How Ecology Informs Documentary Storytelling and Conservation Politics: Understanding the Rim Fire

According to Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott, “We are experiencing now the fires of the future.” The documentary Wilder than Wild: Fire, Forests, and the Future reveals how fuel build-up and climate change have exposed Western wildlands to large, high intensity wildfires, while greenhouse gases released from these fires accelerate climate change. This vicious cycle jeopardizes our forests and affects us all with extreme weather and more wildfires, some of which are now entering highly populated wildland-urban areas.

This award-winning documentary will screen at the Rafael Theatre in San Rafael on September 12th at 7 pm, hosted by the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Filmmaker Stephen Most examines the making of Wilder than Wild in the following excerpt from Stories make the World, Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary, published here courtesy of the author and Berghahn Books. If you enjoyed the excerpt, consider purchasing the book via your local bookstore, IndieBound, or Amazon.

Both documentary storytelling and a politics aimed at restoring the common ground have insights to gain from ecological understanding. An ecosystem is comprised of the interrelationships of living organisms and their environments. Mutualisms are connective tissue between different forms of life, as when truffles evolve with aromas that appeal to the small mammals that eat and spread them around, or when a fungal network colonizes tree roots, receiving carbohydrates as it transports water and nutrients from plant to plant. When one thinks like a mountain, as Aldo Leopold learned to do, it becomes clear that predators and their prey are interdependent. Without wolves to limit their numbers, deer populations destroy so much vegetation that they starve and cannot reproduce. Realizing that human beings live and work within the web of ecological relationships, Leopold, while managing forests for the sake of the forest and wild habitats for the sake of wildlife, formed alliances between groups that had been adversaries—ranchers and rangers in New Mexico, farmers and hunters in Wisconsin; for he knew they had mutual interests, namely the vitality of the lands they relied on.

A political ecosystem of this kind formed in the central Sierra five years before the Rim Fire. And although it is difficult to represent an organization in a documentary, Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions had to be part of the picture.

YSS is a stakeholders’ collaborative. It “brought together the local folks that live here who have an interest in how this part of the forest is managed,” explained Susan Skalski. “We had environmental groups, we had farm bureau, we have local loggers, we have local industry, we have elected officials, we have county participation.” The co-chairs of YSS are a logger, Mike Albrecht, whose company is Sierra Resource Management, and John Buckley, who heads the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. Member organizations include the Central Sierra Audubon Society, the California Forestry Association, the Tuolumne County Farm Bureau, the Tuolumne Mi-Wuk Tribal Council, Tuolumne River Trust, Hetch Hetchy Water and Power, and Dambacher Construction. The US Forest Service and Yosemite National Park are liaison members.

Forest Supervisor Skalski convened YSS in 2008 because she anticipated a megafire. “We needed to bring folks together and help us figure out how are we going to thin these forests, help make them more fire resilient, as well as enhance other values within the forest, and yet there isn’t enough federal funding to do that.”

Skalski had reason to expect a catastrophic fire. A generation had passed since the last one. In 1987, the Stanislaus Complex Fire burned 147,000 acres. Some of its burn area overlaps the footprint of the Rim Fire. Unlike the virtuous cycle of ecologically beneficial wildfires, the vicious cycle of megafires is due to human errors of omission and commission. Fire suppression is one error of commission. Another is planting within the burn area rows of seedlings that grow into dense stands of trees to facilitate logging. The errors of omission include the failure to use prescribed fire and thinning on extensive portions of the replanted forest.

An irony that I hoped my film could capture is that almost everything that those who cared about the forest did after the 1987 Complex Fire was wrong. The dramatic question the full-length megafire documentary might raise is whether history will repeat itself. Will obstructionist lawsuits, lack of funding for prescribed burns, and industry-favored silvicultural replanting build up kindling for future megafires and increase deforestation over the long run?

The Rim Fire gave YSS a renewed sense of purpose. The collaborative worked with the Forest Service on its post-fire restoration and replanting plans. In contrast to the adversarial tactics of the John Muir Project, their work was consensual, using scientific evidence and reasoned arguments to resolve conflicts and reach agreement without reliance on litigation. They took economic concerns as well as ecological values into account, recognizing that the Sierra economy depends upon the health and resilience of the land. If preservationist politics is binary, ecological politics is multivalent, considering information, interests and impacts from all points of the compass.

The YSS stakeholders had an example of a resilient forest to work toward due to a study by research ecologist Eric Knapp that was actualized in the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest. They invited media to tour the experimental forest to publicize its back-to-the-future approach to forest management.

The last major fire occurred there in 1889. Until the Gold Rush, this forest just north of the Stanislaus Complex Fire and Rim Fire burn areas had wildfires every six years on average. Back then it was low in density, with a mix of individual trees, clumps of trees, and open spaces. The experimental forest left an unmanaged high-density area intact for comparison with the managed plots that were shaped by combinations of thinning and prescribed fires to resemble the pre-Gold Rush forest. The core idea, explained by Knapp and Malcolm North, is that low-density mixed conifer forests of this kind are resilient to major wildfires, sequester the most carbon, have the lowest CO 2 emissions, and store precipitation efficiently, while providing abundant habitat for at-risk wildlife, particularly fishers, goshawks and spotted owls. This could be the objective for the restoration of central Sierra forests. Progress toward that goal could, I thought, give the last act of the megafire film a promising sequence.

Every drama, be it comedy or tragedy, depends on things going wrong. Over the objections of YSS, the Forest Service initiated a replanting program that would restore the kind of dense, easily harvestable forest that the Rim Fire destroyed, though with fewer trees per acre than were planted after the Complex Fire. My production filmed a lovely replanting scene by 250 volunteers including war veterans, girl scouts, and members of Americorps’ National Civilian Community Corps. Separated into two groups, adults and children guided by adults, they worked upon a bulldozed mountainside. The Complex Fire had consumed trees that forested that land until 1987. Many of the trees planted after that fire perished 26 years later in the Rim Fire. I wondered whether the thousands of pine seedlings placed ten feet apart in holes dug into the ground above Buck Meadows in 2016 would reach maturity. Were those volunteers planting trees for a future forest or fuel for the next megafire?

Another mistake the Forest Service seemed intent on perpetuating was its fire suppression policy. An article in Science, whose lead author is Malcolm North, states a truth that is almost universally acknowledged: “Changing climate and decades of fuel accumulation make efforts to suppress every fire dangerous, expensive, and ill advised.” Yet the agency, unwilling to let its scientists weigh in publicly on policy decisions, tried to stop Science from publishing the piece. When that failed, the Forest Service asked for North’s name, or at least his affiliation, to be removed. When Science published the article unchanged, the Forest Service barred North from speaking to the media.

Blowing in the wind right after the Rim Fire was the possibility that in response, the Forest Service would change direction as significantly as after the Big Blowup of 1910. Instead, feeling the prevailing winds several years later, I expected history to repeat itself, as Karl Marx said, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” If the Rim Fire was the tragedy that followed the 1987 Complex Fire, the genre of the next megafire could be tragic farce—tragic in its effects, farcical due to its cause—characters persisting in fixed behaviors regardless of bad results. It would dramatize another maxim by Marx, “The traditions of all the dead generations burden, like a nightmare, the minds of the living.”

8 Reasons The Landmark Ruling In Ecuador Signals Hope In The Struggle To Save Amazon Rainforest

This article was originally published on the Amazon Frontlines website. Amazon Frontlines is defending Indigenous rights to land, life and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest.

This summer, a court in Ecuador issued a ruling with profound implications for the urgent fight to save the imperiled Amazon rainforest. The decision effectively blocked a planned government oil-auction that threatened half-a-million acres of some of the world’s most biodiverse primary rainforest. The broad outlines of the situation are sadly familiar to similar cases found throughout the Amazon region: In pursuit of foreign investment, the government sought to partner with foreign firms to develop large swaths of ecologically fragile rainforest. As is often the case, these forests were the ancestral lands of indigenous inhabitants who were not informed about — and did not approve — the arrival of industry on their territory.

The Waorani villagers-turned-plaintiffs have millennia deep roots in the region. They have seen the effects of oil blocks in other parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and knew that the planned auction threatened their survival and way of life. They also knew their rights: Like all indigenous peoples, they hold an internationally recognized right to informed consent when it comes to the “development” of their ancestral lands. When indigenous people fight to defend and enforce these rights, they are protecting their future and ours. The fate of the global climate hinges on empowering the indigenous peoples who help preserve nearly a quarter of the Amazon across seven nations, and who represent a powerful buffer against the destruction of a biosphere that regulates our planet’s flows of oxygen, carbon and freshwater.

