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19 Dec, 2023

- The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

4:08PM, 19 Dec, 2023

Maxime Sudol for Noema Magazine

The tale of Lloyd Peterson is almost too perfect an American parable. Born in rural Arkansas in 1912, Peterson was the grandson of pioneers who, as the tales have it, rolled into the Ozarks by wagon. He was too hardworking a fifth grader to take money from his parents, so he dug ditches, mowed lawns, milked cows, sold newspapers. He was too practical a 22-year-old to accept a professional baseball contract offered by the New York Giants, choosing instead to manage a farm store in Decatur. “Lloyd Peterson developed his business by being fair and honest,” one industry biography reports.

Soon he began to deal in chickens, which he sold to local farmers to be raised and shipped live to cities across the Midwest. By 1939, Peterson had decided to keep a flock to produce “broilers,” the term for chickens destined to become dinner.

It was the eve of a growth spurt for both the chicken industry and the chickens themselves. Technology was key. New indoor barns featured artificial light and heating, promoting faster growth. Nutritionists carefully formulated feeds. Peterson had not gone to college, but he leaned into another angle of the emerging poultry science: genetics. He kept detailed notes on his own chickens and perused scholarly studies. Eventually, he hired a team of geneticists. When he was inducted into the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame, the citation noted Peterson’s breakthrough recognition that “feed efficiency” was a heritable trait. He realized that you could, in other words, breed birds across generations that got better and better at turning food into body mass. Less input, more output.

When Peterson was a child, a typical chicken would take around four months to reach its slaughter weight of 2.5 pounds. Growth rates began to crank upwards in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, as Peterson rose to the heights of his reputation, the chicken was well on its way to becoming a new beast — one featuring a “distinctive new morphotype,” according to scientists. Today, chickens reach 5 pounds in two months, while consuming less food.

Consistently fast-growing and fat chickens became the foundation of a small empire. Before Peterson passed away in 2007, his company was cranking out more than a million broilers each week and bringing in $180 million in annual sales. That made Peterson one of the country’s top 25 poultry operators — and one of the biggest businesses in Arkansas.

The domesticated chicken — Gallus gallus domesticus — had meanwhile been turned into one of the planet’s most important animals: our most-consumed meat. With a global standing population of at least 25 billion, these birds outnumber every other vertebrate species. The total standing biomass of domesticated poultry is around three times higher than the biomass of all wild birds combined.

Understanding the human relationship with our fellow animals — and considering the future of how we might or might not eat those animals — requires reckoning with this unlikely bird.

From a certain point of view, the extraordinary abundance of chickens might be seen as a positive development: Here is a source of protein that is cheaply produced, transportable, happily consumed by a huge number of people across the world. And thanks in part to Peterson’s efforts at improving feed conversion efficiency, chicken has a much slimmer carbon impact than beef, which contributes more than 9% of global emissions.

But the rise of poultry, and of poultry science, has not been great for the chickens themselves. They are now less functional animals than meat-growing machines. So much of a chicken’s energy gets devoted to growing as big as possible as fast as possible that the parts less useful to us humans — lungs and hearts, say — are neglected and wither. Due to underdeveloped immune systems, the birds are dosed with antibiotics. Many full-grown broilers are unable to stand under their weight. Activists and critics have called them “prisoners in their own bodies.”

They’re also more literally prisoners: Most broilers spend their brief lives locked inside massive sheds alongside tens of thousands of their genetic cousins. Each bird gets around a square foot of space, so many that are still young enough to walk have no choice but to step over their immobilized relatives. This is an ethical nightmare, clearly, but also an existential threat: So many identical chickens packed so close together is a breeding ground for disease. The latest strains of avian influenza have grown so severe that endangered wild birds have to be immunized to prevent their extinction. That several humans have tested positive for bird flu over the past few years is also worrying; the worst pandemic in the past century, with a death toll perhaps 30 times worse than Covid, came after bird flu jumped through poultry farms into human populations in 1918.

The specter of chickens killing us through disease is what first led me into the annals of the industry, and eventually to Peterson. What hope is left, I wanted to know, for those of us who enjoy eating meat?

“Chickens today are now less functional animals than meat-growing machines.”

Roughly 12,000 years ago, people in the Middle East began to shift the way they preyed on animals. Hunters realized that rather than roaming a wide territory in search of prey, they could steer the beasts into a smaller area — where, as a bonus, the animals could be protected against predation by rival predators and harvested in a way that allowed them to reproduce. Thus, gradually, began the process of domestication.

Gallus gallus domesticus was a relatively late addition to this brave new world. The species emerged some 3,500 years ago somewhere in southeast Asia, where a few red jungle fowl must have wandered into a village. They were almost certainly tempted by discarded food waste and rice and grain fields. In the Middle East, the first acts of herding were a human innovation, with the goat forced into confinement; the chicken, by contrast, volunteered.

Biologically, then, the egg came before the chicken: The red jungle fowl was laying eggs long before anything distinctly chicken-ish ever emerged from the shells. But that’s not to say that the chicken became the chicken and then the process was done with. Ever since those first flocks decided to join our villages, savvy chicken keepers have been shaping gene flow, gradually altering the species by deciding which hens and roosters were allowed to mate. By the mid-20th century, there were dozens of distinctive local breeds in the United States: White-Laced Red Cornish, Mahogany Orloff, Silver-Spangled Hamburg and so on. Such chickens, known today as “heritage breeds,” were more prized for their laying abilities than for their rapid growth. Meat back then was mostly a byproduct, a profitable and convenient way to dispose of chickens too old (or too male) to lay eggs.

Then came technology. An electronically heated chicken incubator may seem like a utilitarian device, but it is hard to overstate how much it altered the fate of the chicken. Instead of wasting months mating birds and rearing chicks, a farmer could outsource all the messy business of reproduction and receive in exchange a steady supply of chickens ready to lay eggs. This launched a new kind of business: the hatchery, where eggs could be nurtured until they hatch and then the chicks sent off to farms. Enterprising hatchers soon realized that if they focused on growing bigger and meatier birds, then chicken meat could become a star product all its own.

In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped sponsor several “chicken of tomorrow” contests, competitions meant to see who could develop the fastest-growing birds. Many of the entrants attempted to tweak and perfect one of the classic, long-known chicken breeds. But the initial winner took a more daring approach: He crossed a popular East Coast meat bird with a different breed developed in California, creating an entirely new hybrid chicken. Three years later, the same breeder won a second national contest, again with a crossbred bird. A revolution had begun.

The advantage offered by hybrid birds was already well known: Crossing genetic lines can produce heterosis, or “hybrid vigor” — an enhancement of the latent genetic potential in each of the parents. But the boon is temporary. When a pair of promising hybrids mate, the genetic advantages begin to dwindle in their children. In farmer speak, the birds don’t “breed true” — their offspring don’t retain their full characteristics.

The electronic incubator offered a workaround. Chicks were already coming from hatcheries; those hatcheries could maintain separate populations of the two chickens they wanted to crossbreed, producing an endless supply of perfect, first-generation hybrids. The farmers first turned to hatcheries for convenience. Now they came to depend on them: They were the only source for the best modern birds.

Lloyd Peterson became a leader in this new industry. His most famous product was the “Peterson Male,” which, by the 1970s, accounted for the vast majority of the domestic market for male chickens. The genetic code that distinguished each breed of chicken had become intellectual property. Through these decades — as the chicken was hyper-domesticated, as farming industrialized — the chicken farms consolidated. So did the breeders: Peterson Farms eventually sold its male line to Aviagen, one of the two companies that today produce around 99% of the world’s chickens. Consider that again: The world’s most abundant vertebrate is a product supplied by just two corporations. At this point, the chicken might be the most domesticated animal on Earth.

The names for those companies’ top products differ — Cobb 500, the Ross 308 and so on — but most broilers are just subtle variations on what can generally be described as the “Cornish Cross,” which can grow to be five times larger than the hens Peterson first dealt with in the early 20th century.

Many of the companies that advertise “free-range” or “pastured” chicken raise these Cornish Cross hens. Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for safer, healthier and more humane agricultural practices, argued that it hardly matters where such a chicken spends its life. Cornish Cross hens need so much help from humans that they may lead better lives if kept indoors, he said. Studies have found that the greatest factor impacting a chicken’s welfare is its breed. The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.

“The greatest factor impacting a chicken’s welfare is its breed. The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.”

While the chicken was a latecomer to domestication, it became a trailblazer. By the mid-1950s, Farm Journal was encouraging hog farmers to “raise pigs like broilers.” Thus began the turn away from pasture-based farming toward “concentrated animal feeding operations” — one more agricultural word that needs little gloss to reveal its brutality.

Eventually, cows, too, were corralled into CAFOs. Still, there are enough independent ranchers left that grocery stores can procure pasture-raised beef, giving diners who are sensitive to animal cruelty a viable option. But methane-producing cattle are so bad for the environment that a carnivorous diner who cares about cruelty and climate has few good choices: The poultry industry has been so thoroughly swallowed by industry that there is almost nothing for sale in grocery aisles but Cornish Cross meat.

Even if you do not care about animal welfare, there are reasons to despair over industrial chicken. You might worry about human welfare, for example: Modern chicken production is a labor nightmare, sometimes conducted by underaged and undocumented immigrants. And if you don’t care about laborers, there’s a more self-serving reason to worry: Chickens are a major public health risk. The use of antibiotics could drive the evolution of drug-resistant super-bacteria that could infect humans, too.

Perhaps scarier, though, is that chicken CAFOs are breeding grounds for influenza. Population density helps increase pathogen transmission, while genetic homogeneity helps drive pathogen evolution, so sometimes mild viruses become far more deadly. Even early animal agriculture practices created what anthropologist James C. Scott called “a perfect epidemiological storm.” Since then, the scale and density of agriculture has increased enormously.

After the 1918 catastrophe, avian influenza caused two more global pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, and a terrifying near miss came in 1997, when a stunningly deadly strain of bird flu savaged Hong Kong but failed to spread across the globe. Now, another virulent strain of bird flu — which has some genetic roots in African poultry farms — is on the loose.

Scientists describe the situation as “unprecedented and catastrophic,” with the wild bird death toll reaching into the millions. Worryingly, these strains have proved very capable of leaping into mammals. And the virus now appears to be endemic in migrating birds, which means each fall and spring, as they embark on their journeys, they carry the virus, creating a seasonal risk of spillover. Typically with chickens, when just one bird in a flock is confirmed to be infected, the entire barn is euthanized to halt the spread, often by spraying the birds in a foam that causes them to suffocate: millions of birds killed not by the flu but to prevent its spread.

In early October, just a few days after bird flu made its latest seasonal return to the United States, a group of scientists announced that they’d made a breakthrough: Using CRISPR, they had altered the genetics of chickens once more, now to help them resist flu infections. One of the virologists involved described the results as a “proof of concept that we can move toward making chickens resistant to the virus.” But it’s a proof that comes with a strong caveat: They noted that the virus was able to quickly adapt if only one gene was edited. Even when multiple genes were altered, high viral loads led to breakthrough infections. One scientist told The New York Times that the results showed instead how hard it would be to engineer any solution in this arms race.

“Even if you do not care about animal welfare, there are reasons to despair over industrial chicken.”

Another approach might be to reform chicken farming. “We could just tell the poultry industry, ‘Listen, you can’t use these genetics, and you can’t raise them in these kinds of densities — period,’” deCoriolis told me. Sure, the price of chicken would go up, but that cost might be worth the lives saved. He pointed me toward one chicken farm that he thought was doing a decent job of showing how this might be possible: Cooks Venture, it’s called, a business co-founded by none other than Lloyd Peterson’s grandson.

Before Cooks Venture, though, there had been a decline. A year after Peterson died in 2007, amid a family financial crisis, his grandson, Blake Evans, decided to sell off much of the company. The poultry industry was, as Evans later put it, too “high-risk and high-reward.” Chicken is a commodity product, so producers have little protection against the whims of the markets. Even after all the consolidation, a business as large as Peterson’s could not compete against epic giants like Tyson Foods.

After the sale, Evans began to talk with colleagues about where the industry had gone so wrong. Eventually, he decided to return to his grandfather’s first mission: He wanted to build the perfect chicken, but now with a new definition of perfection. Evans decided to create a higher-end product, one that might appeal to a consumer willing to pay a bit more, so he could break out of the commodity rut. Evans had noticed that consumers were more interested in where their food was coming from and how animals were treated. So he tried to create a bird that could thrive out in a pasture rather than in a CAFO, but that would still be relatively cheap to raise and easily shipped to grocery stores. That ruled out the heritage breeds, which Evans deemed grew too slowly to compete in the modern economy.

He found what he considered to be a winning formula when crossed two heritage breeds — Naked Neck and Delaware — with one of his grandfathers’ proprietary creations. “We literally knocked our performance back into the 1950s,” Evans told me.

By 2015, Evans’ company, like his grandfather’s, had vertically integrated with a processing facility. The timing was perfect: Two years later, a group of NGOs began to push for science-based welfare standards in the chicken industry. More than 200 food companies eventually signed what became known as the “Better Chicken Commitment.” The groups’ scientific research later concluded that breed is the most important factor in chicken welfare, and included Cooks Venture’s Pioneer as one of the few that met the requirements — the only such breed, Cooks Venture noted in a press release, that was not owned by massive genetics conglomerates. Here, in other words, was a better form of corporate agriculture: The company of tomorrow would sell the chickens that are halfway tomorrow, halfway yesterday.

“What we need is not just a new form of chicken farming but a complete rethinking of how we relate to meat.”

There is, of course, a simpler solution to the meat conundrum: Stop eating animals entirely. We could turn to lab-grown meat or plant-based replacements for protein, perhaps even precision-fermented bacteria. Modern chicken has been cited as evidence of how little diners care about their meals’ provenance — or their taste. As the writer George Monbiot has noted, poultry today is already a hyper-technological product that has been reduced to a “generic white protein,” bland and tasteless, little more than a vessel for a fried shell.

Unfortunately, several surveys and studies have found that even when meat replacements compete on price, taste and convenience, many consumers decline to make the switch. You can swap out a coal plant for solar panels, perhaps, but protein is more than a technical tool; there is no one-for-one alternate replacement. The world appears to be attached to meat.

