2861. Ecological Destruction in the Name of Science

By Michelle Munjanattu, Left Voice, March 23, 2018

“They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.“I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted — harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population — about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.”

From Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire

In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire describes how colonialism facilitated the whole-scale destruction of entire societies whose peoples and cultures offered insights into how we may live peacefully alongside nature and create a new world. He revealed how colonialism’s fixation with what is produced, without regard to the process of production, obscured the poverty, malnutrition, displacement, and environmental destruction necessitated by an increase in the export of raw materials.

Colonial endeavors far and wide were justified by their description as an effort to civilize barbaric natives, with the ultimate goal of replacing native models of agriculture, industry, and cuisine, among others, with preferred Western models, to facilitate the growth of markets for Western goods. To encourage this shift, traditional knowledge was cast as imprecise, deficient, and unreliable. These perceived gaps in indigenous knowledge could be solved by the adoption of scientific and western methods.

The effect of this deification of scientific knowledge means that alternative models based in tradition and indigenous knowledge are not viewed as complementary practices, but as competition for existing scientific models. It behooves us to view science as one of several methods of discerning realities about nature and our relationship to each other. An uncritical adoption of scientific knowledge obscures how colonial and profit motives often impact the integrity of such discoveries, as demonstrated below. And when the primacy of scientific and western models results in the removal of communities’ control over their own land and food, it deprives them of self-determination and cultural vibrancy.

The Origins of Scientific Forestry

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State opens with a fascinating case study of the origins of scientific forestry in the 18th century, relevant today because it became the basis of forest management techniques in Europe, the United States, and throughout the global South. Scott describes the early European state’s view of forests primarily as a source of revenue generation from timber. Using such a narrow lens, the state obscured other considerations in forest management: the trees, bushes, and plants that couldn’t be sold commercially as fodder, fruit, branches, roots, and more. The aim of the forest scientists was to “deliver the greatest possible constant volume of wood.”

To this end, scientists carefully counted and measured sample plots of trees, coming up with precise calculations of tree size and age under normal growth conditions. Scott reveals that state power utilized forest science and geometry to transform the living, diverse, old-growth woodlands into a new, more uniform forest. In pursuit of the ideal forest formed by scientific principles, underbrush was cleared, the number of species was reduced, and plantings were done in straight rows on large tracts. The archetypal German forest was seen as a victory of scientific control and management, and German forest science became the standard at the end of the 19th century.

However, within a century of adoption of this new forest model, the negative biological and commercial consequences of this anesthetized woodland became clear. The second generation of conifers were retrograde in quality, creating a considerable loss in timber available for sale. In examining the causes of this forest regression, it became clear that the first generation of trees had thrived off the incredibly nutrient-rich soil of the previous old-growth forest that it replaced. Once this soil was depleted, it resulted in a steep decline in growth rates. In the pursuit of an organized, manageable, and aesthetically pleasing forest, this German experiment disrupted a complex process of soil building, nutrient uptake, and an interdependent ecosystem of fungi, insects, mammals and flora.

Can Pine Trees Survive in Palestine?

Connected to this European forest legacy is the prevalence of pine trees in historic Palestine. In November 2016, 60,000 people had to evacuate their homes in the city of Haifa as forest fires threatened the city’s outskirts. A dozen smaller fires raged in forests throughout the country for over a week before Israeli firefighters were finally able to control them. Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government was quick to blame Palestinians, but a critical cause of these fires was the prevalence of pine trees in Israel’s forests, which are highly flammable, especially in Palestine’s very dry climate.

The reason behind the existence of pine trees in Palestine is part and parcel of Israel’s settler-colonialist project. As is well-documented, around 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland by Zionist paramilitary groups, and a majority of them before the official declaration of Israel’s independence (the Nakba) on May 15, 1948. Israel’s plan to ensure these Palestinian refugees could not return necessitated erasure of the violent process of ethnic cleansing that had birthed the state. So Israel undertook the minimizing of Palestinians’ historic presence, thereby demolishing the ruins of evicted and destroyed Palestinian villages in the 1950s.

Part of this sinister project utilized the forces of the Jewish National Fund, which from the beginning of the 20th century had been collecting money to plant and maintain forests in Palestine. Pine trees were chosen to provide a visual representation of Israeli exceptionalism and have the land appear as an extension of Europe.

