Colleen E. Reid, University of Colorado Boulder

When wildfires spread into neighborhoods, they burn all kinds of materials found in cars and houses and everything around them – electronics, paint, plastics, furniture.

Research shows that the mix of chemicals released when human-made materials like these burn is different from what is emitted during a vegetation fire and is potentially more toxic. The smoke and ash can blow under doors and around windows in nearby homes, bringing in chemicals that are absorbed into furniture, walls and other indoor surfaces and continue off-gassing for weeks to months.

As people return to smoke-damaged homes after a wildfire, there are several steps they can take to protect their health before starting to clean.

Elevated levels of metals and VOCs

In 2021, after the Marshall Fire swept through neighborhoods near Boulder, Colorado, my colleagues and I at Colorado universities and labs heard from many residents who were worried about the ash and lingering smells inside their homes that had otherwise survived the flames.

In homes that my colleagues were able to quickly test, they found elevated levels of metals and PAHs – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – in the ash. We also found elevated VOCs – volatile organic compounds – in airborne samples. Some VOCs, such as dioxins, benzene, formaldehyde and PAHs, can be toxic to humans. Benzene is a known carcinogen.

At the time, we could find no information about physical health implications for people who have returned to smoke-damaged homes after a wildfire. So, to look for patterns, we surveyed residents affected by the fire six months, one year and two years after the fire.

Even six months after the fire, we found that many people were reporting symptoms that aligned with health risks related to smoke and ash from fires.

More than half (55%) reported that they were experiencing at least one symptom six months after the blaze that they attributed to the Marshall Fire. The most common symptoms reported were itchy or watery eyes (33%), headache (30%), dry cough (27%), sneezing (26%) and sore throat (23%).

All of these symptoms, as well as having a strange taste in one’s mouth, were associated with people reporting that their home smelled differently when they returned to it one week after the fire.

Many survey respondents said that the smells decreased over time. Most attributed the improvement in smell to the passage of time, cleaning surfaces and air ducts, replacing furnace filters, and removing carpet, textiles and furniture from the home. Despite this, many still had symptoms.

We also found that living near a large number of burned structures was associated with these health symptoms. We found that for every 10 additional destroyed buildings within 820 feet (250 meters) of a person’s home, there was an associated 21% increase in headaches and a 26% increase in having a strange taste in their mouth.

These symptoms align with what could be expected from exposure to the chemicals that we found in the ash and measured in the air inside the few smoke-damaged homes that we were able to study in depth.

Lingering symptoms and questions

There are a still a lot of unanswered questions about the health risks from smoke- and ash-damaged homes.

For example, we don’t yet know what long-term health implications might look like for people living with lingering gases from wildfire smoke and ash in a home. We found a significant decline in the number of people reporting symptoms one year after the fire. However, 33% percent of the people whose homes were affected and responded to a later survey still reported at least one symptom that they attributed to the fire. About the same percentage also reported at least one symptom two years after the fire.

We also could not measure the level of VOCs or metals that each person was exposed to. But we do think that reports of a change in the smell of a person’s home one week after the fire demonstrates the likely presence of VOCs in the home. That likely has health implications for people whose homes are exposed to smoke or ash from a wildfire.

Tips to protect yourself after wildfires

Wildfires are increasingly burning homes and other structures as more people move into the wildland-urban interface, temperatures rise and fire seasons lengthen.

If your home survives a wildfire nearby, here are some of the steps to think about before starting to clean:

• When you’re ready to clean your home, start by protecting yourself. Wear at least an N95 (or KN95) mask and gloves, goggles and clothing that covers your skin. Cleaning can send some of those gases and ash into the air again.

• Keep people with heart or lung diseases, older adults, pregnant women, children and pets away from cleanup activities.

• Vacuum floors, drapes and furniture. A recent scientific study documents how cleaning all surfaces within a home can reduce reservoirs of VOCs and lower indoor air concentrations of VOCs. Once the air outside has cleared, open windows to let clean air in.

