cognitive neurological behavioral
NASA
Photos: Smoke from Wine Country fires traveled as far as Mexico.
It can be challenging to put the devastation of the Wine Country fires into perspective, but when viewed from such great heights, one's cognitive distance quickly shrinks.
Wind carried smoke from the Wine Country fires as far as Mexico, over 550 miles south of the North Bay.
NASA's MODIS satellite passed over California on Friday, and the images it captured show a thick line of smoke projected from Santa Rosa out into the Pacific Ocean, parallel to the northern edge of Mexico. The hazy trail measures over 550 feet long.
It can be challenging to put the devastation of the Wine Country fires into perspective, but when viewed from such great heights, one's cognitive distance quickly shrinks.
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'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms.
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
The Agenda
AGENDA 2020
'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
By CHRISTINE VESTAL 10/12/2017 05:10 AM EDT
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NEW ORLEANS — Brandi Wagner thought she had survived Hurricane Katrina. She hung tough while the storm’s 170-mph winds pummeled her home, and powered through two months of sleeping in a sweltering camper outside the city with her boyfriend’s mother. It was later, after the storm waters had receded and Wagner went back to New Orleans to rebuild her home and her life that she fell apart.
“I didn’t think it was the storm at first. I didn’t really know what was happening to me,” Wagner, now 48, recalls. “We could see the waterline on houses, and rooftop signs with ‘please help us,’ and that big X where dead bodies were found. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. I was crying all the time, just really losing it.”
Twelve years later, Wagner is disabled and unable to work because of the depression and anxiety she developed in the wake of the 2005 storm. She’s also in treatment for an opioid addiction that developed after she started popping prescription painkillers and drinking heavily to blunt the day-to-day reality of recovering from Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died in Katrina from drowning and other immediate injuries. But public health officials say that, in the aftermath of an extreme weather event like a hurricane, the toll of long-term psychological injuries builds in the months and years that follow, outpacing more immediate injuries and swamping the health care system long after emergency workers go home and shelters shut down.
That’s the rough reality that will soon confront regions affected by this year’s string of destructive hurricanes. As flood waters recede from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, and survivors work to rebuild communities in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, mental health experts warn that the hidden psychological toll will mount over time, expressed in heightened rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce, murder and suicide.
Brandi Wagner's home in Lafitte, La., left, and the nearby bayou, Bayou Barataria, right. Below, sandbags line the street across from Wagner's home as Hurricane Nate approached earlier this month. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
Renée Funk, who manages hurricane response teams for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it has become clear since Katrina that mental illness and substance abuse aren’t just secondary problems—they are the primary long-term effect of natural disasters.
“People have trouble coping with the new normal after a storm,” Funk said. “Many have lost everything, including their jobs. Some may have lost loved ones, and now they have to rebuild their lives. They’re faced with a lot of barriers, including mental illness itself,” she said.
In New Orleans, doctors are still treating the psychological devastation of Katrina. More than 7,000 patients receive care for mental and behavioral health conditions just from the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority, a state-run mental health clinic in Marrero, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. At least 90 percent of the patients lived through Katrina and many still suffer from storm-related disorders, according to medical director and chief psychiatrist Thomas Hauth, who adds that he and most of his fellow clinicians also suffer from some level of long-term anxiety from the storm.
“Every year about this time, I start checking the National Weather Service at least three times a day,” he said.
These long-term mental health effects of extreme weather are a hidden public health epidemic, one that is expected to strain the U.S. health care system as the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters increase in coming decades because of global warming and other planetary shifts.
With climatologists promising more extreme weather across the country, mental and behavioral health systems need to start preparing and expanding dramatically or demand for treatment of the long-term psychological effects of future natural disasters will vastly outstrip the supply of practitioners, said Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association.
Dr. Thomas Hauth, a psychiatrist, in his office at the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority in Marrero, La., where he treats residents still suffering from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders caused or exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina. Hauth and his colleagues also report post-storm anxiety and other conditions. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“On a blue sky day, our mental health resources are stretched,” said Carol North, researcher and professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but common sense tells us that more disasters and worse disasters will lead to worse psychological effects.”
”Katrina brain”
For climate change believers, this year’s string of record-breaking Atlantic hurricanes was just a warm-up for what scientists predict will be more frequent extreme weather events in the future.
When an entire city experiences a significant trauma at the same time, as New Orleans did during Katrina and Houston did during Harvey, it can push a lot of people over the edge, said Eric Kramer, another doctor who worked in the Jefferson Parish clinic: “Some people can rely on their inner strength and resilience to get through it, but others can’t.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, many survivors struggled with short-term memory loss and cognitive impairment, a syndrome dubbed “Katrina brain,” according to a report by Ken Sakauye, a University of Tennessee professor of psychiatry who was at Louisiana State University at the time.
