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The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past

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Monday, March 20, 2023

Tyler Comrie for Vox The necessity of progress. If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics. I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced. In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.) Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.” So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone. But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest. The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum. Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create. Though historians still argue over what the writer Jason Crawford calls “the roots of progress,” the fundamental swerve was the belief that, after eons of relatively little meaningful change, the future could actually be different, and better. But the doomerism that risks overtaking us erodes that belief, and undercuts the policies that give it life. The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress. How progress solves the problems we didn’t know were problems Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century. In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition. It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life. What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself. And there were only the slightest inklings at the time that this could or should change. But those inklings were there, and over time, they began to take root. The Scientific Revolution began in the 1500s, as figures like the English philosopher Francis Bacon introduced the idea that through trial and experimentation, scientific knowledge could be advanced, and with it, the human condition itself. Over time, the abstract concepts and discoveries of the Scientific Revolution led to the machines and raw power of what would be dubbed the Industrial Revolution; to James Watts’s steam engine and Michael Faraday’s electric generator and Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, the progenitor of the modern factory. Advances in our ability to generate energy, advances in our ability to harness that energy for work, and advances in our ability to create an economic system that got the most out of both of those factors all intermingled. And that is when human life began to truly change, in a way that was so massive and, eventually, so all-encompassing, that we still struggle to grasp its sheer scale. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has simply dubbed it “the Great Fact.” The simplest fact about the Great Fact might be this: Without it, chances are I wouldn’t be writing this article and you wouldn’t be reading it In his 2022 book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century, the economic historian Brad DeLong uses a simple data point to describe just how much progress occurred after 1870, once the advances of the Industrial Revolution had been fully consolidated and political improvements began to follow economic ones. In 1870, an average unskilled male worker in London could earn enough per day to buy 5,000 calories worth of food for himself and his family. That was more than in 1600, but not significantly more, and not enough to easily feed everyone consistently, given that mean household size in England at the time was just under five people. By 2010 — the end of what DeLong in his book called “the long twentieth century” — that same worker could afford to buy the equivalent of 2.4 million calories of food per day, a nearly 50,000 percent increase. The simplest fact about the Great Fact might be this: Without it, chances are I wouldn’t be writing this article and you wouldn’t be reading it. Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence. We were stuck in the Malthusian Trap, named after the 18th-century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus. The trap argues that any increase in food production or other resources that allowed the population to grow was quickly consumed by that increased population, which then led to food shortages and population decline. (It’s striking that one of the few real spikes in wages and standard of living in pre-industrial times came in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed off perhaps 30 percent of Europe’s population. Those who survived were able to command higher wages to work empty land — but a deadly pandemic is no reasonable person’s idea of a sustainable economic growth program.) Viewed from one angle, the human population before the Industrial Revolution was in an ecological balance of the sort we might aim to preserve if humanity were just another wild species plowing its environmental niche, its numbers kept in check by violence, disease, and starvation. But that nearly flat line of population growth, century after century, hides an untellable story of misery and suffering, one of children dead before their time, of families snuffed out by starvation, of potential and of people that would never have the chance to be realized. It was a story, as the writer Bill Bryson has put it, of “tiny coffins.” In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of the Malthusian Trap, producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death. Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too. The Malthusian Trap isn’t easy to escape, and the progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed. The past two centuries have seen by far the bloodiest conflicts in human history, punctuated by the invention of weapons that could conceivably end humanity. Well into the 20th century, billions still lived lives that were materially little different from their impoverished ancestors. But if progress hasn’t yet fully broken the Malthusian Trap physically, it did so psychologically. Once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand. The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty. In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us. The simplest argument for why we need to continue to build on that legacy is found in the places where it has continued to fall short. The fact that as of 2016 some 13 percent of the world still lacked access to electricity — the invisible foundation of modernity — is just as worthy of our worry. The fact that 85 percent of the world — a little less than 7 billion people — lives on less than $30 a day should keep us awake at night. Because that, as much as any existential challenge we fear hurtling toward us, shouldn’t simply be accepted as inevitable. How progress can solve the problem of being human On January 6, 1941 — 11 months before Pearl Harbor — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his State of the Union speech. But it’s better known by another name: the Four Freedoms speech. As much of the world was engulfed in what would become the greatest and bloodiest conflict in human history, Roosevelt told Congress that “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. There are human values that can’t be captured in dry economic statistics: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If our world had somehow become as rich and as long-lived as it is today with a system of political liberties and human rights frozen in 1820, we might barely consider it progress at all. Except that we have seen startling improvements in everything from political liberty to democratic representation to human rights to even the way we treat some (if not all) animals. In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population. One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them. All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women But in the decades that followed FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, things changed radically, thanks to the defeat of fascist powers, the spread of civil rights within existing democracies, and eventually, the collapse of the communist world. Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China. That doesn’t mean that the liberal democracies that exist are perfect by any means, the US very much included. Nor does it mean that periods of advancement weren’t followed by periods of retrenchment or worse. Progress, especially in politics and morals, doesn’t flow as steadily as a calendar — just compare Germany in 1929 to Germany in 1939. But all you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world. Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society. But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce. These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress. The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one — that, ultimately, is what the Malthusian Trap means. In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era. We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense. But just as every bloody day of the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates that moral and political progress hasn’t eradicated our violent tendencies, the material progress that has helped meet our most basic needs has opened the door to new, knottier problems: to climate change caused by industrialization, to the ills of a longer-lived society, to the mental health challenges that arise once we no longer need to worry about surviving and instead need to worry about living. And with it comes the temptation to turn back and give in. How progress creates new problems — and solves them anew On September 7, 1898, just as the world was finally escaping the Malthusian Trap, the chemist William Crookes told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that we were in danger of falling back into it. According to Crookes, the UK’s rapidly growing population was at risk of running out of food. There wasn’t more room for additional farmland on the isles, which meant the only way to increase the food supply was to boost agricultural productivity. That required nitrogen fertilizer, but existing supplies of nitrogen at the time came from natural sources like guano deposits in Peru, and they were running out. The world faced, he said, “a life-and-death question for generations to come.” On the face of it, this appeared to be Malthus’s revenge. The British population had exploded, but now it was meeting its natural limits, and nature’s correction was coming. But Crookes had a solution, one he believed we could literally pull out of thin air. The Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen. Crookes challenged his audience to develop a way for humanity to artificially fix atmospheric nitrogen in a way that could be used to create synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and with it, produce enough food for Britain and the world. Less than 20 years later, two German scientists managed to do just that, developing the Haber-Bosch process to synthesize ammonia out of atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen, which became a cornerstone of synthetic fertilizer. Combined with the increasing mechanization of agriculture, food production kept growing, and now it’s estimated that half the population alive today is dependent on the existence of synthetic fertilizer. Viewed from this angle, the story of synthetic fertilizer from Crookes to Haber and Bosch is one of just-so progress, of technological advancement rising to meet growing need. And so it is. But the story doesn’t stop there. The synthetic fertilizer industry produces about 2.6 gigatons of carbon per year — more than aviation and shipping combined. Its abundance has led to overapplication, so much so that about two-thirds of the nitrogen farmers apply to crops isn’t used by plants at all, but rather becomes run-off into the surrounding environment as a pollutant, causing dead zones like the massive one found in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and Fritz Haber himself later dedicated his career to developing chemical weapons that would kill thousands in World War I. So the Haber-Bosch process solved one problem, while creating new ones. That’s the story of progress as well. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a single scientific or technological advancement that doesn’t create an element of blowback. Breakthroughs in nuclear physics made possible the creation of zero-carbon nuclear plants — and also, the nuclear bombs that still hold the world hostage. The introduction of antibiotics may have added as much as eight years to global life expectancy, but the more they’re used, the more resistance builds up, paving the way for the next potential pandemic of antibiotic-resistant infections. Striking gains in agricultural productivity have eliminated the threat of famine in all but the poorest countries, but also contributed to a problem that was basically unheard of until recently: widespread obesity. Advances in animal breeding and diet have made meat cheap and widespread, but at the cost of local pollution and the creation of a factory farming system that sentences billions of domesticated animals to lives of terrible suffering. Above all else is climate change. If there was a single material ingredient to the Industrial Revolution and all that followed, it was coal. Coal fired the factories, coal fueled the railroads, coal made industrialization happen. It’s still coal, along with other fossil fuels like oil and natural gas, that provides the bulk of global energy consumption — energy consumption that has risen more than 3,000 percent since 1800. And coal and its fellow fossil fuels are by far the top contributors to climate change. Coal helped create progress, and coal helped create climate change. And if the story ended there, it might be reasonable to look at progress very differently. It might even be reasonable to agree with de-growthers whose demand, at the end of the day, is that we must stop economic growth and throw it in reverse, or face doom. But the story doesn’t end there. The solutions produced by progress create new problems, but almost every time, we’ve managed to find new solutions. The Haber-Bosch process created the new problem of fertilizer overapplication and pollution, but smart agriculture can get the same or greater crop yields with less fertilizer — a change that is already underway — while synthetic biology offers the promise of engineering crops that can effectively fertilize themselves. Before the Industrial Age, we lived in balance, but that balance, for the bulk of humanity, was a terrible place to be — worse, by many measures, than any future we could fear Obesity has proven to be a stubbornly resistant health problem, but new drugs and surgical treatments are poised to make it easier to lose weight even in an environment where food is everywhere. Climate change will be the most difficult challenge of all, but progress is bringing down the cost of renewable energy, reducing energy waste, and putting new forms of cleaner energy on the horizon. Progress — and that is the word — on climate policy and innovation has already bent the curve away from the worst-case climate scenarios. We’re not on course for utopia, but we no longer appear to be headed toward doom either. (At least, not this particular doom.) Before the Industrial Age, we lived in balance, but that balance, for the bulk of humanity, was a terrible place to be — worse, by many measures, than any future we could fear. With industrialization, after tens of thousands of years on this planet, we began to change that. But we also began a race: Could we keep inventing new technologies, new approaches, that would keep us ahead of the new challenges that progress created? Could we keep solving the problems of success? So far, the answer has been a qualified yes. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but we have every reason to believe that we have far more race to run. That race can feel exhausting, even pathological — the endless sentence of a species that can never seem to be satisfied. Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest. But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made. And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?

