Video: Positive Leftist News from November, 2022

Recently, I’ve been made aware that some people avoid watching the videos I post, because the content tends to be depressing, infuriating, or both. I know that the format just isn’t “for” some people, and that’s fine, but for those who do like videos, but are tired of bad news, well, at least we have PLN. There’s a particular frustration that comes with being a leftist in a world dominated by neoliberal capitalism. All of the major news outlets are owned by for-profit corporations, and they have a very definite pro-capitalist bias, while pretending to be “just reporting the news”. This pattern reaches peaks of enraging absurdity when it comes to moments like MSNBC’s panicked attacks on Bernie Sanders, a moderate social democrat whose values and policies seem to be in line with what most of even a right-wing nation like the United States wants.

Positive Leftist News features a wide variety of commentators from different backgrounds and different leftist schools of thought. It focuses on victories in the effort to empower the working people of the world, end oppression, and remove the artificial and/or unnecessary barriers that are maintained by the current capitalist order. This is news from all over the planet about real fights for systemic change, and I hope that it uplifts and inspires you.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, you’ll burn in the fire, if you don’t get fried.

Many years ago, in this blog’s toddler years, I wrote a little about the advantages of being motivated not just by fear of the future we want to avoid, but also by hope for the future that we want to build. While that fear is valid, if it’s our sole motivator, we’ll be too busy looking over our shoulder to pay attention to where we’re going. Most of the time, when I’ve talked about this, the focus has been on the kind of society we want to build, and how being proactive could head off disaster. At that point, I wasn’t thinking much about politics, economics, and power, but I I think the overall idea holds true there as well. What I hadn’t really considered was how literal the metaphor of running away could end up being.

I suppose it’s obvious, in hindsight, and it’s not like the subject of climate refugees hasn’t been discussed. I had assumed that if people were leaving an area because of climate change, if they had a choice in where to go, they’d factor climate change into their decision. After all, if you’re moving away from hurricanes and killer heat waves, you might not want to move to somewhere that’s having a problem with drought, heat waves, and an ever-worsening fire season, right? Right?

Oh dear.

Americans are leaving many of the U.S. counties hit hardest by hurricanes and heatwaves — and moving towards dangerous wildfires and warmer temperatures, finds one of the largest studies of U.S. migration and natural disasters.

The ten-year national study reveals troubling public health patterns, with Americans flocking to regions with the greatest risk of wildfires and significant summer heat. These environmental hazards are already causing significant damage to people and property each year — and projected to worsen with climate change.

“These findings are concerning, because people are moving into harm’s way—into regions with wildfires and rising temperatures, which are expected to become more extreme due to climate change,” said the University of Vermont (UVM) study lead author Mahalia Clark, noting that the study was inspired by the increasing number of headlines of record-breaking natural disasters.

Published by the journal Frontiers in Human Dynamics, the study—titled “Flocking to Fire”—is the largest investigation yet of how natural disasters, climate change and other factors impacted U.S. migration over the last decade (2010-2020). “Our goal was to understand how extreme weather is influencing migration as it becomes more severe with climate change,” Clark said.

‘Red-hot’ real estate

The top U.S. migration destinations over the last decade were cities and suburbs in the Pacific Northwest, parts of the Southwest (in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah), Texas, Florida, and a large swath of the Southeast (from Nashville to Atlanta to Washington, D.C.)—locations that face significant wildfire risks and relatively warm annual temperatures. In contrast, people tended to move away from places in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and along the Mississippi River, including many counties hit hardest by hurricanes or frequent heatwaves, the researchers say.

“These findings suggest that, for many Americans, the risks and dangers of living in hurricane zones may be starting to outweigh the benefits of life in those areas,” said UVM co-author Gillian Galford, who led the recent Vermont Climate Assessment. “That same tipping point has yet to happen for wildfires and rising summer heat, which have emerged as national issues more recently.”

One implication of the study—given how development can exacerbate risks in fire-prone areas—is that city planners may need to consider discouraging new development where fires are most likely or difficult to fight, researchers say. At a minimum, policymakers must consider fire prevention in areas of high risk with large growth in human populations, and work to increase public awareness and preparedness.

I want to say that I’m not blaming these people, as such. There are a lot of factors that go into deciding where to move, and very often the “choice” is no choice at all. You have a job in California? You move to California. We live where we can, not always where we’d like to.

