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Better Angels is a citizens' organization uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America

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Emma Watson speaks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6XTx2Rg04g)

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As the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the HeForShe IMPACT report offers a timely reflection

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"The Problem We All Live With" (This American Life)

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Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," depicting Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South.

Artwork approved by The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

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Chana Joffe-Walt reports on the Hartford, CT school system, which actively seeks to integrate. The results have been impressive. It used to be that 11% of Hartford students were in integrated schools. Now it's nearly half. But the trick to the whole thing is: convince white families it's in their self- interest to go to integrated schools. This requires the kind of marketing skills and savvy we're more used to seeing at Apple and Pepsi than we are at a public school district. (38 minutes)

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The Problem We All Live With - Part Two - This American Life

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If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these What happens when of a group of public school students in the Bronx goes to visit an elite private school three miles away. The rise and fall of a school maintenance man in Schenectady, New York who terrorized his staff and got away with it for decades.

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (Peggy McIntosh)

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https://trello-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/5860875670e3e1791ce9d0b7/586176fc5feed29e1b353237/f6e408b9680b2415fc2f54c6786ef347/White_Priviledge_Unpacking_the_Invisible_Knapsack.pdf

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"Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011."

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Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.

We can only dream of such an effective system in the UK, which is why we end up paying expensive transport costs to send rubbish to be recycled overseas rather than paying fines to send it to landfill under The Landfill Tax of 1996.

The UK has made strides in the proportion of waste recycled under an EU target of 50 per cent by 2020. This has underpinned hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into recycling facilities and energy recovery plants in the UK, creating many jobs. We're not quite at that target yet. Recycling in the UK peaked at around 45 per cent of all waste in 2014.

Since then, provisional figures from the ONS have shown that figure has dropped to 44 per cent as austerity has resulted in budget cuts. The decision to leave the EU could be about to make this situation worse. While Europe is aiming for a 65 per cent recycling target by 2030, the UK may be about to fall even further behind its green neighbours.

Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.

"Swedish people are quite keen on being out in nature and they are aware of what we need do on nature and environmental issues. We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse," says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management's recycling association.

Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. "That's a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they don't make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel," Ms Gripwell says.

Sweden's 6 hour work day explained

Sweden's heating network is not without its detractors. They argue that the country is dodging real recycling by sending waste to be incinerated. Paper plant managers say that wood fibre can be used up to six times before it becomes dust. If Sweden burns paper before that point it is exhausting the potential for true recycling and replacing used paper with fresh raw material.

Ms Gripwall says the aim in Sweden is still to stop people sending waste to recycling in the first place. A national campaign called the "Miljönär-vänlig" movement has for several years promoted the notion that there is much to be gained through repairing, sharing and reusing.

She describes Sweden's policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. "There's a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden," Ms Gripwall says.

"Hopefully there will be less waste and the waste that has to go to incineration should be incinerated in each country. But to use recycling for heating you have to have district heating or cooling systems, so you have to build the infrastructure for that, and that takes time," she adds.

Swedish municipalities are individually investing in futuristic waste collection techniques, like automated vacuum systems in residential blocks, removing the need for collection transport, and underground container systems that free up road space and get rid of any smells.

In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where. "We need more of a coherent national strategy in England to the collection of recyclable materials, rather than the current approach, whereby it is largely left to individual local authorities to determine their own collection policies," says Angus Evers, partner at Shoosmiths and a convenor of the UK Environmental Law Association's Waste Working Party.

Local authorities will often start by recycling the highest volume materials because they are measured according to the proportion of waste recycled, so bigger items count for more. "Whatever we end up with in the UK, we need a system which collects all recyclable materials rather than cherry-picking the easiest and cheapest," says Richard Hands, chief executive of ACE UK, the drink carton industry's trade association.

Mr Hands points to his own drinks carton industry, which includes Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc and Elopak. Through ACE UK, these brands have driven up carton recycling, more than doubling the number of local authorities collecting cartons from 31 per cent in 2011 to 65 per cent in 2016.

He says that the UK needs to build infrastructure around recycling plants so that it can stop sending waste overseas. Some local authorities already have a "no export" policy to achieve this. "Growing the UK waste industry will create jobs and generate UK-based revenue for the economy," Mr Hands says.

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Angus Evers says a better domestic recycling system should be a part of our strategy for leaving the EU. "The materials we currently export represent a huge drain of valuable resources going out of the UK that could be used in the UK economy to make new products and reduce our imports of raw materials. If we have aspirations to be less dependent on Europe, then we need to be more self-sufficient and recycle more," Mr Evers says.

And what will Sweden do if we stop sending it rubbish to feed its heating system? Ms Gripwall says the Swedes will not freeze - they have biofuels ready to substitute for our exported waste.

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Sweden's recycling is so revolutionary the country has run out of rubbish

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Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.

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The Future of Work (Medium via Oxford University)

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The Future of Work (Medium via Oxford University)

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Technology has always changed employment, but the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence could transform it beyond recognition. Researchers at Oxford are investigating how technology will shape the future of work - and what we can do to ensure everyone benefits.

In a famous 1930 talk, John Maynard Keynes imagined a future 100 years hence in which technological progress automated much of human labour. By 2030, he estimated, we could all enjoy a 15-hour working week.

A lot will need to change in the next decade for that to become a reality, but it's not impossible. Right now, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics promise machines that will take on all kinds of human tasks. Digital communication is creating an internet-dwelling labour force that can work remotely and on demand. And the self-employed are finding that new technological services like Uber and Airbnb can provide a flexible way to make a living. But phenomena like these give rise to a cascade of effects - not all necessarily desirable - that are fiendishly difficult to perceive and predict.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the future of work is a topic of increasing fascination for University of Oxford academics. Both the Oxford Martin School and Green-Templeton College now run specific programmes that focus on the topic, with plenty of researchers - from the Departments of Engineering Science and Sociology to those of Politics and Economics - grappling with its complexity.

'We see a need for bringing together different perspectives around the study of work,' explains Dr Marc Thompson, a Senior Fellow at Saїd Business School and the Director of the Green-Templeton College Future of Work Programme. 'Our role as academics is to contribute to the debate, both in terms of theory and to raise challenging questions and issues for those in government and industry. What will happen as a result of these advances? How will it affect people? Whose interests are being pursued? And what are the long-term implications?'

Rise of the robots

A series of recent studies from the University cut straight to the chase of technology's impact on employment, focusing on how robotics and automation will affect the jobs that humans currently undertake. The authors, Dr Carl Benedikt Frey (@carlbfrey) and Prof Michael Osborne (@maosbot), come from quite different backgrounds: Frey is an economist interested in the transition of industrial nations to digital economies, Osborne an engineer focused on creating machine-learning algorithms. Together, they're co-directors of the Programme on Technology and Employment at the Oxford Martin School.

'It would be fair to ask why I'm doing work related to economics while we're sitting here in the Department of Engineering,' admits Osborne, gesturing to his surroundings. 'But I've always had some interest in thinking about what machine-learning could mean for society beyond the industrial applications we usually consider, so when Carl approached me to speak about algorithms and technologies used in automation, and their effects on employment, it seemed like a natural fit.' This is, of course, exactly the kind of multidisciplinary work the University excels at, and the reason the Oxford Martin School was established. Each of its programmes brings together researchers from different fields to tackle complex global issues that can't be solved by academics from a single discipline.

Since meeting, the pair has set about developing ways to analyse which jobs that exist today could be at risk of being taken over by robots or artificial intelligence software in the next 20 years. First, they gathered together 'as many smart people as [they] could' to decide on 70 job roles that definitely could or could not be automated in the next 20 years. For example, they collectively decided that switchboard operators and dishwashers could definitely be replaced, while the clergy and magistrates certainly couldn't.

The pair combined this list with data from the US Department of Labor's O⋆NET system - a database which describes the different skills relevant to specific occupations. Osborne then built an algorithm that could learn from both pools of data to establish the kinds of skills that were common to automatable jobs. When shown other occupations and the skills they require, the software can classify them with a probability of being either automatable or non-automatable.

The pair found that the jobs least likely to be automated are those that require skills of creative intelligence, social intelligence or physical dexterity. These are what they refer to as engineering bottlenecks: current limits to technology that make humans irreplaceable. Osborne points out that it's perfectly possible, for instance, to have an algorithm churn out an endless sequence of songs, but almost impossible to have it create a hit. Similarly, chat-bots may be able to communicate with you but they can't negotiate a deal, and robots can assemble objects on a well-defined production line, but they can't perform a fiddly task like making a cup of tea in your messy kitchen. In each case, it's because humans draw on a huge wealth of tacit knowledge about culture, emotion, human behaviour and the physical environment that's hard to encode in a way that a machine can act upon.

But, even with those bottlenecks, the results suggest that as many as 47% of US jobs are at risk from automation over the course of the next two decades. It's worth bearing in mind that the figures explain which jobs are theoretically automatable, rather than destined to be automated. 'That may seem like a fiddly point,' says Osborne, 'but this analysis doesn't take into account other factors that we absolutely do believe will have an impact on whether an occupation is taken over by a machine, such as human wage levels, social acceptance, and the creation of new jobs.' But however you look at it, the numbers are difficult to ignore.

No vacancies?

There's an intuitive counter-argument to the claims that their analysis makes: for centuries, new technologies have been invented that have pushed humans out of work, but by and large most of us still continue to have jobs. In fact researchers elsewhere in the University have shown that the amount of work we all perform remains steadfastly consistent, irrespective of technological change.

Jonathan Gershuny, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Time Use Research, has spent a large part of his career tracing the way that we all use our time - to work, play, rest and everything else. 'Fundamentally, there are three realms of activity,' he explained from the bay window of his Woodstock Road office. 'There's paid work, unpaid work and consumption.' Paid work is just that: the tasks we carry out in exchange for money, be it mining coal, writing a book or performing brain surgery. Unpaid work, meanwhile, is formed of tasks that you could pay someone else to do for you (but for whatever reason don't), such as cooking, cleaning, gardening or childcare. And consumption is all the activity you absolutely couldn't pay someone else to do for you - your night's sleep, say, or eating lunch.

'Why am I telling you all this?' asks Gershuny, with a grin. 'Well, when you define work quite widely like this, you arrive at a really quite extraordinary discovery, which is that work time - that is the sum of paid and unpaid work time - doesn't change very much. Looking at all the data we have access to, the total is pretty constant, at about 60 hours per week.' That's just over a third of our 168-hour week, and a little more than the approximately 50-hour chunk we manage to spend sleeping.

He points to decades of evidence accumulated by his team  - in countries including Australia, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and plenty more - that confirm the trend, as well as working time regulations from as far back as the Industrial Revolution. His latest dataset - a huge survey of British residents carried out in 2015 - was being downloaded in full the day we met, but a preliminary analysis already suggested that his observation holds true. 'The truth is, we need work for various reasons: a time structure, a social context, a purpose in life,' he explains. Indeed, what many people citing Keynes' famous talk about the future fail to mention is that he went on to suggest that 'there is no country and no people... who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.' In other words, he thought that most us couldn't really begin to comprehend the reality of not working. Gershuny agrees, arguing that humans will simply endeavour to find new types of work to do in order to busy themselves, whether the robots take over the jobs we currently possess or not.

Dr Ruth Yeoman, a Research Fellow at the Saïd Business School who researches meaningful work in organisations and systems, points out that the human desire to find meaning in work is hard to ignore. She explains that the drive to work is so strong that people seek positive meaning in work that is considered by many people to be dirty, low status or poorly paid. 'Hospital cleaners, for instance, interpret their work to be meaningful and worthwhile because they enlarge the scope of that work in their own minds,' she explains.

'It's not just about cleaning, it's about contributing to making patients well and the hospital welcoming.'

This phenomenon allows humans to justify all kinds of work to themselves as useful and relevant, it seems, regardless of what it actually is.

Frey and Osborne aren't so confident that humans are resourceful enough to create new work for themselves, though. Frey has actually studied the rate at which new jobs are being generated as a result of technological change. His findings suggest that about 8.2% of the US workforce shifted into new types of jobs - that is, roles associated with technological advances - during the 1980s. In the 1990s the figure fell to 4.4% and in the 2000s it dropped to just 0.5%. The evidence suggests that the new industries we might assume to be the salvation of the labour force - such as web design or data science - aren't creating as many new positions as we may hope.

Part of the reason for that, argues Osborne, is that many of the new job roles being created are related to software, rather than hard, physical goods. 'Software is pretty cheap with next to zero marginal cost of reproduction,' he explains. That means that a small group of people can have a great idea and easily turn it into a product that's used the world over, while barely growing the size of its team. The smartphone messaging service WhatsApp is a prime example: it was purchased by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, when it served 700 million users. At the time, it had just 55 employees.

Trouble at the top

Counting specific jobs may, however, be overly simplistic when it comes to thinking about how the working lives of real people are set to change. 'People often think about the work that people do as a monolithic indivisible lump of stuff,' explains Daniel Susskind (@danielsusskind), a Lecturer in Economics at Balliol College and co-author of a new book called The Future of the Professions. 'The problem is, that encourages the view that one day a lawyer will arrive at work to find an algorithm sitting in his chair, or a doctor turn up to a robot in her operating theatre, and their jobs will both be gone.' Instead, he argues, we should be focusing on the separate tasks that make up job roles.

