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Karl-Ludwig Poggemann
Science says: Era of monster hurricanes roiling the Atlantic.
It's not just this year. The monster hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Jose and Lee that have raged across the Atlantic are contributing to what appears to be the most active period for major storms on record.
It's not just this year. The monster hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Jose and Lee that have raged across the Atlantic are contributing to what appears to be the most active period for major storms on record.
And the busiest part of hurricane season isn't even over.
An analysis of 167 years of federal storm data by The Associated Press found that no 30-year period in history has seen this many major hurricanes, this many days of those whoppers spinning in the Atlantic, or this much overall energy generated by those powerful storms.
Scientists caution it is too soon to draw conclusions from the data, and they don't say the intense activity confirms a trend. Storms in the distant past may have gone unnoticed, which could make earlier generations appear quieter than they were. Some scientists say past hurricane data is so weak that it's impossible to connect the recent activity to global warming.
But more intense storms are what scientists expect to see as the planet's climate changes because warmer ocean water is fuel for hurricanes. And they say it is important to better understand this current intense period to save lives and prevent worse future destruction.
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said it would be "foolish" for policymakers to ignore the data. "We may not have as much data as we would like, but we have enough to aggressively invest in a variety of defenses for coastal communities," she said in an email. "We face a triple threat of rising seas, stronger winds, and literally off-the-charts rainfall totals."
The Atlantic hurricane season was more intense than normal in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2016. The 2005 season, which included Katrina, Rita and Wilma, was so active forecasters ran out of names for storms.
Then came this year. Fueled by warmer than normal ocean temperatures and ideal wind conditions, September 2017 had more days with major hurricanes spinning and more overall hurricane energy expelled than any month on record, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. Harvey spawned record rainfall. Irma had record high winds in the open Atlantic. And Maria hit the U.S. stronger than the earlier two.
The Associated Press looked at all major hurricanes — not just the small fraction that hit the U.S. — and grouped them into 30-year periods to mirror the 30-year cycles climate scientists use to understand how the climate is changing. The analysis found that in the period from 1988 to 2017:
— There have been 90 major hurricanes, an average of three a year. That's 48 percent more than during the previous 30 years. This hurricane season is at five and still counting.
— During the past 30 years major hurricanes have churned for an average of 7.2 days. That's 65 percent more than the average during the previous 30 years. There have been 18.8 major hurricane days so far this year.
— Scientists use a measure called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or ACE, that factors in wind speed and storm duration to gauge hurricane power. The annual average ACE of the past 30 years is 41 percent more than in the previous 30 years. An average year ACE is just shy of 100 and this year's ACE, with two months still to go, is 204.2.
— Of the last 30 years, nine hurricane seasons were considered "hyperactive" according to the definition used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and seven were above normal. Only seven years were below normal.
Was it just as busy for major storms in the 1930s or 1890s? The numbers say no, but scientists won't draw conclusions because they fear a large undercount of storms before the 1960s.
"There's no question that the storms are stronger than they were 30 years ago," said NOAA climate and hurricane scientist James Kossin. "The questions are if you go back a little further if that's what you'll find. We do know for sure that things have increased a hell of a lot since 1970."
So what's going on?
Scientists talk about two important factors for long-term hurricane activity: man-made climate change and a natural pattern of changes in the Atlantic.
The world's oceans go through long cycles as water circulates like a giant conveyor belt. They last 20 to 30 years, carrying water with different levels of salt and temperature. That cycle seems coincide with hurricane activity, Klotzbach said.
Klotzbach predicts that a period of high salinity and warmer water in the North Atlantic that has been present since 1995 will soon fade — and take with it this ultra-busy period for storms. Other scientists dispute this.
More frequent and more intense storms fit what scientists expect to see accompany global warming, MIT hurricane and climate professor Kerry Emanuel said. Physics, computer simulations and numerous scientific studies show that as the world warms the strongest storms should get wetter and more intense, and probably more frequent. Yet, the overall number of all named storms is likely to drop because there will likely be fewer weaker ones, scientists say.
Still, scientists say it would take more years — and maybe decades — of good data to know for sure if there's a direct connection to climate change.
National Hurricane Center science officer Chris Landsea said the problems with missing past storms are so severe "making any conclusions for the entire (Atlantic) basin would not be justified" and several other scientists agreed with him.
Climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany said the data showing increased intensity is clear enough for him: "The only caveat being that the increase might be exaggerated somewhat because of undercounting early storms."
What's happening with hurricanes — the frequency, the duration, and the energy — is probably a combination of factors caused by both nature and man, Klotzbach said: "a mish-mosh of everything."
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AP data journalist Nicky Forster contributed to this story from New York.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears . His work can be found here .
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This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Katharine Walter
What we get wrong about Lyme disease.
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BIOLOGY ENVIRONMENT
What We Get Wrong About Lyme Disease
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BY KATHARINE WALTER
OCTOBER 5, 2017
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My sister Camilla and I stepped off the passenger ferry onto the dock at Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard’s main port, with a group that had already begun their party. They giggled, dragging coolers and beach chairs behind them. We competed to see how many items of Nantucket red we could spot.
Not that we were wearing any. Camilla wore shorts with white long underwear underneath, and I wore beige quick-dry hiking pants. Both of us had on sneakers with long white socks. It was late June, perfect beach weather. The water sparkled. But we weren’t headed toward the ocean. We were there to hunt for ticks.
On the island, we hopped in a cab. Camilla looked longingly out the window as we passed the turns for the town beach and Owens Park Beach. The driver pointed out the location of the famous shark attack beach from Jaws. We drove on south to Manuel Correllus State Forest, an unremarkable park in the center of the island and the farthest point from any beach.
THE GLAMOUR OF IT ALL: Camilla Walter harvesting deer ticks on Prudence Island, in Rhode Island’s Narraganset Bay. Tick collecting made Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs.Courtesy of the author
Deer ticks, or blacklegged ticks, are poppy-seed sized carriers of Lyme disease. We needed to collect 300 before the last ferry returned to Woods Hole, Massachusetts that night. We each unfurled a drag cloth—a one-meter square section of once-white corduroy attached to a rope—and began to walk, dragging the cloth slowly behind us as if we were taking it for a stroll. The corduroy patch would rise and fall over the leaves and logs in the landscape, moving like a mouse or a chipmunk scurrying through the leaf litter. Ticks, looking for blood, would attach to the cloth. Every 20 meters, we’d stoop to harvest them.
Tick collecting made it to Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs alongside landfill monitor and anal wart researcher. On cool days, though, sweeping the forest floor, kneeling to pluck ticks from corduroy ridges, the job became rhythmic. I felt strangely close to the forest. As I soon found out, the work got me closer to people, too.
The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized is a fantasy.
Sometimes hikers would stop by, curious, then repulsed. They would want confirm the proper way to pull off ticks (with tweezers planted close to skin, perpendicularly), or to tell us about their diagnoses. Lyme disease isn’t like many of the diseases studied by my friends in the epidemiology department, where I was a doctoral student. No one talks about their grandmother’s syphilis infection, caused by Treponema pallidum, another spirochete bacterium.
But once people heard what Camilla and I were collecting, stories of brushes with ticks and family members’ diagnoses were shared freely. I quickly became the “tick girl.” When I started my dissertation I was preoccupied by the ecological question: How have humans altered the environment and triggered a disease emergence? By the time I finished, I realized that far more interesting were the rich and revealing tick stories shared with us along the way.
Illness makes us talk. “This is true of all forms of pain and suffering,” Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and physician at Harvard University, told me. We talk about illness “to seek assistance, care, and in part to convey feelings about fear, anxiety, or sadness.” In his book, The Illness Narratives, Kleinman writes that “patients order their experience of illness … as personal narratives.” These narratives become a part of the experience of being sick. “The personal narrative does not merely reflect illness experience, but rather it contributes to [it].”
The result is a peculiar togetherness. Once, a friend’s mom emailed that she’d just pulled off her first tick of the season, from her pubic hair: “I’m guessing it doesn’t it surprise you to hear, Katie, that you came to mind almost immediately when I discovered the little bugger? I’m afraid that ticks and you will be forever linked in my mind.” Naturally some took the motif too far. One creepy grad student thought that, because I was standing in front of a tick poster at an academic conference, I’d want to hear about the time he pulled a tick off his dick.
By dosing ourselves, we gain control.
The country singer Brad Paisley romances the tick: “I’d like to see you out in the moonlight / I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks / I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers / And I’d like to check you for ticks.” I’m with Paisley here. Creeps aside, tick grooming is an act of love. My sister and I were diligent in the tick checks we gave ourselves and each other. Most nights, we’d pull off several at the campsite showers.
Tick stories mostly fell into a few categories. There were the boastful ones. On Washburn Island, a tiny island a few hundred yards off of Cape Cod, two hairy, fully-bearded park rangers, Steve and Steve, couldn’t be bothered to pull off their ticks. For most of the summer, they lived outside in tents and tarps and always had a few handfuls of ticks embedded in their skin. The Steves boasted that they’d each been infected with Lyme disease and babesiosis, a parasitic illness also carried by deer ticks, on and off for the last several years. Theirs was a backcountry machismo, as if their burliness made them immune to the intrusion of the forest twigs and ticks upon their bodies. Their symptoms, though, were presumably as real as anyone else’s.
The bulk of people’s reactions to the disease reflected a confused anxiety about boundaries. En route to a wedding in Easton, Connecticut, deep in Lyme country, someone found out that I was a tick girl and asked if they should be worried. The wedding was on a farm, an edge habitat where weedy species—mice, chipmunks, and robins—proliferate. Weedy animals include some of the best hosts for the Lyme disease bacterium. They can be infected with a tick bite and pass on the bacterium to the next tick that feeds on them, continuing unbroken chains of transmission. Deer, which are also hosts for ticks, thrive in these fragmented habitats, too.
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I recited my usual tick check endorsement: Shower and check yourselves at the end of the night and you’ll be fine. The Lyme bacterium is only transmitted after the tick has been attached for two or three days. Still, when guests filled the lawn for corn hole and cocktails, I couldn’t help but notice all the cocktail dresses and open heels, ankle-deep in grass. The next morning, one woman told me she’d plucked three ticks from her ankle.
