26 September 20
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26 September 20
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TOOTH PULLING PROGRESS ON DONATIONS - We are pulling teeth here for donations and by gosh it’s starting to work a little. Little by little we are starting gain a little momentum on the September funding drive. A lot of people are contributing what they can now. Please lend your support. Sincere thanks to all. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Bill McKibben | Vote Like the Future of Humanity Depends on It - Because It Does
Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone
McKibben writes: "To understand the planetary importance of this autumn's presidential election, check the calendar. Voting ends on November 3rd - and by a fluke of timing, on the morning of November 4th the United States is scheduled to pull out of the Paris Agreement."
President Trump announced that we would abrogate our Paris commitments during a Rose Garden speech in 2017. But under the terms of the accords, it takes three years to formalize the withdrawal. So on Election Day it won’t be just Americans watching: The people of the world will see whether the country that has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other over the course of history will become the only country that refuses to cooperate in the one international effort to do something about the climate crisis.
Trump’s withdrawal benefited oil executives, who have donated millions of dollars to his re-election campaign, and the small, strange fringe of climate deniers who continue to insist that the planet is cooling. But most people living in the rational world were appalled. Polling showed widespread opposition, and by some measures, Trump is more out of line with the American populace on environmental issues than any other. In his withdrawal announcement he said he’d been elected “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”; before the day was out, Pittsburgh’s mayor had pledged that his city would follow the guidelines set in the French capital. Young people, above all, have despised the president’s climate moves: Poll after poll shows that climate change is a top-tier issue with them and often the most important one — mostly, I think, because they’ve come to understand how tightly linked it is not just to their future but to questions of justice, equity, and race.
Here’s the truth: At this late date, meeting the promises set in Paris will be nowhere near enough. If you add up the various pledges that nations made at that conference, they plan on moving so timidly that the planet’s temperature will still rise more than 3 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels. So far, we’ve raised the mercury 1 degree Celsius, and that’s been enough to melt millions of square miles of ice in the Arctic, extend fire seasons for months, and dramatically alter the planet’s rainfall patterns. Settling for 3 degrees is kind of like writing a global suicide note.
Happily, we could go much faster if we wanted. The price of solar and wind power has fallen so fast and so far in the last few years that they are now the cheapest power on Earth. There are plenty of calculations to show it will soon be cheaper to build solar and wind farms than to operate the fossil fuel power stations we’ve already built. Climate-smart investments are also better for workers and economic equality. “We need to have climate justice, which means to invest in green energy, [which] creates three times more jobs than to invest in fossil fuel energy,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now in September. If we wanted to make it happen, in other words, an energy revolution is entirely possible. The best new study shows that the United States could cut its current power sector emissions 80 percent by 2035 and create 20 million jobs along the way.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t pledged to move that quickly, but their climate plan is the farthest-reaching of any presidential ticket in history. More to the point, we can pressure them to go farther and faster. Already, seeing the polling on the wall, they’ve adopted many of the proposals of climate stalwarts like Washington Governor Jay Inslee. A team of Biden and Bernie Sanders representatives worked out a pragmatic but powerful compromise in talks before the Democratic National Convention; the Biden-Harris ticket seems primed to use a transition to green energy as a crucial part of a push to rebuild the pandemic-devastated economy.
Perhaps most important, they’ve pledged to try to lead the rest of the world in the climate fight. The United States has never really done this. Our role as the single biggest producer of hydrocarbons has meant that our response to global warming has always been crippled by the political power of Big Oil. But that power has begun to slip. Once the biggest economic force on the planet, the oil industry is a shadow of its former self. (You could buy all the oil companies in America for less than the cost of Apple; Tesla is worth more than any other auto company on Earth.) And so it’s possible that the hammerlock on policy exercised by this reckless industry will loosen if Trump is beaten.
But only if he’s beaten. Four more years will be enough to cement in place his anti-environmental policies and to make sure it’s too late to really change course. The world’s climate scientists declared in 2018 that if we had any chance of meeting sane climate targets, we had to cut emissions almost in half by 2030. That’s less than 10 years away. We’re at the last possible moment to turn the wheel of the supertanker that is our government. Captain Trump wants to steer us straight onto the rocks, mumbling all the while about hoaxes. If we let him do it, history won’t forgive us. Nor will the rest of the world.
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Judge Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT)
Trump Selects Amy Coney Barrett to Fill Ginsburg's Seat on the Supreme Court
Tucker Higgins, CNBC
Higgins writes: "President Donald Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, NBC News has learned."
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James Baldwin. (photo: unknown)
Fern Marja Eckman | Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview With James Baldwin
Fern Marja Eckman, The New Yorker
Eckman writes: "James Baldwin's first biographer was my aunt Fern Marja Eckman, a prize-winning feature writer and reporter for the New York Post."
After Baldwin’s biographer died, her niece opened an old desk drawer and discovered a trove of interview material, some of it unpublished.
She died in 2019, at the age of a hundred and three. As her closest living relative, I cleaned out her apartment. Hidden in a concealed drawer of an old mahogany desk, I found transcripts of interviews that she had conducted with Baldwin. Some of that material was included in her book, “The Furious Passage of James Baldwin,” which was published, in 1966, by M. Evans & Company. It is especially interesting to read the carefully typed transcripts of their conversations in light of our current moment.
With the encouragement of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the chair of the department of African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of a current best-seller on Baldwin, “Begin Again,” I am making more of this interview material public. The session captured below, part of which appeared in my aunt’s book, is particularly relevant. It took place on the afternoon of October 9, 1963, just two days after Baldwin returned to New York from Selma, Alabama, where he had taken part in “Freedom Day,” a Black voter-registration drive organized by the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Selma is a town in Dallas County, part of the so-called Black Belt, where Black voting registration was almost nonexistent. In Dallas County, the population at the time was fifty-eight per cent Black; only one per cent of the Black population was registered to vote. More than eighty per cent of the Black population in Dallas County lived under the poverty line and was routinely disqualified from voting by literacy tests and other restrictions. The registration rate among the white population was sixty-four per cent.