Below are eight important lessons of this historic victory.

1) Healthy Cultures, Healthy Forests

The Waorani people are legendary hunter-harvesters of the southcentral Ecuadorian Amazon. For unknown centuries before their contact by missionaries in the 1960s, they lived in harmony with and preserved their rainforest home. They developed a rich culture marked by high craftsmanship and artistry, profound spirituality and a sophisticated understanding of the natural world and its complex systems of plant and animal life.

The Waorani and hundreds of other Amazonian indigenous cultures have been under enormous strain since the arrival of industry in the last century. Indeed, it is impossible to separate the physical pollution of the rainforest from the cultural disruption experienced by the people who live there. The relation between them is not causal, but cyclical: The growth of oil roads, mono-crops and mining jeopardizes indigenous peoples’ ability to survive off the land sustainably and in balance with the forest. It creates a dynamic that forces indigenous youth to abandon tradition and find work in the very industries that threaten their forest homes. The Waorani victory is important not only because it protects trees, but because it protects the culture that can continue to protect trees for centuries to come.


2) Defining the Narrative: Maps, Technology, Stories

The fate of the rainforest will be determined by how the world chooses to see it and conceive of its riches. Is the Amazon basin merely a green mass of undifferentiated land, crisscrossed by hundreds of unremarkable rivers? Is it a grid of resource concessions, notable for what’s under the ground, and convertible into currencies and value on international commodity markets? Or is the Amazon a tapestry of delicate and overlapping systems containing immeasurable biological, ecological and cultural treasures?

At their most basic level, these are competing stories, conflicting narratives, that begin with the maps that we use to represent the land. One of the ways the Waorani “won the narrative” was by using their own maps and telling their own stories. A territorial mapping project showed what the state and company maps left out — the turtle nesting grounds, the sacred sites, the ways the rivers fed the forest and each other. Through this and other tools — drone videos, testimonies, camera-trap images, even selfies — they illustrated the many ways that their culture, and everything it protected, is more precious than oil and greed. They also showed how a hunter-harvester people can leverage technology and social media on their own terms to challenge a mighty industry and capture the imagination of global civil society.

3) The Power of Legal Precedent

The Waorani people sing after a long hearing as they await a three-judge panel ruling at a Provincial Court in Pastaza, Ecuadorian Amazon

Rights enshrined in international laws and national constitutions are not worth their ink without enforcement. As with any laws, they are more likely to be enforced when they rest on firm precedent, locally and around the world. For too many years, the Waorani have seen the Ecuadorean government ignore their constitutional and international obligations to inform and acquire consent, and allow companies to pollute indigenous lands.

“We are Waorani and we have always lived in the Amazon rainforest. For thousands of years we have defended our territory from trespassers. Now we are fighting with our words and papers. We never knew the government wanted to extract oil from our lands. We, Pikenanis, are never going to sell our territory to the oil companies. We want to live well in our territory.”
– Memo Yahuiga Ahua Api, Pekinani (traditional leader)
Because the Waorani demanded the government respect the law and the constitution, indigenous peoples across the Amazon can now draw inspiration and tactical lessons from Waorani legal success in linking the right to self-determination to the right to free, prior, and informed consultation. Its example puts the country and the region one step further towards redefining the legal framework for indigenous rights.

Although the first battle has been won, the struggle is ongoing. The Ecuadorian government is still seeking to auction seven million acres in the country’s central rainforest to oil companies.

4) Climate Change & Interconnectedness

The Waorani victory is a victory for the climate: it keeps 500,000 acres of trees working as carbon vacuums, and prevents the pumping of millions of gallons of crude oil that would have been shipped to California for refining and distribution to gas stations across the United States. In aggregate, it is estimated that over the next ten years the Waorani victory will have avoided approximately 19.0 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions – or the equivalent of the greenhouse gases emitted from roughly 4 million passenger cars in one year.

After the oceans, the rainforests are the world’s most important carbon sinks, a sprawling continent’s worth of vegetation that absorbs and keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for hundreds of years. As the traditional inhabitants and defenders of this carbon sink, indigenous communities are the “secret weapon” in its defense, according to a growing body of research. A report by a group of leading research centers estimates that indigenous lands cover around a quarter of the world’s above-ground tropical carbon sinks.

The importance of the Amazon system extends beyond carbon. Its hydrological cycle involves more than one-fifth of the planet’s freshwater supply, and any decline in rainfall and evapotranspiration in the Amazon — the consequence of deforestation and contamination — has far-reaching effects, including drought in breadbaskets throughout the hemisphere and less river-feeding snowpack in the mountains of the pacific northwest.

5) Women in Front

One of the lead plaintiffs in the case is Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani mother and president of the Waorani communities on the Pastaza river. “We are the caretakers of the forest and we will continue defending it as our ancestors have done for thousands of years,” Nenquimo told reporters outside the courtroom during this summer’s hearing. “As women, we are fighting for our children, for our families, for our communities and for our Mother Earth. We will never allow the oil companies to enter our territory. Our forest is not for sale and this is our decision”.

6) Protecting Rivers and Water

Life in the Amazon is lived on rivers. From fishing to bathing to providing drinking water, the rivers are the central arteries of everyday life. Because all of the rivers in the Amazon flow from or into other rivers — and are often located in floodplains — it is all but impossible to isolate or contain contamination. This is made tragically clear in the legacy of the U.S. oil company Texaco (now Chevron) which in the 1960s won a government contract to develop the region’s oil deposits. Disregarding the health of the forests and the local indigenous people, the company dumped waste and spilled oil wantonly throughout the forest and into its rivers. Many local indigenous people fell ill and died from consuming toxic material that sometimes appeared as thick sludge on the river, and other times was invisible, but no less dangerous to those who consumed it through the water, produce grown on contaminated soils, and the wider food chain. Today, many communities in eastern Ecuador cannot drink from rivers their ancestors used for countless generations. The contamination of the region is not historical, but ongoing. Though Chevron no longer operates in the region, regional and Chinese firms continue to engage in oil production at the invitation of the Ecuadorean government.

This is the crucial, local context for the Waorani victory, and explains why the villagers refused to allow further destruction of the area’s fresh water sources. Their refusal reflects a global movement — seen throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, all the way to Standing Rock in the U.S. — to both defend indigenous rights and lead by example toward a broader and deeper respect for nature as the sacred source of all life.

7) Wildlife and Biodiversity

It is said that the Amazon invites cliché and resists hyperbole. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the bounty of the Amazon’s plant and animal life. Accounting for a tenth of all known species on the planet, the Amazon is an ecosystem without equal. It is also an ecosystem full of mysteries yet to be discovered. Much of the modern pharmacopeia derives from Amazonian plants, and longstanding medical mysteries may yet be solved by researching the flora of a healthy forest.

The northern Ecuadorian Amazon is a tragic example of how the delicate web of life in the rainforest can be ruined within a generation by the arrival of extractive industry. In 1970, the area around Lago Agrio, the region’s biggest city, was one of healthy rivers and forests, full of animal and aquatic life. Now, in villages along the Putamayo and Aguarico, the water is undrinkable and many ancestral hunting grounds are bare, polluted, and bisected by roads. Fragmentation is a major threat to biodversity and wildlife, and the government’s proposed oil blocks would pollute an important biological corridor running across the wider region.

The species-level stakes of Amazon protection were highlighted this May with the release of a landmark United Nations’ report on biodiversity. The report warned that unless critical ecosystems are protected, as many as one million species are threatened with near-term extinction. The Waorani have won a battle for themselves, their children and the planet, but also for the jaguars, the monkeys, the birds, and the ants.

8) Union of Indigenous Nations

The Waorani people mobilize and unite with other indigenous nations including the Kichwa, Sapara, Andoa, Shiwiar, Achuar and Shuar, whose lives and lands are also threatened by oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon

The indigenous nations of the Ecuadorian Amazon understand themselves to share a common struggle. Collectively they are the guardians of 70% of the entire Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Many of these peoples joined the Waorani in solidarity outside the courtroom, traveling from distant communities in the country’s north and south. They marched with the Waorani in the streets; they submitted amicus briefs; and they returned to their communities to share what they had learned to better organize for the future. “We have united with our Waorani brothers and sisters because we share the same struggle and dream: to protect our forest and to continue being who we are, as indigenous peoples,” said Alex Lucitante, a Kofan leader. “We will continue to unite forces and build strength between our peoples to resist the threats to our territories. Without unity, there can be no triumph.”

