Agriculture, forestry, and other types of land use account for 23 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC. To tackle such impacts, the IPCC included one idea that’s popping up more and more: a wide-scale shift to plant-based diets featuring sustainably produced foods.

“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change,” Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, said in a press release. (In the summary of the report, the IPCC acknowledges that factors like financial barriers and cultural habits may influence the adoption of such diets.)

But how much difference can such choices really make? A wealth of research supports the idea that adopting a low- or no-meat diet is a significant way to lower an individual’s greenhouse gas footprint. The IPCC report cites data showing that livestock production accounts for the greatest portion of ice-free land on Earth’s surface, and contributed to over half of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions in 2014.

While there is limited data available that can confidently measure the expansion of the meatless population, societal indicators like the double-digit sales growth of plant-based food options between 2014 and 2017 reflect a growing consumer demand for vegan and vegetarian foods. Still, an analysis by Animal Charity Evaluators found that between 2 and 6 percent of Americans self-identify as vegetarians, and only 1 percent of Americans self-identify as vegetarians and report never consuming meat.

“The fundamental problem with climate change is that it’s a collective problem, but it rises out of lots of individual decisions. Society’s challenge is to figure out how we can influence those decisions in a way that generates a more positive collective outcome,” says Keith Wiebe, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.*

Wiebe argues that policy has limited potential to influence individual dietary choices. He sees a tax on meat, for instance, as a blunt tool that doesn’t take into account the nuance of people’s varied dietary needs. Such a tax also wouldn’t necessarily sway a wealthy consumer from buying meat because food is already a relatively small portion of their expenses, and a small price increase makes little difference to them, he says.

Something that has a greater influence, Wiebe says, is generational social change. He notes, for example, how car ownership, which was a hallmark of independence and freedom when he was young, has declined greatly in his children’s generation. Fewer young people need or want cars. Similarly, young people today are much more tuned in to global concerns like climate change than Wiebe’s generation was, he said. This fact is visible through the worldwide participation in youth climate strikes earlier this year.

“These types of generational changes can have a big impact well beyond anything that would come out of a policy measure or an educational system that would tell you how to change your behavior,” he says.

David Festa, senior vice president for ecosystems for the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that placing too much emphasis on individual dietary choices oversimplifies the highly complex system of agriculture. Instead of thinking just about what they eat, more people should be thinking about and having conversations about how their food is produced and what it means to produce food in a sustainable way, he says.

For farmers, sustainable food production has to do with things like soil health, groundwater, and fertilizer efficiency. If farmers build the health of their soil rather than strip it of its nutrients, manage water without depleting underground aquifers, and use fertilizer in a way that avoids pollution of water and air, then that will ultimately increase crop yields, Festa says.

Consumer demand is one of four important variables that, when combined, can influence and shape farming practices, according to Festa. The other three are the culture of farming communities, governmental policies, and the economic system that drives farming. The rise of organic farming exemplifies how these factors can come together: Consumers want organic food, the United States Department of Agriculture has issued policy standards for it, farmers have grown comfortable in their communities turning to organic practices, and there’s an economic incentive for farmers to grow organic in the form of price premiums. Festa argues that this is why organic farming in the U.S. saw a 56 percent increase between 2011 and 2016.

To Festa, the success of the organic movement is an indicator that people already care about the nuances of how their food is manufactured or grown, and those conversations will lead to more effective, sustainable change than simply urging people to do something like stop eating meat or adopt new dietary guidelines: “You get more traction with people [by] instead of saying ‘Don’t do this,’ say[ing]: ‘Hey, ask how your beef was produced. Find out more about that. Learn about that.'”

While Wiebe says policy changes can have limited influence on consumer dietary choices, Festa says those changes are, in fact, making a big difference for sustainable production. For instance, as a part of the 2018 farm bill, the USDA now provides grants to farmers to incentivize them to adopt practices like no-till and cover crops, which researchers have found help keep carbon in the soil rather than releasing it in the air, improve overall soil health, and increase crop yields.

“Policies that support sustainable land management, ensure the supply of food for vulnerable populations, and keep carbon in the ground while reducing greenhouse gas emissions are important,” Eduardo Calvo, co-chair of the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, said in the IPCC press release.

Given the state of our global climate, scientists, policymakers, farmers, and individual consumers will inevitably keep thinking about how they can do their part to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and improve the sustainability of our land and our food supply. Wiebe points out that, as more organizations like the IPCC promote diets rich in plant-based foods, it’s important to consider the implications of such a large-scale diet shift on the environment—something nobody has yet researched or projected, he says.

“Some of the dietary recommendations talk about getting more protein from nuts, for example,” Wiebe says. “If all of a sudden seven billion people double their consumption of ground nuts or almonds or other types of nuts, that’s going to have a big impact on land use going to those crops that we really haven’t looked at yet.”

*Update—August 16th, 2019: This post has been updated with the correct spelling of Keith Wiebe’s name and to clarify his position on policy’s potential to influence individual dietary choices.

The post How Much Can Dietary Changes and Food Production Practices Help Mitigate Climate Change? appeared first on Pacific Standard.

Es el último día de marzo de 2018, el día antes de Pascua, el comienzo de la temporada de la cosecha de las cebollas. Para media mañana, Berenise, de 16 años, ya había llenado algunos baldes. Al hacer su trabajo usaba unas tijeras afiladas y oxidadas que exigían precisión cuidadosa; un error de cálculo, y podría perder un dedo. A unos pasos de distancia de sus padres, Berenise trabajaba junto a su hermano Salvador, de 10 años. La luz del sol brillaba sobre kilómetros y kilómetros de campos verdes y llanos, interrumpidos solo por unos pocos caminos de terracería. Cuando llega el momento de la cosecha, las familias multigeneracionales, desde niños pequeños hasta abuelos, se agrupan entre los surcos. La tierra está salpicada de cubetas de plástico, cajas de embalaje y algunos baños portátiles azules. Las cebollas cubren el suelo, hasta donde alcanza la vista; el aire huele dulce y penetrante. Las espaldas de los trabajadores están encorvadas por el hábito; sus cabezas cubiertas con sombreros y capuchas, y sus pantalones y dedos manchados con clorofila y barro.

Esta escena sucedió cerca de McAllen en el extremo sur de Texas a lo largo de la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México, pero se repite, campo tras campo, día tras día, en más de un millón de acres de tierra de cultivo en el Valle del Río Grande. Continúa y continúa hasta que la luz del día desaparece o la última verdura es recogida y embalada—lo que ocurra primero. En este campo, Berenise y su hermano habían desarrollado una rutina: agarrar una cebolla, sacudir la tierra, cortar las verduras, cortar las raíces, tirar la cebolla en un balde; cuando este se llena, Berenise lo lleva a una caja de plástico tan alta como sus caderas, levanta el cubo y lo descarga. Con una caja llena la familia gana $16.

“Si trabajas duro, es bueno”, dijo el padre, Salvador Sr., de 43 años, que estuvo dispuesto a compartir públicamente casi cada detalle de su vida y su trabajo, excepto el apellido de su familia—porque él y su esposa son inmigrantes indocumentados de Veracruz, México. “El trabajo en los campos—es duro”, expresó. Lo había estado haciendo durante los últimos tres años después de que fracasara como mecánico; desde entonces, ha laborado en los campos y arreglando autos por dinero extra. “Si tuviera documentos, pues tendría un trabajos seguro”.

Este trabajo—el agrícola—es uno que nadie quiere. Es arduo, y con frecuencia tiene consecuencias nocivas. “Trabajaba como burro todo el tiempo”, recuerda Juliana Martínez, una abuela de 85 años que pasó la mayor parte de su vida en los campos. Comenzó de niña en México, luego trabajó durante décadas en el sur de Texas. En ese entonces no se quejaba. “Quizás cuando sea mayor me comenzará a doler”, bromea. Pero tuvo suerte: entre los trabajadores agrícolas, las lesiones son comunes; a veces los incapacitan, y otras los matan. Además, los campesinos hablan de índices asombrosamente altos de cáncer, diabetes, enfermedades como el Parkinson y Alzheimer, defectos de nacimiento y muertes prematuras—y todos sospechan que la culpable es la exposición a pesticidas.

Aun así, en todo Estados Unidos, hasta 3 millones de personas trabajan en los campos (los cálculos varían en gran medida; no hay una cuenta exacta del total de trabajadores agrícolas en el país). La única razón por la que están cosechando esos cultivos es porque no tienen otra alternativa”, dice Juan Anciso, catedrático en Texas A&M AgriLife, un servicio de investigación y extensión agrícola en Weslaco. No tienen la educación o las habilidades laborales necesarias para sacarlos de ese rubro, agregó. Y la industria alimenticia, en muchos casos, tiene también pocas alternativas; no hay máquinas para recoger muchas de las verduras, y hierbas. El trabajo requiere manos humanas. Es duro, monótono y respalda a una industria que vale aproximadamente $990 mil millones—y alimenta a la nación. Muchos estadounidenses, tal vez la mayoría, no piensan en eso, dice Anciso. “Vas y comes tu ensalada, pero no te das cuenta que alguien se está rompiendo la espalda para cosechar eso”. Lo más sorprendente de todo es que cientos de miles de estos trabajadores son menores de edad—y eso es perfectamente legal.

En realidad, es difícil medir con precisión cuántos niños están trabajando en granjas estadounidenses (en particular porque varias agencias usan criterios distintos y edades diferentes en sus mediciones), pero una Encuesta de Lesiones Agrícolas Infantiles de 2014 estima que la cifra es de es 524,000.

Había una brisa constante ese día en el campo de cebolla, lo que ayudó a reducir el calor. Aun así, la frente de Berenise estaba salpicada de sudor. De vez en cuando, los semis hacían ruido en la carretera cercana, pero sobre todo el campo estaba en silencio, excepto por el sonido filoso de tijeras y el desmoronamiento de los gránulos de tierra al caer de las cebollas al suelo. Hablar es tiempo, y el tiempo es dinero—así que las palabras eran escasas. Pero Berenise hizo una pausa por un momento para decir que estaba esperando el domingo de Pascua y un descanso de los campos. “Vamos a ir al zoológico, toda la familia”, dijo. “No he ido en mucho tiempo porque mis padres siempre están trabajando”.

A la mañana siguiente, en todo el valle, los campos estaban vacíos, las iglesias repletas. A pocos kilómetros del campo de cebolla en la ciudad de San Juan, la familia Martínez—de cuatro generaciones—se reunía para una fiesta en el patio trasero con pollo y arroz, frijoles y salsa, y juegos de sillas musicales. “No Rompas Más (Mi Pobre Corazón)”, una versión en español de “Achy Breaky Heart”, sonaba por altavoces al aire libre. Juliana Martínez repartía cáscaras de huevo que había pintado y llenado con confeti y talco para bebés. Es una tradición mexicana que aprendió en su ciudad natal, y que ha celebrado desde que tenía 6 años. De pronto, todos se animaron, rompiendo huevos en la cabeza, dejando a los presentes, la casa, los árboles empolvados y manchados en un arcoíris de color pastel.

Juliana nació al otro lado de la frontera pero ha vivido la mayor parte de su vida en Texas como campesina, luego como la esposa de un trabajador agrícola, y finalmente madre de nueve hijos. Solía llevar a sus hijos al campo, dejándolos bajo una pequeña carpa en la sombra mientras trabajaba en el algodón, las zanahorias, los chiles y las remolachas de 7 a.m. a 6 p.m. En aquel entonces, cuando llegaba el calor abrasador del verano del sur de Texas, la familia Martínez emigraría al Medio Oeste con sus campos más fríos. Seguirían las estaciones, viajando hacia el norte de pueblo en pueblo, recogiendo una cosecha aquí, y otra allá.

Más de 300,000 niños en todo Estados Unidos emigraron para seguir la cosecha durante el año escolar de 2016-17, según el Departamento de Educación de EE. UU. Cada primavera, comenzando en marzo o abril, muchos de esos estudiantes dejan sus escuelas, se mudan con sus familias, empacando solo lo esencial: sacos de frijoles y arroz, un par de mudadas de ropa, todo dentro de camiones que cruzan las fronteras del condado y del estado. En las palabras de un trabajador, “Como las aves que vuelan nos vamos”. Se supone que cualquier niño que migre por más de 20 millas recibirá acceso al Programa de Educación para Migrantes financiado con fondos federales, que tiene como objetivo coordinar sus estudios en el hogar con sus estudios donde sea que su familia llegue a trabajar. Pero muchos niños son pasados por alto. No terminan sus clases al final del año, y no regresan hasta septiembre u octubre.

La hija de Juliana, María, dijo que su padre nunca reconoció el valor de la educación; sino el valor del trabajo. En sus primeros días en el campo a los 8 años, le dieron una cubeta de helado para llenar con pepinos para encurtir. Comenzó a ganar dinero para su familia y migró con ellos por todo el estado, temporada tras temporada. Para el octavo grado, había abandonado la escuela. Ahora, a los 55 años, María es supervisora en el campo para Rio Fresh, el mismo puesto en la misma compañía donde trabajaba su padre. Después de casi medio siglo en el campo, gana $8.50 por hora.

“Es perfectamente legal que los niños de 12 años trabajen horas ilimitadas en una granja de cualquier tamaño, siempre y cuando no falten a clases y tengan el permiso de sus padres”, dice Margaret Wurth, investigadora principal de la División de Derechos del Niño de Human Rights Watch. La edad mínima federal para trabajar en la mayoría de las industrias es de 14 años; en la agricultura, a menudo es de 12 años. Pero en muchos casos, los niños de cualquier edad pueden trabajar. “En realidad, no hay una edad mínima para que los niños trabajen en la granja de su propia familia”, agrega Wurth. Esta inconsistencia en las leyes es posible porque la agricultura está en gran medida exenta de la Ley de Normas Laborales Justas de Estados Unidos (FLSA por sus siglas en inglés), que establece los requisitos nacionales de salarios, pago de horas extras y empleo juvenil.

Según la Oficina de Rendición de Cuentas del Gobierno de los EE. UU. (GAO por sus siglas en inglés), “los niños de cualquier edad” pueden ser empleados “en cualquier ocupación agrícola en cualquier momento”, siempre que sean empleados oficialmente por un padre (o una persona que esté en lugar de uno de los padres) en una granja “de propiedad u operada por esa persona o padre.

