#the climate crisis. just say people who have the money to escape climate impacts and stop engaging in essentially climate change denial

[allthecanadianpolitics]

though as much as i support the ndp, im concerned abt the lack of detail regarding their energy and carbon platforms. if we're going to push the ndp left we should focus on genuine commitment to effectively reducing emissions

I don't think there's a major lack of detail:

After having overseen emissions increases every single year in which they have been in power, the Liberals have set a target that is not in line with what the best available science says is needed, and won’t do enough to prevent the catastrophic consequences of warming above 1.5 degrees.

Parliament recently passed C-12, to put in law our collective commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. New Democrats are proud of the role we have played in getting here – from Jack Layton’s advocacy for climate accountability legislation almost 15 years ago, to our success in ensuring C-12 included short-term accountability measures – measures that will be so critical in setting Canada up to meet those targets.

C-12 was a step in the right direction, but it was not the bill New Democrats would have written. New Democrats are committed to helping stabilize the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To that end we will set a target of reducing Canada’s emissions by at least 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, reaching further wherever possible to account for Canada’s fair share. We know that reaching net-zero by 2050 means taking action now, during the term of this next Parliament. We will work with partners to establish multi-year national and sectoral carbon budgets as a key guiding framework to develop Canada’s path to 2030 and beyond. And we will create and fund a Climate Accountability Office, to provide independent oversight of federal climate progress, to engage the public, and to make recommendations on how to achieve our goals.

Putting a price on carbon has been an important tool in efforts to drive emissions reductions. We will continue with carbon pricing while making it fairer and rolling back loopholes this Liberal government has given to big polluters. But we also recognize that carbon pricing won’t be enough to tackle the climate crisis. Further action is needed.

Building on net-zero legislation will also be a priority for a New Democratic government. We will support Canada’s net-zero target by reviewing financial legislation, such as the Bank of Canada Act, the Export Development Canada Act, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, to ensure federal financial levers and Crown corporations are aligned with the goal of net-zero. We will work with provinces to put in place a framework for corporate climate accountability to ensure mandatory transparency on carbon risk from publicly traded companies. And we will ensure that strict rules are in place to prevent big companies from using the purchase of offsets as a way to escape their net-zero obligations.

One thing we won’t do is continue down the path that Liberal and Conservative governments have chosen when it comes to spending public money on oil and gas subsidies. Under Prime Minister Trudeau, the federal government spent $18 billion to support oil and gas exploration, production, refining, transportation and more in 2020 alone – and that’s on top of purchasing the Kinder-Morgan oil pipeline. New Democrats know that public funds are best spent supporting the transition to renewable energy, rather than on profitable oil and gas companies. We will fulfill Canada’s G-20 commitment to eliminate these fossil fuel subsidies and redirect these funds to low carbon initiatives, and make sure that future governments can’t reverse this by putting in place legislation to ban any future oil, gas and pipeline subsidies.

We’ll work with the provinces and territories to make Canada an innovation leader on methane reduction in such areas as real-time monitoring and leakage detection, ensuring that provincial methane regulations are genuinely equivalent with the federal regulations, and increasing the ambition of those targets in the 2025-30 period.

The federal government can also model change, by becoming a trail-blazer in energy efficiency, clean technologies and renewable energy use. We will lead by example and procure from Canadian companies producing clean technology, ensure that federal buildings use renewable energy, and move the vehicle fleets of the federal government to electric by 2025, choosing made-in-Canada wherever possible. We will protect Canadian businesses who are taking action to transition to a low-carbon future with a border carbon adjustment that will level the playing field on imports from areas without a carbon price. And we will appoint a Climate Emergency Committee of Cabinet and establish astrong Climate Emergency Secretariat in the PMO to ensure a whole-of-government approach to responding to the climate emergency.

And:

Canadian workers are worried about their place in the changing global economy. The global climate is changing, and Canadian jobs are changing too. But successive Liberal and Conservative governments have left workers to navigate these shifts on their own. New Democrats know that skilled Canadian workers - construction, trades, engineering and others - will be needed to build a low-carbon economy. We will put those workers front and centre of our climate action plan, and fight for workers and their communities to make sure nobody is left behind.

We have a plan to create over a million new good jobs in all communities and rebuild local economies with meaningful, family-sustaining work in every part of the country, all while helping to make the changes we need to succeed in a low carbon future. This will include jobs building green infrastructure in communities across the country, and because products produced by Canadian workers have some of the lowest carbon emissions in the world, we will require the use of Canadian-made steel, aluminum, cement and wood products for infrastructure projects across the country. And just as climate change disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, we are committed to ensuring these same communities benefit from the job-creation and community-building benefits of these investments.

As we turn the corner on COVID-19 and build an economic recovery for people, we have a precious opportunity to build back better. New Democrats would ensure that recovery funding is used to support our net-zero objectives. To that end we would ensure that large businesses receiving recovery funding agree to plan for net-zero – and we would ensure those funds go to supporting Canadian jobs, not executives or shareholders.

The workers most impacted by the changes in our economy cannot pay the price of inaction on climate change. We will work together with labour, employers and the provinces and territories to find solutions for workers and communities. This includes providing dedicated employment support combining access to expanded EI benefits, re-training and job placement services, ensuring companies retain and redeploy their workers when in transition, and ensuring that workers nearing retirement have the retirement security they have worked their whole lives for, without penalties to their pensions if they retire early.

We will boost clean tech research and manufacturing with new funding, incentives and Buy Canadian procurement of environmentally friendly technologies. This will help bring more innovative Canadian clean technology to market and support Canadian manufacturing of batteries, energy storage solutions and alternative fuels like biofuels made from waste. It will also help keep jobs here in Canada.

We will work to put in place joint workplace environment committees – modelled on the successful joint workplace health and safety committees which have had a major impact on making workplaces safer – to help reduce emissions at the source in every workplace.

And we will support sustainable agriculture, working with Canadian farmers to promote sustainable land-management techniques and methods to reduce GHG emissions. We’ll also work with the agricultural sector to help them access low carbon tools and technology, and adapt to climate-induced weather changes and other impacts of the climate crisis, including the associated increase in pests and invasive species.

And:

Our communities are where we can most clearly feel the impacts of the climate emergency – and one of the best places that we can invest to rapidly reduce emissions, save money and make life better.

At the current pace, it will take 142 years to retrofit all low-rise residential buildings in Canada. New Democrats will undertake a mission-based approach, setting an ambitious retrofitting program to upgrade where people live and work, including requiring large scale building retrofits in all sectors. And we will set a target of retrofitting all buildings in Canada by 2050 – beginning with upgrades to all buildings built before 2020 in the next 20 years. Helping families make energy efficient improvements to their homes through low-interest loans help save families almost $900 or more per year on home energy costs. Targeted supports would be provided to low-income households and to renters. Supporting retrofits to improve indoor air quality will also help prevent further waves of COVID-19.

We will work with provinces, municipalities and Indigenous government to make sure that communities have the resources they need to cope safely with extreme weather events. This National Crisis Strategy will help communities plan for and adapt to the changing climate and the weather extremes we are already facing – particularly for vulnerable, remote, and Indigenous communities. The strategy would be supported with long-term funding for adaptation, disaster mitigation, and climate resilient infrastructure. And a new Civilian Climate Corps would mobilize young people and create new jobs supporting conservation efforts and addressing the threat of climate change by undertaking activities such as helping restore wetlands, and planting the billions of trees that need to be planted in the years ahead.

We’ll improve the National Building Code to ensure that by 2025 every new building built in Canada is net-zero. Energy efficiency and sustainable building practices will be at the core of our national housing strategy, leveraging the power of federal investments to create good jobs all across the country delivering the affordable homes Canadians need.

As more Canadians have become accustomed to working from home as a result of the pandemic, more than half of Canadians living in rural areas still don’t have access to high-speed internet. We will make sure that every Canadian has access to affordable, reliable high-speed broadband within four years. This will include taking the first steps to create a Crown corporation to ensure the delivery of quality, affordable telecom services to every community. Supporting more remote work will reduce commuting times and support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via A "Rational Suicide" Note. Ft. Anne Örtegren.)

November 9, 2019

This is a “suicide” note left by a ME/CFS sufferer who sought and found relief from her suffering via legal, medically assisted suicide.  She says this manifesto took her months to write, which I do not doubt a bit: it is long, detailed and polished and was written when she was feeling terrible.  She wrote it with the intent to describe her almost indescribable pain and experience, and to convince others to take action on behalf of ME/CFS sufferers, both of which are lofty communication goals when anyone is seriously ill.

Describing and convincing have been my most impossible endeavors since I’ve been seriously ill myself and I think I have mostly failed, judging by others’ reactions to everything I’ve managed to gather the physical and emotional grit to attempt to communicate: that I am seriously, hopelessly ill with an incurable, progressive disease, that there is no bottom to how bad this can get, and it matters not what anyone thinks about it.  Some things are just true regardless of whether anyone believes it.

In this note, ME/CFS patient Anne Örtegren describes symptoms and dilemmas I have experienced myself and she foresees logical outcomes to her predicament, something sick people and especially sick women are never allowed to do because catastrophization. For example, she knows that her heightened sensitivity to light and sound will make treatment or recovery in a hospital setting impossible where the standard of care in that environment requires constant activity and interruptions, and provides no privacy and no escape from the harsh industrial lighting, interrogations by (allegedly) well meaning staff and the general hustle and bustle of capitalistic money making on the backs and bodies of sick and dying people.

That is but one example of a sick person making informed prognostications regarding likely outcomes of the things other people want to do to us, and as someone who shares these sensitivities to light and sound (and therefore an aversion to hospital settings) as but one example of our shared experience of being seriously ill, I appreciated her spelling it out.  I also feel extremely sad that she had to, and furious that no one who allegedly cared about her wellbeing including medical professionals who should be fucking sensitive to the actual needs of real patients could make the leap themselves.  There are many such examples in this letter.

