The plot to steal the 2020 presidential election was eye-opening. Now Congress must act.
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What we learn when we compare mining concessions in Ecuador and the United States.
A change of direction is needed quickly from Democrats.
Rise follows report of State Council approval for fund to support at least a dozen real estate companies
Republican Dan Cox won nomination for Maryland governor, but current governor says that was thanks to Democrats promoting extremist opponents they think will be easier prey
Dan Cox, an extremist pro-Trump Republican, won his party’s nomination for governor in Maryland last week thanks to “collusion between Trump and the national Democrats”, the current Republican governor said.
“I don’t think there’s any chance that [Cox] can win,” Larry Hogan added, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union.
In October 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new class of civil servant that would no longer enjoy civil service protections from firing. The stated reason was to remove incompetents, who can be difficult to fire. The real reason was to eliminate government employees who were insufficiently loyal to Trump’s policies.
As Jonathan Swan reports in an excellent Axios story posted Saturday, the executive order (which Biden revoked two days after his inauguration) was the brainchild of James Sherk, a special assistant on the Domestic Policy Council in charge of labor policy. Sherk tipped his hand earlier this year when he published a report (“Tales From the Swamp: How Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump”) documenting examples not of incompetence but rather of purported disloyalty. For example, Sherk complained, the regulatory staff of the Department of Labor said it needed a whole year to draft a “priority regulation” that “a competent private sector attorney could have produced … in two to three weeks.” Reality check: A year is what it usually takes, because a federal agency (unlike a “competent private sector attorney”) must issue a notice of proposed rulemaking and do various other things required under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act to encourage public participation. If an unwillingness to break the law constitutes disloyalty, then, yes, Trump encountered a fair amount of disloyalty—among civil servants and even some political appointees—during his four years in office, especially at the end.
Trump was especially blunt about the executive order’s intent. Here’s what The Washington Post reported him saying shortly after the executive order was issued:
You have a lot of people from past administrations, and they’re civil service. I fired some. I say some, just get rid of them. We had a lot of them come to the floor during the impeachment hoax. You see them coming in with their bow ties and everything. It’s a weird deal. We have some pretty deep-set, deep-seated people—we got a lot of them, and we got rid of a lot of them.
Trump lost the election a month later, and so departed the White House before the desired purge could take place. But Swan reports that if Trump wins back the presidency in 2024, he will try to reinstate the executive order and to replace federal bureaucrats with the MAGA faithful. “To drain the swamp, we need to fire the swamp,” read the prepared text of a speech Trump gave Saturday night at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
Reinstating Trump’s executive order on the civil service would be a catastrophe. As I reported in a New Republic story that came out around the same time as Sherk’s report (“Washington Is Not a Swamp”), the civil service kept the lights on during the Trump years while Trump and his minions did their best to lay waste to every rule-of-law norm, right up to and including democratic elections. As I concluded in my earlier piece, these federal bureaucrats, quite contrary to Trump’s view and their general reputation, “shape your nation’s capital, inspire it, and keep it afloat, and you should feel grateful for them every single goddamned day.”
People don’t know about the work civil servants do because they seldom talk to the press. The press, in turn, downplays the civil service’s importance because the alternative—acknowledging that a large and powerful cohort within the federal government does not make itself available to reporters—is too awkward to acknowledge openly. Every now and then, though, the public gets a glimpse. On July 11, Kenneth Chang of The New York Times published a profile of Gregory Robinson, project manager of the James Webb Space Telescope. (The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy also profiled Robinson earlier this year.) Robinson’s is an inspirational story. He is African American and the ninth of 11 children born to Virginia sharecroppers. He went to college on a football scholarship and eventually earned an MBA. He’s worked at NASA since 1989.
Robinson was put in charge of the Webb Space Telescope in 2018. Deadlines were not being met, and Congress was reluctant to appropriate more money. Robinson got the project back on track, raising its “schedule efficiency” from 55 percent to 95 percent. The results—breathtaking images of the universe released earlier this month that are already changing scientists’ understanding of its origins—speak for themselves. “The speed at which he turned this thing around was just astounding,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told the Times.
Let’s compare Robinson to the sort of Trump loyalist we’re likely to see in a second Trump administration. Meet Garrett Ziegler, 26. He is a former aide to Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Ziegler claims credit—and I can’t think why we wouldn’t let him take it—for escorting Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Rudolph Giuliani, and Patrick Byrne into the Oval Office for the much-discussed “clown car” meeting on election fraud conspiracies on December 18, 2020.