The historian Howard Zinn, who attended the march as an adviser to SNCC, wrote in his memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” “The idea was to bring hundreds of people to register to vote, hoping that their numbers would decrease fear.” In Selma, Baldwin marched alongside SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, and other activists. “Freedom Day,” 1963, was a forerunner to events in Alabama in 1965––the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the march from Selma to Montgomery––that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
At the time of the interview, Baldwin was already a major literary star. He had recently published “Another Country,” as well as “The Fire Next Time,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and was riding high on the best-seller lists. He and my aunt were joined at the table by Baldwin’s brother David. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Leslie J. Freeman
James Baldwin: On Sunday morning [October 6, 1963], James Forman called me and asked me if I would come down that night. The reason was that he had designated October 7th as “Freedom Day,” and that involved a tremendous registration drive. He wanted to make sure that we’d get more than the usual press coverage and that I would write about it and speak that evening at the mass rally. So, in a way, I was being used as bait. I wasn’t at all sure I could. Then I thought about it and I got my ticket, and we flew down, David and I.
He wanted me to get down early because he wanted to brief me on the situation in Selma, Alabama, which is a town I’d never seen, and to prepare me for what Monday would be like. I must say, in that he completely failed. No one could have prepared me for Monday.
We got to Selma early Monday morning, about 1:30 a.m. Alabama time. And we had a talk. Jim gave me some idea of the town itself. The proportion of Negroes is something like fifty-eight per cent, which is, of course, the key to the whole battle. It’s a cotton town. And poor.
We were sitting around talking. You would be aware of—sudden silence fell. And then you’d realize that a car was coming. And that everyone was listening . . . for a car. And, of course, you did, too. You’d see the lights of the car pass the window, in this total silence, and you’d be aware that everyone, including you, was waiting for bullets or a bomb. And the car would pass, and you’d go to the blinds and look out.
Then we’d start talking again. This went on the whole time we were talking. During this same conversation, Prathia Hall, [a SNCC field secretary] who was later arrested, went to the phone. We couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, but we heard Prathia saying, “What happened there? How are your wife and children?” And, “Did you know who they were?” Which is sufficiently disturbing. It turned out that a man named Porter found two white men under his house, fiddling with his gas pipe, at two-thirty in the morning. It was his dog who barked and alerted him. The next day, we saw Porter, and we learned they had come and killed his dog. Then we went out to the [voter-registration] line.
Fern Marja Eckman: Were you scared?
J.B.: Yeah! I was scared physically, because I knew what could happen, and I was scared because I didn’t know how to handle myself. The Deep South depends on a certain kind of—I didn’t want to get anybody else in trouble. I didn’t know what I would say to any of those cops. It’s a principal terror when I’m there. There’s a weird kind of etiquette which I can’t observe, because I wasn’t born there, and you can’t learn it.
We got there around 9:45 a.m. The press people were out there. I don’t know if I can explain to you what it means in a town like that to get that many Negroes out to stand on line to vote.
F.M.E.: Well, try to tell me.
J.B.: Well, it’s almost impossible, you know. Here is a town that’s ruled by terror, that’s ruled by mob. The white population and the police are all the mob, and there’s no protection for any Negro in the town of any kind whatever. You cannot call the police. You’d be out of your mind. And the Negroes are not armed. They cannot protect themselves. It’s not a rich town, so everyone there is, in one way or another, dependent for his livelihood on some white man. Now, to get, as Jim did, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes out to vote—
F.M.E.: How long had they been working on that?
J.B.: They’d been working on it since February. A fantastic thing, you know, to be able to do. Fantastic!
F.M.E.: What age ranges were they?
J.B.: They were from sixty to twenty-one, but the higher proportion of people in the line were young people. The older people in one way or another are, in general, too victimized, too intimidated, too tired, you know? It was the kids—obviously, most of the kids—who led the registration drive.
It was very peaceful in the beginning. We walked up and down the line. Jim was proselytizing as he went. It was very impressive to see. I guess we wandered about for an hour, talking to various people, who kept coming. But no Negro had gone through the doors as of yet. No Negro did go through those doors until ten-thirty, and it was not because there was a great press of people inside. They were determined not to register any Negroes. They dawdled as long as they could. We went away about eleven, and when we came back the posse was out. With green helmets.
F.M.E.: The storm troopers.
J.B.: The storm troopers, yes. And the state troopers’ cars.
David Baldwin: They weren’t in yet.
J.B.: That’s right. There were so many it’s hard to remember the colors. Orange helmets. Orange and blue and green helmets.
D.B.: The blue ones were state troopers. The orange and the green are the posse.
J.B.: Yes. The posse was so many people. The sheriff––Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark––had deputized anybody who could carry a gun.
D.B.: And white.
J.B.: And white, yes. I should have pointed that out. [Laughs.] It was the orange deputies first. The other cats didn’t come in until later. But, still, everything was very peaceful. We could still talk to the people on the line, and the line was still stretched around the corner. And there was no real hassle. There was only a very faint harbinger of what was to come in the fact that these men behind with the helmets kept saying, “You’re blocking the sidewalk. Move along, move along.” And so on. We kept moving. But there was no question about whether or not we could talk to people.
I guess the crisis began around noon. Just before noon. When did the sheriff get there?
D.B.: The sheriff got there, say, around eleven-thirty.
J.B.: Yes, it was something like that. The sheriff said that the people, if they left the line, they couldn’t get their place back in line. They’d been standing there for more than two hours and couldn’t leave the line to go to the bathroom. Lunchtime was coming, and they were going to close the courthouse for an hour. But the Negroes were not allowed to leave under any pretext whatever.
So Jim decided they had to feed people. We got some money together and went out and got a whole lot of—made up a whole lot of sandwiches. I’m telescoping the story a little now, because lots of things happened in between, which was really a stepping up of pressure. The pressure of us keeping moving got greater and greater. I must go into that whole “keep moving along” bit, because the pressure was there, you know—CBS and cameras, and microphones and things.
F.M.E.: And surely some newspaper reporters?
J.B.: Newspaper reporters, yes, but also cameras––and they were talking to me. And, whenever this happened, along came the deputies, saying, “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” We kept moving, from the sidewalk to the grass, and from the grass to someplace else. We kept moving. And as we moved these men would stick behind us, and that’s how we ended up in the streets. Then we had to move from there. We were “blocking the sidewalk.” No matter where you were, you were blocking traffic.