See for yourselves, and understand that as illuminating and raw as this letter is, it’s also been edited by the publisher and a so-called suicide prevention expert because the bottom line everywhere appears to be that there is no such thing as rational suicide or euthanasia because well people and people who make money off of the long-term sick and dying say so.  And because living in this capitalistic, patriarchal nightmare is so hideous for so many people that “suicide contagion” exists, where just knowing that someone, somewhere had whatever it took to end themselves is likely to cause untold numbers of happy, healthy consumers with bright futures to do the same damn thing.  Yeah that’s it, let’s keep telling ourselves that.

The letter as published is reprinted below.  The unedited letter supposedly exists online somewhere if anyone cares to look and has the energy to figure out how and where the edited version differs from the original.  Comments are open below.

Farewell – A Last Post from Anne Örtegren

Nobody can say that I didn’t put up enough of a fight.

For 16 years I have battled increasingly severe ME/CFS. My condition has steadily deteriorated and new additional medical problems have regularly appeared, making it ever more difficult to endure and make it through the day (and night).

Throughout this time, I have invested almost every bit of my tiny energy in the fight for treatment for us ME/CFS patients. Severely ill, I have advocated from my bedroom for research and establishment of biomedical ME/CFS clinics to get us proper health care. All the while, I have worked hard to find something which would improve my own health. I have researched all possible treatment options, got in contact with international experts and methodically tried out every medication, supplement and regimen suggested.

Sadly, for all the work done, we still don’t have adequately sized specialized biomedical care for ME/CFS patients here in Stockholm, Sweden – or hardly anywhere on the planet. We still don’t have in-patient hospital units adapted to the needs of the severely ill ME/CFS patients. Funding levels for biomedical ME/CFS research remain ridiculously low in all countries and the erroneous psychosocial model which has caused me and others so much harm is still making headway.

And sadly, for me personally things have gone from bad to worse to unbearable. I am now mostly bedbound and constantly tortured by ME/CFS symptoms. I also suffer greatly from a number of additional medical problems, the most severe being a systematic hyper-reactivity in the form of burning skin combined with an immunological/allergic reaction. This is triggered by so many things that it has become impossible to create an adapted environment. Some of you have followed my struggle to find clothes and bed linen I can tolerate. Lately, I am simply running out. I no longer have clothes I can wear without my skin “burning up” and my body going into an allergic state.

This means I no longer see a way out from this solitary ME/CFS prison and its constant torture. I can no longer even do damage control, and my body is at the end of its rope. Therefore, I have gone through a long and thorough process involving several medical assessments to be able to choose a peaceful way out: I have received a preliminary green light for accompanied suicide through a clinic in Switzerland.

When you read this I am at rest, free from suffering at last. I have written this post to explain why I had to take this drastic step. Many ME/CFS patients have found it necessary to make the same decision, and I want to speak up for us, as I think my reasons may be similar to those of many others with the same sad destiny.

These reasons can be summed up in three headers: unbearable suffering; no realistic way out of the suffering; and the lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs.

Important note Before I write more about these reasons, I want to stress something important. Depression is not the cause of my choice. Though I have been suffering massively for many years, I am not depressed. I still have all my will and my motivation. I still laugh and see the funny side of things, I still enjoy doing whatever small activities I can manage. I am still hugely interested in the world around me – my loved ones and all that goes on in their lives, the society, the world (what is happening in human rights issues? how can we solve the climate change crisis?) During these 16 years, I have never felt any lack of motivation.

On the contrary, I have consistently fought for solutions with the goal to get myself better and help all ME/CFS patients get better. There are so many things I want to do, I have a lot to live for. If I could only regain some functioning, quieten down the torture a bit and be able to tolerate clothes and a normal environment, I have such a long list of things I would love to do with my life!

Three main reasons So depression is not the reason for my decision to terminate my life. The reasons are the following:

1. Unbearable suffering Many severely ill ME/CFS patients are hovering at the border of unbearable suffering. We are constantly plagued by intense symptoms, we endure high-impact every-minute physical suffering 24 hours a day, year after year. I see it as a prison sentence with torture. I am homebound and mostly bedbound – there is the prison. I constantly suffer from excruciating symptoms: The worst flu you ever had. Sore throat, bronchi hurting with every breath. Complete exhaustion, almost zero energy, a body that weighs a tonne and sometimes won’t even move. Muscle weakness, dizziness, great difficulties standing up. Sensory overload causing severe suffering from the brain and nervous system. Massive pain in muscles, painful inflammations in muscle attachments. Intensely burning skin. A feeling of having been run over by a bus, twice, with every cell screaming. This has got to be called torture.

It would be easier to handle if there were breaks, breathing spaces. But with severe ME/CFS there is no minute during the day when one is comfortable. My body is a war zone with constant firing attacks. There is no rest, no respite. Every move of every day is a mountain-climb. Every night is a challenge, since there is no easy sleep to rescue me from the torture. I always just have to try to get through the night. And then get through the next day.

It would also be easier if there were distractions. Like many patients with severe ME/CFS I am unable to listen to music, radio, podcasts or audio books, or to watch TV. I can only read for short bouts of time, and use the computer for even shorter moments. I am too ill to manage more than rare visits or phone calls from my family and friends, and sadly unable to live with someone. This solitary confinement aspect of ME/CFS is devastating and it is understandable that ME/CFS has been described as the “living death disease”.

For me personally, the situation has turned into an emergency not least due to my horrific symptom of burning skin linked to immunological/allergic reactions. This appeared six years into my ME/CFS, when I was struck by what seemed like a complete collapse of the bodily systems controlling immune system, allergic pathways, temperature control, skin and peripheral nerves. I had long had trouble with urticaria, hyperreactive skin and allergies, but at this point a violent reaction occurred and my skin completely lost tolerance. I started having massively burning skin, severe urticaria and constant cold sweats and shivers (these reactions reminded me of the first stages of the anaphylactic shock I once had, then due to heat allergy).

Since then, for ten long years, my skin has been burning. It is an intense pain. I have been unable to tolerate almost all kinds of clothes and bed linen as well as heat, sun, chemicals and other everyday things. These all trigger the burning skin and the freezing/shivering reaction into a state of extreme pain and suffering. Imagine being badly sunburnt and then being forced to live under a constant scalding sun – no relief in sight.

At first I managed to find a certain textile fabric which I could tolerate, but then this went out of production, and in spite of years of negotiations with the textile industry it has, strangely, proven impossible to recreate that specific weave. This has meant that as my clothes have been wearing out, I have been approaching the point where I will no longer have clothes and bed linen that are tolerable to my skin. It has also become increasingly difficult to adapt the rest of my living environment so as to not trigger the reaction and worsen the symptoms. Now that I am running out of clothes and sheets, ahead of me has lain a situation with constant burning skin and an allergic state of shivering/cold sweats and massive suffering. This would have been absolutely unbearable.

For 16 years I have had to manage an ever-increasing load of suffering and problems. They now add up to a situation which is simply no longer sustainable.

2. No realistic way out of the suffering A very important factor is the lack of realistic hope for relief in the future. It is possible for a person to bear a lot of suffering, as long as it is time-limited. But the combination of massive suffering and a lack of rational hope for remission or recovery is devastating.

Think about the temporary agony of a violent case of gastric flu. Picture how you are feeling those horrible days when you are lying on the bathroom floor between attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting. This is something we all have to live through at times, but we know it will be over in a few days. If someone told you at that point: “you will have to live with this for the rest of your life”, I am sure you would agree that it wouldn’t feel feasible. It is unimaginable to cope with a whole life with the body in that insufferable state every day, year after year. The level of unbearableness in severe ME/CFS is the same.

If I knew there was relief on the horizon, it would be possible to endure severe ME/CFS and all the additional medical problems, even for a long time, I think. The point is that there has to be a limit, the suffering must not feel endless.

One vital aspect here is of course that patients need to feel that the ME/CFS field is being taken forward. Sadly, we haven’t been granted this feeling – see my previous blogs relating to this here and here.

Another imperative issue is the drug intolerance that I and many others with ME/CFS suffer from. I have tried every possible treatment, but most of them have just given me side-effects, many of which have been irreversible. My stomach has become increasingly dysfunctional, so for the past few years any new drugs have caused immediate diarrhoea. One supplement triggered massive inflammation in my entire urinary tract, which has since persisted. The list of such occurrences of major deterioration caused by different drugs/treatments is long, and with time my reactions have become increasingly violent. I now have to conclude that my sensitivity to medication is so severe that realistically it is very hard for me to tolerate drugs or supplements.

This has two crucial meanings for many of us severely ill ME/CFS patients: There is no way of relieving our symptoms. And even if treatments appear in the future, with our sensitivity of medication any drug will carry a great risk of irreversible side-effects producing even more suffering. This means that even in the case of a real effort finally being made to bring biomedical research into ME/CFS up to levels on par with that of other diseases, and possible treatments being made accessible, for some of us it is unlikely that we would be able to benefit. Considering our extreme sensitivity to medication, one could say it’s hard to have realistic hope of recovery or relief for us.

In the past couple of years I, being desperate, have challenged the massive side-effect risk and tried one of the treatments being researched in regards to ME/CFS. But I received it late in the disease process, and it was a gamble. I needed it to have an almost miraculous effect: a quick positive response which eliminated many symptoms – most of all I needed it to stop my skin from burning and reacting, so I could tolerate the clothes and bed linen produced today. I have been quickly running out of clothes and sheets, so I was gambling with high odds for a quick and extensive response. Sadly, I wasn’t a responder. I have also tried medication for Mast Cell Activation Disorder and a low-histamine diet, but my burning skin hasn’t abated. Since I am now running out of clothes and sheets, all that was before me was constant burning hell.

3. The lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs The third factor is the insight that the risk for further deterioration and increased suffering is high.

On top of the nearly unbearable symptoms it is very likely that in the future things will get even worse. An example in my case could be my back and neck pain. I would need to strengthen muscles to prevent them from getting worse. But the characteristic symptom of Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) when I attempt even small activities, is hugely problematic.

