Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world’s biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today’s arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It’s almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive “political reeducation” program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don’t think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won’t be easy,” he said. “It’s not an unmitigated win-win.”

The post Why are climate skeptics speaking out about the Uyghur genocide? appeared first on Coda Story.

The “unhelpful invocation” of the term “sunburn,” she argues, makes “an unconscious mind feel vulnerable and fearful of the sun.” She welcomes this color, insinuating that you should too.

Decades of research have shown that sunburns are strong predictors of melanoma. Roughly 8,000 Americans are expected to die this year from the most serious type of skin cancer, melanoma, according to the American Cancer Society. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, and melanoma rates doubled between 1982 and 2011.

Still, Sell is not alone in the anti-sunscreen camp. Even Stanford University neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, host of the wildly successful podcast “Huberman Lab,” claims that some sunscreens have molecules that can be found in neurons 10 years after application. No evidence is offered. Elsewhere, he has said he’s “as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma.” Huberman’s podcasts are frequently ranked among the most popular in the U.S.; he has millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram and has been the subject of admiring magazine profiles.

Spreading misinformation and even conspiracy theories has become commonplace in wellness spaces across social media. In a politically charged atmosphere addicted to brokering in binaries, good science is too often sacrificed at the altar of partisan opinion.

Pushing back against medical advancements from as far back as the 19th century has become a rallying cry for a growing number of today’s conspiritualist contrarians. Fear mongering about vaccinations is not the only entry point to this strange world of conspiracy and misinformation, in which predominantly white, middle- or upper-middle-class wellness influencers propagate and sell ideas and products with little to no oversight. In this world, humans are godlike creatures immune to viruses and cancers, while those who fall victim to illness and therefore the twisted machinations of society are but collateral damage.

In May 2020, I launched the “Conspirituality” podcast with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker. Veteran yoga instructors deeply embedded in the wellness industry, we’ve long been skeptical about many health claims proffered by wellness influencers and the cult-like behaviors that appear in so-called spiritual communities. And we’ve always been attuned to the monetization of health misinformation. 

Conspirituality is a portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality,” coined in 2011 by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in an academic paper. They observed a strange synthesis between “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).” The pandemic provided fertile ground for conspirituality, moving it from the fringe to the mainstream.

Specifically, we launched the podcast after the release of the 2020 pseudo-documentary “Plandemic.” Filmmaker Mikki Willis, who had moderate success in the Los Angeles wellness and yoga scene a decade or so ago, found a much larger audience with right-leaning conspiracy theorists — so much so that he was joined by Alex Jones at the red carpet premiere in June this year of the third installment of the “Plandemic” series. Many other former liberals in the wellness space have taken a hard right turn, including comedian and aspiring yogi Russell Brand. Brand now regularly hosts conspiracy theorists in part of what these days appears to be a gambit to deflect against numerous sexual abuse allegations against him made public earlier this month. 

Not all conspiritualists are hard right, though their rhetoric predominantly leans that way. One of America’s most infamous anti-vaxxers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, is attempting to combat President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primaries from the left. Predictably, Kennedy’s health policy roundtable, held on June 27, featured other leading health misinformation spreaders. 

While the anti-vaccination movement began the moment Edward Jenner codified vaccine science, the modern upswell of anti-vax fervor dates back to disbarred physician Andrew Wakefield’s falsified research that purported to link vaccinations to autism in 1998. Hysteria around COVID-19 vaccines began months before a single one hit the market, in large part thanks to misinformation spread by “Plandemic.” And that trend shows no sign of slowing.

Health misinformation is likely as old as consciousness. The learning curve in understanding which plants heal and which kill took millennia without the benefit of controlled environments. While no science is perfect, to deny or disavow the progress we’ve made is absurd. The 19th century was an especially fruitful time, with vaccinations, antibiotics, germ theory and handwashing greatly advancing our biological knowledge.

Germ theory is a foundational tenet of modern science. For centuries, miasma theory was the favored explanation for the Black Plague, cholera and even chlamydia. These diseases were supposedly the result of “bad air,” which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed originated from rotting organic material and standing water. 

In 1857, English physician John Snow submitted a paper tracing a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a pump in London’s Broad Street. Adoption of sanitary measures was slow and grudging. Civic authorities weren’t interested in the expense of rerouting pipelines.

A few years later, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered a pathology of puerperal fever, though it wasn’t until Robert Koch photographed the anthrax bacterium in 1877 that disease was undeniably linked to bacteria. Medicine was changed.

Contemporary contrarian wellness influencers also trace their antecedents back to the 19th century. While Pasteur won fame — pasteurization remains an important practice for killing microbes — some of his colleagues resisted his findings. French scientist Antoine Béchamp devised the pleomorphic theory of disease: It’s not that bacteria or viruses cause diseases; it’s just that they’re attracted to people already susceptible to those diseases. 

As Pasteur and Koch continued their research on microorganisms, Béchamp faded into obscurity. But his “terrain theory” lingered. It was the harbinger of the infamous “law of attraction,” the belief in the power of manifestation, of effectively imagining wealth, health and success into being. It’s the school of thought that, repackaged, made books like Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” (2006) a global bestseller. 

Extended to physical wellbeing, it means that if your mindset is “correct,” disease has no pathway into your body. This ideology is behind the many products and courses sold by wellness influencers. In 2017, pseudoscience clearing house GreenMedInfo published an article in which the writer described Pasteur as the “original scammer” who enabled “the pharmaceutical industry to dominate and tyrannically rule modern Western medicine.” If you can sell the public on a pathology of disease, the writer argued, you can sell a cure. 

He championed a return to nature as the real way to protect against disease: “Detoxing and seeking fresh whole foods and adding the proper supplements offer more disease protection from germs than all the vaccines in the world.”

Terrain theory has no greater proponent than Zach Bush, a physician who rightfully argues that the environment plays a role in health outcomes. But then he goes on to say that since there are billions of viruses, it must really be unhealthy tissues making the victim susceptible to disease — Antoine Béchamp’s exact argument. Bush claims that viruses are nature’s way of upgrading our genes, and any ailment must be due to a bodily imbalance.

This form of magical thinking is spread across his many web pages. Instead of conducting actual research on COVID-19 as an internist, Bush offered statements like this to his million-plus followers: “May this respiratory virus that now shares space and time with us teach us of the grave mistakes we have made in disconnecting from our nature and warring against the foundation of the microbiome. If we choose to learn from, rather than fear, this virus, it can reveal the source of our chronic disease epidemics that are the real threat to our species.”

In April, Bush told an Irish podcast that if he were to take a single course of antibiotics, his chances of “major depression over the next 12 months goes up by 24 percent.” Two courses, and he claimed that he would be 45% more likely to contract anxiety disorders and 52% more likely to suffer depression. The podcast’s hosts made a public apology, though Bush continues to be able to spread his misinformation. Inevitably, Bush sells a range of supplements “key to our overall health and wellbeing.” 

Watch what they say, then watch what they sell. If an influencer tells you Western medicine has failed you, be sure a product pitch is coming. Supplements are the main vehicle to monetization for wellness influencers since they don’t have to be clinically tested and little regulated, existing in a medical gray zone. Consumers mostly ignore the fine print on the back label because the promises on the front are so much more appealing.

Like Bush, influencers such as Jessica Peatross sell supplements and protocols to her well over 300,000 Instagram followers while consistently invoking Béchamp. “Terrain theory matters,” Peatross wrote in a March 2023 post. “When your body’s symphony isn’t in tune, or you are out of homeostasis, you are much more vulnerable to pathogenic invasion, cancer or autoimmunity.”

Last year, Peatross surrendered her medical license in California due to vaccine requirements. Now she sells subscription health plans. When signing up for her email list, you get a link to download her “Vaccine Protection & Detox Protocol.” 

All proponents of terrain theory put the onus of disease on the individual. They demand we each fend off the toxic effects of Big Pharma, Big Ag and all the other Bigs in existence through supplementation, meditation, breathwork, psychedelic rituals in Bali, or simply by thinking positively, thinking the “right way,” a learned skill for which they always have a course. 

Among the more notorious pushers of terrain theory doctrine was German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer, the inventor of Germanic New Medicine. In 1995, already discredited and stopped from practicing medicine in Germany, he diagnosed a 6-year-old girl as having “conflicts.” As a result, her parents refused to treat the 9-pound cancerous tumor in her abdomen. An Austrian court stripped them of custody, so that she could receive the chemotherapy that saved her life. 

Hamer, who died in 2017, believed medicine was controlled by Jewish doctors who used treatments like chemotherapy on non-Jewish patients. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pseudoscience claims and conspiracies are rooted in antisemitism. Hamer also promoted the idea of microchips in swine flu vaccines and denied the existence of AIDS.

Germanic New Medicine is based on the “five biological laws,” which claim that all severe disease is due to a shock event. If the victim doesn’t immediately solve their conflict, the disease progresses in the brain. Microbes actually enter the body to heal it, provided the victim addresses the psychological conflict that led to the proliferation of the disease state. The victim heals after confronting the conflict, which Hamer thought nature had intentionally placed there to teach some sort of lesson. Death only occurs when you don’t face the trauma of the shock event. So that’s on you.

Disease exists to teach a lesson. A sunburn is light nutrition. It’s no wonder that Melissa Sell is one of the most vocal revivalists of Hamer’s theories, which she has renamed “Germanic Healing Knowledge.” She uses social media to share thoughts like: “You are not ‘sick’. Your body is adapting to help you through a difficult situation. When you resolve that situation your body will go through a period of restoration and then return to homeostasis.” 

Sadly, this is par for the course. With my podcast colleagues, Matthew and Julian, our review of conspiritualists found that the notion of an “ideal” body or way of being is widespread. As we document in our book, modern yoga was in part influenced by the famed 19th- and early 20th-century German strongman Eugen Sandow, whose adopted first name is a truncation of “eugenics.” 

Yoga originated in India, yet Sandow’s techniques found an audience among Indians in the late 19th century. Feeling emasculated and humiliated by British colonialists, many Indians appreciated Sandow’s overt masculinity and mimicked his strength techniques in a set of yoga postures that are now widely used. Indians craved bodily strength as a metaphor for overcoming colonial rule. Sandow came at it from the other side. He used his physique to further an explicitly racist world view. There was a reason why the strong white race dominated the world, he seemed to be saying — just watch me flex my biceps.

Wellness influencers similarly obsess over a strong and purified body. They assign similar causes to all ailments, which usually include poor diet, a lack of exercise, modern medicine and an inability to escape toxic stress. Sometimes, however, the influencer assigns physical attributes to the perfected body, which is why anti-trans bigotry and fat-shaming run rampant in wellness spaces. The ideal body, which can only be accomplished by resisting the evil mechanisms of allopathic (Western) medicine, is the true goal of nature’s design. Strangely, a number of these same influencers take no issue with cosmetic surgeries, botox or steroids, yet scream at followers for using deodorant or applying sunscreen. 

So what is the “right” sort of existence that lets the victim recover and achieve homeostasis, a state of internal balance consistent with Hamer’s five biological laws? According to Sell, as she explained on X, formerly known as Twitter, “The way to feel better is to think better thoughts.” Naturally, she has a number of online courses available to help you think better thoughts, ranging in price from $111 to $2,700.

In 1810, German physician Samuel Hahnemann came up with the term “allopathy” as a strawman to his concept of homeopathy. Whereas homeopathy means “like cures like,” allopathy initially meant “opposite cures like.” In the allopathic system, for instance, you take an antidiarrheal to treat diarrhea; in homeopathy, you take a laxative. Well, the “essence” of a laxative. 

Allopathy has come to mean anything involving Western medicine, while homeopathy is considered a natural system for healing (even though ground-up pieces of the Berlin Wall are used in one homeopathic remedy, and I don’t recall concrete ever forming without human intervention).

Hahnemann left his role as a physician in 1784 due to barbaric practices like bloodletting. He supported his family by translating medical textbooks. Inspired by Scottish physician William Cullen’s book on malaria, he slathered cinchona — a quinine-containing bark — all over his body to induce malaria-like symptoms. Hahnemann likely developed an inflammatory reaction, though he credited them as “malaria-like symptoms.” He then believed himself to be inoculated against malaria. This experience became the basis of homeopathy.

Instead of ingesting (or slathering on) small quantities of an offending agent, Hahnemann removed the active ingredient altogether from his distillations. He believed that less substance equals higher potency, and kept following that trail: Most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient.

Take Oscillococcinum, one of France’s top-selling medicines, which rakes in $20 million in America every year. The process of potentization — homeopathy’s dilution protocol — begins with the heart and liver of the Muscovy duck. Technicians mix 1 part duck heart and liver with 100 parts sugar in water. Then the process is repeated 200 times, which means any trace of the duck is long gone. The late family physician Harriet Hall pointed out that you’d need a container 30 times the size of the earth just to find one duck molecule. Yet it’s marketed to reduce flu symptoms. 

When a spokesperson for Boiron, the manufacturer of Oscillococcinum, was asked if their product was safe, she replied: “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”

Despite an absence of active ingredients, homeopathic products are often mistaken for herbal remedies, according to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with the Office for Science and Society at McGill University. In his article, Jarry cites a Health Canada survey that shows only 5% of Canadians understand what homeopathy entails. Pharmacies and grocery stores confuse customers by shelving these products next to herbal remedies and other medicines.

When I asked Jarry about the danger of consumer confusion, he said, “Homeopathic products are based on sympathetic magic principles and are not supported by our understanding of biology, chemistry and physics. So when they’re sold alongside actual pharmaceutical drugs, it creates a false equivalence in the mind of the shopper. It bumps homeopathy up to the level of medicine and turns its products into pharmaceutical chameleons.”

Homeopathy suppliers want it both ways: They claim their products are superior to pharmaceuticals while pushing to have them shelved next to actual drugs to obscure their difference. The name of their 100-year-old trade group? The American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists.

Jarry has helped lead the charge for proper labeling of homeopathic products in Canada. Over the border, in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission began regulating homeopathic products in 2016, though these efforts seem to have had little impact. The global homeopathic market is expected to reach nearly $20 billion by 2030.

Jarry thinks regulatory agencies must work harder to make clear that homeopathy is not based on science. But everyone passes the buck. “The pharmacists who own drug stores in which homeopathy is sold,” Jarry told me, “say that it’s up to the chain they work for to tell them to stop selling these products.” Meanwhile, “the chains say the products are approved by Health Canada, whose representatives say it’s up to pharmacists to use clinical judgment when recommending them or not.”

While the risk of injury is low given that most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient, there’s another danger lurking beneath the surface — people choosing to use these products instead of seeking out interventions that can actually help them. 

Avoidance of “allopathic” medicine is common in wellness spaces, the belief being that natural cures are better than anything concocted in a laboratory. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to mental health.

We’ve included a chapter called “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong” in our book to acknowledge the fact that many people turn to natural remedies and wellness practices with good intentions. The American for-profit healthcare system can be a nightmare. We likely all have anecdotes of when the system failed us. Just as we all have likely benefited from Western medicine. It often depends on where your attention is most drawn. 

Like many wellness professionals, I lost a lot of income when the pandemic struck. All of the group fitness and yoga classes that I ran were gone overnight. My wife, who worked in hospitality at the time, lost her job. We were fortunate to have enough savings to get by, along with whatever income I pulled together as a freelance writer and by livestreaming donation yoga classes on YouTube. Our story isn’t unique, and it makes sense that wellness professionals turned to whatever revenue they could find. 

I wasn’t surprised to see so many supplements and online courses being marketed in the first months of the pandemic. But the sheer number of mental health interventions sold by wellness influencers was astounding — and concerning. Everyone seemed to have a hot take on mental health, and many leaned on the appeal to nature fallacy: You can heal depression with a supplement or a meditation practice or by cultivating the right mindset. 

“Holistic psychiatrist” Kelly Brogan, who is clinically trained but took a right turn even before the pandemic began, offers tapering protocols from antidepressants — even though none exist — to paying clients. True, pharmaceutical companies that know how to get patients onto their medications have never bothered to figure out how to get them off. But beware the influencer who writes, as Brogan does, “Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling. It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.”

Jonathan N. Stea is a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary. A prolific science communicator, he doesn’t mince words when I ask him about wellness influencers who claim that natural remedies are better than antidepressants. 

“I’m tired of wellness influencers unethically opining on topics they’re unqualified to understand,” he said. “Notwithstanding the appeal to nature fallacy with respect to the idea that there are ‘better natural remedies’ than evidence-based psychiatric medications, it’s irresponsible to make such claims in the absence of scientific evidence.”

The paradox of the wellness industry is that you supposedly thrive when you connect with nature, yet you also need endless products and services. Self-professed metaphysics teacher Luke Storey, for example, sells over 200 products that offer the “most cutting-edge natural healing” that jive with his love for “consciousness expanding technologies.” How much healing does one really need? How contracted is consciousness that it requires so much expansion? 

It’s one thing to enjoy spiritual tchotchkes, but telling people these accouterments are necessary for salvation is disingenuous.

The problem is that people don’t necessarily feel better with these protocols or products. The way the wellness grift is framed — the notion that your thoughts dictate your reality — results in the adherent feeling worse if the therapeutic doesn’t work. They believe it’s a moral failing because charismatic influencers place the burden on them: “You didn’t do x or y hard enough.” So back on the treadmill they go.

Tragically, Stea said some people suspend antidepressant usage to chase magical-sounding cures. “Abrupt cessation of these medications can result in awful withdrawal symptoms,” he told me. “The other risk is that forgoing medications for unsupported or pseudoscientific treatments carry their own potential for harm, either directly due to the treatment, or indirectly by possibly worsening an untreated mental disorder.”

People in pain are vulnerable. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation. At least accountability exists in regulated spaces. Pseudoscientific sermons on TikTok have no such oversight.

Ideally, science tests claims with the best available means at the time. If better tools emerge, findings are updated. Conspiritualists are regressing in this regard. Their romanticization of 19th-century pseudoscience is a ruse that helps them sell products and services. 

In many ways, we’re victims of our own success. The advancements of the 19th century in public health, hygiene and drugs are part of the reason most of us are here today. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, we’re all afloat in the hard-won progress of centuries of trial and error. 

We’re also not the same animals that gave birth to our line 100,000 years ago or even 1,000 years ago. For better and worse, we’ve drastically changed our relationship to our environment, just as we have drastically changed the environment. Glamorizing who we were neglects what we’ve become and how we got here. 

Michelle Wong, a science educator and cosmetic chemist based in Australia, told me that when the likes of Melissa Sell make their anti-sunscreen pitches, they rely on the appeal to nature fallacy. “There’s the idea that humans evolved with sun exposure,” she said, “so our skin should be able to handle it. But skin cancers usually develop after reproductive age (which is all that evolution helps us with). On top of that, migration and leisure, like beach holidays, means we get very different sun exposure compared to how we evolved.” As the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus once observed, what heals in small doses kills in large.

The sun, in other words, isn’t to be feared, but we would do well to respect its power. And to not overestimate our own.

The post The dangerous myths sold by the conspiritualists appeared first on Coda Story.

Desta and his colleagues did their best to treat them, but by the time many arrived at the hospital, it was too late. “We tried to save so many lives,” he recalled, “but in most cases we were not able to.”

These were Desta’s early years as a physician, when one-third of all maternal deaths in Ethiopia could be linked to unsafe abortions. Thousands of women died each year. Under pressure to reduce the maternal mortality rate, the Ethiopian parliament passed a groundbreaking law loosening abortion restrictions for a variety of health conditions in 2005. The policy brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of deaths from unsafe abortions, and the bleak and overwhelmed hospital units that Desta remembers so vividly eventually shut down. The closure of the wards was “a success,” he explained. “I am a living witness that abortion care saves lives.”

But lately, Desta, who is now the Ethiopia program director for the global reproductive health nonprofit Ipas, worries that the dark days of those wards could become a part of Ethiopia’s reality again. That’s because the country’s abortion law is on shaky ground, thanks to the efforts of an emboldened anti-abortion movement buoyed by a court ruling halfway around the world: The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2022 decision to limit abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Dobbs ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion — marked an anomaly in the trajectory of global abortion policy making over the last 30 years, which has trended sharply toward liberalization. 

Since the ruling, there has been a wave of abortion-related policy shifts around the world. In France, lawmakers used Dobbs as the basis for a legislative proposal that would enshrine abortion rights in the French constitution. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion earlier this month, despite the country’s deep Catholic roots. There is mounting support for policies to protect legal access to the procedure in Argentina and Colombia.

Anti-abortion groups, meanwhile, see Dobbs as a signal that it may not be so difficult to roll back the gains made by abortion advocates. “The opposition has tasted blood in the water,” Lori Adelman, the acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, told me. In India, anti-abortion activists took to the streets of Delhi in the months after Dobbs, calling on the Indian government to repeal its 1971 law legalizing abortion. In Italy, pro-choice gynecologists are facing a fresh wave of harassment by an emboldened anti-abortion movement riding a post-Roe high. 

But nowhere has the anti-abortion movement been more energized by Roe’s overturning than on the African continent. While abortion is restricted across much of the region, those countries that have expanded access are now seeing a backlash.

In Kenya, opponents are already drawing on Roe’s reversal to challenge abortion policy. According to the international reproductive rights advocacy organization Fos Feminista, which recently published a report about Dobbs’ global impact, anti-abortion groups highlighted Dobbs as a reason to appeal a 2022 constitutional court decision in Kenya expanding abortion access. The ruling, which came out before Roe was overturned, affirmed abortion as a fundamental right in Kenya’s constitution, citing international jurisprudence on abortion, including Roe v. Wade. But opposition groups latched onto Dobbs as a reason to challenge the judgment, arguing that the judge who decided the case relied on “bad law” from the U.S. The decision is now stayed, pending appeal. “The fact that it was entertained is really worrisome to many that are working on the ground in Kenya,” said Kemi Akinfaderin, a global advocacy officer with Fos Feminista.

In Nigeria, the governor of the state of Lagos suspended policy guidelines about abortion care for life-threatening health conditions less than a month after Roe was overturned. Abortion opponents seized upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that the governor should follow the ruling’s lead and revoke the provisions. In July 2022, he did. “The Dobbs decision has trickled down to Nigeria, and it’s very disappointing,” said Ijeoma Egwuatu, the communications director for the Nigeria-based reproductive health nonprofit, Generation Initiative for Women and Youth Network. 

For abortion opponents, the U.S. trajectory provides a possible model for reversing abortion gains.

“They are saying, ‘Dobbs is the wind we need behind our sails,’” Akinfaderin told me. “‘If we can do this in the U.S., we can do this anywhere else.’” For abortion advocates, it’s a glaring warning. “For the longest time, Roe has been seen as a gold standard,” Akinfaderin continued. “And so the fact that this can happen in the U.S. is a very clear indication to some in the feminist movement in Africa that it can happen here as well. These gains can be lost over time.”

Akinfaderin, who is based in Togo, believes that abortion opponents have strategically chosen where to focus their attention on the African continent. “They’re not making mistakes,” she explained. “They are targeting big countries, countries with political influence and countries with very strong religious communities.”

Enter Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa after Nigeria and the home to the headquarters of the African Union. The country has a distinctive history and cultural legacy. It is one of just two countries on the continent that successfully resisted colonization. (Liberia is the other.) Ethiopia is also home to a distinct Christian Orthodox tradition dating back to the 4th century. Orthodox Christians are the country’s largest and most influential religious group, making up more than 40% of the population. One-third of the population identifies as Muslim and nearly one-fifth as Protestant. Abortion remains controversial in the country — surveys show the majority of Ethiopians, including Orthodox Christians, oppose the procedure. 

The policy reforms in Ethiopia in 2005 legalized abortion in a variety of circumstances, including if a woman was a victim of rape or incest, if her life is in danger, if she has physical or mental disabilities or if she is a minor and is not ready to have a child. The changes had a dramatic impact. Today, deaths from unsafe abortions make up just 1% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia, compared to over 30% before the law went into effect. 

But Ethiopian reproductive health advocates worry that those advances are now in jeopardy. Over the last year, the country’s anti-abortion movement has coalesced around a concrete goal. “They are targeting the abortion law,” said Abebe Shibru, a longtime reproductive health advocate and the Ethiopia country director for the international health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices. “Now, anti-abortion groups are intensifying their movement and they are targeting policymakers, health providers — anyone who might have a strong stake in sexual reproductive health services.” Because of this momentum, Shibru continued, “this existing abortion law is very vulnerable.”

Much of this organizing has taken place behind the scenes, according to Shibru, as leading anti-abortion figures attempt to influence lawmakers, government officials and the general population. But a few public demonstrations from anti-abortion groups in recent months offer a glimpse into the movement’s goals and direction.

In July, thousands of people took to the streets in the town of Hawassa, Ethiopia, to speak out against abortion and LGBTQ rights. Nearly two dozen churches in the city opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage organized the demonstration, according to local media. Participants carried signs and chanted slogans about fetal rights and explained that the protest was organized to “save the youth” from the “dangers” of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Weeks before the protest, healthcare workers began catching glimpses of vans parked near abortion clinics in Addis Ababa. The cars, emblazoned with the slogan “Praying to end abortion in Ethiopia,” written in Amharic, were spotted repeatedly throughout the city in June, according to Desta, from Ipas. “Whenever a provider sees this car parked next to the clinic, or a woman sees this information when trying to access services from these clinics, they’re embarrassed, they are harassed,” he told me. It’s unclear who was behind this effort, but Desta believes it reflects a more confrontational strategy from the opposition post-Roe. 

“Before the decision, they were not boldly coming out in the media and talking about abortion. But now, they are in the media, on TV  and on social media,” Desta said. “They are very vocal, very organized, and boldly speaking out about abortion in Ethiopia.”

According to Desta and other observers, one group leading the charge to repeal Ethiopia’s abortion law is Family Watch International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that claims to be working to “protect and promote the family as the fundamental unit of society.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The organization’s leader has compared same-sex marriage to drug addiction and argued that the “homosexual agenda is a worldwide attempt to justify behavior that is inherently destructive to both society and to the individual.” 

While headquartered in Arizona, the organization has long worked in Africa and maintains an active presence in Ethiopia with an office in Addis Ababa, according to interviews with several reproductive rights advocates working there. After Roe was overturned, Family Watch wrote on its website that the decision was a “historic victory for life and family.” The organization’s Africa chapter, it added, is “working to stop abortion being pushed abroad.” The group’s Africa director is Seyoum Antonios, a prominent Ethiopian physician who recently railed against “the LGBTQ, abortion, and child sexualization and transgender agenda of the European Union” in an August speech to the African Bar Association. 

As of now, Ethiopia’s law is still standing. The forces jeopardizing its survival may not ultimately succeed in toppling the policy, and the transnational anti-abortion coalition — though energized — still faces an uphill battle if it wants to reverse global trends in abortion policymaking.

But even without a change in the law, the opposition’s efforts already appear to be having tangible impacts on the country’s abortion landscape. Over the last year, Shibru and his colleagues have noticed that some healthcare workers in public clinics have ceased providing abortion services — a likely result of the amplified pressure campaign against them. Shibru told me that providers are facing harassment from “their friends, their families, and their communities.” He added, “​When you go into public facilities, we heard that this facility used to provide safe abortion, but not now. Because we used to get good support, but now no one is encouraging us.” 

Additionally, Shibru said that he and other reproductive health workers have documented an increase in the number of women seeking medical treatment for abortion-related complications over the last year. Fewer clinics offering services could cause women to seek out unsafe alternatives, Shibru explained, and medical care for procedures gone wrong. These scenarios, coupled with the abortion law’s shaky standing, fill Shibru with dread. 

“​​What does it mean if the law is reversed?” he asked. “We are going back 20 years. That means more maternal mortality. Hospitals will be occupied with abortion-related problems.The women in Ethiopia in danger.” Such a scenario, he continued, “will be a big moral crisis.”

The post Roe’s repeal has energized Africa’s anti-abortion movement appeared first on Coda Story.

It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don’t share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

The post How space traffic in orbit could spell trouble on Earth appeared first on Coda Story.

In recent years, scientists desperate to stop global warming have looked back at this natural event and wondered: Could people recreate similar effects to help reverse rapidly rising global temperatures? 

Enter stratospheric aerosol injection, the process of releasing tiny reflective particles of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that reflect sunlight back into space in order to cool off the planet. The concept mimics the natural activity of volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo. But it is driven by humans.

Proponents of stratospheric aerosol injection, including start-ups and researchers investigating and experimenting with the process, call it “sunscreen for the earth” and argue that we can create a layer of protection to shield us from the hot rays of the sun. It is one of a growing variety of Earth-cooling techniques that fall under the conceptual umbrella of “solar geoengineering.” Other proposed solar geoengineering techniques range from creating light-reflecting clouds to deploying giant mirrors in space. In 2020, Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, unveiled a “whiter than white” specialized paint, designed for rooftops and roads, that can bounce 95% of the sun’s rays back into deep space, cooling the buildings beneath it.

But a growing group of scientists and academics are afraid that solar geoengineering is an all-too-welcome distraction from our obligations to reduce carbon emissions and a flawed scientific concept to boot. They say processes like these could throw Earth into deeper chaos by cooling the world unevenly and wreaking havoc on our climate systems. Plus, solar geoengineering could lock us into long-term reliance on such techniques, creating new dependencies and potential consequences.

“There’s a sense of really deep desperation and urgency among scientists who are reading climate science and see how dire the situation is,” said Lili Fuhr, the director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Program. She explained that despair can lead scientists to scramble around for an idea — any idea — that might stop global heating quickly.

“I don’t think that desperation turns a bad idea into a good idea. The only good idea is that we need to get out of fossil fuels. Anything else doesn’t help us,” said Fuhr.

Despite the concerns that scientists like Fuhr share, solar geoengineering has some uniquely powerful advocates. Bill Gates has backed a Harvard University proposal to shoot light-reflecting aerosols into the sky above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, a project that was scrapped after local indigenous Saami people raised objections. In February, billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave a nod to the idea of creating more clouds above the ice caps to cool the poles by blocking sunlight. “Human interference has destroyed a previously stable system and human ingenuity, both local and international, will be needed to restore it,” he said in a speech at the 2023 Munich Security conference. And Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has provided $900,000 in funding for 15 solar geoengineering modeling projects.

These projects have the look of a quick, relatively cheap, technology-led solution to global heating that doesn’t involve restructuring society around sustainability and renewable energy. It would mean that society could, in theory, have its cake and eat it too: We could keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere while protecting the Earth from greenhouse gas effects.

But processes like this could require humans to continue shooting chemicals into the stratosphere for centuries. Fuhr explained that this could put us on a dangerous trajectory: We wouldn’t be able to stop or even slow down the deployment of these chemicals without facing a rapid, sudden — and potentially catastrophic — heating event. “There would be a shock effect that humans and ecosystems wouldn’t be able to adapt to,” she said. Scientists like Fuhr estimate that an event like this would cause the Earth to heat up so rapidly that we’d risk destroying life on the only planet we can safely live on.

If we want to avoid this, Fuhr said, we’d need “centuries of an international collaborative political regime, doing this in a benign way, for the benefit of all.” 

“I can’t think that anyone actually believes that is possible. We have regime changes all the time — look at the country I’m in right now,” she told me, speaking from Washington, D.C. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. government has shown increased interest in such initiatives. In June, the White House announced a federal plan to research the concept of solar geoengineering more deeply, with the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy leading an effort to set risk management standards and transparency guidelines for any publicly-funded solar geoengineering research in the U.S. The move could be the first step toward greater federal engagement with solar geoengineering research efforts.

