Monday, February 24, 2020

Arctic 'doomsday vault' stocks up on more food seeds

AFP•February 24, 2020

The latest shipment will bring to around 1.05 million the number of seed varieties placed in three underground alcoves which form the Arctic "doomsday vault", known also as Noah's Ark (AFP Photo/Helene DAUSCHY)

Oslo (AFP) - An Arctic "doomsday vault" is set Tuesday to receive 60,000 samples of seeds from around the world as the biggest global crop reserve stocks up for a global catastrophe.

The seeds are to be deposited in the vault inside a mountain near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen Island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) from the North Pole.

"As the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there is new urgency surrounding efforts to save food crops at risk of extinction," said Stefan Schmitz, who manages the reserve as head of the Crop Trust.

"The large scope of today’s seed deposit reflects worldwide concern about the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on food production," Schmitz added.

"But more importantly it demonstrates a growing global commitment –- from the institutions and countries that have made deposits today and indeed the world –- to the conservation and use of the crop diversity that is crucial for farmers in their efforts to adapt to changing growing conditions," he said.

Common as well as wilder varieties of grains are being sent by institutions in countries as diverse as Brazil, the United States, Germany, Morocco, Mali, Israel and Mongolia.

The latest shipment will bring to around 1.05 million the number of seed varieties placed in three underground alcoves which form the vault, known also as Noah's Ark.

Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world today.

It was launched in 2008 with financing from Norway.

Its usefulness was spotlighted during Syria's civil war when researchers were able in 2015 to retrieve from the vault duplicates of grains lost in the destruction of Aleppo.

The countries and institutions that deposit seeds in the vault retain ownership over them and can retrieve them when necessary.

Paradoxically, the vault was itself hit by climate change.

In 2016, water seeped into the vault's tunnel entrance due to permafrost melting as Arctic temperatures climbed unusually high.

Newly waterproofed Arctic seed vault hits 1m samples

Rapid climate change forced urgent upgrade of ‘failsafe’ doomsday storage facility

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington

Construction workers add the finishing touches to the seed vault. Photograph: Ragnhild Utne/Statsbygg

The Arctic global seed vault has reached the milestone of having 1m varieties stored in its deep freeze. The new deposits are being made after unexpected flooding of its entrance tunnel in 2017 prompted an upgrade.

Seeds from 60,000 crop varieties from across the world are being placed in the vault to back up those held in other seed banks.

The €9m (£7.5m) underground facility in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard opened in 2008 as a “failsafe” store. But the unexpectedly rapid pace of global heating led to melting of the permafrost that had encased it.

Now, a €20m refurbishment by the Norwegian government means the vault is secure for the future and “absolutely watertight”, according to officials.

The destruction of nature means vital diversity of crops and their wild relatives are being lost, at a time when the impact of the climate emergency means new varieties are needed to cope with changing weather and pests. Seed banks can also be destroyed by power loss and war, as happened in Aleppo, Syria, making the Svalbard vault crucial.

The vault, which holds seeds from 60,000 crop varieties, has been carved into solid rock. Photograph: Jim Richardson/NG/Alamy

Tuesday’s deposits, from 36 institutions, are the most diverse and include seeds of 27 wild plants from Prince Charles’s Highgrove estateas well as seeds of the candy roaster squash, which are being deposited by the Cherokee Nation in the US.

Wild emmer wheat, known as the “mother of wheat” when it was discovered in 1906, is being deposited by Haifa University in Israel, alongside potato varieties from Peru and other crops from Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar and New Zealand. Each sample contains roughly 500 seeds.

The Svalbard vault, which is carved into solid rock, houses samples of about 1,050,000 crop varieties from 5,000 species. This represents two-fifths of the estimated 2.4m varieties in the world, and the vault has plenty of room to accommodate them.

“Crop diversity is an essential basis of food production,” said Hannes Dempewolf, a scientist at Crop Trust, which operates the vault alongside the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre. “And the Svalbard vault is the essential backup facility for seed banks around the world, safeguarding the biodiversity they hold.”

