Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

Shein has collaborated with well-known musicians (Katy Perry, Nick Jonas, Lil Nas X, Tinashe) for concerts and events and, like its trendy competitors, has sponsored influencers (Addison Rae) and created capsule collections with D-list reality TV stars (The Bachelor’s Hannah Godwin, The Only Way Is Essex’s Amber Turner). But Shein isn’t a brand made for and peddled by the rich and famous. In fact, it has cemented its reputation among regular people, particularly Gen Z shoppers, who promote the brand through unsponsored clothing hauls and outfit posts on social media. Friends and coworkers have recommended Shein swimwear and dresses to me in casual conversation, over text and even on Slack. On TikTok, a recent crowd favorite is Shein’s cross-wrap crop top — a $13 garment that resembles a halter top, but with a strategically placed cutout that reveals extra cleavage.

There are tens of thousands of styles on the retailer’s site, and each day, about 1,000 more are added. For context, this production pace is even speedier than the “ultra-fast” sites that dominate fast fashion’s Instagram era; Missguided and Fashion Nova, for example, reportedly release about 1,000 new styles a week. Shein’s business model, like that of its fast forebears, abides by the tenet that more is better, that excess can be made accessible through mysteriously low prices, with little care for environmental costs or transparency about its labor force.

@mynamesmillicent69

The part two no one asked for <3 #foryoupage #fyp #foryou #shein #sheinhaul

♬ original sound - bhaddiebeats

A skilled Shein shopper can theoretically buy an entire outfit, accessories and shoes included, for $30 or less. In fact, there are entire sections on the site that help customers clinch the cheapest deals: A shopper can browse for tops under $5.99, dresses under $9.99, and clearance items under $5. The wardrobe possibilities, it seems, are endless. One Twitter user recently observed that $280 spent on Shein can create a year’s worth of outfits.

Yet Shein’s emergence as a fast fashion juggernaut can’t solely be attributed to the price of its clothing or its ubiquitous internet presence. The retailer is also nowhere to be found in the physical world — at least not in brick-and-mortar stores, although it has previously hosted in-person pop-up events. Shein appeared to have sprung out of thin air into the mainstream, unlike fast fashion’s old guards, whose spacious, brightly lit stores were proof of their dominance. Yet, Shein is so far ahead of competitors like H&M, Zara, and Asos, according to an analysis by Apptopia, that it’s difficult to compare them.

So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it.

A brief, incomplete history of Shein

Shein was first launched in 2008 under the domain SheInside, as a site that sold wedding dresses and women’s fashion geared toward US and English-language shoppers. The retailer was started in Nanjing, a province in China, by entrepreneur Chris Xu, who specialized in search engine optimization marketing. Xu has yet to publicly express any interest in women’s fashion or clothing design (granted, it doesn’t seem like he has done many interviews in English); his expertise lies in SEO and brand marketing, key factors that have contributed to Shein’s online popularity.

During Shein’s early years, there was very little that distinguished the brand from other Chinese e-commerce retailers, except that it sold wedding gowns. According to reporting from PandaYoo, an English-language site published by Chinese bloggers, Shein sourced its products from China’s wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou, a region where many Chinese garment factories and markets are centralized. Shein wasn’t involved in any aspect of garment design or manufacturing. It operated much like a dropshipping business that sells products from third-party wholesalers directly to overseas shoppers.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Shein began to acquire its own supply chain system, transforming itself into a fully integrated retailer. That year, it purchased Romwe, another Chinese e-commerce retailer. By 2015, the company had shortened its domain name to Shein, a move that reportedly made the brand more memorable and searchable for shoppers. Yet, prior to these major changes in 2014, the company had a decent online presence and enough customers to expand its operations. It was an early adopter of social media marketing, partnering with fashion bloggers for giveaways and promoting products on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest as far back as 2012.

#SheInside Valentine’s Day Giveaway
Follow @sheinsider,reply and retweet the tweet.
5 winners! pic.twitter.com/jmcbxoPqu3

— SHEIN (@SHEIN_official) January 28, 2014

Throughout the early 2010s, Shein launched overseas sites in Spain, France, Russia, Italy, and Germany, and began selling cosmetics, shoes, bags, and jewelry, in addition to womenswear. According to a translated article from the Chinese tech site LatePost, by 2016, Xu had assembled a team of 800 designers and prototypers, dedicated to rapidly producing Shein-branded clothes. Shein also began honing its supply chain, cutting out suppliers that produced “mediocre-quality products or images,” according to a 2016 press release.

