insecticide
Trump’s global resorts put profit first, environment last, critics say.
Mongabay looked into Trump’s claims that he is an environmentalist, winning “many, many environmental awards.” We were able to locate just two — one a local New York award, and another granted by a golf business association.
Donald Trump’s negative environmental record in Scotland and elsewhere has conservationists concerned in Bali, where Trump firms are developing a major resort and golf facility known as Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali.
Another resort under development, the Trump International Hotel & Tower Lido, a 700-hectare facility including a six-star luxury resort, theme park, country club, spa, villas, condos and 18-hole golf course threatens the nearby Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, one of Java’s last virgin tropical forests.
Mongabay looked into Trump’s claims that he is an environmentalist, winning “many, many environmental awards.” We were able to locate just two — one a local New York award, and another granted by a golf business association. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests to list Mr. Trump’s awards.
Trump’s environmental record as president, and as a businessman, is abysmal, say critics. His attempt to defund the U.S. Energy Star program, they say, is typical of a compulsion to protect his self interest: Energy Star has given poor ratings to nearly all Trump’s hotels, which experts note has possibly impacted his bottom line.
Who doesn’t like a luxury resort and 18-hole golf course set atop a sheer cliff with breathtaking views of the Indian Ocean? Revered Hindu Gods that inhabit the temple nearby, according to the local Balinese concerned over plans to open the Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali. Local environmentalists aren’t keen on the resort either.
The Balinese worry that the Trump development will loom over the centuries-old Tanah Lot, a temple that sits upon a rock off the west coast of the wildly Instagrammed and oft visited Indonesian island.
This particular holy site is one of the most venerated temples of the “Island of Gods.” And while the Balinese are ever welcoming to tourists — important to the island’s economy —their religion, and laws, stipulate that all non-religious buildings not exceed 15 meters, or the height of temples, and more or less the height of a coconut tree.
The Trump tower, resort and golf course, now still in the planning stage, also pose environmental concerns. Suriadi Darmoko — Executive Director of the Indonesian environmental NGO, Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WHALI) Eksekutif Daerah Bali — believes the island does not need more hotel suites and jacuzzis.
A 2010 study by Indonesia’s Culture and Tourism Ministry, he notes, found Bali had a surplus of 9,800 hotel rooms. And according to a report by the HVS consulting firm, the average occupancy of upper luxury hotels in 2013 in Bali achieved only 60 percent.
Darmoko is especially worried about the Trump project’s plans to expand the property around the existing Pan Pacific Nirwana Bali Resort. The amount of “farmland in Bali drops” when land is transferred to “becoming tourist accommodations and supporting facilities” he told Mongabay. “What Bali needs is a tourism accommodation moratorium,” during which the government could “conduct a study to calculate the supporting capacity and supporting ability of the environment in Bali.”
The Trump tower project will be developed by MNC Group, Indonesia’s leading investment firm, and will be managed by the Trump Hotel Collection. As reported by Reuters last February, Herman Bunjamin — the vice president director at PT MNC Land Tbk (MNC Group’s property unit) — has assured the Balinese that the company would follow local government environmental regulations, and respect the Hindu religion.
However, this is not the first time a Trump construction project has experienced a swirl of controversy around its potential environmental impacts. And that worries local Balinese communities and conservationists, even though Trump himself has claimed many times that he is an award-winning environmentalist — a claim we’ll explore in some detail later in this article.
Ever since the 70-year-old billionaire was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States in January 2017, watchdog organizations have paid extra close attention to the past, and ongoing, international environmental record of Trump’s companies, especially considering that Trump has largely retained his ownership interest in his businesses.
Trump: mixing politics, golf and the environment
According to Investopedia, before becoming president, Donald Trump had amassed a net worth of an estimated $3.5 billion. The Trump Organization LLC acts as the primary holding for Trump’s firms, and serves as an umbrella company for his investments in real estate, brands and other businesses, ranging from golf courses to hotels.
Among its key executives are two of his sons: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who last March told Forbes he will not talk business with his father in order to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest, but will only pass financial reports to him. Ivanka Trump, the President’s elder daughter, resigned from her father’s company in January and today works as an unpaid adviser to him in the White House.
Golf is one of the many businesses that made Trump rich. According to the financial disclosure form published last June by the Office of Government Ethics, Trump’s golf courses alone reported $288 million in income from January 2016 through April 15, 2017.
In recent years the sport has increased wildly in popularity, and today golf is a multi-billion dollar industry: as of year-end 2016 there were golf facilities in 208 of the 245 countries in the world. However, the perfect manicured green color of the globe’s 33,161 courses comes at a high price to the environment.
A study by Kit Wheeler and John Nauright of Georgia Southern University found that golf course construction often consists in “clearing of natural vegetation, deforestation, destruction of natural landscapes and habitats and changes in local topography and hydrology” in order to roughly replicate the barren Scottish Highlands in which the game originated. That unnatural landscaping often leads to erosion and habitat loss, not to mention the fact that the maintenance of a standard 9-hole needs a great deal of synthetic chemicals — many deemed hazardous to wildlife — to keep it lush and green, including fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and fungicides.
The environmental problems associated with golf, the authors note, are particularly acute in Southeast Asia due to the sudden boom of the sport there and due the fact that golf course maintenance in the tropics is far more difficult than in other parts of the world because of the higher levels of rainfall, greater numbers of pests, diseases and weeds.
According to UNEP, golf course maintenance can also deplete freshwater resources — an average course in a tropical country needs 1,500 kilograms (3,307 pounds) of chemicals annually, and uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers. This astronomical use of resources is hard to justify in the developing world where competition for water and cropland, amid soaring populations, is intense. The problem is further complicated by weak environmental regulation and enforcement plus corruption, all too typically seen in developing countries.
Today, Trump Golf boasts a portfolio of 17 courses across the globe stretching from the jagged California cliffs to the (previously) barren desert of Dubai. This empire is expanding, and 2018 will see the opening of Trump International Hotel & Tower Lido, a 700-hectare (1,730 acre) development including a six-star luxury resort, theme park, country club, spa, luxury villas, condominiums, and, of course, an 18-hole signature championship golf course.
This new Trump-branded property will be set in the mountains of West Java, around 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Jakarta and beside the Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, one of the island’s last virgin tropical forests.
The project has become a major concern to RMI, the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment, an NGO whose goal is the promotion of community-based natural resource management and biodiversity conservation in the region.
“[T]here are major concerns from the local villagers on [how much of the] water supply that will still be available to them because the project is estimated to demand [lots] of water for their luxury facilities,” RMI’s Executive Director Mardha Tillah told Mongabay, pointing out that the Trump facility will be built in an important water catchment area.
After “a public discussion that was organized by local youth, the local sub-regency government officials stated that the environmental impact assessment was not complete yet, although some construction had been undergone — e.g. a reservoir,” she said.
The Associated Press reports, that the development is causing concern among Indonesian environmentalists, who fear for the nearby national park and its threatened animals, including the Critically Endangered Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus), the Endangered Javan leaf monkey (Presbytis comata), the Vulnerable Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), and Endangered Javan silvery gibbon (Hylobates moloch).
Tillah shares these fears. “I am very much keen on looking at the EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] document that shows how this resort does not affect any wildlife in this area,” she said.
Considering the President’s abysmal environmental record and his anti-environmental pro-business views, it is hard not to imagine that this anti-regulatory philosophy permeates Trump’s companies. During the election, Donald Trump stated that, “[W]e’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.”
Both Trump’s Balinese and Javan projects will be developed in partnership with MNC Group, who is also building the new Bogor-Sukabumi toll road, scheduled for completion at the end of 2017 which will provide direct access to Lido Lakes, reducing the drive time from Jakarta.
The highway, like tropical pavement around the world, is transforming the pastoral region. “The toll road has changed the landscape of rural areas of Bogor — paddy fields are replaced by the toll road projects,” said RMI’s Tillah. “If only it was not for this resort project, [the] toll road might not be constructed, because it was neglected due to lack of investors for more than a decade.”
“On the other hand,” she added, “improvement in [regional] train service and an increase of [operating] frequency [could] already [have served as an alternative] solution for [moving] people.”
