Humans

There is a historical obligation for higher-income countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to lower-income ones to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment, writes Graham Lawton

Humans

| Columnist

20 April 2022

By Graham Lawton
B5HKJ9 The United Glass Limited Glass Works in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, UK. Reflected in the River ForthDavid Robertson/Alamy

THE country I live in is one of the richest on the planet, but also one of the poorest. By GDP, the UK is a superpower with the fifth largest economy in the world. But in terms of intact biodiversity, it is in the bottom 10 per cent globally and the worst in the G7.
These two facts aren’t unrelated. The UK got rich – and has stayed rich – in no small part by overexploiting its natural resources. The agricultural and industrial revolutions turned great swathes of what was once green and pleasant into a polluted and overgrazed wasteland. Even today, more than two-thirds of the UK’s land area is farmed and 8 per cent is built on, leaving little room for wildlife. The nation’s Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) – a measure of how much wild nature remains – is 53 per cent. The global average is 75 per cent. The ideal is 90 per cent plus.Advertisement
That pathway to riches is one that many less-wealthy countries aspire to. But it is also a pathway to mutually assured destruction. A global BII comparable with the UK’s would be catastrophic.
Preventing nature-rich countries from trashing their biodiversity is, of course, one of the goals of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), over which the latest round of negotiations took place in Geneva last month. Such talks naturally feature conservation targets, habitat restoration and so on. But they actually revolve around something else: money.
Before the meeting began, I spoke to conservation biologists about what to look out for. One of them, Stephen Woodley at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told me bluntly: “It’s all about the money.”
Biodiverse countries are often GDP-poor, and many don’t see why they should be forced to remain so in order to rescue wealthy nations from catastrophe. And even where there is the will to preserve, countries often lack the necessary resources and need financial help. “The big issue is about wealth transfer,” Woodley told me. “I suspect that the negotiations will hinge on that.”
He was right. There were many sticking points, but by far the stickiest was finance. Reports from the meeting say that the spirit of the talks was mean, with negotiators generally putting national interests first. For rich countries, that meant digging their heels in over the payments.
“The US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years”
If anything, the negotiations went backwards. The draft text at the start of the meeting included concrete figures, such as that lower-income nations should be given an extra $10 billion every year for conservation. By the end of the talks, all of those numbers had disappeared, replaced by a dog’s breakfast of watered-down and disputed suggestions.
This isn’t just greedy and immoral in the here and now. There is also a historical obligation for richer countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to poorer ones, to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment. A recent analysis published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that the US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years. Other wealthy countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia, are collectively responsible for another quarter, while the low and middle-income countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia are responsible for just 8 per cent.
Alongside greed, immorality and injustice, we can add short-sightedness. “We will pay this amount of money, either today, or we will pay substantially more later on in lost ecosystem services, clean water, clean air, pollination, all these things that we take for granted,” says Brian O’Donnell at the Campaign for Nature, an alliance of more than 100 conservation organisations. “If we destroy the ecosystems we rely on, the cost will be astronomical.”
This is depressingly familiar from climate talks. In 2015, wealthy nations promised to donate billions to lower-income ones to help them mitigate climate change and adapt, but have yet to cough up. They cynically stamp out attempts to extract compensation for “loss and damage”, apparently frit that this would be seen as an admission of guilt and open the floodgates to reparation claims.
There is hope. The clean text that the talks opened with was an ideal one drawn up by the CBD; the mess that emerged is a work in progress by the people who wield actual power. There is a history of brinkmanship at such talks and the CBD itself said that progress had been made.
And while countries like the UK will never accept that much of their wealth is an ecological overdraft that is now overdue, they are starting to understand that they have no option but to pay. “I think governments are starting to recognise that this is an investment rather than just a cost,” says O’Donnell.

Graham’s week
What I’m reading
The Age of Extremes: The short twentieth century, 1914–1991 by Eric Hobsbawm. Suddenly very relevant again
What I’m watching
Dinosaurs: The final day with David Attenborough on the BBC. Attenborough does it again.
What I’m working on
Whether to get a new cat. The old one sadly joined his younger companion.