Why is that? Surely culture has something to do with it. Decades of advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more authoritarian political viewpoints.) As a man myself, perhaps my desire to eat meat is the result of brainwashing. But if I’m able to recognize that, I’m still wary of condemning all meat consumption. As the Canadian Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd has noted, in some Indigenous societies, it would be considered disrespectful to reject an animal’s offering of its flesh: “They’ve given themselves to us,” she said, an effort to assist humans — “feeble and fairly incompetent beings that continually need to be taught how to work better.”

Todd, of course, was not referring to industrial livestock rearing. She was speaking about her own culture’s deep ties to wild-caught fish and hunted bison. The way we eat meat now only became possible after the lands beyond Europe were colonized and cleared and turned into massive meat-raising pastures. Along the way, the animals were stripped of their animal nature, deprived of the joys of an animal life.

Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.

“Protein is more than a technical tool; there is no one-for-one alternate replacement. The world appears to be attached to meat.”

The U.S. produces maybe 45 billion pounds of chicken each year. Because slower-growing chickens, like the Cooks Venture Pioneer, live longer, we’d need more of them to sustain these levels of production and consumption — nearly doubling the U.S. chicken population, according to one study. Even if these chickens were housed in CAFOs, the industry’s land use would have to increase by at least 20%.

“Without a drastic reduction in consumption, switching to alternative breeds will lead to a substantial increase in the number of individuals killed each year, an untenable increase in land use, and a possible decrease in aggregate chicken welfare at the country-level scale,” the study concludes. There is no plug-in solution, then: Simply swapping our current meat supply for “better chicken” would be far worse for the world than plugging in alternate meats. What we need is not just a new form of chicken farming but a complete rethinking of how we relate to meat.

Cooks Venture’s CEO, John Niemann, cautioned that he did not see the company leading a revolution; it wasn’t a David versus Goliath story of a small independent company battling the multinational superpowers. “I’m not interested in slaying the giant,” he said. He just wanted to meet consumer demand for a more ethical product.

It’s not clear, though, how strong that demand is. A 2018 study found that a year after the Better Chicken Commitment, only 12% of consumers had heard of “slow-growth” birds. Only 1% had ever purchased such meat. The study concluded that before such chicken can take off, there would need to be a “substantial marketing effort.” Even then, growth may be limited: What’s made chicken so popular in the first place, the study noted, is that it’s the cheapest of the meats.

As I peeled back the layers on the Cooks Venture story, it seemed as full of warning as hope. I bought a box of the company’s chicken in the fall; each whole bird cost around $20-$25, well above the $15-$20 that Cooks Venture suggested in early press coverage and twice the price of the most expensive chicken at my local grocery store. Would the company be able to survive with prices that high?

More worrying was the company’s ownership changing like a game of corporate hot potato. In 2017, after several years of nearly doubling his sales, Evans decided to sell to a bigger food processor. But then around a year later, he and an entrepreneur named Matthew Wadiak — a founder of the meal-kit company Blue Apron — bought it back. In August, when I first reached out, I learned that Wadiak was departing. The company’s board had decided “a change in leadership was necessary to scale the business,” as the company’s publicist, Elizabeth Matthews, later explained. Niemann, his replacement, spent 20 years at Cargill, a multinational giant hardly known for its sustainability. Niemann noted that on his own row-crop farms, he’d implemented as many regenerative practices “as feasibly possible.”

Wadiak declined to comment on his departure but noted that the company had gotten its chicken into hundreds of stores. Consumer adoption was strong, he said. But to compete against the industrial food system is difficult, and few funders are willing to provide the large-scale, long-term capital needed to help truly revolutionary concepts get off the ground.

As if to prove his point, on Thanksgiving Day, I received what would be a final email from Cooks Venture: The company was ceasing operations immediately. “It was a very sudden decision based on an inability to secure funding,” Matthews wrote.

What would become of the chickens? There were perhaps a million of them in contract farmers’ barns across Arkansas. And what would become of the Cooks Venture Pioneer breed in general? I emailed Evans but got no reply. Soon, though, I heard reports from the Ozarks that state officials were working to “depopulate” the chicken houses with foam, in some cases without permission from the farmers who owned the barns. So far, it doesn’t seem like anyone has been tasked with the responsibility for cleaning up the carcasses, which prompted a state senator to appeal to the governor to declare a state of emergency. In November, more than 8 million chickens had been killed in the U.S. to contain an outbreak of bird flu. Now, a million Cooks Venture Pioneers seem set to join them. And for what?

15 Dec, 2023

- In Kissinger’s Wake

In Kissinger’s Wake

3:37PM, 15 Dec, 2023

Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine

“No truly ‘global’ world order has ever existed,” the late Henry Kissinger acknowledged in his 2015 book “World Order.” “What passes for order in our time was devised in Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other continents or civilizations.” The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War by religious partisans and established the paradigm of sovereign states as the bedrock of international relations.

Since the whole planet is now “involved and aware” when it comes to constructing the next world order, even a hardened realist like Kissinger could see that a strategy of maintaining stability though balancing the once clearly delineated national interests of major powers against each other is no longer sufficient or possible in the 21st century.

The challenge in our time is not just forging a deterrent equilibrium among contentious states and their spheres of influence, but managing the interdependence of plural civilizational identities in one integrated world where interests converge at key intersections — from climate to pandemics, financial contagion, controlling nuclear weapons and the impact of artificial intelligence — while diverging elsewhere. None of this fits neatly into the solid sovereign boxes of the past. Indeed, it is manifestly in the best self-interest of rivals to partner with each other when none alone can meet their common challenges.

Kissinger’s remarkable longevity as the star statesman on the world stage made him the symbolic carrier of the Westphalia paradigm well past its expiration date. In a way, his passing clears the conceptual space for the transition to a new paradigm of realism at the planetary instead of the nation-state level.

Still, it is worth learning what we can from Kissinger’s century-long life. When facing an uncertain future, nothing is ever lost from the lamp of experience.

The Mother’s Milk Of Metternich

Personal experience taught Kissinger how the chaos and power vacuum of interwar European disorder led to the descent of the culture of Goethe and Beethoven into the abyss of madness. He lost 13 members of his extended family in the Holocaust. Serving as an American soldier after the war amid the ruins of Hitler’s Third Reich, he witnessed firsthand the deprivations of total defeat an aggressor nation had brought upon itself.

The lesson he took away from this experience was deeply pessimistic: The way to enable societies to flourish is not by reaching for the utopian perfection of human nature but by keeping the peace through constraining the innate temptations of the will to power.

Intellectually, Kissinger’s strategic mind was weaned on the mother’s milk of Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian diplomat who orchestrated a balance of power through the Concert of Europe among the major sovereigns in the 19th century after the continental upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. By agreeing on political boundaries and spheres of influence modeled on the Peace of Westphalia, decades of stability were achieved — until the 1848 rebellions for nationalism and democracy spread throughout Europe, a telling foreshadow of the conflicts during the Cold War that would rage beneath the relatively stable relations between the superpowers.

As a conservative in the Metternich mold, Kissinger disdained destabilizing revolutions and uprisings from the precincts of the dispossessed. A student and steward of the powerful, he was blind to the driving motivations of aspirational movements at the margins that endeavored to assert their own well-being against the order imposed by ruling authorities. They were not on his radar except as disrupters of the power balance at the top he was seeking.

It is here that the moral stains of a brilliant strategic mind are rightly condemned. Kissinger believed “history” was made in the domain of the dominant, not by those in forlorn backwaters like Chile far from the mighty metropoles. Dismissing the struggle there as a minor chess piece in the grand Cold War game, he fostered a coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende, saying: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Even more tragically, Kissinger’s myopic vision failed to fathom that dropping more bombs across Indochina than the U.S. did in all of World War II would not force the Vietnamese to yield in their determination for sovereign independence. He came late to the realization that their putative Soviet masters had little influence over the hearts, minds and passions of a people asserting their right to exist as a nation. In the name of salvaging credibility, Kissinger squandered it by staying a course that cost countless lives only in the end to meet America’s first defeat in war, no less at the hands of a peasant army.

Evolutionary Stability

Kissinger was a conservative but not a reactionary, as many argue. He sought not to suppress change, but to avoid rupture, which opened a void of authority that would lead to anarchy and chaos more destructive than the subjugations of stability. Kissinger was not a liberal internationalist who believed, absent total war and defeat as in the case of Japan and Germany, that America could remake other societies in its image. He believed in recognizing and dealing with the realities of power as it existed.

In his last book, “Leadership: Six Lessons in World Strategy,” Kissinger distinguished how two types of leaders — the “statesman” and “the prophet” — face challenges differently.

The statesman “tempers” visions of transformation with a realistic understanding of political and economic constraints. Within those constraints, open space for change can be found “by manipulating circumstances rather than being overwhelmed by them.” In contrast, the prophet, or visionary, “treats prevailing institutions less from the perspective of the possible” than from a vision of the imperative to change the very definition of what is possible.

For Kissinger, the best leaders who made the most difference flexibly fashioned an “optimal blend” that successfully navigated constraints to realize new possibilities through evolutionary stability.

In the tumultuous times sure to come during the transition from the solid-state paradigm of national sovereignty to the fluid interdependence of the planetary, this is a wise perspective to bear in mind.

Sprouts Of The Planetary Paradigm

Sprouts of the planetary paradigm that will supersede the order of nation-states are already emerging.

The philosopher Lorenzo Marsili, who heads Berggruen Institute Europe, envisions a lean planetary polity where the capacity to address shared “concrete universals” of common humanity, for example the preservation of the biosphere or access to health, is organized across diverse cultures and even otherwise incommensurate political systems. In practical terms, he sees the shared sovereignty of European Union as a laboratory for this evolving form of governance.

In Noema, we have also written about shifting from the realpolitik for which Kissinger was known to a Gaiapolitik that departs from the old realist school of foreign policy that regards nation-states as the principal actors on the world stage engaged in an endless struggle against others in pursuit of securing their own national interests. In contrast, planetary realism recognizes that the security of each depends inextricably on cooperation and collaboration with others in aligning with the self-regulating ecosystem of the Earth.

In a still deeper sense, the concept of the planetary also entails a departure from thinking of the world in terms of globalization. We now live in a “planetary age,” Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman declared in a Noema essay. “The ‘planetary’ refers to issues, processes and conditions that span the Earth and transcend nation-states. ‘Global’ and ‘globalization’ are the currently popular terms for describing world-scale issues. But the planet is not the globe: The globe is a conceptual category that frames the Earth in human terms. Globalization, likewise, adopts a fundamentally human-centric understanding of ‘integration’ that has happened over the last few decades — the accelerating flow of people, goods, ideas, money and more.

The planetary, by contrast, frames Earth without specific reference to humans. … The Earth is not ours alone. Worldwide integration is not merely the intentional work of humans. Humans are embedded and codependent with microbes, the climate and technologically enabled emergent trans-species communities.”

One of the key points Blake and Gilman make is that awareness of this embedded condition means planetary governance would not be centered at the global level, but distributed through decision-division to appropriate levels where relevant action needs to be taken. They develop this argument further in their forthcoming book, “Children Of A Modest Star: Planetary Thinking For An Age of Crises.”

Despite growing awareness that national sovereignty is no longer fit for purpose as the basis of world order in the 21st century, the inertia remains strong. The post-globalization resurgence of nationalism we are presently witnessing is only the first movement in the long course of transition ahead. Like nostalgia, the defensive politics of holding onto the past is a function of what is already lost before the next constructive phase that embraces a new way of seeing and thinking.

14 Dec, 2023

- Wild Pigeon Chase

Wild Pigeon Chase

6:05PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Velvet Spectrum for Noema Magazine

NORTH UIST, Scotland — For the millionth time, I asked myself what I was doing out here. Roughly fifty miles off the west coast of Scotland, the late September winds shrieked and flung sleet at my head. A rivulet of rain dripped off my hat and down my back, mixing with a cold sweat that was part physical strain and part nerves.

The temperature had plunged to just above freezing. I stared at my husband who, like me, had rolled up his cargos to walk barefoot across the saturated sand, feet bright red from the cold and unwelcome North Atlantic exfoliation.

Along the horizon, a dark line of clouds promised to transform our existing difficulties into a fond memory. I watched as the incoming tide began to close in on our small strip of beach dividing the islands of North Uist and Vallay. If we wanted to catch a glimpse of the rare birds that we had journeyed thousands of miles to see — and make it back before the tide came in and blocked our return — we had to keep moving. Any bird, however, had been far smarter than us and had long since taken shelter. The only things in the sky were wind and rain and clouds.

It was an awful lot of effort for what was, essentially, a pigeon.

For millions of years, before humans domesticated pigeons for food, communication and companionship, these birds existed as rock doves. Across Europe and Asia, rock doves made their homes in small hollows on rock cliffs, scrounging nearby lands for seeds, plants, grasses and the occasional earthworm or insect to eat.

Most modern rock doves now live in cities, descendants of escaped domestic birds that have since gone feral, with a few remaining strands of “wild” DNA buried deep in their cells. Even in more sparsely settled rural areas, the birds identified as rock doves were as much pigeon as they were wild birds.

“This process is irreversible,” says Will Smith, an ornithologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. “Once it happens, we can never get the originals back.”

Except in the Outer Hebrides. A rocky archipelago that stretches 150 miles from north to south, some 27,000 Scots continue to call this wind-whipped stretch of land home. And as scientists discovered just a year and a half ago, so too do what is likely the world’s only remaining population of wild rock dove that hasn’t interbred with feral pigeons.

This makes these rock doves incredibly rare — and incredibly endangered. Vallay was one of their strongholds, and Smith, who has spent the last five years studying the species on Uist (pronounced YOO-ist), had sent me a detailed GPS map of how to hike there. For a new but dedicated birder, it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime.

Watching the charcoal clouds and incoming tide approach, however, I began questioning my decision. Why was I slogging through gale-force winds, near-freezing temperatures and pouring rain with bronchitis to see a rare rock dove? Had I embarked on a wild pigeon chase? The two birds are, after all, the same species. It’s not easy to discern a wild bird from a feral urbanite.

Only when Smith clued me in to the subtle differences in beak shape and feathers on the rump and wings could I begin to tell them apart. Though their behaviors aren’t identical, both pigeons and doves eat the same foods and play the same ecological role. To philosopher Henry Taylor at the University of Birmingham, dividing Columba livia into two different groups — pigeonholing them, if you will — was an exercise based on human values, not biological or ecological differences.

