03 March 23
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He just won’t allow it.
This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none.
“Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June,” the Post reported, adding that FBI agents were “simply afraid” and “worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers.” The FBI did not exhibit this worry in 2016, when it publicly announced that it was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified documents, an announcement that, even with all the other mistakes her campaign made, likely cost Clinton the election. That decision was made in part because then-Director James Comey feared that pro-Trump FBI agents would leak the details if he did not announce them publicly. The federal investigation into the Trump campaign, by contrast, was properly kept confidential until after the election. As one agent told the reporter Spencer Ackerman in 2016, “The FBI is Trumpland.”
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Abortion rights advocates surrounded anti-abortion activists in front of the Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2023, after a draft of an opinion overruling Roe v. Wade leaked. (photo: Leigh Vogel/The New York Times)
The underground has achieved a 50-year goal: free abortion on demand without apology.
The conservative press leapt on Wyden. The National Review called the senator’s floor speech a “vile attack on the federal judiciary.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board denounced Wyden’s “Nullification Doctrine.” An elected official defying the rule of law! Imagine that! No mention of the judge himself giving the law — the six-year statute of limitations on challenges to FDA decisions; the plaintiffs’ lack of standing; the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson returning abortion law to the states — the finger.
Meanwhile, from Wyden’s pro-choice allies, nothing. No congressional Democrat amplified his demand. The White House did not respond. And where were the feminists?
Otherwise occupied.
Since Dobbs, the reproductive justice movement has been transformed into a massive disaster relief agency: delivering pills to pregnant people in red states; transporting, housing, providing child care, and paying medical bills for those who travel to blue states for surgical abortions; and raising charitable donations to fund it all.
Maybe the antis didn’t intend for this to happen. They may have honestly believed, despite a literal world of evidence to the contrary, that once abortion was outlawed it would disappear. Of course, it didn’t. Still, without really trying, the right pushed the enemy hors de combat. The abortion rights movement is consumed with scamming together in some degraded form the already degraded abortion access the U.S. had before June 24, 2022.
There is no time, money, or brainpower left for politics.
The job of keeping abortion alive is greatly complicated by being quasi-legal. Clandestine pill distribution networks are buying drugs overseas, raising and spending money in cash, and fortifying communications and websites with cybersecurity measures, while advising patients on how to erase their own tracks and avoid arrest — and simply trying to figure out what the hell the law is.
PlanC, one of the main online sources of information on obtaining abortion pills, speaks in increasingly gnomic language, trying to keep to the right side of the law while advising users to act legally and illegally at the same time. The newly launched Abortion Defense Network — a collaborative of “values-aligned” attorneys, nonprofits, and legal expense funds — offers and coordinates legal assistance to providers and patients menaced by criminalization.
Meanwhile, aboveground funds are in overdrive financing both self-managed and surgical abortions, which have risen radically in cost, thanks to additional travel expenses and delays pushing procedures later into pregnancy. Donations are pouring in. During the week after the court’s decision in June, the National Network of Abortion Funds, or NNAF, comprising almost 100 local funds around the country, received more than $10 million, compared with $1.9 million from individual donors in all of 2020. But the engine needs more and more fuel, and it can run down. New York’s fund, which has helped women finance late-term abortions in its state for 22 years, has committed over $400,000 in the first seven weeks of 2023 alone; it projects a need of $3 million this year. This past fall, NNAF and five collaborating mid-Atlantic state funds were forced to abandon an ambitious infrastructure expansion called Operation Scale Up when the primary donor pulled out.
At this point, it’s unclear what Kacsmaryk will do next — schedule a hearing, rule on the merits — or when he’ll do it. But, aside from a momentary reprieve, there’s nothing to be optimistic about. The judge is ferociously hostile to abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights. If he decides in favor of the plaintiffs, the hyper-conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Texas’s six-week ban in 2021, is likely to do the same with this ruling, and the Supreme Court is not expected to overrule the Fifth Circuit. There’s no saying how long appeals will take or when, if ever, the Supreme Court will hear the case.
Some lawyers argue that the situation is less dire than the press presents it to be. The FDA is not legally required to enforce the judge’s ruling. If the FDA does comply, Danco Labs, the manufacturer of brand-name mifepristone Mifeprex, could reapply for FDA approval; a fast-track process could wrap up in 60 days. But during all that time, Mifeprex will be unavailable. Distribution will be illegal. And once Kacsmaryk whacks mifepristone, what’s to keep the antis from handing him another lawsuit to take out misoprostol, the other half of the abortion pill combo?
If that happens, feminist abortion networks — until now operating largely from the relative safety of blue states — will be outlaws throughout the U.S.
They will be outlaws in a legal landscape where the road signs point every which-way and the GPS reception is spotty. Justice Samuel Alito was either naïve or disingenuous when he claimed that removing abortion from federal constitutional protection and returning it to the “people and their elected officials” would douse debate and heal divisions. In fact, Dobbs instantly cast the states into a maelstrom of primitive federalism, with red states threatening to go after blue-state docs who write abortion prescriptions across state lines and blue states passing laws shielding providers from red-state prosecutors.
Maybe chaos is part of the plan — or at least an unexpected gift to the disruptors of the right. In opposing the Texas suit, pharma company Danco argued that it is not just an attack on the company’s own medication, but also “a direct challenge to the FDA approval process for all pharmaceutical products.” Yet isn’t destabilizing regulatory agencies — at the same time as they regulate personal life and privatize public institutions — at the heart of the far right’s agenda?