F.M.E.: How was their manner?
J.B.: The only word I can find for it was that it was mindless. They sounded like parrots. It was the only phrase they ever used: “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” And also, I must say, when I finally looked into their faces, they were terrified. With their guns and their helmets. And terrified in a very strange way. Terrified as the mindless are terrified. Because the only way they could react to any pressure was a rock or bullet or gun. They don’t have any other defenses at all! This is the police force the Southern oligarchy has used and created to protect their interests.
Finally, after all this “moving along” bit, Jim Forman wanted to go into the courthouse––a federal courthouse. We started in, and the two guards at the door said we couldn’t come in. And Jim Forman said, “You know, we have to go upstairs to the courthouse. What do you mean we can’t come in?” And they just repeated the same phrase: “You can’t come in.” And when we said, “Why can’t we come in?” “You can’t come in.” And Jim said, “Do you mean you’re forbidding us to enter a federal courthouse?” And he, the first guard, said, “You have to ask him about that.” The other guard looked away, and the first guard finally said, “The chief of this operation”—or whatever phrase he used—said we had to come in “through the front door.” So we went around to the front door, where the line was, and Sheriff Clark said we couldn’t get in there. We had to go around to the side door, so we went around to the side door again, and the guard said we couldn’t get in. And then, you know, we’re standing there, trying to figure out what to do next, and he said, “You’re blocking the door.” [Laughs.] So we moved to the side. This is all happening under the eyes of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., by the way.
F.M.E.: What did they do? They stood and watched?
J.B.: And taking pictures. And making phone calls. I guess it was after that that the trouble with the food started. Around twelve-thirty, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, one of the activists in Selma, and I came back with her car. We didn’t realize we were going to have any trouble about that. I don’t know when I realized it, because Jim and Mrs. Boynton knew it first. They were dealing with the sheriff. We were on the other side of the street. And by this time the state troopers were there. Twelve cars, bumper to bumper. And all their helmets on. I forget the color of their helmets. Blue or green.
D.B.: Blue ones.
J.B.: The helmets were like a garden. So many colors. And, with their guns and their clubs and their cattle prods, they pushed Jim once and one of the Negro photographers. Not with the cattle prod but with a stick. But nothing else. Anyway, the climate was much more tense. And there was a gang of white hangers-on.
F.M.E.: Were you scared?
J.B.: I was furious.
D.B.: I was scared and furious.
J.B.: I was scared in the morning, before it all began, and I was scared the first time I walked around there. But, later on, I wasn’t scared at all. That’s exactly what happened. Your fear is swallowed up by—
F.M.E.: Fury.
J.B.: Fury! Yeah. What you really want to do is kill all those people.
D.B.: Exactly.
J.B.: And you feel that so strongly that you haven’t got time to be afraid. And those faces—my God. You know? The faces of the white in the South is a real blasphemy. Anyway, we started trying to feed the people. Mrs. Boynton came back to report to Jim Forman that the sheriff was not allowing anybody to talk to anybody on the line. And Jim wasn’t talking to anybody on the line. You were not allowed to talk to them.
F.M.E.: Did they give you any explanations?
J.B.: No. The food issue began to be crucial, because if you couldn’t talk to them you couldn’t feed them. And we had all these sandwiches.
F.M.E.: And they’d be tired and have to leave.
J.B.: Well, they didn’t. As a matter of fact, as far as I could tell, nobody left.
F.M.E.: Was it terribly hot?
J.B.: It was very hot. And there they stood. They were leaning on one another’s shoulders, and they took off their shoes and stood around. It turned out we couldn’t even get close enough to the line, as somebody figured out, to put all the sandwiches in a shopping bag and carry it to the end of the line and have those sandwiches passed up by the people on the line. Kind of a bucket-brigade thing. Then Jim and Mrs. Boynton and I walked over to talk to the sheriff. Mrs. Boynton and Jim said that the people had been standing there for a long time, and it was hot, and they were hungry. We had food for them—we’d like to feed them. The sheriff said, “I’ll not have them molested in any way.” Mrs. Boynton said, “We’re not trying to molest them. We’re trying to feed them.” And the sheriff said again—he said it four times, no matter what anybody said. Four times. And this had been the pattern of the whole morning, as though they’d learned one phrase.
F.M.E.: Isn’t there a sign in the zoo—“Don’t feed the animals”? Sometimes they say, “Don’t molest the animals.”
J.B.: That’s probably where he got it from. “I will not have them molested in any way.” And, finally, Jim said, “Are you really forbidding us to talk to these people and feed these people? Don’t you know that’s against the law?” And the sheriff said, “I don’t care if it’s against the law—that’s my order.” And he turned away, with his fat behind and his fat face. And his helmet.
F.M.E.: What’s his name?
J.B.: “Big Jim” Clark. I wish to God that somebody’d blow his head off.
F.M.E.: Wouldn’t help. There’d be another one just like him.
J.B.: No, it would help. There are some people whose only reason to be, whose only human use, is that they should come to a violent death. Their only human use.
F.M.E.: How were the three hundred and seventy-five people on the line? How did they behave?
J.B.: They were very orderly. They were absolutely silent, and they were just standing there. They didn’t say a word to any of us, because we couldn’t get anywhere near them.
F.M.E.: How far away from them were you?
J.B.: We were on the other side of the street. Jim then decided he would take the sandwiches over. And David said, “You’d be playing into their hands if you do. You’re in charge of this operation. If you take the sandwiches over, they’ll put you in jail, and so that destroys your usefulness for the foreseeable—for the rest of this day, anyway.” And, in the same way, Jim thought maybe I should carry one of the registration signs, and David said, “Well, you know, in that case, Jimmy will be arrested, and he’s got to address the mass meeting tonight. They’ll be delighted to have him in jail.” And we prevailed upon Jim not to take the sandwiches. And two boys, [the SNCC activists] Carver Neblett and Avery Williams, about twenty and twenty-one, volunteered to take the sandwiches over, and, well, they did.
