Tag Archives: justice

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

by theacntnt1985-01 Posted on August 18, 2016

high water

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

By on Aug 18, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There is a lot of water in southern Louisiana right now. The region’s been lashed with rain for the past week — the water has inundated freeways, surged past levees, and left about 40,000 homes water-logged husks of their former selves. The rain has stopped, for now. And when the water finally drains, people will return to their homes, pick up what’s left, and start rebuilding.

But the climate science prognosis doesn’t look good. This is the eighth time in about a year that 500-year rainfall has hammered the United States, and climate change will make extreme weather events like this more common. That means, among other things, millions of dollars worth of property damage. Fixing everything up and managing the growing threat of climate-related destruction hinges on flood insurance — which relies on ever-evolving, incomplete maps to determine risk. But new models will make it possible to better predict floodplains as it becomes increasingly dangerous to live on the coast.

The system isn’t perfect, but for people living in flood-prone regions like southern Louisiana, it’s the best line of defense, says Rafael Lemaitre, a FEMA spokesperson. If you’re covered, FEMA will pay out as much as $250,000 to repair your home.

But there are problems with how those policies get parceled out. “So much of it starts with what you define as a floodplain,” says Craig Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University. FEMA creates flood risk maps that delineate areas of the region with a certain likelihood of being flooded every year. (An area that has a 1 percent probability of being flooded every year is called a 100-year floodplain.) Then, they base insurance premiums on where residents fall in those areas — the higher the risk, the higher the price.

Those maps, it turns out, are only updated every decade or so, when FEMA looks back on which places have flooded in the past. “It’s going to be a while before the recent flooding is factored into the maps,” Colten says. And the way water moves on the land is changing all the time: More developed areas with roads and parking lots lead to more runoff, for example. Climate change, too, is dramatically increasing the risk of flooding.

What coastal communities really need is predictive flood maps: projections of flood risk based on modeling. Right now, pretty much all flood insurance comes from FEMA, which, again, updates its maps infrequently and also allows residents to comment and push back on the boundaries, effectively letting them determine their own flood risk. Insurance companies, which might have the capital to invest in models that incorporate climate change, have largely stayed out of the business since the 1920s — partly because it’s too risky, partly because government-subsidized rates are too low for private companies to compete with.

But that may change soon, says Jeff Waters, a flood modeler at Risk Management Solutions, which models catastrophe risk for insurance companies. In recent years, he says, computers have finally been able to handle the computationally draining task of modeling something as dynamic as flooding across the U.S. Better modeling could lead to better estimates of risk in certain places, which would allow companies to price policies accordingly and residents to really understand how risky their locations are. And as FEMA enacts some much-needed reforms (like phasing out government subsidies, for one), it may become easier for insurance companies to offer up flood policies, too.

Another way to manage deepening risks, Colten says, is to widen the pool of people who buy into flood insurance. Currently, only the people living in 100-year floodplain areas are really expected to buy insurance — they’re the ones most at risk, after all. But if the insurance pool included people from 500-year floodplains, say, the risk would spread out more thinly. This scheme would’ve worked well for the flooding happening now, Colten says, since the water traveled far beyond the 100-year floodplain.

And FEMA is going with another, more direct way of managing the increasing risks of climate change: encouraging more severe weather-resistant infrastructure. Some of the funds FEMA provides for a disaster go toward rebuilding cities and houses to stricter code and in areas that aren’t quite so risky — say, at higher elevations or further away from the ocean. “Instead of constantly rebuilding for the next disaster, it’s much smarter to use federal dollars to build safer and build back,” says Lemaitre. As climate change risks climb and insurance costs rise to reflect reality, the shoreline of Louisiana will change, too: fewer buildings on the coast, and a lot more houses on stilts.

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Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

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This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now

by BernardoLuna Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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This June, we published a big story—Shane Bauer’s account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That’s “big,” as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary.

It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we’re told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR’s Weekend Edition picked it up. Montel Williams went on a Twitter tear that ended with him nominating Shane for a Pulitzer Prize (though that’s not quite how it works). People got in touch to tell us about their loved ones’ time in prison or their own experience working as guards. Lawmakers and regulators reached out. And lots of people offered thoughts similar to this, from New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum:

That’s a great sentiment, and we agree! But it also takes us to a deeper story about journalism and today’s media landscape. It starts with this: The most important ingredient in investigative reporting is not brilliance, writing flair, or deep familiarity with the subject (though those all help). It’s something much simpler—time.