A peaceable kingdom of little local democracies was never the end game either. No sooner had the Supreme Court delivered control of every uterus-bearing resident of the U.S. to those elected-by-gerrymander state officials did conservative lawyers march to the courtroom of an unelected federal judge to demand action by an unelected federal agency to complete the mission of a shrinking minority: ban abortion nationwide.
Wyden is no insurrectionist. He didn’t ask the president to ignore the abortion pill ruling forever — just until the Supreme Court resolves the case. And while waiting for Kacsmaryk to drop his bomb, some of Wyden’s colleagues are going through the proper channels to mitigate the worst fallout. A group of Democratic senators are urging Danco to apply to the FDA to add miscarriage treatment to mifepristone’s on-label uses — in fact, a miscarriage is not discernible from an induced abortion. The label change would not disguise the pill’s identity as an abortifacient but could confuse law enforcement as to what it was prescribed for.
Twelve state attorneys general have sued the FDA for imposing on mifepristone the “burdensome” prescribing and dispensing restrictions of the agency’s “risk evaluation and mitigation strategy,” or REMS — adding a drug less risky than Tylenol to a list of potential killers like oxycodone and fentanyl. The lawsuit may be a jab at the Biden administration, which in January showcased its commitment to promoting abortion access by allowing retail pharmacies to dispense the pill directly with a prescription, no longer requiring patients to procure and take it under a provider’s supervision. Then it quietly tacked on the REMS designation.
In May, after the draft of Dobbs was leaked and blue-state clinics anticipated hordes of new patients lining up at their doors, some legislatures loosened the rules to allow midwives, nurses, and other non-MDs to provide abortions. To reassure and keep serving patients, providers are preparing to prescribe misoprostol, an ulcer drug, alone, though it is less effective and has more side effects — including severe nausea, cramping, and bleeding — than the two-drug protocol.
As for the abortion advocacy mainstream, it is (as usual) waiting to react. “People are trying to think creatively based on potential scenarios,” Lorie Chaiten, an American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney, told the Washington Post. “They’re looking at ways to make that happen within the law. But again, without knowing what the ruling will be … it’s really hard to plan.”
All this decorous law-abiding is more than frustrating. It seems simply blind to reality. The Supreme Court’s precedent-shredding ruling in Dobbs didn’t only make potential felons of millions of people doing nothing more than minding their own bodies’ business. It also pushed us one step closer to a far-right vision of law and order: a country where teachers are fearful of breaking the law by teaching, doctors face imprisonment for practicing medicine, and voters are arrested for voting. Where order is kept by snitches and mercenaries and an increasingly powerful carceral state, overseen by judges who select the laws they want to enforce. Where, as judicial decrees lose public confidence, states both blue and red declare themselves sanctuaries from what they see as the resultant injustice. Some may shelter immigrants or welcome abortion-seekers. Others will flout public health edicts. If one Kentucky Republican has his way, his state will become a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” where all federal gun control laws are nullified.
Perhaps it is not so surprising, in this libertarianism-authoritarian climate, that the movement for reproductive justice would become a criminal operation.
As the lawmakers go rogue, feminists are beginning to see the advantages of lawlessness.
No surgical procedure but abortion is directly regulated by any U.S. state or federal agency. We’ll always want trained professionals for complex abortions. But if non-MDs can do the routine ones, why not nonprofessionals? From 1969 to 1973, the Jane Collective’s faux doc Mike and then the Janes themselves, all amateurs, performed over 11,000 abortions and didn’t lose a patient. In the 1970s, feminist self-help collectives taught women the “home-care” technique of “menstrual extraction”: an early pregnancy termination by vacuum aspirator just like you get at a clinic, but without the clinic or staff. The group figured that extracting a couple of unwanted pregnancies a year might do less harm than an IUD or the high-estrogen birth control pill.
You don’t need a doctor for a self-managed abortion. The drugs are safe, easy to use, nonaddictive, and effective. People in other countries take them without medical surveillance. Extralegal pill abortions are cheaper than those overseen by health care providers. The median U.S. medication abortion cost $560 in 2020. Underground networks can purchase generics made in India —a combo pack of mifepristone and misoprostol for $1 to $3 — and give them to patients for free.
Unlike the pre-Roe era, when abortion was often a shame-laden, lonely, and terrifying affair, younger organizers, raised in activist cultures of mutual aid, are training and certifying abortion doulas to “accompany” anyone who wants help while self-managing her abortion. Like the Janes, who charged on a sliding scale down to nothing and cultivated an ethos of egalitarian respect and compassion, today’s citizens abortionists preemptively freezes out any black marketeer who considers horning in.
Some activists are indicating that we won’t go back, not just to the days of the coat hanger, but also to the legal status quo ante-Dobbs. In announcing the demise of Operation Scale Up, NNAF put on a happyish face. “Building and designing the OSU pilot has been an opportunity to plan for an expansive future for abortion seekers,” its statement read. “Together, we are bold — even audacious — to work toward a reality where, even as we witness the evisceration of Roe v. Wade, abortion access could come with more ease for people.” Are they suggesting we give up on legalization?