Many crop varieties have been lost, including 93% of fruit and vegetable varieties in the US.

“The issue of some water intrusion in the entrance tunnel was certainly not foreseen during construction,” Dempewolf said. “No one thought summers would be so warm.

“A major upgrade was the only right thing to do and the Norwegian government has certainly put the resources up to make sure that it is absolutely watertight now.”

Hege Njaa Aschim, a spokeswoman for the government, which owns the vault, said: “The entrance tunnel and the upgrade will secure the seed vault for the future.”

The vault was built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters. Photograph: Renato Granieri/Alamy

In 2017, she told the Guardian: “A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel … The vault was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans.” No water reached the seed vaults.

The 130-metre entrance tunnel has been fully waterproofed and the cooling equipment that keeps the vault at -18C moved to a new service building, so heat from the machinery can be released outside. The vault is 130 metres above sea level and designed for a “virtually infinite lifetime”.

“It is always dangerous to talk about something being completely failsafe and impregnable,” Dempewolf said. “In 20, 30, 40 years down the line, we will continue to monitor the situation to see whether any other upgrades are necessary.”

Norway has since financed work to insulate the vault from further effects of a warming and wetter climate, which scientists say is happening two times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

HEARTLAND INSTITUTE HIRES ANTI GRETA YOUTUBER

A conservative group with a history of climate change denial has hired a German YouTuber to challenge Greta Thunberg's 'climate crisis'

pcachero@businessinsider.com (Paulina Cachero),
INSIDER•February 24, 2020

Naomi Seibt, a German YouTuber, has been hired by a conservative think tank to help spread climate denialism. YouTube

The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with ties to the Trump administration, has a history of promoting climate denialism.

Most recently, the organization has enlisted the help of a 19-year-old German YouTuber named Naomi Seibt and framed her as a challenger to climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Although Seibt detested her "anti-Greta" label, she claims that Thunberg and other youth climate activists are spreading views that are not based on science.

Nineteen-year-old German YouTube Naomi Seibt says she, too, once believed the world was in the midst of a global crisis and rallied behind environmentalist policies and the uprising of youth climate activism — but not anymore.

Seibt now finds herself on the warring side of Greta Thunberg's climate justice movement, working for a conservative American think tank with ties to the Trump administration to combat what she claims is "climate alarmism."

"I have good news for you. The world is not ending because of climate change," Seibt says in a YouTube video for the Heartland Institute. "People are being force-fed a very dystopian agenda of climate alarmism that tells us that we as humans are destroying the planet and that we, the young people especially, have no future."

For decades, the Heartland Institute has promoted what it calls "climate realism" and spreading doubts about the overwhelming science supporting human's role in causing climate change. The organization cited "science backing climate realism" from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a riff on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which they sponsor themselves.

One of its senior fellows, William Happer, objected to a US intelligence official's finding that climate impacts could be "possibly catastrophic" when serving on the White House National Security Council, the Washington Post reported.

The conservative think tank has recently come under scrutiny for its shadowy funding stream through Donors Trust, an organization that has allowed wealthy contributors to donate millions of dollars to conservative causes anonymously. Mother Jones referred to the organization as the "dark-money ATM of the conservative movement."

A recent investigation by German journalists believed they unveiled a plot by the Heartland Institute to utilize Seibt to undermine climate protection measures in Germany — but James Taylor, the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, claims the organization has nothing to hide.

"We're always looking to advance individual freedom and better human health and welfare in the United States and around the world," Taylor told Insider. "Even for folks who think they need to undercover to get that information for me. I'll be happy to have that interview today."

In a new effort, the Heartland Institute has enlisted the help of a YouTube influencer to continue to "spread the truth" about climate change. The organization has pitted Seibt against the face of the climate justice movement: Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

"Greta Thunberg took the world by storm with her doomsday climate predictions. Naomi Seibt, a rising star, advocates for proper scientific discourse over climate change," read a caption on a YouTube video featuring Seibt and Thunberg. "Who seems like the more reasonable advocate to you?"

