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19 December 20
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America's War on Syrian Civilians
Anand Gopal, The New Yorker
Gopal writes: "Bombs killed thousands of civilians in Raqqa, and the city was decimated. US lawyers insist that war crimes weren't committed, but it's time to look honestly at the devastation that accompanies 'targeted' air strikes."
or four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War.
As then, this battle was waged against an enemy bent on overthrowing an entire order, in an apparently nihilistic putsch against reason itself. But Raqqa was no Normandy. Although many Syrians fought valiantly against ISIS and lost their lives, the U.S., apart from a few hundred Special Forces on the ground, relied on overwhelming airpower, prosecuting the entire war from a safe distance. Not a single American died. The U.S. still occasionally conducts conventional ground battles, as in Falluja, Iraq, where, in 2004, troops engaged in fierce firefights with insurgents. But the battle for Raqqa—a war fought from cavernous control rooms thousands of miles away, or from aircraft thousands of feet in the sky—is the true face of modern American combat.
We have been conditioned to judge the merit of today’s wars by their conduct. The United Nations upholds norms of warfare that, among other things, prohibit such acts as torture, rape, and hostage-taking. Human-rights groups and international lawyers tend to designate a war “humane” when belligerents have avoided harming civilians as much as possible. However, in “Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos” (Oxford), Neil Renic, a scholar of international relations, challenges this standard. He argues that, when assessing the humanity of a war, we should look not only to the fate of civilians but also to whether combatants have exposed themselves to risk on the battlefield. Renic suggests that when one side fully removes itself from danger—even if it goes to considerable lengths to protect civilians—it violates the ethos of humane warfare.
The core principle of humane warfare is that fighters may kill one another at any time, excepting those who are rendered hors de combat, and must avoid targeting civilians. It’s tempting to say that civilians enjoy this protected status because they are innocent, but, as Renic points out, civilians “feed hungry armies, elect bellicose leaders, and educate future combatants.” In Syria, home to a popular revolution, entire towns were mobilized for the war effort. Civilians—even children—acted as lookouts, arms smugglers, and spies. What really matters, then, is the type of danger that someone in a battle zone presents. The moment that a person picks up a weapon, whether donning a uniform or not, he or she poses a direct and immediate danger. This is the crucial distinction between armed personnel and civilians.
But what if the belligerents themselves don’t pose a direct and immediate danger? Renic argues that in such theatres as Pakistan, where Americans deploy remote-controlled drones to kill their enemies while rarely stepping foot on the battlefield, insurgents on the ground cannot fight back—meaning that, in terms of the threat that they constitute, they are no different from civilians. It would then be just as wrong, Renic suggests, to unleash a Hellfire missile on a group of pickup-riding insurgents as it would be to annihilate a pickup-riding family en route to a picnic.
One might respond that, say, the Pakistani Taliban does pose an immediate threat to Pakistani civilians, if not to U.S. soldiers. But Renic contends that the U.S., by avoiding the battlefield, has turned civilians into attractive targets for insurgents eager for a fight. Whether this claim is correct or not, it’s clear that risk-free combat has brought warfare into new moral territory, requiring us to interrogate our old notions of battlefield right and wrong. If we can distinguish combatants from civilians only by the danger that they pose to other combatants, then the long-distance violence of modern warfare is inhumane. Renic concludes that the “increasingly sterile, bureaucratized, and detached mode of American killing” has the flavor of punishment rather than of war in any traditional sense. In Barack Obama’s recent memoir, he writes that, as President, he wanted to save “the millions of young men” in the Muslim world who were “warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings.” Yet he claims that, owing to where they lived, and the machinery at his disposal, he ended up “killing them instead.” Leaving aside Obama’s crude generalizations, Renic argues that he could indeed have saved them—by “severely restricting” remote warfare.
Renic’s book is part of a broader trend of scholars and human-rights activists contending with the wreckage caused by America’s recent conflicts abroad. Their studies share a basic quest: how can we use rules to make warfare more humane? Whereas Renic focusses on moral rules, much of this other work is concerned with legal rules. In the aftermath of the Raqqa battle, Amnesty International and other organizations sifted through the rubble, carefully documenting whether this or that bombing complied with the laws of war. This work is salutary, but a troubling question looms behind it: in our drive to subject the battlefield to rules, are we overlooking deeper moral truths about the nature of war itself?
The notion that warfare should be governed by rules is ancient, and dates at least to Augustine, who argued that a legitimate ruler can wage war when he has good intentions and a just cause. In the Middle Ages, the Church attempted to ban the crossbow, and took efforts to protect ecclesiastical property and noncombatants from wartime violence. But it was only in the nineteenth century that states attempted to fashion laws and treaties to regulate wartime conduct. During the American Civil War, the Union implemented the Lieber Code, which sought to restrict the imposition of unnecessary suffering—torture or poisoning, for example—on the enemy. The code also enshrined as legal convention the principle of “military necessity”: if violence had a strategic purpose—that is, if it could help win a war—it was allowed. In the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, world powers accepted vague limits on wartime conduct while upholding the principle of military necessity. States agreed to a moratorium on balloon-launched munitions, which had little tactical value, but were silent on the question of motorized aircraft.
Many nations ignored even these lax regulations. The Hague Conventions prohibited “asphyxiating gases,” but world powers flouted the treaties with abandon in the trenches of the First World War. The conventions effectively outlawed the intentional targeting of civilians, but by the Second World War belligerents had recognized the military advantage of bombing towns and villages. In 1942, British policy actually barred aircraft from targeting military facilities, ordering them instead to strike working-class areas of German cities—“for the sake of increasing terror,” as Churchill later put it. In 1943, the U.S. and British Air Forces of Operation Gomorrah rained down fire and steel upon Hamburg for seven nights, killing fifty-eight thousand civilians. Urban bombing campaigns left millions of homeless and shell-shocked Germans roaming a ravaged land that W. G. Sebald later described as the “necropolis of a foreign, mysterious people, torn from its civil existence and its history, thrown back to the evolutionary stage of nomadic gatherers.” Then came the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about two hundred and fifty thousand people. In all, Allied terror raids may have claimed some half a million civilian lives. The pattern continued in the Korean War; Secretary of State Dean Rusk later recalled that the U.S. had bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.”
