Kurd Guerrillas shoot down a Sikorsky helicopter and two drones of the Turkish army

Kurdistan Freedom Guerrilla carried out a series of actions in memory of 14 July Martyrs. 1 Skorsky helicopter and 2 drones were shot down, 1 container and 1 tent were destroyed.


ANF
BEHDINAN
Thursday, 11 July 2024

The People’s Defense Forces (HPG) Press Centre released a written statement providing information on the latest situation and developments in the guerrilla-held Medya Defense Zones in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq).

The HPG Press Liaison Centre said, "The Kurdistan Freedom Guerrilla marked the anniversary of the 14 July Great Death Fast Resistance by carrying out effective actions in memory of our pioneers, comrades Kemal Pir, Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, Akif Yılmaz and Ali Çiçek who determined the resistance line of our party PKK. We express our determination to continue our struggle with the same Apoist consciousness and sacrificial spirit in the footsteps of our immortal pioneers, and we commemorate all our martyrs with respect and gratitude in the person of the 14 July Martyrs."

The HPG provided the following information about the latest actions carried out by the guerrillas and the attacks carried out by the occupying Turkish army in Medya Defense Zones:

"Şehîd Delîl Western Zap region;

On the 9th and 10th of July, guerrillas from YJA Star (Free Women’s Troops) shot down two drones of the Turkish army in Girê Cûdî Resistance Area.

On 9 July, YJA Star guerrillas targeted the invaders on the move in Girê Amediyê Resistance Area and stopped their movement.

On 9 July, YJA Star guerrillas struck the invaders in Girê Amediyê Resistance Area with heavy weapons, destroying a container and a tent.

On 10 July, guerrillas targeted the invaders on the move in Girê Amediyê Resistance Area and stopped their movement.

On 9 July, YJA Star guerrillas struck the invaders who attempted to take position in Girê Bahar Resistance Area twice.

On 10 July at 23:40, 1 Sikorsky helicopter belonging to the occupying Turkish army, which was set to land in Girê Bahar Resistance Area, was heavily hit and shot down by the guerrillas. The place where the helicopter crashed was bombed by the Turkish army with attack helicopters.

On 10 July, the invaders who attempted to take position in Girê Bahar Resistance Area were intervened three times.

Metîna region;

On 9 July at 22:30, guerrillas intervened in the helicopter activity in Serê Metîna Resistance Area.

On 10 July, guerrillas targeted the invaders in Golka Resistance Area with heavy weapons, damaging a container and a military position.

Attacks carried out by the Turkish army with banned explosives;

On 10 July, the guerrillas’ tunnels in Girê FM Resistance Area were bombed 12 times with chemical gases and 5 times with banned explosives.

On 10 July, the guerrillas’ tunnels in Girê Amediyê Resistance Area in Şehîd Delîl Western Zap region were bombed 2 times with banned tactical nuclear bombs.

On 10 July, the Şêlazê Resistance Area in Metîna region was bombed once by drones loaded with explosives.

Aerial attacks carried out by the Turkish army;

On 9 and 10 July, the Turkish warplanes carried out 21 strikes on guerrilla areas, targeting the areas of Şehîd Şerîf, Girê Şehîd Hawar, Girê Berbizinê in Xakurkê region 6 times, the Şehîd Îbrahîm in Zap region, the areas of Dêreşê, Mijê, Girê Zengil in Garê region, the areas of Gûzê, Girê Reşît, Xêrê, Yekmalê, Deşta Kafya, Şiyê 9 times, the Girê Bahar Resistance Area in Şehîd Delîl Western Zap region 4 times, the Bêşîlî Resistance Area in Metîna region.

On 10 July, the Girê Bahar Resistance Area in the Western Zap region was bombed by attack helicopters."

 On 10 July at 23:40, 1 Sikorsky helicopter belonging to the occupying Turkish army, which was set to land in Girê Bahar Resistance Area in Şehîd Delîl Western Zap region was heavily hit and shot down by the guerrillas. The place where the helicopter crashed was bombed by the Turkish army with attack helicopters.

Gerîla TV released footage of the helicopter shot down by the guerrillas.

Moving Beyond GDP Towards a Human Rights Economy

UN Human Rights Council Event Reflects Momentum for Paradigm Shift

Sarah Saadoun
Senior Researcher and Advocate, Poverty and Inequality

Click to expand Image
© 2024 Human Rights Watch

It’s time to change the metric by which much of the world traditionally measures economic wellbeing: gross domestic product (GDP). The drive for steadily higher GDP growth is fueling environmental disasters and worsening the lives of billions of people.

