If there were any intelligent beings on Mars, they’d likely be confused by a little plaque recently added to the side of the SUV-sized Perseverance Mars rover, which lifted off at 7:50 AM local time on Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida and is set to reach Mars in February. Nobody had planned any late additions to the rover—but no one had planned on a lot of things this year, least of all the COVID-19 pandemic which continues to burn across the world.
As it did with pretty much everyone else in the United States, the pandemic forced the Perseverance team to work from home if they could, social distancing in the factories and clean rooms if they couldn’t. As a nod to the challenges that presented, the flank of the rover now carries the medical community’s snake-and-staff caduceus symbol, along with a picture of Earth and the flight path of a spacecraft soaring away from it:
NASA/JPL-CaltechSeen from below, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is in position in the aeroshell that will protect the rover on its way to the Red Planet.
Perseverance is not the only ship that recently embarked on the seven-month journey from the troubled blue planet to its mysterious red neighbor. On July 19, the United Arab Emirates made its first bid to join the Mars game, launching the 1,360kg (3,000lb.), 3m (10ft.) tall Amal, or “Hope,” spacecraft on a mission to orbit Mars for at least two years while studying its atmosphere. Just four days later, China launched its Tianwen-1, or “Questions to Heaven,” spacecraft, a three-part ship with an orbiter, a lander and a six-wheeled, 200kg (440lb.) rover.
The ships on the Mars-bound international convoy will by no means be alone when they arrive. Mars, a cold, dry desert planet, is rapidly becoming something of a worker-bee world. Six spacecraft—three American, two European and one Indian—are currently in Martian orbit, while one stationary lander and one rover, both American, are busy on the surface. (A joint Russian-European mission, ExoMars, was also planned for this summer, but has been postponed to 2022 due to engineering problems.) What began as a collection of individual ships built by individual nations is rapidly becoming nothing short of an international scientific infrastructure hard at work on another world.
“There is lots of international collaboration both currently [going on] and planned for the future,” says Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “Of those six spacecraft that are currently in orbit at Mars, we have collaborations on all of them. We are absolutely huge supporters of the transparent and open sharing of science discoveries.”
There are an awful lot of those discoveries to be made. The UAE’s Amal will investigate how Mars’s atmosphere—once thick and potentially able to sustain life, but now just 1% of the density of Earth’s—was stripped away by the solar wind, a slow loss of air that continues today. The Chinese rover will, like NASA’s still-active Curiosity rover, investigate the chemistry—and the hoped-for biochemistry—of the Martian soil.
But Perseverance, the fifth in a line of Mars rovers built by the experienced hands at NASA since 1997, is easily the most remarkable of the new explorers. There are its 23 cameras, for one thing. There’s its 2.1m (7ft)-long robotic arm, equipped with a rotating wrist, a rock drill, a camera of its own and a system to analyze the molecular structure of the Martian soil. There’s its on-board brain that allows it to map its surroundings and autonomously travel up to 200m (656 ft.). Oh, and it has its own helicopter. Really.
Attached to the underside of Perseverance is a .45m (1.6ft.), 1.8kg (4lb.) extraterrestrial flying machine, with a pair of 1.2m (4ft.)-long blades. The little chopper, dubbed Ingenuity, is just light enough to gain purchase in the thin Martian air. It will spend a month or so taking short test flights of up to 90 seconds long and 4.5m (15ft.) in altitude, never venturing far from the rover. Ingenuity carries no instruments except for a camera—a must-have for capturing the first ever helicopter flight over Mars—and is very much what NASA calls a technology demonstration.
“That means that it’s not required for the mission to be successful,” says Glaze. “But of course we want it to fly. Of course we want it to be successful.”
A much more important part of Perseverance’s mission will be its search for biology. For all of the talk about looking for life on Mars, previous and ongoing missions have not and are not equipped to do that. Rather, they have only looked for the chemical and environmental conditions that could allow life to thrive—and in some respects, they’ve found plenty. Mars is a world etched with dry river beds, stamped with ancient sea basins, marked by deep depressions that could only indicate long-vanished oceans. Perseverance is landing in one such place: the Jezero Crater, north of the Martian equator, which is lined with both inflow and outflow channels indicating it was once a vibrant sea. Previous rover analyses in similar locations have discovered chemicals and compounds that form only in the presence of water, proving that Mars was once, like Earth, exceedingly wet.
Perseverance will go further. While analyzing soil chemistry like its predecessor rovers, It will also take the critical step of preparing Martian samples to be returned to Earth. There are 43 test tube-sized sample containers on board the rover, and they go far beyond the simple rock boxes the Apollo crews used when they explored the moon. “They are ultra-clean,” says Ken Farley, project scientist for the Perseverance mission. “And by ultra-clean I mean they are surely the cleanest things that have ever flown.”
That’s critical, because Earth is crawling with microbes, which could easily contaminate the tubes even in a sterilized clean-room. That would be a very bad thing if you’re looking for Martian life, since it would be impossible to know if an organism you find in the soil was actually Martian, or originated on Earth and then hitched a ride to Mars and back. To avoid that, the tubes were made of titanium and then treated with nitrogen to convert the material to titanium nitride. “Titanium nitride is a wonderful substance that passivates the surface, which means that organic molecules won’t stick to it,” Farley says.
But once Perseverance collects its samples, the question becomes: how do you get them back to Earth? The answer: you don’t—at least, not yet. For now, Perseverance will leave the tubes it fills with Martian samples neatly on the ground, then go about the rest of its mission. The samples are set to be picked up on NASA’s next—and even more ambitious—Mars trip.
Set for launch in 2026, the sample-return mission will begin with the launch of the so-called “fetch rover,” which will land at the same site as Perseverance and gather up the tubes. A small onboard rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will then loft the sample tubes into low Martian orbit. The samples will then be flown back to Earth through a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), which will launch its own probe, also in 2026, to fly to Mars, rendezvous with the MAV, gather the test tubes and bring them back home, where they will land in the southwest U.S.
