Half-Earth Socialism’s Five Book Plan

Verso Books
16 May 2022

As authors Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue in their thrilling and provocative new book, we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth—but we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good.

Here the authors present their Five Book Plan for imagining a utopian eco-socialist future – or a future at all.

Over the next generation, humanity will confront a dystopian future of climate disaster and mass extinction. Yet the only ‘solutions’ on offer are toothless cap-and-trade programmes, catastrophic geoengineering schemes, and privatized conservation, which will do nothing to reverse the damage suffered by the biosphere. Indeed, these mainstream approaches assume that hyper-consumerism in the Global North can continue unabated. It can’t.

As authors Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue in their thrilling and provocative new book, we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth—but we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good.

The authors collaborated with designers from the Jain Family Institute and Trust to create a video game based on the book, at play.half.earth.

Here the authors present their Five Book Plan for imagining a utopian eco-socialist future – or a future at all.

*****


Half-Earth Socialism is a work of utopian socialism, a tradition that has been largely ignored by the Left over the last century. Utopianism is an inherently interdisciplinary genre as a good utopian is forced to contemplate the myriad facets of a new society, from how to organise the world economy to how one eats and lives. By melding economics, ecology, philosophy, and fiction to delineate the utopia of Half-Earth socialism we were pulled into disciplines beyond our own specialties of history and physics. In short, it has been difficult for us to select only five books from the intellectual potpourri inspiring our zany manifesto.

What the books we chose have in common is a commitment to rigorous contemplation of a new society. Indeed, most people have the wrong impression of utopianism. It is not idle daydreaming, but technically difficult and politically necessary work. It is hard to dismiss William Morris’ News from Nowhere as playful fantasy after reading the chapter of ‘how the change came’. There, Morris imagines how a socialist revolution might transpire and details how a worker-led movement slowly builds dual power to finally overcome the bourgeois state. Perry Anderson called the chapter an ‘extraordinary theoretical feat [...] of remarkable complexity and verisimilitude’. We try to build upon this tradition of hard-nosed utopianism in the fourth chapter of our book, where we imagine life in the mid-twenty first century some ten years after a Half-Earth socialist revolution. It was through writing and imagining such a world that we could see more clearly for ourselves the reciprocal relationship between utopian and quotidian politics. Current struggles influence how we imagine the future, while utopian thought directs these struggles by cohering a broad coalition working together towards the shared horizon of a new society.



1) E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth (Liveright 2016)

Two thirds of our book’s title are borrowed from E. O. Wilson’s monograph, Half-Earth. Wilson – who identified hundreds of new ant species, wrote Pulitzer-prize winning popular books on ecology, and liaised with ‘race realist’ charlatans – studied the relationship between land-area and biodiversity as a young scholar in the 1960s. The insights from his seminal Theory of Island Biogeography (co-authored with Robert MacArthur) undergirded the argument of Half-Earth almost fifty years later. Wilson argued in the latter book that ‘a reduction in area [of a habitat] results in a fraction of the species disappearing in time by roughly the fourth root of the area’. To infuse lifeblood into the dry vein of mathematics, imagine ninety per cent of wild ecosystems are lost – forests turned into pastures, mountains decapitated for mines, suburbs spilling over into greenbelts – then one can expect nearly half of the species to vanish. Wilson did not have much faith that the remaining ten per cent of the wild world would provide much refuge because ‘a team of lumbermen’ could raze it ‘in a month’. Yet, if fifty per cent of the world is preserved – which would create Half-Earth – then only fifteen per cent of the world’s biodiversity would be lost. A tragedy to be sure, but not a disaster of geological proportions. (Perhaps humanity might later opt for a Two-Thirds Earth, who knows). Near the end of the book, Wilson lists eighteen ‘best places in the biosphere’ – from Californian redwood forests to Mozamqbiue’s Gorongosa National Park – that could become the kernels for an expanded system of global nature preserves.

We build upon Wilson’s idea because it is not sufficient in itself. Most importantly, conservationists need to reckon with their movement’s dark past if they want to build a broad coalition that could actually realise their biodiverse utopia. The history of Half-Earth includes other conservationists beyond Wilson – indeed, some are so nefarious as to make him appear mostly harmless. For example, the founders of the WILD Foundation include a Jungian con-man, an admirer of Rhodesia and pioneer in militarised conservation, as well as a game ranger who worked closely with the Apartheid government and the quising Inkatha Freedom Party. The new allies of the conservation movement are billionaire philanthropists, which has led to the delusion that half the world could be bought and turned into ranches for big game hunters and gourmands. Given this history, it may be tempting for socialists to renounce the goal of conservation altogether. Instead the Left needs a radical conservation programme to ensure a task as enormous as Half-Earth is justly realised. Decolonizing conservation has myriad benefits for biodiversity, climate, and people alike, as Indigenous-managed forests sequester twice as much carbon as other lands and support more biodiversity than conventional nature reserves. Protecting the biosphere must be a priority. The Left and its allies cannot stand by and let the worst extinction event in sixty-six millions years transpire without a fight.

We also chose to name Half-Earth Socialism after Wilson’s concept because it expresses the humility and groundedness of our project. We wanted to discuss the environmental crisis in all of its facets – not just climate change – because the Left so far has shown little interest in biodiversity or animal rights. Furthermore, Half-Earth foregrounds the problem of land scarcity because there are trade-offs between the competing goals of meat production, biofuels, and conservation. To create Half-Earth, conservationists must embrace socialism, and socialists should imagine a new utopia predicated upon a new relationship to nature.





2) Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus 1968)

Ursula Le Guin not only transformed the genre of science fiction, she also changed the way socialists imagined utopias. Fredric Jameson described her books as an exercise in ‘world-reduction’, by which he meant Le Guin’s practice of honing in on questions that interested her – the genderless society in The Left Hand of Darkness – by shedding everything that could clutter her thought experiment. Her spare writing style differed from the genre’s frequent striving for the grandiose; instead of space operas, Le Guin’s books were ‘anti-Dune’ in Jameson’s judgement. She explained that her ‘carrier bag of fiction’ was filled with ‘far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions’ and was instead ‘full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don't understand’. She had little interest in stories of Promethean mastery or easy utopias, and instead focussed on the friction encountered in changing the world.

Le Guin’s overtly political novel The Dispossessed might seem the most relevant for socialist theorising (and indeed is widely admired on the Left), yet we were surprised by the unexpected resonances between our book and A Wizard of Earthsea. In Earthsea, a wizard’s magic comes from knowing the ‘true names’ of nature, and Ged – the magical young protagonist – must study ‘the name of every cape, point, bay, sound, inlet, channel, harbor, shallows, reef and rock of the shores of Lossow, a little islet of the Pelnish Sea’. Despite their prodigious learning, wizards accept the limits of knowledge. ‘The lists [of True Names] are not finished,’ Ged is told. ‘Nor will they be, till world’s end.’ Half-Earth Socialism espouses a similar epistemology (a philosophy of knowledge). To counter Marxism’s congenital ‘Prometheanism’ – the desire to dominate nature – we engage with the ideology’s roots in the works of GWF Hegel, a philosopher who deeply influenced Karl Marx. Hegel believed history was propelled by the ‘humanization of nature’, the process where the alien natural world is transformed by labour. When people turn a river into a canal or a forest into a field, they see human consciousness reflected back at themselves and thus reconcile with this ‘humanised’ nature. Both Hegel and Marx welcomed a future where the entire world would be humanised. We counter that Prometheanism is a dangerous creed and the attempt to fully humanise nature will inevitably crash into the accumulating debris of a wrecked biosphere long before it is achieved. Half-Earth is a kind of ‘world-reduction’, as the humanisation of nature must be careful and even reversed (i.e., rewilded) to ensure the stability of essential systems we do not fully understand.

