Meta has been bombarded by academics, researchers, politicians and
regulators about a tool called CrowdTangle, which most people probably
haven’t heard of. It’s been used to investigate the spread of violence,
political disinformation and false narratives on Facebook and Instagram.
On Wednesday, less than three months before the U.S. election, Meta is shutting CrowdTangle down.
“Against
this backdrop, Meta decided to kill one of the best tools that civil
society had to monitor and report on the hate speech and election
interference that is almost certain to proliferate on its platforms,”
said Brandi Geurkink, executive director of the Coalition for
Independent Technology Research.
More than 50,000 people have signed letters and petitions urging Meta to halt its plans, or at least wait six months, according to the Mozilla Foundation.
CrowdTangle
has given researchers and journalists a glimpse into how Facebook and
Instagram’s algorithms work and how false information goes viral. But,
over the past few years, Meta began to limit the tool and stop accepting
new users.
A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment on CrowdTangle shutting down, but did point NPR to a blog post
about a new tool called Meta Content Library. The company says the
Content Library is more comprehensive and provides a better picture of
what is happening on its platforms.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs told Axios
that he hopes people will see the Content Library as "a very good-faith
effort," that could "lead to a flurry of new and interesting research."
Meta
requires researchers to apply to access the Content Library and they
must be from “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions who are
pursuing scientific or public interest research.” This access is far more limited than what Meta offered with CrowdTangle.
Hundreds
of researchers, including Geurkink, say the Content Library “isn’t yet
sufficient.” She said she welcomes improvements to the new tool, but
“they hardly fill the gaping hole that is left by CrowdTangle’s
shutdown.”
Researchers mourn the loss of CrowdTangle
CrowdTangle was created by Brandon Silverman and Matt Garmur in 2011,
who offered it to digital publishers like BuzzFeed, CNN and Vox.
Facebook bought it in 2016 and let researchers and other media partners
use it for free. It was the first time a major social network provided a tool to the public to monitor trends in real time.
The Coalition for Independent Technology Research published a website on Tuesday called “RIP CrowdTangle,”
which will memorialize the work that was done with the tool. Other
researchers and watchdogs are also mourning the loss of CrowdTangle.
“Shuttering
this critical tool in another brazen blow to transparency across its
platforms,” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of academics
and civil rights groups, said in a statement. “RIP Crowdtangle.”
A U.S. District Judge in Texas has recused himself from a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X days after NPR drew scrutiny to the judge’s investment in Tesla and questions about Musk using the court to engage in “forum-shopping.”
But O’Connor, according to his most recent publicly available financial disclosure,
also invests in Unilever, one of the defendants in Musk’s suit against a
coalition of brands. The judge reported receiving a dividend from the
company in 2022 of $15,000 or less.
In O’Connor’s two-sentence order stepping aside from the Musk case, he did not offer an explanation.
Last week, Musk filed a lawsuit against the World Federation of
Advertisers and member companies CVS, Orsted, Unilever and Mars, noting
the matter will be heard by another federal judge in North Texas,
without explaining the decision further.
The lawsuit claimed
brands illegally conspired against X to deprive the company of
advertising revenue. The case has now been re-assigned to U.S. District
Judge Judge Kinkeade, court records show.
According to O’Connor’s most recent publicly available financial disclosures,
he owns up to $50,000 in stock in Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle
company. He also invests in and has profited from Unilever, raising
questions about the judge’s ability to preside over the advertiser case
impartially.
It is the second lawsuit Musk filed against a
critic in O’Connor’s court based in Fort Worth, even though none of the
parties are based in Texas.
In November, Musk’s X sued watchdog
group Media Matters over reports the group released highlighting white
nationalist content appearing next to brands that advertised on the
platform.
In that case, O’Connor has issued sweeping rulings in
favor of Musk, including granting Musk’s lawyers wide latitude to
request hundreds of pages of documents from the nonprofit, a process
known as legal discovery.
This was approved before O’Connor even ruled on whether the Musk case against Media Matters even had any merit.
For
five months, Media Matters has been waiting for O’Connor to rule on a
motion to dismiss, typically the first legal hurdle a lawsuit must clear
before it proceeds. It has not yet been considered. Meanwhile, the
nonprofit has spent millions of dollars complying with document requests
its lawyers have compared to “harassment.”
O’Connor stepping
down from the advertiser case follows news that Musk’s suit is already
squeezing one of the lawsuit’s central players.
The brand safety initiative the Global Alliance for Responsible
Media, known as GARM, announced it was folding in response to Musk’s
suit.
GARM is led by the World Federation of Advertisers, which
Musk is suing. In a statement, the federation said Musk’s legal action
“caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and
finances.”
The alliance was created in the wake of a 2019 video
livestreamed on Facebook of a mass shooting in Christchurch, New
Zealand. The effort was a way to make social media ad placement more
transparent and to have a collective voice to stand up against violent
and extreme content on platforms.
TOPEKA, Kan. — A former central Kansas police chief who led a raid last year on a weekly newspaper
has been charged with felony obstruction of justice and is accused of
persuading a potential witness for an investigation into his conduct of
withholding information from authorities.
The single charge
against former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody alleges that he knowingly
or intentionally influenced the witness to withhold information on the
day of the raid of the Marion County Record and the home of its
publisher or sometime within the following six days. The charge was
filed Monday in state district court in Marion County and is not more
specific about Cody's alleged conduct.
However, a report from two special prosecutors last week referenced
text messages between Cody and the business owner after the raid. The
business owner has said that Cody asked her to delete text messages
between them, fearing people could get the wrong idea about their
relationship, which she said was professional and platonic.
Cody
justified the raid by saying he had evidence the newspaper, Publisher
Eric Meyer and one of its reporters, Phyllis Zorn, had committed
identity theft or other computer crimes in verifying the authenticity of
a copy of the business owner's state driving record provided to the
newspaper by an acquaintance. The business owner was seeking Marion City
Council approval for a liquor license and the record showed that she
potentially had driven without a valid license for years. However, she
later had her license reinstated.
The prosecutors' report concluded that no crime was committed by
Meyer, Zorn or the newspaper and that Cody reached an erroneous
conclusion about their conduct because of a poor investigation. The
charge was filed by one of the special prosecutors, Barry Wilkerson, the
top prosecutor in Riley County in northeastern Kansas.
The
Associated Press left a message seeking comment at a possible cellphone
number for Cody, and it was not immediately returned Tuesday. Attorneys
representing Cody in a federal lawsuit over the raid are not
representing him in the criminal case and did not immediately know who
was representing him.
