Jeff VanderMeer insists that he does not predict the future. Yet mere weeks before his new novel, Absolution, hit shelves, Hurricane Helene tore through the part of Florida where he lives, sharing an uncanny likeness to the fictional hurricane in his book. Of course, there’s a difference between art and reality. The through line between the storms is the climate crisis that inspired VanderMeer to write the trilogy of books that made him a household name a decade ago.
Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X, located in VanderMeer’s home state of Florida in the real place known as the Forgotten Coast. The original trio of books covers the area and its tendency to affect living creatures and create bizarre refractions of life within its confines. The series, called the Southern Reach trilogy, garnered enormous praise, a legion of fans, and a movie adaptation. For the record, VanderMeer told me he found Hollywood “frustrating” because “they stripped out all the environmental stuff.” But he did enjoy the movie’s surreal ending.
“We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative.”
A decade later, Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer. Our warmer world is not just more volatile in terms of natural disasters, like Helene and Milton, but it is also becoming a large-scale petri-dish for new diseases, the type of biological mixing and matching that VanderMeer’s books are known for—albeit on a much smaller scale.
In VanderMeer’s fiction, the mirror world of Area X produced strange, haunting results like a character’s transformation into a whale-like creature covered in eyes, or a murderous bear with a human voice. But for VanderMeer, climate change is the scariest thing of all.
I spoke with him just as he was returning to his home in Tallahassee after evacuating from Hurricane Helene. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What is it like being a climate and science fiction writer right now?
I guess it feels like kind of a privilege to be able to talk about this stuff, that the novels have reached enough readers and had enough of an impact that anyone cares what I have to say.
It’s also true that I’m right now in Florida, at the epicenter of a lot of extreme weather events. And so that creates a weird echoing effect. For example, I was fleeing Hurricane Helene up to Greenville, South Carolina, unsure if that was even the right thing to do. And then also asked by the New York Times to write a piece about fleeing the hurricane. So there’s all this real-world consequence.
You’re getting me at the end of fleeing a hurricane, writing about it, coming back to Tallahassee, seeing the consequences of extreme weather because of warming waters because of climate crisis, and feeling both thankful that I can kind of capture a feeling people have here about these events and write about it, but also kind of caught up in it as well.
That sounds pretty jarring.
You can get in loops too, where you don’t really adapt to the situation and you’re just doing the same talking points which, relevant to your question, is something I worry about. You know, where [people on the internet] were saying, “Well, why did people even build in Asheville?” it was this weird disconnect. And it’s like, “Well, because they didn’t expect there’d be these mega-storms that would still have a huge effect, hundreds of miles inland.”
People in the aftermath of destruction seem to want to try to form their own narratives about what’s happening, and I’m sure you are someone who see this clearly, being in the epicenter, but also being someone who works in fiction.
It’s definitely something that I write about in my fiction: the idea of character agency in the face of systemic or system-wide events, whether they’re human systems or systems in the natural world. Especially in Western fiction, we have this idea of rugged individualism, right? And by the end of the narrative, things will have gone back to normal, because something’s been solved.
That’s not really what happens in the real world. We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative. We’re not always the same person we were before, you know, especially with regard to the climate crisis. And so I try to capture that. There’s a hurricane in Absolution that comes up suddenly in the middle of all these other events. And I really wanted to capture how a hurricane these days can seem like an uncanny event, even to those of us who are familiar with them.
“People think the climate crisis is on the horizon…But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.”
Helene, to be candid, scared the crap out of me when I saw it coming to Tallahassee with 150 mile per hour winds. A lot of people decamped from Tallahassee up into North Carolina, and then were completely trapped. People think the climate crisis is on the horizon, and if they think that it’s because they haven’t been affected by it yet. But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.
In this book, Absolution, and in all the books, there are these in-group, out-group dynamics, and I’m just wondering, why is that something that you’re really interested in exploring narratively?
I’m trying to explore the psychological reality of being in these situations. I’m not trying to extrapolate, I’m not trying to predict. I’m simply trying to show what people are like facing these kinds of choices. Because, you know, people talk a lot about the landscapes and uncanny events, but they’re all filtered through a particular character point of view. And I often ask myself, is this person open to what’s happening or are they closed? Are they in denial? Are they understanding to some degree? Are they trying to form connections or are they disconnected and alienated? These are some of the issues that we find in modern times.
How do you talk to scientists? Because this series is very science-based, but the emotional resonance of why people are drawn to science is something that comes through a lot.
My dad is a research chemist and entomologist who’s always headed up or been part of some lab, usually like fire ants and other invasive species. And so I grew up around these kinds of places. My mom was a biological illustrator for many years, and so that also brought a kind of a scientific element to her art. And between those two kinds of locations, I got to see the real human side of science.
I think that actually really helps, along with going on actual scientific expeditions with my dad to Fiji as a kid, it’s just kind of intrinsically in you at that point that you have an understanding of science. I was really quite lucky in that regard.
What was helpful to you to get this book across the finish line?
One thing that was helpful is that there’s actually a lot of humor in it. I don’t like to write books that are monotone. Even in Annihilation, in the earlier books, there’s some sly humor going on. Here, I think it’s a little more overt in some of the relationships and some of what the secret agency is doing that’s so absurd. And then in the last section, especially with this very dysfunctional, almost tech bro-esque personality that’s in this expedition. It’s kind of unintentionally funny. That’s something that anchors me, because it gives me pleasure to write, along with the uncanny stuff.
What’s the role of fiction at this point in the climate crisis?
I think one thing I don’t want the books to do when they skirt the edge of “prediction” is to be unrealistic. I get asked a question a lot, “Where’s the hope in your books?” or things like that. And it’s like, I don’t want the hope, I want the analysis. And I don’t want the faux analysis where we’re doing like carbon offsets that are meaningless. I don’t want to put that in my book as something that’s viable.
I think that what fiction adds is—it’s kind of like: What do you get from religion versus science, or what do you get from philosophy rather than science? Fiction is not science, but it can give you this immersive three-dimensional reality of what it’s like to be in a situation, and it can bring your imagination to it in such a way that it really lives in your body to some degree.
And so I think that’s why the thing that makes me most happy is having people come up to me and say that Annihilation was one reason they became a marine biologist or went into environmental science, that there was something about the character of the biologists in that book that was compelling to them. That to me, is what fiction can provide.
For a personal tribute to Don Barlett, read “‘Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I Liked Your Story’” from our CEO emeritus, Robert Rosenthal.
It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but the other day it happened to me in the best possible way. The person who passed wasn’t a relative, friend, or close colleague. But he did play a key role at one point in my life, by showing me what journalism can do—and often fails to.
Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo as significant as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they embodied the shoeleather investigative reporting that newspapers once nurtured. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was their mentee and friend at the Inquirer, has some moving (and funny!) recollections of the duo here.
But I wanted to zoom out a little, because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable, and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in that obit: its last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, Calif. 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones’ parent organization, and we are a bit of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.
I was floored when I saw that line, and here’s why. In 1991, I was just out of journalism school, in the middle of a recession and the run-up to a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What Went Wrong? It was a deep dive into the rising income inequality that had come to dominate the US economy.
The pair worked on the series (and subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-yous that feel like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what comes next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything will be fine, Barlett and Steele note. But then why does it not feel fine to so many people? Here we see a giant graphic that looks exactly like what you would make on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans make as much (just in wages, not counting investment income) as the bottom 51 percent.
Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem disconnected from your personal situation.” Those stories don’t talk about the factories and workplaces being shuttered, about millions of workers going from earning $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time in this century, members of a generation entering adulthood”—GenX—“will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents. Most will be unable even to match their parents’ middle-class status.”
These Americans, they write, look at the economy from the bottom up. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are on the top looking down. They see things differently. Call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” Those folks include corporate execs, Republicans—led by Reagan and George H.W. Bush—who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals, and deregulation, but also Democrats who went along with it.
Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport renowned for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That, in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”
It’s incredibly striking rereading, 33 years later, how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamic that still defines our economy—and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists were doing that kind of reporting, and how many fewer do it now.
When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession, there were still a lot of investigative reporters in newsrooms, and they did great work, but there was something that defined most of those stories: They were about exposing people breaking the rules. Politicians stealing from the public purse. Construction workers catching naps on the taxpayer’s dime. Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable. And there was a reason for that: Mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; value judgments had no place in their work. But the mission of investigative reporting, inherently, is about showing the contrast between how things are and how they should be—it’s about exposing wrongs. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells shone a spotlight on lynching has been animated by this.
Defining “wrong” as “rulebreaking” was a way to avoid making a value judgment—but it meant that a lot of important stories were not told. Stories about systems, especially, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.
That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title. Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.
Seeing that journalism could do that—could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice—was an aha moment for cub reporter me. That’s the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and apparently there were jobs for people to do it.
Little did I know that most of those jobs were about to disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who were buying up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a loss rate faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to dig deep on a big issue, especially one as hard to get your arms around as income inequality.
And the idea of journalism as a distant, removed, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t need to tell you how much damage the he-said-she-said model has done to campaign coverage. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we see media (not all media, all the time—but it happens far too often) laundering extremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder that a man who embodies the self-enrichment and rapacious profit-taking that Barlett and Steele skewered in America: What Went Wrong? is getting away with styling himself as a champion of the forgotten Americans.
But Don Barlett wouldn’t want us to stop there, at the doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends on that incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here at Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and it never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we are accountable to you and you alone, we can do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: exposing what is truly wrong, even if it’s completely legal.
Thank you, Don Barlett. We’ll do you proud.
For a personal tribute to Don Barlett, read “‘Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I Liked Your Story’” from our CEO emeritus, Robert Rosenthal.
It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but the other day it happened to me in the best possible way. The person who passed wasn’t a relative, friend, or close colleague. But he did play a key role at one point in my life, by showing me what journalism can do—and often fails to.
Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo as significant as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they embodied the shoeleather investigative reporting that newspapers once nurtured. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was their mentee and friend at the Inquirer, has some moving (and funny!) recollections of the duo here.
But I wanted to zoom out a little, because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable, and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in that obit: its last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, Calif. 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones’ parent organization, and we are a bit of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.
