Between Estonia and a hard place: NATO meets

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Last week, we told you about the boom in spiritual tourism. Today, in the second of our two-part series, we're discussing the influences and apps drawing more and more people to seek spirituality through their phone. And the condor is an iconic vulture from California, but vulturing only works when human activity doesn't mess things up. And you guessed it, things haven't been going too well for this giant bird. But first—

In Estonia's capital Tallinn, the leaders of 10 NATO countries have been gathering to discuss how better to stand up to Russian aggression. Prime among the debating points: should NATO increase defence spending? Some members want countries to commit not just up to 2% of GDP, but 2.5% or more. And that pressure is perhaps strongest from the meeting's host.

I'm standing on the bridge halfway between Estonia and Russia. That's the Narva River that's flowing beneath the bridge.

Adam Roberts is our digital editor.

And on my left side, I'm looking across to the Russian flag that's flying above a fortress in Ivanograd. And on the right side, I see the Estonian flag above a fortress that is in the town of Narva. I've got to say that the lights are a bit brighter on the Estonian side. There's a nice walkway paid for by the European Union. There are people out walking their dogs. There's a few people fishing beside the river. Lots of street lamps, Christmas decorations are up. And on the Russian side, yes, there's some lights and so on, but it looks a little bit colder, a little bit darker at least, and it looks a little bit more forlorn on that side.

Well, I've been in Narva, which is the easternmost part of Estonia. Estonia is one of the NATO countries which borders Russia. It has a land, a river, a sea, a lake border with Russia. Estonia is a very gung-ho country. It's a tough country. They've got a memory of being occupied by the Russians, and Estonia is demanding that NATO members do a lot more about defence. They see that there are rising tensions and they want the West to do more to stand up against Russia.

And what can you actually see at the border with Russia?

Well, until a few years ago, that border at Narva was a relatively easy place to cross. But when I went there a couple of days ago, it was more like standing at Checkpoint Charlie in the middle of the Cold War. The small bridge that crosses the river is a tense and rather ugly place. There's a few people still trying to cross. These are Russian passport holders. They've been standing sometimes for 12 to 14 hours in the cold to try to get across this bridge because there's so much tension, there's so much confrontation now that the border is almost closed.

And has there actually been any tension at this border?

Yes, so the Estonians have given me plenty of evidence of the harassment that they've felt in the last year or two. Sometimes this is hybrid attacks, this is cyber attacks, sometimes this is outright sabotage. So some of this sounds rather petty, but the Russians were caught going down the middle of the Narva River removing navigation buoys to make it harder for anyone to know exactly where Russia ends and Estonia begins. Russia won't recognize that the border is actually a proper border and for years has refused to say it's anything more than a temporary line of demarcation. So there is real hostility. The Russians have been flying a zeppelin along the border with a big Z painted on it to try to intimidate the Estonians. There's constant petty and sometimes stressful harassment on the border.

So Adam, I know you're not just on a jolly to the northern border of Estonia. This week in Tallinn, 10 countries have been talking about the future of NATO. What's been on the agenda?

Yes, we had 10 countries led by Britain. So these are North European countries, the Nordics, the Baltics, and a few others. These are perhaps the most forward-thinking of the European NATO members who all want to spend more on defense, who all want to do more to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and all want to do more to confront Russia because it's seen as not just a short-term but a medium and long-term threat to the stability of Western Europe. The leaders of these 10 countries got together for something called the Joint Expeditionary Force. This is focused on confronting Russia in the Arctic, in the North Sea, to stop sabotage operations that are going on in the Baltic Sea, for example. And the goal really was to get more countries to spend more on defence, to lift defence spending up from just 2% of GDP to some more ambitious goals.

And Adam, what did anyone that you spoke to say about this?

Well, I spoke to many people. Perhaps the most striking was Estonia's Prime Minister Kristian Michel, who is very sure that the West has to do more to lift its defence spending. He points out that Estonia is leading the way by spending more than 3.4% of its GDP on defence.

I would say that NATO is the strongest defence alliance there is. That if we want to keep it the strongest defence alliance in the future, we must all contribute to keeping it strong, because this kind of defence alliance with deterrence and all the capabilities usually works when everybody is contributing as much as they can, because even though Estonian defence expenditure is among the highest in the NATO It's not only because we feel threatened, but I would use the word we are preparing to never be threatened.

And the Prime Minister said it's not just about the overall spending, it's about the capabilities, what you do with the money that matters.

So Adam, has this meeting basically been all about Ukraine?

Yes, constant conversation, whether it was at the dinners or the off-the-record sessions with spies and with diplomats. Everyone was talking about Ukraine. Everyone was concerned about the possibility that the war in Ukraine was going wrong for the Ukrainians, what this would mean for the Russian strength in the years ahead, and the fact that there was a dramatic incident this week when a Russian general was killed by Ukrainian assassins in Moscow. And so everyone was very much focused on the big war that is going on in Europe.

And what have they actually decided?