This model of multi-nation mobilization and solidarity — across Ecuador and the entire Amazon — will be crucial to defeating the extraction at-all-costs paradigm that threatens the region. The Waorani alliance was a powerful demonstration of this. Now the challenge is to scale up the precedent and further empower those defending the seven million acres of indigenous land still targeted by the government and the oil industry.

Will you stand with the Amazon’s oldest guardians to protect a forest we all depend upon at this critical moment? JOIN THE MOVEMENT


Whose Got Next: Cultivating Feminine-Centered Leadership in a Post Hip-Hop Era

Can young women and women of all ages act – personally and politically – with strength, courage and dignity from a place of internalized self-loathing? Entrepreneur, musician and performance artist Rha Goddess offers an alternative: the celebration, empowerment, healing and transformation of humanity through the uplifting of the hearts, minds and souls of young women.

Green-Collar Justice: Another World Is Possible | Omar Freilla and Justin Green

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, as the saying goes. Entrepreneur and activist Omar Freilla and “deconstruction” business owner Justin Green are solving for pattern: By working to eliminate waste, they are creating green collar jobs and improving the environment in some of the nation’s most underserved communities.

Lateefah Simon: Girl Power for Social Justice

Describing her profoundly effective work with the Center for Young Women’s development (CYWD), a group run by and for previously incarcerated young women, Lateefah Simon traces the justice system’s impacts on communities, children, and young women. She also shares CYWD’s strategies to address these inequities.

How Indian Mascots Dehumanize

Dahkota Brown (Wilton-Miwok) Founder of NERDS, Native Education Raising Dedicated Students, and appointee to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education talks about the impact that Indian mascots have on Native youth in school.

This presentation took place in the Indigeneity Forum at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.

Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers that promotes Indigenous knowledge and approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues through respectful dialogue.

Mní Wičhóni: Water is Life – a 2018 Bioneers Indigenous Forum Presentation

The Lakota phrase “Mní wičhóni” (“Water is life”) was the protest anthem from Standing Rock heard around the world, but it also has a spiritual meaning rooted in Indigenous world views. For Native Americans, water does not only sustain life, it is sacred. How can Native Americans create cross-cultural understanding for a river’s rights to protection? How do we help guarantee such “rights of nature” in mainstream jurisprudence? As we take leadership roles in restoring our rivers, how do we blend our Traditional Ecological Knowledge with contemporary science? Tribal leaders working to restore riparian ecosystems explore cutting-edge Indigenous approaches to watershed management and restoration.

This panel was moderated by Clayton Thomas-Muller (Pukatawagan), author and campaigner with 350.org; and featured Caleen Sisk (Wintu), Carletta Tilousi (Havasupai), and Carrie “CC” Curley (San Carlos Apache).

CLAYTON: Standing Rock touched so many of us in so many ways. The world really looked at that moment, and it was a global teaching moment.

In our culture back home, the thunder beings are the ones that bring the rain in the spring,  in our cosmology. What I was told in that moment of Standing Rock, when the whole world learned about mní wičhóni, they learned about connection to the sacred elements, the connection to the sacredness of place, and it moved people because they got connected, and got understanding in their most simplistic form. So that teaching,“water is life,” moved people to actually give a dang and to put their bodies on the line, Native and non-Native alike. 

CALEEN: I’m the fifth chief of my tribe. We don’t really call ourselves chiefs, but we borrowed that word, because more of you know what that means. Because if I said, I’m a [Wintu word], a Winnemen Wintu [Wintu word], would you know what I was talking about? No, you wouldn’t. So I’m following a line of only five leaders who have been in charge since the taking of California. The last leader before me, my Grams, was a woman chief too, and then myself. We’re not elected; we’re born into it. We are trained. We grow up with our constituents and we already know who the next chief is.

My grams brought us through that Shasta Dam when she took leadership. Her dad, who was the chief before, died in 1938. I think he died because he had a heartache about the Shasta Dam. Nobody could believe they were going to put all those mountains under water, all of those sacred things going underwater. He couldn’t do a thing about it. So she took over in the1938 as the chief, and she brought us through that time of heartache and post-traumatic stress – from the killings to the flooding of our land – trying to hang onto everything that we have.

So then I come along and take over in 2000. She’s with me for three more years. I think the next chief is also a woman, and I think there’s a reason that we are all women chiefs right now in a row, because we have to get through this water system. We have to get through the water problems of the world, and of our state, and of our home villages. We have to do that.

Caleen Sisk

It’s not an easy thing to do, and we’re calling on everybody. As the chief, I have a lot of things to do. Now I’m reaching out to the world, asking, are there other Indigenous People and leaders around the world who are working on the same thing? Are you singing to the water? Are you walking around the lakes? And what are we doing all together for the water around the world?

We are Salmon People – most California Indians are Salmon People – and we’re Pacific Coast Salmon People, meaning that these fish are so miraculously in connection with the Creator that they only do things one time. When they swim back upriver and they lay their eggs, and they all die before the eggs are hatched. Then it’s repeated. The little ones swim out and  down to this estuary, and they change into saltwater fish. They don’t say, “I’m a freshwater fish, I made a mistake. Here I am down here in the salt water, I better swim right back up there where I come from.” But they stay, and they change.

We did a war dance on Shasta Dam to oppose raising the level of the Shasta Dam, and New Zealand responded. Our effort was to tell the world what’s happening here to this small tribe, to this water system, and 87 papers around the world picked up the story. New Zealand was one of them. They asked us, Do you want your salmon back? It’s like, What, you have our salmon? Okay, where is New Zealand? [LAUGHTER] And we had to go there and we had to dance for those salmon.

But when we got there, the Maori people were so family like, and they made it totally possible for us to do this atonement, to do this dance for our salmon with them. There’s a film out there called Dancing Salmon Home. If you haven’t seen it yet, that’s the whole story about it.

When I looked at New Zealand, I thought, Oh, that’s an island. But even on that island, they have a mountain, Mt. Aoraki, Mt. Cook, the destroyer of the island, named that mountain, but Mt. Aoraki has ice waterfalls. It is the only place in the world that our salmon survived. Everywhere they were sent, they died, except for New Zealand.

Now New Zealand has one of the biggest economies based on salmon. That should be California. We should have an economy based on salmon, because if we did, our waterways would be beautiful. Our waterways would be clean. We wouldn’t be struggling and fighting over the kinds of things that we are right now.

CARLETTA: The Havasupai people, we’re about 776 people left in Northern Arizona in the bottom of the canyon. We were also pushed in there. We were originally on the Colorado Plateaus. We roamed that whole area from the San Francisco peaks to Bill Williams mountain, to the Seligman area. We had a lot of territory. At one point in time, we have a really bad, sad history that was told to me when I was a child. I think that’s when it really began in my mind that I cannot just live this life without speaking up about what happened to my people. 

As I learned more from my family, my parents, my community, and my elders about what was really going on, it just got me really, really angry.

The Havasupai people are called Havsuw’ Baaja, means “supai”. Havsuw’ Baaja means “people of the blue-green water”. That’s why I’m dressed like this today in a big blue outfit. And I was teasing one of my friends. I said, you can’t miss me walking across, I’m really blue today. [LAUGHTER]

Carletta Tilousi

My elders really taught me if you’re going to go out there and speak, you have to dress it, you have to walk it, you have to talk it. You have to sacrifice some of your life and your family, and that’s what we’ve been doing – sacrificing our time for the water.

But you also have to listen. You have to listen to your surroundings. You have to listen to the water. Go sit over there, see if you’ll hear something, feel something. So we have songs for these waters that flow through, and sometimes it could sing to you and you could feel it. If you don’t hear it, you’ll feel it, and that’s what we feel, and that’s what we’re carrying here today as a message to all of you that are here today, caring. You’re asking about what should we do, what can I do.

Then there’s a whole deeper purpose in why we’re here. And I think the whole connection that we have today, right here, is the water, right here. We cannot go without a couple of hours without drinking water.

