Nobody ever believed the pandemic would go easy on children. The virus might target them less directly than it targets older people, but other challenges—the loss of school, the loss of play, the loss of time with friends—would exact their own emotional toll. A study published April 29 in JAMA Network Open sheds light on how serious that harm has been.
The work, led by psychologist Tali Raviv at Northwestern University, involved a survey of more than 32,000 caregivers looking after children from kindergarten to grade 12 in the Chicago public school system. The definition of “caregiver” was broad, including parents and grandparents as well as anyone 18 or older with principal responsibility of caring for children in a household. The sample group of the families was ethnically and racially diverse—39.3% white, 30.2% Latinx; 22.4% Black; and 8.1% mixed.
The pivot point of the research was March 21, 2020: the day that in-person instruction ended in Chicago public schools and home-schooling began. Raviv and her colleagues asked each caregiver to rate the children they were looking after on how they exhibited 12 different traits in the time before the end-of-school date, and in the time after (the surveys themselves were filled out between June 24 and July 15):
The results were striking. On every one of the negative traits the overall scores went up, and on every one of the positive ones, there was a decline. Some were comparatively small shifts: Talking about plans for the future fell from 44.3% to 30.9% (a change of 13.4 percentage points); positive peer relationships declined from 60.4% to 46.8% (a 13.6 percentage-point drop). But in other cases the change was more dramatic. Just 3.6% of kids overall were reported to exhibit signs of being lonely before the schools were shuttered and 31.9% were that way after, a massive shift of 28.3 percentage points. Only 4.2% of children were labeled agitated or angry before the closures, compared to 23.9% after, a jump of 19.7 points.
A small number of the children studied, Raviv says, improved over the before-and-after period. “About 7% actually benefited” from the shift to in-person learning, she says. Self-harm and suicidal ideation, for example, declined from 0.5% to 0.4% among Black children, and from 0.4% to 0.3% among Latinx kids. “Maybe school was a stressful place and remote learning was good for them.”
But that’s not at all the case for most kids and, as with so many things, race, ethnicity and income play a role, though in this case it was Black and Latinx children generally faring better than whites, instead of the other way around.
Overall, the figure for the “loneliness” characteristic was 31.9% post-school closures, but it broke down to 22.9% among Black kids and 17.9% among Latinx, compared to 48.4% among whites. Since all three groups clocked in at just over 3% before in-class learning ended, the resulting increase in loneliness was much higher among whites. On the “hopeful or positive” metric, 36.4% Black kids exhibited the traits, compared to 30.7% in Latinx households and just 24.6% among whites—a decline in all three cases, but a more precipitous one among whites who were down from 55.7%, compared to 40.2% for Latinx kids and 49.8% for Blacks.
The explanation, Raviv suspects, could be that the greater level of privilege whites generally experience left them less prepared to deal with the hardships of the lockdowns when they came around.”It may have been more unusual for white families to have to cut back,” she says. “For some lower-income people it might not have been that much of a change.”
But Black and Latinx families suffered in other ways. Across the board, they were more likely to have a family member who contracted COVID-19; to have lost a job, lost a home, lost health insurance; to have difficulty getting medicine, health care, food, and PPE. Even if the Black and Latinx children’s change in overall mental health as tabulated in the study was less severe than that of white kids’, they experienced hardship all the same. “They were more likely to see these additional stressors,” says Raviv.
Going forward, Raviv and her colleagues write that the pandemic can be something of a teachable moment for educators, clinicians, and policymakers. The research, they say, points to the need for a renewed commitment to better mental health care—especially access to telehealth; improved access to school- and community-based mental health services; improved funding for communities in need; and a better effort to eliminate structural inequality. The pandemic, eventually, will end. The emotional pain kids in every ethnic group have sustained could stay with them for a long time to come.
Few people think about the time Michael Collins didn’t go to the moon. Collins, who died of cancer on April 28 at age 90, is best remembered as Apollo 11’s command module pilot—in some ways the unluckiest man on the luckiest mission of all time. It was Apollo 11 that, in the summer of 1969, stuck the first crewed lunar landing, taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface, while Collins, bless him, stayed aloft in the command module orbiting 60 miles above, keeping his uniform clean and white while his crewmates got dirty on the endless gray beach that is the moon.
All three men got the credit, all three got the parades and the medals and the world tour and the TV appearances. But Armstrong and Aldrin were the two truly limned in the light of history. Collins? Well, said many, his was a yeoman’s job.
It wasn’t, of course, but never mind. History had other plans for Collins, and in some ways he had already made his mark—a much subtler and arguably richer mark—seven months earlier during the celebrated Dec. 1968 flight of Apollo 8, the first time human beings ventured out to the moon—albeit just to orbit, not to land and walk around. Collins was originally tapped to fly on that mission, but a bone spur in his spine grounded him until he could undergo surgery. He ended up in Mission Control instead, working the capsule communicator, or “Capcom,” console.