ABC revealed that Donald Trump personally lobbied for the road with senior Indonesian politicians in September 2015 at Trump Tower in New York, when he was both in negotiations over the Lido development and running for the presidency. According to ABC, the meeting was not authorized by the Indonesian Government, and was held with the direct assistance of Trump business partner Hary Tanoesoedibjo, President Commissioner and Founder of the MNC Group.
Tanoesoedibjo, a media mogul who created his own Indonesian political party in 2015, attended Trump’s inauguration last January. As the Nikkei Asian Review pointed out, he is the subject of a police investigation for allegations of intimidation and corruption, which he claims are politically motivated.
The Scottish saga
One of the best places to view the ongoing relationship between Trump’s businesses and the environment is in Scotland; the fact that golf originated there has done little to make that association run more smoothly.
For more than a decade, Trump’s golf course on the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has been at the center of a heated dispute between those who support and oppose it. Trump International Golf Course Scotland won planning permission in 2008, but conservationists objected to the project because it would radically transform large parts of one of the country’s rarest coastal dune habitats.
“The construction of Trump International Links has had an irreversible and unjustified impact on a fragile dune system, in particular a large area of the internationally important Foveran Links Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI],” Bruce Wilson, Senior Policy Officer of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, told Mongabay.
“Unfortunately this planning application was approved by the Scottish Government despite evidence that it was easily possible to build two world class courses on the Menie Estate without destroying the SSSI,” he added.
Trump has also been involved in a long-running row with the Scottish government over the impact of windfarms on his golf course.
Before his White House campaign, he sent letters to the then first minister of Scotland Alex Salmond to urge him to withdraw his support for windfarm development. In this series of messages, obtained by the Huffington Post thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, Trump labeled windfarms as “monsters,” suggested without evidence that “wind power doesn’t work,” and told Salmond “your economy will become a third world wasteland that investors will avoid,” if the green energy alternative was embraced by Scotland.
Trump’s resistance didn’t end there. The U.S. president-elect exhorted the leader of UK Independence party (UKIP) Nigel Farage and key associates to lobby against the Scottish windfarms. However, none of this aided Trump’s crusade against the turbines, and in December 2015 he lost a Scottish Supreme Court battle against the installation of an windfarm located several miles offshore of his course.
Last July the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the country’s principal environmental regulator, also raised formal objections to the Trump company’s proposals for a second 18-hole course in Aberdeenshire. Now the organization will have to revise its plans to make sure its project does not violate sewage pollution, environmental protection and groundwater conservation rules.
A statement by Trump International Golf Links published by the BBC reads in part:
The recent correspondence between Trump International, the local authority and statutory consultants is a normal part of the planning process and the regular ongoing dialogue conducted during the application process. SNH and Sepa always reference a range of policy considerations and factors which is standard practice and nothing out of the ordinary. Our application is making its way through the planning system and this dialogue will continue until it goes before committee for consideration. The Dr Martin Hawtree designed second golf course is located to the south of the Trump estate and does not occupy a Site of Special Scientific Interest therefore is not covered by any environmental designations.
We are extremely confident in our proposal and that this process will reach a satisfactory conclusion acceptable to all parties on our world class development.
What’s good for Trump is good for the U.S. and world…
During his campaign Donald Trump said he wanted to get rid of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “in almost every form.” Now that he is President, Trump appears to be moving toward that goal, and some of his businesses are among the institutions that could benefit from a dramatic roll back in environmental regulations. A look at Trump’s attacks on the U.S. EPA, and the business rationale for those assaults, is enlightening when studying the actions of Trump businesses around the world.
For instance, Trump issued an executive order commanding the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to review the Obama-era Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS) — a rule that greatly irks golf course developers.
Last March, Bob Helland, director of congressional and federal affairs of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA), issued a statement that makes clear why his association opposes the Clean Water Rule as written: “Under the rule, golf courses could likely be required to obtain costly federal permits for any land management activities or land use decisions in, over or near these waters, such as pesticide and fertilizer applications and stream bank restorations and the moving of dirt. The impact on golf course management could be dramatic.”
In 2016, the GSCAA praised Trump as “a president who understands the value of the game of golf, both as a golfer and golf course owner,” who “is also familiar with the H-2B Visa program that a number of golf facilities utilize, including one of his own in Florida.” This visa program allows U.S. employers, or agents who meet specific regulatory requirements, to bring foreign nationals to the U.S. to fill temporary nonagricultural jobs. “This could lead to a breakthrough in the red tape that makes using the program so frustrating,” said GSCAA. These statements shine a bright light on the imbalance between the administration’s business, environmental and immigration policies.
World-class hotels form another cornerstone of the Trump financial empire. So when the president proposed cutting all funding to EPA’s very successful 25-year-old Energy Star Program, a program meant to save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, CNN launched an investigation to see how Trump businesses might benefit from its elimination.
It turns out that the government’s Energy Star for Hotels ranking process provides an assessment of the energy performance of a property relative to its peers, taking into account local climate, weather and business activities at the property. Energy Star claims these ratings can affect the value of a property — the media investigation discovered that Trump’s properties tend to receive low ratings.
According to CNN, “[t]he most recent scores from 2015 reveal that 11 of his 15 skyscrapers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco are less energy efficient than most comparable buildings. On a scale of 1 to 100 for energy efficiency, Manhattan’s old Mayfair Hotel, which Trump converted into condos, rated a 1,” the lowest rating possible.
The House Appropriations Committee rejected the Trump’s administration proposal to eliminate Energy Star, but its spending bill for 2018, which came out in early July, proposed reducing funding by roughly 40 percent, a cut to $31 million.
Critics say that such a deep reduction will be significantly harmful to the environment. “We appreciate that the committee has rejected the administration’s proposal… but a 40 percent cut would be crippling as well,” said the President of the Alliance to Save Energy Kateri Callahan in a press statement.
In 2014, EPA estimated that Energy Star has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 billion metric tons since 1992, while also providing energy cost savings to consumers, hotels and other industries.
“I have to wonder where this is coming from,” Callahan said, stressing the fact that Energy Star is one of the most popular government programs in U.S. history and has enjoyed broad bipartisan support since it was created under President George H.W. Bush.
Donald Trump, award-winning environmentalist?
Donald Trump has been claiming he is an environmentalist at least since 2011, when he told Fox & Friends that “I’ve received many, many environmental awards”.
“I am a big believer in clean air and clean water. I’m a big believer. I have gotten so many awards for the environment,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa. “I won many environmental awards, I have actually been called an environmentalist, if you believe it,” he repeated at a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross echoed that assessment on NBC’s Today show. Trump, he said, “is an environmentalist. I’ve known him for a very long time. He’s very pro-environment.”
Politifact found a grain of truth in Trump’s statements. A decade ago two local groups did award Trump for specific projects. In 2007, he received the Friends of Westchester County Parks’ inaugural Green Space Award for donating 436 acres to the New York state park system, and in the same year his Bedminster New Jersey Trump National Golf Course received the first annual environmental award of the The Metropolitan Golf Association (MGA).
MGA’s press statement reads: “Through the leadership of Donald J. Trump, [director of grounds] Nicoll has implemented an environmental strategy that has resulted in the preservation of a dedicated 45 acre grassland bird habitat on the property, as well as intensive erosion control and stream stabilization management plan. The impacts of golf construction and operations on this land have resulted in a significant environmental net gain from the previous land use. Trump National has made itself readily available to Bedminster Township officials by way of monthly meetings to keep them up to date on the club’s environmental monitoring activities.”
MGA also said that, while planning the construction of an additional course, the club integrated environmental awareness into their golf course maintenance and construction plans by maintaining more stringent standards than those required by state and local regulations.
However, critics note, if Donald Trump is an environmentalist, he is not an orthodox one. In his tweets, he has referred to global warming as “a canard,” something “mythical,” “based on faulty science and manipulated data,” “nonexistent” or “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” and also as “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” not to mention “bullshit.”
Nor does he show his environmentalism in the associates with which he surrounds himself. When choosing someone to lead his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump picked climate science denier Myron Ebell, who believes the environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world.” His EPA head is the former Oklahoma attorney Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic whose LinkedIn profile says he is “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” Pruitt in the past sued EPA 14 times to block clean air and water safeguards, and recently denied that carbon dioxide causes global warming.