I think that’s what really brings us together, is the saying, “No More”. No more contamination of the fish. No more contamination of our springs for our Apache people. No more contamination of the Havasupai waters from the international mining companies coming onto federal lands. We’re allowing that to happen as United States citizens. As you citizens, you’re allowing that to happen. Your congresspeople need to hear your voice.

The internationally funded uranium mines live right above one of the largest groundwater aquifers in Northern Arizona, called the Redwall-Muav Aquifer. It’s a huge lake underneath the earth, and a lot of the springs drain right into the Colorado River. These international mining companies come onto federal lands, our aboriginal territories, and stake uranium claims. The United States is allowing that to happen. There goes your water, it just gets drained out.. 

You all know how much water is used for any type of mining. They’re just going to strip that place apart. So for the Havasupai, we’re not just thinking about our 700 people, we’re thinking about the future, and we’re thinking about all the people who are downstream and are going to be consuming all this water.

As Havasupai, we’re one of the last tribes in Arizona to declare our water rights for many reasons. One is that we don’t want the federal government to tell us “this is how much money/water that you’re going to get.” We didn’t want to be a part of that. The Havasupai Tribe is a very close, closed kind of a community. But 2018 was the first time we took steps to claim our water, and it’s going to be a long legal process. I don’t know how long that’s going to take. Some tribes have taken 30, 40 years just to declare their rights to water in Arizona.

There are 21 tribes in Arizona that have claimed their legal rights to water. This affects the Havasupai, because we’re at the headwaters of all the water that goes down the Colorado River. So the Havasu springs drains into the Colorado, and the Colorado goes down, services Nevada, California, all the way down to Southern Arizona, even into Mexico. Well, it used to go into Mexico, now it’s dry there.

Then the developments that are happening in the Phoenix Valley and the Las Vegas area, they’re just sucking up the water like there’s no tomorrow. They don’t even think about conserving or anything. That’s pretty scary when you really think about it. What are they leaving? At least leave a little bit behind, but they don’t think about it that way.

I see that most of the folks in America now just live in the moment. We don’t look at 50 years or 100 years from now. 

CC CARRIE: For us, mní wičhóni – water is life. I tell people, young people, older people – if you don’t understand that basic concept, I don’t know what to tell you. Every day we use water. Give thanks for it, for every drop.  

We went up to Standing Rock with our leader, Wendsler Nosie, former chairman and councilman in San Carlos. We went up there with gifts. When you’re on this right path of sacrificing yourself, and feeding your spirit, and you’re away from home in your own community, because Oak Flat is 44 miles off our reservation. And it’s hard, the battle to wake up your own community, to tell people water is life.

Carrie “CC” Curley

When you fight for the water, and you find that you’re on the right path, the water will always bring you back to that circle, it will always make an impact on you. So with the mní wičhóni, it was an awful thing to see what was happening to brothers and sisters out there. It was awful to see what was going on in the media. It could break your heart. And I know the sacrifice of it, too, in my own community.

The greatest thing that I know as Oak Flat spiritual fight is I can pray, because right now our springs, our aquifers, they are at risk. A copper mine, they want to get that little amount of copper, when water is so valuable, you can never repair that damage. Just like my sister was saying here, it’s your veins. You have to look at it like that, what you put in your own bodies and what we’re doing to the Earth. You put something in your body that’s not meant to be, it will destroy that vein, and it’s the same for the rivers and the streams and the oceans and the lakes here. If you understand that, you’ll see the damage that we’re doing to the Mother Earth.

When you find that yourself, to step out of being selfish, you’ll realize that there’s just so much to pray for and so much to be grateful for, and to continue to pray.

CLAYTON: Let’s continue to support each other in a good way, and let’s continue to build that reverence collectively about our sacred elements that keep all life going. We’ve got to protect water. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. 

 

Will the U.S. Be a Dystopian Hellscape in 2100 if Emissions Keep Rising?

The US is on a path to an unrecognizably hot future. Here’s what that looks like and how to change course.

Guest Post by Dr. Kristina Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists.

This was originally published on July 22, 2019 on The Equation, the blog by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Last week, UCS released Killer Heat, a report analyzing how the frequency of days with a dangerously hot heat index–the combination of temperature and humidity the National Weather Service calls the “feels like” temperature–will change in response to the global emissions choices we make in the coming decades.

When I’m deep in an analysis, like the one for Killer Heat and its companion peer-reviewed article, I often have trouble sleeping. I lie awake in the middle of the night trying to get bits of troublesome computer code to work in my head or thinking through all of the boxes that need to be checked before we start writing the report. The Killer Heat analysis kept me awake for an entirely different reason: the results terrified me.

An Unrecognizably Hot Future

To get a sense of why, project yourself, for a moment, into the future: It’s late in the century, sometime between 2070 and 2099. We’ve stayed on our current global carbon emissions path, and the rise in emissions has continued to outpace our efforts to cut them. Kids who were in elementary school in 2019 are retiring, and this is their United States:

For the equivalent of a week or more each year, about 120 million people across the country are exposed to conditions so hot, the heat index (or “feels like” temperature) surpasses the limits of the National Weather Service’s heat index charts. The upper limit of the heat index scale falls at or above 127°F, depending on temperature and humidity. In other words, they step outside and are hit with a wall of heat that feels upwards of 130°F. How far upwards? That we don’t know.

In 47 of the lower 48 states, these “off-the-charts” conditions occur in at least one county at least once a year. When this happens, the National Weather Service cannot reliably calculate the heat index. Historically, “off-the-charts” conditions have only occurred in the Sonoran Desert region, along the California-Arizona border, and only for a few days each year.

By late century, with no action to reduce emissions, more than 60% of the US ( would experience at least one “off-the-charts” day in an average year. These conditions are so hot they exceed the National Weather Service’s heat index scale. They historically have affected less than 1% of the US in an average year.

The number of days per year that feel like 105°F or hotter is eight times higher than it has been historically. Every major city in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa — and a total of more than 290 populous US cities (greater than 50,000 people) — swelters for the equivalent of a month of such conditions in an average year.

By late century, with no action to reduce emissions, more than 60% of the US ( would experience at least one “off-the-charts” day in an average year. These conditions are so hot they exceed the National Weather Service’s heat index scale. They historically have affected less than 1% of the US in an average year.

Every major city in Michigan experiences 30 or more days per year with a heat index above 100°F, except Muskegon, which averages 29. (Cities in Wisconsin and Minnesota are no better off.)

Residents of Tampa, Florida, Laredo, Texas, and 15 more large cities in Florida and Texas endure 150 days or more per year with a heat index above 100°F.With no action to reduce emissions, by late century large swaths of the Sunbelt would experience more than 100 days per year with a heat index above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

With no action to reduce emissions, by late century large swaths of the Sunbelt would experience more than 100 days per year with a heat index above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Famously cool places average 30 days or more with a heat index above 90°F: Seattle, Washington (30); Portland, Maine (48); Portland, Oregon (53). (In Seattle, two-thirds of homes currently lack air-conditioning.)

In more than 80 counties across Texas and Florida, in an average year, the heat index is above 90°F for half the year (180 days). In broad strokes, that means that spring is very hot, fall is very hot, and summer can be downright deadly.

It’s an unfathomably hot future, and it’s the one we’re on track to hand off to our children and grandchildren. Where do we encourage our children to settle down in this world? Will it be safe for their children play outside in the summer? And what do we tell Gen Z today when they strike and march and plead with us to change course?

Choosing a Safer Future

As my coauthors and I began to dig more deeply into our results, a second potential future came into clearer focus: In this future, rapid, aggressive action to reduce global emissions has limited global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. These ambitious actions still lead to a future in which the number of days with a dangerously high heat index above 105°F is nearly four times what it is today, and 85 of the bigger US cities would endure a month or more of such conditions.

Clearly, we need to be aiming for even greater, even faster cuts to our emissions. Yet limiting future warming to 2°C would yield a future far more recognizable to today’s children than the one we’re recklessly barreling toward, in which 290 cities suffer under such heat.

Rapidly and aggressively reducing emissions would limit the number of cities that would experience 30 days or more per year with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s the future I have to focus on so I can sleep at night. Ensuring this safer future will require us to act on two major fronts: reducing emissions swiftly so that we can achieve net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury and limit future global warming; and building our resilience to extreme heat through a suite of common sense measures that include enacting a national heat safety standard for outdoor workers and ensuring that communities have heat warning systems in place that draw on the best available public health information.