Ged learns the lesson of epistemic humility after casting a spell he half understands and accidentally releases a daemonic ‘shadow’. Zoonotic diseases, which emerge from disturbing biomes and the brutal livestock industry, are shadows of a foolhardy humanisation of nature. In his Jena Lectures, Hegel speaks of the ‘name-giving power’ of language, where Geist incorporates nature into the ‘realm of names’. Perhaps one day humanity will see the magic in trying to know nature without seeking dominion over it.



3) Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (Verso 2013)

Late in 2013, Vettese heard Philip Mirowski speak at e-flux, an artists’ den on East Broadway in Manhattan. Mirowski, a science and technology scholar who had previously studied neoclassical economics and the commodification of university research, was presenting his new work on the history of neoliberalism – an ideology commonly associated with the conservative reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – and its near-death experience after the 2008 financial crisis. Mirowski is an idiosyncratic scholar, whose lectures can be compared to a Cormac MacCarthy novel spoken aloud – erudite, bizarre, menacing, and bleak. Vettese was enchanted. Mirowksi makes clear the necessity of taking neoliberal thought seriously, rather than dismissing it as mindless ‘market fundamentalism’. Mirowski clearly defines neoliberalism as the belief in the market as an ‘über information processor’ able to efficiently discover and collect knowledge in the form of prices. It was this epistemological turn in the inter-war period that cohered the nascent neoliberal movement and encouraged its hostility to rival knowledge-producing institutions, such as university science.

Half-Earth Socialism engages closely with neoliberal thought. In the introduction, we imagine the next twenty-five years of neoliberal hegemony, which in many ways was inspired by the final chapter in Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. In both cases, toothless cap-and-trade programmes buy time for the neoliberals’ preferred solution to the climate crisis: geoengineering. Rather than infringing on the semi-divine market by restricting fossil fuel firms and the many auxiliary industries that depend upon them, scientist-entrepreneurs will develop reckless schemes such as ‘solar radiation management’ (SRM) to manage the climate crisis. SRM relies on high-flying jets to spray sulphur high into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space and thus cool the Earth. The consequences of SRM are unpredictable but likely to be dire. Avoiding such a future requires the renewal of the socialist movement within a broad coalition. We believe the Left should engage in self-critique, as neoliberals did after the Great Depression demolished their erstwhile faith in laissez faire. In Half-Earth Socialism, we similarly begin with the epistemological question of ‘what can we know’ and answer that the biosphere is far more unknowable than the economy. With this principle in place, we see the need to control the economy within planetary boundaries to protect complex systems we cannot fully understand. Mirowski shows the need to understand the ruthless and adaptable neoliberal movement, but perhaps the Left can learn from it too.



4) Otto Neurath, Economic Writings Selections 1904–1945 (Springer 2004)

Although in the popular imagination neoliberalism was born in the conservative revolution of the 1980s, its true origins lie in a memorandum written by a socialist named Otto Neurath. A largely forgotten polymath from early twentieth century Vienna, Neurath articulated a highly original vision of economic democracy that sparked the ‘socialist calculation debate’ between neoliberals and the Left. In 1919, Neurath was appointed the head planner for the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, which emerged during the German Revolution after World War I. His proposed method was based on his experience as a war planner and study on the moneyless economy of ancient Egypt. In ‘Through War Economy and Economy in-Kind’ he extended the lessons learned from wartime planning to a socialist utopia: ‘during the war people everywhere turned toward a conscious shaping of life’ because production needed to be carried out in a way that ‘might not in itself be profitable’. If war planners quickly got rid of profit to guide their decisions, they too realised there was no other universal metric – no ‘war units’ – to guide their schemes. Instead, ‘total plans’ were what mattered, an approach that could be adopted by socialist planners to build new utopias. Neurath imagined planners and parliaments debating several possible blueprints for the future that would balance trade-offs through the ‘scientific study of utopias’. For example, does society want more houses or shorter working hours? Neurath’s memorandum provoked the ire of Ludwig von Mises, a conservative economist and Neurath’s former colleague at the Ministry of War. Mises laid the foundation of neoliberal epistemology by claiming Neurath’s economy would collapse without the information-gathering capacity of markets. Yet, it is notable that at the very beginning of the debate, Mises conceded to Neurath that the market could not properly value the environment.

By studying this early exchange between these two Austrian rivals, it becomes possible to imagine a new socialism fit for our age of environmental crisis. We agree with Neurath’s critique of capitalist ‘pseudorationality’ because the market will never accept the rationale of letting trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels languish ground. Instead, humanity should collectively decide what kind of world it wants to live in. A new generation of Neurathian planners would use physical units (e.g., steel, land, concrete, labour, petroleum, lithium) rather than money and estimate the consequences of such plans on living standards and the biosphere. This might sound technocratic, but Neurath was deeply hostile to the rule of experts. He lambasted ‘the totalitarian kind [who] may try to make scientists the leaders of a new society [...] like the magicians, nobles, or churchmen of former societies.’ Neoliberals may be priests of the market, but Neurath knew socialism required an educated and engaged citizenry. By collaborating with artists Marie Reidemeister and Gerd Arntz, Neurath created the ISOTYPE pictorial language — a precursor to infographics today — to help the Austrian working class visualise the economy. If they could see the economy, Neurath believed, then they could imagine one day controlling it. This is why neoliberals stress the inscrutability of the market. Our attempt to practise Neurathian pedagogy is a video game based on Half-Earth Socialism (available at http://half.earth). You play as a planetary planner experimenting with a wide variety of technologies and policies to create the good life for all and overcome the environmental crisis. In a nod to Neurath’s call for ‘scientific utopias’, our game includes a real climate model. Hopefully, your plans win democratic approval and avoid catastrophe along the path to ecological stability.



5) Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT 2011)

Most socialists thought that Neurath lost the first round of the socialist calculation debate to Mises because Neurath offered no mechanisms for drawing up and realising his proposed ‘total plans’. War economies, after all, are hardly paragons of freedom and efficiency. The neoliberal critique of socialism was based on the impossibility of collecting the information needed for planning. How then can humanity co-ordinate the world economy without markets? In Half-Earth Socialism we journey through the twentieth century to survey experiments in planning to glean how Neurath’s vision might be realised. For example, we examine mathematician Leonid Kantorovich’s achievement in the 1930s of creating the field of linear programming, as well as his failed effort in the 1960s to ‘program the USSR’. We also draw on historian Diana Kurkovsky-West’s research on Olga Burmatov, who developed novel tools in the 1980s to jointly consider ecological and economic factors while planning a huge new railway in Siberia.

One of the fruitful case studies that we draw on is Chile’s Cybersyn (or Synco in Spanish). To understand this oft-admired socailist project, we relied on Eden Medina’s excellent historical monograph, Cybernetic Revolutionaries. After the election of Salvador Allende in 1970, the government attempted to transition from capitalism to democratic socialism. The public sector grew rapidly as firms were nationalised, and Allende and his staff recognised that a new kind of management was needed to uphold their egalitarian principles while maintaining economic productivity. The government invited Stafford Beer, a consultant whose book Cybernetics and Management had recently been translated into Spanish. Cybernetics was a new, sprawling field focussed on human-machine interfaces. Beer believed that complex systems like the economy could be controlled, but that the controller should create a model with the flexibility and complexity commensurate with the original system. His approach, the ‘viable system model’, assumed that worker self-management would be largely sufficient to co-ordinate activity at a single firm, but that additional levels of co-ordination were necessary to ensure that firms received the materials they needed, that investment was rationally dispersed, that crises could be overcome, and that the economy as a whole could be directed towards collectively decided ends. In Half-Earth Socialism, we try to update Beer’s cybernetic vision with advances that have accrued over the past half-century, especially in Pendergrass’s field of climate modelling and data assimilation. Medina’s history reveals the creativity and courage of those trying to create socialism in Chile before the neoliberal-led coup crushed it. Today, socialists can learn from their movement’s past to create scientific utopias for the future.