Journalism often involves parachuting into a subject. We jump in, we learn as much as we can really fast, and we pass that on to our readers. That’s why journalists rely so much on quotes: We’re not usually experts at what we’re covering, so our job is to ask the right questions of the people who are.

But this kind of reporting doesn’t get you far when experts are biased, have vested interests (e.g., virtually anyone in politics), or simply don’t exist. On those kinds of stories, reporters do have to build up their own expertise. They need to immerse themselves in a topic, long enough for the accretion of detail to morph into insight.

There was a point when that kind of long game was a part, to some degree, of every newsroom. Reporters had beats so they could learn about an institution or a community over time. The good ones would accumulate a body of knowledge, and a b.s. detector to cut through the spin. The lucky ones would get to dive deep, chase a big lead, and spend months on a project. Sure, this was the exception, not the rule. But it was something news organizations knew they had to do to earn the public trust that would let them stay in business.

That started to change in the 1990s, when merger mania sucked many independently owned newspapers and TV stations into publicly traded corporations, with the resulting pressures to deliver big returns for shareholders. It kept going in the 2000s, when digital advertising sucked the profits out of news, and it got worse as hedge funds and private equity investors wrung extra “efficiencies” out of already diminished newsrooms. And it continues today, with venture capitalists and billionaire power players the latest to seek a payday—or political influence—by reshaping media in their image.

The first casualty with each of these rounds of retrenchment has been the long game. Veterans who’d built up the expertise to deliver insight were pushed out. Beat reporters were replaced by contractors on the hook for 5, 7, 10 posts a day. Those remaining were ordered to do “more with less” (or told, by cheery actors with robotic smiles, that artificial intelligence would soon do their jobs). (If you haven’t yet, let John Oliver depressingly, hilariously break it down for you.)

Stories that truly reveal something about the way power works are not going to happen in this framework. They take time (way more time than can be justified economically) and stability. They take reporters and editors who can trust their jobs will be there, even if money is tight or powerful folks are offended. They are driven by a desire for journalism to have impact, not just turn a profit.

Take our prison story. Shane started writing about criminal justice for Mother Jones four years ago, after he returned from being held hostage in Iran. (Let that sink in—how he used that horrible experience to help the rest of us understand what prison really is.) His first big piece, in 2012, was the result of spending several months investigating solitary confinement. Shortly afterward, he came on board as a staff reporter. That’s important: MoJo used to be a magazine written mostly by freelancers, but in recent years we’ve prioritized hiring full-time journalists, with the wraparound support of a real newsroom.

This stability and support is what made every one of our breakthrough investigations possible. It let our Washington bureau chief, David Corn, do the months of dogged reporting on Mitt Romney’s economic record that led to the 47 percent scoop in 2012. It enabled Josh Harkinson to dig into Trump’s white-supremacist fan base and discover the avowed racists among his delegates earlier this year. And it’s what has allowed us to do four years of in-depth reporting on mass shootings and the gun industry, investigations that have helped change the nature of that debate.

Shane’s prison project took more than 18 months. That included four months in the prison and more than a year of additional reporting, fact-checking, video production, and legal review, including work by more than a dozen other people on the MoJo staff. And that was the only way we could have gotten that story: By definition, incarceration is invisible to most people, and that’s doubly true for private prisons. Recordkeeping is spotty, public disclosure is limited, visits are difficult. The only people who can describe what really goes on inside are prisoners, guards, and officials, all of whom have a strong interest in spinning the story. To get at the truth, we had to take time, and go deep.

And we had to take considerable financial risk. Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.

MoJo did have support from three foundations for our criminal justice reporting. That’s amazing—but foundation grants only go so far. They are typically limited in time (a few years, tops) and scope (focusing on a particular issue or initiative). And they are finite: All of our foundation support put together accounts for roughly 15 percent of MoJo’s annual revenue.

How else, then, to pay for this kind of work? If you’ve been reading our stuff for a while, you know what we believe the answer must be: support from readers. It makes up 70 percent of MoJo’s budget, and it’s what has kept us independent, strong, and able to withstand the pressure (including lawsuits from billionaires) to let go of controversial stories. And based on your response to Shane’s piece, a lot of you totally get it.

But in order to really keep investing in the long game, we—and, we hope, you—will have to do something different. We’ve talked about how fickle ad revenue is. But fundraising is pretty boom-and-bust too.

