The Need for Wild Bison Restoration

George Wuerthner

Bison were critical ecosystem influences on grasslands of North America, particularly in the Great Plains “bison belt.” They provided prey or carrion for wolves, grizzlies, other smaller predators and scavengers, and food for humans. In addition, bison grazing patterns influenced vegetation growth and distribution and created mutualistic relationships with wildlife such as prairie dogs.

Due to behavioral and other differences, domestic livestock are no substitute for bison.

Due to behavioral and management differences, domestic cattle are no substitute for wild bison. Photo George Wuerthner.

Bison were critical to the horse-mounted bison hunting culture of the plains Indians and to their demise by the 1880s.  The disappearance of the vast herds of bison shocked or alarmed the American public and helped to foster new wildlife protection policies.

The Lacey Act, which prohibited the possession and transportation of wildlife across state borders, was explicitly enacted to protect bison from poachers in Yellowstone National Park.

Due to overhunting and commercial harvest, bison were extirpated from nearly all their vast range. By 1890 the last wild bison, perhaps only 50, remained in Yellowstone National Park. In addition to the Yellowstone herd, a few remaining wild bison were gathered into 5 or 6 small private herds. However, bison in most or all these herds were cross-bred with domestic cattle.

Few of the existing herds outside of Yellowstone National Park are large enough and subject to on-going natural selection such as native predators, variable climate, and other evolutionary influences to preserve wild genes. Photo George Wuerthner.

Today, there are bison herds in some national parks notably Badlands, Wind Cave, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone, and Theodore Roosevelt; and federal wildlife refuges such as Wichita Mountains. Among these, the Yellowstone herd is the most “wild”, being the largest and influenced by the least amount of domesticating management.  Smaller public herds, subject to more intensive and diverse management interventions are being domesticated, with simplification and disorganization of the wild bison genome.

Some bison advocates celebrate the more than 500,000 bison scattered on private ranches and in tribal herds. This is analogous to celebrating hatchery salmon as a substitute for wild salmon restoration.

Most or all these bison herds, wildness is being compromised. Most have cattle genes. These herds generally are subject to typical livestock management, including supplemental feeding, controlled rotations through pastures, selective culling, and controlled sex—age structure of the herd.  None are large enough to preclude degeneration of the wild genome.

This culling is not selective for wildness. Indeed, among many captive herds, the most unruly bison are often the first to be eliminated. The migratory tendency of bison is also being eradicated even among Yellowstone’s bison, shot at the park border by tribal gunners or captured for slaughter by the Park Service. This activity is done primarily to preclude the migration of Yellowstone bison out of the park onto private ranchlands.

Due to the small size of most domesticated bison herds and the heavy-handed livestock-oriented management, the genetic traits that could be summed up as “wildness” are being lost. Biologist Jim Bailey has written extensively about this loss.

A problem with many existing bison herds is their small size. Inbreeding depression and genetic drift are issues with small herds. All existing bison herds have been through genetic bottlenecks and thus have lost genetic variability. Considering that even the wilder bison herds such as those in Yellowstone and Utah’s Henry Mountains were started with tiny numbers, there are also likely some losses of genetic diversity even in these herds.

WHAT CONSTITUTES A WILD BISON HERD

A wild herd needs to be sufficiently large enough to avoid genetic inbreeding and significant genetic drift. Keep in mind that bison are tournament breeders, which means that a single bull can breed many females. The dominance of a few bulls can produce many half-siblings that may foster inbreeding in subsequent years.

Artificial selection, in many forms, plus genetic drift, reduces natural selection, allowing degradation of the wild genome. The pool of animals, actually the pool of alleles, subject to natural selection can be small, diminishing the effectiveness of natural selection.

A large herd also experiences more evolutionary influences and thus can preserve rare alleles that might only have value under stressful conditions (like climate change).

A diversity of landscapes also affects evolutionary selection; hence a large landscape segment is critical to sustaining wild bison. A bison range that is a large diverse landscape provides a diversity of natural opportunities and threats, and is necessary to provide the diversity of natural selection needed to retain the full wild genome.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR WILD BISON

Bison are the official mammal of the United States. It is time we started treating them with more respect and consideration.

We need to establish new wild herds of bison. Several prime locations could sustain large wild herds to ensure the ongoing preservation of “wild genes” in these animals. In 1910, William Hornaday of the Smithsonian Institution proposed a preserve for wild bison on the south side of the Missouri River in Montana and we still have an opportunity in this area to restore wild bison.

The million-acre refuge Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, along with adjacent Bureau of Land Management lands in the Missouri Breaks National Monument, and private lands in the American Prairie Reserve could easily support a herd of several thousand bison.

