UCSC Astronomers Reject Researchers’ Complicity with the Genocide of Palestine

This letter is written 100 days and 75 years since the beginning of the Israeli state’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine. After 57 years of colonization of Palestinian land in the West bank; after 16 years of siege on the Gaza strip; after Palestinians have been subjugated under a dehumanizing apartheid state on their own ancestral lands,[1] we now watch with horror as the Israeli government (hereafter referred to as “Israel”) accelerates its project of genocide under an international spotlight. Since renewed Israeli aggression on October 7 2023, at least 31,497 Palestinians have been killed – 92% of whom are civilians, and nearly half of whom are children.[2] This is a staggering number – compare this to the infamously deadly Syrian Civil War, with a 25-38% civilian casualty rate.[3] 

As internationally banned white phosphorus bombs rained down on Gaza,4 a call to action came from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions to end our complicity with the slaughter:

“Palestinian trade unions call on our counterparts internationally and all people of conscience to end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes – most urgently halting the arms trade with Israel, as well as all funding and military research. […] This urgent, genocidal situation can only be prevented by a mass increase of global solidarity with the people of Palestine and that can restrain the Israeli war machine.” [5]

As people of conscience who love life and wish to see it protected, as astrophysicists who keenly understand just how precious and lonely life is in the vast universe, and as researchers who are made complicit in Israel’s war crimes by our university’s investments and research products, we can no longer in good faith engage in academic research that enables the murder and subjugation of our siblings around the globe.

We, academic workers of the UC Santa Cruz Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, commit to demilitarizing our research by:

(1) withholding academic labor benefiting militarism; 

(2) refusing research collaboration with federal military institutions as well as private arms and defense companies;

(3) calling upon faculty and PIs within our department to disclose funding sources, resist suppression of political speech, and support their students in divesting their labor in the pursuit of ethical research.

The United States military is Israel’s greatest supporter. Without the U.S., Israel’s military infrastructure, which is actively being used for the mass slaughter of civilians in the West Bank, Gaza, and targets outside occupied Palestine, would crumble. To date, the U.S. has sent $158 billion (non-inflation adjusted) in bilateral aid, 86% of which flows into the Israeli military – the U.S. is single-handedly bankrolling one sixth of Israel’s military budget.[6] 

Our University of California holds an ugly place in this ecosystem of blood money. UC has received $295 million in research funding from the Department of Defense in FY 2022 alone.[7]** UC Santa Cruz alone received $10.5 million in FY 2022.[8] In return, the products of our research lubricate the churning gears of the war machine.

Technology that astronomers have developed for science is being misused to surveil and target people both within and outside the U.S. While astronomers prefer to look up, airborne and satellite military surveillance look down, using many of the same optics, image processing techniques, and controls used by astronomical satellites and developed by astronomers. Hyperspectral imagers (known as integral field spectrographs to us) were first developed by astronomers[9] and have been workhorses for our field since – but they are also used for identifying and surveilling targets[10] (and proposed for use in facial recognition[11]). Adaptive optics, independently invented by military and civilian astronomers, can de-blur images taken through the Earth’s atmosphere, allowing ever more precise surveillance[12] – which curtails the freedom of everyone, from civilian protesters[13] to occupied Palestinians.[14]

Beyond astronomy, the UCSC Applied Mathematics department received a 5-year $170,000 grant for “Mathematical Analysis Of Human Response To Millimeter Wave Heating.” The nightmarish weapon using this heating effect already exists and is in use by the U.S. Military – the Active Denial System (ADS) is a millimeter wave ranged weapon that causes heating and intolerable pain in its target, and has been proposed for use in both active combat and controlling protesters.[15] 

UC’s continuing unwillingness to divest from Israel[16] as it commits genocide under an international spotlight demonstrates that, unlike us, they are not bothered by the suffering that our research actively propagates. 

Demilitarizing education is an ethical priority: our research enables the surveillance and slaughter of our Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Syrian siblings with ever-greater efficiency. Further, demilitarizing education is a climate crisis priority: the U.S. military’s emissions are greater than those of entire industrialized countries,[17] and there is no teaching and learning on a dead planet. Universities must put their monetary and intellectual resources towards building a world where war is not necessary, not stoking the flames of rabid militarism. 

We call on the University of California to divest its money from apartheid, genocide, and militarism. Cut the flow of money and intellectual property from UC’s coffers into those of the US military, defense companies, and the apartheid state of Israel. 

We call on UC faculty to divest their research from apartheid, genocide, and militarism. 

  • At minimum, disclose all sources of funding that support your research and students. Support students who wish to divest their intellectual labor in pursuit of ethical science.
  • Fight to withhold your research and patents from military applications. Campaign your institutions to reclaim ownership of your intellectual property and its applications – it’s your research, you deserve to control its use.
  • Disclose and critically consider your collaborations with Israeli universities. Isolating individual researchers is unacceptable punishment that conflates an individual with their institution; however, universities are institutions that launder money, intellectual property, and prestige for the countries in which they are based. Academic collaboration is tacit approval of these institutions’ complicity, theft, and violence.

We call on all academic workers everywhere – graduate students, postdocs, lecturers, faculty – to divest their labor from apartheid, genocide, and militarism. 

  • Think critically about why the fruits of your labor are enticing to military funders, and work to prevent your beautiful science from being used for inhumane purposes.
  • Spread these actions beyond our own department and into yours. Here is our Action Packet to help you get started!

Solidarity forever. Within our lifetimes, Palestine will be free.

Isabel Kain, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Malik Bossett, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Douglas dos Santos Grion Filho, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Tenley Hutchinson-Smith, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Anonymous Graduate Student, UAW 2865
Anonymous Graduate Student, UAW 2865
Kyle Davis, Graduate Student Worker, UAW 2865
Nicholas Scarsdale, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Alexandra Mannings, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Deno Stelter, Assistant Project Scientist, UAW 5810
Tyler Gordon, Postdoctoral Fellow, UAW 5810
Madelyn Broome, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Anonymous Graduate Student Worker, UAW 2865
Sierra Dodd, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Anonymous Graduate Student Worker, UAW 2865
Mikayla Wilson, Graduate Student Worker
Kendall Sullivan, Postdoctoral Scholar, UAW 5810
Maissa Salama, Postdoctoral Scholar, UAW 5810
Anonymous Graduate Student, UAW 2865
Anonymous Postdoctoral Scholar, UAW 5810
Anonymous Graduate Student, UAW 2865
Diego Garza, Graduate Student Worker, UAW 2865
Sven Heydenreich, Postdoctoral Scholar, UAW 5810
Anne Dattilo, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Pedro Jesus Quiñonez, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Alejandra Rosselli-Calderon, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Prasiddha Arunachalam
Jules Fowler, graduate student worker, UAW 2865
Anonymous Graduate Student, UAW 2865
Anonymous Faculty Member
Anonymous Faculty Member
Anonymous Staff Member
Anonymous Postdoctoral Scholar, UAW 5810

**Corrigendum:

• In the original letter, we stated: “UC has received $25.86 billion in research funding from the Department of Defense in FY 2023 alone.[7]” This has now been corrected to “$295 million in research funding from the Department of Defense in FY 2022 alone” and the link to reference [7] updated.