Even though more than half the population of New Orleans had evacuated, psychiatric helpline calls increased 61 percent in the months after Katrina, compared with the same period before the storm, death notices increased 25 percent, and the city’s murder rate rose 37 percent, Sakauye wrote.
A year after Katrina, psychiatrist James Barbee reported that many of his patients in New Orleans had deteriorated from post-Katrina anxiety to more serious cases of depression and anxiety. "People are just wearing down," Barbee said. "There was an initial spirit about bouncing back and recovering, but it's diminished over time, as weeks have become months.”
In a longitudinal study comparing the mental health of low-income single moms in New Orleans before and after Katrina, one in five participants reported elevated anxiety and depression that had not returned to pre-storm levels four years later, said Jean Rhodes, study co-author and professor of psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Boston.
Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 people in 2005, and left behind massive property damage. But publiGetty Imagesc health officials are learning that the longest-lasting damage of several storms is psychological. | Getty Images
For a smaller percentage of people in the study, particularly people with no access to treatment, symptoms of anxiety developed into more serious, chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers found.
These aren’t cheap conditions to treat. One study cited by the CDC estimated the cost of treating even the short-term effects of anxiety disorders at more than $42 billion annually; double-digit regional leaps in rates of anxiety could cause serious financial strain to patients, employers, insurers and the government.
Vicarious reactions
Some damage can take place outside the storm-hit region. Even for people who have never experienced the raging winds, floods and prolonged power outages of a hurricane, this season’s repeated images of people struggling against the storms on television and other news and social media created unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression nationwide, said Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and environmental activist Lise Van Susteren.
“There is a vicarious reaction. When we see people flooded out of their homes, pets lost, belongings rotting in the streets, and people scared out of their wits, we experience an empathic identification with the victims,” she said.
Brandi Wagner pulls out the medications she must take on a daily basis to control a range of storm-related disorders including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and an addiction to opioids. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“People come in saying they can’t sleep, they’re drinking too much, they’re having trouble with their kids, their jobs or their marriages are falling apart. They may not know where the anxiety is coming from, but everyone is affected by the stress of climate change.”
The same kind of vicarious reactions were documented after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and after Hurricane Katrina, particularly in children, said Columbia University pediatrician and disaster preparedness expert Irwin Redlener.
“The mental health effects of natural disasters are really important and vastly overlooked, not only acutely but over the long term,” he said.
Everyone who lives through a major storm experiences some level of anxiety and depression. But for low-income people and those without strong social supports, the symptoms are much worse, said Ronald Kessler, an epidemiologist and disaster policy expert at Harvard Medical School. The same is true for people who already suffered from mental illness or drug or alcohol addiction before the disaster occurred.
Repeated exposure to weather disasters is another risk factor for mental and behavioral disorders. Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, followed by Hurricane Rita less than a month later. Three years after that, Hurricane Gustav hit the Louisiana coast, followed by Hurricane Ike two weeks later.
In September, many who had fled Hurricane Katrina and resettled in Houston had to relive the same horrors all over again, putting them at higher risk for long-term mental health problems.
TOP LEFT: Wagner in her backyard. TOP RIGHT: Wagner's medications. BOTTOM LEFT: Wagner shows off a photo of her son, Sgt. Aaron Briggs, receiving his sergeant badge in a photo on her phone. BOTTOM RIGHT: Wagner's daughter, Jessica Briggs, her grandson, Jeremy Goudeau Jr., and her daughter, Kristina Briggs, at her home in Lafitte, La.. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
But perhaps the greatest risk of adverse mental health reactions to storms occurs when an entire community like New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward is so completely destroyed that people can’t return to normal for months or years, if ever. For those who left and went to live in Houston, Atlanta and other far-flung cities, the dislocation and loss of community was equally harmful, researchers say.
“People are only physically and mentally resilient to a point and then they are either irretrievably injured or they die,” Kessler said. If storms intensify in the future, the kind of devastation parts of New Orleans experienced could become more common, he said.
Psychiatric First Aid
In the past decade, first responders and public health workers began training in a type of mental health first aid that research has shown to be effective in lowering anxiety and reducing the risk that the traumas experienced during a storm will lead to serious mental illness.
Using evidence-based techniques, rescue workers reassure storm survivors that feelings of sadness, anger and fear are normal and that they are likely to go away quickly. But when survivors complain that they’ve been crying nonstop, haven’t slept for days or are having suicidal thoughts, rescue workers are trained to make sure they get more intensive mental health care immediately.
In Houston, for example, teams of doctors, nurses, mental health counselors and other health care professionals offered both physical and mental health services at clinics set up in every storm shelter. The city’s emergency medical director, Davie Persse, said the clinics were so successful that local hospital emergency departments reported no surges in patients with psychiatric distress or minor injuries.
