Danity Laukon was sitting in her bedroom in her two-bedroom flat in Suva, Fiji when she got the call. It was November 2021, and her dad, more than 1,800 miles away at her home in Majuro in the Marshall Islands, had died after a battle with diabetes. 

He was 50 years old.

Diabetes is not an illness that is directly caused by radiation. But Laukon believes that American nuclear testing in the Pacific played a role in his early death. 

After years of nuclear bomb detonations in the Marshall Islands, fallout and forced relocations of communities began a ripple effect: many Indigenous Marshallese people who had relied on subsistence farming and fishing for 4,000 years suddenly couldn’t trust the safety of their food, becoming reliant on imported products, and unhealthy, non-native processed foods.

And those were the lucky ones. On Utrik atoll, where Laukon’s maternal family is from, many residents fell ill from acute radiation sickness. 

Now she’s worried her community will face even more health risks. On Thursday, the government of Japan began releasing wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, and plans to continue to do so gradually for the next 30 years. 

Japan is treating the water before it is poured into the sea, but the water will still contain low levels of radioactive contaminants that can’t be removed. Japan promises that the levels of contaminants present will be significantly lower than international health standards, and has gained the support of a key United Nations agency. But some scientists remain concerned about how little is known about potential long-term effects of the wastewater. 

Japanese officials declined to speak on the record about their plans but have publicly outlined an argument that the country is running out of room to store contaminated water from the nuclear power plant and that another earthquake – similar to the quake that damaged the plant – could release the stored water before being treated. The plan now is to treat contaminated water, then dilute it into the Pacific Ocean over the course of three decades in order to more quickly decommission the nuclear facility.

In 2011, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan causing a tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and knocked out emergency generators to the Fukushima nuclear plant. In the hours after, three nuclear reactors melted down, forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people. Radioactive water spilled into the Pacific and was carried east by currents toward the United States. Two and a half years later, radiation from the plant was detected in waters off California, but at levels considered harmless.

In the decade since, Japan has erected more than 1,000 tanks to store more than a million tons of water from Fukushima: rainwater, groundwater, and water pumped into the facility to cool the damaged reactors. Once treated, that water will be poured into the Pacific for the next three decades.

Japanese officials have promised that the levels of contaminants present in the wastewater will be significantly lower than international health standards, and last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency that oversees nuclear energy, greenlit the plan when it released a report describing the wastewater as having a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.” 

However, some scientists remain concerned about how little is known about potential long-term effects of that wastewater, while many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific, like Laukon, worry that the move will add an additional burden to the health disparities communities already face. For Laukon, Japan’s decision is an extension of a long-running history of using the Pacific as a dumping ground for nuclear waste.

“It’s giving us more to deal with,” she said. “It feels helpless.” 

During the Cold War, Britain, France and the U.S. tested more than 300 nuclear bombs across the Pacific regions of Polynesia and Micronesia as well as in the deserts of Australia. After a detonation in the Marshall Islands, children on Rongelap atoll ate “snow” that fell from the sky that later turned out to be calcium debris from the fallout. Radioactive debris clung to the coconut oil of women’s hair. 

At Fukushima, one concern about the discharge is around tritium, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors that can’t be removed through Japan’s treatment process. Japanese officials say that once the wastewater mixes into the ocean one kilometer off of Japan’s shores, the amount of tritium present is expected to be well below the World Health Organization’s standards for drinking water quality –1,500 becquerels per liter compared with the WHO limit of 10,000 becquerels per liter; levels comparable to those in water released from normally-operating nuclear power plants in China, the United Kingdom and Canada. 

Japan says the discharge is safe, but Timothy Mousseau isn’t so sure. The biologist and professor at the University of South Carolina and author of an exhaustive review of existing studies on tritium currently awaiting publication.

“The bottom line from my perspective is that (tritium) has been insufficiently studied to be making hard promises about the long-term safety of this kind of release,” Mousseau said. “We don’t actually really understand what the potential ramifications of a massive point source of tritium will be on the natural environment.”