Eager as the Israeli state was to erase Palestinians’ claims to the land, their haste to establish this through the construction of pine forests reveals the short-sightedness of the settler-colonial project. Palestinians, like other indigenous communities, know that their survival is intimately tied to the land and its fruits. Instead of approaching the terrain through the lens of control and subservience, there is an ethos of stewardship and an intimate knowledge of the land and seasons. In Palestine’s desert climate, its inhabitants sought to make the best use of rainfall to the region, whether through terracing of olive groves to protect against soil erosion and retain water, or through use of traditional methods to preserve soil moisture ahead of the summer growing season.

The Israeli project in Palestine has been absolutely devastating to its indigenous inhabitants, who are additionally impacted by the demise of Palestine’s indigenous flora and fauna. As the pine tree example demonstrates, there is a clear desire to depict Israel’s ability to transform the existing desert landscape as a victory of science and European standards. This manifests itself in nearly every sector of Israeli society. Specifically in terms of agriculture, the Israeli mythology about making the desert bloom obscures the fact that the state monopolizes the use of water resources (including in its own settlements) to create an export market for its agricultural products in Europe. This market for Israeli produce is artificially sustained by depriving Palestinians of water resources.

And what are the impacts of this artificially-sustained and resource-intensive Israeli agriculture? By creating a situation in which traditional Palestinian methods of sustainable agriculture cannot be followed, Israel continues to decimate ecological resources, from the soil to the water aquifers below ground. By enforcing “modern” methods of agriculture, there are few incentives for Palestinians to learn and preserve traditional agriculture, creating a dependency on chemical companies which supply seeds and fertilizers.

As the Palestinian agronomist Saad Dagher observes, an effect of Israeli agriculture in Palestine has been a decrease in the number of farmers and a concurrent loss of indigenous farming practices. Palestinians are struggling to meet their own food needs, and agricultural biodiversity has significantly decreased — Dagher states that more than 98 to 99 percent of Palestine’s figs and almonds have disappeared.

Preserving Indigenous Knowledge and Creating Possibilities for our Shared Survival

For those seeking answers to the question of how it is possible to materialize a post-capitalist, liberated society, part of this inquiry requires a willingness to scrutinize what is considered to be scientific “truth.” Another part of this inquiry will require respecting indigenous knowledge and practices, specifically those that highlight how people live in harmony with the land, and not in control over it.

There is a tendency for scientific and modern practices to be marketed as the only “valid” form of knowledge. When these practices are used to support colonial and capitalistic ventures, the intention is to depict native practices as deficient, thereby setting the stage for wholesale adoption of the “ideal” methods.

The error in forgetting or neglecting indigenous knowledge is that we will interpret our futures as completely delimited by capitalism’s demands. The reality is, capitalism and settler-colonialism cause a false crises of resources, rendering very few people (and flora and fauna) capable of survival. Indigenous approaches to agriculture are rooted in people living in harmony with the land and what it can offer, and exemplify more equitable and loving treatment of the earth and its inhabitants.

Resources and Further Reading

Lambert, Léopold. “Make the Desert Bloom”: Manufacturing the Israeli Territory Narrative.” April 7, 2015. https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/palestine-make-the-desert-bloom-manufacturing-the-israeli-territorynarrative

Oberender, Svenja. “Traditional Farming in Palestine.” May 12, 2015.https://ps.boell.org/en/2015/05/12/traditional-farming-palestine

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

2860. How Songbirds Deal With Noise Pollution

By Hiroko Tabouchi, The New York Times, March 13, 2018

Savannah sparrow singing his love song.  

If a sparrow sings his heart out on an oil field, but his would-be sweetheart can’t hear him above the oil pumps, what’s a bird to do?

In Alberta, Canada, researchers analyzed hundreds of hours of Savannah sparrow love songs and discovered something extraordinary: To be heard above the din, the birds are changing their tune in complex ways that scientists are only starting to understand.

“They’re tailoring their songs depending on which part of their message is the most affected,” said Miyako Warrington, a University of Manitoba biologist who led a recent study on how sparrows cope with noise from the oil and gas infrastructure that dots Canada’s landscape. “This seems to show a complex level of adaptation. It’s not just everybody talking louder.”

Dr. Warrington is one of a growing number of scholars who study the noise generated by human activity — drills, turbines, roaring jet engines — and how that affects the natural world around us.

Mining on the fringes of the Brazilian rain forest, for instance, is disrupting the calls of local black-fronted titi monkeys, a study found last year. Whales and dolphins are known to be particularly vulnerable to the groans of ship engines or offshore drilling, which can disrupt the complex ways they communicate. Research has shown that noise pollution has doubled the background sound levels in more than 60 percent of protected areas in the United States.

