Joy and nakedness at San Francisco’s Dyke March: Phyllis Christopher’s best photograph

‘The march is like our Christmas – the biggest night of the year, where women celebrate half naked and anything goes’

Shirtless statement … Dyke March, 1999, by Phyllis Christopher. 

Photograph: Phyllis Christopher

Interview by Edward Siddons
Wed 12 Jan 2022 

In San Francisco, the night before the annual Pride parade is reserved for the Dyke March, a celebration of lesbian life throughout the city. It was like our Christmas – the biggest night of the year – and half of us would be so hungover we wouldn’t make it to Pride the next day.

I remember getting a call from an editor at On Our Backs, a lesbian magazine run by women that billed itself as offering “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian”. It was a bedrock of the lesbian community – one of the few ways to communicate with one another, and to celebrate sex and educate each other about it at a time when Aids had brought so much devastation to queer communities. The editor wanted me to shoot a kiss-in, but the tone of her voice sounded almost guilty – like she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask me to work on the biggest party night of the year. But to me, it was the most fun I could imagine

Lesbians from all over the country, many of whom I knew, had gathered in the park, mingling and chatting to whoever came along – gay, straight, whatever gender. But when the Dyke March began, the crowds cleared and the Dykes on Bikes took the lead, with the rest of us forming a column behind.

I’ve always found something beautiful about that moment: people stepping aside to give lesbians their space, to celebrate and applaud them. Many of the women would march shirtless as a gesture of their freedom. It was a time for lesbians to assert themselves in the public sphere, a moment of safety and joy.
It was a way of celebrating sex in the face of the death wrought by Aids – and opposing those who blamed us for it

The rules of the Dyke March were pretty much “anything goes as long as it’s fun”. Women were celebrating being half naked, feeling safe and supported by everyone. There were no protesters because there were simply too many queer people in San Francisco. It was a moment of wild abandon, marching through the streets, climbing bus stops, on top of cars, hanging out of windows.

This shot was taken on 18th Street in the Castro, one of the centres of queer life in San Francisco. Anyone who had an apartment on the march route would take full advantage of their windows. Every year, the inhabitants of houses would lean out of the windows, often with signs, screaming for the crowd and the crowd would scream back.

More than 20 years later, this image still hits me in my gut: I feel the power in it. It encapsulates a kind of joy that, at the time, was absolutely necessary. It was a way of celebrating sex in the face of the death wrought by Aids, and in opposition to voices on the right who blamed us for the epidemic. We couldn’t marry and job security was still uneven across the US for queer people. We still felt like outlaws

In the 1980s, there was a lot of discussion among feminists about the importance of sex. Some took a strident line – that photographing sex was offensive, even violent. While we owe everything to lesbian feminists of that era – they paved the way in so many respects – our generation wanted something different. We were pro kink, pro sex, and pro pornography. Sex meant a lot to us; we weren’t just going to let it go. It was a kind of political hedonism.

It wasn’t separatist by any means but the world we created in San Francisco felt like a beautiful laboratory

There have been few times in history where women run the camera, the press and the ecosystem of publishing. But the world we created in San Francisco felt like a beautiful laboratory. It wasn’t separatist by any means – we didn’t seclude ourselves from men and non-lesbians – but we were making work for each other. I think that’s evident in these images.

Publishing my work from that time in book form has been a dream of mine. I photographed that period so intensively: it told such a story of that community, and I didn’t want it to get lost. Photographs can get destroyed, ruined or lost, and the relative scarcity of lesbian publications means that, often, this work is absent from our collective archives. I’m so glad this survived.

I have immense respect for the women who let me photograph them. It was a real political statement. But there was a feeling that it was also essential to let other gay women know that they were not alone. There’s always this stereotype of the lesbian as angry. Often, we had reason to be. But sometimes, we were too busy having a great time.

Phyllis Christopher. 

Photograph: Kate Sweeney
Phyllis Christopher’s CV

Born: Buffalo, New York, 1963
Trained: State University of New York at Buffalo.
Influences: Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Honey Lee Cottrell, Jessica Tanzer, Chloe Atkins, Leon Mostovoy, Mark Chester and Jill Posener.
High point: Getting my book, Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 published this year.

Low point: Making the switch from working in a darkroom to the digital world. I missed the magic and chemistry of revelation under the red lights.

Top tip: “Follow your bliss – your heart always knows the answer.”

An exhibition of Phyllis Christopher’s work is at the Baltic, Gateshead, until 20 March. Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 is out now (£24).

HAPPY CARNIVORES
The seaweed-eating sheep that may help us to climate-friendly meat

By Vicky Allan

Senior features writer

HERALD SCOTLAND

11th January

The two-metre-high and 12-mile-long wall circling North Ronaldsay is probably the largest such continuous dry-stone dyke in the world, its purpose being to keep a unique breed of sheep out. The construction is a barrier, nearly two centuries old, that prevents the North Ronaldsay flock from reaching the grass that feeds the cattle, and keeps them to the foreshore, where they forage on a diet of seaweed.

The mutton from these small sheep is considered a gastronomic delicacy, served to the Queen at her Diamond Jubilee, and described as “gamey” in flavour. But also, more recently, this rare breed has drawn global attention because it is believed that they might provide clues for how to rear low methane-producing meat.

There has been much hype in recent years about the possibility that the introduction of seaweed to recent feeds might help reduce emissions of the methane, a greenhouse gas which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere. One study at the University of California found sprinkling 85g of seaweed a day into a cow's feed cut methane production by more than 80 percent. This asparagopsis seaweed produces a compound which inhibits the enzyme in the gut which enables formation of methane.

READ MORE: A cry for kelp. Why Scotland's green future could be blue

Methane is burped, and farted, out into the atmosphere by cattle and sheep. The average cow produces 160 to 320 litres of methane every day, the average sheep around 30 litres. We do not yet know the average daily emissions for the North Ronaldsay sheep.

