Hawaii

‘The White Lotus’ Is a Perfect Satire of Today’s Rich

HBO’s limited series reminds us that class society permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island — something that US television traditionally does its best to hide.

Vacations are a special time, when you can leave that burden called society behind and dedicate yourself to more narcissistic pursuits. And be pampered – like a baby.

“They wanna be the only child, the special chosen baby child of the hotel,” explains resort manager Armond to a colleague in the first episode of HBO’s The White Lotus, a six-episode miniseries about rich people on vacation in Hawaii. The comedy drama, whose finale aired on Sunday night, is a scathing satire, neatly availing itself of two TV and film tropes: trouble in paradise (say, The Beach) and comedy in a hotel (Fawlty Towers).

What sets The White Lotus and its eponymous resort hotel apart is that it serves as a container for America’s social antagonisms, its guests and staff playing out the drama of class society and its 21st-century delusions in a tropical idyll. The principal members of the superbly cast ensemble number ten in total. The eight vacationers – a family of four plus friend, a newlywed couple, and a bereaved solo traveller – are avatars of America’s ruling class and its professional adjuncts: self-pitying but vicious, woke and superior. These are complemented by put-upon staff: Belinda, a hotel masseuse, and the manager, Armond.

Their interactions are frequently overlaid by a doomlike portentousness – judicially aided by an over-amped score of tribal drums and crashing waves that ratchet up tension without ever serving as a substitute for the real drama on screen. The characters’ relations, meanwhile, serve as reminders that society (class society) permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island, something that US television traditionally does its best to obfuscate.

The sharpness of the social satire is, it must be said, urged along by a cheap plot device: we learn in an opening scene flash-forward that somebody died at the resort during our eight protagonists’ stay. That this trope is well-executed doesn’t stop it from being a tired cliché. But to showrunner Mike White’s (School of Rock, Enlightened) credit, it works as a hook to get the action started; thereafter, the dramatic tension is self-sustaining. Even if the showrunners fluff the death-mystery denouement in tonight’s finale, it shouldn’t do great damage to the show.

Instead, the hotel guests generate their own compelling drama. Newlywed couple Shane (heir to a real estate magnate and an obnoxious douchebag in a Cornell cap) and Rachel (a clickbait journalist and the only guest not evidently from money) are in the process of discovering each other – and discovering they’ve made a huge mistake. Nicole (high-powered tech company CFO) and her demasculinised husband, Mark, are parents to Quinn (an alienated and screen-addicted teenager) and college sophomore Olivia (a self-obsessed and cruel wokester). Accompanied by Olivia’s college friend Paula (a typical overdiagnosed and overmedicated Zoomer), the five compose your classic rich, dysfunctional family. Rounding out this VIP set – these guests, unlike most, arrived by boat – is tragic Tanya, a botoxed lady of leisure struggling to process grief for her deceased abusive mother.

The characters’ needy narcissism spills over into the ambit of the hotel staff. Alcoholic Tanya latches on to Belinda, the hotel masseuse, imagining her a “mystical Negro” who can fill the void inside her. Stoic Belinda is left discomfited by Tanya’s quasi-ecstatic response to Belinda’s therapeutic massages. Belinda reluctantly accepts Tanya’s invitation to dinner, despite hotel regulations urging against staff-guest confraternisation. “What?! Is this some kind of caste system?” an incredulous Tanya asks (Oh, more than you know!).

Belinda keeps her cards close to her chest, in an echo of what Armond (a star turn by Murray Bartlett as a swishy, camp, recovering-addict hotel manager) advises another employee: “Self-disclosure is discouraged. . . . You don’t want to be too specific as a presence, as an identity.” The staff’s physical labour — readying the resort before guests have even awoken — is added to by the requisite emotional labour.

Armond, though, is at the end of his rope, teetering back into alcohol and drug abuse – requiring only a push from douchebag Shane, who insists on antagonising Armond for having double-booked the prized Pineapple Suite. Though honeymooning Shane and Rachel enjoy a beautiful suite with its own perks, Shane demands his pound of flesh. “I’m finally being shown some respect!” Shane exclaims after receiving a bottle of champagne as recompense from Armond. This “Karen” reimagined as frat boy needs his ego stroked. “People have been coming for me my whole life,” he bemoans to his wife, his immense social advantages recast as victimisation.

It is these sorts of moments that are so astutely observed in the show. Mike White has his characters pushed up against one another such that they land blows, exposing one other’s foibles and contradictions, without a paragon of virtue ever emerging – be it personal or political.

In one of the many tense dinner table scenes (a stable of satires of the bourgeoisie, from Luis Buñuel onwards) social-justice warrior Olivia denounces her mother Nicole’s career, minimising her achievement as a woman at the top of the corporate ladder, and charging her Big Tech company of “unravelling the social fabric.” It turns out that Nicole was merely looking for some personal validation from her daughter, not her political endorsement. “I want support as your mother,” she exclaims – one of the many instances of confusion between the personal and political, the social and psychological.

Olivia and Paula are written perfectly as students in their first years of college, members of a future manager caste who have learned a little about the world and imagine themselves to know everything. At one point, Nicole hits back at the pair: “My feeling is most of these activists, they don’t really want to dismantle the systems of economic exploitation, not the ones that benefit them – which are all global, by the way. They just want a better seat at the table of tyranny.” Olivia retorts, “No, that’s just you, Mom.”

“And what’s your system of belief, Olivia?” Nicole asks. “Not capitalism. Not socialism. So just cynicism?”

That such a skewering of the radical and self-serving pretensions of well-to-do wokeness should come from a Hillary-stan girlboss is some achievement on the part of the show’s creators. When truth emerges from unlikely mouths, it is a testament to good writing.

And an unlikely mouth it is. In a separate scene, pretty puff-piece journalist Rachel approaches Nicole, of whom she’d written a profile some years before, seeking life advice. Rachel feels she is losing her independence, now that she has married into money, and worries her career will evaporate (execrable husband Shaun even proposes to “double whatever they’re paying you” so that his new bride become the trophy wife of his dreams). It is revealed that in that piece Rachel argued Nicole had climbed to the top of the corporate ladder “surfing the Me Too wave, using the victimisation of other women to advance.” No one comes off well, even Rachel – she’s part of the system, too, now benefiting from the financial security she has married into.