Naomi Seibt, the self-proclaimed "climate realist"

Seibt's crusade against "climate alarmism" online began in 2019 after Thunberg's activism won her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" Award, the youngest person to earn the title. In addition to challenging what she calls the "mainstream" climate narrative, Seibt also raised questions about feminism and immigration on her channel that echoed far-right views.

Her views caught the attention of a conservative German think tank with ties to the nationalist Alternative for Germany, and later Taylor.

Taylor saw Seibt speak at a conference in Germany and believed she could help further Heartland's agenda of advocating for "free markets" and "individual liberties."

"Here we have a 19-year-old young lady with tremendous poise tremendous intelligence," Taylor told Insider of its decision to hire Seibt as a digital media specialist. "Essentially, we are helping to provide resources so that she can continue to spread the message advocating individual freedom, which includes economic freedom, as well as climate realism."

Seibt, a former "climate alarmist" herself, claimed her skepticism began with Thunberg's own Fridays for Future movement. While she disagrees with Thunberg, she emphasizes that she is not the "anti-Greta."

"I'm not this evil opposite of Greta — she might be a really nice girl and I would love to talk to her someday," she told Insider.

However, Seibt claimed Thunberg and other youth climate justice activists espouse views that are not based on science.

"The main issues that I have with the climate change is the narrative. There's a lot of fear-mongering going on. Climate change is not something we're allowed to question anymore," Seibt said.

She said her own research suggests that the role of manmade greenhouse gas emissions in destroying the planet has been inflated by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The international body is made up of world-renowned scientists who have reached a consensus on the detrimental effects of human greenhouse gases and contribute to reports on how to mitigate climate change.

"I do not believe that the climate is changing because of manmade CO2 emissions. And if it was, I don't believe that would have such a detrimental effect," Seibt told Insider, who did not cite where her own research derived from.

While the 19-year-old believes that the climate is, in fact, changing, she protested the hysteria around the impending climate crisis. Seibt claimed that the widespread fears about the effects of climate change have not only caused "eco-depression," but has effectively silenced any dissent about the climate crisis.

"To be a scientific skeptic has nothing to be with an authoritarian radical," Seibt, who identified as Libertarian, said.
"We are not allowed to speak up — people are losing their job in the wake of this supposed 'climate crisis.'"

With the Heartland Institute, she said she hoped to promote climate realism, which claimed is "pro-human." (PRO CAPITALISM)

"This mainstream narrative of fear-mongering and climate alarmism is holding us hostage in our own brains," Seibt said in a video for Heartland. "Don't let an agenda that is trying to depict you as an energy-sucking leech on the planet get into your brain and take away all of your passionate spirit."
The anti-Greta: A conservative think tank takes on the global phenomenon
IMITATION THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY
For climate skeptics, it’s hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global phenomenon Greta Thunberg. But one U.S. think tank hopes it’s found an answer: the anti-Greta.

Desmond Butler, Juliet Eilperin

DOPPELGANGER
Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.

KOCH FOUNDATION
“She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump administration.

In December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.

“Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” asked Heartland in a digital video. Later this week, Naomi is set to make her American debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering just outside Washington of right-leaning activists.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest to ever win the honor.

The teenager has called on the nations of the world to cut their total carbon output by at least half over the next decade, saying that if they don’t, “then there will be horrible consequences.”

“I want you to panic,” she told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

Naomi, for her part, argues that these predictions of dire consequences are exaggerated. In a video posted on Heartland’s website, she gazes into the camera and says, “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”

Graham Brookie directs the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an arm of the nonprofit Atlantic Council that works to identify and expose disinformation. While the campaign “is not outright disinformation,” Brookie said in an email, it “does bear resemblance to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the whole thing.”

Naomi said her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking. More recently, she said that watching young people joining weekly “Fridays For Future” protests inspired by Greta helped spur her opposition to climate change activism.

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.

“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements. A slew of peer-reviewed reports, from scientific bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere, have concluded that greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century, producing a range of devastating effects from massive marine die-offs in South America to severe wildfires in Australia and sinking ground in the Arctic.