I was floored when I saw that line, and here’s why. In 1991, I was just out of journalism school, in the middle of a recession and the run-up to a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What Went Wrong? It was a deep dive into the rising income inequality that had come to dominate the US economy.
The pair worked on the series (and subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-yous that feel like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what comes next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything will be fine, Barlett and Steele note. But then why does it not feel fine to so many people? Here we see a giant graphic that looks exactly like what you would make on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans make as much (just in wages, not counting investment income) as the bottom 51 percent.
Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem disconnected from your personal situation.” Those stories don’t talk about the factories and workplaces being shuttered, about millions of workers going from earning $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time in this century, members of a generation entering adulthood”—GenX—“will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents. Most will be unable even to match their parents’ middle-class status.”
These Americans, they write, look at the economy from the bottom up. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are on the top looking down. They see things differently. Call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” Those folks include corporate execs, Republicans—led by Reagan and George H.W. Bush—who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals, and deregulation, but also Democrats who went along with it.
Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport renowned for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That, in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”
It’s incredibly striking rereading, 33 years later, how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamic that still defines our economy—and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists were doing that kind of reporting, and how many fewer do it now.
When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession, there were still a lot of investigative reporters in newsrooms, and they did great work, but there was something that defined most of those stories: They were about exposing people breaking the rules. Politicians stealing from the public purse. Construction workers catching naps on the taxpayer’s dime. Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable. And there was a reason for that: Mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; value judgments had no place in their work. But the mission of investigative reporting, inherently, is about showing the contrast between how things are and how they should be—it’s about exposing wrongs. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells shone a spotlight on lynching has been animated by this.
Defining “wrong” as “rulebreaking” was a way to avoid making a value judgment—but it meant that a lot of important stories were not told. Stories about systems, especially, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.
That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title. Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.
Seeing that journalism could do that—could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice—was an aha moment for cub reporter me. That’s the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and apparently there were jobs for people to do it.
Little did I know that most of those jobs were about to disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who were buying up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a loss rate faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to dig deep on a big issue, especially one as hard to get your arms around as income inequality.
And the idea of journalism as a distant, removed, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t need to tell you how much damage the he-said-she-said model has done to campaign coverage. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we see media (not all media, all the time—but it happens far too often) laundering extremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder that a man who embodies the self-enrichment and rapacious profit-taking that Barlett and Steele skewered in America: What Went Wrong? is getting away with styling himself as a champion of the forgotten Americans.
But Don Barlett wouldn’t want us to stop there, at the doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends on that incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here at Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and it never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we are accountable to you and you alone, we can do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: exposing what is truly wrong, even if it’s completely legal.
Thank you, Don Barlett. We’ll do you proud.
Human beings live every day with the understanding of our own mortality, but do animals have any concept of death? It's a question that has long intrigued scientists, fueled by reports of ants, for example, appearing to attend their own"funerals"; chimps gathering somberly around fallen comrades; or a mother whale who carried her dead baby with her for two weeks in an apparent show of grief.
Philosopher Susana Monsó is a leading expert on animal cognition, behavior and ethics at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. She became interested in the topic of how animals experience death several years ago while applying for a grant and noted that there were a number of field reports on how different animal species reacted to death. It's an emerging research field called comparative thanatology, which focuses on how animals react to the dead or dying, the physiological mechanisms that underlie such reactions, and what we can learn from those behaviors about animal minds.
"I could see that there was a new discipline that was emerging that was very much in need of a philosophical approach to help it clarify its main concepts," she told Ars. "And personally, I was turning 30 at the time and became a little bit obsessed with death. So I wanted to think a lot about death and maybe come to fear it less through philosophical reflection on it."
© Princeton University Press
Last November, I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and the most renowned Palestinian American historian today, about the lack of statements from President Joe Biden expressing sympathy for Palestinians. At the time, I was writing an article outlining Biden’s long-standing and unusual unwillingness to challenge Israel.
“I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all,” Khalidi replied. “He sees the Israelis as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus, which is being sucked at by every element of the mainstream media.”
The professional bluntness was typical of Khalidi. Throughout his decadeslong career as an academic and public intellectual, he has not shied away from lacerating fellow elites as he uproots deep assumptions about Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he has made himself a fitting successor to Said, the late Palestinian American literary critic his professorship was named after.
Khalidi’s 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, was called a “pathbreaking work of major importance” by Said. In the early days of the ongoing war, Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a study of how Ireland was a laboratory for British colonial practices that were later employed in Palestine. At the end of June, he retired and became a professor emeritus.
We spoke last Wednesday—one day after Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel following a series of Israeli escalations—to assess the one-year mark of the current war.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A year ago, more than 1,100 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 attack. At least 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza in response. Now, Israel has invaded Lebanon and provoked a war with Iran, which launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday. A year ago, was this a nightmare scenario?
It is a nightmare scenario, but we may be at the beginning of the nightmare. This is potentially a multiyear war now. By the time this is published, we will have entered its second year. But the risks in terms of a regional confrontation are much, much greater than most people would have assessed back in October 2023. This is potentially going to be a world war, a major regional war, a multifront war. In fact, in some respects, it already is.
An article in the New York Times this morning stated that “Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.” The US has also said it will work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran. Are you surprised that there’s been essentially no willingness by the US to use its leverage over Israel?
I have to say I’m a little surprised. Firstly, because every earlier war, with the exception of 1948, was eventually stopped by the United States, or by the international community with the involvement of the United States, much more quickly than this one. You’ve had wars that went on for a couple of months. But eventually, after backing Israel fully, the United States stopped Israel. There’s absolutely no sign of the United States doing anything but encouraging Israel and arming and protecting them diplomatically. In historical perspective, this is unique to my knowledge.
Secondly, it is a little surprising in domestic electoral terms. I don’t think Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have a whole lot to worry about on their right. People who are going to vote on this issue in one way are going to vote for [former President Donald] Trump anyway. Whereas on his left, I think one of the terrible ironies of this—we will only find this out after the election—might be that Harris loses the election because she loses Michigan. Because she lost young people and Arabs and Muslims.
To the left, there’s a huge void where some people are going to hold their noses and vote for Harris. But some people will not vote for her under any circumstances. And if that tips the margin in favor of Trump, it will be one of the most colossal failures of the Democratic Party leadership in modern history to not understand that there’s lots of space to their left and there’s no space to their right. They have hewed right, right, right on this—at least publicly. Personally, I don’t understand that electoral calculation.
I also go back to the first thing I said: I don’t understand how the United States doesn’t see that the expansion of this war is extremely harmful to any possible definition of American national interests.
What do you think the Biden administration and its supporters fail to understand in terms of the cost to the United States of enabling this war?
The administration and the entire American elite is in another place from Americans, who reject the Biden policy, want a ceasefire, and are opposed to continuing to arm Israel. That’s the problem. You have this cork in the bottle. The bottle has changed. The cork hasn’t.
The media elites, the university and foundation elites, the corporate elites, the donor class, the leaderships of the political parties, and the foreign policy establishment are way out in right field and are completely supportive of whatever Israel does. They back Israel to the hilt—whatever it does. And you are getting the same kind of mindless drivel in the foreign policy world about an opportunity for “remaking the Middle East” that we got before the 2003 Iraq fiasco.
Israel killed the guy they were negotiating with in Tehran—[Ismail] Haniyeh. They don’t say anything. You want a ceasefire? Haniyeh allegedly wanted a ceasefire. Israel goes and kills the guy in Tehran. The US doesn’t say anything. Not a peep. This is a high-level provocation.
[Harris] and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this.
You’re trying to bring about a ceasefire on the Lebanese border? The Israelis kill the person they’re negotiating with. Not a peep. The US says: He was a bad guy. He killed Americans. Good thing.
I find it mind-boggling the degree to which the elite is blind to the damage that this is clearly doing to the United States in the world and in the Middle East—and the dangers that entails. I hear not a peep out of that elite about the potential danger of Israel leading them by the nose into an American, Israeli, Iranian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Lebanese war, which has no visible end. I mean, where does this stop?
Harris has declined to break with Biden on Israel in her public rhetoric. If she’s elected, do you expect a significant shift in her approach to Israel and Palestine?
No, I do not. She had multiple opportunities to do a Hubert Humphrey—to disassociate herself from the president who just decided not to run again. To allow a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic National] Convention, to meet with certain people, to modulate her virulent, pro-Israel rhetoric, she hasn’t taken those opportunities. I don’t expect that she will.
She and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this. They can ignore Arabs and Muslims, and then they can win the election anyway. That seems to have been their decision. That might change if their internal polling at the end of October shows she’s losing Michigan. But it would be a little bit late.
Humphrey’s speech was on September 30. So we’re already past that.
And it was too late for Humphrey.
The main success that Biden administration officials pointed to again and again was preventing a regional war. That has now completely fallen apart. You were in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion with your kids and your wife, Mona, who was pregnant at the time. How does your personal experience of that invasion influence how you see what is happening in Lebanon today?
It’s not deja vu for me. I actually feel it’s much, much, much worse. I’m following along with all my relatives in Beirut, as I have been following along with relatives in Palestine over the past year, as they report on what’s happening to them and around them. It’s similar, but it’s a lot worse. I think my kids are going through the same thing, especially my daughters, who were little children during the ’82 war.
And all of us are sitting in safety outside the Middle East. I’m thinking of the family that we have who are still in Beirut. They’ve been through war and misery and the collapse of Lebanon and various phases of this war in the past. I know they are resilient. But it’s really hard to experience it again and again and again. They went through it in 2006 and now they’re going through it again.
It’s horrifying that nobody seems to read history or understand that no good can come from this. Leave aside good for the Lebanese—obviously, nobody in the Western elite cares about the Lebanese or the Palestinians. There’s a degree of insensitivity, which is shocking, but we’re used to it. But nobody even cares about the Israelis. They are putting their head into a buzz saw in both Gaza and Lebanon: a tunnel without end.