The James Hutton Institute, however, has been researching what these pedigree sheep tell us about a seaweed diet for well over a decade, and has collaborated with Davidsons Animal Feeds, to investigate whether seaweed supplements might work to reduce methane emissions in other sheep and cattle.

Meanwhile, rearing sheep on North Ronaldsay, remains a practice unlike sheep farming anywhere else. A key figure on the island is the sheep dyke warden, whose job it is to maintain the wall. This is crucial, because any break in the wall, could lead to sheep getting through, not only eating grass reserved for cattle, but also impacting on their own health – since the sheep are now highly adapted to their seaweed diet. Long term exposure to the grass is bad for them, as their digestive systems have changed over time and they are now intolerant to the high copper it contains. What fascinates many scientists is the way their digestive systems have adapted, and in particular the way they are able to digest the distinct sugars present in brown seaweeds.

The lives of North Ronaldsay sheep are unlike those of any others. Instead of grazing in the day, and ruminating at night, they forage according to the tides, and, interestingly, it’s in the winter, when gales pile the seaweed high on the shore, when sheep eat best. Distinct in so many ways, the flock show show we may find answers for the future in old and very local practices; why, in this frequently monocultural world, they are so worth preserving.

HUMAN GUINEA PIG

Why pig-to-human heart transplant is for now only a last resort

Analysis: As doctors monitor world’s first human recipient of pig heart, safety and ethical concerns remain

Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center transplanted a heart from a pig into 57-year-old David Bennett. 

Photograph: University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM)/EPA

Ian Sample 

Science editor
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 11 Jan 2022

The world’s first transplant of a genetically altered pig heart into an ailing human is a landmark for medical science, but the operation, and the approach more broadly, raise substantial safety and ethical concerns.

Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center spent eight hours on Friday evening transplanting the heart from the pig into 57-year-old David Bennett, who had been in hospital for more than a month with terminal heart failure.

It was an exceptional procedure. Doctors considered Bennett to be facing near-certain death and deemed him too ill to qualify for a routine human heart transplant. As a last resort, the medical team sought emergency authorisation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to transplant a heart from a genetically altered pig.

The heart came from a the pig created by Revivicor, a spin-out from PPL Therapeutics, the UK company that created Dolly the Sheep in 1996. Now under US ownership, Revivicor’s pigs are engineered to avoid immune rejection. Among the genetic alterations made are tweaks that remove a sugar molecule from the tissues that provokes organ rejection. The FDA approved the operation, along with the team’s proposal to use an experimental drug to prevent Bennett’s body from rejecting the organ.

Dr Bartley Griffith with David Bennett , the world’s first human recipient of a pig heart.

 Photograph: Bartley Griffith/AP

On Monday, doctors at the hospital said Bennett was awake and breathing on his own, but it was too soon to call the operation a success. Doctors are waiting to see how Bennett fares in the coming days, weeks and hopefully months.

The prospect of harvesting organs from animals to save human lives has a long and chequered history. Advocates see the approach as a way to slash waiting lists for desperately ill patients, while animal rights activists see it as dangerous and ethically abhorrent. In the 1960s, US doctors transplanted chimp kidneys into more than a dozen patients, all but one of whom died within weeks. In the 1980s, a premature baby in California received a baboon heart but died three weeks later.


Maryland doctors transplant pig’s heart into human patient in medical first

The main risk is immune rejection: even with organs from human donors, recipients need constant immunosuppression to prevent their bodies from attacking the transplants. While Revivicor’s pig heart is designed to be less prone to immune rejection than standard animal organs, it is unclear how well it will be tolerated by the body. Because the organ comes from another species, Bennett will need more potent immunosuppression than usual, which comes with its own medical risks.

Recent work on such donor animals has focused on pigs because, although they have different immune systems to humans, the animals’ organs are very similar. While much of the effort has been directed at making pig organs invisible to the human immune system, it is far from the only challenge. In the 1990s, scientists all but abandoned their work on donor pigs when they realised that retroviruses lurking in the animals’ DNA could potentially infect human cells. That raised the worrying prospect of transplanted organs spreading infection to the vulnerable patients who received them.

Research has been under way to overcome the problem, by taking genome editing to another level. After tweaking pig DNA to remove molecules that trigger immune rejection, scientists have made precision alterations that remove dozens of retroviruses from pig tissues in the hope the organs will be safer when they are eventually transplanted.

How well animal organs work will be for clinical trials to decide, rather than one-off operations. Many biotech companies are moving cautiously, setting up trials to check whether the organs are safe and effective, first in other animals and then in humans. For those with failing organs, the hope for now remains with the generosity of human donors.

ANTI-ROMA POGROM

The UK is heading towards authoritarianism: just look at this attack on a minority

The policing bill deliberately targets Roma, Gypsy and Traveller people, criminalising them if they move – and if they stop

Gypsy, Roma and Travellers protest against the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, London, 7 July 2021. Photograph: James Veysey/Rex/Shutterstock

George Monbiot
Wed 12 Jan 2022 

At last, we are waking up to the astonishingly oppressive measures in the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, intended to criminalise effective protest. At last, there has been some coverage in the media, though still far too little. The Labour party is finally feeling some heat, and may find itself obliged to stop appeasing the Daily Mail and vote against the government’s brutal amendments in the House of Lords next week.

But as we focus on this threat, we’re in danger of forgetting something else buried in this monstrous bill. It’s the provision that turns trespass from a civil into a criminal offence, allowing the police to arrest people who are Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (GRT) and confiscate their homes, if they stop in places that have not been designated for them. Under the proposed law, any adult member of the group can be imprisoned for up to three months. Given that authorised sites and stopping places cannot accommodate the GRT people who need them, this is a deliberate attack on a vulnerable minority.