During the Vietnam War, a powerful antiwar movement emerged for the first time since the First World War. Through television, the news of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre reached directly into American living rooms, and conscientious objectors and antiwar activists appealed to international law to justify their opposition to the carnage. They were more successful in shaping U.S. conduct than they could have ever imagined. After the war, the Pentagon revamped its arsenal with such inventions as laser-guided munitions, which could carry out “precision strikes.” The U.S. military began to follow the principles of the Hague Conventions, as well as those found in other treaties, calling these combined regulations the Law of Armed Conflict. American terror bombings became a thing of the past. In the first Gulf War, hundreds of specialist attorneys sat alongside generals at CENTCOM headquarters in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, to insure that the U.S. followed legal rules of warfare. It was the largest per-capita wartime deployment of lawyers in American history.
On the face of it, scrupulous adherence to the law is a victory for the cause of humane war. Yet the ruins of Syria tell a more complicated story. Not long before the U.S. assault on Raqqa, Russian and Syrian forces launched a major offensive to capture the rebel-held eastern side of Aleppo. Paying no heed to international law, they retook the city with savage efficiency, laying waste to crowded markets and hospitals. Yet the end result looked no different from Raqqa: a large civilian death toll, honeycombed apartment buildings, streets choked with rubble, entire neighborhoods flattened.
The U.S.-led coalition waged its assault on Raqqa with exacting legal precision. It vetted every target carefully, with a fleet of lawyers scrutinizing strikes the way an in-house counsel pores over a corporation’s latest contract. During the battle, the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, declared, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” Although human-rights activists insist that the coalition could have done more to protect civilians, Townsend is right: unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.
During the summer of 2016, residents of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria, gathered every night in four houses on the community’s edge, hoping to evade gunfire and bombs. This was the farthest point from a front line, a mile away, where U.S.-backed forces were engaging ISIS fighters. Every night, a drone hovered over Tokhar, filming the villagers’ procession from their scattered homes to these makeshift bunkers. The basements became crowded with farmers, mothers, schoolgirls, and small children. On July 18th, at around 3 A.M., the houses exploded. Thick smoke covered the night sky. Limbs were strewn across the rubble. Children were buried under collapsed walls.
People from surrounding villages spent two weeks digging out bodies. The coalition, meanwhile, announced that it had destroyed “nine ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL command and control node, and 12 ISIL vehicles” in the area that night. Eventually, after reports surfaced that many civilians had died, the coalition admitted to killing twenty-four. When a colleague and I visited, a year after the raid, we documented at least a hundred and twenty dead civilians, and found no evidence that any ISIS members had been present near the four houses. A mother told me that some small children were obliterated, their bodies never found.
“We take all measures during the targeting process . . . to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict,” U.S. Marine Major Adrian J. T. Rankine-Galloway said. The essence of this legal code is that militaries cannot intentionally kill civilians. It is true that no one in the chain of command wished to massacre civilians that night—not the pilot or the targeteers or the lawyers. The U.S. points to this fact in calling the Tokhar incident an error, regrettable but not illegal. Yet, though it is reasonable to invoke intention when referring to the mind-set of an individual—this is the idea behind the legal concept mens rea—it seems odd to ascribe a mental state to a collective actor like an army or a state. It is clear, however, that the coalition could have foreseen the outcome of its actions: it had filmed the area for weeks, and intelligence indicating that the village was populated would not have been difficult to gather. During the coalition’s campaign against ISIS, it often based its bombing decisions on faulty assumptions about civilian life; in Mosul, it targeted a pair of family homes after failing to observe civilians outdoors over the course of a few afternoons. Iraqis typically avoid the blazing midday heat. Four people died. The Law of Armed Conflict excuses genuine errors and proscribes intentional killing, but most American warfare operates in a gray zone, which exists, in part, because the law itself is so vague.
A second pillar of the legal code is the rule of proportionality: states can kill civilians if they are aiming for a military target, as long as the loss of civilian life is proportional to the military advantage they gain by the attack. What this means is anyone’s guess: how do you measure “military advantage” against human lives? During the Mosul battle, snipers went onto the roof of the home of Mohammed Tayeb al-Layla, a former dean of engineering at Mosul University. According to neighbors, he and his wife rushed upstairs, pleading with them to leave. In a flash, a warhead flattened the home, killing the snipers, al-Layla and his wife, and their daughter, who was downstairs. It’s nearly impossible to say how one would weigh two dead snipers against a dead family, but most conventions would consider the killing lawful. Much of the destruction in Raqqa follows the example of the al-Layla household: death by a thousand proportional strikes.
American officials are quick to point out that ISIS deserves a good share of the blame: militants dispersed themselves throughout schools and apartment buildings, and otherwise lived among the civilian population. Yet this does not necessarily absolve the U.S. When counter-insurgency doctrine was in vogue during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces sought to win “hearts and minds” by embedding in population centers. For an Afghan, few sights stirred as much dread as a column of beige armored Humvees snaking through a crowded market. If a suicide bomber attacked the Humvees, Americans would rightly condemn him for his disregard for the surrounding civilians—even if he had the force of the law, in the guise of proportionality, behind him.
The contradictions of U.S. military conduct don’t go unnoticed. Human-rights organizations frequently accuse the U.S. of committing war crimes, including in the Raqqa battle. In nearly every case, though, the U.S. can muster a convincing defense. What is in dispute is not whether or not the U.S. killed civilians but the interpretation of the law: the U.S. uses a much looser interpretation of intentionality and proportionality than most human-rights groups do. After such deaths occur, no independent arbiter adjudicates the U.S.’s actions—only vanquished forces ever get dragged before an international tribunal. The Pentagon is left to judge itself, and, unsurprisingly, almost always finds in its own favor. The law’s ambiguities allow the U.S. to classify atrocities like that in Tokhar as accidents, even if the deadly results were foreseeable, and therefore avoidable.