It’s a decidedly complicated mission, involving three launches from Earth (including the one just this morning) and one from Mars, and nobody pretends all of the technicalities have been figured out yet.
“What you do in science and especially in exploration is you have a plan and you beat it with a stick,” says NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen. “You want to make sure you understand every single problem with it. So frankly, we’re beating it with a stick right now.”
The fact that NASA and the ESA are doing that work together says something encouraging about both exploration and humanity as a whole. We may be an exceedingly fractious species on Earth, but as we reach out to Mars—as Americans and Europeans and Russians and Indians and Emiratis and Chinese and surely more in the future—we are reaching out as a species as well. If we can cooperate on a desert world like Mars, think what we could accomplish by doing the same on the garden world that is Earth.
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.
NASA’s Perseverance rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into a clear morning sky in the world’s third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach the red planet in February after a journey of seven months and 300 million miles (480 million kilometers).
The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion.
In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars question, the mission will yield lessons that could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s.
“There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. “It is always hard. It’s never been easy. In this case, it’s harder than ever before because we’re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.”
The U.S., the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet, which has proved to be the Bermuda Triangle of space exploration, with more than half of the world’s missions there burning up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.
China is sending both a rover an orbiter. The UAE, a newcomer to outer space, has an orbiter en route.
It’s the biggest stampede to Mars in spacefaring history. The opportunity to fly between Earth and Mars comes around only once every 26 months when the planets are on the same side of the sun and about as close as they can get.
Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced apart at the Cape Canaveral control center because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance’s liftoff.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old Virginia schoolboy who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and traveled to Cape Canaveral for the launch.
If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, in which the craft goes from 12,000 mph (19,300 kph) to a complete stop, with no human intervention whatsoever. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones that will enable Earthlings to vicariously tag along.
Perseverance will aim for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, a dusty expanse riddled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing signs of microbes from what was once a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store half-ounce (15-gram) rock samples in dozens of super-sterilized titanium tubes.
It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts, including equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars’ thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.
The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, along with a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.
Samples actually brought home from Mars, not drawn from meteorites discovered on Earth, have long been considered “the Holy Grail of Mars science,” according to NASA’s original and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard.
To definitively answer the profound question of whether life exists — or ever existed — beyond Earth, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, he said.
“I’ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,” the 71-year-old Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. “But just maybe, I’ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.”
Said Bridenstine: “There is nothing better than bringing samples back to Earth where we can put them in a lab and we can apply every element of technology against those samples to make determinations as to whether or not there was, at one time, life on the surface of Mars.”
Two other NASA landers are also operating on Mars: 2018′s InSight and 2012′s Curiosity rover. Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three from the U.S., two from Europe and one from India.
(BOISE, Idaho) — The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that.
The U.S. Department of Energy put out the formal request to build what it calls a fission surface power system that could allow humans to live for long periods in harsh space environments.
The Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility in eastern Idaho, the Energy Department and NASA will evaluate the ideas for developing the reactor.
The lab has been leading the way in the U.S. on advanced reactors, some of them micro reactors and others that can operate without water for cooling. Water-cooled nuclear reactors are the vast majority of reactors on Earth.
“Small nuclear reactors can provide the power capability necessary for space exploration missions of interest to the Federal government,” the Energy Department wrote in the notice published Friday.
The Energy Department, NASA and Battelle Energy Alliance, the U.S. contractor that manages the Idaho National Laboratory, plan to hold a government-industry webcast technical meeting in August concerning expectations for the program.
The plan has two phases. The first is developing a reactor design. The second is building a test reactor, a second reactor be sent to the moon, and developing a flight system and lander that can transport the reactor to the moon. The goal is to have a reactor, flight system and lander ready to go by the end of 2026.
The reactor must be able to generate an uninterrupted electricity output of at least 10 kilowatts. The average U.S. residential home, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, uses about 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year. The Energy Department said it would likely take multiple linked reactors to meet power needs on the moon or Mars.
In addition, the reactor cannot weigh more than 7,700 pounds (3,500 kilograms), be able to operate in space, operate mostly autonomously, and run for at least 10 years.
The Energy Department said the reactor is intended to support exploration in the south polar region of the moon. The agency said a specific region on the Martian surface for exploration has not yet been identified.
Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, said his organization is concerned the parameters of the design and timeline make the most likely reactors those that use highly enriched uranium, which can be made into weapons. Nations have generally been attempting to reduce the amount of enriched uranium being produced for that reason.
“This may drive or start an international space race to build and deploy new types of reactors requiring highly enriched uranium,” he said.
Earlier this week, the United Arab Emirates launched an orbiter to Mars and China launched an orbiter, lander and rover. The U.S. has already landed rovers on the red planet and is planning to send another next week.
Officials say operating a nuclear reactor on the moon would be a first step to building a modified version to operate in the different conditions found on Mars.
“Idaho National Laboratory has a central role in emphasizing the United States’ global leadership in nuclear innovation, with the anticipated demonstration of advanced reactors on the INL site,” John Wagner, associate laboratory director of INL’s Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate, said in a statement. “The prospect of deploying an advanced reactor to the lunar surface is as exciting as it is challenging.”
This article is excerpted from TIME: SUSTAINABILITY, available at retailers and on Amazon.
In his book Walden, the American essayist Henry David Thoreau famously documented his attempts to live simply and “deliberately” on the edge of a lake in the woods of Massachusetts. While many today think of Thoreau’s memoir as a paean to a solitary existence, those who study and teach Thoreau say this is a misconception.
“The message of Walden is not about withdrawing from society,” says Aaron Sachs, a professor of history at Cornell University who studies American culture and its engagement with nature and natural resources. “Thoreau was writing at a time when people were making this transformation from being fairly independent in terms of growing their own food and, a lot of the time, making their own clothes to being dependent on wages and industrial production.” This dependence left many feeling powerless and desperate, he says. The Industrial Revolution also ushered in a new era of never before seen consumption and profligacy. In the face of all this, Thoreau was writing about using discarded materials to build his own house, or sometimes even foraging for food in the forest. “He was reminding people that there were alternative ways to live that didn’t rely on the rapacious use of natural resources,” Sachs says. In other words, Thoreau was more humanist than hermit. And he was one of the country’s early advocates of sustainable living.