The European Union has been more cautious: It has warned against using large-scale disruptive geoengineering technology without a proper assessment of the risks. In June, the bloc called for global talks on the subject and said that the risks of interfering with the climate were “unacceptable.” 

“Nobody should be conducting experiments alone with our shared planet,” said European Union climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, at a news conference. But the EU is also looking at setting rules and boundaries for outdoor geoengineering experiments, an indication that at least some officials are warming to the idea.

In 2021, a collective of scientists and industry professionals signed a “solar geoengineering non-use agreement,” demanding no public funding, no outdoor experiments, no patents, and no support in international institutions for the practice. In other words, they called for a complete shutdown of any experimentation or exploration of solar geoengineering. The scientists and academics said the idea was simply too dangerous and that it would be impossible to test the effects of solar geoengineering on the Earth’s climate without actually releasing the chemicals on a global scale.

“You’re literally talking about intervening with the atmosphere, which protects the only semblance of life that we know in an otherwise desolate universe. Like, I don’t even know what to say to these people. It’s extraordinary,” said Noah Herfort, the co-director of Climate Vanguard, a youth think tank that has been warning about the risks of geoengineering since 2022.

At some point, artificially spewing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to see its effects on the Earth stops being a test. We cannot fully predict the outcome without actually doing it, Fuhr explained. “And we just happen to have one planet,” she said.

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The havoc we have wreaked on our environment is why the Anthropocene epoch may be our last. Humanity has been talking about the apocalypse for thousands of years. But in 2023, as we grapple with the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the imminent threat of climate disaster and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is a greater urgency to the questions some are asking about what the world would really look like without us. Would it be better to leave the Earth to the animals, to the trees, even to the rocks? And would the world be a safer and more benevolent place if we let AI robots run everything? 

In “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” the American poet and critic Adam Kirsch interrogates the prospect of a world that is no longer dominated by humans — either because we have driven ourselves to extinction or because we have been replaced by artificial intelligence. Sitting in a sweltering Rome on the hottest day ever recorded in the ancient capital, I spoke to Adam Kirsch on the phone in New York City, where the air quality index hovered near hazardous because of the wildfire smoke drifting over from Canada. It was difficult not to talk about the “end times.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first start thinking about a future without humans?

I began to want to write the book during the pandemic when, very quickly, I felt like my physical world contracted to the space of an apartment. It struck me how little of a difference that made to my life. So much of what I do and what most of us do can be done virtually rather than physically — whether it’s work, leisure or consumption. I began to think about the idea that human life has already changed. It has already gone virtual and disengaged from the physical in ways that our ancestors would not have understood. And the transhumanists’ idea is just another step on that path. 

Let’s clarify for our readers what “transhumanists” think. They basically imagine a world where the human condition can be improved or even replaced by technology like AI, right? 

Transhumanism is the school of thought which says that in the future, we will be able to use technology to overcome the limitations of our physical bodies. Transhumanists look to a future where humans will give way to another species or another form of life that isn’t embodied in flesh and blood. It isn’t necessarily mortal, and it might be able to live indefinitely, as a record of information, or as a simulation, or in the virtual world. 

Or, alternatively, transhumanism says that we will just be able to escape the limitations of our bodies with genetic engineering. One of the most vivid strains of transhumanism right now is the idea that in a future with artificial intelligence, there might be minds that are not human minds at all. Minds that are actually born on computers and that have a very different relationship to reality and the physical world than we do. And that those minds will become the leading form of life on our planet and take over from us in a violent or benevolent way. 

Another group you look at in your book also considers what the world would look like if humans no longer dominated it. They are called “anthropocene antihumanists” and seem to believe that humans are a kind of cancer on the earth, multiplying like a parasite. And that the world would be better off without us.

Antihumanists say that humans have taken over from nature as the most important factor on the planet. They say we no longer live alongside nature, but we control nature and dominate it. This, they believe, is eventually going to lead to the decline or disappearance of humanity itself. And they think that would be a good thing. So antihumanism can be anything from saying we should stop having children to predicting that an environmental calamity is going to reduce us to just a few leftover populations. Philosophically, it can take the form of saying, ‘How can we think about the world in ways that don’t put humanity at the center of it?’ They give equal respect and agency to nonhuman things and even nonliving things, like objects or the ocean. 

Or a rock. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what a world without humans looks like. Especially as I grapple with the realities of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. I sometimes find myself fantasizing about what the natural world looked like before human civilization. Reading your book was an intense experience in that way, because it forces you to think about the Earth without humanity. What kind of place did it take you to psychologically, while you were writing? 

It’s very difficult to imagine the disappearance of humanity as a real prospect — in the same way that it’s sort of hard to imagine what it’s like to be dead. We could all theoretically agree that at some point there will no longer be a human species, that we will have become extinct. And that just as the dinosaurs did, someday we will disappear. But to think about that happening tomorrow or next year plays havoc with all of our assumptions about what matters and how we go about our days. Thinking about these things is on a different track from daily life. In daily life, we’re dealing with the world as it is — raising children and going to work. We’re not thinking about the future in an abstract or philosophical way.

Yes, it’s a kind of bizarre cognitive dissonance to think about a world millions of years from now when humans don’t exist and then go back to thinking about what to have for lunch. 

When the book was published in January, almost right away, all of the things that I was writing about started to become much more mainstream. First, there was ChatGPT, which led to  people talking about artificial intelligence in a very immediate way and talking about how dangerous it might be. And then came this summer that we’re having with all these broken temperature records and parts of the world becoming dangerously hot and endangering human life. Even to me — someone who’s been thinking about this and researching and writing about it for a long time — when it erupts into your actual life, it seems like kind of a shock. We have a tendency to think about dire things or radical changes in the abstract and not deal with the concrete until we absolutely have to. 

I think we rely so much on shards of hope that seem to get slimmer and slimmer every year. You talk about hope a lot in the book. How hopeful would you say you are? 

I think that all of us rely on hope. We rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the present because that’s the only way we know how to navigate the world. But one of the things that drew me to the people I write about in the book is that they’re not afraid to think about things that seem frightening or impossible, that most people dismiss as science fiction or extremism. They’re thinking through the idea of, ‘What if the world actually was like this in the future? What if we actually did have computers that could outthink us or what if billions of people could no longer survive because of climate change? What would that do to our sense of ourselves and the way we live?’ And I think that that’s useful to think about. Both for its own sake and because it maybe also makes us more willing to take action in the present. 

There was one Franz Kafka quote in your book that really stood out to me. “There is hope — an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.” What does that mean to you?

What transhumanists and antihumanists are trying to say is, ‘Well, maybe in the future, there won’t be us, but there will be something else that we can be hopeful for.’ They say that the disappearance of humanity might not mean the end of everything that we care about. They’re trying to nudge us into a new way of thinking that if we’re not here, it might not matter that much — as long as something else is. Both of them think of humanity as a stage. That the normal progression of the human species is to supersede ourselves or eliminate ourselves, not by accident, but by necessity. 

The post Life on Earth, after humans appeared first on Coda Story.

The investigation comes at a time when the Tennessee state government has been proposing a barrage of legislation to limit access to healthcare for trans people. On July 8, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors went into effect. A block on the ban by a federal district judge was temporarily overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a higher federal court, in a split decision after an appeal by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

In such a hostile atmosphere, Skrmetti’s demands for records from the Vanderbilt’s Clinic for Transgender Health have alarmed patients.

Chris Sanders, executive director at Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, told me that the parents of young trans people have expressed fears that their children might be targeted. “When you’re a parent intent on defending your child, this looks like danger coming down the road,” said Sanders. 

States with aggressive anti-trans laws like Texas and Florida have been seeking large swathes of data on trans people. In the wake of the VUMC revelations, people are asking if Tennessee is taking a similar path. 

In September 2022, VUMC battled claims on social media, including by conservative politicians and religious leaders, that their gender-affirming care services were morally and legally objectionable and amounted to “money-making schemes.” Nashville, due in part to the VUMC clinic, has been seen as a haven for people seeking gender-affirming options in Tennessee. In response to allegations of illegal conduct, Attorney General Skrmetti said he would “use the full scope of his authority to ensure compliance with Tennessee law.” 

VUMC was required by law to turn over records to Skrmetti’s office. In response to a request for comment, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office directed me to its statement on June 21: “This investigation is directed solely at VUMC and related providers and not at patients or their families. The records have been and will continue to be held in the strictest confidence, as is our standard practice and required by law. This same process happens in dozens of billing fraud investigations every year.”

But on social media, many feared that Skrmetti’s data sweep was a gross violation of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and that VUMC could have done more to protect confidential information. In one tweet, a person who said VUMC had shared their data and that they were “terrified” claimed to have “challenged it with a HIPAA violation report.” In another tweet, containing a news clip from Nashville’s WKRN station in which the mother of a trans teen says she felt betrayed by the VUMC, several of the comments suggested VUMC had committed a HIPAA violation.

Jolynn Dellinger, senior lecturing fellow on privacy law and policy at Duke University School of Law, says that while HIPAA “is a pretty good law it’s widely misunderstood.” It only applies, she told me, “to a very small number of covered entities. The vast majority of health data is not covered by HIPAA.” 

As VUMC is a hospital, HIPAA does in fact protect its patient records, conversations with healthcare providers, and billing information. This means that the information cannot be shared without consent, but exceptions are made for law enforcement requests such as subpoenas and court orders. In this instance, a VUMC spokesman told reporters, the Tennessee Attorney General had the necessary legal authority to obtain the data.   

According to Dellinger, laws that are looking to criminalize access to gender-affirming care and abortion care leave the door open for authorities to seek people’s health data. On June 16, attorneys general from 19 states, including Tennessee, signed a letter addressed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services voicing their objection to a proposed expansion of HIPAA protections that would prevent states from exploiting their authority to fish for data. The dissenting attorneys general insist that the rule change “would unlawfully interfere with States’ authority to enforce their laws, and does not serve any legitimate need.” While focused on access to abortion, the complaints of Republican-governed states apply equally to those seeking gender-affirming care. 

Laws that restrict bodily autonomy, whether it is access to gender-affirming care or abortion, leave people vulnerable to a set of threats from state authorities that very much include demands for digital data.

Dellinger fears that laws that criminalize access to health care disincentivize people from seeking the care they need because they feel they can’t trust their doctor or that their medical records will be seized. Dellinger also said, “Once criminalization comes into play, privacy risks grow.” In their letter, the 19 state attorneys general argue that HIPAA recognizes that “privacy interests must be balanced against the ‘public interest in using identifiable health information for vital public and private purposes.’” 

Despite Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti’s assertion that the VUMC patients’ records will be held in the “strictest” confidence, it is unclear how long that data will be held by authorities and whether it will continue to hold the data even after its investigation is complete. For now, though, Tennessee has taken another step in the legislative war that it appears to be waging against healthcare for trans people.

The decision this month by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is the first time a federal court has overturned a block on the banning of gender-affirming treatment. Courts have unanimously blocked such bans, points out the American Civil Liberties Union, in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Alabama and Kentucky. In a statement, the ACLU’s Tennessee chapter described the court’s decision as a “heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families.”

Since 2015, reported the Washington Post, “Tennessee has enacted at least 14 laws that restrict LGBTQ rights — the most in the nation in that time frame.” On June 22, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of trans women from Tennessee who wanted the right to change the designated sex on their birth certificates. 

“It’s hard to exist as a transgender person in Tennessee at this moment,” said Jaime Combs, one of the plaintiffs. And now the state is asking the trans people whose rights it seeks to restrict to trust it with their data.

The post Why trans people can’t trust Tennessee with their data appeared first on Coda Story.

On the last day of Pride Month, June 30, the court ruled to allow discrimination, under particular circumstances, against same-sex couples. By a majority of 6 to 3, the Court agreed that a web designer who opposes same-sex marriage could lawfully refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is just one in a litany of recent legislative and political assaults on LBGTQ+ rights. Conservative legislatures around the world have been targeting LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender people, by denying them access to healthcare, dictating which public facilities are available to them, preventing them from speaking about their LGBTQ+ identities and, in the most severe cases, criminalizing their very existence. Here we reflect on Coda’s latest coverage of global LGBTQ+ rights and the trends these stories illuminate.

Florida, United States

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to target transgender youth through restrictive legislation, banning access to gender-affirming care to all children under 18 and dictating which books Floridians can read and which bathrooms they can use. 

Reporting from Tallahassee, Rebekah Robinson tells the story of one family whose lives have been upended by the state’s anti-trans legislation. Milo, 16, and his family have made the difficult decision to leave their home and move 1,200 miles away, to Connecticut, to ensure that Milo can continue to access the medical care he needs. 

It’s not just limited healthcare access that has forced Milo’s family to move. With the expansion of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Bill — the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — teachers in Florida can no longer discuss gender and sexuality in the classroom. In addition, trans people in Florida are now prohibited from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Florida may be only one state out of 50, but Republican legislation hostile toward transgender youth is popping up all over the U.S and will likely be a hot button political issue right up to the 2024 presidential elections. 

Russia

While Russia has recently dominated international headlines thanks to an attempted mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian legislature has also been quietly cracking down on trans rights. A bill is making its way to President Vladimir Putin’s desk that will ban all gender-affirming care for transgender Russians. 

Tamara Evdokimova spoke with Russian psychologist Egor Burtsev to understand what effects a blanket ban on gender-affirming care would have on the trans community. If the bill passes as expected, trans people in Russia will not be able to access life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to surgeries. This will trigger a nationwide mental health crisis and likely provoke violence against transgender Russians. 

Russia’s ban on transition-related care marks the latest escalation in Putin’s war against Western values. In November 2022, he signed a law prohibiting any activities that discuss or promote LGBTQ+ relationships. As Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine and further isolates itself from the West, vulnerable communities inside the country will face ever-greater risks of discrimination, violence and erasure.

India

Mirroring Vladimir Putin’s “family values” rhetoric, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also been advocating against LGBTQ+ rights when it comes to marriage, arguing that permitting same-sex marriage would undermine Indian values. Some Indians have profited enormously by appealing to long-standing prejudice in Indian society against LGBTQ+ people, a prejudice seemingly endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the government. 

Alishan Jafri reports from northern India to tell the story of Trixie, a young transgender woman whose mother pushed her to undergo conversion therapy with a YouTube guru. Santosh Singh Bhadauria, better known as the “YouTube Baba,” specializes in conversion therapy and livestreams “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. Similar to televangelists, Bhadauria is a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has persuaded his followers that he possesses spiritual powers. 

Conversion therapy is illegal in India, and anyone subjected to it, as Trixie was, can take legal actions against the likes of YouTube Baba. The court system might offer some recourse to trans Indians, but with a federal government that advocates conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ views, homophobia and transphobia continue to prevail in many parts of the country.

Uganda

In March, Uganda virtually outlawed LGBTQ+ identity by criminalizing same-sex relationships. The 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill imposes draconian penalties for engaging in same-sex relationships, discussing one’s LGBTQ+ identity and renting or selling property to LGBTQ+ people — and institutes the death penalty for sexual assault and for having sex with people under 18.

And this is not the only law targeting gay people in Uganda, Prudence Nyamishana writes. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, first proposed in 2021, targets Ugandans seeking fertility treatment by requiring them to be legally married in order to qualify for treatments. This bill heavily constrains the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ+ people who want to have children, as Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage. 

Both bills underscore a push among Ugandan legislators to align national laws with their notions of “morality,” rooted in Christianity — or, as the legislation’s opponents suggest, Christian fundamentalism. 

The post The global rise of anti-trans legislation appeared first on Coda Story.

At barely 16, Milo is the proud holder of a Florida learner’s permit, a state-issued driving permit. He has just finished 10th grade. His favorite class is journalism. He enjoys roller skating with friends. Milo is also transgender.

He glances in the rearview mirror as we drive away from Common Ground Books, Tallahassee’s only LGBTQ and feminist bookstore. The family, whose names we’ve changed to protect their privacy, bought half a dozen books to help pass the time on an upcoming road trip, most of them science and historical fiction.

The city is small. In less than 10 minutes, we pull into an empty parking lot next to a complex of sports fields and tennis courts that belong to Milo’s high school. The grounds are quiet — summer break has just begun. He points to an empty red running track on the perimeter of a football field, down the hill from the main school building. 

“That one dude, who’s doing everything wrong, is like right there.” He’s talking about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who lives just five minutes away. DeSantis often runs the track early in the morning while his security detail waits nearby.

In a few days’ time, Milo and his family will load up their car and say goodbye to Tallahassee, Florida, the only place their family has ever called home. They will begin the aforementioned road trip: a 1,200-mile journey to Connecticut, where they are hoping to build a new life, far away from the scorched-earth anti-trans laws that have become a hallmark of the DeSantis administration.

Milo is one of an estimated 16,000 transgender teenagers in the state who have become prime targets of DeSantis’ campaign to ensure, in his words, that Florida becomes a place “where woke goes to die.” Along with restricting access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people, his administration has placed legal limits on what can be taught in schools, which books can stay on the shelves of public libraries and which bathrooms people can use.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has urged legislators to protect young transgender people’s ability to receive “comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space.” The American Medical Association has written that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and that it can “improve the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.” But Florida’s legislature still approved Senate Bill 254, a law that prohibits healthcare providers from administering gender-affirming care to anyone who receives health insurance through Medicaid, and for all people under 18, except for those who had already started treatment before the law was enacted. The policy went into effect in May 2023.

After the families of three transgender teens took the state to court, a federal judge issued an injunction that blocked the law from affecting the plaintiffs in the case beginning on June 6, 2023. While the case has yet to be decided, the judge wrote that Florida’s law likely runs afoul of constitutional protections against identity-based discrimination. 

But for now, state officials say the law remains in effect for everyone but the plaintiffs, and uncertainty prevails. Healthcare providers are unsure of what treatments they can offer. The fear of losing medical licenses or even facing felony charges has led clinics to turn transgender patients away. Some have shut down altogether, leaving young transgender Floridians with nowhere to turn. For many, the costs of seeking care out-of-state are simply too prohibitive. Milo is one of the lucky ones.

“I am just flying under the radar. I know other trans people at school who didn’t transition as early as I did,” Milo told me when we met last month in Tallahassee. “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have the parents and the health care that I do.” 

Milo came out as transgender when he was still in elementary school. Having supportive parents who were able to work together with his doctors made a huge difference, he told me.

Milo’s doctor became a critical figure in their lives. “He really helped us a lot,” his mother Beverly said. “He was one of the only people I found here in town that would adhere to the time frame that we wanted in terms of medical intervention.”

With careful guidance from his doctor, Milo began taking testosterone when he was 13. Since Florida’s law has an exception for those already receiving gender-affirming care, it doesn’t affect Milo directly, at least for now. But with some providers declining to serve transgender patients and others discontinuing their practices altogether, his parents worried that Milo’s ability to get adequate healthcare could still be in jeopardy.

For Milo’s family, an early sign of trouble came in June 2022, when Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo wrote a letter to the state medical board arguing that there was a lack of medical evidence showing that gender-affirming treatments could be beneficial for young people grappling with gender dysphoria. Ladapo insisted that the leading medical guidance from organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics followed a “preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science.”

“We didn’t see a course forward that would allow us to keep our promise,” said Beverly, Milo’s mom. “When we started this whole journey, we said, ‘We will do whatever it takes for you.’ We didn’t feel that was any longer going to be possible in Florida.”

Legal actions targeting education also put the family on notice. Milo recalled a moment when his younger sister came home in the middle of the semester with a note from her biology teacher, explaining that students would no longer be required to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” This award-winning study on racist policies and practices in medical research in the U.S. became optional after Florida began vetting all school curricula and library books to ensure they’re free of pornography and “race-based teachings.”

Soon after, DeSantis signed an expansion of the Parental Rights in Education Bill, the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, which prevents teachers from discussing ideas related to gender and sexual identity at any grade level. The law is set to go into effect this summer. Another law, also passed before the close of this year’s legislative session, will prohibit trans people from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Senate Bill 254 was born out of a recommendation issued by the state’s medical board that had similar parameters — it advised doctors to deny minors access to puberty-blocking medications or hormones. The recommendation was an unusual move for the medical board, a group of state-appointed experts that has traditionally overseen the administration of licensing for physicians in the state and periodically issued recommendations to healthcare providers on public health-related issues, like the Covid-19 pandemic. The board has gone so far as to call itself “vociferously apolitical.” But an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times revealed that Governor DeSantis handpicked eight of the 14 board members, all of whom donated money to his gubernatorial campaign.

WUSF Public Media’s Health News Florida revealed that members of the American College of Pediatricians — an innocuous-sounding organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group — were paid tens of thousands of dollars by the DeSantis administration to provide “expert” reports, witness testimony and talking points discrediting the science behind gender-affirming care.

The medical board recommendation process constituted a unique route to banning gender-affirming care. Instead of starting out at the legislative level, DeSantis took advantage of the supermajority within his state to push his agenda through the executive branch. He then went on to codify the medical board recommendations with Senate Bill 254, officially banning gender-affirming care for minors and for anyone receiving health insurance through Medicaid.

The Republican supermajority in the Florida legislature, and at various levels of state and local government, has been in place for decades. Milo’s dad said it is wearing down people who are advocating for the rights of trans people. 

“It looks like an intentional undoing of democracy when they’re not listening to their constituents,” he told me. He wonders if the next election will bring more people out to vote and elect people willing to engage with public testimony rather than toeing the party line.

“DeSantis, more than anything, has really taken advantage of gubernatorial power that no one has in the past,” said Charles Barrilleaux, a political science professor at Florida State University. For him, the governor’s power shifted in the 1990s under Jeb Bush’s administration. And with the help of redistricting, Republicans gained more substantial control in local government. 

When you combine a supermajority with a politically ambitious governor, the voices of those who don’t agree with the government get drowned out. “Political competition matters, and when you don’t have competition because of districting, you don’t have representation of your own ideas,” said Barrilleaux.

State Senator Shevrin Jones has spoken out against the abundance of anti-LGBTQ legislation pushed through in Florida this year. As a Democrat, Jones is a minority in Florida’s Senate and has voted against adopting the gender-affirming care ban. In a January 2023 NPR interview, he said, “Florida is just the testing ground, but people across the country should be concerned that legislatures and governors across the country are going to do exactly what Florida is doing.”

For Milo’s mom, the onslaught of legislation further solidified the family’s decision to leave the state.

“You think to yourself, ‘Do I really need to uproot my whole family? Did I need to put my kids through all of this? Do we really need to change jobs to get new insurance? Did we really need to sell our house? Do we really need to spend all our savings on a new house? Is it really necessary?’” she said. “And then, something new happens every day, so I’m so glad we’re moving.”

The possibility of these kinds of laws spreading across the country was not lost on Milo’s family. When it came time to decide where to move, they struggled. Hostile legislation was constantly popping up around the country, especially in states with predominantly Republican legislatures. They started looking north. Maryland was safe but surrounded by less-certain places. California felt too far away. Other states looked like they were hanging in the balance, one election away from tipping toward transphobic policies. Eventually, they decided on Connecticut, where they also had some family. They chose a house in a quiet suburb, near the home of Milo’s cousins.

Milo and his parents talked to me about the immense privilege they had in being able to move their family. The move depended on job flexibility and on the sheer financial capital required to uproot and resettle in a more expensive state.

While I was in Tallahassee, I met others whose lives and families were directly affected by the law but who were not in a position to leave. Fenix Moon, a trans man and a visual artist, originally from Orlando, was one of them.

“I do want to go, but I can’t right now,” he told me. “Right now I’m on a one-year lease. I’m just getting stable from the pandemic exactly three years ago,” he said, alluding to financial burdens.

He told me his brother had begged him to leave Florida, fearful of what the legislation would mean for Moon’s health. What would make it possible for him to go?

“If I could wave a magic wand, if I had all the money, I’d probably go to New York,” he said. “I feel like that community would protect me,” he said. 

Moon sees leaving Florida as a powerful political choice too. “We shouldn’t sacrifice our health and our bodies, when in reality, the greatest pushback would be to relocate, if that is the case, and be stronger, and fight from wherever we are, right where we have the most strength,” Moon said. 

When people decide to leave a city, they take social and economic capital with them. “We’re losing a lot of talent, we’re losing a lot of people who contributed a lot to their local communities. We’re losing people in all kinds of fields,” said Melinda Stanwood, who teaches government classes at the Tallahassee Community College. 

Stanwood has two trans children. Her son, who is in his twenties, had to scramble to find a new doctor after his long-time provider at a Tallahassee Planned Parenthood clinic stopped serving transgender patients earlier this year. For now, both children plan to stay in Florida. But Stanwood is worried for them and has been vocal on the issue. “That strength that you have in the community, the diversity of support is being eroded gradually,” she said.

It’s hard to know exactly how many families are leaving, but Rick Minor, a Leon County commissioner, suspects that the numbers are rising.

“I do think it’s gonna have an impact in terms of bringing new businesses into the state that are looking for markets that are diverse and thriving,” Minor said.

He believes that Tallahassee can be an attractive place for businesses because it is home to several universities with diverse populations and lots of young people. But he says that’s not enough to convince businesses to come: “The types of communities like the one we have here in Tallahassee also exist in other states that don’t have these policies being passed.”

When I asked Milo what he’ll miss most when he leaves, he talked about his friends. 

“I have a whole group of friends that I didn’t have last year. Last year, I was a freshman, so I was still building everything,” said Milo. “Now, I’m a sophomore, so I have stuff already put in place, and I don’t want to leave that.”

“It’s hard to see that as a parent and to know that you’re changing those friendships that could have been richer if you had stayed. But we can’t continue here,” Beverly told me. “Friendships won’t be enough for what he needs.”

Milo’s school itself holds a lot of traditions for the family. His mother and grandmother are alumni. From where he sits in his math class, if he looks out the window, he can even see the building where his parents got married.

But the school also sits just a 15-minute walk from the state capitol and the governor’s mansion. DeSantis’ physical proximity to their community is “kind of crazy,” Milo told me.

“If Florida wasn’t being Florida, then I would stay here for sure,” Milo said. “But Connecticut is going to be safer ultimately.”

At school, Milo has never told his classmates or teachers that he is transgender. But during the past semester, Milo slowly started coming out to more friends. “I want to be honest with them because I’ve known them for a while, and I don’t want to have to lie to them about why I’m moving because I care about them,” he said.

His parents tread even more carefully. “In some cases, I said, we have to leave Florida. It’s a family issue. And I left it at that,” Phil told me. But, when it comes to their family and others familiar with Milo and his trans identity, Phil found that he didn’t have to explain much.

“I just said, I’m leaving Florida, and universally the response from everyone was, ‘I don’t blame you.’ Every single person said the exact same thing,” Phil said.

Toward the end of the school year, with moving day looming, Milo wanted to enjoy his last days doing what he loves best. Going skating, hanging out in parks and walking around Railroad Square, the city’s small, mural-covered arts district. When I asked what he was looking forward to about the move, he talked about his hope for getting more involved in the school community at his new school. 

“My focus is just like finding a social group,” Milo said. “As far as school, I have always had pretty good grades. But I just want to find a good friend group and join the newspaper at my new school.”

In spite of all that the past year has brought, Milo is optimistic about what the future holds for him.

“There will be new places, new people, and a new culture. I’m curious about up north, apprehensive and excited,” he told me. “I’m not going to stop being me if I move, right?”

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The ban on legal and medical gender transition marks the latest escalation in Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. In November 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law prohibiting any activities that promote “non-traditional sexual relationships,” effectively outlawing any books, films, media and online resources that discuss LGBTQ+ people.

The bill outlawing gender-affirming care must still pass through Russia’s upper house of parliament and be signed by Putin, but in the event of its likely adoption, it will prevent transgender people from accessing life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to voluntary surgeries. 

According to Egor Burtsev, a clinical psychologist who has worked with transgender and LGBTQ+ patients in Russia for over 10 years, the abolition of gender-affirming care amounts to “torture.” 

Burtsev, who left Russia in April 2022 out of concern for his safety and now lives in Lithuania, worries that the new law will precipitate a mental health crisis in Russia’s trans community, amplify the stigma that LGBTQ+ Russians have long faced and trigger violence against transgender people in Russia. To better understand the far-reaching consequences of a ban on gender-affirming care, I spoke with Burtsev on Telegram. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Russian parliament has passed a law banning legal and surgical sex changes. What impact will this have on access to medical and psychological care for transgender people? 

What they are proposing is a complete abolition of gender reassignment procedures, surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender people. It is a complete ban. What consequences will this have? Transgender people remain, but the procedures are banned. A transgender person — someone who has been undergoing hormone therapy for 10,15 years, who’s looked completely different for a long time, socialized in a completely different way — is suddenly deprived of the possibility to receive hormone therapy. The body changes, not quickly, but it changes, there are all kinds of reversals, transformations. And the relationship with one’s body, for transgender people, is quite complicated. What we will see is the highest risk of depression, the highest risk of self-harm, the highest risk of suicide.

All possible channels of any kind of medical care will be cut off. Transgender people are not going anywhere. They can’t change how they feel, what their gender identity is, because the authorities ordered it. They’re being thrown overboard. And I would equate this to torture: depriving transgender people of medical care, hormone therapy and any psychological help that might have been available before.

Trans people have been left completely without help and in a terrible position of fear, humiliation, discrimination, stigma.

Russia is not the only country adopting laws against gender-affirming care. In the U.S., for example, Florida recently passed a bill that made it illegal to provide gender-affirming care to trans children under 18. From a medical perspective, is it necessary to have any restrictions on who, and at what age, should be able to undergo a gender transition?

There is a wave of such anti-gender movements in the world right now. Conservatism and neoconservatism are coming to the fore. The wave of anti-trans movements is sweeping the world, and Russia has actively, happily joined in. Even some quite democratic countries are not succeeding on this front right now. But that doesn’t mean that this situation won’t change, because democracy works somewhat differently. Democracy doesn’t work like this, with one vulnerable group receiving help while another gets discarded.

As for helping trans children under 18, that’s a very controversial issue. There is no uniform policy on this. It’s understandable that the first feeling the idea evokes is probably bewilderment: ‘How can we allow something like this to happen before a child turns 18?’ But as a psychologist who’s worked mostly in Russia, where gender transition was allowed from the age of 18, I usually recommend to parents to simply provide support, to call the person by their name and use their pronouns. And according to statistics, this dramatically reduces the risk of suicidal behavior — just accept the child, call them what they like. 

It is important to give people the right to decide for themselves, from a certain age, what will happen with hormone therapy and to give endocrinologists the opportunity to help people intelligently, clearly, taking into account their circumstances. 

Based on what you’ve seen in your practice, what have been some of the challenges — medical, interpersonal, social — for transgender people in Russia?

The first problem has to do with socialization. It begins with a person becoming aware of themselves and bringing themselves before society — this is the coming-out process. And the first problem is usually related to acceptance: by family, friends, colleagues, classmates and so on. Of course, there’s the constant stigma. There is also a huge problem with accessing healthcare that has always been there. 

Because the stigma is so layered, so varied, trans people experience different challenges. Often  they experience trauma, stress and suicidal ideation. Episodes of depression can be pretty severe. A large percentage of transgender people experience depressive states. Anxiety is also extremely common. All of this happens because the stigma and the discrimination all over the world, and especially in Russia, are quite strong. 

