“Agricultural rewilding” should be a part of our response to climate change.

In general, I believe that we should be investing heavily in various modes of indoor food production. There are a lot of different forms this could and should take – I’ve talked before about diversity as the foundation of resilience – but central to the case for all of them is the same. The vast majority of food production depends on predictable seasonal weather patterns; weather patterns that become less predictable by the year. Another part of the reason for that is that it would free up current farmland to be used either for carbon capture, or rewilded.

Here at Oceanoxia, we view humanity as being a part of the various ecosystems in which we exist. That means that when those ecosystems are threatened, it puts us in danger too. We’re accustomed to thinking of ourselves as apart from the so-called “natural world”, but that was always a fantasy rooted in supremacist ideologies. Rewilding land, if done right helps increase the resilience of those ecosystems, which benefits us in turn.

So what does it mean to “do it right” when it comes to rewilding? Well, there are a lot of answers to that, and maybe I’ll dig into it more in the future (let me know in the comments, I guess?), but for those article there are two things I want to focus on. The first is that it’s going to be different in different places. With invasive species, pollution, climate change, and a hundred other factors, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution to this.

The second is that we should not necessarily be trying to recreate some ideal of an “unspoiled wilderness”. I’ve talked before about how Native Americans, and many other groups around the world, practiced agriculture as ecosystem management. This means cultivating the wildlife to create an ecosystem where edible and medicinal plants are abundant and easy to find. It also means cultivating your society so that everyone knows to care for this common resource. I think it’s also important to note that with the rising temperature, trying to recreate past ecosystems may be a literally fruitless endeavor.

Regardless, I think that we should be cultivating “edible ecosystems” as one part of the work we’re doing, and the science says I’m right!

‘Agricultural rewilding’ can also help to overcome concerns about the impact of rewilding on livelihoods and produce “win-win” environmental and human benefits, according to the researchers.

Agricultural rewilding involves restoring ecosystems via the introduction, management, and production of livestock with domestic species (typically hardy, native breeds) acting as analogues for their wild counterparts.

Researchers say combining rewilding and agriculture in this way helps to address some of the key concerns related to rewilding – the exclusion of people and agricultural work from the land, and reduction in food self-sufficiency.

It can also support the production of high-quality, high-welfare, high-value meat that is environmentally, ethically, and financially sustainable.

Conventionally, rewilding seeks to remove or reduce human intervention in a landscape in order to restore damaged ecosystems. Researchers argue that agricultural rewilding can achieve ecological benefits such as habitat restoration, tree planting, and natural flood management while still allowing for human management of land.

The paper was first presented at the conference of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics and is now published in Transforming food systems: ethics, innovation and responsibility. The work was a collaboration between Virginia Thomas from the University of Exeter, England, and Aymeric Mondière, Michael Corson, and Hayo van der Werf from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment.

Dr Thomas said: “Agricultural rewilding offers the potential for win-win scenarios in which biodiversity is increased and ecosystems are restored along with active human intervention in landscapes and the provision of livelihoods which are financially and environmentally sustainable.”

“Agricultural rewilding can potentially have biodiversity benefits over those of conventional rewilding since it can create and maintain habitats which may be lost in “hands-off” rewilding practices and whose loss would pose a threat to habitat-specialist species.”

“Furthermore, extensive farming as part of agricultural rewilding offers an advantage over more intensive agriculture in that animals can be kept in naturalistic conditions and in accordance with high welfare standards.”

“Domestic livestock can be present in the landscape, restoring biodiversity and regenerating ecosystem function, while still contributing to agricultural production where their lives are lived to high welfare and environmental standards and their deaths provide high-quality meat, thus contributing to food self-sufficiency and reducing the outsourcing of food production to systems with higher environmental impacts. Meanwhile, management of livestock allows for continued active human intervention in the landscape, thereby supporting rural livelihoods and communities.”

Yes, please. I want that.