There is widespread public support for establishing a wild bison herd on the CMR under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management. For example, a 2015 Draft Environmental Impact Statement for bison conservation and management that proposed establishing public bison herds in Montana by the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks received over 21,000 public comments. Likewise, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service received over 23,000 public comments during scoping and over 21,000 Public comments on the draft conservation plan for the CMR Refuge.

Three polls of citizens have shown that about 70 percent of Montana voters support the restoration of public trust, wild bison on the CMR Refuge.

Opposition to the establishment of wild bison herds in Montana comes primarily from Agricultural interests who currently control the political reins of the Montana legislature.

The Montana Wild Bison Restoration Coalition has put together a proposal to establish wild bison at the CMR

The second potential restoration area is the Green River/South Pass/Red Desert area of Wyoming. The Red Desert is the largest unfenced area in the West and once supported bison herds in the 1800s. Most of this area is BLM land, though there are sections of state lands and other agency lands that might be incorporated in a wild bison refuge.

Though human hunting was a major selective factor in evolution of modern bison before their near extinction, due to the small size of most existing herds, even a limited amount of human predation (as now occurred at the border of Yellowstone by tribal hunters) can negate natural processes like disease, social behavior, reproductive success, and energy efficiency, among other evolutionary factors.

We will have to control the sizes of all bison herds and human hunting is one appropriate method. The issue is to remove animals in ways that minimize weakening and replacement of natural selection by controlling the ages of removed animals and the seasons of removal. The smaller the herd, the fewer animals (alleles) that are available to natural selection.

Wolf predator tends to select for the young and old. Any culling by humans should emulate this process. Photo George Wuerthner.

To degree that hunting is employed for culling herds, it should mimic the natural selection by predators like wolves who target yearlings and at the older animals, while prime age 5–10-year-old individuals should be off limits to removal.

It’s time to restore wild bison to the American West. We have the land base to do this, but do we have the political will?

Global Britain Slashes International Aid

Binoy Kampmark

 

“Decisions on aid are eroding trust and eroding relationships between the UK and developing countries.”

– Abby Baldoumas, Financial Times, July 15, 2021

Politics is not merely the art of the possible but the pursuit of concerted hypocrisy. When it comes to that matter of funding good causes – foreign aid, for instance – wealthy states are often happy to claim they open their wallets willingly.  As good international citizens, they fork out money for such causes as education, healthcare, sanitation.  The goals are always seen as bigger than the cash, a measure of self-enlightened interest.

The United Kingdom is certainly such a case. For years, governments of different stripes praised the political importance of the aid programme.  “Development has never just been about aid or money, but I am proud that Britain is a country that keeps its promises to the poorest in the world,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told the United Nations General Assembly in a 2012 speech.

This all started changing in 2020.  The merging of the Department of International Development with the Foreign Office was a signal that pennies would be in shorter supply.  On November 25, 2020, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced that the government would not spend 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance in 2022.  The allocation would fall to 0.5% of GNI – £10 billion in monetary terms.  Relative to the 2019 budget, this would amount to an effective cut of around £4 to 5 billion.  Aid had very much become a matter of money.

The 0.7% allocation has been part of British policy since 2013.  Two years after that, it became part of legislation.  Up till September 2020, it was even assumed that it would also be part of Tory policy, given its mention in the Conservative Party manifesto.

Sunak did not shy away from populist justification in delivering his spending review for the 2021-22 financial year.  “During a domestic fiscal emergency, when we need to prioritise our limited resources on jobs and public services, sticking rigidly to spending 0.7% of our national income on overseas aid is difficult to justify to the British people.”

The Chancellor tried assuring his fellow parliamentarians that he had “listened with great respect to those who have argued passionately to retain this target, but at a time of unprecedented crisis, government must make tough choices.”  Such a tough choice seemed to put Sunak in breach of the law, not something alien to members of the Johnson government, including the prime minister himself.  But do not expect legal writs or the constabulary to be pursuing the matter: all that’s seemingly required is a statement to Parliament explaining why the aim was not achieved.

On July 13, Parliament passed a motion confirming the reduction in the aid budget, with 333 votes cast in favour of it.  298 opposed it.  Despite being billed as a compromise, the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell was wiser.  “There is an unpleasant odour leaking from my party’s front door,” he ruefully admitted.  The motion had been “a fiscal trap for the unwary.”

The consequences of these slashing initiatives have laid waste to the charity and humanitarian landscape.  The list of casualties mentioned by Devex is grim and extensive.  A few unfortunates are worth mentioning.  On July 7, South Sudan country director of Christian Aid reflected upon the closure of peace-building efforts led by various churches in South Sudan given the 59% cut in UK aid.  “These cuts risk having a lethal effect on the chances of a lasting peace here,” James Wani lamented.

