It’s called Dunbar’s number: an influential and oft-repeated theory suggesting the average person can only maintain about 150 stable social relationships with other people.
Proposed by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar in the early 1990s, Dunbar’s number, extrapolated from research into primate brain sizes and their social groups, has since become a ubiquitous part of the discourse on human social networks.
But just how legitimate is the science behind Dunbar’s number anyway? According to a new analysis by researchers from Stockholm University in Sweden, Dunbar’s famous figure doesn’t add up.
“The theoretical foundation of Dunbar’s number is shaky,” says zoologist and cultural evolution researcher Patrik Lindenfors.
“Other primates’ brains do not handle information exactly as human brains do, and primate sociality is primarily explained by other factors than the brain, such as what they eat and who their predators are.”
Dunbar’s number was originally predicated on the idea that the volume of the neocortex in primate brains functions as a constraint on the size of the social groups they circulate amongst.
“It is suggested that the number of neocortical neurons limits the organism’s information-processing capacity and that this then limits the number of relationships that an individual can monitor simultaneously,” Dunbar explained in his foundational 1992 study.
“When a group’s size exceeds this limit, it becomes unstable and begins to fragment. This then places an upper limit on the size of groups which any given species can maintain as cohesive social units through time.”
But as to the original question of whether neocortex size serves as a valid constraint on group size beyond non-human primates, Lindenfors and his team aren’t so sure.
While a number of studies have offered support for Dunbar’s ideas, the new study debunks the claim that neocortex size in primates is equally pertinent to human socialization parameters.
“It is not possible to make an estimate for humans with any precision using available methods and data,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wartel.
In their study, the researchers used modern statistical methods including Bayesian and generalized least-squares (GLS) analyses to take another look at the relationship between group size and brain/neocortex sizes in primate brains, with the advantage of updated datasets on primate brains.
The results suggested that stable human group sizes might ultimately be much smaller than 150 individuals – with one analysis suggesting up to 42 individuals could be the average limit, with another estimate ranging between a group of 70 to 107.
Ultimately, however, enormous amounts of imprecision in the statistics suggest that any method like this – trying to compute an average number of stable relationships for any human individual based off brain volume considerations – is unreliable at best.
“Specifying any one number is futile,” the researchers write in their study. “A cognitive limit on human group size cannot be derived in this manner.”
Despite the mainstream attention Dunbar’s number enjoys, the researchers say the majority of primate social evolution research focuses on socio-ecological factors, including foraging and predation, infanticide, and sexual selection – not so much calculations dependent on brain or neocortex volume.
Further, the researchers argue that Dunbar’s number ignores other significant differences in brain physiology between human and non-human primate brains – including that humans develop cultural mechanisms and social structures that can counter socially limiting cognitive factors that might otherwise apply to non-human primates.
“Ecological research on primate sociality, the uniqueness of human thinking, and empirical observations all indicate that there is no hard cognitive limit on human sociality,” the team explains.
“It is our hope, though perhaps futile, that this study will put an end to the use of ‘Dunbar’s number’ within science and in popular media.”
Jonathan R Goodman, The Conversation – 13 May 2021
A major debate during the pandemic, and in infectious disease research more broadly, is why infected people die. No virus “wants” to kill anyone, as an epidemiologist once said to me. Like any other form of life, a virus’s goal is only to survive and reproduce.
A growing body of evidence instead suggests that the human immune system – which the science writer Ed Yong says is “where intuition goes to die” – may itself be responsible for many people’s deaths.
In an effort to find and kill the invading virus, the body can harm major organs, including the lungs and heart. This has led some doctors to focus on attenuating an infected patient’s immune response to help save them.
This brings up an evolutionary puzzle: what’s the point of the immune system if its overzealousness can kill the same people it evolved to defend?
The answer may lie in humanity’s evolutionary history: immunity may be as much about communication and behavior as it is about cellular biology. And to the degree that researchers can understand these broad origins of the immune system, they may be better positioned to improve responses to it.
The concept of the behavioral immune system is not new. Almost all humans sometimes feel disgust or revulsion – usually because whatever has made us feel that way poses a threat to our health.
And we aren’t alone in these reactions. Research shows that some animals avoid others that are showing symptoms of illness.
Eliciting care
However, more recent theoretical research suggests something more: humans, in particular, are likely to show compassion to those showing symptoms of illness or injury.
There’s a reason, this thinking goes, why people tend to exclaim when in pain, rather than just silently pull away from whatever is hurting them, and why fevers are linked to sluggish behavior.
Some psychologists argue that this is because immune responses are as much about communication as they are about self-maintenance. People who received care, over humanity’s history, probably tended to do better than those who tried to survive on their own.
In the broader evolutionary literature, researchers refer to these kinds of displays as “signals”. And like many of the innumerable signals we see across the natural world, immune-related signals can be used – or faked – to exploit the world around us, and each other.
Some birds, for example, feign injury to distract predators from their nests; rats suppress disease symptoms so that potential mates won’t ignore them.
We also see many illustrations of immune-signal use and misuse in human cultures. In The Adventure of the Dying Detective(1913), for example, Sherlock Holmes starves himself for three days to elicit a confession from a murder suspect. The suspect confesses only when he is convinced that his attempt to infect Holmes with a rare disease has been successful, misreading Holmes’s signs of illness.
This is an extreme example, but people feign signals of pain or illness all the time to avoid obligations, to elicit support from others, or even to avoid submitting an article by an agreed deadline. And this is an essential element of any signalling system.
Once a signal, be it a wince or a jaundiced complexion, elicits a response from whoever sees it, that response will start to drive how and why the signal is used.
Even germs use – and abuse – immune signals for their own gain. In fact, some virusesactually hijack our own immune responses, such as coughs and sneezes, to pass themselves on to new hosts, using our own evolved functions to further their interests.
Other germs, like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague), can prevent our signalling to others when we are sick and pass themselves on without anyone realizing.
This perspective of immunity – one that takes into account biology, behavior and the social effects of illness – paints a starkly different picture from the more traditional view of the immune system as a collection of biological and chemical defenses against sickness.
Germs use different strategies, just as animals do, to exploit immune signals for their own purposes. And perhaps that’s what has made asymptomatically transmitted COVID-19 so damaging: people can’t rely on reading other people’s immune signals to protect themselves.
Insofar as doctors can predict how a particular infection – whether SARS-CoV-2, influenza, malaria or the next pathogen with pandemic potential – will interact with a patient’s immune system, they’ll be better positioned to tailor treatments for it. Future research will help us sort through the germs that hijack our immune signals – or suppress them – for their own purposes.
Viewing immunity not just as biological, but as a broader signalling system, may help us to understand our complex relationships with pathogens more effectively.
Our model reveals the true course of the pandemic. Here is what to do next
May 15th 2021 8-10 minutos
THIS WEEK we publish our estimate of the true death toll from covid-19. It tells the real story of the pandemic. But it also contains an urgent warning. Unless vaccine supplies reach poorer countries, the tragic scenes now unfolding in India risk being repeated elsewhere. Millions more will die.
Using known data on 121 variables, from recorded deaths to demography, we have built a pattern of correlations that lets us fill in gaps where numbers are lacking. Our model suggests that covid-19 has already claimed 7.1m-12.7m lives. Our central estimate is that 10m people have died who would otherwise be living. This tally of “excess deaths” is over three times the official count, which nevertheless is the basis for most statistics on the disease, including fatality rates and cross-country comparisons.
The most important insight from our work is that covid-19 has been harder on the poor than anyone knew. Official figures suggest that the pandemic has struck in waves, and that the United States and Europe have been hit hard. Although South America has been ravaged, the rest of the developing world seemed to get off lightly.
Our modelling tells another story. When you count all the bodies, you see that the pandemic has spread remorselessly from the rich, connected world to poorer, more isolated places. As it has done so, the global daily death rate has climbed steeply.
Death rates have been very high in some rich countries, but the overwhelming majority of the 6.7m or so deaths that nobody counted were in poor and middle-income ones. In Romania and Iran excess deaths are more than double the number officially put down to covid-19. In Egypt they are 13 times as big. In America the difference is 7.1%.
India, where about 20,000 are dying every day, is not an outlier. Our figures suggest that, in terms of deaths as a share of population, Peru’s pandemic has been 2.5 times worse than India’s. The disease is working its way through Nepal and Pakistan. Infectious variants spread faster and, because of the tyranny of exponential growth, overwhelm health-care systems and fill mortuaries even if the virus is no more lethal.
Ultimately the way to stop this is vaccination. As an example of collaboration and pioneering science, covid-19 vaccines rank with the Apollo space programme. Within just a year of the virus being discovered, people could be protected from severe disease and death. Hundreds of millions of them have benefited.
However, in the short run vaccines will fuel the divide between rich and poor. Soon, the only people to die from covid-19 in rich countries will be exceptionally frail or exceptionally unlucky, as well as those who have spurned the chance to be vaccinated. In poorer countries, by contrast, most people will have no choice. They will remain unprotected for many months or years.
The world cannot rest while people perish for want of a jab costing as little as $4 for a two-dose course. It is hard to think of a better use of resources than vaccination. Economists’ central estimate for the direct value of a course is $2,900—if you include factors like long covid and the effect of impaired education, the total is much bigger. The benefit from an extra 1bn doses supplied by July would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Less circulating virus means less mutation, and so a lower chance of a new variant that reinfects the vaccinated.
Supplies of vaccines are already growing. By the end of April, according to Airfinity, an analytics firm, vaccine-makers produced 1.7bn doses, 700m more than the end of March and ten times more than January. Before the pandemic, annual global vaccine capacity was roughly 3.5bn doses. The latest estimates are that total output in 2021 will be almost 11bn. Some in the industry predict a global surplus in 2022.
And yet the world is right to strive to get more doses in more arms sooner. Hence President Joe Biden has proposed waiving intellectual-property claims on covid-19 vaccines. Many experts argue that, because some manufacturing capacity is going begging, millions more doses might become available if patent-owners shared their secrets, including in countries that today are at the back of the queue. World-trade rules allow for a waiver. When invoke them if not in the throes of a pandemic?
We believe that Mr Biden is wrong. A waiver may signal that his administration cares about the world, but it is at best an empty gesture and at worst a cynical one.
A waiver will do nothing to fill the urgent shortfall of doses in 2021. The head of the World Trade Organisation, the forum where it will be thrashed out, warns there may be no vote until December. Technology transfer would take six months or so to complete even if it started today. With the new mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, it may take longer. Supposing the tech transfer was faster than that, experienced vaccine-makers would be unavailable for hire and makers could not obtain inputs from suppliers whose order books are already bursting. Pfizer’s vaccine requires 280 inputs from suppliers in 19 countries. No firm can recreate that in a hurry.
In any case, vaccine-makers do not appear to be hoarding their technology—otherwise output would not be increasing so fast. They have struck 214 technology-transfer agreements, an unprecedented number. They are not price-gouging: money is not the constraint on vaccination. Poor countries are not being priced out of the market: their vaccines are coming through COVAX, a global distribution scheme funded by donors.
In the longer term, the effect of a waiver is unpredictable. Perhaps it will indeed lead to technology being transferred to poor countries; more likely, though, it will cause harm by disrupting supply chains, wasting resources and, ultimately, deterring innovation. Whatever the case, if vaccines are nearing a surplus in 2022, the cavalry will arrive too late.
A needle in time
If Mr Biden really wants to make a difference, he can donate vaccine right now through COVAX. Rich countries over-ordered because they did not know which vaccines would work. Britain has ordered more than nine doses for each adult, Canada more than 13. These will be urgently needed elsewhere. It is wrong to put teenagers, who have a minuscule risk of dying from covid-19, before the elderly and health-care workers in poor countries. The rich world should not stockpile boosters to cover the population many times over on the off-chance that they may be needed. In the next six months, this could yield billions of doses of vaccine.
Countries can also improve supply chains. The Serum Institute, an Indian vaccine-maker, has struggled to get parts such as filters from America because exports were gummed up by the Defence Production Act (DPA), which puts suppliers on a war-footing. Mr Biden authorised a one-off release, but he should be focusing the DPA on supplying the world instead. And better use needs to be made of finished vaccine. In some poor countries, vaccine languishes unused because of hesitancy and chaotic organisation. It makes sense to prioritise getting one shot into every vulnerable arm, before setting about the second.
Our model is not predictive. However it does suggest that some parts of the world are particularly vulnerable—one example is South-East Asia, home to over 650m people, which has so far been spared mass fatalities for no obvious reason. Covid-19 has not yet run its course. But vaccines have created the chance to save millions of lives. The world must not squander it. ■
A reconstruction of Neanderthal mealtime Mauricio Anton/Science Source
Here’s another blow to the popular image of Neanderthals as brutish meat eaters: A new study of bacteria collected from Neanderthal teeth shows that our close cousins ate so many roots, nuts, or other starchy foods that they dramatically altered the type of bacteria in their mouths. The finding suggests our ancestors had adapted to eating lots of starch by at least 600,000 years ago—about the same time as they needed more sugars to fuel a big expansion of their brains.
The study is “groundbreaking,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Rachel Carmody, who was not part of the research. The work suggests the ancestors of both humans and Neanderthals were cooking lots of starchy foods at least 600,000 years ago. And they had already adapted to eating more starchy plants long before the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, she says.
The brains of our ancestors doubled in size between 2 million and 700,000 years ago. Researchers have long credited better stone tools and cooperative hunting: As early humans got better at killing animals and processing meat, they ate a higher quality diet, which gave them more energy more rapidly to fuel the growth of their hungrier brains.
Still, researchers have puzzled over how meat did the job. “For human ancestors to efficiently grow a bigger brain, they needed energy dense foods containing glucose”—a type of sugar—says molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner of Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “Meat is not a good source of glucose.”
Researchers analyzed the bacterial DNA preserved in dental plaque of fossilized teeth, such as this one from a prehistoric human. Werner Siemens Foundation/Felix Wey
The starchy plants gathered by many living hunter-gatherers are an excellent source of glucose, however. To figure out whether oral bacteria track changes in diet or the environment, Warinner, Max Planck graduate student James Fellows Yates, and a large international team looked at the oral bacteria stuck to the teeth of Neanderthals, preagriculture modern humans that lived more than 10,000 years ago, chimps, gorillas, and howler monkeys. The researchers analyzed billions of DNA fragments from long-dead bacteria still preserved on the teeth of 124 individuals. One was a Neanderthal who lived 100,000 years ago at Pešturina Cave in Serbia, which produced the oldest oral microbiome genome reconstructed to date.
The communities of bacteria in the mouths of preagricultural humans and Neanderthals strongly resembled each other, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In particular, humans and Neanderthals harbored an unusual group of Streptococcus bacteria in their mouths. These microbes had a special ability to bind to an abundant enzyme in human saliva called amylase, which frees sugars from starchy foods. The presence of the strep bacteria that consume sugar on the teeth of Neanderthals and ancient modern humans, but not chimps, shows they were eating more starchy foods, the researchers conclude.
