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For you, these are just headlines around the world. For me, it’s the reality.
My name is Dasha Navalnaya. I’m a 21-year-old studying at Stanford University. My father—Alexei Navalny, became Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy by fighting the Kremlin’s corrupt and bloodthirsty regime.
Since 2011 the Anti-Corruption Foundation has been exposing the corruption of high-ranking government officials in Russia, one of the most famous investigations being Putin’s Palace. In August 2020, my father survived a chemical weapon poisoning with Novichok performed by FSB officers and, several months after recovering, successfully investigated his own assassination attempt.
Despite the dangers he faced, in January 2021, Alexei Navalny went back to Russia and was unlawfully arrested at the airport. He has since been serving his time in prison eye-to-eye with Putin’s jailers. Shortly after his arrest, the Anti-Corruption Foundation was recognized as an extremist organization in Russia. Its team members were prosecuted and forced into exile.
We all know that prison isn’t a place where you want to end up anywhere in the world, but, the conditions of the Russian prison system are far worse than those in the U.S. or Europe. There is nothing like a Russian prison to cripple even those in perfect health. My father survived a chemical weapons poisoning, which took a toll; he spent more than two weeks in a coma and over a month in intensive care. The rehabilitation took months. Shortly after the imprisonment, he started experiencing back pains and a gradual loss of control in his legs. He had to endure a 24-day hunger strike just to get access to medical help.
Barely surviving the hunger strike did not break his spirit—nothing ever will. But the solitary confinement conditions he is now subject to are clearly aimed at mentally breaking and physically killing him. My dad’s “residence” for over two months now – a 7 by 8 feet punishment cell, which is more of a concrete cage for someone of 6 ‘3 height. He spends days sitting on a low-iron stool (which exacerbates his back pain), with a mug being the only thing he’s allowed to keep. Even his bed is fastened to the wall from 6 AM to 10 PM.
On Thursday, November 17th, my dad was moved to the strict regime in a solitary housing unit. The rest of the prisoners live in barracks, which they can freely exit, but he will be permanently locked in the solitary cell. He wrote: “It is a regular cramped cell, like the punishment cell, except that you can have not one, but two books with you and use the prison kiosk, albeit with a very limited budget.” These new conditions will also prevent him from receiving any family visits—they are all completely banned. Being able to have a second book is definitely a bonus for an extremely fast reader like my dad.
I am proud to be my father’s daughter and walk tall knowing that despite the inhuman conditions, he has been standing up against Putin’s war in Ukraine and calling on the Russian people to do everything in their power to fight it.
“Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There’s no one to do it for us. Let’s not ‘be against the war.’ Let’s fight against the war,”—he stated during the trial in March. It is now December, and since August my father has spent 78 days in the punishment cell, serving eight solitary confinement terms back-to-back.
Why was he sent to the solitary confinement punishment cell and now to a long term solitary confinement cell, you ask? Among the violations from the colony administration, my father has been sent to the punishment cell because: unbuttoning jumpsuit” (it is physically impossible to button as the jumpsuit is a few sizes smaller than his), refusing to mop the fence,” and “sweeping the exercise yard poorly and insulting the Сriminal Investigator Lieutenant by addressing him by title and surname instead of his first name and patronymic.” The most recent is simply being an “egregious offender” worthy of the “cell-type” room.
The real reason behind the constant punishments is and always has been, of course, Navalny’s condemnation of the Ukraine war and his opposition to the Putin regime. My father uses every appeal hearing as an opportunity to make an anti-war statement. During his recent hearing, he said: “Your Honor, I declare that I am an innocent person. And I believe that I and others like me did everything possible to prevent what is happening now. And we will continue to do so. And I call on all citizens of Russia to fight this regime, this war, and mobilization.”
“I will spend as much time in a punishment cell as will be necessary to defend my right to speak out against a historic crime Putin is committing” —is a sadly self-fulfilling prophecy in his case. The prison administration made it clear there’s no such thing as a glimpse of the rule of law when it comes to Navalny.
The latter is also attested by the fact that my father’s attorney-client confidentiality privilege no longer exists. The penal colony administration had simply decided to waive it. In recent months, all communication he has had with his lawyers goes through the prison administration. The window in the visiting room has been covered with an opaque film, so lawyers can only hear a voice and see their client’s silhouette as they discuss the defense in the new criminal cases against him (he currently is facing up to 30 years behind bars). My dad’s lawyers no longer have a visual understanding of his health and physical conditions. This is unique even by the low standards of the Russian judicial system.
To me, Alexei Navalny is not only a determined, hard-working, and charismatic leader but also a funny, caring, and incredible father. He taught me how to ride a bike; he helped with math equations and grammar questions when I simply could not wrap my elementary school brain around the concept of semicolons. In middle school, when I made my first attempt to cook porridge, when it turned out to be way too salty, my dad smiled, didn’t discourage me, and ate the whole thing. For hours he helped me learn the poem “The Prophet” by Alexander Pushkin so well it is still engraved in my mind. Every September, he walked my younger brother and me to school on the first day of class. My dad was there for our competitions, concerts, and graduations. And has always written me or anyone he holds close a loving and hilarious letter on our birthday if he was arrested and couldn’t be with us in person.