On June 14, support was cancelled for the Strategic Partnership Arrangement with Bangladesh.  In the view of the NGO BRAC, this would see a halt to educating 360,000 girls, stop the funding of 725,000 school places, and cut nutritional support for 12 million infants, not to mention access to family planning services for 14.6 million women and girls.

Whole initiatives will cease outright, such as the Malawi Violence Against Women and Girls Prevention and Response Programme or the Green Economic Growth for Papua programme, which focuses on preventing deforestation.  In some cases, existing budget allocations have been reduced by staggering amounts.  The UN Sexual and Reproductive Health Agency (UNFPA), for example, has seen its funding allotment from the UK for its family planning programme reduced by 85% – from £154 million to £23 million.

With all this devastation taking place, Prime Minister Boris Johnson could still breezily announce at the G7 summit that his government would be providing an extra £430 million of extra funding from UK coffers for girls’ education in 90 developing countries.  The timing of this was exquisite: only some weeks prior, cuts had been made amounting to over £200 million for the same cause, down from the £600 million offered in 2019.

In April 2021, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab sounded every bit the stingy economic rationalist.  “Throughout the business planning process, we strived to ensure that every penny of the FCDO’s (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s) ODA (Official Development Assistance) spent brings maximum strategic coherence, impact and value for taxpayers’ money.”

At the Global Education Summit this July, the bleak and razored approach Johnson had taken to aid was concealed by a mask of colourful praise for his own moneyed initiatives.  He called the Global Partnership for Education “the universal cure”, “the Swiss Army knife, complete with Allen key and screwdriver and everything else that can solve virtually every problem that afflicts humanity.”

Without blushing at any point, he spoke about educating the world properly and fairly to “end a great natural injustice.”  In giving “every girl in the world the same education as every boy, 12 years of quality education, then you perform the most fantastic benefits for humanity – you lift life expectancy, you lift per capita GDP, you deal with infant mortality”.

The aid cuts have not only aggrieved those in the charity and development sector.  Baroness Liz Sugg resigned as minister for overseas territories and sustainable development in response to the cuts.  “Cutting UK aid risks,” she wrote to the prime minister last November, “risks undermining your efforts to promote a Global Britain and will diminish your power to influence and other nations to do what is right.”

From the levels of local government, Shropshire councillor Andy Boddington also expressed his dismay.  “Our local MPs and Boris Johnson should bow their heads in shame and recognise how this unnecessary cut has diminished Britain on the world stage just as we prepare to host the international climate summit COP26.”  The good councillor would surely be aware that the allocation of shame, for Johnson, is much like Britain’s current aid budget: diminished in supply.

The Fall of Tunisia, Last of the Arab Spring Nations

Patrick Cockburn

“Do you remember the tomorrow that never came?” asked a sad piece of street graffiti in Cairo, referring to the fate of the Arab Spring that once promised to overthrow the brutal autocracies that rule the Middle East.

That tomorrow moved even further into the future this week when a coup displaced the last surviving democracy to emerge from the Arab uprising of 2011. Appropriately, it took place in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began a decade ago after a vegetable seller burned himself to death in a protest against the actions of the corrupt and dictatorial regime.

On 25 July, Kais Saied, the Trump-like populist president of Tunisia, sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and declared himself prosecutor general. As with Donald Trump, he had spent the years since he was elected in 2019 blaming members of parliament, critical media and government institutions for the dire state of the country. Polls show that many Tunisians believe him.

The takeover of power has been called “a constitutional coup” because Saied, a law professor by profession, was already president, but decisive steps towards autocracy are being taken. By now this road to dictatorship is well-travelled in many countries and the Tunisian coup is only the concluding episode in the tragic saga of the Arab Spring. Almost every state in the Middle East and North Africa has now returned to – or never left – the political dark ages from which, not so long ago, they thought they might be emerging.

There was nothing phoney about the Arab Spring in its first phases, though western media coverage was over-optimistic about the chances of success. Spontaneous uprisings spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. People poured onto the streets chanting slogans like: “Bread! Freedom! Social Justice! The people demand the fall of the regime!”

And regimes did fall or falter as television screens worldwide were filled with pictures of protesters battling police in Tahrir Square in Cairo and Libyan militiamen fighting Muammar Gaddafi’s soldiers on the road to Benghazi. The scenes looked like something out of Les Misérables, with the revolutionary populace struggling against the forces of oppression.