What do the Americans think they are doing, pushing, allowing, arming Israel to do this vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Yemen, vis-à-vis Lebanon, vis-à-vis the Palestinians? Where does this end for Israel? They are getting themselves into a minefield out of which they will not be able to extract themselves without enormous, terrible results for them—and obviously infinitely more devastating results for Lebanon and the Palestinians.
I don’t understand the blindness of the United States in basically encouraging Israel to commit harakiri. This cannot end well for them. It’s not going to end well for anyone else. I’m not minimizing the horror. It’s going to end worse, obviously, for Palestinians and Lebanese. But what can they possibly be thinking in Washington? Or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?
Perhaps the most horrifying result of the 1982 invasion was Sabra and Shatila, when Israeli soldiers assisted Lebanese Christian militants as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. You and your family were staying in a faculty apartment that Malcolm Kerr had found for you after American and international troops pulled out of Beirut. Could you talk about what you saw from the balcony of that apartment?
What we witnessed was the Israeli military firing illumination shells over Sabra and Shatila after they had introduced militias that they paid and armed to kill people on the basis of an agreement between [Israeli Defense Minster Ariel] Sharon and the Lebanese forces. We were a little shocked because the fighting had stopped a couple of days before. The Israelis had occupied West Beirut. There were no Palestinian military forces at all in Beirut. No fighters, no units, nothing. The camps were defenseless, and the Americans had promised the PLO that they would protect the civilian populations left behind when the PLO evacuated its forces.
So, we were quite perplexed. What is going with these illumination shells being fired when it seemed completely quiet? We went to bed not knowing the massacre had started. When we woke up, we found out from Jon Randall and Loren Jenkins, who were working for the Washington Post, what they had just seen.
When we spoke in November, you held up your phone so that I could hear pro-Palestine demonstrations passing by you in Morningside Heights. Edward Said had the opposite experience decades before.
He said he was radicalized by being in New York during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and talked about hearing someone in Morningside Heights ask, How are we doing? It drove home that Arabs and Palestinians effectively did not exist. What do you make of the significance of that shift?
I was in New York in June 1967, and I remember people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets outside Grand Central station. The same fervor that Edward witnessed, I witnessed in ’67. There’s been an enormous shift in American public opinion. The polling numbers are unequivocally opposed to this war, opposed to Biden’s policy, opposed to continuing to arm Israel.
We’ve seen it on campus. The campus has been shut down in response to last year’s protests. We call it Fortress Columbia. You can’t get a journalist onto the campus without two days’ notice, and even then, it doesn’t work. Columbia has sealed the campus and installed checkpoints to prevent the people of the neighborhood from walking across the campus on what should be a public thoroughfare on 116th Street.
The protest movement has been shut down by repression, but the sentiment is I’m sure still there. Most young people have an entirely different view of this war—and of Palestine and Israel—than their grandparents have. The difference is enormous and striking, and I think it may be growing. The invasion of Lebanon will do nothing to change the way people see things. I think it will just reinforce it.
I’ve seen a sea change in the past couple of decades that I was at Columbia. I arrived there in 2003, and sentiment was not favorable to Palestine overall. I still had the sense that I had when I was an undergraduate many decades ago that I was swimming against the tide of opinion among students and faculty. That’s not the case anymore. Two-thirds of the arts and sciences faculty voted no confidence in the president because of her position on the protests. I couldn’t have imagined something like that happening 25 years ago.
Do you ever fear that the shift is arriving too late? That by the time America potentially decides to hold Israel accountable, there might not be a Palestine left to save because the West Bank has been annexed and Gaza has been leveled?
Gaza has been leveled, and the West Bank has long since been annexed. It’s been incorporated into Israel in practice for decades. Israeli law operates in the West Bank for Israelis only. Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller Bantustans, and Israel is encouraging them to leave. But that doesn’t mean that Palestine is gone. You still have as many Palestinians as Israelis within the frontiers of Palestine. That’s not going to change.
They still have a problem. How do you establish an entity involving Jewish supremacy in a country where at least half of the population are not Jews? I don’t see how they get out of that conundrum just because they’ve devastated Gaza or just because they’ve annexed the West Bank.
They’ve created that conundrum and there’s no way out for them. They either entirely annihilate the Palestinian population or drive it out, which I don’t think is possible in the 21st century, at least I hope not, or they come to terms with it. They’re not willing to do that right now. They’re even less willing to do that after October 7. Public opinion has hardened in Israel for reasons that are perfectly understandable.
But do I see that this is too late? No. I worry that no matter how consequential the shift in public opinion is, the elite will hold on stubbornly. And that it will take even longer than it took for public opinion opposing the Iraq war or public opinion opposing the Vietnam War to force elites that were dedicated and committed to mindless, aggressive wars abroad to finally change their course. It took years and years on Vietnam, and it took years and years on Iraq.
That’s what I’m afraid of—that the anti-democratic intent of the elite, and of the party leaderships, of the foreign policy establishment, and of the donor class will prevent a shift for many more years than should be the case. If we had a really democratic system, if we had a system where public opinion had as much of an effect as money—which it doesn’t, unfortunately—then you would have seen a change already. There’s no indication that there will be a change for quite a while, regardless of who is elected in November.
A consequence of timing this interview to coincide with the one-year mark of the war is that it can obscure what came before. How should the reality of daily life in Gaza in the decades leading up to October 7 shape how we understand what has happened in the past year?
The people who have been fighting Israel in Gaza, for the most part, are people who grew up as children under this prison camp regime imposed on them by the Israelis and on the southern border by the Egyptians. Most of them have never been allowed to leave Gaza. Most of them have had all kinds of restrictions on everything they can do and buy and say for their entire lives. And they’ve lived under an authoritarian Hamas regime, which was quite unpopular in Gaza before October 7.
The people who have been fighting the Israelis are the people who Israel’s prison camp has created. And what Israel has done in the last year is far, far worse than anything it did in the preceding 17 years of the blockade. They killed over 2,300 people in 2014. They’ve killed probably well over 50,000 in the past year, if we count those buried under the rubble. The number is 41,600 as of today. The numbers are hard to process.
The kids growing up now are going to be the successors to today’s fighters, given that nobody’s offering them a future, given that they’re going to live in misery for a decade if not longer, given that Israel will dominate their lives in even more intense ways than it had before. The people who grow up in that situation—some of them are going to turn into even more ferocious fighters resisting Israel.
The same thing is happening in South Lebanon. People grew up in South Lebanon being bombarded by Israel, and they became the fighters in the ’82 war. There’s a picture of [former Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah fighting in ’82 as a young man. That experience of constant Israeli attacks and the occupations of South Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 created Hezbollah. Even Ehud Barak admitted as much.
I’ve seen not one mention of the fact that the United States helped Israel kill 19,000 people in Lebanon in 1982. And that might have been a factor as important as what Israel was doing in creating Hezbollah and in it turning against the United States. They considered the United States responsible for Sabra and Shatila because it had promised to protect the civilians—that no harm would come to the civilians the PLO left behind.
I fear that the United States’ full-throated support for what Israel is doing may have the same effect in the 2020s and 2030s, unfortunately. I’m not happy about any of this. I consider all of these things disastrous. But I’m looking at them coldly. The things that I’m talking about have produced what has passed, and what we’re seeing now will produce, heaven forbid, possibly even more horrible things in the future. Those who don’t read history and don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, but in a much worse way, I’m afraid.
“Today’s newsletter will probably overwhelm you,” Jessica Valenti wrote in a note preceding the Wednesday, September 25, edition of Abortion, Every Day, the Substack where she breaks down the news on reproductive rights. The first order of business: an explanation of how a powerful anti-abortion group is directing an ad campaign that blames pro-choice advocates for the deaths of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman. Miller and Thurman were two Georgia women who, according to a ProPublica investigation, died because of the state abortion ban. “Honestly, how dare they,” Valenti wrote. “How dare they use these women’s names; how dare they use their pictures. It’s just beyond the pale.”
The same newsletter also covered Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to oppose adding the right to abortion to the state constitution, a report on the increasing criminalization of pregnancy since the end of Roe v. Wade, and a summary of a New York Times/Reveal investigation into Florida maternity homes. That wasn’t even all of it—and that was just Wednesday.
Valenti, known for her previous columns at the Nation and the Guardian, has written about feminism and politics for nearly two decades. She started Abortion, Every Day almost immediately after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling leaked, when she found herself unable to turn away from the news. “It was not a deliberate pivot,” she tells me in a phone interview as she prepares dinner for her family in Brooklyn. “I was just so mad and upset. Like so many people, I think I just wanted to know everything, so I just started writing about it.”
She never stopped. “Hilariously,” Valenti says, “I really did ask myself in the beginning, ‘If I do this, am I going to have enough stuff to write about every day for more than a few months?’” Now, Valenti writes a newsletter every day of the workweek—mostly on her own, though she recently hired an assistant and a part-time researcher. She’s also gathered enough material to fill a new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, out this month. From the very beginning of Abortion, Valenti makes the case that the deluge of news is itself a part of the anti-abortion movement’s strategy. “The anti-abortion movement is hitting Americans with everything all at once in the hopes that those of us who want our rights back will be too exhausted and crushed to fight back,” she writes in the introduction. “It’s hard for any single person to keep track of all the anti-abortion attacks and tactics happening in different states around the country. But it’s vital that we do.”
It’s only by tracking the day-to-day onslaught that Valenti says she and, by extension, her readers can see the full scope of the attack on abortion rights. “I can see a difference in my own knowledge if I skip a day in the newsletter,” she says. “Things are moving so quickly.” If that seems exhausting, well, it is. “I think everyone who is working on this issue is in a very similar place, and I worry about burnout for myself and everyone who does this work because you can feel the impact physically,” Valenti says. “You start losing sleep. It takes a toll on your health.” Since beginning the newsletter, Valenti says she’s given up on seeing almost anyone besides her husband and 14-year-old daughter, Layla.
Layla is the reason Valenti does this work. “It was her I cried for the night the Dobbs decision was leaked,” Valenti writes in Abortion. “I remember crawling into bed with my husband and sobbing. Wailing, really. I kept saying, ‘My daughter, my daughter.’ A mother’s job is to protect her children. How could I possibly do that now?” The newsletter, and now the book, were the answer. The twist is that the work dedicated to Layla pulls Valenti away from her. “She went from having a mom who is writing a weekly column and who is super-present to someone who’s just not,” Valenti says. “It’s a mind fuck, that’s for sure.”
