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25 January 21
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Charles Pierce | I'm Not One to Offer Mitch McConnell Political Advice, but He Should Make Sure Trump Is Convicted
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Right now, the former president* has the power to monkey-wrench Republican politics from hell to breakfast."
f the new Democratic congressional majorities want to make impeaching the former president* an annual event at this time of year, like Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl, I'm certainly down with that. It's not like there aren't enough fresh charges laying around to carry the thing every year for the next few decades. (And what happens to our annual party if that worthy happens to die in the interim? Cadaver Synod, baby!) It appears that the 2021 festival of parliamentary revelry kicks off on Monday. From NBC News:
The transmission will trigger preparations for a trial that could start as early as next week, but Senate leaders indicated it may be delayed to allow Trump to organize his defense. "Make no mistake: A trial will be held in the United States Senate, and there will be a vote whether to convict the president," Schumer, a New York Democrat, said. "Senators will have to decide if they believe Donald John Trump incited the insurrection against the United States."
Far be it from me to offer political advice to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but he's out of his mind if he doesn't whip the 17 Republican votes needed for conviction and then vote himself for the inevitable resolution banning the former president* from ever holding political office again. Right now, the former president* has the power to monkey-wrench Republican politics from hell to breakfast. To use only one obvious example, he can freeze the 2024 presidential primaries until the nomination becomes worthless to whoever finally wins it. And, of course, that's assuming that he doesn't jump in himself. Just by going along with Schumer and impeachment, McConnell could rid his party of 275 pounds (est.) of dead weight.
McConnell's current attitude seems to indicate that he's at least contemplating cutting the former president* loose. Instead of the ferocious partisan rhetoric he mustered up a year ago, McConnell this time has been sticking to pallid banalities about fairness. And his announcement that he's undecided on the merits of the charges already has touched off a volcanic eruption at Mar-a-Lago. This is a tremendous—and tremendously easy—opportunity for McConnell to pretend to be a patriot. And then we can talk about censuring Cruz and Hawley.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leaves the Senate floor on Jan. 1. (photo: Liz Lynch/Getty Images)
Sanders Says Democrats Will Push Coronavirus Relief Package Through With Simple Majority
Orion Rummler, Axios
Rummler writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders, incoming chair of the Senate Budget Committee who caucuses with the Democrats, told CNN's 'State of the Union' on Sunday that Democrats plan to push a coronavirus relief package through the chamber with a simple majority vote."
Why it matters: "Budget reconciliation" would allow Democrats to forgo the Senate's 60-vote requirement and could potentially speed-up the next relief package for millions of unemployed Americans. Democrats hold the the 50-50 split in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote.
What he's saying: "What we cannot do is wait weeks and weeks and months to go forward. We have got to act now," Sanders said.
- "We're going to use reconciliation — that's 50 votes in the Senate, plus the vice president — to pass legislation desperately needed by working families in this country right now."
- When asked if he wants a relief bill passed before former President Trump's impeachment trial begins the week of Feb. 8, he said: "We've got to do everything. This is not — you don't have the time to sit around, weeks on impeachment and not get vaccines into the arms of people."
Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Republicans Back Biden's Coronavirus Response
at a Surprisingly High Rate, Poll Suggests
Joe Manchin's Voters Aren't Letting Him Stop $2,000 Checks
Jay Willis, The Appeal
Willis writes: "The intense backlash to his recent comments criticizing $2,000 stimulus checks signal the growing momentum for guaranteed income programs-and the emerging power of voters who care more about substantive results than partisan skirmishes."
n the same day President Joe Biden sketched out the first details of his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus proposal earlier this month, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a fellow Democrat, dunked its most important component in a bucket of cold water. “Absolutely not. No,” he told The Washington Post, when asked if the party’s top priority should be sending out $2,000 stimulus payments—a pledge that Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and a multitude of other Democratic politicians made repeatedly on the campaign trail. “Getting people vaccinated, that’s job No. 1.”
When the interviewer pointed out that this position placed him directly at odds with party leadership, Manchin more or less shrugged. “That’s the beauty of our whole caucus,” he said. “We have a difference of opinion on that.”