For all I think that we should be planning for a world where people can’t go outside without serious heat protection during growing parts of the year, I also think that we should be reshaping our cultures to make our connection to the rest of the biosphere harder to ignore. Some of that means bringing the outside in, and having more plant and animal life within places like cities (which may need to be enclosed at some times? I feel like people don’t think enough about how hot things are likely to get), but it also means having a different relationship with the outdoors. Yes to recreation, yes to having the time to be outside, but also as a part of maintaining and governing our communities.

As much as capitalists and their supporters may hate to hear it, the biosphere is a common resource. All of our fates are tied to it, and efforts to privatize it have proven disastrous. We can have a better world, than this one, but we should expect it to be radically different from what we’re used to.

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Video: Positive Leftist News from September, 2022

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

John Oliver’s condemnation of Bolsonaro does not go far enough

John Oliver is probably my second favorite political comedian after Cody Johnston of Some More News. He has a well-deserved reputation for delving into obscure and unpleasant details to present a compelling and deep analysis of pressing problems in the world. All of this is why I find it so disappointing that Oliver still has a mysterious inability to report well on anything happening in Latin America.

I first became aware of this flaw thanks to the work of Michael Brooks, whose ability to maintain a solid understanding of international affairs went beyond any other journalist I’ve seen. He died far too young, and we’re still all a bit worse off for his death. I can’t do as good of a response as he could have, but I’ll do my best.

For those of you who don’t know, Brazil is holding the first round of its presidential election tomorrow. The race is between former president Luis Ignácio “Lula” da Silva, and current president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula was not a perfect president, if such a thing exists, but from what I can tell he was far better for the working class and international reputation of Brazil than any of its previous leaders, or any president the United States has ever had.

Lula was imprisoned on a bogus corruption conviction in April of 2018, just six months before the presidential election, and the judge, Sergio Moro, blocked efforts to release him. Moro was appointed Minister of Justice and Public Security by Bolsonaro when he took office in 2019.

Later that year, The Intercept published evidence of a plot between Moro and the prosecutor to imprison Lula to keep him from participating in the 2018 election. The conviction was annulled in 2021, apparently over jurisdiction, and a retrial was ordered in a more appropriate court. It’s unclear to me where things will go from there, but all of this, including the apparent FBI involvement, makes this seem like yet another effort by the United States to undermine a popular left-wing leader in favor of a fascist.

And that brings me to Oliver’s discussion of Bolsonaro.

There’s a lot to like about this video. I think the biggest problem with it is that it seems to stop at the points where the situation is similar to events in the US. It makes a somewhat compelling case that Bolsonaro is dangerous, but it leaves out a lot of context. This is part of a pattern for John Oliver. When it comes to Mexico, Central America, and South America, he seems to have a bizarre aversion to actually digging into stories. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that they’ve got someone on staff who’s in charge of the Latin America segments, who is either lazy, or holding some kind of odd centrist bias.

He was right to cast Bolsonaro as a threat to democracy. Bolsonaro has been openly saying that he won’t accept any result other than victory or death, casting doubt on the electoral system without evidence (sound familiar?), and he got into power in the first place via a judicial coup more blatant than the one that put George W. Bush in power in 2000.

Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. Beyond his extensive ties to both the military and Brazil’s past military dictatorship, Bolsonaro also as ties to terrorism and political assassination. Bolsonaro was twice photographed with suspects in the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco, and turned out to live in the same high-end apartment complex as one of them.

BRASILWIREput together this timeline:

August, 2003: Jair Bolsonaro publicly defends Militias in a speech in Congress, saying, “I just heard a Congressman criticize death squads. As long as the State does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, the crime of extermination, in my understanding, should be very welcome…. If it depended on me they would have all of my support…”

March 2007 – As a State Congressman, Jair’s son Flavio attempts to legalize militias. “For me, human rights are not for all humans, because some people cannot be called humans. They are monsters,” he says in defense of death squad executions.