Worry bled to fear. On Cuttyhunk Island, the most remote of the Elizabeth Islands, a necklace of islands spilling off of southern Cape Cod, my sister and I were generously hosted by a woman I’ll call Susan, a self-trained student of the Lyme epidemic. “Ticks have become the bane of island existence,” Susan gravely told me shortly after I arrived. By 2010, everyone Susan knew on the island was taking doxycycline, the antibiotic most commonly prescribed for Lyme disease. She and her husband arrive in Cuttyhunk at the start of the summer season armed with bottles of it and take it prophylactically. Every time they pull off a tick, they take three doses, spread over 24 hours. This is not recommended by the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Doxycycline makes your skin sensitive to the sun, so their regimen makes it necessary to wear a hat and lots of sunscreen or stay inside.
Susan fenced in her lawn to keep out rabbits, which can host adult ticks, then raised the fence to defend against deer. “Our house is ringed with Damminix tubes, the yard fenced, grass mowed short, and still they turn up in the bed with us,” she told me. (Damminix tubes hold cotton infused with an insecticide that kills ticks.) We slept in her son’s room, crisp and nautically themed and lined with file cabinets full of scientific articles about Lyme disease epidemiology and ecology, local and national reporting on the epidemic, and printed email exchanges with epidemiologists and local politicians. Susan is now spearheading the island’s Tick Eradication Campaign. Her plan for eradication was ambitious, she admitted. But, she asks: “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that you are stepping onto a tick-free island where a sunburn is the most dangerous health risk?”
The idea that the natural and human exist in separate realms is the very “trouble with wilderness,” the environmental historian William Cronon wrote in his 1995 book Uncommon Ground. The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized over the last few hundred years, he says, is a fantasy:
[Wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history … Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.
In the stories told by our doctors, our parks, and the CDC, ticks are invaders. To defend ourselves, we use insect repellent, clothing, and prophylactic antibiotics; fences, signs, and pesticides. “When it comes to pesticides, the environmental toxin par excellence, Lyme patients are often its greatest proponents,” writes Abigail Dumes, an anthropologist at Michigan State University. We prefer the risk posed by pesticides to the fear of Lyme, Dumes explained to me. They let us become actors instead of victims. By dosing ourselves with pesticides (or antibiotics), we gain control of our risks. Ticks, on the other hand are uncontrollable. “It’s difficult to live with the idea that there are enormous threats and many can’t be controlled,” Kleinman tells me.
The problem is our defensive barriers aren’t working particularly well. Deer ticks are now established across 45 percent of United States counties. Their range has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Reported cases of Lyme disease have more than tripled since 1995 and the CDC estimates that more than 300,000 Americans fall ill each year. The story of tick-as-invader isn’t particularly helpful—or complete.
LYME EMERGES: Allen Steere and Stephen Malawista published these maps of Lyme disease in 1979, just two years after it had been named. They noted a correspondence between disease clusters and areas where two species of black-legged ticks were known to exist.Courtesy of the author
In November 1975, Polly Murray, an artist living in Lyme, Connecticut, contacted the Connecticut State Department of Public Health. Two of her children were sick with what doctors called juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a disease of joint pain. Their knees were so swollen that they were forced to walk with crutches. Several other neighborhood children had similar symptoms. Arthritis is rare in children. And it is not normally found in clusters. So Murray kept careful notes of her children’s symptoms and compiled a list of other sick children.
At first, doctors were dismissive. But Allen Steere, a young rheumatologist at Yale-New Haven Medical Center, was curious. He began to investigate cases in Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam, quiet, wooded communities just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River. Through a surveillance “grapevine,” he found 51 residents—39 children and 12 adults—in a community of 12,000 suffering from unexplained arthritis. A quarter of patients also had erythema migrans, an expanding circular rash with a pale center, also called a bullseye. In some neighborhoods, 10 percent of children suffered from this unexplained arthritis. In 1977, in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism, Steere and his team named the set of symptoms Lyme arthritis. They called it “a previously unrecognized clinical entity.”
If anyone is an invader here, it’s us.
At that point, what caused the symptoms remained a mystery. The clustering of cases suggested the new disease was infectious, and the summertime peak of cases suggested it was spread by something in the water—picked up by swimmers—or by insects. Steere’s team tested his patients’ blood for dozens of viruses and bacteria. Nothing fit. In 1979, Steere and a colleague mapped out the first 512 cases of Lyme arthritis. The distribution of cases overlapped neatly with what was then the range of deer ticks. Many of Steere’s patients lived in wooded areas and had mentioned insect bites. But hundreds of ticks were tested and no pathogen was found.
A few years later, William Burgdorfer, an entomologist at the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, identified a new spirochete—a corkscrew shaped bacterium, capable of spiraling through the tissues of its hosts—in ticks collected from Shelter Island, a tiny island nestled between the two pointer fingers of Long Island. Sixty percent of ticks collected on the island carried the bacterium. Soon after, spirochetes were found in the blood of people suffering from Lyme arthritis. The Lyme disease bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, was named in his honor. It cycles silently in forests between ticks and a group of hosts, mostly small rodents and birds. From the perspective of the bacterium, humans are dead-end hosts and play no role in the spread of disease to new areas.
The modern history of the disease is relatively short: Just 40 years have passed since it was named. This can contribute to the sense that it is a new invader into our pristine neighborhoods and parks. But where did the bacterium come from? Was it truly new? And why did it first appear in a bucolic Connecticut suburb?
Spreading ticks and migrating bacteria leave no trace on the environment. Unlike pathogens that spread strictly from human to human (like measles), we cannot trace the history of the Lyme disease bacterium from the history of human epidemics. So, in 1990, biologists turned from medical records to museums. They sifted through old ticks in entomology collections at Harvard University and the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, testing for bacteria. They found ticks infected with B. burgdorferi collected in the 1940s in Montauk Point and Hither Hills, parks near the Hamptons on the eastern tip of Long Island. Museum collections held no ticks before the 1940s.
That effectively doubled the known history of the disease. Then, researchers turned to the hosts themselves. They snipped ear punches from mouse specimens at the Smithsonian Museum, the Natural History Museum in New York, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Mice from Cape Cod in the 1890s turned out to be infected. Now the disease had a century-long history. Scientists studying Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, stumbled upon in 1991 by hikers in the Italian Alps, have found that he was lactose intolerant, had intestinal parasites, severe atherosclerosis—and probably had Lyme disease. This meant the bacterium likely existed in western Europe 5,000 years ago.
PIERCING: The hypostome of a deer tick is a piercing organ with recurved teeth.Ed Reschke / Getty Images
To extend the history of the bacterium further back still, my advisors, Maria Diuk-Wasser and Gisella Caccone, and I turned to the 1 million letters of the bacterium’s genome. Pathogens evolve as they spread, and their genome carries a historical record of this development. By comparing pathogen genomes collected from different areas, we can build an evolutionary tree and a history of the pathogen’s spread. We can also tell how big the population of pathogens is now, and whether it is growing. This is the crux of phylogeography: Use evolutionary relatedness to answer questions about biogeography, the historic and spatial distribution of genetic diversity. A classic finding in the field, for example, is that the HIV epidemic originated in the French or Belgian Congo around the 1920s.
I began to chase bacteria from as wide an area and from as far back in time as possible. Biologists mailed me ticks in tiny tubes of ethanol from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia. A Styrofoam container filled with dry ice and DNA samples of infected ticks collected across Canada was Fed-Exed to me. Old ticks were harder to come by. At the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, I pulled out drawer after drawer of taxidermied Peromyscus leucopus, white-footed mice, elegantly arranged in rows, with handwritten labels tied around their right ankles. Many were collected in the 1800s, when natural history museums were filled with hunting trophies. But the taxidermist had been tidy. The mouse skins had been cleaned of ticks. The oldest ticks I could find that were infected and had well-preserved DNA were from the early 1980s. Camilla and I added them to the 7,000 ticks from our summer harvest.
Finally, with 150 complete genomes in hand, my colleagues and I were able to extend the North American history of Lyme disease from a hundred years to many thousands. We drew a new evolutionary tree which showed that the bacterium likely originated in the northeast of the U.S., spreading south and west across North America to California. Birds likely transported it long distances to new regions, where small mammals continued its spread. Imprinted on the bacterial genomes was also a signature of dramatic population growth. As it evolved, it seemed to have proliferated.
Most interestingly, the tree was far older than we’d expected—at least 60,000 years old. Lyme was likely here in North America much longer than that, long before it was first named in the 1970s, long before humans first arrived in North America from across the Bering Strait (about 24,000 years ago), and long before the last glacial maximum, when much of North America was covered by an ice sheet (also about 24,000 years ago). If anyone is an invader here, it’s us. Our analysis also showed that the modern epidemic was not sparked by some new mutation that made the bacterium more readily transmissible. It was sparked by changes in ecology, most of which were man-made.
When colonists first arrived in New England, much of the area was forested. White-tailed deer were abundant. Deer ticks, whose distribution is closely tied to that of deer, most likely existed throughout much of the continent, too. Colonists pressed and pleated the complex fabric of New England’s forests, grasslands, and swamps into a starched blanket of fenced farmlands. Hunting and deforestation decimated deer populations. By the mid 18th-century, deer had almost entirely vanished. They never disappeared, though. Deer—and likely, deer ticks and B. burgdorferi—persisted in refugia, isolated pockets of southern Cape Cod and the far eastern tip of Long Island. Some deer populations were carefully cultivated. In 1698, hunters stocked the Naushon Island, one of the Elizabeth Islands (a few islands north of Susan’s Cuttyhunk) with deer. The island soon became a glamourous hunting destination and was purchased by the Forbes family in 1856, whose annual hunting party was attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, among others. The earliest record of a deer tick in the northern U.S. was on Naushon Island in 1926.