Police body-camera footage of the August 2023 raid on the publisher's
home shows his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, visibly upset and
telling officers, “Get out of my house!” She co-owned the paper, lived
with her son and died of a heart attack the next afternoon.
The
prosecutors said they could not charge Cody or other officers involved
in the raid over her death because there was no evidence they believed
the raid posed a risk to her life. Eric Meyer has blamed the stress of
the raid for her death.
The original principle of relativity, proposed by Galileo way back in
the early 1600s, remains true in its unchanged form even today.
When most people think of the term relativity, the first person who comes
to mind is Albert Einstein. Indeed, Einstein’s two theories of
relativity — the special theory of relativity, put forth in 1905, and
the general theory of relativity, put forth a decade later in 1915 —
represent a revolutionary way of viewing our Universe. Prior to
Einstein, it was thought that both space and time were absolute
quantities: the same for all observers, regardless of their location or
of their motion through the Universe. It was thought that the amount of
time that passed for anyone, anywhere, would be universally agreed upon,
as would the distance between any two points or the physical size of
solid objects. Only with the arrival of Einstein was it recognized that
even quantities such as space and time weren’t absolute at all, but were
instead experienced relative to the observer’s point of view.
But Einstein didn’t originate the concept of relativity at all. In
fact, relativity can trace its origins back to nearly 400 years ago:
when it was put forth by a scientist who obsessively studied the
behavior of objects that moved long before even Newton’s laws of motion:
Galileo Galilei. Relativity wasn’t about space or time when it was
considered by Galileo, but instead about a much simpler concept: the
detectability of motion. What was the difference between the two
scenarios of:
someone who was in a closed room, with no window to the outside,
that was absolutely stationary with respect to everything around them,
versus someone who was in an identical closed room, with no window
to the outside, that was in constant, unchanging motion in some
direction relative to the outside world?
Galileo’s great realization, encapsulated in the principle of
relativity, is that there was no difference at all. This core principle
of physics, first written down in 1632, remains unchanged, even to the
present day.
Galileo’s thought process that led him to the principle of relativity
was remarkable, yet simple at the same time. Galileo made many
inquiries into motion over his life. His most famous discoveries were
arguably astronomical, relating to the motions of objects in the
heavens. He was familiar with the ideas of Copernicus, and was partial
to the notion of a heliocentric Solar System, where Earth was just one
of several ordinary planets — along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn — that all orbited the Sun. When it came to the daily motion
of the objects in Earth’s sky, however, Galileo noted that there were
two possible explanations for why the Sun always appeared to rise in the
east, pass overhead, and then set in the west, consistent with the
observations that the planets, our Moon, the stars, as well as the
entire night sky appeared to rotate about Earth’s north celestial pole.
It was possible that the entirety of the heavens — along with all of
the objects that were in it — were rotating overhead, while the Earth
remained stationary beneath it.
But it was also possible that the heavens themselves were
stationary, and that it was actually planet Earth itself that was in
motion: rotating about its axis, which gave the appearance of a
“rotating sky” to an observer here on Earth.
Galileo noted that there was no experiment that one could
reasonably perform here on Earth that would allow someone on the Earth
to tell these two scenarios apart. Whether the Earth itself was
stationary or whether the planet itself was spinning on its axis,
rapidly, completing a full rotation once-per-day, was not something that
someone on the Earth was capable of discerning by simply being here on
the Earth itself.
Consider, for example, the popular, legendary (and perhaps apocryphal)
experiment performed by Galileo: dropping balls off of the Leaning Tower
of Pisa. If the Earth were stationary, it’s easy to predict what would
happen. Galileo stands atop the tower, holding a ball, while the tower
stands, unmoving, upon the stationary Earth. When Galileo drops the
ball, it simply falls straight down, in a straight line, with its
horizontal position never deviating from its initial location above the
ground; only its vertical position would change as Galileo releases it,
and gravity pulls it down.
But, now, what would happen if the Earth were rotating?
You
might think that, if the Earth were spinning about its axis, that when
Galileo dropped this ball, the ball would then be in free-fall, while
the tower — anchored into the Earth — would rotate along with the Earth
itself. If this occurred, perhaps:
the ball would fall straight down, in a straight line, toward the center of the Earth,
while the tower would continue rotating along with the Earth itself,
which would result in the ball appearing to “separate” from the tower at the rate of Earth’s rotation.
Noting that the Earth was a sphere about 40,000 kilometers in
circumference, that it rotated once every 24 hours, and that Pisa, where
the tower was located, was roughly halfway between the equator and the
North Pole, it’s fairly easy to calculate that the tower itself is in
motion at around 330 meters-per-second relative to the center of the
Earth. Since it takes a ball dropped from the (55-meter-tall) tower a
little more than 3 seconds to hit the ground, the fact that the ball
appears to fall straight down, rather than winding up over 1000 meters
away, you might be tempted to conclude that this experiment proved that
the Earth wasn’t rotating.
Many of Galileo’s contemporaries thought in precisely this fashion.
Knowing that the Earth was a sphere with a well-measured circumference,
they could calculate what rate the planet — and hence, everything on it —
would be moving at if we were, in fact, spinning about our axis. They
reasoned that once Galileo released that ball, the ball would be
compelled to fall down to the surface of the Earth: straight down, and
therefore the rotating Earth should carry the tower away from the ball.
Since this wasn’t observed, that implied (to them) that the Earth
couldn’t be rotating.
But Galileo thought about things differently: in relative terms to
one another. Sure, the tower might be moving at around 330
meters-per-second relative to the center of the Earth, but so was
everything else in this problem:
the ground of Pisa itself,
the tower,
Galileo, standing atop the tower,
the surrounding atmospheric air,
and the ball in Galileo’s hand.
When Galileo releases this ball, it keeps its memory of that
original motion across the surface of the Earth; nothing impacts or
changes it when Galileo releases it, and so it doesn’t “separate” from
the tower at all. Instead, it simply falls straight down. In fact, the
only difference that could potentially be detected would be the fact
that, since it’s anchored into the rotating Earth, the “top” of the
tower moves slightly faster than the “bottom” of the tower, as it traces
out a slightly greater-circumference circle around the Earth as the
Earth rotates. The relative motion of the ball, once dropped, with
respect to the bottom of the tower would be tiny — about 1.5
millimeters, total — or small enough that it would be unmeasurable with
the technology available to Galileo at the time.
Why would Galileo think so differently than the rest of his contemporaries?
Perhaps
the answer lies in the types of experiments that Galileo performed over
the course of his life. Galileo was extremely interested in the motion
of objects, and in particular, in the relationship between four
quantities:
distance,
velocity,
acceleration,
and time.
