Over 500 migrants drowned near Greece: Fortress Europe and the refugee crisis

Thomas Scripps

More than 500 migrants fleeing war, environmental disaster, poverty, and oppression are dead or missing after their ship sank south-west of Greece in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Among them are between 30-100 children.

An estimated 750 people crammed into a fishing vessel at Tobruk in Libya on June 10, setting sail for days without adequate food or water, hundreds at a time packed on the open top deck.

A handout image provided by Greece's coast guard on Wednesday, June 14, 2023, shows scores of people covering practically every free stretch of deck on a battered fishing boat that later capsized and sank off southern Greece, leaving at least 79 dead and many more missing. [AP Photo/Hellenic Coast Guard via AP]

Only 78 bodies have been recovered. The majority of the dead are likely still trapped in the hold at the bottom of one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean. Just 104 survivors have been rescued, with the search called off Friday night.

The Greek government is complicit in this tragedy, refusing to organise a rescue operation until it was far too late, despite monitoring the dangerously overladen vessel for 14 hours and receiving reports of passengers in distress. Prof Erik Røsæg of the University of Oslo’s Institute of Private Law told the Guardian they “had a duty to start rescue procedures” under maritime law regardless of whether help was requested by those on board.”

After the coastguard claimed not to have had interacted with the ship because offers of help were refused, survivors are suggesting it capsized during an attempt to tow it. The coastguard now admit they had a mooring line attached but insist there was no effort to tug the boat. One survivor said, “Because they didn’t know how to pull the rope, the vessel started tilting right and left. The coastguard boat was going too fast, but the vessel was already tilting to the left, and that’s how it sank.”

Large protests in Greece have condemned the officials responsible for its migrant policy as murderers, and were attacked with teargas by police. (See video below).

That charge can be extended to all the European powers. They have poured billions into a vast anti-migrant apparatus at Europe’s borders, designed to ensure as many people as possible either abandon the journey or die in the attempt. Frontex, the European Union’s (EU) border force, had its annual budget raised from €535 million in 2021 to €754 million in 2022.

Billions more have been given to the dictatorial Libyan and Tunisian regimes, which between them intercepted more than 60,000 migrants attempting to sail to Europe in 2022, reportedly firing shots to ward off rescue ships this March.

At least 21,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean due to the imposition of “Fortress Europe” since 2014. Countless more have been put through hell in detention camps across North Africa—where the United Nations has found evidence of crimes against humanity in which the EU is complicit—and the Greek islands, or while passing through Europe by foot—subject to state-sponsored violence, extortion, humiliation, and deprivation.

Protesters hold a banner which reads in Greek with blue letters "Seas of Dead", during a demonstration in front of the parliament building, following a deadly migrant shipwreck off Greece, in Athens, on Thursday, June 15, 2023. [AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris]

Asylum seekers are victims twice over. The imperialist powers which treat them like vermin are responsible for them having to seek refuge in the first place, ripping apart societies around the world with wars, interventions, intrigues, and economic sanctions, plus the growing impact of climate change.

Among the dead in the latest tragedy were people from Syria, devastated by a US-led proxy war; Egypt, under the heel of Western-backed dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and of international investors; Pakistan, subject to US drone strikes and interventions in its politics, and still suffering the effects of devastating floods; and Palestine, under imperialist-backed Israeli occupation and blockade.

Those arriving at Europe’s borders are only the tip of an iceberg of suffering. According to the latest Global Trends report from the UN Refugee Council, more than one in every 74 people on the planet is forcibly displaced—over 108 million human beings, 40 percent of them children.

Numbers have soared in the last decade. Roughly 60 million were forcibly displaced globally in 2014, at the beginning of the “migrant crisis” in Europe. At that time, tragedies including several off the coast of Lampedusa between 2013-15—in which more than 1,000 people including children drowned—and the image of two-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up dead on a Turkish beach, produced widespread outrage and a feeling this barbarism could not continue.

But Europe’s governments have acted to ensure that it has. After a fall in the number of migrants recorded missing or dead in the Mediterranean from its peak of 5,136 in 2016, the figure has been rising again since a 2020 low of 1,449. The first quarter of this year was the deadliest since 2017.