Now he can’t even do that.
Our family has always taken pride in its optimism: we prefer jokes over complaining when the worse comes. We’ve seen a lot over the years and made sure not to take it too close to heart. My father was detained at least once almost every year between 2011 and 2021, with time spent in prison longer and longer. My mother was detained and tried; my uncle served 3.5 years in prison for the simple crime of having the same last name. Our whole family, including my grandparents and great-grandparents, has been harassed and unlawfully prosecuted many times. Not to mention the “good old times” when the FSB poisoners were close to killing my mother and almost killed my father
It is impossible to get used to the idea that your loved ones can be imprisoned or killed at any time for a made-up reason, but over time it became part of our family routine. “So, I assume you won’t be coming to dinner tonight?” I’d ask my dad whenever he was getting ready to go to a protest. He would respond with a snicker.
The Russian regime has always been based on corruption and it is now based on war – for Putin, these are the two prerequisites for staying in power. That is why he is ready to destroy anyone who dares to expose them. And he treats my father with a personal hatred—as his most implacable opponent for many years.
As you read these lines, Navalny is in mortal danger, but he continues to stand by what he believes in. He has proven willing to sacrifice his freedom, health, and even his life to see Russia become a democratic, prosperous country. And right now, even from prison, he is fighting to make it peaceful. By his example, he supports and inspires millions of Russians who, like him, are unwilling to tolerate war and injustice.
Putin must be defeated. He is a threat not only to Russia and Ukraine but to the world. The very essence of authoritarian power involves a constant increase in bets, an increase in aggression, and the search for new enemies. In order not to lose in this struggle, we must unite.
My father is one of the leaders of this struggle, and he must be out there. He challenges Putin every day, but together we can ensure that his efforts are not in vain and that his words are heard around the world. I now turn to world leaders and ask them to support my call to the Russian government to release my father.
Let’s all strive for a better, more prosperous global future where we can choose our own leaders. Free Alexei Navalny!
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A Russian soldier stands in front of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in territory under Russian military control. (photo: AP)
After years of atomic energy powering big Russian cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Voronezh, the USSR was finally ready to expand the technology to other Soviet republics like Ukraine. Soviet propaganda promised easier jobs and cleaner air.
"We didn't have a reason to distrust the government. They showed us how good things could be," she says.
Or so she thought at the time. It didn't take long for Arkadiyivna to turn skeptical.
She heard from friends and relatives who worked at the Chernobyl plant that authorities would cut corners and pump up power production for the USSR to export to other Eastern bloc countries.
"The Russians always wanted more — faster, more!" she recalls. "It was greed."
On April 26, 1986, Arkadiyivna's worst fears about the reactor's safety came to fruition. One of the reactors blew up, releasing a cloud of radiation over Ukraine and across Europe.
The Chernobyl disaster remains the worst civilian nuclear incident in history.
For months, the International Atomic Energy Agency has warned of another potential nuclear disaster brewing in southern Ukraine, at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which Russia has occupied since March. Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for shelling that has repeatedly hit structures around the site, even as IAEA personnel are stationed there.
"I never thought I would see another nuclear disaster [in Ukraine] in my lifetime," said Arkadiyivna, "not even during Armageddon."
How Russia's nuclear energy helped lead to an independent Ukraine
The Soviet Union put nuclear science at the center of its Cold War strategy — both economic and military.
"Moscow developed nuclear energy above all to control everything — to keep it close and protected from possible conflict," says Oleksandr Sukhodolia, a Ukrainian energy policy expert.
Like many aspects of Soviet life, the nuclear industry was defined by ethnic segregation.
"Ukraine was looked at like a kind of outback. ... As far as nuclear power was concerned, Ukrainians were not trusted to run it themselves," says David Marples, a historian at Canada's University of Alberta and author of multiple books about the Chernobyl disaster.
After the disaster, Soviet Ukrainian bureaucrats raised difficult questions about why they weren't involved in oversight.
Yuriy Samoilenko was the chief environmental inspector at Kyiv's city hall at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown. He says he knew there were some risks associated with nuclear energy, but felt misled by the government in Moscow about the scope of the blasts. After all, the power plant is just 60 miles north of Ukraine's biggest population center.
"Why did they say it was safe to go outdoors? Why did they build it so close to Kyiv?" Samoilenko says. "Why was it all such a secret?"
He linked up with Ukraine's nascent independence movement to find some answers.
"Before Chernobyl, I didn't understand why we needed to be independent. But I did understand that we're no less deserving of dignity than Russians," Samoilenko says.
Soon other environmental scientists joined with the dissidents, and established an organization called Green World. The Soviet government tolerated youth environmental movements, but behind closed doors, the group pushed for Ukrainian independence.
"The only way to protect the environment is through democratic action — because everybody has to be involved in protecting the things that affect everybody," says Samoilenko.
By 1991, they had their wish. Ukraine declared independence and the Soviet Union fell apart.
"All anybody needed to do to vote for independence was say one word: 'Chernobyl,'" Samoilenko says.
Ukrainians were finally in charge of their own nuclear industry, responsible for 12 large nuclear reactors, with several more planned.