However, simply “dropping balls” was too difficult, as there
were no measuring devices at the time that were accurate enough to
uncover the relationship between how much an object moved in a given
amount of time when subjected to the gravitational acceleration here on
Earth’s surface. Fortunately, Galileo had a trick up his sleeve, perhaps
influenced by his music-oriented father.
Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all
When most people think of the term relativity, the first person who
comes to mind is Albert Einstein. Indeed, Einstein’s two theories of
relativity — the special theory of relativity, put forth in 1905, and
the general theory of relativity, put forth a decade later in 1915 —
represent a revolutionary way of viewing our Universe. Prior to
Einstein, it was thought that both space and time were absolute
quantities: the same for all observers, regardless of their location or
of their motion through the Universe. It was thought that the amount of
time that passed for anyone, anywhere, would be universally agreed upon,
as would the distance between any two points or the physical size of
solid objects. Only with the arrival of Einstein was it recognized that
even quantities such as space and time weren’t absolute at all, but were
instead experienced relative to the observer’s point of view.
Featured Videos
But
Einstein didn’t originate the concept of relativity at all. In fact,
relativity can trace its origins back to nearly 400 years ago: when it
was put forth by a scientist who obsessively studied the behavior of
objects that moved long before even Newton’s laws of motion: Galileo
Galilei. Relativity wasn’t about space or time when it was considered by
Galileo, but instead about a much simpler concept: the detectability of
motion. What was the difference between the two scenarios of:
someone who was in a closed room, with no window to the outside,
that was absolutely stationary with respect to everything around them,
versus someone who was in an identical closed room, with no window
to the outside, that was in constant, unchanging motion in some
direction relative to the outside world?
Galileo’s great realization, encapsulated in the principle of
relativity, is that there was no difference at all. This core principle
of physics, first written down in 1632, remains unchanged, even to the
present day.
Are
these men on a train that’s stationary and at rest? Or is the train in
constant motion relative to the outside world? If not for the sounds and
vibrations of the train along the track, and the cues of the outside
world seen through the windows, there would be no way for them to know,
and no experiment they could perform inside the train car that would
tell them. This is the key behind Galilean relativity.
Galileo’s thought process that led him to
the principle of relativity was remarkable, yet simple at the same
time. Galileo made many inquiries into motion over his life. His most
famous discoveries were arguably astronomical, relating to the motions
of objects in the heavens. He was familiar with the ideas of Copernicus,
and was partial to the notion of a heliocentric Solar System, where
Earth was just one of several ordinary planets — along with Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — that all orbited the Sun. When it
came to the daily motion of the objects in Earth’s sky, however, Galileo
noted that there were two possible explanations for why the Sun always
appeared to rise in the east, pass overhead, and then set in the west,
consistent with the observations that the planets, our Moon, the stars,
as well as the entire night sky appeared to rotate about Earth’s north
celestial pole.
It was possible that the entirety of the heavens — along with all of
the objects that were in it — were rotating overhead, while the Earth
remained stationary beneath it.
But it was also possible that the heavens themselves were
stationary, and that it was actually planet Earth itself that was in
motion: rotating about its axis, which gave the appearance of a
“rotating sky” to an observer here on Earth.
Galileo noted that there was no experiment that one could
reasonably perform here on Earth that would allow someone on the Earth
to tell these two scenarios apart. Whether the Earth itself was
stationary or whether the planet itself was spinning on its axis,
rapidly, completing a full rotation once-per-day, was not something that
someone on the Earth was capable of discerning by simply being here on
the Earth itself.
Above
the central array of the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array
(ALMA), the southern celestial pole can be pinpointed as the point about
which the other stars all appear to rotate. The length of the streaks
in the sky can be used to infer the duration of this long-exposure
photograph, as a 360 degree arc would correspond to a full 24 hours of
rotation. This observed phenomenon could, in principle, be due either to
the rotation of the heavens or to the rotation of the Earth.
Consider, for example, the popular,
legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) experiment performed by Galileo:
dropping balls off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. If the Earth were
stationary, it’s easy to predict what would happen. Galileo stands atop
the tower, holding a ball, while the tower stands, unmoving, upon the
stationary Earth. When Galileo drops the ball, it simply falls straight
down, in a straight line, with its horizontal position never deviating
from its initial location above the ground; only its vertical position
would change as Galileo releases it, and gravity pulls it down.
But, now, what would happen if the Earth were rotating?
You
might think that, if the Earth were spinning about its axis, that when
Galileo dropped this ball, the ball would then be in free-fall, while
the tower — anchored into the Earth — would rotate along with the Earth
itself. If this occurred, perhaps:
the ball would fall straight down, in a straight line, toward the center of the Earth,
while the tower would continue rotating along with the Earth itself,
which would result in the ball appearing to “separate” from the tower at the rate of Earth’s rotation.
Noting that the Earth was a sphere about 40,000 kilometers in
circumference, that it rotated once every 24 hours, and that Pisa, where
the tower was located, was roughly halfway between the equator and the
North Pole, it’s fairly easy to calculate that the tower itself is in
motion at around 330 meters-per-second relative to the center of the
Earth. Since it takes a ball dropped from the (55-meter-tall) tower a
little more than 3 seconds to hit the ground, the fact that the ball
appears to fall straight down, rather than winding up over 1000 meters
away, you might be tempted to conclude that this experiment proved that
the Earth wasn’t rotating.
This
Foucault pendulum, on display in action at the Ciudad de las Artes y de
las Ciencias de Valencia in Spain, rotates substantially over the
course of a day, knocking down various pegs (shown on the floor) as it
swings and the Earth rotates. This demonstration, which makes the
rotation of the Earth very clear, was only concocted in the 19th
century: more than 200 years after the death of Galileo.
Many of Galileo’s contemporaries thought
in precisely this fashion. Knowing that the Earth was a sphere with a
well-measured circumference, they could calculate what rate the planet —
and hence, everything on it — would be moving at if we were, in fact,
spinning about our axis. They reasoned that once Galileo released that
ball, the ball would be compelled to fall down to the surface of the
Earth: straight down, and therefore the rotating Earth should carry the
tower away from the ball. Since this wasn’t observed, that implied (to
them) that the Earth couldn’t be rotating.
Top Stories
But
Galileo thought about things differently: in relative terms to one
another. Sure, the tower might be moving at around 330 meters-per-second
relative to the center of the Earth, but so was everything else in this
problem:
the ground of Pisa itself,
the tower,
Galileo, standing atop the tower,
the surrounding atmospheric air,
and the ball in Galileo’s hand.