Notes from Palestine organizing 11.22

Just wanted to send a quick update before the Thanksgiving holiday (in the US), which, of course, is a twisted concept under the framework of settler-colonization. On this note:

Events:

  • Nov 25 (Saturday 1pm ET): “Science under Occupation” hybrid teach-in/forum hosted by SftP Montreal, joined by Palestinian medical trainees in Cuba.
  • Nov 27: No Tech for Apartheid’s online panel.
  • Nov 29–Dec 5 is “Read Palestine Week.” SftP magazine has joined with >300 publications on a solidarity statement. Please see the list of all articles on Palestine we published in the past. We encourage everyone to read, discuss among you, and help advertise them (hashtags #ReadPalestine, #LirelaPalestine and #اقرأ_فلسطين)

Info:

  • We are collecting and updating testimonials from scientists in occupied Palestine, and working toward providing material support.
  • We are building a coalition with Just Mathematics Collective and Particle for Palestine (please sign-on their respective statements) to expand our current organizing activities.
  • More letters to sign from the “Responsible AI Community”
  • A survey of cultural institutions and their political stance. *We are trying to expand on this by focusing on academic institutions and labor unions* Please sign up to join our organizing teams.

For those who get some time off from work, it’s a great opportunity to bring your whole family to your local protests!

Palestinian Scientists Speak

Thank you very much for reaching out. The situation is horrid. Birzeit went online right away but it is limping along and the students are refusing to attend online classes. I wish they would attend online classes. It is not safe for them to travel to campus due to the safety on the roads leading to campus. We are unsure if the universities will be able to pay salaries in coming months.

My research on biodiversity is greatly restricted, yet I continue to make collections and conduct research on native plant propagation and restoration.

At this current stage my field research and collection work is too vulnerable to interference to be made public, but I do appreciate your assistance.

Perhaps we could discuss ways in providing research support to faculty at Palestinian universities who are attempting to carry out research, with small grants, research assistance, server/cloud donations, software, equipment, etc.

Thank you,

—O (Birzeit University)

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to say what is happening to us right now. In fact [the atrocity] started years ago when we were occupied and forcibly removed from our homes and land in Palestine. From that time till now we are suffering all horrible ethnic cleansing and mistreatment.

I don’t know if the world forgets that we are under occupation and blindly took all the Israeli media that “we are terrorists and want to kill them,” or that they know that we are so oppressed. Either way, I don’t know why they never move to help us.

We just want to live in peace and have our freedom like any other people in the world.

Here, we don’t have rights to move freely. Any moment they will stop you and tell you to “go back.” Where? I don’t know. “Just go back.” That’s all. Here, the soldiers have full rights to kill any Palestinian and at the end they will tell you that we threaten them. Settlers with the help of the army are terrorising Palestinian civilians and killed many poor civilian Palestinians. Israelis have full access to roads built in Palestine area A,B, or C. But we don’t.

We are living in concentrated camps waiting to be killed.  Here you have gates at every village. They will close it whenever they want. In some villages they close the gate after 6 pm and open it for a specific period of time. Like a jail. It is a military occupation running for 75 years.

Every day when I go to work I kiss my kids because I don’t know if I would come back. Just why?

The problem is that the majority of Israeli were taught that we are animals and should be killed. They don’t want to give us our basic needs of life. They want to suffocate us and force us to leave. They do it slowly and systematically so the world can’t see. They build settlements in all hilltops and for us we are not allowed to build at all in area C. Where to go? It is my home here; I was born  here; I will die here.

For doing research, we don’t have access to many chemicals and equipments. Yes, many chemicals are being refused, me personally, 2,4-D, a plant hormone is refused.

Gaza is a concentration camp, controlled by sea , land and air. There are 2.2 million peoples in 360 square km.

No clean water, no jobs , no hopes. What to do? Fight back. That’s what they did. They know that this will cost them a lot. But in any case, they are being killed solely in this open prison. What the Israelis are doing is killing children and women, terrorising Gazans so they will leave. Here, their plan is being carried out: kick them out to Sinai. This is not self defense.

No sir. They want Gaza because it has a huge gas revenue and the proposed route (alternative route) to transfer good from East to West that is to pass through Gaza. Americans know this; European know this; that’s why they are silent about the horrific killing of kids and women.

We are living under a brutal regime.

Regards,

—N (Tulkarm, West Bank)

Thank you for your kind solidarity and for being fully aware about what is happening here in Palestine.

I am a professor located in Nablus, West Bank. Despite being quite away of war in Gaza, we are in direct touch an effect of this war. Currently we are facing a full closure in the West Bank which made us living in total isolated cities. Moreover we are experiencing daily military invasions from the Israeli army which made us unable to pursue the academic semester and convert to virtual teaching. In addition to these challenging circumstances we are experiencing the following issues:

1. There is a massive anger towards the Western governments as we now believe that human rights are just private tools for the benefit of white people. The students as well as professors are not being able to exercise their daily routine because of the horrifying news coming from Gaza as well as the current conflict in the West Bank. We simply believe that we are the next target. We believe that is war is not against armed resistance, but also against any civilized existence of Palestinians including hospitals, economy, universities and history.

2. We start believing that the racism in the West turns from individual behavior to a national policy, especially when we see the official promotion of the fake posts and stories about what is happening in Gaza.

3. We feel, especially in the UK, that there is a “Black masking” of racism by putting all Black officials in the front.

4. We simply believe that the West’s colonization of the East is still existing, but instead of being directed by Western governments, they outsourced to Arab governments who are doing that.

5. In simple words,  all Palestinians now are supporting war-based solutions as we now believe that the Israeli and the Western governments will only appreciate peace when they only feel war.

Please stay in solidarity and let the people know that all what we need is be treated as humans.

Kind regards,

—T (Nablus, West Bank)

Notes from Palestine Organizing 11.14

It’s been 38 days of genocide, with no end in sight. Millions of people marching, agitating, and calling for a ceasefire are signs for hope, but class war is a protracted war, and there is much more to be done.

  • Join our organizing teams by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/2NcMzQ6K38AjcVxH6
  •  All SftPers should follow PACBI and join the academic and cultural boycott of Israel both as individuals and as members of your institution (see USACBI) or unions (see Labor 4 Palestine). Please get in touch with us if you’re unsure how to push your institution/union to take a firm stance against genocide.
  • SftP Montreal–Canada will be hosting a forum on November 25 (and see flyer attached) to discuss science and healthcare in Palestine and Cuba. We will be joined by Palestinian medical students from Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). Please attend and show solidarity.
  • SftP magazine will be soliciting articles and onboarding editors for a new Science & Palestine issue. Please read our statement and pitch your article ideas.
Here are other sign-on letters, campaigns, and organizing events from our coalition partners:
  • American Medical Association (AMA), a well-known reactionary political entity, unsurprisingly voted against a ceasefire. If you work in healthcare—espeically in light of Israel Occupation Forces attacking hospitals as its military objective—please sign see this open letter.
  • UAW Region 9A’s call for ceasefire.
  • Just Mathematics Collective (JMC) has joined USACBI. If you work in mathematics, consider joining JMC’s campaign.
  • Breakthrough Science Society India is circulating a sign-on letter. They are also organizing an “International Convention Against War and Destructive Use of Science” of which SftP will play a part. Please reach out if you’d like to help with this.
Other resources:

Notes from Palestine Organizing 11.3

It’s been 27 days since the slow genocide perpetrated by Zionists accelerated into a full-on massacre. The contradictions inherent to this unjust system in which we live are brought to the fore for many to see. The responses to the atrocities of those in power vis-a-vis those of ordinary people in the streets are but only one salient example. SftP has not only made a clear stance but also begun mobilizing. While we’re still in the early phase of coordinating, below we’d like to share a few resources, calls to action, and related events in the coming days:

Here are also some other items initiated by our partner orgs. Please consider responding/attending in solidarity:

  • Heathcare Workers for Palestine petition and event. For more on healthcare in Palestine, it’s also worth checking out the health blog from Jewish Voice for Peace
  • People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty sign-on in solidarity with Gaza
  • No Tech for Apartheid and Tech Workers Coalition’s joint media campaign
  • Rank-and-file UAW members sign-on letter to UAW International to issue a statement in support of Palestine. This is of our particular interest for STEM labor agitation.
  • Letter to HHMI (parent company of the journal eLife) regarding its recent Zionist-enabled firing of its chief editor
  • teach-in about the complicity of science in genocide organized by a few planetary scientists in our network
  • Comprehensive analysis of current events from Palestinian perspectives (by the publication Electronic Intifada).

Elsewhere in SftP:

  • Climate change teach-in on Nov 11 in NYC+live stream
  • “Science under Occupation” teach-in on November 25 in Montreal+live stream (detail and link TBD)

Lastly, please consult this calendar, be in the streets, be with the mass, and protest.

La lucha palestina es nuestra lucha: Declaración de SftP

Mientras lamentamos las vidas perdidas debido al recrudecimiento de la violencia contra Palestina y sus gentes nos preguntamos en profundidad, ¿por qué está pasando lo que está pasando en Gaza?

El Ministro de Seguridad Nacional de Israel, un ultranacionalista instigador de la violencia condenado ocho veces, incluso por cargos de disturbios y apoyo a una organización terrorista, a quien en su día se prohibió servir en el ejército israelí, está al mando de su aparato de seguridad.

El Ministro de Finanzas de Israel declaró su intención de “ser cruel”, habló de los palestinos como “animales humanos” y estableció el plan para privar a Gaza de alimentos, combustible y agua.

Gaza, hogar de dos millones de personas, la mitad de ellas niñas y niños, y que desde 2007 es una prisión al aire libre sitiada por el Estado israelí de extrema derecha, está ahora mismo bajo bombardeos aéreos incesantes que exponen a la gente y al medio ambiente a sustancias químicas tóxicas como el fósforo blanco. 

El Primer Ministro de Israel dejó claro el objetivo de su gobierno de evacuar a 1,1 millones de palestinos en el norte de Gaza, lo que, según él, es “sólo el comienzo”. Se trata de una masacre y limpieza étnica premeditadas.

Los gobiernos de Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Francia, Italia y Alemania rápidamente prometieron su “apoyo firme y unido” a Israel, cuyos líderes ahora están ayudando y apoyando este genocidio.

 Esta injusticia histórica no ha ocurrido de forma aislada. Es la culminación de un proyecto sionista de un siglo de duración facilitado por la clase capitalista en todo el Norte Global a través de la máquina de guerra militar-industrial que se beneficia de la desposesión y destrucción de la tierra palestina. A través de los principales medios de comunicación que se alimentan de la deshumanización del pueblo palestino, borrando su historia y convirtiendo los sentimientos de humanidad en pretextos para la barbarie. A través del desarrollo tecnocientífico (del que todo el aparato científico-tecnológico es cómplice y nosotros y nosotras como trabajadores del mismo, también), financiado y canalizado para reforzar el aparato de apartheid de Israel. Y a través de la hipocresía del mundo académico occidental, que, a pesar de todos sus valores profesados de “antirracismo” y “descolonización”, continúa aceptando y legitimando la colonización.

Por lo tanto, es nuestro deber como miembros de Ciencia para el Pueblo –una organización nacida de la lucha contra las atrocidades estadounidenses en Vietnam, con predecesores que lucharon contra el apartheid en Sudáfrica, contra los regímenes fascistas en toda América Latina y, sobre todo, contra el imperialismo estadounidense– tomar medidas concretas en este terrible momento y plantar las semillas del cambio revolucionario.

1) Como científicos y científicas, debemos educarnos con análisis profundos y exhaustivos de la historia, las circunstancias y las estructuras. La lucha contra la colonización siempre ha sido librada por personas de todas las etnias y religiones, y al sionismo históricamente se han opuesto líderes, científicos y activistas judíos de izquierda. Nos solidarizamos inequívocamente con el pueblo palestino y condenamos los más de setenta y cinco años de crímenes sionistas que han desembocado en este genocidio.

2) Como trabajadores y trabajadoras dentro del complejo académico-industrial, los productos de nuestro trabajo son subsumidos por fuerzas sistémicas y utilizados para la guerra, lo que nos impulsa a reflexionar sobre nosotros mismos y las instituciones para las que trabajamos. ¿Cuánta financiación ha recibido nuestra institución de fundaciones con objetivos explícitamente sionistas? ¿Se relaciona esto con la insensibilidad hacia estudiantes palestinos que recientemente se han manifestado en sus instituciones universitarias sobre los acontecimientos que se desarrollan en Gaza? ¿Qué técnicas, ideología o ambas simultáneamente (como en el intento de biologización de la raza judía) se han desarrollado en cualquier campo de estudio, bajo las limitaciones impuestas por nuestro propio sistema colonial, para mantener el status quo? ¿Cómo han sostenido el Estado israelí y sus aliados occidentales la noción de “progreso” en nombre de la ciencia para enmascarar el retroceso de su colonialidad? Este momento revela la urgente necesidad y oportunidad de lograr un mayor nivel de conciencia política entre científicas y científicos. Debemos acelerar este proceso.

3) Como activistas y promotores de actividades sociales, la reflexión sobre nuestra complicidad apenas alcanza el mínimo requerido. ¿Qué podemos hacer como organización para apoyar materialmente la causa palestina? ¿Qué podemos aportar a los y las compañeras en primera línea que están resistiendo los abusos racistas y orientalistas? ¿Cómo podemos resistir la apropiación de la ciencia y la tecnología por parte de los colonizadores? Dentro del mundo académico, somos testigos de cómo se ahogan las voces pro Palestina y de que aquellas personas que se atreven a hablar contra el genocidio son procesadas, despedidas o silenciadas en beneficio de los intereses políticos y económicos del Estado de apartheid israelí y de las corporaciones transnacionales que se benefician de la ocupación. ¿Cómo conectamos nuestra propia lucha de clases contra el complejo académico-industrial con la defensa local de los derechos palestinos y los movimientos de liberación global? Existe una necesidad urgente y una oportunidad de educar, movilizar, organizar y proteger a quienes dicen la verdad, de luchar contra el sionismo y de desarrollar la militancia sindical e internacionalista entre las clases oprimidas. 

La lucha palestina es nuestra lucha. La ciencia insurgente exige de sus practicantes claridad de pensamiento y coraje para actuar. SftP hace un llamamiento a todos los miembros y simpatizantes a buscar colectivamente estrategias concretas hacia la liberación de Palestina.