Beginning in the mid 1800s, farming gradually shifted westward and New England slowly reforested. But only shreds and slivers of forest were allowed to regrow. Deer populations rebounded and the animal spread across a transformed, suburban New England, one in which wolf predators had been exterminated, and where deer hunting was strictly limited. Ticks followed the deer, and B. burgdorferi followed the ticks. The sprawling grassy suburban lawn adjacent to a forest patch is the ideal Lyme disease habitat. The majority of tick-borne infections occur here because excellent hosts for B. burgdorferi also thrive in these manufactured edge habitats. More recently, climate change has been warming our winters, accelerating ticks’ life cycles and extending their range eight miles farther north each year.
The genetic and ecological history of the Lyme disease bacterium make it clear: Neither ticks nor the bacterium are invaders onto our pristine landscapes. They are the beneficiaries of an artificial and fragmented ecology created by the real invaders, us. Having sectioned and sliced the continent into a patchwork, we are confronted with the consequences. “Many of the individuals I spoke with during the course of my fieldwork moved to or remained in forested suburbs to be ‘close to nature,’ ” writes Dumes. “But ‘after Lyme,’ many described an experience of becoming ‘prisoners of their own paradise.’ ”
We’ve built structured domestic spaces on the periphery of the natural world to help us keep alive our fantasy of a wilderness that is pristine but kept at a safe distance. Ticks put the lie to that fantasy. They make us pay attention. They force us to notice and explore the freckles and spots of dirt on our ankles and our partners’ ankles. They force us to observe the spaces around us. They are rude reminders that there is no such thing as wilderness untouched by humans or humans detached from nature.
That’s a better story than tick-as-invader. This history doesn’t offer a tidy answer for how to stem the epidemic. But it shows us that our modern response to Lyme disease—to build more boundaries—echoes the impulse that created the epidemic in the first place. It’s not a just problem with Lyme. I defended my doctoral work earlier this year and am now studying another artificial boundary—the one between prisons and the free world—that is creating another epidemic: tuberculosis. My study sites have moved from Martha’s Vineyard to Brazilian prisons, but in a few ways, the new disease stories I’m encountering are alarmingly familiar.
Katharine Walter is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
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The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
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Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
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Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
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We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
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The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
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Jamie Dench
How we cope with the end of nature.
As our environment crumbles, we seek solace in animatronic moose.
How We Cope with the End of Nature
As our environment crumbles, we seek solace in animatronic moose.
BY STEPHEN MARCHE
SEPTEMBER 7, 2017
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Solastalgia is the definitive disease of the 21st century but only a few even know its name. The symptoms include an underlying sense of loss, a vague sensation of being torn from the earth, a general out-of-placeness, homelessness without leaving home. You have probably felt it without knowing what it was. Solastalgia is the unease we inflict on ourselves as we create a world we don’t want to inhabit, a world stripped of nature.
Nature is retreating, and not gradually. According to the World Wildlife Fund, over half of the world’s wild vertebrate species has disappeared over the past forty years. More than 290 million acres of North American grasslands have been converted to agriculture. At current growth rates, US development will reduce its forested regions by about 30 million acres by 2050. The amount of urban land in biodiversity hotspots is expected to increase by three times between 2000 and 2030.
Deeper catastrophes, we know, are lurking. The North Pole has hovered near the freezing point this past winter. The partial breakdown of the Paris Accords, and the sudden spike in the consequences of climate change—icebergs the size of Delaware cracking off Antarctica, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef—are forcing us to face a hard truth. The future we are building is one with much less exposure to nature and vastly diminished biodiversity.
And this creates a new problem for us as a species: The experience of nature is integral to our wellbeing and, by destroying the earth, we are making ourselves sick. In 2003, Glenn Albrecht, then an environmental philosopher at the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle in Australia, coined the term solastalgia. Much like nostalgia, solastalgia is difficult to define with precision, but is nonetheless instantly recognizable: “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote, “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the beloved place in which one resides is under assault.” The type of assault may vary. The force of the assault may vary. The loss and unease that follows in the wake of the assault do not.
Glenn Albrecht chose “solasta” as a new root word for two reasons. “Solasta” contains the sense both of “solace” and “desolation.” Where nostalgia describes a longing for another place and another time, solastalgia is a longing for the now as it should be, for nature when there’s no nature there.
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Today solastalgia is going mainstream. For generations, small groups have been responding to the unfolding environmental catastrophe—hippies, off-the-gridders, small political and religious groups—but they were inherently subcultures. The general population could go on arguing about science they didn’t understand and pretending that the earth wasn’t changing. Now the collapse of the natural order is no longer theoretical and we have a new and pressing need for consolation, and a marketplace to serve that need.
If you want to see what kinds of services that marketplace provides, the place to visit is the Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls.
SHALLOW COMFORT: The Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls features indoor talking animatronic animals.Photograph by LifeFormations
Great Wolf Lodge is a theme park whose theme is the great outdoors. It is hugely successful as a brand of entertainment. There are now 17 Great Wolf Lodge resorts across North America. Centerbridge Partners acquired the chain in 2015 for 1.35 billion. There is no need to go outside at all if you attend Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls in the winter. At night you can stand just outside the front doors and roast marshmallows over a mild gas flame in an artificial fire pit, but that’s pretty much it. Intermittent stands of ragged trees in the massive parking lot are the main experience of nature-in-nature at Great Wolf Lodge.
The lobby does nature much better than nature anyway. For one thing, there’s no cold. In the lobby, it is always the second week of summer camp. The inside of the “Grand Living Room” is like a vastly inflated log cabin. There is a fireplace, again gas-lit, with animatronic wolves that occasionally howl from the imitation stones. Rushing through the front doors, the kids are immediately enraptured by the animatronic scene beside the check-in. A robotic moose and bear and tree engage in an endless futile conversation, spurred whenever a kid presses a hand against an imprint. The bear in the tutu declares, “This is the most magical place in the whole North Woods.”
And the children listen to her promise: “Isn’t this a wonderful place?”
Mo the Moose makes jokes. “What can you wear anytime, anywhere?” “A smile.” This is what nature after nature looks like. The kids watch anthropomorphized robots while their parents hand over their credit cards. Under the lobby check-in line, a little robot squirrel pokes out his head and screams. Hysterical silliness follows. The kids push the button again. The squirrel pokes out his head and screams again, and there’s more silliness. The kids push the button again. The kids love the robot squirrel. For the kids, it’s paradise. It is a solastalgic paradise.
The idea of solastalgia came out of a stripped landscape, that of the Australian droughts of the early oughts. They provided direct evidence of the mental health consequences of climate change. The effects were most acute among indigenous groups, scientists who confront climate change directly, and farmers whose land has been destroyed. In 2006, Nick Higginbotham, a scholar of public health also at Newcastle University, developed with his colleagues a quantitative measurement of “the bio-psycho-social cost of ecosystem disturbance” called the Environmental Distress Scale, or EDS. They defined solastalgia as a response typical of “contexts where one’s physical environment (home) is transformed by forces that undermine identity, well-being, and control,” and measured it by asking respondents to agree or disagree with statements like “I miss having the sense of peace and quiet I once enjoyed in this place,” “[I am] sad that familiar animals and plants are disappearing,” or “[The] thought of my family being forced to leave this place upsets me.”
Higginbotham found that the experience of solastalgia measured this way correlated strongly with other reactions to environmental distress, like fear and anger. Solastalgia, the researchers concluded, appeared to “give clear expression, both philosophically and empirically, to the environmental dimension of human distress.” In the eleven years since Higginbotham’s paper, researchers have uncovered the mental health effects of environmental change in communities around the globe. The effect of warming in Nunatsiavut, in Labrador, has produced solastalgia. In Central Appalachia, the destruction of the mountains and the valley streams by mountaintop removal mining have produced solastalgia.
Climate-connected floods and drought “are often accompanied by anxiety, shock, depression, grief, despair, numbness, aggression, sleep disruptions, interpersonal difficulties, acute and posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and suicide,” Canadian environmental psychologists noted in 2016. In Asia, psychiatrists have noted that rising temperature is linked with suicide. A 2013 meta-analysis of 60 studies concluded that every standard deviation warming in global temperatures corresponded to a 4 percent rise in interpersonal violence, and a 14 percent rise in intergroup conflict. In 2015, The Lancet, the world’s foremost medical journals, put together the Commission on Health and Climate change, which described solastalgia as a key dimension to global mental health, something that “people experience when their land is damaged and they lose amenity and opportunity.”
Solastalgia is the latest human affliction, and like the other human afflictions before it, it calls out for a cure.
HOMELESSNESS WITHOUT LEAVING HOME: The Australian droughts of the early 2000s inspired scholars to coin the term solastalgia to describe the distress of a changing environment.Wikimedia
Great Wolf Lodge delivers a cure by presenting a simulacrum of nature. In this sense, it falls into a long tradition. Florence Nightingale, in her Notes on Nursing from 1863, noted the positive effects of patients being able to look out a window, and of “beautiful objects, of variety of objects, and especially of brilliancy of color.” She thought having something natural at your bedside would help you get better. She wasn’t wrong.
Exposure to nature, virtually in any form, has measurable health benefits. Looking at a forest from a window, according to one study in Japan, led to
(i) significantly lower diastolic blood pressure, (ii) significantly higher parasympathetic nervous activity, but significantly lower sympathetic nervous activity, and (iii) significantly lower heart rate.
Since 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has promoted shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Topiary therapy has shown results: the level of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the subjects’ saliva diminishes as do their pulse rate and their blood pressure.
A well-cited 1984 study by Roger Ulrich found that patients recovering from surgery benefited from a view of trees as opposed to a blank wall. They had “shorter postoperative hospital stays, had fewer negative evaluative comments from nurses, took fewer moderate and strong analgesic doses, and had slightly lower scores for minor postsurgical complications.” His research is motivating the study of nature-like animations in office buildings to relax workers. Therapeutic landscapes have been used for many years in psychiatric hospitals.
Researchers in population health have understood the connection between green space and a sense of well-being for centuries: “There is a well-developed body of evidence supporting the premise that contact with ‘nature’ provides a range of health benefits for humans.” A 2015 study of self-reported health across the United Kingdom found a strong positive correlation with how scenic the local environment was, even after correcting for socioeconomic indicators and pollution. The “scenicness” was not strictly determined by the amount of green space, leading the researchers to conclude that “the aesthetics of the environment may have a greater practical impact than previously believed.”