No-law, after all, was the ideal from the start: not to legalize and regulate abortion but to free it from government interference altogether. An absence of interference is not the same as an absence of responsibility, however. A widely scattered thousand-points-of-light volunteer brigade serving those who can find it — and that is dogged by surveillance and threatened by criminal charges as serious as homicide — cannot replace what we need and deserve: a well-resourced welfare state that provides a full range of affordable, high-quality reproductive health care to everything. Nor should we get hooked on the adventure of rescue.
For now, we have a maze of volunteer services, under and aboveground. It can be confusing for activists and, for abortion-seekers in crisis, overwhelming. The systems will rationalize, as these things tend to do. And while we keep them operating, we also have to get back to the streets — to build power, mobilize the grassroots, and make a lot of loud, public noise. We’re busy but we are not paralyzed.
Times of reaction are never dormant, my late friend the feminist activist and intellectual Ann Snitow used to say. You’re never back to zero. You just have to find the place to enter and get to work there. It may not be the usual doorway.
Since Dobbs, veterans of the bad old days alongside women and girls brought up to assume that their bodies are their own have figured out how to deliver what 50 years of advocacy did not. These eight grief-stricken, desperate months have reminded us of what we want — and shown us that it is possible: free abortion on demand and without apology.
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Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 6. (photo: Reuters)
The report assesses the risk posed by Brockovich and activist groups in the wake of the Norfolk Southern train derailment.
Dated Feb. 24 and distributed to law enforcement agencies by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Ohio Statewide Terrorism Analysis … Crime Center Terrorism Analysis Unit Situational Awareness [STACC TAU] report obtained by Yahoo News "assesses that special interest extremist groups will continue to call for changes in governmental policy, which may lead to protests in/around East Palestine and/or at the Statehouse in Columbus.”
The report then singles out the reaction by Brockovich, a whistleblower who helped build a successful lawsuit against the California utility company Pacific Gas and Electric in a case involving contaminated groundwater, to the Feb. 3 train derailment and release of toxic chemicals in East Palestine.
“On 24 February, environmental activist Erin BrockovichUSPER [United States person] is scheduled to be in East Palestine to explain residents’ legal rights. Brokovich has urged the community to use common sense and ask questions. Brockovich is also placing blame solely on Norfolk Southern.The STACC TAU assess this event could potentially increase tensions within the community.”
The report assesses the risk posed by Brockovich and other activist groups that have planned events in East Palestine in the wake of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and the controlled burn of vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic ingredient used in the production of plastic products after the derailment.
“According to the FBI, special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change,” the report states. “Such extremists conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to the extremists’ cause.”
Brockovich, who was played by the actress Julia Roberts in the 2000 film named after her, was in East Palestine on Thursday afternoon to host an event. She did not immediately respond to Yahoo News’ request for comment.
This situational awareness report is highly problematic, said former FBI agent Mike German, who worked on a recent Brennan Center report about issues with DHS fusion centers.
“Obviously, there is no reason to have included Erin Brockovich's name or a description of her advocacy in a law enforcement intelligence report, much less a ‘situational awareness’ report by a state fusion center's terrorism analysis unit,” German told Yahoo News. “Almost all of the activity described in this report is rightly protected by the First Amendment and poses no threat of harm, and therefore should be of no interest to terrorism intelligence units.”
Contacted by Yahoo News, the Ohio Department of Public Safety denied that it had issued a report identifying Brockovich as a possible terrorist threat.
“Erin Brokovich is listed as an ‘environmental activist’ and the brief mention of her falls under the heading of ‘various individuals or groups have responded to the train derailment,’” the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s Jay Carey told Yahoo News in an email. “The fact that she is an ‘environmental activist’ that has ‘responded to the train derailment’ is factual and has been well documented by media accounts. Any inference otherwise is incorrect.”
DHS posted the report on its intelligence sharing platform on Feb. 28, making it available to its more than 150,000 local, state and federal police and other partners nationwide.
“Fusion Centers are state and locally owned and operated centers that actively share, analyze, and operationalize threat-related information between federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and private sector partners,” a DHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. “DHS supports Fusion Centers through the presence of DHS personnel and information sharing technology, but DHS does not run or operate Fusion Centers.”
The report also referred to the environmental group Earthjustice, which, it stated “called on Governor DeWineUSPER to declare a state of emergency," pointing to the "contaminated waterways" and subsequent deaths of thousands of fish.
“Earthjustice works with communities across the country to protect people’s health,” Debbie Chizewer, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Midwest Regional office, told Yahoo News.
“In East Palestine, Earthjustice is supporting partners that have been exposed to toxic chemicals as they call for much needed resources, monitoring, cleanup of the contamination, as well as protections to prevent disasters like the explosion of a chemical-carrying cargo train in the future.”
The report obtained by Yahoo News stated that East Palestine police and fire department officials reported having received threats but had determined they were not credible. It was not clear, however, why they were mentioned in the report.
“This report should not have described any noncriminal activity, particularly after it stated that the terrorism analysis unit is ‘unaware of any credible direct threats regarding the East Palestine train derailment,’” German said. “This flawed reporting only clogs our national intelligence networks with inappropriate materials that undermine effective counterterrorism and law enforcement analysis, by overwhelming intelligence analysts with unhelpful misinformation that dulls the response to genuine threat warnings.”
Former DHS Acting Undersecretary John Cohen agreed that the inclusion of Brockovich’s name was, as he put it, “a bit problematic,” and said that law enforcement needed to be more careful in describing what is and is not considered a threat.