Today, the ideas that Thoreau espoused more than 160 years ago are alive and well. From nature-sensitive and minimalist consumption practices to the thoughtful repurposing and recycling of materials, many of Thoreau’s approaches have acquired new devotees in an era when many are concerned about the health of the planet and its resources. But while, in his own time, many of Thoreau’s causes required a large measure of personal sacrifice, sustainable living today doesn’t make the same demands. It only requires a change in attitude and priorities—ones which can lead to a happier, richer and more satisfying life.
There’s evidence that Americans are increasingly willing to make these changes. According to a 2019 poll of residents of the United States and Australia, conducted by Australia’s Southern Cross University, roughly three out four people are interested in learning how to live a more sustainable life. And, already, a majority of those polled said they engaged in simple eco-friendly behaviors on a daily basis. Some of the most common and popular practices among those polled included recycling, turning off the faucet while brushing teeth, turning off lights when leaving a room, and opting to go paperless when managing bills. Meanwhile, a 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that more than half of all Americans say that they now cut down on food waste, avoid single-use plastic packaging and engage in other sustainable practices that were less popular a decade ago.
While these and other simple green behaviors are becoming more commonplace, many Americans are going to even greater lengths to live sustainably. From electric vehicles and solar panels to “ecotourism” and alternative meat, new opportunities to cut down on waste and its harms are sprouting up all the time. While some experts are hopeful that the current era will turn out to be a watershed moment for the momentum of the sustainability movement, American conservationism goes back many generations. Understanding where the country has been in the past may help direct it toward a brighter, less-wasteful future.
The Roots of the American Sustainability Movement
“The word sustainability didn’t really come into common usage until the late 1980s, but the idea that the way we’re doing things is not sustainable is much older,” says Adam Rome, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo.
During the second half of the 19th century, there was a major shift from burning wood for fuel to burning coal, which led to a significant increase in air pollution—especially in cities. While the air was black with smoke, drinking water was often polluted, streets were full of waste and people were crowded in unsafe housing. “The industrial city was something so phenomenally new, and it wasn’t obvious that you could sustain a society like that,” Rome says. “Cities were becoming death traps, and the challenge of creating a city that could sustain itself and its citizens required a whole slew of new institutions and technologies.”
In stepped the landscape architect and reformer Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted is most famous for conceptualizing and designing Central Park in New York City, but he also played a role in creating or instituting a number of conservationist endeavors that helped make cities greener, healthier and more stable. “Olmsted understood the challenge of making a city sustainable required all kinds of innovations—it was a social, economic and political problem as well as an environmental problem,” Rome says. In other words, many of the same challenges people and governments face today when grappling with sustainable initiatives were present back in Olmsted’s time.
As the American city adapted and evolved, so did the country’s approach to land management. For centuries, many had viewed the American continent as a vast and inexhaustible bank of resources. But as those resources began to dwindle, new and greener ways of thinking emerged. “Beginning in the 1890s, we had this new philosophy of responsible land management called ‘conservation,’ ” says Paul Hirt, a professor of history and senior sustainability scholar at Arizona State University. A major proponent of this new conservation movement was President Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican who created the U.S. Forest Service and established hundreds of forests, parks, bird and game reserves, and other protected lands. “By the 1920s, everyone considered themselves a conservationist,” Hirt said. “It was the right word at the right time. It implied wise and responsible and sustainable use, and it was a philosophy that made a lot of sense.”
The term “conservationism” remained dominant until the early 1970s, at which time it was replaced by a new word: environmentalism. While the lexicon was shifting, the underlying principles continued to garner broad support. “There was no partisan distinction between Republicans and Democrats regarding environmental protection,” Hirt says. “Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan called themselves environmentalists.” This was the era in which the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and many other landmark environmental regulations passed with bipartisan support. But by the early 1990s, he says, “environmentalism” had begun to accrue political baggage and unhelpful connotations. Another change was needed. “Sustainability became this generation’s term,” he says.
While a movement toward a greener, more sustainable way of living is not new, Hirt says people today have more ways than ever before to put their beliefs into action. “There are now hundreds of beneficial practices a person could adopt,” he says. “Everyone can cast about to find ones that make most sense in their life.”
While all are helpful, not all have equal impact.
The Choices That Matter Most
According to Hirt, a single person’s efforts to live more sustainably can make a meaningful difference in two ways. First, the behaviors themselves—creating a compost pile for food scraps, for example, or avoiding the use of plastic bottles—can help cut down on waste and need. And second, other people will notice these efforts. Human beings are social creatures, and they’re heavily influenced by what they see others doing. The more a person “models” helpful practices, the more these are likely to catch on among friends and neighbors, he says.
While any effort to live a more conscious, sustainable life is a worthy one, Hirt says some decisions matter more than others. “I think the daily choices that matter most are those that revolve around food, energy, water and transportation.” Hundreds of behaviors fall into each of these categories, and each exists on a spectrum. For example, a person may choose to bike to work once a week or every day. A person could abandon meat in favor of a vegetarian or vegan diet, or a person could eat meat less frequently while also limiting portion sizes. Any change in the right direction is a helpful one. And, over time, these small adjustments can reveal to people their ability to make bigger ones.
There’s an additional benefit to making these sorts of changes. “Most people go through life not thinking very analytically or deeply about the choices they make, like how long they shower, what they make for breakfast, or how they get to work,” Hirt says. “But people who choose to live a more sustainable life engage in self-analysis, and that’s an incredibly important intellectual practice that leads to all kinds of benefits throughout life.” Examination gives rise to insights and awareness, he says. And trying new things can help teach people that they have the power to make changes—that they can evolve and grow. In these ways and many others, the decision to live sustainably is an empowering one.
“You have to believe you can make a difference and you have to keep pushing,” he says.