Tyler Comrie for Vox

The necessity of progress.

If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

Though historians still argue over what the writer Jason Crawford calls “the roots of progress,” the fundamental swerve was the belief that, after eons of relatively little meaningful change, the future could actually be different, and better. But the doomerism that risks overtaking us erodes that belief, and undercuts the policies that give it life.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

How progress solves the problems we didn’t know were problems

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself. And there were only the slightest inklings at the time that this could or should change.

But those inklings were there, and over time, they began to take root. The Scientific Revolution began in the 1500s, as figures like the English philosopher Francis Bacon introduced the idea that through trial and experimentation, scientific knowledge could be advanced, and with it, the human condition itself.

Over time, the abstract concepts and discoveries of the Scientific Revolution led to the machines and raw power of what would be dubbed the Industrial Revolution; to James Watts’s steam engine and Michael Faraday’s electric generator and Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, the progenitor of the modern factory.

Advances in our ability to generate energy, advances in our ability to harness that energy for work, and advances in our ability to create an economic system that got the most out of both of those factors all intermingled. And that is when human life began to truly change, in a way that was so massive and, eventually, so all-encompassing, that we still struggle to grasp its sheer scale. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has simply dubbed it “the Great Fact.”

In his 2022 book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century, the economic historian Brad DeLong uses a simple data point to describe just how much progress occurred after 1870, once the advances of the Industrial Revolution had been fully consolidated and political improvements began to follow economic ones.

In 1870, an average unskilled male worker in London could earn enough per day to buy 5,000 calories worth of food for himself and his family. That was more than in 1600, but not significantly more, and not enough to easily feed everyone consistently, given that mean household size in England at the time was just under five people.

By 2010 — the end of what DeLong in his book called “the long twentieth century” — that same worker could afford to buy the equivalent of 2.4 million calories of food per day, a nearly 50,000 percent increase.

The simplest fact about the Great Fact might be this: Without it, chances are I wouldn’t be writing this article and you wouldn’t be reading it.

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

We were stuck in the Malthusian Trap, named after the 18th-century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus. The trap argues that any increase in food production or other resources that allowed the population to grow was quickly consumed by that increased population, which then led to food shortages and population decline.

(It’s striking that one of the few real spikes in wages and standard of living in pre-industrial times came in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed off perhaps 30 percent of Europe’s population. Those who survived were able to command higher wages to work empty land — but a deadly pandemic is no reasonable person’s idea of a sustainable economic growth program.)

Viewed from one angle, the human population before the Industrial Revolution was in an ecological balance of the sort we might aim to preserve if humanity were just another wild species plowing its environmental niche, its numbers kept in check by violence, disease, and starvation.

But that nearly flat line of population growth, century after century, hides an untellable story of misery and suffering, one of children dead before their time, of families snuffed out by starvation, of potential and of people that would never have the chance to be realized. It was a story, as the writer Bill Bryson has put it, of “tiny coffins.”

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of the Malthusian Trap, producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too.

The Malthusian Trap isn’t easy to escape, and the progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed. The past two centuries have seen by far the bloodiest conflicts in human history, punctuated by the invention of weapons that could conceivably end humanity. Well into the 20th century, billions still lived lives that were materially little different from their impoverished ancestors.

But if progress hasn’t yet fully broken the Malthusian Trap physically, it did so psychologically. Once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

The simplest argument for why we need to continue to build on that legacy is found in the places where it has continued to fall short. The fact that as of 2016 some 13 percent of the world still lacked access to electricity — the invisible foundation of modernity — is just as worthy of our worry. The fact that 85 percent of the world — a little less than 7 billion people — lives on less than $30 a day should keep us awake at night.

Because that, as much as any existential challenge we fear hurtling toward us, shouldn’t simply be accepted as inevitable.

How progress can solve the problem of being human

On January 6, 1941 — 11 months before Pearl Harbor — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his State of the Union speech. But it’s better known by another name: the Four Freedoms speech.

As much of the world was engulfed in what would become the greatest and bloodiest conflict in human history, Roosevelt told Congress that “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

There are human values that can’t be captured in dry economic statistics: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If our world had somehow become as rich and as long-lived as it is today with a system of political liberties and human rights frozen in 1820, we might barely consider it progress at all.

Except that we have seen startling improvements in everything from political liberty to democratic representation to human rights to even the way we treat some (if not all) animals.

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them.

But in the decades that followed FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, things changed radically, thanks to the defeat of fascist powers, the spread of civil rights within existing democracies, and eventually, the collapse of the communist world.

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China.

That doesn’t mean that the liberal democracies that exist are perfect by any means, the US very much included. Nor does it mean that periods of advancement weren’t followed by periods of retrenchment or worse. Progress, especially in politics and morals, doesn’t flow as steadily as a calendar — just compare Germany in 1929 to Germany in 1939.

But all you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one — that, ultimately, is what the Malthusian Trap means. In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense.

But just as every bloody day of the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates that moral and political progress hasn’t eradicated our violent tendencies, the material progress that has helped meet our most basic needs has opened the door to new, knottier problems: to climate change caused by industrialization, to the ills of a longer-lived society, to the mental health challenges that arise once we no longer need to worry about surviving and instead need to worry about living.

And with it comes the temptation to turn back and give in.

How progress creates new problems — and solves them anew

On September 7, 1898, just as the world was finally escaping the Malthusian Trap, the chemist William Crookes told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that we were in danger of falling back into it.