Although Abortion, Every Day began almost by accident, Valenti has in some sense been preparing her whole career for this. After earning a master’s at Rutgers University in women’s and gender studies, she worked as a communications assistant for a feminist organization. A friend encouraged her to start blogging, and in 2004, she and sister Vanessa founded Feministing, which would become one of the most widely read feminist publications in the country during its 15-year existence, with more than 1.2 million unique monthly readers at its peak.
The goal behind her writing was to give young feminists the tools they needed to speak more confidently about their beliefs. “One of the things that I heard, and continue to hear most often, especially from younger women, is this feeling like someone is going to think that they’re stupid or that they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Valenti says. “So the hope was to provide the language, the context, the information that folks needed to say the stuff that they already believed but didn’t necessarily have the language for.”
That idea continues to be a driving force behind Valenti’s work on Abortion, Every Day and her new book. At the back of Abortion, there is a section of quick facts (“Decades of research have shown that both procedural and medication abortions are safe”) and statistics (“States with abortion restrictions have maternal death rates that are 62 percent higher than states with abortion access”) designed so readers can quickly find what they want to reference when talking about the issue, whether that’s on social media or face to face with family and friends. “Sometimes people ask me if I feel like I’m ‘preaching to the choir.’ What I tell them, and what is true about this book, is that I’m arming the choir,” Valenti writes in Abortion.
Valenti wasn’t always the type of person who could pull these kinds of facts from memory herself. “I was not a wonk by any means,” she says. “I could not tell you about ballot measure shit two years ago. It was not something that was on my mind at all.” But her blogging days gave her a bit of a head start on keeping up with the strategy. In 2009, she published The Purity Myth, an investigation into America’s obsession with virginity. Now, she says, the people she wrote about then, who were focused on anti-sex education campaigns, have come back to haunt her. “It really is all the same people,” she says. “They’re still doing the same thing, and honestly, it is a little weird because they’re using the same tactics, they’re using the same language. They haven’t changed much, which shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.” The difference now is that she knows that the fight is not just about purity, or even just about abortion. It’s about birth control, freedom of movement, and defending democracy. It’s more existential.
Although the subject she covers is obviously heavy, there’s a certain catharsis for Valenti in connecting all the dots in her newsletter and book, in unmasking a movement that’s been encroaching on abortion rights for decades. Valenti says that before Roe was overturned, abortion advocates often felt “gaslit, not just by anti-abortion people, but by leftist dudes and pundits who were like, ‘You’re being hysterical,’ and, ‘Don’t scaremonger.’”
The fight is not just about purity, or even just about abortion. It’s about birth control, freedom of movement, and defending democracy. It’s more existential.
Now, all the threats she and others warned about have become reality. It’s, as Valenti puts it, “horrible and also so incredibly fucked,” but after the years of being called hysterical, it feels good to read someone who is honest about the situation and still as angry as she was two years ago. “It’s a terrible thing to write about every day, to read about every day, to think about. Unfortunately, it’s also something we can’t escape, because it is happening,” she says. “My fear is people reading these stories and sort of being like, ‘Oh man, that’s horrible,’ and turning the page. There’s a reason they’re trying to overwhelm us, right? They know that they can make us numb to it.”
Part of what keeps Valenti from becoming numb is the occasional joy she takes in the ability to “fuck some of them over.” Take, for example, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who said in a 2022 interview that his state’s abortion ban does not criminalize mothers. While searching through news for Abortion, Every Day, Valenti found a comment from Marshall’s office to a local conservative blog, assuring concerned readers that even though the abortion ban wouldn’t allow women to be prosecuted, it wouldn’t stop the office from charging women who had medication abortions under a chemical endangerment law meant to protect children exposed to drugs. “In other words, Alabama’s Attorney General plans to arrest and charge women who take abortion medication…using a law meant to stop adults from bringing kids to drug dealers’ houses,” Valenti wrote in her newsletter. “So much for not jailing women!”
Marshall’s office’s comment to the blog hadn’t otherwise been reported, but after Valenti wrote about it in Abortion, Every Day, it was picked up in local and national outlets. Two days after her newsletter, Marshall backtracked, telling the press that women would not be prosecuted for taking abortion pills.
“What makes me happy about the project are the people who are reading it,” Valenti says. Her readers include people who work directly in abortion access, but also Senate staff and reporters. A few times a month, Valenti says she’ll read a piece she feels like she could’ve written herself and, when she types the reporter’s name into her subscriber list, is delighted to find them there. “It’s been really amazing to see the growth of reporters,” she says. “As horrible as it is, since we’re gonna have to be doing this for a long time, I hope that we’ll see a new generation of reporters who started writing about this issue when they were young and then are just gonna be so outrageously knowledgeable 10 years from now.”
Ten years from now is hard to imagine. Ten years ago, we still had Roe, but the anti-abortion movement was taking hold in the states. The Guttmacher Institute issued a worrying report in 2014 on “an unprecedented wave of state-level abortion restrictions.” A February article in Time that year described how anti-abortion advocates were “looking to turn abortion into an animating issue for the Republican Party.” Valenti was just beginning her stint at the Guardian. She sometimes wrote about abortion in her column. When someone emailed her, she’d get back when she could. It wasn’t urgent.
Now, the emails in Valenti’s inbox come from 17-year-olds who are wondering where they can get abortion medication, from people seeking legal advice, from people whose stories need to be told now. Maybe, Valenti says, she could see herself slowing down the pace of her work in a world with reasonable federal abortion protections. But for now, 13 states have a total abortion ban. Hospitals in those states are unable to recruit OB-GYNs, and maternal health wards are closing. Anti-abortion groups are sowing distrust about birth control. Some pregnant women are being prosecuted; others are bleeding out in parking lots. “No matter what happens in November, we’re still going to be fighting this fight for years, if not decades,” Valenti says. So she will continue tracking the daily churn of legislation moving through statehouses, politicians making crude remarks, and reports on the impact Dobbs has had across the nation. She has to.
Editor’s note: Eight years ago, on the eve of the 2016 election, Mother Jones published a story by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a renowned sociologist who had spent five years interviewing a group of white Southern conservatives to understand what drives the way they see America, politics, and Donald Trump.
Trump was not the focus of Hochschild’s research, but she soon discovered that he was there in the background, tapping into the “deep story” her interviewees told about themselves and their community. They saw themselves, she wrote, as waiting patiently in line for their shot at the American Dream—but others, whom they saw as undeserving and who were often Black or immigrants, were cutting in line. “The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving,” they believed. “It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.”
It didn’t matter if that story was factually true (Hochschild documented that it was not): It drove how people felt and how they would ultimately vote. It gave them an explanation for why the success they had been told was their birthright seemed elusive, why their families might even need benefits like food stamps or disability income that they had been told only the weak would accept.
“Trump solves a white male problem of pride,” Hochschild wrote. “Benefits? If you need them, okay. He masculinizes it. You can be ‘high energy’ macho—and yet may need to apply for a government benefit. As one auto mechanic told me, ‘Why not? Trump’s for that. If you use food stamps because you’re working a low-wage job, you don’t want someone looking down their nose at you.’”
Trump would not, of course, deliver on these voters’ economic needs. But he would deliver on their need for pride. And it’s that issue that Hochschild returns to in her new book, Stolen Pride, set in the heart of what Trump calls the forgotten America—the town of Pikeville, Kentucky.
In 2017, when Hochschild’s research for this book began, Pikeville was the site of a neo-Nazi march that became a prelude for the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The march was a focal point for Hochschild’s interviews with everyone from an imprisoned white supremacist gang member to a self-described “trailer trash” TikTok creator. In Pikeville, the deep story was all about what Hochschild came to call the pride economy.
“We live in both a material economy and a pride economy, and while we pay close attention to shifts in the material economy, we often neglect or underestimate the importance of the pride economy. Just as the fortunes of Appalachian Kentucky have risen and fallen with the fate of coal, so has its standing in the pride economy…
“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
In places like rural Kentucky, that sense of shame and lost pride is connected to what Hochschild identifies as the paradox of the American Dream: A self-sufficient, middle-class life has become harder to attain in many rural, conservative communities—but people in those communities are more likely to blame themselves for this.
“From roughly 1970 on, the United States gradually divided into two economies—the winners and losers of globalization. Rising in opportunity have been cities and regions with diversified economies, often the site of newer, less vulnerable industries, which typically hired college-educated workers in service and tech fields. Declining in opportunity have been rural and semi-rural areas, offering blue-collar jobs in older manufacturing industries more vulnerable to offshoring and automation. These also include regions where jobs are based on extracting oil, coal, and other minerals, the demand for which fluctuates with world demand.
“The urban middle class, which leans Democratic, has become a so-called mobility incubator, while many rural blue-collar areas, now leaning Republican, have become mobility traps. Between 2008 and 2017, one study found, the nation’s Democratic congressional districts saw median household income rise from $54,000 to $61,000, while incomes in Republican districts fell from $55,000 to $53,000…The second part of the paradox lies in core ideas about hard work and individual responsibility for one’s economic fate.
“When asked in a national survey why it is that a person ends up being poor, 31 percent of Republicans (party members or those who lean that way) say it is due to ‘circumstances beyond their control,’ in contrast to 69 percent of Democrats. Similarly, 71 percent of Republicans but only 22 percent of Democrats think ‘people are rich because they work hard.’…Thus, people growing up in the two kinds of economy experience different degrees of moral pinch between the cultural terms set for earning pride and the economic opportunity to do so.”
It’s this moral pinch—being caught in a declining regional economy while being told you have yourself to blame for your economic struggles—that the people Hochschild interviews describe from a variety of angles. For some, it fuels hate; for many, resentment; for all, a kind of bewilderment.