Finding the streptococci on the teeth of both ancient humans and Neanderthals also suggests they inherited these microbes from their common ancestor, who lived more than 600,000 years ago. Although earlier studies found evidence that Neanderthals ate grasses and tubers and cooked barley, the new study indicates they ate so much starch that it dramatically altered the composition of their oral microbiomes.
“This pushes the importance of starch in the diet further back in time,” to when human brains were still expanding, Warinner says. Because the amylase enzyme is much more efficient at digesting cooked rather than raw starch, the finding also suggests cooking, too, was common by 600,000 years ago, Carmody says. Researchers have debated whether cooking became common when the big brain began to expand almost 2 million years ago or it spread later, during a second surge of growth.
The study offers a new way to detect major shifts in diet, says geneticist Ran Blekhman of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In the case of Neanderthals, it reveals how much they depended on plants.
“We sometimes have given short shrift to the plant components of the diet,” says anthropological geneticist Anne Stone of Arizona State University, Tempe. “As we know from modern hunter-gatherers, it’s often the gathering that ends up providing a substantial portion of the calories.”
Manaus Na aldeia Maimasi, em Roraima, uma criança yanomami jaz sobre a rede. Com as costelas expostas pela desnutrição, ela foi diagnosticada com malária e verminose. Mas a primeira equipe médica no local em seis meses não dispunha de medicamentos suficientes para tratar toda a aldeia.
A foto dessa criança e a história por trás dela foram obtidas pelo missionário católico Carlo Zacquini, 84, que atua entre os yanomamis desde 1968. Ele é cofundador da Comissão pela Criação do Parque Yanomami (CCPY), que deu visibilidade aos problemas causados pelos brancos, promoveu atendimento em saúde e lutou pela demarcação, concluída em 1992.
O território yanomami sofre com o aumento da malária e com a desnutrição infantil crônica, que atinge 80% das crianças até 5 anos, segundo estudo recente financiado pela Unicef e realizado em parceria com a Fiocruz e o Ministério da Saúde.
Os indígenas também enfrentam uma grande invasão de garimpeiros, incentivados por promessas do presidente Jair Bolsonaro de legalizá-los e pelo alto preço do minério. São cerca de 20 mil não indígenas morando ilegalmente na Terra Indígena Yanomami, contaminando os rios com mercúrio e contribuindo para espalhar Covid-19 e malária, além do álcool e da prostituição.
Procurado, o Distrito Sanitário Especial Indígena (Dsei) Yanomami, do Ministério da Saúde, informou que a criança, do sexo feminino, foi transferida a Boa Vista (RR) dois dias após a visita médica, acompanhada dos pais e dos irmãos.
Ela tem 8 anos e pesa 12,5 kg. Internada desde 23 de abril, está em tratamento para pneumonia, anemia e desnutrição grave —a malária foi curada. Ela está estável e em acompanhamento pelo serviço social. Segundo o órgão, trata-se de um caso isolado.
O Dsei negou a escassez de medicamentos e afirma que a quantidade é definida de acordo com a demanda prevista pela semana epidemiológica. O órgão não informou sobre como está o tratamento de outros yanomamis doentes na mesma região, mas alega que o atendimento de saúde é dificultado pelo fluxo constante dos indígenas e atribuiu a alta de incidência de malária à presença do garimpo ilegal.
A seguir, o depoimento de Zacquini:
É uma criança da aldeia Maimasi, a dois dias a pé da Missão Catrimani. Ela está sem assistência há muito tempo, com malária e verminose.
A fotografia foi feita por volta de 17 de abril. O pessoal das equipes de saúde tem receio de denunciar essa situação, pois podem ser punidos, colocados em lugares mais penosos ou ser demitidos. Vários polos de saúde estão abandonados. Não há estoque de medicamentos para verminose na sede do Dsei (Distrito Sanitário Especial Indígena Yanomami), em Boa Vista. Até para malária a quantidade é limitada.
O posto de saúde tem muita dificuldade para conseguir medicamentos. Faltam profissionais para revezamento e falta gasolina para deslocamento. Há três meses, eles usam a canoa com rabeta [motor] dos próprios yanomamis.
Com quadro de verminose e malária, criança yanomami dorme em rede na aldeia Maimasi, perto da Missão Catrimani, na Terra Indígena Yanomami, em Roraima – Divulgação
Para chegar a Maimasi, seriam oito minutos de helicóptero, mas, a princípio, isso só ocorre em casos de emergência. Evidentemente, essa criança é um caso de emergência!
Para levar medicamento ao pólo-base, foram deslocados um avião com uma equipe médica, porém eles ficaram aguardando inutilmente a chegada do helicóptero.
Havia seis meses que ninguém visitava a aldeia. Dessa vez, foram medicamentos para malária, mas não deu para repetir a dose. Uma equipe da Sesai (Secretaria Especial de Saúde Indígena, do Ministério da Saúde), incluindo médico, foi de avião até a Missão Catrimani para levar esses medicamentos.
O pessoal da saúde faz tratamentos com medicamentos, mas o tratamento não tem continuidade quando trocam de equipe. Assim, quando possível, fazem a primeira dose de tratamento, mas depois de um tempo os doentes devem recomeçar a partir da primeira dose.
Estou revoltado e com o sangue fervendo. É uma situação que parece estar se generalizando na Terra Indígena Yanomami.
O vaivém de garimpeiros é contínuo e isso implica voos de avião, barcos, helicópteros e a pé. São milhares os invasores da Terra Indígena Yanomami, e o presidente da República anuncia que irá pessoalmente falar com os militares que estão ali e com os garimpeiros também. Faz questão de dizer que não vai prender estes últimos, mas somente conversar.
Até para malária os medicamentos são contados, incluindo a cloroquina. Tem cloroquina para Covid, mas não para malária. A criança desnutrida está numa aldeia a oito minutos de helicóptero de um posto de saúde, mas leva um dia a pé. E depois dessa aldeia há outras, que na época estavam reunidas para o cerimonial funerário em outra aldeia mais afastada.
A equipe do pólo-base se deslocou a pé para a aldeia e encontrou um grupo grande de yanomamis que fazia um ritual funerário para uma criança que tinha morrido sem assistência. Eles ministraram medicamentos para verminose a todos, mas esse medicamento acabou e não puderam dar uma outra dose, o que é a praxe.
Aliás, havia mais de um ano que aquelas aldeias não recebiam atendimento contra verminose. A criança da foto e outros 16 indígenas presentes estavam com malária, a maioria deles com falciparum, a variedade mais agressiva. Os demais 84 estavam todos com sintomas de gripe e de febre.
Ecosystems with a diversity of mammals, including larger-bodies and longer lived creatures like foxes, are better for our health. Credit: Ali Rajabali / Flickr
A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management.
Lead author Felicia Keesing is a professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She explains, “There’s a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But this turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn’t a threat to us, it’s actually protecting us from the species most likely to make us sick.”
Zoonotic diseases like COVID-19, SARS, and Ebola are caused by pathogens that are shared between humans and other vertebrate animals. But animal species differ in their ability to pass along pathogens that make us sick.
Rick Ostfeld is a disease ecologist at Cary Institute and a co-author on the paper. He explains, “Research is mounting that species that thrive in developed and degraded landscapes are often much more efficient at harboring pathogens and transmitting them to people. In less-disturbed landscapes with more animal diversity, these risky reservoirs are less abundant and biodiversity has a protective effect.”
Rodents, bats, primates, cloven-hooved mammals like sheep and deer, and carnivores have been flagged as the mammal taxa most likely to transmit pathogens to humans. Keesing and Ostfeld note, “The next emerging pathogen is far more likely to come from a rat than a rhino.”
This is because animals with fast life histories tend to be more efficient at transmitting pathogens. Keesing explains, “Animals that live fast, die young, and have early sexual maturity with lots of offspring tend to invest less in their adaptive immune responses. They are often better at transmitting diseases, compared to longer-lived animals with stronger adaptive immunity.”
When biodiversity is lost from ecological communities, long-lived, larger-bodied species tend to disappear first, while smaller-bodied species with fast life histories tend to proliferate. Research has found that mammal hosts of zoonotic viruses are less likely to be species of conservation concern (i.e. they are more common), and that for both mammals and birds, human development tends to increase the abundance of zoonotic host species, bringing people and risky animals closer together.
“When we erode biodiversity, we favor species that are more likely to be zoonotic hosts, increasing our risk of spillover events,” Ostfeld notes. Adding that, “Managing this risk will require a better understanding of how things like habitat conversion, climate change, and overharvesting affect zoonotic hosts, and how restoring biodiversity to degraded areas might reduce their abundance.”
To predict and prevent spillover, Keesing and Ostfeld highlight the need to focus on host attributes associated with disease transmission rather than continuing to debate the prime importance of one taxon or another. Ostfeld explains, “We should stop assuming that there is a single animal source for each emerging pathogen. The pathogens that jump from animals to people tend to be found in many animal species, not just one. They’re jumpers, after all, and they typically move between species readily.”
Disentangling the characteristics of effective zoonotic hosts – such as their immune strategies, resilience to disturbance, and habitat preferences – is key to protecting public health. Forecasting the locations where these species thrive, and where pathogen transmission and emergence are likely, can guide targeted interventions.
Keesing notes, “Restoration of biodiversity is an important frontier in the management of zoonotic disease risk. Those pathogens that do spill over to infect humans–zoonotic pathogens–often proliferate as a result of human impacts.” Concluding, “As we rebuild our communities after COVID-19, we need to have firmly in mind that one of our best strategies to prevent future pandemics is to protect, preserve, and restore biodiversity.”
Reference: “Impacts of biodiversity and biodiversity loss on zoonotic diseases” by Felicia Keesing and Richard S. Ostfeld, 5 April 2021, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2023540118
This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant OPUS 1948419 to Keesing.
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies is an independent nonprofit center for environmental research. Since 1983, our scientists have been investigating the complex interactions that govern the natural world and the impacts of climate change on these systems. Our findings lead to more effective management and policy actions and increased environmental literacy. Staff are global experts in the ecology of: cities, disease, forests, and freshwater.
Two new books on quantum theory could not, at first glance, seem more different. The first, Something Deeply Hidden, is by Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, who writes, “As far as we currently know, quantum mechanics isn’t just an approximation of the truth; it is the truth.” The second, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, is by Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, who insists that “the conceptual problems and raging disagreements that have bedeviled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong.”
Given this contrast, one might expect Carroll and Smolin to emphasize very different things in their books. Yet the books mirror each other, down to chapters that present the same quantum demonstrations and the same quantum parables. Carroll and Smolin both agree on the facts of quantum theory, and both gesture toward the same historical signposts. Both consider themselves realists, in the tradition of Albert Einstein. They want to finish his work of unifying physical theory, making it offer one coherent description of the entire world, without ad hoc exceptions to cover experimental findings that don’t fit. By the end, both suggest that the completion of this project might force us to abandon the idea of three-dimensional space as a fundamental structure of the universe.
But with Carroll claiming quantum mechanics as literally true and Smolin claiming it as literally false, there must be some underlying disagreement. And of course there is. Traditional quantum theory describes things like electrons as smeary waves whose measurable properties only become definite in the act of measurement. Sean Carroll is a supporter of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of this theory, which claims that the multiple measurement possibilities all simultaneously exist. Some proponents of Many Worlds describe the existence of a “multiverse” that contains many parallel universes, but Carroll prefers to describe a single, radically enlarged universe that contains all the possible outcomes running alongside each other as separate “worlds.” But the trouble, says Lee Smolin, is that in the real world as we observe it, these multiple possibilities never appear — each measurement has a single outcome. Smolin takes this fact as evidence that quantum theory must be wrong, and argues that any theory that supersedes quantum mechanics must do away with these multiple possibilities.
So how can such similar books, informed by the same evidence and drawing upon the same history, reach such divergent conclusions? Well, anyone who cares about politics knows that this type of informed disagreement happens all the time, especially, as with Carroll and Smolin, when the disagreements go well beyond questions that experiments could possibly resolve.
But there is another problem here. The question that both physicists gloss over is that of just how much we should expect to get out of our best physical theories. This question pokes through the foundation of quantum mechanics like rusted rebar, often luring scientists into arguments over parables meant to illuminate the obscure.
With this in mind, let’s try a parable of our own, a cartoon of the quantum predicament. In the tradition of such parables, it’s a story about knowing and not knowing.
We fade in on a scientist interviewing for a job. Let’s give this scientist a name, Bobby Alice, that telegraphs his helplessness to our didactic whims. During the part of the interview where the Reality Industries rep asks him if he has any questions, none of them are answered, except the one about his starting salary. This number is high enough to convince Bobby the job is right for him.
Knowing so little about Reality Industries, everything Bobby sees on his first day comes as a surprise, starting with the campus’s extensive security apparatus of long gated driveways, high tree-lined fences, and all the other standard X-Files elements. Most striking of all is his assigned building, a structure whose paradoxical design merits a special section of the morning orientation. After Bobby is given his project details (irrelevant for us), black-suited Mr. Smith–types tell him the bad news: So long as he works at Reality Industries, he may visit only the building’s fourth floor. This, they assure him, is standard, for all employees but the top executives. Each project team has its own floor, and the teams are never allowed to intermix.
The instructors follow this with what they claim is the good news. Yes, they admit, this tightly tiered approach led to worker distress in the old days, back on the old campus, where the building designs were brutalist and the depression rates were high. But the new building is designed to subvert such pressures. The trainers lead Bobby up to the fourth floor, up to his assignment, through a construction unlike any research facility he has ever seen. The walls are translucent and glow on all sides. So do the floor and ceiling. He is guided to look up, where he can see dark footprints roving about, shadows from the project team on the next floor. “The goal here,” his guide remarks, “is to encourage a sort of cultural continuity, even if we can’t all communicate.”
Over the next weeks, Bobby Alice becomes accustomed to the silent figures floating above him. Eventually, he comes to enjoy the fourth floor’s communal tracking of their fifth-floor counterparts, complete with invented names, invented personalities, invented purposes. He makes peace with the possibility that he is himself a fantasy figure for the third floor.
Then, one day, strange lights appear in a corner of the ceiling.
Naturally phlegmatic, Bobby Alice simply takes notes. But others on the fourth floor are noticeably less calm. The lights seem not to follow any known standard of the physics of footfalls, with lights of different colors blinking on and off seemingly at random, yet still giving the impression not merely of a constructed display but of some solid fixture in the fifth-floor commons. Some team members, formerly of the same anti-philosophical bent as most hires, now spend their coffee breaks discussing increasingly esoteric metaphysics. Productivity declines.
Meanwhile, Bobby has set up a camera to record data. As a work-related extracurricular, he is able in the following weeks to develop a general mathematical description that captures an unexpected order in the flashing lights. This description does not predict exactly which lights will blink when, but, by telling a story about what’s going on between the frames captured by the camera, he can predict what sorts of patterns are allowed, how often, and in what order.
Does this solve the mystery? Apparently it does. Conspiratorial voices on the fourth floor go quiet. The “Alice formalism” immediately finds other applications, and Reality Industries gives Dr. Alice a raise. They give him everything he could want — everything except access to the fifth floor.
