and wetlands in search of buried gum. In 1985, after environmentalist protests, the New Zealand government banned loggers from cutting live kauri on public land, and Parker and other Northland timber merchants turned their attention to swamp kauri. They clawed the trees from the earth with excavators and sold the exotic wood to furniture makers in New Zealand, the United States, and several European and Asian countries.

The industry grew slowly until around 2010. Then, it exploded, thanks to demand from a booming China, where customers are often willing to pay more for materials with antiquity. Fetching up to $200 per cubic foot, swamp kauri became one of the most valuable timbers in the world. Chinese agents roamed rural Northland, New Zealand’s poorest region, offering farmers cash in exchange for the right to prospect on their land.

The lure of a fast buck also attracted a host of dubious kauri extractors. Among them were the aptly-named “Swamp Cowboys,” who drained endangered wetlands — only 8 percent of Northland’s wetlands are still intact — to reach their quarry. In the years that followed, conservation groups successfully fought to restrain the swamp kauri industry and hold the national Ministry for Primary Industries and regional council accountable. Finally, in 2018, New Zealand’s Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision limiting swamp kauri exports. By then, the shadiest companies had gone bankrupt, and swamp kauri exports dropped from more than 200,000 cubic feet in 2013 to around 10,000 cubic feet in 2019.

The end of the swamp kauri boom was a big victory for wetland advocates — and a big relief for the scientists who study the ancient trees. The slowdown has made it easier for them to take samples from every piece of unearthed swamp kauri before it disappears into the mill and heads out of the country. Every single tree, they know, has a story to tell.

Long-lived, well-preserved kauri are something of a ‘high-resolution time-capsule’

In a windswept paddock on Northland’s remote Karikari Peninsula, on a cool October day in 2019, I watch Andrew Lorrey use a chainsaw to cut a four-inch slab called a “biscuit” off the end of a huge kauri trunk. Around him, beached on the surface like stranded whales, were dozens more unearthed logs, their forms twisted and gum-encrusted, the tortured roots of their massive stumps reaching for a squally sky.

Lorrey, a stocky, bearded American originally from New England, is a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). He came to the country in 2002 to study swamp kauri for his PhD. During the “gold rush” years, he felt a lot of pressure to “scurry around” collecting samples, knowing most of the wood was slipping through his fingers. But over time, he and a handful of other scientists forged relationships with the main timber extractors. “I want to look back and say I did what I could to get this precious natural archive preserved for science,” he tells me

.

Scientists collect a “biscuit” from each ancient kauri log, enabling them to analyze the annual rings and take samples for radiocarbon dating. Kate Evans

Swamp kauri fall into two age clusters: “young” trees that died anywhere between a few thousand and around 13,000 years ago, and “ancient” ones that were alive more than 25,000 years ago. No one has yet found a kauri from the roughly 12,000-year span in between. That was the height of the last glacial period, when temperatures were cooler and sea levels more than 300 feet lower. Scientists speculate that the kauri’s range may have shrunk during that time because of the cold, or that the forests moved to lower elevations on the continental shelf when sea levels fell, and were later submerged as the climate warmed and seas rose again. Or perhaps the trees from that time are simply still out there, waiting to be discovered.


The landowner here on the Karikari Peninsula, a taciturn, pipe-smoking farmer named Chris Hensley, found this batch of buried logs when he was converting an old pine forestry plantation to pasture. For Hensley, the kauri are a nuisance. “They bugger up the farm equipment,” Lorrey says. But for Lorrey, they’re treasure. After learning about them, he quickly organized an expedition, driving more than four hours from Auckland to examine them. Hensley had used his digger to lay the huge haul — 104 individual trees — on the ground like matchsticks. “When I got there, I said, ‘I’ve got gold,’” Lorrey remembers.

Now, Lorrey moves from log to log, slicing biscuits from each one, making detailed notes about their measurements and where they were found, then brushing the cut faces with a white glue-based paint to protect the wood from the elements.

While Lorrey works, Hensley arrives to watch. A tiny white fluffy dog jumps from his truck and runs frenetically among the dark logs. Knowing the age of the timber will help him sell it later, Hensley says. “This way I get them dated for free.”

What the scientists get in return is something they can’t find anywhere else.
THERE’S NO OTHER WOOD RESOURCE LIKE IT FOR THIS PART OF EARTH’S HISTORY, FULL STOP.

There are other ancient trees in the world, but none as old, as long-lived, or as numerous as the kauri. Because migrating ice sheets demolished everything in their path, few trees survived the glacial periods in the Northern Hemisphere, and scientists have found only a handful — including one 23,000-year-old cypress buried in a volcanic mudflow near Mount Fuji in Japan. Northland, however, remained ice-free. “The kauri are globally unique,” Lorrey says. “There’s no other wood resource like it for this part of Earth’s history, full stop.”

Other natural climate archives, such as ice cores, lake sediments, and stalactites and stalagmites, also allow scientists to peer into the past. But trees are the “gold standard,” Lorrey says, because they directly sample the atmosphere, and make a new record of it and other aspects of the environment in each annual growth ring of wood they lay down. Unlike ice cores and lake sediments, tree rings don’t compress over time. Multiple trees growing at the same time can be cross-referenced, too, smoothing out any local or individual variation that might interfere with broad conclusions about the climate. (Imagine a single tree growing poorly for a few seasons because its roots were waterlogged or it was shaded by others.) Long-lived, well-preserved kauri are therefore a kind of “high-resolution time-capsule,” Lorrey says.

Tree rings illuminate the past in several ways. Most simply, counting them under a microscope reveals how long a tree lived. The biscuit that Nelson Parker cut from the log found near the village of Ngāwhā, for instance, indicates that the kauri was about 1,600 years old when it died: 1,600 rings, 1,600 years. Measuring the varying width of the rings from year to year allows scientists to observe changing growing conditions. Chemical analysis of each ring can indicate relative humidity, rainfall patterns, and soil moisture. And by using computer programs and eyeballing tree-ring patterns to string together multiple samples from different times and locations, scientists can create long tree-ring sequences, called “chronologies,” that span millennia and help reveal larger regional climate patterns.