He was there throughout much of the flight, but most notably during the pivotal moment a few hours after launch, when the astronauts were still in Earth orbit and would fire up their engine and light out for the moon. The maneuver was known as trans-lunar injection (TLI), and it was Collins who made the famous call.
“Alright Apollo 8,” he said, “you are go for TLI.”
And then he slumped in his seat. The moment, he knew, was a defining one for humanity. A species that had been walking around the planet for a quarter of a million years but never ventured beyond a few hundred miles above the surface was at last preparing to shove out of the safe harbor of low-Earth orbit and head for the bottomless waters of deep space. And all he had been given to say was that one flat scrap of space-speak.
“I remember thinking, ‘shit, we ought to have an oompah band and some celestial [celebration],'” Collins told me when we spoke about the mission in 2015. “And in the usual way, NASA reduced it to a little bit of jargon no one could understand.”
But Collins understood, and NASA itself understood, and history…well, history is writ from moments like that. Collins, as it happened, almost missed his chance to have any role in that history.
APAstronaut Michael Collins addresses a crowd at the New Orleans Michoud Assembly Plant as a model of the giant Saturn 5 booster that sent the Apollo crew on their way to the moon rests in the background on Sept. 6, 1969.
A U.S. Air Force test pilot who eventually rose to the rank of Major General, Collins was born into a military family in Rome, where his father was on assignment at the time. He later returned to the U.S., where he attended West Point. He was not quite far along enough in his career to compete for selection in the first astronaut class named in 1959, but he applied for the second class in 1962—and was rejected.
“I do recall that when I applied to be an astronaut we had to undergo some psychiatric tests,” Collins told me in a later conversation, in 2019, during the 50th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 mission. “And the first time, I flunked. They assailed me with a whole series of inkblot tests. And I identified very carefully and properly this one, that one. We got down to the last one. It was a blank piece of paper. And I said, ‘Oh sure, that’s 11 polar bears fornicating in a snow bank.’ And, lo and behold, I was rejected.”
The next time around, during the selection for the third astronaut class, he played it smarter. “When I got to that point I said, ‘I see my mother, my father. My father’s a little bit larger than my mother. And they both are very stern and wonderful people.’ And I passed that time.”
It’s a good thing he did. Collins was not just an extraordinary pilot and astronaut—he went to space once before Apollo 11, aboard the 1966 flight of Gemini 10, when he became the first person to walk in space twice—he was also a reflective, even poetic man. “A withered, sun-seared peach pit,” was how he described the surface of the moon in his 1974 autobiography, Carrying the Fire. Of the time he spent by himself in the Apollo 11 command module, he wrote: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”
NASA/APAstronaut Michael Collins wears his space helmet for the Apollo 11 moon mission, on July 20, 1969.
As for that TLI moment? Here’s how he described it when he wasn’t just speaking to the likes of me, but writing for the ages: “After [the engine burn] there were three men in the solar system who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a different place, whose motion obeyed different rules, and whose habitat had to be considered a separate planet. The three could examine the earth and the earth could examine them, and each would see the other for the first time.”
It was that reflectiveness, that lyricism, that long view of his mission—and all of the Apollo missions—that best suited him for his supernumerary role on Apollo 11. As Armstrong and Aldrin cast off in the lunar module to head from orbit down to the surface, he bid them goodbye with a “You cats take it easy.” When they returned, he almost—almost—kissed Aldrin on the forehead, he told me, so glad was he to see his crewmates back and whole.
And in the interval he spent aloft, alone in his command module, circling round and round the moon while those same crewmates planted a flag and set out their experiments and pressed their bootprints into the lunar surface, he quietly did his job, ensuring that they would have a spacecraft to return to at all. “I’d be a liar or a fool if I said I had the best seat on Apollo 11,” he said in our 2019 conversation. “But I can say absolutely, with total honesty, I was delighted to have the seat that I had.”
Michael Collins could have had another seat on a later mission to the moon, this time as commander and this time leaving his own bootprints behind. Deke Slayton, the head of NASA’s astronaut office, promised him as much before he left. But Collins passed up the opportunity.
“I can remember I told him, ‘Thanks Deke,'” he said. “‘If Apollo 11 is having problems and isn’t going to land, I’ll come back and knock on your door. But if it’s successful, I decline your offer for another flight.'”
It did succeed, and he did decline. And that’s just fine. Michael Collins served and flew and thrived and wrote and left his rich, nearly musical voice behind to remind us that he passed this way. That’s more than enough. Godspeed, General Collins.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin filed a protest against NASA’s decision to award Elon Musk’s SpaceX a $2.9 billion award to develop a human-lander system to return astronauts to the moon.
Blue Origin called on the U.S. Government Accountability Office to stay NASA’s deal with SpaceX and correct “errors” in the procurement process, according to the protest. Absent those problems, Blue Origin claimed that NASA would also have selected its proposal, which was submitted by a team that included Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Draper, an engineering and avionics firm.
“NASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute,” Blue Origin said Monday in a statement accompanying the challenge to NASA’s decision. “Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America’s return to the moon.”