The fact is that we’re not sure why, exactly, nature makes us feel so much better. Some have argued that the positive health benefits of forest-bathing were due to the essential oils in the trees themselves, that delicious air that you breathe when you walk through the woods. But those chemical effects don’t explain the already established benefits of men watching forests from their windows. Biodiversity is not, apparently, a requirement.
If you want to understand how humanity deals with its craving for nature, Niagara Falls has always been the ideal place to start looking. It was a forerunner in the history of solastalgia and its consolations. On his visit in 1882, Oscar Wilde described the Falls as “one of [the bride’s] earliest disappointments.” Twelve million visitors arrive every year to the Falls even now when its status as a honeymoon cliché has long ago vanished. The natural spectacle attracts artificial spectacles, too: Tightrope walkers and carnival barkers and Marilyn Monroe and, now, casinos.
MADE TO ORDER: Some of our most famous natural spectacles are actually carefully engineered.
At the core of the experience of Niagara Falls is awe. The cataracts are a classic example of the sublime, the overpowering size and scale of nature that makes humanity itself and the puny human observer, and our vanity and struggle, seem negligible. The sublime is spiritually refreshing. It brings the real position of a person in relation to the natural order, absolute puniness, to the forefront of consciousness.
The irony of Niagara Falls is that the sublimity of the experience, the sense of inhuman power of nature, is very much an effect of engineering. Nature, at Niagara Falls, has always been a feat. The exact quantity of water pouring over the Falls is subject to regulation by an International Joint Commission, which decreed, in the 1950 Niagara Treaty, how much of the river should be diverted to hydroelectric and other uses, and how much for aesthetic display. During the high season, April 1 to September 15, the Falls spume 100,000 cubic feet per second, from eight in the morning to ten at night. During the low season, it’s half that.
The Falls has naturally been eroding for 5,500 years, after the melt waters swelled Lake Erie from about half its current size. Natural erosion would, of course, be totally unacceptable to the people who make their living from the current scenery. No one is moving two towns, one on each side of the border, a meter and a half a year just because of nature. So in 1969, the United States Army Corps of Engineers decided to do the most human thing of all: Stop nature altogether. Using a cofferdam, they halted the flow for the first time since an icejam had silenced the Falls in March 1848. At the exposed bottom, they discovered millions of coins and two corpses. A decomposed woman, evidently forgotten, wore a “forget me not” band on her ring finger.
The engineers took samples from the lip and established that, because of the reduced flow from hydroelectric diversion, the erosion would be minimal. Nonetheless, being engineers, they showed they could change the Falls if they wanted to. In 1973, the citizens of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian and American sides, were sent 220,000 brochures with ballots attached. They were presented with several options for modifying the American Falls: Removing the talus at the base, increasing the flow, changing the Maid of the Mist Pool level, or changing nothing. The answer was obvious. They overwhelmingly decided to keep the Falls as they were and are. Nature has to match the photograph.
One of the clearest ways to recognize the existence of solastalgia is recognizing the attempt to recover from it. “The intense desire to be organically connected to living landscapes is, in part, a desire to overcome solastalgia by finding an earthly home in connection with other living things on this Earth,” Albrecht wrote in his 2006 essay. In order to retain the nature of the Falls, the public retained its image, in contravention of nature itself, which would have eroded it to non-existence.
Today the aestheticization of the Falls continues through aggressive spectacle, although the showiness feels increasingly desperate. At night, the mists and the cataracts are the subject of a newly renovated illumination spectacular that cost four million dollars. Illuminating Niagara Falls is one of the first things that human beings did after the discovery of electric light. The Falls’ electric lights turned on for the first time in 1879, the year the light bulb was invented.
The shifting brightness of turquoise and fuchsia make a perfect background for selfies. Again nature must fit the camera, in this case the camera on the phone.
THE NEW WILDLIFE: A 2002 study found that children were better at identifying Pokémon characters than local plants and animals.Myimagine / Shutterstock
There’s something else for people to do with their phones at Niagara Falls now. Several rare Pokémon have been caught there: Jynxes, Tentacruels, Jolteons. This is the latest form of nature entertainment, and it is massive. Pokémon Go peaked at over 50 million users, and even after the inevitable app cull, one in ten U.S. smartphones still have the game. Last summer, Pokémon Go brought in more money from mobile than Netflix. It is birdwatching without the birds. It is birdwatching with the guarantee of seeing something. A 2002 study in the UK found that children aged 8 and over were far better at identifying Pokémon characters than they were local plants and animals.
Those researchers came to a stark warning for conservationists: “Evidence from elsewhere links loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it.” But there was also another message. Pokémon was evidence of what E.O. Wilson called “biophilia,” an innate desire to encounter nature. Niagara Falls contains and monetizes the sublime. Pokémon contains and monetizes biophilia. Great Wolf Lodge contains and monetizes the experience of being outdoors. They all offer the assuagements of nature without nature’s foremost embarrassments: Change and decline.
The aestheticization of nature has given way to a therapeutization. “Nature” as a spectacle has become “nature” as a playspace. Rather than confront we assuage. The end of the solace of real nature means the beginning of the solace of “nature.” Nature as entertainment replaces the wilderness. The market is efficient: We can buy cures from the longings the market creates.
Whether or not this new development in our culture is positive or negative is a moot question; it is what we need to do to survive. “The single most important measure that can be undertaken now is to ‘enhance adaptive capacity,’” is the way one psychiatric assessment of indigenous Australians suffering from solastalgia put the matter. Pokémon, Niagara Falls and the Great Wolf Lodge show our adaptive capacity in action. Our ingenuity, which has orchestrated the catastrophe we are facing, has already found a way around our resulting sense of desolation. Stopping development and climate change are hard. We have found an easier way. We are building a “nature fix.”
Our species has always dreamed of a reconciliation with nature. The root of the word paradise is the Persian word “Pardes,” which means a walled garden. In the Bible, the drama of Genesis is a man and a woman cast out of their existence as beasts and given dominion over nature in suffering. Their purpose is to work to redeem themselves and the world they have been given—to make things “on earth as it is in heaven.” This dream was so powerful that it translated to secular ideologies. All Utopias conceive of a world in which the desires of human beings are at one with the natural order. Instead our domination has extended even over the organic feelings of loss at our domination of nature. But our final destination was always supposed to be “nature.”
Part of solastalgia, surely, must be that we are witnessing the end of that dream. We have chosen the easier path to reconciliation with nature, engineering instead of self-control. We refuse to treat the ragged, beaten world as a home. Instead we are making for ourselves a painted, bubbled, pretend paradise.
The mornings at Great Wolf Lodge, with the children still asleep, are almost peaceful. A soundtrack of woodland rustling drifts over the scene, and no little hands prompt the cartoonish robots to babble. A nonexistent songbird indefinitely trills with regular intervals. The air hums with a decent imitation of tranquility in nature. It reminds you of what it’s like to be beside a lake, in the woods. At the core of the reminiscence is a sadness that it’s all just a reminiscence. A subtle sting hangs over the pleasure of the imitation.
Great Wolf Lodge is “nature” as a perfectly enclosed system. At Great Wolf Lodge, nature is always upselling you. When you return the key to the lockers in the water park, you can have the deposit back or a stuffed animal instead. There is an arcade in the basement, and a bowling alley, and a spa for mother and daughter mani-pedis. There’s a kind of midway, too. It is the perfect symbiosis of “nature” and commerce.
The Lodge represents both an achievement and an abomination. It is a deeper form of control. Just as standing in front of the Falls, the desire for the sublime, for the sense of human smallness, remains, so watching the talking, animatronic moose, there is the sense of the longing to be in the woods. The residue of the wilderness haunts every garden. Maybe every paradise is somebody else’s ruin.
The period of morning calm does not last. The lobby of Great Wolf Lodge fills up with groggy parents and cheerfully hyped children. A kid pushes a button and the show starts up again: “Isn’t this a wonderful place?” asks the bear in the tutu.
Stephen Marche is a writer in Toronto. His latest book is The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty First Century.
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He’s spent nearly 7 decades at The San Francisco Chronicle. This year, at 98, he’s retiring.
For the majority of his career, David Perlman covered scientific progress in the 20th century and beyond, writing thousands of articles about everything from the beginning of the space age to the computer age.
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Veteran reporters Carl Nolte and David Perlman lead the newsroom at The San Francisco Chronicle in a toast as the paper celebrates 150 years of operation on Friday January 16, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.
CAREER
He’s spent nearly 7 decades at The San Francisco Chronicle. This year, at 98, he’s retiring.
By Daniel Funke • July 26, 2017
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David Perlman was born in 1918 — a decade before the discovery of penicillin and the Big Bang Theory.
And, for the majority of his career, he covered scientific progress in the 20th century and beyond, writing thousands of articles about everything from the beginning of the space age to the computer age.
Until now.
The 98-year-old science editor is retiring from The San Francisco Chronicle after nearly seven decades at the newspaper, a decision he said had been coming for a while.
"I first began thinking about it a year ago and then, what the hell — it was too much fun still working, and I could still write good stories," Perlman told Poynter. "So it was, I think, a couple of months ago, something like that, that I realized it's really time to stop."
San Francisco Chronicle science editor David Perlman is retiring this year after years on the beat.
By the time Perlman leaves The Chronicle in August, he'll be about one year shy of 100 years old. He'll have won numerous science journalism awards — with a few even named after him — and led a couple different science writing organizations. And, almost 80 years after graduating from journalism school, Perlman said he wouldn't have done anything differently.
"I'm a newspaperman, and that I would never change," he said.
Poynter caught up with Perlman to talk about his long career at The Chronicle, what he thinks about the current state of science journalism, and his advice for aspiring reporters. This Q-and-A has been shortened for clarity.
You're retiring from The San Francisco Chronicle after nearly seven decades at the newspaper. You spent basically the entirety of your career there.
I spent about four or five years right after World War II (at another newspaper). I was in the Army, and I got out, and when the war was over I was still in Europe, so I got a job at what was then the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune.