By 2017, the present-day iteration of Shein had begun to take shape. The brand advertised on daytime television shows in the US, and fashion influencers showcased Shein products and hauls alongside other retailers, like Fashion Nova and Zaful. It was, however, the retailer’s early use of TikTok and ability to market viral products that skyrocketed Shein’s popularity.

Is Shein simply “fast fashion,” or is it the future?

While venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs tout Shein as the future of fashion, the company’s rise didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its success is predicated on a confluence of factors, from geopolitical trade policies to a decades-old, disaggregated global fashion ecosystem.

The fast fashion business model was pioneered in the 1990s by the founder of Inditex, the parent company of Spanish retailer Zara. Zara notoriously abandoned the concept of fashion seasons for a year-long cycle of production, which introduced customers to novel items every few weeks. Its success prompted other Western designers and retailers — H&M and Forever 21, to name two — to follow its lead into the next decade. Retailers migrated most of their manufacturing process overseas to countries with lax labor laws, where wages can be low and working overtime (without additional pay) is common. This, of course, made fashion companies more profitable, as shoppers became hooked on a cycle of novelty. But soon, things were about to get even faster.

Toward the tail end of the 2010s, “ultra-fast” fashion brands — Asos, Boohoo, Fashion Nova, and now Shein — emerged as viable competitors to the dominant fashion empires of the previous decade. Last October, Reuters reported that investors think “Zara … is going to be crushed by fast fashion 2.0.” These ultra-fast fashion companies are able to reach millions of young shoppers directly through social media without the need for physical retail space, and relied on search traffic and customer data to foreshadow trends.

But by virtue of Shein’s location and software technology, the retailer developed a speedy edge on its competitors. Matthew Brennan, a Beijing-based writer and analyst of Chinese technology, likened its pace to “real-time” retail. That means Shein is constantly gathering and analyzing customer data and uses that knowledge to craft new designs — within as little as three days.

“Each new design is basically a bet because Shein can estimate how well a product is going to do, but it doesn’t know for sure until it sells,” Brennan explained. “Compared to its fast fashion competitors, Shein is able to take more bets, but at a lower risk. It’s able to place very small initial orders with these factories, about 100 or even smaller.” These batches were much smaller than Zara’s and that of ultra-fast fashion retailers like Boohoo, which reportedly ordered about 300 to 500 units per style. If a specific top goes viral overnight on TikTok, for example, Shein will be able to instantaneously ramp up production on the garment and place additional orders depending on demand.

Shein has spent years cultivating relationships with Chinese garment factories and manufacturers, whereas most Western brands generally outsource this work. Inditex is similarly situated close to a garment production center in the northeast region of Spain, but according to Brennan, business in China moves much faster.

“Shein doesn’t work with very large factories but [with] small to mid-sized workshops that pick up orders daily,” Brennan said. “It’s very much like an Uber system, where new orders are coming into factory owners’ phones and they receive the order. It’s very scrappy, but efficient.”

Most retailers place a main order at the start of the season, according to Craig Ryder, director of the UK-based Supply Chain Consulting Group: “It depends on where the order is made and where it’s being shipped to, but generally, between a retailer placing an order and getting it to market, there is very limited time to order more.”

And despite Shein’s popularity, the company remains largely unknown among Chinese consumers. The Chinese apparel market is extremely competitive, and Shein’s priority from the beginning has been to export goods abroad. The retailer has also benefited from deteriorating trade relations between China and the US. China began waiving export taxes for direct-to-consumer companies in 2018 after the US imposed more tariffs, Bloomberg reported. Since Shein ships its orders directly to customers from Chinese warehouses, packages worth less than $800, or small-value shipments, generally remain duty-free. In other words, Shein has managed to circumvent paying both export and import taxes for about three years, something brick-and-mortar retailers aren’t able to avoid.

“If you’re Zara, there’s no way you’re going to get around US import duties because you’re not shipping to individuals. You’re selling to stores and importing in bulk,” Michael Horowitz, a consultant at the firm Retail ROI, told Bloomberg. “[Zara has] too much of a physical presence. It can’t get away with it.”

Still, receiving a shipment from Shein can take a week or longer, which is a prolonged timeline for most US-based retailers and, of course, Amazon. (The company does offer free shipping on all orders.) Shein has, in a sense, served as an accelerant in the fashion world. It has forced competitors to reassess the emphasis on speed to increase profit margins, at the cost of everything else.

