FROM THE DESK OF

Secretary Antony J. Blinken

U.S. DEPARTMENT of STATE

Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is greeted with an elbow bump as he arrives for a welcome ceremony at the State Department, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021 in Washington. (Carlos Barria/Pool via AP) CARLOS BARRIA

This week, I had the chance to testify before Congress and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Biden administration’s proposed budget for the State Department. This hearing took place just after I returned from Kyiv, Ukraine with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, where, together, we demonstrated the United States’ commitment to the government and to the people of Ukraine. I have to tell you the trip left an indelible impression. We had a chance to talk about it a little bit before the hearing.

As we took the train across the border and rode westward into Ukraine, we saw mile after mile of Ukrainian countryside, territory that just a couple of months ago the Russian Government thought that it could seize in a matter of weeks – today, firmly Ukraine’s. In Kyiv, we saw the signs of a vibrant city coming back to life: people eating outside, sitting on benches, strolling. It was right in front of us. The Ukrainians have won the battle for Kyiv, and for all the suffering that they’ve endured, for all the carnage that Russia’s brutal invasion continues to inflict, Ukraine was and will continue to be a free and independent country.

It’s impossible not to be moved by what the Ukrainians have achieved. It’s also impossible not to believe that they will keep succeeding, because they know why they fight. Seeing this, I have to tell you I felt some pride in what the United States has done to support the Ukrainian Government and its people, and an even firmer conviction that we must not let up.

Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine has underscored the power and purpose of American diplomacy. Our diplomacy is rallying allies and partners around the world to join us in supporting Ukraine with security, economic, humanitarian assistance; imposing massive costs on the Kremlin; strengthening our collective security and defense; addressing the war’s mounting global consequences, including the current refugee and food crises.

We, the State Department, have to continue to drive that diplomacy forward, to seize what I believe are strategic opportunities, as well as address risks presented by Russia’s overreach as countries are reconsidering their policies, their priorities, their relationships. The budget request before the committee predated this crisis, but fully funding it is critical in my judgment to ensuring that Russia’s war in Ukraine is a strategic failure for the Kremlin and serves as a powerful lesson to those who might consider following its path.

As we’re focused intensely on this urgent crisis, the State Department continues to carry out the missions traditionally associated with diplomacy, like responsibly managing great power competition with China, facilitating a halt to fighting in Yemen and Ethiopia, pushing back against the rising tide of authoritarianism and the threat that it poses to human rights.

We also face evolving challenges that require us to develop new capabilities, such as the emergence and re-emergence of infectious disease, an accelerating climate crisis, and of course a digital revolution that holds both enormous promise but also some peril.

Last fall, I had an opportunity to set out a modernization agenda for the department and for U.S. diplomacy to respond to these complex demands. In no small part thanks to the fiscal year 2022 budget approved by Congress, we’ve been able to make real progress on this agenda, though much remains to be done.

To give just a few examples, we have strengthened our capacity to shape the ongoing technological revolution so that it actually protects our interests as it boosts our competitiveness and upholds our values. With bipartisan congressional support and encouragement, we recently launched a new Bureau for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, with 60 team members to start. And I am grateful to Congress and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for long supporting this effort and for the ideas shared on how best to do it.

We’re also making headway on ensuring that our diplomats reflect America’s remarkable diversity, which is one of our greatest strengths, including in our diplomacy. We have our first ever chief diversity and inclusion officer, who is spearheading an effort to analyze and address the obstacles that prevent underrepresented groups from joining and advancing at State. We’ve expanded the Pickering and Rangel fellowships and created, for the first time – thanks to the support of Congress and his committee – paid internships at State, along with strong congressional input and support for all of these efforts.

Mapping Reveals Rapid Changes to the Arctic Seafloor as Ancient Submerged Permafrost Thaws

 

MBARI technology — including autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs, left) and a portable remotely operated vehicle (MiniROV, right)—have revealed rapid changes to the seafloor in the Canadian Beaufort Sea. These changes are associated with degradation of submarine permafrost. Image: Charlie Paull © 2016 MBARI

Across the Arctic, numerous peer-reviewed studies show that thawing permafrost creates unstable land which negatively impacts important infrastructure and impacts Indigenous communities. Now, a new study from MBARI researchers and their collaborators published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds dramatic changes offshore and is the first to document how the thawing of permafrost submerged underwater at the edge of the Arctic Ocean is affecting the seafloor.

About one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost or frozen ground. At the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago) melting glaciers and sea level rise submerged large swaths of permafrost. Until just recently, this submerged permafrost had been largely inaccessible to researchers. But now, thanks to technological advancements, including MBARI’s autonomous mapping robots, scientists are able to conduct detailed surveys and assess changes in the seafloor.