Palestine is Our Struggle: SftP Statement

En Español | يمكنك قرائة هذا البيان بالعربية هنا

As all of us mourn the lives lost to the latest upsurge of violence, how do we appropriately understand what has been happening in the past few days in Gaza?

Israel’s National Security Minister, an ultra-nationalist instigator of violence convicted eight times including on charges of rioting and supporting a terrorist organization, once prohibited from serving in the Israeli military, is now in command of its security apparatus.

Israel’s Finance Minister declared the intent “to be cruel,” spoke of Palestinians as “human animals,” and enunciated the plan to deprive Gaza of food, fuel, and water. 

Gaza, an open-air prison under siege by the extreme-right Israeli state since 2007, home to two million people, half of them children, is now under nonstop aerial bombardment that exposes the people and environment to toxic chemicals like white phosphorus.

Israel’s Prime Minister made clear its government’s aim of emptying out 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza, which he claims is “only the beginning.” 

This is a premeditated massacre and cleansing of an Indigenous population. 

The governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany all quickly pledged their “steadfast and united support” of Israel, whose leaders are now stepping up their implementation of genocide.

Such historic injustice has not occurred in isolation. It is the culmination of a century-long Zionist project facilitated by the capitalist class across the Global North: through the military-industrial war machine that profits from dispossession and destruction of Palestinian land; through the mainstream media that feed off dehumanizing the Palestinian people, erasing their history, and turning sentiments of humanity into pretexts for barbarity; through technoscientific development—which we as scientists and engineers are complicit in—funded by and funneled into bolstering the apartheid apparatus of Israel; as well as through the hypocrisy of Western academia, which, for all its professed values of “anti-racism” and “decolonization,” continues to acquiesce to settler-colonialism.

It is therefore our duty as members of Science for the People—an organization born out of the struggle against US atrocities in Vietnam, with predecessors who fought against apartheid South Africa, fascist regimes across Latin America, and above all, US imperialism—to take concrete steps in this dark moment and plant the seeds of revolutionary change.

1) As scientists, we must inform our politics through deep and thorough analyses of history, circumstances, and structures. The struggle against colonization has always been fought by people of all ethnicities and religions, and Zionism has historically been opposed by left-wing Jewish leaders, scientists, and activists. We stand unequivocally in solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemn the seventy-five plus years of Zionist crimes that led to this genocide. 

2) As workers within the academic-industrial complex, the products of our labor are subsumed by systemic forces and co-opted for war, which prompts us to reflect on ourselves and the institutions we work for. How much funding has an institution received from foundations with explicitly Zionist aims, and does this correlate with the callousness toward Palestinian students in recent university statements on the events unfolding in Gaza? What techniques, ideology, or both concurrently (as in the attempted biologization of the Jewish race) have been developed in any given field of study, under constraints set by our own settler-colonial system, to uphold the status quo? How has the notion of “progress” in the name of science been propped up by the Israeli state and its Western allies to mask the retrogression of their coloniality? This moment reveals the urgent need and opportunity to achieve a higher level of political consciousness among scientists. We must accelerate this process.

3) As activists and organizers, reflection on our complicity barely reaches the minimum of what’s required. What can we do as an organization to materially support the Palestinian cause? What can we contribute to our coalition partners at the frontline that are weathering racist and Orientalist abuses? How to resist the appropriation of science and technology by the colonizers? Within academia, we witness pro-Palestine voices being drowned out and those that dare speak out against genocide being prosecuted, fired, or silenced at the behest of political and economic interests of the Israeli apartheid state and transnational corporations that profit from the Occupation. How do we connect our own class struggle against the academic-industrial complex with local advocacy for Palestinian rights and the global liberation movements? There is an urgent need and opportunity to educate, agitate, organize, protect those who speak the truth, push back against Zionism, build labor militancy and internationalism among oppressed classes.

The Palestinian struggle is our struggle. Radical science demands of its practitioners clarity of thought and courage for action. SftP calls on all members and supporters to collectively pursue concrete strategies toward the liberation of Palestine.

Get involved and act now.

Home is Where the Heart (and Other Organs) is: A New Approach to an Old Problem: The Genetics of Homelessness

Biosketch of Principal Investigator (PI): Prof. Dr. Imasory Shabi is not simply a proper noun. No, he is a verb. An active, ongoing movement that has focused his energies to push the barriers of our understanding of human torment forward into the sunny, happy future. Humble startings with a BMSc. Specialization in Molecular Genetic Ultimatums at Herverd first caught his attention and soon led to a double PhD in Genes and Genetics at MITT. In this short wake lay the first papers to implicate genetic mechanisms into human tendency to buy medium over large, putative molecular therapies to correct this stinginess, and a clear leap over the need for a postdoctoral fellowship. Instead, Shabi  landed right in an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Economic Biology at Sitford. Only as the head of a lab did he find the berth to stretch into genetic origins of the dislike for thinning hair, cargo shorts, and mobile gambling applications. We look forward to his ongoing work with Robert Dockins as to the evolutionary pressures producing these genetic selections. Supported by the Wulson and Rishton professorship for Clarity in a Complicated World, we suspect Shabi will be with us for long to come.

Introduction

Homelessness is a problem. A recent meta-analytic report published in Nature uncovered that homelessness was “a lot” now and potentially “more” in the near future (Nature, 2022). Historically, however, the study of homelessness has been squandered from science, caught in the feelings and qualities of the social sciences, humanities, and non-academics. These interesting researchers have collectively defined homelessness as the, “lack of living in a home”. Although seemingly satisfactory to most of society, this diagnostic definition suffers from a growing problem in non-medical research, environmental determinism.

To demonstrate the fallacy of environmental determinism, I ask you humbly, do we diagnose cancer simply because someone occupies a bed in a cancer treatment centre? No, no we don’t (we diagnose them because they have cancer). Is blindness diagnosed by one’s simple presence in an optometrist’s office? Again, no (lots of people who can see will occupy the same office). Finally, can we diagnose a heart attack by a rushed moment in an emergency room? Not at all. Following this latest inane assumption, my son Andy, who sliced open his forearm after falling on our push mower one fateful April morning, would be diagnosed as suffering a heart attack. Following this latest inane assumption further, Andy would be receiving heart attack drugs unnecessarily. In summary, environmental determinism is a metaphorical road to wasted money, youth, and insight. Yet environmentally defined homelessness stands strong when the problem needs to be treated the most.

An environmentally deterministic explanation for homelessness also clashes with pre-existing data on the condition. Namely, homeless people tend to exhibit lower IQ (Smort et al., 2021), more body hair (Gilettes et al., 1987), more drug use (Blowe & Meph, 2004), less body weight (Paylayton et al., 2013), and significantly lower Cumulative Health Factor (CHF; Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, personal communication) compared to volunteer undergraduates across North American universities. All of these impacted traits are derived from within the homeless body, not attributed to some imaginary, environmental taint suffered during prolonged exposure to air outside of a house. Accordingly, I propose here to challenge a once un-challengable paradigm with my simple voice and a basic logic: homelessness is a disease, not a condition, environment, or un-fortune. Like all diseases, the issues are trapped inside the body, not outside under a bridge or behind Olive Garden. In this proposal, I outline 3 experimental approaches as vital steps to develop the disease status of homelessness, including a review of preliminary data that has been gathered already for each approach.