Susskind co-wrote his new book with his father, Richard Susskind (@richardsusskind), whose Oxford DPhil considered the impact of artificial intelligence on law. That was back in the 1980s, when AI systems were rudimentary and typically based on rules gleaned from human understanding. But five years ago father and son - the latter then working in the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street - realised that a second wave of artificial intelligence was being developed that could have profound effects on professional careers. Since, they've been researching how technology might affect the working lives of lawyers, doctors, teachers, architects and the rest of the professions.

'Not everything that a professional does is creative, strategic or complex,' explains Susskind. 'So while many professionals might think that all their work lies on one side of [Frey and Osborne's] engineering bottlenecks, actually many of the tasks they perform are amenable to computerisation.' For most, that means it's unlikely that they'll simply lose their job to technology, at least in the near future - but they can expect to see a significant change in the sorts of things they're asked to do. In their book, the Susskinds describe twelve new roles that might appear within the professions - such as process analysers, knowledge engineers, data scientists and empathisers. 'These are roles that sound unfamiliar to traditional professionals, that require skills and abilities that many of them are unlikely to have at this moment in time,' they explain.

'Many professionals have trained to be a professional in the 20th century, rather than the 21st.'

We're already seeing professionals adapt so that they can work alongside more intelligent technological systems, though. Take, for instance, your bank manager. When you used to approach them for a loan, they'd carefully make a decision on whether or not you were a good risk, then either give you the money or send you home. Now, an algorithm determines whether or not you're awarded the cash, and yet bank managers still exist. The role has simply changed, to become a customer service and sales job rather than an analytical or technical role.

Hollow centre

Not everyone will be as lucky as the professionals whose jobs merely metamorphose, because if all of the tasks that make up a job are automatable, the job no longer needs to exist. Craig Holmes (@CraigPHolmes), a Fellow in Economics at Pembroke College and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, has been studying shifts in occupational structure of labour markets, and how they've moved away from middle-skilled work, with more people now doing high-skilled or low-skilled work. This phenomenon - referred to as the hollowing out of the labour market - isn't in itself new: middle-skilled factory workers have been losing their jobs to robots for decades, for instance.

But the pace of technological development is now threatening other middle-skilled occupations that in the past we've assumed could only be done by humans. Job categories defined as associate professionals, for instance - the people that provide technical services that keep trade, finance and government running - appear increasingly likely to be taken over by machines. 'In the case of, say, paralegals, there are now pieces of software that can sift through thousands of documents, pull out relevant precedents, and put them together using a very simple format, without requiring any human involvement,' explains Holmes. 'So a traditionally middle-tier research job can be perfectly performed by technology.' The same story could play out in other sectors: large datasets of historical case notes and information from wearables could allow computers to make straightforward medical diagnoses, say, while smarter algorithms might remove the work of number-crunching accountants.

Like car factory workers replaced by robots in the past, Holmes imagines a number of possible futures for those discharged from mid-tier roles. Some, like the bank manager, will be able to assume different roles with similar titles. A small number may move upwards into roles that aren't yet automatable. Others, sadly, may have to assume lower-skilled jobs or face unemployment.

The nature of those lower-skilled jobs will of course change too. The work of Frey and Osborne suggests that many low-skilled jobs - such as call centre workers, data entry clerks and dishwashers - will be readily automated in the future. 'In some cases, the cost of technology will be so low that there's no wage that people could happily accept that would make the job sustainable,' admits Holmes. 'In fast food restaurants, for instance, you can replace someone who takes an order with an iPad that will last for years. Nobody would accept a job that paid wages that low.' But it's not perhaps quite so gloomy as that, as personal service jobs will likely still require a human touch. 'We'll probably see an increase in the number of low-skill service jobs, because people value human interaction and many of those jobs currently seem not to be readily automatable,' suggests Holmes. 'That will provide more jobs, they just won't be great jobs.'

A new digital workforce

While technology may be the mechanism through which many jobs are lost, though, it might very well also be the thing that enables people to take up new lower-skilled positions. 'There's been an explosion in connectivity around the world,' explains Professor Mark Graham (@geoplace) from the Oxford Internet Institute. 'Something like 3.5 billion people are now online. And that has some significant repercussions in terms of what work is, where it's done and how it happens.'

Graham has been travelling the world to talk to people who find themselves in a new kind of labour market. In particular, he's been interviewing individuals who perform work from home, provided to them by a slew of websites such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, UpWork, and ClickWorker. These sites all allow companies and individuals to outsource tasks: potential employers simply post a description of what they need doing to a website, then people interested in doing the work bid for it. The employer chooses someone to do the work, based on a combination of price, listed skills and ratings from previous employers; the worker carries out the task, gets paid, then moves on to another piece of work. The tasks being doled out vary - from transcription and translation to new kinds of work such as tagging images for artificial intelligence systems - but much of it is currently difficult or expensive to automate.

Technology has also created legions of new workforce members in more traditional sectors, such as transportation, hospitality, catering, cleaning and delivery. 'There are increasingly more ways of commodifying bits of everyday life: using your car to be an Uber driver; your apartment to be an Airbnb host; your bicycle to be a Deliveroo rider; or your broom to be a Task Rabbit cleaner,' explains Graham. This is what's become known as the 'sharing' or 'gig' economy. Whether it's Uber, Airbnb or Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the business plan is much the same: create a digital platform which makes it easier to link a customer, who wants a service to be performed, with someone who's willing to provide it, for a (very) competitive fee.

These new styles of working certainly bring some benefits: apparent flexibility for workers, more efficient use of existing resources and equipment, and reasonable prices for those seeking services. But, as Jeremias Prassl, an Associate Professor of Law and Fellow of Magdalen College, warns, this new workforce is potentially vulnerable. 'Uber acts like an employer: it sets your wage, tells you the route to drive, hires you, and fires you if your rating falls too low,' he explains. 'Under any classical analysis, Uber performs all the usual employer functions. But in its contracts with "driver-partners", the platform explicitly denies employer status, suggesting that the worker is very much a contractor. Legally, and through the language it uses, Uber tries to deny the fact that it offers employment.' Through so doing, the company is able to avoid paying social security, pension contributions, redundancy pay and so on - all the usual rights an employee might benefit from.

Levelling the field

But Prassl, who's written a book about the topic, points out that these kinds of contracts are nothing new. 'From the perspective of an employment lawyer, zero hours contracts and the gig economy are old problems,' he explains. 'We've been grappling with the rise of so-called "non-standard work" for the last 30 or 40 years. It's just that now they're receiving more attention and sustained media coverage.'

The problem, as Prassl sees it, is that employment law is currently based on an old binary system. If you're an employee you get rights - to, say, sick pay, notice of dismissal or paid holiday. But if you're a contractor, you're not afforded any of those rights. Employment law currently boils down to a simple question: How do you define whether or not someone counts as an employee? 'What my research suggests is that maybe we should turn the problem on its head,' he explains. 'We could say instead: Who's the employer?'

It seems like a subtle difference but, with the shoe on the other foot, he suggests crowd workers would be able to enjoy some kind of employment law protection. In this upended scenario, everyone could benefit from existing minimum standards like the minimum wage, working time regulations and discrimination protection, with their provision accounted for by whoever is legally deemed to be the employer. If companies failed to comply, workers could litigate employers in the knowledge that the damages were definitely owed to them.

It's not just Prassl that's worried about the vulnerability of employees. 'One of the issues is that we confuse work with jobs,' points out Ruth Yeoman. 'There's an awful lot of work in the world that has to be done, and one of the problems when we think about the future of work is how it all gets converted into jobs for which people will be paid. Sometimes people may contribute to society not through paid work, but through some other mechanism: voluntary work, say, or caring.' And while those tasks may be hard work, or may not pay, they are necessary and many of them must be done by humans.

That's why Stuart White (@StuartGWhite), Associate Professor from the Department of Politics and International Relations, is interested in how we could ensure everyone enjoys a basic standard of living - a concept he's written about in the book Democratic Wealth.

'The state could unconditionally pay every citizen an income, independently of their work status,'

he explains. White's suggestion is that no tests of means or willingness to take a job would be imposed, so that everyone in the country received a basic payment every month. It's worth noting that the idea is not intended to make everyone rich - far from it. Instead, it's a means of giving individuals more flexibility, affording them power to decide when and how to be contributive and productive. 'It's a way of ensuring you don't have people desperately scrambling into jobs to make ends meet,' White explains. In turn, he argues, employers would make some of the least appealing jobs more pleasant - they'd be forced to, otherwise nobody would choose to do them.

Numerous mechanisms for putting such a policy into action have been proposed in the past. One option is to divert existing benefits and tax relief into a basic income that's shared equally amongst the population. If those contributions didn't stretch far enough, they could be topped up with revenue from further taxation - from land value tax, suggests White. Alternatively, the income could be provided by a state-owned investment fund from which the returns would be shared out equally. 'There are lots of philosophical arguments about whether or not it's all a good idea,' he concedes. 'But we're moving into a world where there's increased insecurity around work. Against that backdrop, a source of income that's independent of work is a way of rebalancing power relations in the labour market.'

Decision time

Whether or not you agree with the concept of a universal citizen's income or the reform of employment law, these concepts are indicative of the kinds of discussions that Oxford researchers are increasingly leading. 'I think the University needs to be asking these kinds of Aristotlean questions about whose interests are being met, who benefits from the changes... the moral questions,' explains Marc Thompson. 'It's not something we should shy away from.'

Increasingly, then, just as Thompson hoped for when he set up the Green Templeton College Future of Work Programme, Oxford academics are working with business and governments to shape the debate about the future of employment. Frey and Osborne, for instance, have published reports with Citi and Deloitte about the impact of technology on employment; Mark Graham sits on the Department for International Development's Digital Advisory Panel; and Richard Susskind acts as an IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

What remains, of course, is for policymakers, lawyers and industry officials to take the questions and suggestions raised by academics on board, then work out how best to use technological advance in all our favour. 'These possibilities afforded by technology, automation and commodification of labour... they can all be shaped by policy, organisational change and simply choosing to do things differently,' muses Thompson. 'There are some important choices to be made about how we make use of them.'

Technology will make many jobs redundant, others easier, and create at least some new ones along the way. Keynes' prediction of a fifteen-hour working week may even come true. But while humans are in charge, we can still choose for there to be some work that's performed by non-robotic hands. 'It would be very easy for there to be an automated pub where drinks are served from vending machines,' concludes Mark Graham. 'But nobody wants that. Because it would be depressing.'

Credits

Written by Jamie Condliffe, a science and technology writer based in London. He tweets @jme_c.

In keeping with one of the themes of the article we used 99designs to find an illustrator and worked with slouise.

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Produced by Christopher Eddie, Digital Communications Office, University of Oxford.

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Technology has always changed employment, but the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence could transform it beyond recognition. Researchers at Oxford are investigating how technology will shape the future of work - and what we can do to ensure everyone benefits.

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A coast guard captain on a small Greek island is suddenly charged with saving thousands of refugees from drowning at sea.

Note: This documentary short film won a 2016 Peabody Award and was nominated for a 2017 Academy Award.
When I returned home to Greece last fall to make a film about the refugee crisis, I discovered a situation I had never imagined possible. The turquoise sea that surrounds the beautiful Greek island of Lesbos, just 4.1 miles from the Turkish coast, is these days a deadly gantlet, choked with terrified adults and small children on flimsy, dangerous boats. I had never seen people escaping war before, and neither had the island's residents. I couldn't believe there was no support for these families to safely escape whatever conflict had caused them to flee. The scene was haunting.

Regardless of the hardship Greeks have endured from the financial crisis, for a long time my home country has by and large been a peaceful, safe and easy place to live. But now Greece is facing a new crisis, one that threatens to undo years of stability, as we struggle to absorb the thousands of desperate migrants who pour across our borders every day. A peak of nearly 5,000 entered Greece each day last year, mainly fleeing conflicts in the Middle East.

The Greek Coast Guard, especially when I was there, has been completely unprepared to deal with the constant flow of rescues necessary to save refugees from drowning as they attempt to cross to Europe from Turkey. When I was there filming, Lesbos had about 40 local coast guard officers, who before the refugee crisis generally spent their time conducting routine border patrols. Most didn't have CPR training. Their vessels didn't have thermal cameras or any equipment necessary for tremendous emergencies.

Suddenly, the crew was charged with keeping the small bit of water they patrolled from becoming a mass grave. Each day, thousands of refugees crossed the water on tiny, dangerous inflatable rafts. Most of the passengers, sometimes including whoever was operating the boat, had never seen the sea. Often a motor would stall and passengers would be stranded for hours, floating tenuously on a cold, volatile sea. Or the bottom of a dinghy would simply tear away and all the passengers would be cast into the water. The coast guard felt completely abandoned, they told me, as if the world had left them to handle a huge humanitarian crisis - or allow thousands to drown offshore.

I followed a coast guard captain for three weeks as he pulled family after family, child after child, from the ocean and saved their lives. All the ones in this film were shot on a single day, October 28, 2015. Two additional rescues happened that same day but were not included.

The problem is far from over. Many of the refugees come from Syria, where Russia is intensifying bombings that are killing thousands of civilians and devastating Syrian cities. The United States is planning to respond. According to the Greek Coast Guard, thousands of families with children are lining up along Turkish shores to make the unsafe crossing to Greece.

