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Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.
nthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to create a reality that the rest of us must live in. Comstock was an anti-vice crusader who worried about many of the things that Americans of a similar moral and religious cast worried about in the late nineteenth century: the rise of the so-called sporting press, which specialized in randy gossip and user guides to local brothels; the phenomenon of young men and women set loose in big cities, living, unsupervised, in cheap rooming houses; the enervating effects of masturbation; the ravages of venereal disease; the easy availability of contraceptives, such as condoms and pessaries, and of abortifacients, dispensed by druggists or administered by midwives. But Comstock railed against all these things more passionately than most of his contemporaries did, and far more effectively.
Nassau Street, at the lower tip of Manhattan, was a particular horror to him—a groaning board of Boschian temptations. As Amy Sohn details in her fascinating book “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), when Comstock arrived in New York as a young man, just after the Civil War, he was appalled to see an open market in sex toys and contraceptive devices (both often hawked as “rubber goods”), along with smutty playing cards, books, and stereoscopic images. At the wholesale notions establishment where he held a job, Comstock lamented that the young men he worked with were “falling like autumn leaves about me from the terrible scourges of vile books and pictures.”
Comstock, who was born in 1844, had been raised on a hundred-and-sixty-acre farm in New Canaan, Connecticut, with a view of the Long Island Sound. At home, where his mother, a direct descendant of the first Puritans in New England, read her children Bible stories, he seems to have been a model of good deportment. At school, his better angels appear to have left him exposed—he was often whipped for misbehavior, and sometimes the schoolmasters, with a diabolical flair for sowing gender discord, made him sit with the girls and wear a sunbonnet. He did not attend university, but over time he developed a vigorous rhetorical style. “One cannot get away from a book that has once been read,” he observed. He brought his moral ardor with him when he served a mostly peaceful stint with the Union Army in Florida, fighting what seems to have been a losing battle with the urge to masturbate and incurring the ill will of his fellow-soldiers by pouring out his whiskey rations before anyone else could get at them. For Comstock, the stakes were, always, almost unbearably high. “Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul,” he wrote.
In 1872, the Y.M.C.A., then an organization aimed at keeping young men in big cities whistle-clean in thought and deed, worked with Comstock to form a Committee for the Suppression of Vice. He was given his dream job, carrying out the committee’s investigations, which involved, among other tactics, sending decoy letters ostensibly from people in search of birth-control information or pictures of naked ladies. The following year, he travelled to Washington, D.C., where he successfully lobbied for the passage of a law that made it a crime (punishable in some cases with up to five years of hard labor) to publish, possess, or distribute materials “of an immoral nature” or to mail anything that was “obscene, lewd, or lascivious.” It was the first federal law governing obscenity; as the legal scholar Geoffrey R. Stone notes in his book “Sex and the Constitution,” prior to the religious-revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening, “government efforts to censor speech were directed at religious heresy and seditious libel, rather than sexual expression.” For most of the nineteenth century, abortion was legal under common law and generally acceptable to the public before the stage of quickening—when fetal movement can be felt by the mother—and some of those who provided it were not particularly discreet. (The society abortionist Madame Restell lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and took carriage rides in Central Park draped in ermine robes.) And the declining family size in the course of the nineteenth century—from an average of seven children to half that—suggests that the use of birth-control methods became common; the advertising of contraceptive devices, their purpose often coyly disguised, certainly was.
The Comstock Act, as it came to be known, did not define obscenity, and that omission would give rise to a long chain of court cases and to a subjective befuddlement that lasts to this day. (Each of us may think that, like the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it, but not everyone sees what we see.) Still, the bill did explicitly tie contraception and abortion to obscenity, and enable the prosecution of people who were sharing what was essentially medical information about sexuality and reproduction. This, too, was an innovation: like so many subsequent attempts to restrict birth control and abortion over the years, the Comstock law made them less available to the poor, surrounded them with shame, and stymied research into safer and more reliable methods, without coming close to stamping them out. “Comstockery” became a synonym for the sort of American prudishness that got works of literature banned in Boston. But books could acquire a certain cachet from their placement in the censor’s crosshairs. The more profound damage was to ordinary people—women, in particular—for whom the new law rendered life objectively harder.
Part of what made Comstock more successful than other anti-vice crusaders was his early understanding of the mail as a social medium. In that respect, he was like one of those Silicon Valley visionaries who understood the potential of the Internet long before most people did. The postal service is “the great thoroughfare of communication leading up into all of our homes, schools, and colleges,” Comstock said. “It is the most powerful agent, to assist this nefarious business, because it goes everywhere and is secret.” When he heard that President Ulysses S. Grant had signed the obscenity bill into law, Comstock wrote in his diary, “Oh how can I express the joy of my Soul or speak the mercy of God!” Soon afterward, he got himself appointed as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, empowered to read and seize mail, and to make arrests.
During the next dozen years, almost half the state legislatures passed their own “little Comstock laws,” which were sometimes stricter: fourteen states prohibited people from sharing information about birth control or abortion even in conversation. In rendering a verdict, the courts generally relied on a British legal precedent known as the Hicklin test: if a single line in a work was deemed obscene, the work was obscene. Wearing his law like a bespoke suit of armor, Comstock seized and destroyed literature by the ton, and drove brothels and gambling houses and peddlers of erotica out of business. (One angry pornographer slashed Comstock’s cheek, leaving him with a livid scar under his muttonchops.) He also harassed and arrested health practitioners who offered abortions or birth control and radicals who promoted free love and safe sex.
Although the title “The Man Who Hated Women” refers to Comstock, Sohn’s book is not a biography, and that’s all to the good; there are solid, recent biographies of Comstock out there already. Sohn, a novelist—this is her first nonfiction book—focusses instead on some of the women who resisted Comstock and his law, offering an alternative history of feminism and of the free-speech movement in America. There were certainly men who fought against Comstockery—outspoken journalists and a host of lawyers who defended banned works of literature and sex education against bluenosed censors. But Sohn points out that the women who did so were especially brave, since many of them were persecuted and prosecuted under the law at a time when they did not have the vote and could not serve on juries—and when a lady who spoke openly about sex might be assumed to have gone mad and be treated accordingly.
A few of Comstock’s targets who feature in Sohn’s book are well known—Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman—and many readers will know, too, about Madame Restell and the flamboyant suffragists, newspaper publishers, and stockbrokers Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, Woodhull’s sister. But the others are likely to be much less familiar—they are the deep cuts, sexual freethinkers left aside by most social histories of the era. “Despite their extraordinary contributions to civil liberties,” Sohn notes, most of these “sex radicals have been written out of feminist history (they were too sexual); sex history (they were not doctors); and progressive history (they were women).” These are good explanations, but there is another one: their essential weirdness. They’re like the outsider artists of activism, creating their own unschooled, florid, and enraptured works of protest. Reading Sohn, I grew quite fond of them.