When Galileo releases this ball, it keeps its memory of that
original motion across the surface of the Earth; nothing impacts or
changes it when Galileo releases it, and so it doesn’t “separate” from
the tower at all. Instead, it simply falls straight down. In fact, the
only difference that could potentially be detected would be the fact
that, since it’s anchored into the rotating Earth, the “top” of the
tower moves slightly faster than the “bottom” of the tower, as it traces
out a slightly greater-circumference circle around the Earth as the
Earth rotates. The relative motion of the ball, once dropped, with
respect to the bottom of the tower would be tiny — about 1.5
millimeters, total — or small enough that it would be unmeasurable with
the technology available to Galileo at the time.
According
to legend, the first experiment to show that all objects fell at the
same rate, irrespective of mass, was performed by Galileo Galilei atop
the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Any two objects dropped in a gravitational
field, in the absence of (or neglecting) air resistance, will accelerate
down to the ground at the same rate. The ball does not “separate” from
the tower, either, which some (incorrectly) expected would have been the
case if the Earth rotates.
Why would Galileo think so differently than the rest of his contemporaries?
Perhaps
the answer lies in the types of experiments that Galileo performed over
the course of his life. Galileo was extremely interested in the motion
of objects, and in particular, in the relationship between four
quantities:
distance,
velocity,
acceleration,
and time.
However, simply “dropping balls” was too difficult, as there
were no measuring devices at the time that were accurate enough to
uncover the relationship between how much an object moved in a given
amount of time when subjected to the gravitational acceleration here on
Earth’s surface. Fortunately, Galileo had a trick up his sleeve, perhaps
influenced by his music-oriented father.
Instead
of using objects in free-fall, Galileo began rolling objects — balls
and cylinders — down a very slightly inclined ramp. By controlling the
inclination of the ramp, Galileo could control the speed of the ball: a
ramp that was very close to horizontal would lead to objects
accelerating only very slowly, stretching out the amount of time it took
them to traverse the ramp. Without a timekeeping tool, Galileo instead
set up thin wires, or strings, that would make a sound when the rolling
object rolled over them. By spacing out the wires so that the “sounds”
would occur at an even tempo, with equal amounts of time between the
stimulation of each string, Galileo figured out the basics of the
mechanics of motion: that the distance traveled by an object initially
at rest was proportional to the amount of time squared that the object is accelerated over.
But his next great insight went a step further. Galileo recognized
that the experiments he was performing were yielding results that were
completely agnostic about whether the room that he was in was in
constant motion or not. Sure, there might not have been planes, trains,
or automobiles for Galileo to travel in, but there was a type of vessel
that was frequently in constant motion: a ship. Galileo recognized that
he could perform these experiments — of rolling balls and cylinders down
ramps — aboard a ship just as easily as he could on the surface of the
Earth, and that there would be no way of telling, from the results of
the experiment, whether the ship were safely docked ashore, or whether
the ship was in motion, being carried by the current of the sea.
In fact, this was precisely the situation considered by Galileo in his 1632 book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, where he related (as told in Matt Strassler’s book, Waves in an Impossible Sea),
“Shut
yourself up with some friend in the main cabin belowdecks on some large
ship… [and] a person belowdecks on a smoothly sailing ship cannot hope
to determine whether the ship is in motion or, if so, what is its
speed.”
This key insight — that someone in constant motion has no physical
evidence of their motion except by comparing it relative to the outside
world — is the core of the principle of relativity.
What this version of relativity (Galilean relativity) tells us is
that quantities like “position” or “distance,” as well as quantities
like “velocity” or “speed,” are not absolute quantities that everyone
agrees on. If Galileo were on a ship rolling balls and cylinders down a
ramp, and that ship were in motion on the sea, then someone:
on the ship with Galileo,
on a buoy that were stationary relative to the motion of Galileo’s ship,
or on a different ship that were in motion relative to Galileo’s ship,
would all make different measurements for the positions and
speeds of the balls and cylinders rolling down Galileo’s ramp at any and
all moments in time.
However, even though their measurements
would be different from one another’s, no one would be wrong. The
measurements would all be consistent with one another, and — assuming
that all of these ships and observers were in constant, unchanging
(i.e., non-accelerating) motion — they would all reach the same
conclusions about matters like “What is the acceleration due to Earth’s
gravity?” and “How much time passes between the successive stimulation
of the strings along his ramp?” In Galilean relativity, positions and
velocities are all dependent on the motion of the observer, but other
quantities, like the distances between two points, the time between two
events, or the acceleration due to gravity, remain invariant.
Remarkably, despite all the advances that we’ve made in physics in all the time since, including:
the advent of Newton’s law of universal gravitation,
the discovery of electromagnetism,
the advances of special and general relativity,
and the revolution of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory,
Galileo’s 1632 statement about relativity — that all observers
in constant motion (or at rest) experience the same laws and rules
governing reality — remains correct even today. At 392 years (and
counting), it is arguably the oldest physical principle that remains
true, today, in its original, unchanged form.
However, it’s
important to recognize that three major aspects of relativity truly have
changed in all the time since. The first two were discovered in the late 1800s
and put on solid footing by Einstein in 1905: the notion that
“distance” and “time” are not absolute quantities that are universally
agreed upon between observers, but rather these, too, transform
dependent on the relative motion of the observers in question. There are
quantities that observers do universally agree upon — things like the
value of the speed of light and a quantity known as the spacetime (or
Einstein) interval — but things like “lengths” and “durations” are also
relative.
The third — and arguably, most profound — modification that needs to
be made to Galilean relativity is that what we conceive of as
“acceleration” is also not a constant that all observers agree on, but
rather is a downstream consequence of the combined effects of any thrust
or applied force, as well as the curvature of spacetime, which is the
underlying cause of what we experience as gravitation. Distances (or
lengths) and times (or durations) aren’t only affected by the motions of
observers and objects relative to one another, but are also affected
by the curvature of spacetime, which is itself determined by the
distribution of matter and energy throughout the Universe.
One fun
experiment you can do — even as a child — to experience this for
yourself is to jump, from rest, as high as you can, inside of a closed
elevator. If you do this when the elevator is at rest, you’ll reach a
maximum height above the floor, and come down (for most people) after
about 1 second has passed. If you do this when the elevator is moving
down (at a constant speed) or up (at a constant speed), you’ll have the
same exact experience as you did when the elevator was at rest. But if
you instead jump when:
the elevator accelerates upward from rest,
the elevator accelerates downward from rest,
the elevator decelerates toward rest while moving upward,
or the elevator decelerates toward rest while moving downward,
both your maximum height above the floor and the amount of time
you spend in the air will be different. (Be careful not to hit your head
on the top of the elevator if you do this!)