In time, Bobby Alice becomes a fourth-floor legend. Yet as the years pass — and pass with the corner lights as an apparently permanent fixture — new employees occasionally massage the Alice formalism to unexpected ends. One worker discovers that he can rid the lights of their randomness if he imagines them as the reflections from a tank of iridescent fish, with the illusion of randomness arising in part because it’s a 3-D projection on a 2-D ceiling, and in part because the fish swim funny. The Alice formalism offers a series of color maps showing the different possible light patterns that might appear at any given moment, and another prominent interpreter argues, with supposed sincerity (although it’s hard to tell), that actually not one but all of the maps occur at once — each in parallel branching universes generated by that spooky alien light source up on the fifth floor.
As the interpretations proliferate, Reality Industries management occasionally finds these side quests to be a drain on corporate resources. But during the Alice decades, the fourth floor has somehow become the company’s most productive. Why? Who knows. Why fight it?
The history of quantum mechanics, being a matter of record, obviously has more twists than any illustrative cartoon can capture. Readers interested in that history are encouraged to read Adam Becker’s recent retelling, What Is Real?, which was reviewed in these pages (“Make Physics Real Again,” Winter 2019). But the above sketch is one attempt to capture the unusual flavor of this history.
Like the fourth-floor scientists in our story who, sight unseen, invented personas for all their fifth-floor counterparts, nineteenth-century physicists are often caricatured as having oversold their grasp on nature’s secrets. But longstanding puzzles — puzzles involving chemical spectra and atomic structure rather than blinking ceiling lights — led twentieth-century pioneers like Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg to invent a new style of physical theory. As with the formalism of Bobby Alice, mature quantum theories in this tradition were abstract, offering probabilistic predictions for the outcomes of real-world measurements, while remaining agnostic about what it all meant, about what fundamental reality undergirded the description.
From the very beginning, a counter-tradition associated with names like Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and Erwin Schrödinger insisted that quantum models must ultimately capture something (but probably not everything) about the real stuff moving around us. This tradition gave us visions of subatomic entities as lumps of matter vibrating in space, with the sorts of orbital visualizations one first sees in high school chemistry.
But once the various quantum ideas were codified and physicists realized that they worked remarkably well, most research efforts turned away from philosophical agonizing and toward applications. The second generation of quantum theorists, unburdened by revolutionary angst, replaced every part of classical physics with a quantum version. As Max Planck famously wrote, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” Since this inherited framework works well enough to get new researchers started, the question of what it all means is usually left alone.
Of course, this question is exactly what most non-experts want answered. For past generations, books with titles like The Tao of Physics and Quantum Reality met this demand, with discussions that wildly mixed conventions of scientific reportage with wisdom literature. Even once quantum theories themselves became familiar, interpretations of them were still new enough to be exciting.
Today, even this thrill is gone. We are now in the part of the story where no one can remember what it was like not to have the blinking lights on the ceiling. Despite the origins of quantum theory as an empirical framework — a container flexible enough to wrap around whatever surprises experiments might uncover — its success has led today’s theorists to regard it as fundamental, a base upon which further speculations might be built.
Regaining that old feeling of disorientation now requires some extra steps.
As interlopers in an ongoing turf war, modern explainers of quantum theory must reckon both with arguments like Niels Bohr’s, which emphasize the theory’s limits on knowledge, and with criticisms like Albert Einstein’s, which demand that the theory represent the real world. Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden pitches itself to both camps. The title stems from an Einstein anecdote. As “a child of four or five years,” Einstein was fascinated by his father’s compass. He concluded, “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Carroll agrees with this, but argues that the world at its roots is quantum. We only need courage to apply that old Einsteinian realism to our quantum universe.
Carroll is a prolific popularizer — alongside his books, his blog, and his Twitter account, he has also recorded three courses of lectures for general audiences, and for the last year has released a weekly podcast. His new book is appealingly didactic, providing a sustained defense of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, first offered by Hugh Everett III as a graduate student in the 1950s. Carroll maintains that Many Worlds is just quantum mechanics, and he works hard to convince us that supporters aren’t merely perverse. In the early days of electrical research, followers of James Clerk Maxwell were called Maxwellians, but today all physicists are Maxwellians. If Carroll’s project pans out, someday we’ll all be Everettians.
Standard applications of quantum theory follow a standard logic. A physical system is prepared in some initial condition, and modeled using a mathematical representation called a “wave function.” Then the system changes in time, and these changes, governed by the Schrödinger equation, are tracked in the system’s wave function. But when we interpret the wave function in order to generate a prediction of what we will observe, we get only probabilities of possible experimental outcomes.
Carroll insists that this quantum recipe isn’t good enough. It may be sufficient if we care only to predict the likelihood of various outcomes for a given experiment, but it gives us no sense of what the world is like. “Quantum mechanics, in the form in which it is currently presented in physics textbooks,” he writes, “represents an oracle, not a true understanding.”
Most of the quantum mysteries live in the process of measurement. Questions of exactly how measurements force determinate outcomes, and of exactly what we sweep under the rug with that bland word “measurement,” are known collectively in quantum lore as the “measurement problem.” Quantum interpretations are distinguished by how they solve this problem. Usually, solutions involve rejecting some key element of common belief. In the Many Worlds interpretation, the key belief we are asked to reject is that of one single world, with one single future.
The version of the Many Worlds solution given to us in Something Deeply Hidden sidesteps the history of the theory in favor of a logical reconstruction. What Carroll enunciates here is something like a quantum minimalism: “There is only one wave function, which describes the entire system we care about, all the way up to the ‘wave function of the universe’ if we’re talking about the whole shebang.”
Putting this another way, Carroll is a realist about the quantum wave function, and suggests that this mathematical object simply is the deep-down thing, while everything else, from particles to planets to people, are merely its downstream effects. (Sorry, people!) The world of our experience, in this picture, is just a tiny sliver of the real one, where all possible outcomes — all outcomes for which the usual quantum recipe assigns a non-zero probability — continue to exist, buried somewhere out of view in the universal wave function. Hence the “Many Worlds” moniker. What we experience as a single world, chock-full of foreclosed opportunities, Many Worlders understand as but one swirl of mist foaming off an ever-breaking wave.
The position of Many Worlds may not yet be common, but neither is it new. Carroll, for his part, is familiar enough with it to be blasé, presenting it in the breezy tone of a man with all the answers. The virtue of his presentation is that whether or not you agree with him, he gives you plenty to consider, including expert glosses on ongoing debates in cosmology and field theory. But Something Deeply Hidden still fails where it matters. “If we train ourselves to discard our classical prejudices, and take the lessons of quantum mechanics at face value,” Carroll writes near the end, “we may eventually learn how to extract our universe from the wave function.”
But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Why should we have to work so hard to “extract our universe from the wave function,” when the wave function itself is an invention of physicists, not the inerrant revelation of some transcendental truth? Interpretations of quantum theory live or die on how well they are able to explain its success, and the most damning criticism of the Many Worlds interpretation is that it’s hard to see how it improves on the standard idea that probabilities in quantum theory are just a way to quantify our expectations about various measurement outcomes.
Carroll argues that, in Many Worlds, probabilities arise from self-locating uncertainty: “You know everything there is to know about the universe, except where you are within it.” During a measurement, “a single world splits into two, and there are now two people where I used to be just one.” “For a brief while, then, there are two copies of you, and those two copies are precisely identical. Each of them lives on a distinct branch of the wave function, but neither of them knows which one it is on.” The job of the physicist is then to calculate the chance that he has ended up on one branch or another — which produces the probabilities of the various measurement outcomes.
If, alongside Carroll, you convince yourself that it is reasonable to suppose that these worlds exist outside our imaginations, you still might conclude, as he does, that “at the end of the day it doesn’t really change how we should go through our lives.” This conclusion comes in a chapter called “The Human Side,” where Carroll also dismisses the possibility that humans might have a role in branching the wave function, or indeed that we have any ultimate agency: “While you might be personally unsure what choice you will eventually make, the outcome is encoded in your brain.” These views are rewarmed arguments from his previous book, The Big Picture, which I reviewed in these pages (“Pop Goes the Physics,” Spring 2017) and won’t revisit here.
Although this book is unlikely to turn doubters of Many Worlds into converts, it is a credit to Carroll that he leaves one with the impression that the doctrine is probably consistent, whether or not it is true. But internal consistency has little power against an idea that feels unacceptable. For doctrines like Many Worlds, with key claims that are in principle unobservable, some of us will always want a way out.
Lee Smolin is one such seeker for whom Many Worlds realism — or “magical realism,” as he likes to call it — is not real enough. In his new book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, Smolin assures us that “however weird the quantum world may be, it need not threaten anyone’s belief in commonsense realism. It is possible to be a realist while living in the quantum universe.” But if you expect “commonsense realism” by the end of his book, prepare for a surprise.
Smolin is less congenial than Carroll, with a brooding vision of his fellow scientists less as fellow travelers and more as members of an “orthodoxy of the unreal,” as Smolin stirringly puts it. Smolin is best known for his role as doomsayer about string theory — his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics functioned as an entertaining jeremiad. But while his books all court drama and are never boring, that often comes at the expense of argumentative care.
Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution can be summarized briefly. Smolin states early on that quantum theory is wrong: It gives probabilities for many and various measurement outcomes, whereas the world of our observation is solid and singular. Nevertheless, quantum theory can still teach us important lessons about nature. For instance, Smolin takes at face value the claim that entangled particles far apart in the universe can communicate information to each other instantaneously, unbounded by the speed of light. This ability of quantum entities to be correlated while separated in space is technically called “nonlocality,” which Smolin enshrines as a fundamental principle. And while he takes inspiration from an existing nonlocal quantum theory, he rejects it for violating other favorite physical principles. Instead, he elects to redo physics from scratch, proposing partial theories that would allow his favored ideals to survive.
This is, of course, an insane act of hubris. But no red line separates the crackpot from the visionary in theoretical physics. Because Smolin presents himself as a man up against the status quo, his books are as much autobiography as popular science, with personality bleeding into intellectual commitments. Smolin’s last popular book, Time Reborn (2013), showed him changing his mind about the nature of time after doing bedtime with his son. This time around, Smolin tells us in the preface about how he came to view the universe as nonlocal:
I vividly recall that when I understood the proof of the theorem, I went outside in the warm afternoon and sat on the steps of the college library, stunned. I pulled out a notebook and immediately wrote a poem to a girl I had a crush on, in which I told her that each time we touched there were electrons in our hands which from then on would be entangled with each other. I no longer recall who she was or what she made of my poem, or if I even showed it to her. But my obsession with penetrating the mystery of nonlocal entanglement, which began that day, has never since left me.
The book never seriously questions whether the arguments for nonlocality should convince us; Smolin’s experience of conviction must stand in for our own. These personal detours are fascinating, but do little to convince skeptics.
Once you start turning the pages of Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, ideas fly by fast. First, Smolin gives us a tour of the quantum fundamentals — entanglement, nonlocality, and all that. Then he provides a thoughtful overview of solutions to the measurement problem, particularly those of David Bohm, whose complex legacy he lingers over admiringly. But by the end, Smolin abandons the plodding corporate truth of the scientist for the hope of a private perfection.
Many physicists have never heard of Bohm’s theory, and some who have still conclude that it’s worthless. Bohm attempted to salvage something like the old classical determinism, offering a way to understand measurement outcomes as caused by the motion of particles, which in turn are guided by waves. This conceptual simplicity comes at the cost of brazen nonlocality, and an explicit dualism of particles and waves. Einstein called the theory a “physical fairy-tale for children”; Robert Oppenheimer declared about Bohm that “we must agree to ignore him.”
Bohm’s theory is important to Smolin mainly as a prototype, to demonstrate that it’s possible to situate quantum mechanics within a single world — unlike Many Worlds, which Smolin seems to dislike less for physical than for ethical reasons: “It seems to me that the Many Worlds Interpretation offers a profound challenge to our moral thinking because it erases the distinction between the possible and the actual.” In his survey, Smolin sniffs each interpretation as he passes it, looking for a whiff of the real quantum story, which will preserve our single universe while also maintaining the virtues of all the partial successes.
When Smolin finally explains his own idiosyncratic efforts, his methods — at least in the version he has dramatized here — resemble some wild descendant of Cartesian rationalism. From his survey, Smolin lists the principles he would expect from an acceptable alternative to quantum theory. He then reports back to us on the incomplete models he has found that will support these principles.
Smolin’s tour leads us all over the place, from a review of Leibniz’s Monadology (“shockingly modern”), to a new law of physics he proposes (the “principle of precedence”), to a solution to the measurement problem involving nonlocal interactions among all similar systems everywhere in the universe. Smolin concludes with the grand claim that “the universe consists of nothing but views of itself, each from an event in its history.” Fine. Maybe there’s more to these ideas than a casual reader might glean, but after a few pages of sentences like, “An event is something that happens,” hope wanes.
For all their differences, Carroll and Smolin similarly insist that, once the basic rules governing quantum systems are properly understood, the rest should fall into place. “Once we understand what’s going on for two particles, the generalization to 1088 particles is just math,” Carroll assures us. Smolin is far less certain that physics is on the right track, but he, too, believes that progress will come with theoretical breakthroughs. “I have no better answer than to face the blank notebook,” Smolin writes. This was the path of Bohr, Einstein, Bohm and others. “Ask yourself which of the fundamental principles of the present canon must survive the coming revolution. That’s the first page. Then turn again to a blank page and start thinking.”
Physicists are always tempted to suppose that successful predictions prove that a theory describes how the world really is. And why not? Denying that quantum theory captures something essential about the character of those entities outside our heads that we label with words like “atoms” and “molecules” and “photons” seems far more perverse, as an interpretive strategy, than any of the mainstream interpretations we’ve already discussed. Yet one can admit that something is captured by quantum theory without jumping immediately to the assertion that everything must flow from it. An invented language doesn’t need to be universal to be useful, and it’s smart to keep on honing tools for thinking that have historically worked well.
As an old mentor of mine, John P. Ralston, wrote in his book How to Understand Quantum Mechanics, “We don’t know what nature is, and it is not clear whether quantum theory fully describes it. However, it’s not the worst thing. It has not failed yet.” This seems like the right attitude to take. Quantum theory is a fabulously rich subject, but the fact that it has not failed yet does not allow us to generalize its results indefinitely.
There is value in the exercises that Carroll and Smolin perform, in their attempts to imagine principled and orderly universes, to see just how far one can get with a straitjacketed imagination. But by assuming that everything is captured by the current version of quantum theory, Carroll risks credulity, foreclosing genuinely new possibilities. And by assuming that everything is up for grabs, Smolin risks paranoia, ignoring what is already understood.
Perhaps the agnostics among us are right to settle in as permanent occupants of Reality Industries’ fourth floor. We can accept that scientists have a role in creating stories that make sense, while also appreciating the possibility that the world might not be made of these stories. To the big, unresolved questions — questions about where randomness enters in the measurement process, or about how much of the world our physical theories might capture — we can offer only a laconic who knows? The world is filled with flashing lights, and we should try to find some order in them. Scientific success often involves inventing a language that makes the strange sensible, warping intuitions along the way. And while this process has allowed us to make progress, we should never let our intuitions get so strong that we stop scanning the ceiling for unexpected dazzlements.