I worked there for several years and didn't come back to The Chronicle until 1951. I had been a reporter at The Chronicle before the war — fresh out of journalism school — and then came back in '51. I had been away for almost 10 years, I guess.
Where did you go to journalism school?
I was Columbia College (at Columbia University) class of 1939 and the J-school class of '40.
How did you see The Chronicle change during the time you were there?
Then, in the first place, of course it was all print — there was nothing digital about it. The second place, we produced the story. I had a great typewriter, and if I went out of town on a story, I had an old Olivetti portable (typewriter), and we had telephones where we dictated stories to some rewrite person in the newsroom.
The type was set by linotype, the presses were down in the basement of the Chronicle building here on 5th and Mission (streets).
It was like every other print newspaper because there wasn't any other (option). The hottest electronic stuff was a radio, I guess, and of course there were radio news programs. But this was before television. In the late '40s, television was just coming into its own and there wasn't any real competition. It was a printed newspaper, as all newspapers and news organizations were in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s until the internet came along and things changed rapidly — and still are changing.
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How have you seen the newspaper change in terms of the things it covers?
Most newspapers, including The Chronicle, are focusing more on their circulation area, trying to serve — as we do here at The Chronicle — serve our readers whose local needs, regional needs need to be filled by what we can offer. Of course we provide our Chronicle readers with world and national news, but our staff here in the newsroom is primarily covering the events and the trends and the politics and the environmental issues that affect us here in the Bay Area.
When did you first know that you were interested in science writing?
That's a long story. It was about 1957, and I broke my ankle skiing, and was laid up for quite a while. A friend of mine, actually our kids' pediatrician, brought me a book called "The Nature of the Universe."
It was by ... a famous British astronomer. It described what he called a Steady State Theory, and I said to my friend the pediatrician, "What are you bringing me this astronomy book for? I don't care about stuff like that." And he said, "It's just fascinating, you must read it." Well, I did, while I was in the hospital, and I read and I said, "Oh my God. That's really interesting." And then, of course, it was competing at that time with what later became the dominant theory of the universe — the Big Bang Theory.
In any event, I said, "Well that's pretty curious. If that's what astronomers do, I ought to find out what they're like." So I went up to the Lick Observatory here in the Bay Area, on Mt. Hamilton above San Jose, and I met an astronomer there. His name was Dr. George Herbig — I remember that name, even.
He said he was interested in stars that are being born in the Orion Nebula. I thought, "My God, that's so romantic." It was kind of an epiphany, the idea that a star gets born. I wrote a little story about it and started looking at other scientists to see what they do for a living. One thing led to another, and I became a science writer, because (The Chronicle) didn't have one at the time.
Everything I've written about since then has been a learning experience, and that's the pleasure of being a reporter — especially on a newspaper like this one, which encourages reporters young or old to find areas of fascination and pursue them.
Do you think your service in World War II affected the way you cover stories or approach journalism?
Not at all, and that's not necessarily typical of other reporters in that age bracket. I just had office jobs in the Army. I did get into the infantry but never fired a shot in anger.
A lot of newspapers in recent years have cut their science desks in order to save money. What do you think about that, and how do you think science coverage has changed as a result?
I think it's absolutely obscene. Newspapers, whether online or in print, are a major factor in the ongoing education and awareness of the public, and specifically of a younger generation. And whether it's online or in print, the idea of failing to cover advances in science ... it creates a generation with a major disability in what they can think about and understand.
A perfect example of that is the controversy over climate change, global warming and all that that implies. The failure of people to understand that this is real science, and it's just as scientifically valid as an issue today as is the fact that we're going to have an eclipse of the sun on Aug. 21. That's not a theory — that's going to happen.
And the climate is going to change more, and more and more. The resistance to an understanding of that I can understand ... which is largely generated by people whose economic interests are threatened by the fact that what's causing the changing climate is, in fact, the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.
So I think newspapers have abdicated their responsibility by diminishing the amount of science coverage. There were once, I don't know, 50 or 75 science pages, science sections in newspapers across the country. Now there's The New York Times on Tuesday. Very, very few other newspapers have anything approaching that.
Going back to the start, what did you think your career in journalism would look like, how did it turn out and how do you feel about that?
Well, when I was still in journalism school, most of the time I wanted to run around with a press card stuck in my hat and cover murders. I've covered a few of them, but not very many. So when you're 21 years old, you think a little differently about your career than when you do later on. I had all the usual romantic ideas of would-be newspapermen. On the other hand, my career certainly has turned differently than I would have ever expected, but it's been a wonderful one. And here at The Chronicle, our editors, publishers have let me do the kind of stuff I want to do.
Why did you stay at The Chronicle so long?
Because I had the opportunity to do the kinds of stories I want to do, and I love San Francisco. My wife came from San Francisco, one of (our kids) was born here — the other two were born in Paris back in the day when I was working on The Herald Tribune. This is my town, and this is my area. I don't see any reason to change; I didn't want to live anywhere else. I guess that's as good a reason as any.
But mainly it's because ... I've been all over the world. I've been in Antarctica, the South Pole, the north slope of Alaska, China, Israel, Europe — God knows where. I've just been everywhere covering the kinds of stories that I specialize in.
If you had to start your career today, would you do anything differently?
I'd have to say no, because if I started my career knowing what I know, I'd do the same thing. ... I mean, how many people get to go watch a dig in Ethiopia to uncover the remains of a prehuman called Ardipithecus ... and watch paleoanthropologists digging up fossils in the desert? That's the kind of stuff I can't imagine doing if I weren't a science reporter here in San Francisco.
What advice would you have for young people who are starting careers in science journalism today?
I would offer the same advice to any would-be reporter: Ground yourself in a basic liberal arts education. I would superimpose upon that the need to understand the current tech world and learn to use the tools of tech, and I think most college kids today know far more about that than I do.
Then, if you have time during your years in school, start taking a few science courses — not to probe too deeply, but at least to have an understanding of some of the areas of science: anthropology, astronomy, physics, biology. If you're interested in science, if that's what turns you on, that's where you ought to background yourself as much as you can. And then, I'd have to say from my own experience, you can learn an awful lot by talking to scientists. And most of them are willing to share their excitement and their interests.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Daniel Funke
Daniel Funke is the 2017 Google News Lab Fellow at The Poynter Institute. A recent graduate of the University of Georgia, he previously worked for the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY College and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as both a digital producer and reporter. He also served as editor-in-chief of The Red & Black, UGA's independent student news organization. Interested in the intersection of journalism and technology, his past research and reporting has focused on everything from local crime and national human rights issues, to the media and craft beer industries. He believes you can't have one without the other. You can follow Daniel on Twitter at @dpfunke.
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How the oil pipeline began.
Pipeline fights have a longer history than you think.
How the Oil Pipeline Began
Pipeline fights have a longer history than you think.
BY JONATHAN WALDMAN
JULY 6, 2017
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Soon after Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil, 70 feet down, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 27, 1859, he had a problem. He had nowhere to store the dark green liquid, and no good way to move it. Until then, locals had collected smaller quantities of oil from seeps and puddles and pits, by wringing it out of saturated wool blankets and scraping it off of wooden boards and collecting it in buckets, and they stored it easily in washtubs and whiskey barrels. But Drake’s well produced 1,000 gallons a day, and subsequent wells produced much more. The nearest railroad was 16 miles to the north, in Corry, just shy of the New York border. The roads there, ill-maintained lumber trails, were barely passable. So, for half a decade, before the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad arrived from the east, and the Allegheny Valley Railroad arrived from Pittsburgh, Drake and the oil men who followed him—finding themselves in possession of so much oil—filled up hundreds of thousands of oak barrels, and delivered them to refineries by horse and by barge. It’s hard to say which method was worse.
Behind teams of horses, men in tall rubber boots hauled one-ton loads of oil—six barrels to the wagon—south 15 miles to Oil City, where the barrels were transferred to barges on the Allegheny river. The men were teamsters. They charged $3 to $4 per barrel, nearly the value of each barrel’s contents. The fluctuating delivery rates depended on the depth of the oily mud the teamsters had to wade through. The teamsters were numerous, and busy; in those early years, 2,000 wagons might cross one Titusville bridge in a day. They were also profane, and demanding. The journalist Ida Tarbell called them tyrants, and plutocrats.
Oil Creek, the local waterway, was insufficient on its own to carry the oil and make the teamsters unnecessary. It needed enhancing. Boatmen did this by damming its tributaries, and loading barrels onto flatboats while they waited. The smallest boats held 20 barrels; the largest 1,000. Every week or so, on “freshet days,” the oilmen opened the flood gates, and sent the oil forth, in exciting but perilous little torrents of water. Twenty-thousand barrels of oil made their way south. Colliding into each other, and the shore, the boats regularly yielded their contents to the water. In a typical freshet, 1,000 or so barrels didn’t survive, but still, locals celebrated gaily. Spilled oil soaked the creek, and lined its banks all the way to the Allegheny River. From there, the surviving oil barrels easily made their way, in bigger barges, down to Pittsburgh.
NO RUSH: Oil out for delivery on horse-drawn wagons in Texas.Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images
Whether the oil journeyed by land or by water, the coopers didn’t complain. They were as busy as the teamsters. By 1870, when the region was producing a Drake’s-well-worth of oil every few minutes, one cooperage in Oil City made 1,000 barrels a day. Such shops made pyramids of barrels, as tall as a few horses. Coopers came by the scores. There were more coopers making 42-gallon hooped barrels—each with a distinct company logo on the top—than there were roustabouts (or oil workers).
When the railroad finally arrived in 1862, barrels were loaded onto flat cars, only to slosh around and leak en route. Of each barrel’s 42 gallons, only 40 made the trip. Beginning in 1865, the oil was dumped into specially made wooden tank cars, consisting of 2,000-gallon tubs. The modification made shipping easier, but no less dangerous; a severe fire hazard remained. One old oil man, W.H.H. Fithian, recalled in 1906, “Hardly a day passed but that somebody was not killed or injured” on the railroad. Most oil men, he wrote, called the area “The valley of the shadow of death.” In 1869, big metal cylinders of equivalent volume, with baffles, replaced the wooden tanks, and before long, they doubled in capacity. Still, there was too much oil. “A man with a thousand-barrel well on his hands,” Tarbell wrote, “was in a plight.” Raymond Foss Bacon, in his 1916 treatise, “The American Petroleum Industry,” put it even better: “The magnitude of the petroleum industry made it necessary to find some mode of transportation even cheaper than a railroad.”