However, big business can save big bucks by being environmentally friendly, and that is something that did not go unnoticed at Trump’s environmental award-winning New Jersey golf courses. The Wall Street Journal reported that both of them qualify as a farmland because they are not only sports fields, but also home to activities associated to farming such as hay production and woodcutting. The Bedminster golf course is even home to a small goat herd that grazes overgrown grass. It is not clear exactly how much the tax breaks save Trump, but the Journal estimates the courses pay less than $1,000 in annual taxes instead of the $80,000 that would be standard for such properties.
Still, experts note, anyone saying that Donald Trump always puts profit and his assets ahead of the environment would be wrong. In truth, Trump’s policies could do serious harm to his businesses. As Buzz Feed News notes, Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement likely means continuing rising sea levels and more extreme storms, which both threaten his low-lying properties, including the Trump National Doral in the Miami suburbs, a luxury golf resort that could end up submerged. Indeed, had Hurricane Irma tracked east of Florida instead of west, as originally expected, it’s likely the storm, supercharged by some of the warmest Caribbean waters on record, would have made a direct hit on Mar-A-Lago, the so-called Winter White House.
Conflict of interest?
The U.S. Congress has exempted the president and vice president from conflict-of-interest laws Title 18 Section 208 of the U.S. code. This decision was based on the premise that the presidency wields so much power that virtually any possible executive action might pose a potential conflict of interest (COI).
Last November, during his first news conference since his election, Trump declared: “I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president, which is — I didn’t know about that until about three months ago, but it’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.”
Many watchdog organizations have been less complacent than Congress and the President concerning COIs — including those involving presidential power, the Trump companies, and the environment. These NGOs are watching to see if Trump international and domestic business deals have political implications, or if any policies promoted by his administration seem designed to benefit Trump businesses.
The President’s just proposed tax reforms are a case in point — watchdog groups, the media and financial experts began looking for COIs and policy points benefiting Trump’s tax bracket and his businesses within hours of the announcement of the merest sketch of a tax reform plan.
“Presidents have historically understood that there can be a conflict of interest even if the law doesn’t technically apply, and they have followed the same standards that apply to other federal employees,” Clark Pettig, American Oversight’s Communications Director, told Mongabay.
American Oversight (AO) is a watchdog organization that is investigating numerous COIs across the Trump administration. For instance, it sued EPA to force the release of communications between regulators and industry groups, and to uncover the role investor Carl Icahn has played in setting policy. AO has also launched a broad investigation of the administration’s payments to Trump-owned businesses, and has submitted FOIA requests for documents related to the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Pettig believes Trump clearly has a conflict of interest as he serves as President while also owning and profiting from a global business empire.
“Rather than “draining the swamp,” the Trump administration has brought unprecedented conflicts of interests to Washington,” he said. “From rolling back environmental regulations that could impact his golf courses, to using diplomatic events to promote his own resorts, President Trump seems determined to use his power to enrich himself and his business empire,” Pettig said.
Laura Friedenbach, Deputy Communications Director of Every Voice, a Washington-based watchdog organization whose aim is to reduce the influence of money in politics, is concerned as well. “When a public official is making decisions on behalf of the American people and also has a large personal stake in the outcome, it presents a conflict of interest,” she told Mongabay.
“The conflicts of interest facing President Trump and his cabinet raise real questions about where the Trump administration’s priorities lie,” Friedenbach said. “Are they doing what’s best for the American people, or are they letting their own interests and the interests of their business partners get in the way?”
“If President Trump and his cabinet are more concerned with boosting profits for companies they have a stake in, and personal ties with, including fossil fuel companies, then the result will be slowing down progress on combatting the effects of climate change,” she declared.
The Trump Organization, Trump Hotels, Trump Golf, and MNC Land did not reply to Mongabay’s multiple requests to comment for this article; nor did they answer questions sent to them concerning their projects’ environmental impacts, Energy Star ratings, Trump’s environmental awards, and steps to reduce project carbon footprint.
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48 environmental rules on the way out under Trump.
The list shows dozens of environmental policies that the Trump administration has targeted, often in an effort to ease burdens on the fossil fuel industry.
Since taking office in January, President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration — with help from Republicans in Congress — has often targeted environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, including major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.
To date, the the Trump administration has sought to reverse nearly 50 environmental rules, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
The chart above reflects three types of policy changes: rules that have been officially reversed; announcements and changes still in progress, pending reviews and other rulemaking procedures; and regulations whose status is unclear because of delays or court actions. (Another five rules were undone but later reinstated after legal challenges.)
Regulations have often been reversed as a direct response to petitions from oil, coal and gas companies and other industry groups, which have enjoyed a much closer relationship with key figures in the Trump administration than under President Barack Obama.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has met almost daily with industry executives and lobbyists. (As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mr. Pruitt sued the agency he now oversees more than a dozen times to try to block Obama-era rules.) The E.P.A. has been involved in one-third of the policy reversals identified by The Times.
Here are the details for each policy targeted by the administration so far — including who lobbied to get the regulations changed. Are there rules we missed? Email climateteam@nytimes.com or tweet @nytclimate.
OVERTURNED
1. Revoked Obama-era flood standards for federal infrastructure projects
This Obama-era rule, revoked by Mr. Trump in August, required that federal agencies protect new infrastructure projects by building to higher flood standards. Building trade groups and many Republican lawmakers opposed it as costly and burdensome.
2. Rejected a ban on a potentially harmful insecticide
Dow Agrosciences, which sells the insecticide chlorpyrifos, opposed a risk analysis by the Obama-era E.P.A. that found the compound posed a risk to fetal brain and nervous system development. Mr. Pruitt rejected the E.P.A.'s analysis and denied the ban, saying the chemical needed further study.
3. Lifted a freeze on new coal leases on public lands
Coal companies weren't thrilled about the Obama administration's three-year freeze pending an environmental review. Mr. Zinke, the interior secretary, revoked the freeze and review in March. He appointed members to a new advisory committee on coal royalties in September.
4. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions
In March, Republican officials from 11 states wrote a letter to Mr. Pruitt, saying the rule added costs and paperwork for oil and gas companies. The next day, Mr. Pruitt revoked the rule.
5. Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams
The coal industry said the rule was overly burdensome, calling it part of a “war on coal.” In February, Congress passed a bill revoking the rule, which Mr. Trump signed into law.
6. Approved the Keystone XL pipeline
Republicans, along with oil, gas and steel industry groups, opposed Mr. Obama's decision to block the pipeline, arguing that the project would create jobs and support North American energy independence. After the pipeline company reapplied for a permit, the Trump administration approved it.
7. Approved the Dakota Access pipeline
Republicans criticized Mr. Obama for delaying construction after protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Mr. Trump ordered an expedited review of the pipeline, and the Army approved it. Crude oil began flowing on June 1, but a federal judge later ordered a new environmental review.
8. Prohibited funding third-party projects through federal lawsuit settlements, which could include environmental programs
Companies settling lawsuits with the federal government have sometimes paid for third-party projects, like when Volkswagen put $2.7 billion toward pollution-fighting programs after its emissions cheating scandal. The Justice Department has now prohibited such payments, which some conservatives have called “slush funds.”
9. Repealed a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans
Lobbyists for the oil industry were opposed to Mr. Obama's use of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to permanently ban offshore drilling along parts of the Atlantic coast and much of the ocean around Alaska. Mr. Trump repealed the policy in an April executive order and instructed his interior secretary, Mr. Zinke, to review the locations made available for offshore drilling.
10. Proposed the use of seismic air guns for gas and oil exploration in the Atlantic
Following a executive order in April known as the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy, the Trump administration began an application process to allow five oil and gas companies to survey the Atlantic using seismic air guns, which fire loud blasts that can harm whales, fish and turtles. The Obama administration had previously denied such permits.
11. Revoked a 2016 order protecting the northern Bering Sea region in Alaska
Mr. Trump revoked Mr. Obama’s 2016 order protecting the Bering Sea and Bering Strait by conserving biodiversity, engaging Alaska Native tribes and building a sustainable economy in the Arctic, which is vulnerable to climate change.