August, 2011 – After Judge Patricia Acioli is assassinated with 21 gunshots by two militia members, Flavio Bolsonaro commits character assassination against her, “May God take her but the absurd and gratuitous way that she used to humiliate police officers contributed to her having many enemies,” he said. Before her assassination, Judge Acioli had convicted 60 police officers for acting in militias and for death squad activities.

February, 2018 – During a radio interview on Joven Pan, Jair Bolsonaro, again, defends Militias. “There are people who support militias,” he says, “because it is the way that they can live without violence. In those regions where people pay militias, there is no violence.”

March, 2018 – Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes are assassinated. Jair Bolsonaro is the only presidential candidate who does not publicly condemn the killings.

April 2018 – A motion is passed in the Rio de Janeiro State Legislature to posthumously award slain city councilwoman Marielle Franco with the Tiradentes Medal. Flavio Bolsonaro is the only lawmaker who votes against it.

September, 2018 – Alex and Alan Oliveira, two Rio de Janeiro Military Police officers, are arrested for committing acts of corruption and extortion as part of a Militia that operates on the West Side of Rio. It comes out that both had worked on Flavio and Jair Bolsonaro’s political campaigns, and that their sister was the Treasurer of the Rio de Janeiro state headquarters of the Bolsonaro’s PSL party.

October 2018 – Two candidates for Rio de Janeiro State Congress in Bolsonaro’s PSL party, rip a street sign honoring Marielle Franco in half at a campaign event, while gubernatorial candidate Wilson Witzel cheers. In the scandal that ensues, Flavio Bolsonaro defends their actions.

October 2018 – The Civil Police Organized Crime Unit, GAECO, arrests 18 members of a militia operating in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of São Gonçalo and discovers that they have been working on the campaign of retired Military Police Colonel Fernando Salema, running for State Congressman for the Bolsonaro’s PSL Party.

December 2018 – COAF, the Federal Board of Financial Activities Control, reveals that the Flavio Bolsonaro’s former driver, Fabricio Queiroz, made unusual money transfers valuing $R1.2 million in 2016 and 2017. The ex-Military Police officer committed at least 10 killings while on active duty.

January 2019 – COAF discovers that, in addition to the R$1.2 million, another R$5.8 million went through Queiroz’s accounts while employed for Flavio Bolsonaro during the two previous mandates.

January 2019 – COAF reveals that, during one month in 2017, Flavio Bolsonaro received R$96,000 in 50 bank deposits valued at just under the minimum limit to require money laundering investigations.

January 2019 – President Jair Bolsonaro issues a decree moving the COAF’s jurisdiction to the Justice Ministry, headed by Lula’s captor, former Lava Jato investigator Sergio Moro. In a move widely viewed as made to protect his employer, Moro fires the director of COAF and, two months later, replaces him with a former co-worker from the deeply politicized Lava Jato investigation.

January 2019 – Globo newspaper reveals that, before he went to the nation’s most expensive hospital, Albert Einstein in São Paulo, for what appears to have been frivolous treatment to delay testimony, Queiroz was hiding in the Rio das Pedras favela, which is controlled by the Escritorio de Crime militia under investigation for the assassination of Marielle Franco.

January 2019 – The media announces that Flavio Bolsonaro employed the mother and girlfriend of former Military Police special forces Captain and leader of the Escritorio de Crime militia Antonio Nobrega, in his state congressional cabinet for over a decade.

March 2019 – After legendary Rio de Janeiro Samba School Mangueira pays homage to Marielle Franco during Rio’s carnaval parade competition in an event transmitted live to tens of millions across Brazil, Carlos Bolsonaro tries to smear the group on social media, hypocritically accusing them of involvement with militias.

March 12, 2019 – Elcio Queiroz and Ronnie Lessa, two former Rio de Janeiro Military Police officers, were arrested for the alleged assassination of Marielle Franco. Lessa lives in a R$4 million home in the same small beach-side condominium complex as Jair Bolsonaro, which he purchased shortly after Marielle was murdured. During a press conference, Civil Police Organized Crime Unit officer Giniton Lages says that Ronnie Lessa’s daughter used to date one of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons. Immediately afterwards, he is removed from the case.