Ziegler was called to testify last week before the January 6 select committee. Mostly he invoked what he called “my right to silence,” by which he meant his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Afterward, Ziegler said he was the target of “a Bolshevistic anti-white campaign.” Ziegler also described former Trump White House aides Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, who cooperated with the committee, as “total hos and thots.” (“Thot” is an acronym for “That Harlot Over There.”) If you think Ziegler’s hateful words and the crackpot company he keeps bar him from receiving a choice appointment in any future Trump administration, then you haven’t been paying attention.
(Though it’s hardly his fault, I can’t resist adding that Ziegler is cousin to the late Ron Ziegler, the Nixon White House spokesman who, two days after the Watergate break-in, famously dismissed it as “a third-rate burglary attempt.… Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.”)
Perhaps you feel skeptical that Trump will win back the White House. I am, too (though I was also skeptical—more than skeptical, actually—that he’d win in 2016). But that may not matter. Trumpian politics have settled in to the GOP for the next while, even if the man himself should fail to claw his way back. A Republican president who isn’t Trump will very likely want just as much as Trump did to fire civil servants en masse and replace them with political hacks. So let’s take a closer look at what this godawful executive order, if reinstated, might do.
As Swan tells the story, Sherk’s eureka moment occurred in January 2019, when he discovered Section 7511 of Title Five of the U.S. Code. (Title Five is the set of laws governing the civil service.) Section 7511 exempts from civil service job protections any person “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.” That gave Trump an opening to create a special category of civil servant that he called Schedule F. (The name’s rich expressiveness of hostile intent is entirely fortuitous; there already exist schedules A through E.) Agency officials were ordered to find civil servants to herd into a Schedule F classification, where they could be fired or terrorized into submission. The Office of Personnel Management, noting that the terms “confidential,” “policy-determining,” “policy-making,” and “policy-advocating” lacked clear statutory definition, encouraged agencies to interpret them broadly. A lot of the agency heads, according to Swan, blew this off after Trump lost the election. But Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, proposed reclassifying no fewer than 88 percent of his employees as Schedule F.
When 88 percent of the civil servants at an agency are reclassified as at-will, you are effectively repealing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and its subsequent revisions by Congress. The Pendleton Act was passed two years after Charles Guiteau shot and killed President James Garfield because Garfield wouldn’t appoint him consul to Paris or Vienna. There was a general feeling that the spoils system of political appointments by the party in power (during the post–Civil War era, that was nearly always the Republicans) had gotten out of hand. Here’s how Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner described the state of affairs in 1873 (in their novel published that year, The Gilded Age):
If you are a member of Congress (no offense), and one of your constituents who doesn’t know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can’t earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, “Come my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere—don’t want you here”? Oh, no. You take him to a Department and say, “Here, give this person something to pass away the time at—and a salary”—and the thing is done. You throw him on his country. He is his country’s child, let his country support him.
The Pendleton Act restored some balance by creating a class of career officials able to accumulate experience in governing who would work under political appointees. It was succeeded in 1978 by the Civil Service Reform Act, which reorganized various functions of the civil service but didn’t alter the basic principles underlying the Pendleton Act.
Can a president effectively repeal these 1883 and 1978 laws without consulting Congress? We never got a chance to find out because Trump’s executive order got revoked three months later. But the National Treasury Employees Union argued plausibly, in a lawsuit filed in October 2020, that the president lacks the necessary authority. The union’s complaint for injunctive relief conceded that Trump possessed the power to exempt certain civil servants from civil service protection. But it further noted that the statute in question stipulated that this could be done only when “necessary” and “as conditions of good administration warrant.” The wholesale herding of federal employees into Schedule F did not, the NTEU argued, meet these conditions. We’ll hear this argument again if Schedule F ever reappears.
The House earlier this month included in a Pentagon spending bill an amendment barring any future president from corralling civil servants into a new, fireable category of employment. The bill is now before the Senate, where the amendment’s future is uncertain. But the states have for some time been moving to water down or eliminate civil service protections at the state and local level.
Such policies are favored mostly by limited-government Republicans, but the New Democrat journalist David Osborne, co-author of the book Reinventing Government, has pushed it too. Indeed, it was a Democrat—Georgia Governor Zell Miller—who led the way in 1996. By now, 28 states have adopted some form of “at-will” employment. The changes have taken a toll on the morale of state and local government workers.
A president has 4,000 political appointments to make, of whom 1,200 require Senate confirmation. Trump didn’t work very hard to fill these slots, and by the end of his administration, most agencies had fewer than 70 percent of their Senate-confirmed positions filled. The Pentagon had less than half, the Justice Department had about a third, and the Homeland Security Department had less than one-quarter. All three were run by acting secretaries. This despite the facts that Trump enjoyed a Senate majority throughout his presidency and that Senate rules barred the minority from filibustering presidential appointments. If Trump felt a need for more loyal employees in the executive branch, why didn’t he fill these vacancies?