Half-Earth Socialism
by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese
Hardback
Ebook
Read on any device
April 2022 / 9781839760334

“Half-Earth Socialism conclusively demonstrates how a liveable future requires a fundamentally different relationship to the Earth, the only home our species has ever known. A must read for post-capitalists and those who care about the climate crisis.”

– Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism

In Tribute to Meredith Tax

Verso editor Jessie Kindig remembers socialist feminist activist and author Meredith Tax, and we reprint the 2021 introduction to Tax's classic of socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women.

Meredith Tax at a recent demonstration

Meredith Tax, dynamic voice of socialist feminism for over fifty years, passed away recently at the age of 80. Meredith was one of a generation of women I have learned from and looked up to all my life.

I'm happy to say that we can count Meredith among Verso's authors, for we just last year released Meredith's important work of American socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women, in our Feminist Classics series. Rising is a classic that examined the fraught alliances between working-class women and middle-class women, and the possibility for what Meredith called "a united front of women." I remember reading an old secondhand edition raptly in my dorm room as a college student: I had read socialist labor history, but I hadn't ever read socialist feminist labor history -- but here it was, bringing together what often felt like unreconcilable parts of my political world!

I never met Meredith in person -- she was already ill when we signed her book -- but even over the phone you could tell that she was dynamic, restless, driven, and had a wry sense of humor. Just a few moments from her life: as a young activist, she was kicked out of the Leninist October League for criticizing their treatment of women, and rankled Planned Parenthood by pointing out their sterilization abuse of poor women and women of color. A part of the socialist feminist New York left in the 1970s and 80s, she never stopped working; most recently, documenting the struggle of Kurdish women fighters in Rojava and the new forms of demcoratic feminism they were building in the midst of war.

Meredith helped to found CARASA, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, one of the foundational reproductive justice organizations in the Americas, as well as the PEN America Center Women's Committee -- and I'm sure, a host of other things. A true heir of the "bread and roses too" tradition, she even wrote novels about bohemian life in Greenwich Village!

Below is her 2021 introduction to The Rising of the Women -- a fitting tribute to the work she's left us with, which will guide us in all the work we have yet to do.

– Jessie Kindig,
Brooklyn, NY, 2022


The Rising of the Women
by Meredith Tax
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback with free ebook
$39.95 CAD$27.96 CAD30% off
368 pages / April 2022 / 9781839765742

Forty Years Later

In the late seventies, when I wrote The Rising of the Women, most of the US left thought revolution would come via the classical Marxist strategy of building the labor movement until it was strong enough to form its own political party and, through elections, command the heights of government. The anarchist version of this strategy was that the labor movement would gain power through a general strike, not the vote. In both cases, women were but an adjunct to the main protagonist: the (white) male worker whose courage and collective strength would transform society and free us all.

Almost 175 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, nothing remotely resembling either scenario has yet taken place in the United States. There have been many attempts to explain why the Marxist model couldn’t be implemented, from the continual availability of new farmland as the frontier extended and indigenous peoples were killed off and expropriated, to the constant flood of new immigrants who could be used to break strikes and the divisive effects of racism in a system founded on slavery. All of these factors distinguished the US economic system from the nineteenth-century English capitalism on which Marx based his paradigm—though, as Cedric Robinson points out, the economies of England and the rest of Europe incorporated slavery from the time of ancient Athens. Robinson believes Marx’s desire to produce elegant theory led to serious oversimplifications. “Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce,” he writes, “Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.”

As I worked on The Rising of the Women, I too had doubts about the reliability of Marxist revolutionary predictions—partly because the US labor movement had only a fraction of the strength of its UK counterpart, but principally because the theory excluded women and community organizing. By 1984, I had lost so much faith in the paradigm that, when I made a speech for Monthly Review, which had published The Rising of the Women, I focused on the socialist tradition’s neglect of women’s organizing:

A pattern of male repression, exclusion, devaluation and just not getting the point runs like a thread through the history of the left. With few important exceptions, left-wing movements have been overwhelmingly led and controlled by men and serviced by women: men making speeches, women making coffee. As a result, our hundred-odd years of socialist history is lopsided, reflecting the ideas, history, and experience of only half the species. Within left-wing organizations, the “woman question,” as Leninists quaintly call it, is commonly treated as a petty-bourgeois diversion from the class struggle, its concerns trivial items to be placed on the bottom of an agenda and skipped for lack of time. Women who try to stimulate discussion of it are normally encouraged to tum their attention to more important matters… The socialist movement has paid the price for such stupidity. Its theory does not accurately describe the world and its practice does not prefigure any future society most of us would want to belong to. No wonder it has reached an impasse. How could a theory and practice based—at best—on the experience of only half the human race possibly be adequate?

Today I would go farther, possibly even as far as Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned former Marxist guerilla and ideological leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, who said, “The role the working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of women.”

Theories about the failure of Marxism in the United States also overlook a crucial aspect of US history: every time a progres- sive movement became strong enough to cause concern, the state came down on it with a heavy hand, murdering, jailing, blacklist- ing, and deporting as many leftists as it could find. This happened in the Red Scare following World War I, the McCarthy period, and the attacks during the sixties on the civil rights and antiwar movements, particularly the Black Panthers.

With this history in mind, and in light of the current danger from the extreme right, I believe our strategy for profound social change in the United States must be based not only on the labor movement, but on two other nineteenth-century movements, those of Black people and of feminists, both born in the struggle to abolish slavery. Against a state as powerful as this one, only a united front that bring these movements and labor together will have enough muscle for serious transformation. And time is running out.
The Current Crisis

We are at a turning point in human history. The climate emergency demands that we immediately move from a fossil fuel–based economy to one that is environmentally sustainable. This will require drastic political and economic changes. Nor is the climate crisis the only one we face: by October 2021 the COVID-19 epidemic had already produced over 242 million cases, according to the World Health Organization, and it has not yet run its course. The economic depression resulting from the epidemic is likely to doom millions more to homelessness, hunger, and unemployment.

Climate change, COVID, and the economic slide have put overwhelming stress on a system that had already reached its breaking point. In the last thirty years, global economic integration based on free market ideology has led to obscene wealth for a very few and desperate poverty and uncertainty for most. The decisions that shape today’s world are more often made by trans- national corporations than by governments or national elites. Unwilling to relinquish the power they once had, some members of these elites support right-wing politicians whose appeal is based on a toxic brew of racism, fundamentalism, hatred of women and LBGTQ+ people, and paranoia about cultural dilution by migrants. With help from the religious right, a new axis of fascist politicians has come to power, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Donald Trump here in the United States.

These politicians, and the right-wing movements behind them, are a danger not only to democracy but to life on earth itself, for their disregard for climate change will make it even more difficult to deal with global warming. Lacking the legitimacy that comes from solving real social problems, they rule by force, fear, and deception, relying on the military, police, and support from fundamentalists and a captive media to contain popular dissent. In order to build their base, they target minorities, migrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people; undermine basic democratic rights like voting, assembly, and freedom of speech; and invoke religion to attack the very idea of universal human rights. Some are open fascists; others are willing to accommodate fascism.

Politicians of the center, who spent the last thirty years cheering market solutions and unrestrained economic growth, were unprepared for the cascade of crises we now face. Their main fix for the problems of late capitalism has been austerity and further shredding of the social safety net; their response to climate change has been slow and inadequate; and too few have fiercely opposed the rise of right-wing movements. They are not strong enough by themselves to turn back the extreme right.

The rise of this new global axis demands a united front against fascism comparable to that of World War II and late-twentieth-century movements in China and Vietnam. These were all led from the left. But the reborn US left is young, and, like a toddler, is still learning to walk.