In addition to climate change, Naomi echoes far-right skepticism about feminism and immigration. The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Her path to Heartland began in November with a speech at EIKE, a Munich think tank whose vice president is a prominent AfD politician. By then, Naomi was already active on YouTube, producing videos on topics ranging from migration to feminism to climate change. In the audience was Heartland’s Taylor. He said he immediately recognized her potential and approached her about working with Heartland.

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.

In December, during the Madrid climate conference, two undercover staffers from the nonprofit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV approached Taylor and claimed to work for a wealthy donor from the auto industry who wanted to give Heartland a half-million euros. Taylor took the bait, and followed up with a three-page proposal outlining a campaign to push back against German efforts to regulate emissions.

“These restrictive environmental programs are largely unnecessary,” says the document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post. “Worse, other nations — including the United States and European Union nations — are increasingly being influenced by unwise German policy.”

The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

“Funding for our Germany Environmental Issues project will enable Heartland to provide Naomi with the equipment and the sources she needs to present a series of effective videos calling attention to the negative impacts of overreaching environmental regulations,” the proposal says.

CORRECTIV aired its report on Heartland earlier this month on German TV. Taylor dismissed the report, saying, “Heck, I would have spoken with them if they told us who they were, and the answers would have been pretty much the same.”

The report included secretly filmed footage of Naomi, who struck back with her own video response. Invoking Greta, she said, “To the media, I have a few last words: How dare you?"

Despite echoes of Greta’s style, Naomi has objected to the comparison.

“The reason I don’t like the term anti-Greta is that it suggests I myself am an indoctrinated puppet, I guess, for the other side,” she says in one video. Asked if she meant that as a criticism of Greta, Naomi says: “That sounds kind of mean, actually.” She added: “I don’t want to shame her in any way.”

Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.

“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

PATHETIC PARODY
Still, Naomi has a long climb to reach the level of global attention lavished on Greta. While Greta measures her social media following in the millions, Naomi counts slightly under 50,000 YouTube subscribers.

Through her spokespeople, Greta declined to comment.

The multimillion-dollar Christian group attacking LGBTQ+ rights

LGBT rights

Alliance Defending Freedom reportedly got $55m in donations in 2018 and has lawyers worldwide working against LGBTQ+ people

Jessica Glenza in New York
@JessicaGlenza

Fri 21 Feb 2020 07.20 GMTLast modified on Fri 21 Feb 2020 07.40 GMT

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A group supporting three girls suing to block a Connecticut policy that allows trans athletes to compete in girls sports, on 12 February 2020 in Hartford. Photograph: Pat Eaton-Robb/AP

A group of about two dozen people, mostly women, stood on the steps of the Connecticut capitol on a New England winter day with signs reading “Protect Women’s Sports” and “#FairPlay”.

In front stood Christiana Holcomb, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal group representing three cis teen girls in a lawsuit filed this month demanding two transgender teen girls be barred from competing in the female high school sports division.

“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field and the Connecticut policy now allows males to compete in the girls category if they identify as female,” Holcomb later told the Guardian. “No amount of hormone therapy can ever fully undo those physiological advantages.”

But the lawsuit is just one arrow in ADF’s quiver, a conservative Christian powerhouse working internationally to remake laws governing family, sex and marriage in a vision which “keeps the doors open for the Gospel”.

ADF, which reportedly received more than $55m in contributions in 2018, claims to have more than 3,400 affiliated attorneys and judges worldwide. In the 25 years since it was founded, it has brought 10 cases before the US supreme court, including some of the most consequential cases of the last decade on contraceptive and gay rights.

ADF is, “an aggressive, strategic legal group that is about Christian supremacy and hegemony in the US and in the world,” said Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates. “It’s the world under God’s law.”

The group’s work against LGBTQ+ people has led experts on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center to label them a hate group. ADF rejects that label.

One of its most famous recent cases was of a baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The group argued baking was his form of artistic expression, and won. In another, the group successfully argued the arts and crafts company Hobby Lobby should not be required to pay for birth control included in private insurance plans, because of the owner’s Christian faith.