“We tend to think a species has some kind of essence, that if we allow other organisms to breed with them, we’re going to dilute that. It’s not a very good way of thinking about species,” Taylor says. And if subdividing C. livia into two species was an effort in futility, then maybe Uist’s rock doves can count the world’s hundreds of millions of pigeons as their brethren and aren’t endangered at all.

Smith, however, disagrees. The transformation of wild rock dove to urban or domestic pigeon changed the birds in subtle but significant ways, such as making them less wary of humans and allowing them to produce more clutches of eggs during the year. Pigeons are essentially a human creation; rock doves aren’t. Genetic studies of Columba livia show that the wild rock doves of Uist are potentially at risk of extinction thanks to extensive mixing with feral pigeon populations.

“Pigeons are essentially a human creation; rock doves aren’t.”

What makes rock doves special, he says, is their hidden archive of genetic diversity and a historic record written in their DNA that may help scientists tease apart why some animals adapt so well to humans. The wild doves also provide a reserve of genetic diversity that can help the birds fight off a wider range of pathogens and adapt to changing conditions due to urbanization and climate change. To help save his beloved birds, Smith would have to learn what made these wild birds so special — and so distinct from their more cosmopolitan counterparts.

“Because nobody has looked at them in depth before, every little thing we find out is brand new and exciting,” he says.

My search for wild rock doves, then, not only traced a path to an uninhabited island but also through the debates sitting at the heart of conservation. With so much need and so few resources, we all must decide what species are wild and worth saving. And those answers will have life-and-death consequences.

Country Or City Bird

In 1880, archaeologists excavating the Mesopotamian city of Sippar (located on the outskirts of modern-day Baghdad) discovered a fist-sized chunk of clay. Inscribed on one side was a series of hash marks in ancient cuneiform, an account of the purchase of barley as “bird fodder.”

This artifact, in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is part of a series of etchings, documents and hieroglyphics documenting the some 5,000-year history of pigeon domestication. Genetic studies push this history back even further, to a 10,000-year fellowship between pigeons and people, predating the domestication of all other birds, including chickens and ducks.

Although scientists can’t pinpoint exactly why humans first invited wild rock doves into the Great Indoors, they do know that the peoples of the Near East raised pigeons for food (I found an ancient Sumerian recipe for pigeon soup recreated by a modern chef). People also used pigeons for their homing ability which enabled them to navigate back home from an unfamiliar location over vast distances. This trait made the birds useful for dispatching messages between far-flung settlements.

Whatever the initial motivation for domestication, pigeons thrived with humans. “I think they’re one of the top 10 animals that has learned to live best with us,” Smith told me.

But the dividing line between the domestic pigeon and wild rock dove was never firmly fixed. Some pigeons escaped their confinement and began interbreeding with other erstwhile domestic refugees. Homing and racing pigeons could get lost or blown off course.

Since populations of rock doves were so large and widespread, many of the erstwhile domesticated pigeons went feral and began breeding with wild rock doves. Once these erstwhile domesticates began interbreeding, their elaborate plumage — such as dramatic leg feathers that make the pigeon look like it’s wearing pantaloons — had reverted to a state much closer to their wild counterparts.

Skyscrapers and multi-story buildings that dominate modern cities provide shelters analogous to the rock cliffs where doves have historically lived. What’s more, the doves’ predilection for carbohydrate-rich foods enabled them to dumpster dive for food scraps. Pigeons could raise three-to-four large clutches of eggs each year, compared to two smaller clutches produced by wild rock doves. Rapid urbanization over the past century combined with the fecundity of pigeons has, it seems, put feral and domestic pigeons at a huge advantage over rock doves.

“While we think we know them very well because pigeons are everywhere, we know almost nothing about the wild doves,” says Germán Hernández Alonso, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology at Uppsala University. Hernández Alonso points out that, for all the thousands of papers published each year on domestic pigeons, there’s far fewer in-depth studies on rock doves in all of science.

Nonetheless, rock doves and feral pigeons are the same species, however much we might try to distinguish them (by, say, labeling them “doves” and “pigeons”). Part of what makes them different has to do with the pigeons’ domestic history and the indelible imprint of humanity. Since the rise of the Industrial Age in the late 1800s, Americans have placed humans as outside of nature, says Roderick Nash, a retired environmental historian from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This ethos was ultimately enshrined in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which protected land “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

“What makes rock doves special is their hidden archive of genetic diversity and a historic record writ in DNA that may help scientists tease apart why some animals adapt so well to humans.”

“Civilization created wilderness,” Nash says. “The Neanderthals wandering around didn’t think of it as wilderness. They thought of it as where we live. It was only when humans came and began to put lines on the land that they drew lines in their minds.”

This line-drawing has filled so-called wild animals with a mystique that livestock lacks, Nash says. I realized, in talking with Nash, that it was the wildness of the rock doves that made them so attractive. But that didn’t mean my search for wild rock doves wouldn’t take me on some very wild adventures.

Rise Of The Pigeon

In the 1970s, scientists on Sardinia began tracking the island’s remaining wild rock dove populations. Initially, they found that although the birds in cities and towns were mostly pigeons, wild rock doves continued to dominate in less densely populated areas. Over the next few decades, however, that shifted dramatically as feral pigeons outbred wild doves. By the 2010s, the rock doves on Sardinia were mostly feral pigeons. Ornithologists across Europe came to similar conclusions. “This huge, healthy population in the Mediterranean just collapsed,” Smith says.

The wilds of northern Scotland told a different story. On a research trip to the north coast, Smith kept spotting birds without the tell-tale feral speckles. He began to wonder whether a few wild birds had managed to hang on amongst the hills and heather. Research from Sardinia told him that more isolated locations far from large cities were most likely to yield wild rock doves. So he asked local birding groups across the UK and Ireland to identify any doves without the wing speckling characteristic of feral pigeons.

Individuals certified as bird ringers (what Americans call bird banders, those individuals who are trained and licensed to place small, labeled metal rings around a bird’s leg to enable tracking) also provided some feather samples from the doves. Cells on the end of the feathers allowed Smith to sequence their DNA.

At first, Smith’s PhD project looked like a recapitulation of the work done in Sardinia. Even in sparsely populated corners of the Scottish Highlands and islands like the Orkneys and Shetland, the genetic makeup of the birds Smith found were more pigeon than dove. But when Smith examined the DNA found on feathers gathered on North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he found something different. Those rock doves showed almost no signs of interbreeding with pigeons.

“These guys are special,” Smith says. “They’re like a blank slate for science.”

Journey to Vallay

Until I read Smith’s 2022 paper on his Hebrides discovery, I hadn’t given much thought to pigeons or their wild ancestors. But these distinctions didn’t help me understand why the doves had hung on in Uist and why these particular birds were so special. My husband and I had been planning a trip to Scotland, and so I convinced him to take a detour to the Outer Hebrides so I could see for myself. I didn’t mention that we would need to hop on two ferries in order to seek out a glorified pigeon.

I regretted my powers of persuasion immediately upon stepping onto the second ferry. The tail end of a powerful tropical storm was churning up the North Atlantic and our aging ferry pitched among angry gray waves. I clutched a seasickness bag for dear life.

Four hours later, we drove off the boat and into the inky blackness of the town of Lochboisdale on South Uist. Even with all the accouterments of modern technology, the trip was challenging. For the pigeons, flying from Scotland would have meant navigating over 60 miles of open water and fighting strong winds that barreled off the ocean. The odds that an errant pigeon would somehow arrive on Uist felt vanishingly small.

As dawn broke the next day, I pulled up Smith’s list of the best places to see rock doves and compared it with our map of the islands. Both Smith and other birders I had emailed from the area confirmed that the rock doves were easy to spot. “Can’t miss ’em,” Smith assured me.

The best place to start my search would be Vallay, an island accessible from North Uist by crossing a nearly two-mile-wide sandbar that emerged from the water for two to three hours a day during low tide. Planning the excursion on a cozy sofa with a steaming cup of Earl Grey made it seem manageable.

“With so much need and so few resources, we all must decide what species are wild and worth saving. And those answers will have life-and-death consequences.”

The weather had different plans. Shrieking winds made it hard for my husband and I to remain upright on the open beach, and that was before factoring in the pelting rain and frigid temperatures. Worse, the ground was so saturated with water that it functioned as quicksand, suctioning us up to our knees with every step, so that we had to quickly hop up on another leg in an exhausting dance I dubbed the Vallay High Step. I stopped thinking of birds and simply thought of putting one foot in front of the other.

The agonizing slowness of our progress forced us to make a game-time decision while only about two-thirds of the way across the land bridge. With worse weather on the way and running out of time, we decided to play it safe and Vallay High Step ourselves back to the car. Later, Smith told me we had been smart. Not only were we unlikely to see any doves in the abandoned buildings on Vallay due to the weather, but several people had also died when making the same crossing amid poor conditions. Still, I was frustrated. How hard could it be to find a freaking pigeon?

Extinction By Hybridization

For conservationists, hybridization is a double-edged sword. Genetic analysis has revealed that, far from being a rare anomaly, crossbreeding between two different species is quite common in the natural world. It can be the first step in the creation of a new species, Claudio Quilodran, a conservationist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Geneva, explained to me. It can save a small population from the genetic problems of inbreeding when conservationists deliberately import more distantly related individuals to freshen the gene pool in a process called genetic rescue. But hybridization can also be the death knell for a species on the brink of extinction.

In Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park, about 200 miles due east of Uist, the world’s last remaining Scottish wildcats eke out a living. Even before humans and their housecats crossed the English Channel, the wildcats were almost identical in appearance to an average tabby. A recent study in Current Biology found that over the last 60 to 70 years, as wildcat numbers have plummeted, the remaining cats have begun mating with unfixed outdoor domestic cats, spawning a population that is mostly moggy with only a hint of its wildcat ancestry.

“Hybridization can change things very, very quickly,” says Quilodran. “With Scottish wildcats, it happened in less than 100 years.”

Just like on Uist, an animal domesticated by humans was overwhelming its close wild relative. That this is happening is being written (and overwritten) in the billions of As, Ts, Gs and Cs in the DNA of their cells. What’s harder to measure is how much it matters.

“Species deserve to have their own evolutionary process without human interference,” Quilodran says.

Conservation decisions have hinged on the definition of hybridization. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of the pesticide DDT, flooding and diking of the area’s marshlands to prevent mosquito breeding and the development of Florida’s Cape Canaveral had served to nearly wipe out the dusky seaside sparrow. By 1980, only six birds remained, all of which were male. Crossbreeding the remaining dusky sparrows with another similar Florida bird known as Scott’s seaside sparrows resulted in viable offspring; it seemed possible that the dusky sparrow could be saved, albeit in a modified form.

But the U.S. government ultimately ruled that such hybrid birds threatened the dusky sparrows and declined to protect the hybrids. Both birds ultimately went extinct. In a paper for the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, attorney Kevin Hill and a then-professor at the Ohio Northern University School of Law, wrote that when “presented with the choice of a 98.4% pure Dusky or none at all, the [U.S. Department of the Interior] Solicitor chose extinction. To save an abstraction of the species, the reality was allowed to die.”

For Smith, however, his work with wild rock doves isn’t about some artificial notion of genetic purity. Rather than trying to save some idealized ur-pigeon, Smith’s goal is to preserve the biodiversity of wild rock doves. The process of domestication involves a lot of inbreeding, which quickly strips much of the innate genetic variety out of a species. Since urban pigeons are largely descendants of domesticated birds, they don’t have the underlying genetic variation that’s key to a species’ health.

“The process of domestication involves a lot of inbreeding, which quickly strips much of the innate genetic variety out of a species.”

“Where we have different populations with different histories, we can ask deeper questions about extinction and hybridization,” Smith says. “And the more we can understand this process, the more we can learn about how to kind of mitigate its impacts across more than just this one species.”

Doves In The Wild

After our aborted mission to Vallay, I decided to try looking for rock doves in tamer landscapes. Our first stop — some abandoned outbuildings on a working farm in South Uist — was a flop. I staked out the stone barn in our rental car with my trusty binoculars, but no birds appeared. I reluctantly crossed off that location and moved northward.

Several wrong turns later, a friendly local gave us some cheerfully vague directions that involved taking the first left after the fourth cattle gate. Here, a sheep field butted up against a rocky beach and the North Atlantic. Scanning the beach from the passenger seat, I saw plenty of birds, including the vibrant orange beaks and black and white plumage of oystercatchers, numerous species of gull, and ever-present kittiwakes. Nowhere, however, was there a dove.

No sooner had I opened the door to grab our lunches out of the backseat then a startled flapping of wings greeted me. I didn’t even have time to grab my binoculars before the bird disappeared into the grass. I didn’t need them, though. I was close enough to recognize the brief flash of purple iridescence and thick black wing stripes of a rock dove without them. Giddy with excitement, I scoured the fields for any feathered friends. I saw a few birds in the distance but nothing with certainty. After wandering the beach amongst the shorebirds, we finished our sandwiches and headed further north, just east of where we had attempted our Vallay crossing the day before.

As soon as we turned off the main road and onto a small track, we began passing rock doves. Just like Smith had promised, you couldn’t miss them. We found a place to pull off by an aging burial ground and a large farm. No sooner did we park than the birds decamped from the cemetery and moved to a hilltop 50 yards beyond. Struggling to scramble up the hill while shrugging on my jacket, I followed in pursuit.

No matter how carefully I walked or how gently I approached, the birds moved another 50 yards back every time I got a few feet closer. I tried approaching again, slower still. The doves continued to back away. The more I followed, the farther the birds got. I had no way of getting close enough to see if these birds carried the small metal bands on their legs that Smith and his team had placed on several hundred the year before.

These doves weren’t living in some pristine wilderness. It was a working landscape. I trotted by several startled sheep and saw tramlines where fields had been plowed. Signs of human life were everywhere. The secret to finding these seemingly wild birds — and staying alive to tell the tale — was not to get as far away from human habitation as possible but to stay a bit closer.

It’s just this duality that conservationists are also beginning to embrace, that humans are of this world even as we are inexorably changing it (and not often for the better); that animal species around us aren’t perfect museum specimens but a messy scattershot of mixed bloodlines; and that “wild animal” is as much a human construct as any single species or pure genome. This chaos is so much of what makes nature special and worth protecting.

I could chase my wild doves forever, it seemed, and they would always be flying farther and further away, always just a bit wilder than I could manage.

