27 November 22
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The story of the damage done to the world’s biodiversity is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. Can the world seize its chance to change the narrative?
Take the case of Genyornis, one of the world’s heaviest birds, which was more than 2 metres tall and weighed in excess of 200kg. It lived in Australia until, along with many other megafauna, it went extinct 50,000 years ago. In North America, giant beavers weighing the same as a fridge and an armadillo-like creature called a glyptodon, which was the size of a small car, existed until about 12,000 years ago, when they, too, went extinct. In all, more than 178 species of the world’s largest mammals are estimated to have been driven to extinction between 52,000 and 9,000BC.
For a long time, these extinctions were thought to be linked to natural changes in the environment – until 1966, when palaeontologist Paul S Martin put forward his controversial “overkill hypothesis” that humans were responsible for the extinctions of megafauna, destroying the romantic vision of early humans living in harmony with nature.
Prof Mark Maslin, from University College London (UCL), suggests that the unsustainable hunting of megafauna may have been one of the driving forces that led humans to domesticate plants and animals. People started farming in at least 14 different places, independently of each other, from about 10,500 years ago. “Weirdly enough, I think the first biodiversity crisis was at the end of the last ice age, when early humans had slaughtered the megafauna and therefore they’d sort of run out of food, and that precipitated, in many places, a switch to agriculture,” he says.
Although the debate is far from settled, it appears ancient humans took thousands of years to wipe out species in a way modern humans would do in decades. Fast forward to today and we are not just killing megafauna but destroying whole landscapes, often in just a few years. Farming is the primary driver of destruction and, of all mammals on Earth, 96% are either livestock or humans. The UN estimates as many as one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.
After the spread of farming and significant population increases, it was European expansion that would be the next big blow to the planet’s biodiversity. While Indigenous peoples across the world lived mostly within the limits set by nature, recognising their dependency on it and protecting it, while hunting to survive, all that was about to change.
Spanish explorers and settlers arrived in central and southern America in the 15th and 16th centuries. In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Maslin and Prof Simon Lewis, also from UCL, describe maps of that time showing large tracts of lands with not much on them. These places already had names, but the Europeans claimed them for themselves. “Religion and notions of the superiority of Europeans loomed large as justifiers of both the conquest of land and the names themselves. The heyday of geologists naming vast portions of Earth’s history was also the European colonial era,” they write.
Their arrival also heralded the displacement, persecution and killing of Indigenous peoples. Researchers from UCL, including Maslin and Lewis, found the European colonisation of the Americas caused the death of 56 million people by 1600 – 90% of the Indigenous population. Today, Indigenous people make up just 6% of the world’s population but protect 80% of the planet’s biodiversity.
European scientists’ interest in the diversity of life peaked in the Victorian era. Great natural history museums are testament to this excitement of discovery – they wanted to show off the exotic animals and plants collected from all over the British empire to the public at home. For the first time, they began to understand the immense diversity of the natural world and that humans were destroying it.
In the 18th century, one of the most significant missions to understand the diversity of life on Earth was that of the Swedish natural philosopher Carl Linnaeus. He is known as the “father of taxonomy”, naming more than 12,000 species of plants and animals. His Systema Naturae, published in 1735, still shapes how we classify flora and fauna today. Modestly, he is said to have commented: “God created, but Linnaeus organised.” To be fair, he was pretty much right.
The 18th century was also when people realised humans were having big local impacts on the climate and environment. In 1778, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc noted the decimation of fish populations and destruction of forests, warning that humans “use everything up without renewing anything”, according to one account in Elephant Treaties: The Colonial Legacy of the Biodiversity Crisis, by Rachelle Adam.
At the end of the century, the explorer Alexander von Humboldt was on the loose. He was writing at a time when nature was generally seen as something that humans had to control, but he saw that it was humans who had the power to damage ecosystems and the climate through activities such as deforestation, mining and water extraction.
His work was a great inspiration for Charles Darwin. The British naturalist did not use the term biodiversity (which wouldn’t be coined for another 150 years) but he had worked out a key premise of it – that all species are linked and can be traced back to a single origin, as most notably laid out in On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. The decline of specific species was turning into an understanding about the broader, more far-reaching impacts of ecosystem decline, because of this premise that everything is connected.
In 1881, Darwin published a book about earthworms in which he showed how they aerate the soil, breaking down organic matter into nutrients that can be used by plants. He proved agriculture – and, therefore, our food supply – is heavily dependent on the amount of worms that we have. “That kind of analysis was already there,” says Ted Benton, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex. “But there is a distinction between the analysis being there and how far it is widely understood. And furthermore, how far that understanding filters into government action. That’s what makes a difference.”
Neither Humboldt nor Darwin were activists, unlike Darwin’s collaborator, Alfred Wallace. In his book Island Life, published in 1880, Wallace criticised the “reckless destruction of forests, and with them of countless species of plants and animals”.
Although often critical of colonialism, slavery and the destruction of ecosystems, these early explorer scientists were products of that world. The colonialists needed people capable of deciphering the ecology of new territories, for commercial interests and for the health and safety of those onboard the ships.
Scientists are still debating the official start of the Anthropocene, but some argue that it began towards the end of the 18th century with the advent of the industrial revolution. The majority believe it was more like the 1950s, with the testing of nuclear weapons and the start of the “Great Acceleration”, when destructive human activity surged across the planet. It marks a period when humans (“anthropo”) have altered the planetary boundaries to such a degree it has its own geological epoque.
In the 20th century, a series of natural crises made people more aware nature was under threat, as the planet started being damaged at a faster rate than ever before. The “roaring 20s” gave way to the “dirty 30s” with a decade of dust storms in the US and south-east Australia. In 1935, the dramatic dust clouds of the American midwest loomed over New York and left three-quarters of western states parched. They were caused by a combination of extreme weather – heatwaves and drought – and unsustainable farming practices, which replaced native prairie vegetation.
Ecologist Francis Ratcliffe was sent from London in 1929 to find out more about what was going on in Australia and later wrote Flying Fox and Drifting Sand. He described soil erosion as a “creeping mortal sickness” and said the only solution was to reduce the number of farmers in the area. In response to his reports, soil conservation bodies were created in New South Wales in 1938 and Victoria in 1940.
After the second world war, amateur naturalists started documenting a decline in birds and butterflies. In the US, populations of the bald eagle – the national bird – were rapidly falling. Synthetic pesticides developed during the war, including DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), used to prevent insect-borne diseases such as typhoid and malaria, were identified as the culprits as more insecticides were used in the push to intensify agriculture.
But it was probably not until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that the wider public began to understand the implications of the loss of nature. She wrote about how DDT and other chemicals were damaging ecosystems, killing insects and birds and eventually reaching humans.
Immediately there was great public interest. She was sued by American chemical giants who launched a publicity campaign that criticised her for being an unmarried, hysterical and unscientific woman who kept cats and loved birds. Oil and gas giants used similar tactics to distort science on the climate crisis from the 1980s onwards.
In 1972, DDT was banned in the US, and today a ban on its use in agriculture is worldwide. Carson’s book led to numerous laws being passed to protect the environment as well as the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 1969, Friends of the Earth was set up in the US and two years later Greenpeace was founded in Canada. Awareness about the environment was at an all-time high.
Meanwhile, in the UK, a popular TV presenter was seen lying down beside a mountain gorilla, called Poppy, in Rwanda. It was 1979 and the presenter was David Attenborough, whose series Life on Earth was watched by 25 million people. For the first time, huge swathes of the public witnessed lifeforms they never could have imagined and learned about wildlife far away.
“I think that was an iconic moment, particularly in the UK,” says Maslin. “It starts off as the importance of these as species … I don’t think it was until much later that we realised that ecosystems are essential for the functioning of the biosphere.”
In 1989, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, made a 30-minute speech to the UN about the importance of the environment. She spoke about the ozone layer, acid rain and climate change and mainstreamed issues previously associated with “tree-hugging weirdos”.
A trio of biodiversity researchers – Richard Leakey, Edward O Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy, who all died in the space of 10 days over Christmas and new year 2021 – were key in driving forward an awareness about threats to the natural world. Lovejoy persuaded famous people such as Tom Cruise to go the Amazon to raise awareness of its immense diversity and why it needs protection.
The term “biological diversity” appears to have been used for the first time in 1916 in an article by J Arthur Harris titled The Variable Desert, but it was not until 1980 that Lovejoy used the term in scientific work. It was picked up rapidly and contracted to biodiversity in the mid-80s, although there is some dispute about the exact date. Scientists found the term useful to communicate the fundamental problem of the decline of nature – the loss of natural variety.
In 1986, nine prominent US scientists attending the National Academy of Sciences forum on biodiversity warned that species loss was the most serious challenge facing the world, “second only to the threat of thermonuclear war”. The first mention of “biodiversity” in the Guardian was a write-up of that conference.
Libby Robin, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, notes that this was before the public had picked up that the climate crisis was an issue. She says: “Climate scientists (physicists) elsewhere were starting to be concerned about carbon/global warming but this emphasis came later in the public mind, particularly with James Hansen’s message to the American Congress at the height of the hot ‘greenhouse’ summer in 1988.”
Looking back at Guardian coverage, it is clear scientists were communicating how alarming the situation was 50 years ago. In 1972, American biologist Barry Commoner was quoted as saying that the “rate of exploitation of the ecosystem, which generates economic growth, cannot increase indefinitely without overdriving the system and pushing it to the point of collapse”.
Many ideas we perceive as “new” are not. In 1980, Prof Norman Moore wrote a piece about “biological diversity” in the Guardian (the first time the term appeared in the paper) about how to make compromises that would promote productive farming and conservation, which sounds very familiar to current discussions about the British government’s proposed subsidy system (environmental land management schemes, or Elms) to encourage nature-friendly farming.
Moore wrote: “Generalised statements about the desirability of conserving wildlife will have no effect unless we can order our affairs so that the individual farmer can be helped to conserve wildlife on particular bits of ground.” He suggested the best agricultural land should be used for farming, while less productive places should be given over to wildlife.
In 1982, the Guardian wrote about the Brandt Report, that said: “Few threats to peace and survival of the human community are greater than those posed by the prospects of cumulative and irreversible degradation of the biosphere on which human life depends.” In the same article, British environmentalist Norman Myers, who was responsible for a lot of the Guardian’s early biodiversity coverage, wrote about the importance of soils, water, forests, grasslands and fisheries as ecosystems that “underpin our material welfare”. If a nation lost them “its economy will quickly decline”, he said. This is the basic premise of the landmark and much-celebrated Dasgupta review, published almost 40 years later, in 2021.
In 1987, Myers wrote that “life may be in its death throes”. He said: “Within the lifetimes of many readers, we may well witness the summary demise of at least one quarter, and possibly one half, of our fellow species.” He wrote about a statement from the US National Academy of Sciences written at the time. “They are unanimous in their view that we already have enough scientific information to urge political leaders and policymakers to get to vigorous grips with the extinction crisis forthwith.”
So people had recognised biodiversity loss, and its importance, but what to do about it?
One of the first and most important organisations set up to try to protect biodiversity was the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It was founded in the French town of Fontainebleau in 1948, and supported the creation of international law to protect the planet’s wildlife.
Today, the IUCN is a leading force in shaping international conventions, developing rules and principles for conservation and management of ecosystems. It first established its Red List of Threatened Species in 1964, as a way to mobilise funding and experts to tackle extinction threats. It continues to be the global authority on biodiversity loss, regularly releasing reports and updates.
The IUCN helped push through legislation to tackle wildlife loss by creating the first draft of what would become the UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD).