According to Crookes, the UK’s rapidly growing population was at risk of running out of food. There wasn’t more room for additional farmland on the isles, which meant the only way to increase the food supply was to boost agricultural productivity. That required nitrogen fertilizer, but existing supplies of nitrogen at the time came from natural sources like guano deposits in Peru, and they were running out. The world faced, he said, “a life-and-death question for generations to come.”

On the face of it, this appeared to be Malthus’s revenge. The British population had exploded, but now it was meeting its natural limits, and nature’s correction was coming.

But Crookes had a solution, one he believed we could literally pull out of thin air. The Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen. Crookes challenged his audience to develop a way for humanity to artificially fix atmospheric nitrogen in a way that could be used to create synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and with it, produce enough food for Britain and the world.

Less than 20 years later, two German scientists managed to do just that, developing the Haber-Bosch process to synthesize ammonia out of atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen, which became a cornerstone of synthetic fertilizer. Combined with the increasing mechanization of agriculture, food production kept growing, and now it’s estimated that half the population alive today is dependent on the existence of synthetic fertilizer.

Viewed from this angle, the story of synthetic fertilizer from Crookes to Haber and Bosch is one of just-so progress, of technological advancement rising to meet growing need. And so it is.

But the story doesn’t stop there. The synthetic fertilizer industry produces about 2.6 gigatons of carbon per year — more than aviation and shipping combined. Its abundance has led to overapplication, so much so that about two-thirds of the nitrogen farmers apply to crops isn’t used by plants at all, but rather becomes run-off into the surrounding environment as a pollutant, causing dead zones like the massive one found in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and Fritz Haber himself later dedicated his career to developing chemical weapons that would kill thousands in World War I.

So the Haber-Bosch process solved one problem, while creating new ones.

That’s the story of progress as well.

In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a single scientific or technological advancement that doesn’t create an element of blowback. Breakthroughs in nuclear physics made possible the creation of zero-carbon nuclear plants — and also, the nuclear bombs that still hold the world hostage.

The introduction of antibiotics may have added as much as eight years to global life expectancy, but the more they’re used, the more resistance builds up, paving the way for the next potential pandemic of antibiotic-resistant infections.

Striking gains in agricultural productivity have eliminated the threat of famine in all but the poorest countries, but also contributed to a problem that was basically unheard of until recently: widespread obesity.

Advances in animal breeding and diet have made meat cheap and widespread, but at the cost of local pollution and the creation of a factory farming system that sentences billions of domesticated animals to lives of terrible suffering.

Above all else is climate change. If there was a single material ingredient to the Industrial Revolution and all that followed, it was coal. Coal fired the factories, coal fueled the railroads, coal made industrialization happen. It’s still coal, along with other fossil fuels like oil and natural gas, that provides the bulk of global energy consumption — energy consumption that has risen more than 3,000 percent since 1800.

And coal and its fellow fossil fuels are by far the top contributors to climate change. Coal helped create progress, and coal helped create climate change. And if the story ended there, it might be reasonable to look at progress very differently. It might even be reasonable to agree with de-growthers whose demand, at the end of the day, is that we must stop economic growth and throw it in reverse, or face doom.

But the story doesn’t end there.

The solutions produced by progress create new problems, but almost every time, we’ve managed to find new solutions.

The Haber-Bosch process created the new problem of fertilizer overapplication and pollution, but smart agriculture can get the same or greater crop yields with less fertilizer — a change that is already underway — while synthetic biology offers the promise of engineering crops that can effectively fertilize themselves.

Obesity has proven to be a stubbornly resistant health problem, but new drugs and surgical treatments are poised to make it easier to lose weight even in an environment where food is everywhere.

Climate change will be the most difficult challenge of all, but progress is bringing down the cost of renewable energy, reducing energy waste, and putting new forms of cleaner energy on the horizon. Progress — and that is the word — on climate policy and innovation has already bent the curve away from the worst-case climate scenarios. We’re not on course for utopia, but we no longer appear to be headed toward doom either. (At least, not this particular doom.)

Before the Industrial Age, we lived in balance, but that balance, for the bulk of humanity, was a terrible place to be — worse, by many measures, than any future we could fear. With industrialization, after tens of thousands of years on this planet, we began to change that.

But we also began a race: Could we keep inventing new technologies, new approaches, that would keep us ahead of the new challenges that progress created? Could we keep solving the problems of success?

So far, the answer has been a qualified yes. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but we have every reason to believe that we have far more race to run.

That race can feel exhausting, even pathological — the endless sentence of a species that can never seem to be satisfied. Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?

Read the full story here.
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There’s a Communist Multi-Millionaire Fomenting Revolution in Atlanta

In 2021, when Keisha Lance Bottoms, then Atlanta’s mayor, revealed plans for a new $90 million police training facility, she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the project was essential “if we want the best, most well-trained officers protecting our communities.” Its classrooms, shooting range, and simulated city streetscapes would, according to the project’s website, help […]