With a new, biological locus for research on homelessness comes a new locus for treatment of homelessness. I propose my work will pave novel routes to medical interventions that treat homelessness at its source, the body, revealing unrealistic, non-scientific dreams of affordable housing, incompatible with the beliefs and freedoms of many others, as an ever-impossible solution. I propose a future of housing that is coming without the need for a single sheet of drywall.

Experiment 1 – Establishing a vertebrate model of homelessness

The overly social, environmentally determinant explanation of homelessness referred to above relies on the problematic belief that homelessness is a uniquely human phenomenon. This assumption floats loudly unspoken among decades of research, I believe in part at least, because it has never been tested. Humans have always been the only experimental subject in the study of homelessness.

Not to borrow logic too heavily from my introduction above, but do we assume humans are the only species capable of jumping when we ignore the cricket? The toad? Maybe a deer? We don’t. We recognize the importance of comparative research, where we step away from the university and search the world over, recording the beautiful diversity of animal behaviour the Earth has born to compare to our own. From novel discoveries including the social capacities of spiders (Pruitt et al., 2004) to rhesus monkeys understanding syllabic patterning (Hauser et al., 2008), it is only by reaching far into the feral, untamed wild that we can find homologous behaviours beyond our selfish selves. For this reason, my first experimental approach is to establish a reliable vertebrate model of homelessness: the genetically amicable and convenient lab mouse.

Rationale: Mice live in homes. Whether a hole under a tree in a forest, a hole in a closet owing to ill-fitting floorboards, or the classic cage of the laboratory, mice seemingly love to be housed (perhaps following some natural tendency ingrained in their nature [personal observation]). This tendency supports the study of mice as an opportunity to study the exceptions: the mice refusing to persist in shelter. But do these exceptions exist? Let’s find out.

Methods: Our laboratory mice have been raised for generations to inhabit the cage. Simple, transparent, and reliably produced, the mouse cage presents an ideal shelter for experiments to identify mice that may eschew this very home safety. A clean, sterile testing room is fitted with 25 new, washed mice cages of the same design and dimensions, spaced evenly across the floor. Each cage (house) will be fitted with an exercise wheel, sawdust bedding, a rodent water bottle, and food pellets. Out of a fear that these amenities will confound a test of pure homelessness, we have provisioned similar resources outside of the cages, including water as “puddles” (refilled thrice daily), exercise inherently present in traversing the space between cages, and food pellets provided in taller, narrow food dishes, representative of garbage cans (a vessel consistent with our understanding of human homelessness). Once set up, 50 randomly selected, clonal lab mice will be released into the room and given a week to acclimate to the new, yet familiar, environment. To follow individual mice, their identifier (a name) is written using a permanent marker on their sides. From one week of acclimation onward, mice will be observed via wireless camera and one-way mirror by researchers to score housing status throughout each day. Mice who ultimately spend nights in a cage will be classified as “homed” and mice that spend nights in the “streets” (external to cages) will be classified as “homeless”. As we hypothesize that homeless mice are real, we outnumbered the number of mice to cages as a means of expediting the identification of each group of individuals.

Preliminary results: Using the above methodology and a monitoring period of a week of days (7 days), we successfully categorized upwards of half of our mouse population as “homeless”. Homeless mice were characterized by night behaviour avoidant of any housing/caging throughout most of the week. Interestingly, we noticed significantly higher levels of fatality in the homeless population (homeless deaths throughout the week n = 10; homed deaths throughout the week n = 0), however, elevated fatality during homelessness is completely supported by similar work on humans (Streete et al., 2004). This commonality suggests we were not only accessing a similar behaviour in mice but also that homelessness shares a physiological impact on the lives of mice as it does in humans. In conclusion, our paradigm works to effectively identify homelessness in lab mice. With a homeless sample identified, we next ask if this sample can be used to investigate the biological causes leading to these anti-homing tendencies.

Experiment 2 – Identifying genetic factors associated with mouse homelessness

Rationale: Genes play a role in all biological functions and can be considered to act as a primary mechanism in the production of, among all things, behaviour and cognition (Willson, 1989). Accordingly, we propose to ask if homeless mice identified in our preliminary work in Experiment 1 would exhibit consistent changes in gene expression from homed mice. This approach seems violently at odds with a sociological understanding of homelessness, but in fact will expand our historic understanding of housing deep within the individual, where powerful modern biotechnology aims its medical treatments. Accordingly, we look to use this approach to build a bridge to a new treatment for the homeless.

Methods: At the end of the behavioural observation week, we will sacrifice all mice by flooding the testing room with an overdose concentration of isoflurane. After sacrifice, several researchers enter the room (wearing gas-appropriate PPE) and collect a handful of mice to immediately bring to our surgical suite. Surgical procedures include researchers dissecting out three (3) perfect cubes from each brain. The first cube completely contains the parahippocampal zone, a brain region thought to be involved in homelessness. Supporting this neural function, we have recently reported that the parahippocampal zone is anatomically reduced and functionally silenced in some homeless patients as measured using fMRI approaches (Atome et al., 2022). The remaining two (2) cubes will sample the amygdala and medulla. These are both lower, conserved mammalian brain regions that could reveal neural functions in housing as ancestral vertebrate traits. Cubes are flash frozen on dry ice to preserve RNA prior to storage. Once all brains are frozen and stored at -80 degrees, they are individually dissociated into isolated cells for single-cell RNA sequencing (specific methods available in most papers). Sequencing and expression data are subsequently subjected to classical transcriptomic statistical approaches to produce PCA clustering, volcano plots, and that red to green change-in-transcription kind of grid.

Preliminary Results: We have only run single-cell RNA sequencing and subsequent transcriptomics on a small subset of homeless and homed mouse parahippocampal zones. However, in this small set we see big trends. Following PCA analysis, we found a near significant clustering of cells within the parahippocampal zone unique to homeless mice, suggesting there is a marked difference in the expression of several genes likely to be implicated in homelessness. Elaborating on this result, volcano plots revealed that the most significant (trending) changes in gene expression were found in, unbelievably, housekeeping genes, primarily broom3, windexB2, and swiffer-beta (Fig. 1).  Whereas the history of this gene group points to an ignorable ubiquity (as did misunderstood “junk DNA” beforehand), here we found them as the unique genes underexpressed in homeless mice. This was further confirmed with the red-to-green grid graph, which found these genes are often more red than green in homeless mice. Altogether, we reveal a powerful prescience supporting housekeeping genes as not only no longer ignorable but also well-named. However, despite the expense in this approach, further experimentation is needed to establish statistical significance and a causative role of these genes in homelessness.

Fig. 1

Experiment 3: mutation of key “housekeeping” genes

Rationale: Our first two proposed experiments proffer us with the ability to isolate homeless mice (1) and uncover consistent perturbations in gene expression they exhibit within the parahippocampal zone (2). However, even amongst these great advances, science requires the generation of causal relationships, not simply the correlational ones we have observed so far. Accordingly, we finally propose to target mutations to key genes implicated in mouse homelessness in mouse embryos, tracking their housing tendencies beyond development. We hypothesize that by impairing housekeeping gene function, we can induce homelessness in even the most homey mouse.