12. Repealed an Obama-era rule regulating royalties for oil, gas and coal
Lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry opposed 2016 Interior Department regulations meant to ensure fair royalties were paid to the government for oil, gas and coal extracted from federal or tribal land. In August, the Trump administration rescinded the rule, saying it caused “confusion and uncertainty” for energy companies.
13. Withdrew guidance for federal agencies to include greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews
Republicans in Congress opposed the guidelines, which advised federal agencies to account for possible climate effects in environmental impact reviews. They argued that the government lacked the authority to make such recommendations, and that the new rules would slow down permitting.
14. Relaxed the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects
Oil and gas industry leaders said the permit-issuing process for new infrastructure projects was costly and cumbersome. In an August executive order, Mr. Trump announced a policy he said would streamline the process for pipelines, bridges, power lines and other federal projects. The order put a single federal agency in charge of navigating environmental reviews, instituted a 90-day timeline for permit authorizaton decisions and set a goal of completing the full process in two years.
15. Announced intent to stop payments to the Green Climate Fund
Mr. Trump said he would cancel payments to the fund, a United Nations program that helps developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. Mr. Obama had pledged $3 billion, $1 billion of which Congress has already paid out over the opposition of some Republicans.
16. Dropped proposed restrictions on mining in Bristol Bay, Alaska
A Canadian company sued the E.P.A. over an Obama-era plan to restrict mining in Bristol Bay, an important salmon fishery. The Trump administration settled the suit and allowed the company to apply for permits to build a large gold and copper mine in the area. Alaska Republicans, including Senator Lisa Murkowski, supported the mine.
17. Removed the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the endangered list
Noting that the species population had “rebounded from as few as 136 bears in 1975 to an estimated 700 today,” the Interior Department delisted the Yellowstone grizzly. Delisting the bears was first formally proposed by the Obama administration in March 2016.
18. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges
Alaskan politicians opposed the law, which prevented hunters from shooting wolves and grizzly bears on wildlife refuges, arguing that the state has authority over those lands. Congress passed a bill revoking the rule, which Mr. Trump signed into law.
19. Withdrew proposed limits on endangered marine mammals caught by fishing nets on the West Coast
Under Mr. Trump, the National Marine Fisheries Service withdrew the proposed rule, noting high costs to the fishing industry and arguing that sufficient protections were already in place.
20. Stopped discouraging the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks
The National Park Service had urged parks to reduce or eliminate the sale of disposable plastic water bottles in favor of filling stations and reusable bottles. The International Bottled Water Association called the action unjustified.
21. Rescinded an Obama-era order to consider climate change in managing natural resources in national parks
The 2016 policy, which called for scientific park management, among other objectives, was contested by Republicans. In August, the National Park Service said they rescinded the policy in order to eliminate confusion among the public and National Parks Service employees regarding the Trump administration’s “new vision” for America’s parks.
22. Directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation of the “social cost of carbon”
As part of an expansive March 2017 executive order, Mr. Trump directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation that helped rulemakers monetize the costs of carbon emissions and instead base their estimates on a 2003 cost-benefit analysis. Mr. Trump also disbanded the working group that created estimates for the social cost of carbon.
23. Revoked an update to the Bureau of Land Management's public land use planning process
Republicans and fossil fuel industry groups opposed the updated planning rule for public lands, arguing that it gave the federal government too much power at the expense of local and business interests. Congress passed a bill revoking the rule, which Mr. Trump signed into law.
24. Removed copper filter cake, an electronics manufacturing byproduct, from the “hazardous waste” list
Samsung petitioned the E.P.A. to delist the waste product, which is produced during electroplating at its Texas semiconductor facility. The E.P.A. granted the petition after a public comment period.
IN PROGRESS
25. Proposed repeal and replacement of the Clean Power Plan
Coal companies and Republican officials in many states opposed the plan, Mr. Obama’s signature climate policy, which set strict limits on carbon emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants. Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March instructing the E.P.A. to re-evaluate the plan, which is tied up in court and has not yet taken effect. In October, the E.P.A. proposed repealing the plan and opened a public comment period soliciting suggested replacements.
26. Announced intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement
Arguing that it tied his hands in matters of domestic energy policy, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris accord, under which the United States had pledged to cut emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations of its intent to withdraw, but it cannot complete the process until late 2020.
27. Proposed rescinding a rule that protected tributaries and wetlands under the Clean Water Act
Farmers, real estate developers, golf course owners and many Republicans opposed an Obama-era clarification of the Clean Water Act that extended protections over small waterways. Under Mr. Trump's direction, Mr. Pruitt released a proposal in June to roll back the expanded definition.
28. Reopened a review of fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks
Automakers said it would be difficult and costly to meet fuel economy goals they had agreed upon with the Obama administration. Under Mr. Trump, the E.P.A. and Department of Transportation have reopened a standards review for model years 2021 through 2025. The administration is also considering easing penalties on automakers who do not comply with the federal standards.
29. Recommended shrinking or modifying 10 national monuments
Republicans in Congress said the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate national monuments, had been abused by previous administrations. Mr. Obama used the law to protect more than 4 million acres of land and several million square miles of ocean. Mr. Trump ordered a review of recent monuments; his interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, recommended changes for 10 sites.
30. Reviewing 12 marine protected areas
As part of his April executive order aimed at expanding offshore oil and gas drilling, Mr. Trump called for a review of national marine sanctuaries and monuments designated or expanded within the past decade. In June, NOAA announced that 12 protected marine areas were under review.
31. Reviewing limits on toxic discharge from power plants into public waterways
Utility and fossil fuel industry groups opposed the rule, which limited the amount of toxic metals — arsenic, lead and mercury, among others — power plants could release into public waterways. Industry representatives said complying with the guidelines, which were to take effect in 2018, would be extremely expensive. In September, Mr. Pruitt postponed the rule until 2020.
32. Reviewing rules regulating coal ash waste from power plants
Utility industry groups petitioned to change the rule, which regulates how power plants dispose of coal ash in waste pits often located near waterways. The E.P.A. agreed to reconsider the rule.
33. Reviewing emissions standards for new, modified and reconstructed power plants
In addition to the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Trump's Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence called on the E.P.A. to review a related rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified, and reconstructed power plants.
34. Reviewing emissions rules for power plant start-ups, shutdowns and malfunctions
Power companies and other industry groups sued the Obama administration over the rule, which asked 36 states to tighten emissions exemptions for power plants and other facilities. The E.P.A. under Mr. Trump asked the court to suspend the case while the rule undergoes review.
35. Announced plans to review greater sage grouse habitat protections
Oil and gas industry leaders called the Obama administration's plan for protecting the bird “deeply flawed” and welcomed the Interior Department review, which will reassess restrictions on energy production.
36. Announced plans to rescind water pollution regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands
Energy companies petitioned the Bureau of Land Management to rescind the rule, which was proposed by Mr. Obama in 2015 but never enforced amid legal challenges. In July, the bureau announced plans to revoke the rule, citing Mr. Trump's "prioritization of domestic energy production."
37. Reviewing new safety regulations on offshore drilling
The American Petroleum Institute and other trade groups wrote to the Trump administration, raising concerns over oil rig safety regulations implemented after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. In August, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement confirmed it was moving forward with the review. Mr. Trump had ordered a review of the rules earlier in the year.
38. Ordered a review of a rule regulating offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels in the Arctic
As part of the expansive executive order on offshore driling, Mr. Trump called for an immediate review of a rule intended to strengthen safety and environmental standards for exploratory drilling in the Arctic. The rule, a response to the 2013 Kulluk accident in the Gulf of Alaska, increased oversight of floating vessels and other mobile offshore drilling units.
39. Proposed ending a restriction on exploratory drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Republicans have long sought to to open the Alaska refuge to gas and oil driling. In August, an Interior Department internal memo proposed lifting restrictions on exploratory seismic studies in the region, which covers more than 30,000 square miles and is home to polar bears, caribou and other Arctic animals.
40. Ordered a review of federal regulations on hunting methods in Alaska
Obama-era rules prohibited certain hunting methods in Alaska’s national preserves. They overruled state law, which had allowed hunters to bait bears with food, shoot caribou from boats and kill bear cubs with their mothers present. Alaska sued the Interior Department, claiming that the regulations affected traditional harvesting. The Trump administration ordered a review.