The birth of the CBD was at the Rio conference in 1992, when the UN created the conventions on climate change (IPCC), biodiversity (CBD) and desertification (UNCCD). It was a moment of celebration. The conference involved many world leaders and there was general recognition our form of civilisation was exhausting the world we depend on. The first draft was based firmly on the idea that “biodiversity was a global and common heritage”, writes Adam.
The three goals of the CBD are: the preservation of biological diversity; the sustainable use of its components; and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of genetic resources.
Every 10 years, it aims to set targets on biodiversity for the following decade. But the targets are not legally binding and the world failed to meet a single one of the 20 set out at Aichi in Japan in 2010.
Which brings us to today and nature’s next big moment – the UN biodiversity conference Cop15, which will be held for two weeks in Montreal, Canada, from 7 December. The more than 20 targets expected to be set will probably include preserving 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030, reducing the rate of introduction of invasive species by 50% and cutting pesticides by at least two-thirds.
The meeting comes weeks after the Cop27 climate meeting in Egypt. Ever since the Rio summit, biodiversity has taken second place to the climate on the international stage. But it is increasingly being recognised that the two crises cannot be separated.
Cop26, the UN climate conference held in Glasgow in 2021, included a special day for nature, the first time biodiversity and the climate crisis were linked at the international level. Destroying biodiversity by chopping down forests also results in carbon being released, while climate change in the form of extreme weather, such as droughts and heatwaves, damages ecosystems. Some think the two crises never should have been split. “I’m not sure that we should be placing biodiversity loss and climate change in separate boxes; they are all part of the planetary crisis that human activities have caused,” says Adam.
The climate crisis generally gets more media attention because flooding and fires make headline news, whereas biodiversity loss is harder to see.
Victor Anderson, a visiting professor in sustainability at Anglia Ruskin University, also argues biodiversity loss has been seen by some as a middle-class, trivial or even rightwing issue. He says: “There has been a connection between nature conservation and the aristocracy. In the 19th century, the protection of the countryside came about because of responses to rising industry. And then there is also the big game issue. If you look back at the beginning of WWF, it’s really well-off people wanting large African animals to continue, in some cases because they still wanted to hunt them.”
He says the issue continues to be difficult, not least because every aspect of industry is entwined with nature’s destruction. “I think tracing through the causes of biodiversity loss is a bit frightening, because it does lead you to the whole way in which the world economy operates.”
The story of the biodiversity crisis is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. From hunting huge mammals to extinction to poisoning birdlife with pesticides, humans have treated nature as an inexhaustible resource for too long. Environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and scientists have been sounding the alarm about the biodiversity crisis for more than half a century, and yet no meaningful action has been taken. Much has already been lost, but there is still lots to play for. Cop15 is an opportunity to start to change the narrative.
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Ukraine. (photo: Katerina Klochko/AFP/Getty Images)
The increasingly desperate Russian military is using coordinated, brutal sexual assault to demoralize the Ukrainian people. The U.S. and allies need to act.
This situation appears to be worsening as Ukraine builds momentum in reclaiming its territory from Russian hands. One woman recently detailed her harrowing experience being held in a prison where she was raped and tortured by Russian soldiers. This is one more gut-wrenching story on top of many that came to light over the summer—not to mention the many that we may never learn of.
In researching this article, I found stories of an 11-year-old boy who was raped in front of his mother and now will not speak, and an 83-year-old woman who was raped in her home by Russian soldiers and is now struggling to recover. There were very disturbing reports of children and even infants being sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers, including one case where an 11-month-old baby died from being raped, and another case where a mother had to witness all of her children assaulted—including 9-year-old triplets who were raped by soldiers and her 11-month-old baby sodomized by a candlestick. There is also likely sexual violence being perpetrated against adult men as well, but severe underreporting makes it difficult to know how widespread this is.
This violence has been co-occurring with other atrocities, as in Bucha, where there were mass executions of civilians, in Mariupol, a besieged city where Russian forces purposefully attacked a maternity hospital, and at a prison where civilians and prisoners of war were being held. Now, in Izyum, torture sites are being uncovered.
Political scientists have been increasingly studying rape as a tool of war, and they find that, despite common misconception, “rape in war is not inevitable.”
This is not to say that it doesn’t happen or that it hasn’t been used as a tool of war. As anyone who has studied the wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and World War II—to name a few—will tell you, weaponized rape has been used in a number of horrific conflicts. However, it is not a given that it will be used as a weapon just because a conflict is occurring.
So, if some armed forces constrain their soldiers from using rape in war, what does it tell us that we are seeing such pervasive reports of sexual violence perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Ukraine?
My research examines when insurgent groups use tactics targeting women in war. By applying findings from my own research, I argue that the primary reason that Russia is embracing and adopting widespread use of sexual violence is as a means of coercion, which tells us a lot about the struggles of the Russians in the war. The timing of the widespread use of sexual violence in Ukraine is not coincidental. Faced with high levels of effective resistance, Russia has begun employing sexual violence in order to raise the costs of continued resistance.
Most audiences—international and domestic—find rape in war to be horrifying, and there is, unsurprisingly, a visceral dislike of this behavior. By employing a tactic that is universally disliked, and graphically demonstrating that the costs of continued resistance will be the appalling violation and mutilation of Ukrainian citizens’ bodies, Russia is attempting to coerce Ukrainians into surrendering. It is likely that these tactics are being used with the hope that Ukrainian citizens who are terrified that they or their compatriots will soon be targeted in these ways will pressure Voldymyr Zelensky’s government to make significant concessions to the Russians.
These tactics have not broken the will of the Ukrainian people in resisting Russia’s invasion of their sovereign land, but it is not clear that there is, at this point, any form of violence the Russians will not perpetrate, as they continue to attempt to coerce Ukraine into some form of settlement. The Russians may be hoping that these atrocities will convince the West to pressure Ukraine into backing down.
The use of sexual violence as a strategy in the war in Ukraine illustrates two things—and neither is good.
As someone who has studied this closely, my expectation of a professional military like the Russian armed forces would be that there is a tight chain of command, and that soldiers are responsive to orders issued by their commanding officers. The fact that this behavior is so widespread and so well documented means that the Russian military is knowingly violating every international law and norm about the conduct of war and intentionally using rape as a strategy of coercion. If this is indeed an attempt at coercion, it would mean an undoing of more than 70 years of norms and laws built to protect civilians during armed conflict. As any scholar of international relations will tell you, norms can and do erode if they are not upheld, so any unwillingness on the part of the West to call attention to and prosecute these atrocities could set a dangerous precedent for future wars.
Research on sexual violence in war sheds light on the second observation that deserves attention in this conflict: despite being an armed force representing an advanced nation state, the Russian military is not as cohesive and professional as we previously believed.
Dara Kay Cohen, who literally wrote the book on rape in civil war, finds that rape—particularly gang rape—is used by armed forces to create unit cohesion when soldiers have been forcibly recruited. Given the reports circulating that Russia has been conscripting young, inexperienced men, some of whom reportedly do not even realize they are being sent to fight in Ukraine, it is unsurprising that the Russian military has poor unit cohesion. Forcing or encouraging these men to participate in gang rape—an inherently risky activity, particularly from a sexual health standpoint—can help force bonds between soldiers who were not willingly recruited to fight.
But the bottom line is this: the fact that we are seeing such pervasive sexual violence means that the Russians are losing very badly. In general, we don’t expect that soldiers in an interstate war—especially soldiers from a state with as much advanced military capacity as Russia—will need to resort to these types of tactics in order to gain coercive leverage over their adversary. The fact that the Russians, who have myriad other military tools at their disposal, are resorting to tactics that are this reckless and heinous should be taken as further evidence that they do not have a clear strategy for navigating the war.
There are a number of organizations on the ground trying to document these horrific incidents as war crimes, ranging from NGOs to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to independent investigators. And they are having some small successes, at least domestically.
A few months ago, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian soldier for committing war crimes. Several investigators have suggested that there are numerous war crimes being committed in Ukraine; among them, the widespread use of sexual violence. The Ukrainian government is doing its best to find the perpetrators of these horrific acts and hold them to justice. But the West must do more.
Unfortunately, without actually putting boots on the ground, the West cannot prevent these atrocities. But just as the Russians are using rape to raise the costs of Ukrainian resistance, so too should the West raise the costs of using these inhumane weapons in conflict. This starts with drawing attention, again and again, on every platform, at every public meeting of Western leaders, and in private conversations, to this horrific violence. It means dedicating resources to investigating what is happening on the ground, and then making sure the rest of the world knows about it.
It must also include prosecuting sexual violence in Ukraine as a war crime. International norms, if not defended and upheld, will erode, and the erosion of the norm against using sexual violence in war is extremely dangerous. Some journalists who cover these issues have already pointed to the ways in which the information environment of the war in Ukraine lends itself to collecting evidence that may lead to war crimes prosecution.
Even if Putin or the military commanders who are ordering and allowing sexual violence as a strategy are never brought to account in a court of law, a strong attempt by Western governments to hold accountable any soldiers found guilty of having committed rape and torture in Ukraine will be critical to defending international norms.
In addition, Western officials must work to destigmatize rape so that survivors can avail themselves of any and all resources, and providing said resources will be critical in the coming weeks and months. Furthermore, it is important to remember that not all survivors of sexual violence are women, and that men and sexual minorities who are survivors of sexual violence will also need resources and support.
Most importantly, the international community must find a way to provide access to emergency contraception and safe abortion for survivors of sexual violence, both in Ukraine, and those streaming over borders into countries which, in practice, do not allow abortion. Forced pregnancy and birth is an additional form of violence that we cannot allow to be perpetrated against survivors.
Finally, ensuring that survivors have access to long-term, trauma-informed mental health support will be critical in helping them process and integrate these horrific events. As the West contemplates the types of resources it is providing to aid Ukraine, the sole focus cannot be on military equipment—we must also think about the social, emotional, and relational support that those surviving this war are likely to need, and be sure to provide it.
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An abortion rights protester holds a banner in front of the Constitutional court on Jan. 28, 2021, in Warsaw, Poland. (photo: Omar Marques/Getty Images)
A colorful crowd of doctors, researchers and women’s activists convened in the Latvian capital to explore ways to use pills to circumvent anti-abortion laws.
In the hallways, women pored over posters showing the latest research on the effectiveness of abortion pills and other developments in abortion and contraception care. Representatives from pharmaceutical companies enthusiastically pitched their medications and products to doctors sipping coffee and tea during a break between panels. There were graphic novels about an at-home medical abortion and T-shirts printed with women’s self-stated reasons for ending a pregnancy; there were slogans printed on T-shirts like “Make Abortion Legal Again” and a video promoting abortion rights to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”
The 400 or so doctors, researchers and activists in the room, who hailed from the U.S. and countries across Europe but also much further afield, like Ghana and Georgia and Colombia, had spent their careers working on the issue of abortion: No one in the room questioned a woman’s right to end an unwanted pregnancy, and many were vocal advocates for expanding access as much as possible. In panels and plenary speeches and breakout sessions, expert after expert praised countries that have relaxed abortion restrictions around the globe and extolled the developments in abortion care that have increasingly shifted the procedure toward at-home, self-managed medical abortions.
But halfway through the first day, Kinga Jelinska stepped up on stage to talk about the state of abortion rights in her native Poland — and to deliver a blunt reminder that not everyone has free and easy access to the kind of abortion care they envision. “The dystopian future has already happened in the present,” the 42-year-old activist told those gathered in the wood-paneled lecture hall for a biennial conference on abortion. “We are now in the midst of a global abortion crisis.”
