Charles Darwin the geologist

Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.

It did not start well. Aged 17, he assessed the Edinburgh University geology lectures he dropped in on, while studying Medicine, so ‘incredibly dull’, that he would ‘never attend to the subject of geology’.

His lecturer was Robert Jameson, who was on the wrong side in the dispute about the origin of dolerite. As dolerite could be found as a layer among strata of sandstone and limestone, he believed it had somehow precipitated out of water. It turned out a sill could be intruded between the layers as red-hot basaltic magma.

In the spirit of student rebellion Charles also assessed all but one of his lecturers in medicine as ‘intolerably dull’. Squeamish about anatomy, he ostensibly switched to the University of Cambridge to study theology. By the summer of 1831 he needed to prove some rapid geological acumen in applying to become the geologist/naturalist on a round-the-world voyage on the survey ship HMS Beagle.

Charles convinced Cambridge Professor Adam Sedgwick to allow him to spend a few weeks as a field assistant while the professor mapped the geology of North Wales. The learning was intensive, but it worked.

While on the Beagle, Darwin’s notes on geology were four times longer than those reporting natural history. He wrote to his sister that ’the pleasure of the first day’s partridge shooting …. cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones’—there were some great bones to be found in Patagonia.

On returning after almost five years away on the Beagle, Darwin became the society secretary to the Geological Society of London where he remained for three years. He published four scientific papers on geology, including how coral reefs formed above sinking volcanoes.

Less known was Darwin’s solo expedition to investigate the ‘parallel roads’ contouring Glen Roy in the Scottish Highlands. This was a real adventure. From London one could only get as far as Liverpool by train. Like the raised beach deposits he had mapped on the coast of Chile, he visited Glen Roy to record former sea levels.

Another facet of Darwin’s geology emerged on the long walks he took around his wife’s family’s house at Maer near Stoke on Trent. (His own family life was hectic, with ten children.) On one of these walks he discovered an igneous dyke, now named Butterton Dyke, which intruded around the time of the Hebridean volcanoes (one date gives 54 million years ago) but which chemically and by orientation is of mystery origin. To commemorate Darwin, again as a geologist, a fragment of the dyke was sent into orbit on the Mir space station and then flown to a last resting place on the Moon.

Although no longer collecting bones, or dolerite samples, after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, he summoned geological evidence to manifest the time needed to allow for evolution. He proposed sluggish rates of erosion of 500-foot-tall Sussex cliffs, such as an inch per century, to explain how much geological time had passed to enable evolution. His estimates for erosion have proved to be perhaps a hundred times too slow and he came under much criticism from physicists who calculated the age of the habitable earth from simple thermal decay. However, by the beginning of a new century, twenty years after his death, the discovery of heating accompanying radioactive decay vindicated his projection of the duration of geological time.

If you were scoring Charles Darwin as a geologist the results would be mixed. Always concocting hypotheses, he was ready to change his theories as new evidence arrived. He admitted there was only one such area of theorizing (the explanation for coral reefs) where he hadn’t had to change his mind. And it was Darwin the geologist who could give Darwin the evolutionist the eons of time required to realise his theory of natural selection.

_{Featured image via © Getty Images; iStock.com (Used with Permission).}

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Explore environmental history in eight books [reading list]

Environmental history only emerged a few decades ago but has already established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history—one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the science, and is truly international in its approach.

To understand the field better and showcase some of the recent research, we’re sharing eight of our latest titles in environmental history for you to explore, share, and enjoy.

1. Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol by Jennifer Eaglin

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century.

However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.

Buy Sweet Fuel

2. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat

A comprehensive history of American slavery that examines how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people’s lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape.

Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce.

Buy Scars on the Land

3. Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin

An innovative reconsideration of the Civil War’s profound impact on southern history, Unredeemed Land traces the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South’s transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century.

Bridging the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, Unredeemed Land powerfully examines the ways military conflict and emancipation left enduring ecological legacies.

Buy Unredeemed Land, new in paperback

4. Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon by E. Elena Songster

Panda Nation links the emergence of the giant panda as a national symbol to the development of nature protection in the People’s Republic of China.

The panda’s transformation into a national treasure exemplifies China’s efforts in the mid-twentieth century to distinguish itself as a nation through government-directed science and popular nationalism.

The story of the panda’s iconic rise offers a striking reflection of China’s recent and dramatic ascent as a nation in global status.

Buy Panda Nation

5. Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula by Adrian Howkins

Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southward towards the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly “Pole Apart,” the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent.

Since the start of the twentieth century, Argentina, Britain, and Chile have made overlapping sovereignty claims, while the United States and Russia have reserved rights to the entire continent. The environment has been at the heart of these disputes over sovereignty, placing the Antarctic Peninsula at a fascinating intersection between diplomatic history and environmental history.

Buy Frozen Empires

6. Valuing Clean Air: The EPA and the Economics of Environmental Protection by Charles Halvorson

The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a sweeping transformation in American politics. In a few short years, the environmental movement pushed Republican and Democratic elected officials to articulate a right to clean air as part of a bevy of new federal guarantees. 

Valuing Clean Air examines how the environmental concern that propelled the Clean Air Act and the EPA coincided with economic convulsions that shook the liberal state to its core.

Buy Valuing Clean Air

7. The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s by Michael Goldfield

The Southern Key charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region.

Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries—textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel—Michael Goldfield argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s.

Buy The Southern Key, now new in paperback

8. The Making of Our Urban Landscape by Geoffrey Tyack

Britain was the first country in the world to become an essentially urban county. And England is still one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

The town and the city is the world that most of us inhabit and know best. But what do we actually know about our urban world—and how it was created?

Buy The Making of Our Urban Landscape 

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The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

The Very Short Introductions Podcast offers a concise and original introduction to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves. From ageing to modern drama, Pakistan to creativity, listen to season three of the podcast and see where your curiosity takes you!

Ageing

In this episode, Nancy A. Pachana introduces ageing, an activity with which we are familiar from childhood, and the lifelong dynamic changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning associated with it.

Listen to “Ageing” (episode 43) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Pakistan

In this episode, Pippa Virdee introduces Pakistan, one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947 but has a deep past covering 4,000 years.

Listen to “Pakistan” (episode 42) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Henry James

In this episode, Susan Mizruchi introduces American author Henry James, who created a unique body of fiction that includes Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Listen to “Henry James” (episode 41) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Secularism

In this episode, Andrew Copson introduces secularism, an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe that is more complex than simply “state versus religion.”

Listen to “Secularism” (episode 40) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Demography

In this episode, Sarah Harper introduces demography, the study of people, which addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact certain factors will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

Listen to “Demography” (episode 39) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Psychopathy

In this episode, Essi Viding introduces psychopathy, a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound.

Listen to “Psychopathy” (episode 38) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Modern drama

In this episode, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr introduce modern drama, the tale of which is a story of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through hostility and contrarianism.

Listen to “Modern drama” (episode 37) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Slang

In this episode, Jonathon Green introduces slang. Slang has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today’s vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases.

Listen to “Slang” (episode 36) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Creativity

In this episode, Vlad Glăveanu introduces creativity, a term that emerged in the 19th century but only became popular around the mid-20th century despite creative expression existing for thousands of years.

Listen to “Creativity” (episode 35) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

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How research abstracts succeed and fail

The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. It’s freely available on the publisher’s website and in online databases. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. 

Alas, not all abstracts succeed. 

Some take the notion of abstraction to extremes. This example is from a physics article:

Unitarity and geometrical effects are discussed for photon-photon scattering.

It has just ten words. Fortunately, most abstracts say rather more, though it’s possible to say too much. The next example, from a geology article, has over 370 words. It starts:

Diagenesis of the Holocene-Pleistocene volcanogenic sediments of the Mexican Basin produced, in strata of gravel and sand, 1H₂O- and 2H₂O-smectite, kaolinite, R3-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R1-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R3-kaolinite (0.75)-2H₂O-smectite and R1-1H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite. Smectite platelets…

It continues in a similar vein for a further 350 words, accumulating more and more detail. The reason for the work is hinted at, but only becomes clear in the full article, at which point it’s too late.

Some abstracts introduce citations to previous research to provide background, contrary to the expectation that abstractions stand alone. In practice, citations can block the reader’s progress, as in this example from a remote-sensing article: 

The purpose of this paper is to extend the stationary stochastic model defined in [1] to a time evolving sea state and platform motion.

The reference pointed to by “[1]” isn’t attached to the abstract, and the source article is obviously elsewhere. Yet without it, the rest of the text is difficult to appreciate. Similar problems can occur with abbreviations explained only in the article.

Some abstracts confuse their remit by summarizing the paper rather than its content. The shift to meta-reporting can lead to uninformative boiler-plate text. This example is from a medical education article:

Implications of these results are discussed.

It’s uninformative because readers already know that most research articles contain a discussion section where, by definition, results and their implications are discussed.

Some abstracts expand their remit to include personal research plans. This example is from a clinical article:

We plan to investigate why general practitioners are not complying with the pathway.

It’s common to find research aspirations in internal reports and in research grant applications, where they have a specific function. But published in an abstract, they can present a reader working in the same area with a difficult choice.

Some abstracts expand their remit even further with a self-evaluation of the research. This example is from a finance article:

We believe this study will benefit academics, regulators, policymakers and investors.

The problem is that the reader may not see these pronouncements as truly impartial, with the result that the authority of the article is weakened, not strengthened.

Abstracts can of course fail in many other ways, for example, omitting caveats, adding new information, exaggerating certainty, or providing no more than an advertisement, a piece of puffery.

How to write a successful abstract

In the light of all this, what should go into a successful abstract? Some clinical journals settle the matter by imposing a structured format. But most journal and conference proceedings don’t and may offer little or no detailed guidance to the author, who may be left confused about what’s needed.

One starting point is to think of the abstract not as a condensed version of the paper that preserves the original structure and proportions, but as a mini- or micro-paper in its own right, with certain basic elements:

• the context or scope of the work
• the research question or other reason for the work, if relevant
• the approach or methods
• a key result or two
• a conclusion, if appropriate, or other implications of the work.

Naturally the weight given to each element depends on the research—whether it’s experimental, observational, or theoretical, and whether the expected audience is general or specialized. How much to write about each element is then a balance between including detail and retaining the reader’s interest. 