But the original principle of relativity’s core application still
remains. Observers who experience themselves to be at rest on the
surface of the Earth have no way of telling, without making some
reference or measurement to the outside world, whether they are, in
fact, at rest, or whether they’re in constant, uniform
(non-accelerating) motion.
Additionally — and this is not only a
consequence of general relativity, but was Einstein’s original
inspiration for it — if you are experiencing an acceleration (say,
downward), you have no way of detecting whether this acceleration is due
to the thrust of your engines or whether it’s due to the force of
gravity. These two scenarios, illustrated above, led Einstein to
formulate what’s now known as his equivalence principle.
Observers in a closed room on Earth versus observers in an accelerating
rocket in space have no way of telling which situation describes their
experience without looking to the outside world.
Today, we
understand that many of the laws and rules obeyed by the Universe are
unchanged by our positions and motions as we experience it. But the
origin of relativity, and the notion that constant motion and being at
rest are physically indistinguishable scenarios, goes back nearly 400
years. After all these centuries, we should still find ourselves
thanking Galileo.
Foundation says it ‘does not endorse any organizations’ while funneling hundreds of thousands to rightwing causes
A US foundation associated with the oil company Shell
has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious right and
conservative organizations, many of which deny that climate change is a
crisis, tax records reveal.
Fourteen of those groups are on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint proposing radical changes to the federal government, including severely limiting the Environment Protection Agency.
Shell USA Company Foundation
sent $544,010 between 2013 and 2022 to organizations that broadly share
an agenda of building conservative power, including advocating against
LGBTQ+ rights, restricting access to abortions, creating school lesson
plans that downplay climate change and drafting a suite of policies
aimed at overhauling the federal government.
Donees include the Heartland Institute, a longtime purveyor of climate disinformation, which published a video
on YouTube in May stating incorrectly that “the scientific data
continue to show there is no climate crisis”. Other groups that have
received donations include the American Family Association, which claims that the “climate change agenda is an attack on God’s creation”, as well as the Heritage Foundation, the lead organization behind Project 2025.
“Shell
has every reason to want to maintain close relationships with
organizations that wield outsize political influence and just happen to
reliably support the interests of the fossil fuel industry,” said Adrian
Bardon, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University who has
studied the religious right and climate denialism.
The
Shell USA Company Foundation helps employees boost their charitable
giving to non-profits. A Shell USA spokesperson wrote via email that the
company’s workers make the initial decision to donate “to non-profit
(tax exempt) organizations of their choice”.
According to the company’s online donation portal,
Shell will match individual donations up to $7,500. The spokesperson
confirmed that the foundation “matches employee gifts to such qualified
501(c)(3) nonprofit agencies”, but did not respond to specific inquiries
about which organizations, if any, received matching donations from the
foundation.
Tax records from 2022 show that
the president of the foundation was Gretchen Watkins, the current
president of Shell USA. But the foundation itself “does not endorse any
organizations” and “giving is a personal decision not directed by the
company”, the spokesperson added.
Shell is a multinational oil and gas producer headquartered in London that last year reported
adjusted earnings of $28.25bn. Its American subsidiary, Shell USA, has
for decades operated Shell USA Company Foundation, which makes grants to
American non-profits.
Because the foundation itself is a registered
non-profit, it must file public returns each year with the IRS, which
contain detailed information about the organizations to which it
donates. The vast majority of these non-profits have no explicit
political focus. They include YMCAs, youth groups, local churches,
schools and mainstream charities such as Oxfam and United Way.
But
an analysis by the Guardian and DeSmog found at least 21 groups
supported by Shell’s foundation that are aggressively opposed to
progressive cultural and economic change, including addressing the
crisis of global heating.
“They’re all
certainly working in the rightwing policy and propaganda space,” said
Peter Montgomery, research director at the progressive non-profit
organization People for the American Way. “That includes the
anti-regulation corporate right and the culture warriors of the
religious right.”
Since 2013, the Shell
foundation sent $59,264 to the American Family Association, another
Project 2025 adviser and an organization designated
as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center due in part to its
long history of aggressive anti-gay activism. In a post from 2022, the
conservative Christian organization referred to “the unproven hypothesis of man-made, catastrophic climate change”.
Shell’s foundation contributed $23,321 to the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 document known as Mandate for Leadership. The conservative thinktank has deep ties to Donald Trump and a long history of attacking the scientific consensus on climate change. Last year, it published a commentary on its website stating that “climate change models are poor predictors of warming”.
Shell’s foundation also donated $58,002 to Alliance Defending Freedom,
another Project 2025 adviser. It’s a conservative Christian legal
activist group that claims credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade, explaining that its “attorneys and staff were proud to be involved from the very beginning”.
Shell’s foundation also reported donations worth $105,748 to Hillsdale College,
a private conservative Christian school in Michigan that’s listed as an
advisory board member of Project 2025 and that has hosted prominent
climate skeptics.
The American Family
Association, the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and
Hillsdale College did not respond to requests for comment.
The Shell USA Foundation also donated to religious right organizations that aren’t directly involved with Project 2025, including $79,874 to Focus on the Family, an anti-abortion group that’s called
climate change “an unproven theory”. When reached for comment, Gary
Schneeberger, a spokesperson for the organization, wrote: “We consider
it a best practice for our ministry and, in fact, a promise to our
donors that we never share information about their donations with
anyone.”
Another anti-abortion group called Texas Right to Life, which has previously argued that
climate change is “arguably, nonexistent”, received $65,103 from the
foundation. A spokesperson for the group wrote in an email that “the
gifts that came from Shell were matched gifts from its employees”.
Shell’s foundation also sent $8,541 to the Prager University Foundation, which is associated with the rightwing media outlet PragerU. Known for producing conservative videos targeting young people with messages downplaying the climate crisis, its content has been approved for classrooms in several states.
“In
the absence of real transparency, one can only speculate on the motives
behind these donations,” Bardon said. But the contributions help Shell
maintain its place within a broader conservative coalition, he argued.
“So if something comes up that bothers me, it’s going to bother you,
too, because we’re on the same team,” he said.
JD Vance has climbed to his current position as former President
Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a hillbilly,
calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials to
speak for the American working class.
“I grew up as a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”
Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of “abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.”
But there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to Vance’s poverty credentials.
Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers.
In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic
relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation:
His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents
were “hillbillies.”