Angela Heywood, for instance, was a working-class woman from rural New Hampshire who, with her husband, Ezra, became a public advocate for “free love,” which they defined as “the regulation of the affections according to conscience, taste, and judgment of the individual, in place of their control by law.” The Heywoods sound at times like a contemporary couple who might have met at an Occupy demonstration and settled down in Brooklyn doing something artisanal. Before they married, Ezra had left his graduate studies at Brown to become a travelling antislavery lecturer. Angela supported the abolitionist movement as well, and held a series of odd jobs. The Heywoods, who put down stakes in central Massachusetts, were happily monogamous, but believed that the institution of marriage should be reimagined on more egalitarian terms. They denounced debt and wanted to disband corporations. They also published frank guides to conjugal relations and a journal, which brought them to the attention of Comstock, while operating a tasteful, rustic inn where one of their young sons, Hermes, ran around in girls’ clothes.
At the same time, the Heywoods were steeped in ideas that are harder to identify with today—including nineteenth-century spiritualism and hereditarianism. Angela believed that she could commune with the beyond, and thus enjoyed a prophetic authority to speak that was seldom granted to Victorian women. (A friend said, “She has visions, hears voices and dreams, and she is at times a whirlwind of words.”) They were not fans of artificial contraception—they counselled that men should practice continence instead—and thought that unwanted children were more likely to suffer from physical defects than wanted ones were. They disapproved of abortion, too, though they argued that men should not be able to dictate the laws that governed women’s bodies.
For all that, the Heywoods ended up inspiring mainstream defenses of free expression that, as Sohn shows, had a lasting impact. Comstock’s tireless harassment of the couple, along with the arrests and trials of Ezra Heywood, helped prompt the formation of an organization called the National Defense Association, which aimed to “roll back the wave of intolerance, bigotry and ignorance” and defend “cherished liberties.” In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, Angela wrote tributes to graphic language and her right to use it in public, anticipating later iterations of such advocacy, from George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” to “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Regretting that she herself hadn’t been tried and sentenced instead of her husband, she wrote, “The he was imprisoned in part to shut up the she tongue-pen-wise. But I am still at it; penis, womb, vagina, semen are classic terms, well-revered in usage.” She praised the “aptness, euphony, and serviceable persistence” of “such graceful terms as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking, throbbing, kissing and kin words.” The Heywoods also helped articulate grander principles of free expression and the right to privacy. “If government cannot justly determine what ticket we shall vote, what church we shall attend, or what books we should read,” Ezra wrote, “by what authority does it watch at key-holes and burst open bed-chamber doors to drag lovers from sacred seclusion?”
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, the National Defense Association and a group called the Free Speech League held enormous rallies and fervent fund-raising dinners not only for the Heywoods but for still trippier and more marginal sex radicals. The National Defense Association came to the aid, for example, of Sara Chase, a forty-one-year-old homeopathic physician and single mother, whom Comstock arrested on obscenity charges in 1878. Chase gave afternoon lectures on sexuality at an outfit called the New York Physiological Society, on West Thirty-third Street, which also featured music, conversation, and recitations. Comstock nabbed her, Sohn tells us, for selling a vaginal syringe that could be used to inject spermicide after intercourse, and for, in his words, “all the filthy detail” she “used in describing this article and its use.” Chase had a sense of humor. She filed a lawsuit against Comstock for false arrest—“a startling act of defiance,” as Sohn says—while continuing to market the offending item, now under the moniker “the Comstock syringe.” An ad in her health journal read “We trust that the sudden popularity brought to this valuable syringe by the benevolent agency of the enterprising Mr. Comstock, will prove to suffering womankind the most beneficent of his illustrious life.”
Ida Craddock was a lecturer and writer on the “divine science” of sex who practiced telepathy and enjoyed frequent, transcendent lovemaking sessions with the ghost of a man she had once known. But Sohn gives Craddock her due as a brave campaigner who inveighed against marital rape, urged husbands to engage in foreplay with their wives and encouraged both partners to get naked during sex, and shared fairly reliable anatomical knowledge. She was also pragmatic enough to keep the ghost on the down low when necessary. She told her lawyer, the young Clarence Darrow, that, if asked about her spirit lover, she would simply say that her husband was dead. Any further inquiries into her spectral sex life should be rejected as a violation of privacy.
Count me in for the time-travel experiment (or at least the HBO series or Atlas Obscura immersive evening) in which I get to see women in ringlets and crinolines and men in bowlers and spats listening to earnest lectures about the giving and getting of sexual pleasure. Taken together, these tales of the unexpected also offer a fresh angle on the history of American free-speech activism. Many of us think of it as beginning with the founding of the A.C.L.U., in 1920, and its defense of political radicals hounded under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not with dreamy, self-taught sexologists expounding on the delights of the body. The sex radicals and their champions are not entirely unknown. (A biography of Ida Craddock, “Heaven’s Bride,” came out in 2010.) Still, “The Man Who Hated Women” takes us down some hidden passageways leading to larger, more familiar rooms of the past.
We live in a world that Anthony Comstock would have walked through hellfire to prevent. After his death, in 1915, a series of landmark lawsuits, stretching into the nineteen-seventies, gradually eroded the reach of the Comstock statutes. They carved out more and more room for sexually explicit materials and for the distribution of birth control and information about it. The cultural changes wrought by second-wave feminism, gay liberation, the sexual revolution, and capitalism’s limitless capacity to sell people stuff that turns them on did the rest. These days, people are able to name and pursue their sexual desires and identities more freely and openly than ever before. Porn is as instantly available as any utility in the privacy of your home. Evangelical Christians who might be presumed to be Comstock’s heirs helped elect a President who boasted of grabbing women by the pussy. The Communications Decency Act, which sounds like something Comstock could have sponsored, can help Internet-service providers avoid responsibility for, among other noxious developments, the appearance on their platforms of revenge porn and sexualized hatred. For better and for worse, we all live on Nassau Street now.
Strangely, though, one of the phenomena that Comstock most wanted to quash remains vulnerable today. In the next Supreme Court term, the Justices will hear an abortion case that may overturn Roe v. Wade. Even access to birth control is still subject to restrictions; employers with religious objections can refuse to cover contraception in their health plans. The faith-based conviction that life begins at conception, and some notion of motherhood as women’s overarching purpose, continue to exercise influence over policy. As Brett Gary writes, in the forthcoming book “Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution,” “women’s reproductive autonomy” persists as “a perpetual source of political controversy and site of conservative political mobilization in part because the patriarchal dimensions of Comstockery remain steadfast in the culture.” On this, more than any other subject, the words of Ezra Heywood still sound radical: a woman’s “right to limit the number of children she will bear is unquestionable as her right to walk, eat, breathe or be still.”