(GENEVA) — The U.N. weather agency warned Friday that average temperatures in Siberia were 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) above average last month, a spate of exceptional heat that has fanned devastating fires in the Arctic Circle and contributed to a rapid depletion in ice sea off Russia’s Arctic coast.
“The Arctic is heating more than twice as fast as the global average, impacting local populations and ecosystems and with global repercussions,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement Friday.
He noted that Earth’s poles influence weather conditions far away, where hundreds of millions of people live.
WMO previously cited a reading of 38 Celsius in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk on June 20, which the agency has been seeking to verify as a possible record-high temperature in the Arctic Circle. It comes as fires have swept through the region, with satellite imagery showing the breadth of the area surface.
The agency says the extended heat is linked to a large “blocking pressure system” and northward swing of the jet stream that has injected warm air into the region. But WMO also pointed to a recent study by top climate scientists who found that such a rise in heat would have been nearly impossible without human-caused climate change.
WMO said information collected by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center and the U.S. National Ice Center showed the Siberian heat wave had “accelerated the ice retreat along the Arctic Russian coast, in particular since late June, leading to very low sea ice extent in the Laptev and Barents Seas.”
BEIJING — China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.
Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Hainan Island, a resort province off the south coast of the mainland, state media said.
Livestreams showed a successful liftoff, with rockets blazing orange and the spacecraft heading upward across clear blue skies. Hundreds of space enthusiasts cried out excitedly on a beach across the bay from the launch site.
It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.
China’s tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth,” will look for underground water, if it’s present, as well as evidence of possible ancient life.
This isn’t China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.
This time, China is going at it alone. It also is fast-tracking, launching an orbiter and rover on the same mission instead of stringing them out.
China’s secretive space program has developed rapidly in recent decades. Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year, Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.
Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.
“There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the U.S. has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil, doing it eight times since 1976. NASA’s InSight and Curiosity rovers still operate today. Six other spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one from India.
Unlike the two other Mars missions launching this month, China has tightly controlled information about the program — even withholding any name for its rover. National security concerns led the U.S. to curb cooperation between NASA and China’s space program.
In an article published earlier this month in Nature Astronomy, mission chief engineer Wan Weixing said Tianwen-1 would slip into orbit around Mars in February and look for a landing site on Utopia Planitia — a plain where NASA has detected possible evidence of underground ice. Wan died in May from cancer.
The landing would then be attempted in April or May, according to the article. If all goes well, the 240-kilogram (530-pound) golf cart-sized, solar-powered rover is expected to operate for about three months, and the orbiter for two years.
Though small compared to America’s hulking, car-sized 1,025-kilogram (2,260-pound) Perseverance, it’s almost twice as big as the two rovers China has sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019. Perseverance is expected to operate for at least two years.
This Mars-launching season — which occurs every 26 months when Earth and Mars are at their closest — is especially busy.
The UAE spacecraft Amal, or Hope, which will orbit Mars but not land, is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. NASA’s Perseverance rover is up next.
“At no other time in our history have we seen anything like what is unfolding with these three unique missions to Mars. Each of them is a science and engineering marvel,” the Space Foundation’s chief executive officer Thomas Zelibor said in an online panel discussion earlier this week.
China’s road to Mars hit a few bumps: A Long March-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” because of its bulky shape, failed to launch earlier this year. The coronavirus pandemic forced scientists to work from home. In March, when instruments needed to be transported from Beijing to Shanghai, three team members drove 12 hours to deliver them.
While China is joining the U.S., Russia and Europe in creating a satellite-based global navigation system, experts say it isn’t trying to overtake the U.S. lead in space exploration.
Instead, Cheng of the Heritage Foundation said China is in a “slow race” with Japan and India to establish itself as Asia’s space power.
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Astronauts squeezed in one last spacewalk Tuesday before turning their attention to the all-important end to SpaceX’s first crew flight.
NASA’s Bob Behnken and Chris Cassidy floated out of the International Space Station on their fourth and final spacewalk in under a month. Instead of swapping batteries, they had to route cables, hook up a tool storage chest and perform other maintenance.
It was the 10th spacewalk in each of their careers, tying the U.S. record set by previous space station residents.
In less than two weeks, Behnken and Doug Hurley, who monitored the spacewalk from inside, will depart the orbiting complex in the same SpaceX Dragon crew capsule in which they arrived at the end of May.
SpaceX is aiming for a splashdown off the Florida coast in August — the first splashdown for astronauts in 45 years.
Weather permitting, the Dragon capsule will parachute into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida Panhandle.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said once Tuesday’s spacewalk is finished, the astronauts are “going to be focused like a laser on coming home.”
Bridenstine said the SpaceX test flight has gone exceedingly well so far. “And I’m knocking on wood because it is not over until Bob and Doug are home,” he said at a Space Foundation panel discussion Monday
The first-stage booster used to launch Behnken and Hurley on May 30 blasted off for a second time Monday from Cape Canaveral. It landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic after hoisting a satellite for South Korea’s military, to be used again for another flight.
The majority of polar bears will likely disappear by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, according to a new study published Monday.
While scientists have long known polar bears are threatened by global heating, this latest study published in Nature Climate Change is the first to identify when and where the bears will disappear.
Polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt for seals. But as temperatures rise and sea ice disappears, so do hunting opportunities for polar bears.
“The dire predictions in our study result from polar bear’s dependence on sea ice and the projected rapid loss of that ice due to human-driven climate change,” says Marika Holland, co-author of the paper.
The study found that declining sea ice has already pushed some polar bear populations to their survival limit. If greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current track, only polar bears living in the Queen Elizabeth Islands in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago will remain by the end of the century. But even if emissions are curbed, sea ice will continue to melt in the coming years as a result of the current levels of carbon in the atmosphere, leading to a decline of polar bears, particularly in southern Arctic regions.