In many ways this was true enough, but the chances of victory were always less than they appeared. At first, the demonstrators had the advantage of surprise because the sclerotic regimes that they were seeking to overthrow had never before faced mass protests on such a scale. The powers-that-be used enough violence to enrage, but not enough to intimidate. There was much wishful thinking about how social media had outflanked and marginalised official propaganda.

The greatest triumph of the Arab Spring was in Egypt with its 90m population, where President Hosni Mubarak was removed after 29 years in power. Astonished by their achievement, the revolutionaries did not grasp its limitations. They never took over state institutions, notably the Egyptian army, which in July 2013 staged a military coup with popular support and established an even more oppressive regime than that of Mubarak.

One by one, the countries that briefly dreamed of a bright future in 2011 saw their hopes extinguished. In Bahrain, the Sunni monarchy ferociously stamped out demonstrations by the Shia majority, torturing doctors who had treated the injured and claiming, without any evidence, that the protests were orchestrated by Iran.

The outcome of the Arab Spring was uniformly disastrous in that in the six countries where it took hold the situation is worse than before. In three of them – Libya, Syria and Yemen – civil wars, all fueled and manipulated by outside powers, are raging and show no sign of ending. Governments in Egypt and Bahrain, which is effectively a proxy of Saudi Arabia, ruthlessly crush any signs of dissent. Predictably, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have both welcomed the presidential coup in Tunisia.

I reported and wrote about all these uprisings at the time and in subsequent years. I was never optimistic that all would turn out well, but sitting in Cairo after the fall of Mubarak 10 years ago and trying to decide if I should cover the revolution in Benghazi or the one in Bahrain, it was impossible not to be caught up in the heady atmosphere of a new day dawning.

Even then I suspected that the old regimes were not going to disappear tamely. My minor skirmishes with the Egyptian bureaucracy convinced me that they were still waiting for a clear winner in the power struggle. In Libya, after Gaddafi had been killed, it was telling that one of the first proposals of the transitional government was to end the ban on polygamy.

I have asked myself ever since if the millions who demonstrated during the Arab Spring could have won or was the balance of power always too skewed against them. The answer to this question is vital if there is ever to be a second revolutionary wave more successful than the first.

Outside the Middle East, the vision of the forces at play 10 years ago was always naive, pitting “evil doers” against the good-and-the-true. Almost from the beginning, the Arab Spring was a peculiar mix of revolution and counter-revolution. Genuine popular uprisings took place in Libya and Syria, for instance, but it was absurd to imagine that Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Gulf, were giving vast sums of money to the parties and militias they supported in order to spread secularism, democracy and freedom of expression.

Anti-regime movements in their dealing with the West would sensibly downplay their religious and ethnic allegiances and adopt the vocabulary of liberal democracy. Usually they were taken uncritically at their word. Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion in 2003 blamed all sectarian hatreds on him, and the opponents of Bashar al-Assad did much the same after 2011. But in both countries, the military frontlines commonly mirror the religious and ethnic loyalties of local communities.

Western politicians who led the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq likewise pretend that one of their prime motives was to spread parliamentary democracy and personal freedom. But my experience of reporting these interventions was that they were not much different from 19th-century imperial ventures, and served to exacerbate divisions and spread chaos.

The first uprising in Tunisia provoked vast international interest, but the presidential coup in the same country last Sunday scarcely registered on the news agenda. This is a mistake even from the most nationally egocentric point of view because a great band of human misery now stretches more than 3,000 miles from Kabul to Tunis and 2,000 miles from Damascus to Mogadishu.

This vast zone of deprivation, dictatorship and violence may regenerate Isis or lead to rise of new al-Qaeda-type organisations. It will certainly produce great surges of refugees once again heading for Europe because they see no future for themselves in their own countries.

On Roma Holocaust Memorial Day deportations of Roma from Germany continue

Tino Jacobson

August 2 is the official day of remembrance of the Roma Holocaust. It commemorates the bestial murder of some 4,300 Roma and Sinti during the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in August 1944.

Away from the official events on this day, however, it becomes all too clear that even 77 years after this Nazi crime, the Roma cannot find a safe home in Germany. The callousness of the federal and state governments is expressed in Berlin, for example, where the Roma memorial in front of the Bundestag (parliament), which commemorates the 500,000 Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism (Nazism), is to fall victim to another new S-Bahn (urban transit) line less than ten years after its unveiling .

At the beginning of June, the Independent Commission on Antiziganism (Roma persecution), which was formed on behalf of the Bundestag and the government in 2019, issued recommendations against discrimination against Roma. The 843-page report calls for only a few concrete measures. The most important is certainly the demand for an immediate halt to all deportations of Roma from Germany.

