In recent years, there’s been a growing appreciation for Indigenous land stewardship and traditional knowledge. But what gets overlooked is that successfully managing those lands means that Indigenous people have already survived severe climate events and extreme weather. Now, Indigenous communities are leading the way in climate adaptations — from living alongside rapidly melting ice to confronting rising seas and creating community support networks. Indigenous knowledge does not mean going back to “traditional” methods; it means evolving, a characteristic that has always been a part of Indigenous life. There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge. Recently we launched Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. This summer and fall, we’ll be publishing five features that center an Indigenous community confronting extreme weather on the front lines. This series has not set out to mythologize Indigenous communities with bespoke, unapproachable, or mystic traditional practices and solutions — but instead underscores humility as a throughline. Indigenous people realize we cannot bend the world to our human will. We’re far better and more resilient when we tune in and lean into changes when possible. By showing the connections between storms, climate disasters, and issues of tribal sovereignty, Changing With Our Climate will explore what it really means when we say that climate change is an existential threat — and how we can work together to find a way out. This coastal tribe has a radical vision for fighting sea-level rise in the Hamptons Next to some of the priciest real estate in the world, the Shinnecock Nation refuses to merely retreat from its vulnerable shoreline. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/vox_flood_alexandra_bowman_720.png?quality=90&strip=all] We’re in a deadly cycle of mega fires. The way out is to burn more. How one Karuk fire crew leader is decolonizing our relationship to fire. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/Vox_Fires2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] What 6 degrees of warming means for a community built on ice Alaska is warming far faster than most of the world. For Indigenous people on the front lines, adaptation can be surprisingly simple. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/Vox_AlaskaHeat.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Our most meaningful solutions to the climate crisis are hidden in plain sight There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge. [Image: Eco-Friendly Futures: A Pictorial Odyssey into Renewable Energy, Sustainability, and Environmental Conservation – Vision for a Greener World! https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-2020332753.jpg?quality=90&strip=all]

This past week, Republicans amplified a barrage of strange and racist claims about Haitian immigrants, including falsely suggesting that they’re consuming people’s house pets. The unfounded attacks came from official party social media accounts, lawmakers, and from both members of the GOP’s presidential ticket. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance said Monday that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos,” while former President Donald Trump emphatically, and falsely, claimed during his Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that, “they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country.” The comments echo well-worn tropes, and past attempts to tie Haitian immigrants to everything from the spread of illness to upticks in crime. Republicans have elevated these messages as they seek to make immigration a flashpoint in the November election, capitalizing on voters’ dissatisfaction with current trends. The attacks also come as rampant political instability and gang violence in Haiti has displaced thousands of people — and as the Biden administration has approved temporary protections and humanitarian parole for some new arrivals. The stereotypes the GOP is harping on, however, have been around for much longer. In fact, as experts tell Vox, these types of ugly attacks are the byproduct of centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobic sentiment, which have been used over and over to justify restrictive immigration policies that single out Haitian people. The decision to resurface them in 2024 is, once again, creating a palpably dangerous environment, and adding to this legacy. “It’s a part of a very old historic pattern,” Regine Jackson, a sociologist and the Dean of Humanities at Morehouse College, told Vox. “It’s the idea that they could do something so inhuman, so un-American. That’s the message underneath, that these people will never be like us.” Anti-Haitian racism has deep roots Attacks on Haitian immigrants tap into the longstanding US framing of Haiti as a threat. “Racism and xenophobia against Haitians among white Americans can be traced all the way back to the Haitian Revolution when Haitians … [overthrew] the system of slavery and [established] the world’s first Black republic,” Carl Lindskoog, the author of a book on the US’s detention of Haitian immigrants, told Vox. “Since then, Haitians have been seen by many white Americans as a threat to white rule and have been treated as such.” In 1804, Haitians successfully overthrew colonial rule and enslavement by France. Concerned that Haitians’ victory would inspire enslaved people in America to pursue a similar revolution, the US did not recognize Haiti’s independence for nearly six decades. Following the revolution, France used military force to demand financial restitution for loss of the colony, forcing Haiti to borrow money to cover its demands. The US and France provided those loans — and used them to continue exerting control over Haiti’s finances for years. In total, a New York Times investigation found that reparations to France cost Haiti’s economy $21 billion and directly contributed to poverty and financial problems that still plague the country to this day. The US also occupied Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934, more than a century after its successful revolution, under the flimsy justification that it was there to ensure political stability following the assassination of multiple Haitian presidents. In reality, it mounted the occupation to prevent France or Germany from gaining ground in the region, which was viewed as strategically valuable. During this time, the US set up a system of forced labor, and sold Haitian land to American corporations. The takeover also sent a demeaning message: that Haiti wasn’t capable