Over the course of her speech, she outlined how dire the situation has become for Polish people seeking abortions in a country that has made legal access to the procedure all but impossible. At one point, she motioned to a dark-haired woman sitting in the front row: Justyna Wydrzyńska, a fellow abortion rights activist in Poland, faces trial over providing abortion pills to a domestic violence victim — a grim example of the stakes for those working in abortion activism. “Soon she might sit somewhere else: in prison,” Jelinska said, adding that “it seems that, right now, half the world thinks abortion pills are a tool of crime.”
That abysmal situation, she said, is why her Amsterdam-based nonprofit, Women Help Women, works to help get Polish women abortion care: Putting mifepristone and misoprostol, the two pills that together are needed to carry out a medical abortion, in the hands of anyone who needs or wants them. The Polish state, Jelinska said, provided 107 abortions in 2021 in the country of 40 million people; by her count, Women Help Women helped facilitate, in various ways, more than 30,000 during that same year.
Abortion has long been an issue handled on the national level: Countries have their own laws governing when and how they can be performed, and doctors and activists typically work within those national boundaries. But Jelinska, Wydrzyńska and others are on the front lines of a network of activists that is becoming increasingly international, aided by the widespread availability and safety of the two pills that are used in medical abortions. They, along with other women across Europe and North America, are fighting to ensure that pregnant people in Poland — and other countries where abortion is heavily restricted — have the ability to end an unwanted pregnancy.
In countries where abortion is legal, the activists work openly, registering nonprofits and setting up small offices run by a handful of staff. Where abortion is banned, they have to work within legal gray zones and operate clandestinely, at the risk of arrest or prosecution (as Wydrzyńska’s case demonstrates). Across borders, they have formed a complex and evolving web of relationships to make medical abortion available in countries where it is illegal.
Their experiences are the consequence of what Jelinska referred to as the “dystopian” situation for women in Poland since the country introduced new restrictions in 2020. In the wake of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision in the United States, their network provides a window into what abortion care could look like in some parts of a post-Roe America — and indeed, into the ways it is already changing. The overall shift toward at-home medical abortions and the availability and affordability of mifepristone and misoprostol mean that the future of illegal abortions, while still complex, will be safer and more accessible than the pre-Roe era.
Already, more and more pregnant people are availing themselves of at-home abortions, even in places where local laws restrict the practice. In 2020, medication abortions made up more than half of all abortions in the United States. With an estimated 930,160 women who want or need an abortion in the U.S. that year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, that means hundreds of thousands of women are still opting for other methods. But the activists from around the world sent one message at the conference in Riga: They’re ready to scale up.
“Forcing abortion into medical and legal regimes is in fact the core mistake,” Jelinska said that day in Riga. “Abortion is not just about health care — it is mostly about power, political engagement and agitation.”
As the wide range of attendees in Riga suggested, the history of today’s abortion rights activism is as international as its present Organizations in different countries on both sides of the Atlantic learned from each other’s successes and failures, helping to adopt similar practices across borders. In the U.S., a network of NGOs working to secure access to abortions long predates the recent Supreme Court decision: In the early 1990s, a handful of abortion nonprofits launched in the U.S. to help make up for gaps in abortion access. The Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, or WRRAP, was founded in 1991 to offer financial assistance to those looking for access to abortion or emergency contraception; the National Network of Abortion Funds followed in 1993. Organizations like WRRAP and NNAF have grown steadily over time and, like other nonprofits working in the abortion space, have seen their funding skyrocket in recent years.
Those organizations have in turn inspired similar funds and organizations in Europe. Mara Clarke heads the Abortion Support Network, which is based in the United Kingdom and operates throughout Europe, providing pregnant people with information and funding for surgical abortions. She got her start in the U.S after she read about pregnant people being forced to travel to New York City from around the country to receive an abortion. “That taught me that legal and accessible are two different things,” Clarke said. She got involved with the Haven Coalition, one of nearly 100 funds in the NNAF; when she moved to the U.K. a few years later, she brought the practice across the Atlantic, setting up the Abortion Support Network in 2009 to help pregnant people who couldn’t access abortions in Ireland. She now works all over Europe, including in Poland through Abortion Without Borders, an umbrella group that also includes the Abortion Support Network and Jelinska’s Women Help Women.
As for the use of pills to provide abortions to pregnant people in places where the practice is restricted, the Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts was the original pioneer. In 2005, she founded Women on Web, an organization that ships abortion medications around the world. “People just prefer to do the abortions at home,” Gomperts told attendees during her speech in Riga. “That is what people prefer. And to make them go to a clinic to obtain a pill, I think it’s really … it’s offensive for women.” By sending the pills from pharmacies in different countries, the organization has managed to circumvent strict national laws governing the shipment of abortion medications. In 2018, Gomperts founded Aid Access, the U.S. arm of Women on Web; the organization ships pills to the U.S. via a pharmacy in India.
Gomperts “was a visionary in understanding the power of these pills to give the person who needs the abortion control over that process,” said Elisa Wells, the co-director of Plan C, which provides information about medical abortions and conducts research on abortion pills in the U.S. She said she and the others who founded the organization in the mid-2010s were inspired by how accessible medical abortions were in other parts of the world and vowed to bring that ease of access to American women.
The growing availability and use of these pills to induce inexpensive and safe pharmaceutical abortions has transformed how pregnancies are terminated in places where abortion is legal — and also made the network of abortion activists’ work possible in states and countries where it isn’t. The two drugs usually taken to induce an abortion, mifepristone and misoprostol, are on the WHO’s list of essential medicines. And according to the global health authority, they’re very safe: The number of deaths linked to mifepristone are exceedingly rare (at 0.0006 percent of users). Complications from the pills are uncommon — making up less than 1 percent of cases at the top end of the estimates. They’re also cheap, with a retail price of between $3.75 and $11.75 for both together.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, access to at-home medical abortions grew even further: With telemedicine being approved in more and more states, and the Food and Drug Administration permanently allowing health providers to ship abortion pills to patients by mail, new organizations cropped up to meet the demand for at-home abortions. “I think we were heading in that direction just because of more intense [abortion] restrictions that were just passing all over the United States,” said Julie Amaon, medical director for Just the Pill, which operates in four states and seeks to reach people in rural areas. “But I also think Covid escalated that hugely.” Use of medical abortion has grown swiftly in the U.S.: In 2020, the Guttmacher Institute estimated that medical abortions accounted for 54 percent of all abortions in the U.S., a significant jump from 39 percent in 2017.
From Amaon’s Just the Pill, to Hey Jane, to Choix, to Abortion on Demand, a constellation of new options have been created in just the last two years. Organizations like these operate in states where abortion is legal, with providers supervising (in person or remotely) abortion care for pregnant people who live in or can get to states with legal abortion; in states where the procedure is illegal, Gomperts’ Aid Access and others fill the gap, shipping the pills from abroad. Through this web of domestic and international organizations, activists are working toward their ultimate goal: To make it possible for pregnant people in any U.S. state, regardless of its politics, to have an at-home medical abortion.
Within Europe, Poland is the center of these activists’ work, for obvious reasons: The country is at once the place in Europe where activists face the most organized opposition, and a society undergoing rapid social change. In 2020, Poland’s constitutional tribunal ruled that fetal irregularities are no longer an acceptable reason for pregnant people to seek abortions in the central European country, removing one of the only remaining justifications for a legal abortion. Now, the only remaining exceptions are when the pregnant person’s life is in danger, or for rape or incest.
Still, self-induced abortion isn’t explicitly banned in Poland; it’s only providing the medication for a self-induced abortion that is explicitly against the law. The service provided by Jelinska’s Women Help Women and Gomperts’ Women on Web, then, falls into a legal gray zone. The two organizations operate in similar ways: Users fill out an online questionnaire answering questions about their pregnancy and their medical history. Venny Ala-Siurua, executive director of Women on Web, says the answers are reviewed by an international team of doctors mainly working as volunteers. As long as medical criteria are met, doctors issue pregnant people a prescription and suppliers within Europe then ship the pills to the people who need them — including in countries where abortion is restricted.
(After the first trimester of pregnancy, when using abortion pills is no longer recommended, pregnant people in countries with restrictive laws may then travel abroad for a surgical abortion. That’s where organizations like Clarke’s Abortion Support Network step in, helping facilitate and fund surgical abortions in other nearby countries.)
Poland isn’t the only country where abortion restrictions have meant pregnant people rely on the underground network of activists to access abortion pills: Malta, too, has strict abortion laws that have hindered the ability to get an abortion. In the past, people on the small island nation who wanted abortions had to travel to mainland Europe to receive them; when the pandemic hit and travel restrictions went into place, that option all but disappeared. Groups like Women on Web have filled the gap, said Andreana Dibben, a Maltese abortion rights activist: She and others help run the Family Planning Advisory Service, an online service launched in 2020 whose trained volunteers have already assisted more than 500 Maltese women with finding appropriate abortion and contraception services. Working with the Abortion Support Network and Women on Web, the group has helped facilitate at-home medical abortions for pregnant people in Malta who want them.
During the conference lunch break one day, Dibben said she sees reasons to be optimistic about change even in countries with tight restrictions: A small but growing group of pro-abortion rights activists in Malta, Dibben said, is having some success in shifting public opinion and increasing political willingness to discuss the issue. Until she and other activists launched Doctors for Choice in 2018, she said, “no one could even say the word ‘abortion’ because people were scared.”
Although these international abortion networks have opened up new possibilities for people in restricted states, they can come with significant risk for those involved — as Wydrzyńska, the activist facing trial in Poland, knows all too well. The longtime abortion activist and co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, an organization that provides people with advice on abortions, gave a set of abortion pills to a victim of domestic violence in Poland. The woman’s husband, who had prevented her from going to Germany to receive an abortion there, informed the police. Today, Wydrzyńska is waiting for the next hearing of her trial in January. She faces up to three years in prison for helping with a medication abortion.
Wydrzyńska’s case was a rallying cry for attendees at the conference in Riga, bluntly highlighting the sacrifices some make to ensure a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. When Jelinska referred to her during her speech, the audience applauded; outside the main event hall, attendees could pose with their face behind a cardboard cutout of Wydrzyńska, bearing the hashtag #IamJustyna. During coffee and lunch breaks, people constantly came up to speak with Wydrzyńska.
The Amsterdam-based Jelinska, living in a country that has far more liberal abortion laws, operates under less imminent danger of prosecution than those helping the cause in her native Poland. Still, she’s open about the toll her work takes on her daily life, including the regular death threats she receives. “Of course, this affects me,” she said. Despite those threats, she sees no other way: “Sometimes it is necessary to disobey harmful laws.”
In Riga, the activists’ mere presence at the conference, and the impassioned pitch they made to attendees, demonstrated the extent of international cooperation and support for circumventing strict abortion laws. Cross-border helpers based in other countries are, in many cases, what makes access to abortion pills possible for people in places where the procedure is severely restricted. Bringing together doctors working on research showing the safety and efficacy of medical abortions and pharmaceutical companies who manufacture mifepristone and misoprostol and the activists creating this new web of support across country borders was a way for them to learn from each other about the latest research and developments in abortion care, to be sure. But it was also an opportunity for activists like Jelinska and Clarke to make their case and ask for help from a group of people most sympathetic to their cause, whether in front of a podium on stage or over individual conversations between sessions.