Put these elements together – the curtailment of protest and the persecution of a minority, alongside blatant corruption and barefaced lies, the bypassing of parliament and the new power in the nationality and borders bill enabling the government arbitrarily to remove people’s citizenship – and you see the makings of an authoritarian state. These measures look horribly familiar to anyone cognisant of 20th-century European history. But they also have deep roots in Britain’s peculiar brutalities.

The persecution of mobile people goes back to the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers, which ruled that those deemed to be “vagrants” could be whipped or branded with hot irons. Laws passed in the 16th century decreed that “rogues”, “vagabonds” and other “masterless men” could have their ears sliced in two or bored with a hot poker. If they still failed to return to their own parish (regardless of whether they had one), they could be hanged. A 1554 statute enabled anyone calling themselves “Aegyptians” (Gypsies) to be summarily killed.

Some of the brutal, pre-democratic legislation remains in force in England and Wales today. The 1824 Vagrancy Act is used by the police to arrest rough sleepers, still defined as “rogues and vagabonds”. In 2020, 573 people were prosecuted under this act. Some members of parliament sought to use the police bill to repeal this archaic law, but in November the government rejected their amendments.

Now homeless people find themselves in an even worse position. Certain councils, seeking to interpret confusing government rules, have decided that they will offer housing support only to verified rough sleepers. They have advised homeless people to start sleeping on the streets, so they can be picked up by outreach teams, who will then try to find accommodation for them. Of course, they might first be picked up by the police, whereupon they can be prosecuted under the Vagrancy Act. If they try to house themselves, by occupying empty buildings, they can be prosecuted for that as well, because David Cameron’s government turned squatting from a civil into a criminal offence.

Similarly, people who are Gypsies, Roma and Travellers have been deprived of places where they can lawfully stop, and then punished for the absence of provision. According to a study by the Community Architecture Group, between 1986 and 1993 roughly two-thirds of traditional Travellers’ sites, some of which had been used for thousands of years, were blocked and closed. Then, in 1994, John Major’s Criminal Justice Act granted the police new powers against GRT people stopping without authorisation. With a cruel and perverse twist, the same act repealed the duty of local government to provide authorised sites, and removed the grant aid funding these sites. Partly as a result, a recent study by the group Friends, Families and Travellers found that, of the 68 local authorities they surveyed, only eight had met their own identified need for Gypsy and Traveller pitches. Though there is a long waiting list of GRT households seeking authorised sites and stopping places, official pitches have declined by 8% in the past 10 years.

Now the new bill would enable the police to confiscate people’s vehicles (in other words their homes) on the mere suspicion of trespass. When their homes have been seized and their parents arrested, GRT children are likely to be taken into care. The police bill would deprive this minority of everything: homes, livelihoods, identity, culture, even their families.

And, like the homeless people trapped between the Vagrancy Act and the housing qualification, it would put people who are Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in an impossible position. To apply for an official pitch, you must demonstrate “proof of travelling”. But if you don’t have access to official pitches, travelling will put you outside the new law. In other words, it is not a particular behaviour that is being criminalised. It is the minority itself.

The new authoritarianism meshes with a very old one, that harks back to an imagined world in which the peasants could be neatly divided into villeins (good) and vagrants (bad), where everyone knew their place, geographically and socially. Of course, the demonisation of mobile people, whether Roma or asylum seekers, does not extend to the government ministers and newspaper editors who might shift between their pads in London and their second homes in Cornwall or Tuscany. It’s about the rich controlling the poor, as if democracy had never happened.


George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

POSTMODERN EUGENICS

‘More people is the last thing this planet needs’: the men getting vasectomies to save the world

Illustration: Till Lauer/The Guardian

With the climate crisis becoming ever more urgent, a growing number of young, childless men are t Making the drastic decision of being sterilised for environmental reasons


Simon Usborne

The Guardian
Wed 12 Jan 2022


When Lloyd Williamson lay on his back in a GP’s clinic late last November, it was for the surgical culmination of years of soul searching. Williamson, who is 30 and from Essex, remembers wanting a family as a child, but something changed in his early 20s. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse,” he says, two weeks after his vasectomy.

Williamson was largely motivated to sterilise himself by the climate crisis. Given the link between fossil-fuelled economic growth and population growth, he believes that having fewer children is one thing individuals can do to help. “We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation, because it’s not fair on them,” he says.

Williamson, who works as a data support officer for Essex county council (he stood unsuccessfully as a Green party councillor in Chelmsford in 2019), says he knows of other young, childless men who are thinking of doing the same thing. While reliable data on vasectomy numbers and motivations is scant, there is growing evidence to suggest that, all over the world, men without children are taking direct action.

Nick Demediuk, an Australian GP and one of the world’s most prolific vasectomy clinicians, says most of his patients are fathers over the age of 35. But the doctor, who has completed more than 40,000 procedures since 1981, now estimates that about 200 of the 4,000 patients his clinic sees each year are younger men without kids. About 130 of them say they are doing it for the planet.

We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation,                                    because it’s not fair on them 

Lloyd Williamson

“In the old days, it was purely lifestyle,” Demediuk says of his younger, childless patients. “They wanted to travel the world, work hard and not be stuck with a kid. And that has shifted, probably over the past three or four years, to where the environment is the dominant reason.”

It should not be surprising that a generation with increased awareness of the climate emergency is asking big questions about traditional family structures. In 2019, the then 29-year-old US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held back tears as she gave a speech about the climate emergency. “I speak to you as a human being, a woman whose dreams of motherhood now taste bittersweet because of what I know about our children’s future,” she told a summit of mayors in Copenhagen. “Our actions are responsible for bringing their most dire possibilities into focus.