Whenever we try to ignore the PEM issue and push through, we immediately crash and become much sicker. We might go from being able to at least get up and eat, to being completely bedbound, until the PEM has subsided. Sometimes, it doesn’t subside, and we find ourselves irreversibly deteriorated, at a new, even lower baseline level, with no way of improving.

PEM is not something that you can work around.

For me, new medical complications also continue to arise, and I have no way of amending them. I already need surgery for one existing problem, and it is likely that it will be needed for other issues in the future, but surgery or hospital care is not feasible for several reasons:

One is that my body seems to lack repairing mechanisms. Previous biopsies have not healed properly, so my doctor is doubtful about my ability to recover after surgery.

Another, more general and hugely critical, is that with severe ME/CFS it is impossible to tolerate normal hospital care. For ME/CFS patients the sensory overload problem and the extremely low energy levels mean that a normal hospital environment causes major deterioration. The sensory input that comes with shared rooms, people coming and going, bright lights, noise, etc, escalates our disease. We are already in such fragile states that a push in the wrong direction is catastrophic. For me, with my burning skin issue, there is also the issue of not tolerating the mattresses, pillows, textile fabrics, etc used in a hospital.

Just imagine the effects of a hospital stay for me: It would trigger my already severe ME/CFS into new depths – likely I would become completely bedbound and unable to tolerate any light or noise. The skin hyperreactivity would, within a few hours, trigger my body into an insufferable state of burning skin and agonizing immune-allergic reactions, which would then be impossible to reverse. My family, my doctor and I agree: I must never be admitted to a hospital, since there is no end to how much worse that would make me.

Many ME/CFS patients have experienced irreversible deterioration due to hospitalization. We also know that the understanding of ME/CFS is extremely low or non-existent in most hospitals, and we hear about ME/CFS patients being forced into environments or activities which make them much worse. I am aware of only two places in the world with specially adjusted hospital units for severe ME/CFS, Oslo, Norway, and Gold Coast, Australia. We would need such units in every city around the globe.

It is extreme to be this severely ill, have so many medical complications arise continually and know this: There is no feasible access to hospital care for me. There are no tolerable medications to use when things get worse or other medical problems set in. As a severely ill ME/CFS patient I have no safety net at all. There is simply no end to how bad things can get with severe ME/CFS.

Coping skills – important but not enough I realize that when people hear about my decision to terminate my life, they will wonder about my coping skills. I have written about this before and I want to mention the issue here too:

While it was extremely hard at the beginning to accept chronic illness, I have over the years developed a large degree of acceptance and pretty good coping skills. I have learnt to accept tight limits and appreciate small qualities of life. I have learnt to cope with massive amounts of pain and suffering and still find bright spots. With the level of acceptance I have come to now, I would have been content even with relatively small improvements and a very limited life. If, hypothetically, the physical suffering could be taken out of the equation, I would have been able to live contentedly even though my life continued to be restricted to my small apartment and include very little activity. Unlike most people I could find such a tiny life bearable and even happy. But I am not able to cope with these high levels of constant physical suffering.

In short, to sum up my level of acceptance as well as my limit: I can take the prison and the extreme limitations – but I can no longer take the torture. And I cannot live with clothes that constantly trigger my burning skin.

Not alone – and not a rash decision In spite of being unable to see friends or family for more than rare and brief visits, and in spite of having limited capacity for phone conversations, I still have a circle of loved ones. My friends and family all understand my current situation and they accept and support my choice. While they do not want me to leave, they also do not want me to suffer anymore.

This is not a rash decision. It has been processed for many years, in my head, in conversations with family and friends, in discussion with one of my doctors, and a few years ago in the long procedure of requesting accompanied suicide. The clinic in Switzerland requires an extensive process to ensure that the patient is chronically ill, lives with unendurable pain or suffering, and has no realistic hope of relief. They require a number of medical records as well as consultations with specialized doctors.

For me this end is obviously not what I wanted, but it was the best solution to an extremely difficult situation and preferable to even more suffering. It was not hasty choice, but one that matured over a long period of time.

A plea to decision makers – Give ME/CFS patients a future! As you understand, this blog post has taken me many months to put together. It is a long text to read too, I know. But I felt it was important to write it and have it published to explain why I personally had to take this step, and hopefully illuminate why so many ME/CFS patients consider or commit suicide.

And most importantly: to elucidate that this circumstance can be changed! But that will take devoted, resolute, real action from all of those responsible for the state of ME/CFS care, ME/CFS research and dissemination of information about the disease. Sadly, this responsibility has been mishandled for decades. To allow ME/CFS patients some hope on the horizon, key people in all countries must step up and act.

If you are a decision maker, here is what you urgently need to do: You need to bring funding for biomedical ME/CFS research up so it’s on par with comparable diseases (as an example, in the US that would mean $188 million per year). You need to make sure there are dedicated hospital care units for ME/CFS inpatients in every city around the world. You need to establish specialist biomedical care available to all ME/CFS patients; it should be as natural as RA patients having access to a rheumatologist or cancer patients to an oncologist. You need to give ME/CFS patients a future.

Please listen to these words of Jen Brea, which sum up the situation in the US, but are applicable to almost every country:

“The NIH says it won’t fund ME research because no one wants to study it. Yet they reject the applications of the world class scientists who are committed to advancing the field. Meanwhile, HHS has an advisory committee whose sole purpose seems to be making recommendations that are rarely adopted. There are no drugs in the pipeline at the FDA yet the FDA won’t approve the one drug, Ampligen, that can have Lazarus-like effects in some patients. Meanwhile, the CDC continues to educate doctors using information that we (patients) all know is inaccurate or incomplete.”

Like Jen Brea, I want a number of people from these agencies, and equivalent agencies in Sweden and all other countries, to stand up and take responsibility. To say: “ME! I am going to change things because that is my job.”

And lastly Lastly, I would like to end this by linking to this public comment from a US agency meeting (CFSAC). It seems to have been taken off the HHS site, but I found it in the Google Read version of the book “Lighting Up a Hidden World: CFS and ME” by Valerie Free. It includes testimony from two very eloquent ME patients and it says it all. I thank these ME patients for expressing so well what we are experiencing.

My previous blog posts:

From International Traveler to 43 Square Meters: An ME/CFS Story From Sweden

Coping With ME/CFS Will Always Be Hard – But There are Ways of Making It A Little Easier

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt I: The Facts – Plus “What Can We Do?

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt II: Why it Takes 20 Years to Get 1 Year’s Research Done

Take care of each other.

Love, Anne

Comments Open.

[somescribblestoperuse]

A moment in history to create change for the better

As I fly out of Phnom Penh, the sun sets, figuratively and literally, on my four-month Cambodian adventure, cut short by two-thirds. The goodbyes were short and sweet - done on purpose as I’ve learnt my weakness over years gone by (tears are usually guaranteed). Even though anxieties and stress and adrenaline have been running high this week, at the same time, it’s not total despondency. It’s bittersweet as I look forward to seeing family and friends. I feel hopeful there is still more to come for my story in this wonderful country and with those I’ve met. Just under different circumstances - at least I would hope…

Within 4 days I’ve packed up my life (for the second time in 4 months), as we were told to return home ASAP. I’m returning to a country full of people that have gone into a state of panic (which I don’t think I’m quite prepared for alongside re-entry shock). But in amongst all the chaos, I realise we really are so privileged as Australians. We have a government that I have enough confidence in to intervene as necessary to get us home, if anything went wrong. I have money to fund my return. I have a support network of family and friends who will provide food, supplies and shelter as needed. While I acknowledge there are many within Australia that will experience their own hardships, especially with jobs jeopardised, we will recover in time - in terms of economy, jobs, health care and otherwise. Our country is developed enough to create innovative solutions and evolve and adapt accordingly, if we focus on the opportunities.

I can’t say the same about any of these points for Cambodia. Most of all, I have serious concerns about the impact this pandemic will have on the Khmer people. Foreigners (Barang) are leaving in hordes. Tourism will die down indefinitely affecting many businesses and essentially the livelihood of many. There is a fine line between those who do and don’t live in poverty. For the average tuk tuk driver, a small decline in their daily income can be the difference between eating or not. For the average family, one health scare - in a country with essentially a non-existent health care system - can be the difference between their children attending school or dropping out to earn money for the family. 

It’s a scary time for everyone indeed. But is there any silver lining? I’m an optimistic person and would like to say there is. However, this once again may be coming from a place of privilege - where I don’t have many immediate worries apart from getting myself home and finding another job using a skill set that is fairly adaptable.

So that silver lining: I’d summarize my hope to be that we learn greater awareness, respect and empathy for our fellow humans and this world as a whole. For many that contract COVID-19, they will recover. But that’s not the point - it’s having an awareness of the potential impact on others and doing something to help them. It’s about not fighting with someone in the middle of Woolworths for toilet paper but rather respecting each other and not letting fear dominate. It’s about having empathy for others and realising that we are incredibly connected and social creatures, who rely on one another, especially mentally as we all go into isolation. We have already seen a wonderful example of the good side of humanity come out of Italy, with people gathering on their balconies to sing and dance along to music blasted throughout the area. And those who are volunteering in their community to buy food and supplies for the more vulnerable. And many more examples I’m sure.

This empathy needs to extend outside one’s own country. We need to respect the fragility of this globalised world we live in. If we don’t have empathy and an understanding of the world beyond our borders, we will continue to be baffled and severely affected by any future situations like Coronavirus because our scope was too narrow. We will also never fully understand the impressive impact we can make as a connected global community. 

What do I mean by this? Let’s look at the example already coming out of Venice - the canals are clear and wildlife is returning for the first time in a long time as a result of reduced tourism. This has happened in the space of weeks. Sure it’s taken a global crisis but we know it’s possible to create change - we just need to want it enough and to finally take action. It doesn’t have to take a global crisis to implement systemised measures. You might say, ‘yeah but human lives are at stake because of COVID-19 and that’s why we’ve done something about it’. But the thing is human lives will continue to be at stake as a result of environmental and climate change disasters. That’s what we learnt the hard way during the Australian bushfires this past summer. Let’s continue to learn from what’s happening at the moment. In Australia, we had the opportunity to take a stand after our bushfire crisis but we didn’t. Let’s not miss the opportunity again.

