circulatory system disorder
Wildfires: How they form, and why they're so dangerous.
Everything you need to know about wildfires.
As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.
HOW A WILDFIRE STARTS
Though the exact source of Sonoma County’s wildfires is unclear, authorities have pointed to the fact that 95 percent of fires in the state of California are started by people, according to CNN.
Meteorologists aren’t yet able to forecast wildfire outbreaks, but there are three conditions that must be present in order for a wildfire to burn. Firefighters refer to it as the fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. Four out of five wildfires are started by people, but dry weather, drought, and strong winds can create a recipe for the perfect disaster—which can transform a spark into a weeks- or months-long blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.
Another possible cause of forest fires is lightning. Scientists have found that every degree of global warming sets off a 12 percent bump in lightning activity. Since 1975 the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent.
A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP
Historically, wildfires are actually supposed to be beneficial to certain natural landscapes, clearing underbrush in forests and triggering the release of seeds in some plant species, such as the Jack pine.
Unfortunately, the suppression of naturally occurring, low-intensity forest fires has actually aided in the ability for high-intensity wildfires to run rampant. (Watch a time-lapse of the beauty and danger of wildfires.)
In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from what historian Stephen Pyne calls “pyrophobia,” or the desire to suppress all wildfires (even the good ones). Since the science of forestry first took root in temperate Europe, which is home to a vastly different forest ecosystem than those found in the United States, fire was seen by early U.S. foresters as a problem caused by people.
In some places, the path toward a safer, more ecologically sound relationship with fire is being blazed with prescribed fire, and what’s being called by officials as “managed wildfire.” Fire crews put their efforts to suppress wildfires around the most fire-prone areas, such as communities, municipal watersheds, and sequoia groves. Otherwise they are learning to let some fires burn themselves out, as nature intended.
WILDFIRES CAN HAVE LONG-LASTING IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PLANET
Forest fires actually have the ability to heat up the entire planet, a NASA study from 2016 revealed. In ecosystems such as boreal forests, which store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, the effects of climate change are playing out twice as fast.
Fires ravaged the boreal forests of Canada’s vast north woods in May 2016 and continued for months, consuming millions of acres of trees, and scorching the rich organic soil on the forest floor, which serves as a large reservoir for carbon. For every degree that our planet warms, the forest needs a 15 percent increase in precipitation to compensate for increased dryness. (See how megafires are remaking American forests.)
Similar to the case in Northern California, investigators believe that Canada’s boreal forest fire was caused by humans.
Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 to highlight the dangers of climate change, calling up images of the hundreds of wildfires that burned across the state just that summer. At the time, 2014 had been the warmest year on record, a milestone that has now been surpassed by 2016.
THE EFFECTS OF FIRE ON PEOPLE
Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.
Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart. (Learn wildfire safety tips.)
Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.
HOW FIRE IMPACTS WILDLIFE
Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.
Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.
For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.
A year-old forest will have a different set of flora and fauna inhabiting it than a forest that is 40 years old, and according to wildlife biologist Patricia Kennedy, “a lot of species require that reset,” which comes from a fire.
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Warming oceans may make ‘Nemo’ harder to find.
Heat bleaches sea anemones, too, causing the iconic clownfish to stop laying eggs. Here’s how.
Like coral reefs, sea anemones—with their flashy, tentacle-like polyps that waggle and wave in vibrant reds, greens, pinks, and yellows—provide homes and hiding spots for dozens of fish species, most memorably the orange clownfish made famous in Finding Nemo. Also like coral, rising water temperatures associated with climate change can severely weaken these anemones, causing them to expel the tiny symbionts that keep them alive and lend them color, a process known as bleaching.
That, it turns out, is just where trouble starts.
When anemones bleach, Nemo and pals get stressed out and simply stop laying eggs, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. And scientists suspect that pattern may hold for untold numbers of other fish nurtured by either corals or anemones.
In other words, the mere stress associated with bleaching may be enough by itself to drive down many fish populations.
And, of course, bleaching no longer happens by itself.
Scientists also working with baby clownfish already have shown that shifts in ocean chemistry as the seas absorb excess carbon-dioxide—a process known as ocean acidification—can be unusually deadly. It scrambles juvenile fishes' brains, hampering their ability to see, hear, and smell. All that causes confusion, often leading them to swim toward—rather than away from—predators. The end result: they die far more often.
While few if any longterm studies have yet looked at just how bleaching and acidification may work in concert, scientists say they certainly aren't likely to somehow cancel each other out.
"Both bleaching and acidification are really stressful events separately," says Danielle Dixson, with the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, who spent years researching clownfish and acidification, but wasn't part of the new bleaching study. "I can't imagine that when they both happen it's going to somehow be any less stressful." (Learn how breeding aquarium fish can help reefs.)