The protest opens a new front in a fight over government contracts as Blue Origin races to catch up to Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is already a close NASA partner. The Blue Origin-led team bid $5.99 billion compared with $2.91 billion for SpaceX, based on NASA’s evaluation of the proposals, Bezos’s rocket maker said in the protest. The final award, for a landing demonstration without crew and another one carrying astronauts, totaled $2.89 billion.
Blue Origin said the decision by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration risks the nation’s return to the moon because of its reliance on a single provider. That puts NASA at the mercy of SpaceX’s ability to figure out how to fly its Starship and Super Heavy booster despite the complexity found in the company’s approach, Blue Origin said.
NASA declined to comment due to pending litigation. A representative for SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The United States convened 40 heads of state in a virtual climate summit this week, with the goal of eliciting commitments from attendees for radical reductions in carbon emissions.
The U.S. pledged 50% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030, and others announced their own new targets — with the overall goal of putting the planet on track to carbon neutrality by 2050, the minimum needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
But before patting themselves on the back for a job well done, the leaders of those 40 nations, many of them advanced economies, might want to take a look at some of the countries that didn’t make the guest list.
Several developing and less stable nations are going in the opposite direction, building fossil-fuel energy infrastructure at this moment that will increase emissions for decades to come. Without their buy-in, the world going net-zero by 2050 is an unattainable goal. And environmentalists and climate finance experts say the wealthiest nations need to be doing more to bring the rest with them.
Shifting the burden of emissions
Just a few days before the summit, on April 11, the presidents of Uganda and Tanzania, along with the heads of French oil giant Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, signed an agreement to start construction on a multi-billion-dollar pipeline project connecting the oil fields of Uganda to the Tanzanian coast some 1,400 km (850 miles) away.
When completed in 2025, the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline [EACOP] will turn Uganda into sub-Saharan Africa’s fifth biggest oil producer, while increasing its CO2 emissions by 34 million tons a year — more than six times the country’s current output of 5.5 million tons.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has called the project an “economic victory,” bringing thousands of jobs while funding Uganda’s transition to affluence. The pipeline, he says, could do the same for neighbors South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, becoming the “core of bigger developments,” should they choose to exploit and export their own vast oil resources.
It’s true that EACOP’s total emissions pale in comparison to the output of most countries attending Biden’s climate summit. But the project still underscores how vulnerable global net-zero pledges are to competing demands for economic growth, says Landry Ninteretse, the Kenya-based Africa Regional Director for the climate advocacy group 350.org. “You can’t say ‘yeah we’re going to meet this net-zero target by 2050, but at the same time let’s allow a couple of projects to move forward.’”
In addition to reduction pledges, he says he would like to see the summit’s attendees start providing real climate solutions for smaller or less wealthy nations. “That starts with a commitment to stop any new fossil fuel development project, whether it’s coal, gas or oil, while prioritizing investments that will help transition away from fossil fuels.”
It is disingenuous, Ninteretse says, for countries like China or France to commit to reducing emissions at home, while allowing private or public companies to build fossil fuel projects abroad. A dozen coal-generated power plants are currently under construction in Africa, and another 20 have been announced, according to the Global Coal Plant Tracker.
Those investments, says Ninteretse, “are coming from the very fossil fuel corporations that are no longer authorized to operate in most of the global north context, so they are seeking new ventures in the global south, where maybe the issue of transparency, accountability, and environmental regulations are not so well enforced. They’re just shifting the burden to a continent that is already suffering the most from the impact of climate change.”
How to grow while staying green
Right now, the countries of Africa are together responsible for less than 4% of global carbon emissions. But their population is set to double by 2050, to 2.5 billion people. The need for jobs, and for energy to power those jobs, is paramount. Yet development aid and private investment into green energy is significantly lower than in traditional fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas will account for up to two thirds of the continent’s electricity generation by 2030, according to a January report from the University of Oxford published in the journal Nature Energy. While some African nations, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, have set ambitious “green growth” targets, other governments argue that the cost of renewable energy is simply too high for their developing economies.
The only way to flip Africa’s energy balance is if there is significant investment, says Mark Carney, the United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance. “Of course the objective here is to rapidly grow the these [African] economies alongside decarbonization. That puts a huge emphasis on the availability of finance.”
As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, wealthy nations agreed to set aside $100 billion a year in climate financing to help developing nations adapt to climate change and transition to renewable sources of power. But it is still underfunded—in 2018, the latest information available, countries had only committed a total of $78.9 billion—and does nothing to stop the dozens of fossil fuel projects already in progress on the continent.
Another challenge for the international community will be convincing people from emerging countries that a green transition will benefit them. Ugandans themselves largely support the East Africa oil pipeline, says Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. “They are seeing this oil like a blessing, something that is going to bring lots of money and jobs to the country. They do not have the awareness of the destruction that is going to happen to our country, to the planet.”
Better education is vital, she says. So too is holding the private sector to account. Total’s 72% ownership share in the project flies in the face of its stated commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050, says Nakate. “My question is, how is Total achieving net-zero by leading the construction of the East African crude oil pipeline? Because constructing this pipeline means that we won’t be able to limit the global temperature rise. Net zero does not mean that you allow more decades of environmental destruction.”
