Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

The Lancet: Racism is a global public health hazard.

If you start to dig into the history of white supremacy, you start to realize that it’s still very much a part of the global political and economic system. It’s not the only force at work, of course, but it has left scars on both land and people, and it’s built into a great many aspects of how the world works. It’s not always something you can see, if you don’t have enough context for what’s in front of your eyes, but it’s there, and it continues to do real harm. There are, of course, people who are racist, and who cause harm deliberately for that reason, but it goes far beyond that.

White supremacy is a global public health problem. To some degree, we already knew that, right? Redlining – the racist housing policies that we’re told are in the past – continues to disproportionately expose communities of color to things like lead poisoning. Environmental racism is a known, global phenomenon, but I’m starting to think that we ought to view white supremacy as a sort of pollutant in its own right, or maybe a dangerous building material, like asbestos. The problem is that while the asbestos industry has definitely fought to keep making money (and keep exposing people to the stuff), the social infrastructure of white supremacy was designed to cause harm to people from the very beginning.

And for all many powerful people like to pretend racism isn’t a big problem, it turns out that it is a global public health crisis.

First, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally. The misclassification of race as a biological (rather than social) construct continues to compound health disparities. Four research papers show how discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes and quality of care. In a study of over 2 million pregnancies across 20 high-income and middle-income countries, neonatal death, stillbirth, and preterm delivery were more likely among babies born to Black, Hispanic, and south Asian women. Another shows how theft of land and destruction of traditional practices of Indigenous Brazilians are associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes. Among people diagnosed with brain tumours in the USA, Black patients were more likely to have recommendations against surgical resection, regardless of clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors, suggesting bias in clinical decision making. In Australia, everyday discrimination contributes to half the burden of psychological distress experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The logical conclusion is that racism and discrimination must be central concerns—for practitioners, researchers, and institutions—to advance health equity.

This issue also shows how systems intersect to perpetuate inequities. Racism converges with systems of oppression, including those based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, to exacerbate or mitigate experiences of discrimination. The core problem is an inequality in power, historically rooted but still operating today. It shapes environments and opportunities. Specific recommendations for health include increasing cultural safety and diversity in the health-care workforce; co-designing with affected communities health-care systems that are more flexible, accessible, and welcoming; and strengthening Indigenous self-determination and land rights. A four-paper Series shows that social equity can be promoted best through interventions that target structures and systems, particularly through radical rights-based legal and political measures, led by affected communities. These are important lessons for health care, education, research, funding bodies, and government.

This report tries to quantify the material harm done by racism, and crucially draws attention to the fact that race is a social construct, and that pretending otherwise is itself harmful. It’s good to see research like this being done, and it’s good to see it being published in The Lancet. For all its mistakes, the journal is still well-respected, and I find it encouraging to see such a publication talking about the importance of self-determination, radical measures, and efforts led by affected communities.

As ever, this knowledge means little by itself. We already knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that racism, prejudice, and the infrastructure of white supremacy do ongoing harm, and that knowledge has not helped us stop it. What does make a difference is when people band together and use their collective power to demand change, or better yet to start making that change themselves. This is yet another example of justice delayed being justice denied. The way the British royal family clings to its stolen jewels may be the most glaring example of this, but the reality is that while the rich and powerful may be pay lip service to notions like justice and equality, they will do everything they can to obstruct both. Whether it was the broken promises to former slaves, the broken treaties with Native tribes, or the punitive debt imposed on newly “independent” colonies, justice has never been served, and that has compounded the harm, and re-inflicted the wounds on generation after generation. Do not trust to fairy tales about history having a moral arc – this will not stop unless we make it stop.

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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.

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!

O’ahu, Red Hill, and the environmental disaster that is the U.S. armed forces.

The U.S. military is an ongoing environmental disaster and violation of human rights. The United States of America has been engaged in war, officially and unofficially, for 92% of its history, and as time has gone on, that war has become increasingly destructive not just to humans and our surroundings, but to the environment. Those who’ve been paying attention will know that pollution and the effects of environmental degredation do far more harm to those at the bottom of the political, economic, and racial hierarchies of the world.  This is why justice has become a key part of the modern environmental movement, and why dismantling white supremacy, capitalism, and other hierarchical systems is a crucial part of our fight for a better world.