I am blaming the federal government, and the largely corrupt crowd that comprises it. This is the result of inaction. This is what neoliberal, laissez-faire policies, gets us. Why are there no programs to help people resettle somewhere with more water? Why haven’t we already been moving people out of the Colorado River Valley? Because it would threaten fossil fuel profits, of course, but also because most politicians in both major parties view government action as essentially evil. Some Democrats view it as a necessary evil, and a handful are mostly focused on the good it can do, but as a party, they mostly seem to serve the same agenda as the GOP.

We will be seeing more climate refugees as the temperature continues to rise. Literally the only way to prevent that would be to find a way to get them to move to a safer place before disaster drives them. Instead, we have a borderline useless federal government, and a disorienting fog of misinformation about the issue. People are left to figure things out while navigating a ruthless housing market that’s increasingly controlled by big corporations, with a government whose advisors are advocating an increase in unemployment. This kind of crisis is exactly what society is supposed to be for, but our world is run by people who want to convince everyone that society shouldn’t provide us with any real benefits.

Beyond the aversion to hurricanes and heatwaves, the study identified several other clear preferences—a mix of environmental, social, and economic factors—that also contributed to U.S. migration decisions over the last decade.

The team’s analysis revealed a set of common qualities shared among the top migration destinations: warmer winters, proximity to water, moderate tree cover, moderate population density, better human development index (HDI) scores—plus wildfire risks. In contrast, for the counties people left, common traits included low employment, higher income inequality, and more summer humidity, heatwaves, and hurricanes.

Researchers note that Florida remained a top migration destination, despite a history of hurricanes—and increasing wildfire. While nationally, people were less attracted to counties hit by hurricanes, many people—particularly retirees—still moved to Florida, attracted by the warm climate, beaches, and other qualities shared by top migration destinations. Although hurricanes likely factor into people’s choices, the study suggests that, overall, the benefits of Florida’s desirable amenities still outweigh the perceived risks of life there, researchers say.

“The decision to move is a complicated and personal decision that involves weighing dozens of factors,” said Clark. “Weighing all these factors, we see a general aversion to hurricane risk, but ultimately—as we see in Florida—it’s one factor in a person’s list of pros and cons, which can be outweighed by other preferences.”

For the study, researchers combined census data with data on natural disasters, weather, temperature, land cover, and demographic and socioeconomic factors. While the study includes data from the first year of the COVID pandemic, the researchers plan to delve deeper into the impacts of remote work, house prices, and the cost of living.

For most of my life, climate change has been talked about as some kind of future issue. It has also been talked about as something that will hit poorer countries first, and hardest. While there’s some truth to that latter point, I hope it’s obvious to all of you by now that it’s happening now, and it’s hitting everywhere. It will get worse, of course, but we have entered the Age of Endless Recovery, and part of that is the endless, weary movement of people trying to find that one place where maybe they can live in peace.

This doesn’t have to be our future.

We could, if we can build the collective power to do so, stop prioritizing endless war and the indulgence of bottomless greed. We could build quality public housing in places that are likely to have plenty of water going forward. We could pay people to do ecosystem support and management work, or to clean up pollution, or to work on indoor food production, or any number of a hundred other things that society needs people to do.

We could, in short, respond to this crisis by proactively building a better world, with the changing climate in mind. We have the resources and knowledge to do this, and we’ve had them for a long time. What we lack is political and economic power among those who actually want the world to get better, because the people who currently hold that power? They would rather see the world burn around their bunkers than allow for systemic change.

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France takes a small step in the right direction

This isn’t world-changing, but it’s a first (to me, at least), and an encouraging thing to see. France has banned short-distance air travel along routes for which there exists a train ride of two and a half hours or less. This is, in case it needs to be said, a very narrow ban, clearly designed to cause as little disruption in daily life as possible. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the people most upset about this are exactly the people who should be upset – rich dingdongs with private jets.

France has been given the green light to ban short haul domestic flights.

The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.

The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country’s 2021 Climate Law and were first proposed by France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate – a citizens’ assembly tasked with finding ways to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.

Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.

The super rich are not accustomed to having to follow rules, so we shall see whether they are held to this, or whether they manage to buy their way out of it. This is a trial run that will be re-assessed after three years, but I hope it’s just the start of a broader shift from air to rail travel, at least within Europe. I don’t have extremely high hopes for the U.S., but wouldn’t it be nice to have high-speed rail tying all of the Americas together? One baby-step at a time, I suppose.

Initially, the ban will only affect three routes between Paris Orly and Nantes, Lyon, and Bordeaux where there are genuine rail alternatives.

If rail services improve, it could see more routes added including those between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Lyon and Rennes as well as journeys between Lyon and Marseille. They currently don’t meet the criteria for the ban because trains to airports in Paris and Lyon don’t allow passengers to arrive early in the morning or late in the evening.