Total, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and the Ugandan and Tanzanian national oil companies still have to secure insurance and raise $2.5 billion in debt financing for the project to move forward. She is hoping that a global awareness campaign could make investment banks think twice before committing funds. “This fight is not something for activists in Uganda alone,” she says. “If the African continent really wants to go net zero, it has to opt for more sustainable ways of development. Our future is not on fossil fuels, our future is on renewables. And this is something that our leaders, and our companies, have to understand.”
Developing countries will have an opportunity to address those issues in just a few months, at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow in November. Carbon emission reductions will still be a hot topic, but net-zero pledges alone won’t be enough: with all 197 signatories to the Paris Agreement hoping to be in attendance, discussions will focus on a more equitable approach — where countries with the lowest emissions can negotiate for greater assistance to stay that way.
Sian Proctor may owe her life to Apollo 11—literally. Born in Guam—the daughter of an engineer who worked at the local tracking station that helped NASA maintain communications with its lunar crews—she was the fourth child of a couple that she suspects did not plan for so many kids, and came into the world just nine months after Apollo 11 stuck its historic first moon landing.
“I think I was a celebration baby,” she says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for human space flight.”
Proctor herself has a lot to celebrate this year. Come September, if all goes to plan, the 51-year-old professor of geoscience at South Mountain University in Phoenix will climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and rocket into low-Earth orbit, spending up to three days aloft before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, won’t be the first aboard a SpaceX ship to carry crew; it won’t even be the second or the third. What it will be is the first flight aboard any spacecraft flown by any country or company to be crewed entirely by non-astronauts—four people who until this past February did not know they would be flying to space at all, and now will go to a place that fewer than 600 people in the world have ever gone before.
“I thought a flight like this was a decade away,” says Proctor. “But it’s now.”
From the beginning, the American astronaut club was exceedingly undemocratic. NASA would periodically throw its doors open to new entrants, and you were more than welcome to apply—provided you were a military pilot or an engineer or a biologist or a physicist, of a certain age and a certain fitness and a certain temperament, and prepared to go through exhaustive training over the course of years before your turn finally came to fly. Chances were it never would come, because chances were you wouldn’t be selected for training in the first place. It was a fine system—one that gave us our Armstrongs and Aldrins and Grissoms and Glenns—but it was a decidedly exclusive one, too.
Early this year, Jared Isaacman decided it was time to shake things up—and he was in a position to make it happen. Isaacman, the 37-year-old billionaire founder of online payment processing provider Shift4 payments, is a private pilot who always had a hankering to go to space. Will and wallet are not enough to secure yourself a seat aboard a NASA spacecraft, but SpaceX is a different matter—a private company under government contract to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station, but free to sell flight tickets to anyone it wants to in its spare time. Isaacman approached the company in January and bought four seats for an undisclosed sum.
One slot—the commander’s slot—would be his. The question was how to select the three other people he ultimately chose to fly with him, all of whom TIME visited with this week at Cape Canaveral. Part of the answer, Isaacson decided, would be philanthropy. Long a supporter of multiple childhood charities (including the Make-a-Wish Foundation), Isaacman turned his attention this time to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. He paid more than $5 million for a 30-second ad during last February’s Super Bowl to announce the Inspiration4 mission and raise funds for the hospital. The ad attracted $13 million in donations, and Isaacman added his own $100 million. For his first crew member, he chose Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude and a survivor of childhood bone cancer. Arceneaux will be the youngest American to fly in space and the first of any country to go aloft with a prosthetic body part: a metal rod in place of the portion of her right femur she lost to her disease.
“I’m a little concerned about traveling with it, with all those g-forces on it,” Arceneaux admits. “But I want other people with other prostheses to fly and somebody has to go first.”
One of the remaining two seats was allocated through a competition in which entrants designed an online store using Shift4 Payment’s software and shared their entrepreneurial and space aspirations via social media. The other went to the winner of a random drawing among contestants who made a donation to St. Jude. Proctor won the seat determined by designing the online business. The fact that she was chosen at all represented a sweet bit of redemption: She applied to NASA for selection as an astronaut twice before, and in 2009 made it as far the final 47 out of 3,500 applicants before being cut.
“At least one of the people chosen in that class has not even had a chance to fly yet,” says Proctor. “I may actually be going to space before I would have gone if I’d been selected by NASA.”
The final winner was Chris Sembroski, 41, an Iraq war veteran and engineer at Lockheed Martin in Seattle. Sembroski was actually not the person originally chosen—a close friend of his won the drawing and got the call from Isaacman first, but chose not to go for personal reasons. He recommended Sembroski fly in his place, and Isaacman agreed.
“Jared called and told me that my friend had won, and then he said, ‘but he’s elected to pass this up and is passing it on to you. Congratulations, you’re part of Inspiration4,'” Sembroski recalls.
The new crew is being fast-tracked to space. Never mind the multiple years NASA astronauts spend training for a mission, the Inspiration4 team will get no more than six months. Some of their work—fitness tests with University of California, Los Angeles doctors working with SpaceX; centrifuge runs at the NASTAR aerospace center in Bensalem, Pa.; long hours spent in Crew Dragon simulators—is the stuff of any astronaut training. Other parts—like camping with Isaacman for three days on the flank of Mt. Rainier next week—is particular to this mission.
“I want everyone to know what it’s like to be very, very uncomfortable and to push themselves anyway,” Isaacman says. “It helps build confidence when other challenges come up.”
The flight itself will bear Isaacman’s mark too. At his request, the spacecraft will be flying at an altitude of 540 km (335 mi), higher than the 410 km at which the space station orbits. “We want to go past the altitude we’ve grown comfortable with,” Isaacman says. “We want to say ‘Let’s stretch ourselves.'” Since the Crew Dragon will not be going to the station, SpaceX is removing its docking collar and replacing it with a domed window—the better to take advantage of that more rarefied view.
The crew will be doing more than sightseeing in their three days aloft. There will be science experiments to run and maintenance chores to perform, and Proctor plans to teach a college lesson from space. Then, too, there will be history to make. The physics of space travel—the blistering speeds and the heavy g-loads and the huge, explosive machines necessary to make the trips—will perhaps never make rocket flights beyond the atmosphere as routine as airplane flights through it. But space travel can at least become more routine, more egalitarian—a pursuit not just for humanity’s elite, but for some of the rest of us. Inspiration4 is an extraordinary mission—with the paradoxical goal of making space flight a more ordinary thing.
Rockets are built slowly—slowly and exceedingly carefully—which is in keeping with giant machines on which humans stake their lives and nations stake their prestige. In NASA’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, America’s next great moon rocket—the Space Launch System (SLS)—is being constructed with all that in mind. It is here too that TIME set up half a dozen cameras over the course of two months, capturing 3 million images for a time-lapse video that makes it possible to compress those months of work into just a few kinetic minutes.
Under the eyes of the cameras, the rocket’s twin solid-fuel boosters came together—each of them 177 feet tall, weighing 1.6 million pounds and generating 3.6 million pounds (1.6 million kg) of thrust. Twenty-five percent taller than the solid boosters on the space shuttle, the twin engines are made of five separate segments, compared to the shuttle’s four. When they are completed, they will be attached to a central rocket towering more than 33 stories high. Taken together, the entire SLS will be nearly as tall as the celebrated Saturn V, which launched nine crews to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, and will generate 8.8 million pounds (four million kg) of thrust—significantly more power than the Saturn V’s 7.5 million. It will easily be the most powerful rocket ever built.
A rocket this big does not come cheap. Developing both the SLS and the ground systems that will support it will cost $11.5 billion, NASA says. And this is for a rocket that, unlike the space shuttle or the reusable boosters built by SpaceX, will be flown once and thrown away. According to a 2019 estimate by the Office of Management and Budget, the cost of building and flying a single SLS will reach $2 billion. With alternatives available on the private market—both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance build heavy-lift rockets—many skeptics have questioned why so budget-busting a booster is needed at all. NASA answers that while the private rockets may have muscle, they don’t have as much as the SLS. The Falcon Heavy’s liftoff thrust, for example, is 5 million pounds (2.25 kg). That makes a difference, since it may take two launches of a Falcon Heavy to lift as much payload as a single SLS, significantly cutting into any savings from a switchover to private rockets.
Then there is the principle of sunk costs. When you’ve spent north of $11 billion to get something built, it’s much harder to scrap the work and junk the hardware than it is when you’re early in the development phase. No one suggests that NASA is imprudently rushing the SLS, but no one denies that with every bolt that’s turned and with every meter the rocket grows, it becomes harder to throw it all away. That, at least, should ensure the ongoing assembly and completion of the single SLS now under construction. With the Biden Administration having voiced its support for NASA’s plan to have astronauts back on the moon in this decade, SLS partisans are at least cautiously optimistic that there will be more rockets to follow.
Work will continue on the SLS through this summer and into the fall. Then, it will at last be rolled out to the launch pad in preparation for an uncrewed test flight around the moon at the end of this year or the beginning of next. If things go as NASA promises they will go, the SLS will begin carrying women and men to the moon by 2023—marking the first time humans have left low-Earth orbit since 1972. The liftoff should be thunderous—rattling windows and shaking loose plaster in nearby buildings as the Saturn V once did—and the lunar journeys should be wondrous. For now, the work in the Vehicle Assembly Building continues—as the moon lies patiently waiting.
When he was a child, James Owuor loved hearing the elders talk about the way life used to be. So it comes as something of a surprise that at 38, he is now the one tasked with the job of describing the Before Times in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Before Lake Baringo started to rise, before it flooded and stole everything he knew.