David Kordahl is a graduate student in physics at Arizona State University. David Kordahl, “Inventing the Universe,” The New Atlantis, Number 61, Winter 2020, pp. 114-124.
However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global without facing those inequalities.
Some people work for the common world, keep it going, but are not, for that reason, of it. They might lack property or papers, be sidelined by racism or even disdained as refuse—those who are poor, Black or brown, those with unpayable debts that preclude a sense of an open future.
The shared world is not equally shared. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to “the part of those who have no part”—those for whom participation in the commons is not possible, never was, or no longer is. For it is not just resources and companies in which a share is to be had, but a sense of the common, a sense of belonging to a world equally, a trust that the world is organized to support everyone’s flourishing.
The pandemic has illuminated and intensified racial and economic inequalities at the same time that it heightens the global sense of our obligations to one another and the earth. There is movement in a global direction, one based on a new sense of mortality and interdependency. The experience of finitude is coupled with a keen sense of inequalities: Who dies early and why, and for whom is there no infrastructural or social promise of life’s continuity?
This sense of the interdependency of the world, strengthened by a common immunological predicament, challenges the notion of ourselves as isolated individuals encased in discrete bodies, bound by established borders. Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone?
Within these pandemic times, air, water, shelter, clothing and access to health care are sites of individual and collective anxiety. But all these were already imperiled by climate change. Whether or not one is living a livable life is not only a private existential question, but an urgent economic one, incited by the life-and-death consequences of social inequality: Are there health services and shelters and clean enough water for all those who should have an equal share of this world? The question is made more urgent by conditions of heightened economic precarity during the pandemic, exposing as well the ongoing climate catastrophe for the threat to livable life that it is.
Pandemic is etymologically pandemos, all the people, or perhaps more precisely, the people everywhere, or something that spreads over or through the people. The “demos” is all the people despite the legal barriers that seek to separate them. A pandemic, then, links all the people through the potentials of infection and recovery, suffering and hope, immunity and fatality. No border stops the virus from traveling if humans travel; no social category secures absolute immunity for those it includes.
“The political in our time must start from the imperative to reconstruct the world in common,” argues Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. If we consider the plundering of the earth’s resources for the purposes of corporate profit, privatization and colonization itself as planetary project or enterprise, then it makes sense to devise a movement that does not send us back to our egos and identities, our cut-off lives.
Such a movement will be, for Mbembe, “a decolonization [which] is by definition a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation.” The planetary opposition to extraction and systemic racism ought to then deliver us back to the world, or let the world arrive, as if for the first time, a shared place for “deep breathing”—a desire we all now know.
And yet, an inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own.
As we dismantle the rigid forms of individuality in these interconnected times, we can imagine the smaller part that human worlds must play on this earth whose regeneration we depend upon—and which, in turn, depends upon our smaller and more mindful role.
Google, Nespresso, Amazon e Magalu. Na chamada economia da atenção, a concorrência hoje é, cada vez mais, entre ecossistemas, geralmente capitaneados por uma grande empresa e que abrigam várias organizações em uma rede de dependência e complementaridade.
Ganha quem conseguir satisfazer mais necessidades dos consumidores dentro do mesmo sistema. Para usar o jargão, quem consegue oferecer uma proposição de valor superior.
A ideia em si não é tão nova assim. O impulso veio com a economia digital, mas é possível identificar ecossistemas nos mais diversos contextos, do mundo do futebol e do crime aos sistemas sociais de educação e saúde. Inclusive no conglomerado de organizações que tem se dedicado ao combate à pandemia, que inclui atores do setor privado (como no caso da recente compra do kit intubação) e que deveria ter sido adequadamente capitaneado pelo governo federal.
Mas cá estamos, rumo a meio milhão de mortos. Bolsonaro poderia ter saído como herói da coisa toda, como Bibi em Israel, mas, vivendo da lógica de bunker, preferiu jogar areia nessas engrenagens desde o início, enquanto o Brasil regride institucionalmente a olhos vistos.
Curiosamente, isso não tem sido suficiente para corroer o lastro que o presidente mantém no pedaço conservador de Brasil, que tem racionalizado sem grandes dificuldades o mar de chorume produzido pela covid.
Encarar o bolsonarismo como ecossistema –mais do que um movimento social apoiado por um exército digital– ajuda a entender o fenômeno. Primeiro porque, como sabemos, a atenção das pessoas se tornou superfragmentada e o mundo não anda fácil de ser entendido.
Ecossistemas político-sociais levam vantagem quando conseguem satisfazer uma necessidade humana básica, o conforto das grandes certezas. Uma boa e sólida certeza vale como um barbitúrico irresistível, dizia Nelson Rodrigues. Em um país com nível educacional baixo, essas certezas podem se dar ao luxo de sapatear na cara da realidade.
O bolsonarismo também dá de bandeja aos seguidores uma identidade carregada de tintas morais e, novamente, não há nada de novo aqui –basta lembrar de exemplos próximos, como o chavismo e o lulopetismo. Em outras palavras, o sujeito se sente superior e ganha uma tribo para chamar de sua.
É essa a atual proposição de valor do ecossistema criado em torno do presidente. Não é pouco, ainda que o conjunto já tenha tido mais força quando esgrimia o discurso contra a corrupção e a lábia liberal.
Em torno desse valor, diversos segmentos se agrupam. Tem aquilo que reportagem no El País chamou de QAnon tupiniquim, gente produzindo fake news e usando robôs para influenciar o discurso nas redes sociais.
Tem aquele segmento empresarial “raiz”, madeireiros na Amazônia, por exemplo, fora aquelas grandes empresas que, assim como o Centrão, estão quase sempre à disposição para uma ovacionada, no matter what.
Tem os políticos, os apoiadores de nicho (como os atiradores), os produtores de conteúdo lacrador, os canais de comunicação e parte (presumo) dos militares e policiais. E se a mexerica toda perdeu os lavajatistas, ganhou de presente um gomo suculento que tem sido crucial para sua resiliência, o dos médicos e influenciadores cloroquiners.
Cada segmento desses têm recursos e competências que usa em prol da causa. Por exemplo, a audiência cativa de uma rádio ou a credibilidade extraterrestre que os brasileiros atribuem aos médicos, mesmo que sejam leigos em medicina baseada em evidências.
Cada um deles desempenha atividades diversas mas complementares, reforçando a proposição de valor (lembremos: grandes certezas e identidade moral superior). A lista é longa e inclui organização de protestos, veiculação de programas de opinião em rádio e os encontros empresariais que lustram a legitimidade do governo com o gel do capitalismo de compadrio.
No que é crítico, cada segmento se apropria de uma parte do valor gerado pelo conjunto. Políticos se apropriam de capital eleitoral. Emissoras, de exclusivas com o presidente e audiência. Médicos cloroquiners ganham chuvas de pacientes. Influenciadores e manipuladores de conteúdo ganham seguidores ou, como suspeita a CPMI das fake news, empregos em gabinetes. Entidades empresariais mantem abertos os canais com Brasília. Os mortos são só um detalhe incômodo na paisagem.
Minha percepção é que a disputa de 2022 deve ocorrer mais nesse nível amplificado. Concorrentes precisam começar a colocar de pé seus ecossistemas desde já, de preferência em torno de valores mais racionais e menos divisivos. Não vai ser fácil.
In the last two decades, the Anthropocene has become an informal buzzword to describe the numerous and unprecedented ways humans have come to modify the planet.
As the concept has become more widely adopted, however, definitions have begun to blur. Today, the very meaning of the Anthropocene and its timeline differs considerably depending on who is doing the talking.
To geologists and Earth system scientists, the Industrial Revolution is often considered the dawn of the Anthropocene – when human influence on Earth’s systems became predominant worldwide.
Many anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists, however, consider the 18th century as more of a sunrise, when the era of humans truly began to heat up in some regions. Before that, there were already glimmers of human domination.
Since the Late Pleistocene, right through to the Holocene (our current epoch), humans have been producing “distinct, detectable and unprecedented transformations of Earth’s environments,” states a new paper on the subject.
And while these changes might not be enough to be technically defined as a new geological epoch, we need terms to describe this earlier influence, too. Because right now, people from various disciplines are using the term with subtly different meanings.
“Dissecting the many interpretations of the Anthropocene suggests that a range of quite distinct, but variably overlapping, concepts are in play,” says geologist Colin Waters from the University of Leicester in the UK.
Thousands of years before the boom of industrialization, globalization, nuclear bombs, and modern climate change, humans were already in the first stages of becoming a dominant planetary force.
The rise of crop domestication and hunting, the spread of livestock and mining, and the move to urbanization, for instance, have all caused great changes to Earth’s soil signature and its fossil record, setting us on a course to the modern day.
As far back as 3400 BCE, for instance, people in China were already smelting copper, and 3,000 years ago, most of the planet was already transformed by hunter-gatherers and farmers.
While these smaller and slower regional changes did not destabilize Earth’s entire system as more modern actions have, some researchers think we are underestimating the climate effects of these earlier land-use changes.
As such, some have considered using the terms “pre-Anthropocene” or “proto‐Anthropocene” to describe significant human impacts before the mid‐twentieth century.
Others argue a capitalized “Anthropocene” should represent the tightly defined geological concept of an epoch, while the uncapitalized version should be used for broader interpretations.
Even after the Industrial Revolution, when human influence is clear to see, some argue we need to define further advances of the Anthropocene.
The “Great Acceleration” of the mid-twentieth century, for instance, has been proposed as a “second stage” to the Anthropocene, when human enterprise and influence began growing exponentially.
This second stage not only encompasses rapid geological changes, but it also refers to socioeconomic factors and modern biophysical processes that humans have also begun to alter with our actions.
“This shows an exemplar of ways in which ideas and terms move between disciplines, as is true for the Anthropocene,” researchers write.
It’s unclear what the next stage of the Anthropocene will look like, but many of the changes we have made are currently irreversible and may continue long after our species is gone.
Still, the authors argue, one thing is clear. The exceptionally rapid transformations humans have made to our planet since the Great Acceleration “vastly outweigh” earlier climactic events of the Holocene.
“Given both the rate and scale of change marking the onset of the chronostratigraphic Anthropocene, it would be difficult to justify a rank lower than series/epoch,” the authors conclude.
A 3D portrait of methane concentrations and a slightly wobblier Earth.
Of all the things attributable to climate change, the rotational poles moving differently is definitely one of the weirder ones. But a new study shows that’s exactly what’s happening. It builds on previous findings to show that disappearing ice is playing a major role, and shows that groundwater depletion is responsible for contributing to wobbles as well.
The findings, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, uses satellites that track gravity to track what researchers call “polar drift.” While we think of gravity as a constant, it’s actually a moving target based on the shape of the planet. While earthquakes and other geophysical activities can certainly play a role by pushing land around, it’s water that is responsible for the biggest shifts. The satellites used for the study, known as GRACE and GRACE-FO, were calibrated to measure Earth’s shifting mass.
Polar drift is something that happens naturally. The Earth’s axis is slowly shifting, but there’s been a marked acceleration in recent decades. The poles are now moving at nearly 17 times the rate they were in 1981, a fairly remarkable speed-up. What’s even more remarkable, though, is that poles actually began moving in a new direction quite suddenly in 2000, at a rapid clip.
Previous research used the same satellite data to observe the speed-up and change of gear and attributed it to ice loss in Greenland and West Antarctica as well as groundwater pumping. The new study extends the record back to the 1990s and explores some of the year-to-year wobbles in more detail. The findings point to changes in groundwater use in specific regions as the source of some of those differences.
“Using the GRACE data (for the period 2002-2015) we showed that such interannual signals (as these authors pointed out: kinks at 2005 and 2012) can be explained by the terrestrial water storage,” Surendra Adhikari, a scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the 2016 research, said in an email. “The new paper reinforces the statement by also showing that another kink in the polar motion data (at 1995) is also explained by total water storage variability, especially by the on-set of accelerated Greenland ice mass loss and depletion of water storage in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
“In general, the paper (along with our previous works) reveals the strong connection between the climate variability and how the Earth wobbles,” he added, noting the new study was a “nicely done paper.”
In the scheme of things, climate change triggering polar movement isn’t too worrisome, given the other clear and present dangers like intense heat waves, ocean acidification, and the sixth mass extinction. Ditto for the role of groundwater depletion, which has the potential to impact billions of lives. But it’s a powerful reminder of just how much humans have reshaped the planet and why we should probably cut it out sooner than later if we don’t want our world to turn upside down.
Correction, 4/23/21, 6:30 p.m.: This post has been updated to reflect that the rotational poles are the ones in question moving and being studied.
A recent study finds that social inequality persists, regardless of educational achievement – particularly for men.
“Education is not the equalizer that many people think it is,” says Anna Manzoni, author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.
The study aimed to determine the extent to which a parent’s social status gives an advantage to their children. The research used the educational achievements of parents as a proxy for social status, and looked at the earnings of adult children as a proxy for professional success.
To address the research question, Manzoni examined data from people who were interviewed as part of the National Survey of College Graduates between 2010 and 2017. Specifically, Manzoni focused on United States citizens between 35 and 67 years old who reported on their wages and parental education. The final sample size was 56,819 individuals: 32,337 men and 24,482 women.
The analysis found that if a son gets a degree similar to the degree that a parent had, the son will earn more money than if his parent did not achieve the same level of education.
For example, imagine that Son A becomes a doctor, and he had a parent who was also a doctor. Meanwhile, Son B also becomes a doctor, but his parents only had bachelor’s degrees. The study found that, in general, Son A will earn more money than Son B, even though they have the same degree.
This effect also exists for daughters, but it is much weaker.
“The effect we see here essentially preserves social stratification for sons – less so for daughters,” Manzoni says. “We like to think that if someone makes it to college, becomes a lawyer, becomes a doctor, they have ‘made it.’ But what we see is that even earning an advanced degree is unlikely to put you on the same professional footing as someone who earned the same degree but started higher on the social ladder.
“One take-away is that expanding access to education is valuable, but education alone is not enough to resolve our society’s challenges in regard to inequality,” Manzoni says.
“This work shows that social origin matters, but it’s not clear what drives this structural inequality,” Manzoni adds. “Is it social capital? Access to networks? Differing financial resources? Is parental background becoming more important as a larger percentage of the population is getting a college degree? Is the advantage at the beginning of a child’s career? There is still a lot of room for additional research on this subject.”
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The paper, “Equalizing or Stratifying? Intergenerational Persistence across College Degrees,” appears in the Journal of Higher Education.
A new study by Simon Fraser University historical ecologists finds that Indigenous-managed forests—cared for as “forest gardens”—contain more biologically and functionally diverse species than surrounding conifer-dominated forests and create important habitat for animals and pollinators. The findings are published today in Ecology and Society.