Within those constraints, it’s important to identify any critical assumptions, non-standard methods, and limitations on the findings so that the scope and potential application of the research is clear. The reader shouldn’t discover on reading the article that the abstract was misleading.

Here’s an example of a well-written abstract from a neuroscience article: 

An unresolved question in neuroscience and psychology is how the brain monitors performance to regulate behavior. It has been proposed that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), on the medial surface of the frontal lobe, contributes to performance monitoring by detecting errors. In this study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine ACC function. Results confirm that this region shows activity during erroneous responses. However, activity was also observed in the same region during correct responses under conditions of increased response competition. This suggests that the ACC detects conditions under which errors are likely to occur rather than errors themselves.

From C. S. Carter et al., Science 1998, 280, 747-749. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Successive sentences describe the context, the reason for the work, the methods, some results, and an implication. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, the article has been cited over 2,500 times.

Encapsulating a body of research so effectively usually takes repeated rewriting. The timing, though, can be a challenge, since the abstract is often prepared last, when the main sections of the paper have found a settled form. It then risks being rushed while material is assembled for submission for publication. 

Despite these pressures, the abstract needs as much attention as any other section of the paper. After all, if it doesn’t do its job, the reader may turn to other abstracts that do. And the published article may languish unretrieved and unseen, waiting in vain for the recognition it deserves.

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Take a virtual tour of America’s national parks: the Grand Staircase

Visitors to “scientific treasures” (sites with significant science content) often treat each site on its own. While this may be fine in many cases, in others it leaves the visitor without a complete picture of a certain aspect of science. Sometimes scientific treasures ought to be visited together with other, similar sites.

One example of a synergistic relationship between scientific treasures in the United States is the trio of National Parks: Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, and Bryce Canyon. Here a visitor to all three is treated to a more complete picture of the West’s geology than from each park on its own. This triad of National Parks makes up the Grand Staircase, a formation of multiple cliffs retreating to the north.

Explore the images for the complete picture of the Grand Staircase formation:

We hope that you have a chance to gain a fuller picture of the geology of the southwestern United States by visiting all three scientific treasures. Which other sites would you recommend viewing as a group to give visitors a more complete idea of their scientific significance?

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash

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Why borders are built on ambiguity

During the nineteenth century, Britain, Canada, and the United States began to construct, in earnest, a border across the northern part of North America. They placed hundreds of markers across the 49^th parallel and surveyed the land around them. Each government saw the border as a symbol of their sovereignty, a marker of belonging, and as the basic outline of their nation-states.

If the dreams of politicians were simple, the border’s implementation was not. None of the countries country possessed the manpower necessary to police such an extent. Nor had they developed dependable ways to control how immigrants and citizens understood their place on the continent.

The failure to enforce both the tangible and intangible aspects of the border created an abundance of problems. Canada and the United States required immigration to grow their nations, but they feared admitting individuals whose loyalty they could not trust.

The issue was with the process not the applicants. Those willing to immigrate had expressed a willingness to shift their loyalties and create lives outside of their country of birth through the act of immigration itself. The vagueness of federal policies only added to the concern. Poor wording and conflicting aims created an administrative system that faltered when presented with the complexities of everyday life.

In 1886, J.J. Elder left Ireland for Woodstock, British Columbia and then made his way south to the United States. He contemplated becoming a naturalized citizen but struggled with the implications. The naturalization process required he renounce his allegiance to Britain. He worried, however, that such a decision would limit his ability to visit family or to gain future employment in the British empire.

Unsure of what to do, Elder sent a letter to the American Undersecretary of State. He inquired whether it was legal for him to renounce forever his allegiance to Britain if he thought he might need to renew that allegiance at a later date.

Like many important border issues, Elder’s question had no clear answer. The official he spoke to could think of no policy that governed such a decision. If the absence of any formal guidance, he believed that if Elder wished to make an oath he later intended to break it was a matter of conscience not law.

Temporary allegiance and legal uncertainty ensured that ambiguity remained a constant part of life. As Elder’s case, and hundreds like it suggested, making the border meaningful required both new laws and endless clarification.

By the 1930s, the infrastructure that made the border visible had grown. Thousands of federal officials now guarded ports of entry and permanent agencies governed much of the border’s operations. For all that had changed, the underlying uncertainties remained similar. Federal governments created borders but had failed to monopolize their meaning. The pervasiveness of social and economic connections ensured that the behaviors of everyday people governed the ways borders operated.

Administrators measured the border’s power in terms of confiscations made, entries denied, and fines accessed. Everyday people understood it differently. They measured the border in cost, discomfort, friendships, and family. They measured it in the insults their children faced and in the heartaches it created. Inconsistencies in policy and enforcement had created a border that seemed inescapable in one moment, only to seem forgettable in the next.

Josephine Grondahl moved to Canada as a child in the early twentieth century. Like many others, she first experienced the border as a barrier to friendships, rather than to movement. When she started attending a new school in Canada, the other children bullied her heavily. Her use of American terms for paper and boots (“writing tablet” and “overshoes”) instead of the local lingo (“scribblers” and “galoshes”) set her apart. Decades later, the bullying remained fresh in her mind. She felt the border’s sting first from her classmates, not from the customs and immigration agents that each government invested so heavily into.

As Grondahl and Elder’s experience suggested, the ambiguity of borders could not be resolved with more guards or more laws. Social practices and family connections mattered just as much to the ways individuals defined themselves as national borders did. In that context, border guards possessed only partial control over a world fill with motion and complexity.

Today, border guards use infrared cameras, facial recognition software, and unmanned drones to guard ports of entry. New technologies have amplified the kinds of surveillance possible but have created new gaps at the same time. Virtual private networks allow Canadians to mask their location in order to gain access to online streaming services meant for American eyes only. Old problems remain unabated. In 2020, American vacationers began to exploit transit rules to avoid pandemic restrictions. They claimed to be travelling to Alaska in order to sneak across the border to vacation in Vancouver instead. The approach was an old one, one that residents from both countries had used for more than a hundred years.

For both historic and contemporary communities in North America, attempts to create a meaningful border have faced the same problem. Creating hard boundaries requires assigning a binary (Canadian or American) to a spectrum of identities and people. As the past hundred years has shown, the problem cannot be solved by either advances in technology or the addition of thousands of pages of laws, policies, and regulation. The problem is inherent in borders themselves. By their very nature, borders create ambiguity because they overlay simple lines across a world that is impossibly complex.

Featured image by Jim Witkowski via unsplash

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SHAPE today and tomorrow: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part two)

SHAPE (Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities for People and the Economy) research helps us to make sense of the past, to inform the present, and develop a vision for the future. Considering the last year alone in which the vital work of STEM researchers in developing vaccines and treating COVID-19 has been closely followed across the globe, it is also important to acknowledge that SHAPE research has played an important role in our response to the pandemic. From considering ethics to inform how vaccines should be allocated amongst the population, to looking back at the societal and economic impact of pandemics through history, SHAPE research has provided us with valuable insights across a vast spectrum of different areas.

This second part of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, reflects on how SHAPE disciplines can help us to understand the impact of the events of the pandemic and look towards the future of SHAPE.

In part one of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black, they introduce SHAPE and what it means to them—if you missed it, you can read it here.

In the current context of the coronavirus pandemic, how can SHAPE subjects help us make sense of how the last year has impacted us and the world in which we live?

Sophie Goldsworthy: The last year has been testing in many ways. But we might turn to SHAPE subjects as we start to evaluate what life looks like after the pandemic, assessing the human impact, finding new ways to connect, and working out how to salvage the best of what we have been left with.

SHAPE subjects can help us start to understand where we are now and drive innovative solutions. We can draw on what these subjects tell us as we endeavour to improve on the inclusivity of our virtual networks; and to figure out how we retain balance in our ways of working and flexibility around our caring and other social responsibilities; and as we think again about how we might inhabit global city spaces and reimagine transport networks with sustainability and environmental impacts in mind. Scientists tell us that birdsong changed during the shutdowns, that wild animals moved quickly to inhabit the spaces we vacated, that air quality improved as transport ground to a halt. SHAPE subjects can help us to think about the ways in which we learn from and build on this enforced hiatus.

Julia Black: It’s difficult to think of a single area where SHAPE subjects don’t help us make sense of how COVID has impacted us and where they won’t be relevant in thinking about the future. The enforced lockdown of the world’s population has been a natural experiment of a scale no policy maker would never have volunteered to undertake, but our clearer skies, quieter roads, and noisier wildlife have made us all acutely aware of the impact our ways of living were having on our planet, and to the vulnerabilities to which we are thereby exposing ourselves as well.

We have turned to literature and, virtually at least, to the arts to provide us with solace, enrichment, entertainment, and sheer relief. We have turned to history for insights into how societies in the past have been fundamentally changed due to pandemics and to philosophy for reflections on how we want our societies to be. As we re-think how we will live, how we will travel, how we will work, insights from anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, politics, literature, design, architecture, and art, to name but a few, will all be essential.

We also face other challenges which COVID has revealed or exacerbated: to equality and inclusivity, to democracy and to human rights, to the shifting imbalances in power within societies and across nations. And meanwhile the need to address climate change and enhance biodiversity are becoming ever more pressing. Ultimately SHAPE subjects help us imagine and evaluate what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of life we want to have.

The pandemic has undoubtedly had a profound impact on universities and the student experience. Why should prospective students choose to study a SHAPE subject, and what unique skills do you think SHAPE graduates bring to the workforce?

SG: SHAPE graduates are highly employable, bringing a wealth of skills to the workforce, and prospective students might be attracted to these subjects for the same reasons. They help us make sense of the human experience and develop our capacity for critical thinking and communication. They encourage problem solving, creativity, and curiosity, and help graduates approach a question from many angles, working collaboratively and with empathy. In a world beset by challenges, among them not only the pandemic, but climate change, structural inequalities, the rise of populism in some quarters and nationalism in others, SHAPE graduates are central to the development of the versatile, resilient workforce that will help us respond to these challenges, identify future opportunities, and nurture innovation.

JB: Studying SHAPE subjects provides both knowledge and skills which are valuable to all aspects of society, whether a person is working in a business or the public sector, or for a charity, or in the voluntary sector, or as a freelancer, or an entrepreneur. Some of the subjects have more direct application than others, such as law, finance, journalism, languages, education, design, or the arts, but in different ways all provide knowledge of how to analyse complex problems, interpret and integrate information and ideas, test the strength of competing arguments, see things from another’s point of view, create new inspirations and forms of expression, and understand how and why context matters.  Many of the skills of analysis, rigour, interpretation and creativity can be learned studying either SHAPE or STEM subjects, but it is their focus on the human world which helps those who study SHAPE understand people and the societies they live in, and the values they live by.