The Chernobyl cleanup took a substantial chunk of newly independent Ukraine's national budget. Meanwhile, dependence on nuclear energy crept up to 55% of the country's production, according to the IAEA. That rate of production is second only to France.
"Nuclear power has never really gone away, it's even gone up despite Chernobyl," says Marples, the historian in Alberta.
Nuclear fears and the Russian invasion
Sophia Arkadiyivna is now retired as mayor of her hometown of Kupovate. Ukraine's government erased the village from the map in 1999. That's because it's in the 60-mile-wide "exclusion zone," which was deemed too dangerous for the public after the Chernobyl disaster.
But after she retired from her other job as a school teacher, she returned, despite the environmental risks. The government turns a blind eye to pensioners like her who opted to return to their abandoned houses. She spends most days now alone, tending to her garden, her main source of sustenance.
"I'm just happy to be home. I'm happy with every flower, and every leaf, and every animal," she says.
She speaks Ukrainian, with a few Belarusian words peppered in. This village is closer to the border with Belarus — just 10 miles to the east — than to the former Chernobyl plant. She says she used to believe there wasn't much difference between Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians.
"Us old folks raised our kids to believe in God: Don't steal, don't kill, don't bother anyone, live virtuously, have a soul, help people," she says while angrily chopping vegetables to pickle for the winter.
"But the Russians beat us, raped us. And today they don't want there to be a free Ukraine."
Hundreds of other retirees like her lived through the Russian occupation of the exclusion zone in March, as did thousands of Ukrainian officials and workers who continue to maintain the vital power infrastructure that passes through the zone.
Oleksandr Havrylenko, the safety chief in the exclusion zone, says the Russians stole radios, tires, batteries or alternators from his entire fleet of vehicles. Many had smashed windows or bullet holes in the doors.
"I give it a 50-50 chance they'll be back," Havrylenko says of the Russian forces.
Instead of working on necessary tasks around the zone, Havrylenko and his team are still cleaning up after the Russian occupation. Having survived the month-long occupation, though, they can hardly imagine the stress that people working at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are under.
"I'm very, very scared," says Serhiy Biruk, a top official with the Ukrainian agency that manages the exclusion zone. He's been involved in the Chernobyl cleanup for 37 years.
After Russia forcibly annexed the territory in September, Ukraine's power utility says occupation officials forced Ukrainian nuclear workers to sign new contracts acknowledging Russia's control over the power plant.
"I don't think the Russians know what the real danger is," Biruk says.
But a potential meltdown is only half the dilemma, according to Anna Ackermann, co-founder of a Ukrainian environmental group called Ecoaction.
"Ukraine's energy system was meant to function with Russia and Belarus," she says. While Ukraine did separate its grid from those countries after 2014, Anna Ackermann says that nuclear energy is centralized by its very nature.
With the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant now disconnected from the Ukrainian grid, Ukraine loses a substantial proportion of its power generation. That's been exacerbated by Russia's attacks on energy delivery infrastructure across the country over the past couple of months.
Ackermann says people want their energy production to be even more local. They're looking to the lifestyles of people like Arkadiyivna, relying on off-grid utilities like batteries and solar panels to survive.
"We're entering a new area where Ukrainians want autonomy," says Ackermann. Autonomy, like energy sources and homesteads they know how to sustain.
"It's a striking difference with nuclear power plants," Ackermann says.
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A woman wears a mask indoors in Manhattan earlier this year, in New York City. The city's public health commissioner issued new guidance on Friday advising New Yorkers to wear face coverings in all public spaces. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Over the past few weeks, a surge in cases of COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been sickening millions of Americans, overwhelming emergency rooms and even causing a cold medicine shortage. The triple threat has been called a "tripledemic" by some health experts.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted this past week that the simultaneous combination of viruses has been straining healthcare systems across the country.
The center's map that tracks COVID-19 community levels has been showing more orange recently, a color indicating an area of "high" infection, Walensky told NPR's Alisa Chang on All Things Considered.
"To protect communities in those circumstances at those high levels, we have recommended and continue to recommend that those communities wear masks," she said.
Nearly a tenth of counties in the U.S. are advised to wear masks indoors, CDC says
CDC's latest COVID-19 community level map indicates that over 9% of counties in the country were considered to have a high risk of infection. The federal agency recommends that people living in those areas practice indoor masking. Generally, children under the age of 2 are not recommended to wear face coverings.
Nearly every state on the map released Friday included at least one county where the COVID-19 community level is high or medium. Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia are the only U.S. jurisdictions where all of its counties have low community levels.
You can look up your county on the CDC's page here to see what the local risk level is and whether masking is advised where you live.
Public health officials are urging masks in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and other places
In Washington state, 12 county health officers and 25 hospital executives released new guidance on Friday asking residents to practice indoor masking.
The Oregon Health Authority similarly advised residents to wear face coverings in crowded indoor areas, particularly to help protect children and older adults.
"The combination of surging flu, RSV and COVID-19 cases is pushing hospitals past their current ICU bed capacity, which never happened during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Oregon," Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state epidemiologist said in a press briefing on Thursday.
Los Angeles County's COVID community level was moved to "high" last week. On Thursday, local public health director Dr. Barbara Ferrer urged residents to wear masks indoors, adding that a mask mandate may be imposed if COVID cases and hospitalizations continue to rise.