In 2021, when Keisha Lance Bottoms, then Atlanta’s mayor, revealed plans for a new $90 million police training facility, she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the project was essential “if we want the best, most well-trained officers protecting our communities.” Its classrooms, shooting range, and simulated city streetscapes would, according to the project’s website, help law enforcement “learn de-escalation and harm reduction techniques that reduce the use of force.” But some Atlantans who had taken to the streets for the previous year’s demonstrations over the police murder of George Floyd didn’t think Atlanta needed any more cops—no matter how well trained. Protesters quickly mobilized against the project, dubbing it “Cop City” and describing it in very different terms. The facility would “allow police not just from Atlanta, but globally, to learn repressive tactics, so that protests and rebellions can be easily crushed,” warned the American Friends Service Committee. Other critics worry about the environmental impact of the facility—the woods for its proposed location are one of four forests called the “lungs of Atlanta. Nonetheless, the construction began, with the first phase set to open two years later. Then, in 2023, Georgia state troopers killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist known as Tortuguita who had taken up residence at the planned facility’s wooded site hoping to block construction. Outraged by Tortuguita’s death, organizers supercharged efforts to put the project up for a voter referendum in the fall. More radical protesters allegedly have damaged construction equipment and thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at police cars; 42 are currently facing state domestic terrorism charges. In August, 61 opponents of the project were indicted under Georgia’s RICO law—the same broad anti-racketeering measure behind Trump’s DeKalb county election interference case. A vigil in Atlanta, Georgia commemorating the life of environmental activist Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Teran on Jan. 18, 2024. Tortuguita was killed by Georgia State Troopers a year before, on Jan. 18, 2023., during a raid on a Stop Cop City encampment. Collin Mayfield/Sipa/AP Damaged equipment sits at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County, Ga., Monday, March 6, 2023. John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP The protesters, meanwhile, have doubled down, sending teams out to collect signatures for the ballot measure, chartering buses to pack events, and hiring lawyers to defend those facing charges. This kind of activism doesn’t come cheap—but luckily for the protesters, they have a deep-pocketed ally: Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)   In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested. While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian president Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me. “I think it’s a good thing that Cop City is causing increased polarization and fracturing amongst Democrats and so-called progressive politicians.” Because of these extremist views, Chambers’ generous funding of Cop City protests has repercussions beyond the training facility itself. Some Atlanta Democrats worry that his views, along with what they see as increasingly belligerent tactics by the protesters he funds, could alienate the suburban voters who helped Georgia flip the Senate blue in 2020. A poll last year showed that a majority of the state’s voters—and 43 percent of Democrats—support the facility. Last fall, former Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a Democrat who represented a metro Atlanta district from 2021 to 2023, wrote an op-ed in the Journal-Constitution: “Certainly, from my suburban vantage point, it looks like downtown progressive activists, supported and funded by national activists and donors, are going crazy over a well-intentioned effort,” she wrote. When I spoke to her, she said she worried that property-destroying protesters were a bad look. “No one should be subjected to police brutality—hard stop,” she wrote to me in an email. But “most moderate Democratic voters of my acquaintance don’t even understand why on earth this facility would generate such ferocious protest…better training would seem to be a solution to problem of police brutality.” Bill Torpy, a veteran columnist for the Journal-Constitution, put a finer point on it: The “kind of rhetoric” from the most strident protesters, he said, “is something that might get Trump reelected.” But opponents of the facility I spoke with dismissed those concerns. “I think it’s a good thing that Cop City is causing increased polarization and fracturing amongst Democrats and so-called progressive politicians” who are “more concerned with their bank accounts than they are with doing what is actually right,” argued Sam Beard, an organizer of a group called Block Cop City. Similarly, veteran Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin told me he thinks the facility “should be a wedge issue because establishment Democrats have not sided with the people when it comes to issues of cops and capitalism. Establishment Democrats are on the same side as right-wing Republicans.” Activists gather outside Atlanta City Hall, on Sept. 11, 2023, where they delivered dozens of boxes full of signed petitions to force a referendum on the future of a planned police and firefighter training center. Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP If Chambers’ rhetoric and politics are brash and unapologetic, when he speaks about his early years, he’s different—tortured, bashful, almost self-loathing. “It was very typical—sort of nepo-baby or, like, rich kid journey to find oneself,” he told me during our first phone call. While the Coxes have shaped Atlanta for generations, Chambers was raised in Brooklyn, where his father felt more at home with the Patagonia-clad upper crust of the Northeast than his family’s southern opulence. So Chambers’ exposure to Georgia as a child was limited to yearly visits to his grandmother’s house in the tony neighborhood of Buckhead. Her “crazy fancy” home was a showier version of wealth, he recalls, than the brownstones-and-progressive-private-school version in Brooklyn. He recalls thinking of Atlanta as a “weird oasis of ultra-elite people.” Chambers grew to feel uncomfortable around them, in part, he says, because of his troubled life at home. As a teenager, he got into drugs, which led to run-ins with police.   It wasn’t until Chambers was in his twenties—recently married, a Bard College dropout, and “going through a Christian phase”—that he relocated to Atlanta to attempt a conventional life. He moved to the middle-class suburb of Smyrna and took a job training managers at his family’s vehicle auction company, Manheim. By the time he was 25, he had three children. Though his role at the company was decidedly white collar, “I was friends with a lot of regular, truly working-class guys,” he said. “I related to that and wanted to fit into that.” As he told me about this chapter of his life, Chambers seemed eager to head off any accusations of slumming it. “I’m not trying to claim some class identity that I don’t have,” he said. “I’m just talking about the social environments that I’ve been in.”   Working at the plant rubbed him the wrong way—he was unsettled by the power dynamic between the white managers and the mostly Black workers and appalled by the low wages and the “incredibly poor conditions the lowest ranks of workers had.” Then, the 2008 recession hit, and the company laid off thousands of workers, yet “there was still revenue in the billions,” he recalled. “I hated it—I hated the whole thing.” Disillusioned, Chambers left Georgia later that year. For a few months, he made a half-hearted attempt to finish his degree at Bard but then decided to move his family to Russia, where his wife was born and still had family.  Surrounded by a new culture, Chambers became enthralled and dove into learning everything he could about the country and its politics. He decided to try to finish his degree at Bard, returned with his wife to upstate New York, and threw himself into working out and learning more about radical leftist movements. In 2012, Chambers was summoned to Atlanta for his grandmother’s 90th birthday, and during the trip, he met a guy selling two gyms, one in the city, and one in the Northern suburb of Alpharetta. Impulsively, Chambers bought them and relocated to Atlanta again, commuting between the two gyms. At the Alpharetta location, he remembered that one of his trainers was a “bored, wealthy housewife” who aspired to open a gym. Her name was Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a Republican member of Congress representing Georgia. At that time, Chambers recalled, Greene wanted to become “an important person in the world of CrossFit.” When I asked Rep. Greene’s office about Chambers’ account, a spokesperson responded, “We aren’t participating in any article written by Mother Jones, but for clarity, I can not confirm because it’s not true whatsoever and you should refrain from printing any nonsense about Congresswoman Greene from this avowed Communist.” Chambers’ first few months back in Atlanta were tumultuous: He got divorced, began using drugs again, became involved with another woman, got sober, married the other woman, and opened a coffee shop in the upscale enclave of Virginia Highland with his new wife. Nearby, in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of East Atlanta Village, he opened a new gym, which he advertised as “a radically aligned, left-friendly gym and community.” A posted sign offered something of an ethos: “Do whatever the fuck you want, correctly, except CrossFit cultism. No fucking cops.” But he was making inroads with the city’s radicals—especially the police abolitionists. In 2014, he traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the police shooting of Michael Brown. The trip was another turning point—and it coincided with a family transaction that, he said, took his own fortunes from “theoretically wealthy” to “immediately wealthy,” in the “single digit millions of dollars.” But Atlanta, Chambers told me, was “a difficult place to organize, because there was a really strong Democratic Party mechanism there,” he told me. “It just felt like dancing around with these NGOs.” He discovered that several of the racial justice groups he had been working with had ties to the Democrats, so he abandoned the mainstream groups and began to offer direct support to activists. During the next seven years, Chambers got divorced again and started a commune in the Berkshires, but he stayed in touch with his police abolition friends in Atlanta. In 2021, shortly after Bottoms announced plans for the police facility, Chambers learned of the need for funds to mount a robust protest. He gave generously—first in the tens of thousands, and then in the hundreds. “It was unbelievable to people—in the wake of a pretty strong decade of anti-police sentiment growing especially in Atlanta—that then this would be dropped on the city,” he said. “They were demolishing a forest—that was just totally insane.” Despite his contributions, it wasn’t easy mobilizing opposition to the facility. Specifically, Chambers saw Atlanta’s Black Democrat centrists—such as former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)—as barriers to progress. “I understand how the Black radical community views them,” Chambers told me. “You know, advancing the white corporate agenda of [Atlanta’s wealthy] North Side.” In 2021, Reed told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I support the development of a best-in-class training facility for our police officers, but I have not made a judgment on where it should be located.” Last year, Sen. Warnock criticized the protesters who destroyed property.  “I was ready to let go of whatever illusions I had about doing anything else with myself, except trying to be of service to destroying the thing that had created me.” If the protesters were going to win, they needed more people on their side. And if they wanted more people, they needed more money. So, Chambers decided to do something he had been contemplating for a while: Last July, he struck a deal with his family. Instead of inheriting a vast portfolio of investments, he received $250 million and will get more in the coming years—he declined to say how much or exactly when. Some of his money, he said, is in irrevocable trusts, so he can’t personally access it—but it’s designated to go toward the causes he cares about, including protesting the facility in Atlanta. Chambers sees his divestment as an act of protest—against capitalism, yes, but also against his own family’s elitism and greed. “I was ready to let go of whatever illusions I had about doing anything else with myself,” he said, “except trying to be of service to destroying the thing that had created me.” If Atlanta’s police and political powers have their way, Cop City will be finished by the end of this year. They appear undeterred by the protesters, except for occasional complaints about the inconvenience and expense they’ve caused. In January, city officials said 23 acts of arson had taken place at the site, resulting in a $20 million rise in costs, which they promised would not be passed on to taxpayers. The leaders of the protests claim that they’ve collected 116,000 signatures, nearly double the number they needed to bring the facility before voters as a ballot initiative. But a December analysis by four Atlanta news outlets found that as many as half of those signatures could be invalid—one signature that they found, for example, was that of “Lord Jesus” with the address of “homeless.” In February, the Atlanta City Council voted to start an official count of the signatures, which will determine the fate of the proposed ballot measure. On X these days, Chambers is prolific, musing in rapid-fire style about Palestine, the war in Ukraine, his recent conversion to Islam, and, of course, Cop City. On the January anniversary of the killing he posted that because they supported the project, “my family, the Cox family, continues to have Tortuguita’s blood on their hands.” Recently, he’s also been mocking those who suggest that Democrats must unite behind Biden to defeat Trump. “Why any of you ever put ANY faith in liberals continues to be beyond me,” he posted in January. As he later added, “The Democrat base is about as uncritical as any political bloc, ever…Thank God that base is aging out of relevance.” In Georgia, recent polls predict a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election. Bipartisan politics, Cop City, Palestine, Russia—one gets the sense that for Chambers and many of those he supports, these are all a single cause. When I spoke to Franklin, the community organizer whose demonstrations against the facility Chambers has funded, he offered similar context, telling me that his fellow protesters “see Cop City in terms of the connection that police here in the United States have with the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli policing agency” and “US imperialism driving towards Russia’s border or using Ukraine as a proxy for that.” But when we spoke, other, more personal issues demanded his immediate attention. When I asked him in December if I could join him at an Atlanta protest event sometime, he told me that would be unlikely; he had moved to Tunisia. “I just needed to take a break,” he told me. “Elements of people who call themselves the left and the state want to come after me.” I asked him what was next with the protest movement. He didn’t know, he said. “What if there’s a scandal that we don’t know about?” he wondered aloud, hoping that a political curveball could kill the project. But mostly, he just seemed overwhelmed with the magnitude of his recent inheritance. “Nobody’s used to operating with this scale of resources and, like, how to use it strategically—I need to create different trusts and, like, donor-advised funds.” He sighed anxiously. “I don’t understand this shit.” In March, when we spoke again, he was still in Tunisia; he had gotten married again the previous month, this time to the mother of his fourth child. He told me that the Cop City organizing had slowed, mostly because he is devoting more time and money to Palestine, as are many of the other activists he works with. There are, he said, “definitely murmurings of the FBI looking at me.” Still, he said he plans to keep supporting the protesters and their legal defense, to the tune of still more millions of dollars if necessary. “They’ll have really significant costs that are going to come up because it’s going to be a fairly drawn-out thing,” he said. “I know we’re going do something considerable.”