Others – such as routes from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Bordeaux and Nantes – weren’t included because the journey time is more than the 2.5 hour limit.

Connecting flights will also have to follow these new rules.

It’s a glimpse of a better world, if we can build it.

‘Cause to be victorious, you must find glory in the little things.

SLoSSing out climate conservation policy

There’s an old debate in the field of conservation, about what strategy is best when setting aside land for conservation. Should our efforts go into getting large contiguous areas, or would it be better to have a collection of smaller reserves distributed over a wider area: Single Large, or Several Small (SLoSS).

There are good arguments for both. A single, large area can allow for habitats that cannot occur in a smaller space. The edge of a forest, for example, lets light and wind penetrate into the understory from the side, spurring the growth of less shade-tolerant plants, different animals, and even affecting things like soil moisture. Deep forest habitats are much darker, tend to have less undergrowth, and can harbor very different kinds of life. This distinction is reliable enough, that undergraduate ecology students often do “research” on these dynamics as part of their training. It’s not generally a way to learn something new, so much as a way to practice the skills, knowing the results you should be getting. I know less about it, but I’m sure similar things exist in aquatic ecosystems, accounting for stuff like depth, fishing and other human activities, proximity to pollution sources like farms and factories, and so on.

The “Several Small” perspective is also generally about a diversity of habitats, but accounts for the way the changing landscape allows for different conditions over much wider areas. A mountaintop will have different life from a river, which will be different from a forest, or a plain, or a lake, or the boundary between those habitats. While one large place can encompass a good amount diversity in that regard, spreading your reserves out can cover more ground, so to speak. Having scattered nature reserves can also serve to create vital safe “pit stops” for migrating birds.

Both of perspectives are a form of triage, in the face of the relentless, escalating environmental destruction being driven by capitalism. The “ideal middle ground” could be described as a number of large reserves, connected by corridors, but that’s rather difficult to arrange in a world where capitalists get what they want by default most of the time.

I think this research supports my preferred approach of ending capitalism, and integrating our development into our surrounding ecosystems as much as possible (I mean, they don’t actually talk about capitalism, but in my opinion a growth-obsessed system like that can never allow for the kinds of change we need). Not only may the heat tolerance of sub-populations vary, but a population starting in a cooler area has more “room” for warming before temperatures start to get dangerous. This means that if you want a species to be able to survive global warming, the best thing you can do is make sure that the populations are not fragmented, and have space to move and change.

By conducting a metanalysis of 90 previously published studies, from which Cheng and his co-authors mined data on 61 species, the team was able to construct a set of “upper thermal limits”—specific temperatures above which each species could not survive. However, by zooming in further and looking at 305 distinct populations drawn from that pool of 61 species, they found that different populations of the same marine species often had widely different thermal limits. This suggests that some populations have evolved different abilities to tolerate high temperatures. The key then, is to keep different populations of the same species connected so that the populations that have adapted to the higher temperatures can pass this advantage on to the populations with the lower thermal limits.

In other words, imagine a wide-ranging marine species, such as the diminutive Atlantic killifish, which occurs from the warm Florida coast of the United States north to the frigid waters of Newfoundland, Canada. The northern killifish populations may be better able to withstand warming waters if some of their southern kin are able to naturally shift their range to the north.

“Scale matters,” says Matthew Sasaki, a marine biologist and evolutionary ecologist who completed this research as part of his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut and is the paper’s lead author. “The patterns you see across species aren’t the same you see within species, and the big-picture story doesn’t necessarily match what is happening on the local level.”

In case you need the refresher, working to preserve biodiversity can help us deal with climate change. That’s why I like the idea of, to the greatest degree possible, bringing nature into our cities and other developed spaces, both by setting aside land around us for wildlife, any by making “our” territory safer. Less dependence on cars for transit (and more rail and foot traffic) would also make it a lot safer for animals to move through our landscape as they go from place to place.

When it comes down to it, they key seems to be having a clear understanding of the local conditions, and the needs of local ecosystems. What works for one place, one species, or one community of interacting species, may not work for another:

In yet another twist, the team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and was composed of biologists specializing in terrestrial as well as marine ecosystems, discovered that this intra-species variability was primarily a feature of animals living in the ocean and intertidal areas. Populations of widespread species that live on land or in freshwater exhibit far more homogeneity in their thermal limits, and thus could be more sensitive to rising temperatures. However, on land, plants and animals can take advantage of microclimates to cool down and avoid extreme temperatures, by moving into shady spots, for example.