41. Announced a review of emissions standards for trailers and glider kits
Stakeholders in the transportation industry opposed the Obama-era rule, which for the first time applied emissions standards to trailers and glider vehicles. They argued that the E.P.A. lacked the authority to regulate them, because their products are not motorized.
IN LIMBO
42. Reviewing a rule limiting methane emissions at new oil and gas drilling sites
Lobbyists for the oil and gas industries petitioned Mr. Pruitt to reconsider a rule limiting emissions of methane and other pollutants from new and modified oil and gas wells. A federal appeals court has ruled that the E.P.A. must enforce the Obama-era regulation while it rewrites the rule. The E.P.A. said it may do so on a “case by case” basis.
43. Put on hold rules aimed at cutting methane emissions from landfills
Waste industry groups objected to this Obama-era regulation, which required landfills to set up methane gas collection systems and monitor emissions. In May, the E.P.A. suspended enforcement of the new standards for 90 days, pending a review. Environmental groups challenged the action in court, but the delay period has since passed, throwing the status of the case into question.
44. Delayed a lawsuit over a rule regulating airborne mercury emissions from power plants
Coal companies, along with Republican officials in several states, sued over this Obama-era rule, which regulated the amount of mercury and other pollutants that fossil fuel power plants can emit. They argued that the rule helped shutter coal plants, many of which were already compliant. Oral arguments in the case have been delayed while the E.P.A. reviews the rule.
45. Delayed a rule aiming to improve safety at facilities that use hazardous chemicals
Chemical, agricultural and power industry groups said that the rule, a response to a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant that killed 15 people, did not increase safety. Mr. Pruitt delayed the standards until 2019, pending a review. Eleven states are now suing over the delay.
46. Continuing review of proposed groundwater protections for certain uranium mines
Republicans in Congress came out against the 2015 rule. They said the E.P.A. had not conducted an adequate cost-benefit analysis of the rule, which regulated byproduct materials from a type of uranium mining. The Obama administration submitted a revised proposal one day before Mr. Trump was sworn into office. The Trump administration must now decide the fate of the rule.
47. Delayed compliance dates for federal building efficiency standards
Republicans in Congress opposed the rules, which set efficiency standards for the design and construction of new federal buildings. The Trump administration delayed compliance until Sept. 30, but it is unclear whether the rules are now in effect.
48. Withdrew a rule that would help consumers buy more fuel-efficient tires
The rule required tire manufacturers and retailers to provide consumers with information about replacement car tires. The tire industry opposed several aspects of the rule, but had been working with the government to refine it. The Trump administration withdrew the proposed rule in January but has not said whether it may be reinstated.
At least five other rules were reinstated after legal challenges
Environmental groups have sued the Trump administration over many of the proposed rollbacks, and, in some cases, have succeeded in reinstating environmental rules.
1. Reinstated rule limiting methane emissions on public lands
The oil and gas industry opposed the rule, which required companies to control methane emissions on federal or tribal land. The House voted this year to revoke the rule, but the Senate rejected the measure, 51 to 49. The Bureau of Land Management later suspended enforcement of parts of the rule. In early October, a federal court ruled that the B.L.M. had acted unlwafully in delaying the rule, and ordered its immediate enforcement.
2. Reinstated a requirement for reporting emissions on federal highways
Transportation and infrastructure industry groups opposed a measure that required state and local officials to track greenhouse gas emissions from vehichles on federally funded highways. The Trump administration twice postponed the rule's effective date, putting it off indefinitely on May 19. The rule was reinstated after environmental groups and eight states challenged the delay in court.
3. Delayed by one year a compliance deadline for new ozone pollution standards, but later reversed course
Mr. Pruitt initially delayed the compliance deadline for a 2015 national ozone standard, but reversed course after 15 states and the District of Columbia sued.
4. Delayed publishing efficiency standards for household appliances
After being sued by a number of states and environmental groups for failing to publish efficiency standards for appliances including heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators, the Trump administration released its rules on May 26.
5. Reinstated rule limiting the discharge of mercury by dental offices into municipal sewers
The E.P.A. reinstated an Obama-era rule that regulated the disposal of dental amalgam, a filling material that contains mercury and other toxic metals. The agency initially put the rule on hold as part of a broad regulatory freeze, but environmental groups sued. The American Dental Association came out in support of the rule.
Sources: Harvard Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker; Columbia Law School’s Climate Deregulation Tracker; Federal Register; Environmental Protection Agency; White House
Note: This list does not include new rules proposed by the Trump administration that do not roll back previous policies, nor does it include court actions that have affected environmental policies independent of executive or legislative action.
Additional reporting by Tatiana Schlossberg.
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Katharine Walter
What we get wrong about Lyme disease.
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BIOLOGY ENVIRONMENT
What We Get Wrong About Lyme Disease
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BY KATHARINE WALTER
OCTOBER 5, 2017
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My sister Camilla and I stepped off the passenger ferry onto the dock at Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard’s main port, with a group that had already begun their party. They giggled, dragging coolers and beach chairs behind them. We competed to see how many items of Nantucket red we could spot.
Not that we were wearing any. Camilla wore shorts with white long underwear underneath, and I wore beige quick-dry hiking pants. Both of us had on sneakers with long white socks. It was late June, perfect beach weather. The water sparkled. But we weren’t headed toward the ocean. We were there to hunt for ticks.
On the island, we hopped in a cab. Camilla looked longingly out the window as we passed the turns for the town beach and Owens Park Beach. The driver pointed out the location of the famous shark attack beach from Jaws. We drove on south to Manuel Correllus State Forest, an unremarkable park in the center of the island and the farthest point from any beach.
THE GLAMOUR OF IT ALL: Camilla Walter harvesting deer ticks on Prudence Island, in Rhode Island’s Narraganset Bay. Tick collecting made Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs.Courtesy of the author
Deer ticks, or blacklegged ticks, are poppy-seed sized carriers of Lyme disease. We needed to collect 300 before the last ferry returned to Woods Hole, Massachusetts that night. We each unfurled a drag cloth—a one-meter square section of once-white corduroy attached to a rope—and began to walk, dragging the cloth slowly behind us as if we were taking it for a stroll. The corduroy patch would rise and fall over the leaves and logs in the landscape, moving like a mouse or a chipmunk scurrying through the leaf litter. Ticks, looking for blood, would attach to the cloth. Every 20 meters, we’d stoop to harvest them.
Tick collecting made it to Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs alongside landfill monitor and anal wart researcher. On cool days, though, sweeping the forest floor, kneeling to pluck ticks from corduroy ridges, the job became rhythmic. I felt strangely close to the forest. As I soon found out, the work got me closer to people, too.
The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized is a fantasy.
Sometimes hikers would stop by, curious, then repulsed. They would want confirm the proper way to pull off ticks (with tweezers planted close to skin, perpendicularly), or to tell us about their diagnoses. Lyme disease isn’t like many of the diseases studied by my friends in the epidemiology department, where I was a doctoral student. No one talks about their grandmother’s syphilis infection, caused by Treponema pallidum, another spirochete bacterium.
But once people heard what Camilla and I were collecting, stories of brushes with ticks and family members’ diagnoses were shared freely. I quickly became the “tick girl.” When I started my dissertation I was preoccupied by the ecological question: How have humans altered the environment and triggered a disease emergence? By the time I finished, I realized that far more interesting were the rich and revealing tick stories shared with us along the way.
Illness makes us talk. “This is true of all forms of pain and suffering,” Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and physician at Harvard University, told me. We talk about illness “to seek assistance, care, and in part to convey feelings about fear, anxiety, or sadness.” In his book, The Illness Narratives, Kleinman writes that “patients order their experience of illness … as personal narratives.” These narratives become a part of the experience of being sick. “The personal narrative does not merely reflect illness experience, but rather it contributes to [it].”
The result is a peculiar togetherness. Once, a friend’s mom emailed that she’d just pulled off her first tick of the season, from her pubic hair: “I’m guessing it doesn’t it surprise you to hear, Katie, that you came to mind almost immediately when I discovered the little bugger? I’m afraid that ticks and you will be forever linked in my mind.” Naturally some took the motif too far. One creepy grad student thought that, because I was standing in front of a tick poster at an academic conference, I’d want to hear about the time he pulled a tick off his dick.