Its rebirth began with Occupy Wall Street in 2011. That led to the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2015 and 2019, which in turn led to the resurrection of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a mass organization, and the election of new progressive politicians to a host of offices. Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement against police brutality and a racialized justice system, began in 2013 with mass protests against the acquittal of the man who killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. This led to the formation of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over a hundred abolitionist, anti-capitalist groups, while BLM itself went on to build a national network that protested the murders by police of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others, culminating in the vast mobilization after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But where is the comparable progressive organization or network focused on women’s issues? It doesn’t exist. This is a problem not just for feminists but for all of us, because the organized strength of women is needed to fight fascism.
Suffrage and the United Front of Women

In The Rising of the Women, I use the term “united front of women” to mean a broad women’s movement of different classes in which socialists must fight for their own political goals without destroying the unity needed to move forward. The suffrage movement in the early part of the twentieth century drew in everyone from millionaire J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne to socialist union organizer Clara Lemlich. Each faction fought for leadership, but while the Anne Morgans had money and social status on their side, socialist feminists did not even have the full support of the left for women’s suffrage. Anarchists and syndicalists thought the vote was a bourgeois distraction, while some socialist politicians feared that women were so backward they might all vote for capitalist parties.

Still, most progressives saw the vote as a basic democratic right that should be extended to women as well as men. In this period the Socialist Party was large and mass-based and elected many local and state officials; socialist Eugene V. Debs won more than 900,000 votes in the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections. The party’s founding program in 1901 included equal rights for men and women. When it did nothing to put this position into practice, socialist feminists around the country organized local women’s groups. These women were not separatists by choice; they wanted access to the party’s national reach. So, in 1908, they submitted two resolutions to the party convention: one to set up a Women’s National Committee, the other for a women’s suffrage campaign. When both resolutions passed, they set to work. A year later, the party had ten times more female members.

But how were they going to approach the suffrage movement, most of which was anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and racist towards Black women? They had three options: work within existing suffrage organizations as individuals; build socialist suffrage organizations that could participate in the movement alongside mainstream organizations; or form socialist suffrage organizations that would criticize the movement from the sidelines rather than collaborate with the bourgeoisie.

To find out what they did, you will have to read Chapter 7. But these strategic questions confront the left in any united front situation: do you give up your independence to be part of the action, build your own organization and fight for leadership in the broad movement, or stay pure on the sidelines? A mature left is capable of working with liberals without forgetting its objectives or losing its soul. An infantile left is not. But without their own autonomous women’s organizations, left-wing feminists cannot fight for leadership within the united front.
Feminism and the Left

In my preface to the second edition, I painted a picture of the feminist movement in 2001: many sectors, each with its own objectives and style, but still demonstrably part of one movement. Look for feminist organizations today and what do you see?

There’s #MeToo, an unquestionably powerful movement against job-related sexual harassment and assault, with a huge impact. But because it is a campaign, not a membership organization, there is no way for people who support this movement to ensure either consistency or accountability. Then there’s the Women’s March, which started out strong after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, staging the largest protest in US history: up to a million people in Washington, DC, and between 3 and 5 million people in the United States as a whole. But because it was a campaign originated on Facebook, its governance was up for grabs, and it has had many ups and downs since 2016. Reproductive rights organizations, notably Planned Parenthood, and the reproductive justice movement have been on the front lines against the right-wing religious assault on women since the late seventies. Now, as many states pass laws cutting off access to abortion, spontaneous groups funding women’s travel to abortion clinics have sprung up. All this is well and good. But multi-issue left-feminist organizations are also needed if we are to defeat the right.

The history in this book shows what happens when women rely on progressive groups led by men to do feminist organizing, and the US left today is a long way from grasping feminism, let alone integrating it into a general political program. In 2008, Linda Burnham, an experienced Black left-wing feminist, did an in-depth study of US grassroots organizations’ approach to racism and sexism, interviewing leaders of eleven community organizing groups, mostly people of color. She found that while all of them had a structured program to deal with racism, not a single one had anything comparable on sexism.

Our generation learned about sexism the hard way. One of the igniting events of women’s liberation was the 1969 counter-inaugural rally in Washington, DC, which made the limitations of the antiwar movement extremely clear. When Marilyn Webb and Shulamith Firestone came onstage to read a women’s statement, the predominantly male audience shouted them down, yelling, “Take them off the stage and fuck them!” Dave Dellinger, who was chairing the rally, responded by telling the women to leave the stage. Furious, they went home and started women’s groups.

Women in the Black movement faced similar hostility. Their voices were deliberately excluded from the 1963 March on Washington, and Fran Beal, who fought the sexism she found in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), remembers the pushback she encountered when discussing abortion rights for Black women: “We were called lesbians and dykes. They accused us—this was from the SNCC people—they accused us of dividing the movement. They said, That’s not as important as race.”

Today, many feminists work inside and often lead unions and left-wing organizations. But their personal feminism cannot trans- form the overall consciousness of these groups, much less the progressive movement as a whole. Such large-scale transformations in consciousness do not come about merely by women winning over their male colleagues. Autonomous feminist groups are needed to push from the outside at the same time.

The work of the Illinois Women’s Alliance discussed in Chapter 4 and the history of the shirtwaist strike in Chapter 8 show how much can be accomplished by a united front of women with progressive leadership. The story of the Lawrence strike in Chapter 9 shows what more can be done when a strike unites the entire working class at both the union and the community level. And the struggles over socialist suffrage work in Chapter 7 shows what happens to women’s work when the left disregards it, or when its male leaders feel threatened by feminist activism, and the women involved have no independent organization that can keep their issues alive.

Today a large and aggressive right-wing movement is on the attack against feminists, queers, and especially transgender people. At a time when the right is led by angry white men and religious fundamentalists, it is critical for progressives to fight attacks on trans people while strengthening the fight against patriarchy in general. Only by doing both can we build a progressive movement that will fight for all of our rights, not play one group off against another. Everyone in this movement needs to understand gender, patriarchy, racism, and class, and the specific ways they intersect and overlap. In addition, progressive feminists have to build both our own independent organizations and a broad united front of women, and work with and within the left to achieve our common social justice objectives. Unless we can do all these things, and fight climate change at the same time, we will fall short. And failure could mean the end of human life on earth.
Notes

“Fully aware of the constant place...” Cedric Robinson, “Preface to the 2000 edition,” Black Marxism, London: Penguin, 2000, xlix.

“The US labor movement had only a fraction of the strength of its UK counterpart...” In 2020, only 10.8 percent of the US workforce were unionized; most of these union members were government workers. “News Release,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021, BLS.gov. In the same year, 23.7 percent of workers in the United Kingdom were union members. D. Clark, “Percentage of Employees That Are Members of a Trade Union in the United Kingdom from 1995 to 2020,” June 7, 2021, Statista.com.

“I made a speech for Monthly Review...” In the end, my speech proved too heterodox to be published in Monthly Review and ended up in Dissent: “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Women’s Liberation and the Left,” Dissent, Fall 1988, available at MeredithTax.org.

“The role the working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of women...” Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution, Cologne, Germany: International Initiative and Mesopotamian Publishers, 2013, 52, Freeocalan.org.

“In 2008, Linda Burnham, an experienced Black left-wing feminist, did an in-depth study...” Linda Burnham is an American journalist and organizer in women’s rights movements, particularly those serving women of color. She was a co-founder of the Third World Women’s Alliance and founder of the Women of Color Research Center in Oakland, and is now research director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The study is here: Linda Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework in Social Justice Organizing,” Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan, July 2008, CEW.UMich.edu.

“We were called lesbians and dykes....” Fran Beal, interview by Loretta Ross, March 18, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, p. 40, cited in Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework.”