In making this film, I was struck by the fine lines that separate us, the moments when our paths cross fleetingly, and we look at one another for the first time and sometimes for the last. This film shows that crucial moment between life and death, where regardless of political beliefs, fears or preparation, some people will go beyond themselves to save a stranger.

And it raises questions about our collective responsibility - the choices we all make for ourselves, and for others. We don't all confront the refugee crisis with the same immediacy as the coast guard captain portrayed here. But as our world becomes more interconnected, and more violent, we do all face a choice - would we act as he does, to save the life of stranger? Or would we turn away?

Daphne Matziaraki is a Greek documentary filmmaker who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Op-Docs is a forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with creative latitude by independent filmmakers and artists. Learn more about Op-Docs and how to submit to the series.
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Note: This documentary short film won a 2016 Peabody Award and was nominated for a 2017 Academy Award. When I returned home to Greece last fall to make a film about the refugee crisis, I discovered a situation I had never imagined possible.

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Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (Tanya Maria Golash-Boza)

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Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (Tanya Maria Golash-Boza)

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"The United States is deporting more people than ever before. Obama hit an all-time record high of more than 400,000 deportees in 2012. These numbers are unprecedented: In the first five and a half years of his presidency, President Obama deported more than two million people— more than the sum total of all people deported before 1997.
Why are deportations at a record high? Why at this historical moment? Many deportees are people like Eric who have close ties to the United States. The vast majority of deportees are men of color. Why are they the
primary targets?"

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2010 US Census map showing housing segregation

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2010 US Census map showing housing segregation

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Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: " The End of the Segregated Century." U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated--something this incredible map makes clear in vivd color.

The map, created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, is stunningly comprehensive. Drawing on data from the 2010 U.S. Census, it shows one dot per person, color-coded by race. That's 308,745,538 dots in all--around 7 GB of visual data. It isn't the first map to show the country's ethnic distribution, nor is it the first to show every single citizen, but it is the first to do both, making it the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created.

White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown. Since the dots are smaller than pixels at most zoom levels, Cable assigned shades of color based on the multiple dots therein. From a distance, for example, certain neighborhoods will look purple, but zooming-in reveals a finer-grained breakdown of red and blue--or, really, black and white.

"There are a lot of moving parts in this process, so this can cause different shades of color to appear at different zoom levels in really dense areas, like you see in NYC," Cable explains. "I played around with dot size and transparency for a while and settled on the current scheme as being adequate." You can read more about Cable's methodology here, but it comes down to this: When you're dealing with 300 million dots at varying levels of zoom, getting the presentation just right is as much an art as a science.

Looking at the map, every city tells a different story. In California, for example, major cities aren't just diverse, they're integrated to a great degree, too. We see large swaths of Sacramento dotted variously with reds, blues, oranges, greens and browns. Los Angeles is more distinctly clustered, but groups still bleed into one another.

In the Midwest, though, the racial divide can be shockingly exact. In Chicago, bands of whites, blacks, and Latinos radiate out from the city center like sun beams. In St. Louis, a buffer of a few blocks separates a vast area of largely black citizens from another of white and Asian ones. In Detroit, the most segregated city in America according to one recent study, there's no buffer at all. We see how 8 Mile Road serves as the dividing line between two largely homogenous swaths--one predominantly white and one predominantly black.

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The Best Map Ever Made of America's Racial Segregation

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Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: " The End of the Segregated Century." U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated--something this incredible map makes clear in vivd color.

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WFSS Founder Salva Dut gave a moving and inspirational talk at TEDxBeaconStreet in Boston. I Kept Walking tells the true story of Salva's journey as one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, and how his faith, hope and perseverance helped him achieve his goals.

Please watch and share!

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WFSS Founder Salva Dut gave a moving and inspirational talk at TEDxBeaconStreet in Boston. I Kept Walking tells the true story of Salva's journey as one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, and how his faith, hope and perseverance helped him achieve his goals. Please watch and share!

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Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers.

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Greta Thunberg: The Swedish Teen Inspiring Climate Strikes

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Greta Thunberg: The Swedish Teen Inspiring Climate Strikes

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Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke to the BBC in September about her climate strike outside the Swedish parliament.

Since then, she's become a global phenomenon, speaking at the UN and Davos.

Her climate strike has inspired thousands of other young people across the world to carry out similar protests.

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The Swedish teen inspiring climate strikes

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Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke to the BBC in September about her climate strike outside the Swedish parliament. Since then, she's become a global phenomenon, speaking at the UN and Davos. Her climate strike has inspired thousands of other young people across the world to carry out similar protests.

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In Syria, the rainy season begins in November and ends in April. Only a third of the country's farms have irrigation systems; the rest depend on what the season supplies them with, which, even in good years, isn't all that much. The northeasternmost province of Al Hasakah, where much of Syria's wheat is grown, receives an average of about eleven inches of rain a year, which is what New York is likely to get between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

In the winter of 2007, the rainy season never really began. The next year was worse; the country experienced its driest winter on record. Wheat production failed, many small farmers lost their herds, and prices of basic commodities more than doubled. In the summer of 2008, according to a leaked diplomatic cable, Syria's minister of agriculture told officials from the United Nations that the consequences of the drought, both economic and social, were "beyond our capacity as a country to deal with." Meanwhile, Syria's representative to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization warned American officials that the situation was contributing to "a perfect storm" that could undermine the country's stability, and asked for aid. (The Americans, the leaked cable shows, were unmoved by this appeal.) The drought persisted through the following winter and the winter after. Hundreds of thousands of people abandoned the countryside and moved to cities like Homs, Damascus, and Aleppo. There they joined more than a million similarly desperate Iraqi refugees.

On the list of horrors that led to Syria's civil war, it's hard to know how high to place the drought or its destabilizing consequences-the spike in food prices, the internal displacement, the further crowding of already overcrowded cities. Certainly, it ranks below the repressive brutality of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Still, as Secretary of State John Kerry put it recently, in a speech about climate change and national security, it's probably "not a coincidence" that the war was preceded by four years of failed rains. Kerry also observed, "Because the world is so extraordinarily interconnected today-economically, technologically, militarily, in every way imaginable-instability anywhere can be a threat to stability everywhere." This was, explicitly, an allusion to isis, which arose out of the civil war's chaos. Three days after Kerry made these remarks, the attacks in Paris took place.

This week, as the banks of flowers and tributes to the dead continue to grow on the Place de la République, world leaders will gather in Paris to try to reach an accord on climate change. Owing to security concerns, the French government cancelled many of the events that had been planned around the talks, including a rally that was expected to attract two hundred thousand people, and has installed sensors on the city's water supply to guard against a chemical strike while negotiations are in progress.

Officially, the meeting is the twenty-first annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or, in U.N. parlance, COP21. Since previous COPs have, for the most part, ended in failure and bitterness, COP 21 is trying a new approach. Each country has been asked to offer a plan for reducing its own greenhouse-gas emissions; these plans will then be incorporated into a broader framework. As of this writing, a hundred and seventy-five countries have submitted targets. The United States has pledged to reduce its emissions by twenty-six per cent, against a baseline of 2005, while the European Union nations have said they will cut their emissions by forty per cent, against the lower baseline of 1990. China, which is the world's largest emitter, has promised that its carbon output will peak by 2030.

This bring-your-own-plan approach should reduce the chances of a stalemate; still, some major-and potentially deal-breaking-issues need to be resolved by negotiators this week. One of these, which may seem paradoxical, is what to do about the fact that the plans are inadequate. Several independent studies have concluded that, even if every country lives up to its target, warming will far exceed two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This is the limit that many of the same world leaders who are meeting in Paris vowed five years ago not to cross.

Another unresolved issue is money. Developing countries, which, so far at least, have contributed relatively little to climate change, are, in many cases, likely to suffer the worst effects of it. These countries have, collectively, been promised a hundred billion dollars a year to help deal with problems like sea-level rise, and to adopt cleaner energy systems. Only a fraction of that amount has been raised. The Obama Administration has pledged three billion dollars, but, in an effort to muck up the negotiations in Paris from a distance, Senate Republicans have vowed to block any U.S. contribution. "We want to make sure that any of these countries that think they're going to have a check to cash because of an agreement that the president may make in Paris-that they shouldn't cash the check just yet," Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, told Politico.

Which brings us back to Syria. A recent study by researchers at Loyola Marymount University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that unabated warming would render Persian Gulf cities like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Dhahran virtually unlivable in a matter of decades. "A plausible analogy of future climate for many locations in Southwest Asia is the current climate of the desert of Northern Afar on the African side of the Red Sea, a region with no permanent human settlements," the researchers wrote.

One of the most robust predictions that can be made about climate change is that it will send millions-perhaps tens or hundreds of millions-of people in search of new homes. And, in an "extraordinarily interconnected" world, disaster cannot be cordoned off. By mid-century, which, in the scheme of things, is not very long from now, the Syrian-refugee crisis is likely to seem routine. Rather than playing games with the federal budget, security-minded Republicans should be doing everything they can to insure that Paris succeeds. ♦

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In Syria, the rainy season begins in November and ends in April. Only a third of the country's farms have irrigation systems; the rest depend on what the season supplies them with, which, even in good years, isn't all that much.

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Universal Basic Income Explained – Free Money for Everybody? UBI

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""NYC Charges Ahead With its Own Green New Deal" (Huff Post)

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""NYC Charges Ahead With its Own Green New Deal" (Huff Post)

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New York City is gearing up to enact its own version of the Green New Deal with a suite of bills that aim to dramatically slash the city's planet-warming emissions, create thousands of blue-collar jobs and set the stage for future state and federal climate policies.

The City Council on Thursday plans to announce the Climate Mobilization Act, a package that includes six p ieces of legislation grouped in an omnibus bill to be voted on by Earth Day, April 22. It's the first of what's expected to be at least two waves of climate-focused legislation this year.

"This is about saving New York City," Councilman Costa Constantinides, the Queens Democrat leading the effort, said in an interview at his office in his native Astoria, a densely populated immigrant neighborhood choked by car and power plant pollution and bordered by water on two sides. "This is saving the city as we know it."

If passed, the bill would likely be the largest single legislative mandate to cut climate pollution by any city in the world. The legislation, by one estimate, would create a demand for more than 3,600 jobs construction jobs per year and another 4,400 jobs in maintenance, services and operations, fueled by the sheer magnitude of the investment required to meet the emissions goals.

The full Climate Mobilization Act package goes further. One bill orders the city to Another require certain The complete a study over the next two years on the feasibility of closing all 24 oil- and gas-burning power plants in city limits and replacing them with renewables and batteries. Two more establishes a renewable energy loan program. buildings to cover roofs with plants, solar panels, small wind turbines or a mix of the three. last in this initial bunch tweaks the city's building code to make it easier to build wind turbines.

The second round is expected to include a bill creating a new city agency to direct and oversee New York's adaptation efforts, and a bill mandating all-electric school buses.

It's the kind of unsexy, technical policymaking to which municipalities ― even those with a gross domestic product big enough to rank among the world's 20 largest economies ― are limited. The state controls New York City's rent laws, public transit system and drinking water regulations. Most of the city's electricity is generated in the suburbs north of the Bronx. New York City's borders don't reflect its actual cultural and economic barriers: The metropolitan area sprawls from New Jersey up through Connecticut, meaning major infrastructure projects require the kind of interstate coordination that hinges on federal support.

On those fronts, there's change afoot. The state budget passed last week included a ban on single-use plastic bags, congestion pricing to reduce automobile traffic and raise money for mass transit improvements, and $500 million for water infrastructure. The state legislature in Albany is set to vote by the summer on the Climate and Communities Protection Act, a historic measure mandating 100% clean electricity and a completely carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

A new cadre of left-wing Democrats in Washington, led in part by New York's own Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), is pushing for a national Green New Deal that would ramp up clean energy development, bolster electric vehicle manufacturing and guarantee high-wage jobs raising roads, rebuilding bridges and doing the kind of energy-efficiency work the city's legislation calls for.

"It really is the beginning of a Green New Deal for New York City," said Pete Sikora, a senior adviser to the housing and climate justice advocacy group New York Communities for Change. "It's not everything, but it's a transformative package."

No Corporate Carve-Outs

The Climate Mobilization Act is already facing fierce backlash, particularly from the powerful real estate lobby that dominates politics in the Big Apple.

As it was, the building emissions bill puts pressure on landlords that they won't find in any other major metropolis where spaces in glimmering, energy-hungry towers are popular assets for the globetrotting private-jet set. No other city in the world has yet enacted such a policy. Tokyo operates a limited cap-and-trade scheme that allows big buildings to buy and sell pollution permits, but the policy doesn't require the kind of abrupt and rapid investments mandated in the New York City bill.

Outright challenging the basis of the bill was never an option. The legislation came from an agreement last August brokered by the nonprofit Urban Green Council between the city's real estate lobby and grassroots activists that set out a framework for cutting building emissions 80% by the middle of the century. To meet the goal, the agreement outlined a road map for requiring landlords to retrofit old buildings with energy-efficient technologies.

An early draft of the legislation nixed proposals to give extra leeway to New York's dwindling stock of roughly 990,000 rent-regulated apartments. But the final version unveiled in November surprised activists by not only creating a loophole for rent-regulated units but also going beyond the original Urban Green Council framework to call for cuts to be made roughly twice as fast.