The pipeline was just the thing.
The first oil pipeline existed only in imagination. A West Virginian brigadier general named Samuel Karns, who’d worked for the Corps of Engineers, had a salt well in Burning Springs. When it started pumping crude oil, he proposed a 6-inch pipe, 35 miles long, running downhill to the Ohio River at Parkersburg. This was in November of 1860. It was never built. A year later a man from Erie proposed building a wooden pipeline from Titusville to Oil City. It, too, was never built.
A Pennsylvania oilman named J.L. Hutchinson was the first to actually build one, in 1862. It ran over a hill, to a refinery, and worked on the principle of a siphon: as long as the outlet was lower than the inlet, liquid would flow. Except it didn’t work—because the pipe was not airtight. Most people, in fact, thought pumping oil through a long metal pipe was a “visionary scheme,” its funders crazy, the endeavor certain to fail. Stitching together hundreds of pieces of metal, with nary a leak, seemed impossible.
To teamsters, the pipeline promised the termination of their employ. That little tube threatened their entire industry, and they fought it hard.
The next summer, Hutchinson tried again, building a 2-mile line. Although it leaked, the combination of pumps and pipes worked well enough that the Humboldt Mining and Refining Company, to which the line ran, proudly claimed success. Its 1864 prospectus declares: “An oil-duct has been constructed, leading from the Tarr farm to the Humboldt refinery, with power to convey 800 barrels of oil through it in twenty-four hours. ... The Company can now pump the oil from Oil Creek over the hills through the iron pipes ... at half the expense of former times.” Harper’s reported on the novelty of pumping oil “in tubes.” Hutchinson’s next attempt, though, failed. When he built a 3-mile line the following year, from a well to the railroad, it leaked so much it didn’t matter how powerfully oil was pumped through it.
When Samuel Van Syckel proposed sinking his oil money into a 5-mile pipeline, he was ridiculed. His friends discouraged him, pitied him, and called the idea folly. Strangers made him the butt of their jokes. They’d ask, “Do you intend to put a girdle around the world?” and “Can you make water run uphill?” He was so humiliated that he ate alone, and left by the back door.
A.W. Smiley, who later worked as a timekeeper and paymaster on Van Syckel’s pipeline—which succeeded—attributed the achievement to ingenuity, but also to youthful ambition and self-conceit. Really, though, it was fastidiousness. Another old pipeliner recalled, “it is no longer surprising that so many of the early pipe lines, which had their origin in optimism, ended their careers in bankruptcy. The real surprise is that any escaped the common fate of the many.”
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When, in 1865, Van Syckel finished his line, of 2-inch pipe screwed together, from a well to the railroad, it worked. People began to notice. With three Reed & Cogswell single-piston steam pumps, his line was seven times more capacious than Hutchinson’s best. It did the work of 300 teams working 10 hours a day. The Pithole Record called it a “considerable novelty” and later called it “one of the most wonderful of the many wonders.” Tarbell called the day Van Syckel’s pipeline began to run the second most important event in the history of Pennsylvania’s oil region, ranking it just behind the day oil was discovered. She said it began a revolution.
While the first successful—which is to say not astoundingly leaky—pipeline promised oil companies delivery rates of only $1 per barrel, it also promised, to teamsters, the termination of their employ. That little tube threatened their entire industry, and they fought it hard. Having successfully lobbied against the wooden pipeline proposal of 1861, they put up signs around town decrying Van Syckel’s pipe. Then they attacked it with pickaxes. They tied chains to it, and pulled it apart with horses. After the sheriff sent out armed deputies to guard the pipeline, Smiley and his colleagues were “threatened with transportation to a warmer clime.” The teamsters, infuriated with the way things were developing, sent a threatening anonymous letter to the head of an oil company. At 2 a.m., an armed mob of teamsters stormed one company’s tanks, and set five ablaze. Someone telegraphed the governor, asking for help. Van Syckel sent for rifles from New York. The railroaders got mad, too. Employees of the West Penn Railroad Company, sensing a threat from a pipeline that crossed their road, tore it up. The pipe was relaid, and the railroaders destroyed it again.
The pipeline men gave up, and in a nod to the teamsters they’d obviated, settled on transporting oil from the first half of their pipeline, across the railroad tracks in 25-barrel wagons, and into the second half of their pipeline. In this bipartisan fashion, they could do about 8,000 barrels a day. The teamsters eventually left town en masse. Soon enough, pipeline companies raised their prices, minimally undercutting the bids from the bygone teamsters.
The earliest pipelines led from wells to local refineries, and then, as John D. Rockefeller consolidated the refineries, straight to railroads. There were dozens of them, in parallel, supplied by places like the Oil Creek Tube Works. By 1872, the Pennsylvania region’s 1,200 wells were producing 6 million barrels of oil a year, all of it gathered through pipelines. Soon enough, the pipelines began to compete with the railroads, and, taking a cue from Rockefeller, consolidated. Fairview Pipe Line was first to do so. It became the United Pipe Line Association, and eventually part of Standard Oil. By 1874, it had a 4-inch trunk line to Pittsburgh, 60 miles away. In 1875, the Pennsylvania Transportation Company got a charter to build a pipeline clear across the state, to the sea more than 300 miles eastward. First, though, came pipelines to Cleveland. Then Buffalo. At last, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Tide Water, though, beat the Pennsylvania Transportation Company in the race to the Atlantic, completing a 6-inch line from Bradford, Pennsylvania to the Bayonne, New Jersey refineries in 1879. By 1907, the generation following Van Syckel had built enough 6-inch and 8-inch lines to put a girdle around the world, twice.
To achieve these lengths, pipeliners figured out how far and high pumps could push oil. No single pump, or pipe, could possibly get oil across the Alleghenies alone. So they broke long routes into sections, and built storage tanks and pump stations along the way. As links make a chain, so conjoined sections made pipelines. And conjoining sections got easier as pipe manufacturers learned to consistently make good screw-threads.
Lindsey G / Wikipedia
Laying these 19th-century trunk lines required a big frame and a strong back. The pipe, in 18- or 20-foot sections, was hauled into the woods by horse or ox, on a wagon or sled. The pipe was heavy, as were the tools used to manipulate it. To assemble screw-coupled wrought iron pipe, a foreman banged on the end of the pipe, then another man, bucking it up, rotated it a hair with a huge wrench, called Klein tongs. The tongs were the length of a man, and just as heavy. A bang, a turn—one, then the other. Through the woods, pipeliners buried the line in a ditch. Through wetlands, they encased it in concrete. Long days, and longer weeks, proceeded as such. Neil Mcelwee, the author of a small history, The National Transit Co., Standard Oil’s Great Pipeline Company, said it was like being in the army. “Most pipeline men had an edge, a swagger, an attitude,” Mcelwee writes. “Pipeline men were hardworking, hard drinking rascals on their better days. Farmers liked them but sent their daughters to live with aunts in the city when the pipelines came through.” Another historian, P.C. Boyle, wrote that men accomplished “by sheer force results that now appear astonishing, and at a cost that is little short of appalling.”
After the line was assembled, buried, and filled with oil, linewalkers went out to check for leaks. In long leather coats, and high leather boots—to protect against bites from copperheads and rattlesnakes, which were “as plenty as fleas on a mangy dog”—they hunted for puddles. Discovering one, a linewalker would tap into the parallel telegraph line with a pocket relay, and notify the foreman’s office. Men and tools were requisitioned, and the pipe was dug up and fixed. Hermit-like, linewalkers stayed in sheds along the pipeline. In the spring, many discovered that their pipelines, laid in rivers, had been taken out by floods and ice. They telegraphed for more supplies and men, who waded into frigid water and fixed the pipe. On they went, crossing rivers in rowboats that they tied to shore. In their coat pockets, they carried canned beef, hash, soup. Though they carried walking sticks, and wore hats, their job was not relaxing: If it was determined that a linewalker hadn’t done his job, he could be responsible for the cost of any oil lost.
The shooter, though, had the most dangerous job. Once the torpedo had been filled, and lowered into the bottom of the well, it was his job to make it explode.
The linewalkers were not alone. Carrying brass tools, so as not to make sparks, other men kept rights-of-way clear. Carrying calibrated sticks, gaugers measured and recorded the volume of the oil in storage tanks along the line. Moving oil across the state required volumetric choreography. They checked for water in the oil, and checked the temperature of the oil, adjusting their calculations if necessary. Since these tanks were often hit by lightning, they spent much of their time putting out fires. This they did with wet carpets or sod. If that failed, they used cannon balls, aimed at the bottoms of the tanks. Once drained, a tank could easily be extinguished and repaired.
Every mile or two, inside pump stations, other men conducted the work necessary to keep oil flowing through pipelines. Firemen shoveled coal into the Woodbury & Booth 50-horsepower boilers that ran the pumps. Operators kept the boilers full of water, running at the proper pressure. Laborers maintained and repaired “Long John” engines. Station engineers, trained in hydraulics, supervised. Telegraphers sent messages to district foremen, who sent messages to the main pipeline office. This changed the gathering of news. No longer did the reporter for the Oil City Derrick need to ride his horse from well to well, talking to pumpers and drillers. He could just visit the pipeline office, and wait for the telegraphs to come in.
Because Pennsylvania oil was light (not much wax) and sweet (not much corrosive sulfur), early pipeline operators were not especially troubled by it, at least in a maintenance sense. If necessary, they cleaned their pipelines by pumping canvas rags through them. Though well-intentioned, the efforts worked poorly. By the 1870s, a pipeline scraper—a round squeegee—was devised. Early models had leather cups; by the 1930s the cups were rubber. Pipeliners took to calling these things pigs; before that, they called them go-devils.