Sylvain Cordier
The study—which looked at 13 of the world’s 19 polar bear subpopulations that account for 80% of the total population—modelled the energy use of polar bears. The study estimated the number of days the bears can fast before their reproductive abilities begin to be impacted and mapped this onto the number of projected ice-free days in the coming decades. They determined that the amount of time bears would have to fast surpassed the amount of time polar bears are capable of fasting. The result is that by 2040, some polar bear populations living in southern Hudson Bay and Davis Strait in Canada will begin to experience reproductive failure and by 2080, the majority of polar bear populations will be likely be afflicted.
Polar bears are a keystone species in the Arctic that keep biological populations in check. “Their loss would reverberate throughout the ecosystem,” Holland says.
But polar bears, which are the largest terrestrial carnivore on the planet, are vulnerable to extinction according the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which cites climate change as the main cause of their decline. The Arctic has been warming at double the rate of the global average for the past 25 years. Since the 1970s, sea ice has been melting by approximately 13% per decade, according to satellite records. Polar bears, which are not strong enough swimmers to catch seal in open water, have struggled to hunt as sea ice disappears.
Ulf Mauder—GettyA polar bear stands on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean.
This is not the first time polar bears have faced extinction. In 1965, specialists warned that commercial polar bear hunting was pushing the species to extinction, leading to a worldwide restriction on commercial hunting in 1973. And though the ban led to a resurgence in bear population numbers, melting sea ice now threatens the lives of the estimated 26, 000 polar bears that remain today.
While this latest study paints a dire picture of the future of this species, it does note that decreasing the burning of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases can reduce sea ice loss.
“I believe that there is hope,” says Holland. “But humans need to act quickly to turn that hope into a reality.”
(TOKYO) — A Japanese H-IIA rocket carrying a United Arab Emirates Mars spacecraft has been placed on the launch pad for Monday’s scheduled liftoff for the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, officials said Sunday.
The launch of the orbiter — named Amal, or Hope — from Tanegashima Space Center on a small southern Japanese island was initially scheduled for this past Wednesday, but was delayed due to bad weather in the region.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the provider of the H-IIA rocket, announced Sunday that the launch would proceed at 6:58 a.m. Monday (2158 GMT Sunday). The preparation has been completed, and the rocket is now on the launch pad, Mitsubishi said.
Hope is expected to reach Mars in February 2021, the year the UAE celebrates 50 years since its formation. A successful Hope mission would be a major step for the oil-dependent economy, which is seeking a future in space.
Two other Mars missions are planned in the coming days by the U.S. and China. Japan has its own Martian moon mission planned for 2024.
Hope will carry instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change on Mars. It is scheduled to circle the red planet for at least two years. The UAE says it will provide a complete view of the Martian atmosphere during different seasons for the first time.
A newcomer in space development, the UAE has so far successfully launched three observation satellites, but has not gone beyond the Earth’s orbit.
Omran Sharaf, project director of Emirates Mars Mission, said in a Twitter video message Sunday: “The Emirates’ Mars mission is a message of hope to the Arab youth. If a young nation like UAE is able to reach Mars in less than 50 years, then we can do much more as a region.”
As countries entered the final months of talks ahead of the Paris Agreement in 2015, China offered a big revelation: the country had burned substantially more coal than it had previously acknowledged in the preceding years.
Many diplomats took the voluntary acknowledgment as a sign of good faith. Nonetheless, the update underscored the broader challenges that climate change activists face when it comes to data collection. Historically, there’s been no way for third parties to directly gather data on the greenhouse gas emissions of both public and private entities, and so any concerted effort to reduce emissions has required trusting companies and governments to tell the truth about how much they’re polluting.
Now, a new coalition of nine climate and technology organizations calling themselves Climate Trace say they have used satellite data, artificial intelligence and other technology to track greenhouse-gas emissions from across the globe remotely. At the micro level, the platform allows users to track emissions down to the level of individual factories, ships and power plants. In aggregate, the platform will allow for a collective accounting of the how the world is doing in the effort to reduce emissions.
“We are creating, in a way, a massively distributed body cam for the planet,” says former Vice President Al Gore, who has helped lead the initiative. In other words, if a given country claims to have reduced, say power-plant emissions, other countries will soon be able to immediately tap into Climate Trace and get data to verify the claim.
The problem Climate Trace aims to solve is as old as the climate challenge itself. Emissions data are often collected by local governments and authorities and collated at a national level. For that reason, the validity of the data can vary significantly from country to country and region to region. This has created distrust and disagreement about what data can be trusted—and by extension which governments can be relied upon to follow through on their commitments to reduce emissions.
Creating a system that would provide a single, reliable data set is as much an organizational feat as a technical one. Individual countries and other organizations have their own satellites, as well as other ground-level tracking tools, that collect greenhouse-gas emissions data. But these countries, companies and even non-profits often have competing interests and, therefore, aren’t necessarily inclined to collaborate.
The organizations behind Climate Trace intend to bring that data together. Instead of launching a new satellite, they have gained access to data from dozens of sources, including satellites and ground observations, and are crunching the information in a way that no organization has yet been able to do. “They can construct something that none of them can do individually,” says Paul Bodnar, a former energy and climate official in the Obama Administration who now serves as a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is working on the project.
Accurately monitoring the world’s emissions from afar would be a significant feat that could reshape many key points of debate among those working to fight climate change. Countries would be able to verify that their counterparts are following through on emissions reductions commitments, governments could crack down on companies that are covering up their true footprint and environmental groups could trace illegal forestry practices that are reducing forest cover and emitting carbon in the process.
To do that, “we’re going to need power-plant, in fact, boiler-level information in literally real time for every single power plant in the world,” says Gavin McCormick, executive director of WattTime, a coalition member that works to advance clean energy.
The project is currently in prototype mode, but Gore and his partners say they plan to offer an accounting of global emissions by next October ahead of COP26, a key climate conference in Glasgow scheduled to begin Nov. 1, 2021. Gore says he has been in contact with the conference organizers about how to implement it. This would be a major advance. In the talks that led to the Paris Agreement, discussions about how to monitor, report and verify emissions lasted long into the conference, with many negotiators concerned about the possibility that some countries might cheat. Climate Trace would allow for instant monitoring and verification.