Part of that effort includes understanding that the United States is still very much a colonial empire that exerts power on a global scale, and that works to maintain the injustices created in the establishment of that empire. The native people of the various bits of land the U.S. has claimed – those that survive – are still very much under the thumb of an occupying power, and it shows. The Water Protectors who have been opposing the Keystone XL pipeline probably got the most attention over the last decade, but similar fights have been ongoing not just across the United States, but around the world. Many of the fights are against corporations, which often have government support, but some are also directly against the U.S. government. One of these that has gone under-reported is the ongoing poisoning of O’ahu’s drinking water by the U.S. Navy.

For nearly 80 years, the U.S. Navy has stored well over 100 million gallons of fuel in 20, 20-story massive underground storage tanks in Kapūkakī, also known as Red Hill, a ridge between Hālawa and Moanalua.

Located a mere 100 feet above Oʻahu’s primary drinking water source these deteriorating tanks have leaked more than 180,000 gallons of fuel over their lifetime. Their walls have corroded to less than the thickness of a dime and are under high pressure from the large volume of jet fuel. While the Board of Water Supply maintains that Oʻahu’s drinking water is currently safe to consume, the recent pattern of leaks suggests that the tanks and their connected distribution system are failing and have a high probability of catastrophic failure that would make our water supply undrinkable:

– In 2014, 27,000 gallons of jet fuel leaked from Tank 5.
– In March 2020, a pipeline connected to Red Hill leaked an unknown quantity of fuel into Pearl Harbor Hotel Pier. The leak, which had stopped, started again in June 2020.  Approximately 7,100 gallons of fuel was collected from the surrounding environment.
– In January 2021, a pipeline that leads to the Hotel Pier area failed two leak detection tests. In February, a Navy contractor determined that there is an active leak at Hotel Pier. The Department of Health only found out in May.
– In May 2021, over 1,600 gallons of fuel leaked from the facility due to human error after a control room operator failed to follow correct procedures.
– In July 2021, 100 gallons of fuel was released into Pearl Harbor, possibly from a source connected to the Red Hill facility.
– In November 2021, residents from the neighborhoods of Foster Village and Aliamanu called 911 to report the smell of fuel, later found likely to have come from a leak from a fire suppression drain line connected to Red Hill. -The Navy reported that about 14,000 gallons of a fuel-water mixture had leaked.
– The Navy’s own risk assessment  reports that there is a 96% chance that up to 30,000 gallons of fuel will leak into the aquifer over the next 10 years.

The Red Hill fuel tanks are an environmental time bomb threatening the drinking water for 400,000 Oʻahu residents.

In general, the default position of the U.S. government is that if it did anything bad, no it didn’t. My first encounter with this was in high school, when I was briefly involved in the movement to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC, and to bring justice to its victims. In addition to attending a protest in Georgia, signing petitions, and doing all that sort of stuff, the group I was with also met with a US army PR officer, who simply denied that anything bad had ever happened in association with the institution or its graduates. Skim through the list of notable graduates on the Wikipedia link above, you’ll note one or two things that don’t seem to align with that story.

The same is true here. This news report on the crisis has some pretty good reporting, including the fact that the Navy was warned about this almost a decade before it happened, and they were denying it past the point where their own people, living on-base, were getting sick. It seems that the main civilian water supply is still clean, but there’s no way to be sure that the contamination just hasn’t reached that far yet, or that another spill won’t happen at any time.

I think it’s also important to note, here, that the callous disregard that the U.S. government holds for powerless people extends to those people tied to its military. There are a lot of veterans and military families who’ve had to spend their lives in and out of hospitals and trying to get coverage for ailments caused by exposure to burn pits, agent orange, and a host of other stuff, and it looks like these folks are joining their ranks.

More than two dozen families have joined a lawsuit accusing the U.S. Navy of making them sick from jet fuel that leaked into the tap water in their Hawaii homes.

There are now more than 100 people in an amended lawsuit filed Thursday that also accuses the Navy of destroying more than 1,000 water samples collected from affected homes.

The families say in the lawsuit the samples could have revealed chemicals in the water.

Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. James Adams said the Navy doesn’t comment on current litigation.

A fuel storage facility in the hills above Pearl Harbor leaked petroleum into the Navy’s tap water system last year and sickened nearly 6,000 people, mostly those living in military housing.

The lawsuit was initially filed in August with four families alleging the Navy hasn’t fully disclosed the scope of the contamination and hasn’t provided appropriate medical care to those who are sick.

The lawsuit said the Navy continues to claim families are not sick from the jet fuel exposure.

It’s honestly very reminiscent of the way fossil fuel companies have denied contamination from fracking activities, denied the risk of earthquakes from wastewater injection, denied climate change… Why, it’s almost like the U.S. military and the fossil fuel industry are sharing notes! As always, I am with these families in their fight for justice, and I’m with everyone fighting to defuel Red Hill and end that threat to the aquifer.