And this is precisely the point. Ideology is not what you believe, it is what you do.

Teenage son Quinn, fed up with his sister and mother’s self-serving arguments, explodes at the table: “What does it matter what we think? If we think the right things or the wrong things? We all do the same shit.” A moment of stunning clarity – though one quickly undermined as we learn what Quinn was driving at: eco-nihilism. “We’re all still parasites on the Earth. There’s no virtuous person when we’re all eating the last fish and throwing all our plastic crap in the ocean. Like a billion animals died in Australia during the fires. A billion. Where does all the pain go?”

Once again, the guests’ preening narcissism leads them to continually misrecognise the political as personal and vice versa. For example, when self-pitying father Mark is traumatised by the impromptu news he receives (his late father was gay, had led a double life, and died of AIDS, not cancer as previously believed), unfeeling daughter Olivia interprets it as an expression of homophobic disgust — yet another opportunity for her to virtue signal.

This self-involvement can be dangerous. Dipsey, needy Tanya casually throws out the idea that Belinda could start her own business – Tanya could even bankroll it! Belinda suddenly eyes an opportunity to prize herself out of an unsatisfying job at the hotel wellness centre “helping fucked-up rich people” (“Oh, I know loads of fucked-up rich people,” Tanya spits with some venom – clearly referring to her abusive parents . . . and maybe herself). Later, Tanya starts a vacation romance and seems to lose interest in her erstwhile favourite Belinda. Will Belinda be left in the lurch, holding a business plan with no addressee?

Tanya’s evident psychological pain encourages a degree of audience sympathy. As does Olivia’s friend Paula – caught not only in her friend’s family’s derangement but also in her friend’s jealous crosshairs. Paula – one of the only non-white guests — identifies with the plight of Kai, a handsome Hawaiian staff member and his story of injustice (the hotel stole his family’s land; now he works at the hotel performing traditional dances for the hotel’s rich patrons). To “save” Kai, she devises a plan for him to steal a pair of Nicole’s bracelets worth seventy-five grand each – thereby exposing him, not her, to a great deal of risk. She only does so, however, once she learns Olivia had been flirting with Kai, trying to steal him out from under her. Funny how alleged passions for social justice so often come interlaced with personal vindictiveness.

That such a show has been made in the contemporary United States may be an accident of circumstance. It was greenlit because HBO was looking for something “COVID friendly” from a production point of view. Shooting on location at a Hawaiian resort hotel fit the bill. But HBO does have prior. In its satire of the rich – and examination of American pathologies through the prism of the family – Succession is an obvious comparison. The latter is a far grander show, and the better drama, but showrunner Mike White recognises some limitations of Succession as satire of the upper-middle class: “It’s a great show, but it’s very king’s court. You can kind of otherise them. They’re billionaires. With White Lotus, I wanted it to be more, like, this is your next-door-neighbour rich person who is part of the system.”

A poster for HBO’s ‘Succession’.

Some critics have complained that this approach lacks dramatic tension, asking “Why should I care about these people’s vacation?” But it is the (if not quite ordinariness, then) lack of exoticism of the show that makes it such cutting satire. After all, a sense of entitlement is common to vacationers lower down the social order too, and this is what makes it such engaging viewing. So much is invested into your one week away amid fifty-one weeks of slog that the need for it to be perfect and unencumbered by ordinary social concerns looms large. This is why the trouble-in-paradise trope, the vacation disaster idea, recurs so frequently, in fiction as well as in our own fears. It’s what makes the show so provocative.

But what makes the guests at the White Lotus that bit different is their evident lack of concern with making a nice time of it; they, unlike most, wear their leisure lightly – be it Nicole’s workaholic disposition or Shane’s determination to pursue the resort manager at the expense of honeymoon bliss.

Here is an important point about class that the show understands – with its carefully rounded and almost never totally unsympathetic characters (to be expected from a writer of Freaks and Geeks, the only thing on screen ever to do high school well). Class is not about inequality, it’s about unfreedom. A major part of the story of class society is the damaged subjects it creates. Like in Parasite, the staff, the downtrodden, the downstairs to the rich guests’ upstairs, are not good victims, or good because they’re victims. They have their foibles and their damage too. But we sympathise because their agency, their freedom, is far more circumscribed than those they serve.

This is socially structured. It is not about having good opinions or being a good person. Ideology works through what you do, not the thoughts you hold in your head. Understanding things this way allows The White Lotus to pierce through the endless self-important culture wars, whose foundation is precisely the opinions one holds and the opinions of others one holds and the opinions one presumes the other to hold. And this remains true no matter how “political” the opinions – say, in the face-off between those concerned with oppression and privilege and those defensive of merit and achievement. At the White Lotus’s evening lobster bake, these sides are materially only divided by an expanse of table, and maybe a generation.

That their narcissism prevents them from perceiving it is by the by: What would it change? At issue is that their materially structured delusions are continually splattered over the US media. This is contemporary politics – The Discourse – flattening, crushing, bending out of shape, and sucking out the oxygen from the public sphere. That place where class politics might be.

Alex Hochuli is a writer and research consultant based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is co-host of Aufhebunga Bunga, the global politics podcast, and co-author of Politics at the End of the End of History.

This article was first published on Jacobin.

Astronomers May Not Like It but Astronomy and Colonialism Have a Shared History

Casting Native Hawai’ians’ opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea as a contest between science and religion is a red herring that distracts from a deeper problem with modern science.

Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawai’i, has been the site of a long-running conflict. Native Hawaiians who consider Mauna Kea sacred have been at odds with the international consortium of astronomers behind the $1.4-billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), meant to be “the largest ground-based observatory in the world” (source). Now, a white paper by Native Hawaiian scientists calls for an immediate halt to the TMT’s construction and for restarting dialogue. An associated paper by five US and Canadian astronomers situates the TMT controversy in the long history of how astronomy has benefited from “settler colonial white supremacist patriarchy” and calls on the astronomy community to reject these benefits.