“When reporting on online or other activity that may be protected speech, authorities need to be very clear how that speech relates to threat-related activities or other public safety issues,” Cohen told Yahoo News. “It’s fine to catalog what different people are saying, but from a law enforcement perspective, they need to be clear where there is a nexus with the need for an operational response.”
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Fertilizers filled with the nutrient boosted our ability to feed the planet. Today, they're creating vast and growing dead zones in our lakes and seas. (photo: Zachary Haslick/Aerial Associates Photography)
Fertilizers filled with the nutrient boosted our ability to feed the planet. Today, they’re creating vast and growing dead zones in our lakes and seas.
When human beings invented agriculture, some ten thousand years ago, they were, almost immediately, confronted with a conundrum. Crops need nutrients to grow, but harvesting them removes the nutrients, leaving the soil unfit for future harvests. Early farmers got around this bind by letting some fields lie fallow; spreading animal waste, including their own, on the land; and planting legumes, which possess restorative properties. But they had no clear idea why these practices worked. By Humboldt’s day, savants in Paris and London were starting to figure out what it was, exactly, that crops required. A Prussian chemist analyzed some of the clay Humboldt had brought home and found that it contained high concentrations of two essential nutrients: nitrogen and phosphorus. Guano offered an answer to the age-old problem of soil exhaustion; as Gregory Cushman, a historian at the University of Kansas, has observed, it “was the Miracle-Gro” of its moment.
Peru’s Indigenous people had been collecting guano from the Chincha Islands for centuries. (The word “guano” comes from the Quechua wanu.) But once Europeans decided to exploit the islands—they were delayed for a few decades by the Napoleonic Wars and the campaigns of Simón Bolívar—the Peruvian government enthusiastically extinguished all Native claims. In 1840, it agreed to a monopoly arrangement with some European merchants, and in the next fifteen years more than a million tons of guano made their way from Peru to the United Kingdom. The miserable work of harvesting the stuff was largely performed by Chinese laborers, under conditions of near-slavery.
By the mid-eighteen-forties, American farmers, too, had become gung ho for guano, and they were furious that the United States had failed to secure a steady supply. In 1850, President Millard Fillmore moved to rectify this situation, declaring that guano had “become so desirable an article” that it was incumbent on Washington to use “all the means properly in its power” to obtain it. In the spring of 1856, William Henry Seward, then a senator from New York, proposed what would become known as the Guano Islands Act; the bill, which became law later that year, deputized U.S. citizens to claim for their country any poop-covered “island, rock, or key not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government.”
A rush to some of the world’s most remote landmasses ensued. Within three years, the United States had staked claims to nearly fifty islands, including those of Midway Atoll, in the North Pacific. The Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser described these islands as the equivalent of “a new El Dorado” and proclaimed that although they possessed no actual gold, they would cover this country’s “wasted fields with golden grain.” (Seward would later engineer the purchase of Alaska, which critics dubbed Seward’s Icebox; by analogy, one historian has suggested that the U.S.’s guano islands might be considered Seward’s Outhouse.)
Guano exports from Peru peaked in 1870. Then they dropped dramatically. The shit exported to farms in Europe represented the cumulative output of millions of birds in the course of hundreds of generations. Once it had been shipped off, the birds that remained—many had seen their nesting grounds destroyed—couldn’t poop fast enough to keep up with demand. America lost interest in its de-guanoed islands. Most were eventually ceded to other countries; only a handful, like Midway, remain U.S. possessions.
But the end of the boom proved to be the beginning of something much bigger. Chemists identified other deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus, which replaced guano. When these sources were, in turn, exhausted, others were discovered, or, in the case of nitrogen, invented. Farmers can now purchase fertility as readily as they might buy seeds or plows. The result is a world awash in nutrients. This has created a new conundrum: How do we feed the planet without poisoning it?
The longest conveyor belt on earth begins in the town of Bou Craa and runs for sixty miles across Western Sahara to the port city of El Marsa. The region is so flat and so desolate that the conveyor stands out, even from space. According to NASA, the belt “has often attracted astronaut attention in this otherwise almost featureless landscape.”
The conveyor carries phosphorus-rich rock, which is mined in Bou Craa and then shipped from the coast to places like India and New Zealand to be processed into fertilizer. The mine, and indeed the vast majority of the rest of Western Sahara, is controlled—illegally, by most accounts—by Morocco, which possesses something like seventy per cent of the planet’s known phosphorus reserves.
The status of Western Sahara is one of the worries that Dan Egan takes up in his worrying new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance” (Norton). Egan is a journalist who for many years reported on the Great Lakes, for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; it is the condition of Lake Erie that, in a roundabout, everything-in-the-modern-world-is-ultimately-connected way, seems to have led him to learn about Bou Craa. Egan quotes Jeremy Grantham, the British investor, who has said that Morocco’s hold over the planet’s phosphorus “makes OPEC and Saudi Arabia look like absolute pikers.” He also quotes Isaac Asimov, who once wrote, “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.”
As Egan notes, phosphorus is critical not just to crop yields but also to basic biology. DNA is held together by what’s often called a “phosphate backbone”; without this backbone, the double helix would be a hash. The compound ATP provides cells with energy for everything from ion transport to protein synthesis; the “P” in the abbreviation stands for “phosphate.” In vertebrates, bones are mostly made up of calcium phosphate, as is tooth enamel.