But, of course, the problems don’t end there. While the fuel tanks will supposedly be empty by 2024, the process has been delayed by a different toxic spill.

The Navy says there is no evidence of any drinking water contamination after a spill of about 1,100 gallons of fire suppressant at a fuel facility in Hawaii.

A cleanup is underway at the Red Hill fuel facility after the spill Tuesday of Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which is used to suppress fires caused by flammable liquids such as fuel and contain PFAS, a class of chemicals that are slow to degrade in the environment.

“This is egregious,” Kathleen Ho, a Hawaii environmental official, said in a news release. “AFFF contains PFAS forever chemicals — groundwater contamination could be devastating to our aquifer.”

At least we have them to protect us from the bad guys, right? I suppose one small ray of light is that if the water supply does end up being contaminated, we’re closer to being able to remove PFAS from it. What’s interesting is that there seems to be some kind of cover-up underway relating to this spill. I suppose it could be serial incompetence, but at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I’ll just say that this seems odd to me:

The state Health Department is demanding that the military release video of the latest spill at the Red Hill fuel facility.

Last week, military leaders said there was no video of the toxic spill of firefighting foam concentrate.

But officials later corrected that, saying there was actually video.

But the military says it won’t release the closed circuit video because it “may impact the integrity of the investigation.” Instead, military officials say they’ll allow the state Health Department regulators to see the video without sharing a copy.

The Health Department, in response, said it’s imperative that the Joint Task Force on Red Hill makes the video available to the public as soon as possible in the “interest of honesty and transparency.”

Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, called the military’s decision “ludicrous.”

“This just isn’t a matter of transparency or even after the fact investigation, this is a matter of saving lives,” he said.

Kat McClanahan, former Pearl Harbor resident, worries about the impact of the toxic concentrate on the environment ― and says the military should release the video to clear up doubt.

“I’m scared that they are hiding something, that something else is going on,” she said.

Gary Gill was deputy director of environmental health for nine years at the state Health Department under two governors. The Navy’s 27,000-gallon fuel spill from Red Hill happened in 2014 during his tenure.

“With a facility as complex as Red Hill and as old as Red Hill you can just assume there’s going to be a continual number of these events,” said Gill.

In 2013, Gill saw naphthalene ― a chemical in gasoline ― detected in the Navy’s monitoring well just 20 feet from the Red Hill drinking water shaft. The military dismissed it, he said.

“I think the Navy’s chain of command and their mission, they are there to be ready for war,” said Gill.

“They don’t really have the resources or the imperative to manage these environmental issues,”

I often talk about how we need to ensure that fascists no longer have the power to hurt people, or that billionaires no longer have the power to mess with other people’s lives the way they do not. The U.S. armed forces have demonstrated over, and over, and over again that they cannot be trusted to handle toxic materials in a responsible manner, even if one was so lost to humanity as to approve of everything else they do. Empires come and go, borders change, and priorities change. At some point in time, the U.S. government will no longer control Hawaii, but they’re playing with poison over a water supply that could, if managed carefully, support human life on that island for centuries to come.

The way we’re going, it’ll end up being yet another place that has to rely on imported water, because someone couldn’t be bothered to invest enough to protect such a vital resource. At some point, we’re going to run out of places to import clean water from.

I started this post by mentioning the colonial aspect of the U.S. presence in Hawaii, and while the Native Hawaiian community isn’t the group “primarily” affected by this particular leak, it’s worth remembering that all of this is happening in a broader context. The main interest the U.S. government has in Hawaii is its usefulness as a military base. That usefulness does not require the people of those islands to have good lives, or even lives at all, so there’s little incentive to invest in protecting natural resources. This is demonstrated with murderous negligence like the saga of Red Hill, but it’s also demonstrated in what being part of the U.S.A. has meant for the people of Hawaii. A combination of tourism and rich people buying property is making life increasingly difficult for Native Hawaiians, to the point where they’ve been actively asking people to stay away. As with so many other aspects of our society, the way we do things right now just isn’t working, and the longer it takes us to accept that, the more damage will be done, and the harder it will be to clean up, repair, or recover from it.

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!

 

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.

Scientists looked at school masking requirements and you will probably believe what they found!

Tegan and I started wearing some form of face covering, even if it was just a bandana, early in 2020. Everything we’d seen indicated that some covering was better than none, and that still seems to be the case. As the pandemic progressed, we decided that once it was “over”, we’d keep masking in most indoor, public areas. Ireland has had consistently low COVID numbers since August, and vaccination rates are high, so the vast majority of people have stopped wearing them.