THE CRITICAL ROLE OF HORMONES
The most recent research began when an ocean heat wave washed across French Polynesia in 2015 and 2016. A team of scientists tracked 30 different species of anemones in a lagoon off the island of Moorea. That warmth didn't just cripple corals. For more than four months, it attacked and bleached roughly half of those sea anemones. So scientists sampled the fish living among these overheated anemones and compared them with fish living in healthy ones nearby.
The release of hormones is known to affect how everything from sea birds to marine iguanas weather the rapid upheaval associated with climate change. That's true for fish, too.
The team found that the creatures associated with bleached anemones were chronically stressed, showing high levels of cortisol in their blood, says study co-author Suzanne Mills, with the Center for Insular Research and Observatory of the Environment in French Polynesia. Reproductive hormones dropped in both males and females. Fish pairs from bleached anemones spawned less and ultimately produced far fewer viable young.
That could have longterm implications that could ripple through entire marine systems.
"The cascading effects of bleaching at the community and ecosystem levels will, and may have already, played an important role in population impacts," Mills says.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Mills and her co-authors figured out that of 464 coastal fish species in French Polynesia, 56—about 12 percent—depend on species susceptible to bleaching for food or shelter from predators.
"If these species suffer even a fraction of the impact found for anemone fish, then a short-lived bleaching event could decrease the reproductive output of at least 12 percent of species," the study authors wrote. Ecosystem-wide impacts "may be considerable."
Dixson says Mills' findings are "really, really solid." And while they may not be terribly surprising to marine scientists, it should be an eye-opener for the public.
And, of course, that's only one part of the equation.
"Unfortunately, we're never going to have a world where the oceans are acidifying but not warming," Dixson says. "And all of the data suggests that won't be good."
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'Shocking' spike in Hunter Valley's coal-linked air pollution fails to prompt action.
Air pollution from the Hunter Valley coal mines gets so bad for Wendy Wales on occasion that she has called neighbours warning them of a bushfire, mistaking the dust for smoke.
'Shocking' spike in Hunter Valley's coal-linked air pollution fails to prompt action
Peter Hannam
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Air pollution from the Hunter Valley coal mines gets so bad for Wendy Wales on occasion that she has called neighbours warning them of a bushfire, mistaking the dust for smoke.
Wednesday was another day of heavy haze in her region as the high school science teacher drove into the upper Hunter town of Muswellbrook where she lectures.
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The Wambo open cut mine in the Hunter Valley. Photo: Anita Jones
"It looked like the whole place had been blown up like a bomb," Ms Wales said. "It was really shocking."
Pollution monitors in the area earlier picked up readings of 103.4 PM10 – particulates of 10 micrometres or less in diameter – at midnight at Warkworth near some large open-cut coal mines.
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The Hunter Valley has many open cut coal mines that residents say should be more tightly regulated. Photo: Dean Osland
Residents received an air quality alert from the NSW Environment Protection Authority at 5am, warning PM10 levels had exceeded the national air quality standard of 50 PM10 per cubic metre averaged over 24 hours.
According to James Whelan, spokesman for Environmental Justice Australia, the EPA has issued about 190 such alerts in the Hunter this year. Last month's tally of 72 of the most he had seen in the five years he had been tracking the pollution readings.
"September was extraordinary," Mr Whelan said, adding the jump does not appear to have prompted any steps by the EPA to curtail mine production or seek other remedial step. "It wouldn't make any difference if there were no alerts, or there were 100 a month."
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Health impacts
PM10 particulates affects health at any level, with the material absorbed into the blood or lungs. Coal mining is responsible for about 90 per cent.
Coal and Allied's Mount Thorley-Warkworth mine reported emitting 9.2 million kilograms of PM10 in their most recent National Pollution Inventory report, up 12 per cent on the previous year, while nearby Bulga mine emitted more than 5 million kilograms of PM10, up 32 per cent, Lock The Gate said.
Stockton in the Lower Hunter had the worst pollution with its daily average PM10 concentrations exceeding the national standard 36 times so far this year.
Camberwell, Mt Thorley, Singleton NW and Maison Dieu recorded the most exceedances in the Upper Hunter, accounting for 65 of the region's 80 breaches.
Cumulative effects
Fairfax Media asked the EPA whether the September alerts were a monthly record and what steps it had taken to press mines to alter operations.
"The EPA has also required all coal mines to implement best management practice measures to minimise dust emissions via the Dust Stop program," a spokeswoman said.
Mr Whelan said the government's own 2011 commissioned report into best practice stated emissions from material dumping could be minimised by ceasing or modifying activities on dry windy days – weather most of NSW including the Hunter has frequently endured in recent months. Water sprays were another option.
If miners and the EPA had been taking steps, "they were not enough to bring pollution levels down below the [national] standard", he said.
The EJA and Lock the Gate say it is time EPA and NSW's Department of Planning acted on long-overdue recommendations – accepted five years ago – to address and prevent cumulative impacts of open-cut coal mining on air quality.