Was Comstock a man who hated women? As Sohn acknowledges, he would not have said so. He would have said that he revered virtuous women—his devout Congregationalist mother, who died when he was ten, just after giving birth to her tenth child; his pious, docile wife; his daughter, whom he’d taken in as a baby, after rescuing her from the arms of her dead mother during a raid on a Chinatown tenement—and believed that his life’s work was to safeguard them. But the language he used to describe the other sort of women, the women he sought to arrest and imprison, was revealing. One anecdote that Sohn relates—she has a gift for summoning up such scenes—reminded me vividly of modern-day Internet trolls. After Ida Craddock was arrested, in 1902, Comstock accompanied her on an elevated train above the streets of New York to the police station: “As she sat quietly in her corner of the seat, he showered her with what she called ‘opprobrious epithets’ and loudly told the other passengers that she wrote filthy books.” Politely, she pleaded with him to stop, saying that a “public conveyance was not a place for the discussion of such subjects.” After her trial, hours before she was to appear in court for sentencing, Craddock killed herself. Looking back on the case a year later, Comstock compared her to a rabid dog that had to be put down: “To those who realize the effect of a mad dog’s bite, it is imperative that mad dogs of all sizes should be killed before the children are bitten.” Craddock addressed a heartbreaking suicide note to her mother, who was embarrassed by her and whose understanding she was perpetually seeking. “The real Ida, your own daughter, loves you and waits for you to come soon over to join her in the beautiful, blessed world beyond the grave, where Anthony Comstocks and corrupt judges and impure-minded people are not known,” she wrote. Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi during a news conference with other House Democrats to discuss H. R. 1, the For the People Act. (photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Democrats must quickly pass their landmark voting rights legislation if they want to prevent Republicans from gerrymandering their way to a hold on power for the next decade.
ou wouldn’t know it by watching Congress take long summer vacations and slowly mull infrastructure legislation, but Democrats are facing a fast-approaching deadline that could decide the party’s political fate for the next decade.
By August 16, the US Census Bureau is scheduled to release data gathered in the 2020 census to the states, enabling state governments to begin redrawing their legislative and congressional districts.
If Democrats want to have their best shot at preventing Republicans from redrawing red states’ congressional districts in a way that could lock in a GOP House majority for a decade, they need to tweak and pass the For the People Act, their signature voting rights and democracy reform legislation, before that date.
The For the People Act would implement a series of rules and procedures designed to curb partisan gerrymandering, the process of drawing legislative districts to benefit a political party. If the bill isn’t passed before August 16, Democrats could modify its language to ensure some parts of its anti-gerrymandering provisions could take effect retroactively — but not all of the legislation’s original redistricting reforms would be preserved this way. There’s also a risk that some Democrats may end up happy representing new, safely Democratic districts, and thus be less interested in passing reforms.
As of today, the bill has completely stalled. It failed in the Senate last month due to a Republican filibuster, and since a handful of conservative Democrats have steadfastly refused to eliminate or modify Senate filibuster rules requiring sixty votes to advance virtually all legislation, Republicans can continue to block the legislation indefinitely.
It’s not clear how or when Democrats are planning to pass the bill. In recent weeks, Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have instead focused on negotiations over infrastructure legislation, a key priority of the Biden White House.
Both legislative houses are currently scheduled to be on recess for much of August. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, recently indicated he could keep senators in Washington for part of the August recess period — but specifically to work on passing infrastructure legislation.
“The Next Great Civil Rights Bill”
The For the People Act was supposed to be the Democratic Party’s response to ongoing efforts by Republicans to restrict voting rights across the country. Supporters describe it as a democracy infrastructure bill or, as Elizabeth Hira, a policy counselor with the Brennan Center for Justice, calls it, “the next great civil rights bill.”
“Not only is it beating back voter suppression, the likes of which we’ve been fighting since before 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, it actually does the forward-looking work to ask the question about what structural changes would need to exist in our democracy to actually create an inclusive democracy,” Hira says.
To that end, the legislation would establish redistricting rules that include enhanced protections against minority voter dilution, mandate states use independent federal commissions to oversee their redistricting, and require transparency and public participation in the redrawing process.
For Democrats, the need to pass such a package could not be more urgent. Every ten years, following the release of updated demographic data from the US Census Bureau, states redraw congressional and legislative districts. Republicans, who dominated state legislative elections last year, have proven to be willing to use the redistricting process to their extreme advantage.
And yet Democrats remain paralyzed on the issue — a problem stemming from the top.
On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden announced that “a first priority of a Biden Administration will be to lead on a comprehensive set of reforms like those reflected in the For the People Act (H. R. 1) to end special interest control of Washington and protect the voice and vote of every American.”
As president, Biden followed this rhetoric with gestures signaling a desire to overhaul American democracy to be fairer and more inclusive. After the House passed its version of the For the People Act in March, he released a statement that he was looking forward to signing the bill into law. Days later, Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to expand ballot access.
The White House and Democrats even mobilized top brass to back the legislation. Vice President Kamala Harris has led the administration’s voting rights efforts, while former president Barack Obama and ex–attorney general Eric Holder held a teleconference last month urging Congress to compromise in order to get an iteration of the For the People Act passed.
Despite these gestures, however, the For the People Act remains stymied. On June 22, a vote to debate the bill failed in the Senate — much to the chagrin of activists who, for months, have been calling on Senate Democrats and the Biden administration to embrace eliminating the filibuster.
Running Out of Time
Time is running out to pass the For the People Act, says Michael Li, the redistricting and voting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. He says August 16, or shortly thereafter, is the deadline for Democrats to pass a bill containing “the most robust [redistricting] reforms possible.”
“You could pass some things after August 16. The partisan gerrymandering ban, for example, could be retroactive,” he says. “But other things like the procedural requirements (the transparency and public participation requirements) could not be implemented.”
But making parts of the bill retroactive could leave it less politically viable, says Li because, as he notes, “As a practical matter, the politics of passage. . . potentially become more complicated once [redistricting] maps are passed.” That’s because members of the House, including Democrats, could in some cases end up pleased with their newly redrawn districts, and therefore less interested in redoing them by passing the legislation.
Because Democrats have waited so long to pass the For the People Act, even if lawmakers find a way to pass the bill before the August 16 deadline, they will now have to rewrite some of its language regarding nonpartisan redistricting if they want it to apply to this cycle.
“It is too late to create federal commissions to draw maps, so even though that is still technically in the bill, it won’t be possible and will need to come out of any final bill,” says Li. “But there is time to implement national map-drawing rules, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering.”
A “Drunken Bacchanalia of Gerrymandering”
The uncertainty about whether Democrats will actually pass the For the People Act and whether it would even make a difference in the redistricting process is concerning for advocates who say there is a unique danger in Democrats not using their current control of the government to do away with gerrymandering once and for all.
“I would have come out of the gates with a partisan gerrymandering bill,” says author David Daley.
Few would know better than Daley. His 2016 book, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, recounts how the GOP weaponized the redistricting process after the 2010 midterms in defiance of unfavorable demographic trends.