A study in 2017 said the single most effective action an individual could take in terms of helping the planet was having one fewer child; this would save more than 25 times the emissions of the next biggest undertakings (living without a car and avoiding long-haul flights). Prince Harry cited the climate when he revealed in a 2019 interview with Vogue that he would not be having more than two children.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an associate professor of environmental studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, is the author of a forthcoming book about “eco-reproductive” choice. Last year, he carried out a detailed survey of 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were worried about the climate crisis. Of these, 96% worried that their children would struggle to thrive in or even survive the worst-case climate scenarios, while 60% were concerned about the carbon footprint of their potential offspring.

Schneider-Mayerson has not explored the rise of the climate vasectomy. It may still be a niche choice, often informed by other factors, including a broader ambivalence about raising children. But it raises ethical and political questions, including about controversial “overpopulation” ideologies, as well as the practical consequences of generationally imbalanced societies. Apart from anything, Schneider-Mayerson says, “it’s sad that people are being forced to factor climate change into this decision”.

For Nate Miller (not his real name), a 36-year-old from Colorado, the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, a climate science denier, was the clincher. “I made an appointment to get a vasectomy later that week,” he says. Like Williamson, Miller, who works for an environmental charity, had grown up balancing an assumption that he would have kids with a deepening environmental conscience. “We’re driving ecosystems out of balance and causing mass extinction of countless species,” he says. “I think more people is the very last thing this planet needs.”

Other forms of contraception had worked for Miller and his long-term partner, but getting a vasectomy felt like a definitive act. They found a urologist, who booked in Miller after checking he was certain of his decision. Miller also wanted to be reassured, given the widely held view that the procedure is bloody, painful and somehow emasculating.

This perception is outdated, Demediuk says. The operation, which used to be more invasive and was carried out under general anaesthetic, is now typically bloodless; there is no scalpel involved. Instead, the scrotum is punctured under local anaesthetic with a tiny pair of forceps, creating a hole just big enough for the vasa deferentia – the two sperm-carrying tubes – to be drawn into the open air. The tubes are cut, sealed and popped back in. Demediuk says the hole rarely requires a dressing, much less a stitch. The process takes 15 minutes and is more than 99% effective. Miller and Williamson say they were back to normal in days.

 

Illustration: Till Lauer/The Guardian

Vasectomies address the gender imbalance that still accompanies the choice and practice of birth control. They come with less risk than more invasive and less reliable methods of female contraception, including sterilisation and the coil. Yet they can be hard to come by, especially for younger, childless men.

Williamson had thought about getting a vasectomy in his early 20s, but was put off by grisly stories he heard from older men who had had the procedure years ago. Williamson waited in vain for the still-elusive “male pill” until, at 25, he learned about advances in the vasectomy. He asked his GP if he could have one and was rebuffed.

While there are no laws on the age at which men in the UK can get a vasectomy, the NHS advises that they may be more likely to be accepted if they are older than 30 and have children. “Your GP can refuse to carry out the procedure … if they don’t believe it’s in your best interests,” says the guidance, which also warns that reversals are unreliable, with a success rate of 55% within 10 years and only 25% thereafter.

Williamson accepts that minds and circumstances can change, but he viewed the guidance as paternalistic. When he turned 30, he tried again. This time, his GP agreed, but said he would have to pay; the Mid Essex clinical commissioning group (CCG) – the GP-led body responsible for buying healthcare services in his area – withdrew funding for vasectomies in 2016 to save money. In an email, it says demand was low; it adds that vasectomies “can be accessed relatively easily without too much financial burden and there are freely available contraceptive methods for women”.

Mid Essex was one of nine CCGs that cut or considered cutting funding around the same time, drawing heavy criticism from family-planning charities. When I contact NHS England to establish how widely the procedure has been withdrawn, it says I will need to speak separately to all of England’s 106 CCGs. Access and waiting lists also vary in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Reversals are rarely covered by the NHS and cost thousands of pounds.

It’s about gender equity, family planning 

and more responsible masculinity

Jonathan Stack

Williamson’s GP referred him to David Acorn, a GP in Essex who runs a private vasectomy clinic, one of dozens across the UK. Acorn, who charges £360 for the procedure, says Williamson was the first patient he saw who explicitly cited the climate as a reason. But he says he is getting more inquiries from younger, childless men. “I’m particularly keen to make sure they fully understand the potential permanence of what they’re asking for,” he says.

Funding cuts may be part of the reason for an apparent decline in vasectomy numbers, but the privatisation of the procedure makes demand hard to track. According to NHS figures, there were almost 20,000 operations in 2010/11 and fewer than 4,500 in 2020/21. Whatever the true figure, family-planning groups are trying to rebrand “the snip” to tempt more men to share the burden of contraception.

There is hope that the climate crisis may burnish the vasectomy’s progressive image. In 2012, Jonathan Stack, a 64-year-old American film-maker, co-founded World Vasectomy Day, a campaign dedicated to tackling the stigma and myths surrounding the modern vasectomy. Stack had one himself after having three children. “It’s about gender equity, family planning and more responsible masculinity,” he tells me from his home in New York.

World Vasectomy Day is now an annual event and year-round programme that has worked with family-planning groups and public health bodies around the world. Clinicians, who are offered training in the latest no-scalpel technique, have performed almost 100,000 vasectomies as part of the campaign.

Four or five years ago, Stack began to notice growing demand among younger, childless men. “A lot of it has to do with a feeling of economic instability and a general sense of uncertainty in life,” he says. Nonetheless, when we speak, he is surprised by an unpublished campaign report he has just received from a project in Bolivia run jointly by World Vasectomy Day, Marie Stopes Bolivia and Université Laval in Canada.

Family-planning groups are trying to rebrand ‘the snip’ to tempt more men to share the burden of contraception.

Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

In November, four Bolivian physicians received training, part of which involved performing 127 supervised vasectomies. The average age of the patients was 31 and 25% did not have children. When all the men were asked why they were getting a vasectomy, 48% said they didn’t want more kids. What stood out for Stack, though, was that 28% of the men said they were motivated by climate concerns.