Manchin went on to explain that he might back a more narrowly targeted round of checks, if he could be persuaded that the money would bring back some of the millions of jobs that evaporated during the pandemic. Even under this hypothetical set of self-imposed conditions, though, he seemed to remain philosophically opposed to the notion of giving people money, and wistfully invoked the New Deal championed by President Franklin Roosevelt almost a century ago. “I don’t know where in the hell $2,000 came from,” Manchin later said, a statement that could only be true if he had not watched TV or listened to any member of his party for the last several months. “Can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ‘em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?”
For Manchin, this question is apparently rhetorical. For the 1.8 million West Virginians he represents in Washington, it is assuredly not. An infrastructure job soon is of little use to a family that needs to buy groceries last week. Already among the nation’s poorest states before the pandemic hit, more than half of West Virginians are now struggling to cover their basic expenses, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Since Manchin is the most conservative member of a Senate Democratic caucus that must remain united to act without Republican support, his opposition to sending out checks signaled to many that Biden’s proposal was effectively dead before members of the 117th Congress would even have the chance to vote on it.
Manchin’s constituents wasted little time expressing their feelings on the subject. The backlash was “swift and vocal,” said Stephen Smith, a former Democratic gubernatorial candidate and co-chair of West Virginia Can’t Wait. “People of all stripes and all over the state were saying, ‘This is the difference between whether or not my family gets to stay in their home. This is the difference between whether my small business gets to stay alive. This is the difference between whether or not I get glasses.’”
In Beckley, a billboard went up portraying a bewildered-looking Manchin next to “HEY JOE! WHERE’S MY $2,000?”—and, just as importantly, next to his office’s phone number. Radio ads mocked him for accomplishing the rarest of feats in Washington these days: being out of step on an issue with both Trump and his Democratic counterparts. “Our senator, Joe Manchin, thinks he knows better than both our president and the Democrats in Congress,” the narrator said. “I guess Joe just don’t know what it’s been like to live through the pandemic.”
“I think that it was important that we not equivocate on something that was core to the message that won us Georgia and the Senate,” says No Excuses PAC co-founder Corbin Trent, whose group paid for the ads that he narrated himself. “And not to look like Democrats, right out of the gate, are full of shit.”
The message, in some form or another, got through. During an appearance on Inside West Virginia Politics last weekend, Manchin again emphasized the importance of embedding trillions in infrastructure spending in a stimulus bill. But the precise distribution of direct payments, it seems, is no longer among his principal concerns. “Is there a way to target it? Maybe there’s not,” he said. “But we gotta get more money out.”
Manchin’s reversal here is a product of both West Virginia’s unconventional political landscape and the unique position he occupies within it. Voters in the state are less Democrat or Republican than independent and anti-establishment; although Trump won every single county in 2020 and beat Biden by nearly 40 points, registered Democrats actually outnumber registered Republicans, and nearly a quarter of voters are unaffiliated with any particular party. And after some four decades in state politics, Manchin is now the lone Democrat elected to statewide office, a skilled retail politician who prides himself on eschewing the labels by which many of his colleagues define themselves. (Re-elected most recently in 2018, Manchin was the only Democrat to vote to confirm Republican justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, and memorably made headlines by flirting with the idea of endorsing Trump’s re-election bid.) In an evenly-divided Senate, Joe Manchin’s penchant for refusing to toe the party line makes him arguably the most powerful lawmaker in Washington.
As the backlash to his comments illustrates, however, moderate politicians who overthink the inside-the-Beltway partisan machinations risk whiffing badly when it comes to delivering what voters actually want. Polling conducted by Data for Progress and The Appeal found that about 80 percent of all voters, including nearly three-quarters of Republicans, support a one-time distribution of $2,000 payments, and more than half support making such payments retroactive and recurring until the pandemic is over. As it turns out, the economic devastation wrought by a disaster that brought large swaths of American society to a grinding halt does not discriminate based on party preference. For lawmakers, performing bipartisanship when people are suffering doesn’t burnish your independent bona fides; it just makes your constituents furious.
With stakes this high, the emergence of independent, nonpartisan coalitions like the one banging on Manchin’s office door could redraw entrenched political battle lines in a hurry, even in this hyperpolarized version of Washington, D.C. “The thing that’s going to move Joe Manchin or anyone else positioning themselves on the fence … is the existence of a populist movement,” said Smith. “That is something that Manchin can’t control, and therefore has to listen to.”