Repeated surveys with MBARI’s mapping AUVs revealed dramatic, and rapid, changes to seafloor bathymetry from the Arctic shelf edge in the Canadian Beaufort Sea. This massive sinkhole developed in just nine years. Image: Eve Lundsten © 2022 MBARI

High-resolution bathymetric surveys in the Canadian Beaufort Sea have revealed changes in the seabed from 2010 to 2019. Using autonomous mapping robots, scientists documented multiple large sinkhole-like depressions—the largest the size of an entire city block of six-story buildings—had developed in less than a decade. 

“We know that big changes are happening across the Arctic landscape, but this is the first time we’ve been able to deploy technology to see that changes are happening offshore too,” said Charlie Paull, a geologist at MBARI who led the study with Scott Dallimore from the Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and an international team of researchers. “While the underwater sinkholes we have discovered are the result of longer-term, glacial-interglacial climate cycles, we know the Arctic is warming faster than any region on Earth. As climate change continues to reshape the Arctic, it’s critical that we also understand changes in the submerged permafrost offshore.”

Since 2003, MBARI has been part of an international collaboration to study the seafloor of the Canadian Beaufort Sea with the Geological Survey of Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and since 2013, with the Korean Polar Research Institute. Support for this work was provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Geological Survey of Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the Korean Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries (KIMST grant No. 1525011795).

“This research was made possible through international collaboration over the past decade that has provided access to modern marine research platforms such as MBARI’s autonomous robotic technology and icebreakers operated by the Canadian Coast Guard and the Korean Polar Research Institute,” said Dallimore. “The Government of Canada and the Inuvialuit people who live on the coast of the Beaufort Sea highly value this research as the complex processes described have implications for the assessment of geohazards, creation of unique marine habitat, and our understanding of biogeochemical processes.”

Repeated mapping of the seafloor with ship-based sonar and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was critical to this work. MBARI’s mapping AUVs can resolve the bathymetry of the seafloor down to a resolution of a one-meter (about three-feet) square grid, or roughly the size of a dinner table. These self-guided robots have been instrumental in enabling detailed visualization of the seafloor and documenting changes over time.

April 24, 2022

Jo Freeman Reviews Vice President Kamala Harris: Her Path to the White House

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Vice President Kamala Harris: Her Path to the White House                                      by Malaika Adero New York: Sterling, 2021, 186 pages with 120 photos, $29.95 hardcover   If you like photos, you’ll love this book.  It is packed with some of the most striking photos of KH and her life that I have seen.   While it’s mostly photos, there is some text.  It has many of her own speeches, including her 2011 inaugural address as California Attorney General, her 2020 speech accepting the Democratic nomination, and several commencement addresses.     The author provides some fascinating tidbits of information.  Where else can you read that Harris’ sorority sisters donated checks written for $19.08 to the Biden-Harris campaign, commemorating the founding of Alpha Kappa Alpha in 1908?  The author says that the Biden Victory Fund received more than 11,000 such checks, from an AKA membership of 300,000.   There are also some holes. The author is not familiar with Berkeley in the Sixties, even though it was very important to Harris’ parents, who were Cal graduate students at that time.  One striking photo shows her mother and a friend at what the caption says is a civil rights protest in Berkeley but without a specific date or place.  Since I was a Cal undergraduate during those years, and very active in the civil rights movement, I recognized the scene.  It was a small plaza at the southern entrance to the campus, where we put up our tables and passed out literature.  The photo does not depict a civil rights protest, though the signs on the tables clearly indicate that it was late Spring of 1963 during or after the Birmingham demonstrations.   The book raises lots of questions.  KH’s mother was a high caste Hindu but sent her daughters to a Christian church in nearby Oakland.  Why?  Both parents were active in the civil rights movement in Berkeley but KH chose electoral politics rather than radical politics.  I well remember the split in California during KH’s formative years, with radicals often denouncing those who pursued elective office as sell-outs.  Nor is there anything about her political mentors or her base.   Electoral politics requires money, contacts and name recognition.  Where did KH find these?   Given her international origins, one might expect her to study international affairs rather than go to a local law school and from there become a criminal prosecutor.  “Her path to the White House” must have been very curvey.   KH’s parents separated when she was eight.  She was raised by her mother.  Nonetheless, one gets the impression that KH saw herself as fundamentally a Black woman.  Although she visited her relatives in both India and Jamaica, this book paints those identities as more background than foreground.  Having participated in electoral politics in Brooklyn, where we have people from everywhere, I know that African-Americans and West Indians don’t like each other. Yet KH chose Black as her primary identity.   This is a gorgeous book, well suited to be a graduation present for a young woman of any color.  Buy it for the photos, not for the text.    Copyright © 2022 by Jo Freeman

April 20, 2022

Bree Rosenblum, Professor of Global Change Biology at UC Berkeley, Urges Stopping Blaming Each Other For the Environmental Crisis We’re In

By Anne Brice, Berkeley News, and Kara Manke| APRIL 1, 2022

 

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In this Berkeley Voices episode, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet. “I really think that if we’re not addressing culture at a really deep level, that we cannot address climate change,” said Rosenblum. “Do we want humanity to mean what it has meant in the past, or do we want to create a new meaning for our species and our purpose?”