If New York City can do it in the complicated city that we're living in, anyone else should be able to do it. New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson

The Greater New York Hospital Association called the original 2022 start date "extremely problematic" and an "arbitrary timeline" for facilities like those it represents, which stay open 24/7 and require constant lighting and power. The New York League of Conservation Voters complained that the loophole for rent-regulated buildings risked excluding New Yorkers "who would benefit the most" from retrofits.

The final bill pushed the start date back two years and preserved the exemption. For buildings that house even one rent-regulated apartment, this gives them a pass to make modest energy efficiency upgrades that wouldn't meet the threshold of what's known under state law as a major capital improvement, which could be legally passed on to tenants in the form of a rent hike of up to 6% a year.

But asked if the legislation would include the loopholes the industry groups requested, New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said bluntly: "There are no exemptions."

The Climate Mobilization Act's power plant measure is less controversial. The proposal only requires the city to conduct a feasibility study on how, if at all, it could meet electricity demands with solar or wind generation paired with batteries. The bill would affect the 24 plants that ring the city and start burning fuel oil or natural gas when power demands exceed the supply that comes in from gas, nuclear and hydro dam plants outside the city. That's stoking some concern among energy buyers who already worry about how the city will meet demands once the Indian Point Energy Center nuclear plant in the northern Westchester suburbs closes.

Expanding the bill's mandate to include buildings smaller than 25,000 square feet will be a significant next challenge.That type of regulation requires considerably more nuance and a delicate approach to sidestep the potential for rent increases or overly burdensome requirements on mom-and-pop property owners.

Future legislation could take on loftier goals. There's a plan, promoted by the environmental justice group UPROSE, to open a manufacturing hub for wind energy equipment on the rapidly gentrifying industrial waterfront of Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. Then there's Constantinides' proposal to close the notorious prison on Rikers Island, in the East River just north of his district, and convert the 413-acre facility into a solar farm and water treatment plant.

What's missing from the bill is notable. The legislation doesn't set a 100% renewable energy target for New York City beyond the existing rules for city-owned buildings ― something the Big Apple is likely to face greater pressure to do since the Chicago City Council voted Wednesday to adopt such a measure. Nor does the bill set policies to deal with the effects of climate change already baked in, such as potentially catastrophic sea-level rise by the end of the century. Manhattan, largely an elevated island of solid bedrock, faces less of a threat than the outer boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn, situated on a porous glacial moraine.

Yet emissions reduction plans are "just less disruptive" than new zoning laws and potential rules barring construction in low-lying waterfront areas, said John Englander, an oceanographer and president of the International Sea Level Rise Institute.

"It's good to reduce emissions," he said. "But you've got to break this thinking that New York City going to zero emissions will slow sea-level rise."

If You Can Make It In New York...

Like much of climate policy, the ultimate test of the Climate Mobilization Act is whether it will influence what happens on the national and global levels.

But New York City isn't the only place charging ahead in the Trump era, when many still debate mounting evidence that shows the planet headed toward cataclysmic average temperatures.

In Los Angeles, the City Council passed a motion requiring the nation's second-largest city to draft a Green New Deal plan to match the resolution Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced in February. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of cities pledging to generate all their electricity from renewables . At least 13 states have passed or are considering setting 100% clean-electricity targets, according to a last month by the consultancy EQ Research.

The Green New Deal movement is animating local elections, too. Adrian Rivera-Reyes, a 26-year-old biologist and socialist running to be Philadelphia's first openly gay councilman, a "municipal Green New Deal a cornerstone" of his campaign. In Seattle, Shaun Scott, another socialist running for city council, published an last month declaring, "It's Time for Seattle's Green New Deal."

"If New York City can do it in the complicated city that we're living in, anyone else should be able to do it," Johnson said.

It's easy rhetoric to latch on to. As a concept, the Green New Deal is the only proposal that matches the scope of a climate crisis Americans are increasingly worried about, as hurricanes, wildfires and flooding routinely set records. The slogan is catchy and resonant, harking back to Great Depression-era programs that built much of the nation's grandest infrastructure and created safeguards against abject poverty. The policy goals attributed to the Green New Deal are overwhelmingly popular, with one poll in December finding support from 81% of voters, including 64% of Republicans and 57% of conservative Republicans.

But it's not yet policy. The resolution Ocasio-Cortez and Markey released in February was a statement of purpose, outlining the core tenets of what future Green New Deal legislation should include. The document was more politics than policy. It included what critics called a wish list of progressive reforms that its authors reckon could appeal to enough disparate, downtrodden demographics to build a mass movement of working-class voters, energized enough to counter opposition from deep-pocket industries with the most to lose from decarbonization, such as oil, gas and coal companies.

But the resolution sketched out a clear enough picture of a Green New Deal to give municipal lawmakers a sense of what to plan for.

In that sense, New York City's Climate Mobilization Act fits the mold, said Greg Carlock, the architect of the Green New Deal blueprint that the think tank Data for Progress published last year.

"It is the responsibility of city councils and leadership to figure out what authority they have and what resources they have to start their share of the mobilization," Carlock said. "It sounds like this legislation in New York City is precisely that."

A progressive approach to climate change in New York is likely to ripple far beyond the five boroughs.

Last month, the mayor, who is flirting with a run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, announced his most ambitious climate proposal yet, a $10 billion plan to add two city blocks' worth of land to lower Manhattan and create a flood zone protecting the physical epicenter of global finance.

That's "a laudable and important goal," said Constantinides.

"My son is nine right now; he's going to be an adult in 2050, when all this is going on. God willing he lives to the nice, old age of 90 or above, he'll ring in 2100," Constantinides said. "We can't let it be 'Hunger Games' or 'Mad Max.'"

BEFORE YOU GO

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New York City Charges Ahead With Its Own Green New Deal

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New York City is gearing up to enact its own version of the Green New Deal with a suite of bills that aim to dramatically slash the city's planet-warming emissions, create thousands of blue-collar jobs and set the stage for future state and federal climate policies.

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Hot and cold dishes at Beit El Qamar near Beirut, Lebanon. Credit Credit Ieva Saudargaité for The New York Times

Hot and cold dishes at Beit El Qamar near Beirut, Lebanon. Credit Credit Ieva Saudargaité for The New York Times

Can I eat well without wrecking the planet? As a climate reporter and personal chef to a growing, ravenous child, I think about this question a lot. Is there a cuisine somewhere in the world that is healthy both for us and for the planet we live on? And if one exists, would we even want to eat it?

Turns out, there is no magic cuisine to save our species. There are, however, many ways to eat sustainably. They're built into many traditional cuisines around the world, and we can learn from them.

In any case, we don't have much choice. To avert the most severe effects of climate change, scientists say, we have to very quickly transform the way we eat. Food production accounts for somewhere between 21 and 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how you slice the data; food waste accounts for an additional 8 percent, considering that worldwide, we waste a third of the food we produce. Also, with climate change turbocharging droughts and storms, there are new risks to food security for the 800 million people worldwide who don't have enough to eat.

Eating well doesn't have to mean eating weirdly, or depriving ourselves, or even breaking the bank. Here are five simple ideas to guide you, whether you're eating out or cooking at home.

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Pho with beef at a breakfast restaurant in Hanoi, Vietnam. Credit Kham/Reuters

Pho, the hearty Vietnamese noodle soup, I discovered on a recent reporting trip to Hanoi, can deliver happiness at breakfast, lunch and dinner. At mealtimes, I scanned the streets and headed over to what looked to be the most popular pho stand, took the first free plastic stool and waited for the chef, usually an enterprising woman seated on an identical plastic stool, to assemble my bowl.

The soul of pho is the broth, and the genius of the broth is that a bit of meat, not even the best meat, goes a long way. I like the beef version, made with bones, tendon, a bit of brisket, and simmered for three hours or more with charred onions, ginger, the spices of the tropics and the essence of all Vietnamese cooking, fish sauce. Chicken works fine, too, and I've even had a vegetarian version, which, I admit, was surprisingly delicious.

For me, the lesson of pho is a lesson embodied in many traditional cuisines. Meat can discreetly be the star of the meal. It can be used in small quantities to enrich grains and vegetables.

No question, some of us must eat less meat. North Americans eat six times more red meat than they should, according to a recent report published in the medical journal The Lancet. Its authors recommend that we instead fill most of our plates with fruits, nuts, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. They did not suggest that humanity forgo all flesh.

Legumes are a universe unto themselves: from fava in the Middle East to flor de mayo in Mexico, cowpeas in Ghana to mung beans in Bangladesh. I've eaten them on five continents.

Nowhere have I eaten legumes in as many avatars as I have in India. Pigeon peas become breakfast pancakes known as dosa. Chickpea flour, steamed and topped with oil-popped mustard seeds, turns into a fluffy yellow dhokla. Mung beans are repurposed into sweet halwa, swollen with ghee and cardamom.

And then there's dal, the savory lentil stew without which no Indian meal is complete. The nature of the dal depends entirely on who's cooking it, where and in which season. It can be made from any of the vast variety of legumes that grow in the region. It can be flavored with green mango or goat, coconut or tomato, even a fish head, which my mother swore would make me smarter. (I refused to eat it.)

Make me your dal and I'll tell you who you are.

Lentils and beans are high in protein and fiber, low in fat. They are good for the planet, too. The Food and Agriculture Organization calls them " climate smart " because they can adapt to rough weather, restore degraded soils and even make cattle feed more digestible.

Alejandra Schrader, a chef based in Los Angeles, grew up on shellfish in Venezuela. She remembers a seafood cocktail sold near the beach: steamed plates of mussels and clams, sometimes oysters, soaked with lime and herbs. Levanta muertos, people would call it, roughly, "the resurrector," because its iron could help revive you after a night of hard drinking.

Then, there was her mother's thrifty paella. The Spanish version - which has mussels and clams but also needs rabbit, a short-grain rice called bomba and a special pan - is often too luxurious for many of us.

But her mom's version required just going to the beach with a plastic bucket and digging for clams in the sand. At home, her mother cooked a sofrito of onion, garlic and sweet pepper, added some cooking wine, if there was any in the house, and then folded in the clams and a bowl of leftover white rice, which was always in the fridge. No special pans were needed. No fancy ingredients.

"To me it's very comforting." Ms. Schrader said. "You add a little cilantro or top it with some avocado, and it's a really great meal."

Bivalves like mussels, clams and scallops are a healthy protein, as long as they come from clean waters. That's important because they filter the waters in which they grow. But, because they are filter feeders, slurping up phytoplankton, they need only a tiny piece of the ecosystem to produce their protein.

"It's the closest thing you have to a free lunch, from an animal protein perspective," said Richard Waite, who specializes in agriculture at the World Resources Institute, a research and advocacy group based in Washington.

Every spring, Devon Mihesuah, a professor of indigenous history and culture at the University of Kansas, prepares salads of dandelions from her garden and collects wild onions that grow in the fields. When the frost lifts, she puts gourds and peppers into the ground. She does not spray chemicals to get rid of what others would consider weeds, she says, because bees need them to pollinate.

Those habits are grounded in the culinary tradition of indigenous people. Eating local is part of that tradition, but it's not everything. Often it means treating food as medicine. Always, it means eating in such a way that doesn't pollute the place where the food is grown. And not eating all of it.

That's why Dr. Mihesuah, a member of the Choctaw nation and editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays on indigenous eating, is wary of recommending specific foods. She worries that some could become trendy and then be depleted through overconsumption.

"It's a real respect for your resources," Dr. Mihesuah said. "You don't take all of it. You don't pull things out by root."

An example of this principle is the revival of bison, a traditional source of protein for Native people in the Midwest.

Bison have started to make a comeback in the region, replacing cattle, which were brought by European settlers. With them, wild turnips and sage have returned to the land, said Mark Tilsen, co-founder of a snack bar company, called Tanka, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Many more songbirds are around, and the Lakota people who live there have their traditional source of meat once more. The Tanka Bar is a modern version of a traditional Native snack, made of smoked meat and preserved with tart fruits.

It was a Sunday morning and the kitchen at Beit El Qamar, in the hills above Beirut, was a bright, busy enterprise. Herbs had been picked from the garden out back. Pots were simmering on the stove. Chickpeas were folded into an earthen bowl of yogurt and tahini.

By midday, as my family and I sat on the terrace, small plates of many things appeared on the tables all around. There were cold and hot foods, blended and whole, a spectrum of colors from every part of the landscape. There was sheep cheese, grilled or plain, tabbouleh heavy in mint, walnuts puréed with red peppers, dandelions sautéed with onions, and, for dipping, a bowl of olive oil with crushed thyme and sesame.

It was all there. Grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. There was meat, too. But, as in pho, it didn't dominate. It hid in the heart of a fried kibbe: ground, spiced lamb cocooned in bulgur.

It was a meal meant to be eaten with others, to be passed around and discussed. A meal designed to slow me down, even if just for an afternoon.

I tell you about this meal because it embodies the final and most basic principle of eating well, both for our health and the health of the planet: eating together.

Sharing a meal can be a good way to avoid waste and overconsumption. There's usually someone in the group who will pop the last piece of cheese into her mouth (my kid), or scrape the last bits of kibbe from the plate (me).