 

The UCP have made it clear. Rather than fighting to defend working Albertans, they’ve chosen to veer even farther to the right by electing a radical candidate who has no plan outside of dividing our province even further. Eugene, don’t stand by while the UCP rallies their base of rich corporate donors to pull the rug out from under the workers who built this province. Send a tweet now to tell the UCP that workers are fed up and we’re demanding better. The UCP government has set us back 4 years. They’ve failed to deliver the jobs they promised, they’ve gutted crucial services, and they’ve done nothing to stabilize our economy. They’ve been too busy picking fights and chasing the past to focus on our future. We’re fed up with the UCP’s attacks on workers. We do the work, we pay the taxes, and we spend the money that creates good jobs. Workers deserve respect. Now, with Danielle Smith at the helm, we need to fight even harder for workers in Alberta. Workers have had enough. Tell Danielle Smith and the UCP that the damage is done. We’re demanding better. https://action.afl.org/action-pages/leader-tweet/ Thanks In solidarity, Gil Gil McGowan President Alberta Federation of Labour Workers across the province have been let down by soaring inflation, stagnant wages, and persistent job insecurity. We pay our taxes, but can no longer count on crucial services to be there when we need them. To build a life here, working families need stability, opportunity, and a good standard of living. That means getting inflation under control and making life more affordable. It means making sure we have public health care that is there when we need it, good homes for all, and quality education so the next generation can reach their full potential. It also means making the rich pay their fair share and strengthening rights for workers. There is a better way. That’s why we’re teaming up with Better Way Alberta to reimagine how we can make sure working families across our province have the support they need to build a better future for Alberta. But we need you to be part of the conversation, Eugene. Will you join us? Eugene, RSVP now to join the conversation at a Better Way Tour event near you Tour Stops: October 24 — Calgary October 25 — Lethbridge October 26 — Medicine Hat October 27 — Red Deer October 28 — Edmonton We’re at a critical point for workers in Alberta. Workers built this province and we can build a better future. But we need to work together, and we need to act now. So don’t wait. RSVP now to attend the Better Way Tour and join the conversation. See you there! In solidarity, Jocelyn Jocelyn Johnson Director of Campaigns Alberta Federation of Labour

Racial equity in marijuana pardons requires states’ action

By AARON MORRISON

October 8, 2022

1 of 7

Weldon Angelos poses for a photograph Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, in West Jordan, Utah. President Joe Biden’s executive action pardoning Americans with federal convictions for simple marijuana possession will benefit thousands of people by making it easier for them to find housing, get a job or apply to college. Angelos, whose 2003 federal case for selling $300 worth of marijuana to a confidential informant in Utah got him sentenced to 55 years in prison, said he knows many people who will benefit from the president’s pardon. But there are also many more who will not, he said. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)


By pardoning Americans with federal convictions for marijuana possession, President Joe Biden said he aimed to partially redress decades of anti-drug laws that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino communities.

While Biden’s executive action will benefit thousands of people by making it easier for them to find housing, get a job or apply to college, it does nothing to help the hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and Hispanic Americans still burdened by state convictions for marijuana-related offenses, not to mention the millions more with other drug offenses on their records.

Advocates for overhauling the nation’s drug laws are hopeful that Biden’s pardons lead state lawmakers to pardon and expunge minor drug offenses from people’s records. After all, they say, dozens of states have already decriminalized cannabis and legalized it for a multibillion-dollar recreational and medicinal use industry that is predominantly white-owned.

“We know that this is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people who are suffering the effects of (past) marijuana prohibition,” said Maritza Perez, director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization pushing for decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

The decades-long “war on drugs,” a sweeping federal legislative agenda that Biden championed as a U.S. senator and that was mirrored by state lawmakers, brought about mass-criminalization and an explosion of the prison population. An estimated tens of millions of people have had a marijuana-related arrest on their record since 1965, the vast majority of them stemming from enforcement by local police and state prosecutors.

But as many law enforcement officials like to point out, the majority of people who serve long sentences for marijuana-related offenses were convicted of more serious charges than possession, such as a weapons count or the intent to sell or traffic the drug on a larger scale. Such factors are typically how a case moves into federal territory versus state prosecution.

Still, reform advocates counter that many of them aren’t violent drug kingpins.

A 2021 Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data showed that between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million people. Of them, about 1 in 5 were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

The passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in the 1990s helped to triple the Black and Hispanic incarceration rates by the year 2000. The white incarceration rate only doubled.

And despite state legalization or decriminalization of possession up to certain amounts, local law enforcement agencies continue to make more arrests for drug possession, including marijuana, than any other criminal offense, according to FBI crime data.

The president’s pardon of more than 6,500 Americans with federal marijuana possession convictions, as well as thousands more with convictions in the majority-Black city of Washington, captures only a sliver of those with records nationwide. That’s likely why he has called on state governors to take similar steps for people with state marijuana possession convictions.

“While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionate rates,” Biden said Thursday. “Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.”

With the president’s unambiguous acknowledgement of racial inequity in marijuana enforcement, drug law reform advocates and those with convictions now see an opening to push for far more remedies to the harms of the war on drugs.

Weldon Angelos, whose 2003 federal case for selling $300 worth of marijuana to a confidential informant in Utah got him sentenced to 55 years in prison, said he knows many people who will benefit from the president’s pardon. But there are also many more who will not, he said.

“I feel like this is a first step of (Biden) doing something bigger,” said Angelos who, after serving 13 years in prison, received presidential clemency and a pardon during the Obama and Trump administrations. He is now a drug law reform activist.

Felony cannabis cases like his also deserve consideration, Weldon said. Biden’s pardon does not cover convictions for possessing marijuana with an intent to distribute, which could further widen the scope of people receiving relief by tens of thousands.

Enacting a law that clears a person’s federal drug record, similar to what has been offered in nearly two dozen states where marijuana has been decriminalized or legalized recreationally, would make the conviction invisible to companies and landlords doing criminal background checks, he said. Even with the federal pardon, Weldon’s record is still visible, he said.

“There’s a lot more that needs to be done here, if we really want to unwind the effects, and the racist effects, of the war on cannabis,” Weldon said.

Some advocates believe the country should consider clearing more than just marijuana records. In the 1990s, Marlon Chamberlain was a college student in Iowa when he learned that his then-girlfriend was pregnant with his eldest son. He began using cannabis to cope with the anxiety of becoming a young father and, soon after, started selling the drug.

“My thought was that I would try to make enough money and have the means to take care of my son,” said Chamberlain, a 46-year-old Chicago native. “But I got addicted to the lifestyle and I graduated from selling weed to selling cocaine.”

Chamberlain said he had a slew of state charges for marijuana possession between the ages of 19 and 25. But it was a federal case for crack cocaine, in which authorities used his prior marijuana arrests to enhance the seriousness of their case, that upended his life. Chamberlain was sentenced to 20 years in prison before the punishment was reduced to 14 years under the Fair Sentencing Act that narrowed the sentencing disparity between crack and powder forms of cocaine. He was freed after 10 years.

Even though he will not benefit from Biden’s marijuana pardon, Chamberlain sees it as an opportunity to advocate for the elimination of what he calls the “permanent punishments,” such as the difficulties in finding a job or housing that come with having a past drug offense.

“What Biden is initiating is a process of righting the wrongs” of the drug war, he said.

Colorado and Washington were the first states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis in 2012, although medical use had already been legal in several states. According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 37 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories now permit the medical use of cannabis. Nineteen states, D.C. and two territories have legalized its recreational use.

And during next month’s midterm elections, voters in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota will decide whether to permit recreational adult use of cannabis. That is reason enough for every state to look into mass-pardons and expungements, civil rights leaders say.

“How fair is it that you will legalize marijuana now, tax it to use those state taxes to fund government, but forget all the people who are sitting in jails or were incarcerated when it was illegal?” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told the AP. “All those individuals who have been charged with marijuana crimes need to be pardoned, particularly those in states that have legalized marijuana.”

Richard Wallace, executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, said state pardons must also come with some form of restitution to those who suffered economically under the racially discriminatory drug war.