“It’s an entirely different proposition to have real time and near real time data,” says Gore. “When we can trace the source of all significant emissions, then it creates a new reality.”
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — A newly discovered comet is streaking past Earth, providing a stunning nighttime show after buzzing the sun and expanding its tail. NASA’s Neowise infrared space telescope discovered the comet in March.
Comet Neowise — the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere in a quarter-century — swept within Mercury’s orbit a week ago. Its close proximity to the sun caused dust and gas to burn off its surface and create an even bigger debris tail. Now the comet is headed our way, with closest approach in two weeks.
Scientists involved in the mission said the comet is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across. Its nucleus is covered with sooty material dating back to the origin of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
The comet will be visible across the Northern Hemisphere until mid-August, when it heads back toward the outer solar system. While it’s visible with the naked eye in dark skies with little or no light pollution, binoculars are needed to see the long tail, according to NASA.
It will be about 7,000 years before the comet returns, “so I wouldn’t suggest waiting for the next pass,” said the telescope’s deputy principal investigator Joe Masiero of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He said it is the brightest comet since the mid-1990s for stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have already caught a glimpse.
NASA’s Bob Behnken shared a spectacular photo of the comet on social media late Thursday, showing central Asia in the background and the space station in the foreground.
“Stars, cities, spaceships, and a comet!” he tweeted from orbit.
The honeymoon for Extinction Rebellion, the hugely influential climate activist group, ended on Oct. 17, 2019.
From its launch, a year earlier, until that day, it seemed like the group might have cracked the formula for saving the planet: its strategy of shutting down city centers with disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience had drawn ordinary people onto the streets to demand action on the climate crisis. It had also made the group, now present in 75 countries, the most radical of a wave of climate activist groups sweeping the world in recent years, including the youth-focused Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and the school strikers led by Greta Thunberg.
In the U.K., Extinction Rebellion (or XR) is a household name, able to generate enough pressure to reach milestones that traditional environmental campaigners spent decades chasing: within weeks of XR’s first two-week mass mobilization in London in April 2019, the U.K. government declared a climate emergency and announced a legally binding target for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, compares XR’s potential impact to that of groups like the suffragists and the civil rights movement. “When you’re talking about a large systemic transformation, history shows us that civil disobedience is a very important component,” she says.
But on Oct. 17, as XR began a second two-week mass mobilization in London, one local branch staged an action in Canning Town, a predominantly Black and Asian working-class neighborhood, in which several XR members clambered onto a subway car, preventing the train from leaving. Commuters dragged the protesters down onto the platform and beat them. Video of the incident prompted a massive backlash. “Upsetting the general public travelling to work in an environmentally sound way is plain stupid,” tweeted David Lammy, a prominent Black lawmaker for the left-wing Labour Party.
Daze Aghaji, 20, a member of XR and a student in London, shudders remembering the feeling of dread when she heard about the action. “It was like, ‘Wait, are we the bad guys?'” she says a few months later. “It felt like a callout from the public saying, ‘We support your efforts. But this is just not the way.'”
The moment distilled three problems bubbling under XR’s surface: First, as a predominantly white movement, founded in a small, wealthy town in England, XR has faced persistent criticism for its failure to include people of color and working-class communities in its activism. Second, the group is fiercely resistant to hierarchy, and has no formal leader and no effective way of vetoing actions, even when they cause internal divisions. And third, its strategy of disrupting the public walks a fine line between pressuring the government to act and becoming villains easily dismissed by the British media.
Falling donations and stagnant membership over the six months after Canning Town forced reflection and a rethink of core parts of XR’s operations. But just as XR announced a new strategy for 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Nationwide quarantine measures disrupted public life more than any XR action ever could, and prompted the group to temporarily suspend its central tactic of mass mobilization. The health crisis has also shifted the climate crisis down the agenda for governments, the media and the public.
Scrambling to learn from its mistakes and avoid losing hard-won momentum, XR is now planning a large-scale action for September. If the group gets its next steps right, it could offer a blueprint for activists around the world. If it flounders, XR could join the chorus of ignored voices shouting as the climate breaks down.
Rodger Bosch—AFP/Getty ImagesYoung XR activists demonstrate outside South Africa’s Parliament in Cape Town on June 1.
Since January, XR has made its headquarters in a hollowed-out apartment building in a trendy area of East London. On a sunny afternoon earlier this year, Gail Bradbrook, 48, sat at the kitchen table of a startup-like office on the first floor, surrounded by fellow activists busily typing on laptops. She acknowledged that the movement she co-founded has had a bumpy ride as it amassed more than 200,000 members worldwide in less than two years. “It feels like 15 of us started off pedaling on this bike, and then we realized we needed a train, so we keep sticking bits on while we’re pedaling,” she said.
It was in Bradbrook’s home in Stroud, southwest England, that XR began on a spring weekend in 2018. Fifteen environmental activists gathered to discuss ways to overcome the inertia on carbon emissions despite decades of warnings by scientists and pressure from NGOs. Drawing on the work of Harvard social scientist Erica Chenoweth, they decided they needed numbers. Chenoweth’s 2011 study of nonviolent civil-disobedience movements that aim to overthrow authoritarian governments concluded that those that engage at least 3.5% of the population always succeed. XR’s critics point out that demanding drastic action on emissions in a democracy does not exactly map onto Chenoweth’s scenario. But the group’s founders believe that if they can get 3.5% of a country’s population to participate in the “rebellion”–either attending actions or assisting behind the scenes–and combine that with a small core of a few thousand people willing to be arrested, as well as the passive support of 50% of the population, they can force governments into a position where taking climate action is less painful than XR’s disruption.
Bradbrook and her fellow founders envisaged a decentralized structure for XR. That has proved to be both its driving force and its Achilles’ heel. There’s a national U.K. actions team, made up of about a dozen people, that plans mass mobilizations, and a finance team that responds to funding applications from local groups. But there are some 400 of these local groups, all of which lead their own actions, with no single body in charge of sign-off. Internationally, more than 1,100 groups across 75 countries are working in a similarly loose structure.