Is Shein’s speediness ethical?

Over the past year, Shein has received backlash from customers for selling, among several offensive items, a necklace with a Buddhist swastika pendant, a phone case with an image of a handcuffed Black person outlined in chalk, and a Muslim prayer mat as a decorative rug. The company has apologized for these incidents, which Shein has spun as a lack of cultural sensitivity and understanding of its global audiences.

But these hiccups — which are offensive at worst, and weird at best — are partly a direct result of Shein’s fast production cycle. Following the completely legal copycat model of most fast fashion retailers, Shein employs workers to recreate trending designs for its own products. The artwork on Shein’s offensive phone case was replicated without permission from a 2014 drawing by French graphic artist Jean Jullien, in the wake of the Ferguson uprisings. Several designers and artists have accused the company of making blatant rip-offs of their work, but there’s little that can be done, besides drawing the internet’s attention to it.

Im SO over these major brands stealing from black designers. @SHEIN_official STOLE my @sincerelyriaxo designs to a T. They couldn’t even change ONE thing and it’s now one of their highest selling items. They even stole the brands aesthetic. Like Come on pic.twitter.com/ose8DiM9hK

— Mariama Diallo ✨ (@MariamaDiallo__) June 11, 2021

There’s a running, unproven accusation on TikTok that Shein depends on child labor. These comments usually appear on videos of Shein hauls or styling videos, in which users try to shame well-off creators for buying from a purportedly unethical company. To be clear, there is no evidence that Shein employs children or produces an unsafe labor environment, but the company has not publicly disclosed workers’ wages or hours. LatePost reported that Shein has “a reputation for timely payment [to factories],” which is a rarity in China, and factory owners were willing to relocate their operations with the retailer in 2015.

Yet timely payment alone should not be cause for praise. What are the ethics of producing and selling thousands of garments a day at a breakneck pace, even if workers are reportedly paid on time? Shein’s business model drives — and depends on — overconsumption. Some of the most popular Shein-related TikToks feature young women buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes to try on for every season or fashion TikTok trend. Sure, not every consumer can afford ethically made goods or have easy access to a thrift store, but it’s not low-income shoppers who are keeping Shein and the fast fashion industry alive.

@itsdejbabes

It finally came…$800 spent on clothes ✨…. SHEIN haul ?#fyp #foryou #foryourpage #shein_official #sheinhaul #fashion #shein

♬ She Make It Clap - Soulja Boy

I’ve previously written about how the fashion industry is one of the world’s most resource-intensive sectors, even though there is no official research that fully summarizes fashion’s environmental impact. The production of polyester textiles alone emitted about 706 billion kilograms of greenhouse gases in 2015, and hundreds of gallons of water go into making a single cotton garment. Most of the clothes from Shein are made from synthetic fabrics, which are responsible for releasing plastic microfibers into oceans.

The retailer has stayed mum on ethical fashion and sustainability, but it’s hard to imagine Shein embracing corporate accountability without widespread consumer pressure. Regardless, Shein seems poised to be the fashion giant of the decade, and investors are scrambling to look for other retailers that could copy its speedy supply chain. And as the fashion industry adjusts to Shein’s blinding pace, it’s safe to assume that shoppers are encouraged and expected to buy more and more. All it takes is another viral must-have product from a brand that might be the next big thing. For now, though, Shein doesn’t seem willing to give up the throne.

A number of unique factors in recent seasons combined with long-term trends and created the devastating blazes. But a major reason for the massive scale of the destruction is that natural fires and burning practices first developed by Indigenous people have been suppressed for generations.

Wildfires are essential to many Western ecosystems in the US, restoring nutrients to the soil, clearing decaying brush, and helping plants germinate. Without these fires, vegetation in woodlands, grasslands, and chaparral shrublands accumulates, so more fuel is available to burn, especially when a megadrought keeps drying out the fuel, year after year. A debt to the landscape starts to mount, and when it comes due, there is hell to pay.

“If we’re not using fire in the same way that this landscape evolved with over millennia, then we could be creating a situation where we’re creating a further imbalance,” said Don Hankins, an environmental geographer at California State University Chico and a Plains Miwok Indigenous fire practitioner.

So a key part of the strategy to reduce the growing threat from wildfires is to burn parts of the landscape on purpose.