Toward the end of the conference, Clarke stepped up to the stage to talk about the Abortion Support Network and underscored just how important gatherings like these are for what they do. It’s rare for there to be so many people in one room who are passionate about the right to end a pregnancy and finding the safest and best ways to do so; as another speaker noted, this field of medicine is “uniquely political.” With that in mind, Clarke asked for the audience’s support however they could give it so they can grow their networks even further: By pushing for looser laws in their respective countries, working to expand access, and even just by supporting groups like hers directly (“We would gladly take your money in any amount in any currency!” her presentation declared).
“Why do a bunch of abortion pirates come to a scientific conference?” Clarke said. “We do this work because whether or not you can have an abortion should not depend on the passport you hold, or where you live, or what money you have, or what gender you are — any of that.”
Violet Martin, center, and activists pray outside the Wyandotte County Courthouse in Kansas City, Kan., on Oct. 24 before her brother Brian Betts’s hearing. Betts and Celester McKinney have spent two decades in prison for murder but have been granted a new evidentiary hearing after making credible claims that former Kansas City Police Department detective Roger Golubski was involved in their case and tainted evidence. (photo: Christopher Smith/WP)
Former detective Roger Golubski is charged with raping Black women two decades ago. Residents are asking: How far did the corruption go?
Golubski, 69, took the witness chair slowly. He was still burly, but his once-intimidating presence had been punctured by ailing health, including renal failure, diabetes and quintuple bypass surgery in April.
“Did you have a history of pressuring witnesses?” said Kevin Shepherd, a lawyer for Brian Betts and Celester McKinney. The two inmates, who were convicted in the 1997 case, sat next to Shepherd in striped prison jumpsuits.
“Never,” Golubski replied.
Golubski is the key figure in alleged corruption stemming from his 35 years in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department that has raised troubling questions about justice and accountability at a time when many predominantly Black or Brown communities and other disenfranchised groups are vocally demanding both. He is accused of preying on impoverished Black residents by exploiting a network of female informants for sex and for coerced testimony, which he allegedly used to close cases — charges he has denied.
The tale that emerges from court testimony, documents and interviews reveals a world in which Golubski, at minimum, appears to have played a significantly influential role in dramatically determining what darkness happened in the lives of scores of Kansas City residents. It also provides a sense of the changes in power and justice occurring in the city, including the nuance, frustration and hope that has come as new leadership reckons with racial wounds.
In recent weeks, the U.S. Justice Department has taken steps to address some of the allegations, announcing two indictments of Golubski on eight counts, including civil rights violations, conspiracy and forcing women into involuntary servitude.
Advocates for alleged victims want accountability from local officials, as well. They are seeking an examination not just of Golubski’s actions, but of the police department, and what they see as a local power structure that helped cover up what residents say happened.
Community leaders are demanding to know how Golubski was seemingly able to operate with impunity for decades and seeking reassurances that behavior such as his alleged misconduct could not happen again in the city’s 330-officer police force — now overseen by Kansas City’s first Black mayor, a former police officer who rose to the rank of deputy chief.
Golubski’s former police department partner, Terry Zeigler, who served as police chief from 2015 to 2019, denied knowledge of the alleged misconduct.
Nikki Richardson, who in 2020 founded an advocacy group called Wyandotte for Justice, named for the county that includes Kansas City, is among those who believe many people share responsibility for any abuse.
“The entire police department knew what he was doing,” Richardson said. “They love to point to Roger Golubski as this individual boogeyman. That’s what the police department wants — take care of him, problem solved. But it was an entire system.”
In 2017, Lamonte McIntyre, a Black man who spent 23 years in prison on a double murder conviction, was exonerated after his lawyers presented evidence that Golubski had set him up.
That case prompted federal authorities to launch a criminal investigation into his conduct on the force and, in September, the Justice Department charged Golubski, who retired as a police captain in 2010, with allegedly raping two Black women in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In November, a federal grand jury indicted Golubski on separate charges that he conspired with drug dealers and raped Black girls, ages 13 to 17, who were forced to work as prostitutes.
Golubski, who faces life in prison if convicted, has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. In an email, his attorney, Christopher Joseph, said Golubski “looks forward to clearing his name from these decades-old and uncorroborated allegations.” Joseph did not respond to other requests for comment for this story.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Rachel E. Schwartz, citing Golubski’s need for regular medical treatment, released him to house arrest pending trial.
Police Chief Karl Oakman, who was hired in 2021, said in an interview that his department is assisting federal authorities in their criminal investigation. He disputed the notion that there is a broader cultural problem in the police force.
“I think it’s a personal accountability issue that I hope he’s gonna have to deal with for his actions,” Oakman said. “Do we have, in 2022 or 2021, a pattern of people doing this? Do we have a pattern in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017? You won’t find it.”
One key question is how far city leaders are willing to look as they examine accusations that stretch back decades. Authorities face the daunting prospect of reviewing dozens of convictions, opening unsolved murder cases, and sorting through mounting allegations of abuse.
In a lawsuit against the county government this year, McIntyre’s legal team included the initials of 73 women they said Golubski victimized, based on interviews and other evidence they said they collected. The Midwest Innocence Project is weighing requests for legal help from 40 inmates in Wyandotte County, many whose cases are tied to Golubski, said the group’s executive director, Tricia Rojo Bushnell.
Last week, Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark A. Dupree Sr. (D) announced a $1.7 million plan to review 150 of Golubski’s cases, a process he said could take up to 18 months.
“The scale of this is mind-boggling,” said Cheryl Pilate, McIntyre’s lawyer, who has worked on the case since 2009. “Every time I think I have my arms around this, it gets bigger and more distressing. They can’t sweep this under the rug. There are gaping wounds out there.”
With a population of 155,000, Kansas City, Kan., is far smaller and, residents say, more insular than its more than 500,000-person namesake a few miles east on the other side of the Missouri River. The municipal building, county courthouse and police department headquarters are clustered in a downtown strip that includes a Native American-run casino and a handful of Latin American restaurants.
As a detective, Golubski worked cases in low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods in the northeast, cultivating a network of female informants.
His accusers say he targeted the city’s most vulnerable — drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless. Prosecutors said Golubski protected a local drug dealer, Cecil A. Brooks, who has served 13 years of an 18-year federal prison sentence for cocaine trafficking, in exchange for money and sex with underage girls. Brooks and two other men were also charged in the November indictment.
Ophelia Williams, 60, who said she is one of the two women identified by their initials in the federal indictment in September, once lived in this area of town. On a recent afternoon, she returned to her old residence, a white-paneled, split-level house on a quiet, tree-lined block.
“That’s where he raped me,” said Williams, who has four children and nine grandchildren.
She recounted the night in August 1999 when police arrested her twin sons, then 14, on charges that they had stolen a gun and fatally shot an elderly couple while stealing items from their house.
At that moment, Williams didn’t yet know the name of the White detective who complimented her legs and her nightgown. The detective, who she eventually found out was Golubski, returned a few days later, offering to help her sons avoid punishment. When she let him in, she says, he assaulted her.
Federal prosecutors allege that Golubski raped Williams several times over the next few years, including in his police vehicle. When she threatened to report him, he implied he would harm her and “she would never be found,” according to federal prosecutors. He never helped her sons, Ronnell and Donnell, who pleaded guilty and remain in jail.
Williams speaks in a hoarse whisper, the consequence of a massive heart attack in 2017. But her voice carries loudly. Having told her story in a private deposition in the McIntyre case, Williams went public in June, speaking out at a rally organized by the activist group More2 outside the federal courthouse.
Williams has accused Zeigler, Golubski’s former partner, of being outside her house in their police vehicle on one occasion when Golubski assaulted her.
In a phone interview, Zeigler adamantly denied the accusation, saying he investigated the case involving her sons with a different detective because Golubski was an acting captain at the time.
“I didn’t take Roger by her house,” said Zeigler, who has not been criminally charged.
The other woman in the September indictment, identified only by the initials S.K., has not spoken publicly. McIntyre’s lawyer said the woman remains frightened of Golubski.
S.K. was in middle school when Golubski contacted her in the late 1990s to falsely claim she was a witness in a case, prosecutors said. Once she agreed to meet him, Golubski threatened to harm her grandmother. Then, he sexually assaulted the girl, according to federal prosecutors.
Golubski raped S.K. at least 10 times over three years, according to prosecutors. On one occasion, he took her to a cemetery and “instructed her to find an area to dig her own grave.” On another, he forced her to crawl along a riverbank on a dog leash, prosecutors said.
“This has taken such a toll on her life,” Lora McDonald, executive director of More2, said of S.K., now in her late 30s. “She was a middle school girl when this happened. She has no understanding of what lawfulness looks like, what legitimacy looks like.”
In the interview, Zeigler said Golubski operated largely on his own in developing contacts in the community and did not share information about his informants over concerns that doing so could compromise their safety. Their superiors did not demand to know where Golubski got his tips, Zeigler said, because keeping tabs on all of the police department’s informants would be nearly impossible.
“The more that mounts up, you just shake your head,” Zeigler, who testified to the federal grand jury that indicted Golubski, said in the phone interview. “If it turns out to be true, a lot of people, including me, will be feeling pretty stupid and saying, ‘Okay, why didn’t I see this, or should I have seen this?’”
A step toward legitimacy for Golubski’s alleged victims came in 2017 when Dupree, the Wyandotte County district attorney, agreed to reopen McIntyre’s case.
McIntyre was 17 when he was arrested and charged in the killings of Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing in April 1994.
His lawyers contend that Golubski, who investigated the case, may have targeted McIntyre because his mother, Rose, had refused the detective’s sexual demands. The teenager was arrested just six hours after the killings on the basis of 19½ minutes of taped interviews, according to his lawyers.
Prosecutors presented no search warrants, offered no forensic evidence and did not recover the murder weapon, according to testimony in the case.
McIntyre, in a phone interview, recalled being transported, in handcuffs, to Dupree’s office for a meeting. “I’m not here to beg for my life,” McIntyre said he told him. “Just look at evidence that is presented to you. Judge me on the evidence.”
Dupree, Kansas’s first Black district attorney, grew up locally with parents who were pastors, and he quotes scripture from Micah 6:8 as a guiding principle: “To do justice and have mercy.”
He conducted his own investigation, and the blowback was intense. Zeigler and other police officials “didn’t like the fact that I was looking at cases they investigated,” Dupree said. “I remember calling my wife and having her pray with me. To do justice, I have to tick some folks off.”
McIntyre was scheduled for a six-day hearing to determine whether he would be granted a new trial. Two days in, the district attorney declared a “manifest injustice” had occurred in McIntyre’s trial 23 years earlier. Dupree asked the court to vacate his convictions and drop all charges, saying the new evidence would have created reasonable doubt about his guilt.
Five years later, Ziegler, the former police chief who had been Golubski’s partner, said he still objected to Dupree’s decision not to retry McIntyre and let a new jury consider the totality of the evidence. He accused the district attorney of acting to fulfill a political agenda in a case that received considerable media attention.
“The whole hearing was about Golubski, but where are the facts when you’re talking about the homicide? They didn’t get into it,” Zeigler said. “[District Attorney] Mark [Dupree] says it was a great injustice what happened to McIntyre. What he did was a great injustice.”
After the exoneration, Dupree announced plans to launch a “conviction integrity unit,” joining a growing number of jurisdictions that have moved to reopen cases. The number of exonerations in the United States has risen steadily in recent years, already reaching a record high of 217 this year, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Dupree also raised concerns about Golubski with Stephen R. McAllister, who at the time was the chief federal prosecutor in Kansas. In 2019, McAllister asked the FBI to open a criminal investigation.