And humans are not immune to the din. Epidemiologists have linked traffic noise to cardiovascular and other diseases.

Scholars of birdsong have long noticed that avian city dwellers sound different from their peers in the country. But Dr. Warrington wanted to understand how wild birds adapt to the pumps and drills that oil and gas development has brought to wide swaths of North America.

Her team at Manitoba decided to focus on the mating call of the male Savannah sparrow, a bird slightly larger than a tennis ball with handsome, streaky feathers and a dash of yellow above the eye. Once commonly found on North America’s grasslands, Savannah sparrow populations are on the decline as their natural habitat has dwindled.

In the audio clip below, you can hear two of the birds calling: one in his natural, quiet environment, and one near a generator-powered oil-well screw pump — a raucous machine with a rotating screw that pulls petroleum from the ground.In a quiet environment, the male sparrow’s love song is a string of playful staccatos followed by a throaty buzz and a final, triumphant trill. Using past research on sparrow songs, Dr. Warrington offered an approximate translation of what is essentially a pickup line: “Hey, hey, sexy, hey, I’m Bob, a Savannah sparrow, I’m sexy, sexy.”

In the presence of the screw pump, the sparrow not only adapts the middle section of his song but also lowers the pitch of the opening notes. Dr. Warrington theorizes that the first section is where the song most closely overlaps with the sounds of the screw pump, and that lowering the pitch improves the chances that the opening motif will not get drowned out.

Each bird, of course, adds its own quirks to its songs. To better understand an overall pattern of changes, the research team tracked and recorded 73 male Savannah sparrows at 26 sites within 200 kilometers, or about 125 miles, of the city of Brooks, at the heart of Canada’s oil country.

The researchers looked at sites near four types of oil and gas infrastructure: grid-powered screw pumps, generator-powered screw pumps, compressor stations that pump natural gas from wells and oil-well pump jacks with the “nodding head” pumps. The team also recorded birds at sites with no oil infrastructure.

Overall, the team found that birds altered their songs most near generator-powered screw pumps — the device heard behind the second songbird in the recording above and the loudest of the four types of oil infrastructure studied. The most common difference was in pitch and in the opening notes and buzzy parts of their songs. Researchers did not find that the content of the songs changed.

There was no consistent change to the final trill. That appeared to be a personal flourish that male sparrows changed at whim. (In the recording, the final trill performed by the two birds is clearly distinct.)

Dr. Warrington and her colleagues are now looking at how changes to songs can affect a bird’s reproductive chances. Separate research on mountain bluebirds and ash-throated flycatchers in New Mexico showed signs of chronic stress in birds exposed to steady noise from oil and gas infrastructure. In some cases, their chicks showed signs of stunted growth.

“The birds are altering their signals — but are these birds fine then? No, evolution doesn’t work like that,” said Nathan Kleist, a postdoctoral researcher in conservation biology at Colorado State University and a lead author of the study in New Mexico. Industrial noise, he said, “is having impacts on wildlife that we are just now beginning to understand.”

In an early encouraging sign, a follow-up study of female Savannah sparrows’ mating behavior — reciprocal calls, flirtatious wing flicks, annoyed attacks — showed that the male birds may be successfully wooing their belles with their modified tunes.

“We were worried that by changing their pitch, birds that used to sound like, say, George Clooney would now sound like Bart Simpson, and that might mean the ladies never come,” Dr. Warrington said. “But what you hope for is that, in the face of noise, you change your voice, and it’s still good.”

2859. Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming

By Robert Hunziker, Counterpunch, March 27, 2018

Everybody’s heard about global warming. It is one of the most advertised existential events of all time. Who isn’t aware? However, there’s a new kid on the block. An alarming loss of insects will likely take down humanity before global warming hits maximum velocity.

For the immediate future, the Paris Accord is riding the wrong horse, as global warming is a long-term project compared to the insect catastrophe happening right now! Where else is found 40% to 90% species devastation?

The worldwide loss of insects is simply staggering with some reports of 75% up to 90%, happening much faster than the paleoclimate record rate of the past five major extinction events. It is possible that some insect species may already be close to total extinction!

It’s established that species evolve and then go extinct over thousands and millions of years as part of nature’s course, but the current rate of devastation is simply “off the charts, and downright scary.”

Without any doubt, it is difficult to imagine how humanity survives without insects, which are dropping dead in bunches right before our eyes. For proof, how many insect splats do people clean off windshields nowadays? Not many…. How many fireflies do children chase at night? Not many….