In New York City, health commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan on Friday advised New Yorkers to wear face coverings inside stores, public transit, schools, child care facilities, and other public shared spaces, especially when they are crowded.
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The 'Road to Chaos' runs through the Yanomami territory in the Amazon. (photo: Valentina Ricardo)
Aerial photos from reconnaissance mission reveal effort to smuggle excavators into Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory
Its objective: a clandestine 120km (75-mile) road that illegal mining mafias have carved out of the jungles of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory in recent months, in an audacious attempt to smuggle excavators into those supposedly protected lands.
“I call it the Road to Chaos,” said Danicley de Aguiar, the Greenpeace environmentalist leading the reconnaissance mission over the immense Indigenous sanctuary near the Brazilian border with Venezuela.
Aguiar said such heavy machinery had never before been detected in the Yanomami territory – a Portugal-sized sweep of mountains, rivers and forests in the extreme north of Brazil’s Amazon.
“We believe there are at least four excavators in there – and that takes mining in Yanomami territory to the next level, to a colossal level of destruction,” the senior forest campaigner said, as his team prepared to take to the skies to confirm the road’s existence.
The plane’s cabin filled with excited chatter an hour into the flight, as the first glimpses of the clandestine artery came into view.
“We found it, people!” the navigator celebrated, while the pilot performed a series of stomach-churning manoeuvres over the canopy to get a clearer view of the dirt track.
“That’s the Road to Chaos,” Aguiar announced through the plane’s internal communication system.
“And this is the chaos,” he added, pointing to a gaping hole in the rainforest where three yellow excavators had clawed a goldmine out of the banks of the coffee-coloured Catrimani River.
In a nearby clearing, a fourth digger could be seen wrecking a territory home to about 27,000 members of the Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples, including several communities that do not have contact with the outside world. Worryingly, one of those isolated villages is just 10 miles away from the illegal road, Aguiar said.
Sônia Guajajara, a prominent Indigenous leader who was also on the plane, suspected the criminals had benefited from Brazil’s recent presidential election to sneak their equipment deep into Yanomami lands. “Everyone was focused on other things, and they took advantage,” Guajajara said.
The arrival of excavators – witnessed for the first time by journalists from the Guardian and Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo – is the latest chapter in a half-century assault by powerful and politically connected mining gangs.
Wildcat prospectors known as garimpeiros began flocking to Yanomami land in search of tin ore and gold in the 1970s and 80s, after the military dictatorship urged poor Brazilians to occupy a region it called “a land without men for men without land”.
Huge fortunes were made – and often lost. But for the Yanomami it was a catastrophe. Lives and traditions were upended. Villages were decimated by influenza and measles epidemics. About 20% of the tribe died in just seven years, according to the rights group Survival International.
A global outcry saw tens of thousands of miners evicted in the early 1990s as part of a security operation called Selva Livre (Jungle Liberation). Under international pressure, Brazil’s then president, Fernando Collor de Mello, created a 9.6m-hectare reserve. “We have to guarantee the Yanomami a space so they don’t lose their cultural identity or their habitat,” Mello said.
Those efforts initially succeeded but by the next decade the garimpeiros were back due to soaring gold prices, lax enforcement and grinding poverty that ensured mining bosses a constant supply of exploitable workers.
The assault intensified after Jair Bolsonaro – a far-right populist who wants Indigenous lands opened to commercial development – was elected president in 2018, with the number of wildcat miners on Yanomami land reaching an estimated 25,000.
“It was a government of blood,” said Júnior Hekurari Yanomami, a Yanomami leader who blamed Bolsonaro for emboldening the invaders with his anti-Indigenous rhetoric and for crippling Brazil’s environmental and Indigenous protection agencies.
When Guardian journalist Dom Phillips, who was murdered in the Amazon last June, visited a mine in the Yanomami territory in late 2019, he found “a hand-operated industrial hell amid the wild tropical beauty”: mud-caked miners using wooden scaffolding and high-pressure hoses to blast their way through the earth.
“It’s astonishing. You’re in the lap of this great forest and it’s almost as if you’re in one those old films about ancient Egypt … All those monstrous machines destroying the earth to make money,” said the photographer João Laet who travelled there with the British reporter.
Three years later, the situation has deteriorated further with the arrival of hydraulic excavators and the illegal road.
Alisson Marugal, a federal prosecutor tasked with protecting Yanomami lands, said the introduction of such machinery was a troubling development for communities already facing an acute “humanitarian tragedy”.
Miners, some with suspected ties to drug factions, had brought sexual violence, malaria outbreaks and forced health posts to close, exposing children to “scandalous” levels of disease and malnutrition. Rivers were being poisoned with mercury by an illegal fleet of about 150 mining vessels.
Marugal said Brazil’s underfunded environmental agency Ibama launched sporadic crackdowns, blowing up and torching illegal airstrips, helicopters and planes used to reach the territory. But the intermittence of such missions – and the huge economic rewards involved – meant they were only a temporary inconvenience.
Bush pilots could receive up to 1,000,000 reais (£160,000) for a few, perilous months ferrying prospectors, supplies and sex workers to remote jungle camps. For their bosses, the profits were greater still.