Human Rights Watch (HRW por sus siglas en inglés) argumenta que el trabajo agrícola en Estados Unidos debe considerarse una de las “peores formas de trabajo infantil” según la Organización Internacional del Trabajo. La exención agrícola de la FLSA no solo permite que los niños trabajen más horas, a edades más tempranas, que en cualquier otra industria en EE. UU., sino que también permite que los niños trabajen en condiciones más peligrosas, según HRW. En agricultura, los jóvenes de 16 años pueden realizar tareas que el Departamento de Trabajo considera “particularmente peligrosas”; para todas las demás industrias, la edad mínima es de 18 años.

Estados Unidos llama la atención en lo que respecta al trabajo infantil en la agricultura. Wurth ha realizado gran parte de su investigación en Brasil, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, y ha encontrado diferencias importantes. “Lo que distingue a Estados Unidos de todos estos países es cuán débil es la ley”, dice. “Ninguno de estos otros países permite que los niños de 12 años legalmente trabajen como empleados contratados en granjas… Es increíble que en 2019, ese sea el estado de nuestras leyes de trabajo infantil cuando se trata de la agricultura”.

Como resultado, aproximadamente 33 niños sufren accidentes relacionados con la agricultura todos los días, según cifras del Centro Nacional de Niños para la Salud y Seguridad Rural y Agrícola. Un informe de la GAO publicado el pasado noviembre indica que los niños que trabajan en la agricultura representaron menos del 5,5 por ciento de todos los niños empleados en el país durante cualquier año entre 2003 y 2017, pero el 52 por ciento de todas las muertes infantiles relacionadas con el trabajo en todas las industrias ocurrieron en los campos de 2003 a 2016. El informe documenta 237 de esas muertes de niños en la agricultura entre 2003 y 2016—un promedio de aproximadamente 17 accidentes mortales por año.

Aunque defensores de los derechos humanos y de la salud denuncian los peligros del trabajo agrícola para los niños, las soluciones no son tan simples como prohibir esta práctica. Para algunas familias, el trabajo no solo es esencial para subsistir; también es una tradición. Los lazos se estrechan entre sus integrantes; los niños aprenden a contribuir para el sustento de su familia. Pero la industria agrícola también ha aprendido a beneficiarse de esta ética de trabajo compartida. El salario mínimo nacional es de $7.25 por hora, y la mayoría de las industrias requieren el pago de horas extras por días más largos que ocho horas, pero muchos trabajadores agrícolas, niños y adultos por igual, están exentos de estas condiciones de leyes de Trabajo Justo porque algunas granjas, usualmente operaciones más pequeñas, están excluidas de la FLSA por completo. En cambio, los trabajos agrícolas a menudo aún pagan “tarifas por contenedor”. Cebollas: $16 por caja. Cilantro: $3 por caja de 100 racimos. Col y col rizada: $3 por caja de 72 racimos. Por ley, se supone que esas tarifas por caja equivalen o exceden el salario mínimo al tener en cuenta las horas trabajadas,—pero a menudo no lo hacen, según los defensores de los trabajadores agrícolas en el área.

“La pobreza es el determinante de si un niño va a trabajar en el campo”, dice Norma Flores López, del Proyecto Head Start Migrante de la Costa Este, que preside el Comité de Asuntos Domésticos de la Coalición de Trabajo Infantil. “Si realmente quieres deshacerte del trabajo infantil, si realmente deseas llegar a la raíz de esto, págale lo suficiente a los padres. Dales un salario digno con el que puedan vivir”.

En Edinburg, Texas, Reyes estaba por culminar su año académico. El 10 de mayo, a las 4 a.m., el estudiante de segundo año de secundaria empacaría 13 pares de calcetines, media docena de jeans y camisetas, botas de goma, pantalones de plástico e impermeables, y comenzaría el viaje de tres días en un camión desde su casa al sur de Texas hasta Hart, Michigan, para trabajar durante cinco meses en los campos de espárragos y otras tierras de cultivo. Recogería a mano y, a veces, incluso trabajaría la tierra a mano, rompería terrones y sacaría rocas para preparar un campo para sembrar. “He sufrido mucho, pero sabes qué: necesito ayudar a mi familia”, dijo Reyes. Tenía 16 años, comenzando a cambiar su rostro infantil redondeado por uno con el rastro de patillas afeitadas y la sombra de un bigote. “Si no lo hago yo, ¿quién lo hará?”

Reyes comenzó a ir a Michigan en 2011, cuando tenía solo 9 años, acompañando a su madre, María Magdalena, y su esposo, Carlos, que es como un padre para él. María Magdalena todavía está en el proceso de obtener papeles legales en el país, por lo que pidió que solo se utilicen sus primeros nombres en esta historia. Trabajar en los campos es un asunto familiar. “Es importante estar junto a tu familia, para cuidarse mutuamente, cuidarse las espaldas”, dijo Reyes. Durante su primer año, María Magdalena trabajaba en una máquina motorizada, arrancando espárragos con los dedos, y Reyes caminaba detrás de ella, recogiendo los tallos que dejaba caer o no podía romper, arrojándolos en una caja. “Ella era nueva y no era tan rápida como otras personas”, recordó Reyes. En una foto de ese verano, Reyes se apoya en un azadón. Usa un sombrero de paja y está envuelto en una camisa que le queda grande. María Magdalena pensaba que Hart era verde y hermoso pero nunca se acostumbró al frío y extrañaba a sus padres.

El verano siguiente, las cosas cambiaron. Justo antes de irse a Michigan, Carlos tuvo un sueño: vio a agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza deteniendo a María Magdalena en un retén, donde los funcionarios descubrieron que era una inmigrante indocumentada y la deportaron. La familia va tres veces por semana a una iglesia pentecostal, y cuando Carlos le contó a María Magdalena de su sueño, decidieron que era una señal: Dios no quería que migrara, dijo ella. María Magdalena, de 35 años, solicitó documentos sobre la base de su matrimonio, pero durante siete años, ha estado esperando porque Carlos era un residente legal permanente, no un ciudadano naturalizado, y el proceso lleva más tiempo. (Carlos se hizo ciudadano en junio, lo que puede acelerar la solicitud de María Magdalena).

Mientras esperan, María Magdalena ha mantenido un perfil bajo. “A veces trato de conducir. Me pongo en manos de Dios”, dijo. “La gente pregunta: ¿Tienes licencia? Bueno, solo tengo la licencia que Dios me da”. Desde Edinburg, no se puede ir más de 50 millas al norte de la ciudad antes de toparse con el puesto de control de la Patrulla Fronteriza de Falfurrias en la autopista 281. Debido a que Edinburg se encuentra dentro de la zona fronteriza de 100 millas de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza, incluso ir a cenar a un restaurante mexicano o tomar un café en Starbucks significa que una persona podría ser detenida e interrogada por la Patrulla Fronteriza. La gente vive con el miedo de ir a comprar comida y ser deportada.

Su preocupación está bien fundada. Antes de Pascua, se supo desde el Valle Central de California que los agentes del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas habían arrestado y detenido a trabajadores agrícolas que se dirigían a los campos en las horas previas al amanecer. No es casualidad que ICE se enfoque en los campos. Históricamente, el trabajo agrícola es uno de los primeros trabajos que toma un inmigrante después de llegar a los Estados Unidos. Según cálculos conservadores del Departamento de Trabajo, alrededor del 46 por ciento de trabajadores agrícolas son inmigrantes indocumentados. “Mis padres eran indocumentados, y eso era lo que había—trabajar en los campos”, dice Juanita Valdez-Cox, directora ejecutiva de la sucursal de San Juan de La Unión del Pueblo Entero, la unión comunitaria fundada por César Chávez y Dolores Huerta en 1989. “Los salarios eran muy bajos”, agrega “necesitabas a los niños. Si hiciéramos unas canastas adicionales de cebolla o pimiento o lo que sea que estuviéramos cosechando, era una ayuda para la familia”.

Ese es exactamente el caso de Reyes. El dinero que gana en Michigan cada verano ayuda a su familia a cubrir las facturas del hogar, porque el ingreso de sus padres es inconsistente. Carlos corta el césped en parques cercanos y gana alrededor de $400 por semana trabajando para la ciudad de Alton, a 20 millas de distancia, atrapando animales callejeros. María Magdalena ocasionalmente trabaja en una panadería haciendo pasteles por dinero extra. Reyes usa su propio salario para pagar su ropa, su teléfono celular y, a veces, el teléfono de Carlos también. “Nunca me gusta estar sin trabajo. Nunca me gustó tener mi billetera sin dinero”, dijo el joven.

Pero lo que gana la familia no es suficiente. Su traila o casa móvil necesita trabajo, el baño se comenzó a gotear recientemente, un auto se descompuso y la hermana de tres años de Reyes necesita una niñera—todo lo cual requiere cada centavo que Reyes, María Magdalena y Carlos pueden ganar. Peor aún, el abuelo de Reyes, quien también se llama Reyes, necesita diálisis, pero no tiene documentos migratorios. Durante tres años, la falta de cobertura de seguro del abuelo de 65 años ha significado que no puede buscar el tratamiento de manera regular. Debe esperar hasta que se considere una “emergencia”—solo entonces un hospital cercano lo tratará. Por eso, el joven Reyes tiene una meta especial: ahorrar suficiente dinero para comprar un automóvil que pueda usar para llevar a su abuelo al médico. En mayo, hizo las maletas y se preparó para cinco meses de arduo trabajo

Una noche, en la mesa de su cocina, Reyes dibujó una imagen de la máquina que recolecta espárragos en Michigan: un tractor con “alas”, donde los trabajadores se sientan con las piernas extendidas, las espaldas encorvadas y los brazos tratando de alcanzar los tallos para cortar espárragos con los dedos a medida que el vehículo se mueve por el campo. Reyes lo compara con tratar de tocarte los dedos de los pies todo el día. “Y estás cortando, cortando y cortando” demuestra con sus manos, haciendo el movimiento en el aire tensa los dedos. Pero si los trabajadores pierden un tallo, se hace más grande al día siguiente, y luego es aún más difícil cortarlo. Retuerce los dedos. Duele aún más.

La preocupación y el trabajo han sido estresantes para Reyes. A veces, se ahogaba al hablar, tratando de recuperar el aliento. En los veranos, recordó que, está constantemente mojado por la humedad de los campos de Michigan, y no puede deshacerse del olor de los espárragos cuando se va a casa. Se aferra a su ropa y a su piel. Se va cubierto de tierra y sudor y ese espárrago apesta. Si va a la tienda, sabe que puede recibir miradas desagradables de los otros clientes. “A veces comemos en restaurantes y no quieren que nos sentemos todos sucios al lado de las personas que están comiendo la comida”, dijo Reyes. Entonces el anfitrión del restaurante sienta a la familia en una parte separada del comedor. “Lo entendemos”, dijo.

“Pero tienen que tratar de ser un poco más amables y no juzgar a las personas que están haciendo su comida”.

Al decir hacer, Reyes quiere decir producir. Excavar, escardar, recoger, arrancar, cortar, y cargar—todo el sudor y el trabajo que se necesita para servir una sola comida en un plato. “Nosotros como consumidores tenemos la responsabilidad de reconocer que hay un precio que pagar por lo que consumimos”, dice Bobbi Ryder, expresidente y directora ejecutiva del Centro Nacional para la Salud de los Trabajadores Agrícolas en Buda, Texas. Ese precio va mucho más allá de los dólares y centavos en la línea de pago. En última instancia, afecta la salud y el bienestar a largo plazo de quienes trabajan para alimentar a Estados Unidos.

SSolía ser que la comida era políticamente “invisible”, según el gurú de la comida y periodista Michael Pollan. Ya no es así. Los movimientos alimenticios que han crecido en Estados Unidos y más allá, han convertido la justicia alimentaria en un tema de interés social. Su alcance es amplio, y aboga por todo, desde el bienestar de los animales hasta las prácticas agrícolas sustentables, ingredientes de origen local hasta cultivos urbanos, inocuidad de los alimentos hasta la soberanía alimentaria, diversidad de cultivos para la salud del suelo, conservación del agua para la conservación de la vida silvestre, ética de las unidades de engorde de ganado y la reforma del proyecto de ley agrícola. Pero, ¿dónde, en esa amplia red de atención, está la salud y el bienestar de los trabajadores agrícolas?

Los consumidores pagarán una prima por huevos sin jaula, pollo de corral, leche sin rBGH, duraznos sin pesticidas, maíz que no esté genéticamente modificado. Las etiquetas nos dicen qué salmón es capturado en la naturaleza, qué atún es seguro para los delfines. Nos dicen cuándo nuestra carne está “certificada como humana” y “aprobada para el bienestar animal”. Pero, ¿quién nos dice que ningún migrante resultó perjudicado en el proceso de cosechar nuestra comida, que ningún niño fue privado de una educación para reducir nuestros costos? Andrea Delgado, directora legislativa para comunidades saludables en Earthjustice, una organización sin fines de lucro con sede en California, dice que necesitamos una etiqueta de trabajo agrícola justa que diga: “Este producto llegó a usted, y ningún trabajador se enfermó, lesionó o envenenó antes de que llegara a usted”.

Algunas organizaciones apuntan precisamente a eso. La iniciativa de Alimentos Equitativos, con sede en Washington, D.C., por ejemplo, incluye las condiciones laborales junto con la inocuidad de los alimentos y el manejo de plagas en sus normas para productos con la etiqueta EFI. Desde 2014, EFI ha certificado 13 operaciones agrícolas en Estados Unidos, tres en Canadá, 14 en México y una en Guatemala. Es un paso positivo pero pequeño. En su mayor parte, los trabajadores agrícolas continúan siendo excluidos de la ecuación—simplemente “una ocurrencia tardía”—cuando su salud y su bienestar deben ser fundamentales para los debates alimentarios equitativos, dice Flores López del Proyecto Head Start Migrante de la Costa Este. Los salarios más altos podrían hacer la diferencia—pero “las compañías siguen tratando de asustar a las personas: si le pagamos a la gente un salario justo, los precios se dispararán”, afirma. “En realidad no lo harán. Será unos centavos por libra”.

