For me, it had all the elements: I grew up in a North Jersey town known for housing a few Mafia celebs, like Willie Moretti, the real-life inspiration for The Godfather’s legbreaker, Luca Brasi.
A few miles away were the heavily-polluted Meadowlands, a once-gorgeous wetland that had become, among other things, the alleged final resting place of countless Mafia debtors, rivals, and no-account Goodfellas.
So when drought-parched Lake Mead gave up the skeletal remains of a potential Western wiseguy, I was fascinated.
Lake Mead is in desperate shape. Along with Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado River, Mead is the key to prosperity for the booming cities, suburbs and farms of the desert Southwest – Arizona, Southern California, and, of course, Las Vegas. In addition to the unfortunate guy in the barrel, decades of overuse capped off by several years of brutal, climate-driven drought has exposed an intake pipe for Southern Nevada’s 2.2 million people.
They’re running out of water. Putting megacities like Phoenix and Vegas in a desert was never a good idea. They were always destined to run out of water, some day. But the rampant growth and a years-long, killer drought have made the crisis immediate.
And with the corpse-in-a-barrel story, we have one more link between climate and popular culture: The Sopranos meets fossil fuels.
It hardly made a wave, thereby joining the long rap sheet for climate change’s impact on our culture. Mostly, it’s things we’re losing.
A California vineyard
Winecountry Media, via flickr
From Bordeaux to the Napa Valley, vineyards are in trouble. Bordeaux’s quarter million acres of vines face “a slow but simmering” climate crisis, according to Wine Enthusiast magazine. Increased temperatures, more frequent damaging storms and more can have a big impact on the sensitive grape, increasing the alcohol content in some varieties by 10% or more.
In California’s Napa Valley, frequent wildfires have scalded multi-million-dollar vintages. Other vintners who thought they were spared by the flames were felled by the smoke, which either ruined the taste of America’s priciest wines, or blackened the grapes to make the costliest raisins in history.
Insurers have also turned the screws on California wineries, either jacking up premiums, limiting coverage, or cancelling policies outright.
Phenology is the science of measuring plants’ and animals’ responses to long-term changes in weather and climate. (Note: phenologists get really upset when their work gets mixed up with that of phrenologists, the sideshow quacks who tell your fortune by reading the bumps on your head.)
As spring replaces winter each year, the time- honored work of the tree tappers yields the sweet sap of sugar maples from the northeast U.S. and Quebec. But researchers tell us two things about rising temperatures and sugar maples: The maple syrup is less sweet, and the trees’ range is slowly moving north. Someday, phenologists tell us you won’t be able to find Vermont maple syrup in Vermont.
Lobstermen hauling traps on the Maine coast
Offshore, New England lobsters could meet the same fate. Warming waters are chasing much of the food chain northward. Connecticut and Long Island lobstermen are struggling with a dwindling catch; within decades, Maine lobsters may only exist on the state’s license plates.
Summer flounder, or fluke, are a popular target for both sport and commercial fishermen. North Carolina commercial boats hold most of the permits for fluke in the $22 million industry, but they have to motor north to New Jersey to find the fish.
Northern right whales winter and calve off the Georgia and Florida coasts. They feed in summer in the Gulf of Maine. For now. The 300 or so remaining whales are what’s left after centuries of whaling. Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear risk taking more But three recent studies indicate that climate change may be a final blow. The zooplankton that are right whales’ primary food source are increasingly scarce in the whales’ northern range.
I could go on. Ocean wildlife everywhere is under threat from acidification and from the everyday torrent of microplastics. Shorter term, the energy dynamics of the Ukraine crisis have become the newest rationales for keeping the oil & gas infrastructure afloat.
But I guess that’s plenty for now.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo credit of Lake Mead: Jakob Owens/Unsplash
Every morning at dawn I review lists of new studies about endocrine-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA). It can be brutal.
I can take only so much of this. My retreat is bird photography. It makes me focus on the wonders of evolutionary adaptation to difficult challenges. My pretentious goal in this effort is to become a bird version of Georgia O’Keefe. OK … I know I’ll never get that good, but I can try. I deeply enjoy helping the casual observer see intimate views of a bird they normally would never see.
I have no choice but to shut out of my mind all the bad stuff, and focus my mind and the camera on the bird in front of me, hopefully RIGHT in front of me, at minimum focusing distance or close-there-to.