Golubski “was notorious in the community,” McAllister said in the interview. “When I met early on with agents, and they talked about interviews and people they had encountered, the stories were atrocious.”
McIntyre won a certificate of innocence from the state of Kansas, which awarded him $1.5 million in 2020. He struggled to adjust to his new life and, in 2019, moved to Phoenix, where he took up meditation. He breeds exotic dogs and founded the nonprofit Miracle of Innocence to advocate for the wrongly incarcerated.
Last spring, McIntyre and his mother won a $12.5 million civil settlement from the Wyandotte County government. He said he won’t consider justice served until Golubski is behind bars and the state reviews all of the cases he was involved in.
“Had no one investigated my case, I would still be in prison,” McIntyre said. “Every case that came through that time should be looked at.”
Zeigler retired as chief in the fall of 2019. County officials replaced him last year with Oakman, who served 29 years in the Kansas City, Mo., police department.
A few months later, Tyrone Garner (D), a former deputy police chief under Zeigler, was elected as the city’s first Black mayor.
The historic leadership change offered renewed hope for community activists who had garnered national attention in demanding that the Justice Department open a broader civil investigation in to the police department’s policies, training and discipline. Team Roc, entertainment mogul Jay-Z’s social justice group, has amplified their demands and sent its own investigators to Kansas City to gather evidence, said managing director Dania Diaz.
Garner, the mayor, and Oakman, the police chief, have resisted a federal investigation of the Kansas City police, which Oakman said would be costly and serve as a distraction as he pursues changes in the department.
Since taking over, Oakman arranged for FBI officials to train supervisors and commanders on “color of law” violations that deprive suspects of their civil rights. He asked an outside jurisdiction — his former department in Missouri — to review officer-involved shootings and established a cold case unit to reopen unsolved murders. And he has sought to improve public relations, organizing a community peace walk and rebranding police vehicles with a refreshed color scheme and logo.
“When I go out to talk with the community, I say, ‘This is not your grandfather’s police department,’” said Oakman, who grew up in Kansas City, Kan.
He suggested that Golubski’s alleged misconduct was a relic of a bygone era. Police officials said nine current officers were on staff in 1994, the year McIntyre was charged, and 58 officers remain from the early 2000s, during the period Golubski is accused of assaulting Williams and S.K.
“I’ve done a top-to-bottom review of this current police department. The stuff with Golubski and some others, I don’t see that,” Oakman said.
Garner, who served in the police department’s internal affairs division, said he knew nothing of Golubski’s alleged misconduct. He has distanced himself from Zeigler, with whom he says he clashed after publicly supporting Dupree’s efforts to review questionable convictions.
Garner said in an interview that the Justice Department’s criminal probe of Golubski should be completed, and its findings made public, before officials determine whether an investigation of the police department is warranted. He took umbrage at criticism from activists, saying he, Oakman and Dupree have been supportive of efforts to hold Golubski accountable.
“You’ve got three African American males sitting here that are saying, ‘We are going to make sure that we get to the bottom of the allegations, and we’re going to help [the Justice Department],’” Garner said. “But to hold us to a higher standard, to me, is somewhat unfair.”
Oakman has pledged support for Dupree’s plan to review Golubski’s cases, but activists remain skeptical that police officials will be willing to hold themselves accountable. The effort represents a massive undertaking, whose challenges were illustrated on the recent day when Golubski testified in the Betts-McKinney hearing.
The two men were sent to prison in 1997 for the killing of Gregory Miller during a botched drug deal. Their attorneys say Golubski, who had been married to Miller’s aunt, arranged to be transferred onto the case and coerced incriminating testimony from the men’s uncle, who later recanted.
On the witness stand in October, Golubski matter-of-factly denied any involvement. “It wasn’t my case,” he said.
Two dozen community activists watched from the courtroom gallery.
Dupree’s office is standing by the conviction, and his prosecutors argued that Betts and McKinney should remain in prison. Judge Gunnar A. Sundby has not ruled in the case.
“Not every case is a McIntyre case,” Dupree said. “There are cases that maybe raise an eyebrow, but according to the law, the evidence is not there to substantiate anything further.”
Completing his testimony, Golubski conferred with his attorney and walked out of the courthouse by himself.
Betts and McKinney, in handcuffs and leg irons, were escorted back to the county jail.
READ MORE 
Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal at the OSPI building in Olympia, Washington, in 2020. (photo: Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Northwest SOIL promised to help students with serious disabilities. But when school districts urged action, the state let the private school stay open and receive millions in tax dollars.
A therapist emailed about a teenage boy with severe autism, who had wailed for hours inside a locked room in her school, pleading to be let out. A local education official saw a teacher shove her foot in a student’s face as he lay on the ground and threaten to step on him. A special education director observed uncertified teachers struggling with no curriculum and urged the state to step in to protect “these extremely high-risk students.”
The alarming reports cataloged a failure to serve kids with disabilities at the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, a private school designed to cater to Washington’s most vulnerable students.
Despite the complaints, the state took no action to force changes at Northwest SOIL. Instead, it allowed the school to stay open and tap a pipeline of taxpayer money. In the five school years ending in 2021, Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million and took in hundreds of public school students.
Northwest SOIL operated for years with few trained teachers, and its staff relied heavily on restraint and isolation. Some of the students made no academic progress and even regressed, as their parents were shut out of information that would be available at any public school.
The lack of state oversight has allowed Northwest SOIL to essentially warehouse kids with complex developmental and behavioral disabilities, according to a Seattle Times and ProPublica review of more than 17,000 pages of documents from 45 school districts, three police departments and the state education department.
“Northwest SOIL is an example of turning back the clock 50 years on kids” to an era when people with disabilities were denied access to education, said Vanessa Tucker, a Pacific Lutheran University professor who serves on the state’s Special Education Advisory Council. “It should not continue.”
While most of the roughly 140,000 students in special education in Washington attend classes within their public schools, Northwest SOIL is the biggest player in an obscure but vital corner of the state’s special education system. It’s one of a set of private schools, known as nonpublic agencies, that serve about 500 public school students with the most serious disabilities.
Since the 1980s, states across the country have reduced their reliance on separate schools for special education students and moved to integrate such students with their peers. Washington, which has the nation’s second-highest dropout rate for special education students, has recently made strides by increasing the amount of time students spend in regular classrooms.
But for those with the highest needs, the state has been heading in the opposite direction, sending more students out of traditional public schools.
That led to the state and school districts pouring at least $173 million into outsourcing special education to Northwest SOIL and other schools over the five school years ending in 2021. While a full accounting is not available, state spending on these programs more than doubled during that time.
The state knows little about the more than 60 campuses that serve the students. Some of these private schools have decent reputations, but the state doesn’t track how many kids in private schools successfully return to their community schools — a key goal for many of the programs. It doesn’t know how many are restrained or locked in isolation rooms. Until two years ago, it couldn’t even count how many public school students attended these schools.
Those gaps are the result of a fundamental flaw in Washington’s oversight system, which places responsibility for monitoring the private schools not on the state but on individual school districts. State education officials said districts are expected to spot and correct problems, as they’re the ones contracting with the schools to educate students.
But because more than 40 districts at a time send students to Northwest SOIL’s three campuses, and each district only receives information about its own students, no single school district or agency has a complete picture of what’s going on there.
So serious incidents — one district learned that a Northwest SOIL staffer kicked a fourth-grader, another heard that a teacher dragged a 9-year-old boy with autism by his thigh — might appear to be isolated rather than signs of systemic problems. Pieced together, reports from parents, teachers, visitors and police paint a troubling picture the state has failed to address.
“There is probably a sentiment that those kids are bad kids,” said Carrie Basas, the former director of the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds. “It’s just students that we have already written off, that teachers or school leaders may perceive as threatening, and we just send them somewhere.” She added, “There has to be somebody in charge.”
Even Northwest SOIL’s top administrator in 2021, Donna Green, complained to the school’s owner, Fairfax Hospital, that the company had crossed ethical boundaries. In a resignation letter, Green said she struggled to make changes as the hospital’s parent company, Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 health care corporation, cut staff hours and skimped on basic resources to increase profits.
The state “needs to be more hands-on to ensure that these kids are getting a proper education and not just feeding a money horse for UHS,” Green said in an interview.
Leaders of Northwest SOIL and Fairfax, the largest private psychiatric facility in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this story. They defended the program in a statement to the Times and ProPublica, saying administrators take seriously the responsibility of addressing students’ complex needs. The school said it has recently purchased a new English and math curriculum, along with computers for teachers and students.
“We are proud of our overall academic and clinical performance and earned reputation for accepting the most difficult referrals in the area,” the school said. UHS said it had no comment beyond the school’s statement.
Chris Reykdal, who heads the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said in an interview that his office doesn’t have clear investigative authority or enough people to monitor private schools. But he said his staff looked into complaints about Northwest SOIL four years ago, and he stands by the agency’s decision to not crack down on the school.
“I do think that the response was there,” Reykdal said. “It’s just that people might disagree that we should have done more — which is a fair criticism.”
With no one responsible for scrutinizing the schools, even the most serious warning signs fell through the cracks, with devastating consequences.
“I Am Not OK to Be Here”
Northwest SOIL’s website paints a serene picture, splashed with stock photos of smiling kids. The Tacoma campus advertises hiking trails, pet therapy and 11 separate staff specialties — from speech language pathologists to licensed mental health counselors.
In reality, the building sits in the vast asphalt parking lot of a megachurch. The closest thing to a hiking path is a 200-foot-long walkway that cuts through a patch of greenery between sections of pavement.
Former employees and records from the state and districts describe more of an institution than a school: A staffer wands students with a metal detector as they arrive. Kids bang on the locked doors from inside “quiet rooms,” whose walls are sometimes smeared with feces or blood. At times, children wander the school or aides sleep in chairs.
The Times interviewed 23 former staffers, many of whom described chronic shortages of classroom assistants, inadequate training, a lack of licensed therapists and high-school-educated aides running classes. Amid high turnover, some positions sat vacant for months.
"My role was to be the school therapist, but it rarely worked out that way because they were so understaffed,” said Kingsley Simpson, who worked at the Tumwater campus from 2016 until this March. “I covered as an educational assistant or a teacher or at the front desk. I rarely got the opportunity to do therapy."
Northwest SOIL said its hiring practices ensure that “only appropriate and qualified candidates are hired.” It added, “As in many areas of healthcare in Washington (and other states), staffing shortages are a challenge. Nonetheless, we meet appropriate staffing levels that satisfy our student needs.”
Former employees say — and documents back up — that Northwest SOIL staffers were stretched thin managing students and often resorted to restraint or isolation. But the state doesn’t track how often restraints are used.
Among the few reports state regulators do require are annual staffing lists. But even then, OSPI doesn’t consistently check them to see if staff are qualified to teach.
Jimmy Fioretti worked at Northwest SOIL for five years. The school repeatedly listed Fioretti as a special education teacher even though he lacked that certification and at times was only approved to be a substitute.
In 2017 and 2019, police investigated after two separate allegations that Fioretti had choked students at Northwest SOIL. Each time, he told the police he never violated school restraint policy. Prosecutors declined to pursue charges, citing insufficient evidence or a law that broadly permits student discipline.
Fioretti — who has been convicted of assault and felony drug possession — was also accused in July 2020 of choking a housemate while living at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation home, according to a police report. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and served five days in jail.
Fioretti did not respond to phone calls or emailed questions.
State law requires nonpublic agencies to “promptly notify” the state and school districts of “any complaints it receives regarding services to students.” But the law doesn’t define what constitutes a complaint. There is no indication that Northwest SOIL notified state education officials of any police investigations.