The poster reads: "The memorial stays"--demonstration on 8 April 2021 in Berlin (Photo WSWS)

It reads: “The Independent Commission on Antiziganism recommends to the federal government ... to put an end to the lack of prospects of those who have to live with the insecure status of having their residence tolerated. Concerning the practical application of the provisions of the Residence Act, it must be made clear that the Roma living in Germany are to be recognised as a group particularly worthy of protection for historical and humanitarian reasons. State governments and Aliens Departments are called upon to immediately end the practice of deporting Roma.”

But this is precisely what Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Democratic Union, CSU) categorically rejects on behalf of the federal government. It is true that in the press conference on July 13 he advocated some cosmetic measures, such as the appointment of a commissioner against antiziganism or the creation of a permanent federal-state commission. But he then quietly dropped the demand for an end to deportations.

Meanwhile, the federal and state governments are continuing the brutal deportation policy of recent years against Roma.

In 2020, 10,800 people were officially deported, more than 25 percent to the Western Balkans. Of the 2,787 people deported there, 761 were minors. The Western Balkan states include Albania and the former Yugoslav states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia and Kosovo. In 2014 and 2015, the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) declared these six states to be so-called “safe countries of origin,” even though the Roma are massively discriminated against there. Almost all Roma there live in slums and have no access to health care and education.

This classification as “safe countries of origin” means almost all asylum applications from the Western Balkans are rejected. As a result, even people who have lived in Germany for decades, or since birth, face deportation. Whole families with children, single parents and severely disabled adults and children are affected.

On June 30, 2021, in the middle of the night, the city of Göttingen arrested the Islami married couple in their flat, who had been living in Germany for 30 years, placing them in hand and foot cuffs to deport them immediately to Serbia. The children and grandchildren who lived in the flat with the couple were completely shocked following this brutal police action.

Both the parents in Serbia and the children and grandchildren in Germany are now left to fend for themselves. One adult daughter is severely mentally handicapped and needs permanent care, which the parents were able to provide for her until 2020 when she was placed in an institution against her parents’ wishes. Mr. Islami has a physical and chronic mental illness. Ms. Islami is the sister of Gani Rama, who was deported to Kosovo two years ago and then murdered by a nationalist a short time later.

On July 22, about 50 people, including the Islami children, protested in front of the Göttingen Aliens Department against this brutal deportation. The children reported how their parents have been living in Belgrade since then and would be homeless without the support of the family in Germany. The father is also unable to buy his necessary medication in Serbia. The couple, who originally fled from Kosovo, also have language problems, as they both speak little Serbian.

In Celle, under the cover of darkness, the authorities deported a single mother with her severely disabled daughter to Serbia at the end of June. The six-year-old daughter is 90 percent disabled. She suffers from severe hearing loss with a resulting speech disorder, microcephaly, and hip dysplasia. The Celle Youth Welfare Office had appointed a supplementary carer to support the mother for years.

The mother had originally fled Serbia, where she was subjected to severe physical and psychological violence. About two weeks before the deportation, a supporter had filed a hardship application for the family. Despite the ongoing asylum court proceedings and the application for hardship support, the deportation was allowed to proceed, even though it presented “a serious threat to the child’s well-being,” as Sebastian Rose from the Refugee Council of Lower Saxony rightly put it in a nutshell.

In Bochum, the Destanov family of five is facing deportation to Northern Macedonia, from where they fled in 2015. The family has a five-year-old son who suffers from severe breathing problems as well as heart disease. The reason for their flight from Northern Macedonia was an arson attack on their home. The family was originally supposed to be deported on June 1, but protests prevented this, which at least made it possible for the five-year-old to have a heart examination at the end of July.

Stefani (14), from Hamburg, is facing deportation to Montenegro in August together with her siblings and mother. In March 2019, they had escaped the miserable conditions there. In Germany, however, their asylum application was rejected under the pretext that they had entered “illegally.” Despite very good grades at school, Stefani and her family face having bureaucratic obstacles to the prospect of staying placed in their way. According to German residence law, she would have had to attend school “regularly and successfully” for at least four years. But logically, this has only been possible for Stefani for two years. The corresponding committee of the Hamburg state parliament rejected the petition to forward her case to the hardship commission.

In Magdeburg, the Barjamovic family, who have lived there for ten years, are again being threatened with deportation to Serbia, after this was averted in 2015 and 2016 through loud protests. Discrimination and inhumane conditions were the reasons for their flight to Germany. A petition containing 52,000 signatures to support the family’s right to stay was submitted to Magdeburg City Hall on July 14, 2021.