Manchin’s objections to direct stimulus payments are as substantively unfounded as they are strategically unwise. For one, endless tinkering with eligibility criteria ignores the fact that the government has tools available to recover money that might flow to unintended beneficiaries—the annual tax filing process, for example. And although preemptive means-testing might sound like a sensible component of a massive cash distribution scheme, experts caution that it often does far more harm than good. “The moment you start to really apply means testing, there’s just a lot of people that fall through the cracks,” says Income Movement president and founder Stacey Rutland, whose organization paid for the billboard in Beckley. “Usually it’s the people who need it the most.”
The high-profile fights over COVID-19 stimulus payments have been a boon to the guaranteed income movement, which has already been the subject of high-profile pilot programs over the last several years. (A coalition of 34 mayors is now running ads in The Washington Post calling on Congress to make those stimulus payments a monthly occurrence: “ONE MORE CHECK IS NOT ENOUGH,” it reads.) Many people who were previously skeptical of “government handouts” now have firsthand knowledge of the woeful insufficiency of the existing social safety net. And the longstanding insistence on tying receipt of assistance to employment—a reliable staple of “welfare reform” language used by Republicans and Democrats alike—loses its rhetorical force when a global emergency prevents so many people from working at all. As Smith points out, the pandemic has not created economic precarity so much as it has democratized it. “People who are not sure how they’re going to put food on the table don’t need a crisis to remind them that things need to change in a fundamental way,” he says.
As Democrats in Washington prepare to tackle the stimulus bill—among the many, many urgent items on their agenda—conventional wisdom dictates that they have to act quickly to accomplish their legislative priorities, but also cautiously, to preserve the majorities that make those successes possible. The parties of incumbent presidents usually lose seats in Congress in the midterm election that follows. Given the narrow margins by which Democrats currently control both chambers, getting too ambitious might lose them the unified Democratic government they worked so hard to earn in 2020.
But Manchin’s rapid about-face here reveals just how shortsighted and obsolete this conventional wisdom really is. As Trent points out, Roosevelt, whose New Deal leadership Manchin cited approvingly to the Post, is the rare incoming president who actually expanded his party’s legislative majorities two years later. “It’s because they were producing,” Trent says. “That led to a generation of majorities and trifectas from the Democratic Party, and we were able to do some amazing shit because of that.” In this moment of crisis, voters are far likelier to punish their lawmakers’ failures to deliver than they are to reward knee-jerk partisan intransigence. Lawmakers who don’t learn this lesson will quickly find themselves out of office.
The skies over Mar-a-Lago. (photo: Twitter)
Members Are Quitting Mar-a-Lago Because It Has Become a 'Sad' and 'Dispirited' Place Since Trump Moved In
Joshua Zitser, Business Insider
Zitser writes: "Former President Donald Trump's return to his glitzy Mar-a-Lago resort is said to have been met with little fanfare by the club's wealthy members."
In fact, the author of a book on the Florida resort says that the mood is "dispirited" and that people are canceling their memberships.
"I've talked to a bunch of people the last couple of days," the author Laurence Leamer told MSNBC. "A lot of people have quit Mar-a-Lago."
Leamer, who wrote "Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace," then remarked that members were leaving over concerns they might be featured in newspaper articles.
Leamer said Trump's declining popularity had turned off members.
"They don't want anything to do with Donald Trump," he said. "Many of the members, they're not going there very often because it's a very dispirited place."
He continued: "It's a sad place for Trump to be hanging out. It's not what it was."
Leamer later added: "They're walking away from him. Even here, people don't like him."
Members, who pay $200,000 to join the club, have voiced their concern about Trump's return to Mar-a-Lago.
Some of his neighbors last year began taking legal action to try to prevent the move from becoming permanent, according to The Washington Post.
The neighbors wrote a secret letter to Palm Beach authorities and the US Secret Service arguing that Trump had no legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago full-time, The Post reported.