This is much easier said than done. It’s costly, it can be dangerous, and it demands a sophisticated and granular understanding of the land. But American Indians have used burning practices across much of the West for thousands of years, building up a vast reservoir of knowledge of when and how to start fires to protect themselves and to increase the bounty of the land.

Much of this burning stopped when European settlers arrived, driving American Indians away from their ancestral homes and depriving those who remained of their culture. Now there’s a growing movement to bring these practices back to the landscape, with Indigenous practitioners in the lead in places like California. But it requires confronting an ugly past and facing a future of growing wildfire risk.

Why Indigenous burning practices are a powerful way to mitigate wildfire risk

To understand how we arrived in this era of extreme wildfires across the western United States, scientists have studied patterns like those in tree rings to get a sense of the history of fires across the West.

“It shows that a lot of these areas burned a lot, anywhere from every two years to every 15 years,” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist at the United States Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station. “If you haven’t burned in a long time — some of these places haven’t seen fire in recorded history, or since 1910 — that’s a lot of fire debt.”

A tree ring section showing burn scars. Eric Knapp/USFS
A tree ring cross-section collected near Redding, California, shows regular fire burn scars that became much less frequent after 1855.

The US Forest Service has even tabulated estimates for how often fires have historically occurred across ecosystems like sage scrub and ponderosa pine forests. These records, plus what we know about how fires were suppressed since the 1800s, point toward how much American Indians in the western US engineered the landscape with their burning practices for thousands of years. European settlers arrived and saw a landscape that had been methodically cultivated, like forests with trees spaced far apart and with little leaf litter on the ground. But they often failed to recognize it as such.

“There’s this idea — the idea I was raised with — that this wilderness is untrammeled by man,” Knapp said. “The more work I’ve done in this field, the more strongly I believe that there was a pretty strong human imprint on this landscape.”

The gap between historical levels of burning and the current fires also illustrates how much more fuel is now available to burn in dangerous megafires. However, there’s more to paying off this fire debt than lighting a match.

Bill Tripp is the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources. The Karuk Tribe’s territory is in Northern California and reaches into Oregon. Tripp, a member of the tribe and an Indigenous fire practitioner, explained that every bit of the landscape has its own terroir when it comes to fire, a unique set of traits in a given region that can influence a blaze. The ideal conditions for a burn depend on the mix of plants, sunlight, soil, and weather conditions. They can change from day to day, and from one hillside to another.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources, stands in a stretch of tribal land that was burned in June near Happy Camp, California.

And these deliberate fires are not just about reducing wildfire risk, as is often the case with prescribed burns from government or private land managers. These Indigenous burns serve cultural purposes, like maintaining trails, helping food plants grow, and providing materials for building and crafts. Such fires don’t just hinge on “when” and “how,” but on “why,” which in turn demands sophisticated local insight. For practitioners, it’s not just a tactic, but a way of thinking about how they interact with the natural world.

“The Karuk people have historically been dependent on the food, fiber, and medicinal resources that come off the greater landscape,” Tripp said. “We’re still dependent on those today.”

When done right, these Indigenous-prescribed fires have natural breaks built in as they spread from one type of vegetation to another. Indigenous burning practices can create a mosaic of areas that can readily burn, surrounded by areas that are more resistant to ignition. Those breaks can be areas that have previously burned, thereby having less fuel, or plants that retain more moisture and are less likely to catch on fire.

There are ecological benefits, too. A well-timed burn can also restore the biodiversity of the species of plants and animals in places where invasives have become dominant. For example, invasive grasses like ripgut brome and shrubs like Spanish broom in parts of California can outcompete local vegetation, but quickly turn into highly flammable tinder when it gets hot.

A robust mix of native plant and animal species can instead make an ecosystem more resilient to shocks like drought and extreme heat, as well as speed up recovery after a fire.

A comparison of ponderosa pine forests with and without prescribed burns. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
This image shows how a ponderosa pine forest looks when fire is excluded (left) compared to a section of forest after multiple controlled burns (right).

“In California, in our foothill and valley ecosystems, we’ve got a lot of nonnative grasses,” Hankins said. “If we think about the seasonal timing of when it’s appropriate to remove those species with fire and favor native species in their place … we can still achieve the fuel reduction but then we’re shifting the dynamics in favor of native species.”

The Indigenous-prescribed fires can be slower and less intense than natural or inadvertent fires, creeping along the forest floor rather than tearing through tree canopies. The trees and plants that remain become more resistant to future fires.