Typically, nonprofits like us run big pledge drives that seek, frankly, to scare you into giving—”donate right now, or this VERY BAD THING will happen!” It’s not an approach that respects your intelligence, it makes for a bad user experience (lots of emails and online ads), and it doesn’t really match up with the work you want us to do. Because that work is not something you can do in fits and starts. It’s not about responding to an immediate crisis (or for that matter seizing a short-term opportunity—let’s hire a bunch of people and fire them in six months). The real work is about putting reporters on the beat, day after day, month after month.

So starting now, we’re undertaking a new experiment—scary, but exciting—in how we pay for MoJo’s journalism. And we’ll try to make the case with facts and logic (just like our journalism), not sensationalism and panic.

Here’s the bottom line: If you want us to play the long game, the most powerful thing you can do is to do the same. In other words, become a sustaining donor with a tax-deductible gift that renews every month. We don’t have an endowment or reserve fund sitting around somewhere, or advertising profits we can squirrel away. Support from you is the only reason we can do the work.

If you join us as a sustaining donor, you’ll be part of making the next prison project, the next gun violence investigation, the next 47 percent story happen. You’ll keep reporters on the beat, fact-checking those in power. If that sounds right, you can start your monthly support here.

But if you’re the kind of person who likes to nerd out on the mechanics—or really wants a look at the books before deciding to invest—let’s break it down some more.

In the past, our three big fundraising pledge drives typically raised between $125,000 and $200,000 each. Last year, we did better: Readers dug deep and gave $260,000 to help us pay down the legal bills we faced after winning a lawsuit from a billionaire political donor. Then you rose to the challenge again in December and April, pitching in a combined $415,000. And in the month since Shane’s piece published, we’ve had an extra spike in donations and subscriptions.

But banking on raising money in these kinds of fits and starts is a huge risk—and there are clear limits to how much of it we think we can do without being incredibly pushy with emails and ads on the site. Plus there’s little room to grow—and grow, at a time of crisis in both journalism and our politics, we must.

Here’s the other approach. If, before the end of our next scheduled pledge drive in September, we can find just 2,000 readers who value our reporting enough to each pitch in $15 a month, we’ll generate $30,000 in new monthly revenue, or $360,000 over the course of the next 12 months. That’s enough to fund a big project like Shane’s—every single year. And we hope we can get there largely with the argument you’re reading right now, instead of blanketing the site with fundraising ads or filling your inbox with panicky emails.

Is that a fantasy? Well, right now, hundreds of thousands of people are sustaining donors to public radio and television. At MoJo, we currently have about 2,000 sustainers who give about $28,000 a month. But there are some 185,000 of you who subscribe to the magazine, 250,000 who subscribe to our email newsletters, 1.2 million who follow us on Facebook or Twitter, and between 9 million and 10 million of you who come to our website every month. If 0.02 percent of the people who visit the site by the end of September sign up as sustainers, we’ll meet our goal. We have no idea if it will work—and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to pull out all the stops to figure out something else—but everything we know says it’s the right way to go. And if it does work, we will have proven something really important about how to keep in-depth journalism alive.

Are you in? Start your tax-deductible, monthly gift today.

We promised no panic or sensationalism, and we’ll stick with that. But we can’t overstate how urgent this is: Reliable, monthly contributions represent our best shot—and, we believe, your best shot—at ensuring a stable foundation for the watchdog reporting our democracy desperately needs. If you join in, you’ll be part of a big experiment that others can emulate: As you’ve seen with our previous posts on the business of media, we’re committed to transparency and sharing what we learn with our peers.

So let’s see if we can do this thing. We’ll keep you updated here, and we’d love your thoughts on whether this is the right direction and how to refine our approach. Let us know in the comments, on Twitter and Facebook, or at fundraisingteam@motherjones.com.

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This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now

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Pipeline company gets nasty as it tries to push huge new project through sensitive lands

by ChandaThibeault Posted on August 17, 2016

midwestern battles

Pipeline company gets nasty as it tries to push huge new project through sensitive lands

By on Aug 17, 2016Share

If pipeline companies learned one thing from the fight that took down Keystone XL, it’s that sustained and vocal criticism can achieve real political outcomes, so they shouldn’t underestimate their opposition.

Maybe that’s why Dakota Access LLC, the company building one of the biggest pipelines proposed in the U.S. since Keystone XL, is attacking its critics directly.

On Monday, Dakota Access filed suit against the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, asking for restraining orders and seeking unspecified monetary damages against a tribal chairman and other protesters who had been “occupying” land near pipeline construction sites.

The company has already begun construction on the 1,172-mile pipeline, intended to send up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil a day from North Dakota’s Bakken shale sites, through South Dakota and Iowa, to a refinery in Illinois.