12 Dec, 2023

- Narendra Modi’s Punjab Problem

Narendra Modi’s Punjab Problem

3:22PM, 12 Dec, 2023

Farmers ride with an effigy of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi six months into their protest against the new farm laws in Amritsar, India. May 26, 2021. (Sameer Sehgal / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

In March, three months before the assassination of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, the Indian government turned the Sikh-majority Punjab into a police state. Its internet was cut and messaging services restricted, gatherings of more than four people banned in some places, and a state-wide cordon and manhunt launched — all just to find one man, a 30-year-old fellow Sikh agitator called Amritpal Singh.

Over the previous year, Singh had been advocating for a separate homeland for Sikhs in northern India. He toured villages and towns in Punjab, a longstanding focal point of Sikh separatist ambitions, garnering a small following. He also drew the attention of security forces. Several weeks before the manhunt began, he and a group of armed supporters raided a police station in Ajnala, close to the Pakistan border, forcing the release of a close aide who was being held there. Singh then went on the run, moving from village to village, crisscrossing state lines, changing vehicles and guises. The police operation that ensued, with house-to-house raids and roadblocks set up across the nearly 20,000-square-mile state, resulted in the arrest of more than 300 people — including, on April 23, Singh himself.

It marked the intensification of a crackdown on Sikh separatists by Narendra Modi’s government — one that soon went international. Nijjar was killed outside a temple in British Columbia by an unknown assassin, an operation Canada pinned on India. Around the same time, according to an American investigation, an Indian official was directing a plot against another Sikh separatist in New York. Allegations of similar plots in the U.K. have since surfaced, and revelations of other India-backed assassination campaigns elsewhere in the world have emerged.

As the Singh manhunt widened in March, journalists and commentators began asking questions. Was Sikh separatism a valid concern, one deserving of such a far-reaching response? Or was the mass deployment of security forces to Punjab and the Indian government’s intensifying rhetoric around “Khalistan” — the long-imagined Sikh homeland beyond the control of New Delhi — serving other ends?

Despite once causing great tumult in Punjab and rocking the foundations of post-independence India, the Sikh separatist cause had lain dormant for three decades: Militant activity was so infrequent as to barely make headlines. As far as security threats were concerned, the government had spent the past decade far more interested in insurgencies in Jammu and Kashmir and the Maoist-Naxalite rebellion in the east.

The crackdown in Punjab — and the targeting of Sikhs on foreign soil that followed — seemed puzzling. Was Singh really raising an army? Did Nijjar really have the support in India to reinvigorate a long-dead insurgency? Or rather, was Modi, with an eye on the 2024 elections, raising the specter of a national security threat in order to sell the idea that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for whom national security has always been top of the agenda, must be reelected lest India break apart? Might he be diverting attention from the many real crises in Punjab, if not India more generally, that the BJP has been unable to resolve?

As the police dragnet widened in March, pro-Khalistan protestors organized actions in London, San Francisco, Brisbane and beyond. Khalistan banners were raised outside Indian embassies; in Punjab, police were forced to divert traffic as hundreds of Singh’s supporters, openly defying government orders, blocked roads. For anyone following the news at the time, it seemed as if their cause had substantial local and global backing — so much so, perhaps, that the government’s warnings of increasing separatist activity in Punjab might be worth listening to.

“Might Modi be diverting attention from the many real crises in Punjab, if not India more generally, that the BJP has been unable to resolve?”

From the air, Punjab appears like a patchwork quilt, its surface portioned into countless square farm fields. To its immediate west is Pakistan; beyond its eastern border, the foothills of the Himalayas begin.

Five centuries ago, as the Mughal Empire was expanding into Hindu lands, Guru Nanak Dev Ji found enlightenment at the Kali Bein rivulet, around 50 miles west of Ludhiana, and there Sikhism was born. Well-versed in the Vedas and fluent in Sanskrit and Persian, Bābā Nānak saw the new religion as a harmonizing influence on, if not a compromise between, the different faiths of northern India. He preached inclusivity and steadfastly opposed the caste hierarchies of Hinduism; at the langar — community meals — he encouraged all peoples, irrespective of caste divisions, to eat together, in the process birthing a core principle and practice of the new faith.

Some two hundred years later, in the dying months of the 18th century, Ranjit Singh, the “Lion of Punjab” and the first maharaja of the Sikh Empire, had captured Mughal Lahore and won Sikhs their own “nation.” But it was short-lived: His death in 1839 precipitated the decline of the empire, and via two Anglo-Sikh Wars in the mid-19th century, the British annexed the territory and brought Sikhs under their rule.

Over time, Sikhism grew to become the world’s fifth-largest religion, with around 26 million followers. Yet Sikhs, the majority of whom live in the towns, villages and farming communities of Punjab, remained a firm minority in India, and came to experience the social and political costs of that status. Out of a series of events in the first half of the 20th century — British duplicitousness, Partition, religious chauvinism, New Delhi’s authoritarianism, economic insecurity — grew support for the idea of an independent Sikh homeland in modern-day India.

The movement had begun in earnest in the years leading up to Partition in 1947. The division of the British colony into India and Pakistan split Punjab in two and sparked communal bloodletting between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of an intensity not seen anywhere else in India that year. The western region of Punjab, home to mostly Muslims, would become part of the new nation of Pakistan, while its eastern region, where the majority of Sikhs were concentrated alongside Hindus, would remain in India. “Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more,” Nisid Hajari wrote in “Midnight’s Furies,” his account of the violence of Partition. Trains carrying refugees moved in both directions across the new India-Pakistan border. “All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.”

“When the midnight hour came, calls for a separate homeland grew in volume.”

As with all communities impacted by Partition, these were years of heightened insecurity for Sikhs. They had been failed already by the British colonial power: First, with the broken promise of fair representation in the Punjab legislative council in the 1910s, when a pledged 33% of seats for Sikhs never materialized, and later with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, in which hundreds of Sikhs and others in the city of Amritsar, protesting Britain’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, were gunned down.

Sikh leaders had generally opposed Partition on the grounds that the community would become a subjugated minority. Unable to influence the course of events in the mid-1940s, they then began pushing for a state of their own. There were hints from the incoming national leadership that this might be granted. “The brave Sikhs of Punjab are entitled to special consideration,” Jawaharlal Nehru said in Calcutta a year before Partition. “I see nothing wrong in an area and a set up in the North wherein the Sikhs can experience the glow of freedom.”

Yet the designs for Partition wouldn’t allow for that. Sikhs were a minority at every level, from the town to the state, and administrative energies were instead being directed toward the separation of the far larger Hindu and Muslim communities. When, therefore, the midnight hour came, with Sikhs knowing they would become a minority in a Hindu-majority state under the rule of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress in faraway New Delhi, calls for a separate homeland grew in volume. Leaders implored Sikhs to think of themselves as not merely a community but a nation with cultural systems distinct enough from others to justify a state of their own. That belief underpinned the budding separatist movement. Khalistan may not have yet been named, but its core ideology was taking shape.

A farmer checks his wheat crop after heavy rain and a hailstorm in Amritsar. Feb. 26, 2022. (Sameer Sehgal / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Congress, the first ruling party of independent India, repeatedly refused separatists’ calls. Nehru, asked in 1954 what had become of his pledge to Sikhs, simply replied: “The circumstances have now changed.” But by the 1960s, a movement called the Punjabi Suba that advocated splitting the new Punjab along linguistic lines was growing in influence. In some ways a precursor to the Khalistan movement, albeit non-violent, by 1966 the Punjabi Suba had pressured Congress to partition Punjab a second time: Hindi speakers would predominate in Haryana, in the south, and Punjabi speakers, most of them Sikhs, would be a majority in the north, in what is the present-day Punjab. Smaller parts of the territory went to neighboring Himachal Pradesh.

Many Sikhs, though, felt this concession wasn’t enough. Their new state was still firmly in the orbit of New Delhi. Both Punjab and Haryana were forced to share a capital, Chandigarh, built in the 1940s under Nehru’s orders following the loss of the old state capital, Lahore, to Pakistan. But Chandigarh was a union territory, not a state; directly controlled by New Delhi, Chandigarh ended the dream of an autonomous Punjab.

In the new Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal — then India’s only Sikh-centric party and the country’s second oldest after Congress — battled Congress in elections at the state assembly level. It was the Akali Dal that had led the Punjabi Suba movement. Congress — the party of Mohandas Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru; the party that was, for many, the political embodiment of independent India — may have dominated national politics, but the Sikh party had become a formidable force in Punjab.

“The Akali Dal began to thread together narratives of political and economic disenfranchisement and religious oppression in a way that suggested New Delhi was intent on weakening all aspects of Sikh life.”

By the 1970s, economic problems were eating away at Punjabi society, heralding an era of even sharper hostility toward the central government.

Punjab had been receiving vast amounts of farming subsidies and technologies as part of the so-called Green Revolution, an effort to transform food production and thereby end India’s long-running hunger crisis. Its semi-arid climate meant the region was already a major contributor to national wheat stores, but the Green Revolution powered even greater agricultural output, earning Punjab the moniker of “India’s breadbasket.”

But although overall prosperity grew, the revolution’s gains were “distributed unequally,” wrote the scholar Rajshree Jetly, causing the “pauperization of marginal and poor peasants, who could neither reap the benefits of the land nor find employment in the industrial sector.” Added to that, the intensification of cropping meant that farmers needed to buy more seeds and equipment, spend more on water for irrigation, and hire more labor to work the land and process its output. New Delhi, meanwhile, was unable to sustain its subsidies. Even though Punjab grew richer as a whole on the back of the Green Revolution, small farmers fell into severe debt, unemployment worsened and drug and alcohol abuse spread.

The Akali Dal was able to consolidate support among aggrieved Punjabis by continuing to emphasize their mistreatment at the hands of Congress. It wasn’t an election-winning formula — the party was being weakened by infighting, and Congress, which fielded Sikh candidates in Punjab, was still able to gather enough votes to win a slew of state elections in the early 1970s. But the Akali Dal began to thread together narratives of political and economic disenfranchisement and religious oppression in a way that suggested New Delhi was intent on weakening all aspects of Sikh life. It also began crafting a more coherent, and more rigid, vision for a Punjab that wouldn’t be so beholden to the central government.

Congress saw the Akali Dal as a growing threat not only to the secular precepts it was ostensibly cultivating, but to its political supremacy. By then under the rule of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, it made repeated efforts to undermine the Sikh party, culminating in a decision in the late 1970s by Gandhi’s inner circle that set the wheels in motion toward disaster.

Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a young farmer and Sikh preacher who, by his early thirties, had been made leader of the Damdami Taksal — an influential traveling Sikh seminary. Through the late 1970s, he preached abstinence from drugs and alcohol and called for a revival of the traditional Punjabi way of life, one that was being lost to the Green Revolution. Gurharpal Singh, a scholar of Sikhism and Punjabi culture, has written that the rapid modernization of Punjab society in the 1960s and 1970s “ushered in a mass society by dislocating, atomizing and shattering traditional village Punjab.” Bhindranwale was a convincing orator, and those appeals struck a note among young and disaffected, educated but unemployed Sikhs who had felt this shattering in a multitude of ways.

By 1978, Congress had lost power in New Delhi and the Akali Dal controlled the Punjab assembly. Gandhi hoped Bhindranwale’s appeal to orthodox Sikhs and the young could split the Akali Dal vote and strengthen Congress’s position in time for the next elections. Following clashes between Sikh groups in Amritsar, during which more than a dozen people died, Bhindranwale questioned how Sikhs could be killed while a Sikh party held the Punjab assembly. Congress began quietly supporting him.

But Bhindranwale’s militancy gradually became more apparent. In his eyes, Hindus were holding Sikhs down as “slaves in independent India,” and he repeatedly and publicly scorned the religious majority. For a while, this worked for Congress: Hindu voters fearful of a Sikh separatist movement would be more inclined to support a party dominated by Hindus. Yet it was clear Bhindranwale could not be controlled, nor could his growing influence be contained. He fused appeals for Sikh revivalism with calls for greater water rights for Punjabis — a long-running grievance — thereby winning the support of the powerful Jat Sikh rural landholding community, as well as of the Akali Dal’s youth wing. He formed a party — allegedly with Congress’s help — and his candidates were successful in general elections. High-ranking ministers became deferential in his presence.

Against Gandhi’s designs, Bhindranwale’s popularity eventually forced the Akali Dal into an alliance with him. Their joint Dharam Yudh Morcha campaign, launched in August 1982, once again demanded greater autonomy for Punjab. Hundreds of thousands of protestors mobilized. In a foretaste of a strategy the BJP would later employ to slander opposition forces, Gandhi — now back in power — falsely branded the campaign as secessionist, and police and paramilitaries were sent to break it up. Reports of state brutality followed, including torture in custody and extrajudicial killings on the streets. Between 100,000 and 150,000 protestors were arrested. Bhindranwale accused the government of “wreak[ing] atrocities on the Sikh nation,” and more Sikhs turned to his increasingly militant stance.

Early on in the Dharam Yudh Morcha, Bhindranwale had taken up residence in the compound of the Golden Temple in Amritsar — the holiest of Sikh gurdwaras, located in the heart of the city just streets away from the memorial to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Other armed groups also holed up there. Militant activity, some of it directed by the preacher, was rising across the state; bodies of civilians and government officials were showing up in greater numbers. Security forces were becoming less restrained in response. Gandhi finally ordered the army to enter the Golden Temple and remove Bhindranwale and the militants. Operation Blue Star began on June 1, 1984. Nine days later, the temple compound was strewn with bodies and empty shells. Hundreds of people — militants, soldiers, civilians and Bhindranwale — were dead.

Gandhi wrote a letter the following week to Margaret Thatcher: “We have a troubled situation in Punjab,” she began. “Of all malefactors, those who wear the religious garb are the most dangerous.” Four months later, on October 31, she was assassinated in the garden of her New Delhi residence by two bodyguards, both of whom were Sikh.

In the days afterward, retaliatory attacks on Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere mutated into a series of pogroms. Within three days of the assassination, more than 3,000 Sikhs had been killed. The final death toll, according to some estimates, reached 17,000.

A violent Khalistan insurgency, driven to greater extremes by the bloodbath at the holy temple, took hold in Punjab. Its foot soldiers were often young, undereducated Sikh from towns and villages and from various social and caste strata. But they all shared, the historian Robin Jeffrey wrote, “a vision of Sikh history that fits poorly with their own demoralized present.”