Several naturalists and environmental writers believe the massive loss of insects has everything to do with three generations of industrialized farming and the vast tide of poisons pouring over the landscape year-after-year, especially since the end of WWII. Ours is the first-ever pesticide-based agricultural society. Dreadfully, it’s an experiment that is going dead wrong… all of a sudden!

Insects are basic to thousands of food chains; for example, the disappearance of Britain’s farmland birds by over 50% in 40 years. Additionally, North America and Europe species of birds like larks, swallows, and swifts that feast on flying insects have plummeted.
But, these are only a few of many, many recorded examples of massive numbers of wildlife dropping dead right before our eyes.

Significantly, insects are the primary source for ecosystem creation and support. The world literally crumbles apart without mischievous burrowing, forming new soil, aerating soil, pollinating food crops, etc. Nutrition for humans happens because insects pollinate.

One of the world’s best and oldest entomological resources is Krefeld Entomological Society (est. 1905) tracking insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves. They first noticed a significant drop off of insects in 2013 when the total mass of catch fell by 80%. Again, in 2014 the numbers were just as low. Subsequently, the society discovered huge declines in several observation sites throughout Western Europe.

For example, Krefeld data for hoverflies, a pollinator often mistaken for a bee, registered 17,291 hoverflies from 143 species trapped in a reserve in 1989. Whereas by 2014 at the same location, 2,737 individuals from 104 species, down 84%. (Source: Gretchen Vogel, Where Have All The Insects Gone? Science Magazine, May 10, 2017)

Down Under in Australia anecdotal evidence similarly shows an unusual falloff of insect populations. For example, Jack Hasenpusch, an entomologist and owner of the Australian Insect Farm collects swarms of wild insects but now says: “I’ve been wondering for the last few years why some of the insects have been dropping off … This year has really taken the cake with the lack of insects, it’s left me dumbfounded, I can’t figure out what’s going on.” (Source: Mark Rigby, Insect Population Decline Leaves Australian Scientists Scratching For Solutions, ABC Far North, Feb. 23, 2018)

Concerned, Mr. Hasenpusch talked to entomologists in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, New Caledonia, and Italy. All of them related similar experiences.

According to entomologist Dr. Cameron Webb / University of Sydney, researchers around the world widely acknowledge the problem of insect decline but are at a loss to explain the causes.

Obviously, something dreadful is suddenly happening throughout the entire biosphere. The insect catastrophe is a relatively new phenomenon that has caught society unaware, blindsided. Interestingly, 97% of the Animal Kingdom consists of invertebrates such as insects, crabs, lobsters, clams, octopuses, jellyfish, and worms, etc.

Scientists have been noticing the problem for some time now, but widespread public knowledge is simply not there. Jürgen Deckert, insect custodian at the Berlin Natural History Museum is worried that “there’s a risk we will only really take notice once it is too late.” (Source: Christian Schwägerl, What’s Causing the Sharp Decline in Insects, and Why It Matters, YaleEnvironment360, July 6, 2012)

The Senckenberg Entomological Institute/Frankfurt recorded a 40% decline in butterfly and Burnet moth species over a period of decades.

A Stanford University global index developed by Rodlfo Dirzo showed a 45% decline for invertebrates over four decades. Of 3,623 terrestrial invertebrate species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, 42% are classified as threatened with extinction.

The Zoological Society of London in 2012 published a major survey concluding that many insect populations are in severe decline. And in both the U.S. and Europe researchers have recorded 40% declines in bee populations because of colony collapse disorder and sharp losses of monarch butterflies.

“Of particular concern is the widespread use of pesticides and their impact on non-target species. Many conservationists view a special class of pesticides called neonicotinoids — used over many years in Europe until a partial ban in 2013 — as the prime suspect for insect losses… “There are many indications that what we see is the result of a widespread poisoning of our landscape,” says Leif Miller, director general of the German chapter of Bird Life International,” Ibid.

Widespread poisoning of ecosystems is the norm in modern day society. “Ours is a poisoned planet, … This explosion in chemical use and release has all happened so rapidly that most people are blissfully unaware of its true magnitude and extent, or of the dangers it now poses to us all as well as to future generations for centuries to come.” (Source: Julian Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century, Springer Nature, Switzerland, 2017, page 104)

“Most people are blissfully unaware” may be a blessing in disguise as the angst, dread, and uneasiness that knowledge of this horrendous crisis brings is the root cause of severe bouts of sleeplessness along with difficult spells of deep depression.

2858. Nations Won’t Reach Paris Climate Goal Without Protecting Wildlife and Nature, Warns Report

By Ashley Braun, Desmog, March 23, 2018 

A sweeping new report released today emphasizes just how intertwined the challenges of climate change and loss of biodiversity truly are.