Granted, civil servants have political appointees outnumbered. There are about two million of them situated around the country, about one-third of them working for the Pentagon. Still, the caricature of the federal civil service as some out-of-control bureaucracy that grows like kudzu is 100 percent false. Today’s total civilian government employment is about what it was 70 years ago. The Deep State is no deeper in 2022 than it was back in 1952. If a Republican is elected president in 2024, he (or she) should leave it the hell alone.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
In May, a gunman killed ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and livestreamed the event on Twitch. While that by itself was horrific, many were further disturbed upon learning that the shooter’s manifesto made references to memes and online platforms where he spent most of his time. It didn’t take long for public figures to demand law enforcement target the online pipeline that “radicalized” him.
It may seem like a win for officials to investigate Twitch, 4chan, Discord, and similar platforms. But this approach—spying on people online in search for ‘pathways to radicalization’—draws from counter-extremism logics built on the ongoing surveillance of oppressed communities worldwide. Amidst rising right-wing mass shootings in the United States, increased funding of counter-extremism, supposedly in this case to prevent white supremacist violence, represents a double-edged sword for communities of color who are most often the target of these programs.
Counter-extremism is shaping the response to mass shootings like the one in Buffalo. Los Angeles, for example, approved a $250,000 grant to the city’s police earlier this year, provided by the Department of Homeland Security’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program. The grant will help fund the Providing Alternatives to Hinder Extremism (PATHE) program, an intervention-based program claiming to help the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) identify individuals on pathways to extremism.
PATHE is touted by media and police as an efficatious way to combat so-called “domestic terrorism.” Yet the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (SLAPD), a community-driven abolitionist organization, condemns it as a “vehicle for LAPD to racially profile youth of color with pseudoscientific ‘risk assessments.’”
In Los Angeles, SLAPD, alongside organizations like Vigilant Love, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and others, have led the charge against the LAPD’s counter-extremism programming for years.
SLAPD told Shadowproof by email that, in 2018, organizers blocked a $425,000 grant to expand the city’s precursor to PATHE. However, city councilors and police “ignored the wishes of Angelenos” three years later, SLAPD said, “in order to prioritize the budget of the LAPD over the well-being of our youth.” PATHE’s expansion eventually came to fruition in 2021 on the tail end of another betrayal, this time on the national level.
In June of that year, President Joe Biden not only abandoned campaign promises to end the Trump administration’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program (TVTP)—a resurrection of the Obama-era Countering Violent Extremism (CVE)—but effectively recreated TVTP with the new Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3).
Today, TVTP lives on as a grant program managed by CP3 and is described as the “only federal grant program dedicated to enhancing the capabilities of local communities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.” CP3 distributed $20 million in grants nationwide through TVTP in 2021, including the $250,000 grant for PATHE in Los Angeles.
Organizers like those working with SLAPD are urging abolitionists nationwide to explicitly take up and confront the ever-expanding surveillance state.
Abolition Beyond Police Shootings
Abolition was shoved into popular consciousness following the protest summer of 2020. However, media coverage often hyper-focuses on police killings, failing to make important connections as the U.S. pours millions into dangerous counter-extremism programming.
“Surveillance isn’t harmful merely because it’s used by police,” SLAPD wrote. “Intent to harm is an essential part of surveillance and [it] precedes the creation of the police as a distinct institution in North America.”
In the U.S., surveillance has taken different forms at different times, from the early development of biometric identification with slave passes to lantern laws demanding Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous people carry lanterns after sunset if not accompanied by a white person. No matter how it presents itself, though, surveillance is fundamentally “real-time social control” facilitated by a number of organizations.
Through counter-extremism, the U.S. government uses debunked “radicalization” theories to target Muslims — and often Black Muslim youth — and communities of color with increased policing and surveillance. Exported by the United Kingdom’s Prevent, counter-extremism strategies like CVE borrow the underlying assumption that there is an identifiable pathway to “extremism” requiring early intervention through not only watching communities but selectively funding non-profit programming, universities, and more. SLAPD writes that the federal government uses counter-extremism to “export policing and surveillance to social workers, teachers, clergy, community members, and nonprofits.”
For example, TVTP does not limit its funding to law enforcement alone. Vigilant Love’s #ServicesNotSurveillance campaign highlights counter-extremism’s encroachment into “therapy, social work, school counseling, and other related spaces.” Cultural productions have been targeted as well: in 2021, DHS provided $750,000 to the University of Texas at El Paso and $400,000 to Music in Common’s Black Legacy Project. Surveillance is not necessarily about restricting only the actions and movements of targeted communities, but their thoughts, too.