Along the pipeline route, Dakota Access cuts across farmland, the Missouri, Mississippi, and Big Sioux rivers, and cultural and historical sites sacred to Native American tribes. In one location, the pipeline runs just 500 feet from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation border, according to organizer and property owner LaDonna Brave Bull Allard.

The tribe last week organized protesters to occupy land less than a mile from the tribe’s reservation boundary — land that Dakota Access had intended to cross in order to begin laying down pipe, said Nicole Donaghy, a native of Standing Rock and lobbyist for the Dakota Resource Council.

More than 500 protesters faced off with police and private, armed security guards; about 28 people have been arrested, reports the Bismarck Tribune. (Among their number was Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley, the star of the Divergent film series, reports the Associated Press.) Dakota Access did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

The Army Corps of Engineers in July gave the pipeline its final federal permits, despite the tribe’s pending lawsuit against the Corps, filed in D.C. district court, which has an injunction hearing scheduled for Aug. 24. The suit argues that the project violates the Clean Water Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, among other laws. The tribe hopes the court will rule in its favor and issue a stop-work order.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, landowners have filed suit against eminent domain proceedings, which they argue would only be legal if the pipeline were a public utility instead of being privately owned.

Despite protests and pending lawsuits, Dakota Access will keep laying pipeline in the ground in all four states. Unless Dakota Access is derailed or delayed, the pipeline should be operational by the end of 2016.

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Pipeline company gets nasty as it tries to push huge new project through sensitive lands

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

by Anh40L3815000 Posted on August 8, 2016

Hot Bods

Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

By on Aug 8, 2016Share

Sewage water isn’t the only thing competitors may be worrying about at the Rio Olympics: Hot temperatures and air pollution are already interfering with athletic performance. In a preliminary racewalking competition before the games began, 11 out of 18 competitors suffered from heat-related injuries. One athlete even passed out.

But this Olympics might be the best it gets. According to a report from Brazil’s Climate Observatory, as climate records keep falling, outdoor sports records could become much harder to break.

Already, marathon times are 2 minutes slower on average for every 10 degree Fahrenheit that temperature rises. In Rio, the problems are even more pronounced, because poor air quality from vehicle congestion makes high-performance outdoor sports difficult — even deadly. Each year, thousands of Rio’s citizens die from complications of air pollution, which is tied to lung cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and asthma.

“On hot days in polluted areas, it is healthier to go out and have a beer (in the shade) than to practice sport outdoors,” said Luzimar Teixeira, professor at the School of physical education at the University of São Paulo.

The report notes that competitors may be able to mitigate the effects of climate change through technological advances like high-tech equipment and clothing, but those advances are not likely to be available to athletes from less wealthy nations.

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Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

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The Supreme Court Just Blocked This Trans Kid From the Bathroom of His Choice

by EJZAugusta Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked a lower court order that would have allowed a transgender boy in Virginia to use the boys’ bathroom at his school when he returns for classes in September.

The student in question is 17-year-old named Gavin Grimm who was born female but identifies as male. After he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2014, doctors recommended that he live and be treated like a boy. For about two months, his school allowed him to use the boys’ bathroom, but after receiving complaints from parents, his school board adopted a policy that prevented him from doing so.

On Wednesday, in a 5-3 order, the justices temporarily blocked Grimm from the boys’ bathroom while the Supreme Court considers whether to take up a case concerning the Virginia school board’s policy. If the justices agree to hear the case, it would be the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on the question of whether trans students should be allowed to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates. Twenty-three states are currently suing the Obama administration over a guidance from the Department of Education that says it’s discriminatory to block transgender kids from bathrooms of their choice.

With help from the American Civil Liberties Union, Grimm sued the Gloucester County school board in June 2015, arguing that its policy blocking him from the boys’ bathroom violated Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding. Grimm initially lost his case in district court, but in April this year, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, kicking the case back to the district court and urging it to respect the Obama administration’s guidance. The district court then granted an injunction allowing Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom.

In July, the Virginia school board filed an emergency appeal with Chief Justice John Roberts to put the district court case on hold until the justices determine whether they will review the appeals court decision. The school board also asked Roberts for permission to prevent Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom when school resumes, arguing that parents might otherwise pull their kids out of school.

The Supreme Court agreed on both counts. In a concurring statement, Justice Stephen Breyer said he agreed to temporarily block the lower court order as a “courtesy” because the high court was on recess until October. “Granting a stay will preserve the status quo,” he wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented.