What distinguishes phosphorus from other elements that are essential to life—carbon, say, or nitrogen—is its relative scarcity. (Asimov described phosphorus as “life’s bottleneck.”) The atmosphere contains almost no phosphorus. Phosphate-rich rocks, meanwhile, exist only in limited quantities, in certain geological formations. China holds the world’s second-largest reserves—these are less than one-tenth the size of Morocco’s—and Algeria the third-largest.
Since the early nineteen-sixties and the start of the Green Revolution, global consumption of phosphorus fertilizers has more than quadrupled. How long the world’s reserves will last, given this trend, is a matter of debate. As the planet’s population continues to climb—it recently reached eight billion and is expected to hit nine billion in fifteen years—more and more people will need to be fed. At the same time, as the best-grade ores get mined out, more and more rock will presumably have to be processed just to hold fertilizer production steady. Some researchers say that “peak phosphorus,” the point at which the amount of phosphorus being pulled from the ground starts to decline, could be reached within the next decade. Others maintain that the time frame is more like centuries.
Egan doesn’t think that the world will run out of phosphorus anytime soon, but he does argue that the U.S. is “particularly vulnerable.” America is rapidly churning through its domestic reserves, which aren’t all that large to begin with. (Much of the country’s phosphorus is found in central Florida, a region where mining has to compete with condo development.) When these reserves are gone, potentially within the next thirty years, the U.S. will become dependent on other countries—notably, Morocco—to feed itself.
This, it seems, would suit Morocco just fine. The country seized large swaths of Western Sahara in 1975, after Spain, which had ruled the region for almost a century, relinquished control. The invasion, Egan writes, was primarily “a business move.” Morocco has its own huge phosphorus operations, and it didn’t want the Bou Craa mine competing with them. Tens of thousands of the territory’s residents fled; most of them settled in Algeria, where their children and their children’s children still live in refugee camps. In November, 2020, the Polisario Front, a group fighting for independence for Western Sahara, declared that it was ending a ceasefire that had been brokered by the United Nations. A month later, Donald Trump, in one of his last acts as President, announced that the U.S. would recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the region. The decision was criticized as a violation of international law, and many U.S. officials urged Joe Biden to reverse it. So far, though, he hasn’t.
On September 1, 2018, a young man named Abraham Duarte was pulled over for speeding in the city of Cape Coral, in southwest Florida. He jumped out of his car and took off. Before him stood some apartment buildings that faced a canal. Duarte ran around the buildings and threw himself into the water. When the police caught up with him, he was having trouble swimming. “I need help!” he cried. “I’m going to die!”
One of the cops sounded sympathetic. “You need to get out of that stuff,” he advised. “Seriously, man, that is going to kill you.” Duarte struggled to make his way back to shore, through a bank of green slime so thick that it made the water look solid. He started to retch. The cops fished him out and cuffed him.
Among his many ill-considered moves, Duarte had flung himself into a toxic algae bloom. The body-cam footage of the incident, released by the Cape Coral Police Department, went viral. Newscasters chuckled over the crime-fighting slime. But the story, which Egan relates in detail in “The Devil’s Element,” is, he argues, “more than a meme. It is an omen.”
On a farm, crop yields increase when phosphorus is applied. Phosphorus that makes its way into lakes, streams, and canals also promotes plant growth. Unfortunately, the aquatic organisms that tend to do best are the kind that no one wants to see around. And so there are two sides to the phosphorus problem—one shortage, the other excess.
In a toxic algae bloom, tiny photosynthetic organisms reproduce explosively, then throw off chemicals that, in addition to nausea, can cause brain and liver damage. And, when the algae die en masse, a fresh hell ensues. Their decomposition sucks oxygen out of the water, creating aquatic dead zones where almost nothing can survive.
At the bright-green center of Florida’s excess-phosphorus problem lies Lake Okeechobee. The lake receives as much as two million pounds of phosphorus a year—about ten times what biologists think it can safely take in—much of it from agricultural runoff. In the summer of 2018, around the time that Duarte took his dive, ninety per cent of Okeechobee’s surface was covered in toxic slime. Water released from the lake, via the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Rivers, made so many people sick that Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, declared a state of emergency. Egan visited that summer, hoping to take a boat trip down the Caloosahatchee, but his chosen guide, an ecologist named John Cassani, refused to take him, on the ground that it was too dangerous.
“Things are thoroughly screwed up,” Cassani told him. “Thoroughly.”
Harmful algal blooms, or HABs, also plague Lake Erie. Mostly, the blooms interfere with fishing and tourism—dense, stinking slime is a turnoff to visitors—but in 2014 some of the toxins got sucked into Toledo’s public water supply. The city was forced to issue a do-not-drink order to four hundred thousand residents in the area, and Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, activated the National Guard.
Lake Erie’s troubles can be traced to concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, that dot the Maumee River watershed, in northwestern Ohio. Millions of cows and pigs in these CAFOs spend their days converting phosphorus-fertilized soy and corn into phosphorus-laden manure, much of which washes out of the operations and into the water. In Egan’s words, the Maumee now functions “like a syringe” that pumps thousands of tons of phosphorus a year into Lake Erie’s westernmost reaches.