The Paris Climate Agreement and several other United Nations (UN) pacts “all depend on the health and vitality of our natural environment in all its diversity and complexity,” said Dr. Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the UN-backed organization behind the report. “Acting to protect and promote biodiversity is at least as important to achieving these commitments and to human well-being as is the fight against global climate change.”

The report comes from the efforts of more than 550 scientists in over 100 nations, corralled by an organization often dubbed “the IPCC for biodiversity.”

Much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses the state of research on global warming and its impacts, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reviews the best-available science on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to human well-being.

Climate Change not so Great for Wildlife

Three years in the making, the study concluded humans are causing the planet to lose species at such a rapid clip that the resulting risks are on par with those presented by climate change. On top of being unfortunate for those species that no longer exist, these losses also endanger people’s access to food, clean water, and energy, according to the report.

“We must act to halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature or risk not only the future we want but even the lives we currently lead,” Robert Watson, current IPBES chair and former IPCC chair, told The Guardian.

In addition, by 2050, the report found that under a “business as usual” scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, climate change could jump ahead of other threats, such as habitat loss and change in land use, as the primary cause of extinctions in North and South America.

Wildlife and ecosystems across the world are threatened by the impacts of a warming climate.

Coral reefs, under assault from warming, acidifying waters and pollution, are the poster child for this. They have suffered extensive damage already in South and Southeast Asia, and this report determined that “up to 90 percent of corals will suffer severe degradation by 2050, even under conservative climate change scenarios.”

In Africa by the year 2100, climate change could threaten over half of the continent’s species of birds and mammals and many of its plants.

Healthy Ecosystems Are More Resilient Ecosystems

Larigauderie pointed out that protecting the lands and waters that support the world’s wildlife helps prepare them for the effects of climate change already happening.

“Richer, more diverse ecosystems are better able to cope with disturbances – such as extreme events and the emergence of diseases,” she said. “They are our ‘insurance policy’ against unforeseen disasters and, used sustainably, they also offer many of the best solutions to our most pressing challenges.”

Sea level rise and extreme weather are poised to jeopardize species (including humans) in low-lying areas of the Asia-Pacific region. For example, as mangroves continue to be cut down, coastal areas lose these natural buffers against flooding and severe storms, a similar issue as Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico.

Some Good News Here

But there were a few bright spots among the report’s generally glum news. One was the rise in forested areas in Northeast Asia, where restoration and other efforts have increased tree cover by nearly 23 percent, and in the Asia-Pacific region more broadly, by 2.5 percent.

Furthermore, the study set out a range of successful policy options for protecting biodiversity, beyond habitat restoration projects and protected areas such as parks and reserves.

Many of the solutions for stemming the loss of species would have simultaneous benefits for the climate, such as protecting and restoring ecosystems (which can store more carbon), cleaning up energy sources (fewer greenhouse gas emissions), and practicing more sustainable and diverse agriculture (lowering emissions, storing carbon).

And in a comment that continues the parallels between addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, Watson said: “It is also clear that indigenous and local knowledge can be an invaluable asset, and biodiversity issues need to receive much higher priority in policy making and development planning at every level. Cross-border collaboration is also essential, given that biodiversity challenges recognize no national boundaries.”

In other words, neither of these global issues is receiving the attention they deserve, and neither can be solved adequately without international collaboration and reversing historical imbalances in power and decision-making, particularly among Indigenous peoples.

2857. The Uber Crash Is Just the Start: How the Gig Economy Threatens the Future of Work

By Anthony Gabb, Truthout, March 26, 2018

Taxi drivers protest agains Uber in Berlin, Germany, June 11, 2014.

Uber, the embodiment of the sharing economy, was once again propelled into the spotlight on March 19, 2018, after one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. This has resulted in renewed debate over the safety of Uber's driverless cars, as well as over its illegal and unethical tactics of skirting regulations, which are in part responsible for the company's rapid growth.

Since the end of the post-WWII economic expansion in the 1970s, capitalism has been struggling with slow growth and flat wages. The gig economy, actuated by technological innovation, is a restructuring response to cut labor costs and increase profits. It is not a solution for unemployment, inequality and forced migration, yet estimates show that the gig economy will soon account for over 40 percent of the US workforce. Simultaneously, capitalism manufactures both wealth and unemployment (thereby inequality and misery), which is necessary for its own existence. Immigrants are not the cause of unemployment, and the gig economy is not the solution.The gig economy is the future workplace, once associated with less industrialized countries in the 1970s, where temporary, unstable employment is commonplace and companies tend toward hiring employees who are all but in name performing the work of permanent workers but are denied permanent employee rights. It is glamorized by some, but the truth is, it undermines the traditional economy, and will aggravate unemployment, poverty and immigration. The "gigzombie" is the alienated gig employee whose vitality has been sapped by rapid technological advancements that are changing the nature of work and increasingly threatening job security.