Instead of giving attention to GDP, governments should focus on developing a human rights economy which builds an economic system that enables all people to realize their human rights on a livable planet.

Fundamentally changing our economic system seems like an insurmountable challenge. But there are concrete actions states and international institutions can take to build an economic system that achieves progress for all, not just some, and safeguards our environment.

The missing ingredient from the international system is human rights. A human rights economy is experienced on a local level – by all people enjoying their rights like quality public services, universal social security systems, and fair and living wages and safe working conditions, not to mention a livable planet – but it is enabled on the global level by rewriting the rules of the global economic system to more equitably distribute global resources between countries.

Taking steps on a path towards a human rights economy was the theme of a July 2 event of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Governments from four regions – Malaysia, The Gambia, Chile, Panama, and Spain – joined with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and eight civil society organizations that work on economic justice, including Human Rights Watch, in the event on the sidelines of a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) session. It built on similar discussions that took place at the HRC session in October 2023 and at a HRC intersessional meeting in January 2024, reflecting momentum for change. Around 80 people attended, including representatives from 25 states.

At the July 2 session, the inadequacies of GDP alone as a measure for how countries and citizens are faring was a common theme. In her opening remarks, Malaysia’s ambassador to the UN, Dato’ Nadzirah Osman, said her country seeks to “collaborate with like-minded countries and international organisations to promote a fairer and sustainable global economic order, based on the principles of human rights. Malaysia is committed to playing its part in this transformation. By fostering an economy that values well-being over mere GDP growth, we can build a more just, equitable and sustainable world for all.”

Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, struck similar notes. “For decades, GDP growth was the dominant approach for eradicating poverty, but it never fulfilled its promise and devastated our planet,” he said. One concrete step that can be taken to achieve a ‘human rights economy’ is to replace GDP and a focus on growth with measures of progress grounded in human rights: meeting the challenges of the climate crisis, addressing inequalities, and eradicating poverty.”

Surya Deva, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, told the gathering that the current economic development model has serious deficits, as poverty isn’t being reduced enough and inequality is rising: the benefits of economic growth are not getting shared equitably. He asserted that the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is as important as the right to development. Also, “there is not enough or meaningful participation of people in development policies, plans and projects, leading to social conflicts and attacks against human rights defenders. In view of these development deficits, we should look for a new model of economic development.”

Todd Howland, Chief of the Development, Economic, and Social Rights Branch at OHCHR, said that people hear the economy is growing, “but they see their opportunities, education, health and well-being negatively impacted. They see some doing well and many doing not so well. A human rights economy puts human rights back in the policy equation to ensure all benefit from the economy.”

THIRD WORLD U$A

Geographic regions aren’t “left behind” – they’re oppressed and exploited. Restoring them might mean reimagining progress.

Ann Eisenberg
July 12th, 2024

LSE


In the US, places that have experienced a lack of investment over a long period of time are often referred to as being “left behind”. Looking closely at the structural forces behind why some places struggle, Ann M. Eisenberg argues that the term is misleading. Calling places “left behind”, she writes, obscures the agency of the institutions and decision-makers who create and worsen rural disadvantage and of people in those locations who fight for better conditions. Rather than through market-based capitalist interventions and ideas about growth, restoring these places from decades of exploitation might involve new ways of looking at meeting needs and measuring progress.

We often hear people say that certain regions have been “left behind.” But what does it mean for a place to be “left behind”? If we dig deeper into the structural forces that have made some places thrive while others struggle, we can see that this label is misleading. Regions aren’t merely left behind; they are oppressed. More attention has turned to questions about so-called “left behind” regions due to rising geographic inequality in the United States and beyond. In my research, I study socioeconomically distressed rural regions in the United States, who are often labelled as left behind.

Looking more closely at “left behind” places

The notion that distressed rural regions have been left behind does have a basis in fact. Patterns of uneven development in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have exacerbated rural disadvantage. Since the 1980s, large cities like New York have accounted for a greater share of economic activity and population concentration.

Approximately 14 percent of the US population lives in rural areas—down from about twice that in 1980—while the 86 percent majority now lives in cities and suburbs. In 2019, rural counties accounted for 86 percent of counties the US Department of Agriculture designated as burdened with persistent poverty.