According to researchers, ancient forests were once tended by Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples living along the north and south Pacific coast. These forest gardens continue to grow at remote archeological villages on Canada’s northwest coast and are composed of native fruit and nut trees and shrubs such as crabapple, hazelnut, cranberry, wild plum, and wild cherries. Important medicinal plants and root foods like wild ginger and wild rice root grow in the understory layers.
“These plants never grow together in the wild,” says Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an SFU Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the study lead researcher. “It seemed obvious that people put them there to grow all in one spot—like a garden. Elders and knowledge holders talk about perennial management all the time.”
“It’s no surprise these forest gardens continue to grow at archeological village sites that haven’t yet been too severely disrupted by settler-colonial land-use.”
Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples’ management practices challenge the assumption that humans tend to overturn or exhaust the ecosystems they inhabit. This research highlights how Indigenous peoples not only improved the inhabited landscape, but were also keystone builders, facilitating the creation of habitat in some cases. The findings provide strong evidence that Indigenous management practices are tied to ecosystem health and resilience.
“Human activities are often considered detrimental to biodiversity, and indeed, industrial land management has had devastating consequences for biodiversity,” says Jesse Miller, study co-author, ecologist and lecturer at Stanford University. “Our research, however, shows that human activities can also have substantial benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem function. Our findings highlight that there continues to be an important role for human activities in restoring and managing ecosystems in the present and future.”
Forest gardens are a common management regime identified in Indigenous communities around the world, especially in tropical regions. Armstrong says the study is the first time forest gardens have been studied in North America—showing how important Indigenous peoples are in the maintenance and defense of some of the most functionally diverse ecosystems on the Northwest Coast.
“The forest gardens of Kitselas Canyon are a testament to the long-standing practice of Kitselas people shaping the landscape through stewardship and management,” says Chris Apps, director, Kitselas Lands & Resources Department. “Studies such as this reconnect the community with historic resources and support integration of traditional approaches with contemporary land-use management while promoting exciting initiatives for food sovereignty and cultural reflection.”
More information: Chelsey Geralda Armstrong et al, Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity, Ecology and Society (2021). DOI: 10.5751/ES-12322-260206
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Ancient Indigenous forest gardens promote a healthy ecosystem (Science Daily)
Date: April 22, 2021
Source: Simon Fraser University
Summary: A new study by historical ecologists finds that Indigenous-managed forests — cared for as ‘forest gardens’ — contain more biologically and functionally diverse species than surrounding conifer-dominated forests and create important habitat for animals and pollinators.
A new study by Simon Fraser University historical ecologists finds that Indigenous-managed forests — cared for as “forest gardens” — contain more biologically and functionally diverse species than surrounding conifer-dominated forests and create important habitat for animals and pollinators. The findings are published today in Ecology and Society.
According to researchers, ancient forests were once tended by Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples living along the north and south Pacific coast. These forest gardens continue to grow at remote archaeological villages on Canada’s northwest coast and are composed of native fruit and nut trees and shrubs such as crabapple, hazelnut, cranberry, wild plum, and wild cherries. Important medicinal plants and root foods like wild ginger and wild rice root grow in the understory layers.
“These plants never grow together in the wild,” says Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an SFU Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the study lead researcher. “It seemed obvious that people put them there to grow all in one spot — like a garden. Elders and knowledge holders talk about perennial management all the time.”
“It’s no surprise these forest gardens continue to grow at archaeological village sites that haven’t yet been too severely disrupted by settler-colonial land-use.”
Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples’ management practices challenge the assumption that humans tend to overturn or exhaust the ecosystems they inhabit. This research highlights how Indigenous peoples not only improved the inhabited landscape, but were also keystone builders, facilitating the creation of habitat in some cases. The findings provide strong evidence that Indigenous management practices are tied to ecosystem health and resilience.
“Human activities are often considered detrimental to biodiversity, and indeed, industrial land management has had devastating consequences for biodiversity,” says Jesse Miller, study co-author, ecologist and lecturer at Stanford University. “Our research, however, shows that human activities can also have substantial benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem function. Our findings highlight that there continues to be an important role for human activities in restoring and managing ecosystems in the present and future.”
Forest gardens are a common management regime identified in Indigenous communities around the world, especially in tropical regions. Armstrong says the study is the first time forest gardens have been studied in North America — showing how important Indigenous peoples are in the maintenance and defence of some of the most functionally diverse ecosystems on the Northwest Coast.
“The forest gardens of Kitselas Canyon are a testament to the long-standing practice of Kitselas people shaping the landscape through stewardship and management,” says Chris Apps, director, Kitselas Lands & Resources Department. “Studies such as this reconnect the community with historic resources and support integration of traditional approaches with contemporary land-use management while promoting exciting initiatives for food sovereignty and cultural reflection.”
Journal Reference:
Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Jesse E. D. Miller, Alex C. McAlvay, Patrick Morgan Ritchie, Dana Lepofsky. Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity. Ecology and Society, 2021; 26 (2) DOI: 10.5751/ES-12322-260206
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s streets, are stark evidence that President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.
Daniela dos Santos cooking a meal in downtown São Paulo. The pandemic aggravated Brazil’s economic crisis, increasing the rolls of the unemployed and the homeless.Volunteers distributing sandwiches and soup.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
And about 117 million people, or roughly 55 percent of the country’s population, faced food insecurity, with uncertain access to enough nutrition, in 2020 — a leap from the 85 million who did so two years previous, the study showed.
“The way the government has handled the virus has deepened poverty and inequality,” said Douglas Belchior, the founder of UNEafro Brasil, one of a handful of organizations that have banded together to raise money to get food baskets to vulnerable communities. “Hunger is a serious and intractable problem in Brazil.”
Luana de Souza, 32, was one of several mothers who lined up outside an improvised food pantry on a recent afternoon hoping to score a sack with beans, rice and cooking oil. Her husband had worked for a company that organized events, but lost his job last year — one of eight million people who joined Brazil’s unemployment rolls during the pandemic, driving the rate above 14 percent, according to Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics.
At first the family managed by spending their government assistance carefully, she said, but this year, once the payments were cut, they struggled.
“There is no work,” she said. “And the bills keep coming.”
Ismael dos Santos asks drivers for change at a traffic light.Members of an evangelical church serving breakfast.
Brazil’s economy had gone into recession in 2014, and had not recovered when the pandemic hit. Mr. Bolsonaro often invoked the reality of families like Ms. de Souza’s, who cannot afford to stay home without working, to argue that the type of lockdowns governments in Europe and other wealthy nations ordered to curb the spread of the virus were untenable in Brazil.
Last year, as governors and mayors around Brazil signed decrees shutting down nonessential businesses and restricting mobility, Mr. Bolsonaro called those measures “extreme” and warned that they would result in malnutrition.
As a second wave of cases this year led to the collapse of the health care system in several cities, local officials again imposed a raft of strict measures — and found themselves at war with Mr. Bolsonaro.
“People have to have freedom, the right to work,” he said last month, calling the new quarantine measures imposed by local governments tantamount to living in a “dictatorship.”
Early this month, as the daily death toll from the virus sometimes surpassed 4,000, Mr. Bolsonaro acknowledged the severity of the humanitarian crisis facing his country. But he took no responsibility and instead faulted local officials.
“Brazil is at the limit,” he said, arguing that the blame lay with “whoever closed everything.”
But economists said that the argument that restrictions intended to control the virus would worsen Brazil’s economic downturn was “a false dilemma.”
In an open letter addressed to Brazilian authorities in late March, more than 1,500 economists and businesspeople asked the government to impose stricter measures, including lockdown.
“It is not reasonable to expect economic activity to recover from an uncontrolled epidemic,” the experts wrote.
Laura Carvalho, an economist, published a study showing that restrictions can have a negative short-term impact on a country’s financial health, but that, in the long run, it would have been a better strategy.
“If Bolsonaro had carried out lockdown measures, we would have moved earlier from the economic crisis,” said Ms. Carvalho, a professor at the University of São Paulo.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s approach had a broadly destabilizing effect, said Thomas Conti, lecturer at Insper, a business school.
“The Brazilian real was the most devalued currency among all developing countries,” Mr. Conti said. “We are at an alarming level of unemployment, there is no predictability to the future of the country, budget rules are being violated, and inflation grows nonstop.”
Evangelical church members performing baptisms while distributing food.Volunteers with a Catholic charity preparing meals for the hungry in São Paulo.
The country’s worsening Covid-19 crisis has left Mr. Bolsonaro politically vulnerable. The Senate this month began an inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic. The study is expected to document missteps, including the government’s endorsement of drugs that are ineffective to treat Covid-19 and shortages of basic medical supplies, including oxygen. Some of those missteps are likely to be blamed for preventable deaths.
Creomar de Souza, a political analyst and the founder of the consultancy Dharma Politics in Brasília, said the president underestimated the threat the pandemic posed to the country and failed to put together a comprehensive plan to address it.
“They thought it wouldn’t be something serious and figured that the health system would be able to handle it,” he said.
Mr. de Souza said Mr. Bolsonaro has always campaigned and governed combatively, appealing to voters by presenting himself as an alternative to dangerous rivals. His response to the pandemic has been consistent with that playbook, he said.
“The great loss, in addition to the increasing number of victims in this tragedy, is an erosion of governance,” he said. “We’re facing a scenario of high volatility, with a lot of political risks, because the government didn’t deliver on public policies.”
Advocacy and human rights organizations earlier this year started a campaign called Tem Gente Com Fome, or People are Going Hungry, with the aim of raising money from companies and individuals to get food baskets to needy people across the country.
Mr. Belchior, one of the founders, said the campaign was named after a poem by the writer and artist Solano Trindade. It describes scenes of misery viewed as a train in Rio de Janeiro makes its way across poor neighborhoods where the state has been all but absent for decades.
“Families are increasingly pleading for earlier food deliveries,” said Mr. Belchior. “And they’re depending more on community actions than the government.”
Waiting in line for food to be handed out.Joaquim Ribeiro searching for recyclable materials to sell.
Carine Lopes, 32, the president of a community ballet school in Manguinhos, a low-income, working-class district of Rio de Janeiro, has responded to the crisis by turning her organization into an impromptu relief center.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the price of basic products rose dramatically at nearby stores, she said. The cost of cooking oil more than tripled. A kilogram of rice goes for twice as much. As meat became increasingly prohibitive, Sunday outdoor cookouts became a rarity in the neighborhood.
Long used to fielding calls from parents who desperately wanted a slot for their children at the ballet school, Ms. Lopes has gotten used to a very different appeal. Old acquaintances and strangers text her daily asking about the food baskets the ballet school has been distributing weekly.
“These moms and dads are only thinking about basic things now,” she said. “They call and say: ‘I’m unemployed. I don’t have anything else to eat this week. Is there anything you can give us?’”
When the virus finally recedes, the poorest families will have the hardest time bouncing back, she said.
Ms. Lopes despairs thinking of students who have been unable to tune in to online classes in households that have no internet connection, or where the only device with a screen belongs to a working parent.
“No one will be able to compete for a scholarship with a middle-class student who managed to keep up with classes using their good internet and their tablets,” she said. “Inequality is being exacerbated.”
Handing out food baskets.
Ernesto Londoño is the Brazil bureau chief, based in Rio de Janeiro. He was previously an editorial writer and, before joining The Times in 2014, reported for The Washington Post.
Is it really just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or to get “back to normal?”
People of color are disproportionately harmed by climate change, but whites disproportionately fret publicly about it. Credit: Spencer Platt Getty Images
The climate movement is ascendant, and it has become common to see climate change as a social justice issue. Climate change and its effects—pandemics, pollution, natural disasters—are not universally or uniformly felt: the people and communities suffering most are disproportionately Black, Indigenous and people of color. It is no surprise then that U.S. surveys show that these are the communities most concerned about climate change.
One year ago, I published a book called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Since its publication, I have been struck by the fact that those responding to the concept of climate anxiety are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, these climate anxiety circles are even whiter than the environmental circles I’ve been in for decades. Today, a year into the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, I am deeply concerned about the racial implications of climate anxiety. If people of color are more concerned about climate change than white people, why is the interest in climate anxiety so white? Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety? Put another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get “back to normal,” to the comforts of their privilege?
The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?
My book has connected me to a growing community focused on the emotional dimensions of climate change. As writer Britt Wray puts it, emotions like mourning, anger, dread and anxiety are “merely a sign of our attachment to the world.” Paradoxically, though, anxiety about environmental crisis can create apathy, inaction and burnout. Anxiety may be a rational response to the world that climate models predict, but it is unsustainable.
And climate panic can be as dangerous as it is galvanizing. Dealing with feelings of climate anxiety will require the existential tools I provided in A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, but it will also require careful attention to extremism and climate zealotry. We can’t fight climate change with more racism. Climate anxiety must be directed toward addressing the ways that racism manifests as environmental trauma and vice versa—how environmentalism manifests as racialized violence. We need to channel grief toward collective liberation.
The prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional terrain for Black and brown people, whether that terrain is racism or climate change. Climate change compounds existing structures of injustice, and those structures exacerbate climate change. Exhaustion, anger, hope—the effects of oppression and resistance are not unique to this climate moment. What is unique is that people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future.
It is a surprisingly short step from “chronic fear of environmental doom,” as the American Psychological Association defines ecoanxiety, to xenophobia and fascism. Racism is not an accidental byproduct of environmentalism; it has been a constant reference point. As I wrote about in my first book, The Ecological Other, early environmentalists in the U.S. were anti-immigrant eugenicists whose ideas were later adopted by Nazis to implement their “blood and soil” ideology. In a recent, dramatic example, the gunman of the 2019 El Paso shooting was motivated by despair about the ecological fate of the planet: “My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.” Intense emotions mobilize people, but not always for the good of all life on this planet.
Today’s progressives espouse climate change as the “greatest existential threat of our time,” a claim that ignores people who have been experiencing existential threats for much longer. Slavery, colonialism, ongoing police brutality—we can’t neglect history to save the future.
RESILIENCE AND RELATION AS RESISTANCE
I recently gave a college lecture about climate anxiety. One of the students e-mailed me to say she was so distressed that she’d be willing to submit to a green dictator if they would address climate change. Young people know the stakes, but they are not learning how to cope with the intensity of their dread. It would be tragic and dangerous if this generation of climate advocates becomes willing to sacrifice democracy and human rights in the name of climate change.
Oppressed and marginalized people have developed traditions of resilience out of necessity. Black, feminist and Indigenous leaders have painstakingly cultivated resilience over the long arc of the fight for justice. They know that protecting joy and hope is the ultimate resistance to domination. Persistence is nonnegotiable when your mental, physical and reproductive health are on the line.
Instead of asking “What can I do to stop feeling so anxious?”, “What can I do to save the planet?” and “What hope is there?”, people with privilege can be asking “Who am I?” and “How am I connected to all of this?” The answers reveal that we are deeply interconnected with the well-being of others on this planet, and that there are traditions of environmental stewardship that can be guides for where we need to go from here.
Author’s Note: I want to thank Jade Sasser, Britt Wray, Janet Fiskio, and Jennifer Atkinson for rich discussions about this topic, which inform this piece.