This is the first episode of a two-part series about how to resist the feeling of doom that many of us experience when thinking about climate change. The second episode features student Hope Gale-Hendry who shares how she discovered her deep interconnectedness with all living things, and why she decided to study the American pika.

Bree Rosenblum is a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley and author of the 2021 textbook Global Change Biology: The study of life on a rapidly changing planet. (Photo courtesy of Bree Rosenblum)

Read a transcript of Berkeley Voices episode 97, ‘Biologist confronts deep roots of climate despair.’

Bree Rosenblum: I really think that if we’re not addressing culture at a really deep level, that we cannot address climate change.

Anne Brice: Bree Rosenblum was hired at UC Berkeley in 2012 to lead a research and teaching program in global change biology.

Bree Rosenblum: And it rapidly became kind of my favorite thing. It’s just such a compelling area of study and also one that requires a lot of thoughtfulness about how to engage students on a topic that could be so demoralizing and depressing, and how to do it in a way that’s honest, but also inspiring.

Anne Brice: Global change biology addresses how living systems are responding to the complex threats they face right now, like habitat destruction, the homogenization of biodiversity and climate change.

Bree Rosenblum: This generation of students has been bombarded by climate doomsday thinking from the time they were very young. In my experience, in the American culture — not to overreach into other cultural streams on our planet — but at least in mainstream American culture, I think this has had an enormous impact on the psyches of young people.

Anne Brice: This is Berkeley Voices. I’m Anne Brice.

This is the first episode of a two-part series about how to resist the feeling of doom that many of us experience when thinking about climate change.

A new Berkeley News series examines how the campus community is confronting the climate crisis.

In this episode, Rosenblum — a professor of global change biology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management — talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet.

[Music fades]

I’m joined by a colleague of mine, Kara Manke, a science writer for Berkeley News in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Kara is leading a series that explores how the campus community is creating innovative climate solutions and implementing them in ways that ensure a more equitable future for our planet. Hi, Kara. Welcome to Berkeley Voices.

April 17, 2022

Ferida’s Wolff’s Backyard: Robin At The Window

  

Robin at the Window

A strange thing happened this weekend. I heard a banging at the window of our den. The room is at the back of our house so no one should have been there to knock. I thought it might be a pebble tossed by the wind. Then it happened again — and again. When I looked out back I saw a robin on the branch of an evergreen bush near the window.

And then I saw the bird fly off the branch and knock its beak against the glass! It did this multiple times.

Okay, I thought. Maybe the robin sees a reflection of the bush and wants to land on a different branch. But I would imagine that after a few tries it would get the hint and stop. It didn’t. I went outside to encourage it away. It left as I opened the door but soon returned to continue its jabbing at the window.

It stopped when night came and I hoped that it was finished with whatever prompted its action. No such luck.

I was awakened in the morning by the now-familiar thumps. The robin was back at it. I thought that maybe if I blocked off the window with a blanket it would discourage the robin. It continued anyway. I removed the blanket and looked straight at the bird, telling it to leave. It just stared at me but didn’t fly away.

I thought that perhaps it was seeing its own reflection and thought it was another bird that was threatening in some way. Then my husband got an idea. He taped some newspaper pages on the outside of the window to hide whatever it was that the bird was seeing. We sat down to breakfast and listened as we ate. We did not hear any knocking! As the morning continued, all was quiet.

We can’t leave the papers there forever and there is rain in the forecast for tomorrow which should destroy the papers. Will the robin be back then? Who knows?

I just hope it has satisfied what prompted this strange action and I wish the robin well — just not at my den window.

©Ferida Wolff  for SeniorWomen.com

Editor’s Note:  We did look up the phenomena and an Australian website known as Backyard Buddies seemed to be the most authoritative site we found: https://backyardbuddies.org.au/help/stop-birds-attacking-windows/

 

Audubon Minnesota, too, also had a reasonable approach to the problem:

https://mn.audubon.org/conservation/birds-attacking-your-windows#:~:text=Birds%20may%20attack%20windows%20to,purpose%20%E2%80%93%20attacking%20their%20own%20reflection.

Don’t forget an Audubon near you: https://www.audubon.org/about/audubon-near-you

April 13, 2022