Distressed rural regions face unique challenges. Populations in these regions often struggle with higher rates of poverty and unemployment. They have to navigate population sparseness, distance from population centers, changing economic landscapes, and the specific stereotypes that undermine the political will for potential rural-focused interventions.

The need to move beyond “left behind” as a label

My critique of the left-behind label is that it obscures agency and proactiveness both for the supposed leavers and for the so-called left-behind. This masks institutional and policy decisions that have actively created and exacerbated rural disadvantage, and the local social movements that have often fought for better local and regional conditions.

Commentary on “left behind” places also often suggests that the problem of geographic inequality is unsolvable. We have tried everything and nothing has worked; efforts to intervene are doomed to fail, this narrative tends to say. But I argue that the weaknesses of prior efforts to better the fortunes of distressed places are rather predictable. Just as the “left behind” label is problematic, overly narrow definitions of the problem of geographic inequality have led to overly narrow interventions to address it.

When the expression, “left behind,” is used as an everyday idiom, the term implies movement and the creation of distance between two things. In the sentence, “He went to college and left his hometown behind,” the sentence’s protagonist goes on a journey away from the apparently rejected, static hometown.

When applied to geographic areas, the “left behind” designation implies a sort of failure to advance or move along on the journey toward development goals. Those places that have not been left behind, by implication, have advanced, or progressed. By contrast, those regions and localities that have been left behind are understood as stagnant in some way. Someone else—someone doing a better job, it’s implied—went on a journey. The left-behind regions did not get to go.

But the designation of left behind denies the agency of the institutions, policymakers, companies and other actors, that have actively facilitated the conditions associated with a place being left behind. Often, the better verbs for describing how US structural and institutional forces have treated socioeconomically distressed rural regions include the verbs, “ravaged”, “exploited”, “depleted”, “undermined” and “under-invested.”

Rural places have been oppressed – not left behind

A few places offer good examples of rural localities that would at first glance be deemed left behind due to their regional socioeconomic distress, but upon further investigation, are revealed to be subject to some form of subjugation by structural forces. Three examples of places that fit this description are the West Virginia coalfields, a remote California logging town referred to by the pseudonym “Golden Valley,” and Burke County, Georgia.

The West Virginia coalfields lie within rural central Appalachia, a region known for its coal economy. Golden Valley, the focus of an in-depth ethnography by sociologist Jennifer Sherman, sits at the heart of a rural, northwestern American region formerly known for timber extraction. And Burke County, Georgia, is about two hours inland from the coastal cities of Charleston and Savannah, and plays host to the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which runs on nuclear power. The area of Burke County near the plant was the focus of an extensive ethnography by sociologist Loka Ashwood.


“Zenith 3” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by foxtail_1

Each of these areas would likely be considered left behind in some fashion, due to high rates of poverty, struggling local economies, and poor infrastructural conditions. However, they all have a story of being shaped by government and corporate institutions that actively created or made their disadvantages worse.

In West Virginia, federal and state policymakers and legal systems coordinated with coal companies to enable decades of ecological destruction, worker exploitation, economic inequity and the suppression of dissent. In Golden Valley, the designation in 1990 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service of the northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act devastated the regional economy. In Burke County, the local nuclear plant, operating under the auspices of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is understood to dominate local land use, working conditions and political discourse, making it challenging for the local community to thrive.

Local resistance to under-development and exploitation

These institutional interventions were active players in creating challenging conditions in these regions. In turn, the “left behind” designation also denies the agency on the part of the people living there. Another common theme across these regions is that people there have attempted to secure better living conditions for themselves. Each place has a story of some form of local advocacy, uprising, or clash with the institutions and companies that sought to impose some condition on their community.

These are not stagnant regions that have failed to keep up with more dynamic places. These regions are home to populations who have fought for a better future and encountered overwhelming forces that sought to quash their efforts. The geographic, economic, and demographic diversity of these localities, alongside the diverse structural forces that created their conditions, make it start to seem like leaving rural places behind—by exploiting and undermining them—is a feature and not a bug of the American political-legal-economic system.

Skeptics of my argument may want to point out that some of the interventions that hurt rural regions have been pursued in the name of desirable policy goals, like protecting endangered species. But this analysis is not about what collective progress may or may not require. The question is whether passive forces of nature resulted in these regions’ under-development. And the answer to that question is, “No.”