Philip Martin, un economista laboral de la Universidad de California–Davis, ha realizado investigaciones que muestran que los agricultores generalmente reciben una parte tan pequeña del precio que una persona gasta en el supermercado (entre 28 por ciento y 38 por ciento de frutas y verduras en 2015) que incluso un aumento considerable del 40 por ciento en costos laborales resultaría en incrementos mínimos para el consumidor. Solo $21 más por consumidor cada año, según los números de 2017, pondría a los trabajadores agrícolas por encima del nivel de pobreza.

Sin mejores salarios, hay algo más que afecta los hogares de muchos trabajadores agrícolas: el “hambre”, dice Ann William Cass, directora ejecutiva del Proyecto Azteca, una organización sin fines de lucro que ayuda a las familias en las colonias (barrios temporales que pueden carecer de servicios básicos como electricidad y plomería) y áreas rurales. “La inseguridad alimentaria supera el 81 por ciento en comparación con un promedio nacional del 18 por ciento”, agregó. Se refiere a un informe de octubre de 2017, llevado a cabo por médicos (con la ayuda del Proyecto Azteca) en el Children’s Medical Center en Dallas y el Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, que señala una serie de afecciones a largo plazo relacionadas con una nutrición inadecuada entre los residentes de las colonias rurales en la región del Valle del Río Grande, incluida la desnutrición, la obesidad y la diabetes. La ironía es que, muchas veces, las mismas frutas y verduras que estos trabajadores cosechan no son asequibles para sus familias.

Del mismo modo, para las madres de trabajadores agrícolas como Mireya, que trabaja con su esposo e hijos, Berenise y Salvador, en los campos de cebolla, es un desafío mantenerse al pendiente de comidas para sus hijos, de 2 a 19 años. La mayoría de los días, se despierta alrededor de las 4 a.m. para preparar avena para sus hijos más pequeños antes de irse a los campos. Por la noche regresa tan tarde como las 6 p.m. Cocina algo rápido, pero si no tiene tiempo, compra pollo del restaurante de comida rápida Church’s y lo lleva a casa. Al igual que muchos de los hogares de sus vecinos, el suyo es un trabajo en progreso perpetuo, al que se le agrega y mejora paso a paso a medida que la familia acumula dinero. La cocina es espaciosa y el fregadero descansa en un mostrador de madera casero. La puerta de entrada no tiene portillo, el acabado no está terminado, pero muchas paredes están pintadas. Berenise, su hermano y hermana, y algunas veces sus padres, duermen en una habitación con aire acondicionado. Un par de colchones grandes se juntan, uno con una sábana y el otro sin ella. Salvador Sr. compró la tierra hace 15 años, pagó la electricidad y la fosa séptica, y ha ensamblado la casa, pieza por pieza, desde entonces. Sus aspiraciones son obvias, pero la falta de dinero lo limita.

Su vecindario, como muchas colonias, se encuentra en una zona rural lejos de cualquier supermercado. Por lo tanto, muchos residentes de la colonia confían en las tiendas de la esquina que venden papas fritas, sodas y otras comidas chatarras.

“Si tienen un galón de leche que podrían haber comprado por $2 en el supermercado, la pequeña venta de la esquina lo está vendiendo por $5”, dice Amber Arriagas-Salinas, directora ejecutiva asistente de Proyecto Azteca. “Conozco madres que simplemente no comen y tratan de estirar cada dólar”, agrega. Las escuelas locales ofrecen un programa de comidas durante todo el año, afirma, y es bueno que los niños tengan esa asistencia. “Pero realmente deberíamos preguntarnos por qué los padres no pueden darse el lujo de alimentar a sus hijos, y la realidad es que no tenemos trabajos bien remunerados”, concluye.

Tal vez un ligero aumento en los precios en los supermercados suburbanos no resolvería todos estos problemas. Pero Bobbi Ryder y otros defensores de los trabajadores agrícolas dicen que es hora de que los clientes de los supermercados de clase media comiencen a verse a sí mismos no solo como consumidores, sino también como impulsores de una economía con consecuencias en el mundo real. “No es que una persona se proponga abusar de otra persona”, dice Ryder. “Décadas y décadas y décadas de prácticas y leyes nos llevaron a la posición en que esta es la población que mantenemos perpetuamente en la pobreza”. Y, sin embargo, las persistentes desigualdades actuales son inconfundibles. Todos deben comer, pero no todos se ven obligados a considerar lo que se necesita para cultivar una cebolla o para recoger una remolacha o para romper un tallo de espárragos para que llegue a los paquetes ordenados y atados en la sección de productos.

Reyes está decidido a terminar su educación. Quiere ser un ingeniero arquitectónico y construir una casa mejor para su madre. Sobre todo, quiere romper el ciclo de pobreza. En mayo, antes de empacar sus cosas para el viaje a Michigan, se reúne con Roberto García, el consejero de migrantes de la preparatoria Edinburg High School. El trabajo de García es asegurarse de que todos los estudiantes migrantes en la escuela—unos 131 niños—sepan lo que tienen que hacer para completar sus créditos para el semestre, o corren el riesgo de repetir el año académico y retrasar su graduación. Roberto se está volviendo calvo, su cabello se está poniendo blanco. Se viste de traje todos los días y usa un anillo de plata con una cruz de oro. Muchos de los adolescentes no saben que comenzó la vida justo donde están ahora, así que una y otra vez, durante años, les ha dicho a sus alumnos: “Nunca olviden de dónde vienen”.

Roberto nació en 1951, el hijo 18 de 21 hermanos. Cada primavera, su familia migraba al norte a lugares como Michigan y Ohio. Algunos de sus hermanos tenían la edad suficiente para conducir camiones grandes y viajaban de dos o tres a la vez, con lonas en

la parte trasera y seis o siete familias a lo largo del viaje. Su padre era un mayordomo, un supervisor de los campos. “Mientras más manos tuviera, más dinero ganaría”, dijo Roberto. Esta rutina se repetía cada año, y en un par de viajes, Roberto recuerda una vez que su madre estaba embarazada, a punto de dar a luz. “Mi papá literalmente se detenía y nos sacaba a todos del camión. Y cuando escuchábamos a ese bebé llorar—waaahhh—dos o tres horas más tarde, nos volvían a meter en el camión y continuábamos”.

Por meses, su familia vivió en condiciones terribles, en barracas que estaban “infestadas de roedores” (aunque su familia trabajó para mantener limpios sus espacios de vida). Luego, en octubre, todos regresaban a Texas, después de estar meses fuera de la escuela. Los hermanos de Roberto eran adolescentes, pero aún estaban en primaria debido a todas las clases que habían perdido. Avergonzados, los niños de García dejaron de ir a la escuela—todos excepto Roberto. “Seguí diciéndoles: ‘¿Saben qué chicos? La educación es nuestro único boleto para el éxito. Mamá y papá no tienen nada que dejarnos. Necesitamos educarnos”. No funcionó. Dos de sus hermanos terminaron muertos a una edad temprana—”a causa de las drogas”, dijo Roberto—y otro estuvo en prisión durante 36 años. “Me rompe el corazón no haber visto a mis hermanos y hermanas terminar la escuela como yo lo hice”.

De hecho, la mayoría de los niños en su vecindario en Edcouch, una ciudad a 13 millas de Edinburg, no fueron a la escuela en absoluto, y el programa para migrantes aún no existía. Roberto recordó que los consejeros escolares de su ciudad natal descartaban a los estudiantes latinos como él, diciéndoles que se esperaba que se unieran al ejército. El castigo físico de los maestros y directores era la norma. Roberto recordó que el mal tiempo significaba “días horribles” en la escuela porque los estudiantes comerían adentro en lugar de afuera en el patio de recreo. Los niños que podían pagar los boletos para el almuerzo de 25 centavos irían a la cafetería. Entonces la maestra preguntaba: “¿Cuántos de ustedes trajeron almuerzos?”. Algunos de los niños levantaban la mano. “¿Cuántos de ustedes trajeron sándwiches?”. Los niños con sándwiches podían permanecer en sus asientos. “¿Cuántos de ustedes trajeron tortillas?”. Todos esos niños eran llevados al fondo de la sala, detrás de los percheros y lejos del resto de la clase.

Hoy, Roberto ve mucho de sus hermanos y de sí mismo en sus estudiantes en Edinburg High School, y hace todo lo posible para asegurarse de que obtengan su educación. Pero los problemas viejos persisten. “En Georgia eran un poco racistas, así que no me querían en la escuela”, dijo Charito Talavera, una estudiante de 15 años, durante su primera visita con Roberto un 8 de octubre. Su cabello negro estaba recogido en una cola de caballo. “Entonces decían que perdieron mi papeleo. No fui a la escuela allí durante unos tres meses. Y cuando fui a la escuela, estuve durante aproximadamente una semana antes de mudarme”, compartió.

Roberto se inclinó sobre una carpeta roja con sus registros y le dijo que pelearía por ella. Charito migra con su madre y su padrastro, pero no trabaja. A nivel nacional, casi el 10 por ciento de los 300,000 niños elegibles para el Programa de Educación Migrante K-12 en 2016–17 no estaban matriculados en la escuela, según los últimos números del Departamento de Educación. Su movimiento constante hace que sea difícil para los consejeros escolares hacer un seguimiento de los créditos de los estudiantes hacia la graduación, y los niños a menudo terminan en las clases equivocadas. A veces, faltan a la escuela o simplemente la abandonan. El Programa de Educación para Migrantes iniciado en 1966, proporciona fondos a los estados para identificar y ayudar a los estudiantes que califican, pero no siempre es fácil, incluso con fondos federales y el apoyo disponible de consejeros como Roberto. Según los datos de la Agencia de Educación de Texas, solo el 70.7 por ciento de los estudiantes agrícolas migrantes que comenzaron en el noveno grado en el Distrito Escolar Consolidado Independiente de Edinburg se graduaron en la clase de 2017. Esa tasa es considerablemente más baja que la tasa de graduación de los estudiantes inmigrantes y estudiantes con desventajas económicas en todo el estado.

Aún así, queda la esperanza. A Roberto le encanta alardear de Leslie Limas Treviño. Su familia comenzó a llevarla a Eldora, Iowa, cuando tenía dos meses. Y como solo hablaba español en casa, llegó al jardín de infantes sin hablar inglés. Durante años, pasó la mitad del tiempo lejos de Texas, saltando entre escuelas. Pero se graduó en 2006 y se convirtió en enfermera registrada. Leslie tiene 30 años y todavía viaja todos los veranos con su esposo, que trabaja en el campo, tal como lo hacen sus padres. Se llevan a su hijo de tres años y a su hija de cinco meses. Esa es una decisión a propósito, a pesar de que los niños no pueden trabajar y son demasiado pequeños para entender. “Necesitan saben el valor de las cosas, sabiendo de dónde viene todo y de dónde provienen ellos”, dice.

Cuando Roberto comenzó en 2002, dice que había aproximadamente 5,000 estudiantes migrantes en su distrito. Hoy, ese número se ha reducido a alrededor de 1,600. Ese cambio es percibido por agricultores como Max Schuster, vicepresidente de operaciones de Val Verde Vegetable Co., una granja familiar multigeneracional. Algunos de sus trabajadores solían llevar a sus hijos de 16 a 18 años a trabajar los fines de semana o después de clase, pero no los ve tanto en estos días. “Los padres les dicen: ‘¿Es esto lo que quieres hacer por el resto de tu vida? ¿O quieres obtener una educación, proporcionar más para tu familia?'”

Roberto sabe que a menudo es más fácil decir que hacer. Mientras revisaba la carpeta roja de Charito, notó que tenía muchas ausencias y que estaba teniendo dificultades en su clase de español. Pero estaba bien, dijo, todavía tenía tiempo para compensarlo; él podía hablar con sus maestros si ella lo quisiera así. Antes de irse, Roberto la animó a unirse al club de migrantes.

“Si no lo haces, te buscaré, niña”, le dijo. “Serías un muy buen oficial en el club. Realmente lo serías. Puedo ver esa cualidad en ti”.

Eran las 6:30 a.m., y una luna plateada colgaba en el cielo negro sobre la casa de Berenise en Weslaco. Una camioneta estaba estacionada en el camino de entrada mientras Salvador Sr., Mireya y su yerno se preparaban para otro día plantando caña de azúcar. Este trabajo paga por hora, no por contenedor, y es demasiado peligroso para los niños. Entonces Berenise y el joven Salvador durmieron toda la mañana. El trabajo de los hermanos mayores era cuidar a su hermano de 2 años ese día. Eso fue parte de su contribución a la familia, dijo Salvador Sr.

Salvador Sr. condujo lentamente en la oscuridad, a veces 15 millas por debajo del límite. Había sido detenido un par de veces en las paradas de tráfico, y dijo que siempre había sido sincero con los policías. “Solo les muestro mi identificación mexicana y les digo la verdad: no tengo papeles. Pero tengo seguro en mi carro”. Ha tenido suerte hasta ahora.

Cuando Salvador se subió a su tractor, la luz del sol iluminó nubes gigantes en un cielo de color rosa, durazno y azul concha. Alrededor había una mezcla de sonidos urbanos y rurales: grillos, ranas, perros, tráfico en la carretera, gallos y radios. El tractor estaba enganchado a un par de remolques largos y rectangulares apilados con caña. Un par de trabajadores colgó un enfriador de agua naranja de Home Depot de uno de los remolques, junto con un alijo de vasos de papel.

Una docena de los hombres más resistentes se subieron a las pilas de caña de azúcar. Algunos llevaban guantes y sombreros de alta resistencia, agarraban largos postes de metal con picos curvos hechos de barras de refuerzo, que usaban para tirar la caña de azúcar al suelo mientras el tractor avanzaba. Uno de los trabajadores, Manuel Salazar, mordió un trozo de caña y lo masticó. En unas horas ayudaría a calmar su sed. Sabía que, por la tarde, haría tanto calor que se sentiría enfermo.

“El tractor salta y salta todo el día”, dijo Salvador. “Pero una vez que te acostumbras, es mejor ejercicio que la zumba”.

El tiempo pasa más rápido con sentido del humor. A Mireya también le gusta burlarse de sus compañeros de trabajo encima del remolque. “Échele caña, Nicolás, échele caña”, dijo instándolo a mantener el ritmo. A las 8 a.m., el sol apenas había salido, pero el aire ya estaba caliente y pegajoso. La humedad subió del suelo. Los remolques se movían de un lado a otro, de un lado a otro, hora tras hora, a través de un campo que parecía tocar la eternidad. ❖

Esta historia fue reportada gracias a una subvención de la International Women’s Media Foundation.