Over time, with frequent controlled fires, the landscape starts to shift to a healthy mix of species. The fires become easier and safer to conduct, and eventually the risks of a devastating wildfire start to go down.

Halting Indigenous burning practices was part of a deliberate strategy to eradicate American Indians

When European settlers arrived in the western United States, they intervened to stop American Indian burning practices, but not just out of fear of fire. Instead, according to Tripp, cultural burning practices were blocked as a deliberate tactic to threaten the survival of Indigenous people like the Karuk Tribe.

“It became part of the policy to remove that connection to the food systems well before fire suppression became a policy,” Tripp said. “When you’re going through a cycle of genocide and people are trying to remove the Indigenous component from a place, that [Indigenous burning practice] becomes a logical target.”

Laws in states like California stripped Indigenous people of their rights and prevented them from practicing their culture, including burning. As late as the 1930s, Karuk people were actively stopped, and even shot, for trying to conduct burns.

Fire exclusion policies also stemmed from a misguided impulse to improve the region’s ecology. Prior to the 20th century, forests like those in the Sierra Nevada were far less dense, with trees spaced much farther apart. “The relative openness of forests was attributed to frequent fire, which many early foresters saw as a negative,” according to a 2012 study from the US Forest Service. “It was believed that if fire could be kept out the forest could support many more trees. This became one of the main arguments for suppressing fire.”

With the suppression of natural fires and indigenous burning practices, some sections of the forest grew to be anywhere from 2.4 to 10 times as dense as they were when fires were more frequent, increasing the likelihood of what’s known as a “stand-replacing fire.” These are massive blazes that can wipe out almost all of the living trees in an area, including towering trees that form the canopy. When there’s a drought, more trees means there’s less water to go around, leading to drier and more flammable vegetation.

Today, the Karuk Tribe can only conduct burns on the tiny sliver of their ancestral lands across California and Oregon that is privately held and not part of federal land.

More than 135,000 acres of Karuk ancestral territory burned in 2020 fires. But Tripp said this could also be an opportunity to begin a regimen of controlled burns in those areas. “We need to be putting some strategic placement of follow-up burning,” he said.

Vast swaths of land across the West are overdue for a fire

The question now is how to scale up these Indigenous burning practices across federal, state, and private land and broaden appreciation for the knowledge behind them. Even with the record-breaking blazes across the United States in recent years, there are still millions of acres of wildlands that have yet to burn and could still be devoured in megafires. And as the climate changes, more areas will become primed to ignite.

With controlled burns, the plants that could fuel a massive uncontrollable fire are depleted in smaller, easier-to-manage bursts. Many small fires can help prevent devastating megafires.

Burning is also just one of several ways to reduce the risks of dangerous wildfires alongside measures like mechanically removing vegetation and building fire breaks.

Bringing these tactics to all the places they’re needed stands to be a costly endeavor, and the investment is far short of where it needs to be. Already the federal government, which manages huge swaths of land in the western United States — including 57 percent of the land in California — is struggling to implement its existing prescribed burning plans.

The US Forest Service conducts fire mitigation work, including controlled burns, across roughly 1 million acres of land per year across the country. But the agency has an 80-million-acre backlog built up after years of fire suppression and inadequate budgets, with 50 million acres “at high risk of wildfire, insects, and disease.”

In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to mitigate wildfire risk, with an emphasis on fuel reduction. In 2020, California reached an agreement with the US Forest Service to conduct fire mitigation treatment across 1 million acres in the state per year. That’s a big step up. Currently, California land managers conduct controlled burns on 125,000 acres per year across state, federal, and private lands. By comparison, Florida, a much smaller state, permits about 2 million acres of controlled burning each year.

And California has a lot of fuel it needs to eliminate. “An estimated 20 million acres of forestland in California with high wildfire threat may benefit from fuels reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to a 2018 state report.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Karuk tribal chair Russell Attebery looks over a map of the area burned by the Slater Fire in Happy Camp, California, on September 30.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
An aerial view of the devastation that left scores of structures destroyed and thousands of acres burned by the Slater Fire.

However, California has been falling far short of its targets. CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom reported that while the state has claimed that fire prevention work was conducted across 90,000 acres, the true number is less than 12,000.

For Indigenous fire practitioners like Hankins and Tripp, the aim now is to build a framework from the bottom up to support Indigenous cultural burning practices within and beyond the bounds of Indigenous lands. The Karuk Tribe, for instance, has launched the Endowment for Eco-Cultural Revitalization and is raising funds to help teach people about the culture around burning, and to support burning practices over the long term.