Well, frankly, I think it's disappointing they didn't decide to do more, but what they've decided is that they need to squeeze the Russian economy. They need to stop Russian exports of oil and gas that do continue despite sanctions. There are many ships that continue to sail out of Russia through North European waters with energy from Russia. This is the so-called shadow fleet. These are unmarked vessels or not properly registered vessels that are secretly continuing to break the sanctions on Russia. So the NATO countries have decided they're going to be more serious about cracking down on those vessels, checking their insurance papers, their registration papers, and potentially starting to board and inspect the ships as well. So this raises the tension in the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea.

So Adam, it sounds like NATO has basically agreed to do much as it has been until now, just a little bit more so. But of course, the big thing coming down the line is Donald Trump entering the White House. What effect might that have?

Well, Trump is the great uncertainty. He could be a very tough leader, he could try to intimidate Russia, or he could roll over and agree to sell out Ukraine and give Russia all sorts of victories on the ground that would make it much stronger. For European NATO members, this is a disastrous prospect, and the only way for Europeans to stand up to this and to be stronger is to start being tougher themselves. That means spending more of the money that they talked about, doing more than just inspecting the shadow fleet in the North Sea. They need to give more material help to Ukraine itself. The Estonians— reminder that I'm in Tallinn— they're very proud of the hundreds of tons of ammunition that they send by truck to Ukraine constantly. They're going to send billions and billions of dollars worth of munitions to Ukraine in the coming years. The Europeans know that they have to do more because they fear that Donald Trump may mean America does less.

Adam, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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A question that I get asked a lot is, how do you know that you're going through a spiritual awakening? How do you know you're on the spiritual journey? Well, I can't really answer that question for you because everyone's path looks different and everyone's journey—

Ava Renee is a spiritual influencer. She refers to herself as your spiritual big sis.

Anne Hannah is a news editor at The Economist.

Ava started her own spiritual journey when she was 15.

I was like, there has to be more, but like, I don't think God's a man in a chair. And meditation and spirituality or just meditation in general and yoga really, really got me into it. Like mantras 108 times a day in the mountains for like multiple summers way back when I was 15 and 16.

And during the pandemic, she started sharing some of her experiences online.

And very quickly, within 6 months, my following went from 0 to 300,000 people.

Ava is one of just many influencers that promise to guide their followers on a spiritual journey. Now, spirituality is nothing new. Some of the practices mentioned by Ava, like meditation, can be dated back to 7,000 years ago. Last week, my colleague Henrietta talked about the booming spiritual tourism industry. This week, we're talking about the kind of spirituality you can get from the comfort of your own phone. Spiritual influencers, and we're talking about people who are not affiliated with any particular religion, have recently started to become more popular. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. Many of them just share ideas and practices. Not surprisingly, others seem to have just money in mind, selling things like tarot card readings for hundreds of dollars. Dr. Alex Christiansen is a researcher at the University of Birmingham. He's been poring over thousands of videos on TikTok to understand this mix of spirit and spending.

Often in our data, we've seen that influencers in the wellness space blend together multiple aspects of lifestyle, alternative health, and well-being content as part of what appears to be brand creation strategies.

Some of the spiritual influencers that Dr. Christiansen has been researching appear to advertise spirituality as a route to wellness.

While the videos are then positioned as solutions to specific material problems, recommendations for supplements and crystals are often found connected to promotions of self-published books, podcasts, affiliate links, or one-to-one classes with the influencer.

Popular influencers sell courses for thousands of pounds. They're tapping into a popular sentiment here. Lots of young people in the West say they are less of religious institutions. But in surveys carried out by the Springtide Research Institute last year, nearly 80% of young people aged between 13 and 25 say that they're at least slightly spiritual. Young people seem to be picking out and paying for aspects from different spiritualities and religions that they find appealing. Then they practice their own concoctions at home. But it isn't just influencers. Of course, there's an app for that too. Grandview Research, a market research firm, reckons that the spiritual apps market size was almost $2 billion last year and could grow by about 15% each year in the years to 2030. Apps that lead users in meditation or mindfulness exercises dominate the market. Headspace, the biggest, has over 70 million downloads from around 200 countries and regions. Another popular app, Satva, guides users in ancient chants, Vedic mantras, and provides blissful music while you do it. So the first thing it comes up with is it's asking us about whether we have already begun our meditation journey or whether we want to go deeper. So, I'm going to say I am yet to begin my meditation journey. You've never done it before? Never done it. So, there's guided meditations, sacred sounds, there's quick start, set timer, music, and then there's a streak section. And then if you scroll down, there are challenges as well. Great way to build your meditation practice. 1,500 people are meditating now. Right now. Can you join them? Can I join them? Okay. So, here's a live feed. I can say namaste to newbies on here. Let's do it. Okay. Are we meant to join in? I'm not sure. This one's had 1.9 million plays and it's got a start time on it and it takes 2 minutes 21 to go through it all. It's quite interesting that this seems to be a combination of different ideas and different religions and different concepts. And as we just saw, apps like this one also offer a group meditation function, allowing people to connect to each other. But why are people doing all this? We spoke to Daryl Van Tongeren, a psychologist who has tried to answer the question.