As a global community, we can make changes and a positive impact, together. Whether it’s for the environment, looking out for the mental wellbeing of others, or improving the systems we have in place for the vulnerable and underprivileged in our society who are severely affected by incidents and crisis. We just need respect, awareness and empathy for our fellow humans and the world as a whole.

For me, I like to think I have grown in these ways over the last four months in Cambodia but even moreso over the last few days (which you would hope considering I’m doing an awful lot of preaching right now). We were told to pack our things and leave. Don’t say goodbye to everyone. Don’t wait a couple of weeks. Just leave. I can’t even imagine being in a more vulnerable situation, such as an asylum seeker or refugee escaping their country because of war or famine or whatever it may be. Unimaginable fear with no place to go. It’s a position I hope I never have to be in. As I sit on the first leg of my flight home, I’m more grateful than ever before of both my life and the country I live in.

So what’s next? On a personal level, I’m looking forward to two weeks isolation, which may sound strange (and maybe don’t quote me on that in 5 days). I’ll need the time to recuperate, reflect and take those first steps to set myself up again. Also, can’t complain about some Netflix and couch time (again, fully aware of privilege here).

On a global scale, let’s get through these next few weeks and months together. Don’t let fear dominate. Be kind. This will become a significant moment in history with potential to change the world as we know it. Let’s not miss the opportunity to learn from it and create change for the better.

[perfectirishgifts]

Climate Action Is Critical For SMEs Long-Term Success—And SMEs Are Integral To Climate Action’s Success

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/climate-action-is-critical-for-smes-long-term-success-and-smes-are-integral-to-climate-actions-success/

Climate Action Is Critical For SMEs Long-Term Success—And SMEs Are Integral To Climate Action’s Success

To achieve the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, businesses of all sizes, including … [] SMEs, need to take action now.

The public sector will not achieve the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement—to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees Centigrade—without the involvement and commitment of the private sector to reducing and even achieving net-zero emissions. And soon. That realization and frankness is what drives Gonzalo Muñoz, co-founder of Sistema B the 2019 UN COP Climate Champion, to directly call out businesses of all sizes, including SMEs, to take action now.

And, as Muñoz shares, this isn’t just about doing the “right” thing—it’s the only financially sustainable way for organizations to operate into the future. “The smartest money is moving so rapidly with this aspect at the center. It’s not about ESG, it’s about how much of not considering the climate risk increases the general risks of any investment. We’re seeing how much of the money is moving a lot faster toward reaching companies that have this commitment in place. So, even taking the commitment gives you the possibility of being a better choice for the financial sector,” he says.

Starting with the 2019 UN Climate Conference, COP25, through this year and into next year’s COP in Glasgow, the role of the private sector in addressing climate change and taking climate action has taken a front seat alongside the duties of the public sector and civil servants. Business leadership, according to Muñoz, must either commit to becoming net zero by 2050, or even better, 2030, or “be comfortable being part of the problem.” 

Muñoz believes Certified B Corporations, businesses that have been verified for their positive impact on people and planet, have an imperative to pledge, commit and take action on their climate impact. That to not do so would be a reason to forfeit their certification in coming years. This direct, science-centered approach is how Muñoz and the UN are working to make meaningful action—before it’s too late. And this passion has helped result in the NetZero2030 commitments by now nearly 1,000 B Corps, meaning companies are aiming to hit the net-zero goal 20 years before required by the Paris Agreements to do so.

I recently spoke with Muñoz as part of my research on B Corps and stakeholder capitalism. Here’s part of our conversation, where he discussed NetZero 2030, #RaceToZero, and how businesses of all sizes can get involved and take climate action today.

Tell me about the NetZero 2030, how it began and the commitment of businesses to this goal. 

Gonzalo Muñoz, 2019 UN COP Climate Champion

What was absolutely instrumental for this to happen was that Chile took the lead on the 2019 UN Climate Conference, COP25, after Brazil stepped away. COP goes around five major areas of the world and it was time for Latin America. Brazil was supposed to be the country that was going to lead COP 25 and at last minute they decided not to, so Chile took the baton and one of the things that an incoming presidency for COP has to decide is naming what is called the High Level Climate Action Champion, a figure that was created in the Paris Agreement to lead the non-party stakeholders. 

The role of the High Level Climate Action Champion is to mobilize action among those sectors and until COP25, all of the previous Champions were civil servants. For Chile, it was absolutely evident that the role had to be led by somebody coming from the non-state sector, and they named me. For the first time ever, the High Level Climate Action Champion came from the private sector, which has been replicated by the U.K. The following High Level Climate Action Champion is now Nigel Topping from We Mean Business, also coming from the private sector.  

The second thing that Chile did in that sense was to ask me and the team to position science at the center. To say, “Okay, we have to follow science and science has just spoken.” In October 2018, a couple of months prior to COP24, scientists of climate at the APCC released a report stating the best possible option is to go toward 1.5 degrees Centigrade temperature rise, and in order to reach the 1.5 degrees, the world has to be net zero by 2050. The year to achieve net-zero emissions worldwide, everything has to emit the same amount or less than what nature has escapable of sequestering. 

We then launched the Climate Ambition Alliance at the Secretary General Summit in September 2019 for everyone who wanted to follow and was capable of following a net zero by 2050 target. At that time, there were 66 countries that committed. But it is not only about the countries. We started to put together businesses, investors, sub-national regions, and cities all working together toward net zero by 2050. 

Why is it important to have a diversity of companies committed?

We are trying to change the narrative of the climate solutions from being North-centric to one that represents everybody in the world. This requires diverse types of companies and providers to have the same target, if not a better one The #RaceToZero campaign is pulling more and more members, it now has 1,100 companies and hopefully in December, at the Paris Agreements anniversary, we will update the number.  

We launched the SMEs Climate Hub with the International Chamber of Commerce, with We Mean Business, and Exponential Climate Action Roadmap, as ways to bring thousands or hundreds of thousands of SMEs from around the world to join #RaceToZero, to join the commitment. 

And in that case, the target is 2050. Not committing, at least to 2050, is recognizing that you are comfortable being part of the problem. … It’s not only about your position, but about changing the rules of the game with a bottom-up approach.

Can you say more about how businesses will work with the governing bodies and what sort of coordination exists there?

The Paris Agreement recognizes the role of the business sector is important in terms of giving the business sector the possibility of moving from being part of the problem to being an important part of the solution. And if that works well, what we need to see in every country of the world is that they signed the Paris Agreement, which is perceived by the business sector in each of the countries saying, “okay, my country signed the Paris Agreement, that means climate is now in the center.” 

Countries will start positioning different types of regulations, as business leaders start moving toward the implementation of the Paris Agreement. We want to see how businesses worldwide shouldn’t expect anything less than countries that are part of the Paris Agreement.  

What do you say to businesses or companies, affected by the economic downturn from COVID, that are focusing on getting their business back on the ground rather than focused on goals like climate change, which is, decades away?

We need to increase the number of commitments in order to change the culture. When it comes to small businesses, this is a massive opportunity. We already have the big multinationals of the world declaring that they need to be net zero by 2050. They are urgently needing SMEs of the world to say, “I’m with you, count on me.”

The smartest money is moving so rapidly with this aspect at the center. It’s not about ESG, it’s about how much of not considering the climate risk increases the general risks of any investment. We’re seeing how much of the money is moving a lot faster toward reaching companies that have this commitment in place. So, even taking the commitment gives you the possibility of being a better choice for the financial sector. 

But also during COVID times, we have seen an acceleration of the energy transition. We have seen an acceleration of ESG metrics being considered. We have seen an acceleration on the value of nature-based solutions. So I’m absolutely sure that probably five years from now, we will take a look back to COVID and we will see how many of the trajectories sped up during this year. And, in that sense I would encourage any business of the world to surf the wave and not to just stay on the beach staring at it.

 Do you have any case studies or examples of projects, companies, or people that are really inspiring to you?

It’s been two years since the APCC launched their report, so things are moving really fast. But still we have to see a change of trajectory on emissions, on regeneration of the ecosystem, on capacity of solving the crisis. If you go to the financial sector, we’re seeing insurance companies, asset managers, and asset owners—$5.1 trillion committed to net-zero emissions. We’re seeing all of that happening because they have learned even this year, how to measure the risk in a better way. 

We’re seeing airlines committing to fly NetZero flights by 2035, because they know if they don’t do that, they won’t have their social license to operate. You’re seeing countries like the U.K. or states like California, Quebec, or even companies like Daimler killing the internal combustion engine earlier than 2030. That means a lot in terms of those who are places where the internal combustion engine was created, and the economy was moved.

To become regenerative by 2035 is a massive topic. I mean, of course, joining Unilever and Danone, Mars, Cargill, and big multinationals that have somehow been blamed on being based on extraction and now they’re absolutely committing to regenerate. We’re seeing energy company General Electric deciding to get out of coal. We’re seeing the SMB, Skype, IKEA, Sony and Unilever saying, “we need this because we need to align them.” They’re already sending a message to their providers.

From Green Tech in Perfectirishgifts

[monkeyandelf]

Billionaires are building space colonies to escape an impending catastrophe

A lot has changed since December 21, 2012 , when about 10% of people believed that the world would end.  The effects of climate change have become more frequent and severe, threatening vulnerable areas with floods, hurricanes and extreme heat. The machines have become smarter, which has led some to worry about the technological overthrow of society. And the possibility of a global nuclear war is glimpsed on the horizon, with the United States and Iran facing an unprecedented conflict. And, as if that were not enough, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists adjusted the Judgment Clock 20 seconds closer to midnight. The clock is a symbol of how close we are to "destroy our world" using "dangerous technologies of our own creation ." The closer to midnight, the closer we are to Armageddon. And this leads us to the following, that billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are preparing to leave our planet. Preparing for the apocalypse Several billionaires, especially Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Yuri Milner, have poured large amounts of money into space travel. Perhaps they are only investing in space technology, however, there are many who believe that billionaires are preparing to flee the planet . In an article published in the New York Times entitled "The rich plan to leave this planet miserable," Michael Suffredini, president and co-founder of Axiom Space, revealed the details of its orbital design habitat.