Up next week: Annalee Newitz

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A suspense-filled documentary sees Free Solo’s Alex Honnold and 80-year-old ecologist Bruce Means set out to climb a remote table-top mountain deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest

Humans

20 April 2022

By Gregory Wakeman
Federico Pisani, part of the documentary team, on the cliff face of Weiassipu in GuyanaNational Geographic/Renan Ozturk
Explorer: The Last Tepui
Renan Ozturk, Drew Pulley, Taylor Rees
Disney+Advertisement
THOSE of you who have seen the astounding National Geographic documentary Free Solo will know just how mesmerising it can be to watch a professional climber scale the side of a mountain.
A new documentary, Explorer: The Last Tepui, shares a lot with Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Not only does it also star rock climber Alex Honnold, it shows him dangling off the side of a mountain in precarious positions that will make your stomach drop in terror.
While his athletic feats are astounding, Honnold isn’t the most captivating character in the film. That honour goes to Bruce Means, who has spent his academic career finding and cataloguing new species throughout South America to prove to the world and its governments that the area is a biodiversity hotspot to be protected at all costs.
In Explorer: The Last Tepui, the 80-year-old ecologist and conservationist is intent on climbing the 300-plus metres to the peak of a remote table-top mountain, or tepui, deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest.
Means, Honnold, expedition leader Mark Synnott and a world-class team of climbers have to hike 56 kilometres over 10 days across increasingly treacherous terrain to reach the base of the tepui. This is a very big deal because Means has problems just bending his knees.
Once at the tepui, team members plan to climb to the top and then pull Means up, which will allow him to explore the cliff wall for novel animal and plant species.
Directors Taylor Rees, Renan Ozturk and Drew Pulley do a superb job of setting up the aim of the expedition, as well as the myriad difficulties that could blight it. Fully aware of the extraordinary visuals and fascinating characters that they have at their disposal, they take a step back and allow the majesty of the rainforest to take over, while giving the highly intelligent and passionate specialists room to describe what makes it so special.
Some of the shots that Matthew Irving, director of photography, captures are awe-inspiring, and the directors also provide plenty of long, lingering views of mountains, creatures, streams and waterfalls, which allow viewers to soak up the natural beauty, listen to the sounds of the animals and get lost in the frame.
What makes the documentary so riveting is Means’s detailed explanations as he walks with the team through the forest, which is dense with trees and vegetation. The ecologist’s positive and self-deprecating nature makes him instantly likeable, while his endless knowledge and devotion to nature and science are so contagious that they will make viewers of all ages appreciate the diversity of our environment.
His efforts are made all the more valiant by his admission that if he makes it to the summit, it will be the culmination of his life’s work. Unsurprisingly, because of the unforgiving terrain they must cross to reach the tepui, various major obstacles soon get in the way of the party. Means’s strain at holding up the expedition because of his age and health doesn’t just make him more lovable, it injects real suspense into the documentary, which will debut on Disney+ on 22 April for Earth Day.
The constantly changing viewpoints and potentially life-threatening issues ensure that Explorer: The Last Tepui remains compelling to the very last frame. Even though it is just 54 minutes long, you will still feel utterly exhausted, as well as inspired, by the time it is over.

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Ending a relationship by disappearing without explanation, known as “ghosting”, seems to be a distinct form of social rejection – and psychologists are discovering why it is so painful

Humans

20 April 2022

By Amelia Tait
Offwhite
IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
Unexpected disappearance
Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

20 April 2022

Watch
The Velvet Queen herself – the snow leopard – comes to selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 April, accompanied by wolves, bears, yaks, birds and the fabulous and untouched landscapes of the Tibetan plateau.

Read
Wild by Design by environmental historian Laura Martin examines how we ended up casting ourselves as the “managers” of wild spaces, and goes on to ask whether we can design natural places without destroying wildness.