Can you briefly explain the legal and medical process that a trans person in Russia needed to go through if they wanted to transition, before this law was passed? 

The transition procedure in Russia was one of the best in the world. We were even a little proud of it, because in recent years, Russia was preparing to adopt ICD-11. This is the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, in which ‘transsexualism’ is excluded from the list of psychiatric conditions. The removal of this psychiatric diagnosis was a huge victory for the trans community. Plus, with the exclusion of this diagnosis, the procedure for changing one’s gender marker has been simplified in many countries. That is, people simply come in, declare their desire to transition and have different procedures. 

We had commissions in Russia that issued permits [to transgender people]. The commission consisted of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist and a sexologist. People came before these commissions, had conversations and were diagnosed. Afterwards, they received written permission to change the gender marker in their passport without any legal obstacles. The procedure was quite humane. Before that, less than 10 years ago, this process still required surgery. You had to have at least one surgical procedure. And, in many countries of the world, this requirement still remains.

There has been a lot of talk from the Russian government about protecting “traditional values.” Putin often says that soon, in the West, children will have a “Parent #1” and a “Parent #2,” instead of a mom and a dad. 

One of the major problems that Putin and some other politicians — or, rather, the entire State Duma — have is that they don’t pay attention to science-based approaches. They don’t look at the science, they don’t look at the research, they don’t know what they’re proposing. They just engage in populism in the service of power. 

The whole world is moving toward greater diversity, there is no stopping it. We see it in our teenagers — who are 15-16 years old, who are not interested in politics because of their age, who are more interested in relationships and their own identities — and in how they construct their identities, how they look at relationships, how they experiment. They have a much more open view on things. The world, for them, is much more multilayered, not black-and-white like it is for government representatives, who tend to be quite old.

Does the government’s position reflect prevailing attitudes toward transgender people? 

I think in many ways it does. Because there is such a thing as propaganda, and propaganda shapes the average Russian’s public opinion. And if propaganda works, then quite a few people really are transphobic, homophobic. I’m afraid there will be a lot of violence against LGBTQ+ people and against transgender people. There will be murders, there will be violence. It’s very scary. It’s a nightmare.

So, fearing exactly that, LGBTQ+ people are now panicking and trying to escape to somewhere else. But trans people tend to be financially disadvantaged. It’s very hard for them to move, they don’t have the right documents, they don’t always have passports. They find themselves trapped inside [Russia] with this society. 

But there is an alternative, there are, of course, people who are more progressive, who think for themselves. Some have left for now, but many have stayed in the country. They just shut down, they keep quiet, they don’t actively speak out, because staying safe right now is paramount. As soon as there is a chance to exhale, we will hear those voices. And I really hope that someday the situation will begin to change for the better. We must all work together to change it.

The post Russia’s ban on gender transition amounts to ‘torture’ appeared first on Coda Story.

It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct. Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”

“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. 

Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers, then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers, bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.

Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when everyone was having lunch.

He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.” Over the years, Schwab has bred beavers and helped numerous communities across Europe with reintroductions — always in partnership with local wildlife management schemes. Rubbers showed Schwab some official-looking papers, all stamped and in French. Schwab had no idea that Rubbers was introducing the beavers into their new surroundings without local approval. 

“I had all the authorizations I needed,” Rubbers said. “Which, in my mind, meant no authorization.”

“He bombs quite a bit,” Schwab admitted about Rubbers. “He wanted to do something for nature.” 

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.

Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. 

Some, like Rubbers, have no background in conservation. Others have scientific credentials and feel an urgent need to restore nature’s ecosystems by taking matters into their own hands.

The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were on the verge of extinction in Europe. They were hunted for their prized pelts and scent glands, and by 1900, there were just 1,200 left. Now, beavers are back from the brink, with the current European population estimated at about 1.5 million — and conservationists and rewilders agree that beaver bombers are partly to thank.

Floods, wildfires and droughts have become multi-trillion-dollar problems in the 21st century, ravaging the landscape from Bangladesh to Belgium. As the world burns and biodiversity hits a crisis point, rewilding — the process of letting nature restore itself — can feel like a hopeful refuge. Beavers, ecologists say, may be part of the solution.

The healthy wetland systems beavers create can sequester large amounts of carbon, according to climate scientists. Slowing down river flow helps the land act like a sponge, storing and holding more water, so it is more resilient to flooding and drought.

“Beavers work for free, they work weekends, they work round the clock increasing the groundwater and being a motor for biodiversity,” Schwab said. 

In the U.S., after Oregon’s devastating forest fires in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks in the land. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

“I think beaver bombers are the heroes of our time,” said Ben Goldsmith, a British financier, writer and environmentalist who is a passionate supporter of rewilding. “A human lifetime is short — why should I not be the one that gets to see wildcats back on Dartmoor? Why should I not live in a country with beavers when they’re supposed to be there?”

I asked Goldsmith if he’d participated in rogue reintroductions. “Had I been involved in beaver bombing more widely,” he said, “I don’t think I’d tell you.” Until last year, Goldsmith served as a director for the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His older brother, Zac, is a former member of parliament and the U.K.’s current international environment minister.

For ecologist and author Alex Morss, the fringe of the rewilding movement and its powerful backers are a problem. “Who cleans up the bill for illegal anonymous rogue rewilding if things go wrong?” she wrote to me in an email. Alongside a number of scientists working in ecology and conservation, Morss worries about the pitfalls ahead if people are encouraged to take matters into their own hands to address species loss. 

Maverick rewilding, she says, could increase the chances of conflicts between humans and wildlife, spread disease and actively harm biodiversity by introducing the wrong animals into the wrong environments. “There are also releasers who are skirting around the law or outright breaking it,” Morss added. “Or making decisions based on personal bias rather than ecological expertise, rather than lawful, professional and evidence-based conservation done carefully and less glamorously.” 

Beavers are capable of destroying valuable trees, eating crops and flooding farmland. In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there. It was, as one ecologist explained to me, a “wild west.”

Morss said she welcomes “true” rewilding but is concerned that the movement is being co-opted by a privileged few who want to turn nature’s last refuges into “eco Disneyland.”

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding.

Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. 

“The British government and European governments are foot-dragging,” said Tim Kendall, who wrote a book about beaver bombing with his wife, Fiona Mathews, the chair of Mammals Conservation Europe and a professor of environmental biology at Sussex University. “You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.” 

Goldsmith is vocal about what he sees as a reactionary fifth column within the nature conservation movement. “There are these gray figures that lurk in the background of government agencies and other bodies, who kill off these projects before they have a chance to happen,” he said. “These are people who are governed by caution and say, ‘We’ve got to make sure every possible angle is researched to death.’ They don’t feel the urgency.”

The rewilding fringe believes that something more radical than scientific reintroduction and conservation programs that are implemented at a sloth-like pace is necessary. According to Mathews, there is a “grudging acknowledgment” among scientists that without the maverick rewilders, “we’d just get nowhere. We’ve been talking about reintroducing beavers in many countries for years and years, and basically, nothing happens.”

Derek Gow told me that he believes change will never come if the rules are always followed. Gow, 58, worked for a decade as a sheep farmer in Devon, in southern England, but is now one of the loudest voices in the maverick rewilding movement. He had his moment of reckoning when a pair of curlews — a European wading bird species — disappeared from his farm. They died, Gow says, because there was nowhere left for them to take cover, feed or breed. “How solemn and how sad that is,” he said. “They died because we had mowed everything to a bowling green with the sheep.” 

After the birds were gone, Gow began to see his farm work as a model for perfect destruction. He observed the men alongside him, who had worked in agriculture all their lives. “They can remember the last of the gray partridge or the glow worms. And even though they’ve done nothing for nature, they’ve done nothing other than continue their destruction; when their time finishes, that’s the thing they’ll remember.”

Gow now runs a 300-acre rewilding project in Devon with financial support from Goldsmith, among others. He spends his days among wildcats, Iron-Age pigs, wild horses, beavers and storks. He wakes up every morning to a cacophony of birds singing from the trees. He describes them to me as we talk on the phone: bluetits and stonechats flit above him, a water shrew runs past his feet.

Gow is resolute: He thinks the time has passed for doing things slowly and carefully. “I do wonder how the people who administer these things — who display the most incredible caution and naivety and a lack of willingness to do anything — really feel when they finish a long, long career and have achieved absolutely fuck all.”

I ask if he sees himself as a beaver-bomber, a maverick or a rogue rewilder. “I would describe myself as a human being concerned about the fate of the natural world,” he said, “at this time of colossal extinction, crisis and ecological collapse. I’m not interested in any other titles.”

Gow recently gifted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson a beaver pelt. Johnson has been vocal and enthusiastic about rewilding. “We’re going to rewild parts of the country and consecrate a total of 30% to nature,” he said in 2021 to rousing applause during his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back. And if that isn’t conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is.”

“Build Back Beaver!” he added. Johnson tried to give his father Stanley a pair of beavers for his Somerset farm but was reportedly thwarted by his own government’s regulations. 

Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite. The medieval 3,500-acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, owned by Baronet Sir Charles Burrell, is perhaps the country’s most famous rewilding project. King Charles III has a wildlife retreat in Transylvania, a rewilding mecca known as “Europe’s Yellowstone.”

Goldsmith jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I’ve got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”

This is a sticking point for Morss. “Is it healthy that a class of elite unelected people are using their wealth and privilege and influence to make changes to places, rather than with places and their communities of ‘plebs’ who live and work there and don’t get a say?” she said. “It feels like a form of ecocolonialism.”

In Scotland, a cohort of millionaires, billionaires and corporations known as the “green lairds” have bought up huge swathes of the Highlands for rewilding and carbon-offsetting nature restoration programs. Among them is fast-fashion Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Swedish Tetra Pak heiresses Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing and pension funds Aviva and Standard Life. The green laird movement has been criticized as “a greenwashed land-grab” that’s pushing up the price of land in the country and shutting out local communities. The Scottish Land Commission has reported to the Scottish government that the ownership of land by so few people in Scotland is tantamount to a monopoly.

“It is not democratic or always particularly wise when restoration ‘’rewilding’ is led by unqualified, rich hobbyists,” said Morss.

Across Holch Povlsen’s land, forests are beginning to regenerate. The project has been praised by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as “Scotland’s most exciting and celebrated forest recovery project.” There have been increased reported sightings of ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels and pine martens — all incredibly rare creatures in modern Britain. The manifesto for Holch Povlsen’s project, Wildland, says it aims to build “a culture of mutual respect with our communities” and “to support the viability of the local economy and improve quality of life.” But British online retail giant ASOS, the company that helped Holch Povlsen make his billions, has been criticized in the past for having an entirely different mission, with investigations revealing how the brand has used child sweatshops and contributed to the fast-fashion industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

Holch Povlsen and the Rausing sisters have contributed funding for a study exploring the implications of reintroducing the lynx to the Highlands, a predator that hasn’t been seen in Scotland since the Middle Ages. They’re still known in Holch Povlsen and the Rausings’ native Scandinavia as “the ghosts of the forest,” moving silently through the land while they hunt their prey. 

Reintroducing the lynx could well be in the plans of rogue rewilders too. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Goldsmith, “if we started seeing lynx popping up in different parts of Europe where they’ve been absent.”

The hope in bringing back the lynx to the Highlands would be to see it help naturally control Scotland’s deer population and restore the overgrazed landscape, with minimal human interaction. 

Thomas Cameron, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Essex, is skeptical. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land, scientifically speaking,” he said. “It sounds nice. It’s really pretty. It’s a good story. It attracts lots of money, but it’s not going to reduce deer numbers.” He added that it would take hundreds of years to have an effect — “and we need less deer tomorrow.”

Cameron works on an above-the-table beaver reintroduction project in Essex, which he said is already helping to reduce flooding in the local area. But he said he is wary of “false promises” made by advocates for species reintroduction. “Beavers aren’t going to save biodiversity. They’re not going to stop climate change by improving carbon sequestration,” he said.

Species reintroduction has limits — and it’s not going to fix the planet’s problems, he said. “The idea that that’s somehow some kind of utopia to get to is also quite dangerous.” The science, he insisted, “tells us that it’s simply not true. And the science tells us we’re at a crisis point.” 

Cameron, who hails from northeastern Scotland, is also frustrated by how much Scotland, rather than England, features in the imagination of the people who want to reintroduce predators to the ecosystem. “It’s always about Scotland — ‘Oh it’s wild, let’s go to Scotland’ — despite the fact that people are poorer there than they are in the south. They lead shorter lives. Making a living from the rural environment is more challenging. We’ve got people with limited opportunities, and we want to put it on them.” 

In continental Europe, rifts are emerging between rewilding projects and local agricultural communities. In Asturias, in northwestern Spain, some farmers are furious about the presence of wolves among them. Spain’s wolf population, once close to being wiped out, has grown since the 1970s to become the largest in Europe at around 2,500 wolves. They kill around 11,000 livestock a year, for which farmers are compensated by the state. But when the government introduced a law banning people from shooting or hunting the wolves, it led to outrage. In May, a protest culminated with locals dumping two decapitated wolf heads on the steps of a town hall. 

“The human-wildlife conflict isn’t far away,” tweeted local wildlife photographer Luke Massey with a photo of the bloody heads. 

In Italy, the far-right government is busy dismantling hunting regulations and laws protecting wildlife. When a rewilded bear in Trentino mauled a jogger to death in April, the right-wing governor of the region took a reactionary stance: cull the bear. The governor has since embarked on a one-man mission to deport 70 more bears from the region. There were wider calls for rewilding projects to be scrapped. “We need to kill them all and close the discussion,” wrote one Twitter user when the jogger was attacked. “Fuck bears and animals,” said another. Viewers on Italian TV were invited to answer “yes” or “no” to the question, “Should the bear be put to death?” 

In May, news spread that beavers had turned up on the River Tiber, upstream from Rome. “They must be removed,” said Claudio Barbaro, the Italian undersecretary for the environment. He added that the beavers had “entered illegally,” using language that surreally echoed the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, up by the Belarusian border, beavers and humans are working together. Ukrainian military commanders say beaver-made wetland systems, with their swampy terrain and waterlogged landscape, are helping to protect the country from Russian attacks, creating a natural barrier along the frontier that’s difficult for tanks and infantry to traverse.

With his bandana and grizzled white beard, Gerhard Schwab stands out among the dark-suited crowd of business travelers at the Munich airport arrivals gate. We drive straight out into the Bavarian countryside. Swinging on his keyring in the ignition is a fat little cuddly-toy beaver. 

“When I was a child, there were a lot more edges between the fields,” he says, as we drive past huge, featureless pastureland, the neat green crops rippling in the early summer sunshine. “Now it’s just fucking green. Back then you had everything. All kinds of wild plants. All the small ditches, all the small creeks — they’re all gone.” 

He takes me to a rare scrap of wilderness. The pocket of meadow, right next to a busy autobahn, has been transformed into a vibrant wetland. Bright blue dragonflies dip across the water, and the air seems to vibrate with birdsong. Schwab points to something in the distance, and I can see a pile of sticks: a beaver lodge.

We hear the two-note call of a cuckoo. I’ve never heard it before, though it was a familiar sound for my mother, who grew up in Surrey in the 1960s. Europe has lost 550 million birds since she was a child, and in Britain, cuckoo numbers have crashed by 70%. The cuckoo’s distinctive call is a traditional symbol of the start of summer. But most children in the U.K. will grow up never hearing it. 

The strange sorrow we feel when we confront this world without our fellow creatures has a name: “species loneliness.” Isolated from nature, we feel an existential loss for how the world once looked and sounded.

For Ben Goldsmith, his despair over the destruction of our wild places intersects with his own grief over the sudden loss of his teenage daughter, Iris. A lifelong lover of nature, she died, aged 15, in a farm vehicle accident in 2019. He has since given his farm over to rewilding. The spot where Iris died is marked with a stone circle. Not far off, along the stream threading through his land, a family of beavers has appeared.

“The family on my land happened to make their own way there, which is sort of a beautiful irony,” Goldsmith said. “They appeared by magic at a time in my life when I really needed and wanted that. It was one of the happiest events of my life.”

Beavers are resilient creatures. When the Khakova dam collapsed in Ukraine in May, it unleashed a torrent of chemicals and toxic oil into the surrounding landscape, with untold amounts of debris flowing into the Black Sea. But amid the waterlogged wreckage of Kherson, a lone beaver was seen wandering the streets. “OK, I’ve got work to do!” one British tabloid quipped in a caption of the video. Beavers are used to rebuilding, restoring and fixing what’s been broken.

Schwab feels sure beavers will long outlive us. After all, they have roamed the Earth far longer than humans — the oldest fossil is around 30 million years old. “When my bones and your bones are gone,” he says, “the beaver will still be here.”

The post The secret movement bringing Europe’s wildlife back from the brink appeared first on Coda Story.

In the U.S., one special breed of telehealth companies tends to focus on “wellness” issues common among people in their 20s and 30s: Companies like Cerebral, Hims & Hers, Keeps and Mindbloom offer a quick path to prescription medications for anxiety, depression, sexual health and skin-related issues. They also tend to feature a sleek, Instagram-friendly aesthetic.

Hims, launched in 2017, uses the tagline: “Telehealth for a healthy, handsome you.” For years, I’d noticed ads for Hers, its sister brand, dotting my social media feeds and featuring on the walls of subway cars. I finally visited the Hers website and found a banner stretched across the homepage: “Anxiety treatment, no insurance required. START YOUR FREE ASSESSMENT,” it read. Curious to learn more, I clicked on the link.

After a short intake assessment, the platform told me to wait for a provider evaluation that would also take place entirely online. If prescribed, the medication would be delivered to my door, as soon as possible. In the meantime, I could browse the site to see what kinds of drugs they prescribe. Brand names like Lexapro, Wellbutrin and Zoloft float across the sections for medication featuring the website’s calming, sage-green color palette. The site also sells health and sex-adjacent products like melatonin gummies (to help you “get the sleep of your dreams”) and USB-rechargeable vibrators (because “life’s too short for boring sex”). The familiar shopping cart icon in the upper right corner of the site reinforced the idea that I was here to buy something, not to seek a professional medical consultation.

It felt almost too easy. I didn’t see it through — I see a regular doctor at a regular brick-and-mortar clinic. But it left me wondering how other people might understand — or misunderstand — what the service really offers. Hims & Hers and companies like it often adopt the language of telehealth that we see coming from established healthcare providers, a practice that might give consumers the impression that the company has their best interests at heart. But these companies aren’t regulated in the same way that traditional healthcare providers are. And they are out to make money. In the first half of 2021 alone, venture capitalists invested nearly $15 billion into digital health companies.

In the eyes of Dr. Adrianne Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology researcher at Georgetown University, “there’s real telehealth and there’s fake telehealth.” Real telehealth, she explained, was an asset during the worst periods of the pandemic. And for years, it has helped people with limited mobility, or those who live in far-flung places, get access to specialist clinicians who tend to work in big city hospitals.

But then there are fake telehealth outfits, which Fugh-Berman described as “companies who are really just bypassing clinicians to provide drugs to patients.” 

“There’s a prescriber involved,” she said, and that clinician does provide some level of safety. But she cautioned that they ultimately answer to the telehealth company, not to a traditional medical institution. “Their job is to prescribe you drugs,” said Fugh-Berman. If they deny a lot of people drugs, “they are not going to keep that job.” 

In traditional healthcare, patients typically see a primary care provider who can recommend treatment, medication or otherwise, with their full health status and history in mind. Although traditional healthcare institutions have been caught bending to the interests of big pharma — a major factor in the U.S. opioid crisis — there are regulatory measures in place to prevent this. New-fangled telehealth companies do not have the same guardrails.

Fugh-Berman runs Georgetown’s PharmedOut program, a project to help educate healthcare professionals on pharmaceutical marketing practices. According to PharmedOut’s resources, companies that use direct-to-consumer advertising are not subject to FDA regulations if they provide “disease awareness,” even though these sorts of campaigns can “lead to the overuse of marginally effective or potentially dangerous drugs for minor conditions.” PharmedOut warns that this practice can harm public health, especially as more companies rely on social media ads to get in front of potential customers.

Although it’s rare, plenty of the antidepressants that these companies prescribe can cause serotonin syndrome, a serious and potentially fatal response. The anxiety drug propranolol, described by Hims & Hers as a medication that can help you ace “a public speaking engagement, interview, or audition,” can trigger asthma attacks for people with the disease. Last year, Bloomberg investigated the telehealth company Cerebral, which focuses on mental health treatment, and found that patients were prescribed medications that led to complications and even death from overdoses. In short, the actual health risks that these companies might present for consumers are real.

Then there’s the matter of the telehealth companies’ business model. Alongside payments for the services they provide, companies like Hims & Hers also collect a good deal of customer data. We all know what it’s like to be asked to consent to the terms of service of data privacy agreements. They’re incredibly long, written in legalese and impossible to negotiate with. If you want the service, you select “I agree” and hope for the best.

The mere fact that these companies deal with people’s health data might make customers think that it will be covered by HIPAA, the U.S. federal law that requires healthcare and insurance providers to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent. But just because you’re sharing your health data does not mean it’s protected. In fact, Hims & Hers’ privacy policy mentions that it is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA. This suggests that the company is collecting demographic data and medical information, as well as images and messages, all on behalf of the diagnosing providers and with no guarantee of privacy protection under U.S. law. We asked Hims & Hers for more information about their business and how they handle customer data but did not receive a response prior to publication.

What happens to your data after it is collected? Researchers have shown that it can be bought and sold by third-party data brokers. Last year, The Markup reported that private information about the medications prescribed through telehealth services (Hims & Hers was among those they tested) had been shared with Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Snapchat. This data is often used to improve ad-targeting and prompt customers to purchase even more products or services based on their browsing habits. But it could be used or abused in other ways, too.

The lack of HIPAA oversight over some telehealth companies is a concern for Keith Porcaro, who researches law and technology at Duke University. He explained that these kinds of companies can get around privacy protections that traditional healthcare companies would otherwise be subject to and said that regulations need to catch up with the market.

“Companies like this are changing people’s expectations about healthcare,” he said. “There’s an assumption, especially if you talk to doctors, that there’s sort of one model of getting care: You go to your doctor and rely on doctors for everything. Putting doctor shortages aside, there’s a lot of evidence that says that most people take care of most of their health problems on their own,” Porcaro told me.

Bypassing traditional healthcare routes in favor of for-profit, start-up companies may be making consumers more vulnerable to medical misinformation. Influenced by a growing self-care movement that has popularized the idea that “you know your situation best,” consumers increasingly turn to these companies. 

Porcaro puts some of this on people’s legitimate “mistrust of the medical establishment,” based on their negative experiences with traditional healthcare. In a 2022 Pew research study on race and disparities in healthcare, more than 70% of Black female respondents between the ages of 18 and 49 said that they had had a negative experience with healthcare providers, ranging from pain they reported not being taken seriously to being treated with less respect than other patients. The same report found that most Black Americans were skeptical of “medical researchers when it comes to issues of openness and accountability” and suspected that misconduct in medical research remains just as likely to happen today as in the past. Long-standing stigma may drive prospective patients to seek alternative routes to healthcare. But people looking for quick solutions might be willing to accept help from just about anyone. 

“People who are going to services like this, especially mental health or addiction treatment, are vulnerable,” Porcaro said. And they’re not just vulnerable to misinformation, he said, “they’re vulnerable to actual harm.”

The convenience and branding of telehealth start-ups may have plenty of appeal for Gen Zers and people with legitimate reservations about the medical establishment. But they come with some serious trade-offs that could affect your health data — and your health itself.

CORRECTION [05/15/2023 11:08 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said Duke University lawyer and technologist Keith Porcaro. Keith Porcaro researches law and technology at Duke University.

The post Telehealth start-ups are monetizing misinformation – and your data appeared first on Coda Story.

On April 6, Trixie found herself standing on a stage, before the shaven-headed, heavyset Baba himself. With cameras rolling, two men held her in place while the Baba, draped in long white robes, accused her of being infected with the “disease of queerness.” By posting videos like these on social media, the Baba has made a fortune in just three years. He claims to have a “godly” cure for terminal illnesses and a variety of other personal and psychological complaints. 

He also specializes in conversion therapy — in which he claims to “pray the gay away” — and offers a special prayer package to “reconvert” transgender people and align their gender identity to the sex they were assigned at birth. Trixie’s family paid about $1,830 for her “treatment,” a sizable sum in a country in which the average monthly wage is below $500.

The Baba’s promises to banish homosexuality and to “cure” transgender people appeal to longstanding popular prejudices in Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India. Even the federal government is currently arguing in the Indian Supreme Court that gay marriage is an “urban elitist concept.” For most of the country, the government insists as it attempts to put the brakes on the Supreme Court hearings that would determine whether India should legalize same-sex marriage, the “notion of marriage itself necessarily and inevitably presupposes a union between two persons of the opposite sex.” And this notion is “deeply embedded in religious and societal norms.”

From his estate, the Baba regularly livestreams his “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. His most popular videos on YouTube, where he has a verified channel, have surpassed one million views. He also commands an impressive following on Facebook, where he maintains multiple pages. His social media pages all link to the ashram’s website, which boasts testimonials from his patients, instructions for devotees and a market for the Baba’s health products.

The Baba — aka Santosh Singh Bhadauria — is what is known in India as a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has managed to persuade people that he possesses spiritual powers. Godmen are similar to televangelists, and their followers might once have been called holy rollers. As with televangelists, godmen are frequently found to be conmen, criminals and sex offenders. Bhadauria has been in trouble with the law for decades, accused of various crimes though yet to be convicted of any.

Last month, a doctor who challenged Bhadauria by calling out his theatrics as cheap quackery was allegedly assaulted at Bhadauria’s behest. Among the types of cures Bhadauria enacts in public spectacles on his estate, attended by thousands of followers, is the ritual “murder” of “Muslim ghosts” that he claims have possessed the bodies of Hindus. The Muslim ghosts are exorcised with a toy gun.

Trixie knew little about Bhadauria’s methods before agreeing to visit his ashram. She was just trying to keep her parents happy. On reaching the estate, she found that a recording of his exhortations was being broadcast to hundreds of devotees. People were screaming and crying as if they’d been possessed by a spirit, she said.

Uncomfortable with the atmosphere, Trixie tried to walk away but says she was physically restrained by the Bhadauria’s security. The next morning, Bhadauria showed up in person. He addressed Trixie’s family directly. Homosexuality, he said, was a disease, and Trixie, as someone infected by it, was “filled to the brim with filth.”

Her mother stood beside her, silently watching as Bhadauria continued to rant. That was when Trixie realized, she told us, that she had lost her mother to the propaganda, a far more cruel betrayal than Bhadauria’s crude abuse. 

“Parents can be wrong sometimes too,” she told her mother in front of Bhadauria and the audience. They were the only words she would utter during the “therapy” session. Had she tried to argue her case, she told us, she would have felt “like a dog barking without reason.” 

Bhadauria’s conversion therapy is emblematic of the transphobia and homophobia of Indian society. This prejudice is seeing a resurgence as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the question of same-sex marriage. Despite a long history of gender fluidity in Indian theology, mythology and culture, the Hindu nationalist government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi argues that the push for LGBTQ rights is a result of increasing Western influence and the decline of so-called Indian values. 

The Indian judiciary, though, has taken a more liberal line. Consensual gay sex was decriminalized in India in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned a colonial law. “History owes an apology to members of the community,” said one of the judges, “for the delay in ensuring their rights.” And last year, a state high court ordered the prohibition of conversion therapy, ruling that it constituted misconduct when performed by medical professionals. 

If the Supreme Court does legalize same-sex marriage, it would be yet another ruling that defies the values and beliefs of some of India’s most powerful political actors. While no judgment has yet been made, trolls have targeted the court on social media and its chief justice was attacked as “woke” even before he was appointed to the bench. Government officials and mainstream media personalities have also piled on, insisting that the judges would be undermining tradition and imposing their own values on the country. Religious representatives from all of India’s major religions, in a rare show of togetherness, have teamed up to oppose the marriage equality petition before the Supreme Court.

Social activist Indrajeet, the founder of “Yes, We Exist,” a digital LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, told us in an interview that although the Indian right wing says same-sex marriage is a Western imposition, Indian conservatives are also taking their cues from the West. In the West, particularly in the United States, transphobia has become an endemic political hot-button topic and is similarly framed as an issue beloved by liberal elites rather than one of existing civil rights being unequally applied. 

The Indian government says it is for elected legislators to decide on the fate of same-sex marriage rather than for unelected judges. But the Indian constitution — as a government website helpfully points out — gives all Indians the right to equal treatment before the law.

It is to the courts that a transgender woman like Trixie has to turn to get redress for the ordeal she was forced to endure at Bhadauria’s ashram. “If you do not self-determine and do prayers to be a boy,” Bhadauria said to Trixie, “you’ll become a girl and will get beaten by boys. Even if you marry a boy, he will beat you too.”

Turning to Trixie’s mother, Bhadauria said, “The only way left to cure him is by doing prayers. If he doesn’t do it by himself, you should do this for him.” Bhadauria also insinuated that Trixie’s transition was sexual in nature, a perversion rather than a deeply felt identity. This vein of transphobia has been contested at length by scholarship on and by queer people. 

Pointing to the scholarship, though, is not always a helpful strategy when confronted by hate speech on social media and the socially permitted behavior of quacks like Bhadauria. Indrajeet, the founder of the LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, explained that social media sites have become key platforms for the likes of Bhadauria. Their brand of hate is easily spread on these platforms and enables them to attract new followers and expand their reach. It also allows them to monetize their polarizing content. 

Although many of these social media pages and channels are riddled with hate speech and discriminatory messages, platforms routinely fail to take action against violations of their own rules of conduct.

For instance, though Meta does not offer clear guidance about organic content promoting conversion therapy on Facebook, the company expressly prohibits advertisements offering such services. Google (YouTube’s parent company) prohibits the promotion of conversion therapy in its publisher policies. Both companies have a broad ban on the kinds of hate speech and discriminatory language that characterize Bhadauria’s content.

Bhadauria’s video of his encounter with Trixie was highly visible both on Facebook and YouTube for two weeks after their “therapy session.” It has since been removed from Facebook, but the video is still up on YouTube, where Bhadauria has 439,000 followers. Indrajeet and other activists we spoke with expressed concern that these videos, spread by spiritual leaders with significant social influence, could be used to justify physical attacks on queer people in the public eye.

Zainab Patel, a trans woman, activist and one of the petitioners in the pending marriage equality Supreme Court case, told us that Bhaduria’s attempt to “treat” Trixie is against Indian law. All forms of conversion therapy against queer people were banned in 2021 by the National Medical Commission of India which described such therapy as “professional misconduct,” following an order from the Madras high court which has jurisdiction in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. 

These therapies can take the form of pseudo-religious rituals but can also involve measures as extreme as “corrective rapes.” Independent research has proven that conversion therapy practices increase the risk of self-harm among queer people. It is why, Zainab says, it is essential that legal action is taken against self-appointed holy men like Bhadauria.

“After watching Trixie’s video,” Zainab told us, “we can say that she has been subjected to humiliation, stigmatization and discrimination.” Trixie’s parents, Zainab added, “along with the spiritual person to whom she was taken, can both be punished under the Transgender Protection Act.” This also means that both Facebook and YouTube could be compelled, by a court order, to remove the material. But so far, most of the footage remains online, garnering thousands of views and untold advertising revenue.