University of Auckland dendrochronologist Gretel Boswijk and collaborators, for example, used 700 samples of both ancient and living kauri to piece together a continuous 4,491-year chain of trees that lived between 2488 BC and today. The chronology allowed Boswijk’s colleague, Anthony Fowler, to figure out that kauri are especially sensitive to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean that affects annual temperatures and rainfall around the world. “When we have an El Niño year, here in the north of the country we’ll get more southwesterly flow — clearer skies but also cooler average temperatures,” Boswijk says. “Kauri tend to respond well in those conditions, so they tend to put on a wide ring.” Conversely, in a warmer, cloudier La Niña year, kauri add narrower rings. “They get stressed, they don’t grow as well.”

Using this information, the team was able create a 700-year reconstruction of ENSO variability in northern New Zealand, providing a lengthy picture of the country’s natural climate variation. For comparison, historical climate records date back only 150 years. The longer timeline is crucial for climate modelers trying to predict how ENSO will respond to future anthropogenic warming.

Scientists have also assembled a handful of other kauri chronologies that go even further back in time, each covering a few millennia of the past 60,000 years. But because they’re not connected to the present, they’re called “floating chronologies,” meaning their calendar ages remain relatively uncertain. Lorrey dreams of one day finding the right logs to link all of them into one unbroken chain.

In the meantime, the floating chronologies and ancient kauri samples are already proving incredibly valuable for global science in other ways. As a start, they can help scientists determine the ages of other plant, human, and animal artifacts, from as far back as tens of thousands of years ago.

Read the rest in bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

 THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS

IN HEALTH & SAFETY; THEY'RE KNOWN AS 

PREVENTABLE INCIDENTS

Daunte Wright: Police officer who 'accidentally' shot black man is identified

 

Police: Minnesota officer meant to draw Taser, not handgun 

Daunte Wright: Police officer who 'accidentally' shot black man is identified as more protests take place in Minnesota 

WHAT ABOUT AMPHIBIANS, BIRDS, REPTILES, OH MY

COVID-19: World Health Organisation calls for ban on sale of live wild mammals in food markets

The statement comes after a WHO team visited Wuhan in China to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

Tom Gillespie
News reporter @TomGillespie1
Tuesday 13 April 2021 

Image:Flying foxes - mega-bats - are seen at a food market in Indonesia. File pic


The sale of live wild mammals at food markets should be suspended as an emergency measure, the World Health Organisation has said.

The statement comes after a WHO team visited Wuhan in China to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

The most likely scenario is that the virus originated in bats, was spread to another unidentified animal, and then passed on to humans, a WHO report said in March.

The organisation said in a separate report on Tuesday that animals, "particularly wild animals", are the source of more than 70% of emerging infectious diseases in humans.

They added many of these are caused by novel viruses - a virus that has not previously been recorded.

The report states: "Wild mammals, in particular, pose a risk for the emergence of new diseases. They come into markets without any way to check if they carry dangerous viruses.

"There is a risk of direct transmission to humans from coming into contact with the saliva, blood, urine, mucus, faeces, or other body fluids of an infected animal, and an additional risk of picking up the infection from contact with areas where animals are housed in markets or objects or surfaces that could have been contaminated with such viruses."

The WHO said "traditional markets play a central role in providing food and livelihoods " around the world.

It added that banning the sale of live wild animals would help to protect the health of both shoppers and workers.

Play Video - WHO: Lab leak COVID origin 'unlikely'

WHO: Lab leak COVID origin 'unlikely'

The closest-related viruses to COVID-19 have been found in bats in southwest China.

The intermediate host is more elusive: mink, pangolins, rabbits, raccoon dogs and domesticated cats have all been cited as a possibility.

The WHO team said that a theory the virus was leaked from a lab was "extremely unlikely" but it has not been ruled out.

The call for a ban of the sale of wild animals comes as the the WHO said the global coronavirus pandemic is at a "critical point".

It added that people need a "reality check" as restrictions are eased.

Dr Maria van Kerkhove, head of the WHO's technical response, told a news conference vaccinations alone are not enough to combat COVID-19.

Coronavirus restrictions were eased in parts of the UK on Monday, with shoppers returning to high streets and drinkers visiting pub gardens in England, and non-essential retailers reopening in Wales.

Dr van Kerkhove, speaking on Monday afternoon, urged caution, saying: "We need headlines around these public health and social measures, we need headlines around the tools that we have right now that can prevent infections and save lives.

"We are in a critical point of the pandemic right now, the trajectory of this pandemic is growing."

Amazon drivers describe the paranoia of working under the watchful eyes of new truck cameras that monitor them constantly and fire off 'rage-inducing' alerts if they make a wrong move

ahartmans@businessinsider.com (Avery Hartmans,Kate Taylor) 
4/13/2021

© Provided by Business Insider An Amazon delivery driver. Patrick Fallon/Getty Images

Amazon drivers now have multiple cameras constantly filming them as part of the Driveri system.

Drivers told Insider they're worried about privacy, with cameras monitoring every yawn.

They fear they'll fail to keep up with Amazon's breakneck pace because of the new surveillance system.

Many Amazon drivers say the solitude and the independence of working on the road are big draws of the job.

But those perks are under threat since Amazon started installing surveillance cameras in delivery vans that monitor workers' driving, hand movements, and even facial expressions.

Some workers are paranoid about what the cameras - which peer at them from their windshields and fire off audible alerts following missteps - are watching and how they could be punished for what the technology flags, according to interviews with five drivers.

"I know we're on a job, but, I mean, I'm afraid to scratch my nose. I'm afraid to move my hair out of my face, you know?" a female driver based in Oklahoma told Insider. "Because we're going to get dinged for it."

The Oklahoma driver and several others interviewed asked that their names be withheld for fear that their jobs would be affected, but Insider verified their identities.

Several drivers said the cameras could be helpful in cases of collisions or other dangerous situations. But they also worried about how the technology was affecting their productivity and described concerns with managing bathroom needs, like changing adult diapers, within sight of the cameras.

"We have zero privacy and no margin for error," a California-based driver said.