“Seeing this growing trend of people who don’t have enough faith in the future to believe having a child is a good decision is a little disturbing,” he says. Yet he adds: “What do we read in the news that would make us think this is a great time for kids?”

Stack is not alone in having a sense of unease about the push to curb procreation. Demographers have already predicted that the global population will enter a sustained decline by the end of this century, easing demand for resources but fuelling far-reaching shifts in society. A care crisis among older people is already playing out in many parts of the world. In May, China announced it will allow couples to have three children, after the shift of its notorious one‑child policy to two children in 2016 failed to increase the plummeting birthrate.


BirthStrikers: meet the women who refuse to have children until climate change ends

Stack is anxious to distance his campaign from theories of “overpopulation” and their longstanding overlaps with anti-immigration and often racist ideologies such as eugenics and eco-fascism. Paul Ehrlich’s landmark 1968 book The Population Bomb is credited with amplifying the environmental movement, but “populationism” has also been widely blamed for emboldening rightwing population-control and immigration policies.

In 2018, the British songwriter and activist Blythe Pepino co-founded the BirthStrike movement, for people who had decided to forgo children in response to the coming “climate breakdown and civilisation collapse”. The well-meaning group made a splash, but shut its website in 2020 because the name BirthStrike “did no end of harm in allowing us to be aligned with the ‘overpopulation’ topic”.

Another controversial moral philosophy, antinatalism, calls for the extinction of the human race by ending procreation. “I think there would be some concern if the climate movement becomes closely attached to antinatalism or an ethic that calculates the value of human life and carbon emissions,” says Schneider-Mayerson.

ADOPTION THE REAL OPTION

Vasectomies don’t necessarily preclude parenting. Rodney Pohl, 26, an IT technician, is planning to foster or adopt with his wife, Carrie, who watched Pohl’s vasectomy at the SimpleVas clinic near their home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last June. The couple were motivated partly by weather extremes and what they foretold. A recent polar vortex had taken out the power on their street for 10 days. “We had neighbours breastfeeding small infants and we were sharing generators to try to keep their fridge going, to not waste [expressed] milk,” Pohl says.

In Essex, Williamson, who is not in a long-term relationship, says he may also adopt one day. “There are more than enough children and young adults already out there who could have a loving home and family – it doesn’t have to be your own blood,” he says. Neither he nor Miller expect to regret their vasectomies. Pohl says he very occasionally feels pangs of broodiness. “But I quickly move on,” he says.

Williamson says he cried after his procedure, but with relief. “It was such a weight off my mind after having all that uncertainty about bringing someone into this world,” he says. He says he wishes that governments were doing more to legislate for the climate crisis, before sharing his thoughts about what is known as “bystander apathy”. “A lot of people are happy to point and say: ‘That’s wrong,’ or film it on their phone,” he says. “I look at the world and say: ‘That’s not right; I’m going to try to do something about it.’”

Biden gives lip service to voting rights in Atlanta as legislation remains stalled in Senate

Alex Findijs

WSWS.ORG

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris gave speeches Tuesday in Georgia calling on Congress to pass voting rights reform. The speech came after a year of extensive efforts by Republicans at the state level to enact laws restricting access to the ballot and extend partisan control over the electoral process.

Fueled by the false claims of Trump and leading Republicans that the 2020 election was fraudulent, Republican law makers have introduced a barrage of restrictive voting bills. Throughout 2021 there were at least 440 restrictive bills introduced in 49 states. Of those, 34 were signed into law in 19 states.

The laws range extensively in their attacks on voting rights. Many restrict the ability of voters to acquire and cast mail-in ballots, impose new voter ID requirements, and introduce changes to voter registration procedures that could block thousands of people from casting ballots.

States which have passed restrictive voting legislation since the 2020 election

In Georgia, one of the first states to pass restrictive legislation, Senate Bill 202 reduces voting hours, restricts mail-in ballot access, imposes voter ID requirements, and notoriously outlaws the distribution of food and water to voters waiting in line at the polls.

Most significantly, however, the law creates a system whereby the Republican-dominated State Election Board may replace local election officials with partisan appointees, effectively granting the Republican Party the authority to seize control of the electoral process.

Just months after passing the law, the Georgia State Election Board utilized its new power to move towards replacing the local election board of Fulton County (Atlanta), a Democratic stronghold in the state. If the State Election Board is successful, it would be able to appoint a partisan superintendent capable of manipulating the electoral process in the favor of Republican candidates.

In Texas, Senate Bill 8 imposes similar restrictions on ballot access with additional provisions which make it easier for partisan poll watchers to intimidate election officials and voters. In particular, it imposes heavy fines and potential jail time on any election worker found to have impeded the activities of a poll watcher.

Despite the serious threats to voting rights, Senate Democrats have failed several times last fall to pass two voting reform bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

With a narrow Democratic majority based on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Harris in the 50-50 Senate, the Democrats cannot bring the bills to a vote on the Senate floor. Republicans have filibustered the bills, which lack the 60 votes required to force a vote.

The filibuster, which allows a Senate minority to delay or prevent the voting on a bill, is neither part of the Constitution nor of any law. It is a longstanding custom spelled out each year in the rules adopted by the Senate itself.

The Democratic Party could alter the filibuster at any time with its majority of 51 votes in the Senate. However, the right-wing Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have strongly opposed any alterations to the filibuster, arguing that the voting reform bills must receive support from the Republican Party to pass.

Several other Democrats have indicated their opposition to any change in the filibuster, and President Biden took the same position throughout last year, but his tune has changed in recent weeks.