Politicians are responding by building the EU’s walls higher—in some cases literally. At a meeting in Luxembourg this month, European leaders agreed to sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of asylum seekers allowing for their prolonged detention and fast-track deportation. The length of external EU border walls has increased more than sixfold between 2014 and 2022, to over 2,000 kilometres, covering 13 percent of the union’s land border, with more building planned.

The intention is to seal European capitalism off from the human consequences of a global society shattered by capitalist crisis, on which the media barely reports.

Of the 108 million forcibly displaced, most (62.5 million) are internally displaced in dire conditions within their own countries. Eighty percent of them are in just 10 locations: Colombia, Syria, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Low- and middle-income countries host three quarters of the externally displaced. They live in rudimentary camps like those at Bidi Bidi in Uganda (270,000 mostly South Sudanese refugees), Nyarugusu in Tanzania (150,000 mostly Congolese), or Za’atari in Jordan (76,000 mostly Syrians); or are housed in countries like Turkey in conditions exposed by the earthquake of this February which killed over 50,000 and displaced millions—many for the second time.

Far more leave their homes every year than can return—22 for every one returnee last year—and vanishingly few have any chance of resettling in another country—just 114,300 could do so in 2022. Most are left to rot, with those who try to find a job and a home in Europe violently repelled.

The horrific regular toll of migrant drownings and the global refugee crisis highlights the essential connection between imperialist war and the obliteration of democratic rights. The three birthplace countries of the largest groups of forcibly displaced people according to the UN’s latest report are Syria, (6.5 million), Ukraine (5.7 million) and Afghanistan (5.7 million)—locations of some of the most destructive US-NATO operations of the 21st century.

When the 5.9 million internally displaced in Ukraine are added, the total in that country rises to a staggering 11.6 million, the world’s fastest displacement crisis, and one of the largest since the Second World War.

Under conditions of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, with the imperialist powers directing resources into massive military spending programmes and repressive legislation at home, the attitude of the European ruling class to these displaced people is ever more hostile. The four million Ukrainians given “temporary protection” within the EU states and the paltry 60,000 allowed into the UK are considered a necessary exception to justify their friends, families and homes being used as NATO’s cannon fodder against the Russian army.

In that war, the ruling classes of the NATO powers advance themselves as defenders of democracy deeply concerned by humanitarian plight. Their brutal treatment of refugees exposes these hypocrites for what they are.

Canadian security agencies prevail on universities to scuttle joint research with Chinese academics

James Clayton

For the past four months, Canada’s political establishment and corporate media have been consumed with a vicious anti-China campaign, centered on lurid and unsubstantiated allegations from the intelligence agencies that Beijing interfered in Canada’s 2021 and 2019 federal elections.

In addition to casting China as a nefarious, hostile power, this campaign has served to destabilize the trade union-backed Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal government, so as to push it still further right. The government has adopted an anti-China “Indo-Pacific Strategy” developed in close consultation with the White House and routinely deploys Royal Canadian Navy warships alongside US vessels on provocative “freedom of navigation” missions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Yet the ruling class is flailing it for being insufficiently aggressive against Beijing.

In this photo provided by the U.S. Navy, the USS Chung-Hoon observes a Chinese navy ship conduct what it called an "unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait, Saturday, June 3, 2023. The incident occurred as the American destroyer and Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal were conducting a so-called “freedom of navigation” transit of the strait between Taiwan and mainland China. [AP Photo/Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Andre T. Richard/U.S. Navy via AP]

This reactionary, war-mongering campaign, is infecting all areas of public life. This includes the universities.

In recent months the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and government have intensified their efforts to compel the country’s universities to cease scientific cooperation with Chinese academics.

On May 3, Ontario’s University of Waterloo announced it was shutting down its “Joint Innovation Lab” founded in 2018 with a $6.5 million donation from Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. The laboratory had been working on 26 scientific research projects, staffed by 128 graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

The following day, the Universities of Toronto, Calgary, and Saskatchewan as well as McGill and Carleton Universities declared that they too were ceasing any research cooperation with Huawei, citing “national security” concerns that “Canadian” research “could” end up in the hands of the Chinese military. No proof has ever been offered for such hysterical nationalist claims.