The plan was called REDMAP and it was simple: pour money into state races to control the process and use it to disempower the opposition. The results were devastating for Democrats.
Democrats did not regain control of the House of Representatives until the 2018 midterms, despite winning a majority of votes in congressional races in 2012, and have faced uphill battles at the state level ever since.
A 2017 study from the Brennan Center described the impact: “In the 26 states that account for 85 percent of congressional districts, Republicans derive a net benefit of at least 16-17 congressional seats in the current Congress from partisan bias — significantly more than previously thought.”
Now, Daley predicts that unless legislation is passed to stop it, this redistricting cycle will be a “drunken bacchanalia of gerrymandering,” making what came before seem tame by comparison.
Law professor Lawrence Lessig shares Daley’s concerns. Speaking to the Daily Poster, Lessig predicts that “the gerrymandering we saw in 2010 is going to be gerrymandering on steroids in 2020.” Lessig notes that in 2010, “people were still worried that the Supreme Court was going to come in and strike down extreme partisan gerrymandering, but now the court said, ‘We’re not going to do anything.’”
The Supreme Court decision Lessig was referring to came down in June 2019 in the case of Rucho v. Common Cause. The court found that partisan gerrymandering was a political issue, and therefore not reviewable by federal courts.
The Rucho decision is not the only one clearing the path for extreme gerrymandering. Six years earlier, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that laid out the metrics used to determine which jurisdictions needed to obtain federal preclearance before changing their voting laws. The court found that the old standard — which applied to places with a history of racial discrimination — was no longer adequate and left it to Congress to find a new, workable formula. But lawmakers never came up with a substitute.
At the time, Greg Abbott, then Texas attorney general, lauded the decision, noting: “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may. . . take effect without approval from the federal government.”
The warnings of Daley and Lessig are likely prophetic. Democrats took a drubbing in down-ballot elections in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to retake state legislatures.
Making matters worse for the party is its unilateral disarmament in the redistricting wars. In the last decade, several Democratic states, including New York, Colorado, and California, have implemented nonpartisan redistricting measures since the last census, while big red states have not. Most of the thirty-one states in which state legislatures draw the districts as a partisan matter are controlled by the GOP.
All Talk and No Action
Since the failure of the For the People Act in the Senate, Biden has continued to speak about the need for voting rights reform.
Last week, the president pointed out that seventeen states have enacted “28 new laws to make it harder for American to vote, not to mention nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of state legislature are trying to pass.” He labeled the GOP efforts “the 21st century Jim Crow assault.”
“It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history,” Biden said.
Despite the tough talk, Biden stopped short of calling for Senate filibuster reforms that might allow Democrats to actually do anything about the threat.
Some Democrats, like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-SC, have now started pushing to exempt voting rights legislation and other constitutional measures from the filibuster.
It’s a weak proposal, especially since it would mean the filibuster would continue to block major Democratic priorities like overhauling climate policy, reforming labor laws, and increasing the federal minimum wage.
With less than a month left before the census data is set to be released to the states, these efforts and all of the talk about preserving voting rights may be too little, too late. Unless Democrats manage to spring into action, quickly and decisively, Biden may never have full control of Congress again.
French president Emmanuel Macron, seen in Paris in 2015 when he was a cabinet minister, is among 14 current and former world leaders whose phone numbers appeared on a list that included numbers selected for surveillance by NSO Group clients, records show. (photo: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images)
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Private Spyware After Israeli NSO Group Pegasus Revelations
Among 50,000 phone numbers, the Pegasus Project found those of hundreds of public officials
And in the 21st century, most of them carry smartphones.
Such is the underlying logic for some of the most tantalizing discoveries for an international investigation that in recent months scrutinized a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that included — according to forensics analyses of dozens of iPhones — at least some people targeted by Pegasus spyware licensed to governments worldwide.
The list contained the numbers of politicians and government officials by the hundreds. But what of heads of state and governments, arguably the most coveted of targets?
Fourteen. Or more specifically: three presidents, 10 prime ministers and a king.
None of them offered their iPhones or Android devices to The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations that scrutinized the list of phone numbers. That means the forensic testing that might have revealed infection by NSO’s signature spyware, Pegasus, was not possible. Nor was it possible to determine whether any NSO client attempted to deliver Pegasus to the phones of these country leaders — much less whether any succeeded in turning these highly personal devices into pocket spies capable of tracking a national leader’s nearly every movement, communication and personal relationship.
Read key takeaways from the Pegasus Project
But here’s who’s on the list: Three sitting presidents, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. Three current prime ministers, Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani.
Seven former prime ministers, who according to time stamps on the list were placed there while they were still in office, including Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, Uganda’s Ruhakana Rugunda and Belgium’s Charles Michel.
And one king: Morocco’s Mohammed VI.
The Post and its partner news organizations in 10 countries confirmed the ownership of these numbers and others cited in this article through public records, journalists’ contact books and queries to government officials or other close associates of the potential targets — though in some cases it was not possible to determine whether the phone numbers were active ones or former ones. The Post confirmed five of the numbers itself. The rest were confirmed by its partners.
Calls to almost all of the phone numbers on Monday and Tuesday yielded canceled calls or changed numbers. A handful of people picked up the line. Others responded to text messages.
A French journalism nonprofit, Forbidden Stories, and the human rights group Amnesty International had access to the list of more than 50,000 numbers. They shared the list with The Post and the other news organizations.
The purpose of the list is unknown, and NSO disputes that it was a list of surveillance targets. “The data has many legitimate and entirely proper uses having nothing to do with surveillance or with NSO,” a Virginia attorney representing the company, Tom Clare, wrote to Forbidden Stories.
Post Reports: The spyware secretly hacking smartphones
But forensic examination by Amnesty’s Security Lab of 67 smartphones affiliated with numbers on the list found 37 that had either been successfully penetrated by Pegasus or showed signs of attempted penetration. The analyses by Amnesty also found that many of the phones showed signs of infection or attempted infection minutes or even seconds after time stamps that appeared for their numbers on the list.
NSO — just one of several major players in this market — says it has 60 government agency clients in 40 countries. In every case, the company says, the targets are supposed to be terrorists and criminals, such as pedophiles, drug lords and human traffickers. The company says it specifically prohibits targeting law-abiding citizens, including government officials carrying out their ordinary business.
NSO chief executive Shalev Hulio said his company has policies to guard against abuse in a phone interview with The Post on Sunday, after an initial set of stories about the company appeared in news reports worldwide, under the heading of the Pegasus Project.
“Every allegation about misuse of the system is concerning me. It violates the trust that we give customers,” Hulio said. “I believe that we need to check every allegation. And if we check every allegation, we might find that some of it is true. And if we find that it is true, we will take strong action.”
However common spying on national leaders may be in general, public revelations about it often spark controversy. When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the United States had tapped into a phone used by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, it caused months of uproar in that country and strained otherwise close relations between the two nations.