This may seem an unlikely combination of charges against fellow astronomers who simply wish to “reach back 13 billion years to answer fundamental questions about the advent of the universe” (source) – until one takes a closer look at the conflict, moving beyond its unhelpful framing as science versus religion and situating it in its historical context.

“At its core, [the conflict over] Mauna a Wākea is about power,” writes Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, who studied the TMT controversy for his doctoral thesis at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2017. “How are we to understand the controversy over Mauna a Wākea and the TMT if we fail to identify or accept the context in which this battle is being waged; if we fail to critically analyse settler-colonisation under US occupation?” Casumbal-Salazar is now an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, New York.

The story of TMT in Hawai’i began in 2009, when the collaboration of scientists building the observatory selected Mauna Kea as the location. The summit, at about 4,200 m above sea level, is particularly conducive for astronomy, with stable, dry air that allows observations throughout the year. As a result, it is already host to 13 observatories that have been built since the 1960s.

Preparations for TMT’s construction began in 2014 but were paused following opposition from Native Hawaiians – “protestors” to the state and the astronomers, “protectors” for the activists. In December 2015, the Supreme Court of Hawai’i invalidated the TMT’s 2011 construction permit because it had been granted before the opposition’s petitions had been addressed – putting, as the verdict observed, “the cart before the horse”.

In October 2018, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead and construction was to resume in July 2019. But Native Hawaiians have continued opposing the TMT by blocking access to the mountain and courting arrest. In December 2019, the Governor of Hawai’i announced that “the state will reduce its law enforcement personnel on Maunakea”, an admission that the project cannot be forced through. (India, a partner and full member of the TMT consortium, prefers moving the telescope to an alternate location in the Canary Islands, Spain.)

That’s the legal summary. For a historically informed understanding of the conflict, we have to go back much further, to Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, following which land was ceded to the US government.

In 1959, these lands – including Mauna Kea – were in turn ceded by the US government to the State of Hawai’i, which held them “in trust” for native Hawaiians. The next year, a tsunami laid waste to the city of Hilo in Hawai’i, prompting its chamber of commerce to write to universities in the US and Japan suggesting that Mauna Kea might be useful for astronomical observatories. This event coincided with US astronomers’ interest in Hawai’i as well.

And so the conflict between native Hawaiians and the American astronomy community began in the 1960s, when the first of the 13 observatories was constructed on the mountain that the former consider to be “a place revered as a house of worship, an ancestor, and an elder sibling in the mo’okū’auhau (or genealogical succession) of all Hawaiians.”

At the time, writes Casumbal-Salazar, “there was no public consultation, no clear management process and little governmental oversight.” Environmentalists soon began opposing further construction on the mountain, arguing that the existing telescopes had contaminated local aquifers and destroyed the habitat of a rare bug found only on the mountain’s summit.

Native Hawaiians joined forces with environmentalists, arguing that any construction on the summit is desecration of a sacred mountain that is the site of spiritual and cultural practices. “Indeed,” Casumbal-Salazar, whose ancestry is partly native Hawaiian, writes, “Mauna a Wākea is more than just a list of physical attributes; it is our kin. As our kupuna [ancestors] are buried in the soil, our ancestors become the land that grows our food and the dust we breathe.” Soon, native Hawaiians were required to seek permission from the state for spiritual practice on the mountain.

The view from the summit of Mauna Kea. Photo: Daniel Gregoire/Unsplash

Contrary to the narrative that native Hawaiians did not oppose the first telescopes on Mauna Kea in the 1960s and 1970s, Casumbal-Salazar shows how they did indeed express their dissent “in the few public forums available, by writing newspaper editorials, publishing opinion pieces and speaking out at public events” while also fighting other battles, such as those to reclaim their rights to land, resources, cultural practices – even the right to teach their children in the Hawaiian language.

They were also fighting evictions and resettlements in the name of tourism development and decades of the US Navy’s use of an island as target practice for its bombs. At the same time, the state’s dependence on tourism and militarism resulted in income inequalities and emigration.

Mauna Kea is not the only mountain in the US where native communities and astronomers have clashed. Two telescopes on mountaintops in Arizona became controversial for parallel reasons, beginning from the mid-1970s, as Leandra Swanner examines in her doctoral thesis at Harvard University. Environmental groups opposed the Mt Graham International Observatory in Arizona fearing ecological damage and further threat to the endemic Mt Graham red squirrel, joined later by a community of native Americans for whom the summit had spiritual significance as a prayer site.

Similarly, native communities and environmentalists opposed the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, concerned about the ecology and “spiritual integrity” of the mountain. At the time the new observatory was proposed, Kitt Peak was already host to two dozen telescopes.

Strikingly, Swanner tracks how native groups at these three different sites have “independently framed the observatories as colonialist projects”. She finds that astronomers, native communities and environmental groups “deployed competing cultural constructions of the mountains – as an ideal observing site, a ‘pristine’ ecosystem or a spiritual temple,” and that “the timing and form of anti-observatory narratives was historically tethered to the legal and political strength of environmental and indigenous rights movements.” In the case of the conflict at Mauna Kea, this is the nationalist movement known as the Hawaiian Renaissance.

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Sustained opposition to construction on Mauna Kea led in 1998 to a state legislative audit that indicted the University of Hawai’i for its management of the mountain, citing inadequate measures to protect its natural resources and lack of recognition of its cultural value. In 2000, the University of Hawai’i drafted a ‘master plan’ for activities on the mountain, which empowered native Hawaiians to voice their objections to the observatories formally, eventually leading to the current impasse.

Swanner finds that for native Hawaiians, “science has effectively become an agent of colonisation”, “fundamentally indistinguishable from earlier colonisation activities”. This puts astronomers in a difficult position. They see the economic benefits astronomy brings to Hawai’i – over a thousand jobs, business for local firms and services and, once the TMT comes online, a promise to pay $1 million in annual lease rent – and their own work as a noble pursuit of knowledge. However, they encounter opposition that has charged them with environmental and cultural destruction.

“Unfortunately for the astronomers involved in the TMT debate,” writes Swanner, “whether they identify as indigenous allies or neocolonialists ultimately matters less than whether they are perceived as practicing neocolonialist science” (emphasis in the original).