Taken together, the research suggests that a one-size-fits-all-species approach to conservation and management won’t work. Instead, write the authors, we need to understand how populations have adapted to their local conditions if we want to predict their vulnerability to changing conditions. A more effective approach would include ensuring that marine species can find wide swaths of undamaged habitat throughout their entire range, so that different populations of the same species can mix and pass on the adaptations that help them survive warmer waters. And on land, we need to maintain large patches of cool ecosystems—such as old-growth forests—that terrestrial species can use as refuges.

“The glimmer of hope here,” says Cheng, “is that with conservation policies tailored to individual populations, we can buy them time to adapt to the warming world.”

As with antifascist action, and human climate adaptation, local understanding, local communities, and local solutions are going to be key. The big advantage we have over more locally-focused societies of the past, is that we can retain the ability to communicate and trade globally. We really can make this world more peaceful, just, and more beautiful, all as a part of saving ourselves from the disastrous conditions we’ve created.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tegan Tuesday: When online mobs turn wholesome

There’s a lot going on this week in personal life, in the wider world, and in the internet world. So I thought I’d share a heartwarming story from tumblr. I’ve been a tumblr user since 2012 or so, as has probably been obvious by the amount of tumblr threads that I’ve shared, and it is a very specific culture. A lot of it is silly, a lot of it is incredibly intelligent, and most of it is anonymous.

On October 27th, tumblr user Aquila Calvitium posted this:

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/699296989413785600/okay-fuck-it-if-this-post-reaches-666k-notes-by

This user had never had a text post of theirs get more than a dozen notes, so betting against almost 700,000 notes felt like a sure bet and a funny little joke amongst their friends. Unfortunately for Aquila Calvitium, tumblr loves a challenge. The first several thousand notes were simply people reblogging the post with the air of ‘haha sucker! We’ll fix you!’ Tumblr user LizLuvsCupcakes stated the general vibe:

Well, OP, I’m officially invested in this shit. Your whiny ass is doing self care if I have to drive to your goddamn house and do it for you.

By October 30th, Aquila Calvitium had moved the deadline to the end of 2022. This still seemed like an unachievable goal.

Then after a discussion about throwing an osage orange at OP between users Headspace-Hotel and TheLeakyPen, user LaineysBucketList offered a gamechanging idea:

We should just fill this post with other interesting things as reasons to reblog it.

Within the versions of this post I’ve seen discussions of hagfish slime used as an egg white substitute; infodumping about beryls; the axial tilt of Venus; and many other interesting random facts from the interesting and random users of tumblr. This collection of smart people with wildly different interests posting informally and anonymously is one of the reasons why I still love tumblr. It’s where academics (formal and informal) go to infodump.

Another update from OP happened on November 4th.

I was going to wait until y’all hit the mark, But I feel like I should say this now
When I made this post, it was supposed to be a joke
I mean, none of my posts ever get more than 20 notes if I’m lucky, so what are the odds of one reaching 666k? Impossible, haha
But then, something happened, something I didn’t expect
People actually began to… like it? And… reblog? And comment?
Before I knew it, my notifications were swarmed with comments after comments after reblogs after comments all on this one post
Then, still in the mindset of this being a joke, I realised I’d made the goal too easy, so I upped the stakes
But… the notes just got more frequent from there
And it started to hit me just what was happening

[Editor’s note: there are inserted screenshots of comments like “i Will reblog this every time i see this. you WILL do self care op,” “how does nihilism still exist. when tens of thousand of people can band together to make a stranger take care of themself,” and “get self care’d idiot <3.”]

For a while, I was overwhelmed with a feeling
A feeling I wasn’t used to
It was like… all of a sudden… I mattered…
My existance was actually noteworthy
People actually… cared?
It wasn’t a game anymore, it was a race to assure a stranger on the Internet that they were actually worth something
Hundreds of people all gathering in one online place to help out
Leaving messages and well wishes
Making me smile
Making me laugh
Funny comments
Jokes
Fun facts
Even simple comments
It all suddenly felt so real
This was never a joke to you
This was important
And I won’t let any of that go in vain
So… stay tuned I suppose
I’ll look after myself, and I’ll post proof of it too
I’ll catalogue every time I put my health first
Physical and mental
I’ll acknowledge my bad days and celebrate my good days
But most of all
I won’t forget this
Any of this
Ever

I am happy to report that today, November 8th, 2022, was the first day of self-care for the original poster. Yesterday, a mere eleven days after the first post, we went over 666,000 notes. As of writing, there are over 697k. Here is OP’s first post about self care.