The origin of the term relates to another apparatus of the early oil industry. To increase production, men detonated explosives in the bottoms of their wells. The explosive of choice was nitroglycerine, in a container called a torpedo. Colonel E.A.L. Roberts, who patented the process in 1862, torpedoed a “dry hole” in 1866, and got 20 barrels a day. He did it again, and quadrupled his output. More boom meant more oil, or so the thinking went, so where he began with only four quarts of nitroglycerine in narrow tin canisters a foot long, those canisters soon grew beyond 10 feet, capable of holding more than 200 quarts.
The nitroglycerine was delivered to the well in a special wagon, skillfully driven. One man, driving a nitroglycerine wagon over a bump a few inches high, disappeared. His fragments, one writer later suggested, would have fit in a cigar box. The shooter, though, had the most dangerous job. Once the torpedo had been filled, and lowered into the bottom of the well, it was his job to make it explode, by dropping a 10-pound cast-iron projectile onto it. The projectile was a go-devil. Well shooting, oil men wrote, sent shivers from one end of oil country to the other, and nearly blew Bradford, Pennsylvania into Cataraugus County, New York. Hence go-devil: You had to go like the devil when you dropped it.
But for the nitroglycerin, modern pipelines are not so different from the first pipelines schemed up in Pennsylvania. Most are steel, welded together, but iron pipes abound. So do pump stations and storage tanks. Dozens of companies make pipeline pigs, and now they don’t just scrape pipes clean, but (using ultrasonics or magnetic flux) inspect pipes for corrosion damage, too. Through computerized systems, modern operators monitor flow rates and pressure—but the combination of man and machine leaves plenty of room for the same leaks that plagued Hutchinson. That’s why linewalkers continue their work today, some on cars, but many still on foot and horseback.
Now, as then, it’s one thing to build something, and quite another to maintain it.
Jonathan Waldman, a 2017 Alicia Patterson fellow, is working on his second book, Sam, about the development of an unusual robot. His first book, Rust, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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Fiction: New York under water.
Your future commute to work is on a boat.
CULTURE FICTION
New York Under Water
Your future commute to work is on a boat.
BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHAN MARTINIERE
JUNE 29, 2017
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Science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson paints a vivid picture of life in New York City after the sea level rises more than 50 feet, drowning lower Manhattan and creating a forest of skyscrapers in his new book, New York 2140.
1
Numbers often fill my head. While waiting for my building’s morose super to free my Jesus bug from the boathouse rafters where it had spent the night, I was looking at the little waves lapping in the big doors and wondering if the Black-Scholes formula could frame their volatility. The canals were like a perpetual physics class’s wave-tank demonstration— backwash interference, the curve of a wave around a right angle, the spread of a wave through a gap, and so on—it was very suggestive as to how liquidity worked in finance as well.
Too much time to give to this question, the super being so sullen and slow. New York parking! One can do nothing but practice patience. Eventually the zoomer was mine to step into, off the boathouse dock and then out the doorway onto the shadowed surface of the Madison Square bacino. Nice day, crisp and clear, sunlight pouring down the building canyons from the east.
As on most weekdays, I hummed the bug east on Twenty-third into the East River. It would have been shorter to burble south through the city canals, but even just past dawn the southward traffic on Park was terrible, and would only get worse at the Union Square bacino. Besides I wanted to fly a little before settling in to work, I wanted to see the river shine.
I turned and thwopped across some big barge wakes, then hummed and gurgled into the city.
The East River too was busy with its usual morning traffic, but there was still room in the fast southbound lane to plane up onto the Jesus bug’s curving hydrofoils and fly. As always the lift off the water was exhilarating, a rise like a seaplane taking off, some kind of nautical hard-on, after which the boat flew over its magic carpet of air some six feet off the river, with only the two streamlined composite foils shearing through the water below, flexing constantly to maximize lift and stability. A genius of a boat, zooming downriver in the autobahn lane, ripping through the sun-battered wakes of the slowpokes, rip rip rip, man on a mission here, out of my way little bargie, got to get to work and make my daily bread.
WATERWAYS: Current-day Venice provides a sneak peak at what a future commute in New York City could look like, if sea level rises sufficiently. juliohdez / Pixabay
If the gods allow. I could take losses, could get shaved, get hosed, take a hammering, blow up—so many ways to say it!—although all were unlikely in my case, being well hedged and risk averse as I am, at least compared to many traders out there. But the risks are real, the volatility volatile; in fact it’s the volatility that can’t be factored into the partial differential equations in the Black-Scholes family, even when you shift them around to account for that quality in particular. It’s what people bet on, in the end. Not whether an asset price will go up or down—traders win either way—but just how volatile the price will be.
All too soon my jaunt downriver got me offshore of Pine Canal, and I cut back on the jet and the bug plopped down into ordinary boathood, not like a goose crashing down, as in some hydrofoils, but gracefully, with nary a splash. After that I turned and thwopped across some big barge wakes, then hummed and gurgled into the city, moving at about the pace of the breaststrokers braving the toxicity in their daily suicide salute to the sun. The Pine Canal Seebad was weirdly popular, and they did indeed “see bad,” pods of old breaststrokers in full wetsuits and face masks, hoping the benefits of the aquatic exercise and the flotation itself counteracted the stew of heavy metals they inevitably took on. Got to admire the aqualove of anyone willing to get into the water anywhere in the greater New York harbor region, and yet of course people still did it, because people swim in their ideas. A great attribute of the species when it comes to trading with them.
The hedge fund I work for, WaterPrice, had its New York offices occupying all of the Pine Tower at Water and Pine. The building’s waterbarn was four stories tall, the big old atrium now filled with watercraft of all types, hanging like model boats in a child’s bedroom. A pleasure to see the foils curving under my trimaran’s hulls as it was hoisted into place for the day. A nice perk, boathouse parking, if expensive. Then up the elevator to the thirtieth floor and over to the northwest corner, where I settled into my aerie, looking through a scattering of skybridges midtown, and the superscrapers looming uptown in all their gehryglory.
2
The intertidal zone of lower midtown sloshed back and forth over an area with a lot of old landfill, and that double whammy had brought a lot of buildings down. Thirtieth to Canal was a wilderness of slumped, tilted, cracked, and collapsed blocks. A house built on sand cannot stand.
Nevertheless I saw the usual signs of squatting in the soggy ruins. Life there possibly resembled earlier centuries of cheap squalid tenement reality, moldier than ever, the occupants risking their lives by the hour. Same as ever, but wetter. But even in the worst neighborhoods there stood some islands of success, waterproofed and pumped out and made habitable again, in many cases better than ever, or so people claimed. The mutual aid societies were making something interesting, the so-called SuperVenice, fashionably hip, artistic, sexy, a new urban legend. Some people were happy to live on the water if it was conceptualized as Venetian, enduring the mold and hassle to live in a work of art. I liked it myself.
As always, each neighborhood was a little world, with a particular character. Some of them looked fine, others were bedraggled, still others abandoned. It wasn’t always clear why any given neighborhood should look the way it did. Things happened, a building held or fell down, its surroundings followed. Very contingent, very volatile, very high risk.
Anyone who tried on a regular professional basis to fight the sea in any capacity whatsoever always admitted that the sea always won in the end.
So on this day I hummed in very slowly to have a look at the neighborhood, south of the recently-fallen tower. It was south of the Hudson Yards, I noticed, a small bay that had lost the railroad tracks that used to floor it, leaving the shallows there open to tidal tear so severe that it was said to be as deep there as in the middle of the river. Whether seepage from that hole in the side of the island had caused this tower to fall was unknown, but there it was, its broken upper half taking waves right in its broken windows. It looked like a crippled cruise ship on its last slide to the bottom.
A lot of other buildings were following it down. I was reminded of those photos of drunken forests in the Arctic, where melting permafrost had caused trees to tilt this way and that. Chelsea Houses, Penn South Houses, London Terrace Houses, they all canted drunkenly. Recovery techniques were improving all the time, but there is no point to waterproofing a house built on sand. The graphenated composites and diamond sheeting are strong but they can’t hold slumping concrete, they’re more like very strong plastic wrap; they need support to work, they’re mostly waterproofing.
As I purred along the narrow canals between Tenth and Eleventh I caught sight of the Great Intilt Quad, up near the shore of the Hudson. Here in the first rush of skybridge building a group of investors had suspended a mall about forty stories above the ground, in the middle of four skyscrapers that anchored the skybridges holding the mall in air. This had thrilled people until the weight of the mall had pulled the four towers abruptly inward, dropping the mall five stories at once and breaking everything in it before somehow the towers held. After that people had gotten a lot more careful, and now the Great Intilt Quad stood there like a bad Stonehenge, reminding people never to hang too much weight outside the plumb line of a skyscraper. They were only built to hold up their own weight, as many engineers pointed out.
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All these drunken buildings: how long could they last? In the eternal battle of men against the sea, which antagonist was winning? The sea was always the same, while improvements were being made in humanity’s ramparts; but the sea was relentless. And it might rise yet again. A Third Pulse was not out of the question, although big masses of ice at risk of sliding were not currently being identified by the Antarctic surveys; this was a finding factored into the IPPI. Anyway, wherever sea level went in years to come, the intertidal was always going to be in trouble. Anyone who tried on a regular professional basis to fight the sea in any capacity whatsoever always admitted that the sea always won in the end, that its victory was merely a matter of time. Some of them could get quite philosophical about this in a depressive nihilist way. Nothing we do matters, we work like dogs and then we die, et cetera.
So a time was going to come when all the weaker buildings in the intertidal were going to need major repair—if that was even possible. If it wasn’t, they would have to be replaced—if that could even be done!
Meanwhile, people were living here. Signs of squatting were everywhere: broken windows replaced, laundry hanging from clotheslines, farms on rooftops. Especially by day it was obvious. At night they would turn off their lights and their buildings would look abandoned, perhaps here or there candlelit for their ghosts’ convenience. But by day it was easy to see. And of course it would always be that way. Manhattan never had enough places to live. And you couldn’t make rents high enough to keep people away, because they dodged the rents and squatted wherever they could. The drowned city had endless nooks and crannies, including of course diamond bubbles holding the tide out of aerated basements. People living like rats.