Astronomers have attempted a counter-narrative, linking the contemporary practice of astronomy to ancient Polynesian explorers and astronomers who navigated using the stars. A concrete outcome and centrepiece of this effort was a science education centre and planetarium that “links to early Polynesian navigation history and knowledge of the night skies, and today’s renaissance of Hawaiian culture and wayfinding with parallel growth of astronomy and scientific developments on Hawaii island.”

Swanner notes the unequal relationship – the centre “merely grafts Native Hawaiian culture onto the dominant culture of Western science … Astronomers do not look to traditional knowledge to carry out their observing runs, after all, but the observatories studding the summit physically deny access to sites of sacred importance.”

A view of Mauna Kea from the Mauna Loa Observatory. Photo: Nula666/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

For Casumbal-Salazar, this strategy of linking telescopes on the mountain to ancient Hawaiian culture reinterprets colonial conquest as inheritance while consigning indigeneity to history. This is not hard to spot from a glance at the TMT website, for example. The homepage displays the results of a “statewide scientific public opinion poll” which asked, among others, the following question: “Do you agree or disagree that there should be a way for science and Hawaiian culture to co-exist on Maunakea?” The way the question has been framed is revealing: science and Hawaiian culture are seen as distinct entities.

The conflict at Mauna Kea, as Swanner and Casumbal-Salazar learn from native Hawaiians, is not just over the construction of the TMT. The problem is that anything is being built on top of a sacred summit. Nevertheless, it is not incidental that the conflict involves science, particularly astronomy. Science did not merely happen to accompany colonialism: they are deeply linked in ways that are still being unraveled by historians who are tracing “the roots of contemporary science in the projects and practices of colonialism,” filling in the elisions from standard histories of science.

In their white paper, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an American-Barbadian cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, and her co-authors give examples of how colonial conquests have historically enabled, facilitated or benefited astronomy. James Cook, the British explorer who was the first European to establish contact with Hawai’i, was tasked with leading an expedition to Tahiti to observe the 1769 transit of Venus (to help determine the Earth-Sun distance). But he had also been given sealed orders to search for Australia, indicating “that astronomy and colonisation have been entwined in the Pacific since first contact.”

Colonial conquests helped develop astronomy and cartography, not least through the establishment of overseas observatories. Other sciences “co-constituted” with colonialism include botany and medicine. And, as one author reviewing the existing scholarship put it: “One cannot imagine Charles Darwin’s work being possible without his access to plant and animal specimens derived from several European empires.” Science and medicine “functioned not merely as a ‘tool’ for a project already imagined, but as a means of conceptualising and bringing into being the colonial project itself.”

This history has consequences – not because the TMT is “a pawn in a long, losing game” for the Hawaiians (as one condescending New York Times article phrased it) nor is the issue confined to questions of representation of colonised peoples in astronomy (although only one Native Hawaiian holds a PhD in astronomy, with none in tenure-track positions at major institutions). For Casumbal-Salazar, it is about how “Western law, science and the state together control the ways humanity is imagined in the first place” and about “the techniques of governance by which Kanaka ‘Ōiwi [native Hawaiian] claims to land, sovereignty and independence remain in perpetual deferral.”

This settler colonialism, he argues, is the product of a sustained process with territorial ambitions. As Swanner notes, dismissing this neocolonialist image of science has only resulted in native communities continuing to “report feeling victimised while scientists’ efforts to expand their research programs suffer social, legal and economic setbacks.”

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In response, astronomy practice is changing. In her thesis, Swanner tracks how the opposition to mountaintop observatories and the rigours of preparing an environmental impact statement have forced astronomers to directly engage with the public and acknowledge their concerns.

Prescod-Weinstein and her coauthors go further, advancing a number of recommendations for a more ethical astronomy. For example, they call on the astronomy community to stop weaponising disagreements within native communities, which they have a history of doing. At Kitt Peak, for example, leaders of a native community signed a lease agreement in 1958 after they were invited to view the sky through one of the telescopes of the University of Arizona, even as others in the community remained unconvinced. Such tactics led the community to feel their interests weren’t fairly represented. They filed a lawsuit against the National Science Foundation fifty years later.

Prescod-Weinstein and her colleagues also recommend that “astronomers reject the use of state power to get what they want”, “consider what is globally healing for the communities rooted in the land” and “engage in dialogue and negotiations in good faith, understanding that a deal may not be reachable, with a mandate to respect a ‘no deal’ outcome.” The paper by Native Hawaiian scientists also recommends the same things, and asks: “Do indigenous people have the power to decide what happens to their own homelands?”

At Mauna Kea, this means understanding that Native Hawaiians, from the beginning of the opposition to telescopes on the mountain, “were not fighting against something,” as Casumbal-Salazar notes, “so much as they were fighting for something: the protection of the mountain from further development… Perhaps we should be asking what constitutes progress. Who determines that? And what are the costs of its production?”

Nithyanand Rao is a freelance science writer.

Birds Species Extinction Rates Accelerate Hundred Times Faster than Before

Spix’s macaw is now extinct in the wild. Conservation programs in Brazil maintain the last 70 or so individuals from this species.

Extinction, or the disappearance of an entire species, is commonplace. Species have been forming, persisting and then shuffling off their mortal coil since life began on Earth. However, evidence suggests the number of species going extinct, and the rate at which they disappear, is increasing dramatically.

Our recent work suggests that the rate at which species are going extinct may be many times higher than previously estimated — at least for birds. The good news, however, is that recent conservation efforts have slowed this rate a lot.

Old rates

For decades, palaeontologists have used fossils to estimate how long different species persisted before dying out. The discovery of a new fossil species gives a minimum estimate of when the species might have first evolved. The absence of the same species later in the fossil record signifies its probable extinction.

Though the methods are woefully imprecise, researchers have estimated that the average lifetime of a vertebrate species is between one and three million years. Many species are at the lower end of this range, while a few species persist many millions of years longer. For comparison, our own species, Homo sapiens, has been around for less than 500,000 years.