D.B.: There was a whole load of sandwiches, and they wouldn’t let them take no more than a little box. They knew—
J.B.: They went over with these sandwiches. You know, a handful of sandwiches. And from across the street we saw the two boys. They approached the sheriff together and were arguing with the sheriff, obviously. The sheriff struck one of them, and then the other boy went down. The posse closed in, and you could see them kicking them. And they were using the cattle prod on them. The cameramen were trying to get this. And the posse—half the posse—was on these two kids, and the other part of the posse was beating up a cameraman and jumping up with their helmets in front of the cameras, to prevent anything from being seen. This is also happening under the eyes of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. And they finally carried the boys around the corner and threw them into a bus. It’s the last we ever saw of them—for the day.
When the posse started beating up these kids, the mob rushed forward, as though someone had blown a whistle—and this was the signal for slaughter. I’ll never forget that. Because that was what this town is like.
F.M.E.: How large a white crowd was there?
J.B.: It got bigger as it went on. They were integrated with the posse, because they’d driven us away. We were driven off the sidewalk, and we found ourselves on the federal-courthouse steps, where we thought we were protected, and where the sheriff had already arrested three boys carrying voter-registration signs.
F.M.E.: What was the charge?
J.B.: Unlawful assembly. We all had to stand on the federal-courthouse steps. We couldn’t stand anyplace else. And I went inside. The F.B.I. was picking up statements, for what reason I cannot imagine. I went inside to give a statement, and while I was inside David and the cameramen and everybody—this is an integrated crowd—came in to report that the sheriff had driven them off the steps of the federal courthouse.
F.M.E.: Were the reporters friendly?
J.B.: The reporters were very friendly.
D.B.: It was the reporters who asked them if it was against the law to drive us off the federal-courthouse steps. And the F.B.I. man said, “Yes, it’s against the law.” By this time, you’re quite mad. You ask if it’s against the law and they ask you if you had a statement to make. In my statement, I said I’d had sixteen months in Korea. And what for?
J.B.: Yes. The moral of the story, Fern, is that what really happened was that three hundred and seventy-five people who are American citizens, whom the government would put in jail if they didn’t pay their taxes, would put in jail if they did not serve in the Army—this same government says, and makes it known, they can’t do anything to protect them. There were three hundred and seventy-five people in that street yesterday who could have been shot down under the eyes of the F.B.I., and the government could have done nothing about it. All these people were jeopardizing their lives, their jobs, their children, everything they had in order to stand on that line in order to vote, which is an American right and duty. And the government of the U.S., which can mount invasions of Cuba and “protect” the Vietnamese, cannot protect these people! That’s a lie. The government can do anything it wants to do. What it means is that the government does not dare yet to offend the Southern oligarchy. It’s not the F.B.I. who does it, you know, it’s really the power of all these people in Congress who are Southerners, and the fact that Bobby Kennedy doesn’t dare attack them. The Administration doesn’t give a damn.
The terrible bargain America struck, when the North and South agreed they were going to use the Negro both as agrarian cheap labor and as industrial cheap labor—do you know? And the South created that mindless mob, which rules the South in order to protect the Southern interests and continue to keep the Negro in his place. It’s a creation of the American government.
And, really, you know, finally, the poor white is the great victim in the South. He’s the real victim. It makes him humanly useless and monstrous. But that is the crime. And the Administration is still playing footsie with these people, you know? The judges Kennedy has appointed in the South are designed to protect the oligarchy. This has the effect of exposing, for example, to loss of life, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes yesterday in Selma.
F.M.E.: How did they make it so only fifty could register?
J.B.: What? Fifty, baby? I’m sorry—the last count we had in Selma was twelve to twenty. All day long.
F.M.E.: I thought the Times said—
J.B.: The Times was wrong! The Times doesn’t talk to the Negroes on the line. The first woman came out at eleven o’clock. She went in at ten-thirty. She’d been there since twenty to nine. From nine o’clock until four-thirty, twelve to twenty people registered, all of whom are going to fail the test by the time the next registration day comes around.
D.B.: Doctors, lawyers, teachers are going to fail the test.
J.B.: And the government can’t do anything about it. There were certain things I realized sitting in Selma and watching the local news, for instance. The implication is that the Negroes are so passive that they don’t want to vote. That it’s only people like Jim Forman and Jimmy Baldwin who stir them up. And, even then, they only had a hundred and fifty. And the sheriff kept everything very orderly.
The real drama is the fact that the people can’t vote and the government won’t help them, and that they’re living in a police state with the collusion of the federal government. The last thing we heard as we left Selma, early the next morning, was a housewife saying, “I think I’d better get a gun.” This is a Christian housewife. She said, “I’d better get a gun.” I saw the guns out down there.
And when they shut down [the registration], this whole line of Negroes, just walking by the courthouse, marching in twos—they didn’t get a chance to vote. They all stayed there all day long. You know the day is coming when they will no longer go to the courthouse for redress of grievances. And, when that day comes, the country will have no one to blame but itself.
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William Barr. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
DOJ's Rush to Report on 'Discarded Ballots' Raises Fears of Pro-Trump Bias
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Experts say decision to publish findings of investigation into possible ballot irregularities in Pennsylvania is highly unusual - and deeply concerning."
t was a story that seemed tailor-made for Donald Trump: election officials in an important Pennsylvania county were caught discarding nine ballots from military voters that had been cast for the president.
That’s what federal prosecutors said on Thursday happened in Luzerne county, a key Pennsylvania county in the north-east of the state that Trump flipped in 2016. William Barr, the attorney general, personally briefed Trump on the matter. Trump and the White House hyped the announcement even before the justice department made the announcement. Afterwards, Trump seized on it to support their argument that voting by mail leads to fraud – a lie that several studies have disproved.
But the Pennsylvania story federal prosecutors initially released turned out to be misleading and incomplete. Hours after releasing the statement, the DoJ removed it from its website and issued a revised statement saying that while investigators had recovered nine ballots, they could only determine that seven of them were cast for Trump. Later, the department released a third statement detailing some of the early findings of its investigation. While the letter noted that officials had in fact discovered “discarded” ballots (it did not define the term), it suggested that administrative error may have played a role.