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/700357376093667329/starting-today-on-the-8th-of-november-2022-the

Aquila Calvitium, who normally has problems eating properly, made themselves a sandwich and hung out with their family. Three cheers to OP! I hope their sandwich was tasty and that their beginning steps for self care and self maintenance take off. And if the news you see in the world is cold and unfeeling, remember how thousands of anonymous people pulled together to convince a stranger that their life matters. The world can be a wonderful place, if we let ourselves see it.

Climate change is bad for your skin, and we should do revolutionary change about it.

Well, the rapid test says that I am now COVID-free, which is nice. My nose and sinuses aren’t back to normal yet – still some congestion and my voice resonates in my head as if I’ve got a cold. I also seem to just have less energy, which is annoying. All in all, it was unpleasant but far from unbearable, and I’m sure the vaccine helped with that.

When it comes to climate change and health, my focus has mostly been on stuff like the ways in which air pollution affects the cardiovascular system, with occasional mentions of how ecosystem collapse will likely lead to more zoonotic disease outbreaks. What I hadn’t really considered was how climate change looks to a dermatologist. Honestly, I don’t think about how the environment affects skin health in general, beyond solar radiation and things like poison ivy. I have encountered it when looking into the health impacts of flooding, but for some reason I haven’t felt a need to write about it, and that ends today. Sort of. It ends today because I came across some research on the ways in which extreme weather affects skin health:

The skin is a large, complex organ, and it serves as the body’s primary interface with the environment, playing key roles in sensory, thermoregulatory, barrier, and immunological functioning. As floods, wildfires, and extreme heat events increase in frequency and severity, they pose a significant threat to global dermatological health, as many skin diseases are climate sensitive. Investigators draw on an extensive review of published research to highlight the key dermatological manifestations initiated or exacerbated by these climatic events and also highlight the disproportionate impacts on marginalized and vulnerable populations. Their findings appear in The Journal of Climate Change and Health, published by Elsevier

“We wanted to provide dermatologists and other practitioners with a comprehensive overview of extreme weather-related skin disease as a foundation for patient education, implementation of early treatment interventions, and improved disease outcomes,” explained lead author Eva Rawlings Parker, MD, Department of Dermatology and the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA. “We were astounded by the shear breadth of impacts that extreme weather events have on skin disease and how profoundly climate change exacerbates inequality.”

In their review, Dr. Parker and her colleagues cite nearly 200 articles documenting the myriad impacts of extreme weather events on skin. Marcalee Alexander, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Climate Change and Health, noted, “This information is especially timely in light of traumatic events such as Hurricane Ian, which has led to increased infections due to flood and standing water exposures.”

Flooding, one of the most common natural disasters, is linked to traumatic wounds and bacterial and fungal infections of the skin. Contact dermatitis is another common consequence of flooding since flood water is often contaminated with pesticides, sewage, fertilizers, and chemicals. Exposure to wildfire smoke can trigger atopic dermatitis (eczema) in adults with no prior diagnosis, and it can trigger or exacerbate acne.

Because the skin plays a critical role in the regulation of body temperature, the effects of extended heat waves can be severe. The inability to properly cool during high heat events can lead to heat stroke and death, for example. Many chronic inflammatory dermatoses are exacerbated by heat as well. Infectious diseases can be seasonal, with heat and humidity increasing the risk of common cutaneous infections caused by bacterial, fungal, and viral pathogens. Less obvious, extreme heat events influence behavior. When temperatures are high, people may spend more time outdoors, increasing exposure to air pollution, UV radiation, and insects.

I think I’ve been ignoring skin problems partly because I’ve been fairly lucky in the kinds of skin ailments I’ve had, and partly because of the ways in which our culture has affected my brain (more on that later). Injuries don’t seem to count, in my head. As a kid I had an unpleasant encounter with a bunch of boiling water, and learned that burning large portions of your skin can be deadly. It’s clearly a vital organ, but it’s one that’s designed to handle treatment that would destroy any other organ in our body, so I think I take it for granted sometimes. I suppose the same can be said of other organs as well, but generally if there’s something detectable wrong with an internal organ, that’s a much worse sign than being able to detect a problem that’s only skin-deep.

But, of course, skin health is damned important. Leaving aside the way the skin itself can give us indications of more internal health problems, it’s also where we’re most exposed to external harm, we rely on our skin to keep the good stuff in, and the bad stuff out.