They say the agencies should tackle the effects of adding more mines when they assess the United Wambo super pit coal and the expansion of the Hunter Valley Operations near Singleton.
"Why is the government still considering more open-cut pits in the worst affected area when they still haven't set basic thresholds to protect people from cumulative health damage?" Georgina Woods, Lock the Gate spokeswoman, said. "There has to be a limit, and we've reached it."
The Department of Planning is currently assessing United Wambo's development application and has commissioned an independent review of its Air Quality Impact Assessment that will include the cumulative mining impacts in the area, a spokesman said.
'Megamine'
Jeremy Buckingham, NSW Greens resources spokesman said the government was failing to account for mining's cumulative impacts from particulate pollution to greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction or water.
"The scale of modern open-cut mining turns the surrounding landscape into an industrial area, which is incompatible with sustainable agriculture and healthy communities," he said.
For Ms Wales, efforts to curb develop further down the valley are likely to bring little benefit to her area near Aberdeen where the nearby Mount Pleasant mine is rapidly expanding.
"It's just opening up – it's going gangbusters," she said. "It's a megamine."
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Should we be having fewer children for the sake of the planet?
Supporters’ contributions to our podcast on population and climate change show exactly why we need to talk about this issue.
Supporters’ contributions to our podcast on population and climate change show exactly why we need to talk about this issue
Listen to the podcast here
Many readers ask why childless lifestyles are not more actively promoted by politicians and celebrated in societies.
Many readers ask why childless lifestyles are not more actively promoted by politicians and celebrated in societies. Photograph: Sergei Fadeichev/TASS
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Vicky Frost and Guardian supporters
@vickyfrost
Saturday 7 October 2017 07.41 EDT Last modified on Saturday 7 October 2017 08.08 EDT
Last month, on these pages, I asked if you might get in touch with your questions and thoughts on population and climate change. You did – in some numbers. These generous contributions form the heart of the latest edition of We Need to Talk About …, our podcast featuring supporters’ voices, in which your concerns are addressed by a panel of Guardian journalists and experts.
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As a starting point, we used a Guardian article with an arresting headline: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children. In the podcast, we hear from one of the academics who produced the research which this article refers to, but equally interesting were your responses to this issue, and the discussions they prompted in our studio.
That’s why we’ve decided to publish some of them here. While we aim to hear from lots of voices and include differing points of view on the podcast, a lack of time means we sometimes have to cut people short, or use one person to represent the views of several who have contacted us making similar points. Here, we can give members a bit more space to air their views.
You can listen to the panel respond to them – our line-up is Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor; Lucy Lamble, the Guardian’s executive editor for global development, who often writes on and takes part in debates on global inequality; John Vidal, the multi-award winning former Guardian environment editor and Afua Hirsch, a writer and broadcaster for the Guardian and SkyNews among others, who has also worked in international development and the law.
But first gain a flavour of the concerns of your fellow readers below. Many of these questions appear in the podcast, while others influenced the direction in which we headed.
Poor allocation of resources is the problem – Kevin, Canada
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The issue isn’t overpopulation – it’s poor resource allocation. We do not live in a world of lack, but of extreme waste and inefficiency. This is true of food, energy, land use and the financial system. The overpopulation argument is a way to once again deflect from real societal change that is needed, and instead focuses the discussion on families, usually poor families, having too many children.
While it is likely that the Earth does have some sort of maximum carrying capacity, even that is not guaranteed with recent technological advancements such as vertical farming. The question is whether those technological advancements will be put to use to raise the standard of living for every human being on the planet, or are put towards continuing to line the pockets of the wealthiest individuals and their investors.
We consume without asking where these things come from – Cristina, Brazil
To my mind, it is not the countries in Africa, or groups with a more traditional and much simpler way of life – such as Native people in North and South America, for instance – that have caused so many environmental problems, but the irrationality and consumerism of our western society. It is the fact that we consume without truly asking ourselves where all these goods come from, how they were produced, what the environmental impact is of producting all these mostly useless things. Unless we seriously address these questions, I cannot see any significant change or serious solution to climate change.
A convenient way to blame others – Marc, France
I‘ve often noticed that some westerners, who have no agenda at all on any environmental question, are keen to invoke “overpopulation” as the main and only threat to survival on Earth. Is overpopulation just a convenient way for westerners to put the blame on Africans for the environmental threats we face?
Entitlement to reproduce - Clare, UK
How can those with the largest carbon footprint be encouraged not to reproduce, when they are ones who make the greatest impact and have the greatest sense of entitlement?
Access to contraception faces a barrier: the church – Angela, UK
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Pope Francis recently condemned climate change sceptics. He is passionate about protecting the planet and has called on everyone to care for creation, particularly as climate change disproportionately impacts the poor.