The Hardship Commission, which has been sitting on the case since last December, postponed its decision in mid-July. Seven-year-old Alex had to undergo emergency surgery in mid-July and his father is severely disabled with epilepsy. The youngest son, Mario, suffers from a rare hereditary disease and kidney stones. Seventeen-year-old son Josef has been dancing successfully for eight years in the “Break Borders Crew” and has already received several prizes and even won the title of German champion with the group in 2017.

Especially in Magdeburg, the memory of the crimes committed against the Roma by the Nazis is omnipresent. This is commemorated by two Roma monuments, one at Magdeburg Cathedral and the other at the Flora-Park shopping centre. During the Third Reich, the Holzweg-Silberberg forced labour camp was built near today’s Flora Park, where Roma and Sinti were imprisoned from 1935. The memorial consists of a 1.80-metre-high marble stele with the names of 340 murdered people engraved on it. The dedication text at Flora Park reads: “These names are to commemorate the fate of the Sinti and Roma who were deported from the camp at Holzweg-Silberberg to Auschwitz and murdered on 01.03.1943.”

Chinese paleontologists discover fossilized remains of largest land mammal to ever inhabit the Earth

Ronan Coddington

In mid-June, a research team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences lead by professor Deng Tao published their findings of a new species of Paraceratherium along the border of the Tibetan plateau.

A skull and mandible of Paraceratherium linxiaense which are preserved at the Hezheng Paleozoological Museum in Hezheng County, Gansu Province, China. Credit: Deng et. al., 2021

Today, the largest mammal to walk the Earth is the African bush elephant. While a sight to behold, this contemporary behemoth of the African plains pales in comparison to the Paraceratherium, the largest mammal to ever walk the Earth. While appearing to be some strange mix of a giraffe and an elephant, Paraceratherium was in fact a giant early rhinoceros. The ancient rhino’s skull alone was roughly the size of a human torso while the animal’s shoulders would have reached five meters above the ground. Paraceratherium linxiense is named after the Linxia Basin in central China where its fossils were discovered.

According to the University of Montpellier’s rhino paleontologist Pierre Olivier, in comments made to National Geographic, Paraceratherium would have been able “to eat flowers at the third or fourth floor of a building” today. The animal’s very own steps would have been felt through the earth, as estimates suggest it could have weighed a whopping 20 tonnes.

Deng’s team found that early species of Paraceratherium spread to central and south Asia around 43 million years ago. Millions of years later, it crossed what is now the Tibetan plateau seeking a humid environment. These findings suggest the Tibetan plateau was not elevated at the time, and its increased elevation is the cause of its modern aridity.

This giant mammal led an existence similar to a modern giraffe, feeding on huge amounts of plants throughout the Oligocene, a period lasting from 34 to 23 million years ago. It lived in a massive area encompassing what is now modern-day Eurasia. It had little to fear from nearby predators, with the exception of Astorgosuchus, a massive crocodile that would often exceed 10 meters in length. Evidence suggests it would prey upon even fully grown members of Paraceratherium.

The findings give paleontologists clues as to how this rhino genus spread across what is now Eurasia. Paraceratherium likely had social structures and reproductive cycles not dissimilar from the modern elephant, living in small social groups where females would guard younger members of the species. Males would live solitary lives, only approaching other members of its species to mate or compete for resources.

Ironically it was likely gomphotheres, an ancestor and relative of elephants, that likely drove Paraceratherium to extinction. Like elephants, gomphotheres were mixed browsers, feeding on both grasses and trees. This enabled them to become ecosystem engineers, as their feeding habits were extremely damaging to foliage, producing an ecosystem that had significantly fewer trees. For Paraceratherium, a large mammal that spent most of its waking hours browsing on trees, this change in plant composition proved devastating and it fell into extinction.

This change was not restricted to Paraceratherium’s range, as gomphothere descendants spread across the world. The engineering opened new ecological niches and in turn enabled animals more closely resembling modern rhinos to diversify and eventually become the horned beasts we know today.

These discoveries have provided numerous fascinating insights into the world of millions of years ago. However, modern military conflicts and wars for the control of resources in central Asia have greatly reduced science’s ability to understand these magnificent beasts. According to paleontologist Donald Prothero, efforts to explore the region continue despite being “extremely dangerous now because of warfare between the tribal chiefs and the Pakistani government, Taliban insurgents, Islamic extremists, and the spillover of the military conflict in Afghanistan.”

In 2006, the most remarkably preserved remains of these animals were annihilated. Excavated by a French team of paleontologists in the hills near the village of Dera Bugti, Pakistan, in 1999, the region was controlled by Akbar Bugti, the head of the Bugti tribe, a group consisting of an estimated 180,000 people. The elder Bugti was an invaluable source of information and protection for the scientists as they searched for bones, eventually recovering a nearly complete skeleton of Paraceratherium.