of handling its own affairs. “A lot of scholars have talked about … rhetoric that’s used to justify invasion around civilizing a society,” says Jamella Gow, a sociologist at Bowdoin University. “This notion of Haitians as backwards, criminal and dangerous started way back then.” The association of Haiti with voodoo practices, something self-help author Marianne Williamson, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020 and 2024, evoked this week, is another tactic that’s been used to suggest that they’re a “mysterious … migrant other,” says Gow. In the decades since, the US’s treatment of Haitian immigrants has built on and reinforced these ideas. That was evident in the 1970s, when a wave of Haitian migrants sought asylum in the US as they tried to escape political persecution from US-backed dictator Jean Claude Duvalier. Many of these arrivals were detained and denied asylum, though they met the qualifications for it. These practices set a precedent for the detention of asylum-seekers, a punitive approach the US still employs now. In a 1980 Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti case, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the US government had singled Haitians out and practiced blatant racism in its immigration policies. Despite this decision, then-President Jimmy Carter and his successors managed to find loopholes to keep up this approach. In the years that followed, while a surge of Cuban and Haitian migrants came to the US around the same time, Haitian people were far more likely to stay in detention compared to their Cuban counterparts. The stigmatization of Haitian immigrants continued, too, in subsequent decades, including efforts to associate Haitians with illnesses, such as HIV. In the early 1980s, when no scientific name had been given to HIV/AIDS, the press and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed it the 4H disease — which stood for “Haitians, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Heroin users,” in part because some of the early cases of the illness included Haitian people. A fear of HIV — and the framing of Haitian immigrants as carriers of disease — was among the reasons that led the US to detain Haitian asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay during the 1990s. (Thousands were detained and deported, while some who were HIV-positive were threatened with indefinite detention.) That’s part of a long history of the US government deeming immigrants health hazards in order to stymie their entry into the country — a practice that was again embraced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Both the Trump and Biden administrations used a federal authority known as Title 42 to turn away migrants due to public health concerns during and following pandemic. Haitians were one of the largest groups turned away at the southern border on these grounds, Lindsvoog said. Other attacks on Haitians were also evident in both administrations, such as when Trump himself referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, and when border patrol officers were captured riding on horses and using their reins to confront Haitian immigrants under Biden. These types of attacks have real consequences In the town of Springfield, Ohio, the latest GOP invective is already doing real-world harm. On Tuesday, Trump gave the conspiracy its largest platform yet, and since then, the claims about the immigrants, which have been repeatedly debunked, have only spread. In the wake of all this, Haitian immigrants in Springfield — the town in which the GOP claims the pet eating is taking place — have experienced property damage and are keeping their children home from school out of concerns for safety, the Haitian Times reports. Springfield’s city hall was also evacuated on Thursday in response to a bomb threat, and two elementary schools were evacuated on Friday due to concerns about public safety. The municipality’s mayor has said he believes both incidents are tied to the claims that have been made about Haitian migrants. Springfield, a town of roughly 60,000 people in the southwestern part of the state, has found itself in Republican crosshairs due to the changes it’s seen since 2020. About 15,000 Haitian people have moved to Springfield for jobs following a manufacturing boom there, and while the growth in population has helped rejuvenate the town, it’s also put pressure on social services in the form of longer wait times at medical clinics and more competition for affordable housing, fueling some animosity toward the newcomers. That anger only intensified in 2023, following a school bus accident that killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark, since the driver of the car involved was a Haitian immigrant. Republicans and right-wing figures have since invoked Clark’s death to highlight the threat immigrants pose — something his parents have begged them to stop doing. This hostility toward Haitian immigrants has resulted in neo-Nazis and Republican lawmakers spreading lies about immigrants eating not just pets, but also ducks from the local parks. There is no evidence of this, Springfield officials have said. One instance of a woman — neither an immigrant nor of Haitian descent — eating a cat took place in Canton, Ohio, which is many miles away. Tropes about people eating pets aren’t new, and have long been used to demonize immigrant communities in the US, including Asian immigrants. Such stereotypes allow Republicans to paint immigrants, including Haitian people, as “forever foreigners” in a bid to ostracize them. The focus on pets, in particular, is designed to undercut immigrants’ humanity, and to suggest that they could harm something people hold dear, says Jackson. ”This kind of language, this kind of disinformation, is dangerous because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is, and they might act on that kind of information and act on it in a way where somebody could get hurt. So it needs to stop,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said at a press briefing Tuesday. Vance downplayed these concerns after Tuesday’s presidential debate when he was asked about his comments by NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor. “What do I think is a bigger problem? Insulting 20,000 people or the fact that my constituents can’t live a good life because Kamala Harris opened the border?” Vance said. As US history — and the threats Springfield faced this week — makes clear, however, these racist ideas can have a direct influence on policies, and lead to immediate, and dire, consequences.