The project “Novel Smartphone Application for Eye Disease Diagnosis and Therapy for Young Children” was determined by CSIS to be a “security risk.” The director of the Joint Innovation Lab, computer scientist Tamer Oszu, commented to the Waterloo Record: “It’s hard to comprehend what national security risk there might be in a topic that studies computer assistance in diagnosing eye diseases in children.”

The hysterical anti-China press campaign paints just the opposite picture. As in the case of the unproven allegations about Chinese election interference, vague allegations from CSIS—which has repeatedly lied to the courts about its activities—are being presented as incontrovertible and demonstrating a present and growing threat. The Toronto Star announced the severing of the Waterloo/ Huawei relationship, citing only the fear of “potential ties to the militaries or security apparatuses of foreign powers.”

Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, the former chair of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council which stewards more than $1 billion per year in research grants, could do little better, saying only that “these risks”—left entirely to the morbid imagination to enlarge upon—“are particularly related to Huawei’s very close relationship with the Chinese military through its many employees who are military staff, as well as through collaborations with military scientists and engineers.”

McCuaig-Johnston could not point to a single concrete instance of so-called “Canadian research” falling into the malign hands of the Chinese military, because there are no such documented instances. The state campaign against international scientific research is therefore simultaneously unscientific in its methods. Rather than shutting down “China,” it is shutting down projects initiated by Canadian graduate students and faculty.

“These were research projects that faculty members wanted to do and the funding from the joint lab facilitated the research. There’s not a single project where Huawei came to us and said ‘We want you to find someone to do this work for us’,” Oszu told the Record.

Vague “concerns” have been raised, and warnings made by CSIS about so-called “dual-use” technologies, including quantum computing, photonics, aeronautical and AI research. However, in no instance has a specific allegation of either copyright theft or “technology transfer” to the Chinese military been documented.

These draconian measures will halt collaborative research between Chinese and Canadian scientists in a host of engineering fields, including photonics, robotics, artificial intelligence, communications technology and aerospace–for starters. They are a bellicose attack on academic independence from state censorship, and on science itself.

The very notion that there exists such a thing as “Canadian science” is frankly absurd. Scientific research is by its very nature the result of the cumulative efforts of millions of scientists around the world, past and present. But that fundamentally social nature of science, and therefore also its necessarily international character, given the globalized means of production, is coming into direct conflict with the campaign of imperialism to re-divide the world.

In addition to smears and fear mongering, the CSIS campaign is characterized by an utterly Orwellian level of doublespeak in which official statements mean their exact opposite. Manal Bahubeshi, vice-president of research and partnerships at NSERC, could state without shame to the Globe and Mail, “Our interest is really in supporting an open and collaborative research environment and supporting national and international partnerships,” while in fact working to end such partnerships.

While scare-mongering about the potential for the Chinese military to benefit from jointly conducted research, neither CSIS nor its stooges such as McCuaig-Johnston have anything to say about Canadian spying operations directed against China or against the Canadian working class. Similarly, they are silent on the extent to which Canada’s universities are being integrated into military research.

The Trudeau government banned Huawei and ZTE components from deployment in Canada’s 5G cell phone networks in 2022 on the pretext that “Beijing could use the company’s products for spying.” Yet the Canadian state reserves the right to listen to private phone calls and private emails, and vet the social media posts of the entire world. It is a member of the “Five Eyes” spying network, including the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which, as Edward Snowden demonstrated, spies essentially on the entire population of the planet—from leftist opponents of imperialism to Beijing and the heads of reputed allied government like Germany.

All of the bogus and cynical appeals to “national security” cover up the real, economic and profit interests of Canadian capitalism and imperialism in the business of developing new technologies in a period of capitalist crisis and war.

The state’s campaign to block collaboration with Chinese universities has developed over the past five years, closely following the implementation of similar measures in the United States. An early media supporter was the Globe and Mail. On May 26, 2018, an article entitled “How Canadian money and research are helping China become a global superpower” pointed to how the Canadian state is intervening to try to cut Chinese players out of rapidly growing high-tech economic sectors and thereby strengthening the hands of their North American competitors. Jim Hinton, a Waterloo patent lawyer, stated that Canada is “…missing out on that middle piece–the commercialization of innovation. That’s where the money is. We need to retain at least some ownership of what we’re subsidizing so that we can grow technology companies that own IP behind the technology...”