In response to detailed questions from the investigative consortium, NSO said it monitors how its spyware is used and cancels access to the system for any client that misuses it. But it also says its clients, not the company itself, are responsible for its use.
“NSO Group will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations,” the statement said. “This includes shutting down of a customers’ system, something NSO has proven its ability and willingness to do, due to confirmed misuse, done it multiple times in the past, and will not hesitate to do again if a situation warrants.”
In a separate letter Tuesday, it also said “we can confirm that at least three names in your inquiry Emmanuel Macron, King Mohammed VI, and [World Health Organization Director General] Tedros Ghebreyesus — are not, and never have been, targets or selected as targets of NSO Group customers.”
“The leaked list of 50,000 numbers is not a list of numbers selected for surveillance using Pegasus,” a lawyer for NSO, Thomas Clare, wrote to a Pegasus Project partner on Tuesday. “It is a list of numbers that anyone can search on an open-source system for reasons other than conducting surveillance using Pegasus. The fact that a number appears on that list is in no way indicative of whether that number was selected for surveillance using Pegasus.”
A person familiar with NSO operations who has spoken earlier on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters told The Post that among clients the company had suspended in recent years were agencies in Mexico. The person declined to detail which agencies had been suspended.
But reports of Pegasus abuse have been rampant in Mexico, and more than 15,000 Mexican phone numbers are on the list, including that of former president Felipe Calderón. The investigation found he had been added to the list after his term ended in 2012.
Burundi’s prime minister, Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni, was added to the list in 2018, before he took office, the records show. So were the numbers of Kazakhstan’s future president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and its future prime minister, Askar Mamin.
Key figures in major international organizations were not exempt from inclusion on the list. The list contained numbers for several United Nations ambassadors and other diplomats. It also contained a phone number for a former staffer for the WHO’s Tedros.
Overall, the list contained phone numbers for more than 600 government officials and politicians from 34 countries. In addition to the countries where top leaders’ phone numbers appeared were numbers for officials in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bhutan, China, Congo, Egypt, Hungary, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mali, Mexico, Nepal, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Togo, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
According to NSO marketing materials and security researchers, Pegasus is designed to collect files, photos, call logs, location records, communications and other private data from smartphones, and can activate cameras and microphones as well for real-time surveillance at key moments. Often these attacks can happen without the targets getting any kind of alert or taking any action. Pegasus can just slip in — to both iPhones and Android devices — and take over smartphones in what the surveillance industry calls “zero-click” attacks.
Geographic clues
A review of the list showed that some of the leaders’ phones were entered more than once, as were phone numbers for their friends, relatives and aides. Phone numbers for associates of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador were added to the list during the run-up to the 2018 election, which he ultimately won, unseating the ruling party. Among those on the list were smartphones belonging to his wife, sons, aides, dozens of his political allies, and even his personal driver and cardiologist. There was no indication that López Obrador’s phone was on the list; aides say he used it sparingly.
Which NSO client might have added the numbers could not be learned definitively from the records. But the numbers for Calderón and the many associates of López Obrador were among a portion of the records from 2016 and 2017 dominated by Mexican targets. Also listed were dozens of sitting governors, federal lawmakers and other politicians.
“Now we are learning that they also spied on my wife, my sons, even my doctor, a cardiologist,” López Obrador told reporters on Tuesday. “Apart from the issue of this spying, imagine how much cost! How much money went for this spying?”
Numbers belonging to Michel, Macron and dozens of French officials appeared amid a group of more than 10,000 numbers dominated by Moroccan targets and those in neighboring Algeria, a Morocco rival. The numbers for Mohammed VI and the Tedros staffer also were found in that group. So was the number of Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister.
“We were aware of the threats and measures were taken to limit the risks,” Michel told a reporter for Belgium’s Le Soir, a partner in the Pegasus Project.
Prodi picked up at the phone number that was on the list on Tuesday, but he declined to comment.
Pakistan’s Khan appeared among a group dominated by numbers in India. Iraq’s Salih and Lebanon’s Hariri were grouped among numbers dominated by the United Arab Emirates and a separate grouping dominated by Saudi numbers.
South Africa’s Ramaphosa, Uganda’s Rugunda and Burundi’s Bunyoni were among a group dominated by Rwandan phone numbers.
Rwanda, Morocco and India have all issued official statements denying involvement in spying on journalists and politicians.
Rwanda’s minister of foreign affairs, Vincent Biruta, said his country “does not possess this technical capability in any form.” In a statement, Morocco expressed “great astonishment” at the publication of “erroneous allegations … that Morocco has infiltrated the telephones of several national and foreign public figures and officials of international organizations.” The statement added, “Morocco is a State governed by the rule of law, which guarantees the secrecy of personal communications by the force of the Constitution.”
In India, the home minister called suggestions it has spied on journalists and politicians the work of “disrupters,” which he defined as “global organizations which do not like India to progress.” In a separate statement, the government said, “The allegations regarding government surveillance on specific people has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever.”
Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates did not respond to requests for comment.
'Unjustifiable violation’
Macron’s phone number was added to the list as he was about to embark on a tour of Africa, with stops in Kenya and Ethiopia. Added about the same time were the phones of 14 French ministers and Belgium’s Michel.
“If the facts are true, they are clearly very serious,” the Elysée said in a statement. “All light will be shed on these press revelations.”
At the time, Morocco’s neighbor Algeria was in turmoil. Its longtime authoritarian ruler, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, had just announced he did not plan to run for reelection. Algeria fought a bloody war of independence from France in the 1950s, and many French citizens are of Algerian descent; the two countries retain strong ties and intelligence relationships.
African Union nations were also ratifying a major free-trade agreement at the time. Trade and other international negotiations historically have been major targets for government intelligence-gathering as all sides seek insight into the thinking of their negotiating partners.
Senior French government officials typically have access to secure devices for official communications, but French political insiders say some business also gets transacted on less-secure iPhones and Android devices.
In addition to his personal iPhone, Macron uses two special highly secure cellphones for more sensitive conversations, aides say. His personal iPhone is the least secure of the devices he regularly uses, and he routinely shared its number with journalists and other associates before he was elected to high office. The number for one of his personal cellphones was also published online in 2017 after someone stole the phone of a journalist who had Macron’s contact details.
But officials familiar with his habits say he does not usually use any of the phones for discussions of classified information, for fear of being spied on. For that he sticks to encrypted landlines and other tools, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Mexico’s Calderón told The Post that such intrusions were “an unjustifiable violation of the most elemental rights of liberty and privacy, as well as others that constitute elemental guarantees of human dignity.”
He added he wasn’t surprised his phone number was on the list. “It’s not the first time, and I fear it won’t be the last, that I suffer from espionage,” he said. “On another occasion, the so-called WikiLeaks revealed that I had been the object of surveillance by the United States.”
Commuters wearing protective face masks ride a bus in Brooklyn on July 13, 2021. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The pandemic isn’t over in the US — but it is changing.
ovid-19 cases are on the rise in the United States again. But this time, the story is more complicated than it was in previous waves.