Netradyne, the maker of the camera system, did not respond to Insider's request for comment. A representative for Amazon said in a statement to Insider that Netradyne cameras are used to keep drivers and communities safe. In a pilot of the cameras from April to October 2020, accidents dropped by 48%, stop-sign violations dropped by 20%, driving without a seatbelt dropped by 60%, and distracted driving dropped by 45%, according to the company.

"Don't believe the self-interested critics who claim these cameras are intended for anything other than safety," Amazon's statement said.

The cameras capture yawns, distracted driving, and more

 A still from the instructional video on Amazon's Netradyne camera system. Amazon/Vimeo

The camera system, called Driveri, isn't made by Amazon. It was created by Netradyne, a transportation company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor fleets of drivers.

The system, mounted on the inside of a windshield, contains four cameras: a road-facing camera, two side-facing cameras, and one camera that faces inward toward the driver. Together, the cameras provide 270 degrees of coverage.

While the cameras record 100% of the time when the ignition is running, Amazon says the system does not have audio functionality or a live-view feature, meaning drivers can't be watched in real time while they drive. The cameras upload the footage only when they detect one of 16 issues, such as hard braking or a seatbelt lapse, and that footage can be accessed only by "a limited set of authorized people," Karolina Haraldsdottir, a senior manager for last-mile safety at Amazon, said in a training video about the cameras.

The Driveri system also sounds alerts in four instances: failure to stop, inadequate following distance, speeding, or distracted driving.

The system can be shut off, but only when the ignition is also turned off. Amazon said it would share video data with third parties, such as the police, only in the event of a dangerous incident.

The camera system sparked a backlash from some drivers shortly after it was announced. A driver named Vic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the cameras were the final straw that led him to quit, calling them "both a privacy violation and a breach of trust."

A driver named Angel Rajal told Insider last month that he thought the new cameras were "annoying" and made him feel as if he were always being watched.

"I get a 'distracted driver' notification even if I'm changing the radio station or drinking water," he said.

Read more: Amazon logistics salaries revealed: Here's what workers bulking out

Amazon's supply chain make, from entry-level analysts to senior management

Drivers say they're worried about their privacy

© AP The struggles of Amazon drivers have been in the spotlight recently. AP

In interviews with Insider, drivers whose vans have the cameras installed highlighted a slew of issues they were facing so far. Lack of privacy is a top concern, they said.

Several drivers said they feared that yawning while driving would result in an infraction for drowsiness. And with some drivers feeling pressured to urinate in bottles on the job, there are concerns about being caught on camera in an uncomfortable position.

Bronwyn Brigham, a driver based in Houston who has driven trucks outfitted with Driveri for about two weeks, told Insider that the presence of the cameras made her feel as if she were being watched and made her worry about how to manage her bathroom needs inside the van.

"I have to wear a Depends because I'm 56," she said, referring to a type of adult diaper. "If I wet that Depends, I need to take that off. Then the cameras are on, so that makes it hard. If I need to change into another one, they're watching that."

"We are all worried that we have zero privacy," the California driver said. "Considering we have to use bottles to relieve ourselves - is that being watched?"

The ignition must be off to turn off the cameras, but that leaves drivers with no air conditioning.

As a result, drivers in regions that experience extreme heat during the summer will need to choose between privacy and cool air while they take their breaks.
'Rage-inducing' voices and guidance 'designed to make you slower'

A male driver based in Oklahoma who has been driving with the cameras for about a month told Insider that the Driveri system was obstructing his view while he drives, making it difficult to see house numbers - and children playing - on the passenger side of the street.

"I've had times where I look up and there's nobody there, and then all of a sudden the kid pops out from behind where the camera is obstructing the view," the driver said.

The driver also said the camera's verbal alerts, which use a computer-generated voice, were distracting and "rage-inducing." That sentiment was echoed by several other drivers who said the alerts made them feel as if they were being micromanaged.

Several drivers told Insider that they were worried about receiving infractions for handling their phones on the job, even though they need the devices for navigation.

Drivers rely on two apps while they work: Mentor, which monitors driving, and Flex, Amazon's navigation app. A driver who delivers near the Twin Cities told Insider that he juggled this by loading one app on his work phone and the other on his personal device.

"In order to be successful throughout your day, you have to zoom in and out on the map on the Flex app that you have on a dock that you can look at while driving," he said. "My concern is that ... with the cameras in place, it's going to be noticing we're using our phone while driving."

Keeping up with Amazon's demands is an ongoing concern for drivers. Some are worried that the new system will slow them down, making it more difficult to deliver all the packages they're expected to drop off every day, which could be as many as 300.

For example, Driveri is triggered by a "failure to stop" at an intersection. However, the female Oklahoma-based driver said that in situations where a stop sign is several feet before the intersection, she had to stop twice to avoid an infraction, costing her valuable seconds. The California driver said he feared being reprimanded for going just a few miles above the speed limit.

Brigham said that she was doing her best to drive especially carefully now that the cameras are installed and that it was slowing her down. If she's not moving fast enough, she said, she'll get a call from her dispatcher - a supervisor who tracks drivers' progress - telling her she's running behind in her deliveries.

The male driver from Oklahoma said the new system felt like a Catch-22.

"The job is all about speed and how fast you can get to the door," he said. "But these cameras and some of the other policies Amazon has in place, it's like they're designed to make you slower."

Being watched by a computer is now part of the job

© AP Cameras have advantages and create challenges. 

Several of the drivers Insider interviewed said there were advantages to the Driveri system.

If an accident occurs during a delivery, for instance, the system will automatically upload the footage. Drivers will be able to prove if they were paying attention and following the rules of the road.

And the cameras will record outside the delivery van for 20 minutes even if the ignition is turned off, which could help drivers if someone approaches the van to harass or rob them.

Still, drivers say the cameras are a new frustration in an already challenging job.

"I do like my job, but it is stacked up against me," the California driver said.

The driver said that 99% of the time he enjoyed delivering packages but that the cameras highlighted the extreme demands of the job. Recently, he said, he worked from 10:45 a.m. to 10:10 p.m. He said he did not have time for a single break and had to pee in a bottle twice. The entire time, he was aware the camera was on.

"The part that bothers me the most is that we're being watched by a computer," the male driver from Oklahoma said, "and that computer is what makes a judgment as to whether we're doing something wrong or not, whether or not we get to keep our jobs."