Akkai Padmashali, a transgender rights activist, pointed out that while in other democracies the numbers of openly homosexual and bisexual legislators are growing, India’s LGBTQ community has no representation in parliament to stand up for their concerns. Instead, the court case on marriage equality has become an opportunity for politicians to grandstand on matters of religious tradition. “I believe that I am bound to follow constitutional morality,” Akkai told us, “and not any social construct, cultural or religious morality.” But, in India, that is an increasingly rare position.

For Trixie, her ordeal does have a silver lining — she has found her voice and an inner strength. She counts it as a small victory that the video of her conversion therapy is no longer on Facebook. Now, she says, she is ready to take on more transphobic propaganda on her Instagram, where she has found many new supporters and followers.

The post In India, a trans woman stands up to the ‘YouTube Baba’ appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s chilly inside the Creede Underground Mining Museum. For one thing, it’s winter. For another, the museum is located underground. That was the innovative idea of three local workers who decided to blast out the 10,000-square-foot space when the last of the town’s famous silver mines closed down. They wanted to show outsiders and younger generations alike what their lives, and the lives of their predecessors, were really like.

Heather Brophy, the facility’s director, is used to the museum’s cold: She spends all day down here. Sporting sophisticated pigtails and a nose ring on this winter day, the Creede native is 29, younger than one might expect for someone in her position. She is the keeper of information about an industry that — for all intents and purposes — died decades ago in Creede, Colorado. But growing up here, Brophy became fascinated by how mining had shaped her town.

Today, more than 30 years after the Bulldog Mountain Mine — the last stalwart — closed up shop, Creede’s long-gone industry might soon come alive and chisel a new story from its past.

Last year, the largest silver mining company in the United States, Hecla Mining, confirmed that it plans to dive back into the Bulldog mine, through its subsidiary, Rio Grande Silver. The mountain still holds plenty of metal, and the company is poised to extract it. Brophy wagers that as soon as the price of silver can guarantee a return on investment, Hecla will seek out its permits and head into production mode. “They will bring in crews,” said Brophy. 

The American government just might be ready for that moment, too. Right now, the country is largely reliant on foreign silver sources. But soon, it’s going to need a lot more of the metal than it currently consumes: The shiny stuff is a key component in solar panels, electric cars, charging stations and 5G infrastructure, along with consumer electronics. The desire to increase mineral supplies in the country, while silver demand is increasing, means the U.S. could use more stateside silver than it currently mines.

The U.S. is keen on increasing the minerals the country sources domestically so that the availability of the metal won’t be determined by whether one country invades another, the general vagaries of international trade or supply chain delays. 

Where to get it, though? 

Sometimes, it turns out, the best places to start new mines are on the backs (or in the bellies) of old ones — in this case, that can mean in the heart of old silver boom towns, like Creede, that have gone bust. There, the ground is already excavated, data on what’s beneath already exists, and companies know for sure someone struck it rich in the past. 

And so, that new work might happen in the shadows of the falling-down infrastructure of the past. Here in southern Colorado, where miners once pounded chisels — the risks to themselves and the earth largely unmitigated — a batch of hopefuls is trying to extract raw materials for the green energy economy while keeping a historically dirty business a whole lot cleaner than in the past.

Silver outwardly appears in things like jewelry, utensils or the coins your conspiratorial uncle hoards. But its physical properties make it useful, not just pretty. Silver reflects light better than any other metal and also better conducts heat and electricity. Plus, it’s antibacterial. It’s part of medical equipment and is an important ingredient in all kinds of electronics. It’s integrated into cars, cell phones, TVs. It’s in “everything that has an on-and-off switch,” said Michael DiRienzo, the executive director of the Silver Institute, an international nonprofit with members from across the silver mining industry. 

And it’s going to become even more important as energy sources transition away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy: Silver is integral to solar panels’ workings, and it’s also a key to the zippy cars of the future. Last year, according to DiRienzo, the automotive industry used somewhere between 60 and 65 million ounces of the metal. “The number is just going to continue to grow as electric vehicles and, down the road, autonomous driving vehicles become more prevalent,” he said, going so far as to describe silver as a “decarbonization metal.” 

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, an electric vehicle’s greenhouse emissions over its lifetime, including manufacturing and minerals, are half of those of a gasoline-powered car. There are some risks that come along with acquiring the minerals,  like loss of habitat for animals and plants, significant water usage and potential for water contamination, air pollution and noise pollution. On balance, the risks of remaining dependent on fossil fuels, or not investing in the materials that clean energy requires, seem higher — for people and for the planet. 

DiRienzo is bullish about the prospects. “The demand side in the last year was a new high,” he said. It shot up 17% from 2021. “The market was firing on all cylinders.”

Hecla, ensconced at the Bulldog Mine in Creede, agrees with the hopeful forecasting and its connection to decarbonization — or, at least, its documents agree. The parent company did not respond to my multiple requests for an interview.

In recent years, Hecla’s silver output has accounted for 40% of all silver mined in the U.S. And so, predictably, it’s hopeful about the current prospects. “We’re at an inflection point unlike anything we’ve seen in more than a century,” says a 2021 Hecla document called “Silver: The Story of Our Past, the Foundation of Our Future.” That inflection comes courtesy, the company claims, of the transition to clean energy.

The document may be company propaganda, but data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration backs up some of its key assertions. To keep up with solar panel production alone, the world will need 500 million ounces of silver by 2050. Meanwhile, American domestic silver production has stagnated. Just four mines in the U.S. produced silver as their primary output last year. The rest of the approximately 32 million ounces came from mines that primarily dig for lead, zinc, copper or gold. To be part of the potential impending boom, those numbers will have to change.

But these aspirations can get complicated: If a company wants to open a mine on federal land, for instance, there’s a lot of paperwork and waiting involved. 

“Starting a new mine is much more difficult now than it was a hundred years ago,” says Hecla’s report. “You can’t just dig a hole in the ground and start producing.”

In fact, according to DiRienzo, if you started the clock at zero when you found silver in the ground, “it would take you nearly 10 to 12 years before you finally get the permitting to go ahead.” Those permits are there for a reason, of course. “The process is to make sure everything’s good,” he said. “You can’t just go in there and start destroying.”

But it can make things difficult for companies that won’t see any profit from their labor for many years. While what happens at any given site is different, and every state is different, the mining industry is in general subject to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a detailed analysis of how a project on federal land will impact an area and its occupants. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts deal with issues like dust and other particulate pollutants, along with stormwater runoff near mines and the disposal of water used in extractive operations.

Officially, the United States still operates on a legal framework for mining on federal lands that was written in 1872, but that could change. In 2022, the Biden administration released its principles for proposed mining reform, predicated on the idea that the U.S. needs to mine more of its own goods, create jobs and do so in a way that’s environmentally and socially responsible.

The “how” part of that plan includes making sure strict standards are in place, consulting with local tribes and communities, protecting places with sensitive ecosystems or Tribal Nations’ resources, recycling material that’s already been mined and processed and cleaning up the messes of extractions past.

Oh, and companies could have to pay royalties on their spoils, if they extract silver from land owned by the government, which is effectively taxpayers’ land. That money would go in part toward mitigating or preventing environmental and social impacts of mining, which today are still no small matter. 

Mines take up space that might otherwise be used by communities, flora and fauna. They also produce more waste material than they do metal. Water near silver mining sites regularly gets contaminated. According to the Government Accountability Office, abandoned hardrock mines have “contributed to the contamination of 40% of the country’s rivers and 50% of all lakes.” Historically, people have also used mercury, a pretty toxic substance, as part of the silver extraction process.

Reforms to the regulatory system and the long timelines, when coupled with the call for more domestic mining, irk Michael Feinstein, the founder of a geologic exploration company called MineOro. Produce things within the country, the government demands. “But the next breath they tie the hands of any potential domestic production,” Feinstein said.

As the largest silver producer in the country, Hecla can untie its hands better than most. And with the company’s purchase of the rights to 21 square miles of land in the Creede Mining District, Hecla has been working to make Bulldog’s old infrastructure accessible again. The company planned an exploration campaign for 2022 to figure out what metal was left in the mountain, where it was and how best to access it.

Brophy, the Creede museum director, details these efforts as she bustles about the caved, rocky interior of the museum, sending visitors — who’ve braved the incoming, days-long winter storm — out on the audio tour. Headphones on, they’ll wind their way through a U-shaped tunnel of exhibits featuring mannequins posing as miners throughout the decades. The first little group shows how Creede’s 19th century miners, seeking silver, used hammers and iron drills to hand-pound into the rock. Later, they transitioned to using hydraulic drills, affectionately known as “Widow Makers,” named for the silica dust they kicked up that got sucked right into the miners’ lungs. Then, farther into the tunnel, the inanimate miners show how life — and pulling material out of the planet — became easier and safer, as, for instance, mechanized equipment required less backbreaking labor. The industry also figured out that if you wet the material before drilling into it, you could reduce dust. From there, ventilation improved, and cave-ins became less frequent.

“There’s a ton of history here,” said Brophy, a space heater blowing air toward her desk chair. “But that’s pretty much all there is right now.”

Randy McClure, the current site and safety manager for Rio Grande Silver, is a third-generation Creede resident. His grandfather homesteaded near the town in the late 1800s, and McClure himself started working in the mines when he was 18. If the industry bounces back, it wouldn’t just change the state of the mine but also the state of the town. 

“A return of mining to Creede would bring back a solid year-around economy, families with kids to fill the school, and the characters that make a mining town great,” he said.

As mining declined and then ceased, Creede’s population shrank — today, there are just 700 residents. The town shifted to arts, theater and outdoor tourism to survive, meaning it is now home to a mix of people who’ve been around since the mining days and those who were attracted to its new offerings. The different groups are learning to coexist, Brophy says. If the Bulldog reopens, they may have to find a new equilibrium.

“Mining is our roots,” Brophy said. “It’s what we came from. Without mining, this place never would have existed.” 

Anyone who likes Creede’s repertory theater and art, in other words, really has the town’s dirty, dangerous business of the past to thank. And they may have a modern version to thank for the town’s future.

Hecla’s re-exploration of this former boom site seems to mirror other efforts in the American West. Idaho’s aptly named Silver Valley is home to mines owned by Hecla and by a company called Sunshine Silver Mining and Refining that has gobbled up tens of thousands acres of mineral rights in the area. One patch includes the Sunshine Silver Mine that began in the 1800s and closed in 2001. In 1972, the mine was the site of one of the worst mining disasters in history, when a fire broke out underground. Sunshine Silver declined to comment for this story, stating that while it was exploring, it wasn’t actively mining.

In the small, adjacent towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe, Colorado, meanwhile, a Canadian company called Viscount Mining has been digging around old mining areas. These locales, along with nearby ghost towns, once hosted one of the biggest silver booms in the state. 

Silver Cliff was the third largest Colorado city in the late 1800s, as prospectors and miners flocked to the high-altitude valley, flanked by two mountain ranges. In the 2020 census, it had just around 600 residents. Westcliffe had 435.

The holes and mine-waste — loose piles of rocky leftovers (called tailings) that lay fan-shaped over mountainsides — that this silver boom left behind remain, easily visible on a drive through town. Both also appear in the deep woods on hikes. Today, the downtown area shared by the two towns is a bit bigger than Creede’s, and it also has live theater, art galleries and many burger joints for hungry climbers who probably failed to get to the top of the 14,000-foot peaks that point to the sky above town.

Like Creede, Silver Cliff hasn’t made much silver since those very early days. But that past is not so distant: When the dirt roads in town get graded, you can find miners’ abandoned tin cans or the occasional century-plus-old belt buckle. Decrepit wooden structures loom around the landscape, alongside badlanded tailings piles, all begging for photographs — and, apparently, begging at least one company to plumb their depths.

Viscount, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has invested in two silver exploration projects, both of which sit on 19th century boom spots. The company’s website has a gallery of images, showing two wooden structures left to decay and collapse, along with an old claim boundary, carved into rock, from the initial discoverer. It looks like a tombstone.

These modern explorers, currently drilling for samples, have at their fingertips tools that were unimaginable back during Silver Cliff’s previous boom, like surveying instruments that can provide a picture of what lies 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) or more underneath the shoes of the surveyor.

With this data in hand, the company suggests its Silver Cliff property could be home to one of the largest silver deposits in the entire U.S. 

If that’s the case, life in Silver Cliff, like life in Creede, could someday shift, looping back on itself like a time machine.

A new-old industry in towns like these could be an ultimate good: more jobs, more money, more renown. And getting silver from towns like these could, counterintuitively, be an ultimate good for the environment. If the silver has to come from somewhere, it might as well be a place with a number of environmental restrictions, controls and regulations — along with the current administration’s proposal to reform and improve policies that are already on the books.

For its part, Hecla claims to have the lowest carbon emissions in the industry per dollar of revenue. Most of the electricity it uses comes from hydropower, and it sucks out less water to produce an ounce of silver than the average person uses in a day. Mining in general is notorious for its water usage, accounting for 1% of all water usage in the United States. Hecla also generally backfills areas it mines — taking the waste that, in the past, might just have ended up stranded on a hillside, combining it with cement and filling up the empty, extracted places. That shore-up means that the land won’t collapse or be dotted by the abandoned pits that are so ubiquitous in the American West.

But Hecla has caused plenty of harm, too. In 2011, it paid $263 million to the federal government, the Coeur d’Alene tribe and the state of Idaho to settle a Superfund lawsuit about historical waste that its operations had discharged into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, causing harm to the water itself, fish and birds. In 2015, it paid $600,000 in fines after releasing heavy metals, in addition to other pollution, into the same river. Although no environmental fees have been levied against Hecla since then, the company has had more than a dozen workplace safety or health violations, for issues like using equipment beyond the capacity it was designed for or not correcting safety-relevant defects in machinery in a timely way.

Nevertheless, mining is safer and more friendly to the ground, water, animals and humans near its operations than it used to be.

Not everyone wants a mine in their backyard or as their employer. But as the final exhibit in the Creede Underground Mining Museum points out, it’s not so simple as yelling, “not in my backyard!”

If you like phones, and solar panels, and electric cars, the material that goes into them has to come from below someone’s backyard. “Since minerals exist randomly throughout the world, we do not always have the simple choice to mine or not to mine at home,” read the museum’s final panels.

But nor do people watching a potentially impending silver boom just have to sit back and let it happen, as it happens. Public information and engagement can make the industry better. It was agitation from the public, the museum’s signs point out, that helped usher in American environmental reforms that companies like Hecla and Viscount now have to abide by. Though companies in any industry can sometimes consider federal fines to be the cost of doing business, the Environmental Protection Agency can criminally prosecute, and jail, those who they can prove knowingly broke the rules.

For now, here in Creede, Hecla is waiting for the economics to tip in its favor, as they keep Bulldog’s underground infrastructure pumped free of the water that builds up underground and analyze how best to dig into the metal in the future. 

Brophy is ready for the next chapter of her town’s complicated industry — a potential resurrection of the town as it used to be, mixed with the way it has become. A condition that might be more accurately described as reincarnation.

“Mining is our past,” said Brophy. “And we hope that it’s our future.”

The post How 19th century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy appeared first on Coda Story.

In early March, Ugandan lawmakers approved the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill that brings back life imprisonment for same-sex relationships and imposes a slate of new penalties for related offenses. This extends as far as restricting Ugandans from saying that they’re gay and speaking about LGBTQ topics. It even prohibits land owners from renting or selling to LGBTQ people. The bill also dictates that “aggravated homosexuality,” which includes sexual assault, but also sex with a person under 18 years of age, is punishable by death.

The bill is now waiting for approval from Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has never been shy about his homophobia. During his State of the Nation address on March 16, Museveni called gay people “deviants.” In 2013, when the country’s original anti-gay law passed, local opposition, international outrage and a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court defanged the policy. But the sentiments behind it appear to be driving legislative action once again.

But this is not the only law in progress that seeks to curtail gay people’s rights in Uganda. Another bill has come to the surface recently that would further cement state power over the private lives of LGBTQ people, as well as those of unmarried women. 

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, an effort to regulate infertility treatment, say it would protect people seeking these services and healthcare professionals that provide them. But the bill also requires anyone seeking fertility treatment to be married under Ugandan law. As such, it discriminates against all unmarried Ugandans who might want to have children, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

First proposed in December 2021, the bill had flown under the radar until a former Ministry of Justice attorney, Samantha Mwesigye, called attention to it on Twitter last month.

“That the Ugandan parliament is even considering tabling this is a travesty not only because of the unconstitutionality of the bill but because Uganda is and should be a progressive society,” Mwesigye told me. She also noted that Ugandan women are increasingly deciding to take the parenting journey on their own.

Rose Wakikona, an expert on reproductive health rights at the Center for Health, Human Rights and Development in Kampala, sees links between this bill and the anti-homosexuality bill. 

“The purpose of this bill is to pass a law that expressly kicks out sexual and gender minorities from having children,” she said.

In its current form, the assisted reproductive technology bill would heavily constrain the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ people who want to have children of their own. Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage. 

As the bill acknowledges in the introduction, infertility takes a toll on people who want children. And childlessness, and the decision not to have a child, are both heavily stigmatized in Uganda. It should come as no surprise that those who seek fertility treatment prefer to go on with it privately. 

The bill could also threaten people’s privacy — and thereby potentially run afoul of Uganda’s constitution. If the bill were to pass, married couples would be required to present proof of marriage prior to accessing in-vitro fertilization or surrogacy services. They would also be subject to a medical examination “to ascertain that the married couple suffers from infertility or other health challenges” and compelled to prove that they have been having unprotected sex for one year but have failed to conceive a child. The bill does not indicate how, exactly, state officials expect couples to provide such proof.

Healthcare providers who work in this area declined to speak with me about the bill. “This is a very sensitive topic,” said a worker at one fertility clinic. Their silence was not surprising, given increasing threats to the freedom of expression in Uganda.

Both the assisted reproductive technology and the anti-homosexuality bills speak to a broader push among legislators to align Ugandan laws with notions of “morality” rooted in Christianity. 

Dr. Sarah Opendi, the country’s health minister who is now a member of parliament, is the bill’s main sponsor. Opendi has a history of promoting policies tied to “family values” and traditional notions of morality and is a co-sponsor of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill. She also caught the attention of young, progressive Ugandans last year, when she pushed forward a motion to ban Nyege Nyege, an annual electronic music festival that attracts thousands of people from around the country and beyond. Calling for the festival to be canceled, Opendi argued that it “breeds immorality” and “recruits” young people into the LGBT community.

Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, one of only two parliamentarians who voted against the anti-homosexuality bill, told openDemocracy that support for the bill was “fueled by Christian fundamentalism.” In 2020, openDemocracy reported that U.S.-based Christian right groups, many with close links to the Trump administration, spent at least $50 million on campaigns that sought to undermine the rights of women and LGBTQ people across Africa. The Fellowship Foundation, a group with strong ties to David Bahati, the parliamentarian who wrote Uganda’s original anti-gay law in 2009, gave the Ugandan government $20 million between 2008 and 2018.

Mwesigye also expressed concern that Christian fundamentalists might have had a hand in promoting the assisted reproductive technology bill. “Lawmakers need to stop moralizing legislation,” she said. “There must be a separation of the church and the state, because the state knows that it is bound to protect the constitutional rights of Ugandans. We cannot have members of parliament citing the Bible and the Quran on the floor of parliament.”

It remains to be seen whether the bill will pass the test of constitutionality. Bills of a similar nature have been tabled and passed in the Ugandan parliament but rejected by the Constitutional Court.

If the anti-homosexuality bill should pass, LGBTQ people in Uganda will be barred by law from seeking out some of the most fundamental components of a healthy and fulfilling life. It will become a crime to seek love and speak about your identity. Even finding a place to live can lead to criminal penalties for your landlord. And if Opendi’s bill should pass, an important avenue for having a child will be outlawed too.

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“Everybody is in a kind of chaos right now,” said Joseph Knoll, a nurse practitioner and the CEO of Spektrum Health, a community-based health center located in central Florida that specializes in medical and mental health services for the LGBTQ community and beyond. He told me that the new rules leave healthcare professionals who provide this care “feeling helpless.”

Doctors and other practitioners who violate the ban could lose their medical license and be hit with hefty fines. Many are even considering leaving the state, given the uncertainty of future restrictions on their practice. Part of the dismay comes from feeling that the deck has been unfairly stacked. Local news outlets have reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed all the members of the “vociferously apolitical” Board of Medicine, several of whom made contributions to his campaign totaling $80,000. DeSantis is reportedly considering running for president in 2024 and gender-affirming care is an issue that many conservative lawmakers have been pushing across the country.

Florida is now one of 10 or more states that have passed similar legislation. In Utah, the state passed a law at the beginning of the year to ban any healthcare professional from providing any gender-affirming treatments to minors or face a felony charge. In February, South Dakota passed a similar law for minors in which medical professionals providing such treatments stood to lose their licenses. Georgia followed in March. And just days ago, West Virginia enacted a ban on gender-affirming therapies, though it made exceptions for teenagers considered to be at risk for self-harm or suicide. 

Florida, unlike the other states, initially chose not to take a legislative route, instead moving ahead via state medical boards. A bill, though, is currently making its way through the Florida House of Representatives to codify the ban on gender-affirming care. This bill also includes a ban on changing the sex as recorded on a birth certificate, prohibits health insurance providers from covering any treatments related to youth transitioning and prohibits organizations that provide transition-related healthcare to minors from receiving public funds. 

Already, this has led to clinics shutting down preemptively. Outlets reported that the Johns Hopkins All Children Hospital in St. Petersburg and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, among others, stopped accepting new patients into programs that provided hormones or puberty blockers well before the law went into effect. The fear of prosecution leaves few providers still offering these services.

With clinics closing and the high potential consequences for providing care, medical professionals are increasingly forced to choose between staying in an environment that makes it challenging to provide the necessary medical care to their patients or leaving to continue practicing elsewhere. 

“Our primary service line is gender affirming treatment,” Knoll, the Spektrum Health CEO, told me, “but we’re a community healthcare clinic that does primary care as well.” He says he is now faced with the choice of abandoning all patients because his clinic’s survival is at stake. “Gender affirming treatment represents somewhere between 50% and 60% of our services,” he said. “Obviously, our biggest concern is the care of people that need to access our services, but we have to be realistic. We don’t have room in our budget to have half of our revenue gone.”

He told me he’s heard of colleagues who are taking the option to leave Florida. The consideration weighs heavily for his transgender staff members. “For them to stay in the state of Florida,” Knoll said, “they have to accept the lack of access to health care while working at a healthcare organization. I mean, it’s nonsense.” 

Nurse practitioners like Knoll play an essential role in this equation. They can prescribe medication, promote disease prevention and diagnose common ailments, often providing this care directly in clinical settings. In 2020, Florida passed a law that grants nurse practitioners full authority to autonomously practice primary care. Losing these healthcare professionals drastically affects the communities they serve. 

Vernon Langford, the president of the Florida Association of Nurse Practitioners, wrote in an email that the state has “a bad shortage of healthcare professionals now and it is not getting better anytime soon.” It’s hard to know exactly how many medical professionals are leaving and what their exact reasons are for doing so, but a 2021 report for the Florida Hospital Association estimates that the state will face a shortage of nearly 6,000 primary care physicians by 2035. The lack of physicians makes it difficult for all patients seeking care in Florida, especially those in rural areas. Additionally, more care providers will be needed as the population increases and ages. A state facing significant shortages in care needs to be able to attract and retain talent. 

The new rules are not helping. Langford said Florida needed to remove barriers to accessing care, not create additional hurdles. “The culture wars have seeped into healthcare,” he said, which introduces more restrictions for the work of nurse practitioners. There has been an increase, he added, “in the desire to relocate to states that have more favorable practice environments.” 

As bans and restrictions on gender-affirming spread around the country, perhaps the only option left for patients who need this care is to file legal challenges. Four anonymous transgender minors sued the state this month, arguing that the medical bans “violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” and should, as unconstitutional legislation, be thrown out. “It is,” Langford told me, “a very sad thing to see when vulnerable populations are being targeted.”

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Even before the war, Ukraine was at least 10 years away from reaping the financial rewards for some of its in-demand raw materials, vital ingredients in many products from iPhones to fighter jets. Most rare earths are, in fact, not all that rare. But extracting and purifying the lightweight elements is expensive, dangerous and environmentally damaging. Almost all of Ukraine’s critical materials and rare earths can be easily found elsewhere. International investors might seek less risky alternatives.  

As the war grinds into its second year, the European Union, the United States and other Western powers are making strategic investments around the world to diversify away from their dependence on Chinese and Russia-sourced critical raw materials — investments that will translate into mines and infrastructure in places other than Ukraine and greatly undermine Ukraine’s ability in the future to compete in the critical raw materials market.

“Most of the foreign natural resource development is probably off the table,” said Chris Berry, an analyst on critical raw materials at House Mountain Partners in Washington, D.C. Even after the war, investor confidence is likely to be deeply shaken. The demining process alone will take approximately ten years according to Ukrainian officials. Russia has contaminated vast swathes of territory with landmines and other unexploded ordnance.

The total value of Ukraine’s deposits is believed to be astronomical, a prospective loss to add to the estimated $138 billion worth of damage caused so far by Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

Ukraine and the European Commission had signed a strategic partnership agreement on raw materials in 2021, heralded as a significant step forward for Ukraine in the renewables space. It was an accord that also boosted the confidence of foreign mining companies moving to secure Ukrainian exploration permits, the first step in the mining process.  

The Ukrainian government has not publicly announced how many lithium fields and promising areas are now under Russian occupation. Before the invasion, no lithium was being extracted from Ukraine. But several licenses were in various stages of development, including the Shevchenkivske field in the Donetsk region, the Kruta Balka block in the Zaporizhzhia region and the Dobra block and the Polokhivske field in the Kirovohrad region. Both the Shevchenkivske field and the Kruta Balka have danced along the war’s ever-moving frontlines.

Despite this, Ukrainian officials have presented an image of a stalwart critical materials partner to the EU, and last month Ukraine and the EU reaffirmed the strategic importance of their alliance. In December, Ukraine’s parliament passed mining reform legislation to increase the attraction of the country’s extraction industries.  

The invasion coincided with the EU’s quest to seek alternatives from China in order to meet its ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. The pandemic established the need to move away from single suppliers like China, while the Ukraine invasion underscored the geopolitical vulnerabilities for Europe that exist close to home.   

China supplies Brussels with 98% of the EU’s supply of rare earth elements. It’s a supply chain that Olivia Lazard, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said needs to be reviewed.

In fact, the issue of raw materials tops Brussels’ political agenda. Last September, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the European Critical Raw Materials Act. “Lithium and rare earths are already replacing gas and oil at the heart of our economy,” said von der Leyen in a speech, adding that Europe has to “avoid falling into the same dependency as with oil and gas.”

While Europe has been moving away from reliance on Russian oil and gas, Russia continues to hold many of the essential elements for the West’s green transition. Russia accounts for approximately 7% of the global supply of nickel, a vital ingredient in solar panels. It is also a leader in the global supply of aluminum, palladium, potash and vanadium. The EU imports approximately $7.4 billion a year in Russian raw materials.

Russian metals and minerals have escaped the same kind of scrutiny that oil and gas exports have encountered. Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel, owned by the Putin-supporting oligarch Vladimir Potanin, has not come under Western sanctions. Russian nickel exports to the U.S. and the EU actually saw a boost in 2022. “If you look into the sanctions, you will see that the EU has been more cautious on certain types,” said Vasileios Rizos, the head of sustainable resources and circular economy at CEPS, a think tank. “The whole raw materials agenda comes from a more strategic perspective at the EU level.”

In 2020, Russia pledged $1.5 billion for mining rare earth minerals with the goal of becoming the biggest producer after China. Capturing raw materials on Ukrainian land will redound to Russia’s benefits, allowing the Kremlin to keep the materials off world markets. 

Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group is believed to collect raw material deposits to shore up its finances. “This tells us something about the nature of the Russian approach now regarding security and defense,” said Lazard, the Carnegie fellow. “Geology is now an asset and geological exploration is a competency to wield in the global geopolitical competition.” 

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Between January 9 and January 17 alone, teachers and professors led 400 protest marches across the country. It’s the latest in a long line of humiliations suffered by Venezuela’s educated, aspirational middle class and shows why so many millions are emigrating to pastures new.

Like many of her colleagues in Venezuela’s educated, professional middle class, Fusco has been driven to despair by low wages and terrible working conditions. She hasn’t bought clothes in two years and couldn’t pay for health insurance this year. “I’m having a hard time,” she told me. “I’m doing what I didn’t have to do when I started my career.” She describes a Venezuela in which some teachers wear shoes with holes in them, while others struggle to put nutritious, healthy food on the table. Some teachers, she told me, were moonlighting as security guards, others foraged for discarded fruits and vegetables at local street markets.

When an American NGO donated medicine to Fusco’s university, she says “around 70 professors asked for antidepressants.”

As salaries have collapsed, so have the budgets for state universities. According to Inírida Rodríguez, a professor and administrator at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), these reduced budgets are part of policies by the governments of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro aimed at exerting political control over autonomous public universities. Every aspect of university life is affected, said Rodríguez — with research equipment often obsolete and buildings left in disrepair. In 2008, the budget assigned to the university was almost 60% of what it asked; in 2021, it was only 2.3%. That year, part of a roof that covered a walkway on the university’s Caracas campus — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, extolled as a “masterpiece of modern city planning” — collapsed.

Over the last decade, the Central University of Venezuela’s student body has reduced by as much 60%, says Rodríguez, while the number of professors and courses on offer has reduced by about 30%. Other universities have been similarly gutted. Between 2015 and 2017, 430 professors left Simón Bolívar University, an institution focused on scientific and technological research and once among Latin America’s best.

The state of Venezuela’s universities reflects the wider animus between “Chavismo,” the ideology of the Chávez and Maduro governments that have ruled Venezuela since 1999, and the country’s professionals.

Chavismo’s hostility towards this class stems from its particular brand of socialism, argues the Venezuelan political scientist Guillermo T. Aveledo. Professional skills, if they’re not being used in service of the revolution, he says, are then seen “as serving the interests of capitalism and imperialism.” The Chávez and Maduro governments, Aveledo told me, prioritized ideological loyalty in state institutions over professional governance, over the language of efficiency and productivity. As the Venezuelan commentator, Francisco Toro acerbically observed nearly two decades ago: “For Chavismo, privilege always comes cloaked in a PowerPoint presentation.”

Growing control over education, including at university level, rising authoritarianism and the official encouragement of squatting turned the professional class — cosmopolitan and broadly liberal — against the Chávez government. In turn, adherents of Chavismo believed they needed to push critical professionals out of state institutions as a means to hold on to political power.

For example, the government moved to take control of public service companies, many of which had been turned by professional management into efficient and productive units by the late-1990s. “They removed professional managers and replaced them with obedient managers, and not necessarily highly skilled ones,” says José María de Viana, an engineer who led Hidrocapital, the public company that provides water in Caracas. De Viana was fired in March, 1999, soon after Chávez began his presidency, and was replaced by a Chavista engineer who would rise to become an important party member.

De Viana told me that the government “dismantled the internal corporate governance structures” of public companies like Hidrocapital, the Caracas Metro and Edelca, at the time the largest electric company in Venezuela. “This led to the destruction of the talent built over many decades in these companies,” De Viana says. “Human capital was lost.” The presidents of Edelca and the Caracas Metro were replaced by military men in 2002 and 1999 respectively. “The Bolivarian Revolution’s offensive ordered by President Chávez,” wrote Guillermo García Ponce, a director at a pro-Chávez newspaper, in 2003, “must mean the definite annihilation of the fifth column [that is] PDVSA, Edelca and the Caracas Metro.” PDVSA refers to Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company.