Dr. Anthony Fauci. (photo: Getty Images)
Trump Fumes in His First Weekend Out of Office as Fauci Clowns on Him
Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Suebsaeng writes: "In recent days, former President Donald Trump has watched from afar as one of his most popular rivals for public attention has been unleashed by the Biden administration to, in part, disparage Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the ex-president hasn't even been able to tweet about it."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, once a prominent figure on Trump’s coronavirus task force who’s now a top COVID-19 adviser to President Joe Biden, began his multi-day blitz to different news outlets that included openly expressing his relief that the old crew was gone and that he could now serve in the Biden administration.
“One of the new things in this administration is if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess, just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters at the White House on Thursday. He also stressed to journalists during that White House briefing that when he told them about how certain matters had markedly improved after Trump left office, he definitely “wasn’t joking!”
And as Biden’s predecessor watched on—albeit from hundreds of miles away from where he last week sat at the height of executive power—he reacted in a fit of grievance, self-obsession, TV hate-watching that largely defined his presidency and now-defunct policy-making operations.
Fauci’s re-emergence on prime-time television during the Biden era infuriated the exiled Trump, who began whining about how “incompetent” the doctor was, and how he probably should have fired Fauci when he had the chance, a source close to the former president and another individual familiar with the matter tell The Daily Beast. (Technically, Trump did not have the power to fire Fauci, a career federal employee.)
On top of everything else that was stripped from him, he’s lost his primary emotional release valve, thanks to his post-Capitol riot banning from Twitter, just as his enemies—real and perceived—keep dancing atop his administration’s freshly dug grave.
And it’s not just Fauci. Trump has also griped this weekend about not being able to tweet about the Biden team telling journalists that Trump and ex-officials had left them with a gigantic COVID mess to mop up, according to a person with direct knowledge of his recent ramblings.
“He very much feels that a lot of people are working to downgrade his legacy out of hatred for him,” this source said.
Fauci may not be trying to actively downgrade Trump’s legacy—which speaks for itself as infections surpassed 25 million on Sunday and has killed more than 400,000 Americans—but he nowadays is not shy about telling the press and the cameras about how he was treated by the former president and his lieutenants in the West Wing.
“After a TV interview or a story in a major newspaper, someone senior, like Mark Meadows, would call me up expressing concern that I was going out of my way to contradict the president,” the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “There were a couple of times where I would make a statement that was a pessimistic viewpoint about what direction we were going, and the president would call me up and say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive.’”
During the Q&A, Fauci went on to discuss the deluge of death threats and harassment that he and his family received during the Trump era, which included how “one day I got a letter in the mail, I opened it up and a puff of powder came all over my face and my chest… The security detail was there, and they’re very experienced in that. They said, ‘Don’t move, stay in the room.’ And they got the hazmat people.” (He said it turned out to be “benign,” and not something like ricin or anthrax.)
The now former, twice-impeached President Trump had spent chunks of his final year in office denigrating and pushing aside Fauci, a longtime infectious diseases expert who during the prior administration had even once publicly suggested that Trump and his team’s COVID-era decisions had cost many American lives. It got to the point where the Trump White House and key MAGA allies devoted time and resources to compiling memos and official talking points to attack Fauci’s credibility as an expert on science and public health. In Peter Navarro’s case, the now-former top White House trade adviser to Trump authored a short opinion piece published in USA Today that trashed Fauci as being “wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” During his time in the White House, Trump would on-and-off complain to aides about public opinion polling that showed Fauci was trusted by a significantly greater share of the U.S. population than himself. The former president would also launch into tirades about how he’d made Dr. Fauci a “star” who, supposedly, would be a nobody without Trump.
All of this happened while Fauci was still working on that administration’s COVID task force while the White House was supposed to be focusing on fighting the virus that was surging through the country and the White House itself. And for the former president and much of Trumpworld, the animus remains intact.
“The scorn of Fauci should be worn as a badge of honor, since he’s done so much harm to the economic, physical, and mental vitality of our nation,” Steve Cortes, who worked as a senior adviser on the Trump re-election campaign, said on Sunday afternoon.
Fauci occupies a unique position in the Trump orbit as a target for hate, even though he wasn’t the only member of the Trump White House’s task force who was glad to see the prior administration sent packing. And he certainly wasn’t the only one who recalled President Trump derailing high-level coronavirus policy meetings with inane, if not dangerous, input.