 Beijing Urges Japan to Revise Decision on Discharging Fukushima NPP Wastewater Into Sea

© East News / AP/FOTOLINK

ASIA & PACIFIC

05:48 GMT 13.04.2021Get short UR

BEIJING (Sputnik) - The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday expressed deep concerns over Japan's decision to discharge contaminated wastewater from the disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) into the sea and believes it should be promptly revised.

"On 13 April, the Japanese government decided to dispose of the nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant accident by discharging it into the sea. As a close neighbor and stakeholder, the Chinese side expresses grave concern over this. ... This is highly irresponsible and will severely affect human health and the immediate interests of people in neighboring countries," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It further called on its neighbor to reevaluate the decision and wait until a consensus is reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency expert team and all stakeholders through consultations.

"China will continue to watch closely the developments of the matter together with the international community and reserves the right to make further reactions," the ministry added.

The Japanese branch of the Greenpeace non-governmental environmental organization, in the meantime, has also strongly condemned the government's decision to dispatch some 1.23 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater.

"The Japanese government has once again failed the people of Fukushima. The government has taken the wholly unjustified decision to deliberately contaminate the Pacific Ocean with radioactive wastes. It has discounted the radiation risks and turned its back on the clear evidence that sufficient storage capacity is available on the nuclear site as well as in surrounding districts," Kazue Suzuki, the climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, said.

Earlier in the day, the Kyodo news agency reported that Japan had finalized its decision to release toxic water into the ocean, as the NPP was running out of storage capacity. Despite neighboring states' concerns, Japan's leadership said there would be no negative impact on the environment or human health.

Japan warned in December that it was running out of storage capacity and would release the water used to cool the Fukushima Daiichi reactor into the Pacific in 2021, prompting concerns of pollution among neighbors. The wastewater discharge is now planned for 2023, but only after it is greenlighted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

The Fukushima NPP was heavily damaged in March 2011 after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake in the Pacific Ocean triggered a massive tsunami that hit the plant and caused three nuclear reactors to melt down.

UCP GOVERNMENT OF ANTI VAXXERS

Alberta bill removes mandatory vaccinations, repeals Bill 10 powers

Alberta's public health act is more than 100 years old.

RESULT OF THE SPAINISH FLU PANDEMIC 1918-1919

Michelle Bellefontaine 

© Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press The Alberta government is removing a requirement for mandatory vaccinations in the Public Health Act.

Mandatory vaccinations and other measures currently enshrined in the Public Health Act to manage health emergencies would be dropped under new legislation tabled in the Alberta legislature on Monday.

Bill 66, the Public Health Amendment Act, repeals powers the government gave itself through legislation passed in April 2020.

The measures in Bill 10, the Public Health Emergency Powers Amendment Act, allowed ministers to unilaterally amend legislation by ministerial order. The measure was meant to keep public services operating but was widely criticized for being unconstitutional by giving the government too much power.

Health Minister Tyler Shandro said Bill 10 was drafted in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to address fears the legislature would not be able to meet.

However, MLAs managed to adapt and kept meeting safely, he said.

"The legislature has continued to successfully debate and the government has passed critical legislation to support lives and support livelihoods through this extraordinary time," Shandro said.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms filed a constitutional challenge shortly after Bill 10 was passed into law. .

Last October, Shandro announced the government would repeal the the legislation. Last month, an Alberta Court of Queen's Bench judge dismissed the court action for that reason.

Edmonton-City Centre MLA David Shepherd, the NDP Opposition critic for health, said the changes proposed in Bill 66 have more to do with blowback over Bill 10 than with improving public health.

"It's mostly about cleaning up the political messes for Jason Kenney and the UCP," he said.

Shepherd said the NDP proposed amendments to limit the government's powers when Bill 10 was first debated, but they were voted down by the UCP majority in the legislature.

He said Kenney chose to strike a special committee of MLAs to examine the Public Health Act rather than admitting he made a mistake.
Vaccination a 'personal choice'

Other measures included in Bill 66 includes a provision to immediately tell someone who is being detained for public health reasons where they are going and lists criteria that must be met before they can be examined or given medical treatment.

The bill defines the qualifications for a chief medical officer of health and mandates the Public Health Act is reviewed every decade. It also removes a provision for conscripting Albertans to help during a public health crisis.

Lorian Hardcastle, an associate professor who specializes in health law at the University of Calgary, said the power to unilaterally amend legislation goes back to 2002, when the government implemented changes in the period after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 amid concerns the legislature would be unable to meet during a crisis.

"This was a power that was unique to Alberta," she said. "No other province allowed the minister of health to amend other statutes during a public health emergency."

Alberta's public health act is more than 100 years old.

Last June, the government appointed a special committee of MLAs to review the act and suggest updates.

The committee's report, tabled in October 2020, said MLAs received 41 public submissions against mandatory immunizations during a pandemic.

People who made submissions argued vaccinations should be a personal choice and mandating them is an overreach of government power.

SHE CAPITULATES
Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health, told the committee last summer that the power to mandate immunizations has never been used, so she had no issue with the government taking it out of the legislation.

UK

Among the Covid sceptics: ‘We are being manipulated, without a shadow of a doubt’

Who are the people who have come to follow wild conspiracy theories about Covid-19?

by Samira Shackle
THE GUARDIAN
Thu 8 Apr 2021 


When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Anna, a young woman from Bradford, was waiting for surgery for endometriosis. The surgery was cancelled, leaving her in excruciating pain. She was forced to close her business, a small tattoo studio that she had opened two years earlier, at the age of 24. She could no longer pay for the weekly counselling that had been helping her deal with her troubled childhood. Her partner lost his job. Anna was convinced that if she caught Covid, she would die. “I was in a terrified bubble, having the news on constantly, crying, worrying, panicking,” she told me. For weeks, she waited anxiously for news about support for shuttered businesses. The cash grant, when it finally came, fell far short. Other business expenses – insurance, bills – went on her credit card. She considered suicide.