Forced evacuation, whether temporary or permanent, can also trigger psychological problems for people confronted by natural disasters. | Wikimedia Commons
Another important factor in reducing the psychological impacts of a storm is avoiding secondary traumas like being stranded for weeks in the convention center in New Orleans, said Sarah Lowe, a co-author of the Katrina study who teaches psychology at Montclair University in New Jersey. “Repeated traumas can pile up almost the way concussions do.”
“What I’m seeing in Harvey and Irma is there’s more mitigation of secondary trauma,” Lowe said. People were allowed to take their pets to the shelters with them, for example. In Katrina, survivors either had to leave their pets behind or stay in their homes and be more exposed to physical and mental dangers.
Evacuation and relocation
Some public health experts say that we need to start thinking of longer-term solutions to the longer-term problem of severe weather; instead of trying to treat post-storm psychological damage, we should avoid it in the first place by persuading residents to move out of storm-prone areas.
“We do a great job with preparedness and response to hurricanes in this country. It’s an amazing accomplishment,” said Mark Keim, an Atlanta-based consultant who works with the CDC and the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Health. “But as climate change progresses over the next one hundred years, what are we going to do—respond, respond, respond? We can’t afford that anymore.”
According to Keim, much of the rest of the world is already taking that approach:
“Hurricanes can’t be prevented, but by refusing to rebuild in flood plains and developing the infrastructure needed to reduce inland flooding and coastal surges, we can avoid much of the human exposure to the coming storms. That’s where the world is right now in disaster management. Preparedness and response are older approaches.”
Climate change experts agree. To avoid increasing loss of lives from the mega storms expected in the decades ahead, large coastal populations should relocate, researchers say. Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, recently found that a predicted 6-foot rise in sea levels by 2100 would put 13 million people in more than 300 U.S. coastal counties at risk of major flooding.
But relocating large populations has its own risks. For the hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents who rebuilt their lives far from home after Katrina, the loss of social ties and the stress of adapting to new surroundings also took a heavy psychological toll, according to recent research at the University of California.
There’s another problem with relocating people from coastal regions. It’s not just hurricanes that are expected to plague the planet as the climate shifts. Wildfires, droughts, inland flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters are also expected to increase in frequency and intensity, making it hard to find a safe place to put down new roots.
“Whether people decide to stay or decide to move, which means giving up a way of life, the long-term psychological costs of climate change appear to be inevitable,” Harvard’s Kessler said. “We can expect a growing number of people to have to face that dilemma. They’ll be affected by extreme weather one way or another, and they will need psychological help that already is in short supply.”
Christine Vestal is a reporter for Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Ecosystem expert says 'interacting effects' contribute to rise in blue green algae.
Research presented in Sudbury shows a number of factors are triggering cyanobacteria blooms.
Global climate change could be behind the rise in blue-green algae blooms across northern Ontario, at least according to a renowned Canadian ecosystem scientist.
"We're trying to figure out what triggers the cyanobacteria blooms in landscapes that are historically not known to have had these...blooms," says Irena Creed, the executive director of the School of Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of Saskatchewan.
She was in Sudbury, Ont., on Friday for Laurentian University's annual watershed lecture.
Creed spoke to a group of environmental scientists, biologists and community members about her research into cyanobacteria, the scientific name for the algae blooms.
"There's so many interacting effects of all of those global change drivers, that it becomes hard to tease apart what may be contributing to the rise — and it's globally a rise — in cyanobacterial blooms," Creed says.
The Sudbury and District Health Unit confirmed on Wednesday that Wanapitei Lake and Clearwater Lake in Sudbury both tested positive for blue-green algae. Several lakes in the area tested positive for the algae throughout the summer.
Temperature, precipitation and forests all a factor
To track the presence of algae blooms over time, Creed says her research team used satellite images to build a 30-year timeline of over 20,000 lakes. Graduate students also gathered samples from the lakes for testing.
"We're looking at the interactive effects of warmer temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, more intense storms, and how that changes the supply of nutrients from the land to the water."
Creed notes that Ontario is almost 85 per cent forested, meaning that what is happening in the forest can also have a big effect on what is going on in the lakes. As temperatures increase, the type of trees and length of the growing season is changing.
"The combination of those two factors means that later in the fall, you're having a fresh supply of nutrients that's hitting that forest floor, that could then be driving a next wave of algal blooms in the lakes."
Creed says understanding the conditions under which blue-green algae is produced is the key to predicting how humans might be affected. Toxins in cyanobacteria have been linked to neurological conditions, including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer's disease.
"If we learn from that, we might be at least able to identify the risk of many of the human settlements around these lakes," Creed says.
"When is there the likelihood that there might be toxins in those lakes?"
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Sheila Sund
In a changing climate, conservative elephant seals suffer.
Elephant seals that shirk traditional foraging grounds fare better during times of change.
by Rebecca Heisman
Published September 27, 2017
West Coast elephant seals have one of two broad dispositions: some are traditionalists and some are explorers.