“We are disappointed that the court has issued a stay and that Gavin will have to begin another school year isolated from his peers and stigmatized by the Gloucester County school board just because he’s a boy who is transgender,” ACLU senior staff attorney Joshua Block wrote in a statement. “We remain hopeful that Gavin will ultimately prevail.”

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The Supreme Court Just Blocked This Trans Kid From the Bathroom of His Choice

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The Movement for Black Lives calls for fossil fuel divestment

by ZDQJocelyn Posted on August 1, 2016

The Movement for Black Lives calls for fossil fuel divestment

By on Aug 1, 2016Share

The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 groups including Black Lives Matter, released a detailed platform today to address the challenges that disproportionately affect black people — like environmental injustice.

A Vision for Black Lives identifies the public policies hemorrhaging the black community, and then provides possible solutions in the form of model legislation and policies.

The agenda comes in six parts, with sections that explicitly address the influence of the oil industry and environmental racism:

As part of the broader call to divest from criminalization and incarceration, the platform also calls for a divestment from fossil fuels. “Black people are amongst the most affected by climate change,” reads the agenda. Solutions include a strategy to invest in black cooperatives instead.
The call for economic justice also acknowledges environmental racism — including the way black communities have been built in close proximity to sources of pollution, like landfills and incinerators (and vice versa). Instead, the group calls for shuttering incinerators and financing renewable energy projects instead.
Black farmers face unique challenges, including flagrant racial discrimination. The platform suggests putting an end to black farm foreclosures and forgiving black farmer debt.

The platform focuses on policy as a tactic to address the myriad injustices black people face, including in the environment. Its release on the heels of the GOP and Democratic party conventions provides context for local, state, and federal campaigns aimed to meet the platform’s demands.

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The Movement for Black Lives calls for fossil fuel divestment

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Virginia’s Supreme Court Just Struck Down a Plan to Restore Voting Rights to 200,000 Felons

by BryanElkin95320 Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Virginia’s Supreme Court on Friday blocked Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s attempt to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 felons. The 4-3 ruling, which could have a significant impact on the potential swing state in November, comes three months after the Democratic governor issued an executive order to enfranchise felons who had completed their sentences and parole or probation as of April 22.

In May, Virginia Republicans sued the governor over the use of taxpayer money to make such an order, suggesting that the order would aid Democratic turnout in the general election. State Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Normen, Jr. said in a statement at the time that McAuliffe had “overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.” McAuliffe struck back, stating that the lawsuit would “preserve a policy of disenfranchisement that has been used intentionally to suppress the voices of qualified voices.”

The Virginia Supreme Court found that McAuliffe overstepped his clemency authority in granting 206,000 felons the right to vote through executive order and that it violated the state constitution.

“Never before have any of the prior 71 Virginia governors issued a clemency order of any kind—including pardons, reprieves, commutations, and restoration orders—to a class of unnamed felons without regard for the nature of the crimes or any other individual circumstances relevant to the request,” wrote Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons in the majority opinion.

“To be sure, no governor of this commonwealth, until now, has even suggested that such a power exists,” the justice wrote.

The court’s decision made Virginia “an outlier in the struggle for civil and human rights,” McAuliffe said in a statement Friday. He criticized Republicans’ lawsuit.

“I cannot accept that this overtly political action could succeed in suppressing the voices of many thousands of men and women who had rejoiced with their families earlier this year when their rights were restored,” he said, adding that he would “expeditiously sign” orders to restore voting rights to 13,000 felons. It was immediately unclear if the court’s order would affect McAullife’s plans to grant rights for those people.

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Virginia’s Supreme Court Just Struck Down a Plan to Restore Voting Rights to 200,000 Felons

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Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

by Franklyn86C Posted on July 20, 2016

You Break It, You Bought It

Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

By on Jul 20, 2016Share

One of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history will result in a fine second only to the one levied for the Gulf’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster — and the largest ever for a pipeline accident. Canadian-based Enbridge will pay $61 million for violating the Clean Water Act and $110 million in safety upgrades for its pipeline system that spans the Great Lakes, the U.S. government announced Wednesday.

The 2010 rupture near Marshall, Michigan, polluted the Kalamazoo River and tributaries with more than a million gallons of dirty tar sands oil. Workers in the Enbridge control room initially ignored automated warnings about the rupture and continued forcing oil through the broken pipe for several hours. Enbridge has already spent close to $1 billion on clean-up and related costs.