Last Tuesday in Shine, North Carolina, a barn holding over 1,000 pigs caught on fire. Multiple fire departments were called to put out the blaze, but only 200 pigs survived. The cause of the fire is under investigation and hasn’t yet been determined. This is not an isolated incident. Three weeks ago, 1,100 pigs died in a fire at a factory farm in Ohio, while 70,000 chickens died in a fire at a California factory farm in mid-July. So far, in 2024, nearly 1.5 million farmed animals have died in barn fires, according to data compiled by the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), a US nonprofit organization. More than 8 million farmed animals have perished in barn fires over the last decade, but animal advocates believe the true number is much higher because reporting requirements vary by state. Among the factory farming complex’s many cruelties, these deaths are little noted but disturbingly common. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/Ahn6b-over-8-million-farmed-animals-have-died-in-barn-fires-since-2013-the-true-death-count-is-likely-far-higher-nbsp-.png?quality=90&strip=all] This week’s fire at the pig farm in North Carolina is especially timely, however: The pork industry has recently pushed back against proposed fire codes that would require sprinkler systems at new farms. Farm fires and how to put them out Virtually all animals raised for meat, dairy, and eggs in the US are raised on factory farms, where thousands to tens of thousands of animals are crammed together in large warehouses. These aren’t the old red barns you might see from the highway, anachronisms from a pre-industrial age. These contain modern ventilation, lighting, and heating systems that can malfunction and start a fire. Malfunctioning heating and electrical systems are the main cause of barn fires, according to the research foundation of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), a non-governmental organization that writes the fire codes and standards many states and localities adopt. Other causes include machinery, weather, wildfires, and, albeit rarely, arson. In early 2024, an NFPA expert committee overwhelmingly voted to update its animal housing code, which includes commercial livestock facilities, to require that buildings being built or renovated at mid- and large-sized factory farms install sprinkler systems starting in 2025. However, the code would still need to be adopted by localities and states to become enforceable. In response, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) filed a motion to strike the requirement, which was rejected by NFPA members at its annual technical meeting. NPPC appealed that decision and was granted a hearing by the organization’s standards council, which took place last month. The council recently rejected the industry’s appeal, and the requirement for applicable livestock barns to install sprinkler systems will be included in the upcoming 2025 edition of the NFPA’s animal housing code. The National Pork Producers Council didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it laid out its position in a September blog. One of its arguments is simply that more research is needed to determine the causes of barn fires and solutions to prevent them. Notably, however, the National Fire Protection Association’s foundation published a comprehensive report in 2022 detailing the causes of barn fires and recommended sprinkler systems as the first solution. In its appeal, the pork group had laid out a number of other reasons to reject the sprinkler requirement, including biosecurity, environmental pollution, and the potential for sprinkler activation to harm animals. “In my opinion, a lot of this is grasping at straws,” said Allie Granger, a policy adviser at AWI. “A lot of their claims seem to really just distract from the fact that this is a pervasive issue within their industry.” The pork group’s biggest concern, however, appears to be how much sprinkler requirements would cost the industry. The meat industry’s same old argument on repeat The pork council claims that installing sprinkler systems would cost pork producers $9 to $15 per square foot. If they’re right, that would come out to roughly $200,000 for an industrial barn, and many facilities have multiple barns. It’s a lot of money, but a reasonable price to pay for protecting vulnerable animals trapped in a fire. Even though fires are relatively rare, buildings for humans require sprinkler systems because we’ve decided — rightfully — that we value human life enough to protect it, even if it makes construction that much more expensive. “They don’t want to put up the cost for sprinklers, and they just will continue to ignore the fact that thousands of animals are dying on their facilities,” Granger said. The pork industry, despite its supposed “moral obligation” to raise animals “humanely and compassionately,” is willing to absorb the loss of animal life in an occasional barn fire if it means not incurring the cost of installing and maintaining sprinkler systems. It has also aggressively lobbied to maintain its right to confine pregnant pigs in tiny crates for virtually their entire lives for the same reason: cost. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/WAM26923.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Over the last couple of years, the poultry industry — in its efforts to stamp out the spread of bird flu — has killed tens of millions of animals by closing vents and cranking up the heat so the birds slowly die by heatstroke, the most cost-effective, and cruelest, form of mass euthanasia. If there’s one defining characteristic of today’s meat industry, it’s a willingness to sacrifice the welfare of an animal — or the safety of a worker or the health of a river, for that matter — if it improves its bottom line. At some point, regulators need to say enough is enough and enact commonsense reforms. Sprinkler systems to prevent animals dying en masse by fire seems like a good place to start. Update, September 16, 11:55 am ET: This story, originally published on September 16, has been updated with the NFPA council’s decision to reject the pork industry’s appeal of new sprinkler requirements.