“At the beginning, we just thought it was a bad rainy season, that the water would recede when the dry season came. It didn’t,” he says ruefully, peering over the edge of his motorized canoe at what used to be houses below the milky brown waters. Over the past decade, an unprecedented increase in annual rainfall—widely attributed to climate change—has raised the lake by 40 ft. (12 m), inundating nearly 22,000 acres and destroying homes, businesses and Roberts Camp, the lakeside resort where Owuor has worked for most of his adult life.
In 2014, he watched the waters overtake the two-story-tall shorefront lodge. The restaurant went next, then the bar. In September, the resort’s entrance gate on the road to the nearby town of Kampi Ya Samaki went under. Navigating through the drowned remnants of downtown, Owuor points out the remains of a fish factory’s roof. A crocodile paddles past the submerged rooms of the Lake Breeze Restaurant and Bar while a hippo grunts from the nave of a flooded church. Water laps at the third-floor balconies of the luxury Soi Safari Lodge, an 80-room resort that once employed 300 locals.
Eventually, he says, “people will have to leave this place and find somewhere else to live. If they were running a business, that means they probably will not have that business anymore. Life is drastically going to change.”
Khadija M. Farah for TIMEFestus and Veronica Parkolwa stand at the entrance of their former home by Lake Baringo in November.
An even bigger threat looms. The nearby alkaline Lake Bogoria is also rising. Twice as salty as seawater, and home to more than a million flamingos, Lake Bogoria is on the brink of breaching its own natural barriers. If the waters rise up by another 4 m, says Professor Simon M. Onywere, a geologist at Kenyatta University’s department of environmental planning, it could flood freshwater Lake Baringo with a deadly spill of alkaline waters. The two lakes used to be 12 miles (20 km) apart. Over the past decade, climate change has nearly halved the distance.
The merging of the two lakes would be devastating, says Paul Chepsoi, an environmentalist and advocate for local Indigenous rights from the area. “It’s not just a worst-case scenario. It’s an ecological and human disaster.” More than 100,000 people depend on Baringo for income, from either fishing or agriculture. A saltwater influx would destroy both industries. “It means that livelihoods will be affected for generations to come,” Chepsoi says, standing in the middle of a paved road that once led to the gates of Bogoria’s national park. Water laps at his feet. A nearby lakeside lodge, like the park entrance sign behind him, is mostly underwater.
Nothing short of a catastrophic drought—the kind that would also destroy livelihoods—will stop the rising waters. “The people here will have to leave,” says Chepsoi. Many, he says, are already being forced to migrate to neighboring towns and cities largely unprepared for the influx. “The pressure of so many new arrivals will overwhelm the services providers,” he worries. “They are not prepared with housing, water, health care facilities or police.” Migration may be inevitable, but if the destination cannot absorb the new migrants, they may find themselves even worse off.
Khadija M. Farah for TIMEThe remnants of Kilimo Estate by Lake Nakuru are now only accessible by boat.
In some parts of the world, climate change brings drought. In Kenya’s Rift Valley, it has brought torrential, out-of-season rains over the past decade, which, combined with deforestation, have resulted in rising waters in all of the valley’s eight lakes. Some have nearly doubled in size, drowning pastureland, farms, homes, schools, churches, clinics and businesses in what Elizabeth Meyerhoff, an American social anthropologist who studies Rift Valley communities, calls a “slow-motion tsunami.” By the end of 2020, one of Kenya’s wettest years on record, Baringo had risen by several meters, and had claimed 34 sq. mi. of land.
The local ward administrator says that a health clinic, a technical college, five schools, seven churches, 48 shops and 1,250 houses—home to nearly a third of the population—have been destroyed. Thousands in the Rift Valley lakes region have been forced from their homes. They are part of a new, global movement of refugees fleeing not conflict but climate change.
“If you just lose your income that is one thing, because you can adapt. You find another job or another field,” says Meyerhoff. “But once you lose everything— your home, your school, your clinic, your road, your church—then it’s an impossible situation. You become an environmental migrant because you have to find those facilities in some other place.” She is no detached observer; her own home for the past 40 years is just a few inches away from being swallowed by Baringo’s rising waters. In her notebook, she carries a photo of her teenage children leaping from her garden’s cliffside edge into the lake 40 ft. (12 m) below. Now in their 30s, they could sit in the same spot and dabble their feet in the water. They are begging her to pack up and leave; if she does, she will need to get a boat—the road to her house is already underwater.
Khadija M. Farah for TIMEJudy Lewiri stands next to her former home on Ol Kokwe, an island within Lake Baringo. She was forced to move to higher ground and rebuild on borrowed land.
Some 24 million people—more than three times the number fleeing armed conflict—are displaced each year by ecological disasters such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves and rising sea levels, according to an October 2020 analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a global think tank headquartered in Sydney. In the next 30 years, some 1.2 billion more people could be displaced if greenhouse-gas emissions continue on an upward trajectory, accelerating global warming and amplifying climate impacts, particularly in rural areas where livelihoods are dependent on the kind of agriculture most affected by changing weather patterns.