While counter-extremism programs like PATHE masquerade as supportive interventions into communities, SLAPD warned “they greatly expand the power of the police state, which is the primary agent of white supremacy and violence in our lives.”
As a domestic expansion of the so-called War on Terror, counter-extremism programming is part of a “global surveillance infrastructure,” Darakashan Raja, the founding director of Muslims for Just Futures, told Shadowproof by email. That infrastructure “create[s] a global confinement zone where individuals can’t truly be free anywhere they go if they are flagged as a terrorist or potential terrorist.”
Counter extremism and surveillance. Illustration by Paul Lacombe.Framing The Problem As “Domestic Terrorism”
DHS claims CP3 will combat “domestic violence extremism, including violent white supremacy.” CP3’s formation came alongside the development of a Domestic Terrorism Branch within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. While the government targeting white supremacy may seem like a positive development, it raises serious questions about the framing of the problem. If the focus is on “violent” white supremacy, for example, what is non-violent or non-extremism white supremacy, and what is being done about it? There are significant reasons to doubt that a “domestic terrorism” framework can confront the problem of white supremacy.
As Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah noted in a recent report and toolkit, “Focusing on individualized acts of white supremacist violence while failing to respond to structural inequalities that harm communities of color actively contributes to the reproduction of white supremacy.”
To put it another way, counter-extremism’s frameworks reduction of white supremacy to the deeds of a few individual bad actors allows the federal goverment to ignore that “the DHS and the FBI […] have always been intrinsically white supremacist institutions, from the histories of COINTELPRO to the War on Terror,” SLAPD wrote.
”In addition,” Raja warned, “history has taught us that the state’s counterterrorism and national security infrastructure has always been weaponized against Black, Brown, Indigenous communities, and liberatory movements.”
That much is easily found within the Biden administration’s guidelines for combating “domestic violent extremism” released after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. While the guidelines never mention white supremacy explicitly, “advocating for the superiority of the white race” is listed under the Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists category. It’s reminiscent of the FBI’s adoption of the “Black Identity Extremists” category in 2019, which SLAPD argues “paves the way for the administration to equate protesters rising up against the police with Neo-Nazis.”
Abolishing Surveillance
Demanding the abolition of counter-extremism strategies seems like a daunting task especially as the federal government continues to muddy the program’s lineages by restructuring it, and as events like mass shootings create demand for further investment in them. Organizers are making it easier for people to hop onboard with an abolitionist approach, though.
Last year, Raja led the development of the Muslim Abolitionist Futures grassroots policy agenda calling for the abolition of the War on Terror and demanding investments in care infrastructure instead. The project collected oral histories from community organizers, activists, and others, “who led, organized, and participated in social movements to resist the War on Terror.”
“The agenda brought together Muslim-led abolitionist groups in order to build a collective agenda so that we could use it as a movement and advocacy tool,” Raja explained. “It’s easy to dismiss one person or one organization, but when we can back up our demands with people power and the endorsement of multiple groups, it’s harder to ignore us.”
For both Raja and SLAPD, rejecting the false promises of reform is central to their work as abolitionists. “We don’t measure out victories in reformist wins, which often sacrifice communities for the sake of expediency,” SLAPD wrote. “Rather, our goal is to build community power and popular knowledge and build a culture of resistance.” This can look like working directly with community members who have been harmed by the state rather than prioritizing the perspectives of academics, attorneys, and other professionals, who lack those ties to the community.
When it comes to policing, surveillance is sometimes presented as a reform option and is not recognized as harmful and integral to the architecture of policing. As Raja wrote, “One of the biggest trends I have seen within criminal justice reform movements is the push for alternatives to incarceration that places people under state surveillance through parole and probation.” The Community Justice Exchange, for example, highlights that more immigrants are enrolled in ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (one of its Alternatives to Detention programs) than are detained in immigration facilities.
“Not A Moment In Time But A Continuation Of History.”
An analysis of the development of counter-extremism programming in the U.S. illuminates the importance of more complex confrontations with policing. While it is certainly necessary to highlight the $100 billion cities collectively pour into policing each year in general, CP3 distributed $20 million in grants last year alone. Its predecessor, CVE, provided $10 million in grants in 2017. Neither of those numbers account for the funding required to run and house these programs.
Even if police are abolished, the constant evolution of counter-extremism programs shows that, without a direct abolitionist confrontation, surveillance will find a way to survive. The billions of funding currently directed to law enforcement institutions will likely find itself funneled into counter-extremism programs at city, state, and federal levels.
Confronting surveillance, Raja wrote, “allows for us to take a transnational approach to abolition.” While the global counter-extremism industry is one small vein of surveillance as a whole, it is perhaps among the least understood. But it is a perfect representation of SLAPD’s motto: “Not a moment in time but a continuation of history.” The motto not only frames SLAPD’s work as part of a longer struggle but helps to “desensationalize the latest outrageous surveillance technology and ground abolition in decolonization.”