He said that a holiday in Axiom would cost $ 55 million, and not only hired the famous French designer Philippe Starck to create the interior of the station, but intends that the space suits be designed by an important European fashion firm. Suffredini revealed that three people had already signed up for the project even though the space station is not yet finished. The space colony is scheduled to receive its first guests in 2022 . In addition, Elon Musk has not hidden his plan to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. He has emphasized on many occasions the importance of ensuring that humanity is a kind of multiple planets in order to be prepared in case the worst happens. On the other hand, the professor of virtual culture at the University of New York has said that the general direction of technological development is to create "an escape route" for billionaires . He noted that robots will be used to protect the assets of the rich left on Earth. And they can certainly afford such salvation. The richest people in the world have seen their wealth increase 42.5% at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to just over 50% by the end of 2017. This adds up to a total of 140 billion dollars, according to a recent report by the Credit Suisse financial services company.

But how is it possible to establish a colony outside our world? According to experts in the field they say that, from a technical point of view, we are closer to returning to the Moon than ever, this time with modern systems that will provide more access to the lunar surface and allow us to remain on the surface for longer periods of time. However, when it comes to establishing a permanent orbital habitat, the only current obstacle is the need to develop a replacement for the space shuttle. The solutions to the problems of food and oxygen supply are more achievable than many people imagine, but less certain is the impact of the long-term effect of the low gravity of Mars or the Moon on the human body and that is a problem. Even with all these inconveniences, technology billionaires are creating a galactic upper class to escape the catastrophe that we will live shortly . Whether war, natural disaster or a global pandemic , humanity is currently fighting for its survival. And the people most likely to escape this evolutionary end are the few who have money to observe the disaster from space. And you? Are you ready for the impending planetary catastrophe? Read the full article

[morganbelarus]

The App Creeping on Your IG Location, Jakartas Insurance Crisis, and More News

The new app that creeps on your Instagram location, why Jakarta is sinking, and all things Comic Con. Fast. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here!

Today's Headlines

This app lets your Instagram followers track your location

Wherever you go, Instagram's there too. A new app called Who's in Town offers its users an interactive map of every place the people they follow have geotagged themselves in Instagram posts and stories. While this information is ostensibly available already if you search through someone's posts, Who's in Town transforms data into a chronological log of the to-ings and fro-ings of anyone who has a public Instagram account. “The amount of data is insane,” said Erick Barto, the app’s creator. “It's the equivalent of you going through every single story and writing down every single location, just consistently all the time.”

The sea is consuming Jakarta, and its people aren’t insured Jakarta is literally digging itself into a hole. The coastal megalopolis continues to pump too much water from its aquifers, causing the land to collapse by almost a foot a year in some places. And it gets worse: Very few people in Jakarta have insurance, the very thing that could help the country's citizens move away from rising tides. WIRED's Matt Simon reports, "The sea is swallowing up the nation's 17,000 islands, so families can’t just move down the street to escape danger. They’ll need money to relocate and find new livelihoods—money that insurance can provide."

Cocktail Conversation

In case you didn’t know, Comic-Con is happening right now, through the weekend. Check out our highlights (including all things Marvel) here.

WIRED Recommends: iPads

So many iPads, so little time. Let us help you pick out the perfect iPad for you with our 2019 buying guide.

News You Can Use

Say farewell to Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. WIRED deputy editor Adam Rogers bids a fond adieu: "Thanks for the ride, Agents. In the era of peak, golden-age, highly burnished, super-professional polish, TV needs weird too."

This daily roundup is available via newsletter. You can sign up right here to make sure you get the news delivered fresh to your inbox every weekday!

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Mixed Reality Shows the Impact of Climate Change on Charleston in 2100

The Weather Channel used mixed reality to show how climate change-related flooding will impact Charleston in the year 2100.

Original Article : HERE ;

The App Creeping on Your IG Location, Jakartas Insurance Crisis, and More News was originally posted by MetNews

[ggdbcheapforsale-blog]

Golden Goose Deluxe Brand Sneakers Sale Enough with The Help Of The usage Taxes before Now

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[mikemortgage]

AP FACT CHECK: O’Rourke on climate, Trump on ‘no collusion’

WASHINGTON — Beto O’Rourke opened his Democratic presidential campaign this past week with a call to action on global warming that misrepresented the science. From Iowa, he claimed scientists are united in believing the planet only has a dozen years to turn the tide on climate change, which is not quite their view.

In Washington, an exasperated federal judge fact-checked the “no collusion mantra” recited by President Donald Trump and his associates as they try to dispel suspicions that people from his 2016 campaign and Russia worked together to tilt that election. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, while sentencing former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, reminded her courtroom — and indirectly the president — that Manafort’s trial was unrelated to questions of collusion with Russia.

“Court is one of those places where facts still matter,” Jackson said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur.”

That didn’t stop the refrain. “Again that was proven today, no collusion,” Trump tweeted.

A look at some of the political rhetoric of the past week:

CLIMATE CHANGE

O’ROURKE, on global warming: “This is our final chance. The scientists are absolutely unanimous on this. That we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis.” — remarks in Keokuk, Iowa, on Thursday.

THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.

A report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, drawn from the work of hundreds of scientists, uses 2030 as a prominent benchmark because signatories to the Paris agreement have pledged emission cuts by then. But it’s not a last chance, hard deadline for action, as it has been interpreted in some quarters.

“Glad to clear this up,” James Skea, co-chairman of the report and professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, told The Associated Press. The panel “did not say we have 12 years left to save the world.”

He added: “The hotter it gets, the worse it gets, but there is no cliff edge.”

“This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”

The report forecasts that global warming is likely to increase by 0.5 degrees Celsius or 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit between 2030 and 2052 “if it continues to increase at the current rate.” The climate has already warmed by 1 degree C or 1.8 degrees F since the pre-Industrial Age.

Even holding warming to that level brings harmful effects to the environment, the report said, but the impact increases greatly if the increase in the global average temperature approaches 2 degrees C or 3.6 degrees F.

“The earth does not reach a cliff at 2030 or 2052,” Ebi told AP. But “keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and temperatures will continue to rise.”

As much as climate scientists see the necessity for broad and immediate action to address global warming, they do not agree on an imminent point of no return.

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie M. Mahowald told the AP that a 12-year time frame is a “robust number for trying to cut emissions” and to keep the increase in warming under current levels.

But she said sketching out unduly dire consequences is not “helpful to solving the problem.”

——

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

TRUMP, on Manafort’s sentencing to a second federal prison term: “I can only tell you one thing: Again that was proven today, no collusion.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters at the White House.

THE FACTS: There was no such proof in that trial or in Manafort’s other trial. Whether collusion happened was not a subject of the charges against Manafort. It’s one of the central issues in a separate and continuing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

In the case that produced Manafort’s first prison sentence, he was convicted of tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians. Judge T.S. Ellis III neither cleared nor implicated the president, instead emphasizing that Manafort was “not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government.”

Trump ignored that point afterward, tweeting: “Both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort case stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.” Trump misquoted the lawyer as well as the judge.

On Wednesday, Jackson sentenced Manafort for misleading the government about his foreign lobbying work and for encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf. Again, the case did not turn on his leadership of Trump’s campaign. “The investigation is still ongoing,” she noted, scolding Manafort’s lawyers for bringing up the “no collusion” refrain during the trial.

The two judges sentenced Manafort to 7.5 years altogether.

As with other Americans who were close to Trump and have been charged in the Mueller probe, Manafort hasn’t been accused of involvement in Russian election interference. Nor has he been cleared of that suspicion. The same is true of Trump.

——

THE BORDER

TRUMP: “Since 1976, presidents have declared 59 national emergencies. … The only emergency Congress voted to revoke was the one to protect our own country. So, think of that: With all of the national emergencies, this was the one they don’t want to do. And this is the one, perhaps, they should most do.” — Oval Office remarks Friday after vetoing the congressional resolution seeking to strike down his declaration of a border emergency.

THE FACTS: His declaration was not the only one designed to protect the country.

President Barack Obama declared an emergency in 2009 to protect the nation from the swine flu, which had killed more than 1,000 people and spread to 46 states before he took that step. The H1N1 flu strain was linked to more than 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths in the U.S. between April 2009 and April 2010.

It enabled the activation of emergency plans, such as moving emergency rooms offsite to keep those infected with the virus away from other emergency room patients, and it had Republican support. Unlike Trump’s order, it was not designed to free up money that Congress had already refused to spend.

Most national emergencies declared by presidents have been narrowly drawn, designed to protect U.S. interests in foreign countries, often in response to crises breaking abroad.

——

TRUMP on border security: “We’re apprehending record numbers of people.” — drug-trafficking meeting Wednesday.

THE FACTS: One major record has been broken — the number of migrant families arrested for crossing into the U.S. illegally. Other records have not.

More than 76,000 migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border last month, more than double the number from the same period last year. Most were families coming in increasingly large groups.

Overall numbers of Border Patrol arrests were the highest in 12 years, but not the highest ever.

The annual numbers are far from a record. About 400,000 people were arrested for crossing the border illegally in the last budget year, just one-quarter of the 1.6 million in 2000. That is the record.

——

MELANIA TRUMP

TRUMP: “The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it’s actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time!” — tweet Wednesday.

THE FACTS: No, there’s no evidence that the news organizations Trump likes to call the “Fake News” doctored pictures of Melania Trump to peddle the falsehood that a stand-in took the first lady’s place in Alabama last week or other places at other times. Some wrote about the fakery, spread by a mix of satirical, gullible and anti-Trump people online, and Trump’s tweet gives them more visibility than they would have had otherwise.

Among them, The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde tweeted in October 2017 that she was “absolutely convinced Melania is being played by a Melania impersonator these days.” She followed up with an admission that she had indulged in a “parallel fake universe” in which she fantasized that the first lady had escaped to small-town Missouri and was volunteering at a shelter for refugees.