The Catholic church runs 25% of health and education systems worldwide and therefore, through its direct teaching and management, significantly reduces safe access to contraception for millions of women. No debate on controlling population growth and subsequent pollution can therefore exist without tackling this institutional barrier to action. Last year over 170 theologians issued a statement saying there was no reason for the Catholic church’s position against “artificial” contraception.
How does the panel feel the church can continue to do great work on this issue, yet continue to block safe access to contraception for some of the world’s poorest women?
Women are being denied choice about pregnancy – Sally, Hong Kong
I am a gynaecologist working in Hong Kong, occasionally counselling women considering having another child. If someone is ambivalent about doing so, I add into the decision-making the idea that having more children impacts climate change.
Since I was a teenager in the 1970s, I have believed it is a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. Working as a volunteer in an African country where abortion is illegal, I have seen women saved from death after trying to procure an abortion themselves. They were lucky – the hospital was nearby, there were good doctors, antibiotics, surgery, and blood transfusion.
2017: the year we lost control of world population surge?
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In African countries where abortion is often illegal, an unmet need for contraception is also common. I applied for a volunteer job in northern Uganda where women having five to six children is the norm; when asked, they say they would have preferred three or four .
Donald Trump’s global gag rule which removes US aid from any NGO providing contraceptive advice, is a huge problem. Not only because maternal mortality due to abortion deaths will rise in Africa, but also because the UNFPA [UN population fund] will stop training midwives, and the resulting reduction in maternal mortality will diminish. In addition, there will be greater unmet need for contraception.
With good information couples will do the right thing – Dave, US
Do you think our society can reach the point where choosing to have fewer children as an essential carbon-cutting strategy is as widely understood as conserving energy?
As a parent I would take a bullet for either of my two children. I’m certain almost all parents would do just about anything to ensure their kids have a decent life. Knowing this, I cannot help but feel that if young couples around the world have good information they will do the right thing. If they understand the ramifications of their family-size decisions on the quality of life – chance of survival even – of their children, then they will make the most loving, compassionate decision possible: to conceive no more than one child.
We are failing to get the family-size issue across – Alison, UK
I joined Population Matters, an organisation that promotes smaller family size and reduced consumption, to find like-minded people and put my energies into a worthwhile organisation. I appreciate the impact we are having on the environment, and am mindful of that. However, I have found people around me such as family, friends and colleagues are largely not interested, or suggest they should have the freedom to do as they please.
How do we start making a difference? Also we seem to have failed with high-profile individuals, royals and celebrities in particular. So what happens now?
What will persuade people? Money? – Gwyneth, UK
We have to reduce the population, hopefully not by severe climate change, war or disease. China’s one-child solution would not be accepted by most people. What do experts suggest? It seems money has the only power over most people. Should we pay people not to have children?
Politicians don’t talk about this – Mike, UK
How do we get politicians to talk seriously about the links between population and climate change? The last three elections in the UK have barely mentioned the environment. Is there an agreement between the political parties to avoid this discussion?
Childless lifestyles need promoting – Michelle, UK
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I like children, but have never felt that I would like to have my own.
I am very regularly treated as odd for this decision, and feel that if we don’t open up the discussion about not having children, people will never consider this decision thoroughly, whether for the environment or other reasons.
In the past three years, I have made a number of lifestyle changes in order to reduce my carbon footprint – which has only further cemented my feeling that I don’t want children. I often feel like I need to keep having what can be sometimes difficult conversations with people about this choice, so as to build conversation momentum around the subject. Alternative lifestyles need to be promoted. I would like to focus on supporting and improving the lives of people already on the planet.
Can we ditch our pro-reproduction stance? – Tet-Wo, New Zealand
I have made the decision to be childfree, largely due to environmental reasons. As a childfree person, I am constantly surprised how this decision is commonly questioned by others as being a poor or “selfish” choice when the evidence suggests that it is anything but.
Given the evidence that having fewer children isthe greatest decision one can make to combat climate change, do the panel think that society can switch from having a pro-reproduction stance, where policies promote reproduction and society views having children as the “correct” choice, to a neutral stance, where having children is considered optional and policies are made to promote other means of having a fulfilled life?
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Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment leveled at noted scientist.
Years ago, two women allege, their team leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica. Now they are taking action.
A COLD CASE Years ago, two women allege, their team
leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica.
Now they are taking action
In 1999 at Pivot Peak in Antarctica, Jane Willenbring (right) was the only woman on a four-person team including David Marchant (center) and his brother (left).
ADAM LEWIS
Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at noted scientist
By Meredith WadmanOct. 6, 2017 , 12:45 PM
Editor’s note: This article includes crude language and disturbing details.
Boston University (BU) is investigating sexual harassment complaints made against a prominent Antarctic geologist by two of his former graduate students. The women allege that David Marchant, then an assistant professor, harassed them during different research expeditions starting 2 decades ago, while they were isolated in small groups in the Antarctic. In supporting documents and interviews, several other women report similar treatment from Marchant in that period.