Maybe that’s not conclusive, but I think it’s certainly worth considering.

As I said, John Oliver is right to be concerned about Bolsonaro, but I find it strange that he would leave out so much of the history there. I also find it disappointing that Oliver’s “analysis” so often seems to rely on stereotyping and denigration of politicians who seem to be doing better by their people than anyone Oliver has lived under in the U.S. or the U.K.. I think the danger is greater that Oliver is indicating, and Bolsonaro holding on to power would be bad for all of us.

Sadly, this video from 2018 is still relevant:

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Nord Stream gas leak underscores the need to end all fossil fuel use

From what I can tell, there are still rather a lot of people clinging to the notion that we’ll be able to keep the fossil fuel industry by just capturing all the carbon that’s emitted, and storing it. That line of thinking is useful in two ways – first and most importantly, it justifies continued obsession with short-term profits. The second is that it’s a framing of the problem that doesn’t require systemic change. At it’s core, I think the popularity of this idea comes from its appeal to the group of insatiable ghouls who would rather see humanity go extinct than lose their ill-gotten fossil fuel empires. It’s the bedtime story they tell themselves to quell those rare pangs of conscience, and to give their sycophants an excuse to maintain their blind loyalty.

The reality is that we must end the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and we must do it as quickly as we can.

Even if the day-to-day operations of fossil fuel corporations didn’t do massive environmental damage, and leak unforgivable amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the fact remains that the infrastructure is both prone to failure (because the corporations are too greedy to spend on improvements), and it’s also vulnerable to attacks. We do not currently know for sure whether the Nord Stream pipelines burst due to accident, negligence, or a deliberate attack, but no matter what the cause turns out to be, we are all being hurt by this:

Scientists fear methane erupting from the burst Nord Stream pipelines into the Baltic Sea could be one of the worst natural gas leaks ever and pose significant climate risks.

Neither of the two breached Nord Stream pipelines, which run between Russia and Germany, was operational, but both contained natural gas. This mostly consists of methane – a greenhouse gas that is the biggest cause of climate heating after carbon dioxide.

The extent of the leaks is still unclear but rough estimates by scientists, based on the volume of gas reportedly in one of the pipelines, vary between 100,000 and 350,000 tonnes of methane.

Jasmin Cooper, a research associate at Imperial College London’s department of chemical engineering, said a “lot of uncertainty” surrounded the leak.

“We know there are three explosions but we don’t know if there are three holes in the sides of the pipe or how big the breaks are,” said Cooper. “It’s difficult to know how much is reaching the surface. But it is potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes of methane: quite a big volume being pumped into the atmosphere.”

Nord Stream 2, which was intended to increase the flow of gas from Russia to Germany, reportedly contained 300m cubic metres of gas when Berlin halted the certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine.

That volume alone would translate to 200,000 tonnes of methane, Cooper said. If it all escaped, it would exceed the 100,000 tonnes of methane vented by the Aliso Canyon blowout, the biggest gas leak in US history, which happened in California in 2015. Aliso had the warming equivalent of half a million cars.

The Aliso Canyon gas leak was the first time I can remember that the public was able to actually see greenhouse gas emissions in a major way, thanks to this infrared footage:

I don’t know if anyone had their minds changed by that incident and the coverage of it, but if so it clearly wasn’t enough. I’ve said in the past that one of my concerns with nuclear power is the danger posed by war and by terrorism. I still think we should be using nuclear power, but I think that security and the dangers of a rapidly changing climate are both valid concerns if we’re going to massively increase our use of that technology. Fossil fuels have all of the same problems, except that they are already driving us towards extinction at a rate few believed possible even a couple decades ago.

This leak, to use an overly-appropriate simile, is like pouring gasoline on a flame.