Where do you see SHAPE in the future? How do you think these fields of study might change?

SG: Just as we think about SHAPE and STEM as complementing each other, so we’re seeing an increasing move towards interdisciplinarity within SHAPE subjects, both in the academy—with university trends including the amalgamation of departments and interdisciplinary research programmes—and in our publishing programme, with multi-disciplinary content one of our fastest growing areas. Our disciplinary analysis shows a fascinating web of connections between subjects, showing how our existing content clusters and is used online, and we’re excited to explore this more at OUP, developing our acquisitions approach to reflect changing practices within the academy and encourage emerging spheres of research, as these subjects aggregate to redefine fields of study.

JB: I think the SHAPE subjects are changing in three ways. The first is a growing inter- or multi-disciplinary engagement across SHAPE disciplines and with those of STEM, often focused around particular challenges or themes, such as health, climate change, or conservation. The second is the awareness that the languages of mathematics and computer codes can be used to interrogate questions which preoccupy social scientists and humanities scholars, just as they can those of physicists or biologists. Digital humanities and computational social sciences combine knowledge from languages, history, media and communications, economics, information studies, graphic design, computer sciences, data analytics, machine learning, AI, and more to analyse texts, music, or data on a scale which was previously unimaginable, providing powerful new insights. Thirdly, both SHAPE and STEM disciplines are adopting critical stances towards the other in ways which are, or have the potential, to change the way in which each are conducted: the challenge to social sciences to produce results which are replicable, verifiable, and falsifiable, for example; and the challenge to science and technology to be conducted in ways which are ethical, non-discriminatory, and which take into account their impact on societies. The core disciplinary pillars within SHAPE and STEM subjects remain strong, but increasingly we are seeing them combined in new and exciting ways.

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Introducing SHAPE: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part one)

OUP is excited to support the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. SHAPE has been coined to enable us to clearly communicate the value that these disciplines bring to not only enriching the world in which we live, but also enhancing our understanding of it. The contributions that SHAPE subjects make are more important now than ever as they can help us to navigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global economy, dramatically altered our quotidian routines, and changed the way we communicate with one another, against the backdrop of climate change and urgent calls to address structural injustice.

In the first instalment this two-part Q&A, we spoke to Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions here at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, to find out more about SHAPE and what it means to them.

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your background and current position, and what SHAPE means to you?

Sophie Goldsworthy: I’ve worked in publishing for approaching 30 years, 25 of them at OUP. My first role at the Press was on the Literature list and I currently run our humanities, social sciences, and trade programmes in the UK, as well as directing Oxford’s content strategy more broadly across the research publishing business.

At a time when the content needs of the university sector are evolving, leading to shifts in research publishing, my role is about developing our focus and building data and evidence into our approach to content acquisition, more closely aligning commissioning with what librarians, researchers, and readers want, and working to maximise the reach, impact, and amplification of the scholarship we publish.

Oxford is the world’s largest university press, and SHAPE subjects sit at the very heart of our offering, giving us breadth which in turn underlines a complementary view of the subjects. SHAPE gives us a better way to articulate that mutual, porous relationship, helps us move past an arts/sciences dichotomy to a place where each enhances and supports the other.

Julia Black: My academic interests span social sciences and humanities. I focus on how governments and other organisations regulate behaviours, systems, and processes to address complex problems, such as environmental management, or financial stability, or AI, and what values guide, or should guide, those processes. Given that problems are multi-dimensional, trying to address them requires engaging with technical, scientific aspects of the issues as well as the social and ethical elements. As my principal research questions are always centred around people and organisations, social sciences and humanities dominate, but for me, it seems quite natural to engage with several disciplines, across SHAPE and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), in order to understand and address the multiple dimensions of a problem.

I’ve also always worked quite fluidly across the worlds of academia and public policy, and I’m constantly struck by the huge reliance which government places on social science and humanities in seeking guidance and evidence for its policies, and yet the contribution those disciplines can make, and are making, is often under-recognised and under-valued. And when I look beyond policy to the vibrancy of the arts, the richness of literature, the diversity of our society, and even to the structure and dynamics of our economy, SHAPE subjects are everywhere. So for me SHAPE is a way to celebrate the value of social sciences, humanities, and the arts, and to demonstrate their relevance and value to ourselves and to society. It’s also to encourage people to study them, and to build meaningful lives and contribute to society using the knowledge and skills they gain in doing so. For we need them now, more than ever.

What are the benefits in bringing together the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines under the SHAPE umbrella?

SG: How we describe a thing has the potential to accord or diminish its power. At its heart, SHAPE offers us the opportunity to begin to tell the story of a set of subjects which might seem at first glance to be disparate. It allows us to draw together the ways in which they contribute value to society, helping us make sense of the human experience, develop our understanding of global issues, and work to find solutions.

JB: SHAPE is offering social sciences, humanities, and the arts their own descriptor, providing a coherence to a heterogenous set of subjects in a way which celebrates their diversity but emphasises what connects them: a focus on the human world—on people and societies across time and space.

It’s important to emphasise that we are not “setting up” social sciences, humanities, and the arts in opposition to STEM. SHAPE subjects have their own value which is on a par with STEM, they are just differently focused: on the human world, rather than the natural or physical worlds. There are areas within each where they operate largely separately, but if we want to understand how humans interact with the natural and physical world, then we need the insights gained from connecting both sets of disciplines. There are also opportunities to use the knowledge and insights from each to inform the other.

How can SHAPE and STEM disciplines complement each other in our pursuit of knowledge?

SG: The pandemic has reinforced how essential STEM subjects are, as we look to medical and technical solutions: witness only the breath-taking speed at which vaccines have been developed. But SHAPE disciplines complement STEM in myriad ways—and conversely leaving them out of the mix can have troubling implications.

We might need to draw on behavioural economics and “nudge” theory to help influence how people act, changing the message around mask wearing from “protect yourself” to “protect others,” for example. Or to take a holistic approach to data interpretation to circumnavigate structural inequalities, where the price we otherwise pay is a high one. The past year has been full of stories about “one size fits all” PPE that leaves female health workers poorly protected, or remote education initiatives that overlook those children for whom a school lunch provides the only meal of the day.

At its most straightforward, learning the stories of past pandemics can enlighten us in the present. How and why do conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferate in an outbreak, for example, and what should we learn as we navigate precisely that set of circumstances all over again in the rollout of a new vaccination programme.

JB: SHAPE subjects can complement STEM, and STEM subjects can complement SHAPE. In some cases, one discipline may be more in the lead than the other, but the synergies still exist. Some SHAPE subjects are through their approaches closer to STEM, for example in their use of quantitative and statistical methodologies and data analytics, and some directly cross the boundaries, such as mental health and wellbeing. However, we could do more to illustrate how STEM and SHAPE subjects can together enhance our knowledge, and what we create from that knowledge.

Some have asked why we aren’t satisfied with the term STEAM to describe this interaction. The answer is that STEAM focuses only on the interaction of art and design with STEM subjects, in other words it only looks at the “A” in SHAPE, not the “S” and the ”H.” Whilst art and design are hugely valuable to the design of products developed by technology, or as ways to visualise the natural and physical worlds, for example, there are many more benefits to be gained from the interaction of STEM disciplines across the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Changes in an ecosystem are frequently rooted in human behaviour; managing pandemics requires knowledge of history, cultures and behaviours, as well as economics and logistics; the search engines we have become so reliant on use natural language programming based on linguistics; and for science and technology to be legitimate it is imperative that it is developed and used in ways which are aligned with our ethics and values.

But these examples are the tip of the iceberg; there are multiple instances where the insights of each enhances the other, and it is often when they are combined that truly transformative developments in our knowledge, understanding, innovation, and creativity can occur.

Read part two of our Q&A, in which Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black discuss the importance of SHAPE today in light of the pandemic, and how consider how it may evolve in the future.

Featured image by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

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A change in Brazil’s national populist government

As we approach 15 November, a national holiday marking the end of the Brazilian Empire and proclamation of the Brazilian Republic in 1889, and also a day of municipal elections, many Brazilians may be contemplating what has happened to their country and where it might be heading.

In October 2018 a national populist candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, won the presidency by campaigning on the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above everyone.” Bolsonaro is populist in the sense described by the political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser: he embodies a world view “that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, `the pure people’ versus `the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté général (general will) of the people.” An obscure member of Congress for 27 years and a former army captain, Bolsonaro used social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, to win the country’s highest office. His untraditional and Trump-inspired campaign channeled the Brazilian public’s frustration with an enormous government corruption scandal and the established political parties, as well as disillusionment with the governments of the centre-left Workers’ Party, which had controlled the presidency from 2003 to 2016.

Bolsonaro offers the usual tropes of national populists—religious nationalism, illiberalism, cultural conservatism, the exaltation of the armed forces (many retired and active-duty members serve in his government), a reverence for the patriarchal family, aggressive anti-Communism, and attacks on globalism and multilateralism, as well as criticism of the mainstream media and its “fake news.” However, in at least two respects he is different from most of his counterparts, who tend to rely on strong party machines and espouse economic protectionism. Bolsonaro has no political party, having fallen out with the colleagues with whom he temporarily allied in the 2018 election. He also campaigned on the promise of implementing ultra-neoliberal economic policies, appointing a University of Chicago alumni, Paulo Guedes, to be his “super minister” of the economy. Guedes pledged to downsize the state, lighten the tax burden, privatize state-owned firms, flexibilize labour markets, and achieve rapid economic growth through neoliberal shock therapy.

That has not happened. Bolsonaro’s government spent much of 2019 enacting a reform of the public pension system in order to halt the growth of the fiscal deficit. Most of the rest of the neoliberal package, including a reform of the tax system, was not implemented. This year the coronavirus pandemic has hit Brazil hard, in part because of President Bolsonaro’s cavalier dismissal of the disease and his refusal to use the federal government to coordinate the public health response in states and municipalities. The country has the second highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world behind the United States, with over 140,000 deaths officially recorded (at time of post publication; see John Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard). Many people in crowded low-income neighbourhoods in urban peripheries have found it difficult to self-isolate, and the government was induced to pay an emergency income supplement to the poor of R$600 (about £90) per month for three months, and then extended it for two more months in August and September. The income support now reaches 65 million beneficiaries, or more than 30% of the population of roughly 210 million, and the Bolsonaro administration has proposed to continue it until December at half of its initial value.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of the economy, neoliberal shock therapy—which was never seriously attempted in 2019—was abandoned. The fiscal deficit, which the super-minister Paulo Guedes promised to reduce to zero in his first year, has ballooned. Gross national debt is expected to reach 93.5% of GDP, the economy could shrink by up to 6% this year, and the official unemployment rate is over 13%.