Over the decade after 1984, the conflict between insurgents and the Indian government convulsed Punjab. Civic order broke down, the state was militarized, some 30,000 people were killed. Canadian Sikh separatists blew up an Air India flight over the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, killing 329 people. An already deteriorating security situation had turned into something much darker, presenting the gravest threat to the political legitimacy of the Indian state since independence.

“Over the decade after 1984, the conflict between insurgents and the Indian government convulsed Punjab. Civic order broke down, the state was militarized, some 30,000 people were killed.”

The goals of the Khalistan movement were never realized. But that wasn’t due only to an effective counterinsurgency operation. Many Sikhs were alienated by the violence of the 1980s and 1990s, and especially by the separatists’ killings of Sikhs who opposed them.

Questions also arose of the ideological commitment of recruits. Many were young and, by the 1980s, frustrated with their lot; weapons were easily available. The armed movement may have given them purpose, and yet — according to researchers who later visited several of the Punjabi villages the insurgents recruited from — it did not always translate into a desire for a separate homeland.

Moreover, a key ideological foundation for Khalistan — that the Sikhs were a nation unto themselves — rubbed up against the fact that they shared much in common with Hindus, including language and various religious practices. (That may help to explain why the movement lost steam in India yet remained alive in the minds of Sikhs who joined the diaspora, like Hardeep Singh Nijjar, for whom interaction with Hindus wasn’t part of daily life.) Either way, as the military upped its violence and the body count rose, the incentive to remain a fighter, and be martyred for a cause many were not convinced of, diminished. By the end of the 1990s, militant activity in Punjab barely registered.

Amritpal Singh’s arrival on the scene some 25 years later therefore seemed out of the blue. But he had already won some affection from a community whose plight a half-century before had helped power the separatist movement: Punjabi farmers. The grievances stemming from the Green Revolution had not been adequately addressed by any government since, and the epidemic of suicides of indebted farmers had become a stain on the nation. A set of laws passed in 2020 to further corporatize the agricultural sector and remove the price floor on crops only inflamed them further. Farmers saw in the laws “an alliance between corporate capital and the authoritarian state working through the language of Hindutva,” one analyst noted, referring to the Hindu nationalist ideology embraced by Modi and the BJP. Punjab served as the wellspring of what became a yearlong nationwide farmers’ protest — still the biggest mobilization yet faced by Modi.

Many of the farmers were Sikh, and leaders of the movement pointed to the inclusive tenets of Sikhism to bridge the old caste, class and urban-rural divisions that had become salient during the 1970s. To appeal to millions-strong Punjabi Dalits, for so long politically sidelined and maligned, they celebrated the anniversaries of B. R. Ambedkar and other icons. They marched on New Delhi, set up sprawling protest camps and invited all, irrespective of caste, to join in the langar. At these camps outside the capital, an inclusive micro-society was born. For its fundamental embrace of unity, it stood in sharp contrast to, if not undermined, the purposefully divisive politicking of Modi and the BJP.

The government responded as expected. BJP officials began branding the farmers “Khalistanis” and even “jihadis” who were being supported by dark elements in the Sikh world. Once they began articulating their grievances in the language of human rights, the BJP claimed they had been infiltrated by “Maoists.” The party’s old playbook was out. Modi was later forced to repeal the laws, but not before deriding the farmers as “anti-national.”

Singh, living in Dubai when the protests began, had supported the movement on social media and amplified the view, commonly held in Punjab, that the farming laws were just the tip of a wider attack on the rights of Punjabis. After returning to India in September 2022, he set about preaching throughout the Punjabi countryside, lamenting the loss of traditional ways of life and calling for a revival of the separatist cause. He grew his beard long and wore the kind of “religious garb” Indira Gandhi had once labeled a signal of violent intent. Bit by bit, his profile as a Bhindranwale of the modern age was being established.

“For its fundamental embrace of unity, the farmers’ protest stood in sharp contrast to, if not undermined, the purposefully divisive politicking of Modi and the BJP.”

Were it not for certain awkward truths, the state-wide pursuit of Singh six months later might have seemed rational. The prospect of a renewed Khalistani insurgency would unnerve most Indians, given how all-consuming the crisis of the 1980s and 90s was. It’s not clear what exactly Singh had been doing in the period between returning to India and storming the police station where his aide was being held, although several media outlets alleged that he was radicalizing drug-addicted young Sikhs and stockpiling weapons. With elections due next spring, a government that made such a point of safeguarding “national security” needed to act swiftly.

Yet not only did the data not support the BJP’s suggestions of a reinvigorated separatist movement — total incidents related to separatist activity in Punjab over the last two decades barely passed 30 — but there was something highly performative about the massive security operation. Singh’s return coincided with the farmers’ protests — the greatest challenge so far to the authority of the BJP, once seemingly so secure in power. Those protests demonstrated that 30 years after the end of the insurgency, new centers of power were emerging in Punjab, from the villages and farm fields where political power was traditionally thought to be weak, and within communities, like the peasants or Dalits, long dismissed by New Delhi as backward and unsophisticated.

The BJP wasn’t going to win a propaganda war. Few ultimately bought its claims of violent separatist intentions among farmers, and it failed to do what it had done so successfully against Muslims: use a national security pretext to whip up popular anger toward a minority community.

Even more glaring, its grudging withdrawal of the farm laws showed a rare vulnerability to popular pressure. All of a sudden, it wasn’t the same BJP that had won successive elections by a landslide or could change the political landscape of India at will, as it had with the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy the year before. A large constituency, whose core came from a state where the BJP always lacked support (it has only ever ruled in Punjab as part of a coalition, and currently occupies just two of 117 seats in the state assembly), was now asserting its rights and bargaining power. Modi’s party couldn’t withstand the pressure, so it bowed to farmers’ demands.

“Not only did the data not support the BJP’s suggestions of a reinvigorated separatist movement, but there was something highly performative about the massive security operation.”

It was against that backdrop that the statewide manhunt for Singh was ordered. What was clearly roiling Punjab was not a reawakened separatist insurgency, but the latest iteration of a longstanding political economy crisis, one that, nearly a decade into Modi’s rule, echoed across much of India. That presented a grave crisis of legitimacy for the BJP, which was already facing unrest elsewhere as a result of a weak economy and low employment.

With neither the vision nor the will to treat Punjab’s ills, and clearly alarmed by the size of the opposition that materialized with the farmers’ movement, the government’s response was to first talk up the reemergence of a Khalistan project and then, when Singh went on the run, create the visual dimensions of a security threat — soldiers on the streets, house-to-house searches, roadblocks — to reinforce the perception that a crisis was unfolding. Congress had tried something similar decades before, but in doing so had fueled the mutation of a nonviolent movement rooted in social and economic disenfranchisement into a violent one.

“By securitizing political economy issues,” wrote Mahika Khosla, “successive central governments have diverted blame away from failed economic policy — and toward Muslims, Maoists, Sikhs and ‘Khalistanis.’” All the while, they have failed to address “the root causes of discontent.”

Punjab police removing those protesting the security crackdown in the state on March 21. Mohali, India. (Sanjeev Sharma / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

The killing of Hardeep Nijjar, as well as the subsequent foiled assassination plots elsewhere in the world, might seem like a risky escalation by the BJP. But that would be to misread the mindset of its support base, if not that of Indian politics more generally. Not only did social media users quickly rally in support of Modi — either denying Canada’s allegations or celebrating the show of strength signaled by the killing — but even Congress took a security-first line. “Our fight against terrorism has to be uncompromising,” Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh said, “especially when terrorism threatens India’s sovereignty, unity and integrity.”

It wouldn’t be the first time an attack on foreign soil boosted Modi’s political capital. In February 2019, several months before the last nationwide elections, Islamic militants carried out a deadly assault on a convoy of Indian soldiers in Kashmir. Forty-six were killed. Modi then sent Indian fighter jets to bomb a camp inside Pakistan that he alleged was hiding the militants. Soon after, intelligence showed that nothing of consequence had been hit — a detail that Congress, hoping for a pre-election boost, played up in parliament and media.

“What was clearly roiling Punjab was not a reawakened separatist insurgency, but the latest iteration of a longstanding political economy crisis, one that echoed across much of India.”

But still, Indians took to the streets in celebration. Despite the country reporting its worst national employment figures in nearly half a century, and despite the BJP having struggled in recent state elections, the wind seemed to suddenly shift. A BJP minister claimed the strikes had “enthused youths,” and pessimism at the government’s poor economic performance turned to jubilation at its military might. Pakistan’s alleged sheltering of anti-India groups had “provided [Modi] with a golden narrative,” one commentator said. Congress had misread the mood, and the BJP went on to win a landslide.

With elections looming in the spring of 2024, the government will likely continue to play on the fears of militant activity in Punjab, or whatever other threats it can find. Fear-mongering may not be its only tool: Pro-poor welfare schemes, temple construction and other acts that resonate with lower-income Hindu voters were central to its victories in regional elections in early December. But shows of force are game-changers in Indian politics. The fact that there is little evidence of an appetite among Sikhs inside India for another era of violent upheaval makes little difference to how those threat narratives land with the wider electorate.

For a range of historical and present-day reasons — the legacy of colonialism, the India-Pakistan rivalry, competition with China and, most obviously today, the threat to Hindu supremacy posed by India’s diversity — a majority of Indians want a leader who will unleash the full force of the state to quash any threat, and who will ensure “unity” via aggressive centralizing measures, even when pressing day-to-day problems remain unaddressed.

Modi is keenly aware of all this, and in moments of weakness he finds sources of strength, often in the unlikeliest of places. Last time around they were hiding in camps across the border in Pakistan; this time, they drift like specters through the villages and farm fields of Punjab.

7 Dec, 2023

- When To Stop AI

- Green Colonialism

When To Stop AI

10:56PM, 7 Dec, 2023

Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine

In dramatic fashion, the recent rift at OpenAI laid bare the core concern over where and when to draw the line at that point beyond which frontier technologies designed to enhance human well-being become a threat to it. For the moment, the incentives behind rapid commercialization of AI, which will drive its diffusion throughout all aspects of society, appear to have won out over precaution. Competition, in turn, will further accelerate the pace of developing ever more powerful capabilities among companies and nations alike.

The pattern so far, as illustrated in this chart, suggests that intelligent machines latched to unleashed animal spirits will bring the moment of reckoning sooner than we may be ready for. AI does not advance gradually, but in leaps and bounds:

To get a grasp on what former Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls “the capability ladder” of exploding AI technologies, Noema asked him to lay out the unfolding landscape as he sees it and where we should draw the redlines that should not be trespassed.

It is worth quoting him at length:

Today, the AI models are under human control, the work is initiated by humans and their behavior is regulated by current law. A simple regulatory landscape would feature strict liability where an agent acting for a person has the same liabilities as that person and the owner of the agent or its developer can be held accountable for its actions.

There is a clear danger around recursive self-improvement, autonomy and AI setting its own goals. When this level of AI becomes generally available, it will mean that a computer cluster could become a truly superhuman expert and choose to use its abilities to act on its own.

In the scenario where such a system can send and receive emails, where it has access to large amounts of money, and where it has access to specialized labs or even dangerous weapons, we will have to restrict and regulate these. It is possible that in a distant future these capabilities will be so dangerous that the government could actually ban further development and require such development in a national lab under military secrecy. In all cases, the training of very large models with huge data sets and computing clusters will be regulated and restricted in the future due to their potential danger.

Companies are beginning to invent some of these more potentially dangerous capabilities in their quest for artificial general intelligence. The ability of the model to call itself in “chain of thought” reasoning is a start in this. And the learning can be embedded in a system prompt.

Another near future step of concern will be when the system can correct its own errors and learn from them, for example with AI writing software — then we will have the beginning of real AGI. Later events would include full recursive learning, where the system learns something new and based on that, learns more and more and more. Eventually the ladder up will include new results in science discovered and proven by AI on its own.

When the system can decide its own questions and what to work on, we will need guarantees of red lines that the system cannot cross regardless of use. Establishing the test and certification of these systems will be very difficult. Companies will need to have responsible scaling plans where they evaluate whether they are on this path. If they achieve these more dangerous results, they will be hard to keep hidden and we can expect a strong national and international reaction to these events. The danger is from both general intelligence (which is a good thing) and the drive to achieve outcomes (which can be bad if it involves biology, weapons or deception.) The maximally intelligent systems will have to be fully limited in what they can do.

In all cases, it’s clear that governments will serve as referees on these tests, and the tests that need to be developed are ones of capabilities that are likely to emerge. We will eventually need a regulatory body with enough power to restrict training or release of the most dangerous models.

Few know the tech world, both how to scale up companies into a dominant position while also recognizing the two-edged sword of AI, better than Schmidt. If his understanding of when and how to control “maximally intelligent systems” is shared by the entrepreneurs leading the charge in that direction as well as the authorities tasked with protecting society from its own inventions, there seems a chance to reach a governing consensus that reaps the potential of this phase transition in anthropo-technogenesis while mitigating its perils.

To explore whether such a consensus can be reached, Noema will be following up with a collage of commentary by an array of technologists and entrepreneurs on Schmidt’s map of where things are headed. Stay tuned.

Green Colonialism

6:15PM, 7 Dec, 2023

The mining town and mountain of Kiruna, Sweden. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

KIRUNA, Sweden — Every night, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., everyone feels it, right on schedule: a deep, rhythmic rumbling that reverberates through their floors, shaking their walls and their beds. Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock — around six Eiffel Towers’ worth.

In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer may find themselves jolted awake, night after night.

The signs of the ground being hollowed out below are everywhere. Cracks run up the brickwork of houses and apartment buildings, and nearest to the mine, the land almost seems to undulate. This town is ever so slowly being pulled towards the mine like a tablecloth dragged from a table set for breakfast. Kiruna is breaking apart.

The Land Of The Future

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth, ready to be extracted.

But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s caused deep, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself.

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout.

The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.

It’s an old question in Kiruna, where an iron mine first laid waste to the land in the early 20th century. It forever changed the lives of the local Sami people — indigenous reindeer herders, native to northern Scandinavia and northeast Russia, who have lived alongside nature in these lands for millennia. But today, the question has taken on new meaning amid the modern-day green transition.

Across Kiruna’s region of Norrbotten, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the prospective locale for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes northern Sweden could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s a prevailing sense in Kiruna that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry — sacrificed on the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for the region’s residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future.

“There’s a prevailing sense that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry — sacrificed on the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels.”

Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe, alongside the Sami, the region’s last Indigenous culture.

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it.

Some politicians, like Busch, say the solutions to the climate crisis are in the ground, ready to be mined, while the Sami believe the answers have always existed in the quiet teachings of the natural world. This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet. Kiruna is, as one scholar put it, “a microcosmos, like a magnifying glass under which you see all the problems of the world.”

Sweden’s northernmost town was founded in 1900 by the mining company LKAB. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Cracks run up the sides of buildings in Kiruna — signs of the ground becoming deformed by the extensive mining. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Entering the tunnel of LKAB’s iron ore mine in Kiruna. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Going Underground

This past October, I went to the mine myself. From a platform three-quarters of a mile below ground, I watched as an electrified train approached, moving autonomously along the tracks and letting out a shrill whistle. Carriages passed by filled with black rocks — some like gravel, some as big as watermelons. When they reached the loading shaft, the bottom of the carriage flew open and pieces of iron ore fell into the abyss with a screech and a roar. From there, my guide explained, they would be crushed, turned into pellets and eventually melted down into steel.

Anders Lindberg, a spokesman for LKAB, Sweden’s state-owned mining company, drove me down into the Kiruna mine in the company’s four-wheel drive SUV. Cheerful, bespectacled and passionate about mining, he kept up a constant stream of chatter as we rolled through the unfathomable warren of underground tunnels, caverns and railways. As we approached 4,000 feet below ground, the mine’s deepest level, my ears started to pop and it got hotter — we were getting closer to the Earth’s core.

“Whatever you do in your daily life, it has started in the mine,” he said as his headlights flashed across the roughly hewn rock of the tunnel wall. “The tools you use, the chair you’re sitting on, the bike you’re riding on your way to work. The pens you’re writing with, the computer, your mobile phone. It has all started in the mine.”

From Kiruna, the iron is taken by train to ports in Norway and Sweden, where it is refined into steel or shipped to LKAB’s clients. At least 80% of iron ore in Europe comes from LKAB’s mines. The company says its products can be found in mobile phones, bikes, strollers, electric cars, roads and buildings all over the world.

When Lindberg took me to see some of the miners, I expected pickaxes and dusty faces, but instead I found men and women sitting in state-of-the-art underground offices — with computer screens, water coolers and even a canteen. It turns out that a lot of the mining now happens remotely. I watched as one woman, Ingela, picked up piles of rock and moved them using joysticks and an Xbox controller, before a huge curved screen.

Most iron mining and steelmaking today is otherwise not very modern: The pelleting, refining and smelting process is typically powered by fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Globally, the steel industry is responsible for about 8% of carbon emissions. But LKAB says they can transform the whole process from mine to end-product by using electricity generated by water and wind instead.

“This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet.”

Ahead of COP 28 — the global climate conference taking place this week in Dubai — the UN warned that we’re on track for global temperatures to rise 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. The UN estimates that an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced by climate disasters each year since 2008. Without drastic changes in the way we live, we’ll see more and more hellish weather events, deadly heat waves, forest fires, drastic flooding and millions more forced to leave their homes — the world as we know it will be even further transformed.

We’re already living through these consequences, but stopping the worst effects will require overhauling nearly every industry. We must reduce our carbon emissions, but the question of how to do that hangs heavily in the Arctic air.

Inside Kiruna’s mine where LKAB employees, including Ingela pictured above, do much of their work from behind a computer screen. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

When Meta Came To Town

Until the last decade, Sweden’s northernmost county — Norrbotten, home to Kiruna — wasn’t such an exciting place. Unemployment levels were among the highest in the country, and people were moving down to Stockholm in search of work. But a new chapter began when Facebook came to town.

In 2011, Meta (then Facebook) began building an enormous data center in Lulea, a small city on the Baltic coast, about four hours south of Kiruna. Run on hydropower and cooled naturally by the frigid Arctic air, the data center called attention to northern Sweden’s potential as a place with an abundance of renewable energy. More server farms began setting up shop and wind farms were erected in the vast forestland.

Within a few years, industry leaders and politicians spoke of the area’s potential to help revamp age-old, carbon-heavy steel production into new eco-friendly processes. Meanwhile, Kiruna’s space center — a rocket range and satellite station — was becoming an important European hub for monitoring climate change and space weather.

Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits —  are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to “become the green transition.” Someone handed me a newspaper that proclaimed northern Sweden’s green transition will “save the world.”

The need for a change in the way we live and treat the Earth is also plain to see here. Every winter feels a little shorter than the last. The snow, once soft and easy for animals to dig through to reach food beneath, is now melting and refreezing as the temperature fluctuates unpredictably. The region’s reindeer are moving about ever more erratically, in constant search of food.

Alongside the “land of the future,” this place has another alias — “Europe’s last remaining wilderness.” There’s truth to the name: These vast boreal forests are home to the brown bear, golden eagle, Arctic fox, lynx, wolf and beaver. It’s one of the least inhabited places in Europe. But the Sami don’t like the term. For them, this isn’t a wilderness, and it isn’t empty. The land is replete with cultural heritage, with the traces of thousands of years of living alongside nature, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting and storytelling.

“If you read a map now, you can see Sami names all over, every mountain, every lake, every river, all have Sami names. It’s our ancestors’ land,” said Anna Sarri, Carina Sarri’s cousin who runs a nature tourism business in a village outside Kiruna and comes from a long line of reindeer herders. “It’s a culture.”

Anna Sarri pictured here, and her cousin Carina Sarri, come from a long line of reindeer herders and advocate for Sami rights. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Land of the brown bear and the reindeer, northern Sweden is home to some of the largest remaining tracts of boreal forest in Europe. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

The world’s largest underground iron ore mine and its smokestacks loom over everything in Kiruna. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

In January of this year, the city of Kiruna laid out a lavish welcome for the European Commission to celebrate the start of Sweden’s six-month leadership of the Council of the European Union. Donning a blue LKAB hard hat and protective clothing, Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech inside the belly of the mine to mark the occasion.

“I don’t know what comes to mind when you think of Sweden. Some of you might think of the Swedish musical miracle like ABBA, Roxette or Swedish House Mafia. Maybe you’re thinking of Astrid Lindgren or those red-painted wooden houses. Untamed wilderness,” Busch said with a smile. “But I’d like to add another entry to that list. LKAB, the Swedish mines.”

She went on to announce that in Kiruna, just north of where the LKAB is currently mining, is a second enormous underground deposit of metals, containing not only iron, but also Europe’s largest quantity of rare earth metals. This second deposit, she said, would be a treasure trove of much-needed materials for making magnets that power electric car engines and help convert motion into electricity in wind turbines.

“It’s only shit talk, this green transition. It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

— Tor Lennart Tuorda

Opening up a sister mine — to dig for these valuable minerals —  would be crucial, she said, for Europe’s greener, profitable future. It would wean Europe off dependence on China’s rare earth elements and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. “Sweden is literally a goldmine,” Busch told reporters.

Anna Sarri was in her village when she first heard the news. Announcing the deposit without consulting the Sami first, and doing it on the grandest possible scale was a “dirty trick,” she said. In reality, the mining company has known about the deposit for over a century. They simply hadn’t categorized or publicly registered its geological makeup in detail until now.

But the international media immediately bought the political calculus, hailing the deposit as a new “discovery.” The fanfare suddenly made it a very difficult thing for the Sami — or anyone else — to oppose the opening of a new mine. Doing so would mean being on the wrong side of the climate change debate.

“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don’t, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.

Archival photographs exhibited at the Sami Heritage Museum in Jokkmokk. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

The mining company says that according to geological reporting standards, it had to make a large public announcement so all parties were notified at once.

Talk of untapped treasures lying beneath the earth in northern Sweden is nothing new, especially to Indigenous people like Sarri and Labba. In the early 20th century, a eugenicist named Herman Lundborg traveled to Kiruna to meet the Sami and classify them. He measured their skulls and photographed people naked, a project that was privately backed by the founder of Kiruna’s mine and the LKAB mining company.

In 1919, Lundborg wrote that there were “dormant millions” in profits underground in northern Sweden and that because the Sami — which he believed to be racially inferior — did not extract those resources, they should “give way to clean Swedish [industrial] interests.”

At the time, Lundborg’s influence served as the backdrop for the state’s displacement of Sami communities during the industrialization of the north in the early 20th century. Racial ideology — and assimilation policies forced on the Sami people — painted the Sami people’s traditions and philosophy around land use as incompatible with Sweden’s prosperity.

Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land. The undeniable threats of climate change on one hand and the constant acquisition of land by mining companies on the other, feel like an existential Catch-22; they can lose their land to green development, lose it to climate change or, potentially, lose it to both.

But these rare earth metals are here. And they could help human beings keep using the tools and technologies we’ve come to depend on, without doing quite so much harm to the planet. Should the Sami have to give up their way of life to make way for these mines — when they had little to do with destroying the climate in the first place? I put the question to LKAB’s Lindberg.

“You cannot look at the Sami population and say, ‘They’re a small group that’s not part of the society,’” he said. “We have Samis working in the mine. Reindeer herders are using motorcycles, snowmobiles, helicopters, drones, mobile phones. They also need these metals. They are also using fossil fuels, being part of the climate change.”

A Culture Of Silence

The mineral-rich land here may contain real answers to the climate crisis. But there’s also money to be made from these rare earth metals — and a lot of it.

The state-owned mining company has not yet put a price on how much that second deposit in Kiruna’s potential sister mine — the one announced during the European Commission visit in January — might be worth. Along with 700 million tons of iron ore, LKAB believes the new deposit contains about 1.3 million tons of rare earth elements.

One metric ton of neodymium, one of the elements found in the deposit used for powerful magnets and electronics, is currently priced at around $70,000. The total profits here — of iron for traditional industrial use alongside valuable mining byproducts in the form of rare earth metals that go into our phones and EVs — could be astronomical.

“Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits — are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to ‘become the green transition.'”

Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, has called the newly announced Kiruna deposit as potentially fortune-changing for Sweden’s economic future as Norway’s discovery of offshore oil in the late 1960s, which led to it becoming a top global exporter of crude oil.

A pub in Kiruna’s newly-built downtown that draws many of the city’s residents working in the mine. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

But some locals are skeptical about what all this mining is really for and who really stands to gain from it, especially given the cost of eco-friendly steel production. At a pub in Lulea, where locals were competing in a Swedish-style pub quiz over plates of meatballs and lingonberries, I met workers who had just flown in to lay fiber optic cable in the Baltic Sea. They chuckled when I mentioned the green transition. “Ask the companies how much electricity it will need!” one of them said.

It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.

How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

But wind farms come with issues of their own. “They talk about wind power,” said Johan Sandström, a mining expert at the Lulea Institute of Technology. “OK, some wind turbines might end up in the sea, but others must be on land. Whose land?”

For people in northern Sweden, this is the real million-dollar question. And it’s a hard one to raise in a place like Lulea — where almost everyone is somehow connected to the town’s industry and technology sectors. Sandström described an emerging “culture of silence” around challenging the new narrative of the green transition.

“As soon as you ask a question about it, you’re categorized as being against progress and sustainability,” said Sandström. “It’s like a silent consensus that we need to view this as a positive thing, period. And I think that’s unfortunate.”

Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top.

When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly. “It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

For a century, humans and machines have blasted Kiruna’s mountain open, sculpting its rugged silhouette into ordered, crimped edges. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Steel, fresh from the old-fashioned blast furnace, being cut at Lulea’s steel plant. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

A briquette of LKAB’s future product, carbon dioxide-free iron sponge. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Dimming The Midnight Sun

Mining for the green transition will bring some harm to the land and the people who live on it. But its champions carry a healthy dose of realism about what drives the global economy and how our demands for everything from ballpoint pens to laptops affect the climate. They are pushing for more sustainable ways for us to keep living as we do.

Then, there’s a more radical crowd: scientists who argue that all options must be on the table, that we may need to look beyond the Earth itself to slow down climate change. They too found their way to Kiruna.

In 2021, a group of researchers at Harvard University wanted to study whether humans could one day bring down the Earth’s rising temperatures by dimming light from the sun. They predicted that if they could send a burst of mineral dust into the atmosphere, it would act like millions of tiny mirrors high in the sky, scattering sunlight back into space and potentially lowering temperatures worldwide.

The group set their sights on Esrange, the name of the Swedish Space Corporation’s rocket launch site and space base a 40-minute drive east of Kiruna, which has institutional expertise in atmospheric research, making it a perfect place to test their hypothesis.

“Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land.”

The first step would be to come to Esrange, where they could test out flying a special mechanical balloon about 12 miles overhead. The sparsely populated Arctic landscape would make it an ideal testing ground. If successful, the balloon could one day be used to sprinkle the sky with those tiny mirrors.

One of the scientists on the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short, is David Keith, who is now a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. He told me that the first goal was simply to test the balloon, but the longer-term goal was “to do some stratospheric science, with a focus on solar geoengineering.”

Dubbed “sunscreen for the Earth,” solar geoengineering is one of the most controversial types of climate science out there today. If it works, it could have the potential to reduce global temperatures and save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change. But there are huge, potentially catastrophic, risks involved. Scientists say a mistake in the process could disrupt our climate system — even erode the ozone layer — and severely impact global drought and flooding patterns.

Nevertheless, the stage was set for the SCoPEx team to come to Sweden. They even announced their plans to the media. But then word reached Åsa Larsson Blind, who lives northeast of Kiruna and is vice president of the nonprofit Saami Council, a cross-border rights group that spans the Sami region.

Larsson Blind was startled by what she saw as the mindset of geoengineering — the idea that humans might one day be able to tweak the Earth’s climate to suit our own ends.

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” she told me. “Not only of nature and the Earth but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere is to take it a step further.”

The Saami Council launched a high-profile campaign opposing the project, releasing a video that challenged not only the proposed experiment but called for a complete global ban on geoengineering research. The video featured Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking alongside Larsson Blind, other Indigenous leaders, scientists and environmentalists who called geoengineering “pollution for a pollution problem” and a “false solution” to climate change.

In his work, Keith talks about a stark future where the effects of climate change get so bad that it could become urgent to research geoengineering as a potential solution. He argues that it is important to understand the risks while we still have time to consider them soberly, rather than in some future climate emergency.

“The purpose of research,” he told me, “is to provide more information about how well these technologies might work and what their risks are.” But after the Saami Council campaign, the Swedish Space Corporation reneged on its commitment to the SCoPEx team — the balloon launch was called off.