It seems that the U.S. is not doing so well, partly because of the consistent politicization of vaccines and mask-wearing by the right wing. One of the more shameful versions of this has been the insistence that children are not at risk from COVID, and so there should be no measures taken to protect them or their teachers. This is often supported by the claim that “masks don’t work anyway” (for those who don’t claim that masks on children are literal child abuse). One might hope that such obvious bullshit wouldn’t need correcting, but if one actually believed that, one would be extremely naïve. Of course it needs debunking, and while I have little hope that this will reach those who most need to hear it, here’s some research:

The lifting of masking requirements in school districts outside of Boston in February 2022 was associated with an additional 44.9 COVID-19 cases per 1,000 students and staff in the 15 weeks after the statewide masking policy was rescinded. This represented nearly 12,000 total COVID-19 cases or 30% of all cases in those school districts that unmasked during that time, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Boston Public Health Commission, and Boston University School of Public Health.

“Our study shows that universal masking is an important strategy to reduce transmission in schools and one that should be considered in mitigation planning to keep students and staff healthier and minimize loss of in-person school days,” said Tori Cowger, corresponding author and Health and Human Rights fellow in the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard Chan School. “Our results also suggest that universal masking may be an important tool for mitigating structural inequities that have led to unequal conditions in schools and differential risk of severe COVID-19, educational disruptions, and health and economic effects of secondary transmission to household members.”

Basically, because different school districts ended mask requirements at different times, the researchers were able to compare infection rates, and tie the increase in cases to the change in policy.

The findings also showed that the effect of school masking policies was greatest during periods when COVID-19 incidence was highest in surrounding cities and towns, suggesting that implementing universal masking policies during times of high transmission would be most effective.

“This study provides clear support for the importance of universal masking to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in school settings, especially when community COVID levels are high,” said study co-author Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. “Masking reduces COVID-19 transmission in schools in an equitable and easy to implement way and should be part of any layered mitigation strategy.”

There may be valid reasons to be concerned about universal mask-wearing. Leaving aside matters of personal preference, I could see them being extremely isolating for people who rely on lip-reading for communication. It also wouldn’t shock me to learn that masking in school could mess with social development in some ways – I honestly don’t know, though I presume we’ll see research on that at some point.

But I think the larger takeaway here is clear – masks should be something we use a lot more, going forward, than we used to. COVID isn’t the only illness they can help with, and it’s also unlikely to be the last pandemic in our lifetimes. There’s also the simple fact that we have no real way of knowing how many immunocompromised people we come across in our day to day lives, or how many simply cannot afford the wages they’d lose from a week of sickness. I’m going to keep wearing a mask, and that’s no great burden. I know there are some places back in the U.S. where doing so might be inviting harassment, but the most I get here is the occasional odd look, and I get those anyway.

In general, just wear a mask when you’re in indoor public places.

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.

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Video: Timbah on Toast takes an empathetic and educational look at Ye, and bipolar disorder

A couple days ago, I called Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) a fascist, while talking about the company he’s been keeping lately. I’m comfortable saying that, because of the misinformation and hate that he’s spreading, and because of the people and ideas he’s empowering. He is, as the philosophers say, “doing fascism”. There’s no excusing that, and I think that he’s in a quagmire mostly of his own making, from which he’ll have trouble escaping. Because of his cultural stature, he’s someone whose actions we need to consider, at least from time to time, and in doing so, it seems like a good idea to know at least a little bit about bipolar disorder. It’s also something that’s just generally good to know about, because the odds are decent that there are people in your life who have to deal with that set of symptoms.

Timbah on Toast has done a number of excellent videos on different subjects, and in my very inexpert opinion, this one is worth watching as well. It gives an overview of what bipolar is and how it manifests, as well as a description of what it’s like for the person living through those manifestations. The video also talks about treatment, and about Ye specifically. The combination of wealth (Beau of the Fifth Column likes to call money “power coupons”), cultural influence, existing bigotry, and bad company seems to act like a bit of a perfect storm for driving Ye into these waters. That said, there’s one prediction that Timbah makes that I worry may be overly optimistic.

He correctly points out that the people who’ve been encouraging and enabling Ye lately don’t care about his wellbeing. He’s profitable for them, and for some, he’s a potential pathway to power. Where I fear Timbah may be going wrong, is in the prediction that when Ye goes into a depressive episode, having pushed away the people who cared about him, his current crowd will abandon him.