Methods: To generate mutant mice, we propose to use the latest techniques in targeted mutagenesis centred on the highly popular and accurate cas9 exonuclease (SigmaAldritch-IDT-CRISPoh, technique in preparation). CRISPoh guides will be generated in triplets to induce nonsense/stop mutations in the three housekeeping genes exhibiting the largest decrease in expression in homeless mice identified above: broom3, windexB2, and swiffer-beta, heretofore referred to as the BWS trilogy. Mutations will be induced in one-to-two-cell embryos and confirmed later in development by genetic sequencing of tail samples. We hypothesize that triple mutant mice will overwhelmingly exhibit homeless tendencies as adults.

Preliminary Results: As the final experiment proposed, we have had the least opportunity to produce preliminary mutant results. However, we have generated twenty (20) successful triple mutants that are currently developing to adulthood, when behavioural testing will commence. Our only current finding is that twelves (12) of these triple mutants have already died within the first week of development. Although this may sound problematic to our proposal, we again will highlight that fatality is a trait common to human homelessness. Furthermore, research has consistently demonstrated that all dangers are more likely to lead to fatality in younger, weaker, developing vertebrates compared to mature ones (Matell et al., 2007). Accordingly, we believe this level of fatality (which was not found in controls, singles, or double mutants) validates our proposed approach for more thorough testing. Knowing if these genes play a critical role in homelessness will open the path to gene therapies. Gene therapies enable us to combat homelessness from a perspective too quickly swept under the rug and usher a world into the human body that has been kept outside for far too long.

Conclusion

My proposal is simple. In a world where genetics has reshaped and directed such success over the understanding and treatment of diseases, I reveal that homelessness is a disease ignored for far too long. I propose a means to study the behaviour and genetics of homelessness using a popular lab model, including the establishment of causal mechanisms producing an aversion to the home. While environmental approaches to house provisioning have failed on all fronts (BlacRoc, 2021), I suggest a biological approach holds far more promise. Home is where the parahippocampal zone is.

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Statement

EDI is central to all of my work. My lab includes all types of people: undergraduates, Masters candidates, PhD candidates, postdocs, technicians, research assistants, and one secretary. I appreciate all lab members and remember to tell them how proud I am of them as often as possible. However, EDI, similar to homelessness as pointed out above, has also been applied to only humans for far too long. Here, I wish to highlight the wholly new ways I apply EDI philosophy to the other biological materials in the lab.

It all began as I watched the caps of the microcentrifuge tubes bob, firmly fit in the foam floaty cutout that resembled a frog silhouette, ever so agitating in the mysterious currents coming and going within a water bath. From the outside, sure, not the most photogenic, but the visual abstract building in my head reminded me that what counts was inside the familiar cell membrane figure I downloaded off of BioRender. Within each tube was a small cube of the parahippocampal zone excised from the brain of either a homed or homeless lab mouse, holding my secrets. The dilute trypsin in the surrounding liquid of each tube was playing the paleontologist, excavating those great unknowns by loosening layer after layer of cells to float freely from the outermost tissue surface.

I would lean in closer. I was liberating these cells, giving them freedom to be themselves. Unjudged. Equal. Diverse. Included in all analysis. No longer were they twisted and tied amongst other neurons or, god forbid, the nearby glia and vasculature. They had been overcommitted to their surroundings and undercommitted to themselves. No, this cabalistic tissue would be dissolved by weak detergents and reasonable incubation temperatures. I imagined every neuron set free in 15-20 minutes, molded by water tension into small, perfect spheres. The liberatory action of detergent did not stop here: we would help each nucleus to even sever its protuberances, axons, dendrites, cutting off these interferences to leave just the essence of life in a million crystal balls. The soma is the brain of the cell, so to speak, these neurites only simple arms, holding nothing new.

With these thoughtful processes, I embrace EDI for both my trainees and our cells to be themselves. Independence, faith, and support have led both to teach me new things: my trainees when I come in each morning to learn of their late night discoveries, and my cells when the transcriptomic graphs come back in. EDI can reach far beyond the boundaries we have given it, if only we are brave enough to let it. 

Conflict of Interest Statements

While I personally believe wishing to see your research through to its most helpful application is simply responsible, I must legally disclose that I am the founder and sitting CEO of The Home Up Top, a private biotechnology start-up corporation seeking to develop genetic therapies to combat homelessness following this research.

Grant Review Outcome and Recommendations

The study session has met and discussed the proposal, wherein the investigator applied cutting-edge gene-editing technology to study a common disorder of homelessness, the etiology of which remains unknown. All reviewers generally agree with the overall hypothesis and are optimistic about the expected outcome and trust the expertise of Dr. Shabi’s team to complete the study. Furthermore, a few reviewers noted the study’s potential to present a paradigm shift, which sets the foundation for a revolutionary approach to understanding the pressing and unresolved issues of our time, such as hunger, crime, and illiteracy. There are, however, a few minor comments for consideration; however, these do not dampen our enthusiasm and the study session’s recommendation that the study should be funded.

*Author Responses are in the colour blue, but also labeled as “Author Response” for those unable to perceive blue (I apologize for your loss).

Reviewer 1: Homeless humans are typically anonymous. I wonder whether identifying the mice using body marker would change the outcome. A separate control should be added.

Author Response: This ethological aspect of homelessness has rightly been highlighted as a detail alluding our experimental design. However, in lieu of provisioning another control group, we propose to proceed by removing the name-based body marker on each mouse and, instead, add small outfit repositories (structurally reminiscent of dumpsters) filled with tattered clothing, bandanas, and dirty pants outside of the mouse houses (cages). A complementary closet full of new, untattered clothing and jewelry will be introduced inside each cage. This way, we aim to have all mice assign themselves visualized identities, which we suspect will lead our animal models closer to their human homologs while enabling long-term experimental tracking on an individual basis. 

Reviewer 2: The red-to-green-change-in-transcription-kind-of-grid has been challenged by the color-blind, or color-differently-perceived researchers. The field has started to shift toward using yellow-to-blue-absolute-transcription-level-histograms.

Author Response: Firstly, we would like to apologize to the visually difficultied for our ignorance. To repent for our short sight (apologies for that too), we will adopt the yellow-to-blue-absolute-transcription-level-histograms as the field has recently tended. Our red-to-green-change-in-transcription-kind-of-grid will be adapted by transforming all numbers into star ratings (from 10 stars down to “rotten”)  and relegated to supplementary material on future publications.

Reviewer 3: How do you score the anti-homing behavior? An automatic and quantitative methodology should be used to ensure total and complete objectivity of the outcome.

Author Response: This is a thoughtful question. Time in a cage is the primary differentiator between the housed and the homeless mice. We noticed after weeks of hands-on and video observation that homeless mice tend to spend much less time in a cage home. In future work, our interest seeks to subdivide this larger label of homelessness, including by tracking acts in which homeless mice enter cages to steal food, clothing, water, or jewelry (see response to Reviewer 1 above). This theft score will contribute as a sort of severity of homelessness and, we hope, be tied to other genes in the near future.