This is an opinion and analysis article.
Sarah Jaquette Ray, Ph.D., is professor and chair in the Environmental Studies Department at Humboldt State University.
Woodland in the UK has been influenced by human activity for millenniaSteve Speller/Alamy
As early as 12,000 years ago, nearly three-quarters of land on Earth was inhabited and shaped by human societies, suggesting global biodiversity loss in recent years may have been driven primarily by an intensification of land use rather than by the destruction of previously untouched nature.
“It’s not the process of using land itself [that causes biodiversity loss], it’s the way that land is used,” says Erle Ellis at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “You can have traditional land use and still have biodiversity.”
Ellis and his colleagues analysed the most recent reconstruction of global land use by humans over the past 12,000 years and compared this with contemporary global patterns of biodiversity and conservation. They found that most – 72.5 per cent – of Earth’s land has been shaped by human societies since as far back as 10,000 BC, including more than 95 per cent of temperate and 90 per cent of tropical woodlands.
“Our work confirms that untouched nature was almost as rare 12,000 years ago as it is today,” says Ellis. He and his team found that lands now considered natural, intact or wild generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and lands inhabited only by relatively small numbers of Indigenous peoples.
The extent of historical human land use may previously have been underestimated because prior analyses didn’t fully account for the influence that hunter-gatherer populations had on landscapes, says Ellis. “Even hunter-gatherer populations that are moving around are still interacting with the land, but maybe in what we would see as a more sustainable way,” he says.
The researchers also found that in regions now characterised as natural, current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and overall biodiversity are more strongly linked to past patterns of land use than they are with present ones. Ellis says this indicates the current biodiversity crisis can’t be explained by the loss of uninhabited wild lands alone. Instead, this points to a more significant role for recent appropriation, colonisation and intensification of land use, he says.
“The concept of wilderness as a place without people is a myth,” says Yadvinder Malhi at the University of Oxford. “Where we do find large biomes without people living in them and using them – as in North American national parks, Amazonian forests or African game parks – it is because of a history of people being removed from these lands through disease or by force.”
“[This study] shows that high biodiversity is compatible with, and in some cases a result of, people living in these landscapes,” says Malhi. “Working with local and traditional communities, and learning from them, is essential if we are to try to protect biodiversity.”
“With ambitious calls to expand global terrestrial protected areas to cover 30 per cent or even half of the Earth, this [study] brings into focus that protection necessarily cannot mean the exclusion of people and anthropogenic land uses,” says Jason Riggio at the University of California, Davis. The “30 by 30” pledge, being championed by a coalition of more than 50 countries, aims to expand protected areas to cover at least 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030.
Joice Ferreira at Embrapa Amazônia Oriental in Brazil says that there are important roles for both protected areas and sustainable land use in preserving biodiversity. “The combination of deforestation, degradation […] and climate change make protected areas paramount,” she says, adding: “if Indigenous custodianship was important in the past, it is much more so nowadays, in the face of new and more intense threats.”
Sonia Guajajara, Coordenadora-executiva da Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil e ex-candidata do PSOL à Vice-Presidência da República (2018)
19 de abril de 2021
Nem sempre deixamos de sentir a dor do outro por falta de empatia; às vezes, isso acontece por puro desconhecimento. A história do Brasil sempre foi muito mal contada. Não desejamos o que passamos a ninguém, nem mesmo aos nossos algozes. São 520 anos de perseguição praticamente ininterrupta. Mas, neste Dia do Índio (19.abr), estamos enfrentando a maior ameaça de nossa existência. E agora não me refiro somente a nós, indígenas. O governo federal atual fez do coronavírus um aliado e põe em risco a vida da população em geral. Hoje, todos sentem como é ser acuado por uma doença que vem de fora, contra a qual não há defesa. Todos mesmo; agora, falo do mundo inteiro.
Nós, indígenas, somos perseguidos em nosso próprio país; neste momento, por causa da Covid-19. Todos nós, brasileiros, corremos o sério risco de sermos marginalizados globalmente. Ninguém em sã consciência nega a importância da Amazônia para a saúde do planeta —e hoje a ciência atesta que a destruição da natureza e as mudanças climáticas podem causar novas pandemias. Mas, além de abusar da caneta para atacar o meio ambiente e os nossos direitos, como de costume, o presidente Jair Bolsonaro vem tentado aliciar e constranger lideranças indígenas. Até Funai e Ibama estão jogando no time rival. Não é apenas um vírus.
A Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (Apib) foi criada em 2005 no primeiro Acampamento Terra Livre (ATL), evento que reunia milhares de pessoas de todo o país em Brasília —por causa da pandemia, ele foi realizado virtualmente em 2020 e, neste ano, terá encontros online durante todo o o mês de abril. É fruto da união e auto-organização dos povos, que são as raízes que sustentam esse país e que durante a pandemia recebeu o reconhecimento do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) como entidade que pode entrar com ações diretas na principal corte do país.
Com organizações regionais, nossa rede está presente em todas as regiões do país: a Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Nordeste, Minas Gerais e Espírito Santo (Apoinme), o Conselho do Povo Terena, a Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Sudeste (Arpinsudeste), a Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Sul (Arpinsul), a Grande Assembleia do Povo Guarani (Aty Guasu), a Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da Amazônia Brasileira (Coiab) e a Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa.
No ano passado, a Apib ganhou o Prêmio Internacional Letelier-Moffitt de Direitos Humanos, concedido pelo Instituto de Estudos Políticos de Washington. A organização tem sido chamada a falar em conferências da ONU. Há décadas tem voz ativa em conferências internacionais, junto a organismos como a ONU e a Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos. Enquanto o governo negligencia criminosamente o atendimento aos povos tradicionais durante a pandemia, com seu projeto integracionista, estamos garantindo segurança alimentar, barreiras sanitárias e equipamentos de proteção por meio do Plano Emergência Indígena, construído de forma participativa com todas as organizações de base que compõem nossa grande articulação.
Estamos nas redes, aldeias, universidades, cidades, prefeituras, Câmaras Legislativas federal, estaduais e municipais e seguiremos lutando contra o racismo e a violência. Em um mundo doente e enfrentando um projeto de morte, nossa luta ainda é pela vida, contra todos os vírus que nos matam! Nosso maior objetivo é garantir a posse de nossas terras para preservá-las e manter nossas identidades culturais.
Terras indígenas são bens da União; ou seja, pertencem ao Brasil, a todos os brasileiros. Temos direito a seu usufruto, mas para manter nossos modos de vida tradicionais. Está tudo na Constituição. Conhecemos as mentiras, que agora são as famosas fake news, desde 1500, quando os portugueses chegaram aqui oferecendo amizade e, assim que dávamos as costas, nos apunhalavam. Não trocamos Pindorama por espelhos, conforme ensinavam erroneamente os livros de história de antigamente. Sabemos o real valor das coisas e das pessoas.
No dia 6 de abril, quando 4.195 compatriotas foram levados pela Covid-19 no país, a revista “Forbes” publicou duas notícias que dizem muito: mais 11 brasileiros entraram para a lista de bilionários do mundo durante a pandemia —dentre eles, ironicamente, nomes ligados à saúde privada— e que todo dia 116,8 milhões de pessoas não sabem se terão o que comer no país.
O abismo social se aprofunda; a quem isso interessa? Quem acredita que vai ver a cor do dinheiro que será arrancado das ruínas de nossas terras? “Decidimos não morrer”: esta resolução, tomada por nós há mais de cinco séculos, foi reafirmada no Acampamento Terra Livre. Nem todos sabem, mas zelar pelo meio ambiente é um dever constitucional de todo cidadão —é só consultar o artigo 225.
Convidamos todos os brasileiros a firmar esse acordo conosco.
Todos os anos, os chamados profetas da chuva do interior do Ceará se reúnem para divulgar suas previsões para a quadra chuvosa na região —período que geralmente vai de janeiro a junho e é crucial para o sustento das famílias de pequenos agricultores locais. Com a pandemia do novo coronavírus, no entanto, até eles tiveram de aderir ao “trabalho remoto”.
Os profetas são nordestinos que dizem antever as chuvas no semiárido observando sinais da natureza, como a floração de determinadas plantas, o comportamento de pássaros ou o movimento dos insetos. Para alguns deles, por exemplo, se o joão-de-barro não estiver no ninho é sinal de chuva.
“A formiga é o bicho mais inteligente que existe”, define o agricultor Titico Báia, de 69 anos e há 35 como profeta. “Elas começam a limpar o formigueiro no verão e jogam o bagaço seco fora. Dali a 90 dias, a chuva vem. Quando o sapo cururu se prepara para começar a cantar, também é sinal de água.”
Báia é conhecido por observar a natureza principalmente em três dias de setembro e três em outubro. O comportamento de animais, do vento e da lua nesses dias ajuda a prever como será a chuva no primeiro semestre do ano seguinte. “A gente vive da safra de milho e de feijão. E a regularidade da chuva é o que define se a vida vai ser mais fácil ou mais difícil naquele ano. Em 2021, a chuva só não foi mais esperada do que a vacina.”
“Em uma época em que não tínhamos medições regulares na nossa região, essas mulheres e esses homens eram a bússola para os agricultores. Eles diziam a hora certa de plantar e ajudavam a garantir uma colheita melhor”, conta o diretor do Instituto Federal do Ceará (IFCE) de Tauá (337 km de Fortaleza), José Alves Neto. Ele é um dos organizadores do encontro dos profetas da chuva da região do sertão dos Inhamuns, que acontece há cinco anos. “Mesmo hoje, os órgãos que medem as chuvas escutam o que os profetas têm a dizer.”
Com a pandemia da Covid-19, no entanto, esse grupo de observadores da natureza, que faz recomendações do melhor dia de plantio e estimativas de como será o inverno do ano, não pôde se reunir, já que a maioria tem mais de 60 anos e faz parte do grupo de risco.
Para manter a tradição, os profetas populares se adaptaram e promoveram os primeiros encontros virtuais, com transmissões de profecias pela internet, aumento das parcerias com rádios locais e trocas de previsões com outros agricultores pelo WhatsApp. A tecnologia, que chegou a ser vista como rival da tradição popular, agora ajuda os observadores da natureza a continuarem em atividade.
Quem espera a vacina para voltar a circular pela região é o agricultor Totonho Alves, 64. Ele, que herdou a sensibilidade para observar a natureza do pai e do avô, começou a notar o trabalho das formigas e outros sinais há 40 anos. “Meu avô sempre dizia que a chuva estava para vir quando via as formigas trabalhando mais do que o normal. Foi ele quem me ensinou que vinha enchente quando a coruja cantava na beira do riacho.”
Alves conta que as formigas poucas vezes erraram com ele. Quando elas saem das terras mais baixas e se mudam para o alto é sinal de chuva. Mas, se o formigueiro estiver na beira dos riachos, não é bom sinal. “Sinto falta do encontro presencial, daquele movimento, de poder reencontrar os amigos e trocar previsões. Mas com a pandemia, a gente faz o que pode”, diz.
O encontro mais antigo do estado começou em 1997, na região de Quixadá, a 164 km de Fortaleza. Na época, o funcionário da Companhia de Água e Esgoto do Ceará (Cagece) Hélder Cortez se deu conta de que havia um número cada vez maior de interessados em ouvir os agricultores que alertavam sobre as chuvas. Hoje, são 22 profetas na região do município.
Ano passado, antes da pandemia, 400 pessoas se reuniram em um auditório em Quixadá. “Este ano, pela internet, tanta gente se interessou pelos profetas que surgiram várias ideias para que essa cultura não se perca. Com o fim da pandemia, a gente pretende criar uma escola de formação de profetas, em parceria com instituições locais”, diz Cortez.
A audiência online animou os profetas e alguns municípios querem manter os encontros virtuais mesmo após a vacina. O evento no sertão dos Inhamuns, por exemplo, que chegava a reunir até 90 pessoas em auditórios de escolas da região quando era presencial, já tem mais de 3.000 visualizações no canal oficial no YouTube.
O diretor do IFCE de Boa Viagem, no Sertão de Canindé, João Paulo Arcelino do Rêgo, que organizou algumas das gravações das profecias virtuais, conta que a maioria dos profetas não tem acesso regular à internet e acaba não trocando previsões ao longo do ano. Os encontros presenciais sempre foram a oportunidade para isso.
“Este ano, levamos uma equipe de filmagem até a casa de cada um deles, fizemos os vídeos e o evento aumentou de tamanho. O mais surpreendente é que as previsões batiam, mesmo sem eles conversarem antes. Não é por acaso que muitos engenheiros agrônomos da região nos telefonam para saber o que os profetas têm a dizer”, diz ele.
“Quando eles viram que a pandemia se arrastaria em 2021 também e que as reuniões seriam prejudicadas, foram os primeiros a cobrar uma solução. São pessoas que tiram o sustento da terra e que são profetas por vocação, sem ganhar nada com isso. Para eles, repassar as previsões é a forma de manter viva a tradição”, diz Neto.
Outra expectativa é a de que a tecnologia também sirva para atrair mais jovens interessados em aprender sobre as técnicas de observação da natureza, já que a transmissão desse conhecimento para as novas gerações é fonte constante de preocupação do grupo.
“A nossa intenção é repassar o conhecimento para as outras gerações. Minha esperança é um dos meus filhos mais novos, que é quem eu levo para observar a natureza comigo. Quando eu vier a faltar, é ele quem vai levar a história para frente”, diz Alves.
This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low.
Credit: Celeste Noche for The New York Times
April 8, 2021
When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces — and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth — they could become infected.
Americans responded in kind, wiping down groceries, quarantining mail and clearing drugstore shelves of Clorox wipes. Facebook closed two of its offices for a “deep cleaning.” New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority began disinfecting subway cars every night.
“People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.”
The admission is long overdue, scientists say.
“Finally,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. “We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.” She added, “There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.”
During the early days of the pandemic, many experts believed that the virus spread primarily through large respiratory droplets. These droplets are too heavy to travel long distances through the air but can fall onto objects and surfaces.
In this context, a focus on scrubbing down every surface seemed to make sense. “Surface cleaning is more familiar,” Dr. Marr said. “We know how to do it. You can see people doing it, you see the clean surface. And so I think it makes people feel safer.”
Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
But over the last year, it has become increasingly clear that the virus spreads primarily through the air — in both large and small droplets, which can remain aloft longer — and that scouring door handles and subway seats does little to keep people safe.
“The scientific basis for all this concern about surfaces is very slim — slim to none,” said Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, who wrote last summer that the risk of surface transmission had been overblown. “This is a virus you get by breathing. It’s not a virus you get by touching.”
The C.D.C. has previously acknowledged that surfaces are not the primary way that the virus spreads. But the agency’s statements this week went further.
“The most important part of this update is that they’re clearly communicating to the public the correct, low risk from surfaces, which is not a message that has been clearly communicated for the past year,” said Joseph Allen, a building safety expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Catching the virus from surfaces remains theoretically possible, he noted. But it requires many things to go wrong: a lot of fresh, infectious viral particles to be deposited on a surface, and then for a relatively large quantity of them to be quickly transferred to someone’s hand and then to their face. “Presence on a surface does not equal risk,” Dr. Allen said.