Every summer and fall, female elephant seals leave the beaches of California and travel thousands of kilometers into the open water of the North Pacific. There they gorge on fish, squids, and other marine animals, packing on weight that will, hopefully, see them through the late fall and winter breeding season when they spend months on land tending to their pups. But as new research shows, seals have two main approaches to picking their autumn feasting grounds. The traditionalists return to the same site year after year, while the explorers venture into parts unknown.
The research also shows that when conditions are normal, traditionalists are better off—there’s value in knowing where the eating is good and sticking to what you know. But when the climate is thrown into disarray, it’s the explorers that thrive. It’s a showcase of how behaviors that are maladaptive in the short term could actually be beneficial in the long run.
Briana Abrahms, a researcher at NOAA and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues spent the past 10 years tracking 30 female elephant seals with satellite tags, which revealed that roughly two-thirds of the animals are traditionalists. They also weighed the seals each year, charting how much they’d fattened up. This gave them a sense of how the differently behaved seals fared under changing ocean conditions.
The researchers found that under typical conditions, traditionalist elephant seals are more successful—they tend to put on more weight. But as a natural climate cycle sent water temperatures awry, it was the explorers that put on more weight.
In recent years, the frequency of these natural oscillations between warm and cold water has been picking up, shifting every two to four years instead of every 10, which scientists agree is due to anthropogenic climate change. And as ocean conditions become less predictable, it is the exploratory seals that may be the species’ best hope.
The idea that seemingly maladaptive behaviors could pay off in the future isn’t new. Think of migratory birds: in many populations, a few individuals opt to stay put for the winter instead of heading south. When winters are harsh, those homebodies tend to die. But if the winter is mild, skipping the stress of a transcontinental flight could be worth it.
Even though the concept is well known, Abrahms’s study is one of the first to provide data on the benefits of different behavioral strategies under changing climate conditions.
Cameron Ghalambor, a Colorado State University evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the research, says it’s very difficult to predict which behaviors might become beneficial in the future.
“What ultimately matters most is that variation is maintained within populations,” he says. “So even if we can’t say with a lot of confidence whether a particular behavior or trait is likely to be adaptive, we can say that if environments change, those populations that have maintained variation are more likely to persist.”
Natural selection, after all, can only work if there is a range of behaviors to select from.
Abrahms and her colleagues are continuing to track the elephant seals. If the explorers become more common, they can watch this adaptive response to climate change play out. Not every species has the flexibility to cope when their environment shifts, but it seems that, just maybe, elephant seals do.
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World hunger haunts the UN festivities.
After a decade of decline, global malnutrition rose last year, as global warming and civil conflicts posed a greater threat.
World Hunger Haunts the U.N. Festivities
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDSEPT. 22, 2017
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Credit Thoka Maer
As the leaders of the world posture and sermonize for the United Nations General Assembly this week, a growing global specter should spur common concern among them: World hunger, after a decade-long decline, spiked last year, because of scourges like global warming and civil conflicts that show little sign of abating.
The number of undernourished human beings on the planet increased from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated, in a report timed for the world leaders’ annual review of their hopes and fears for the planet. That means 11 percent of the world’s population went hungry every day — a 5 percent increase in two years and a severe setback for the United Nations’ goal of eliminating global hunger by 2030.
The human suffering underlying the data includes almost one in four children under 5 years of age — 155 million — with stunted growth and a greatly heightened risk of cognitive damage and susceptibility to infection. Another 52 million children are considered “wasting” — weighing too little for their height, for lack of food.
The report didn’t specify precise factors that drove the decade of success in diminishing world hunger. But it stressed rising civil strife and climate disruption in explaining the sudden downturn.
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“There is more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone, yet 815 million people go hungry,” the United Nations food agency summarized plaintively.
At the same time, obesity continues to rise for adults all over the world, with a significant increase lately among children in most regions. “Multiple forms of malnutrition therefore coexist, with countries experiencing simultaneously high rates of child undernutrition and adult obesity,” the report warned.
A recent investigation by The Times delved into this paradox, finding food corporations exploiting the poor in Brazil with products richer in sugar than in balanced nutrients, thereby feeding obesity and its attendant life-threatening diseases.
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A stark measure of the complicated problems is that a vast majority of those going hungry — 489 million of the 815 million “food insecure” and malnourished — are fighting for survival in countries afflicted by violent conflicts, with children suffering the most, the United Nations report said. Battles between armed groups within nations have increased 125 percent since 2010, with hunger often enlisted as an allied aggressor. Conflict in South Sudan produced “a humanitarian catastrophe on a massive scale.” Famine was declared in some parts of that country this year, with two out of five people suffering severe hunger and food deprivation “being used as a weapon of war,” the report noted.