By dosing ourselves, we gain control.
The country singer Brad Paisley romances the tick: “I’d like to see you out in the moonlight / I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks / I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers / And I’d like to check you for ticks.” I’m with Paisley here. Creeps aside, tick grooming is an act of love. My sister and I were diligent in the tick checks we gave ourselves and each other. Most nights, we’d pull off several at the campsite showers.
Tick stories mostly fell into a few categories. There were the boastful ones. On Washburn Island, a tiny island a few hundred yards off of Cape Cod, two hairy, fully-bearded park rangers, Steve and Steve, couldn’t be bothered to pull off their ticks. For most of the summer, they lived outside in tents and tarps and always had a few handfuls of ticks embedded in their skin. The Steves boasted that they’d each been infected with Lyme disease and babesiosis, a parasitic illness also carried by deer ticks, on and off for the last several years. Theirs was a backcountry machismo, as if their burliness made them immune to the intrusion of the forest twigs and ticks upon their bodies. Their symptoms, though, were presumably as real as anyone else’s.
The bulk of people’s reactions to the disease reflected a confused anxiety about boundaries. En route to a wedding in Easton, Connecticut, deep in Lyme country, someone found out that I was a tick girl and asked if they should be worried. The wedding was on a farm, an edge habitat where weedy species—mice, chipmunks, and robins—proliferate. Weedy animals include some of the best hosts for the Lyme disease bacterium. They can be infected with a tick bite and pass on the bacterium to the next tick that feeds on them, continuing unbroken chains of transmission. Deer, which are also hosts for ticks, thrive in these fragmented habitats, too.
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I recited my usual tick check endorsement: Shower and check yourselves at the end of the night and you’ll be fine. The Lyme bacterium is only transmitted after the tick has been attached for two or three days. Still, when guests filled the lawn for corn hole and cocktails, I couldn’t help but notice all the cocktail dresses and open heels, ankle-deep in grass. The next morning, one woman told me she’d plucked three ticks from her ankle.
Worry bled to fear. On Cuttyhunk Island, the most remote of the Elizabeth Islands, a necklace of islands spilling off of southern Cape Cod, my sister and I were generously hosted by a woman I’ll call Susan, a self-trained student of the Lyme epidemic. “Ticks have become the bane of island existence,” Susan gravely told me shortly after I arrived. By 2010, everyone Susan knew on the island was taking doxycycline, the antibiotic most commonly prescribed for Lyme disease. She and her husband arrive in Cuttyhunk at the start of the summer season armed with bottles of it and take it prophylactically. Every time they pull off a tick, they take three doses, spread over 24 hours. This is not recommended by the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Doxycycline makes your skin sensitive to the sun, so their regimen makes it necessary to wear a hat and lots of sunscreen or stay inside.
Susan fenced in her lawn to keep out rabbits, which can host adult ticks, then raised the fence to defend against deer. “Our house is ringed with Damminix tubes, the yard fenced, grass mowed short, and still they turn up in the bed with us,” she told me. (Damminix tubes hold cotton infused with an insecticide that kills ticks.) We slept in her son’s room, crisp and nautically themed and lined with file cabinets full of scientific articles about Lyme disease epidemiology and ecology, local and national reporting on the epidemic, and printed email exchanges with epidemiologists and local politicians. Susan is now spearheading the island’s Tick Eradication Campaign. Her plan for eradication was ambitious, she admitted. But, she asks: “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that you are stepping onto a tick-free island where a sunburn is the most dangerous health risk?”
The idea that the natural and human exist in separate realms is the very “trouble with wilderness,” the environmental historian William Cronon wrote in his 1995 book Uncommon Ground. The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized over the last few hundred years, he says, is a fantasy:
[Wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history … Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.
In the stories told by our doctors, our parks, and the CDC, ticks are invaders. To defend ourselves, we use insect repellent, clothing, and prophylactic antibiotics; fences, signs, and pesticides. “When it comes to pesticides, the environmental toxin par excellence, Lyme patients are often its greatest proponents,” writes Abigail Dumes, an anthropologist at Michigan State University. We prefer the risk posed by pesticides to the fear of Lyme, Dumes explained to me. They let us become actors instead of victims. By dosing ourselves with pesticides (or antibiotics), we gain control of our risks. Ticks, on the other hand are uncontrollable. “It’s difficult to live with the idea that there are enormous threats and many can’t be controlled,” Kleinman tells me.
The problem is our defensive barriers aren’t working particularly well. Deer ticks are now established across 45 percent of United States counties. Their range has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Reported cases of Lyme disease have more than tripled since 1995 and the CDC estimates that more than 300,000 Americans fall ill each year. The story of tick-as-invader isn’t particularly helpful—or complete.
LYME EMERGES: Allen Steere and Stephen Malawista published these maps of Lyme disease in 1979, just two years after it had been named. They noted a correspondence between disease clusters and areas where two species of black-legged ticks were known to exist.Courtesy of the author
In November 1975, Polly Murray, an artist living in Lyme, Connecticut, contacted the Connecticut State Department of Public Health. Two of her children were sick with what doctors called juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a disease of joint pain. Their knees were so swollen that they were forced to walk with crutches. Several other neighborhood children had similar symptoms. Arthritis is rare in children. And it is not normally found in clusters. So Murray kept careful notes of her children’s symptoms and compiled a list of other sick children.
At first, doctors were dismissive. But Allen Steere, a young rheumatologist at Yale-New Haven Medical Center, was curious. He began to investigate cases in Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam, quiet, wooded communities just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River. Through a surveillance “grapevine,” he found 51 residents—39 children and 12 adults—in a community of 12,000 suffering from unexplained arthritis. A quarter of patients also had erythema migrans, an expanding circular rash with a pale center, also called a bullseye. In some neighborhoods, 10 percent of children suffered from this unexplained arthritis. In 1977, in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism, Steere and his team named the set of symptoms Lyme arthritis. They called it “a previously unrecognized clinical entity.”
If anyone is an invader here, it’s us.
At that point, what caused the symptoms remained a mystery. The clustering of cases suggested the new disease was infectious, and the summertime peak of cases suggested it was spread by something in the water—picked up by swimmers—or by insects. Steere’s team tested his patients’ blood for dozens of viruses and bacteria. Nothing fit. In 1979, Steere and a colleague mapped out the first 512 cases of Lyme arthritis. The distribution of cases overlapped neatly with what was then the range of deer ticks. Many of Steere’s patients lived in wooded areas and had mentioned insect bites. But hundreds of ticks were tested and no pathogen was found.
A few years later, William Burgdorfer, an entomologist at the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, identified a new spirochete—a corkscrew shaped bacterium, capable of spiraling through the tissues of its hosts—in ticks collected from Shelter Island, a tiny island nestled between the two pointer fingers of Long Island. Sixty percent of ticks collected on the island carried the bacterium. Soon after, spirochetes were found in the blood of people suffering from Lyme arthritis. The Lyme disease bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, was named in his honor. It cycles silently in forests between ticks and a group of hosts, mostly small rodents and birds. From the perspective of the bacterium, humans are dead-end hosts and play no role in the spread of disease to new areas.
The modern history of the disease is relatively short: Just 40 years have passed since it was named. This can contribute to the sense that it is a new invader into our pristine neighborhoods and parks. But where did the bacterium come from? Was it truly new? And why did it first appear in a bucolic Connecticut suburb?
Spreading ticks and migrating bacteria leave no trace on the environment. Unlike pathogens that spread strictly from human to human (like measles), we cannot trace the history of the Lyme disease bacterium from the history of human epidemics. So, in 1990, biologists turned from medical records to museums. They sifted through old ticks in entomology collections at Harvard University and the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, testing for bacteria. They found ticks infected with B. burgdorferi collected in the 1940s in Montauk Point and Hither Hills, parks near the Hamptons on the eastern tip of Long Island. Museum collections held no ticks before the 1940s.
That effectively doubled the known history of the disease. Then, researchers turned to the hosts themselves. They snipped ear punches from mouse specimens at the Smithsonian Museum, the Natural History Museum in New York, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Mice from Cape Cod in the 1890s turned out to be infected. Now the disease had a century-long history. Scientists studying Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, stumbled upon in 1991 by hikers in the Italian Alps, have found that he was lactose intolerant, had intestinal parasites, severe atherosclerosis—and probably had Lyme disease. This meant the bacterium likely existed in western Europe 5,000 years ago.
PIERCING: The hypostome of a deer tick is a piercing organ with recurved teeth.Ed Reschke / Getty Images
To extend the history of the bacterium further back still, my advisors, Maria Diuk-Wasser and Gisella Caccone, and I turned to the 1 million letters of the bacterium’s genome. Pathogens evolve as they spread, and their genome carries a historical record of this development. By comparing pathogen genomes collected from different areas, we can build an evolutionary tree and a history of the pathogen’s spread. We can also tell how big the population of pathogens is now, and whether it is growing. This is the crux of phylogeography: Use evolutionary relatedness to answer questions about biogeography, the historic and spatial distribution of genetic diversity. A classic finding in the field, for example, is that the HIV epidemic originated in the French or Belgian Congo around the 1920s.
I began to chase bacteria from as wide an area and from as far back in time as possible. Biologists mailed me ticks in tiny tubes of ethanol from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia. A Styrofoam container filled with dry ice and DNA samples of infected ticks collected across Canada was Fed-Exed to me. Old ticks were harder to come by. At the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, I pulled out drawer after drawer of taxidermied Peromyscus leucopus, white-footed mice, elegantly arranged in rows, with handwritten labels tied around their right ankles. Many were collected in the 1800s, when natural history museums were filled with hunting trophies. But the taxidermist had been tidy. The mouse skins had been cleaned of ticks. The oldest ticks I could find that were infected and had well-preserved DNA were from the early 1980s. Camilla and I added them to the 7,000 ticks from our summer harvest.
Finally, with 150 complete genomes in hand, my colleagues and I were able to extend the North American history of Lyme disease from a hundred years to many thousands. We drew a new evolutionary tree which showed that the bacterium likely originated in the northeast of the U.S., spreading south and west across North America to California. Birds likely transported it long distances to new regions, where small mammals continued its spread. Imprinted on the bacterial genomes was also a signature of dramatic population growth. As it evolved, it seemed to have proliferated.
Most interestingly, the tree was far older than we’d expected—at least 60,000 years old. Lyme was likely here in North America much longer than that, long before it was first named in the 1970s, long before humans first arrived in North America from across the Bering Strait (about 24,000 years ago), and long before the last glacial maximum, when much of North America was covered by an ice sheet (also about 24,000 years ago). If anyone is an invader here, it’s us. Our analysis also showed that the modern epidemic was not sparked by some new mutation that made the bacterium more readily transmissible. It was sparked by changes in ecology, most of which were man-made.
When colonists first arrived in New England, much of the area was forested. White-tailed deer were abundant. Deer ticks, whose distribution is closely tied to that of deer, most likely existed throughout much of the continent, too. Colonists pressed and pleated the complex fabric of New England’s forests, grasslands, and swamps into a starched blanket of fenced farmlands. Hunting and deforestation decimated deer populations. By the mid 18th-century, deer had almost entirely vanished. They never disappeared, though. Deer—and likely, deer ticks and B. burgdorferi—persisted in refugia, isolated pockets of southern Cape Cod and the far eastern tip of Long Island. Some deer populations were carefully cultivated. In 1698, hunters stocked the Naushon Island, one of the Elizabeth Islands (a few islands north of Susan’s Cuttyhunk) with deer. The island soon became a glamourous hunting destination and was purchased by the Forbes family in 1856, whose annual hunting party was attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, among others. The earliest record of a deer tick in the northern U.S. was on Naushon Island in 1926.
Beginning in the mid 1800s, farming gradually shifted westward and New England slowly reforested. But only shreds and slivers of forest were allowed to regrow. Deer populations rebounded and the animal spread across a transformed, suburban New England, one in which wolf predators had been exterminated, and where deer hunting was strictly limited. Ticks followed the deer, and B. burgdorferi followed the ticks. The sprawling grassy suburban lawn adjacent to a forest patch is the ideal Lyme disease habitat. The majority of tick-borne infections occur here because excellent hosts for B. burgdorferi also thrive in these manufactured edge habitats. More recently, climate change has been warming our winters, accelerating ticks’ life cycles and extending their range eight miles farther north each year.
The genetic and ecological history of the Lyme disease bacterium make it clear: Neither ticks nor the bacterium are invaders onto our pristine landscapes. They are the beneficiaries of an artificial and fragmented ecology created by the real invaders, us. Having sectioned and sliced the continent into a patchwork, we are confronted with the consequences. “Many of the individuals I spoke with during the course of my fieldwork moved to or remained in forested suburbs to be ‘close to nature,’ ” writes Dumes. “But ‘after Lyme,’ many described an experience of becoming ‘prisoners of their own paradise.’ ”
We’ve built structured domestic spaces on the periphery of the natural world to help us keep alive our fantasy of a wilderness that is pristine but kept at a safe distance. Ticks put the lie to that fantasy. They make us pay attention. They force us to notice and explore the freckles and spots of dirt on our ankles and our partners’ ankles. They force us to observe the spaces around us. They are rude reminders that there is no such thing as wilderness untouched by humans or humans detached from nature.
That’s a better story than tick-as-invader. This history doesn’t offer a tidy answer for how to stem the epidemic. But it shows us that our modern response to Lyme disease—to build more boundaries—echoes the impulse that created the epidemic in the first place. It’s not a just problem with Lyme. I defended my doctoral work earlier this year and am now studying another artificial boundary—the one between prisons and the free world—that is creating another epidemic: tuberculosis. My study sites have moved from Martha’s Vineyard to Brazilian prisons, but in a few ways, the new disease stories I’m encountering are alarmingly familiar.
Katharine Walter is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
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A very hungry caterpillar is killing trees in New England.
Climate change is partly to blame. So is an amateur entomologist who lived in the 1800s.
Walking through the woods near her home in Marlborough, Connecticut, Matylda Biskupski couldn’t help but notice that the forest seemed bare. “There’s very little shade. It’s very weird,” said Biskupski, a freshman at Rham High School.
During the summer, gypsy moth caterpillars have been munching on the forest’s green canopy, leaving trees across Connecticut and Rhode Island leafless. According to Heather Faubert, who runs the Plant Protection Clinic at the University of Rhode Island, the caterpillars prefer oak and apple leaves when they’re young. But as they grow and the population expands, they’ll feed on just about any kind of tree.
There were so many caterpillars that Biskupski could hear them. “They poop a lot,” she said. “It would sound like rain.”
The moths are an invasive species in the United States. Nearly 150 years ago, an artist and astronomer named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot returned to Massachusetts from a trip to France with several gypsy moth egg masses. According to the U.S. Forest Service, Trouvelot was an amateur entomologist and was experimenting with cultivating the egg masses on trees in his yard. During his experiment, a few of the caterpillars escaped, changing American forests forever.
Since the late 19th century, states and the U.S. Forest Service have been trying to control gypsy moth outbreaks and their spread across the country.
The main threat to the gypsy moth in North America is a Japanese fungus called Entomophaga maimaiga. But the fungus dies during prolonged drought, and the northeast has experienced unusually dry, early springs and dry, hot summers during the past three years.
“The fungus that usually kills the caterpillar was almost non-existent,” Faubert said.
And that means the gypsy moth has been thriving.
In Windham, Connecticut, Judy Donnelly also saw a boom in the caterpillar population.
“At their worst, the shady side of the trees were completely covered with caterpillars,” she said.
The caterpillars pose a threat to forests. In large numbers, they can completely defoliate trees and even forest understories. In 2016, over 350,000 acres of Massachusetts forests were defoliated by gypsy moths. This defoliation stresses the trees and can kill them.
Late May → late June, tree defoliation per caterpillars across SE New England is notable, esp W RI pic.twitter.com/AfRYKxdPEL
— NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) June 26, 2016
“We usually think that trees can tolerate two years of defoliation, and then the third year they will die,” Faubert said. “But that’s really just a rule of thumb. What we found last year was trees got defoliated, and I think due to the drought, it really stressed out a lot of trees, and a lot of trees died last year.”