Brazil’s incoming president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has pledged to put the garimpeiros out of business and slash deforestation, which has soared under Bolsonaro.
“Both Brazil and the planet need the Amazon alive,” Lula said in his first speech after narrowly defeating his rival in October’s election.
Marugal believed stopping illegal mining on Yanomami land was perfectly possible if there was political will, which was something entirely lacking under Bolsonaro. In fact, Ibama already had a plan involving a relentless, six-month offensive that would have cut off the miners’ supply lines and force them to flee the forest by starving them of fuel and food.
Aguiar argued a militarized crackdown would not succeed in the long term unless it was accompanied by policies attacking the hardship on which environmental crime was built.
“This isn’t going to be fixed just with rifles,” said the campaigner. “Overcoming poverty is an essential part of overcoming this economy of destruction.”
Hekurari Yanomami also hopes for a large-scale federal intervention when the new government takes power in January, but warns that defeating the garimpeiros will not be easy.
“These miners don’t just carry spades and axes … They have rifles and submachine guns … They are armed and all of [their] bases have heavily armed security guards with the same kind of weapons that the army, the federal police and the military police use,” he said.
The price of inaction would be obliteration for a people who have inhabited the rainforest for thousands of years.
“If nothing is done we’ll lose this Indigenous land,” Marugal said. “For the Yanomami, the outlook is grim.”
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A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The increase comes about two weeks before the anticipated end to a restrictive border policy that’s been in place since 2020.
United States Border Patrol agents in El Paso reported seeing an average of about 2,500 crossings each day.
“Over the weekend, the El Paso Sector experienced a major surge in illegal crossings with a 3-day average of 2,460 daily encounters, primarily through the downtown area of El Paso,” El Paso Sector Acting Chief Peter Jaquez posted on Twitter Monday. “Border Patrol personnel, along with our governmental and non-governmental partners, are doing all we can to assess and manage the migrant influx as it continues to impact our region.”
The migrants include a large group believed to have been detained by organized crime in the Mexican state of Durango as it made its way north, the El Paso Times reported early Monday.
The increase led Customs and Border Protection officers from El Paso and Border Patrol agents from the nearby Big Bend sector to aid in processing the migrants, CBP El Paso said in a statement Monday.
The mass crossing comes less than two weeks before a controversial border health policy put in place by the Trump administration and continued by President Biden is set to expire. Title 42 allows the U.S. to keep people from entering the country to stymie the spread of a communicable disease. It was invoked in 2020 to contain the spread of COVID-19, Trump officials said at the time, and was kept in place despite opposition by Democrats and several immigrant rights organizations.
Last month, a federal judge ruled the policy was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered the Biden admiration to stop enforcing it. The administration has appealed the decision, but news of the policy’s potential end has sounded alarm bells for city governments and other officials who argue that shelters and federal holding facilities in border cities cannot handle the anticipated large numbers of asylum seekers.
The increases in crossings have forced federal officials to release hundreds of migrants into the streets because of a lack of space in processing facilities. The average number of daily releases in El Paso stood at about 900 as of Monday, according to statistics from the City of El Paso. That includes nearly 300 “daily street releases,” according to the information, in addition to the more than 5,100 migrants who are in CBP custody daily.
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Excerpt: "Elon Musk's Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform."
The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.
The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was "reevaluating how best to bring external insights" and the council is "not the best structure to do this."
"Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal," said the email, which was signed "Twitter."
The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn't have any decision-making authority and didn't review specific content disputes. Shortly after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would form a new "content moderation council" to help make major decisions but later changed his mind.
"Twitter's Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues," tweeted council member Alex Holmes. "At no point was it a governing body or decision making."
Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an "open conversation and Q…A" with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.
That came on the same day that three council members announced they were resigning in a public statement posted on Twitter that said that "contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter's users are on the decline."
Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticism of them and Twitter's past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
"It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" Musk tweeted.
A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter earlier on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting the council's role.
Those false accusations by Twitter leaders were "endangering current and former Council members," the email said.
The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing … Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors … Kin in Need.
Former Twitter employee Patricia Cartes, whose job it was to form the council in 2016, said Monday its dissolution "means there's no more checks and balances." Cartes said the company sought to bring a global outlook to the council, with experts from around the world who could relay concerns about how new Twitter policies or products might affect their communities.
She contrasted that with Musk's current practice of surveying his Twitter followers before making a policy change affecting how content gets moderated. "He doesn't really care as much about what experts think," she said.
The Calf Canyon and Hermit's Peak fires burned in the Rocky Mountains near Pecos, N.M., in May. The blazes weren't brought under control until August. (photo: Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal/AP)
Climate change is reshaping the American economy. New Mexico is leaning on ecotourism and sustainable industries to see it through, but extreme weather keeps getting in the way.
He wanted to build the sort of business that could raise local income levels and help rural residents stay on their land, rather than sell to outsiders. That was in line with the state’s plans too: The governor had created a division in her economic development department to promote outdoor recreation.
So Mr. Ulibarri started building campsites and a small guesthouse, even retrofitting the one-room cabin where his father was born. Early this year, he was ready to book a summer of visits.