They might, I suppose, but looking at the situation, I’m reminded of the radicalization funnel that’s been guiding people towards the extreme right. For that, extreme low points are often an important part of the process. That’s when you can really convince someone that everyone else has abandoned them, and that only you, the fascist benefiting from his involvement, can be trusted to take care of him, and to guide him when he needs it. I don’t know if someone like Fuentes, Yiannapoulis, or Owens will be the one to do that, and I don’t know whether they’ll succeed if they try, but I think it is inevitable that someone in his current orbit is planning to take advantage. For all these are horrible people, they’re perfectly capable of being kind and caring when they think it will pay off. I don’t think it’ll be hard to convince Ye that nobody will forgive him, and that they’re the only ones he can rely on.

I could be wrong, obviously. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t know the man, and I know very little about him. With luck, he’ll extricate himself and go spend some time out of the spotlight. People do de-radicalize themselves all the time, when they have a way out, and it sure seems like someone of Ye’s stature has a number of options in that regard. Time will tell, I suppose, but regardless of how all this turns out, it’s a nasty situation.

Fascists have escalated to attacking infrastructure

Part of the reason I feel comfortable saying that fascists and other conservatives want the violence we’ve been seeing, is that they have been told, at every step of the way, what the result of their hateful rhetoric would be. It was true of the pro-life movement’s love of stochastic terrorism. It was true of the horrors we’ve seen since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade. It’s true of the current violence against LGBTQIA people.

Mass murder is the desired outcome. When I use terms like “genocide” for this, I mean it quite literally – they want queer people to stop existing.

In Abigail Thorne’s excellent video on the philosophy of Antifa, she says that while fascists can non-violently make themselves safe from anti-fascist activists by ceasing to “do fascism”, the targets of fascism cannot make themselves safe from fascists, because their mere existence is why they’re under attack. The only way to make the fascists happy is for them to stop existing.

This also means that as a fascist movement gains power and confidence, they will keep escalating attacks on the groups they’re scapegoating. You can’t claim that a group of people is causing the downfall of civilization forever, without doing something about it, and as we’ve seen, they’ve reached the stage where they’re openly saying, “if you don’t want to be murdered, follow my rules“.

The response to the Club Q shooting was an escalation. It marked the point at which many conservatives felt safe enough to shed the pretense of disapproval, and to openly support the violence. We’ve now had another escalation, in North Carolina:

Much of Moore County — more than 40,000 homes and businesses — remain without power following an attack to electrical substations. Authorities have confirmed that at least two substations were damaged by gunfire on Saturday night.

Damage assessments are still underway and estimates for the return of power to almost all of southern and central Moore remain uncertain. For now, Duke Energy has estimated restoration by 10 p.m. Sunday night, but that was before full estimates of the damage were available.

This coordinated attack coincides with rhetorical attacks on a drag show that was in one of the affected businesses, and has been followed, as with the Club Q shooting, by right-wing extremists making not-so-subtle implications:

Unsurprisingly, they claim that their god is responsible – who knew he used guns?

As usual, their “all-powerful” deity needs fanatical zealots to interpret and carry out its wishes.

I’ve talked before about how bigots are more than willing to hurt themselves and those they claim to care about, if it means hurting the people they hate more. In this case, shutting down one drag show was apparently worth cutting off power to tens of thousands of people, no matter how much harm that does to anyone else. The long history of blaming natural disasters on “the gays” has primed them to accept massive amounts of collateral damage in their war on most of humanity. If “God” is angry about the drag show, then he’s punishing everyone who lost power for not being bigoted enough towards that show, and towards the people who are OK with such things.

It will not stop here.

This shouldn’t be required for anyone to fight back, but it won’t stop with trans people either, or gay people, or any other group. Fascism is a pyramid scheme fueled by hatred – it always needs new targets. They are coming for queer people right now, and the only way they will stop is if we make sure they no longer have the power to keep going.

The exact mode of opposition is going to vary from place to place. Anti-fascist action tends to be locally organized, and tailored to the needs of the moment. It may be that cancelling an event is the best course of action in a given moment, to avoid an armed confrontation. It may be that groups like the John Brown Gun Club will run a security operation to defend an event. If you think things are safe where you are, and you want to help out somewhere else, follow local leadership.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, beyond the importance of collective action. Work with others. Do not assume the police are on your side (they aren’t). This is dangerous. People are getting killed, and the trend is towards more violence, not less. The people who’ve been warning about fascism have not been exaggerating or making stuff up – it is happening here, and without real, organized opposition, it will keep happening.

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!