Donnelly also lost several trees this year. When she called to have them removed, it was difficult to schedule an appointment. “I guess there’s a lot of people who need trees down,” she said.
It’s left her wondering how to protect her trees in the future. “Now what?” Donnelly asked. “The fungus apparently is very effective, but if it’s dry then what do we do?”
“I can’t go out and water the woods,” she added.
Managing the moths
There’s not a lot that individuals can do to combat gypsy moth populations in the midst of an outbreak. Faubert says the best bet is to keep the trees wet, but she admits that’s easier said than done.
If you have a few trees in particular that you want to keep safe, try to keep them watered to give the fungus a chance to act, Faubert said.
Faubert also noted that some people attempt to control the population by spraying a BT insecticide, which should have a limited effect on insects other than moths, or by knocking down any egg masses they see. The problem with these efforts is that the BT sprays last only for a few days, and there are thousands of egg masses.
The only guaranteed relief comes from rain. Luckily, this summer brought rain to drought-stricken areas throughout the Northeast.
“It was a lot rainier this year,” Bisupski said. “We saw the fungus.”
In Rhode Island, Faubert witnessed a major die-off of gypsy moth caterpillars on June 23. But she said the fungus takes all season to build up to full strength, so the real benefits of a wet summer should be felt next year – especially if next spring is wet.
But wait, what caused the drought?
The relationship between climate change and precipitation is complicated. As the climate warms, overall precipitation has increased. But rainfall is concentrated in quick, extreme events instead of spread out over time. Winters in the northeast have also seen a decrease in snow coverage, which can contribute to a drier spring season, since there is less snow melt.
According to Jeanne Brown, communications and outreach manager at the Northeast Climate Science Center, summers in the northeast are expected to get much warmer. Without action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, average summer temperatures in Massachusetts are projected to increase by 8 degrees F. And warmer temperatures, Brown said, mean higher potential for dry spells.
All of these factors, according to research by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, contribute to drought in New England. “Warming and less frequent precipitation events favor an increase in drought intensity,” the report said. That could make for fundamental changes in the landscapes of New England.
With trees increasingly damaged by insects and weird weather, Curt Newton from Amherst noticed the strange sound of dried leaves blowing in the hot and humid August breeze. “I viscerally associate that sound with cool weather and more slanting autumn sunlight,” he wrote in a post on ISeeChange.
Produced in partnership with ISeeChange.
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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
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The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
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Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
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Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
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We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
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The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
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CDC: Disease-carrying mosquitoes may swarm more than 75 percent of US.
According to a CDC study, up to 75 percent of the contiguous United States may provide suitable conditions for several disease-spreading mosquitoes.
CDC: Mosquitoes carrying Zika, other deadly viruses may invade 75 percent of the US
0
Stephanie Toone The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2:56 p.m Friday, Sept. 22, 2017 Atlanta News
NEWS
According to a CDC study, up to 75 percent of the contiguous United States may provide suitable conditions for several disease-spreading mosquitoes.
The recent study, published in the Public Journal of Entomology, found 71 percent of counties in the 48 contiguous states were suitable for the aegypti species and 75 percent could support albopictus species.
Researchers found that the dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses in particular represented a “growing public health threat in parts of the United States where they are established,” according to the journal’s report.
»RELATED: Zika Virus: What’s the big deal? A lot. Here’s what you need to know
Rebecca Eisen, a research biologist with the CDC, told the Independent the maps showed the CDC’s “best estimate” of the insects potential range. The maps do not show where the mosquitoes are currently nor where there is a risk of transmission.
“In other words, these maps show areas where CDC predicts Aedes aegypti and albopictus mosquitoes could survive and reproduce if introduced to an area during the months when mosquitoes are locally active,” Eisen told the publication.
Journal of Medical Entomology
Temperature is a key factor. If there were just one day in winter when the temperature exceeds 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the chances that the area would be suitable for mosquitoes increased. Areas with consistently cold temperatures, however, have reduced chances that the insects’ eggs would sustain through the winter, specifically for aegypti, according to Eisen. Rainfall had a significant influence on albopictus, as it relies more on water courses filled by rainwater to lay its eggs than aegypti.
The maps will help health professionals monitor for signs of the mosquitoes.
“Surveillance efforts can be focused in counties where Aedes aegypti and albopictus could survive and reproduce if introduced to an area during the months when mosquitoes are locally active or at least survive during summer months if introduced,” Eisen said.
The CDC suggested taking the following steps to avoid mosquitoes and potential disease:
Wear long-sleeved shirts and trousers
Stay in places with air conditioning or that use window and door screens
Use insect repellents approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, treating clothing with an insecticide, permethrin.
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Debunking climate change deniers' claims about plants.
Some climate deniers claim carbon dioxide is good for plants, and plants are good for people, so we should aim to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere than we already are.
Bigger isn’t always better. Too much of a good thing can be bad.
Many anti-environmentalists throw these simple truths to the wind, along with caution.
You can see it in the deceitful realm of climate change denial. It’s difficult to keep up with the constantly shifting — and debunked — denier arguments, but one common thread promoted by the likes of the U.S.-based Heartland Institute and its Canadian affiliate, the misnamed International Climate Science Coalition, illustrates the point. They claim carbon dioxide is good for plants, and plants are good for people, so we should aim to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere than we already are.
We’ve examined the logical failings of this argument before — noting that studies have found not all plants benefit from increased CO2 and that most plants don’t fare well under climate change-exacerbated drought or flooding, among other facts. Emerging research should put the false notion to rest for good.
Several studies have found that, even when increased CO2 makes plants grow bigger and faster, it reduces proteins and other nutrients and increases carbohydrates in about 95 per cent of plant species, including important food crops such as barley, rice, wheat and potatoes. A 2014 Harvard School of Public Health study, published in Nature, looked at 130 species of food plants and found that increased CO2 reduced the amount of valuable minerals such as zinc and iron in all of them.
Another study, by Irakli Loladze at the Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, found increased CO2 caused calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron concentrations in plants to decline by an average of eight per cent, while sugar and starch content increased.
As a Scientific American article points out, billions of people depend on crops like wheat and rice for iron and zinc. Zinc deficiency is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly children, and exacerbates health issues such as pneumonia and malaria. Iron deficiency, which causes anemia, is responsible for one-fifth of maternal deaths worldwide.
Part of the problem with the industrial agricultural mindset and the denier argument that CO2 is plant food or “aerial fertilizer” is the idea that bigger and faster are better. These studies illustrate the problem with the climate change–denial argument but, in its pursuit of profit, industrial agriculture has often made the same mistake. Plants — and now even animals like salmon — have mainly been bred, through conventional breeding and genetic engineering, to grow faster and bigger, with little regard for nutrient value (leaving aside anomalies like the not-entirely-successful “golden rice”). But higher yields have often resulted in less nutritious fruits and vegetables.
Genetic engineering’s promise was increased yields and reduced need for pesticides, but studies show it has fallen far short of that ambition. A 2016 National Academy of Sciences study, as well as a New York Times investigation, found no evidence that genetically engineered crops increased yields over conventional crops. Although insecticide and fungicide use on GE crops in the U.S. and Canada has decreased, herbicide use has gone up to the point that overall pesticide use has increased. France, which doesn’t rely on genetically modified crops, has reduced use of all pesticides — 65 per cent for insecticides and fungicides and 36 per cent for herbicides — without any decrease in yields.
The “golden rice” experiment shows that plants can be engineered for higher nutrient value, but that hasn’t been the priority for large agrochemical companies.
As for carbon dioxide, we know that fossil fuel use, industrial agriculture, cement production and destruction of carbon sinks like wetlands and forests are driving recent global warming, to the detriment of humanity. The one flimsy argument climate change deniers have been holding onto — that it will make plants grow faster and bigger — has proven to be a poor one.
Like life itself, science is complex. Reductive strategies that look at phenomena and reactions in isolation miss the big picture. Our species faces an existential crisis. Overcoming it will require greater wisdom and knowledge and a better understanding of nature’s interconnectedness.
Tackling climate disruption and feeding humanity are connected. It’s past time to ignore the deniers, reassess our priorities and take the necessary measures to slow global warming.
— written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation senior editor Ian Hanington.
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