Restoring places through alternative interventions

How might government interventions most effectively address an area’s left-behind status, especially since past programs have not worked very well? This is where diagnosis of the problem matters. If we say in one breath that distressed rural communities have merely been left behind, and in the next that large-scale investments in rural revitalization are doomed to fail, we frame rural regions as bottomless money pits that are beyond hope.

But, if we include the part of the story that involves more direct accountability for the institutions and policymakers that did the ravaging and the exploiting, it suddenly changes the remedy. Exploitation and ravaging require restorative efforts—a deeper reckoning for a deeper harm. Typical proposals for interventions—trying to create a few jobs or lure a company to relocate—start to sound half-hearted and silly.

If the policy mandate is to not merely “create jobs,” but rather to help counteract decades of exploitation, the intuitive policy prescriptions begin to contradict the capitalistic assumptions about competition and dynamism that seem to underlie the left-behind moniker. Capitalist treatment of waste people and waste places to be discarded in the name of progress created the crisis illustrated in the phenomenon of localities being “left behind.”

It is far from clear, then, that capitalist interventions—such as efforts to develop localities to be more like self-sustaining, for-profit businesses—offer something meaningful for efforts to create better futures for distressed localities. Another way to think about this is, if economists keep telling us they do not know how to solve this problem, maybe we should listen to people other than economists.

Rethinking progress in favor of meeting needs

It is true that no perfect suite of potential policy interventions has emerged as a silver bullet for improving living conditions in distressed rural regions. What would meaningful interventions look like we rejected the need for people and places to be “dynamic,” and always moving toward the nebulous target of “progress,” rather than to simply have their needs met?

The rejection of capitalistic assumptions opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities. We could pursue more public jobs in conservation; more aggressive antitrust enforcement alongside support for local business development; ambitious investments in education and healthcare; land reform and restorative racial justice; cooperative, sustainable agriculture; investments in essential infrastructure like high-speed rail; universal basic income; collective bargaining and worker protections; and other options.

 The possibilities abound.

The response to these proposals is likely to be that they are either not politically feasible or that they are too expensive. But radical new visions should at least be part of the conversation. These possibilities complicate the widespread embrace of the idea that “We have tried so much and nothing has worked.” We have, in fact, tried very little in the scheme of all that is imaginable.

This article is based on the paper, “What does it mean to be ‘left behind?’’, in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
Shortened URL for this post: https://wp.me/p3I2YF-e5T

About the author

Ann Eisenberg
Ann Eisenberg is Professor of Law and Research Director at the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University. Her research examines questions of law and sustainability, with particular emphases on rural development, property, energy law, and local government.
Posted In: Urban, rural and regional policies

Immigrants in Canada face worst job crisis in 10 years. Indians likely hit hard

The unemployment rate for recent immigrants to Canada in the last five years was 12.6% in June. This is the worst in a decade. Indians, at 30%, are on top of the list to have got permanent residency in Canada and are likely to have been hit by the job crisis.


The decade-high unemployment rate in Canada is a big challenge for recent immigrants. (Image: Instagram/heyiamnishat)

India Today World Desk
New Delhi,

UPDATED: Jul 12, 2024 
Written By: Priyanjali Narayan

In Short

Canada's unemployment rate for recent immigrants in five years was 12.6% in June

It is the worst rate among immigrants since 2014. Youth unemployment rate high too

Indians, the biggest cohort to get permanent residency, might have been hit hard

Immigrants who moved to Canada eyeing a better life are grappling with the worst job crisis in a decade. The unemployment rate for recent immigrants in the last five years was 12.6% in June, the worst in 10 years. Indians, being the biggest national cohort to get permanent residency in Canada, are likely to be the worst hit.

The unemployment rate of 12.6% is four percentage points lower than 2023, according to Statistics Canada.

The unemployment rate for those who were originally from Canada was 5.5%. In 2023, it was 5%.

These latest numbers show the unemployment rate among immigrants is the largest since 2014, according to a Globe and Mail report.

Indians are one of the largest group of immigrants who have become permanent residents(PRs) in Canada over the past five years.

WHY INDIAN IMMIGRANTS ARE LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN HIT

In 2023, out of the 471,810 new permanent residents, Indians were 139,785 or nearly 30%.

Since 2019, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), of the new permanent residents, 1,841,250, Indians were 514,435 in number.

“There were 1.4 million unemployed people in June 2024, an increase of 42,000 (+3.1%) from the previous month," Statistics Canada revealed in a recent report.

The companies in Canada are struggling with high interest rates, and they have become more hesitant to hire in the last two years. The Canadian population has increased due to a strong influx of immigrants.