Such estimates can be compared to what is happening now. Conservation biologists estimate current extinction rates using historic, documented extinctions. For instance, since 1500 — just after Columbus’s arrival in the Americas — 187 of the roughly 10,000 bird species have gone extinct worldwide.

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Some simple math based on the average duration of fossil species predicts that only two to five bird species should have been lost since 1500. If the fossil data suggests a bird species will persist for three million years before going extinct, a species living in 1500 could be expected to survive for 30,000 years. In other words, a hundredfold drop.

This is the sort of calculation that supports the argument that we are approaching a “sixth mass extinction,” rivalling times in the past when extinction rates were orders of magnitude higher than the long-term average.

However, a high historical extinction rate based on data from the past few centuries may not be helpful. Using the historical extinction rate to predict current rates of extinction is similar to using car crash numbers for Model T Fords in the 1920s to predict deaths on the road in the 2020s. Many more cars hurtle down the road much faster today than they did 100 years ago. But in contrast to the 1920s, cars today sport airbags and other safety features.

Almost 80 per cent of historic bird extinctions were on oceanic islands like Hawaii, Madagascar and New Zealand, and often due to our unwitting importation of rats and snakes. Current threats include habitat destruction and climate change. And, akin to airbags, we are now much more interested in, and able to attempt, active conservation.

New rates

Using the same reasoning as before, we studied the number of species that change their status. But instead of considering extinct versus living species from long ago, we considered all levels of endangerment (the entire escalator of decline that moves species closer to extinction), and more recent data. We used numbers from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List for all 10,000 bird species from four time points.

The Red List gives each species a threat rating based on the likelihood that it is at risk of extinction. There are six ratings in total, starting with least concern (8,714 species in 2016) and moving through critically endangered (222 species) all the way to extinct in the wild (five species).

We started with the initial records from 1988 and compared them to subsequent updates taken every four to six years. My co-authors – comparative biologist Melanie Monroe and Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International — tallied the number of species that remained in place, rose or descended the extinction escalator decade over decade. Using those numbers, applied mathematician Folmer Bokma calculated a current average rate of extinction — the chance an average species would go extinct in any given year.

The vast majority of species moved down the endangerment escalator. That means that they are at higher risk of extinction today than they were previously. So the final average rate of extinction was high.

Based on the Red List numbers, the expected lifespan of a species living today is only about 5,000 years — this is six times worse than the historical rate and hundreds of times worse than the average extinction rate calculated using fossils.

A silver lining?

These results are surprisingly dismal, but we also found an encouraging pattern. We calculated the overall impact of conservation activity on rates of extinction by including or excluding improvements in risk status due to conservation efforts. Without conservation, our estimate of a 5,000 year future for living species would have dropped to 3,000 years.

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Because of intense conservation efforts, a species designated as critically endangered in the past was twice as likely to improve in status as it was to become extinct in the wild. Likewise, from year to year, the probability of a critically endangered species to move up to the relative safety of merely endangered status was greater than the probability of an endangered species having its prospects become critical. This is hard evidence that conservation works.

Costs of preventing extinction

This raises an interesting challenge. It is clear that we can bring species back from the brink of extinction, and many countries engage in last-ditch efforts.

But we also know that 11th-hour intervention is expensive. For instance, in British Columbia, the government recently earmarked nearly $30 million to try to protect the few remaining caribou in the province. We have known for decades that B.C. caribou have been declining, and extreme intervention, like shooting wolves from helicopters, seems, well, desperate.

And this desperation is unnecessary. If we want to conserve particular species, we need to target them early. This means we need to pay more attention to species that are not currently critically endangered.

We must identify the species that we want to keep around and that are unlikely to deal well with the world we are creating (or maybe more accurately, destroying) for them. Importantly, these species may currently be assessed as merely vulnerable, or even of least concern. We need to get them off the extinction escalator. It bears repeating: an ounce of prevention, a stitch in time.

Arne Mooers is Professor, Biodiversity, Phylogeny and Evolution, Simon Fraser University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scramble for Food and Water as Hurricane Lane Approaches Hawaii

Dangerous, hurricane-force winds were expected to hit the Big Island overnight and slam Maui Thursday afternoon.

Honolulu: Hurricane Lane, threatening a direct hit as Hawaii’s worst storm in a quarter century, churned toward the main island of Oahu on Thursday as schools, government offices and business closed while residents stocked up on supplies and boarded up homes.

Lane, classified as a powerful Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength, was packing sustained winds of up to 145 miles per hour (230 km/h) and could dump as much as 20 inches of rain over parts of the US Pacific island state, triggering flash flooding and landslides, the National Weather Service (NWS) warned.

As of 5 pm (0300 GMT), the storm was centered 260 miles (415 km) south of Kailua-Kona as it moved northwest at about 8 miles per hour, the weather service said.

Dangerous, hurricane-force winds were expected to hit the Big Island overnight and slam Maui Thursday afternoon, the National Weather Service said. To the north, Oahu was under a hurricane warning while Kauai remained on hurricane watch meaning it could face such conditions starting Friday morning.

“Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the center said. “Life threatening impacts are likely in some areas as the hurricane makes its closest approach.”

Governor David Ige urged residents to prepare for the worst by setting aside a 14-day supply of water, food and medicines in the event of major damage to roads and infrastructure.

“I urge our residents and visitors to take this threat seriously and prepare for a significant impact,” the governor said at a news conference in the state capital, Honolulu.

He also announced that all public schools, University of Hawaii campuses and non-essential government offices on the islands of Oahu and Kauai would be closed for at least two days starting on Thursday.

Store shelves stripped

The shelves of a downtown Honolulu Walmart were stripped of items ranging from canned tuna to dog food. Shoppers jostled with one another to get the last boxes of ramen noodles.

“There’s nothing in there,” said one shopper leaving the store.

City residents used carts to push cases of bottled water and coolers full of ice, after warnings of possible power outages and evacuations.

Cars waited in long lines at gasoline stations in Honolulu and people could be seen pulling small boats from the water ahead of Lane’s expected storm surge.

“I went to Safeway last night for regular groceries, everyone was in a panic,” said Thao Nguyen, 35, an employee at a Honolulu branch of Hawaiian shirt retailer Roberta Oaks.