——

RAIL SAFETY

TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY ELAINE CHAO, on positive train control: “Nothing happened on this until we came into office. And I would like some credit for that.” — remarks Monday to reporters.

THE FACTS: Her comment that nothing was done on positive train control before she took control of the Transportation Department is not true.

The Federal Railroad Administration took an aggressive posture on the braking technology under the Obama administration. After an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, the agency’s administrator, Sarah Feinberg, pushed railroads to move faster on installing positive train control, which has been available for years. The GPS-based technology is designed to automatically slow or stop trains that are going too fast and can take over control of a train when an engineer is distracted or incapacitated.

Congress had mandated that railroad companies install the braking technology by 2015, after a 2008 Metrolink crash in California killed 25 people. But the rail industry persuaded Congress to push back the installation deadline to 2018, while allowing railroads to apply for an extension until 2020 in some circumstances.

Feinberg said she wouldn’t accept further delays and had her agency post quarterly updates about each railroad’s progress on her agency’s website.

She warned railroads that any extensions beyond the 2018 deadline would only be considered if the railroads could prove they made a good-faith effort to meet the mandate. She also told railroads to submit plans that spelled out their detailed schedules for the braking systems and warned that the agency could fine them up to $5,000 per day if they didn’t file the required plans.

In contrast, Chao was noncommittal on the deadline at her confirmation hearing, saying she needed to be briefed on the technology.

Data provided by the FRA shows that by the end of 2016, positive train control was in operation for 16 per cent of freight railroads’ required route miles and 24 per cent of passenger railroads’ required route miles. As of December 2018, it was operating for 83 per cent of route miles for freight railroads and 30 per cent of passenger railroads’ required route miles.

The miles completed under the Trump administration built on the foundation that had been set out under Obama.

——

CLINTON EMAILS

TRUMP, on former FBI lawyer Lisa Page: “Comey testified (under oath) that it was a ‘unanimous’ decision on Crooked Hillary. Lisa Page transcripts show he LIED.” — tweet Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Nothing in Page’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last year indicates that former FBI Director James Comey lied about his investigative team’s decision not to recommend charges against 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Clinton in her handling of an email server while secretary of state. A transcript of Page’s testimony was released by the panel’s top Republican this past week.

Trump is correct that Comey did testify to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July 2016 that the decision on no charges was unanimous among his investigative team.

In the newly released transcript, Page said the investigative team determined it did not have “sufficient evidence” against Clinton to bring a charge of “gross negligence” in her handling of emails.

Page did note there was some “smack talk” by higher-level FBI officials expressing a desire to “get” Clinton. “So I am aware of senior FBI officials talking to subordinate FBI officials on the Hillary Clinton investigative team who unquestionably had anti-Hillary sentiment, but who also said: You have to get her or — again, I don’t have an exact quote — but like we’re counting on you, you know,” Page said.

But Page also noted that none of those officials was in a position of authority over the investigation any longer.

——

BREXIT

TRUMP, on how he stood at his Scottish golf resort, Turnberry, on the eve of the Brexit referendum and predicted that the British would vote to leave the European Union: “I predicted it was going to happen and I was right and people laughed when I predicted it and they won by about two points. And I was standing out on Turnberry and we had a press conference and people were screaming. That was the day before, if you remember. I think you were there. And people were screaming and I said, ‘No, I think it’s going to happen.’ And people were surprised I made the prediction …because President Obama made the opposite prediction. And I was right.” — remarks Thursday at White House.

THE FACTS: As when he has told this story before, Trump is mixing up his predictions and his days. A month before the vote, he did predict accurately that Britain would vote to leave the EU. The day after the 2016 vote — not the day before — he predicted from his Scottish resort that the EU would collapse because of Britain’s withdrawal. That remains to be seen.

——

Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo, Chad Day, Mary Clare Jalonick and Jill Colvin in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

——

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

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EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

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Four years ago, my fiancé, Colin, and I decided to move to New Mexico. We had been living in a secluded river valley in western Colorado, but both of us were venturing into self-employment and thought it’d be easier in a bigger town. So we rigged our pickup with a load the Beverly Hillbillies would have admired — furniture, lamps, buckets full of pottery glaze — and drove south. I was happy. I’d waited my whole life to make this move.

Every summer of my childhood, my family had made a similar migration, leaving our duplex in Illinois and driving west. We’d spend a couple of months in the scrappy adobe house on a hill in Santa Fe, where my dad grew up. Though we had a great life in Chicago, this house cast a spell on all of us. The hill’s edges looked soft and green from afar. Up close, the land was spiny and jagged, a pile of pinkish granite with squat trees and tough succulents. It seemed even then that though I didn’t live here, it was where I came from, the place I always wanted to get back to.

Colin and I are married now. Colin is generous and goofy, a self-taught professional potter with impossibly pale blue eyes. He grew up in Ohio and loves mountains and the space of the western horizon, but he doesn’t pine for the high desert. He notices with annoying frequency how little water Santa Fe has. He likes big trees and he likes to grow food, and he wonders if big trees and homegrown food will exist here in 50 years. Or in 20. Or in 10. These are reasonable concerns, I know. I’m a journalist who covers climate change, and I’ve written thousands of words about the Southwest’s hot, dry future. Yet whenever Colin fretted, I found myself punting, offering half-baked reassurances that we’d be fine.

And then this year, winter never came. I watered the trees in our yard in early February. On April Fool’s Day, I hiked to 11,000 feet without snowshoes. A friend and her husband who were planning a spring trip to Montana said they wanted to scope it out as a place to live. “We can’t have all our money tied up in property in a place that’s going to run out of water!” she told me.

I began to worry, too, that after a long and frequently distant romance, I’d married us to a town without reckoning with the particulars of its future. How likely is this place to become barren? How soon? Will we have the tools to endure it? We’d eloped.

Now, in this rapaciously dry year, a quiet question grew louder: What are we doing here? I felt a sudden need to understand what Colin and I stood to lose as the heat intensified and the world dried out. And I wondered if we should leave.

After our wedding, Colin and I planted an elderberry bush, his favorite plant, in our yard in Santa Fe. We had found a variety native to New Mexico, and our parents had added soil from their homes to the plant’s pot during the ceremony. Putting it in the ground was our first act as homeowners.

We had started to look at real estate soon after moving, though Colin was reluctant to make the financial and physical commitment. I had promised that our move to New Mexico didn’t have to be final. We’ll give it five years, we said. We looked at loads of houses before we found one: It was a bank-owned wreck with a leaky roof, a bathtub that drained into the yard through a haphazard hole in the wall, and a mess of once-wet dog food still caked to the kitchen floor. Yet it had “good bones,” as they say, and we knew right away that it fit. More than money, we had time and the innocent enthusiasm of first-time renovators.

We thought we’d move in within months. Instead, it took more than a year. I learned how to tile and chiseled fossilized gunk from the floors. And Colin got to entertain his fantasy of raising his own house, rebuilding walls, replacing windows, building a shower, plumbing sinks.

Neither of us slept as well as we used to. We were stressed by our irregular paychecks. We’d begun a splintered conversation about having children. Our house was on a well. At first, we thought this was a liability, but people told us it was an asset: In Santa Fe, city water is expensive and well water is free. We looked into hooking up to the city system anyway, but it would have been pricey, and the guy who replaced our sewer line advised us to just wait until our well ran dry.

Conversations like this felt like little warnings. One truism about the future is that climate change will spare no place. Still, I suspect the threat of warming feels more existential in New Mexico than it does in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. Drought has gripped the Southwest for 19 years, more than half my life. It’s been dry in two ways: First, less water has fallen from the sky. And second, it’s been unusually hot.

By the time we arrived in Santa Fe, the Jemez Mountains west of town had become an archetype of the murderous impact climate change will have on forests. Drought, heat, and insect outbreaks had killed 95 percent of the old piñon pines over large portions of the southeast Jemez. This year, the moisture in living trees in the Santa Fe National Forest has hit levels lower than those you’d find in lumber at Home Depot. The fire risk was so high by June 1 that the US Forest Service closed all 1.6 million acres of the forest to the public.

The forecasts for our water supplies are equally grim. The Colorado River’s flows are down about 20 percent since the start of the drought, and scientists believe the remarkable heat is responsible for up to half of the decline. By the end of the century, some say, the amount of water in the Southwest’s rivers could plummet by 50 percent.

We could see the power of the parched air and scorching sun in our own yard. Our elderberry seemed to melt in the midday sun. It sacrificed limbs, their leaves shriveling brown and crisp. Is it a bad sign if our wedding plant dies? We joked about it, but it felt like an omen. Last year, Colin divided its roots, and he transplanted part of it into the shade this spring, a kind of insurance against death.

Aridity, in one way or another, has pushed or drawn people to New Mexico for centuries. Pueblo peoples came in part because a punishing drought strained their societies in the Four Corners and it was time to start anew. In the late 1800s, white Easterners came because the aridity healed. These so-called “lungers” suffered from tuberculosis, and doctors believed dry air and sunshine could sap the damaging moisture from patients’ lungs.

In the 1940s, my dad’s parents, Polly and Thornton Carswell, were living in Carmel, California, a countercultural refuge from their buttoned-up hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Polly was a free spirit, a weaver, who kept a few demure beige dresses to wear back to Springfield. Out West, she wore flowing skirts, colorful aprons, heavy turquoise jewelry, and orange lipstick, and carried a basket instead of a purse.

A couple years after they moved to Santa Fe, they started a restaurant. They screen-printed the menus and hosted jazz concerts there, and when business was slow, they pulled the boys out of school and took road trips through Mexico. They bought the house on the hill and were laid to rest beside its back door.

Their story taught me about where I came from, both the place and the people: brave, adventurous, entrepreneurial folk who took risks and led lives that were, above all, interesting. Yet when I asked my family about this story recently, hoping to understand it better, another version emerged. Thornton told my Aunt Linnea that the family had moved to New Mexico in part for protection from Polly’s troubled mind. Once, when my dad was an infant, Thornton found Polly carrying him toward the ocean, intending to give him to it, to let the waves swallow his tiny body whole. In this version of the story, Thornton came here to escape the ocean, drawn by the sense of security that came not from what New Mexico had but from what it lacked: too much water.