Wolf trapping must be curtailed in Idaho to protect endangered grizzlies, court rules

The ruling ends the wolf trapping season in northern and eastern Idaho between March 1 and Nov. 31, when grizzlies are out of their dens.

A federal court ruling will cut back Idaho’s wolf trapping and snaring season in large swaths of the state in response to claims that grizzly bears, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, could be killed or injured by trapping or snaring devices.U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale issued the summary judgment Tuesday as part of a 2021 lawsuit filed by environmental activist groups over the Idaho Legislature’s expansion of trapping seasons.She wrote that “there is ample evidence in the record, including from Idaho’s own witnesses, that lawfully set wolf traps and snares are reasonably likely to take grizzly bears in Idaho.”Dale’s ruling ends the wolf trapping season in northern and eastern Idaho between March 1 and Nov. 31, when grizzlies are out of their dens, unless the Idaho Department of Fish and Game obtains an incidental take permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The permit would waive potential Endangered Species Act violation liability if a grizzly is caught or killed in traps meant for another species.The Idaho Department of Fish and Game did not immediately return a request for comment on the ruling.The ruling applies to hunting units in the Panhandle, Clearwater, Salmon and Upper Snake Fish and Game regions, where current trapping seasons on public land range from mid-September to the end of March.Dale’s ruling also rolled back a portion of controversial 2021 legislation that expanded wolf trapping season on private land to be legal year-round.The Tuesday ruling cataloged several instances in which grizzly bears have been caught, injured or killed in traps and snares set for wolves. Though just three of those incidents — two in 2020 and one in 2012 — occurred in Idaho, Dale said similar scenarios in Montana and Wyoming proved the possibility that wolf traps posed a danger to the threatened bears despite Idaho trappers and Fish and Game experts calling such instances highly unlikely.In 2020, two young male grizzlies in Boundary County were killed after becoming caught in wolf snares. Fish and Game enforcement reported the first had “a wolf snare very tightly around its neck and another wolf snare wrapped around its front left paw.” The second grizzly was shot and killed by hunters that mistook it for a black bear. That grizzly had a broken wolf snare around its neck that Fish and Wildlife Service officials said “would have eventually resulted in death.”The snares in both incidents were determined to be illegally set and contained no information identifying the trapper who set them, as required by Idaho law.In 2012, a professional Fish and Game trapper caught a grizzly in a wolf foothold trap in eastern Idaho. The bear was released with minor injuries.Dale’s judgment said it’s possible other grizzlies have been caught in snares or traps intended for wolves and have managed to break free. Another Idaho grizzly was photographed in 2019 with apparent snare scars around its neck. The judge also noted that trappers may not report non-target catches. She said existing inadvertent catch reports are “woefully inadequate” and note 37 instances of bears caught in traps or snares when Fish and Game did not note the bear’s species.Dale said Idaho’s grizzly population is roughly 200 animals, with most concentrated in the Panhandle and eastern Idaho’s Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. However, the bears have also been seen in recent years wandering into the Bitterroot Ecosystem, where federal officials may try to reestablish a grizzly population. The animals have been considered extinct in that area of Central Idaho for decades, and Dale said trapping or snaring of grizzlies there could upend recovery efforts.“The reality of even one take could have profound effects upon Idaho’s grizzly bear population,” Dale wrote.©2024 The Idaho Statesman. Visit idahostatesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Mystery among the vines: Why is the FBI probing some of Napa Valley's fanciest wineries?

Among the Napa Valley luminaries whose county records have been subpoenaed in a secretive federal probe are the owners of Hall Wines, Caymus Vineyards, Alpha Omega, The Prisoner — and the list goes on.