“People were buying cases of tiny water bottles.”

President Donald Trump directed FEMA and administration officials to remain in close coordination with the state, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters.

“The president is deeply concerned for the well-being of all Hawaiians,” she said.

US Navy ships and submarines based in Hawaii were instructed to leave port, a common practice as a hurricane approaches to avoid damage.

The most powerful storm on record to hit Hawaii was Hurricane Iniki, a Category 4 storm that made landfall on Kauai island on September 11, 1992, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It killed six people and damaged or destroyed more than 14,000 homes.

(Reuters)

Hawaii: Volcano’s Gassy and Glassy ‘Laze’ a New Threat

Even a wisp of laze – a term combining the words “lava” and haze” – can cause eye and respiratory irritation.

Pahoa: Hawaii residents coping with Kilauea’s volcanic eruption faced a potentially deadly new hazard on Sunday as authorities warned that lava flows reaching the Pacific Ocean could produce noxious clouds of acid fumes, steam and tiny, glass-like particles.

The civil defence notices cautioned motorists, boaters and beachgoers to beware of caustic plumes of “laze” formed from two streams of hot lava pouring into the sea after cutting across highway 137 on the south coast of Hawaii’s Big Island late on Saturday and early Sunday.

The bulletins also warned that reports of toxic sulphur dioxide gas being vented from various points around the volcano had tripled, urging residents to “take action necessary to limit further exposure.”

Laze – a term combining the words “lava” and haze” – is a mix of hydrochloric acid fumes, steam and fine volcanic glass specks created when erupting lava, which can reach 1,093 Celsius, reacts with sea water, Hawaii County Civil Defense said in a statement. “Be aware of the laze hazard and stay away from any ocean plume,” the agency said, warning that potential hazards include lung damage, as well as eye and skin irritation.

Under Sunday’s conditions, with strong winds and copious amounts of lava hitting the ocean, the laze plumes could extend as far as 24 km, mostly along the coast and offshore, though the hazard would diminish the farther out to sea it blows, according to USGS geologist Janet Babb.

Authorities cautioned, however, that wind patterns can change abruptly. The US Coast Guard was “actively monitoring” the area to keep away all vessel traffic except permitted tour boats, the civil defense office said.

Laze killed two people when a lava flow reached the coast in 2000, and even a wisp can cause eye and respiratory irritation, the USGS said. Acid rain from laze has corrosive properties equivalent to diluted battery acid, the agency said.

The section of coastal highway 137 and a nearby a state park in the area where lava was pouring into the ocean were both closed, and another road in the vicinity was restricted to local traffic as a precaution due to elevated levels of sulphur dioxide gas.

An air quality index for Kona, about 64 km northwest of the eruption site, was at “orange” level, meaning that older individuals and those with lung problems could be affected.

Earthquakes, ash eruptions

Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, began extruding red-hot lava and sulphuric acid fumes through newly opened fissures on the ground along its eastern flank on May 3, marking the latest phase of an eruption cycle that has continued nearly nonstop for 35 years.

The occurrence of new lava-spewing vents, now numbering at least 22, have been accompanied by flurries of earthquakes and periodic eruptions of ash, volcanic rock and toxic gases from the volcano‘s summit crater. The lava flows have destroyed dozens of homes and other buildings, ignited brush fires and displaced thousands of residents who were either ordered evacuated or fled voluntarily.

The volcano has also fed a phenomenon called vog, a hazy mix of sulphur dioxide, aerosols, moisture and dust, with fine particles that can travel deep into lungs, the USGS said.

On Saturday, authorities reported the first known serious injury from the eruptions – a homeowner whose leg was splattered with lava while standing on the third-floor balcony of his home.

With highway 137 severed, authorities were trying on Sunday to open up nearby highway 11, which was blocked by almost a mile of lava in 2014, to serve as an alternate escape route.

The Hawaii National Guard has warned of additional mandatory evacuations if more roads become blocked.

Officials at the Hawaii Volcano Authority have said hotter and more viscous lava could be on the way, with fountains spurting as high as 182 meters, as seen in a 1955 eruption.

(Reuters)

Fresh Quakes Hit Hawaii After Kilauea Volcano Erupts, Hundreds Evacuated

The volcano, one of five on the island, began erupting on Thursday after a series of earthquakes over the past week.

Pahoa: A series of fresh earthquakes on Friday, including a couple capable of causing considerable damage, hit Hawaii’s Big Island, where the Kilauea volcano has been spewing fountains of lava into residential areas and forcing hundreds to evacuate.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the latest tremor at 12:32 pm (2332 GMT) measured a magnitude of 5.8.

The Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency said the quake, which was on land close to the volcano, was not large enough to cause a tsunami.

Its epicentre was located 19.3 km southwest of Leilani Estates, one of the communities where lava has been burbling up from the ground from newly opened fissures or vents.

A new fissure opened up just before the latest tremor on Friday, the Defense Agency said in a text message, making a total of four found so far in residential areas.

The volcano, one of five on the island, began erupting on Thursday after a series of earthquakes over the past week, the USGS reported on its website. Starting around 11 am on Friday, the island experienced a flurry of earthquakes, the largest registering magnitude 5.8.

Residents in Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens subdivisions, home to about 1,700 people, were ordered to evacuate after public works officials reported steam and lava erupting from fissures in the road, the Civil Defense agency said.

No injuries or deaths were reported.

“There are lava tubes on our property,” said Dale Miller, 58, a Leilani Estates resident, referring to the natural tunnels underground that drain lava during an eruption. “The whole thing is Swiss cheese.”

“It felt like there was something under the house – like a big snake was moving under the house,” said Lee Begaye, 61, Miller’s partner and housemate. Lee added this was the first time in eight years of living by the volcano that they’d had to evacuate.

Civil defence officials have warned the public about high levels of sulfur dioxide near the volcano, one reason for the evacuation orders. The gas can cause skin irritations and breathing difficulties.

Keala Noel, 64, also from Leilani Estates, said she didn’t feel the lava was directly threatening them, but came to the shelter at 3 am on Friday because of the sulphur. “We stayed because we didn’t feel any imminent danger. But I could hardly breathe yesterday.”