As this spring wore on, though, the thirsty days piling up, this force that had lured my family here with its power to heal, and apparently, to protect, began to feel like a real threat. Halfway across the world, amid another deep, multi-year drought, the residents of Cape Town, South Africa, were anticipating “Day Zero,” when the city’s taps would run totally dry and residents would have to line up for water rations. Could that happen here? And if it did, what would become of this home we were building?

The house was our shelter, our first big project together, but it was also a foundation. We’d both chosen fulfilling careers that paid poorly, and if we wanted to travel, go out to eat, support a future child, make self-employment viable long term and generally not live in perpetual fear of our bank balance, we figured we should grow the modest money we made.

I got in touch with Kim Shanahan, the head of the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association, to gauge how reality-based my fear was. It wasn’t that long ago that the developers and contractors he represents had faced their own demise. In 2002, a nail-bitingly dry year that followed several pitiful winters, Santa Fe’s aboveground reservoirs dipped precipitously low, and the city was draining groundwater through its wells at frightening rates. The city implemented water restrictions, and the citizenry aimed pitchforks at developers. If there wasn’t enough water for the people already here, they felt, there wasn’t a drop to spare for new homes. The city council debated whether to stop issuing building permits.

This year, though, for whatever reason, the city didn’t seem to be facing imminent crisis. Were water cuts or construction moratoriums on the horizon? Shanahan didn’t think so, and he told me something had changed: toilets. To deal with the water shortage and to avoid a building moratorium, the city purchased 10,000 low-flow toilets and offered them free to anyone who would replace an aging one. Then the city added a water conservation fee to utility bills that funds rebates for things like efficient clothes washers, fixtures, and rain barrels. The water saved through the program goes into a “bank,” and today builders have to buy offset credits from it so that water use doesn’t rise with new construction.

All this has allowed the city’s population to grow even as water consumption has declined. Combined with rules that limit outdoor watering and pricing that incentivizes conservation, Santa Fe has reduced its per capita consumption from 168 gallons per day in 1995 to 90 today. Crucially, it has also diversified its supply, piping water from the Colorado River Basin to the Rio Grande, allowing the city to rest wells and turn groundwater into drought insurance. So far, it’s worked.

“On a personal level, yeah, this is frightening,” Shanahan admitted. “I’ve never seen it so damn dry. But I’m feeling more bullish about our ability to be sustainable with diminishing resources.”

The city doesn’t have much choice but to try. An in-depth 2015 study of the risk climate change poses to Santa Fe’s water found that as the population continues to grow, the city and county’s supply could fall short of demand by as much as 3 billion gallons by 2055. That’s a lot — about equal to the city’s current annual consumption.

Strangely enough, though, learning all this made me less fearful. It helped to define the problem, and reminded me that we were agents in this mess, not blind victims. In that sense, the drought in Santa Fe had a strange upside: It forced the conversation. And the result so far seems to prove journalist John Fleck’s principle of water: When people have less, they use less. Even my husband was more adaptable than I’d expected, worrying as I had that the high desert would never satiate his desire for leafy canopies and grapefruit-size garden tomatoes. He told me recently that when we started looking at houses, he decided: Screw the consequences. “Look, if we all run out of water and lose everything,” he told a friend, “that’s just going to be part of our story.”

Colin had confronted the uncertainty by making peace with it. I was searching instead for objective information to confirm my fears that our move was misguided, our own act of climate change denial. But the question of whether we should stay or go was turning out to be complicated; even the angles that seemed straightforward weren’t. Shanahan pointed out that if water limited the city’s growth, the value of our home might go up.

That’s how supply and demand should work, Grady Gammage, a lawyer, water expert, and sometimes developer in Phoenix, told me. But the idea that there’s not enough water to build houses? “That’s going to scare people, so it might constrain demand.” Claudia Borchert, Santa Fe County’s sustainability manager, remarked over coffee that she’d just fielded a call from an anxious homeowner asking if his property value was safe. “Boy, in the short term, yes,” she told him. “In the long term, all bets are off. It won’t necessarily be that there’s no water, but will people want to live here?”

It occurred to me that the drought is a little like the Trump presidency. You know it’s bad, and that it could herald much worse. But in the present moment, life feels strangely normal. Sure, draconian water shortages and the demise of our democracy are real possibilities — not even distant ones — but you’re not really suffering. Not yet. It’s hard to tell how much you will. If this is your reality, as it is mine, you’re probably not an immigrant, or a farmer, or a tribal member, or poor, or sick, or brown-skinned. You’re lucky. The crisis is real, and it’s not.

In this limbo, I felt a melancholy that was both hard to identify and hard to shake. A hot day no longer felt like just a hot day, something that would pass. On a cloudless Saturday in May, shoppers at a plant nursery griped about how Santa Fe was becoming like Albuquerque, the sweatier city to our south. The heat seemed imbued with finality, a change that could not be undone.

My grandmother Polly died the year before I was born. After my dad’s birth, she suffered bouts of what the family calls “sickness.” Her illness was mental — schizophrenia, manic depression, or some other condition doctors didn’t understand. With her glasses on, she could see St. Peter. She wailed in bed. One night at the hospital, she continued to wail after doctors had pumped her full of enough sedatives to, as they told my parents, “kill a horse.”

My parents used to rent the house on the hill during the school year. Once, a renter abruptly moved out mid-lease, saying that Polly’s ghost had appeared over her bed in the middle of the night, growling at her to “get out.” As a kid, the haunting didn’t scare me. I thought it was awesome and hoped it was real. I secretly hated the renters: Nice as they were, I didn’t want them in our house or on our land.

My attachment to the place was always instinctual. My parents occasionally talked about selling it, daydreaming about what they’d do with the money. I reacted to these conversations defensively, like a coiled snake. I’m an only child, and I told them that when they died, it was what I would have left of my family. The house and the land would be my memory.

“Querencia,” the late New Mexico poet and historian Estevan Arellano has written, “is a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn. Folklore tells us that ‘no hay mejor querencia que tu corral,’ there is no better place than your corral — a typical saying that alludes to where someone is raised, the place of one’s memories, of one’s affections, of things one loves and, above all, where one feels safe.”

Staying put may not mean that Colin and I lose what we’ve put into our home, and it may not mean running out of water. But it may mean bearing witness to the slow death of the Rio Grande. It may mean biting our nails with the rest of the city every June, hoping this won’t be the year that a mushroom cloud of smoke rises from the Santa Fe Mountains, which are primed for a destructive fire. If the mountains do burn big and hot, and the tourists that are Colin’s customers stay away, it may mean recalibrating his business plan. It may mean more summer months when we can’t escape to the cool of the forest because the forest is closed. And it already means grappling with the more unsettling feelings that accumulate from these smaller worries.

In 2005, the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to characterize the peculiar modern condition caused by circumstances like these — “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’” Solastalgia describes a loss that is less tangible than psychic. “It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault,” Albrecht writes. “It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging to a particular place and a feeling of distress about its transformation.”

When the drought began in the late 1990s, my parents and I had stopped spending summers in Santa Fe. A couple of years into the drought, my uncle called to report that the piñon trees surrounding the house on the hill were dying. The news of the tree die-off inspired apprehension and a kind of fear — my dad said he was afraid to go back.

The total transformation of landscapes — and of a community’s sense of place — isn’t an abstract possibility in New Mexico. It’s already happened to communities in the Jemez Mountains, where a series of wildfires have torched the forests. And so on a Sunday afternoon, I visited a woman named Terry Foxx at the home she’s evacuated twice during recent burns, interrupting her afternoon sewing to ask about the aftermath.

Foxx has studied the fire ecology of the Jemez since the 1970s, and after the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, which burned more than 400 homes in Los Alamos, she also became something of a community therapist. She collected fire stories and published them in a spiral-bound book. She gave community lectures on how life returns to the forest, and about the spiritual toll of landscape loss.

“There was grief, just intense grief,” Foxx told me. “Some people would say, ‘I have no right to be grieving because so-and-so lost their home.’ I thought, wait a second, we have all lost something. It was that mountain that used to have trees on it.”

Some people in Los Alamos did flee, though. Foxx told me about one couple who left because they loved trees and couldn’t stand to look at a mountain of blackened sticks. They moved to Colorado, right back into the pines. Others rebuilt, the fire strengthening their resolve to stay. When we experience loss, Foxx said, “It’s like, ‘What can I do?’ You either feel a deep sense of depression or, if you can, you find some way to help.” Two men formed a group called the Volunteer Task Force that rebuilt trails, planted trees, and pelted the burn scars with golf ball-size mash-ups of clay and wildflower seeds made by schoolchildren, nursing home residents, and others. It gave people a sense of ownership, Foxx told me, and of hope.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I believe we need to be doing everything we can to prevent polluting and changing our area. But regardless of what we do, nature is here. I say nature adjusts to change easier than we as humans do.”

The answers I sought, I began to understand, could not be found in climate studies, water plans, or market analyses, because my questions, my doubts, weren’t ultimately about logic or pragmatism. They were about love.

After leaving Terry Foxx’s House, I drove to the forest and hiked to the edge of a burn scar. I sat below a gnarled old ponderosa that had survived the fire, facing a hillside that looked like a moonscape, and wrote Colin a letter.

Ecologists call wildfires “disturbance events.” In nature, disturbance often gives rise to new life. The large aspen stands in the Sangre de Cristos facing Santa Fe, the trees whose colors help us measure the seasons, are there because a fire raced over the mountain, killing conifer stands whole. My marriage had been through its own disturbance event. For months, our conversation about children had not gone well. I wanted a child, but the idea made Colin anxious. He wasn’t ready yet, and unsure that he ever would be. I was hurt by his reluctance.

One night, I blurted out a tearful and angry ultimatum, without knowing whether I meant it. It bruised him in a way that one apology, then another, couldn’t quite heal. Eventually, though, the difficult conversations grew more honest and empathetic. We turned toward each other, closing the raw space between us, and as we did, we felt more in love. Still, the issue was unresolved. Some days, I was fine with that. Others, I’d be struck by a sudden and profound sadness.