Feeling abandoned by the government and frustrated by the daily press briefings, Anna and her partner researched the virus online. On Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, they came across theories about the origins of coronavirus that the mainstream media weren’t talking about – that it was engineered in a lab in China, say, or that it had been artificially spliced with HIV. Some of it seemed implausible to Anna, but it was enough to convince her that the media wasn’t telling the full story. “Loads of people were saying ‘even if you die from a heart attack, they’ll put it down as a Covid death’. I was looking into that, and how many people who died had pre-existing health conditions,” she said. “It was to make me feel better, so I wouldn’t be as scared.

She read dense, seemingly scientific material which claimed that PCR testing – the throat and nasal swabs that are considered the gold standard of Covid tests – leads to enormous numbers of false positives. She read that the World Health Organization had said that Britain is testing at too high a sensitivity. She read about the cost of lockdowns, and Sweden’s more permissive approach. She read about the death rate; 1% didn’t sound that high at all. Looked at another way, 99% survived. By the end of the first lockdown, Anna was no longer afraid. She was angry. “I’d been sat in my house for four months, in absolute agony, no mental health support, no financial support, and it did an absolute number on me,” she said.
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Anna was not the only one to respond this way. During the first few months of the pandemic, a broad movement coalesced online. At the most extreme end were outright Covid deniers, those who believed that the virus didn’t exist and the pandemic had been fabricated. At the other were Covid sceptics or anti-lockdowners, those who thought that the numbers were exaggerated or that the government had an ulterior motive for restricting freedoms. Over the past year, these views have attracted more and more adherents. Occasionally, the most extreme activists have taken direct action: setting fire to 5G masts which they suspected of spreading the virus, entering Covid wards and attempting to remove relatives, visiting hospitals to film empty corridors and posting them as “evidence” that the public is being lied to about the numbers of sick and dying. On New Year’s Eve, a doctor at St Thomas’ hospital in London filmed a crowd of protesters who had gathered outside holding placards and chanting “Covid is a hoax”.

“A lot of people think that they’re the only ones that think like they do, and they’re not,” the British businessman Simon Dolan told me in January. Early in the pandemic, Dolan, who owns a chartered airline and a motor-racing team and lives in Monaco, attempted to prove through the courts that lockdown was unlawful. The case failed, but as it picked up media attention, people contacted him to express their support – mostly small business owners, he said, and others directly affected by strict lockdown rules. “There’s thousands and thousands, more as time goes past, that think this stuff has been really overblown and there is something a bit fishy about it.”

Although these are minority views, polls suggest the numbers are significant. A YouGov survey in October found that the number of people in the UK who thought that Covid fatalities had been exaggerated was about 20%. “Civilians have come across conspiracy theories in a way they haven’t ordinarily,” said Peter Knight, a professor at Manchester studying Covid-19 disinformation. As death rates soared in December and January, Facebook groups, Instagram accounts and Telegram channels dedicated to downplaying the pandemic attracted thousands of followers.

Covid scepticism is not limited to a single demographic. Many Facebook accounts are run by suburban mums, who post memes about children being traumatised by masks. Other Covid sceptics, particularly some regulars at street protests, are members of far right and football hooligan groups. Some are fans of David Icke, the conspiracist’s conspiracist, who believes that coronavirus is spread by 5G. Still others came to the movement via alternative health and new age communities, jumping into Telegram conversations about the Illuminati to talk about homeopathy and vibrations. Some are simply, like Anna, small business owners who have suffered major personal fallout over the past year. All share a conviction that they are seeing something that the mainstream is blind to.

As the vaccine rollout continues to log impressive numbers, and lockdown restrictions are eased, the movement’s appeal might be expected to fade. But it seems there is, instead, a renewed energy. Like apocalyptic cults that immediately say they had simply misinterpreted a prophecy when the world fails to end, there are at least some strains of Covid scepticism where views remain the unchanged, no matter what occurs. “A lot of these organisations are here to stay in one form or another,” said David Lawrence, who tracks disinformation for the anti-extremist organisation Hope Not Hate. “They might rebrand, they might shift focus, but a lot of people have more or less given up their normal lives to do this. They’ve really bought into it. They won’t give up that easily.”

Of the hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts spreading disinformation about Covid, three organisations emerged during the first lockdown to dominate the scene: Stand Up X, which had 40,000 followers on Facebook before it was removed in September, and remains active on Instagram and Telegram; Save Our Rights UK, which has 65,000 followers on Facebook; and Stop New Normal, which sprang up around Piers Corbyn, the brother of the former Labour leader, who is often the headline act at anti-lockdown rallies. (Piers Corbyn is one of four anti-lockdown candidates standing for London mayor in May, along with the actor Laurence Fox, the London Assembly member David Kurten and the American conspiracy theorist and podcaster Brian Rose, who interviewed Icke in March.)

From April 2020 onwards, all three groups began organising small protests, and on 16 May they attracted national attention when protesters clashed with police at Hyde Park in London. Corbyn was arrested along with 18 others. “That event got a lot of press because it was confrontational,” said Lawrence. “The rallies elsewhere flopped, but it was the first properly coordinated attempt to have protests around the country.”

Piers Corbyn being arrested at an anti-lockdown protest in Fulham, west London, February 2021. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex/Shutterstock

Protests continued through the early summer but struggled to get traction. Most groups remained focused on internet activism. When following anti-lockdown accounts on Facebook or Instagram, it is striking is how quickly the posts about the supposed dangers of vaccines and the memes depicting government ministers as cult leaders lose their power to shock and are simply folded into the fabric of the everyday, appearing alongside pictures of friends’ babies and job news. On lively Facebook groups, people swap stories about hardship under lockdown, and approvingly share screenshots of tweets by mainstream lockdown sceptics such as Toby Young and Allison Pearson. One particularly popular figure is the backbench Tory MP Charles Walker, who voted against the second and third lockdowns and recently staged a protest against ongoing Covid restrictions in which he walked around London holding a pint of milk. “Charles Walker, one of the very few good ones”, wrote one admirer on Telegram.