In 2021, the federal government introduced a requirement for academics to undergo national security reviews if they were receiving funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. In February 2023, the government expanded this measure to all federal research funding bodies and pledged to stop all funding for projects involving academics with ties to Chinese military or state security institutions, which as defined by Ottawa includes many if not most Chinese research universities.

In January 2023, the Globe published two articles detailing the results of “research provided to the Globe and Mail by US Strategic Intelligence company Strider Technologies” into joint Chinese-Canadian scientific research projects that it alleged could benefit the Chinese military. The article effectively demanded an end to such research, again citing McCuaig-Johnston, who declared, “The People’s Liberation Army is not our friend and we should not be partnering with them.”

Left out of the article was the fact that banning such collaborative research with China would reap fat profits for the financial backers of Strider Technologies, the provider of the “research” for the “article,” which was not run as a paid advertisement, though it should have been. Strider Technologies is backed financially by Koch Industries, through its “Disruptive Technologies” investment vehicle.  Additional financial backers include: Valor Equity Partners, led by a former Tesla director; and “One 9 dot ca,” a venture capital investment firm led by former Canadian Armed Forces JTF2 sniper Glenn Cowan, which declares, nauseatingly, that it is “funding and scaling business using precision military tactics.” Microsoft is also a backer. Koch Industries has invested more than $500 million in Mavenir, which is attempting to compete with Huawei in the development of 5G telecommunications platforms.

But the demonization of Chinese scientists and investors is not merely a matter of immediate business considerations. The anti-China campaign is a central component of Canadian imperialism’s preparations, alongside its US ally, to prepare for and wage war against Beijing. Its goals are to whip up an hysterical climate within the middle class to create a constituency for war, and legitimize vast spending increases on the military and intelligence services. These budgetary increases include a comprehensive modernization of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), a bilateral US-Canada continental “defence” network aimed at creating the basis for North America’s twin imperialist powers to wage a “winnable” nuclear war with China.

Confronting the Phantom Limbs of America’s Foreign Wars

Andrea Mazzarino

America’s War on Terror, launched in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has had a staggering impact on our world. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, paints as full a picture as possible of the toll of those “forever wars” both in human lives and in dollars. The wars, we estimate, have killed nearly one million people, including close to 400,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. Worse yet, they sickened or injured several times more than that — leading to illnesses and injuries that, we estimate, resulted in millions of non-battlefield deaths.

And don’t forget that those figures include dead and wounded Americans, too. Most of us, however, have little awareness of any of this. If you live outside the archipelago of American military bases that extends across this country and the planet — an estimated 750 of them outside the U.S. on every continent except Antarctica — it’s easy enough not to meet stressed-out military service members and their families. It’s easy enough, in fact, not to grasp just how America’s wars of this century rippled out to touch military communities.

In recent times, those bases have become ever more difficult for the public to enter and often aren’t close to the cities where so many of us live. All of this means that, if you’re a civilian, the odds are you haven’t met the grieving spouses of the soldiers who never came home or the shaken children of the ones who did, forever changed, sometimes with amputated limbs or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I’m thinking of the ones with those far-off gazes and the pain they have to deal with in their heads, their limbs, their backs.

Personally, I find it overwhelmingly hard to write about such human-shaped holes in our disturbed world. That’s probably why the Costs of War Project has a 35-person (and counting) team of journalists, physicians, social scientists, and other experts to portion out the research and the pain that goes with it as they deal with the fact that the monumental death and injury counts they’ve produced are likely to be underestimates.

As I write this, my chest tightens and my breath gets short, reminding me that some realities are impossible to contemplate without a physical reaction. And I begin to understand why so many Americans, including those not in the military — an estimated 50 million in fact! — experience chronic pain. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is writing a stunning series of pieces reporting on what many in the public-health world term “diseases of despair” like depression, suicidality, and addiction. A significant portion of those Americans don’t have injuries that are detectable via X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, or the like. Often, pain is linked with major depression, other symptoms of PTSD, or anxiety. Something is happening in the minds of Americans that’s not easily traceable in the body because its causes may lie in our wider world.