In his speech in Atlanta yesterday, Biden called for changes to the filibuster rule, stating that the Senate should “[get] rid of the filibuster” voting rights legislation. However, Biden also stated that he favored a return to the “talking filibuster,” in which a minority may still block a vote by holding the floor long enough to expire a legislative session. Continuous physical presence and speaking are required, not just 41 votes.

This caveat to Biden’s statements is an expression of the utter fecklessness of the Democratic Party in the face of concerted assaults on voting rights and bourgeois democracy.

Ever since the passage of the Georgia voting law the Democrats have consistently avoided any real attempt to defend democratic rights. Instead of passing federal legislation to stop the voting restrictions, the Democratic Party called on corporations to “pressure” the Georgia Republicans into repealing their own law.

The failure of the Democratic Party to produce any change in voting rights has fostered frustration among voting rights groups in Georgia, who announced that they would be boycotting Biden’s speech earlier in the week.

A Georgia voting rights activist who spoke with NBC News expressed that frustration, saying, “They’re coming to this very late. I think they’ve been sucked into caring about this rather than having had an affirmative strategy around this from the start.. . Even after Jan. 6, they continued to think of this as a second-tier set of issues.”

Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, told CNN “We don’t need another speech. We don’t need him to come to Georgia and use us as a prop. What we need is work.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Democratic Party has abandoned the defense of democratic rights, only now returning to the issue after the failure of Biden to pass his Build Back Better spending bill and the one-year anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt.

Throughout his speech Biden refused to name Trump or his Republican supporters in his condemnation of the January 6 insurrection. While he acknowledged that it was a coup attempt based on a lie of electoral fraud, he continued with the evasive language of his speech on January 6, referring to Trump only as the “defeated former president” and refusing to name his co-conspirators in the Republican Party.

This is in line with Biden’s insistence that that there must be a “strong Republican Party,” which he cleared of all responsibility for the coup, instead framing it as solely the fault of Trump as an individual.

He claimed that Republicans did not have “the strength to stand up to Trump,” as if the Republican Party were an unfortunate hostage of Trump’s power grab, and not a willing participant.

Biden’s inability to publicly recognize the threat of fascism within the Republican Party demonstrates and the Democratic Party’s complicity in the destruction of democratic rights. His most cowardly statement came when he said “don’t let the Republican Party turn into something else.”

This “something else” that Biden is referring to is the transformation of the Republican Party into an openly fascistic political party. Biden will not name the threat clearly because he and the Democratic Party are afraid of the social forces they might unleash within the working class if they were to approach the situation with any real level of seriousness.

The Democratic Party, one of the oldest capitalist political parties in the world, fears this outcome far more than it fears the rise of fascism. It would rather sacrifice democratic rights at the altar of profit than allow the working class to take control of the defense of its own rights.

Biden’s speech is another in a long line of empty statements and platitudes which will likely result in another failed attempt to pass voting reform. Upon another failure, the Democrats will either capitulate to the Republicans and strip the bills of any substance, or use them as an electoral promise in this year’s midterm elections, issuing an empty promise to pass electoral reform in 2023.

We study ocean temperatures. The Earth just broke a heat increase record

Last year the oceans absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

‘The clear, persistent rise over the past three to four decades is unmistakable evidence of an Earth that is out of balance.’

 Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Tue 11 Jan 2022 
John Abraham

I was fortunate to play a small part in a new study, just published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which shows that the Earth broke yet another heat record last year. Twenty-three scientists from around the world teamed up to analyze thousands of temperature measurements taken throughout the world’s oceans. The measurements, taken at least 2,000 meters (about 6,500ft) deep and spread across the globe, paint a clear picture: the Earth is warming, humans are the culprit, and the warming will continue indefinitely until we collectively take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

Peter Kalmus

We used measurements from the oceans because they are absorbing the vast majority of the heat associated with global warming. In fact, more than 90% of global warming heat ends up in the oceans. I like to say that “global warming is really ocean warming”. If you want to know how fast climate change is happening, the answer is in the oceans.

But this paper was not merely an academic exercise. It has tremendous consequences to society and biodiversity on the planet. As oceans warm, they threaten sea life and the many food chains that originate in the sea. Warmer ocean waters make storms more severe. Cyclones and hurricanes become more powerful; rains fall harder, which increases flooding; storms surges are more dangerous; and sea levels rise (one of the major causes of rising sea levels is the expansion of water as it heats).

How much did the world’s oceans warm in 2021 compared with the previous year? Well, our data shows that oceans heated by about 14 zettajoules (a zettajoule is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy). This is a mind-bending number, so it may help to use analogies. This is the equivalent of 440bn toasters running 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Another way to think about this is that the oceans have absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I have plotted the ocean heat, measured since the late 1950s, and the clear, persistent rise over the past three to four decades is unmistakable evidence of an Earth that is out of balance.

You could say that we took the Earth’s temperature – and the Earth’s fever is getting worse

The oceans are vast, and you need many measurements spread out across the planet to get a good sense of what is happening to the oceans as a whole. This study used hi-tech temperature sensors on autonomous buoys that rise and fall in the ocean waters as they make measurements. These sensors then send the data to laboratories around the world for analysis. In addition, we deployed high-quality temperature sensors from ships, temperatures from stationary buoys, and even strapped sensors to animals so we could measure temperatures from the water they traveled through. Our research was enabled by thousands of in-field researchers who are obtaining and processing the raw data. Without their contribution, studies like this would not be possible.

We discovered that the temperatures are not rising uniformly across the planet. We found the fastest warming in the Atlantic, Indian and northern Pacific Oceans. In our work we also explore the question of why this pattern is emerging the way it is. Using climate model simulations, we directly tie various features of the ocean to human emissions of industrial pollution and greenhouse gases. These findings suggest that a similar pattern is likely to persist into the coming decades.

The information we used is absolutely crucial for understanding the planet. You could say that we took the Earth’s temperature – and the Earth’s fever is getting worse.