“We need to be thinking about building out durable reparations campaigns centered around cannabis legalization,” he said. “I think oftentimes we end up just fighting for the pardons and the expungements, and we leave out the economic component.”

___

Aaron Morrison is a New York City-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

Breonna Taylor warrant details deepen mistrust in police

By DYLAN LOVAN

October 8, 2022

Police and protesters converge during a demonstration, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. Recent revelations about the search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death have reopened old wounds in Louisville’s Black community and disrupted the city’s efforts to restore trust in the police department.

 (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Recent revelations about the search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death have reopened old wounds in Louisville’s Black community and disrupted the city’s efforts to restore trust in the police department.

Former Louisville officer Kelly Goodlett admitted in federal court that she and another officer falsified information in the warrant. That confirmed to many, including U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, that Taylor never should have been visited by armed officers on March 13, 2020.

Protest leaders who took to the streets of Kentucky’s largest city after she was fatally shot by police say Goodlett’s confession confirms their suspicions that Louisville police can’t be trusted and that systemic issues run deep. They say officers abused demonstrators after the botched raid, and that her fatal shooting is just one of many reasons why the community remains wary.

“What bothers me so incredibly is that so many lives were lost because of this lie,” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and leader in a push for justice after Taylor’s death. “They don’t even understand the far-reaching tentacles of what they did.”

More than once during that long, hot summer, individual officers escalated rather than calmed a situation.

Days before a Black man was shot dead by a National Guard member in his restaurant’s kitchen, an officer who wounded the man’s niece taunted demonstrators on social media, daring them to challenge police. Another Louisville officer faces a federal charge over hitting a kneeling protester in the back of the head with a baton.

“We were right to protest,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds tweeted shortly after Goodlett’s plea. “People are dead and lives upended because of a pile of lies.”

Some Louisville officers have been disciplined, fired, and even charged with crimes for abusing protesters, in addition to the four officers now charged federally in relation to the botched raid. But the problems can’t be blamed on a few rogue officers, according to a lawsuit brought by Taylor’s white neighbors, who were nearly hit by gunfire during the raid.

They accuse the department of having a “warrior culture” and cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality. In a lawsuit, the family of the man shot at the restaurant alleges that police aggression during a curfew instigated his death.

Louisville is working on numerous reforms, implementing a new 911 diversion program, increasing leadership reviews of search warrant requests and improving officer training. The city has outlawed “no knock” warrants, conducted an independent audit and paid Taylor’s mother $12 million in a civil settlement. A new police chief, Erika Shields, was hired in 2021.

Such reforms have been implemented amid a continuing U.S. Department of Justice investigation of LMPD’s policing practices, which could land at any moment.

The chief called Taylor’s death “horrific,” and said in an interview with The Associated Press that she welcomes the federal investigations, which led to charges against Goodlett and the other officers. “I think we’re in an important place that was necessary to get to, before we move on,” she said.

Mayor Greg Fischer, whose 12-year run ends this year, said city officials turned the probes over to state and federal officials “because the community rightfully was saying LMPD should not be investigating LMPD, and I agree with that.”

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s investigation then ended without any officers being charged directly in Taylor’s death. It took federal prosecutors to convict Goodlett — she pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted to helping create a phony link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer. Goodlett resigned the day before her charges were announced in August and awaits sentencing next month.

In August court filings, federal prosecutors said another former officer, Joshua Jaynes, inserted the crucial information into the warrant request that drew Taylor into the narcotic squad’s investigation — claiming that a postal inspector had verified that the drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment.

Goodlett and Jaynes knew that was false, as did their sergeant, Kyle Meany, when he signed off on the request, Garland said.

“Breonna Taylor should be alive today,” Garland said.

Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany were all fired, as was a fourth officer, Brett Hankison, who faces federal charges for blindly firing into Taylor’s home through a side door and window. He was exonerated on similar state charges earlier this year. Jaynes and Meany are being tried together. That trial, along with Hankison’s, is scheduled for next year. Goodlett is expected to testify against Jaynes.

Metro Council President David James, a former police officer, said that to restore trust, Louisville’s Black community “just wants the police to treat them the same way they would treat people in another part of the city.”

No incident highlighted the racial divide more than the fatal shooting of Black restaurant owner David McAtee as police sought to enforce the city’s curfew in a predominantly African American neighborhood far from the center of the Taylor protests.

Just before midnight on May 31, 2020, Louisville officers and Kentucky National Guard members were sent to a gathering spot near McAtee’s YaYa’s BBQ “for a show of force (and) intimidation,” McAtee’s family alleges in a lawsuit.

A few nights earlier, officer Katie Crews had been photographed in a line of police as a protester offered her a handful of flowers. Crews posted the image on social media, writing that she hoped the protester was hurting from the pepper balls she “got lit up with a little later on.”

“Come back and get ya some more ole girl, I’ll be on the line again tonight,” Crews wrote.

When officers marched toward McAtee’s restaurant, Crews escalated the tension by firing non-lethal pepper balls at the crowd, an LMPD investigation found. Many people rushed into McAtee’s kitchen, where his niece was shot in the neck by Crews with the non-lethal rounds.

That prompted McAtee to pull a pistol from his hip and fire a shot. Seeing that, Crews and other officers switched to live rounds and McAtee, leaning out his kitchen door, was fatally shot in the chest by a National Guard member. The deadly force was found to be justified, but the police chief was fired by Fischer because the Louisville officers involved had failed to turn on their body cameras, just as they did during the Taylor raid.

Crews later admitted that no one in the crowd had been disorderly. She was fired by Shields in February. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a federal charge of using unreasonable force.

James, the Metro Council president and former officer, groaned while recalling McAtee’s death, saying he was saddened because he knew him and had eaten his food. The “extremely unfortunate and tragic” shooting has stuck with him as an example of bad policing, he said.

Drake, the poet and activist, said more systemic changes are needed. In the meantime, she said authorities should apologize for their treatment of protesters, and drop any cases against people arrested for demonstrating that summer. Hundreds have been cleared, but some remain criminally charged. Knowing it was all so unnecessary only deepens the pain, she said.

“We could have avoided all this,” Drake said. “And I think that’s where the pain comes from — we were right!”

Missing snow puts famed New Zealand ski areas on precipice

By NICK PERRY

October 5, 2022

1 of 10

The ski slopes are almost devoid of snow at the Tūroa ski field, on Mt. Ruapehu, New Zealand on Sept. 22, 2022. A disastrous snow season has left two of New Zealand's largest ski fields on the brink of bankruptcy, with climate change appearing to play a significant role. (AP Photo/Nick Perry)


TŪROA SKI AREA, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand’s Tūroa ski area is usually a white wonderland at this time of year, its deep snowpack supporting its famed spring skiing. This season, it’s largely a barren moonscape, with tiny patches of snow poking out between vast fields of jagged volcanic boulders.

The ski area was forced to close for the season this week, three weeks earlier than planned.

Rain repeatedly washed away the snow, and the ski area’s 50 snowmaking machines proved no match against balmy temperatures. Climate change appears to be a significant factor, after New Zealand experienced its warmest winter on record — for the third year in a row.

The disastrous snow season comes after the previous two seasons were severely disrupted by COVID-19, leaving Tūroa and its sister ski area Whakapapa on the brink of bankruptcy.

The two ski areas, which are among New Zealand’s largest, are owned by the same company and located on opposite sides of Mount Ruapehu. Should they be forced to close permanently, it would leave North Island, where more than three-quarters of the nation’s 5 million people live, without any major ski areas.

Even in New Zealand’s cooler South Island, climate change is raising questions about the future of skiing and snowboarding. The sports have long been important for attracting foreign tourist dollars to New Zealand and form part of the nation’s identity as an outdoor adventure destination.

At Tūroa this season, workers in snow-grooming machines spent thousands of hours pushing what snow there was onto trails, allowing expert skiers and snowboarders to take the chairlifts to the top of the ski area for limited runs. But there was little on offer for beginners or intermediates.

