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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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Hurricane damage in Puerto Rico leads to fears of drug shortages nationwide.
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, manufacturers are rushing to get their plants on the island back on line to avoid production problems.
Hurricane Damage in Puerto Rico Leads to Fears of Drug Shortages Nationwide
By KATIE THOMAS and SHEILA KAPLANOCT. 4, 2017
A factory owned by the pharmaceutical company Mylan, which makes the childhood leukemia drug methotrexate, in Caguas, P.R., is one of 80 drug manufacturing plants struggling to stave off shortages of critical medicines in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Federal officials and major drugmakers are scrambling to prevent national shortages of critical drugs for treating cancer, diabetes and heart disease, as well as medical devices and supplies, that are manufactured at 80 plants in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
Pharmaceuticals and medical devices are the island’s leading exports, and Puerto Rico has become one of the world’s biggest centers for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Its factories make 13 of the world’s top-selling brand-name drugs, from Humira, the rheumatoid arthritis treatment, to Xarelto, a blood thinner used to prevent stroke, according to a report released last year.
With business of nearly $15 billion a year at stake in Puerto Rico, drug companies and device makers are confronting a range of obstacles on the island: locating enough diesel fuel for generators to run their factories; helping their employees get to work from areas where roads are damaged and blocked, electricity is down and phones don’t work. Companies have taken out radio ads pleading with workers to check in. The pharmaceutical and device industries contribute to the employment of nearly 100,000 people on the island, according to trade groups.
“Some of these products are critical to Americans,” Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told a congressional panel this week. “A loss of access could have significant public health consequences.”
Dr. Gottlieb, who visited F.D.A. staff in Puerto Rico last week, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on Health: “We have a list of about 40 drugs that we’re very concerned about. It reflects maybe about 10 firms.”
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Thirteen of the drugs, Dr. Gottlieb said, are “sole-source,” meaning the product is made only by one company. Those include H.I.V. medications, injectable drugs and sophisticated medical devices, although he did not name the products. The biggest problem, he said, was not damage to the factories, but the instability of the electric supply. Manufacturers are worried that a long-term lack of connection to a major power grid could jeopardize their products, and are also wary of relying on the more limited electrical grids that the territory is likely to activate as a first step to restoring power.
One of the drugs F.D.A. officials said they were concerned about was methotrexate, which treats childhood leukemia and other diseases. It has been scarce, off and on, for several years. Mylan makes the product in Puerto Rico, and all five manufacturers of the injectable form of the drug have reported shortages of the product, according to a list maintained by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
In a statement, Mylan did not address the methotrexate shortage but said it was “working closely with F.D.A. to help address drug shortage concerns.” Its plant has sources of water, electricity and communication, and the company said it is “working on ways to make them sustainable for manufacturing purposes.” Like other companies, it said it was focusing on helping employees and other residents of the island with basic needs, including chartering a cargo plane carrying essential goods to deliver to them.
Several pharmaceutical and medical device companies said that their factories were coming back on line with the assistance of generators and that they did not anticipate supply shortfalls. But others said the situation was precarious. Drug companies depend on consistent refrigeration to avoid shortages. And device makers are wondering when the power grid would be back up, which some officials have predicted could take months.
“Everybody is struggling to get diesel fuel — that’s just widespread,” said Antonio Medina, an independent consultant who until last year was executive director of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, a government-run group that promotes manufacturing.
Wilberto Maldonado, a pharmaceutical consultant in Puerto Rico, said drug and device makers were navigating a logistical “nightmare,” especially when trying to get access to fuel for their generators.
With phone lines down, “many employers have people still unaccounted for,” Mr. Maldonado said in a message through LinkedIn. “This may not improve, as telecom service providers are also depending on backup generators.”
Industry officials have sought to strike a delicate balance in making their case for help without appearing to divert precious resources from hospital and other emergency services. Returning the drug and device industry to its feet, however, is crucial for ensuring the island’s economic recovery as well as safeguarding the supply of medicines and devices to the rest of the United States.
If the manufacturing plants are slow to fully recover, some companies could shift their production elsewhere, said Deepak Lamba-Nieves, research director at the Center for a New Economy, a nonpartisan economic think tank in Puerto Rico. “That may have medium and long-term consequences for an island that is going to be hugely and severely impacted by this hurricane for many years to come,” he said.
Lobbyists and executives from health care companies met Tuesday with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make their pitch for assistance.
Photo
Fallen wires hung just outside the Mylan facility on Wednesday. Challenges to getting the drug manufacturers up and running again include locating diesel fuel to power their generators and helping their employees get to work in areas where roads are blocked, electricity is down and phones don’t work. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
AdvaMed, the trade group for the device makers, said its requests included priority access as the electricity grid is restored.
“Even if companies are fine now with diesel fuel, we want to make sure we’re in the queue in terms of priority,” said Greg Crist, a spokesman for AdvaMed. “Because if there is an electricity shortage well into November, for example, how can we as an industry make sure we are in line for those priorities, once you’ve taken care of hospitals and essential needs?”
While AdvaMed has outlined its members’ challenges, its pharmaceutical counterpart — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — provided fewer specifics and referred questions to Healthcare Ready, an industry group that is coordinating the recovery operations in Puerto Rico.
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Several drug companies said that while their plants lost power and were forced to shut down, they were not anticipating a disruption in supply. “We have a strong local team working through incredible logistical challenges, and we’re seeing progress each day,” said Ernie Knewitz, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson. Tylenol and Prezista, an H.I.V. drug, are among the products that the company manufactures in Puerto Rico. “We are also closely monitoring our product inventory levels and will work to ensure all critical needs are met.”
The industry’s rosy outlook, presumably offered in part to assure nervous shareholders, contrasted with the concern expressed by Dr. Gottlieb.
“We know that the grid is going to be unstable for a long period of time,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “The generators were never meant to operate for months and months on end.”
Erin Fox, a drug shortage expert at the University of Utah, said she and other hospital pharmacists were monitoring the situation, and were worried that the storm’s impact could exacerbate the United States’ already dire drug-shortage problem.
Ms. Fox said companies typically do not disclose where they manufacture their drugs because it is considered a trade secret. Several companies declined to list which products they made in Puerto Rico.
“Because we have no transparency around that,” she said, “it’s actually hard to know the true impact of this.”
Baxter, a medical-supply company, has said that it is limiting shipments of products made in Puerto Rico to conserve its supply, including small bags of dextrose and saline, which are used by hospitals to prepare medication. Hospitals will be limited to their typical monthly shipment to prevent some institutions from stockpiling the products.
Ms. Fox said hospitals rely on these small bags of saline solution to mix medicines for patients, and “an allocation doesn’t guarantee that you will get some.”
A few years ago, Baxter was at the center of a shortage of large saline bags that led to state and federal investigations into its business practices.
Baxter said that its three manufacturing sites in Puerto Rico sustained “some damage,” and that “limited production activities” had resumed at all of its plants.
Puerto Rico has been a hub of drug manufacturing for decades — companies were lured to the island because of tax breaks and its access to the United States market, along with skilled employees who worked for lower wages. About a decade ago, expiring tax incentives led to a wave of factory closings, stoking fears that the industry was in jeopardy.
Today, the drug and device industries remain a mainstay of the Puerto Rican economy. Pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing accounted for nearly three-quarters of Puerto Rico’s exports in 2016, of $14.5 billion, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“These are some of the best jobs,” Mr. Medina said.
Dr. Gottlieb hopes the companies stay there.
“A highly skilled, highly dedicated and highly productive Puerto Rican work force enables the success of the industry,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “If they decide to relocate after this disaster, it would jeopardize the island’s economic future.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Drug Shortages Are New Concern In Wake of Storm. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Steve 4 hours ago
Its plant (Mylan) has sources of water, electricity and communication, and the company said it is “working on ways to make them sustainable...
Kittredge White 4 hours ago
How generous, how sweet! It's really funny how no one gave a hoot about PR until corporate bottom lines were at risk...
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Great time to put some money into getting these operations back up and running. Would be a political win as it would provide JOBS!!!! and...
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The volcano that shrouded the Earth and gave birth to a monster.
Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.
IDEAS CLIMATE
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.
BY GILLEN D'ARCY WOOD
ILLUSTRATIONS BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK
OCTOBER 5, 2017
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Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815.
After perhaps 1,000 years’ dormancy, the devastating evacuation and collapse required only a few days. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.
Within weeks, Tambora’s stratospheric ash cloud circled the planet at the equator, from where it embarked on a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes. Five months after the eruption, in September 1815, meteorological enthusiast Thomas Forster observed strange, spectacular sunsets over Tunbridge Wells near London. “Fair dry day,” he wrote in his weather diary—but “at sunset a fine red blush marked by diverging red and blue bars.”
RAIN OF ASH: This map shows the density of ash fall issuing from Tambora’s eruption.
The thickness of the ash is shown in centimeters. Prevailing trade winds drove the ash clouds north and west as far as Celebes (Sulawesu) and Borneo, 1,300 kilometers away. The volcanic eruptions could be heard twice as far away.Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Artists across Europe took note of the changed atmosphere. William Turner drew vivid red skyscapes that, in their coloristic abstraction, seem like an advertisement for the future of art. Meanwhile, from his studio on Greifswald Harbor in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a sky with a chromic density that—one scientific study has found—corresponds to the “optical aerosol depth” of the colossal volcanic eruption that year.
For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.
ALSO IN CLIMATE
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
By Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815.
After perhaps 1,000 years’ dormancy, the devastating evacuation and...READ MORE
One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel Frankenstein bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie—which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—serve as tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18.
Considered on a geological timescale, Tambora stands almost insistently near to us. The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in temperatures and rainfall, and a flow-on tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.
On Sumbawa Island, the beginning of the dry season in April 1815 meant a busy time for the local farmers. In a few weeks the rice would be ready, and the raja of Sanggar, a small kingdom on the northeast coast of the island, would send his people into the fields to harvest. Until then, the men of his village, called Koreh, continued to work in the surrounding forests, chop- ping down the sandalwood trees vital to shipbuilders in the busy sea lanes of the Dutch East Indies.
On the evening of April 5, 1815, at about the time his servants would have been clearing the dinner dishes, the raja heard an enormous thunderclap. Perhaps his first panicked thought was that the beach lookout had fallen asleep and allowed a pirate ship to creep in to shore and fire its cannon. But everyone was instead staring up at Mount Tambora. A jet of flame burst skyward from the summit, lighting up the darkness and rocking the earth beneath their feet. The noise was incredible, painful.
Huge plumes of flame issued from the mountain for three hours, until the dark mist of ash became confused with the natural darkness, seeming to announce the end of the world. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the column of fire collapsed, the earth stopped shaking, and the bone-jarring roars faded. Over the next few days, Tambora continued to bellow occasionally, while ash drifted down from the sky.
THE BIG CHILL: This diagram shows the penetration of volcanic matter into the stratosphere. As volcanic sulfur dioxide is chemically transformed into sulfuric acid, an aerosol layer forms, reducing incoming radiation from the sun and cooling the surface, even as the stratosphere itself is warmed.Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Meanwhile to the southeast in the capital Bima, colonial administrators were sufficiently alarmed by the events of April 5 to send an official, named Israel, to investigate the emergency situation at the volcano, on the Sanggar Peninsula. By April 10, the man’s bureaucratic zeal had led him to the very slopes of Tambora. There, in the dense tropical forest, at about 7 p.m., he became one of the first victims of the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history.
Within hours, the village of Koreh, along with all other villages on the Sanggar Peninsula, ceased to exist entirely, a victim of Tambora’s spasm of self-destruction. This time three distinct columns of fire burst in a cacophonous roar from the summit to the west, blanketing the stars and uniting in a ball of swirling flame at a height greater than the eruption of five days before. The mountain itself began to glow as streams of boiling liquefied rock coursed down its slopes. At 8 p.m., the terrifying conditions across Sanggar grew worse still, as a hail of pumice stones descended, mixed with a downpour of hot rain and ash.
On the northern and western slopes of the volcano, whole villages, totaling perhaps 10,000 people, had already been consumed within a vortical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma, and hurricane-strength winds. In 2004, an archaeological team from the University of Rhode Island uncovered the first remains of a village buried by the eruption: a single house under three meters of volcanic pumice and ash. Inside the walled remains, they found two carbonized bodies, perhaps a married couple. The woman, her bones turned to charcoal by the heat, lay on her back, arms extended, holding a long knife. Her sarong, also carbonized, still hung across her shoulder.
The Tambora climate emergency offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.
Back on the mountain’s eastern flank, the rain of volcanic rocks gave way to ashfall, but there was to be no relief for the surviving villagers. The spectacular, jet-like “plinian” eruption (named for Pliny the Younger, who left a famous account of Vesuvius’s vertical column of fire) continued unabated, while glowing, fast-moving currents of rock and magma, called “pyroclastic streams,” generated enormous phoenix clouds of choking dust. As these burning magmatic rivers poured into the cool sea, secondary explosions redoubled the aerial ash cloud created by the original plinian jet. An enormous curtain of steam and ash clouds rose and encircled the peninsula, creating, for those trapped inside it, a short-term microclimate of pure horror.
First, a “violent whirlwind” struck Koreh, blowing away roofs. As it gained in strength, the volcanic hurricane uprooted large trees and launched them like burning javelins into the sea. Horses, cattle, and people alike flew upward in the fiery wind. What survivors remained then faced another deadly element: giant waves from the sea. The crew of a British ship cruising offshore in the Flores strait, coated with ash and bombarded by volcanic rocks, watched stupefied as a 12-foot-high tsunami washed away the rice fields and huts along the Sanggar coast. Then, as if the combined cataclysms of air and sea weren’t enough, the land itself began to sink as the collapse of Tambora’s cone produced waves of subsidence across the plain.
On the sunless days following the cataclysm, corpses lay unburied all along the roads on the inhabited eastern side of the island between Dompu and Bima. Villages stood deserted, their surviving inhabitants having scattered in search of food. With forests and rice paddies destroyed, and the island’s wells poisoned by volcanic ash, some 40,000 islanders would perish from sickness and starvation in the ensuing weeks, bringing the estimated death toll from the eruption to over 100,000, the largest in history.
While the skyward eruptions lasted only about three hours each, the boiling cascade of pyroclastic streams down Tambora’s slopes continued a full day. Hot magma gushed from Tambora’s collapsing chamber down to the peninsula, while columns of ash, gas, and rock rose and fell, feeding the flow. The fiery flood that consumed the Sanggar Peninsula, traveling up to 19 miles at great speeds, ultimately extended over a 216-square-mile area, one of the greatest pyroclastic events in the historical record. Within a few short hours, it buried human civilization in northeast Sumbawa under a smoking meter-high layer of ignimbrite.
WORST OF TIMES: Charles Dickens, whose grim weatherscapes and portraits of poverty are definitive representations of Victorian London, grew up under the ever-cloudy, bone-chilling atmosphere created by the Tambora eruption.British Library
Tambora’s cacophony of explosions on April 10, 1815, could be heard hundreds of miles away. All across the region, government ships put to sea in search of imaginary pirates and invading navies. In the seas to the north off Macassar, the captain of the East India Company vessel Benares gave a vivid account of conditions in the region on April 11:
The ashes now began to fall in showers, and the appearance altogether was truly awful and alarming. By noon, the light that had remained in the eastern part of the horizon disappeared, and complete darkness had covered the face of day ... The darkness was so profound throughout the remainder of the day, that I never saw anything equal to it in the darkest night; it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye.
Across a 600-kilometer radius, darkness descended for two days, while Tambora’s ash cloud expanded to cover a region nearly the size of the continental United States. The entire Southeast Asian region was blanketed in volcanic debris for a week. Day after dark day, British officials conducted business by candlelight, as the death toll mounted.
Months after the eruption, the atmosphere remained heavy with dust—the sun a blur. Drinking water contaminated by fluorine-rich ash spread disease and with 95 percent of the rice crop in the field at the time of the eruption, the threat of starvation was immediate and universal. In their desperation for food, islanders were reduced to eating dry leaves and their much-valued horseflesh. By the time the acute starvation crisis was over, Sumbawa had lost half its population to famine and disease, while most of the rest had fled to other islands.
Tambora’s violent impact on global weather patterns was due, in part, to the already unstable conditions prevailing at the time of its eruption. A major tropical volcano had blown up six years prior, in 1809. This cooling event, hugely amplified by the sublime Tambora eruption in 1815, ensured extreme volcanic weather across the entire decade.
A flurry of research since the discovery of the 1809 eruption has resulted in the identification of the 1810–19 decade as a whole as the coldest in the historical record—a gloomy distinction. A 2008 modeling study concluded Tambora’s eruption to have had by far the largest impact on global mean surface air temperatures among volcanic events since 1610, while the 1809 volcano ranked second over that same period, measuring just over half Tambora’s decline. Two papers published the following year confirmed the status of the 1810s as “probably the coldest during the past 500 years or longer,” a fact directly attributable to the proximity of the two major tropical eruptions.
The spectacular eruption increased that cooling to a truly dire extent, contributing to an overall decline of global average temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius across the decade. One-and-a-half degrees might seem a small number, but as a sustained decline characterized by a sharp rise in extreme weather events—floods, droughts, storms, and summer frosts—the chilled global climate system of the 1810s had devastating impacts on human agriculture, food supply, and disease ecologies.
The Scottish meteorologist George Mackenzie kept meticulous records of cloudy skies between 1803 and 1821 over various parts of the British Isles. Where lovely clear summer days in the earlier period (1803–10) averaged over 20, in the volcanic decade (1811–20) that figure dropped to barely five. For 1816, the Year Without a Summer, Mackenzie recorded no clear days at all.
On the eve of the summer of 1816, 18-year-old Mary Godwin took flight with her lover, Percy Shelley, and their baby for Switzerland, escaping the chilly atmosphere of her father’s house in London. Mary’s young stepsister, Claire Clairmont, accompanied them, eager to reunite with her own poet-lover, Lord Byron, who had left England for Geneva a week earlier. Mary’s other sister, the ever dispensable Fanny, was left behind.
The dismal, often terrifying weather of the summer of 1816 is a touchstone of the ensuing correspondence between the sisters. In a letter to Fanny, written on her arrival in Geneva, Mary describes their ascent of the Alps “amidst a violent storm of wind and rain.” The cold was “excessive” and the villagers complained of the lateness of the spring. On their alpine descent days later, a snowstorm ruined their view of Geneva and its famous lake. In her return letter, Fanny expresses sympathy for Mary’s bad luck, reporting that it was “dreadfully dreary and rainy” in London too, and very cold.
Stormy nor’easters are standard features of Genevan weather in summertime, careening from the mountains to whip the waters of the lake into a sirocco of foam. Beginning in June 1816, these annual storms attained a manic intensity not witnessed before or since. “An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house,” Mary wrote to Fanny on the first of June from Maison Chappuis, their rented house on the shores of Lake Geneva: “One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.” A diarist in nearby Montreux compared the bodily impact of these deafening thunderclaps to a heart attack.
In fact, the year 1816 remains the coldest, wettest Geneva summer since records began in 1753. That unforgettable year, 130 days of rain between April and September swelled the waters of Lake Geneva, flooding the city. Up in the mountains the snow refused to melt. Clouds hung heavy, while the winds blew bitingly cold. In some parts of the inundated city, transport was only possible by boat. A cold northwest wind from the Jura mountains—called le joran by locals—swept relentlessly across the lake. The Montreux diarist called the persistent snows and le joran “the twin evil genies of 1816.” Tourists complained they couldn’t recognize the famously picturesque landscape because of the constant wind and avalanches, which drove snow across vast areas of the plains.
On the night of June 13, 1816, the Shelleys’ splendidly domiciled neighbor, Lord Byron, stood out on the balcony of the lakeside Villa Diodati to witness “the mightiest of the storms” that he—well-traveled aristocrat that he was—had ever seen. He memorialized that tumultuous night in his wildly popular poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:
The sky is changed—and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong ...
And now again ’tis black,—and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.
In Byron’s imagination, the Tamboran storms of 1816 achieve volcanic dimensions—like an “earthquake’s birth”—and take delight in their destructive power.
GHOST STORY: One night in1816, in a villa on Lake Geneva, in the dark, dismal atmosphere created by Tambora’s eruption, poets (at left) Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and writer Mary Shelley, told ghost stories that gave birth to Frankenstein’s monster and the Byronic Dracula.Wikipedia
What caused the terrible weather conditions over Britain and western Europe in 1816–18? The relation between volcanism and climate depends on eruptive scale. Volcanic ejecta and gases must penetrate skyward high enough to reach the stratosphere where, in its cold lower reaches, sulfate aerosols form. These then enter the meridional currents of the global climate system, disrupting normal patterns of temperature and precipitation across the hemispheres. Tambora’s April 1815 eruption launched enormous volumes of long-suppressed volcanic rock and gases more than 25 miles into the stratosphere. This volcanic plume—consisting of as much as 12 cubic miles of total matter—eventually spread across 386,000 square miles of the Earth’s atmosphere, an aerosol umbrella six times the size of the cloud produced by the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
In the first weeks after Tambora’s eruption, a vast volume of coarser ash particles—volcanic “dust”—cascaded back to Earth mixed with rain. But ejecta of smaller size—water vapor, molecules of sulfur and fluorine gases, and fine ash particles—remained suspended in the stratosphere, where a sequence of chemical reactions resulted in the formation of a 60-mega- ton sulfate aerosol layer. Over the following months, this dynamic, streamer-like cloud of aerosols—much smaller in size than the original volcanic matter—expanded by degrees to form a molecular screen of planetary scale, spread aloft by the winds and meridional currents of the world. In the course of an 18-month journey, it passed across both south and north poles, leaving a telltale sulfate imprint on the ice for paleo-climatologists to discover more than a century and a half later.
Once settled in the dry firmament of the stratosphere, Tambora’s global veil circulated above the weather dynamics of the atmosphere, comfortably distanced from the rain clouds that might have dispersed it. From there, its planet-girdling aerosol film continued to scatter shortwave solar radiation back into space until early 1818, while allowing much of the longwave radiant heat from the earth to escape. The resultant three-year cooling regime, unevenly distributed by the currents of the world’s major weather systems, barely affected some places on the globe (Russia, for instance, and the trans-Appalachian United States) but precipitated a drastic 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit seasonal decline in other regions, including Europe.
The first extreme impact of a major tropical eruption is felt in raw temperature. But in western Europe, biblical-style inundation during the 1816 summer growing season wrought the greatest havoc. Because of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun and the different heat absorption rates of land and sea, solar insolation of the planet is irregular. Uneven heating in turn creates an air pressure gradient across the latitudes of the globe. Wind is the weatherly expression of these temperature and pressure differentials, transporting heat from the tropics to the poles, moderating temperature extremes, and carrying evaporated water from the oceans over the land to support plant and animal life. The major meridional circulation patterns, measuring thousands of miles in breadth, transport energy and moisture horizontally across the globe, creating continental-scale weather patterns. Meanwhile, at smaller scales, the redistribution of heat and moisture through the vertical column of the atmosphere produces localized weather phenomena, such as thunderstorms.
Tambora’s influence on human history does not derive from extreme weather events considered in isolation but in the myriad environmental impacts of a climate system gone haywire.
In the summer after Tambora’s eruption, however, the aerosol loading of the stratosphere heated the upper layer, which bore down upon the atmosphere. The “tropopause” that marks the ceiling of the Earth’s atmosphere dropped lower, cooling air temperatures and displacing the jet streams, storm tracks, and meridional circulation patterns from their usual course. By early 1816, Tambora’s chilling envelope had created a radiation deficit across the North Atlantic, altering the dynamics of the vital Arctic Oscillation. Slower-churning warm waters north of the Azores pumped over-loads of moisture into the atmosphere, saturating the skies while enhancing the temperature gradient that fuels wind dynamics. Meanwhile, air pressure at sea level plummeted across the mid-latitudes of the North Atlantic, dragging cyclonic storm tracks southward. Pioneering British climate historian Hubert Lamb has calculated that the influential Icelandic low-pressure system shifted several degrees latitude to the south during the cold summers of the 1810s compared to 20th-century norms, settling in the unfamiliar domain of the British Isles, and thus ensuring colder, wetter conditions for all of western Europe.
Both computer models and historical data draw a dramatic picture of Tambora-driven storms hammering Britain and western Europe. A recent computer simulation conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado showed fierce westerly winds in the North Atlantic in the aftermath of a major tropical eruption, while a parallel study based on multiproxy reconstructions of volcanic impacts on European climate since 1500 concluded that volcanic weather drives the increased “advection of maritime air from the North Atlantic,” meaning “stronger westerlies” and “anomalously wet conditions over Northern Europe.”
Back at the ground level of observed weather phenomena, an archival study of Scottish weather has found that, in the 1816–18 period, gale-force winds battered Edinburgh at a rate and intensity unmatched in over 200 years of record keeping. In January 1818, a particularly violent storm nearly destroyed the beloved St. John’s Chapel in the heart of the city. The slowing of oceanic currents in response to the overall deficit of solar radiation post-Tambora had left unusual volumes of heated water churning through the critical area between Iceland and the Azores, sapping air pressure, energizing westerly winds, and giving shape to titanic storms.
It was in this literally electric atmosphere that the Shelley party in Geneva, with Byron attached, conceived the idea of a ghost story contest, to entertain themselves indoors during this cold, wild summer. On the night of June 18, 1816, while another volcanic summer thunderstorm raged around them, Mary and Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and Byron’s doctor-companion John Polidori recited the poet Coleridge’s recent volume of gothic verse to each other in the candlelit dimness at the Villa Diodati. In his 1986 movie about the Shelley circle that summer, British film director Ken Russell imagines Shelley gulping tincture of opium while Claire Clairmont performs fellatio on Byron, recumbent in a chair. Group sex in the drawing room might be implausible, even for the Shelley circle, but drug taking is very likely, inspired by Coleridge, the poet-addict supreme. How else to explain Shelley’s running screaming from the room at Byron’s recitation of the psychosexual “Christabel,” tormented by his vision of a bare-chested Mary Shelley with eyes instead of nipples?
From such antics, Byron conceived the outline of a modern vampire tale, which the bitter Polidori would later appropriate and publish under Byron’s name as a satire on his employer’s cruel aristocratic hauteur and sexual voracity. For Mary, the lurid events of this stormy night gave literary body to her own distracted musings on the ghost story competition, instituted two nights earlier. She would write a horror story of her own, about a doomed monster brought unwittingly to life during a storm. As Percy Shelley later wrote, the novel itself seemed generated by “the magnificent energy and swiftness of a tempest.” Thus it was that the unique creative synergies of this remarkable group of college-age tourists—in the course of a few weeks’ biblical weather—gave birth to two singular icons of modern popular culture: Frankenstein’s monster and the Byronic Dracula.
YELLOW EYE: An illustration from an 1831 edition of Frankenstein features this indelible line from the novel: “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the creature open.”British Library
A week after the memorable night of June 18, Byron and Shelley almost came to grief sailing on Lake Geneva, caught unawares as another violent storm swept in from the east. “The wind gradually increased in violence,” Shelley recalled, “until it blew tremendously; and, as it came from the remotest extremity of the lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam.” By some miracle they found a sheltered port, where even the storm-hardened locals exchanged “looks of wonder.” Onshore, trees had blown down or been shattered by lightning.
The pyrotechnical lightning displays of June 1816 ignited the literary imagination of Mary Shelley. In Frankenstein, she uses the experience of a violent thunderstorm as the scene of fateful inspiration for her young, doomed scientist:
When I was about fifteen years old ... we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump.
Frankenstein’s life is changed in this moment; he devotes himself, with maniacal energy, to the study of electricity and galvanism. In the fierce smithy of that Tamboran storm, Frankenstein is born as the anti-superhero of modernity—the “Modern Prometheus”—stealer of the gods’ fire.
Tambura’s influence on human history does not derive from extreme weather events considered in isolation but in the myriad environmental impacts of a climate system gone haywire. As a result of the prolonged poor weather, crop yields across the British Isles and western Europe plummeted by 75 percent and more in 1816–17. In the first summer of Tambora’s cold, wet, and windy regime, the European harvest languished miserably. Farmers left their crops in the field as long as they dared, hoping some fraction might mature in late-coming sunshine. But the longed-for warm spell never arrived and at last, in October, they surrendered. Potato crops were left to rot, while entire fields of barley and oats lay blanketed in snow until the following spring.
In Germany, the descent from bad weather to crop failure to mass starvation conditions took a frighteningly rapid course. Carl von Clausewitz, the military tactician, witnessed “heartrending” scenes on his horseback travels through the Rhine country in the spring of 1817: “I saw decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes.” In the winter of 1817, in Augsburg, Memmingen, and other German towns, riots erupted over the rumored export of corn to starving Switzerland, while the locals were reduced to eating horse and dog flesh.
Meanwhile, back in England, riots broke out in the East Anglian counties as early as May 1816. Armed laborers bearing flags with the slogan “Bread or Blood” marched on the cathedral town of Ely, held its magistrates hostage, and fought a pitched battle against the militia.
In his magisterial account of the social and economic upheaval in Europe during the Tambora period, historian John Post has shown the scale of human suffering to be worst in Switzerland, home to Shelley and her circle in 1816. Even in normal times, a Swiss family devoted at least half its income to buying bread. Already by August 1816, bread was scarce, and in December, bakers in Montreux threatened to cease production unless they could be allowed to raise prices. With imminent famine came the threat of “soulèvements”: violent uprisings. Bakers were set upon by starving mobs in the market towns and their shops destroyed. The English ambassador to Switzerland, Stratford Canning, wrote to his prime minister that an army of peasants, unemployed and starving, was assembling to march on Lausanne.
Most shocking of all was the fate of some desperate mothers. In horrific circumstances repeated around the world in the Tambora period, some Swiss families abandoned their offspring in the crisis, while others chose killing their children as the more humane course. For this crime, some starving women were apprehended and decapitated. Thousands of Swiss with more means and resilience emigrated east to prosperous Russia, while others set off along the Rhine to Holland and sailed from there to North America, which witnessed its first significant wave of refugee European migration in the 19th century. The numbers of European immigrants arriving at U.S. ports in 1817 more than doubled the number of any previous year.
Devastated by famine and disease in the Tambora period, the poor of Europe hurriedly buried their dead before resuming the bitter fight for their own survival. In the worst cases, children were abandoned by their families and died alone in the fields or by the roadside. The well-born members of the Shelley circle were never reduced to such abysmal circumstances. They did not experience the food crises that afflicted millions among the rural populations of western Europe in the Tambora period. Yet the Shelleys’ celebrated writings were enmeshed within the web of ecological breakdown following the Tambora eruption.
Byron and Percy Shelley were companions on a weeklong walking tour of Alpine Switzerland in June 1816, during which they debated poetry, metaphysics, and the future of mankind but also found time to remark on the village children they encountered, who “appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats.” In Frankenstein, the Doctor’s benighted creation assumes a similar grotesque shape: a barely human creature, deformed, crooked, and enlarged. Like the hordes of refugees on the roads of Europe seeking aid in 1816–18, the Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, horror and abomination. As the indigent Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season” but “still more from the barbarity of man.”
As remarkable a feat of literary imagination as Frankenstein is, Mary Shelley was not wanting for real-world inspiration for her horror story, namely the deteriorating rural populations of Europe, in the climatic upheaval of Mount Tambora.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood is the author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.
Excerpted from Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Copyright @ 2014 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
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Industry lawsuits try to paint environmental activism as illegal racket.
Logging and pipeline companies are using a new legal tactic to seek damages from Greenpeace and other groups. The long-shot cases are having a chilling effect.
On a bright afternoon in May 2016, two men in a silver SUV pulled into Kelly Martin's driveway. One of them, tall and beefy with a crew cut, walked up to her front door.
"The guy said, 'Is Joshua Martin home?' and I said, 'No, who are you?" recalled Kelly. "He said, 'I'm with a company that's talking to current and former employees of ForestEthics, and I'm wondering if he still works there'."
Joshua had left ForestEthics, renamed Stand last year, to run the Environmental Paper Network. Kelly asked to see the stranger's ID and to snap a picture on her phone. Instead, the man retreated to the SUV and "they literally peeled out of the driveway."
Around the same time, Aaron Sanger, another former employee of Stand, also received a visit from two men asking similar questions. So did others, some of them former employees of Greenpeace.
Then, on the last day of that month, Greenpeace and Stand were hit with an unusual lawsuit brought by Resolute Forest Products, one of Canada's largest logging and paper companies, that could cost the groups hundreds of millions of dollars if Resolute wins.
The timber company said the organizations, which for years had campaigned against Resolute's logging in Canada's boreal forest, were conspiring illegally to extort the company's customers and defraud their own donors.
Invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a federal conspiracy law devised to ensnare mobsters, the suit accuses the organizations, as well as several green campaigners individually and numerous unidentified "co-conspirators," of running what amounts to a giant racket.
"Maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace's true objective," the complaint says. "Its campaigns are consistently based on sensational misinformation untethered to facts or science, but crafted instead to induce strong emotions and, thereby, donations." Dozens of the group's campaign emails and tweets, it said, constituted wire fraud.
"As an NGO, that is a deeply chilling argument," said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which joined eight other groups to file an amici curiae brief supporting a move to dismiss Resolute's case.
The far-reaching lawsuit has seized attention across the environmental advocacy and legal communities. Arguments are to be heard in court next week.
The Resolute lawsuit was unprecedented. Then several months ago, former employees of Greenpeace and the environmental advocacy group 350.org were similarly visited by investigators. In August, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline filed a separate RICO suit against Greenpeace and two smaller groups, Banktrack and Earth First!. The complaint echoes Resolute's claims: a broad conspiracy against a major company, advocacy groups running an illegal "enterprise" to further their own interests while damaging the company, Energy Transfer Partners. It even alleges support for eco-terrorism, a violation of the Patriot Act, and drug trafficking.
It was filed by the same lawyer who represents Resolute—Michael J. Bowe, of the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, who is also a member of President Donald Trump's personal legal team.
"The Energy Transfer Partners lawsuit against Greenpeace is perhaps the most aggressive SLAPP-type suit that I've ever seen," said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, using the acronym for a lawsuit that aims to silence political advocacy. "The paper practically bursts into flames in your hands."
While the second lawsuit names only three defendants, together with unnamed "co-conspirators," it also accuses many of the nation's leading environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and 350.org, of participating in a sprawling enterprise to disrupt business and defraud donors.
"This was precisely what we were concerned we would see," said Muffett of CIEL. Dozens of organizations, American Indian tribes and countless individuals were involved in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. By naming a handful of them and unnamed co-conspirators, the suit may cause anyone with any ties to the movement to think twice before sending the next campaign email or launching a new effort, Muffett said.
"Those groups will be looking at this and trying to decide on how to respond and what it means for their campaigns going forward, not only on Dakota Access but other campaigns as well. And that is, in all likelihood, a core strategy of a case like this."
A Powerful Message
Kasowitz Benson Torres has earned a reputation as a particularly brash New York law firm. The waiting room of its Manhattan offices displays a brochure of media mentions, including several about the firm's close relationship with Trump. When Timothy O'Brien reported in his 2005 book, "TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald," that the future president was worth between $150 million and $250 million, not the billions he boasted, Trump hired Kasowitz to sue O'Brien for $5 billion. The case dragged on for five years before being dismissed.
It may have been the firm's work for a Canadian insurance company, however, that captured the attention of Resolute.
In 2006, Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited hired Bowe and Kasowitz to sue several hedge funds, accusing them of operating a criminal enterprise to drive down the company's share price and boost their short-sale profits. The case relied on New Jersey's RICO statute, and while it was dismissed in 2012, Fairfax appealed and in April won a ruling saying it could proceed with some of its claims. Bradley Martin, Fairfax's vice president of strategic investments, is chairman of Resolute's board of directors.
Bowe said that while his clients suffered damages, "defamation cases also typically involve an element of restoring your reputation. In fact, sometimes plaintiffs who don't have substantial damages sue primarily to clear their reputations," he said. Behind Bowe's desk hangs an American flag from the battle of Fallujah, among the bloodiest of the Iraq War. "I think the filing of a suit in court sends the most credible message that what they're saying about you is not true."
The Resolute case has its origins in a long-running environmental campaign focusing on Canada's boreal forest, a thick green stripe across much of the country. It's one of the world's largest stores of carbon, and environmental groups say it's under increasing pressure from logging operations. In 2012, Greenpeace Canada released a report purporting to show that Resolute was operating in parts of the forest it had agreed to stay out of. It turned out, however, that the area in question was not part of the protected forest. Greenpeace later issued an apology and said it would retract any material that drew on the assessment.
There's some disagreement on whether Resolute's logging practices stand out from its peers—many environmentalists say they do, but some people familiar with its work dismiss the claim. What everyone interviewed for this article agreed on is that unlike many of its peers, Resolute has resisted settling with environmentalists. In 2013, it sued Greenpeace Canada in an ongoing Canadian defamation suit over the boreal campaign. And after Greenpeace continued its work, and targeted many of Resolute's American customers, Resolute eventually filed its U.S. RICO claim, targeting the organization's U.S. and international arms, as well.
In 124 pages of detailed and passionate language, the complaint alleges not only that the defendants lied in order to harm Resolute's business, but that their primary objective is not to protect the environment but to raise money. It describes a "blitzkrieg attack" of threats against the company's customers unless they dropped Resolute. Some, like Kimberly-Clark, UPM, Best Buy and News Corp have either ended contracts or requested the contracts be altered to alleviate concerns, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit says the groups impersonated company employees to gain proprietary information and suggests Greenpeace was associated with a hack of the websites of Resolute and Best Buy. Beyond the 2012 error that Greenpeace retracted, the lawsuit says Greenpeace defamed the company by, among other things, calling it a "forest destroyer." In addition to Greenpeace and Stand, the lawsuit names several of the organizations' employees personally as defendants. The co-conspirators—or John and Jane Does—it says, are people of unknown identity who assisted Greenpeace's work, including "cyber-hacktivists, environmental activists, and certain foundations directing funds to the defendants." The suit seeks damages to be determined in a trial, but cites a claim by Greenpeace to have cost the company at least $80 million. RICO claims entitle plaintiffs to recover triple damages, in this case potentially more than $240 million.
On Oct. 10, Greenpeace will ask a federal judge in California to dismiss the case. The group submitted a similar motion last year in Georgia, where the suit was originally filed. The Georgia judge later moved the case to California, where two of the defendants are based, saying Resolute had not provided any "factual basis from which to infer that defendants committed fraud or extortion" in Georgia. "Rather, the allegations in the complaint, at best, support the inference that the defendants organized and held a protest in Augusta."
"It is very alarming that you can have plaintiffs like this, representing corporate interests attacking legitimate critics doing advocacy work by just drafting a complaint, throwing whatever in there, stretching racketeering law and going after constitutionally protected free speech by throwing labels out there basically trying to criminalize legitimate advocacy work," said Tom Wetterer, Greenpeace's general counsel.
Changing the Conversation
Over the past year, several energy corporations have filed lawsuits against critics. Murray Energy Corp., an Ohio-based coal company, filed a libel claim against The New York Times in May after it published an editorial critical of the company, and the following month filed another suit against comedian John Oliver, HBO, Time Warner and some staff members of his show, "Last Week Tonight." In August, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., which has been accused of polluting residential water wells in Pennsylvania, sued one of the residents and his lawyers, saying they had harmed the company by filing a lawsuit, later withdrawn, that Cabot considered frivolous. The same month, a mining company run by the son of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice sued two Kentucky regulators—personally—alleging that they interfered with the company's business.
The suits against Greenpeace, however, are broader in scope, and because of their use of racketeering law, potentially much more damaging. "They can change the tenor of the debate," said Joshua Galperin, who runs the Environmental Protection Clinic at Yale Law School. The cases, he said, are not simply legal acts, but political too.
"Now wouldn't be a bad time for certain industries to follow Resolute's lead and say, 'let's try to change the conversation. Let's see if we can get the Trump administration to intervene in these lawsuits, to get behind us, to bring perhaps even criminal RICO charges against groups like Greenpeace," he said. "Now wouldn't be a bad time to try these aggressive tactics, unfortunately."
The day the Resolute lawsuit was filed, Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar at Case Western Reserve University of Law, wrote about it in a blog published by the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board offered conditional support. Others, including Steve Forbes, welcomed the lawsuit in Investor's Business Daily and the National Review.
Brandon Phillips, of the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, wrote a letter published in the Wall Street Journal saying, "Bravo to Resolute Forest Products and here's hoping the discovery process in the litigation shines a light on the misconduct that environmental journalists have apparently ignored for far too long."
Marita Noon, in a column for Breitbart and the American Spectator, said: "Hopefully other companies will now tune into the public's change in attitude and with firmness and determination also fight back to protect shareholders and workers." She placed Resolute's fight in the political context of growing support for Trump's presidential campaign.
H. Sterling Burnett, of the conservative Heartland Institute, well known for its denial of mainstream climate science, said in an interview that other companies have been too quick to cave to the demands of environmentalists, and that the RICO suits may change that. "The Resolute case is one small thread," he said, "but you can take a thread and unravel a whole sweater."
Adler, a contributing editor to the National Review Online, spent years at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose litigation has marked climate policy debates. "There is a view in the free market community that corporations don't fight back enough and are too quick to write the terms of their own surrender," he said.
Adler said he's not a fan of using RICO in the way that Kasowitz Benson Torres has, but that he has little sympathy for Greenpeace. And he has little doubt that companies are watching. "If weapons are lying around, someone's going to pick them up."
Bowe said he's spoken with several other companies interested in filing similar lawsuits—both before and after Energy Transfer Partners filed its case in August—though he would not disclose any details about the companies or potential targets. Speaking from his office, with plate glass windows looking over midtown Manhattan, he said his firm is not shopping the case to potential clients, that he's not allowed to do so.
A Perfect Boogeyman
In December 2014, as negotiators from around the world gathered in Lima, Peru, for the United Nations-sponsored climate change talks, a group of Greenpeace activists laid out a pro-renewable energy message in giant yellow fabric letters next to some of the nation's famous Nazca Lines, an archeological site, and photographed the episode from above. Many Peruvians, as well as diplomats at the talks, were outraged by the stunt, and the Peruvian government said the activists damaged the site.
Since its founding in 1971, Greenpeace has embraced this type of high-profile antics that self-consciously skirt the edges of legality and politesse. They also make Greenpeace the perfect boogeyman for conservatives and corporate leaders who have long pushed back against environmentalists, considering them out-of-touch radicals bent on crippling economic growth. (The Nazca Lines episode, for which Greenpeace later apologized, is listed in Resolute's complaint as evidence that the organization does more harm than good.)
Greenpeace is international in reach, nipping at corporate heels no matter where they tread, and in recent decades it has become one of the most effective groups at pressing companies to reform. For any practice that Greenpeace wants changed—clearing Amazonian forests for soy or Indonesian ones for palm oil—the group searches the supply chain for a major consumer brand, asks it to change suppliers, and threatens to paint the brand as complicit in environmental pillage if it refuses. The group has sent protesters dressed as chickens to McDonald's franchises in London to protest logging in the Amazon, deftly mimicked a Dove soap public service announcement in Canada to link its parent company, Unilever, to deforestation in Indonesia, and dropped banners across the front of Procter & Gamble's corporate headquarters for its sourcing of palm oil. The rhetoric is blunt and hyperbolic. And it's been remarkably effective, winning concessions, cooperation and even grudging respect from some of the world's best-known corporations.
Kimberly-Clark agreed to boost its use of recycled and environmentally certified wood fiber in 2009 after a years-long Greenpeace campaign. McDonald's agreed to work with the group to reduce deforestation in the Amazon.
The case brought by Energy Transfer Partners is an explicit attack not just on Greenpeace and the other defendants, but on this method, which it calls the "Greenpeace Model."
The pipeline company says the groups damaged its business through their protests against the pipeline, and also through their campaigns to pressure banks to cut off funding. It says they lied about the company's practices—claiming it hadn't consulted with Indian tribes and that the project hadn't received a thorough environmental review. (In December, the Obama administration ordered a more comprehensive environmental review of alternative routes, but the Trump administration later approved the pipeline before the review was finished.) The suit also names nine other groups, including the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and 350.org, as members of this "criminal enterprise," though most are not included as defendants. Together with the Resolute suit, which names Stand, the cases go after much of this uncompromising wing of environmentalism.
"An attack against Greenpeace and Stand, two groups that have been really at the forefront of corporate campaigns, is not just an attack on those groups but is an attack on the strategy that NGOs have used to really bring corporations back under control in terms of their social and environmental behavior," said Michael Marx, who runs CorpEthics, an environmental consulting firm that works with several of the named groups. The two complaints list other campaigns that Greenpeace has engaged in, including its work against genetically modified crops, Canada's tar sands and a campaign on sustainable fishing. "If Resolute is successful in a case like this, they're basically taking away what's become what I think is the real driver in the social responsibility movement."
The lawsuits make extraordinary claims, comparing the named environmental organizations to "parasites" and a "predatory pack preying on legitimate businesses."
Many legal experts and environmentalists say it's too soon to say whether the suits will pose a serious threat to the groups or to the advocacy community more broadly. Several, including Galperin, say the cases are unlikely to prevail in court. They may not need to.
Revealing the Whole Iceberg
The Resolute suit has now been running for nearly a year and a half, requiring Greenpeace and Stand to spend money and time filing briefs, responding to motions and traveling to court. Defendants in the Energy Transfer Partners case face a similar road ahead, with the filing of motions scheduled to last into March.
"We're confident they're not going to win, we're confident they're going to spend probably 10 times as much money as we're going to spend defending it, but this is definitely a difficult thing to deal with," said Todd Paglia, Stand's executive director, who was also named as a defendant. Paglia said the group has already lost support from one funder who was wary of being dragged into a lawsuit, accounting for about a quarter of the funding for its boreal campaign. "If we weren't really aggressive in trying to control costs, in trying to maintain our focus on our campaigns and revenue, it would be very easy for this lawsuit to turn into not just harassment but a death threat."
Greenpeace is much larger, with nearly $400 million in revenue from all its international branches last year. If it lost in court, the payout could be substantial. (Energy Transfer Partners didn't specify a figure, saying it had lost hundreds of millions.) But Tom Wetterer, Greenpeace's general counsel, said that's not the goal, or the danger, of the cases. "I don't think it's really about the money," he said. "I think they have to realize that their claims are not strong, that it's the process that they're really focused on, regardless of the end. It's really a means to drag us through the legal process."
The groups have tried to capitalize on the lawsuits, too. Greenpeace launched a new campaign asking authors and publishers—whom Resolute supplies with paper—to denounce the company's tactics, while Stand has asked supporters to rally behind it, adding an appeal for donations at the bottom of the message.
Energy Transfer Partners declined to comment, referring questions to Bowe. In an interview in August, Kelcy Warren, the company's chief executive, told a North Dakota television station that "We've created this kind of tolerance where, oh my gosh, you can't challenge these people in fear that someone is going to say you're not a friend of the environment. That's nonsense," he said. "Could we get some monetary damages out of this thing, and probably will we? Yeah, sure. Is that my primary objective? Absolutely not. It's to send a message, you can't do this, this is unlawful and it's not going to be tolerated in the United States."
Seth Kursman, Resolute's vice president for corporate communications, said in a written statement to InsideClimate News that "we decided to draw the line, unapologetically and forcefully defending our integrity."
The case has already provided a document trail that's proved useful to the company and its allies. In a January filing, Greenpeace wrote that some of its statements were "heated rhetoric" and opinion, and not actionable. Richard Garneau, the company's chief executive, drew on the quote in a column in the National Review, calling it an admission of lying. The cry was echoed in the Daily Caller, the oil and gas industry website Energy in Depth, and a site run by the prominent corporate public relations consultant Richard Berman, whose firm's tagline is "Change the Debate." Energy Transfer Partners cited the filing in its complaint.
A dozen media and advocacy organizations, in a second amici curiae brief supporting Greenpeace and Stand, warned that using RICO was "clearly an attempt at an end-run around the protections of the First Amendment." For a more common defamation case to proceed, plaintiffs must prove a defendant acted with "actual malice," meaning they either knew what they said was false or they should have known. It's unclear, some legal experts say, whether the same standard would apply under RICO, potentially making it easier for the case to proceed to discovery.
Among those who signed the brief was the First Amendment Coalition, which until January was led by Peter Scheer. He said he doubts Resolute will win the RICO case, but that if it drags on long enough, it could provide a model for silencing defendants, particularly smaller groups.
"It is something that is greatly subject to abuse because it gives the plaintiff so much leverage that it can force the defendant to settle," he said. "It's like an extortion law."
Bowe, the lawyer representing the companies, dismissed the idea that RICO would weaken First Amendment protections.
"Certain elements of the statute allow you to hold people accountable who might not be held accountable in a defamation case," he said. "If you're dealing with a group acting in concert, you want to hold accountable those who are directing and funding and calling the shots, not just the people doing the acts."
Enter the John and Jane Does. "When you get to discovery, the whole iceberg becomes revealed," Bowe said. "There might be people there who you weren't aware were involved. It could be funders, it could be foundations." A foundation could be implicated, he said, if it was closely involved in the campaign and its messaging.
Marx, of CorpEthics, worries that the suits have already intimidated some of his peers. "Even the threat that companies might do it could have a chilling effect both on the foundations that fund this work and on the groups that do these kinds of campaigns," he said.
Several people interviewed for this article said that threat quietly murmurs in the back of their mind. One of them is Joshua Martin, among the targets of the private investigators. The investigators never identified themselves as working for the Kasowitz firm; Bowe would not confirm or deny that he sent them.
"As soon as that lawsuit came out, I read the whole thing and I looked for my name," Martin said. "I just think that psychologically that's interesting in terms of the potentially intimidating impact that the visits have."
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We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost.
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable 'food Fordism.'
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable ‘food Fordism’
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK.
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK. Photograph: For Guardian investigation with ITN
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Tuesday 3 October 2017 01.00 EDT
The dirty business of chicken processing is in the spotlight, with a Guardian undercover abattoir investigation revealing dodgy practices. As supermarkets suspend sales from the factory involved and Labour promises a parliamentary inquiry, some members of the food industry are sighing at the media’s obsession with the subject of poultry hygiene. But the subject will keep coming up, however much business wishes it away, because industrial chicken is one of the defining commodities of our era. Its cheapness comes at a high price.
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Meat production has quintupled in my lifetime, in large part thanks to the ubiquitous skinless factory chicken breast, and chicken accounts for around half of the meat we eat. At any one time there are more than twice as many chickens on Earth as humans – around 19 billion of them, bred to put on weight at turbocharged rates and mature in record time as uniform units of production that fit abattoir machinery. We have invented food Fordism – meat for the masses from the conveyor belt, no longer a luxury but an everyday ingredient. But, for all its apparent democratising possibilities, it is a commodity fraught with inescapable dilemmas.
Intensive livestock production is one of the most significant drivers of climate breakdown. It contributes nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the whole global transport sector. True, feedlot cattle leave a greater environmental footprint than poultry, but if you care about mitigating global warming, plant-based proteins are far better than intensively reared birds. Most of us in developed countries eat far more protein than we actually need for health, and most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding like Marie Antoinette, but the price of cheap is too high
As the world’s population grows, the question of how we produce enough to feed everyone becomes ever more urgent. Intensively reared livestock is an inefficient way of meeting needs. Farm an acre of decent land and you can produce 20kg (45lb) of animal protein from it; give the same acre over to producing wheat and you’ll get 63kg of protein. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed directly to people, there might be just enough food to go round when population peaks. If instead we continue to spread our industrial meat habit to poorer countries, we’ll need three planets to feed the world. The ethical argument is overwhelming: we need to get back to thinking of meat as a luxury, to be enjoyed occasionally, if not entirely forsworn.
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The reason the sector is beset by repeated scandals is that it is economically unsustainable. Even leaving aside the big planetary questions, meat can only be this cheap if the price is paid elsewhere. The livestock revolution took off in the 1950s because of three factors: cheap energy, which allowed farmers to house animals indoors; cheap synthetic fertiliser, which produced surplus grain for concentrated feed; and the mass production of cheap drugs, particularly antibiotics – you can only keep large numbers of birds in close confinement if you have the means to control the disease that inevitably accompanies the practice.
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For centuries before that, farmers had been constrained in their production by how much their land could support. Chickens were fed waste and acted as scavengers of food and insects, allowed to range free so that they could eat food that would otherwise go unused, with the added advantage that they spread their manure as they went.
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The next leap forward for industrial chicken production came with the development of processing machinery in the 1960s – an engineering feat that automated the mass slaughter, plucking, eviscerating and cutting of birds in one continuous conveyor belt. Large numbers of workers are still needed to process chickens, but they are in low-skilled production-line jobs. All this slashed costs and allowed the populations of developed countries to consume meat in a completely new way.
But now the consequences are coming home to roost. Energy is no longer cheap; nor is the grain needed for concentrated feed, despite agricultural subsidies. Some of the raw materials for fertiliser are running out globally. Frontline antibiotics needed for humans are losing their efficacy in large part because of overuse in farming. Supermarkets with their oligopolies of buying power have used cheap chicken as a weapon in their price wars and kept prices low, so that processors have to work on high volumes with low margins, despite the pressure of rising costs.
The sector is highly concentrated, with just a few corporate players. Just five companies account for 90% of the birds slaughtered in Britain each week. The pressure to cut corners in factories and sweat capital-intensive machinery, leaving little time for cleaning, is intense. Food-borne illness caused by chicken is a stubborn problem. Meanwhile, if a supermarket wanted to go elsewhere to punish an errant supplier, it has little choice left.
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There’s plenty you could do to make it a more sustainable industry. You could slow the growing time and give birds more room on farms, using less engineered breeds that take 12 weeks, rather than just over a month to reach slaughter weight. That would help curb some of the cruellest aspects of the business, which see densely packed, overbred birds, prone to disease and bacterial infection, collapsing under their own weight. But that would cost more. In the factory you could slow the speed of the lines, so that cross-contamination of carcasses was less likely, and workers’ jobs less relentlessly tough and unpleasant, thus easing the pressure to break hygiene rules and making the sector more attractive to local staff. But that, too, would cost more.
We know roughly how much more, since the top end of organic production already does these things, and a posh chicken from that sort of outlet is three to four times as expensive as a conventional supermarket one. But there are hardly votes in arguing we should pay that much for our chicken. Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding Marie Antoinette-ish. But the price of cheap is too high, and we should probably be eating something else.
• Felicity Lawrence is special correspondent for the Guardian
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Can Hollywood movies about climate change make a difference?
To galvanize audiences: Don’t use apocalyptic plots. But a dose of humor? That might help.
How do you tell a story about the destruction of the world?
Movie- and TV-makers know how to do it with aliens, of course, or suggest it with invented political intrigue and rogue leaders. But capturing the real global threat of climate change is far harder than filming any spaceship landing. Just ask Darren Aronofsky, whose recent thriller, “Mother!,” buried his climate-change message in allegory.
“It’s really tough,” said Fisher Stevens, the filmmaker and actor. “It’s not a very sexy subject, and people just don’t want to deal with it and think about it.”
Mr. Stevens, who won an Oscar in 2010 as a producer of “The Cove,” a documentary about dolphin-hunting, used the star power of Leonardo DiCaprio for his latest environmental film, “Before the Flood,” which examined global warming in a way Mr. Stevens hoped would inspire viewers to change their habits. A 2016 National Geographic documentary, it found a sizable streaming and digital audience.
But getting Hollywood movies about climate change made is not easy. And when they do refer to it — as did the Roland Emmerich 2004 disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow” — they rarely do much to galvanize the public to action. Even well-intentioned filmmakers with carefully drafted cautionary tales often miss the mark, climate scientists say.
Part of the problem is simply plot, said Per Espen Stoknes, the author of “What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.”
“As opposed to terrorism or drugs, there is no clear enemy with climate change,” he said. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us. And it’s hard to go to war against ourselves.”
And when climate change is depicted on screen, it’s often in an onslaught of fire and brimstone, an apocalyptic vision that hardly leaves room for a hopeful human response.
That, climate researchers and social scientists say, is exactly the wrong message to give.
“Typically, if you really want to mobilize people to act, you don’t scare the hell out of them and convince them that the situation is hopeless,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the University of Michigan who is the author of “How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate.”
But that is just the kind of high-stakes film that Hollywood loves to produce — like “The Day After Tomorrow,” which depicted New York City as a frozen dystopian landscape. Or “Geostorm,” due Oct. 20, in which the climate goes apocalyptically haywire, thanks to satellites that malfunction.
Copious research shows that this kind of dystopian framing backfires, driving people further into denial and helplessness; instead of acting, they freeze.
“You have to frame these things so people feel like they have an entry point,” said Max Boykoff, a professor and director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Mr. Stevens, the filmmaker, agreed with this approach. “It’s going to turn people off if it’s doom and gloom,” he said. “Although it’s not easy to do, when you’re talking about climate change, as you can see with what’s happening now,” with the recent hurricanes. “It’s becoming apocalyptic.”
The question becomes how best to motivate people. “It’s a difficult balance,” said Mr. Hoffman. “You have to communicate the sense of urgency, otherwise you won’t have a sense of commitment.”
Some high-profile examples, like the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” may go too far.
“The movie was 100 percent about fear,” said Ed Maibach, a professor and director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “And during the credits, literally the credits, they made some recommendations about what we could do. That should’ve been a prominent part of the narrative, in telling people the highest value actions they could take.”
More recent documentaries and programs like “Years of Living Dangerously,” a National Geographic series in which different celebrity hosts investigate environmental issues around the world, hope to find the sweet spot between jolting audiences and inspiring them. David Gelber, a co-creator of the series, whose producers include the director James Cameron, said its makers were familiar with climate messaging research.
“The goal is to ensure that our audience doesn’t feel like they’re being fed their vegetables,” said Tim Pastore, president of original programming and production for the National Geographic channel. “We try not to create programming that is a cause for despair, but rather an opportunity.” Because, he added: “The greatest goal of climate change programs is to first find a new audience and stop preaching to the converted. At the end of the day, we’re trying to find new converts.”
But as the well-reviewed and little-seen little-seen “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” demonstrates, the right messaging doesn’t help if nobody catches it. “The term ‘climate change’ isn’t as sexy and ‘script friendly’ as most plotlines,” said Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association. The solution, some researchers said, was to employ a bit of misdirection. “Agriculture, water issues, environmental justice,” Ms. Levin said. “Those all are big issues that work really well dramatically without saying the words ‘climate change.’”
One bright spot in showing environmental alarm onscreen is children’s programs, Ms. Levin said, which “work beautifully for everyday practices and overall awareness. Parents often watch with them, and they learn together.” And climate change is a frequent topic of visual artists and writers, where the genre known as cli-fi is growing.
One thing too few people do, according to Mr. Boykoff, the University of Colorado researcher, is laugh about climate change. Alexander Payne’s forthcoming “Downsizing,” in which people are shrunk to tiny versions of themselves — thereby using less resources — takes a swing at that approach. Mr. Boykoff has had his students perform a comedy show about environmental destruction; a research paper on the outcome is being readied for publication. “If just scientists talking about their research and findings were successful” in motivating the public, “we’d be sorted by now,” Mr. Boykoff said. “But that’s not true. A lot of people don’t engage with these things through scientific ways of knowing. So the arts, the cultural sphere, is a really important part of this that’s underexplored so far.”
Mr. Maibach, the George Mason professor and an expert in polling on climate understanding, said the greatest problem facing climate communicators is that Americans are not talking about climate change enough — in any shape. “We call it the climate silence,” he said, “and it’s pretty profound.”
So, said Mr. Hoffman, the University of Michigan professor, we need “more movies, more TV, more music.”
“We have to touch people’s hearts on this,” he said. “It’s critical.”
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Puerto Rico’s slow-motion medical disaster.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases. Roads are blocked, supplies are stuck at the ports, and only 11 of Puerto Rico’s 69 hospitals are open. Doctors at one children’s hospital were forced to discharge 40 patients this week when their generator ran out of diesel fuel.
But the immediate need for treatment is only the beginning of the island's public health challenges. With the island’s entire power grid knocked out, Puerto Rico’s massive pharmaceutical manufacturing industry—which provides 30 percent of the island’s gross domestic product and 90,000 jobs—has been shut down. FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb announced this week that his agency is trying to shift production to the mainland US to prevent shortages of cancer drugs, immunosuppressants for transplant patients, and medical devices for diabetes patients. Bringing Puerto Rico back online will make a big difference for people living both on—and off—the island.
In the short term, energy is essential to keeping patients alive. Medicines like insulin to treat diabetes or tetanus vaccines need to be kept cool. That means either in a refrigerator at 45 degrees Fahrenheit (for seasonal flu or tetanus vaccines) or at room temperature, which is about 72 degrees (for insulin). But without air conditioning, Puerto Rico’s tropical climate is hitting the upper 80s this week. “Refrigeration and cold storage are really big issues, and will be for the forseeable future,” says one former federal emergency response official who asked not to be identified.
The patients most affected by the failing cold chain will be those with chronic conditions. One-fifth of Puerto Rico's population has some kind of disability, including half of those above age 65. Its 3.5 million residents have the highest prevalence of diabetes in the United States—nearly 13 percent compared to 8.7 percent on the US mainland. That helps make Puerto Rico the most vulnerable US territory to a natural disaster like Hurricane Maria, according to a recent study by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers .
Federal health officials say they are already seeing patients come into emergency clinics with chronic disease related problems. “People with the most dire need are dialysis patients,” says Lt. Cmdr. Garrett Martin-Yeboah of the US Public Health Service and the national clinical pharmacist to the Department of Health and Human Service’s assistant secretary for emergency preparedness and response. “They are on a good number of prescription medications. Because of the volume of medications and tenuousness of their condition, those are some of the patients we are concerned about.”
The immediate refrigeration problem is solvable. Martin-Yeboah said a squad of federal emergency care doctors who were stationed on the island before Maria struck brought battery-powered mini-fridges that can run four days without power. They also brought their own diesel generators—though a week after the storm left, there is still not enough fuel to run them. “There are some challenges in Puerto Rico with fuel and things like that,” says Martin-Yeboah, who coordinates medicines and supplies for HHS doctors. “We’ve had to go to the airport to retrieve medical supplies,” she says. “Our suppliers can get them to Puerto Rico, but can’t get it to the site.”
The Navy hospital ship Comfort, which was finally dispatched this week, may also help in the short-term, especially for trauma patients. The converted supertanker will bring 1,000 beds, 12 operating rooms, a CAT-scan, and radiology capabilities to Puerto Rico. Meanwhie, emergency responders are using ham radios to reach some communities and even considering air-dropping medicines into villages, according to Nicolette Louissaint, executive director of Healthcare Ready, a group that coordinates post-disaster medical supply chain between public agencies and private suppliers such as pharmacies and drug manufacturers.
“The most important part is how we support the patients,” Louissant says. “These disaster responses are massive logistical operations. We have to do unusual things. Folks are looking at how you can get up to the mountains, and what solutions to move medicines to people but also people to medicines.”
Louissant noted that less than 10 percent of the island’s pharmacies were open as of Wednesday. Overall, there is no panic over medicines, according to health officials working in Puerto Rico. But they are prepared for the situation to worsen if conditions don’t improve quickly. Chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes are often not counted in the final toll of natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. “These people end up dying from things that are preventable under ordinary circumstances,” said the former federal emergency official. “That’s what is going to start happening.”
But long-term, the effects of Puerto Rico's collapse may ripple far beyond the island. Twelve of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have manufacturing facilities on the island, according to the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company. As a result, Puerto Rico manufactures seven of the top 10 drugs sold globally including AstraZeneca's cholesterol treatment Crestor, Abbvie arthritis drug Humira, and Johnson & Johnson-owned HIV drug Prezista, USA Today reported. Those three companies have said supplies of their drugs are in good shape and drugmakers are working to get production up and running. Still, Puerto Rico officials say it may be months before the island's power grid is fixed.
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