In Yemen, 60 percent of the population — 17 million people — live in hunger and need urgent help. Similar conditions were underlined in Nigeria and Somalia. The human destruction wrought by rampant conflict was clearest, perhaps, in Syria, whose once-vibrant middle-income population has been decimated by civil war. An estimated 85 percent struggles in poverty now, with more than six million people suffering persistent hunger in a land where agriculture has been devastated.
Compounding these problems globally are the disruptions of climate change — droughts and floods, as well as political crises and severe economic drops in nations reliant on commodity exports, the study found.
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If the diplomats at the United Nations are paying attention to the world out there, the report should prod them into a fresh look at hunger and an increased resolve to drive it back down. There are signs of hope, notably an increase in better nutrition through the breast-feeding of infants.
Unfortunately, President Trump, for all the spotlight he commanded this week at the United Nations, has already proposed a severe cut in funding for the organization. But the United Nations is larger than any of its members. Its ultimate constituency is humanity itself. The planet’s diplomats have been put on notice that, whatever their differences, they cannot afford to let up in the fight against global hunger.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on September 22, 2017, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Hunger Haunts the U.N. Festivities. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Want to bridge the urban-rural divide? Start by learning about family farms.
Ted Genoways, a journalist and fourth-generation Nebraskan, talks about the year he spent chronicling a Nebraskan family farm and what the rest of us can learn from his experience.
Ted Genoways wants to challenge your thinking about the people growing your food. Counter to popular wisdom, not all farmers are either 1) selling organic tomatoes at your local farmers’ market or 2) running massive corporate operations.
In his new book, This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, Genoways chronicles the trials and tribulations of a third kind of farmer. Rick Hammond grows conventional corn and soy and raises cattle in Eastern Nebraska with his daughter and son-in-law. He’s not your typical 2017 farm hero, but, as Genoways artfully illustrates, Hammond is working hard to pass his farm on to the next generation against the odds. And the myriad challenges family farms like his face—from unstable prices to a diminishing water supply and increasingly erratic weather—are worth our attention.
As Genoways wrote recently in a reflection on the book, a “sea change in consumer habits” has arisen over the last two decades. But, he began to ask, “Is all of this really helping family farmers? How do they feel about a food movement that lionizes ideologically-driven operations like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms, the pastoral curmudgeon made famous in Omnivore’s Dilemma, and vilifies generations-old operations in the middle of the country, where many farmers have no choice but to raise commodity grains—principally corn and soybeans—just to keep their families afloat?”
Civil Eats talked to Genoways recently about the Hammonds, the changing face of rural America, and the role that in-depth local reporting can play in holding agribusiness interests accountable to their communities.
Maybe we should start by talking about the term “family farm.” Can you talk about how you define that?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) classifies something like 97 percent of American farms as “family farms.” And so in that context the term essentially means that the person who owns the farm has a family. And many large operations that I’ve dealt with over the years that started out family-owned have grown to the point where the families that own them may only rarely actually visit the land.
So, when I talk about family farmers, I really mean in the old-fashioned sense—a nuclear family that is living on a farm that they operate with little or no hired assistance. Typically, they are doing it on land that they have some sort of longstanding connection to. And everything is about protecting and sustaining the land at the center of that universe. That’s something that is—at this point in history, especially in the Midwest—quite unusual.
I was interested in how the real family farmers are hanging on. And in how they’re doing so at a point when, for almost a generation, there’s been an enormous amount of pressure to either go corporate or go do something else.
Can you say more about what “going corporate” looks like?
It has to do with the size of the operation. [It means] acquiring enough land that you start to have some economies of scale, but you also then require employees. I have reported on operations that describe themselves as “family farms,” but have operations that are spread across seven states. They have hundreds of employees and have operations that include row crops, feed mills, hog barns, and packing houses.
So closer to a vertical model?
That’s right. There is an attempt to vertically integrate and to diversify across regions to insulate [themselves] against weather and some of the vagaries of the local markets. And essentially you’re getting large enough that you have some protection. And that, to my mind, is where the corporation really comes from.
I understand that instinct. I’m not as knee jerk anti-industrialized agriculture as some people are. I certainly have many reservations about what tends to come along with it. But I don’t feel any particular romance for the difficulties or the risks that come from trying to operate a small farm. And that’s exactly why I wanted to focus on those kinds of farmers and in the context of what has happened with the food system itself for over a generation now—as everything is pushing toward that industrial model—but I also wanted to look at the kinds of pressures that have been exerted over the last decade by people like us who have some questions about that industrial model and some reservations about it. And I think many farmers [see those questions] as personal critiques and register them as yet another threat.
Let’s back up and talk about the larger urban-rural divide that has been made especially clear since the election. Do you hope This Blessed Earth can bridge any of that divide?
My interest is in trying to make sure that when we talk about how to reform the food system we’re not doing so in a vacuum or based on some sort of received wisdom about what’s happening on the farm.