Keith recalled Space Corporation officials telling the group that “there were enough different disputes over mining and other topics in Sami land; that from the point of view of the Swedish government, they just didn’t want one more irritation.”

“I think the Swedish government failed kind of abysmally on that score,” he said. “It is entirely legitimate for the Sami to oppose experiments or whole research in general,” Keith told me. “But their right to do so needs to be balanced against the rights of people in poor, hot countries.” He added that in his experience, people were more interested in geoengineering in the Global South.

Mattias Forsberg, a representative from the Esrange Space Center, said that it was not only opposition from the Sami that caused them to cancel the project. “Our core mission as a company, our reason for being in business, is to serve the sustainable development of humanity and our modern societies,” Forsberg said. “Since it quickly became clear that this whole topic around the SCoPEx project needed to be discussed more widely internationally before any related mission could be conducted, we took the decision to cancel our engagements with the project.”

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization. Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere.”

— Henrik Blind

I talked about the scuttled geoengineering project with Henrik Blind, the Sami politician in Jokkmokk. For him, the shutdown of SCoPEx’s balloon test in Kiruna — and the debate it sparked — seemed to capture the clash between nature-based solutions and techno-fixes to climate change.

“This is an example of how stupid it is, that we as one creature, among millions of creatures, think we can be larger than nature. It’s something that makes me laugh,” he said. “It isn’t the sun’s fault, and it isn’t the planet’s fault, that our climate is going where it’s going.”

The green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” says Henrik Blind, local politician in Jokkmokk. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

We met by a frozen lake a few minutes’ drive from Blind’s office at city hall. He glided up to our meeting place in a pristine white Tesla, the tires squeaking on the snow. Dressed in a pink cashmere hat and bright red knitted mittens, he walked with a slight bounce, making quick progress around the lake.

Dusk was drawing in — it was October, and the nights were getting longer. Blind gestured at the twilight stillness around us, the sky turning the color of watery ink. “We call it the blue hour,” he said with a smile.

Jokkmokk lies just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the sun only just manages to peep over the horizon during winter. People in this part of the world have a singular relationship with the sun. It’s something that made the concept of solar geoengineering — the idea we can blunt the strength of the sun’s rays — feel particularly unsettling for Blind.

We talked about the strange reality of living mostly in the darkness for six months of the year, and with abundant light for the other six. “Of course it’s dark, but dark is also light in some way,” Blind said. “The light needs the darkness, to get the contrast.”

On the subject of contrasts, I asked Blind about the Tesla. Electric cars depend on metals and minerals often extracted in environmentally destructive conditions in countries in the Global South. “For me, it’s showing how hard it is to be a modern person. You want to do the right thing, but still, you are harming nature in one way or another,” he said. “It’s a conflict in the head. I know that an electric car has a lot of minerals in it, and it’s causing trouble in other places.”

Meta’s data center in Lulea. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Trouble Elsewhere

In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it. Those least responsible for climate change are forced to relinquish their land — and in some places, even their lives — in the race to fix the damage.

In Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur people are being forced to work in solar panel factories while millions more are surveilled, imprisoned and “re-educated” so China can consolidate control over the region’s vast resources of rare earth elements and precious metals.

In Mexico, Indigenous communities say their lives and livelihoods are being threatened by wind farm company land grabs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mines providing 70% of the world’s supply for rechargeable batteries in cars and phones are expanding rapidly, mines run on trafficked child labor, with spartan conditions as people scrape out the metal by hand using pickaxes and shovels.

It’s a far cry from the Kiruna iron mine, which LKAB dubs the “most modern iron mine in the world.” Victoire Kabwika, a mining technician from the DRC, now works here in LKAB’s mine. I met Kabwika and his wife Angel as they came out of Sunday service at Kiruna’s church, blinking in the slanting Arctic sunlight. He too spoke of contrasts. To Kabwika, mining in Sweden is night and day compared to back home.

“In Congo, people are working with soldiers around. And weapons. Children are working. It’s not good,” he told me. Mining in the DRC to fuel the green transition is also ravaging the landscape, but there, people regularly pay for it with their lives.

More than 7,000 miles south of Kiruna, the Kolwezi mine is also causing nearby houses to crack apart due to the excavation below them. But there, soldiers are forcing people to leave their homes, marking them with red Xs and burning them down. Amnesty International found they’d even torched some homes with families still inside.

“In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it.”

All over town in Kiruna, signs proclaim that the company has “secured mineral assets that guarantee the future for ourselves and our region beyond 2060.” If the new sister mine for iron and rare earth elements — just north of the current mine — is allowed to open, “it will mean my life, because it’s going to extend the time for exploration,” said Kabwika. It would mean more jobs in the region, and that he could likely stay in his job here indefinitely.

For the Sami collective that currently herds reindeer here, it would mean yet another loss of land. And for everyone in town, it could mean more earthquakes.

Homes and businesses are being bulldozed in Kiruna. Around 6,000 residents must move due to the dangers caused by mining. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

Earth-Shaking Realities

At 3:11 a.m. on May 18, 2020, a 4.9-magnitude earthquake shook Kiruna, triggered by ongoing mining activity.

“I was in my bed,” said Zebastian Bohman, 51, who has lived in Kiruna for a decade. He remembers how his apartment shuddered: paintings fell off the walls and glasses tumbled from kitchen cupboards. His thoughts immediately turned to the mine: “Who’s down there? Who’s on the shift? You start to call.”

No one was killed. But the “minequake” was more evidence of how dangerously unstable the land had become — and would continue to grow if the mining company kept digging. Even before “the big one,” as locals now call it, plans were made to move Kiruna for precisely this reason.

So LKAB drew a big, red line down the middle of the town. Everyone on one side, around 6,000 homes, would have to move around two miles to the east, and the mining company would pay the cost — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Most of the “old town’s” buildings are being bulldozed, replaced by new buildings in a “new town” center. But homes built in the traditional Swedish style — with painted clapboard and sloping, copper roofs — are being moved one by one, loaded onto trailers in their entirety and relocated. Residents often walk behind the houses, keeping a sort of slow-moving vigil.

In 2025 the city will move its immense Lutheran church. Made of wood, with soaring stained glass windows that bathe the congregation in Arctic sunlight, the architect constructed its pitched triangular shape to look like a Sami tent. The town will need to widen the road and demolish a railway viaduct to finish the job.

Since summer, the old town has largely emptied out. The land that’s closest to the mine has been turned into a kind of memory park, for the next few years at least, while the ground is still stable enough to be safe. It’s a place where people can go to process the loss of Kiruna as it was.

“People are grieving, mourning the old city,” Bohman told me. “I would think it will take a generation. They love their old city and the new one is not in their heart yet.” Alongside his wife Cecilia, Bohman runs a food truck just outside the mine where they serve up reindeer kebabs to miners, businessmen, Kiruna’s teenagers and anyone else passing by. In between shifts, Zebastian Bohman took me to his old apartment building, where he showed me a series of cracks, big and small, running up through the block from the basement.

Bohman and his wife moved out of the apartment last year, into their newly allotted home. They were pleased with the trade and relieved to be out of their old place, away from the booming, the juddering and constant worry about seismic activity.

But a month after their move, around the holidays last year, the Bohmans were sitting on the sofa late into the evening watching television, when they felt it. That familiar, sickening jolt: a mini-earthquake. The couple looked at each other as their new house shuddered around them. When the shaking stopped, they could do nothing but laugh. “We realized we were fucked,” Zebastian Bohman said with a chuckle and a shrug. “That’s what we realized. This is not the end. This is not a home forever.”

The mining company says they don’t foresee the new town having to move again. But the Bohmans believed, in that moment, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

As we imagine our future on this planet, we can all expect epic upheaval in the places we call home. But the stakes of change will be much higher for some than for others.

For people who are already seeing the worst of the climate crisis, the costs are extraordinary: their homes, their land, their lives. For those industrialists at the top of global supply chains, the fight to kick humanity’s fossil fuel habit will force a change in the source and size of their profits.

And for the people of Kiruna, the gains and the losses are as immense as the landscape itself. The fragility of this reality is felt every night, for now and for the foreseeable future, as the earth continues to shake.

Officials are preparing to move Kiruna’s church as the old city empties out and is lost to the mine. (Frankie Mills/Coda Story)

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5 Dec, 2023

- Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech

Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech

1:53PM, 5 Dec, 2023

Tala Schlossberg for Noema Magazine

In 2020, 75% of Massachusetts voters voted in favor of an automotive right-to-repair ballot initiative, which would force auto manufacturers to share access to diagnostic information with car owners and independent mechanics, so any mechanic could fix your car. You wouldn’t be locked into taking it to the manufacturer.

The people of Massachusetts were pretty adamant: They wanted to choose their own mechanics. They had voted even more forcefully for a very similar right-to-repair initiative in 2012.

The problem is that right to repair only came into effect in August. The carmakers had so much ready cash (much of it accumulated by gouging drivers on maintenance) that they were able to pay an army of lawyers to challenge the law in court. In the decade since Massachusetts voters affirmed their overwhelming support for automotive right to repair, the actual state of it in Massachusetts went into freefall, with an ever-growing proportion of the cars on the road becoming inaccessible to independent mechanics. And it’s still on shaky ground, not fully enforced, and carmakers are deactivating some of the features in cars so they don’t have to share the specifics of how to repair them.

The mechanics were the first casualties of this attack. Drivers who brought their cars in for repairs would have to be turned away because the local independent mechanic just couldn’t diagnose their problems. Independent mechanics closed down shops and exited the trade — or went to work for dealerships, who had a buyer’s market for their labor and could name their prices and terms.

Drivers were the second casualty: There was no official list of all the cars that independent mechanics could fix. If you crossed your fingers and went to the local mechanic you’d used for years, there was a chance they could fix your car but a growing probability that they’d get it up on the lift and tell you they couldn’t even attempt the repair, and off to the dealership you would have to go.

Creditors and investors were the third casualties: Mechanics struggled to service their bank loans or pay back the investors who’d taken a chance on their business.

Mechanics learned not to try to buck the system. Drivers learned not to try to go around the dealership’s monopoly. The banks and investors learned never to bet against Big Car.

It didn’t have to be that way.

“The thicket that blocks competitive compatability is woven out of software patents, exotic contract theories and trademark and cybersecurity laws. The thicket took decades to grow. Dismantling it will be the work of decades.”

Imagine a contrafactual with me for a moment. Imagine if a few smart MIT kids reverse-engineered automotive diagnostic codes and designed a gadget with a $7 bill of materials, commissioned a factory in Guangzhou or Shenzhen to make a couple container loads of them, then shipped them to the U.S. They could sell those little dongles to every mechanic in the country at $100 a throw.

With margins like that, it’s not hard to imagine that there would be interested investors. Ancillary businesses — third-party parts distribution, warranties and other high-margin services — could strike at the core of the automakers’ own commercial ambitions. Perhaps just the threat of such a countermove would be sufficient to convince automakers to color within the lines and offer a managed, predictable diagnostic tool; it might erode their margins, but at least it would be on their own terms.

But if it didn’t, well, then, we’d still have the gadget. Mechanics could diagnose cars, so drivers could patronize the mechanics of their choosing. Everybody would win (except the automakers, who would lose, but honestly, fuck them).

This is what I’ve been calling “comcom” — competitive compatibility. For most of modern history, this kind of guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics, were the norm. But a growing thicket of “IP” laws creates severe legal jeopardy for these time-honored traditions. Just one of these IP rules — the “anti-circumvention” provision in Section 1201 of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act — provides for a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for anyone who bypasses “an effective means of access control.” And that’s for a first offense!

Combining comcom and mandates (like the Massachusetts right to repair law), could create something more powerful than either is on its own. Mandates and comcom are like two-part epoxy: The mandate is strong but brittle, comcom is flexible but requires constant maintenance to keep it from bending out of shape. Together, they are strong and resilient.

Comcom was once the order of the day. Originally, there was no copyright on software at all. Then it acquired a “thin” copyright that could only be narrowly applied. Then software acquired a copyright far beyond any ever applied to literary works, musical compositions, sound recordings, photos or moving images.

The prohibition on circumventing digital rights management makes software the most copyrighted class of works in the world. Software authors (or rather, the corporations that employ them) enjoy more restrictions under copyright than the most talented composer, the most brilliant sculptor or the greatest writer.

But anti-circumvention is just the beginning. The thicket that blocks comcom is woven out of software patents, exotic contract theories (“tortious interference”) and trademark, trade-secrecy, noncompete, nondisclosure and cybersecurity law, as well as other laws, policies and regulations. The thicket took decades to grow. Dismantling it will be the work of decades. It’s unlikely that a single omnibus bill modifying all of these laws could pass any legislature. It would gore far too many oxen. Even if it did, the court challenges could tie up the process for years or decades.

Not that we shouldn’t try! We should! There are lots of long-term projects that deserve our commitment and attention (think: remediating climate change). But it’s not enough to pledge our- selves to long-term reform — we need action today.

How can we get comcom back while we’re waiting for decades of legislative reform to run its course? Here are three scenarios, in order of likelihood.

Binding Covenants

Companies sometimes agree not to block interoperability. For example, if your company wants to help create web standards at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it has to promise not to enforce its patents against interoperators who implement the standards it helps create.

There are plenty of clubs that companies would like to join, where we can make comcom nonaggression pacts a condition of entry. Standards bodies can — and should — adopt a rule that says that members who join must make a legally binding promise not to invoke their rights under patents, copyright, anti-circumvention, trade secrecy, etc., against rivals who reverse engineer and extend their standards-compliant products, so long as this is done in service to privacy, security, usability, accessibility or competition.

But there’s a much bigger, more important club that every large company wants to be a member of: the club of companies that supply government agencies and departments.

Most governments have “procurement rules” that define the minimum standards of conduct from the suppliers that sell goods and services to them: They specify what kind of insurance these companies must carry, how they must handle private data, how they must treat their workforce, where they must manufacture their products and source their inputs from and so on.

Governments can — and should — have rules about interoperability in their procurement policies. They should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the schematics, error codes, keys and other technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they sell and provide to our public institutions.

That’s not a radical proposition — it’s just sound governance. Governments should spend public funds in ways that deliver value for money, and vendor lock-in does not deliver value for money.

“Governments should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they provide to our public institutions.”