The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir –
is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in
Ohio’s middle class.
In my forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,”
I detail how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call
“poornography.” Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people for
like-minded readers, this long line of novels, films and plays can end
up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.
Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they
tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed
laziness of poor people.
Yet all these monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by
authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of
the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters whose
source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things up,
recycling stereotypes about poverty.
For example, John Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a
reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of Wrath,”
he relied heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb
– herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant camps
throughout California for the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s boss –
a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the author her notes, without her permission.
Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences,
which was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it
after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004,
when the author was 97 years old. That year, she told the Chicago
Tribune – correctly, I might add – that Steinbeck’s work “isn’t as accurate as mine.”
Then there’s London, whose “The People of the Abyss” is seen as a faithful portrayal of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went “undercover”
to craft a sordid account of England’s urban poor, nonetheless
maintained a comfortable apartment. He kept a stash of money sewed into
his ragged coat and conveniently escaped for a hot bath and a good meal
while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book laden with
put-downs of the English working class, who are cast in eugenicist terms as a degenerate race.
When you look at the books or films created by people who grew up poor, the tone and focus often shift dramatically.
Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that
explore the things that bind all people together: family, love,
politics, complex emotions and sensual memories.
You only have to open Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of Earth” or Justin Torres’ “We the Animals”
to see their protagonists’ appreciation of beauty and ability to
experience profound pleasure – yes, all while experiencing poverty.
Wright recalls how, as a child, he would play in the sewer, where he
would spend hours fashioning all manner of detritus into toys. The young
Smedley loves to stare through a hole in her roof to gaze at the sky.
And Mike Gold, author of “Jews Without Money,” sings a paean to an empty, garbage-strewn lot in his neighborhood that doubled as his beloved playground.
Hillbilly cosplay
Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the
greatest hits of “poornography” – violence, drugs, sex, obscenity and
filth.
But Vance himself was never actually impoverished.
His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother
and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown,
Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a
lucrative pension.”
He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a
conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he
confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying that he is
middle class, working class and poor.
In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a
drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand
theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social
class – or even living in Appalachia.
To Vance, hillbilly-ness becomes kind of a cultural trait, tied to a
family history and identity, not class. His grandmother, he writes, “had
thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty –
emotional if not financial – had followed her.”
Bootstraps redux
In developing his grand theory, Vance takes readers very close to the now-debunked notion of a culture of poverty,
in which the poor are responsible for their situation and their
attitude toward work is passed along from one generation to the next.
A dependence on government handouts, according to the theory,
undergirds this culture. Vance pines for an imagined glorious past of
his slice of America. His neighbors in Middletown had lost – thanks to
the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their neighbors, that
inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me.”
But Vance finds himself in a dilemma: Are these people simply lazy?
Or are they the victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and
eat bad food as they collect welfare or disability checks?
Several times he refers to people who live on welfare as “never
[having] worked a paying job in his life.” He seems to fully buy into
the notion that people are poor because they are lazy freeloaders.
He “solves” the problem with the age-old critique of poor people:
They got there because of “bad choices.” He mentions a friend who
although having a job that paid a steady income nevertheless quit it
because he didn’t like getting up early.
“His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s
made,” he writes, “and his life will improve only through better
decisions.”
No platform, no voice
And so the GOP’s young standard-bearer for the working classes simply repeats the same bootstrap rhetoric that’s been peddled for decades.
But it’s not simply a question about believing a politician or not. That would be a fool’s game.
Rather, the issue here is what I call “representation inequality,” by
which I mean that one identity group – in this case, poor people –
don’t get to represent themselves.
What has happened – whether it’s in politics or in publishing – is something called “elite capture,” in which those with cultural capital and power assume the right to speak for and represent the powerless.
In so doing, dangerous stereotypes and tropes get developed with serious political consequences. Just because you drink Diet Mountain Dew doesn’t mean you do get to speak for those in the mountains.
Our political and educational system elbows out most poor people. First-generation students
– like myself, and like many of my students at the University of
Illinois in Chicago, where I teach – have a harder time staying in
school, have more food insecurity and homelessness, and will often not benefit
from the normal boost education offers. They tend to have a much harder
time ascending the stratified ranks of culture and politics, becoming
the published authors and elected officials who might provide
representational equality.
n July 2024, The New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law professor and author
Amy Chua read an early version of what became “Hillbilly Elegy,” one
that was more geared to an academic audience and grounded in political
theory. She prodded Vance to change his manuscript, telling him that “this grand theory [about America] is not working.”
While it is important to understand the fiscal impact of the promises candidates make on the campaign trail – particularly because they reflect the candidates’ own policy preferences and are not impacted by unexpected external events or the actions of Congress – the fact that both leading candidates have served as President also allows for a comparison of their actual fiscal records. This analysis focuses on the estimated ten-year debt impact of policies approved by Presidents Trump and Biden around the time of enactment.1 In this analysis, we find: • President Trump approved $8.4 trillion of new ten-year borrowing during his full term in office, or $4.8 trillion excluding the CARES Act and other COVID relief. • President Biden, in his first three years and five months in office, approved $4.3 trillion of new ten-year borrowing, or $2.2 trillion excluding the American Rescue Plan. • President Trump approved $8.8 trillion of gross new borrowing and $443 billion of deficit reduction during his full presidential term. • President Biden has so far approved $6.2 trillion of gross new borrowing and $1.9 trillion of deficit reduction
2 In companion analyses, we will show: • Roughly 77 percent of President Trump’s approved ten-year debt came from bipartisan legislation, and 29 percent of the net ten-year debt President Biden has approved thus far came from bipartisan legislation. The rest was from partisan actions. • President Trump approved $2.2 trillion of debt in his first two years in office and $6.2 trillion ($2.6 trillion non-COVID) in his second two years. President Biden approved $4.9 trillion ($2.9 trillion non-COVID) in his first two years in office and has so far approved over $600 billion of net ten-year deficit reduction since. • President Trump approved $5.9 trillion of net spending increases including interest ($2.8 trillion non-COVID) and $2.5 trillion of net tax cuts ($2.0 trillion non-COVID). President Biden has approved $4.3 trillion of net spending increases including interest ($2.3 trillion non-COVID) and roughly $0 of net tax changes ($60 billion revenue increase non-COVID). • Debt held by the public rose by $7.2 trillion during President Trump’s term including $5.9 trillion in the first three years and five months. Debt held by the public has grown by $6.0 trillion during President Biden’s term so far. • President Trump’s executive actions added less than $20 billion to ten-year debt on net. President Biden’s executive actions have added $1.2 trillion to ten-year debt so far. • The President’s budget was on average 39 days late under President Trump and 58 days late under President Biden. Summary Table: Executive Actions & Legislation Approved by Presidents Trump & Biden Policy Ten-Year Debt Impact Partisan/Bipartisan President Trump (January 20, 2017-January 20, 2021) Tax Cuts & Jobs Act +$1.9 trillion Partisan Bipartisan Budget Acts of 2018 & 2019 +$2.1 trillion Bipartisan ACA Tax Delays & Repeals +$539 billion Bipartisan Health Executive Actions +$456 billion Partisan (Executive Action) Other Legislation +$310 billion Bipartisan New & Increased Tariffs -$443 billion Partisan (Executive Action) CARES Act +$1.9 trillion Bipartisan Response & Relief Act +$983 billion Bipartisan Other COVID Relief +$756 billion Bipartisan* Total, Debt Impact Under President Trump +$8.4 trillion Partisan: +$1.9 trillion Bipartisan: +$6.5 trillion President Biden (January 20, 2021-June 21, 2024) Appropriations for FY 2022 & 2023 +$1.4 trillion Bipartisan Honoring Our PACT Act +$520 billion Bipartisan Bipartisan Infrastructure Law +$439 billion Bipartisan Other Legislation +$422 billion Bipartisan Student Debt Actions +$620 billion Partisan (Executive Action) Other Executive Actions +$548 billion Partisan (Executive Action) Fiscal Responsibility Act -$1.5 trillion Bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act -$252 billion Partisan Deficit-Reducing Executive Actions -$129 billion Partisan (Executive Action) American Rescue Plan Act +$2.1 trillion Partisan Total, Debt Impact Under President Biden +$4.3 trillion Partisan: +$3.0 trillion Bipartisan: +$1.3 trillion Note: bipartisan indicates legislation passed with votes from both political parties in either chamber of Congress. *Includes $23 billion of executive actions in the form of student debt payment pauses.