Not least, eating together makes eating more pleasurable.

Brazil is nudging its people in that direction. Its national dietary guidelines offer not just tips on what to eat, but also how to eat.

"Eat regularly and carefully in appropriate environments and, whenever possible, in company," they suggest. "Plan your time to make food and eating important in your life."

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a World Resources Institute agriculture expert. He is Richard Waite, not Waites.

Somini Sengupta covers international climate issues and is the author of "The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young." @SominiSengupta * Facebook

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These Five Cuisines Are Easier on the Planet

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Hot and cold dishes at Beit El Qamar near Beirut, Lebanon. Credit Credit Ieva Saudargaité for The New York Times Can I eat well without wrecking the planet? As a climate reporter and personal chef to a growing, ravenous child, I think about this question a lot.

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Together we are building a strong global community that's ready to take action to help end extreme poverty

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Yes. The world's food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat - beef, chicken, fish, milk, lentils, kale, corn and more - as well as processing, packaging and shipping food to markets all over the world. If you eat food, you're part of this system.

How exactly does food contribute to global warming?

Lots of ways. Here are four of the biggest: When forests are cleared to make room for farms and livestock - this happens on a daily basis in some parts of the world - large stores of carbon are released into the atmosphere, which heats up the planet. When cows, sheep and goats digest their food, they burp up methane, another potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Animal manure and rice paddies are also big methane sources. Finally, fossil fuels are used to operate farm machinery, make fertilizer and ship food around the globe, all of which generate emissions.

Meat and dairy, particularly from cows, have an outsize impact, with livestock accounting for around 14.5 percent of the world's greenhouse gases each year. That's roughly the same amount as the emissions from all the cars, trucks, airplanes and ships combined in the world today.

In general, beef and lamb have the biggest climate footprint per gram of protein, while plant-based foods tend to have the smallest impact. Pork and chicken are somewhere in the middle. A major study published last year in the journal Science calculated the average greenhouse gas emissions associated with different foods.

Holy Cow!

The average greenhouse gas impact (in kilograms of CO ₂) of getting 50 grams of protein from:

Now, these are only averages. Beef raised in the United States generally produces fewer emissions than beef raised in Brazil or Argentina. Certain cheeses can have a larger greenhouse gas impact than a lamb chop. And some experts think these numbers may actually underestimate the impact of deforestation associated with farming and ranching.

But most studies agree with this general hierarchy: Plant-based foods usually have a lower impact than meat, and beef and lamb tend to be the worst offenders by a considerable margin.

Consuming less red meat and dairy will typically have the biggest impact for most people in wealthy countries. That doesn't necessarily mean going vegan. You might just eat less of the foods with the biggest climate footprints, like beef, lamb and cheese. If you're looking for substitutes, pork, chicken, eggs and mollusks have a smaller footprint. But plant-based foods like beans, pulses, grains and soy tend to be the most climate-friendly options of all.

How much would changing my diet actually help?

It varies from person to person. But a number of studies have concluded that people who currently eat a meat-heavy diet - including much of the population of the United States and Europe - could shrink their food-related footprint by one-third or more by moving to a vegetarian diet. Giving up dairy would reduce those emissions even further.

If you don't want to go that far, there are still ways to shrink your individual footprint. Just eating less meat and dairy, and more plants, can reduce emissions. Cutting back on red meat in particular can make a surprisingly large difference: According to a World Resources Institute analysis, if the average American replaced a third of the beef he or she eats with pork, poultry or legumes, his or her food-related emissions would still fall by around 13 percent.

Keep in mind that food consumption is often only a small fraction of a person's total carbon footprint: There's also driving, flying and home energy use to consider. But dietary changes are often one of the quickest ways for many people to lighten their impact on the planet.

I'm just one person! Can I really make a difference all by myself?

It's true that one person alone can make only a tiny dent in the global climate problem. It's just a really huge problem that requires large-scale action and policy changes to address. And food isn't even the biggest contributor to global warming; most of it is caused by burning fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and industry.

On the other hand, if many people collectively made changes to their diets, that could start to add up.

Scientists have warned that we'll need to slim down agriculture's climate impact in the years ahead if we want to get global warming under control, particularly as the world's population keeps growing. For that to happen, farmers and ranchers will need to find ways to curb their emissions and become much more efficient, growing more food on less land to limit deforestation. But experts have also argued that it would make a big difference if the world's heaviest meat eaters scaled back even moderately, helping to free up land to feed everyone else.

Think about it this way: It's often more efficient to grow crops for humans to eat than it is to grow crops for animals to eat and then turn those animals into food for humans. One recent study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that, on average, it takes about three pounds of grain to raise one pound of meat.

That's not the whole story. In their defense, cows, chickens and pigs often eat a lot of things that humans wouldn't otherwise eat, like grasses or crop residues. And meat can be rich in key nutrients like protein and iron. But, in general, it takes more land, energy and water to produce a pound of animal protein than it does to produce a pound of plant protein.

Beef and lamb have an especially large climate footprint for another reason: The stomachs of cows and sheep contain bacteria that help them digest grass and other foods. But those bacteria create methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that is then released through burps (and a bit of flatulence).

Does it matter how the cows are raised?

Yes. Many cattle in the United States are raised on existing pasture that wouldn't otherwise be used, but it's a different story in places like Bolivia and Brazil, one of the world's largest beef exporters. There, millions of acres of rain forest have been burned to make space for meat production.

Studies have found that, as a result, beef from Brazil can have 10 times or more the climate impact of beef from the United States. Even within the United States, there can be significant variation in the carbon footprint of cattle herds, depending on factors like local climate conditions and how they're raised. Unfortunately, for this kind of information to be useful for consumers, we would need much more detailed labeling than exists today.

What about grass-fed beef?

In the United States, most cattle spend their first year on pastures eating grass, after which they are typically moved to a feedlot, where they are fattened up with grain. By contrast, "grass-fed" or "grass-finished" cattle keep grazing on grass until they are slaughtered.

Some scientists have suggested that grass-finished beef, if managed properly, can be a more sustainable option: As the cattle graze, they stimulate grass to grow deep roots and pull more carbon into the soil, helping to offset the cows' climate impact. But, on the flip side, grass-finished cattle also take longer to reach slaughter weight, which means they spend more time burping up methane into the atmosphere. Because of this, some studies have suggested that grass-fed beef can actually be worse for the climate over all, though the debate about this continues to rage.

For now, it's hard to say with confidence that grass-fed beef is consistently more climate-friendly than conventional beef.

What about chicken?

A number of studies have found that chicken and other poultry have a lesser climate impact than other livestock. Modern-day chickens are bred to be extremely efficient at converting feed into meat. That's not to say chicken is perfect: Industrial-scale poultry operations still create water pollution, and have prompted major concerns about animal welfare. But if you're solely focused on climate change, chicken usually produces far fewer emissions than beef and a bit fewer than pork.

Not necessarily. A number of experts have argued that a sustainable food system can and should still include plenty of animals. Cows and other livestock, after all, can often be raised on pasture that would otherwise be unsuitable for growing crops, and they eat crop residues that would otherwise go to waste. They produce manure that we can use as fertilizer. And animal agriculture provides livelihoods for some 1.3 billion people worldwide. In many countries, meat, eggs and milk offer a vital source of nutrition when there aren't good alternatives available.

That said, there are also millions of people around the world - in places like the United States, Europe and Australia - who currently eat far more meat than they need to for a healthy diet, according to a recent report in the medical journal The Lancet. And if we want to feed a growing population without adding to global warming or putting increased pressure on the world's forests, it would make a difference if the heaviest meat eaters cut back.

What about 'fake meat'?

New plant-based meat substitutes, like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat products, are increasingly showing up in supermarkets and even fast-food chains. Made from vegetables, starches, oils and synthesized proteins, these products attempt to mimic the taste and texture of meat more closely than traditional substitutes like tofu and seitan.

While the jury is still out on whether these products are any healthier, they do appear to have a smaller environmental footprint: One recent study estimated that a Beyond Burger had just one-tenth the climate impact of a beef burger.

In the future, researchers may be able to "grow" real meat from animal cell cultures - work is continuing on this front. But it's too early to say how helpful this will be from a climate perspective, not least because it could take a lot of energy to produce cell-cultured meat.

Are there other ways meat could become more climate-friendly?

Yes. If meat production around the world were to become more efficient, farmers and ranchers would be able to feed more people while reducing their emissions.

This is already happening in many places: The United States, for example, produces more beef today than it did in 1975 even though the total number of cattle has declined by about one-third. Advances in animal breeding, veterinary care, feed quality and grazing systems are already helping to shrink the climate footprint of livestock operations around the world, and there's a lot of room for further improvement. Some scientists are even trying to figure out how to get cows to emit less methane by introducing seaweed or other feed additives to their diet.

Since it's unlikely that the whole world is going to go vegetarian anytime soon, these efforts will be critical for putting meat production on a more sustainable footing.

Wild fish often have a relatively small climate footprint, with the main source of emissions being the fuel burned by fishing boats. One recent analysis found that a number of popular wild fish - anchovies, sardines, herring, tuna, pollock, cod, haddock - have, on average, a lower carbon footprint than chicken or pork. Mollusks like clams, oysters and scallops are also great low-carbon choices. ( We have dozens of good recipe options for you here.)

On the other hand, wild shrimp and lobster can have a larger impact than chicken or pork, because pulling them in demands extra fuel for the fishing boats.

There is a huge caveat to all wild seafood, though: At this point, the world is already catching about as much as it possibly can - most fisheries are being fished at their maximum sustainable level, while others are being overexploited. So there's not a ton of room for everyone in the world to increase their wild fish consumption. For now, you can check with science-based sources like Seafood Watch to see if the fish you buy is being harvested sustainably.

YOU RANK IT Rank these seafood options in order from highest climate impact to lowest.

How do I know whether a farmed fish is good or bad?

There are a number of groups, like the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and Friend of the Sea, that are starting to certify fish farms that adhere to environmental standards. That can be a good starting point. But a word of caution: Critics have warned that these labels still aren't perfect and often don't account for the full climate impacts of farmed seafood.

One recent study found some general trends in farmed seafood: Farmed mollusks (oysters, mussels, scallops) tend to be protein options with some of the lowest emissions around. That study also found that farmed salmon is, on average, lower impact than chicken or pork. On the other hand, farms for catfish and shrimp often require a large amount of energy to recirculate water and can sometimes have a larger climate footprint than even beef. But there's a lot of variation from farm to farm.

So what's the single best choice I can make about seafood?

You could incorporate more mollusks into your diet. Most Americans don't often eat them at home, but mussels, clams and scallops are familiar, succulent and easier to cook than you might think. We have recipes for you right here.

As for farmed or wild fish, they can often be a good low-carbon option, but it's a good idea to check first whether a product is certified as sustainable.

A number of studies have found that milk typically has a smaller climate footprint than chicken, eggs or pork per pound. Yogurt, cottage cheese and cream cheese are similar to milk.

But many other types of cheese, such as Cheddar or mozzarella, can have a significantly bigger footprint than chicken or pork, since it typically takes about 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese.

Wait - cheese might be worse than chicken?

It depends on the cheese. But broadly speaking, yes, if you decide to go vegetarian by, say, eating cheese instead of chicken, your carbon footprint might not fall as much as you expect.

Are some kinds of milk better than others? I pay a lot more for organic milk.

The short answer is that you can't count on organic milk being better for the climate.

In the United States, that "organic" label on your milk just means that the cows spent at least 30 percent of their time grazing, weren't treated with hormones or antibiotics, and ate feed grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. That's certainly appealing to many people. But there's no requirement that an organic dairy farm have a lower climate footprint than a conventional farm.

To date, studies have disagreed on whether organic dairy farms produce more, less or about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as conventional farms do, per gallon of milk. Most likely it varies a lot from farm to farm. The trouble is that there's nothing about the organic label that tells you anything specific about the climate impact of the carton of milk you're holding.

Almond, oat and soy milk all have a smaller greenhouse gas footprint than cow's milk does. But, as always, there are caveats and trade-offs to consider. Almonds require a lot of water to grow, and this has been a problem in places like California. Soy milk tends to be fairly low-impact, as long as the soy is sustainably farmed.

Milk vs. 'Milk'

I don't like vegan food. What would I eat?

If you like pasta with tomato sauce, hummus, avocado toast or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you actually do like some vegan food. Eating a fully vegan diet is hard for many Americans to imagine. Some assume that a vegan diet has to include meat "substitutes" like tofu, but that's not true: There's ample protein in beans, grains and nuts. And as more people become vegan, plant versions of ice cream, butter and even burgers are getting better all the time. For home cooks, the challenge is often producing a vegan dinner that everyone at the table will eat. We've got recipes that can help.

Another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains. (Here are recipes that go heavy on beans and grains.)

You could go vegetarian: no meat, poultry and fish, but dairy and eggs are allowed. The advantage here is that the rules are simple, and food manufacturers and restaurants are used to accommodating vegetarians. (We have vegetarian recipes for you that you can cook on a weeknight.)

Eating as a pescatarian, adding seafood to a vegetarian diet, can be a good compromise, and makes it easier to get protein into your meals.