Forces Giving Rise to the Gig Economy

To understand the need to restructure the future workplace to boost the corporate bottom line, it is important to understand the economic forces that have brought us to this point. As such, the Marxist theory of the accumulation of capital (wealth) assumes that "labor is the source of all value." The drive for profits gives rise to technological change. Labor and machines working together create more wealth.

The problem is that in order to create more wealth, workers are replaced by machines, which tend to cause more unemployment, torment and migration. As unemployed workers move into and out of the workforce, they are used as a lever to discipline the already employed by destroying unions, depressing wages, making it easy to lay off workers without notice and replacing them with temporary and part-time employees, destroying the social safety net, and keeping production costs down. When the number of displaced workers plus the increase in population is greater than the number of jobs created, the result is mass unemployment and poverty, which triggers migration to places where people think there are jobs. Immigration laws, which are anti-labor laws, are used to manage the ebb and flow of the global reserve army of the unemployed, by opening or closing the immigration spigot to make cheap labor available.

The point is that capitalism is unable to create dignified work with livable wages and benefits for everyone who wants to work. The system manufactures unemployment; it is a necessary outcome of the accumulation of wealth, and a tool used to perpetuate the existence of the system by pitting employed and unemployed workers, and US-born and immigrant workers against one other, making them compete for a limited number of jobs. As such, capitalism creates obscene levels of inequality; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The Future Workplace

The workplace is rapidly transitioning from the traditional 40-hour workweek with benefits, to the gig economy, where there is a race to reduce labor cost, and at the same time, creating an environment where immigrants are an instrument of control due to the schism (the false notion that immigrants are taking our jobs) between them and the US-born workforce.

Technological innovations give employers the ability to identify, calculate and monitor how much employees produce wherever they are. In this increasingly automated workplace, digital technology enables employers to manage the workplace from afar, allowing them complete control over workers; the machine incorporates and absorbs the worker who is the appendage within it, and extracts wealth from it. Already, more than 34 percent of the workforce is employed as temporary part-time precarious employees and expected to soon grow to 43 percent of the total workforce.

The state plays a critical role in the transition to the gig economy by dismantling unions using "right-to-work" laws and re-writing tax laws that suggest people can get rich from becoming independent contractors. Under provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act that require unionized workplaces to become "open shops," employees must be allowed to work whether or not they join the union or pay dues. This makes it more difficult for workers to form unions. About 28 states in the US are right-to-work states. In part, right-to-work laws have devastated organized labor. Unionized workers on average are paid 27 percent more than non-union workers. If you want a raise, join a union is fast becoming a thing of the past. In the absence of union representation, labor costs decrease at the expense of workers, by reducing wages and benefits.

The recent tax law passed by Congress and signed by Trump gives $1.5 trillion to corporations and the wealthy. Some believe that tax cuts for small businesses offered by the new tax law will increase the pace to form independent contractor small businesses in order to take advantage of these tax cuts. This, however, comes at a cost, as employers shift the cost of wages and benefits -- once hard-fought for by unions -- onto employees.

The Future Workforce

As population grows and automation displaces millions of workers in farming and manufacturing, the levels of unemployment and the number of workers looking for work in the service sector increase. As the tendency toward mass unemployment and the transition from union to non-union, and full-time permanent status to temporary part-time independent contractors, consultants and freelancers increase, so too, has migration, the widening inequality gap and poverty.

The spectrum of the workforce, according to Marx, (the proletariat) spans from those who are working, to the mass unemployed (reserve army of the unemployed), to those who have lost their class identity -- people who are very poor and disenfranchised (the lumpen proletariat). The actively employed are distributed among the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. The reserve army of the unemployed includes the floating, latent and stagnant unemployed. During the last 40 years, while there has been an increase in the number of the actively employed, due to automation and an increase in the working-age portion of the global population, there has also been a significant increase in unemployment.