My favorite subjects are shorebirds, especially sandpipers and most especially sanderlings, a species I focused upon while doing a Ph.D. on its behavior and ecology while at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s through 1981.
I have taken tens of thousands of photographs of shorebirds. I rely on my intimate knowledge of not just what birds are doing, but what they are going to do next. And while each new generation of cameras allowed me to get better photographs, in April 2021 I acquired a camera and lens that changed the game: it shoots up to 30 frames per second.
In early December 2021 I spent three days on the beaches north of San Francisco that I studied in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I recorded almost 10,000 images. It took me two months to sort through them and another month to organize them into a coherent narrative.
On this Earth Day, with so much to worry about in the world, I hope these images convey some of the magic I experience when I am up close and personal with shorebirds.
These 32 images below are some of my favorites selected out of more than 200 from that trip to California I have put online here.
When people go to the beach, it’s usually for relaxation or a swim or a suntan. When these birds go there after a brief nesting season in the high Arctic, it’s to feed, fight, flock, flee from predators, and sometimes to indulge in a bathing orgy or a high tide roost.
I marvel at how they thrive through what can be life or death challenges, frenzied, frenetic moments, not knowing when the next falcon will strike or whether the next mad rush down to the base of the receding wave will yield something to eat. I am awed by the precision of natural selection giving the western sandpiper extra webbing between its toes to facilitate its walking over mud while eliminating a sanderling’s hind toe to allow it to run rapidly over sand. I am thrilled to know that come May most of these winter beach birds will migrate to the Arctic, flying non-stop for days, then building nests, laying and incubating eggs, raising young and by July beginning to migrate back to this very beach.
Adaptations like those have emerged from millions of years of evolution. I am so at peace with my mind when I can breathe the ocean air and contemplate the miracles they truly are. And my commitment and resolve to leave the world a healthier place is reinvigorated, not just on Earth Day but every day.
Click the photos for a full screen view and see the Creative Commons license below.
This work is copyrighted by Pete Myers and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Banner photo: Mixed flock of sanderling and dunlin on Limantour Spit. The two sanderling in the very front are carrying sand crabs.
This work is copyrighted by Pete Myers and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Claxton, Georgia, was a classic small town in the late 1940s, with two soda-fountain drugstores, a grocery, a hardware store, and a bakery famous for its pecan-raisin fruitcake. The Nancy Hanks II streamliner train passed through twice a day, carrying its segregated passengers between Atlanta and Savannah. Highway 280, newly paved, cut through town parallel to the tracks, connecting Savannah to the east and Americus to the west, lined with small farms in both directions.
Doffie Colson was new to Claxton, one of millions of Americans whose lives were uprooted by the war. Her own Methodist family’s roots ran deep in rural Tattnall County, just to the west.
But when Congress authorized the army to build dozens of new camps and training centers for the war effort, her family and hundreds of others—more than half of them Black, the rest white like the Col- sons—were moved off their land to make way for a new antiaircraft artillery range. It was a “forced exile,” said Colson’s sister. But they gave up their homes and, “most valuable,” their neighbors, Colson said, “to help train soldiers in the nation’s hour of need.”
Their new Claxton farms were small but big enough to be self-sustaining. Colson farmed and raised bees with her two daughters. Her sister’s family, on the farm next door, grew vegetables and truck crops and blooms that won the local flower shows. Highway 280 gave them access to Georgia Power, phone lines, and passenger buses right outside their doors.
All told, Colson thought they had found a promising place to live, until the spring of 1945—three years after they moved in. Colson fell sick with a sore throat, “nervous chills,” and muscle pain so intense she sometimes took to bed for weeks at a time. Her sister, Mamie Plyler, fell sick too, her mouth and throat erupting in painful sores and her head aching with a persistent “irritation” that didn’t give way for months.
A local doctor diagnosed Colson with allergies, but his treatments didn’t work. Colson found a specialist up in Atlanta, but his treatments failed too. Then her daughters began to feel sick, and Colson was at a total loss. But her sister had a theory: Plyler wondered if their health problems might be related to the planes that, since the war, had been using Highway 280 as a runway to dust the vast tobacco, tomato, and peanut fields owned by big landowners near their farms.
