Any Good News in 2022?

Courtesy of Future Crunch, here is a selection of good-news stories from the past year. Most did not make it into mainstream media (whatever that means nowadays), because good news is generally statistical, while bad news - “powerful people behaving badly,” “something went wrong” - often takes the form of a narrative. We like a good story, even if it makes us feel terrible. These stories are drier, but won’t leave the reader feeling helpless and hopeless.

 

Africa: Morocco expanded paid paternity leave to 15 days. Niger has reclaimed 400,000 hectares of desert land under the multi-national Green Wall project. Benin legalized abortion. Sierra Leone’s president announced the allocation of 22 percent of next year’s budget to education. Togo announced eradication of four tropical diseases, including trachoma and trypanosomiasis. The Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Zambia outlawed the death penalty. Rwandan hospitals used drones to make 250,000 medical deliveries.

Students in Sierra Leone. Credit: The Guardian

 

Asia: As of 2020, 97 percent of India’s households have access to electricity. The Philippines banned child marriage. “You’ll have to go to the United States for that sort of thing,” officials in Manila reportedly said. In China, the city of Chaozhou is planning a 43 GW wind farm in the Taiwan Strait. Thailand legalized medical marijuana.

 

Europe: Several large western European countries have announced plans to replace home gas boilers with heat pumps and boost wind turbine construction. A certain Russian president may have had something to do with this. Poland accepted over two million refugees from the Ukraine war. 92 Saimaa seal pups were born in Finland. Seville, Spain is building underground canals to help cool the city. London turned seven billion lbs. of earth from the Elizabeth Line excavation into a wetland bird sanctuary. British firms announced an increase in productivity from their experimental four-day work week; four out of five plan to continue the experiment voluntarily.

Saimaa seal stamp (Wikimedia)

 

North America: Canada approved psilocybin and MDMA as psychiatric drugs. Canada also announced plans to increase annual immigration to 500,000 by 2025. I don’t know if these stories are related. The following two might be: solar power capacity in the United States has risen 2,000 percent since 2011, and Duke Energy announced it will fully exit coal-fired power generation by 2035. The American Inflation Reduction Act allocated about $40 billion for conservation. The Snoqualmies bought 12,000 acres of ancestral land in Washington state. Five other Native nations partnered with the U.S. to manage Bears Ears National Monument. Colorado, California, and Maine will provide free school meals to all public-school students. California announced plans to manufacture insulin for state residents. In Mexico, same-sex marriage is now legal in all states, and bullfighting is illegal.

Bear's Ears Natl. Monument (Wikimedia)

 

South America: Lula defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential election. This is unqualified good news for the whole planet. Also in Brazil, the golden lion tamarin has been saved from extinction. The Rainforest Trust protected one million more acres of tropical forest in Ecuador, Central America, and southeast Asia.

I AIN'T DEAD YET (Wikimedia)

 

The World at Large: Artemis I successfully launched and rounded the Moon in November. Global child mortality reportedly dropped from twelve to five million between 1990 and 2020. The Intl Energy Agency reports that renewable and nuclear power now employ more people globally than fossil fuels. In Australia, ranchers are raising asparagopsis seaweed as an additive to cattle feed. It will reduce methane omissions by up to 95 percent and make cows more comfortable in social situations.

 

Artemis I heads to the Moon (Wikimedia)

 

Sometimes Imperialism Wears an Expensive Fur Hat

The Manchus, whose soldiers conquered China in the 1640s and whose Qing dynasty ruled it for 270 years, shared with other northern Eurasian peoples a love of fur. In the cold northern provinces of the Qing Empire, ermine, sable, and otter adorned the hats and outer garments of Manchu elites and their wealthier Han subjects. Of all these adornments the thick and lustrous pelts of Pacific sea otters were probably most prized. European observers claimed that Han merchants would buy otter fur for its weight in silver. This made sea otter pelts very valuable to Europeans, for China had much that Europe wanted - tea and fine silks, in particular - and Europe had nothing China wanted, except for silver itself. Hard cash being ever in short supply in the backward and barbarous West, China-bound merchants saw the luxury fur market as their salvation. Here at last was a commodity the sophisticated Han would willingly buy.*