How many civilian deaths in Raqqa were avoidable? In Tokhar, it was possible to reconstruct the evidence, but often it is not. Without transparency in the targeting process, the military usually has the final word. Yet there is one way we can intuitively know when an armed force has an alternative to causing civilian suffering. When U.S. forces are faced with a pair of ISIS gunmen on the roof of an apartment building, they can call in a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb—or they can approach the enemy on foot, braving enemy fire, and secure the building through old-fashioned battle. In the past, armies have sometimes chosen the harder path: during the Second World War, when Allied French pilots carried out bombing raids on Vichy territory—part of their homeland—they flew at lower altitudes, in order to avoid striking civilians, even though it increased the chances that they’d be shot down. For the U.S. military, however, the rules are blind to the question of risk. The law doesn’t consider whether an armed force could have avoided unnecessary civilian suffering by exposing itself to greater danger. For Neil Renic, wars waged exclusively through drones, therefore, point to the “profound discord between what is lawful on the battlefield and what is moral.”
This may be why the U.S. military today tends to downplay the old martial virtue of courage. Historically, though, the concept was so central to the idea of good soldiering that weapons or tactics lacking in valor sparked objections from the ranks. Renic writes that when aircraft first entered the modern arsenal, in the nineteen-tens, fighter pilots engaged in dogfights reminiscent of the gallantry of a medieval duel. But such long-distance tactics as mortar fire and aerial bombardment had little to do with valor. A pilot from the First World War recalled, “You did not sit in a muddy trench while someone who had no personal enmity against you loosed off a gun, five miles away, and blew you to smithereens.” He concluded, “That was not fighting; it was murder. Senseless, brutal, ignoble.” A British airman from the Second World War wrote, “I was a fighter pilot, never a bomber pilot, and I thank God for that. I do not believe I could ever have obeyed orders as a bomber pilot; it would have given me no sense of achievement to drop bombs on German cities.”
Though sniping causes far less devastation, it has long aroused a similar unease. In the First World War, a British brigadier-general denounced the practice as “an act of cold murder, horrible to the most callous, distasteful to all but the most perverted.” During the American Revolution, a young British officer trained his rifle’s sights on a target, only to decide that “it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty.” The individual in question was George Washington.
In 2014, the bio-pic “American Sniper” ignited a debate about whether its protagonist, a legendary marksman, had fabricated parts of his story. But, Renic points out, nobody questioned the moral legitimacy of sniping itself, an indication of the extent to which courage has vanished as a battlefield norm in today’s wars. Even if he is overstating the role of valor historically, it’s clear that the U.S. military today goes to great lengths to avoid risk, justifying its conduct instead by extolling the Law of Armed Conflict. A military that emphasizes courage may wind up protecting more civilians, but with bravery comes body bags—and, the moment that body bags arrived in the U.S., we would be forced to contend with the hard questions that the law lets us ignore. Were those deaths of Americans worth it? What is the purpose of this war? Should it be fought, and, if so, fought differently? These are conversations that neither the military nor human-rights organizations appear interested in having.
Critics might say that the ruins of Syria reveal the limited value of the laws of war: two armies, operating under greatly differing norms, produced nearly identical results in Raqqa and Aleppo. Defenders might retort that such rules, even when vague or overly permissive, are better than none at all. Probably both views are correct, but the focus on legality may have lulled us into a comfort with war itself. Human-rights groups have found the U.S. guilty of dozens of war crimes in Afghanistan, but most American killing has been lawful: a housewife wandering too close to a convoy, a farmer gunned down on faulty assumptions, a family made victim to the rule of proportionality. Americans seem to become exercised about the miseries of combat only when the rules are flagrantly violated; as long as they are not, a war quietly slides into the background—even into a permanent state of being. If the Afghan war continued for another twenty years, it’s doubtful whether it would arouse much domestic opposition, even though the over-all suffering may be as great as a wanton slaughter that ended in a decisive victory. The U.S. cannot carry out such a slaughter without violating the law and provoking widespread opposition, and so the conflict remains at a perpetual low boil. The U.S. finds itself in a peculiar situation in which it can neither win nor lose its wars.
Faced with this bitter truth, some thinkers espouse the doctrine of realism, which bluntly states that the battlefield is no place for moral strictures. But this doctrine can be used to excuse terrible and unnecessary suffering. Another approach is pacifism, which, for all its merits, asks us to condemn both the tyrant and those violently resisting tyranny. That leaves the moral tradition of “just war,” which maintains that warfare is a fixture of human existence, so the best we can hope for is to regulate when and how it is waged. This is the essential idea informing the laws of war.
Yet, although armed conflict is not disappearing anytime soon, that doesn’t mean we must reduce war solely to a question of legal violations and battlefield rules. Even if we can never abolish war, Immanuel Kant argued, we should act as if we could, and design our institutions accordingly. Today in America, we could work to insulate the Pentagon’s decisions from defense contractors and other vested interests; more important, we could revert the decision to make war to democratic control. After 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which Presidents have since invoked to justify at least thirty-seven military activities in fourteen countries, including the U.S. war in Syria, without formal declaration or public debate. Whether this or that pile of rubble was produced lawfully, or whether or not American boots touched Syrian soil, is not nearly as important as the fact that the U.S. was free to raze a foreign city with no public discussion or accountability. Perhaps only when our foreign adventures are subject to democratic constraints will we view the starting and ending of wars—not just their conduct—as a matter of life and death.
FDA Clears Moderna's Covid Vaccine as Average Daily Cases and Deaths Hit Records
Jason Hanna, Theresa Waldrop and Christina Maxouris, CNN
Excerpt: "The US Food and Drug Administration on Friday night authorized a second coronavirus vaccine for emergency use as Covid-19 hospitalizations rose to another record and cases and deaths are piling up in unprecedented ways."
The FDA had signaled it would issue the authorization quickly for Moderna's vaccine candidate, after the agency's vaccine advisers voted Thursday to recommend approval.
"The emergency use authorization allows the vaccine to be distributed in the U.S. for use in individuals 18 years and older," the FDA said in a tweet.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still needs to green-light the vaccine before shots can be administered -- and a CDC advisory panel is meeting this weekend to discuss it.
If all hurdles are cleared, Moderna's vaccine could be given in the US next week -- joining Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine, which rolled out this week, with first doses primarily being given to health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities.