The night before had been one of those nights, so I decided to write what was hard for me to say. I told him that if we didn’t have a kid, I still wanted to buy the weedy dirt patch next door together and build a studio and make it beautiful. And if we did have a kid, I wanted Colin to teach them to make buttermilk biscuits, to hear them squeal as he chased them around the yard like a deranged zombie. He cried when he read the letter, and then he baked me a perfect apple pie.

I began to think that our relationships with places aren’t so different from our relationships with people. They are emotional and particular. Over time, there is tumult. That has been true for as long as people have lived on the side of volcanoes or in deserts or on top of tectonic faults. What’s both hard and hopeful about this new tumult is that, unlike an eruption, a natural drought cycle, or an earthquake, it’s not inevitable. The change is the result of the choice we are making to continue our carbon binge.

The disturbance in my marriage had ultimately deepened our commitment to our joined lives. And maybe the same should be true of our relationships with our places. A better response than running might be to spend more time walking the forests and canyons of the landscapes we love, even as they change, to engage more deeply, to fight for them. After all, leaving might not be a form of protection but just another form of loss.

After my parents retired a few years ago, their desire to come home overrode any fear of what they’d find there. They’re living in the Santa Fe house again — back in their “corral” — and the tree die-off wasn’t as bad as they’d feared. The junipers are toughing it out, and some piñons survived. A decent number of piñons are even re-sprouting in the shelter of old junipers.

There was something else, too: a weed that popped up near the front door. My dad didn’t recognize it, but he didn’t pull it up. Then one day, it erupted in purple flowers. It was a native wildflower called desert four o’clock, and he thought it might be Polly, signaling her approval that they were back. Every year since, it has returned. And every year, it has bloomed.

This essay is adapted from an article in High Country News.

Cally Carswell is a freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a longtime contributing editor at High Country News.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> Why are people still living in the western US with the constant threat of climate change?

via The Conservative Brief

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Hurricane Maria: Inside Puerto Rican Barrio's Fight to Survive

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/hurricane-maria-inside-puerto-rican-barrios-fight-to-survive/

Hurricane Maria: Inside Puerto Rican Barrio's Fight to Survive

On a hot and cloudless afternoon in mid-October, the eight San Juan barrios known collectively as the G8 look a lot like other neighborhoods in the hurricane-battered capital. Uprooted trees lean against roofless homes. Piles of storm detritus and soggy furniture crowd the streets, an odd diesel generator providing a rumbling soundtrack and some power, still a rare commodity on the island three weeks after Hurricane Maria laid waste to the national grid.

But these barrios are unique – a disaster zone within a disaster zone. For decades, G8 residents have lived in a near-permanent state of emergency on the perimeter of San Juan’s gleaming “golden mile” business district. The immediate cause of this emergency is a collapsed waterway: 25,000 people are clustered along the Caño Martín Peña, an inland channel that once drained rainfall into lush mangrove swamps, then carried it east into the San Juan Bay. But that was a long time ago. Unregulated dumping and development have narrowed and clogged the Martín Peña into a parody of a functioning wetland. Since the 1970s, heavy rains have brought flooding to the streets of Cantera, Obrero San Ciprian, and the six other G8 neighborhoods. All lack a modern sewage system, meaning floodwaters invariably mix with trash and waste-waters.

“Growing up here, you get used to waking up after heavy rain to find everything floating, water for blocks around your house,” says Chrismaury Alomar, a 22-year-old community leader from the G8 neighborhood of Las Monjas. “The Maria surge was worse, just like we knew it would be.”

Routine flooding, government neglect and vulnerability. These have defined much of life and local identity in the G8, sometimes called the Caño communities. They’ve also weaved a social fabric of special strength, its eight bolts connected by community institutions that offer a model of “resilience” – that new-century buzzword for building out social and environmental defenses in an age of accelerating climate change.

“The island is going to receive more intense hurricanes as the atmosphere and oceans warm,” says Louis Jorge Rivera Herrera, a San Juan-based environmental scientist and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. “The kind of community projects you see in El Caño, deeply rooted in citizen involvement and empowerment, provide an excellent footprint to follow in the years ahead.”

“Resilience” translates to Spanish as “resistencia,” a term with a double meaning that captures the essence of the G8’s political culture. This culture has effectively organized campaigns for infrastructure investment by the government (promised but as-yet undelivered), and built networks of participatory democracy that from webs within and between the barrios.

This culture, which has helped G8 residents deal with regular flooding for years, helped them weather the heavier hits of Irma and Maria.

“Our communities may not have the most resources, but they know how to rapidly organize and help themselves,” says Estrella Santiago, an environmental manager with Project Enlace, an umbrella organization for G8 institutions. “Being organized and having a history of active participation and solidarity was essential after Maria, especially in the crucial first week. The leadership already knew the specific needs of families, who were most affected, who needed diapers, a tarp, money. They also had experience with dirty floodwater and preventing diseases. In a lot of ways, people in the G8 were more prepared and more open to help each other.”

The Mantin Pena Channel in San Juan, before Maria hit. Stephanie Maze/National Geographic/Getty

In the streets of Israel-Bitumul, a Caño community, I meet barrio president Jose Gonzalez as he delivers bottles of water. A jolly giant of a man, he makes sure I notice a nearby wall covered with political murals. “The kids made these,” he says. One depicts residents marching under a banner posing the question, “If you get to walk on carpets, why do we have to walk in shit?” Another shows a youth blocking a bulldozer and declaring, with an outstretched hand, “I am from here, and here I will remain.”

“They’d love to get rid of us,” says Gonzalez, 42. “Just like they did with Barrio Tokio.” Tokio, once the westernmost barrio of the Caño communities, was razed in the 1980s, its residents removed but not resettled. After the nearest section of the channel was dredged, construction began on high-rise condos, a sports stadium, and office towers. “We’re not going to let the city and developers do that again.”

At the center of the G8’s web of community networks is Project Enlace, which coordinates a range of activities across the area, including youth groups and adult education, urban farming and public art. In 2004, Enlace established a Community Land Trust to prevent displacement and gentrification; it marked the first time an “informal settlement” (as the G8 is designated) had ever used a public-private land trust to protect its territory. The pioneering Trust has since inspired other similar communities around the world and drawn international notice, including a UN World Habitat Award.

The offices of Project Enlace served as an emergency bunker in the immediate aftermath of Maria. Cells were established to organize clean ups, search and rescue, and other forms of aid. It also provided a ready-made network for city and federal authorities to plug into. In the days after the storm, FEMA contacted Enlace and asked them to help canvass the Caño communities’ needs: Who needed a tarp? Who needed wood? Who needed insulin?

G8 residents signed up to assist in distributing federal relief, but have sometimes found FEMA to be a frustrating partner.

“They never gave us a time frame for delivering the aid, and from what I have seen, I have little faith,” says Evelyn Quinones, a G8 resident who collected aid requests on behalf of FEMA. “We do this work with a lot of love, but also with a lot of sadness. We can’t tell people when the aid will come. We’re still waiting.”

While sympathetic to the magnitude of FEMA’s job, some G8 leaders have been disappointed by what they say are gaps in the agency’s ground game. Lucy Cruz, the president of G8 Association, says FEMA is short on Spanish-language technicians, and has asked the communities to provide translators during visits. When Cruz visited FEMA’s headquarters in the convention center, she says only a handful of FEMA staff members spoke Spanish. And very few of those could be found in the communities where they were most needed.

The national guard in Barrio Obrero distributing water and food. Xavier J. Araujo/AP

“We understand they’re stretched thin, but we are the most impacted communities in San Juan,” says Cruz. “We expected them to at least have offices here on the ground. They’re asking us to prepare claims through the Internet and over the phone, but people don’t have access to those things.”

In an email, FEMA’s spokesperson in San Juan, Daniel Stoneking, disputed such accounts, saying the agency had sufficient language resources on the island. “At least a quarter of the 1,500 people in the convention center are bilingual,” he wrote. “Many of our staff are local citizens. Virtually all of the Puerto Rico National Guard are bilingual. [Thirty] days and I have not once had a problem communicating with anyone. Responders and survivors have been working well together with grace and dignity.”  

The federal government, meanwhile, has yet to deliver on its promise to dredge the Martín Peña and help prevent and mitigate future flooding. No timeline or funding plan has been announced; both are complicated by Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and the austerity measures imposed by the Washington-appointed Financial Oversight Board. The role of the board in its problems is something G8 residents understand very well.

“You can see the building where they have their offices from here,” says Alomar, the activist from Las Monjas. “There’s money for debt payments, but not to build us the same infrastructure everybody else has? We deserve to live healthy, the same as the rich. People are tired of waiting.”

By triggering a wave of emigration, Maria has brought the G8 communities full circle. The growth of the barrios dates to the aftermath of San Ciprian, a 1932 hurricane that devastated much of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy. The government encouraged newly unemployed farmers to migrate to San Juan, find work in the factories, and build homes by clearing the mangrove forests on the banks of the Martín Peña Channel. Nearly nine decades later, Maria has triggered another wave of migration, this time an exodus for the U.S. mainland.

It has not escaped residents that Maria’s dramatic highlighting of their arguments for environmental justice has accelerated the depopulation of the community. Like so many from around the island, many third- and fourth-generation G8 residents are making plans to leave. Among them is a very reluctant Chris Alomar, the 22-year old organizer from Las Monjas. His mother has enforced plans to move the family to Hartford, Connecticut, before the end of the year.

Standing on a bridge overlooking the narrow canal, Alomar tells me he plans to return to Las Monjas as soon as he can.

“I told my mom I’m not staying long,” he says. “My grandparents lived here. Survived here. Sometimes, yeah, it’s hard. Sometimes it makes you sad. Who wouldn’t get depressed? We live in shitty ass conditions. Flooding. Bad plumbing. But that’s when you got to hold yourself up. We’ve been through a lot. And we still here.”

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