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… read about the tallest Christmas Tree in Tasmania.

In the heat of the hottest summer so far, it is nice to find a tall tree and hide under its shadow, even if for just a few minutes. Forests are an essential part of how humans and terrestrial life have adapted to our planet, and if there’s to be a chance at mitigating or ultimately reversing climate change, it will include, by necessity, the preservation of existing forests. Writing for The Nib [[link removed]] in its farewell week, Eleri Harris takes her keen pen and rich drawings to illustrate the state of deforestation. It is bleak news with an undercurrent of positive action. Trees are valuable across industries, and natural forests are easy for the extractive industry to deplete without external action, especially in places where governments override the rights and defenses of local Indigenous people. Yet, changes in governments can have real, tangible material consequences, as the switch from President Jair Bolsonaro to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva meant that July 2023 could see 60% less deforestation of the Amazon than in 2022. Keeping carbon in trees by keeping forests intact is a hard task. It is also a much, much easier task than finding a new way to pull carbon out of the air in a deforested world.

Slow Going

A car hurtling down a highway serving as a commercial thoroughfare is a mechanical beast that warrants caution. Roads in the United States, and the behavior patterns that have grown up around them, are primarily designed for the efficient transfer of cars between parking spots, with the safety of pedestrians an afterthought. It’s simple physics that makes impacts at speed deadly: force is, after all, mass times acceleration. On a trip in Finland, writer Ryan Cooper observed how much safer the experience of slow traffic makes life with and around cars.

“On local city streets, the limit drops to 30 kph (18 mph), and most streets are narrow and paved with rough stone that, together with raised crosswalks, effectively force people to drive even slower,” Cooper observes, in a story at Heatmap [[link removed]].

The realization that slower speeds on roads, along with traffic calming measures and consistent fine enforcement, is hardly novel, but it’s worth revisiting, especially as policymakers across the world look for ways to adapt the traffic designs of the 20th century for the climate realities of the 21st. Besides saving lives directly through fewer car-and-person collisions, slower speeds cut carbon emissions.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Sea Saw

Deep sea exploration for mineral extraction is like walking into a dark room and attempting to discern the shape of its contents using only a knife. So much of what is underwater is unexplored that assessing the impact of deep-sea mining is a daunting task. That the seafloor contains resources that could power a green transition on land is without dispute, but the consequences of doing so are unknown, and it is hard to fathom that a cut-first approach wouldn’t result in some metaphorical blood on the floor.

“Since the onset of the industrial era, the oceans have absorbed about a quarter of all human-generated CO2 emissions. Deep-sea mining would loosen ocean-floor sediment, potentially reinjecting carbon stored there back into the ocean, potentially accelerating ocean acidification and global warming,” writes Charlotte Elton at Noema. [[link removed]]

While the necessity of urgent action on climate change is vital, working with known supply chains at least keeps impacts known. Ideally, reuse and repair would meet economic and energy needs, and plenty of e-waste remains untapped. If there’s diving to be done, suggests Elton, extractive companies could start with landfills.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Beneath the State: Part I

When a pandemic hits, the nature of its disruption is universal. Governments responded to the spread of COVID-19 wherever it went, in many cases by adopting lockdowns, masking, and social distancing measures designed to first halt and then limit the spread of the disease. Armed groups, from insurgent forces to political rebellions through territory-contesting criminal enterprise, can all also be forms of governance.

Erica De Bruin and Michael Weintraub explore this new development in “ Did Covid-19 Change Armed Group Governance? Evidence from a Survey of Local Security Authorities in Colombia [[link removed]].” Colombia is a good case study since it has multiple armed groups contesting space, political legitimacy, and, especially, illicit economic activity.

“In addition to its public health and economic consequences, the pandemic also impeded the state's capacity to respond to security threats. The national police were suddenly tasked not only with patrolling streets to prevent crime and carrying out criminal investigations: they also were charged with monitoring compliance with quarantine measures and, once the quarantine was lifted, with ensuring the use of face masks and preventing overcrowding in public and private spaces,” write the authors. Even though the police had an expanded mandate, it was also suffering officer shortages, as the disease spread through police ranks as easily as the civilian population.