Autores: Karen Coates es periodista independiente, autora, editora y formadora de medios con sede en Nuevo México. Principalmente cubre alimentos, medio ambiente, salud y derechos humanos, y se especializa en contar historias desde cero. Es miembro de la International Women’s Media Foundation y presidenta del Capítulo de Río Grande de la Sociedad de Periodistas Profesionales.

Valeria Fernández es una periodista independiente de Uruguay con más de 16 años de experiencia como productora de documentales bilingües y escritora en la comunidad de inmigrantes de Arizona y las fronteras entre Estados Unidos y México. Es miembro de la International Women’s Media Foundation y, en 2018, fue la receptora inaugural del Premio Mosaico por sus informes sobre comunidades subrepresentadas.

Fotógrafo: Jerry Redfern es un periodista visual galardonado, que cubre el medio ambiente, la salud y los derechos humanos, principalmente en los países en desarrollo. Fue miembro sénior del Instituto Schuster de Periodismo de Investigación hasta que se retiró a principios de este año, y fue miembro de Ted Scripps 2012-2013 en Periodismo Ambiental en el Centro de Periodismo Ambiental de la Universidad de Colorado-Boulder.

Editor: Ted Genoways
Investigador: Jack Herrera
Editor de Imágenes: Ian Hurley
Editor de Copia: Leah Angstman
Traductora: Angie Baldelomar

Esta historia es parte del proyecto Unseen America, historias sobre las luchas y los desafíos que enfrenta el medio incomprendido de nuestra nación.

The post Las Manos Jóvenes Que Nos Alimentan appeared first on Pacific Standard.

Welcome to our fall books preview. While Pacific Standard won’t be around in the fall, these books will, and we encourage you to read them! —Ted Scheinman

September 3rd

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib (Tin House Books)
In his second collection of poetry, Hanif Abdurraqib explores loss, heartbreak, and the possibility of “fashioning / something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything / worthwhile of their burial”—crafting beauty from grief even when a clean redemption narrative can’t be found. The well-known cultural critic mixes references to Marvin Gaye, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, ’90s hip-hop, and black poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to today. These poems are filled with surprises, from their eclectic titles to the voltas in their final lines. Abdurraqib can turn a poem about a flubbed pizza order into a meditation about the inevitability of breaking promises. “Isn’t it funny,” the poem concludes, “to vow that you will love someone until you are dead.” —Rebecca Stoner

Fentanyl, Inc. by Ben Westhoff (Grove Atlantic)
An information-packed work of reporting that traces the rise of designer drugs, including synthetic and/or more dangerous versions of weed, acid, and heroin, the last of which gives the book its title. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that’s chemically similar to morphine and heroin, is the top cause of fatal drug overdoses in the United States. The most illuminating parts of the book are those that reveal the business practices of Chinese labs that supply illicit fentanyl to U.S. dealers. These labs are a source of death and destabilization for our country, American officials say, while Chinese leaders contend that it’s on us to deal with Americans’ appetite for the stuff. —Francie Diep

September 10th

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Forget what you saw on seasons two and three of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood’s official sequel to her 1985 dystopian novel is coming soon. Although Atwood’s publisher has released very few details about the contents of the new book—even the Booker Prize committee was unable to talk about it when rolling out its 2019 long list—rest assured that, at a time when reproductive rights are in jeopardy and the plight and costume of the handmaid has been taken on by protesters around the world, we’ll be watching. —Maris Kreizman

The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball (Ecco)
For the past decade, the dystopian scenarios of Jesse Ball’s propulsive novels have been converging with reality in ways that feel more and more prophetic and urgent. His latest is set in a society where refugees are segregated from the general population and systematically dehumanized—sound familiar? The Divers’ Game uses fantastical frameworks to explore the very real consequences of what happens when the state indoctrinates its citizens to fear others. —Maris Kreizman

Homesick: A Memoir by Jennifer Croft (Unnamed Press)
In this elegant memoir, Booker-winning translator Jennifer Croft tells the story of the seizure disorder that beset her younger sister in childhood, the high-risk brain surgery to remove a tumor thought to be culpable, and the fragile relationship between her mother and sister that followed. A prodigy, the author enters college at 15, where she excels in language and literature but also at drinking and self-harm. When her sister runs away from home after surgery to visit her at college, the memoir takes an even darker turn, but Croft recounts her own trip back to the light with a lyrical assurance. Croft’s photographs, and the fragmented letter to her sister that weaves the whole book together, are not merely bonus features, but emerge by the end as the meticulous wind-up to a structural masterstroke. Homesick is a revelatory look at tragedy, family, mental illness, and how we make meaning together. It’s also the best answer to “why did you become a translator?” that I’ve ever read. —Ted Scheinman

She Said by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey (Penguin Press)
It’s under strict embargo until its publication, but needless to say we’re excited to read the book that takes us inside the investigation that brought the #MeToo movement to the forefront of our culture. New York Times reporters Kantor and Twohey broke the news that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is an alleged rapist many times over and a consistent abuser of power. Their reporting has made workplaces across industries confront sexual harassment more thoroughly than ever before (faint praise!), and has prompted a time of reckoning—even if it’s only just begun. —Maris Kreizman

September 17th

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy (Beacon Press)
Mona Eltahawy is not having it: the patriarchy, that is. In The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, she lays out a blazing prescription for courageous and, well, necessary acts that liberate females and gender non-conforming people from the terrorizing, pervasive, self-perpetuating effects of the patriarchy. Each chapter takes an idea like anger, profanity, power, and lust, and reframes it as a virtue, repudiating cultural expectations that are framed by and designed to reinforce the power of the patriarchy, and encouraging readers to step outside of that paradigm altogether. —Jennifer Sahn

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein (Simon & Schuster)
This February, when Democrats put forth a proposal for a Green New Deal, reporters sought to identify the deal’s intellectual forebears, among whom they noted Thomas Friedman, Jill Stein, and others who had advocated for government programs under that same, FDR-inspired name. Grist even dubbed Senator Bernie Sanders “the godfather of the Green New Deal.” Yet at the heart of the GND is a series of policies meant to transform the economy in ways that protect workers and the Earth at once, and the writer who’s been arguing for such policies most emphatically for the past 20 years is Naomi Klein. On Fire collects Klein’s essays, commencement addresses, and speeches across the Anglosphere from the past half-decade or so, each of them focused on the urgent need to create a healthier, happier, more livable world by rejecting the brutal logic of 21st-century consumer capitalism. Klein bookends the collection with an opening portrait of 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, “patron saint of pissed-off kids everywhere,” and a closing case for the GND that reclaims the economic argument from the right (the GND, Klein writes, will be “a massive job creator”). Klein’s clarifying skepticism about “the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin Western culture,” has never been more valuable. —Ted Scheinman

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead)
Jacqueline Woodson has a gift for finding the perfect sets of details and poetic turns of phrase to make her novels feel epic and expansive even when they weigh in at less than 200 pages. Woodson’s latest adult novel takes place in a Park Slope brownstone where 16-year-old Melody lives with her father and her grandparents, while her often absent mother makes occasional visits. Told from five points of view over three generations, Red at the Bone takes readers through the history of how the family arrived at this place, where race and class and family bonds determine who gets to pursue their dreams and who gets left behind. —Maris Kreizman

September 24th

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith (Knopf)
In her latest memoir, musician and writer Patti Smith travels back in time to visit old friends, enters a dream state for some playful introspection, and chats with hotel signs and other inanimate objects about life’s wonders. Chronicling the year she turns 70, Smith wanders in and out of the Western hemisphere (and, in more heady moments, between metaphysical realms), commenting on her relationship to loss, and the growing pains that accompany loss, along the way. —Alexa Lee

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Harper)
A traditional novel in the very best sense of the word, Ann Patchett’s latest is an expertly plotted and paced exploration of regret and obsession over decades. The Dutch House begins in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1950s, where siblings Maeve and Danny live in an extravagant home with their upwardly mobile father and their modest mother. When their mother leaves them and a classic wicked stepmother type moves in, Maeve and Danny find their lives literally and metaphorically uprooted in dramatic ways that leave them haunted by their past. —Maris Kreizman

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays by Leslie Jamison (Little, Brown)
Tattooed in Latin down the arm of essayist Leslie Jamison is a line from the Roman playwright Terence that translates as: “I am human, nothing human is alien to me.” In her latest collection, even as she documents the experiences of others—Sri Lankan soldiers, Second Life superusers, eminent writers and photographers—Jamison is keenly aware of how her personal experiences shape the way she reports their stories. It’s this knowledge that propels the collection, along with her rejection of cynicism in favor of being open to new ideas and experiences, no matter how foreign they may seem. —Maris Kreizman

October 1st

Pigs by Johanna Stoberock (Red Hen Press)
On an island where the world deposits all its trash, far from civilization, a small group of children are in charge of feeding discarded plastics and electronics to six giant, magical, eternally hungry pigs. The grown-ups on the island take pleasure in drinking, dressing in evening wear at all times, and idly torturing the children when no other amusement presents itself. Johanna Stoberock’s second novel is a grotesque and luminous thriller with a big, swashbuckling allegory at its core, and Stoberock’s own magic trick is to populate the island with characters sufficiently rich to elevate the novel far beyond parable or admonition. It’s a beautiful book that I can’t wait to reread. —Ted Scheinman

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)
“I want to hate him but I can’t,” writes Jeannie Vanasco in this searing, intimate memoir about her decision to confront a former friend who sexually assaulted her during their college years. In revisiting her confusion and ambivalence as much as her fury about the event (at the time, she told him she forgave him), Vanasco gets at so many of the gray areas in our conversations about rape and the rehabilitation of its perpetrators. If some traumas don’t fit into neat little narratives, then the pleasure of reading Vanasco is in knowing that messiness is OK, that there’s no right way to handle such betrayals. —Maris Kreizman

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
While Ben Lerner’s first two novels feature tight first-person narratives about young men who live deeply inside their own heads, his third novel expands the scope of his autofictional universe to make room for a few different perspectives. Spanning many time periods yet set mostly in Kansas in 1997, The Topeka School brings us into the lives of high school debate champion Adam Gordon and his parents, both of whom work at a supposedly comprehensive psychiatric clinic called The Foundation. Lerner is especially keen in depicting how the bizarre pageantry and idiosyncratic rules of high school forensic debates in the ’90s foreshadowed the ways in which contemporary discourse has devolved into absurdity. —Maris Kreizman

October 8th

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones (Simon & Schuster)
Though the focus of this coming-of-age memoir is largely on the memoirist, tracing his tumultuous and confusing time growing up as a gay black man in the American South, the heroine of the story is inarguably his mother. A single mom working for Delta airlines, constantly scraping to cover the bills, she is always there in the background, trying to move mountains for her son. How We Fight for Our Lives reckons with the isolation Saeed Jones feels as teenager beginning to explore his sexuality, as well as the terror he feels moving through a world where some might prefer to see him dead. Poignantly, it is the early death of his mother, and the reckoning that follows, that ultimately free him to feel comfortable and confident in his own skin. —Jennifer Sahn

Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger edited by Lilly Dancyger (Seal Press)
“My anger was a reasonable reaction to the experience of growing up in a country that hated women and encouraged women to hate each other,” writes Melissa Febos in “Rebel Girl,” her essay from the forthcoming anthology Burn It Down. For many women, anger is something we’re trained to contain or dissociate from. It’s an emotion characterized in the culture as a lapse of judgment, a condition that’s unpalatable to others and rarely reads as righteous. In this collection of essays, writers examine what it means to be angry while female (and angry while black, and angry while trans, and angry while queer, and so on). While anger is often weaponized against women to delegitimize them, this book gives powerful voice to women’s rage in all its glory. —Alexa Lee

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church by Megan Phelps-Roper (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, Megan Phelps-Roper believed she was blessed with a perfect childhood—loving and involved parents, close siblings, and a strong sense of community at the church that her grandfather founded. It wasn’t until years later, after she’d severed ties with the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, that she came to re-evaluate her upbringing, and the homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric that pervaded her youth. In her memoir, Unfollow, Phelps-Roper sifts through decades of memories to confront her infamous Christian past, and explain what finally pushed her to leave her family and faith. —Alexa Lee

Confluence: Navigating the Personal and Political on Rivers of the New West by Zak Podmore (Torrey House Press)
Rivers are a powerful force in the American West, where water is often scarce and passionately fought over. Confluence, a book both deeply researched and deeply personal, is ostensibly about rivers, which Podmore navigates with the comfort and devil-may-care adventurousness of a life spent in desert canyons. But the book encompasses much more: It’s about communities (from the members of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe protesting the uranium mill in their midst near Podmore’s home in Southern Utah, to migrants moving across the U.S.–Mexico border), and it’s about life flourishing and floundering in the desert. Confluence is dedicated to Podmore’s mother, who raised him in the desert and died of cancer in 2014, and both his grief and his love of the landscape run through the book, lyrical and raw. “Were it not for the Colorado River, I might have been a rich man by now,” Podmore admits. But we as readers are richer for his love of rivers and the lands they run through. —Rebecca Worby

Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)
Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories is as sad, funny, and finely tuned as you would expect. These stories, many first published in The Paris Review or The New Yorker, include vignettes about, and meditations on, migration and homeplace, racism passive and active, parenthood, what happens to old punks, and how to live as an artist when everyone around you is being so damn loud. There’s sci-fi and fantasy, and plenty of postmodern fuckery, but also more old-fashioned story styles that feel vaguely mid-century (“Big Week“). In “Kelso, Deconstructed,” Smith revisits the 1959 stabbing of Kelso Cochrane, a West Indian immigrant to Britain, with a mix of semiotic headiness and grounded poignancy. The excellence of the collection might be a given, but nearly every story here has something that will surprise. —Ted Scheinman

October 15th

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha (Ecco)
Set during the Los Angeles riots of the 1990s and leading up to fictional yet all-too-real present-day protests in L.A. after a police officer has killed an unarmed black teenager, this compassionate crime novel by Steph Cha offers no easy answers for how to fight gross injustice. Instead, Cha’s story connects a Korean family with a black family, both of whom must grapple with the effects of a murder that has torn their communities apart. Your House Will Pay never downplays the impacts of racism and trauma, but Cha’s nuanced portrait of the two families in crisis sparks hope for the possibility of connection and mutual understanding, if not forgiveness. —Maris Kreizman