Scott Raub, OSPI’s administrator for these private schools, said in an interview that abuse allegations would likely count as a complaint, but “just because you notified us, it doesn’t result in anything specific.”
While the law is unclear about who’s responsible for investigating problems, the state has powerful enforcement tools. Officials can force these private schools to comply with specific conditions or prohibit them from accepting public school students if they don't. That could have shut down Northwest SOIL. But the state never took those steps.
One day in late 2020, Fioretti wrapped his arm around a 13-year-old boy’s neck and hauled him across the classroom, as the teenager grasped at Fioretti’s forearm.
A school counselor reported the “chokehold” to Child Protective Services and the police, describing how Fioretti had instigated the confrontation and how the boy couldn’t breathe, his eyes bulging for half a minute until Fioretti released him. Almost immediately, the boy vomited in a trash can. The chokehold was caught on surveillance video reviewed by Tacoma police.
But, once again, neither the state nor the school district would know the severity.
In the more sanitized narrative that Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s parents and his home district, Tacoma Public Schools, Fioretti wrote that staff “restrained” the student without injury and “attempted to deescalate” the situation, then “escorted him to the hallway.”
Shortly after the incident, the school director sat down at Fioretti’s desk. Fioretti said the boy was “running his lips,” according to an internal company email. Fioretti “then got teary eyed,” the director wrote, “and said, ‘I can’t do this. I love my job and you guys but I am not OK to be here.’”
Nine days later, Northwest SOIL fired him for misconduct.
Northwest SOIL administrators declined to comment on specific allegations of abuse but said “use of restraints and seclusion are always used as a last response when a student is at imminent risk of hurting themselves or others.” The school said any allegation is promptly investigated. “Since even one unintended outcome is one too many, we take the time to determine what lessons can be learned from the regrettable incident,” the statement said.
A review of more than 1,000 pages of restraint reports show that Northwest SOIL regularly sends districts vague summaries of events.
One teenage boy with autism couldn’t tell his parents what happened at Northwest SOIL. He only knows a few words and mostly doesn’t speak. So every day when he returned home, his parents would strip off his clothes and check his body for bruises. They found them often, said his father, who asked that neither he nor his son be named to protect the privacy of his family.
One summer afternoon in 2020, Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s school district and his parents that he was shoving staff. They tried to “redirect” him to his desk, and he “tripped over a chair, falling backwards,” the report says, his arm smashing through a glass window. The boy, then 16, went to the hospital and received three stitches.
His father questioned how his son could fall backward, arm first, into a glass window. The report didn’t say where the window was or how the incident started.
Before the fall, the boy was marked as “safe, responsible & respectable - Holding a Book” at 9:38 a.m. Then he tried to “elope” — or wander away, a common occurrence among children with autism — 11 times, the report says. That was just 10 minutes later.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” his father said.
State Didn’t Intervene
As far back as 2014, Northwest SOIL was already drawing scrutiny from the state’s biggest school district.
Two special education officials from Seattle Public Schools visited the Redmond campus and reported that what they saw left them “literally speechless.” They said kids roamed freely around campus without supervision, and education was virtually nonexistent. They implored the district to withdraw all its students immediately.
Records show the district continued to send students each year but monitored Northwest SOIL more closely. After conditions seemed to improve, the school board voted in 2016 to keep using the school.
Seattle was focused on its own students. But administrators from other districts were also fielding alarming reports about Northwest SOIL.
In October 2017, the head of special education at the Orting School District, Chris Willis, emailed the state about the Tacoma teacher who had threatened to step on a boy. The incident happened in front of an Orting official and parent who were touring the campus, and Willis said he worried problems at the school were “more systemic.” But OSPI had no record of investigating.
Then, in May 2018, Rochester School District’s special education director visited Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus to check on a student and wrote to Glenna Gallo, then OSPI’s assistant superintendent of special education, that “the elementary student did nothing during the time I was in the class and no one interacted with him.”
During one visit, the Rochester director observed the boy opening YouTube on a computer and watching a game of “a man going to different places with a large machine gun shooting at everything in front of him.” When Rochester pulled him out of Northwest SOIL and brought him back into a district school, it found “little to no growth academically in the two years’ time that he was at NW Soil,” the director wrote.
A month after Rochester schools’ visits, Cecilia McCormick, a McCleary School District director, reported to OSPI that her district’s student had no special education teacher supervising his instruction. “This is a violation of both federal and state law,” McCormick wrote. The fourth grade boy, who had a history of harming himself, was told by a staffer he’s a “bad boy,” she wrote.
In the summer of 2018, the Tumwater campus was up for its annual review by the state. By that point in the year, OSPI had received at least five serious complaints about Northwest SOIL from district administrators and a parent. Gallo and Raub scheduled a meeting with Northwest SOIL’s leaders.
“We said that this is not acceptable. You have to follow the expectations,” Raub said. “And we got all the assurances that we wanted to hear.”
After the meeting, more complaints poured into Raub’s inbox. The Tumwater School District reported its student did puzzles while his aide — whom the district paid for — slept in the classroom. The school also didn’t provide speech language services for months despite telling the district it had hired a specialist, Tumwater added.
Northwest SOIL didn’t respond to questions about the specific district complaints but said it “strongly refutes claims regarding the intentional billing of services not provided.”
Gallo approved the school’s 2018 annual renewal. She has since left the agency and has been nominated to be the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for special education.
Gallo did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a 2021 interview with The Times she said the state expects school districts to address problems at private schools.
Raub, who was new to the private schools role in 2018, said he would approach the complaints differently now that he has more experience. He pointed to a 2020 case in which OSPI received abuse allegations at another private school and conducted a detailed review of student restraint and isolation files, school policies and staff qualifications.
But the department continued to be hands-off when presented with concerns about Northwest SOIL, including an April 2021 allegation of emotional and physical abuse against an Everett student by a Northwest SOIL staffer.
Raub instructed the district to investigate and said he would be there for “continued support” if it “uncovers a broader, more systemic issue.” OSPI said the district and family never followed up. Everett said it investigated but “did not conclusively find evidence to report back” to OSPI.
This month, the agency said it was investigating a complaint about Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus after a parent reported inadequate staffing and their student coming home with injuries — the same sort of allegation that has flowed to the state for years.
Because of the diffuse oversight system, many complaints never made it to OSPI. Less than four months after the Everett allegation, Green, Northwest SOIL’s top administrator across all campuses, detailed a series of complaints in her resignation letter, ranging from a lack of training to cutting assistants’ hours that school districts had already paid for. She also sent it to Tacoma Public Schools.
But with no requirement to forward Green’s letter to OSPI, Tacoma never did so, and neither did Northwest SOIL, leaving the state missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Other States Have Stricter Standards
In many ways, Washington’s special education funding system has exacerbated oversight problems at private schools like Northwest SOIL.
The state reformed its funding model in 1995, realizing that school districts needed more money to educate students with disabilities. It developed a safety net fund to help districts pay for special education services.
But the program prohibits those funds from being used to train teachers in public schools. And while a 2012 state Supreme Court ruling on school financing, known as the McCleary decision, resulted in the Legislature sending billions of state dollars to public schools, lawmakers sidestepped special education.
With limited options, the districts came to rely on the private schools.
The safety net model “made it easier for districts to say, ‘Let’s place the student at Northwest SOIL,’” said Tucker, the Pacific Lutheran professor.
But, unlike in other states, Washington lawmakers have not adopted key oversight and transparency regulations to protect students and taxpayers.
In Massachusetts, similar private schools are required to report all instances of restraint and isolation directly to the state, allowing central oversight.
This isn’t true in Washington. While the state tracks isolation and restraint incidents in public schools with a goal of reducing their use, it doesn’t at private schools that receive public money.
The only institution with the complete picture is the private school itself, but Northwest SOIL claims it doesn’t have to disclose the restraint and isolation reports because it’s a private company. The Times filed a public records lawsuit against Northwest SOIL’s parent company after the school denied a request for those reports and other records typically available from public schools. The lawsuit is pending.
Without information from either the state or the school, the Times and ProPublica requested copies of restraint and isolation records inside Northwest SOIL from 34 school districts. Only 27 districts provided reports, and many documents were missing.
The Bethel School District, for instance, destroyed a year's worth of reports “in error,” an official said, and had to retrieve paper copies of others from a warehouse. A district that sent dozens of students to Northwest SOIL turned over fewer restraint reports than a district that sent only one.
Raub said the department is working to improve data collection and acknowledged it “would be very useful” to track restraint and isolation.
Washington also doesn’t demand state inspections and has vague staffing obligations. It requires an unspecified number of certified teachers and only one special education teacher per school. A representative from a district has to visit every three years.
In contrast, California requires periodic state inspections, a teacher with special education credentials in every classroom and a specific ratio of students per teacher, typically 14-to-1.
Stricter standards allowed former students and staff in California to build a whistleblower case when similar problems cropped up at Universal Health Services schools there. The company shut down the last of those campuses in 2013 shortly after settling the case, without any admission of wrongdoing.
Reykdal, the Washington state superintendent, said stricter staff qualifications could improve the quality of education and reduce staff turnover at private schools.
“I think it's likely that our Legislature has to say, ‘When it comes to basic ed, we're not going to have different expectations for the private sector than we do for the public sector,’” he said. “And they should up their game on that.”
“It Was Hell”
For parents like Sarah Snyder, the lax oversight of these specialty schools can turn finding the right education environment for their children into a terrifying ordeal.
Snyder knew her son Christopher needed a special school. He has autism and learning disabilities and finds it difficult at times to express his frustrations in words. Occasionally, he breaks furniture, hits his parents or punches walls.
Students like Christopher, now 16, can benefit from specialized care that private schools promise. But his mother said his stay at Northwest SOIL left him traumatized.
From his bedroom in Puyallup, his shelves brimming with Lego models, Christopher recounted his time at Northwest SOIL with extraordinary detail.
“They don’t treat you like people; they just grab you,” said Christopher, curled up on his Star Wars sheets, holding his knees to his chest. He spoke about being shoved into a seclusion room.
“It was hell —” Christopher said, glancing at his mom in the bedroom doorway. “Can I say that?” She nodded. “It was hell,” Christopher repeated.
In June 2017, a few days after starting at Northwest SOIL, Christopher came home with a disturbing story. He had watched as a boy was strapped to a chair by a belt around his stomach. Another boy erupted in an outburst, competing for attention.
Scared, Christopher, then 11 years old, wanted to call the police. “I don’t feel safe here,” he thought. “I don’t feel safe here.”
He darted across the classroom toward a phone on a filing cabinet and started to dial. A staff member grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back, yanking him away from the phone. (The staffer later threatened to break his arm, Christopher said.)
For seven months, Snyder struggled to get information about what her son had reported. She sought help from Christopher’s home district, Bethel School District, and its school board, as well as the local PTA and nonprofit advocates. She even emailed talk show host Dr. Phil.
“I was desperate,” she said. “I was begging, ‘Please, someone, help my family.’”
Snyder got Christopher out of the school within a month. But she kept complaining to officials for months after. In one letter to OSPI she wrote that it appeared “no one is responsible” for the actions of private schools like Northwest SOIL. Bethel said it cooperated with the state’s investigation.
The state found that Northwest SOIL had violated state laws, including improperly restraining Christopher and withholding the staffer’s name.
It concluded with a reminder that the state has the power to revoke Northwest SOIL’s status.
Five months later, OSPI approved the school’s renewal without any conditions.
The author, Marion Renault (left), with her sister Emilie and grandmother Denise. (photo: Jocelyne Renault/New Yorker
Every resident of the Village Landais has dementia—and the autonomy to spend each day however they please.
Yes, I told her. I was returning to the United States, where my parents moved our family when I was eighteen months old. I found it painful to leave; each time we visited France, the progression of her disease seemed to become more unignorable. Her pencil trembled when she practiced her handwriting. She moved her daily baguette from the kitchen counter into the plate drawer. Late at night, she muttered and puttered around her apartment. When her wandering inconvenienced us, we guided her back to her chair. My family talked about the chair as if it were her refuge; it was probably more accurately described as our refuge from her confusion.
In the summer of 2020, my grandmother stopped eating and getting out of bed. She had fallen, fractured a vertebra, and forgotten about it. I flew to France with a dozen of Mamie’s favorite sesame-seed bagels, and I lived with her as she recovered, fetching prescriptions for the pain she was constantly rediscovering, and rubbing her back when she coughed until she retched. I lay in bed with her until she fell asleep. I fed her. I learned, for the first time in my life, what it meant to care for someone. After five weeks, my mom took my place as Mamie’s at-home caretaker.
Like so many families that are affected by Alzheimer’s, we searched desperately for a new place where my grandmother could live. We viewed her isolation in her seventh-floor apartment as a risk to her health and safety, and felt that it was not only right but necessary to exchange what was left of her autonomy for the round-the-clock, structured care that she could receive at a nursing home. About half of the six hundred thousand people who live in France’s EHPADs, or “housing establishments for dependent elderly people,” have dementia. These are imperfect institutions: in 2018, French nursing-home workers went on strike to protest staff shortages and cost-cutting, and, earlier this year, disturbing reports of abuse and neglect, untrained staff, and the rationing of food and diapers by a for-profit nursing-home company put the country’s elder-care system under intense public scrutiny.
A nursing home in a nearby suburb finally offered her a place after weeks of uncertainty.
My grandmother’s life now seems safer, but smaller. Her memory-care unit is locked with keypads to prevent her from wandering out and is rarely unsupervised; the woman who taught me to cook couscous no longer has a kitchen. My family is satisfied with her care: the staff is affectionate, Mamie is often cheerful during visiting hours, and she regularly participates in Montessori activities such as vegetable peeling and sing-alongs. I never saw her with pets when I was younger, but she now lets the nursing home’s service dog, an enormous Labrador named Nova, cuddle with her in bed. Still, it seems inevitable that, as my grandmother’s condition declines, she will lose the few freedoms she has left. Last year, I stopped bringing her bagels after I noticed that they were furring themselves green inside their plastic bags. This year, she complained of being weaker, of fighting with her brain but not understanding why. She sometimes referred to her nursing home as her aunt’s house, or the children’s daycare where she worked for decades. Someday soon, she will no longer be able to play dominoes with me—she won’t understand how to win, or even how to count the dots on each tile. Later, she might be moved to the unit next door, where people with more serious cognitive limitations live under even closer surveillance.
Anyone who has cared for someone with Alzheimer’s is likely to be familiar with this transaction. We cede their freedom to gain a sense of security—theirs, but also ours. We attempt to resize their world, removing the choices that might pose a danger to them. But I often wonder whether the standard approach of a nursing home—the constant surveillance, the rigid schedules for waking, bathing, eating, socializing, and sleeping—is the best that we can offer to loved ones with dementia.
This summer, before going to see my grandmother in Grenoble, I visited a nursing home that aims to expand, not restrict, the liberties of people with Alzheimer’s. The Village Landais, situated in Dax, in southwestern France, is part of a movement to make memory-care units less like hospitals and more like small neighborhoods. Some of these facilities are designed to convince residents that little has changed—“that life is still as it was once, with children to take care of, and holidays at the seashore, and familiar homes to return to,” as Larissa MacFarquhar wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. But the Village seemed to convey a slightly different message: that life remains full of choices and that autonomy enriches life. Its residents can come and go from their homes as they please, whether through the unlocked door or through a window. They can wake and shower at their leisure; they can shout, pilfer sweets, make tea at 2 A.M., sweep with the broom upside down, and handle sharp knives in the kitchen. Advocates for this kind of care argue that, for people with Alzheimer’s, the risks of institutional dehumanization are just as profound as the physical dangers of cutting one’s hand, or falling and breaking a bone. “Their cognitive troubles don’t permit them to adapt to our world,” Gaëlle Marie-Bailleul, the Village’s head of medicine and a specialist in neurodegenerative disorders told me. “We adapt to them.” Most nursing homes devote themselves to the narrow and perfectly reasonable goal of keeping residents safe and healthy. The Village Landais contemplates a broader question: What might a good life with Alzheimer’s look like?
A hundred and eight people, of whom the youngest are fortysomethings and the oldest are centenarians, live full-time on the seventeen acres of the Village Landais. Its sixteen group houses are clustered into small neighborhoods, and each house features two staff members, who are trained in disciplines such as home care, occupational therapy, and gerontology. Living areas are filled with natural light and secondhand furniture. Hallways are designed as loops, without dead ends, to reduce confusion; each resident has her own bathroom, with a mirror that can be folded up when she no longer recognizes her own reflection.
In the Village’s restaurant, which is supposed to open to the public in 2023, I met Nadine Zoyo, who began baking as a child during the war and spent many years as a homemaker, catering the baptisms and weddings of loved ones. “She never stopped,” her daughter Béatrice, who was dining with her, told me. As her Alzheimer’s progressed, Nadine struggled with words, and repeatedly fell and injured herself. Because Béatrice could see her mother’s apartment from her own, she told me, “I was always looking out the window.” The Village seemed to reanimate Nadine: she used to sit still for long periods, Béatrice said, but now she knits, interacts with others, and seems to lose her train of thought less often. “It’s extraordinary,” Béatrice continued. “She is living again.”
In many respects, the Village lives up to its name. Residents can tend to a large garden each morning and feed Junon and Jasmine, two donkeys who keep the grass in check. A salon offers haircuts, and each house makes a daily grocery run to the épicerie, or supermarket. The store has no cash register or price labels, however; the cognitive work of budgeting and paying has been conveniently edited out. The Village’s hundred and twenty employees, along with sixty active volunteers, travel the grounds on foot, or on bikes that are parked haphazardly around the campus. The medical staff do not wear lab coats; they conduct house calls, not office examinations. Marie-Bailleul told me that she tries to set aside expectations when she speaks with villagers during meals and walks. “They oblige us to be sincere, spontaneous, and in the present moment,” she said. Does it matter if a patient mistakes her for a friend or a grandchild? If someone wants to eat yogurt with a fork, so what? As long as they have an appetite and feel cared for, these are positive experiences, she said.
One of the most radical aspects of the Village is its insistence that a person with Alzheimer’s is not just diminishing into the sum of her symptoms, but flourishing and evolving as a human being until the end. Leticia, a forty-one-year-old villager with early-onset Alzheimer’s, is learning to play the guitar. Many residents who never previously engaged in the arts take to painting or collage-making, staffers told me, and former marathoners and cyclists can re-create long runs and rides within the village. (Academic researchers have noted that some people with dementia appear to enjoy enhanced artistic abilities; Mary Mittelman, a research professor at New York University, told me that, in the chorus she founded for people living with dementia and their families, those who may not remember what they ate for lunch are able to learn as many as eighteen new songs for each concert.)
A bright-green train car sits in the Village library, hitched to nothing in particular. A therapeutic tool, its interior is realistic, with metal racks for baggage and a flat-screen television, which plays footage shot from a train as it rolls through a forest. Nathalie Bonnet, a staff psychologist, told me that the simulacrum of travel appears to quell a simple desire to be elsewhere: she has seen agitated villagers fall asleep on the car’s cushy seats, or sit and articulate worries that they could not before.
Bonnet, who has silver hair and was wearing earrings shaped like droplets of water, led me to a terrace in one of the Village’s little neighborhoods and explained its philosophy. “As long as they can do, we must be able to leave them the liberty to do,” she said. “The spirit of security—of safety as a means to live longer—should be reconsidered. It’s not about opening up all freedoms, either. It’s not that. It’s, ‘What is the tolerable level of freedom to let the person live?’ ” Villagers can set the rhythm of their own existence, hour by hour, minute by minute. They can wash their own clothes, gather beneath expansive eaves, and walk unsupervised along looping wooded paths.
As Bonnet and I talked, a pair of residents ambled by. She asked a gloomy-looking woman, “How are you, Claudine?” Claudine, a former hairdresser, shrugged morosely, tugging at her sweater and pant pockets.
Bonnet asked again how Claudine was doing. Sensing that something was wrong, she rose out of her seat and took the woman’s hand.
“You’re looking for something?” Bonnet asked softly.
“Excuse me,” Claudine said sorrowfully, unable to explain.
“It’s all right,” Bonnet said, her voice softening even more. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
Time and intimacy are especially precious in understaffed nursing homes, and in families that care for those with dementia. Despite myself, I’d often felt irritated when I had to stop the clock in my world in order to accompany my grandma in hers. In Bonnet, I saw no sign of irritation. She asked Claudine whether she was worried that someone had taken her belongings. Claudine nodded, so Bonnet, still stroking Claudine’s hand, suggested that she go check that her bag and coat were safe in her room.
“There’s the style of communication where you have few words,” Bonnet told me as Claudine walked off. “We find a way of decoding.”
The Village’s operating costs exceed six million euros a year, of which about two-thirds come from public coffers. In exchange, researchers are studying the experiences of Villagers, from their behavioral troubles to their medication use and levels of depression and anxiety. “It does not suffice to want to do well,” Hélène Amieva, a researcher and professor of gerontology at the Université de Bordeaux who is independently studying the Village, said. The Village seeks to demonstrate that its philosophy of elder care has measurable positive impacts—that the day-to-day quality of life of its residents improves, or that their disease progresses more slowly. Research into medical outcomes is still ongoing, although a survey has suggested that, since the Village opened, members of the public who live nearby have formed more positive associations with Alzheimer’s, and may see those with the disease as warmer and more competent than they previously did. Another group of researchers is studying economic feasibility. Some families with financial need pay as little as three thousand euros a year, but others pay up to twenty-four thousand—and even that is not enough to cover the majority of the Village’s operating costs. It remains to be seen whether medical savings—for example, in the form of fewer hospital visits or reduced medication use—will offset some of these expenses.
In the U.S., where one in four nursing homes faces employee shortages, experts were skeptical that such a model could ever be implemented on a large scale. “That kind of staffing is not even there in our I.C.U.s,” Joe Verghese, a neurologist and the chief of geriatrics at Montefiore Health System, told me. Elena Portacolone, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, went so far as to reject the Village’s basic design, and argued instead that Alzheimer’s patients should be integrated into society. “To me, it’s segregation,” she said. “I think it’s wrong.” Manon Labarchède, an architect and sociologist who recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation about Alzheimer’s, at the Université de Bordeaux, said that, if the village model remains closed off from the outside world, it will fail to change societal views of the elderly. Still, she said, it helpfully explores an alternative to traditional nursing homes. “It shows other things are possible.”