However, despite the economic and public health disasters, President Bolsonaro has discovered the political benefits of directly supporting the incomes of the poor in a country in which the average wage is only £330 per month. His approval rating reached 40%, the highest level of his presidency, in a CNI poll of 2,000 voters conducted on 17-20 September 2020. The emergency supplement does not explain all of this rise, but it accounts for some of it, and the President has picked much of his new support in the impoverished north and northeast of the country. It may be that President Bolsonaro has decided that neoliberalism is not essential to his national populist movement, and that he can compensate for loss of support amongst higher-income groups with an increase in support amongst the more numerous poor. Just as the anti-corruption plank of his platform was muted with the resignation in April 2020 of his Minister of Justice, former federal judge Sérgio Moro, and revelations of the investigation of possible corruption on the part of his son Flávio Bolsonaro when he was a Rio state legislator, neoliberalism may prove to be a disposable element of this government.

President Bolsonaro’s rule and his movement are likely to go through further changes. If President Trump of the USA fails to secure re-election on 3 November, that could weaken Bolsonaro’s support base. The November municipal elections could see the ascension to office of a raft of opponents of Bolsonaro who articulate widespread indignation at the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and his style of rule. Looking farther ahead, the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence in 2022 will probably coincide with President Bolsonaro’s attempt to secure his own re-election. At that point Brazilians will discover whether an incumbent saying “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” can win a second term.

Featured image by Sergio Souza from Unsplash

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The socially distanced library: staying connected in a pandemic

The concept of a socially distanced library would be considered the ultimate antithesis of the modern-day library. The past two decades have witnessed the evolution of the library from a mostly traditional space of quiet study and research into a bustling collaborative, social space and technology center. The library has been described as a third place, the home constituting the first place, work as the second place, and then the library—where in addition to research and study, the user can do virtually most things including relax, eat in a library cafe, and even exercise. Public libraries have provided many community benefits, including health and government services, as well as loans of non-traditional items such as tools and equipment.

In 2020, the entire world was thrown into a state of confoundment, as the novel coronavirus ground routine day-to-day activities to a screeching halt. Many organizations, including academic institutions in the United States, made a hasty retreat into an exclusively virtual online environment. Libraries followed suit and most were firmly shut, as was the corresponding access to library stacks, study, and collaborative spaces. This was also the case with public libraries; even the Library of Congress shuttered its physical facilities to the public. How did libraries initially respond to this massive disruption and how would connections to library users be maintained in this new and unprecedented context?

First, with regards to library collections, many libraries have increasingly migrated to online collections over the past two decades. Electronic publications provide a flexibility and ubiquity of access, which is highly attractive to researchers on the move. A persistent challenge, however, has been how to invite traditional print users into the digital world of publishing. The pandemic forced a moment of reckoning; few could have predicted the speed by which electronic publications would be adopted by erstwhile print-only users. Quite suddenly, users married to the print version of materials could no longer access them because of quarantine protocols, shipping delays, and a host of other factors tied to the pandemic. This is not to say that libraries have not made accommodations for delivery and loan of books. While pandemic protocols have impeded the volume and speed of distribution, users have for the first time tapped into take-out services such as curbside delivery of books and the use of remote book lockers. Duke University Libraries’ take-out service enables patrons to request library materials and pick them up with minimal contact—a video promoting the service went viral at the start of the Fall 2020 semester. Library scan and deliver services have also increased exponentially, with users requesting more document delivery by email (and within copyright guidelines). Libraries with means will also ship books to users at their residential addresses. One public library in Virginia even deployed drone delivery of books through a collaboration with Google spin-off, Wing, a drone delivery service.

Once the pandemic hit, research consultations with librarians went completely virtual. Library patrons adapted to the ease of tapping into the library’s knowledge machinery without having to make a physical trip to the library. In some instances, Zoom consultations (similar to telemedicine with doctors) were made available to library users, in addition to already existing text, email, chat, chatbots, and phone services. Library trainings and other modes of instruction also morphed from in person into online or hybrid formats. The Goodson Law Library at Duke Law school promoted a virtual asynchronous legal research bootcamp for students in the summer. In effect, the closure of the law school building did not preclude continuous learning and instruction. Research and scholarly services support also continue in the remote context, for example Duke Law researchers are able to tap into virtual online empirical and data support services. These types of virtual initiatives have become the new normal.

Perhaps, the most challenging change for the more social library users are the severe restrictions on space usage and the ensuing inability to fully engage and collaborate in person, pre-pandemic fashion.  Libraries have slowly reopened in a limited manner and with socially distanced protocols in place—masking, distanced seating and severe restrictions on indoor group gatherings. While various collaborative activities can be conducted online, using new platforms designed to replicate the gathering experience, many users still yearn for the in-person collaborative-style experience. Community engagements have moved online, and, for the first time, the Library of Congress held the 2020 National Book Festival as an online event in September. These novel ways of engagement, while limiting for physical interactions, have ameliorated persistent inequities of access. In a virtual context, library users do not have to face barriers of travel funding or other financial and social limitations. But while it is true that some inequities of access to library resources have been addressed through technology, this new shift has also uncovered the challenges of access in undeserved populations, many without necessary equipment and internet access.

Libraries are critical institutions for facilitating democracy, rule of law, and social justice. In the United States, the summer of 2020 ushered in a painful season of global reckoning for racial injustices, triggered by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers. While many libraries were still physically closed, support for racial justice was swift and strong. Libraries provided online information resources for researchers, protesters, and allies. Virtual exhibits, such as the Stanford Libraries ‘Say their Names’ exhibit, were installed to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

What then will be the future trajectory for library users in a post pandemic context? Technology has been more fully harnessed on an expansive and deeper scale to leverage library services and access to resources. A significant change which will likely persist is the transition of the more traditional user to digital content (and an increasing comfort level with the latter). Overall an acceleration and acceptance of the concept of the online library, not just the library as a physical place, has taken place. While social in person interactions will reemerge, many users will continue to value and expect a continuation of the newly discovered ease of access to the library’s resources facilitated by the expanded availability of virtual collections. More importantly technology access must be expanded as an urgent matter of public policy in undeserved populations to promote equitable access to information, so that none are left behind.

Feature image by Chris Montgomery

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It’s cheaper to preserve the Amazon than we might think

“The cattle need ladders to graze here.” That is what my wife’s relatives used to tell her after they moved to the Amazon rainforest. She visited their farm when she was 13, and the planted grass was taller than she was. Grass grows tall there because of the substantial amount of nutrients left on the ground immediately after deforesting. A few years after clearing the land, though, most nutrients were gone and the grass became thin. That is hardly surprising as the Amazon soil is known to be among the poorest on the planet. By that point, as the locals say, the cattle would need to bend their knees to graze.

Despite the poor soil, the accumulated deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon since 1988 comprises an area larger than California. About two-thirds of that area is used for extensive pasture (the most common land use there). Extensive farming is to be expected in places where land is abundant and of poor quality.

The high deforestation rates have been a source of international concern for at least the past 30 years – and especially in the last two years. There has been many discussions among academics, policy makers, and in society in general, about different ways to curb the deforestation process. Examples of such policies include pre-established limits to deforestation in public and private lands, and the so-called “incentive-based” policies, which – as the name suggests – provide incentives for farmers to not deforest, such as taxing agricultural land or subsidizing forested areas. While all these policies can be effective in preserving forests if properly implemented, monitored, and enforced, their economic costs are not the same. Reducing the costs of policies is an important goal by itself, as it eliminates wasteful expenditures, and it can help avoid political strife. The greater the costs, the less likely are farmers to abide by the rules.

Key to reducing economic costs of environmental policies is to note that, although the soils are generally poor in the Amazon, they are not equally poor. Nor are farmers’ resources or entrepreneurial abilities. Differences in farms’ profitability means that some farmers need to forgo substantial profits to preserve the land, while others lose much less. A cost-effective policy minimizes farmers’ losses by avoiding unnecessary sacrifices. In order to preserve a certain amount of forested area, a cost-effective policy induces farmers who lose less from preservation to preserve larger areas, while inducing farmers who lose more from preservation to sacrifice smaller agricultural areas.

Some environmental policies are considerably more expensive than others. Currently, the Brazilian Forest Code requires that each farm in the Amazon must keep 80% of its area in natural vegetation. There is ample evidence that this rule has not been fully enforced: Forest coverage on private properties there has been approximately 40%. Farmers would lose about US$ 4 billion per year in forgone profits if the legislation were perfectly enforced. Not surprisingly, farmers have tried, systematically, to alter the Forest Code since it was implemented; the senator Flavio Bolsonaro (one of the president’s sons) had even proposed recently to eliminate the 80% rule completely.

In contrast, taxing agricultural land in a way that preserves 80% of forest cover in total would be approximately eight times less costly to farmers (about US$ 480 million per year of forgone profits). This corresponds to a cost saving from the land-use tax of approximately 90% of the cost of a perfectly enforced 80% rule. To have a sense of magnitudes, this is substantially higher than the cost saving estimates from allowance trading in pollution markets, ranging from 20 to 47% of the cost of standard quantitative limits to pollution emissions. Taxing agricultural land puts in place a price for everyone that considers that activity. In this way, the less productive farmers would find it profitable to use less land for agriculture, while the more productive farmers would still use more land and forgo fewer profits. (As a by-product, noting that the most productive farms are located in the south Amazon, toward the edge of the rainforest, forests in the central regions would be more preserved and less fragmented, which is advantageous from a biodiversity point of view.) The 80% rule disregards differences in profitability and so penalizes the more productive farms disproportionally, raising the total costs of the policy (and allowing for more forest fragmentation).