“The record surge in immigration has meant that even the healthy pace of job growth over the past year has fallen well short of what would have been needed to keep the unemployment rate steady,” Royce Mendes and Tiago Figueiredo, economists at Desjardins Securities, said in a research note on July 9.

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT IN CANADA A CHALLENGE FOR INDIAN STUDENTS

The job market is not just harsh on newcomers. The youth unemployment rate is also at a high at 13.6%, the highest since 2016.

This has led to a decline in interest in Indian students coming to Canada. Indians made up the largest national cohort with 37% of study visas issued in 2023, but they are not applying to Canada in equally large numbers any more.

Although the number is declining, Indian students make up 41% of Canada's international students. Now, they will enter the job market and challenges await them.

Desjardins Economists are saying that the labour market is going well for people who are already employed but not for those who are seeking a job.

“Canada’s unemployment story is less about job losses and more about population growth. Immigration is rising much faster than the country’s economic capacity to create jobs, leading to much higher unemployment for new immigrants and young adults competing for similar roles," wrote Canadian outlet, Better Dwelling.

Macron’s neoliberalism moved country toward fascist abyss, leading to left’s surge in support

July 12, 2024

 BY DENNIS BROE

PEOPLES WORLD

Sophie Binet, general secretary of France's largest labor federation, the CGT. In an interview Thursday, July 11, 2024, with France Inter broadcaster, Binet called for massive protests against what she says is President Emmanuel Macron’s denial of legislative election results that entitle the labor-backed New Popular Front coalition the right to form a government. | Thibault Camu / AP


PARIS—“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” wrote Yeats in “The Second Coming,” but he might as well have been covering the just completed French elections.

The mainstream media are describing the mixed results of the National Assembly, the principal French lawmaking body, as “hung” or even validating President Emmanuel Macron’s judgment to call a snap election after the defeat of his party in the European Parliament vote.

However, the fact of the matter is that the left – in the form of the New Popular Front coalition – now controls the most seats in the Assembly, standing approximately 100 seats away from having one of its leaders appointed Prime Minister. A remarkable turnaround from just a week before, when it looked as if the far-right candidate Jordan Bardella was on the threshold of heading the government on behalf of the Le Pen party, the National Rally (NR), in “cohabitation” with Macron.

A clear trend in the election is that the French are fed up with Macron’s neoliberal “reforms,” a program that under the guise of securing foreign investment and creating jobs amounted to a vicious and continuous attack on working people, those on the edge of the cities, and small businesses.

Macron’s major “reform” in his first term was rewriting the labor laws promoting precarity over work security by making it much easier to hire and fire. His major reform in his second term was extending the age of retirement from 62 to 64. In a society where, because of the earlier reform, workers are being laid off at an earlier age, many around 55, with a decreasing possibility of being rehired, they now have to scrape together a livelihood for two additional years, a drain on themselves and their families.

Macron also canceled the wealth tax, imposed a tax on gasoline that prompted the Gilets jaunes (yellow vests) rebellion, and continually used provision 49.3 to pass laws unilaterally, many of them budgetary, in the Assembly. The use of this provision upset all the other parties and was an abrogation of the main power of any legislative body dating back in European legal history to the Magna Carta, the power of the purse, that is to control the budget.


See our earlier report: Macron on the throne: French president takes neoliberal path

The far right has taken advantage of this neoliberal attack on so much of society in the name of increasing the wealth of the rich and the most powerful corporations, and now controls much of the countryside. The electoral map after both rounds of the current election outside the major cities is all brown, the NR color.

Much like far-right parties throughout the West, the NR has succeeded with an anti-immigrant platform that stirs hatred and animosity and promises little else, despite the fact that it is immigrants who constitute the workforce most likely to pay into the French welfare system. The party’s economic platform, such as it is, skews remarkably close to Macron’s and is, if anything, even more business friendly.

The NR gives the appearance of being concerned with ameliorating the worst effects of a still biting inflation, but it promises to raise the money for this protection by cutting France’s contribution to the European Union, whose subsidies benefit one of the NR’s core constituencies, farmers.

The party also, despite its policy of normalization, called “dédiabolisation,” still has at its core a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ faction. During the campaign, violence was unleashed against these elements, violence that, had the NR dominated the legislature, would most likely have increased, along with a strengthening of police violence against these populations.