The Costs of War on the Homefront

Know one thing: in the U.S., so many of us do feel the painful results of our disastrous distant wars of this century, whether we know it or not. For instance, ever more Americans attend crumbling, understaffed schools, drive on roads in disrepair, and go to hospitals and health clinics (not just Veterans Administration ones with their seemingly endless waiting lists!) that don’t have enough doctors and mental-health therapists to meet our needs. Arguably, a major culprit is the war on terror. To take just one example, we could have fully staffed and equipped our whole healthcare system and made it significantly more pandemic resilient had we spent just a fraction of the $8 trillion or more this country put out for our foreign wars.

And the sting of war on our society doesn’t end with decrepit infrastructure, but extends to civil liberties and human rights. For example, our police are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry and other equipment provided by an overfed Pentagon and in this century have grown more aggressive towards unarmed people here at home.

And believe me, pain from American war-making is felt elsewhere, too, often all too directly in the dozens of countries around the world where the U.S. arms and trains militaries, continues to fight counterinsurgency wars, and runs prisons and intelligence operations. There are the air strikes and shootings, the father or brother who can no longer be the breadwinner because he was collateral damage in a drone strike, the millions of displaced and malnourished people — many of them mothers with children — in countries where Washington has supported authoritarian regimes in questionable counterinsurgency wars.

Pain That Is Difficult to Trace

Given global events since those 9/11 attacks, it shouldn’t be surprising that pain is so frequently experienced by people in our military communities. Somewhere between 31% and 44% of active-duty American soldiers report chronic pain of some sort. That’s significantly higher than in the general population. And no surprise in this either: veterans are about 40% more likely to report chronic pain than non-veterans.

Chronic pain is, in fact, part of a category of neurological conditions that ranks as the fifth most common source of disability for service members treated at on-installation clinics and hospitals. Worse yet, military pain-related diagnoses have been growing. Back pain, neck pain, knee pain, migraines, and chest pain are becoming the norm.

As a military spouse and a therapist who has treated many soldiers and veterans, I’ve all too often observed how such pain, while sometimes untraceable to a visible source, is all too real — real enough, in fact, to immobilize some soldiers, or even keep them from successfully stringing together sentences. (And while I’ve seldom found that commonly recommended medication treatments truly alleviate such pain in a sustainable way, I have watched it subside over time thanks to the sorts of things that also boost mental health — talk therapy, exercise, and deepening friendships.)

Of course, military communities aren’t the only places where such pain is commonplace. It’s also experienced all too often by poor Americans without college degrees, especially women and people of color — in other words, the most vulnerable slices of our American pie.

The portraits in Kristof’s pieces reveal some surprising findings about pain. First, the amount of pain you experience depends not just on the physical injury that may show up on an X-ray or CT scan or, in the case of soldiers, the wound you got, but on what you think and feel. Two-thirds of people with depression have unexplained chronic pain, for example. Doctors have even discovered that some people reporting knee pain have no discernable anatomical problem.

By the same token, the brain has a certain ability to heal or ameliorate pain. In some cases, through the use of “mirror therapy,” people have been able to ease pain from an amputated limb or “phantom limb” by looking repeatedly at the intact one and somehow creating the impression that they’re okay.

Some people, military or not, with chronic depression, anxiety, or PTSD symptoms like exaggerated startle reflexes or sleep problems experience greater sensitivity to pain if they get physically injured again. Their brains, it turns out, have been trained by trauma to believe something’s wrong with their bodies.

Common diagnoses that have seeped into household parlance tend to reinforce this notion for many. Medical categories like fibromyalgia and irritable bowel symptom make pain sound as though it’s related to something tangible, except that all too often, it’s “just” pain.

It’s hardly a surprise anymore that the go-to treatment for pain in America is opioids, and look where that’s left us — with an epidemic of addiction and deaths to the tune of tens of thousands of lives lost yearly. Somehow, that approach to dealing with pain brings me back to the way the U.S. fought “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks — with our own brand of terror (war!) globally and, indeed, it not only proved all too addictive but so much more costly to us and so many others on this planet than the original blow.