“It’s not lost; it’s all still ingrained in our culture,” Tripp said. “If we wait a couple more generations, it might get lost. If we don’t start acting soon to revitalize the knowledge, practice, and belief systems, then a lot more than just information about our practices will be lost. We’ll be looking at large-scale biodiversity collapse as well. And we’re already starting to see it.”

Deploying Indigenous knowledge to reduce fire risks would also require recognition of tribal sovereignty over their ancestral areas, returning land to American Indian communities, and a frank accounting of what was lost and stolen over more than a century of settlement and colonization.

At the same time, when land managers start strategically deploying fire and thinking carefully about all the factors at play, they often arrive at practices that resemble Indigenous burning.

Jared Dahl Aldern, an environmental historian and lead researcher at the West on Fire Project, highlighted the example of a 15,000-acre plot of land managed by Southern California Edison near Shaver Lake. The area survived the 2020 Creek Fire near Fresno with much less destruction than adjacent federal land, becoming an island within a nearly 350,000-acre megafire. Prior to the blaze, the power utility deployed controlled burns, forest thinning, and timber harvests to help protect its assets on the land from wildfire.

“While they didn’t draw on a lot of Indigenous knowledge or consult with tribes in terms of figuring out how to do their land management, I call it a process of convergent evolution of their forestry practices because they ended up in the same place as historically what forest conditions were under an Indigenous fire regimen,” Aldern said.

But land managers don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to strategically deploying fire; by partnering with and following the lead of American Indian fire practitioners, they can build on an existing foundation of knowledge.

Prescribed burns are essential for reducing wildfire risk. But we need to do even more.

As important as it is to reduce the amount of vegetation that can readily burn, fuel is not the only driver of massive, destructive wildfires.

Many factors converged to create such a devastating year for wildfires in 2020. A series of unusual weather events, from a searing heat wave to a rare dry lightning storm to high winds to extraordinarily low humidity, left much of the West ready to burn.

But other long-term factors are at play as well. People have continued to build into the wildland-urban interface, where suburbs meet shrubland. Across the United States, the number of homes in these regions has grown rapidly over the past two decades. And more homes continue to be built. One study found that, based on current trends, 645,000 homes in California will be in “very high” wildfire severity zones by the middle of the century.

Firefighters put out burning embers in the Fresno County community of Bald Mountain, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, on September 11, 2020 Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Firefighters extinguish the remnants of the Creek Fire, which ignited near Shaver Lake in California in September.

Since the vast majority of wildfires are ignited by humans, this can increase the likelihood of sparking a new blaze, increase the damage of the blazes that do occur, and lengthen the fire season.

Humans are also continuing to destabilize the climate. With the emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, the planet is warming. That’s upping the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events and is increasing aridity in many parts of the West, making grasses and trees more likely to ignite.

California, in particular, is still experiencing the effects of a drought that stretched from 2011 to 2017. That drought, exacerbated by climate change, helped dry out forests and left trees vulnerable to pests like bark beetles, fueling a die-off of more than 140 million trees across the state, potentially adding more fuel to fires.

There’s also risk in conducting controlled burns. Even a well-managed fire can behave in unpredictable ways, or winds can suddenly shift and drive embers over fire breaks and six-lane highways. Fires can even generate their own weather, and rising temperatures are making it harder to safely conduct controlled burns, whether by American Indians or by other land managers. There’s also the problem of air pollution stemming from wildfires; deliberate blazes also have to take steps to reduce the smoke exposure of people who live downwind.

In addition to restoring fire to the land, some of the existing vegetation may have to be removed in other ways. That can take the form of forest thinning, where trees in a given region are selectively removed to reduce fire risk.

Some forest thinning can yield salable products and generate money. But forest thinning is different from logging in that reducing wildfire risk is the priority. In fact, some forms of logging can increase fire risks, as hardy, fire-resistant trees give way to fast-growing, fast-drying plants.

People will also have to use fire-resistant building materials for their homes and construct defensible perimeters around property. In some cases, people may have to retreat from high-fire-risk areas altogether. Humanity will also have to take aggressive action to limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to stave off the worst consequences of climate change, which include more severe wildfires.

Just as there’s no single cause of the increase in destructive wildfires in recent years, there’s no single fix. And since this situation took more than a century to develop, it will take decades to start making progress toward a solution. However, without concerted action now, the risks will only get worse. There is a debt to be paid — both to the landscape and to American Indians — and restoring Indigenous burning practices is a small step toward paying off both.