While exposure to tritium through swimming or drinking water isn’t a risk, the radioactive isotope can bioaccumulate through the food chain. Studies of mice and rats suggest that ingesting tritium could lead to cancer and fertility problems, Mousseau said, but whether that would happen in humans isn’t clear because the radioactive isotope hasn’t been studied enough.

“We really don’t know whether there will be a significant hazard to humans at the end of the food chain,” said Mousseau. 

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That potential to impact the food chain is a big concern to Robert Richmond, director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaiʻi and a professor who specializes in marine conservation biology and coral reefs. 

Richmond is part of a panel of experts advising the Pacific Islands Forum, the chief diplomatic body representing Pacific island nations, on Japan’s plan. In February, he visited Japan to meet with the country’s scientists about the release. He left unimpressed by the lack of data they provided regarding the contents of their water tanks and the effectiveness of their treatment system. 

“When they say the science is impeccable — no, anything but,” he said. 

Richmond and his fellow scientists saw red flags in what data did exist including inconsistencies and poorly designed sampling protocols. One of Richmond’s colleagues, Kenneth Buesseler, is a marine radiochemist and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Buesseler says the water flowing through the plant is exposed to more radiation than cooling water in normally functioning nuclear reactors because it’s in direct contact with molten coil. That means the water will need to be treated multiple times to reach the health standards that Japan has promised. He doesn’t believe Japan has effectively demonstrated that its treatment system can consistently remove the high levels of dangerous compounds present in the wastewater. 

He also doubts that there’s an urgent need to get rid of the water and says Japan should consider other viable alternatives. The rush to discharge the water, Richmond said, suggests Japan is choosing the cheapest, most politically expedient method to get rid of the nuclear waste rather than doing what’s best for its neighbors and the ocean, which is already stressed from the effects of climate change, plastic pollution and ocean acidification.  

“Once you’ve made a mistake, there’s no turning back, and all the monitoring in the world does nothing to protect ecosystems or the people who depend on them,” he said. “It simply tells you when you’re screwed and that doesn’t really do anything.”  

Pacific opposition to the plan was initially strong, but after Japanese officials carried out a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to sway public opinion including meeting with Pacific leaders, several expressed support, most recently Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.

On Twitter on Tuesday, Rabuka called the comparison of Japan’s controlled wastewater discharge to historic nuclear testing in the Pacific “fear mongering.” 

“It’s impossible to compare those nuclear tests with the careful discharge of treated wastewater from Fukushima over a period of approximately 30 years,” he wrote.

But other leaders, like Vanuatu’s foreign minister, remain unconvinced. Sheila Babauta, a former legislator from the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, abbreviated as CNMI, authored a resolution that condemned Japan’s plan in 2021. Today, she remains resolute in her opposition.

“I’m deeply concerned for the people of the CNMI and how decisions by major world powers are being made without our knowledge and how that’s going to impact our lives today and for future generations,” she said.

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On Tuesday, Laukon was visiting Honolulu, and woke up to Facebook messages from friends asking her about Japan’s plan to release the wastewater that week. What could they do? Could they put out a statement criticizing the plans? Would it make a difference? 

It took her a while for the reality to sink in — the fact that what she and others had been campaigning against was actually happening. 

“To be honest, it feels helpless to really voice what you want to say because does it matter? Are they listening?” she said. “But it does matter. Whatever we do now will still affect later generations. And that’s why I’m worried.”

It was hard to put how she felt into words. What could she say that could capture the feeling she had about what she feared, what this big decision that was so far out of her control meant for her people? 

She finished composing a poem she had started writing last week in Fiji. It was about a turtle who lays eggs under the full moon, only to realize they won’t hatch. 

“Under a full moon / I see raindrops / blue water / an island is grieving / in silence,” she wrote.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Japan releases Fukushima wastewater into the ocean, Pacific Islanders are reminded of a never-ending nuclear legacy on Aug 24, 2023.