ADF counts the former Trump-appointed US attorney general Jeff Sessions as an ally, and its founders are a who’s-who list of opponents of gay rights. And this American group is busy abroad too.

As recently as last month, ADF was working actively with students in the United Kingdom, defending anti-abortion protesters whose graphic signs concerned the University of Cardiff.

ADF defended Baker Jack Phillips, who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Photograph: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

In the last decade, ADF attorneys argued in favor of state-sanctioned sterilization for trans people at the European Court of Human Rights. Their brief argued, “equal dignity does not mean that every sexual orientation warrants equal respect”.

In Belize, the group sided with another organization pushing to criminalize gay sex. In India, the executive director applauded a supreme court decision ruling gay sex illegal (that was struck down in 2018). In Romania, ADF pushed for a referendum to oppose same-sex civil unions. In Jamaica, ADF attorneys defended anti-sodomy laws.

Meanwhile, in US states, the group has worked to craft legislation and defend “religious freedom” laws. These laws often give secular, public-facing businesses the right to refuse customers or perform services.

Now, in the years since public sentiment and the law has swung in favor of same-sex marriage, groups who once opposed legal unions have worked on to curtail trans rights. Many have honed in on trans girls in particular, and alleged dangers they cause to cis women.

People who have transitioned often have gender dysphoria, a recognized medical condition in which sex assigned at birth is incongruant with a person’s gender identity. ADF’s Connecticut lawsuit claims three cis female high school runners are being unfairly outcompeted by two trans sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood.

“The essence of this argument is if you protect transgender people, this violates the rights of other people,” said Chase Strangio, deputy director for trans justice at the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is representing the trans girls named in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks to establish a chromosomal standard for girls’ high school sports – that only people with XX chromosomes should be able to compete, Strangio said.

“The starting premise is that trans girls are not girls, and the second premise is that boys are always better, stronger, faster than girls,” said Strangio.

Yearwood and Miller issued statements vehemently defending their right to run in girls’ events. “I have faced discrimination in every aspect of my life and I no longer want to remain silent,” Miller said. “I am a girl and I am a runner.”

“Connecticut has had plenty of trans athletes who are good or fine or bad,” said Strangio. “What’s rare is having two examples of transgender girls who are good – and that’s what bothers people.”

The ADF was founded in 1995 by a who’s who of white, anti-gay, Christian men. Among them are men like D James Kennedy, the late pastor of a Florida megachurch who played a critical role in the rise of conservative Christianity in the US.

The group’s “800lb gorilla”, in Clarkson’s words, is James Dobson. His large and influential organization Focus on the Family has opposed same-sex marriage for decades. Fellow founder Alan Sears wrote the 2003 book: The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.

ADF’s legal work has earned the group glowing reviews from friendly media, such as Fox News, where host Laura Ingraham recently included Holcomb on her high-profile show.

But ADF’s Connecticut lawsuit is, in part, an acknowledgement that earlier tactics have failed.

Just a few years ago, Christian legal groups were pushing “bathroom bills” across the country. The laws would have banned trans people from using the public toilet of their choice, arguing that woman would be in danger from other trans women. There is no evidence to support the claim.

Bathroom bill referendums failed in Massachusetts, California and Alaska, and legislative efforts tanked in many more, including conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas. In place of the bathroom bills, ADF’s new Connecticut lawsuit has put faces and names to those who it alleges are victimized by inclusive policies.

Demonstrators react to hearing the supreme court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby birth control case in 2014. ADF successfully argued the store should not be required to pay for birth control included in private insurance plans. Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

Other groups, such as the American Principles Project, are testing the electoral success of this message in states like Kentucky. The group is running adverts which argue trans girls will destroy women’s sports, in an effort to re-elect the Republican incumbent governor.

The group’s president, Frank Cannon, told the New York Times last year that polling showed that messaging emphasizing sports, especially children in sports, was more likely to move the needle with voters. It gives people “the idea that you are taking something away from people. And that’s where they don’t like it”.