A half-baked public statement from the DoJ is extremely unusual, former department employees said, noting that the department’s own handbook cautions prosecutors to minimize any impact an investigation could have on an election. Even when it does make a public statement in an election fraud investigation, DoJ officials do not typically say who ballots were cast for. The episode further raised alarms that the president could use perhaps the most powerful law enforcement apparatus in the country to support his re-election bid.
“It is a violation of DoJ policy to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. By making an exception to that rule, the US attorney is creating the appearance that he is using his office to advance the political agenda of President Trump,” said Barbara McQuade, who served as a US attorney in Michigan during the Obama administration.
In Pennsylvania, election officials are prohibited from opening mail-in ballots until election day. But overseas and military voters, who can use a different set of procedures to vote, can return ballot requests and ballots themselves in similar envelopes. Election officials in Luzerne county told investigators it can be difficult to distinguish between an actual ballot and a ballot request, so they opened almost all envelopes that arrived in their office to make sure they didn’t miss any requests.
“Our interviews further revealed that this issue was a problem in the primary election – therefore a known issue – and that the problem has not been corrected,” David Freed, the US attorney for the middle district of Pennsylvania, wrote in his letter.
David Pedri, the county manager, said in a statement Friday that a seasonal contractor, hired on 14 September, was responsible for sorting the mail and had discarded the ballots into the office trash. Shelby Watchilla, the county’s election director, discovered the problem on 16 September and brought it to the attention of county officials, who subsequently contacted law enforcement. Federal agents searched the trash for all three days the contractor was employed and elections officials did not know the for whom the ballots were cast until the DoJ’s Thursday announcement, Pedri said. The county is also offering additional training for employees and has a video camera to monitor activities in the office.
“While the actions of this individual has cast a concern, the above statement shows that the system of checks and balances set forth in Pennsylvania elections works. An error was made, a public servant discovered it and reported it to law enforcement at the local, state and federal level who took over to ensure the integrity of the system in place,” Pedri said in a statement.
“The Luzerne county voters should be assured that the election will move forward with transparency and integrity. Every properly cast vote will be counted.”
Freed publicly announced some of his investigative findings a little over a week after his office took over the probe at the request of the Luzerne county district attorney. Some of the preliminary findings on their face appear alarming – in addition to the nine military ballots in question, Freed also said his office found “four apparently official, bar-coded, absentee ballot envelopes that were empty.” A majority of the materials, he wrote, were found in a dumpster outside the office. Freed said in his Thursday letter he was disclosing the information based on “the vital public importance of these issues.”
While the investigation may be justified, there was no need to release a list of unconfirmed facts, said Justin Levitt, a former top official in the justice department’s civil rights division.
“Minor mistake, fine for DoJ to follow up. Investigation seems unremarkable,” said Levitt, a professor at Loyola law school in Los Angeles. “Telling the White House is a problem. You don’t tell the White House about a pending investigation because political folks might misuse that info (exactly as they did).”
“You don’t do a press release on starting an investigation, you don’t do a press release with partial (and unconfirmed) facts, and you absolutely 100% no question don’t do a press release mentioning the candidate. There’s zero legit reason for that candidate information,” he added.
Disclosing preliminary findings without a full picture, however, can sow doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots, said David Iglesias, who served as a US attorney in New Mexico under George W Bush.
He added he couldn’t think of any good law enforcement reason to publicly share the Luzerne finding so early, “just political ones.”
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Doctors protest outside a detention center in Pompano Beach, Florida, to demand that ICE release immigrants from detention and ensure they receive testing and treatment for the coronavirus. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A Congressional Oversight Committee Found That ICE Detainees Died After Receiving Poor Medical Care
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "The House Oversight Committee has found that ICE detainees died after receiving inadequate medical care and that jail staff 'falsified records to cover up' issues, according to a report released on Thursday."
“While the medical examiner ruled the cause of death ‘undetermined,’ the complete lack of medical leadership, supervision and care that this detainee was exposed to is simply astonishing," the report states.
Committee staffers visited several for-profit detention centers during the course of their investigation and reviewed 60,000 pages of records related to the care of immigrants. The report also frequently cited in its findings a memo obtained by BuzzFeed News that revealed a whistleblower’s complaint alleging that care at several facilities overseen by ICE was so dire, it resulted in two preventable surgeries, including an 8-year-old boy who had to have part of his forehead removed, and contributed to four deaths.
The allegations in the whistleblower memo are still being investigated by Congress, according to the report released Thursday.
“The Committee’s investigation shines a critical new light on the failures of the Administration’s immigration detention system and the deaths of immigrants in custody,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the committee. “This staff report and the documents the Committee obtained explain how the Administration and its private prison contractors have let known problems fester into a full-blown crisis — a crisis that has become far worse during the coronavirus pandemic.”
ICE has come under fire in recent years for issues related to medical care provided within its detention centers. The agency’s detention system relies on a variety of methods to provide medical care. In some facilities, ICE provides it directly; in others, it has a few ICE employees assist private or public contractors; and in many, it oversees care provided by a contractor.
The committee staff focused much of its efforts on immigrants in for-profit detention facilities and the deaths of immigrant detainees.
Committee staffers found that Huy Chi Tran, a 47-year-old man who died in June 2018 at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona — operated by private contractor CoreCivic — had been placed in solitary confinement.
“CoreCivic detention staff were supposed to check on Mr. Tran every 15 minutes, but the detention officer on duty left Mr. Tran unsupervised for 51 minutes just before Mr. Tran’s cardiac arrest that led to his death,” the report found, citing an internal ICE document. “Investigators found that the officer falsified observation logs to hide the fact that he had failed to conduct welfare checks over that 51-minute period.”
The report cited the whistleblower memo obtained by BuzzFeed News that stated that “ICE health officials were ‘informed of multiple concerns regarding the care provided at the facility, particularly the facility’s psychiatrist misdiagnosing, failing to treat detainees appropriately, and the lack of readily available emergency medications.’”
The report also highlighted the death of Kamyar Samimi, a 64-year-old man who died in late 2017 at the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado, which is operated by Geo Group. The committee obtained an ICE death review and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties report on the matter, both of which documented deficiencies at the facility.
For example, the ICE report found that facility staff “failed to transfer Samimi to an ER even though he exhibited life-threatening withdrawal symptoms during the week following his intake,” and that nurses in charge of his care were not trained in understanding opioid withdrawal symptoms.