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.
The second complainant, Deborah Doe (a pseudonym), who was in Antarctica for two austral summers during this era, reports that Marchant called her a “c--t” and a “bitch” repeatedly. She alleges that he promised to block her access to research funding should she earn a Ph.D. She abandoned her career dreams and left academe.
A third woman, Hillary Tulley, a Skokie, Illinois, high school teacher, describes her experience in a supporting letter filed with BU investigators. “His taunts, degrading comments about my body, brain, and general inadequacies never ended,” she writes. She claims Marchant tried to exhaust her into leaving Antarctica. “Every day was terrifying,” she says in an interview with Science.
Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.
“This is one of the only real regrets I have in my whole life,” says Adam Lewis, who as a graduate student was in Antarctica with Willenbring and Tulley. “I had the chance to stand up for people. And I didn’t.”
David Marchant has led dozens of field expeditions to Antarctica’s Dry Valleys.
COURTESY NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Science is unaware of any additional formal complaints from more recent students. Marchant supervised two women who earned Ph.D.s in 2009 and 2016. Both women, contacted repeatedly by Science, declined to comment on their experiences with him.
Marchant, 55, now a department chair at BU, declined by email to be interviewed or to provide his written rebuttal to Willenbring’s complaint. Other documents related to the investigation suggest that he denies the allegations. He was scheduled to be honored as a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) at the society’s meeting in Seattle, Washington, this month, but last week his name was removed from the GSA website listing of new fellows.
Some other women who have worked with Marchant at BU and in the field stoutly defend his character. Emily Jacesko, who as a 21-year-old undergraduate worked with Marchant and others in Antarctica in 2002, says she never witnessed or experienced sexual harassment from him. “I … sincere[ly] support … him as an upstanding and professional individual,” says Jacesko, a senior staff geologist at a consulting firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. She has filed a letter of support for Marchant with BU.
The allegations come at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in science. Scientists are also becoming more attuned to the potential dangers women face in isolated field camps, where they may depend on senior men for food, water, and shelter. In one online survey published in PLOS ONE and covered by Science in 2014, 71% of 512 female respondents reported being sexually harassed during fieldwork; 84% of them were trainees.
He said, ‘I noticed someone hasn’t cried today.’
Jane Willenbring, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The allegations against Marchant raise the question of whether women can successfully press complaints many years after allegedly abusive incidents. “I have seen claims up to 4 years after the last incident had happened. But I haven’t seen anything with quite that amount of time,” says Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an attorney with Hopkins Way in Phoenix who specializes in gender discrimination.
Tracy-Ramirez, who read Willenbring’s complaint at Science’s request, says the case likely “will be a fairly important part of a larger conversation schools are having about ‘What are we required to do?’ and ‘What is the right thing to do?’”
Two portraits of a man
Those who know Marchant describe him as often charming and charismatic, a very good scientist, and an excellent teacher. He made his name documenting landscape evolution in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, and he is known as an experienced field geologist, making more than 30 research trips to the frigid continent.
Jennifer Berglund, 33, a science communicator based in Somerville, Massachusetts, who was a field assistant for Marchant in 2012, recalls her first, windy night in Antarctica, when she and her tentmate had set up their tent with only small rocks holding down the guy lines. “In the middle of the night, we heard some rustling around outside of the tent. It was Dave lugging and placing giant boulders atop our small, scrawny ones, and tightening the guy lines.”
Marchant also made his mark on the BU campus, winning two teaching awards including, in 2004, one of the university’s highest teaching prizes. In 2014 he was named a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); his $1 million, 5-year award is part of a program to improve science teaching. Marchant was “an excellent professor,” says Rachel Watsky, now a law student at BU. She took a class with Marchant, who was also her undergraduate academic adviser, and she worked for him as a lab assistant on campus in 2011–12. She told Science he was a “great boss … eager for my input.”
Jane Willenbring (in Antarctica in 2008) switched her Ph.D. thesis research to the Arctic after working with Marchant.
ADAM LEWIS
The allegations against Marchant in the complaints and supporting documents paint a different picture, and read like a riveting survival novel unfurling in unforgiving, isolated terrain. In her complaint, Willenbring, now 40, describes her first Antarctic field season as a master’s student starting in December 1999, when she was 22.
Marchant, Willenbring, Lewis (then a graduate student at the University of Maine, Orono), and Marchant’s brother Jeffrey, who was working as an assistant, lived and worked in the arid, boulder-strewn Beacon Valley and in the shadow of 2470-meter Pivot Peak. They slept in unheated tents in temperatures as low as –40°C, walked long distances in rugged terrain, and dug deep holes to find ancient ice and volcanic ash. Dropped by helicopter with supplies, for weeks the four had only radio contact with the main base at McMurdo Station.
Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.
One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.
“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.
As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.
In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.
Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.
Lewis had also been in Antarctica with Marchant the previous season, when Tulley was there with a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic. Tulley writes in a letter supporting Willenbring’s complaint that she had not yet cleared the rotors of the helicopter that dropped them at their field site when “I was aggressively grabbed by Marchant and wheeled around, while he yelled and called me a ‘dumbass, lazy c--t … who did not know that we had to set up camp immediately.”
She alleges in her letter that Marchant failed to teach her or include her, the only woman present, in the research. “Talk during [group] meals … always included relentless, snickering mentions of my advanced age (I was 43), my small breasts, and other failings, always initiated by Marchant. All my attempts to steer the conversation to science were shut down.”
The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.
Jacquelyn Hams, Los Angeles Valley College
Lewis’s letter supports much of Tulley’s account. He writes that Marchant repeatedly said to the other men that an older woman in the field “will slow us down.” He adds in his letter: “On multiple occasions while walking without Tulley, Marchant made grotesque sexual comments about her body.” At other times, Lewis writes, Marchant “clearly stated that he did not believe women should be field geologists.”
Andrew Lorrey, then a student at the University of Maine, Orono, was also in the field that season and was interviewed by BU investigators last year. Contacted by Science, Lorrey says he also remembers Marchant’s mealtime disparagement of Tulley and her body. Marchant’s relationship with Tulley was “not positive,” says Lorrey, now a climate scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Auckland, New Zealand. However, he says: “I did not necessarily attribute [this] to her being a woman as much as … an outsider.”
Doe, a third woman, alleges that she was harassed by Marchant in field seasons in the late 1990s, in a supporting letter for Willenbring that she later converted into a formal complaint on her own behalf. (She authenticated this letter in an email to Science, and requested anonymity.)
When she was a student at BU, she writes, Marchant told her “less than two weeks into my graduate career, that I was lazy, less than intelligent, and incapable of meeting even the basest expectations.” She adds in the letter that, “My every action or social interaction was scrutinized and remarked upon, usually with a belittling comment, followed by … that blinding smile that he deployed to make it seem as if he hadn’t just cut you to the core. … I began to believe the things he told me.”
Once in Antarctica, the abuse escalated, Doe writes. “He repeatedly called me a ‘c--t,’ among many other insults … (bitch being the most common) that were invoked on a daily basis or more. … He would crow that he could say absolutely anything he wanted to because we were ‘in his domain.’”
Marchant told her that if she completed her Ph.D., he and another scientist would ensure she never got NSF funding, Doe alleges. (NSF is the major source of funding for Antarctic field research.)
“I distinctly remember standing there, aghast, in my red down jacket and black wind pants, watching my career and life plans dissolve as Dr. Marchant smiled triumphantly at me,” she writes.
Four women who all worked in the Antarctic with Marchant at different times report him saying close variations of the same words: “I’m going to break you down and build you up in my image.”
Keeping quiet
Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”
Simpson, who has since retired, wrote in an email that she could not comment on the ongoing investigation. She wrote that she would have “dealt quickly and decisively” with allegations “approaching the seriousness indicated” in Doe’s letter.
Doe writes that “it took years, literally, to overcome the damage to my self-worth. I slowly … rebuilt a career grounded in scientific inquiry” outside academe. She writes in her complaint: “For [many] years I have carried the weight of knowing” that she stayed quiet “rather than speaking up and saving those who would follow me from the torment and anguish I had experienced.”
Tulley writes that she contacted one of the directors of NSF’s polar program for teachers upon her return, and was promised “a private, confidential meeting with an administrator.” The meeting did not materialize, and she did not pursue her complaint, she tells Science, because Marchant’s alleged treatment had “knocked me for a loop psychologically.…I wimped out.” When she spoke to other teachers on NSF’s behalf, she relayed only the positive aspects of her experience.
Back at BU, Willenbring, too, did not speak up. She writes in her complaint that, “I believe that I would not be where I am today if I had said something” at the time.
In 2002, as Willenbring finished her master’s degree with Marchant, another professor asked her to write a letter of evaluation for Marchant’s tenure and promotion file. She alleges that Marchant threatened to ruin her career if she did not write a positive letter. She wrote one. “I kept it to the science because he is a very good scientist,” she tells Science.
To avoid Marchant, Willenbring switched her Ph.D. research to the Arctic and moved to another university. She promised herself that when she got tenure, she would speak out.
Speaking out
In July 2016, Scripps hired Willenbring as a tenured associate professor. She filed a Title IX complaint with BU in October 2016. Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex at universities that receive federal funding. Institutions can lose federal funds if they do not comply with the law. (Willenbring also filed complaints with NSF and NASA, which fund Marchant’s research, in December 2016. However, Title IX complaints against individuals are typically handled first by the institutions where the alleged harassment occurred.) Schools are unlikely to dismiss a years-old complaint out of hand, says Tracy-Ramirez, the Title IX lawyer, “but rather to ask ‘Did a hostile environment occur at that time?’ and ‘Is there reason to suspect there is a hostile environment happening now?’”