St. Helena, Calif. —  Highway 29 winds along the floor of the Napa Valley through Yountville and St. Helena and up into Calistoga, passing by vineyards that produce some of the most celebrated and expensive wines in the world.The road, lined with rows of grapevines planted along sun-dappled hills, is justly famous for its stunning beauty — and the stunning number of Michelin-rated restaurants, spas and boutique inns that have popped up among the vineyards.And lately, for locals anyway, it is also the source of a pressing mystery: Why have so many of the fancy wineries along this road — and their rich and powerful owners — been named in federal subpoenas that were served late last year on Napa County?“Please provide any and all documents relating to the following individuals, entities, and/or projects,” one subpoena says, before unspooling a roster that reads more like a high-end tourist brochure than what is normally found in a court docket.Among the glittering names whose county records are being sought are Hall Wines, known for its bold cabernets and luxe St. Helena winery with a towering statue of a silver rabbit. Kathryn Hall, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, is also named, as is her husband, Craig Hall, a former part-owner of the Dallas Cowboys whose art collection is so revered that portions went on loan to the Jeu de Paume arts center in Paris.Caymus Vineyards, whose cabernet is a frequent favorite of Wine Spectator, and owner Charles J. “Chuck” Wagner are listed in the records request, as are Wagner’s son, Charlie Wagner, and his vineyard, Mer Soleil.The inventory of luminaries rolls on: Robin Baggett, a former general counsel for the Golden State Warriors, and his Alpha Omega Winery. Dave Phinney, whose “Prisoner” label changed the industry. Grant Long Jr. and his wineries Aonair and Reverie II. Jayson Woodbridge and Hundred Acre. Darioush Khaledi and his namesake winery. And on it goes — 40 people and businesses in total, including Napa’s exclusive Meritage Resort and Spa. The subpoena seeking records on the wineries and their owners, dated Dec. 14, 2023, is filed under the name of Patrick Robbins, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. It also references an FBI agent, Katherine Ferrato, who has experience working on complex financial crimes. Separately, a trial attorney working in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division filed a subpoena, dated Dec. 7, requesting records pertaining to the Upper Valley Waste Management Agency, a joint powers authority that manages trash and recycling services for Calistoga, St. Helena and Yountville. A third subpoena seeks records on the Napa County Airport, which local officials are seeking to modernize. A fourth was served on the county’s farm bureau, which in recent years has become a powerful political voice on behalf of wineries.If Napa County officials have any idea what’s going on, they aren’t saying. “Napa County is not being investigated,” county spokesperson Holly Dawson said. “We were issued a subpoena for records. We know nothing more.”The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco declined to comment, as did the FBI’s San Francisco office. Some of those named in the probe did not respond to interview requests. Some who did respond said they are stumped. Craig and Kathryn Hall released a statement through their director of public relations: “We are aware that there is an ongoing investigation. However, we do not know the scope or the details and it would be inappropriate for us to speculate,” the couple said. Baggett, of Alpha Omega, said his operations had “nothing pending” before the county and therefore “zero” documents that would have been turned over. He said it has been “a big waste of time daily explaining that we have done nothing wrong.” Baggett dismissed the probe as a “fishing expedition” or worse, adding: “I hope it’s not a political witch hunt.”Like several people interviewed, Baggett speculated that one person of interest could be Napa County Supervisor Alfredo Pedroza, who has generated ire among local environmental activists because he is perceived as pro-agriculture, which in Napa Valley almost always means pro-winery.Some of the entities whose records were subpoenaed have donated to Pedroza’s political campaigns. A small number were involved in a controversial land deal involving Pedroza’s family that is adjacent to property the Halls sought to develop in Napa Valley’s eastern hills.For years, Craig and Kathryn Hall had sought to construct a 208-acre vineyard on Walt Ranch, 2,300 acres of oak woodland they owned in Napa’s Atlas Peak appellation, prized for its elevation and rich volcanic soil. The property was undeveloped when the Halls bought it in 2005, but zoned for agriculture. Their efforts to clear space for a vineyard drew fierce opposition from environmental groups that said it would endanger oak trees and animal habitat, deplete limited water supplies and boost fire risk.After years of regulatory and legal wrangling, the development was tentatively approved by the Board of Supervisors in late 2021. Pedroza voted in favor of the project. His vote set off a new controversy when a local activist, documentary filmmaker Beth Nelsen, discovered that Pedroza’s father-in-law had bought property adjacent to the proposed vineyard. The San Francisco Chronicle followed with reports that Pedroza and his wife helped secure a loan for the purchase, using his Napa home as collateral. Critics said the Walt Ranch development would no doubt raise property values in the area — including the property Pedroza’s father-in-law had purchased — and that Pedroza should have publicly disclosed his involvement as a conflict of interest.Pedroza denied he had a financial interest in the property, but recused himself from subsequent votes on Walt Ranch. In late 2022, the Halls gave up on the idea of developing the vineyard, and worked out a deal to preserve the land through the county land trust.The FBI searched Pedroza’s home in December, according to the Napa Valley Register. He opted not to run for another term on the Board of Supervisors and will end his tenure later this year.Pedroza did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment from The Times. Earlier this month, he sent an emailed statement to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat : “I believe everyone should cooperate fully with all branches of federal and state government and I have always encouraged citizens in Napa and all Napa public authorities to do so. There is no reason to do otherwise.”Adding to the intrigue — and the grief — a key figure in Napa County, Ryan Klobas, died in an apparent suicide in January, weeks after the Department of Justice served a subpoena on the Napa County Farm Bureau, which Klobas headed. Klobas joined the farm bureau in 2017 as policy director and was named chief executive in 2018. Under his leadership, the bureau doubled its membership and formed a political action committee to work on behalf of the bureau that raised funds to successfully defeat a county initiative that would have limited the growth of wineries. The bureau’s interim CEO, Tawny Tesconi, confirmed the bureau had received a subpoena but declined any additional comment. As the mystery swirls, one thing is clear: The federal probe comes amid a bitter divide among longtime vintners and residents over Napa Valley’s future. Should the valley keep adding vineyards? Or has the proliferation of wineries and tourists and traffic reached a tipping point that threatens to erode its natural environment and rural charm — no matter how pretty the rows of grapes in the slanting afternoon light?“Our entire economy depends on the success of our agriculture, and our wine and hospitality,” said former Yountville Mayor John Dunbar, a supporter of the wine industry. But the fight over land use has grown “toxic,” he said. “People are being attacked because they are for or against a winery permit.” Geoff Ellsworth, a former mayor of St. Helena, is among those who believe the forces of development pose a grave risk to the valley’s environment and invite political corruption. What’s more, he worries that the influx of hotels and tourist attractions are “hollowing out” his hometown and others on the valley floor.Ellsworth, who grew up in St. Helena and returned about a decade ago after years in Los Angeles, said a breaking point for him was when he learned of a proposal to redevelop St. Helena’s City Hall into a hotel, as well as a decision that did away with tiered water rates. “I was like, ‘Wait a second,’” he said. Soon after, he decided to run for City Council and eventually became mayor.And then he started hearing about problems at the landfill in the hills above Calistoga, which takes in trash from many of the wineries, as well as waste from nearby counties. “Fires,” he said. “Radioactive waste. I’m the mayor, and I’m like what is going on?”Ellsworth eventually joined forces with another citizen concerned about the landfill, Anne Wheaton. Now a couple, they have devoted the last few years to exposing what they say is a complicated web of environmental and worker safety violations that they worry could make the landfill hazardous.In late 2020, Ellsworth said, he was sufficiently outraged that he reached out to the Department of Justice. He and Wheaton were gratified to read the subpoena the department filed with the county asking about dealings with the Upper Valley Waste Management Agency. It seeks information on contracting, as well as communications among agencies and elected officials. Ellsworth said he isn’t privy to the scope or details of the federal probe or what role the landfill might play. But he believes powerful interests have a stake in the outcome — enough so that he and Wheaton have moved out of the county. “The amount of money at stake here is billions of dollars,” Ellsworth said. “We wanted to distance ourselves from the situation.”

‘Water is worth more than gold’: eco-activist Esteban Polanco on why violence won’t stop him

Brutally attacked for his work as one of the Dominican Republic’s leading land defenders, Polanco says the next generation must fight environmental destructionWhile making his way from his home in Loma de Blanco, a mountain in the middle of the Dominican Republic, to the nearby town of Bonao, Esteban Polanco was attacked by a group of about 10 men. They threw a molotov cocktail at the car in which he was travelling with two of his children, before running off. The family survived, but Polanco suffered terrible burns.“I was close to death, and it took a year to recover,” he says of the 2007 attack. Some, but not all, of the perpetrators were later imprisoned. Continue reading...