The program of the New Popular Front, on the other hand, rolls back many of Macron’s reforms, including resetting the pension age to 60 and abolishing his automated system for allocating spaces in Frances élite universities, accused of simply fostering inequality in education.

The left alliance consists also of the Communist, Socialist, and Green parties, along with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, LFI). Its three-phase program of technologizing the economy will raise the minimum wage and has already halted Macron’s attack on unemployment insurance and his Bill Clinton-style cutting of the welfare ranks.

The left will pay for these programs by increasing taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, a program which the business press has termed “reckless” and “alarming.” The program also calls for a new constitution and more specifically annulling the extremely undemocratic 49.3.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Macron and the center’s—in reality center-right’s—main enemy is not the far right but the actual reforms of the left. Macron, after swearing this would never happen, even worked with the NR to pass his restrictive immigration “reform” and claimed that should the New Popular Front come to power its platform to correct his heightening of inequality in the country would lead to “civil war.”

While members of the three center parties helped form the dam or “barrage” to defeat the NR, both Macron and another centrist party leader Édouard Phillippe, the mayor of Le Havre, urged voters not to vote for the New Popular Front even in districts where the party opposed the NR.

A key accusation leveled against the LFI component of the alliance and its leader Mélenchon is that because of his criticism of the Zionist genocidal attack on Gaza he is anti-Semitic. Both centrist leaders, though, often ignored the open anti-Semitism of the NR, whose roots, despite the dédiabolisation, trace back to Pétain’s France which collaborated with the Fascist Germans in Jewish extermination during World War II.

Although the mainstream press is already quaking at the prospect of a France led by the New Popular Front, the numbers indicate that there is a chance, if the left coalition holds, for members of Macron’s Ensemble Party, some of whom are ex-Socialists, to join the coalition, which would then have the 289 members required to necessitate the appointment of its candidate as the Prime Minister, the figure who would direct the legislature and promote the left agenda. During the campaign, one Ensemble candidate claimed he still had a lot in common with the left, including favoring taxing the rich.

The left would not only then have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but also halted the center-right trend that instead of aiding the country pushes it ever closer to the fascist abyss.

CONTRIBUTOR

Dennis Broe  a film, television and art critic, is also the author of the Harry Palmer LA Mysteries, the latest volume of which, The House That Buff Built, is about the real estate industry, dispossession, and appropriation in the shaping of “modern” Los Angeles.

 

Hatcheries can boost wild salmon numbers but reduce diversity, research shows

by Jeff Richardson, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Differences between two male pink salmon highlight morphological diversity in the species.

 Credit: Julia McMahon

The ability of salmon hatcheries to increase wild salmon abundance may come at the cost of reduced diversity among wild salmon, according to a new University of Alaska Fairbanks–led study.

The number of juvenile salmon released into the North Pacific Ocean by hatcheries increased rapidly in the second half of the last century and remains at over 5 billion each year. Salmon hatcheries have helped push annual pink salmon harvests in Prince William Sound from about 4 million fish prior to hatchery programs to roughly 50 million in recent years.

Using data collected from pink salmon streams in Prince William Sound, Alaska, through the Alaska Hatchery Research Project, researchers determined that many hatchery-raised fish are straying onto natural spawning grounds and interbreeding with wild populations. In a related study, researchers used simulations developed with the real-world data to ask what this continued input of hatchery fish might mean for wild populations.

"Even if only a small percentage of hatchery-origin fish stray into wild populations, a small fraction of a huge number can still be a lot," said Samuel May, lead author of the studypublished in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

"We were interested in exploring the long-term consequences of hatchery straying for wild population recruitment and resilience."

Life-history diversity is a distinguishing characteristic of wild salmon, which are specifically adapted to the local conditions of their home streams. Simulations showed that wild fish population sizes increased because more fish reproduced than would have without hatchery strays.

Those increases came at a cost: As hatchery-origin gene variants spread into wild populations, diversity among those populations was reduced.

"Wild populations can be very different from one another, but hatchery fish are often more alike. If many individuals with relatively similar traits are introduced into diverse populations, it can make those populations more alike. Lower diversity among populations can reduce resilience to future changes," said May, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral fellow at UAF's College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Previous studies have shown that hatchery-origin salmon, which may be adapted to environments different from those they stray into and which don't face the same evolutionary pressures as fish born in natural streams, produce about half as many offspring as wild fish.

Introducing those gene variants into wild salmon populations could potentially affect their ability to adapt to future challenges in nature.