This story was co-published with Rappler, a Philippines-based online news publication.

Tina Batalla had owned a bicycle for many years. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that the then-21-year-old university student really started using it to get around Metro Manila after a friend invited her out on a rainy day ride in June 2020.

“There were no cars, and it felt safe,” she said. Riding on streets free of the car traffic that has earned Metro Manila a reputation as one of the most congested urban areas in the world built Batalla’s confidence that she could get around by bike despite not being a “hard-core cyclist.” 

“Re-experiencing the city I grew up in clicked a switch in me, and I felt like this is something I want to continue doing,” she said.

Batalla is one of many Filipinos — and people around the world — who embraced biking in a new way during the pandemic. But now, the country’s climate-friendliest mode of transportation besides walking is at risk, as national lawmakers slash the budget for bike lanes — and Filipino cyclists are organizing to ensure that the silver lining of the pandemic leads to lasting improvements in bicycle infrastructure.

Keeping the gains

COVID-19 pushed Metro Manila’s already-struggling public transit system into crisis: The government shut down mass transportation in the city for two and half months in an effort to contain the virus, and after the shutdown lifted, capacity limits forced commuters to wait for up to three hours just to board the Metro Rail Transit, or MRT. Similar wait times plagued buses and jeepneys, iconically Filipino public transit vehicles.

Bike owners outnumber car owners 5 to 1 in Metro Manila, a metropolitan area made up of 16 interconnected cities. The long lines at transit stations left cycling as the most viable alternative for many. Hospitals began setting up bike parking to accommodate the droves of doctors and nurses cycling to work. Local city governments used traffic cones or simple stripes of paint to outline pop-up bike lanes, and the national government’s Department of Transportation, or DOTr, created a new office to focus explicitly on active transport (which includes biking, walking, scooters, and the like). By June 2021, 313 kilometers (194 miles) of new bike lanes had been added to streets within Metro Manila through the combined efforts of local and national governments.

“The pandemic was a huge factor in pushing the Philippine government to prioritize and promote active mobility,” said Eldon Joshua Dionisio, the program manager of DOTr’s active transport office, which has grown to include 14 employees.

Metro Manila’s pandemic cycling boom mirrors a phenomenon experienced in cities all over the world. In the U.S., people began cycling at “unprecedented levels” and bike sales surged. In Europe, more than $1.1 billion dollars worth of biking infrastructure was built between March and October 2020, with cities like Paris and Brussels leading the way. And in South America, cities like Lima and Bogotá began building out bike lanes along routes that had been identified years beforehand but never installed until the pandemic drove more cyclists onto the streets.

All that pedal-pushing has come with a host of benefits. Elijah Go Tian, a lead on the Low Carbon Transport Project at the United Nations Development Programme in the Philippines, noted that switching from cars to bikes drastically lowers climate change-causing emissions. The daily travel emissions of people who cycle are 84 percent lower than those of non-cyclists, according to one Oxford study. More bike trips and fewer car trips also makes for less air pollution, which costs the Philippines approximately $87 billion annually in healthcare costs and productivity loss, according to a 2021 study. Bikes can also reduce car traffic and noise pollution, help riders stay healthier and more active, and provide greater agency over one’s own mobility.

Despite this multitude of benefits, the gains of the last three years are not guaranteed to persist in the Philippines. Though the national government earmarked 4 billion pesos (around $71 million) for active transport from 2020 to 2023, the budget has been cut each year, down to 500 million pesos for 2024 from a high of 2 billion pesos in 2022. 

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“We have decision-makers who are still car-centric,” Dionisio said. 

That drop in funding for the office that oversees safe biking infrastructure could slow progress considerably: A recent survey found that 4 out of 5 household heads in the Philippines agree that more people would use bikes as transportation if the roads were safer.

“The momentum has been slowing down a bit,” said Tian.