How Much Debt Did President Trump Approve? During his four-year term in office, President Trump approved $8.4 trillion of new ten-year borrowing above prior law, or $4.8 trillion when excluding the bipartisan COVID relief bills and COVID-related executive actions. Looking at all legislation and executive actions with meaningful fiscal impact, the full amount of approved ten-year borrowing includes $8.8 trillion of deficit-increasing laws and actions offset by $443 billion of deficit-reducing actions.2 These estimates are based on scores of legislation and executive actions rather than retrospective estimates. Scores are generally made on a conventional basis, though the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is scored dynamically. The actual debt impact of the policies was likely somewhat higher than these scores. In particular, the TCJA likely reduced revenue more than projected and saved less from repealing the individual health care mandate penalty,3 while the Employee Retention Credit was likely far more expensive than originally estimated
The major actions approved by President Trump (and ten-year impact with interest) include: • The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ($1.9 trillion debt increase) • The Bipartisan Budget Acts of 2018 and 2019 ($2.1 trillion debt increase) • ACA Tax Delays and Repeals ($539 billion debt increase) • Health Executive Actions ($456 billion debt increase) • Other Legislation ($310 billion debt increase) • New and Increased Tariffs ($443 billion debt reduction) • The CARES Act ($1.9 trillion debt increase) • The Response & Relief Act ($983 billion debt increase) • Other COVID Relief ($756 billion debt increase
How Much Debt Has President Biden Approved? Over his first three years and five months in office, President Biden has approved $4.3 trillion of new ten-year borrowing, or $2.2 trillion when excluding the American Rescue Plan Act. This includes $6.2 trillion of deficit-increasing legislation and actions, offset by $1.9 trillion of legislation and actions scored as reducing the deficit. These estimates are based on scores of legislation and executive actions rather than retrospective estimates and do not include preliminary rules, unexecuted “side deals,” or actions ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. Updated scores and in-process actions would increase the total. For example, an updated estimate would likely wipe away the $252 billion of scored savings from the Inflation Reduction Act,4 the informal FRA side deals would reduce its savings by about $500 billion, and the new student debt cancellation plan could cost $250 to $750 billion. Sources: CRFB estimates based on CBO and OMB projections. The major actions approved by President Biden so far (and ten-year impact with interest) include: • Appropriations for FY 2022 and 2023 ($1.4 trillion debt increase) • The Honoring Our PACT Act ($520 billion debt increase) • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ($439 billion debt increase) • Other Legislation ($422 billion debt increase) • Student Debt Actions ($620 billion debt increase) • Other Executive Actions ($548 billion debt increase) • The Fiscal Responsibility Act ($1.5 trillion debt reduction) • The Inflation Reduction Act ($252 billion debt reduction) • Deficit-Reducing Executive Actions ($129 billion debt reduction) • The American Rescue Plan Act ($2.1 trillion debt increase) 4 How Much Debt Has President Biden Approved? Over his first three years and five months in office, President Biden has approved $4.3 trillion of new ten-year borrowing, or $2.2 trillion when excluding the American Rescue Plan Act. This includes $6.2 trillion of deficit-increasing legislation and actions, offset by $1.9 trillion of legislation and actions scored as reducing the deficit. These estimates are based on scores of legislation and executive actions rather than retrospective estimates and do not include preliminary rules, unexecuted “side deals,” or actions ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. Updated scores and in-process actions would increase the total. For example, an updated estimate would likely wipe away the $252 billion of scored savings from the Inflation Reduction Act,4 the informal FRA side deals would reduce its savings by about $500 billion, and the new student debt cancellation plan could cost $250 to $750 billion. Sources: CRFB estimates based on CBO and OMB projections. The major actions approved by President Biden so far (and ten-year impact with interest) include: • Appropriations for FY 2022 and 2023 ($1.4 trillion debt increase) • The Honoring Our PACT Act ($520 billion debt increase) • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ($439 billion debt increase) • Other Legislation ($422 billion debt increase) • Student Debt Actions ($620 billion debt increase) • Other Executive Actions ($548 billion debt increase) • The Fiscal Responsibility Act ($1.5 trillion debt reduction) • The Inflation Reduction Act ($252 billion debt reduction) • Deficit-Reducing Executive Actions ($129 billion debt reduction) • The American Rescue Plan Act ($2.1 trillion debt increase
Conclusion The next presidential term will present significant fiscal challenges. While past performance is not necessarily indicative of future actions, it is helpful to examine the fiscal performance from each President’s time in office for clues as to how they plan to confront these challenges or how high of a priority fiscal responsibility will be on their agendas. Both candidates approved substantial amounts of new borrowing in their first term. President Trump approved $8.4 trillion in borrowing over a decade, while President Biden has approved $4.3 trillion so far in his first three years and five months in office. Of course, accountability also rests with Congress as a co-equal branch of government, which passed legislation constituting the majority of the fiscal impact under both presidents. Some of this borrowing was clearly justified, particularly in the early parts of the COVID-19 pandemic when joblessness was rising rapidly and large parts of the economy were effectively shut down. However, funding classified as COVID relief explains less than half of the borrowing authorized by either President, and arguably, a meaningful portion of this COVID relief was either extraneous, excessive, poorly targeted, or otherwise unnecessary.5 In supplemental analyses, we will compare a number of other aspects of the candidates’ fiscal records. During the next presidential term, the national debt is projected to reach a record share of the economy, interest costs are slated to surge, the debt limit will re-emerge, discretionary spending caps and major tax cuts are scheduled to expire, and major trust funds will be hurtling toward insolvency. Adding trillions more to the national debt will only worsen these challenges, just as both Presidents Trump and Biden did during their terms along with lawmakers in Congress. The country would be better served if the candidates put forward and stuck to plans to reduce the national debt, secure the trust funds, and put the budget on a sustainable long-term path
As
the Earth's rivers warm, salmon must either struggle to survive in a
degraded habitat or move to cooler waters – but native Alaskan fishing
practices are helping protect them.