The CDC says some schools can drop mask mandates — but not all of them.

As the US quickly returns to a pre-pandemic normal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now working to ensure that schools do the same — releasing new guidelines last week outlining, in part, when schools should still consider mandating masks.

The guidelines put the CDC at the center of yet another Covid-19 controversy. As everything from concerts to bars to movie theaters has started up again, parents have pushed for schools to pull back Covid-related restrictions, too, leading to protests and shouting over masks at public school board meetings. Elected officials have taken note, with eight states now banning school districts from imposing mask mandates.

But experts say there are good reasons to continue requiring masks in at least some schools, particularly those where the majority of the student body isn’t — or can’t be — vaccinated and in areas where the coronavirus is still spreading at high rates. The CDC guidelines reflect this expert guidance, arguing that universal masking requirements make sense in several circumstances.

One key consideration: Children under 12 can’t yet get the vaccines. Since the CDC still recommends that unvaccinated people wear masks, it follows that kids under 12 should wear masks in schools — and those around them should as well to mitigate the risks of Covid-19 spread to potentially vulnerable children as much as possible.

“The people who are at risk are those who are unvaccinated,” Katherine Auger, a health policy researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told me. “And we know all kids under 12 are unvaccinated at this point.”

For experts, it’s about a cost-benefit analysis. It’s true, they acknowledge, that children generally face a much lower risk from Covid-19 than older populations. But, at the same time, masks also are a very low-cost intervention: They are cheap, aren’t more than a minor hassle to wear, and can do a lot to stop the wearer from catching or spreading Covid-19. In short, masks are a low-cost, high-benefit intervention — one that can help ensure the defeat of Covid-19 this fall, before all kids get vaccinated, so high-cost interventions aren’t needed again. It’s about transitioning from Zoom school to a pre-pandemic normal responsibly, ensuring that the coronavirus isn’t given a chance to surge back and trump progress so far.

Part of the consideration here is the risk to kids of Covid-19, while low, isn’t zero. More than 300 children (under 18) have died of Covid-19 in the US, and that’s with widespread social distancing and masking keeping deaths down for much of the past year and a half. There are also concerns about Covid-19’s long-term consequences — with the evidence so far suggesting, Brown University School of Public Health dean Ashish Jha told me, “that it’s not great to have contracted Covid.”

Experts also worry that kids could spread Covid-19 to people who are more vulnerable, or keep the virus circulating in a way that might allow it to mutate into yet another variant of concern.

The good news is the vaccines work. So high schools with teenagers, who are now eligible to get vaccinated, can ditch the masks if their students are vaccinated. Once children under 12 are eligible for the shot (perhaps in the coming fall or winter), elementary and middle schools could follow as well. The CDC guidelines are explicit in differentiating older and younger student bodies for this reason.

Ultimately, there will be variation in how schools interpret all of this. Different places will be at different stages with Covid-19, based on their case counts and vaccination rates. Different communities will have different levels of risk tolerance, with some favoring a higher degree of risk to move closer to a pre-pandemic normal. Schools that serve more students who are immunocompromised or are otherwise at serious risk of Covid-19 may lean on the safe side. Even individual parents will likely make different decisions for their children.

But to make all of this advice more actionable, I talked to experts about what schools and parents should watch out for when considering masking up. That led to the following three rules on when schools should mandate or at least encourage covering up those faces.

  1. If Covid-19 is still quickly spreading in the community, mask

If the community around a school is still seeing a lot of Covid-19 spread, the school is at risk, too: The more the virus is spreading, the more likely it is to end up in a school building and cause a local outbreak. One study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found places that reopened schools despite high levels of Covid-19 saw accelerated spread.

As the CDC notes, schools may want to require masking if they see “increasing or substantial or high COVID-19 transmission within the school or their surrounding community.”

A good benchmark here is dropping, and staying, below four daily new cases per 100,000 people. That’s roughly in line with White House adviser Anthony Fauci’s recommendation that the US needs to, as a whole, get below 10,000 daily new cases to get the virus under control.

To make sure they’re in the clear, school districts should look at local data, at either the county or city level. They can also check that data with testing positivity rates — which should be below 5 percent if there’s enough testing — and state figures to make sure there might not be a hidden outbreak or one around the corner.