Two emergency shelters were opened to take in evacuees, the Civil Defense Agency said, while Governor David Ige activated the Hawaii National Guard to provide emergency help.

An ash cloud rises above Kilauea Volcano after it erupted, on Hawaii’s Big Island May 3, 2018, in this photo obtained from social media. Credit: Janice Wei/via Reuters

“Please be alert and prepare now to keep your family safe,” he said on Twitter to residents living near the volcano.

One resident, Ikaika Marzo, told Hawaii News Now he saw “fountains” of lava as high as 38 meters. Others also told the news network they smelled burning brush and heard tree branches snapping.

Footage from a drone aired on the Hawaii News Now website showed lava incinerating trees as it crept near structures.

A 150–meter fissure erupted with lava for about two hours in Leilani Estates at about 5:30 pm, the Hawaii Volcano Observatory said on its website.

Lava, which can reach temperatures of about 1,150 celsius, spread less than about 10 meters from the fissure, the observatory said.

“The opening phases of fissure eruptions are dynamic and uncertain. Additional erupting fissures and new lava outbreaks may occur,” it said.

A plume of red ash rose from the volcano’s Pu’u ‘O’o vent high into the sky over the island, according to photos on social media.

Production at the Puna Geothermal plant was suspended until further notice, the Civil Defense Agency said on Friday, while Hawaii Electric Light said crews were disconnecting power in the areas affected by the active lava flow.

The Kilauea volcano has been erupting nearly continuously for more than three decades. Lava flows from the volcano have covered 125 square km, according to the US Geological Survey. Scientists say it is nearly impossible to predict how long an eruption will last.

Betty Long, 72, another Leilani Estates resident, evacuated to the shelter near Pahoa in the early hours of Friday morning, but her husband stayed behind with their pets because he was afraid of looters.

“I think my husband is like a lot of residents there” who are assuming looting is going to be a problem. “That’s why they are reluctant to leave,” she said.

Long said that while their retirement home is a gorgeous place to live, it comes with risks. She and her husband faced a choice between purchasing hurricane or volcano insurance. They chose the hurricane insurance, she said.

(Reuters)

Hawaii Says Lack of Adequate Fail-Safe Measures Led to False Missile Alert

Elaborating on the origins of Saturday’s false alarm, spokesman Richard Rapoza said the employee who mistakenly sent the missile alert “has been temporarily reassigned” to other duties.

A combination photograph shows screenshots from a cell phone displaying an alert for a ballistic missile launch and the subsequent false alarm message in Hawaii January 13, 2018. Credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry

Honolulu: Human error and a lack of adequate fail-safe measures during a civil defense warning drill led to the false missile alert that stirred panic across Hawaii over the weekend, a state emergency management agency spokesman acknowledged on Sunday.

Elaborating on the origins of Saturday’s false alarm, which went uncorrected for nearly 40 minutes, spokesman Richard Rapoza said the employee who mistakenly sent the missile alert“has been temporarily reassigned” to other duties.

Rapoza said an internal investigation of the blunder would be completed by week’s end and that the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency welcomed outside review by the Federal Communications Commission, which has jurisdiction over wireless US alert systems.

Rapoza also said that no further drills of the emergency alert system would be conducted until new measures were put in place to reduce the chance of future false alarms and to swiftly withdraw any warnings sent in error.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said on Sunday that the agency’s probe of the incident so far suggested “reasonable safeguards or process controls” were lacking, a point that Rapoza said officials at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency did not dispute.

The error occurred when, in the midst of a drill during a shift change at the agency, an employee made the wrong selection from a “drop-down” computer menu, choosing to activate a missilelaunch warning instead of the option for generating an internal test alert, Rapoza said.

The employee, believing the correct selection had been made, then went ahead and clicked “yes” when the system’s computer prompt asked whether to proceed, Rapoza said.

Governor David Ige initially said on Saturday that “an employee pushed the wrong button.”

The resulting message, issued amid heightened international strains over North Korea’s development of ballistic nuclear weapons, stated: “EMERGENCY ALERT BALLISTIC MISSILETHREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

‘Not making any excuses’

It was transmitted to mobile phones and broadcast on television and radio across the Pacific island state shortly after 8 a.m. on Saturday, and took 38 minutes to be retracted by an official all-clear message.

The mistake unleashed hysteria and confusion across the state, home to some 1.4 million people and a heavy concentration of US military command structure.

Civil defense officials have said that in the event of a real missile attack from North Korea, people in Hawaii would have only about 12 minutes to find shelter.

In November, Hawaii said it would resume monthly statewide testing of Cold War-era nuclear attack warning sirens for the first time in at least a quarter of a century, in preparation for a possible missile strike from North Korea.

Ige, who said he was “angry and disappointed” by Saturday’s incident, said some sirens went off after the false alarm.

To prevent a repeat, the Emergency Management Agency will now require two employees to activate the alert system – one to issue the warning and another to confirm it. The agency also has incorporated a way of issuing an immediate false-alarm notice in the event of an error.

“That’s something we were lacking yesterday,” Rapoza told Reuters by telephone. “Our focus was on getting the message out quickly, and not enough attention was paid to what happens if there’s a mistake. And frankly, that was a failure of planning on our part. We’re not making any excuses for it.”

US President Donald Trump weighed in on Sunday during a visit to Florida and gave Hawaiistate officials credit for admitting their mistake, saying: “I loved that they took responsibility.”

He added: “But we’re going to get involved,” an apparent reference to the FCC’s review of the incident.

Trump, whose public war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, including a tweet boasting that he had a “much bigger” nuclear button than Kim, has widely been seen as stoking tensions, added: “But maybe eventually we’ll solve the problem” so people in Hawaii “don’t have to be so on edge.”

Criticism of the state emergency management agency from other quarters was swift.

Lee Cataluna, a columnist for the state’s largest newspaper, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, wrote in an opinion piece published on Sunday: “It’s the time for outrage. Somebody needs to get fired.”