While making his way from his home in Loma de Blanco, a mountain in the middle of the Dominican Republic, to the nearby town of Bonao, Esteban Polanco was attacked by a group of about 10 men. They threw a molotov cocktail at the car in which he was travelling with two of his children, before running off. The family survived, but Polanco suffered terrible burns.“I was close to death, and it took a year to recover,” he says of the 2007 attack. Some, but not all, of the perpetrators were later imprisoned.Polanco believes IT was brutal retaliation for his work as one of the country’s most prominent land and water defenders. The collective of farmers he leads, the Federation of Farmers Towards Progress (La Federación de Campesinos hacia el Progreso), has, for decades, challenged successive governments and powerful business interests and famously stopped an international mining company from destroying and exploiting Loma de Blanco.Polanco, 62, grew up in a remote community in Loma de Blanco. He remembers having to wade across the river 21 times to get to the nearest town. As a child, he helped his father, a farmer, before studying education and working as a teacher for 12 years. He is jovial and friendly, but his voice rises and he becomes animated when the conversation turns to defending the environment and the injustices his community has faced.Polanco was badly burned in an attack, which he believes was due to his work defending the land with the Federation of Farmers towards Progress. Photograph: Pedro Farias-Nardi/The GuardianToday, his organisation continues to defend the land, rivers and rights of local people. It also trains environmental defenders from surrounding areas and around the world.Latin America is consistently found to be the world’s most dangerous region for activists. In 2022 88% of the global total of 177 murders of land and environmental defenders occurred here.We, the people, were the barrier that would prevent the mining company from accessing the land“The situation for defenders is more dangerous than ever,” says Polanco. “[Mining companies and ranchers] exhaust more resources every day, and they are more aggressive. We have to keep fighting harder because they are going into areas much more vulnerable than those they have already damaged.”The federation’s story dates back to the summer of 1992, when the government granted an exploration permit to Hispaniola Gold Mine, a subsidiary of a Canadian company no longer in existence, in the middle of a region called Madre de las Aguas (mother of the waters). The area includes Loma de Blanco and is home to the River Yuna, the second-longest river in the Dominican Republic.It was a David and Goliath fight. Members of the federation travelled on foot or by mule from village to village alerting residents to the dangers presented by potential mining and conducting assemblies and workshops. “We, the people, were the barrier that would prevent the mining company from accessing the land,” says Polanco.They studied the law and how it related to mining and the environment. They collaborated with geologists to learn about rock. “We fed ourselves with knowledge, and we created a newsletter with 10 reasons explaining why it was impossible to allow a mine to enter,” he adds.The Pueblo Viejo gold and silver mine in Cotuí, Dominican Republic, shows the environmental impact that might have happened in Loma de Blanco. Photograph: The GuardianPolanco also asked well-known activists and environmentalists, such as Aniana Vargas, considered a national heroine, to help in their fight.In 1997, after years of relentless campaigning and protests involving thousands of people from across the country, government ministers notified the federation that the mining company had abandoned its plans.The campaigners’ triumph “opened the possibility of us having an environmental law” and “changed the nature of the environmental movement in Dominican society”, Luis Carvajal, coordinator of the environmental commission at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, later commented.Fernando Peña, of the National Space for Extractive Industry Transparency, a coalition of more than 100 organisations monitoring the impacts of mining in the Dominican Republic, says: “The federation’s conquest was huge. [Their struggle] inspired others.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Global DispatchGet a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development teamPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionToday, the federation’s headquarters lie in Loma de Blanco, overlooking mountains covered in lush, verdant greenery. The area is home to seven hydroelectric dams providing more than half of the country’s renewable energy. The federation has been there for 28 years since it was granted a resolution by the government to protect the area.Its members have been involved in new environmental battles in the country, such as gaining national park status for nearby Lomo Miranda, which has vast reserves of ferronickel.They have also built an eco lodge to generate tourism and show people some of what the natural surroundings can offer. They make their own coffee, teach farmers how to get the most out of the land and train people to make bamboo furniture.Polanco at the Ecotourism Complex in Rio Blanco where they welcome visitors and teach people sustainable farming methods. Photograph: Pedro Farias-Nardi/The GuardianIn February, Polanco was one of those invited by the ministry of the environment and natural resources to organise local communities to help forest firefighters prevent devastation and deal with fires, which, according to the authorities, are caused by humans in 68% of cases.The federation educates young people from surrounding communities about the importance of natural resources, such as water. It runs workshops and camps, invite environmental experts and academics to give talks, and is in the process of starting an agroecology school to teach people about food sovereignty and how to defend water, mountains, nature and biodiversity.Land and water defenders from across the country and Latin America have come to learn about the methods the federation used to protect themselves and the environment. Esther Giron, 28, co-founder of Aquelarre RD, a grassroots feminist collective in Bonao, is one land and water defender inspired by their work.Esther Giron (right), with a colleague. Giron has been inspired by Polanco and the federation in her work as a co-founder of Aquelarre RD. Photograph: Sarah Johnson/The Guardian“When I found out about the federation, I understood that their struggle was ancestral and anticolonial and was in the defence of water, land and life,” she says. “I realised that our political actions have to start from the community, and above all, they have to be done alongside women on a lesser privilege scale.”Although the threat of environmental destruction is ever present, Polanco is reassured that there is increased public awareness of the need to protect the environment. He looks to the next generations to continue the fight.“Today, we have young people from our community and surrounding towns who are determined that nothing is going to happen that threatens Loma de Blanco,” he says. “We cannot allow any vulnerable mountain in this country that produces water to be exploited for mining because, for us, a drop of water is worth more than an ounce of gold.”

Can we protect and profit from the oceans?