Skin ailments come with unique forms of misery. It’s difficult to not be aware of something wrong with your skin, and the mental toll of pain, itching, and dysmorphia that tends to come along with skin problems – especially chronic ones – is something that I think we should not underestimate. More than that, skin problems are visible. They’re there for other people to see, and so they can be harder to ignore. You can sometimes cover them up, but if there’s something wrong with your skin, having it in constant contact with cloth can be a problem all by itself.

There’s also a degree to which actively taking care of one’s skin is seen as an act of vanity. Certainly, most products surrounding skin care are aimed at appearance, and while a desire to be seen as attractive is an entirely valid part of the human experience, I think the Puritanical disdain for seeming like you care about your appearance is still running strong in our society, as is the misogynistic denigration of “feminine” activities like skin care.

I’m mentioning the social stuff because beyond the direct impact of any given health problem, I think it’s important to remember that stress – in addition to being an effect of all sorts of illness, also is a cause of ill health.

The news on climate change tends to be bad. The planet is going to keep getting more hostile and dangerous as the temperature rises, and so if we want life to get better for everyone – mere survival is not enough for me – then developing a more caring society is a key public health measure. Climate change is happening, and happening fast, but a lot of the pain and death we’re seeing because of it is still mostly because of social, political, and economic factors that make life unnecessarily hard for a large majority of humanity. I think that systemic cruelty is going to get worse as the temperature rises, unless we make some pretty big changes.

Thankfully, this report does not shy away from the ways in which societal conditions interact with skin health:

Dr. Parker and her colleagues observed that extreme weather events disproportionately affect marginalized and vulnerable populations and widen existing health disparities. Children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with mental health illness, racial/ethnic minorities, low-income individuals, and migrants are especially vulnerable to climate-related effects.

Black and Hispanic populations and lower income populations are more likely to live in areas at higher risk for flooding. These populations also have a greater incidence of skin disease and less access to care. Extreme heat is a frontline occupational hazard for manual laborers and migrant workers. Extreme weather events contribute to large-scale migration. Skin diseases are among the most commonly reported health concerns observed in migrants. Of particular concern is the spread of communicable and infectious diseases and vector-borne viruses. People experiencing homelessness are plagued by higher rates of highly morbid, climate-sensitive skin diseases.

As a reminder – there are more vacant houses and apartments than there are unhoused people, and the money most societies spend on “policing” houseless folks (also known as punishing them for being poor) far exceeds what it would cost to just guarantee safe housing for all. The same is true for the cost of privatized vs. universal healthcare. Things are likely to get worse as the temperature rises, but it’s important to remember that they don’t necessarily have to get worse. Climate change is increasing all sorts of health problems, but the degree to which people suffer because of those problems is almost always going to be determined by their place in the economic and political systems in which they live.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Positive Leftist News from September, 2022

Too often, we see “good” news in the world that either highlights the cruelty and injustice of our society, or that is actually terrible news for most of humanity. It’s frustrating, and it’s often tiring. That’s why I appreciate Mexie and her team for putting together these roundups of good *leftist* news. It helps to remember that while nobody has gotten it perfect, there are people all over the world fighting for real justice, prosperity, and self-governance.

Exposure to air pollution in the womb and early childhood linked to abnormal brain development

I talk a lot about the need for us to clean up air pollution as part of our climate response, despite the fact that doing so speeds up the warming. Air pollution has been linked to a wide array of health problems, and higher temperatures mean more poisonous air. We didn’t need another reason, but now we have one. I feel like this isn’t a big shock, but researchers have now found a link between in-utero and early childhood pollution exposure, and abnormalities in brain development:

A study published in the journal Environmental Pollution has found an association, in children aged 9‑12, between exposure to air pollutants in the womb and during the first 8.5 years of life and alterations in white matter structural connectivity in the brain. The greater the child’s exposure before age 5, the greater the brain structure alteration observed in preadolescence. The study was led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation.

Tracts or bundles of cerebral white matter ensure structural connectivity by interconnecting the different areas of the brain. Connectivity can be measured by studying the microstructure of this white matter, a marker of typical brain development. Abnormal white matter microstructure has been associated with psychiatric disorders (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety and autism spectrum disorders).

In addition to the association between air pollution and white matter microstructure, the study also found a link between specific exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and the volume of the putamen, a brain structure involved in motor function, learning processes and many other functions. As the putamen is a subcortical structure, it has broader and less specialised functions than cortical structures. The study found that the greater the exposure to PM2.5, especially during the first 2 years of life, the greater the volume of the putamen in preadolescence.

“A larger putamen has been associated with certain psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders),” says Anne-Claire Binter, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study.