BU’s Equal Opportunity Office has interviewed numerous people, elicited a 200-page rebuttal from Marchant, and received at least four letters in his support plus at least five letters supporting Willenbring. It has also begun investigating Doe’s complaint, which was filed 7 months later, in May. BU told Willenbring last month that it expects to finish its report soon. The university declined to discuss the investigation with Science, citing privacy concerns.
Willenbring had also sent her complaint to GSA in December, because Marchant edits a GSA publication. The society declined to comment, or to say why Marchant’s name was removed as a GSA fellow.
Marchant, contacted repeatedly by Science, wrote in an email: “Boston University’s investigation into these allegations is ongoing. I have cooperated fully in that investigation. I do not wish to compromise the integrity of that investigation by making any comments before the investigation has been completed.”
Marchant’s defenders tell Science they do not recognize the man described in the complaints. “I find the allegations against Dave of physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment beyond comprehension given my field experiences with him in Antarctica as a female” in 2008 and 2012, Jacquelyn Hams, chairperson of the earth science department at Los Angeles Valley College in California, wrote in an email. “The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.”
Others praised his character. Marchant is “a person completely absent the stain of misogyny or unchecked anger,” wrote Berglund, who in addition to working with Marchant in Antarctica, administers the HHMI-supported BU science education program that he leads. Shivani Ehrenfeucht, 26, a second-year Ph.D. student in Marchant’s lab who has not been to Antarctica, says she was “completely shocked” by the allegations. “Nothing that I have heard lines up with the man that I know.” She calls Marchant “kind and genuine.”
Some scientists note that extreme isolation and the absence of institutional support at remote camps create conditions where abuse can flourish. “On campus, I can go speak to a trusted faculty member, the department chair, the ombudsperson,” says Meredith Hastings, an atmospheric chemist at Brown University and co-principal investigator on a $1.1 million NSF grant aimed at curbing sexual harassment in the geosciences. “Who do you go talk to when you are in the field?”
Lewis, who earned his Ph.D. with Marchant, noted in his letter: “In the office and classroom setting, Marchant’s behavior toward women was much less outrageous … he was careful and measured in his tone when others were present.” He adds that he never again saw from Marchant “the extreme behavior” of those early seasons, and says Marchant’s “attitude shifted to simply being distrustful” of women.
What is an institution’s responsibility when confronted with decades-old sexual harassment complaints? “The evidence is that the people who perpetrate this kind of behavior, it’s a pattern,” Hastings says.
Billie Dziech, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and an expert on sexual harassment on college campuses, argues that even if an abuser has changed over time, they are not absolved of responsibility for acts committed decades ago. “I have a moral responsibility to the young people I teach,” she says. “I don’t care if I did damage 10, 20 years ago: What I do today and what I did yesterday matters.”
In concluding her complaint against Marchant, Willenbring writes that her goal is to prevent “another young, female student bearing the brunt of his misogyny.” She added, in an interview with Science: “I just don’t want it to happen again.”
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It is time to transform, not just rebuild, in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico's new infrastructure, particularly in a context of growing environmental threats related to climate change, cannot be built on a foundation of austerity.
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
By Marisol LeBrón and Hilda Lloréns, Truthout | Op-Ed
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A car drives under tilted power line poles in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Humacao, Puerto Rico on October 2, 2017. (Photo: Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images)
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In a series of tweets on September 30, 2017, President Donald Trump countered challenges to his administration's response to the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico by claiming that Puerto Ricans "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort." The tweets sounded a racial dog whistle meant to communicate to the president's base that Puerto Ricans are lazy and exist in a parasitic relationship with the United States -- always taking, always expecting more. Many commentators took Trump to task for his racially coded language and colonial paternalism. Images circulated throughout social media of Puerto Rican men and women, and even children, working together to clear roads in their communities to enable travel to access urgent necessities.
Puerto Rico's new infrastructure, particularly in a context of growing environmental threats related to climate change, cannot be built on a foundation of austerity.
It is not enough, however, to recognize local efforts toward recovery. It is crucial, in addition, to support concrete steps to radically transform Puerto Rico's infrastructure, which can pave the way for a more just and sustainable society. Puerto Rico's new infrastructure, particularly in a context of growing environmental threats related to climate change, cannot be built on a foundation of austerity. Puerto Rico needs meaningful debt relief and investment in order to recover and ultimately, transform. Moreover, the local and federal governments need to listen to and follow the lead of community activists and local residents as opposed to trying to impose a one-size fits all recovery model on Puerto Rico.