Instead of taxing agriculture, we could subsidize farmers to keep their forested areas. The total economic costs of payments would be similar to taxing, as it similarly puts a price on land use, but with the difference that farmers would not bear the burden of preservation – those who pay to preserve (and presumably benefit from) the forests would bear the conservation costs, which may sound fair. It could be politically difficult to do so in practice, either by taxing Brazilian families and business or by obtaining resources from foreign sources. Still, the benefits could be enormous. If we paid farmers to preserve the land based on the amount of carbon on the ground, a payment as small as US$10 per ton of CO2 per year could virtually eliminate all agricultural land in the Amazon. That is because of the overall low agricultural returns and the large stock of carbon on the ground there.

Evidently, no policy can be successful without efficient monitoring and enforcement systems, which in turn depend on political will – a by-no-means small issue, as we have been experiencing during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Yet Brazil has a well-established, almost real-time, satellite-based monitoring system that have proved to work in deterring deforestation. Also, the country has been in the process of geo-referencing all rural properties, including the location of the required preservation areas within farms. Further, the Forest Code permits farmers who use more agricultural land than allowed by the 80% rule to buy quotas from farms that use less land than required – this effectively allows for a trading quotas market to emerge, which, like taxing or payments, is another “incentive-based” tool that puts a price on land use, and so can be a cost-effective policy.

In sum, despite the current increases in deforestation rates, all these recent advances point to a state with an increased capacity to implement preservation policies with small (or at least as small as possible) economic costs. Hopefully, cattle won’t need to be climbing ladders nor bending their knees, and perhaps not even travelling to the Amazon, to graze in the future.

Featured image credit: Rio Teles Pires by Frederico Oliveira. Photo owned by the author. 

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How water conflicts hurt marginalized populations

There are 286 international transboundary river basins that are shared by 151 countries. These basins are the source for water as well as livelihoods to 2.8 billion people. In many of these places the already vulnerable and marginalised are at great risk due to problems managing water.

Sudden, sharp changes in these basins are not like that of water wars between states seeking military control over shared waters. Rather, such armed conflict does not happen. Instead, it is floods, droughts or the breakdown of dams that cause sharp changes and grab headlines. Water conflicts evolve around the management of the river to secure water, to install infrastructure, and to harness the economic possibilities of the river.

What does not grab headlines at the time of these sudden changes are the underlying conditions of inequality. In other words, the vulnerable and marginalised are those who feel the impacts of these changes more intensely than others. Moreover, they are faced with everyday struggles to access water and to manage the river for their livelihoods. Weathering any variability to flows or water quality is done by those most dependant on the river, at the cost of their health, safety and livelihoods. They are also the first ones to notice the impact of degraded river ecosystems and the ones with no choice but to somehow mitigate them.

An example is the Mekong River in Southeast Asia which has seen rapid development of dams. In 2018, the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy dam in Laos collapsed, releasing 500 million cubic metres of water and causing fatalities and a reported displacement of over 6000 people. This dam was under construction in the tributary of the Mekong in Lao territory but its proximity to the Cambodian border also meant that downstream communities faced the effects of unexpected water level rise. This dam is one of the many being built to provide hydropower for an increasingly urbanising region, notably to supply demand in Thailand. While the urban dwellers and industries far from dam locations may benefit from hydropower, the rural communities close to these sites observe the changes to the river on a daily basis. Some have been relocated due to the construction, others have attempted to make do with the changing ecosystems and river flows. It is against this context that through the dam collapse villagers have been made homeless or lost possessions without warning. On top of any concerns they may have had about the changing river environment, they will have to deal with the long-term consequences of this incident to their families and livelihoods.

Diplomatic flare ups over water quality control or mounting international tension over the building of dams that prevent water flowing to downstream states may be soothed through handshakes over basin management agreements or the launch of new technical reports.

What might seem like cooperation between states may in fact conceal harms to the vulnerable and marginalised communities. Cooperation done in centres of power far flung from the banks of the river may be touted as sharing water-related benefits between countries. For example, an agreement over the building of a hydropower dam to provide green energy for the region. Or enabling water withdrawal for agricultural projects for high-value goods for export that makes for efficient water use. However, as the Mekong example showed, these projects may bring about a real, qualitative change to efforts at using and accessing water for subsistence farming or river resources such as fish for food. Being blind-sighted by benefits would only normalise the harms the vulnerable and marginalised experience to make these dams and agricultural projects materialise.

Rather than getting caught up with avoiding water conflict, we need to think about the ways to address these harms. We need to ask how water used, when and by whom, and what are the implications of changing them when decisions to develop a river is made. These questions need to be answered with a variety of inputs and knowledge, crucially incorporating those marginalised voices usually left out of mainstream decision-making. Only by posing these questions, can we begin to ask ourselves what alternative ways of managing the river may be possible—an alternative that does not cause fallouts to the already vulnerable and marginalised.

Featured image taken from the cover of Water Conflicts: Analysis for Transformation.

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Charles Darwin’s five-year journey [timeline]

Charles Darwin is most known for his journey to the Galapagos Islands, and for the work he published around the theory of evolution, The Origin of Species, as a result of that trip. And though his time in the Galapagos was vital to Darwin’s work, he also visited many other places, a small selection of which are featured here. While the ship itself was commissioned to survey the coast of South America, Darwin was on board to make the scientific observations for which that he is remembered.

Image by Alin Meceanu via Unsplash

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Why the holidays are the loneliest time for seniors

The winter holidays are a time to celebrate family, friends, and community. But for the millions of older adults worldwide who have no family, few friends nearby, or are lonely and socially isolated, December is far from the most wonderful time of the year. A survey carried out by AARP in 2017 found that 28 percent of U.S. adults ages 50 and older report that they’ve felt lonely during a holiday season over the past five years, and nearly half (43%) have worried about a friend or family member who was lonely during the holidays.

Christmas season may sharpen the dull pains of loneliness, as older adults yearn for their loved ones who have died, or reminisce about happy celebrations in their family home that they have since abandoned for residence in a long-term care facility. Yet social isolation among older adults is a sweeping social problem whose impact extends beyond the family-centric weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Rising numbers of older adults worldwide have no living or nearby kin. In the United States, nearly 7% of adults ages 55 and older have neither a living spouse nor biological children and 1% have no partner/spouse, children, biological siblings, or biological parents – with these rates rising across successive cohorts. Worldwide rates of kinlessness, or having neither a spouse nor children, range from a low of just 2% in China and Korea, to more than 10% in wealthy western nations including Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Rising numbers of kinless older adults are a result of demographic trends over the past century. Declining birth rates mean that older adults today have fewer children than in the past, especially in societies that have maintained restrictive population policies, and where childlessness rates are high. Due to processes of urbanization and globalization, adult children may migrate far distances from their aging parents to pursue rewarding economic opportunities. Moving from the countryside to the city, or from one’s hometown to more lucrative opportunities overseas are especially common among young adults in Asia and the global south. Rising rates of divorce worldwide mean that older adults may no longer live with a spouse. Women are especially likely to grow old alone, both because they tend to outlive their husbands and because they are less likely to find another partner after being divorced or widowed.

Being kinless isn’t the same thing as being lonely, however. Unmarried and childless adults tend to have larger networks of friends, compared to their peers with spouses and children. Friends can be an essential source of practical support and emotional uplift for older adults, especially in countries where non-family ties are valued as highly as familial ties. And even older adults with family by their side are not necessarily spared of emotional loneliness, or a lack of intimacy and closeness in one’s relationships. An older adult who has a stale marriage or chilly relationship with her adult children might feel a sense of aloneness and alienation even when surrounded by others at a lively family dinner. One in four married older adults reports feelings of emotional loneliness, and these rates are even higher for those whose spouses are chronically ill, who have a dissatisfying (or non-existent) sexual relationship, and for whom communication is silent, stilted, or combative.

An absence or shortage of satisfying social and emotional ties can be harmful and even deadly to older adults. Loneliness and social isolation are serious public health concerns because they are linked to far-ranging health problems including difficulty sleeping, poor cardiovascular health, high blood pressure, depressive symptoms, compromised immune function, and dementia, each of which is linked with mortality risk. The societal problem of loneliness and the health toll it exacts on older adults is so profound that in early 2018, the United Kingdom appointed its first-ever Minister for Loneliness, alongside the launch of a national charitable Campaign to End Loneliness.

Old age need not be a time of loneliness and isolation, however. Innovative clinical practices, public policies, and community programs can help mitigate against loneliness and its personal toll. Health care providers can screen older adults for loneliness as part of their usual geriatric assessment, identifying and providing supports for those at particular risk. Meal delivery programs like Meals on Wheels provide not only nutrition to older adults, but are effective in reducing their feelings of loneliness. Publicly-funded volunteering programs like Senior Corps that provide older adults an opportunity to learn new skills, interact with others, and give back to their communities help to reduce loneliness and provide the physical and emotional health boosts that come from meaningful social engagement. Continued investments in programs that enhance older adults’ social integration will have payoffs that linger long after the holiday season has passed.

Featured image credits: Tejas Prajapati via Pexels

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Introducing the nominees for Place of the Year 2019

2019 has been a year of significant events – from political unrest to climate disasters worldwide. Some of the most scrutinized events of the past year are tied inextricably to the places where they occurred – political uprisings driven by the residents of a city with an uneasy history, or multiple deaths caused by the very location in which they happened. Listed below are eight places that caught the eyes of the world this year. But only one can be our 2019 Place of the Year. Explore each, vote for your pick, and keep an eye out for our shortlist to vote for the winner!

Mt. Everest
Our planet’s tallest peak made headlines this summer for having an especially deadly climbing season. Eleven people have died this year, many due to overcrowding by inexperienced climbers on the dangerous path. Nepal’s government drew criticism for issuing a record 381 permits, a symptom of what some call too-lax requirements for climbers. In response, Nepali officials proposed new safety rules, including requiring climbers to prove that they have more than three years’ experience with high-altitude expeditions and have scaled another major peak.

Hong Kong
In early 2019, the Hong Kong government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill, which sparked rallies beginning in March, eventually turning into mass protests in June 2019 that are still ongoing. Protestors laid out five key demands: complete withdrawal of the extradition bill from the legislative process, retraction of the “riot” characterization of protestors, release and exoneration of arrested protesters, establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into police conduct and use of force during the protests, and finally, the resignation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam and the implementation of universal suffrage for Legislative Council and Chief Executive elections. While the extradition bill has been withdrawn from the legislative process, large-scale demonstrations continue as protestors push for the rest of their demands.