Other lakes that have recently experienced HABs include Lake Superior, Lake Champlain, Lake Tahoe, Lake Winnebago, and Seneca Lake. Indeed, Egan writes, “a map of US lakes and rivers suffering from blue-green algae outbreaks today looks like, well, a map of the United States.” And the situation isn’t much better outside the U.S. A few years ago, researchers at Stanford and NASA analyzed three decades’ worth of satellite images to assess the conditions of some seventy large lakes around the globe, including Lake Baikal, Lake Nicaragua, and Lake Victoria. They found that “peak summertime bloom intensity” had increased in two-thirds of them.
Meanwhile, dead zones in the oceans, too, are expanding. These zones—a large one forms every summer in the Gulf of Mexico—are also produced by fugitive nutrients. Scientists warn that, as nutrient loads continue to grow and the oceans heat up, the problem will only get worse. (Warm water holds less oxygen than cold.) A trio of British researchers have speculated that, “if our descendants are heedless,” human beings might produce “large-scale and long-lasting global anoxia”—which is to say, a planet-wide marine dead zone. In the judgment of Stephen Porder, a professor of ecology at Brown and the author of “Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future” (forthcoming from Princeton), the consequences of this would be so catastrophic as to be unimaginable.
Not long ago, I loaded a jug of urine into the trunk of my car and set off—carefully—for Brattleboro, Vermont. Some of the pee was my own; the rest came from my husband, who likes his contributions to journalism to be recognized.
In Brattleboro, I drove past the county transfer station and turned in at a long, low, shedlike building, which houses a group called the Rich Earth Institute. The institute’s stated goal is “a world with clean water and fertile soil achieved by reclaiming the nutrients from our bodies,” and to this end it promotes a practice known as urine diversion, or, more catchily, peecycling. When I arrived, I asked to use the institute’s rest room. Arthur Davis, who directs Rich Earth’s Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program, explained that it was equipped with four kinds of urine-diverting toilets.
“We have a lot of choices,” he said. “Enjoy.”
Just as livestock excrete phosphorus, so, too, do people. Each year, billions of pounds of phosphorus enter humanity’s collective gut. Most of that flows out again, mainly in the form of urine. “Around sixty per cent of the phosphorus we excrete comes out in our pee,” Davis told me.
The Rich Earth Institute has enlisted a network of volunteers around Brattleboro, who drop off their donations at specially designated depots or, in some cases, pay to have their pee picked up. After it has been pasteurized, the urine is distributed to local farmers. Peecycling can cut down on the amount of conventional fertilizer that the farmers purchase. (Urine contains not only phosphorus but also large amounts of nitrogen and potassium.) At the same time, it keeps nutrients out of the sewage system and, by extension, it is hoped, out of Vermont’s waterways.
“There is no ‘away’ when it comes to nutrients,” Davis said. “We’re always putting them somewhere. So we can either choose to set up systems where we’re reusing them in useful ways or they’re going to go into Lake Champlain and cause all of these problems.”
Davis had arranged for us to meet up with a pair of volunteers in the town of Rockingham, just north of Brattleboro. He grabbed a container that had been sitting under one of the urine-diverting toilets. I poured in the pee that I had brought, and we set off. The peecyclers, Laurel Green and Steve Crofter, were waiting for us at the Rockingham depot, along with a few five-gallon jugs of their output.
“Practicing what we pee,” Green said, when I asked why she became involved with the institute. (During my visit to Vermont, I heard endless pee-related puns; one of my favorites was “Pee the change you want to see in the world.”)
A sign outside the depot read “Help us ensure this program is flushed with success.” Inside, Crofter lowered a pipe attached to a vacuum pump into his and Green’s jugs, which were soon empty. Davis explained that the pee had been sucked into a holding tank. When that was full, the institute would cart off the contents.
On an annual basis, the Rich Earth Institute processes about twelve thousand gallons of urine, which is a lot of pee to truck around and, at the same time, barely a drop in the proverbial bucket. In an average year, New York City residents piss out about a billion gallons; Shanghai residents, three billion. “The scaling-up question—there’s a lot to that question,” Davis acknowledged.
In the final chapter of “The Devil’s Element,” Egan goes looking for ways to address both sides of the phosphorus problem. Peecycling gets a nod, as do techniques for stripping phosphorus from the wastewater that runs through sewage-treatment plants. Manure, too, Egan argues, could be more efficiently harvested for its nutrients; in that way, less phosphorus would end up in lakes and rivers and more in next year’s crops. “The potential benefits to better managing manure are staggering,” he writes.
At one point, Egan consults with Jim Elser, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana and the director of a group called the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance. Elser tells him that if every bit of manure on the planet were recycled—cows, pigs, and chickens produce some four billion tons annually—it could cut the demand for mined phosphorus by half. Of course, even in this best-case scenario, the problem would be only half solved.
As it happens, Elser has written his own book, “Phosphorus: Past and Future” (Oxford), together with a British soil scientist, Phil Haygarth. The two researchers coin the term “phosphogeddon,” to refer to expanding dead zones and the threat of oceanwide anoxia. Fully addressing the problem, they say, will demand not just recycling nutrients but remaking global agriculture from the ground up.