For a long time, experts have seen this kind of migration as flowing from the failure of carbon-spewing nations to rein in their emissions, along with the inability of poorer governments to protect their citizens through adequate adaptation measures. But that view is changing: there comes a point where no amount of infrastructure can hold back the sea, bring back the seasonal rains or cool the global climate. At that point, “migration becomes the adaptation strategy,” says Vittoria Zanuso, executive director of the Mayors Migration Council (MMC), a global organization that works with cities to develop comprehensive urban-migration programs. For many of these climate migrants, cities and towns will be their final destination.
Wealthy countries are not exempt. A 2018 study, published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, predicts that climate change will push 1 in 12 Southern and Midwestern residents of the U.S. to move to less affected areas in the Northeast and Northwest over the next 45 years. “It’s no longer a question of if climate migration is happening but rather who, how much, where and when,” says Alex Randall of the U.K.-based Climate and Migration Coalition. “Up until now, the focus has been on stopping people from migrating in the first place. Now the focus needs to be on how to make them an asset rather than a burden for the places they are going.”
Cities need migrants in order to grow, but chaotic, undirected migration can be as disruptive as an influx of salt into a freshwater lake. That means preparing towns for a new generation of climate migrants by building up infrastructure and increasing services from sanitation to education and health care—often a pricey undertaking for cash-strapped municipalities. New York City’s annual budget per resident is approximately $9,500; Nairobi’s is around $74.
Khadija M. Farah for TIMEGerrard Otieno sits on a boat in what used to be his living room. He is among hundreds of people displaced by Lake Nakuru’s rising waters.
Several cities—including Orlando; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Freetown, Sierra Leone—have launched programs to build climate resilience while making sure new arrivals have opportunities for both safe housing and fair employment. These programs are usually funded by the municipality, but in order for them to expand, more investment is needed. International climate funds should play more of a role, says Randall. “Once you accept that moving is a form of adaptation, we would potentially get to a point where climate-adaptation finance could be spent on helping people move safely, or making sure cities had the necessary infrastructure for coping with rapid growth.”
As part of the discussions that led to the Paris Agreement, wealthier nations committed to contribute $100 billion a year to help poorer countries combat climate change through loans, grants, cash and private investments. The Green Climate Fund, as it is known, is the world’s largest fund dedicated to addressing climate change, but so far, only 20% of global contributions have gone toward adaptation, with the rest largely going to greenhouse-gas-reduction projects—despite a stated goal of 50-50 allocation. (Donor nations make the final decision on project financing.)
To developing nations that typically bear a lesser responsibility for the climate crisis, it’s an egregious oversight. “When it comes to a country like Bangladesh or Kenya, where our emissions are small to start with, telling us to use the money to reduce emissions doesn’t make sense,” says Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). “We need the money for adaptation; that should be the priority.” Zanuso, of the MMC, estimates that urban-adaptation projects—enabling cities to absorb migrants in a way that helps them and their host communities flourish—receive only 3% to 5% of the adaptation funding that has been made available.
Khadija M. Farah for TIMESarah “Pirate” Mwaniki and her fishing crew make a plan for the night.
When the rising waters of Lake Nakuru, 85 miles (137 km) south of Lake Baringo, claimed the rural settlement of Mwariki in September, Evelyn Ajuang, a 41-year-old widow with close-cropped dark hair, had nowhere to go. She had just spent her entire life savings building and furnishing a four-bedroom house and had nothing to fall back on. So Ajuang took a single room in a low-income neighborhood in the middle of Nakuru town. She sold her goats and chickens to cover three months’ rent—besides, the concrete warren of crammed shacks offered no space for livestock. Now, unable to sell the eggs, milk and vegetables that once provided a steady income, she fears the uncertainty ahead.
Ajuang, like most of us, has only a vague understanding of how rising carbon emissions could trigger the rains that have flooded the Rift Valley lakes, but she knows enough to blame it for destroying her life. “Climate change is why I don’t think I will ever return to my home,” she says, eyeing the four rooms’ worth of furniture stacked to the ceiling of her rented room.
Ajuang has been thrust unprepared, and unsupported, into urban life. Every market day, she goes to the wholesale market across town to buy the vegetables she once grew in her own garden, which she sells for a slight profit in her new neighborhood. But transport is expensive, and competition is high. Most months, she can’t even make her $30 rent. So far, 153 families from Mwariki have lost their homes; another 174 farmers have lost their fields. Most are sheltering with family or charity organizations in town. While Kenyan authorities say they are looking into the matter, the former residents of Mwariki say the government has yet to distribute any substantial aid or even broach a resettlement plan, leaving victims in agonizing limbo. At least one has committed suicide, says community organizer David Kahoro; several have suffered heart attacks, and many are facing destitution. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Khadija M. Farah for TIMEEvelyn Ajuang, 41, was forced to move when Lake Nakuru’s rising waters flooded her home.
Sub-Saharan Africa is already one of the fastest urbanizing regions, with around 450 million city dwellers. That number is expected to climb to 621 million by 2030, the equivalent of adding two New York Citys to the continent each year. Climate change has been a major driver of this urbanization and is likely to increase the pressure on city infrastructure and resources, says sociologist Marc Helbling of Germany’s University of Mannheim. Helbling has tracked 50 years’ worth of urbanization trends in 133 countries and found that rising temperatures consistently lead to higher levels of rural-to-urban migration.