Like Hochschild’s 2016 book, these stories are even more timely now than they were when she conducted the interviews, in part because of Trump’s running mate selection of JD Vance, whose fame began with his book, Hillbilly Elegy. But where Vance concludes that the fix for places like Appalachia is to exclude others from the economy—both the material and the pride kind—Hochschild’s interviewees offer more nuanced views. All but one reject the white supremacists marching through their town. But many also are drawn to the way Trump and Vance make them feel seen. She talks with TikTok creator David Maynard, born literally yards away from Vance’s ancestral hometown of Jackson, Kentucky, and his wife, Shea, who show her the places where they grew up, fell in love, and built a life together. It’s a “reverse Hillbilly Elegy,” Hochschild writes, a story of wrestling with the paradox of the American Dream.
“If I’m a Moore’s Trailer Park white trash person, the only narrative I have tells me that I’m white, so I’m privileged,” Maynard tells Hochschild. “That’s the something I have and that must put me ahead. But what if it doesn’t put me ahead? I’m left with nothing because I’m lazy and stupid. There’s no excuse. If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom?’”
Another of Hochschild’s interviewees, Tommy Ratliff, digs deeper into that sentiment: “I could have become a white nationalist,” he tells her. Why that’s so, and how he didn’t, is the subject of the chapter excerpted below. —Monika Bauerlein
“In college,” Tommy Ratliff told me, “we had a guest speaker who gave us a lecture on the American Dream. He told us all we had to do was to work real hard, stick to a plan, and open a bank account. We should save a little money each month for our kids’ future education. At the time, I was earning $9.50 an hour behind the counter at a hobby shop and had to repay a loan I took out to pay for college and child support. Part of me just felt like telling the guy, ‘Shut up.’”
A tall man with long, wavy brown hair fanned across broad shoulders, gentle and direct in manner, Tommy was wearing his favorite black T-shirt, which said, “Not perfect, just forgiven.”
“Maybe I could earn my way to the American Dream if nothing else went wrong. That’s if I don’t get sick, if I don’t need a new heat pump, if my electric bill weren’t $400 a month, if my ex-wife didn’t get hooked on drugs, if my parents weren’t alcoholics, if my disturbed brother didn’t move in with me and raid my refrigerator while I was at work. Sure, the American Dream is all yours if nothing goes wrong. But things go wrong.”
Tommy explained what that meant as we walked through maple, redbud, and pines around his natal family’s quietly sheltered valley enclave. We walked by the home of his Uncle Roy, now widowed and seldom home. Roy had gotten Tommy out of scrapes, bought him a car, lent him money. Roy’s wife, Tommy’s aunt, became the “one I was closest to” when words became slurred and voices were raised in his own home next door.
We passed a shed used by Tommy’s paternal grandfather, now deceased, a former miner and World War II vet who had been at Iwo Jima as American GIs raised the flag. He had been decorated with a Purple Heart, long proudly kept like a holy icon in a glass cabinet in his grandfather’s hallway. A nearby shed held his grandfather’s beekeeping equipment and a wooden cane he had made in his retirement, together with a long wooden chain miraculously carved from a single piece of wood.
Visiting the small hillside cemetery near the end of a logging road where Tommy’s ancestors were laid to rest, we ran into Tommy’s Aunt Loretta washing family gravestones and restaking the VFW flag by his grandfather’s grave. A retired nurse, Loretta enjoyed Civil War reenactments but was uninterested in Pikeville’s upcoming white nationalist march. “Those guys come and go. I don’t pay them mind,” she said.
“The very idea that I had a place on a class ladder came to me slowly,” Tommy mused. “First, I thought of my family as middle class, and I was proud of that. As a kid, class was a matter of the kinds of toys I got at Christmas. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to get what I got—GoBots, Action Max, Conan the Barbarian, Turok, the Warlord. But the kids at school had better-made versions of the toys I got. So, in toys, I felt somewhere below the middle.” Then when Tommy’s mother’s Texan relatives came to visit, he said, “I could see they looked around and thought my mom had married down and felt sorry for us. One cousin asked me, ‘What do you think a redneck is?’ and I wondered why she asked me that. Did she think I was one?”
We walked along a dirt path to a gurgling stream in back of Uncle Roy’s and Aunt Loretta’s homes—a wondrous wooded childhood haunt, filled with pine, poplars, birch, and pawpaw trees, that Tommy had long ago christened “Fairyland,” a term he still used with reverence.
“After 14 or 15, I used to spend a lot of time in this forest,” Tommy recalled, looking around at the trees as if at the faces of dear friends. “George [a childhood pal] and I would fight monsters and trolls and orcs and talking animals, like we saw in films about Narnia. We wore rounded strips of tree bark as body armor and used sticks as swords. I’d catch salamanders, frogs, and crawdads from the stream and let them go. We didn’t fish or hunt; we thought everything should be left the way it is. If you listened really close to the crickets and frogs sing to each other at night, first a song would come from one bank of the stream, then we’d hear an answer from the other. In the winter, we’d walk up the frozen streambed on the ice, then slide all the way down.” Listening to Tommy, I was reminded of a passage in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: “Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam.”
“Growing up, my world was real small—Elkhorn, Dorton, Belcher, Millard, Lick Creek, places around our holler. I didn’t know what was going on outside my family and neighbors and these places,” Tommy said. “Elkhorn only had one red light, but it was a city compared to Dorton, nothing there except the school and a pizza place. Dorton was tough. In a lot of hollers, people only come out once a month [to shop or visit] and don’t like outsiders. Nearly everyone in my world—my parents, my two brothers, my best friend George, my neighbors and schoolmates, and the action figures we played with—were all white.”
When, after finishing high school and working a few jobs, Tommy enrolled at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia, he made his world smaller still. “Dad never liked me or my brothers to talk. If we were at dinner, he told us, ‘Don’t talk.’ If we were in the car, it was ‘Don’t talk.’ If we had company, ‘Don’t talk.’” So at Clinch Valley, Tommy sat in the back of a large classroom, was assigned to no discussion group or advisor, feared going to his professor’s office hours, and never talked. At the end of the first semester, Tommy flunked out, imagining that he, not the college, had failed.
“I’m not sure if I wasn’t paying attention or if it wasn’t taught. But before college, honestly, I wasn’t very sure how Blacks got to America,” Tommy told me. “I learned about slavery from seeing Amistad [a film about a slave ship rebellion in 1839] and 12 Years a Slave [about a free Black man kidnapped and sold into slavery], and about the Holocaust from Schindler’s List.”
Tommy also learned about Black life through television: “For a while, we didn’t own a TV. Dad would rent one in his name and when the bill got too high, Mom would put it in her name. I watched The Cosby Show and thought those kids were a whole lot better off than I was. They got an allowance, and all they had to do was save it. Their parents didn’t yell or drink. They lived in a nice house, and the dad was fine with them talking.”
Yet in one program about Black family life, Tommy suddenly recognized his own. “I watched and loved every episode of Good Times,” a 1970s sitcom about a Black family in Chicago that struggled with such things as job losses, a car breakdown, and an eviction notice. “In one scene,” Tommy recalled, “the wife, Florida, is talking to her girlfriend, who confides, ‘I can always tell when it’s Saturday morning because I wake up with a black eye.’”
“What got me wasn’t the story. It was that people laughed at it. Florida’s friend laughed. Florida laughed. On the TV soundtrack, the audience laughed. As a kid, I remember wondering: Why did they all laugh? At night, I’d crawl into bed with my older brother. I could hear my dad downstairs drunk, yelling and cursing at Mom, hitting her, shoving her against the wall, and shouting, ‘That didn’t hurt!’ Mom was yelling at Dad, ‘Stop it!’ I was scared. I wanted to cry.”
As Tommy grew up, his parents’ lives spiraled. “In the 1980s, when I was in high school, Dad lost his job guarding a mine and got a job as a supervisor in a lumberyard. When the lumberyard closed, Dad worked for my Uncle Roy’s road crew cutting grass along public roads with a dozer at minimum wage. That’s when we fell behind in taxes. When my father fell off the dozer and injured his back, his doctor discovered he had cancer.” As funds ran down, Tommy said, “we went from three cars to one, which we could barely keep running. We applied for food stamps, which bothered my dad terribly. I wondered: Had we become that class of family? We felt ashamed.”
Then Tommy’s parents began to drink themselves farther downward. “Dad drank Early Times whiskey with Tab and Mom drank vodka with Sprite—all day long. By 6:00 p.m., I’d try to leave. They argued. Mom would cry. Dad would get mad at her crying. That’s when I heard him shout, ‘That doesn’t hurt.’”
The family house fell into disrepair and his parents moved out of it into a trailer, then asked to move in with one troubled son after another until, one by one, they died.
In the wake of his parents’ decline, Tommy’s own ordeal unfolded. An acquaintance asked him if she could move into his trailer to save on rent. The two became involved, she became pregnant, and at 19, Tommy married and briefly imagined he was glimpsing a life of satisfaction and pride. “I got baptized at the Free Will Baptist Church in a creek one midnight in December, total immersion. One man held my back, another my head. It was cold and I got sick. When I got better, I got a union job at Kellogg’s biscuit factory. We moved near her folks in Jenkins, and I thought, ‘For my American Dream, this is good enough,’ and it would have been if she’d been the right woman.”
But she was not. The baby was too much for her. The house was left in disarray. Tommy’s addicted brother moved into a spare room. Returning late from his job at Kellogg’s, Tommy had a head-on collision. When, after his medical leave, he tried to return to his job, Kellogg’s fired him.
Jobless, with a wife and child to support, with $225 due monthly for rent and $100 for power, Tommy began scavenging aluminum cans out of ditches to recycle, $25 per bunch. Other luckless neighbors competed for the good cans. “I knew people looked down on me because I knew how I looked at other people scrounging cans. But part of me still thought, ‘I’m not that kind of person.’ I’d spend a few hours visiting with Uncle Roy before I got around to asking to borrow money. He’d know why I came, which was embarrassing. I’d borrow his car if mine broke down or I was driving mine with dead tags. I looked for work, but you had to pass the drug tests first, and for a while, I was trying muscle relaxants, Valium, Ativan. Then it got to half a case of beer, then more.” After Tommy’s marriage dissolved, his loving and nondrinking in-laws took in Tommy’s son. Now, with Tommy on his own, his heavy drinking grew worse, from occasionally to every day, from with someone else to alone, to alone and a lot.