On the phospho-cheery side, Elser and Haygarth have plenty of ideas about how this might be done. The crop varieties that powered the Green Revolution tend to require lots of “inputs”; new varieties that use phosphorus more efficiently could be bred, at least in theory. In the U.S., something like ten per cent of all fertilizer is applied to corn that’s converted into biofuels. In terms of CO2 emissions, corn-based biofuels are probably worse than gasoline; getting rid of them would thus benefit both the climate and the country’s waterways. Globally, it’s estimated that a third of all food gets thrown away. (In the U.S., the figure may be closer to forty per cent.) Reducing the amount of food waste would reduce the need for phosphorus by a similar proportion.
“It’s clear that there is no ‘silver bullet,’ ” Elser and Haygarth observe. “It’s going to take a ‘silver shotgun blast’ to hit all of the targets that need to be hit.”
How likely is it that the world will mobilize in time for such a “blast”? “We’re not going to sugarcoat it,” Elser and Haygarth write. “There are many in the water quality/phosphorus management communities who think that phosphogeddon is, indeed, where we’re heading and where we will end up. We will confess that, in the dark of night, both of us will often resign ourselves to the fact that our children and grandchildren will suffer these outcomes.”
When Humboldt lugged his sack of bird shit to Europe, it seems safe to say, he had no idea what lay ahead—the wrecking of the guano islands, the Bou Craa conveyor belt, the war in Western Sahara, aquatic dead zones, and, potentially, phosphogeddon. This is the hazard of innovation. Short-term solutions often turn out to have long-term costs. But, by the time these costs have become apparent, it’s too late to reverse course. In this sense, the world’s phosphorus problem resembles its carbon-dioxide problem, its plastics problem, its groundwater-use problem, its soil-erosion problem, and its nitrogen problem. The path humanity is on may lead to ruin, but, as of yet, no one has found a workable way back.
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Lee and Deborah Dorbert say they have endured anger and depression since learning that Deborah's fetus was not developing normally and would die soon after delivery. (photo: Reuters Connect)
Her story is not unique: similar cases have happened in other countries with extreme abortion bans. But on March 22–23, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, one branch of the Organization of American States charged with adjudicating alleged violations of the American Convention on Human Rights, will hear arguments in a case that could change the ways those women and their pregnancies are treated under international law by condemning such treatment as violating the right to be free from gender-based discrimination, violence, torture, stigma, and threats to bodily autonomy.
The case involves a 2013 controversy over “Beatriz,” a 22-year-old Salvadoran mother with lupus who was forced to continue a life-threatening pregnancy even though the fetus lacked parts of its skull and brain. Everyone agreed Beatriz’s pregnancy was both life-threatening—Beatriz nearly died during her first pregnancy—and nonviable. But El Salvador’s law dictates that life begins at conception and bans abortion without exception, leading the Salvadoran Supreme Court to conclude that, because the fetus was technically alive, it had the same right to life as Beatriz did.
Beatriz endured seven weeks in the hospital while doctors struggled to control the worsening symptoms of her disease—kidney failure, septic lupus lesions, hypertension. Finally, when her death was imminent, and under an emergency order from the Inter-American Court, her doctors delivered the fetus—which lived only five hours—and managed to save Beatriz’s life.
To the Salvadoran government, it was a good outcome: the abortion ban held and Beatriz lived. They avoided having to grant an exception to save Beatriz’s life. But Beatriz’s lawyers are arguing that El Salvador’s ban violates the government’s international responsibilities as well as Beatriz’s human rights. They are asking the court to order El Salvador to pay damages, and also to rule that the country’s absolute ban on abortion violates the American Convention on Human Rights, which governs international human rights for the Western Hemisphere, so as to prevent similar cases from arising in the future.
Given our habitual disregard for human rights discourse, Americans might be inclined to ignore Beatriz’s case. American politicians routinely dismiss the applicability of international human rights law in this country. The U.S. has ratified neither the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women nor the American Convention on Human Rights. Still, even Americans agree that torture is a crime under international law, having ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
Beatriz’s is the latest in a line of cases in which the international community has recognized that denying access to abortion can sometimes constitute torture. So ruled the U.N. Human Rights Committee in 2005, after the Peruvian government forced a pregnant teenager to carry an anencephalic fetus to term. And so ruled Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court in 2012 when it exempted anencephaly from abortion restrictions, acknowledging that such pregnancies cause trauma and suffering. Forbidding termination in such cases, one Brazilian justice said, is equal to torture. Likewise, when Colombia’s Supreme Court legalized abortion in 2022, it noted that total abortion bans, especially in contexts of grave fetal malformations, violate basic human dignity and the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Beatriz v. El Salvador will mark the first time the Inter-American Court hears a case in which a woman has explicitly demanded that the right to terminate a pregnancy be recognized. It comes at a time when many countries of the Americas have expanded abortion rights, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia. In this regard, the United States is an outlier following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion last year—only a few other countries have restricted or annulled that right. If the Inter-American Court rules in Beatriz’s favor, the decision would be considered binding on all 20 countries that ratified or adhere to the American Convention on Human Rights. The United States is not one of those countries, although, as U.S. abortion rights advocates have noted, because the court is a multilateral body tasked with promoting human rights across the Americas, Americans can still seek recourse there.
Because the U.S. has not ratified the convention, a victory for Beatriz means Salvadorans and others bound by the Inter-American system will enjoy greater human rights protections from the harms of abortion bans than Americans do. Anti-abortion conservatives seem to relish casting the U.S. as a pariah among nations for our libertine abortion laws, an argument which indeed formed part of Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs opinion striking down Roe v. Wade. As the Inter-American Court is likely to soon demonstrate, the opposite is true. Indeed, these same conservatives have mounted a decadeslong strategy to disengage from international human rights law and to undermine multilateral human rights bodies. It is no accident that the majority opinion in Dobbs omitted any mention of “human rights” because, by their reckoning, those rights do not apply to Americans.