Done right, urbanization can foster economic growth. No modern country has ever reached middle-income status without urbanizing first. But uncontrolled, it can result in slums, mismanaged sprawl, poor public health and rising insecurity for residents—a city that is less inclusive, less productive and less sustainable. An influx of climate migrants could drive the development of several African megacities (population 10 million or more) into global powerhouses within the next decade and a half—but it could also create unprecedented mega-slums.
“If cities don’t start planning now for climate migrants, this will certainly increase all the problems that come with uncontrolled urbanization—overpopulation, increased pollution, sanitation challenges—and it means that they won’t be able to pre-empt the negative or indirect impact of those migrants,” says Linda Adhiambo Oucho, executive director of the Nairobi-based African Migration and Development Policy Centre.
That means doing something that few governments are good at: preparing for a crisis that hasn’t yet happened. Urban planning is a slow science, says Oucho. “We don’t want to get to a situation where we are talking about what to do about mass displacement when climate refugees are already streaming into the city; we need to start addressing it now while it is still manageable.” In part, that means expanding schools, health clinics, sewage systems and transport networks, but it also means making sure that the new arrivals move into safe areas where they won’t be exposed to additional climate hazards, like the flooding and storm surges that already threaten the low-income neighborhoods usually found in low-lying areas.
Most important is making sure that rural migrants are able to transition to urban livelihoods. “We don’t want to see cattle herders begging on street corners because they don’t have the skills to thrive in the city,” says Oucho. “The only way climate migrants can become a positive factor in urban growth is if they have the retraining and skills transfer that will allow them to adapt and survive and find new opportunities.”
Khadija M. Farah for TIMELow-income housing in Langa Langa, Nakuru, where Ajuang was forced to relocate because of rising water levels.
While Kenya is only just starting to see the impacts of climate migration, some countries have had years of experience and can offer a template for urban-adaptation solutions. Bangladesh, with its population of 163 million relatively poor residents residing on a flood-prone delta threatened by rising sea levels, was once the global symbol for climate-change victims. But over the past decade, the nation has embarked on a multipronged adaptation strategy that is now starting to show results. “We are still very vulnerable,” says Huq of the ICCCAD, “but that vulnerability isn’t the story anymore. It’s how we deal with the vulnerability.”
The key, says Huq, is long-term thinking. Even as the adult population is taught to adapt by switching to salt-tolerant rice, or to farm shrimp instead of vegetables, younger generations are offered an education that will allow them to eventually flourish in an urban setting. “The second order of adaptation is preparing people to move by their own volition, not being forced to move [by climatic conditions] but being enabled to move and resettle in towns with greater protection.”
Huq’s center, which focuses on climate change and adaptation in developing countries, also works to divert migration streams away from the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, toward secondary cities better prepared to absorb the flows. The center identified some 20 target towns on the basis of their ability both to withstand climatic changes and to offer employment and education opportunities for newcomers. The most overlooked part, he says, is what he calls the “software” that accompanies the “hardware” of infrastructure development: working with civil-society organizations to “help residents understand that there will be climate migrants coming in and that they need to be welcomed and supported so they can settle in and become citizens of that town.” Otherwise, he says, conflict between groups could derail progress.
To a certain extent, every place will have to keep its own unique geography in mind. The state of New Jersey, for example, has worked with Rutgers University to map out the areas most likely to flood as sea levels rise in the coming years in order to forestall risky development projects. That kind of thinking should be more widespread, says Randall, particularly when it comes to the poorer urban areas where climate migrants are most likely to settle. “What we are seeing at the moment is people leaving a rural area affected by drought, for example, and moving to a city where they’ve managed to find work but are living in an informal settlement that is vulnerable to flooding. They may have moved, but they have traded one kind of climate risk for another.”
And in some cases, a proactive climate-adaptation policy may mean helping whole communities start all over again. In Louisiana, government officials are spending $48.3 million to relocate several dozen households from the low-lying Isle de Jean Charles to higher ground 40 miles away, as part of the first federally funded, climate-change-induced community resettlement project in the U.S. Construction on the new houses started in May 2020.
Wholesale community relocation is expensive and best used as an option of last resort, but Ajuang, who lost her home to the rising waters of Lake Nakuru, can’t help wondering how different her life would have been if the government was able to offer her another property. She doesn’t think victims of the floods should get money, but having a safe place to land and the resources to start over would have helped. She worked for years to buy her own house to be self-sufficient in retirement and is desperate to regain that autonomy.
Wading hip-deep past what used to be her front porch one recent afternoon, she shoos away a pelican stalking fish in her old goat pen. Referring to the hustle that helped her get her own home, she says she would happily do it all over again, given an opportunity. She just needs a dry piece of land to start. “Without somewhere to go, the dreams I had for my future and my life will end just like that.”
—With reporting by Billy Perrigo/London and Sandra Mutuku/Nairobi