And if Covid-19 cases do start popping up in a school, officials should be ready to respond with escalated measures, from masking to physical distancing to a hybrid model, to prevent an outbreak from spiraling out of control.

“Have some situational awareness,” Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Maryland, told me. “Look at what’s happening with Covid in your community. And have a plan that’s responsive — that doesn’t just make one blanket statement, yes or no, about masks but has a responsive attitude about it.”

  1. If vaccination rates are still low in the community, mask

Even if a community sees low numbers of Covid-19 cases, there’s another number they should look at to feel in the clear: vaccination rates. Because if a community or school isn’t sufficiently vaccinated, it remains at risk of the coronavirus coming back — all it takes is one infected person interacting with others to potentially launch an epidemic.

In general, higher vaccine rates are always good — there’s no upper limit. But the evidence from different states and other countries indicates that around 60 percent vaccination rate is when cases really start to drop and stay low.

There’s also evidence that places with low vaccination rates are more likely to see Covid-19 outbreaks. A New York Times analysis found that places with 60-plus percent of their population vaccinated report about a third of the cases as those with 0 to 30 percent vaccination rates.

School districts, then, should generally aim for at least 60 percent vaccination rates, looking particularly at these rates among their staff and student bodies. They can also look at community vaccination rates — since, again, risk out in the community can lead to risk in the school.

For elementary and middle schools, that likely means, the CDC suggests, they won’t be able to drop universal mask mandates this fall since their student bodies won’t be eligible for the shots. For high schools, this means they can drop the mask mandates — as long as enough of their staff and students are vaccinated.

To ensure this happens quicker, schools should also consider mandating the vaccine, as they do with vaccines for other diseases. Schools could also try the carrot instead of the stick: They could suggest that people can ditch the mask if they’re vaccinated, or make it explicit that the school district will drop a mask mandate once it reaches a certain rate of vaccination among its students and staff.

But if a school does reach high vaccination rates along with low case counts, it can feel safe in dropping a mask mandate and other restrictions around Covid-19.

  1. When in doubt, mask

Over the past year and a half, people have made a lot of sacrifices to combat Covid-19. Workplaces shut down. Schools closed. Places of socialization and entertainment vanished. All of this happened so quickly that it felt like our lives were upended overnight.

Masks, in comparison, were a relatively small intervention. Yes, they can be a bit of a hassle, and in some situations, including the classroom, they can make it harder to read faces.

But those are minor costs for stopping a deadly pathogen, especially when compared to the costs, financial or otherwise, of social distancing, mass testing, and better ventilation in buildings.

This is something that experts emphasized to me time and again: Once you look past the broader symbol that masks have become, they are a very low-cost intervention that, in the middle of a pandemic, can lead to big benefits.

“Most kids don’t care that much” about having to wear a mask, Jha said. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

In that context, maybe we shouldn’t make too much out of requiring masks in schools. It might be a good idea to play it safe, given the low cost of doing so.

That’s especially true if masks are, short of broader vaccination, the thing that prevent a community from having to deploy much more costly, much more intrusive interventions. If masking prevents a Covid-19 outbreak that otherwise would have shut down a school or at least forced it to go back to a hybrid model, then universal masking is obviously the winner.

“What are the simple things, low-cost things we can do to keep people in the classroom?” Auger said. “Something like a mask doesn’t prevent normal interaction. It doesn’t prevent learning. It is a low-cost, low-risk intervention that actually has a decent return on value.”

Looming over all of this is the risk of new Covid-19 variants. Some experts said that the delta variant has already made them more cautious about the future. While the vaccines seem to work against the variants so far, they can still hit unvaccinated people hard — as Israel recently saw with outbreaks in schools with low vaccination rates.

It’s not just delta. The CDC warned of a worse possibility, in which a variant pops up “that is spread more easily among children and adolescents or is resulting in more severe illness from COVID-19 among children and adolescents.” That would dramatically shift the cost-benefit analysis of masks and other precautions in schools, since Covid-19 would suddenly be a much bigger threat to children.

The best way to prevent the emergence of new variants is to shrink the spread of Covid-19 altogether — to rob the virus of more opportunities to replicate, mutate, and transmit. That means vaccinating as many people as possible, but, also, when vaccination is not possible, following the standard precautions, including masks. Schools can play a role here, too.

The upshot is even schools that feel safe from Covid-19 right now should remain ready to adapt along with the virus. And when there’s any doubt, turn to the mask — which still, at the end of the day, comes at a fairly low cost.

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit