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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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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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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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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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Is climate-themed fiction all too real? We asked the experts.
Some works of apocalyptic fiction are starting to feel too close for comfort. We chose seven of them and asked: How likely are they to come true?
CLIMATE
Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts
By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA SEPT. 26, 2017
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Credit Illustration by Jordin Isip
When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In “Ship Breaker,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a monster “Category 6” hurricane.
Now, his readers were asking: Is this what you were talking about?
Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So fiction writers like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention.
But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven climate-themed stories and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?
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CLIMATE EFFECT: WATER WARS
‘The Water Knife’
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In his fifth climate-related book, published in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asks: What would happen if drought became the “new normal” in the American Southwest? His answer: Refugees, apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land where water is controlled by thugs.
“What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” Mr. Bacigalupi said. “If you put those questions in people’s mind, it changes how they look at their daily life.”
Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as fictional extension. “Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author envisions,” he said.
Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said. “Available water will shift to cities,” he said. “There will be less water, less food, fewer jobs.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DESERTIFICATION
‘Gold Fame Citrus’
by Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 novel, her first, imagines drought differently. Sand has swallowed California; now it’s known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims that new species — a diurnal owl, carnivorous plants and albino hummingbirds — have emerged through a “super-speed evolutionary time warp.”
“Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution,” said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend said.
The novel is “not an unreasonable fictional depiction” of drought, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California already has a “new climate,” he added. Anthropogenic warming has increased the state’s drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains unlikely.
“That’s probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: SPECIES EXTINCTION
‘Flight Behavior’
by Barbara Kingsolver
The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 novel doesn’t believe in climate change until she has a “vision of glory” — a colony of monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming temperatures.
“I think it could happen, but pretty far into the distant future when global warming really has an effect further north,” said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the book.
Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six decades, said their numbers were already “way down” because of a combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter migration.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen,” Dr. Brower said, “but I don’t think it will be good.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DISRUPTED FOOD CHAIN
‘The History of Bees’
by Maja Lunde
China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are long since gone. Maja Lunde’s first book, published in 2017, chronicles three generations as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic bees, whose extinction has become a familiar device in climate-themed fiction.
“It’s a crazy idea, and it’s being done,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa, describing the hand-pollinators of Hanyuan County in China’s Sichuan Province.
Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and mosquitoes) are crucial to the food chain because they move pollen between fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on pollination are 35 percent of global crop production. While Colony Collapse Disorder — previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees — has declined substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six “keystone” species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.
But hand-pollination? “The question of whether you could do something like that on a planetary scale,” Dr. Kerr said, “Holy moly, if that’s where we got to, I think other things would probably kill us first.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: REFUGEES
‘Borne’
by Jeff VanderMeer
In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2017 novel, rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.
Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.
“What would be fair,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, “would be for each of the major emitting countries to accept a portion of the world’s climate-displaced people proportional to its historic contribution” of greenhouse gases.
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DROWNED CITIES
‘New York: 2140’
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Veering from the dystopic futures common to climate-themed fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 book is what the author calls a “comedy of coping,” set in a Venetian-like half-submerged New York City. Seas have risen 50 feet, making lower Manhattan a low-rent “intertidal” zone; water washes up to 46th Street every 12 hours. New Yorkers commute not by subway, but by vaporetto.
While multi-meter sea level rise in New York City is realistic, the timescale is not, said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on sea level change. He said that current modeling predicted extreme flooding of New York City by around 2300, but that the city would likely protect itself from rising waters with sea walls and other infrastructure.
Mr. Robinson said he had chosen the year 2140 to balance scientific predictions with a plot that could incorporate a transformed economic system.
“Climate change is basically a capitalist catastrophe,” he said. “We have to create post-capitalism to deal with climate change.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: ADAPTATION
‘The Machine Stops’
by E. M. Forster
Forster’s eerily prescient novella imagines a world where life on earth’s surface — besides ferns and “a little grass” — has become impossible. Humans live underground, where they communicate via glowing blue-lit plates and eat, drink and sleep to the rhythm of the eternally humming “Machine.”
Written in 1909 — just over a decade after the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested anthropogenic emissions could change the climate — “The Machine Stops” prophetically described something like the internet. But it was far off in imagining how we would adapt to climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.
“The idea that we could have self-sufficient civilization underground basically requires we replace the sun,” Dr. Foley said. “And any technology that’s capable of doing that — whether it be fusion, or some kind of magical technology — would have to be so powerful that I’d ask: Why didn’t we solve the climate problem first?”
Dr. Foley said the novel’s ideas weren’t that far from the science-fiction-like discussions he heard coming from Silicon Valley, where vertical gardens, orbiting microwave transmitters or machines that harvest carbon are touted as silver bullets for climate change. “The actual solutions are far simpler,” he said. “But they’re not as sexy. Like, hey: What if we threw less food away, or we ate less meat?”
Dr. Foley said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which “we all do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on a spaceship to save us all.” It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. “No one would buy it, and Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie, but it’s the one I want, and it would surely save the world.”
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Chad Horwedel
Illinois' vanishing bugs and why it matters to Earth.
Endangered insects, a little-known part of the Endangered Species Act, prepare for life under Trump.
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
A beast with black wings buzzed close and darted past us into the trees: What was that? Was that it? That had to be it. Mallory Sbelgio, citizen scientist, entomologist in training, defender of rare insects, did not quite roll her eyes, though it was remarkable her eyes remained in her head: No, she said, no, that wasn’t the bug we were looking for. She continued walking. Our insect was rarer — in decline throughout the country, but especially Illinois. We were hunting the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, one of relatively few insects to receive a special status: It’s protected by the Endangered Species Act.
A long sliver of a thing alighted on a curling blade of grass, its body sky blue, its wings slim windowpanes. It clung to its green, then zipped off.
There!
“Nope,” Sbelgio said. “Damselfly.”
It was a bright Saturday morning, and we were walking along the Des Plaines River in Will County, stepping around the spongy marshes and flooded banks left by a downpour a few hours before. Dragonflies darted inches above the waterline. But not our dragonfly. Sbelgio was too polite to state the obvious: This was a waste of time, we would never stumble onto a Hine’s by wandering around a forest preserve. Success was statistically unrealistic: According to Andres Ortega, an ecologist who specializes in insects for DuPage County, where the Hine’s is slightly more prevalent, its population in Illinois is “close to extinction — like maybe just 200 to 300 a year. So, incredibly low for an insect.”
Think finding an endangered elephant is hard?
Try finding an endangered insect.
Sbelgio crouched and peered into the forest. She wasn’t always a bug person. As a child, she was scared of everything, until one day her father brought home a tarantula, as a happy-birthday joke. To her shock, she has been hooked on insects ever since. The 27-year-old Lombard native has studied entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and zoology at Miami University in Ohio; lately, she has been trying to start a nonprofit to raise awareness of endangered insects in Illinois.
“All the energy goes into endangered fish and mammals,” she said. “So there are not a lot of us out here, but someone has to advocate for bugs. Most of the time I mention I stand up for endangered insects, I’m met with dead silence. People think ‘endangered’ and ‘insects’ don’t go together. But lose insects, and we are dismantling our ecosystem.”
The good news? As summer ends, there are fewer insects, fewer swats.
The bad news? That insect you just swatted might be the last of its kind.
Scientist after scientist, and research study after research study, has agreed our ecosystem is indeed being dismantled, partly because extinction rates for thousands of wildlife species have accelerated in the past decade. The really bad news: Insects constitute a majority of those species. Tarantulas, for instance. Some biologists believe most tarantulas could be extinct within our lifetime. The suspects are not hard to guess: climate change, development, the human-made decline of natural habitats.
One hope, entomologists say, is the Endangered Species Act.
Invertebrates have been on it since 1976, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted protections to seven species of butterflies. Yet, the trouble with insects is, well, most are not a “charismatic species,” scientists’ term for superstars of the endangered animal kingdom. We coo for pandas and whales. Ants, not so much. “Honestly, endangered insects have been a (public relations) nightmare,” said May Berenbaum, the head of UIUC’s department of entomology. She received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama; “The X-Files” named a character after her. But ask about protecting insects and even she acknowledges “insects are a hard case (for protection). Try arguing for a pygmy hog-sucking louse. Not a great name for something we might want to save.”
You can make eye contact with a rare river otter.
Try that with a beetle that buries roadkill for lunch.
And now, insects face a more existential hurdle — the Trump administration, which has signaled it intends to gut the Endangered Species Act. Never mind melting glaciers — explain to a politician why the extinction of the rattlesnake-master borer moth is a crisis. As the Entomological Society of America noted in a recent statement of support for the Endangered Species Act: Insects are 75 percent of species, and insects are necessary for a healthy environment, but only 84 species of invertebrates have government protection, compared to 439 vertebrates.
So the battle for bugs is lonely.
Sbelgio stared into the forest and shook her head: “People don’t get it. They don’t think insects impact their world at all — something moved!” She trudged off into the thicket, ever careful of where she stepped.
Specimens in the Insects, Arachnids and Myriapods collection of the Field Museum.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its first list of endangered and threatened species to be federally protected, an outcome of 1966’s Endangered Species Preservation Act. Some of the initial 76 protected animals included manatees, bald eagles, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American alligator. You know, relatable.
By 1970, protections were extended to invertebrates, and in 1973, at the urging of the Nixon administration, the Endangered Species Act, a significantly beefed-up version of the 1966 law, was passed to include protections for the habitats of endangered species. It wasn’t the federal government’s first rodeo with animal conservation: The Lacey Act of 1900, a response to the decline of passenger pigeons (which eventually went extinct), addressed the illegal trade of animals. Later legislation tried to slow whale hunting and the shooting of migratory birds. Today, the federal Endangered Species List isn’t even the only list: Many states keep their own lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has published a broader “Red List” since 1964, classifies 195 insect species (worldwide) as “critically endangered.”
Still, the Endangered Species Act remains a regulatory outlier compared with conservation laws in many countries, said Andy Suarez, an entomologist at UIUC. “Never mind it gives value to a species, which many people find abstract. The language is pretty blanket — it preserves entire habitats. That’s why a lot of people are terrified of losing it under Trump — conservationists will never get anything like it again.”
Despite strong laws, however, insect protection is awkward.
Insects are small and everywhere. Their lives are short. More butterflies receive protection than, say, flies because they’re outgoing, they pollinate — if you can see a bug, you have a better chance of compiling data on it. Said Michael Jeffords, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey: “Illinois is an insect Venn diagram. We’re on the edge of a lot of (insect) ranges, so accuracy gets rough. On the other hand, we’ve been collecting data since the 1850s. If you don’t see an insect that once lived here, you know they’re done — or their habitat is.”
Bugs die quietly every day.
Since millions of insects remain unidentified, entire species have vanished before we knew they existed. As California condors were captured in the 1980s and brought into breeding programs to prevent their extinction, scientists washed them. However, doing this killed a louse that lived only on California condors. Now that louse is extinct.
The federal Endangered Species Act lists 85 endangered or threatened insects. Illinois’ list is 15 species long and includes Karner blue butterflies, springtails, stoneflies and a scorpion. Crystal Maier, collections manager for invertebrates at the Field Museum, has most of them. She has 4 million bugs stuck on boards, 12 million more floating in alcohol. She walks the cold hallways of the museum’s insect storage room, locates the scientific name of a species, then slides out a series of wooden trays with dead specimens stuck with pins. It’s a combination library/morgue. “And there you ... go,” she says cheerfully.
Behold, the striped bark scorpion.
Found rarely in Illinois on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, outside St. Louis; grows no more than 3 inches; black stripe on its back; resembles a crustacean; stings. Maier puts it back and reaches for rare springtails, so tiny the specimens float in vials placed inside jars.
Ask an entomologist why it matters to protect bugs like this, and they rattle off reasons, economic, environmental, moral: Bugs provide billions of dollars of pollinated crops, according to agricultural studies. In the Chicago area, said John Legge, Chicago conservation director of the Nature Conservancy, a lack of biodiversity in natural spaces “can be an illustration of the threat of climate change.” (A few years ago, after an uncommonly cool spring in the Indiana Dunes caused the Karner blue to emerge too soon, the population crashed and never recovered.) Maier, whose own specialty is aquatic beetles, said the biodiversity of the insects along a river or stream is often a warning light of water quality.
There are times, though, where she is hesitant to identify a rare species: “Because you’re not just naming a species anymore, you’re pointing out habitat for protection — which gets politicized.” Indeed, the Reagan administration sought to remove all insects from protection. Instead, “pests” — mosquitoes, ticks, certain beetles, anything regarded as having a negative impact on health or economic concerns like crops — were prohibited. “Yet people assume all bugs are pests,” Berenbaum said. “During the W. Bush years, a recommendation was made to set aside 9,200 acres in Hawaii for flies found nowhere else that had bacterial qualities useful, some said, in developing drugs. The White House said ‘OK,’ and then it set aside 18 acres — a giant middle finger to bugs.”
Consider the journey of the rusty patched bumblebee.
Once common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, it’s found in only 13 states now (including Illinois). It pollinates cranberries, tomatoes. Even dead and stuck with a pin, it’s adorable: fuzzy, colored like an autumn forest. Last fall, the Obama administration announced it would be added to the Endangered Species List. Hours before Rusty was officially listed, the Trump administration delayed inclusion, explaining more study was needed. A coalition of farm and real estate interests had petitioned against Rusty. After the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit, the White House backed down and included Rusty.
This bee’s story isn’t over.
In the spring, work on the Longmeadow Parkway Corridor Project in Kane County, which cut through the bee’s habitat, was halted, then restarted; that battle is ongoing. Yet Rusty’s inclusion has been pivotal, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, which led the decadelong petition process for protection. He sees the bee as a “charismatic” gateway to bringing attention to endangered insects in general. “But the endgame is never the listing. Insects get less money than endangered animals, and almost nothing if they’re not listed, so now the struggle for conservation action begins.”
Xerces, founded in 1971, a pioneer in insect conservation, is not alone. The Nature Conservancy in Chicago buys land that protects local insect habitats; museums launch butterfly counter iPhone apps; the St. Louis Zoo established a Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation.
Just off the lobby of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum — some distance from the live-butterfly exhibit, to prevent contagion — Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology, and Doug Taron, chief curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, breed Baltimore checkerspot butterflies, a vulnerable species. The lab is humid, small. A graduate student is hunched over a table, using a thin paintbrush to delicately sift caterpillar poop from paper cups. That’s nearly the entire arrangement: cups, student, a humidifier, a few leaf greens of food.
“With insects, it doesn’t cost a lot to make a difference,” Lawrence said.
Next summer, after three years, the project will release its Baltimores in Elgin. “Habitat conditions have to be ideal,” Taron said. “The problem is that nature, no matter what you do, throws so much at you.” As with many things in life, it’s the spineless that take the roughest hits.
Grass poked through the fast-moving current on the Des Plaines River. Geese honk-honked overhead. Mallory Sbelgio watched a harvestman (aka daddy longlegs) step carefully around her hand.
It was no Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
Dead specimens alone are hard to find. Andres Ortega, in DuPage, is eager to change this. His Hine’s breeding project in Warrenville is a year old. On waterways, he’s carving the kind of shallow channels that Hine’s look for. And though he wasn’t involved, when the Illinois Tollway built Interstate 355 across the Des Plaines, the state made the road higher than planned, so motorists didn’t accidentally speed up the Hine’s extinction.
“Why spend so much money on a dragonfly?” he asked. “Extinction is normal and happens, but when that removal is unnatural, as we are seeing all over the world, we have a cascading crisis in our backyards.”
The prognosis is grim.
Sbelgio pictures herself on the front lines by staying small. The state rejected her proposal for a nonprofit organization centered on endangered insects. But she’s not going away. Endangered insects make the Endangered Species Act accessible in a way that an endangered polar bear does not, she said — it’s a niche waiting for a leader.
A small quick oblong alien crawled past.
Oh! There!
“That’s an ant,” Sbelgio said. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot of ants.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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Pipeline 'man camps' loom over British Columbia's Highway of Tears.
A B.C. First Nation prepares for a possible influx of thousands of temporary energy industry workers over the next decade to try to prevent increased violence and crime.
Pipeline 'man camps' loom over B.C.'s Highway of Tears
By Brandi Morin in News, Energy, Politics | September 21st 2017
Drummers participate in the Nak'azdli Whut'en's All Nations Gathering between Aug. 4 and 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of the Nak'azdli Whut'en on Facebook
Nak'azdli Whut'en First Nation is nestled on the banks of Stuart Lake in north-central British Columbia, surrounded by rolling foothills and tall trees.
It is a relatively remote community, breathtaking in scenery and dependent on economic opportunities in forestry, mining, and pipeline development. It is a community bracing for major change.
Over the next decade, as many as 6,000 new energy industry workers could descend upon the region. The prospect of such a big influx of workers living in nearby “man camps” has aroused fears of increased violence and drug use.
The influx could more than double the population of about 4,500 in the Fort St. James area, which includes the municipality, rural communities and First Nations. Nak'azdli has just 1,972 members living both on and off reserves. The nearest city, Prince George, is 160 kilometres away.
To get ahead of the documented challenges that accompany an influx of temporary workers from outside the region, the Nak’azdli and Lake Babine First Nations are creating two full-time positions, funded by the B.C. government, to help them prepare.
Nak'azdli Band Councillor Ann Marie Sam says if several industrial project proposals go ahead as planned over the next decade, as many as six new work camps, housing up to 1,000 workers each, could be built within 60 to 100 kilometres of the community.
Among the proposed projects are TransCanada’s: the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the North Montney Mainline pipeline and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline. The company is reviewing the Prince Rupert project, however, because Pacific NorthWest LNG announced in July that it would not proceed with a proposed liquefied natural gas export terminal near Port Edward, B.C. due to economy uncertainty.
The Nak’azdli band had also expressed opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have run through its territory had it not been rejected by the federal government last year.
The danger of bringing in "man camps"
The “man camps” are precisely what their name implies: work camps housing mostly male employees working on resource development projects.
There were more than four men for every woman working in the forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in Canada in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.
The federal Liberal government is now reviewing Canada's conservation laws and is expected to tackle this issue. In June, it recommended changes to environmental assessments to require a gender-based analysis of an industrial project's impacts.
When the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project was under review, community members expressed concern about two camps slated for construction in the traditional territory of the nearby Lake Babine First Nation. The Lake Babine and Nak’azdli nations found common cause, as Nak’azdli’s traditional territory hosts mining and forestry camps already.
The two nations commissioned a joint report, funded by B.C.’s Department of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, with research by the consulting company Firelight Group. Statistics from the study, released in February 2017, indicate that industrial camps are associated with increased rates of sexual assault and violence against Indigenous women, along with addiction, sexually transmitted infections, and family violence.
“The potential for sexual assault, violence, disappearances, (sexually transmitted diseases), increases with the number of trucks on the road,” study author Ginger Gibson told National Observer. “There’s a whole whack of issues that don’t get considered until construction is happening and that’s too late.”
The final report recommends governments and agencies consider legislation, programs and services to address problems associated with industrial camps, and plan for integrated service delivery in advance of resource development projects. It also states a need for governments to allocate new financial and human resources to health, social services, and housing in the region.
Specific recommendations, from provision of addiction counseling to building recreational facilities, are designed to prevent problems and to address them when the do occur.
In an email, a spokesperson for TransCanada wrote that the company regularly engages with Indigenous communities and would continue to do so throughout the life of the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project. Although TransCanada says it attended an info session during the research phase of the industrial camp report, it wouldn’t provide further comment on the findings.