Then, on an April day with blistering winds following months of only trace rainfall, the mountain went up in flames.
Mr. Ulibarri and his partner, Becky Schaller, held out as long as they could, even as the electricity failed and smoke clouded the sky. When the winds turned their direction and they saw the blaze creeping over the mountain, they loaded up their goats, dogs, horses and a couple of parrots into a big trailer and drove slowly down to safety.
Surveying the damage later, they saw their buildings had been spared, but the trees on the ridges were gone — along with the fences they needed to confine their animals, and the trails in the surrounding forest they were counting on for bikers and hikers. Plus, the river was running inky black with ash. A year’s worth of food in their freezer had perished. And the business plan was on ice.
By the end of the season, they were able to host one group, and plan to try again next year. But Mr. Ulibarri wonders whether the business model he’d hoped his neighbors could emulate is viable. Even before the fires, he noticed less snow on the mountains and fewer fish in dwindling streams. For years, fire managers had suppressed natural blazes, so there’s still plenty of timber left to burn again.
“Climate change does scare me, a lot, because we really don’t know what it’s going to look like, you know?” he said. “Just what I’ve seen so far in my lifetime, the changes are incredible.”
The changes are indeed incredible. So are the costs.
The study of how climate change affects economies is still relatively nascent, but evolving fast. Economists are grappling with bigger shocks than even scientists had anticipated, both in the form of catastrophic events like hurricanes and wildfires, as well as the slow, creeping influence of drought, extreme heat, and rising sea levels.
Unlike its neighbors to the east and west, New Mexico is tackling the economic challenge head on, passing legislation and funding programs to mitigate the effects of climate change. Complicating that effort: The state’s primary taxpayer, the oil and gas industry, is also the main source of the disruption.
For that reason, New Mexico faces both what economists call “physical risk” and “transition risk”: The financial damages of extreme weather and shifting temperatures, plus the damage caused by doing something about it. To offset those risks, the state is working to diversify into other industries. The problem is, some of those that offer the most potential are vulnerable to climate change themselves.
“In looking for alternatives to extraction as ways to fuel New Mexico’s economy, the two that always jump out most immediately are tourism or outdoor recreation and agriculture,” said Kelly O’Donnell, an economic consultant. “And obviously those are two of the industries that very likely will suffer extreme damage from fires, floods and drought.”
‘We just get hit over and over’
The days before the fire carried a sense of foreboding — different, Phoebe Suina remembers, from years past. She had dealt with the aftermath of many blazes before, as an environmental engineer who helps communities respond to natural disaster. This time, it had barely rained in the northern part of the state in months, the snowpack was already gone, humidity was minimal, and the winds were so intense that it was hard to walk outside.
“This April, I remember having that sinking feeling — how I can explain it in English is, all the elements of a major imbalance were occurring,” Ms. Suina said. “And it wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. We have to figure out how we’re going to survive.”
The Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires started in April, after the U.S. Forest Service conducted what was supposed to have been a controlled burn to thin the dense undergrowth. High winds whipped both fires into a megacomplex that ultimately torched 342,000 acres across three counties, and wasn’t fully controlled until mid-August.
Then came the flooding. With no trees to hold back the mountains, monsoon season sent rivers of sediment coursing through the gulleys, spilling over roads and onto the homes below. Irrigation channels have been filled with dirt and rocks, but there’s no point in dredging them until the deluges stop.
Michael Maes’s home in Mora, an edenic valley town a few canyons away from Mr. Ulibarri’s place, stands right in the path of this water. At one point, it rose to his waist, and even after clearing out all the mud, he had to scramble repeatedly to channel fresh flooding around the structure instead of through it. Meanwhile, water pressure has remained low, so he’s had to carry buckets around just to flush toilets.
“We just get hit over and over,” said Mr. Maes. All of that work kept him from his day job, cutting hair about 40 minutes down the valley, and drained his savings. Every time the sky darkens, he keeps in touch with friends on a text chain, dreading the wreckage that follows. “There’s a cloud that rolls over, all of a sudden,” he said, and the question is: “Who’s going to get it today?”
Because the U.S. Forest Service took responsibility for the fire, it is footing the bill for reconstruction and compensating those who suffered financial losses with an aid package worth $2.5 billion. Eventually, if people are able to prove their claims — a complicated endeavor in a place where property ownership often isn’t fully documented — they should be made whole. Meanwhile, the White House is asking for $2.9 billion more, as part of a $37 billion package for victims of the year’s natural disasters across the country.
In New Mexico, the physical risk from climate change comes in two forms. One is the creeping loss of prosperity brought on by prolonged drought, which in the Mora area had already completely dried up the system of ditches that had irrigated crops and watered cattle for generations. Catastrophic fire exemplifies the other kind: A destructive event that vaporizes assets all at once.
Mora County, population 4,200, has seen both. Long sustained by small-scale agriculture and logging, local nonprofits had been working to develop a tourism economy. They were building up a social media presence, and one group even talked to film studios drawn by the sweeping views and ranches that seem right out of the old West.
The vision is to become something more like Colorado, where the Commerce Department reported that outdoor recreation generated $6.1 billion in salaries in 2021; New Mexico brought in only $1.2 billion.