In most cases, cleaning with simple soap and water — in addition to hand-washing and mask-wearing — is enough to keep the odds of surface transmission low, the C.D.C.’s updated cleaning guidelines say. In most everyday scenarios and environments, people do not need to use chemical disinfectants, the agency notes.
“What this does very usefully, I think, is tell us what we don’t need to do,” said Donald Milton, an aerosol scientist at the University of Maryland. “Doing a lot of spraying and misting of chemicals isn’t helpful.”
Still, the guidelines do suggest that if someone who has Covid-19 has been in a particular space within the last day, the area should be both cleaned and disinfected.
“Disinfection is only recommended in indoor settings — schools and homes — where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of Covid-19 within the last 24 hours,” Dr. Walensky said during the White House briefing. “Also, in most cases, fogging, fumigation and wide-area or electrostatic spraying is not recommended as a primary method of disinfection and has several safety risks to consider.”
And the new cleaning guidelines do not apply to health care facilities, which may require more intensive cleaning and disinfection.
Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, said that she was happy to see the new guidance, which “reflects our evolving data on transmission throughout the pandemic.”
But she noted that it remained important to continue doing some regular cleaning — and maintaining good hand-washing practices — to reduce the risk of contracting not just the coronavirus but any other pathogens that might be lingering on a particular surface.
Dr. Allen said that the school and business officials he has spoken with this week expressed relief over the updated guidelines, which will allow them to pull back on some of their intensive cleaning regimens. “This frees up a lot of organizations to spend that money better,” he said.
Schools, businesses and other institutions that want to keep people safe should shift their attention from surfaces to air quality, he said, and invest in improved ventilation and filtration.
“This should be the end of deep cleaning,” Dr. Allen said, noting that the misplaced focus on surfaces has had real costs. “It has led to closed playgrounds, it has led to taking nets off basketball courts, it has led to quarantining books in the library. It has led to entire missed school days for deep cleaning. It has led to not being able to share a pencil. So that’s all that hygiene theater, and it’s a direct result of not properly classifying surface transmission as low risk.”
O BBB 21 faz parte da tragédia e do aprendizado que atravessamos enquanto país e cultura (Foto: Reprodução/ TV Globo)
Os mil tons de brancos! Precisou um homem branco falar para que o outro brother branco ouvisse. Mas a fala do apresentador Tiago Leifert no programa exibido nesta terça (6), ao invés de explicitar um ato de racismo puro e simples, tratou de amenizar, contextualizar e lembrar que “não vejo maldade no que você fez”, reafirmando a hoje inaceitável expressão “não foi intencional” ou ainda “é só uma brincadeira”, “meu pai tem cabelo black power”, “sou do interior” etc.
São mil tons do racismo ou do machismo, são mil tons de desculpas cotidianas para não encarar a violência que é assujeitar o outro e desqualificá-lo, seja pelo que for. Quando nós, brancos, vamos parar de nos afagar, mesmo no racismo, assim como homens se protegem no machismo e em tantas outras confrarias nas quais se juntam para exercer seu poder?
Mas a fala do apresentador do Big Brother Brasil 21, Tiago Leifert, “de homem branco para homem branco” (sou só eu que tenho horror dessas expressões que apelam para a nossa razão de brancos ou de machos etc?) acaba, até por contraste, mostrando que esse Brasil cordial e conciliador deu errado, e que radicalizar, explicitar, expor, também pode ser pedagógico.
A fala dura e a emoção de João Luiz Pedrosa explicita o racismo que sofreu. A fala e a reação de catarse de Camilla de Lucas demonstra que não aguenta mais explicar o racismo cotidiano cometido “alegremente”, “sem intenção” para brancos que se defendem afirmando sua alienação: “eu não sabia”. A questão faz transbordar o choro contido e represado, a raiva de ter que suportar o racismo no corpo, no cabelo, na pele, na existência.
O que tem acontecido no BBB 21 não é “menor” e nem mimimi, nem pouco importante, mesmo no meio de uma pandemia com 300 mil mortos. Mesmo que seja sim um programa de entretenimento e que lucra com o sofrimento de negros, com tretas, com situações humilhantes, com a audiência que quer “ver sangue”.
O BBB 21 faz parte da tragédia e do aprendizado que atravessamos enquanto país e cultura. Precisamos de formação, educação, ativismo, mudanças nos padrões da cultura do entretenimento para dar um salto como sociedade, pois existem muitas maneiras de matar e elas estão no cotidiano.
Para concluir, temos uma fala do brother Rodolffo, o cantor sertanejo que fez o comentário racista sobre o cabelo de João, justificando-se: “eu sou chucro, eu sou do interior, essas modernidades [o combate ao racismo!] não chegaram em um Brasil profundo, puro e conservador, sem ‘maldade’”.
A questão é que não existe mais lugar para esse brasileiro “inocente, puro e besta” como o da letra da música. Se existe, ele foi abduzido por fake news massivas no Whatsapp, adotou valores de extrema-direita, reafirmou seu poder branco quando achou confortável e quando se viu representado por um presidente da República que deu voz ao que tínhamos de pior, que deu poder real e simbólico para um Brasil profundamente conservador que já existia, mas que foi chancelado e pôde exercer seu poder de morte em praça pública.
Muitos se identificam com Rodolffo, infelizmente! Temos um presidente “chucro” que, em nome da sua ignorância e “autenticidade”, em nome do seu racismo, misoginia, lgbtfobia “de raiz”, “de família”, defende tortura e mata de forma real e simbólica ao usar sua pretensa “ignorância” como base de políticas públicas e no comando de um país. Esse é o real tamanho do estrago dos Rodolffos – e não adianta dizer que “não é intencional”, pois é muito pior : é estrutural e destrói a vida de milhões.
Todos os tons de branco estão envolvidos nesse massacre e é pedagógico que a gente entre nesse debate não apenas “de brancos para brancos” em uma conversa condescendente entre pares, mas de brancos antirracistas que combatem o racismo dos brancos. O racismo não é um problema dos negros, mas nosso.
Ivana Bentes é pesquisadora do Programa de Pós Graduação da Escola de Comunicação da UFRJ
[Linking solar activity to the onset of droughts in places like Northeast Brazil has historically been treated as something that did not deserve attention by mainstream meteorology. The El Niño Southern Oscillation – of which La Niña is part – was always presented as the main causal factor for droughts. This new study connects solar activity with the La Niña. The interesting thing here is that many local farmers seen as knowledgeable about rains and drought in NE Brazil mention a 10 years period for the repetition of climate events. -RT]
Date: April 5, 2021
Source: National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Summary: A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth.
A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth.
If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have a number of seasonal climate effects over land. For example, the southern United States tends to be warmer and drier during a La Nina, while the northern U.S. tends to be colder and wetter.
“Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper. “Even so, the scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The study was led by Robert Leamon at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and it is also co-authored by Daniel Marsh at NCAR. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor, and the NASA Living With a Star program.
Applying a new solar clock
The appearance (and disappearance) of spots on the Sun — the outwardly visible signs of solar variability — have been observed by humans for hundreds of years. The waxing and waning of the number of sunspots takes place over approximately 11-year cycles, but these cycles do not have distinct beginnings and endings. This fuzziness in the length of any particular cycle has made it challenging for scientists to match up the 11-year cycle with changes happening on Earth.
In the new study, the researchers rely on a more precise 22-year “clock” for solar activity derived from the Sun’s magnetic polarity cycle, which they outlined as a more regular alternative to the 11-year solar cycle in several companion studies published recently in peer-reviewed journals.
The 22-year cycle begins when oppositely charged magnetic bands that wrap the Sun appear near the star’s polar latitudes, according to their recent studies. Over the cycle, these bands migrate toward the equator — causing sunspots to appear as they travel across the mid-latitudes. The cycle ends when the bands meet in the middle, mutually annihilating one another in what the research team calls a terminator event. These terminators provide precise guideposts for the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next.
The researchers imposed these terminator events over sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific stretching back to 1960. They found that the five terminator events that occurred between that time and 2010-11 all coincided with a flip from an El Nino (when sea surface temperatures are warmer than average) to a La Nina (when the sea surface temperatures are cooler than average). The end of the most recent solar cycle — which is unfolding now — is also coinciding with the beginning of a La Nina event.
“We are not the first scientists to study how solar variability may drive changes to the Earth system,” Leamon said. “But we are the first to apply the 22-year solar clock. The result — five consecutive terminators lining up with a switch in the El Nino oscillation — is not likely to be a coincidence.”
In fact, the researchers did a number of statistical analyses to determine the likelihood that the correlation was just a fluke. They found there was only a 1 in 5,000 chance or less (depending on the statistical test) that all five terminator events included in the study would randomly coincide with the flip in ocean temperatures. Now that a sixth terminator event — and the corresponding start of a new solar cycle in 2020 — has also coincided with an La Nina event, the chance of a random occurrence is even more remote, the authors said.
The paper does not delve into what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but the authors note that there are several possibilities that warrant further study, including the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the amount of cosmic rays that escape into the solar system and ultimately bombard Earth. However, a robust physical link between cosmic rays variations and climate has yet to be determined.
“If further research can establish that there is a physical connection and that changes on the Sun are truly causing variability in the oceans, then we may be able to improve our ability to predict El Nino and La Nina events,” McIntosh said.
Robert J. Leamon, Scott W. McIntosh, Daniel R. Marsh. Termination of Solar Cycles and Correlated Tropospheric Variability. Earth and Space Science, 2021; 8 (4) DOI: 10.1029/2020EA001223
Could the way drosophila use antennae to sense heat help us teach self-driving cars make decisions?
Date: April 6, 2021
Source: Northwestern University
Summary: With over 70% of respondents to a AAA annual survey on autonomous driving reporting they would fear being in a fully self-driving car, makers like Tesla may be back to the drawing board before rolling out fully autonomous self-driving systems. But new research shows us we may be better off putting fruit flies behind the wheel instead of robots.
With over 70% of respondents to a AAA annual survey on autonomous driving reporting they would fear being in a fully self-driving car, makers like Tesla may be back to the drawing board before rolling out fully autonomous self-driving systems. But new research from Northwestern University shows us we may be better off putting fruit flies behind the wheel instead of robots.
Drosophila have been subjects of science as long as humans have been running experiments in labs. But given their size, it’s easy to wonder what can be learned by observing them. Research published today in the journal Nature Communications demonstrates that fruit flies use decision-making, learning and memory to perform simple functions like escaping heat. And researchers are using this understanding to challenge the way we think about self-driving cars.
“The discovery that flexible decision-making, learning and memory are used by flies during such a simple navigational task is both novel and surprising,” said Marco Gallio, the corresponding author on the study. “It may make us rethink what we need to do to program safe and flexible self-driving vehicles.”
According to Gallio, an associate professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the questions behind this study are similar to those vexing engineers building cars that move on their own. How does a fruit fly (or a car) cope with novelty? How can we build a car that is flexibly able to adapt to new conditions?
This discovery reveals brain functions in the household pest that are typically associated with more complex brains like those of mice and humans.
“Animal behavior, especially that of insects, is often considered largely fixed and hard-wired — like machines,” Gallio said. “Most people have a hard time imagining that animals as different from us as a fruit fly may possess complex brain functions, such as the ability to learn, remember or make decisions.”
To study how fruit flies tend to escape heat, the Gallio lab built a tiny plastic chamber with four floor tiles whose temperatures could be independently controlled and confined flies inside. They then used high-resolution video recordings to map how a fly reacted when it encountered a boundary between a warm tile and a cool tile. They found flies were remarkably good at treating heat boundaries as invisible barriers to avoid pain or harm.
Using real measurements, the team created a 3D model to estimate the exact temperature of each part of the fly’s tiny body throughout the experiment. During other trials, they opened a window in the fly’s head and recorded brain activity in neurons that process external temperature signals.
Miguel Simões, a postdoctoral fellow in the Gallio lab and co-first author of the study, said flies are able to determine with remarkable accuracy if the best path to thermal safety is to the left or right. Mapping the direction of escape, Simões said flies “nearly always” escape left when they approach from the right, “like a tennis ball bouncing off a wall.”
“When flies encounter heat, they have to make a rapid decision,” Simões said. “Is it safe to continue, or should it turn back? This decision is highly dependent on how dangerous the temperature is on the other side.”
Observing the simple response reminded the scientists of one of the classic concepts in early robotics.
“In his famous book, the cyberneticist Valentino Braitenberg imagined simple models made of sensors and motors that could come close to reproducing animal behavior,” said Josh Levy, an applied math graduate student and a member of the labs of Gallio and applied math professor William Kath. “The vehicles are a combination of simple wires, but the resulting behavior appears complex and even intelligent.”
Braitenberg argued that much of animal behavior could be explained by the same principles. But does that mean fly behavior is as predictable as that of one of Braitenberg’s imagined robots?
The Northwestern team built a vehicle using a computer simulation of fly behavior with the same wiring and algorithm as a Braitenberg vehicle to see how closely they could replicate animal behavior. After running model race simulations, the team ran a natural selection process of sorts, choosing the cars that did best and mutating them slightly before recombining them with other high-performing vehicles. Levy ran 500 generations of evolution in the powerful NU computing cluster, building cars they ultimately hoped would do as well as flies at escaping the virtual heat.
This simulation demonstrated that “hard-wired” vehicles eventually evolved to perform nearly as well as flies. But while real flies continued to improve performance over time and learn to adopt better strategies to become more efficient, the vehicles remain “dumb” and inflexible. The researchers also discovered that even as flies performed the simple task of escaping the heat, fly behavior remains somewhat unpredictable, leaving space for individual decisions. Finally, the scientists observed that while flies missing an antenna adapt and figure out new strategies to escape heat, vehicles “damaged” in the same way are unable to cope with the new situation and turn in the direction of the missing part, eventually getting trapped in a spin like a dog chasing its tail.
Gallio said the idea that simple navigation contains such complexity provides fodder for future work in this area.
Work in the Gallio lab is supported by the NIH (Award No. R01NS086859 and R21EY031849), a Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences and a McKnight Technological Innovation in Neuroscience Awards.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Northwestern University. Original written by Lila Reynolds. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
José Miguel Simões, Joshua I. Levy, Emanuela E. Zaharieva, Leah T. Vinson, Peixiong Zhao, Michael H. Alpert, William L. Kath, Alessia Para, Marco Gallio. Robustness and plasticity in Drosophila heat avoidance. Nature Communications, 2021; 12 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22322-w
John McWhorter, contributing writer at The Atlantic and professor at Columbia University
March 31, 2021
The word racism, among others, has become maddeningly confusing in current usage.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic
Has American society ever been in less basic agreement on what so many important words actually mean? Terms we use daily mean such different things to different people that communication is often blunted considerably, and sometimes even thwarted entirely. The gap between how the initiated express their ideological beliefs and how everyone else does seems larger than ever.