Alongside this, there is more extreme content – people posting about the government using vaccines to implant microchips in your brain or about the New World Order, a longstanding conspiracy theory that a shadowy elite is secretly plotting to bring about a worldwide totalitarian government. The tone of the posts, even when describing conspiracies to end humanity as we know it, is not panicked, but worldly wise: come on, is it still not obvious what’s really going on? It is easy to assume these wilder theories would put any reasonable person off. But that isn’t how disinformation works. Just as with any other belief system, it’s possible to subscribe to elements of something while not agreeing with everything.

This was Anna’s experience. She didn’t agree with everything that people posted on the different Instagram accounts she followed; she’d had a lot of medical treatment in her life, so she had no time for the anti-vaxxers, and as a sceptic rather than a denier, she believed that the pandemic was real, just exaggerated. But it was easy enough to disregard the comments about the virus being a hoax. And it wasn’t just the sceptics who were extreme, she felt. When friends posted anti-lockdown content on their main feeds, Anna saw others jumping down their throats, “telling business-owners they should die because they want to earn a living,” she said. “It’s scary. It really is.”

As restrictions loosened last summer, Anna had her long-delayed endometriosis surgery. As soon as it was permitted, she reopened her tattoo studio. But she was still frustrated that journalists weren’t asking the prime minister about false positives in PCR testing, or inflated death rates, or the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had been forced into debt. “Everyone was calling them conspiracy theories,” she said. “It’s just degrading, when people have got actual, genuine questions about things.”
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The first rule of any conspiracy-based movement is that nobody wants to be called a conspiracy theorist. Almost every Covid sceptic I spoke to for this story warned me to avoid talking to other people in the movement with more extreme views. One activist told me that journalists just want to focus on the “wacky” when actually “most people who oppose lockdown just want to do sensible things”. Simon Dolan told me not to “go down the 5G route” as this was a “small minority”. He went on to tell me that “we are being manipulated, without a shadow of a doubt” and that the UK is artificially turning up the sensitivity on PCR tests to give a higher infection rate “to make the government look good”. After our phone call in January, he forwarded me a theory that PCR testing was going to be made less sensitive again. This supposed shift, which would presumably reduce the case numbers, arrived just when Joe Biden took office – something that “could be read by some as more than a coincidence”, he added.

Covid conspiracies – in common with most conspiracy theories – are often presented in the form of complex, pseudo-technical documents. The idea that the WHO has criticised the UK’s use of PCR testing, for instance, is based on a misreading of a highly technical bit of lab guidance attached to the tests. This kind of thing is difficult to factcheck, and besides, factchecking is of limited use in changing believers’ minds, because sources such as the BBC or the Office for National Statistics are seen as untrustworthy, part of the lie. “If you don’t want to be convinced, then it’s not going to happen,” says Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge academic who studies disinformation.

Over the summer of 2020, the focus of the Covid sceptic movement shifted away from 5G and Chinese labs, and on to the restrictions on businesses and social gatherings. On 29 August, a major rally was held in Trafalgar Square. It is difficult to trace who exactly organised it, but David Icke was the headline speaker and all the main players had some involvement. (“I think it’s almost been a deliberate tactic on the organisers’ front to obscure who exactly was behind the protests, to present them more as a grassroots thing,” says Lawrence.) People in the movement say there were 50,000 people there; the Metropolitan police placed the numbers closer to 10,000.

For many people who had spent months consuming Covid-sceptic content online, the rally was a revelation. “I just got this energy from seeing so many like-minded people,” a London-based Polish man named Luca told me. He had gravitated towards the movement after seeing posts on his cryptocurrency groups about the “Great Reset” – a common theory that the pandemic is cover for a globalist conspiracy. The atmosphere at the Trafalgar Square protest was friendly and celebratory, and Luca came away feeling he had made new friends. “It was amazing,” he said.
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A month later, another large protest took place in Trafalgar Square. It was once again headlined by Icke and drew similar numbers. “I was quite taken aback to see just how diverse the mix of people was,” said Lawrence of Hope Not Hate. “I can’t think of a similar time where conspiracy theorists have been so organised and able to get those kinds of numbers out on the street.”

An anti-lockdown protest in Trafalgar Square, London, September 2020. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex/Shutterstock

In September, as concern grew about the spread of disinformation, Facebook shut down some of the biggest Covid sceptic groups, including Stand Up X. Most migrated to Instagram, which, despite being owned by Facebook, was not subject to the same crackdown. All the major groups made more use of their channels on Telegram, the largely unmoderated messaging app. The platform isn’t as widely used as Facebook – most of the main Covid sceptic Telegram groups have between 5,000 and 15,000 users – but discussion is lively, with members swapping thousands of messages a day. And the closed nature of the platform – with groups essentially operating like giant WhatsApp chats – helps to entrench people in their positions.

Anna signed up to an anti-lockdown Telegram group, but it made her uncomfortable; when she talks about the pandemic, she is respectful of those who don’t share her perspective. It wasn’t like that on Telegram. “I found people to be quite militant and set in their views,” she said. “You have to be willing to have your mind changed.” After a fortnight, she left and went back to Instagram, where there were plenty of accounts sharing content that she preferred – including anti-lockdown activists from the US and Europe. She didn’t come across anything that changed her mind.
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Covid scepticism is a global phenomenon. Although its central tenets are reasonably consistent – that the pandemic is exaggerated, or that we’ve been lied to about its origins, or that it’s cover for something more sinister – it has different inflections around the world. In the US, many Covid sceptics are also libertarians paranoid about government intervention, who advocate for gun rights and see masks as fundamentally “un-American”. In Germany, anti-lockdown rallies – which have attracted tens of thousands of people – are promoted and sometimes organised by the far right. In France, already one of the most vaccine-hesitant countries in the world, Covid sceptics have harnessed existing suspicion of big pharma and venal politicians. In Britain, Covid scepticism is often framed in terms of our fundamental rights and freedoms: the right to protest, the right to make a living, the right to make our own decisions. There is much talk of Magna Carta.

In November, during the second lockdown, hairdresser Sinead Quinn became a hero of the movement when she announced she would keep her salon in Bradford open. In the window, she pinned a piece of paper on which she had typed: “I do not consent. This business stands under the jurisdiction of Common Law. As the business owners, we are exercising our rights to earn a living.” Citing “article 61 of Magna Carta 1215”, the document claimed that “we have a right to enter into lawful dissent if we feel we are being governed unjustly”. The notion that citizens don’t have to follow unjust laws, and can only be fined or arrested if they give their consent, is a commonly circulated bit of disinformation. This clause of Magna Carta applied only to a small group of barons, not the public at large, and in any case, it never became statutory law. (In January, Kirklees council obtained an injunction to prevent Quinn from opening her business during a national lockdown again.)