And so I do think in many ways, uh, in the research that we've done, we see that people try to emulate or replicate what religion offers, but without religion.

So in the end, spirituality has a lot more in common with organized religion than some would want to admit. Whether it's in their own home or on a spiritual retreat in India, people are looking to find their own personalized connection to something larger than themselves and to each other. And people are paying for these kinds of experiences. In some ways, that is no different to a religious model that has existed for centuries.

Well, capitalism never misses an opportunity. And so I do think that there are some capitalistic endeavours that are taking advantage of the fact that people are moving away from religion and are trying to monetise spiritual connection.

Just as religion has always been a big business, now so too is spirituality.

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Okay, everybody's all buckled in and ready to go. Ready. Let's go have some fun.

I recently went on a plane ride above the Central California coast in the region known as Big Sur.

Erin Braun is the West Coast correspondent for The Economist.

The mountains were really green and it contrasted with the really blue waters of the Pacific Ocean below.

This area right here is where the SoCal Canyon, which is a branch of the—

I was flying with Bob Van Wagenen. He's a pilot who contracts with the federal government for all kinds of conservation issues.

This area here is called Shark Park, and it is one of the largest assemblages of great white sharks on the planet.

On and off over the past few years, he's been tracking California condors.

This is still where about 100 condors hang out. You can see the massive—

The condor is an iconic species in California. California, partly because of its size. It is the largest land bird in North America, but it's also sacred to several Native American tribes. Like a lot of other animals in the American West, as America's population grew in the 19th and 20th centuries, the bird's numbers really plummeted. By the early 1980s, only a handful of condors were left, so conservationists in California took a pretty drastic step to save them. More than 40 years later, it seems to have worked, but the birds still face a somewhat unusual threat.

So, Erin, I'd never actually heard of the California condor. Tell me a bit about it.

The condor is a species of vulture, which means that it feeds on dead animals. Adults can have a wingspan of up to 3 meters, so it's really kind of remarkable when you see one flying around. In Big Sur, you can sometimes see them above the rocky coast waiting for seals below. In 1967, they were added to the federal endangered species list, but even after that, they continued to die off. By 1982, just 22 condors remained in the wild. So conservationists came up with a pretty ingenious plan to save them.

So what was this ingenious plan? Tell me more.

America's Fish and Wildlife Service and the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos decided to bring the remaining condors into captivity. So they wanted to totally remove them from the wild. And this was controversial, but it was also a pretty disgusting task. It turns out there are a couple of ways that you can capture a California condor. You can either shoot a net out of a cannon to get a bunch of them at the same time, or one person can sit in a hole in the dirt underneath a carcass, and then they would wait for a California condor to come and have a little snack. And when a bird would land, somebody would radio that person, say, "Now," and they would reach up and grab the bird's legs. So not a job that I would want, certainly, but it seems to have worked. The zoos began releasing condors back into the wild in the 1990s, and by last year, there were nearly 350 wild condors across California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California in Mexico, and there were more than 200 others in captivity. So it's a really kind of good news conservation success story, but unfortunately the birds are still under threat.

So how did things get so dire to begin with? And you said there's still some kind of threat now.

One of the big problems recently have been the severe wildfires in California. Bob Van Wagenen, the pilot that I flew with, told me a little bit about this when we were back on the ground.

Condors, they do not fly at night. And so they literally perished in flames at the hack site. And so we had 9 animals that we lost. And so they said—

There's also been some egg snatching, but condors were not hunted almost to extinction like other animals in the American West, like bison or grizzly bears, for example. Hunting was part of the issue, but it was in a different way.

And what was that different way? What's the problem with hunting?

More than anything else, the problem is lead poisoning. Remember that condors are vultures, so they feed on dead animals, and most hunters use lead bullets, which poison the birds if the fragments of them are ingested. And Bob told me a bit about this.

Lead poisoning is not always fatal if we can find the condor within about a week, because they have about 2 weeks to chelate the lead, get it out of their system, and they survive. If you don't do anything—

since 1992, half of all condor fatalities when the cause of death was known were attributed to lead poisoning.

So everyone knows about the lead poisoning. Why hasn't something been done about it?

So they've tried. Interestingly, the policy solutions here have to do with gun control rather than environmental policy. In 2019, California banned the use of lead ammunition for hunting. So you might think that that would solve things. Non-lead ammunition exists. Hunters can buy things like copper bullets, but because of another California gun control law that very strictly regulates who can sell ammunition, those copper bullets can be hard to find, and it can also be tricky to convince ranchers and hunters to switch. The Ventana Wildlife Society, which helps maintain a condor population in Big Sur where I was reporting, gives away free non-lead ammo to try to persuade people to switch, but I think it's gonna be a long process, unfortunately.

So does that mean condors are still under threat?

It does, Rosie. Yeah. Until hunting with lead bullets actually becomes taboo, the condors will be threatened. But there is this dedicated community of conservationists working to sustain their numbers. So this iconic bird will keep flying through the California skies.

Erin, thank you so much.

Thank you, Rosie.

That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcast@economist.com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.