“Understanding our fight as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle has led to our collaboration with orgs like Anakbayan LA and the Palestinian Youth Movement,” SLAPD wrote. “The struggle for abolition is one with the struggle against the US war machine.”
The post Abolitionist Organizers Warn ‘Counter-Extremism’ Won’t Stop White Supremacist Violence appeared first on Shadowproof.
Lack of lending opportunities points to prolonged weakness in growth, warn bank officials
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last month, during a slow-moving heat wave that smothered much of the United States, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported at least 2,000 cattle had died from heat stress. In 2021, as the Pacific Northwest sweltered under a heat dome, more than 650,000 farm animals perished in British Columbia alone. And in 2015, a deadly heat wave in India killed more than 17 million chickens.
Hot, humid conditions can lead to massive heat casualties in animals—in livestock as well as wild animals. These events will become more extensive, longer lasting and more damaging as the world warms, potentially threatening economies and ecosystems. While many studies have demonstrated the impact of individual events or gradual trends in heat stress on livestock, there is a Panglossian tendency among many working in livestock agriculture to believe in a nearly infinite capacity for modern agricultural practices and breeding to overcome heat-stress induced challenges.
Much of the warming that has occurred in places like the United States or Europe can be dealt with through breeding in key traits from variants from warm countries like India or North Africa. But as high heat conditions travel beyond the upper ranges of temperatures recently experienced (over the past few thousand years) in North Africa, India, or South America, there will limited genetic diversity to draw upon to prepare for these conditions. There are temperature ceilings that humans and mammals (and many other animals) cannot survive, if breached. What those limits are, and what happens when they are crossed, will have profound implications for agriculture and biodiversity in a warming world.
In 2010, Steven Sherwood and I published a paper introducing wet-bulb temperature, a measure of moist heat stress, as a way of conceptualizing a 35 degree Celsius upper limit for survivability. Today very small regions cross this threshold for brief intervals. But with every degree of global warming, maximal wet-bulb temperatures will increase by nearly 1 degree Celsius. With enough warming more and more of the world will begin to cross this critical moist heat stress threshold. This critical survivable wet-bulb temperature concept has since spread well beyond its initial scope and its application to human health appears nearly daily in newspapers and even in science fiction.
Unfortunately, this limit was always understood to be an upper limit for perfectly hydrated, perfectly sweating people living in the shade exposed to a strong wind. Real humans do not behave this way all the time, if ever, and the real-world wet-bulb limit is in all likelihood substantially lower.
All mammals—indeed all endotherms, or warm-blooded animals, to a greater or lesser degree—are subject to similar temperature-humidity limits. Much of the best data exists for livestock so extra attention is due there, but moist heat stress is an equal opportunity killer, and the welfare of entire species and ecosystems need to be considered. And unlike many humans or even some livestock animals cared for by humans, wildlife does not have access to technologies like air conditioning to use to adapt to extraordinary temperatures.
When Sherwood and I began work on this topic we were inspired by records of past “greenhouse” climates over the past 90 million years, in which temperatures and humidity were mostly much higher than they are today. At a conference in which I was presenting these paleoclimate records, Sherwood asked, “Given that there is substantial evidence that the world used to be much hotter, is there a thermal limit that applies to all warm-blooded animals which might have been crossed in the past? If so, could it be crossed in the future, causing mass extinctions?”
The standard mammal has a maximum sustainable internal body temperature of about 37 to 38 degrees Celsius, as long as one is measuring the temperature of blood entering certain critical areas, such as near the base of the brain. All placental mammals have roughly that same maximum internal temperature, which is indicative of that temperature being shared among mammals with a common ancestor. Internal temperatures can be lower, but not higher without causing injury and death. Indeed substantial evidence exists for placental mammals having that same internal body temperature for tens of millions of years or more.
Birds are a slightly different story. It is now widely understood that birds are avian dinosaurs and are derived from an endothermic avian dinosaur lineage. Their maximum sustainable internal body temperatures are significantly higher (approximately 43 degrees Celsius), likely a necessary legacy of the hot, humid Mesozoic conditions in which they evolved.
The common maximum internal temperature is about 38 degrees Celsius for placental mammals or 43 degrees Celsius for birds, and these are shared across the vast majority of genera and species within these groups, which strongly suggests that these are immutable limits on human time scales. In other words, this is not something that human beings or other animals can rapidly evolve out of as conditions warrant. The mass death events in recent history described above are great examples of this.