Since early January, when the United States hit a peak of 260,000 new cases every day on average, case numbers have been in more or less constant decline. Tens of millions of people were inoculated against Covid-19 in the following months. By late June, the country was averaging just 11,000 new cases per day.
But as of July 18, the US is seeing more than 31,000 new cases daily on average, nearly triple the case levels of just a few weeks ago.
So far, hospitalizations have not increased as much: They’re up about one-third compared to two weeks ago. Deaths, likewise, are still comparatively low: a seven-day average of 258, compared to January when the US was losing more than 3,000 people per day. Both measures are still growing, if not yet as rapidly as cases.
Confirmed cases are a leading indicator. Somebody tests positive for the disease, but it may take two weeks for them to become sick enough to go to the hospital and even longer for them to die if they do not recover. (One caveat: Testing rates have dropped significantly in the past few months, so we may not be detecting every new case. But that only makes the rise in confirmed cases more concerning.)
This is still true — when cases accelerate, so do deaths, eventually — and the current trends reflect that basic reality.
But this time, about half of the country is now fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Some of those people could still contract the virus, but their illness is much more likely to be mild if they have received the vaccine. The Biden administration announced in early July that nearly all the Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths being reported are of unvaccinated people.
“The decoupling between cases and deaths has really occurred,” Andrew Pavia, who specializes in infectious diseases at the University of Utah, told reporters at an Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing last week. “We’re seeing an increase in deaths but not nearly to the degree previously.”
Still, so long as the virus is circulating, there are risks, especially to the half of the population who haven’t been vaccinated. The delta variant appears more transmissible and virulent than those that came before it, and, while the vaccines seem to be holding up well against it, it is still accounting for a bigger and bigger share of cases in the US.
Hospitalizations and deaths are also becoming more prevalent among younger people, another distinction from prior surges.
All in all, the situation is much messier than it was last year, when hospitalizations and deaths would grow like clockwork following a rise in cases. Here are three factors to keep in mind going forward.
1) Unvaccinated people are still very vulnerable to Covid-19
If you have not been vaccinated, you do not have protection against the coronavirus — and the increasingly prevalent delta variant appears more dangerous than previous iterations of the virus. Right now, it accounts for nearly half of new cases in the US, and it is expected to become the dominant strain.
As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained, the delta variant appears to be 60 percent more transmissible than the alpha variant first identified in the United Kingdom — which was likely already 60 percent more transmissible than the version of the virus first identified in humans.
Early evidence is mixed, but some suggests the delta variant may also be more virulent: A study conducted in Scotland found that people who had contracted the delta variant were twice as likely to end up in the hospital, though the death rate did not appear to be significantly worse.
“As greater numbers of non-vaccinated persons acquire the delta variant, hospitalizations may indeed rise,” David Celentano, an epidemiologist at the John Hopkins School of Public Health, told me.
Different states also have different degrees of vulnerability, with vaccination rates by state ranging from 78 percent of Vermonters being fully vaccinated to just 42 percent of Alabamians. That has translated to the growth in cases: The states seeing the most new cases (including parts of the South, Midwest, and the West) per capita all rank in the bottom half of states in vaccination rates.
Then there is the changing nature of which age groups are being affected by Covid-19: According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s polling, 85 percent of all people 65 and over say they have been vaccinated. But that percentage drops among younger cohorts, to 66 percent of people 50 to 64, 59 percent of people 30 to 49, and 55 percent of people 18 to 29.
2) Vaccines are protecting the people most vulnerable to Covid-19
These trends contain both good and bad news. The bad news is self-evident: Because younger people and people in certain states are less likely to have been vaccinated against Covid-19, they remain more likely to contract the disease. Especially as the delta variant becomes more dominant, a higher share of them will end up in the hospital. Some will die.
According to CDC data, the share of people hospitalized with Covid-19 who are ages 18 to 49 has grown from 20 percent of the total in January to more than 40 percent in mid-July. Americans 65 and over made up more than half of Covid-19 hospitalizations in January; they now account for less than 30 percent.
To be clear: Overall hospitalizations are still way down from their peak, so the raw number of young people getting seriously ill is not as large as the number of hospitalizations among older people during the worst of the winter surge. But, relatively speaking, younger people are now making up a bigger share of hospitalizations.
The good news is the other side of this trend: The people who are the most vulnerable to dying of Covid-19 have much more robust protection than they did last year. We have known from the start of the pandemic that age, as much as anything, is the best proxy for a person’s risk of succumbing to Covid-19.
That’s why nursing home residents and workers were prioritized when mass vaccinations began in early 2021. According to an AARP analysis of federal data, nearly 80 percent of people residing in nursing homes were fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as of late June.
Over the course of the pandemic, they have accounted for a disproportionate share of Covid-19 deaths — 133,482 out of 608,000 total US deaths. But death rates among that population slowed significantly once vaccinations took off. In early January, US nursing homes reported more than 5,000 resident deaths every week, according to federal data.
In the last week of June, nursing homes reported just 147 resident deaths. That represents remarkable progress in protecting the most vulnerable.
3) Vaccinated people can contract Covid-19, but cases are almost always mild
The Covid-19 vaccines are very good, but they aren’t perfect. Some number of people who have been fully vaccinated will contract the coronavirus, and they may also account for some of the rising case numbers.
When the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were first approved, it was the astounding 95-percent efficacy rates that got all the attention. But even then, that meant a very small number of vaccinated people did get sick.
That share will grow as the delta variant becomes more dominant; as Irfan reported, the initial evidence suggests the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is still 80 percent effective in preventing illness. But that means a larger number of vaccinated people may contract the virus and feel symptoms as the variant continues to spread.
That is still a high success rate. The World Health Organization said last week that most vaccinated people who do contract the delta variant experience no symptoms. They may also be less likely to spread the virus, as they appear to shed less of it, CDC Deputy Director Jay Butler told reporters at the Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing.
And the vaccines are still providing impressive protection against severe illness, which is reflected in the minuscule number of vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying of Covid-19.
“Breakthrough infections tend to be milder,” Butler said. “Even if infection occurs, [vaccination] decreases the risk of hospitalizations and death.”
Rising cases are not ideal. Millions of Americans are still vulnerable to Covid-19, and a more dangerous variant of the virus is taking hold. The number of deaths occurring each day is still the equivalent of a jetliner crashing every 24 hours.
But this is a different kind of wave than the ones that preceded it, with nearly 160 million Americans and counting now fully vaccinated. The solution is the same as it’s been for the past six months, as Celentano told me over email: “The best way to avoid the acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 is to get vaccinated now!”
Otherwise, as long as the virus is circulating, there are risks.
“The more virus that circulates, the more mutations that occur, and greater chance of the emergence of yet another new variant,” Jen Kates, director of global health at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me.