“While the medical examiner ruled the cause of death ‘undetermined,’ the complete lack of medical leadership, supervision and care that this detainee was exposed to is simply astonishing and stands out as one of the most egregious failures to provide optimal care in my experience,” a medical expert examining the case found. “The magnitude of failures to care for this detainee is only surpassed by the number of such failures.”
The committee also examined the case of Vicente Caceres-Maradiaga, 46, who died at the Adelanto Detention Facility in May 2017 of an enlarged heart and liver. His blood pressure went “unmonitored while detained,” the committee report states.
The congressional investigators obtained an internal report from the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties that found: “The failure to hire an effective and qualified clinical leader contributed to the inadequate detainee medical care that resulted in medical injuries, including bone deformities and detainee deaths, and continues to pose a risk to the safety of other detainees at ACF.”
Committee staffers said the documents they obtained showed that there were “glaring deficiencies” with the medical care provided to detainees and cited issues included in an ICE report at a facility in Ohio as an example.
“This report substantiated an allegation of an ‘unacceptably long’ delay in treatment for a detainee with possible lymph node cancer even after an outside doctor wrote to the facility stressing the urgency of treatment,” the committee wrote. “The report concluded, 'This delay and [sic] resulted in an effective denial in access to care for a serious medical condition.'”
The report also documented general issues with the conditions within government detention facilities.
“Many ICE facilities, including those that house children, have had repeated sanitation problems, including dirty and moldy bathrooms, insufficient clean clothing, unsanitized dishes, dirty food preparation and service areas, and a lack of soap, toilet paper, paper towels, clean razors, and other hygiene items,” the report states.
Stacey Daniels, ICE's director of public affairs, said in a statement that the agency "is fully committed to the health and safety of those in our care and will review the committee’s report."
"However, it is clear this one-sided review of our facilities was done to tarnish our agency’s reputation, as opposed to actually reviewing the care detainees receive while in our custody," she added. "Improvements to civil detention are based on concrete recommendations from the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and an aggressive inspections program, which includes formal facility inspections, independent third-party compliance reviews, daily on-site compliance reviews and targeted site visits. The agency also maintains a toll-free service that provides a direct channel for detainees, their attorneys, and other stakeholders to communicate with ICE about detainee concerns or conditions of confinement.”
In a statement, Geo Group said it "strongly reject[s] these baseless allegations, which are part of another politically driven report that ignores more than three decades of providing high-quality services to those in [its] care."
"The Adelanto ICE Processing Center provides safe and humane residential care and high quality 24/7 medical services," a company spokesperson said. "The health services department at the center employs approximately 79 health services professionals, including; three doctors, five dental professionals, and forty-three nurses, as well as seven mental health professionals, including two psychiatrists.
"In 2019, the health services team provided more than 54,000 medical encounters, over 3,100 dental encounters, and over 20,000 mental health encounters to individuals at the center. In all of 2019, the center processed approximately 8,000 individuals in and approximately 8,200 individuals out of the center."
A CoreCivic spokesperson also said the company "is committed to the safety and health of every individual in our care."
"We don’t provide the healthcare in the majority of our immigration facilities. In most cases, comprehensive medical, mental health and dental care is provided for by the ICE Health Services Corps," the spokesperson said in a statement. "Where we do provide care, our clinics are staffed with licensed, credentialed doctors, nurses and mental health professionals who contractually meet the highest standards of care."
ICE officials have long said that they are dedicated to providing timely and comprehensive medical care to immigrants in their custody, noting that they have access to a daily sick call and 24-hour emergency care.
The agency has also been criticized for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic in detention facilities.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, detainees and immigrant advocates have highlighted the health threats posed by the highly contagious disease for those in ICE custody. The agency has attempted to assure congressional officials and the public that it has carefully examined the issue and has even released certain “vulnerable" detainees as a precaution.
Earlier this week, a separate committee report issued by the House Homeland Security Committee found that ICE detainees are often given deficient medical care and that detention centers use segregation as a threat against immigrants.
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Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (photo: AFP)
The Raids Against the Opposition in Turkey Show Erdogan's Weakness
Max Zirngast, Jacobin
Zirngast writes: "This morning, Turkish police arrested 82 leading members of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish HDP, while also mounting a separate assault on the opposition in Istanbul."
This morning, Turkish police arrested 82 leading members of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish HDP, while also mounting a separate assault on the opposition in Istanbul. As its own social base crumbles under the weight of economic and public-health crises, Erdoğan’s regime is mounting an increasingly desperate campaign against “the enemy within.”
Such news is hardly uncommon. Just two weeks ago, there was a concerted raid against the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi, ESP), with seventeen people first taken into custody and then detained.
But this morning’s raids were a much vaster operation, spanning many provinces all over the country. As the picture became clearer, we came to understand that there were actually two separate attacks going on — with two related but different targets.
The first series of raids, conducted by the chief prosecutor in Ankara, was directed against the leftist, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The HDP has been a thorn in the side of the regime for years, particularly after it managed to enter parliament in 2015 despite the 10 percent threshold for representation.
The official justification was that the raids happened because of the so-called “Kobanê events” of October 6–8, 2014. That’s right — a lightning police response to events that took place six years ago.
“Kobanê events” refers to what happened in late 2014, when the self-declared Islamic State began to attack the Kurdish city of Kobanê in northern Syria, on the border with Turkey. As a result, clashes broke out in several cities in Turkey, particularly in the Kurdish southeast. This is the pretext on which leading HDP politicians are now being taken into custody.
The arrestees include the joint mayor of Kars, Ayhan Bilgen; the former MP and movie director Sırrı Süreyya Önder; the former MPs Altan Tan, Emine Ayna, and Nazmi Gür; and former and current HDP central executive board members such as the academic Beyza Üstün, the feminist researcher Gülfer Akkaya, the socialist writer and Abstrakt editor Alp Altınörs, Can Memiş, Günay Kubilay, and Dilek Yağlı. Overall, there are said to be warrants for eighty-two people in seven provinces.