Indeed, most species today have experienced strong evolutionary pressure to adapt to cooler “icehouse” conditions during the prevailing glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 3 million years. The last time climate was as warm as it will be in the next 50 to 100 years was 3 million years ago during the “warm” Pliocene climate. Warming projected for moderate emissions scenarios going beyond 2100 brings temperatures into a range not seen since the Miocene (23 to 25 million years ago). There is a real danger that in the near future, temperatures and corresponding humidity will increase to such a degree that wet-bulb levels extend beyond the range seen for at least 3 million years, or perhaps 15 million years.
There is good news though. In climate model simulations it requires substantial warming (more than 6 degrees Celsius) to create zones deadly to endothermic mammals and birds over substantial areas. That is not likely to happen even by the year 2300 in the most likely carbon emissions scenarios. With 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, which current research indicates is the most likely future, most of the world’s terrestrial biosphere will avoid crossing the 35 degrees Celsius wet-bulb limit for significant periods of time.
The bad news is, as previously mentioned, the 35 degree Celsius wet-bulb is an upper limit for mammals, not a lower survivability limit, meaning that in reality the limit may be reached sooner, with less global warming. Lower limits on wet-bulb temperature might be as low as 31 degrees Celsius for humans and other mammals. But in this lower range, wet-bulb may not be a useful or reliable metric, and less-idealized and more case-specific calibrated metrics are likely to be of more use. These include the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, a measure of heat stress in direct sunlight, or the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which accounts for ambient temperature as well as humidity, wind, and radiation, in the case of humans; or the temperature–humidity index in the case of animals.
Food systems involving livestock do not fare well in simulations with 3 degrees Celsius of global warming when using these livestock-specific metrics calibrated on modern animal tolerances. In the United States, just 3 degrees Celsius of warming conditions in simulations tend to be hotter—when humidity is factored in—than heat waves in North Africa today. These heat waves of the future could devastate US livestock yields, if they don’t kill the animals outright. Much more work needs to be done to understand how mammals and birds will fare globally, but most especially in tropical and subtropical regions. As noted above, animals there are already tolerant of high heat conditions, but they also have the least recent history with warmer and wetter than modern conditions and may therefore have a diminished capacity to adapt to warmer conditions.
With 1 degree Celsius of global warming already locked in, and several more that appear to be guaranteed by current policies, over the next century scientists will see just how much adaptability and genetic phenotypic plasticity there is. This raises the question of the degree to which humans can and should interfere to help this process along via more selective breeding or genetic modification.
As animals are moved by global warming outside of the environmental envelope that has encompassed them for literally millions of years, it is quite possible they will not have the ability to adapt. The best solution of course would be to avoid this experiment entirely. That is within the realm of feasibility. Limiting warming to less than 3 degrees Celsius by slashing the use of fossil fuels substantially reduces the area of the planet subject to dangerous moist heat stress conditions.
One may rely on either natural or man-made refugia, or, in other words, moving populations of endotherms either uphill or away from hot humid regions, or building giant air-conditioned enclosures, in order to allow animals to continue to survive. But, if humans are in the position of doing this in a big way, that already presumes the fight to preserve the major ecosystems that make our world beautiful has been lost. For the sake of all the animals, including us, I hope we choose a saner path.
From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions.
As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to pondering language about and human relationships to the natural world. As a person, he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region, a sublime area of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. The valley here offers a stopover along a flyway that runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand how coal mining was threatening the well-being of the valley’s feathered and human residents. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter, akin to the mountaintop-removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes, had increased almost twentyfold. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge toxic metals into water supplies.
Albrecht understood all of this in the abstract, but witnessing it directly was more visceral—“an acute traumatic event of environmental destruction,” he wrote, air “thick with dust” and the smell of coal, a “dull roar” from a mine detonation, a “cloud of orange smoke.”
The coal industry, Albrecht felt, was wrecking his home. His observations marked the beginning of his relentless inquiry into what it means when the places we call home are remade or altered, sometimes violently.
Over a period of decades, Albrecht has devoted himself to searching for language that might describe a type of sadness, shock, and loss that now seems more and more common—grief of displacement, unease with our surroundings, a sense that damage and disaster might lie just down the road. He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up. There, thanks partly to the early impacts of climate change, regional rainfall had dropped by about 15 to 20 percent since the 1970s, and the jarrah trees he had loved since he was a child—eucalypts with lustrous wood—were dying en masse.
As he studied his own and others’ emotional responses to such damages, he was on the cusp of something, a sentiment that now might easily define our time: We live in an era of radical change, when it feels like everything is being remade and altered. What do we call this unprecedented moment of home instability?
In moments of collective distress, people have tried to name the pain that comes from the disruption of home: a complex set of feelings that includes longing, love, grief, existential angst, and even a lurking sense of dread. Loss of home can evoke the pain of dispossession, profound cultural and personal disorientation, and righteous anger, all of which can haunt a society for generations.