Here's how Moderna's vaccine differs from Pfizer's
"It's an exciting time, but it's a heartbreaking time," Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN Friday of the vaccines' arrivals. "The numbers (of cases, deaths and hospitalizations) are almost unspeakable at this point."
In the US, average daily cases, total hospitalizations and average daily deaths are still rising to levels not previously seen, as hospital staff around the country warn they're running out of space and energy to provide sufficient care:
• Cases: The country's average number of daily cases across a week was 216,674 on Thursday -- a record high, John's Hopkins University data show. That's more than three times what the daily case average was during a summer peak in July.
More than 1.51 million new coronavirus cases were reported in the US this past week -- the most ever for one week, according to JHU. That means new infections were reported in roughly 1 in 216 people in the US this week alone.
• Hospitalizations: The number of Covid-19 patients in US hospitals was 114,751 on Friday -- the most recorded on a given day for the 13th straight day -- according to the COVID Tracking Project.
• Deaths: The nation averaged 2,633 Covid-19 deaths daily across the last week -- the highest average yet. The total reported Thursday, 3,270, is the third-highest daily total on record.
With the authorization of the Moderna vaccine, 5.9 million Moderna doses could be delivered next week, joining 2 million allocated next week from Pfizer, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said earlier this week.
"We still anticipate that every American will have the opportunity to be vaccinated by June," Adm. Dr. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at HHS, said.
Friday night's authorization will, in the end, bring speedier relief, Azar said in a statement after the FDA's announcement.
"Authorization of Moderna's vaccine means we can accelerate the vaccination of frontline healthcare workers and Americans in long-term-care facilities, and, ultimately, bring a faster end to this pandemic."
The Department of Defense "stands ready to work with our public and private-sector partners to ensure doeses reach Americans as soon as possible," Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said in the statement. "Together, we will bring this pandemic to an end."
The task at hand now is to tackle skepticism many communities have toward the vaccines, and pass along the facts, according to Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. To that end, public figures including Vice President Mike Pence have received vaccinations on live television this week, hoping in part to inspire confidence.
"I've had the chance to be intimately involved in every step of the way here in the development of these vaccines. There have been no shortcuts taken, there's no hidden information," Collins told CNN Thursday. "This is something you want to do, for yourself, for your family, for the future of our nation."
Model raises prediction for number of deaths by April
An influential coronavirus model at the University of Washington on Friday projected that a total 562,000 people in the US will have died from Covid-19 by April 1 -- up significantly from the prediction it made last week, when it forecast 502,000 deaths by that date.
The increase is due to surges in cases and deaths, with particularly large increases in the nation's most populous state, California, the model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation says.
The US could see more than 3,750 deaths reported daily in mid-January, the IHME predicted. The country so far has reported more than 311,000 total Covid-19 deaths.
Authorization of the Moderna vaccine is "fantastic news, and in the long term that's going to really help us get Covid under control," Dr. Chris Murray, IHME director, told CNN.
But it's going to take time to get the vaccine delivered and for it to take effect in those who are immunized, he said.
"We don't expect to see a major dent on the daily death rate from vaccination until sometime in February," Murray said, adding there will be "many weeks ahead of these really high death numbers per day."
VP and surgeon general get vaccines on live TV
On Friday morning, Vice President Mike Pence, second lady Karen Pence and Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams received the Pfizer/BioNTech shots on live television in Washington.
After getting his shot, Pence said history will show this week's vaccine rollout marked the beginning of the end of the pandemic, "but with cases rising across the country ... we have a ways to go."
Also getting the vaccine earlier Friday morning on CNN were Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, dean of the Morehouse Medical School, and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital.
Montgomery Rice said she hoped her example, as a Black physician who followed the vaccine data and decided to get vaccinated, inspires confidence in others who may be wary of it, including minorities and even undecided health care workers.
Getting the public messaging right about the vaccines is crucial, especially for the Black community that -- along with other communities of color -- has been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, Montgomery Rice said later Friday.
"Really, this is a life and death message for Black people about the coronavirus," Montgomery Rice said at a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine meeting on Covid-19 vaccine campaign strategies.
Some states see Covid-19 numbers surge, others loosen restrictions
Covid-19 cases have particularly exploded recently in California. The state averaged 38,700 new daily cases across the last week. Some of the recently reported cases are from a backlog, state health officials say.
Still, the average is more than nine times what the average was at the start of November, JHU data show.
And hospitals are becoming overwhelmed. Southern California's intensive care units are filled to their typical capacity, officials said Thursday. If they go beyond capacity, health care workers will be caring for more patients than is safe, the Los Angeles County health director has said.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti pleaded with people Thursday to stay home and avoid holiday gatherings.
The county could soon declare a "systemwide crisis," indicating hospitals have virtually run out of space, he said. If that is declared, all elective procedures could be canceled.
"If (cases keep) soaring for the next three of four weeks, we will have nothing left to meet this moment," Garcetti said.
More than 98% of the state's nearly 40 million residents are now under a stay-at-home order -- that is, all of California except for a mostly rural section north of Sacramento -- that officials hope will slow the spread of the virus.
In New York state, among the hardest hit areas early in the pandemic, new cases are soaring again, averaging more than 10,300 daily across the last week. That's five times higher than what the average was November 1.
Hospitals in New York must notify state officials if they are three weeks away from reaching 85% of maximum capacity. So far, no hospital has, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday.
The state will shut down the economy in any areas where hospitals make such a report -- but this is "totally avoidable" if New Yorkers heed distancing and masking guidelines, Cuomo said.
Florida, meanwhile, on Thursday reported the highest number of daily new cases since mid-July. Kentucky's governor announced a record number of new deaths, saying it was "by far the most people that we've lost." Pennsylvania's health officials announced the state's number of hospitalizations is double the peak in the spring, with more than 1,200 Covid-19 patients in the ICU.
"We continue to hear of additional hospitals across the state that have few ICU beds left, or in some cases no ICU beds left," Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said Thursday.
And in Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown said hospitals remain "stretched to their limits" and extended her declaration of a state of emergency for Covid-19 for another two months, adding "these are the darkest days of this pandemic."
But while many states are still battling a ferocious spread, others are loosening restrictions.
In Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has weathered severe pushback and rallies against restrictions meant to stop the virus, a decrease in Covid-19 markers in the last month led her to announce the lifting of some of those measures.
In-person classes can resume at high schools, and indoor venues including movie theaters can reopen with capacity limits and other precautions, Whitmer said at a news conference Friday.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said this week that Covid-19 case numbers have gone down in the state and announced she was lifting all curfews for bars and restaurants and removing limitations for social gatherings.
Bars and restaurants will be able to resume normal operations as long as customers are seated when eating or drinking, wear masks when not seated, be seated 6 feet away from other groups and there are no more than eight people per group, the governor said. The governor also announced she was lifting gathering limitations, but a distance of 6 feet is required between groups.
In Utah, where health officials said hospitals across the state are operating at capacity, Gov. Gary Herbert announced he was removing a restriction on alcohol sales after 10 p.m., saying local bars and restaurants have demonstrated a willingness to enforce physical distancing and mask wearing when customers aren't eating or drinking.
"We appreciate the willingness to step up and help enforce protocols that make bars and restaurants a safe environment for the patron to come and participate," the governor said.
Mitch McConnell. (photo: CNN)
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Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Emergency Paid Leave During the Pandemic
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "Congressional leaders are hard at work this week on a stimulus package that could bring much-needed relief to workers, families, and small businesses. It's not a moment too soon, as many Americans are struggling to get by after months without help from the federal government."
The benefits expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t act.
ongressional leaders are hard at work this week on a stimulus package that could bring much-needed relief to workers, families, and small businesses. It’s not a moment too soon, as many Americans are struggling to get by after months without help from the federal government.
But there’s a crucial piece missing from the negotiations: paid leave.
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, passed in March, guaranteed paid sick leave for workers who were quarantined or ill with Covid-19, as well as for those caring for children while schools or day cares were closed. By helping parents keep their jobs while taking time to care for kids, the legislation helped families stay afloat during a nearly impossible time. It also saved lives — one study found that by allowing sick people to stay home and quarantine, the legislation prevented more than 15,000 cases of Covid-19 per day.
But the paid leave benefits in the act expire at the end of 2020 — and so far, they don’t appear to be part of the stimulus deal being negotiated by congressional leaders (neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has yet responded to Vox’s request for comment). That could force Americans to work while they’re sick, worsening the spread of Covid-19 at a time when the country is already facing its deadliest weeks yet.
It’s “incomprehensible” that members of Congress would fail to extend “literally a lifesaving provision,” Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy at New America, told Vox. “This is a matter of public health.”
Millions of workers could lose paid leave protections in January
Lack of paid leave has long been a problem for American workers, especially if they make low wages — as of 2017, just 27 percent of those whose pay fell in the bottom 10 percent in the country had access to this benefit. And the problem took on even greater urgency when the pandemic began, since forcing people to work while sick meant they could infect others.
In March, Congress took action by guaranteeing workers 10 days of paid sick leave if they were sick or quarantined because of Covid-19, or were caring for family members who were sick. The legislation also offered an additional 10 weeks of paid leave to parents affected by school or day care closures.
The benefits didn’t apply to everyone — companies with more than 500 employees were exempt, and small businesses and many health care providers could get around the new requirements as well, leaving millions of American workers without protection. And as of this summer, many parents were still unaware of their paid leave options or unwilling to take them, perhaps because of fears of retaliation at work.
Still, the benefits made a difference. According to a study published in October, granting paid sick leave to even some workers prevented about 400 cases of Covid-19 per state per day, or over 15,000 across the country. They also helped Americans take time off to care for children or family members, without the risk of losing a paycheck or even their job. They were especially crucial for low-income people who can’t afford to take unpaid time, Shabo noted, and for women, who have disproportionately shouldered the added caregiving responsibilities of the Covid-19 crisis.
But now the paid leave benefits in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act are due to expire. And unlike expanded unemployment insurance and aid to small businesses, they weren’t part of the $908 billion bipartisan deal that served as a starting point for the current round of talks in Congress.
Without paid leave, many families could be stranded in the new year, with the virus causing record deaths and hospitalizations and many schools still on remote or hybrid schedules. “We’re now at the point where parents who took the paid leave that they had to care for kids are running out of it,” Shabo said, “and yet we’re going to be in the situation that we’re in for many more months.”
Many Americans can’t afford to take unpaid time off, whether it’s to care for children or quarantine after a positive Covid-19 test. Research conducted before the pandemic showed that “just three unpaid days away from work jeopardized a family’s ability to buy food for the entire month,” Shabo said, and about seven days jeopardized the ability to pay rent or a mortgage.
And a failure to extend paid leave protections would further hamper the country’s ability to fight the coronavirus at a time when thousands of Americans are dying every single day.
Paid leave benefits aren’t expensive when compared to other parts of the relief package — extending them would cost about $1.8 billion, or less than 0.2 percent of the total price tag, according to New America. It’s not clear why they haven’t been included in negotiations thus far, though some Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have opposed the paid leave expansion from the beginning. Corporate interests have historically sought to block mandated paid leave on the grounds that it hinders businesses’ flexibility, as the American Prospect reported in March, and Republicans have often sided with them.
Advocates on the issue are continuing to urge members of Congress to include paid leave in the current package, Shabo said. Negotiations continue on Friday and could extend into the weekend.
If they don’t include it this time around, Congress could take up the issue again in the next recovery package in 2021. But it’s unclear when that will happen. In the meantime, American workers would be left without support as they navigate an ongoing pandemic and caregiving crisis.
Ultimately, the eleventh-hour debate illustrates a larger problem that many have pointed to since the pandemic began: American workers lack many of the protections that workers in other countries have, leaving them and the entire country ill-equipped to handle any kind of crisis. “If we had had a national paid leave policy and a national paid sick day standard in place in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Shabo said.
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Republicans Strategize for Next Elections: 'Their Plan Is to Make It Harder for Voters to Participate'
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "After record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in some states are already signaling they will pursue measures that make it harder to vote in the coming years."
Backlash following the 2020 election underscores how severely the party is willing to cut off access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate
The Republican efforts come after an election in which nearly 160 million people voted, the highest in a presidential election in over a century. About half of voters cast their ballots by mail, a big increase from 2016, while about another quarter cast their ballots in person ahead of election day.