Ocean
heatwaves have been well documented in recent years. Now, scientists
say river temperatures, too, are soaring – leaving Alaska's world-famous
salmon to navigate increasingly challenging waters as they struggle to
complete their migratory cycle. When circumstances deteriorate,
migrating fish are often forced to keep moving until they find cooler
water. Now, changes in salmon populations are already affecting the
culture and lifestyle of many coastal native tribes, a connection that
goes back thousands of years.
Salmon are anadromous
fish, meaning they spend parts of their lives in different habitats.
Alaska's rivers are home to all five species of Pacific salmon; pink
(humpy), chinook (king), coho (silver), sockeye (red) and chum (dog).
Although there are differences between them, they are all born in
freshwater and spend some time there before heading to the ocean, which
has better resources for them to eat and grow. When ready, they return
to the same stream they were born in, to reproduce and then die.
Salmon
go back to their home river because it usually gives them the best
chance of survival, says Peter Westley, associate professor of fisheries
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "Different rivers have different
factors, like temperature and how much water is in it, and how big the
rocks are – all kinds of stuff. So, the fish that were born there and
survived there have traits that allow them to do well there."
However,
salmon are also very temperature-sensitive and there is growing
evidence that some are veering to cooler habitats. Westley led a
research project that confirmed salmon are increasingly spawning in Arctic rivers,
a region which had previously been too cold. This suggests that at
least some salmon species, in this case chum, could be venturing into
new territory as climate change reshapes their environment. Similarly, a
more recent study
found a significant shift in the migratory patterns of Pacific salmon;
namely a northward movement into the western Canadian Arctic as it gets
warmer.
However,
rising temperatures are affecting salmon species differently across the
regions of Alaska. While some are working their way north, other
populations are severely declining. "In some southern parts of Alaska,
it's getting so warm that salmon are really struggling with heat stress
and are dying," says Westley.
Although
fish can, in theory, find better conditions elsewhere, it doesn't
always happen. "Migrations are costly. If you're going to travel, it
puts you at risk of being eaten by predators and you're burning energy
to swim longer distances. It's difficult for a fish to just go somewhere
else," says Westley. "And if you go too far north, there's not as much
food, so there are real trade-offs for fish that are migrating."
This trend is not endemic to Alaska, and although climate change is
affecting habitats, it is not the only culprit. A 2024 global study by
the World Fish Migration Foundation found an average of 81% decline in migratory freshwater fish populations
between 1970 and 2020. Due to data limitations, the situation might be
even worse. The report states that migratory fishes are
disproportionately threatened, especially those that spend parts of
their life in freshwater, largely due to overfishing, and habitat loss
or degradation.
One
of the places most affected by salmon declines is along the Yukon
River, Alaska's largest watershed which originates in the coastal
mountains of Canada and flows 1,979 miles (3,184km) in a wide arc to the
Bering Sea (where approximately 40% of the US commercial fishery catch comes from).
I look at salmon as my ancestors, my children and grandchildren – Eva Dawn Burk
Eva
Dawn Burk, from the Nenana native village grew up on a fish camp along
the Yukon River with her nomadic family, who subsistence harvest and
commercially fish. In a fish camp, native families put their net or fish
wheel in the rivers, build smokehouses, set up drying racks and process
salmon, a tradition that goes a long way back. Her background was in
engineering, working in oil and gas pipelines, but Burk now specialises
in natural resources and environment. She is trying to reconnect with
their traditional indigenous way of life, and campaigning for food
security and food sovereignty.
Most
villages on the Yukon are only accessible by plane or boat, which
elevates the cost of importing food sources. Salmon is a crucial part of
native people's culture and diet, especially those living along rivers,
and who have depended on wild salmon for thousands of generations.
"You
have so much respect for living beings as a native person. I look at
salmon as my ancestors, and then as my children and grandchildren. The
salmon relatives and my relatives have been living in relation for all
these years," says Burk.
But locals have been facing severe salmon scarcity. "This will be the
fifth year of not fishing," she says. "We had a lot of heat stress in
2019. Salmon were floating up dead in the river and we saw salmon divert
into cooler streams much more downriver. After that, everything was
shut down."
Both
the Kuskokwim River and parts of the Yukon River are under federal
management for salmon. Around 110 out of Alaska's 229 tribes live in the
Arctic Yukon Kuskokwim (AYK) area. "Half of our tribes are in a salmon
crisis right now. People are turning more to beavers, ducks or geese,
moose and other species to supplement their diet," says Burk.
"On
the Yukon, you have tribes who are told they can't take a single fish.
But out in the ocean, these big pollock trawlers are wasting chinook as
bycatch," says Burk. As harvesting salmon on rivers is being banned, Alaskan tribal leaders are coming together to denounce
that industrial trawlers, which throw and drag large nets into the sea,
are intercepting salmon while they are still in the ocean, halting
their migration back to their home rivers.
For Burk, an important part of the problem has been due to mismanagement
of fisheries by the state and the federal government. This year she
joined the North Pacific Fishery Management Council's (NPFMC) Advisory Panel,
hoping to increase Tribes' representation and involvement in the way
fisheries are managed. "We are taking up space and demanding that action
be taken. We're fighting to get stronger trawler restrictions," says
Burk. "This is one of the last wild king salmon runs in the world and
we're trying to protect it."