After the English invaded Wales in the 1200s, the word hiraeth (pronounced “here-eyeth”) became a fixture in the Welsh language, in part to express the societal disruption of living under colonial rule. “Hiraeth is a protest,” writes the essayist Pamela Petro. “It’s a sickness [that comes on] because home isn’t the place it should have been.” In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, assembled a set of case studies to document the pain of home disruption. Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that turned the region into “a smoldering land, amputated of half its population,” writes the historian Thomas Dodman, and left this part of Europe in a state of economic stagnation and political instability. Later, Hofer’s hometown became a sanctuary to refugees fleeing religious persecution in France. At the time, young Swiss mercenaries, hired out across Western Europe, reportedly suffered a common, chronic heartbreak, la maladie du pays, literally “the disease of the country” in French, or Heimweh, “home-woe” in Swiss German. Hofer gave a scientific name to the pain of home loss that he had witnessed throughout his life. He called it nostalgia, derived from Greek, “composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nosos [now more often spelled nostos], return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifies suffering or grief,” he wrote.
To Hofer, nostalgia was also a medical condition whose symptoms included fever, nausea, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and respiratory problems, along with “palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.” Untreated, it could be fatal, and there were documented deaths among Swiss soldiers attributed to this malady. By the 19th century, the symptoms of nostalgia included “tachycardia, skin rashes, hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating), hearing difficulties, convulsions, heartburn, vomiting, diarrhea, and any rales or wheezing that a stethoscope might pick up in the chest,” according to Dodman. We would probably now attribute many of these symptoms to other psychological ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
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In the 20th century, the meaning of nostalgia became more detached from home; instead, it signified a longing for the real or imagined comforts of the past.
But in discarding the original notion of nostalgia, we may have underestimated the impact that place and home have on the human body and our ability to navigate our lives. Having a home is part of human well-being; when home is disrupted, it can make us literally sick. It is a kind of trauma. The social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove has described the pain felt by displaced communities—especially Black communities uprooted because of gentrification, discrimination, and urban development—as “root shock,” or “the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of some or all of one’s emotional ecosystem.” In an era of climate crisis, we will have to reckon with new complexities in our relationships to home, and even more people will experience the shock of being uprooted. In the long run, if we fail to address the crisis, hardly any safe refuge will be left.
Like Hofer, Albrecht thought it would be useful to name the experience of watching one’s home environment unravel. Around the turn of the millennium, he decided to coin his own word. (There are words in Indigenous languages that could have filled the gap, but none had yet migrated into the English language.) “With my wife Jill, I sat at the dining table at home and explored numerous possibilities. One word, ‘nostalgia,’ came to our attention as it was once a concept linked to … homesickness,” he wrote. Hunter Region residents were homesick, but they hadn’t gone anywhere—the place they lived in just no longer offered the kind of comfort, solace, or safety one would expect from home. Albrecht came up with the word solastalgia, using the suffix –algia, meaning “pain,” and the same Latin root in the words solace, console, and desolation. In Latin, solacium means “comfort,” and desolare, “to leave alone,” so the word solastalgia suggested the loss of comfort, the loneliness of being estranged from home. He published the first academic paper on the idea in 2005.
Some neologisms never make it out of the realm of private conversation, and some molder in the corners of academic journals as useless jargon. But occasionally a word like this catches a bit of zeitgeist, like wind, and gets borne aloft into the culture at large.
Over the next several years, Albrecht’s mellifluous word seemed to tap into a kind of angst about life on a warming planet. A British trip-hop band produced an instrumental track called “Solastalgia,” and a Slovenian artist recorded an album also called Solastalgia. At the beginning of 2010, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Albrecht and commissioned the sculptor Kate MacDowell to create a porcelain representation of solastalgia—a brain full of delicate trees and Australian wildlife.
The neologism also offered a useful means of describing and studying how the impacts of climate change reach beyond tangible, physical, and economic damages. A team of social scientists identified feelings of solastalgia among people from rural northern Ghana, a region devastated by climate change–related drought and crop failure. A collaboration of environmental scientists and public-health researchers observed solastalgia in communities affected by hurricanes and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. A Los Angeles physician named David Eisenman stumbled across the idea of solastalgia when interviewing survivors of the 2011 Wallow Fire, the largest wildfire on record in Arizona. Over and over, he heard them express “the sense that they were grieving [for the landscape] like for a loved one.” He and his team found that the more uneasy they felt about the landscape itself, the more at risk they were for other kinds of psychological distress.