The GOP backlash underscores how swiftly and severely the party is willing to cut off access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate. The baseless accusations of fraud that Donald Trump and other allies continue to levy about the election has offered election officials justification for passing the measures.
“There will be some states where it is very clear that the existing power structure is worried about their voters. And part of their job security plan is to make it harder for their voters to participate,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Two states that appear to be at the center of the push are Georgia and Texas, where Republicans are already advocating measures to scale back mail-in voting and other access to the ballot. Both states, traditionally seen as Republican strongholds, are increasingly seen as politically competitive because of demographic shifts, with the electorate becoming much more diverse. In Georgia, there has been significant growth among Black, Hispanic and Asian eligible voters over the last two decades, while Texas has seen a surge in its Latino population.
“I am not at all surprised to see this happening in Texas and Georgia that I think are on the cusp of a big shift,” Pérez said. “You have some dinosaurs who are not going to stay in power much longer trying to suppress votes.”
In Georgia, a state where record numbers of voters cast their ballots by mail, Republicans who control the state legislature have said they want to pass a slew of new restrictions focused on mail-in voting. They have said they want to require voters to submit a copy of their ID with their mail-in ballot and eliminate ballot drop boxes. While Georgia currently allows anyone to vote-by-mail, Republicans said they intend to work on a new law that would only allow voters to cast a mail-in ballot if they have an excuse. Newt Gingrich, the conservative Georgian and former speaker of the US House, complained earlier this month that Republicans were helping Democrats by making it easier to vote.
The Republican push to do away with no-excuse absentee voting comes just 15 years after the party embraced the practice and adopted a state law doing away with the excuse requirement to vote by mail. In previous elections, Republicans in the state have used the practice more widely than Democrats, said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia.
“Now, they’re clearly operating on the premise that: ‘fewer votes, we win’,” he said. “Making it harder to do absentee voting, assuming we don’t remain all locked in our homes because of the pandemic, that may hurt Republicans more than Democrats. It’s kind of a simple, knee jerk reaction to an election they very narrowly lost.”
Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that works on expanding voter access, questioned why Republicans were suddenly interested in restricting access to vote by mail. “I’m just gonna be honest, more white people used vote by mail than people of color, because they didn’t trust the process – now that we’ve got them trusting the process, now they want to go in and change the rules,” she told the Guardian earlier this month.
In Texas, which already has some of the most stringent rules around voting in the country, lawmakers have pre-filed several bills with new restrictions. One bill would prevent state officials from sending out applications to vote by mail. The measure comes after election officials in Harris county tried to mail applications to all 2.4 million registered voters in the county.
“There are differently going to be those same efforts, like we saw during the election, to combat what local election administrators are doing to try and innovate to try and make voting more convenient and safer,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group. “Texas is always on the cutting edge of finding new ways to suppress the vote.”
Another measure would require state officials to investigate anyone who casts a ballot while swearing they don’t have an acceptable form of photo identification (something currently allowed under Texas law). The same bill would require the state to regularly compare its voter rolls with a Department of Homeland Security data to try and find registered non-citizens, a process that has been shown to be inaccurate in the past. In 2019, Texas officials announced they had found nearly 100,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, but were forced to retract that accusation once the data was shown to be inaccurate.
This isn’t the first time that lawmakers have moved to cut off voting access after turnout surged, Pérez said. After the 2008 presidential election, Republicans took control of state legislatures in 2010 and were more likely to pass voting restrictions in places where there were high minority populations or high turnout among minority voters. “People don’t get threatened about participation levels until they start reaching a certain threshold where they can actually disrupt the power structure,” she said.
Keith Bentele, a professor at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona who has studied efforts to restrict voting access, said it was “extremely likely” that Republicans – who will still wield enormous power over state legislatures – would pass new voting restrictions.
“Given the extraordinarily intense amplification of the voter fraud myth by President Trump and allies unfolding currently, it would seem odd if state legislators did not follow through with legislation to address these alleged (and in nearly all cases immaterial) issues of election integrity,” he wrote in an email.
Pérez questioned what kind of message it would send to the American public to see politicians so swiftly restrict access to voting after many people used it for the first time.
“What does it do to the American population to have to see our politicians being so self serving. So brazen in their attempts to make it harder for people to vote?,” she said. “It’s just gonna tell a really ugly story about America.”
A prisoner. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
1 in 5 Prisoners in the US Has Had COVID-19, 1,700 Have Died
Beth Schwartzapfel and Katie Park, The Marshall Project and Andrew Demillo, Associated Press
Excerpt: "One in every five state and federal prisoners in the United States has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population. In some states, more than half of prisoners have been infected, according to data collected by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project."
ne in every five state and federal prisoners in the United States has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population. In some states, more than half of prisoners have been infected, according to data collected by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project.
As the pandemic enters its 10th month — and as the first Americans begin to receive a long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine — at least 275,000 prisoners have been infected, more than 1,700 have died and the spread of the virus behind bars shows no sign of slowing. New cases in prisons this week reached their highest level since testing began in the spring, far outstripping previous peaks in April and August.
“That number is a vast undercount,” said Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex.
Venters has conducted more than a dozen court-ordered COVID-19 prison inspections around the country. “I still encounter prisons and jails where, when people get sick, not only are they not tested but they don’t receive care. So they get much sicker than need be,” he said.
Now the rollout of vaccines poses difficult decisions for politicians and policymakers. As the virus spreads largely unchecked behind bars, prisoners can’t social distance and are dependent on the state for their safety and well-being.
This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Marshall Project exploring the state of the prison system in the coronavirus pandemic.
Donte Westmoreland, 26, was recently released from Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas, where he caught the virus while serving time on a marijuana charge. Some 5,100 prisoners have become infected in Kansas prisons, the third-highest COVID-19 rate in the country, behind only South Dakota and Arkansas.
“It was like I was sentenced to death,” Westmoreland said.
Westmoreland lived with more than 100 virus-infected men in an open dorm, where he woke up regularly to find men sick on the floor, unable to get up on their own, he said.
“People are actually dying in front of me off of this virus,” he said. “It’s the scariest sight.” Westmoreland said he sweated it out, shivering in his bunk until, six weeks later, he finally recovered.