The B.C. government didn't respond to requests from National Observer for comment for this article.
A view of Stuart Lake in north central British Columbia. This area is home to the small Nak'azdli First Nation, which is bracing for challenges that can accompany an influx of energy workers. Photo courtesy of the Nak'azdli Whut'en First Nation
'Rigger culture' puts Indigenous women at risk?
The Firelight Group's research included discussions with local community members about the experience of Indigenous women living near construction camps.
“There’s a ‘rigger culture’ that exists, where a lot of people are working together in a hyper masculine context and they’re not really taking care of themselves — they might be drinking and doing drugs, and then they’re blowing off steam,” said Gibson.
“They’re not in their home community and they don’t think about the (local) people as their family or neighbours so they don’t treat people very kindly.”
Following the findings of the study, Nak’azdli leadership is looking at ways to prepare for the next influx of workers. Community members talk about preparing to welcome newcomers to their territory. Industry representatives talk about working with Indigenous groups to provide local cultural competency courses to their employees.
The Nak'azdli Health Centre is assembling rape kits to gather physical evidence after assaults.
Coun. Ann Marie Sam says planning for assaults is an unfortunate necessity.
“When we started developing rape crisis plans the first question for me was, ‘Why do we have to tell our women we can’t protect you and sexual assaults are going to happen? And when they do, we’re going to have a plan for you,'" she said in an interview. "I thought it was so unfair for our community to have to do that."
Community leaders worry that nearby women and children could be a target for workers who parachute into the area.
Sam recalled seeing an unfamiliar woman in town about a year ago when she was out walking with one of her daughters.
“I watched her, wondering who she was. One of the delivery trucks from the (Mount Milligan) mine was coming through town, driving fast, saw her, slams on the breaks, dust on the road and stops beside her. She gets in the truck and I don’t know whose daughter that was — if she was a mother, or whose sister that was. But that really struck me.”
Sam said she wondered if the driver solicited the young woman for sex. “Who do you report that to? I didn’t report it because I didn’t know who she was and I didn’t know what happened to her."
Among risks identified in the Firelight report are increased rates of sexually transmitted infections. The Nak’azdli Health Centre is launching an awareness campaign and promotes STI testing for both workers and community members.
“We want to welcome workers to our town but we also want to let them know that these are the rules of our town,” community health nurse Liza Sam, the councillor’s sister, told National Observer.
“They (workers) don’t have any ownership to our town, so we really want to keep our community intact with less disturbances,” she explained. “If the mine’s gonna be here or other industries, we want them to be the best they can be for community members.”
The proximity of Nak’azdli to the infamous Highway of Tears only adds to the community’s safety concerns.
Since the late 1960s, dozens of women and girls — most of whom are Indigenous — have gone missing or disappeared along Highway 16, an east-west highway spanning northern B.C. that eventually leads through Edmonton and Saskatoon before meeting the TransCanada Highway at Portage la Prairie, Man. The “Highway of Tears” takes in smaller roads in the vicinity too, explains Highway of Tears Walkers co-ordinator Brenda Wilson.
Women reach for an embrace during the Nak'azdli Whut'en's All Nations Gathering between Aug. 4 and 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of the Nak'azdli Whut'en on Facebook
Away from home with 'a lot of money'
Mia is a First Nations woman in Alberta. A former sex trade worker, she said camp workers and sex go hand-in-hand. She worked in Fort McMurray for 10 years during the oilsands boom and was on call "23 hours a day."
Mia's name has been changed to protect her identity.
“I think the guys are maybe lonely," she told National Observer. "They’re away from home, they have a lot of money — disposable income if you will.”
She came from what she describes as an abusive, broken home, and said adversarial circumstances led to the sex industry at age 17. She said she was encouraged to tell clients that she was Spanish or Italian, because Indigenous women were considered trash.
“The men became angry if they knew (you were Indigenous), and your value goes down significantly, so we didn’t reveal that.”