A new variant that is more deadly, more transmissible, or more resistant to vaccines “would of course have more severe public health implications.”
Lamar Cornett has worked in restaurants for more than 20 years. During the pandemic, he began thinking about leaving that career behind. (photo: Lamar Cornett)
ALSO SEE: Companies Claim There's a Labor Shortage.
Their Solution? Prisoners
That first cooking lesson launched a lifelong journey in food. Cornett has spent over 20 years in Kentucky restaurants, doing every job short of being the owner. The work is grueling and tense but rewarding and rowdy, and so fast-paced that the pandemic shutdown was like lightning on a cloudy day.
"It was almost like there was this unplanned, unorganized general strike," Cornett said.
In those rare quiet moments, millions of restaurant workers like Cornett found themselves thinking about the realities of their work. Breaks barely long enough to use the restroom or smoke a cigarette. Meals inhaled on the go. Hostile bosses, crazy schedules and paltry, stagnant pay.
To top it off: rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often forced to tolerate. And lately, testy diners have only gotten more impatient as they emerge from the pandemic shutdowns.
Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave.
"I was working what I decided was going to be my last kitchen job," Cornett said.
As he pondered a new career path, an exodus began rattling his industry. Workers have been leaving jobs in restaurants, bars and hotels at the highest rate in decades. Each month so far this year, around 5% of this massive workforce have called it quits. In May alone, that was 706,000 people.
And now "help wanted" signs are everywhere, with a staggering 1.2 million jobs unfilled in the industry, right when customers are crushing through the doors, ready to eat, drink and finally socialize.
"They're just yelling the entire time"
Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return.
That's because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers.
"I never want to do something like this again," said Marcus Brotherns, who spent two years serving coffee and doughnuts at a drive-through in Rhode Island. During the busiest hours, customers would storm inside to complain about the wrong amount of creamer or sugar.
"They're just yelling the entire time," he said. Brotherns got a new job delivering beverages to restaurants, work that's tough but quieter and better-paying with more stable hours. "I am done with fast food."
Tensions escalated over the pandemic, when many low-wage workers at stores and restaurants found themselves forced to be the enforcers of mask-wearing mandates, facing harassment and physical attacks.
Now, as many eateries are short-handed and hurriedly train new staff, negative reviews and complaints are on the rise from impatient, oblivious diners. One restaurant in Massachusetts even closed for a "Day of Kindness" after angry customers drove servers to tears.
Average pay finally topped $15 in May
To adjust to the worker shortage, many food establishments found themselves reducing their hours, operating with skeleton crews and hiring like crazy.
"We used to be known as a late-night restaurant. ... We can't do that anymore. I don't have the staff and people are exhausted," said Laurie Torres, whose Ohio restaurant now closes earlier and stays closed on Mondays. She said she's been paying her staff bonuses and offered $17 an hour for a dishwasher job, and still three workers stood her up.
In fact, for the first time on record, average hourly pay for nonmanagers at restaurants and bars topped $15 in May.
Major chains have been trumpeting higher wages: Chipotle, Olive Garden, White Castle, even McDonald's, which is now promising entry-level pay between $11 and $17 an hour. Employers are paying people just to show up for interviews, adding signing bonuses and recruiting ever-younger workers on TikTok.
"Every manager acted like they were urgently hiring, it was kind of weird. Like, their big focus was: When can you start?" said Sterling Baumgardner, who at 17 is a minor in Ohio. He recently quit his job at Dunkin' Donuts and got immediately hired at a sandwich chain making about $12.50 an hour, $3 more than before.
If you can't pay well, "then you can't afford to be in business"
Food service jobs have been "plagued with low wages for an extraordinary long period of time," said Jeannette Wicks-Lim, labor economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Pay was eking up before the pandemic but then fell again, and so now, she said, workers are just barely making up lost ground. Wages might be jumping fast, but not very high.
Cornett, the lifelong restaurant worker from Kentucky, has watched the wage issue get tense on his local food service Facebook group. Any job posting below $15 an hour would get jeers and demands for higher pay. Then the employers would get defensive, saying they couldn't afford big raises.
"The immediate response every time was: 'Then you can't afford to be in business, bro,' " Cornett said.
He was planning to hang up his apron and began looking at jobs at warehouses and factories when he got an offer he couldn't turn down — from someone who could afford to be in business while paying him better. He's now a chef at a new brewery in Louisville.
"This is the first time I've ever been on a salary," Cornett said. "This is the first time I've been able to depend on getting a specific amount of money every pay period."
That amount is $30,000 a year — which isn't a lot, he admits. But it's "life-changing" compared with his long career earning $22,000 or $23,000 a year.
It's also the first time he's had only one boss, whom he likes. And the first time — finally — that he's had a job that offers health insurance.
Elephants in Longue Bai, Gabon. (photo: Jefe Le Gran/Flickr/Mongabay)
n 2019, Norway committed to pay $150 million to Gabon to protect its forests under the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). After independent verification of the country’s deforestation rates in 2016 and 2017, Gabon recently received its first $17 million payment, making it the first African country to receive a results-based payment for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+).
“I think it’s good news,” said Denis Sonwa, senior scientist for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Cameroon. “It shows that REDD+ is technically possible, but for it to become a reality we need some sort of dynamic domestic policy.”
CAFI was founded in 2015 as a collaborative agreement between six central African countries — the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon — and six financial partners: the European Union, France, Norway, Germany, South Korea and the Netherlands.
CAFI is based around the REDD+ mechanism developed by the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The idea that underpins REDD+ is that developing nations should be able to financially benefit from the ecosystem services that their forests provide, such as carbon storage and as reservoirs of biodiversity. The REDD+ concept has been around since 2005 and trialed in various forms, with varying degrees of success.
With 88% of the country covered in tropical rainforest and an average deforestation rate of less than 0.1% over the last 30 years, Gabon is what’s known as a high-forest, low-deforestation (HFLD) country — one of only 11 in the world to claim this status. The forests of Gabon have immense biodiversity, with more plant species than all West Africa’s forests combined. Gabon is also one of the few places left in the world where forest elephants can roam all the way from forest to sea and can be found sauntering along the beach.
“In terms of carbon emissions, we were actually positive,” Lee White, Gabon’s minister of forests, oceans, environment and climate change, said in a BBC interview. “We absorb 100 million tons of carbon dioxide over and above our annual emissions.”
Gabon’s situation is unusual. Discovery of oil in the 1970s radically changed the country’s fortunes and the dynamics of its society. In 1970, urbanization in Gabon was 30%; by 2020, more than 90% of Gabon’s population lived in urban areas, compared to a sub-Saharan Africa average of 41%. Gabon also has a very low population density, with just eight people per square kilometer (about 21 per square mile) compared to the average of 45 per km2 (117 per mi2) for sub-Saharan Africa.