A particularly tasty nugget of information for understanding what is going on is that Ankara chief prosecutor Yüksel Kocaman, who initiated this attack, was only recently a guest in president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s palace after getting married. Together with his wife, Kocaman took the time to pose for a picture with the president.
Twitter Coup?
However, there also was a second series of raids, directed by prosecutors in Istanbul. Officially, it appears as if this second attack is directed against a loose platform called “Movement of the Nameless,” which is active on social media with hashtag campaigns on Twitter.
The people taken into custody in supposed connection to that platform in fact seem rather random, even if they do represent various elements of the leftist and social opposition in Istanbul. Arrestees include the lawyer Tamer Doğan; the writer and intellectual Temel Demirer; the writer and spokesperson for the Party of Social Freedom (Toplumsal Özgürlük Partisi, TÖP) Perihan Koca; and the writer and journalist Hakan Gülseven.
While lawyers have not been able to access the case files yet, it appears that the charge is “coup attempt via social media.” Further information seems to suggest that the Turkish state wants to present the “Movement of the Nameless” as a terrorist organization that seeks to stage a coup via tweets.
While the justifications for both these attacks are absurd, the target of each is relatively clear. In the first case, the target is the Kurdish movement and particularly the HDP; in the second, it’s the social opposition that crystallized in the Gezi Uprising in 2013. While there are currently no protests of that scale, the regime around Erdoğan still fears that a coalition of social dynamics similar to Gezi could take to the streets again.
But there are also deeper objective factors behind these assaults. The social and economic crises in Turkey are constantly deepening, and the regime seems to be unable to get them under control. The pandemic was horrendously mishandled, hospitals are overloaded, health workers are dying, and even the doctors’ association is protesting the government’s handling of the crisis.
A recent ill-fated attempt to discredit the protesting doctors by Erdoğan ally Devlet Bahçeli of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) backfired, as the doctors were defend by large swaths of society. Added to that, the economic crisis continuously worsens, and the impoverishment of the population is advancing rapidly.
No wonder social support for the regime is dwindling. The most recent poll shows the pro-regime coalition of the AKP and MHP parties with a combined score of 38.8 percent. Thus, while the regime has more or less established full control over all the central organs of the state, it still lacks social legitimacy. It is attempting to solve this crisis through more and more violence, directed both externally and internally. The troubled relations with more or less all neighboring countries are an indication of the former trend; this morning’s attacks are further proof of the latter.
Wider Clampdown
It is very clear that, with these attacks and the recent raids against the ESP, the regime is testing the waters. Very likely, this will be only the beginning of a campaign against all political and social opposition in Turkey, which could eventually encompass even the bourgeois opposition. If this strategy works, we could be faced with snap elections very soon.
Yet there is also resistance. Even though it is difficult to take to the streets in mass numbers in these days, declarations of solidarity have been made in many cities across the country already.
Furthermore, the regime has not been able to get social media under its control, as much as it wishes. A recently passed internet law to be enforced starting October 1 attempts to accomplish this. The law will essentially require all companies to have a representative based in Turkey and to share information with the Turkish state. It is yet to be seen if companies like YouTube and Twitter, which are important platforms of the opposition, will comply with this demand — and what will happen if they don’t.
For the time being, it is paramount that we stand in solidarity with all the revolutionary and democratic forces in Turkey — forces that are mounting a heroic struggle for a free society.
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A royal flycatcher. (photo: Philip Stouffer)
As the Amazon Burns, What Happens to Its Biodiversity?
Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay
Kimbrough writes: "Fires do not occur naturally in the Amazon rainforest. So, for fires to burn in a standing forest there, a few things must happen, namely a dry year along with lots of ignition sources on neighboring lands."
Studies show that where fire is on the increase in Amazonia, biodiversity is altered, with unique rainforest flora and fauna — and vital ecological services — diminished.
he number of fires burning in standing Amazon rainforest spiked dramatically in recent weeks, threatening the forest’s biodiversity — a richness of flora and fauna not adapted to withstand the flames.
Of all major fires detected in the Amazon this year, 43% were in standing forests, as of Sept 21, (up from only 13% in August) according to the non-profit MAAP. The forest burned is estimated at roughly 4.6 million acres (1.8 million hectares) — an area about three-fifths the size of Belgium.
Fires do not occur naturally in the Amazon rainforest. So, for fires to burn in a standing forest there, a few things must happen, namely a dry year along with lots of ignition sources on neighboring lands. These sources — almost exclusively human caused — can arise from runaway agricultural fires (routinely used to burn off croplands and pastures to remove pests, for example), or from blazes set intentionally to clear land following deforestation, much of it illegal.
“It’s difficult to know what ‘typical’ is when it comes to fire in the Amazon,” Jos Barlow, a professor of conservation science at Lancaster University, UK, told Mongabay. Barlow, who has been studying Amazon fires for over two decades, added: “Last year… we had lots of deforestation fires…. whereas, this year, it does seem to be that the fires are burning more areas of standing forest, which is a huge concern.”
The Amazon fires that drew international attention in 2019 largely followed a pattern of recent deforestation, driven by landgrabbers, emboldened by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s pro-agribusiness rhetoric. In February, more than 1,200 scientists signed a letter, stating that, “the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro is dismantling the country’s social–environmental policies.”
In comments to the United Nations this week, Bolsonaro said that the country has, “the best environmental legislation on the planet,” and that, “the fires practically occur in the same places, on the east side of the forest, where peasants and Indians burn their fields in already deforested areas.” He provided no evidence for this claim.
Analysis by MAAP, NASA, INPE and others show a widespread pattern of fires throughout the Brazilian Amazon that includes significant illegal burning within conserved areas — doing serious harm in the most biodiverse country in the world.
When it burns, what happens to life in the forest?
The rainforest burns slowly. A fire line could advance just 300 meters (984 feet) in 24 hours, Barlow says. Such slowly moving burns give large mobile animals plenty of time to flee. But where to? The choices are to burrow, head to water, or move into other areas. Most animals cannot simply shift into the territory of another without consequence: be that violence from a competitor, or simply a lack of resources like food and shelter. Unfortunately, the research on the impacts of such flight is limited.
“We don’t really know what happens to the larger animals that are forced to move into other territories,” Barlow said. “So, presumably, at some point, there’s a reduction in population size, because you can’t just have more animals in an area.”