“The novel aspect of the present study is that it identified periods of susceptibility to air pollution” Binter goes on to explain. “We measured exposure using a finer time scale by analysing the data on a month-by-month basis, unlike previous studies in which data was analysed for trimesters of pregnancy or childhood years. In this study, we analysed the children’s exposure to air pollution from conception to 8.5 years of age on a monthly basis.”

As someone with a somewhat “abnormal” brain, I think it’s important that we not dismiss or dehumanize the “victims” of this sort of thing. Groups like Autism Speaks and the anti-vax movement have done real harm by treating autism as a fate worse than death, and acting as though autistic people have no agency, thoughts, or lives worth living. I want a world in which people of all neurotypes are able to thrive, not a eugenical fantasy of uniformly “normal” brains.

I think it’s a clear good for us to have a better understanding of how air pollution affects us. Obviously it’s not enough to doom our species at this stage, but it’s worth remembering that it is affecting us in a myriad of ways, some of which are not immediately obvious.

Another strong point of this study is that the data analysed came from a large cohort of 3,515 children enrolled in the Generation R Study in Rotterdam (Netherlands).

To determine each participant’s exposure to air pollution during the study period, the researchers estimated the daily levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM2.5 absorbance) at their homes during the mother’s pregnancy and until they reached 8.5 years of age. When participants were between 9 and 12 years analysed of age they underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging to examine the structural connectivity and the volumes of various brain structures at that time.

The levels of NO2 and PM2.5 recorded in the present study exceeded the annual thresholds limits specified in the current World Health Organization guidelines (10 µg/m3 and 5 µg/m3, respectively) but met European Union (EU) standards, an indication that brain development can be affected by exposure to air pollution at levels lower than the current EU air quality limit values.

“One of the important conclusions of this study” explains Binter “is that the infant’s brain is particularly susceptible to the effects of air pollution not only during pregnancy, as has been shown in earlier studies, but also during childhood.”

“We should follow up and continue to measure the same parameters in this cohort to investigate the possible long-term effects on the brain of exposure to air pollution” concludes Mònica Guxens, ISGlobal researcher and last author of the study.

There’s a part of me that worries this information will be either ignored, or abused. Ignored, because those most exposed to air pollution tend to be those with the least power. I also worry about what governments and corporations might try to do with this knowledge.

There’s also a part of me that tends towards excessive optimism and hopefulness. I don’t know if it’s as strong as my pessimistic side, but it’s there nonetheless. That side of me hopes that research like this – in addition to helping make the case for change, will also open the way for new treatments. There’s a lot that I like about how my brain works, but there are many aspects of it I could do without. It seems to me that understanding the causal factors at work here should shed new light on the development of our brains in relation to our environment, and possibly even ways to tinker with that even into adulthood. It also seems like it moves us closer to figuring out more targeted medications for temporary effects.

This may be another one of those studies that seems important, but is never heard from again, but I don’t think it’s likely.

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Combatting the frustration of slow change in a time of crisis

I talk a lot about the need for rapid systemic change, and I sometimes worry that I don’t do a good enough job drawing a line between the kinds of individual action for which I advocate, and the scale of change that I want to see in the world. I’ve been hoping for something to help build a sort of social momentum on climate change for a long time. Back in 2011 or so, I started advocating for members of the New England Quaker community who could, to contribute to a loan fund so members of that community could get zero-interest loans for stuff like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and so on. The idea was to have people pay back the loan out of savings on their power bills (always assuming they could afford to), and then contribute a little extra, as able, to grow the fund and help the next person. Ideally, over time, the number of people helped by that project would grow, and the speed at which they could make change would increase. There have definitely been a number of group efforts on solar panel installation since then, but I don’t know if anything that organized ever cropped up.

Since then, as you may have noticed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to address the systemic problems that are blocking climate action, but that basic principle remains the same – if you have the patience to do things right at the beginning, you build a movement that’s flexible, hard to eradicate, and capable of achieving great things seemingly overnight. Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay that discussed similar topics a while back, and she recently shared this cartoon illustrating a section of that essay.

For those of you who can’t see it, the image in the tweet is three horizontal, rectangular panels, arranged vertically under the title, “Mushroomed:”. The top panel has a picture of a single mushroom, the second shows several in a cluster, and the third shows a cross-section of the soil, revealing all of those mushrooms to be part of the same organism lying beneath the soil. The images are accompanied by the following excerpt from Solnit’s essay:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.