Russia pioneered the Chinese luxury-fur trade, selling high-value pelts at the Qing entrepot of Kyakta on the Amur River. Once Russian traders (promyshlenniki) discovered the value of sea otter pelts, they began buying or seizing them from northern Pacific indigenes. From the Kamchatka Peninsula the adventurers expanded their range into the Aleutian Islands, thence to southern and southeastern Alaska. The 100 or so Russian trading expeditions to Alaska between 1740 and 1800 brought home up to 4,000 otter pelts each, and collectively sold eight million rubles’ worth** of otter in northern China. Many paid little or nothing to their Native American suppliers, forcing Aleut hunters (for instance) into their service by taking Aleut families hostage. Some indigenes proved harder to coerce: the Tlingits destroyed several Russian outposts rather than submit to serfdom, and the Russian-American Company decided that peaceful commerce would cost less than the conquest of so large a nation. Russians bought the Tlingits’ furs with European and Chinese trade goods. Tlingit chiefs displayed the wealth they derived from the tripartite Pacific trade by wearing vests adorned with one of their new imports: Chinese coins. Three continents’ peoples were now joined not only by commerce but by the exotic clothing, the bright silks and sleek furs and formidable vests, that their elites showed off in public.

Russia could not long enjoy a monopoly of northern Pacific commerce. Other European powers with strong mercantile fleets soon inserted themselves into the Sino-American otter trade. Britain got in early, after James Cook learned (1778) that the Nootka people would sell the furs of “sea beavers” (as he called otters) for a relative pittance. The fractious but intrepid Americans soon followed. After American independence New Englanders began sailing round the Horn to the north Pacific, stopping near the Columbia River to swap beads and nails for Chinook hunters’ furs, then continuing on to Canton with their “soft gold.” By 1820, 400 British and American trading ships had called at the Columbia, Puget Sound, and Vancouver Island. Sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest drew lower prices than their Alaskan equivalents, but Alaska lay under a Russian claim, and otter remained easier for Americans (or Brits) to obtain in quantity than their other China-market export, ginseng.

Fairly early on, wealthy British and American merchants, and the government officials with whom they enjoyed a more-than-cordial relationship, realized that a land-based otter trade could probably operate more cheaply and effectively than a maritime one. Coastal trading posts could attract trading partners from greater distances, as Native American hunters would presumably more readily undertake long journeys to a permanently staffed storehouse than to an ephemeral landing site. Also, such posts might prove easier to supply by land than by sea. Using an oceanic route, the Pacific Northwest lay half a planet away from London and Boston, but a continental riverine route might make it more accessible from the eastern United States and Canada.

Britain’s Northwest Company, one of the two largest trading firms in eighteenth-century Canada, made an early attempt to develop an overland route to the western sea. In 1792-93 NWC employee Alexander McKenzie, with substantial assistance from Native American guides, crossed the northern Rockies to the Pacific. The path he followed proved too rough and difficult for sustained long-distance commerce. Nonetheless, it stoked the anxieties of American officials when Mackenzie published an account of his travels in London a decade later. President Thomas Jefferson worried that the British would soon discover a cheap and easy overland route to the Pacific, use it to establish trading posts in the Northwest, and thereby dominate the region’s sea-otter trade. Hoping that the United States could beat Britain to the punch, Jefferson directed the Corps of Discovery (which departed one year after the release of Mackenzie’s book) to chart a route for water traffic from the center of North America to the western shore, and to plant the American flag on the north Pacific coast. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark weren’t engaged in an early act of Manifest Destiny, blazing a trail for brave pioneer settlers*** - they were securing American access to the complex and valuable China trade. Gumption and bravery these explorers doubtless had, but what set them on their course were silk and silver, Manchu fur hats and Native American coin vests, and plain old-fashioned imperialism.