Dementia isn’t unique to our species—it also shows up in dogs, cats, horses, and rabbits—and has probably been with us for centuries. In a cultural and medical history of dementia, “Dementia Reimagined,” the psychiatrist and bioethicist Tia Powell notes that the writer Jonathan Swift is thought to have been afflicted by it in his old age, during the eighteenth century, when he complained of a fleeting memory, an ill temper, and a lasting despondency. “I have been many months the shadow of the shadow of the shadow,” he confessed in one letter. In another, he told his cousin, “I hardly understand a word I write.” When Swift died at seventy-seven, in 1745, dementia was seen less as a medical condition than as an inevitable feature of aging or, in some cases, a kind of madness. Not until 1906 did Alois Alzheimer, a German pathologist, argue that one of his patients had lost his memory because of a tangle of proteins identified in his postmortem brain. Over the years, studies have suggested that Alzheimer’s causes at least sixty per cent of dementia cases.
Americans long dealt with dementia by institutionalizing the people who experienced it. In the time of Alzheimer, the U.S. housed them in cramped poorhouses, where they frequently came down with infectious diseases, and suffered chronic neglect and abuse. One 1909 report describes a Virginia poorhouse warden who stopped an older woman from wandering by anchoring her with a twenty-eight-pound ball and chain. Eventually, poorhouses were replaced by mental hospitals, and mental hospitals were replaced by nursing homes. These facilities were a step forward, but they limit autonomy by design, and they often overuse antipsychotics as chemical restraints.
Dementia finally came to be seen as a public-health crisis in the late nineteen-seventies. In 1976, the National Institutes of Health spent $3.8 million on Alzheimer’s research; by the year 2000, federal funding for research on Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia had reached four hundred million. But this money has overwhelmingly been spent on trying to eradicate Alzheimer’s, and not on experiments in dementia care, like the Village. Even the Alzheimer’s Association, the country’s leading advocacy group for people with the disease, envisions “a world without Alzheimer’s,” rather than a world in which we try to live with it peaceably. But the dream of vanquishing Alzheimer’s has proved elusive. Alzheimer’s drug trials almost always fail. In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved aducanumab, the first novel Alzheimer’s drug in almost twenty years—against the recommendation of an advisory panel, which overwhelmingly concluded that there was insufficient evidence to deem the drug effective.
“Because the drugs keep failing, people are, like, ‘What do we offer people?’ ” Kristine Yaffe, a neurologist and psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, told me. “What do we say to our patients?” In the U.S. alone, some 6.5 million people over 65, of whom a disproportionate number are women and people of color, already have Alzheimer’s. Between one-third and one-half of Americans aged eighty-five or older are estimated to have dementia. Most people live between three to eleven years after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis; some survive for decades. Because of a shortage of elder-care infrastructure and workers, many of them will face the disease with far too little support. “We’re not prepared,” Esther Friedman, a University of Michigan sociologist who studies elder care, told me.
News coverage of dementia is far more likely to focus on how to prevent it, or how much it burdens our health system, than to highlight the experiences of people who live with it. In surveys, many adults report fears that, if they were diagnosed, they might lose their health insurance, driver’s license, or job. More than half expect a person with Alzheimer’s to lose the freedom to make their own medical decisions, as my grandmother eventually did. “It’s a disease that scares, and that repulses,” Marie-Bailleul told me. As the sociologist Karen Lyman has written, people with dementia are often depersonalized into “merely disease entities.” Powell notes in her book that, in 2007, a bioethicist even explored the philosophical argument that because dementia destroys personhood, a person who develops dementia has a moral obligation to kill herself. “Not killing herself would show selfish callousness,” he wrote. “She causes unnecessary harm to others by imposing significant burdens on them rather than autonomously solving the problem.”
Our fear and hatred of Alzheimer’s ultimately seems rooted in our modern attachment to the idea of the self. “The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist,” Rebecca Solnit writes in “The Faraway Nearby,” a memoir that touches on her mother’s Alzheimer’s, among other subjects. “She was herself being erased.” By yoking our humanity to our cognition, however, we risk dehumanizing those whose grasp on memory, language, and perception slackens. Families may stop bringing loved ones with Alzheimer’s to restaurants and gatherings; they may take away quotidian things, like the freedom to run errands or set the table or have neighbors. This summer, with a twinge of guilt, I realized that my family did not refer to Mamie’s nursing home as her home, but rather as “là, ou elle est”—there, where she is. “We consider that, because you have lost your memory, you are incapable of anything,” Pascale Lasserre-Sergent, the director of the Village Landais, told me. “We consider that you no longer exist as a person.” The poet Tony Harrison wrote:
If we are what we remember what are they
who don’t have memories as we have ours,
who, when evening falls, have no recall of day,
or who those people were who’d brought them flowers.
In recent years, new philosophies of memory care have emerged. In 2009, a dementia village called the Hogeweyk opened in the Netherlands, funded mainly by the Dutch government. Its houses evoke various Dutch life styles—one is for urbanites, another is for culture lovers, and another is for people with religious affinities—and residents can visit a pub, restaurant, theatre, and supermarket. The Village Landais is not affiliated with the Hogeweyk, but the Village’s press representative, Mathilde Charon-Burnel, told me, “Their example inspired us.” The Village, she said, aims to take the ideal of autonomy even further, and to scrutinize its own impact by using a scientific approach. Even if researchers discover that the Village fails to improve patient outcomes, Charon-Burnel told me, they will still publish their results so that other organizations can learn from them.
These alternative approaches do not pretend that the disease is anything but cruel. Alzheimer’s takes away so much that we consider essentially human: knowing, remembering, expressing. But Bonnet, the psychologist, pointed out that people with Alzheimer’s often show a gift for rich presence that eludes many of us. When patients forget about their own condition, a development called anosognosia, they sometimes feel better, as my grandmother did. They inhabit the present moment and may let go of troubling memories or fears about the future. Even as their experience of the world is transformed, they find ways to describe it that the rest of us can understand. “It can be very imaginative, very symbolic,” Bonnet said. A resident might tell her that they took a flight to go grocery shopping; it felt like a long journey. If someone tells her “I saw my mother,” she understands that someone took special care with them. Marie-Bailleul told me about a conversation she had with a woman who was grieving the loss of a fellow-resident. The woman pointed to the leaves of a tree, which were riddled with holes. “Look, he’s crying,” the woman said. “He lost his friend.”
The author, Marion Renault (left), with her sister Emilie and grandmother Denise.Photograph courtesy Jocelyne Renault
My family tries to remember the things that my grandmother has forgotten. Her father fed seven children by farming someone else’s land. When she was twenty, she married my grandfather Angelo, a French Italian man twelve years her senior, who had survived eighteen months in a labor camp during the Second World War. Angelo worked at a bottling plant and later became a welder; Denise worked at a factory that made metal bearings, then at a day care.
My grandfather developed Alzheimer’s before my grandmother did. She knew the complicated feelings of pity and protectiveness, the uneasy impatience, the sweetness and sadness, of caring for a loved one with dementia. When they visited my parents in the U.S., he went out for a long walk while mistakenly wearing her size-five shoes, and she waited by the front door, fuming. She got embarrassed when he mistook the curtains at Olive Garden for giant hanging napkins. She was his primary caretaker until he died at home in France, from a lung infection after aspirating food. Then, within a year or two, she began to experience symptoms of her own. “I’m sick of this disease,” she cried out one morning from her chair, according to a journal I kept at the time. “What did I do to God that he did this to me?” More than once, she told me that Alzheimer’s was devouring her life. I grieve not only for the life she is forgetting but also for the hardship it has contained.
My grandmother will probably never relocate to a place like the Village, but I have started to wonder whether I have the power to bring parts of the Village to her. How would my grandma choose to spend time with me if I allowed her to set our itinerary? Are there new hobbies or activities that I could invite her to explore—or old ones, like cooking, that I could reintroduce with a simple gesture, like bringing her potatoes or carrots that we could peel together? “Discovery is possible in this disease,” Bonnet told me. Solnit, in “The Faraway Nearby,” wrote about how Alzheimer’s drew her closer to her mother: “In that era, I think my voice and other things registered as familiar and set her at ease, and perhaps she knew me more truly. And perhaps I her, as so much that was superfluous was pared away and the central fact of her humanity and her vulnerability was laid bare.”
During my latest trip to see my mamie, I asked her, “Who am I to you?” She paused for a moment, then smiled. “You are my little sister,” she said. Once, I might have fretted about how far from reality she had strayed. But this time I tried to share her interpretation of reality, instead of imposing mine onto hers. What does it mean to be a younger sister? It means that I am someone who has giggled, cried, cooked, and played with her. It means that she has protected me, and that she feels that she is safer when I am near. My grandmother’s answer was not accurate, but it was truthful.
A few days later, on my last visit of the summer, I found myself unable to say goodbye. I searched my mind for words that would capture how easy and familiar it felt to be with her, and that I wished I were not going, and that, as soon as I could, I would be back. “See you tomorrow,” I told her. “À demain, ma chérie,” she replied. See you tomorrow, my dear.
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People sort through plastic bottles they collected at a junk shop in Manila. (photo: Romeo Ranoco/Reuters)
At the global plastics treaty talks, we, the people, need to speak louder than the plastic-addicted corporations.
The resolution established an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to put together the text of the agreement. Its first meeting will begin on November 28 in Uruguay.
Thinking of the upcoming negotiations for the plastics treaty has me swinging between high hopes and anxiety. I can see how the plastics treaty can finally end the age of throwaway plastic. The world has an opportunity to forge an ambitious global plastics treaty – a solution that can match the scale of this global crisis.
On the other hand, I have seen how the most promising policies can go awry when the interests of big businesses are threatened. Corporations pour millions into blocking, delaying, and undermining legislative efforts and global agreements. At the same time, big brands, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Nestlé, make pledges to cut plastic use but consistently fall short of fulfilling their public commitments.
Around the world, plastic regulations have been enacted, yet much more needs to be done. Front-line communities are still grappling with plastic pollution in all its forms. The Global South bears the biggest social and environmental costs of sachet production, waste trade, and waste burning.
In the Philippines – one of the biggest recipients of plastic waste from all over the world – our communities disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental degradation caused by pollution with plastics. We are at risk because plastic production remains unchecked, and companies, in league with big oil, continue to burden us with their disposable packaging that harms our health and the climate just so they can maximise their profits.
This is why it is essential that the Global Plastics Treaty immediately limit and reduce total plastic production and use. Cutting the amount of plastic that companies make and use is in line with the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as 99 percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Ending the corporate addiction to single-use plastic is a vital step towards addressing climate change and protecting communities.
The Global Plastics Treaty we need must stop excessive plastic production, must keep oil and gas in the ground, and must mainstream refill and reuse systems.
We must ensure not only justice but a just transition for affected groups and the most vulnerable stakeholders, such as fenceline communities in “sacrifice zones” near plastic production facilities, fisherfolk and workers across the plastics supply chain.
For this treaty to result in meaningful change, the voices of impacted communities, waste pickers, and populations displaced by plastic pollution have to be heard. Their experiences and knowledge are valuable to ensure that we leave no one behind. More importantly, their authentic and empowered participation in this process is necessary for environmental and climate justice.
Achieving all these will be challenging, but solving the plastic pollution crisis is truly doable and key to tackling climate change. The reuse revolution is thriving with scalable solutions from around the world – from reusable cups at convenience stores and refilling systems in community shops, to the comeback of returnable glass bottles in the beverage sector.
Policies like plastic bans and upstream-focused extended producer responsibility measures are paving the way for systemic change at local and national levels. These are what I call pockets of hope and change.
During the treaty negotiations, we must make speak louder than big brands, big oil and the politicians who pander to them. We must ensure that the treaty puts people’s interests, environmental justice, and our climate at its core. The Global Plastics Treaty has the potential to be one of the most significant environmental agreements in history – and we need to make sure that it does not fall short of its promise.
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