The simulations tapped into an ongoing project in Prince William Sound that has gathered tissue samples from hundreds of thousands of pink salmon since 2011. The Alaska Hatchery Research Program has collected samples from 30 streams in the region, providing a huge collection of DNA and other data for conducting research to inform Alaska policies and sustainable resource management.

This unprecedented sampling effort allows researchers to recreate the family trees of pink salmon from five of these sampled streams in the region and determine which fish can be traced back to hatcheries.

May cautioned that, as with any simulation, it can be difficult to fully capture all the complex relationships in nature. Modeling for the study was specific to pink salmon in Prince William Sound, he said, and overarching conclusions about other systems or species should be done with care.

"The same things that make these kinds of models incredibly useful in specific contexts—like their simplifying assumptions and being parameterized with empirical data—also make them misleading if applied in the wrong context," May said.

Other contributors to the paper included authors from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Alaska Hatchery Research Project is a collaborative endeavor between the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, hatchery operators, nongovernmental organizations and academics.

"Salmon hatcheries in Alaska have become a flash point, making discussions of policy options mired in contention and acrimony," said Peter Westley, a UAF associate professor of fisheries and principal investigator for the project.

"Hopefully, this work can guide conversations by serving as an agreed upon reality—hatcheries can increase salmon abundance of both hatchery and wild individuals, but it comes with an inherent trade-off for wild fish ecological diversity such as run timing."

More information: Samuel A. May et al, Salmon hatchery strays can demographically boost wild populations at the cost of diversity: quantitative genetic modelling of Alaska pink salmon, Royal Society Open Science (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.240455

Journal information: Royal Society Open Science 

Provided by University of Alaska Fairbanks Reproductive success improves after a single generation in the wild for descendants of some hatchery Chinook salmon

Let’s reduce poverty & deforestation via greater EUDR traceability requirements (commentary)

by Julia Christian on 12 July 2024
MONGABAY

The traceability requirement at the heart of the E.U.’s new deforestation law can also help lift smallholder farmers around the world out of poverty, a new op-ed argues.
This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

The EU’s regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) was hailed as a watershed in the fight to protect the world’s forests when it came into force in 2023.

The world’s first law its kind, the EUDR requires companies selling certain high-risk goods on the EU market – including palm oil, cocoa and soy – to prove that they haven’t harmed forests.

The path to achieving this “global benchmark” in forest protection was long and arduous, and followed years of intense political debate, tireless campaigning, and behind-the-scenes lobbying by industry forces and member states, who were intent on weakening or entirely sabotaging the regulation.

Yet the challenges in passing the EUDR pale in comparison with those involved in implementing it – and making it work.

Communities around the world rely on the proceeds of crops such as cacao. Image courtesy of Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests.

A thorny issue

One of the biggest hurdles is the vexing question of traceability.

The requirement for companies to trace goods’ supply chains back to where they were produced, to ensure they’re legal and deforestation-free, is at the heart of the EUDR.

How this traceability is done, by whom, and at what cost, is a major bone of contention for many governments in the tropical forested countries who will be impacted by the law. Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s two biggest producers of palm oil, for instance, have described the EUDR as protectionist and discriminatory.

A persistent complaint from producer governments is that requiring smallholder farmers to demonstrate the origin of their goods will be too big a burden as it will require that they geolocate their farms. Advocates respond that this can be done in a few clicks via a map application on a smartphone, but admit it does require a smartphone and internet access.

It is also true that farmers’ cooperatives will face higher costs, as they must manage all the data collected – including geolocated farm boundaries – and ensure that cocoa grown in compliance with the EUDR is separated from that which isn’t.

Oil palm plantations on the edge of Tangkulap Forest Reserve in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Image courtesy of Sebastian Kennerknecht/Panthera.

Living on the edge

In many instances, these smallholders are already living on the edge.

In Côte d’Ivoire, where nearly six million people rely on the cocoa industry for their survival, and most of the cocoa beans the country produces are destined for Europe, half of cocoa farmers live below the extreme poverty line.

A similar situation prevails in Ethiopia where most coffee is produced by low-income smallholders and destined for Europe.

But if the EUDR is implemented in the right way, it can be an opportunity for smallholders. In Côte d’Ivoire, farmers’ organisations say they support the Regulation because it could help push their government to complete the national cocoa traceability system — which they have been demanding for many years, as a means of ridding the local cocoa sector of corruption. This corruption blights the lives of smallholders, who are regularly forced to sell below the government-set price, with multiple local middlemen taking cuts along the way.