New Zealand
On 15 March, a white supremacist terrorist attacked two mosques during Friday prayers, killing 51 people and injuring 49. This attack was the first mass shooting in New Zealand since 1997. One week after the attacks, 20,000 people gathered to pay their respects at one of the targeted mosques in a nationwide moment of silence and prayer. On 21 March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons, and the legislation was voted into place by the House of Representatives on 10 April.

Venezuela
Since 10 January 2019, there has been an international crisis regarding the presidency of Venezuela. Nicolas Maduro took the oath as president of Venezuela in January 2019; however, as of June 2019, Juan Guaidó’s presidency has been recognized by 54 separate countries. Additionally, Maudro’s relationship with the United States deteriorated when Maduro accused the United States of backing a coup and Guaidó’s presidency to make Venezuela a puppet state. Furthermore, governments of the United States, the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Switzerland all applied individual sanctions against people associated with Maduro’s administration. Tensions remain high; on 3 November El Salvador ordered all Venezuelan diplomats to leave the country.

Greenland
In an unprecedented loss, Greenland had two large ice-melts, which culminated in a record-breaking loss of 58 billion tons of ice in one year—40 billion more tons than the average. In the political realm, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly implied that he would like to purchase Greenland from Denmark multiple times. Trump’s – and China’s – interest in Greenland revolves in part around new shipping lines which are becoming possible due to melting ice sheets.

Palace of Westminster
Brexit has been dragging on since 2016, but since July, the politics involved have become uncharacteristically chaotic. After her third Brexit proposal was voted down, Prime Minister Theresa May resigned on 7 June. Notoriously unconventional Boris Johnson was elected and promptly achieved a new record by facing seven consecutive defeats in his first seven votes in Parliament. In a bold, bipartisan act, some Conservatives joined the opposition to pass a law ensuring that Britain could not leave the European Union without a deal – an act which prompted Prime Minister Johnson to expel 21 members from the conservative party (the largest number to leave a party at once since 1981). After a brief (and unlawful) suspension of Parliament, Parliament agreed to a Withdrawal Agreement Bill for the first time… but denied a 31 October exit. The new Brexit deadline is 31 January 2020 – as long as the General Election, called by Johnson, and set to occur on 12 December this year, doesn’t drastically change Parliament – or Britain’s future – yet again.

Paris
Paris hasn’t left the public’s attention since March 2019, when the Yellow Vest Movement came into the international news after police arrested and fired tear gas at protestors. Less than a month later, a major fire engulfed the historic Notre Dame Cathedral, which resulted in the roof and main spire collapsing. Just after hosting the Women’s World Cup, Paris recorded the all-time hottest day on record. In October, at the Paris police headquarters, a policeman stabbed four of his colleagues to death and injured two others before being killed at the scene by police.

The Atmosphere 
The summer of 2019 tied for hottest summer on record in the northern hemisphere, continuing the trend of extreme weather set by deadly cold winter temperatures, heavy snowfalls, and catastrophic mudslides and typhoons worldwide. Climate change claimed its first Icelandic glacier as a victim, where researchers marked the event with a memorial plaque. All of these climate events are driven by the carbon dioxide being poured into the oceans and Earth’s atmosphere by human activities. 2019 is projected to be the year with the highest carbon emissions of all time, and while the fact that the ozone hole is the smallest it’s been since its discovery might sound like good news, it’s actually being kept on the smaller side by the record heat in our atmosphere.

Voting for the longlist closes Friday 15 November – be sure to check back in on Wednesday 20 November to see which places made it to the top four and vote for the Place of the Year winner!

Featured image credit: earth-lights-environment-globe via Pixbay

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The important role of animals in refugee lives

Refugees are people who have been forcibly displaced across a border. What do animals have to do with them? A lot.

Companion animals, for example, are important to many people’s emotional wellbeing. “For people forced to flee,” the Norwegian Refugee Council recently noted, “a pet can be a vital source of comfort.” At the sterile and hyper-modern Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, Syrian refugees would pay a high price for caged birds (30-40 Jordanian dinars each, roughly €35-50). In Syria, many people keep a bird at home. At Azraq keeping a bird is one way of making a plastic and metal shelter into a home.

In many contexts, refugees also depend on animals for their livelihoods. Humanitarian assistance understandably focuses on supporting people, but if refugees’ working animals and livestock perish then their experience of displacement can worsen drastically: they lose the means to support themselves in exile, or to return home and rebuild their lives.

Ever since the earliest days of modern refugee camps, at the time of the First World War, agencies responsible for refugees have had to think about animals too. When the British army in the Middle East built a camp at Baquba near Baghdad in 1918 to house nearly 50,000 Armenian and Assyrian refugees, there were some animals that they needed to keep out. Fumigation procedures and netting were used against lice and mosquitos, carriers of typhus and malaria respectively. But refugee agencies also needed to let larger animals in. The people in the camp, especially the Assyrians, were accompanied by seven or eight thousand sheep and goats, and about six thousand larger animals like horses and cattle. Many of the people depended on their animals for their livelihood and for any prospect of permanent settlement, so they all needed to be accommodated and cared for.

There are similar examples around the world today, like the longstanding camps for Sahrawi refugees in southwestern Algeria. There, goats and camels are socially and economically significant animals: goat barns, enclosures often made of scrap metal, are a prominent part of the camps’ increasingly urban landscape, while camel butcheries are important shops.

This helps us understand why the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees now has programmes to support refugees’ animals. For example, in 2015, with funding from the IKEA Foundation, the organization assisted 6,000 Malian refugees in Burkina Faso and their 47,000 animals: helping animals helps the people too, in this case to earn a living (and achieve economic integration) through small-scale dairy farming. It also helps us understand how conflicts can arise between refugees and host communities when refugees’ animals compete for grazing or water with local animals, or damage local farmers’ crops.

Starting in 2011, nearly 125,000 people from Blue Nile state in Sudan fled from a government offensive into Maban country, South Sudan, with hundreds of thousands of animals (about half of whom soon died, stressed by the journey). Peacefully managing their interactions with local residents and a community of nomadic herders who also regularly migrated through the county was a complex task for the South Sudanese government and humanitarian agencies. It required careful negotiations to allocate grazing zones as far as 60km from the camps where the refugees lived, schedule access to watering points, and agree a different route for the nomads’ migration.

In Bangladesh, meanwhile, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has recently been involved in efforts to prevent conflict between refugees and wild animals. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees from state persecution in Myanmar live in semi-formal camps near Cox’s Bazar that have grown up since 2017, but these block the migration routes of critically endangered Asian elephants. The International Union’s conflict mitigation programme includes building lookout towers, training Rohingya observers, and running an arts-based education project.

And this highlights a final issue. The elephants at Cox’s Bazar are endangered because of ecological pressures caused by humans. But increasingly, humans too are endangered—and displaced—by ecological pressures. In the late 2000s, a years-long drought in Syria, worsened by human-caused climate change, pushed over a million rural Syrians off the land. (The country’s total livestock fell by a third.) The political and economic pressure that this generated was a significant factor in the crisis that ignited into war in 2011, in turn displacing millions more people. Hundreds of thousands of them fled to Jordan, one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where the increased extraction of groundwater has lowered the water table, drying out oases in the Jordanian desert. Wild birds migrating across the desert have to fly further to find water and rest, meaning fewer survive the journey. In the Syrian war, and in many other conflicts around the world, human and animal displacements are intersecting under environmental stress. If we want to understand human displacement and respond to it adequately, we need to be thinking about animals too.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Herd of sheep in mountains’ by Nima Hatami. CCO public domain via Unsplash.

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Water scarcity, warfare, and the paradox of value

Back in 1995, then World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin made an important prediction about the future: “The wars of the next century will be fought over water,” Serageldin warned, “unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” Fortunately for the world, Serageldin’s predication has so far not occurred. No wars have been fought strictly over water in modern history. In fact globally the number of international agreements over water far exceeds the number of international conflicts. That paradox shows that water can be just as powerful a driver of cooperation as of conflict between nations, regions, and communities.

But that doesn’t mean Serageldin is wrong.  The world does have a big problem with its most critical resource, and it’s very far from managing water effectively. Broadly speaking, the world faces three major challenges when it comes to freshwater. First, water is unevenly distributed across both space and time, meaning it’s almost never available where and when we want it, and in the right quantity. This problem is just as bad when there’s too much water, causing flooding, as when there’s too little. Moreover, this mismatch is getting worse because of climate change, which in many parts of the world is increasing the frequency of floods and droughts while also making precipitation more variable, and therefore harder to predict.

A second major challenge arises from water quality. What water does exist around the world often isn’t in a state where we it can be used as is; most often, it has to be purified or treated. Around the world, about 800 million people lack access to clean drinking water, and many more lack sanitation facilities. The problem of water pollution, too, is getting worse, for two main reasons. First of all, growing cities around the globe are generating increasing volumes of wastewater, most of which isn’t treated before being released into surrounding waterways. The accumulation of industrial pollutants like heavy metals in groundwater is cause for particular concern, since it’s very difficult to purify. Second, the increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides to boost crop yields causes vast quantities of pollutant runoff, choking streams and rivers. And unlike many side effects of economic growth, water pollution turns out to be pretty egalitarian: heavy metal and nutrient pollution is a major threat to human health in both developed and developing countries.

But it’s the world’s third major water-related challenge that is in many ways the most concerning. What water we do have we use poorly – and that’s true across the globe. A decade after Serageldin made his prediction, a 2004 World Bank report noted that while most experts agreed on what steps needed to be taken to manage the world’s water more effectively, virtually no country had done so. Another fifteen years later, the situation isn’t much different. But we do have some examples of where countries have succeeded in making water use more sustainable. As is so often the case, the solutions are economic – but the issues are political.

As complex as the world’s water challenges are, many of them stem from the fact that across the world, water is essentially free. There are very few places in the world where users pay anything close to the total cost of withdrawing, transporting, and purifying water, to say nothing of environmental and other externalities – meaning there’s little reason for individual water users to think about not using that last cubic meter. Adam Smith once observed that while water is about the most valuable commodity there is, hardly anyone values it, while things that are essentially useless, like diamonds, fetch enormous prices on the market. This paradox of value still obtains, and it means that the world’s water won’t be used effectively unless people learn to value it more highly. More people are going to have to pay more, in some cases much more, for the water that they use.