“There was parallel data streams coming into the White House that were not transparently utilized,” Dr. Deborah Birx, another senior member of the Trump administration task force, told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made. So, I know that someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president.”
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser for the COVID task force who ended up leaving and endorsing Biden last year, told The Daily Beast last month that during meetings on the virus, Trump and other administration brass would repeatedly interrupt the conversations to ask if things like herd immunity would be good policy for them to pursue.
Many experts and former Trump administration officials feared that an official policy of herd immunity would get a staggering amount of Americans killed in the process, and Trump had to be walked back from the edge of endorsing it multiple times.
And some of the times when Trump wasn’t offering up potentially disastrous ideas on the pandemic in closed-door huddles, he would choose to focus on, in Troye’s words, “talk[ing] about media that had pissed him off.”
She added, “At times, he would go around and spend his time complimenting people for their [recent TV] appearances. He’d compliment Kellyanne Conway, or someone, on how well he thought someone did, saying, ‘Oh, you did a great job on that today!’ This was [during meetings] when we were trying to get him to focus on matters of life and death around the country.”
A woman holds up a sign reading 'Brazilian lives matter. Out Bolsonaro!' during a motorcade in São Paulo. (photo: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)
Motorcade Rallies Call for Impeachment of Bolsonaro in Brazil
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "Thousands of Brazilians have taken to the streets in their cars to demand Jair Bolsonaro's impeachment as polls showed support for the far-right president slipping over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic."
Protests take place across country at what many see as president’s shambolic Covid response
On Saturday, as Brazil’s official Covid-19 death toll hit 216,000, leftwing and centrist protesters organised motorcade rallies in more than 20 state capitals, including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Belém.
The leftwing leader Guilherme Boulos told objectors parading through São Paulo the rallies signalled the start of “a popular uprising against this genocidal government”.
“We’re here to announce that we aren’t going to wait until [the next presidential election in] 2022, because lives are at stake. Now’s the time to defeat Jair Bolsonaro,” Boulos told the car-bound dissenters. “He’s going to leave the presidency and go straight to jail.”
On Sunday, rightwing groups held their own pro-impeachment events, including in Barra da Tijuca, a bastion of Bolsonaro support in west Rio.
An online petition being promoted by conservative former supporters has attracted more than 180,000 signatures in three days. “President Bolsonaro is a curse on Brazil and … it’s up to us, the people, to secure his removal,” it says, accusing the president of endangering thousands of lives with his anti-scientific response to Covid.
Lucas Paulino, a lawyer who helped organise a rally in Belo Horizonte, said demonstrators were driven by the horrifying healthcare collapse happening hundreds of miles north in the Amazon. In recent days dozens of patients have died in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, after a surge in Covid infections and a catastrophic lack of planning caused hospitals to run out of oxygen. Brazil’s health minister, Eduardo Pazuello – whose critics call him “Pezadello” (nightmare) – travelled to the city only to promote bogus “early treatments” such as hydroxychloroquine.
“That really showed us the extent of the federal government’s dereliction of duty and denialism towards the Covid pandemic,” said Paulino, 32, a regional leader for a progressive political group called Acredito (I Believe).
“The feeling that this negligence, this anti-democratic extremism, this denial of science, this omission, this glorification of authoritarianism, can no longer be allowed to continue was trapped in the throats of many Brazilians,” Paulino added.
Political journalist João Villaverde, a columnist for the magazine Época, said the drive-by demos – the first significant outdoor mobilisations since the pandemic began – suggested opposition to Bolsonaro was entering a new and unpredictable phase with the potential to end his presidency.
He said: “These protests show our politicians that Brazilian society has reached such a level of anger and annoyance with the state of affairs provoked by the utter ineptitude of Bolsonarismo, that it’s willing to protest even in the middle of a pandemic. This hadn’t happened before.
“Alright, they were motorcades, with protesters in cars. But it shows society is on the verge of exploding.”
Bolsonaro suppporters, who claim their opposition to coronavirus containment measures is designed to protect Brazil’s economy, played down the protests. The president’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro, a politician, attacked what he called the “villainous media” for over-egging what he described as embarrassingly small demonstrations.
Villaverde, who has studied Brazil’s history of impeachments, said he believed that two years into his four-year term Bolsonaro was on the ropes.