I believe the warming of our climate has already gained enough momentum that it would keep warming for centuries even if we cut off all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow. I believe we can influence that, and in time possibly even reverse it, but it’s important to understand that we are already rolling down that hill. Our current emissions mainly serve to accelerate us further out of control.

And this? Well, I suppose time will tell how severe of a problem it is, but we did not need this right now. We really didn’t. Things were going badly enough already.

Prof Grant Allen, an expert in Earth and environmental science at Manchester University, said it was unlikely that natural processes, which convert small amounts of methane into carbon dioxide, would be able to absorb much of the leak.

Allen said: “This is a colossal amount of gas, in really large bubbles. If you have small sources of gas, nature will help out by digesting the gas. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, there was a lot of attenuation of methane by bacteria.

“My scientific experience is telling me that – with a big blow-up like this – methane will not have time to be attenuated by nature. So a significant proportion will be vented as methane gas.”

Unlike an oil spill, gas will not have as polluting an effect on the marine environment, Allen said. “But in terms of greenhouse gases, it’s a reckless and unnecessary emission to the atmosphere.”

Germany’s environment agency said there were no containment mechanisms on the pipeline, so the entire contents were likely to escape.

The Danish Energy Agency said on Wednesday that the pipelines contained 778m cubic metres of natural gas in total – the equivalent of 32% of Danish annual CO2 emissions.

We’re not going to see a global spike in warming that’s clearly due to this leak. It’s a lot, but it’s not that much. That’s the good news. That said, this would not have happened if sundry global “leaders” were not continuing to build new fossil fuel infrastructure as though change is neither wanted, nor needed. I suppose for them, it’s not. They can just leave when things get rough. It will be interesting to see what changes are attributable to this leak – it wouldn’t shock me if there was measurable local warming associated with the methane plume and prevailing winds. This is just speculation but it’ll take time for that much gas to disperse around the world, which means it should be in higher concentrations in some areas for a while.

The real problem is that I can say with complete confidence that this will not be the last massive natural gas leak. There will be more. If greed and lust for power continue to fuel war around the world, then whether or not this pipeline was attacked, others definitely will be, wherever warring nations depend on this energy source. More than that, changing weather conditions will also lead to pipeline ruptures, and the day to day operations of the natural gas industry are already criminally destructive to the climate. Even if all emissions were captured at the smokestack and tailpipe, the gas leaked daily, and the gas leaked from incidents like this will continue adding speed to our “downhill” tumble into global warming hell. At this stage, the mere existence of the fossil fuel industry is a global security risk.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we’ll see the needed change any time soon. That means that we keep looking for ways to build collective power, and we keep preparing to help our communities through disasters when they hit. There’s a lot of grim news out there, so just remember that it’s not over till it’s over. Till then, we fight.

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

 

The Alt-Right Playbook: The Cost of Doing Business

I had intended to have a more involved piece done today, but that didn’t end up getting finished (though I did make some delicious marmalade chicken as a treat). Fortunately, Innuendo Studios just came out with a new installment in his series The Alt-Right Playbook. If you’re not already familiar with it, the series covers a wide array of tactics used by the modern U.S. fascist movement, mostly focused on their used of rhetoric and propaganda. While I’m aware that my taste is far from universal, I find these videos to be both very watchable, and very important if you want to understand what is happening in politics these days. As far as I knew, the series ended in 2021, so I was pleasantly surprised to see there was a new addition. I don’t know if more videos will be coming, but I hope so!

Video: Some More News about the GOP’s recent foray into human trafficking

As you have no doubt heard, the Republican Party of the United States of America has taken to engaging in human trafficking for political stunts. They tricked Venezuelan asylum seekers into taking a flight to Martha’s Vineyard, without warning anyone there that they were about to need to take care of a bunch of refugees. This was apparently done under the belief that the people of that island would freak out at the presence of scary brown people, and their hypocrisy would be exposed. Mano Singham did a good breakdown of the history of this sort of tactic, most infamously the “freedom rides” during the Jim Crow era, so you should check that out, but you know I couldn’t resist posting the Some More News take on this story:

This follows on the theme of fascists seeing humans as disposable tools.