This future may be the next-best thing to the one we’d ideally hand off to our children, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the one we’re currently heading toward. The best time to boldly begin pursuing this safer future was 20 years ago. The next-best time is now.

Radical Transparency: Mapping the Earth from the Ground to the Cloud

New, democratized access to powerful analytical and mapping tools is transforming our understanding of the natural world – and with it, our ability to meaningfully conserve, protect and restore our collective home – the biosphere.

In this program, we explore the boundless possibilities of digital maps and platforms with Rebecca Moore, visionary founder of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine.

To see visualizations of the mapping projects that Rebecca Moore describes in this podcast, watch her 2018 Bioneers Conference Keynote address below:

This Will All Be So Great If We Don’t Screw It Up

Cory Doctorow on Big Tech and Pathways Forward

As the power, influence and scale of the major firms that dominate Silicon Valley continues to grow, the collective response might be best described as befuddled. From our mental health to influence on elections to copyright and fair business practices, the impacts are wide reaching and complex. Joshua Fouts sat down with Cory Doctorow to discuss the overall state of Big Tech at the moment. Doctorow is a prolific journalist, blogger, creative commons advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author whose latest book, RADICALIZED, was published in March.

Doctorow last spoke at a Bioneers Conference in 2017 – watch his keynote talk on The Fight for a Free, Fair and Open Internet here.

JOSHUA FOUTS: Cory Doctorow, thank you so much for joining me. This is a real pleasure and a thrill.

In some ways, these Big Tech companies can be thought of as the robber barons of the 21st century. Their reach is enormous and what to do about them is becoming a political talking point. In your May 2019 column in The Locus, “Steering with the Windshield Wipers,” you focused on the history of monopolies and monopoly regulation in the US at it relates to technology companies today. Given the recent political posturing around this topic from Elizabeth Warren and others, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue. How big is too big? What is to be done about the increasing size and scope of today’s major technology problems?

CORY DOCTOROW: I’ve given some thought to what I would like written on my tombstone. And what I would like written on my tombstone is something like: “This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.” The kind of technology that I want to see in our future is one that is resilient on a technological and on a policy level because it is distributed and pluralistic. Right? Rather than having five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, I would like there to be a lot of different places where people accomplish a wide variety of goals online – communication, fellowship, commerce, any of the other things we do, romance and so on. 

What I would like written on my tombstone is something like: “This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up. — Cory Doctorow on today’s technology problems.

The history of the Internet for most of its life is of a system that was very, very dynamic, where last year’s winners were overturned by new entrants so routinely that you could barely keep track of who it was. I remember a conference around 2002 or 2003 put on by Kevin Werbach featuring Sergey Brin from Google. He said that people didn’t need to worry about how big Google was getting because all it takes for someone to change search engines is to update their bookmarks, and when that happens, Google will go away. So the only way Google was going to remain on top was if their search engine was better than any other search engine a user might try. 

Over time we’ve had this massive concentration in tech, and that has happened at the same time as we’ve had massive concentration in virtually every other industry you care to name: automotive production, energy, shipping and logistics, pro-wrestling, etc… John Oliver did this infamous, wonderful episode about how there used to be 30 pro-wrestling leagues and now there is one, and it has all the problems that you would expect to have with monopoly. It squeezes its suppliers, in this case the wrestlers, who are now non-consensually reclassified as contractors, which means that they’re no longer entitled to medical benefits, which means that these people who do this very physically dangerous thing are using Go Fund Me to pay for their healthcare, and they’re dropping dead in their 50s. Every industry has been attended by mass concentrations – we have four movie studios, five publishers, four record labels. Finance has gone through this. Pharma has gone through this.

When people talk about Big Tech, they repeat the same tech exceptionalist lines that tech itself uses to describe why it got so concentrated. They say Big Tech avails itself of network effects and of first-mover advantage, and sometimes of a semi-mystical capacity to use machine learning to make people addicted to a product. For these reasons, they say, tech is a winner-take-all phenomenon. 

It’s a really interesting evolution in how we talk about tech because it wasn’t so long ago that we were talking about the long tail and we were saying that what tech enabled was this massively pluralistic marketplace where every conceivable idea could find its audience no matter how niche it was. Think about the initial shape of the blogosphere. I remember Technorati releasing an early report saying more than half of all blogs had three or fewer in-bound links from other blogs, which meant that more than half of all blogs were so niche that they were viable with an audience of three. Today, that is not the case. 

Today we have this massive concentration and Big Tech – and a lot of critics – want you to think that it is because of these network effects. The thing that I find very unconvincing about this narrative is that pro-wrestling doesn’t have network effects, but it has undergone the same concentration. As an example, take eyewear: one company – Luxottica, the Italian company – owns every eyewear brand you’ve ever heard of. They also own every eyewear retailer you’ve ever patronized. They own LensCrafters and Sears Optical, and Sunglass Hut. Anytime an eyewear brand won’t sell their company, Luxottica will boycott the company in their retailers until the company is driven to its knees, and Luxottica can buy it for pennies on the dollar. They own every major lab that makes lenses and contact lenses, they own every major insurer that insures optical, and they own every eyewear brand and every eyewear retailer. They don’t have network effects. They don’t have first-mover advantage. They don’t have globalism. They just have oligarchy. 

It behooves us, I think, to ask: Is there an alternate set of explanations that explains why Big Tech is giant, that also explains why big optical is giant? I think there is, and it’s that until the mid-‘80s, companies were not allowed to merge with their major competitors, called merger to monopoly. They also weren’t allowed to buy their small nascent competitors, the companies that might grow to challenge them. They had functional separation obligation. If you were a bank, you couldn’t own a company that competed with the companies you were lending money to because it would give you a huge advantage over them. If you were a rail company, you couldn’t own the freight companies that put the freight in your rail cars because you’re competing against the other freighters who wanted to put freight in your rail cars. 

Ronald Reagan was a great fan of Robert Bork, a hobbyist economist and lawyer (I call him an “alternate historian”). Bork believed that if you squinted really hard at the legislative history of antitrust laws, the Sherman Act in the US, that the congressmen who debated this (and it was congressmen in those days) were totally indifferent to the idea of monopoly, and that the only thing that the Sherman Act really prohibits is what’s called consumer harm. That is when you merge two companies and in the short term they raise prices on consumers. Not in the long term, because Luxottica has raised the price of eyewear a thousand percent relative to where it was before they started, but in the short term. If you could show that there wouldn’t be immediate price increases, then you could have any kind of merger, any kind of anti-competitive activity, any kind of acquisition. 

Tech companies grew by doing the things that Robert Bork fought to legalize, and that Reagan ultimately legalized (and that his successors – Bush I, Bush II, Clinton, and Obama – all enabled.) They bought their competitors, they merged with their biggest competitors, and they vertically or horizontally integrated so that they would have the rail cars and the freight, so that they could be the lender and the business that took the loan. 

Google has only ever had two successful products that they developed in-house – Gmail, which is a clone of Hotmail, and Search. Everything else Google does came from an outside acquisition. When you think through possible alternate explanations, you have to ask yourself: Is it possible that the reason we have monopolies is that we took away the rules that we used to have to prevent monopolies? You can look at those monopolies and realize that everything they did to become a monopoly is a thing that used to be banned under anti-monopoly rules. Maybe the rules were working. Maybe it wasn’t the mystical power of machine learning to turn us into addicts. Maybe it wasn’t network effects. Maybe it was just that we had rules that worked and then we stopped employing them. 

Ask yourself: Is it possible that the reason we have monopolies is that we took away the rules that we used to have to prevent monopolies? – Cory Doctorow

Listening to true believers in Borkian-Reaganite market capitalism explain why it must be machine learning or globalism or network effects is like listening to a lifelong smoker who’s finally got lung cancer who wants you to understand that the reason they have lung cancer is not because they unwisely kept jamming cigarettes in their face, it’s because of environmental toxins.

So this brings me to Liz Warren. Full disclosure: I am a great supporter of Elizabeth Warren and am a donor, both to this campaign and her previous campaigns. I’m Canadian (we’re like serial killers, we’re everywhere, we look like everyone) and I’m eligible to become a citizen during the next presidential administration. If I could walk into a federal office and put my hand over my heart and swear allegiance to the flag under the grinning face of President Elizabeth Warren, I would be a very, very, very happy man. 