One of the three cis runners at the center of the lawsuit, Chelsea Mitchell, recently won against Miller in a 55m race. So far, ADF has refused to take a position on trans men competing in cis men’s sports.

“I’m not going to take a position on that at this point,” said Holcomb said. “What we are really clear on, is it not fair for males to compete in the female category.”

The largest-ever study of how trans athletes perform after transitioning is still being conducted in the UK, but only includes 20 people.

“Until we have several of these larger-scale studies done worldwide, it’s hard to be truly definitive on anything,” the medical physicist Joanna Harper told the CBC. Harper is a trans woman, a long-distance runner and an advisor to the International Olympic Committee. She said she saw her own performance drop off after hormone therapy, and that such could be the case with other trans athletes.

No openly trans person has ever competed in the Olympics, although it has been allowed since 2004, under guidelines laying out how much testosterone an athlete can have in their body. But that rule too is being challenged – not by a trans athlete or a Christian group, but by a South African intersex running star. Intersex people are born with anatomy that doesn’t easily fall into male or female.

“We get down to micro-details of this abortion case or that LGBTQ+ case or prayer in the schools, but those are details,” Clarkson said. “It may use nationalist ideas when you’re working within a specific culture and legal code, but their religious and political vision is global, and needs to be understood in that context.”

Justice, Order and Anarchy:
The International Political Theory Of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

W. A. L. Prichard

Doctoral Thesis
Submitted in Partial Fulfilment
of the Requirements for the
Award of Doctor of Philosophy
of Loughborough University
3rd April 2008
© by W. A. L. Prichard, 2008

The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: “Tout est Bien”
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affereuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces members dispersés;
Direz-vous, C’est l’effet des éternelles lois
Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?
Non, ne présentez plus à mon coeur agité
Ces immuables lois de la necéssité,
Cette chaîne des corps, des esprits, et des mondes
O rêves de savants! O chimères profondes!
Dieu tient en main la chaîne, et n’est point enchaîné;
Par son choix bienfaisant tout est déterminé,
Il est libre, il est juste, il n’est point implacable.
Pourquoi donc suffrons-nous sous un maître équitable?

The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
Useless eternal pains maintenance!
Deceived Philosophers Who Shout: “Everything is Good”
Run, contemplate these hideous ruins,
These debris, these shreds, these unhappy ashes,
These women, these children huddled together,
Under these broken marbles these dispersed members;
You say, It’s the effect of the eternal laws
Who of a free and good God requires choice?
No, no longer present to my restless heart
These immutable laws of necessity,
This chain of bodies, minds, and worlds
O dreams of scholars! O deep dreams!
God holds the chain in his hand, and is not chained;
By his beneficent choice everything is determined,
He is free, he is just, he is not implacable.
Why then will we suffice under a fair master?

Abstract

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist PierreJoseph Proudhon’s writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality.

The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon’s voluminous writings on international
politics. These texts have been relatively marginalised in the broader secondary literature
on Proudhon’s thinking, and the thesis seeks to correct this important lacuna.
In International Relations (IR), the academic discipline to which this thesis will make its
most obvious original contribution, Proudhon’s writings on war and peace have been
almost completely ignored.

By providing an anarchist approach to world politics, the thesis will also contribute to IR’s historiographical and critical theoretical literature.

The second claim to originality lies in using these writings and the context from which they
emerged to tell a story about the evolution of the nineteenth century, the origins of the
twentieth century and provide possible ways of thinking beyond the twenty first.

The thesis employs a contextualist methodology that works in four ways.

First, I have contextualised Proudhon’s thought geo-politically, in relation to the dynamics of the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe.

Secondly, I have sought to understand Proudhon’s ideas against the backdrop of the evolution of the French nation state in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Third, I have shown how Proudhon’s thought emerges out of the dominant intellectual currents of his day – ideas that range from the inspiration for the activism of Fourierist and Saint-Simonian feminists, to the epochal influence of Rousseau and Kant.