I also think that Nebraska, where the book is set and where I live and have had family for generations, is an interesting example of what happens in many of these Great Plains and Midwestern states, which tended to be settled along the rivers. All of the population clusters on one side and then the rest of the state is left open for agriculture, which historically got brought in to those distribution centers along the rivers. But what that means is that every one of these states has major metropolitan areas on one side of the state and then vast areas that are lightly populated on the other. And, over the last 40 years, those rural areas have become less and less populated. And so within each state there ends up being two different states.
And I have certainly seen over my lifetime this intense and growing suspicion of the urban part of [Nebraska] from the people who are in the rural parts of the state. And I think some of that is exacerbated by the loss of small-town newspapers and the consolidation of schools—losing that individual identity and the sense of community and conversation that took place in those local venues. And it’s all been replaced by talk radio on the AM radio in the machine shop, or by Fox News, which is on TV at home and in the coffee shop.
I think many of these more isolated rural places have ended up feeling more connected to a national politics and a national rhetorical debate than they are connected to people who may only live a couple of hours away from them but in a [more urban] environment. I would also hope that [this book] encourages people in urban areas to recognize some of the work that they need to do to reach out to rural areas and include them in some of the progress that has occurred in cities and not leave rural areas behind.
As you mentioned, there has been a lot of critique of conventional farming and farmers who sell into the commodity market in recent years. And there are people in the Midwest now growing organic and non-GMO foods—either out or conviction or because of consumer demand—but it’s not anywhere near as simple as just deciding to change. Can you say a little bit about that challenge?
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the real mistakes of the food movement has been to assume that we can reshape the food system simply by buying non-GMO corn chips or Animal Welfare Approved chicken. The reality is that if there’s not a mass movement among consumers, all that that really does is create niche markets. And niche markets may help some farmers who have the means, the know-how, and the ambition. But, right now, the premium that can be commanded for those things is not adequate to offset the risks and expenses.
For people who have an emotional connection to the farm, their first commitment is to their family and to their legacy. And from there whatever they can do to produce something that they feel good about being sent out to the consumer, they definitely want to do it.
But I think it’s important to recognize that when somebody says, “Why not go organic?” It is no different than any of us being asked: “Why don’t you do everything in your life and in your profession in a different way than you’ve always done it?”
And even when that may be good advice or good for us collectively, trying to make that change individually is hugely challenging. And the way you can get that to happen is not by [making different consumer choices]. The only way that that’s really going to happen is by changing the incentives at the macro level and that’s about government regulation, and the incentive we build in to government programs.
And so if people care enough to pay extra for non-GMO or organic food, then they should be looking into which candidates would actually push for those sorts of changes and put their support behind them. At a moment when the next farm bill is being crafted and the USDA is being staffed with people who have little to no expertise, it’s really critical to recognize that these things don’t take care of themselves.
Do you want to talk about the Keystone XL pipeline—and the role that it played in the year you spent on the Hammonds’ farm? At a time when many farmers in that part of the country seem to feel more competition that neighborliness, do you think the pipeline helped bring them together?
I saw places where were families and neighbors were divided based on their feelings about the pipeline. But I also saw this group of farmers and ranchers from up in the Sandhills who have banded together to be the wrench in the works for close to a decade now. And that is just remarkable to me. They’ve been holding out long enough that now TransCanada is saying, “Well we’re not sure that the numbers work out for building this pipeline in the way that we had originally proposed any more.” And with another project that they looked at as an alternative—the Energy East Pipeline, which would have gone across southern Canada—they’ve said that they fear that they would encounter the exact same resistance trying to build that project.
Rick Hammond really thought that there was no choice but to sign the initial easement agreement with Trans-Canada and instantly regretted it. And then Trans-Canada moved the route and said, “we’re no longer going to build the pipeline across this piece of land.” But Rick farms another piece of land that belongs to his family members. And they refused to sign, and they have held out on allowing any construction on that land. In fact, that’s the land where they erected a solar-powered barn that is directly in the path of the pipeline.
Rick Hammond has family in place—his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle—to take over the operation. But that’s unusual these days. Will you talk about what you see the next few decades looking like in Middle America for farmers?
It’s a really bleak outlook in terms of that very issue. Succession is the thing that you hear all the ag groups worrying about the most, because they have the perspective to see that the farmers are advancing in age and at the same time land values, overhead costs, and equipment costs are going up.… So the only people who can really get into farming as young people these days are those who are inheriting land, homes, and equipment. And I have a hard time understanding the young farmers who commit to staying on the land. Because even a small operation is now worth millions of dollars in land and equipment and everything that goes with it. To be presented as a young person with the choice of, “you can sell this off for millions of dollars and go do whatever you want with your life….”
Or you can make $25,000 a year if you’re lucky.
Right. And you’ll be working 12-15 hours a day. And [the ag landscape] is going to be constantly changing. The technology is going to be new. The climate is going to be new. It’s going to be a daily struggle. And the people who are inheriting operations for the most part have parents and even grandparents who are right on top of them—sometimes on the same property.