Half of the prisoners in Kansas have been infected with COVID-19 — eight times the rate of cases among the state’s overall population. Eleven prisoners have died, including five at the prison where Westmoreland was held. Of the three prison employees who have died in Kansas, two worked at Lansing Correctional Facility.
In Arkansas, where more than 9,700 prisoners have tested positive and 50 have died, four of every seven have had the virus, the second-highest prison infection rate in the U.S.
Among the dead was 29-year-old Derick Coley, who was serving a 20-year sentence at the Cummins Unit maximum security prison. Cece Tate, Coley’s girlfriend, said she last talked with him on April 10 when he said he was sick and showing symptoms of the virus.
“It took forever for me to get information,” she said. The prison finally told her on April 20 that Coley had tested positive for the virus. Less than two weeks later, a prison chaplain called on May 2 to tell her Coley had died.
The couple had a daughter who turned 9 in July. “She cried and was like, ‘My daddy can’t send me a birthday card,’" Tate said. “She was like, ‘Momma, my Christmas ain’t going to be the same.’”
Nearly every prison system in the country has seen infection rates significantly higher than the communities around them. In facilities run by the federal Bureau of Prisons, one of every five prisoners has had coronavirus. Twenty-four state prison systems have had even higher rates.
Not all states release how many prisoners they’ve tested, but states that test prisoners broadly and regularly may appear to have higher case rates than states that don’t.
Infection rates as of Tuesday were calculated by the AP and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal justice system, based on data collected weekly in prisons since March. Infection and mortality rates may be even higher, since nearly every prison system has significantly fewer prisoners today than when the pandemic began, so rates represent a conservative estimate based on the largest known population.
Yet, as vaccine campaigns get underway, there has been pushback in some states against giving the shots to people in prisons early.
“There’s no way it’s going to go to prisoners ... before it goes to the people who haven’t committed any crime,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told reporters earlier this month after his state’s initial vaccine priority plans put prisoners before the general public.
Like more than a dozen states, Kansas’s vaccination plan does not mention prisoners or corrections staff, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-partisan prison data think tank. Seven states put prisoners near the front of the line, along with others living in crowded settings like nursing homes and long-term care facilities. An additional 19 states have placed prisoners in the second phase of their vaccine rollouts.
Racial disparities in the nation’s criminal justice system compound the disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on communities of color. Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites. They are also disproportionately likely to be infected and hospitalized with COVID-19, and are more likely than other races to have a family member or close friend who has died of the virus.
The pandemic “increases risk for those who are already at risk,” said David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.
This week, a Council on Criminal Justice task force headed by former attorneys general Alberto Gonzalez and Loretta Lynch released a report calling for scaling back prison populations, improving communication with public health departments and reporting better data.
Prison facilities are often overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Dormitory-style housing, cafeterias and open-bar cell doors make it nearly impossible to quarantine. Prison populations are sicker, on average, than the general population and health care behind bars is notoriously substandard. Nationwide, the mortality rate for COVID-19 among prisoners is 45% higher than the overall rate.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, public health experts called for widespread prison releases as the best way to curb virus spread behind bars. In October, the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering released a report urging states to empty their prisons of anyone who was medically vulnerable, nearing the end of their sentence or of low risk to public safety.
But releases have been slow and uneven. In the first three months of the pandemic, more than 10,000 federal prisoners applied for compassionate release. Wardens denied or did not respond to almost all those requests, approving only 156 — less than 2%.
A plan to thin the state prison population in New Jersey, first introduced in June, was held up in the Legislature because of inadequate funding to help those who were released. About 2,200 prisoners with less than a year left to serve were ultimately released in November, eight months after the pandemic began.
California used a similar strategy to release 11,000 people since March. But state prisons stopped accepting new prisoners from county jails at several points during the pandemic, which simply shifted the burden to the jails. According to the state corrections agency, more than 8,000 people are now waiting in California’s county jails, which are also coronavirus hot spots.
“We call that ‘screwing county,’” said John Wetzel, Pennsylvania’s secretary of corrections, whose prison system has one of the lower COVID-19 case rates in the country, with one in every seven prisoners infected. But that’s still more than three times the statewide rate.
Prison walls are porous even during a pandemic, with corrections officers and other employees traveling in and out each day.
“The interchange between communities and prisons and jails has always been there, but in the context of COVID-19 it’s never been more clear,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a professor of social medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill who studies incarceration and health. “We have to stop thinking about them as a place apart.”
Wetzel said Pennsylvania’s prisons have kept virus rates relatively low by widely distributing masks in mid-March — weeks before even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending them for everyday use in public — and demanding that staff and prisoners use them properly and consistently. But prisoners and advocates say prevention measures on the ground are uneven, regardless of Wetzel’s good intentions.
As the country heads into winter with virus infections on the rise, experts caution that unless COVID-19 is brought under control behind bars, the country will not get it under control in the population at large.
“If we are going to end this pandemic — bring down infection rates, bring down death rates, bring down ICU occupancy rates — we have to address infection rates in correctional facilities,” said Emily Wang, professor at Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the recent National Academies report.
“Infections and deaths are extraordinarily high. These are wards of the state, and we have to contend with it.”
Sanctions fall most heavily on the poorest people in society, causing death through food and medicine shortages. (photo: AP)
US Issues New Venezuela-Related Sanctions Over Recent Elections
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United States has issued sanctions against two individuals and a company that it alleges played a role in 'fraudulent elections' in Venezuela earlier this month, a move that was rejected by President Nicolas Maduro as 'stupid.'"
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro slams US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for ‘stupid’ sanctions.
In a statement on Friday, the US Treasury Department said it had sanctioned Ex-Cle Soluciones Biometricas CA, a biometrics company, for providing material support to Maduro, “including by providing goods and services” to help carry out the parliamentary vote.
The department also sanctioned two individuals it alleged acted “for or on behalf of” Ex-Cle Soluciones Biometricas CA: dual Argentine and Italian national Guillermo Carlos San Agustin and Venezuelan Marcos Javier Machado Requena.
The sanctions block any assets they may have in the US, and prohibit US citizens from interacting with them.