Drinking had its own pride system, Tommy discovered. “At the top were guys who could hold a lot without getting sloppy drunk, pay for the drinks, and share the high. In the middle ranks were angry drunks. There was a rule to never talk politics, so angry drunks would be mad at ‘the man keepin’ us down.’ At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the crying drunks. I was a crying drunk.”
Our walk through Fairyland was taking us to a cluster of branches, a long-ago-collapsed teepee Tommy and his pal George had once built as boys in a moment of childhood triumph, and Tommy began to relate the hardest moment of his life. “We all have different bottoms,” he reflected softly. “I reached my bottom when I overheard my dad—whom I’d always assumed was my real dad—call me his stepson. I was shocked; I’m not his real, biological son? Maybe that’s why he never liked me, seemed prejudiced against me. I’m the wrong blood and can’t do a thing about it.
“The world went dark. I gave up. All I saw was a wall of night. I had failed. That was my bottom. I was drinking alone, a quart of whiskey a day. I dreamt of driving fast into oncoming traffic. I had an appointment with a doctor to check on the beginning stage of cirrhosis of my liver. I was heading toward my own death.”
One of Tommy’s favorite musical artists was Jelly Roll, a white, Tennessee-born rapper who put Tommy’s feelings into words:
All my friends are losers.
All of us are users,
There are no excuses, the game is so ruthless. The truth is the bottom is where we belong.
In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton report a surprising finding: Although the United States had long been among the world leaders in extending its citizens’ life spans, since the turn of the 21st century, there has been an unexpected rise in premature deaths of white people in the prime of life, ages 45 to 54. The main causes are death by drug overdose, suicide, or alcoholic liver disease, which together claimed the lives of 600,000 people between 1999 and 2017. Especially hard hit have been white, blue-collar men without a bachelor’s degree.
Such men were not dying in heroic wars, battling fierce storms at sea, or toiling in coal mines. One by one, they were—and are—dying in solitary shame. In the obituary section of the Appalachian News-Express, I began to notice death notices showing young faces, sometimes listing young ages, but nearly always omitting the cause of death.
Tommy could name a number of local suicides. “The younger brother of a fifth-grade friend of mine shot another and then himself in the head. One guy drove drunk into a tree. My own brother Scott drove drunk off the road, and I believe that was a suicide. At one point, you could have almost counted me.”
Tommy remembers reading Christian Picciolini’s White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—And How I Got Out, the autobiography of a boy who was converted by a neo-Nazi. Picciolini was 14, smoking pot with a pal in a Chicago back alley, he writes, when a man in a muscle car drove up, stopped, and got out. The friend fled, but the man confronted the young Picciolini, took the joint out of his mouth, and said, “Don’t you know that’s exactly what the communists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?” By 16, now clean of drugs and with a purpose, Picciolini had become the leader of a group of Chicago-area skinheads, which he then merged with the yet more violent white supremacist Hammerskins.
“If I had been 14 and smoking in an alley and a man showed interest in me,” Tommy mused, “what if he dressed in camo, wore his ball cap back to front, and took me in? What if I began spending time at his house to get out of mine? And if my dad was beating me hard, and my parents were drinking, and I felt like they didn’t really know me or care? I ask myself: What would have happened? I could have felt the guy in the muscle car really cared about me.
“And what if that guy told me, ‘Your dad lost his job at the lumber mill because immigrants were coming in, or because a Jew closed it down’? I might have said, ‘Oh yeah,’” Tommy continued. “Or when I was going out with Missy [a mixed-race girl whom he invited to senior prom], what if he’d said, ‘Missy dumped you for that other guy. Black girls do that’? I might have said, ‘Oh yeah.’ Or when I flunked out of Clinch Valley community college and I couldn’t go home—my stepdad had converted my bedroom into his hobby room to make fishing lures—the man could have said, ‘Colleges are run by commies.’ I might have said, ‘Oh yeah.’”
In these ways, Tommy speculated, an extremist might offer recruits a raft of imagined villains onto whom to project blame and relieve the pain of shame. David Maynard had focused on a missing national narrative that might protect poor whites from the shame of failing to achieve the American Dream. Tommy was focused on something else: the shamed person’s vulnerability to those offering to blame a world of “outside” enemies.
On the third day of Tommy’s detox, he walked outside and seated himself on a patio chair, miserable. “My head was hung low, and I was staring at the ground between my legs. Then I suddenly noticed a trail of ants. Each ant was carrying a tiny load—a crumb, a bit of leaf, a piece of dirt. Then I saw it: One ant was carrying another ant as big as he was. That dead ant was useless, not doing its part, being a load instead of carrying a load. I thought, ‘See that dead ant? That’s me, right there. I could be that carrier ant. I do not want to be that dead, carried ant.’ That was one of the greatest moments in my life. That carrier ant brought me back.”
The Latin term prode, “to be of use,” is the origin of the word pride. Tommy’s grandfather had been honored for his bravery in the mines and on the battlefront. He was a carrier ant. For Tommy, it would be through helping others out of drink and drugs that he was to carry a load himself.
Tommy had hit bottom: shame. But he had rejected the temptation to shift blame to all the racial targets offered up to him and had come to see how blame, placed like a covering over disappointing life events, might falsely seem to relieve his pain. He was to find his way forward to creative repair. By the time I was walking with Tommy through Fairyland, he had happily remarried to a medical researcher and earned a bachelor’s degree, graduating on the dean’s list. He’d also taken a job at the Southgate Rehabilitation Program, where he counseled recovering addicts.
Imagining the leader of the upcoming march, Tommy reflected, “That guy’s selling white nationalism as a quick fix to make a guy who’s down on himself feel like he’s strong and going places. With racism, that guy would just be handing anyone like I was another drink.”
In 1996, Purdue Pharma had 318 sales representatives. Four years later, the number had risen to 671. It dispatched 78 sales representatives to Kentucky alone. In 2000, Kentucky had only 1 percent of the US population, but it had a higher than usual proportion of coal miners who had suffered injuries and needed pain relief, and it was one of the regulation-averse states Purdue focused on. For each drug purchase, such states called for only two receipts documenting the purchase—one for the pharmacist, a second for Purdue. More closely regulated states, mostly blue states, called for three copies—the third going to a state medical official monitoring the prescribing of controlled substances.
The requirement of that third copy had an astonishing effect. As later research would reveal, distribution of Purdue’s opioid pain medication OxyContin was 50 percent higher in the loosely regulated states (requiring two copies per drug purchase), such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, than it was in more tightly regulated states (requiring three copies per purchase), such as New York, California, and Illinois.
Within these “freer” states, Purdue targeted doctors who were already prescribing large amounts of opioids and the pharmacists from whom those high-prescribing doctors ordered drugs. Health care professionals were given OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed plush toys, and music CDs (Get in the Swing with OxyContin). Purdue offered free, limited-time prescriptions for a seven- to 30-day supply of OxyContin—a drug that, it was found later, produced similar withdrawal cravings and symptoms as heroin. Crucially, Purdue offered its salespeople large bonuses for increasing OxyContin sales. In addition to the average sales representative’s annual 2001 salary of $55,000, annual bonuses ranged from $15,000 to nearly $240,000.
In 1996, when the company first introduced OxyContin, sales were $48 million. By 2000, sales had hit $1.1 billion.
In 2021, the rate of deaths from drugs in the United States was 32 per 100,000. In Pike County, the rate was 91 per 100,000. Between 2016 and 2018, Kentucky had the nation’s highest rate of children living with relatives other than their parents—9 percent. Another 5 percent were in foster care.
Through Tommy Ratliff, I met one of the men he counseled, James Browning, and I asked James how drugs had affected his sense of pride. He answered with a clarity he credited to his recovery. “I felt shame about some things that happened to me when I was a kid. To hide from my shame, I turned to drugs. Then I was ashamed of being on drugs. So I was part of a shame cycle. I took drugs to suppress shame, then felt shame for taking drugs. I disappointed my mom. I destroyed my marriage. I hurt my kids. But with Tom Ratliff’s help, for the first time in my life, I recovered from my fear of shame.”
Looking back at his descent into drugs, James observed how he had slipped down a hidden status hierarchy among fellow users, parallel to that Tommy Ratliff had discovered among the inebriated. “At the top of the hierarchy was the guy who can manage his drug habit and not get caught, and at first, I was that guy. I thought drugs were an adventure. I tried marijuana at 14, moved to pain pills in high school, and said to myself, ‘I’m just doing pills.’ Then when I was a husband and father and could hold down a job, I was proud of managing my habit. Then I was a divorced father. When my ex-wife wanted to move eight hours’ drive away to live near her sister, I moved into a drug house with five buddies and began my homelessness.
“We worked out our own way of judging ourselves and other addicts,” James commented. “When I was snorting oxycodone and hydrocodone, I told myself, ‘I’m just snorting. I’m holding down a job. I’m not a junkie.’ And that worked for a while. But then I got dopesick and I wasn’t holding down a job. And a guy came around, obviously a heroin pusher, and said, ‘Hey, I can make you feel better.’ But we looked down on heroin, and my buddies and I told him we were broke and ran the guy off. But in a few weeks, I was dopesick again and the pusher came back saying, ‘I’ll give it to you free.’ We took some heroin and felt better for a while.
“Then I told myself, ‘I’m snorting heroin, not shooting it.’ I snorted heroin for four or five years telling myself, ‘If you snort, you’re okay, but if you shoot up, you’re a junkie.’ But then I found the effect was stronger if it was shot into me. I didn’t like needles, so I asked a girl to shoot it into me, and I wasn’t shooting it myself, so that was better. But then two years later, the day came when I shot myself up. I became a junkie.”
Shortly after James had arrived at an emergency room unconscious from his fourth heroin overdose, the phone rang in the apartment of his sister, Ashley, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee. “I’d received emergency calls three times before, and every time my phone rang,” she would tell me later, “I dreaded it would be the call: ‘James is dead.’”