Two decades later, electricity and water shortages are widespread in Venezuela. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Public Services, less than 30% of Venezuelans have regular water supply and even then the water sometimes comes out of the tap with a strange color and smell. Electricity rationing, essentially blackouts, that lasts for several hours is common in some states. Last year alone, Venezuela had 233,298 power cuts, according to the watchdog Committee of People Affected by Blackouts. In 2019, Venezuelans were forced to endure a weeklong nationwide blackout.

For De Viana, Edelca’s “twin” dams of Tocoma and Caruachi in the Venezuelan south illustrate the consequences of disregarding professionalism and expertise. Construction on Caruachi began in 1997, when Edelca still had its old corporate governance structure in place. The project took nine years to finish and cost $2.5 million dollars. Construction on Tocoma was started in 2007, a decade after construction began on Caruachi, and it remains unfinished and has already cost at least $10 billion dollars.

The project was mostly led by Odebrecht, a Brazilian company, which admitted it paid Venezuelan officials and middle men up to $98 million in bribes between 2005 and 2016 to secure contracts. Construction has now stalled on several of Odebrecht’s multi-million dollar projects in Venezuela.

Some argue that Chávez declared war on Venezuela’s professional classes in 2003 when he fired 18,000 employees from PDVSA, the national oil company, after they went on strike. “Venezuela had more registered patents per capita in the United States than almost any other country,” energy expert Francisco Monaldi told me. Most, Monaldi added, came from an institute within PDVSA that had 170 PhDs on staff.

While many Venezuelan public companies were characterized by clientelism and corruption, Monaldi insists PDVSA was both meritocratic and professional. “It was an island within a very different country,” he told me. After the mass firings, Monaldi says, “the company’s gray matter was lost.” The people that left, says Pánfilo Masciangioli, a researcher and manager who worked at the institute between 1982 and 2010, “were replaced with people who did not even know how important it was to publish a paper.” The institute, which had around 1,200 patents before 2003, went on to register only around 100 over the next ten years, Masciangioli told me.

Former PDVSA employees, fearing for their futures, left Venezuela. The number of Venezuelans living and working in the Canadian oil province of Alberta rose from 465 in 2001 to 3,860 within a decade. In Colombia, the influx of highly skilled PDVSA employees helped its national oil company almost double its oil production by 2011. “The full effects of the professional exodus from PDVSA,” Monaldi told me, “weren’t fully felt until a decade later. The company went from producing 3.2 million barrels per day in 2002 to 717,000 in 2022.”

Before the mass firings, Monaldi adds, it was expected that oil production would reach six million barrels per day in 2019. The collapse of PDVSA’s infrastructure, after years of neglect and mismanagement, has also resulted in the country having around seven oil spills per month, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology. In 2020, a massive oil spill affected a coastal national park known for its high levels of biodiversity. Two years later, turtles and birds washed up dead on the tourist beaches of Lechería in eastern Venezuela, where a spill had affected almost eight kilometers of coastline.

Similarly, between 2006 and 2011, under the direction of a Chavista zoologist, the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research saw “a systematic process of dismissals of researchers and assistant personnel” who were opposed to the government of Chávez. Former institute researcher Claudio Mendoza told me: “You were either fired or forced to retire.” Cultural institutions weren’t spared either. In January 2001, announcing a “cultural revolution,” Hugo Chávez fired the directors of 30 cultural institutions on live television.

Among them was Sofía Imber, who led the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas and had curated arguably the best modern art collection in Latin America. Culture had become elitist, said Chávez in justification of his decision. But for Lorena González Inecco, an art professor at the Metropolitan University in Caracas, this was the beginning of the “demolition” of public cultural institutions which included the elimination of institutional autonomy and the appointment of loyalists to top positions.

A larger wave of purges from public institutions happened after 2004, when the Venezuelan government compiled the Tascón List: a document with the names of the more than two million people who had signed a recall referendum against Chávez. The list was used to discriminate against those who had signed, including the firing of hundreds of workers from state institutions and companies.

Among these institutions was the National Library. Specialist departments became defunct. The library’s archives are decaying, says Mario Di Giacomo. He worked at the library for 20 years. “Dissent was not acceptable,” he told me, after the Chavistas took over. “It was a truly disgusting, traumatic and undignified process.”

Many professionals who once worked in public institutions and companies have now left Venezuela, joining an ever-growing diaspora of middle class Venezuelans who have escaped a deep economic and humanitarian crisis. In 2017 alone, 4,000 Venezuelan engineers moved to Argentina. By 2019, 21,000 engineers from Venezuela had moved to Peru.

Maduro became president in 2013, assuming office after the death of Chávez. Since 2015, over seven million people have left Venezuela, six million of them for other countries in Latin America. By 2025, over eight million people will have left Venezuela, or over a quarter of the country’s population as recorded in 2015. Their effect on the GDPs of the Latin American countries that absorb this influx of educated Venezuelans is expected to be positive.

Meanwhile, back in Venezuela, a presidential election is anticipated at some point next year. But observers and analysts have remarked on the growing political apathy in Venezuela, as the opposition flounders. Despite a fledgling economic recovery, over half of Venezuelans still live in poverty and the average monthly wage is a pittance.

Venezuela, with its significant oil reserves and its educated population, could have become a balanced, middle class society, political scientist Guillermo T. Aveledo has said. Instead, it is now riven with extreme inequality, with a fraction of people enjoying outsized wealth while the rest of the country struggles to stay abreast of inflation.

As Inírida Rodríguez, the professor and administrator at Central University of Venezuela, told me, there is a need for those who have remained in Venezuela to cling to optimism. “Many young people still come to our classrooms,” she said, “with their hopes resting on the university. And our professors, with effort and dedication, continue to support those hopes and dreams.”

The post How Venezuela lost its middle class appeared first on Coda Story.

“Something that happened to me and was beyond my control has left me like a machine that’s been switched off – disabled – unable to do anything that a 21-year-old of my intelligence and interests might want or need to do,” she wrote.

That young correspondent, Maeve Boothby O’Neill, spoke Russian, listened to jazz and read constantly. She loved musical theater, especially the shows “Wicked,” “Billy Eliot” and “Into the Woods.” She was plotting out a series of 1920s mystery novels set in the villages of Dartmoor, an upland expanse of bogs and rivers and rocky hills in southwest England where Maeve and her mother had once lived.

Maeve died on October 3, 2021. She was 27. On the death certificate, her physician noted “myalgic encephalomyelitis” — an alternate name for the illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome — as the cause. It is rare for a death to be attributed to either ME or CFS. 

An inquest into the circumstances, including the actions (and inactions) of clinicians and administrators at the local arm of the National Health Service, or NHS, is expected to be held later this year. Maeve was diagnosed with the illness in 2012, after several years of poor health. She fought hard to access appropriate medical care and social service support from institutions and bureaucracies that did not seem to understand the disease.

“She did everything she could to survive,” wrote Sarah Boothby, Maeve’s mother, in a statement she prepared for the upcoming inquest. The NHS “did not respond to the severity of Maeve’s presentation, and failed in its duty of care,” wrote Boothby, adding that her death was “premature and wholly preventable.”

Maeve’s father and Boothby’s ex-husband, Sean O’Neill, a journalist at The Times, brought widespread attention to ME in a series of articles, including one last year about Maeve. His “creative, courageous” daughter, wrote O’Neill, “struggled not just with the debilitating, disabling effects of ME but also with the disbelief, apathy and stigma of the medical profession, the NHS and wider society.”

Myalgic encephalomyelitis is frequently triggered by an acute viral or other infectious illness, although it has also been associated with exposure to environmental toxins, including mold. Patients have been found to suffer from a range of immunological, metabolic, neurological and other dysfunctions. Core symptoms include profound exhaustion, a pattern of relapses after minimal exertion known as post-exertional malaise, brain fog, poor sleep and heart rate irregularities that lead to dizziness or nausea when in a standing position. Standard therapies have focused on symptomatic relief since the underlying causes remain unknown and there are no diagnostic medical tests.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 836,000 and 2.5 million people in the country have what it refers to as ME/CFS, and most remain undiagnosed. In the U.K., the estimates range from 125,000 to 250,000. Many patients are unable to work, climb stairs or even perform basic daily functions without assistance. 

As a journalist and public health academic, I have been investigating and writing about ME for several years. I have learned how it can devastate the lives of patients and their families, not least because mainstream medicine has framed it as largely psychosomatic — a modern version of what would once have been diagnosed as hysteria or conversion disorder. 

From the start of my project in 2015, I found it to be enormously intellectually and emotionally rewarding. But no one besides desperately ill patients took much notice. Editors at major news organizations couldn’t be bothered. Academic colleagues were polite but perplexed at my dedication to this obscure domain. At gatherings with friends, I could tell they’d had enough after the fifth or eighth time I’d mention the latest developments in the field. 

Viral epidemics always leave in their wake a small percentage of people experiencing chronic complications that have no identified cause. And the prolonged medical complaints being reported by millions of people around the world after acute coronavirus infection include some of the key symptoms that define ME. 

Patients, clinicians, scientists and journalists are debating and investigating the overlaps between the two conditions. While long Covid is a grab-bag term for an extremely diverse group of patients, some are receiving clinical diagnoses of ME or ME/CFS, as it is often called these days. 

And just as ME patients have long felt dismissed or misunderstood, long Covid patients have had similar experiences. As I reported last year for Coda, for example, doctors unable to continue working because of long Covid have been dismayed that their medical colleagues often tell them their cognitive impairment and repeated relapses are physical expressions of pandemic-related trauma. Conditions like ME and others that lack definitive medical tests — such as irritable bowel syndrome, Gulf War Illness, fibromyalgia and various forms of pain — are often lumped together into a category called “functional” disorders or “medically unexplained symptoms,” known as MUS.

The emergence of long Covid has focused widespread attention on a long-simmering debate that has previously been confined largely to academic and medical circles: Do these functional and medically unexplained ailments arise mainly from ongoing disease processes or from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and related psychiatric conditions?

All around the world, leading scientists and clinicians regard long Covid as a heterogeneous disease. They are seeking to elucidate its many pathophysiological pathways and find drug targets for therapy. In December 2022, the CDC reported that long Covid “played a part” in 3,544 deaths in the U.S. from the start of the pandemic through June 2022.

Another camp is applying the psychosomatic lens to long Covid. The experts in this group also hold impressive academic status, receive significant research funding and publish in respected journals. They witness the same phenomenon and see something completely different: A global tsunami of mass hysteria leading to paralysis, gait disorders, memory loss, inability to remain upright without feeling sick, repeated flu-like relapses and a list of other complaints.

Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system. Physicians frequently prescribe psychotherapy and exercise programs based on their presumption that emotional or mental distress, negative or unhelpful thoughts and/or unhealthy behavior patterns are causing the persistent problems.

It goes without saying that stress, anxiety and related factors can have negative health impacts and exacerbate underlying ailments and that psychological support and lifestyle adaptations can help alleviate distress, including among people with chronic conditions. But when it comes to medically unexplained illnesses, mistakes in interpreting symptoms can visit trauma and despair upon patients and families. 

Last May, an Irish court ordered a hospital to pay a young man 6 million euros for having failed to diagnose a brain tumor, an error that delayed necessary surgery by months. Doctors had misdiagnosed his headaches, concentration problems and hand numbness as “psychological and functional” and referred him to “the mental health services and physiotherapy,” according to the Irish Independent.

Physicians can be quick to default to psychological explanations when they don’t understand what is causing a patient’s problems, noted Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of Galway, in a blog post about the case. (Professor Hughes is a friend and colleague.) 

“It would be nice if the doctors concerned could perhaps try to be a little less hasty, and a bit more humble,” he wrote in the post. “The phrase ‘Medically Unexplained’ does not mean ‘Medically Unexplainable.’ Just because you don’t know what’s wrong with a patient doesn’t mean that nothing is wrong with them.”

Maeve Boothby O’Neill was born in 1994 in London. Her parents divorced when she was five, and from then on she lived with her mom in southwest England — first in Dartmoor, and then in Exeter, a major university town.

In pulling together the following account, I spoke multiple times with Maeve’s mother, Sarah Boothby, via social media as well as in her cozy flat on a quiet road a few blocks from Exeter’s High Street — the same flat where Maeve had struggled with her declining health and where she’d died the previous fall. While there, I reviewed three fat clip binders stuffed with copies of Maeve’s medical and social service records, voluminous correspondence, reams of handwritten notes and journal-type entries, applications for social benefits and related documents and writings.

The Royal Devon University Health NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital where Maeve sought care during the last months of her life, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

From an early age, Boothby told me, Maeve adored “storytelling” in all its forms and loved being surrounded by books. She wrote her first play — or rather, she dictated it — when she was seven. “She played happily in her imagination for days on end,” said Boothby.

Maeve expressed her opinions early. During a family vacation to southern Spain, Boothby recalled, Maeve, then four years old, declared: “What’s the point of Spain? It’s too hot!” At 10, she became a vegetarian out of both principle and gustatory preference.

In the summer of 2007, when Maeve was 12, both she and Boothby came down with what felt like a mild viral illness. Boothby recovered completely after four weeks. But according to Maeve’s diary from that time, she still felt exhausted weeks after the acute sickness.

(Boothby read the diary after Maeve’s death. It opened with this advisory: “The writing beyond this page is strictly private and is only to be viewed with the express permission of Maeve.” Boothby posted the following snippets and others from the diary on Twitter. )

“God I am TIRED,” Maeve wrote on August 7. On August 11: “Oooohh . . . tired . . .” August 12: “I am still vair [very] tired! Why?! Mum has said she wants me to stay in bed all day and rest :¿ (got a tiredness headache too. Ow ow ow ow).”  August 17: “in bed – still tired :(”

Besides the references to exhaustion that pepper the diary, Maeve also expressed delight about compelling personal matters — celebrating her birthday, getting a new dollhouse, visiting her dad in London.

Just after 11 p.m. on August 25, the night before her birthday, she wrote:

“It is 53 minutes until I’m 13! OMG! We (me & dad) went shopping today…the plan tomorrow is to have a nice breakfast then a picnic with PINK CHAMP [champagne].” And at midnight: “I am officially 13 years old and have made it to TEENAGERDOM!” 12:01 p.m.: “Wow! I’m 13!”

Over the next few years, Maeve’s exhaustion increased, sometimes accompanied by punishing headaches. She began fainting while engaged in gym class, school sports, dancing and even walking. Her social life dropped off significantly and she reduced her school attendance to essential classes only, although she managed to keep up her grades.

Two general practitioners examined Maeve, found nothing wrong and dismissed her symptoms as “normal for a girl of her age,” said Boothby. A pediatrician referred Maeve to psychological services while telling her “the symptoms were all in her mind,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

“She was only 15 and doubted herself for years afterwards,” Boothby told me.

Spontaneous remission from ME is relatively rare, although the disease is known to fluctuate. Many patients remain more or less stable for years, and some improve slowly. Others, like Maeve, experience a gradual decline, for reasons that remain unclear. It is estimated that about a quarter of patients are home-bound or even bed-bound. 

In 2012, despite her reduced class attendance, Maeve graduated from high school in Bristol, where she and her mother were living for a year. She earned top grades in Russian, biology and English literature. She’d long imagined a career involving travel, foreign languages and international relations.

In a photo of Maeve on her 18th birthday, she glows with good humor. Her bright face is graced by a half-moon smile and framed by a tangled mane of brown hair. Her eyes are focused on some point to the left of the camera. She seems, like many her age, to be brimming with ideas and secrets and vital insights. Unlike her peers, she was too sick to attend university and explore her future.

That year, Maeve was finally referred for assessment to a clinic specializing in CFS/ME, as the illness was then often called, at a hospital in Bristol. Although the intake and diagnostic process dragged on for nine months, a specialist at last confirmed that she had the illness. In a subsequent email to the specialist, Maeve expressed relief at getting the news.

“It feels very empowering to finally have a diagnosis and some external recognition of my symptoms, to know that it’s not all in my head!” she wrote.

Shortly afterwards, Maeve and her mother returned to Exeter, where she contacted the local CFS/ME clinical service and reviewed their guidelines for treatment and care. These guidelines recommended a behavioral and psychological approach to recovery based on the hypothesis that patients like Maeve were extremely out of shape from remaining sedentary and harbored dysfunctional beliefs about having an organic disease that caused them to relapse when they did too much.

For decades, two related interventions were viewed as the standard-of-care for ME. A specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy was designed to alter patients’ faulty beliefs so they would do more. An approach to increasing activity called graded exercise therapy (GET) was designed to reverse their physical deconditioning so they would do more. A major British study called the PACE trial, with the first results published in 2011 in the Lancet, appeared to demonstrate that these treatments led to significant improvement and even recovery.

The information Maeve received in 2012 conformed to this approach. Leaflets advised her that “many people with CFS/ME have unhelpful thoughts,” which include “catastrophizing,” “eliminating the positive” and “all-or-nothing-thinking.” Instead of adopting these patterns, the leaflets advised, patients should ask themselves questions like: “What alternative views are there?” and “How would someone else view this situation?” and “Am I focusing on the negative?”

Maeve found this approach useless but did see a specialist in Mickel therapy, a cognitive approach popular in the U.K.. In a journal entry, Maeve wrote that, according to the therapist, “I should have more fun and be more childlike” and “my body’s ‘message’ is: my symptoms are here to tell me to stop containing my emotions and start expressing them honestly now.” 

She dropped the therapy after a couple of sessions. “It isn’t working for me,” she wrote. “If anything it’s making me worse, because I’m worrying about not having fun.”

As advised by the CFS/ME service, Maeve kept a meticulous activity diary in an effort to determine her “baseline” — the amount she could do without triggering the relapses that characterize post-exertional malaise. The goal was to increase the amount over time in order to nudge her body to improve. Maeve regularly struggled to stay within her limits.

In an email to the doctor who diagnosed her, she expressed concern that her legs ached after any physical activity. “Don’t worry about the aching of the legs,” the doctor replied. “That will not go until you enter a phase of sustained improvement — then it will, I promise you!”

“I’m looking forward to entering a period of sustained improvement so I can have my legs back!” Maeve responded in a follow-up email.

The doctor’s promise proved to be illusory. Maeve never entered a period of “sustained improvement.” Eventually, she realized her baseline was around 30 minutes of activity a day. If she exceeded it, she suffered a relapse — or a “crash,” as patients called it. And as she struggled to accept this restriction, she crashed again and again.

In the years since the Lancet and other journals published findings from the PACE trial, medical and public health experts — including me — have documented that the study includes egregious methodological and ethical missteps. Related research has also been shown to be poorly designed and fraught with bias. In 2015, I wrote a 15,000-word exposé of the PACE trial that garnered significant media and scientific attention, and I have continued to criticize research in the field. 

In 2017, the CDC rescinded its recommendations for CBT and GET as treatments for the condition. The CDC website now flatly declares: “ME/CFS is a biological illness, not a psychologic [sic] disorder…These patients have multiple pathophysiological changes that affect multiple systems.”

On October 31, 2021 — less than a month after Maeve’s death — the U.K.’s National institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, issued new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS that reversed the agency’s own prior recommendations for the two treatments. In a review of studies, NICE assessed the quality of evidence in favor of GET and CBT, including from the PACE trial, as either “very low” or merely “low.”

The new guidelines highlighted the symptom of post-exertional malaise, which it called post-exertional symptom exacerbation, and warned of possible harms from graded exercise. The guidelines approved of psychotherapy for supportive care only — not as a curative treatment.

Maeve read everything she could discover about her illness and sought out whatever she thought might help. She found yoga and meditation helpful. She explored the possibility that she suffered from a deficiency of carnitine, an amino acid essential to energy metabolism. At various times, turmeric, B12, aspirin, the gastrointestinal drug famotidine and the gout drug colchicine seemed to provide some symptomatic relief.

She had to fill out exhaustive applications in order to obtain funds for basic expenses like buying a wheelchair and hiring care personnel. In her London Review of Books essay, she protested at the indignity of having to prove to a “mean and punitive government” that she was not malingering or faking it but was actually very sick and reliant upon benefits to survive.

“To access my right to this welfare payment,” she wrote, “I am required to prove my life has been devastated, presenting it as a collection of medico-historical facts about all the things I can’t do, which reminds me of all the things I might have wanted to do and makes my existence sound abject and pitiful.”

Records of correspondence with medical and social service agencies show multiple occasions of missed calls and misunderstandings about appointments. In a journal entry, Maeve expressed irritation at the inefficiencies and delays involved in dealing with the public institutions responsible for ensuring that everyone could access care and assistance. “It makes me angry that I’m supposed to get free treatment at the point of need, AND I FUCKING NEED IT NOW AND IT TAKES A MONTH FOR ANYONE TO LIFT A FINGER TO EVEN THINK ABOUT HELPING ME,” she wrote at one point.

At other times, her comments conveyed a sense of hope, however fragile. “I am still young and will get better,” she wrote in one application for benefits. “But no one can tell me how long it will take.”

Such hope notwithstanding, the scope of activities Maeve could perform gradually dwindled. “Over time, she became unable to cook, wash up, change her bedlinen, clean her room, apply for and renew her welfare benefit entitlements, make or attend appointments or go outdoors without assistance,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

Maeve also experienced challenges with food intake. “Sometimes I have to wait for enough energy to eat — lifting a fork to my mouth requires energy I don’t have,” she wrote in one social service questionnaire.

ME or CFS has only rarely been cited as a cause of death. In England and Wales, the illness was cited as the underlying cause or as a “contributory factor” in only 88 deaths from 2001 to 2016, according to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. Malnutrition is among the most serious possible life-threatening complications. In very severe cases, patients can become unable to ingest sufficient nutrition because they have difficulty chewing and swallowing. 

At that point, tube-feeding — via a tube inserted down the throat or directly into the stomach through the abdomen — can be necessary to prevent death from malnutrition. William Weir, an infectious disease and ME specialist in London, has treated several patients who have been tube-fed for extended periods before improving enough to be able to eat on their own. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Weir told me, doctors who don’t understand ME often view malnutrition in severe patients as if it were a psychiatric issue like anorexia. “Patients with this illness are frequently regarded as having a psychological disorder that causes them to be deliberately and perversely inactive without any regard for the possibility that their inactivity actually has a physical basis,” he said.

By early 2021, Maeve’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she was unable to consume enough food, even with her mother preparing liquified meals. Boothby and Maeve’s GP at the time advocated for her to be hospitalized so she could have a feeding tube inserted. In mid-March, Maeve was admitted to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Noting that her tests appeared to be normal, the staff physician refused the tube-feeding request. 

“They kept treating her as if she was making it up,” said Boothby.

Maeve was discharged without a plan for providing her with sufficient nutrition at home, Boothby noted in a chronology of events of the last months of Maeve’s life that she prepared for the inquest. She was “unable to sit up, hold a cup to her lips, or chew,” wrote Boothby, and “all her symptoms were now highly exacerbated.”

Further deterioration in Maeve’s condition led to a second hospitalization in May. By then, Dr. Weir had examined her and found her to be extremely debilitated. In a phone call and a follow-up letter, he recalled, he urged the hospital physician overseeing Maeve’s care to insert a feeding tube.

The hospital did not follow Dr. Weir’s advice. The doctor, Boothby wrote, was “adamant she would not tube feed Maeve and told Maeve she would ‘feel much better if you gave your hair a wash.’” 

Again, Maeve was discharged without a plan for home care, according to Boothby. “She was completely immobilized except for being able to turn her head from side to side,” she wrote. “Her voice could not rise above a whisper. She was unable to reposition in bed or to lie on her side.”

During a third hospital admission that summer, a naso-gastric tube was finally inserted. But by that point Maeve’s body was unable to tolerate the hospital’s tube-feeding regimen. She responded with bouts of pain and constipation, which caused crashes and further exacerbated her condition. The tube was removed, and she was again discharged. 

On August 27, 2021, Maeve turned 27.

When tube-feeding fails, another possible option is total parenteral nutrition, in which the digestive system is bypassed and patients are infused through a vein. In a letter dated September 9, 2021, Dr. Weir warned the chief executive of the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that Maeve’s situation looked dire if this approach was not adopted.

“I have experience of similar cases leading to death and Maeve’s current clinical status shows all the initial hallmarks of this,” he wrote. “I am not exaggerating the issue when I say that this [total parenteral nutrition] may well save Maeve’s life.” 

Maeve ultimately refused to be readmitted because the hospital would not guarantee that she would receive total parenteral nutrition, according to Boothby’s written chronology. Maeve knew that without nutritional support she was going to die, Boothby told me, and she wanted to die at home — not in the hospital while being denied care. 

“She said, ‘At least we tried, mum,’” said Boothby.

Maeve continued to deteriorate throughout September and received morphine for pain. On October 1, according to Boothby’s written chronology, Maeve “said she was experiencing mild hallucinations.” On October 2, she exhibited “rapid shallow breathing, racing heart, eyes rolling.” 

At 1:45 a.m. on October 3, “Maeve was awake but incapable of utterance or focusing.” At 3 a.m., she was found dead. Doctors confirmed her death at 11 a.m., and her body was removed to a funeral home in the early afternoon. 

That evening, Maeve’s GP visited Boothby. “She said she had never had a patient so poorly treated by the NHS,” wrote Boothby. 

The inquest, which is not yet scheduled, will presumably shed light on the events that led to Maeve’s death and on the hospital’s actions in the matter. Philip Spinney, the senior coroner for Exeter and Greater Devon, declined to be interviewed but noted in an email that the process is at the “evidence gathering stage” and that the inquest itself could last at least two days. 

Given the prominence of Maeve’s case, the inquest and its findings could receive significant publicity. Boothby told me she would like the investigation to “expose as many facts as possible to public scrutiny.” 

Beyond that, she hopes it will demonstrate “how socially, morally and ethically unjust it is to deny a biomedical cause to ME” and will lead to recommendations for preventing more deaths like Maeve’s. “She died by the incomprehension and disbelief of an acute hospital,” said Boothby.

The post When the doctor doesn’t listen appeared first on Coda Story.

In many places, meteorologists on the local news are local celebrities, seen as trusted interpreters of the data provided by the National Weather Service, friendly personalities and loyal community boosters. Even in today’s sharply divided, partisan America, they are not usually seen as divisive figures.

No longer.

A vocal opposition has formed against TV weather forecasters and the science of meteorology.

Former political candidates have conjured claims that last October’s devastating Hurricane Ian was engineered by the “Deep State” to destroy Republican governor Ron DeSantis’ reputation. Many in Florida’s Tampa region prepared for the landfall of Hurricane Ian, which, models had predicted, would hit their area. But storm path models rapidly evolved in the run-up to the hurricane, sparking spurious allegations from two Republican candidates: DeAnna Lorraine, who ran for election to the U.S. House in 2020, and Lauren Witzke, who campaigned for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware. They claimed that the hurricane was, in fact, a political instrument targeting opponents of vaccine mandates and anti-transgender legislation — baseless and absurd claims that gained currency on social media, especially among some Republican supporters.

Weather manipulation conspiracies have been around for decades. One of the most durable has been the chemtrails theory, which holds that the U.S. government manipulates the weather for nefarious reasons by releasing chemicals into the atmosphere from aircraft. Chemtrail conspiracists often mistake the trails of water vapor expelled by airplanes flying overhead for chemicals.

This conspiracy has been re-upped many times in recent years, especially during moments of uncertainty or social panic, such as during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Chemtrail conspiracists often share the same messaging as other conspiracy theorists, like adherents of the “Great Replacement Theory.” Researchers have estimated that between 30% and 40% of Americans believe in elements of the chemtrails conspiracy.  

Adverse weather events like the latest catastrophic hurricane, heatwave or winter storm energize conspiracists. Many cite local weather to bolster their claims of climate change denial. 

“Weather is your mood, the climate is your personality. It’s easy to conflate the two, if you don’t understand the difference,” said Dennis Mersereau, a weather journalist in Reidsville, North Carolina. “It’s hard for folks to separate daily weather from long-term climate patterns, especially now that we’re feeling the effects of climate change’s influence on extreme weather.”

Weaponizing weather has made meteorologists a target, and not only in the United States. 

Meteorologists in Sweden had faced backlash ahead of the country’s general elections last year because of a “misleading image” that falsely claimed to show proof of “climate hysteria.” Screengrabs of weather forecasts are being manipulated to show weather patterns and temperatures that allegedly prove that climate change is not real. 

In Hungary, two meteorologists were fired over forecasts, ultimately inaccurate, that put a damper on patriotic celebrations, part of the government’s general crackdown on media in the country. 

In response, meteorologists have felt the need to get political themselves. A German meteorologist has centered climate change in his weather reports to counter growing climate change denial. “TV meteorologists, unlike news reporters, can demonstrate this connection in a way that’s far more immediate and accessible,” he told Politico Europe.

As climate change transforms coastlines, consumes forests and upends hundreds of millions of lives, it follows that the local weather report has become a cultural and political warzone. Added to their predictions of precipitation and reporting on snowfall measurements, meteorologists have begun to develop a televised discourse on climate change in an effort to combat climate misinformation. 

“Meteorologists are the most visible scientists in our daily lives. They’re on television every day, and their forecasts are omnipresent whenever you hop online. That visibility makes them an easy target for someone looking to vent their rage,” said Mersereau, the weather journalist.

And because climate change denialism has been linked to other forms of online extremism, meteorologists have a unique role in being able to bring familiar credibility to combat misinformation for a local audience. 

“Once you believe that even nature itself is under the control of a shadowy cabal, it gets easier to see how someone falls into the really dangerous stuff,” said Mersereau.

“We’ve done a lot of work with TV meteorologists on understanding their audience,” said Bernadette Placky, the chief meteorologist at Climate Central. “People’s views on climate change do tend to be more aligned with politics than they do with science and education.”

Climate Central provides resources for meteorologists to help educate their local audiences on matters of climate change. They collaborate with meteorologists abroad since these issues can also be transnational. 

It wasn’t that long ago that the majority of meteorologists had trouble believing in the human causes of climate change. In a research paper published in 2017, surveys of TV weathercasters suggested that “weathercasters’ views of climate change may be rapidly evolving.” The paper found that “in contrast to prior surveys, which found many weathercasters who were unconvinced of climate change, newer results show that approximately 80% of weathercasters are convinced of human-caused climate change. A majority of weathercasters now indicate that climate change has altered the weather in their media markets over the past 50 years, and many feel there have also been harmful impacts to water resources, agriculture, transportation resources, and human health.”

American audiences have also continued to shift, according to reports from the Climate Change Communication program at the Yale School of the Environment. The number of people who are “alarmed” by climate change is increasing, while those grouped as “dismissive” have trended downward. 

The challenge for meteorologists is to tease out the distinctions between everyday weather and long-term climate patterns, while still preparing their audience for the next extreme weather event. The outlook looks cloudy, with a strong possibility of storms ahead.

The post Conspiracy theorists target your local TV weather forecaster appeared first on Coda Story.

On a Sunday afternoon in February of 2022, a daunting task loomed before me. I had to document my competency for a certificate in grief therapy, although I had no background in mental health. I logged into a continuing education company’s website and launched the six-hour pre-recorded workshop. 