Although Enbridge initially denied its line was carrying bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, it became quickly apparent that this was no ordinary spill. The heavy oil sank to the bottom of the riverbed, increasing the length and difficulty of the clean-up. The spill occurred just as the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, proposed by an Enbridge competitor, was gaining momentum. President Obama ultimately denied Keystone’s construction permit last year.

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Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

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Gotta catch ’em all? It’s a lot easier if you’re white.

by romek52 Posted on July 19, 2016

Gotta catch ’em all? It’s a lot easier if you’re white.

By on Jul 19, 2016Share

For those of you who’ve deprived yourselves of the thrill that is Pokemon Go, here’s all you need to play the game: Pokemon (the little cute animals) and pokeballs (the little things that catch ’em). In cities, the Pokemon themselves show up all over the place. As for the pokeballs, you get a few for free when the game starts, but after that you need to visit a pokestop in order to re-up. But all pokestops are not located equally.

I’ve been playing the game for about a week now, and I noticed several screenshots from other players’ illustrated neighborhoods with considerably more pokestops than my own (I live solidly working class neighborhood of color in Los Angeles). I started a hashtag, #mypokehood, on Twitter to crowdsource some information about what pokestops looked like in different places.

Here’s some of what I’ve found:

Pokemon Go racially preferences some areas more than others. It turns out Niantic, which makes Pokemon Go, relied on a map from a previous augmented reality game called Ingress, which was crowd-sourced from its mostly male, tech-savvy players. The result is a high concentration of pokestops in commercial and downtown areas of some cities, while there are typically fewer pokestops in non-white or residential areas, if there are any at all.

Parks are filled with pokemon and pokestops — but that doesn’t help in neighborhoods of color that lack green space. It seems that public parks in cities are designated pokestops, regardless of the neighborhood’s racial makeup. But as Grist has previously pointed out, parks tend to be concentrated in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods.

Black players have reasonable concerns. Back when Ingress players were mapping out the landmarks we now use to play Pokemon Go, black players were targeted by police. According to @typhoonjim, who played Ingress, a “black opponent received thorough grilling” by cops when mapping out spaces in Baltimore — and he reports hearing of similar accounts in other cities. Omari Akil explains that, as a black Pokemon player, he fears that circling neighborhoods while playing the game could even mean death.

Muslim, Arab, and South Asian players might be considered a national threat when out catching Pikachu. What is considered suspicious behavior? According to Homeland Security, someone who loiters or takes “unusual, repeated, and/or prolonged observation of a building,” may be engaging in a “terrorism-related crime.” The problem is, playing Pokemon Go requires this exact kind of behavior — and whether or not it’s deemed suspicious might depend on someone’s religion or ethnicity.

Native American players living in reservations have fewer options. Because pokestops are concentrated in cities, rural players everywhere have trouble. But for Native Americans who live in reservations, it’s even tougher. Majerle Lister, who lives in the Navajo Nation, two hours outside of Flagstaff, says his friends, who want to play the game, haven’t found any pokestops. Angel White Eyes, who lives in Pine Ridge, said that there are a few pokestops there, but they’re a serious trek away.

The game doesn’t serve disabled people. It doesn’t matter that a pokestop is just a few doors away if you can’t leave the house. Pokemon Go players have to move around in order to hatch Pokemon eggs, catch new kinds of Pokemon, and fight in gyms. None of that works very well for disabled players, children stuck in hospital beds during a long-term stay, and others who aren’t guaranteed accessible sidewalks and transportation.

There’s no way to submit new pokestops. Niantic originally allowed Ingress players to submit potential locations using pretty straightforward criteria, as noted by @Charkitect  — but that’s been shut down, at least for now. It’s too bad we can’t add to the map and start shaping the world of the game to better match the world its players live in.

Pokemon Go illustrates systemic inequities. The tech-savvy, mostly male Ingress players who built this map didn’t just happen to end up where they did: A neighborhood’s tax base determines how good the local public schools are. Because white people earn more money on average, their kids get to go to better public schools. Those kids who have better backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are better suited to help games like Ingress create maps. Now, they’ve got a leg up on the most popular smartphone game on the planet — and they’re safer when they play it. That’s how systemic inequity works: It influences every facet of life, even in augmented reality.

Moving forward, there are some quick fixes for Pokemon Go, like adding pokestops at all bus stops — but that will only help part of the problem. It’s going to take a lot creativity, as well as a lot of patience, to fix augmented reality, starting with real reality.

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Gotta catch ’em all? It’s a lot easier if you’re white.

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