In fact, the EUDR has directly pushed the Ivorian government to finalise their national traceability system, according to the head of the Ivorian Conseil du Café-Cacao. Since the EUDR was passed, the government has been handing out ID cards to farmers which will not only permit EUDR traceability, but also serve as a bank card to receive e-payments which will have a major impact on clearing up fraudulent under-payments to farmers. This has been received enthusiastically by farmers as, in the words of one farmer, “Now I can sell my cocoa at the guaranteed price.”

See related: E.U. passes historic law forcing companies to track deforestation

Dany Murillo, manager of the regenerative cacao program in Ecuador, harvesting cacao. Image courtesy of Third Millennium Alliance.

Supporting producer countries’ national traceability systems

As Côte d’Ivoire shows, such national traceability systems are the key to maximising the EUDR’s positive impacts for small farmers. And many other producer countries – such as Ghana, Malaysia and Indonesia – are also developing national systems to trace EUDR commodities, which they are asking for the EU to use in EUDR compliance.

A new report from my organization, FERN, found that if designed correctly, such systems could ensure that smallholders don’t bear the burden of complying with the law. Nation-wide traceability systems are more efficient than asking companies to each conduct traceability in their own supply chains, which often means farmer cooperatives producing data multiple times in different formats for different companies.

But national traceability mechanisms must be designed with smallholder farmers in mind, providing information that helps them strengthen their bargaining power and push for better prices. This will mean ensuring farmers and NGOs can access the data and tracking issues such as the prices paid at different points in the supply chain.

National systems also provide the chance to magnify the impact of the EUDR beyond supply chains destined for the EU, improving forest protection and transparency across a whole country.

The onus is now on the E.U. to signal its willingness to support nationally-owned traceability systems in producer countries: via financial support, but also by giving some weight to high-quality national traceability systems when it creates its deforestation risk-rating for producer countries.

Doing so will benefit those in the supply-chain who toil for little reward, while also assuaging some tropical forested countries’ key criticisms of the EUDR. More broadly, it would be a significant step towards slashing global deforestation.


Julia Christian is a lawyer trained in the U.K. and the U.S., and has worked for with FERN since 2014. She’s a co-author of FERN’s report, “Transformative traceability: How robust traceability systems can help implement the EUDR and fight the drivers of deforestation,” which can be read here.

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?

An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar … and mull over survival.

BY PETER WATTS
May 31, 2024


LONG READ

I’ve known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Over the decades, Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet as an evolutionary biologist, with over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left an academic career in marine biology in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science-fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic—admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding—I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the United States Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel Echopraxia is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other—and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect.

What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of A Darwinian Survival Guide, authored by Dan and evolutionary biologist Salvatore Agosta.

In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP (Conference of the Parties, the annual international climate change meeting held by the United Nations) was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas. In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit, Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

Why is it that human beings are susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea and are not?

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive?

A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine?

In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse—

No.

—you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”?

In other words—and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy—if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

SURVIVOR: “We’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence,” says evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks. If nature collapses, as scientists predict, “how are those people going to survive?” Photo by Diego Cervo / Shutterstock.

Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Right, right. Yeah.

And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Yeah.

And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Yeah.

Now, this is an argument that some might say can be invaded by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

This is neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain—this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious—although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested.

But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one—the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness”—that you need variation to cope with future change.

Right.

So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like—who was it that responded to The Origin of Species by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

And that might be one of the more essential values of this book—that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book: democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit, and this is a quote: “Our governance systems—long ago co-opted as instruments for amplified personal power— have become nearly useless, at all levels, from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of well-being, or conflict resolution in mind.”

So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state

Yes.

And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

That’s right. Yeah.

So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.”

And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed—at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

That’s an interesting question.

That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control.


And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Right.

“This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Nobody’s running to the cities.

“Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life—

Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half—

And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment—in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on—

That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it—or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a—

But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush—Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

Absolutely.

And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse—

Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Exactly.

Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen—

So?

—and I would argue that most people—I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within—you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we—you know, some form of humanity—may be part of that, or may not.

But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We now know enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that?

So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years—you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.

Reprinted with permission from the MIT Press Reader.

Lead image: kkonda / Shutterstock

Peter Watts

Posted on May 31, 2024

Peter Watts is a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction author and a former marine biologist. His most recent novel is The Freeze-Frame Revolution.