(Reuters)

Tears and Panic as False Missile Alert Unnerves Hawaii

The false alert came amid high international tensions over North Korea’s development of ballistic nuclear weapons.

A screen capture from a Twitter account showing a missile warning for Hawaii, US, January 13, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. Credit: Twitter/ @valeriebeyers/via Reuters

Honolulu: Panic and confusion swept Hawaii on Saturday as a mistaken alert about a ballistic missile attack spread across the Pacific US state, sending residents and tourists scrambling for shelter and questioning why an all-clear was not issued faster.

Rhonda Ramirez and Michael Sterling, both 56 and from Los Angeles, were staying at a hotel in the Waikiki tourist district when the state emergency agency issued the bogus alert at 8:07 a.m. HAST (1807 GMT).

Ramirez, a mortgage broker, “immediately started crying. I was thinking, ‘What could we do? There is nothing we can do with a missile,'” said Sterling, a law firm employee.

The hotel told guests to stay indoors and about 30 minutes later announced the all-clear.

“That seems too late,” Sterling said as he and Ramirez prepared to have breakfast at a restaurant.

Ikaika Hussey, 39, publisher of Summit Magazine and candidate for Honolulu City Council, was home with his children when he got the alert. They grabbed food and headed for a room with a rock wall, he said.

He blamed Hawaii‘s status as a potential target on its being home to the US Pacific Command and the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

“Militarism is reducing, not enhancing, our security,” Hussey said by phone.

The false alert came amid high international tensions over North Korea’s development of ballistic nuclear weapons. The alert was not corrected for 38 minutes. Many in Hawaii learned it was falsebecause of a tweet sent in the interim by US Representative Tulsi Gabbard.

State Representative Matt LoPresti told CNN he and his family sought safety in a bathtub but wondered why nuclear alert sirens had not sounded.

“That was my first clue that maybe something was wrong, whether a hack or an error. But we took it as seriously as a heart attack,” he said.

Governor David Ige apologised for the mistake, saying it occurred when the system was being tested during a shift change at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Since the sirens did not ring out, work continued as normal at a post office in Honolulu’s Manoa district, said part-time postal worker Adam Goss, 32.

Puzzled friends contacted by Goss told him that they were hearing nothing more about any imminent attack.

“I think they should have put out another message right away, rather than for us to have to check Twitter for Tulsi Gabbard’s message it was a false alarm,” Goss said.

(Reuters)

US Top Court Dismisses Hawaii’s Challenge to Trump Travel Ban

Trump’s 120-day ban on refugees ended on Tuesday and is set to be replaced by a new set of restrictions.

FILE PHOTO: Tourists and locals play on Ko’Olina beach on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, July, 29, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry/File Photo

Washington: The US Supreme Court on Tuesday formally dropped plans to hear the last remaining challenge to an earlier version of President Donald Trump‘s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries and a ban on refugees, but a fight over the legality of his latest restrictions still could reach the nine justices.

The high court said it will not hear the case brought by Hawaii over the bans, which have expired and been replaced with revised policies. Trump‘s 120-day ban on refugees ended on Tuesday and is set to be replaced by a new set of restrictions.

Two lower courts have blocked Trump‘s new ban targeting people from eight countries, Trump‘s third set of travel restrictions, and the issue could find its way back to the Supreme Court on appeal.

The court on October 10 disposed of the first of two travel ban cases – brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others in Maryland – after Trump‘s earlier 90-day ban on people entering the US from six predominantly Muslim countries expired on September 24. It was a replaced with a modified, open-ended ban involving eight countries.

The justices had been scheduled to hear arguments in the two consolidated on October 10.

Among the issues raised by challengers was whether the travel ban discriminated against Muslims in violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on the government favouring or disfavouring a particular religion. The same arguments are being used against the new ban.

Trump has said the restrictions were needed to prevent terrorism in the United States.

The expired ban had targeted people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. The new ban removed Sudan from the list and blocked people from Chad and North Korea and certain government officials from Venezuela from entering the United States.

If the new restrictions go into effect, they could block tens of thousands of potential immigrants and visitors to the United States. Trump had promised as a candidate “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

(Reuters)

US Appeals Court Refuses Hawaii’s Bid to Narrow Trump Travel Ban

A Honolulu judge this week rejected Hawaii’s request to clarify the Supreme Court ruling and narrow the government’s implementation of the ban.

US President Donald Trump in Bedminster, July 3, 2017.Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas

San Francisco: A US appeals court on Friday rejected Hawaii‘s request to issue an emergency order blocking parts of President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban while the state sought clarification over what groups of people would be barred from travel.

The US Supreme Court last month let the ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries go forward with a limited scope, saying it could not apply to anyone with a credible “bona fide relationship” with a US person or entity.

The Trump administration then decided that spouses, parents, children, fiancés and siblings would be exempt from the ban, while grandparents and other family members traveling from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would be barred.

Trump said the measure was necessary to prevent attacks. However, opponents, including states and refugee advocacy groups, sued to stop it, disputing its security rationale and saying it discriminated against Muslims.

A Honolulu judge this week rejected Hawaii‘s request to clarify the Supreme Court ruling and narrow the government’s implementation of the ban.

Hawaii appealed to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, saying in a filing on Friday that the appeals court has the power to narrow the travel ban while it decides how to interpret the Supreme Court’s ruling.

A three-judge 9th Circuit panel on Friday rejected that argument and said it did not have jurisdiction to hear Hawaii‘s appeal.

The 9th Circuit said the Honolulu judge could issue an injunction against the government in the future, if he believed it misapplied the Supreme Court’s ruling to a particular person harmed by the travel ban.

But the judge did not have the authority to simply clarify the Supreme Court’s instructions now, the appeals court said.

In a statement, Hawaii attorney general Douglas Chin said he appreciated that the 9th Circuit ruled so quickly, and that the state will comply.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Justice Department lawyers have argued that its definition of close family “hews closely” to language found in US immigration law, while Hawaii‘s attorney general’s office said other parts of immigration law include grandparents in that group.

The roll-out of the narrowed version of the ban was more subdued last week than in January when Trump first signed a more expansive version of the order. That sparked protests and chaos at airports around the country and the world.

(Reuters)