That grassroots strategy drew in people who had never previously gotten involved in activism. Among them are grandmothers like Hazel Mason, 71, who had “never been a rebel” but went from trying to recycle more to taking to the streets. “I thought, Why am I hoping ‘they’ do something? Why don’t I do something?” she says. It also resonated with parents like Andrew Medhurst, 54, who told his colleagues at a pension fund that he “couldn’t ignore the crisis anymore” and quit in 2018 to start voluntarily coordinating XR’s finances, getting arrested three times during actions. In April 2019, thousands of XR rebels shut down central London, dominating the British media’s attention for two weeks. Millions of dollars in donations rolled in from philanthropists, celebrities and crowdfunders. While school strikers were raising global momentum around the climate crisis, XR seemed on the verge of a revolution in the U.K.
“What [XR] achieved, in a short space of time with few resources, was pretty outstanding,” says veteran activist Kumi Naidoo. After participating in civil-disobedience actions challenging apartheid in South Africa as a teenager in the 1980s, Naidoo served as director of Greenpeace from 2009 to 2015, and then as secretary-general of Amnesty International, before stepping down in December 2019 for health reasons. He says there’s “no question” that XR contributed to a shift in public consciousness on climate change, reflected in opinion polls that are “unrecognizable” from his time at Greenpeace. Naidoo sees XR’s more disruptive disobedience as “one of the only really strong, convincing parental voices” answering youth activists’ appeal for adults to act.
Extinction RebellionXR activists climb onto a train at London’s Canning Town station, prompting a standoff with commuters, on Oct. 17.
The nonhierarchical structure seems, in theory, to be democratizing and in line with XR’s belief in equality. But in practice, it has meant there was no one to blame for decisions that many felt were insensitive to Black people and other people of color. The Canning Town stunt was highly controversial within XR when its planners began sharing details days ahead of it. A statement released by its U.K. team hours after the action read: “Very few people in XR wanted this to happen, but the ‘postconsensus’ organizational model which we currently employ is such that it happened all the same.”
That did little to dampen the anger of critics. “From the get-go, they were asked by environmental justice campaigners in London to consult with communities about how to not alienate people,” climate-justice campaigner Suzanne Dhaliwal wrote in a London newspaper after the Canning Town incident. “[XR] is not taking heed of the call to look at its class and privilege blind spots.”
These blind spots are particularly apparent in the movement’s interactions with British police forces, which have a history of discrimination against Black communities. In July 2019, many heard a dog-whistle message in XR’s call on Twitter for police in London to “concentrate on issues such as knife crime, and not nonviolent protesters who are trying to save our planet.” In October, one XR member delivered flowers and a note thanking officers for their “decency and professionalism” to the Brixton police station in London. It was the same police station where, during the 1990s and 2000s, three Black men had died in police custody, sparking large local protests at the time. Kevin Blowe, coordinator for the Network for Police Monitoring, a watchdog group, wrote that the incident displayed a total lack of “empathy for communities who experience racist policing” and “outright, blatant racism [in] choosing to not ‘see’ race.”
Critics also point to the visible dominance of white people at XR’s actions, even in ethnically diverse cities like London, and to the core importance of confrontations with police and arrests in XR’s strategy. Aghaji, who is Black and has led youth-outreach efforts for XR, says the initial “focus on the arrests” in media coverage put off young people of color from joining the movement. “Arrestability does lie in privilege, and not everyone needs to get arrested,” she says. “I never really identified as arrestable.”
XR’s international chapters have also been criticized for centering white perspectives. In Canada, members of the Scia’new First Nation accused XR of entering their lands without permission while protesting a gas pipeline in February of this year. Some members splintered off from XR U.S. in opposition to language on its platform calling for “reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice.” (The rival faction, dubbed XR America, stripped out the specific language on race and class.)
In the U.K., XR’s decentralized structure has led to incidents that alienated the wider public and contributed to a narrative of its activists as careless. In September 2019, a group of XR activists, including co-founder Roger Hallam, attempted to use drones to block flights taking off from Heathrow, the U.K.’s largest airport, to protest air-travel expansion. Though XR had released a pre-emptive statement saying the group had collectively decided not to back such an action, it still hurt the movement’s image, says Jackie Scollen, a member of XR from a working-class area of County Durham, in northern England. “When my friends heard about that, they said, ‘You can’t do that.’ People work and save all year long to go on two weeks’ holiday to Spain or somewhere.”
XR activists interviewed by TIME say such unpopular actions contributed to a leveling off in sign-ups and donations in late 2019 and early 2020. XR is burning through its savings. From November to January, XR U.K.’s income averaged around $120,000 a month, while it spent close to $240,000.
Aghaji believes XR will have to learn to weather these unpredictable controversies. Imposing a top-down structure, she argues, would undermine the reason that XR has been successful in the first place. “It’s people taking power into their hands, saying the social contract is broken and rebelling in a way that’s true to them. I think that’s beautiful.”
Jeremy Selwyn—Evening Standard/ReduxXR protesters dressed as dead polar bears in Westminster, London, on Feb. 17.
On a Saturday in February, before the pandemic put an end to in-person meetings, a dozen people sat in mismatched chairs in the half-painted lobby of XR headquarters, trying to learn from the group’s rocky ride. During an all-day “DNA training,” designed to teach new members the movement’s core values, a session leader taught attendees how “to tell XR’s story” to get others involved. Tips included holding meetings in “inclusive spaces” that didn’t feel exclusive to white people and asking people about their personal experiences with the environment. There were things to avoid: using phrases that implied overpopulation was a problem; focusing on individual lifestyle changes rather than systemic change; and using “lefty language” (no examples were given). Almost every point set off a fierce debate among attendees. Rolled out at the start of the year, the workshop was an effort to learn from XR’s missteps and unify a movement that has sometimes struggled to agree on its message to the world.