This rare combination — low population and high urbanization, supported by oil revenue — has limited the human impact on Gabon’s forests. Oil has been the foundation of Gabon’s economy, accounting for 80% of exports and 45% of GDP between 2010 and 2015. However, oil reserves are now running low, and with oil prices unstable, Gabon’s government is looking for new ways to power its economy.
With limited agricultural land available, Gabon has to import food — $591 million worth in 2018 alone. The country wants to generate more income from its forests as well as preserve them, and CAFI is one part of that plan.
“We’re trying to come up with a new development model for a high rainforest country that preserves the forest but allows us to develop,” White said.
To be financially as well as ecologically sustainable, the timber industry needs to make and retain as much value as possible in-country. Since 2010, Gabon has only allowed timber to be exported once it has been processed to some degree. Gabon has also adopted a sustainable approach to forestry to minimize degradation, with timber companies required to harvest on a 25-year cycle to allow regrowth. In 2018, President Ali Bongo also declared that all forestry concessions must be FSC-certified by the end of 2022.
Recognizing that Gabon’s deforestation rate is already low, CAFI’s payments to Gabon focus on reducing CO2 emissions from degradation through sustainable forestry practices. CAFI will also pay for the CO2 Gabon’s natural forests sequester, hoping to give the forests value as they stand, beyond timber. The money received from Norway will be put toward further developing Gabon’s sustainable forest model.
With oil exports of $4.7 billion in 2019, Gabon faces an uphill struggle to replace oil revenues in a sustainable manner. As well as sustainable forestry, oil palm has featured prominently on Gabon’s diversification agenda, raising concerns over potential forest conversion.
It’s still early days for CAFI’s other initiatives. CAFI committed to investing $200 million into programs designed to address deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016. Since the deal was signed, instability in the country has hampered CAFI’s efforts, and the discovery of oil beneath the peatlands of the Cuvette Central have raised concerns about the effectiveness of any deals signed. CAFI has not yet made any significant commitments to the other four partner countries.
It remains to be seen if the other countries can emulate Gabon’s success in achieving results-based payments for protecting their natural forests or whether Gabon can diversify away from oil while keeping its forests intact.
What is undeniable is the value of the Congo Basin and the global consequences if countries like Gabon cannot find a way to achieve the development they need without sacrificing their rainforest.
“The Gabonese and Congolese forests help to create the rainfall in the Sahel, so if we lose the Congo Basin we lose rainfall across Africa,” White said. “If we lose the carbon stocks in the Congo Basin, which represent about 10 years of global emissions of CO2, we lose the fight against climate change.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
A firefighter during nighttime operations to tackle the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon. (photo: U.S. Forest Service Handout/EPA)
One of the largest fires in modern Oregon history has burned an area half the size of Rhode Island
uelled by erratic winds and dry lightning, the enormous Bootleg fire in southern Oregon burned through another 47,000-plus acres on Monday to reach an estimated total of 364,000 acres (564 sq miles) – an area more than half the size of Rhode Island.
The challenging weather conditions have added to the dangers for the crews in parched Oregon forests who are battling the fire, currently the largest in the US.
Personnel had managed to carve containment lines around 30% of the perimeter by late Monday, up from 22% the day before, the Oregon Forestry Department reported.
“We are running firefighting operations through the day and all through the night,” said incident commander Joe Hessel in a statement on Monday morning. “This fire is a real challenge, and we are looking at sustained battle for the foreseeable future.”
Thousands were ordered to evacuate, including nearly 2,000 who live in rugged terrain among lakes and wildlife refuges near the fire, which has burned at least 67 homes and 100 outbuildings.
Despite the fire’s jaw-dropping size, the evacuations and property losses have been minimal compared with much smaller blazes in densely populated areas of California, offering a reminder that Oregon, which is larger than Britain, is still a largely rural state.
Excessive heat has baked the desiccated region, intensifying drought conditions, complicating fire containment efforts and increasing the risks of new ignitions. Officials are also concerned that dry lightning storms over California and the northern Great Basin could spark new fires. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings and fire weather watches from central California to northwest South Dakota.
“Along with the above average temperatures, the combination of extreme drought, gusty winds, and dry lightning could make conditions ripe throughout the west for new wildfires to form and spread uncontrollably,” the agency said in a forecast issued Monday morning.
Climate change has made the US west much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. Firefighters said these conditions in July are more typical of late summer or fall.
Pyrocumulus clouds – literally translated as “fire clouds” – complicated containment efforts for the Dixie fire in northern California, where flames spread in remote areas with steep terrain crews can’t easily reach, officials said. New evacuation orders were issued in rural communities near the Feather River Canyon.
The Dixie fire remained 15% contained and covered 29 sq miles. The fire is north-east of the town of Paradise, California, and survivors of the horrific Camp fire that killed 85 people watched warily as the new blaze burned.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the nation’s largest utility – which has been repeatedly found responsible for the some of the biggest blazes, including the Camp fire – told California regulators in a report on Sunday that their equipment may again be to blame.
In a report issued Sunday, PG&E told the California Public Utilities Commission that on the day before the official start to the fire, a repairman responding to an outage saw what he called a “healthy green tree” leaning into a conductor with blown fuses, and a fire at the base of the tree. The investigation is on-going and officials have not yet confirmed the cause of the fire, and the utility reports that it is cooperating with CalFire’s investigation.
A growing wildfire south of Lake Tahoe jumped a highway, prompting more evacuation orders, the closure of the Pacific Crest trail and the cancellation of an extreme bike ride through the Sierra Nevada.
The Tamarack fire, which was sparked by lightning on 4 July, had charred about 28.5 sq miles of dry brush and timber as of Sunday night. The blaze was threatening Markleeville, a small town close to the California-Nevada state line. It has destroyed at least two structures, authorities said.
A notice posted on Saturday on the 103-mile Death Ride’s website said several communities in the area had been evacuated and ordered all bike riders to clear the area. The fire left thousands of bikers and spectators stranded.
Kelli Pennington and her family were camping near the town so her husband could participate in his ninth ride. They had been watching smoke develop over the course of the day, but were caught off guard by the fire’s quick spread.
“It happened so fast,” Pennington said. “We left our tents, hammock and some foods, but we got most of our things, shoved our two kids in the car and left.”
About 800 fire personnel were assigned to battle the flames by Sunday night, “focusing on preserving life and property with point protection of structures and putting in containment lines where possible,” the US Forest Service said.
A fire in the mountains of north-east Oregon grew to more than 18 square miles by Sunday. The Elbow Creek fire that started on Thursday has prompted evacuations in several small, remote communities around the Grande Ronde River about 30 miles south-east of Walla Walla, Washington. It was 10% contained.
Natural features of the area act like a funnel for wind, feeding the flames and making them unpredictable, officials said.
Overall, about 80 active large fires and complexes of multiple blazes have burned nearly 1,835 sq miles (4,753 sq km) in the US, the National Interagency Fire Center said. The US Forest Service said at least 15 major fires were burning in the Pacific north-west alone.
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