October 29th

Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World by David Owen (Riverhead Books)
“Our ability to deafen ourselves with daily activities has never been greater,” New Yorker staffer David Owen writes in Volume Control, a close look at the problems besetting the human ear, and at the remarkable strides we’re making in alleviating all sorts of aural distress, from early onset deafness to chronic tinnitus. Yet deafness of various degrees remains an important, and growing, public-health challenge. Owen’s writing and thinking about the nature of ears, sounds, and communication are lively enough that you don’t need to know someone suffering from deafness or tinnitus to find value in the book (though with 37 million Americans having lost some degree of hearing, you’re likely to know at least a few of them). The World Health Organization projects that a billion people on Earth will experience a disabling hearing loss by 2050, as the world grows louder and more populous—meaning that the concerns of Volume Control will remain relevant for decades to come. —Ted Scheinman

November 5th

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown)
This collection of essays and stories by actress, comedian, and children’s book author Jenny Slate revels in the purple prose of everyday life: “When I imagine my ingredients, I imagine my that my muscles are made of plums, that my heart is a giant ruby with a lightbulb in it, that my blood is a goldenrod yellow, and the bones inside my body are made from lions’ bones and shells, and that my brain is made of steak and silk and Hawaiian Punch.” With the soul of a performer—even on the page—Slate shares charming fragments from her life, ideas about ideas, and fanciful fictions that are both delightfully absurd and deeply human. —Maris Kreizman

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf)
Memoir is often an attempt to shape the various winding paths of one’s life into a discernible, tellable journey. In her forthcoming memoir, Carmen Maria Machado, the author of the genre-bending story collection Her Body and Other Parties, doesn’t take a direct route. She structures each chapter of her memoir around a different narrative trope, using many different methods of storytelling (“Unreliable Narrator,” “Choose Your Own Adventure”) to illuminate her experiences of living through an emotionally abusive relationship. In the Dream House is both innovative in its approach and nerve-striking in its subject matter. —Maris Kreizman

November 12th

Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short by Matthew Gutmann (Basic Books)
The English expression “boys will be boys” has its roots in an ancient Roman proverb—which is to say, humans have been eager to excuse male misbehavior as innate for a long time. In Are Men Animals?, the anthropologist Matthew Gutmann interrogates this cliché, and offers a timely and thorough debunking of the idea that masculine behavior is determined purely by biology. Gutmann draws on his field research in the U.S., Mexico, and China to show that culture and economic class have as much if not more influence over our behavior than anything in our chromosomes. He spends much of the book arguing convincingly that, when we focus on biological explanations for male aggression and violence, our analysis will yield solutions that merely treat the symptoms of a much deeper, society-wide disease. Segregating men and women with women-only subway cars to combat sexual assault, for example, may lead to fewer assaults on public transit, but it doesn’t change the fact that some men feel entitled to grope women. —Kate Wheeling

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The post Twenty-Five Must-Read Books for Fall of 2019 appeared first on Pacific Standard.

That night and for the following month, Martin, whose last name is omitted for his safety, his mother, and his four younger siblings sought refuge in a wooded area behind the property. For many Anglophone families like Martin’s, the mosquito-infested bushes had become hideouts to avoid the increasingly common police round-ups. They had even developed a communication system between the farms: Whenever a neighbor rang a bell, everyone else knew to run to the bushes.

The northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon have been in turmoil ever since late 2016, when the Francophone central government violently suppressed a series of peaceful protests against the marginalization of the English-speaking minority—about 20 percent of the overall population. In response to the crackdown, separatist groups gained traction, prompting security forces to raid villages like Martin’s and targeting those suspected of supporting the cause.

Martin’s involvement with the separatist movement had started a few months before the attack on his family’s farm. At the time, he had taken it upon himself to teach young children in his village the national anthem for a self-declared state called Ambazonia. That was enough, he says, for the police to threaten to kill him. Then, on October 1st, Martin joined thousands of demonstrators across the Anglophone regions to celebrate their symbolic independence. Gathering in a public square, they waved the white- and blue-striped flag and held tree branches as a sign of peace. Standing close to the front row, Martin watched as security forces shot the leader of the march and used tear gas to disperse the crowd. When a policeman hit him in the ribs, Martin was left coughing up blood and unable to walk because of the pain.

At least 20 people were reportedly killed during the protests that fall. Martin knew then that staying in Cameroon would be a death sentence.

Martin fled to seek asylum in the United States a few days after the march. Since he left Cameroon, the Anglophone crisis has escalated into a full-fledged armed conflict between the security forces and separatist groups, plunging the country into near-civil war.

According to Amnesty International, at least 400 civilians had been killed as of last year, and humanitarian groups continue to accuse the government of committing extrajudicial executions, burning down villages, and torturing and arresting people without charges. Armed separatist groups have reportedly killed at least 44 security forces members between September of 2017 and May of 2018, and have perpetrated attacks on teachers and students to enforce school boycotts in protest against the Francophone government.

As a result, as many as 437,000 people are currently internally displaced, and thousands of others are living in refugee camps in Nigeria. Still, despite the staggering figures, the humanitarian calamity “has been met with deafening silence” by the international community, according to a report from the Norwegian Refugee Council, which ranked it as the most neglected displacement crisis in the world.

As the conditions pushing the Anglophone population to flee continue to deteriorate and routes to Europe prove to be prohibitively dangerous, more and more Cameroonians are risking a long journey to safety in the U.S. According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of Cameroonians applying for asylum in the U.S. more than doubled—from 821 to 1,840—between 2015 and 2017, and now Cameroonians are among the top 10 nationalities arriving at the border to ask for protection. But with the Trump administration taking several steps to limit asylum, Cameroonians are facing increasing likelihood of being returned to the same threats they hoped to escape in the first place.

For those sent back, Martin says, “It’s like living in hell there. People are being killed like flies.”

After leaving behind a war-torn country, asylum seekers from Cameroon often head to Ecuador, where they are visa-exempt. But without Spanish language skills and fearing racial discrimination, many like Martin decide to continue north. For Martin, the 15,000-mile journey meant spending $3,000 on plane tickets to Liberia, Ghana, Spain, and then to Ecuador, where he hopped on buses to Colombia and took boats to the notorious Darien Gap, a 60-mile remote stretch of rainforest on the border with Panama.

African migrants often report being robbed, beaten, and extorted while crossing South and Central America. Martin says he was attacked in the jungle by six men armed with guns and machetes who stole his food and clothes. He had to walk for days under heavy rain, drinking water from streams, and sleeping under rocks and trees.

Other asylum seekers from Cameroon describe seeing abandoned bodies along the way. “That journey is another war of its own. But you just have to continue because if you go back, you’re dead already,” says Tony, who left Cameroon in 2017 and was granted asylum in the U.S. after being targeted for taking part in the protests and for his father’s affiliation with the Southern Cameroons National Council, a group calling for secession.

Those who make it past the jungle in Panama find their way to a refugee camp in Costa Rica, and from there head to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, until finally arriving at the border with the U.S. But a growing number of Cameroonians are finding themselves stuck in dangerous Mexican towns. Since 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been implementing a metering system to allow fewer migrants to cross through ports of entry every day, forcing people to wait for months to make their asylum claims. And for those arriving today, seeking protection in the U.S. might not even be an option. Under the safe third country rule agreement signed with Guatemala in July, anyone who passes through another country where she could have requested protection will no longer qualify for asylum in the U.S.

By the time Martin reached the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego, California, and presented himself to immigration authorities to ask for asylum, he had been traveling for four months. Still in pain from the police beating back in Cameroon, Martin was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken rib and a blood clot in his stomach, before being taken into custody of CBP. While still feeling the effects of pain medication, Martin had his credible fear interview with an asylum officer—a crucial first step in the process to determine whether a person has the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to avoid immediate deportation—who found him to have a reasonable fear of returning to his home country.

From the temporary holding facility at the border, Martin was transferred to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora, Colorado. In his application for asylum, Martin wrote that he was afraid of being persecuted for his involvement in protests in support of independence for the Anglophone minority. “Sir, if I returned to my country of Cameroon,” he stated, “just know that I will be a dead man.”

After a few months in detention, Martin was struggling with severe depression. He had recurring flashbacks, headaches, and panic attacks. “Life is unbearable,” Martin wrote as part of a memoir he started while in ICE custody. “It is truly a prison, except the health care is worse. The food is unrecognizable, and on many days, inedible.”

At the time, Darren Straus, a volunteer with the non-profit organization Casa de Paz, paid visits to Martin and said he was extremely distraught. “He didn’t know what was happening to him,” Straus recalls.

Feeling confident about the strength of his case, Martin requested for his immigration hearing to be moved to an earlier date. Like the overwhelming majority of detained immigrants, Martin didn’t have access to an attorney when he went before immigration judge Nina Carbone in May of 2018. A couple of days later, her decision came: She found Martin not credible and denied him asylum. In her written decision, Carbone noted that Martin was “visibly upset and tearful during his testimony.” The judge pointed to some inconsistencies between his testimony and the information he gave during the credible fear interview, including the exact date he left Cameroon. Martin also forgot to mention having been harmed by the police during the October protest. The transcripts show multiple indications of “indiscernible” parts where the court reporter couldn’t understand Martin’s words.

Martin appealed the judge’s decision and, while it was pending, he was released on parole to live with his sponsors, Straus and his wife Sarah, in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. The couple was used to visiting detainees at that point, but something about Martin’s story and the fact that he didn’t know anyone in the U.S. compelled them to welcome him into their home. “We never felt there was an option,” Straus says.

They also found an immigration attorney to help Martin with his case. After the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the immigration judge’s decision to order Martin deported last October, Denver-based lawyer Mark Barr filed a motion to re-open the case and introduce new evidence that could reverse the negative outcome, including a mental-health evaluation determining that Martin has signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The judge didn’t believe Martin’s story because he was confused and scared and breaking down on the stand,” says Barr, who describes the recording of the hearing with the immigration judge as heartbreaking. “Not only is he crying over what he’s afraid of, but because he doesn’t know if his whole family has been killed or not.”

For a while, as he waited for his appeal case, Martin was able to create a life for himself in Colorado. He started attending a men’s Bible study on Wednesday evenings at the Living Way Fellowship Church, joined a soccer team, and often helped neighbors by walking their dogs or raking leaves. Much to the surprise of Straus, who describes the community as “white, conservative, and Christian,” people have embraced Martin in return.

An ongoing petition asking ICE to stop his deportation now has more than 5,000 signatures, and a crowdfunding campaign has raised more than $8,000 to help with his legal fees. In two-dozen letters gathered by Martin’s attorney to support his case, members of the community describe him as having a diligent character and being reliable, hard-working, and, above all, trustworthy. One person wrote: “I do not expect the U.S. Government to guarantee his safety as a resident of our country, but I do expect the government to prevent his physical harm in a foreign one.”

As more Cameroonians arrive at the border to request asylum in the U.S., the number of cases approved has also gone up, from 92 in 2015 to 218 in 2017. But so has the number of Cameroonians being sent back: For the fiscal years 2017 and 2018 combined, 130 nationals of Cameroon were deported, compared to only 29 in 2016.

For many deportees, returning to Cameroon means immediate detention and, in some instances, violence. When Agbor, an Anglophone teacher in his hometown of Kumba and a vocal supporter of the separatist cause, arrived in Cameroon from the U.S. last October, he was arrested for questioning by the police at the airport.

“They knew I was coming,” he says. Agbor, whose last name is also omitted for his safety, was only released after his family paid the police commissioner a sum of $1,500. “The majority of my colleague teachers in the fight for secession went to jail and their families don’t even know their whereabouts,” Agbor says. “I knew that being in prison would be the gateway to my death.”

While the U.S. has acknowledged the bleak conditions in Cameroon in Department of State country reports and advises American citizens against traveling to the Anglophone regions due to armed conflict, crime, and kidnapping, it has done little to address the crisis. According to Alexandra Lamarche, an advocate with Refugees International who traveled to Cameroon last March to report on the displaced population, the U.S. has only provided $300,000 in humanitarian aid to the southwest and northwest regions out of a total of $18.4 million designated to Cameroon in 2019. Meanwhile, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates the needs in the Anglophone areas at $93.5 million.

“The population is increasing every day,” says Agbor, who is working with a non-profit organization to provide assistance to the internally displaced, mostly families whose houses have been burned down and children who lost their parents to the armed conflict.

“It’s a genocidal war,” he says.

Recently, Martin learned through a childhood friend that his father has been released from jail after two years. But his family continues to live in the bushes: Their house was burned to the ground by government security forces, and one of Martin’s brothers was shot in the leg after the police searched his phone and found text messages exchanged with Martin’s lawyer. According to the friend’s accounts, the government forces have put up flyers with a picture of Martin at the airports in Douala and Yaoundé, Cameroon’s two biggest cities. “I know that his life will be in danger if he returns,” Martin’s friend wrote in a statement to assist his asylum case. “I know because my own life is in danger.”

Last April, Martin was detained again during one of his check-in appointments with ICE and has since been denied parole. He could be deported any day now, even with the pending motion to re-open his case. If the motion is denied, he could still appeal to a higher federal court, the Tenth Circuit, but the standards are exceptionally high. “If he is deported and he wins, the government would have to arrange for him to come back to the U.S,” Barr says. “But that of course would all be rendered moot if he was sent back to Cameroon and killed.”

In detention, Martin reads the Bible every day but he still can’t make sense of his situation. During a recent phone call, he sounded agitated and desperate. “He never doubted the merits of his case,” Straus says. “But I think he’s getting toward the end of his rope by being locked up.”

If Martin is released and allowed to stay in the U.S., he says he would go back to living with Darren and Sarah Straus. He would also work to open a chocolate shop. But above all, Martin is hoping to be free so that he can help his friends and family back home.

“I’m just hoping it will be done,” Martin says.

The post ‘People Are Being Killed Like Flies’: Denied Asylum in the U.S., Cameroonians Fear Increasing Violence Back Home appeared first on Pacific Standard.

But increasingly it seems that it will be a man-made disaster, rather than an asteroid, that leads to our own demise on Earth: Last month, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin aerospace manufacturing chief executive officer who wants to put humans back on the moon as early as 2024, said that we are “destroying the planet” with heavy industry and climate change, and that humans will “have to go to space if we are to continue to have a thriving civilization.”