Reviewer 4: Will you do proteomics to confirm transcription profiles? This would be important as swiffer-beta is typically dominated by swiffer-alpha.

Author Response: …we’ll think about it.

Reviewer 5: Congratulations on achieving such heights as still an Assistant Professor. The founding of a company is no small task and demonstrates your willingness to see this work change the world.

Author Response: Thank you, Robert, this means a lot.

To fight genocide and ecocide, we must abolish the RCMP

This post is a from the Autumn 2023 Rage Climatique journal; read the full journal here. Members of Science for the People Canada are supporting the Week of Climate Rage taking place September 25-29 in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Join us at the anticapitalist climate protest, September 29th at 2pm, Place George-Etienne-Cartier.
Support the Abolish C-IRG campaign: https://abolishcirg.org/

The Community-Industry Relations Group (C-IRG) is a secretive, armed detachment of Canada’s federal police force, specifically established to police Indigenous-led resistance to resource extraction projects. In calls to abolish the C-IRG, we see more clearly than ever how police abolition, ecological restoration, and Land Back are one and the same struggle. To work towards police abolition is to deliver a blow against colonialism, extractivism, the climate crisis, and capitalism itself.

The myth of the “public” sector

Like almost everyone who attended public school in Canada, I was misled to believe that the government played a mostly neutral or even sometimes positive role in conflicts between resource extraction companies and the communities they harmed. Our textbooks were filled with examples of US and Canadian legislators passing regulations and bylaws that seemed to protect everyday people from the pollution of profit-seeking private companies.

The myth that there is any kind of meaningful, antagonistic relationship between Canada’s public sector and Canada’s private sector is a powerful propaganda tool for the capitalist class. The reality is that our settler-capitalist government and its colonial legal system were created in tandem with the establishment of extractive industries, expressly to support capitalist accumulation through violent force. Capitalists established a bourgeois government and colonial police force to remove Indigenous inhabitants, to crush the armed resistance of the people, and to fend off competing American capitalists who would otherwise begin to encroach upon “their” resources. Contrary to what we were all taught in school, in the vast majority of cases, the state holds a gun to the heads of the people so that the capitalist class may rob, drill, pollute, and clear-cut with impunity. “Canada” to this day remains “three mining companies in a trench coat,” no matter how many millions of dollars are spent on “CanCon” media productions that try to fabricate a vacuous nationalist mythology based on hockey, timbits, liberal multiculturalism, and “reconciliation.”

The RCMP: 150 years of colonial violence

The North West Mounted Police (NWMP) was the direct predecessor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), established in 1873 on the heels of the Métis Red River Resistance. It was created for the express purpose of clearing Indigenous communities from Western Canada and crushing any remaining pockets of rebellion, so that the new settler-colonial state could be joined from coast to coast. In one of the first of many social and ecological crises precipitated by the Canadian state, the NWMP were also in part responsible for the near-extinction of the buffalo on the Western plains. The NWMP immediately embarked on the project of pushing Indigenous people further and further West to allow for encroaching European settlements to establish enclosed cattle ranching, right atop the traditional grazing land of the buffalo. Meanwhile, U.S. settlers engaged in a systematic campaign of buffalo slaughter to clear the way for ranching and white settlements to the South– this was done to try to induce starvation and disease in Indigenous populations, to force dependency on colonial food rations, and to corral Indigenous people onto reservations under the constant threat of starvation. Once the buffalo were all but a distant memory, the police engaged in routinized humiliation and sexual violence by withholding food rations to reserves in order to “secure their access to teenaged Indigenous women,” among other atrocities.

Over the years, the RCMP along with provincial police forces have consistently overseen the rights of the capitalist class to systematically bull doze, clear-cut, and drill on Indigenous land. But they have been met at every turn by heroic anti-colonial resistance and struggle. During the armed conflict at Oka in 1990 over the expansion of a golf course and the development of condos on Kahnienkehaka land, the Quebec police department sent in officers with M-16s, tanks, helicopters, jets, artillery units, and even naval forces to repress resistance at both Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawake. The armed standoff lasted 78 days and ultimately saw the successful blocking of the golf course expansion. 5 years later, the RCMP carried out a 31-day siege of Secwepemc territory and arrested Ts’peten land defenders during the Gustafsen Lake Standoff in BC. In 2013, the RCMP arrested over 40 Elsipogtog First Nation members opposing shale gas and fracking projects on their territory. These are but a few of hundreds of examples in the history of so-called Canada that highlight the centrality of state police forces in settler-capitalists’ centuries-long crusade to exploit the “rich natural resources” on which the wealth of “Canada” is built.

The Community-Industry Response Group 

Today, as the climate crisis worsens and Indigenous-led resistance grows, the reactionary state repression of land defenders has become increasingly efficient and consolidated. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the identity of interests of state and industry is the creation of the C-IRG (Community-Industry Response Group). The C-IRG is a secretive paramilitary detachment within the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), specifically established in 2017 to streamline the violent repression of Indigenous-led resistance against resource extraction projects in BC. So far, at least $50 million has been spent over the last 6 years to surveil and beat back land defenders at Fairy Creek, the Wet’suwet’en-led resistance to the CGL pipeline, several First Nations’ protests against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, the Coast Salish Nation’s resistance to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, and resistance at the Site C hydroelectric dam.

What is known about the C-IRG in BC has been revealed through access to information requests by investigative reporters, and from research led by land defenders like Molly Murphy in collaboration with Research for the Frontlines. The C-IRG has been described as free “mercenaries” for the oil and gas industry, hired and paid for through public tax dollars. This special detachment consists of “volunteer” RCMP officers who specifically put their names forward to work alongside private industry to police Indigenous-led resistance to pipeline construction and logging. Some are paid $100 per hour, working 18.5 hour shifts at a time. They routinely remove their name badges to avoid accountability for misconduct, and have become infamous for sporting fascist “thin blue line” badges in their place. The group is funded through a 70:30 split between the provincial and federal governments. In other words, the C-IRG is a racist, self-selected, highly remunerated, state-funded paramilitary group that provides free intelligence and “quick-response” armed security for the owners of oil, gas, logging and mining companies.

Among their favourite tactics is stimming– a psychological warfare technique where cops play unnerving noises and keep bright lights on at all hours of the evening in the campsites, walking through the camps non-stop to prevent land defenders from getting rest. This is meant to break land defenders’ morale and create tensions within the camp. Floodlights, loud speakers, cameras, and other sensors are trained on the sleeping quarters of prominent activists. During confrontations, the C-IRG is also authorized to use “pain compliance” techniques, including face holds that involve gouging land defenders’ eyes with the index and middle finger.

“Private-public partnerships” are the colonial way

The RCMP also collaborates intimately with private firms to spy on activists. At Fairy Creek, they helped the Teal Jones logging company’s private security agents infiltrate activist camps, who then conducted covert ops and shared surveillance intelligence with the C-IRG. If ever there were any doubts about the extent of collusion and coordination between the RCMP and private industry, some at Fairy Creek reported company loggers physically pinning down land defenders then calling over C-IRG officers to finish the job. In other words, loggers openly assaulted individuals with impunity, right in front of police officers, in order to facilitate their formal arrest.