This year, rather than promote economic development, Mora officials tried to just keep people alive, and restore what they had lost. Airbnbs burned alongside primary residences, the few hotels filled up with reconstruction workers, and the landscape was left so scarred that film studios would have to rewrite their scripts.
In Taos, waiting for disaster to strike
On the other side of the mountain from Mora, Taos has been watching closely.
Although the fires never reached the posh ski town or its magnificent surroundings, Sanjay Poovadan, a real estate broker and landlord, saw the fires’ effect immediately in bookings of his rental properties. “People said, ‘We hear there’s a fire in the Hermit’s Peak area, and it’s near Taos, so we’re canceling, we don’t want to be breathing that air,’” Mr. Poovadan recalled. “And of course why do you come to northern New Mexico? Because you get clean air.”
That kind of hit is particularly hard for the outdoor economy, given its seasonality — a forest that’s closed for one month can wipe out a third of a business’s profits.
A direct hit from a wildfire would multiply that effect many, many times over. And although there’s more forest thinning activity around Taos than there had been around Mora — in part because of a billion-dollar effort headed by the Nature Conservancy — the task is so vast that a major fire seems inevitable.
In an explicit acknowledgment of the risk, the city has devoted $10,000 of the revenue from its lodgers tax — which by statute has to fund tourism promotion — for forest restoration. “We’re making the argument that if the fire had come over to our side of the mountain, we would’ve had no tourism at all,” Mayor Pascualito Maestas said.
The Taos Ski Valley, a resort that’s been operating since the 1950s, is at a relatively high elevation and says it has more snow than other increasingly desperate ski areas across the West. But it hasn’t been unscathed: Last year, a freak windstorm took out a huge swath of mature trees, as if mowing the lawn.
Regardless of whether another fire erupts, climate change has already made living in Taos more difficult, and more expensive. Air conditioning is now needed to stay comfortable in the summer, and home insurance premiums are skyrocketing, given the likelihood of having to rebuild a burned home. Meanwhile, Taos’s relative isolation and lack of other disasters like hurricanes has attracted a new influx of high-income, part-time residents who have created a housing crunch for locals.
Mr. Poovadan sees both sides of that squeeze. He worries that when a big fire does come, the most harmed will be those with no other place to go.
“The folks who can afford to leave will leave,” Mr. Poovadan said. “And the people here will be picking up the pieces.”
From drought to flood
The extremes that increasingly characterize New Mexico’s climate are even harder to deal with when you don’t know when they’ll arrive. That especially applies to water: There’s not enough, except for when there’s too much.
Consider Nick Baefsky and Amy Wright, who have more food than they need for the number of mouths they have to feed. Six months ago, they had the opposite problem.
The couple, who manage cattle on a 96,000-acre ranch on a vast plain beneath the same mountains that burned over the summer, had to sell 10 percent of their hundreds of cow-calf pairs in the spring. Rains hadn’t arrived to green up the fields, and brutal winds sheared off the grass left standing, so there wasn’t enough for them to eat.
“It felt like it was the worst it could be,” said Ms. Wright, relaxing after a long day fixing fences. They kept checking the weather forecasts, but couldn’t see a safe path through to the rainy season.
The other snag: Despite investing in pipes and troughs to supplement natural watering holes, some of the 40 wells that the ranch has to keep the cows hydrated are producing less water, as the aquifers beneath them dry up. “Even if there was good grass, if you can’t water them, you can’t run them,” Mr. Baefsky said.
Then, at the end of June, it started raining. And raining. At that point, they could easily have supported the extra cattle. But buying them back is expensive.
Not everyone is so completely at the mercy of rain. Some farmers of high-value cash crops have more control over their water supply,through deep aquifers and rights to divert from the state’s major rivers. They have figured out ways to maintain their yields.
Expansive pecan groves, whose owners drilled deep wells in the 1950s and which produce more of the nuts than any state save Georgia, would pay any price in order to avoid having to rip out their trees. Farmers of New Mexico’s iconic chiles, under pressure from drought, have invested in technology to get more from less acreage.
There are limits to even that degree of control, however.
Mike Hamman, the state engineer, is in charge of maximizing the water supply when nearly all of it is spoken for and the total pool is shrinking. After years of increasing efficiency, returns are diminishing.
“I would say we’ve squeezed that sponge out pretty good by now,” Mr. Hamman said.
What climate change costs
The fires last spring are just a snapshot of climate change’s economic impact in one year, in one corner of the state. To add it all up beyond that is a daunting task, but there have been attempts.
Back in 2009, Ernie Niemi, an environmental and economic development consultant, worked up a forecast for how climate change would affect New Mexico’s economy at various points in the future. It was part of a project housed at the University of Oregon that aimed to show state legislators, wary of hurting their economies by easing off fossil fuels, the cost of doing nothing.
He found it would be about $1.7 billion by 2020 — including $488 million for wildfire costs, $421 million for health-related expenses, and $286 million for lost recreation opportunities. He imagined the figure would actually be much larger, in ways they couldn’t calculate. The list includes costs from more frequent and intense storms — and items like regulations for protecting additional endangered species.