But there are less existential reasons for humans to spread out into the cosmos, from a romantic pursuit of interplanetary manifest destiny to the immeasurable reservoirs of frozen water, gold, platinum, and other rare metals locked up in other celestial bodies including the moon. Colonization on Earth, however, especially in pursuit of resources, is colored by a history of genocide, cultural cleansing, and environmental destruction. There is a growing social justice movement that calls for policies to prevent the same fate in space.

But settling space without repeating the same mistakes on Earth will require a robust policy framework. While our motivations to settle space have broadened and our ability to do so has advanced, the only legal framework for settling space comes from a deliberately vague international treaty drafted during the dawn of the space age. The rapid commercialization of space in recent years has left space law experts debating how to interpret the treaty’s flexible language.

Of course, the idea of a long-term settlement in space for any purpose is still technologically and economically unfeasible. But the rise of billionaire-backed, private space companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin, with lofty goals like Mars settlements and moving heavy industry into artificial space colonies, has made space settlements more realistic than ever.

Historically, space has been viewed as a “common heritage of humanity”—a region preserved for all current and future generations, protected from exploitation. This idealistic framing was born out of an age of conflict on Earth. In 1967, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high and the space race was well underway, both nations drafted and signed onto a legally binding, international agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty. (More than 100 other countries have since become parties to the treaty.) It was a remarkably cooperative document for its time.

“At that time, there was a real concern that the Cold War was going to extend itself into outer space,” says P.J. Blount, a professor of air and space law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. The 17-article treaty was drafted to preserve space as a peaceful and communal zone, where any activities would be for the benefit of all humankind. The treaty bars weapons of mass destruction and military installations on celestial bodies, and it encourages states to share both knowledge gained from scientific and exploratory endeavors and responsibility for the safety of all astronauts, which the treaty designates as “envoys of mankind.”

Even throughout the Cold War, Blount notes, the U.S. and the Soviet Union cooperated in space, trading moon rocks and telemetry data on human spaceflight to advance both science and safety.

“On the face of it, it’s a very optimistic document,” says Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. “It really frames space as a peaceful sanctuary.”

“Inspired by the great prospects opening up before mankind as a result of man’s entry into outer space,” as the treaty itself reads, it was an intentionally vague document, designed to guide space exploration as science and technology advanced and new issues arose. It requires states to guard against the contamination of other planets, but doesn’t specify how to do so; it allows for stations and installations on celestial bodies for peaceful purposes, but doesn’t speculate what those activities might be; and it bans governments from “appropriating” outer space, but doesn’t define what the term means.

“There’s a lot of debate over this particular clause,” Blount says. “It’s sort of ambiguous, but I would argue that it really means that states aren’t supposed to go out and claim sovereign territory.”

So while governments can’t claim land on other worlds, they can set up stations for scientific purposes. But there’s no discussion in the Outer Space Treaty, or the four other international space treaties that followed it, of the idea of a long-term settlement on other planets. What does that mean for the private companies with plans to set up settlements on the moon or Mars?

When the treaty was drafted, the Soviet Union wanted to outlaw all non-governmental activities in space, but the capitalist U.S. insisted that outer space be open for business. The compromise was that the treaty allows for commercial activities, but requires that federal governments take responsibility for the actions of both their space agencies and non-governmental actors in space. The idea was to keep a private actor from accidentally kicking off a war. “This is, within the world of international law, extraordinary,” Blount says. “If you go into space and you do something terrible, the state itself might very well be on the hook for what you’ve done.”

But exactly how much the state has to authorize and supervise the activities of companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin is up for debate. What agency, for example, should companies turn to for approval for space settlements? The questions only get more complicated from there. Under the current law, settlements would be inextricably linked to the nations that authorized them to begin with. So Elon Musk’s city on Mars would likely be governed by U.S. law. But what happens when settlers no longer feel like citizens of the U.S.—or even of Earth?

“If you have an actual settlement, where people are living and working permanently, at some point that settlement is no longer going to feel represented by its terrestrial state,” Blount says. Imagine a second generation that has never set foot on Earth. “It’s a ‘no-taxation-without-representation’ problem all over again,” he says. “That’s one of those places where you find yourself in the gap in the law.”

SpaceX and Blue Origin are not so different from the contractors that NASA has always been working with such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, according to Walkowicz. “Private companies have always had a role in space exploration,” she says. The difference is that the new generation of private rocket companies are lobbying for greater autonomy. “There are a lot of companies that are advocating for the ability and right to do whatever they want,” Walkowicz says. “Why would you want to have to pay for the protection of another world if your ultimate goal is to exploit it and take its resources?”

On multiple occasions, Bezos has outlined his vision for moving heavy polluting industries off of Earth, leaving the planet to be “zoned residential.” Other smaller start-ups with less stable capital but equally ambitious plans to mine the moon or asteroids for precious metals and water helped to shepherd through legislation in the U.S. giving private industry more leeway in space. Such bills include the SPACE Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2015—a piece of legislation that, for the first time, gave corporations a right to the resources they extract from other celestial bodies.

“It’s the same-old, same-old that we see here on Earth all the time,” Walkowicz says, “where companies don’t want to have to really preserve the environment that they also plan to strip mine, because the two are incompatible.”

How does that square with the Outer Space Treaty? It doesn’t, really. But that’s not all that surprising. “A lot of the things people are thinking about, and often expressly making plans for, are in direct conflict with treaties,” Walkowicz says.

“If you look at the colonization of the Americas in particular, there were lots of treaties that the United States had with American Indian nations—hundreds of them, in fact—all of which have been broken,” she says. “What history tells us is that we have to decide whether we want to continue to do things the way that we’ve always done things, or whether we want to try and uphold some of those high-minded principles that are in the Outer Space Treaty.”

The post Outer Space Treaties Didn’t Anticipate the Privatization of Space Travel. Can They Be Enforced? appeared first on Pacific Standard.

The Delaware Diamond, of course, hasn’t always been so named. In 1999, the Delaware Museum of Natural History held a contest to name a star after it purchased the naming rights from the International Star Registry, an Illinois-based company that had been incessantly offering celestial naming rights on radio buys around Christmas for over two decades. A 12-year-old won the contest, and, in 2000, at the behest of Delaware’s lieutenant governor, perhaps desperate for an act of bipartisan consensus, the general assembly put a bill forward to recognize it as the official star of the state.

The bill passed unanimously, but would come to consternate some Delawareans. To more crotchety observers, it served as yet another example of Delaware demeaning itself by scrambling to valorize minutiae. The state has consistently dispensed official designations solicited from school children: It recognizes “The First State” (the suggestion of a first-grade class) as an official nickname, and peach pie (the suggestion of fifth- and sixth-graders) as the official state dessert.

To the conscientious, there was also a larger problem: The International Star Registry and its star names are not recognized by any astronomical body as legitimate. No astronaut will ever refer to a galactic event near the Diamond; no NASA rocket scientist will ever set her sights on Delaware. In the words of the International Astronomical Union, a century old body with 82 member countries that through force of academic consensus actually has the power to name the sky, the ISR has “has no formal validity whatsoever.”

Because the sky is shared but only accessible at a distance, there have always been competing star naming systems. Arabian cultures in the centuries after Mohammed, for example, had a linguistic separation between what they called the stars of the astronomers and the “stars of the Arabs”—those that common people used in daily life. But now that might change: As the ISR sails past two million stars named, the IAU has formally set out to codify official star names for the first time ever. In 2016, it established a Working Group on Star Names to scour the globe for potential names and to adjudicate naming disputes concerning prominent stars.

The task requires great diplomacy: To label the sky is, necessarily, to unlabel it. The careful choice of which tradition to defer to contains acts of erasure. Should the two stars that make up the “stinger” in the Ptolemaic constellation Scorpius, for example, be named after the Arabic and Greek words for stinger and sting respectively, as the Western tradition has decided? Or should they be identified as two boys walking together, as the Chaco in Argentina have? The IAU’s parceling of the sky by executive decision, and to a lesser extent the ISR’s by payment, reveal an uncomfortable truth: The stars belong to everybody, but their names cannot. The WGSN must now figure out how best to leave various peoples out.

Reaching for the Star Names

Long before the days of Acrux, Gacrux, Libertas, and a slate of contrived names befitting of sci-fi that came into existence in or after the 19th century, the first star names were functional. They emerged not from the halls of science, but rather from sailors and herdsman, as a navigational necessity or as an agricultural harbinger of the end of fall or the beginning of spring.

For those, like sailors, who relied on the sky, constellation names typically formed the basis for star names. The stars in Ursa Major, for example, Dubhe, Merak, and Phecda, mean bear, loins of the bear, and thigh of the bear, respectively, in Arabic; the Southern Hemisphere constellation Eradinus, the river, is made up in part by Archernar and Zaurak, Arabic for the end of the river and the boat, respectively, and Rana, Latin for the frog.

In 2010, after a number of exoplanets were discovered orbiting distant stars, the IAU elected to label them via public naming contests. This decision led to a classificatory windfall: If planets were to be named, so should their host stars, the IAU determined. But if host stars were to receive names, it was important that we didn’t re-use those from other stars, which meant the IAU had to codify a list of those other stars.

In the process of cataloging other star names, the IAU noticed that the names scientists employed for notable stars were almost all in Greek, Latin, or Arabic. So the IAU established the WGSN, which now seats 18 members, both to set official names, for perpetuity, of prominent stars, and to try to make the names of stars more culturally diverse and inclusive.

According to Alejandro Martín López, a cultural astronomer and member of the IAU from Argentina, the historic underrepresentation of indigenous groups in the Western astronomic tradition has the effect of homogenizing far more than just the skies. “Many of these astronomical views are linked with identity and idea of terrestrial landscape,” he says. “If you cut these sky views, you cut these identities.”

The WGSN first began its search for a more expansive list of names by setting limits on acceptable ones. Among other dictates, names must be pronounceable in some language—though all are transliterated into the Latin alphabet; they cannot be in reference to a primarily military or political event; and they must be non-offensive, non-commercial, and preferably between four and 16 characters. Pet names are also banned, pursuant to a controversy in 1985 when an astronomer, James Gibson, named an asteroid “Mr. Spock,” after his cat.

But beyond these restrictions, the problem of setting names—particularly with an eye toward durable relevance, linguistically and culturally, for the next thousands of years—is not an easy one. Imagine you were tasked with naming celestial objects. Where would you begin?

The first step might be to set a language, much as the IAU has with Latin. With perpetuity in mind, however, this part is tough. The languages people recognize shift rapidly and unpredictably: 200 years ago, French was a dominant language worldwide. And of course, a language itself can morph: Middle English didn’t have set capitalization rules or contractions, the letters “U” and “J” came to the modern English language in the 16th century, and “snowflake” did not come to officially mean an “overly sensitive person” until 2019.

These and other problems posed by shifting languages have dogged star catalogers for millennia. Lesath, one of the stinger stars in Scorpius, was mistranslated from its initial Greek meaning of “foggy” to Arabic to Latin and then back to Arabic again, before astronomers settled on a name meaning “sting.”

Once you’ve chosen a language—linguists says that Latin and Arabic are sensible choices, since both have long traditions in the sciences—the real task begins. In the West, but notably not so much elsewhere, places and geographical features are often named after historical or religious figures, according to Sheila Embleton, a York University linguist who was once president of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, an academic organization devoted to the study of naming. But there is a big problem with naming stars after such figures—which perhaps explains why the WGSN has a guideline against naming bright stars after individuals: As mores change, and historical heroes are re-assessed as immoral, cancel culture can come for the stars. This isn’t an abstract problem in the naming of outer space. There are asteroids today named after Vladimir Lenin (Wladilena) and Josip Tito (Tito). A number of minor planets, like major countries and institutions on Earth, are named after Christopher Columbus.

Embleton suggests that saints and royalty tend to have names that age well—the former because they have been pre-vetted, and the latter, she says, because they are given a pass. If such names aren’t to your taste, however, another solution is to name astronomical bodies after lesser figures, with no presumption of sustained cultural relevance. All four Beatles, Eric Clapton, and Herbert Hoover have asteroids named after them; Monty Python’s John Cleese is now a minor planet, as are Bill Nye, Johnny Galecki, and Beatrix Potter (and Bacon and Beer). Outer space is littered with nominal grabs for immortality: The names of astronomers and their dead relatives sprinkle the sky, Lutz Schmadel, a prolific discoverer of asteroids, once said, though spouse-inspired names are more common than children-inspired ones.

If you’re worried that a reference to a person might become dated, you might decide to instead name a star after a geographical or spatial feature, as is common in the non-Western world, according to Embleton. This is, of course, how many constellations were named: after what they loosely appeared to be. But unity of celestial vision is often hard to achieve. The sky is chaotic, and the same grouping of stars can be interpreted in starkly different ways, as if a Rorschach test. Some tribes in North America see what is known officially as Ursa Major as an elk, deer, or scorpion; others in the Americas see half of it as a bear, and the other half as three hunters chasing it; in Europe, many see it as a wagon. Owing to this wild variance in symbolic projections onto the sky, some scholars in the ’60s even suggested one could derive a genealogy of tribes from the degree to which their folkloric cosmologies were shared; one astronomer took this logic to its cosmic conclusion and argued the intercontinental interpretation of Ursa Major as seven brothers was evidence of migration into America from Siberia during the Ice Age.

Beyond disagreement on how to name the same sets of stars, another problem is that not every cultural tradition views the sky as a collection of nameable items in the same discreet ways. According to Martín López, many indigenous groups have names for asterisms (clusters of stars), but not for individual ones. Other groups include negative features of the sky—the dark spots between stars—as constituent parts of constellations: The Chaco in Argentina, for example, refer to alpha Centauri, or Rigel to the IAU—a binary star that appears as one to the naked eye—as the “two dogs chasing the celestial bird.” In this account, the bird is formed, like a photo negative, by a swath of dark spots in the band of the Milky Way.