Sitting in the kitchen of her little farm home on the highway, Colson thought about her sister’s theory as she read the farm papers, where she learned all about the new poisons developed since the war. The papers had much to say about DDT, which killed mosquitoes, flies, boll weevils, bud beetles, corn borers, hornworms, tobacco worms, and more. Compared to the older poisons, such as lead and arsenic, DDT was a “wonder drug,” said the farm paper Capper’s Weekly.
But it was also “fussy stuff” that farmers had to use with care. Channing Cope, Georgia’s popular farm columnist, was impressed with DDT but also nervous: because it killed pollinators, he said, he feared it had “the power to ruin us.”
Colson, like any farmer, knew that the key to using poisons had always been to use just the right amount, right where it was needed. When poisons rained down from a crop duster, however, that was just about impossible. So when the crop dusters flew low over their home, she closed their windows, brought in the animals, and took down any laundry on the line—if she could get to it all in time.
Then one morning in the spring of 1948, a crop duster parked near the entrance to Colson’s property to set up for its flight. As the pilot loaded the hopper, a wind picked up and blew the plane’s load toward the driveway, where her older daughter, Dorothy, stood waiting for the bus to school.
Without warning, the girl was bathed in a fine dust. She ran inside. Before her mother could clean her, she began vomiting and grew weak. Her temperature climbed, and for days she suffered a high fever and severe sore throat.
Colson now knew her sister was right. The illness in her family wasn’t allergies. It was “straight out poisoning,” she said.
Elena Conis is a professor history and journalism at the University of California Berkeley and the author, previously, of Vaccine Nation.
How to Sell a Poison is available now from Bold Type Books.
It’s the “fastest timeline in the nation,” Laurie Valeriano, executive director of advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, told EHN.
PFAS, which refers to per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, are often used in consumer products as an additive, usually to make stain- or water-resistant materials. The chemicals can also be unintentionally introduced into products via manufacturing or packaging, and are linked to multiple negative health outcomes including some cancers, reproductive problems, and birth defects, among others.
The new bill, HB 1694, bans the use of PFAS in a range of these products, including apparel, non-stick pans, cosmetics, cleaning products, and firefighter gear after 2025.
“We know that these chemicals threaten the health and safety of every plant, animal, and human that calls this state home,” state Rep. Liz Berry (D-Seattle), who sponsored the bill, told EHN. “These chemicals should not be in our products.”
Berry was inspired to create the bill after reading a 2021 study from Toxic-Free Future, which analyzed PFAS in breast milk and found that 100% of women tested had contaminated milk. “I'm a mom of two young kids. I breastfed with my babies,” said Berry. “I was terrified when I read more about what PFAS did, and I asked what I could do.”
While this new bill puts Washington at the forefront of the push to phase out PFAS, other states have taken action as well. In California, PFAS will be banned in paper food packaging as of 2023; a Maine law passed last summer will ban the sale of most products containing PFAS by 2030. In the fight against PFAS, said Berry, states have the most potential to improve regulation. “With federal inaction, we’re the place to get things done,” she said. “Nothing’s getting done in DC.”
Berry’s new bill speeds up the timeline for regulation of PFAS from a 2019 bill, which aimed for regulation by 2030. “[The bill] allows the Department of Ecology here in Washington to really expedite action on addressing and managing these chemicals in our state,” said Berry.
HB 1694 is now law! It tackles #PFAS in products such as apparel & firefighter gear by 2025, the fastest PFAS timeline in the U.S!
Thank you @LizBerryWA, @joefitzgibbon, @senmonadas, @SenLizLovelett, @WSCFF_UNION & @nickfedwa for your work on this bill!https://t.co/Uexv0jk9Qqpic.twitter.com/iqMYFyPEZu
— Toxic-Free Future (@ToxFreeFuture) April 1, 2022
The original bill that Berry proposed included additional directions for regulation of other priority toxic chemicals such as phthalates and PCBs, in addition to PFAS. However, she said, those components of the bill did not make it into the final legislation because they were blocked in the Senate.
The bill’s 2025 phaseout deadline makes Washington the first state to tackle PFAS on an accelerated timeline. “I just don't think that any more time is necessary to make sure people are safe,” said Berry. “We've got to keep industry on their toes, make sure they're being innovative, so that we're not poisoning people for their products.”
Valeriano said the timeline puts pressure on industries in Washington state. However, she said, “I think it’s entirely doable to get there in the next few years.”
“It's just the will and the direction and the regulatory hammer that has to be put in place in order to drive those decisions on a faster timeline,” she said.
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