To keep some meat in your diet, try cutting back to one serving of red meat per week, replacing the rest with chicken, pork, fish or plant proteins. This approach is more flexible, but it means more planning ahead and keeping track of what you eat.

Climate-Friendlier Diets

The average drop in food-related emissions when people switch from a typical Western diet to lower-impact ones:

Organic produce is grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, which is important to a lot of people. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily better from a climate perspective. In some cases, it can be a bit worse - organic farms often require more land than conventional farms. That said, organic farms' climate impact can vary widely from place to place, and the organic label, on its own, doesn't give you great information on the food's carbon footprint.

Should I worry about whether my produce is local and seasonal?

In general, what you eat matters a lot more than where it comes from, since transportation accounts for only about 6 percent of food's total climate footprint. That said, there are a few things to consider.

Anything that's in season where you live, whether you buy it at a local farmers' market or at a supermarket, is usually a good choice.

Things get trickier when it comes to out-of-season produce. Some fruits and vegetables that are shipped by plane can have a surprisingly hefty carbon footprint. During the winter, that may include asparagus or blackberries - produce that's perishable and needs to move quickly between distant places. By contrast, apples, oranges and bananas are often shipped by sea, which is more fuel-efficient. Plenty of cold-climate vegetables, like carrots, potatoes and squash, can be stored after the fall harvest and last through the winter.

In some cases, though, there can be an advantage to food that's shipped in from elsewhere. If you live in the northern United States during the winter, it can be better to buy a tomato trucked in from California or Florida than to buy a local variety that was grown in an energy-intensive heated greenhouse.

Yes. By some estimates, Americans end up throwing out roughly 20 percent of the food they buy. That means that all the energy it took to produce that food was wasted. If you're buying more food than you actually eat, your climate footprint will be bigger than it needs to be. So minimizing waste can be a pretty straightforward way to curb emissions.

YOU PICK IT Which type of food do Americans throw out the most?

Percentage of food wasted or lost at the consumer level, by category.

How can I reduce my food waste?

There are lots of possibilities. If you cook, start with meal planning: Over the weekend, take 20 minutes to lay out three weeknight dinners, so that you buy only the food you plan on cooking. (A similar rule applies if you eat out: Don't order more than you need.) Trim and wash your produce before putting it away, to make it easier to use. Be vigilant about eating or freezing the food in your refrigerator, instead of letting it spoil.

It's also worth remembering that "sell by" labels on food don't mean the item absolutely has to be tossed out after that date; they're usually manufacturer suggestions for peak quality. Many foods (with the exception of baby formula) can still be safely consumed after that date.

Should I be composting?

If you're able to, it's not a bad idea. When food is tossed into a landfill along with your other garbage, it begins to decompose and release methane into the atmosphere, where it warms the planet. Although a few American cities have started capturing some of this methane and recycling it for energy, most do not.

When composting is done right, the organic material in leftover food is converted into compost that can help grow crops, and methane emissions are cut significantly. Some cities, like New York, have started setting up centralized composting programs or curbside pickup. Or you can follow these tips to compost at home.

Paper shopping bags appear to be a bit worse from an emissions standpoint than plastic bags, although the plastic bags at supermarkets can't typically be recycled, and create waste that sticks around for much longer. But in general, packaging makes up only about 5 percent of global food-related emissions. What you eat matters a lot more for climate change than the packaging it comes in.

That said, it's a fine idea to reuse the bags that you do get, or to buy a reusable bag ( as long as you keep it and use it often), or to minimize plastic bags when picking out produce. Other plastics at the store, like soda bottles or milk jugs, are tougher to avoid, but those can often be recycled.

Does recycling really do anything?

It can help, though it's not as effective as reducing waste in the first place. Recycling aluminum, plastic and paper can cut energy use and curb emissions. But make sure you're recycling properly; follow these tips to make sure your recyclables don't just end up in the landfill.

Why aren't there labels in the grocery store explaining the carbon footprint of different foods?

Some experts have argued that there should be environmental labels on food, similar to nutrition labels. In theory, these labels could help interested consumers pick out lower-impact products and give farmers and producers more incentives to curb their emissions.

A recent study in the journal Science found that products that look very similar at the grocery store can have widely different climate footprints depending on how they're produced. One bar of chocolate may have the same climate impact as driving a car for 30 miles - if rain forests were cleared to grow the cocoa - while another chocolate bar may have very little climate impact at all. But without more detailed labeling than exists today, it's extremely difficult for a shopper to figure out the difference.

That said, a really detailed labeling scheme would likely require a lot more monitoring and emissions calculations, so it could take a fair bit of effort to put a system like this in place. For now, most shoppers will have to get by using rough rules of thumb.

Correction: May 1, 2019

An earlier version of this article included an incorrect citation for a scientific publication by Aleksandrowicz et al about climate-friendlier diets. The study appeared in the journal PLoS One, not PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Correction: May 8, 2019

An earlier version of a graphic accompanying this article about the average greenhouse gas impact of various foods included a value for milk that was based on a different measurement than the other foods. The 1.6 kilograms of CO2 impact for milk is per half-liter, not per 50 grams of protein, which is the measure used for the other foods in the chart.

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Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

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Yes. The world's food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat - beef, chicken, fish, milk, lentils, kale, corn and more - as well as processing, packaging and shipping food to markets all over the world.

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Fishing nets and ropes are a frequent hazard for olive ridley sea turtles, seen on a beach in India's Kerala state in January. A new 1,500-page report by the United Nations is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe. Credit Credit Soren Andersson/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

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WASHINGTON - Humans are transforming Earth's natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate "unprecedented in human history."

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

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Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará state, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. Credit Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth's ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.

"For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake," said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. "But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries."

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet's land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for "transformative changes" that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture's environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing.

"It's no longer enough to focus just on environmental policy," said Sandra M. Díaz, a lead author of the study and an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. "We need to build biodiversity considerations into trade and infrastructure decisions, the way that health or human rights are built into every aspect of social and economic decision-making."

Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

"Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before," the report concludes, estimating that "around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken."

Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.

Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe.

In Indonesia, the replacement of rain forest with palm oil plantations has ravaged the habitat of critically endangered orangutans and Sumatran tigers. In Mozambique, ivory poachers helped kill off nearly 7,000 elephants between 2009 and 2011 alone. In Argentina and Chile, the introduction of the North American beaver in the 1940s has devastated native trees (though it has also helped other species thrive, including the Magellanic woodpecker).

All told, three-quarters of the world's land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world's wetlands have vanished since the 18th century.

And with humans continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy, global warming is expected to compound the damage. Roughly 5 percent of species worldwide are threatened with climate-related extinction if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded. (The world has already warmed 1 degree.)

"If climate change were the only problem we were facing, a lot of species could probably move and adapt," Richard Pearson, an ecologist at the University College of London, said. "But when populations are already small and losing genetic diversity, when natural landscapes are already fragmented, when plants and animals can't move to find newly suitable habitats, then we have a real threat on our hands."

The dwindling number of species will not just make the world a less colorful or wondrous place, the report noted. It also poses risks to people.

Volunteers collected trash in March in a mangrove forest in Brazil. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding. Credit Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

Today, humans are relying on significantly fewer varieties of plants and animals to produce food. Of the 6,190 domesticated mammal breeds used in agriculture, more than 559 have gone extinct and 1,000 more are threatened. That means the food system is becoming less resilient against pests and diseases. And it could become harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops and livestock to cope with the extreme heat and drought that climate change will bring.

"Most of nature's contributions are not fully replaceable," the report said. Biodiversity loss "can permanently reduce future options, such as wild species that might be domesticated as new crops and be used for genetic improvement."

The report does contain glimmers of hope. When governments have acted forcefully to protect threatened species, such as the Arabian oryx or the Seychelles magpie robin, they have managed to fend off extinction in many cases. And nations have protected more than 15 percent of the world's land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up nature reserves and wilderness areas.

Still, only a fraction of the most important areas for biodiversity have been protected, and many nature reserves poorly enforce prohibitions against poaching, logging or illegal fishing. Climate change could also undermine existing wildlife refuges by shifting the geographic ranges of species that currently live within them.

So, in addition to advocating the expansion of protected areas, the authors outline a vast array of changes aimed at limiting the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Farmers and ranchers would have to adopt new techniques to grow more food on less land. Consumers in wealthy countries would have to waste less food and become more efficient in their use of natural resources. Governments around the world would have to strengthen and enforce environmental laws, cracking down on illegal logging and fishing and reducing the flow of heavy metals and untreated wastewater into the environment.

The authors also note that efforts to limit global warming will be critical, although they caution that the development of biofuels to reduce emissions could end up harming biodiversity by further destroying forests.

An elephant in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy at the foot of Mount Kenya, outside Nairobi. More than 500,000 land species do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival. Credit Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

None of this will be easy, especially since many developing countries face pressure to exploit their natural resources as they try to lift themselves out of poverty.

But, by detailing the benefits that nature can provide to people, and by trying to quantify what is lost when biodiversity plummets, the scientists behind the assessment are hoping to help governments strike a more careful balance between economic development and conservation.

"You can't just tell leaders in Africa that there can't be any development and that we should turn the whole continent into a national park," said Emma Archer, who led the group's earlier assessment of biodiversity in Africa. "But we can show that there are trade-offs, that if you don't take into account the value that nature provides, then ultimately human well-being will be compromised."

In the next two years, diplomats from around the world will gather for several meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, to discuss how they can step up their efforts at conservation. Yet even in the new report's most optimistic scenario, through 2050 the world's nations would only slow the decline of biodiversity - not stop it.

"At this point," said Jake Rice, a fisheries scientist who led an earlier report on biodiversity in the Americas, "our options are all about damage control."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Brad Plumer is a reporter covering climate change, energy policy and other environmental issues for The Times's climate team. @bradplumer

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Civilization Is Accelerating Extinction and Altering the Natural World at a Pace 'Unprecedented in Human History'

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. WASHINGTON - Humans are transforming Earth's natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind (Published 2019)

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In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

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Every day in the media we see once-unthinkable science headlines. More than seven hundred cases of measles across 22 states in the U.S., largely due to vaccine deniers. Climate change legislation stalled in the U.S. Senate-due mainly to partisan politicians who routinely confuse climate and weather-even as scientists tell us that we have only until 2030 to cut worldwide carbon emissions by half, then drop them to zero by 2050. And, in one of the most incredible developments of my lifetime, the Flat Earth movement is on the rise.

To make matters worse, scientists (and others who care about it) have not really found an effective way of fighting back against science denial. In this "post-truth" era-with headlines like " Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds"-it is an open question how to convince people who reject evidence, not just in science, but also on a host of other factual matters. In the empirical realm, scientists often choose to respond by presenting their evidence, then get upset and refuse to engage more when their data aren't accepted or their integrity is questioned. Perhaps this is understandable, but I also believe it is dangerous just to walk away and dismiss science deniers as irrational (even if they are.) Even worse is to react to their hectoring on the question of whether there is "100 percent consensus" on global warming, or whether we're "certain" that vaccines don't cause autism, by blustering about "proof," which only gives aid and comfort to one of the most damaging myths about science.

But we really can't afford to do this anymore, nor can we afford to defend science simply by talking about its successes. Climate change "skeptics" already know about the marvels of chemotherapy...but what does that have to do with the spike in global temperatures in 1998? And philosophers of science have spent the last hundred years looking in vain for some definitive logical "criterion of demarcation" between science and non-science.

A better way to respond is to stop talking about proof, certainty, and logic, and start talking more about scientific "values." In my book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science From Denial, Fraud, And Pseudosience, I defend the idea that what is most distinctive about science is not its method but its "attitude": the idea that scientists care about evidence and are willing to change their views based on new evidence. This is what truly separates scientists from their deniers and imitators.

I had a chance to test this theory in person recently when I attended the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) in Denver, Colorado, in November 2018. There I found myself among six hundred cheering, clapping Flat Earth advocates in the main ballroom of the Crowne Royal Hotel and Convention Center, who were taking part in a two-day extravaganza of presentations, multimedia performances, and "evidence" that the "globalists" have been pulling the wool over our eyes for millennia.

First, let's deal with the threshold question: yes, these people were serious. Believing the Earth is flat is not something one would come to lightly, for they are routinely persecuted for their views. Everyone I spoke to said that they used to believe in the global Earth but one day "woke up" and realized that there was a worldwide conspiracy of people who had been lying to them. "Trust your eyes," was their mantra. "Do your own experiments." "Water is level." "Space is fake." "A government that could lie to you about 9/11 and the Moon landing is one that could lie to you about Flat Earth."

Most Flat Earthers describe their conversion as a quasi-religious experience, where one day they "took the red pill" (and yes, they adore the movie The Matrix) and realized the truth that the rest of us have been blind to for our entire lives, as a result of our miseducation and indoctrination-the Earth is flat.

To state this immediately raises a series of questions:

What do they actually believe? (That the Earth is a disk, with the "mountains of Antarctica" spread out along the perimeter, and a dome over the top.)

Who could keep such a secret? (The government, NASA, airline pilots, and others.)

Who put them up to it? ("The adversary," one man told me. "The devil rewards them mightily for covering up God's truth.")

Why don't others realize the truth? (Because they've been fooled.)

What is the benefit of believing in Flat Earth? (Because it's the truth! And, for many, it is the only physical account that is consistent with the Bible.)