During this period, the number of workers displaced by automation, plus the increase in population has far outpaced the number of jobs created, both in the US and global economies. During the four decades beginning in 1977, from Presidents Carter to Obama, the US economy created 69.8 million jobs (Carter 10.5 million, Reagan 15.9 million, G.H.W. Bush 2.6 million, Clinton 21.5 million, G.W. Bush 2.1 million, and Obama 17.2 million) -- an average of 1.7 million a year. The workforce grew an average of 1.6 million a year, and the number of yearly unemployed people ranged between 5.6 and 1.5 million. From 1980 to 2014, the number of people living in poverty in the US increased from 29.3 to 46.7 million. From 1990 to 2010, the size of the global workforce increased by 40 percent, or 1.3 billion people to 4.5 billion people. The global industrial reserve army of the unemployed is projected to be 215 million, with only 40 million new jobs added; more than 60 percent of those who are employed are in precarious employment. By 2030, not accounting for population growth, an additional 400 to 800 million will be displaced by automation. These changes in the size of the reserve army of the unemployed tend to create downward pressure on wages and exacerbate unemployment, migration and inequality.

The primary sector includes all non-manufacturing workers in the extractive industries like mining, farming and fishing; the secondary sector includes all industrial/manufacturing workers; and the tertiary sector includes service workers in the public and private spheres. The service sector has expanded as more workers have been displaced by automation in farming and manufacturing. Since 1960, the portion of the workforce in manufacturing decreased from 25 percent to about 8.5 percent of the total workforce in the US. About 80 percent of US workers are now employed in the service sector.

At the other end of the workforce spectrum is the mass unemployed, which includes the floating, latent and stagnant unemployed. The floating unemployed is the most mobile and moves more easily (than those displaced in the farming sector) into and out of manufacturing jobs, depending on whether the economy is expanding or contracting. As automation increases, workers in this sector are expected to increase the number of the precarious independent contractors, consultants and freelancers employed in the gig economy. More than 57 million workers in the US are already employed in the gig economy, most of them in temporary, part-time, low-paid jobs, without any job security or benefits.

The latent unemployed, generally less mobile than the floating unemployed, includes workers displaced from the farming sector, who migrate to urban areas where they compete for precarious employment with unemployed manufacturing workers. The stagnant unemployed, the least mobile and fluid sector, includes both those who are able to work and those who cannot work, such as the elderly and the disabled. As deindustrialization of the economy becomes more acute, the floating and latent sectors will increase the ranks of the poor.

In 2016, the United Nations reported an "unprecedented 65 million people displaced by war and persecution in 2015" and over 160 million others living outside their countries of origin. In 1970, there were 9.6 million immigrants in the US, or 4.7 percent of the population; in 2016, there were 43.7 million, or 13.5 percent of the population. Due to economic plight in the less developed world, immigration has continued to shape the US and global workforces.

The rise in global unemployment driven by innovation, which exacerbates economic plight, as well as natural and human-made disasters like wars, all impact migration patterns. As immigrants impact economic, social and cultural dimensions of host countries, what drives the discourse on immigration in host countries are issues of joblessness and the "threat" immigrants pose to their "values" and customs. The solution proposed by many is to demand that governments do more to manage immigration.

A circumspect review of immigration data dispels these myths about immigrants. The truth is that immigrants inject new energy into the economy, academia, arts and sciences, and technological innovation. As political and economic conditions in the US change, however, many immigrants no longer see the US as their first destination. In fact, the 2016 US census reported that citizens who have chosen to live outside the US have more than doubled from 4 million to 9 million between 1999 and 2016.

Toward Radical Change

As attacks on immigrants and labor unions continue, wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of a few billionaire oligarchs. The richest 42 people on the planet control more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the world's population. In 2017, 57 percent of Americans had less than $1,000 in savings; less than 50 percent  of them have less than $400. In 2015, The American Institutes for Research and National Center on Family Homelessness reported that in the US, there were over 2.5 million homeless in 2012 and between 13.4 million and 16.5 million children living in poverty. Most of Walmart workers earn less than $25,000 last year.

Over the past 40 years, the global economy has followed similar trends. The world's population increased by 3.4 billion and there has been a significant shift toward the service sector, which is also under pressure from automation. The availability of cheap labor as well as high levels of unemployment and the lack of unions in the less industrialized world have maintained and intensified temporary part-time employment that is now trending in many industrialized economies. Twenty percent of organizations globally with more than 1,000 employees have a workforce that is made up of 30 percent or more contingent workers and 162 million people in the US and Europe are engaged in independent work. The US accounts for 53 million. As the gig economy expands, globally, more than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 per day, and 1.3 billion live on less than $1.25 per day in extreme poverty.