Watch
The philosophy and science of the disrupted mind are explored by philosopher Noga Arikha and neuroscientist Katerina Fotopoulou in this online talk by The Royal Institution at 7pm BST on 26 April.Advertisement More

The new science fiction novel from Station Eleven’s author is mostly set centuries into the future – but also contains scary glimpses of a pandemic-strewn past

Humans

20 April 2022

By Clare Wilson
Time travel isn’t all fun and games in Sea of TranquilityShutterstock/Tomertu
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel
Picador
IT SAYS a lot about Emily St John Mandel’s imagination that while there are multiple instances of time travel in her new book, Sea of Tranquility, this is only one of several intriguing plot strands.
The novel, Mandel’s sixth, is a welcome return to science fiction after her contemporary outing, The Glass Hotel. Her highly successful fourth novel, Station Eleven, is set 20 years after a deadly pandemic, and … More

The heavens wheel above us, but at least we can rely on the North Star, aka Polaris, to provide eternal stability, right? Afraid not, says Abigail Beall

Space

20 April 2022

By Abigail Beall
Igordabari/Alamy
ONE of the most iconic stars in the northern hemisphere is Polaris, also known as the North Star. If you can spot this star, you will always know which direction is north, because it is a steady point of light in a changing sky. No matter where you are in the northern hemisphere, it will never move. Or will it?
The North Star hasn’t always been, and won’t always be, Polaris. At the moment, it is our North Star because of the tilt of Earth: the north pole faces the same direction in space – towards Polaris – even as Earth moves around the sun … More

In 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants, 82 per cent overestimated the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups

Humans

14 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A stock image of a group of people of a range of ethnicitiesShutterstock/Rawpixel.com
People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.
“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
Previous studies suggest people in … More

The earliest evidence of calendar use by the Maya may have been found in the remains of an ancient temple in Guatemala

Humans

13 April 2022

By Carissa Wong
An ancient fragment of a Maya calendarHeather Hurst/Skidmore College/Saratoga Springs
Two pieces of an ancient wall may preserve the earliest evidence of the Maya calendar. The fragments are decorated with a dot and line above a deer head – representing one of the dates from the 260-day calendar – and they are from a temple built between 2300 and 2200 years ago in what is now Guatemala in central America.
Several ancient communities living across the Americas – including the Aztecs, Maya, Mixtecs and Zapotecs – tracked the time using cycles of 13 days denoted by numbers, alongside cycles of 20 days named after gods. In this calendar, a specific day is assigned both a number and a name, producing 260 unique days before the cycle repeats. It is thought that people used the calendar to decide when to hold ceremonies, to mark important dates or to attempt to predict future events.
Until now, most previous early evidence for calendar use by these ancient people had been found on stone monuments dating to around 100 BC. David Stuart at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues have now found evidence that the Maya people may have used this calendar over a century earlier.Advertisement
The team previously discovered the San Bartolo archaeological site, which includes a pyramid called Las Pinturas – meaning “the paintings” – back in 2001. Excavations then revealed that the Maya completed several phases of construction, with earlier structures eventually knocked down to form the foundations of the pyramid.
When the researchers were sorting through pieces of plaster collected from the pyramid’s foundations, they realised that two pieces fit perfectly together to form a date symbol.
“That was a stunner – we believe that this is the earliest example of the use of the Maya calendar, showing the day seven Deer,” says Stuart.

The fragments came from the remains of a long platform that was probably built to track astronomical events as well as the time. “This platform may have acted as an observatory for looking at the rising sun or other astronomical bodies in the sky, or for just keeping track of time. Like a kind of architectural clock,” says Stuart.
By radiocarbon dating charcoal found alongside the fragments, the team dated the symbols to between 300 and 200 BC. Stuart believes the symbols may have been used to denote the date of a new year, but they may also have been used to reference a person or deity.
However, some archaeologists question whether this is really the earliest evidence of the 260-day calendar. Mary Pohl at Florida State University believes that a previously discovered roller stamp from Tabasco in Mexico shows this date notation was used in 500 BC. But Stuart thinks the symbols on the stamp from 500 BC aren’t necessarily a form of date notation comparable to the Maya system.
“Early evidence of the… calendar has been debated, but in this study they present clear evidence of the 260-day calendar use. This is very important work,” says Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
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