• Avoid harsh chemical cleaners because they can react with the chemicals in the ash.

• Clean your HVAC filter and ducts to avoid spreading ash further, and change filters monthly until the smell is gone. Portable air cleaners with carbon filters can help remove VOCs and particles.

• If your car smells of smoke, consider changing the cabin air filter.

This is an update to an article first published Dec. 23, 2024.

Colleen E. Reid, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2024, the German state-owned news service Deutsche Welle published an article with the headline “Trump’s election victory is a nightmare for Germany.”

A few hours later, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced that his three-party political coalition had collapsed. Disagreements about how to help strengthen Germany’s weak economy were a major factor, but Scholz mentioned that the U.S. election outcome also fueled the coalition breaking up.

One month later, Scholz lost a confidence vote, ending the government he has led since 2021. Germany will have federal elections on Feb. 23, 2025.

Germany is considered one of the United States’ closest allies in Western Europe, partnering on everything from economic trade to military defense.

But this might change with Trump returning to office. As Angela Merkel, the longtime former chancellor of Germany, said in November 2024, the looming second Trump presidency “is a challenge to the world, especially for multilateralism.” Indeed, Trump’s U.S.-centric approach to international affairs runs counter to multilateralism, which is the idea that different countries working together helps everyone involved.

As someone who researches German-American relations in the 20th century, I share German politicians’ worries that the incoming Trump administration poses a serious threat to the relationship.

The German concerns include Trump potentially launching a tariff-induced trade war, as well as the possibility of the president-elect withdrawing financial and military support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Both scenarios would further hurt the weak German economy – especially since, following the U.S. and the European Union, Germany is the third-largest donor to Ukraine and would be required to shoulder even more of this financial support if the U.S. stopped giving Ukraine money.

German politicians also remain dumbfounded by Trump’s particular style of politics, despite the fact that he already served as president.

Merkel wrote in her 2024 memoir “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” that when she first met Trump in 2017, she acted as though she were having a conversation with “someone completely normal.” Merkel quickly realized, though, that Trump was not like other American politicians. She observed that Trump seemed to think all countries competed and the success of one meant the failure of another.

A long-lasting alliance

That was not the type of American president Merkel and other Germans were used to. Merkel was born in 1954, when Germany was split into two countries: communist, Soviet-aligned East Germany, where Merkel grew up, and capitalist West Germany, which was formed out of the three western sectors controlled by France, the U.S. and the United Kingdom at the end of World War II and was aligned with the U.S.

The U.S. embraced West Germany as an important ally shortly after the war. This alliance helped the U.S. make sure that Germany, not too long ago an enemy of the U.S. during World War II, would never again become a threat to world peace.

West Germany also served as an important front line in Europe as the U.S. navigated the Cold War with the Soviet Union starting in 1947.

West Germany, meanwhile, appreciated the power of having an American überpartner during the Cold War, especially since West Germany flourished economically during most of the conflict. East Germany’s economy, on the other hand, was relatively weak throughout the Cold War.

Perhaps the most visible symbol of Germany’s division was the Berlin Wall, a 96-mile partition that cut through Berlin. East German authorities built the wall in 1961 in order to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany.

It was only after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, symbolizing the looming end of the Cold War that year and opening up the possibility for German unification, that Merkel entered politics.

Unified Germany and the United States

As a politician in the 1990s, Merkel witnessed how then-President George H.W. Bush convinced France and the United Kingdom to put aside their fears about a new German dominance over Europe and allow their former World War II enemy to unify and gain full sovereignty.

The four main Allied powers of World War II in Europe – the United Kingdom, U.S., Soviet Union and France – had initially denied Germany the right to sovereignty after the end of the war.

But in 1990, the four Allies signed the Two Plus Four Treaty – an international agreement that allowed Germany to unify as a fully sovereign state in October 1990.