Then I pressed the mute button and went about my day. I baked garlic bread, caught up with some friends, binged a Netflix show and took a nap.

Six hours later and $239.50 lighter, I took the final test. My grade was 35 out of 38; I passed with flying colors. I proudly downloaded my “certificate of successful completion” from a continuing education provider called PESI, although I had no intention of actually hanging out a shingle as a certified bereavement practitioner.

Why would I do such a thing? I’m an investigative reporter, and I wanted to see how hard it would be to game the system and pass the test without taking the course. As it turned out, it was ridiculously easy: The answers to the final quiz are summarized on the handouts shared prior to the test. 

Like several other online education organizations, PESI provided certifications in grief counseling for non-professionals and professionals alike. I applied for my Grief Informed Professional certification offered by Evergreen Certifications, a company owned by PESI. But Evergreen rejected my application, informing me that I needed to  demonstrate a background in mental health. 

However, the grief therapy industry was buzzing with other options, and I turned to an online education outfit called Udemy, signing up for its “Grief and Bereavement Counselling ACCREDITED CERTIFICATE”  – advertised for just $9.99, reduced from $94.99. The course was described as a “first step towards a professional career as a ‘bereavement counsellor.’” This turned out to be an even speedier ride than PESI. I bought the course at 1:37 am and received my certificate of completion at 1:39 am.

Wait, what?! Here’s a breakdown of the blitzkrieg: The course was divided into 24 lectures; I clicked the checkbox next to each of them to confirm my attendance and moved on to the 10-question quiz, which was the last requirement to obtain my certificate. Then, as I was answering the second question, my certificate arrived by email. Call me a teacher’s pet but I felt that I should finish the test anyway. I did, earning a 100% score without opening any of the lectures or studying the material.

A Udemy representative who responded to my interview request declined to talk about the certificate because, she said, she was “not a certified mental health professional.” 

“When we get to the area of certifications, it’s the Wild West,” said Jason Washburn, a board-certified clinical psychologist, professor and chief of the psychology division in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University. “There’s absolutely no governance…because it’s not regulated by the state or by the [U.S.] Department of Education.”

Why grief counseling has boomed

With COVID-19 deaths well past 1 million in the U.S. and 6.5 million worldwide, the demand for grief counseling has exploded. Every death has a profound impact on approximately nine people, according to the University of Cambridge. Two years into the pandemic, a report showed that the percentage of Americans suffering from anxiety and depression has tripled, and drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver disease have risen as well. For some, the experience of bereavement can morph into something much deeper – an unshakable sadness that psychologists call prolonged grief disorder and is often misdiagnosed as depression.

Grief counseling is also in demand in the criminal justice system: Grief counselors have worked with bereaved prison inmates and are sought after for families enmeshed in substance use disorder. Inspired by work from restorative justice advocates, courts in numerous states from California to Alabama have ordered grief counseling as part of mandated treatment  for people in criminal diversion programs – all changes that experts view as bellwethers of a less punitive future.

However, there’s a tremendous shortage of trained and licensed mental health professionals to meet the demand for therapy, creating a market opportunity for people even without clinical training and licenses to work as grief therapists. To do that, they need something that attests to their knowledge –  certification.

And that’s where things get confusing. Being certified in grief counseling doesn’t mean someone is a licensed counselor, but to the general public, it seems like the same thing: A certification can be easily mistaken for a professional license.

Colleges and universities provide education and training in disciplines such as social work, counseling or psychology, culminating in an advanced degree. State boards administer exams and issue licenses to these professionals, giving them the right to practice. Certifications are legal, but they are neither a degree nor a license.

Adding to the confusion, many clinical professionals do seek additional certifications for specialized training in narrower areas, ranging from counseling for pet loss to trainings in preventing and treating patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress. Even for mental health professionals, specialization in working with bereaved people is an important need, because few have been trained in this work through their degree programs. 

“You can go through the entire graduate curriculum in psychology and social work, even, astonishingly, in chaplaincy or palliative care and nursing, and never hear the word grief,” said Robert A. Neimeyer, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis who also directs the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, which offers training and certification in grief therapy.

Most professionals have to take continuing education (CE) credits to maintain their licenses and certifications. Taking CE courses is critical, said Gerald Koocher, an attending psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and  senior lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Within about seven or eight years after you graduate…half of what you learned is obsolete,” he said.

And while state licensing boards appear to do an adequate job of screening CE credits, certification providers may not. Perhaps the biggest reason: The terms “Continuing Education Credit” or “Continuing Education Unit” are not legally protected – meaning no organized body controls them – and are thus available to any education provider that wants to issue them. And if patients looking at their grief counselors’ certificates on the wall cannot tell the difference, what then?

In 2020, Washburn of Northwestern University co-authored a study on specialty mental health certifications with two colleagues, including Gerald Rosen, a psychologist and clinical professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle  They gave a “Certified Clinical Trauma Professional” certification test and materials to a 14-year-old, the daughter of an author’s friend. She answered all 50 questions correctly thanks to matching sentences in the study guide. 

In a caustic abstract, the authors wrote: “We demonstrate that an 8th grader with no prior mental health education or training can pass a test intended to assess expert levels of knowledge obtained from a workshop.” 

Rosen, in fact, remembers when qualifications were even more lenient. “In the 1970s, you didn’t even need to have a high school degree,” he said. “It was unbelievable. Anyone could call themselves a counselor.”

Credentialing: Not the cat’s meow

But the three professors weren’t the first ones to go after the certification industry.

Two decades ago, Steve Eichel, a psychologist known for his research on destructive cults and mind control, grew increasingly exasperated and dubious of credentials in his profession. He decided to credential his cat – yes, you read that right – to showcase the lack of checks and balances in the industry. “This was a surprisingly easy thing to do,” he wrote in an article published on his website.

Eichel was compelled to explain himself after a reporter wrote to him in 2002 asking how to reach Dr. Zoe D. Katze. “The cat is out of the bag,” he wrote. “Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht. is a cat. In fact, she is my cat. Those familiar with basic German have probably already enjoyed a laugh. ‘Zoe Die Katze’ literally translates to ‘Zoe the cat.’”

He reported that his cat’s credentials looked impressive and that she had been certified by three major hypnotherapy associations, “having met their ‘strict training requirements’ and having had her background thoroughly reviewed.”

The psychologist was driven to certify his cat, he wrote, after hearing too many prospective clients complain that they had found someone else “with all these certifications and diplomas and he/she charges half of what you psychologists charge.” His breaking point came when he discovered another colleague online who had a PhD from “a notorious diploma mill” and listed “a veritable alphabet soup” of certifications and diplomas after his name. 

After Eichel added Zoe as an “authorized user” on his credit card, everything fell into place. “In the nefarious world of quasi-credentialing and diploma scams, money talks. Or at least it meows,” he wrote. After Dr. Katze received one credential, other associations that had reciprocity agreements awarded more. “Not bad for a cat that’s not even a purebred,” he wrote.

Eichel noted that a banker asked for Zoe’s social security number, but “cheerfully relented when I told him it would take me some time to search for it.” The certification industry isn’t responsible for the banker’s lack of rigor, of course, but Eichel’s point still holds: It’s far too easy to pass these tests and get certified.

Eichel turned more serious when he discussed the meaning of his cat’s credentials. He dismissed the idea of stricter laws on credentialing, which he thinks would do more harm than good, since what constitutes “good” therapy is hard to define. However, he called on readers to help monitor themselves, “to examine our own motivations for obtaining credentials (both legitimate and dubious), to police ourselves and our own professions, and to do our best to educate the public.” 

The tale of Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht, made a lasting impression on the experts I spoke with. Twenty years later, not once did a source fail to mention the story to me. Because 20 years later, it seems like almost no progress has been made.

Online grief courses abound

For consumers, certifications are supposed to signify a set of minimum competencies. But in a competitive market, credentials have also become an avenue to distinguish yourself. Quite naturally, some professionals are attracted by less expensive and less time-consuming courses that offer a quick way to get visibility or access to a network of prospective clients.

I looked into six grief recovery and/or counseling certification courses for this story. Four of them – offered by the Grief Recovery Institute, the Global Grief Institute, PESI and Udemy – are among the first to come up in an internet search for grief therapy certification. Two others are offered by professional associations. I found that the rigor, the work required and the education prerequisites to seek certification varied widely.

The Global Grief Institute, for example, which urges people to “get your piece of the $100 Billion dollar Coaching industry,” doesn’t require a college degree; in fact, it appears to discourage participants from getting one (see Facebook posting, left). It’s able to certify mental health newbies like myself because it markets its courses under the term “coach” – and coach isn’t a protected job title in the U.S.; neither is “professional” or “specialist.” Protected job titles such as psychologist or social worker require completion of specific training courses, usually a graduate degree in psychology or related fields. 

Interestingly, the designation “counselor” isn’t protected equally across the country, either: Most states require counselors to obtain a license to practice. But certain states allow unlicensed counselors to practice if they don’t advertise themselves as licensed.  

Since laws differ from state to state, the landscape is difficult to navigate for patients as well as professionals seeking to get certified. Of the four commercial certification outfits, one is being sued for deceptive pricing and has racked up hundreds of outraged consumer complaints. (See accompanying summary of other grief counseling training organizations and of two rigorous professional certification providers.)

APA stamp of approval?

The credentialed cat experiment – and most recently, my own experience – underscore that certification for grief practitioners needs improvement. The mental health field has always strived to become as credible and respected as regular health care, and the concept of certifications and credentials, in fact, comes from medicine. 

You can ask a surgeon for his track records of successful operations, or a gastroenterologist about his rate of successful colonoscopies. But how do you apply this level of rigor to a profession often characterized by subjectivity? How do you make sure counselors in general are skilled and reputable? 

Certification attempts to address these questions, and not all the training is questionable, of course. The American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP), for example, issues well-regarded certifications that involve extensive work and prerequisites. 

Without an oversight agency, many look to the American Psychological Association as a gatekeeper. The APA has a section of its website called “Approved Sponsors of Continuing Education” – CE providers the association recognizes as trustworthy and professional. Udemy is not on it. Neither are the Global Grief Institute or the Grief Recovery Institute. But PESI is, and you can click through to its listing of classes and webinars.

APA’s list is theoretically only relevant for psychologists. However, the APA does approve sponsors of CE courses created by laypeople if they meet its lengthy standards and criteria for CE content. The APA’s seal is widely seen as a stamp of approval – and PESI, for example, advertises the APA seal on its own website.

Is there a gatekeeper in the house?

Perhaps it’s not necessary to have a professional background to be an effective grief coach or peer counselor.  Many people who want to enter the field mention that they have experienced grievous losses of their own that motivate them to help other people in their suffering.

There is also a growing movement of people with lived experience with mental illness and recovery who want to use their experiences to help others. Peer support specialists are even eligible to be paid for their work with funds from the federal Medicaid system – if they have completed training and certification programs sanctioned by each state. 

So what’s the harm in the lack of strict national standards in the grief counseling industry? To begin with, peers and others who want to work with people who are grieving deserve the best possible training. At present,  professionals and non-professionals alike may pay for continuing education that isn’t optimal or even scientifically valid.  More importantly, patients dealing with profound grief could find themselves working with people who have no real training – beyond an easily passed on-line course.

Jolene Formaini, a retired nurse who ran a bereavement program for a Pennsylvania hospice, recalls the story of a mother grieving over the death of her college-aged daughter. She sought help from a woman who billed herself as a “certified”  grief counselor but had no clinical training. When Mother’s Day came, her counselor sent her flowers and a card signed with her daughter’s name. 

“She was crushed,” says Formaini. For this mother, it felt like going back to square one in her grieving process. “There is no course in the world that would say that’s okay,” says Formaini. She believes marketing oneself as a certified grief counselor despite not completing any appropriate program is “dangerous.”

Licenses and board certifications, at least, give patients an avenue to complain. Psychologists certified by the ABPP can lose their certification if sanctioned by the licensing board or even have their license revoked. An unlicensed counselor, therapist, coach or professional who’s been handed bogus credentials isn’t held to a set of minimum standards.

“If somebody just calls themselves a grief counselor and they give you bad advice, there’s no profession for you to appeal to. No one regulates their behavior,” said Gregory Neimeyer, the APA’s associate executive director for professional development and continuing education. 

And gatekeepers are hard to find: Counseling and psychology have become increasingly specialized and universities don’t have the resources to provide hyper-specific training. States don’t want to halt innovation since they can’t keep up in creating specialized licenses for each new, potentially effective therapy. National boards and associations are shackled by lack of time and resources.

That means people needing help with their grief may face unexpected hazards, experts say.

“We want to raise the awareness of the public that you should be careful when somebody says they’re certified, to make sure that they’re certified by something that’s bona fide within the profession,” said Washburn.

Kathy Richardson, a licensed counselor and assistant professor at Rosemont College, advises patients to ask grief practitioners about their educational background and training before committing: “Where were they trained? What’s their educational background? Did they just get a Black Friday deal or 50% off a workshop and they went ‘now I’m a world renowned grief specialist?’”

Down the rabbit hole

Richardson’s words were ringing in my ears as I opened a new tab. A quick internet search on “How to get a certification in grief counseling” displayed an attractive offering: a certification with “a minimum of 6 hours of continuing education in specific grief counseling topics.” I clicked on the link. It led me to Evergreen Certifications, a private company that provides certifications in behavioral health, healthcare, speech-language, physical therapy, occupational therapy and education. I emailed the company, identified myself as a journalist, requested an interview and got an automated acknowledgment – but no further reply or interview opportunity.

I continued my research. Of the four grief recovery courses approved by Evergreen, two were available through PESI, a leader in healthcare continuing education. PESI markets mostly to health care professionals, but it also allows non-professionals (in categories such as ‘parent/guardian’) to take various courses.

Unlike other continuing education providers, PESI doesn’t give out certifications. It provides the training and credits required to qualify for certifications from Evergreen and others. I thought PESI and Evergreen were separate entities, but court and tax records show that PESI actually owns Evergreen, which was founded in 2017. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been advertised by either organization. (For more on PESI’s internal financial workings, see here).

“We don’t hide the fact that [Evergreen is] part of PESI, but we don’t feel the need to also advertise it because it does sit as its own entity,” PESI’s deputy director Michael Olson said in an interview. “Evergreen standards will honor education from any provider that meets the standards.” The cost for PESI’s Grief Treatment Certification Training course was $219.99 for a $439.97 value, according to its website. 

I wasn’t especially lucky to get this deal since the online course has almost always been on sale. Since enrolling in PESI’s certification program a year ago, I have received 808 promotional emails for various courses, seminars and workshops – more than two a day on average. Anything is fertile ground for massive discounts: summer sales, Memorial Day sales, spring sales, St. Patrick’s Day sales, and Valentine’s Day sales.

The completion of PESI’s Grief Treatment Certification Training relied on self-monitored attendance records and a multiple-choice quiz. This was the test I was able to pass on that Sunday afternoon of bread-baking, with a certificate of completion available to download soon afterward.

But could I finally advertise myself as a certified grief and bereavement practitioner? This was still unclear. The documents I received from PESI and Udemy were indeed certificates, but they did not mention “certification.” This distinction is confusing but critical. 

My certificates – also called certificates of successful completion – are proof that I attended and completed a course. That paves the way for students to apply for certification, which allows you to add a multitude of letters after your name: CGP for instance (Certified Grief Professional). In fact, several of my fellow Udemy classmates had already posted various diploma-like certificates to the “Licenses and Certifications” section of their LinkedIn profiles. Some of them were mental health professionals; others were not.

I noticed a similar trend scrolling through the forum page of the PESI course I took. The drop-down list of professions upon signing up included non-professional occupations such as “teacher,” “school administration,” “physical therapist,” “audiologist,” “massage therapist,” “coder,” “attorney,” and even “HR professional.”

I was uncertain how to identify myself since the multiple-choice boxes included no category for journalist, so I initially checked the first one: “Counselor,” then changed to “parent/guardian” since that was the closest I could find to my situation. 

When  I called  Evergreen to find out why I had never been issued a certification,  a customer service representative explained that I had to be a licensed mental health professional.  That’s not what PESI’s director Michael Olson told me, however.  He said in an interview that the certification would be different than a mental health professional’s, but that non-professionals are eligible to get certified if they pass the test.

Either way, I had another option now. The Grief and Bereavement Counselling course offered by Udemy is accredited by the International Association of Therapists (IAOTH), an organization based in the U.K. I promptly signed up for a membership, adding both my Udemy certificate and the PESI one to the qualifications section. 
And today – voilà – here I am: listed on the association’s website and ostensibly available for hire.

The post On the internet, anyone can be a grief therapist now appeared first on Coda Story.

Bird flu, as it is more commonly known, is the latest in a series of disease outbreaks that have plagued the U.K. over the past two decades. Outbreaks, including foot-and-mouth disease in the early 2000s, swine flu in 2009 and Covid since 2020, have been made worse by a political system that, at its best, treats science with indifference and, at its worst, with disdain.

In the midst of the bird flu outbreak, an October 2022 parliamentary committee report revealed that the main facility for the country’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, a site in the town of Weybridge, on London’s outskirts, is being underfunded. This puts the U.K. at risk of entering another deadly outbreak unprepared. 

This neglect is also deepening a rift between the scientific community, whose job it is to advise, and politicians, whose job it is to decide what course of action to take during public health crises. This neglect was laid bare in the government’s Covid response. In early 2020, members of parliament appointed a committee of scientists to advise policymakers on how to tackle the virus, known as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. But nearly every aspect of this process happened in secret — the names of committee members were not made public and meetings happened behind closed doors.

In response to the near-total lack of autonomy and transparency in the official advisory group, in May 2020, experts set up an independent advisory group (known as the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or Independent SAGE) that works on a volunteer basis to provide independent scientific advice to the government and the public on how to minimize deaths and support the country’s recovery. In a March 2022 review of its work to date, Independent SAGE wrote: “Scientific advisers should be critical friends to governments, speaking truth to power.”

Other experts too have called for scientific advisors to be given more autonomy as a mechanism for ensuring politicians do not just seek out whichever advice best aligns with their other political goals.

But so far, this doesn’t seem to be happening. After the country steered itself past the worst of the pandemic, a separate parliamentary report criticized the U.K.’s approach to the crisis, saying it was “too reactive as opposed to anticipatory.” Ministers have been trotted out to reassure the U.K. public and global partners that the government is doing everything it can to prepare for future pandemics. 

Yet many such assurances have proven hollow, as the government also has stepped back from several vital research efforts. One is the Pandemic Sciences Institute, which was designed to improve bio-defenses by providing the U.K. with the knowledge and strategies required to respond to the next major outbreak and avoid the failures that defined the Covid response. According to the Telegraph, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised the institute over $175 million but never delivered. Whether the U.K.’s new conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who came into power in October, will follow through on this and other bold commitments is yet to be seen.

Kate Bingham, who in 2020 steered the U.K.’s vaccine procurement and deployment as the chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, in late November told a parliamentary inquiry that the government was failing to prepare for a future pandemic by not supporting scientific research into variants and by allowing access to vaccines to wane. Baffled by this lack of leadership, Bingham said she is beginning to see it as “deliberate Government policy not to invest and not to support the sector.”

When conservative politicians ignored their own government’s advice by refusing to wear masks in the House of Commons, it angered scientists, with some frustrated by what they saw as a pervasive culture of prioritizing ideological concerns over scientific advice. For Kit Yates, a member of the independent advisory group and senior lecturer in mathematical sciences at the University of Bath, it was evidence that the U.K. has not learned its lesson from the Covid pandemic.

Scientists have also felt that the government is too willing to throw them under the bus when things go wrong — prior to becoming prime minister, Sunak said that scientists should not have been given so much power in responding to Covid. Yates himself sees a link between this rhetoric and attacks that he personally received online and in the press, as political frustration with scientists trickles down into society.

Natalie Bennett, a Green Party member in the House of Lords, says that the political right are more resistant to science and that the current government is worse at dealing with science than any other for the last twenty years. But beyond ideology, neglect is also underpinned by a lack of understanding of science across the political system.

“When you look at so many of the issues, whether it’s Covid, whether it’s the climate emergency and nature crisis, whether it’s issues of public health, there’s so few people from either side of the house, who know how to ask the right questions,” Bennett said.

The consequences of neglecting science are not just limited to the Covid outbreak. Bennet told me over the phone that future disease outbreaks could be far worse than Covid.

In October 2022, as concerns about the bird flu outbreak were reaching a crisis point, the Public Accounts Committee in the U.K. Parliament released a report warning that the U.K. government was failing to prioritize the significant threat posed by animal diseases to the country’s health, trade, farming and rural communities. It raised concerns about the state of the U.K.’s main animal health facility at Weybridge, which it said “has been left to deteriorate to an alarming extent,” leaving the country unprepared for high category animal disease outbreaks or to deal with more than one outbreak at a time.

After a long period of underinvestment and mismanagement, there is now a redevelopment plan to improve the site, but this will take more than 12 years, and the committee is unsure the government will cough up the billions of dollars needed to properly carry it out. The government is underestimating the threat posed by diseases such as rabies, bovine tuberculosis and African swine flu, said the committee. 

While bird flu has decimated bird populations, causing devastating effects on the livelihoods of poultry farmers, a swine flu outbreak could do the same to pigs and the pork industry in the near future.

The Weybridge facility and the government department that runs it have been essential in ensuring the U.K. catches animal disease outbreaks early, according to Paul Wigley, a professor of avian infection and immunity at the University of Liverpool. Wigley’s concerns are not just limited to known diseases such foot-and-mouth disease but also to “novel” ones.

“There is always a chance that something will leap from somewhere that we have not seen before or become a new variant of something that we have not really seen before,” Wigley said.

Such diseases could pose a significant threat to human life. We have had Covid. It is now widely accepted that another pandemic is not a question of if but when. Like a turkey voting for Christmas, the government’s neglect of science puts the U.K. at risk of sleepwalking into that crisis.

The post The UK is sleepwalking into another health crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Russian bio labs 

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the internet was set alight with a pro-Russia conspiracy theory that the U.S. was running secret bioweapons labs on Russia’s borders. The theory was used as part of Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, and was pushed by Russian state media before being picked up by online conspiracy theorists and QAnon adherents, as well as influencers like Alex Jones. Even British comedian and social commentator Russell Brand ran with the narrative, weighing in on the lie to his five-million-strong following. The myth that the U.S. is building bioweapons on Russia’s borders goes back years. Chinese officials and state media also promoted the conspiracy theory, using it as an opportunity to parrot its long-running claim that the U.S. was behind the Covid-19 pandemic.

The U.S. bioweapons narrative is nothing new. For years, the Kremlin has made extensive claims that the U.S.-owned Lugar Lab in Georgia — which monitors infectious diseases — was secretly running “germ warfare” operations, and has said it’s responsible for everything from Covid to the Zika virus to plagues of stink bugs. Thanks to this conspiracy theory, even biolabs in the U.S. itself are facing opposition and conspiracy claims. A new biolab in Kansas opened recently to study some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Though some concerns about the lab were legitimate, they were accompanied by a torrent of conspiracy theories, reminiscent of those in Ukraine, pushing the notion that the lab was really building bioweapons. 

Anti-vaxxers refuse to back down post-Covid 

At the outset of the year, Canadian truckers drove cross-country to participate in a standoff with the Canadian government, protesting Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates. Their action inspired motorists in France, Israel, Finland, Australia and the Netherlands to stage similar protests demanding an end to pandemic measures. Many of the “Freedom Convoy” social media groups were being run by fake accounts tied to content farms in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Romania. They were heavily endorsed by QAnon influencers, and QAnon logos were seen emblazoned on trucks during the protests, while other organizations among the truckers claimed that the pandemic had been orchestrated by Bill Gates with the intention of injecting 5G microchips into the population. 

As most of the world returned to some semblance of normality after two years of Covid restrictions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that anti-vaccine activists might quiet down. But a new and terrifying trend emerged, in which hardline anti-vaccine adherents the world over staged a “battle over blood” and began refusing blood transfusions from vaccinated donors. Perhaps the most extreme example of this strange and scary phenomenon was a case in New Zealand, in which two sets of parents refused donor blood for their seriously ill children. 

QAnon goes mainstream

The U.S. midterms saw record numbers of QAnon-linked candidates running for office. And  candidates, including Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Arizona State Representative Leo Biasiucci, who have all been linked with the conspiracy movement or spoken at QAnon conventions, managed to win seats. Two darlings of the digital disinformation scene — Christian nationalist and QAnon devotee Doug Mastriano and Covid skeptic and celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz both lost their bids. In the recesses of Telegram and other social media platforms, QAnoners celebrated Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and began returning to the platform in their droves. Musk himself began tweeting QAnon-aligned messaging and using QAnon tactics, like accusing his critics of pedophilia, to bolster the support from his conspiracist fans. 

The high tide of antisemitism 

After antisemitic incidents in 2021 reached an all-time high, 2022 was no better. The rapper Kanye West faced a growing backlash after he spiraled into a public embrace of antisemitism with an ever-escalating series of outbursts targeting Jewish people. On conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, he repeatedly praised Hitler and the Nazis, to the extent that Jones had to make a rare intervention by admitting “the Nazis did a lot of very bad things.” During his outburst, Kanye mentioned that 300 Zionists ran the world — borrowing directly a fringe conspiracy theory called “the Committee of 300” that is over a century old and was commonly used by the Nazis to justify their persecution of the Jews.

Reichsburger 

The late-breaking entrant award among the conspiracy theorists of 2022 goes to the Reichsburger movement behind the attempted coup in Germany at the beginning of December. The hard-right movement, accused of plotting against the German government, adheres to a grab bag of conspiracy theories. It’s not unlike QAnon, but it also has uniquely German ideas, namely that the country should return to having a Kaiser and go back to the Germany of the 1800s. As a result, adherents to this moment call themselves “sovereign citizens” and don’t recognize the current state of Germany or its laws. The movement came into its own during the pandemic, when Reichsburger followers protested against Covid laws, and in doing so, merged with QAnoners and anti-vaccine advocates.

The post The year in conspiracy theories appeared first on Coda Story.

“Today, Mozambique enters the annals of world history as one of the countries that export liquefied natural gas, which, in addition to representing an alternative source of supply, contributes greatly to the energy security of the countries with the highest consumption,” declared Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi. This moment, he insisted, “must bring pride to all Mozambicans.”

Yet life in Cabo Delgado has increasingly brought pain and fear, with thousands displaced to refugee camps to the south following vicious ongoing battles between government troops and militants linked to the Islamic State, with both sides accused of war crimes. Four thousand people have been killed and more than a million people have fled their homes in the five years of fighting. The abandoned buildings bear the scars of an insurgency that the Mozambique government — even when bolstered by forces from neighboring states and mercenaries from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group — cannot control.

TotalEnergies, one of a nexus of American and European energy companies present in gas-rich Cabo Delgado, declared force majeure at their site last year, following a nearby attack, and ceased operations. Rights groups accuse the government and its supporting forces of focusing on security for global gas exporters over the local population, amid a new worldwide urgency to find gas supplies following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There is a prioritization of optics for the world to see that these areas are fine and therefore investment should come, rather than a prioritization of basic conditions for people to go back,” Zenaida Machado of Human Rights Watch told CNN.

That urgency was on full display at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort town where dozens of heads of state and tens of thousands of delegates gathered to ostensibly tackle the climate crisis. European Council president Charles Michel began his address to the conference with the warning that the “Kremlin has chosen to make energy a weapon of mass destabilization.” And, he added gravely, “it is pointing this weapon directly at Europe and at Europe’s global energy markets.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, whose trip to Sharm el-Sheikh was punctuated by numerous energy deals, addressed the climate talks with what she presented as a solution to Europe’s energy crisis. “For Europe,” she said, “the answer is RePowerEU,” the bloc’s plan to phase out its dependence on Russian fossil fuels in part by scaling up the use of renewable energy. “Let us not take the highway to hell,” Von der Leyen said somberly, seemingly quoting ancient Australian rockers AC/DC. “Let us earn the clean ticket to heaven.”

But even amidst talk of energy independence through ratcheting up renewable energy supplies within Europe, the bloc is on a renewed hunt for natural gas reserves across Africa.

Von der Leyen’s clean ticket to heaven seems to stop at Europe’s borders. It includes plans to increase cooperation to build a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan, potential new supply deals with Algeria and Qatar, as well as accelerating orders of LNG from Egypt and Israel. RePowerEU also notes the need to “explore the export potential of sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Senegal and Angola.” This divide between encouraging growth in renewables as part of a green transition within Europe and what some have labeled a “dash for gas” outside the EU’s borders has provoked anger and alarm among climate advocates.

The British Court of Appeal is due to hear a legal challenge from Friends of the Earth, who argue that the British government’s decision to approve $1.15 billion in financing for TotalEnergies’ LNG project in Cabo Delgado is incompatible with the commitments made in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Exploration or broadening extraction in gas-rich countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mozambique or Egypt put the world on a path to accelerate even faster past acceptable limits of global warming and into dangerous levels where the African continent will bear the brunt of the initial consequences. African nations are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming despite accounting for, at most, 3.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually.

Evidence of climate change is already visible in many places across the continent, including flooding that displaced over 1.4 million people in Nigeria, in the same months as severe drought across the Horn of Africa that has led to a growing famine that risks affecting 82 million people in eastern Africa according to the U.N. “Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of this crisis. If you think 2022 is bad, beware of what is coming in 2023,” said leading World Food Programme official Michael Dunford. He added that the Horn of Africa “is experiencing the worst drought in over 40 years.”

Fears about the consequences for Africa as the world remains on track to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming have done little to stop business interests discussing the continent’s gas reserves, estimated to be around 13% of the world’s total. “Wind and solar are not going to help Africa industrialize,” said Joseph McMonigle, the secretary general of the International Energy Forum, at an industry gas conference in Dubai in early November. “They need to have access to hydrocarbons.” The African Union expressed a similar sentiment before COP27, pointing to natural gas as a short-term measure to solve the problem of 600 million Africans currently living without electricity.

Many of those looking to Africa as a business opportunity have prioritized gas for export over improving living conditions for those on the continent. “The energy crisis that emerged during the pandemic and that was exacerbated by the war in Ukraine has given East African gas greater appeal,” wrote Carole Nakhle, an energy economist and CEO of the London-based analysis firm Crystol Energy. She noted that countries such as Tanzania or Mozambique “may benefit over the medium term from Europe’s efforts to diversify its energy sources and thus see stronger export demand from the region, especially given the European Union’s recent decision to classify gas as sustainable.”

Gas producing nations such as the COP27 host Egypt have been part of this effort to rebrand natural gas as sustainable, claiming it will form an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels — despite being a fossil fuel. Cairo hosted a meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in late October, shortly before COP27, welcoming officials from Russia, Iran, Qatar and nearby Algeria, a key natural gas supplier to Europe. The conference also welcomed officials from Angola and Mozambique, which sits atop an estimated one percent of the entire world’s gas reserves.

Egyptian officials were keen to present gas as the solution, rather than part of the problem. “We are convening at a critical time when global efforts are dedicated towards achieving the energy trilemma for security, sustainability and affordability. As the cleanest hydrocarbon [fossil] fuel, natural gas is seen as the perfect solution that strikes the right balance, and will continue to play a key role in the future energy mix,” Egypt’s Minister for Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla, told the conference.