And they have strong opinions.
Yes, they do. And they don’t keep them to themselves very often.
To make the choice to stay and do all that work for all of that risk and to have all of that family pressure? I’m not sure that I could counsel anyone that that’s the wise choice.
But this is where that notion of the family farm comes in. Meghan is the sixth generation on the Hammond’s farm. And they’ve been there since the 1870s. And now Meghan and Kyle have had a baby; the seventh generation has been born on the land. The reasons for staying very often are not wise financial decisions. They are about being part of something that is long and historic and meaningful to the family.
And the thing is all this contraction really started in the 1960s—after 50 years, the farmers who are left are the die-hards. That makes it even harder for the rising generation to let [the land] go because it has been fought for their whole lives. And it’s a fairly common thing these days that you have siblings who have equal shares in a farm, but don’t have equal labor being put into it. And naturally that creates friction.
Before writing this book, I knew that there were people who specialize in farm succession planning. But I learned that there are also psychologists dedicated to it as their practice.
Do you want to talk about the precision involved in soy and corn farming these days? In many ways it has become a high-tech job.
Yes, it has become an incredibly technical job at every stage of the operation—from selecting seed to deciding the seed density (where the seed is planted and how close together) to deciding about how much water to apply to a field and where and when. It’s also a matter of collecting harvest data and entering it into a system that is then returning information about how everything performed. And you’re often looking at data sets that are a decade-long and making predictions for the next year.
Most farmers don’t have just one type of crop on their fields, but even if you were just talking about soybeans, most farmers are planting different varieties in order to spread out the risk. And making those kinds of decisions and then keeping track of what you’ve decided in any given place and then of course all of the financial calculations if there’s hail damage, drought damage, or loss to insects … and no, I don’t think the average consumer has any idea about any of that.
At the same time it is a lot less labor.
No question. A lot of the physical labor has been mechanized out, which means that there are fewer people involved in the operation. But I think that this has also made farming much less of a social activity than it used to be. There are far fewer people involved in operations and that’s also contributed to the dwindling size of rural communities.
The psychological pressures and the mental and emotional pressures of farming have really soared. You’re not out there hand-husking corn and tossing it into the back of a horse drawn cart. But, to me, there is something almost more stressful about sitting in the cab of your John Deere harvester watching the color of the swath change as it’s telling you whether you’ve lost or made money for that particular row.
And the farmer suicide rates remain high in the Midwest as well, right?
Yes. And here in Nebraska, there’s been mounting evidence to suggest that those suicide rates may also be linked to some of the neuro-disruptors that have been used in pesticides. Just south of us, where the Hammonds farm, there’s a cluster of neurological disorders that is being actively studied. They’re trying to figure out why there’s a hot spot for Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders in this particular place.
Do you want to say anything more about solutions?
I really feel that the only way that the current system will be reformed is if top-down pressures change the sorts of incentives that exist for the businesses that largely control the industry—and the farmers who are under their sway.
And that means trying to reform the politics of many of these middle states. The progressives in these states—who have been essentially abandoned by national parties—need to have support. Because if we allow the state politics of the middle of the country to be controlled by agribusiness, then we’re never going to get elected leaders who are looking to regulate and reform agribusiness.
But that’s a tall order, especially with Iowa being at the center or national politics in the way it is.
Yes, but what’s fascinating is the fact that is the corruption that exists by way of pressure from big agricultural interests in Iowa is so out in the open it’s kind of jaw-dropping. And, again, this is where the decline of newspapers comes in. If there were people being paid to go out and be daily watchdogs on these sorts of things, I think that would it would be much harder for people to do.
If you really want to reform politics in the middle of the country, you’ve got to find the people who are doing the right work and give them money and then go home. But that is an awfully tall order, and I would just hope that the awareness-raising and the transformation of thinking [about food and farming] that has come into being in the last 10 years doesn’t turn into a kind of panacea.
It’s not enough to say, “I’m not contributing to these industrial practices, or I’m not contributing to climate change.” If what you’re doing has too little impact to be meaningful, I’m not sure it gets you off the hook.
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Pandemics, politics and the Spanish flu.
One of the worst plagues in human history is largely forgotten now. For our own sakes, it’s time to remember what happened.
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World Laura Spinney Jonathan Cape (2017)
“The Spanish flu,” Laura Spinney tells us, “infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918 and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population — a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. …It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”
Yet when it was over, a kind of stunned silence fell on the survivors. People might talk about the carnage of the First World War and the resulting revolutions, but not about the much greater slaughter they had personally witnessed in their own homes and workplaces. My own grandparents, who had small children in 1918 and ’19, never mentioned the flu pandemic.
Part of that silence is thanks to the human tendency to pay more attention to some deaths than to others. The 3,000 deaths in the 9/11 attack are trivial compared to the 64,000 drug-overdose deaths the U.S. suffered last year, or the 660,000 worldwide malaria deaths so far this year. The 9/11 deaths changed the world, while we shrug off far greater death tolls.