The whole point of vendor lock-in is to give customers a stark choice: pay whatever the manufacturer is charging for software, parts, consumables and service, or throw the product away and start again. Maybe you can’t make HP give up its ink-gouging grift, but if the U.S. government announced that no federal department could buy a printer unless it accepted third-party ink, either HP would cave or one of its rivals would.

This has a long and honorable tradition. When Abraham Lincoln sourced rifles for the Union Army, he insisted that they use interoperable tooling and ammo. I mean, obviously, right? “Sorry general, we won’t be taking that fort today — the bullets we received aren’t compatible with our rifles.”

Amazingly, this is a lesson that even the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the largest employers in America and an eight-bazillion-pound gorilla in the procurements department, has forgotten. The U.S. armed forces have long permitted themselves to buy materiel with single-source components — that is, parts that are made only by a single vendor.

Shrewd private equity investors noticed this and quietly gobbled up all these single-source suppliers. Then, these conglomerates lowered the price of their single-source parts. These parts are now available below cost, which means that the primary military aerospace contractors (a handful of companies, thanks to an orgy of mergers) preferentially build aircraft, drones and other systems with parts that can only be purchased from a single supplier.

You might have predicted the next phase of the scam. While these parts are sold well below cost to the companies that build military jets, when the military needs to order those parts to fix those jets, the parts come with multi-thousand-percent markups. So long as the cost of fixing a jet is lower than the cost of replacing it, the military will pay.

“It’s not the government’s job to figure out how to protect automakers’ cockamamie repair-rigging schemes.”

Now, I happen to be a military abolitionist, but even so, I can’t see any reason that military procurements should line the pockets of private equity profiteers who have figured out how to worm their monopoly products into the military’s supply chain.

That goes double for all the peacetime public spending. Government motor pools buying cars, school districts running Google Classroom, administrative agencies getting Microsoft 365, Slack and Zoom licenses — they should extract binding promises from every one of these vendors not to attack interoperators who reverse engineer, modify and improve their products on behalf of government customers.

If every vendor selling to any branch of local, state or federal government has a binding nonaggression contract against adversarial interoperators, that opens whole swaths of products and services to reverse engineering and improvement.

The automakers will complain that there is no way that a diagnostic tool could be made readily available to every local, state and federal government agency without that tool leaking out into the hands of private-sector mechanics. They’ll point out that private-sector mechanics sometimes fix public-sector vehicles, and so they’d be entitled to purchase and use these tools for their government customers, but it would be impossible to stop them from using those same tools on the privately owned cars that their other customers bring in for maintenance.

So what?

It’s not the government’s job to figure out how to protect automakers’ cockamamie repair-rigging schemes. It’s the government’s job to prudently administer public finances and public procurements. If automakers can’t bear the emotional (or financial) strain of knowing that their customers have the option to entrust their car repairs to someone other than their authorized service depots, then those automakers can find a less emotionally taxing trade to pursue. Or they can just forego all public customers and take massive losses — some other automaker will choose to deal on terms in accord with good public procurement policy.

But they’re right. If governments demand that companies promise not to sue or harass interoperators doing comcom on behalf of public-sector policies, it will create a vast pool of comcom tools out there that will inevitably leak into all our hands.

State Limits On Contract

One-sided, bullying contracts are a major impediment to comcom. Companies use nondisclosure, noncompete, trade-secrecy, terms-of-service and “tortious interference” claims to prevent their competitors from offering interoperable products and services. They argue that these rivals can’t even begin to reverse engineer their products without first “agreeing” to a contract in the form of a clickthrough or shrinkwrap license.

Then they argue that even if someone somehow does manage to reverse engineer their products without being trapped by one of these “agreements,” that any comcom tool they provide to the public is “tortious interference.” Translation: Any customer who uses a comcom tool has already “agreed” not to do so when they clicked “I Agree” at the bottom of some endlessly scrolling garbage novella of legalese. Under the “tortious interference” theory, the interoperator is in the wrong because they’re abetting those customers to break their “agreements” with the original company.

Contract law is mostly regulated by states, and every state has its own set of contractual terms that are considered unenforceable; some states even ban certain terms from appearing in contracts. Take California, where noncompete agreements were mostly unenforceable and, as of October, unlawful. That has been hugely important to the history of the state.

The first semiconductor company in California was founded by William Shockley, who shared a Nobel Prize for figuring out how to make transistors, a key step in the development of computing technology. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in 1955 and recruited brilliant technologists to work on semiconductor devices, but closed in 1968. It never made a successful microchip.

That’s because William Shockley was more or less a Nazi.

Shockley was an ardent eugenicist who devoted his energy to touring America and offering Black women shares of his Nobel prize money if they promised to be sterilized and thus removed from the gene pool. He was a brooding, paranoid, hateful man, prone to wiretapping his employees and even his family, and his company struggled to develop any sort of high-tech products, much less bring them to market.

Working for William Shockley was no fun. But because California banned noncompetes, eight of Shockley’s top engineers (“The Treacherous Eight,” in tech lore) were free to quit their terrible jobs, raise investment capital and start Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful microchip company in Silicon Valley.

“By banning certain terms in employment contracts or declaring them unenforceable, states could kick open the doors to Big Tech’s biggest silos.”

Fairchild was a nerd’s playground — at first. But as time went by, the company ossified, coming under the sway of a straitlaced management committee, prompting two of the company’s top engineers to quit and start their own company. They swiftly devastated the ranks of Fairchild, poaching the best of their former colleagues to work for them at their startup, which they called Intel.

Contract law is a powerful lever for encouraging — or starving — competition. California’s policy of blocking noncompetes gave us Silicon Valley. Massachusetts’s tolerance for noncompetes left the state’s once-promising tech sector in California’s dust. Neither Massachusetts nor California had a monopoly on companies founded by bad people with good ideas — but if you were unfortunate enough to join one of those companies in Massachusetts, you were stuck working for them. Until 2018, if you quit, you had to leave your chosen field for three years until your noncompete expired. Massachusetts startups became a place where good ideas went to die, dragging skilled technologists behind them.

When modern companies seek to block comcom, contract law is a powerful weapon. Terms of service can be invoked to ban users from availing themselves of interoperable tools (from third-party ink to third-party parts to ad blockers for social media), which also opens the door to tortious interference claims against the companies who make comcom tools.

Noncompetes can be invoked (in most states) to prevent former employees from striking out on their own with interoperable products that help their previous employers’ customers pay less and get more from the services they use. Trade secrets and nondisclosure can be invoked even when no noncompete exists, as a means of preventing former employees from directly competing with interoperable products and services.

All of these can be moderated by state-level rules on contracting; by banning certain terms or declaring them unenforceable, states could kick open the doors to Big Tech’s biggest silos. What’s more, given the concentration of tech in a few geographic regions in the U.S. (and the problems associated with moving elsewhere), changes in just a few states could make a huge difference for people across America, and the world. Pass bills in California, New York and Washington and you’d be much of the way there. Throw in Texas and Massachusetts and you’d have nearly every base covered.

These changes would be good for business! Admittedly, they’d be bad for giant, stagnant monopolists, but they’d be good for all the small businesses that would nibble them to death with a thousand comcom products that shifted value back to users and workers and away from big institutional shareholders.

Adult Supervision

There is pending legislation called the U.S. ACCESS Act, which has a successful equivalent in the EU Digital Markets Act; it is a powerful bill that would force the biggest tech companies to open up their silos by making available APIs (gateways for exchanging information with their users). This is meant to allow interoperability without the messiness and unreliability of comcom.

But while an API sounds like a reliable way for users who quit a platform to go on communicating with the people they left behind there, it has one major weakness: The API has to be run by the big company, and it is designed to erode that company’s monopoly profits by directly enabling its competitors to eat its lunch by luring away its most valuable users.

This creates a powerful incentive for the tech companies to cheat — and there are so many hard-to-detect ways to do so. They could slow things down to a crawl and blame too much traffic. They could throw out a lot of spurious error messages and shake their heads in bewilderment. They could introduce random dropped messages — say, 3% of the overall traffic, which would make everything kind of suck but be hard to decisively identify.

The tech giants cheat all the time. They are pathologically incapable of not cheating. Whether it’s privacy law, competition law, labor law, environmental law — you name it, they cheat on it. But they also kind of suck at it. They keep getting caught. A disgruntled employee blows the whistle, for example, or the conspirators just get sloppy.

When a tech giant cheats on the ACCESS Act or the Digital Markets Act, and when it gets caught, it will have to pay a very large fine. These laws are designed to hurt. Obviously, cheaters will throw lawyers at the problem. When the fine runs into the billions, it’s rational to spend hundreds of millions on outside counsel to get it reduced. One thing those lawyers will eventually do is offer a settlement: “Let’s just resolve this like reasonable people, and spare everyone all that delay and court expenses, shall we?”

“The tech giants are pathologically incapable of not cheating. Whether it’s privacy law, competition law, labor law, environmental law — you name it, they cheat on it.”

Here’s the settlement we should offer them: a special master. A special master is a court-appointed guardian who supervises the conduct of a company or individual as part of a court procedure or settlement.

This person would act as adult supervision for cheating tech companies. Before a tech giant could sue or threaten another company, the special master would have to sign off on it, to make sure that the lawsuit was about a true infringement and not merely a way to prevent a competitor from doing some comcom to help the cheater’s customers get more privacy, usability, accessibility or equity.

This is like having a corporate parole officer, someone who has to approve any moves outside the usual routine. It’s a very big step to take, but very big companies demand very big steps.

Once a company has adult supervision, would-be interoperators are on a much surer footing. They can reverse engineer, scrape and take other comcom measures and know that the tech giant they’re nibbling away at can’t bring the law to bear against them, provided that they can make a case to the special master that they’re acting on behalf of the users. That’s an assurance that technologists can bring to investors or crowd-funders or granting agencies, opening up space for startups, social enterprises, nonprofits and co-ops to provide interoperable services.

The Interoperator’s Defense

This one is way out there, but it’s a potentially valid shortcut. Rather than reforming copyright, trademark, contract, patent, trade-secrecy, cybersecurity and other laws so they can’t be used to obstruct comcom, we just create a legal defense against claims under these laws (and others).

Here’s how that defense works: A company could sue you for breaking one of these laws, but in the early stages of the trial, you can put forward the defense that you were engaged in interoperability that furthered user privacy, security, accessibility or other legitimate interests. If the judge decides that’s what you were doing, the case ends.

This means that companies still get their day in court. They can still use the law to shut down people who hack their service and hurt their users. But interoperators also get a day in court. They can use a relatively cheap, relatively fast legal process to get past otherwise punitively expensive and time-consuming courtroom fights with monopolists whose legal budgets are effectively unlimited — who might be willing to spend otherwise irrational sums of money getting the courts to put interoperators out of business because that will scare off future comcom upstarts.

Interop mandates and comcom are no substitutes for traditional antitrust remedies like corporate breakups. There’s just nothing fair about massive, deep-pocketed companies operating app stores and competing with the companies that sell apps in those stores, or selling e-books and also competing with the authors and publishers who publish on their e-book stores, or serving search results and also competing with the companies listed in those results, or operating a social media network and also a bunch of other social media networks.

But breakups take a long-ass time. Consider the breakup of AT&T. At first it looks like it took eight or so years: from 1974, when the Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit, to 1982, when the breakup was finalized. That’s extremely misleading! In truth, U.S. competition regulators first took on AT&T in 1913, 69 years before the company was finally broken up. For most of the intervening decades, AT&T was fending off some kind of attempt to tame it.

We have monopolies — lots of them, in every sector, including tech. With monopolies, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. But, as the old Irish joke goes, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

“Interop mandates and comcom are no substitutes for traditional antitrust remedies like corporate breakups. But breakups take a long-ass time.”

Tech’s critics rightly decry “tech exceptionalism,” the idea that tech is different and so should play by a different set of rules — and they’re right in at least two ways:

First, tech is foundational. The questions of tech monopoly aren’t inherently more important than, say, the climate emergency or gender and racial discrimination. But tech — free, fair, open tech — is a precondition for winning those other fights. Winning the fight for better tech won’t solve those other problems, but losing the fight for better tech extinguishes any hope of winning those more important fights.

Second, tech is interoperable. That means that, long before we break up Meta (formerly Facebook) or Google or Microsoft or Apple, we can offer immediate, profound relief to the people whose freedom of motion is hemmed in by tech’s walled gardens. We don’t have to wait for breakups to allow someone to install a third-party app, or bypass heavy-handed (or overly tolerant) moderation, or overcome the algorithmic burial of their material. We can do that right now, with interop.

And when we do, we hasten breakups! The bullying that walled gardens enable isn’t driven by sadism, after all, but by profit. Letting people wriggle out of companies’ bad decisions means that those companies will lose the money they would have otherwise earned thereby — and if companies behave better to prevent those users from defecting, then they will forego the profits they would have realized by acting worse.

Monopolies need those profits to defend themselves from trustbusters. Hiring lawyers to outfox the Justice Department isn’t cheap, and IBM wouldn’t have been able to pay those bills if it hadn’t been piling up a war chest by abusing its monopoly for decades. Interop starves the beast, depriving monopolists of the excess profits they would otherwise be able to use to keep trustbusters at bay. With interop, it’s harder for a company to make itself too big to jail.

But interop also makes it harder for a company to make itself too big to fail. The Pentagon wouldn’t have been such an ardent defender of AT&T if it hadn’t been so dependent on Ma Bell: If the U.S. military could have easily uncoupled itself from AT&T — by buying interoperable products and services to replace the ones that Bell Labs supplied — then the Defense Department might have been less eager to go to war to defend the Bell System.

And, as Lincoln knew, the military shouldn’t be single-sourcing key capacities to one company without at least securing a promise of interoperability.

Starve monopolies of the profits used to hold trustbusters at bay, cut them off from the allies who fight trustbusters on their behalf, and maybe it won’t take 69 years to break up Microsoft. Or Apple. Or Google. Or Meta. Or Salesforce. Or Oracle.

30 Nov, 2023

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Table of Contents

Noema Magazine: 19 Dec, 2023

19 Dec, 2023

The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

15 Dec, 2023

In Kissinger’s Wake

14 Dec, 2023

Wild Pigeon Chase

12 Dec, 2023

Narendra Modi’s Punjab Problem

7 Dec, 2023

When To Stop AI

Green Colonialism

5 Dec, 2023

Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech

30 Nov, 2023

Noema’s Top Artwork Of 2023