That said, I think that we need to understand that we can try to fix Big Tech or we can try to fix the Internet, but we can’t do both. So fixing Big Tech would be like saying if you’re a rail company and you want to carry freight, this is the price schedule that you have to set forth. Everyone has to get those prices. Or you have to make sure that you don’t discriminate against these kinds of freight companies. Or you might say if you’re a banker and you want to lend money to businesses that you own, this is the way that you have to manage that separation, this is the wall you have to erect between your two business units. Those compliance costs are very expensive, and they’re very complicated, and they have a pretty low chance of working because in order to make them work, you have to be privy to things happening inside board rooms that are not necessarily visible even to an in-depth audit. They require constant and near-total scrutiny. 

A lot of what has been proposed for Big Tech amounts to a very complex regulatory regime to make them behave themselves as “good monopolies.” Take Facebook or Twitter and the issue of online harassment and violent or extremist content. We say to them, you have to have some kind of regime where you can detect and eliminate these activities on your platform. You need to build filters, you need to hire rooms full of people. Or we say that since the livestream of the mosque shootings in Christchurch on Facebook meant that 2.3 billion people can see it, that Facebook now have to have some mechanism to determine whether every livestream on Facebook is or isn’t a mosque shooting.

We say that because YouTube captures all of the videos in the world now means that they need to spend at least $100 million to filter everything that people upload to YouTube under a new European copyright rules. What these regulations do is they lock in the permanent advantage of the Big Tech companies because they say that you cannot launch a rival to YouTube unless you have $100 million to build a YouTube filter.

There are distinctions made where if you’re a small Facebook competitor, you have a different duty than if you’re a large Facebook competitor, but getting that right is really hard. What it tends to do is produce glass ceilings where, for example, during the copyright directive fight in Europe, at one point there was a rule that said you didn’t need filters until you turned over 10 million euros in one year. That means that the day you earn your 10 million and first euro is the day you have to have 100 million euros to build the filter to comply with the regime. 

You can try to come up with a gradient, but ultimately all of these things cut against the other possible remedy we have for Big Tech, which is breaking them up, which is what Warren also suggests. I’m very sympathetic to breaking up Big Tech. I’d like to see them broken up on functional lines, I’d like to see ad technology firms left out of the social media and search business, I’d like to see them broken up on merger-to-monopoly lines, I want to see Facebook divesting itself from Instagram.

If we say to be Facebook you need to be big enough to buy all these filters, then we also say we will never make Facebook so small that it can’t afford these filters. You can’t do both. We know how this works because the last company that ever faced meaningful antitrust remedies in this country was AT&T. AT&T had resisted breakup for generations because every time someone said let’s break them up, AT&T said, “Let us introduce you to the stack of public safety duties that Congress expects us to fulfill, that the FCC expects us to fulfill. Fulfilling these requires that we be as big as we are.” As soon as you give state-like duties to a firm, you effectively guarantee that you will never make that firm too small to serve as a de-facto arm of the state. 

I’m in favor of vigorous regulatory enforcement. I want the FCC and the FTC to regulate the Big Tech and telecom companies. I don’t want those companies to self-regulate because they suck at it, because they are permanently compromised, no matter how much they say, “We have this arm’s-length person in the firm who’s paid by us, who doesn’t answer to us, and they will act as the regulators proxy.” We know how that works because every one of the big four accounting firms has been embroiled in a series of horrific scandals, each worse than the last in the last two or three years, in which that whole mechanism has totally broken down because they get paid by the company whom they are responsible for keeping honest, and ultimately you cannot be paid by the company you’re responsible for keeping honest because your divided loyalty will screw you. 

When people hear, “Don’t regulate Big Tech because it will give them a permanent advantage,” they think that I’m saying, “Don’t regulate Big Tech at all.” What I’m saying is regulate Big Tech first by making them small enough that we can hold them to account, and second by making them small enough that we can make them pay their taxes so that we have the money to pay the regulators to hold them accountable. Anything less than that is just enshrining their permanent dominance. It’s effectively replacing the dream of a democratic tech with a constitutional monarchy where we say to these firms, King Zuck, King Sergey, King Larry, you guys get to rule the Internet forever, but there is an aristocratic parliament who will meet, a house of lords, and they will drape you with golden chains that you will suffer, and those golden chains will bind your behavior in ways that will reflect what the aristocracy thinks you should do, but you will never be answerable to the unwashed masses who will only have one social network, one search engine, where they go to conduct the democratic business of using the nervous system of the 21st century. I think that that is throwing in the towel.

FOUTS: Against the backdrop of all of this and the focus on the downside of Big Tech, are there things you’re excited about or that we should we excited about in the larger field at the moment?

DOCTOROW: That’s the “this will be so great” part (if we don’t screw it up.)

I can’t imagine a future where we survive the climate emergency, or find justice for people who’ve been historically discriminated against and suffered the worst of environmental problems and other forms of economic and coercive violence, that doesn’t involve using Big Tech or at least tech, but it requires that it be a democratic tech. 

If you are looking at Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria and saying we need to take power generation out of the hands of giant corporations that are looking for the fastest buck with the lowest cost, and return it to community control, we need to create sustainable, renewable micro-grids. These micro-grids would form federated agreements with one another to share across one community to the next, where the profits remaining in the community can be used to do maintenance, upgrading and so on. 

One of the reasons we have big centralized power generation is because it requires huge amounts of logistical oversight and coordination that you can only accomplish with computers, with really advanced embedded systems, and also systems that are in the hands of both the users and the technicians that can monitor the health of the system and tune it in real time.

I just read a great paper about how connected fields of wind-based power turbines can tune their wake, their backwash, so that as they turn the blades, they tune the whole turbine so that the turbulence that they create maximizes the speed of the turbine behind it through intense, real-time computation, looking at things like the fluid dynamics of wind in real time.

It’s not just that we’re able to do these things, it’s that we’re really going to have to. We are going to have to be able to do things like use computation to measure the outcomes of policing to determine whether or not our police are practicing racial discrimination, whether overt or intrinsic racial bias, and the only way we’re going to do that is with data. Take predictive policing which uses policing data and directs future police activity using a predictive algorithm.

If you gather data from racist policing practices and use it as your ground truth, the crime is only where you look for it. The only place where you find weed in people’s pockets is the neighborhood where you stop everyone and make them empty their pockets. By definition you don’t detect weed in people’s pockets in neighborhoods where no one has to empty their pockets. So if you only ever make brown people in brown neighborhoods empty their pockets, the algorithm will predict that that’s where all the weed is going to be. What this does as presently construed is reify and produce a veneer of objectivity to existing racist practices. 

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group did work analyzing police data and comparing it to other data and were able to validate or invalidate the predictions. Turns out you can use this same data set and algorithmic approach, with a few tweaks, to actually identify whether or not police are practicing discriminatory or non-discriminatory policing. It is literally the same technology, it just vests the locus of control in different hands.

I think the problem with Big Tech is where the locus of control is. It’s that in order to talk to all of your friends online, you have to commodify your relationship through Facebook advertising algorithms. That the search algorithms run by Google use secretive tools to do ranking that make it hard to discover when the search result that you’ve been served is or isn’t trustworthy. It’s not subjected to peer review the way other information that we want to trust in our world is. 

The “This will be so great” part is actually not so hard to distinguish from the “If we don’t screw it up” part. Because the difference is who has control over the system. Is it the people who use the systems? Or is it the people who are trying to extract value from people who use the system? That’s really the major difference.

FOUTS: My final question is: Is there anything you’ve read lately that you recommend others pick up in and around things that get you excited?

DOCTOROW: What’s good recently? I’ve nearly finished Naomi Klein’s next book, which is called On Fire, and it’s a collection of her essays from about the past decade or so. Watching the way that we think about the climate emergency changes over that decade is super instructive. In some ways it gives me hope because you can see the Overton window opening. Right? You can see the things that we’re allowed to say about climate without worrying that we’ll be laughed out of the room expanding. 

I really liked Karl Schroeder’s new book Stealing Worlds. It is a very, very good book about climate emergency, civil liberties, and the subversion of totalitarian computer networks to achieve anti-totalitarian, pro-egalitarian, anti-oligarchic ends. It’s a cracking adventure novel and really fun to read.