Sources:

James Gibson, Otter Skins, British Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast (McGill-Queens UP, 1992), 12-15

Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), Chapter 1

Jonathan Schlesinger, “China’s Tangled Environmental History,” The Diplomat, 5 November 2016

Alan Taylor, “Continental Crossings,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004): 182-188

Jason Wordie, “Pelt and Road: How Trade with China was Smoothed with Furs from British Columbia,” South China Morning Post, 7 March 2018

* Before the British introduced opium, the only other European imports saleable in China were French clocks and printed cotton cloth, the latter of which Chinese traders bought only reluctantly.

** About 240-480 million modern U.S. dollars, based on the equivalent exchange values between each currency and gold.

*** The Oregon Trail followed a different route than Lewis and Clark’s path, in any case, a route pioneered by the first American fur-trading company to set up shop in the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific Interlude

Two quick historical notes from the Pacific coast of North America:

First, an article in Science (summarized in the March 8, 2011 issue of the New York Times) reports on archaeological findings at three 12,000-year-old sites on the Channel Islands of California. The sites contained numerous "delicate" projectile points, used for a variety of marine-oriented subsistence activities: catching fish and shellfish and hunting seals and waterfowl. The most startling feature of the sites was their age: they were contemporaneous with the Clovis culture, and provide further evidence that some of the earliest human settlers of the Americas were mariners who migrated into the hemisphere via the Pacific Coast.

Second, via Newshoggers.com, an interesting observation about historical earthquakes in the Pacific. I found it neat that one can so precisely date a major earthquake off the Oregon coast in the era before European contact, based on the simple combination of radiocarbon dating of destroyed trees and plant life, and the known impact date of a tsunami that crossed the Pacific and hit Japan the following day (27 January 1700). I must confess I also didn't know how recently Mount Hood had erupted: there was apparently a major eruption in 1805, right before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Columbia Valley.

Undaunted Puppy Flinging

2006 concludes a four-year commemoration of the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's overland journey to the Pacific Ocean. The two explorers have been back in the public eye for nearly a decade, owing to Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage and Ken Burns' PBS series. The bicentennial commission has sponsored commemorative events along the Lewis andClark National Historic Trail, and the U.S. Mint has issued a series of commemorative nickels displaying a keelboat, a peace medal, a buffalo, and the Columbia Gorge. Naturally, our public remembrance of the explorers has been adulatory, emphasizing their courage, their scientific curiosity, and their sympathy for and good relations with the western Indians.

I think it useful to remember that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were only human, and that their personal shortcomings became particularly pronounced as they entered the last year of their journey. By 1806 Lewis and Clark were flea-bitten, footsore, exhausted, and homesick, and had lost all patience with the nominally-friendly Indians, even though their commission from President Jefferson had assigned them the dual role of explorers and diplomats. The highly strung Captain Lewis complained about acts of petty theft committed by members of the Wahclella and Eneeshur nations (in northern Oregon), whose beliefs about personal property -- i.e., that friendly people shared their goods with one another -- were very different from his own. In April Lewis beat up an Indian man who tried to steal "an iron socket of a canoe pole" and threatened his kinsmen with fire and sword if it happened again (John Bakeless, Journals of Lewis and Clark, 306-307).

A few weeks later, on May 5th, there was an even more noteworthy confrontation, stemming from Meriwether Lewis's acquired taste for dog meat. A young Nez Perce man "very impertinently threw a poor, half-starved puppy nearly into my plate by way of derision for our eating dogs, and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence." Rather than behaving diplomatically, Lewis responded violently: "I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struck him in the breast and face, seized my tomahawk, and showed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tomahawk him." (ibid, 313). The Nez Perces' replies to Lewis's action are not recorded. Neither is the puppy's.

Somehow, I doubt that Lewis's bloodthirsty threats, the fistfights, or the flung puppy will make it onto coins or into future television programs on the expedition. Americans need their myths, and the tale of the Corps of Discovery is the closest thing to the Odyssey that we have. On the other hand, a reader familiar with this story at least knows one fact that differentiates Meriwether Lewis from the more phlegmatic William Clark, whom most Americans otherwise tend to confuse with one another.

(There are some very good Websites on the Lewis & Clark expedition, including "Discovering Lewis and Clark.")