Decision-makers in business and politics come primarily from the car-owning class, which can exacerbate inequality, said Earl Decena, a sustainable transportation officer at the business association Makati Business Club. Though only 6 percent of Filipinos own cars, biking has been associated with poverty in the past, and sometimes discriminated against in both the public and private sector. 

“The norm, especially pre-pandemic, has been that if you’re on a bicycle, you’re not treated the same way you would be treated if you came in a vehicle,” he said. “There’s an undertone of, ‘If you’re in a car, you can probably pay more.’” 

When that attitude gets scaled up to the level of policy, it can enshrine preferential treatment for car owners — rather than the 94 percent of Filipinos who don’t own cars — into law.

Maintaining momentum

Fractured and uneven oversight of biking infrastructure also causes problems for bikers, explained Ramir Angeles. Angeles is a transportation engineer for the government of Quezon City, one of the cities that makes up Metro Manila. Since local government units oversee local roads, while the national government oversees national roads, maintenance of bike lanes can be uneven. 

“Bike lanes have now become a much more hostile environment than they were” during the height of the pandemic, said Angeles, adding that the return to pre-pandemic levels of car traffic has escalated the sense of danger for many bikers. And in some parts of Metro Manila, bike infrastructure is actively “being removed or downgraded,” he added. 

Batalla has experienced the latter firsthand. When she learned in February that the bike lanes along Ayala Avenue, a major thoroughfare in one of Metro Manila’s busiest business districts, were going to be converted into dreaded “sharrows,” which would force bikers to share a lane with public transit vehicles like buses and jeepneys while leaving private vehicle lanes untouched, she was outraged. 

“These bike lanes were so important for the safety of our essential workers … What happens if we have cities that keep on making them work but don’t actually care about their safety?” she asked. “It really hit me that if we did not get on the streets, speak up and organize, those lanes would basically be lost forever.”

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Batalla’s response to that frustration was to organize. What started as a one-off group ride in protest of the Ayala Avenue plan eventually grew into the #MakeItSafer campaign, part of a larger transportation advocacy group called the Move As One Coalition. The campaign convinced Ayala Land, the decision-making entity behind the bike lane conversion, to enter into a dialogue with advocates to work towards a different solution. And when Ayala Land “rejected the community’s proposed safety interventions,” Move As One staged another protest ride in July, this time to pressure the decision-makers to fix bike lanes and strengthen enforcement to keep motorcycles out of bike lanes.

Batalla’s experience points to a factor that could help maintain Metro Manila’s momentum: the vibrant community of bikers that has been expanding rapidly since 2020. Cycling clubs started by those riders have been popping up all over the metro area, facilitating group rides, pop-up events, and protests. The result is a network of people across the city who are primed to mobilize to protect bikers’ interests.

And even if cycling isn’t accelerating as quickly as it did in 2020, the numbers of bikers on the roads remain high. A bike count in June 2022 found about 54,000 cyclists on main roads over four hours. Even that number, which Angeles said is an undercount and which was only conducted in four of the 16 cities that make up Metro Manila, makes clear that cyclists remain a sizable demographic. 

“Because of the community that was built, because of the people who were awakened, there is a stronger pushback,” said Aneka Crisostomo, a sustainable transport advocate and community manager at Tambay Cycling Hub, a bike shop and gathering spot in Pasig, another city in Metro Manila. 

“There are people who are now more vigilant about the road space we deserve, because a lot of us saw that it actually can be done.”

Many businesses are starting to see the value in catering to that growing community, said Makati Business Club’s Decena. Restaurants that earn a reputation for being “bike friendly” by treating bikers as valued customers rather than second-class citizens attract valuable word-of-mouth marketing among the cycling community. He also pointed to larger companies like McDonald’s and Robinsons, a mall chain, that have prioritized safe bike parking. 

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“The majority of our population, and therefore the majority of our market, is a cycling market,” he said. “If you’re a business, you stand to make more if you cater to the cyclists and pedestrians.”

Ultimately, Decena thinks it’s no big mystery what Metro Manila needs to do to maintain its cycling momentum and deliver a host of climate and health benefits to its citizens. 