The word racism has become almost maddeningly confusing in current usage. It tempts a linguist such as me to contravene the dictum that trying to influence the course of language change is futile.
Racism began as a reference to personal prejudice, but in the 1960s was extended via metaphor to society, the idea being that a society riven with disparities according to race was itself a racist one. This convention, implying that something as abstract as a society can be racist, has always felt tricky, best communicated in sociology classes or careful discussions.
To be sure, the idea that disparities between white and Black people are due to injustices against Black people—either racist sentiment or large-scale results of racist neglect—seems as plain as day to some, especially in academia. However, after 50 years, this usage of racism has yet to stop occasioning controversy; witness the outcry when Merriam-Webster recently altered its definition of the word to acknowledge the “systemic” aspect. This controversy endures for two reasons.
First, the idea that all racial disparities are due to injustice may imply that mere cultural differences do not exist. The rarity of the Black oboist may be due simply to Black Americans not having much interest in the oboe—hardly a character flaw or evidence of some inadequacy—as opposed to subtly racist attitudes among music teachers or even the thinness of musical education in public schools. Second, the concept of systemic racism elides or downplays that disparities can also persist because of racism in the past, no longer in operation and thus difficult to “address.”
Two real-world examples of strained usage come to mind. Opponents of the modern filibuster have taken to calling it “racist” because it has been used for racist ends. This implies a kind of contamination, a rather unsophisticated perspective given that this “racist” practice has been readily supported by noted non-racists such as Barack Obama (before he changed his mind on the matter). Similar is the idea that standardized tests are “racist” because Black kids often don’t do as well on them as white kids. If the tests’ content is biased toward knowledge that white kids are more likely to have, that complaint may be justified. Otherwise, factors beyond the tests themselves, such as literacy in the home, whether children are tested throughout childhood, how plugged in their parents are to test-prep opportunities, and subtle attitudes toward school and the printed page, likely explain why some groups might be less prepared to excel at them.
Dictionaries are correct to incorporate the societal usage of racism, because it is now common coin. The lexicographer describes rather than prescribes. However, its enshrinement in dictionaries leaves its unwieldiness intact, just as a pretty map can include a road full of potholes that suddenly becomes one-way at a dangerous curve. Nearly every designation of someone or something as “racist” in modern America raises legitimate questions, and leaves so many legions of people confused or irritated that no one can responsibly dismiss all of this confusion and irritation as mere, well, racism.
To speak English is to know the difference between pairs of words that might as well be the same one: entrance and entry. Awesome and awful are similar. However, one might easily feel less confident about the difference between equality and equity, in the way that today’s crusaders use the word in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In this usage, equity is not a mere alternate word for equality, but harbors an assumption: that where the races are not represented roughly according to their presence in the population, the reason must be a manifestation of (societal) racism. A teachers’ conference in Washington State last year included a presentation underlining: “If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.” A DEI facilitator specifies that “equity is not an outcome”—in the way equality is—but “a process that begins by acknowledging [people’s] unequal starting place and makes a commitment to correct and address the imbalance.”
Equality is a state, an outcome—but equity, a word that sounds just like it and has a closely related meaning, is a commitment and effort, designed to create equality. That is a nuance of a kind usually encountered in graduate seminars about the precise definitions of concepts such as freedom. It will throw or even turn off those disinclined to attend that closely: Fondness for exegesis will forever be thinly distributed among humans.
Many will thus feel that the society around them has enough “equalness”—i.e., what equity sounds like—such that what they may see as attempts to force more of it via set-aside policies will seem draconian rather than just. The subtle difference between equality and equity will always require flagging, which will only ever be so effective.
The nature of how words change, compounded by the effects of our social-media bubbles, means that many vocal people on the left now use social justice as a stand-in for justice—in the same way we say advance planning instead of planning or 12 midnight instead of midnight—as if the social part were a mere redundant, rhetorical decoration upon the keystone notion of justice. An advocacy group for wellness and nutrition titled one of its messages “In the name of social justice, food security and human dignity,” but within the text refers simply to “justice” and “injustice,” without the social prefix, as if social justice is simply justice incarnate. The World Social Justice Day project includes more tersely named efforts such as “Task Force on Justice” and “Justice for All.” Baked into this is a tacit conflation of social justice with justice conceived more broadly.
However, this usage of the term social justice is typically based on a very particular set of commitments especially influential in this moment: that all white people must view society as founded upon racist discrimination, such that all white people are complicit in white supremacy, requiring the forcing through of equity in suspension of usual standards of qualification or sometimes even logic (math is racist). A view of justice this peculiar, specific, and even revolutionary is an implausible substitute for millennia of discussion about the nature of the good, much less its apotheosis.
What to do? I suggest—albeit with little hope—that the terms social justice and equity be used, or at least heard, as the proposals that they are. Otherwise, Americans are in for decades of non-conversations based on greatly different visions of what justice and equ(al)ity are.
I suspect that the way the term racism is used is too entrenched to yield to anyone’s preferences. However, if I could wave a magic wand, Americans would go back to using racism to refer to personal sentiment, while we would phase out so hopelessly confusing a term as societal racism.
I would replace it with societal disparities, with a slot open afterward for according to race, or according to immigration status, or what have you. Inevitably, the sole term societal disparities would conventionalize as referring to race-related disparities. However, even this would avoid the endless distractions caused by using the same term—racism—for both prejudice and faceless, albeit pernicious, inequities.
My proposals qualify, indeed, as modest. I suspect that certain people will continue to use social justice as if they have figured out a concept that proved elusive from Plato through Kant through Rawls. Equity will continue to be refracted through that impression. Legions will still either struggle to process racism both harbored by persons and instantiated by a society, or just quietly accept the conflation to avoid making waves.
What all of this will mean is a debate about race in which our problem-solving is hindered by the fact that we too often lack a common language for discussing the topic.
Em seu novo livro Como evitar um desastre climático, Bill Gates adota uma abordagem tecnológica para compreender a crise climática. Gates começa com os 51 bilhões de toneladas de gases com efeito de estufa criados por ano. Ele divide essa poluição em setores com base em seu impacto, passando pelo elétrico, industrial e agrícola para o de transporte e construção civil. Do começo ao fim, Gates se mostra adepto a diminuir as complexidades do desafio climático, dando ao leitor heurísticas úteis para distinguir maiores problemas tecnológicos (cimento) de menores (aeronaves).
Presente nas negociações climáticas de Paris em 2015, Gates e dezenas de indivíduos bem-afortunados lançaram o Breakthrough Energy, um fundo de capital de investimento interdependente lobista empenhado em conduzir pesquisas. Gates e seus companheiros investidores argumentaram que tanto o governo federal quanto o setor privado estão investindo pouco em inovação energética. A Breakthrough pretende preencher esta lacuna, investindo em tudo, desde tecnologia nuclear da próxima geração até carne vegetariana com sabor de carne bovina. A primeira rodada de US$ 1 bilhão do fundo de investimento teve alguns sucessos iniciais, como a Impossible Foods, uma fabricante de hambúrgueres à base de plantas. O fundo anunciou uma segunda rodada de igual tamanho em janeiro.
Um esforço paralelo, um acordo internacional chamado de Mission Innovation, diz ter convencido seus membros (o setor executivo da União Europeia junto com 24 países incluindo China, os EUA, Índia e o Brasil) a investirem um adicional de US$ 4,6 bilhões por ano desde 2015 para a pesquisa e desenvolvimento da energia limpa.
Essas várias iniciativas são a linha central para o livro mais recente de Gates, escrito a partir de uma perspectiva tecno-otimista. “Tudo que aprendi a respeito do clima e tecnologia me deixam otimista… se agirmos rápido o bastante, [podemos] evitar uma catástrofe climática,” ele escreveu nas páginas iniciais.
Como muitos já assinalaram, muito da tecnologia necessária já existe, muito pode ser feito agora. Por mais que Gates não conteste isso, seu livro foca nos desafios tecnológicos que ele acredita que ainda devem ser superados para atingir uma maior descarbonização. Ele gasta menos tempo nos percalços políticos, escrevendo que pensa “mais como um engenheiro do que um cientista político.” Ainda assim, a política, com toda a sua desordem, é o principal impedimento para o progresso das mudanças climáticas. E engenheiros devem entender como sistemas complexos podem ter ciclos de feedback que dão errado.
Sim, ministro
Kim Stanley Robinson, este sim pensa como um cientista político. O começo de seu romance mais recente The Ministry for the Future (ainda sem tradução para o português), se passa apenas a alguns anos no futuro, em 2025, quando uma onda de calor imensa atinge a Índia, matando milhões de pessoas. A protagonista do livro, Mary Murphy, comanda uma agência da ONU designada a representar os interesses das futuras gerações em uma tentativa de unir os governos mundiais em prol de uma solução climática. Durante todo o livro a equidade intergeracional e várias formas de políticas distributivas em foco.
Se você já viu os cenários que o Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC) desenvolve para o futuro, o livro de Robinson irá parecer familiar. Sua história questiona as políticas necessárias para solucionar a crise climática, e ele certamente fez seu dever de casa. Apesar de ser um exercício de imaginação, há momentos em que o romance se assemelha mais a um seminário de graduação sobre ciências sociais do que a um trabalho de ficção escapista. Os refugiados climáticos, que são centrais para a história, ilustram a forma como as consequências da poluição atingem a população global mais pobre com mais força. Mas os ricos produzem muito mais carbono.
Ler Gates depois de Robinson evidencia a inextricável conexão entre desigualdade e mudanças climáticas. Os esforços de Gates sobre a questão do clima são louváveis. Mas quando ele nos diz que a riqueza combinada das pessoas apoiando seu fundo de investimento é de US$ 170 bilhões, ficamos um pouco intrigados que estes tenham dedicado somente US$ 2 bilhões para soluções climáticas, menos de 2% de seus ativos. Este fato por si só é um argumento favorável para taxar fortunas: a crise climática exige ação governamental. Não pode ser deixado para o capricho de bilionários.
Quanto aos bilionários, Gates é possivelmente um dos bonzinhos. Ele conta histórias sobre como usa sua fortuna para ajudar os pobres e o planeta. A ironia dele escrever um livro sobre mudanças climáticas quando voa em um jato particular e detém uma mansão de 6.132 m² não é algo que passa despercebido pelo leitor, e nem por Gates, que se autointitula um “mensageiro imperfeito sobre mudanças climáticas”. Ainda assim, ele é inquestionavelmente um aliado do movimento climático.
Mas ao focar em inovações tecnológicas, Gates minimiza a participação dos combustíveis fósseis na obstrução deste progresso. Peculiarmente, o ceticismo climático não é mencionado no livro. Lavando as mãos no que diz respeito à polarização política, Gates nunca faz conexão com seus colegas bilionários Charles e David Koch, que enriqueceram com os petroquímicos e têm desempenhado papel de destaque na reprodução do negacionismo climático.
Por exemplo, Gates se admira que para a vasta maioria dos americanos aquecedores elétricos são na verdade mais baratos do que continuar a usar combustíveis fósseis. Para ele, as pessoas não adotarem estas opções mais econômicas e sustentáveis é um enigma. Mas, não é assim. Como os jornalistas Rebecca Leber e Sammy Roth reportaram em Mother Jones e no Los Angeles Times, a indústria do gás está investindo em defensores e criando campanhas de marketing para se opor à eletrificação e manter as pessoas presas aos combustíveis fósseis.
Essas forças de oposição são melhor vistas no livro do Robinson do que no de Gates. Gates teria se beneficiado se tivesse tirado partido do trabalho que Naomi Oreskes, Eric Conway, Geoffrey Supran, entre outros, têm feito para documentar os esforços persistentes das empresas de combustíveis fósseis em semear dúvida sobre a ciência climática para a população.
No entanto, uma coisa que Gates e Robinson têm em comum é a opinião de que a geoengenharia, intervenções monumentais para combater os sintomas ao invés das causas das mudanças climáticas, venha a ser inevitável. Em The Ministry for the Future, a geoengenharia solar, que vem a ser a pulverização de partículas finas na atmosfera para refletir mais do calor solar de volta para o espaço, é usada na sequência dos acontecimentos da onda de calor mortal que inicia a história. E mais tarde, alguns cientistas vão aos polos e inventam elaborados métodos para remover água derretida de debaixo de geleiras para evitar que avançasse para o mar. Apesar de alguns contratempos, eles impedem a subida do nível do mar em vários metros. É possível imaginar Gates aparecendo no romance como um dos primeiros a financiar estes esforços. Como ele próprio observa em seu livro, ele tem investido em pesquisa sobre geoengenharia solar há anos.
A pior parte
O título do novo livro de Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky (ainda sem tradução para o português), é uma referência a esta tecnologia nascente, já que implementá-la em larga escala pode alterar a cor do céu de azul para branco. Kolbert observa que o primeiro relatório sobre mudanças climáticas foi parar na mesa do presidente Lyndon Johnson em 1965. Este relatório não argumentava que deveríamos diminuir as emissões de carbono nos afastando de combustíveis fósseis. No lugar, defendia mudar o clima por meio da geoengenharia solar, apesar do termo ainda não ter sido inventado. É preocupante que alguns se precipitem imediatamente para essas soluções arriscadas em vez de tratar a raiz das causas das mudanças climáticas.
Ao ler Under a White Sky, somos lembrados das formas com que intervenções como esta podem dar errado. Por exemplo, a cientista e escritora Rachel Carson defendeu importar espécies não nativas como uma alternativa a utilizar pesticidas. No ano após o seu livro Primavera Silenciosa ser publicado, em 1962, o US Fish and Wildlife Service trouxe carpas asiáticas para a América pela primeira vez, a fim de controlar algas aquáticas. Esta abordagem solucionou um problema, mas criou outro: a disseminação dessa espécie invasora ameaçou às locais e causou dano ambiental.
Como Kolbert observa, seu livro é sobre “pessoas tentando solucionar problemas criados por pessoas tentando solucionar problemas.” Seu relato cobre exemplos incluindo esforços malfadados de parar a disseminação das carpas, as estações de bombeamento em Nova Orleans que aceleram o afundamento da cidade e as tentativas de seletivamente reproduzir corais que possam tolerar temperaturas mais altas e a acidificação do oceano. Kolbert tem senso de humor e uma percepção aguçada para consequências não intencionais. Se você gosta do seu apocalipse com um pouco de humor, ela irá te fazer rir enquanto Roma pega fogo.
Em contraste, apesar de Gates estar consciente das possíveis armadilhas das soluções tecnológicas, ele ainda enaltece invenções como plástico e fertilizante como vitais. Diga isso para as tartarugas marinhas engolindo lixo plástico ou as florações de algas impulsionadas por fertilizantes destruindo o ecossistema do Golfo do México.
Com níveis perigosos de dióxido de carbono na atmosfera, a geoengenharia pode de fato se provar necessária, mas não deveríamos ser ingênuos sobre os riscos. O livro de Gates tem muitas ideias boas e vale a pena a leitura. Mas para um panorama completo da crise que enfrentamos, certifique-se de também ler Robinson e Kolbert.
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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