What about all of the scientific proofs of a round Earth? (All flawed...which is what the conference was about.)

To spend two days attending seminars with titles such as "Globebusters," "Flat Earth with the Scientific Method," "Flat Earth Activism," "NASA and other Space Lies," "14+ Ways the Bible say Flat Earth," and "Talking to your Family and Friends about Flat Earth," felt in some ways like spending two days on another planet. The arguments were absurd, but intricate and not easily run to ground, especially if one buys into the Flat Earthers' insistence on first-person proof. And the social reinforcement that participants seemed to feel in finally being "among their own" was palpable. Psychologists have long known that there is a social aspect to belief. FEIC 2018 was a lab experiment in peer pressure.

For the first day, I kept my mouth shut and just listened. I wore the conference badge and took notes. The second day, I came out hard as a philosopher of science. After numerous conversations, I came away with the conclusion that Flat Earth is a curious mixture of fundamentalist Christianity and conspiracy theory, where outsiders are distrusted and belief in Flat Earth is (for some) tantamount to religious faith. This is not to say that most Christians believe in Flat Earth, but almost all of the Flat Earthers I met (with a few notable exceptions) were Christians. While they claimed not to rely on faith as proof of their beliefs-and were anxious to present their own "scientific evidence"-most did seek empirical findings that would make all of their beliefs (both spiritual and worldly) consistent with one another. And once they started looking, the evidence was all around them.

Most of the presentations were designed to show that the "scientific" evidence for a global Earth was flawed, and that their own "evidence" for Flat Earth was solid. Virtually all of the standards of good empirical reasoning were violated. Cherry-picking evidence? Check. Fitting beliefs to ideology? Check. Confirmation bias? Check. How to convince anyone in this sort of environment? You don't convince someone who has already rejected thousands of years of scientific evidence by showing them more evidence. No matter what I presented, there was always some excuse: NASA had faked the pictures from space. Airline pilots were in on the conspiracy. Water can't adhere to a spinning ball.

So I tried a different tactic. Instead of talking about evidence, I went after their reasoning.

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they hold themselves up as skeptics, but they are actually quite gullible. There is a rampant double standard for evidence: no evidence is good enough to convince them of something they do NOT want to believe, yet only the flimsiest evidence is required to get them to accept something they DO want to believe. Contrast this to the "scientific attitude," which is a mindset of flexibility toward changing one's beliefs based on new evidence.

This was my leverage.

Instead of saying "show me your evidence" (which they were only too happy to do) or "here's my evidence" (which they wouldn't believe anyway,) I asked "what would it take to convince you that you were wrong?" They seemed unprepared for this question.

The first time I asked it was to one of the main presenters after he had just walked off stage. Although he admitted that he didn't have any science background, he wore a white lab coat, which was all the authority he said he needed. I asked what evidence might convince him the Earth was round and he said "just give me proof." I asked what kind, and he referred me back to one of the pieces of "evidence" he had just presented from the stage: a picture of the Chicago skyline from 60 miles out in Lake Michigan. The problem was, if the Earth was curved, you shouldn't have been able to see any buildings.

"But wait," I said, "you just told us that every photo from NASA was Photoshopped....yet I'm supposed to believe this one?"

"Yes," he answered, "because I know the guy who took it-and I went out on Lake Michigan myself and recreated it from only 46 miles out."

During his talk I'd done a quick calculation to determine that you only had to go out 45 miles for the tallest building in Chicago to disappear below the skyline. (I'll say this for the Flat Earthers, they weren't incompetent mathematicians.) So was he right?

No, due to something called the "Superior Mirage Effect," which is a familiar physical phenomenon whereby-depending on the temperature of the surface of the water relative to the temperature of the air on any given day-what you saw in the photo was NOT actually the city of Chicago, but its super position as a mirage in the sky. It was an optical illusion. (We've all seen a similar illusion of the "Inferior Mirage Effect" when, on a hot day, there seems to be water on the pavement.) Light doesn't always travel in straight lines.

He laughed.

"I dealt with that in my talk," he said. "It's made up."

"You didn't deal with it in your talk," I said. "You just said you didn't believe it."

"Well I don't," he said.

A crowd of his admirers was pushing close and he began to get antsy, but I had one final question.

"So why didn't you go out one hundred miles then?" I asked.

"What?"

"A hundred miles. If you'd gone out that far not only the city would've disappeared but also the mirage too. If it didn't, you'd have your proof."

He shook his head, "We couldn't get the captain of the boat to go out that far."

Now it was my turn to scoff.

"What? You've devoted your entire life to this work and you didn't go? You had the definitive experiment within reach and you couldn't go out an extra 55 miles?"

He turned his head and began to talk to someone else.

It is going to be a long process to talk to science deniers. They won't be convinced by evidence because their views are not based on a rational way of responding to evidence in the first place. Of course I didn't convince the speaker, or anyone else over my 48 hours at FEIC 2018. But I did do one important thing that might have affected their belief. I showed up.

Research has shown that people aren't convinced by data, but by having conversations with people they trust. I don't pretend that the speaker at FEIC trusted me, but I do think that I built up some credibility by not just doing a quick "hit and run" interview, then leaving. I stayed at the convention and had many more conversations. I even took another guest speaker out to dinner, where we had a two hour no-holds-barred talk about rocket travel and flights over Antarctica. He was intelligent, nimble, and an excellent debater. I even liked him. But we disagreed on almost everything.

When people feel threatened they retreat into their silos, and the Flat Earth community is no different. They do their "research" by viewing a spate of Flat Earth videos on Youtube and-now that a quorum has been reached-they go to conventions. There is even an upcoming Flat Earth cruise planned to "reach the ice wall" in 2020. They really do seem to want to pursue evidence. (My idea: how about a reality TV show that follows them on this cruise? Call it "Edge of the Earth.")

But the problem with Flat Earthers-and other science deniers-is not that they don't pursue evidence, but that they don't respond to it in a rational way. They lack the scientific attitude. So how should we respond?

I don't think it is wise just to dismiss them. This only creates more distrust and further polarization. Instead I think we need to engage. Scientists, after all, would never want to be accused of retreating into their own silos. (At the FEIC conference I heard a rumor-though never confirmed-that there was a scientific conference at the hotel up the street. But of course none of them bothered to show up and refute the Flat Earthers. Boy did they make hay out of that.)

Science denial is too dangerous to ignore. You might think that Flat Earth isn't harming anyone, but they had sessions on how to recruit new members, including children. And, by their own report, they are growing fast. They've recently recruited some prominent celebrities like Kyrie Irving (before he recanted) and Wilson Chandler. There are Flat Earth "meet up" groups in many cities, including Boston. Just before the convention in Denver, someone funded a billboard.

My other concern, based on my academic research, is that all science deniers use roughly the same reasoning strategy. Belief in conspiracy theories, cherry picking evidence, championing their own experts. These are also the tactics used by deniers of evolution, climate change, and the recent spate of anti-vaxx. How many more years before the Flat Earthers are running for school board, asking physics teachers to "teach the controversy," just as Intelligent Designers did not too many years back?

If we can understand science denial in its most elemental form, might we not be able to make progress against all of it at once? For those of us who care about science, it is important to fight back against science denial in whatever form it arises.

But we must do it in the right way.

As I argue in The Scientific Attitude, we need to stop merely pointing to the successes of science and reclaim the notion of uncertainty as a strength rather than a weakness of scientific reasoning. No matter how good the evidence, science cannot "prove" that climate change is real. Or that vaccines are safe. Or even that the Earth is round. That is just not how inductive reasoning works.

What scientists can do, however, is say much more than they do about the importance of likelihood and probability, to puncture the myth that until we have proof, any theory is just as good as any other. Scientific beliefs are not based on certainty but on "warrant"-on justification given the evidence. To say that the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has hit the "five-sigma" level, which means that there is only a one in a million chance of a false positive, is something less than certainty. But who could deny that this is enough for rational belief? When certainty is the standard, science deniers may feel justified in holding out for proof. So let's explain to them that this is not how science works. That certainty is an irrational standard for empirical belief.

When a scientist looks for evidence, and it shows that his or her theory is wrong, this cannot just be ignored. If the problem gets bad enough, the theory must be changed or perhaps even abandoned, else one is no longer really a scientist. Yet I do not believe that this is a matter of method or logic (as Karl Popper and other philosophers have long argued,) but of values. One of the reasons that science works as well as it does is that-as opposed to ideology-it does NOT pretend that it has all the answers. It is open to new ideas, but also insists that these must be rigorously tested. In science there is a community standard to enforce this, based on data sharing, peer review, and replication. The scientific attitude exists not just in the hearts of individual scientists, but as a group ethos that guides empirical inquiry in a rational way. But how many of the lay public know this?

I therefore think that the best way to defend science is to go out and have more conversations with science deniers. I am not talking here about those desultory TV debates of yore, where they used to put James Hansen (a NASA scientist and leading voice on climate change) on a split screen with some conspiracy theorist, and then give them equal time. There are obviously legitimate concerns about giving a platform for falsehood. I'm talking about getting more scientists in front of the media, to talk not just about their findings, but about the rigorous process by which scientific results are produced. And yes, I think it is reasonable to expect more interactions between scientists and science deniers, as is now happening with the measles outbreak in Washington state, where public health officials are holding workshops to talk with anti-vaxxers.

In scientific reasoning there's always a chance that your theory is wrong. What separates science deniers from actual scientists is how rigorously they pursue that possibility.
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. His book The views expressed in this article are the author's own.​​​​​​​ The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience is available from the MIT Press.

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Flat Earthers, and the rise of science denial in America | Opinion

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Every day in the media we see once-unthinkable science headlines. More than seven hundred cases of measles across 22 states in the U.S., largely due to vaccine deniers. Climate change legislation stalled in the U.S.

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Fashion helps shape our identities. What we wear signifies who we are and what we stand for. I support Good On You because I need to know my clothes do not harm our precious planet or its people.

On the red carpet we're often asked not what we are wearing but 'who'. It's as if the ideas behind the clothes - the label, the designer, the collection - have more meaning than the garment itself.

But there's something missing. There's a bigger story to be told about the conditions in which our clothes are made, the resources that have been used and the impact they've had on communities.

Good On You is my benchmark for sustainable fashion. This means that when I'm given a platform to speak about my choice of outfit, I will have a meaningful story to tell. And it's powerful.

But I am just one person.

We have so much power to change the world by just being careful in what we buy.
Emma Watson - Good On You Supporter

In truth, we can all play a part in driving fashion to be more sustainable and ethical. By choosing to wear clothes from labels that embrace transparent, creative and innovative production methods; and by re-wearing, recycling, swapping and thrifting. Together we are building a bigger, better movement every day.

Fashion is a creative force. It has the power to persuade, to influence, and transform. When fashion truly embraces transparency and sustainability, other spheres will follow.

We're on a journey towards a more sustainable future. This is just the beginning.

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Fashion helps shape our identities. What we wear signifies who we are and what we stand for. I support Good On You because I need to know my clothes do not harm our precious planet or its people. On the red carpet we're often asked not what we are wearing but 'who'.

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Leta Hong Fincher We talked to her about the oppression of women abroad and in the US, and the role gender equality plays in a healthy democracy. Your most recent book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, explores the detention and treatment of feminist activists in China, and ultimately suggests that the feminist movement is one of the most powerful tools with which to challenge China's authoritarian regime. Which parts of feminism are most useful when challenging such huge patriarchal structures? is a scholar and journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Her second book, "Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China," was named one of the best books of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Bitch Media, among others. Hong Fincher will speak in the 2019 program track Next World Order In an article for The Washington Post, you write, "I believe that China's all-male rulers have decided that the systematic subjugation of women is essential to maintaining Communist Party survival. As this battle for party survival becomes even more intense, the crackdown on feminism and women's rights - indeed, on all of civil society - is likely to intensify." What strategies are feminists in China adopting in the face of censorship and surveillance? . The force of internalized sexism can be hard to see. What do you suggest for calling out and disrupting everyday instances of patriarchy and misogyny?
The oppression of women is a central feature of all authoritarian forms of control around the world, yet far too little attention is paid to the unique promise of women's uprisings against autocratic governments. I write about feminist resistance in the world's largest authoritarian regime - China - but all across the world, we are seeing democracies come under assault by misogynistic autocrats like Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and other "strongman" rulers who are rolling back women's rights as an integral part of their authoritarian repression. Right here in the United States, we have a misogynistic president who is corrupting our democratic institutions and attacking women's rights. Just look at the 23 women who have publicly accused him of sexual harassment or assault, and his promotion of punitive, anti-abortion policies.

As we search for effective ways to fight the global rise of authoritarianism, I believe the key lies in supporting women's rights and grassroots feminist activism. One of the core demands of feminism - that women must be free to control our own bodies and lives - is in direct conflict with the coercive, often pro-natalist, ethno-nationalist policies of authoritarian states, which regard falling birth rates as an existential crisis. When feminist activists organize effectively around issues that directly affect the personal lives of millions of ordinary women - such as sexual violence, reproductive justice, and systemic gender discrimination - even the all-powerful, male-dominated Chinese Communist Party struggles to quash the movement.
How can women and girls across the world better tap into global feminist networks?
China is an autocracy with no press freedom, no internet freedom or freedom of assembly, and effectively no rule of law. Yet even though the government persecutes feminist activists, shuts down women's rights centers, bans feminist social media accounts, censors #MeToo accounts of sexual harassment, and tightens controls on gender studies programs at universities, China's feminist networks have actually grown in recent years instead of being wiped out.