Sam Yates, 21, this year landed his dream job as a ski instructor at Tūroa. But he estimates he managed to teach people on only about a dozen days between frequent mountain closures. On some days when Tūroa was closed, he was asked to pour coffees in the cafeteria at Whakapapa. In mid-August, he was one of about 135 workers — one-third of the staff at the two ski areas — who were laid off.

“It’s heartbreaking to see the weather,” Yates said. “You move down here and sacrifice six months of your life to commit to skiing. When you do that and then you can’t ski, it’s quite disheartening and yeah, heartbreaking.”

With the snow melting away and his job gone, Yates decided to pack up his van and move to South Island, where the skiing has been better. Then he hopes to follow the winter to Canada.

Johan Bergman, the ski area manager at Tūroa, said it had been a tough season.

“We’ve had some pretty decent snowfalls, but they’ve generally been followed by rain events, which has washed a lot of the snow away,” he said. “And it’s been a bit warm this winter, too, over the whole country, so we’re really lacking that snow this year.”

He looked behind him at the barren mountain.

“This should be white at the moment,” he said.

Bergman said that in his view, climate change is a background factor but this season has been more a case of bad luck. And he’s bullish on the sport’s future at Ruapehu.

“I always see skiing up here in the North Island of New Zealand,” he said.

But the poor season is putting severe financial pressure on Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, the company which owns both ski areas. Set up 70 years ago by ski enthusiasts, the company operates as a nonprofit. It’s exempt from paying company tax and is required to put any profits back into enhancing the ski areas.

But there are no profits. Last year the company lost nearly 6 million New Zealand dollars ($3.4 million) and its total debt climbed to over NZ$30 million. The company has been seeking a major new investor, so far without success.

Even before this year’s barren snow season, the company’s auditors noted there was significant doubt about whether the company could continue to stay afloat. Chief Executive Jono Dean this week did not immediately respond to written questions about the company’s future.

The company seems to have underestimated the threat posed by global warming. It doesn’t mention climate change once in its most recent 54-page annual report, instead listing the major threats to its business as further COVID-19 disruptions and borrowing restrictions.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research found New Zealand’s average winter temperature hit a new a record this year of almost 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit). It was also the wettest winter on record. The agency concluded that climate change was a major contributor to both the extra warmth and the rain.

Professor James Renwick, a climate scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington, said that as temperatures increase in New Zealand, skiing will become more untenable.

“I’ve told the North Island ski operators more than once that things are going to become marginal fairly quickly,” Renwick said.

He said there would always be changes from season to season but the trend was for warmer winters. He said it was hard to predict how long any individual ski area could survive.

“The further south you are and the higher up the mountains you are, the colder it is, so the longer you can keep going,” he said.

Some ski areas may even benefit, at least initially, from the extra precipitation driven by climate change if it’s cold enough to fall as snow, Renwick added.

Ski areas in some countries have increased revenues by opening their chairlifts to mountain bikers during the summer. But the ski areas on Mount Ruapehu can’t because they are in a national park and don’t have permission.

Mount Ruapehu is stunning, an active volcano that film director Peter Jackson used as a backdrop in “The Lord of the Rings” movies. The fertile volcanic soil at its base has allowed market gardening to flourish, including in the village of Ohakune, which is affectionately known as the nation’s carrot capital.

But Ohakune also relies on the ski business.

Phil Jackson, who built the Hobbit Motorlodge in Ohakune nearly 40 years ago, said this year has been the worst ski season since 1983, when the mountain was covered in ice. Normally he would ski at Tūroa, he said, but this year his only skiing has been four days in the South Island. And business at his motor lodge has been terrible.

“A shocker,” Jackson said. “Two years of COVID and now another disaster ski season. We’ll survive, but there will be people who won’t be able to survive.”

Others are hoping increased summer activity might make up for the skiing shortfall.

Ben Wiggins, the managing director of the TCB Ski, Board and Bike shop, said that while fewer people were coming to Ohakune for skiing and snowboarding, they’ve seen more visitors who want to go golfing, fishing, camping and mountain biking.

“The facilities down here like bars, cafes and restaurants are beautiful, and everybody loves the little town,” he said.

Nearby at the Osteria restaurant, manager Teresa Mochan said diner numbers were lower this year from pre-COVID levels but she was still busy because staff were hard to find.

“There are people that are a little bit down, I guess, because they haven’t been able to go skiing,” she said.

But Mochan said she loves living in Ohakune and plans to stay.

“Fingers crossed that next year we bounce back and have an amazing winter season and the town can really start to show its full potential again,” she said.

___

See more AP Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific

As suicides rise, US military seeks to address mental health

By ASHRAF KHALIL

today

1 of 10

Dionne Williamson, of Patuxent River, Md., grooms Woody before her riding lesson at Cloverleaf Equine Center in Clifton, Va., Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. After finishing a tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Williamson felt emotionally numb. As the Pentagon seeks to confront spiraling suicide rates in the military ranks, Williamson’s experiences shine a light on the realities for service members seeking mental health help. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)


WASHINGTON (AP) — After finishing a tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Dionne Williamson felt emotionally numb. More warning signs appeared during several years of subsequent overseas postings.

“It’s like I lost me somewhere,” said Williamson, a Navy lieutenant commander who experienced disorientation, depression, memory loss and chronic exhaustion. “I went to my captain and said, ‘Sir, I need help. Something’s wrong.’”

As the Pentagon seeks to confront spiraling suicide rates in the military ranks, Williamson’s experiences shine a light on the realities for service members seeking mental health help. For most, simply acknowledging their difficulties can be intimidating. And what comes next can be frustrating and dispiriting.

Williamson, 46, eventually found stability through a monthlong hospitalization and a therapeutic program that incorporates horseback riding. But she had to fight for years to get the help she needed. “It’s a wonder how I made it through,” she said.

In March Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the creation of an independent committee to review the military’s mental health and suicide prevention programs.

According to Defense Department data, suicides among active-duty service members increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2020. The numbers jumped by 15% in 2020 alone. In longtime suicide hotspot postings such as Alaska – service members and their families contend with extreme isolation and a harsh climate – the rate has doubled.

A 2021 study by the Cost of War Project concluded that since 9/11, four times as many service members and veterans have died by suicide as have perished in combat. The study detailed stress factors particular to military life: “high exposure to trauma — mental, physical, moral, and sexual — stress and burnout, the influence of the military’s hegemonic masculine culture, continued access to guns, and the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life.”

The Pentagon did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But Austin has publicly acknowledged that the Pentagon’s current mental health offerings — including a Defense Suicide Prevention Office established in 2011 — have proven insufficient.

“It is imperative that we take care of all our teammates and continue to reinforce that mental health and suicide prevention remain a key priority,” Austin wrote in March. “Clearly we have more work to do.”
Last year the Army issued fresh guidelines to its commanders on how to handle mental health issues in the ranks, complete with briefing slides and a script. But daunting long-term challenges remain. Many soldiers fear the stigma of admitting to mental health issues within the internal military culture of self-sufficiency. And those who seek help often find that stigma is not only real, but compounded by bureaucratic obstacles.

Much like the issue of food insecurity in military families, a network of military-adjacent charitable organizations has tried to fill the gaps with a variety of programs and outreach efforts.

Some are purely recreational, such as an annual fishing tournament in Alaska designed to provide fresh air and socialization for service members. Others are more focused on self-care, like an Armed Services YMCA program that offers free childcare so that military parents can attend therapy sessions.

The situation in Alaska is particularly dire. In January, after a string of suicides, Command Sgt. Maj. Phil Blaisdell addressed his soldiers in an emotional Instagram post. “When did suicide become the answer,” he asked. “Please send me a DM if you need something. Please …”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said that while posting to Alaska can be a dream for some service members, it’s a solitary nightmare for others that needs to be addressed.