In an update for the state of Oregon in 2018, Mr. Niemi found that they had significantly escalated, and the same was likely true for New Mexico.
Now, estimates are piling up for how climate change will affect the national and even global economy — moving beyond the cost of an individual hurricane or fire, and ballparking the economic drag from rising temperatures. The World Meteorological Organization, for example, has calculated that the U.S. economy has lost $1.4 trillion to climate-related weather events over the past 50 years, while Deloitte says it stands to lose an additional $14.5 trillion over the next 50, if further warming isn’t averted. For the first time, this year the draft U.S. National Climate Assessment includes a chapter on economic effects.
But the economic damage of climate change isn’t always measurable by traditional methods, because the full value of nature isn’t computed in gross domestic product. A forest doesn’t have statistical worth until it’s cut down — even though it cleans the air and sequesters carbon in a way that blunts the damage to human civilization down the line.
That’s why the federal government is developing “natural capital accounts,” a standardized way of valuing healthy ecosystems. In other words, a state can figure out what it’s worth to keep forests thinned, so they’re less likely to erupt in flames, and more likely to stay in place to keep mountaintops from washing into valleys.
That’s the kind of math Joshua Sloan is doing. The associate vice president at New Mexico Highlands University, he has tried to convince the state legislature that it’s worth spending $68 million on a reforestation center. If built, it could supply seedlings to burned acreage across the western United States, generating both revenue and the forests on which communities depend.
So far, lawmakers haven’t agreed.
“Typically direct costs are much more immediately felt than those more diffuse social and ecological benefits,” Dr. Sloan said.
Predicting the future
Two and a half-billion dollars: That’s the budget surplus New Mexico ended up with for fiscal year 2024, most of it from higher gas prices that increased royalties from oil and gas extraction in the Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oil field. All in all, the industry supplied about 40 percent of the state’s general fund revenues in 2022.
That money is a huge windfall for a historically poor state that has few other major industries. But it also represents “transition risk”: the collateral damage incurred by decline in the use of fossil fuels.
That dynamic was on display in October in Santa Fe, in the stately round building that houses New Mexico’s all-volunteer legislature. Oil and gas revenues pay for lots of things, including addressing what emissions can lead to: For fiscal year 2023, out of an $8.4 billion budget, the legislature appropriated $36.7 million for climate change resilience, mostly in drought mitigation; $42 million for energy efficiency initiatives; and $105.8 million in water infrastructure and wildfire prevention. In the halls of the capitol, agriculture lobbyists and environmental advocates were asking for hundreds of millions more.
Despite the riches the industry pumps into state coffers, it makes legislators uneasy.
“I support oil and gas, but I am concerned that they have an inordinate place in our revenue structure,” said state Senator Patty Lundstrom, who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee.
Ms. Lundstrom is from Gallup, in the northwest part of the state. The region is facing the retirement of two coal plants required by the Energy Transition Act of 2019, which committed the state to meeting aggressive renewable energy targets for its own utilities. The state is pursuing federal funding to potentially convert some of that infrastructure to produce hydrogen. The resulting fuel emits zero carbon, but it would likely require lots of natural gas — and water — to run. For that reason, the state’s environmentalists have been dead set against the idea, which Ms. Lundstrom finds confounding.
“Because we’re looking at reducing carbon emissions, we need to embrace things like hydrogen so we can get to that point,” she said. “If we don’t, we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost not only those industrial jobs, but the opportunity for industrial jobs.”
Rather than a complicated, energy-intensive project like hydrogen, environmentalists say the state should focus on conserving land for outdoor recreation, investing in more sustainable agriculture methods such as those practiced by Native communities, and pursuing the billions of dollars unlocked by the Inflation Reduction Act for wind and solar energy.
While the in-state energy needs are mostly met, demand from across the west could support thousands more megawatts per year. New Mexico has the land, wind, and sun for it. It also has another untapped resource: A relatively high share of people who aren’t working, which means thousands of people who could be deployed to build things.
However, even if wind and solar installations were erected as rapidly as possible, when the construction phase is over, the industry couldn’t employ everyone who might want to leave jobs in oil and gas.
“If we expect renewables to replace oil and gas one to one, we will never be satisfied,” said Rikki Seguin, the executive director of Interwest Energy Alliance, a trade group of wind and solar developers.
Dealing with physical risk and transition risk at the same time is a dizzying task. One way to tackle both at once is employing people to fix the problems caused by climate change, whether it’s planting new seedlings or developing drought-tolerant crops.
Getting that started is expensive, but there’s probably no better time to do it. With billions of dollars filtering down from the federal government, New Mexico has the potential to develop whole new industries devoted to restoring fire-scarred lands and adapting to survive with ever-shrinking supplies of water. Other regions face similar challenges. Such expertise could even become an export itself — partially replacing the revenues that oil and gas now supplies in abundance.
Nathan Small, a state representative from the Las Cruces area, has been among those trying to smooth New Mexico’s transition to an economy that’s viable. Its best chance to get there, he thinks, goes beyond resilience inside the state. It’s marketing techniques for how to live on a hotter planet. It is, in his view, a growth industry.
“We have to reckon with the challenge that in 10, 15, 30 years, that these might be considered pretty good years,” he said.
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