Many retired elderly people employed by Amazon, who gave the best years of their lives to their jobs, now live nomadic lives, in makeshift refugee trailer encampments, which they set up serendipitously in parking lots of big box warehouses where they work. Because many of these people's social security checks are generally less than $1,000 a month, they supplement it by working at Amazon and Walmart warehouses, making sub-standard wages in exchange for robotic 10-hour workdays. They can be fired without notice and don't get paid extra if they take longer than the prescribed time to complete their assigned work. Many of them have said that they work sometimes under horrible workplace conditions without any air conditioning or heating. At the same time they are complimented for their work ethic, they are discouraged from talking to union organizers. It has been reported that Amazon warehouses have set up "Li'l Medics" stations and "Urine Color Charts" outside bathroom walls for workers to check the color of their urine to monitor dehydration and to convey the feeling that the company cares about them.

Sadly, these elderly workers, who are made to compete with younger "gigzombies" in their prime working age, have been known to say that they are happy with what they can get, the opportunity to subject themselves to such humiliation. The working conditions in the gig economy is reminiscent of the horrible working conditions experienced almost a hundred years ago, in the 1930s, by San Francisco longshoremen. There is a well-known example of a reported incident after a 700-pound load accidently dropped on the foot of a longshoreman and broke several bones. Employers placed the worker on the no-hire blacklist because they said he had weak bones.

As economic crises become more frequent and acute, and unemployment, migration and inequality reach unacceptable heights, critics have called for a greater role for government. But these trends are systemic and ubiquitous and, as such, a greater role for government and the gig economy are not solutions to these problems. Mass unemployment is the necessary outcome of the accumulation of wealth. Capitalism is an economy driven by profits, which hampers the development of humanity; when profit investment ventures dry up, the system shuts down. A collectivized system where the fruits of human labor are available to all will set free the forces of labor for the benefit of everyone, not just a few.

Workers -- the creators of wealth -- want dignified and creative work, with a shorter workweek and a livable wage with benefits, not a gig economy that is automated and stacked with robotic "gigzombies."

In this respect, there are important lessons to learn from the revolutionary tradition in the US. This tradition has a long history that has inspired subsequent generations to demand a world free of misery, impoverishment, exploitation, oppression and class distinctions. They understood that radical change is not just a thing of the past, but that it requires international solidarity, since the alternative is a life of abject poverty.

2856. How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

By David Reich, The New York Times, March 23, 2018

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

To get a sense of what modern genetic research into average biological differences across populations looks like, consider an example from my own work. Beginning around 2003, I began exploring whether the population mixture that has occurred in the last few hundred years in the Americas could be leveraged to find risk factors for prostate cancer, a disease that occurs 1.7 times more often in self-identified African-Americans than in self-identified European-Americans. This disparity had not been possible to explain based on dietary and environmental differences, suggesting that genetic factors might play a role.

Self-identified African-Americans turn out to derive, on average, about 80 percent of their genetic ancestry from enslaved Africans brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. My colleagues and I searched, in 1,597 African-American men with prostate cancer, for locations in the genome where the fraction of genes contributed by West African ancestors was larger than it was elsewhere in the genome. In 2006, we found exactly what we were looking for: a location in the genome with about 2.8 percent more African ancestry than the average.

When we looked in more detail, we found that this region contained at least seven independent risk factors for prostate cancer, all more common in West Africans. Our findings could fully account for the higher rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans than in European-Americans. We could conclude this because African-Americans who happen to have entirely European ancestry in this small section of their genomes had about the same risk for prostate cancer as random Europeans.

Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.

While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.

But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.

It is not yet clear how these genetic variations operate. A follow-up study of Icelanders led by the geneticist Augustine Kong showed that these genetic variations also nudge people who carry them to delay having children. So these variations may be explaining longer times at school by affecting a behavior that has nothing to do with intelligence.

This study has been joined by others finding genetic predictors of behavior. One of these, led by the geneticist Danielle Posthuma, studied more than 70,000 people and found genetic variations in more than 20 genes that were predictive of performance on intelligence tests.

Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.

To understand why it is so dangerous for geneticists and anthropologists to simply repeat the old consensus about human population differences, consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.

Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.)

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females. The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material — a Y chromosome that males have and that females don’t, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don’t.

Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)

How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

It is clear from the inequities that persist between women and men in our society that fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward. And if this is the case with men and women, then it is surely the case with whatever differences we may find among human populations, the great majority of which will be far less profound.

An abiding challenge for our civilization is to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.

It is important to face whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings. Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.

David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” from which this article is adapted.