On a cold day in mid-January, two women met at Seven Sisters station in north London. They each had a stack of crudely printed leaflets, notifying businesses of “the Great Reopening” and urging them to open their doors on the 30th in defiance of lockdown. The Great Reopening was promoted by all the main Covid sceptic groups, who hoped that collective action could force the government to lift restrictions. They were inspired by Italian anti-lockdown activists who used the hashtag #ioapro (I Open) to encourage restaurants to open their doors in mid-January. The leaflets included an email address; anyone who made contact would receive a long, dense email setting out Magna Carta and “common law” defence. (Later, on Telegram, the Great Reopening organisers clarified that after speaking to a lawyer they’d established that “parliamentary law always trumps common law” and retracted their advice to use this defence.)

Sinead Quinn in her salon in Bradford on the day of the ‘Great Reopening’, 30 January 2021. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

The two women, Lucy and Julia, had initially connected via Telegram. This was the first time they’d met in person. Lucy is in her late 20s, an actor who was out of work and socially isolated during lockdown. Julia is in her 50s and has long been “into alternative health” and suspicious of vaccines. As they walked along the high street, sticking leaflets through the letterboxes of shuttered nail salons and restaurants, they chatted. Lucy had never been involved with anything like this before, but the more she read, the more convinced she was that the pandemic was being exaggerated, and that lockdown was a means for government to increase its control. “I have lost friends,” she said. “But it’s given me a lifeline. If we don’t come out of lockdown this year, I’ll probably kill myself. I’m not the only one who feels like this.” Julia agreed with her. “It’s so frustrating to see your loved ones blindly swallowing propaganda. I’m really scared about how many people will take this gene-altering vaccine because the government has lied and created all this fear.” Before they went their separate ways, they agreed to meet up more often.

In the week before the big day, Telegram users encouraged one another to phone businesses to check if they knew about the Great Reopening. Many were disappointed to find that no one had heard of it. On the morning of the Great Reopening, one user urged others to keep on message: “No Illuminati or unrelated chat today. Only reopening chat.”

The Great Reopening was a flop. About 70 businesses in the UK agreed to open, sharing their details on an online spreadsheet. “Really only 70 with nearly 13,000 members just in here!” wrote one disappointed user on Telegram. In the late morning, I stopped off at the only business in my vicinity listed on the site – a small clothing boutique in north London. A woman was inside, but the door was locked. I knocked and asked if she had reopened that day. She nodded, adding knowingly: “We had a visit.” She was not alone in this; all the businesses listed online were shut down by police early in the day.

On Telegram, people complained about the poor showing. “Most people are lazy as fuck,” wrote one user. “We have been living among stupid robots far too long!”; “We’re up against a highly sophisticated, well-funded propaganda machine, so it is not going to happen overnight,” counselled another.

Even the area where the anti-lockdown movement had previously found success – street protests – floundered over the winter. The day of the Great Reopening was cold and wet, but a small group of protesters still showed up in Hyde Park, as they have most weekends since the summer. Four riot vans were parked at nearby Marble Arch and a further six vans did circuits around the park. “It’s become a weekly occurrence,” a police officer told me. “Sometimes it gets rowdy, but it’s like any other protest – there’s a few troublemakers, but mostly it’s fine.”

The protest was sparsely attended; people milled around, trying to work out who else was there to demonstrate. On Telegram, messages had gone out telling people to gather at midday with the grand aim of “marching on parliament”. But there was no clear plan, and no one was leading the protest.

Luca, the Polish man who had attended the big Trafalgar Square rallies in the summer, had come along. He told me that a few weeks earlier, he’d been arrested after a protest in Clapham turned violent. But it hadn’t put him off. He firmly believed that the pandemic was a globalist conspiracy, and that it was vital to resist. He broke off, looking nervously at the police. “They’re going to come over here if they see us talking,” he said.

Eventually, a group of about eight people identified one another and started chatting under a gazebo as they sheltered from the rain. They were an unlikely group – two middle-aged women in brightly coloured winter coats, two men from Essex with a carrier bag full of beer tins, who cheerfully told me they were “from the far right”, an older man with a shock of grey hair, and Luca, a self-described “tech-libertarian”. No sooner had they begun to talk than four of the police vans that had been circling the park drove up to them.

“Go home, there is a national emergency,” the police officers shouted. “You are not allowed to be here.”

The two women shouted back at them. “We’re in the park, we’re allowed to be in a public place.”

Other would-be protesters looped around the park, not wanting to stop while the police were there. Two older men in leather jackets kept walking once they saw the altercation. As they strolled out of the park, I saw that one of them had “FLU WORLD ORDER” scrawled across the back of his jacket in large letters. People gradually dissipated, leaving just Luca and the two men with the bag of tins. They told me that they had lost their jobs in the pandemic; they’d worked in the building trade. An aunt’s hairdressing salon had gone bust. They’d first come across the protest movement through “Patriot groups” on Facebook.

One said sadly that his grandparents wouldn’t see him any more. “They believe this whole thing, hook, line and sinker. They’ve been brainwashed by the BBC. To be honest, I don’t blame them. I put it on for 15 minutes the other day, and I could feel myself getting brainwashed, too, so I switched it off.”

As the UK’s vaccination programme picked up steam over February, and infection numbers dropped, Boris Johnson announced the roadmap out of lockdown. It was greeted with predictable scepticism by anti-lockdowners. “Subject to conditions being met … Behave and you get freedom at the end. Or what you think is freedom,” Sinead Quinn, the hairdresser, posted on Instagram. Keep Britain Free, a group founded by Dolan, tweeted that Johnson “has spearheaded the greatest destruction of our freedoms over the past year and is still refusing to hand them back”.