Finally, I argue that Proudhon’s thinking on world politics needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of his own thinking after Napoleon III’s coup d’état of the 2nd of December 1851.

I will show that Proudhon’s mature anarchism, his mutualist federalism, was an engaged response to each of these social and intellectual contexts. I will argue that his critiques of these processes, and their intellectual champions, have been given an added poignancy given that he campaigned in large part against those very processes that culminated in two world wars.

Keywords: Anarchism, Balance of Power, Federalism, International Relations,
International Political Theory, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Political Theory, Mutualism,
Nineteenth-Century France

INTRODUCTION (EXCERPT)

IR Theory
Writing in the The Times Literary Supplement, soon after the end of the Second World
War, E. H. Carr claimed that Proudhon was “one of the first crank financial reformers”,
an “isolated eccentric” out of touch with his time.

Furthermore, he argued, Proudhon’s vision of “a world of independent self-assertive individuals” was doomed to besubsumed by the forces of modern nationalism and his approach was also full of “self -contradictions”.

For example, Carr casts Proudhon as an individualist and suggests that
this clashes with his theory of federalism. He thought Proudhon something of a
chauvinist, and that this contradicted his critique of everyone else’s nationalism.
Perhaps most importantly Carr also implied that Proudhon’s two-volume La Guerre et la Paix, the central text of this thesis, could be dismissed “as a passing aberration” or a “confusion of thought”. It was a “panegyric on war” that included a “disconcerting streak of self assertive nationalism”.

This evaluation doubtless goes some way towards explaining why Carr agreed with J. Selwyn Schapiro that Proudhon was a “progenitor of Hitlerism”.

This is quite a claim, but Schapiro goes even further than this. He argues that
Proudhon’s followers have in fact mistakenly seen Proudhon as an anarchist; Schapiro
claims he was, in fact, a virulent anti-Semite and a “harbinger of Fascism”,
an argument that Carr believes he “depicts […] with skill and plausibility.”

As the thesis will show, both Carr and Schapiro’s accounts of Proudhon’s thought are completely inaccurate.

Hans Morgenthau, the second ‘father’ of IR theory, gives us insight into the prevalence of
two further positions on Proudhon’s thought in the immediate post-war period. The first
is the argument that Proudhon was a liberal individualist and supporter of laissez faire
capitalism. Morgenthau believed that Proudhon, like his contemporaries Cobden and
Bright, was “convinced that the removal of trade barriers was the only condition for the
establishment of permanent harmony among nations, and might even lead to the
disappearance of international politics altogether.” Nineteenth-century nationalism and
power politics sounded the death knell of Cobden and Bright’s liberal internationalism, as
I will discuss in chapters one and two. However, as I will show in chapters one, five and
six, this argument is simply not applicable to Proudhon’s thought.

But perhaps even more important is Morgenthau’s claim that “Proudhon was among the
first to glorify the blessings of science in the international field.” The historical
significance of Proudhon’s thought in this area was subsequently ignored by all who
followed Morgenthau, because for Morgenthau what this actually meant was that
Proudhon was thus guilty of a second naïveté – scientism. Morgenthau’s position on
science in its application to matters of world politics is well known. He argued against
neo-Kantian “scientific utopians” who, he argued, believed that if human behaviour could
be brought into line with universal reason, the harmony that would emerge would be
forceful enough to illustrate the stupidity of the “atavism of power politics”. Proudhon,
it is implied, was one of the first to suggest such nonsense, and Morgenthau directs the
reader to Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix in a footnote as evidence of this. Both Carr
and Morgenthau were the fathers of Realism as an approach to international relations, and
their casting of all who came before them as idealists is perhaps the founding myth of
academic IR. For both, neo-Kantian liberalism was the cause of the inter-war crisis and
the failure of IR to establish itself as a coherent discipline. Placing Proudhon in this neoKantian tradition was a discursive strategy that is simply not warranted by the evidence.
As I will show in chapters three and four, by unpacking Proudhon’s critique of Kant,
Morgenthau was also simply wrong.