Yet even as Molla spoke to the conference, his own country provided a warning to other African nations about the consequences of prizing gas exports above domestic need. Following an August cabinet directive, the lights were switched off in public buildings in central Cairo and shoppers in the capital’s malls fanned themselves in the crushing heat as the air conditioning was cut to conserve energy so that more gas could be exported.

The Egyptian government has pledged to increase its development of solar energy projects and has publicly sought investment in renewables, all in a bid to export the maximum possible amount of gas in order to bring in desperately needed foreign currency. This has not automatically resulted in a smooth shift to burning cleaner fuels.

Instead, as the multicolored neon lights adorning the streets around Cairo Tahrir square dim, the Egyptian state has been forced to rapidly increase the burning of a heavy fuel oil named mazut in power stations nationwide in order to plug the energy gap, according to a government leak published by Climate Change News. Mazut, a blend of heavy hydrocarbons that can contain sulfites and heavy metals, is now consumed in over 20% of power stations compared to just under 4% at the same time last year.

Ministers who met at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum cautioned against “misguided calls to stop investing in natural gas projects,” in their statement following the meeting, warning that this could cause “supply-demand imbalance, which has been exacerbated by geopolitical tensions.” They applauded Egypt for hosting COP27, as well as praising the United Arab Emirates, a gas exporter, for hosting next year’s COP28 and presenting “a great opportunity to make a case for gas in the energy transition as well as to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular in Africa’s development.”

While talk of development and Africa’s wealth of untapped gas reserves proliferates in boardrooms and conference rooms around the world, Mozambique’s bid to become a major gas exporter shows how such economic ambition plays out for communities on the ground. Since an American company found gas off the coast of Cabo Delgado region in 2010, the northern province has become the scene of some of  Africa’s largest private gas investments, including TotalEnergies’ 20-billion Mozambique LNG. According to the French energy giant, the Mozambique LNG project represents a coalition of some of Africa’s largest export loans, financed through $14.9 billion in loans from eight different export credit agencies, 19 commercial banks and a loan from the African Development Bank, saddling an already heavily indebted state with further debt repayments.

There is little evidence that the population of Cabo Delgado has felt any benefits from the multi-billion-dollar gas projects that now dominate the shoreline. Instead, according to environmental groups, an estimated 2,000 people who lived and fished in the area were evicted to make way for gas extraction infrastructure. In the past five years, Cabo Delgado became the center of an armed insurrection in which, the International Crisis Group said, “most of the Mozambican rank and file militants are motivated by their perceived socio-economic exclusion amid major mineral and hydrocarbon discoveries in the region.”

Outside Cabo Delgado, the wider population of Mozambique also appears unlikely to receive any of the alleged development benefits that could come from sitting atop this wealth of natural gas. “Despite the incredibly limited access to electricity in the country, the liquid natural gas projects will not benefit Mozambican citizens lacking access to electricity, since most of the gas will be transformed into LNG and immediately sent to other countries, in particular markets in Asia and Europe,” observed the environmental groups Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth in a 2020 report. “Furthermore, in order to build and maintain needed infrastructure for this project, the government will need to divert funds that could instead be spent on other more sustainable investments such as renewable energy development, education and social programs.”

Mozambique will also have to deal with the heavy environmental impacts of gas extraction, notably increased levels of harmful methane gas, even as Europe enjoys the benefits of greater access to supplies of LNG. Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth warned that the projects risk increasing Mozambique’s greenhouse gas emissions by 14%.

Charity Migwi, a regional campaigner for 350Africa.org, said that African nations buying into the idea that exporting their gas reserves will bring development are being sold a lie. “Before even a drop of gas was exported from Mozambique,” she said, “the project caused massive issues, it brought about conflict among people, and violence as well as internal displacement. Everyone wants a share [of the gas] and that need for control creates conflict.”

Migwi told me that Europe’s focus on hunting for fossil fuels in Africa hampers efforts at genuine energy independence, rather than spurring development. “The dash for gas in Africa threatens the potential investment and development of renewable energy in the continent. Africa has an abundance of renewable energy alternatives like solar. This is the real solution that spurs Africa’s economic growth, especially when decentralized, without causing adverse climatic impacts.” Short-term thinking in Europe and knee-jerk responses to the war in Ukraine, she argued, have debilitating long-term impacts in Africa. 

“I don’t even think the dash for gas in Africa can meet the European Union’s energy needs in the near future,” Migwi said. “That’s part of what makes it so destructive.”

The post Europe scrambles for gas in Africa despite climate concerns appeared first on Coda Story.

It also hosts Kansas State University, where Hensley — who has studied some of the world’s scariest diseases — was going to speak. At the time, Hensley was part of the leadership at the National Institutes of Health. While she was visiting campus, she heard about a new, gigantic high-security lab called the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF for short, that was going to be built adjacent to K-State. There, scientists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would study very contagious, and often fatal, diseases that affect animals and humans.

Around that time, construction on the 48-acre, 1.25-billion-dollar campus was just beginning. “I saw the pictures of the facilities and I was like, ‘Oh, that would be a really cool place to work,’” Hensley said.

Years later, a colleague called her with what sounded like a perfect opportunity: NBAF, whose construction finished earlier this year, was looking for someone to head up its Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit. That group would study existing high-consequence (read: dangerous) diseases that spread between humans and animals and those that are just beginning to rear their germy heads into existence or prominence on this planet. Scientists across NBAF would study foot-and-mouth disease, classical and African swine fevers, Rift Valley fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Japanese encephalitis and Nipah virus. These diseases affect animals like cattle, pigs, birds, bats, snakes and frogs, and also Homo sapiens.

The gig did sound perfect. Hensley’s son even thought it was a good idea, although he’d have to leave his friends in Maryland for this version of Manhattan.

NBAF officials apparently thought Hensley sounded pretty good, too: They hired her to lead the new team. “I think we could use a little adventure,” Hensley’s son told her.

The pair arrived in Kansas in August 2022, not long after the facility’s commissioning started. It had been under construction since 2015, and Manhattan had been chosen as the site in 2009 (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has managed the construction, but the USDA will run the facility). That’s a long time to have a mere paper-and-scaffolding lab, but the timeline makes sense because NBAF is a fundamentally new kind of project for the U.S. It’s subject to the highest safety protocols, a set of standards for “biosafety level 4,” or BSL-4, labs. These labs have to decontaminate everything before it goes out. They have dedicated air supply and exhaust systems and maintain negative air pressure, meaning physics dictates that air (and the pathogens wafting within it) only flows in, not out. People working inside, meanwhile, wear full-body, positive-pressure suits, so that air and particles from the lab can’t get in. Doing their work, they resemble badly-outfitted astronauts.

The BSL-4 designation and its attendant restrictions are reserved for places where scientists work with life-threatening, highly transmissible diseases for which there are usually no treatments or cures. And NBAF will be the first BSL-4 facility in the country that can handle large livestock. If you’ve ever tried to deal with a cow, you know that’s not easy even in a BSL-0 situation.

But it’s necessary if NBAF is to fulfill its mission of studying diseases that affect both humans and animals (zoonotic illnesses), deadly and currently untreatable diseases that affect animals abroad but haven’t yet crossed U.S. borders and related illnesses that are just popping up in nature. The average person is perhaps more familiar with the last category, nearly three years into a pandemic caused by a shiny new virus. 

Scientists like those on Hensley’s team will work to understand germs’ fundamentals and determine how to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. NBAF is replacing an aging facility in New York, called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which couldn’t host large animals or diseases as dire as those NBAF will. Plum Island was only a BSL-3 lab.

Officials picked Manhattan as Plum Island’s successor in part because of the density of animal health companies in the area, as well as the scientific expertise found at K-State and its Biosecurity Research Institute. All of that exists, of course, because lots of livestock live nearby, and agriculture is a big part of the state’s economy.

But those are precisely some of the reasons critics, and conspiracists, have historically opposed the facility. Should there be a leak or an accident, a pathogen could find many unwitting animal hosts. University campuses like the one on which NBAF sits host academics flitting in and out (as Hensley did on her lecture visit), potentially taking pathogens with them. Those are grounded concerns, but more conspiratorially, some have called NBAF a bioweapons lab.

In high-containment biology labs like NBAF, though, the line between antagonistic misinformation and grounded concern is thin. And that means NBAF has to balance (at least) three things: the value of its research, the real risks of keeping big-time germs around and public concerns, both real and imagined.

The value of the work that Hensley and others will do within NBAF’s 574,000 square feet is clear: The World Health Organization estimates that around three-quarters of new diseases are zoonotic. And if a bunch of livestock came down with an exponentially spreading illness, it could devastate food supplies, economies and obviously the lives of the animals themselves.

That last part is important to Hensley. “What became really clear to me over the last few years is there was a lot of attention to, and we’re all very good now at understanding, how viruses will jump from animals to people and the impact that that can have,” she said. “But we’re not thinking a lot about what happens when that virus jumps back into animals, or when it goes from one animal species to another.” And that does happen: SARS-CoV-2, for instance, seems to have hopped from humans to mink. The virus has flamed through mink farms, killing thousands. Farmers have “culled” millions more in response.

Every time such a species jump happens, Hensley said, the virus gets a fresh chance to change and evolve — to get better at, say, spreading or becoming more virulent. In her unit of the lab, Hensley hopes to spot, and respond to, shifts like that as they happen. In these early stages, before the lab is actually open, she’s been setting up projects with partners abroad, in part to help them watch for new or jumping germs. After all, inevitably, those pathogens won’t stay in their countries of origin. “Ideally, when things do change, or there are new viruses, we will pick them up earlier and earlier,” she said.

That on-the-spot reaction has been Hensley’s catalyst since she became a scientist, which she did in part because of her father, who has the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia and is also a clinician.

One day when Hensley was home on a visit from college, her father took her to a medical conference he was attending. Outside the venue stood a number of protesters: They were fighting back against the lack of treatments available for HIV positive people or those with AIDS.

That struggle was personal for Hensley’s father, and soon became personal for her, too. Hemophilia interventions at the time involved giving patients a soup of concentrated blood “product,” cooked from the fluids of hundreds of different people. Sometimes — a lot of times, actually — that aggregate blood contained HIV. In the early 1980s, contaminated blood gave the fatal virus to about half of the 16,000 American hemophiliacs and 12,000 others who received blood transfusions, according to the 1995 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Study HIV Transmission Through Blood and Blood Product.

“On the way home, I asked my dad if he had been tested for HIV,” Hensley said.

He had not, he said. He and her mother had both determined that ignorance was bliss because the only treatment available was a problematic drug with lots of side effects. If a better drug came along, he said, sure, he’d get tested. But for now, he’d rather not know. “It was what I always call a moment of impact,’” she said, in almost startup-founder language. “You’re sitting there and this realization becomes personal.”

Hensley’s realization took the form of a question: How many people might still be alive if scientists had been more proactive about the HIV epidemic and acted earlier to, for instance, protect the blood supply?

Maybe, she thought, she could be part of that preemptive action in the future. When she went back to school, she changed her major. “I wanted to study how viruses jumped species and try to get ahead of the next pandemic,” she said.

After Hensley finished her schooling, she went to work for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — USAMRIID, a place immortalized in “The Hot Zone,” a book by Richard Preston. There, Hensley dealt with all the bloody diseases you never want to get, like Ebola, Marburg virus and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

For that research, Hensley toiled in the literal hot zone, donning an astronaut-esque BSL-4 getup. Some of her experience there is actually included in a different Richard Preston book: “The Demon in the Freezer.” One chapter focuses on Hensley, describing an accident she had. One day, sick with a cold, she cut herself with scissors, while in the presence of the often-fatal Ebola virus.

She didn’t end up falling ill, but it had been a close, scary call. “I think you need to suck it up and get back in there and finish your experiment,” her father told her when they first spoke after the accident, according to “The Demon in the Freezer.” If she didn’t get right back on that horse, she might not ever saddle up again.

Clearly, she’s stayed in the rodeo ring for a long time. And now she will be working alongside some of the animals you’d actually find in one.

Accidents like Hensley’s nevertheless highlight the kinds of things that worry people near BSL-4 facilities like NBAF (and, as the spread of SARS-CoV-2 shows us, everywhere in the world is effectively “nearby”). If a researcher infects themselves, or pathogenic particles otherwise escape, it’s possible for a disease to spread beyond the confines of the lab. In Kansas, for instance, the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association long opposed NBAF’s construction, in part fearing that an accidental outbreak would infect livestock and spread like prairie fire.

It would be easy to just tell concerned residents they were overreacting. After all, “BSL-4” doesn’t mean “dangerous research level 4.” It’s not itself an indicator of how risky the work is: It’s a measure of how safe the researchers and the facility need to be, and are designed to be.

Perhaps the biggest way labs like NBAF mitigate against risk is redundancy. “They actually think through how the initial containment might fail and then have containment for containment,” said Scott Hanton, editorial director at Lab Manager, which provides resources to researchers to run their facilities more effectively and safely. The idea is to account for the fact that systems sometimes fail and sometimes multiple things can go wrong at once. “In the lab environment, we’re pretty good at dealing with a single failure,” Hanton said, “but in my experience, injuries come from two or more failures happening at the same time.”

As such, BSL-4 facilities like NBAF think about risk like a bunch of Swiss cheese, Jonathan Klane, Hanton’s coworker and senior safety editor at the publication, said. If you stack a bunch of Swiss slices, their holes often don’t line up. The stacked cheese is functionally solid. But if you stack the cheese enough times…“Probability, right?” Klane said. “Eventually, those holes — and those holes are gaps in our protective measures — do line up.” High-containment labs have to account for those gappy situations, even if they’re statistically unlikely.

And that’s to benefit everyone. “This BSL-4 facility isn’t just designed to protect the scientists who work in it,” Hanton said. “It’s also designed to protect the community in which it is placed.”

In this case, that means Manhattan and its residents, animal and human. The people of that community are right to have concerns and ask questions: Paranoid-sounding fears aren’t as far away from the actual risks as experts might like. In the U.K., for example, foot-and-mouth disease escaped a Surrey lab and infected cows at four nearby farms in 2007. NBAF’s own environmental impact statement has a whole appendix of “biocontainment lapses and laboratory-acquired infections.” It details a significant one from the 1970s, when its predecessor facility, Plum Island, allowed foot-and-mouth disease to sneak out. “Cattle outside of the laboratory facility were found to be infected,” the document reads. “…All animals on the island were euthanized and incinerated. The virus outbreak was limited to the island.”

NBAF officials don’t want anything like that to happen and are aiming to make the facility a “high-reliability organization” — a kind of formalism that UC Berkeley researchers began to come up with in the late 1980s to describe companies that have managed to do their thing without big accidents, despite operating in environments where accidents could be expected, like nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. “We’re building a culture from the ground up,” Katherine Pawlosky, a USDA public affairs specialist, said. “This is a brand-new facility, so we have the opportunity to start with the best culture possible, rather than try to have to fix it.”

Still, the “what ifs” aren’t hype-y: They’re reasonable, and over the years of NBAF’s development, USDA and Department of Homeland Security officials had heard many of them and considered many of them themselves — for example, “What if a big tornado blows through?”

But they hadn’t seen anything quite like the April 2021 livestream of a Manhattan city commission meeting. NBAF wasn’t even on the meeting’s agenda, but as officials spoke, nearly 2,000 comments appeared beside the Facebook Live video (compared to a normal 10 or so), almost all about the BSL-4 facility. A sample:

“Who thought putting such a dangerous lab in the middle of our food supply was a great idea! ‘Mistakes’ happen all the time! Get this out of here! Put it on a remote island!”

“WHY would a Level 4 Lab be located in the middle of our BEEF supply in the heartland of our FOOD PRODUCTION?!!! This sounds intentionally criminal.”

“It’s all about the $$$. So sick of you all sacrificing the people, our food supply, our land and our health...for YOUR greed!”

“Tax $$$ should NOT be used against us to experiment on our food supply. Don’t play with fire.”

“Wuhan mutant cold viruses coming to central USA....Who wants another muti-year lockdown? Only this time with no food.....”

“They are planning the next great pandemic that can grow their pockets further”

According to a report in the Mercury, the town newspaper, these commenters — who came from all over the country and the internet — may have been spurred partly by a conservative podcaster who’d recently released an episode and written an article about NBAF. The episode’s description read: “A chilling show on bio weapons, level 4 labs, and using famine as a weapon. A history of forced industrialization and shortages. Population safety concerns are mostly a PR effort. …Why Kansas? America’s beef belt is vulnerable. Attacking food resources is an ancient evil.”

The difference between “I don’t want my cattle to get sick because of an accident” and “they are planning the next great pandemic” illustrates the difference between a worry grounded in reality and conspiracy, misinformation and disinformation. In this realm, you tend to step into dubious territory when you start accusing people of lying or hiding things, particularly if you’re taking one small data point and extrapolating it into a broader coverup. “There is this kernel of truth, you know?” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, said. “There is something to build on, which is how disinformation works anyway. You pick on this kernel of truth, and then you just build elaborate lies around that.”

To combat that construction, Lentzos said, the best thing BSL-4 facilities can do is to be transparent about the goings-on among their secluded HVAC systems. “You have to engage with your local community and talk about what it is that you’re doing,” she said.

“If there’s a void of information people make up their own, for sure,” Pawlosky admitted.

NBAF officials are trying to fill that void. “From our knowledge, we are the first USDA laboratory facility to have its own communications unit on the ground floor,” Pawlosky said. Representatives from the lab talk into microphones monthly for a local radio show and occasionally pen articles in the local newspaper. Last fiscal year, the lab did more than 200 outreach activities, like making presentations to community groups. They try, Pawlosky said, “to educate the community, to partner with the community, to make sure that NBAF isn’t just this place that sits over by the Kansas State football stadium that nobody knows anything about.”

But, actually, if people want information about BSL-4 labs in general, there is no great place for them to go. That’s something Lentzos noticed as the Covid pandemic was lassoing the world. Then, as now, people voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a BSL-4 facility, could be the source of the pandemic. This provenance got labeled a conspiracy, but the idea that a pathogen might escape, accidentally, from a lab is not in itself outrageous or conspiratorial. As scrutiny bore down on the lab, people started asking Lentzos about other such facilities. “So where’s the list of these labs?” she recalled them saying. “How many are there?”

There isn’t a list, she told them. Aside from the one on Wikipedia.

Those questions ringing her ears, she and her colleague Gregory Koblentz, director of George Mason University’s biodefense program, decided to make their own list and began to scour the world virtually for BSL-4 labs.

On some parts of the planet, it’s fairly apparent — in that labs aren’t actively hidden. But it’s rarely easy. “Even in the U.S., you don’t have a sense of exactly how many you have,” Lentzos said. There’s no central register, no DMV of BSL-4s.

In the end, though, they found more than 60, with 14 in North America, and set up the website Globalbiolabs.org to display the results. On the site, a Cartesian map of the planet is dotted north, south, east and west with yellow biohazard symbols, their spidery arms reaching toward each other, denoting the locations of known labs.

NBAF is already on there, and if you click on its icon, the map will jump to a satellite view of the K-State campus. An informational box will pop up, showing the Global Health Security Index ranking of the U.S. (“high”) and linking to its Biological Weapons Convention declarations, which contain information about labs, research programs, vaccine production and outbreaks, among other things. A little flower overlaid on the image denotes the Kansas State University Gardens nearby.

In the second phase of Lentzos and Koblentz’s project, they hope to learn more about the regulations and oversight that fence in each facility, which differ from nation to nation. There is no international body that has a mandate to keep track of or oversee pathogen labs or high-consequence biological research. “You can’t collate up the information to see bigger trends and patterns in, for example, typical accidents or typical challenges,” Lentzos said. 

What Lentzos would like to see is the life sciences equivalent of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees nuclear goings-on across the world. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, people could see the potential fallout of unchecked proliferation. They also realized that no matter which country was undertaking atomic development, the consequences wouldn’t heed borders. “Biology has never had that security moment that nuclear physicists had when the bombs went off,” Lentzos said. “So the biological community, life science community, has remained naive in many ways to the potential security implications of their work.”

But both biologists and the general public are likely more acutely aware of how disruptive, disturbing and dangerous an invisibly small pathogen can be now than they were just a few years ago. That awareness also means that more people have likely heard the term “BSL” than ever before. Hensley finds the new public familiarity to be a positive thing.

When she first started donning BSL-4 suits, her family thought her work was interesting. “Almost like it’s cute,” she said. Things first started to change after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed: People became aware of the idea of “biodefense.” “I would say it’s the first shift,” she said.

More recently, since Covid came along, people know more about viruses’ ability to hop species. They are also painfully knowledgeable about the havoc that hopping can have on society, and, Hensley said, “just how vulnerable we are.”

In this pandemic, then, Hensley has seen a second shift, toward a broader appreciation of public health and the importance of early detection and intervention — the kinds of things that have been shaping her career since she watched the protestors with her father. “It makes my life easier, I’ll be honest,” she said, “that people better appreciate what I do, and are more receptive to the laboratories and to the work and in general are just much more supportive of what we’re doing.”

Her son hasn’t wavered in his support. And now, when they go about their lives in the Little Apple and pass some sign related to Covid, he likes to remind her of something. “This is why you’re here,” he tells her.

Because if it’s not HIV, it’s anthrax. And if it’s not anthrax, it’s SARS-CoV-2. And if it’s not SARS-CoV-2, it’s whatever is coming for us, and our livestock, next.

The post The future home of the world’s most dangerous pathogens appeared first on Coda Story.

Known in the British cycling community as a “punishment pass,” this type of threat is an occupational hazard for anyone pedaling on two wheels in the U.K. 

A video of this particular punishment pass ignited a fiery controversy online in early November. Some people were enraged the child had been threatened. But many others were just as angry at the 5-year-old and his father. 

The video garnered millions of views and soon became the top story on the Daily Mail website — one of the most-visited news sites in the world. It unleashed a wave of hatred, with thousands blaming the boy’s father for “horrific parenting” and risking his son’s life by letting him out on the road. 

“I faced insane levels of abuse,” the boy’s father Ashley Zhang-Borges, 36, told me. “Some of it was very direct threats of violence: ‘I’d run you over if I saw you’ or ‘hope they get you next time,’” he said. Others said they hoped his son would be killed.

Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid even weighed in on Twitter, also casting blame on the father. Although he later deleted the tweet, it was a signpost to how Britain’s cyclists are facing an onslaught of criticism amid the debate over who owns the roads in the U.K.

On one side, cyclists say they don’t feel safe on the roads, and there is not enough space for them when there should be. On the other, motorists see cyclists as a nuisance, people who hold up their travel time and don’t obey Britain’s Highway Code.

But the anti-cycling narrative is also frequently rooted in disdain for environmental policy. Cycling advocates are campaigning for safer streets for bikes amid a broader global movement to rethink the way cities are run as the world heats up. It’s causing fury among those who believe that the road should be for cars.

“A frenzy of high-minded moral purpose — allied to a lockdown culture of big government deciding how we should live our lives — has been the perfect excuse for town and city councils to impose a range of drastic ‘cycle-friendly’ measures with appalling consequences,” wrote politician-turned-broadcaster Nigel Farage in a 2020 Daily Mail op-ed during the lockdown. “Cyclists are the new kings of the highway, accountable to no one. Of course, the rest of us are told to shut up because cycling is the green alternative, better for the environment and healthy living.”

Right-wing media voices frequently paint cyclists as fanatical environmentalists. In another Daily Mail op-ed, Brendan O’Neill declared: “I’d rather take my chances with the carbon emissions from cars than with the moral emissions that emanate from these puffed-up, two-wheeled eco-warriors.”

On a 2017 BBC talk show debate about cycle lanes in Northern Ireland, Irish broadcaster George Hook even accused cyclists of being Nazis, saying they “used to wear brown shirts and sing the Hurst Wessel song.” 

The anti-cycling lobby in the U.K. also has some powerful backers. Two Facebook groups called “Unblock the Embankment” and “Londoners for Transport” were formed to advocate for the rerouting of London’s flagship cycle lanes running along the river Thames. Although often presented as a grassroots movement, the groups were really overseen by Crosby Textor, a lobbying firm owned by Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Alongside efforts to tear up London’s cycling lanes, the group has orchestrated a number of social media disinformation campaigns, doing everything from influencing Zimbabwe election debates to burnishing the reputation of Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It is easy to imagine how these narratives trickle down and contribute to rising levels of online vitriol towards cyclists. People who post about cycling on social media say they regularly receive death threats. Anne Ramsey, a 55-year-old cyclist from Northern Ireland who posts under the handle “Cyclegranny,” told me she’d recently gotten a string of knife emojis in a private message. She used to post on Facebook about life on two wheels but was so inundated with abuse she had to leave the platform. “The level of aggression was extreme,” she said.

But cyclists too have popular online allies. Just outside leafy Regent’s Park, a notorious corner for collisions in London, drivers stuck in traffic are known to lurch out into the oncoming lane to overtake the line of cars. Cyclists coming out of the park can easily be hit — so one man has taken the matter into his own hands. Mike van Erp, 50, hides behind a hedge with his camera, waiting to pounce.

“Here we go,” he tells his YouTube audience of millions as he sees a car pull out of the traffic. Reciting the license plate number to his viewers, like a vigilante traffic cop, van Erp stands in front of the car trying to pass and tells them, “Go back!” Van Erp nicknamed the junction Gandalf’s Corner after the YouTuber was compared to the Lord of the Rings character shouting “you shall not pass.”

The videos are artistic in their own way — they somehow form a vignette of London in 2022. Doctors on their way to clinics, frustrated by the traffic, pull out illegally and immediately enter into a shouting match with van Erp. Drivers on the other side of the road yell words of encouragement or derision, and cyclists and motorbike riders whizzing past chime in.

“I do think there’s some kind of U.K. position that cyclists are like eco-warriors. Yeah, actually, I’m a terrible environmentalist,” van Erp laughed.

“I still don’t really understand why people enjoy watching it,” van Erp told me. But enjoy it they do. Van Erp’s YouTube channel has racked up almost 50 million views, and his supporters are fiercely protective. When I reached out publicly to van Erp to ask him for an interview about “Britain’s cycling wars,” his followers immediately fell on me, assuming I was preparing to write another anti-cycling hit piece. “You are part of the car cancer,” one follower wrote (full disclosure: I cycle in London myself, but am also learning to drive), and my phone pinged with notifications for days. It was a litmus test for how fraught the debate has become.

It is minor in comparison to the abuse van Erp receives from the other side. “I can’t wait for you to get your head kicked in you little t***,” read one recent message. “Ten years and you still haven’t been curb stomped, I’m astonished. What a loser you are. I’m telling you now one day you’re gonna get hurt.”

According to a 2021 study by Oxford researchers, on average, those who swapped their car for a bike for just one journey a day could decrease their carbon emissions by 67%.

“People don’t want to make any sacrifices, but no one’s going to think about those sacrifices when we have a global catastrophe that’s been caused by heating up the planet,” said Frances Cherry, 38. Cherry campaigns for “play streets” and set one up on her local road. Once every month, the road is closed to cars, and kids can play freely on the street, riding their bikes around. It harkens back to 1950s London, when passing cars in residential neighborhoods were a rarity.

When the pandemic hit, it offered a glimpse of what the world’s cities could look like without cars. Metropolises that previously were hostile to cyclists, where only the most foolhardy would take to the road on two wheels, suddenly became cycling havens. 

During the lockdown in London, Cherry took her children on long bike rides through the suddenly quiet city, riding for miles across the capital as a way to get fresh air and exercise and pass the time. With her 5-year-old son, she cycled from Haggerston, in London’s East End, to St. James Park, a distance of almost five miles. “It felt almost unlimited. Like if it was safe he could go all that way. So I started questioning why people need a huge heavy machine to get any distance.” But soon enough, the cars returned.

The post Britain’s ‘eco-warrior’ cyclists face digital death threats as debates rage over who owns the roads appeared first on Coda Story.

“You do not know the plight of the poor,” the girl told reporters, referring to the high priests and seers who argue that eggs violate the vegetarianism supposedly intrinsic to the practice of Hinduism. “We need eggs… who are you to tell us [what to eat]?”

In July, the howls of indignation from upper caste communities and even legislators notwithstanding, Karnataka’s department of education announced that it would provide eggs in all districts on 46 days of the 2022-23 school year.

Only half of India’s 28 states and eight union territories provide eggs as part of the midday meal scheme. And in those states that do provide eggs, the frequency ranges from daily to once a week to even once a month. These free school lunches feed well over 100 million of the poorest children in the country, ensuring they get at least one balanced, nutritious meal every day. The scheme began as an incentive for poor parents to send their children to school, if only to guarantee lunch, but is now a widely acknowledged bulwark against the persistent malnutrition that afflicts children in India.

Rates of stunting and severe stunting remain stubbornly high in India, despite decades of economic growth. The children most affected are those under five years old, but even among school-going children over 30% are underweight and undernourished.

Covid has exacerbated concerns, with government figures between 2020 and 2021 showing a sharp rise in the number of acutely malnourished children, even in prosperous states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat. According to this year’s Global Hunger Index, India ranks 107 out of 121 countries, faring worse than poorer neighbors such as Bangladesh.

Nutrient-rich eggs, packed with protein, would substantially improve India’s nutritional outcomes. In Karnataka, a study commissioned by the government showed that 13-year-old to 14-year-old girls who had access to eggs as part of a midday meal program gained 71% more weight than girls of the same age and socioeconomic background who did not get eggs.

Still, Karnataka’s apparently sensible decision to make eggs available to schoolchildren who wanted them met with disapproval in influential circles. Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, the vice president of Karnataka’s BJP chapter and widow of a former minister in the Narendra Modi government, tweeted that eggs were “not the only source of nutrition.” She added that the decision to serve eggs in school might be considered “exclusionary to many students who are vegetarians.”

The BJP is the political party in government at state-level in Karnataka and federally, with Modi arguably the most popular and powerful prime minister in decades. Its prevailing ideology is Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist movement that has disdain for India’s constitutional secularism, believing India ought to be a Hindu nation — in the same way that countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan are Islamic nations.

Karnataka is now one of very few BJP-ruled states that are offering eggs to schoolchildren. States such as Gujarat, where Modi comes from and where he was chief minister between 2001 and 2014 before becoming prime minister for the whole country, don’t offer eggs as part of school lunch even though large numbers of children suffer from chronic malnutrition.   

Sylvia Karpagam, a doctor and public health researcher based in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, told me that the “myth about India being vegetarian is strongly pushed by those with an ideological agenda. It is far from the truth. And it is reinforced by the mostly dominant caste, English-speaking, Indian-origin diaspora in the West. It feeds the stereotype that India is a largely mystical, yoga-practicing, peace-loving country.” Karpagam, who has written extensively on India’s nutrition problems and its links to caste and class inequalities, noted that this dominant class influence “manifests itself in the kind of decisions about food that are being made in the country.”

A 2020 paper published by experts whose findings were intended to help shape India’s new national education policy claimed that “animal-based foods interfere with hormonal functions in humans.” Just a few lines before this conclusion, the authors noted that “[g]iven the small body frame of Indians, any extra energy provided through cholesterol by regular consumption of egg and meat leads to lifestyle disorders.”

Widely criticized on social media, the paper was deemed further proof of an unscientific, state-sanctioned effort to portray vegetarianism as somehow more Indian than the meat-eating commonly associated with lower caste Hindus and Muslims. In its ugliest manifestation, this endorsement of vegetarianism spills out of conference rooms and academic position papers and onto the streets in the form of lynchings of mostly Muslim cattle traders.