There’s a really good, very dark book that just came out from Richard Kadrey called The Grand Dark, and it’s a kind of Weimar, dieselpunk novel. It’s set in this inter-war period where there’s this hectic energy, the war has ended, they can hear the drums of war in the distance, and everyone is in this kind of frenetic sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll period in this fictional town, but the town is full of the mamed soldiers from the last war, and then also the automata, the robots that were developed in the last war, which are creating this kind of army of disaffected, unemployed people who are clearly being teed up to be cannon fodder. The robots are also developing genetically engineered chimeras that they called eugenics, that are being sold as pets but are the descendants of the war dogs that were bred for the previous war. Clearly the same labs that are turning out these pets are also turning out the next generation of biological, synthetic-biological organisms to fight the next war. It resonates very beautifully with our current moment. Kadrey is so good at writing hard boiled. It’s like someone took like a Tom Waits album, some really peaty Scotch, and a really shitty cigar and put them in a nutribullet and you’re drinking it and it’s terrific. 

FOUTS:  What’s your latest writing?

DOCTOROW: I have three books now in the pipeline. The one that’s through production and now in the schedule for 2020 is a picture book for little kids called Poesy the Monster Slayer about a little girl who is obsessed with fighting monsters, and she takes apart the super girly toys in her room and repurposes them into monster-slaying weapons. So her Barbie Dreamhouse roof becomes a shield and her Barbie bubble gum perfume becomes mace that she uses, her tiara is the silver she uses to repel the werewolves and so on.

I’ve got a novel for adults coming – not on the production schedule yet but it will be soon. It’s the third Little Brother novel.

I’ve just finished a very short (25,000-word) nonfiction book. It’s a long essay about competition and surveillance capitalism, why machine learning is a problem, how to understand the debate about surveillance capitalism in the framework of monopoly capitalism, and how those two are interrelated. It’s called Working as Intended: Surveillance Capitalism Is Not a Rogue Capitalism. It is with my publisher now.

FOUTS: Fantastic. Cory Doctorow, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for all the work that you do. It’s really, really incredible and vital against the backdrop of 2019 Planet Earth.

DOCTOROW: Well thank you, and thanks for the work Bioneers is doing and you’re doing. You guys are amazing. 

From Artificial Intelligence to Data Collection: The Perils and Promise of Tech

We are living in an age of dizzying technological change, especially in the domains of electronic communications, artificial intelligence, robotics, data collection and genetics. The admittedly remarkable new capacities provided by tech were initially heralded with utopian predictions of their transformative effects, but we have increasingly been seeing their much darker aspects—their critical role in the erosion of individual privacy and democracy, the heightening of social atomization and alienation, and the vulnerability of all our major systems to cyberattack have become ever more glaringly obvious. Few people are better equipped to help us make sense of these rapidly evolving crises than Elizabeth Dwoskin, the Washington Post‘s Silicon Valley correspondent, and one of the nation’s premiere reporters on the world of tech. 

Bioneers sat down with Dwoskin at a recent Bioneers Conference to discuss some of the best and worst implications of our increasingly plugged-in lives. Watch Dwoskin’s Bioneers presentation on this topic here.

Elizabeth Dwoskin

“These companies right now, they just print money. But you can see a scenario where if Europe continues the way it’s going, and if the U.S. continues the way it’s going, companies won’t be able to buy their way out.”

BIONEERS: There’s a lot of fear in the marketplace about job losses and inequity around AI. What are your views are on the real threats or advantages of AI and robotics? 

ELIZABETH: The data show that there will be more jobs lost than gained. And of course that’s why you’re seeing the rise of movements toward basic income. How will people get money when there’s fewer jobs? 

This reminds me somewhat of a story in my past. I used to cover immigration before I covered tech. I remember there was this debate about whether NAFTA was going to cost American jobs. At the time there were a lot of economists saying, “Yes, a small portion of people are going to lose jobs to globalization, but overall, the consumers are going to benefit. The boat will be lifted.” But it turned out that those predictions were wrong. The number of people affected was much larger than anticipated, and those people became justifiably angry. And it had huge political consequences. 

Back to AI and robotics: People talk a lot about truckers. Truck driving is one of the biggest job categories for men with only a high school degree. With the self-driving movement, people are talking about long-haul trucks as being first to make the switch.

Another one is picking and packing. One of the holy grails of robotics is what we call the “dexterity challenge.” If I pick up this water glass, my hand has sensors that tell me how not to break it. But a robot doesn’t know not to break the glass. Teaching a robot dexterity, to pick up the glass and not break it, is considered a holy grail. There have been some big innovations in that area recently, including in Amazon’s warehouses. So if you think about the next layer of automation and jobs being lost, it’s people who pick things up in warehouses.


BIONEERS: You’ve done quite a bit of exploration into “tech bro” culture. As a female investigative journalist, what’s your take on that culture, especially in the #MeToo era? 

ELIZABETH: I think a lot of women in Silicon Valley are really angry. One thing that’s been sad for me as a reporter is when I go into interviews with people, I’m almost always interviewing white men or Indian men. Then there’s usually a woman in the room, because a lot of women work in PR and marketing in Silicon Valley—It’s like the feminized job of Silicon Valley. The women don’t speak, because I’m supposed to be interviewing the executives. It’s really uncomfortable for me. 

Venture capital firms can be uncomfortable too. You have a very attractive woman who’s an admin in the front, and all the partners are men. So it’s like walking into the 1950s. She’s great at her job. It’s no critique of her. It’s about these kind of like 1950s social structures.

I do think that if the culture is going to change, it will happen now because there’s so much anger. People are looking more and more at the workplace. I think papers like The Washington Post are still struggling with how to cover people’s personal conduct. There hasn’t always been a willingness to go forward with these kinds of stories. As journalists, we still have a long way to go.

I recently wrote a piece about this whole new crop of apps and businesses founded by women since #MeToo to improve reporting in the workplace. There are new channels for reporting and understanding your rights.


BIONEERS: I was recently reminded of a Tweet that you posted during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Facebook’s top lobbyist was actually seated behind Kavanaugh in the middle of his hearings. You posed the question: “Who thought that was a good idea?” What do you see as the ideology of Silicon Valley? 

ELIZABETH: Pro money. Stay off my back, government. 

About that Tweet: That was really interesting. I was watching the hearings and looking at who was in the row of Kavanaugh supporters right behind him. On the bench were his wife, his former law clerk, people very close to him. And then I saw this one face—actually, a source pointed out to me. I thought, could that be Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s head of policy? I confirmed it with a couple of sources. Those people were inside Facebook, and they were mortified. 

Most of the people who work at Facebook are what you would consider liberal. Joel Kaplan is probably the top conservative at Facebook. And there aren’t that many. So you have this company that is largely run by liberals trying to make a non-partisan platform, and it’s being attacked particularly in the last few years by conservatives who think they’re being censored.

When I posted that Tweet, a lot of people started asking questions. And then The New York Times did a story about it. Kaplan went on his own accord, but apparently he got in trouble when there was so much attention. They had to do a company town hall for all the employees. But e didn’t apologize. People who work there flipped out. Some of them took mental health days. Literally, people took mental health days because this executive so publicly supported Kavanaugh. 

These employees are so coddled. One of the biggest debates among management at these very rich tech companies is whether to serve dinner and how many people in their family employees should be allowed to bring home dinner to. They get breakfast and lunch already, fully catered and the fanciest buffets, but they also want dinner. And if you change the organic bananas, people complain. These are very, very entitled people. It’s completely divorced from reality. 

The companies always tells people to work within their principles. But then you have this one really high-up guy whose principles you don’t agree with. It raises a lot of interesting question about how neutral this platform should be.


BIONEERS: We’ve also seen workers in Google and Facebook pushing back against some of the company’s contracts. Google is taking a contract with the Defense Department, for example. Do you see the maturation of these organizations?

ELIZABETH: The organizations are maturing, and they’re becoming much more like regular big companies, which in corporate America play both sides. They want to curry favor with both sides of the aisle. They’re playing the game in Washington. One of the ways to do that is by getting government contracts. 

These companies also want to diversify their revenues. They want to have government contracts because that makes you politically safer if shit hits the fan. 


BIONEERS: Many people who are attracted to the tech world, traditionally, feel that they are going into technology to help make the world better. Is the improve-the-world-through-tech philosophy still the reigning ethos?

ELIZABETH: No. I think that’s what a lot of people are reckoning with. That’s why you see the worker insurrections. 