Of course, water being water, it’s not quite as simple to just raise the price of water. Everyone needs a certain quantity of water just to live, and there are obvious benefits to clean water that are hard to capture in a single price. These ethical issues are why it’s proven so difficult to put a price on water, and to use it effectively.

But going forward, we may not have much choice. Cooperation is more likely than conflict over water – and yet it’s not inevitable. There’s only so much water on Planet Earth, and we have to find some way short of warfare to use it equitably, efficiently, and sustainably.

Featured image credit: ‘Subnational Hydropolitics‘. Owned by Oxford University Press.

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A new geological epoch demands a new politics

Young people have become increasingly vocal in castigating older generations for their failure to act on climate change. University students are at the forefront of campaigns to divest from fossil fuels. A group of 21 young Americans launched a high-profile court case against the US government to pursue a legal right to a stable climate. And the School Strike for Climate initiative launched by fifteen-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg has attracted worldwide attention.

At the UN climate change conference in December 2018, Thunberg delivered a scathing message: “we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.”

What has got the world into this predicament, what kind of change is needed, and how can it be achieved?

Humanity now exerts such a pervasive influence over the Earth’s life-support systems that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. A Great Acceleration in global production and consumption since the mid-20th century has brought human-induced climate change, large-scale deforestation and plummeting biodiversity.

The Anthropocene brings renewed instability to the Earth system—in contrast to the unusually stable Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years. Without radical changes to the ways in which we produce energy, feed ourselves, and meet other basic needs, the Earth could reach dangerous tipping points including multi-metre sea-level rise and the collapse of globally significant ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest.

The scale of the change required to reduce these risks poses unprecedented political challenges. Many of our core institutions—from nation-states to capitalist markets—emerged years ago, enabling them to ignore the ecological degradation they were causing.

Some of these institutions have helped to achieve remarkable progress. Nevertheless, these institutions—from markets that ignore environmental impacts to governments that rely on unsustainable economic activity to maintain their authority—remain stuck in what we call “pathological path dependencies.” These path dependencies decouple human institutions from the Earth system by systematically repressing information about ecological conditions and prioritizing narrow economic concerns.

How can pathological path dependencies be broken? Institutions must develop ecological reflexivity: a capacity to question their own core commitments, and if necessary change themselves, while listening and responding effectively to signals from the Earth system.

To cultivate ecological reflexivity we must confront a core paradox for institutional design in an ever-changing Earth system, no fixed model of governance is appropriate for all time. Institutions must be flexible enough to respond to changing environmental and social conditions, while stable enough to provide a framework for long-term protection of shared interests.

We call this kind of institution a “living framework.” The term calls to mind the idea of a living document that is updated over time. It also suggests the idea of a framework for living, that is, for flourishing under unstable conditions.

Achieving the reflexivity that is necessary also requires dismantling barriers to reflexive governance, including government subsidies for unsustainable practices and the ability of vested interests to undermine progressive reform. And it requires empowering agents to rethink what core societal values—such as justice, democracy, and sustainability—should mean under Anthropocene conditions.

Given that dominant agents such as states, international organizations, and corporations are often stuck in pathological path dependencies, more promising agents might include cities and sub-national governments, scientists and other experts, and those most vulnerable to a damaged Earth system.

Each of these agents has an important role to play, whether shifting dominant discourses in a more ecological direction or cultivating local experiments in sustainable living. But each kind of agent also has important limitations when working in isolation.

To overcome these limitations, societies need to cultivate interactions among agents. The best way of doing so is through democratic practices. Democracy opens up essential spaces for those most affected by environmental change—whether peasants’ movements for climate justice, citizens of small island states, or youth advocates on biodiversity or climate change—to hold decision-makers accountable.

Overcoming the pathological path dependencies that drive ecological degradation will not be easy. But, given that we cannot turn the clock back on the advent of the Anthropocene but must learn how to live with it, finding an antidote to those path dependencies is essential. The antidote, we believe, can be found in cultivating an ecologically reflexive democratic politics.

Feature image credit: “Cave, rock, water and cavern” by Ademir Alves. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Place of the Year 2018 contenders [quiz]

Before we announce the 2018 Place of the Year, we are looking back at the diverse places that topped the shortlist. Myanmar, North Korea, Mexico, the International Space Station, and the Pacific Ocean all have unique histories and have topped international headlines this year. Take this quiz to see how well you know each of our contenders.

[qzzr quiz=”467178″ width=”100%” height=”auto” redirect=”true” offset=”0″]

Featured image credit: Map Of The World Compass Antique by schaeffler. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest single structure humans have ever put into space. The spacecraft is in orbit 240 miles above Earth, and is both a home and a science laboratory for astronauts and cosmonauts. The station took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble, beginning in November 1998 when the first piece of the Station was launched by a Russian rocket.  It includes laboratory modules from the United States, Japan, and Europe. As of January 2018, 230 people from 18 different countries had visited the International Space Station. The ISS includes contributions from 15 nations, with NASA of the United States, Roscosmos of Russia, and the European Space Agency contributing most of the funding. Other partners of the space station include the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The ISS has created the opportunity for people to maintain an ongoing presence in space, conducting research that couldn’t be done elsewhere. 

2018 has been an exciting year for the International Space Station. At the end of August, a tiny hole was found in a Soyuz spacecraft while it was docked at the ISS, leading to a small drop in cabin pressure. Initially thought to be the result of a micrometeoroid strike, Russian cosmonauts came to the shocking conclusion that it may have been deliberately drilled from the inside of the craft, leading to suggestions of sabotage—either by the team who built the spacecraft on the ground, or by one of the astronauts who were on the ISS at the time. The investigation into this incident is ongoing, and Russia convened a State Commission to look into the incident. The location and shape of the hole suggests a drilling mishap, leading to the conclusion that the hole was probably caused on the ground, by the company that builds the Soyuz capsules. However, for a brief period of time in September, speculation ran rampant that someone on the ISS may be trying to sabotage the Russian cosmonauts. 

Russia launched another investigation in October, this time into the failed launch of another Soyuz spacecraft. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, explained that their investigation pointed the blame to a bent pin, which prevented one of the side boosters from cleanly falling away. This resulted in its decompression, and the loss of control over the rocket.

On November 1, The Russian space agency announced that they intend on launching three astronauts to the International Space Station on December 3, an indication that it believes their Soyuz spacecraft is safe for travel. The astronauts for the December launch are Oleg Kononenko of Russia, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency. On November 16, Russia sent a care package to astronauts aboard the ISS in a cargo shipment dubbed Progress 71, launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Progress’ Soyuz FG booster is loaded with 5,654 pounds of propellant, air, water and supplies. 

In the private space sector, SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, was named as the No. 1 company on the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. SpaceX delivers supplies to ISS. With an estimated $28 billion, it is one of the most valuable private companies in the world. In February the company launched the world’s most powerful rocket since NASA’s Saturn V. In early November at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX engineers prepared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket. They are working to boost a Qatrai communications satellite into orbit on November 19. 

All this is happening in the shadow of President Trump’s proposal in June to create a new branch of the US military called the United States Space Force. He explained that, “We must have American dominance in space.” How this could affect the spirit of international cooperation and scientific research on ISS is unknown.

The International Space Station turns 20 this year, and in its time has hosted upwards of 1,500 experiments. We know about the nature and formation of other planets’ moons from spacecraft exploration, such as Voyager and Galileo. Watch below to see David A. Rothery, author Moons: A Very Short Introduction, give his top 10 things you should know about moons. 

Learn more about space and those who explore it with these titles: The First Men in the Moon, Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, Mass: The quest to understand matter from Greek atoms to quantum fields, Gravity: A Very Short Introduction, and Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction

Featured image credit: “satellite-iss” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: Myanmar

Extreme violence and discrimination has led to a humanitarian crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Rohingya refugees have been crossing the border into Bangladesh in fear of their lives. United Nations officials have described the crisis as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In 2018, mid-October reports revealed that the number of Rohingya refugees has reached nearly one million. In addition to being forced from their homes, many refugees face further danger; young girls in Bangladesh refugee camps account for the largest group of trafficking victims, with many being sold into forced labor.

Human rights groups blame anti-Rohingya propaganda and “fake news” on Facebook for inciting murders, rapes, and the largest forced human migration in recent history. Myanmar military personnel conducted a systemic campaign through false Facebook accounts and posts, targeting the country’s predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority group. The posts consisted of personnel posing as pop stars and national heroes, posting and sharing fictitious stories claiming Islam was a global threat to Buddhism, the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man, and more.

The fake news campaign stretches back half a decade, with as many as 700 officers meeting in foothills near the capital of Naypyidaw. They would gather intelligence on popular accounts and criticize any content that was unfavorable to the military.

Facebook’s head of cyber-security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said it had found “clear and deliberate attempts to covertly spread propaganda that were directly linked to the Myanmar military.” The Facebook posts have since been removed, with Mark Zuckerberg saying in response to the deaths that, “My emotion is feeling a deep sense of responsibility to try to fix the problem.”

The concept of fake news has created acute damage to the cultures of democracy and faith in institutions in places such as Hungary, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, and the 2018 Midterm elections in the US. The negative repercussions of fake news are tragically present in Myanmar today. On the below episode of the Oxford Comment, authors Jamie Susskind and Siva Vaidhyanathan explore the influence of digital media on the modern political sphere and the negative repercussions that come with it, such as in Myanmar. Find all of the Oxford Comment episodes also on Spotify.

On November 15, 720,000 Rohingya who escaped slaughter, rape, and village burning were scheduled to be repatriated to Myanmar from Bangladesh. Among others, the United Nations was vehemently opposed to this move, warning that forcing the first group of 2,200 Rohingya refugees to return to the mass violence that awaits the minority Muslim group is a “clear violation” of core international legal principles. A coalition of 42 humanitarian and civil society groups called this repatriation process “dangerous and premature.” The day the refugees were supposed to be transported back to Myanmar, Bangladesh’s Rohingya Relief and Repatriation Commissioner announced that no one will be forcibly repatriated. Many of the refugees are terrified at the prospect of returning, as they believe it would be a death sentence.