“You’ve got to be paying attention to this when you see the statistics jump as they are,” Murkowski said. “Right now, you’ve got everybody. You’ve got the Joint Chiefs looking at Alaska and saying, ‘Holy smokes, what’s going on up there?’”

The stresses of an Alaska posting are compounded by a shortage of on-the-ground therapists. During a visit to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska earlier this year, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth heard from base health care workers who say they are understaffed, burned out and can’t see patients on a timely basis. If a soldier seeks help, they often have to wait weeks for an appointment.

“We have people who need our services and we can’t get to them,” one longtime counselor told Wormuth during a meeting. “We need staff and until we get them, we will continue to have soldiers die.”

The annual Combat Fishing Tournament in Seward, Alaska, was formed to “get the kids out of the barracks, get them off the base for the day and get them out of their heads,” said co-founder Keith Manternach.

The tournament, which was begun in 2007 and now involves more than 300 service members, includes a day of deep-water fishing followed by a celebratory banquet with prizes for the largest catch, smallest catch and the person who gets the sickest.

“I think there’s a huge element of mental health to it,” Manternach said.

It’s not just in Alaska.

Sgt. Antonio Rivera, an 18-year veteran who completed three tours in Iraq and a year at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, freely acknowledges that he has serious PTSD.

“I know that I need help. There’s signs and I’ve waited long enough,” said Rivera, 48, who is assigned to Fort Hood in Texas. “I don’t want my children to suffer because of me not going to get help.”

He’s doing yoga, but says he needs more. He’s reluctant to seek help inside the military.

“Personally I’d feel more comfortable being able to talk to someone outside,” he said. “It would allow me to open up a lot more without having to be worried about how it’s going to affect my career.”

Others who speak up say it’s a struggle to get assistance.

Despite the on-base presence of “tons of briefings and brochures on suicide and PTSD,” Williamson said she found herself fighting for years to get time off and therapy.

Eventually, she entered a monthlong in-patient program in Arizona. When she returned, a therapist recommended equine-assisted therapy, which proved to be a breakthrough.

Now Williamson is a regular at the Cloverleaf Equine Center in Clifton, Virginia, where riding sessions can be combined with a variety of therapeutic practices and exercises. Working with horses has long been used as a form for therapy for people with physical or mental disabilities and children diagnosed with autism. But in recent years, it has been embraced for helping service members with anxiety and PTSD.

“In order to be able to work with horses, you need to be able to regulate your emotions. They communicate through body language and energy,” said Shelby Morrison, Cloverleaf’s communications director. “They respond to energies around them. They respond to negativity, positivity, anxiety, excitement.”

Military clients, Morrison said, come with “a lot of anxiety, depression, PTSD. … We use the horse to get them out of their triggers.”

For Williamson, the regular riding sessions have helped stabilize her. She still struggles, and she said her long campaign for treatment has damaged her relationship with multiple superior officers. She’s currently on limited duty and isn’t sure if she’ll retire when she hits her 20-year anniversary in March.

Nevertheless, she says, the equine therapy has helped her feel optimistic for the first time in recent memory.

“Now even if I can’t get out of bed, I make sure to come here,” she said. “If I didn’t come here, I don’t know where I would even be.”

___

Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

___

The national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.

AP EXPLAINS: How one computer forecast model botched Ian

By SETH BORENSTEIN

October 7, 2022

1 of 5

Cars and debris from washed away homes line a canal in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., Oct. 5, 2022, one week after the passage of Hurricane Ian. Hurricane Ian confounded one key computer forecast model, creating challenges for forecasters and Florida residents. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

As Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida, normally reliable computer forecast models couldn’t agree on where the killer storm would land. But government meteorologists are now figuring out what went wrong — and right.

Much of the forecasting variation seems to be rooted in cool Canadian air that had weakened a batch of sunny weather over the East Coast. That weakening would allow Ian to turn eastward to Southwest Florida instead of north and west to the Panhandle hundreds of miles away.

The major American computer forecast model -- one of several used by forecasters -- missed that and the error was “critical,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration postmortem of computer forecast models determined Thursday.

“It’s pretty clear that error is very consequential,” said former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue, now a private meteorologist who wasn’t part of NOAA’s postmortem.

Still, meteorologists didn’t miss overall with their official Hurricane Ian forecast. Ian’s eventual southwestern Florida landfall was always within the “cone of uncertainty” of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast track, although at times it was on the farthest edge.

But it wasn’t that simple. Computer forecast models, which weeks earlier had agreed on where Hurricane Fiona was going, were hundreds of miles apart as Ian chugged through the Caribbean.

The normally reliable American computer model, which had performed better than any other model in 2021 and was doing well earlier in the year, kept forecasting a Florida Panhandle landfall while the European model -- long a favorite of many meteorologists — and the British simulation were pointing to Tampa or farther south.

Trying to avoid what meteorologists call the dreaded “windshield wiper effect” of dramatic hurricane path shifts, the official NOAA forecast stayed somewhere in between. Tampa — with lots of people and land vulnerable to gigantic storm surges — seemed to be the center of possible landfalls, or even worse just south of the eye so it would get the biggest surge.

Although people’s fears focused on Tampa, Ian didn’t.

The storm made landfall 89 miles (143 kilometers) to the south in Cayo Costa. For a large storm, that’s not a big difference and is within the 100-mile (161-kilometer) error bar NOAA sets. But because Tampa was north of the nasty right-side of the hurricane eye, it was spared the biggest storm surge and rainfall.

People wondered why the worst didn’t happen. There are meteorological, computer and communications reasons.

Overall, the European computer model performed best, the British one had the closest eventual Florida landfall but was too slow in timing and the American model had the highest errors when it came to track, NOAA’s Alicia Bentley said during the agency’s postmortem. But the American model was the best at getting Ian’s strength right, she said.

University of Albany meteorology professor Brian Tang said he calculated the American model’s average track error during Ian at 325 miles (520 kilometers) five-days out, while the European model was closer to 220 miles (350 kilometers).

“A lot of what we notice in the public is when there are big misses and those big misses affect people in populated areas,” Tang said in an interview.

Although this is technically not a miss, people who evacuated Tampa may think it is because the Fort Myers area got the brunt of the storm.

In some ways people are spoiled because the average track error in hurricane forecasts have gotten so much better. The three-day official forecast error was cut nearly in half over the last 10 years from 172 miles (278 kilometers) to 92 miles (148 kilometers), Tang said.

For years meteorologists touted the European model as better, because it uses more observations, is more complex but also takes longer to run and comes out later than the American one, Tang said. The American model has improved after a big boost of NOAA spending, but so has the European one, he added.

The models use a similar physics formula to simulate what happens in the atmosphere. They usually rely on the same observations, more or less. But where they differ is how all those observations are put into the computer models, what kind of uncertainties are added and the timing of when the simulation starts, said University of Miami’s Brian McNoldy.

“You are guaranteed to end up differently,” McNoldy said.

It’s not a problem if the models show similar tracks. But if they are widely different, as during Ian, “that makes you nervous,” he said.

People wrongly focus on funnel-like cone for where the hurricane is forecast to go instead of what it will do in specific locations, said MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel. And in the cone people only pay attention to the middle line not the broader picture, so Emanuel and McNoldy want the line dropped.

Another problem meteorologists say is that the cone is only where the storm is supposed to be with a 100-mile (161-kilometer) error radius, but when storms are big like Ian, their impacts of rain, surge and high wind will easily hit outside the cone.

“The cone was never intended to convey the actual impacts. It was only intended to convey the tracks,” said Gina Eosco, who heads a NOAA social science program that tries to improve storm communications.

So for the first time, NOAA surveyed Florida, Georgia and South Carolina residents before Ian hit and will follow up after to see what risks the public perceived from the media and government information. That will help the agency decide if it has to change its warning messaging, Eosco said.

___

Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.