Carr and Morgenthau cannot be held solely responsible for Proudhon’s absence from the
canon of IR theory, and I have not come across any evidence to suggest that others have
repeated their views in print. Nevertheless, their influence in the formation of IR as a
post-war academic discipline is incontestable,15 and yet it is only very recently that their
ideas have begun to be re-examined. Both Carr and Morgenthau cast nearly all who came
before them as utopians or idealists. The hegemony of realism in post-war debates about
IR theory, particularly its explicit statism, helps explain why Proudhon’s thought might
be seen to be antithetical to a realist-dominated IR. A return to Proudhon’s thought is
perhaps only possible now that this hegemony has begun to be eroded by a plethora of
critical and post-statist approaches to IR theory. I return to this literature below.

Perhaps the best work to engage with Proudhon’s international thought is Madalene
Amoudruz’ 1945 text Proudhon et l’Europe.
It provides a good historical contextualisation of his thought. Amoudruz shows that what transpired in the totalitarian century after Proudhon’s death was the “inverse” of what he had argued and campaigned for. Nevertheless, Proudhon is deliberately painted as simply an astute journalist with the common sense of the “petit paysanne”. This is unfortunate. What we ultimately take from Amoudruz is that Proudhon’s thought simply does not contain any of the deeper and more penetrating philosophical insights of his more illustrious contemporaries. This lack of intellectual contextualisation, also a flaw in Hoffman’s work, has contributed to the myth of Proudhon’s intellectual and political provincialism, a view reinforced by E. H. Carr who claimed that Amoudruz’ work is indeed “[m]ore judicial” than most. I will rectify this in this thesis by contextualising Proudhon’s thought within the dominant intellectual currents of his day, and by so doing show how deeply involved in these
debates he actually was.

The final work of political and social history to note is Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (1984). This work is excellent.
As the title suggests, Vincent locates Proudhon within the development of the French
republican movement and ties his thought to the work of Rousseau and Montesquieu
amongst others. While generally comprehensive, the work does not engage with
Proudhon’s international political theory or his underlying theory of justice to any
significant degree. For example, there is only one index reference to La Guerre et la
Paix, and Vincent admits that he does not engage with De la Justice, Proudhon’s
unquestioned magnum opus and the inspiration for La Guerre et la Paix, “in any
detail”. Vincent’s aims are more to tie his early life, context and writings to his work on
federalism. This thesis will fill an important gap in between these two periods.

What is so surprising is that this contemporary move in IR theory is a remarkable and
unconscious repetition of the arguments Proudhon made all those years ago. While
Proudhon’s arguments were made in radically different times, they were made for the
much the same reasons. Proudhon questioned and reformulated the newly devised
sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, the teleological Kantian philosophy of history,
the claims about the immutability of the social order espoused by the religious right, and
the ahistorical nationalist statism of Rousseau. Proudhon also criticised the Jacobin
communism of Louis Blanc, the providentialism of the liberal Saint-Simonian
technocrats, and the capitalist doctrines of laissez-faire. By standing fast to a commitment
to individual and group autonomy, a sociological and moral ontology, anti-dogmatism in
social theory and an openness in historical analysis, he broke decisively with each of
these authors – in particular in relation to their statism – and in so doing devised
anarchism as an alternative political paradigm.

As Alexander Herzen, one of the most prominent Russian revolutionaries of the mid to
late nineteenth century, observed at the time: “Proudhon is the first of a new set of
thinkers. His work marks a transition period, not only in the history of socialism, but also
in the history of French logic.” It will be argued that Proudhon’s thought was arguably
the first comprehensive break from the state-based, materialist and deterministic
paradigm that dominated modern social theory, particularly on the left, within fifty years
of his death. Indeed, it is against this past dominance that contemporary critical theory is
directed. As such, what needs to be explained is less how Proudhon might contribute to
contemporary IR theory but how and why IR theorists like Linklater are making
Proudhonist arguments and calling for a return to his ideas. Of course we cannot
address this issue before we have a full account of Proudhon’s arguments. Careful
research design is thus vital to substantiating the historical, analytical and political claims

this thesis makes.

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