Finally, there’s the challenge of balancing names with the fact that the night sky is not an equally shared resource. People at the planet’s extremes, like the Inuit, for example, have limited nighttime in the summer, and they experience snow and cloud cover, as well as bright polar moonlight, in the winter. As a result, historically, they’ve had fewer star names than have herdsman in the world’s grassy plains. As the WGSN collects names, its chair, Eric Mamajek, has noticed that the Chinese and Wardaman people of Indigenous Australia, for example, have many star names to choose from, whereas other groups, such as the Mursi people of Ethiopia and Native Hawaiians, do not. (Recently, the IAU adopted the star name “Imai,” from Mursi, for a star in the Southern Cross, and “Paikauhale,” from Hawaiian, for a star in Scorpius). Mamajek notes that most traditions have names for the brightest star, Alpha Canis Majoris or Sirius, but none have a non-scientific name for the relatively bright star in the constellation Lupus currently referred to as Epsilon Lupi.

“Our focus over the next couple years is on widening the net for names from a growing list of cultures,” Mamajek says. “Much of the low-hanging fruit in terms of astronomical literature has been already harvested.”

The WGSN has slowed down on naming stars, according to Mamajek, to make sure it continues to find names that expand the cultural horizons of the IAU. He specifies that, of the current 313 names, Indigenous groups from the Americas and Africa are notably underrepresented.

For most, there’s no official recourse for being left out of the IAU’s naming of the sky. For those of means and no regard for scientific validity, however, there is, perhaps, another option.

A Star Is Bought

In May of 1979, the Toronto Festival of Festivals made a promise to prospective patrons: Anyone who gave more than $250 to the event would get the right to name a star in the Andromeda galaxy, authenticated by the International Star Registry with the cooperation of the Smithsonian Institute, and recorded by the Library of Congress. Yet, in July, two months before the festival began, representatives of the Smithsonian issued a press release clarifying that the organization had never heard of the International Star Registry prior to the festival. Later that year, a Library of Congress spokesman said, on account of the misleading branding, that she’d “like to put them [the ISR] out of business.”

Pressed for explanation, the film festival admitted its promise had been in error: The International Star Registry, in fact, would simply use Smithsonian Institution coordinates to identify stars to be named, and would publish those names and corresponding geo-locations in a book copyrighted by the Library of Congress, as all books published in America are. What the ISR offered, in actuality, was little more than a galactic cartography of unfulfillable promises.

And yet, despite astronomers like former IAU Documentation Committee Chairman Wullf Heintz consistently decrying the ISR as a “dumb idea” or the “result of decaying capitalism,” buyers kept coming. In 1982, the Research Institute of America suggested buying star names to reward standout employees; by 1984, there were 16 stars awarded to “John Smiths,” and five named for Barry Manilow.

In 1983, John Mosele, the vice president of the ISR, called his organization’s reference to the Library of Congress in promotional capacity “legitimate puffery.” Today, Elaine Stolpe, the ISR’s director of marketing and communications, makes clear that the “service is not intended for scientific research; it is intended as a lasting gift.”

The ISR has now sold over two million stars—well beyond the 400,000 it reported having in stock for purchase in 1982. It partners with film companies releasing movies, and the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and, unlike the IAU, allows names from a variety of languages—simplified Chinese, Greek—to be written in the native characters. While the European Union does not recognize its trademarks, considering them deceptive, the ISR has successfully fended off copycats in the United States multiple times. It has withstood citation and investigations by multiple state departments of commerce alleging grift, only to later to earn an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

“Stars don’t belong to anyone—to us, or astronomers,” Stolpe says. “We’re respectful of astronomers, but we believe everybody is moved by the stars and always has been. They belong to everybody.”

In fact, one star, it turns out, may have unofficially belonged to me. My aunt, when I was in elementary school, purchased a star name for me and my siblings one Christmas. In physical terms, the gift was an enveloped certificate, with data on where to look for the star. In turn, it became misplaced on some shelf in the flotsam of school art projects and papers, sports gear and participant trophies, Gameboys and binoculars. With the certificate, the star was functionally lost too.

In an email last month, Stolpe confirmed for me the existence of “Rowen’s Star,” printed and copyrighted by the Library of Congress in the seventh volume of ISR’s book, Your Place in the Cosmos. The star, close to the third brightest one in the Northern hemisphere, Capella, is not itself visible to the naked eye. “The biggest impediment to locating stars of this magnitude is light pollution rather than magnification,” Stolpe wrote. I had grown up in a city. I’m not sure any of us had ever looked for Rowen’s Star—but perhaps we had gone out and just missed it.

But earlier this month, I wanted to find it. The universe, it has been noted, has a way of trivializing earthly squabbles and ambition on account of their cosmic insignificance. This is supposed to be a humbling thought, but cosmic insignificance also facilitates Earthly delusion: While I may be meaningless, I thought, I’m meaningless on the same order of magnitude as mountains, as parliaments, as astronomical authorities. My star name is a rounding error, but so are the IAU’s: The stars, in belonging to none of us, can be claimed by all.

Around 2:30 a.m. one recent Friday, I headed out to a vacant, dimly lit lot by my apartment. As a child, I had loved star-gazing, but the experience of looking for Rowen’s Star put my antique knowledge to the test. I knew from a Google search to look for the Big Dipper, the key to the convoluted skies, whose top edge forms a line that points in the general direction of Capella, in the constellation Auriga. I had sketched a rough idea of how to triangulate the region where my star must be—plain black to the naked eye—once I’d located Auriga, which allegedly resembles a charioteer and his goat. But the first night I looked to the northeast, the Dipper had plunged behind mountains, and I couldn’t find a goat in the sky.

Two nights later I went back out, armed with more indicators. The star would be near the constellation Perseus too; at 4:50 a.m., Orion’s belt would crest and I could locate his non bow-hand, which would gesture in Rowen’s direction. But when I walked to my car to drive to an even darker field, there was too heavy cloud cover, so I turned back.

On my third attempt, an evening later, I finally found some success. Tracking a line across the top of the Dipper, passing by scores of inaccessible stars I didn’t know the name of, I eventually landed upon Capella. I pulled out my binoculars and fixed them on a nearby dark region, bringing yet more stars to life. Which one was Rowen’s, I couldn’t quite tell. 

The post The Fault in Our Star Names appeared first on Pacific Standard.

“That’s the starting point to a whole civilization right there,” says Utah State University researcher Bruce Bugbee. This is Bugbee’s vision, one he’s been dreaming of and testing and revising for years as a plant engineer with NASA.

Astronauts going to Mars can eat all the freeze-dried food they’re able to ship, but if humans are going to survive on the planet they’ll need plants to produce oxygen. Not just any photosynthesizer will do: Mars is a difficult environment, with many challenges for farmers. Crops will need to be able to thrive in a small area, retain their nutrient content, and still taste good. Structures where they grow on the surface will need to withstand basketball-sized meteorites. The technology used to grow the plants will take massive amounts of energy. Mars also presents the ultimate recycling challenge, since astronauts can’t pack all the water and nutrients they need on a two-and-a-half-year space flight.

Bugbee and his colleagues have been working on all these problems for decades, in a sometimes fantastical bid to support life on Mars (and, in the meantime, on space shuttles). Decades ago, NASA researchers ruled out some of the easiest plants to grow indoors, like algae: not enough sustenance, Bugbee says. Very tall crops like corn and sugarcane were also nixed because they wouldn’t fit easily into the plant habitats.

What the astronauts really wanted was something green. “They say that having the texture and flavor and color and aromas of fresh foods apparently—and I believe it—really does add to the experience of eating,” says NASA plant physiologist Raymond Wheeler.

Scientists started looking at traditional field crops like lettuce, tomatoes, and broccoli. Right now, astronauts are growing mixed greens 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station, using two small, sealed greenhouse units called Veggie. NASA researchers have planned and adjusted and measured for everything—including which types of lettuce tastes best in space. Astronauts’ clogged sinuses already make it so they “can’t taste much of anything,” according to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, but the researchers are also curious to see whether the space environment affects a plant’s flavor compounds and nutrient levels. Panels of specialists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston typically conduct formal taste tests, but sometimes the researchers sample a leaf or two themselves.

What Bugbee and his team didn’t expect is that the technology they created for this grandiose, futuristic mission would become somewhat eclipsed by those using it to farm on more familiar terrain.

In 2017, NASA commissioned a space farming project to figure out how to grow food on Mars, but they were also hoping to make some discoveries that could improve crop yields overall. The problems that space farmers of the future will face are similar to those already plaguing earthbound agriculture as climate change grows worse, including a dwindling water supply and poor soil. Now, researchers in Utah and three California universities—NASA’s partners with the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space—are working on projects that can sustain life not just on Mars, but on Earth.

“I think the reason NASA funds us is a powerful human fascination with being able to go inside a closed system and grow your own food,” Bugbee says. “What if the atmosphere went bad and we had to build a big dome … and go inside and live in it?”

In 1988, Wheeler built the first working vertical farm—growing plants on shelves, typically in a warehouse or storage container—at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center. Wheeler’s farm was 25 feet high and equipped with a hydroponic system for growing plants in water and high-pressure sodium lamps, the type commonly used for street lighting. All together, it was 20 square meters of growing space—almost 90,000 times less than the size of the average outdoor United States farm. According to Wheeler’s calculations, it would take 50 square meters of plants to provide enough food and oxygen—and remove enough carbon dioxide—for one human in space. (Astronauts won’t be using sodium lamps, though: A few years after Wheeler’s innovation, a different group of NASA-funded researchers patented another significant piece of technology to indoor farmers: LEDs, which require much less electricity than sodium lights and are now used to power most greenhouses.)

Wheeler was focused on optimizing the area inside a chamber aboard a NASA space shuttle—and up seemed like the best way to go. “One of the things you have to think about in space is volume efficiency,” he says. “You’re vertically and dimensionally constrained.” The team had to pick shorter crops: wheat, soybeans, potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes.

In space, resources are limited: NASA scientists have to extract and reuse the nutrients from excess plant material and human waste; they collect water from the condensation that collects in the closed chambers. Here on Earth, water is also growing increasingly precious—climate change will make droughts more frequent and severe, devastating crop yields and making some staple crops like corn and soybeans obsolete. Every day, Earth looks a little more desolate, a little more like Mars.

When Wheeler started, the term “vertical farming” didn’t exist yet. Today it’s a $10 billion industry attracting interest from Silicon Valley and start-ups all over the world. Its acolytes believe the technology will one day completely replace conventional field agriculture, allowing businesses to grow crops year-round and indoors, insulated from the next drought or flood and the effects of climate change. “People imagine that we’ll grow everything indoors, in skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan,” Bugbee says. “It’s a wildly popular idea.”

Sonia Lo, the chief executive officer of the biggest vertical farming company in the world, Crop One Holdings, says she believes vertical farming can “liberate agriculture from climate change and geography.”

Crop One announced it would break ground on the world’s largest vertical farm last November in Dubai: a five-story, 130,000-square-feet warehouse, capable of producing three tons of leafy greens a day. The company is also growing chard, arugula, and other greens in large, sealed rooms—year-round. “I made my whole management team stand in the supermarket and give out samples of what we were growing in the middle of the Boston winter,” Lo says.

Soon people across the U.S. can try it too. Crop One is building new farms in the northeast, southwest, and California, where it will grow food to sell through its FreshBox Farms brand.

While researchers have been quick to condemn vertical farming’s promises as over-hyped, even the industry’s greatest critics acknowledge that this approach eliminates some of the challenges with conventional agriculture: Since vertical farms are located in compact warehouses, they’re often located much closer to their markets than, say, the corn belt is to a city, allowing producers to cut down on food waste and save on transportation costs—a major contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The lettuce grows in a controlled environment, free of pests and pathogens, meaning farmers can grow food without pesticides or herbicides, which have a massive environmental and human-health cost. Vertical farmers can also recycle their nutrients—like astronauts do in space—preventing phosphorus or nitrogen from flooding into the world’s waterways and wreaking havoc with algal blooms. And indoor growth systems can be very productive: When all the conditions are right, researchers have surpassed record crop yields in the field by as much as six times.

Lo says that a vertical farm using 100 percent renewables has one-tenth of the carbon impact of a conventional farm. But few companies have reached this goal; most are still moving toward a combination of renewable energy and non-renewables to power the electric lights used to grow the plants. It takes a lot of land to generate that much solar—about five acres of solar panels to supply the light for just one acre of indoor farm, Bugbee estimates. That’s why many have resorted to fossil fuels, breaking one of vertical farming’s great promises. “It takes massive amounts of fossil fuel energy, so, environmentally, it’s really a disaster,” Bugbee says. “Those people have used many of the principles that we’ve developed through NASA.”

Bugbee’s current project could help with that. His lab at Utah State is using LEDs and fiber optics to grow plants under different types of lights, with different ratios of colors—ultra violet, blue, green, red, far red (out of the limit of human vision)—to manipulate both photosynthesis and plant shape. The goal, he says, is to find “the most efficient system possible.” Right now, the technology is too expensive: millions of dollars to light one building. But eventually, he believes fiber optics will replace electric lights for good.

But there are other qualms with vertical farming: Instead of helping to colonize space—the future that Mars researchers envision for their technology—vertical farms might take over city real estate, at a time when housing costs are extremely high. In some countries and some industries, it already has: Japan has had flourishing plant factories for the last 10 years. The fledgling cannabis industry has also started to ramp up its indoor production, poised to become even more profitable.

Lo says it won’t be long until greens grown indoors cost the same as those in the field. “Field-grown food will continue to rise in cost, and course the climate is also changing,” she says. “From a cost perspective, vertical farming will become competitive very quickly.”

Others are more skeptical: “Economically, will they succeed? That question is still ongoing, because they always have to compete with field agriculture,” Wheeler says. “What’s their cost to pay for electric power? What are their labor costs? Are these operations sustainable? All of this is sort of a living experiment right now.”

Technology for farming in climate change may be a by-product of NASA’s research, but it has helped the agency ensure funding for its work in space. In response to the skeptic who doubts whether it’s worth figuring out how to farm for a Mars mission we might never see, one only has to point to vertical farms in Boston or Seattle that already use some of NASA’s innovations.

But Bugbee believes these earthly pursuits can be just as futuristic (or deluded) as those meant for space. “People that do it say they’re going to save the planet … but they have to have a lot of fossil fuels,” he says. “It’ll tell you all kinds of rosy pictures about it—that it saves water, it saves fertilizer.”

He’s not quite comfortable with his research being used to prop up this industry, now flooded with billions of dollars of venture capital. “I’m not doing it to make this more possible on Earth,” he says. “We get asked all the time about the spinoffs: Could you do this, could you do that.”