Primates, for example, may get trapped in islands of unburned vegetation in the burnt forest, persisting on remaining food until they are forced to risk travel into foreign habitat. Fires in 2019 burned through the habitat of a recently discovered species, the Mura’s saddleback tamarin. But the effects on its population are unknown.
“Who can survive the flames? We know arthropods nesting in the soil usually do very well,” Lucas N. Paolucci, a professor of biology at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil, told Mongabay in an email. “But several others, like litter-dwelling invertebrates, some birds, small mammals and snakes frequently die directly due to flames.”
“You do see the small invertebrates trying to flee the flames and obviously they don’t survive,” Barlow said. “We’ve come across forest floor tortoises and [turtles] with burns scars on their shells. So, some animals do get affected and do burn.” But how many animals may die in this year’s extensive blazes, no one can say.
It is known that rainforest trees are especially vulnerable to fire. Because fire is a relatively new, and foreign element in the Amazon, the forest and the life within it have not evolved to withstand the flames. Tropical trees, for instance, lack the thick bark of a temperate fire adapted species such as sequoias or pines. A rainforest fire, burning the forest for the first time, kills most small trees and seedlings and can kill 50% of large trees. Seeds in the soil heated to high temperatures can lose their ability to germinate.
While bigger trees may not be immediately killed, fire damage to a trunk can cause a mortal wound, allowing pathogens to enter the trunk. These trees then take years to die. But as they succumb, they open the canopy, making surviving trees more susceptible to being knocked over in wind storms. When those large trees fall, the dark rainforest understory is compromised, with devastating consequences for the biota which has evolved in deep shade.
Barlow and his colleagues found that after Amazon forest fires, flora changes radically. Understory specialist birds, which feed in the leaf litter, “basically disappeared” with populations still not recovering ten years later. This finding is not surprising, he says, because a decade after fire, tropical forests look very different, with less biomass and an open canopy.
One study indicated that the abundance and types of dung beetle species were altered in burned Amazon forests. Dung beetles play a vital role in nutrient cycling and seed dispersal and a decline in their diversity has cascading effects on the ecosystem.
In a large experimental study, forest plots that were burned several times saw a decline in the abundance of specialist forest ant species. These species disperse seeds, play specific roles in the forest food chain, and work the soil via their burrowing. After fires, these specialist ant species were replaced by an influx of ant communities from more open-habitat areas such as savannas. The loss of these specialized forest species means the loss of the specialized work they do.
In the same experimental burn area, a different study found similar patterns of species loss for butterflies, with forest specialists decreasing in burnt areas. There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that fire is a threat with long-term consequences to animals and plants that require the cool, moist, understory microclimate of the Amazon forest.
How do forests recover?
Because forest fires are a newer phenomenon in the Amazon, scientists are still not sure how long it takes forests there to fully recover, or even if they do. It is not surprising for researchers to examine a forest in the years after a fire and find a loss in biodiversity, but the fate of the animals on land and in the water, as well as the role of that biodiversity in supporting forest recovery, remain a mystery.
As researchers examine these landscapes, surprises emerge. For example, lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris), a large fruit-eating mammal that looks somewhat like a pig crossed with an elephant, may assist with the natural recovery of burned forests, Paolucci’s team found in a recent study. Tapirs travel and defecate more frequently in degraded forests, dispersing up to three times as many seeds in degraded forests.
However, these tapir experiments involve small experimental fires and occur close to unburned forests. “What happens in a fragmented landscape when a burnt area is not adjacent to an unburned patch?” Barlow asks. “Where are the seed sources going to come from then? And how does the forest recover when you don’t have forest connectivity or the ability for the large game and the birds to help disperse the seeds?”
In areas that have burned multiple times, or in areas with large amounts of deforestation and little connectivity, with little chance to recover, the forest changes from a closed canopy primary forest to, what Barlow describes as, “essentially open scrubby bamboo and vine dominated vegetation, which is very, very flammable.” This landscape, now devoid of game, food and medicines, is “of very low value to local people as well as most forest species.”
“The Amazon is like a bubble… if the trees are intact, it keeps moisture under the canopy in the forest,” Ernesto Alvarado, a professor of wildland fire sciences at the University of Washington said. Logging, roads, deforestation, and fires can pop this moisture bubble. “You open the canopy, right? It’s like a bunch of holes in the bubble, and now the moisture is better escaping and the forest becomes drier.”
Also, the Amazon dry season is getting longer and mega-droughts more common, primarily due to climate change and deforestation. Towards the end of the dry season, plants in more seasonal parts of Amazonia must rely not on rain but on water held in the soil to keep on transpiring and releasing moisture into the atmosphere. But when the dry season extends beyond that seen in past years, plants lack soil water, and some shut down their demand for moisture by dropping leaves. This dry leaf litter is ripe for burning when a fire set in a neighboring field blazes out of control.
“All these years when fires took over, plants were water-stressed,” Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist at the University of California, Irvine, said, “and then, for animals… all sorts of problems, right? Because the resource availability in terms of fruits and energy decrease a lot if you have a combination of droughts and fire.”
The Amazon fires tomorrow
The future of the Amazon rainforest will depend on complex interactions between fire, deforestation, and deepening drought due to climate change, as well as other human causes.
Some scientists warn that the Amazon is nearing a tipping point, when precipitation diminishes until the rainforest transitions into a “derived-savannah.” However, unlike a natural savannah, which is a highly diverse and functioning system, a severely degraded Amazon may look more like, “a very impoverished [ecological] system, less diverse, providing less function,” Brando said.
The Brazilian Amazon’s southern portion is currently most vulnerable to this forest-to-savannah transformation, especially along the Arc of Deforestation where rainforest meets pasture and cropland, and where several elements, including worsening drought, a prolonged dry season, and someone ready to set the land ablaze, all come together.
One ray of hope: Because Amazon forest fires burn slowly, they are fairly easy to fight with the right resources in place, Barlow says. Brazil has the technology to both predict and monitor fires with accuracy. However, without the political will and investment to do so, the Amazon rainforest, which holds 10% of the planet’s biodiversity, will continue to burn.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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