Immediately afterward, Bush praised the transatlantic alliance between the U.S. and Germany. The American president emphasized the two countries’ common “love of freedom” and expressed his hope that they become “partners in leadership.”

Bush’s words signaled an important turnaround in the international expectations of Germany, and the need for it to become a more influential political and military player in world politics. It was a turnaround, however, that many Germans did not necessarily welcome. Germans felt reluctant to step into the powerful leadership role that the U.S. expected of the country.

At the time, there was a common belief in Germany that military restraint had finally made their country a stable and prosperous one, following two devastating wars.

In fact, in almost all the global crises since 1990 – from the war in Bosnia in 1992 to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 – Germany has shown a reluctance to take the lead. Instead, Germany prefers a secondary role in navigating international conflicts, primarily through its membership with the military coalition NATO and the United Nations.

Germany’s international position today

After Russia launched a full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Germany’s approach to international conflicts dramatically changed, and it finally stepped into the leadership role envisioned by Bush in 1990. In a historic speech on Feb. 27, 2022, Scholz called the attack a “Zeitenwende”, meaning “a watershed era” in German, and announced a significant increase in military spending.

The U.S. and other Western allies have welcomed this shift.

While NATO members had already agreed to invest a minimum of 2% of their gross domestic product in defense spending in 2006, Germany – like other European countries – did not meet this commitment for many years.

It was only in February 2024 that Germany finally achieved its 2% spending target for the first time in the wake of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine.

That it did so was not just a result of that conflict.

Pressure by American presidents, above all Trump, also played a major role. Trump’s continuous threat throughout his first presidency to “pay your bills or we leave NATO” had apparently paid off.

It will be up to the new German government to remind Trump of the history of German-American relations and the many benefits of the transatlantic alliance between the two powers since 1945.

Sylvia Taschka, Professor of Teaching of History, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Monti Datta, University of Richmond

Several high-profile celebrities were slapped with human-trafficking charges in late 2024, from music mogul Sean Combs, known as P. Diddy, to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries. Neither has been tried yet, but in 2022 the R&B superstar R. Kelly was convicted of sex-trafficking crimes that dated back decades. He was sentenced to 30 years.

Sex trafficking, like forced labor, is a contemporary form of slavery. I am an academic who studies the mindset of slaveholders to understand more fully their rationale for what they do, in hopes of finding better ways to eradicate modern-day enslavement.

Early thinking on owning slaves

Historically, many revered figures have endorsed slavery.

“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient,” the ancient philosopher Aristotle reasoned in his book “Politics,” written around 350 B.C.E. “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”

Aristotle argued that some people, such as those with mental impairments, were inferior to those with greater mental faculties. He believed this was part of the natural order. Enslaved persons, as Aristotle saw them, could be seen as a public good, to be used by the elite for the productivity of society.

This kind of thinking continued with America’s Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson condemned slavery and warned of its dangers, saying in 1820 that enslaving a human was like holding “a wolf by the ears.” Yet Jefferson maintained that Black people were inferior to white people and owned hundreds of slaves. He repeatedly raped one enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, fathering six children with her.

Jefferson’s thinking and behavior is characteristic of U.S. slaveholders prior to the Civil War. As scholars Elizabeth Fox-Genonese and Eugene D. Genonese explain, although many antebellum slaveholders were pious, they used faith to justify the American slave trade.

Mindset of the modern slaveholder

Today, upward of 50 million people are enslaved worldwide, trapped in sex trafficking, forced marriage and various kinds of involuntary labor.

Many enslaved persons live in Global South countries and work in industries ranging from electronics and seafood to agriculture. Their free labor provides cheap goods and services for rich countries. Their enslavers may be individuals, criminal rings or families, but big global companies are often complicit. Several Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Samsung, Nestlé and Nike, have been charged with or admitted to using slave labor.

Academic research on the mindset of modern slaveholders is limited.

In perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date, sociologist Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick focuses on India, where an estimated 11 million people are enslaved, many in debt bondage in agriculture, textiles, brick kilns and stone quarries.