“We are now very, very close to the moment in which all the conditions exist for an impeachment process to happen,” Villaverde said, pointing to Brazil’s Covid-battered economy, the existence of multiple impeachable offenses linked to the pandemic, and shaky support in congress.
Still lacking were sustained street protests and a greater meltdown in public support that would convince members of congress to abandon Bolsonaro. On Friday one of Brazil’s leading pollsters, Datafolha, claimed rejection of Bolsonaro had jumped by 8% while support had fallen from 37% to 31%. An impeachment process would become more likely if that number fell to about 20%, Villaverde said.
The coming weeks could prove significant to Bolsonaro’s political survival, with emergency coronavirus benefit payments from the government set to end on Wednesday.
“We are on the cusp of a very, very severe social problem,” said Villaverde. “Millions and millions of Brazilian men and women are going to be left incomeless right in the middle of a second wave when we’ve already got 15 million unemployed.”
While they may look similar to indiscriminate raccoons, endangered red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) are specialists and eat mostly bamboo. (photo: Rhett Butler/Mongabay)
6% of Earth's Protected Land Is Used to Grow Crops, Study Finds
Morgan Erickson-Davis, Mongabay
Erickson-Davis writes: "Covering around 13% of Earth's surface and harboring an estimated 83% of its endangered wildlife, protected areas are tasked with an outsize responsibility to safeguard vulnerable species, as well as many Indigenous communities. But mounting evidence suggests protected areas may not be living up to their name."
overing around 13% of Earth’s surface and harboring an estimated 83% of its endangered wildlife, protected areas are tasked with an outsize responsibility to safeguard vulnerable species, as well as many Indigenous communities. But mounting evidence suggests protected areas may not be living up to their name, with around a third of the planet’s protected land area under intense pressure from human activity. Now, a new study reveals 6% of the world’s protected land has been cleared and converted to crop fields.
The study, published this week in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by researchers Varsha Vijay of the University of Maryland’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and Paul R. Armsworth of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee. Vijay and Armsworth combined data on protected areas, cropland, biodiversity levels, biomes, human density and income to see just how much of the planet’s agricultural land is coming at the expense of protected habitat and the factors that play into this.
Their analysis revealed that cropland takes up 13.6% of the planet’s ice-free surface area and overlaps with 6% of its protected area. They write that while most of this activity is happening in protected areas that are designated muti-use – which means limited and regulated land conversion is legally allowed – “worryingly, we find that 22% of cropland in protected occurs in areas of strict protection,” which include nature reserves, wilderness areas, national monuments, protected landscapes and national parks.
The study indicates that northern latitudes have larger proportions of cropland in protected areas overall, but that much of that cropland had been converted from forest before protected areas were established around it. Meanwhile, tropical and subtropical locations experienced bigger recent surges of cropland conversion. This, the authors write, raises “concerns for cropland expansion into protected and unprotected conservation priority areas.”
While some species are at home in agricultural fields, most are not – particularly specialist species that require particular foods to survive (versus generalists, like raccoons, that can eat pretty much anything they come across). And research has shown that an endangered species is more often than not a specialist.
Vijay and Armsworth’s findings come as nations and international agencies prepare to establish conservation goals for the coming decade and revamp existing ones, and as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) attempt to claw their way up from setbacks due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the SDGs acknowledge the importance of biodiversity and human health by including specific goals for improving both habitat conservation and food security, “conservation and development planning are still often treated as independent processes,” Armsworth said in a statement.
The study took advantage of multiple recent datasets and “represents the most comprehensive assessment of the extent and distribution of global cropland inside protected areas,” Vijay and Armsworth write in their study; Vijay added that similar methods could be used to help governments achieve their conservation and development sustainability targets.
“Rapid advances in data availability provide exciting opportunities for bringing the two processes together,” Vijay said.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft chief environmental officer and an expert on protected area effectiveness who was not involved in the study, added his voice to the chorus urging a reformed approach.
“The findings of this study emphasize the need to move beyond area-based conservation targets and develop quantitative measures to improve conservation outcomes in protected areas,” Joppa said, “especially in areas of high food insecurity and biodiversity.”
This story was originally published on Mongabay
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