According to Human Rights Watch, between 2015 and 2018, 44 Indians, including 36 Muslims, have been killed by cow vigilantes. In another analysis, 97% of attacks by self-styled “gau rakshaks,” literally “the providers of protection and security to cows,” between 2010 and 2017 occurred since the ascension of Modi to power in Delhi. As recently as April 2022, there were reports of a man dying after he and two other men were severely beaten by vigilantes who suspected the men of slaughtering cows.

“There is a contempt for meat,” Sylvia Karpagam, the doctor from Bangalore, told me. “And for meat eaters who are viewed and projected as more violent, as sexually aggressive, lustful and criminal.” She stressed that these behavioral associations were linked to casteist notions of “purity and pollution.” Brahmins, she said, flaunted vegetarianism as pure and meat-eating as impure. “This idea is fed early to children,” she explained. “Meat-eaters often experience shame for their food choices and tend to hide what they eat in their homes.”

In recent years, this cultural shaming has been abetted and encouraged by the government. Four years ago, India’s health ministry tweeted an image explicitly associating extra weight and lack of health with the eating of meat and eggs. A backlash led to the ministry deleting the tweet, but the mindset, Karpagam insists, remains.

Vegetarianism and veganism have become increasingly popular in the West, where these dietary choices are seen as not just beneficial for health reasons but also for the environment. But, Karpagam argues, “the vegetarianism that is being pushed here, in our context, is top-down, caste and class-based. It is totally unscientific. For example, if a woman goes to a hospital with anemia, she will be given iron tablets and told to eat vegetables. But it is unlikely she will be told that liver and red meats are good for her. This is vegetarianism by erasure. The government is not endorsing vegetarianism for ethical reasons or scientific ones. In fact, our knowledge of healthy vegetarianism is also poor.”

According to Karpagam, “enforced vegetarianism” harms the poor. “When the poor eat a cereal-heavy and nutrient-deficient diet they are more likely to suffer from malnutrition. Children are more likely to have stunting and to be undernourished,” she said. Yet most national health surveys show that up to 70% of Indians are meat-eating, that for poor people food such as the meat from water buffaloes (classified as beef by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making India ironically one of the world’s largest exporters of beef alongside the likes of Brazil and Australia) are a major part of their diets.

Dipa Sinha, an economics professor at Delhi’s Ambedkar University, said that “if meat and eggs were incorporated into public food programs then obviously supplementary nutrition would be better and that could have an effect on our malnutrition crisis.” But, she conceded, “the resistance to such a move comes largely from the upper castes. Vegetarianism is an upper caste idea and it is the dominant castes that exert the most influence on public programs.” These programs mostly help those whose diets have traditionally included meat and eggs and who are ill-served by the growing distaste with which the government views people who do not follow vegetarian diets.

The Right to Food Campaign describes itself as an “informal network of organizations and individuals” who recognize that “everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and undernutrition.” Swati Narayan, a scholar and activist who works with the Campaign, told me that while India “has achieved scale with the universalization of school meals, we’ve still not achieved nutrition, as is evident in the government data.” Eggs, she pointed out, “are nutrient dense, so why not achieve adequate nutrition by adding eggs to school meals?”

As inflation bites, poor people in India often go without, eating flatbread and pickles as a meal, or going without basic vegetables. In such circumstances, school midday meals are a lifeline.

It seems wholly unreasonable that a simple and inexpensive fix such as adding a single egg to free lunches for poverty-stricken children must meet such virulent cultural opposition that it falls upon straight-talking schoolgirls to show community leaders, priests and government ministers the error of their ways.

The post Eggs in school lunches can fix India’s malnutrition crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Alberta was the site of many of the mass protests over the summer: “Freedom Convoys” stretched over parts of southern Alberta along the border with the United States, blockaded cross-border commerce and occupied the streets of Canada’s capital, Ottawa. Hundreds of truckers traveled from across the country to protest vaccine mandates in front of the parliament building. To many in Canada, the protests highlighted the cultural and ideological differences between the western prairie provinces and the more populated, urban provinces in Canada’s east. 

The Freedom Convoy that shut down the border with the U.S. was full of people from Alberta. The blockades lasted for several weeks as the anti-government protests challenged vaccine mandates and other Covid safety restrictions. Those who joined the demonstrations frequently slipped into extremist far-right narratives and promoted conspiracy theories. 

Conspiracy theorists have latched on to spreading scientific misinformation. Doubts about vaccine efficacy are commonly circulated through social media, and potential Covid cures like ivermectin, which scientific research does not support, are promoted. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking bureau found a fire hose of false claims online suggesting that more vaccinated people were hospitalized in Canada than those who were unvaccinated — a claim unsupported by data from Health Canada.

In this still-simmering political cauldron, the new premier of Alberta’s government announced that people unvaccinated against Covid confront the most discrimination in the state.

Shortly after taking office last month, Danielle Smith declared at her first press conference that unvaccinated people are the state’s most vulnerable, having already come up with a plan to amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to codify protections for those who allegedly have been discriminated against for being unvaccinated against Covid. (She ultimately backtracked when leaders from groups experiencing discrimination protested her remarks.)

The new premier, the equivalent of a state governor, has previously come under fire for sharing unproven claims about the virus on Twitter during the early days of the pandemic. Smith became the leader of the Wildrose party in 2009. The party is unique to Alberta with a platform that has sought to revamp healthcare delivery with more privatized options and reign in provincial spending, hoping to appeal to populist voters. Her previous position as a radio talk show host allowed her to broadcast views that promoted pseudoscience and cures for Covid frequently touted by former President Donald Trump.

Overall, Canada consistently ranks as having one of the most highly educated populations in the world. Nationally, support for vaccines is high. But while 88% of the Canadian population has received at least one dose, Alberta has the lowest number of doses administered per 100,000 people to date compared to the other prairie provinces.

Alberta is well known for its “western alienation” — a kind of jilted, strained relationship with other parts of Canada. A feeling of limited representation in the federal government and an economic reliance on natural resources has yielded a sense of apartness from the rest of Canada.

This apartness is rooted in Alberta’s history. In the 19th century, many Americans heading west settled in the vast Canadian province, bringing with them a strident individualism and deeply entrenched political populism, rejecting government reach into private lives. The number of Americans arriving in Alberta, mainly from the rural American Midwest, quickly outpaced British settlers and even native-born Canadians.

Whether due to the stress of the pandemic, opportunism from populist politicians or the forces still at work from its settler colonial history, Alberta’s apartness now may be intensifying. 

Doctors in Alberta have warned that it is becoming more common for patients to refuse blood transfusions from Covid-vaccinated donors, and they worry that this could develop into the next form of widespread protest. Timothy Caulfield, a professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, believes this trend is driven by misinformation, which is causing patients to refuse to consent to blood transfusions if the blood comes from a donor who had received the Covid vaccine. 

Damaging myths surrounding blood purity cost countless human lives during the 20th century, and centering Covid vaccine opposition around the transfusion of blood would be a remarkable new chapter for the vaccine hesitancy movement. 

In the 20th century, a fear of contaminated blood was a vehicle for anti-Black racism. The false notion that drops of blood could contain racial purity was a widespread belief in the U.S. and swaths of Europe. The Canadian Red Cross oversaw the blood donation process for five decades, from the mid-1940s to the late 1990s. The program, originating in wartime, had a history of racially segregating blood for American and British white soldiers. 

Fear of blood contamination has historically impacted marginalized communities. Earlier this year, after three decades, Canada removed the ban on donated blood from men who have sex with men. The ban came out of longstanding concerns about HIV transmission in the donated blood supply following the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It was slowly dialed back as testing requirements became more comprehensive and donation supply demands increased.

Dr. Nathan Lachowsky, a public health professor at the University of Victoria, cited “a variety of screening questions that have excluded specific groups from blood donation, including men who have sex with men, certain Black African communities, people who inject drugs, and sex workers.” He believes that while the screening questions have evolved, “rarely has there been acknowledgment or apology for ways in which the blood system has propagated stigma and discrimination against these groups.”

The general public has questioned the integrity of Canada’s blood donation system in the past. A scandal in the 1990s led to thousands acquiring HIV and hepatitis C through blood transfusions, which prompted investigations into the system. Subsequently, a nonprofit health organization, Canadian Blood Services, took over the processing of blood donations with stringent health protocols. 

“This system failure led to a national inquiry and the current blood donation system we have today in Canada,” said Dr. Lachowsky, which created a sense of distrust. 

Nevertheless, Canada’s public healthcare system, which shielded the country from outsized effects of contracting Covid and minimized vaccine hesitancy, should also minimize an outbreak of fear over “contaminated” vaccinated blood, said Dr. Davinder Sidhu, a transfusion specialist physician from the University of Calgary.

“Based on the Canadian universal healthcare model, there is just a presumption [that] the system will be here to take care of people if they get sick. The fear of significant financial pressures and costs don’t exist like in the U.S. medical healthcare model. And so, people may be more cavalier with their health,” said Dr. Sidhu. 

According to Dr. Sidhu, the requests for directed donations from unvaccinated donor groups is particularly surprising because Canada is known for its safe blood system. “Directed donations are more common in parts of the world where the blood supply is less well tested or deemed dangerous due to other circulating transfusion-transmitted diseases,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Blood Services said in a statement: “Our ultimate priority is the health of the patient. Health Canada has not recommended or imposed any restriction on the use of the approved Covid-19 vaccines and blood donation. This is because the blood of donors who have received non-live vaccines does not pose a risk to patients who receive a blood transfusion.”

The post Covid misinformation ignites a battle over blood in a Canadian province appeared first on Coda Story.

Dr. Babu, an ophthalmologist by training, was horrified. “How can they treat double vision with some drops!!” he exclaimed incredulously on Twitter. Retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, has no known cure, and cataracts cannot be treated without surgery, he told me over the phone from his home in Kannur, in the south Indian state of Kerala.

“There are no clear cut studies to substantiate that advertisement,” he said, expressing concern that patients might opt for the eye drops instead of clinically proven treatments or surgeries. “People will be denied proper treatment, which will lead to blindness.”

After spotting several similar adverts from Patanjali claiming that their Ayurvedic medicines could cure, among other things, diabetes, blood pressure issues and goiter, Dr. Babu filed a legal complaint. Last month, the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a notice to the company for misleading advertising.

Endorsing unscientific cures

In April, at a convention center in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi sat next to the World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as they celebrated the growing global impact of traditional Indian medicine.

Together they inaugurated the WHO Global Center for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, Gujarat — built with a $250 million investment from the Indian government as a standard bearer for the shared vision with WHO that “harnessing the potential of traditional medicine would be a game changer for health when founded on evidence, innovation and sustainability.” According to the WHO, over “40% of pharmaceutical formulations are based on natural products and landmark drugs, including aspirin and artemisinin, originated from traditional medicine,” with an estimated 88% of countries using traditional therapies, such as herbal medicines, acupuncture, yoga, and others. 

For Modi, the promotion of Indian traditional medicine is essential to both his economic and ideological agenda. The export of Indian-made herbal medicines is worth several hundred billion dollars already and the industry is growing at nearly 9% each year, with demand exploding during the Covid-19 pandemic as people sought natural remedies and “immunity boosters” for the virus.

On October 23, at an event to mark “Ayurveda Day,” the minister of state for Ayush (the traditional medicines ministry created by the Modi government in 2014 when he became prime minister) claimed that Ayurveda was now accepted as a traditional system of medicine in 30 countries and that Ayush medicines were being exported to 100 countries.

Ayurveda dates back some 4,000 years and its foundational texts emphasize ideas of balance and harmony. While the economic reasons to promote Ayurveda, like yoga, as an Indian gift to the world are apparent, it also fits with the Modi government’s Hindu supremacist agenda and with feeding a sense of grievance that India’s colonial history has meant Indian knowledge systems are frequently dismissed as inferior to Western science.

The second sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Ayurveda declares that the “theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.” This so incensed the Ayurvedic Medicine Manufacturers Organization of India that it complained to the Supreme Court that the entry was defamatory, prompting the bench, as it dismissed the case on October 21, to observe acerbically that “you can edit the Wikipedia article.”

Yet allegations of pseudoscience and low testing and quality control standards continue to dog Ayush medicines. Patanjali is far from the only company peddling unproven medical cures. And the nationalist agenda to promote traditional Indian medicines has prompted a slew of endorsements from prominent religious or political figures for treatments which have never been scientifically proven to work.

For instance, Ashwini Choubey, ex-Minister of State for Health, extolled the use of cow urine as a cure for cancer. The cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism, and cow urine has been used in Ayurvedic treatments for centuries. Another Union Minister of State, Shripad Naik, claimed that Ayurvedic treatments “have already reached a stage where just like chemotherapy, we can treat cancer, but without the side effects.” There is no reliable evidence to support the use of any Ayurvedic medicine as a treatment for cancer.

Choubey and Naik are among a growing number of voices on the Hindu right pushing for the integration of traditional Indian therapies with modern medicine. The Ministry of Ayush — Ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy — was set up to oversee and promote traditional Indian medicine. But the ministry has also helped promote medical cures which are not backed by evidence. In an advisory on preventative measures against Covid-19, for instance, the ministry suggested the use of Arsenicum album 30C, a homeopathic drug, as a prophylactic against the virus, alongside other measures such as inserting sesame oil in each nostril every morning.

Not only is there no evidence that these treatments can help to prevent Covid-19, but homeopathy as a whole has been widely debunked.

Critics are keen to emphasize that while not all alternative treatments are ineffective — indeed, many modern medicines drew originally on traditional medicinal knowledge — all treatments should undergo rigorous clinical trials before being promoted in the public sphere.

“It doesn’t matter what form of therapy you suggest is working. It has to be grounded in evidence,” said Anant Bhan, a researcher in bioethics and health policy. “If you can’t show that, then such claims should not be made, because then you’re potentially putting human lives at risk.”

A violation of the right to life?

Misinformation surrounding alternative therapies in India has already proven deadly. One study from 2019 published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Hepatology, which compared patients with alcoholic hepatitis who were taking alternative medicines with a control group who received standard care, found that the patients using alternative medicines had significantly higher short-term mortality rates; only 18% survived to 6 months, compared to 52% of patients receiving standard care.

Concerns that the attempt to integrate traditional medicine with modern science may negatively impact health outcomes have also been voiced by the Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), a group of doctors in Mumbai. Earlier this year, they filed a petition against two new bills which would allow Ayurvedic doctors to practice various types of surgery. The government claims the scheme will address the country’s chronic shortage of doctors, and has set up a six-month-long bridge course which aims to train the Ayurvedic practitioners.

But the AMC contested that the new bills constitute a “violation of the right to life” as laid out by the Constitution of India. “The government steps to try and integrate the Indian system of medicine with the contemporary modern system of medicine is fraught with danger,” said Dr. Sudhir Naik, an obstetrician and past president of the AMC who was involved in filing the petition.

“We understand the government’s limitations as far as the workforce is concerned. But there are no shortcuts,” he said. “You can’t give them six months training and say, okay, now go ahead, go into the field and do these procedures. That’s not practical, that’s highly dangerous. You can’t use our rural population as guinea pigs.”

Questions remain, too, about the use of essential anesthetic drugs and post-surgery antibiotics, which fall outside the scope of Ayurvedic practice.

“If there is a claim that an Ayurvedic surgeon, for example, can do surgeries of a particular kind, then it has to be based on some kind of comparative evidence generation,” said Bhan. “Ultimately, it comes down to public health and to patient safety.”

Government-led misinformation

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a strong proponent of science, initiating reforms to promote higher education and inaugurating several new scientific research and educational institutes. Today, India has a huge tech industry, its own space program, and is the world’s largest exporter of pharmaceuticals — as well as supplying over half of the vaccines produced worldwide.

The rise of pseudoscience seems to signal a shift however in the priorities of the current leadership, rejecting scientific rigor in pursuit instead of a Hindu nationalist ideology.

Sumaiya Shaikh, a researcher studying the neurobiological underpinnings of violent extremism, has spent years advocating for evidence-based medicine and critiquing misinformation in public health policies in India. There has been a “definite increase” in unscientific claims in recent years, she said — including in the promotion of alternative medicines.

“The government has used it as a strategy to push out untested remedies,” she said. From a neuroscience perspective, misinformation which backs up a person’s existing belief system is very effective because “it’s less taxing for your brain than to actually read the evidence or fact check,” she said. “The way that it captures your brain is often highly emotive.”

This means that not only do adverts like Patanjali’s appeal to people on an ideological basis — the conglomerate’s brand ambassador, Baba Ramdev, is a popular Hindu spiritual leader and vocal supporter of the BJP — but they also bank on simplicity. 

People tend to be drawn to the quick fixes, said Shaikh, “where there are bigger promises made. For example, a person who’s an expert in, say, diabetes is never going to claim that we’re going to completely rid you of diabetes — but somebody who is an expert in homeopathy will make that promise to you.” The result, she said, is that many end up opting for therapies which have little evidence of efficacy.

Dr. Cyriac Abby Philips is a liver specialist who actively campaigns against what he sees as a dangerous lack of regulation of alternative medicines. He believes that the current leadership is unwilling to correct misinformation, because it would directly contradict some of the core tenets of Hinduism.

For example, Tinospora cordifolia, commonly known as Giloy, is a shrub native to India which appears in ancient Hindu texts, and has been used by Ayurvedic practitioners to treat various medical ailments for centuries. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have linked its use to liver damage, however. The results of some of these studies have been strongly disputed by the Ministry of Ayush, which called one paper and the media reports which followed its publication “misleading” and questioned whether the active ingredient has been mistaken for a “similar looking herb.” The ministry did not respond to my requests for comment on this article.

Dr. Philips, who has also published a paper linking Giloy usage to liver damage, believes that the ministry’s strong rebuttal of the research is due to the “cultural, traditional and political values” attached to Ayurvedic treatments such as Giloy. “It’s not so simple saying that this Ayurvedic drug or this Ayurvedic practice is wrong. if you say that, it’s like you are hitting at the foundation of India,” said Philips.

Capitalizing on fear

The promotion of alternative treatments with limited evidence of efficacy increased drastically with the arrival of Covid-19 in India in early 2020. Fear of the virus, combined with a lack of consensus from the scientific community on how it was spread, resulted in a marked increase in misinformation.

“There was this sense of urgency of getting something which works. So when you get any source of information which seems credible, then of course, you would jump at it,” said Bhan.

At the peak of the pandemic in June 2020, Patanjali launched Coronil, advertising it as the “first evidence-based medicine for Covid-19” at an event also attended by India’s then Minister of Health, Harsh Vardhan. After a backlash and widespread doubt over the veracity of the data, Coronil was later downgraded to an “immunity booster,” a claim which was endorsed by the Ministry of Ayush. A lab test carried out by the University of Birmingham found that the pills offered no protection against the virus.

Despite this, Patanjali sold 2.5 million Coronil kits in the four months since its launch, grossing $30 million, according to the company. Sales of some other “immunity boosters” manufactured by Ayurvedic companies rose by as much as 700% during the first few months of the pandemic.

“There is cultural supremacy that the medicines bring, but at the same time, there’s a huge financial gain here,” said Shaikh. “The alternative health industry knows that they’re making a large amount of money out of this. And of course, the government knows that too — the government is equally to blame here, in not containing the misinformation, in promoting it from their own channels.”

A lack of regulation

While alternative medicine manufacturers in India must comply with the same Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) as pharmaceutical companies under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, factory inspections are conducted by different departments for each school of medicine. As such, the production of alternative medicines is often subject to less stringent regulations, said Akash Sathyanandan, a lawyer at the High Court of Kerala, with “different yardsticks for different schools of medicine.”

With public scrutiny lower than in the pharmaceutical industry, Sathyanandan said that substandard manufacturing processes often go unnoticed and underreported. “There is a lot of data that is below sea level,” he said.

Many alternative formulations have been found to contain contaminants, some of which are harmful to human health. Several studies conducted in the U.S. for example, found that a significant percentage of imported Ayurvedic supplements contained lead and other heavy metals, at quantities which would result in intake above regulatory standards if consumed as recommended by manufacturers.

Dr. Cyriac Philips has first-hand experience of the danger this poses. At his clinic in Kerala, many of the patients have liver injuries which have been caused or exacerbated by the consumption of alternative medicines.

In one case, a 16-year-old girl who presented to the clinic in urgent need of a liver transplant was found to have spent the past three years consuming alternative medicines for a seizure disorder. When a laboratory analysis of the medicines was done, it was found that they contained high quantities of arsenic.

“She had arsenic detectable in her nails and hairs. And she also developed a very special type of liver disease due to arsenic toxicity known as non-cirrhotic portal hypertension,” said Dr. Philips. He estimates that he has conducted laboratory tests on around 250 different alternative medicines, all brought to him by his patients, and has found many of them to contain contaminants such as mercury in levels “more than 100,000 times the upper limit of what is ideally recommended.”

Tampering with the processes of good science

Dr. Philips’s work has often been seen as an attack on alternative medicines, and he has faced a heavy backlash, with his laboratory being attacked twice. On social media, he said, he regularly receives threats when he posts anything critical of Ayurveda. “They send me messages, derogatory and vulgar messages, threatening me that my life is gone,” he said.

Silencing criticism is a broader problem, said Shaikh. “If you’re a non-Ayush clinician, you do not have the right to talk about Ayush,” she said. “They’re actively stopping peer review.”

In the long run, she believes that this approach to scientific research will only damage the global reputation of India in the health industry.

“It’s harming, what they want to do,” she says. “If you want to establish India as the main provider of service, whether it’s manufacturing or health service, then you’ve got to have scrutiny in place for every single step, and listen to what the scientists are saying.”

Others, such as Dr. Babu, are more hopeful that regulations surrounding alternative treatments will slowly catch up with modern medicine as the industry grows. He believes that the success of his legal complaint against Patanjali’s advertisements marks a turning point in the battle against pseudoscience.

“There’ll be some concrete action from [regulatory bodies] to prevent such misleading advertisements in future, I’m sure,” he says. “I am trusting the legal system of my country.”

But India’s legal system will have to contend with the determination of a powerful prime minister intent on ushering in, as he put it in April, alongside the WHO director general, “a new era of traditional medicine in the next 25 years.” And with the pop cultural appeal of figures like Baba Ramdev who has built a multi-billion-dollar yoga and Ayurveda empire with Patanjali, dubious treatments notwithstanding, at its heart. 

The post Modi wants to export traditional Indian medicine to the world, but doctors warn against pseudoscience and quack cures appeared first on Coda Story.

A recent national survey on hunger in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Brazil hard, found more than half of the country’s population, 125.2 million people, experienced some degree of food insecurity, with more than 33 million people going hungry.

Three times as many Brazilians faced hunger in 2022 than in 2013, a return to the kind of widespread hardship that had long characterized life for many in Brazil.

The survey had found that nearly half of families experiencing severe food insecurity live in the country’s low-income northern and northeastern regions, and 65% of homes headed by a person of African descent have had to restrict their food intake. Nearly one in five households headed by women have gone hungry, primarily due to wage disparities; while families with children are worse off than those without.

The survey helped fuel an expectation that Bolsonaro’s chances in the October 2 general elections were poor. Polls showed former president Lula da Silva potentially winning the election outright, with Bolsonaro carrying just 33% of the electorate. The same polls showed that among families with household incomes of about $450, Lula registered 54% against Bolsonaro’s 26% with a two-point margin of error.

The polls were wrong. Bolsonaro’s conservative values and tough-on-crime discourse found traction, while the issue of hunger has been largely absent from election campaigning. The failure of Bolsonaro’s agricultural policy and social programs to slow the rise of hunger in Brazil hasn’t weakened support for his reelection even among the electorate made food insecure during his presidency — a remarkable reflection of contemporary right-wing populism and the power of social media messaging.

Bolsonaro often attacks low-income Brazilians as lazy or criminal. In 2012, he said northeasterners didn’t want to work because they would stop receiving their dues from the government’s income-transfer program, the Bolsa Família. The social welfare program was among Lula’s most celebrated initiatives and played a major part in reducing Brazilian poverty during his first term in office almost 20 years ago. Bolsonaro replaced Bolsa Familia in 2021 with his own program, the Auxílio Brasil.

As recently as September, Bolsonaro had said that government handouts had prevented low-income people from learning professional skills and that they had been “habituated over the years to not worrying” about how to support themselves. And in a rancorous debate with Lula on October 16, Bolsonaro implied that residents of favelas are criminals.

Meanwhile, his policies have exacerbated hunger. On his first day in office, Bolsonaro axed seven government ministries and eliminated the National Council on Food and Nutritional Security, which served as the nodal point for hundreds of state and local councils. “You eliminate the head and you cut all the space for discussion,” said Vera Villela, President of São Paulo’s Municipal Council on Food and Nutritional Security.

A system of food stocking that ensures supplies for public facilities like schools and hospitals shrank from 349 warehouses in 1991 to 92 last year, and the Bolsonaro government announced it will close 27 more. Meanwhile, the government supports export-focused production making Brazil one of the world’s leading exporters of commodities like soybeans and beef.

And yet Bolsonaro remains electable in large part with the help of this demographic that he so frequently scorns. Brian Winter, the Editor of Americas Quarterly, says Bolsonaro has wooed the country’s evangelical leaders, benefiting from waves of disinformation on social media and messaging platforms and calculated financial support to the poor and to truckers, in his attempts to sway voters to his side. The sheer complexity of the Brazilian electorate helps explain why growing poverty and hunger haven’t had the impact on voters that Bolsonaro’s opponents might have expected.

Doraci and Jurandir live in the Northeast. They moved in together as teenagers and had a roof over their heads but little else. “We didn’t even have bedsheets,” says Doraci Anunciada de Oliveira Silva, now 39 years old. “The ants would bite the baby as he slept on the floor.”

The couple met in 1999 when Jurandir, then 19 and three years older than Doraci, was hired to build a fence around her parents’ property. “He asked if I wanted to date him, and I almost said no,” Doraci recalls. “But he was so nervous and trembling in his agony, that I decided to give him a chance.”

They live in Alto do Rosario, a community of about 500 people in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil’s semi-arid region. The bumpy red dirt road leading to the settlement rises and dips over hills, winding between scraggly trees and fences made from knobby, barkless branches and barbed wire.

Despite the material hardships they faced early in their relationship, Doraci and Jurandir have managed to build a small farm that not only provides for their needs but also enables them to sell products like cheese and butter at a pair of local markets.

Their good fortune stands in stark contrast with millions of other Brazilians, particularly in rural areas and in the country’s northern and northeastern regions.

But Doraci and Jurandir had no access to running water for years. Every day, Doraci would carry an empty jug over a mile to a watering hole where she would fill it and carry it back on her head. “I suffered a lot,” she says of the hard daily work of tending to animals, carrying water, and looking after the crops.

In 2004, during Lula’s first term as president, Doraci and Jurandir received a government grant to build a cistern. The simple structure has transformed their lives. It saves Doraci hours of work every day and also ensures that the family farm has a supply of water for the animals, plants and people.

During the pandemic, the Bolsonaro administration funded an emergency cash transfer program to try to guarantee that Brazil’s most vulnerable would be able to eat. As the election runoff comes closer though, critics alleged that the cash transfers amount to bribes. The Northeast has the largest number of emergency cash recipients — 9.75 million. A constitutional amendment in July allowed the cash transfers to continue after the height of the pandemic — and to increase. Yet Bolsonaro’s government has cut funding to programs such as the one that enabled Doraci and Jurandir to build their cistern and transform their family finances.

In 2008, they put a deposit of 500 Brazilian reals (at the time about $250) down on a second home one lot over from their own. Eight years ago, when Doraci was pregnant with their third child, she used a subsidy offered to low-income pregnant women to invest in a milk cow to produce cheese and two kinds of butter that she and Jurandir sell in local farmers’ markets. For years, Jurandir worked as a delivery driver in the nearby city of Surubim, giving them a cash income in addition to the foodstuffs they produce on the farm. 

A 2009 law, passed when Lula was president, requires state and local governments to spend 30% of their budget for school lunches and snacks on foodstuffs produced by family farms. Schools closed during the pandemic, and so did the spending. When most of Brazil’s states halted their purchases of family-farm products in 2020, it left farmers without a market for their crops. The state of Rio Grande do Norte may be the only one to have opted for a different approach: it expanded the role of family-farm produce. That state is now the most food-secure state in the northeast, and the fourth best ranked state in the country.

“The government of Rio Grande do Norte implemented an integrated policy involving several state agencies to combat hunger during the pandemic,” said Alexandre de Oliveira Lima. Lima runs the state’s rural development and agricultural program. “Here in Rio Grande do Norte, we had a big expansion,” he says, “a really big expansion of family farms” during the pandemic.

Beautifully shot and edited agriculture commercials fill ad breaks on Brazilian television. “Agro é top,” goes the slogan. Agro is the best. The ads reflect the deep political power wielded by Brazil’s agribusiness industry and the rural caucus in the Brazilian legislature.

Almost half of Brazil’s total exports in 2021, $120 billion, came from agriculture and livestock farming, a 20% increase over 2020 according to reporting by the Brazilian magazine Piauí. More than a quarter of Brazil’s GDP is attributed to agribusiness, although this figure includes ancillary activities like the sale of veterinary medicines.

“Agribusiness acts like a vacuum for resources that concentrates this wealth in a few pockets of prosperity,” wrote Marcos Emílio Gomes in Piauí. Foodstuffs exported from Brazil are exempt from export taxes thanks to the country’s “Kandir Law,” named after a former planning minister, which exempts raw and semi-elaborated export products from specific taxes. Agribusiness is the biggest beneficiary of this exemption. In contrast, family farms like Doraci’s and Jurandir’s represent more than three-quarters of all farms and yet account for just 23% of the land farmed.

Yamila Goldfarb, Vice President of the Brazilian Association for Land Reform, says the contradictions in Brazil’s agricultural system are striking. “There are difficulties in accessing credit,” she tells me. “There are difficulties in obtaining technical assistance, and when you analyze who is actually producing food, it’s not on these big farms. The big farms produce commodities: soybeans, corn, cotton — products for export. They are large consumers of pesticides; they deforest. They participate in this process of grabbing lands illegally, of deforesting in order to appropriate land.”

The large farms have institutional support through think tanks, the rural caucus in congress, and other advocacy efforts. Subsistence farming, on the other hand, according to Goldfarb, is portrayed as backward and as unimportant. “But it’s not, in reality. It has huge significance because it represents food security for a large percentage of the population,” she said.

The Brazilian government’s statistical agency backs up Goldfarb’s claim, reporting that family farms produce 48% of the turnover for coffee and bananas, 80% of cassava, 69% of pineapples and 42% of beans.

Still, family agriculture is often dismissed. Alexandre Pires of the Sabiá Center, which helped Doraci and Jurandir bring their dairy products to market, pointed to a lack of political engagement with family agriculture.

“There’s an absence of a political strategy that values camponesa [small-scale farmer] agriculture, that values family agriculture,” he told me. This lack of engagement, Pires said, is draining people from rural areas.

Just two weeks before the second round of Brazil’s general election, polls showed Lula’s lead over Bolsonaro dwindling to five points, suggesting that the outcome of the runoff remains a toss-up. And with approximately 20% of the population, or nearly 33 million people, abstaining from voting in the first round of the elections, the couple’s activism takes on additional meaning.

“I know a place here where there are people with really a lot of needs,” Doraci said. “And they’re talking about Bolsonaro, which makes me want to spit. How is it that in a place like this, people want to vote for Bolsonaro?”

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