The Phantom Limb of American Society

If this comparison seems kind of out there to you, that’s my point. The problems experienced by Americans in pain are often all too hard to pin down, because at least in part they derive from survival guilt at having watched fellow soldiers getting blown to pieces by improvised explosive devices, or your parents dying from Covid because their jobs as janitors didn’t allow them to quarantine, or intense loneliness in a pandemic that made high school a virtual solo performance for all too many students. And get this: you don’t even need to go through one of those nightmarish scenarios personally to be in pain. Just hearing about economic insecurity in our world can exacerbate whatever aches you have.

This makes me wonder what it was like for so many to watch the recent coverage of Congress reaching the precipice over whether to raise the debt ceiling so that the government could pay its bills. How did it affect already struggling people to contemplate imminent economic catastrophe in the form of potentially soaring interest rates, inflation, job loss, and potential cutoffs in social services like healthcare? As a therapist who relies heavily on state-funded health insurance for my income and whose spouse is a soon-to-be veteran, I can’t help but scoff at congressional representatives who claim to be supporting our military by insisting on raising already astronomic Pentagon funding yet higher, while trying to gut the very systems that would let even a family as privileged as mine make ends meet once a soldier finishes his or her service.

Now look a little farther out if you want to be anxious. Most Americans don’t realize that our forever wars have been funded almost entirely by borrowing. A fundamental reason why we have to talk about a debt ceiling and continue to borrow ever more money to pay bills like those due for Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps is war. One key reason why we need to worry at all about making college graduates start paying their exorbitant loans back again is… yes, our debts from war-making. Notice a theme here?

Of course, war means that the remedies for pain that have proven to be most effective in the long run are not as available to those who experience the most pain. Exercise, certain types of talk therapy, and community are key and yet can be all too sparsely available to those working multiple jobs and struggling to pay their bills, not to mention those being shipped from base to base amid the grinding pace of military life.

In the meantime, military families and veterans are left to pay the costs of war directly via just about every kind of stress and distress imaginable. I remember someone I knew at one military post. A person of color and a veteran of the Vietnam war, he’d often be outside his house in the early mornings and evenings, smoking weed in order to alleviate leg pain that was untraceable to any particular injury. What he did talk about frequently were his painful memories of shooting at rural, dark-skinned villagers in Vietnam who resembled his own farmworker family in the U.S. when he was growing up. Trauma and pain were his frequent travel companions and yet the source of his pain remained unidentifiable in his small, fit body.

As then-President Donald Trump had banned or suspended the entry of people from eight different majority Muslim nations (as well as other refugees) to this country, I knew life wasn’t easy for him. He was, after all, often mistaken for a Muslim, called racial slurs, and told by passersby to go back where he came from. And even so many years later, that veteran and all too many soldiers like him may still not find a healthy part of our country to look at in order to convince themselves that life indeed will be okay.

Yes, there are all too many sick parts of our land, including a shaky social safety net, the hate and violence that continue to spread, and the long lines to get anywhere near a doctor or therapist. Contemplating all of this can be like gazing at a phantom limb that still smarts, even as so many of the original injuries — from 9/11 to our disastrous military response to it — seem all too forgettable to so many of us. Sad to say, but it’s vital that we remember the costs of war not only for ourselves but for those millions of people out there who experienced the — in every sense — wounds we inflicted in the name of an injured America in our nightmarish war on terror. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if we do it again.

How Colonialism Shaped Plant Collections Around the World

Daniel Park

Photograph Source: Raul654 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Some of the world’s most popular museums are natural history collections: Think of dinosaur fossils, gemstones and preserved animals. Herbaria – collections of pressed, dried plant specimens – are a less-known but important type of natural history collection. There are some 400 million botanical specimens stored across over 3,500 herbaria around the world, but most are not widely publicized and rarely host public exhibits.

I study biodiversity and global change, and these collections have fueled my work. My collaborators and I have used herbarium collections to study how flowering times respond to changes in climate, how dispersal traits and environmental preferences affect the likelihood that plants will become invasive, and how fires affect tropical biodiversity.

I have had easy access to specimens from every corner of the world, but most researchers are not as lucky. This is partly because herbaria as we know them today are largely a European creation. And like other natural history collections, many of them grew as imperial powers expanded their colonial empires and amassed all kinds of resources from their colonies. Today, over 60% of herbaria and 70% of specimens are located in developed countries with colonial histories.