Forget the government contracts, let’s look at the other effects. I think there was always something really delusional about Silicon Valley’s dreams for the Internet and these profound tools that have changed the world in profoundly positive ways. Overall, I think there’s a net benefit to these tools. Like the fact that they’re becoming utilities, the fact that they’re as necessary as electricity,. 

When I talk to some of the people doing healthcare startups who came from Google or Facebook, they’ll say it’s because they were looking for more meaning.

One of the quotes that made me come out to Silicon Valley was a guy who was a Facebook executive early on. He developed a cancer institute at Mt. Sinai. When he talked about this institute, he said, “The greatest minds of my generation were trying to make people click on ads.” He didn’t want to do that anymore. So he did the science thing. 


BIONEERS: What do you think is the end game for the current U.S. administration in terms of the tech industry? A lot of what the Trump administration is doing seems to be making us less competitive players in terms of the global tech industry.

ELIZABETH: In this new Trump North American Free Trade Agreement, there’s actually an interesting clause. In the U.S., tech companies enjoy a very liability-free situation. If somebody puts something illegal on a tech platform, whether it’s selling a drug or anything illegal except for child pornography, they’re not legally responsible for it. It’s called Section 230, and it’s a 20-something-year-old law that frees internet companies from liability. They fight tooth-and-nail to keep it. 

What you’re seeing in these new trade agreements, the whole global trade scheme that’s being renegotiated right now under Trump, is the tech companies are trying very hard to get those liability freedoms, those exemptions, baked into international law as well. So if the Mexican government comes in and says, “Wait, people are openly selling illegal opiates on Facebook,” which happens all the time, actually, the companies aren’t liable for it. 


BIONEERS: Tell us about the European privacy law that passed in May 2018 and what it means for user data privacy.

ELIZABETH: The Europeans passed this sweeping new law that is changing the way tech companies do business. It requires tech companies to delete their records after a short period of time. But their business is mining and collecting data and making money off of it. Purging data is something that they’re not used to doing as part of their business model. 

The Europeans are going to have to enforce this. They passed this sprawling new law that they themselves may not even understand the ramifications of. No one can fully understand what this European law means, but they’re going to have to audit everybody. 

There’s also always a question about whether we should delete data or delete inferences made based on that data. Which is wrong—is it collecting data or is it profiling. That’s something that’s unresolved in European law and not even addressed in American law.


BIONEERS: And then there’s the argument in data forensics that data’s never fully deletable. Ultimately the way that the hardware is made, you can never fully remove data.

ELIZABETH: Yeah. There may be a lot of these cyber people sitting there smirking, “Ha, ha, deletion, yeah right.” 

I do know that a lot of law enforcement types are very upset about the deletion requirements in Europe. If they go to tech companies and say, “We need you to help us find terrorists,” the companies are like, “You told us to delete the data.” We don’t have the Gmail records of the terrorist anymore. 

I heard law enforcement in Europe was fighting for an exception. 


BIONEERS: I’d like to hear your perspective on who is responsible for the consumer education side of this conversation. How can people start to understand what they’re getting themselves into in the world of tech?

ELIZABETH: What we need is not these long privacy policies. I’ve done stories where we’ve counted up the words in privacy policies, and it’s ridiculous. Nobody understands what they’re signing. 

What happened in Europe was they passed this law. It went into effect in May, but the companies had two years to prepare for it, because it actually passed in 2015 or 2016. One of the central tenets of it was simplicity. They’d have to explain to people very clearly what they’re doing with the data. And in theory, they have to disclose to you every single time they come up with a new-fangled way to use your data. 

That’s not how it’s actually played out. A lot of the new policies were as complicated as the previous ones, in my eyes. And did anyone police or care about that? No one has come down on a company for that. 

Ninety percent of consumers keep the default setting, whatever it is. So if the default setting of a tech platform is data collection, that’s what you’re going to have. – Elizabeth Dwoskin on Tech Privacy

Something that is worth thinking about if the U.S. passes a privacy law is default settings in terms of consumer education. Ninety percent of consumers keep the default setting, whatever it is. So if the default setting of a tech platform is data collection, that’s what you’re going to have. Very few people actually go in and change their defaults. Something that I thought would be interesting for a privacy law in the United States is to pass one in which the default is actually no collection. 

The way the tech and publishing companies responded to that in Europe was by creating all these new sign-in screens that made it so hard for you to get to what you wanted. If you wanted to get to the news, you had go through all these new screens. And same if you were going to use Facebook in Europe. They made it so frustrating – this is my cynical read – for you to actually get to the product, that you ended up just signing the thing away. Technically you gave affirmative consent. 

But in the U.S., the default is just collection.


BIONEERS: Who’s job is it right now to police these types of things?

ELIZABETH: Well, the tech companies are doing a lot more policing than they ever did. They used to be very hands-off. But now, especially with the Russian interference, society’s saying that’s not good enough. And lawmakers are saying, “If you let this stuff continue to happen, then you might get regulated.” Facebook and Google claim to have hired over 20,000 moderators around the world in the last two years. 

Facebook let me sit in on a meeting where they debated their moderation practices. If a post goes up anywhere in the world, the first thing that might happen is somebody flags it as problematic—it was nudity, it was hate speech, it was violent, it was bullying. Let’s say the moderator can’t decide the answer. Then it goes to a manager in Austin, and then from Austin, the hardest questions go to this really high-level meeting that takes place in Menlo Park every week. There, Facebook’s top executives look at the three hardest issues that came up that week, and they decide whether they should make a new rule. That’s been happening for a few years, so you can imagine how many rules they have now and how complicated it is. 


BIONEERS: Are there cross-company conversations happening about data, policing and ethics?

ELIZABETH: They all know each other. It’s a small world. But I think what actually happens is that a lot of the smaller companies in Silicon Valley follow what the big companies do. 

These companies don’t fully publish their guidelines. So I know that Facebook prohibits hate speech. That’s what they say. I’ll ask them for a definition of hate speech, and they’ll give me a very simple definition. That’s not what the moderator gets. What the moderator working in a call center in the Philippines gets is a very, very long page of likely scenarios. “If you see this scenario, it’s hate speech. If you see this, it’s a beheading. If you see this, it’s news. If you see this, it’s ISIS. If you see this, it’s just a group expressing themselves.” I mean, every little thing. The guidelines that they get are very, very detailed, and those aren’t public.

I think that everyone follows the broader policies, but it’s a complete black box for how those policies are actually enforced. And that’s why we see a ton of mistakes.


BIONEERS: Have you learned much about facial recognition software and how it tends to have an inherent ethnic bias? Is there anybody who’s actually in charge of making sure those tools work ethically?

ELIZABETH: No. There’s no rule. We did a story a couple of months ago on Amazon was selling facial recognition services to local law enforcement departments in Orlando and Washington state. There was no public auditing of whether that facial recognition was accurate. If it’s accurate, that’s a problem in and of itself. If it’s inaccurate, you’re sweeping all these innocent people into a facial database. 

I don’t think there’s anything in our law that could prevent Facebook from building a facial recognition tool that doesn’t work as well on people with darker skin.

And then the question is: Well, do you want the tool to get good?

There are some civil-rights implications in other targeted data decision making. For example, there are lawsuits against Facebook over the issue of targeted, discriminatory ads, and the fact that you could target a job ad on Facebook to exclude women or to exclude older Americans. There’s a question over whether that should be allowed. Facebook has actually pulled back and said, “Okay, we’re going to remove that targeting category for certain types of ads — employment ads, lending ads, and housing ads.” 


BIONEERS: Younger people are trending away from Facebook. What do you think the future of Facebook looks like?

ELIZABETH: I think Facebook is really scared of the generational shift. But they’ve amassed so much market power that even if all the kids of the future stopped using Facebook, which most have these days, they still have all their data. They have the parents’ contact lists. And they’re going to have the market power to buy whatever hot new thing comes along that all the kids are using. 

They have an unbelievable visibility into what you use, because even if you’re not on Facebook anymore, they collect so much data about people in your social network that they can often find out about your behavior too. 

I guess one question is: Can what’s going on in the European laws affect these huge tech companies’ revenues? These companies right now, they just print money. Right now they make so much money that they can almost do whatever they want. But you can see a scenario where if Europe continues the way it’s going, and if the U.S. continues the way it’s going, companies won’t be able to buy their way out of their problems.