On the global stage, human rights advocates are condemning the actions of political leaders in Myanmar. In March, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum rescinded its top award from Suu Kyi. Other honors she has been stripped of include the freedom of the cities of Dublin and Oxford, England. In September, Canada’s parliament voted to strip Suu Kyi of her honorary citizenship. On November 12, Amnesty International stripped State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi of the Ambassador of Conscience Award. By failing to speak out against the violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority, the human rights group accused the leader of perpetuating human rights abuses. Amnesty’s Secretary General Kumi Naidoo wrote that, “We are profoundly dismayed that you no longer represent a symbol of hope, courage, and the undying defense of human rights.” The United Nations has been outspoken in their condemnation of the military leaders in Myanmar, recommending that they be put on trial for crimes that include genocide.

Learn more about the history of Myanmar and the Rohingyas with these titles: The Rohingyas, Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, Borders: A Very Short Introduction, Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior

Featured image credit: “myanmar-burma-landscape-sunrise” by 12019 / 10266 Images. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: Mexico

Mexico has had an eventful 2018, both on the national and international stage. With conversations centered on immigration, natural disasters, economic advancements, and political protests, the country and its people have been front and center.

On November 5, Mexico City received their first wave of migrants from a large group of people travelling through Mexico towards the United States. Approximately 450 people have taken temporary shelter in a stadium, as authorities in Mexico City have prepared food, shelter, medical and legal advisers, drinking water, and have had residents donate clothes and shoes for travelers. The group of about 5,000 people—known as a caravan—set off from Honduras. Many of the migrants plan to seek asylum in the United States, saying they are fleeing from persecution, poverty, and violence in their home countries. US President Donald Trump has said that he will use the military to completely shut the US-Mexico border if necessary, and has threatened to cut aid to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, three of the countries migrants are fleeing. The US president has even deployed troops to the border to keep the migrants out.

Mexican immigration has remained a popular talking point within United States political conversation during the 2018 election season, contributing to great polarization and tension. The number of family members arrested at the US-Mexico border rose to roughly 16,658 in September, a 31 percent increase over the previous month, and the most recorded in a single month since fiscal year 2012 when the Border Patrol started compiling records.

Mexico has also endured multiple natural disasters in 2018. One earthquake hit Mexico City right after the Mexican national soccer team defeated Germany in the World Cup, leading to initial speculation that the quake had been caused by jubilant fans. This was proven untrue shortly after, however—it was in fact an entirely natural earthquake. On the Pacific coast of Mexico, it has been a difficult hurricane season. At the beginning of November, Tropical Storm Xavier became the 22nd named tropical storm of the 2018 eastern Pacific hurricane season, making this year’s hurricane season the most active since 1992.

In economic news, Mexico, the United States, and Canada agreed on a revised trade deal to replace NAFTA in early October, called USMCA. It is expected to be signed by the end of November, and then will be sent to Congress for approval. Despite the cooperation, however, tensions remain high as immigration remains a talking point in both countries.

Mexican citizens are becoming more and more politically engaged in protest of their leadership’s decisions. In late October, Mexico’s President-elect López Obrador announced that he would respect the result of a referendum that rejected a partially built $13 billion airport for Mexico City. Following the announcement, Mexico’s peso declined more than 3 percent against the US dollar, with the interbank rate ending at 20.06 pesos to $1. Banco BASE said it was the biggest single-day drop since November 9, 2016, following Donald Trump’s election as US president. There has been a public backlash, with a protest of 5,500 people marching in Mexico City on November 11. The protesters questioned the constitutionality of the cancellation decision, and expressed their lack of trust in Obrador.

Do you want to learn more about Mexico and immigration? Try these titles: Mexico: What Everyone Needs to Know, Mexico: What Everyone Needs to Know Second Edition, Borders: A Very Short Introduction, and Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction.

You can also learn more about natural disasters such as those plaguing Mexico with these titles: Climate: A Very Short Introduction, and Weather: A Very Short Introduction.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about the culture of Mexico, listen to this recent episode of our podcast, the Oxford Comment. Culturally, societal changes in post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920’s produced shifts in urban women’s activity and mobility that were reflected in their dress and appropriation of indigenous stylistic and symbolic traditions. Women today continue to use traditional forms, such as embroidered huipiles, as a means of expressing their identities and rights through fabric. Listen to William Beezley, Professor of History at the University of Arizona and Editor in Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, as he moderates a roundtable discussion with historians Stephanie Wood and Susie Porter about Mexican women’s self-expression through textiles and dress. For all Oxford Comment episodes, find us on Spotify.

Featured image credit: “ancient-architecture-backlit-building” by Rafael Guajardo. CC0 via Pexels.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: Pacific Ocean

A study in March of 2018 revealed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), the world’s largest collection of ocean garbage, has grown to more than 600,000 square miles. That’s twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France. The mass weighs 88,000 tons, a number which is 16 times higher than previous estimations indicated. The trash in the patch originates from around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia and North and South America.

The title of “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is deceiving; contrary to popular belief, the GPGP is not one large and continuous mass of easily visible marine debris that can be identified from a satellite. Higher concentrations of trash can be found in the GPGP, but much of the debris is made up of small pieces of floating plastic not immediately evident to the human eye. This debris is dispersed over a large expanse of area, and throughout the top portion of the water column.

The GPGP is devastating for marine life. Much of the plastic has deteriorated into micro-plastics as a result of sun exposure, waves, marine life, and temperature changes. Once they break down to this small size, micro-plastics are difficult to remove. Micro-plastics make up 8% of the total mass of the GPGP, but 94% of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of garbage floating in the area. They are often mistaken for food by marine animals, resulting in malnutrition and serious threats to the animals’ behavior, health, and existence.

There are serious consequences for human beings and our economy as a result of the GPGP. Through a process called bio-accumulation, chemicals found in plastics will enter the body of the animal that feeds on it, which will consequently be passed to humans as they eat the animal. Through this process, micro-plastics can enter the food chain. The pollutants they contain become more concentrated as they work their way up the chain to top level predators such as sharks, seals and polar bears. According to the United Nations, the approximate environmental damage caused by plastic to marine ecosystems represents $13 billion.

Watch the video below to hear Judith Weis, author of Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know take a look at one of the major culprits behind marine pollution: microfibers and micro plastics.

The Pacific Ocean has faced other difficulties this year as well. In 2018 the eastern Pacific Ocean saw its most active hurricane season on record. The season started on May 15, and has had three Category 5 hurricanes east of the international date line. This is only the third eastern Pacific season to have three Category 5’s. Meteorologists measure the intensity and duration of all the storms that form with a metric Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE). The average season-to-date ACE for late October is 125.7 units; as of October 23, the storms had created 311 units, more than two and half times the expectation. Of the dozen hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, 83 percent rapidly intensified at some point, an increase from the historical average of 79 percent. The most drastic change of any of the storms was in late August when Hurricane Norman’s peak winds increased 80 mph in only 24 hours. In under 48 hours, Hurricane Willa went from a low-end tropical storm to a Category 5. These hurricanes impacted areas such as Hawaii, Mexico, and the Southwestern United States.

Interested in learning more? Check out the following titles: A Farewell to Ice: A Report From the Arctic, Oceans: a Very Short Introduction, and from the What Everyone Needs to Know® series: Climate Change, Marine Pollution, and Environmental Protection.

Featured image credit: “beach-pacific-coastline-ocean-coast” by RogerMosley. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: North Korea

North Korea dominated the headlines in 2018 with historic meetings and heightened tensions over nuclear threats. This year Kim Jong-Un, Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Supreme Leader of North Korea, has met with multiple world leaders, and has been vocal about his stance on the North Korean nuclear program. This has ignited strong reactions, ranging from hope, confusion, and fear around the world.

Kim Jong-Un met with Moon Jae-In, the President of South Korea, in April for an inter-Korean summit. The countries reached a historic agreement to work toward peace and reunification following decades of conflict. North Korea promised to retire its nuclear program, and both countries signed an agreement pledging to work towards the “common goal” of denuclearization on the peninsula. In late October, along with the United Nations Command, North and South Korea agreed to remove firearms and guard posts from a portion of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two countries.

While the two countries are still technically at war, the visible thaw in relations began in February at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. Athletes from North and South Korea marched under a unified flag at the opening ceremony PyeongChang, and the women’s ice hockey team featured women from both countries competing together. Following inter-Korean sport talks on November 2, North and South Korea issued a statement announcing that they wish to compete as a unified team at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and intend on bidding to co-host the 2032 Summer Games.

Despite initial plans for Kim Jong-Un to visit Seoul, Moon Jae-In told parliamentary leaders that the trip may be delayed until early next year. This highly anticipated event would be historic, as it would be the first time a North Korean head of state ventured to the South. Even as the trip has been postponed, however, both countries have agreed that further demilitarization should continue, as should reunions between families separated for decades on either side of the border.

North Korea has also been meeting with leaders of other nations in a bid to join the global community. Kim Jong-Un met with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in early November in Pyongyang. According to North Korea’s state media, they agreed to expand and strengthen their strategic relations. They discussed ways to boost ties between their countries in fields such as the economy, culture, public health, science, and technology. The state media stressed their shared socialist history and commitment to continued solidarity. Both are hoping to get out from under US economic sanctions.

Prior to that meeting, Kim Jong-Un met with US President Donald Trump for the first time in Singapore in June, resulting in President Trump declaring that Kim, “trusts me, and I trust him.” Leading up to high-level talks between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong Chol in early November, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that if the United States did not ease the sanctions on North Korea, Pyongyang could restart “building up nuclear forces.” The day before the discussions were scheduled, the State Department announced that they would be delayed. They did not give a specific reason for the decision, but tensions between the two countries have continued to rise. The negotiations are currently at a stalemate, as the United States is only willing to form a peaceful relationship with North Korea until after it gives up its nuclear weapons, and North Korea is only willing to give up its nuclear weapons once it has established a peaceful and trusting relationship with the United States.

Rhetoric centered upon the threat of nuclear weapon usage has instilled unease around the world. A missile test alert in Hawaii resulted in widespread panic fueled by the tension between North Korea and the United States. Just days later, a Japanese public broadcaster NHK mistakenly sent out an alert warning that North Korea had fired a missile; this was quickly corrected.

This year North Korea has made history. Kim Jong-Un continues to work to end his country’s years of isolation through meetings with high ranking officials and leaders around the world. As conversations continue between the United States and North Korea, only time can tell what progress will be made in regard to denuclearization.

Learn more about nuclear power on the global scale with Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation since 1945 and Nuclear Power: A Very Short Introduction.

Featured image credit: “north-korea-pyongyang-bronze” by Alex_Berlin. CC0 via Pixabay.

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