To assess whether or not armed groups used these disruptions to expand their governance, in July and August 2021, De Bruin and Weintraub conducted a survey of local security officials from municipalities contested by multiple armed groups.

What the officials reported, instead, was the largely unchanged role of armed groups, or if anything, a retreat from areas in which they had previously operated. Complicating previous literature on this, though not the overall trend of the study, was that multiple different armed groups engaged in governance activities in the same area. These governance activities include settling disputes, imposing a tax, and creating rules of behavior, and rates of those activities were largely unchanged from before the pandemic to during the pandemic. One area in which governance expanded somewhat was the direct provision of financial aid, like access to jobs, which diminished compared to what armed groups had been able to provide before COVID-19.

“Moreover, the extent and forms of governance in which armed groups engaged remained quite similar before and after the onset of the pandemic. Those armed groups that provided public goods tended to continue to do so during the pandemic; those that had not done so beforehand did not capitalize on the pandemic to expand service provision or the regulation of civilian life,” write the authors.

Ultimately, the authors conclude, armed groups were either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic. The reasons for why, exactly, they were unable to do so will have to be the subject of future study.

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Daniel Ofman interviewed [[link removed]] Crimean Tatar folk singer Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova, known as Jamala, about her new album titled simply “Qirim” or “Crimea.” Since 2014, Crimea has been occupied by Russia, an intrusion that continued to the production of the album. Jalama had almost finished recording when Russia launched its fuller invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and recording had to stop while Kyiv was under siege. “Russians can steal our territory nowadays, but they can’t steal our identity, our songs,” Jamala told Ofman. “I want to say to the whole world that we exist. And for me, it's important to give a voice to my homeland, Crimea.”

Charles Ray called on [[link removed]] the US to stop sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. Ray acknowledged that cluster munitions have a specific utility against entrenched troops, like the Russian-held lines Ukraine is trying to break. Ray’s call is informed by his time as a soldier in Vietnam and a diplomat in Cambodia decades later, witnessing decades of explosive aftermath against civilians. “Cluster ammunition, because of its widespread coverage and devastating impact on people and vehicles, is considered by many to be an efficient way to shape the outcome of a battle. Should we, though, sacrifice the future of children not yet born on the altar of efficiency in a battle today?” he wrote.

Tibisay Zea listened [[link removed]] to the women calling for an end to deadbeat child support debtors. “In a corrupt country where machismo is so strong, people are more afraid of shame than justice,” Diana Luz Vasquez told Zea. Vasquez’s partner left when she was two months pregnant and has refused to claim paternity for her now six-year-old daughter. So Vasquez, along with other women, orchestrated a protest where they hung pictures of the deadbeats not paying child support along a clothesline across the public plaza of Oaxaca. After such protests spread, Mexico’s government passed a bill preventing child support debtors in Mexico from running for public office, driving, or leaving the country.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Xed Out

A quick programming note on the well-played section. X, the site owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, is increasingly managed in a way that is unsafe for users. Most recently, this came to light when Musk personally intervened [[link removed]] to restore an account that had posted upsetting and illegal imagery. Safeguards against the upload of such imagery [[link removed]] appear to be missing from the site. This is normally the part of the newsletter where I tell jokes, riffing on the news of the week as seen on Twitter, which is one of the joys of producing and sharing Critical State. However, given the refusal of the company to maintain basic and vital safeguards, I feel uncomfortable directing anyone to the site once and probably still known as Twitter.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

A snack so bad, it can only be part of this world [[link removed]].

I’m at the canal. I’m at the train. I’m at the cccccccombination canal and train [[link removed]].

The fact that a commercial drone will be used for drug smuggling is known as the Heisenberg Certainty Principle [[link removed]].

I would simply try to keep “autonomy” and “nuclear submarines” as far apart as possible [[link removed]].

The first rule of Successful Coup Club [[link removed]] is you have to commit to the act

Radio Flaw Flaw [[link removed]]

We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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