Aghaji says the movement has been through an ongoing learning process on both race and class since Canning Town. “It was a turning point for us. The perspectives of marginalized groups are now at the forefront rather than just an addition.” One result has been an effort to emphasize that you don’t need to get arrested to take part in actions, Aghaji says. In January, XR started a team looking at how race and class oppression intersects with the climate crisis and why members of some groups were less likely to join XR. The movement has also intensified its focus in messaging on climate justice–the idea that since climate change is hitting harder and earlier in communities in the Global South, responses must be geared toward addressing systemic inequalities.
Antiracism protests that have spread around the world after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by police on May 25 in Minneapolis, have put further pressure on XR to address its failings on race. “We have made mistakes, and we’re now taking the time to listen, educate ourselves further and work out a plan for taking responsibility for these mistakes properly,” Alanna Byrne, a London-based member of XR’s media team, said in early June. “Racism is a key factor in the causes and continuation of the climate and ecological emergency, and tackling it needs to run through all aspects of our work.” The XR Internationalist Solidarity Network, a group formed in early 2019 and led by Black XR members from the Global South, would have a “much more” central role going forward, Byrne added.
George Cracknell Wright—LNP/ShutterstockCo-founder Gail Bradbrook speaks to activists blocking a road in Central London on Oct. 9.
XR organizers say they are more broadly shifting strategy toward a model that prioritizes the communities in which they operate. Co-founder Bradbrook says XR will ramp up outreach to local residents, getting members to knock on doors and talk with people one-on-one about how XR should organize locally, to avoid clashes. More surprisingly, the group will also move away from its focus on disrupting the public, which won it so much attention. Bradbrook says repeating the same tactic won’t sustain media interest. “We’ve made our point to the public. The public, frankly, are not the problem.”
Instead, XR will direct its actions at institutions, businesses and government bodies preventing climate action. “We can’t just be pissing people off,” agrees Scollen, the member from Durham. “We need to target the people with power.”
In late February, Scollen helped lead one of XR’s last major actions before the U.K. entered a lockdown, as 300 activists dressed as canaries blocked the entrance of an open-pit coal mine near Durham to protest its expansion. The action exemplified the new strategy, disrupting the mine owners, not the local area.
But not everyone is happy. Joel Scott-Halkes, 27, traveled up from London for the mine action. He describes a “mini civil war” inside XR over the decision to shift away from public disruption. A member of the U.K. actions circle, he spent two months working on the 2020 strategy. He argues that public disruption is what got the movement to where it is today, and that outweighs the risk of upsetting people. “The disruption is minimal and tiny compared to the disruption that’s going to come as the planet breaks down,” Scott-Halkes says.
In his view, the movement’s most powerful tactic is mass mobilization. When security forces can’t contain the protests, the argument goes, it will be easier for the government to take drastic action to cut emissions–what XR has been pushing for–than to do nothing and allow protests to continue. XR claims it came close to overwhelming authorities in October. London’s police force had to draft officers from elsewhere, and even resorted to issuing a ban on XR protests–a move England’s high court later ruled unlawful. “If we had even 3,000 or 4,000 more people, we would have done it,” Scott-Halkes says. “We would have broken something in history.”
Steve Bell—Camera Press/ReduxA die-in protest under the blue-whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum in London on April 22.
Events in 2020 have made that strategy much harder to execute. It was meant to be a landmark year for climate action. The U.K. was due to host this year’s U.N. climate conference in November, where international negotiators would gather to scale up emissions targets, five years after the Paris Agreement was signed. To ramp up pressure on lawmakers, XR had planned mass mobilizations for May and November.
But in May, the British government said it would postpone the summit by a full year because of the pandemic. Largely stuck at home since late March, XR activists have used their daily lockdown-sanctioned exercise periods to post posters or graffiti at oil companies and banks that invest in fossil fuels, urging the government not to give them bailout packages. In late June, a group of XR activists led a 125-mile march from Birmingham to London to protest ecological disruption by a planned high-speed rail link.
Fundraising has also gotten harder. Since March, XR’s monthly income has fallen to around $60,000, Medhurst, the finance coordinator, says. In mid-April, the group suspended payments to 150 activists who had been receiving small grants for living expenses. A recent $300,000 donation will help, but the pot is far smaller than in October 2019, when XR spent close to $1.2 million.
Kristian Buus—In Pictures via Getty ImagesThousands of Extinction Rebellion activists took over 5 bridges in Central London and blocked them for the day, November 17 2018, Central London, United Kingdom. The actvists believe that the government is not doing enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and they demand the government take radical action to save future generations and the planet.
COVID-19 has also threatened to sap the momentum of the climate movement as a whole. Some fear that in the rush to revive failing economies, countries will abandon their climate goals. Indigo Rumbelow, a 25-year-old member of the U.K. actions circle, says the pandemic has filled XR “with both hope and fear.” Governments could opt to prop up the fossil-fuel industry, she says. “But there’s also a sense that we can rebuild something new and create a more just society.”
To get there, though, effective organizing will be crucial. Naidoo says XR must “continue to do substantially better” on understanding race and class. For him, the convergence of COVID-19, the climate crisis and high-profile incidents of police brutality may create a “boiling point” for anger over inequality, making collaboration between environmentalism and other social movements essential. “It is critical that we have an approach that celebrates a million flowers blooming for the fights of justice,” he says.
XR appears to have embraced that philosophy. On July 3, it announced that it would stage its next large-scale action, starting Sept. 1. While following social-distancing guidelines, activists around the country will target institutions and businesses they accuse of blocking emission reductions, and “peacefully blockade” Parliament in London as it returns from a summer break. “There is growing frustration at government inaction, not just on climate but on our health, well-being, on racial injustice, inequality and more,” Byrne says. “It’s time to express that and come out on the streets again.”
Scollen, the organizer from the northeast, says XR’s future will be defined by its ability to make people from all parts of society feel empowered. “Most people, unless they’re highly educated and privileged, don’t feel like they can change anything,” she says. “But look around: it has started. People will see that you can be a part of this. You can do this.”