It doesn’t need to become Amsterdam, Paris, or even Bogotá, which Decena thinks is a more useful comparison than wealthy cities in the Global North. The city just needs its leaders to stick with the initiatives they started during the pandemic — to build out and maintain safe bike infrastructure rather than prioritizing cars at every turn.

“If you plan for transport based on your past patterns, you are always running the risk of replicating whatever patterns have held in the past,” he said. “So there has to come a point where you say, ‘We want to change what that looks like moving forward.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can Manila’s cycling boom survive a return to car traffic? on Aug 24, 2023.

Workers at the shipping company UPS have just ratified a union contract that secures wage increases and extreme heat protections for more than 340,000 employees across the country. The deal marks a major win for what organizers have dubbed “hot labor summer,” in which labor fights led by groups ranging from auto workers to Hollywood actors have made headlines in recent months. UPS workers called attention in particular to the dangers posed by soaring temperatures and unsafe working conditions — a key issue in contract negotiations. 

The five-year deal bumps up hourly wages for all employees, ends a two-tier wage system that allowed UPS to pay new drivers less, and eliminates mandatory overtime on drivers’ days off. UPS has also agreed to equip vehicles purchased after January 2024 with air conditioning and to retrofit existing cars with fans, vents, and exhaust heat shields. Leaders at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union representing UPS workers, have called the contract “the most lucrative agreement the Teamsters have ever negotiated at UPS.”

“This contract will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers,” said Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union. “This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention.”

The deal was approved by 86.3 percent of unionized workers at UPS. Teamsters said that it received the highest number of votes ever seen for a Teamsters contract at UPS. 

The new agreement highlights how extreme heat has raised the stakes for labor organizing this summer. Relentless heat and humidity in the South, a heat dome stifling the central U.S., and the hottest June and July recorded in world history have created especially dangerous conditions for workers. Heat-related health risks heighten exponentially for people who have to work outdoors or without air conditioning. In the past few months, workers from Greece to Texas have responded by staging walkouts, going on strike, and demanding greater heat protections for workers.  

UPS drivers and warehouse workers say that record-breaking heat waves have rendered the company’s 12-hour workdays and unrealistic productivity benchmarks downright deadly. UPS previously refused to install air conditioning in delivery trucks, claiming that it wouldn’t be feasible due to their frequent stops. “When you open the bulkhead door to go to the back to look for packages, it’s like running into a brick wall — it’s so hot,” said Rick Johnson, a driver who has worked at UPS for 28 years, in a Teamsters video. “You can’t stay back there with the doors closed or you’ll pass out.”

In June 2022, a 24-year old UPS driver named Esteban Chavez died of heat-related heart failure while delivering packages in California. In August 2021, another driver named José Cruz Rodriguez died of heat-related illness on his delivery route in Texas. UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2015. 

Union workers praised the contract for finally including vital protections for drivers working in sweltering conditions. “The A/C in the trucks is something I never thought I would see,” said Keith Short, a UPS worker who participated in the Teamsters strike at UPS in 1997, in a Teamsters video.

A tentative agreement reached between UPS and the Teamsters union last month averted what would have been the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history. UPS workers transport about $3.8 billion worth of goods each day, equal to about 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

In addition to protecting workers from heat, the contract immediately bumps up all wages by $2.75 per hour, with total wage increases adding up to an additional $7.50 per hour over the next five years. All existing and new part-time employees will receive minimum wages of $21 per hour. The deal also guarantees union members will receive Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a full holiday for the first time, and creates thousands of new jobs during the length of the contract.

UPS called the contract a “win-win-win agreement” when the Teamsters first announced the tentative agreement last month. “This agreement continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong,” the company said in a statement at the time. 

The contract will go into effect as soon as one outstanding supplemental agreement for a local Teamsters chapter in Florida is renegotiated and ratified. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UPS workers win wage increases, AC in new union contract on Aug 23, 2023.