In the end, a victory for Beatriz will not come in time to stop the torture of Deborah Dorbert, nor will it necessarily prevent other U.S. states from violating the human rights of those who, like Dorbert, face devastating diagnoses during pregnancy. But even if the U.S. refuses to follow the Inter-American Court’s directives, a victory for Beatriz will matter because the world is watching. Recognizing these cases for what they are—torture—will call out America’s rogue status among the community of nations.
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Israeli police block protesters from advancing on a Tel Aviv road, on 1 March 2023. (photo: Oren Ziv/MEE)
Opponents accuse PM of seeking to dismantle the checks and balances system and institutional corruption
In an open letter on Wednesday, more than 700 activists called on the Biden administration to initiate the Global Magnitsky sanctions, which target foreign government officials deemed as corrupt or human rights offenders.
The letter coincided with a "national day of disruption" that saw thousands of people protesting a controversial government plan to overhaul the judicial system.
Protesters blocked vital roads and burned tyres on highways in several Israeli cities.
Police violently dispersed the crowds, wounding several people, and arresting 28.
"These days, Prime Minister Netanyahu is working with all his might to turn the state of Israel into a full dictatorship, in order to stop or cancel his criminal trial for serious corruption cases," Eitay Mack, the lawyer who published the open letter, told Middle East Eye.
The signatories said that since winning the elections in November, Netanyahu and his extreme far-right allies have embarked on a carefully planned scheme to dismantle Israel's delicate checks and balances system.
"His actions in recent years are a clear example of the corruption’s ability to corrode democracy, and clearly justify imposing sanctions on him according to the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, enacted in December 2016," the authors wrote.
'Abolishing democratic norms'
Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, and the judicial reforms could enable him to evade conviction or see his case dismissed. Since being indicted in 2019, Netanyahu has publicly railed against the justice system, calling it biased against him.
"In a series of bills that his government is promoting, PM Netanyahu is working to abolish the independence and professionalism of the courts, law enforcement agencies, the public service, and the media, and put all of them under the absolute and direct control of his government," the letter read.
Mack said Netanyahus’ reforms would see corruption become "institutional without any boundaries and an integral part of the Netanyahu government's 'governance' system".
"In addition, Netanyahu... appointed National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to head a team to combat 'incitement', which is expected to engage in the censorship of the opposition," he added.
In an open letter in January, prosecutors and state attorneys who have served in Israel over the past half-century warned that planned reforms to the country's justice system would "destroy" judicial independence.
If implemented, the reforms would turn the supreme court into a "pseudo-political body that would be suspected of bending the law in favour of the government", they said in an unprecedented defence of the judicial system.
"In reviewing the state department's list of those who have been sanctioned in recent years, it is clear that there is no justification for excluding PM Netanyahu," said Mack.
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Smoke from wildfires raging in the North Bay filled the air on Wednesday in Palo Alto in 2017. (photo: Robert Shi/The Stanford Daily)
The authors of the study say funding of this kind can influence research programs and policies toward climate resolutions preferred by the industry, reported The Guardian. According to Data for Progress and nonprofit Fossil Free Research, these include carbon capture, biofuels and hydrogen.
“It’s no mistake that fossil fuel companies have continued to make major financial gains through the climate crisis; fossil fuel industry executives, knowingly, have long misled the public about their impact on it and used their profits to manipulate climate research,” the Data for Progress report said.
Schools known for their climate research that received the most funding according to the report were the University of California, Berkeley, at $154 million, Stanford University at $56.6 million and MIT at $40.5 million, The Guardian reported. George Mason University, which has had a long relationship with fossil fuel companies, received $64 million.
“$700m is probably an absolute bare minimum,” said Data for Progress psolling analyst Grace Adcox, as reported by The Guardian. “There’s so little transparency around these gifts.”
Berkeley says it now receives less than a quarter of a percent of its funding for research from fossil fuel companies.
According to a Data for Progress poll conducted in January of this year, 67 percent of all likely voters felt that the values and political actions of a college or university would influence them donating to or supporting the school.
“Academic inquiry can’t be truly free if researchers know they’re financially beholden to fossil fuel companies. And academics at a school as wealthy as Harvard shouldn’t have to depend on corrupt money to do the important work they’re doing,” said Phoebe Barr, an organizer with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, who was also a researcher on the report, as Divest Harvard reported.
Berkeley professor of energy Dan Kammen — who was an adviser on climate to the UN and a leader of one of the research groups that benefited from a $500 million donation by BP to the Energy and Biosciences Institute consortium for the study of biofuels — said transparency in funding is imperative.
“There needs to be full disclosure not only when you write a paper, but also around the funding of research centers. We have clear examples where research agendas were shifted. Everyone will deny it, but the best way is to have the data open,” Kammen said, as reported by The Guardian.
Co-founder of Fossil Free Research Ilana Cohen said climate solutions should be funded by fossil fuel companies, but without allowing them to influence the research.
“[T]hey shouldn’t have any direct role in how the production of knowledge relevant to those solutions is coming about,” said Cohen, as The Guardian reported.
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