 

Tegan is home at last, so we’re celebrating with a couple cat pictures.

Tegan is finally home from three weeks out of town, and both His Holiness and I are very happy. She’s still catching up on sleep and recovering from her journey, so I decided to use today to share a couple cat pictures. The first is from our semi-regular turn about the village. St. Ray likes to sample the various grass patches on offer, and sniffing around for traces of the various outdoor cats and strays that pass through “his” territory. When we first started this tradition, I was worried that I’d be cleaning up grass-filled puke around the apartment, but it seems to agree with him just fine, and he’s almost as insistent about his constitutional as he is about being fed. I particularly like this shot, because for some reason his legs look disproportionately short and stubby – like one of those “munchkin cats”. I think it’s just that he’s crouching a bit to make sure he’s got the best leverage for his salad.

The image shows a brindled black and gray-brown cat with white legs, a white chest, and a white muzzle and forehead. He’s craning forward with his mouth open wide to take a big chomp out of a blade of grass. The grass is growing by a tree, whose trunk fills the lefthand third of the photo.. You can see a sun-dappled patch of lawn behind the cat, and out-of-focus bushes and mulch behind that. The angle of the photo, combined with the cat’s plush fur and chunky stature make it look like his legs are comically short and stubby.

Salad is important whether or not Tegan is home.

Her homecoming is slightly marred by the fact that we are distancing in the apartment for a bit, so he doesn’t get to have both of us on the same piece of furniture. It also means that the windows are open, otherwise the distancing would be pointless. That means that it’s very chilly in here. The walls are cement, and do a great job of staying cool. That’s lovely in the summer, but Autumn has landed with a resounding crunch, the days are getting shorter fast, and it’s not uncommon for it to be colder inside than outside. This means that the natural thing to do is to huddle together for warmth, but Tegan and I are being downright irrational, so he has to cuddle with us one at a time. Normally, when he hangs out on the bed, he’ll be just under an arm’s length away, but yesterday he came and curled up as tightly against me as he possibly could:

The image shows myself (a bearded human) and His Holiness (a cat) on a bed. My gray sweater fills up most of the photo, with my head craning to fit in the bottom left corner. You can see the green flannel sheet and a bit of a black t-shirt in the top left corner, by my shoulder. His Holiness is curled very tightly under my armpit, and is resting his head on my chest. For all he’s a chonker, he looks tiny in this picture.

He’s currently doing his shift on Tegan’s lap in the other room as I write this, and he’ll shift back to me when she goes to sleep, ’cause there’s not room for both of them on the couch. Even if things aren’t fully back to normal, we’re all glad to be in the same building, and within yelling distance of each other. Tegan and I holler conversations, and he spends the two hours or so before each of his three feedings screaming about his impending doom to all who can hear.

Truly, nothing says domestic bliss like a small mammal screaming at the top of its lungs

If you want to forestall the looming starvation of His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat, or you want the ability to request more cat posts, you can support me and my work at patreon.com/oceanoxia. I’d like to increase the number of people giving $5 per month and under. That seems to be a better foundation for crowdsourced income, so if perchance you were thinking that your three pennies per day isn’t enough to make a difference, well, you can stop thinking that now! How exciting for you!

Reminder: Children are disposable tools to fascists. They don’t actually care about them.