Choi-Fitzpatrick finds that slaveholders in India tend to be paternalistic; they think of the enslaved as part of their extended family. Slaveholders buy into a myth that without their help the enslaved would be helpless, like children.

“Like a shepherd who knows his herd, we know the laborers,” one slaveholder says in Choi-Fitzpatrick’s 2017 book.

Part of this mindset likely stems from India’s caste system, in which members of higher castes believe they are superior to those belonging to lower castes.

Journalistic accounts have identified a similar mindset among South Korean slaveholders, too.

Novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux of the documentary series “Unreported World” reported in 2015 that scores of disabled people were enslaved on salt farms in South Korea.

South Korea’s social welfare system lags other major developed nations. People with disabilities can end up homeless on the streets, where they become easy prey for criminal networks that ensnare them into debt bondage, forced to work off an unpayable debt on salt farms.

Yet, South Korean slaveholders often believe they are doing the enslaved a favor, Theroux’s reporting found.

“My wife and I are just like real parents to him. In fact, people say we are closer to him than to our real sons who’ve left home,” one slaveholder said of his relationship with an enslaved laborer.

Slavery in the US

People are enslaved in the U.S., too. The National Human Trafficking Resource center, which documents cases of forced labor and sex trafficking, has identified 197,000 victims of human trafficking since 2007.

In a bombshell revelation published after his death in 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Alex Tizon wrote about growing up in the U.S. with a domestic slave named Lola.

Tizon’s grandfather had purchased Lola in the Philippines as a present for Tizon’s mother, who then moved to the U.S. Lola stayed enslaved in Tizon’s family for 56 years until her death in 2011. Despite his misgivings about slavery, Tizon hailed Lola “a hallowed figure in (his) extended family.”

The U.S. has laws, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, that ban such behavior. But enslavers find ways to skirt the law. Coyotes and other middlemen who smuggle people into the country find a lucrative market for the forced labor of their victims.

Purchasing a slave is not expensive today. A domestic servant from Haiti can be bought for about US$50 with the requisite forged documents to bypass immigration. An Eastern European slave costs about $500.

This relatively cheap price stems from globalization along with the global population explosion. Human beings are, in scholar Kevin Bales’ words, disposable.

Survivors such as Rachel Lloyd and Holly Austin Gibbs have published their testimonies of being trafficked in Germany and the U.S., respectively. Their accounts offer some insight into the mindset of modern slaveholders.

In their memoirs, they write that their slaveholders thought of the people they enslaved as an economic commodity and cared little for their emotional well-being. Slaveholders, in their experience, were manipulative and violent. Their goal in trafficking teenage girls was simply to turn a profit.

This perspective recalls in some sense Aristotle’s thinking – that a slave is a tool to be used by another.

More research to be done

The field of contemporary slavery studies is relatively young. Data and research on modern slavery began to appear only about two decades ago, and that work focused on the systemic causes of enslavement – not on individual perpetrators.

Given the unique cultural underpinnings of slavery that vary around the world and over time, academia is still far from developing a general theory of what slaveholders think. There simply isn’t much research on their mindset.

Yet as the global population continues to explode, millions more people are likely to be enslaved in the coming years. Enslavement will continue to take familiar forms, from forced labor to sex trafficking, while the internet and social media provide new venues for online recruitment and cyber enslavement.

And if 2025 is anything like 2024, this year will see even more high-profile cases of celebrities accused of human trafficking.

I believe a better understanding of the mindset of slaveholders is crucial to combat contemporary slavery. Breakthroughs in understanding the thinking of other perpetrators, such as serial killers, has helped law enforcement better profile suspects, understand their thinking and develop better strategies and tool kits to apprehend them.

More fully understanding the people who dare to enslave another human being could give law enforcement worldwide a better shot at stopping this crime against humanity.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Rachel Lloyd was trafficked in Germany, correcting an error introduced during editing.

Monti Datta, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.