However, before they could be removed for further research, repeated bombings related to the Pakistani army’s suppression of the Baloch people in the region led to their destruction. The bombings that destroyed the fossils were part of a deliberate campaign to terrorize the local population.

Furthermore, efforts throughout the 20th century to construct a full skeleton of Paraceratherium suffered complications due to the remains being scattered across eastern, central and western Asia. Due to the rivalries between Soviet, Chinese and Western imperialist governments, little collaborative study was carried out.

Instead, scientists often led duplicate efforts and published findings that were inaccessible to outsiders. To this day, conflict embroils the region, as Chinese efforts to economically integrate the region and exploit fuel resources have provoked backlash from the local populations as well as US-backed efforts to sabotage Chinese pipelines.

These conflicts are not only an affront to the people of the region, but a blow to the scientific understanding of people around the world. The history of life on Earth belongs to all of humanity, regardless of region. The subordination of life to the capitalist profit system not only threatens human knowledge but the very existence of life on Earth.

Welcome to Western China!

Serge Halimi

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends states try to convince people of the — undeniable — benefits of Covid-19 vaccines rather than use coercion. Emmanuel Macron thinks otherwise. This president, a constant critic of ‘illiberalism’, sees public liberties as nothing more than a dial he can adjust, an insignificant variable subordinate to the emergencies of the moment — be they medical, security or military.

Forbidding millions of people from boarding a train, ordering a meal outdoors, or watching a film in a cinema without proving they are not infected by showing, as many as ten times a day, a document that business-owners will have to check, shifts us into another world.

That world already exists and it’s called China. Police officers there have augmented-reality glasses linked to thermal cameras on their helmets so they can pick out a person with a temperature in a crowd. Is this what we want?

We are, in any case, blithely endorsing the rampant invasion of digital technology and the tracking of our private and professional lives, our exchanges and our political views. Edward Snowden, asked how to stop our data being used against us once our mobile phones are hacked, said, ‘What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons? There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that’s why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies’ (1).

Macron is encouraging the exact opposite of this by accelerating the replacement of human interaction with a tangled web of government sites, robots, voicemail, QR codes and apps. Now, booking a ticket and shopping online require both a credit card and a mobile phone number, and sometimes even additional official documentation. There was a time, not so long ago, when you could take a train and remain anonymous, and travel across a city without being filmed, your sense of freedom enhanced by knowing you left behind no trace of having been there. Yet child abductions happened then, too, as did terrorist attacks, epidemics, even wars…

The precautionary principle will have no limit. Is it wise, for example, to sit in a restaurant with a person who may have visited the Middle East, had irrational thoughts, taken part in a banned demonstration or visited an anarchist bookshop? The risk of your meal being interrupted by a bomb, a Kalashnikov or a punch in the face may not be great, but nor is it zero. So will it soon be necessary for everyone to present a ‘civic pass’ guaranteeing they have police approval and no criminal record? They could then peacefully repair to a museum of public freedoms, the true ‘lost territories of the Republic’ (2)

Pegasus and the Threat of Cyberweapons in the Age of Smartphones

Prabir Purkayastha

Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is haunting the Narendra Modi-led Indian government once again. Seventeen media organizations including the Wire, the Washington Post and the Guardian have spent months examining a possible list of 50,000 phone numbers belonging to individuals from around 50 countries. This list was provided by the French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. These investigations by the media organizations helped zero in on possible targets of these cyberattacks. The mobile phones of 67 of the people who were on the target list were then forensically examined. The results revealed that 37 of the analyzed phones showed signs of being hacked by the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware or signs of attempted penetration. Of the remaining 30, the results were inconclusive as either the owners had changed their phones or the phones were Androids, which do not log the kind of information that helps in detecting such penetration.

The possible targets not only include journalists and activists, but also government officials. This includes 14 heads of states and governments: three presidents (France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa), three sitting and seven former prime ministers, and a king (Morocco’s Mohammed VI). The three sitting prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Among the seven former prime ministers are Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, France’s Édouard Philippe, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel, according to the Washington Post.

Once the malware is installed on a target’s phone, the spyware not only provides full access to the device’s data but also controls the phone’s microphone and camera. Instead of a device for use by the owner, the phone becomes a device that can be used to spy on them, recording not only telephonic conversations but also in-person conversations, including images of the participants. The collected information and data are then transmitted back to those deploying Pegasus.

Successive information and technology ministers in India—Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ashwini Vaishnaw—have stated that “the government has not indulged in any ‘unauthorized interception’” in the country, according to the Wire. Both the ministers have chosen to duck the questions: Did the government buy NSO’s hacking software and authorize the targeting of Indian citizens? And can the use of Pegasus spyware to infect smartphones and alter its basic functions be considered as legal authorization under the Indian Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009 for “interception, monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource”?

I am going to leave the legal issues for those who are better equipped to handle them. Instead, I am going to examine the new dangers that weaponizing malware by nation-states pose to the world. Pegasus is not the only example of such software; Snowden surveillance revelations showed us what the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States and the Five Eyes governments do and shed light on their all-encompassing surveillance regime. These intelligence agencies and governments have hacked the digital infrastructure of other countries and snooped on their “secure” communications and even spied on their allies. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not spared from NSA surveillance.

The key difference between nation-states and cybercriminals developing malware is that the nation-states possess far greater resources when it comes to developing such malware. Take the example of a group called the Shadow Brokers, who dumped a gigabyte of weaponized software exploits of the NSA on the net in 2017. Speaking about this, Matthew Hickey, a well-known security expert, told Ars Technica in 2017, “It is very significant as it effectively puts cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who downloads it.” Ransomware hit big time soon after, with WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware creating havoc by using the exploits in NSA’s toolkit.

Why am I recounting NSA’s malware tools while discussing Pegasus? Because Pegasus belongs to NSO, an Israeli company with very close ties to Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA. NSO, like many other Israeli commercial cyber-intelligence companies, is founded and run by ex-intelligence officers from Unit 8200. It is this element—introducing skills and knowledge of nation-states—into the civilian sphere that makes such spyware so dangerous.

NSO also appears to have played a role in improving Israel’s relations with two Gulf petro-monarchies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Israel, therefore, sees the sale of spyware to these countries as an extension of its foreign policy. Pegasus has been used extensively by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to target various domestic dissidents and even foreign critics. The most well-known example, of course, is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and the Washington Post’s columnist, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

NSO’s market capitalization is reported to be in the range of $2 billion, making it perhaps one of the most expensive civilian cyber-intelligence companies. And its tools are frightening, as there does not seem to be any protection against them. Most of these tools are classified as cyberweapons and require the Israeli government’s approval for export, again showing the link between the Israeli state and NSO.

The other reason why Pegasus spyware is so dangerous is that it does not need any action on the part of the owner of a phone for the device to be hacked by the spyware. Most infections of devices take place when people click on a link sent to them through email/SMS, or when they go to a site and click on something there. Pegasus exploited a security problem with WhatsApp and was able to hack into a phone through just a missed call. Just a ring was enough for the Pegasus spyware to be installed on the phone. This has now been extended to using other vulnerabilities that exist within iMessage, WhatsApp, FaceTime, WeChat, Telegram, and various other apps that receive data from unknown sources. That means Pegasus can compromise a phone without the user having to click on a single link. These are called zero-click exploits in the cyber community.

Once installed, Pegasus can read the user’s messages, emails, and call logs; it can capture screenshots, log pressed keys, and collect browser history and contacts. It exfiltrates—meaning sends files—back to its server. Basically, it can spy on every aspect of a target’s life. Encrypting emails or using encryption services such as Signal won’t deter Pegasus, which can read what an infected phone’s user reads or capture what they type.

Many people use iPhones in the belief that they are safer. The sad truth is that the iPhone is as vulnerable to Pegasus attacks as Android phones, though in different ways. It is easier to find out if an iPhone is infected, as it logs what the phone is doing. As the Android systems do not maintain such logs, Pegasus can hide its traces better.

In an interview with the Guardian published on July 19, “after the first revelations from the Pegasus Project,” Snowden described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist… If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.” He called for an immediate global ban on the international spyware trade.

Snowden’s answer of banning the sale of such spyware is not enough. We need instead to look at deweaponizing all of cyberspace, including spyware. The spate of recent cyberattacks—estimated to be tens of thousands a day—is a risk to the cyberinfrastructure of all countries on which all their institutions depend. After the leak of NSA and CIA cyberweapons, and now with NSO’s indiscriminate use of Pegasus, we should be asking whether nation-states can really be trusted to develop such weapons.

In 2017, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft and no peacenik or leftist, wrote, “Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.” It is this concern that certain leading companies within the industry—Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and others—had raised in 2017, calling for a new digital Geneva Convention banning cyberweapons. Russia and China have also made similar demands in the past. It was rejected by the United States, who believed that it had a military advantage in cyberspace, which is something it should not squander.

Pegasus is one more reminder of the danger of nation-states developing cyberweapons. Though here, it is not a leak but deliberate use of a dangerous technology for private profit that poses a risk to journalists, activists, opposition parties and finally to democracy. It is a matter of time before the smartphones that we carry become attack vectors for attacks on the very cyberinfrastructure on which we all depend.