But the silence after the pandemic was also like many soldiers’ PTSD: the survivors didn’t much want to talk about an experience that seemed to have neither cause nor remedy.
Spinney, who is both a science writer and novelist, is far enough removed from the pandemic to gain perspective on it, and storyteller enough to condense a global disaster into a chain of vivid stories linked by lucid explanation. In the process, she evokes a world that seems both farther from us than a mere century, and also uncomfortably close.
Nobody knew anything
Nobody knew anything in 1918. The germ theory of disease, a few decades old, was as controversial then as climate change is now. “Virus” was a medical buzzword for “something we can’t see in a microscope that must be causing this or that disease.”
Even the word “influenza” was a hand-me-down from the Middle Ages, when the diagnosis for many ailments was the “influence” of the stars. The 19th century had seen many outbreaks of a respiratory disease called influenza, including the “Russian flu” of 1890 that had killed a million people. Less fatal flu outbreaks occurred yearly, as they continue to do.
So a wave of flu in the spring of 1918 didn’t stir much alarm though it killed more people and those of a younger age than usual — especially in the armies still locked in trench warfare. So many soldiers fell ill that a major German offensive — intended to knock France and Britain out of the war before the U.S. arrived — failed. Even though French and British soldiers were sick as well, they had the advantage of defence. (The Americans, meanwhile, were dying aboard their troop ships en route to the front.)
Most histories of the Spanish flu focus on events in Europe and the U.S., but Spinney’s scope is world-wide. Here is where her book distinguishes itself — by detailed scrutiny of the response to the pandemic in places like Brazil, China and India. All were baffled by the disease and by its seeming randomness. In the gold mines of South Africa’s Rand district, for example, black miners lived under crowded, unsanitary conditions that encouraged pneumonia. They fell ill with the flu, but most recovered. A week later, the flu hit Kimberley’s diamond mines — and the death rate was 35 times that of the gold miners.
Culture played a crucial role. In Spain, a charismatic bishop in the city of Zamora drew crowds into the churches to offer prayers to St. Rocco, the patron saint of plague, making the spread of flu much easier. The authorities tried to forbid mass gatherings; the bishop said they were interfering in church affairs.
Elsewhere, politics promoted the flu. In the Philippines, the Americans who’d occupied the islands 20 years before didn’t try to protect the local population except for a camp where Filipinos were training to join the U.S. war effort. Flu killed an estimated 80,000 Filipinos.
But the flu also promoted politics. After the Russian Revolution and civil war, Lenin brought in the first modern public healthcare system (at least for urban Russians). He asked doctors to make epidemic and famine prevention their top priority because flu and famine had nearly wiped out the Russian working classes.
Before that, however, flu had influenced not only the war but also the peace conference that followed. Woodrow Wilson almost certainly contracted Spanish flu en route to the Paris peace conference in 1919, and like many other cases, he suffered cognitive harm. His illness may also have helped cause the stroke he suffered a few months later; it left him crippled and unable to persuade Congress and the Senate to back the League of Nations.
In India, Mohandas Gandhi contracted flu. Already a leading figure in the struggle against British rule, Gandhi was temporarily unable to act as the epidemic aggravated a drought-related famine. But some of his followers began to build a grassroots organization to provide influenza relief — laying the groundwork for future liberation campaigns.
When Gandhi did recover, he was still too weak to control the response to a British bill that continued the rule of martial law in India after the end of the war. That bill, says Spinney, led to the Amritsar Massacre in April 1919, when brigadier general Reginald Dyer ordered his soldiers to fire into an unarmed crowd of protesters. Somewhere between 400 and 1,000 died. The slaughter was the beginning of the end of the British Raj.
The silence of the artists
If culture influenced influenza, influenza also influenced culture. Spinney explores the eerie silence about the pandemic in the work of 1920s writers. She argues that flu led to a general melancholy among artists, rather than works dramatizing its impact on individuals and communities.
From this she makes an interesting further case: We remember wars and then gradually forget them, while we forget pandemics and then gradually remember them. So, 72 years after the end of the Second World War, we contend with neo-Nazis while we also begin to sense what a shattering event the 1918-19 influenza pandemic really was.
A century later, we are far better equipped to deal with the next flu pandemic but also more vulnerable to it. The 2009-10 “swine flu” pandemic travelled at the speed of modern air travel; British schoolgirls brought it home from a holiday trip to Mexico. It killed over 200,000, a number too small to earn respect. In B.C., we had more than 1,000 cases and a mere 56 deaths — and promptly forgot them all.
The next influenza — whether H5N1, H7N9, or some other strain — could kill a magnitude more. As Santayana famously observed, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we can’t reconstruct our memories of the Spanish flu quickly enough, millions more will die in the next pandemic.
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