Writers, artists, and scholars are now talking more openly about the emotions of the climate crisis. We have even more ways to name the experiences of people living through mega-disasters and the slow attrition of beloved places—including climate grief, ecological grief, and environmental melancholia. In a 2020 survey by the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of American adults said they’d experienced “eco-anxiety.” We are moving into an era defined by homesickness.
Does it matter if we name or even notice this kind of angst?
Recent years have made it abundantly clear how much our actual, physical homes and lives are at risk, all over the world. In 2019 alone, 24.9 million people around the globe were effectively evicted from their homes by natural disasters and climate-change impacts. Communities that survive disasters, both large and small, face damage that is hard to even tally. Various economists have tried to estimate the harm of climate change to our societies in monetary terms. Others have made calculations of potential economic losses based on factors such as wage-earning potential and gross domestic product. The world could lose up to 18 percent of GDP by 2050 if nothing is done about climate change. But such calculations strike me as profound underestimates of a phenomenon that could easily tear apart the basic fabric of our societies, economically and physically.
In the past several years, a whole field of study has emerged to quantify the intangible losses associated with climate change. Losses related to culture, identity, heritage, emotional well-being, and the sacredness or spirituality of people’s relationship to a place or a community—not to mention experiences such as the joy, love, beauty, or inspiration found in a cherished landscape—are nearly impossible to quantify in economic terms. So scholars of intangible loss are now trying to find other ways to account for them, formally, for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We have to find a better way to make visible what is often overlooked, ridiculed, dismissed as too personal, not generalizable, not quantifiable,” says Petra Tschakert, who is a geography professor at Curtin University, in Australia, and who has also studied solastalgia in Ghana.
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Even these measures, though, do not quite capture what I have long wondered: Have we failed in some more personal realm? Have too many of us convinced ourselves for too long that climate change is the problem of others and that the storms will never rattle our own roof? And if we all faced our grief, would we find the collective will to take the kind of drastic action required to stanch the destruction?
In 2013, I met Glenn Albrecht while I was on a writing fellowship in Perth, a city of Spanish-style architecture, white-sand beaches, brightly colored wild cockatoos, and some of the most profuse biodiversity of any city in the world. He had moved back to the country’s west coast in 2009 to take a post as a professor of sustainability at Murdoch University and was living with and caring for his elderly mother in a house about 30 miles outside Perth that they had nicknamed Birdland. He had also broadened his work beyond solastalgia and was creating an entire lexicon of polysyllabic words related to climate change. At a seminar at a local university, I watched him—a gangly, energetic man—urge the few dozen people in the room to pronounce several other neologisms, waving his arms like a drum major as we sounded out in unison “SUM-BI-OS-IT-Y,” sumbiosity, which refers to a utopian-sounding state in which people live in balance with Earth. (I had doubts about whether this word would catch on, though I appreciated the sentiment.)
Meanwhile, the idea of solastalgia has taken on a life of its own, and in the Hunter, the concept had been used in a 2013 court ruling to stop the expansion of a coal mine by the company Rio Tinto: The solastalgic pain of local residents was named as one of several reasons to halt the project. Albrecht had testified on the negative impacts on citizens and how the project would likely make one village unlivable. It was maybe the first time that something as intangible as love of home had nearly as much legal standing as pure economics. The decision was overturned again in 2015, but the community group there has continued to try to fight the mine.
After Albrecht’s mother died, he returned to southeastern Australia full-time in 2014—to a place at the edge of the Hunter Region that he and his wife named Wallaby Farm, where they could live nearly off the grid with solar power and a farm full of fruits, herbs, and vegetables. But in 2019, wildfires raged around his property—part of the massive outbreak of flames called the Black Summer that would devastate much of Australia and draw international attention. One fire ignited about a mile from Albrecht’s house. Albrecht wore a face mask much of that season to cope with the searing smoke. He kept watch for any embers that might drift through the air and alight on his property. When I spoke with him not long thereafter, he said, “We’re actually in the process of trying to sell it and move. We’re being driven out by climate change.” (I later heard that he and his wife had stayed put.)
In our interview—just after the explosion of the coronavirus outbreak worldwide—he took the same slightly detached, professorial tone that I had always heard from him. I couldn’t hear his emotion in his voice. “The bushfires were a massive psychoterratic experience,” he observed, drawing on another Latinate word he had coined. I asked him about a post he had placed on Facebook during the height of the fires. It was full of expletives and occupied some space between humor and rage. “The land that we love is being fried … because the joint is getting fucking hotter,” he had proclaimed. This post was, he said, an expression of his anger in the Australian vernacular.
When I read it, it was like hearing a battle cry in the distance—a roar about everything we love, everything we are losing, everything we must try to defend.
This article was adapted from Madeline Ostrander’s forthcoming book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth.
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