As these investigations point out, injunction law is the resource extraction industry’s greatest weapon, allowing judges to consider each case in isolation without regard to the validity of Aboriginal Title. All the company needs to do is make the case that they will suffer “irreparable harm” if their project is not allowed to advance. The majority of the C-IRG’s operations consist of the armed enforcement of these illegitimate civil injunctions.

The C-IRG is currently under CRCC review after the RCMP received over 500 complaints in areas where the detachment was active. But no matter how much the Canadian state attempts to reform, rename, or rebrand these forces under different names or through “cultural sensitivity training,” we must never be fooled. Our capitalist government will never support Land Back in any material sense– it will never allow for the collective stewardship of our forests, mountains, and waterways so long as there is more profit to be squeezed from the mines, fracking projects, and monocultures of lumber.

For those still holding out hope that electing a “progressive” party might help stall or reverse the climate apocalypse, it’s worth remembering that almost all of the violent crackdowns on Indigenous groups by the C-IRG in BC were funded and supported by the so-called “progressive” provincial New Democratic Party (NDP), who have held a majority government in the province since 2017. In 2022, they pledged $230 million in additional funding to the RCMP to grow rural police detachments, recognizing the increased importance of protecting the capitalist class’s massive mining, logging, and natural gas projects in the face of growing Indigenous-led resistance.

“Democratic” elections at both the provincial and federal levels in Canada have time and time again proven to be highly effective propaganda campaigns– they are exercises in democracy for the capitalist class only, who get to select every four years the particular flavour of welfare-state capitalism or free-market capitalism they’d like to enjoy. In a faux-democratic system designed and controlled by settler-capitalists to serve the interests of resource extraction and labour exploitation, there has never been an electoral party that truly and materially delivers on Land Back. Capitalists rest easy knowing that state-funded mercenaries like the C-IRG will always be there to back up their pipelines and logging projects, no matter the colour of the posters that hang in the office of the incumbent.

Abolition and environmental stewardship are the same struggle

Police abolition– and especially the abolition of the RCMP– is central to the fight against ecocide and climate change. If completed, the 670-km Coastal Gas Link pipeline will transport 2.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas to export terminals on the coast, to be processed, exported, and burned. Canadian liquified natural gas exports are set to soar thanks to new market penetration opportunities brought about by the war in Ukraine, with new export terminals being considered on the West Coast, East Coast, and even in Québec.

And now, seizing the opportunity to greenwash the production of semiconductors and batteries, the Canadian state has arbitrarily labeled a whole host of new metals and minerals as “critical” and “essential,” in much the same way that “oil and gas” was labeled critical infrastructure in the mid-2010s. This designation, in conjunction with Stephen Harper’s Bill C-51, means that resistance to fossil fuel extraction can now be considered domestic terrorism– with Indigenous land defenders and their supporters labeled members of “fringe terrorist groups” by intelligence agencies. As Canada expands its domestic mining operations to deliver on “critical mineral” for “green” batteries and semiconductors, their promotion of these mines to “critical infrastructure” could allow the state to come down on protestors with the full force of its intelligence, surveillance, and paramilitary apparatus.

There is an inextricable and increasingly obvious link between police abolition and ecocide. Accelerating extreme weather events and climate-related catastrophes make the former an ever more urgent necessity, because climate disasters and social upheaval only strengthen the fascist tendencies of the liberal capitalist state, as demonstrated by the creation of the C-IRG. To dream of reversing or even just curbing our precipitous ecological decline, and slowing the exponential proliferation of extreme weather events, we must make rapid and sustained progress towards abolishing the armed forces that have enabled capitalists to exploit the land for far too long.

MORE READING ON C-IRG:

Support the Abolish C-IRG campaign: https://abolishcirg.org/

1. APTN (“Behind the thin blue line” – Brett Forester): https://www.aptnnews.ca/ourstories/cirg/

2. Briarpatch (“The C-IRG: the resource extraction industry’s best ally” – Molly Murphy): https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-c-irg-the-resource-extraction-industrys-best-ally

3. Briarpatch (“Real climate action means defunding the police” – Molly Murphy): https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/climate-action-defunding-police-CIRG-RCMP-Fairy-Creek

4. RCMP 150: https://rcmpheritage.ca/

Memo to SftP NYC

I want to alert you to a “science happening” in the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I think deserves our attention.  Unfortunately, it is no longer a happening we can do much about; it is a fait accompli.  I am referring to the recent opening of the Gilder Science Center as a new wing of the American Museum of Natural History.  The Museum announced the opening with understated triumphalism.

A New York Times encomium to the Gilder Center written by Michael Kimmelman was less restrained.

Warning: Kimmelman’s article and its photographs may instill in you an urgent desire to visit the Gilder Center.  It is indeed impressive.  But as the saying goes, “All that glitters is not gold.”  There is more to it than meets the eye, in ways that will probably not surprise any SftP members.

Kimmelman tips his hat to the “imperialistic and voracious” history of the Museum, and mentions, in passing, “years of sometimes acrimonious community engagement.”  That was an acknowledgement of the strong local pushback against the Gilder Center project in the neighborhoods surrounding the Museum.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York chapter of SftP wasn’t meeting at the height of the anti-Gilder protests.  It is too late to challenge it now, but at least we might want to provide historical perspective in order to help the public understand why it wasn’t such a great idea.

The moving spirits driving the project were not scientists or science educators, but billionaire investors.  It was a science-themed high-finance operation that grew into an unstoppable juggernaut crushing all critics, questioners, and protesters in its path.  Unsurprisingly, it enjoyed the unwavering bipartisan support of the political establishment at all levels.  The politicians milked the public’s fascination with the “gee whiz” aspects of science to sell the big-money construction scheme.

No one was protesting the creation of a beneficial new science education facility.  But while acknowledging that the shiny new science center could indeed serve to advance science education, they asked why it could not be constructed in one of New York City’s many underserved communities that suffer from a paucity of educational resources?  The Upper West Side of Manhattan, with the American Museum of Natural History as it was, already enjoyed an embarrassment of riches with regard to science education facilities.

Cary Goodman was a prominent opponent of the project for several years. Here are excerpts from a letter Dr. Goodman wrote to the New York Times in response to Michael Kimmelman’s previously mentioned puff piece praising the Gilder Center:

The new wing is neither “poetic” nor “theatrical.” The new wing is an extension of the museum’s colonial heritage and world view.  The new wing has been constructed at the cost of ancient trees, an enormous increase in air pollution, and with disregard for wildlife and residents.

Shamefully, the City Council increased its financing for the expansion by more than 600% in five years to $92,000,000.  Amazingly, no elected official opposed the private museum’s encroachment on public parkland.

Five thousand neighbors and park goers, including prominent West Siders like Bill Moyers, Holland Taylor, Philip Roth, and Billie Jean King, petitioned against the expansion.  At public hearings, the museum turned off opponents’ microphones, ignored requests for information, and crippled democracy.

Mr. Kimmelman excuses his bias in favor of the museum by writing that he might be “coming from a blinkered space.”  Might this explain why the Times, alone among all New York media, never met with, listened to, or wrote about the other side of this “joyful” story?

We might want to solicit a more in-depth analysis of the issue from Dr. Goodman.  I have heard him speak eloquently and at length about it, so I know he has a lot more to say about it.

–Cliff Conner