As fascism rises around the world, we’re going to see a lot of bigotry and oppression justified in the name of “protecting children”. One of the worst offenders in the United States right now is Tucker Carlson. He’s a white supremacist and a fascist, and he’s also most watched “news” host on cable. I don’t believe that literally every attack from conservatives is projection, but it’s certainly their favorite tool, and I think this is no exception. Carlson is happy to engage in stochastic terrorism because of the left “sexualizing children” by teaching them about things like gender and consent, but he was also happy to insist repeatedly and over objections that when a teacher gave a lap dance to a child, no crime was committed:

Fascists see children as a means to an end. They’re a way to build and exert power. They’re props in the political theater. They’re worth murdering doctors to defend one day, and they’re lazy moochers for wanting food the next. The mere existence of gay or trans people is a threat to all children everywhere, but it’s fine to support people like Donald Trump or Josh Duggar.

The only boundary on their actions is what they think they can get away with, whether it’s lying about their concern for children, or engaging in human trafficking for political stunts, or overthrowing democracy and murdering people they disagree with. They will keep pushing farther until they are forcibly stopped. That’s why turning out to oppose them en masse is so important at this stage, and it’s why more organizing and networking are needed, so that communities can mobilize quickly to defend themselves and each other when a hospital or school is targeted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Puerto Rico is demonstrating yet again that capitalism cannot solve climate change.

I wrote a few days ago about the total failure of Puerto Rico’s privatized power grid under Hurricane Fiona. As of seven hours before writing, half the island is still without power. In case it’s unclear to anyone, this – both the failure of privatization and the arrival of another hurricane – was entirely predictable. That’s what makes it all the worse that it seems as though most or all of the rebuilding from that disaster was done without any attempt to guard against the next hurricane. Many of you may have seen this already, but the most dramatic example from Hurricane Fiona is this bridge that was build shortly after Maria:

A temporary metal bridge in Puerto Rico, built in the wake of Hurricane Maria, was swept away in the rushing floodwaters of Hurricane Fiona.

The bridge, over the Guaonica River in Utuado, was destroyed Sunday, the same day Fiona made landfall on the island, officials said at a news conference.

It’s been five years, and they still just had a temporary bridge. Why didn’t they build something sturdier, or something that could be lifted out of the way of entirely predictable floodwaters? How much damage did that bridge do on its way downstream?

To me, this is emblematic of the Age of Endless Recovery. Puerto Rico had not rebuilt from Maria before Fiona hit, and what rebuilding they did do seems to have been dragged down by the same kind of greed and corruption that plagues all the rest of the United States. We know that storms are going to be getting stronger. We know that Puerto Rico is in dire need of resilient infrastructure, as is most of the rest of the world. If we valued human life and wellbeing above profit, then we would prioritize infrastructure that won’t be destroyed by entirely predictable weather events.

This is one of the many reasons why I think capitalism is incompatible with real climate action, or with the long-term survival of humanity. From the perspective of a construction corporation, there’s more profit to be made in building the same bridge every few years, than in building one bridge that can actually meet the demands of its location, and last for decades with maintenance. Obviously, this is not a problem limited to Puerto Rico, but remember the fundamental rule of climate catastrophe in our society – it hits those at the bottom first and hardest. While there are a myriad of communities in the United States and its colo- sorry, territories – Puerto Rico is both a laboratory for disaster capitalism, and for the shambling, undead horror that is Reaganomics. You know how conservatives of both parties always talk about lowering taxes to attract rich people “because of all the prosperity that brings”?

Puerto Rico has done wonderfully at attracting rich people, and I hope it’s clear to all of you that doing so has not helped the people of that island. The defining trait of a rich person is their selfishness, and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will spend a cent on something that doesn’t benefit them personally. They moved there for tax purposes, because they don’t care about things like infrastructure. It’s far better for them to just leave the island until the peasantry has managed to pull it back together, and then they’ll move back.

Capitalists do not care about climate change, or about the billions of lives that are at risk. Capitalism means that the capitalist class has total freedom, paid for by the rest of us. They have open borders. They can go anywhere they want whenever they want.

Our entire society has been designed to reward greed and ruthlessness, and this is the result. Obviously it’s good to provide material help to those in need if you’re able, but if we want the world to get better, we need to change how people interact with politics, and build the collective power we need to actually topple the hierarchy that’s currently driving us towards extinction.