Mia described many dangerous encounters, including one with a client she said threatened to hang her in his apartment in Fort McMurray — a memory that haunts her. Employers know full well what’s going on, she added. But they don’t get involved.
“In that industry, nothing would surprise me. I can see people that may be running the camps turning a blind eye to this kind of thing.”
Mia said local women and girls in Alberta are recruited to the sex industry to service camp workers on a regular basis by pimps and escort agencies, and that locals in communities like Nak’azdli wouldn’t be passed by.
“We already know of cases where our young people have been recruited right off the reserve through the Internet. But if (a camp's) in their own backyards, I would be very concerned,” she explained. “It’s scary. I hope that the communities are looking at ways of preventing and also educating on exploitation.”
Industry challenges
The Mount Milligan ore mine has been operating on Nak’azdli territory for the past four years. It’s roughly 60 kilometres from the Nak’azdli town site and has around 300 men working there at any given time.
A representative from Mount Milligan said the work camp mostly hires locally, so they go home every night.
“We do have a camp, but it’s not a big camp,” said company spokeswoman Joanna Miller. “Compared to a construction camp, they bring in a transient group of people — that’s not the case that happens at Milligan. Seventy per cent of (the miners) live in our local communities. For those who don’t live within a regional community the transportation is by bus.”
Mount Milligan works with local Indigenous groups to strengthen relationships by providing cultural competency courses to workers and teaching them local First Nation history. Miller sits on the community sustainability committee, which brings together representatives of nearby municipalities, regional districts, First Nations, educational institutions and economic development organizations.
“We work with the community to deal with concerns regarding social effects. Since I’ve been on that committee we have not had a single issue come forward. I have not had a conversation with an emergency personnel or RCMP in an instance where the mine has been a factor,” she said.
Mount Milligan’s practices align with the co-operation recommended in the Firelight Group report authored by Gibson.
“Everybody has to work jointly to take care of this issue,” Gibson said. “Siting is a big thing — where (communities) can control how often and who can get into your community. Making (workers) immobile at the camps so they’re not able to get into their trucks and be out looking for sexual services, makes a difference.
An undated photo of the Mount Milligan mine site in northern British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Centerra Gold
'Don't let it happen'
Tribes south of the border are familiar with the side effects of industry booms and influxes of workers living in "man camps."
Since the North Dakota Bakken oil boom began in 2008, reports of violence against Indigenous women have increased in the vicinity of the Fort Berthold Reservation, which is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations.
In 2013, North Dakota’s Uniform Crime Report showed an annual increase of 7.2 per cent in the total number of reported violent index crimes such as murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The report showed an increase of 17 per cent in rapes alone to 243 reported in 2012.
In response to those findings, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem told the Bismarck Tribune in 2013 that 12 of the state’s top oil-producing counties accounted for much of that crime. He also said that the North Dakota legislature increased funding for state law enforcement agencies to put more officers in the field.
Kandi Mossett, 38, has seen the effects of man camps first hand. She is with the Indigenous Environmental Network from North Dakota and is from New Town in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where more than 1,500 oil wells sprouted when the boom came.
“We definitely didn’t know about the man camps and how that was going to play out,” she told National Observer. “It was something that took over and shocked the community as far as how quickly the violence escalated and how it’s continued to cause problems in our community in this past decade.
“It’s a totally different place to live. It’s gross, the men are everywhere looking at women like they’re meat. We never used to have to lock our doors... but now people are scared for their safety. You make sure you have mace with you when you walk home at night.”
Her advice for the Nak’azdli and Babine First Nations as they deal with the prospect of more industrial camps is: “don’t let it happen.”
Since camps will be built if projects go ahead, she encourages the communities to get their police force involved and on site to monitor them.
The RCMP declined an interview request, but said in an email statement that the police force works with the Province of B.C. before industrial projects are approved to conduct socio-economic impact studies in First Nations and other communities.
Ultimately, industrial development is not something that Nak’azdli wants to abolish. They just want to make sure it will be safe when it comes.
Activist Kandi Mossett waits to smudge during Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. Photo provided by Kandi Mossett
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