This time, the medics had found James without a pulse. But they had done CPR and revived him. “I just sobbed,” Ashley recalled. “I took a breath, got online, and spoke to James: ‘James, are you ready this time?’ He said, ‘I’m so sorry, Ashley; yes, I’m ready.’” In treatment, James recalls, “Tom told us about how he hit his own bottom and saw the line of ants, each carrying its tiny burden, one live ant carrying a dead ant. I understood. Tom Ratliff became the carrier ant willing to carry the dead—or nearly dead—ant. Me.”
This article is adapted from Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (New Press), by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Early into his new book, The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter poses a playful, but loaded, question: “How could a morning piece of toast or a plate of dinner pasta be such a world-altering culprit?” This, like many ideas Easter digs into in his illuminating debut, is a glimpse at how the author goes about breaking down the climate toll of the US agricultural system: One dish at a time.
Seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and pie are just some of the quintessentially “American” kitchen table staples Easter structures the book around as he tries to help readers understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of soils and plants on land across the country. Each of the nine chapters examines how a single dish is made; from the soil needed to grow the ingredients, to the people who manage the land and the laborers who toil to get it to the table, and the leftovers that remain—documenting the emissions created each step of the way.
The Blue Plate also takes a look at some of the innovative practices being implemented around the US to make such culinary favorites more climate-friendly. Stopping off at an Arizona produce farm, a Wyoming fertilizer plant, a Colorado landfill, an Idaho fish farm, and several dairies, Easter shows how small businesses are making conscientious changes to how they work. He theorizes how each could be applied at scale while quantifying how the widespread adoption of such techniques, and minimal shifts in consumer purchasing and consumption habits, could reduce agriculture’s gargantuan role in warming.
It’s a topic driven by Easter’s own family history. His great-grandmother was a farmer during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s who, along with others growing grain at the time in the Great Plains, unknowingly contributed to the release of one of the greatest known pulses of carbon emissions. The book uses her story to probe how the Great Plains was transformed from one of the planet’s most carbon-rich grasslands into one of its largest agricultural complexes.
By analyzing the emissions released when food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped, The Blue Plate makes the case that curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It’s already happening, in bite-sized cases across the country.
Grist sat down with Easter, a research affiliate at Colorado State University, to discuss what his vision of eating our way out of the climate crisis would look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
In The Blue Plate, you dig into the emissions impact of the production and consumption of everything from husks of corn to hunks of meat. What led you to decide to focus on the ingredients of, in your words, “a typical meal at an American weekend dinner party”?
I sat down one evening with a plate of food in front of me, and I looked at it, and I realized that there were critical stories tied to the climate crisis in every single item of food that was on the plate. I also realized I’ve been working with farmers and ranchers around the world who were already implementing the practices that could help reduce and actually reverse those emissions. And I saw the basis for the book in that moment.
At Colorado State University, you belonged to a team of “greenhouse gas accountants” who tally the tens of billions of tons of carbon that move each year between the Earth’s plants and atmosphere—a huge focus of the book. What, exactly, does that look like?
It’s very much like what an accountant for a business or a bank does. We’re basically trying to tally the flow of carbon and nitrogen back and forth between the Earth and the atmosphere and try to understand, “Do we have too much flowing in the wrong directions?” And that’s basically what’s been happening. Not just from the fossil fuel industry, and for generating electricity, for heating homes, for transportation, but also from the way we’ve been growing food and managing forests. We’ve been essentially exhausting the ecosystem capital of organic matter and sending that into the atmosphere. When really, what we need is for that flow to be stabilized and reversed, so that we have that flow of carbon back into forests, into pastures, into crop fields, and into the plants that sustain us through agriculture.
The carbon and nitrogen in ecosystems, they’re really like the capital in businesses. If you’re burning through your capital, that’s a warning sign for business, and they can’t sustain it very long, eventually they’ll go bankrupt. And that’s essentially what’s been going on with agriculture.
Let’s talk more about that, through the lens of bread. Something that has stayed with me is a line in the book where you note that although humans eat more of it than any other food, bread and grains have some of the smallest carbon footprints, on average, of any food—about a pound and half of CO2 equivalent for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas. But you argue that the emissions impact of producing bread and grain is larger than that, because of its soil impact.
This is one of the most interesting stories when we think about the food that’s on our plates: the role that carbon, organic matter, has in the soil, supporting the crops that we grow. The more organic matter we have in the soil, the more fertile the soil is going to be, the more abundant the crops will be, the more resilient the plants will be in terms of being able to fight off disease and be able to deal with drought.
It’s part of that ecosystem capital. The carbon that’s in the soil there accumulates over millennia. It can take five to ten thousand years for that ecosystem capital to build up and fill what we call the soil carbon vault that sustains the ecosystem. If we’re not careful, we can burn through that soil carbon vault over a short time. We essentially exhaust that capital. Burning through that vault, and that’s just an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, that is essentially a climate burden that comes with every loaf of bread.
You visited a Colorado farm where the farmers have eliminated things like mechanically tilling the soil or leaving land fallow, both of which degrade soil. They’ve also weaned off of chemical fertilizers and planted cover crops. In what way are these compounding practices restoring the carbon that past generations of farmers have mined from their soils?
What these growers are doing is reversing that process of degradation that started when the land was first settled, and what we now know as industrial agriculture was brought to those fields. And they are restoring it through these really straightforward practices that have been around in some form or another since the beginning of agriculture, and they’re implementing it at a scale that’s very focused on ending that cycle of degradation and actually restoring, regenerating, the soil.
A story I tell in my book is of Curtis Sayles, who talks about how his soil had hit rock bottom. His focus has pivoted entirely to looking at the health of the soil, and he tracks that through the amount of organic matter, the carbon, that’s in his soil. And he’s steadily adding back the carbon into his soil. It’s extraordinary to see it come back to life.
What would scaling this require? The book notes that many US farmers still intensively till cropland every year. Is it feasible to imagine large-scale changes?
It’s important to understand that the decisions to regenerate soil, and to improve soil health, and to increase the organic matter in the soil, happen one farmer at a time, one rancher at a time, one field or pasture at a time. And there are hundreds of thousands of farmers and millions of pastures and fields around the country where the effects of those decisions can play out.
There’s been a tremendous emphasis upon soil health within the farming and ranching community today. As soon as the US Department of Agriculture started talking about this in the context of soil health, it really started getting people’s attention. And now, we see some of the fastest-growing practices in the country are changes to reduce tillage and to start to incorporate cover crops. There’s still a lot of barriers to it, and those barriers are cultural and social. And some people are uncomfortable with change. But that said, farmers are increasingly seeing this as an opportunity for them to increase their yields.
In the book, you pay homage to your great-grandmother and how she lost her farm during the Dust Bowl. How do you see her story, and historical accounts of farmers like her, reflected in how we talk about the role of agriculture in driving climate change?
The story of my great-grandmother Neva and the story of her farm was a story that played out on literally billions of acres across the world. And not every farmer at the time was generating the kinds of emissions, degrading the soil, the same way that she was. But her story was not unique. What she did on that 160 acres of land in southeastern Colorado was similar to what was happening on farm parcels everywhere across the US, especially where people were homesteading under the Great Plains.
In the process, they emitted as much carbon dioxide from the soil as we produce in a single year, in total, for all the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The magnitude of that was just extraordinary. And that is what really made my great-grandmother Neva’s story so personal to me. To realize that one of my ancestors had played a role there, unwittingly, in just trying to live a good life and fight for herself, and for her family.
Soil is a cornerstone of the global food system, and very much a focus of The Blue Plate. But it’s not the only focus. For one, you examine the emissions footprint of things like steak and salmon, but you notably do not advocate for Americans to stop eating meat or seafood or dairy altogether. In fact, you explore what the solutions could look like if these emissions-intensive foods remain on kitchen tables. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?
A lot of people are asking me about meat and their consumption of meat and “Do we need to stop eating meat?” I think what’s become clear is that we eat too much meat, whether it’s cattle or pigs or poultry. But I don’t think the answer is as simple as stopping eating meat. In some parts of the world, where millions of people live, trying to grow wheat or tomatoes, or other crops, would be an environmental disaster. It would completely deplete the soils. And some of those places, the best choice for the landscape, where it’s compatible with local wildlife and with the ecosystem as a whole, is to graze livestock. We have to be cognizant of that.
I think the message that I’m trying to get across to the public is that if they eat meat, they need to consider pastured poultry, or try to source from regeneratively grown livestock herds and dairy products, wherever possible. And farmed shellfish, which can help restore oceans, estuaries, or our coastlines. People should search for foods in the grocery store that have a “regeneratively farmed” label attached to them. Finally, to avoid foods that travel by air, and the carbon emissions that come from that. And I know that’s not possible for everybody.
The through line of The Blue Plate is this question: “Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?” You wrote that the answer is “a partial yes” but that we need to reframe the question. How would you like to see it reframed? And how would you answer it?
How can we end the process of burning fossil fuels? And then what role can the way we grow, process, ship, cook our food, and deal with the leftovers, play in reducing the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels?
We are burning fossil fuels at such a high rate and the impacts are so large we have to stop, as quickly as possible. Growing food differently, using regenerative methods, using these carbon farming methods, has the greatest potential to draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and back into the soil, back into the Earth, where we need more of it to lie. In that process of drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we’re going to be helping to cool the planet, and reduce the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has a tenuous relationship with the word “hope.” The marine biologist, policy expert, teacher, and author is too much of a pragmatist to rely on something so passive. Hope as a noun is defined as having an expectation of a positive outcome. To Johnson, that’s not in line with reality. In a chapter near the end of her new book, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, she writes, “Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”
“Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”
Later in the chapter she concedes that active hope—“catalytic hope” as she calls it—is the type of thing she could get down with. A hope that allows people to exist on auto-pilot could be disastrous. But a hope that inspires people to act could be revolutionary.
What If We Get It Right?, which hit shelves Tuesday, offers some of this inspiration. The book features Johnson’s interviews with a wide swath of people about how we as a society are going to get ourselves out of the climate mess. She talked to the likes of Indigenous rights activist Jade Begay, screenwriter Adam McKay, film executive Franklin Leonard, climate justice advocate Ayisha Siddiqa, and writer and activist Bill McKibben, among others, on topics ranging from how to facilitate a truly just transition to how to design neighborhoods for a warmer, more dangerous world.