Joe Gough for Vox What the UN is missing with its plan to save the seas The ocean is home to most animal life on Earth. It’s also vital to human survival, regulating the climate, capturing 90 percent of the heat caused by carbon emissions, and producing 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. But most of the ocean is poorly regulated, amounting to a free-for-all of resource extraction — from commercial fishing to drilling for oil — that severely damages the marine ecosystems we all depend on. Now, world governments are inching closer to the most decisive step ever to safeguard the ocean’s future. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which was drafted last March and will take effect once 60 countries ratify it, aims to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. It particularly focuses on the part of the ocean that is currently least protected, the high seas, which make up about two-thirds of the ocean and are defined as any area beyond 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. The treaty intends to create “marine protected areas,” or MPAs, a legal designation that would regulate and limit the kinds of extractive activities that can happen within the high seas. Once ratified, participating governments would designate MPAs — ideally prioritizing protecting areas rich in biodiversity — and compliance would be monitored by a central body formed under the treaty. Yet MPAs are also highly limited. Though they sound like a kind of Yellowstone in the sea, they can perhaps be better thought of as “protected in name only,” as Vox’s Benji Jones put it last year, because commercial fishing, oil drilling, and mining will still happen in these areas. Instead, MPA regulations hope to prevent the worst injustices against humans and animals, while the revenue generated from permitted activities — which could range from recreational diving and fisheries to mining and drilling — would then partially pay the management fees for these zones. Another major goal of the UN High Seas Treaty is promoting the equitable sharing of ocean resources, such as new genetic discoveries that can help advance medicine, between high- and low-income countries. It also aims to create a more regulated ocean economy, with some nations able to pay off national debt if they agree to protect certain areas. Some management is better than the usual way of doing business in the high seas — a lawless place where nations do not have jurisdiction, horrors like slavery on industrial fishing vessels are common, and ocean trawlers catch and often kill billions of pounds of bycatch (unintentionally captured creatures like dolphins, whales, and turtles) every year. A deeper look, however, into the proposed management in Marine Protected Areas complicates its image as a conservation solution. The crux of it all is the trade-off between making a profit and fully protecting the ocean. We can’t have both. There’s a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean in the short term. But thinking solely of short-term profit will cost us more down the line, even in purely economic terms. The ocean economy — encompassing industries like fishing, maritime shipping, and oil drilling — generates nearly $3 trillion of global GDP every year, and its worth is estimated at $24 trillion. Its stability depends on making conservation a priority now, rather than extracting more from the ocean than it can bear. The High Seas Treaty’s 30 percent target for turning the ocean into protected areas is just a starting point if we want to conserve oceans and the future of life on Earth. But proposed regulation needs teeth. Figuring out what activities should and should not be allowed in MPAs is a broad and tough conversation about what we think the true value of the ocean is. What is a marine protected area? The concept of a marine protected area goes back centuries. “Taboo,” or tabu, as historically practiced in the Pacific Islands, has contemporary resonance as a conservation strategy. To this day, it keeps certain areas of the ocean off-limits to fishing. MPAs, as we think of them today, have been in the global conversation since at least 1962, when the limits of the ocean’s resources were discussed at the World Congress on National Parks, the international forum for creating protected natural areas. Then, at the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders agreed on a target to turn 10 percent of the ocean into MPAs by 2020, but this goal was not met. Today, just 2.9 percent of the ocean is fully or highly protected from fishing impacts. A shuffle of different targets and conversations then ensued, culminating in the 30 percent by 2030 goal set by the UN High Seas Treaty last year. Even that ambitious target represents the bare minimum needed to adequately protect the ocean, experts told me, and the agreement may take years to come into force. That’s time we do not have. Jenna Sullivan-Stack et al | Frontiers in Marine Science The size and scope of MPAs can vary widely: The largest is in the Ross Sea region near Antarctica, where 1.12 million square kilometers have been protected since 2016. The smallest MPA is Echo Bay Marine Provincial Park in Gilford Island, between Vancouver Island and British Columbia, which has just 1 acre of protection. The UN High Seas treaty, for the first time, sets out a process for states to set up marine protected areas in the high seas, outside of any nation’s direct jurisdiction. In their proposals, states must show what area they intend to protect, the threats it faces, and plans for its management. In exchange, countries could create a range of economic benefits from the ocean, like debt restructuring (as was the case with the Seychelles), benefiting fisheries, and even selling blue carbon credits. Beyond marine protected areas, the High Seas Treaty lays out a framework for the use of marine genetic resources and what fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from discovery would look like. Currently, developed nations are far outpacing developing nations in finding and commercializing marine genetic resources, such as the anti-cancer drug Halaven, which is derived from a Japanese sea sponge and has annual sales of $300 million. There’s still a lively debate in ocean politics over whether an MPA should fully protect a region of the ocean, or whether it can also be used for commercial purposes like fishing, mining, and oil extraction. Critics of the MPA approach go so far as to call them “paper parks” (or parks in name only) because, as they exist now, they allow a number of exploitative activities within protected areas. Groups like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s premier conservation organization, have proposed supplementary guidelines for MPAs that would ban extractive activities, especially at industrial scales. The UN High Seas Treaty as it stands now does not limit what existing fisheries, cargo ships, and deep-sea mining organizations can do in open waters. “We need to remove perverse incentives, and we need to rewire the world in a different way,” said Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN also advocates for an ecosystem-wide approach to conserving the ocean rather than single species protections, and for protecting species as they migrate across the ocean over time, rather than solely in one static location. Additionally, IUCN guidelines point to the fluctuating nature of the ocean and its inhabitants that travel across large distances; because of this, they suggest that there should be temporal protections in migratory paths and spawning locations. The IUCN guidelines also call for greater protection of the entire water column, from the top to the bottom of the seafloor. The UN High Seas Treaty, on the other hand, would exempt deep-sea mining operators from submitting environmental impact assessments on their proposed activities on the ocean floor. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images These black polymetallic sea nodules form naturally in the deep sea. There’s something fishy about extracting buckets of money from the ocean in order to save it Getting world leaders to agree to these terms is the challenge. Scientists and activists want full protection of the oceans now, while business interests argue that there’s too much money to be made by continuing extractive activities. The challenge for ocean advocates is to create economic incentives for conservation that can outweigh the enormous incentive to continue to allow business-as-usual pollution and exploitation of marine ecosystems. “Giving a different value to nature is one of our biggest challenges,” said marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle in a panel at the UN World Oceans Day conference last June. “Our continued existence — that needs to be on the balance sheet.” This conversation plugs into a long-running debate over whether economic incentives and market forces can promote effective stewardship of nature. The 1970s saw the emergence of the idea of “ecosystem services”: the benefits we get from functioning ecosystems. It started as a way for biologists to highlight the life support systems that keep the Earth habitable, but ecosystem services later started to be used by economists to create analyses of the monetary value of ecosystems. While these monetary valuations could be used in conservation advocacy by translating the benefits of ecosystems into the dollars-and-cents language of policy, they’re inherently incomplete and reductive. Critics of putting a price on nature have argued that this approach would put financial incentives before sound ecological measures. Environmental journalist George Monbiot has written that treating nature and its benefits as “ecosystem services” that can be paid for will make them seem fungible and make it easy for companies to destroy ecosystems by claiming they can build technological replacements that can do the same thing. And, by expressing the value of nature only in economic terms, the ecosystem services framework could consolidate decision-making power in the hands of those who have money. When it comes to conservation, practicality can be the cloak under which cynicism hides. We’re still in the early stages of knowing whether financial approaches to conservation can align with the well-being of oceans. There are some promising case studies: Following the example set by the Seychelles, for example, could let countries restructure their debt into protection of the ocean by creating MPAs. In 2015, the Seychelles sold $22 million of its debt to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit, in exchange for protecting its oceans by creating 13 marine protected areas across 30 percent of its national waters. The country has banned or restricted fishing, development, and oil exploration in these zones — regulations that are enforced with steep penalties, including imprisonment. The risks outweigh the rewards when the bait for conservation is money The High Seas Treaty’s vision of conserving 30 percent of global oceans would allocate more protection for marine ecosystems than the world has ever seen, but it has to be approached thoughtfully, conservationists say. Tessa Hempson — chief scientist at Mission Blue, a global coalition founded by Earle to support a network of global MPAs — thought of the questions we should first be asking. “Are we targeting the really essential areas that we need to be focusing on?” Hempson told Vox. “Do we know enough to make sure that we are targeting those areas correctly? And then also, you know, it’s all good and well having those areas demarcated on a map, but are they actually effectively conserved?” It’s not the first time these tensions (and their corollary benefits and consequences) have been highlighted. The idea of a “blue economy” first emerged at a 2012 UN conference, aiming to bridge the gap between conservation and treating marine ecosystems as a fungible asset. At the time, Pacific Island nations saw how the ocean could be their gateway to be included in global “green” development by highlighting the importance of the ocean and coasts to their livelihoods, culture, and economy. The blue economy, in turn, would help bolster equitable sharing of benefits between developed and developing countries. In the years that followed, the agenda of equity fell through the cracks. Framing of the blue economy turned to prioritizing growth and promoting “decoupling” — an idea that the economy can keep growing without consequences to the environment. Decoupling separates nature and economy in an intellectualized way in which the effects of capitalism and consumption can continue undeterred. Though the concept of the blue economy began with intentions of global equity and fair distribution of benefits from the use of ocean resources, we’ve landed in a wayward place where endless growth models don’t truly respect the limits of nature. The ocean stands to be mined for all it is worth unless MPAs start to guarantee meaningful protection. The high seas were long held as global commons; expressions like “plenty of fish in the sea” reflected the impression that the ocean held infinite resources for the taking. Now, it’s clearer than ever that this model won’t work anymore. If overfishing continues, we can expect a global collapse of all species currently fished by 2050 — though the lead author of the study, Boris Worm, wrote in 2021 that putting forth ocean protections could give us reason for hope. In any case, the collapse of fish stocks will have ecosystem-wide consequences, like the mass extinction of large ocean creatures, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. Another major threat to the ocean looms on the horizon: mining. Deep-sea mining is not yet occurring on an industrial scale, but it’s a major issue of discussion in the marine space because of its implications for the global renewable energy transition. Firms are hoping to mine the ocean bed in search of polymetallic nodules containing cobalt and nickel for use in renewable car batteries. Last year, the International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates the ocean floor, postponed a decision on whether to start allowing mining, citing the need for more time to understand what science-backed guidelines should be in place before moving forward. But many believe it’s only a matter of time before companies are granted licenses to begin mining the ocean floor — unleashing a drilling bonanza that could have consequences we don’t yet understand because the deep ocean has barely been explored. Arguably, the only thing we should be extracting from the ocean is knowledge. Indeed, the knowledge we have of the ocean pales in comparison to the knowledge we have of outer space, with funding for space exploration exceeding that of ocean exploration more than 150-fold. People have been debating for a long time whether greed will be the end of humanity, or whether financial incentives can be used to create protections. When it comes to the oceans, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As Sylvia Earle said at the June UN conference, “The most important thing we take from the oceans is our existence. If you like to breathe, you’ll listen up.”

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