3
“Mayday,” the Met said from Vlade’s wall monitor. He had chosen a woman’s voice for the building, and now he found himself sitting up in bed reaching for the light and then his clothes. “What’s up?” he asked. “Report.”
“Water in the sub-basement.”
“Shit.” He leaped up and threw on his Carhartts.
The wetsuits and dive tanks and gear were in the boathouse, in a storage room next to his office. People were getting out in their watercraft without undue stress, it seemed, and Su nodded nervously to him that all was well. “I’m going to take a quick dive,” Vlade told him, which caused Su to frown. Dives were never supposed to be solo, but Vlade did it all the time around the building, accompanied only by a little sub sled.
“I’ll keep the phone on,” Su said, to remind him, and Vlade nodded and began the somewhat arduous process of getting his wetsuit on. For building inspections he could use the smallest tank, and the headset was just a mask settling onto the hood like a snorkel mask. The seal was not completely hermetic but good enough for brief work near the surface, and he could scrub down afterward.
Being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown.
There were steps down into the water inside the boathouse. Only three were now exposed, which meant it was almost high tide. Down he went, feeling like the swamp thing from the eponymous movie, the scariest movie of all time in his opinion. Happily he was not dragging some poor rapidly aging maiden down with him. Nor even the sled, which was not needed for a dive like this.
The water was cold as always, even in the wetsuit, but he had been warming up so fast that it felt good to be cooled. Submerge, quick test of the gear, then out the boathouse door into the bacino, swimming horizontally. The wetsuit’s feet were just slightly webbed and finned, and that too felt good. Headlamp on, powerful beam, nevertheless mostly catching the particulates in the god-awful water of the city, as always. Actually the hundreds of millions of clams in the aquaculture cages all over the intertidal were doing yeoman work in filtering clean the water. Now he could usually see at least two or three meters, and sometimes more. Stay deep enough to not get knocked on the head by some boat’s keel or prop, but high enough not to run into the bacino’s aquaculture pens. The familiar weightlessness of neutral buoyancy, of horizontal underwater life. Lots of fish in the highest cages: salmon, sea trout, catfish, the sinuous schools of shy bodies all turning together against the cage sides.
Swim around the northwest corner of the building, hovering over the old sidewalk like a ghost. Sidewalk, curb, street: always a little stab of the uncanny to see these signs of New York as it used to be. Twenty-fourth Street.
Around the corner, float to the spot on the wall outside room B104. GPS to be sure he was there. He put his face to the wall and inspected the diamond sheen inch by inch, running his gloved fingers over it too. Nothing super obvious . . . ah yes, right outside the inner crack, it seemed: an outer crack. What the fuck?
Vlade had spent ten years in the city’s water division, working on sewage lines, utilidors, subway tunnels, and aquafarms, mostly. So being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown, or indeed more ordinary, as he hardly ever went uptown. The surface overhead surged slightly back and forth like a breathing thing. Opalescent sheen to the east where the sun was rising between buildings. Wakes crisscrossing, slapping against the Met and North, rebounding and breaking against each other, bubbles coming into being and snapping out of existence. A glimpse of the sun now, shattering on the water when he looked east along Twenty-fourth. All normal; but still he found himself creeped out. Something was wrong.
Just to be sure, he swam to the building’s northeast corner and shined his headlamp at the juncture of building and sidewalk, looking five or six meters on both sides. This was always a weird sight, with the goo that sealed the juncture of building and ancient sidewalk looking like congealed gray lava, and the sidewalk itself diamond-sheeted, even to a certain extent the old street surface. This was the weak point for every building still upright in the shallows of lower Manhattan; you could only seal surfaces so far out from the building, and beyond that they were permeable. Indeed one of the projects of city services was to caisson and pump out every drowned street in the city, about two hundred miles of streets all told, and diamond sheet every surface up to above high tide, before letting the water back in. This could only ever be partly successful, as of course there was already water everywhere down there below street level, saturating the old concrete and asphalt and soil, so they would be sealing some of it in while keeping the rest out. It wasn’t clear to Vlade that this would be particularly useful. Closing the barn door after the horses had leaked, as far as Vlade and many other water rats were concerned, but the hydrologists had declared it would help the situation, and so slowly it got done. As if there weren’t more pressing chores on the list. But whatever. Looking at the edge of the sealant and sheeting and the beginning of bare street concrete, now a canal bottom, Vlade could feel in his gut why the hydrologists had wanted to try something. Anything.
Inspection complete, he swam slowly back into the boathouse and clomped dripping up the steps, this time reminding himself of the creature from the black lagoon.
When he was out of the wetsuit, and had sprayed down his face and neck with bleach, and washed that off and dried himself and gotten back in his civvies, he called his old friend Armando from Lame Ass’s submarine services. “Hey Mando, can you pop over and take a look at my building? I got a couple of leaks.” Mando agreed to schedule him in. “Thanks.”
He looked at the photos on his pad, then turned to his screens and called up the building’s leak records. Also, after some hesitation, the building’s security cameras.
Nothing obvious. But then again, after checking his log: there was nothing recorded on the basement cameras, even on days when people had definitely gone into those sub-basement rooms, as recorded in the logs.
Often after a dive he felt queasy, everyone did from time to time; they said it was nitrogen buildup, or anoxia, or the toxic water with all its organics and effluents and microflora and fauna and outright poisons, the whole chemical stew that made up the city’s estuarine flow, my God! It made you sick, that was just the way it was. But today he felt sicker than usual.
4
Stefan and Roberto had not found a chance to recharge the battery that powered their boat, so they walked on skybridges west and got on the Sixth vapo north. Low tide revealed the dark green bathtub ring on every building in this neighborhood. Eleven-foot tides, people said. The incoming flood tide was what the boys wanted to exploit on this day, by stopping at the Street of Fundy, meaning Sixth between Thirty-second and Central Park.
They left the vapo at the dock next to Ernesto’s deli on Thirty-first and borrowed a couple of Ernesto’s skimboards and wetsuits. From there they walked up the west Sixth boardwalk, which ran like a flat awning across building fronts, to the long triangular bacino where Sixth and Broadway met at Thirty-fourth, just north of the low tide line. This was the start of the Street of Fundy, yet another renaming of this section of Sixth, and much better than Avenue of the Americas, a cheesy politician’s name more suitable for Madison Avenue, or Denver. Now this stretch had a very appropriate name, because tides on the Street of Fundy were shocking at both flood and ebb.
The last surges of a good flood tide could carry you in a single shot all the way up to the high tide mark.
This stretch of midtown was the widest part of the intertidal, a mess for the most part, but interesting, a zone of squatters and scammers and street people out to have some fun. People like Stefan and Roberto, who loved to join the skimboarders who congregated when the rising tide, coming up both Broadway and Sixth, combined to surge hard up the slight incline of Sixth, each advance of the white foam hissing north with startling rapidity, especially if pushed by a south wind. If you stood at Fortieth and looked south during the flood tide, you saw the bay’s edge sluice up the green slick in low waves, rolling over the mat of waxy seaweed leaves in rushes of white foam, reflooring the street a long way before the verge of foam stalled and sucked back, then crashed into the next incoming white surge, throwing up a little white wall that quickly collapsed and folded into the next onrush.
All that action meant that if you were riding the surge on a skimboard, as Stefan and Roberto soon were, you could cut around on the mini-breaks, shoot across the street from curb to curb, turn on a dime in the curbslush, or jump the curb and turn in doorways, sometimes even catching the rebound wave coming off buildings and jumping off the curb back into the street.
Stefan and Roberto joined the group with some whoops to announce their presence. The group’s objections were duly noted and rejected, and off they all went, skimming up block after block with the tide’s rise, jockeying for position on the surges, doing spinners if possible, curb turns, stepping off if necessary, even falling from time to time. Which could be painful, as the water was never deep enough to keep you from hitting asphalt, although even four inches could cushion the blow, especially if you trusted the water and pancaked on it.
Then also Sixth was flat enough across the top of the intertidal, especially between Thirty-seventh and Forty-first, that the last surges of a good flood tide could carry you in a single shot all the way up to the high tide mark, where the asphalt, though cracked and worn, returned to being mostly black rather than mostly green. The intertidal always tended to be green. Life! Life liked the intertidal.
It was fantastic to feel the resistance of water getting squished between your board and the street, a sensation that was perfectly tangible underfoot, so much so that you could shift your weight just a tiny bit, using the most exquisite precision, and cause the board to shoot forward over the water, keeping it from touching the street by margins ever so small; a tenth of an inch off the street and you were still frictionless! If you didn’t pearl the world was a whirl! And if you did bottom out you just ran off the board, turned and caught it before it barked your ankles, threw it ahead of you and ran and jumped on it again, nailing the landing just right to press straight down on the board, and off you went again!
It was also very cool, if you stuck around till the start of the ebb, to see the water run back down the street. You couldn’t ride it, that didn’t really work, though diehards always tried; but it was great just to sit there in the street, wasted and glowing in your wetsuit, and watch the water just run away, sucking down the street as if Mother Ocean had breathed in deep or was prepping some gnarly tsunami. Seemed at that moment like the whole world might dry out right before their eyes. But no, just the ordinary tidal suck, it would stabilize again down near Thirty-first, the low tide line, beyond which you had the true lower Manhattan, the submerged zone, their home waters. Their town.
Great fun all around! Afterward they pulled off Ernesto’s ratty old wetsuits and sprayed each other down first with bleach, then with some water drained through a jumbo lifestraw, after which they toweled off shivering and wincing at their cuts, which were almost sure to get a little infected. Then they thanked Ernesto as they returned his stuff, promising to make some deliveries for him later. Lot of verbosity with the other regular skimmers who stashed at Ernesto’s; there weren’t that many of them, because the falls could be just a little too brutal. So it was a tight group, one of the many small subcultures in this most clubbish of cities.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the Mars trilogy, 2312, and Aurora.
New York 2140 (c) 2017 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Reproduced with permission from Hachette Book Group.
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