We may never make it to Mars. It will be years until NASA is ready for a journey to the red planet, and many more until Bugbee would be able to build his greenhouse underground, tucked away from meteorites. But if Earth continues on this collision course, Mars could come to us.

The post The Farms of the Future Were Built for Outer Space. Will They Work on Earth? appeared first on Pacific Standard.

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Yaeji Pokes Holes in the Facade: In the video for “Last Breath,” artist Yaeji repurposes the YouTube make-up tutorial format as a visual foreground for cutting commentary. She lightly pats foundation into her skin while the background vocals harmonize, “All your embarrassing memories / can be applied naturally.” She then serenely drags a contour stick along her jawline, parting her lips into a slight smile so she can blend into the shadows of her face more easily—mirroring the beats of the conventional tutorial video. As she smears dark eye-shadow along the rims of her eyes, subtitled lyrics at the bottom of the video read, “This product is called Depression and / it stays on for 24 hours.”

Yaeji’s “Last Breath” is both an homage to and whimsical mockery of women’s beauty routines. Her piercing lyrics, juxtaposed with her groovy, pulsating melodies and shimmery skincare products, remind listeners that the demand for immaculate self-presentation and self-loathing often go hand in hand.

For me, “Last Breath” delivers a refreshing punch of candor to the realm of make-up, which, as of late, is being re-christened as the realm of “beauty and wellness.” There has been a recent pivot in the way beauty products are marketed to women: Looking pretty is not about looking pretty as much as it is a means to demonstrate well-being and empowerment. Millennial beauty brand Glossier calls itself a “people-powered beauty ecosystem,” one that vows to “democratize beauty” if you invest in its Generation G lipstick. In the Vogue video series “Beauty Secrets,” celebrity women cheerfully toss their hair and dance around marble-adorned bathrooms as they share their guides to getting that perfect glowing skin or effortless color correction. The stakes for women to appear pleasant are already high, but the stakes for women to derive empowerment from their appearance are even higher.

The beauty-as-wellness phenomenon seems to leave women with two undesirable options: Either learn to stop worrying and love the performance of femininity or reject the beauty routine altogether—and be robbed of the genuine, unadulterated joy of self-exploration using cosmetics. Yaeji shows us a third option—acknowledging the pressure to mask imperfections and pain while reveling in the theatrics of beauty.

The post PS Picks: Yaeji’s Cutting Commentary on Beauty Routines appeared first on Pacific Standard.

As several speakers noted, it has been nearly three decades since the publication of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, which helped put the perils of climate change on the national agenda. Yet we’ve done relatively little to change the disastrous trajectory we are on. Scientists have not been effective in getting people to grasp the problem and take action. Can artists do any better?

That question was the focus of this hybrid evening event, which began with readings of six new, short, climate-related plays, and concluded with a discussion among climate scientists.

It’s hard to say which half of the program was bleaker.

“I thought I’d be the bearer of bad news,” Neil Berg, associate director of science at the University of California–Los Angeles Center for Climate Science, said as he took the stage following the play readings. “But that was dark.”

Berg was not criticizing anyone. Indeed, he praised the accuracy of the information and data that playwright Bess Wohl had woven into her play Continuity. The script includes a climate scientist, who delivers a long monologue explaining just how deep a hole civilization has dug for itself.

That particular playlet, set on the stage of a (wildly inaccurate) climate-themed disaster movie, had some moments of laugh-out-loud comedy. But it couldn’t transcend the fundamental problem that each of these playwrights was grappling with: Full and accurate information about the climate crisis is almost too bleak for us to take in.

As a recent study of climate change-themed visual art showed, imagery that portrays a bleak future tends to leave people feeling hopeless and dispirited and less likely to act. To inspire action—the stated goal of the conference’s artistic director, Robert Egan—an artist needs to convey hope.

But how do you do that without making false promises?

“It’s all about awareness and action,” Egan said a few days before the event. “The artist’s job is to raise consciousness and cut through the complacency. I asked playwrights to meditate on the theme of, ‘Wake up—act now!’ We’re creating awareness, and stimulating action.”

Egan argues that theater could be uniquely effective in this regard. “People in a live space, together with each other, can stimulate a kind of consciousness and awareness that may be more difficult to create if you’re staring at a screen,” he said. To emphasize this communal aspect of the experience, at one point during the event, he asked everyone to hold hands with their seatmates on either side for 30 seconds and meditate on what we had just seen and heard.

But while it is a collective experience, no one goes to the theater to be lectured at. They want to hear a compelling story, and perhaps learn something along the way. The playwrights on Thursday, including nationally known figures such as Bill Cain, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Jon Robin Baitz, approached this  challenge in different ways.

One playlet brought Saint Francis of Assisi back to life; another featured a family squabble between a scientist, her brother (who is moving to a commune in Mexico to live a spartan life off the grid), and her college-age daughter, who declares, “I’m scared of the world you made for us.”

The most compelling piece was Baitz’s The Aquifer, which painted a chilling portrait of a future world in which water is rationed out by a giant corporation. Patricia Wettig (of Thirtysomething) played a representative of a governmental district who travels to the company’s headquarters to describe her community’s polluted aquifer and to plead for help. The corporate honcho, played by Rachel Ticotin, admonishes Wettig’s character for exacerbating the water shortage by allowing in the least-deserving refugees imaginable: Americans.

There’s the seed of a good play or movie there, but, again, it’s questionable that such a frightening vision of the future will inspire audiences to take action, given what we know about climate, art, and persuasion. “We must tell the story of what’s happening—to each other, to our neighbors, to our communities,” Egan said ahead of the show. “We have to tell it until they start doing something.”

And yet, as Berg admitted later in the evening, there’s only so much we can do. An insert in the program included a list of 10 ways everyone can fight climate change, including eating less meat, taking public transit, and generally using energy more wisely.

Sure, everyone should do those things, Berg told the crowd. But honestly, even if everyone in California did so, “it wouldn’t make a dent” in the overall global problem, he said. It’s that big, and time is that short.

At this point, Berg argued, our focus should be on making ourselves, and our societies, more resilient to the climate extremes we are certain to face. The question we need to be asking ourselves at the moment, he said, is not, “How do we fix climate change?” but rather, “How do we prepare for climate change?”

Inadvertently, he was quoting Shakespeare. It was Hamlet, after all, who reminded us that “the readiness is all.”

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With all this new writing by, and new attention on, Indigenous authors, I wanted to chat with two Native women who are pursuing groundbreaking work that honors Indigenous life and creates art from our struggles. Haudenosaunee author Alicia Elliott‘s non-fiction book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground has been on the Canadian bestseller list week after week since it appeared in March, and she’s been writing for years about Native issues in Canadian newspapers and magazines. (Her recent editorial in the Washington Post on murdered and missing Indigenous women adds a thoughtful new perspective to the issue.) This year, Arielle Twist, a Nehiyaw, two-spirit trans woman, published Disintegrate/Disassociate, a groundbreaking work of poetry exploring sexuality, identity, and metamorphosis. Twist’s work is powerful in its experiments in form.

Both authors chatted with Pacific Standard about what it means to see success among fellow Indigenous authors, and how they deal with generational poverty and abuse in their work.

Alicia, you write head-on about the stark realities Indigenous people face, addressing things like residential schools, or misuses of power, while exploring the lasting effects of poverty and trauma. Concerning mainstream Canada’s view of Indigenous life today, you write: “Abusers rarely take responsibility for themselves. They prefer to blame their victims for their actions.” Have you received any pushback for how you’ve characterized the average white person in Canada?

Alicia: I’m lucky in that I haven’t done too many events since my book has come out yet, and the ones I have done have been pretty supportive. Some people, mostly white folks, have talked about how my book is difficult to read, which I find interesting. I’m writing about my own life and the social, political, and historical forces that have shaped it. I don’t really think of it as particularly difficult because it was my life—the only life I had access to. I had to deal with situations and move through them, regardless of how old I was or if I was ready, so it’s strange to see people remark on my life as though it were abnormal. This was my normal. If you don’t think my life should be anyone’s normal, then do something to change the systems that both created that life and made any other options impossible.

Now that the Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has come out, though, the big debate happening in Canada is whether this is actually genocide. I’m pretty clear in my book that it is genocide, so I have a feeling that going forward I might have to deal with questions about that, [with people] trying to make me feel bad for telling the truth. I won’t feel bad, though. I find the best way to deal with racist white people in real-life literary contexts is to be better informed than all of them, which isn’t hard, since they often have nothing to base their opinions on but racism.

Online it’s different, because they can hide behind a screen and feel no shame, so I just block them. I don’t have the time to try to break through to people who think my family should be dead. I’ve got better things and people to funnel my time and energy into.

Arielle, when you were writing your book of poems, what were the important things to honor in your work, and what gaps did you see in the world of poetry?

Arielle: Writing this collection, I was wanting to honor reality, even if that reality is gritty and hard to read at times. I thought I owed honesty to myself and the young 2SLGBTQ+ [two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, etc.] Indigenous folks who I was initially writing this book for. I wanted to encompass my lived experience as a two-spirit trans woman in a way which highlighted these realities: things like grief, longing, kinship, and an unapologetic sexuality.

What I wanted for this book is to resonate with people like me: I wanted to show the messy, ndn trans girl from the prairies that we are surviving, and that these things we are surviving aren’t all-consuming if we have hope and create community.

I think when I came into poetry, the representation was coming from people like Gwen Benaway, Kai Cheng Thom, Vivek Shraya, and Alok-Vaid Menon. I was seeing racialized trans femmes creating incredible work, and the only gap I felt I needed to fill was Indigenous trans girls from the prairies and the rez. I wanted to see more of us having access to art and being included more in the conversation. I couldn’t have survived without these amazing femmes I named above paving the way!

Alicia, your collection of essays explores deeply personal things about your life, like your mother’s mental health and your young motherhood. It can be difficult to write about the complexities of our lives without people mining our traumas or letting our stories affirm stereotypes. How did you handle this dilemma in your work?

Alicia: I was very conscious while writing that people were going to see stereotypes in my life and the lives of those around me, so I actively tried to use certain literary techniques to call [those prejudices] into question. In the essay “Weight,” for example, which is about my experience of getting pregnant at 17, I decided to use second-person narration to force the reader to see the world more intensely through my eyes. Second-person narration is great for fostering intimacy between the reader and the text.

I wanted to give people insight into what that experience actually looked like for me by focusing on the details. It’s easy to say, “Oh, she’s a teen mom; it’s all her fault, she should have kept her legs shut” when you don’t know anything about me. It’s harder to say that when I tell you that the sex that led to my pregnancy wasn’t really based on informed consent, or that my mother is super Catholic and anti-abortion, or that I started the process of putting my child up for adoption and it was incredibly traumatic. Those are the sort of heartbreaking details that aren’t really public, but once they are, it’s harder to flatten my experience and the experiences of women like me into easily digestible stereotypes.

Overall I wanted to use detail to humanize people that were otherwise dehumanized—like my mother, like my father, like myself. I wanted to show the highs along with the lows, because that’s what people are like. That’s what life is like. And then, of course, there’s the fact that whenever Indigenous women speak for ourselves, whenever we believe our lives are full of insight and worthy of being made into art, we’re already smashing stereotypes.

Arielle, your book is beautiful. In your poem “Cold,” you write, “clinging to a man who / wasn’t mine. / Betrayal couldn’t thaw me / but it was warm, / for a moment.” You explore relationships in your work, and the poems are always centered within the speaker, who is “reckless,” she says, because men are entirely reckless with her. The speaker in your work is so guileless, passionate, and honest—how did you execute that voice?

Arielle: I think when exploring the relationships throughout my life, specifically intimate, sexual relationships, I was deconstructing this idea about how reckless I felt I was being with myself, whether physically or emotionally. The guilt and blame that comes with promiscuity, or the perception of promiscuity, is something I think all femme-of-center people feel. I wanted to show the thought process of guilt that is settled in calling myself reckless, the self-blame that exists through patriarchal ideals, and the rape culture that dismisses our realities of violence, and the coming to terms with the fact that it was men who were shaping these ideas with the ways they were and still are reckless with my body and heart with little or no emotional intelligence.

So, this whole collection is written from a personal point of view; it’s a literal look into my own thought process and the grittiest, most intimate parts of myself. I think why it comes off so honest, guileless, and passionate was because I was writing from a place of naivety about where it would end up. It was written within the first year of cultivating a writing practice, which makes this collection the first steps of my very public growth as a writer. In entering my third year as a writer, I realize it will probably be the most honest, unfiltered writing I will ever do.

Who are you both reading, and what do you foresee for the future of Indigenous writing? How happy does it make you to see us thriving, and what do we need to keep pushing forward?

Alicia: I can’t keep up with all of the amazing Indigenous writing that’s coming out right now, which is exactly the sort of problem that I want. It’s incredible to be making art at the same time as all of these other writers I admire. I’m honored and humbled to be working alongside writers like you, Arielle, Lindsay Nixon, Gwen Benaway, Joshua Whitehead, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tenille Campbell, and others. I’m excited for new work from Brandi Bird, Helen Knott, Oscar Baker III, and Jessica Johns. I think Indigenous writing is going to continue to set the bar for literary excellence, pushing our ideas of genre, structure, syntax and form.

I think we need to constantly be making space for Indigenous women and two-spirit, queer, trans, and non-binary writers. I also think that we need to be making space for black Indigenous writers. A variety of voices from all different perspectives working across genres to create the robust Indigenous lit we all deserve.

Arielle: Right now I am catching up on years of Indigenous literature, while also trying to read all the work by my peers and mentors! In this moment I am reading Alicia’s book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, patiently waiting for NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt to come in the mail any moment now, while forever admiring the published works of Gwen Benaway, Joshua Whitehead, Lindsay Nixon, Tenille Campbell, Jessica Johns, Brandi Bird, and so many others. I see Indigenous literature continuing to be honest: messy, queer, and unapologetic while consistently setting the standard for creative, innovative storytelling. If we want to continue pushing forward we need to be centering more voices that have been left out of conversations.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Pacific Standard’s Ideas section is your destination for idea-driven features, voracious culture coverage, sharp opinion, and enlightening conversation. Help us shape our ongoing coverage by responding to a short reader survey.

The post ‘Indigenous Writing Is Going to Continue to Set the Bar for Literary Excellence’: An Interview With Alicia Elliott and Arielle Twist appeared first on Pacific Standard.