Standing apart from the technocratic and economic-oriented solutions literature, What If We Get It Right? focuses on nature-based and justice-oriented strategies. For instance, Johnson interviewed farmer and author Leah Penniman about the role of reparations in regenerative agriculture. While regenerative agriculture has become increasingly buzzy—the USDA is even making massive investments to support it—Penniman highlights that giving farmland back to its rightful owners, including dispossessed Indigenous and Black communities, is just as important as eliminating industrial methods of farming because regenerative practices are derived from those communities.
In fact, the book seems to say, much of the wisdom about how to conquer climate change is already at our fingertips—we just need to do a better job of actually putting those solutions into practice, whether by strengthening our disaster recovery systems, finding new ways of building cities, or covering climate change better in the news. Everyone has gifts to help in the fight. A mass movement to tackle climate change through art, design, science, policy, and justice is our best bet.
Ahead of the book’s release, I spoke with Johnson about her writing process, the plethora of climate solutions out there, and what to do to avoid spiraling about climate change. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Why did you want to write this book?
I actually don’t know that I wanted to write this book, but it was like the book that I wanted to read and I couldn’t find it. I was feeling like there was a gap in the literature of books helping us see the way forward, or more broadly than books, I guess just culture.
“We have so much media about climate apocalypse—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them?”
We have so much media about climate apocalypse, so many films, so much news about disasters—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them? I was wishing for that to be the climate conversation, to shift more to a solutions focus, and not in a techno-utopian kind of way, but in a grounded in nature and justice sort of way.
How do you want a reader to approach this book? Do you want it to be a Project Drawdown thing, where they’re like, “Oh, let me just read one of these chapters, and then, like, go live my life and come back.” Or do you want people to read it completely from start to finish?
I don’t want it to feel like a textbook. I mean, that’s why it took me so long to write the book, because I couldn’t crack the code of how to structure this so that it would feel readable. And my editor had been coming to this event series that I curate and host at Pioneer Works, an arts institution in Brooklyn, and he was like, “This is the book. It’s you telling us who we should be listening to and helping us understand what they’re saying.”
Writing the book, did it make you feel better?
I don’t know that I felt bad when I started. I think the broad strokes of climate science and where we’re heading—unless we rapidly, dramatically change our ways—have been known for decades. That’s still the case.
Everyone has some way they can contribute to climate solutions. I feel better now that this book exists, because it’s like the best I could do.
I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the writing process. Where did you write this book and what was helpful for you to get it across the finish line?
I started writing this book at my family farm, my mom’s, in my bedroom there and at the kitchen table that’s described in the introduction of the book. And I moved to Maine almost two years ago now, and the book was written almost entirely here. I moved here because I needed more green in my life, right? And the opening line of the last chapter is: If we get it right, the world is a lot more green. I just wanted to skip ahead to living in that world.
After the last debate, are you feeling hopeful about the future of climate action?
Hope is not really my jam. I’m not an optimist. As a scientist, I find that to be a sort of unscientific position, but I also, you know, just the assumption it’ll be okay in the end—I don’t harbor that, but I do know that there’s also a scientific fact that there are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one.
“There are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one.”
And that didn’t change after the debate. I mean, I’m still like, “Wow, we have a lot of work to do.” We clearly need a much stronger climate electorate so that politicians feel like they have to talk about their climate plan, so that the debate organizers and moderators feel like they need to ask those questions, not just one at the end, but acknowledge that climate is the context within which all of our other policies and challenges as a country are unfolding.
What’s a good first step for someone who wants to work toward climate solutions but doesn’t even know where to start because they’re so overwhelmed?
I would just say, I get it: It’s the biggest thing humanity has ever faced. Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, depressed about it is a reasonable and very human response. So there’s nothing wrong with that, per se.
But of course, I do hope that people will find a way to leverage that energy into finding a way to contribute to solutions, because we really do have the solutions we need. I think that’s sort of the open secret: We know what to do. We know how to shift to renewables. We know how to green buildings. We know how to improve public transit. We know how to improve agriculture. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems. None of this is a secret. You don’t need to wait for a magical new technology. It’s just a matter of building the cultural momentum, unlocking the political will, pressuring a shift in financing.
Obviously, I know it’s not simple, but I do think it’s important for people to understand that we’re not lacking for solutions. We’re lacking for people working on them.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.
Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.
Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.
While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.
I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.
Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.
What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.
Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.
Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.
California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.
In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.
Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.
Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.
They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.
Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.
Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”
They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.
Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”
On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.
At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.
Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.
The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.
From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.
They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”
In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.
It was to be the high point in their relationship.
The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”
In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.
Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.
Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.
Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”
So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.
But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”
Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.
The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.
In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.
The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:
“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”
With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.
Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”
The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.
“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”
The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”
Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”
The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”
Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”
But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.
The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.
This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.
Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.
Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.
While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.
I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.
Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.
What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.
Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.
Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.
California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.
In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.
Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.
Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.
They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.
Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.
Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”
They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.
Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”
On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.
At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.
Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.
The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.
From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.
They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”
In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.
It was to be the high point in their relationship.
The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”
In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.
Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.
Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.
Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”
So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.
But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”
Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.
The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.
In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.
The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:
“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”
With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.
Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”
The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.
“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”
The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”
Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”
The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”
Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”
But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.
The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.
This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com
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When his uncle Donald became president, Fred Trump III—whose son William, due to a rare genetic mutation, has seizures and an intellectual disability—saw an opportunity to advocate for disability rights.
In a Time excerpt of his forthcoming book All in the Family, Fred Trump revealed a disturbing conversation with the then-president following a White House meeting in which he discussed how expensive caring for people with complex disabilities can be. Donald Trump said of some disabled people, his nephew recounted, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Time said that it had reached out to Donald Trump for comment about his nephew’s allegations but received no response.
It wasn’t the only concerning conversation Trump’s nephew alleged that they had. When a Trump family medical fund for William’s medical and living expenses was running low, Fred said his uncle told him, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
“The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Donald Trump has made offensive comments about disabled people. He infamously made fun of a reporter’s disability at a 2015 rally. But it’s still even more shocking to hear from a close relative that he clearly does not value the life of his own disabled family member.
When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.
Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”
Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.
Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing?
Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his argument.
He used these Black women’s deaths to sort of make the argument that Black people, who he saw as a species that was separate from white people, had a specific genetic flaw [causing them] to die spontaneously.
He argued Black women died through small amounts of cocaine use and sexual activity, which he assumed or presumed to be consensual. Then he argued that Black men died spontaneously around police officers. This reveals so much dehumanization.
How did Wetli use and misconstrue Afro-Latine religions in rationalizing excited delirium?
The relationship between Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine and “excited delirium syndrome” is not direct or obvious, but I think it’s much more subtle and ingrained. So this is the 1980s, during the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans arrived as refugees in Miami—and those Cubans that arrive are darker, poorer and less well or less resourced than the previous generations of Cubans, who were whiter and wealthier.
Wetli was in his first couple of years as the new assistant medical examiner, and at the same time, there was a mass criminalization of this community. You see it in stereotypes like the famous Tony Montana from Scarface, who is this sweaty, aggravated, sexual predator mobster who is addicted to cocaine and murder.
Charles Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine, particularly on the tattoos of Afro-Cubans, is a participation in this longer criminalization of Afro-Cuban religions. He has this hobby where he claims himself as an expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, or cults, as he calls them.
He’s saying that, basically, mostly Black and Latino men have this tendency to become aggressive, sweaty, and overheated—essentially just self-combusting as a result of their aggressiveness. And as a result, he argues, they die, and police witness their deaths. It becomes a pattern with the Afro-Cubans he’s studying, where he blames the religion and the Cubans as these aggressive criminals, almost a plague infection into the United States.
How has the label of “excited delirium” in the killing of Black people by police been used to underplay how lethal other forms of police violence can be, such as the use of tasers?
Excited delirium has allowed for certain deaths to go under the radar for so long. With shootings, it’s very clear what the cause of death was. But for many years, with this term, these deaths have been completely ignored.
What excited delirium does is say that the person’s own behavior— cocaine use or hyper-masculinity, aggressiveness—leads to their death. As a result, there’s a very frightening, medicalized cover-up of police violence. If it hadn’t been for footage of George Floyd’s death, many people would have taken for granted the initial argument: that he was simply a man who died under medical distress. That was what [Minneapolis police] had posted when his death first occurred. Without the bystander video, there really would have been no way for the world to have known that this was someone who was essentially murdered in plain sight.
Was there anything that stood out to you in conversations with family members of people whose deaths were labeled as excited delirium?
For a lot of the family members I spoke with, there is a sense of relief—because for many years, people were blaming the victims. A family I interviewed was told that their father just suddenly up and died during a police car chase, that it was his drug use, and his heart had just self-combusted. There were other stories that maybe the police had pushed him off the road. Questions around that completely got erased by the narrative.
These people who are labeled as dying by “excited delirium” are often seen as written off by society, similar to the way that the Black women who were murdered and raped were written off as so-called “crack whores.” That weaponization [of the term] by police justified blaming the victims, and in many [cases], created a buffer for police and medical doctors to work together to write off whole communities.
The American Medical Association came out against “excited delirium” in 2021. What do you think would need to change for its racist pseudoscience to be discarded?
I’m really glad to see that there have been many people, many organizations, many states, actively working against excited delirium right now. I think it’s [a trend] that grew out of the post-2020 uprising of people coming together and recognizing systemic police violence.
That practice has not gone away simply because people don’t use the term any longer. People are still being tased and asphyxiated. Police officers are putting their weight on people’s bodies, putting them into chokeholds; people are complaining of not being able to breathe, and then ultimately dying. Medical examiners and coroners are still using the same kinds of medical justifications, like heart failure and drug use, rather than acknowledging the role of police violence in these deaths.
We have to continue to ensure that we don’t just focus solely on this term, but on the broader structure of policing in the country and how these two institutions—medical institutions, police institutions—are tied together.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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