Toward Energy Sovereignty
In Puerto Rico, "community efforts" -- to use Trump's own language -- to improve the quality of life for local communities have long preceded the current official top-down conversations about how to rebuild the hurricane-ravaged territory. For example, in the Bay of Jobos region, in southeastern Puerto Rico, a number of communities have been hard at work resisting environmental degradation and creating plans for sustainable environmental transformation for more than three decades. These are largely low-income communities that are disproportionately exposed to the toxic pollutants generated by two power plants that bookend Jobos Bay: the Aguirre Power Plant Complex and the AES coal power plant.
A fire that erupted at the Aguirre Power Plant Complex on September 21, 2016, plunged Puerto Rico into a three-day blackout, which foreshadowed the current power crisis and exposed the vulnerability of the power grid. The AES coal plant has been in the news lately as a result of the ongoing protests against the irresponsible disposal of toxic coal ash in the towns of Peñuelas and Humacao. Protesters are demanding that the AES plant be shut down because generating energy using coal inevitably leads to the production of toxic coal ash that is harmful to communities and the environment.
Despite its fertile terrain, Puerto Rico imports approximately 85 percent of its food. Hurricane Maria has revealed the intense vulnerability of Puerto Rico's food supply chain.
Almost all of the electricity generated in Puerto Rico comes from fossil fuels and is imported at a high cost to residents. Puerto Ricans pay some of the highest energy costs within US jurisdiction. Presently, activists working with community-based environmental watchdog organizations, such as climate advocate and attorney Ruth Santiago of Comité Diálogo Ambiental and Alexis Massol Gonzalez of Casa Pueblo, argue that recovery efforts must entail a complete transformation of the grid itself. Building a resilient electric power grid will require ending the island's dependence on fossil fuels, opting instead for solar power, wind power and other clean energy resources. Additionally, the power grid must be decentralized from the current model, which is based on large fossil-fuel dependent power plants with long-distance transmission. The island should instead seek to develop a system of micro-grids, solar communities and other sustainable alternatives that allow residents to manage energy demand at a community level. Environmental justice communities, which have suffered the worst effects of the current model, want to play a central role in the management and production of photovoltaic and wind energy. These are not people "who want everything to be done for them," these are people asking for the resources and commitments necessary to build a better Puerto Rico for themselves and future generations.
Toward Food Sovereignty
Despite its fertile terrain, Puerto Rico imports approximately 85 percent of the food consumed in the territory. Even staples of Puerto Rico's traditional culinary culture -- plantains, rice, beans and root vegetables -- tend to be imported. Because of the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from transporting goods to Puerto Rico, residents are forced to absorb high shipping costs in the form of more expensive food that takes longer to get to them. This has resulted in increased rates of hunger and food insecurity as people are unable to keep up with the rising prices of food in the face of staggering rates of unemployment and poverty.
Hurricane Maria destroyed an estimated 80 percent of Puerto Rico's cash crops and caused significant damage to livestock industries.
Hurricane Maria has revealed the intense vulnerability of Puerto Rico's food supply chain. With transportation limited as a result of the storm, many areas, particularly those far outside of San Juan, are still lacking access to food and clean water. In the face of governmental delay, activists have stepped up to provide food for their communities. For instance, the Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico, a community-managed food distribution initiative launched in 2013 to counter the effects of the economic crisis, has been working to provide breakfast and lunch seven days a week to residents of Caguas in the aftermath of the storm. As concerns grow about how funds and materials will be distributed, the federal and local governments need to support and amplify the existing network of community pantries and solidarity kitchens to make sure that all Puerto Ricans have access to healthy and nutritious food.
Hurricane Maria destroyed an estimated 80 percent of Puerto Rico's cash crops and caused significant damage to livestock industries. This news is devastating as Puerto Rico's emergent agricultural sector was a source of growth in an otherwise anemic economy. Over the past few years, more people had begun working in various agricultural industries, from larger dairy farms and sugar cane plantations to smaller organic farms focused on growing fresh produce for high-end restaurants. Community huertos, or gardens, had also experienced a boom in recent years in response to the financial crisis and ever-rising prices at local supermarkets.
As with Puerto Rico's electrical grid, the destruction of much of Puerto Rico's agricultural sector, devastating as it is, provides an opportunity to make practices more sustainable. The government should work with small and large-scale farmers to modernize their infrastructure to reduce water waste and decrease dependence on fossil fuels. Transformations to the agricultural sector will also help reduce dependence on imported food, making Puerto Rico less susceptible to international price fluctuations and disruptions in the supply chain.
***
As Puerto Rico faces the difficult task of rebuilding from a catastrophic natural disaster in the midst of an economic crisis, the federal and local governments must not respond with austerity measures. Instead, they must aid recovery by investing in Puerto Rico's existing physical and human resources. Community efforts to build sustainable and socially just institutions and infrastructure should be prioritized to help Puerto Rico prepare for the storms ahead.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
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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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