Maduro’s political alliance overwhelmingly won the National Assembly elections, which were boycotted by Venezuela’s main opposition parties and criticised internationally for being fraudulent.
“The illegitimate Maduro regime’s efforts to steal elections in Venezuela show its disregard for the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people,” US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in the statement announcing the sanctions.
“The United States remains committed to targeting the Maduro regime and those who support its aim to deny the Venezuelan people their right to free and fair elections.”
US President Donald Trump’s administration has for years heaped pressure on Maduro, issuing numerous rounds of sanctions that have crippled Venezuela’s economy and backing his main opponent, Juan Guaido, who has tried to overthrow Maduro.
Guaido, the outgoing National Assembly speaker, urged Venezuelans to boycott the December 6 elections, which he alleged were rigged to favour Maduro, and instead organised a “popular consultation” vote in protest.
Maduro rejected Friday’s US sanctions announcement and slammed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in particular.
“The disgraceful Mike Pompeo today put out some stupid sanctions, like the good imbecile that he is … against the company and businessmen that manufactured machines so that the Venezuelan people could vote,” Maduro said in a televised broadcast.
The Maduro-led political alliance won more than 90 percent of the seats in the legislature, which had been the last state institution not in the hands of the governing Socialist Party.
The Maduro government said 5.2 million Venezuelans or about 31 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the congressional vote.
Firefighters preparing to fight a blaze in Australia. (photo: Matthew Abbott/NYT
Another Australian Wildfire Ignites - in One of Its Most Unique Ecosystems
Craig Welch, National Geographic
Welch writes: "The Flames licked sideways and leapt above the treetops. It was January 2020, and Greg Slade raced through smoke and past downed eucalyptus trees along a burning road on Australia's Kangaroo Island."
A huge fire on Fraser Island illustrates how unique landscapes across Australia remain at risk for transformation by the seemingly incessant flames.
Already, Slade, the acting manager of a wilderness retreat, had evacuated 18 staff and dozens of guests. He hung back to protect the hotel, but with 50-knot winds and scorching heat the retreat would not survive the worst fire season in the nation’s history. It, like thousands of homes and business, soon would be reduced to smoking rubble.
It took Slade 12 hours to get to safety that day. He spent the next 10 months traveling and, this October, landed a job at another retreat, on Australia’s 700-square-mile Fraser Island, east of Queensland.
But weeks into his job, a new wildfire forced him to evacuate yet again.
The new blaze “got pretty nasty and came within 100 meters” of his new workplace, says the 42-year-old Slade. Luck, weather, and Australia’s fire brigade saved the business. But for the first time in memory half of Fraser Island, an ecological oasis and UNESCO World Heritage site, burned all at once.
In the wake of last year’s devastating bushfires in Australia, which killed at least 33 people and three billion animals, from koalas to frogs, and torched an area twice the size of Pennsylvania, the country is still just beginning to wrestle with a future that promises ever bigger and more severe fires.
As what is typically the most explosive portion of Australia’s fire season gets underway, weather patterns indicate that this year will see heavy rain, perhaps tempering flames and the country’s years of scorching heat and drought. Rain this week helped firefighters finally corral Fraser Island’s fire, though burns are expected to smolder into January.
But as the island’s experience makes clear, unique landscapes across the continent remain at risk for transformation and conflagration, as climate change, flawed land management, and other environmental threats increasingly collide with fire.
A rare place at risk
Fraser Island, also known by its Aboriginal name, K’gari, is the world’s largest sand dune island, with cliffs, unusual dune lakes, and rare ecosystems. Its signature vista is an inland rainforest of Kauri pines, giant ferns, and turpentine trees that can live for a thousand years. The island’s beaches, heathlands, and forests also are home to sensitive species, from knots, petrels, and other birds to flying foxes, skinks, sea turtles, and wild dingoes.
Fraser’s October fire was ignited by an illegal beach campfire. Unlike the racing megafires that burned large sections of New South Wales and Victoria a year earlier, this blaze didn’t move with force or ferocity. But its slow march was relentless. “It was alarming how big it was,” says Rod Fensham, ecology professor at the University of Queensland.
Fire is a natural part of Fraser’s landscape, but in recent years the austral winter dry season has extended later into spring and also been warmed by climate change. According to Jamie Shulmeister, a researcher with New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who has studied Fraser for years, that cures the vegetation faster and makes it ripe for fire to run uncontrolled before it’s noticed.
“In the old days,” he says, “that sort of fire could easily have happened, but the likelihood is that it would have petered out after a day or two.” Instead, this one crisped more than 200,000 acres and burned for two months straight.
Fraser is sparsely populated, and its pockets of homes and businesses were spared. But the island’s geology is unlike anywhere else. It is home to plants and animals living in sensitive niches, such as acidic swamps with fish and amphibians specially adapted to tolerate the water’s chemistry.
Even in areas that evolved with fire, flames that burn too hot can destroy vegetative cover, allowing sand to move with the winds. Once that starts, the island’s dune system can shift, potentially reconfiguring whole ecosystems.
That’s not the only risk. Thus far, it appears fires did not penetrate Fraser Island’s rainforest, Shulmeister and Fensham both say. But a South American tree fungus called myrtle rust infects vegetation near its edge. Big hot burns combined with myrtle rust can alter the ability of shade species to regenerate, making it hard for rainforest plants to take root. For the rainforest, fire can pose “an existential threat to its survival,” Shulmeister says.
It will be years before Shulmeister can say for sure whether this blaze sparked damage that can’t be undone. For now, he hopes the Fraser Island fire is “mostly a warning sign.”
Slade, for one, definitely feels warned.
After his evacuation order lifted, Slade returned to work. Like many Australians, he’s comfortable around wildfire. He saw it in the bush in Victoria, the region around Melbourne in south Australia, in his 20s and has even taken courses in fire management. And unlike his experience on Kangaroo Island, no one on Fraser, even during evacuations, felt like they were fleeing for their lives.
But the other day he took a drive to survey the damage. Even though the Fraser blaze burned slower than last year’s megafires, it was hard not to be humbled by its raw power.
“A lot of vegetation is completely nuked to the ground,” Slade says.
He is not eager to go through that again.