Various forms of women's rights hashtag campaigns (like the recent #NotYourPerfectVictim discussion of rape culture) continue to spring up and go viral on China's internet, with millions of views before they're extinguished by censors. In 2018, the #MeToo hashtag on sexual harassment was one of the top 10 censored topics on China's popular messaging app, WeChat, according to the University of Hong Kong's WeChatScope.

Last year, China's most influential feminist media platform, Feminist Voices, was banned on Weibo (China's equivalent of Twitter) and WeChat. Many individual feminist social media accounts are getting deleted, but activists are still finding ways to circulate messages about feminist and LGBTQ topics considered "politically sensitive," constantly playing a cat-and-mouse game to try to get around the censors. One of the best-known examples of the feminists' creative strategies to evade censorship was the idea of using emojis for "rice" 🍚 ( mi) and "rabbit" 🐰( tu) to make the hashtag #RiceBunny 🍚 🐰 " mitu," which sounds like "Me Too" in Chinese.
What do you say to people who don't see gender inequality as a pressing issue of our time?
Unlike autocratic countries like China, where open protests are banned, the US guarantees rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and we must exercise those rights. The extreme abortion bans passed in several state legislatures recently are an unprecedented attack on American women's rights, and particularly the rights of Black women, who have the highest maternal mortality rates. But women are rising up and fighting back, from protesting in the streets to volunteering or donating to organizations that are doing effective work on reproductive justice. We can speak out freely on social media without being constantly censored. We can vote in local, state, and midterm elections.

At the same time, it is essential that we care for ourselves and cultivate our sense of joy in living as we engage in the difficult, long struggle for justice and equality. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the barrage of bad news every day, but I am heartened by the fact that women of color were elected to the US House of Representatives in record numbers in the 2018 midterms and that there are several amazing, pro-choice women running for president in 2020. I am learning so much from Black feminists in the US, who have been fighting racism and sexism for decades. I am always inspired by the extraordinary commitment and resilience of feminists in China, who are extremely unlikely to realize their dreams of justice in their own lifetimes, yet they persevere against seemingly impossible odds.

The first step is to pay attention to the condition of women and girls beyond our own borders. We have to remember that threats to our own democracy and rights as women are connected to a rising threat to democracies and women's rights worldwide. As we fight for our own rights, we should also learn from feminist activists in other countries.
The views and opinions of the author are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.
One of the women I write about in Betraying Big Brother is Lü Pin, founding editor of the prominent Feminist Voices. Since the jailing of China's Feminist Five activists in 2015, Lü Pin has lived in self-exile in the US and started a new organization, the Chinese Feminist Collective, which has created a space for Chinese feminists to communicate more freely and sustain the momentum of the movement back home. Chinese feminists have built a networked, global community of supporters numbering into the thousands. Although they live in different parts of China and the world, many of these women have formed close bonds of solidarity. Core activists in the movement look out for each other's safety and keep track of when police are harassing their fellow activists.

One of the things we should do as a country is to have a more open immigration policy, which welcomes the world's most original, transformative thinkers - like Lü Pin and others in the Chinese feminist community - and provides a refuge for people fleeing persecution elsewhere.

Gender is not just a marginal issue. It should be central to our analysis of why democracies around the world are now in crisis and how we can find a way out of this crisis.

Young feminist activists are posing a unique challenge not only to China's Communist Party; they are beginning to confront patriarchal authoritarianism in many other countries. These young women all want similar things: freedom to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives; freedom to work, travel and live without being sexually assaulted, beaten, or killed. Often, women's rights activists spread their message through viral hashtags, demonstrating the continued importance of social media, even in countries such as China, with the world's most invasive, sophisticated system of internet censorship and surveillance.

I believe that in the long run, women's rights movements - if given the proper support - can triumph and lead to more open societies in the future. The best way to fight global authoritarianism is to double-down on feminism, not retreat from it, by actively supporting the increased participation of feminist women in politics and by supporting intersectional women's rights activists everywhere.

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How the Feminist Movement is Challenging Authoritarianism | Aspen Ideas

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Leta Hong Fincher We talked to her about the oppression of women abroad and in the US, and the role gender equality plays in a healthy democracy. Your most recent book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, explores the detention and treatment of feminist activists in China, and ultimately suggests that the feminist movement is one of the most powerful tools with which to challenge China's authoritarian regime.

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We have the brains to slow down climate change. Do we have the will?

By Jon Gertner

Mr. Gertner is the author of the forthcoming book "The Ice at the End of the World."

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One potential way to delay the worst effects of global warming: spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to shade the sun and cool the earth. Credit Credit Illustrations by Thoka Maer

As the effects of a warming climate intensify and a sense of impending catastrophe grows stronger, it's becoming easier to give in to environmental despair. Having spent the past five years studying the Arctic and traveling around Greenland, I feel the pull as well.

Glaciers and sea ice are melting at an alarming rate; temperatures are rising at a steady clip. To make matters worse, the Trump administration's recent efforts to ignore a fact-based, scientific approach - rejecting, for instance, the use of computer projections to assess how a warming world might look after 2040 - leads me to worry that climate denialism is moving from the scientific fringes to the institutional center.

Still, it's worth considering that things may not be as bad as they appear. I say this with a full understanding that most indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. Yet I also feel we're in danger of losing sight of two crucial and encouraging aspects of our predicament.

The first is the extraordinary value of the climate knowledge we've amassed over the past 100 years - a vast archive of data and wisdom that gives us a fine-grained understanding of how the planet is warming and how we can change the trajectory we're on.

The second is the emergence of potential solutions, the products of a half-century of technological innovation, which may help us avert the worst impacts of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we continue to release into the atmosphere. (Last year carbon dioxide emissions were the highest ever recorded.)

Almost certainly, these tools, if used wisely, could keep global average temperatures from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, from a preindustrial baseline. Even lesser levels of warming are probably hazardous, but that temperature is the point beyond which many scientists believe the planet will suffer irreversible impacts from extreme and dangerous warming.

Recently, the entrepreneur and technologist Saul Griffith undertook a study of energy consumption for the Department of Energy and concluded that, using the United States as an example, "decarbonization is not an unattainable ideal." In fact, he surmised it would be far easier than one might think, given our wealth and technological know-how.

We don't need to assume an attitude of fear and dread. Our scientific progress is a story of technological optimism, defined by an extraordinary sense of capability. It shows what might be built and gained in the coming decades, and not merely what could be lost.

First, let's consider this: For all the terror and gloom that global warming portends, its discovery is one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Technology can now tell us everything from how many tons of ice were shed by the glaciers in Greenland over the past few years to how many millimeters the oceans rose. Indeed, almost every fact or idea that informs the climate debate, from the number of endangered species to the dangers of melting permafrost, results from countless scientists and engineers, working in the field and in laboratories, over the course of a century.

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To slow their melting, glaciers could be protected by walls blocking warm waters.

This knowledge derives not only from heroic human expeditions to tropics, oceans, icecaps and deserts, but also from exquisite orbiting satellites that constantly scrutinize natural systems and human impacts on those systems. We know how much we have to fix on this planet, because we've figured out how to measure just about everything.

In the past few years, some commentators have warned that modern society's faith in technology has led to a mistaken belief that it will save the world. They embrace solutions that encourage widespread behavioral changes, like consuming less, traveling infrequently and adopting a plant-based diet. We're likely to need both technological and personal transformations. But in the end, it's technology that will save us, not only because it can but also because it will have to.

In many respects, technology is saving us already: by identifying the magnitude of the threat, providing the extraordinary computing power required to run climate models to predict the future, and enabling architects and engineers to design for resilience against tempestuous storms and encroaching seas.

Technology has made possible clean and efficient energy systems that wouldn't have been achievable a few decades ago, including cheap solar panels, LED lighting and batteries for electric cars. We now have green buildings that reduce energy usage and an emerging class of solar cells known as perovskites that may greatly lower the costs of renewable energy, and we are developing techniques to produce concrete that absorbs carbon dioxide rather than emitting it.

There is even room for techno-skeptics. A movement for " natural climate solutions, " like planting vast forests and using agricultural methods that sequester carbon in the soil, will become increasingly important as technology in the form of "integrated assessment" computer models tells us how much this approach can mitigate warming trends.

In the coming years, moreover, our ability to improve technology will determine the viability of carbon capture techniques to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and the value (or danger) of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to shade the sun, cool the earth and provide more time for a clean-energy transition.

The range of hypothetical geoengineering ideas for the Arctic is equally audacious. One is to use wind power in winter to pump water from the depths of the Arctic Ocean to the surface to thicken sea ice so that it is more resistant to melting. Sea ice is critical to cooling the planet, because it reflects sunlight that would otherwise be absorbed by the ocean, heating it. (The downside of this idea, which underscores the scope of the problem, is that 10 million windmills would be needed.)

Wind power could be used to pump cold ocean water to the surface to thicken sea ice.

Another idea is to geoengineer glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica to delay their melting. For instance, a 100-meter-high wall could be built across the five-kilometer-wide fjord in front of the Jakobshavn glacier in western Greenland to block the warm ocean currents that have been melting it. The glacier has contributed more to sea level rise than any other glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, though recently, that has slowed. There's no proof yet this plan would work, and it would be hugely expensive. But as the idea's proponents pointed out in the journal Nature, sea walls and flood defenses already cost tens of billions of dollars a year to build and maintain. "At this price, geoengineering is competitive," they argued.

So, as much as we may be asking whether technology will save us, that's the wrong question. The right question is: How will we use our current technologies - and our potential to develop new and better ones - to save ourselves?

Adopting a measure of technological optimism is not the same as adopting the blithe and complacent outlook of a techno-utopian. Neither is it to assume that we won't suffer in the coming years from heat waves, storms and floods - or from elected officials who disregard the urgent need for action.

Rather, it's to view 20th-century history as an accumulation of hard-won knowledge that arose from using our wits to understand the climate. It's also to see that important technological and engineering achievements - developing mass transit systems, huge wind farms, even nuclear power plants - are possible when we choose to act, especially through our politics and policies.

Proof of this can be found in the most unlikely places. For the past few years I've been tracing the history of scientific discovery on the imperiled Greenland ice sheet. Greenland's ice is so thick and so old that scientists can drill down and extract samples that contain evidence of what the environment was like thousands of years ago. With the help of lab instruments, researchers can reconstruct ancient temperatures and atmospheric conditions.

Amid the trace chemicals that turn up in the old ice, there is an unmistakable fingerprint of lead from a few thousand years ago - traces from silver smelters in Europe, during the height of the Roman Empire, which released lead into the air that was deposited on the icy surface of Greenland. In more recent records, we can see vestiges of the metal from the fumes of the early years of the Industrial Revolution and, later still, the residue from leaded gasoline.

But by the early 1990s, these traces had receded from Greenland's snow and ice. That was after new regulations and new products - created over the opposition, incidentally, of fossil-fuel concerns - eliminated the lead that was poisoning us from gasoline.

And life went on as usual.

Think of that the next time dread creeps in. Without question, reducing carbon dioxide is a far bigger challenge than reducing lead, and the stakes are much higher. But we now have a deeper well of knowledge and considerably better technologies. Indeed, if we don't deploy the resources we now wield, many years into the future our story of failure will simply be this: We understood the threat, we were very smart and exceedingly capable. We had money and we had tools. And we chose not to act.

Jon Gertner is the author of the forthcoming "The Ice at the End of the World."
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Opinion | Maybe We're Not Doomed After All

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We have the brains to slow down climate change. Do we have the will? By Jon Gertner Mr. Gertner is the author of the forthcoming book "The Ice at the End of the World." As the effects of a warming climate intensify and a sense of impending catastrophe grows stronger, it's becoming easier to give in to environmental despair.

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In this segment, RELX's Global Head of Corporate Responsibility, Dr Márcia Balisciano, talks to Dr Annie Sparrow, Associate Professor of Population Health, Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Annie Sparrow, MBBS, MRCP, FRACP, MPH, combines the clinical skills of an experienced practitioner with public-health expertise acquired from working in many of the world's most devastating combat zones. As an Associate Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, she teaches human rights and humanitarian aid in complex emergencies. An Australian, Dr. Sparrow spent most of her first ten postgraduate years practicing pediatric critical care in London and her native Perth. She began focusing on refugee health and human rights after a brief stint in Afghanistan under Taliban control in 1999.

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She has travelled repeatedly to the Syrian border to document the health crisis and to train Syrian doctors and nurses in critical care, infectious diseases, malnutrition and siege medicine. She has published widely on the public health crisis, including the systematic assaults on doctors and targeting of medical care, the re-emergence of poliomyelitis, the use of chlorine in chemical attacks and as an indirect weapon of biological warfare, and on the collision of global health, conflict and the refugee crisis.

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The SDG Impact of COVID-19: The view of Dr Annie Sparrow, Associate Professor of Population Health, Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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The SDG Impact of COVID-19 podcast series gathers expert opinion exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the Sustainable Development Goals. In this segment, we get the view of Dr Annie Sparrow, Associate Professor of Population Health, Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.