My colleagues and I wanted to understand how many herbarium specimens are not where the plants originated and are housed in former colonizing countries instead. Our international team of researchers from herbaria on every continent analyzed over 85 million plant specimen records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the largest online repository of biodiversity data, and also surveyed physical herbarium collections across the world.

We found that many former colonial powers have more plant diversity in their herbarium cabinets than they do in nature. Our data suggest that this is not the case, however, for former colonies, whose herbaria often house fewer plant species in their collections than are found naturally in the region. This disparity can limit former colonies’ capacity for botanical research.

A persistent colonial legacy

Herbaria are centers of botanical discovery and research, and are critical for understanding the diversity of plants and fungi around the world. The specimens they hold were originally collected to document and classify species. Today scientists use them for additional purposes, such as reconstructing plant evolutionary history, tracking pollution trends and identifying potential new drugs.

Researchers at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh explain how the collection supports biodiversity research and conservation projects around the world.

Botany was the science par excellence of colonial empires. Botanists moved numerous living and preserved plant specimens to institutions in colonizing nations which sought to exploit their colonies’ biological resources.

For instance, physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, often credited as the inventor of chocolate milk, acquired numerous plant specimens from overseas colonies via his connections with the slave trade. His collections formed the basis of Britain’s Natural History Museum. Well-known scientists, including Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus and their disciples, relocated large numbers of plants from across the globe to European museums and collections.

Our analyses of online specimen records suggest that botanical collection trends over the past four centuries have been shaped by colonialism. Even though overt colonialism ended after World War II, specimens have largely continued to move from Africa, Asia and South America to institutions in Europe and North America, with a few exceptions.

Similarly, when we examined physical herbarium collections, we found that those in developed nations in the Global North that were former colonizers housed a higher proportion of internationally collected specimens on average. Herbaria in the U.S. and several European nations house specimens of over twice the number of species that naturally occur in these nations.

In nature, plant diversity is typically greatest in regions near the equator and decreases northward and southward toward the poles. Our data suggest that centuries of colonialism had the opposite effect: Plant specimens were moved away from countries with high natural plant diversity to collections in countries where fewer plant species occur naturally.

Ruellia tubiflora, a tropical plant collected from Venezuela in 2001, preserved in the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Field Museum, CC BY-ND

The digital divide

As herbaria digitize their specimens and share data online, they are becoming somewhat more decentralized and democratic. Open-access data repositories, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, allow researchers from around the world to query aggregated specimen metadata and images over the internet. This reduces the need to ship fragile specimens over long distances, and to take extensive and costly research trips.

But digitization requires large investments in equipment and personnel, which small institutions and developing countries often can’t afford. Stable internet connections are not always widely available in developing countries either. Further, our survey of herbaria indicates that digitization still has a long way to go.

We estimated that in general, fewer than 30% of physical collections have information online that at least describes when and where specimens were collected, and fewer than 10% have digital images available online. Most herbaria that responded to our inquiries were located in developed countries, so these figures probably overestimate the state of specimen digitization. The disparity in access to herbarium collections exists in the digital realm as well.

Making global plant collections more inclusive

Many natural history museums and other cultural institutions are working now to address their colonial legacies. This often includes acknowledging items in their collections that were acquired unethically or illegally, and sometimes returning them to their original sources. But botanical collections have received less attention, maybe because few of them offer public displays.

Our study shows that there is a large disparity between where plant diversity naturally exists and where it is artificially housed and cataloged. As a result, many countries rely on botanical knowledge and resources housed outside of their own borders.

My colleagues and I believe that herbaria should be part of the ongoing movement to decolonize cultural institutions, natural history museums and related scientific practices. Key steps would include:

– Openly acknowledging the colonial legacy of herbarium collections, and communicating their history;

– Improving access to the vast information held in herbaria worldwide; and

– Building capacity in previously colonized countries by sharing knowledge and resources for contributing to research. These could include, for instance, supporting the local collection and study of plant diversity by providing training for local scientists.

In our view, the science that comes from botanical collections is globally relevant, so access to these resources should be within reach of the global community. Herbarium collections are critical to modern understanding of the world’s plants, and they have played key roles in numerous scientific discoveries and advances. Imagine how much more would be possible if these invaluable resources were available to all.