I asked my colleague Alexey Mishonov, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, about the implications of these findings. “Our results demonstrated that ocean warming is extensively penetrating deeper layers of the ocean,” Dr Mishonov said. “The resulting increase of the ocean heat content cannot be adequately assessed without real measurements. We need to continue our field missions and collect these data.”

My new year’s resolution is to help the planet cool down. It’s getting hot in here and there is no sign things are going to change anytime soon. Collectively, we certainly have the technology to reduce greenhouse gases, but we have never really shown the will.


John Abraham is a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota

Buyout giants Bain Capital and CVC join forces to mount bid for Boots

Jan 12, 2022 | 

Two of the world’s biggest buyout firms have joined forces to pursue a multibillion pound takeover of Boots, Britain’s largest high street chain of chemists.

Sky News has learnt that Bain Capital and CVC Capital Partners are assembling a joint bid for the retail behemoth, which trades from more than 2,000 stores and employs over 50,000 people. Retail insiders said that Bain and CVC were being advised by bankers at Lazard on their interest in Boots.

Their partnership is intriguing because of the key role that will be played by Dominic Murphy, one of CVC’s team of managing partners and an architect of the £11bn takeover of Alliance Boots by KKR, the private equity firm he previously worked for, in 2007.

Mr Murphy, who remains a director of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), Boots’ US-listed parent company, is expected to need to recuse himself from boardroom discussions about the potential sale of Boots as a result of his interest in the process at CVC.

Sources said Bain and CVC were working on a plan to acquire Boots that was predicated upon substantial investment in its digital, beauty and healthcare services offerings.

A number of other private equity firms are expected to examine offers for the chain as part of a process to be run by Goldman Sachs.

However, Mr Murphy’s extensive knowledge of the Boots business and Bain’s lengthy planning for a bid are expected to leave their joint offer well-placed to succeed.

Both firms have invested heavily in prominent British businesses ranging from Formula One to Worldpay, while Bain has also recently backed Maesa, a French beauty manufacturer.

WBA announced strong trading figures at Boots last week, although the company made no formal comment on its decision to explore a sale.

It remains conceivable that no transaction involving the 172-year old British health and beauty retailer takes place, although a disposal by WBA is viewed as increasingly likely because of its renewed focus on its home US market.

Spinning the chain off into a separately listed company is also a possibility, according to insiders.

A full-blown auction of Boots, which will probably get under way in the spring, will be among the most significant deals involving a high street chain for many years.

The UK arm, which is among the country’s biggest private sector employers, is run by Sebastian James, the former Dixons Carphone chief executive.

Mr James has presided over a period of renewed investment in the business following a period in which its stores were criticised for failing to modernise.

Valuing Boots is a complicated process given the changing nature of consumer behaviour and its predominantly rented store estate, with many shops tied to long leases, but analysts said that a price of between £5bn and £6bn was realistic.

For Stefano Pessina, the WBA chairman, a decision to sell Boots would mark the final chapter of his involvement with one of Britain’s best-known companies.

The Italian octogenarian engineered the merger of Boots and Alliance Unichem, a drug wholesaler, in 2006, with the buyout firm KKR acquiring the combined group in an £11bn deal the following year.

In 2012, Walgreens acquired a 45% stake in Alliance Boots, completing its buyout of the business two years later.

Mr Pessina and his partner, Ornella Barra, the group’s chief operating officer for its international businesses, have been mainstays with the company since the original Boots merger.

Like many retailers, Boots has had a turbulent pandemic, announcing 4,000 job cuts in 2020 as a consequence of a restructuring of its Nottingham head office and store management teams.

It has also been embroiled in rows with landlords about delayed rent payments.

Shortly before the pandemic, Boots earmarked about 200 of its UK stores for closure, a reflection of changing shopping habits.

The chain’s heritage dates back to John Boot opening a herbal remedies store in Nottingham in 1849.

It opened its 1,000th UK store in 1933.

Bain Capital and CVC declined to comment.

Source: Sky News

 

Build Back Better Could Make Transformative Investments in Children for Years to Come

With the Build Back Better plan (BBB) currently facing an uncertain future in the Senate, substantial investments in children that would expand on earlier pandemic responses also hang in the balance.

The House-passed Build Back Better bill would continue several pandemic relief programs for children, including the expanded child tax credit, nutrition benefits, and access to health care, that have helped families weather the pandemic. The plan would also expand existing programs and create new ones to increase access to affordable housing, preschool, child care, and paid leave. Altogether, the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives would allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in support for children and make a transformative difference in their well-being.

Build Back Better would substantially increase spending on children for the next seven years

If enacted, we estimate the House version of BBB would increase spending on children by $575 billion over the next decade, equivalent to nearly a full year of federal expenditures on children before the pandemic. Spending on children accounts for 39 percent of the $1.5 trillion in BBB outlays (all figures in 2021 dollars to adjust for inflation). These estimates are based on Congressional Budget Office estimates of the bill enacted by the House on November 19 and Kids’ Share estimates of the share of programs benefiting children.

If additional tax reductions benefiting families with children are included as well, our estimate increases to $605 billion supporting children in BBB. These new investments would come on top of a historic $630 billion increase in federal support for children already enacted as part of the federal government’s pandemic response.

Under the House-passed version of BBB, children’s spending in 2022 would remain close to 2021’s historically high levels, with the bill extending some of the pandemic response programs that increased spending in 2021 as well as the implementation of new provisions. Specifically, children’s spending would reach $830 billion in 2022, $100 billion higher than without the bill and nearly 50 percent more than what children’s spending would have been with neither BBB nor pandemic relief spending.

After 2022, federal spending on children falls, reflecting the phaseout of pandemic response spending and the end of some temporary BBB provisions. But even with the drawdown, kids’ spending is still projected to be around $40 billion to $90 billion higher than it would be under current law each year through 2029 as additional BBB provisions go into effect.