Many of the anti-lockdown Telegram channels refocused on opposing vaccinations. People asked for advice about stopping their parents and grandparents from taking the jab. “Unfortunately, many who took the jab are likely to die within the next 3 to 18 months,” stated one user. Disagreement was unwelcome. In mid-March, when one user posted that they were going to get their vaccine as soon as they were eligible, the administrator replied: “You are in the wrong group then.” Someone else responded “What a fucking nob head trying to instigate something.” “Defo a troll,” another agreed. The user was blocked.

Although vaccine uptake is high – more than 90% of over-70s in England have had it – many doctors have encountered scepticism. “I’ve had patients with Covid who say, ‘I don’t want to go to hospital because the oxygen will kill me’,” says Siema Iqbal, a GP in Manchester. Many of her older patients get their information from their children, who are immersed in denialist social media groups. “Sometimes we’ve found elderly people will not take the vaccine because the children have said ‘don’t have it’,” Iqbal said. “They’re not just affecting their own uptake. They’re affecting a big, multi-generational household.”

Other healthcare professionals I spoke to had experienced online abuse from Covid sceptics, or found their daily work disrupted by organised campaigns. Earlier this year, Stand Up X encouraged followers to call hospitals to ask about their capacity. One hospital receptionist in southern England told me she had fielded several of these calls a week in January. “This was such a busy time, and we’re talking to people at the worst moments of their lives, calling up to ask if they can visit their dad before he dies. Then in among that you get someone demanding to know how many Covid patients we have and how many spare beds, because they’re essentially saying ‘you’re a liar’.”

In recent weeks, street protests have returned with an energy not seen since the autumn. On 20 March, a protest was held to mark a year since lockdown began. Police vans gathered near Marble Arch and helicopters circled overhead. People streamed towards Hyde Park Corner. There were young people in athleisure, older men in full black paramilitary-style gear, older women in tie-dye. A small child handed me a leaflet that said: “SOS – what is happening to our world?”, advertising an evangelical church.

As Hyde Park Corner came into view, so did the crowds of people, cheering and blowing whistles. A young black man in a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt shouted into a megaphone: “People, how powerful is this?” A few paces on, a white man in a baseball cap that read “Make England Great Again” stood on a railing, looking down at the crowd. A woman held up a placard that said “Censor paedophiles, not scientists”. More than one person wore a six-pointed yellow star, reminiscent of those that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, with “Covid” or “Exempt” written in the centre. Spontaneous chants went up of: “Freedom! Freedom!” and “We are the people! We are the power!”

A woman and a bus driver during an anti-lockdown protest in London, 20 March 2021. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

The demonstrators marched to Marble Arch and down Oxford Street, blocking traffic. They banged on the windows of buses, shouting good-naturedly at passengers to take their masks off. A few obliged; more than one bus driver reached out of the window to shake hands with protesters and give them the thumbs up. The atmosphere was like a carnival; people smoked spliffs and drank beers. Two rastas with greying dreads played handheld drums and people danced alongside them. A group of young women in brightly coloured clothes held placards that said “My body, my choice” on one side and “Make Orwell fiction again” on the other; near them, a man in a union jack suit with “Brexiteer” emblazoned on the back walked alone. A large group of police stood at Bond Street station. People booed them. A man with a megaphone shouted: “Your job is to protect the people and you’re oppressing them. They want to see their families. You’re disgusting.”

People had travelled from all over the country; one man in his 40s drinking a can of lager said he’d come from Blackpool. It was his sixth visit to London to protest; until last year, he’d never attended a march. “It’s the biggest hoax in world history,” he told me. “We’re going to turn into a communist country like China. Is that what you want?” When I asked about the roadmap out of lockdown, he told me that the country would be “locked down illegally for at least two years” because of invented variants. A woman in her 50s dressed in brightly coloured patchwork, with glitter smeared on her cheeks, told me she had travelled from the Midlands, where she works as a psychotherapist and home-schools her teenage children. “I’ve never been a protest person, but we care about our freedom, and we’re not going to collude with the New World Order,” she said. “This last year made me get out of my little bubble and look at the wider world.”

By the evening, the crowds began to disperse. The mood on the Telegram channels was jubilant. “GUYS FUCKING AMAZING ABSOLUTELY BUZZING THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING OUT TODAY THEY HAVE TO TAKE NOTICE NOW. WE JUST ACHIEVED THE BIGGEST MARCH IN THE WORLD THIS WEEKEND,” one of the organisers wrote. People insisted that more than 100,000 people had attended (it was likely closer to 10,000). They turned their attention to another protest to take place in late April. Other, more localised protests continued, too; in late March, a group of maskless protesters entered a Tesco in Chelmsford. Videos of the action went viral.

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Not everyone who broadly supports the cause has been protesting in the streets, but most feel alienated and pessimistic about lockdown actually easing. Anna’s endometriosis flared up over the winter, and she suffered a severe adverse reaction to anaesthesia. She almost died. “I’ve got a lot of feelings about how I’ve spent the last year of my life, and it has essentially been trapped indoors for nine out of 12 months,” she said. “If a partner had done to me what the government has done over the past year, there’d be abuse charges: telling me I can’t work, I can’t see my family, I can’t see my friends, you’re only allowed to rely on me for money. I feel gaslighted.”

Her health problems meant less time to engage with anti-lockdown activism, but as the movements have broadly shifted to anti-vaccine content, she, too, has become more receptive to their concerns. She understands why older people are taking the Covid vaccine, but feels young people are being “coerced”, and worries that it is “experimental”. For months, anti-lockdown groups have warned of vaccine passports; the government is now talking seriously about this possibility. “We were being called conspiracy theorists, and now it’s actually happening,” she told me. “I’ve definitely fallen out with the government, and I will never, ever trust them again.”

For most people, it is easy to ignore the fact that this scepticism still exists, but this loss of trust will find another outlet when the pandemic eventually ends. After I left the protest, I walked back along the Strand. The police vans at Charing Cross station were the only sign something was unusual. Most shops were shut, people picking up coffee or snacks wore masks, and hand-sanitiser dispensers stood at regular intervals along the street. An old woman, who had diverged from the protest crowd, handed out leaflets warning of the risks of masks and vaccines. Passersby took the leaflets, and dropped them, without looking, as they carried on walking.

Some names have been changed