The passage in question then goes on to make the metaphor explicit:

Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Right now we’re at the foundation-laying stage. We’re forming those underground connections (called “hyphae“, if you’re interested), and extending our ability to interact, pool resources, and plan for the future. For me, this process is frustrating, and painfully slow, but it’s important to recognize that the small actions we take can be part of much larger change, especially of those actions are made with the larger change in mind. Altering consumer choices is an “individual change”, but it’s one that has proven itself to be incapable of supporting the more dramatic change that we need. To switch back to the building metaphor, it’s a weak foundation. It might support a small shack above, but any attempt at something bigger will collapse.

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Shocking and unexpected news! Overfishing and climate change are bad for fish!

So, I actually think there’s a lot of value in doing research on subjects with “obvious” answers. We’ve done a lot of damage to this planet by assuming we already know what’s what, and I think that it would be reckless and short-sighted to assume that because we know more than we used to, we don’t need to examine what we think we know. That doesn’t mean wandering through life in a state of existential befuddlement, but it does mean scientists actually taking the time to check that we’re right.

This kind of research is also useful in a world full of highly-paid industry propagandists who spend all of their time finding ways to spread doubt about the harm done by various industries. In this case, the fishing industry, and the fossil fuel industry (because of course).

Researchers at UBC, the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and University of Bern projected the impact that different global temperature increases and ranges of fishing activity would have on biomass, or the amount of fish by weight in a given area, from 1950 to 2100. Their simulations suggest that climate change has reduced fish stocks in 103 of 226 marine regions studied, including Canada, from their historical levels. These stocks will struggle to rebuild their numbers under projected global warming levels in the 21st century.

“More conservation-oriented fisheries management is essential to rebuild over-exploited fish stocks under climate change. However, that alone is not enough,” says lead author Dr. William Cheung, professor in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). “Climate mitigation is important for our fish stock rebuilding plans to be effective”

The research team, including co- author Dr. Colette Wabnitz of Stanford Centre for Ocean Solutions, used computer models to find out the climate change levels at which over-exploited fish stocks cannot rebuild. Currently, the world is on track to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming relative to preindustrial levels and approach two degrees in the next few decades, says Dr. Cheung.

The study projected that, on average, when fisheries management focuses on the highest sustainable catch per year, the additional climate impacts on fish at 1.8 degrees Celsius warming would see fish stocks unable to rebuild themselves.

If people around the world fished only three quarters of the annual highest sustainable catch, fish stocks would be unable to rebuild at a higher degree of warming, 4.5 degrees.

That last bit strikes me either over-optimistic, or over-pessimistic. I do believe that if we were to dramatically decrease fishing, fish populations would recover, even with another degree of warming, but at 4 degrees? At that point it seems like mass extinction would be far more likely than not, even without overfishing. Still, if we get to that temperature and we haven’t made dramatic change to society, I doubt that we’ll have the capacity for over-fishing, even if we do somehow still exist, and still have most of our current technology.

On the one hand, I appreciate the rosy view of the future. I also would like to think that there would be a way for humanity to thrive even at those temperatures, but I think that in order to get there, we will have to have already solved problems like overfishing. This article feels a bit like the whole “end of history” thing, where it’s assumed that Liberal Democracy with minor adjustments is the “final form” of human politics, and the need for revolutionary change – despite all evidence to the contrary – is a thing of the past.

It is entirely possible that I’m reading far too much into this, but I feel like it’s an example of how the indoctrination of our society has placed boundaries on the kinds of society we’re capable of imagining. I don’t know whether those limitations also influence the design of models like this. I certainly hope they don’t, but when I see that kind of projection, I do have to wonder what’s being missed because nobody involved in the research would even think to check it. It’s not a new problem by any stretch, nor is it limited to our society. I think this is a concern in any society, which is part of why institutionalized hierarchies seem like a dangerous thing to have normalized. I mainly focus on the society in which I live, because I can clearly see the path that we’re on because of it, and it does not look good.

I suppose this is an odd conclusion for an article about fish populations, but I think there’s a degree to which we need to become more comfortable with political uncertainty. Not the “will the president try to become a dictator?” kind, but rather “our society is flexible enough that we might briefly form a formal institution in order to get something particular done, and then dissolve that institution”. Maybe a circumstance will arise in which we need a corporate structure with incentives to work particular jobs, but that doesn’t mean that that institution will need to exist in perpetuity. The same is true of governments, nations, and borders. There may be a case for setting certain geographical boundaries – bioregionalism is interesting, and when it comes to commons like the oceans, it’s clear that some coordination is required.

But I think we may need to let go of the notion of an ever-lasting government as a means of achieving security and stability. It doesn’t seem to be providing either very well, especially with a global perspective.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!