Build Back Better provides a range of investments in children’s well-being

If enacted, BBB would make major investments to support children across a range of sectors, from early education to affordable housing to income and work supports for families to child nutrition. Some of the largest child-focused provisions in BBB include the following:

• Early childhood programs: More than any other area, the House-passed version of BBB would invest in early childhood programs. By investing more than $300 billion, the legislation would create a new universal preschool program that offers free early education to all 3- and 4-year-olds, would change child care subsidies to an entitlement, and would expand subsidy eligibility and cap family’s child care costs. These changes, which states could opt into, would be phased in across three years and run through 2027. According to estimates by the administration, when fully implemented, the universal preschool program would serve more than 6 million children each year, and expanded subsidies would help around 20 million children access care per year.
• The expanded child tax credit: Initially included in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARP), the expanded child tax credit would be extended for an additional year through 2022 at a cost of $176 billion under BBB. The ARP made the credit fully refundable, allowing families with low or no income to claim the full value, allowed the credit to be claimed as advanced monthly payments, and increased the benefit from $2,000 to $3,600 for each child younger than 6 and to $3,000 for all other children. According to a recent analysis, making the expansion permanent would decrease the number of children living in poverty by 4.3 million a year, or by more than 40 percent.
• A new paid leave program: If passed, BBB would provide millions of workers up to four weeks (PDF) of paid time off each year to care for a new child, a family member’s medical issue, or their own health, starting in 2024. The program would provide around $50 billion benefiting children, and the benefit is open to self-employed and gig workers as long as they meet work history and earnings requirements. Analyses of an earlier 12-week proposal that provided the template for the BBB estimated that, when BBB is fully implemented, more than 3 million workers (PDF) would take parental leave each year.
• Children’s well-being: BBB also provides tens of billions of dollars to support access to affordable housing for children and their families through investments in public housing, housing vouchers, and rental assistance. Other provisions would increase children’s access to free school meals, provide children receiving free or reduced-price school meals resources to purchase food during the summer, increase access to health care coverage for children and their families, and invest in education and training programs for children and young people.

Build Back Better funds programs with evidence of improving children’s well-being

Build Back Better supports program areas with long-term positive effects and payoffs. Prior research has found that early childhood education programs boost children’s educational performance (PDF) and have a positive return by increasing their productivity as adults. Similarly, evidence suggests child care and paid leave programs can help boost employment among mothers and have a long-run payoff. Ultimately, the House-passed Build Back Better bill would make significant investments in children’s well-being that could result in long-term positive effects.

THE RIGHT WING VS PUBLIC EDUCATION

From dependence to resilience: How philanthropies can better support private schools

 providing donor-development boot camps and school-building tool kits are two ways to more effectively support private Christian schools for long-term success.

American Enterprise Institute

January 12, 2022

Key Points

• The current popularity of private schools cannot be denied. Alternative schools and educational settings need to prepare for an influx of students.
• Philanthropies are right to help private schools during this period of growth, but they should be helping private school leaders prepare for decades of success.
• Providing donor-development boot camps and school-building tool kits are two ways that philanthropies can more effectively support private schools for long-term success.

Read the PDF.

Introduction

As the proverb goes, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Philanthropy is not a new concept. In fact, the word “philanthropy” derives from the ancient Greek word philanthropia, meaning “to love people.” True philanthropy and love for others are displayed by helping individuals become more self-sufficient. Yet, too often, philanthropies have created dependent communities and cultures.

More than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations are registered in the United States.¹ In total, these organizations raise hundreds of billions of dollars per year. In 2020, charitable giving reached a record high of $471 billion.² Unfortunately, a large percentage of these charitable dollars is not being used in new or creative ways and may be creating dependencies in the recipients they claim to help.

Take food banks for example. The US has more than 200 food banks.³ In 2020, these organizations distributed six billion meals nationwide. That’s enough food to provide every US resident with breakfast, lunch, and dinner for just over six days.⁴ Despite these impressive numbers, hunger persists in the United States.

Foundations should focus on “feeding” private schools for a lifetime—not just a fleeting moment. Private schools have experienced record enrollment growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁵ Whether you attribute this to public school shutdowns or political pressure on public school curricula, private schools’ current popularity cannot be denied.

Alternative schools and educational settings need to prepare for an influx of students. Otherwise, current enrollment levels will be only a temporary phenomenon. As schools grow, so do their needs. If schools suddenly have more students, then they need more teachers and classrooms. Unless a generous donor or philanthropic organization steps in, schools are often faced with an uncomfortable choice: raise tuition or go out of business.

Philanthropies are right to help private schools during this period of growth. But to fulfill only present needs does a great disservice to these schools. Philanthropies should be helping private school leaders prepare for decades of success. To do this, they must think beyond supporting traditional funding models and start focusing on long-term training and development. For example, The Stanley M. Herzog Foundation has found that providing donor-development boot camps and school-building tool kits are two ways to more effectively support private Christian schools for long-term success.

Read the full report.

Notes

1. National Center for Charitable Statistics Team, “The Nonprofit Sector in Brief,” Urban Institute, June 18, 2020, https://nccs.urban.org/project/nonprofit-sector-brief.
2. Haleluya Hadero, “Charitable Giving in the U.S. Reaches All-Time High in 2020,” Associated Press, June 15, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/philanthropy-health-coronavirus-pandemic-business-94cac51d5caf18f48a7827de04e017c0.
3. Feeding America, “Delivering Food and Services,” https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/food-bank-network.
4. Paul Morello, “The Food Bank Response to COVID, by the Numbers,” Feeding America, March 12, 2021, https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-blog/food-bank-response-covid-numbers.
5. Ruth Graham, “Christian Schools Boom in a Revolt Against Curriculum and Pandemic Rules,” New York Times, October 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/christian-schools-growth.html.